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The World in Which Franz Brent Ano Believed He Lived

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The World in Which Franz Brent Ano Believed He Lived THE WORLD IN WHICH FRANZ BRENT ANO BELIEVED HE LIVED George KATKOV - Oxford What I have to say in this address has only an indirect bearing on Franz Brentano's contribution to philosophy. Many years ago, I was passionately interested in the philosophical ideas of Brentano, and they certainly influenced my outlook on the world, and still do so. The circumstances of my life distracted me from philosophical pur­ suits, and by now I have lost the intellectual acumen necessary for them. My interest in, and attachment to, the man who dominated my philosophical thinking in my younger days remains the same as ever. I never had the opportunity of meeting Franz Brentano per­ sonally, but I was intimately connected with his most faithful pupils and with many others who, without having been disciples in the proper sense, were nevertheless influenced by him, and were often admirers of his extraordinary personality. All these people are no longer with us, and I feel it somehow to be my duty to transmit the reflected light which fen upon me to a new generation. I will do so not by trying to trace the whole scope of unusually original and daring discoveries in the field of the theory of know­ ledge, ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics made by Brentano, but by seeking to explain how these ideas affected his outlook on the world in which he lived. Brentano himself never felt a call to describe his Weltanschauung, and limited himself to the elucidation of a few basic ideas which he felt should reform and improve our knowledge in special branches of philosophy. The frightening example of German speculative philosophy of the nineteenth century warned him against ever attempting to build a so-called philosophical system of his own. Possibly the character of his education in early you th also con­ tributed to this reluctance to publicise his beliefs, hypothetic con­ jectures and tentative explanations of the world around him and his place in it. 12 It was the ambition and the will of his parents, and especially of his extremely devout mother, that their son Franz, who showed signs of unusual gifts, should become a priest, and, it was hoped, a future leading light in the Roman Catholic church. He seems to have ac­ cepted his destiny, planned for him by parental authority, without question. As a novice and later as a young priest he implicitly ac­ cepted the teaching of the Church about the universe and the place of man in it. He saw his calling in pursuing the study of that part of Catholic doctrine which is based on natural methods and was to a large extent derived from the reception of Aristotelian doctrine in the Middle Ages, mainly in the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. Under cover of the clerical habit he could, in the sixties of the last century, indulge in close and most ingenious investigation of some obscure or controversial points of Aristotle's metaphysics, logic and psychology without entering into open conflict with any of the teachings of the Church. The results of his Aristotelian studies do not seem to have lost their interest for Aristotelian scholars of the pres­ ent day. We cannot give a date for his initial doubts concerning beliefs based on revelation: he must in any case have rejected the use of "revealed" knowledge in philosophy by the time he took his doctor's degree, for one of the theses he presented to the Faculty for disputation was: "The true method of philosophy is no other than that of natural science." We can be sure that the conflict which arose between him and Church authority in '69-'71 concerning the dogma of Papal infallibility was only a pretext to free himself from the moral and intellectual bondage under which he had suffered for many years and which, inwardly, he had long discarded. The painful procedure of leaving the priesthood, and subsequently the Church, had great consequences for Brentano's life and career, but very little effect on the development of his philosophy. Nevertheless, from the moment Brentano felt free to dissociate himself from Church dogma, he could only have recourse to his rational thinking to buttress his world outlook, which had earlier been provided for him by eccle­ siastical tradition. Steeped in Aristotelianism, he decided to proceed critically, revising what he had learned from Aristotle and not de­ parting from the teaching of the philosopher without having carried out the most thorough investigation. It so happened that almost simultaneously with his rupture with the Church, Brentano discovered that he could not follow Aristotle .
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