The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4.7 The Separation of the Soul from the Extra-soul by Franz Brentano

[ 1 ] Brentano shows through various statements how strongly he strove for a clear separation of the soul from the extra-soul. The concept of the soul that he characterizes in this work compels him to do so. To see this, look at the way in which he attempts to describe the experience of the soul that is present in the formation of the conviction of a truth. He asks himself: where does what the soul experiences as conviction, which it attaches to a conceptual content, come from? Some thinkers believe that the degree of conviction of a truth consists in a felt intensity with which one experiences the corresponding conceptual content. Brentano says about this:

"It is false, but an error to which almost universal homage is paid, and from which I too, when I wrote the first volume of Psychology, had not yet freed myself, that the so-called degree of conviction is a degree of intensity of judgment which could be brought into analogy with the intensity of pleasure and pain. Had Windelband reproached me with this error, I would agree with him completely and utterly. But now he rebukes me because I only wanted to recognize intensity in an analogous sense, but not in the same sense in the case of conviction, and because I declared the alleged intensity of conviction and the true intensity of feeling to be incomparable in terms of magnitude. There we have one of the consequences of his improved conception of judgment.

If the degree of conviction of my belief that 2+1 = 3 were an intensity, how powerful it would have to be! And if this belief could be made into a feeling with diaper tape, not merely thought analogous to feeling, how destructive to our nervous system the intensity of the emotional shock would have to be! Every physician would have to warn against the study of mathematics as something destructive to health" (page 57 f. of Brentano's "Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis").

If Brentano had been able to continue living through what was at work in him in this striving for the essence of conviction, he would have seen the distinction that arises between the imaginative mental, which in itself experiences no intensity when a conviction is formed, and the extra-soul, which enters into the content of the soul, and which in the intensity of the degree of conviction also remains an extra-soul within the soul, so that the inner life looks at the degree of conviction, but does not live with it.

[ 2 ] Brentano's treatise "On Individuation, Multiple Quality and Intensity of Sensual Appearances" (page 5 1ff. of his "Investigations into Sensory Psychology") belongs to a similar field of a sharp separation of the soul from the extra-soul. There he endeavors to show how intensity is not inherent in the actual psychic, and how the degree of intensity of psychic sensation is a life of the extra-sensible on the scene of the psychic. Brentano feels that it is not at all necessary to enter into the "mystical darkness" of unscientificity if one endeavors to further develop the germs inherent in such elementary insights. This is why he writes at the end of the aforementioned treatise (page 77f.):

"It is easy to see what this will mean. - How much had not Herbartian psychology, how much had not psychophysics built on this dogma (he means the dogma of intensity in the soul)! All this will be swept away in the fall. And thus we see how the correction of a small point in the theory of sensation will exert a far-reaching reformatory influence. - Even the hypotheses which have been put forward about the world as a whole will not remain unaffected. - A consistent analogy has often been asserted for the two areas of the psychic and the physical; however, no proof of this has been provided or even seriously attempted. The idea of intensity as a kind of quantity that is peculiar to every psychic, just as spatial intensity is peculiar to every physical, was sufficient for the role assigned to it. - But if one were to assert a consistent analogy between the psychic and the physical, why not rather assert their identity or simply substitute one for the other? - Analogous to the physical in everything and guaranteed in itself solely by evident perception, the psychic must make any hypothetical assumption of a physical appear superfluous. - Thus, among other things, Wundt's psychology also sounds out in the thought that the assumption of a physical world, after being utilized heuristically for a while, could finally be dropped like a scaffolding, where the whole of real truth would then reveal itself as a purely psychic world structure. - This idea has probably had little prospect of ever taking on a tangible form and being developed in detail. The new conception of intensity, however, with its clear proof that an intensive quantity can be called nothing less than universally inherent in psychic activity, completely destroys the hope that such a thing will ever come about. - We will therefore not allow ourselves to be deprived of the belief in the true existence of a physical world, and for natural science it will always remain the hypothesis of all hypotheses."

A consistent analogy between the psychical and the physical, which Brentano rejects, is only sought by those who do not strive to present the psychical on the one hand and the physical on the other in a clear manner, but who instead, feeling their way along the physical with their concepts, attribute to the psychical such experiences as that of intensity, while nothing of this can be found in the purely psychical. It seems to me that this above-mentioned Brentanoan thought would have come to light even more precisely if its bearer had drawn attention to it in the sense described in this paper. had drawn attention to the characteristic of the physical, which is equal in importance to the intentional in the psychic.

However, it is significant that Brentano dares to look forward from elementary insights to views on more far-reaching world puzzles. For the way of thinking in recent times is averse to such outlooks. I give one example for many. The eminent psychologist Fortlage shows in one passage of his "Eight Psychological Lectures" (Jena 1869) how close he was with his suspecting cognition to a certain area of looking consciousness, namely the cognition of the paralyzing power of the soul's existence living in ordinary consciousness. He writes (page 35 of the aforementioned writing):

"When we call ourselves living beings, and thus attribute to ourselves a quality which we share with animals and plants, we necessarily understand by the living state something which never leaves us, and always continues in us both in sleep and in waking. This is the vegetative life of the nourishment of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain makes an exception here in that this life of nourishment, this life of sleep, is outweighed in the pauses of waking by the life of consumption" (called "paralysis" by me in this writing). "In these pauses the brain is exposed to a predominant consumption, and consequently falls into a state which, if it extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute debilitation of the body or death."

And taking this thought to its conclusion, Fortlage says (page 39): "Consciousness is a small and partial death, death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths." One can only say that with such thoughts Fortlage stands at the starting point of anthroposophy, even if - like Brentano - he does not enter into it. But even because of this standing at the starting point, Eduard von Hartmann, who is under the spell of the newer way of thinking, finds that such an outlook from elementary cognition to the great world riddle of immortality is scientifically inadmissible. Eduard von Hartmann writes about Fortlage: "But he transcends the boundaries of psychology when he describes consciousness as a small and partial death, death as a great and total consciousness, as a brighter, complete awakening of the soul in its depths ..." (Compare Eduard von Hartmann, "Die moderne Psychologie", Leipzig, 1901, Hermann Haackes Verlag, page 48 f.)