58. Franz Brentano - On the Future of Philosophy

With apologetic-critical consideration of Adolf Exner's inauguration speech "On Political Education" as Rector of the University of Vienna. Vienna 1893

Brentano emphasizes that he was one of the first to say: "The method of philosophy is no other than that of the natural sciences." In this pamphlet, he makes the fate of philosophy in the future dependent on the general recognition of this principle. We must recognize in this the signature of an unphilosophical way of thinking. The extension of the scientific approach to certain areas, such as psychology, can provide nothing more than an increase in the natural sciences, an expansion of the latter with new content, but never philosophy. Wundt's experimental psychology is a scientific, not a philosophical chapter. Philosophy cannot content itself with collecting and systematizing experiences; it must go one step deeper and ask: what does experience mean at all; what value does it have? Only through philosophical thinking can the truths of experience be put in the right light. Those who know how to look at something with the right concept will see it from a completely different side than those who simply let it affect them. But we can never experience concepts. They must be generated in thought. Haeckel would never have arrived at the basic ontogenetic law if he had not conceived it freely in thought (through intuition). It is quite futile to simply observe the facts. We must place them under certain aspects. Even mere experimentation is not enough. Without guiding ideas, it remains only an artificially produced object of observation. Even if we have produced the conditions of a phenomenon ourselves in the experiment and therefore know exactly the relationship between the condition and the conditional, we still learn nothing about the nature of this relationship.

In pure mathematics we have an example of how we can really come to recognize this essence. This is the case because here we are dealing with objects that we do not look at from the outside, but that we completely generate ourselves. In contrast to experiential knowledge, pure mathematics can be regarded as a realization of the essence of its objects. It can therefore rightly serve as a model for philosophy. The latter must only overcome the one-sidedness of mathematical judgment. This one-sidedness lies in the abstract character of mathematical truths. They are merely formal. They are based on mere concepts of proportion. If we are able to create entities ourselves which have a real content, then we obtain a science not merely of forms, as mathematics is, but of essences, as philosophy is supposed to be. The supreme entity of this kind is the "I". This: cannot be found through experience, but can only be generated through free intuition. Whoever is able to generate this intuition soon realizes that he has not carried out an act of his individual, random consciousness, but a cosmic process: he has overcome the opposition of subject and object; he has found the substantive world in himself, but also himself in the world. From then on, he no longer looks at things as an outsider, but as one who stands within them. At this moment, he has become a philosopher. Philosophy wants to experience things, not merely observe them like empirical science. This is a fundamental difference. Anyone who does not admit it and simply wants to apply the scientific method to philosophy has no concept of the latter. For me, the general acceptance of Brentano's theorem would be tantamount to the general decline of philosophy.