Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology

Gestalt psychology in Gennan

GENERAL EDITORS: MITCHELL G. ASH AND WILLIAM R. WOODWARD
culture, 1890-1967
This new series provides a publishing forum for outstanding scholarly work in the history
of psychology. The creation of the series reflects a growing concentration in this area by Holism and the quest for objectivity
historians and philosophers of science, intellectual and cultural historians, and psycholo-
gists interested in historical and theoretical issues.
The series is open both to manuscripts dealing with the history of psychological theory
and research and to work focusing on the varied social, cultural, and institutional contexts
Mitchell G. Ash
and impacts of psychology. Writing about psychological thinking and research of any
University of Iowa
period will be considered. In addition to innovative treatments of traditional topics in the
field, the editors particularly welcome work that breaks new ground by offering historical
considerations of issues such as the linkages of academic and applied psychology with
other fields, for example, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis; interna-
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tional, intercultural, or gender-specific differences in psychological theory and research; or
the history of psychological research practices. The series will include both single-authored
monographs and occasional coherently defined, rigorously edited essay collections.

Also in the series

Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research

KURT DANZIGER
Metaphors in the history ofpsychology
edited by DAVID E. LEARY
Crowds, psychology, and politics, 1871-1899
JAAP VAN GINNEKEN
The projessionalization of psychology in Nazi Germany
ULFRIED GEUTER

UCAMBRIDGE
V UNIVERSI'IY PRESS

5 community was still tied to philosophy both institutionally and intellectually; the
Challenging positivisn1: Revised philosophies of
n1ind and science
The struggle within Gennan academic philosophy was only part of a far broader
cuitural and ideological conflict that was not limited to one country. One contem-
porary writer spoke of an "idealistic reaction against science" in European thought
at the turn of the century. Intellectual historians have generalized this to a "revolt
against positivism."' Taken too far, such accounts can lead to easy dichotomies
between science and antiscience, or modem and antimodem positions. In philoso-
phy of mind, however, this was also a time of attempts to discover a middle path
between idealism and positivism, represented most prominently in America by
William James and John Dewey, on the Continent by Henri Bergson, Dilthey, and
Edmund Husser! 's Logical Investigations. All of these writers opposed the views
of Mach and Avenarius, described in the previous chapter. Bergson, Dilthey, and
James worried about the challenge to traditional vaiues posed by technology and
doubted that science could offer sufficient certainty to serve as a cultural compass.
And yet Bergson and James used the term "empiricism" to describe their methods,
and all three thinkers were fascinated enough by natural science to present their
alternatives as research programs.
There was no linear ordering of antipositivism to cultural conservatism, either.
Dilthey's attack on the "separation of science from life" expressed such a stand-
point. But James's and Dewey's "via media" in philosophy ultimately grounded
the political theories of social democracy and progressivism. Because they paid so
much attention to empirical psychology, David Lindenfeld describes these
thinkers' work as a "transformation of positivism"; James Kloppenberg speaks of
a more expansive version of naturalism, a "radical theory of knowledge" based on
the immediacy of lived experience, that "made possible new ways ofthinking." 2
When neovitalist Hans Driesch brought his challenge to mechanistic metaphors
from developmental biology into philosophy, he joined that chorus.
The challenges to scientistic discourse on mind came both from within and
from outside the community of experimenting psychologists. In Germany, that
68
Challenging positivism 69
struggle was in part one for position in a common epistemic space. These debate£,
like those in sensory physiology, provided both intellectual challenges and con-
ceptual resources to the founders of Gestalt theory. Because of their disciplinary
location between philosophy and natural science, they were aware of the philoso-
phers' attacks. They accepted their criticisms, and ultimately even employed
some of their terminology, but did not conclude that a natural science of mind was
therefore impossible .
.IP'Ih:H«ll§l[)jp'hnes cf mn~rnd lll!> proceM: J&ergMm amd Jame§
From a different starting point and by different arguments from those of h-1ach,
French philosopher Henri Bergson arrived at similar conclusions about the con-
ventional character of scientific practice and its incompatibility with lived experi-
ence. Bergson's major works were all translated into German between 1908 and
1912. Their publication constituted part of the revival of metaphysics propagated
there by Rudolf Eucken and Southwest German Neo-Kantians, like Wilhelm
Winde!band. 3 At the same time, Kohler and Koffica taught Bergson in their
earliest seminars. They took note of his critique of associationistic psychology
and his call for psychological categories better suited to lived experience, but
pointed to his proposed alternative as an example of what they wished to avoid.
In his "Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" (1889), Bergson argued
that experience viewed as a succession of separate, thinglike states is no less an
abstraction from lived consciousness than time as measured by the hands of a
clock. Both are fundamentally spatiaL Lived consciousness, on the other hand, is a
spatiotemporal continuum, "iike a mutual penetration, a solidarity, an intimate
organization of elements, each of which is representative of the others and neither
distinguished from nor isolated by abstracting thought." 4 Associationist psychol-
ogy clearly exemplifies the difficulties of applying "spatial" science to mind,
according to Bergson. We can describe the movement of an object in space, for
example, by postulating an infinite number of reference points, through which the
object may be said to move. But "they are not parts of the movement; they are so
many views taken to it; they are, we say, only supposed stopping points. Never is
the mobile reality in any of these points; the most we can say is that it passes
through them." 5 But instead of rejecting metaphysics, as Mach did, Bergson
proposed an intellectual division of labor. Scientists could retain their analytical
methods, while metaphysicians would strive for a "true empiric,ism" that would
seek by intuition to keep "as close to the original itself as posS'fble."6
Bergson's reduction of metaphysics to a question of method can be seen as an
important concession to positivism. Still, he had equated point-to-point analysis
with natural science in general, thus making it seem inherently incommensurable
with his dynamic, holistic model of experience. The consequences of this logic
 The social and intellectual settings
70
became clear in Bergson's most popular work, Creative Evolution ( 1907). There
he asserted that intuition was rooted in an all-encompassing life-principle called
the elan vital. Though he protested that this vital principle was only a heuristic
construct, he had clearly left his original basis in direct experience. There was no
way of experiencing the elan vital even by intuition, since it was what made
intuition possible.7
In Stumpf's lectures Kohler and Kofika also learned of William James's Princi-
ples ofPsychology ( !890). There James challenged associationis~ in terms simi-
lar to those Bergson used, condemning the conception of consciousness as a
collection or succession of constant, retrievable "ideas." In James's words, that
view sacrifices "the continuous flow of the mental stream" and substitutes for it
"an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction," for which there was no introspec-
tive support.S For him this atomism was one instance of "the psychologist's
fallacy," the confusion of thought as experienced with a properly objective psy-
chologist's view of it. James singled out the doctrines of unconscious inference
and unnoticed sensations as prize examples of where such confusions could lead.
Helmholtz, for example, attributed visual form perception to the fusion of retinal
images from the two eyes, and contended that we can discover the original
sensations by first opening and closing one eye, then the other. To James this
involved the assumption, unsupported by introspective evidence, that sensa-
tions present in monocular vision remained present but unnoticed in binocular
vision.9
The dynamic concept of consciousness as a continuously flowing stream for
which James thought there was good introspective evidence was obviously
different from Mach's "mass of sensations." Within that stream James placed an
"Object" consisting of"things" cognized intellectually, which we know "about,"
and an immediately "felt fringe" of expectation and relation which we know only
by active "acquaintance." The "fringes" he attributed to "the influence of a faint
brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but
dimly perceived," for example when we hear a thunderclap and immediately have
the vague expectation that something- a lightning bolt - is about to happen. 1o
James, like Bergson, resorted to nonintellectual factors to account for the unity of
the mental stream. The two writers also agreed that we grasp only part of the flow
at any given moment, and that practical interests act as a principle of selection. In
emphasizing the role of attention directed by interest directed in tum by need or
utility, James accepted the Darwinian metaphor of selection as the governing
principle of order in experience. Darwin called natural selection the mechanism of
evolution, but James opposed machine metaphors and substituted aesthetic im-
ages like that of the stream, or that of mind as an artist, working on the "mere
matter" of sensation to produce objects, "as a sculptor works on his block of
stone." 1 1
Despite his criticism of associationism and his use of dynamic and aesthetic
Challenging positivism 71
rather than mechanical metaphors for consciousness, James never relinquished
the positivist hope of causally relating all psychical phenomena to organic events.
His "empirical parallelism" was similar in logical structure to the doctrines of
Mach and Avenarius, but not in its content. Mach demanded for two similar
figures corresponding nerve-processes with "identical components," a point-to-
point isomorphism. For James, perception and thinking are integral processes.
The "organic conditions" corresponding to them must therefore share this charac-
teristic. Research on the loss and recovery of function in brain-damaged patients
showed "that the whole brain must act together if certain thoughts are to occur.
The consciousness, which is itself an integral thing not made of parts, 'corre-
sponds' to the entire activity of the brain, whatever that may be, at the moment." 12
In an 1884 paper, he proposed a more specific analogy from electrodynamics to
describe brain action that Wolfgang Kohler later developed in detail (see Chapter
ll):
The whole drift of recent brain-inquiry sets towards the notion that the brain
always acts as a whole, and that no part of it can be discharging without
altering the tensions of all the other parts. The best symbol for it seems to be
an electric conductor, the amount of whose charge at any one point is a
function of the total charge elsewhere.13
This- by 1890 quite widespread- theoretical commitment to locating the causes
of mental events in the brain rather than the mind underlies many of the concep-
tions in James's psychology, not least that of"the stream of thought." Even so, he
found it difficult to reconcile his empirical parallelism with his ethically derived
allegiance to the doctrine of free will, which presupposed an active mind. In 1890
he declared that such issues could only be decided on philosophical, not empirical
grounds. Yet even after he took the step to metaphysics more than a decade later,
problems remained. James's treatment of so-called mental compounds reveals the
limits of his attempt to reform empiricism. The awareness of the alphabet, for
example, is for James indeed "something new" compared with twenty-six
awarenesses, each of a separate letter. But he did not say that it is something
fundamentally different, presumably because it is as immediately present in con-
sciousness as the others. He preferred to treat that additional awareness "as a
twenty-seventh fact, the substance and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler
consciousnesses," and to attribute the different sorts of awareness to simpler or
more complex "physiological conditions." 14 James did not guess what these
"physiological conditions" might be; nor did he explain how postulating a twenty-
seventh "awareness" would solve the problem of its intrinsic relatftm to the others.
James's pluralistic universe remained, in essence, a universe of pluralities. His
radical empiricism revised, but did not abandon the traditional version. 15
Carl Stumpf regarded James as a both a colleague and a friend. He drew support
from The Principles ofPsychology for his own cautious extension of empiricism,
72 The social and intellectual settings
in particular his claim that relations are as directly experienced as sensations (see
Chapter 2). He recommended the book to his students for this reason, but advised
them to treat its theoretical conclusions with caution. 16
§t£rtlilllg fr-4>m the wiMJ.te, llllllldi fri()Jm ''til;e t!htilrng~> tfu:emseiwes":
Dfnthey al!lld HllllsserE
In the meantime, two other philosophical reformers, Wilhelm Dilthey and Ed-
mund Husser!, developed alternative conceptions of consciousness comparable to
James's, but drew more negative conclusions about the possibility of a natural
science of mind. Max Wertheimer took a seminar with Dilthey while a student in
Berlin, and read Husser! 's work shortly afterward; he drew upon their ideas in his
own, natural-scientific refashioning of holistic thinking (see Chapters 7 & 8).
Dilthey had good reason to cite James in support of the dynamic and holistic
conception of consciousness he presented in his 1894 essay, "Ideas on Descriptive
and Analytical Psychology." For him, as. fr:~ James, conscious experience is not a
collection of simple sensations and thei · coi:·esponding "ideas," but "a structured
whole" combini~g intellect, feeling, and will. This whole is not static but
dynamic, a "living, unitary activity within us." 17 The "dominant psychology"
cannot grasp this reality, Dilthey argued, because its representatives persist in
reducing "all phenomena of consciousness to elements imagined to be atom-like"
and constructing the psyche from these strictly hypothetical entities. Dilthey did
not question the achievements ofhypothetical thinking in the natural sciences, and
he granted that experimental and quantitative research had proven useful for the
understanding of phenomena at the mind-body interface. He nonetheless insisted
that such methods would never help us to grasp the central aspects of mental life,
especially the role of wi!I.18
When he spoke of"the dominant psychology," Dilthey meant the ideas that had
been dominant in his youth, particularly the "intellectual mechanics" (Vorstell-
ungsmechanik) of Johann Friedrich Herbart, the associationism of Mill, and the
empiricism of Helmholtz, all of which drew heavily on analogies from physics
and chemistry. He congratulated Wundt somewhat sardonically for recognizing
the dynamic character of mental life and the importance of will in his principle of
"creative synthesis," but quite rightly refused to exempt the Leipzig master from
his general indictment. He joined Wundt in angrily dismissing the extreme sensa-
tionalism of Mach and the younger generation of experimentalists, which he
called "a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy." Such thinking could only lead to
"increasing skepticism, a cult of superficial, unfruitful fact-gathering, and thus the
increasing separation of science from life." 19
Dilthey's alternative was an injunction that became the common wellspring of
Gestalt theory and the so-called Leipzig school of "holistic psychology"
( Ganzheitspsychologie)- the injunction to proceed "from the whole to the parts."
Challenging positivism 73
He maintained that in inner life the "experienced connection [erlebter Zusam-
menhang]" of thought, feeling, and will is primary, while "the distinguishing of its
individual members [Glieder] comes afterward." For him this meant beginning
with an intuitive description of inner experience more systematic than that carried
out by poets but at the same level of sympathetic understanding. In his I 894 essay,
such description yielded continuous cycles of thinlcing, feeling, and willing in
interaction with a changing milieu. Aspects of the environment are taken up as
ideas, affectively treated, then converted into willed action, which in tum alters
the milieu, and so on. This dynamic flow of interrelationship between the "totality
of human nature" and the world Dilthey called, simply, "life" or "life itself." 20
The cultural coding in this terminology is evident. The "life" Dilthey meant was
that of an educated elite of cultivated individuals, capable of comprehending the
thought and feeling of past cultures by actively "co-experiencing" them.
In his Introduction to the Human Studies (1883), Dilthey had spoken of the
person as a "psychophysical whole," and presented this as the appropriate unit for
the human studies, rather than the physical "atoms" of the natural sciences. In
1894, he emphasized in addition that individuals are formed (gestaltet) by their
own history, and by that of their society and culture. The product of such interac-
tions between individuals and their cultural circumstances he called "the form of
the psyche" (Gestalt der See/e). The teleological end of Dilthey's psychology,
then, was not a monadic individual but a socially and culturally formed or orga-
nized personality, which he called "character," or, in one place, Gestalt. 21 The
word Gestalt is often used in Gennan to designate a historical personage. In this
sense it refers both to persons and to their significance, to the figure they cut on the
historical stage. Such figures were the center of Dilthey's research interest
throughout his career; he called biography "the most philosophical form of his-
tory." He did not consider e""'h individual unique, however, but referred to "typi-
cal people," or to "forms of individuality." Though all kinds of personalities could
offer material for such a psychology, he thought it was better to begin with "the
developed person of culture" (entwickelten Kulturmenschen). Only when such
personalities had been studied and classified with all the available methods would
psychology "become a tool for the historian, the economist, the politician and
theologian. "22
In principle, Dilthey had outlined an alternative research program to that of the
experimentalists, one that was in better agreement with the values of Germany's
traditionally educated elites than the technological vocabulary of the experimen-
talists. But he did not elaborate the practical side of that program in any detail.
Eduard Spranger, Karl Jaspers, and others later tried to create suCh usable tools-
systems of personality "types" based in part on Dilthey's thinking (see Chapter
17). In the 1890s, experimenting psychologists reacted to such views, predictably,
with the disdain of practitioners for the armchair expert. In his vehement rebuttal
in the Zeitschrifi for Psychologie, Hermann Ebbinghaus asserted that Dilthey 's
74 The social and intellectual settings
"descriptive" psychology was nothing new; experimenting psychologists, too,
begin with "the given" and analyze it into its experiential elements, in order to
discover the laws of their connection. From this perspective Dilthey himself was
guilty of placing hypotheses before facts. Only a vague sense of"connectedness,"
not the structure of consciousness, and certainly not that of personality, are acces-
sible to introspection. Thus Dilthey's psychology, too, required acts of intellectual
"construction. " 23
This point was well taken. In his reply, Dilthey ack..nowledged that our sense of
totality is given only in "partial experiences" of connectedness. These must be
supplemented by elementary logical operations, such as abstraction and general-
ization, before they can become genuine functional connections. He nonetheless
denied that experienced structure is a hypothesis; for these operations, too, are
parts of experience. Thus we do have an im1-nediate, though vague awareness of a
partial experience's place in and value for the whole. 24 In 1894 Dilthey did not
explicate in detail how this awareness operates; he attempted to do so in his later
analyses of poetic experience. Both his reply to Ebbinghaus and the essay on the
fonns of individuality that followed it were rather brief, and he soon laid aside his
psychological system.
In the 1890s, then, Dilthey did not offer a method that could do justice to lived
experience as he conceived it and still compete with the apparent precision of the
experimentalists. Edmund Husser! thought he had done so. He presented his
alternative in his Logical Investigations ( 1900-190 I), according to one contem-
porary "perhaps the most influential single work published in philosophy" in the
first twenty years of this century.25 Like his friend and colleague Stumpf, to whom
he dedicated the book, Husser! began his second, philosophical career under the
influence of Franz Brentano. He hoped that careful descriptions of the act of
counting and of the role of symbols in arithmetical thinking would help him to
solve fundamental problems in the philosophy of his original field, mathematics.
However, criticism from Paul Natorp and Gottlob Frege, his own discovery of
Bernard Balzano's logic and his realization of intrinsic difficulties in his original
scheme ended these hopes. Frege in particular pointed out a problem Husser! had
also seen - that our experience of counting does not include concrete ideas
(eigentliche Vorstellungen) oflarge numbers. The validity of the sum 999,999 + I
surely cannot be traced to the experience of counting apples; nor can the mathe-
matical significance of concepts like infinity be reduced to ordinary counting.26
In the first volume of the Logical Investigations, entitled "Prolegomena to Pure
Logic," Husser! attacked in broadest terms the doctrines he called "psychologism"
and "anthropologism," the attribution of the validity of logical propositions to
inductions from experience or to supposed "natural laws of thinking." All such
ideas lead inevitably to "naturalism" or relativism, he claimed. Though he named
Mill, Alexander Bain, Wundt, and others as his most prominent opponents, it was
the "modem Humeans" Mach and Avenarius who brought the issue most clearly
Challenging positivism 75
into the open. The fundamental question is whether or not "ideal objects of
thought," such as the propositions of arithmetic, are really no more than efficient
signs for "mere individual experiences, collections of presentations, and judg-
ments about isolated matters of fact."27
Given the term "pure logic" in the title, there was little doubt that Husser!
intended to side with idealism. What comes forward most strongly in the Pro-
legomena is a Platonistic account of logic as a science of the ideal laws governing
concepts and propositions conceived on the model ofBolzano's realm of entities
"as such" (an sich). As the studies in the second volume of the Investigations
show, however, Husserl did not separate such concepts and propositions entirely
from the realm of mental acts. Instead, he held, with Lotze, Brentano, and Stumpf,
that "logical concepts as valid units of thought must have their origin in concrete
intuition; they must have grown up by abstraction on the basis of certain experi-
ences." The only way to overcome psych~logism was thus not to ignore psychol-
ogy, as Frege and the Neo-Kantians did, but to examine more closely than even
Kant had done the experiences we have when we think. This is what Husser!
meant when he said that "phenomenology is descriptive psychology."28
The prototypes of these "logical experiences" were acts {If perception. "Experi-
enced sensation," Husser! asserted, "is animated [beseelt] by a certain act charac-
ter, a certain grasping [Au.ffassen] or referring [Meinung]." Sensations are "an
analogical building material" for the objects presented through them; but we see
the objects, not their components. 29 Husser! meant this meaning-giving act and its
reference to an object when he spoke of the intentionality of consciousness. In this
respect, there is little difference between Husserl's psychology and that of Bren-
tano. His innovation was to assert the psychological primacy of such experiences,
of perception over sensation. Failure to recognize this was, in his view, the
fundamental error in Hume's account of experience, and thus of the "modem
Humeans" as well.
In the second logical investigation, devoted primarily to the problem of ab-
straction, Husser! accused Hume of ignoring the fundamental difference between
an object as it appears to us, for example a smooth, white globe with its uniform
coloring, and the sensations supposedly contained in that object. The object as it
appears is something essentially different from a complex of sensations, and
Husser! argued that we must accept its existance as it appears in intuition, rather
than saying it is really something else. An object can appear in various ways, show
various "sides" of itself according to the interests ofthe observer. Nonetheless we
!mow that we perceive it with nearly self-evident certainty: "I can delude myself
about the existence of an object of perception, but not about whether I perceive it
as determined in such and such a way, and that it is in th~ referring [Meinung] of
this perception not a totally different object, e.g. a pine tree and not a June bug."30
This was a version of psychological realism similar to that advocated by James.
Husser! credited the American philosopher with helping him to liberate himself
76 The social and intellectual settings
from psychologism. In fact, his position harkens back to Brentaro's "immanent
objectivity" (discussed in Chapter 2); and it soon became one of the foundations
of Gestalt theory.
Husser! then applied this version of the intentional model of consciousness to
what he called "the experience of truth." By this he meant "the agreement ...
between the experienced sense of a statement and the experienced state of affairs
[Sachverhalt]." Insofar as a proposition "makes sense" to us, it has, or can have,
that sort of (self-) evidence which amounts to our experience of its truth. Thus,
propositions about mathematical, fictitious, or nonexistent entities can also ac-
quire evidence, even though we do not have direct experience of the objects to
which they refer. The truth of the statement "Pegasus does not exist" is as self-
evident to us, on this account, as that of the statement "I see a round, smooth
globe," which can be true even if the globe is an illusion, because it refers to the
person's own seeing. The validity of such statements is therefore guaranteed, even
though there is no presentational content, no "real" object involved.3 1
\Vith such arguments Brentano 's students used the techniques of thinking they
had learned from him to couple the structure of cognition with that of proposi-
tions. Instead of relating the structure of experience to that of the person, as
Dilthey did, the key question in logic and the theory of knowledge became for
them not "How can we know?" but "How can we describe the act of knowing and
fonnalize the results?" This shift to what has been called logical realism was a
step on the •vay to the reform of analytical philosophy later in the century.
However, the implicit, and soon quite explicit formalism of this approach iron-
ically led to the very disciplinary split between logic and psychology that Husser!,
Meinong, and Stumpf wished to avoid.
A different but related tension, between formal ontological order and psycho-
logical fact, emerged in Husser! 's third logical investigation, on the theory of
whole and part. In this discussion Husser! employed two key concepts. The first
was that of"moment," or aspect. Stumpf, as we saw in Chapter 2, spoke of color
and extension as "partial contents" of a "state of affairs" (Sachverhalt) that is
experienced is a unity. He was not talking about separable parts of an object, but
about interrelated aspects of experience. Husser! had already used the concept of
"figural moment" in his Philosophy ofArithmetic to describe the feature of intui-
tions in which the apprehension of like sensory contents and their subsumption
under a collective concept seem to occur in a single act, when we speak, for
example, of a heap of apples or a swarm of birds. In the second logical investiga-
tion, Husser! extended this usage to perception in general, speaking of the color or
form (Gestalt) "moments" of the experience of objects. In the third investigation,
he generalized the concept still further, employing the term "moment of unity"
taken over from Neo-Kantian philosopher Alois Riehl for this class of experi-
ences. He then made an additional, crucial distinction between "phenomenologi-
cal" and "objective" moments of unity. The former "give unity to the psychotogi-
Challenging positivism 77
cat experiences and experience-parts," while the iatter "belong to the intentional
and nonpsychological objects and object-parts." A contemporary example of an
objective moment of unity might be the current flowing through a computer
system. Without it, the system would only be a collection of equipment pieces, but
its unifying status is not dependent on the successive mental acts or states of any
given perceiver.32
From this distinction Husser! developed an a priori classification of part-whole
concepts according to what he called their "unity of foundation." Here, too, he
could easily have meant a psychological act, but he did not. In the second logical
investigation, he described perception as an act of"grasping" based or "founded"
on sensory material. Here, his use oj, the term is more like the idea of a building
that rests upon a foundation, or is built up on a "foundation" of bricks and mortar.
Thus, to use one of his examples, when we see a group of stars drawn on a piece of
paper, we are presented with a "hierarchy of foundations" in which points found
the lines, the lines found the individual figures, and finally the figures found the
collection or group. This hierarchy exemplifies what one commentator calls a
relation of"one-sided" foundation: a founds b, but not vice-versa. Stumpf's claim
that color and extension necessarily require or presuppose one another is an
example of mutual or two-sided foundation. 33
Now, these are obviously not psychological statements about how wholes are
experienced, but ciaims about their "objective," that is, formal ontological struc-
ture. Had he been making an empirical statement, Husser] could not have implied
that we see a collection oflines and a group of stars in the same way. According to
his own theory of perception, we see the group of stars whether we sense the lines
or not. Yet for all his emphasis on conscious activity and the primacy of percep-
tion, Husser! did not give up elementary sensations. In fact, he required them as
one sort of analogical building block for perceptions. Thus, though he carefully
distinguished them, his objective and psychological realms had a parallel, hier-
archical structure.
Experimenting psychologists drew a number of important lessons from Hus-
serl's work. His arguments against "psychologism" gave them a clear idea of the
limitations of older psychologies, without denying the legitimacy of psychologi-
cal investigation as such. When he said that "phenomenology is descriptive psy-
chology," he hastened to add that such a psychology could not be the same as that
of the experimentalists, but in 1900 he left the door wide open for the use of his
observational procedure as an alternative data base in psychology. 34 This was the
method that Carl Stumpf had used in his psychological research from the begin-
ning (see Chapter 2). Its first rule of procedure- that investigators'i;hould begin by
examining the conscious contents they actually have, nol what empiricist assump-
tions say they ought to have- meshed comfortably with Ewald Hering's injunc-
tion to begin with "seen objects" rather than those of physics. In other words,
experimenters working with Hering's methods could obtain philosophical support
78 The social and intellectual settings
for what they were already doing. In his 1911 work on color (discussed in Chapter
4), David Katz acknowledged that he had been encouraged to adopt a "general
phenomenological attitude" by lectures and seminars he had heard with Husser!,
who had been teaching in Gottingen since 1901. Katz later said that to him,
"phenomenology, as advocated at that time by Edmund Husser!, seemed to be the
best connection between philosophy and psychology."35
If this was a misunderstanding, then Husser! himself was partly responsible for
it. In his Gottingen lectures cf 1905 on the phenomenology of time consciousness,
he drew in part on William Stern's experimental research on the "psychical
present" to support a far more sophisticated view than Bergson's undifferentiated
flow of duree. Dissertations written under Husserl's direction in Gottingen, for
example by Wilhelm Schapp on color and Alfred Brunswig on comparison, could
easily be taken as contributions to descriptive psychology, though they lacked
experimental support. Schapp's work, in particular, is notable for his claim that
qualities such as color, form (Gestalt), and movement are immediately given in
perception, as means of presenting "the thing itself."36
The most important use of Husserl's method and vocabulary in psychology
came in the work of former positivist Oswald Kiilpe and his students in Wurzburg
on the psychology of thinking. The Wiirzburg experimenters discovered nu-
merous psychical contents in acts of thought different from the sensations, im-
ages, and feelings called for in classical associationism; and they made observa-
tions on the purposive, directed character of thinking that bore a close
resemblance to Husserl's ideas. Narziss Ach, Henry Watt, and KU!pe himself
found, for example, that the experimenter's instruction produced a "mental set"
(Einsteilung) that played a dynamic role in observers' thinking. Kiilpe presented a
series of four syllables, each one printed in a different color and position, and
asked observers to focus on one specific aspect, for example, to name the letters,
then to tell the color or the shape. As expected, responses were more accurate for
the aspects observers were told to focus on, regardless of how often a given object
had appeared before. Ach showed that the process could be unconscious by
achieving similar results with subjects under hypnosis, and attributed the "ordered
and goal-directed course of mental events in general" to hypothetical "determin-
ing tendencies. "37
In 1906 and 1907, August Messer and Karl Buhler introduced Husser! 's vocab-
ulary and his model of consciousness into the Wiirzburg vocabulary. In his sys-
tematic treatise on sensation and thinking, Messer described Husserl's act of
"intending" as the "imageless element" that "gives meaning [Sinn] to the word in
consciousness." Buhler distinguished three classes of thought contents: simple
"thoughts," or content correlates of Ach 's determining tendencies, "thought-
memories" distinguished by consciousness of a rule, and "intentions," in which
"the act of meaning comes to the fore and not what is meant."38 Finally, KU!pe
himself made the directedness ofthinking a cornerstone of his epistemology: "For
Challenging positivism 79
us the fundamental characteristic of thinking is referring [meinen], meaning aim-
ing at something."39
Considerable controversy swirled about these claims, primarily on meth-
odological grounds. Wundt called the Wurzburg procedures "pseudoexperiments"
and alleged that they were open invitations to suggestion. 40 More important for
the emergence of Gestalt theory was Ernst Cassirer's substantive criticism that the
Wiirzburg experimenters tended to treat the contents and processes they
discovered as new units alongside the conventional ones, rather than treating
thought processes as wholes. 41 Nonetheless, Kiilpe, the former positivist, did not
hesitate to use his school's results to proclaim the death of sensationalism. Mach's
epistemology fails, he wrote, because sensations are not all there are in conscious-
ness: "Modem psychology teaches that sensations are products of scientific analy-
sis .... We do not discover elementary contents, such as simple colors or bright-
nesses, tones or noises, elements of any kind in our investigation of what is given
in consciousness."4 2 Kiilpe was equally explicit about the significance of this
work for the status of psychology as a philosophical discipline:
Associationist psychology, as founded by Hume, has ended its solitary
reign ... There are still psychologists who have not risen above this stand-
point. Their psychology can rightly be accused of unreality, of moving in an
abstract region where it neither seeks nor finds entry into full experience.
These are the psychologists who offer stones instead of bread to those
representatives of the human studies who are asking for psychological
support. 4 3
Thus, KUlpe and his followers relied on Husserl's methods and his model of
cognition for support in their effort to establish a fruitful middle position in
philosophy, located between traditional, sensation-based empiricism and ideal-
ism, without forsaking experimental method.
Husser! himself retracted his designation of phenomenology as "descriptive
psychology" as early as 1904. He and his students insisted that their efforts
yielded evidence about the nature of consciousness as such, while experimental
procedures only provided provisional laws about the range of variation of certain
conscious experiences under given conditions. Between 1906 and 1907, he
decided that only a "transcendental phenomenology" would overcome the danger
of relativism once and for all. His 1911 essay "Philosophy as Rigorous Science"
(discussed in Chapter 3) helped prepare the way for this step.44 Experimenting
psychologists, Stumpf included, did not follow him along this road.
4
From 1111eovitaiism to psydnovitalism: Hans Driesch
By this time, Hans Driesch had joined the challenge to mechanistic discourse in
philosophy of mind through a side entrance, coming from a biologists' debate
80 The social and intellectual settings
about the nature of organic development. In doing so, he underscored the on-
tological dimension of both arguments; for both revolved around the issue of
whether and how discursive norms derived from mechanical physics could be
extended to all forms of reality. At the same time, talk of wholes determining
parts, and of inherent organizing dynamics coming from within rather than with-
out, was central to his position.
Most nineteenth-century Gem1an biologists were trained in physiology, and the
commitment to mechanistic categories in that discipline remained strong. How-
ever, both the study of organic form and the theoretical tradition created by Hans
Blumenbach and Immanuel Kant, which Timothy Lenoir calls teleomechanism or
"vita[ materialism," persisted in Gem1any throughout the century. That tradition
posed a challenge even the most committed mechanists continued to face- how to
deal with the apparently inherent purposiveness of ordered growth and develop-
ment without invoking occult vital forces. 45 Wilhelm Raux proposed to provide
such an account in his "developmental mechanics": a "causal morphology of
organisms" that would reduce the origination and maintenance of these forms to
"movements ofparts."46 His self-styled "mosaic theory" was compatible with the
teleomechanist tradition, in that it described development as the "self-differentia-
tion" of "hereditary potentialities," with irreversible functional differentiation
among the cells. This hypothesis was supported in part by Raux's own experi-
ments at the marine biological station in Naples. When he lcilied one of the first
two cleavage ceils in a frog's egg, the surviving cell, as expected, gave rise to only
half of a normal embryo.
In 1891, working at the Naples station with a different organism, the sea urchin
Pluteus, Driesch separated the paired, multicellular preembryonic stmctures in
their eggs, called blastomeres, from one another without killing any by shaking
them apart in sea water. Each developed into a whole, normal, though somewhat
smaller than average adult. Even crushing a section under a glass plate, thus
confusing the structures completely, did not prevent the development of anoma-
lous but functioning individuals. Jacques Loeb obtained comparable results, also
with sea urchin eggs, in 1893. Loeb opposed ideas of unfolding inherent natural
order and relied heavily on machine metaphors that equated knowledge with
control; for example, he thought of the tendency of certain plants to grow toward
light as a kind of reflex response. Apparently he saw no threat to his mechanistic
position in these results, but Driesch clearly thought differently. In his "proof of
vitalistic events" in 1896, he subsumed all organisms under a single teleological
schema, in which the goal is the whoie organism, and used an aesthetic metaphor
from music to oppose Loeb's reliance on a machine metaphor. Developmental
potential could be realized in two ways. In "determined equipotential systems,"
potential was divided among the parts of the system; in "harmonious equipotential
systems," like his sea urchins, it was not. The existence of "harmonious equipo-
tential systems," he declared, was proof of "dynamic teleology" in nature.47
Challenging positivism 81
Little of this would have been significant for the emergence of Gestalt theory if
Driesch's own development had ended there, but it did not. First he applied the
concept of "harmonious equipotential systems" to phenomena of organic self-
regulation, such as the regeneration of organs and restoration of function. He then
searched for a more general teleological principle to justify the expansion of his
ideas beyond biology. He found it in a central concept of German Romanticism,
Seele, which he took from Eduard von Hartmann's critique of recent psychology,
published in 1901. In his book, The Soul as an Elementary Factor of Nature
(!903), Driesch argued that the nature of human activity cannot be explained
mechanically. In a physical-chemica! system there is a one-to-one ordering of
stimuli and reactions; within the constraints of given boundary conditions, sys-
tems can react only to present stimuli. In human action, however, the effects of
past experience are "present for me"; this fact, he contended, makes for a "free
divisibility and combinability of elements" in a lawlike, but not mechanical act.'~ 8
D1iesch illustrated this claim with cases in which the alteration of a single
stimulus element has a "total effect" (Ganzwirkung}. For example, when someone
calls across the street to a friend, "Mein filter ist schwer erl,.,.,-ankt" (My father is
seriously ill), the effect is completely different from that obtained when he says,
"De in Vater is schwer erkrankt" (Your father is seriously ill); yet only one letter of
the message has changed in German. Taking the opposite case, the message "your
father is dead" produces in a single hearer the same reaction in different lan-
guages, even though all the stimulus elements- i.e., the letters- may be different.
This is what Driesch meant by the claim that past events- in this case the presence
or absence of a loved parent-can be "present for me." Today, such examples are
material for research in information processing. For Driesch they were evidence
that the brain is a "harmonious equipotential system with respect to its possible
performance"; he was sure that no inorganic system could function in this way,
and concluded that psychophysical parallelism must be rejected. 49
This transfer of neovitalism to psychology touched off a controversy in the
Zeitschrififor Psychologie. The debate was discussed in Stumpf's seminar in the
summer of 1908, when Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka were both students in
Berlin. 5° Erich Becher, a student of Halle psychologist and philosopher Benno
Erdmann, praised Driesch for pointing to the link between vitalism and mind-
body interactionism, but criticized his justification for it. Aside from the psycho-
logical "naivete" of the fonnulation that past experiences can be "present for me,"
he said, Driesch had needlessly confused the general principles of physical and
chemical events with those of man-made machines. Becher recognized the impor-
tance of "total effects" of the kind Driesch had described, but ,Pointed out that
these can also be found in machines; a keywound toy is an example. On the other
hand, the unlimited connectability of stimulus and reaction is characteristic of any
telephone system. On this basis, Becher argued, all we can conclude is the exis-
tence of "preestablished harmony" between the mental and the physical worlds,
82 The social and intellectual settings Challenging positivism 83

which is little more than parallelism in disguise. Instead, Becher espoused the University of Heidelberg, where he bad been living as a private scholar. Two years
version of interactionism Stumpf had offered in 1896. Although "a certain ner- later he shifted to the philosophical faculty, with the express approval of the chair-
vous process in a certain part of the cortex is the regular precondition fgr the holder, Wilhelm Windelband. The pragmatic Oswald Kiilpe had pointed out to
occurrence of a certain sensation," he argued, the sensation itself "absorbs no him that with the few existing natural science faculties in German-speaking
physical energy, and its relationship to the [physical] conditions cannot be ex- universities, he would have better chances of advancement in the philosophical
pressed in mathematical concepts and Jaws." Though be depicted psychical phe- faculty.54 Driesch took up Husserl's ideas and the research ofKiilpe's Wilrzburg
nomena as emerging from physical causes in the brain, be also claimed that-they school when he worked out the logical and epistemological implications of his
were capable of altering physical effects, as in hearing or in acts of will. 51 philosophy in greater detail.
The year after Stumpf's seminar focused on this debate, Driesch elevated his Thus, just when Driesch 's ideas had ceased to be interesting to most biologists,
neovitalism to the status of a full-blown philosophy in his book The Science and they became so for philosophers and psychologists. In many respects his thinking .
Philosophy ofthe Organism (1909). He retained the arguments in his earlier work, paralleled that of the philosophers described earlier. None of these challenges to
but tried to avoid the criticism that he had reinvented a mental substance called positivism was as antiscientific or irrationalistic as is often claimed. James's
Seele by making more extensive use of the tenn "entelechy," which he had commitment to empiricism was hardly in doubt; but even Bergson, Dilthey, and
already introduced in 1896. "Entelechy" for Driesch is the fonnative power of the Husser! presented their ideas as alternative conceptual and research programs for
organism, the end for which physical and chemical factors are only the means. a philosophical science, though it was clear that this would be a human and not a
This power is itself neither spatiai nor temporal, but manifests itself in its effects. natural science; These critiques gave further weight to the argument that it is
The logical sign of such a manifestation is the fact that in organisms wholeness is impossible to reconcile the phenomena of mind with the claims of natural science
retained despite division into parts: "Is it possible to imagine that a complex on the basis of mechanistic categories. At the time, however, it was difficult to see
machine, unsymmetrical in the three planes of space, could be divided hundreds what other basis there could be.
and hundreds of times and still remain intact?" For Driesch, such observable
"individuality" meant that we can "see the world, the world of entelechy, as it is in
its immediacy." Entelechy itself can only be inferred, but its effects are most
evident to our own self-observation, particularly in our awareness of acts of will.
With this Driesch completed the step to psychovitalism he had begun in 1903.52
In some respects Driesch 's critique of mechanism was similar to Bergson's
critique of associationism. However, though his entelechy was like Bergson's elan
vital in being only indirectly knowable, he did not speak of it as a higher reality
grounded on intuition, as Bergson did. He insisted that, despite his use of terms
like See !e. he was not a Romantic but a realist. His entelechy was another aspect of
the single reality of nature, qualitatively different from but in constant interaction
with the aspects studied in physics and chemistry. The idea that purposive action
in nature could be reconciled with at least a loose form of mechanism was
widespread by this time. Thus some biologists, like Herbert Spencer Jennings,
were prepared to see the positive side of Driesch 's critique of mechanistic think-
ing. Vvhether it was necessary to postulate an unknowable entelechy was another
matter. Here it seemed as though Driesch had substituted metaphysics for
investigation. 53
Philosophers were not so allergic to metaphysics. Driesch's ideas were similar
to current philosophical reflections about the mind, for example Husser! 's account
ofperception as the "besouling" of sensation. Driesch himselfwas aware of the
step he had taken toward philosophy, and drew the consequences. In 1909 he
obtained the right to teach natural philosophy in the natural science faculty of the