Philosophical background: Phenomenology

Liliana Albertazzi

To appear in:
Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization
Oxford University Press
Edited by Johan Wagemans

Verae philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientia naturalis est

Brentano, IV Habilitationsthesen

1. The philosophical origins

Phenomenology, understood as the science of phenomena, appearances or subjective experiences, was

born as a philosophical theory. It is a complex neo-Aristotelian theory that firstly originated in the empirical
and descriptive psychology of Brentano (Brentano, 1874/1995a, 1988), although is generally best known in
the version developed by Husserl (1913, 1963). Husserl’s analysis, however, for a series of reasons,
remained essentially theoretical. Apart from a few cases (Merleau-Ponty, Ingarden, Becker, Schütz,
Gurwitsch), the majority of Husserl’s successors (Heidegger and Sartre, Derrida, Levinas, Ricoeur, Henry,
Marion), abandoned the contact with the sciences and the problem of their foundation – aspects which
were instead fundamental for Husserl (see Spiegelberg, 1982).

When in 1874 Brentano introduced the notion of intentional reference in his Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint (PES) he might not have immediately foreseen all the consequences that would ensue from that
particular, and so ambiguous, passage in his book. And yet it sparked a surprising intellectual debate and
gave rise, through Stumpf and Meinong, two of his best pupils, to an astonishing flourishing of
experimental research in the Berlin and Graz schools of Gestalt psychology (Albertazzi, 2001; Wagemans et
al., 2012), of which the basis was that perceiving, grounded on the subjective, inner space-time dynamics of
psychic presentations, is the perceiving of appearances.

Described in what follows are those aspects of the Brentanian theory which drove the development of
experimental studies in perception, and mainly in vision. Descriptive psychology, in fact, was the origin of,
and the first systematic effort in experimental phenomenology (see Koenderink’s chapter, this volume).
The extreme complexity of the theory, however, extends far beyond a summary of what is known to be
Brentano’s contribution to the science of psychology although it was constrained to perception studies. The
reader is invited to refer on individual points to the literature cited (for a general introduction to Brentano
and related literature see Albertazzi, 2006a).

1.1. Presentations
In PES Brentano defines the nature of the psychic phenomena (Vorstellungen) as acts (i.e. processes) of
psychic energy (a sort of Jamesian flow of awareness, hence James’s esteem for Brentano as expressed in
James, 1890/1950, I, p. 547).

Presentations may originate either in perception (as seeing, noticing, observing, etc.), or in the phantasy,
generally understood in terms of the capacity to present or to visualize (when thinking, remembering,
imagining, etc.).

Presentations, usually do not exist on their own, but in the context of other intentional modalities like
judgments and phenomena of interest, founded on presentations themselves. Whatever their occurrence,
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and however complex simultaneously occurring psychic phenomena may be, conscious experience is
always unitary: because the acts are unitarily directed to the same object (say, a landscape) and because
individually they are partial phenomena (non-detachable parts) of a single whole, i.e. of actual presenting.

Brentano’s theory, in fact, is not ‘a summative bundle’ (Hume, 1739/2007) where perceptions arise in
parcelled pieces or sensations, to be later associated with each other according to traces of earlier
perceptions, memory etc. (Wertheimer, 1925b/1938, p. 12). A bundle, as Brentano observes, “strictly
speaking requires a rope or wire or something else binding it together”, vice versa consciousness consists of
a multitude of internally related parts (Brentano, 1995b, 13-14).

As to perceiving, in Brentanian terms it consists neither in the symbolic or probabilistic representation of an

objective external physical reality, as for example assumed by the inferential approach (Marr, 1982; Rock,
1983) nor in a direct or indirect resonance of such a reality due to action, as for example assumed in the
Gibsonian (Gibson, 1979) and enactive approaches (Noë, 2004) to perception. The ecological approach to
vision still plays an important role in current studies of perception (Koenderink, 1990; Lappin, Norman, and
Phillips, 2011; Mace, 1977; Todd, 2004; Warren, 2005, 2006), and it is certainly closer to a Brentanian
viewpoint than inferentialism; however, in the Brentanian stance, one perceives qualitative wholes, not
physical entities or physical invariants. As to inferentialism, in the Brentanian framework this plays a role
only insofar as the nature of the transcendent world is concerned: in fact, appearances, the sole objects of
our experience, have only an extrinsic relationship with entities and unknown processes (PES, 129).
Contrary to inferentialism, however, a descriptive approach does not need to verify/justify the veridicality
or illusoriness of appearances with respect to the stimuli, because appearances are experienced as
evidently given in actual perceiving: at issue is the coherence of the structure, not the so-called veridicality
of the objects (Brentano, 1874/1955a).

Brentano identifies the essential characteristic of intentional presentation in its being directed towards an
inner object of some kind. As he writes in a celebrated but dense passage:

“Every psychic phenomenon is characterized by what the medieval scholastics termed the intentional (i.e.
mental) in/existence of an object and which I shall call, albeit using expressions not devoid of ambiguity,
reference to a content, directedness towards an object (Objectum) (which should not be taken to be real),
or immanent objectivity. Every psychic phenomenon contains something in itself as an object
(Gegenstand), although each of them does not do so in the same way. In presentation something is
presented, in judgement something is accepted or rejected, in love something is loved, in hate hated, in
desire desired, etc. (PES, p. 88).”

Brentano was clearly aware from the outset of an intrinsic ambiguity in this formulation which was
exacerbated by the medieval implications of the term intentional, whether or not it implied an act of will
related to a goal, i.e., an ‘intention’ as generally understood in contemporary theory of intentionality; or
whose behaviour, in modern parlance, could be explained or predicted by relying on ascriptions to the
system of beliefs and desires (and hopes, fear, intentions, hunches as well, as in Dennett 1978), or even in
terms of a perception-action relation (O’Reagan and Noë, 2011).

One of the problems immediately raised by definitions of psychic phenomenon concerns the relationship
between the immanent object and the content of the presentation process, which are often treated as
synonyms by commentators (Höfler, 1897; Twardowsky, 1894/1977; Husserl, 1896/1979; Passmore, 1968,
178). To greatly simplify the question, the distinction regards, say, the appearance of something like a red
patch in seeing (“Seeing a colour”, Brentano, 1874/1995a, 79). Because a perceived surface, as a part of the
visual space, is necessarily a coloured appearance, a spatial quality and a red textured quality, are both
contents and object of a presentation (concrescent, non-detachable parts in Brentano’s 1995b terminology)
of the red patch as a whole. Other distinctions concern the difference among seeing, thinking,
remembering, judging, or loving an object like a red patch, or a cat, which means having the same object in

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mind under specific and different psychic relations. On seeing a cat, for example, the perceiver’s
presentation grounds on specific shape perspectival aspects appearing in awareness: the cat being
white/grey/black, running/staying, stretched out or curled up, etc., i.e. all the partial contents of the object
of presentation ‘cat’, that directly offer the cues for it to be perceptually completed as either a modal or
amodal cat (Tse, 1998). Assuming this standpoint means conceiving human experiences as based on
internal mental forms, be they figural patterns and/or colour appearances (see Smithson’s chapter, this
volume).

1.2. Experimental phenomenology

In Brentano’s approach the world is built from within, but not in a neurophysiological sense.
Neurophysiological aspects are not relevant to this kind of inquiry, which concerns itself only with the
modes of appearance of perceptive objects (on the relation between phenomenology of appearances and
neuroscience see Spillmann and Ehrenstein, 2004; Spillmann, 2009). What Brentano affirms is that the
world of experience is reducible neither to external nor to internal physiological psychophysics
(Wackermann, 2010): it is a primary, conscious, evident, qualitative level made up of perception of colours,
shapes, landscapes, movements, cats, and so on. This also means that information is qualitative,
immediately given, and endowed with meaning, not a product of the computational retrieval and
elaboration of stimuli. These are also the main tenets of an experimental phenomenology, focused on
qualitative perceiving and its laws.

As Kanizsa put it:

The goal pursued by experimental phenomenology does not differ from that of other sectors of
psychology: discovery and analysis of necessary functional connections among visual phenomena,
identification of the conditions that help or hinder their appearance or the degree of their evidence, in
other words: determination of the laws which the phenomenological field obeys. And this without leaving
the phenomenal domain; without, that is, referring to the underlying neurophysical processes (to a large
extent unknown) or to the concomitant non-visual psychological activities (logical, mnestic, affective
activities which are just as enigmatic as vision itself). The influence of such processes and activities certainly
cannot be denied, but they must not be identified with seeing... The experimental phenomenology of vision
is not concerned with the brain but with that result of the brain’s activity that is seeing. This is not a
second-best choice justified by the slowness of progress in neurophysiological research and its uncertain
prospects, it is a methodological option taken for specific epistemological reasons. And mainly the
conviction that the phenomenal reality cannot be addressed and even much less explained with a neuro-
reductive approach because it is a level of reality which has its own specificity, which requires and
legitimates a type of analysis suited to its specificity. The knowledge obtained in this way is to be
considered just as scientific as the knowledge obtained in any other domain of reality with methods
commensurate to that domain (Kanizsa, 1991, pp. 43-44; emphasis added).

In other words, phenomenological description comes first and it is also able to explain the laws of seeing as
the conditions governing appearances in visual space. The point has also been stressed by Metzger when
describing the task and method of an experimental phenomenology:

we have proceeded exclusively and without any glance into physics, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology,
from within, from the immediate percept, and without even thinking of rejecting any aspect of our findings
or even changing its place, just because it does not fit with our contemporary knowledge of nature so far.
With our perceptual theory we do not bow to physiology, but rather we present challenges to it. Whether
physiology will be able to address these challenges, whether on its course, by external observation of the
body and its organs, it will be able to penetrate into the laws of perception, is pointless to argue about in
advance (Metzger, 1936/2006, p. 197).

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A phenomenological approach to perception obviously does not deny the existence of stimuli, but it treats
them as external triggers, and consider them extraneous to the phenomenological level of analysis. Nor
does it deny the psychophysical correlation between the stimulus and the behavioural response, nor its
measurement. In short, it does not deny classical psychophysics but distinguishes among what pertains to
psychophysics, what pertains to brain analysis, and what pertains to a qualitative analysis of phenomena.

The gestaltists adopted several features of the phenomenological method outlined by Brentano, such as
the description of appearance of the phenomena (Koffka, 1935, Part III). Katz, for example, in his eidetic
(Gestalt) analysis of colour, furnished an exemplary description of what is a phenomenological variation
(Husserl, 1913/1989, sect 137) by showing that a particular appearance of red is nothing but an instance of
a certain shade of red in general (as pure colour) and that there is a phenomenal difference between
surface colours and film or volumetric colours (Katz, 1935, Part I). Hering provided a psychological
grounding for this method of analysis in the first two chapters of his Outline of a Theory of a Light Science
(Hering, 1920/1964), which led to recovery of the laws of opponence among the unique colours which were
subsequently confirmed at neurophysiological level (Hurvich, and Jameson 1955). Although further
research has cast doubt on some of the results obtained by neuroscientific investigation (Valberg, 1971,
2001), it has not changed in the slightest the validity of Hering’s analysis at the phenomenological level, nor
of Brentano’s proposed methodology.

2. The information content of presentation

However complex the riddle of the structural embedding of the act, content and object in a whole of
presentation, as addressed in detail in Descriptive Psychology (Brentano, 1995b), may seem at first sight, it
highlights some aspects crucial for a science of experiential perceiving: for example, the non-detachability
of visual space and visual objects in the organization of perception, as was later demonstrated (Koffka,
1935, Chapter 3; Kopfermann, 1930), and the fact that qualities as they appear in configurations like
‘coloured patches’ or ‘cats’ are intrinsically relational and cannot be analysed in atomistic terms, even less
in terms of physical properties. What constitues the identity of phenomenal objects like a seen cat, which is
of neither a logical nor a physical kind, but a whole made up of merely qualitative, internally related
appearances; and what constitutes its phenomenal permanence in the flow of our awareness, are questions
to be explained. In fact, they were later addressed by, among others, Husserl (1966a/1991), Benussi (1913),
and Michotte (1950/1991).

It should also be noted that appearances in presentations may have stronger or weaker degrees of
intentional existence like that of a presented, remembered, or dreamed cat (Albertazzi 2010). As Metzger
(1941/1963, Chapter 1) would later show, degrees of mental existence regards, for example, an occurring
event (presented reality) and the event represented (represented reality). Consider a play, which takes
place during a certain period of physical time, and which is watched ‘live’ with a subjective experiencing
that varies in relation to the spectator’s attention, interest and emotional involvement. Then consider the
representation of the event in static photographic images or as reported in a newspaper. Mainstream
science represents events in a quantitatively parametrized mode, but it involves structural changes in the
lived experience.

A second difference within the level of phenomenal reality is given by the present reality in its fullness, and
by the reality that is equally given but present in the form of a lack, a void, or an absence. Examples of this
difference are almost structural at presentative level because of the organization of appearances into
figure/ground, so that in the visual field there is always a ‘double presentation’ (Rubin, 1958). Other striking
examples are provided by the phenomena of occlusions, film colour, or the determinateness vs.
indeterminateness of colours, or the volume of a half full and half empty glass.

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A further difference within the phenomenal level of reality is that between forms of reality which present
themselves as phenomenally real and forms that present themselves as phenomenally apparent. In the
latter case, they have a lower degree of phenomenal reality. Examples are mirror images, after-images, and
eidetic images, and by hallucinations, delusions, illusions, etc. A phenomenological conception is not a
disjunctivist conception, as has sometimes been argued (see e.g. Smith 2008; for a review of the varieties of
disjunctivism see: http://plato.stanford.edu / entries / perception-disjunctive /). In fact, what is seen is only
a difference in the degree of reality among veridical, deceptive and hallucinatory perceptions. This is
because the reality of an appearance is not classifiable in terms of its possible veridicality upon the
stimulus. As said, for Brentano a 'physical phenomenon' is the object of a presentation or an appearance. A
complex and paradigmatic example of this difference is provided by amodal shadows, like those produced
on the basis of anomalous contours in an unfolding stereokinetic truncated cone (Albertazzi, 2004).

Perceptual appearances may also have different modalities of existence: one think of the amodal triangle
(Kanizsa), of the impossible triangle (Penrose), of the length of lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion (1889), or of
the size of the circles in the Ebbinghaus illusion (1902), or more simply of the already mentioned diverse
modes of appearance of colour (Katz, 1935), including their valence characteristics in harmony, which is still
a controversial topic (Allen and Guilford, 1936; Cohn, 1894; Da Pos, 1995; Guilford, 1931; Major, 1895; von
Allesch, 1925a, b; Washburn and Regensburg, 1921).

Distinguishing and classifying the multifarious variety of immanent object/s and content/s also in regarding
to the different kinds of psychic processes (ranging among presentations, judgments, emotional
presentations and assumptions) was the specific goal of both Twardowsky (1894/1977) and Meinong
(1910), while the subjective space-time nature and internal dependence of act, object, and content were
the specific concern of Husserl’s, Meinong’s, and Benussi’s research, as well as the phenomenological-
experimental approach to the study of consciousness.

3. What is physical in qualitative perceiving?

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Brentano’s theory concerns the distinction between what should
be understood as being psychic and what should be understood as being physical, in perceiving. This
distinction is still a matter of debate, and it may have significant potential for the advancement of
perception studies.

As Brentano wrote in another famous passage:

Every presentation which we acquire either through sense perception or imagination is an example of a
psychic phenomenon. By presentation I do not mean what is presented, but rather the act of presentation.
Thus, hearing a sound, seeing a coloured object, feeling warm or cold, as well as similar states of
imagination are examples of what I mean by this term. I also mean by it the thinking of a general concept,
provided such a thing actually does occur. Furthermore, every judgment, every recollection, every
expectation, every inference, every conviction or opinion, every doubt, is a psychic phenomenon. Also to be
included under this term is every emotion: joy, sorrow, fear, hope, courage, despair, anger, love, hate,
desire, act of will, intention, astonishment, admiration, contempt, etc. (Brentano, 1874/1995a, pp. 78-79,
tr. slightly modified).

Vice versa,

Examples of physical phenomena, on the other hand, are a colour, a figure, a landscape which I see, a chord
which I hear, warmth, cold, odour which I sense; as well as similar images which appear in the imagination
Brentano, 1874/1995a, pp. 79-80)

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Although his theory underwent subsequent developments, Brentano always maintained his assumption
that ‘psychic phenomena’ like a seeing, a feeling, a hearing, an imagining, and so on, constitute what
effectively exists in the strong sense (Brentano, 1982, p. 21). They are mental processes, in fact expressed in
verbal form.

Psychic phenomena are essentially distinct from ‘physical phenomena’, which for Brentano are immanent
and intentional objects of the presentations themselves, i.e. appearances, and are expressed in nominal
form (Brentano, 1874/1995a, pp. 78-79). Essentially, physical phenomena are composed of two non-
detachable parts, i.e. phenomenal place and quality (Brentano, 1874/1995a, pp. 79-80; 1907/1979, p. 167;
1982, pp. 89, 159 ff.). For example, if two blue spots, a grey spot and a yellow one appear in the visual field,
they differ as to colour and place; each of the blue spots, in its turn, is different from the yellow and the
grey one. But they are also different from ach another because of a difference in place: colour and place, in
fact, being two (distinctional) parts of the same visual phenomenon (Brentano, 1995b, p. 17ff; Albertazzi,
2006a, Chapter 4).

The point is important, because readers of whatever provenance easily misunderstand what Brentano
conceives to be physical phenomena, as distinguished from psychic phenomena, mostly because of the
equivocalness of the term ‘physical’. Given that the objects of a presentation are wholly internal to the
mental process, it is not surprising, in this framework, that a seen colour, a heard sound, an imagined cat, a
loved poem, etc. are conceived as the only ‘physical phenomena’ of our subjective experience. Brentano’s
“sublunar Aristotelian physics” is a physics of man, or an observer dependent physics (Koenderink, 2010).
One might think that, avoiding equivocalness, and for example speaking in terms of processes and
appearances would be more fruitful for understanding Brentano’s theory. However, one notes that a
similar radical position was later assumed by Hering when he addressed the nature of the visual world. In
defining the nature of objects in a visual presentation, Hering declares:

Colors are the substance of the seen object. When we open our eyes in an illuminated room, we see a
manifold of spatially extended forms that are differentiated or separated from one another through
differences in their colors... Colors are what fill in the outlines of these forms, they are the stuff out of
which visual phenomena are built up; our visual world consists solely of different formed colors; and
objects, from the point of view of seeing them, that is, seen objects, are nothing other than colors of
different kinds and forms (Hering, 1920/1964, Chapter 1, p. 1. Emphasis added).

Nothing could be more Brentanian than Hering’s account of vision, both from a psychological and an
ontological viewpoint. Interlocked perceptual appearances like colour, shape, and space, in the
Brentanian/Heringian framework are in fact the initial direct information presented to us in awareness.
They are not the primary properties of what are commonly understood as physical entities, even though
they are correlated with stimuli defined on the basis of physics. Appearances in visual awareness are not
simply representations of ‘external’ stimuli; rather, they are internal presentations of active perceptual
constructs, co-dependent on, but qualitatively unattainable through, a mere transformation of stimuli (see
Mausfeld, 2010). For example, the intentional object ‘horse’ is not the ‘represented horse’, but the inner
object of who has it in mind (Brentano, 1966/1979, pp. 119-121). The references of the phenomenal
domain are not located in the transcendent world but are the subjective, qualitative appearances produced
by the process of perceiving. Consequently, phenomena of occlusion, transparency, so-called illusions,
trompe l’oeil, and so on, because they are almost independent from external stimuli, are entirely ordinary
perceptive phenomena; they are not odd, deceptive perceptions as has been maintained (Gregory, 1986).
In fact, appearances are prior from the point of view of experiences to any construction of physical
theories: consider, for example, a visual point in which one can distinguish between a where (the place in
the field the point appears) and a what (its ‘pointness’), something very dissimilar from the abstraction of
an Euclideian point. We perceive the world and we do so with evidence (the Brentanian concept of internal
perception, innere Wahrnehmung) before making of it an object of successive observations and scientific
abstractions.

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4. Psychology from a first person account

Descriptive Psychology (Brentano, 1995b) presents a sophisticated taxonomy of wholes and parts, intended
to lay down a science of the mental components of the process of intentional reference and their laws of
organization. Brentano painstakingly itemizes the different varieties of distinctional parts of a psychic
whole, not necessarily detachable, and how they relate to each other. For example, he distinguishes
between concrescent parts, like the place and colour of a patch and parts of the psychic phenomenon
regarding awareness of an object and self-awareness of being conscious of it. Furthermore, he distinguishes
among the different varieties of the detachability that parts can undergo within the unitary consciousness:
bilateral detachability as in simultaneously seeing and hearing; one-side detachability as between side by
side red and yellow patches, as separate instances of the common species ‘colour’, this being their logical
part; or the one-side detachability between a presentation and a phenomenon of interest. In so doing, he
shows not only the psychological but also the ontological nature of the processes and of the part-processes.
Thus descriptive psychology plays the role of a general foundation of science.

Brentano, in fact, maintained that his descriptive psychology, i.e. a pure non physiological psychology, was
far more advanced than physics, because it aimed systematically to describe, distinguish, and explain the
nature of subjective experiences and their laws before they are correlated with our conceiving and
understanding of the transcendent world in terms of physics. In other words, phenomenology “is prior in
the natural order” (Brentano, 1995b, p. 8, p. 13), and provides guidance for correlated neurophysiological
and psychophysical researches; but it also explains the nature of appearances themselves, i.e. the
conditions of their appearing.

This is why a science of phenomena must be strictly and formally constructed on the basis of subjective
judgments in first person account. Experimental-phenomenological science must then identify the specific
units of representations and the specific metrics with which to measure them and construct a generalized
model of appearances (Kubovy and Wagemans, 1995). In his criticism of Fechner (1860/1966), Brentano
maintained that explanation is required not only of the classical psychophysical just noticeable differences
(jnd), but also of ‘just perceivable differences’ (jpd), i.e. magnitudes of a qualitative nature that constitute
the perception of difference, like the ‘pointness’, ‘squareness’, ‘acuteness’ or ‘remoteness’ of an
appearance in presentation. Here evaluation is made of the phenomenic magnitude of a subjective,
anisotropic, non Euclidean, dynamic space (Albertazzi, 2012a). The nature of such units (for example,
temporal momentum), depending on the conditions and the context of their appearances, requires a non-
linear metrics for their measurement. Contemporary science has not yet developed a geometry of visual
awareness in terms of seeing, although this is a necessary preliminary step in order to be able to address
the question in proper terms; but there are some proposals more or less organized into theories
(Koenderink, 2002, 2010, 2013; Koenderink and van Doorn, 2006). This radical standpoint, obviously, raises
numerous issues as to the proper science of psychology, its feasibility, its laws of explanations, its
correlation with the sciences of psychophysics and neurophysiology, its methods, and its measurement of
psychic processes and their appearances. Last but not least, how the construction and the final identity of
the object of a presentation develops in the flow is something that cannot be explained until we have a
general theory of subjective time-space, and of the inner relations of dependence among the parts of the
contents of our awareness in their flowing.

One only need look at Brentano’s analysis of the intensity of colour perception, for example, to understand
how distant from classical psychophysics his approach is (On Individuation, Multiple Quality and the
Intensity of Sensible Appearances (Brentano, 1907/1979, Chapter 1, pp. 66-89); or at what should be
framed as a geometry of the subjective space-time continuum, presented in the Lectures on Space, Time
and the Continuum (see the contributions in Albertazzi, 2002a) to be aware of what could be the

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foundations of a science of subjective experiencing or, in strictly Brentano’s terms, a science of psychic
phenomena. These pioneering studies are at the roots of a theory of consciousness as a whole.

5. Perceptual grouping

5.1. Wholes and parts

The theory of wholes and parts is a cornerstone of Gestalt psychology (Brentano,1982). However, closer
inspection of the subject, shows how complex the question may be, how many different aspects of our
awareness it may concern, and at the same time the still enormous potential that it has for the study of
perceptual organization and of awareness in current science. Gestalt mereology, in fact, concerns different
aspects of perceiving, and intrinsically correlated topics like the continuity, variance and isomorphism of
the inner relations of the parts of a perceptual whole, this being a process of a very brief duration.

Mostly unknown in psychological studies, however, is that it was Twardowsky’s book (1894/1977) on the
object (i.e. phenomenon, or appearance) and content of a presentation, and his distinction among the
different types of parts in a whole, which prompted several striking developments in mereology among the
Brentanians. It was the starting point for Husserl’s mereology (1901-2/1970, Third Logical Investigation),
Stumpf’s analyses of the process of fusion (Verschmelzung) between the parts of an acustic whole (Stumpf,
1883), Meinong’s works on relations (Meinong, 1877, 1882) and on higher order mental objects like Gestalt
wholes (Meinong, 1899). Fusion is today studied in light of the concept of ‘unitization’ (Goldstone, 1998;
Czerwinky, Shriffin and Lightfoot, 1992; Welham and Wills, 2011), but is generally seen as the product of
perceptual learning.

All the above-mentioned developments were painstaking analyses that distinguished the many ways in
which something is part of a whole, and how a whole is made up of parts, as well as the hierarchy of acts,
objects, and parts of contents in a presentation. Most notably, Stumpf’s analysis of tonal fusion was based
on similarity of sounds, in contrast with Helmholtz’s neurophysiological explanation, which was framed
within a quantitative summative theory (Zanarini, 2001). Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler, all Stumpf’s
pupils, inherited also his concept of the colour of a musical interval and the Gestalt concept of vocality. The
concept of fusion was then taken up by Husserl (1891/2003, § 29) when he considered mental aggregates
and manifolds. Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1900-1/1970), in fact, are dedicated to Carl Stumpf.

Over the years, the analyses concentrated mainly on the nature of the already-organized percept and its
laws of organization in the so-called Berlin style (Koffka, 1935; Metzger, 1934, 1936/2006, 19411963),
giving rise to what today is generally conceived as the Gestalt approach to perception. Less developed has
been the analysis of the process itself, in the so-called ‘Graz style’, i.e. how the percept unfolds from within,
in presentation. Wertheimer himself, however, in clarifying the role and the goal of Gestalt theory, wrote:

There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where
the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt
theory to determine the nature of such wholes (Wertheimer, 1925/1938a, p. 2).

The nature of this type of whole is explained as follows:

Empirical enquiry discloses not a construction of primary pieces, but gradations of givenness (Gegebenheit)
‘in broad strokes’ (relative to more inclusive whole properties), and varying articulation. The upper limit is
complete internal organization of the entire given; the lower limit is that of additive adjacency between two
or more relatively independent wholes. To sever ‘a part’ from the organized whole in which it occurs –
whether it itself be a subsidiary whole or an ‘element’ – is a very real process usually involving alterations in
that ‘part’. Modifications of a part frequently involves changes elsewhere in the whole itself. Nor is the
nature of these alterations arbitrary, for they too are determined by whole conditions and the events

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initiated by their occurrence run a course defined by the laws of functional dependence in wholes. The role
played here by the parts is one of ‘parts’ genuinely ‘participating’ – not extraneous, independent and-units”
(Wertheimer, 1922/1938b, p. 14).

Emphasising that the concept of Gestalt had nothing to do with “sums of aggregated contents erected
subjectively upon primary given pieces”, or “qualities as piecemeal elements”, or “something formal added
to already given material”, expressed by kindred concepts - Wertheimer defined these types of wholes as
“wholes and whole processes” possessed of specific inner intrinsic laws (Wertheimer, 2002b, p. 14;
Albertazzi, 2006b), whose ‘pieces’ almost always appear as non-detachable ‘parts’ in the whole process:
that is, they are not detachable from them. Finally, he stated:

The processes of whole-phenomena are not blind, arbitrary, and devoid of meaning … To comprehend an
inner coherence is meaningful; it is meaningful to sense an inner necessity (Wertheimer, 1925/2002b,
p. 16).

In short, according to Wertheimer, Gestalt wholes are made up of non-independent parts; they are
presented as phenomenal appearances with different degrees of reality; and they are intrinsically
meaningful, which signifies that they do not have to refer to transcendent entities for their truth validity
and consistency. From where do these statements derive? And, can we say that over the years
Wertheimer’s theory, with all its richness, has received adequate explanation?

One may distinguish between two main approaches in the analysis of whole and parts: a line of inquiry that
can be broadly ascribed to Stumpf, Husserl, Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler, and a line of inquiry broadly
ascribable to Ehrenfels, Meinong, and Benussi, although matters are not so clear-cut. Kenkel (1913),
Lindemann (1922), Hartmann (1932), and Kopferman (1930), for example, worked on the dynamic aspects
of the apprehension of Gestalten; while the positions taken up by Meinong, Benussi, Höfler, Witasek and
Ameseder, exhibit features in common with what was the main concern of the Leipzig school of
Ganzheitspsychologie (Sander, 1930; Klages, 1933; Krueger, 1953; Wellek, 1954; Ehrenstein, 1965). In fact,
there is a time of the development phenomena (what the Leipzigers called ‘actual genesis’) which inheres
in the onset of a form at a certain temporal point of consciousness. From this point of view, the individual
Gestalten are sub-wholes of a larger whole, that is, the entire content of consciousness (see also Husserl’s
theory of double intentionality in Husserl, 1966a/1991).

Briefly, the Berliners focused mainly on appearances and their laws of organization in perceptual fields and
their physiological correlates, while the Grazers were mainly interested in the construction and the
deployment of appearances in the subjective duration. Both approaches essentially concerned with the
question of relations of a specific kind: the figural qualities, and how they appear in perceiving. The
solutions, however, were different.

5.2. Gestalt qualities

The term ‘Gestalt qualities’ was initially proposed by von Ehrenfels (1890), Meinong (1891), Cornelius
(1897) and Mach (1886). Specifically, Mach observed that we are able to have an immediate sensation of
spatial figures, and of tonal ones like melodies. As well known, the same melody can be played in F, G, and
so forth, as long as all the relationships of tempo and the tonal intervals among the notes are respected:
even if we replace all the melody's sounds, the melody is still recognizable as the same melody.
Ehrenfels (1890/1988) wrote:

By Gestalt quality we intend a positive content of presentation bound up in consciousness with the
presence of complexes of mutually separable (i.e independently presentable) elements. That complex of
presentations which is necessary for the existence of a given Gestalt quality we call the foundation
[Grundlage+ of that quality” (Ehrenfels, 1890/1988, § 4).

9
The most interesting and generally unknown development of the Brentano mereological theory, however,
was due to Benussi (Benussi, 1904, 1922/23). What Benussi experimentally discovered is that there are
phases (prototypical durations) in a presentation which allow dislocations and qualitative reorganization of
the stimuli. He identified very short durations (from 90 to 250 msec ca); short durations (from 250 to 600
msec ca); indeterminate durations (from 600 to 1100 msec ca); long durations (from 1100 to 2000 msec
ca); and extremely long durations ( 2000 msec).

These findings addressed the subjective temporal deployment of a presentation and how meaning is
perceptually construed in the duration. The stereokinetic phenomenon of the rotating ellipse, later
developed by Musatti, shows the presence of ‘proto-percepts’ that processually unfold from the first
configuration in movement until the final perceptual stable outcome (Musatti, 1924, 1955, pp. 21-22).

To be noted is that Kanizsa, who first declared his disagreement with the idea of phases in perceiving
(Kanizsa, 1952), later came to reconsider Benussi’s viewpoint (Vicario, 1994). While Kanizsa distinguished
between seeing and thinking, considering them two different processes, at least euristically, he never
directly addressed the question as to whether there were continuity of discontinuity between the two
processes (Albertazzi, 2003). Benussi’s theory shows the temporal transition from perceptive to mental
presence (i.e. from seeing to thinking) in presentation, as the inner deployment of the part/whole structure
of a presentation.

Benussi’s experiments showed that seeing has a temporal extensiveness comprising phases in which an
ordering between the parts occurs; that the parts in perceptive presence are ‘spatialized’ in a simultaneous
whole given in mental presence; that processes and correlates develop together; and that the duration has
a progressive focus and fringes of anticipation and retentions of the parts, as Husserl had already discussed
from a phenomenological viewpoint. Benussi also showed that the dependence relation among parts is a
past-present relation, not a before-after one, occurring in the simultaneity of the time of presentness; that
parts may be reorganized qualitatively (as in cases of temporal and visual displacement); and that at the
level of the microstructure of the act of presentation, the parts can give rise to different outputs as second-
order correlates (which explain the phenomena of plurivocity). After the initial ‘critical phase’ of the
presentation regarding the actual duration of a presentation, we take note of the spatial arrangement, the
symmetry, the distance of its content-elements, and take up assertive attitudes or attitudes of persuasion,
fantasy, of fiction, etc. (again a Brentanian legacy, Brentano PES II). These are all intellective states,
concerning the types of the act.

6. Berlin vs Graz

6.1.The Benussi-Koffka dispute

A turning point in Brentano’s theory and in the development of descriptive psychology can be exemplified
by the controversy between Benussi and Koffka (Koffka-Kenkel, 1913; Benussi, 1912b; Albertazzi, 2001a).

In 1912 two articles were published on the perception of stroboscopic movement (Benussi, 1912a;
Wertheimer, 1912/2012). The articles raised the issue of the theoretical status of so-called illusions.

Benussi designed a vertical, tachistoscopic variant of the Müller-Lyer illusion, and he found that the
subjects saw the vertical line, which was of constant length, as extending or shortening according to the
position and orientation of the collateral segments. The subjects perceived the apparent movement of the
median point of the line in relation to the change of form of the figure as a whole, and in the temporal
deployment of the various phases of the phenomenon. Benussi highlighted the presence of two different
types of movements: the first resulting from the succession of the stroboscopic sequence of stimuli (s-
Movement); the second resulting from the apprehension and subjective production of the whole
appearance (S-Movement).

10
This explanation was bitterly contested by the Berliners. In 1913 Koffka and Kenkel published a joint article
in which they conducted detailed analysis of the results from tachistoscopic presentations of the Müller-
Lyer illusion, results which closely resembled Benussi's. Kenkel found that with stroboscopic exposure
objectively equal lines in these figures were seen to expand and contract (-movement) in exactly the
same manner as two similarly exposed objectively unequal lines (-movement). From Koffka and Kenkel's
point of view, the two moments were functionally and descriptively the same. While acknowledging
Benussi's temporal priority on this type of experiment, Koffka nevertheless criticized his explanation.
Benussi maintained that the cause of apparent movement was the diversity of position assumed by the
figure in the individual distinct phases of the process. Koffka instead believed that the vision of movement
was a unitary phenomenon, not an aggregate of parts. Hence, he maintained, even if the phases presented
are physically distinct, they are seen as a unitary, clearly structured complex (Koffka and Kenkel, 1913,
445ff). From his viewpoint, it was not possible to derive wholes from their parts, which he evidently
considered to be sensory contents, i.e. individual pieces.

At bottom, therefore, this was a theoretical dispute concerning: (i) the existence or otherwise of non-
detachable components of the Gestalt appearance; (ii) their nature, i.e. whether they were sensory
contents; (iii) their relation with the stimuli; (iv) their mutual inner relations; and (v) more generally
whether or not it was possible to analyse the deployments of the contents in the presentation.

While insisting that the presence of internal phases did not imply the separateness of the parts of the
phenomenon, Benussi (1914a) in his turn criticized the physiological conception at the basis of the
Berliners' theory, in that it did not account for the eminently psychological structure of the event. What the
Berliners lacked was a thorough theory of presentation in which stimuli play only the role of triggers, in the
absence of any constancy principle: presentations are not psychophysical structures representing stimuli, as
Brentano maintained.

The controversy continued in Koffka (1915/1938), who used the dispute with Benussi as an occasion to give
systematic treatment to the Berlin school's views on the foundations of the theory of perception, and
which he set in sharp contrast to those of the Graz school.

The value of the controversy consists in its clearly depiction of the different positions taken by the two
Gestalt schools. From our present point of view, the controversy was grounded in the question as to
whether it is possible to test, and consequently explain, the subjective deployment of a phenomenon at the
presentational level, without necessarily having to resort to psychophysical or brain correlates for their
explanation.

6.2. Descriptive and genetic inquiries

The Meinongians went further into the object and methodology of a descriptive psychology, by addressing
the processual aspects of the psychic phenomena - the laws of becoming - in Brentanian terms (Brentano,
1995b, p. 6), although not from a physiological viewpoint. In so doing, they further distinguished their
research and interests from the Berlin approach.

Meinong’s work on assumptions was also the maximum point of development of Brentano’s descriptive
psychology. Brentano, in fact, on distinguishing the task of psychology from that of physiology, wrote:

My school draws a distinction between psychognosis and genetic psychology … The former contains all the
psychic elements which when combined produce the totality of psychic phenomena, in the same way as
the letters of the alphabet produce the totality of words … The latter teaches us the laws which determine
how psychic phenomena appear and vanish. Given thatbecause psychic functions indubitably depend on
the workings of the nervous systemthese are in large part physiological conditions, we see that in this

11
case psychological research must combine with physiological research (Brentano, 1895, p. 35. Emphasis
added).

And he subsequently observed that “the perfection of psychognosis *descriptive psychology+ will be one of the
most essential steps in preparation for a genuinely scientific genetic psychology (Brentano, 1995b, p. 11).

In 1910, in the preface to the second edition of On Assumptions, Meinong wrote:

the theory of assumptions can pride itself on the success of having been chosen as one of the mainstays for
a new theoretical edifice, namely that of genetic psychology - the latest, most arduous, and most promising
of the special psychological disciplines (Meinong, 1910/1983, p. 7. Emphasis added).

The ‘genetic’ approach to which Meinong refers means neither a reduction to physiology; nor research
conducted in terms of developmental psychology, to use modern terms. The genesis, i.e. the study of the
deployment of a presentation, pioneered by Benussi, to distinguish specific prototypical micro-durations
responsible for the final output, was conducted without resorting to underlying neurophysiological
processes, but merely by analysing the characteristic of the subjective integrations occurring in the space-
time of awareness. Benussi admitted, however, that at his time the tools available were not such to enable
him to slow down the process in the proper way. Recent research on attention processes, by Rensink (2000,
2002) for example, have confirmed almost all the five prototypical durations evidenced by Benussi in his
experiments (Benussi, 1907, 1913, 1914b; see also Katz, 1906; Calabresi, 1930; Albertazzi, 1999, 2011).
These durations constitute the present and its fringes, i.e. they are the basic components of presentations.

The theory of production, instead, was understood by the Berliners in terms of a mosaic theory, as a
variation of elementism, grounded on the constancy hypothesis of what, in their view, still appeared to be
‘sensations’(Köhler, 1913; Koffka, 1915/1938), interpreting it in inferentialistic terms.

As Kanizsa points out, in fact, in the inferentialist viewpoint:

One postulates the existence of a first ‘lower-level’ psychic phase, that of the 'elementary sensations’.
Acting upon this are then ‘higher-level’ psychic faculties or instances, namely the memory, the judgement,
and the reasoning, which, through largely unconscious inferences founded upon specific and generic past
experiences, associate or integrate the elementary sensations, thus generating those broader perceptual
units which are the objects of our experience, with their forms and their meanings (Kanizsa, 1980, p. 38).

However, there is almost nothing in the Graz theory that can be traced back to a theory of atomic sense
data, to a Wundtian apperception or to unconscious Helmholtian inferences: what the Grazers called the
‘founding elements’ on which higher-order objects (Gestalten) are subjectively grounded, are non-
detachable parts of the whole and do not depend on probabilistic inferences from past experience. Being
partial contents of presentations, they are already phenomenic materials, i.e. part-processes on their own,
influenced, modified and reorganized in the Gestalt whole deploying in the time of presentness: for
example, they are presented as ‘being past’, which is a qualitative determination. Moreover, although they
are distinguishable parts, they are not separable. Also set out within this framework are the classic
Brentanian notions concerning temporal perception (specifically the difference between perceived
succession and the perception of succession), and the location in subjective space, place and time of
appearances.

7. Gestalt phenomenology and beyond

I have briefly sketched the origin of, and the main concepts which gave rise to experimental
phenomenology, and mainly from the Gestalt point of view in the version of both the Berlin and Graz
schools. The main distinction between the two schools consists in the greater weight given to the
12
relationships between phenomenology and physiology by the Berliners, and to phenomenology and the
structure of awareness by the Grazers. Simplifying to the extreme, the Meinongians were somewhat less
‘positivistic’ than their colleagues, notwithstanding Koffa’s claims in his Principles (Koffka, 1935, pp. 684-5).
At the basis of the controversy lay a different idea of the theory of wholes and parts.

In the 1970s the ideas of Brentano and his school on the theory of wholes and parts were recast mainly in
the analytic field, through the so-called mereological essentialism formulated by Chisholm (1973, 1975).
However, if mereological essentialism may prove to be a valid instrument in analysis of wholes which are
aggregates (Grelling, Oppenheim 1937/8), it is unable to deal with the dynamic unity of Gestalt wholes, the
basics of Brentano’s psychology. Consequently, this recasting had no impact on the development of the
theory of intentional reference as such.

As to the relationship between phenomenology and neurophysiology, envisaged by the Berliners, the
phenomenological analysis of appearances has furnished inputs to the neurosciences. As Brentano
maintained, a genetic psychologist without descriptive knowledge is like a physiologist without anatomical
knowledge (Brentano, 1995b, 10). Not only the phenomena but also the principles of Gestalt have been
subject to neurophysiological investigation. Very rarely, however, have the results of neurophysiological
analyses furnished insights for phenomenological analysis. Moreover, our current knowledge about
neuronal mechanisms does not yet enable us to establish with precision the relations between the two
levels: the qualitative level of perception of visual appearances and that of the underlying neuronal activity.

The Brentano programme in its entirety, instead, is still awaiting completion and most of all a
phenomenological-experimental explanation. Still unaccomplished, for example, is completion of the
project regarding the foundations of a general theory of subjective space-time and its filling-in (Albertazzi,
1999, 2002a, 2002b), i.e. a general theory of appearances in awareness.

What experimental phenomenology incontestably entails is the need to devise “sharply and precisely”
(Brentano, 1995b, p. 5) a psychological science per se, which goes beyond current proposals. Such a science
must develop new methods for the investigation, measurement and mathematical modelling of qualitative
perceiving. One of the starting points, for example, would be conceiving a geometry of virtual or ‘imaginary’
spaces closer to awareness of visual phenomena - which is what Brentano laid out almost two centuries
ago.

13
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