Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

114 Notes
The Rehmke school refuses to speak of the “psychical relation to a thing” and refers instead to the
“having of this thing”. According to this manner of speaking, one who sees or perceives a house or a
ducat has a house or a ducat. But “to have” is easily interpreted to mean possession, which comprises
a spatial-physical relation. Use of this word does not improve matters in the least, for here too one
must emancipate oneself from the “inner linguistic form”. This is why Brentano expresses the socalled
psychical relation by means of the longer expression, “to have as object”, saying “I have something
coloured as object (zum Objekt oder Geganstand)”. If one understands by “relation” something
requiring the existence of two terms and their connection, then admittedly we are not dealing here
with a relation in the strict sense of the term. Hence Brentano late abandoned the term “relation”,
and referred instead to “something relative (etwas Relativlichem)”. (Incidentally, I should take the
opportunity to correct an error I made in the introduction to the new edition of Vol. I of the Psychologie.
I said there that the psychological relation constituted the archetype of all relations. But actually
the archetypes of all relations are neither the psychological or intentional relations, nor the so-called
comparative relations. They are, rather, real relations, such as are involved in causation, in continuity,
and in the relations between substance and accident. The error in question was not made by Brentano,
as Fernkorn assumes in Grundwissenschaft, Vol. IX, p. 201, but by me.) It is remarkable indeed that
Heyde elsewhere rejects the expression “I am related to a tree” and yet holds that the tree is related to
me. How can the tree or the house have a relation to me if I am not related to it? Similarly, we should
not say that, if a person sees or hears something, he thereby experiences that thing. One experiences
the seeing and hearing, but one does not experience the object of the seeing and hearing.
One experiences states of consciousness, the state of being conscious of objects, but one does not
experience the objects. I perceive a spot of colour, I “see” a friend or a bus, but I do not experience
either one of them. The term “experience” loses its ordinary sense, and we give rise to a new source
of equivocation, if we apply it not only to the perception of one’s own experience (i.e., to one’s conscious
states), but also to the primary objects of these experiences.
4 The question whether the object exists “outside the mind” is not a question that pertains to thinking
alone or to the phenomenognostic description of the act of thinking. If I think about a Pegasus, one
says that “Pegasus” is the “intentional or immanent object” of the thought. In this case there would
be an immanent object, but no real or existing object. But if I think about the moon, then, along with
the so-called immanent object, there would also be a real object, an object which exists “outside
the mind”. Brentano’s letter is concerned with the locution “immanent, intentional”, but there is
more that is left to be said. For further details, see the new edition of Brentano’s Psychologie, and
in particular my introduction to the first and third volumes. The Rehmke school also disapproves of
such expressions as “inside and outside the mind”, as though one here considered the mind as a kind
of container or vessel. As long as there is no characteristica universalis, one must put up with such
metaphorical expressions. After all, Rehmke and his followers speak of “grasping a theorem” or of
an “introduction to philosophy” without taking “grasping” and “introduction” in their original senses.
5 This locution shows that the designation of consciousness as “psychic relation” is not to be taken
literally, as I have indicated above in connection with Rehmke. Thus, as already noted, Brentano later
described consciousness not as a relation, but as something relational (etwas Relativliches). Every
relation, in the strict sense of the word, requires the existence of two terms. This should take care of
Rehmke’s “relationless having”.
6 Here Brentano expressly says “linguistic correlate”. The locution “corresponding outside”, once
again, might give the followers of Rehmke’s “Grundwissenschaft” occasion to note that this “outside”
must be contrasted with an “inside” and therefore that it is spatial. I suppose it is superfluous to
remark that Brentano is saying only that I can have something as object of my thinking even though
that something does not exist.
7 The meaning of this hastily written sentence, which was revised in many places in the original,
is this: if we suppose that the contemplated horse, and not just the horse, is to be looked upon as the
object of the thinking, then this “immanent object”—the contemplated horse—would be the correlate