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Franz Clemens Brentano
1838-1917
From a letter by F. Brentano of 2 September 1906 to Anton Marty :
Dear Friend :
I have spoken at length with Bergmann about your view that what there is includes not only things, but also the being, or the non-being of things, as well as a legion—indeedn an infinity—of impossibilities. He writes that he has taken up the problem with you again, finding you intransigent as before, and that he has now made some concessions with respect to my own arguments.
And so, once again, I will try to undeceive you, for I cannot help but regard your theory as a serious mistake. First let us make sure that I understood it correctly.
We are not considering the question whether there are contents of judgement qua contents of judgment. We want to consider rather whether there is something subsisting in and for itself, which, under certain conditions, may become the content of a judgement, and indeed of a correct judgement. Since one can judge with correctness that there is a tree, then (according to the theory) that tree is a tree may become the content of a correct judgement.
And this being of the tree is itself something which is. Similarly there would have to be the non-being of a golden mountain, the impossibility of a round square, and such like, where this little word �to be� is taken in an entirely strict sense.
But, according to my view, we are here confronted only with a figure of speech, which leads to the fiction of new beings and which so deceives us with respect to our psychological activities that we believe we are judging affirmatively when in fact we are denying something.
Of course, a person may say that, in imagining, he has had �the impossibility of a round square�, or the like, as an abject of his thought. But he is not thinking about it ; he is thinking only of signs which are meant to be surrogates. He is counting on there being no errors in the final result, as does the mathematician who makes use of absurd fictions—for example, negative quantities, unities divided by multiplicities, irrational and imaginary numbers, polygons with an infinite number of sides, etc., etc. In this way the ens linguae becomes the ens rationis, i.e. it becomes a fiction cum fundamento in re, a fiction which, although erroneous, is so firmly related to truth that it may be of help in leading us to the truth.
The difference between our views is considerable. Let us see what seem to be clear and decisive considerations in favour of mine.
1. It is impossible to have an idea without having and idea of something. The term �something� here signifies what is a thing. If the thinking is a compound thought, then things are what one has compounded.
It is because of this fact that the concept of an idea—of having something before the mind—is a simple, unequivocal concept.
Every observation confirms the point. No one can be said to think of the being of a tree, of the non-being of a tree, or of the impossibility of a round square, in the way in which one can be said to think of a tree. A careful psychological analysis shows that the former cases involve not only ideas but judgements. Suppose, for example, I reject apodictically and that I think of a as identical with b (merely thinking, but not judging, I predicate a of b). In such a case, language may mislead one into supposing that the impossibility of that b is here the object of our thought.
To say that, in the strict sense of the term �thinking�, one may think of an impossibility, or the like, is just as much of a mistake as to say that an impossibility may be the object of a correct affirmative judgement, or that there is such an impossibility.
2. Confirmation of what I have said may be found in this fact : even you must admit that every assertion affirming your entia rationis has its equivalent in an assertion having only realia as objects. Thus �There is the impossibility of a� is equivalent to the judgement �a is impossible�, which rejects a apodictically. What I have shown, with respect to the temporal modes of thinking, indicates that the temporal entia rationis are no exception.
Not only are judgements about things equivalent to your judgements about entia rationis ; where there is an instance of the letter there is also an instance of the former. Hence the entia rationis are entirely superfluous and not in accord with the economy of nature.
But all this fits in neatly with my conception of entia linguae—that they are fictions resulting from an improper understanding of the multiplicity of linguistic forms which we happen to have.
* * *
. . . Aristotle and . . . others in his tradition . . . defined truth as the correspondence of intellect and res. They did not consider res as an ens rationis corresponding to the content of the judgement ; they considered res as the thing which is the object of the judgement.
THE TRUE AND THE EVIDENT,
Translated from the German WAHRHEIT UND EVIDENZ (1930)
by Roderick M. Chisholm, Ilse Politzer and Kurt R. Fisher
New York : Humanities Press 1966, pp. 82-84, 85.
Comment It seems that any ens rationis (high-order abstraction) that one (anyone) might conceive becomes ens linguae (in Brentano�s terms) as soon as a word (term, name) has been placed on it—such as could be use for intelligible discourse.
Ens rationis seems equivalent to �fictitious entity� (d'Alembert, Bentham, Vaihiner, etc.) and the ens linguae seems equivalent to the name of the fictitious entity ; either sort sometimes collectively called 'fiction'. Ens rationis may exist with an individual (as an idea, or say, notion), ens liguae must exist as the name of some such idea insofar as it can be introduced as part of propositions that can be interpreted by others (by any number of individuals).
The existence of an entity (whether real entity or ficticious one) is itself the name of a fiction. For example, when speaking about 'the existence of A' we might, or might not, have the presence (somewhere) of the entity called 'A', of which the term 'existence' may be predicated, truly if there exists such an 'A', otherwise untruly — the expression has two terms and not one : whereas there is considered only one entity called 'A'.
It A does exist than 'A' is the name of an ens realis (real entity) while the 'existence' of A is the name of a fictitious entity (ens linguae) needed for the purposes of the discourse ; and it is so whether A does or does not exist.
It seems there had never been any use in arguing whether such entities as the geometrical �point�, �line�, �circle�, etc., do in fact exist. They do not exist as discrete material objects (bodies) ; but they do exist as ense rationis (when contemplated by someone) and/or as ens linguae, man-made conveniences. (WPT, Aug 03, rev Sept 07)
From FRANZ BRENTANO, 2002 by Wolfgang Huemer
Brentano has often been described as an extraordinarily charismatic teacher. Throughout his life he influenced a great number of students, many of who became important philosophers and psychologists in their own rights, such as Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, Carl Stumpf, Kasimir Twardowski, as well as Sigmund Freud. Many of his students became professors all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Marty in Prague, Meinong in Graz, and Twardowski in Lvov, and so spread Brentanianism over the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another of Brentano's students, Tomas Masaryk, was to become founder and first President (from 1918 to 1935) of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, where he created ideal conditions for the study of Brentano's philosophy. These factors explain the central role of Brentano in the philosophical development in Middle-Europe, especially in what was later called the Austrian Tradition in philosophy.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Winter 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
( http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2002/entries/brentano/ )
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