What Makes a Thought About Something? Franz Brentano and the Mystery of Intentionality

Here’s a strange thing philosophers noticed: most things in the universe aren’t about anything. A rock isn’t about anything. A cloud isn’t about anything. Rain isn’t about anything. But your thoughts? Your thoughts are about things. When you think about pizza, your thought points toward pizza. When you remember your grandmother’s laugh, your memory reaches toward that sound from the past. When you’re afraid of a test, your fear is of the test.

This “aboutness” — the way mental states point toward objects — is one of the most puzzling features of being conscious. A 19th-century philosopher named Franz Brentano made it his life’s work to understand it, and the questions he raised are still bothering philosophers today.

The Man Who Wanted Psychology to Be a Science

Franz Brentano was born in 1838 into a remarkable family. His uncle and aunt were famous writers; his brother became a leading economist. Brentano himself studied mathematics, poetry, philosophy, and theology. He became a Catholic priest in 1864, but over time he found himself disagreeing more and more with official Church doctrine — especially when the Church declared that the Pope could not make mistakes. In 1873, Brentano left the priesthood and gave up his professorship.

He would later marry, but Austrian law said that former priests couldn’t marry. So Brentano and his fiancée temporarily moved to another country, became citizens there, got married, and then moved back — only to find that Austrian authorities wouldn’t give him his job back. For years he taught without a salary, hoping to be reinstated. Eventually he gave up and moved to Italy, where a war later forced him to flee to Switzerland. He died in Zurich in 1917, almost blind, but still dictating philosophy to his wife.

Brentano was known as an extraordinary teacher. Many of his students became famous philosophers themselves — including Edmund Husserl (who founded phenomenology), Alexius Meinong, and even Sigmund Freud attended his lectures. Brentano taught his students to think critically and scientifically, to question everything, and not to bow to philosophical fashion. But when his students later criticized his ideas, Brentano often reacted badly. He became increasingly isolated, convinced that nobody really understood him.

What Makes a Mental State Mental?

Brentano wanted to make psychology a proper science — like physics or chemistry. But to do that, psychology first needed to know what it was studying. What, exactly, is a “mental phenomenon”? How do you tell the difference between something mental and something physical?

His answer became famous. Every mental state, Brentano said, has what he called intentionality. This is a fancy word for a simple idea: mental states are directed toward something. When you see a tree, your seeing is about the tree. When you wonder whether it will rain, your wondering is about the weather. When you hope your friend will come to your birthday party, your hoping is about that event.

Physical things don’t do this. A chair isn’t about anything. A rock isn’t directed toward anything. A puddle of water doesn’t point to something else.

This might sound obvious at first. But think about how strange it really is. How can a bunch of neurons firing in your brain be about something? How can a physical object — your brain — have this weird property of “pointing to” things outside itself? A photograph of your grandmother points to your grandmother, but that’s just because we interpret it that way. A thought of your grandmother points to her intrinsically — the pointing is built into the thought itself.

Brentano put it this way: “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself.” That “including” is what makes mentality special.

Presenting, Judging, and Loving

Brentano didn’t just notice that mental states are intentional. He also tried to classify them. He thought there were three basic kinds of mental phenomena:

Presentations are the simplest. Whenever you’re aware of something — seeing, hearing, imagining, remembering — you have a presentation of it. Presentations just present an object to your mind; they don’t say anything about it.

Judgments go further. When you judge, you either accept or reject the existence of something. You look outside, see rain, and judge that it’s raining. Or you hear that someone claimed there’s a unicorn in the schoolyard, and you judge that no, that’s not true. Every judgment is built on top of a presentation — you have to present the object to yourself before you can accept or reject it.

Emotions (which Brentano called “phenomena of love and hate”) are the third category. When you love someone, hate injustice, feel happy about a good grade, or are disgusted by a bad smell — these are emotional attitudes toward objects. Like judgments, they take a stance: positive (love, joy, desire) or negative (hate, sadness, fear). And like judgments, emotions are built on presentations.

This tripartite division might seem like a dry bit of classification, but it mattered deeply to Brentano. He thought that truth, goodness, and beauty each connected to one of these three categories. Truth is about correct judgments. Goodness is about correct emotions — loving what is worthy of love. Beauty is about the value of presentations themselves. More on that later.

The Puzzle of Things That Don’t Exist

Here’s where things get weird and interesting. If every mental state is about something, what happens when you think about something that doesn’t exist?

You can think about Sherlock Holmes. You can imagine a golden mountain. You can worry about a dragon that isn’t really there. Your thought seems to be directed toward something — but toward what? There’s no actual Sherlock Holmes for your thought to point at.

This was a huge problem for Brentano and his followers. If mental states are defined by being directed toward objects, but some of those objects don’t exist, then either:

The object must somehow exist inside your mind (a “mental” object), or
Mental states aren’t really relations to objects at all, or
Non-existing objects somehow still exist (which sounds confusing, and it is).

Brentano’s original way of talking suggested option 1 — that the object of your thought is “immanent,” meaning it’s inside the mental act itself. When you think about Paris, the Paris you’re thinking about is a mental Paris, not the actual city.

But this leads to problems. If you and your friend are both thinking about Paris, are you thinking about the same thing? If your Paris is in your head and her Paris is in her head, it seems like you’re thinking about different things. And when you promise to meet someone somewhere, you don’t want to marry a “mental object” — you want to marry a real person.

Brentano’s students tried to fix this. One of them, Kazimierz Twardowski, distinguished between the content of a thought (which is in your mind) and the object of a thought (which is the real thing out there). Another student, Alexius Meinong, went in a wild direction: he said that non-existing objects like Sherlock Holmes do exist, just in a different way. They “subsist” rather than “exist.” (This sounds silly until you realize that many mathematicians talk about numbers this way.)

Brentano himself later changed his mind. He said that intentionality isn’t really a relation at all — it’s a quasi-relation. In a real relation, both sides have to exist. If you’re taller than your brother, both you and your brother must exist. But in a quasi-relation, only one side needs to exist. Your thought can point toward something that doesn’t exist, because the “pointing” isn’t a real relation — it’s something special that only mental things can do.

This sounds like moving the problem to a different word rather than solving it. But that’s okay — philosophers still argue about this today.

The Awareness That Comes with Every Thought

Here’s another strange claim Brentano made. He said that every mental state is not just about its object — it’s also about itself.

When you see a tree, you don’t just see the tree. You’re also aware that you’re seeing. This isn’t a second, separate thought (“Now I’m observing myself seeing”). It’s built into the act of seeing itself. The seeing has two objects: the tree (the primary object) and itself (the secondary object). Every mental state, Brentano said, is incidentally aware of itself.

This might sound like a small point, but it has big consequences. If every mental state is aware of itself, then there can be no “unconscious” mental states — no thoughts that happen without your knowing about them. (Brentano admitted that some mental states can be very faint, so faint that you might not remember them later, but he denied that any mental state is totally unconscious.)

It also means you can’t really observe your own mental states while they’re happening. To observe your anger, you’d need two separate mental acts — the anger and the observing of the anger — happening at the same time. But according to Brentano, this is impossible. You can only have one mental state at a time. (Remember the unity of consciousness? More on that in a moment.) Instead, you perceive your mental states as they happen, through that built-in self-awareness. You can only observe them later, in memory.

This is still a live debate in philosophy of mind. Some philosophers today argue that consciousness requires a “higher-order” thought — a second thought that’s about the first. Others argue, like Brentano, that the self-awareness is built into the first thought itself. Which view is right? Nobody’s sure yet.

The Melody Problem

If you can only have one mental state at a time, how do you experience something that takes time — like a melody? When you hear a song, you don’t just hear one note. You hear the melody as a whole, stretching from the past through the present toward the future. But the past notes aren’t actually happening anymore. The future notes haven’t happened yet. So how can you be directed toward something that’s spread out in time?

Brentano wrestled with this problem for decades, changing his mind several times. His basic idea was this: when you hear a note, it doesn’t just vanish from your consciousness. It lingers for a moment, modified as “just past.” When the next note comes, the first note is still present in your awareness, but as “past” — and the second note is present as “now.” When the third note arrives, the first note is “further past,” the second is “just past,” and the third is “now.” So at any moment, you’re aware of the present note and the recent past notes, all as one unified experience.

This is why you hear a melody rather than a series of disconnected notes. Your consciousness holds onto the past and presents it to you as part of a flowing whole. (Modern psychology calls this “echoic memory” or “short-term memory,” but Brentano was trying to explain something deeper — how consciousness itself can be spread across time.)

The Worth of Thinking

Brentano had interesting things to say about ethics and beauty, too. He thought that emotions, like judgments, can be correct or incorrect. Just as you can correctly judge that 2+2=4 and incorrectly judge that 2+2=5, you can correctly love something and incorrectly hate it.

When your love for something is correct, that thing is good. When your hate for something is correct, that thing is bad. Goodness, for Brentano, isn’t a mysterious property floating around in the world. It’s connected to whether our emotional responses are fitting.

This idea — that value is about whether our attitudes are “fitting” toward their objects — has been revived by philosophers working today. It’s called a “fitting attitude” theory of value. When you think something is good, you might be thinking that it’s worthy of being loved.

Brentano also said something surprising about presentations: every presentation has value, just by being a presentation. Even the most boring, unpleasant thought is better than having no thoughts at all. “Everyone,” he wrote, “if they had to choose between a state of unconsciousness and the having of any presentation whatsoever, would welcome even the poorest presentation and would not envy lifeless objects.”

Would you? If you had to choose between being completely unconscious (like a rock) and having any thought at all — even a boring or painful one — which would you pick? Brentano thought the answer was obvious: consciousness, even unpleasant consciousness, is valuable in itself.

Why This Still Matters

Brentano died more than a hundred years ago, but his questions are still alive. What makes a thought about something? How can consciousness be aware of itself? How do we experience time? Can emotions be correct or incorrect?

These aren’t just academic puzzles. They’re questions about what it means to be a thinking, feeling, conscious being. When you’re sitting in class, thinking about lunch, your thought is about lunch in a way that nothing else in the universe is. That “aboutness” is what Brentano spent his life trying to understand. And we’re still trying to understand it today.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Intentionality	The feature of mental states that makes them “about” or “directed toward” something
Presentation	The most basic kind of mental state — simply being aware of something
Judgment	A mental state that accepts or rejects the existence of something
Inner perception	The built-in awareness every mental state has of itself
Original association	The way past moments linger in consciousness, allowing us to experience time
Quasi-relation	Brentano’s later term for intentionality — a kind of “pointing” that doesn’t require both sides to exist
Fitting attitude	The idea that emotions can be correct or incorrect depending on whether their object deserves them

Key People

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) — A former Catholic priest who became a philosopher and teacher, trying to put psychology on a scientific foundation. He argued that all mental states are defined by their “aboutness.”
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) — One of Brentano’s students who founded phenomenology, a method for studying conscious experience. He took Brentano’s ideas in a different direction.
Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) — Another of Brentano’s students who argued that even non-existing objects like Sherlock Holmes have a kind of existence.
Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938) — A Brentano student who distinguished between the content of a thought (in your mind) and its object (in the world).

Things to Think About

If every mental state is about something, what is a thought about nothing? Is that even possible? Try to think of nothing — really nothing — and see what happens.
Brentano said that emotions can be correct or incorrect. Do you agree? If your friend is afraid of spiders but the spider isn’t dangerous, is your friend’s fear incorrect? What would that even mean?
If consciousness is always aware of itself (as Brentano argued), can there be unconscious thoughts? Have you ever had a thought that you didn’t know you were having?
Brentano said every presentation has value — even bad experiences are better than no experiences. Is this true? Would you rather be in pain or be completely unconscious? What about extreme, unbearable pain?

Where This Shows Up

When you think about a movie you watched last week, your memory is directed toward that movie — that’s intentionality in action.
When you taste a new food and decide whether you like it, you’re making a judgment (accepting or rejecting) built on a presentation (the taste).
Debates about whether computers can think often come down to whether a computer’s “thoughts” could be about anything — or whether they’re just manipulating symbols without any real intentionality.
The problem of non-existing objects shows up when you play video games or read fiction. When you care about a fictional character, you’re having emotions about something that doesn’t exist. How is that possible?