Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

116 Notes
in the sentence “The tree is an object per se” it functions autosemantically, as I have indicated in my
introduction to Vol. I of the Psychologie. “The tree is my intentional object” is synsemantic in more
than one respect, since the word “object” and the word “is” both function only synsemantically. For
the point is, not that the tree is an object, but that I am one who has the tree as an object, i.e. that I
am one who is thinking of a tree. And this is also true if the tree exists. “Being an object” is not a
predicate which is ascribed to the real tree; it is a denominatio mere extrinseca.
Husserl says that “the non-existence, or the conviction of the non-existence”, of the object thought
about cannot deprive the thinking of its object (Ideen, p. 185). But this means only that the conviction,
this judgement of the “reduced perception”, does not affect the thinking as such. The more one
reflects on all this, the more clearly one realizes that the talk about “bracketing” yields only another
unclear metaphor and not an analysis.
It requires no great phenomenological insight to realize that the tree per se might be consumed in
flames, while the intentionally existing tree, or the tree “in phenomenological reduction” remains
untouched (Ideen, p. 184). It has never yet occurred to anyone to take out fire insurance to protect
his “idea of a tree”.
10 Marty is not entirely consistent in his treatment of the so-called “irrealia”. To be sure, he follows
Brentano’s doctrine with respect to the analysis of form words such as “colour”, “redness”, etc. He
believes, however, that he must acknowledge empty space and time as entia irrealla; see A.Marty,
Raum und Zeit (Halle 1916), especially pp. 92 ff. On page 97 Marty says: “We should count as
abstracta, and hence as fictions, not only colour, quality, quantity, and such like, but also similarity,
difference, equality, causality, as well as existence, non-existence, possibility, necessity, impossibility,
being present, being future, and even being coloured, being spatially located, and such like.” In view
of these concessions, Marty is hardly consistent in adding, “But I definitely do not count the contents
of judgement among such fictions.” He holds that, in the case of every negative judgement, there is
a state of affairs constituting the basis or justification for asserting the judgement or for asserting it
apodictically. But this last desperate attempt to uphold the theory of “states of affairs” and “contents
of judgements” is a contradiction in terms. For “state of affairs” either signifies the things, concerning
which we judge either that they are or that they are not, or it signifies their “existence” or “nonexistence”.
But Marty, like Brentano, indeed even before Brentano, referred to the “existence” and
“non-existence” of things as fictions. See Brentano’s letter to me, dated 31 October, 1914, and my
comments upon it. Recently the doctrine of “states of affairs” has come to play a role in experimental
psychology; Bühler, for example, constructs his philosophy of language on the assumption of “states
of affairs”, as does Lindworsky.
11 This passage is concerned with the connection between modo recto and modo obliquo; for further
details see the appendix and index to Vol. 11 of the Psychologie.
12 According to Marty, the content of judgement is most naturally conceived as that which provides
the objective basis of the correctness of the judgement, or, more exactly, as that without which our
attitude could not be said to be correct or adequate. The content of the judgement “A is”, according
to this conception, would be “the being of A”; that of the judgement “A is B”, would be “the being-B
of A”; and so on. See A.Marty, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und
Sprachphilosophie (Halle 1908), p. 294 and elsewhere; see index under “Inhalt”.
13 See the Appendix to Vol. II of the Psychologie and “Neue Abhandlungen aus dem Nachlass”, in
the same volume, especially selection XIV and those that follow.
14 “Thing” (Reales), or “res”, is a term indicating the most general concept which can be abstracted
from our intuitions. The expression encompasses not only inanimate things, but everything that can
be thought about at all. Ordinary language has no fixed universal term for this concept other than
the pronoun “something” (etwas). Aristotle believed that there is no such most general concept.
“Thing” is not to be confused with “actual”, since one may say of many things that they are not
actual; but everything that is actual, on the other hand, is a thing. See the Introduction to Vol. I of the
Psychologie.