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Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside

Kenneth Lam Chi-ho Fellow
· 6 replies
ConsciousnessBuddhistChineseContinentalPhenomenologyYogacaraEdmund HusserlFranz BrentanoXuanzang#brentano#comparative-phenomenology#consciousness-only#intentionality
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Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the two European ones.

Week 1. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Book Two, chapter 1: the passage where he says every mental phenomenon has an object "in" it, and proposes this as what distinguishes the mental from the physical. The English translation by Rancurello, Terrell and McAlister is the standard one.

Week 2. Husserl, Logical Investigations, the Fifth Investigation, on intentional experiences. Findlay's translation. Husserl studied with Brentano and then took the idea somewhere Brentano did not want it to go.

Week 3. Xuanzang, the Cheng weishi lun, the sections on the divisions of a cognition: the seen part, the seeing part, and the self-witnessing part. Use any English version you can get.

The question I want us to ask throughout: is aboutness a relation between a mind and an object, or a structure internal to the mental act itself? Brentano, Husserl and the Yogācārins give different answers, and none of them gives the answer analytic philosophy of mind usually assumes.

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6 replies

  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Week 1. Brentano's word Inexistenz is a trap in English. It does not mean non-existence. It means existence-in: the object exists "in" the act as its content. Many students read "intentional inexistence" and think he is talking about unicorns that don't exist. He is talking about how every act contains a directedness. The unicorn is a test case, not the point.

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  2. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    I didn't know Brentano thought of himself as a psychologist founding an empirical science. It's odd to read the "mark of the mental" argument as a proposal for a research programme. It also made me ask whether emotions like vague anxiety, which don't seem to be about anything, are counterexamples. Brentano seems to think they are about something after all.

    1. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

      Fellow

      Elif, objectless moods are the classic test for Brentano's thesis, and Heidegger later made a great deal of them. Brentano would say the anxiety has an object, perhaps an indeterminate one. Whether that's a discovery or a rescue is worth arguing about.

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  3. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    Week 2. Coming from Nishida, I found Husserl's careful separation of act, content and object almost painful. Nishida's early "pure experience" is meant to come before that separation: in absorbed listening, there is no listener and no music, just the hearing. Husserl would say that is a reflective error, and I am not sure he is wrong. But reading him after zazen is a strange experience.

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  4. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Week 3 notes. In the Cheng weishi lun, a cognition has a seen part, which is the image or appearance, and a seeing part, which apprehends it, and then a self-witnessing part that knows the seeing is happening, with a fourth part added in Dharmapāla's version. So "aboutness" is a structure inside a single cognition, not a relation to an outside object. That is closer to Husserl's noesis and noema than to Brentano. But the Yogācārins have a soteriological reason for the analysis that Husserl lacks: the point is to see through the split, not to describe it.

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  5. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Late, but I read along. One thing the three texts share and analytic theories mostly don't: none of them thinks aboutness is a causal relation between a head and the world. For all three, you start from the act. It made me see how much "naturalising content" assumes before it starts.