Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

102 Notes
and futural thinking are differences not in the objects of thought, but in its modality. (He spoke of
“Vorstellungsmodi”.) The thing that I think about in the present mode can be thought of at some
other time in the past or in the future mode. The modes of thinking or presentation also affect the
judgements we make about these things, but in every case what is thought of is itself a thing. When
we think of a past or a future man, we are thinking of a thing—a man—in the praeterital or in the
futural mode. Compare Brentano’s doctrine of time and temporal modes of presentation (Psychologie,
Vol. II and esp. Vol. III), and also Brentano’s published letters to Marty going back to 1895 (Archiv
für Psychologie, LXXV, Heft 1 and 2, 1930). The latter also contain a discussion of Husserl’s later
doctrine of modalities.
The question that Brentano raised here—“Does one expect to find, as a thing external to oneself,
some entity one knows to have perished a long time ago?”—is a question which, at that time, he
answered in the negative; he believed that one is here concerned with a non-real entity that once
existed, and that one is not concerned with a thing.
11 Brentano held at that time that, if I say there is a lack of money, then I have affirmed something,
acknowledged something in judgement; this something is not a “thing” but is the lack of a thing, and
the lack of a thing is itself an entity—a non-thing. Things as well as non-things are subsumed under
the concept of “entity” (cf. 48). But Brentano later realized that this was a mistake. The statement
“There is a lack of money” is nothing but the linguistic disguise of a denial—“Money is lacking”,
“There is no money”, or “No money is there”, all of which express my disavowal, or denial, of money.
Such expressions as “lack of money” are not names but pseudo-names. They are syncategorematic
(mitbedeutende) expressions; their role in the complete statement is that of expressing a denial and
not, as the language might suggest, an affirmation.
12 Brentano speaks here of “impossibilities”, “eternal truths” which subsist (bestehen); he rejects
the idea that one might speak here of “entities” or “things” to which a true judgement corresponds.
As may be gathered from the following paragraphs, however, he does allow himself to speak of nonthings
or irrealia, and he believes that any non-thing may be counted as an “entity” which exists and
to which our affirmative judgement corresponds. At the time Brentano did not consider the “entity” in
such cases to be a thing; it was a non-real entity. Thus he considered mathematical truths as something
existent, though he did not consider them to be existing things. This is all false; and the fact that it
has been exposed as such by Brentano himself has been obstinately ignored. Contemporary theory
of knowledge and especially later “phenomenology” (Husserl’s Ideen and Transzendentale Logik)
absorbed these thoughts which had long been surmounted by Brentano and developed them into a
direction from which Brentano himself had parted.
13 It seems, Brentano says, that the adaequatio rei et intellectus disintegrates because there is no res,
no “thing”, among the “eternal truths”, “impossibilities”, etc. to which thought would correspond. But
in the following paragraph he holds that entities which are non-real and are yet capable of existing
may serve as that to which thought corresponds.
I repeat that this idea is untenable and that Brentano later rejected it categorically. But the theory
reigns over the whole of epistemological literature without anyone taking note of Brentano’s (later)
objections.
14 Brentano believed, then, that the doctrine of the adaequatio rei et intellectus is not completely
false; it is to be interpreted, however, not as a correspondence of judging with a res (a thing or entity,
in the strict sense of the term), but as a correspondence of the affirming judgement with something
existent, and of the denying judgement with something non-existent. Non-things, irrealia, entities of
reason, were thus said to be like things in that they sometimes exist and sometimes do not exist.
15 In this context “entity” is the most fundamental concept for Brentano, under which not only every
thing but also every non-thing can be subsumed. Later Brentano rejected this thesis. He attempted to
show that “entity” must be a univocal concept, since the concept of our consciousness, which always
has something as its object, is univocal. But it would be impossible for “entity” to be a univocal
concept if it were intended to encompass both things and non-things, for these would not share a