A third party in German philosophy between the movement of experimen-
tal psychologists and the Neo-Kantians was led by Brentano. He too had his
strategy for re-elevating philosophy amidst the disciplines. Philosophy, he held,
can become a progressive science because its topic is the study of empirical
consciousness; psychology is on firmer grounds than any of the physical
sciences because it alone rests on the certainty of inner perception. So far
psychology is the master discipline, but the sensory and associative laws of the
Wundtian laboratories and the British empiricists alike are wrongheaded be-
cause they miss the central point: consciousness consists not in content but in
acts. The chief domain of mental acts is the “intentional,” whereby the mind
intends an object, giving it mental existence whether it exists externally or in
imagination; as against Neo-Kantianism, the mind always reaches out to
objects rather than passively screening objects through categories. Brentano
was the most influential academic lecturer at the end of the century. At Vienna
during 1874–1895, he taught Husserl, Meinong, Stumpf, Scheler, Simmel, and
Twardowski, who began the Polish school of logicians, as well as Buber and
Freud. Psychoanalysis and phenomenology were products of Brentano’s pupils;
the founders of Gestalt psychology were his grandpupils.
After the turn of the century, Brentano’s position dissolved in a new array
of schools, and psychology crystallized out as a separate discipline. Neo-Kan-
tianism too broke down, coming under attack both from the philosophically
oriented physicists in the Vienna Circle and from Heidegger’s theologically
oriented phenomenology. This was a reversal of alliances. Neo-Kantianism was
generally close to positivism in its earlier phases: both shared the view that
there is no thing-in-itself, and that science is a formal representation of the
surface of phenomenological experience. Rather than undermining other dis-
ciplines, Neo-Kantianism gave them a supporting rationale. In another direc-
tion, Dilthey and Rickert reserved a realm for spiritual culture that protected
theology against the reductionism of scientific militants and secularists. Nev-
ertheless, in a fashion typical of intellectual change, the revolution took place
within the very networks of the establishment. The Vienna Circle began as a
revolt against Neo-Kantianism, but it was also a revolt within Neo-Kantianism.
The networks tell a different story from the familiar ideological surface: most
of the leaders of the generation of 1900–1935—Schlick, Carnap, but also
Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger—came from the breakup of Neo-Kantianism.
Against these German trends, English academic life for most of the century
seemed archaic. England’s academic revolution did not occur until 1860–1870.
Before that time, philosophy remained within the mold of the Enlightenment
lay intellectual. At the same time, England’s industrialization and democrati-
zation put it in the lead in forming public political movements and thus in the
creation of the activist social sciences. The result was a very different pattern
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^693