Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Notes 121
Thus we have developed the thesis that “the non-being of a thing” is not the name of anything
which can be affirmed or denied or even thought about. The same is true of “the being of a thing”, of
its “possibility” and “impossibility”, and so on. All these expressions, which make up the greater part
of Kant’s Table of Categories, are merely synsemantic terms (or synsemantica); their function in language
may be indicated by analyses similar to that just given. We see at the same time that Kant may
have had a vague idea of all this, when he tried to relate his categories to the table of judgements.
41 As is well known, Hume and Mill deny the strict concept of causal efficacy.
42 Despite Brentano’s penetrating criticism of Marty’s later work, we must not lose sight of the
fact that Brentano himself was significantly influenced by Marty. Marty had immediately drawn
consequences from Brentano’s rejection of the Aristotelian doctrine of “forms”, but Brentano
acknowledged these only after considerable resistance.
43 As early as the year 1909,1 had corresponded with Brentano on these questions, without allowing
myself to become convinced. After the death of Marty in 1914, there began a more intensive
correspondence. Brentano set forth his reasons once again with great patience, and I stubbornly
adhered to my untenable position. This apparent blindness on my part, which is now incomprehensible
to me, tried Brentano’s patience to the utmost, but it did not deter him from developing his
argument. It was responsible for the good-natured ridicule which is manifested here and elsewhere.
44 I have been able to ascertain the following from the correspondence between Brentano and
Marty. The subject-matter of the correspondence was Marty’s investigation into language and the
various questions to which these investigations led. It was Marty who set all the problems: thus he
posed them to Brentano and described his own attempts at solving them. Brentano would then reply,
sometimes agreeing, and sometimes not agreeing; in this way a lively debate ensued. During the
course of this debate, Brentano proposed the “far-reaching thesis” mentioned in the letter to Marty
of March 1901 (the first selection in Part II of the present book): the thesis, namely, that grammatical
abstracta, such as “redness’, “colour”, “virtue”, “size”, (i.e. the so-called Aristotelian “form words”),
are “fictions of speech” which do not themselves designate anything. “To speak of a redness which
is inherent in the thing and which constitutes the thing as something red”, Brentano had written, “is
to misconceive that property of general concepts which is revealed only through experience.” Marty
agreed at once and accepted the theory himself; see Anton Marty, Die “logische”, “lokalistische”
und andere Kasustheorien (Halle 1910), pp. 94 ff. Indeed, Marty not only agreed, but immediately
(1901) drew the important consequence that even the so-called “contents of judgement” are linguistic
fictions (where the content of the judgement “A is” would be the being of A, or that A is, and the
content of the judgement “A is not” would be the non-being of A, or that A is not). At first Brentano
rejected this consequence. As late as 1903, he wrote to Marty: “The non-things are not fictions. They
are concomitants; that is to say, the non-things are only logical consequences of the fact that there
are (or are not) certain things, things which come into being, persist, and pass away, entirely on their
own.” “But non-things are dependent for their actuality upon things.” And as late as 1904, it was
Marty who wrote to Brentano: “It would be a mistake to suppose that true negative judgements have
an objective correlate which is analogous to that of affirmative judgements. If it is true that A is, then
there is an object which corresponds to the idea of A; but if it is true that A is not, then there is no
object which corresponds to the idea of A. We must not adopt the fiction of supposing this ‘non-being
of A’ to be an object.” On 10 September of this same year (1904), Brentano replied in the following
way: “I have made a new attempt at treating the entia rationis as fictions, thus denying that there are
such things. It looks as though this can be carried out completely. We must understand the situation
in terms of the stenogrammatical character of our language: a single word may express a wealth of
intellectual activity. The ideas of reflection—the being of A, the existing A, and such like—appear
to be non-things.” “The old view required that these entia rationis be thought about only along with
certain things. But the new view says that only the things can be thought about.” “By denying that
the form words are true, names (names of what truly exists), the new view is prepared to forbid their
use, as having no proper function in the language.” The strange thing is that Marty proceeded to reject