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I ntentionality So, we can now see why intentionality, for Brentano, must be characterized in terms of ‘intentional inexistence’, because it is the term that applies to all possible objects of mental phenomena: The ‘intentional inexistence’ of an object is what is distinctive of all mental phenomena; only some of the objects of mental acts have ‘real existence’ This interpretation of Brentano’s characterization of intentionality is very foreign to our contemporary understanding of intentionality We tend to begin with the idea that our intentional mental states are typically directed at, or relate us to, a mind-independent reality.20 In fact, we take the paradigm cases of such intentional mental states to be relations to physical objects And if this is our starting point, the idea that we can think about objects that not exist becomes a pressing problem If intentional mental states are relations, and relations can only have relata that exist, how can we think about non-existent objects? Similarly, if we can only stand in genuine relations to things that exist in space and time and have causal influence, and abstract objects don’t exist in space and time and don’t have causal influence, how can we think about, and hence become intentionally related to, abstract objects? Although Brentano later started thinking about intentionality in these terms in the 1911 Appendix, it didn’t seem to concern him at all in 1874 The shift is evident in the following remarks In the very first sentence of the Appendix he writes, “What is characteristic of every mental activity is, as I believe I have shown, the reference to something as an object In this respect, every mental activity seems to be something relational” (211/ 271) In the Foreword to the 1911 edition, he characterizes his shift in thinking about intentionality as follows: “One of the most important innovations is that I am no longer of the opinion that the mental relation can have something other than a thing [Reales] as its object” (xxvi/xxiii) And in the Nachlass (XIV On Objects of Thought) he writes: Anyone who thinks thinks of something And because this is part of the concept of thinking, this concept cannot be a unitary one unless the little word “something,” too, has a single meaning. . . [I]f the “something” is a univocal concept, it can only be a generic concept under which everything which is supposed to be an object of thought must fall And consequently it must be maintained that anyone who is thinking must have a thing (Reales) as his object and have this as his object in one and the same sense of the word This is in opposition to Aristotle, and to many moderns who say that we not always have a thing, but often have a non-thing (Nicht-Reales), as our object In these passages, we see Brentano move from thinking about intentionality as involving reference to something as object to thinking of it explicitly as a relation, and as a relation only to Reales It is important to bear in mind Brentano’s original 209
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