Brentano’s Intentionality and Self-Awareness

Franz Brentano’s theory of consciousness is a foundational act-theory in which phenomenal consciousness is not a private container of qualia, but a structured field of mental acts intrinsically directed toward objects and simultaneously aware of themselves. His decisive thesis is that intentionality—being of, about, or directed toward something—is the mark of the mental; every conscious episode presents an object—it is about something—whether perceiving a color, judging a proposition, loving a person, fearing danger, or desiring an end (Brentano, 1874/1995). Brentano thereby created the immediate prehistory of Husserlian phenomenology while remaining a descriptive psychologist rather than a transcendental phenomenologist.

In other words, Brentano’s significant contribution to philosophy of mind, and even to the science of mind, was to ground it in intentionality—this directedness of every mental act toward an object, which he called "intentional inexistence," and he proposed it as the mark distinguishing mental from physical phenomena (Brentano, 1874). His account of phenomenal consciousness follows: every mental act is directed toward a primary object and, simultaneously and incidentally, toward itself as a secondary object, so that hearing a sound is in the same undivided act an awareness of that hearing. Consciousness is thus not conferred by a second, higher-order state observing the first; it is intrinsic to the act, which Brentano held could be perceived from within but never observed as an object. This one-level architecture, with his further claims that inner perception is infallible and that no mental states are unconscious, makes Brentano at once the immediate progenitor of Husserlian phenomenology and the historical opponent of higher-order theories.

Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental

Brentano’s central claim in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, and the thesis for which he is best known, is that mental phenomena are distinguished by this “intentional inexistence,” or object-directedness: in presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love or hate something is loved or hated (Brentano, 1874/1995). Every mental phenomenon contains an object intentionally within itself, and no physical phenomenon does, so mental phenomena may be defined by this feature. The formulation draws on Aristotle read through Thomistic sources; Brentano never used the noun "intentionality," speaking instead of “intentional in-existence” (Antonelli, 2025). On differing modes of directedness, he classified mental acts into three irreducible kinds—presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate—presentations being foundational.

For consciousness studies, the point has broad implications. Brentano rejects the idea that consciousness is first a bare subjective aura to which aboutness is later affixed. Consciousness is inherently relational: to be conscious is to be consciously related to an object. This object need not exist externally; one can think of a centaur, hope for an impossibility, or fear a fictional monster. Thus, phenomenal consciousness includes presentation even when external confirmation fails. Brentano is rightly recognized as the philosopher who brought intentionality into modern philosophy and made it fundamental for philosophy of mind.

Inner Perception and the Impossibility of Inner Observation

Brentano's pivotal move is a subtle distinction. Inner perception (innere Wahrnehmung) is the immediate, incidental awareness accompanying every mental act. Inner observation (innere Beobachtung) would turn attention upon one's own state as a target—impossible, Brentano held, since attending to an act as object alters or destroys it. Outer perception can become observation—hearing birdsong can become listening to it. Inner perception cannot (Textor, 2015). Introspection in the ordinary sense is therefore unavailable, while a more reliable access is always already present: inner perception yields immediate and infallible self-knowledge, and this evidential privilege grounds psychology as a science.

The Secondary Object and the Unity of Consciousness

Brentano’s positive theory is the secondary-object doctrine. Every mental state has a primary object—in sensory experience a physical phenomenon such as a sound or color—and is conscious insofar as it presents itself as a secondary object (Antonelli, 2021). These are not two acts. Brentano describes primary and secondary consciousness as distinctional parts, separable in thought but not in reality—which leads Kriegel (2018) to argue they are strictly identical: one state framed either as consciousness of x or as consciousness of the consciousness of x. Kriegel names the governing commitment the "awareness principle"—the claim is that one cannot be conscious without being conscious of being conscious.

This yields an explicit rejection of higher-order perception theories, which require two mental phenomena at distinct levels, one directed at the other—precisely the inner observation Brentano deemed impossible. His unity-of-consciousness thesis holds that present consciousness forms a single real unity whose parts are only conceptually distinguishable (Brentano, 1982).

Descriptive Psychology and the Denial of the Unconscious

From the mid-1880s Brentano developed this program as descriptive psychology, also calling it psychognosy, descriptive phenomenology, and sometimes simply phenomenology (Fréchette, 2023). It analyses the elements of consciousness and their connections, and is sharply distinguished from genetic psychology, which pursues causal and physiological conditions. Only psychognosy, Brentano insisted, is pure psychology—an anatomy of consciousness yielding a priori laws given to intuition, against Wundt and Fechner.

One commitment separates Brentano most sharply from the psychology that succeeded him: he denied unconscious mental states outright, treating mental and conscious as co-extensive. Kriegel (2018) regards this as the system's least defensible element, though excisable with minimal damage.

Reception, Contestation, and Legacy

Husserl, Brentano’s student at Vienna, reportedly declared that without Brentano he could not have written a word of philosophy (Moran, 2020)—yet was among the first to reject two central claims, denying that mental acts stand before us as objects of inner perception the way a house stands before my seeing, and that such perception is infallible (Fréchette, 2023). Zahavi (2004), following the Heidelberg School critics, presses a related objection: Brentano models intransitive consciousness on transitive consciousness, treating a state as conscious insofar as one is aware of it as an object, reintroducing the subject–object split that pre-reflective self-awareness was meant to dissolve.

Reception divides along this fault line. Thomasson (2000) reads Brentano as offering a one-level, adverbial account; Kriegel (2003, 2018) develops him into self-representationalism; Textor (2006) counters that a state becomes conscious not by representing itself but by being fused with an immediately evident cognition of it; Antonelli (2021) argues the self-representational reading imports a concept of object foreign to Brentano and courts a regress. Undisputed is that the secondary-object doctrine is the principal historical alternative to higher-order theories—a same-order account of what makes a state phenomenally conscious, formulated decades before the movement it inaugurated.

References

Antonelli, M. (2021). Consciousness and intentionality in Franz Brentano. Axiomathes, 31(5), 613–634.

Antonelli, M. (2025). Brentano's "intentional in-existence of the object" as the defining mark of mental phenomena. In Brentano and the Aristotelian Tradition. Cham: Springer.

Brentano, F. (1874/1995). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, & L. L. McAlister, Trans.; 2nd ed., intro. P. Simons). London: Routledge.

Brentano, F. (1982/1995). Descriptive Psychology (B. Müller, Trans.). London: Routledge.

Fréchette, G. (2023). Descriptive psychology: Franz Brentano's project today. European Journal of Philosophy, 31(4), 1064–1080.

Kriegel, U. (2003). Consciousness as intransitive self-consciousness: Two views and an argument. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 33(1), 103–132.

Kriegel, U. (2018). Brentano's Philosophical System: Mind, Being, Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moran, D. (2020). Brentano's concept of descriptive psychology. In The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School. London: Routledge.

Textor, M. (2006). Brentano (and some Neo-Brentanians) on inner consciousness. Dialectica, 60(4), 411–431.

Textor, M. (2015). "Inner perception can never become inner observation": Brentano on awareness and observation. Philosophers' Imprint, 15(10), 1–19.

Thomasson, A. L. (2000). After Brentano: A one-level theory of consciousness. European Journal of Philosophy, 8(2), 190–209.

Zahavi, D. (2004). Back to Brentano? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(10–11), 66–87.