The Place of Description: Natural Method in the Psychology of Franz Brentano

Guilherme Riscali

Descriptions can be used in many ways. We are accustomed, for instance, with literary descriptions – of actual or fictional settings –; we employ descriptions in practical situations – as when we describe an acquaintance to a friend or a suspect to the police –; but descriptions can also be motivated by theoretical interests. In this case, the thread of the description is, most of all, “subject to certain laws”, it must follow “the nature of the thing”, as Louis Daubenton once put it (in his entry on ‘description’ for the Encyclopédie, 1751-1772). The scientist must vary his descriptions according to the order and the proportion of his subject matter: in this sense, description has been employed by zoologists and botanists, geologists and physiologists.

But what about in philosophy? In fact, following the burgeoning developments of physics and psychology in the 19th century, description makes its way into philosophy, becoming a central concept for thinkers as diverse as Mach, Wundt or Helmholtz; then, in the 20th century, it explodes into what looks like complete equivocity: think, for instance, of Russell’s theory of descriptions, Wittgenstein’s descriptions of language games, Rorty’s talk of redescriptions or, on the other side of the canal, the establishing of Husserlian phenomenology as the “descriptive eidetic science of lived-experiences”.

Given this initial perplexity, the objective of this work is to examine oneparticularly outstanding occurrence of description as a philosophical concept, namely, Franz Brentano’s influential proposal of a descriptive psychology. On the one hand, as it will be shown, Brentano’s psychological description has strict and explicit theoretical goals, following Daubenton’s injunction that description proceed “selon la nature de la chose”; on the other hand, the descriptive procedure acquires here a philosophical – and a philosophically fundamental – significance.

In the literature on the topic, characterizations of Brentano’s DP have followed a comparative strategy: descriptive psychology is always presented in relation to and in contrast with genetic psychology. While this comparison is not wrong, it is my contention that it can be misleading, failing to specify the particular place and importance attributed by Brentano to DP. An attempt will then be made to present an intrinsic account of DP: as it will be argued, the method of DP must be understood precisely as the natural method (naturgemäß, kata physin) of psychology, i.e., the method that is in accordance with the nature of the object studied by psychology such as Brentano understands it.

If this methodological principle – that the method of a science must accord to its subject-matter – is really behind Brentano’s development of DP, then the first step towards a comprehension of DP would be to examine Brentano’s own and original conceptualization of psychology as the science which has mental phenomena as its object. This is the goal of the first part of this work, where Brentano’s conceptualization of psychology will be properly relocated in the context of his broader motivations – the reaction to the decadence of scientific philosophical thinking as well as the need to rescue philosophy from despondency – and where Brentano’s critique of the then current conceptions of psychology will finally lead him to the presentation (in the 1874 Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint) of psychology a science of mental phenomena. Now, even if the concept of DP is not explicitly operational in 1874, we will argue that the concept of psychology presented there already asks for the descriptive approachas its natural method.

In the second part of this work, then, the actual unfolding of such natural method will be examined. If the first part had shown Brentano’s conceptualization of the domain of psychology – the tillage of the field, as it were – the second part will show how the methodical configuration of DP is designed to harvest the certainty with which mental phenomena are perceived. We will thus examine the different parts that compose the method of Brentanian DP, from inner perception as a source of immediate evidence; through the general procedures involved in description, such as experiencing and noticing mental phenomena and fixating the concepts that refer to them; to the actual core of Brentano’s descriptive method, namely a new sense of induction, which he calls (allegedly following an Aristotelian lead) ‘induction in a broad sense’, and which he distinguishes from traditional, ‘strict’ induction.

As we will see, through this new conception of induction, Brentano believes he is able to convert the assertoric immediate evidence of inner perception into the apodictic immediate evidence of general laws, expressing absolutely valid truths about the modes of connection of mental phenomena. This conversion – which, however, will also be shown to be deeply problematic – would allow Brentano to carry out the task of providing not only a classification and an analysis of mental phenomena, but a general compositional account of the whole domain of consciousness – a veritable periêgêsis of this territory.

After a further discussion of some potential problems the Brentanian descriptive psychologist might face (error, incompleteness and linguistic confusion), we will finally be in a position to measure the particular place that DP occupies in Brentano’s broader system of sciences: not only its relation with its counterpart, genetic psychology, but also its propaedeutic, bolstering function with regard to all other sciences; and its analogies (and disanalogies) with other empirical, but non-exact, descriptive sciences (such as those examined by William Whewell and John Stuart Mill, with whom Brentano holds a continuous dialogue). At this point, on the one hand, we will be able to better measure the uniqueness of the methodological configuration of DP and its appropriateness to its objectual domain. On the other hand, we will be able to assess the original, philosophical concept of description operative in Brentano’s psychology; a very peculiar concept of description indeed, quite different from the idea of merely “writing down what we see in front of us,” and clearly distinct from both practical and scientific kinds of description.