Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

I
ON THE SO-CALLED
“IMMANENT OR INTENTIONAL OBJECT”
To Anton Marty 1
17 March, 1905
Dear Friend,
I have your kind letter. I see that the Roman Congress has also upset you a little. I wasn’t
disturbed myself, I must say, and I have tried to calm E. as well as K. in a letter sent today.
Typographical errors are a nuisance, though, and because there were no offprints, I cannot
even send a copy to you. 2
As for your account of Höfler’s comments, I was baffled by the reference to the “content
and immanent object” of thought (“inhalt” und “immanentes Objekt” der Vorstellung). 3
When I spoke of “immanent object”, I used the qualification “immanent” in order to
avoid misunderstandings, since many use the unqualified term “object” to refer to that
which is outside the mind. 4 But by an object of a thought I meant what it is that the thought
is about, whether or not there is anything outside the mind corresponding to the thought.
It has never been my view that the immanent object is identical with “object of thought”
(vorgestelltes Objekt). What we think about is the object or thing and not the “object of
thought”. If, in our thought, we contemplate a horse, our thought has as its immanent
object—not a “contemplated horse”, but a horse. And strictly speaking only the horse—not
the “contemplated horse”—can be called an object.
But the object need not exist. The person thinking may have something as the object of
his thought even though that thing does not exist.
Of course it has long been customary to say that universals, qua universals, “exist in
the mind” and not in reality, and such like. But this is incorrect if what is thus called
“immanent” is taken to be the “contemplated horse” (gedachtes Pferd) or “the universal
as object of thought” (gedachtes Universale). For “horse contemplated in general by me
here and now” would then be the object of a general thought about a horse; it would be
the correlate of me as an individually thinking person, as having this individual object
of thought as object of thought. 5 . One could not say that universals as universals are in
the mind, if one of the characteristics of the “things existing in the mind” is that they are
“objects of my thought”.
When Aristotle said the is in one’s experience, he was also speaking of
what you call simply “object”. But because we do use the word “in” here, I allowed myself
the term “immanent object”, in order to say, not that the object exists, but that it is an
object whether or not there is anything that corresponds to it. Its being an object, however,
is merely the linguistic correlate of the person experiencing having it as object, i.e., his
thinking of it in his experience. 6
Aristotle also says that the receives the without the just as the intellect,
of course, takes up the in abstraction from the matter. Wasn’t his thinking