Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Contents of Judgement, Propositions, Objectives, States of Affairs 67
to his own consciousness. A person who denied God would not in the same thought be
affirming him as something which is incapable of being denied. If it were not for the bias of
those deep-rooted convictions which you have so often expressed to me, you could hardly
be satisfied with the type of answer that you have given.
The fact that you have lived so long with this conviction may thus be a disadvantage, but
there are compensations. Since you are in the position of one who has nursed a conviction
for a long time and who continues to cling to it even after it has been emphatically rejected
by others whose judgement he respects, it may be assumed that you have carefully
pondered all sides of the matter and that you will have no difficulty in answering a number
of elementary questions. 43 May I ask you, then, about one of the simpler examples of your
supposed non-things? Let us consider, if we can, the being of a certain particular thing—
say, the being of this individual person. If I ask whether the being of this person is to be
distinguished from the person himself, then, of course, you will say yes; and similarly you
will have to say that the being of this person is distinguished from the being of the being
of this person, and then, of course, that this fourth thing is distinguished from still another,
and so on ad infinitum, And now, since I am dealing with one who is so well-informed
about the sort of entity that the being of this particular man is supposed to be, I may ask
for still more information. The man himself is made up of head, torso, and extremities,
and his head is made up of a nose, a mouth, two eyes, and two ears, and various smaller
parts, and a continuity of limits. Do you say, then, that the being of this man, and the
being of this being, and the being of this being of the being, are composed, in a similar
way, of the being of the being, and of the being of the being of the being, of the particular
parts and limits which make up the man? Surely you would have to answer affirmatively.
Assuming, then, that you do, I go on to my next question. Would you say, of the being of
the man, and the being of the being of the man, that they are extended entities having the
same dimensions as the man himself? Would they be included in a primary continuum
which is three-dimensional and infinite in every direction—a continuum, however, which
is not space, but which in one instance is the being of space, in another the being of the
being of space, and so on? Since space is supposed to be a non-thing, there would be no
distinction between these innumerable and ever-multiplying infinite primary continua and
space itself. I will only intimate here that one could construct an analogous argument with
respect to time: one would have to assume that outside time there is the being of each thing,
and you would say that the being of the beings of these things exist. Consequently, so far
as I can see, you couldn’t put these beings in time any more than you could put them in
space. But doubtless you have considered all this long ago, in feasting your eye upon the
majestic splendour and inexhaustible wealth of infinities which the doctrine of non-things
has bestowed upon the world.
A series of other questions arise. If the being of this particular man exists over and above
the man himself, then, over and above the man who is thought of only in general terms,
there will also exist the being of a man who is thought of only in general terms. Indeed,
if the sentence “There is this particular man” has a content that exists, then the indefinite
sentence “There is some man or other” would also have a content that exists. But now we
may ask: How is the existence of the content of “There is some man or other” to be related
to the being of this definite man? Marty’s views about the universal man, so far as I know,
are in complete agreement with mine. The universal as universal does not exist. General