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"Alexius von Meinong , fitly described by [the] distinguished English philosopher [Ryle] as the ‘infinitely courageous and pertinacious Meinong’, was born
at Lemberg in Poland in 1853. We have, for purposes of information, given him the ennobling ‘von’ of which he never made use, shrinking, as he says, from ‘privileges that lack an inner foundation’. He belonged, however, to a noble German family that had moved over to Austria: it was his father’s professional duties that took them all to Poland. Meinong’s education was in Vienna, first at the Academic Gymnasium, and, after 1870, at the University ; in his doctorate examination in 1874 his Hauptrigorosum was History, but Philosophy was his Nebenrigorosum. For the purposes of the latter, he had studied Kant entirely without the help of commentaries: it would be interesting to be able to hear once again his no doubt audacious, autodidactic sallies. After some further dalliance with history, and some profitable attendance at Carl Menger’s lectures on economics, which were to influence his value-theory, Meinong gave himself unreservedly to philosophy. He devoted himself to the study of Hume under the supervision of Brentano, whom he had first encountered in connexion with his Nebenrigorosum. While much less intimate with Brentano than others were, partly, he says, owing to a deep desire for independence, he was able to write in his last years of the radiant memory-image of his master, in which a ‘spiritualized beauty’ was ‘made golden by the sunshine of his own and my youth’. Of his two profound and sympathetic Hume-Studien, done under Brentano’s supervision, the first (1877), on Hume’s theory of abstraction, secured his ‘habitation’, the second, on Hume’s theory of relations, appeared in 1882: both were published in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at Vienna, of which Meinong was later to be a Fellow. That Meinong should have served his first serious philosophical apprenticeship with Hume, places him in the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Germanic philosophical tradition, and it was in this tradition that he continued mainly to work. It was in the Anglo-Saxon world, likewise, that his philosophical reputation and influence were at their greatest.
Meinong spent four years (1878-82) as a Privatdozent at Vienna, and then moved on to Graz, where he remained for the rest of his life, first as Professor Extraordinarius (1882-9), and then as Ordinary Professor (1889-1920). Graz is one of those rare places, in the furthermost corner of one world and on the edge of another, where everything seems set in fixed perfection: its river, its plain, its town, its castle, its not too high and not too distant mountains with their many exquisite vantage-points, are all wholly beautiful, whether in sunshine or in snow. The inhabitants share in the grace of the landscape and the architecture, and like these they stay, and do not alter: if they go away for a time, they hardly ever fail to come back. It is agreeable to think of Meinong spending all those years in this delightful place (from which even a call to Vienna did not tempt him), while the theory of objects slowly burgeoned and took shape. Apart from the foundation of an Institute of Experimental Psychology in 1894, the first in Austria, there seem to have been few events during Meinong’s professorship. His history was the history of his publications and of the academic activities of his small school of pupils.
Among these publications the most notable were the Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungenzur Werttheorie (1894), which almost succeeds in formalizing ordinary morality ; the composite school-publication Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie (1904), to which Meinong contributed an article ‘Uber Gegenstandstheorie’ ; the valuable but now little accessible epistemological essay Über die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens (1906) ; the programmatic Uber die Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie im System der Wissenschaften (1906-7) ; the brilliant Über Annahmen (1910), with its manifold contributions to psychology, value-theory, etc., and its important introduction of ‘objectives’, the Sätze-an-sich of Bolzano, as peculiar entia rationis ; the long treatise Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (1915), with its important doctrine of ‘incomplete objects’ ; the treatise Über emotionale Presentation (1917), a uniquely original essay in the epistemology of valuation ; and the somewhat unpersuasive Zum Erweise des allgemeinen Kausalgesetzes (1918). Meinong wrote many
important articles which were collected by his pupils in
the two volumes of Gesammelte Abhandlungen, one vol¬
ume devoted to psychology, the other to epistemology
and object-theory: a third, to be devoted to value-theory,
was never issued. Several important articles on value-
theory, as well as the unreprinted Psychologisch-ethische
Untersuchungen, are therefore practically inaccessible. The
Grundlegung zur allgemeinen IVerttheorie was published
posthumously in 1923, and a work entitled Ethische Bau-
steine is still in manuscript in the Library at Graz.
Among Meinong’s pupils probably the best known are
Ernst Mally, his successor in the Chair at Graz, who died
during the second World War; Stefan Witasek (d. 1915),
author of a Meinongian Grundlinien der Psychologie and of
a little known but valuable Asthetik\ and V. Benussi, the
psychologist. Christian von Ehrenfels, himself the author
of an influential System der IVerttheorie (1897-
, and a remarkable metaphysical Kosmogonie, was a pupil of
Meinong’s at Vienna, and so were Alois Hofler and A. Oelzelt-Newin. Other Meinong-pupils, such as R.
Ameseder, E. Martinak, and R. Saxinger, have more or
less been forgotten.
The school of Graz never achieved the eminence and
influence of the phenomenological school of Husserl,
though both had their roots in Brentano, and taught simi¬
lar doctrines at many points. Husserl’s great influence
began, however, when he forsook the brilliant dryness and
systematic carefulness of his early Philosophie der Arith-
metik and Logische Untersuchungen, for the exciting pro¬
grammatic vistas and systematic transcendentalism of his
later phenomenology. After about 1907 he may be said
to have become absorbed in the main stream of German
philosophical thought, accepting its unqualified idealism,
and its somewhat dogmatic way of exploring the a -priori,
and it is to this change, as much as to his philosophical
genius, that his immense later influence is due. Meinong,
however, never became part of that stream, and his latest
writings show the same spirit of logical dryness and piece¬
meal caution as his first. He tells us that ‘the continuously
increasing preoccupation with Kant has made it into a
tradition to give new thoughts, where possible and even
beyond this, the form of Kantian conceptions. If one con¬
siders, however, how uncertain the interpretation of Kant
has become, it seems to me that one can become more
than doubtful whether this is a good tradition. I have thus
not thought, in any case, that the method of justifying
positions by way of Kant was indispensable, and have even
thought it detrimental, where it made one’s treatment cir¬
cuitous. I have therefore avoided it.’1 It is not remarkable,
therefore, that Meinong and his school came to be regarded
as travellers on a philosophical by-path or even dead-end,
and that they were described as ‘scholastic’ or merely
as ‘queer’ (fremdartig). ‘Scientific research’, Meinong re¬
marks, ‘is generally a lonely business, and one that produces loneliness.’ It is plain (see Uber Moglichkeit und Wahr-
scheinlichkeit, pp. ix and x) that Meinong rejoiced in the
coincidence between many of his independently formed
views and those of Husserl, and would have welcomed
fruitful co-operation from that quarter had not Husserl,
with his jealously proprietary attitude towards certain con¬
ceptions, made this impossible.1
Meinong stoically encountered an expected death to¬
wards the end of 1920. The character-profile that emerges
from his writings and from report is the somewhat old-
fashioned one of a crusted, formal exterior concealing deep
loyalties and attachments to persons and things, many
extremely pure and lofty motives and sentiments, great
generosity, complete honesty, vast patience and courage,
and a somewhat oversensitive, readily injured pride.
Philosophically, as well as personally, there is no one
Meinong so much resembles as G. E. Moore. They share
the same independence of tradition, the same unwillingness
to be browbeaten by the ‘deep’ utterances of philosophers—
Meinong gently sets aside Schopenhauer’s explanation
of morality by an underlying identity of the ‘will’, much
as Moore sets aside Bradley’s assertion of time’s un¬
reality—the same reluctance to make declarations too
firm or too wide, the same cautious quasi-empiricism
of approach even in the realm of the a -priori, the same
sensitiveness and deference to what people actually believe
and commonly say, coupled with the same willingness to
put forward highly daring analyses of common notions,
the same unrepentant, almost obsessive realism, and lastly,
though many would question it, the same common sense,
in the sense of an unwillingness to abandon what we
plainly understand and know, and what forms the firm
foundation of our discourse, at the behest of theories much
less lucid and indubitable. With this go the typical Mooreian
faults of elementarism and atomism, and of a piecemeal progress so myopic as often to miss the large connexions
essential to philosophical insight.
A few quotations may here be given as typical. ‘It is
certainly desirable to find an exact conceptual formulation
for the mutual relevance, evident in practice, of all that is
traditionally done under the name of philosophy. So far
I have not been successful in doing so.’1 ‘The theory of
objects is no doubt an a priori science, possibly the a priori
science, and subsistence and extraexistence (Auflersein) must
be garnered from the nature of these objects, therefore
a priori. None the less this knowledge of being goes back
to a direct apprehension of these objects as a sort of quasi¬
experience, so that even the theory of objects permits us
to tread the path from below upwards, like the empirical
sciences.’2 ‘Like all apprehension knowledge is also, to a
quite particular degree, an entirely peculiar performance,
not reducible to anything more elementary. But whoever
believes in knowledge will also, wherever he recognizes it,
and provided he is consistent, not be able to doubt this
performance. It is essential to this performance that it
relates to something that in no manner coincides with the
knowing experience . . . but always transcends the latter.’3
Meinong’s most famous and characteristic doctrine,
that of an unbounded realm of objects which are daseinsfrei,
indifferent to the antithesis between being and non-being,
and his frank espousal of the anti-Parmenidean position
that what is not is as much the object of significant refer¬
ence and valid examination as what is, might seem to prove
Meinong’s extravagance and unsoundness, his wide ex¬
ceeding of the bounds of common sense. The doctrine,
however, is eminently arguable at a common-sense level,
and was once even justified by Russell on the basis of
‘perception’.4 Certainly it initially approved itself both to Russell and Moore, and might have continued to deserve
their approbation, had they sufficiently considered the
qualifications with which Meinong held it. It is strange,
further, that Meinong’s object-theory should have been
regarded by some as a bewildering and tangled ‘jungle’d
it resembles rather an old formal garden containing some
beautiful and difficult mazes.
Meinong’s thought had a relatively poor and rapidly
dwindling reception in the German philosophical world.
In the obliteration of practically all philosophical land¬
marks by the blanketing snowfall of Heidegger—one of
those great natural cataclysms to which even philosophy
seems liable, and to which recent British philosophy offers
analogies—the work of Meinong was plunged into neglect.
It was in the Anglo-Saxon world that his thought, that
certainly belongs to the tradition of Ockham and Hume,
achieved both a temporary influence, and a lasting, if equi¬
vocal, respect. Meinong’s teachings certainly did not pene¬
trate to the rank and file of British philosophers, but they
impinged on the most eminent and understanding, and
through them affected the rest.
Russell was early aware of Meinong’s great merits,
and devoted the generous, brilliant ‘Meinong’s Theory of
Complexes and Assumptions’ (Mind, 1904) to their ex¬
position and partial defence. It is well known that Russell’s
Theory of Descriptions, that famous and historically im¬
portant piece of logical analysis, was, in part at least, an
attempt to provide an alternative to Meinong’s doctrine of
Aufersein, of extraexistential objectivity. Russell also dis¬
cussed Meinong’s theory of content in the first chapter of
The Analysis of Mind. Unfortunately Russell was far too
concerned to advance from Meinong to his own notions
and conclusions to bother to get Meinong quite straight,
and the accounts he put into circulation of Meinongian
contents as consisting of sense-data and images, and of Meinong’s non-existent objects as ‘subsistent’, are simpli¬
fying travesties of Meinong’s complex opinions.
In Moore, Meinong met with a far more careful and
receptive student: the doctrine of content is correctly ex¬
pounded and valuably criticized in ‘The Subject-Matter
of Psychology’ (Aristotelian Society Proceedings, 1909-10,
pp. 36-62), and Moore’s remarkable Morley College Lec¬
tures, delivered in 1910-11 and published as Some Main
Problems of Philosophy in 1953, deal mainly withMeinong-
ian problems in an almost wholly Meinongian manner. We
may note that Mooreian analysis found itself unable to
deal satisfactorily with the problem of meaningful reference
to the false or non-existent, the precise problem with which
Meinong struggled so valiantly, and that Moore never
thought that the Theory of Descriptions had solved all the
philosophical difficulties connected with this sort of refer¬
ence, nor imagined that Russell had worsted Meinong in
the manner attested by the prevailing legend.
Through Russell and Moore the echoes of Meinong
were carried to Wittgenstein: no one who considers the
stress on facts and being-the-case in the Tractatus Logico-
'philosophicus, or the frequent references to the puzzling
character of thought about the non-existent in The Blue
Book and elsewhere, can doubt that Meinong is here exer¬
cising a remote influence. Meinong also had a considerable
influence on C. D. Broad, who reviewed the second edition
of Vber Annahmen in Mind, 1913, and on G. Dawes-Hicks,
who contributed a valuable article entitled ‘The Philo¬
sophical Researches of Meinong’ to Mind, 1922. In the
United States the direct influence of Meinong extended
more widely. The writers of the co-operative volume
called The New Realism (1912) explicitly associated them¬
selves with Russell, Moore, and Meinong as their ‘big
brothers overseas’. Edwin Holt’s theory—stated in The
Concept of Consciousness (1913)—of a world of ‘neutral en¬
tities’, variously divided up by ‘conscious cross-sections’, represents a greatly simplified, behaviouristically modified
version of Meinong’s doctrine of Auflersein, and the same
applies to Santayana’s beautifully phrased, but less exactly
thought-out, doctrine of a ‘Realm of Essence’. It is not
widely known that T. S. Eliot wrote a doctoral dissertation
on Meinong which still reposes in the Library at Harvard:
it seems a pity that no reference to Auflersein has strayed
into The Waste Land.
There was, however, a second season of Meinongian
influence in Britain, the time at the end of the twenties and
the beginning of the thirties when the Cam overflowed
into the Isis, and Oxford for the first time took serious
cognizance of the thought of Russell, Moore, and Witt¬
genstein, and of those who had influenced them. Among
these last Meinong held an honourable place. The author
of the present book belongs to this period, and so do his
contemporaries or near-contemporaries William Kneale
and Gilbert Ryle. Ryle’s estimate of Meinong at that time
may be gauged from the following quotation: ‘Meinong
was the sort of reformer who makes revolutions inevitable,
yet himself stops short of seeing that they are even possible.
He was a philosophical Kerensky. Both in epistemology
and in logic, with terrifying assiduity and remarkable rigor¬
ousness of reasoning, he carried to their extreme con¬
clusions the implications of presuppositions which no one
had yet questioned, and which he himself did not question.
But of these conclusions he never said what has to be said,
“By God, this is impossible.” He was perhaps the supreme
entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy, and yet, I
suppose, the main service which he really rendered philo¬
sophy was to force logicians to see that “wherever possible
logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred en¬
tities” . . . Meinong is in my opinion important for . . .
three main reasons. First, he was very largely responsible
for the de-psychologizing of logic. Next he raised, and
raised together, the logical and metaphysical questions of the nature and status of relations, numbers, facts, univer¬
sal, negation, possibility, probability, necessity. He also
forced philosophers to investigate the whole problem of
what is meant by such predicates as “exists”, “subsists”,
“is an object”, &c. But thirdly, and chiefly, he accepted
the traditional doctrine of Terms in logic, and by genera¬
lizing the issues and remorselessly drawing the conclusions
from the premisses, he showed, though he did not see, that
the whole structure was rotten. If the orthodox theories
of terms were true almost the whole fantastic hierarchy of
Meinong’s non-actual entities would have to be accepted.’1
It will be seen from the above that the role of Meinong
in modern British philosophy has been largely that of a
philosophical Aunt Sally, who is honoured in being struck
down. Except to a very few like Ryle, he was known only
by hearsay. Possibly his fate is happier than that of Moore
who, imperfectly read, has been treated as the mere ‘fore¬
runner’ of another philosopher, and whose most character¬
istic and valuable doctrines have been interpreted in a
manner quite at variance with their obvious sense. Recently
there have been signs that Meinong may come to be more
understandingly treated: the formal discipline of semantics
has found it profitable to revive something like his object-
theory, and a philosopher like Chisholm has translated
some of his work. Meinong’s importance as a thinker
ought, in our day, to be no longer a matter for debate or
doubt." (pp.V-XV)
-John Niemeyer Findlay, Meinong's Theory of Objects and Values, Oxford University Press, 1963, 353 pages.
