ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses only on the pre-reflective consciousness of the intentional acts by themselves, which is supposed by Sartre and Brentano to exist and to give its very meaning to the notion of consciousness itself. In psychology from an empirical standpoint, it is quite clear that Descartes' Cogito means for Brentano that mental phenomena appear with self-evidence, as contrasted with physical phenomena, which do not. Brentano's theory of inner perception as pre-reflective self-consciousness is a transcendental analysis of the conditions of possibility of the Cogito as Brentano understands it. Husserl's intentional objects appear and identifies through the stream of Brentano's physical phenomena, while Brentano's intentional objects are those physical phenomena themselves, which only appear and exist through intentional presentations. The relation of the self to other phenomena would then only be a spatial relation, and in any case, no pre-reflective self-consciousness would be required for the appearance of this self or of the external phenomena which surround it.