FRANZ BRENTANO

Philosophers are creatures of the mind and the circumstances and events of a philosopher’s life are usually marginal to their philosophical ideas, achievements and outputs. In the case of Franz Brentano this is not so. His status as a lapsed priest led to his being denied the standard reward of a successful academic, a university chair, a denial which became a cause célèbre in late nineteenth-century Vienna. This, his several shifts of country, his blindness in later life, his fraught relationships with former students, and his many and complex changes of mind and doctrine, resulted in his published works being just a small and unrepresentative fraction of his thought. His in¶uence was exerted not through the printed but through the spoken word. An inspiring lecturer and a dedicated mentor, he was perhaps the most successful teacher of philosophy in the history of the subject, inspiring two generations of students with his vision of a rigorous scienti…c philosophy. His best students …lled chairs of philosophy and psychology throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and abroad in Germany and Italy: they also numbered two heads of government and the founder of psychoanalysis. The fragmented and chaotic nature of Brentano’s scienti…c Nachlass and its initial unscholarly editing and posthumous publication mean that his work is still not properly available to the historian of philosophy. The breadth of his in¶uence on subsequent philosophy is considerable, but his own philosophy remains partly hidden and unknown. Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was born in 1838 in the Rhineland into a distinguished German literary and Roman Catholic family of Italian ancestry. His father Christian was a writer and Catholic publicist, brother of the noted romantic poet Clemens. Brentano’s father died when he was thirteen. His mother Emilia, née Genger, was very pious and strongly encouraged him to enter the priesthood. His aunt Bettina von Arnim was also a notable romantic author famously associated with Goethe. Brentano early showed an aptitude for study and scholarship. In his teens he was fascinated by Aquinas and scholastic philosophy. He specialized in philosophy and theology, studying, as was the custom, at several universities, including Berlin with the notable German philosopher Adolf Trendelenburg, who had written an in¶uential

history of the theory of categories. He completed his doctorate in 1862 with a dissertation called Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle), a piece which attracted attention for its well-argued defence of the reasonableness of Aristotle’s division of the categories against criticisms of Kant and Mill. Following his doctorate Brentano studied theology and took holy orders in 1864. He obtained his Habilitation in 1866 at the University of Würzburg, where he was employed as lecturer and later as associate (“extraordinary”) professor. His students from the Würzburg period include Anton Marty and Carl Stumpf, both of whom became notable philosophers. In the period preceding the …rst Vatican Council, it became clear that the Pope and his supporters wanted to proclaim a dogma of papal infallibility. Brentano was commissioned by liberal Catholic bishops to argue against this proposal. The opposition was unsuccessful, and at the same time Brentano began to have doubts about matters of Catholic dogma including the Trinity and the Incarnation. He delayed acting openly until after the death of his mother, but news of his doubts had leaked out and made his position untenable in Würzburg, where his position was linked with his status as a priest, so in 1873 he resigned his position there and left the priesthood. Being in the middle of writing a book on psychology as a “passport out of Würzburg,” he spent several months without a position, contracting then recovering from smallpox, and visiting Herbert Spencer in England, though unable to meet John Stuart Mill in Avignon as planned, due to the latter’s death. In his absence he was appointed to a chair of philosophy at the University of Vienna, which he took up in 1874. In the same year the …rst part of his book Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint) was published, and this made his reputation. In Vienna Brentano plunged into teaching and society. Being a brilliant and charismatic teacher, with an imposing appearance and a hint of exotic scandal because of leaving the priesthood, he soon acquired celebrity status, and his lectures, particularly those on practical philosophy (ethics), were heavily attended. Never a ¶uent writer, his publishing suffered from his other activities, and his ongoing changes of mind made it impossible for him to complete the psychology book. In this period his notable students included Alois Hö¶er, Alexius Meinong, Sigmund Freud, and Tomáš Masaryk. In 1880 Brentano married Ida Lieben, member of a wealthy Jewish family. Austrian law apparently forbade ex-priests from marrying. Although juridical opinion was divided on the question, Brentano decided not to risk a court case and revoked the Austrian citizenship he had acquired with his professorship, which entailed resigning his chair. He took Saxon citizenship and he and Ida married in Leipzig. Returning to Vienna in the expectation of reinstatement, having broken no Austrian law, Brentano discovered he had alienated conservative opinion including that of the Emperor, who steadfastly refused to reappoint him despite annual declarations of support from the Vienna faculty. Brentano retained the lowly status of Privatdozent, allowed to lecture, but unsalaried and unable to supervise dissertations. His teaching continued to be as popular as before, with his lectures on ethics attended by hundreds of students. His later illustrious students from this period of Vienna teaching included Christian von

Ehrenfels, Edmund Husserl, Benno Kerry, and Kazimierz Twardowski. During this period his publications were mainly con…ned to short essays. Ida’s death and his continuing frustration with the of…cial blocking of his reinstatement prompted Brentano to retire in 1895 and move to Florence. He married again, his second wife Emilie Ruprecht becoming stepmother to his son Johannes (John, Gio). As time went on his eyesight deteriorated and he became unable to read or write. An eye operation in 1903 failed to restore his sight and he became dependent on his wife reading to him and his thoughts being dictated. He corresponded copiously, in particular with Marty. In this period he acquired a second generation of followers who had been taught by Marty in Prague, but had “defected” to Brentano, notably Emil Arleth, Oskar Kraus and Alfred Kastil. They stepped in to help Brentano in compiling publications. During this period Brentano’s ideas underwent a fundamental shift towards the position later called reism, and everyone struggled to understand him and catch up with his changes of opinion. After Italy entered the war against AustriaHungary in 1915, the popular sentiment against Austrians forced Brentano into exile again, in Zurich in Switzerland, where he died in 1917. As a person Brentano was apparently genial, helpful to his students, and a kind and loving husband and father. His striking photographic appearances as a young man in dark habit, black beard and shock of hair, and occasionally a dashing broad-brimmed hat suggest a certain dandyism, certainly an awareness of the impression he conveyed to others. This is corroborated by the testimony of his student Ehrenfels, who claims Brentano’s speaking style was a little self-conscious, retaining something of the tones of the pulpit, and he continued to wear black. In later life, having lost his eyesight, he appears more conventionally the untidy grand homme. In social conversation he was effortlessly charming and witty. His wit extended to penning numerous puzzles, some of which he published. He was an accomplished chess player, and published a new opening. In art and music his tastes were by nineteenth-century standards old-fashioned: he loved plainchant and hated Wagner, a difference in taste setting him off from the ardent Wagnerian and Bruckner student Ehrenfels. As an academic polemicist Brentano was quick to take offense and did not readily forgive or try to understand those of his students – the majority – who strayed from the assigned path. As his at times intemperate correspondence with Marty makes clear, had he remained in a position of power and in¶uence in Vienna he might well have become, as Rudolf Haller once remarked, “an impossible tyrant.” After Brentano’s death his second generation followers Kraus and Kastil, assisted by generous funding from the new Czechoslovak state, whose …rst President was Brentano’s former student Masaryk, set about organizing and publishing his copious and chaotic Nachlass. This caused many more of Brentano’s words to enter the public domain, and in some cases, such as in the publication of lecture notes, these were relatively unproblematic. On the other hand, Brentano, realizing that his writings were a mess, explicitly gave his editors carte blanche to work with his Nachlass in the way Jeremy Bentham’s nephew had dealt with his similarly chaotic leavings, by a process which can euphemistically be called “creative editing.” The problems caused by the editors’ way of going about this are still with us, in two senses. Firstly, many of the actually published texts are compilations of pieces

drawn from different places and periods, put together to give the appearance of a coherent treatise, but in fact no such thing. In some cases, such as the compilation on logic called Die Lehre vom richtigen Urteil (The Theory of Correct Judgement), edited by Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand and published in 1956, the complication gives a drastically misleading picture of Brentano’s thought on the subject, lending it a spurious unity and coherence. The second and not unconnected problem is that Brentano’s views underwent a long, complex and tortuous development, resulting in him abandoning or repudiating earlier positions, but sometimes also going back to earlier positions after reconsideration. Without a suitably chronological trail through Brentano’s thinking, which is completely covered up by the attempt to provide coherent and convincing uni…ed presentations, we remain largely in the dark about his motives for changing his mind. In this he is very unlike, say, Bertrand Russell, whose similarly copious and radical changes of mind are much more publicly documented in virtue of his ¶uency and productivity as a writer. The fragmentary nature of Brentano’s writings as his eyesight deteriorated also increased the problems, as did his practice of reusing lecture notes more than once and introducing copious revisions and annotations to his manuscripts at different times. The problem is similar to, but if anything worse than, the problem that faced the Wittgenstein Nachlass. There is even a genetic link between the two cases, in that Wittgenstein’s literary executor Rush Rhees had been in earlier times a Brentanist, and had spent time at Innsbruck with Alfred Kastil, presumably observing Kastil’s cut-and-paste editorial methods. After his death, Brentano’s Nachlass passed into the possession of his son John, who had trained in Germany as a physicist and worked in Zurich, Manchester and …nally at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Parts of it went to Innsbruck (Kastil) and Prague (Kraus) for working into publication, but after the Second World War John Brentano gathered the manuscripts together and deposited them in the Houghton Library at Harvard, where they were catalogued by Franziska MayerHillebrand and partly micro…lmed by John and his wife Sophie. John also set up a foundation to propagate his father’s work, and this was led for many years by the eminent philosopher Roderick Chisholm, who assiduously promoted Brentanian ideas and organized further publications and translation into English. In time it became apparent that the only way to preserve Brentano’s writings, which were written on highly acidic and rapidly deteriorating paper, was to digitally photograph them, and this work has been largely completed with support from the Brentano Foundation. In the course of this work Mayer-Hillebrand’s defective catalogue was revised, enlarged and much improved by Thomas Binder. The more exacting work of transcribing the complex manuscripts into a publishable form, whether print or online, remains to be done. Until much of this writing is in the public domain, any summative assessment of Brentano’s philosophy and its complex development will remain interim and incomplete.