Introduction to Phenomenology

Dermot Moran, Dermont Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134671052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to phenomenology. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.
Written in a clear and engaging style, Introduction to Phenomenology charts the course of the phenomenological movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomonology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and assesses the distinctive use of phenomonology by some of its lesser known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout the book, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored.
This is an indispensible introduction for all unfamiliar with this much talked about but little understood school of thought. Technical terms are explained throughout and jargon is avoided. Introduction to Phenomenology will be of interest to all students seeking a reliable introduction to a key movement in European thought.

1

FRANZ BRENTANO

Descriptive psychology and intentionality

Introduction: exact philosophy

Franz Brentano’s project for reviving exact scientific philosophy, and, specifically, his project for descriptive psychology (deskriptive Psychologie), provided the first and most important intellectual stimulus for Husserl’s development of phenomenology. At first glance, Franz Brentano (1838–1917) seems an unlikely forerunner to Husserlian phenomenology, and indeed phenomenology is by no means an inevitable outgrowth of Brentano’s efforts. But Husserl was in fact deeply inspired by Brentano’s overall vision of philosophy as an exact science, and by Brentano’s reformulation of Aristotle’s conception of intentionality, as well as by his account of the peculiar kind of self-evidence of mental states which could yield apodictic truths, and thereby found a descriptive science of consciousness.

Of aristocratic birth, Brentano combined a grounding in Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy – over his life, he would publish five monographs on Aristotle – with a strong interest in the fledgling science of psychology, a science which he understood as a renewal of the enquiry regarding the nature of the soul first undertaken in Aristotle’s De anima, an enquiry which, he felt, was continued in Aquinas’s and in Descartes’s accounts of the soul. Following his mentor Aristotle, Brentano’s approach was problem oriented rather than historical, characterised by the careful study of empirical instances and by the drawing of subtle distinctions. Brentano read Aristotle as the first empiricist, whose enquiries had more in common with the empiricist tradition of Hume and Mill than with the decadent tradition of German metaphysics. Throughout his life, Brentano constantly referred back to Aristotle, though he eventually abandoned the conviction that philosophy could be founded on the Aristotelian system. Brentano always drew more on Aristotle than on the medieval Neo-Aristotelians such as Thomas and Suarez, presumably because he had completed his studies on Aristotle before the rise of Neo-Thomism. He planned a major collection of his writings on Aristotle which he never managed to complete. He did, however, publish one short monograph, Aristotle and His World View, in 1911.¹

An admirer of Comte and positivism, Brentano believed that philosophy was continuous with the natural sciences. He is recognised, along with Wilhelm Wundt, as one of the founding fathers of scientific experimental psychology. His emphasis on the importance of dispelling ambiguities in scientific language led, in his later work, to a kind of linguistic analysis not dissimilar to that being separately developed by Bertrand Russell, and which was developed in its own way by Brentano’s pupil, Anton Marty. On account of his friendship with Ernst Mach and others, his insistence on the empirical method, and his interest in distinguishing logical from grammatical form, Brentano was even cited as a formative influence in the Manifesto of the Vienna Circle, in which he is praised for his interest in Bolzano and Leibniz.² Brentano’s view of philosophy as a rigorous science put him at a considerable intellectual distance from his contemporaries who were proponents of idealism, existentialism, and life philosophy. Indeed he especially disdained Nietzsche as a practitioner of bad philosophy.³

The Brentano school

The works that appeared in Brentano’s lifetime (many on the history of philosophy) do not adequately portray either the richness of his philosophical insights or the charismatic influence he exerted over the gifted students attracted wherever he taught. Better evidence of his originality as a thinker is to be found in the Nachlass. But it is clear that Brentano himself was an inspiring, original thinker, who stimulated his students to develop in many different philosophical directions. These students were sufficiently united in their attachment to their teacher, and their desire to emulate his methods, such that one can speak loosely of a ‘Brentano school’. Besides Edmund Husserl, the membership of this ‘school’ included Anton Marty (1847–1914), who pioneered a form of linguistic analysis; Carl Stumpf (1848–1914), who developed descriptive psychology, especially of sensory experience (e.g. audition); Kasimir Twardowski (1866–1938), the so-called ‘father of Polish philosophy’ whose interests included both metaphysics and linguistic philosophy; Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), who developed the theory of objects (Gegenstandstheorie) against which Bertrand Russell reacted; Alois Höfler (1853–1922), an influential logician and descriptive psychologist who also taught at Vienna; Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), the founder of Gestalt psychology; and Thomas Masaryk (1850–1937), philosopher and nationalist, who went on to become President of Czechoslovakia, and was supportive of Husserl to the end. Though not a member of the Brentano school, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, attended Brentano’s lectures between 1874 and 1876, the only philosophy courses Freud took as part of his medical training. Members of the Brentano school contributed to realist metaphysics, Gestalt psychology, and the reform of Aristotelian logic and were clearly extremely influential in the birth of both phenomenology and logical positivism.⁴ But here, however, we are interested chiefly in the intellectual motivation which Brentano’s researches and teachings provided for Edmund Husserl in his development of phenomenology.

Husserl’s two years (1884–1886) of studying with Brentano were crucial for his intellectual development, and he gratefully acknowledged Brentano’s influence throughout his subsequent career. Having completed his doctorate in pure mathematics, Husserl was drawn to Brentano’s lectures, curious to learn more about this renowned teacher of whom his friend, Thomas Masaryk, had spoken so highly. Masaryk himself had completed his doctorate under Brentano in 1876, and had taught as Privatdozent in the University of Vienna from 1876 until 1882, when he moved to the University of Prague.⁵

Brentano’s lectures provided Husserl with his first serious introduction to traditional philosophy. He passed on to Husserl a conviction concerning the self-critical and serious life of the philosopher, and, within a short time, had influenced Husserl’s decision to transfer from a career in mathematics to philosophy. Husserl adopted Brentano’s view that any worthwhile philosophy must be rigorously scientific, not speculatively generating arbitrary opinions. In his first decade of research (1890–1900), Husserl saw himself as advancing Brentano’s programme of ‘descriptive psychology’, taking Brentano’s account of intentionality as the key concept for understanding and classifying conscious acts and experiential mental processes (Erlebnisse). Brentano’s philosophy of Evidenz, ‘evidence’ or, more accurately, ‘selfevidence’, had an enormous impact on Husserl’s conception of philosophy as the winning of genuine insights which can be held with justifiable certainty.⁶ Husserl also adopted and developed Brentano’s distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ presentations, a distinction which plays a key role in Husserl’s first publication, the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), and, subsequently, in Husserl’s phenomenological account of the difference between ‘empty’ and ‘filled’ intuitions, between symbolic thought and mental acts, which takes place in the full presence of the object. Brentano also inspired Husserl’s initial impetus to investigate time consciousness as a kind of original association or synthesis distinct from memory. Over the years, Husserl became more critical of aspects of Brentano’s teaching, and eventually came to see that he had progressed far beyond his teacher in the study of consciousness and in his conception of philosophy generally, until, finally, Husserl came to reject entirely Brentanian ‘descriptive psychology’ as a proper characterisation of his own phenomenology. Husserl, though he developed Brentano’s theory of wholes and parts, does not appear to have ever been attracted to, or influenced by, Brentano’s more metaphysical interests, for example his Aristotelianism, or, indeed, his later turn to reism, the doctrine which holds that only individual things exist, denying the existence of universals, species, and even properties.⁷

In contrast to Brentano’s effect on Husserl, Husserl had little influence on his teacher. Brentano never could understand Husserl’s enthusiasm for phenomenology and seemed genuinely perplexed by Husserl’s claims for phenomenology as an eidetic science. Overall, though they remained in personal contact and corresponded until Brentano’s death in 1917, Brentano did not follow Husserl’s subsequent philosophical development with any great interest, nor did he actually read Husserl’s books in any depth. Husserl’s gift of a copy of the Philosophy of Arithmetic remained unopened, though some passages from the Logical Investigations may have been read to Brentano, when his eyesight was failing. Nor did Brentano sympathise with Husserl’s critique of psychologism in the Prolegomena (1900) to the Logical Investigations. Brentano retained the classical view of logic as a ‘technique’ (Kunstlehre) for correct reasoning, and even suspected that he himself was the target of Husserl’s crusade against psychologism. In general, he tended to see Husserl as akin to Meinong in pursuing avenues of research (e.g. the theory of ideal ‘objectivities’, Gegenständlichkeiten), which he himself had already discarded, or indeed which he claimed were a distortion of his own position.

Brentano: life and writings (1838–1917)

Because of Brentano’s monumental influence, it is worth briefly charting his life and philosophical development. On the personal level, Franz Clemens von Brentano was an engaging, warm-hearted, conversationalist, a lover of songs and word-play. He even composed a book of riddles, Aenigmatias.⁸ He was born in Marienberg-am-Rhein in Germany on 16 January 1838 into a wealthy, well-connected, Catholic, but politically liberal, aristocratic family which originally had come from Italy.⁹ Soon after his birth, the family moved to Aschaffenburg, Germany.¹⁰ He graduated from the Royal Bavarian Gymnasium there in 1855, and, after a year at the Lyceum, also in Aschaffenburg, in 1856 he enrolled in the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Munich, where he spent three semesters,¹¹ followed by one semester studying theology at the University of Würzburg. He then went to Berlin, where he studied for one semester under the great logician and Aristotle scholar Friedrich August Trendelenburg (1802–1872), attending his lectures on psychology.

The encounter with Aristotle

Because he wished to specialise in medieval philosophy, Brentano moved to Münster to study for two semesters with one of the earliest advocates of Thomism in Germany, Franz Jacob Clemens (1815–1862), a vigorous Catholic polemicist. Brentano proposed a doctoral dissertation on Suarez, but, when Clemens died, Brentano changed to a different doctoral thesis, entitled On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, submitted to the University of Tübingen. This work, published in 1862, and dedicated to Trendelenburg,¹² was, much later in 1907, to be Martin Heidegger’s first introduction to philosophy and to the meaning of Being.¹³ This doctoral thesis is a fairly standard, systematic study of Aristotle’s metaphysics which defends Aristotle’s account of the categories and argues, against Kant, Trendelenburg, and others, that Aristotle’s presentation is not haphazard, but rather offers a complete and systematic account of the ways in which something can be predicated of a first substance (OSS 130).

Trendelenburg had completed an edition of Aristotle’s categories and published A History of the Doctrine of the Categories¹⁴ in 1846, which argued that Aristotle’s categories should be construed grammatically as a classification of the way things can be said to be. Against Trendelenburg, Brentano argues that Aristotle’s account of the categories is a genuine metaphysical contribution and not just an essay in grammar or logic. The categories are all the ways in which a being can be, and are all dependent on the manner of being of the first category, substance. Brentano, elucidating Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics Book IV that “being is said in many ways” (to de on legetai men pollakos, OSS 3), reviews Aristotle’s different accounts of being, identifying four main senses which he then proceeds to discuss in detail: accidental being (on kata symbebekos), being according to the categories, potential and actual being (on dynamei kai energeia), and being in the sense of being true or false (on hos alethes). Brentano finds that the chief meaning of ‘being’ for Aristotle is given by the category of substance, meaning thereby an individual thing, but credits Aristotle with the important discovery that ‘being true’ is another equally important meaning for ‘being’. Sometimes to say ‘is true’ is to do no more than affirm that something ‘is’, but there is a particular and proper sense of truth which belongs solely to judgements. Something is true if we judge it correctly. In later essays, dictated between 1907 and 1917, and collected as The Theory of the Categories, Brentano proposed a revision of Aristotle’s account of substance and accident, reversing the priority of these principles so that, instead of an accident being in a subject as Aristotle held, Brentano saw the subject as contained in the accidental unity and defended the view that accidents could supervene on accidents and not only on substances.¹⁵

On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle testifies to Brentano’s early interest in metaphysics, and especially the theory of substances, accidents, and relations, an interest consciously suppressed in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in order to concentrate on the presuppositionless description of psychical phenomena. Nevertheless, a metaphysical approach underpins much of his later work, and elements of his later ‘reism’ can already be found in this thesis, for example in his tendency to understand ‘substance’ as always meaning an individual entity (e.g. a man, a horse).

Having completed his doctorate in 1862, Brentano entered the Dominican house in Graz, the order to which his friend, Heinrich Denifle (1844–1905), later a renowned medievalist, belonged, but he soon left to become a seminarian in Munich. He was ordained a priest on 6 August 1864. In 1866 he completed his Habilitation at the University of Würzburg with a thesis entitled The Psychology of Aristotle, In Particular His Doctrine of the Active Intellect,¹⁶ This Habilitation thesis shows Brentano’s careful reading of Aristotle’s psychology, but it also lays down the basis for his later account of psychical acts. In particular, Brentano claims that when we perceive ‘cold’ then cold is ‘objectively’ in us. Furthermore, Brentano endorses Aristotle’s view that the mind grasps itself accidentally, per accidens, in its thinking of other objects. In this work, Brentano sought to defend Ari...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Franz Brentano: descriptive psychology and intentionality
• 2 Edmund Husserl: founder of phenomenology
• 3 Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901)
• 4 Husserl’s discovery of the reduction and transcendental phenomenology
• 5 Husserl and the crisis of the European sciences
• 6 Martin Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology
• 7 Heidegger’s Being and Time
• 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer: philosophical hermeneutics
• 9 Hannah Arendt: the phenomenology of the public sphere
• 10 Emmanuel Levinas: the phenomenology of alterity
• 11 Jean-Paul Sartre: passionate description
• 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty: the phenomenology of perception
• 13 Jacques Derrida: from phenomenology to deconstruction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index