The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (Routledge Revivals)

Franz Brentano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415557900
• eBook ISBN: 9781135195878
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Based on a lecture given before the Vienna Law Society in 1889, this title had an extraordinary influence in the field of philosophy. It provided the basis for the theory of value as this was developed by Meinong, Husserl and Scheler. In addition, the doctrine of intentionality that is presented here is central to contemporary philosophy of mind.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

On Kant’s Categorical Imperative
(Note 14 to page II)

In the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, (Foundations of Morals) ^* Kant formulates his categorical imperative in these two ways: “Act only in accordance with that maxim which you can at the same time will should become a universal law”; and “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature” (IV, 421 in the Akademie edition). In the Critique of Practical Reason, ^* he says: “Act so that the maxim of your will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation” (V, 31). In other words, as Kant himself puts it, act upon a maxim which is such that, if it were to become a universal law, it would not lead to contradictions and thus nullify itself. Consciousness of this fundamental imperative, according to Kant, is a fact of pure reason, which thereby proclaims itself to be legislative (sic volo sic jubeo). But Beneke has long since observed that this supposed consciousness is only a “poetic, psychological fiction”. (See his Grundlinien der Sittenlehre, 1841, Vol. II, p. xviii; compare his Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten, which is a counterpart to Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten.) There is probably no longer anyone of sound judgement who would disagree with Beneke on this point. It is noteworthy that even philosophers such as Mansel, who have the highest esteem for Kant, concede that the categorical imperative is a fiction and manifestly untenable.

And the categorical imperative has still another defect which is no less serious. Even if one were to accept it, one could not use it to deduce any ethical consequences. As Mill correctly observes (Utilitarianism, Chapter 1), the deductions Kant himself attempts to make fail “in an almost grotesque fashion”. The following is Kant’s favourite example of the way in which the categorical imperative is to be applied; it is to be found in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (IV, 722) as well as in the Critique of Practical Reason. If a person has been entrusted with some possession, without giving a receipt or any other acknowledgement, is it right for him to keep it for himself? Kant answers: “No!” For, he says, if the contrary maxim were to become a universal law, then no one would entrust anything to anyone without a receipt. In this case, Kant says, the law could not be put into effect since there would be no instances to which it applied, and therefore it would nullify itself.

It is easy to see that Kant’s reasoning is invalid and in fact absurd. If in consequence of a law certain actions cease to be performed, the law does exert an influence. It is therefore still effective and it has in no way nullified itself. To see the absurdity of what Kant says, we have only to deal with the following question in an analogous way: “Should I give in to a man who tries to bribe me?” The answer would have to be this: “Yes!” For if the contrary maxim were to become a universal law, then people would no longer attempt bribery. Therefore the law could not be put into effect since there would be no instances to which it applied, and therefore it would nullify itself.

Descartes’ Classification of Psychological Phenomena
(Note 21 to page 15)

Descartes writes in the third Meditation: “It is requisite that I should here divide my thoughts (all mental acts) into certain kinds…. Of my thoughts some are, so to speak, images of the things, and to these alone is the title ‘idea’ properly applied; examples are my thought of a man or of a chimera, of heaven, of an angel, or of God. But other thoughts possess other forms as well. For example, in willing, fearing, approving, denying, though I always perceive something as the subject of the action of my mind, yet by this action I always add something else to the idea which I have of that thing; and of the thoughts of this kind some are called volitions or affections, and others judgements.” ¹

Despite this clear statement, we find Windelband saying that, according to Descartes, to judge is to will. ² What misled him is Descartes’ treatment, in the fourth Meditation, of the influence of the will in the formation of our judgements. Scholastic philosophers—Suarez, for example—were already attributing too much to this influence, and Descartes himself exaggerates it to the point of considering every judgement, even those which are evident, as the product of an act of will. But it is one thing to produce the judgement and quite another thing to be that judgement. The view that judgement is a product of the act of will does appear in the passage cited above, and it is probably what led Descartes to assign judgement to the third place in his classification of psychological phenomena. And yet he can add, quite consistently, concerning such phenomena, “Some are called volitions and others are called judgements”.

There are two passages in Descartes’ later writings which are more likely to lead us astray. One of these appeared in the Principles of Philosophy (Part I, Principle 32), written three years after the Meditations, and the other three years after that, in the Notae in Programma. ³ It is strange that Windelband did not appeal to the passage from the Principles, instead of to the one in the Meditations, for the former could easily lead one to suppose that Descartes had changed his views. The passage reads: “All the modes of thinking that we observed in ourselves may be related to two general modes, the one of which consists in perception, or in the operation of the understanding, and the other in volition, or the operation of the will. Thus sense-perception, imagining, and conceiving things that are purely intelligible, are just different modes of perceiving; but desiring, holding in aversion, affirming, denying, doubting, all these are the different modes of willing.” ⁴

This passage, which could easily be taken to conflict with what Descartes says in the third Meditation, may tempt one to suppose that he has abandoned his threefold classification, thus giving up Scylla for Charybdis. Has he avoided the older mistake of confusing judgement and idea only now to confuse judgement and will? A closer examination will show that this is not the proper interpretation and that Descartes has made no such mistake. Let us note the following points, (1) There is not the slightest indication that Descartes was ever aware of abandoning the views he had expressed in the third Meditation. (2) Moreover, in 1647—three years after the publication of the Meditations and shortly before the conception of Notae in Programma—Descartes published his revised translation of the Meditations, and he made no change whatever in the crucial passage in the third Meditation.⁵ (3) In the Principles (Part I, Principle 42), just after the passage we have cited, he says that all our errors depend upon the will, but far from saying that our errors are themselves acts of will, he says that there is no one who would err voluntarily (“there is no one who expressly desires to err”). And there is an even more decisive indication of the fact that he views our judgements not as inner acts of will comparable to our desires and aversions, but as only the effects of the acts of will. For he immediately adds: “There is a great deal of difference between willing to be deceived and willing to give one’s assent to opinions in which error is sometimes found.” He says of will, not that it affirms or assents, in the way in which it desires, but rather that it wills assent. Just as he says, not that it is itself true, but that it desires the truth (“it is the very desire for knowing the truth which causes…judgement on things”). ⁶

There can be no doubt about Descartes’ real view; in the respects concerned it did not undergo any change at all. But we do have to explain the fact that he did alter the way in which he expressed his views. I think the solution is clearly as follows. Although he recognized that will and judgement are two fundamentally different types of mental phenomenon, he also saw that they have one feature in common which distinguishes them both from ideas. In the passage from the third Meditation, he notes that both will and judgement add something to the ideas on which they are based. And in the fourth Meditation he refers to another common character: the will decides with respect to both—it can initiate and withhold, not only its own acts, but also the acts of judgement. It is this feature which seems to him to be all-important in the first part of the Principles (numbers 29 to 42), and thus he contrasts ideas, which he takes to be operations of the understanding (“operationes intellectus”), with both judgement and will, which he takes to be operations of the will (“operationes voluntatis”). In the Notae in Programma, he again describes the acts of both judgement and will as being determinations of the will. “When I saw that over and above perception, which is required as a basis for judgement, there must needs be affirmation, or negation, to constitute the form of the judgement, and that it is frequently open to us to withhold our assent, even if we perceive a thing, I referred the act of judging which consists in nothing but assent, i.e., affirmation or negation, not to the perception of the understanding, but to the determination of the will.” ⁷ Indeed, he does not hesitate to say in the Principles that both of these “modes of thinking” are “modes of willing”, but from the context it is clear that he wishes only to say that both fall within the domain of the will.

We find additional support for this explanation if we consider the scholastic terminology with which Descartes had been familiar in his youth. It was customary to designate as actus voluntatis not only the motion of the will itself, but also anything performed under the control of the will. Hence there were said to be two kinds of acts of will—actus elicitus voluntatis’, the acts of the will itself, and actus imperatus voluntatis, the acts that are performed under the control of the will. In the same way Descartes includes under one category both the actus elicitus of the will and what, according to him, can only be an actus imperatus of the will. But his classification must not be taken to imply that the intentional relation is the same in the two cases.

This explanation is clear enough if we consider all sides of the matter; yet we find Spinoza anticipating Windelband’s misconception of the Cartesian doctrine. (It is more likely that Spinoza was misled by the passage in the Principles than by the one which Windelband cites from the Meditations?) In Proposition 49 of the Second Book of the Ethics, Spinoza himself interprets affirmation and negation as being, in the strictest sense, “volitions of the mind” (“volitiones mentis”), and then, as a result of still further confusion, he abolishes the distinction between the class of ideas and that of acts of will. The thesis now reads, “Will and understanding are one and the same”, ⁸ so that the threefold classification of Descartes and the twofold classification of Aristotle are both discarded altogether. Here, as usual, Spinoza has served only to corrupt the doctrines of his great teacher.

In Defence of a Theory of Judgement
(Note 22 to page 15)

All states of consciousness fall into one or the other of three groups: (i) merely contemplating something, having the thing before the mind [Vorstellen]; (ii) judging [Urteilen]; and (iii) feeling or having an emotion [Gemütstätigkeiten]. I do not wish to claim, however, that there is now general agreement on this point. After all, if we had to wait for universal agreement, we could not even be sure of the law of contradiction; and in the present case there are some old prejudices that are not easily given up. Nevertheless no one has found it possible to bring forward a single serious objection to this conception of psychological phenomena, and this fact itself is a significant confirmation.

There are some—for example Windelband—who concede that judging and mere having before the mind should not be thought of as constituting one and the same type of phenomenon, but who do contend that judging and the feelings of emotions should be classified together. They make the mistake that Hume made in his discussion of belief. The act of affirming is taken to be an instance of approval, or valuing or prizing, on the part of the feelings, and the act of denying is taken to be an instance of disapproval, a rejection on the part of the feelings.

There is some analogy, to be sure, but it is difficult to see how this confusion could be made. There are people who affirm the goodness of God and the wickedness of the devil—the being of Ormuzd and that of Ahriman—with the same degree of conviction, yet they value and prize the being of the one, while feeling nothing but aversion and repulsion towards that of the other. Or again: we love knowledge and we hate error; hence it is entirely proper that we approve those judgements which we hold to be correct—and every judgement we make, after all, is one that we hold to be correct. Judging is related to feeling, then, in that we do thus approve of the judgements we make. But why would one confuse the judgement, which we may thus be said to approve, with the activity or feeling which is the approval itself? It is as though a man who loves his wife and child and material possessions came to confuse these objects with the love that he feels for them. Compare again what I have just said [in Note 21] about Windelband’s mistake in ascribing such a doctrine to Descartes. One might also compare Sigwart’s note about Windelband, parts of which are very much to the point.¹ Perhaps I may be permitted to refer anyone who needs further grounds for distinguishing the second and third of these basic types of phenomena to my forthcoming Deskriptive Psychologie. This work, which is almost completed, will be a further development, and not just a continuation, of my Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. ^*

1 have just a few more remarks, in opposition to what Windelband has to say.

(1) He writes, on page 172, that according to me “love and hate” is not an appropriate designation for this third class of psychological phenomena; indeed, he attributes to me a quotation to this effect. But he is entirely mistaken and has made a serious oversight—as he could verify for himself by re-reading Vol. I, page 262, of my Psychologies²

(2) On page 178, he says that, according to me, the only classification of judgements which pertains to the act of judging itself is the classification according to quality; but this too is a mistake, and one which is entirely unjustified. My own belief is just the contrary; unlike Windelband, I believe that both the distinction between assertoric and apodictic judgements and the distinction between evident and blind judgements pertain to the act of judgement itself, and also that these distinctions are of basic importance. And I could cite still other distinctions—for example, the distinction between simple and compound acts of judgement. For it is not possible to resolve every compound judgement into entirely simple elements. The same can be said of certain compound concepts, as Aristotle saw. What is it to be red? To be coloured red. What is it to be coloured? To have the quality of being coloured. In each case the concept of the genus is contained in that of the specific difference; the separability of the one logical element from the other is thus one-sided. And we find the same situation, I believe, with respect to certain compound judgements. J.S.Mill said that to classify judgements as simple and complex would be like classifying horses as single horses and teams of horses.³ But he is quite wrong in ridi-culing this traditional classification; for his argument would apply equally well to the distinction between simple and compound concepts.

(3) Still another mistake—which almost everyone has made and which I, too, made in the first volume of the Psychologic—is that of supposing that one’s “degree of conviction”, so-called, is a kind of intensity analogous to the intensity of pleasure and pain. Were Windelband to accuse me of this mistake, his accusation would be entirely just. Instead, however, he criticizes me because I say that the so-called intensity of conviction is only analogous to, and not the same as, the variety of intensity experienced in pleasure and pain, and because I say that the (supposed) intensity of conviction and the (real) intensity of feeling are not comparable with respect to magnitude. This is one of the consequences of what Windelband takes to be his improved theory of judgement!

If a man’s belief that 2+1=3 had a degree of conviction which was literally an intensity, consider how powerful it would be! And if, as Windelband would have it (p. 186), the belief were a feeling in the strict sense of the word, and not merely something bearing a certain analogy to feeling, consider the havoc and violence to which the nervous system would be submitted! Our doctors might well tell us that, for the sake of our health, we should avoid the study of mathematics. (Compare what J.H. Newman has to say about the so-called degree of conviction in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent—an interesting work which has received but little notice in Germany.)

(4) Windelband wonders how I could think that the word “is” has one and the same meaning in such sentences as “There is a God”, “There is a human being”, “There is a deprivation”, “There is a possibility”, and “There is something which is true” (p. 183). Referring to my Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles, he finds it odd that anyone who writes on the manifold significance of being should fail to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
• AUTHOR’S PREFACE
• THE LECTURE: The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong
• SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
• APPENDICES