Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

xviii Introduction
of view—just as in ethics and the theory of value—is neither autonomy nor heteronomy;
it is orthonomy. The correct point of view for theoretical reason is neither Ptolemaic nor
Copernican. Knowledge is not to be fitted to the things, nor are the things to be fitted to our
knowledge. Certain judgements about the things, however, are judgements as they ought
to be; they are justified in themselves, seen to be correct, and therefore they are the norms
for what is true and false, correct and incorrect. A judgement contradicting a judgement
which constitutes knowledge cannot possibly be evident—that is to say, it cannot possibly
constitute knowledge itself.
Descartes intends precisely this point with his “Quod clare et distincte percipio verum
est”; Spinoza is even clearer in Proposition 43 of Book II of the Ethics, where we find
that the subtle questions about “logical presuppositions” have already been exposed and
repudiated. For he exclaims: “Who can know that he knows a thing unless first of all he
knows the thing? That is to say, who can know that he has certainty with respect to a
thing, unless first of all he does have certainty with respect to the thing? What can serve
as a clearer and more certain norm of the truth than a true idea? As light reveals itself and
darkness, truth is the norm both of itself and of falsehood.”*
The Sophist Protagoras expressed the creed of all subjectivists and relativists with his
doctrine “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, of those that are
not that they are not.”
Neither Plato’s flight to the transcendent realm of ideas, nor the more mundane
correspondence theory of Aristotle, nor even the transcendental method of Kant and
the Kantians with its “Copernican revolution”, could completely uproot the doctrine of
Protagoras. But all these attempts were necessary in order that proper correction to the
homo-mensura could finally be formulated: the one who judges with insight, that is to say,
the one who knows, is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of those
that are not that they are not. Here we have the Archimedean point from which both the
Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories of knowledge may be uprooted. It is the logical and
epistemological
The demise of the correspondence theory, for Brentano, goes hand in hand with the
recognition that only things, or realia, can be thought, and that such irrealia as being
and non-being, existence and non-existence, possibility and impossibility, states of affairs
and truth, are mere fictions. And we may add to this, as already noted, the fact that the
correspondence theory involves a vicious circle. The essays and letters published here deal
with the correspondence theory partly in general terms and partly in the form of a polemic
against Anton Marty and the present editor. They apply, even to a greater extent, to the
views of Meinong (compare Brentano’s Psychologie, vol. II, p. 158) and Husserl.
Surely one ought to be able to see that nothing whatever is accomplished by the
assumption of these ideal and unreal objects, states of affairs, eternal truths, and the highlyprized
realm of “eternal values”. The assumption is totally incapable of dealing with
relativism and scepticism. If Protagoras says of such “truths” and “values” that they exist
only for those who believe in them, and that they do not exist for those who reject them,
how is one going to be able to use the “eternal truth” against him? What else can one do
* Compare the review, by Oskar Kraus, of Hermann Cohen, in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung,
1929, No. 30.