Individuality of the “I”: Brentano and Today

1. Introduction

The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), as a fifty-year-old movement of both phenomenologically and existentially disposed philosophers, may regard Franz Brentano (1838–1917) as at least a grandfather. For many SPEP members, including myself until very recently, Brentano has been known in a rather vague and inauthentic empty intention merely as the teacher of Husserl, foremost in regard to some aspects of the doctrine of intentionality. Upon closer inspection this is pitifully shortsighted, and I have come to believe that the phenomenologist’s lineage to the grandfather is not to be forgotten and that retrieving it may bring out not only differences but surprising enrichments that will emerge through wrestling with the differences.¹ As merely one example, I want to discuss Brentanian propositions regarding the individuality of the I.

2. The Emergence of the Theme of I as Substance

My interest in this and many other allied topics was first awakened by Manfred Frank,² who has noted that the teachings found in the first and only volume that Brentano published (in 1874) of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint developed a rather I-less theory of consciousness.³ It was not nonegological as an explicit denial of an I-moment or ingredient, but the position he developed might lead to that conclusion. Brentano’s emphasis was on the mere ontological unity of consciousness in the present as revealed in the pre-reflective or inner perception that accompanies all intentional acts. In the flux there is that of which one is conscious in one’s presencing, judging, and emotive-voluntary acts. But there is also the ineluctable self-knowing whereby these acts are also presenced. Is the one presencing also so presenced, that is, simply as another contemporary object along with the perceptually presenced, the judged, and the desired? No, the self is presenced only as a self-presencing of the intentional act, which, for example, perceives externally what is not the self who/which is presencing. Yet early on Brentano insists that the exterior presencing is always also a self-presencing.

Inner perception is analogous to outer perception in that it, too, is founded on a presenting or presencing, a Vorstellen, but inner perception is subordinate, and its object is not primarily and explicitly targeted but, rather, secondary and implicit. When one hears the sound the presenced sound is primary and the presenced hearing secondary. But the concrete whole act of hearing the sound is always at once a case of one’s presencing the sound and presencing, secondarily and implicitly, one’s hearing of the sound. (Inner perception’s presencing is always of what is actually present; Husserl’s retention or retention of retentions is not part of what Brentano’s inner perception presences.)

For Brentano, the whole that is “the unity of consciousness” is the unity of that of which one is conscious in exterior and interior perception. That “of which one is conscious” includes the acts presenting that of which one is conscious—there is no being-conscious without a presencing quasi-reflective act. This effects an inner appearing of . . . to—, a genitive and dative of manifestation. The whole is not something simple but, rather, made up of parts (he called them early on “divisives”) that are not identical with one another or the whole. Thus, for example, acts of memory are neither identical with feelings nor identical with the whole, which is the unified whole of consciousness (or that of which one is conscious). Yet they belong to one real entity or “thing” (the unity of that of which one is conscious) and enjoy a common membership with all the other acts in this one real thing.⁴

In later writings, some of which appeared as the second and third volumes of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, but especially The Theory of Categories, these parts are called the modes or accidents, which are distinct from one another but are said to belong to the substance, a subsisting entity, as the common part presenced presently in the inner perception of whatever acts. Eventually the “I” is...