Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Notes 119
cannot deny that if the supposed thought of the non-being of a sparrow is to be completely distinct, it
requires nothing more than the thought of a sparrow and the thought of its evident rejection or denial.
The next letter makes this entirely clear. See note 28 above.
31 In order to arrive at the concept of that which is not a thing (der Begriffe vom Irrealem), Marty
was forced to imagine or invent special sources of abstraction.
32 For example, I cannot intuit my seeing without also intuiting what it is that I see; what I see is the
primary object of the intuition, and my seeing of it is the secondary object.
33 Brentano here refers to the view that, wherever the concept of “the correct” is applicable, there
must be an agreement or correspondence, and that this agreement or correspondence is a relation,
not to a thing, but to a “state of affairs”, “proposition” (Russell), “objective” (Meinong), “content”
(Marty), or, in the case of valuing, a relation to a “value” or to a “state of value”. But all these
supposed entities are fictitious.
34 In a letter to O.Kraus dated 14 November, 1909, which is published in the Introduction to Vol. I
of the Psychologie, Brentano writes:
“It is paradoxical in the highest degree to say that what a man promises to marry is an ens
rationis and that he keeps his word by marrying a real person. It would be just as paradoxical
to say that, if everything real were to be destroyed, a process would continue on throughout
infinity in which that which was yesterday would become that which was the day before yesterday,
and then become that which was the day before the day before yesterday, and so on.”
35 In fact, Brentano’s epoch-making discoveries have opened up vast perspectives and we cannot
even begin to envisage their significance for philosophy. To be sure, Brentano has already provided
many important applications in a long series of essays, of which only a few have been published up to
now (as appendices to Vols. II and III of the Psychologie). In carrying out these analyses one constantly
encounters new problems; we have been working on these without interruption, since 1916 when we
first began to understand the new theory. The later views are so revolutionary that they require an almost
continuous translation of traditional modes of expression; for these modes of expression, like the
ordinary language in which they originate, are almost completely permeated with fictions of the inner
form of language. While the so-called phenomenology of Husserl sets the Ossa towering upon the Pelion
of fictions, Brentano’s Phänomenognosie strips this ontological spook-world of its very foundations.
36 The “non-being of a cow” contains the non-being of a two-year-old cow, of a white cow, of a cow
with a herdsman, etc. Whatever is thought of as an essential physical or logical part of an object in a
completely explicit idea of that object belongs to the “content” of that idea and could not be correctly
denied if the object were correctly affirmed. And conversely: all those things which cannot correctly
be denied of the object if the object is to be correctly affirmed would be included in any explicit idea
of the object. If one correctly affirms the non-being of a cow, one cannot correctly deny the non-being
of a white cow, of a two-year-old cow, etc. It is as if these non-beings were contained in the non-being
of a cow as parts and were thus such that they would have to be thought of if that non-being were to
be thought in complete distinctness. But this is only “as if”, for the idea of the “non-being of a cow”
is a mere fiction. Actually a clear analysis of this pseudo-concept will show that it contains none of
the things it would have to contain if we really could think of “ideal objects” such as non-being,
impossibility, and the like.
37 This extremely important theory of the universality of all our intuitions, outer as well as inner,
is set forth in detail in Vol. II of the Psychologie; see also Vol. III. Up to this time, it has been
almost universally held that our sensations can present us with that which is individual; and similarly
for inner perception. But Brentano returns to the Aristotelian doctrine here, however much he may
deviate from Aristotle with respect to other fundamental points.
38 See note 19 above concerning the third letter to Marty (2 September, 1906). As indicated there,
Brentano first set forth his theory of temporal modes in 1894–95. In its initial version it was a theory
of the modes of judgement; later, around 1905, it also became a theory of the modes of thinking.