Riddles of the Soul
GA 21
7. Brentano's Separation of the Soul Element from What Is External to the Soul
[ 1 ] Through his different presentations Brentano shows how strongly he strove for a clear separating of the soul element from what is external to the soul. His concept of the soul, which we have described in this book, compels him to do this. In order to see this, let us look at the way he tries to define the soul experience we have in forming a conviction about a truth. He asks himself: What is the source of what the soul experiences as a conviction when it relates this conviction to a content of mental pictures? Some thinkers believe that, with respect to a given truth, the degree of conviction is determined by the intensity of feeling with which one experiences the corresponding content of mental pictures. Brentano says about this:
It is wrong—but it is an error embraced by almost everyone, and one from which I also had not yet freed myself when I wrote the first volume of my Psychology—to believe that the degree of conviction is a level of intensity in judging that could be analogous to the intensity of pleasure and pain. If Windelband had reproached me with this error, I would consider him to be completely right. But now he criticizes me for wanting to accept intensity only in an analogous sense (not in the same sense) in the case of a conviction, and for declaring that in terms of magnitude one cannot compare the supposed intensity of conviction with the actual intensity of feeling. There we have the results of his improved grasp of what a judgment is.
If the degree of conviction in my belief that 2+1=3 were an intensity, how powerful this intensity would have to be! And if now, as Windelband would have it, this belief were made into a feeling—not just something that could be thought of as analogous to a feeling—how destructive for our nervous system the vehemence of a stirred feeling would be! Every doctor would have to warn against the study of mathematics as something shattering to one's health.
If Brentano could have lived more deeply into what worked in him in his striving to discover the nature of conviction, he would have seen the separation that exists between the mentally picturing soul element—which does not experience any intensity within itself when a conviction is being formed—and what is external to the soul—which enters the content of the soul element and which in the intensity of the degree of conviction, also remains something external to the soul while in the soul, in such a way that our inner life does indeed observe the degree of conviction, but does not live in it.
[ 2 ] What Brentano presents in his essay “The Individuation, Multiple Quality, and Intensity of Sense-perceptible Phenomena” (in his book Investigations into a Psychology of the Senses) belongs in a similar sphere of strict separation between the soul element and what is external to the soul. He endeavors to show there that intensity is not inherent to the actual soul element, and that the degree of intensity of soul sensation represents a life of what is felt outside the soul and is now present upon the stage of the soul element. Brentano senses that one absolutely does not need to enter into the "mystical darkness" of nonscience when one is endeavoring to develop further in cognition the seeds planted in such elementary insights. Therefore, he writes at the end of the essay just mentioned:
It is easy to see what the wider significance of this is.
Look how much Herbart's psychology and also psychophysics were founded upon this dogma (he is referring to the dogma of the intensity of the soul element)! All that will be tom down also in its fall. And so we'll see how the correction of a small point in the science of soul sensation will exert a far-reaching reformatory influence.
Even the hypotheses that one has set up relative to the world-all will not remain untouched by it.
To a large extent one has declared that a common analogy prevails between the psychic and the physical realms, without any proof being offered, to be sure, or even seriously attempted. One kept entirely to generalities and so an assigned role sufficed for the thought of intensity as a kind of magnitude belonging to every soul entity just as a spatial magnitude belongs to every physical entity.
But if one declares a common analogy to prevail between the soul element and the physical element, why not go all the way and declare them to be identical or simply substitute one for the other?
In everything analogous to the physical and vouched for in itself only through the evidence of perception, the soul element must render superfluous any hypothetical assumption that anything physical exists.
So, among others, Wundt's psychology also ends up with the thought that, after heuristically attributing an existence to the physical world for a time, one could finally let this assumption of physical existence fall away like scaffolding, in which case the whole genuine truth would reveal itself as a purely psychic world edifice.
This thought, to be sure, until now has had little prospect of ever gaining tangible form or being elaborated in detail. Any hopes in this direction, however, have been completely dashed by the new concept of intensity with its clear proof that nothing could be farther from the truth than calling the magnitude of intensity a universal property of soul activities.
So we will never allow our belief in the true existence of a physical world to be taken away from us, and this belief will always remain for natural science the hypothesis of hypotheses.
The common analogy between the soul element and the physical element, which Brentano rejects, is only sought by someone who does not strive to picture clearly the soul element on the one hand and the physical element on the other, but rather, instead of this—while continuing with his concepts to feel his way along against the physical—attributes to the soul element experiences like that of intensity, whereas, in the purely soul element, nothing of it is to be found. It seems to me that the above thought of Brentano's would have come more clearly into view, if its bearer—in the sense of what was described in this book on page 69f.—had focused his attention upon that characteristic of the physical element which is equal in significance to the intentional element within the soul element.
Nevertheless, it is significant that Brentano dared to extend his view beyond elementary insights out into more far-reaching, cosmic riddles. For, today's way of thinking is disinclined to broaden its views. Here is one example from many. At one place in his Eight Psychological Lectures (Jena, 1869), the eminent psychologist Fortlage shows how close he was with his cognitive inklings to a certain region of seeing consciousness, to the region, namely, of knowledge of the laming power of the soul existence living in our ordinary consciousness. On page 35 he writes:
When we call ourselves “living beings,” and thus ascribe to ourselves a characteristic that we share with animals and plants, we necessarily understand the “living state” to mean something that never leaves us, and continues on in us in sleep and in the waking state. This is the vegetative life of the nutrition of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain is an exception to this through the fact that this nutritive life, this sleeping life, is outweighed in the brain during the pauses of wakefulness by a consuming life (what I have called “laming down” in this book). During these pauses the brain is given over predominantly to being consumed, and consequently falls into a state that, if extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute debilitation of the body or death.
And taking this thought to its conclusion, Fortlage says (page 39): “Consciousness is a little, a partial death; death is a large and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.” One can only say that Fortlage stands with his thoughts at the starting point of anthroposophy, even though, like Brentano, he does not enter. Nevertheless, even because of his standing at the starting point, Eduard von Hartmann, who is completely under the spell of today's way of picturing things, finds that a perspective extending out beyond elementary knowledge into the great cosmic riddle of human immortality is scientifically untenable. Eduard von Hartmann writes of Fortlage: “He steps outside the boundaries of psychology when he describes consciousness as a little and partial death, and death as a large and total consciousness, as a clearer, total awakening of the soul in all its depths...” (Please see Eduard von Hartmann, Modern Psychology, Leipzig, 1901)
IV-7. Die Sonderung des Seelischen von dem Außer-Seelischen durch Franz Brentano
[ 1 ] Brentano zeigt durch verschiedene Ausführungen, wie stark er nach einer klaren Sonderung des Seelischen von dem Außer-Seelischen strebte. Der in dieser Schrift gekennzeichnete Seelenbegriff, den er hat, zwingt ihn dazu. Man richte, um das zu sehen, den Blick auf die Art, wie er das Seelen-Erlebnis zu umschreiben versucht, das in dem Bilden der Überzeugung von einer Wahrheit vorliegt. Er fragt sich: woher rührt, was die Seele als Überzeugung erlebt, die sie an einen Vorstellungs-Inhalt knüpft? Einige Denker glauben, daß der Überzeugungsgrad einer Wahrheit gegenüber in einer gefühlten Intensität bestehe, mit der man den entsprechenden Vorstellungs-Inhalt erlebt. Brentano sagt darüber:
«Es ist falsch, aber ein Irrtum, dem fast allgemein gehuldigt wird, und von dem auch ich, als ich den ersten Band der Psychologie schrieb, mich noch nicht befreit hatte, daß der sogenannte Grad der Überzeugung eine Intensitätsstufe des Urteilens sei, welche mit der Intensität von Lust und Schmerz in Analogie gebracht werden könnte. Hätte Windelband diesen Irrtum mir vorgehalten, so würde ich ihm ganz und vollkommen recht geben. Nun aber tadelt er mich, weil ich eine Intensität nur in analogem, nicht aber in gleichem Sinne bei der Überzeugung anerkennen wollte, und weil ich die angebliche Intensität der Überzeugung und die wahrhafte Intensität des Gefühls der Größe nach für unvergleichbar erklärte. Da haben wir eine der Folgen seiner verbesserten Auffassung des Urteils.
Wäre der Überzeugungsgrad meines Glaubens, daß 2+1 = 3 sei, eine Intensität, wie mächtig müßte diese dann sein! Und wenn nun gar dieser Glaube mit Windelband zu einem Gefühl gemacht, nicht bloß dem Gefühl analog gedacht werden dürfte, wie zerstörend für unser Nervensystem müßte die Heftigkeit der Gefühlserschütterung werden! Jeder Arzt würde vor dem Studium der Mathematik als etwas Gesundheitszerrüttendem warnen müssen» (Seite 57 f. von Brentanos «Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis»).
Hätte Brentano weiter durchleben können, was in diesem Streben nach dem Wesen der Überzeugung in ihm wirkte, er hätte die Sonderung erblickt, die sich zwischen dem vorstellenden Seelischen ergibt, das in sich selbst keine Intensität erlebt, wenn eine Überzeugung gebildet wird, und dem Außer-Seelischen, das in den Inhalt des Seelischen eingeht, und das in der Intensität des Überzeugungsgrades auch in der Seele ein Außerseelisches bleibt, so daß das Innenleben den Überzeugungsgrad zwar anschaut, aber nicht mit ihm lebt.
[ 2 ] Auf ein ähnliches Gebiet einer scharfen Sonderung des Seelischen vom Außer-Seelischen gehört, was Brentano in seiner Abhandlung «Über Individuation, multiple Qualität und Intensität sinnlicher Erscheinungen» (Seite 5 1ff. seiner Schrift «Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie») vorbringt. Er bemüht sich da, zu zeigen, wie dem eigentlich Seelischen eine Intensität nicht innewohnend ist, und wie der Intensitätsgrad der seelischen Empfindung ein Leben des außerseelischen Empfundenen auf dem Schauplatze des Seelischen ist. Daß man durchaus nicht ins «mystische Dunkel» der Unwissenschaftlichkeit kommen muß, wenn man sich bemüht, die in solchen elementarischen Einsichten gelegenen Keime erkennend weiter zu entwickeln, empfindet Brentano. Deshalb schreibt er am Ende der genannten Abhandlung (Seite 77f.):
«Was das dann weiter bedeuten werde, ist wohl leicht ersichtlich. - Wie viel hatte nicht die Herbartsche Psychologie, wie viel nicht auch die Psychophysik auf dieses Dogma (er meint das Dogma von der Intensität im Seelischen) gebaut! Alles das wird im Sturze mitgerissen werden. Und wir sehen so, wie die Berichtigung eines kleinen Punktes der Empfindungslehre einen weittragenden reformatorischen Einfluß üben wird. - Selbst die Hypothesen, welche man über das Weltganze aufgestellt hat, werden davon nicht unberührt bleiben. - Man hat für die beiden Gebiete des Psychischen und Physischen vielfach eine durchgängige Analogie behauptet; den Nachweis dafür freilich nicht erbracht oder auch nur ernstlich zu erbringen versucht. Man hielt sich ganz im allgemeinen und da konnte denn der Gedanke an die Intensität als eine Art Größe, die jedem Psychischen, wie die räumliche jedem Körperlichen eigen sei, der ihm zugedachten Rolle genügen. - Behauptete man aber einmal durchgängige Analogie von Psychischem und Physischem, warum nicht lieber geradezu ihre Identität behaupten oder das eine dem anderen einfach substituieren? - In allem dem Physischen analog und in sich selbst allein durch evidente Wahrnehmung gewährleistet, muß das Psychische jede hypothetische Annahme eines Physischen überflüssig erscheinen lassen. - So klingt denn unter anderem auch die Wundtsche Psychologie in dem Gedanken aus, daß man die Annahme einer physischen Welt, nachdem man ihn eine zeitlang heuristisch verwertet, schließlich wie ein Gerüst fallen lassen könne, wo dann das Ganze der echten Wahrheit als rein psychisches Weltgebäude sich enthülle. - Dieser Gedanke hatte wohl auch bisher wenig Aussicht, jemals eine greifbare Gestalt und eine Durchbildung ins einzelne zu gewinnen. Die neue Auffassung der Intensität aber mit ihrem klaren Nachweis, daß eine intensive Größe nichts weniger als universell den psychischen Tätigkeiten eigen genannt werden kann, macht die Hoffnung, daß es einmal zu einer solchen kommen werde, vollends zunichte. - Den Glauben an den wahren Bestand einer Körperwelt werden wir uns also nicht nehmen lassen, und er wird für die Naturwissenschaft immer die Hypothese aller Hypothesen bleiben.»
Nach einer durchgängigen Analogie von Psychischem und Physischem, die Brentano ablehnt, sucht nur derjenige, welcher nicht danach strebt, das Psychische auf der einen Seite, das Physische auf der andern in klarer Weise vorzustellen, sondern der dafür, sich mit seinen Begriffen am Physischen forttastend, dem Psychischen solche Erlebnisse wie das der Intensität zuschiebt, während im rein Seelischen nichts davon gefunden werden kann. Mir scheint, daß dieser oben angeführte Brentanosche Gedanke noch genauer zum Vorschein gekommen wäre, wenn sein Träger im Sinne des in dieser Schrift Seite 85 f. Dargestellten die Aufmerksamkeit gelenkt hätte auf das Merkmal des Physischen, das dem Intentionellen im Psychischen an Bedeutung gleichkommt.
Doch ist schon bedeutsam, daß Brentano den Ausblick wagt von den elementaren Einsichten zu Anschauungen über weiter gehende Welträtsel. Denn die Denkungsart der neueren Zeit ist solchen Ausblicken abgeneigt. Ich gebe ein Beispiel für viele. Der bedeutende Psychologe Fortlage zeigt an einer Stelle seiner «Acht psychologischen Vorträge» (Jena 1869), wie nahe er mit seinem ahnenden Erkennen einem gewissen Gebiete des schauenden Bewußtseins war, nämlich der Erkennmis von der ablähmenden Kraft des im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein lebenden Seelendaseins. Er schreibt (Seite 35 der genannten Schrift):
«Wenn wir uns lebendige Wesen nennen, und so uns eine Eigenschaft beilegen, die wir mit Tieren und Pflanzen teilen, so verstehen wir unter dem lebendigen Zustand notwendig etwas, das uns nie verläßt, und sowohl im Schlaf als im Wachen stets in uns fortdauert. Dies ist das vegetative Leben der Ernährung unseres Organismus, ein unbewußtes Leben, ein Leben des Schlafs. Das Gehirn macht hier dadurch eine Ausnahme, daß dieses Leben der Ernährung, dieses Schlafleben bei ihm in den Pausen des Wachens überwogen wird von dem Leben der Verzehrung» (von mir in dieser Schrift «Herablähmung» genannt). «In diesen Pausen steht das Gehirn einer überwiegenden Verzehrung preisgegeben, und gerät folglich in einen Zustand, welcher, wenn er sich auf die übrigen Organe miterstreckte, die absolute Entkräftigung des Leibes oder den Tod zu Wege bringen würde.»
Und diesen Gedanken zu Ende führend, sagt Fortlage (Seite 39):« Das Bewußtsein ist ein kleiner und partieller Tod, der Tod ist ein großes und totales Bewußtsein, ein Erwachen des ganzen Wesens in seinen innersten Tiefen.» Man kann nur sagen: Fortlage steht mit solchen Gedanken am Ausgangspunkte der Anthroposophie, auch wenn er - wie Brentano - in sie nicht eintritt. Doch selbst wegen dieses Stehens am Ausgangspunkte findet der im Banne der neueren Vorstellungsart stehende Eduard von Hartmann, daß solch ein Ausblick von elementarischer Erkennmis zu dem großen Welträtsel der Unsterblichkeit wissenschaftlich unstatthaft ist. Eduard von Hartmann schreibt über Fortlage: «Er überschreitet aber die Grenzen der Psychologie, wenn er das Bewußtsein als kleinen und partiellen Tod, den Tod als großes und totales Bewußtsein, als ein helleres, gänzliches Erwachen der Seele in ihren Tiefen bezeichnet ...» (Vergleiche Eduard von Hartmann, «Die moderne Psychologie», Leipzig, 1901, Hermann Haackes Verlag, Seite 48 f.)
IV-7 The separation of the soul from the extra-soul by Franz Brentano
[ 1 ] Brentano shows through various statements how strongly he strove for a clear separation of the soul from the extra-soul. The concept of the soul that he characterizes in this work compels him to do so. To see this, look at the way in which he attempts to describe the experience of the soul that is present in the formation of the conviction of a truth. He asks himself: where does what the soul experiences as conviction, which it attaches to a conceptual content, come from? Some thinkers believe that the degree of conviction of a truth consists in a felt intensity with which one experiences the corresponding conceptual content. Brentano says about this:
"It is false, but an error to which almost universal homage is paid, and from which I too, when I wrote the first volume of Psychology, had not yet freed myself, that the so-called degree of conviction is a degree of intensity of judgment which could be brought into analogy with the intensity of pleasure and pain. Had Windelband reproached me with this error, I would agree with him completely and utterly. But now he rebukes me because I only wanted to recognize intensity in an analogous sense, but not in the same sense in the case of conviction, and because I declared the alleged intensity of conviction and the true intensity of feeling to be incomparable in terms of magnitude. There we have one of the consequences of his improved conception of judgment.
If the degree of conviction of my belief that 2+1 = 3 were an intensity, how powerful it would have to be! And if this belief could be made into a feeling with diaper tape, not merely thought analogous to feeling, how destructive to our nervous system the intensity of the emotional shock would have to be! Every physician would have to warn against the study of mathematics as something destructive to health" (page 57 f. of Brentano's "Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis").
If Brentano had been able to continue living through what was at work in him in this striving for the essence of conviction, he would have seen the distinction that arises between the imaginative mental, which in itself experiences no intensity when a conviction is formed, and the extra-soul, which enters into the content of the soul, and which in the intensity of the degree of conviction also remains an extra-soul within the soul, so that the inner life looks at the degree of conviction, but does not live with it.
[ 2 ] Brentano's treatise "On Individuation, Multiple Quality and Intensity of Sensual Appearances" (page 5 1ff. of his "Investigations into Sensory Psychology") belongs to a similar field of a sharp separation of the soul from the extra-soul. There he endeavors to show how intensity is not inherent in the actual psychic, and how the degree of intensity of psychic sensation is a life of the extra-sensible on the scene of the psychic. Brentano feels that it is not at all necessary to enter into the "mystical darkness" of unscientificity if one endeavors to further develop the germs inherent in such elementary insights. This is why he writes at the end of the aforementioned treatise (page 77f.):
"It is easy to see what this will mean. - How much had not Herbartian psychology, how much had not psychophysics built on this dogma (he means the dogma of intensity in the soul)! All this will be swept away in the fall. And thus we see how the correction of a small point in the theory of sensation will exert a far-reaching reformatory influence. - Even the hypotheses which have been put forward about the world as a whole will not remain unaffected. - A consistent analogy has often been asserted for the two areas of the psychic and the physical; however, no proof of this has been provided or even seriously attempted. The idea of intensity as a kind of quantity that is peculiar to every psychic, just as spatial intensity is peculiar to every physical, was sufficient for the role assigned to it. - But if one were to assert a consistent analogy between the psychic and the physical, why not rather assert their identity or simply substitute one for the other? - Analogous to the physical in everything and guaranteed in itself solely by evident perception, the psychic must make any hypothetical assumption of a physical appear superfluous. - Thus, among other things, Wundt's psychology also sounds out in the thought that the assumption of a physical world, after being utilized heuristically for a while, could finally be dropped like a scaffolding, where the whole of real truth would then reveal itself as a purely psychic world structure. - This idea has probably had little prospect of ever taking on a tangible form and being developed in detail. The new conception of intensity, however, with its clear proof that an intensive quantity can be called nothing less than universally inherent in psychic activity, completely destroys the hope that such a thing will ever come about. - We will therefore not allow ourselves to be deprived of the belief in the true existence of a physical world, and for natural science it will always remain the hypothesis of all hypotheses."
A consistent analogy between the psychical and the physical, which Brentano rejects, is only sought by those who do not strive to present the psychical on the one hand and the physical on the other in a clear manner, but who instead, feeling their way along the physical with their concepts, attribute to the psychical such experiences as that of intensity, while nothing of this can be found in the purely psychical. It seems to me that this above-mentioned Brentanoan thought would have come to light even more precisely if its bearer had drawn attention to it in the sense described in this paper. had drawn attention to the characteristic of the physical, which is equal in importance to the intentional in the psychic.
However, it is significant that Brentano dares to look forward from elementary insights to views on more far-reaching world puzzles. For the way of thinking in recent times is averse to such outlooks. I give one example for many. The eminent psychologist Fortlage shows in one passage of his "Eight Psychological Lectures" (Jena 1869) how close he was with his suspecting cognition to a certain area of looking consciousness, namely the cognition of the paralyzing power of the soul's existence living in ordinary consciousness. He writes (page 35 of the aforementioned writing):
"When we call ourselves living beings, and thus attribute to ourselves a quality which we share with animals and plants, we necessarily understand by the living state something which never leaves us, and always continues in us both in sleep and in waking. This is the vegetative life of the nourishment of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain makes an exception here in that this life of nourishment, this life of sleep, is outweighed in the pauses of waking by the life of consumption" (called "paralysis" by me in this writing). "In these pauses the brain is exposed to a predominant consumption, and consequently falls into a state which, if it extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute debilitation of the body or death."
And taking this thought to its conclusion, Fortlage says (page 39): "Consciousness is a small and partial death, death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths." One can only say that with such thoughts Fortlage stands at the starting point of anthroposophy, even if - like Brentano - he does not enter into it. But even because of this standing at the starting point, Eduard von Hartmann, who is under the spell of the newer way of thinking, finds that such an outlook from elementary cognition to the great world riddle of immortality is scientifically inadmissible. Eduard von Hartmann writes about Fortlage: "But he transcends the boundaries of psychology when he describes consciousness as a small and partial death, death as a great and total consciousness, as a brighter, complete awakening of the soul in its depths ..." (Compare Eduard von Hartmann, "Die moderne Psychologie", Leipzig, 1901, Hermann Haackes Verlag, page 48 f.)