Brentano was a man of broad intellectual interests. He is best known for his work in philosophy and psychology, but he also wrote on theology, ethics, and politics. This, as we shall see, was not foreign to his great endeavour in the field of scientific psychology. Brentano was first interested in Aristotelian metaphysics and, though rejecting Aristotle's system as a whole, he found in it an important starting point for his later reflections on the value and meaning of knowledge. But, having done away with Aristotelian philosophy, he was also deeply aware of the weakness of the attempts of the psychologists of his time to develop scientific procedures within the framework of philosophical studies. These circumstances, as well as his personal convictions, led him to consider himself as being charged with the mission of reforming philosophy in a fundamental manner. In his view, this mission assumed an 'almost messianic sense' (Spiegelberg 1960).
This peculiar attitude was ultimately motivated by metaphysical concerns. As a result of his reflections on theology, Brentano developed a basically obsessive anxiety about time and eternity; having rejected his religious faith as far as dogmatic contents were concerned, he nevertheless remained deeply troubled by the problems of human destiny which such teachings necessarily raise. Since he could no longer rely on theology, he was bound to search for another life reference. This he found in experience, i.e. in consciousness. It is therefore not surprising that he should have devoted his main philosophical effort to the epistemological analysis of the foundations of psychology.
The word 'experience' is misleading because it may be understood either as the content of consciousness in the sense of introspective psychology, or as the perceptual phenomena which make up our empirical knowledge of the external world. As a matter of fact, Brentano succeeded in transcending the classical opposition between immanentism and empiricism by developing an original theory of consciousness that allowed him to escape this well-known dualistic conception of the psychological subject. This he achieved by stressing the fact that the fundamental property of consciousness is intentionality: every subjective experience can only make sense if it is understood as an act of consciousness referred to some object, the latter being either some perceptual content, or some mental construct independent of its object but, once again, necessarily referred to some kind of object. Within such a framework, psychological immanentism is condemned at the outset because, though internal perception readily exists in subjective experience, internal observation of the introspective kind is plainly impossible, since it requires that particular sort of dualism according to which the subject is at the same time an object for himself. If, further, this postulated 'object' is defined as a 'scientific' one, as in early experimental psychology, the study of experience amounts finally to paradoxical realism, because it is a realism devoid of any empirically definable 'reality'.
Given these difficulties, we must now ask ourselves in which sense Brentano claims to be an empiricist, as testified by his well-known contention that experience is his 'only teacher' and by the significant title of his main work, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint) (1874). Empiricism, in this context, carries the meaning of a return to the only unavoidable experience, namely the subjective one as constitutive of a relation to the world. We know from Descartes's philosophy that his Cogito ergo sum led him to a similar attitude regarding the foundations of metaphysics and of science. The basic difference in Brentano's system lies in the fact that, unlike Descartes, he does not discard the relation to experienced objects for the sake of the so-called illusions of the senses but strives on the contrary to establish a firm world reference for every conscious phenomenon. This is the reason why he speaks of acts of consciousness, designating thereby not the facts of actual behaviour but the constitutive power of the self as such.
In order to circumscribe the realm of psychic phenomena, empirical psychology must first proceed to a descriptive survey of subjective experience by way of intuition. This first phase is not meant to be introspective; it is in fact an attempt at delineating psychology's own field of investigation, i.e. at a pre-scientific level. This basic task of classifying the 'acts' is ultimately phenomenological and represents the epistemological moment of Brentano's endeavour. In the partial republication of his original work in 1911 under the title On the Classification of Psychic Phenomena, Brentano refers to it as 'psychognosis' or 'phenominognosis'. Once this has been completed, the second task of empirical psychology is to establish psychological science as such by evidencing the causal relations between phenomena, eventually up to the physiological level. Brentano refers to this part of his work as 'genetic' psychology. We see therefore that what he is aiming at is finally a kind of experimental psychology epistemologically well founded, i.e. relying firmly on actual subjective experience.
It is worth noting that the publication of Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint coincided almost exactly with that of Wilhelm Wundt's Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Foundations of Physiological Psychology), both works appearing in March 1874. However, of these two founding treatises, for many decades only that of Wundt exerted a wide influence on the developments of psychology as a science. This was most probably due to the fact that in Wundt's system the relation of psychic events to physiological ones was more readily understandable, because Wundt took the existence of phenomena of consciousness for granted, under the form of introspectively accessible 'objects', whereas in Brentano's view the very concept of object could be defined only through the intentional founding acts. Historically speaking, it seems that the positivistic impetus given by Wundt to the new science of consciousness was much stronger than the epistemological warnings of Brentano concerning the possibility of a scientific psychology.
More than a century has now elapsed since the birth of experimental psychology, and we are in a better position to appreciate the results. Whatever tendencies made their appearance in psychology during this long period of experimenting and theorizing, we know that the debate is not closed. Brentano's teachings have made their way through the school of Graz and were responsible for the emergence of both Gestalt psychology and Husserlian phenomenology. The psychological positivism inherited from Wundt has evolved in its own way; it has not only yielded visible results, but has also given rise to a great deal of methodological and even epistemological reflection. This in itself testifies to the fact that the question of the essence of psychic phenomena, to use a phenomenological expression, is an unavoidable one. No doubt it would be careless to consider that a satisfactory answer to it will be found by merely increasing the quantity of factual results, since psychological data are the product of intentional acts of scientists. Today's psychologists are therefore indebted to Brentano — be it in an indirect fashion — for his early endeavour to lay the epistemological foundations which psychology needs, in order to exist as an adequate science of man's subjective experience.
(Published 1987)
See also phenomenology.
— Georges Thinès
- Bibliography
- Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, vol. i. Posthumous edn., ed. O. Kraus (1924–8).
- Spiegelberg, H. (1960). The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2 vols.
- Thinès, G. (1977). Phenomenology and the Science of Behaviour.
