Introduction
Brentano's passage on intentional inexistence is a single paragraph. Every major theory of intentionality since has had to decide what it means. This reading walks through it phrase by phrase: its scholastic vocabulary, its central term, and its list of examples. It then looks at the ambiguity that divided Brentano's readers, and closes with a two-sentence paraphrase you can check your own reading against.
Locating the Passage
The passage is in Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Book II, Chapter 1, Section 5 (Brentano [1874] 2015, bk. II, ch. 1, §5). Short phrases below come from the English translation by Rancurello, Terrell, and McAlister. Everything else is paraphrase.
If you don't have the book, the free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Brentano quotes the passage in full and discusses it (Huemer 2019). The German original is also free online, where the key phrase reads intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz.
Before you start, note where the passage sits. The chapter's task is to find a feature that separates mental phenomena, such as seeing or judging, from physical phenomena, such as the colors and sounds that sensation presents. Brentano has considered several candidate features. This paragraph gives the one he treats as decisive.
Walking Through the Passage
Step 1: Trace the scholastic source of "intentional"
The passage opens by crediting its key term to "the Scholastics of the Middle Ages." Brentano signals that he is reviving an old term, not inventing a new one.
The Latin intentio comes from intendere, "to stretch toward" or "to aim at." In medieval philosophy, the vocabulary of intentio was used for the way things exist in the mind as understood, as opposed to the way they exist in nature. Brentano adds a note tracing the idea back through medieval authors to Aristotle. For Brentano, the term names the mind's being directed at, or containing, an object.
Keep one thing in view from the start. Nothing in this history connects "intentional" with purpose or deliberate action.
Step 2: Read "inexistence" as existence in
The central phrase is "intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object." The prefix in- here means "in," not "not." Inexistence is existence in something, the way the Latin inesse means "to be in." The object in-exists in the mental act as its object.
Brentano then offers alternative expressions for the same feature: "reference to a content," "direction toward an object," and "immanent objectivity." He adds two qualifications. First, "object" here shouldn't be understood as meaning a real thing. Second, none of these expressions is wholly free of ambiguity.
The alternatives don't all say the same thing. "Direction toward an object" describes the act as pointing beyond itself. "Immanent objectivity" describes the object as lying within the act. Brentano treats them as equivalent, and that's where the trouble starts.
The qualification about "object" matters too. Brentano isn't saying that every mental act is directed at a physical thing, or even at something real. The object is whatever the act is directed at, taken just as the act takes it. A dreaded exam, a remembered friend, and an imagined dragon all count.
Step 3: Read the list of examples
Brentano then makes the claim concrete. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, though not all in the same way. In presentation, something is presented. In judgment, something is affirmed or denied. In love, something is loved. In hate, something is hated. In desire, something is desired.
Two features of the list matter. First, it runs through the kinds of mental act Brentano recognizes: presenting, judging, and the emotional and volitional acts he groups under love and hate. Second, the list is grammatical as much as psychological. Each verb takes an object: presenting something, loving something. That slot is filled whether or not the thing exists. You can love a fictional character, and you can desire a future that never arrives.
The paragraph ends by drawing the conclusion. This intentional inexistence belongs exclusively to mental phenomena, and no physical phenomenon shows anything like it. Mental phenomena can therefore be defined as those that contain an object intentionally.
This last sentence turns a description into a definition. Up to this point, Brentano has said what every mental phenomenon has. Now he says that having it is what makes a phenomenon mental. That move from "all" to "all and only" is the mark-of-the-mental thesis, and it's where most later criticism aims.
Key Considerations
The central ambiguity. Is the object inside the act, or does the act point beyond itself to the object?
- The immanent-object reading. On this reading, the object is a mental entity that exists in the mind, just as "in-existence" and "immanent objectivity" suggest. Thinking of Vienna is then a relation to something mental.
- The directedness reading. On this reading, the passage describes directedness toward the object itself, and "in" is a manner of speaking. Thinking of Vienna is then directed at Vienna.
The passage supports both readings, and scholars dispute which Brentano meant in 1874. His later work rejected immanent objects altogether (Huemer 2019). The choice matters because it decides what a thought about something nonexistent is related to: a mental item, or nothing at all.
Terms and translation.
- "Inexistence" renders the German Inexistenz. English readers often hear "nonexistence." Some commentators prefer "in-existence," with a hyphen, to block that reading.
- "Presentation" renders Vorstellung, which older English translations sometimes render as "idea." It means having something before the mind, not a picture or a claim.
- "Mental" in "intentional (or mental) inexistence" signals that the object exists in the mental act. It doesn't mean the object is imaginary.
A common misreading. It's natural to take "intentional" to mean "deliberate" or "on purpose." In this passage it means directed. An unwanted memory, a sudden fright, and an idle daydream are all intentional in Brentano's sense, because each is directed at something. None of them is intended in the everyday sense.
Summary
The passage revives a scholastic term, treats inexistence as existence in the act, and illustrates the thesis with each kind of mental act. It also leaves open whether the object is inside the act or merely aimed at by it. Here is a model paraphrase to check your reading against:
Every mental phenomenon is directed at an object: in presenting, something is presented; in judging, something is affirmed or denied; in loving or hating, something is loved or hated. This directedness, which Brentano calls the intentional inexistence of an object, belongs to all mental phenomena and to no physical phenomenon (Brentano [1874] 2015, bk. II, ch. 1, §5).
References
- Brentano, Franz. (1874) 2015. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Translated by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge.
- Huemer, Wolfgang. 2019. "Franz Brentano." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https\://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brentano/.