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greatest work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874/1973), had just been
published, and no doubt the distinctive ideas in it would have influenced his lectures substantially.96
While taking these courses, Freud wrote to his friend Silberstein: “One of the courses—lo
and behold—just listen, you will be surprised—deals with the existence of God, and Professor Brentano,
who lectures on it, is a marvelous person. Scientist and philosopher though he is, he deems it
necessary to support with his expositions this airy existence of a divinity.”97 Freud
continued in a later letter: “This peculiar, and in many respects ideal man, a believer in God,
a teleologist, a Darwinist and altogether a darned clever fellow, a genius in fact. For the moment I
will say only this: that under Brentano’s influence I have decided to take my Ph.D. in philosophy and
zoology.”98
Philosophically, Brentano stood firmly in the Catholic, Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.99 He absorbed Aristotle through his teachers, and St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition were standard fare in seminary.100 (He would also have learned much Aristotle as filtered through Aquinas.) Brentano’s Aristotelian position is clear in his work.101 As Brentano said in a letter to Oskar Kraus (quoted by Srzednicki), “In these times of woeful downfall of philosophy I could find none better than the old Aristotle. Aquinas had to serve as a guide to the understanding of a text that wasn’t always easy to follow.”102 Brentano was also for a time in the Dominican order, the community to which St. Thomas belonged and the one that has sustained Thomism in the Catholic world.103 Brentano’s very distinctive philosophy was a psychological phenomenalism. His purpose was to construct a “scientific philosophy” without categories or forms, in reaction to German idealism, with its emphasis on abstract ideas and the dialectical and historical movement of ideas. The empirical focus of his philosophy was a close, descriptive concern with mental life as it was experienced, in contrast to idealistic philosophies, with their involvement in hypothesized historical forces, or abstract categories of thought, all of which are far removed from the “empirical” world of natural mental life. Essential to his psychology was the notion that all mental acts are “intentional” and related to objects.104 Brentano thus put the motivational character of psychology at the center of his theory; this is one reason for Brentano’s being classified as the founder of what is called “act” psychology.105 James R. Barclay elaborates on this: The doctrine of the intentional existence is the core of Brentano’s own theory of intentionality…In essence the basic tenet is that the soul is the dynamic intending force behind psychic activities which actively structures and confers meaning in the act of perception [emphasis in original].106 |