DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY Edited by Tim Crane and Jonathan Wolff University College London The history of the International Library of Philosophy can be traced back to the 1920s, when C.K. Ogden launched the series with G.E. Moore’s Philosophical Papers and soon after published Ludwig’ Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus. Since its auspicious start, it has published the finest work in philosophy under the successive editorships of A.J. Ayer, Bernard Williams and Ted Honderich. Now jointly edited by Tim Crane and Jonathan Wolff, the I.L.P will continue to publish work at the forefront of philosophical research. Other titles in the I.L.P. include: PSYCHOLOGY FROM AN EMPIRICAL STANDPOINT, SECOND EDITION With a new introduction by Peter Simons Franz Brentano CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS Daniel C. Dennett G. E. MOORE: SELECTED WRITINGS Edited by Thomas Baldwin A MATERIALIST THEORY OF THE MIND D. M. Armstrong DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY Franz Brentano Translated and edited by Benito Müller London and New York First published 1982 by Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg First published in English 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 English translation © 1995 Benito Müller All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested Brentano, Franz Clemens, 1838–1917. [Deskriptive Psychologie. English] Descriptive psychology/by Franz Brentano: translated and edited by Benito Müller. p. cm. – (International library of philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Descriptive psychology. 2. Phenomenological psychology. I. Müller, Benito, 1958–. II. Title. III. Series. BF39.8.B7413 1995 150.19'8–dc20 94–44167 CIP ISBN 0-415-10811-X (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-00604-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20373-9 (Glassbook Format) To Vineeta and Anisha CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction x Part I The task of psychognosy 1 PSYCHOGNOSY AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 3 2 ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 13 Unity, not simplicity of consciousness 13 Separable and distinctional parts 15 A fictitious example 17 Distinctional parts in the strict sense 22 Distinctional parts in the modified sense 28 3 THE CORRECT METHOD OF THE PSYCHOGNOST 31 Introduction 31 Experiencing 32 Noticing 34 Fixing 66 Inductive generalization 73 Making deductive use 76 Psychognosy as precondition for genetic psychology 78 Part II A survey of psychognosy 1 THE COMPONENTS OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS 83 2 PSYCHICAL ACTS 89 Introduction 89 vii CONTENTS Two main classes of psychical acts: fundamental acts and superposed acts 90 The nature of fundamental psychical acts 91 The primary objects of fundamental psychical acts 94 3 THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF SENSATIONS 111 Spatial determination 111 Of what fills space 122 Appendices 1 INNER PERCEPTION 129 2 DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY OR DESCRIPTIVE PHENOMENOLOGY 137 The concept of descriptive psychology 137 The genesis of descriptive psychology 138 Summary 138 3 OF THE CONTENT OF EXPERIENCES 143 4 PSYCHOGNOSTIC SKETCH 155 Introduction 155 Of the relations of the soul 156 5 PSYCHOGNOSTIC SKETCH: DIFFERENT ADAPTATION 163 Psychognosy 163 Psychology 165 6 PERCEIVING, APPERCEIVING, CLEARLY APPERCEIVING, COMPOUNDED APPERCEIVING, TRANSCENDENTALLY APPERCEIVING 171 Editors’ notes 175 Index 193 viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Roderick Chisholm and Barry Smith for approaching me with this project, and the Brentano Foundation for having financed it. I am also grateful to Rolf George, Sue Hamilton, Hugh Miller for their helpful comments, and to John Penney for his patience and philological expertise. Last, but certainly not least, I am greatly indebted to Wilhelm Baumgartner for the time he spent with me discussing my suggestions for editorial changes, and for his hospitality in Würzburg. ix INTRODUCTION* I It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence, direct or indirect, of Franz Brentano’s thought upon both philosophy and psychology. Among those he taught himself were Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, C. Stumpf, A. Marty, Th.G. Masaryk and Freud, and through them Brentano’s work influenced Ajdukiewicz, Lukasiewicz, Lesniewski, Kotarbinski, Tarski, Heidegger, Chr.V. Eherenfels, M. Wertheimer, W. Köhler and even Kafka. Yet Brentano’s teachings are by no means merely of historical interest. His doctrines of intentionality and evidence (which did have a strong influence on the moral philosophies of G.F. Stout, Russell and G.E. Moore) remain highly relevant to present-day philosophy of mind, psychology and ethics, and have been taken over and advanced by contemporary thinkers such as R.M. Chisholm. Brentano and Philosophy1 Perhaps the best known fact about Brentano is that he was Husserl’s teacher. Yet to think that this exhausts Brentano’s philosophical significance is to underestimate Brentano’s influence and the importance of his philosophical work in its own right. As concerns, * Part II of this introduction, which explains and comments on the particular doctrines put forward in Brentano’s text, is taken from the German edition: F. Brentano, Deskriptive Psychologie, R. Chisholm and W. Baumgartner (eds), Hamburg: Meiner 1982. 1 For a more comprehensive contemporary account of Brentano’s life and work see: W. Baumgartner and F.-P. Burkard, ‘Franz Brentano; Eine Skizze seines Lebens und seiner Werke’, International Bibliography of Austrian Philosophy, Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi 1990, pp. 16–53. x INTRODUCTION in particular, the relationship between Brentano and Husserl, Chisholm is much closer to the truth in his choice of ‘viewing Husserl as being a student of Brentano rather than viewing Brentano as a teacher of Husserl’.2 Apart from Brentano’s notorious reluctance to publish, one of the reasons for the still prevalent underrating of Brentano’s own work might be that he was, unfortunately, only too right in his view of the development of philosophy as following a peculiar law of ascendence and decay.3 For many of the ‘improvements’ on Brentano’s doctrines suggested by his students and their successors are in fact nothing but inadvertent regressions into the realm of obscurity and even mysticism so vehemently rejected by him. Whether or not Brentano always succeeded in achieving his intended standard of scientific clarity is open to debate. The fact, however, that clarity was one of his main objectives – and, incidentally, the lack thereof one of his criticisms of Husserl4 – is indisputable. Brentano’s explicit rejection of the so-called ‘speculative science’5 proposed by Hegel and Schelling, and his famous fourth habilitation thesis that the method of philosophy is no other than that of natural science (Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est), are testimony to this avowed standard. Indeed, in his methodology Brentano was particularly insistent on a rigorous, ever self-critical analysis of our inner life [Seelenleben], of logic and of language. His ambitions were thus, in some ways, very close to those of the so-called positivists;6 and yet, unlike them, he was by no means ready to abandon metaphysics completely, but only to reject the mysticism and dogmatism of the German Idealists as ‘a travesty of genuine metaphysics’.7 Unfortunately, as Stegmüller rightly laments, this methodology was largely ignored by ontologists or metaphysicians, in particular of the Continental tradition. Instead, they continued to take over everyday language with its vaguenesses and its misleading grammatical 2 H. Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, The Hague: Nijhoff 1981, p.137. 3 See F. Brentano, Die vier Phasen der Philosophie, Leipzig: Meiner 1926. 4 See H. Spiegelberg, ‘On the Significance of the Correspondence between Brentano and Husserl’, in Grazer Philosophische Studien 5 (1978), pp. 95–116. 5 p. 5. 6 Brentano was indeed favourably impressed by the founder of positivism, A. Comte, on whom he published an article called ‘Auguste Comte und die positivistische Philosophie’, reprinted in Die vier Phasen der Philosophie, pp. 99 ff. 7 H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2nd ed. Vol. I, The Hague: Nijhoff 1965, p. 33, note 1. xi INTRODUCTION peculiarities, merely to burden it additionally with curious new linguistic constructs.8 Given the intellectual honesty of Brentano’s methodology, it is not surprising that he came to change some of his positions in the course of his long and fruitful philosophical career, in particular his views on truth and existence. Following Aristotle,9 the ‘early’ Brentano was an advocate of a correspondence theory of truth and of the doctrine that the ontologically relevant sense of ‘existing’ is that of ‘being true’, and thus he was obliged to accept non-real things, or irrealia (see pp. xx–xxii), in his ontology.10 The first of these views was later rejected in favour of his theory of evidence (mainly developed in his Vienna years) which has been considered by some11 to be Brentano’s most