The Non-Temporal Priority of the Concept in Franz Brentano’s Intentionality Thesis
In the grand architecture of philosophical tradition, the name of Franz Brentano—though not relegated to utter obscurity—resides in the shadowed vestibules of more thunderous dialecticians. Eminently cited for his reintroduction of the medieval notion of intentionality into modern thought, Brentano’s contribution is oft treated with the perfunctory reverence due a signpost rather than that due an effulgent luminary. Yet there exists in his theory of intentionality a subtle lacuna, or rather a richness overlooked, in the non-temporal logical priority of the concept over its instantiation. This article endeavors to unpack this nuanced detail, demonstrating that for Brentano, the act of consciousness does not merely intend an object, but prefigures the entire ontological modality under which the object may be said to exist.
It is by now a truism that Brentano defined mental phenomena by their inherent intentionality, that is, their character of being “about” or “directed toward” something. At first blush, this seems to establish a dyad of act and object, with a clear ontological asymmetry: the object may exist independently of the act, but never the reverse. However, this orthodoxy must be reevaluated. If one considers the phenomenological instantiation of the object as it appears to the act, one must ask whether the object, so instantiated, possesses the same ontological status as an object existing in se, independently of any consciousness. Brentano, far from postulating a duplicity of realms à la Kant or Husserl, suggests by implication that the very mode of the object’s existence is conditioned by its apprehensibility within the intentional act.
This becomes perceptible in a little-examined passage in Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, where Brentano writes:
“Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although not always in the same way. In presentation something is merely presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love and hate it is accepted or rejected, and in desire it is sought or shunned.”¹
What is telling is the subtle assumption that the object’s status is modulated by the quality of the act—mere presentation, judgment, or volition. Nowhere does Brentano suggest that “the object” remains unaffected in its ontological stature by the modality of the act. Instead, it is recategorized according to the type of directedness. This entails, not merely semantically, but metaphysically, a theory where conceptual apprehension prefigures and thus ontologically precedes the possibility of the object’s instantiation.
Let us, then, suspend the modern temptation to collapse this structure into a functionalist or psychological schema. Brentano is not merely describing states of mind; he is, perhaps unwittingly, offering a metaphysical hierarchy wherein the “object” is constituted, not fabricated, by the prior availability of a conceptual modality. The mental act is not a lantern illuminating the object’s shadows; it is the prism through which the object emerges as possible.
This has profound implications for the longstanding dispute between realism and idealism. Brentano sidesteps the quarrel with what one may call a proto-intentional idealism: the reality of the object cannot even be posited unless a mental act of a certain structure is already given. It is not simply that cognition follows being; rather, the possibility of being-as-such is inscribed in the structure of possible cognition. In this, Brentano anticipates a lineage of thought that would later graze the lips of Heidegger’s Dasein-ontology and Sartre’s theory of the “nothingness” that constitutes the being of consciousness.
Indeed, it behooves us to consider whether Brentano, though paraded as a mere taxonomer of mental phenomena, does not in fact propose a radical departure from substance ontology altogether. In his framework, the so-called “mental act” becomes the locus where being and meaning coalesce. The object is neither a noumenon nor a phantasm, neither wholly outside nor wholly inside; it is a mode of potentiality brought forth by the mental act’s structure of intentionality. The act determines not merely the appearance but the form under which appearance becomes intelligible.
This becomes clearer if one analyzes Brentano’s assertions on inexistence or immanent objectivity. The object, in mental acts, has no external position in space or time—it exists within the act, but in a fashion sui generis. So defined, the object has what may be termed a non-temporal ontological priority: it is prior not in chronological sequence, but in the logic of existence. Before we can speak of an actual object, there must be the conceptual sketch, the horizon of possibility, the frame within which the object may appear.²
That these considerations are often relegated to the periphery of Brentano scholarship attests to the unfortunate tendency of philosophy to entomb its riches beneath taxonomical monotony. Yet if we dare to elevate this overlooked insight, we may extract from Brentano a thesis of philosophical gravity: the concept, as generated within the intentional act, is ontologically prior to the instantiation of the object, not in time, but in the order of intelligibility. Concepts are not constructed from empirical objects; rather, empirical objects are discernible only under the aegis of preconfigured concepts.
Here Brentano threatens to converge with the scholastic dictum, intellectus in actu est intelligibile in actu, yet without adopting the theological scaffolding. The act of intellect renders the intelligible object real in the only sense that “real” can truly hold: meaningful participation in the order of thought. A stone outside my window acquires its status as stone not through brute materiality but through the conceptual intentionality that projects stoneness upon an otherwise mute conglomerate of qualities. Brentano’s insight, then, is not into the workings of psychology per se, but into the proto-metaphysical condition that allows for objecthood.
In sum, the subtle but consequential dimension of Brentano’s thought lies in this: that the concept, arising in intentional presentation, is not merely an echo or representation of an already-existing object, but is the condition of the object’s possible presence in any realm—phenomenal, ideal, or actual. By this measure, Brentano’s philosophy is not one of mental representation, but of ontological constitution—a daring metaphysical reconstruction disguised in the unassuming garb of empirical psychology. In recovering this depth, we awaken a Brentano freed from the pedantic strictures of post-Aristotelian logic, a Brentano who stands amidst the great metaphysicians of apprehension and possibility.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
intentionality, Brentano, ontology, concept, metaphysical priority, phenomenology, mental acts
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¹ Brentano, F. (1874). *Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt*, Vol. 1, 112–113.
² Chisholm, R. M. (1957). *Perceiving: A Philosophical Study*. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.