also held to that distinction and then asked about the basic structure of the mental, especially as regards what we call presentation, judgment, acknowledgment, taking positions, positing, insight, and thinking. Are these phenomena—which we are so quick to call processes and events—actually inside us in the way that the circulation of the blood and the function of gastric juices are, with the simple difference that they are not sensible and cannot be treated in a direct chemical and physical way? Or does what we mean by thinking, judging, and so forth—this “mental,” as such—have its own structure and its own kind of being? We should have asked about the structure of one of the two regions in order to understand in it the μέθεξις. To put it more exactly: Husserl did not really need to ask for a directive regarding the basic character and elements of the mental question, insofar as he already had received such an orientation from his teacher, Franz Brentano.75, 76 [94]
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Brentano had already explained these basic determinations of the mental in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, of which only the first volume was published.77 This Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint is divided into two books: book 1, “Psychology as a Science”; and book 2, “Mental Phenomena in General,” the real heart of Brentano’s investigations. The point is to determine what the mental really is, in order to go on from there to the various ways in which mental being can comport itself. The basic determination of the mental is intentionality. Understood very roughly, intentionality is self-directedness-tosomething. All mental comportments, as mental, are determined by the fact that they are directed toward something. Now, there are various ways to be directed toward something: presenting, judging, taking a position, willing—i.e., the ways we understand the usual divisions of
75. [Editor’s note: Cf. Heidegger’s lecture course, Summer Semester 1925, Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs.] [Translator‘s note: Published in English as Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).]
76. [Here (Moser, p. 198) Heidegger ends his lecture of Tuesday, 24 November 1925, to be followed by that of Thursday, 26 November, which opened with a 230word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]
77. New edition in the series Philosophische Bibliothek, published by Felix Meiner. The introduction that precedes this edition is entirely worthless. [Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 2 vols., ed. Oskar Kraus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955; repr. from the 1924–1925 edition: Philosophische Bibliotek, no. 193); translated as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Linda L. McAllister, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAllister (New York: Humanities Press, 1973).]