Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

I
GRAMMATICAL ABSTRACTA
AS LINGUISTIC FICTIONS
(From a letter to A.Marty of March 1901)
Your question has occupied me for several days now. 1 I have asked myself whether it
is not necessary to give up my view that general concepts are correlative pairs (a view
which is required if we think of the so-called abstracta such as “redness”, “evidence”,
etc., as being something—a “divisive” or a “form”—which inheres in things). Should we
not say instead that there is nothing whatever that corresponds to these abstracta (and not
merely that there is no thing that corresponds to them)? In other words, that we are here
confronted with a widespread error which may be attributed to language? Even Aristotle
was infected with this error, for he frequently took language as his point of orientation; he
was over-conservative in his approach to language, just as I have been over-conservative
in my approach to him.
My earlier train of thought had been this: the theory of concepts as correlative pairs is
based upon an analogy with the parts of a physical thing. Consider the tail, for example.
We seem to have as correlative concepts “A thing which has a tail” (Geschwänztes) and
“A tail which is had by a thing” (gehabter Schwanz). In the thought of “a tail”, the animal
is considered with regard to a physical part and is therefore not conceived completely;
similarly, in the thought of “redness”, a body is considered with respect to a logical part
and is therefore not conceived completely. The only difference is that the tail may exist
separately; hence “tail” and “tail which is had” are not identical concepts. But “redness”
and “redness which is possessed by something” are one and the same concept.
It now seems to me, however, that this analogy is false. The idea of the redness of a
thing, I should now say, is not the idea of a part of the thing; it is the idea of the whole thing
but of the thing considered in an incomplete way. What does this mean? Perhaps that just
a single part of the thing is considered? Not at all. For this would imply that universals are
parts of things, which is not at all the case. There is nothing universal in the things; the
so-called universal, as such, is only in the one who is thinking. It is not a part of any of
the things he is thinking about, for otherwise these things would have this part in common.
And if it were a part of any such thing, then, since the object of the thought is the entire
thing, the object would be the part.
The truth of the matter is this: the whole object is thought of by means of an indefinite
concept, and this is all there is to be said. There is no redness to be found and singled out
in the red object. One can say of the object only that “it is red”, i.e., that “red” or “being
red” can be predicated of it, or that the object falls under the definite concept of a red
thing. But we speak in this way only after secondary reflections. If we were to speak in
ordinary language of a redness which is inherent in the thing, or to speak with Aristotle
of a which belongs to the thing in so far as the thing is red, or
which makes it a red thing, we would misunderstand the remarkable property of general