Husserl on Brentano

I’ve finished rereading Husserl’s 10-page recollection of Franz Brentano, which I’ve always enjoyed. As Husserl portrays him, Brentano was a peerless teacher and a master logician with a fiery sense of personal mission. On the downside, his commitment to freedom of thought went hand-in-hand with a somewhat dogmatic sense of being the author of a perennial philosophy, despite the fact that Brentano was by no means committed to his insights at various stages and regularly replaced them with new ones. He was also fairly harsh in his view of Kant and German Idealism as representing a period of philosophical decline. In short, he has just the sort of paradoxical personality we should like to see in a significant thinker.

Ortega y Gasset claims that Brentano and Dilthey were born in the unluckiest generation of modern philosophy, one in which the landscape had been reduced to desert (especially in the Germany of the 1870’s). Ortega also holds that these two were the greatest philosophers of the second half of the 19th century. That seems a bit much, given that Nietzsche also falls in this period (though Ortega view Nietzsche, much too harshly, as someone who merely gesticulated while Dilthey saw), and Bergson was in some respects a philosopher of the 1890’s rather than of the early twentieth century. I’m certainly fond of both Brentano and Dilthey, though in Dilthey’s case I tend to find his concrete historical work refreshing and his more systematic work often unreadably dry. In Brentano’s case I always feel impressed. In fact, he’s such an original in his tone that I can’t think of anyone comparable, and it’s a shame (as many others have noted, including Roderick Chisholm) that he has been so extremely overshadowed by Husserl. But then again, Husserl has also been subjected to the dynamic of overshadowing.

Even though Husserl is a fairly heavy technical philosopher, I suspect he’s one of those where you have to admire him early or you will never learn to admire him properly. It still seems to me that he has the most undervalued stock, at present, of any of the “Top 20” greatest philosophers of all time, where I think he belongs. (I wouldn’t go for Top 10; I draft such lists from time to time and he can never quite fit that high, whereas Heidegger always can.)

[ADDENDUM: For those who weren’t reading this blog back in its infancy when I discussed such lists, Plotinus was probably my most surprising entrant in the Top 10, Spinoza at #11 maybe my most surprising exclusion, and I’m sticking with that for now. But I won’t repost any of the lists until I have something new to say about them– either through significant readjustments or through a clearer sense of what principles ought to be used. I drafted my lists with a few key mostly negative principles and a lot of gut instinct. One of my negative points was that influence should not be as high on the list as some might hold. There are plenty of influential philosophers who aren’t that good –Herbert Spencer being the proverbial case, the first philosopher ever to sell 1 million books– and possibly some great ones who aren’t as influential as they should be. At best, influence is a useful instrument that can help register inherent quality.]