Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838–1917)

2. Psychology

Brentano’s interest in psychology dated from his early occupation with the work of Aristotle and the British empiricists. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint) (1874) helped establish psychology as an independent discipline. Following Comte in deliberately eschewing metaphysical controversy, Brentano, though believing in the soul, determined psychology as the science not of the soul but of mental phenomena. He writes: ‘All the data of our consciousness are divided into two great classes: the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena.’ Brentano initially restricted scientific investigation to phenomena or appearances and regarded the assumption that there are things in themselves as very uncertain. Physical phenomena are those sense-objects (for example, colours, sounds, odours) that we experience whenever we have a sensation or an imagined or dreamed counterpart of a sensation.

Comte had held inner observation to be impossible, since it would require us to split ourselves mentally in two. Brentano countered that inner perception is possible, because every mental act is accompanied by a secondary awareness of itself. Inner perception and memory form the solid experiential basis of psychology. Brentano was concerned in the Psychology to establish a proper taxonomy of mental acts. Following Descartes, he divides them into three classes: ideas (Vorstellungen), judgments and a third class comprising emotions, feelings, desires and acts of will, variously called interests or phenomena of love and hate. Ideas merely present something, judgments accept as existent or reject as nonexistent something presented, while interests take a pro- or con-attitude to something judged. Thus interests presuppose judgments and these in their turn presuppose ideas. So all mental phenomena are either ideas or are founded on ideas. Brentano’s classification has not been widely accepted.

From the late 1880s Brentano divided psychology into descriptive psychology, which he also sometimes called ‘phenomenology’ (see Phenomenological movement), and genetic psychology. The former is an a priori, philosophical discipline concerned with the basic elements of consciousness and their modes of structural combination, resting on the certain evidence of inner perception. The latter is a posteriori, empirical and probabilistic, concerned with the causal laws governing how mental phenomena arise and perish and the connections between the mental and the physiological.