The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong

by Franz Brentano

While engaged in a profound study of the descriptive peculiarities connected with the third fundamental class of psychical states above referred to—a study analogous to that previously undertaken by him with regard to the judgment—Brentano was led to the discovery of the principles of ethical knowledge which form the subject of this lecture. The author, in his lectures delivered before students of all faculties, but especially to students in the faculty of law, during each winter session throughout many years, presented a complete and fully developed system of ethical teaching based upon these principles.[A] Unfortunately, this lecture still remains unpublished. The same holds good of many of his inquiries into “descriptive psychology,” or psychognosie, e.g. inquiries into the nature of sense perceptions according to their qualitative and spatial nature, the nature of the continuum, the time phenomenon, etc., the results of which are hitherto familiar only to those who have either attended his lectures, or have been present during private conversations.

[A] Since this essay was written the statements as to the principles here developed have been modified only in respect of two points which, if not practically important, are still theoretically so, and these, with the author’s permission, may be here shortly referred to:—

1. In the lecture (p. 15) it is said that anything may be either affirmed or denied, and that if the affirmation is right its denial must be considered wrong, and vice versâ. It is also stated that this is true analogously in respect of love and hate.

This Brentano no longer asserts, but rather observes that whereas the whole must be denied, if but a part is untrue, a sum of good and bad, on the other hand, may be of such a nature as nevertheless as a whole to be worthy of love. It may be also so constituted that good and bad remain in equilibrium.

2. In the lecture (p. 24), and in the corresponding note 37 (p. 87), it is said that our preference qualified as right in the case where, for instance, to one good another is added, is drawn, not from our knowledge of the preferability of the sum as opposed to the parts, but that analytic judgments here yield the means of our advance in knowledge, and that the corresponding preferences are therefore qualified as right, since the knowledge (given analytically) is here the criterion. Here it is overlooked that without the experience of acts of preferring we neither have nor could have the conception, and therefore also our notion of preferability. And so it is also true that it is by no means evident from analysis that one good plus another is preferable to each of these goods taken singly. Here also a complete analogy to the sphere of the true is wanting.

One truth added to another does not yield something more true. On the other hand, one good plus another good yields a better. But that this is so can only be understood by means of a special experience belonging peculiarly to this sphere, i.e. by means of the experience of acts of preferring which are qualified as right.

As to the other branches of philosophy, the work of Brentano already published forms but a portion—often but the smaller portion—of investigations, which, in the manner above described, have become known to a larger or smaller circle of disciples. This explains the striking fact that, in proportion to the extent of what has been published, an unusually large number of investigators and scholars appear in a greater or lesser degree to have been influenced by Brentano. (Überweg-Heinze, in the eighth edition of the Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, reckons, as belonging to his school, six names of men at present occupying important positions as teachers of philosophy.)

One section of Brentano’s doctrine of sense-perception forms the substance of a lecture, Zur Lehre von der Empfindung, delivered at the Third International Psychological Congress held in Munich (1896), and published in the report of its proceedings (1897). A fragment of the above system of ethical inquiry, Über das Schlechte als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung (Leipzig, 1892), treats of the worth and preferability of the ideas employed by the artist.

With regard to psycho-genetic problems, apart from the question as to the meaning and validity of Fechner’s psycho-physical law, a question discussed in the first volume of his Psychology and elsewhere, and that of the spirituality and immortality of the soul, which formed repeatedly the substance of lectures at Vienna University, Brentano has especially occupied himself with the laws of the association of ideas. One result of this study is his lecture, Das Genie, published in 1892, which seeks to explain the artistic productions of men of genius—often regarded as something quite unique and inexplicable—as a development of psychical events which universally control our imaginative life.

Of Brentano’s researches in metaphysics and in the theory of knowledge it must also be said that hitherto they remain still unpublished, though they are familiar to a greater or smaller circle of disciples. In this latter sphere are to be mentioned particularly his inquiries respecting the nature of our insight into the law of causality, the logical justification of induction, the a priori nature of mathematics, and the nature of analytic judgments. In ontological questions also psychognosie has proved fruitful to the investigator in leading him to an understanding and to an analysis based upon experience, of the most important metaphysical notions, as, for instance, causality, substance, necessity, impossibility, etc., notions which some, despairing of the task rightly insisted upon by Hume, of showing their origin to be based upon perception and experience, have sought to explain straight away as a priori categories.