Husserl’s epochê is not Descartes’s skeptical doubt, clearing the decks of
everything given; it retains the surface of phenomenal appearance as the start-
ing point for a deep ontology. The essence of consciousness is to be intentional;
objects are first and foremost things that are intended, whether or not they
exist in sensory experience. Husserl twists this characteristic doctrine of Bren-
tano into congruity with that of his mathematical logicist friends. As in Frege,
for Husserl “to be” adds nothing to the object predicated, but operates only
on the pragmatic, naturalistic level; as in Cantor, the realm of logical objects
is eternal and transcends ordinary sensory experience. Geometry is the exem-
plar of phenomenology as the science of pure essence, studying ideal objects
superior to lines scratched on a chalkboard (Roberts, 1972: 192, 195).
Husserl’s work coincided with a general breaking up of the Brentano camp
(see Figure 13.8). Meinong was Husserl’s network sibling, as a pupil of Bren-
tano, and the two were rivals for prime attention in the decade of the early
1900s, working out problems within the same cultural capital. In Meinong’s
case, the distinctive ingredient came not from hybridization with the mathe-
matical lineages but by moving closer to the new movement of psychologists.
Meinong regarded philosophy as a natural science and promoted empirical
psychology in his own laboratory; his exploration of the constituents of con-
sciousness was expressly modeled on chemistry (Lindenfeld, 1980: 115–123,
148–157). Between 1899 and 1904 Meinong elaborated a series of distinctions
in answer to problems which had arisen within Brentano’s doctrine of inten-
tionality and in the new empirical psychology. What is the ontological status
of perceptual gestalts, configurations over and above the particular qualities
which receive their significance within them? What is the ontological status of
negative ideas (e.g., hole, infinity, non-smoker)? For these too are intended by
the mind and arouse feelings perhaps even stronger than positively existing
objects. In what sense can consciousness intend a relation as an object (e.g.,
the similarity between a copy and its original; or indeed the higher-order
relations among relations, which Bradley had recently cited as an infinite
regress to prove the incoherence of relations)? And in what sense can one intend
imaginary objects, insofar as they are not merely existences in the mind? For
it is possible to distinguish between Hamlet and someone’s thought of Hamlet.
Meinong solves these problems by distinguishing three kinds of being: existence
of objects; subsistence (Bestehung) of relations and imaginary objects, even
contradictory ones like a round square; and so-being (Sosein), the charac-
teristics of objects independent of particular existence in time and space, known
a priori and with certainty.
Meinong proposes a new science, Gegenstandstheorie (theory of objects),
more general than metaphysics, which deals only with being, whereas subsis-
tence and so-being are “indifferent to being.” Mathematics is the science of
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^739