Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
degree of abstraction is what it is that Marty dared to reject. I cannot forbear expressing my
surprise and regret that Marty permitted himself to deviate from long-established usage.
He transformed the concept of thing into the concept of that which is capable of causal
efficacy; in this way, a term which has traditionally been the most simple and the most
general of all our terms has been transformed into one designating a sophisticated and
complex concept which has been a matter of controversy since the time of Hume. Given
Marty’s sense of the term “thing”, we would have to say that according to Hume and Mill
and many others, there are no things at all! 41 Could anything show more clearly that Marty
has permitted himself to alter terminology in an entirely arbitrary way? And if we go back
from modern times to the Middle Ages and to antiquity, we are equally struck by Marty’s
deviation from what has been a consistent usage throughout all times. Thus, according to
Thomas, the concept of a thing, of being in the sense of the real, is the most general concept
to which reason can attain. Could he have imagined that one would think of a “thing” as
being equivalent to that which is capable of causal efficacy? And in antiquity Aristotle had
declared the concept of thing to be included in the concepts of substance and of accident.
Note he would have contradicted himself if he had identified thing with the concept of
causal efficacy, for he cites as a special category which falls under the accidental!
I think I may say that Marty’s highly irregular deviation from traditional usage has other
unfortunate consequences. A good many of the misguided corrections which he was led
to make in his views about space and time and contents, and, what I especially regret, in
his views about God, would have been avoided had he not revised his terminology in such
an arbitrary and misleading way—and in a way which does not correspond at all with our
thinking. The drive and zeal with which Marty tirelessly pursued his investigations will
continue to make us marvel; and so it is all the more to be regretted that the road leading
to the goal has been missed entirely, with the result that each step leads farther away from
the truth instead of closer to it. 42
VIII
To Oskar Kraus
16 November, 1914
I am pleased to note, in connection with my argument appealing to the unity of the concept
of thought, that Marty attempted to answer it by taking the concept of “something” to be
the concept of “that which is thinkable” rather than “that which is thought”. But I would
ask you to consider carefully and without prejudice whether this distinction really bears
upon our question. Could it be that, after appropriate modifications, my argument will
remain just as cogent as before? If it is necessary to concede that our thinking does not
have “that which is thought” as its object, then it is equally clear that our thinking does not
have “that which is thinkable” as its object. Who would want to take “being thinkable” as
a generic characteristic, common to stone, horse, forest? My comparison with denying or
rejecting something may be made to apply equally well here. For if the atheist cannot be
said to deny God as something denied, then he cannot be said to deny God as something
capable of being denied; in each case he would be contradicting what is intuitively obvious