Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
something to the ideas on which they are based. And in the fourth Meditation he refers
to another common character: the will decides with respect to both—it can initiate and
withhold, not only its own acts, but also the acts of judgement. It is this feature which
seems to him to be all-important in the first part of the Principles (numbers 29 to 42) and
thus he contrasts ideas, which he takes to be operations of the understanding (“operationes
intellectus”), with both judgement and will, which he takes to be operations of the will
(“operationes voluntatis”). In the Notae in Pogramma, he again describes the acts of both
judgement and will as being determinations of the will. “When I saw that, over and above
perception, which is required as a basis for judgement, there must needs be affirmation,
or negation, to constitute the form of the judgement, and that it is frequently open to us
to withhold our assent, even if we perceive a thing, I referred the act of judging which
consists in nothing but assent, i.e., affirmation or negation, not to the perception of the
understanding, but to the determination of the will.”* Indeed, he does not hesitate to say in
the Principles that both of these “modes of thinking” are “modes of willing”, but from the
context it is clear that he wishes only to say that both fall within the domain of the will.
We find additional support for this explanation if we consider the scholastic terminology
with which Descartes had been familiar in his youth. It was customary to designate as
actus voluntatis not only the motion of the will itself, but also anything that is performed
under the control of the will. Hence there were said to be two kinds of acts of will—actus
elicitus voluntatis, the acts of the will itself, and actus imperatus voluntatis, the acts that
are performed under the control of the will. In the same way Descartes includes under one
category both the actus elicitus of the will and what, according to him, can only be an actus
imperatus of the will. But his classification must not be taken to imply that the intentional
relation is the same in the two cases.
This explanation is clear enough if we consider all sides of the matter; yet we find Spinoza
anticipating Windelband’s misconception of the Cartesian doctrine. (It is more likely that
Spinoza was misled by the passage in the Principles than by the one which Windelband
cites from the Meditations.) In Proposition 49 of the Second Book of the Ethics, Spinoza
himself interprets affirmation and negation as being, in the strictest sense, “volitions of the
mind” (“volitiones mentis”), and then, as a result of still further confusion, he abolishes
the distinction between the class of ideas and that of acts of will. The thesis now reads,
“Will and understanding are one and the same”*, so that the threefold classification of
Descartes and the twofold classification of Aristotle are both discarded together. Here, as
usual, Spinoza has served only to corrupt the doctrine of his great teacher.
* Ego enim, cum viderem, praeter perceptionem, quae praerequiritur ut judicemus, opus esse
affirmatione vel negatione ad formam judicii constituendam, nobisque saepe esse liberum ut
cohibeamus assensionem, etiamsi rem percipiamus, ipsum actum judicandi, qui non nisi in
assensu, hoc est in affirmatione vel negatione consistit, non rettuli ad perceptionem intellectus
sed ad determinationem voluntatis. [English trans. from Haldane and Ross, Vol. I, p. 446.]
* Voluntas et intellectus unum et idem sunt.