Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

108 Notes
any kind of a thing, and “existing” and “having being” are not predicates, referring to any kind of
attribute; each of these words is only a denominatio mere extrinseca. (This is not true, of course, of
such expressions as “an existent”, or “a being”, which are used, not to refer to being in the sense of
existing, but to refer to thing or res, in the Aristotelian sense.) Compare Vol. II of the Psychologie,
Appendix XVII, “Vom ens rationis”, and see the index under “Sein”, “Seiendes”, “Existenz”, etc.
43 Brentano is certainly right in saying that “A thing exists” does not imply the perceptibility of the
thing. His examples, however, are unfortunately chosen, for they presuppose that such expressions
as “deprivation”, “possibility”, “future”, and the like are not synsemantic but have a meaning of their
own. He might better have cited, as examples of what exists without being “perceptible”, the inner,
unconscious structure of the soul (habitus, as a permanent property) or the process of being affected
or coming into being, in the case of physical bodies.
44 I. e. one can infer that there is a necessary being, without thereby supposing that such a being
must be “perceptible”, in the usual sense of the word, by itself or by anything else.
45 Strangely enough, there are many physicists and Naturphilosophen who would now say nothing
can exist unless it is at least “in principle” observable.
46 Brentano here says that the statement “Perhaps there is an empty space” is not at all absurd. He
also says explicitly that empty space is not a thing. Hence he seems to have classified empty space
among the irrealia which he was later to reject. The question turns upon how we are to understand
“empty space”. If it is intended to refer to a Newtonian, irreal, infinite empty space, then, according
to Brentano’s later view, the concept is contradictory (see Psychologie, Vol. II, pp. 262 ff., and “Raum
und Zeit”, in Kantstudien, Vol. 25, 1920, pp. 1–23). This infinite empty space pertains to the so-called
possibility of places, but the latter comes to nothing more than the fact that spatial things as such are
not absurd or impossible. (For a more precise statement, see the Psychologie, Vol. II, pp. 254, 266.) But
one might also take “empty space” to refer to a real spatial object having no qualitative determination.
In such a case, empty space would be an extended thing and its stages could be regarded as physical
conditions; the non-qualified space would then become under certain circumstances the bearer of
such states. Empty space, in this latter sense of the term, is not a contradictory concept. One could
doubtless say of such empty space that it is a thing and that it exists, even though it is not perceptible.
(Compare Brentano’s Uber die Zukunft der Philosophie, Leipzig 1929, ed. O.Kraus, pp. 137, 175.)
47 This passage is now of historical interest. It makes clear that in 1889 Brentano interpreted
the doctrine of intentionality in terms of the mental existence of the object, thus saying of the
contemplated centaur (den vorgestellten Zentaur), the centaur that is an object of thought, that it
exists as a correlate of the act of thinking about a centaur (see the second selection in this book
and note 29). But he was soon to submit these ideas to criticism. By 1905 he was so far away from
this doctrine that he even expressed doubts, in a letter to Marty, that he had ever held it. Thus he
wrote: “It has never been my view that the immanent object is identical with the ‘object of thought’.
What we think about is the object or thing and not the ‘object of thought’. If, in our thought, we
contemplate a horse, the object of our thought is not a ‘contemplated horse’; it is the horse itself
which is the immanent object—the only thing that can strictly be called an object.” (See the first letter
in Part III of the present book.) But the passage in the paper on Sigwart cites the so-called immanent
object as an example of a non-thing, an entity which is not an in the sense of the categories, but
is an and thus something which may be said to exist. Marty also rejects the immanent
object in his Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie
(Halle 1908), but he replaces it by another untenable doctrine—that of consciousness as a “process
of assimilation (Verähnlichungsprozess)” with the object. Husserl too seems inclined to reject the
doctrine of the immanent object in his Logische Untersuchungen, but he is not entirely consistent,
for he also seems to regard the objects of his sensuous intentions as being “real components
(Bestandstücke) of consciousness” (Vol. II, pp. 238, 244). The older doctrine still haunts the Ideen
(sections 88, 91) and appears in the correlative fictions of Noema and Noese. The Rehmke school,
independently of Brentano, takes a strong stand against any distinction between object and content.