Uncovering Critical Personalism: Readings from William Stern’s Contributions to Scientific Psychology (Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology) 3030677338, 9783030677336

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Uncovering Critical Personalism Readings from William Stern’s Contributions to Scientific Psychology James T. Lamiell

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

Series Editor Thomas Teo Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology publishes scholarly books that use historical and theoretical methods to critically examine the historical development and contemporary status of psychological concepts, methods, research, theories, and interventions. Books in this series are characterised by one, or a combination of, the following: (a) an emphasis on the concrete particulars of psychologists’ scientific and professional practices, together with a critical examination of the assumptions that attend their use; (b) expanding the horizon of the discipline to include more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work performed by researchers and practitioners inside and outside of the discipline, increasing the knowledge created by the psychological humanities; (c) “doing justice” to the persons, communities, marginalized and oppressed people, or to academic ideas such as science or objectivity, or to critical concepts such social justice, resistance, agency, power, and democratic research. These examinations are anchored in clear, accessible descriptions of what psychologists do and believe about their activities. All the books in the series share the aim of advancing the scientific and professional practices of psychology and psychologists, even as they offer probing and detailed questioning and critical reconstructions of these practices. The series welcomes proposals for edited and authored works, in the form of full-­length monographs or Palgrave Pivots; contact beth. [email protected] for further information. Series Editor Thomas Teo is Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada. Series Editorial Board Alex Gillespie, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Suzanne R. Kirschner, College of the Holy Cross, USA Annette Mülberger, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Lisa M. Osbeck, University of West Georgia, USA Peter Raggatt, James Cook University, Australia Alexandra Rutherford ,York University, Canada. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14576

James T. Lamiell

Uncovering Critical Personalism Readings from William Stern’s Contributions to Scientific Psychology

James T. Lamiell Psychology Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology ISBN 978-3-030-67733-6    ISBN 978-3-030-67734-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the memory of Werner Deutsch (1947–2010), a dear departed friend and a valued Stern scholar.

Foreword

William Stern was an eminent German psychologist who worked successfully in several branches of psychology, particularly during the first half of the century. It is the core of his work to which James T. Lamiell has devoted this insightful book. Nowadays, Stern is by no means forgotten, but familiarity with his scientific work is very compartmentalized. Experimental psychologists know of his Tonvariator (sound variator), an experimental device belonging to the psychology of perception which made it possible to study the psychology of changes in tone pitch for the first time (Stern, 1902). Applied psychologists will think of the concept Psychotechnik, a term coined by Stern in 1903, to describe a branch of applied psychology and used in several languages until after the Second World War. Psychologists involved in diagnostics know that it was William Stern who argued convincingly for an intelligence quotient that would quantitatively represent a child’s level of mental functioning as the ratio of the child’s mental age to the child’s chronological age, rather than as the difference between the two, as had become customary following Alfred Binet. Developmental psychologists, by contrast, emphasize the importance of the diaries— which Clara and William Stern kept of their three children—to developmental psychology which, at the time, was still called child psychology. Forensic psychologists point to his seminal studies concerning the vii

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credibility of juvenile witnesses. However, the most widespread opinion in psychology today is that William Stern’s main achievement was his founding of differential psychology, that research framework within which to systematically investigate individual and group differences in psychological phenomena. This all sounds like haphazard assortment of scientific activities, leaving it unclear what his real achievement was. Stern himself regarded as the most important part of his work a field which he called Philosophie und Psychologie des kritischen Personalismus—The Philosophy and Psychology of Critical Personalism. This was his own theoretical framework into which the different areas of research were slotted and then coordinated. Whenever he was able to, Stern worked on the development of the Philosophy and Psychology of Critical Personalism, but this was often only between considerable intervals in time. The results appeared in different publications; the three main works were published in 1906, 1918 and 1924. Numerous other works were published between or after these dates. The texts dealing with his Critical Personalism are not forgotten today, but even in his lifetime they did not receive the recognition he would have desired. This was partly because the publications were spread out over time, partly because relatively few copies and editions were printed, and partly because Stern thought that each of those publications should be independent of the others. Another factor was the rapid development of psychology in the first decades of the twentieth century, which Stern followed assiduously, and which ultimately also had an impact on his own development. Consequently, he explained early on that he had revised his thinking somewhat over the years. This was not a sign of uncertainty on his part, but was instead an integral part of his scientific development. Reading Stern’s books and papers on his Critical Personalism is not easy, even for German readers in the twenty-first century, although Stern did write in a very descriptive and comprehensible style. It is therefore understandable that the general theory which Stern regarded as his very own and his most important one has rarely been adopted abroad. Only a few authors have referred positively to the value of Critical Personalism, amongst others Gordon Allport who worked

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with William Stern for a semester during his 2-year scholarship in Germany (1922–1924); the Canadian Wilfred H. O. Schmidt (1985); Werner Deutsch and his team (1991); and more recently Rebecca Heinemann (2016) in Germany. As of yet, this has not had a significant effect on the reception of Critical Personalism in psychology. All the more reason, therefore, for Lamiell’s current publication. He has identified the important parts of Stern’s theory and translated them meticulously, but, at the same time, has adhered closely to the original works. This has made Stern’s work accessible to an English readership. In his book, Lamiell has focused specifically on Stern’s Critical Personalism. William Stern dated the starting point of his development of Critical Personalism to the time between the summer of 1900 and the early months of 1901 when he wrote the first draft of his book Person und Sache (Person and Thing). In those months his first child, Hilde, was born and he and his wife started to keep meticulous records of her development. Lamiell reminds us that it was not just by chance that these two developments overlapped in time. William Stern wrote in his intellectual self-portrait: Here I became aware of the fundamental personalistic fact of unitas multiplex: the wealth of phenomena, concomitantly or successively observable, arrayed themselves in a unified life-line of the developing individual, and received their significance directly from this … [H]ere I gained conceptual foundations for the dawning philosophical theory. (Stern, 1930, p. 350)

Stern was born in 1871, the year of the foundation of the German Reich. In his lifetime he experienced war, changes of government, economic depression and inflation. He also experienced personal discrimination despite coming from a traditional and well-respected German family of Jewish descent. In 1931 the German Association of Psychology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie) had its congress in Hamburg. It was organized by Stern and his team and enlarged by exhibitions for a wider audience. Over 800 people participated, far more than ever before at such a conference (Kafka, 1932, p. 470). The congress proved to be a notable success for German psychology. The general assembly elected Stern to be

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the new president of the Association. William Stern had now reached the peak of his academic career. When he celebrated his 60th birthday a fortnight after the congress in Hamburg, he was honored with an impressive Festschrift. Two years later, in the autumn of 1933, the German Association of Psychology held its meeting in Leipzig. Stern’s name had now been deleted from the list of members. The new president, Felix Krueger, did not even mention the name of Stern in his speech. Stern was no longer allowed to enter the institute in Hamburg which he himself had expanded. It was his caring nature that prompted him then to ensure that his students were able to complete their Ph.D. examinations in the following weeks, conducting their doctoral vivas (Rigorosum) in his own home. William Stern’s academic activities were closely connected to his personality and temperament. He was interested in new developments, was amazingly industrious and arguably critical towards trends he disapproved of, such as child psychoanalysis. However, he was conciliatory and friendly at the same time (McCrae & Costa, 2020). William Stern’s son, the philosopher Günther (Stern-) Anders (1902–1992), appraised his father critically in one important respect: William Stern consistently underestimated the danger and malice of National Socialism and believed unswervingly in the good of mankind. As Stern-Anders noted, William Stern ‘was too kind to face the facts of violence and malice’ (Stern-Anders, 1950, p. xxv). It is discernible that William Stern’s positive view of mankind not only affected his attitudes and relationships with other people, but also aspects of his academic work when, for example, he reported on juvenile legal testimonies. Yet Stern’s belief in the goodness of people did ultimately prove qualified. He was perhaps chastened in part by that manifestation of Nazi perfidy, the edict that the pensions of refugees were not to be forwarded abroad. This required William Stern to return to Hamburg periodically, at great risk to his very life, to retrieve what was in any case a reduced pension. Eva Michaelis Stern (1904–1992), Stern’s daughter, wrote in her recollections: Already some years before the emigration, when a well-meaning colleague in Hamburg tried to convince him to hold out for the presumably imminent

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end of the Hitler regime, William Stern rejected this plea with the words ‘My faith in the German people has collapsed.’ (Michaelis-Stern, 1991, p. 140, translation by HL)

In the tenth and final chapter of his book, Lamiell addresses the question of what impact Critical Personalism might have on present and future psychology. He outlines some features of present-day psychology such as the strict separation of qualitative and quantitative research methods, the dominance of statistical thinking, and a few other characteristics which psychologists have become used to. Does Critical Personalism still stand a chance? Lamiell expresses doubts about this. Some additional considerations can be introduced here: the diversity of psychological research areas with their separate terminologies and theories, and the focus during his time on isolated behaviors rather than the wholeness of the person. In fact, Stern rejected elementalistic thinking of any kind and he, of course, also rejected the bombastic statements of behaviorist John B. Watson. He criticized the one-sided views of psychoanalysis; however, he found friendly words where Alfred Adler’s theory was concerned. Perhaps we can regard Stern, like Adler, as one of the predecessors of Humanistic Psychology, a branch which was established in the USA but which Stern did not live to experience. The humanistic spirit of Stern’s theory has been discussed by Lehman-Muriithi, De Resende Damas Cardoso, and Lamiell (2015). Certainly, we can stress that Critical Personalism has found some resonance in subsidiary fields, particularly in educational sciences as well as in social sciences, and in qualitative biographical studies, which nowadays do not belong to mainstream psychology but have been part of social sciences and humanities for several decades now. Critical Personalism had already been received in other areas during Stern’s lifetime (e.g., Liebe, 1926). There is evidence that his theory has found more acceptance in fields other than psychology today. Lamiell’s book is an exceptional achievement: he pinpoints the core of what William Stern strove to achieve. His translations are very precise and they capture the sense of the originals very well. Widespread resonance of this work among contemporary psychologists would fittingly repay Lamiell’s efforts against the formidable challenges of translation

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work. Of greater consequence in the long run, widespread attention to this work could spark, at long last, an appreciation within contemporary mainstream psychology for William Stern’s estimable scientific achievements as creator and practitioner of that conceptual framework he developed under the name of Critical Personalism. University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany

Helmut E. Lück

References Heinemann, R. (2016). Das Kind als Person. William Stern als Wegbereiter der Kinder- und Jugendforschung 1900 bis 1933 [The child as a person. William Stern as the pioneer of child and youth research]. Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt. Kafka, G. (Hrsg.) (1932). Bericht über den XII. Kongreß der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie in Hamburg vom 12.-16. April 1931 [Report on the 12th Congress of the German Association of Psychology in Hamburg, from 12th to 16th April, 1931]. Jena: Gustav Fischer. Lamiell, J. T. (2010). William Stern (1871–1938): A brief introduction to his life and work. Lengerich, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers. Lehmann-Muriithi, K., De Resende Damas Cardoso, C. & Lamiell, J. T. (2015). Understanding human being within the framework of William Stern’s Critical Personalism: Teleology, Holism, and Valuation. In J.  Valsiner, G. Marsico, N. Chaudhary, T. Sato & V. Dazzani (Eds.), Psychology as a science of human being. The Yokohama Manifesto. Annals of Theoretical Psychology (Vol. 13, pp.  209–223). Springer International Publishing, Switzerland 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­21094-­0 Liebe, R. (1926). Der kritische Personalismus und seine Bedeutung für die Theologie [Critical personalism and ist significance for theology]. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, Neue Folge, 7(2), 108–129. McCrae, R.  R., & Costa, P.  T. (2020). Understanding persons: From Stern’s personalistics to five-factor theory. Personality and Individual Differences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109816 Michaelis-Stern, E. (1991). Erinnerungen an meine Eltern [Recollections of my parents]. In W.  Deutsch (Ed.), Über die verborgene Aktualilät von William Stern (pp. 131–141). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Schmidt, W.  H. O. (1985). Dialogue with a human scientist: William Stern (1871–1938). Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 3(3), 149–160. https://doi. org/10.29173/pandp14990 Stern, L. W. (1896). Die Wahrnehmung von Tonveränderungen (1. Mitteilung) [The perception of changes in tone (1. Communication)]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 11, 1–30. Stern, L.  W. (1902). Der Tonvariator [The tone variator]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 30, 422–432. Stern, W. (1903). Angewandte Psychologie [Applied psychology]. Beiträge zur Psychologie der Aussage. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Problemen der Rechtspflege, der Psychiatrie und Geschichtsforschung, 1, 4–45. Stern, W. (1906). Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung, Erster Band: Ableitung und Grundlehre [Person and thing: A systematic philosophical worldview. Volume 1: Rationale and basic tenets]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1918). Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung, Zweiter Band: Die menschliche Persönlichkeit [Person and thing: A systematic philosophical worldview. Volume 2: The human personality]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1924). Person und Sache: System der kritischen Personalismus, Dritter Band: Wertphilosophie [Person and thing: System of critical personalism, Volume 3: Philosophy of value]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1930). William Stern intellectual self portrait (S. Langer, Trans.). In C.  Murchison (Ed.), A history of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 1, pp. 335–388). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press. Stern-Anders, G. (1950). Bild meines Vaters [Portrait of my father]. In W. Stern (Ed.). Allgemeine Psychologie auf personalistischer Grundlage (2nd ed.) [General psychology from the personalistic standpoint] (pp. xxiii–xxxii). Den Haag: Nijhoff.

Preface

In May of 1984, I participated in a symposium that was organized for the Second European Conference on Personality, held at the University of Bielefeld in the country then known as West Germany. In discussions with several colleagues that took place after that symposium, it was recommended to me on the basis of the substance of my presentation that I look further into the writings of William Stern. In due course I followed that recommendation, and the study of Stern’s works has occupied a major place in my scholarly life ever since. The more familiar I have become with Stern’s works, the more regrettable it has seemed to me that so little of his estimable scholarly oeuvre had ever been published in English translation. This convinced me of the worthiness of a project that would make more accessible to contemporary psychologists who do not read German the key features of Stern’s vision of a personalistic psychology. That is what I have attempted to accomplish with the present volume. The book begins with a chapter of my own authorship, but liberally interspersed with quotations from Stern’s writings. In that chapter, I present the foundational concepts of Stern’s personalistic psychology while introducing the reader to some of the developments, both personal and academic, within Stern’s life that helped give shape to his personalistic convictions. xv

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Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, and 7, 8, and 9 all present translations of works originally authored by Stern and published over a time period ranging from 1906 to 1933. Chapter 6 is a ‘hybrid’ chapter of sorts, the first half being of my own authorship, while the second half is a translation of work that Stern published in 1911. For each of Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, I offer prefatory remarks intended to orient the reader to the chapter’s contents. Chapter 10 is a short afterword in which I offer my perspective on the reason for the obscurity of Stern’s personalistic views heretofore, and on what will be necessary for any revival of those views within mainstream psychology today. Each of the five original German works translated for, respectively, Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 6, and 9 of the present volume itself originally appeared as a book chapter, and in those works Stern occasionally referred to parts of the volumes in which they respectively appeared that have not been translated for inclusion here. In such instances, my English text digresses from the original German in order to avoid confusing the reader. Otherwise, I have made every effort as a translator to maintain fidelity to Stern’s original German while making his ideas understandable in contemporary academic English. The intended audience for this book is one comprised mainly of academically oriented psychologists and other scholars with an interest in theoretical and philosophical issues in psychology. The book could prove pedagogically useful to instructors offering advanced undergraduate or graduate-level coursework in these topics. Washington, DC, USA

James T. Lamiell

Contents

1 William Stern and Personalistic Thinking: Making Acquaintance  1 2 Impersonalism 23 3 The Concept of the Person and the Problem of Freedom 45 4 Personalistic Psychology 63 5 The Personalistics of Recollection 79 6 The ‘Problem of Individuality’ in Scientific Psychology111 7 Personality Research and the Methods of Testing133 8 The Personal Factor in Psychotechnics and Practical Psychology149 9 Meaning and Interpretation163 10 Conceptual Work Matters187 xvii

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N  ame Index195 Subject Index197

1 William Stern and Personalistic Thinking: Making Acquaintance

On March 27, 1938, just one month prior to what would have been his 67th birthday, the accomplished German scholar, William Stern, passed away in Durham, North Carolina. Four years previously, he and wife Clara had fled from Nazi Germany to Durham, where William could then take up the offer of a faculty position in the Psychology Department at Duke University. Recalling in the immediate aftermath of Stern’s passing his many and varied accomplishments, the American psychologist and Harvard University professor Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967), who knew Stern personally as well as through his scholarly works, observed that the personalistic view that Stern represented in his life’s work “ran counter to the trend of the times, particularly in American thought,” but forecast optimistically that Stern’s orientation would “yet have its day, and [that] its day [would] be long and bright” (Allport, 1938, p. 773, brackets added). Now, more than eight decades on, the day Allport forecast has yet to arrive. The present volume has issued from this author’s conviction that, at the very least, Stern’s vision of a critically personalistic psychology merits the serious critical consideration that to date has been denied it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_1

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This introductory chapter offers the reader a preliminary acquaintance with Stern and with the ideas that guided his thinking throughout his career. It is intended that this discussion will serve to enhance the reader’s appreciation for the translated writings of Stern that appear in subsequent chapters, writings that were originally published over three quarters of a century ago, in the rhetorical style of early twentieth century academic German.

 tern’s Personalistic Perspective in Context: S Biographical and Intellectual Groundings Stern, whose full given name was Louis William,1 was born in Berlin on April 29, 1871 to Jewish parents of modest means. Stern, who would be his parents’ only child, was not fond of the name ‘Louis,’ and, with the exception of a few of his early-career publications, the author of his works was identified simply as William Stern. By 1888, when Stern began his university studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (later to be named the Humboldt University), he already harbored ideas that would prove central to his personalistic perspective and that would guide his thinking for the duration of his professional life. In a 1927 Selbstdarstellung, or self-­presentation, in which he related the course of his intellectual development, Stern referenced a diary that he kept during his student days. In that diary, he registered the sense he had gained early in his studies of an “overvaluing of the natural science perspective, which is being carried over uncritically into the domains of art, the humanities, and ethics” (cf. Stern, 1927, pp. 131–132).2,3 He would soon develop comparable doubts about the straightforward extension of the ontological assumptions of natural science into the discipline of psychology. Those doubts diminished neither over the course of his doctoral studies nor during his post-doctoral Habilitation work at the University of Breslau (today the University of Wroclaw in Poland). The latter work was mentored by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), to whose ideas about scientific psychology Stern had been introduced

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during his studies in Berlin, before Ebbinghaus relocated to the University of Breslau in 1894. Hence, when Stern later followed Ebbinghaus to Breslau to assume an available position there as a lecturer, he would have done so fully cognizant of Ebbinghaus’s firm resolve that the idea of the absolute and inevitable subjection to law of all mental processes … forms the foundation of all serious psychological work … In order to understand correctly the thoughts and impulses of man, we must treat them just as we treat material bodies, or as we treat the lines and points of mathematics. (Ebbinghaus, 1908, pp. 6–9)

Three years after his move to Breslau, Stern’s enduring opposition to the stance adopted by Ebbinghaus found clear expression in a letter to his friend and University of Freiburg philosopher Jonas Cohn (1869–1947) dated July 31, 1900: What we need above all is a comprehensive worldview that relates the psychological and physical, that is anti-mechanistic and vitalistic-teleological; one in which modern natural science dogma is reduced to its true—that is, relatively inferior—value. This is a huge task, but I will work on it as I can. (cf. Lück & Löwisch, 1994, p. 33).

Lest the wording Stern used in this particular segment of his private correspondence leave a false impression, it should be pointed out that, repeatedly in his professional writings, Stern would make clear his disavowal of that version of vitalism that had been incorporated into a nineteenth century school of thought known as ‘faculty psychology,’ a school that already by the turn of the twentieth century had fallen into disfavor in scientific circles. On the other hand, Stern’s embrace of what he took to be a scientifically defensible teleological conception of human doings, explicitly drawing on the Aristotelian notion of entelechy (refer below), was an intellectual commitment he would maintain for the duration of his career. True to his word in the above-quoted letter to Cohn, Stern turned promptly to the “huge task” he had set for himself, and continued work on it to the extent permitted by his other commitments, both academic

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and personal. In due course—which, as it turned out, would span a quarter of a century after the above-quoted letter to Cohn—he completed a three-volume series setting forth the philosophical worldview, the Weltanschauung, he named critical personalism. The ‘umbrella’ title given to the series was Person und Sache, Person and Thing. Volume I of the series was published in 1906, during Stern’s tenure at the University of Breslau, under the title Ableitung und Grundlehre, ‘Derivation and Basic Tenets’ (Stern, 1906). Volume II, titled Die menschliche Persönlichkeit, ‘The Human Personality,’ would not appear until 1918 (Stern, 1918), two years after Stern relocated to Hamburg in the midst of World War I.4 Still another six years would pass before the publication of Volume III, titled Wertphilosophie, ‘Philosophy of Value,’ in 1924 (Stern, 1924). One project in which Stern was involved over a substantial portion of this time period, and that, by his own account, played a pivotal role in the development of his thinking, was functionally initiated on April 7, 1900, when the Stern couple’s first child, daughter Hilde, was born. On that date, William Stern noted in writing some observations he had made of Hilde both pre-natal (e.g., of detectable movements by Hilde in utero) and immediately post-natal (e.g., of her breathing patterns, visual and auditory responsiveness, vocalizations, and sucking movements; see Lamiell, 2010, pp. 54–55). In writing those notes, a diary project was launched that the Sterns would continue for some 18 years, recording observations pertinent to the development, from birth to puberty, of Hilde and, in turn, of each of her two younger siblings (brother Günther, born in 1902, and sister Eva, born in 1904). In the 1927 Selbstdarstellung referenced above, William Stern left no doubt about the role of the diary project in the sharpening of his personalistic convictions: [In] the studies of my own children … I observed psychological life concretely, and in this way I was protected from those ivory-tower schemes and abstractions that we all too often encounter in the name of psychology. I came to see how a great diversity of psychological contents can exist within a single individual, either simultaneously or sequentially, and yet all converge on that developing person’s unitary life course, thus endowing the highly variegated psychological contents of a life with meaning. The diary material impressed upon me the fundamental form of personal causality,

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which is the convergence of the propensities that are present in a child with the totality of outer influences. In short, the diary material provided me with a perspectival foundation for the philosophical theory I was gradually developing. (Stern, 1927, p. 17)

The “philosophical theory” to which Stern referred here was, of course, critical personalism.

The Rudiments of Critical Personalism Persons versus Things The following passage, which is translated from a footnote that appears in an early chapter of Volume I of Person and Thing (Stern, 1906), reflects both Stern’s keen interest as a psychologist in child development and, at the same time, his philosophical opposition to an utterly impersonalistic conception of human psychological functioning of the sort embraced by his erstwhile mentor Ebbinghaus (refer above): The impersonal [mechanistic] natural scientist sits at his desk and writes: ‘What we call a human is physically nothing but an aggregate of atoms or, as the case may be, energy quanta, psychologically an aggregate of consciousness contents; nothing happens with him except that which must occur as a consequence of the blind causal relationship of physical elements; and his so-called psychological life is nothing but the mechanical coupling of those physical elements. But then he steps into the nursery, where his child is lying ill; he braces himself against the thought of losing this beloved being—beloved being? What is it about atom + atom + atom (or energy + energy + energy) and idea + idea + idea that merits love? And: lose? In one case (that of the so-called living individual) the elements are bound more tightly to one another; in the other instance they stand in looser relationship. In the former instance, the influx and outflow of energy is equal, in the latter case it is not. How can this entirely indifferent variability of purely spatial constellation or energy flow mean the difference between joy and despair? And if his other child comes home from school with poor grades, he warns the child: ‘You should do better!’ Better? Is

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there a better or a worse in the indifferent coupling of indifferent atoms and indifferent ideas? Whence this scale of value all of a sudden? Whence values at all? And: you should? Where mechanical laws and nothing else are at work, how can there be such a thing as ‘should’? Because ‘should’ signifies nothing other than a determination of one’s own doings through the consciousness of a goal ‘Should; is something that can exist only for a self-­ activated being. A mere string of elements cannot ‘should.’ (Stern, 1906, p. 79, parentheses in original, brackets added)

For Stern, the questions he raised rhetorically in this passage made salient the need in scientific psychology for an explicit and irreducible distinction between persons and things. He articulated that distinction in the 1906 book as follows: A person is an entity that, though consisting of many parts, forms a unique and inherently valuable unity and, as such, constitutes, over and above its functioning parts, a unitary, self-activated, goal-oriented being. … A thing is the contradictory opposite of a person. It is an entity that likewise consists of many parts, but these are not fashioned into a real unique, and inherently valuable whole, and so while a thing functions in accordance with its various parts, it does not constitute a unitary, self-activated and goal-oriented being. (Stern, 1906, p. 16)

Although this definition of ‘person’ makes reference to ‘parts’ (Teile) of a person, Stern would in time eschew the use of that term in favor of the term ‘moments’ (Momente). He did so out of concern that reference to ‘parts,’ or ‘components’ or, perhaps most problematic of all, ‘elements,’ would imply the independent existence of those entities prior to the whole person, and this is an implication Stern was intent on avoiding (cf. Stern, 1930b). Viewed through personalistic lenses, the facticity of a whole person is a conceptual pre-requisite for any meaningful consideration of his sub-personal features (Stern, 1930b), much in the way that a jewel is ontologically prior to its facets.

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The Thesis of Psychophysical Neutrality Within critical personalism, the stipulated ontological priority of the whole person over her moments or facets is fully applicable to considerations about those particular facets customarily referenced by the distinction between ‘body’ and ‘mind.’ This is the basis for Stern’s conception of the whole person qua person as a psychophysically neutral entity. It is in virtue of this concept of psychophysical neutrality that Stern distinguished critical personalism not only from a reductive and mechanistic impersonalism, but also from a framework that postulates a mind-body dualism, a view he termed ‘naïve personalism.’ Stern declared in the 1906 volume: It is not that there are the physical and the psychological, but rather that there are real persons. That is the primary fact of the world, [and] the distinction between the psychological and the physical is a fact of secondary order. (Stern, 1906, pp. 204–205)

As this quotation indicates, Stern did not deny that the scientific study of a person’s ‘doings’ could be facilitated by distinguishing at certain points between their ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ facets. Rather, his argument was that as those doings transpire—in ‘real time,’ as might be said today—they do so as ‘moments’ of the functioning of a psychophysically neutral, whole person, an entity that cannot properly be understood as a mere assemblage of discrete and independently existing ‘parts.’ The reader familiar at all with that school of thought advanced by Stern’s contemporaries Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) and known as ‘Gestalt psychology’ would not be mistaken in surmising its compatibility with the holism of Stern’s personalistic views. Stern was concerned, however, that an insufficiently critical Gestalt psychology would end up favoring a view of empirically established Gestalts as ‘elements’ of perception, and thus reduce that entire school of thought to just another version the elemental-ism it purported to challenge. It was this concern that prompted Stern to emphasize: “Keine Gestalt ohne Gestalter!”: “There is no Gestalt absent a gestalt-ing person!” (Stern, 1930b, p. 17). It is the whole person, functioning in a

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psychophysically neutral manner, and not the Gestalts that that whole person perceives, that is fundamental in all human ‘doings,’ including those regarded by psychological scientists as perceptual. To illustrate the concept of psychophysical neutrality, Stern (1930b) invited his readers to consider the simple ‘doing’ of a speech act. Certainly, the execution of such an act requires a physical vocal apparatus, even if in some instances the bodily organs that normally serve that function must be mimicked by an artificial physical device. In any case, a knowledge of the functioning of a physical apparatus, whether biological or mechanical, cannot provide a full account of a speech act because such knowledge provides no insight into the meaning(s) conveyed by some particular speech act, meanings conveyed not only by the words uttered but, in some instances at least, also by audible tones and inflections that a speaker can deliberately incorporate into the delivery of those words. The understanding of those meanings also demands a consideration of psychological factors (memories, emotions, etc.) that are ‘in play’ as the speaker speaks. Still, the foregoing considerations do not justify any claim that a speech act qua speech act is properly understood scientifically as an occurrence causally produced by the quasi-mechanical assemblage of free-standing physical and mental ‘components.’ The act qua act is the unitary (and goal-oriented) ‘doing’ of a psychophysically neutral entity—the person— and this remains true even if a distinction between the physical and mental ‘moments’ or ‘facets’ of that unitary ‘doing’ proves useful for the analytic purposes of the scientist. Clearly, Stern’s thesis of psychophysical neutrality is flatly incompatible with the view of scientific psychology advocated by Ebbinghaus (1908; refer above). Interestingly, however, there was, in addition to Ebbinghaus, another prominent member of the philosophy faculty at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin while Stern was pursuing his doctoral studies there who explicitly advocated a view of scientific psychology with which Stern’s thesis was compatible. Against the notion that scientific psychology should seek to explain (erklären) meaningful human actions on the model of the natural sciences (die Naturwissenschaften), i.e., in terms of laws governing the essentially mechanistic functioning of their underlying elements, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) argued that psychology should be modeled on the human sciences (die

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Geisteswissenschaften), with its overarching objective being to understand (verstehen) human actions holistically, through the descriptive articulation of their meaningful coherences. In a work published in 1894, Dilthey argued for a widespread recognition within scientific psychology that “experienced coherence is primary, [while] the distinction between isolated components of that experience is secondary” (Dilthey, 1894, p. 144; brackets added). The compatibility of Stern’s thesis concerning the psychophysical neutrality of persons with Dilthey’s claim is apparent. However, perhaps because the young Stern was somewhat intimidated, he did not avail himself to the extent that he might have of Dilthey’s tuition. Stern acknowledged this in a rueful remark in the 1927 Selbstdarstellung, stating that “it was not until [well after my doctoral studies] that I realized what a loss it had been for me that as a student I did not develop a closer relationship with the difficult but estimable Dilthey” (Stern, 1927, p. 131). Much more extensive during his student and early post-doctoral years was, ironically, his relationship with Ebbinghaus, who just two years prior to Stern’s matriculation at the university had published a scathing critique of Dilthey’s 1894 tract, and in that text vigorously defended his view that psychology could and should continue to be pursued strictly as a natural science (Ebbinghaus, 1896). Although, as has been noted, Stern did not share the reductive, mechanistic assumptions embedded in Ebbinghaus’s thinking, he was nevertheless drawn to Ebbinghaus’s experimental approach to psychological research for two major reasons. First, Stern explained in the Selbstdarstellung, he found in that approach a needed counterweight to his own more speculative, philosophical proclivities. But in addition, and complementing those very proclivities, he saw in Ebbinghaus’s experimental work some possibilities for giving “the principles of natural science …their appropriate place … [in psychology] without in the process completely materializing one’s view of the world” (Stern, 1927, p.  5, brackets added). It seems, then, that, despite the philosophical affinities between his own views and those of Dilthey, the combination of Stern’s relative youth during his doctoral studies and the interpersonal style of Dilthey did not conduce to a closer professor-student relationship between the two.

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The Entelechy of Personal Doings Within critical personalism, the normal coordination or coherence of the moments of a person’s doings,5 e.g., of routine speech acts, as in the simple example just discussed) is viewed as a manifestation of the “personal causality” to which Stern alluded in one of the passages from his 1927 Selbstdarstellung quoted above (refer to ms. pages 4–5). It is the person herself who coordinates her many ‘moments,’ and this is done in accordance with—though not necessarily in conscious deliberation over— one’s goals. More will be said about goals presently. What bears prior emphasis is Stern’s explicit commitment to the view that “the best expression for this unitary, goal-striving [form of ] causality is the concept of ‘entelechy,’ which was used by Aristotle in a similar way” (Stern, 1918, p. 68, brackets added). In the adoption of this concept, critical personalism incorporated what Stern regarded as a scientifically defensible teleology, and this in turn made place for the Aristotelian notion of final cause over and above the role of material and efficient causes in advancing the scientific understanding of personal doings and development. Stern was fully aware of the resistance to these notions that he would encounter among his contemporaries, a fact vividly reflected in the final passage of the 1918 volume: Long-standing concerns about the excesses and inadequacies of a false teleology have led many to doubt that a teleological perspective could ever be justified at all. But … the idea of purpose is the very key to a true understanding of personal being. Having now acquainted ourselves with a correct understanding of teleology, with its justification and its limits, we have reached a time when the aforementioned concerns—which have actually developed into a kind of ‘teleophobia’—can be allayed. The way has now been opened for making a critically teleological conception of human nature fruitful both for work in the human sciences and for the grounding of cultural life. (Stern, 1918, p. 270)

Within the mainstream of psychology, the ‘way’ that Stern believed he had opened with his 1918 book remained largely untrodden, and more

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than a century later, the “teleophobia” of which he wrote in this passage has remained.6

 oal Systems in the Dynamics of Personal Doings G and Adjustments In the terminology of critical personalism, the framework’s teleological commitments are underscored by the descriptors Stern used to refer to the various kinds of goals that would be relevant to understanding a person’s doings and adjustments (cf. Stern, 2010). An individual person’s own goals, or Selbstzwecke, Stern labeled autotelic, and he identified two major subcategories of such goals: self-­ maintenance (Selbsterhaltung), and self-development (Selbstentwicklung). Stern emphasized, however, that the person who pursues only his/her own narrow individual goals would be an extension-less point in emptiness. Only the goals extending beyond the self give the person concrete content and living coherence with the world. Autotelie encounters heterotelie. (Stern, 2010, p. 130)

Heterotelic goals are originally situated in entities external to the person under immediate consideration. Very often, these external goals (Fremdzwecke) are the self-goals of other persons, and when the focal person adjusts himself in one way or another to another person’s goals, the adjustment is said to be of a syntelic nature. In other cases, the external entities in which the heterotelic goals are situated are entities constituted of collectives of persons, such as families, religious congregations, or civic organizations. A focal person’s adjustment to the goals of such supra-personal entities is thus said to be hypertelic. Yet another possibility is that the heterotelic goals in question are broad human ideals such as truth, beauty, justice, etc. The focal person’s adjustment to such goals is then said to be of an ideotelic7 nature. Of the general process through which an individual person adjusts her own goals to any of these kinds of heterotelic goals, Stern wrote of the human capacity to

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… take up the heterotelic into the autotelic. The former … are appropriated within and formed according to one’s own self. Only in this way does it become possible that the surrender to [external] goals nevertheless does not signify any de-personalization or degradation of the personality to a mere thing and tool, but that, on the contrary, the personality becomes, through its embodiment of those outer goals, in its self-activity, a microcosmos. (Stern, 2010, p. 131)

The process of appropriation to which Stern referred in this passage is one for which he adopted the technical term ‘introception’ (Introzeption). He conceived of that process as active and purposive, and regarded its critical execution as especially important in the conduct of social/interpersonal relationships. In elaborating on his understanding of the person functioning in the physical and social/interpersonal world, Stern drew attention to the need to break free from conceiving of personal doings in isolation: From the standpoint of the person, the world is not only at hand as a part of one’s goal system (specifically with respect to ‘heterotelic’ goal setting) but is also a co-determinant of one’s doing and being. … I refer to this co-­ determination as ‘convergence.’ … The person is, according to his inner dispositions simultaneously goal-striving and in need of supplementation. It is in view of this latter need that a role is postulated for the participation of the world in the person’s development. (Stern, 2010, pp. 132–133, emphasis added, parentheses in original)

Consistent with this view of the person as naturally requiring supplementation by the world in order to survive and develop, Stern regarded the “inner dispositions” to which he referred in the above passage not as fixed characteristics that would dictate an individual’s ‘doings’ in some one, narrow, unilinear and mechanistically causal way (as was understood in the ‘faculty psychology’ mentioned earlier), but rather as potentialities the realization of which might be facilitated—or, as the case may be, impeded—to varying degrees and in a variety of alternative ways, depending upon what is afforded by the external world, whether physical or social or, as would typically be the case, both. Over time, and contingent upon the regularity of those affordances, dispositions can gradually

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become ‘ossified’ into what Stern called ‘traits,’ i.e., personal characteristics that eventually do constrain a person’s doings ever more narrowly. Highlighted here still more prominently is Stern’s understanding of the role of the external world—again, both physical and social—in the life adjustments made by the person over time.

 n Illustration of Person-world Convergence During A Child Development One vivid illustration of the personalistic conception of the dynamics of person-world convergence is found in a discussion of the development of lying in early childhood that was included in a work that Stern published in 1909 in co-authorship with wife Clara (cf. C. Stern & W. Stern, 1999). The primary data for that study were observations that the Sterns had recorded in the previously mentioned diaries they were keeping for each of their three children (refer above), who in 1909 had reached the ages of 9, 7, and 5 years, respectively. The Sterns defined lies as … consciously false assertions made for the purpose of deceiving another. Both features are necessary: if the awareness of falsehood is absent, then one cannot speak properly of a lie. But by the same token: if awareness of falsehood is present but there is no intention to deceive, then again there is no lie. (Stern & Stern, 1999, p. 33)

Utterances known to be false but made without the intention to deceive belonged, the Sterns argued, in a category that they called ‘pseudo-lies.’ Playful fantasies of the sort in which young children commonly engage, e.g., with dolls or make-believe friends), are one kind of pseudo-lie. Another is what they termed “defense against unpleasantness” (p. 35). As one example of this, they wrote of the child responding ‘yes’ to an adult when asked if something in the distance is seen when, in fact, that something is not seen. Often in such circumstances, the child is knowingly giving a false response to the adult’s question not so as to deceive the adult but rather in an attempt to ward off her disappointment

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with herself for failing to have the pleasant visual experience that the adult was trying to bring about for her. Unlike genuine lies, the Sterns maintained, pseudo-lies quickly yield to resistance by the person to whom the untruth has been told. After providing several instructive examples of both pseudo-lies and genuine lies documented by their own observations and those of other adults who had made note of their own or others’ children,8 the Sterns provided a personalistic theoretical account of how lying develops in children. They began by emphasizing that “just like every other psychological function, lying must be seen as a consequence of the convergence of inner and outer factors” (Stern & Stern, 1999, p. 129). The Sterns argued that lying by a child could not properly be regarded as, in and of itself, something that children at some point in their development will naturally and hence inevitably do. In other words, they found no compelling evidence in their observations that there exists in children a natural disposition to lie. However, their own studies as well as what they were able to learn from the observations that other adults had made available to them did persuade them that children do naturally have certain inner dispositions—understood, as explained above, as potentialities—that, in convergence with certain outer influences can lead to occasional lying or even, eventually, to the trait of chronic lying. For example, they explained, children are naturally disposed to defend themselves against the threat of pain or physical danger. Consequently, if forced to adjust to (converge with) a social milieu dominated by adults’ use of corporal punishment in their attempts to control a child’s behavior, the outcome can be lying. Children also naturally have, according to the Sterns, an inner disposition to imitate, and when they are very young this imitation can be relatively indiscriminate. In a milieu where influential adults themselves tell supposedly ‘little white’ lies, or where the child is even recruited into the perpetration of an adult’s lie (e.g., when an adult directs a child to misstate its age on a public conveyance so as to secure a lower fare for the child’s ride), habitual lying can, over time, be the developmental outcome.

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Values and Valuation In the lengthy quotation from Stern’s 1906 book cited above (refer to pp. 5–6), we found Stern raising the question: whence values in the doings of human persons? The pithy personalistic answer to this question is: from persons themselves. Ich werte, … also bin ich Wert—“I evaluate, … therefore I am value”— wrote Stern in ‘Philosophy of Value.’9 To e-valuate is to project values outward onto entities, occurrences, and developments in the world. As Stern often wrote, persons “strahlen Werte aus,” i.e., exude values. The fact that this is true of persons means that value must in some sense inhere within persons to begin with. This is not true of things, which can only be evaluated, passively. From the standpoint of critical personalism, then, it is correct to say that persons—but not things—are inherently value-able, i.e., by their very nature able to evaluate, and it is but a small step from here to the critically personalistic thesis that persons—but again, not things—are inherently valuable. A mechanistic, impersonal psychology is deeply problematic just because it denies and hence obscures this, and, indeed problematic both epistemically and ethically: if persons are not things, then it is both scientifically wrong to portray them as things, and morally wrong to treat them as things.

Note Bene: Personalism Is Not Individualism Given the emphasis in personalistc thinking on the theoretical importance of understanding of psychological phenomena at the level of the individual, one might be inclined to suppose, at least on first acquaintance, that personalism is a form of individualism. Stern himself explicitly sought to head off this supposition in the preface to Volume II of Person and Thing. There he wrote that … critical personalism is as distant from a one-sided individualism, which recognizes only the rights and happiness of the individual, as from a

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s­ ocialism, in which individual uniqueness and freedom are choked by the pressure of supra-personal demands. (Stern, 1918, p. x)

One illustration of personalism’s decidedly non-individualistic nature is found in the just-discussed work on the development of lying in children. In the penultimate chapter of that work, Clara and William Stern took the occasion to contrast their views on how to prevent the development of chronic—or, eventually, even pathological—lying in children with those that had been expressed by the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in his 1762 work, Emile, or Treatise on Education. In that work, which was widely read by scholars, pedagogues, and many others interested in child rearing, Rousseau maintained that the best way to prevent the development of lying in children is for adults to refrain from asking children to tell the truth to begin with. The Sterns quoted Rousseau as averring that “the more the child’s well-being is made independent, be it of the will of others or of their judgment, the less will be the child’s interest in lying” (Stern & Stern, 1999, p. 137). The Sterns commented as follows: One can well understand Rousseau’s pleas as a reaction to prevailing, overly strict child- rearing practices. But to the extent that he is struggling against excessive discipline, he also undermines, to a considerable extent, self-­ discipline, and it is precisely those child-rearing practices that foster self-­ discipline that offer the best possibility of recruiting the child himself to the collective struggle against lying. … A child whose parents teach him about the importance of maintaining self-control in general, a child who has learned to curb his own anger, or to forego a pleasure out of consideration for others, or to tolerate an unfairness—yes, a child who can take satisfaction in having achieved self-control—will overcome his own inclinations to lie. (Stern & Stern, 1999, p. 137)

On sees clearly in this text how the Sterns’ convictions as psychologists concerned to advance scientific understandings of the psychological development of individual children complemented and were complemented by their concerns for the ethos of the larger society in which those children develop. As personalistic psychologists, they emphasized

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that the social milieu in which a child is raised is a critical factor in the child’s development, operating not as some sort of force mechanically producing certain behavioral outcomes in a strictly deterministic fashion the details of which must only be discovered through painstaking empirical research, but rather as a social arrangement that sets parameters for interpersonal relations. Within those parameters, each individual child-­ person must come to act deliberately in accordance not only with his natural inclinations but also with societal values that he will ultimately have to either embrace or reject. The choices made are ones for which the developing person will gradually be held ever more accountable. Viewed personalistically, then, understanding how to prevent the development problematic lying is much more than a topic for scientific study by psychologists, but an issue of socio-ethical consequence for the very fabric of the larger community—and hence one for which not only children but their parents, educators, and adult caregivers must all share moral responsibility. The modern expression ‘it takes a village’ is fully at home within the framework of critical personalism. Further illustrative of the non-individualistic nature of personalistic thinking are Stern’s writings on the identification of pupils who would be characterized today as ‘gifted and talented.’ Work bearing on that subject formed a major part of his research program in Hamburg from 1915 until his banishment from the lecture halls and research laboratories of the university there10 by the Nazis in 1933. In a personal letter to Jonas Cohn in October of 1918, Stern wrote that …the problem of selecting and advancing talented young persons is everywhere in need of discussion. In fact, the questions here are not just in need of psychological investigation, but must also be considered in terms of their ethical, socio-political, and pedagogical facets. (Stern letter to Cohn, October 11, 1918; reprinted in Lück & Löwisch, 1994, p. 115)

A decade later, Stern would underscore this point in one of his professional publications on the topic: The insight that the advancement of highly capable youth would be a socio-ethical task of the first order has spread further and further in recent

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years.… We stand before an ‘ethics of ability,’ such that, on the one hand, the people at large recognize their duties with regard to those talents growing within our midst, and, on the other hand, that individuals blessed with a special ability not be permitted to see in it a private privilege which they enjoy, but a special duty to themselves and to the entire society. (from a 1928 writing by Stern as quoted by Feger, 1991, p. 98)

In her discussion of Stern’s historical contribution to work in this area, Feger (1991) noted that following World War II, U.S. researchers came to dominate this line of research (as well as many others). Inasmuch as the ethos in this country was then—and remains—predominantly individualistic, and is to that extent incompatible with the personalistic perspective, the fact that Stern’s influence in this area of research has been minimal is less surprising. By the same token, the fact of that matter can be seen to underscore the central point under present discussion, namely, that personalism, at least in the intellectual patrimony of William Stern, is not a framework philosophically hospitable to individualism.

A Closing Observation As the material in the following chapters will make abundantly clear, William Stern saw the task of establishing a critically personalistic perspective within scientific psychology as one calling for, above all, careful work of a primarily conceptual nature. The need for such a perspective would be neither discovered in nor decisively validated by empirical work alone. Rather, that need was going to be revealed by meticulous and penetrating critical analysis of its own tenets and those of competing, non-­ personalistic conceptions of human doings. It is just that sort of analysis that the reader will be encountering in the chapters that follow. Unfortunately, it was during the prime of Stern’s scholarly life that critical conceptual analysis itself was falling into disfavor among mainstream psychologists. Such analysis was (and remains) the core concern of the discipline of philosophy, and among early twentieth century psychologists, the movement to sever their discipline’s ties with philosophy was rapidly gaining momentum. It was out of deep concern for this very

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development that Stern’s senior colleague and experimental psychology’s acknowledged founder, the renowned Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), made public his misgivings in an essay published in 1913 under the title (in translation) Psychology’s Struggle for Existence. In psychologists’ rush to distance themselves from philosophy, Wundt pointed out, … [T]here is a question that has hardly been touched upon but should be thought about, as it is a decisive one: this is the question of the extent to which it would even be possible for the psychologist to divest himself of philosophy, and to have no need of the assistance of philosophical observations while addressing in depth psychology’s own problems. Assuming that such philosophical observations would have value, the question is whether or not psychologists would be able to formulate them on their own. … In a psychology divorced from philosophy, philosophical considerations will be latent, and so it is possible that psychologists who will have abandoned philosophy, and whose education in philosophy will therefore be deficient, will be projecting those considerations [anyway, but] only through an immature metaphysical perspective. As a result of such a separation, therefore, no one will suffer more than psychologists—and, through them, psychology. (Wundt, 2013, p. 3 and pp. 23–24)11

William Stern was among the small minority of Wundt’s contemporaries who was in full agreement with the view that a stifling—or, worse, complete cessation—of intellectual discourse between philosophers and psychologists would ultimately degrade the scientific quality of psychology. The fact that Stern’s convictions in this regard were so misaligned with then-prevailing thinking is undoubtedly one—and quite possibly the—major reason for the decades-long obscurity of his personalistic views. We will return to a consideration of this matter at the conclusion of this volume, as it has important implications for any prospect of reviving Stern’s personalistic perspective today. For now, the point to be stressed is that, just as Stern’s belief in the importance to psychology of conceptual work is abundantly reflected in his full scholarly oeuvre, so is it prominently featured in those few of his works translated for inclusion in the contents of this volume.

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Notes 1. Contrary to indications that can be encountered in other sources, Stern’s name was not ‘Ludwig Wilhelm’ nor was it ‘William L.’ (cf. Kreppner, 1992). 2. An English translation by Susanne Langer (1895–1985) of Stern’s Selbstdarstellung was published in 1930 (Stern, 1930a). 3. Here and throughout the present chapter, all quotations of German texts are translations made by the present author. 4. Publication of the book was delayed partly by a paper shortage that developed in Germany during the war. 5. This ‘normal’ coordination or coherence is not exceptionless. Indeed, pathology is to be understood personalistically as an absence, to one degree or another, and for whatever reason, of such coordination or coherence. 6. In the 1960s, the psychologist Joseph F. Rychlak (1928–2013) launched his own highly systematic effort to persuade mainstream psychologists of the need for and scientific viability of what he called a ‘human teleology,’ in a book titled A Philosophy of Science for Personality Theory (Rychlak, 1968). Rychlak doggedly pursued that mission over the rest of his lengthy and highly productive career (see, e.g., Rychlak, 1979, 1981, 1988, 1991, 1994). However, like Stern before him, Rychlak gained precious few converts from psychology’s mainstream. 7. This term is not a cognate of the term ‘idiographic’ (itself often misspelled as ‘ideographic’), but is instead rooted etymologically in the word ‘ideal.’ 8. The Sterns also devoted attention to a syndrome that they labeled ‘truth fanaticism,’ in which a child becomes so concerned about speaking even the slightest untruth that he will refuse to do so even if only in momentary jest (see, e.g., Stern & Stern, 1999, p. 117). Sometimes, therefore, a child must be persuaded that there are circumstances when the generally valid imperative of social conduct ‘Speak the truth’ may be and indeed ought to be relaxed! 9. Volume III of Person and Thing, published in 1924. 10. When Stern relocated from Breslau to Hamburg in 1915, there was no university in that world class center of maritime trade and Germany’s second-largest city. However, Stern worked diligently with a handful of other civic leaders to change that circumstance, and in June of 1919 the

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University of Hamburg was officially opened. Stern was appointed as Director of the Psychological Laboratory there, and was also a prominent member of the Philosophical Seminar. 11. The cited reference here is to my English translation of the entirety of Wundt’s 1913 essay.

References Allport, G.  W. (1938). William Strn: 1871–1938. The American Journal of Psychology, 51, 770–773. Dilthey, W. (1894). Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie [Toward a descriptive and analytical psychology]. Sitzungberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaftlicheh zu Berlin (pp. 1309–1407). Zweiter Halbband. Ebbinghaus, H. (1896). Über erlkärende und beschreibende Psychologie [On explanatory and descriptive psychology]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 9, 161–205. Ebbinghaus, H. (1908). Psychology: An elementary text-book (M. Meyer, Trans.). D C Heath & Co Publishers. Feger, G. (1991). William Sterns Bedeutung für die Hochbegabungsforschung—die Bedeutung der Hochbegabungsforschung für William Stern [William Stern’s significance for research on the highly gifted, and vice versa]. In W. Deutsch (Ed.), Die verborgene Aktualität von William Stern (pp. 93–108). Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang. Kreppner, K. (1992). William L.  Stern, 1871–1938: A neglected ounder of developmental psychology. Developmental Psychology, 28, 539–547. Lamiell, J. T. (2010). William Stern (1871–1938): A brief introduction to his life and work. Lengerich, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers. Lück, H. E., & Löwisch, D.-J. (Eds.) (1994). Der Briefwechsel zwischen William Stern and Jonas Cohn: Dokumente einer Freundschaft zwischen zwei Wissenschaftlern [Correspondence between William Stern and Jonas Cohn: Documents of a friendship of two scientists]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rychlak, J.  F. (1968). A philosophy of science for personality theory. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Rychlak, J. F. (1979). Discovering free will and personal responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. Rychlak, J.  F. (1981). A philosophy of science for personality theory (2nd ed.). Malabar, FL: Krieger.

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Rychlak, J. F. (1988). The psychology of rigorous humanism (2nd ed.). New York: New York University Press. Rychlak, J. F. (1991). Artificial intelligence and human reason: A teleological critique. New York: Columbia University Press. Rychlak, J. F. (1994). Logical learning theory: A human teleology and its empirical support. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Stern, C., & Stern, W. (1999). Recollection, testimony, and lying in early childhood (J.  T. Lamiell, Trans.). Washington, D.  C.: American Psychological Association Books. Stern, W. (1906). Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung, Erster Band: Ableitung und Grundlehre [Person and thing: A systematic philosophical worldview, Volume 1: Rationale and basic tenets]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1918). Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung, Zweiter Band: Die menschliche Persönlichkeit [Person and thing: A systematic philosophical worldview, Volume 2: The human personality]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1924). Person und Sache: System der kritischen Personalismus, Dritter Band: Wertphilosophie [Person and thing: System of critical personalism, Volume 3: Philosophy of value]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1927). Selbstdarstellung [Self presentation]. In R.  Schmidt (Ed.), Philosophy der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung (Vol. 6, pp.  128–184). Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1930a). William Stern intellectual self portrait (S. Langer, Trans.). In C.  Murchison (Ed.), A history of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 1, pp. 335–388). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press. Stern, W. (1930b). Studien zur Personwissenschaft, erster Teil: Personalistik als Wissenschaft [Studies in the science of the person: Personalistics as science]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (2010). Psychology and personalism (J. T. Lamiell, Trans.). New Ideas in Psychology, 28, 110–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. newideapsych.2009.02.005. Wundt, W. (2013). Psychology’s struggle for existence (J.  T. Lamiell, Trans.). History of Psychology, 16, 195–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032319.

2 Impersonalism

Translator’s prefatory remarks: The translated text presented in this chapter was authored by William Stern and published in 1906 as Chapter III in the first of the three-volume set titled ‘Person and Thing’ (Stern, 1906). The comprehensive system of thought that William Stern set forth in ‘Person and Thing’ was called ‘critical personalism,’ and was viewed by him as a needed counter to two other extant philosophical frameworks: ‘naïve personalism’ and ‘impersonalism.’ Stern viewed ‘naïve’ personalism as unsatisfactory because of its essentially dualistic commitments, which rendered it incapable of accommodating the ontological priority of whole persons over any analytic division into the domains of ‘mind’ and ‘body.’ Stern viewed ‘impersonalism’ as unsatisfactory because of its thoroughly mechanistic commitments, according to which persons must be effectively reduced to mere things. Without doubt, Stern saw ‘impersonalism’ as the more ascendant and hence more problematic of these two systems of thought within early twentieth century scientific psychology. Stern’s penetrating and sophisticated account of the conceptual commitments of impersonalism is followed by an informative overview of that -ism’s historical rise to prominence in virtually all then-extant fields of scientific thought—including but not limited to psychology. Familiarity with this text © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_2

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will facilitate the reader’s efforts in reading subsequent chapters to appreciate how critically personalistic thinking contrasts with impersonalistic views. Despite Stern’s efforts, impersonalistic/mechanistic understandings of psychological dynamics and their causal explanation continued to dominate scientific psychology throughout the twentieth century and does so now, implicitly or explicitly, well into the 21st. Accordingly, readers will find the present chapter richly informative, not only as a window onto scientific psychology’s predominant philosophical commitments in Stern’s time, but also as a mirror reflecting commitments that have continued to prevail, whether implicitly or explicitly, to the present. Indeed, addressing the problems presented by this continued presence is a major purpose of the present volume, very much as it was Stern’s overriding purpose in his own time. Our focus in this chapter is on that possible standpoint with respect to the person-thing problematic that negates persons altogether and sees in the world only a system of physical and psychological “things.” We begin with some terminological preliminaries. The ‘thing perspective’ (Sachstandpunkt) is labeled negatively as ‘impersonalism’. The more positive label would be just ‘thing perspective.’ Alternatively, and taking into consideration that this standpoint entails a conceptualization of the world in a fashion analogous to technical fabrications, this perspective might be described appropriately as ‘mechanistic.’1 Of course, this expression is not to be taken in the narrow sense that it has acquired within modern physics and natural philosophy, but rather in the older and more comprehensive sense of metaphysics.2 The fact that the mechanistic view is not identical with the old ‘materialism’ needs no further explication. The mechanistic view is psychophysically neutral. This means that within the purely psychological domain, the implementation of a mechanistic perspective is just as possible as within the physical domain, and this has often enough been attempted. Hence, materialism is merely a special form of application of the mechanistic view. Finally, I view the expression ‘naturalism,’ which one likewise often finds used in a sense that is similar to our ‘impersonalism,’ as too generous for the meaning that we are trying to capture here. Using ‘naturalism’ would foster the impression that the standpoint thus designated is necessary and broadly valid in considering nature, but for other domains of consideration is no longer adequate. But we have no

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intention here of conceding without objection the notion of what is natural to the mechanistic viewpoint. So, the expression ‘naturalism’ would be justified only to the extent that it would simply refer to certain dominant perspectives within natural science. On occasion, a contrast will be drawn between the ‘personal’ and the ‘neuter’ (sächlich), or ‘it-like in quality,’ rather than between the ‘personal’ and the ‘objective’ (sachlich). In deeply rooted customs of speech, this latter contrast has a value connotation favoring the ‘objective,’ and this is far from what we wish to imply. (Grammatically, the word ‘neuter’ is already used to denote the ‘non-personal.’)

The Derivation of Impersonalism Let us now consider how the mechanistic viewpoint had to develop out of its opposite, i.e., naïve personalism. Naïve personalism recognizes the difference between persons and things. It subordinates things as means to persons’ ends, and submits persons themselves to analysis,3 culminating in the assumption of a simple, independent core element contained within them as the sole bearer of personal values and personal doings. The logical basis for this view lies in the dogma of the analytical position: everything that is uniform (einheitlich) is based on the simple (einfach). However, in the very establishment of this dogma, personalism stopped itself in its own tracks. It had analyzed the being of the person, but not the doings of the person. More specifically, it failed to go beyond the uniformity of goals, and so neglected the complexity of the acts involved in the attainment of those goals. That was its logical deficiency. The clearer this logical point became, and the greater the press for theoretical knowledge relative to the more rudimentary requirements of concreteness and symbolic representation, the less satisfactory this ‘half-way’ state of affairs was. Once analysis had begun, it was necessary for it to take its full course. In other words, the analysis of being required supplementation through the analysis of doings. Matters are relatively simple when the unfettered spirit of analysis is aimed at things. The stone on the ground, the water in a container, the

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iron of the magnet: each of these things can be broken down into components that are uniform in nature, with each one of the components having the same characteristics and functions as any other. And if we take all of the functions of the elements together, the action of the whole is completely given. The flowing of the water, or the falling of the stone, or the attraction of the magnet is nothing but the sum of the functions of all of the parts of water or stones or magnets. So, in the case of things, one can with virtual completeness account not only for the existence, or being, of the whole in terms of its simple elements, but also all of the doings of the whole in terms of the simple doings of those simple elements. Here, then, was where the dogma of the analytic position reached its full extension. Since personalism had articulated only the partial formulation ‘All doings in the world can be traced back to the influence of simpler entities,’ it was now necessary to add the claim that ‘simple entities can execute only simple functions,’ thus fully proclaiming of the hegemony of the elements. However, this consequence, at first worked out within the context of the analysis of things, had now to be applied, in turn, to persons themselves. So it happened that naïve personalism, by raising analysis to the level of universal method, sawed off the branch on which it itself was perched. Its dogmatic assertion of analysis led directly to impersonalism. Naïve personalism gave us the picture of the person as a machine with an ‘engineer.’ This ‘engineer’ was that particular component of the whole that, existing alongside of and independent of all of the other components, really is elementary and uniform, but nevertheless executes personal doings, while the other elements have nothing to do other than to react to external promptings in simple and unambiguous ways. At this point, it was necessary to think critically about that obvious assumption within personalism according to which personal doings could be carried out by what was conceived as a simple, uniform entity. When one considers, for example, the immeasurable array of specific acts that must occur in the course of building of a house—in the psychological domain, such activities as planning, perspective taking, willful decision making, disappointments, hopes, etc., and, in the physical domain, millions of muscle contractions, etc.—one’s thoughts lead soon to the contradiction entailed by the presumption that a simple being could be the

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cause of this vast cornucopia of effects. We are asked to accept that, somehow, a simple, uniform entity, one that cannot be further partitioned into a multiplicity of parts, can accomplish such an enormous array of doings! We must accept that this simple, uniform entity stands alongside of and completely apart from other simple, uniform parts of the person but, nevertheless, not only exerts effects on those other parts but does so in just such a way that a condition of the person projected for the future can bring about a specific and quite complex constitution of a current doing! Given the presumed uniformity and independence of all of the elements, the ‘engineer-element’ is not supposed to be different from other elements, i.e., the ‘machine-elements,’ yet given the presumed causal power of the former, it must be absolutely different from the others! What is more, this ‘personal element’ was something that had to be assumed, whereas the impersonal machine-elements were always empirically detectable. The inevitable endpoint of this line of thinking was the irreconcilability of personal doings with uniform being, i.e., the dissolution of the person. The arguments seem to develop seamlessly: Since everything that happens in the world must be traced back to the functioning of basic elements, and since simple elements are capable of only simple functions, there cannot be any basic elements that give rise to personal (and therefore complex) activities. It follows that the apparent uniformity of [complex] personal doings is in reality nothing but the summation of simple functions of impersonal elements. If, because of its incomplete analysis, personalism’s claim was that person = machine + engineer, with n it-like (sächliche) elements being directed by an n + first personal element, the completion of that analysis now yields the claim: person = machine without engineer, the sum of n it-like elements without any personal element. Nihil est in persona, quod non sit res mechanica—Thus could the mechanistic standpoint just elaborated be formulated in a variation of Locke’s claim that there is nothing in mind that was not first in experience. [For here we have: “There is nothing in a person that is not mechanical.”] To this point in the discussion, we have come to know only the negative face of the mechanistic viewpoint,’ i.e., impersonalism. Just because it would not only repress personalism, but, more than that, would replace personalism with something else, we must now seek to represent the

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more constructive features of impersonalism. For this purpose, the dogma of analysis, which seeks to reduce all entities in the world to their fundamental parts, and all doings in the world to the unitary functioning of those fundamental parts, will not suffice. Analysis alone would end with the complete fragmentation of the world, that is, with chaos. So, following the obliteration of all existing syntheses, one must finally seek a new synthesis, so that after the drawing and quartering, a new coherence can be achieved. The nature of this synthesis determines the configuration of a worldview. If one thinks about the principle of synthesis concretely, and so in the form of actually existing entities with the capability to connect isolated particulars into new wholes, that would be nothing other than the reintroduction of persons, albeit in another form. But this would be irreconcilable with the consequences of the dogma of the analytical position [as discussed above]. Hence, the principle of synthesis through which the partitioned world can be brought back together cannot be concrete, but must instead be abstract: the principle of relationship. Accordingly, the dogma of synthesis within the mechanistic viewpoint states that all uniform entities must continuously be thought of as standing in relationship to the others. We call this the ‘dogma of synthetic relation.’ The constructive role that the concept of relation plays in the mechanistic system is an enormous and continuously growing one. Increasingly, the concrete basic principle, that of uniform analytical being, steps back in favor of the abstract basic principle, that of synthetic relationship. In its most radical form, the mechanistic viewpoint becomes a complete relativism, in which interest is no longer focused on what an entity is in and of itself, and what it causes, but instead exclusively on how it relates to other entities. The problem becomes that of finding the formula that specifies the relationships; the world dissipates into an endless chain of relationships among relationships. But we can understand the dogma of relation more precisely (schärfer). Between two substantial separate entities that cannot be formed into a unity by anything concrete, an abstract relationship can only exist by thinking about one in place of the other, i.e., by comparing them. Hence, the fundamental category of all abstractly conceived relationships is that of [in]equality.

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The function of comparison has long since been shown to be one of the most fruitful scientific procedures. The research principle of observing of things what it is about them that is consonant (übereinstimmend) is what has made possible all classification, quantification, generalization and law-finding. But now the mechanistic viewpoint must make the principle of comparability exhaustive—which is to say metaphysical. Its exclusiveness becomes the real content of the dogma of synthetic relation, which now reads: Everything that is in the world and everything that happens in the world can absolutely be subjected to comparison.4 This, then, is the fundamental formula for that system of thought we denote as the ‘mechanistic’ worldview. The proposition that this claim, too, as well as the previously derived dogma of the analytical position, is in fact a dogma and not a conceptually necessary axiom is one that will require epistemological investigation.

The Theses of Impersonalism Based on the two dogmas identified above, we can now elaborate in strictly logical fashion the doctrine entailed by the mechanistic view. We do this by situating that doctrine within a series of theses. These stand parallel to the definitions that we had given for the concept of ‘thing,’ though now we replace nominal definitions with real definitions, in which the existence, and indeed the exclusive existence, of the ‘things’ so defined is proclaimed. (a) We have already realized the consequence of the dogma of the analytical position: every thing that exists is but the sum of its parts, and every occurrence that happens is the sum of its part-happenings. Thesis: there exist in the world only aggregates of simple elements and combinations of simple occurrences.

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(b) The dogma of absolute comparability leads to two important theses, depending upon its application to beings or to occurrences in the world. In reference to the comparability of discovered elements of being, the thesis is that those elements are all equal, or, in other words, that there are no further qualities left to be identified among those elements. This means that in the place of qualities we find only a continuously repeating sequence of equivalent elements. Moreover, every thing that exists in the world can be characterized by designating the repetitions of its elements. The mechanistic viewpoint entails, ultimately, the quantification of everything qualitative. This tendency is, incidentally, supported by the analytical dogma: as long as unique qualities are being considered, qualitative changes are likewise conceivable. Something that is green can become yellow. So it is possible for a single element to undergo a succession of different conditions; the element, then, would not be simple. Hence, the analysis cannot be considered complete until all qualities and their changes are attributed not to characteristics within the elements but exclusively to relationships between unchanging elements. As long as they entail qualitative features, however, these relationships are themselves not pure and simple. To become pure and simple they must be characterized strictly in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’ So here, too: quality is to be replaced by quantity. If the comparability of existing elements is expressed in terms of amount, the comparability of occurrences is expressed in terms of general lawfulness. Here, too, comparability is regarded as absolute: every occurrence must ultimately be completely accounted for as a case of a general rule (Regel). But comparability is also required of these rules. They are merely special forms of, and are themselves fully attributable to, a still more general lawfulness. Hence, what hovers over the mechanistic perspective as a knowledge ideal is not properly regarded as a series of laws that differ qualitatively, but instead the full and unambiguous reduction of all occurrences to the workings of an absolute law of the world. Thesis: All that is qualitative must ultimately be accounted for quantitatively, and every particular occurrence must ultimately be explained lawfully.

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(c) What emerges from the qualitative equivalence of all that exists and the lawfulness of all that occurs is the essential passivity of all existence. Everything associated with such terms as activity, freedom, spontaneity, etc. is to be discarded. This is so because there is in the world only what is caused, according to the abstract principle of lawfulness. There is no functioning (Wirken) that emerges as a doing of a concrete being, and through which that being is capable of influencing what occurs. It is not a being’s own essential nature that determines its doings—for there is no such thing as a being’s essential nature. There is only, and exclusively, the constellation of that being relative to other beings. Thesis: All occurrences are mechanistically determined, i.e., lawfully and unambiguously deducible from the constellation of an existing entity’s environmental conditions. (d) Inherent in all of this is the dissolution of all teleology. Because if there is no such thing as active doing, then nor can there be any such thing as goal-setting. All functioning is the summation of simple functions, and it is impossible for a simple function to produce a complex goal act. Further, just because a happening is unambiguously determined by a current constellation of conditions, which constellation has itself been determined by past conditions, so is determination by a to-be-achieved goal likewise precluded. Thesis: All goal activity in the world is mere appearance; all goal orientation is simply the consequence of aimless (zweckfremd) law-like occurrences. All causation is blind. (e) The final attribute is once again an absence, namely, the absence of value (Wertfremdheit). That which really qualified as valuable, and which was the standard against which everything else not inherently valuable would be appraised, i.e., the existence of independent, coherent personalities, has been dissolved as mere appearance. And the apparently personal functions that seemed to be oriented toward maintaining and augmenting the value of those coherent p ­ ersonalities

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have been revealed as the consequences of the summations of aimless simple functions. And finally: where there are no variations in quality to begin with, nor could there be any qualitative variations in value. Thesis: The world of being and of occurrences has nothing to do with values or evaluations.

The Development of Impersonalism The above theses contain all of the decisive tenets of the mechanistic viewpoint as developed to its fullest implications. This does not mean that wherever we encounter that viewpoint every one of those tenets will be found, logically developed to its full extent. On the contrary, such an exhaustive elaboration of the mechanistic viewpoint has never been achieved. Still, these theses express the tendency that determines the course of theorizing wherever the mechanistic viewpoint is represented, be it with reference to a particular domain of knowledge, or to a comprehensive world theory, or to practical culture. The realization of this tendency has occasioned a development that has run through the centuries. Ever more domains of inquiry are pulled into the mechanistic framework. Once discovered, mechanistic principles have been built up and applied ever more broadly. In the course of this development, the abandonment of the tenets of personalistic thinking has been proclaimed ever more openly—tenets that had lent value and meaning to human life. We can see this slow process of mechanization quite clearly in developments over recent centuries, with the pace greatly increasing during the last half-century. This is to be seen in practical culture. The more that one’s cultural activities and needs involve ‘things,’ the more does one’s very personhood hinges on the thing-assets that one has. The greater the degree to which impartial institutional or bureaucratic intermediaries press their way between one person and another—one thinks of trade, finance, means of transportation—the more limited the influence of strictly intra-personal considerations. To be sure, the continuing increase within the culture of psychological content gives, on the one hand, the possibility of ever more

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advanced training of individual and collective personalities, but also increases, on the other hand, the danger that the individual becomes a formless and style-less aggregate of cultural ‘stuff,’ and, ultimately, the danger of losing the touch for prioritizing values. In the end, the manifold of cultural particulars increasingly diverts the person from the ultimate foundation of all things, and from the need to give coherence and sensible purpose to the entirety of the world. The culture of mechanism culminates in irreligiosity and the utter absence of a worldview. This development in the direction of mechanism is shown even more clearly in scientific theory, including both philosophy and the more specialized scientific disciplines, their concerns being both narrower and more insulated from outside influences. Already in antiquity do we find the mechanistic viewpoint represented in the atomism of Democritis, yet these ideas remained without influence for the next 1,500 years. Change did not come about until the beginning of modernity, when a new philosophy and research orientation began to be elaborated on the basis of scholasticism. Obviously, this line of philosophizing was officially concerned with the mind-body problem, and that remains so today. It is also clear that the cult of individualism-personalism, which is the opposite of the mechanistic viewpoint, is characteristic of certain currents of modernity (consider, for example, the Renaissance, or the views of Leibniz or Nietzsche). But for this very reason, one has to be amazed at the relentlessness and sense of certainty with which, indifferent to and unimpeded by those counter-currents, an unofficial and even, to some extent, unconscious scientific program prevailed over the course of the centuries, a program that emerged from a single demand: the world must be mechanized (i.e., broken down into a system of things). In the middle ages, the academy consisted almost exclusively of the humanities. But as the natural sciences came to dominate inquiry at the dawn of modernity, the academy not only shifted its concern from humanity to nature, but also its perspective, from the personal-­teleological to the impersonal-mechanistic. When, later, attention was turned back with renewed appreciation for the human being—the psychological, the historical, and the cultural—the alternative was faced: either submit these spheres of inquiry, too, to the mechanistic perspective maintained within the natural sciences, or else abandon once and for all the possibility of

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including these newly revived interests within the greater context of the scientific world view. That these seemed to be the only alternatives is a reflection of how strong the suggestive power of the mechanistic viewpoint had become. Things, facts, causes; these three ‘thing categories’ took the place of the earlier personal categories. Things replaced persons, facts replaced values, and causes replaced goals. Hardly had this change achieved a methodological importance before, imperceptibly, it had also achieved a metaphysical significance. De-personification was one of the goals. At first, and with full justification, notions proper to a misguided personification were eliminated— notions such as spirits, ghosts, gods in rocks, water, thunder and lightning. Sickness and abnormal growth came to be viewed in terms of natural [rather than supernatural] causes. In turn, the attempt was made to de-­ personify real persons themselves and, finally, to de-personalize the entire world. The tasks became those of quantification and then proof in terms of lawfulness. One began with the justifiable demand that in everything individual and variable, the fundamental scientific task must be that of demonstrating commonality, the coupling of equal causes with equal effects and the quantitative determination of these conditions. One ended with the conviction that the complete leveling of all that is different, peculiar, and qualitative would be possible. Analysis was called for. Knowledge of the elements, i.e., of their basic characteristics and functions, proliferated. But this glittering success led to the opinion that, through knowledge of the analytically determined elements and their abstract lawful relationships to one another one would have, in principle, everything needed for an understanding of the world’s larger wholes. Ultimately, the absence of value became the norm. With justification, it was demanded that the scientific point of view would have to go beyond love and hate, wishes and interests on the way to the goal of truth. It was forgotten, however, that values and valuation are themselves inherent facts of the world, and that the fundamental neglect of those facts not only did not improve the scientific picture of the world, but necessarily distorted and even stultified it. Increasingly favored was a schematized,

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value-less, abstract truth that distanced thinkers further from the genuine truth of life, one that demands not only a system of being, but also one of values. The prosecution of this program of world mechanization, established within science three hundred years ago, has demanded the relentless efforts of ten generations of scientists. Obviously, efforts in opposing directions have not been altogether absent, but due to their fractionation, their insufficiency, and their overly narrow concentration on sub-­ specialties, those efforts have failed to stop the victory march of the ‘thing principle.’ So now, the time seems to have come when the prosecution of this program has reached its limits—a significant moment. It is a dizzying achievement that humanity can look back upon, but is at the same time a tragic moment, because in spite of everything, the endpoint is the realization of the intellectual (geistig) inadequacy of the mechanistic viewpoint to subsume the entire world. At this point, it is worth devoting a few lines to historical considerations serving to recall the amazing development of the mechanistic perspective in its relentless logicality. It is striking how at the beginning of modern research and philosophizing the questions posed focused on the mechanistic/‘it-like’ aspects of the world. Bacon, who, in his speech ‘Knowledge is Power’ proclaimed the motto of the practical/technical/intellectual mechanistic culture of concern to us here, intended to change the culture of theoretical knowledge. Part of that change, in Bacon’s view, would be the incorporation of a new foundation for scientific method. In the study of nature, it was the discipline of physics that led the way. The original subject of physics had been mechanics, which entailed the study of qualitatively indistinct entities in terms of their location in space and their locomotion through space. As physics entered its second phase, becoming the science of inorganic nature more generally, it carried over the concepts and methods that had proven so serviceable in the study of mechanics. This development was decisive for the course of modern science, for here the mechanistic viewpoint could lay claim to great success, because the entities that were the focus of analysis were really only apparently unitary, and, without any loss, could be broken down into their elements. Galileo, Kepler, and, later, Newton showed that all movements of lifeless entities could be

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understood in terms of the lawful influences of elements on each other, and Newton set forth the philosophy of the new mechanistic perspective in his ‘philosophia naturalis’ or natural philosophy: the world is simplified by learning to regard it quantitatively. But at about the same time as Galileo’s emergence a further step was taken: Descartes objectified all of material nature—including what was organic. The bodies of plants, animals, and humans were not to be regarded as real unities with the capability of functioning teleologically, as it had seemed to naïve thinking, but instead only as apparent unities, like a piece of steel or a lever. They are machines, fully explainable in terms of elements blindly influencing each other. At least the psychological side of life was understood personalistically—granted, naively personalistically as a mind substance exerting its influence on the mechanistic body from without—but it would not be long before here, too, objectification would be imposed. In England, a psychology gradually developed in which the unity of the psychological personality would be decomposed into the contents of consciousness. Hume proclaimed: “The ‘I’ is but a bundle of perceptions!” But well prior to that, on the continent, Spinoza had applied the blind, lawfully progressing conditionality applicable to material beings to the parallel domain of the mental. On Spinoza’s account, the psychological empties itself continuously and un-segmented into space, and he sees in every individuation, i.e., in every compartmentalization of the mental within a distinct personal whole, only an unreality: omnis determinatio est negatio [all determination is negation]. Ultimately, he takes the last step toward objectification, the removal of value, by viewing human willing and doing with indifferent objectivity, as if one were dealing with mathematical figures. So it was that by about the middle of the eighteenth century, but above all through the system of Spinoza, the image of the objectified world was sketched for the first time, admittedly only in broad strokes and suggestive outlines, yet sufficiently recognizable to provide later thinkers with a valuable foundation for the establishment, detailing, and elaboration of this line of thinking. That establishment would take place in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the empirical elaboration would be attempted in the nineteenth.

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In the eighteenth century, the critique of knowledge was applied to itself. Decisive once again for the advancement of the worldview was the establishment of the standard of scientific knowledge by a man who himself had been active as a researcher in the domain of mechanistic natural science, and who now sought to generalize this type of doctrine to any kind of knowledge. The categories of substantiality and causality were interpreted by Kant in a thoroughly mechanistic way: substance as enduring material and causality as lawful relationship between two occurrences. The domain of persons, with their goal-striving and capacity for spontaneous acts, was stipulated for the world of a higher reality, but was explicitly excluded from the sphere of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century had the curious task of undertaking again, from virtually the beginning, the work of mechanization, albeit in quite different dimensions. All those domains that in the previous centuries had already been incorporated into the mechanistic worldview in bold sketches: physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, and ethics, expanded their content, refined their methods, and divided themselves into countless sub-disciplines. This empirical upswing, which up to then had not been experienced to any similar extent, inevitably blurred the simple contours of mechanistic interpretation. Every day brought new qualities (of chemical elements, forms of physical energy, biological kinds, psychological types), and previously unknown goal connections (correlations, adjustments, regulations, inborn characteristics, self-directional features, etc.) were discovered everywhere. One was as far as ever from a mechanistic understanding of the world as quality-less entities and blind occurrences. If this was true with respect to the established scientific disciplines, the nineteenth century brought new facets of the world into the sight range of science. Alongside the question of what exists there arose the equally or perhaps even more important question of how what exists came into existence. From the developmental (i.e., evolutionary/historical) perspective, the matters to be investigated multiplied in all domains. And alongside the study of nature, life, and soul arose the study of culture: many of the “human-“—or, better, “cultural”—sciences are creations of the nineteenth century; for example: political science, jurisprudence, social science, linguistics, literary studies, the science of art, and religious studies.

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The movement toward mechanism, in particular, lost its courage neither in light of the subject matter of the older disciplines that had still not been satisfactorily dealt with, nor in the face of the entirely new contents of the newly emergent specialties. The work of mechanizing the world simply began anew. What previously had been sketched in the form of speculative notions was now laid out in detail with all manner of comprehensive empirical and experimental methods and extended beyond the limits of previous portrayals. The forms of mechanistic knowledge, i.e., quantification and lawfulness, proved to have unanticipated heuristic fruitfulness. No domain remained entirely untouched by the movement toward mechanism, and many domains were completely subsumed by that movement. The downside of all of this was that, as always, successful methods became dogmatic metaphysics, and, gradually, the conceptual eye for all other aspects of the world that could not be subsumed by mechanistic principles began to atrophy. The mechanistic principles of quantitative equivalence, blind causal laws, and the external relationships have achieved uncontested successes in those domains where they had first won citizenship: in the sciences concerned with inorganic phenomena. Physics ceased being primarily concerned with mechanics in the narrower sense (i.e., study of macroscopic movements of solid and fluid bodies), but it remained concerned with mechanics in the broader sense, because in such new areas of study such as gas, light, temperature, electricity, radiation, the central task was seen as one of rendering the phenomena of interest in mechanistic terms, i.e., in terms of mathematical/mechanical principles. Some physicists (the so-called ‘mechanists’ in the narrower sense) interpreted the phenomena just named quite directly as mechanical movements, distinguished from the simplest mechanics only through purely quantitative features such as periodicity, extension, and speed. Other physicists, ‘energy theorists,’ did not go so far; but they incorporated into the concept of energy an expression for the purely quantitative that is common to all of those changing and transitory processes and that either hovers over those processes or lies as ground beneath them as the genuine reality. Indeed, the energy theorists in physics made this purely neutral feature of comparability or equivalence into a thing in and of itself. Moreover, nearly all physicists are in agreement that all happenings in the world

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must be fully accounted for in terms of unambiguous and unconditional lawfulness. The countless advances that were made in this direction culminated in the law of the conservation of energy in its most general form. In similar fashion, chemistry took up the task of reducing all qualitative aspects of the characteristics, variability, and metamorphosis of material through to quantification and hypothetical laws. Through the stereometric hypothesis, chemistry attempted to conceptualize all chemical processes involved in quantitatively specified states and their alterations in terms of simpler and more stable component parts. As physical chemistry, the discipline reduced ‘chemism’ to a componential phenomenon of energy, thereby linking the discipline to the neutral knowledge categories of physics. Finally, from the perspective of the ‘chemical hypothesis,’ the most fundamental atoms (die Uratomen) (out of which all chemical “elements” were thought to be composed) were viewed as the real, irreducible, and quality-less components of existing entities, the ideal of the mechanistic standpoint: complete ‘it-ness.’ The task of mechanization was especially challenging in the life sciences, for it entailed not only the struggle to eliminate all qualitative considerations but all teleological considerations as well. Matters could not remain as they had been in earlier times, when it was summarily decreed that the organism is a machine without any teleological feature, for such a proclamation could neither explain nor eliminate the factually existing goal directedness of every life process. Indeed, the ever-­progressing empirical research had only revealed more of such goal directedness, so that the “vitalism” that prevailed in the first half of the nineteenth century seemed to be a scientifically necessary life principle. Hence, apart from simply denying the existence of a special life force, a mechanistic theory of life had the positive task of explaining seemingly teleological facts in terms of non-teleological causes. For decades, then, organic science has worked and continues working on the problem that often enough seems to be the most fundamental: to understand the organism as a machine, to reduce the organic and complementary relationships between the distinct features of wholes to the blind operation of separate and fundamentally identical elements. Every explicitly organic explanatory concept, be it “life force,” “nisus formativus,” “soul,” or “Dominante” (decision) had to be dismissed as impossible and unnecessary, and

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replaced through a combination of non-organic causes and the application of general physico-chemical principles. Physiology attempted to prove the case for a mechanistic view analytically. It undertook to show that in no component part of organic being or doing can there be found anything specifically organic or teleological. The discipline of physiological chemistry, seeking to show that the stuff of an organic body is no different from the stuff of an inorganic body, came to the conclusion that though the metabolic processes of an organism may be much more complicated than what can be produced artificially in the laboratory, there is, in principle, no difference between the two. Blood physiology sought to understand the circulatory system as a hydro-mechanical pump. Locomotion was reduced to the mechanics of fixed body parts. The nervous processes were first understood in terms of electrical impulses, and later in terms of chemical discharges. The physiology of lower animals and cellular physiology investigated these processes in ever-finer detail. Functions that appeared to reveal spontaneous (and, therefore, hyper-mechanical) doings were proven clearly to be reactions to outer stimuli (geotropisms, chemotropisms, etc.). Through random influences on cell growth, one could modify such growth arbitrarily; indeed, it was even possible to mimic certain goal-appropriate performances of organic matter (for example, the formation of shells by certain forms of algae) in experiments with inorganic matter (e.g., little balls of oil). Unarguably, all of these findings and theories situate our understanding of life on somewhat new ground. However, it is doubtful that they can disprove the existence of an effective teleological process in the organism. Because here one can raise the objection (to be discussed thoroughly later on) that the core of the goal-directedness found in life does not exist in any particular one of the functions investigated by physiology, but rather in the coordination of all of those functions in the interest of survival. The ultimate goal-appropriateness of the doings of the whole as a unitary being is simply not to be grasped by means of analysis. But now, organic science applied another method for understanding life, namely, the evolutionary (genetische) method. In this method, it is the individual organism as a whole that must be understood mechanistically. The exploitation of this method became a matter for biology, which made the living

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individual into a thing by conceiving it as a passive product of external influences. Climate and sustenance, enemies and needs have made the living entity into what it has become. Small changes in random happenstance and outer environmental causes in accordance with blind lawfulness have resulted in the organism’s adjustment—an adjustment completely devoid of goal-directedness, yet nevertheless goal-appropriate. Moreover, this milieu theory satisfies another tendency of mechanistic thought, that horror qualitatum that we encountered in physics and chemistry. The endless cornucopia of organic qualities (kinds, species, forms) came to be seen not only as having emerged from each other, but further and equivalently, as having done so in accordance with the workings of mechanical laws. So here, too, the ultimate ideal appears as the reduction of everything qualitative to a quality-less level. On Spencer’s5 view, a single, undifferentiated origin characteristic (Urbeschaffenheit) and the general lawfulness of differentiation must suffice to give rise, in mechanistic fashion, to the multiplicity of kinds. In addition to inorganic and organic nature, the life of the mind became the third object of the mechanistic movement, in the seventeenth century and then again in the nineteenth. From being a science of the mind and the doings of an ‘I,’ psychology became a discipline concerned with the contents of consciousness and their mechanisms, and with that became a science of things rather than a science of persons. Only that which was revealed by ‘an-alysis’ was considered to exist; the findings of psychological segments would reveal comprehensively the essence of mental life, which, in reality, was itself destroyed by the segmenting process itself. The coming, going, linking, and melding of passive elements was considered the core of that which was borne by the appearance of active doing. Multiplicity and change were regarded as the truths of that which gave the appearance of unity and identity. Neutral features such as quantification (mathematical calculation, measurement, statistics), the establishment of lawfulness, the postulation of intersubstitutable basic elements (gleichartige Urelemente), the elicitation of phenomena by means of external manipulation (experiment) were brought to bear in the domain of the psychological with noticeable success. And after the ‘thingification’ (Versächlichung) of the mind had been pushed so far, it was also fortunately possible to establish

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parallels with the body, likewise conceived of as a thing. Hence the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism as the endpoint of the ‘thing orientation,’ as exemplified by the work of Spinoza, even if, there, in an idealistic form. While everything mentioned up to this point was, primarily, just a deliberate continuation along the path already traveled from the seventeenth century on, the subject of human culture offered the movement toward mechanization an entirely new object of investigation. It is at the same time the domain in which the prevalence of mechanistic tenets is least complete. Originally, the sciences concerned with cultural phenomena of humanity were either historical (history in all of its branches, e.g., literary history, philology) or normative (ethics, logic, aesthetics, jurisprudence, theology). The historical disciplines concerned themselves with the individual, unique peculiarities of happenings, that is, with the genuinely qualitative; the normative disciplines were concerned with the establishment of values and goals that would be achieved through inner doings. But such phenomena as individual peculiarity, value, teleology, and inner causality are thoroughly personal categories. So it was of great significance that here, too, the mechanistic viewpoint was able to bridge the gap and, in a most colorful amalgam, exerted both useful and damaging effects. From the one-sided standpoint of indifferent general validities and lawful concepts, the phenomena of uniqueness and individual peculiarity, i.e., the phenomena of historical analysis, seemed to be no proper object at all for scientific research. Hence, the attempt was made to turn history into a science of laws, to be replaced by sociology—linguistically a bastard and, content-wise, a formless something or other. The ‘merely’ qualitative perspective did not satisfy the spirit of the time, which by then had become accustomed to quantification. The numerical approach—as statistics—was erected in the service of the cultural sciences. The teleological perspective of normativity likewise did not accord with the insistence of the mechanistic orientation that the job of science was to analyze what is accessible to observation in terms of causal relationships and not in terms of value consideration. Thus emerged that psychologism whereby the analytic decomposition of consciousness contents discernable in the course of valuing and acting, thinking and recognizing, observing and doing, believing and praying could be regarded as the essence of ethics,

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logic, aesthetics, and religious philosophy. Spontaneity and inner doings were ultimately incompatible with the requirement of the mechanistic principle according to which causality must be thought of in terms of external impulses. So here, too, just as in the case of biology, a ‘milieu’ theory, i.e., the materialistic, or better yet the ‘economic’ conception of social and historical phenomena, emerged. On this view, the human is simply a kind of mechanical pinball, determined entirely by its utterly impersonal outer circumstances. Persons are explained in terms of their circumstances, and every inner causality is denied, both for the individual and for folks as collectives. It is no coincidence that within the modern cultural sciences the national economy, which is now so inextricably bound up with statistics and sociology, plays a central and highly influential role with respect to the definition of problems, the methods of investigation, and the kinds of explanations similar to the role that for centuries has been played by physics within the natural sciences. For just as physics is the science of the inorganic in nature, so do economics, sociology, and statistics, together, constitute the science of the impersonal in culture. Moreover, the inclusion of psychology has changed nothing in this regard, because psychology defined as the science of psychological laws and as the indifferent analysis of consciousness contents is itself a ‘thing-science’ and not a person science. In effect, “psychologistic” and “materialistic” conceptions of culture are the same, and they are both ‘thing-oriented.’ Ultimately, this entire effort in the direction of mechanizing, or ‘thingifying’ the world culminates in a general philosophical worldview that would fully incorporate all of nature, mind, and culture. This view surfaces in many forms—as materialism in the case of Büchner,6 as evolutionism in the case of Spencer, as hylozoistic monism in the case of Häeckel,7 as ‘energism’ in the case of Ostwald8—but the fundamental direction here is always the same: the world is understood as a system of things that are directionless, valueless, and fully quantifiable, and based ultimately on elements the functioning of which is determined by causes external to those elements.

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Notes 1. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: For ease of discourse, it is this term, ‘mechanistic’ (or, at times, a cognate thereof ) that will be used in this translation in most places where Stern has referred to ‘the thing perspective.’ 2. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as the first and only footnote that he included in this chapter. [In contrast to energic theory, for example, physicalistic theory conceptualizes the material world as a system of moving atoms. In (the older and more comprehensive sense of; JL) metaphysics, both energic theory and physicalistic theory belong together in the camp of ‘mechanistic’—i.e., impersonal— world theories, with both views rejecting the notion of teleological causation.] 3. TRANSLATER’S NOTE: Here and throughout, Stern meant by ‘analysis’ the process of segmenting some object of investigation into its component elements. In effect, the intended meaning here was the opposite of ‘synthesis.’ 4. Alles Sein in der Welt und alles Geschehen in der Welt ist schlechthin vergleichbar. 5. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Stern’s reference here was to Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). 6. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Stern’s reference here was to Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899). 7. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Stern’s reference here was to Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). 8. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Stern’s reference here was to Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932).

Reference Stern, W. (1906). Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung. Erster Band: Ableitung und Grundlehre [Person and thing: A systematic philosophical worldview. Volume 1: Rationale and basic tenets]. Leizig: Barth.

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Translator’s prefatory remarks: The present chapter combines translations of two separate segments of a book authored by William Stern and first published in 1918 (and in unrevised second and third editions in 1919 and 1923). The book appeared as Volume II of ‘Person and Thing,’ and was titled ‘The Human Personality’ (Die menschliche Persönlichkeit) (Stern, 1923). The first segment of this chapter, headed ‘The Concept of the Person,’ served as the Introduction to that volume. The second segment, headed ‘The Problem of Freedom,’ appeared as part of Chapter 4 of the same volume. Seen against the background of Stern’s discussion of impersonalism in the previous chapter, the fundamental tenets of his concept of the person appear in bold relief in this chapter’s first segment. In the second segment, Stern takes up directly the challenge of explaining how a scientific psychology aimed at achieving causal explanations for human doings can be—and, indeed, must be—reconciled with the understanding that a person’s actions are causally determined in part by the person herself.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_3

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The Concept of the Person In its origin and in its contemporary usage, the concept of the person has been applied almost exclusively to the human being. In attempting to broaden the use of this concept within the system of critical personalism to make it applicable to all forms of being that can legitimately be regarded as functioning wholes, it was understood that we were moving into the realm of the speculative and that we would encounter stiff resistance. As a general worldview, critical personalism is by its very nature a system of beliefs that cannot be proven to a doubter in strict mathematical fashion—however plausible its validity, and however fruitful its claims might be both for scientific theory and in practical terms. But matters are entirely different where the person concept is being applied exclusively within its original domain of validity. That the concept of personality applies to the human being is not metaphysical speculation, nor is it some more-or-less plausible belief. It is instead as great a certainty as there is. In order for the science of human beings to reach, through observations of human beings, the view that this age-old certainty is dispensable, it has been necessary for that science to remove itself to a remarkably great extent from reality. How preposterous is that notion, which now dominates many areas of research on human beings! The individual has been probed analytically to the fullest extent possible, and in the process reduced to its bodily parts and functions, to its mental contents, acts, and abilities, and to its social and cultural accomplishments. Inquiry pushes ever deeper into knowledge of the elements and elemental processes, into the lawful regularities governing the relationships between these elements, but the perspective, fixed as it has been on the elements, became blind to the wholeness of the individual. Attention has been focused so completely on distinct parts or aspects of the human that the human himself has been forgotten. All that could be recognized were aggregates of psychophysical facts instead of persons. Everywhere where the human being was made the object of research, this impersonal perspective proliferated, in physiology as well as in psychology, and in ethics as well as in history and sociology. And even where the instinctive sense of researchers bristled against this de-personalization of the human

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being, they nevertheless lacked the philosophical foundation on the basis of which another orientation could have been justified. It is just such a foundation that I am seeking to provide. It will not base the theory of human being on a scheme of dissection (i.e., one that partitions the human into physical and mental elements), but instead on a notion of the unitary, whole, living personality, that in all countless goal relationships to the outer world as well as in the plenitude of the phenomena of inner experiences preserves her unity. It is only on the basis of such a conception of personality that there can be any discussion of parts. It is only in this way that the contrived results of analysis, which up to now have stood in the foreground of researchers’ interests, can acquire their sense and meaning. The philosophical scaffolding of this conception of personality is based on the general worldview of critical personalism, the basis of which has been set forth in the first volume of Person and Thing. For this reason, a brief review of the major concepts developed in that work is pre-requisite for the present discussion. In some places, of course, these introductory considerations will have to point to ideas that were not covered in the earlier book. This is true in particular of the concepts of introception and convergence. We mean by ‘person’ an entity that, though consisting of many parts, forms a real, unique, and inherently valuable unity and, as such, constitutes, over and above its functioning parts, a unitary, self-activated, goal-­ oriented being.1 A thing is the contradictory opposite of a person. It is an entity that likewise consists of many parts, but these are not fashioned into a real, unique, and inherently valuable whole, and so, while a thing functions in accordance with its various parts, it does not constitute a unitary, self-­ activated and goal-oriented being.

 he Fundamental Attributes of the Person: T Multifaceted Unity, Goal Directedness, Individuality By the definition given above, there are three conceptual categories inextricably bound together within the person: substantiality, causal

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effectiveness (Kausalität), and individuality. Every person is, as a whole, a substance, i.e., an independently existing entity. Further, every person is, as a whole, causally effective, i.e., an entity the actions of which are productive of consequences. Finally, every person is, as a whole, an individuality, i.e., something whose essence and significance stands out against the background of the world. These three characteristics of the person merit elaboration. Substantiality is an attribute of the person only as a whole. This means that the person’s essence and being are proper to her as an entirety, and not to the parts (be they physical or mental) that are contained within her. The person consists of parts (cells and atoms, ideas and feelings, etc.), but is neither the mere sum of those parts nor itself just some special part among the other parts. The thesis that the person is no mere summation of elements is what sets critical personalism in opposition to “impersonalism,” a view that claims that only the elements have real existence and that everything else is simply a complex of those elements. On the other hand, the thesis that the person is not some sort of special element among other elements is what sets critical personalism in opposition to “naïve personalism,” a view that claims that the personal core of every person is a simple “mental essence” that takes its place alongside of all of the other elements. Critical personalism opposes each of these other two positions with the thesis: Unitary being need not be simple. The unitas multiplex, or ‘multifaceted unity,’ is a final secret that we can neither explain nor obviate. This is a tenet that must be granted as the foundation of all of our thinking about the world. The foregoing is relevant not only to our understanding of the relationship of the elements to one another but also to their sequencing in phases. Unitary being need not be something unchanging. The person remains a substance despite, and over and above, the changes that he is continuously undergoing; the person remains himself so long as the two other characteristics of causal effectiveness and individuality are maintained without interruption. The person conceptualized critically is causally effective, not in the purely mechanistic sense that cause-effect sequences are being played out in her, but rather in the original sense of ‘effect.’ The person exists in that he exerts effects, and he exerts effects so that he exists. Being and activity

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are inextricably bound together, and, therefore, a person’s activity is a feature of her as a whole, and not as a feature of the sum of parts or any individual part. Certainly, the parts contained within a person carry out activities, but these activities do not, in the aggregate, make up a person’s doings; they are rather but the raw material, condition, and limits of those doings. The basis for attributing this causal effectiveness to the person is the goal-directedness of his doings; the activity of the person is directed and not blind. As activity streams from the person, so is it directed back to the person. Activity asserts and augments the person’s own existence and is dedicated to the inwardly appropriated serviceability for external goals. On this view, causal effectiveness and teleology converge within the person. The person is causa finalis, or entelechie. It is in this precise understanding of goal-directedness that critical personalism overcomes the two other viewpoints named above. Impersonalism denies the very existence of goal-oriented causality and seeks to deduce all human happenings, mental as well as physical, from blind mechanistic causal laws and elementary processes. Naïve personalism acknowledges only an intentional teleology originating from outside the person, whereby God directs the world and the soul directs one’s body. In contrast, critical personalism advocates an immanent teleology: the person as a whole causally affects her entirety in accordance with her objectives as an entirety. All of her doings are saturated with tendency, which exists beyond the boundaries of the mental and physical. Conscious awareness of intended goals is only a late and last manifestation of this comprehensive goal-directedness. If we combine these ideas about goal-directedness with the previously-­ introduced notion of unitas-multiplex, we find that the person does not carry within himself a simple, unitary goal, but instead a multiplicity of goals that nevertheless form a unit, i.e., a system of goals. The third above-mentioned feature of persons is individual distinctiveness. A person’s wholeness can only be realized if it is contained within itself and in that sense partitioned off from the world and from other persons. Every person is an ‘individual,’ and so ‘in-divisible’ from the standpoint of inner experience, however otherwise things might appear when he is viewed from without. The unity of consciousness on the mental side, and the unity of organic configuration on the physical side, are

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the two coordinate appearances of this principle of individualization. But this simple separation from the outside world, the person, is something special and, as such, a unique individuality. Despite all commonalities, through which persons are like other instances of humanity, representatives of a race, members of a gender, despite all broader and narrower lawful regularities that are at play in all personal happenings, there ever remains an ultimate reality, according to which every person stands as a world unto himself before every other person. The three characteristics elaborated up to this point, multi-faceted unity, goal-directedness, and individuality form the constitutive attributes of the concept of person. But once these are recognized, one is led immediately to implications of broad significance, namely, the notions of the hierarchy of persons, of convergence with the world, and of psychophysical neutrality.

Person and World (Hierarchy and Convergence) To elaborate on the first two of these implications, it is necessary to start with the counter-opposite of the person concept, i.e., the concept of ‘thing.’ We regard as ‘things’ all of those entities that are not understood to be individual, self-activating wholes. A ‘thing’ is thus an entity that is a conglomerate but not a unity; passive and not self-activating, and is, with respect to other entities, comparable, measurable, and interchangeable rather than individual and unique. With ‘things,’ occurrences do not stem from the doings of the things themselves, but are brought about causally through the workings of general laws that are external to those things. The functioning of things is blind and mechanical. Things have no goals of their own, and can, at best, be made serviceable to the realization of some other entity’s goals. If one juxtaposes the concepts of ‘person’ and ‘thing’ as has just been done, they appear to be irreconcilable, and we must resign ourselves to a dualism according to which the world consists of an objective, mechanistic lawfulness that is opposed and antagonistic to personal intentionality. But critical personalism is able to fashion a bridge here. Personal being

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stands in relationship to the world of things in two ways: inwardly in the form of hierarchy; outwardly in the form of convergence. Through the principle of hierarchy, it is understood that the very concept of ‘thing’ depends upon the concept of ‘person.’ This is so because each person, as a multifaceted unity, forms the grounds for determining the manner in which the ‘elements’ of her being shall function. The ‘elements’ serve the person, and the goal objectives of the person are the preconditions for what transpires with the elements. Since the elements must function coordinate with one another according to the person’s goals, those elements are interchangeable and comparable. In short, all characteristics of ‘things’ are present in the ‘elements’ of a person, not because the person himself is a ‘thing,’ but because those elements exist in the service of the person as an entirety. Even the most general physical and chemical laws of nature are nothing other than the forms in which the human person imposes her eternal goals upon its elements, i.e., the entirety of all being. One can express this priority of the ‘person’ concept over the ‘thing’ concept as follows: what appears in its entirety from above as a person is seen from below as a collection of parts, i.e., as a thing. Here we are only applying this principle to the human being. So, it is only in consideration of the super-ordinate person that the elements are ‘things.’ What are they in and of themselves? In response to this question, too, an answer is possible because we conceive of the person as a unitas multiplex: to the extent that they have independent existence at all, each of the components of a person must for their parts likewise be persons, because we cannot conceive of the world in any way other than as consisting of individualized, goal-striving, causally effective substances, i.e., persons. However, since every multi-faceted unity in turn deals with multi-faceted unities, there exists a hierarchy of persons differing in order of magnitude and of indeterminate extensiveness. Within that hierarchy, every person, without regard to his personality, is a part of superordinate collections of persons and a point of unity for subordinate collections of persons. Thus does the human personality take its place as an entity subordinate to and in the service of higher unities such as family, and superordinate to lower personal entities of cells, molecules, and atoms. Through the thesis of hierarchy, the world ceases to be a mere

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juxtaposition of things; and humanity ceases to be a mere aggregate of isolated individuals. Peoples are not merely collections of human beings but real ‘personal’ unities with their own unitary causal capabilities and goal-setting capacities. On this particular point, it will be necessary to expand the concept of personality to cover unitary entities other than individual human beings. But even here, the notion of ‘hierarchy of persons’ will concern us only with respect to its implications for the individual human. The goal system of the human personality is not to be understood without taking into account those tasks having to do with one’s serviceability with respect to superordinate personal unities. As will be seen, this serviceability does make the individual human into a ‘thing’ in a certain sense, but since she is herself, in turn, an individual person, she can never be exclusively a thing. It is here that we encounter that basic contradiction within the human goal system between heteronomy and autonomy, a struggle that is only resolvable through a mystery that is not to be further resolved, namely, the achievement of ‘introception.’ The person-world dynamic is not to be fully comprehended in terms of the super- and subordinate hierarchies. On the contrary, the human sees himself face-to-face with a wide world of things and other persons, of natural and cultural forces—a world that is and remains outside of his own, and yet interacts closely with him. It is only through one’s relationship with this outer world that the concept of the person attains its full reality. This is so because the person is in need of the world in order to complete herself. The external world offers promptings to which the person reacts; that same world forms the material that is engaged by the person’s causal effectiveness, and out of which the person forms himself. The external world sets the limits of and boundaries within which the person’s multifarious tendencies and assets are shaped and realized in particular ways. Thus is it so that for every person the world is, on the one hand, ‘not-I,’ an aimless object and hence an “outer” world in the real sense—but, on the other hand, an “around” world: both stimulus to and tool of personal causality, a facilitator of personal formation. This positive, goal-determined relationship between person and environment we call ‘convergence’ (‘Konvergenz’), and the thesis of convergence will require elaboration elsewhere.

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Psychophysical Neutrality Our conceptualization of the person has yet another, and initially negative-­seeming, consequence that in reality has a thoroughly positive meaning nonetheless. None of the characteristics essential for the person—wholeness of being, goal-striving effectiveness and individualization—belongs exclusively either to the physical or to the mental side of being. On the contrary, each of the characteristics is manifest on both sides and thereby makes the person an entity standing above the dualism of appearance. The old contrast “spirit and material” (“Geist und Stoff”) is not equivalent to the contrast being drawn here between “person and thing.” Instead, the former cuts across the latter. For centuries, the problem of world and humanity suffered by the confounding of these two pairs of concepts. It was believed that the principle of the personal/teleological was identical to the principle of the spiritual/mental. On the other side, it was likewise believed that the principle of the material/bodily could be equated with the notions of thing and mechanism. The result of this was great confusion, as well on the side of humanism as on the side of natural philosophy, and on into the domain of worldview itself. Humanistic philosophy overrated the concept of consciousness because it held that it was there, in consciousness alone, where personal doing, goal-striving, and valuation came together. Proponents of this philosophy felt threatened by the prospect that the domain of the mental might be accessed in a purely objective way. So, in the concepts of the “mental” and “mental life” humanistic philosophy sought to achieve a dazzling ‘between-status’ (Zwischengebilde) that would enhance understanding of both the mental and the personal, without making clear the relationship between these latter two concepts. For its part, natural philosophy held that the domain of the mental had to be something that really was neither mental nor teleological, and positioned itself forcefully but blindly against the countless experiences that spoke in favor of the presence of goal-striving causality in the world of bodily life. Moreover, those few who acknowledged such a teleology did so only by stipulating that it required the postulation of a “mental” principle.

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The only hope for clarity here is a decisive turning away from mind-­ body thinking and talking. The person is not spirit or mind but rather a goal-striving individual whole, and the portrayal of the person in mental as well as physical terms is sensible only as a consequence of her existence and being as a psychophysically neutral entity. From this standpoint, the physicality of the person is as much involved in his goal-oriented doings as is his mentality. The concept of ‘thing’ is likewise psychophysically neutral. It is methodologically possible to treat the elements present in the person without taking into consideration her goal-striving, i.e., simply as elements the functioning of which is determined by certain super-­ ordinate laws. Such an objective orientation can be applied in the same way to either physical elements or to mental elements. One who would explain physical life in terms of the mechanics of atoms makes the organism into a ‘thing,’ and one who would explain mental processes in terms of the laws of association makes consciousness into a ‘thing.’ The oppositional pairs teleological-mechanical (person-thing) and psychological-­ physical (mind-body) are likewise orthogonal to each other. The first of these two pairs will serve as the real axis of the worldview while the other will extend out orthogonally in either direction to represent the different modes in which persons and things can appear. The basis for this turn of thought has already been prepared in the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism according to which the mental and the physical are but two sides of the same essence. However, this doctrine has up to now failed to formulate positively the basis for these two modes of appearance. Thought and discourse has continued to proceed along the lines of the old mind-body dichotomy that in fact has continued to dominate even after having been dethroned. Only by insisting that persons should be characterized only in terms of those attributes that apply both to the mental and to the physical was it possible to conceptualize persons positively, yet in a way that extends beyond the physical-­ psychological duality. Now the perspective turns around: only for so long as we remain committed to the notion of psychophysical neutrality can we hope to grasp the essence of the person as directly as our human faculties permit. Both the physical and the psychological, in and of their respective selves, are now seen as derivative notions. Neither the

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biological organism nor consciousness is any longer an independent entity: both are realized in the un-segmented person. In consideration of this point, the problem of consciousness will not be taken up as part of the present discussion. It requires treatment in a way different from what has thus far been possible in psychology, so that its significance for the genuine (psychophysically neutral) goal-act system of the person can be elaborated. Psychological experience proceeds from and must be understood in terms of personal life. The goal of the present discussion has simply been to give an overview of the features of the personalistic concept of the person, yet there is one essential feature of persons that has not been explicitly mentioned, namely, that of values. It can be said, however, that the question of values has just not been treated explicitly. As one who reads more deeply will discern, the tenets of value are already contained within the tenets of being. In particular, the development of the personal goal system reflects the role of values at many points. Nor is there any reason to anxiously avoid these points as if they are not relevant to the subject, because, ultimately, the basic distinction in the system of values, that between self-­ values and external values, is based on the distinction within the personal goal system between one’s own goals (self-goals) and the goals of others. All specific goals of the personality are finally matters of realizing and enhancing values.

The Problem of Freedom We turn now to an issue that has occasioned controversy for a thousand years, and the orientation of critical personalism with respect to it must be clarified. Ultimately, this is a matter of determining which of the many meanings of the concept of freedom is specifically applicable in the present context. First: we are not concerned here with freedom as a psychological phenomenon. Notions such as the feeling of freedom, or the consciousness of being able to do otherwise, or the sense of responsibility are not subjects of philosophical consideration. Such notions are psychological phenomena that, of course, can be precisely described in terms of their

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structure, but the mere existence of such conscious phenomena in no way answers the question as to whether or not those subjective phenomena correspond to some objective state of affairs, or if they are an illusion on the order of a fever-induced delirium or a dream. The concept of consciousness of freedom is psychological in nature, but the concept of freedom is psychophysically neutral. It pertains directly to the activity of the person, and it is specifically with this that we are here concerned. We ask, then: in what sense is human behavior free? In the objective notion of freedom, we encounter first a negative consideration: free from what? What is not present in behaviors that we call free? The answer to this question has long been taken to be: what is lacking is unambiguous causality—and this notion has resulted in a terrible confusion the elimination of which has seemed quite impossible. By setting freedom in opposition to causal necessity, one makes things far too easy for those opposed to the concept of freedom. This is so because a happening that is not clearly determined by all of its preconditions is incomprehensible to human reason. Here, we find, in fact, an a priori necessity in human thought: a precondition for recognizing and understanding of every happening, including human behavior, is that the happening in question be seen as the necessary result of the constellation of circumstances preceding it. Hence, one who would insist that the principle of freedom necessitates a genuine indeterminism forfeits the possibility of genuine knowledge and can be salvaged by nothing better than an a-theoretical world of belief. But if this is so, one might ask, is not the only alternative to surrender concept of freedom? The answer is: not at all. The reason is that freedom is not to be understood exclusively, or even primarily, in terms of a negative consideration [i.e., in terms of what is lacking from a genuinely free behavior]2 but instead through a positive one. In order to see this, one must revise the concept of causality. Those who deny freedom usually understand causality only in the form of general mechanical causality. In this form, causality means: “Every occurrence is unambiguously determined by laws having nothing to do with goals (Ziele) and purposes (Zwecke).” But this understanding is false. First of all: natural laws of nature can never provide a complete causal account of some happening. In and of itself, a general proclamation,

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which has only the form of a hypothetical “if … then” statement, never leads to a concrete individual happening. No instance is identical to another; yet the singular aspects of any given instance are causally determined no less than are those aspects of that occurrence that are common to other like instances. Therefore, the completion of the causal principle demands that individual causalities be considered in conjunction with the requirements of the general causal laws in order to produce an individual happening. That something can be necessarily determined and yet absolutely unique, with no other occurrence fully comparable and by no general law fully covered. This elusive insight is the one precondition for understanding the concept of freedom. Secondly: causal effectiveness exists not only in goal-blind (mechanistic) form, but also in goal-directed (teleological) form. Our entire orientation heretofore incorporated the notion of causa finalis; the foundational first volume of the present work sought to justify this notion thoroughly, both epistemologically and from the standpoint of the history of science, and that justification will not be repeated here. It must suffice instead to repeat: since in an array of happenings the purposefulness of one can be identified as an empirical fact, the completeness of the principle of causation demands here, too, a causal tracing. But now since all attempts to account for the occurrence of some particular goal appropriate happening as a coincidental side-effect of blind causal processes fail, one is left with no alternative but to assume causal processes which are essentially directed and oriented toward goals, i.e., that are goal-oriented activities. With this we see that in some or other personal action there are two causal groups involved: one is comprised of the general laws of natural happenings; the other is comprised of the individual, goal-striving causalities of the person himself (entelechy). Both groups together determine necessarily and unambiguously the characteristics and course of the action—and with that the principle of causation is satisfied. The joint functioning of both causal groups is at once another expression of the well-known law of convergence: every personal action is a product of the convergence of personal and impersonal (objective) causal factors. However, in joint workings of this sort, the proportion of personal vs. impersonal factors can vary greatly: those actions in which the proportion of personal goal-striving factors is high we regard as free; those in

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which the impersonal factors outweigh the personal ones in the overall causal constellation we regard as un-free or forced. Freedom, we thus see, is not the opposite of causality, but is rather a part of causality as a special kind of causal linkage. The opposite of the causality of freedom is another kind of causality, the causality of compulsion—as was seen by Kant.3 With this, we also achieve an understanding of the psychological phenomenon of “matters might also be otherwise” that is part of the subjective consciousness of freedom. This is so because in both causal groups, the inner causality of entelechy is the focus of attention in every “free” action. Yet, this inner causality is found in the person’s dispositions, and every disposition retains, for as long as it remains a disposition, a multiplicity of possibilities. That is, the goals lying latent in each disposition have a certain latitude and can be realized in various ways. The way finally selected is determined through the convergence of the disposition with impersonal causal factors in the moment of action. This means that the “things could be different” feature of the disposition before the act is just as true as the necessity of the eventual occurrence in the moment of that act. Every disposition has its indeterminacy only because and so long as it remains mere potentiality, and, with that, in need of supplementation. Exactly what actually happens in that moment when the contributing causes exert their effects is unaffected by this. The question “free from what?” is now answered: a free action is free from compulsion, from the disruption of inner entelechy. At the same time, however, we see that the far deeper question is another one, and is formulated more positively: “Free for what?” and we have already suggested the answer: free for the best possible realization of personal entelechy; it is the telos of freedom that is the source of the ‘freeing from’ that takes place. What consequences the one-sided consideration of the negative side of freedom has had in individual lives, in culture, in ethics and in history! As if every arbitrary unchaining were an unrestrained freedom! As if all value and sense of freedom lie not in the goal toward which it strives, but instead in the limitations that it removes! But what is the significance of that goal? Personal entelechy is, according to the principle of convergence, involved in every act. What, then, do we mean by “best possible realization?” We must recall here the goal

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system of the personality, within which we have discerned various partial goals among various grades of value. First, we encountered the separation of self-maintenance goals from those of self-development. The first are activated in reactions, that is, they are closely bound to non-personal conditions. The second work from the inside out, gradually bringing into realization inner conditions. Only those acts which incorporate spontaneous efforts toward self-­development, in which the outer world is not the determining factor, but is rather the material by means of which a disposition [potentiality] is transformed into reality, can be called “free.” In this sense, we distinguish the tree that grows “freely” from one that is constrained to grow along a wall or trellis (ein Spalierbaum). Even a tree such as that has its entelechy and activates it, but only in the lower form of what we may term ‘adjustment,’ which is the only form of goal-directedness available to it. Growth in the sense of its innermost self-development tendencies is not available to it. Matters are entirely different with the completely free-growing tree. It, too, is dependent on outer conditions: sunshine, water, and humus are indispensable for its development, and even necessarily and unambiguously determine, together with its developmental potential, every step of its growth. However, the outer conditions are not imposed in such a way as to disturb or constrain the tree’s growth. Instead, they exist in the sense of facilitating its developmental potential. Hence, we say that, given all causally necessary conditions, the tree grows “freely.” It is in the same sense as this example that we often need the concept of freedom in discussing the human. We say, for example, that Rousseau has his Emile grow “freely;” or that one who has undergone an operation can once again move his arm “freely,” always in the sense that within the overall causal constellation the inner determination of goal appropriateness can be realized. On this view, freedom is identical with the previously developed concept of “spontaneity.” That alone, however, is not the best possible realization of entelechy. In fact, freedom in the moral sense, i.e., that sense of freedom at the center of controversy for a century, has still an entirely different meaning. In the goal system of the personality, not only the goal systems of self-­ maintenance and self-development are juxtaposed, but also these two aspects of self-determination, or autotelie, are juxtaposed with the goals of

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entities other than the focal personality (Fremdzwecke). Collectively, these goals are heterotelic, and include goals of other persons who are one’s peers as well as those who are one’s superiors, and also goals of abstract values [e.g., truth, beauty, justice]. A lower conception of the notion of freedom emphasizes once again only the negative: the liberation from goals that are not among those of the narrow self. That understanding sees nothing but compulsion in legal and religious restrictions, in the legacies of folk traditions and social customs, and it regards as free that act that fends off such restrictions on the self. In this, however, the most powerful mystery of all personal life is overlooked: that of “introception,” which overcomes the opposition of external goals and self-goals, in such a way that the person takes up the external goals into one’s own goal system and thus transforms the personality from an isolated point in space into a microcosm. Then, the ‘I’ is no longer enslaved by externally imposed goals but is rather enriched when the person incorporates the influence of superordinate and peer-level goals into his/her own personal doing. And it is just such a doing that deserves the label of freedom in the full sense. It is no longer purely individual and singular in that it suits the individual special-ness of some particular person. Instead, it is the case that that person expresses general demands that are made upon the person by super-personal goals. But these laws—and this the great and final wonder—are no longer extra-­ personal but are rather self-laws, having been made into components of one’s own goal system: autotelie has raised itself to autonomy. Thusly is the soldier who invests all of the power of his ‘I’ in the service of the development of his fatherland, and with that expresses his personal doing, “free” in a sense entirely different from the individualist, who regards the nurturing of his special-ness and the rejection of goals emanating from others as the highest form of activity. This is why the concept of duty does not contradict the concept of freedom but is its necessary correlate: ‘should’ is the self-willing of ‘must,’ and thus the transformation of compulsion into spontaneity.

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Notes 1. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1  in the original text of the Introduction to Volume II of Person and Thing. [The more precise distinction of the concept of ‘personality’ from the more general concept of ‘person’ will be developed elsewhere.] 2. Brackets added, JL. 3. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text of that section of Chap. 4 of Person and Thing being presented here. [Kant explicitly contrasted the causality of compulsion with the causality of freedom; obviously, he regarded only the causality of compulsion as knowable and scientifically applicable, while he regarded the causality of freedom only as a moral demand. For us, both causalities, as well as their joint workings (and, ultimately, even the reduction of mechanical causality to teleological causality, cf. Volume I) are regarded as aspects of philosophical knowledge.]

Reference Stern, W. (1923). Person und Sache. System der philosophischen Weltanschauung. Zweiter Band: Die menschliche Persönlichkeit (dritte unvereänderte Auflage) [Person and thing: A systematic philosophical worldview. Volume 2: The human personality (3rd unrevised edition)]. Leipzig: Barth.

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Translator’s prefatory remarks: The translated text presented in this chapter was authored by William Stern and published in 1928 as a chapter in a volume edited by Emil Saupe and titled (in translation) ‘Introduction to Modern Psychology’ (Stern, 1928). In this work Stern emphasized the holistic nature of personalistic thinking, and hence the compatibility of such thinking with the larger movement toward holistic thinking that was ascendant at the time, especially in Germany (cf. Diriwächter & Valsiner, 2008). Complementing the discussion of the previous chapter, the first segment of this chapter is devoted to the concept of the person as a self-initiating, goal-oriented, psychophysically neutral entity that converges with his/her physical and social world in the course of development. Stern then elaborates his understanding of the psychological life of persons, with particular attention to the respective roles of conscious and unconscious material in a person’s experiences. Every experience, Stern argues, is to some extent symbolic in the sense of pointing beyond itself, and the peculiar obligation of the psychologist is to advance the understanding of persons by probing this ‘something beyond.’ This, Stern concludes, mandates a place for interpretation in the methodological toolbox of psychological science.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_4

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The expression ‘personalistic psychology’ designates not a special branch of psychology but rather a new orientation to—and, indeed, foundation for—the theory and practice of psychology as a whole. At that, ‘new’ is a label that can be applied to this orientation only with caution. For one thing, it has been worked out in a scientific system of thought that has been under development for some two decades.1 For another thing, there is in the entirety of contemporary psychology, which, particularly in Germany, has undergone a veritable revolution over the past several years, a recognizable trend that may be characterized as ‘personalistic.’ Granted that the perspectival differences between the various schools of thought are still seemingly quite large, and many would contest the appropriateness of the personalistic label. Nevertheless, these differences appear to be of secondary importance relative to the one overarching tendency leading away from a concentration on elements and back to a focus on the ‘whole,’ and in the domain of human doings there is no whole that is more immediate, more real, or more essential than that of the ‘person.’ Hence, the establishment of a personalistic foundation for psychology will make possible the incorporation of the multi-faceted features of modern psychology without distorting them.

The Person The concept of the ‘person’ is not itself a psychological concept, but is rather one that is fundamental to personalistic science. This discipline, currently under development, is one to which psychology and all other distinct sciences of human doings are subordinate. This is so because the person is properly characterized in terms of attributes that lie beyond the distinction between mind and body. When we define the person as self-­ activated, self-determining, goal-striving, sensible whole, we are referring not to this entity’s consciousness contents specifically, nor are we referring to the entity’s bodily functioning specifically, but to an entity that is originally un-segmented, in which the mental and the physical are and remain non-independent ‘moments.’ The person herself is thus psychophysically neutral, and the same is true of the person’s basic characteristics and functions.

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When we treat of the goal system of the person, which gives direction and meaning to his self-initiated activity, we are working in the realm of the psychophysically neutral. We find here on the one hand the immediate self-goals (Selbstzwecke) of either self-maintenance (Selbsterhaltung) or self-development (Selbstentfaltung), and, on the other hand, the goals of others (Fremdzwecke), be they superordinate entities (a people, humanity),2 one’s peers, or abstract ideals. But this oppositionality of goal tendencies would destroy the wholeness of personal being were it not for the existence of a third goal directedness, that of ‘introception,’ or the capacity of incorporating the goals of others into one’s own goal system. Nowhere are we closer than here to the mystery of personality: through the affirmation of objective values as goals of one’s own doings, the person becomes not the mere slave of external forces, a passive thing, for she is, in the process, affirming herself as the self-activated agent of this doing, and thus realizes herself by participating in the realization of the objective world.3,4 Likewise psychophysically neutral is, then, the activity of the person as such in the commitment to the realization of his goals. So, for example, what marks an act of will is not that there is, on the one hand, a conscious experience (e.g., a conception of one’s motive) and on the other hand some bodily movement(s). On the contrary, what marks an act of will is the fact that from an inner, undifferentiated prompting, goal-striving engagement with the world in its current objective state is taken up. It is only in the course of this engagement that we are able to distill out of the willful act the tightly interwoven partial ‘moments’ that we can then identify as the psychological and physical factors involved. The same holds for every other kind of personal activity, for example, speech or artistic accomplishment. Everywhere, the separation into a psychological part and a physical part is strictly secondary, and the resulting artificial isolation is often undertaken only for the purpose of scientific analysis. Among psychophysically neutral activities certain distinctions can be made. Above all, we can distinguish between reactions and spontaneous actions, depending upon the extent to which the activity has been prompted from without or from within. The interweaving of reactivity and spontaneity, and the various sub-categories of both forms of activity, cannot be discussed here in their particulars.

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The fact of person-world ‘convergence,’ which establishes the contingencies of personal doings, is also psychophysically neutral. Previously, the causal relationship between the person and the environment was understood either nativistically, in that the person herself (or, more precisely, the entirety of what she inherited from her forebears) was made into the clear determinant of her being and becoming, or empiricistically, in that the influences stemming from the external world fully determined the form taken by the personality. Both of these one-sided views are superseded by convergence theory. ‘Convergence’ means the joint influence of the world and the goal-striving person. In the smallest and in the greatest doing, in every current happening, as well as in every enduring characteristic of the person, both the world’s outer influences and the person’s inner tendencies and goals are involved. A portion of the outer world becomes environment for the person only if it conforms to or in some respect opposes some aspect of his inner striving. Moreover, a person’s inner tendencies and goals can be realized and take concrete form in his personal life only where objective outer conditions serve as stimulus, material, a task, a force, or an assistance. What the person contributes from within are just potentialities, latent energies to which a certain, but still not clearly fixed goal-directedness is added: so-called dispositions. The abilities that at the beginning of life are marshaled faintly and ambiguously are gradually, through continuous convergence with the world, more and more directed in certain avenues, i.e., they become increasingly defined as ‘traits’. This process defines increasingly and simultaneously the possibilities and limitations of the personality’s formability (plasticity)—an insight fundamental for all pedagogy. Abilities can be worked with; traits must be reckoned with. Pedagogy has a broad but not unlimited latitude. It cannot successfully knead the person into the form of any given ideal arbitrarily imposed from without, but must, instead seek to bring to the fore what is most valuable within the limits set by what the person determines for herself in accordance with her given abilities. Dispositions are not separate and discrete faculties (Vermögen) but, rather, partial projections of the unitary, total entelechy, coordinated in manifold ways with each other through their common belongingness to this totality. An isolated examination of separate dispositions (e.g., the

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varieties of talent, traits of will) is scientifically necessary, but must always be supplemented by the study of the whole. Every disposition entails both a capability and a directionality. But in accordance with the relative prevalence of one or the other of these two moments, we can classify dispositions as either ‘ability’ dispositions or ‘directional’ dispositions. Illustrative of this distinction is the difference between intelligence and interest. Structure is one of the features of the person that stands prior to the separation of the physical from the mental. For, as a manifold unity (unitas multiplex), the person evinces a rich articulation of part-wholes of various categories: organs, functions, goal directions, performance domains, experiences, etc. All of these part-wholes stand in coordination to each other, in tighter or looser interpenetration, in the super- or sub-­ ordinate standing of their moments. And this structure is replicated within each one of these part-wholes in such a way that, within the structure, each subordinate moment finds its particular place and its task. Indeed, it is only in this way that the very existence of each part-whole is realized. Within the framework of the person, there is nothing entirely isolated. The person is never constituted of “elements,” that is, of original fundamental parts, out of the summative combination of which the person comes into existence. On the contrary, the person consists of non-­ independent moments. The whole precedes the parts, and the entirety is more real than the parts. Applied to psychology, this principle implies the rejection of every sort of ‘elemental’ psychology that would propose to construct mental life out of the mere combination of ultimately simpler consciousness atoms. There are structures whose domains incorporate the entirety of the person and that, seen from a certain perspective, oversimplify the person. This happens, for example, when the biologist speaks of the ‘constitution’ of the person; or when the psychologist speaks of the person’s ‘temperament’; or when the humanist speaks of a person’s mental ‘type.’5 Depending upon one’s perspective, a given individual can be assigned to a different structural category. It is for this reason that attempts by many contemporaries to establish some single typology as the one valid framework lead astray.

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On the other hand, there are part structures, as already indicated above, and for these, the way in which they are related to the whole is important. For every partial moment of the person and his life, it is the case that in some way it stands out from the whole and is at the same time embedded within the whole. But the relative degrees of protuberance (Abhebung) and embeddedness (Einbettung) can vary over a wide spectrum. At one pole of this continuum stand structures of relatively strong independence, which are sharply separated through opposition to other immediately proximate moments of the person, and which, through their relative wholeness, influence all of their component moments. These are the ‘Gestalten’ for which the Gestalt laws applying to them have been established. So, it is here that modern Gestalt psychology finds its place within personalistic psychology. But even these ‘Gestalten’ (be they physical, mental, or psychophysical in nature) are not autonomous: they have their unity and pseudo-wholeness only thanks to the person: there are no ‘Gestalten’ absent a ‘gestalter.’ Nor, by any means, are all structures contained within the person ‘gestalted’ in this sense. On the contrary, the continuum of protuberance-­ to-­embeddedness extends to a group of structures with unclear margins grouped on the periphery around a sharply defined core and embedded deeply and without borders in the entirety of the person. One example of this would be the experiential complex ‘occupation;’ another would be the psychophysical condition of expectation, in which certain present experiences oscillate into a person’s indeterminate future, and so forth. These firmly embedded part-structures are obviously much more difficult to grasp than are the relatively isolatable Gestalts, and for this reason their significance has up to now been little researched. For psychology, the moral of these last observations is: every psychological factuality is not only structured in itself, but is in turn embedded into higher structural unities, the ultimate unity being the person. Hence, each such factuality is to be understood and explained neither in terms of its elements nor in and of itself, but only in terms of its relationship to the whole person. The last psychophysically neutral attribute of the person to be mentioned here is development. Just as the person is not a sum of elements, the person’s life is also not a mere sequence of happenings but is rather a

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meaningful self-unfolding as an entirety. In this development, every advance that a person makes becomes a part of his totality. Thus, for example, ‘puberty’ is not an epoch in which one can understand bodily changes on the one hand, and psychological changes on the other, but instead a complete inner revolution, that includes physical, mental, and cultural aspects and brings about the thorough interpenetration of all of these developmental moments. The developing person displays three structural attributes the consideration of which is especially important for youth studies: Growth—personal life expands the scope and variety of the contents of life, and experiential contents, and activities. ‘Articulation’—personal life proceeds from an original condition of un-­ clarity and diffusion to one of greater structure, i.e., simultaneously more comprehensive wholes and more extensive inner differentiations. Change—personal life unfolds in a sequence of phases qualitatively distinct from but inwardly related to each other.

The Psychological We are now positioned to make clear how the science of the mental fits into the discipline of personalistics. Let us first be clear about what the psychological is not, namely, something that exists or can be understood in and of itself. So, any attempt to attribute to the psychological some special substance, a mental essence that exists as something distinct within the human alongside of physical substance must be rejected. Likewise untenable is any attempt to regard the psychological as a sum or aggregate of irreducible elements of consciousness that, through purely psychological laws (e.g., the law of association) are linked to each other. On the contrary, the psychological points beyond itself to the “person,” which, as the sole genuine substance and only true totality is the precondition for the existence, functioning, and sense of the psychological. In short: the psychological is, in relation to the person, a derivative; it is something contingent (a kind of appendix

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or attribute). Relative to the whole person, the psychological is something partial. Juxtaposed with the meaning-endowing, self-valuing person, the psychological is a kind of repository of those meanings and values. At first glance, it might seem as if this conception of the psychological diminishes it, but this appearance only results from the fact that many attributes and value accents that up to now have been mistakenly attributed to the psychological as such are in actuality properly attributed to the person herself. However, the consequence of this for psychology is that it has no claim to complete autonomy, because its first question now concerns the meaning of the psychological within the person, and this in turn means that psychology must be grounded on personalistics as its scientific precondition. Because the person exists in a world, he manifests himself doubly without in any way damaging his irreducible unity: once to himself (i.e., inwardly) and once to entities existing outside of him (i.e., outwardly). This is what gives rise to the differentiation of the psychological and physical in the person. So, there are not two latent and continuously parallel-running attributes (as Spinoza and the modern parallelists aver), but rather two ways in which the active person displays her being; two performative directions of the initiating activity of the person. Everything bodily is an ‘expression’ (Äußerung) of the person, while everything mental is an ‘internalizing’ (Innerung; a turning inward) of the person. Expression and internalization are intimately connected; not in such a way that every fragment of bodily being and doing matches some particular fragment of mental doing (a view that would, once again, dissolve the person into mechanistically conceived elements), but rather in such a way that both, as a result of their mutual belongingness to the whole [person], are involved in the most heterogeneous goals and meaning contexts. In this work, we can consider only suggestively the consequences of the above considerations for the newly emerging science of expression (physiognomy, graphology, etc.). An isolated bodily state (e.g., a facial expression or a handwriting movement) is not at all a sign of some isolated mental state, but instead points—directly or indirectly, openly or in disguise—to the uniqueness of the total personality, which is then in turn also reflected in certain mental processes. The discipline of

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characterology, which is closely aligned with these ideas, is therefore not a branch of psychology, but rather one of personalistics, inasmuch as the understanding of the bodily expressions is no less necessary in that discipline as is the understanding of the inner psychological experiences. In this work, however, we are concerned primarily with ‘internalizing,’ i.e., with every act of the person that entails the psychological. The person brings his being (Sein) into consciousness (Bewußt-Sein); his life (Leben) into experience (Erleben). Exactly how this happens remains a mystery; but it is still possible to discuss the meaning of this fact. In order to understand the meaning of becoming conscious (Bewußtwerdung), we must now complement the previously discussed concept of convergence with the concept of conflict. Convergence brings about and directs one’s life (das Leben); conflict awakens the person’s consciousness (das Er-leben). “As long as a person’s life flows smoothly in customary pathways or in obvious accuracy; as long as convergence entails a smooth melding of environmental conditions with inner dispositions, life remains calm and requires no inner reflections. But as soon as inner and outer discordances, constraints, and contradictions occur, consciousness arises from the spark of the friction. When that happens, what is mirrored in consciousness is not all of life, but instead only its struggles: in ego-consciousness only the struggling side of the I; in object consciousness only that portion of the world that must be dealt with or defended against.”6 Now since a person, in accordance with her relatively high level of organization, is a relative abundance of contents, happenings, and values that must be sensibly arranged within the entirety, there are relatively many tensions and constraints that must be overcome, and consciousness is heightened commensurately with level of development. This is seen, for example, when one compares humans with animals, or an adult with a child, or relatively primitive people with people of a more advanced culture. Thus, consciousness has great significance in the personal lives of highly developed people. Even so, this significance remains only partial, and is necessarily supplemented by what is unconscious. This concept, the discovery and investigation of which is among the great accomplishments of the last century, nevertheless acquires only through personalistics its justification. This is so because although, heretofore, the

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unconscious has been described in purely negative terms as a kind of mystical ghost hovering about (as in the writings of Eduard von Hartmann and, still now, in the writings of Freud), what is unconscious can now be understood as a positive force in personal life, to the extent that it stands in relationship to consciousness without itself being internalized. Unconscious is thus that continuing feature of personal life through which the discrete flashes of consciousness (which, considered in isolation would be only a chaos of unconnected points) are bound together meaningfully. Unconscious are the after-effects of conscious experiences, to the extent that they carry over into the (psychophysically neutral) aliveness of the person and here again (in the form of memory contents) can take on anew their internalized character. Unconscious are those activities that, in the service of personal goals, activate consciousness (acting, doing). Finally, unconscious are those rare peak conditions in which the conflicts arising in consciousness are temporarily suspended (such as in raptures or mystical visions). Thus do the unconscious workings of personal strivings form the dark but sense-endowing background from which conscious experiences arise in a great variety of colors and hues. Together, conscious and unconscious material circumscribe the concept of psychological. “Psychological is the person as the essence of his internalization, i.e., to the extent that one’s life entails internalization or stands in relationship to what has been internalized.”7 An additional observation is best related to the concept of experience. Let us call a specific wave in the course of a person’s life that arises from the flow as a distinct feature (e.g., an act of will) a ‘something lived’ (ein ‘Lebnis’). In and of itself, this ‘something lived’ is psychophysically neutral. But if this ‘Lebnis,’ or ‘something lived’ is internalized, it becomes an experience (an Erlebnis), or rather—since it is not projected in its entirety onto the level of consciousness—the features of that ‘something lived’ that are internalized become an experience. Experience extracts from the life of which it is part a temporal presence, centrality (in the experience, personal life is concentrated at the moment), and structure: the experience has a middle and a periphery, stands out, and is internally segmented. But the experience is not there for its own sake, nor is its meaning exhausted in the contents of the experience itself.8 “Only the

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transcendence of an experience over its mere existence gives that experience its meaning.” What does this mean? The person lives—absolutely. But the person experiences—something. What is this something? Recall that consciousness arises from conflict that is opposed by the process of convergence. In convergence with neutral life occurrences, the person remains seamlessly melded with the world. In experiences, however, the person strives to escape this melding. All experience is a kind of disputatious sorting-out of the ‘I’ from the world, of subject and object. Accordingly, every experience points in a preferred direction; its specific object could be either the person himself—who might experience a particular condition as a feeling, or an activity as an impulse of will, or continuing being as self-consciousness— or it could be the world, experienced in the present as a perception, in the past as thought, or in the future as imagination, or in its continued existence as an idea. One sees that from this standpoint a certain primary articulation of consciousness contents is possible. But while these primary groupings have been conceptualized in other psychological theories as initial, given qualities of psychological life, they are seen from the present perspective to be derivatives of the person, and given their sense through the person. Because they point beyond themselves, the meanings of experiences can be characterized as symbolic—a characterization that expresses the peculiar tension between presenting and disguising. In other words: in an experience of feeling or of willing the one’s ‘I’ is symbolized; it is in some way or other projected into the experience, yet not fully revealed or complete, but rather only fragmentarily and suggestively—perhaps also displaced (see below). This is so because, in principle, consciousness does not extend to the deepest layers of the ‘I.’ In like fashion, a perception or a recollection symbolizes a piece of the objective world: here, too, a consciousness content does not deliver a complete depiction of the object world, but only an approximation, a distillation of certain facets, something fashioned in the processing. This is so because despite all striving for objectivity, the convergence-vs.-entanglement between the ‘I’ and the world is never completely resolved. It is always the case that the human is able to recall or think about objects only by looking through the concealing and coloring mist of her own subjectivity.

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If we attend to the negative aspects of the symbolic nature of experiences, we arrive at the concept of self-deception (Bewußtseinstäuschung). There occur deviations of consciousness contents from the object to which those contents are related. Psychology has long recognized such deviations within the domain of objective experiences: sensory deceptions, deceptions of recall, cognitive deceptions (fallacies of thought, failures of judgment, etc.) have been extensively investigated. On the present view, however, there must be analogous self-deceptions in the domain of subjective experiences: my feeling can deceive me concerning my actual condition; the motive of which I am conscious can deceive me about what is actually driving my actions; the self that I consciously sense can deceive me about my true self. Only recently, and partly through the work of the psychoanalysts, has it been made clear to us that there are such self-deceptions of consciousness. But only personalistics provides the wherewithal to understand these phenomena theoretically, because within this framework the person is something other and deeper than the consciousness that he has—including the consciousness of self. In fact: as little as our objective experience ever shows to us the ‘thing in itself,’ so little also does our experience of ourselves show to us our ‘I-s’ themselves. But—and with this we come to the positive facet of the symbolic character of experience—though we can never experience purely things in themselves, or our respective ‘I-s’ in themselves, our experience is nevertheless the continuous (though admittedly incomplete) way to both. Every object experience that one has in perception, imagination and thought is a continuous approximation to the object, an overcoming of deceptions insofar as they are recognized. Every experience of our respective selves is a search for self, a journey along the way to self-discovery, and not self-knowledge in the sense of a grasping of the self as it is in itself. But now for the psychologist, the task here is to interpret what is symbolized by experiences. Since no experience signifies only itself, but instead points to something beyond itself and lying deeper, we as psychologists have the obligation to investigate further into this deeper-lying real sense of the experience. This makes interpretation a necessary method of psychology, so this claim must first be convincingly justified, and an acceptable method for its application must then be worked out. The psychological detail work necessary to make use of interpretation has long

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since begun—examples include dream interpretation by psychoanalysts, handwriting interpretation by graphologists, test interpretations by psycho-­technicians—but what is still lacking up to now is a theoretical justification for these methods, and in carrying out of interpretations there has been the wildest arbitrariness and unscientific generalizations. One need recall here only the well-known attempt to interpret all superficial experiences in terms of deep-seated sexual processes. So, since personalistics has now provided the theoretical foundation for the interpretation of consciousness contents, a methodology of interpretation will henceforth be one of the most urgent tasks of scientific psychology. We must be satisfied here that, in all that has been said above, we have only pointed suggestively to certain philosophical prerequisites for a personalistic psychology. The fertilization of these seminal ideas, categories, and methods for various particular lines of psychological inquiry, and the relationships of personalistic psychology to the directions and methods of the established psychology are matters lying beyond the scope of this essay.

Notes 1. Endnotes TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text: [Person and Thing: System of Critical Personalism; 3 volumes. Leipzig: J. A. Barth. (Volume I. Derivation and Basic Tenets, 2nd edition 1925; Volume II: The Human Personality, 3rd edition, 1923; Volume III: Philosophy of Value, 1924.) For our current concerns, especially relevant are volume II and chapters 6–8 in volume III. The 1917 work titled ‘Psychology and Personalism no longer covers entirely my current understanding, and is no longer available, and is succeeded by the present work. A brief introduction can be found in the 1920 essay titled ‘The psychological life of the human personality.’ Volume VI of the edited work ‘Contemporary Philosophy in Self-Presentations.’ published in 1927, contains an account of the development of my personalistic convictions under continuous relationship to my psychological work. Some of my more focused psychological works also contain seg-

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ments dealing with questions of principle; e.g. in The Psychology of Early Childhood there is a chapter on ‘The personalistic psychology of striving.’ Finally should be mentioned the 1922 essay by W. O. Döring titled ‘The Significance of Personalism for Pedagogy.’]. 2. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: All parenthetical remarks expressed in German give terminology used by Stern in the original text. All parenthetical remarks expressed in English are translations of expressions that appeared in the original text. All remarks inserted into the English text by the translator will appear in brackets. 3. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 2 in the original text: [This concept of introception is central to the aforementioned work Philosophy of Value, which is the last of the three volumes setting forth the system of critical personalism.]. 4. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 3 in the original text: [What is here being called the ‘affirmation of goals’ should not be understood to refer necessarily to a conscious affirmation. The intended meaning here is much broader. It is in the way that a person lives and functions—whether with or without the participation of consciousness—that one determines for oneself the meanings affirmed within one’s goal system. 5. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 4 in the original text: [These examples show again clearly the psychophysical neutrality of the concept of structure. In fact, a theory of ‘constitution’ is being developed within contemporary physiology, biology, and pathology that is nothing other than a personalistic conception of the physical person. On the other hand there is, for example, the typological structural framework of Spranger that extends beyond the purely mental to the other side, into the domain of objective value relationships.]. 6. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In the passage set in quotation marks here, Stern has quoted is own 1924 work, Philosophy of Value, pp. 198–199. 7. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In the passage set in quotation marks here, Stern has again quoted his own 1924 work, Philosophy of Value, p. 201. 8. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 5 in the original text: [This is contrary to “experience philosophy.” For more on this point, refer to Philosophy of Value, p. 204 ff.].

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References Diriwächter, R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2008). Striving for the whole: Creating theoretical syntheses. New Brunswik, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Stern, W. (1928). Personalistische Psychologie (Personalistic psychology). In E.  Saupe (Hg.), Einführung in die neuere Psychologie, 2. und 3. Auflage (S. 192–202). Osterwieck am Harz: A. W. Zickfeldt.

5 The Personalistics of Recollection

Translator’s prefatory remarks: The translated text presented in this chapter was authored by William Stern and originally published in 1930 in the German language Journal for Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs (Stern, 1930). This work offers a vivid and detailed illustration of the manner in which a phenomenon that many would regard as quintessentially psychological, namely, recollection, is treated from a personalistic perspective. It is thus instructive not only for its content, but also as a model for personalistic work in other substantive areas. ‘Recollection’ (Erinnerung) is our topic in this work not only—or even primarily—as a conscious experience, i.e., as something to be understood psychologically, but rather as a personal function, i.e. as something to be understood personalistically. By the expression ‘personalistics’ [and its cognates] we mean a scientific perspective according to which all of the particular psychological,

TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text: [This discussion is the Part I of a forthcoming book by Clara and William Stern titled ‘The Development of Recollection in Early Childhood,’ fourth completely revised edition, published in Leipzig by Johann Ambrosius Barth.] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_5

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physical, and cultural moments of a person’s existence are seen in relationship to the entirety of her personal life.1 We ask: What inner drives and orientations of effort produce the phenomenon of interest which in our case is ‘recollection’? What personal goals does recollection serve? How does it facilitate the realization of these goals? How are these personal tasks of recollection mirrored in the conscious experience of the person? How is recollection involved in the gradual development of the personality? What place does recollection have alongside other phenomena in the overall matrix of personal wholeness? In what ways is recollection involved in the construction of one’s ‘personal world,’ i.e., that reality as the center of which every person experiences and conducts himself? The personalistic perspective is broader than the strictly psychological, and so encompasses the psychological and gives the latter its sense. This is so because although the bare description and analysis of the conscious phenomena of recollection that have been identified by observation, self-­ observation or experiment remain tasks of great importance, they necessarily lead one further to the questions of personal significance and personal integration of the identified psychological phenomena.

The Essence of Recollection These are matters that must be established immediately in connection with our first task: that of circumscribing the concept of ‘recollection.’ Clearly it has something to do with the relationship that every person has to his own past. But what kind of relationship is this? Since every human life presents a temporal line, it is the case at any given moment that a certain part of that line belongs to the past. Admittedly, this part is not entirely ‘certain,’ at least not at its start point, because one could specify the moment of birth, or the moment of conception as the starting point of one’s personal past. But one can also go back in the past beyond that by including the preceding life of one’s parents, and, indeed, one’s forebears. This purely temporal meaning of past presents merely the background possibility, out of which the effective past develops. In every life moment,

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there is not just that moment with its immediate conditions, stimuli and circumstances; rather, earlier circumstances are also present and determine extensively one’s doing, functioning and experience; they evince themselves in one’s routines and habits, in enduring preferences and proficiencies. In short, these factors ensure that the ever-fleeting presences and the flowing into ever new futures can be effected on a firm and familiar platform and in a domain of unerring familiarities. In their broadest meaning we call the persisting effects of the past on the present and future ‘mnemes.’ A mneme extends to every aspect of a person: to body forms and activities just as well as to unconscious mental attitudes and conscious psychological experiences. It is psychophysically neutral. Furthermore, it is not limited to the post-birth life of the individual. There are mnemonic effects on embryos; indeed, the fact of heredity shows the presence of a so-called species mneme. The next step in our considerations here is confined to the psychological side of mnemes. However, we do not yet encounter the concept of recollection, but only the much more general concept of ‘memory.’ Memory is that characteristic of the person in virtue of which events of the past have psychological effects. Memory occurs either in ‘bounded’ or in ‘free’ form. A bounded memoric effect is expressed in the fact that some or another present mental state or content acquires a special shade from some past occurrence, but without those past impressions themselves being present to consciousness in isolation. So, for example, a strong feeling of imbalance that a person has once experienced can later cause serious disturbances of mood and anxiousness in mental attitudes of defense, aggression, etc. In these circumstances, the content of the original occasion for such an effect can have disappeared entirely (i.e., be ‘forgotten’ or ‘repressed’), and possibly even replaced by a new content. On the other hand, the sense of familiarity that the person brings to what is well-known is to be seen as a ‘bounded’ memory effect, at least for so long as one’s behavior is linked only to the present return of the impression; here, too, there are many cases in which a reproduction of the previously experienced content is impossible, yet the psychological sense of ‘familiarity’ is not lost. Belonging here, too, are the most important aspects of ‘education’: previous experiences and acquired impressions

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vibrate (schwingen) in every relevant situation so strongly that the present experience in any given case is fully embedded in them. So, for example, one ‘sees’ a painting with ‘educated’ eyes; one participates in a discussion, one understands political events as an ‘educated’ human. And here, too, the boundedness of memory effects need not be loosened; even one who has little demonstrable ‘knowledge’ of the history of the middle ages can be sufficiently enriched and influenced by what she previously read, heard, and saw, so as to be able to gain much more from the view of a gothic dome or from the lessons of an old mystic than would one whose past did not entail gaining impressions of the middle ages. The territory of such bounded memory effects is unlimited. They are everywhere where mental deportments gain some degree of consolidation: one thinks about interests, sentiments, principles, etc. The person lives in a ‘personal-historic’ way, even if unconsciously so. His own life history has been set down in each of his momentary activities as well as in his chronological states of being. However, memory effects can happen unboundedly or free, leading to independent mental entities in which their source in the past and hence their opposition to the purely present adheres as if consciously. These are the genuine memoric ideas (Gedächtnisvorstellungen). While I ‘now’ see the trees outside of my window and the building across the way, I can simultaneously see before my inner eye an image of the Köln Cathedral, because I saw it once before, and while looking at the printed word ‘dog’ make present to myself the name of the dog in English, because I had learned it previously. The German expression ‘to make present’ (vergegenwärtigen) expresses beautifully this repositioning of something past (das Vergangene) into the present (die Gegenwart). Even the usual technical terminology for this process, ‘to reproduce’ (reproduzieren) contains the word-part ‘to produce’ (produzieren), the momentary achievement in the ‘re-’, the relating backwards to the past. We have now finally reached the point where we can designate the place of ‘recollection’ in this system of personal past connections. The two just-named examples of memoric ideas illustrate two types, one of which is covered by ‘recollections,’ the other by ‘things known.’ Things known are ideas whose relationship to the past is really only etiological: they are there at any given point in time because at some earlier point in

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time they had been experienced and incorporated. But this earlier point in time is not itself of relevance: the knowledge of a foreign language or of historical dates is significant for me not because I gained it at this or that earlier point in time but because I can now call it up. In that moment when a prior acquisition itself enters into consciousness (e.g., ‘I still know how much effort was required of me in school to learn historical facts’), an item of knowledge gives rise to recollection, because recollection is a conscious personal/historical experience. With the capability to have recollections, the person reaches an entirely new phase of being. While all other mnemonic relationships extend directionally from the past to the present and into the future (because the latter epochs are under the influence of the former), with recollections this directionality is reversed: the present reaches back to the past, experiencing the latter as precursor and prelude to the now and later.2 So, a memoric idea is referred to as a ‘recollection’ if it contains within itself the past-ness of its origin: primary is what has been experienced sometime or other and is now surfacing again secondarily. In this, the “sometime or other” can become conscious in varying degrees of certainty; it is quite vague when the graybeard is recalling his childhood (“once upon a time”); it is sharply circumscribed if, for example, I try to make present to myself the experiences of my doctoral exam. This temporal indexing of recollection I would like to call ‘temporalization’ (corresponding to the term ‘localization’ in connection with spatial indexing). Naturally, the differential clarities of temporalization have their personal significance. One might regard the individual with vaguer temporalization as comparable to a people whose historical consciousness is tied to and exhausted by myths and sayings. Similarly, individuals with strong temporalization of recollections might be regarded as comparable to a people with trained historical consciousness, in which their own past is compartmentalized into a sequence of clearly established points of orientation and epochs. This differentiation of recollections intersects with another arranged according to the degree of continuity. We speak of a fully historical consciousness only when the past—as seen from the perspective of the present—appears as flowing continuously. This is likewise as true, in turn, for the historical consciousness of a people as for a single individual—which

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is our sole concern here. This sense of continuity—which for mathematical conception of continuity would be absurd—has its stages. For example, even when the adult feels his past life overall as continuous, the concrete filling-in of this stretch with real recollection contents is possible only bit by bit. And, indeed, it is generally true that every continuum becomes less certain, the further one looks back, and is ever less populated with fully formed recollections. One sees here a stepladder: how the pure mneme, exerting its effects completely unconsciously, leads through an in-between stage of a vague, feeling-infused prior experience to a selection of recalled ideational contents, between which temporal continuity exists only to an extent. Whoever has once attempted—perhaps in the context of autobiographical work—in the course of recalling her own past tried to make it present, can easily relate to this difference. There are long stretches for which there are no traces at all of her store of experiences; either one knows nothing at all about them or knows them only indirectly from other sources such as recounting by family members or from documents such as letter written at the time.3 But this knowledge is no different than the knowledge that I can acquire about the life course of another person. Because there are other epochs of one’s own life history that, though at first they seem to be completely submerged, can strike us as somehow familiar and our own when they have been newly enlivened by some indirect source. Such a purely feelings-like trace of the past can, in turn, already be present in other segments of the past: there are many people for whom little more can be recalled from their entire time as a student or from a severe illness beyond what their mood was. And, ultimately, these subterranean strips of brighter light and glaring, sharply contoured isolated configurations of experiences rise up, at times with a clarity that approximates the intensity of current perception; at times also (in the manner of their effect) with a longevity, even obdurateness, that can be shown in feelings of a very ambivalent nature. This is so because such an un-detachable recollection will at times be sensed as precious treasure, and at other times as a torturous nightmare. The problem of continuity must also be related to the ratio of past to personal present. Where one experiences with full consciousness the continuity of the life line that leads from ‘once’ to ‘now,’ the ‘now’ is

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partitioned from a simple phase into a comprehensive context that carries and envelopes it. But such an experience as this is hardly ever realized; it is at best approximated in seniority, when even the present itself is so fleeting that it no longer stands out much from the ever more enlivened shadows of the past. Even in the changes in psychological life accompanied by illness, a similar blurring of immediate experience and immediate recollection could occur. However, for the normally trained recollective structure, we find the opposite phenomenon: mnemonic separation. What is past must initially stand out from what is present, so as only later to be applied in common with the present to the unitary life line. This separation can take on widely disparate degrees. Sometimes only a single recollection enters into a present situation as a strange form, with the two not compatible; the strange form belongs to another time, another reality, different from the one that is now perceived, felt, and lived—and does not belong to me, yet is simultaneously there alongside these entirely different pictures that now make immediate sense to me. Soon, however, the duality stiffens into an opposition that can have a multiplicity of feeling tones. The simple phenomenon of personal disjointedness (still disregarding any specific content of the then and the now) can frighten or exalt. The ‘once was’ seems eerie to the current ‘I’; something with which one now can identify only with difficulty or not at all. And yet: the very fact that it is still there in recollection forces the recognition of identity: an estranged Doppelgänger. Or else: the multiplicity of the ways of ‘I’ of different epochs, which yet in the current ‘I,’ despite all differences, are united by means of recollection, gives the impression of a huge fullness and can elevate without limit the feeling of self-worth of a personality. Here, I would like to refer to my own experiences while engaged in work of an autobiographical nature. While I was working on my ‘self-­presentation,’4 I lived for a time in a very strange two-sided condition, when forgotten deeds and events surfaced with the threatening demand that I recognize them as ‘mine.’ It was almost as if the vividness that they sought to win so as to again become imaginable as manifest recollections drained some of the blood from them in the here-and-now. But at the same time, I experienced the multiplicity of the phases, and their tensions relative to themselves and in the present, as a warrant that personal historicity is a

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much richer, multifaceted unity than a limited focus on the present and immediate future would suggest. Other feelings-toned aspects of mnemonic cleavage are determined by the content-wise comparison of the phases with accompanying evaluation. Sorrowful retrospection on one’s lost youth, or proud consciousness over how well one spent it, requires at the same time the possibility of the juxtaposition of then and now. At the same time, it becomes apparent here—a point to be examined closer below—what the recollection can gain for the attitude of the person toward himself, i.e., for one’s so-called self-esteem (Selbstwerterleben). It is through the counter-play of continuity and cleavage in recollection that one’s personal history acquires its structure. Those recollections that are essentially linked in their continuity with the present moment of experience acquire a ‘presence’ in a broader sense,5 while everything that lies temporally prior to a distinctive cutoff point is experienced as expressly in and of the past. In this connection, too, there are parallels in the historical consciousness of peoples (Völker). Thus, the contemporary person experiences the entire ongoing course of history after the world war as ‘present,’ even though many things in that time period happened an entire decade or longer back from the present ‘now’—while the time before the world war can only be experienced as ‘it was’ and ‘it was at the time different than now.’ It is similar for the individual. At times it is a decidedly outer event, that the continuity breaks through: an accident, a severe sickness, a change of location. At other times it is an essentially inner happening: an insight (Erleuchtung), a conversion, the sparking of a passions. With regard to the structure of the entire life of recollection, two points are noteworthy here. The first point: the partition between recollections, which itself is almost never momentary but instead has a certain temporal extension, belongs clearly neither to the past nor to the present. It gains a peculiarly timeless character as milestone, or at least it is not part of the one-dimensional extension of personal life processes, but rather has the character of a resting state; it gives personal time a certain latitude.6 The second point: the present in its broader sense contains again a piece of the past, but in continuity up to the experience of the moment:

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the recollection has much more relationship with what is actually a perception and an idea (Anschauung), into which that recollection flows unsegmented; it has no cleavages.7

The I-Relatedness of Recollection When we go from the forms of recollection to their objective content, we immediately encounter a great duality: ‘I’ and ‘world.’ Both are surely involved in every recollection. For just as the human person never exists for himself alone, but instead lives in and with his personal world, so is it also the case that the past that is made current in a recollection both ‘my’ past and the past of ‘my world.’ Nevertheless, the separation is necessary for two reasons: first, there are decided accentuations of a recollection toward the objective or the subjective: many recollections are essentially of ‘it was’ while other are of ‘I was.’ Still, however, both moments enter into the most peculiar and multifaceted connections—or, instead: they stand from the very start in certain amalgamated forms whose particular moments and reciprocal structural relationships must be worked out in a personalistic analysis. Let us consider first the I-relatedness of recollection. Here, we must completely abandon an older understanding of recollection grounded in an elementalistic psychology. Recollections are not the brittle residuals of earlier perceptions that generally contain the traces and remains of the objective character of those perceptions, even if a faded, depleted, in places modified form. On the contrary, recollections are moments of a personal life, and, at that, not only of that earlier life when those moments were experienced initially, but of the continuation of a life that has leads out of that time into my present and future. In the recollection, I belong to myself as I was, as I am now, and as I am now tending to become later. My present and my readiness for the future are filled and enriched, pressed and influenced by my past; I seek to come to terms with my past, to cope with it, to ultimately incorporate it into my entire being, and it is from these basic personal tendencies that the recollective experiences are awakened, formed, and, yes, created. And this should not be regarded as a kind of derailment, or a shortcoming relative

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to some ideal demand for objectivity. On the contrary, the one essential function of recollection (namely, the subjective function) is to secure for the person a past in a form that is suitable to and necessary for her. Certainly, this is never fully successful; in particular, there is always a function involving an objectivizing of recollection to be discussed further below.8 But it is just in this struggle for the continuity of one’s personal/ historical self-awareness where recollection has a crucial task. The personal boundedness of recollection is reflected in the content of recollection in two ways: ‘selection’ (Auslese) and ‘shaping’ (Modellierung). Selection: From the endlessness of what can potentially be recalled only a very small segment is ready for recall and in fact remembered, whether because that segment stands in a uniform relation to the present, and its situation is thus supported and secured through a direct link to the continuous line of the lived life (such as when love between spouses is continuously renewed through common reminiscences; or when the senior recalls with unanticipated clarity his childhood, which in the meantime had seemed to disappear, but has again become uniform), or be it because the recollection through its juxtaposition to the present lends to that very present a moment of tension in the overall life process and thus its uniqueness all the more strongly underscores (as when a five year-old child recalls the time “when I was still a baby”; or when a current accident is immediately deepened by the recall of an earlier happiness, under circumstances that also have just then become bearable. But what does not have the connection to the present is “forgotten,” that is, it comes not at all to current revival in consciousness, because it is at that moment personally insignificant. The fact that there is no such thing as absolute forgetting evinces clearly the importance of this personal relationship; even what seems to have been finally disposed of and gone without any trace can under circumstances be revived unexpectedly if some personal situation or phase of life conduces to that. But such potential recollections, that can directly threaten one’s personal now, awaken in the person two kinds of protective tendencies, that are well known from psychoanalysis: either repression, i.e., the forceful exclusion from consciousness, or abreaction, making something fully conscious, whereby the experience is isolated and made to stand out so

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clearly that it can actually be renounced and expelled from the personal danger zone. Shaping. But even the forming of the factually remembered underlies this personal relationship. It is a quite inadequate characterization of this matter—and admissible only in the interest of terminological brevity— when one says: ‘Recollections change in the course of time.’ It is inadequate because recollections are made into special little entities with lives of their own, when in reality it is the life of the person that continuously shapes and stylizes the recollections. One speaks of optimistic recollection, of glorification, of idealization, of augmentation, and these expressions are valid, but really only in their outer aspects. What is essential is that the past has a plasticity, and this is true not only for the individual but for a people and for humanity.9 Every person must repeatedly come to terms with her past in different ways. Out of inner necessities of one’s life, every person forms for himself, in every temporal phase, his realities. There are not only dreams, in which wishes and drives seem to be realized in the present, and not only air castles, that transform the immediate future into wished-for realities, but also recollections, that shape a reality out of wish and drive and need, but in this case a reality of the past. A woman who in her young years lost her husband after only a few months of happy marriage might live the next half-century just in and from the recollections of that short time; her entire existence is maintained by those recollections, which for her personally are the most real, even if there are hardly any features in the images similar to how things really were and really happened at the time. As far as the purely personal function of recollection is concerned, the discrepancy between primary experience and secondary recall matters not at all, especially when no check on accuracy is possible. The experiences at the time develop gradually first a meaning content that lends those experiences an entirely new reality and is now projected into the past. We stand here at the origin of myths. In fact, the way in which, as in our example, the widow makes a mythical form out of her deceased spouse and a mythical happening out of her short happy marriage, is the same way in which, in the history of humanity, myths came and come into existence.

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Our example offers an especially impressive case of the shaping of recollections. But the process is of general validity even if its manifestation can vary in intensity. Another example can be found in the case of a quite banal recollection. X was witness to a fistfight between his good friend Y and their common enemy, Z.  The event happened so quickly that the direct perception could provide only very chaotic and uncertain impressions. As a result, the experience took real shape only afterward, in recollection, and here the shaping was immediately influenced by personal affects and aspirations. A kind of ‘wish picture’ developed in the form of recalled reality. Moments that presented the friend as in the right dominated; what did not favor that picture was repressed or minimized. It is not even necessary that there existed the prospect of having to testify in court, and it is even less relevant that this formulation and accentuation of the recollection, and its presentation, proceeded with conscious intention. On the contrary, the recollection is at first nothing other than an obvious extract of the personal friend/enemy relationship. The relationship determined the content of the recollection and was in turn enriched by that content. The objective value of the recollection is another question, and will be discussed further below. The personal shaping of recollection is especially prominent where it proceeds in relationship to considerations of self-esteem and self-worth. Examples of this are so well-known and have been described and commented on in so many ways by the various schools of depth psychology that there is no need to discuss them at length here. There is one important distinction that must be noted here. The configuration of recollections relevant to self-esteem will show very different pictures depending upon whether it is the continuity of recollection or its mnemonic cleavages that dominate. This is especially clear in the dark areas of one’s own past: accidents, failures, sins of thought and action. If the person recalls these happenings in their continuous connection with her present, so that she still feels herself standing in their effects and continuations, then the recollection must attempt to eliminate or even turn into something positive their negative sense. Then, the person encases each event—not only vis-à-vis another person but in his own consciousness—in excuses and exculpations, thus changing a ‘could not

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have done’ into a ‘did not intend to do;’ this devalues the missed objective, that—to the extent that it is still regarded as reachable—had been valued so highly, and allots the roles in the interplay of persons and things with the self so that one’s own role is placed in the most positive light possible. Matters are different when the opposition of ‘once’ and ‘now’ determines the recall process. This is so because when the patch of the past stands out from the brighter time that followed, then under some conditions this additional darkening of that patch can serve to enhance the self-value and prestige of the present ‘I’. The simplest example: after overcoming a danger or an illness, the recollection paints what has been experienced as worse than it actually was. A more complicated example: the consciousness of having done wrong. From the occasional need to confess (which need not necessarily be expressed to another individual, but might be expressed only to oneself, as in a diary) all the way to an habitual self-degradation and self-accusation, there are many degrees of the life of a recollection in which sins committed or attempted or thought or even only faintly felt are recalled and furnished with garish colors and harsh points of emphasis. Were the person here to experience himself only in his personal continuity as the one who had done that, then consciousness would have to make his personal existence impossible; and sometimes in states of heavy depression to self-destruction. Usually, however, one experiences with and beyond the continuity of self a distance from one’s past. She has achieved a higher vantage point, because she can look back on that past and give an account of herself, and in this way free herself, or at least desire and strive for such an emancipation. And this is again a positive moment of personal affirmation, and more so the more forceful the to-be-overcome negativity. Not only before God but also before oneself is the human of higher value as a penitent sinner than as one of a thousand righteous others. It is in this way that the personal function of recollection shaping is to be understood. However, it would be a false abstraction to conceive of the ‘I’ in the just-described ‘I-relatedness’ of recollection in a purely individualistic way. Each individual is from the very beginning at one and the same time a social being (Gemeinschaftswesen) and experiences and recalls his I-relatedness simultaneously as a ‘we-relatedness.’ Recollection thus

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entails a strongly social meaning, the more detailed consideration of which is a matter not only for personalistics but also of sociology. After all, sociology has the task of investigating the role played by common recollections in the establishment and development of various social entities. In contrast, the question of the extent to which the life of the single individual is influenced by the commonality of recollections among other individuals falls within the domain of personalistics. Here, only a few indications can be given. Reference has already been made above to the old married couple that lives in common reminiscences. If, sociologically speaking, the marriage is solidified through this commonality of recollections, it is also the case, personalistically speaking, that for each partner the recalled ‘I’ is raised to a recalled ‘we.’ Also notable is the meaning of a common front-experience [in the military], or the meanings that common experiences shared during college days have for countless persons. The personal history of such an individual is in its conscious recollection to a great extent no longer individual, but rather has been incorporated into the history of the community including the ‘I.’ There are great individual differences in the we-relatedness of recollection, whereby fate and predisposition can be determinative. For example, the role of fate is reflected in the fact that we-­recollections are less in the case of an only child than to a child who has siblings. After all, siblings standing relatively close to each other age-wise have not only a common milieu but also a similar kind—namely childlike—of experience of that milieu. As a consequence, their recollections of their own respective lives are obviously saturated with recollections of comradeship. Of course, even the child without siblings has we-recollections because of his relationship to adults, particularly the mother. But since the adult and the child experience the identical facts in very different ways, particularly in the one’s superiority and the other’s dependency, the we-relatedness of the recollection is colored differently. At times, there can be a certain tension between we-recollections and I-recollections. This is most characteristically the case during puberty: the forcefully awakening I-consciousness encounters not only the existing communality with and dependency on the family but also the we-ness of

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the past. The maturing person is ashamed to have been dependent, and does not wish to acknowledge that those around her have experienced her weaknesses in her childhood, and therefore she seeks to shut out these communalities from her recollection. Analogous to this is the case of one who is released from a correctional facility and intends to begin a new life: having been a member of a society of prisoners is a kind of blip in his past that he would very much like to erase from his recollection. People who have experienced an unhappy marriage and have freed themselves from it must, in order to find themselves again, attempt to repress the we-recollections of their past. The we-relatedness of recollections brings us to the transition to the objectifying function of recollection, the topic with which we will concern ourselves in another work.

The World-Relatedness of Recollection By recalling one’s past, one also recalls the world as it then was, i.e., the objects, persons, and situations that were part of the world at that time. The expression ‘her’ world points to the objective character of this recalled reality, because in that stylization and shaping discussed above, the external sphere of the objects of recollection is included, and it is necessary that we understand clearly how the picture of this reality is distinguished from the other realities, i.e., those of immediate perception and of current effort. First of all: the recalled reality, is to an entirely different extent than the present perceived reality vague and ambiguous. This is true temporally, spatially, and materially. In spatio-temporal terms, the relatively circumscribed ‘here’ and ‘now’ contrasts with the ‘sometime’ and ‘somewhere’ of the recalled facts. We discussed above the graded sharpness of temporalization: the recollection that is related to a clear point in time (and correspondingly to an exact location) represents only the limiting case of high approximation to sensed reality; but in most cases there is room for inexactness that is unknown in an immediate perception. Materially speaking, the palpable vividness and clarity of the recalled forms, images,

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colors, tones, etc. in recollections are likewise, on average, much weaker than in immediate perceptions and approaching reality—not actually less ‘real’ but less one-track than in perception. Recollection is also a reality loaded with potentialities. As a result of this feature, the past reality of a recollection is much more closely related to the future reality of striving, wishes, and plans than to the present reality of a perceived situation. But while in the case of the future reality this ambiguous potentiality is a legitimate part of recollection—from the many possibilities only one should and can become reality in imminent action—it is at the same time an undesired limitation of the objectivity of recollection, because the past was already there as an apparently clear present, and the more recollection is oriented toward an objectivity that goes beyond its merely subjective personal function, the more the previously existing objective facts must be made present, i.e., the more a level of clarity must be approximated that renders those facts as if they were present. We encounter here the source of many deceptions in recall: more is expected of recollection than it is able to achieve on its own. In other words, we find ourselves at the point where reality laden with potentiality encounters a clarity laden with errors. The convergence of recollection and perception works similarly to the convergence of an individual’s recalled reality to the trans-individual past. The personal world of each individual is built into worlds of wider spheres: of the social community, of the spatial community, of a people, of humanity, and finally of the cosmos. Compared to the individual world of one person, each of these wider worlds has an ever-heightening objectivity, and the question is how such realness as attaches to personal recollections fits into the transpersonal spheres of validity. Naïve recollection knows nothing of these gradations; it takes its own objectivity as real, without questioning the degree of that objectivity. But this naiveté reaches a limit where the recalled personal past reaches to the transpersonal present and future. In the moment at which from the recollections of the individual X consequences follow—e.g., for the conviction of an accused, or for the scientific presentation of an historical event—it is demanded of X again a clarification and transpersonal objectification of which he is incapable.

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Of course, it is possible for a person to be self-critical enough to appreciate the limited objectivity of her recollections. She then acknowledges that she no longer recalls at all, some things only in vague ambiguity, still other things only in a form that she has stylized and shaped. But this self-­ criticism is easily undermined by the personal moorings or fixations (Verankerung) of recollection. Because as we have seen, when recollection is a needed securing of personal-historical self-awareness, and with that the present sense of self-worth, the shaking of recall certainty becomes unbearable, because in that case the certainty of the ground on which one’s life up to the present has been built suddenly shakes and becomes soft. In this possibility of correction at the trans-personal level, the reality of recollection is different from the reality of perception. If I regard as objective a perception (e.g., think that I see a form in front of me or hear the voice of someone calling), so there is an automatic control, that almost always immediately reveals when that is not objectivity true: the expected consequences of the perceptions do not appear, or other perceivers have noticed nothing. And it is also much easier to adjust to the invalidity of what one initially believed—particularly because the perception was only momentarily believed and therefore not closely bound to the perceiving person. Matters are entirely different in the case of recollection. Usually, automatic controls do not exist, because to a much greater degree than perceptions, recollections remain within the person’s psychological constitution and so there is rarely occasion for countering controls to occur. Consequently, recollections can gradually become so much a part of the psychological constitution of the person that the possibility of recognizing their illusionary character encounters insurmountable constraints. Here, too, and especially instructive example can be given. I know of a case in which, a long time ago, a 13-year-old girl accused a teacher of having touched her inappropriately during a tutoring session. The accused repeatedly contested his guilt. Seventeen years later, there was a new proceeding during which the now 30-year-old repeated under oath before a new investigative judge the earlier claim. Let us now assume that this oath was taken in completely good faith. Should we now grant some degree of objectivity to the woman’s recollection? Whether or not she was at the time really the object of inappropriate advance in the way claimed, her previous testimony with all of its consequences (destruction of the

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reputation and professional existence of the teacher), must have become stylized in a particular way into such a firm and unyielding part of her life that, for her, there could not be any more powerful reality. For this woman, the objectivity of her recollection lay far below the threshold of any possible verification, because that recollection was by now a precondition of her existence, like the air she breathes. And even if we assume that at the time the 13-year-old deliberately lied, that lie could over time and in the course of the events that actually occurred gradually have acquired such a personal validity that the accompanying ideational pictures are no longer distinguishable from real recollections. In effect, the temporally circumscribed lie from long ago has gradually become, for her, a life lie, whose uncovering would be unbearable for her. As in our earlier example of the widow, we must again emphasize here that we seldom encounter with this clarity the seeming objectivity of a recollection that is basically rooted in pure subjectivity. But as a part of the concern for objectivity in the domain of recollections, the phenomena described can play a greater or lesser role. Now, however, we must differentiate certain realities of recollections. Up to now, we have been discussing only the robust actual realities that can be attributed not only to recollection but also to perception. But not even the immediate reality of one’s perceptual sphere is always so blunt and unambiguous. Consider, for example, a child’s play reality (and also that of adults), that maintains a peculiar middle ground between being and seeming to be, or on the feigned reality which sets up another reality demanding recognition not only by an individual but by individuals (e.g., the imposter who pretends to be Prince X). We find such levels of reality also in recollection. Indeed, due to their oft previously mentioned vaguer, more schematic character, the possibility is even greater for recollections to take leave of the real and incorporate a tentative connection with reality. Here, too, there is a play reality; for just as a person plays with current interactions, he also plays with declarations about past interactions, and in this context a peculiar shimmering back and forth between appearance and actuality can be seen. It is well known how in verbal accounts, reports, and memoirs of artificial or fantasized personalities fiction and truth become inextricably solidified. People believe in the objectivity of what is told, but, at that, only

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half and half, with hesitancy and without consequences. Here we find also the never absent shaping of recollection out of a pressure to form and stylize, the aesthetic component of which at the same time diminishes the seriousness of what is being presented. Moreover, what is unique is the reality-likeness of dream recollection. It is almost always the case that what remains in wakefulness from the traces of dream is so vague, fleeting, and fragmented that the mere attempt to formulate the dream in words requires extensive processing, and, in particular, a rendering that makes logical sense. There is often in just this connection an awareness of this elaboration and supplementation and of the consequent diminishment of the correctness of the presentation. But more important is the lack of transpersonal control. The dream reality is and remains my individual reality exclusively and for this reason is the counter piece to the object world that I encounter in common with others. Obviously, this counter piece is not clear to the person from the very start; it is understood only at the conclusion of a long mental development and remains therefore unreachable by the more immature psychological structures that by means of objectifying dream interpretations attempt to construct the dream reality within the objective world. Below we will have similar things to say in connection with children. Finally, we should mention here the genuine lie. What is posturing in the present is a lie in the past. A past reality is consciously claimed that does not accord with the recalled reality, and this in the effort to achieve certain goals within the reality of the present and future. Later it will be our task to show how this way of imagining and portraying the past emerges from certain ‘between’ forms of fully- and half-conscious stylizing, and out of playful or purely affective behaviors develops into that particular phenomenon that we must regard as genuine and fully formed lies.

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The Development of Recollection We have reached the point where, on the basis of the general observations about recollection, we can cross over to the theme of development. Here, space limitations require us to constrain our discussion to the consideration of certain primary themes. All of psychological development is at first a sorting out or making prominent distinct moments of a diffuse overall condition, and then, in turn, the further reordering (re-embedding) of each designated moment into the more clearly sectioned wholeness of the person.10 The phenomenon of recollection comes into existence developmentally in the course of a double partitioning (Ausgliederung). Functionally, it is partitioned off gradually from the vaguer form of the larger mnemonic process itself, because the child has long since been functioning under the unconscious effects of previously encountered situations and impressions (refer to discussion above of mnemes), before some of these effects become memory traces and then, in turn, past-relevant recollections. Phenomenologically, the partitioning of recollection-based ideas (Erinnerungsvorstellungen) and perceptual experiences is preceded by an as yet undifferentiated mode of objective experience that is usually referred to as a ‘sensory image’ (Anschauungsbild). The character of sensed and yet vague aliveness so drenches these experiential contents that there is no possibility to separate in them what is the result of present stimuli from what stems from earlier impressions. The same is true of the ‘reality accent’ (Wirklichkeitsakzent) that is given to the experienced content: the ‘now is’ is still not sharply distinguished from the ‘once was.’11 As the immediate precursor of genuine recollection, one sees a personal behavior that is tied to a present perception yet, at that, is determined by a mnemonic influence. This is usually called recognition (Wiedererkennen), but this designation is, at least for the initial primitiveness of the behavior, too sophisticated, and, above all, too intellectual. This is so because we are not yet dealing here with a genuine re-cognition, i.e., a conscious identification of the current impression with an earlier one. For that, a mnemonic cleavage on the one hand, and a comparison of ‘once before’ with ‘now’ on the other, would be necessary, initially,

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neither of these is present. On the contrary, what is at hand is nothing but a change in the total constitution of the child occasioned by a returning impression, a personal attitude that is still irresolutely psychophysically neutral. This ‘familiarity attitude’ is extended both to the motoric and to the psychological: the motoric aspect of the attitude includes expressive movements of both positive and negative kinds as well as interaction movements such as approaching or avoiding, or the usual ways of dealing with trusted people and objects. Mentally, the ‘familiarity attitude’ is visible in the “familiarity qualities”12 of a current impression, namely, the feeling and affective tones that stand in clear opposition to feelings of unfamiliarity, as in the lighter unrestrained flow of the mental experiences that are bound with the impression. Out of this diffuse state of familiarity attitude there gradually develops not only genuine recognition but also real recollection. In the case of recognition, a present impression is responded to and treated as familiar and continuously part of the ‘I.’ In the case of recollection, the trace of an earlier impression takes on a life of its own as a distinct idea and is apprehended as belonging not to the present but instead to the past. For recollections, then, mnemonic cleavage and temporalization are preconditions. At first, mnemonic cleavage is experienced affectively: the discrepancy between what does not fit with one’s present experiences and the present situation leads to unrest and disorientation. This is followed by the isolation; sometimes having the character of an ‘aha’ experience, of a discoverer’s pleasure at the new dimension of life beginning to open up. Seen phenomenologically, what develops at this point out of vague sensory images is the distinctness of perceptions from ideas and, with that, the temporalization. Perceptions have to do with what is present, while ideas have to do with not-present matters: indeed, that is the first and roughest form of the temporal indexing of experiences. What is not now present includes both the future and the past; both are given only in the form of ideas. For further temporal separation there is a quite general developmental law: the conscious relation to the imminent future develops earlier than does the conscious relation to the past. This law is understandable in terms of the primarily active nature of the child. The future called forth directly

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from the past is the arena of all childhood strivings, expectations, and hopes. The child stands relative to the past only in the mode of contemplation, and periods of quiet regard are even more distant from the child. This point stands in contradiction to the fact, discussed at length earlier, that recall is not merely of something that has been objectively registered, but is rather of a shaped and stylized past influenced by wishes. Nevertheless: though these wishful ideas directed backward are indispensable grounding for further development, they are not of so great significance for the child’s momentary, concrete goal-setting that they must continuously be condensed into conscious experiences, that is, genuine recollections. Consciousness is essentially an expression of pressing conflicts. It occurs when the obviousness of life doings is interrupted, and, therefore, the earliest expressed ideas of the child are the future-­ oriented ideas of the child’s own doings, or expectations, fears, and hopes in the face of the what is imminent in that child’s world, and not recollection ideas explicitly oriented temporally toward the past.13 For a while, the failure of recollection during the first periods of life, i.e., the stage of so-called “infantile amnesia,” was regarded as deep psychological problem of special significance. Specifically, psychoanalysts regarded the phenomenon as a manifestation of repression: the child supposedly banishes to the unconscious the recollections of its first sexual phase (nursing self-pleasure, blissful sucking, erotic connection with the mother) in order to escape the embarrassment of these experiences, and with that impose an inviolable taboo on the entire first phase of its life. On the present view, psychoanalytic theory errs by regarding the having of recollections as the default or to-be-expected condition. A special mechanism must then be introduced in order to explain the absence of recollection. From the perspective developed above, however, the not-­ yet-­present state of conscious recollections is the to-be-expected beginning point of development. The developmental problem is not in the disappearance but in the appearance of the first recollections.14 Only when a rich life of recollections is present can processes of repression emerge in the way portrayed by psychoanalysis, but doubtless exaggerated in reference to the young child. Regarding the first phases of the development of recollections, I reintroduce here a presentation that I have given elsewhere:

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In the fog that shrouds the child’s own past from its present conscious life, rays of light shine weakly through, faint and quickly disappearing. With increasing age, they become progressively clearer, more varied, and more frequent, and they bind themselves in time to larger contexts, to recollections of [for example] a celebration or a summer trip. But many years pass before, in place of these fragments, a temporally configured past experience surfaces and the child secures a comprehensive picture of the past course of life. This side of the conscious functioning of a personality does not achieve a richer configuration until well beyond early childhood. Let us continue with our allegory of a child’s own past lying in a previously traversed territory that is surfacing in a slowly lifting fog. In the fog, only what is proximate is visible, and so the first-surfacing recollections extend only to impressions that are not long past; the latency times are very short and only gradually become longer. And the fog, even when it has become lighter, robs the landscape of depth and perspective; the isolated points hide everything in the same gray mass without clearly discernable distances. This means that for the child, the past is not temporally malleable in a way that the greater or smaller time interval, or the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of events will be clear to it. An indeterminate ‘once upon a time’ must for a long time replace a more specific time specification. This inability to localize recollections more precisely in time is, along with the above-­ mentioned absence of context, one of the characteristic features of childhood recollections and at the same time the source of multiple deceptions.15

As we saw above, all recollections have at the same time both subjective and objective features: they make current earlier phases of the self and a piece of the prior world. In the initial forms of a child’s recollection these two features are still not separated, least of all as they are in perception: the child experiences itself in its world situation, or a world situation in its significance for its little ‘I;’ that is still a diffuse total experience without the sharp accentuation of one or the other pole. Nowadays, of course, it is regarded as one of the most trustworthy insights of all of developmental psychology that ‘person’ and ‘world’ are not from the very outset manifest in this duality, or even in some rougher opposition. As little as the child at first knows about an impersonal world,

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indifferent to everything including its own self, it knows equally little about its own person as an entity unto itself in this world and an ever new-becoming subjectivity. The general emergence of the subject/object distinction has recently become much investigated in the domain of perception, but less so in the domain of recollection. In this connection, there is a variety of perspectives to consider. When the distinction begins, the accent in recollection will at first be on the object side: some or other thing, a person, a happening, an overall situation arises out of the past. But this object focus (Objektivität) is at first still far removed from strict objectivity (Sachlichkeit) and general validity. We had already indicated above that the approximation of the recalled reality to the ideal of full objectivity is never complete, not even in the most educated and self-critical recollections of the adult. How much less is this so, then, in the case of the child. This limited objectivity expresses itself in two ways. There is first of all the limited performance level of recollection. At the beginning, the child has no idea that recollections can be objectively false; and even when it on occasion notices a mistaken recollection, the child still lacks the more general attitude to align its recollections as closely as possible with reality. The child also lacks the self-criticism to allow through among the swirling recollections only those of which it can be maximally sure. More will be said below about this lower performance level. At the same time, childhood recollection is especially rich in those types of recalled realities occupying a middle ground between strictly serious realities and pure subjectivity. The reference here to ‘realities’ is fully intentional, as that is in the majority of instances the case; because the child is able, much more easily than the adult, to live in different levels of reality successively or even simultaneously; and all of these realities somehow remain attached to the ‘I,’ are still creations of the child, and accessible to its wishes in their formulation—although at the same time they seem to belong to a finished past. These are “magical realities.” Again, an important theoretical task is to portray that quite primitive magic of the child, that up to now has been studied in its relationship to the present (in play) and to the future (in magical customs of invocations, wishes (im magischen Bräuchen des Beschwörens, des

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Herbeiwünschens), and now must be studied also in relationship to the past; in fantastic confabulations over supposed experiences, in declarations intended to fend off unpleasantness by un-doing things that in fact have happened, in dream recollections that have as their content a reality accessible only to the child. In all of this, a peculiar amalgamation (Verquickung) of various realities is noticeable. Soon, the past flows unnoticeably into the present (and vice versa); then the reality of dream experience is understood as accessible only to oneself and yet also experienced by others. Or, it awakens in the child the problem of whether or not remembered objects maintain existence beyond the moment of having been perceived. There is perhaps no respect in which the special nature of early childhood psychological life surfaces more characteristically as in these between worlds of realities. While in later ages, and especially in adulthood, only in rare and short circumstances do conditions arise in which appearance and reality flow into one, such conditions for a time even seem to dominate in early developmental stages. Especially prominent is the readiness for such occurrences around the age of 4; it is that epoch that has often previously been characterized as “childhood puberty,” and which, in any case, in the respects just described shows similarities with actual puberty. We will encounter from entirely normal and healthy children of this age confabulations that solidify into productions of unusual stubbornness that incorporate a network of fictitious persons and happenings and seem to acquire a high degree of objectivity. As already noted, the subjective accents of recollection develop later than their objective counterparts discussed up to now. The conscious grasping of the ‘I was’ follows the ‘it was.’ And also here, the grasping of one’s own self is understood only half way, because it is not yet divorced from its relationship to the object, any more than the latter is from the former. A condition in which recollection becomes pure self-recollection and self-reflection is still not present in the small child—nor even in the school-age child. This is something that develops only around the beginning of puberty. The child’s realization of its own existence, and with that its being ‘other’ or ‘smaller’ or ‘dumber’ always transpires within the context of an objective situation in which the previous otherness of the ‘I’ has been quasi-objectified. Likewise, also missing here is the ability to grasp

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the continuous becoming of one’s own ‘I’ through the past and into the present, and on this basis to discern the consequences, wishes, and preferences for the coming time; only some pointed circumstances and experiences of one’s own ‘I’ stand out from the past. The discussion up to this point of the development of recollection had treated of the immanent characteristic and significance of this primitive structural form. Now, however, we can consider the same processes from a different and apparently more superficial, but by no means less important, perspective: that of performance. Because recollections are—like all psychological functions—not there only in this or that particular form, but are segmented in a system of requirements and demands that are regulated by the obvious belongingness of the human to a social and cultural world. Recollection as a performance means: the coping psychologically with a previously experienced objective material from the past. ‘Coping’ means here, viewed more closely: making something previously experienced once again present inwardly and then expressing it outwardly. That the development of recollection is an advancement in performance ability is clear. The features that we ascribe to primitive recollections: fragmentation, short latency times, indefinite temporalization, limited objectivity and self-correction, etc., appear now, considered from the standpoint of performance, as deficiencies of recollection; and with increasing age these deficiencies are increasingly eliminated. The improvements in performance constitute a rich theme, both in terms of method and content, because they are amenable to investigation with aid of objective methods—sometimes even measurable in extent and tempo. If one follows through different ages the recollections that a child expresses, one sees clearly the progress from bare and unclear particulars to increasingly comprehensive, rich, and clearer connections. The “latency times” are measurable when one knows the date of the initial experiences and the time of the first occurrence of a reminiscence. It occurs that with increasing age, increasingly longer stretches of the past can be bridged without the recollection being refreshed during the interval, and that with 4- and 5-year old children latency times of even several years are possible. The temporalization shows the double progress in the increasingly precise and certain arrangement of a discreet recollection to a

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specific point in time and in the grasping of the temporal sequence of various recollections: the child’s past becomes increasingly contoured. One can see here the development of the child’s ability to categorize as an advancement in psychological performance. The command of new psychological categories follows inner laws, one of which, the so-called “stage law,” we have already considered several times. That law states: the human must approach the world with selected and organized categories in order to render finitely the world’s infinity, and in this way master it. In this way, the concrete world is segmented into happenings with objects, activities, attributes, and relationships. This sequence is also a developmental one and seems to hold especially with respect to the development of recollection. At the beginning,16 thinking is situated in the ‘substantive stage: out of the diffuse, unsegmented, and un-reflected experience, what is first worked out is the substantive material, the independently existing persons and things as separate thought contents. There follows the ‘action stage’: the activities transpiring with the persons and things are emphasized in thought and become the focal points of interest. Only in the third stage does the child develop the ability to work out the characteristics that attach to things and to the changing relationships between them. This is the stage of “relations and attributes.” Of course, as newer stages are reached, the content of the previous stages steadily increases in breadth and detail (Mannigfaltigkeit). The assignment of the thinking performances of a child to categorical stages does not mean that a given stage is separated out and made independent within the child’s experiential structure, but rather that within that structure a given stage is particularly accentuated and stands at the middle point. Moreover, the stages should not be taken to signify that through them the entire psychological life of the child will be determined in a way that the child at a specific time would think entirely in terms of ‘substance,’ at another time entirely in terms of ‘action.’ On the contrary, the stages signify the forms sequentially taken on by various kinds of childhood intellectual achievements. Difficult achievements, that do not take place until later, will for that reason remain in the substance stage, while others have long since reached the action stage.

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Evidence for the last assertion above can be found elsewhere, in a discussion of studies of children’s testimonies.17 Another developmental regularity: “from the concrete to the abstract” is likewise reflected in the progression of the child’s recollection capabilities. Initially, recollections pertain only to concrete matters that have been perceived visually, aurally, or haptically. The child must be considerably older in order to recall things it has heard said, or said oneself, or thoughts it has had, or similar material. Since just now the last-named recalled contents are bound to spoken content and hence on aural impressions, it is the case that in early recollections acoustic material is much less prominent than optical material. Recollections of melodies are an exception here, e.g., on sounds and tones from voices, etc., i.e., on acoustic impressions, due not to their logical place in relationships but instead to their concrete characteristics. All of these developmental regularities are to be regarded only as schemata that serve to provide a general orientation. They will in individual cases at times be supplemented and at other times opposed as a result of the highly influential factor of individual predisposition. Recollection in particular is often a very fine indicator of the special psychological constitution of the young person, even if these constitutional factors are at first so hidden and indeterminate. The objects to which a child is compelled from within to direct its interest and attention will also naturally play a more prominent role in recollection as well. Hence, one child’s recollections will be dominated by colors, another’s by melodies, a third’s by linguistic-conceptual material, just as would be expected in accordance with the general developmental scheme. We reach here once again a point where the personal anchoring of the life of recollection becomes clear. Unfortunately, the material available up to now pertaining to early childhood will permit us in only a few cases to draw attention to individual cases. With regard to the topic of achievement, we have now to consider the objectivity of recollections, discussed earlier in terms of its personal significance. We emphasized there that the personal significance had to do primarily with the stylization and reconfiguration of recollections, we can say now such reconfiguration requires our attention at that moment

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when the recollections are assessed on the scale of their objective truth value. Here, the covering up (Deckung) of a fabrication of recollection (or, as the case may be, an accepted portrayal of it) by means of a previously perceived ideal, and deviations from the cover-up themselves acquire the stigma of deceptions of recollection and false pronouncements. We encountered here the familiar problematic of the so-called ‘psychology of testimony,’ which has been addressed not only by means of observation and casuistry, but also by means of experiments. Clearly, the latter have been conducted much more often among somewhat older children and among adults than among small children, though this gap is now being filled in, at least in part. The performance of the child can be objectively determined by the confrontation of an objective record of some prior state of affairs with an account of same based on recollection; the mistakes made by the child can be counted, categorized, and traced back to various source conditions (Ursprungsbedingungen). In the gradual decline of these mistakes with increasing age of the child, a clear progress of performance can be seen. Psychologically, this progress can be interpreted as an increase in the clarity of pictures of recollection, in the sharpening of temporalization, in the child’s understanding of the growing demand of accuracy in the recollections, in the consciousness of responsibility and of self-criticism, and, finally, in the growing independence and capability of resistance against influences toward falsehoods, and in particular against the forces of suggestion. Here, too, of course, the importance of individual characteristics must be mentioned. The extent and nature of the fidelity of a child’s recollections and the reliability of a child’s testimony are dependent not only on the developmental stage that a given child has reached, but also strongly dependent on tendencies that are unmistakably of the nature of characterological factors. Cool-headedness or the inclination toward the fantastic, carefreeness or self-criticism, strong suggestibility or independence; all of these characteristics play an important role and can sometimes be regarded as symptoms of future character development.

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Notes 1. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 2 in the original text: [Consult further in this regard especially: Studies in Personalistic Science: Personalistics as Science. Leipzig 1930.] 2. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 3  in the original text: [Because of this dual directionality, personal chronology is fundamentally different from mathematical chronology, that recognizes the course of things in one direction: from the past to the present to the future.] 3. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 4 in the original text: [That such apparently completely ‘forgotten’ periods of one’s life can nevertheless have the strongest ongoing mnemonic effects on one’s entire life is, in accordance with what was said earlier, a given. One need think here only about the entirely normal ‘amnesia’ with respect to the experiences of the first years of life.] 4. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 5 in the original text: [That work was written for the edited volume ‘Contemporary Philosophy in Self-Presentations,’ Volume VI.] 5. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 6 in the original text: [On the superposition of personal presences of varying magnitudes, see Studien zur Personwissenschaft I, pp. 118 and 132; see also Günther Stern: On having, p. 127.] 6. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 7 in the original text: [Here, too, we have a concept incompatible with the mathematical conception of time.] 7. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 8 in the original text: [When I am traveling, I can say without any inner contradiction: ‘I am ‘now’ teaching in Hamburg.’] 8. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 9 in the original text: [One encounters often the quote from Nietzsche: ‘My memory says that I did that. My pride says implacably, that I could not have done that. Ultimately, memory surrenders.’ (Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 68).] 9. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 10 in the original text: [For more regarding this ‘plasticity of the past’ as a principle of general history: Wertphilosophie, p. 293, where

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I wrote: ‘The petrified stiffness of the past holds only for the abstractions of natural science, not for history. A Brutus and a Caesar, a Jesus and a Goethe are changed as truly historical powers even now; there are connections and meanings that in their times, and to those individuals themselves, were foreign …’] 10. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 11 in the original text: [Refer in this connection to the four part ‘developmental formula: diffusion, salience, embeddedness, increased sectioning’ discussed in Studies in the Science of Persons, I, p. 42.] 11. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 12 in the original text: [Up to now, these ‘sensory images’ have been more closely examined predominantly in higher ages than are relevant to us here, primarily by Jaensch and his colleagues. However, Jaensch’s hypothesis is very plausible: that the major function of these sensory images is to form an undifferentiated preparatory form out of which, in turn, perceptions and ideas are worked into their specific forms and different temporal connections.] 12. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 13 in the original text: [The expression ‘familiarity qualities’ comes from Höffding.”] 13. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 14  in the original text: [The concrete expressions of the above-­named law are quite varied. So, for example, the reader should note that in the child’s development of speech the infantile forms used to name current effort or what is presently being done are acquired earlier than the participles (‘drink’ earlier than ‘drank’), and that among time adverbs the words ‘morning’, ‘then’, ‘soon’ are used sensibly earlier than ‘yesterday’, ‘before’, ‘earlier’.] 14. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 15 in the original text. In it, Stern is quoting his own text, The Psychology of Early Childhood, p.  424: [It is absurd to juxtapose within a child such a perfect, content-rich, and segmented unconscious with such an immature consciousness.] 15. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In footnote 16 of the text on which this translation is based, Stern indicated that the source of this quoted passage was his own text, The Psychology of Early Childhood. In the fourth edition of that book, which was published in 1927 (Stern, 1927), the passage appears on pp. 204–205.

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16. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In footnote 17 of the text on which this translation is based, Stern indicated that the source of this quoted passage was his own text, The Psychology of Early Childhood. In the fourth edition of that book, which was published in 1927 (Stern, 1927), the passage appears on pp. 339–40. 17. See Stern and Stern (1999).

References Stern, C., & Stern, W. (1999). Recollection, testimony, and lying in early childhood (J.  T. Lamiell, Trans.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Books. Stern, W. (1927). Psychologie der frühen Kindheit bis zum sechsten Lebensjahre, vierte überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage (The psychology of early childhood up to the sixth year of life, fourth revised and expanded edition). Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle & Meyer. Stern, W. (1930). Personalistik der Erinnerung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 118, S. 350–381.

6 The ‘Problem of Individuality’ in Scientific Psychology

Prefatory remarks: Situated as it is within the present volume, this chapter is a kind of hybrid. Its first segment presents material of my own authorship, while the second segment presents my translation of some material originally authored by William Stern. I begin by discussing Stern’s foundational views of the subdiscipline of ‘differential’ psychology as he set them forth in two books, published in 1900 and 1911, respectively. The discussion then documents the adoption by two of Stern’s most prominent contemporaries in differential psychology, E. L. Thorndike and Hugo Münsterberg, of an understanding of knowledge gained through studies of individual differences that was fundamentally divergent from Stern’s understanding but nevertheless rose to prevalence in the research methods and intervention practices in each of differential psychology’s two major investigative domains: personality research and psychotechnics. That discussion is intended to provide the reader with a context for understanding the next two chapters, in which Stern registered his concerns over what he saw as the untoward consequences of these disciplinary developments. The second segment of the present chapter is a translation of Chapter 21 in Stern’s 1911 differential psychology textbook. In the first part of that work, Stern elaborates briefly on the point that the study of individual differences © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_6

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does not yield knowledge of individualities. Stern then moves into discussion of the method of biography as an indispensable tool in the effort to achieve such understanding. The work underscores Stern’s conviction, one he held from the very start of his efforts as a differential psychologist, that knowledge of individualities could not be incorporated successfully into a scientific psychology defined strictly in accordance with the concepts and methods of natural science. William Stern is widely and properly regarded as the founder of that sub-discipline of psychology originally referred to as ‘differential’ psychology, an area of the field devoted primarily to the study of relatively enduring differences between individuals and groups. That is how Stern circumscribed the mission of the sub-discipline he was proposing in the pioneering monograph he published in 1900 (Stern, 1900). However, in a sequel to that work, published in 1911, Stern widened his circumscription the field’s mission in ways that he felt would be necessary in order to do justice to the challenge presented to scientific psychology by the realities of human individualities (Stern, 1911). Those modifications explicitly incorporated a recognition of the distinction between the study of individuals, on the one hand, and the study of attribute variables marking individual differences, on the other. It happened, however, that other prominent and influential differential psychologists who were contemporaries of Stern, namely, E.  L. Thorndike (1874–1949) and Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1909), departed from Stern’s position on this epistemically crucial point. Following Thorndike and Münsterberg rather than Stern, mainstream thinking in the field came to regard studies of individual differences as an altogether appropriate method not only for securing scientific knowledge about individualities, but for achieving the scientific objectives of scientific psychology more generally. Thus did one leading figure in the ‘second generation’ of twentieth century differential psychologists, Anne Anastasi (1908–2001), advance the view, entirely at odds with the position that Stern had maintained in both of his pioneering texts, that differential psychology is … not … a separate field of psychology, but (is) one approach to the understanding of behavior. Its fundamental questions are no different from those of general psychology. It is apparent that if we

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can explain why individuals react differently from one another, we shall understand why each individual reacts as he does. (Anastasi, 1937, p. vi)1

The discussion immediately below highlights the early history of this digression from Stern’s original views, as it has had highly problematic epistemic consequences within psychological science generally over much of the twentieth century and now well into the twenty-first (cf. Lamiell, 2019). Among those consequences has been the widespread and long-­ standing failure within psychology’s mainstream to recognize Stern’s firm epistemic commitment to biographical inquiry (and qualitative methods more generally) as essential in the quest to understand individualities. That commitment is reflected by the translated material presented in the second half of this chapter.

 tern’s Foundational Ideas S in Differential Psychology The empirical psychology being conducted in the experimental laboratories of the late nineteenth century, following the lead of Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) initiative in the German city of Leipzig in 1879, was devoted to the search for generallaws presumed to govern the psychological functioning of individuals. Such laws would capture what the evidence suggested could be regarded—barring contradictory empirical evidence emerging from later experiments, and in full appreciation for the logical limits of induction prevailing in all scientific inquiry—as ‘common to all’ normal adult humans.2 It was against the backdrop of that experimental psychology that, in the opening line of the above-­ mentioned 1900 monograph, Stern proclaimed individuality as the “problem of the 20th century” for scientific psychology (Stern, 1900, p. v). By ‘problem’ in this context, Stern meant ‘challenge.’ He believed that the long-term prospects for psychology as an empirical science would depend importantly on the discipline’s capacity not only for discovering the general laws of human psychological life, but also for accommodating those manifestations of individuality deliberately ignored by the general

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experimentalists yet inevitably at play in the psychological doings of each particular human being. Stern believed that systematic studies of the differences between individuals (and groups) in various psychological domains such as sensation, perception, emotion, judgment, cognition, memory, behavior, etc., while not themselves studies of individualities, would serve to highlight the need for such studies by establishing the existence of aspects of individuals’ psychological ‘doings’ that were not, in fact, ‘common to all.’ Thinking along these lines, Stern suggested in his 1900 book that a very important role in scientific psychology would be served by a sub-­ discipline oriented toward three knowledge objectives, namely, those of discovering (1) the most fundamental and enduring respects in which individuals differ from one another, (2) the sources of those differences in nature and/or nurture, and (3) the ways in which the differences are manifested in various domains of human life such as school, work, personal relationships, community doings, etc. Even in his enthusiastic advocacy of this new sub-discipline of scientific psychology, Stern (1900) cautioned that a ‘differential’ psychology should be regarded as a complement to and not as a replacement for the general psychology being prosecuted in the laboratories of the discipline’s experimentalists. Left largely undeveloped by Stern in the 1900 book was his vision of exactly what would be needed in order to move scientific psychology beyond the systematic study of individual and group differences and squarely into the domain of investigating individualities. That vision was much more fully elaborated in the 1911 book. Nothing in the later work negated what had been set forth in the earlier one, but there were additional considerations that Stern introduced in 1911 that did significantly re-shape his vision of differential psychology’s scope. The fact of this matter was surely part of what prompted him to indicate explicitly on the title page of the 1911 book that that work had been undertaken instead (an Stelle) of a second edition of the 1900 book, and he underscored his insistence on this point in the text of the foreword to the 1911 book. In the 1911 work, titled (in translation) Methodological Foundations of Differential Psychology, Stern (1911) structured his treatment of differential psychology’s subject matter by crossing the consideration of ‘one vs.

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two or more individuals’ with the consideration of ‘one vs. two or more attributes.’ This gave rise to four basic ‘research schemes.3 In two of the four research schemes, the knowledge generated is knowledge of the attribute variable(s) in terms of which individuals have been differentiated. Variation research focuses on one attribute in its distribution across a multiplicity of individuals. Of primary interest here would be the basic statistical properties—most fundamentally, the mean and between-person variance—of the focal attribute variable, defined, e.g., by test scores, within a population of individuals. In a direct extension of variation research, co-variation research would yield knowledge not only of the basic statistical properties of each of two or more attribute variables within a population of individuals, but also, as the name of this research scheme suggests, the degree of co-variation (correlation) between pairs of such variables. In his 1911 book, Stern explicitly drew attention to the fact that the knowledge gained by ‘variation’ and ‘co-variation’ studies is knowledge about the attribute variables, and should not be taken as equivalent to or substitutable for knowledge of any individual research subject. In such studies, the individual research subjects function merely as place holders, of interest only as empirical instantiations of the different categories or levels of the variables that are the actual foci of the investigations. In order to gain knowledge of individuals, Stern argued, one must actually study individuals and not variables delineating individual differences. One way to do this is in terms of the research scheme Stern called ‘psychography’ (die Psychographie), the third of the four research schemes he laid out in his 1911 text. In a psychographic investigation, the focus is on a single individual, profiled in terms of his or her standing with respect to a set of attributes. In a straightforward extension of psychography, one could use ‘comparison’ research, the last of the four research schemes, to examine (dis)similarities in the attribute profiles of two or more individuals, each of whom has been represented psychographically in terms of some common set of attributes. There is no mistaking Stern’s insistence in his 1911 text on the fundamental epistemic distinction between, on the one hand, knowledge of the attribute variables with respect to which individuals can be differentiated, and, on the other hand, knowledge of any one individual who might—or

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might not—be differentiated from others in terms of certain designated attributes. It is just this crucial epistemic distinction that Stern’s most prominent contemporaries within differential psychology either failed to grasp or chose to simply ignore.

 eering Off the Course Set by Stern: V Conflating Knowledge of Individual Differences and Knowledge of Individuals During the same year that Stern published his Methodological Foundations of Differential Psychology, there appeared a monograph by E.  L. Thorndike (1874–1949) titled simply Individuality (Thorndike, 1911). Thorndike began that work with the following observation: We may study a human being in respect to his common humanity, or in respect to his individuality. In other words, we may study the features of intellect and character which are common to all men, to man as a species, or we may study the differences in intellect and character which distinguish individual men. (Thorndike, 1911, p. 2)

Clear from the rhetorical structure of this passage—in particular the two ideas linked by the phrase “in other words”—is Thorndike’s view that the study of between-person differences “in intellect and character” is tantamount to the study of “man (sic) in respect to his individuality.” As noted in the immediately preceding discussion, this was not the view of the founder of differential psychology, William Stern. Thorndike went on to argue that … the difference between any two individuals, if describable at all, is described by comparing the amounts which A possesses of various traits with the amounts which B possesses of the same traits. (Thorndike, 1911, p. 5)

In combination with the thesis that to study individuality is to study the differences between individuals, this latter claim establishes Thorndike’s commitment to the view that every individuality would be definable in

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terms of dimensions of between-person differentiation applicable to all individualities. This, too, is an important point of divergence between Thorndike’s and Stern’s thinking, as Stern allowed for the possibility of meaningfully characterizing individuals in terms of dimensions that did not necessarily apply to all others and, indeed, might conceivably apply to no others (cf. Lamiell, 2003).4 Of most immediate relevance to our present concerns, however, is Thorndike’s belief that knowledge of the magnitude of statistical covariation within a population between two variables marking individual differences conveys knowledge about the degree of correspondence between the respective relative magnitudes of those two attributes within individual persons. This notion is vividly reflected in Thorndike’s claim that the correlation between two variables marking between-person differences in a population of individuals indicates “the extent to which the amount of one trait possessed by an individual is bound up with the amount he possesses of some other trait” (Thorndike, 1911, p. 22, emphasis added). As I have vividly illustrated elsewhere (see Lamiell, 2003, p.  101; Lamiell, 2019, p.  27), this claim by Thorndike (1911) is simply false. Logically, the only empirical circumstance under which the claim could possibly be true would be one in which the correlation between the two variables under consideration is perfect, and that is a circumstance that never actually occurs empirically.5 However, under the false interpretation proffered by Thorndike (1911), knowledge of the statistical correspondence between variables with respect to which individuals have been differentiated is interpretable as if it were knowledge about the individuals who have been differentiated, whatever the magnitude of that statistical correspondence might happen to be. On this view, the distinction clearly drawn by Stern in his 1911 book between these two domains of knowledge collapses, and, with that collapse, the study of individual differences is made to appear, contra Stern (1911), as a viable method for advancing our understanding of individuals ‘in general.’ The need is thus (seemingly) obviated for independent research schemes such as those identified by Stern (1911) as ‘psychography’ and ‘comparison studies.’ As many readers of the present work may know, this is exactly the view that ascended within mainstream twentieth century differential psychology.

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That view prevails to this day, and this is so despite warnings that have been sounded periodically over the past seven decades about that view’s logical fallaciousness (cf. Lamiell, 2019).6 Undoubtedly, this epistemically untoward turn was spurred by a contemporary of both Stern and Thorndike, one Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1909). Münsterberg’s primary interests took shape not within personality psychology but instead within that specialty that would come to be known as ‘industrial/organizational’ (I/O) psychology. More specifically, he was primarily interested in the practical problem of coordinating individual differences in abilities and interests with the differential requirements of various jobs or organizational responsibilities. It was in this context that he emerged as a major figure in early twentieth century differential psychology.7 Consider, for example, a segment of his widely read Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Münsterberg, 1913) where Münsterberg discussed the multifaceted nature of the psychological faculty of ‘attention.’ He noted that, given valid tests for each of those various facets and knowledge of the magnitude of statistical correlation between them within a population of workers or prospective workers, practically useful inferences about individual workers could be scientifically justified. He wrote: We found that typical connections exist between apparently independent features of attention. Persons who have a rather expansive span of attention for acoustical impressions have also a wide span for the visual objects. Persons whose attention is vivid and quick have on the whole the expansive type of attention, while those who attend slowly have a narrow field of attention, and so on. Hence, the manifestation of one feature of attention allows us to presuppose without further tests that certain other features may be expected in the particular individual. (Münsterberg, 1913, pp. 135–136)

In this passage, Münsterberg explicitly embraced the view that knowledge of the statistical relationship between two variables marking between-person differences (in this case, in distinct facets of attention) allows one to “presuppose without further tests” where a particular

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individual would be found to stand on a test of one of those facets given knowledge of his standing on the other. Münsterberg’s knowledge claim in this example is no more valid than is the previously discussed claim by Thorndike. Both claims appeal to a false understanding of knowledge about variables in terms of which individuals have been differentiated, namely, the correlation between those variables, as knowledge about the individuals who have been differentiated in terms of the variables. This conflation of knowledge about variables differentiating individuals and knowledge about individuals is precisely of the sort that could have been avoided by more critical attention to the epistemic position adopted by Stern in his 1911 book (refer above).8 Although Stern’s mounting concerns through the late 1920s and into the early 1930s about developments within the differential psychology he himself had founded were not couched explicitly in terms of this knowledge conflation, it is apparent that just that conflation played a large role in the creation of the blind spots in mainstream thinking in personality research and in psychotechnics that Stern endeavored to address in the works that the reader will find in the following two chapters.9 Before turning to those works, however, the remainder of this chapter presents my translation of text authored by Stern himself, namely, Chapter XXI from his 1911 differential psychology book. This text offers a glimpse of Stern’s views on the nature of the challenge to scientific psychology of the ‘problem of individuality,’ and on indispensability of biographical investigation to the larger effort to meet the challenges presented by that problem.

Individuality as an Object of Research10 However different may be the various problems of differential psychology discussed in the preceding chapters [of the 1911 book; JL], they had one thing in common: the object of investigation was the attribute in its distribution across individuals. The individuals were only a means of the investigation, in that they were regarded as the carriers of attribute(s) being investigated. Now, however, our perspective must be altered. We will no longer be focused on the distribution of an attribute across many individuals, but

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will concentrate instead on the multi-attribute structure of distinct individuals. This is the problem of ‘psychography’ (die Psychographie), the empirical psychological ascertainment of an individuality. We can touch only briefly on the theory of science question about the suitability of individuals at all, and human individuality in particular, as an object of scientific investigation. The presumption of such suitability has often been contested, primarily by those thinkers who regard the natural science concepts of generalizable validity and lawfulness as the sole knowledge objective in any domain of scientific research. But this theory has long since been abandoned due to the factual development of research. Eventually, Windelband and Rickert formulated the epistemic justification for the principle of individuality. Windelband regarded as equally valid the ‘nomothetic’ or law-seeking sciences and the ‘idiographic’ disciplines, i.e., those concentrated on individuals. Rickert furthered this idea by arguing that the object of the former disciplines was the system of lawful regularities found in nature while the object of the latter disciplines was the system of values found in cultures. In fact, culture is the essence of common values, norms, and ideals, but they are realized in individual phenomena, acts, and capabilities, which in their particularity are unique, and it is just in this uniqueness and incomparability that they have their significance. History is a completely singular happening standing in relationship to domains of value. Hence, every work of art and literature, every religious legal sanction is an individual doing. Not even the determination of causal relationships is entirely outside the domain of idiographic inquiry, though it takes on here a different form. It is not that of a law-like relationship but rather one of individual causation and emergent effectiveness.11 All of this is especially valid in the case of the human individual. Viewed purely as an object of natural science, the human being is simply an exemplar or instance of application of general laws. But when the human being is seen in relationship to culture, she appears, she acts, and she suffers as an individuality. This relationship of individuality to culture can be an object of science both in its theoretical and in its practical significance. In the former context, what is investigated is the way in which the characteristics of certain individualities were suited to contribute to the great movements and value arrangements of the culture. In the latter

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case, culture is assigned the task of recognizing in its members their individual particularities, and to appropriately evaluate and influence this recognition: this is practical knowledge about humans (Menschenkenntnis) and the practical treatment of humans (Menschenbehandlung). Now, however, the separation of the nomothetic and idiographic perspectives cannot be viewed as if it reflected a strict division of two scientific disciplines. They are two standpoints but not two regions. On the contrary, often enough it is necessary to shift back and forth between the two within one and the same research project, and, at times, the two must be united. Within the context of a decidedly individual/historical context, for example, an historian may at times raise the question of the extent to which certain sociological, political, and/or economic laws or general trends have played a role in the particular happenings being investigated. Even more important to us here in the context of such comparisons is the discipline of medicine. In consideration of its overriding objectives, that discipline is without doubt a natural science, seeking to discover and to apply the general laws governing the contraction and alleviation of illnesses. But at a patient’s bedside, the doctor’s concern is no longer with general laws but with individual cases, each of which— regardless of what ever is ‘typical’—is a singular case in and of itself. The diagnosis is an idiographic finding, and the therapy is an individualized doing. Moreover, the doctor directly approximates a purely historical/ idiographic stance when he engages in pathognomonic analysis. More will be said about this below. The psychologist must claim these same rights. He must appropriate what is without question accorded the doctor, namely, that alongside his task as a natural scientist seeking lawful regularities, he has also an idiographic task. For the psychologist, the struggle is not easy, because it takes place along two fronts. On the one side, the dogma concerning psychology’s purely natural science orientation has been embraced by many psychologists themselves, who have adopted the views prevailing in physics, physiology and anthropology. Yet on the other side, psychologists have been driven to that orientation by many humanists (Geisteswissenschaftlern) concerned to insulate their domain of inquiry against encroachments by those with a natural science perspective. In the face of all of this, we hope to be able to show that the individualizing method of psychography is a

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necessary supplement to nomothetic psychology, one demanded both by theoretical and practical requirements. Further, we hope to be able to show that psychography provides the heretofore missing bridge between nomothetic psychology and the idiographic humanities and cultural sciences, in the face of which nomothetically oriented psychologists need not anticipate interference but, instead, advancement and support. The concept of individuality encompasses not only what is particular (das Besondere), or singular, but also the undivided, the unitary. It does not matter how one philosophically explains that which is unitary, for it is an empirical fact that cannot be overlooked. However, this unity is not a simplicity, but, on the contrary, incorporates an endless multiplicity of attributes—physical, mental, psychophysically neutral, synchronic, diachronic, constant and changing. Consequently, the study of individuality must always proceed from the fundamental fact that individuality is multiplicity within a unity. Every observation that takes into consideration only the unity, by reducing the essence of a personality to one fundamental, predominant, and determining characteristic, is just as one-sided and hence misguided as is a view according to which one conceives of the individual as a center-less aggregate of characteristics, a checkered template of attributes. Whichever of these two views one takes as a starting point for research, we will subsequently distinguish between the biographical and the genuinely psychographic treatment of individuality.

Biography12 For the biographer, the unity of the personality must always be the dominant theme. The biographer understands the life of the individual as the fulfillment of an inner mission in the service of a great cultural task, and appraises accordingly the meaning of all biographical details, i.e., how they are part of that unitary inner telos of the personality. In the writing, we admittedly find all different degrees of simplification, which—often with a certain distortion—seeks to reduce the life and psychological development of a personality to a certain formula, and, based on the

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purely chronological collection of data and voluminous material that is first left for other workers, tries to fashion a unity. Even for the portrayer of an artistic individuality, be that individuality a poet, a creator or a stage performer, the principle of unity dominates, because the portrayer’s task is composition (Gestaltung). All distinct characteristics should be understood as partial determinants of the entirety, and the artistic performance is only greater the more vivid and empathic the picture of the unitary personality in its essential characteristics is unfurled before us. In this, it does not matter whether the subject is a fictitious personality (Don Quixote, Nora, Faust) or a real one (e.g., Egmont’s Tell; Klinger’s Beethoven; Lenbach’s Bismarck). Here, too, are to be found all transitions between type-casting simplification and realistic accumulation of details. Between the two kinds of individuality portrayals just mentioned, the historical and the artistic, there are peculiar relationships, indeed, continuous transitions. Every good biography is at the same time a work of art; in order to create the impression of the unity and vitality of the personality to be portrayed, the biographer must have artistic capabilities such as intuition, empathy, and ability for composition. This point must be heavily emphasized here, because the discussion to follow will not treat further of these qualities of biography, but instead will consider them only insofar as they are the object of scientific method. Biography thus has the unity of the personality both as its starting point and as its goal. However, biographical work cannot ignore the multifaceted nature of the individual, because it makes up the material that must ultimately be synthesized. Hence, the question arises: what are the principles according to which the biographer selects, organizes, and composes her material? Usually, the concept of ‘the essential’ is the guiding principle of selection: the essential characteristics of the individual should be emphasized with the greatest possible acuity, the less essential should only be touched upon, and the unessential should be ignored. But: what does ‘essential’ mean? The concept of ‘the essential’ appears to have two distinct meanings: absolute and relative.

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Invoking the concept of ‘absolutely essential’ requires that within the individual there are certain characteristics that play a much more fundamental role than others; that one can specify in advance those attributes the variations of which have this fundamental significance, and that one must specify the particular form (Gestalt) that they acquire in person X in order to characterize X adequately. What counts as ‘relatively essential’ depends upon the particular question about an individuality that is being investigated. For example, when I want to portray Moltke [a German field marshal who lived from 1800–1891 and was also an author; JL] as an author, I will find other attributes to be essential than if I chose to portray him as a military strategist. In both cases, the usual kind of biography proceeds in a way that is primarily constructive; the task is approached with a theory about the structure of the individuality, and this theory determines the choice of the attributes to be regarded as ‘essential.’ As different as the possible theories are, the choice of what is presumably essential must be equally so, as, too, must be the set of the biographer’s resources (Anlagen). The number of possible theories is so great because, first of all, it is possible to view the problem of individuality from a great many different perspectives, and, second, because within each of those perspectives numerous and mutually contradictory hypotheses about the essence and determinants of the individuality are plausible. As a result, each new theory is almost always an enrichment of our biographical vision; many have even resulted in a radical perspectival change. Only a few of such constructive processes can be mentioned here. At the top of the list would be the historical/philosophical theory. On the one side we have the thesis, invoked many times since Hegel: a great man is only the megaphone of the impersonal, objective, spiritual movement (Geistesbewegung) of humankind; only the tool of supra-individual forces. On the other side, we have the individualistic hero tribute, which regards genius as the starting point and goal of all cultural development. Of course, either one of these theses must be applied to a specific biography, fully determining the overall picture. Compare, for example, Kuno Fischer’s biographies of the great philosophers, each of which seems to embody precisely the logically demanded advance of human thought at a

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particular stage of thought development, with the sorts of presentations Carlyle gives of his subjects. There are also purely psychological theories: Whoever does biographical work in the patrimony of an intellectualistic psychology must come to a very different choice of what is seen as important than will the voluntarist, who will group his presentation around questions of character and attitude. In addition, one could mention here how the phrenological system of Gall, or a graphology scheme, has influenced many biographers. Among modern biographical presentations we might mention Ostwald’s portrayal of great men: a simple schema of typological psychology (the ‘classical’ type and the ‘romantic’ type) provides the most essential categories, according to which various prominent researchers of nature are characterized. Then, too, there are ethical theories: a biographer’s ethical understanding determines not only whether the subject will be praised or scolded, but also the selection of the evaluated attributes themselves. The representative of a pious Jesuit morality and the modern representative of a worldly ethic see their subjects with lenses of different shades from the very beginning. For each, rays of certain colors are reabsorbed while others are let through. In recent decades, we have witnessed the rise of specifically natural science theories, a development that has substantially extended the number of viewpoints. Predominating here are the widely contrasting understandings of the etiology of individuality. The milieu theorist seeks to understand the individual as the sum of environmental influences. This view has, in a most meritorious way, drawn the attention of the biographer to the fact that alongside the conscious and intended influences that influence the individual, there are continuously, silent, unnoticed, and unintended factors that also affect the formation of the personality: the general atmosphere of the home and of the society, suggestions and readings, nourishment and bodily care, etc. But the contrast we are drawing here is also well-served if, as in the presentations by Taine, one thinks it permissible to use milieu theory as the redemptive magic word for all puzzles of individuality.

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In the opposite extreme lapse inheritance theorists. The most general form in which this dogma has been applied to biography is racial theory. Gobineau and Chamberland, Woltmann and Reibmayr see genius as nothing other than the product of race—whereby at times the emphasis is placed on the purity of race and at other times on extensive racial mixing, and at still other times on a single specific race (the Germanic) as a precondition for any prominent individuality at all. And so, we find here suddenly that genealogies and portraits, skull shapes and hair color are the most important components of biography, behind which the otherwise usual components are placed. There are more specialized theories that bring the pathological perspective into biography. Among others, Lombroso had put forward the theory that genius and pathology stand in close relationship to one another. This prompted psychiatrists to investigate the great personalities of history and of present times within Lombroso’s framework, for, on the one hand, geniuses were to him “interesting cases,” that were especially well-suited to serve as illustrative examples of psychopathological phenomena, and, on the other hand there arose hope that the confirmation of a pathological impact that would provide genuine understanding of the uniqueness and achievements of the subject. Thus came into existence ‘pathography,’ the kind of biography that is oriented toward discovering the original significance for the essence and works of the subject of bodily constitution, inherited handicaps, signs of degeneration, hysteric and epileptic conditions, sexual perversities, preference for alcohol, and other pathological characteristics. The real creator of pathography was Möbius, who treated in this way the cases of Goethe, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Schumann and many others. The number of those who followed him is shown by the number of pathographs that have up to now been published. That list also shows that the pathographs have a peculiar preference for particular personalities, most prominently C.  F. Meyer, Maupassant, and, above all, Jesus. Finally, we find a recent further narrowing of pathographic dogma in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and his school. This theory offers a universal key to understanding any individual, including a great personality: it is the sexual experiences of childhood that, seemingly forgotten

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and repressed, in reality influence and find expression in all of the thoughts and feelings and doings and writings of the mature person. This listing of theories, intended constructively to provide perspectival choice for biographers, is by no means exhaustive. However, it might suffice to show the diversity that predominates in this area. Each theory has additional features which increase the biographer’s palate of procedural options. The particular direction of interest held by the biographer, the possibility of applying a specific method, and other features likewise affects the choice of attributes of the subject to be considered and how great or little will be the intensity of their investigation. What is the take-home from this discussion of biography as scientific method? However valuable may be the particular theories in terms of which one seeks to understand the individual, we are ultimately faced with an arbitrariness documented in terms of disorder, incompleteness and incomparability. Where some particular theory—even the best one—determines the biographer’s course a priori, unimportant considerations will intrude and important considerations will be overlooked; real connections will fall under the table, and others will be shams. If in some given instance the attention of the biographer is fixed on some or other cultural or psychological category or on a certain group of causes, everything will be attributed to it, and a distorted picture could easily result. At the same time, the multiplicity of selection principles has the effect that quite disparate biographies of the same individual could come into existence, and that a comparison of the biographies by different individuals toward the end of determining similarities and differences will be rendered more difficult or even impossible. The historian knows nothing about the medical doctor’s pathographical perspective, which could lend that historian much of value. The psychoanalyst does literary analyses without having sufficient familiarity with the scientific method of literary studies. The fact that the psychologist is available with a great variety of categories and methods to enrich the work of the researcher of individuality is something that most biographers still do not know.

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Hence do we see the need here for a common and neutral foundation for biography that provides a maximally complete overview of the multiplicity of the relevant points of view and, at the same time, raises awareness of more exact ways of determining the ‘essential.’ Only a ‘psychographic scheme’ can do this.

Notes 1. This claim was repeated in editions of Anastasi’s text that were published in 1949, 1958, and 1981. 2. The German expression for ‘common to all’ is allen gemein, and this is why the experimental discipline launched by Wundt was known as die allgemeine Psychology, or ‘the general psychology.’ The same discipline was also referred to as the ‘individual’ psychology, and occasionally even by the full expression ‘general experimental individual’ psychology. All of these labels are entirely sensible provided that one understands ‘general’ to mean ‘common to all’ and not, for example, ‘true on average.’ 3. On p. 18 of his 1911 book, Stern provided a visual representation of the four research schemes. An English language rendition of that representation can be found on p.  47 of Lamiell (2003) and on p.  54 of Lamiell (2019). 4. This was a feature of Stern’s thinking that the American psychologist Gordon W.  Allport (1897–1967) found especially attractive, and in which Allport saw prospects for an ‘idiographic’ psychology of personality as an alternative to the individual differences approach that was dominating the mainstream (cf. Allport, 1937). It is most unfortunate that both Allport and the advocates of the individual differences approach that Allport was critiquing mistakenly thought that that approach qualified as ‘nomothetic.’ For further reading on this subject, see Lamiell (1987, 1997, 1998). 5. Nor can the epistemic integrity of Thorndike’s claim be salvaged by arguing that Thorndike had ‘really intended’ the quoted passage to be understood probabilistically (refer to Proctor & Xiong, 2018, then to Lamiell, 2018). 6. The fundamental epistemic error that thus infected differential psychology early in the twentieth century would soon spread to experimental psychology. As the original ‘Leipzig model’ for single-subject experimen-

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tation established by Wundt was gradually abandoned in favor of treatment group experimentation (cf. Danziger, 1987, 1990), the vast majority of experimentalists also became, effectively, investigators of individual and group differences. Unlike the original differential psychologists (who came to be known as the ‘correlationists’; cf. Cronbach, 1957), focused as they were on differences between people that had arisen outside of the laboratory and that would be ‘captured’ by tests of some sort, practitioners of treatment group experimentation trained their focus on variables marking differences between people that were deliberately created inside the laboratory through the imposition of different treatments on separate groups of subjects. The same aggregate statistical methods were adopted to guide data analyses in each of scientific psychology’s ‘two disciplines’—and in hybrids of the two spawned by Cronbach’s (1957) famous discourse on the subject—and, in this way, the research methods canon of virtually all of empirical psychology came to be anchored by the practice of interpreting statistical knowledge of variables with respect to which individuals have been differentiated— hence variables definable only for populations (or samples therefrom)— as if it constituted knowledge of the individuals within those populations. It is the language of population-­level statistical realities that has enabled mainstream psychology’s correlational and experimental sub-disciplines to ask their questions in “one voice,” as urged by Cronbach (1957). The reader is referred to Lamiell (2019) for a fuller exposition of this history and its highly problematic epistemic legacy. 7. Like Stern, Münsterberg was a native German, and as Lück and Löwisch (1994) documented by letters from Stern to his long-time friend and colleague, the Freiburg philosopher Jonas Cohn (1869–1947), Stern knew Münsterberg personally. Indeed, one gains the sense from the aforementioned letters that the two men were on friendly terms with one another despite the divergence of their respective views on certain key aspects of scientific psychology. 8. This failure of critical attention to Stern’s writings was undoubtedly due in part to the fact that he was publishing in German whereas both Thorndike and Münsterberg were publishing in English. It is likely that this fact also contributed to the ‘origin myth’ of differential psychology that has featured William Stern (cf. Lamiell, 2006, 2019, Chap. 3). 9. Despite those efforts, the views of Thorndike and Münsterberg, later furthered not only by Anastasi (1937) as described earlier but also by another highly influential ‘second generation’ differential psychologist,

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Leona Tyler (1906–1993; cf. Tyler, 1947) became canonical within the field. Elsewhere (Lamiell, 2019) I have discussed at greater length this highly important historical development. I must note here, however, to Tyler’s credit, that she did chastise herself in an unpublished paper written nearly four decades after the original publication of her 1947 textbook for having long mischaracterized Stern’s views (Tyler, 1985). 10. The text in the remainder of this chapter is my translation of Chapter 21 in William Stern’s 1911 book (Stern, 1911), Methodological Foundations of Differential Psychology. 11. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text: [Completely unjustified is the opinion that the natural law/objective perspective on the world is irreconcilable with the individualizing/personalistic perspective. In my philosophical work, Person and Thing, I have shown thoroughly that the two perspectives are not only reconcilable but belong together and are mutually dependent upon one another.] Stern’s discussion of ‘the problem of freedom,’ included as part of Chap. 3 in the present volume, is the most direct point of reference for his remark in this footnote. 12. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In  brackets I  present here what Stern included as footnote 2 in the original text: [We are concerned here not with biography as a reservoir of raw material for the use of the psychologist, but  rather with  biography as  a  special method of  portraying an individuality.].

References Allport, G.  W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. New  York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Anastasi, A. (1937). Differential psychology: Individual and group differences in behavior. New York: Macmillan. Cronbach, L. J. (1957). The two disciplines of scientific psychology. American Psychologist, 12, 671–684. Danziger, K. (1987). Statistical method and the historical development of research practice in American psychology. In L. Krueger, G. Gigerenzer, & M. S. Morgan (Eds.), The probabilistic revolution, Vol. 2: Ideas in the sciences (pp. 35–47). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Lamiell, J.  T. (1987). The psychology of personality: An epistemological inquiry. New York: Columbia University Press. Lamiell, J. T. (1997). Individuals and the differences between them. In R. Hogan, J.  A. Johnson, & S.  Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology (pp. 117–141). New York: Academic. Lamiell, J. T. (1998). ‘Nomothetic’ and ‘idiographic’: Contrasting Windelband’s understanding with contemporary usage. Theory and Psychology, 8, 23–38. Lamiell, J. T. (2003). Beyond individual and group differences: Human individuality, scientific psychology, and William Stern’s critical personalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Lamiell, J. T. (2006). William Stern (1871–1938) und der ‘Ursprungsmythos’ der differentiellen Psychologie. Journal für Psychologie, 14, 253–273. Lamiell, J.  T. (2018). Rejoinder to Proctor and Xiong. American Journal of Psychology, 131, 489–492. Lamiell, J. T. (2019). Psychology’s misuse of statistics and persistent dismissal of its critics. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Lück, H. E., & Löwisch, D.-J. (Eds.). (1994). Der Briefwechsel zwischen William Stern und Jonas Cohn: Dokumente einer Freundschaft zwischen zwei Wissenschaftlern [Letters between William Stern and Jonas Cohn: Documents of a friendship between two scientists]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag. Münsterberg, H. (1913). Psychology and industrial efficiency. Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin. Proctor, R.  W., & Xiong, A. (2018). Adoption of population-level statistical methods did transform psychological science, but for the better: Commentary on Lamiell (2018). American Journal of Psychology, 113, 483–487. Stern, W. (1900). Über Psychologie der individuellen Differenzen (Ideen zu einer “differentiellen Psychologie”) [On the psychology of individual differences (Toward a “differential psychology”)]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1911). Die Differentialle Psychologie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen [Methodological foundations of differential psychology]. Leipzig: Barth. Thorndike, E. L. (1911). Individuality. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. Tyler, L.  E. (1947). The psychology of human differences. New  York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Tyler, L. E. (1985). Neglected insights in personology. Unpublished manuscript, Eugene, OR.

7 Personality Research and the Methods of Testing

Translator’s prefatory remarks: The translated text presented in this chapter was authored by William Stern and originally published in 1929 (Stern, 1929). Stern had presented a version of the article in 1927 at the Fourth International Conference for Psychotechnics in Paris. That presentation was reprinted in the official conference proceedings, and was also published in French translation in the Journal de Psychologie (1928, Vol. 25, pp. 5–18). This text begins with a brief and highly condensed re-statement of Stern’s understanding of the concept of ‘person,’ and proceeds to discuss the various ways in which that understanding is violated by ascendant practices in personality studies and in the psychotechnical methods that had come to dominate much of applied psychology. Applied psychology is the focus of this conference. However, it would be mistaken to ignore theory entirely. So, as our discussions begin, it is appropriate to say some words about the regrettable cleft that exists between the applied psychologist and the theoretician. One must realize that each is dependent upon the other. Practical life continuously challenges theory with new problems. It demands new research methods suited to its needs, and it protects theory from becoming rigidified in abstract concepts and schema disconnected from everyday life. Theory, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_7

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for its part, offers the applied psychologist new ideas and points of view, and in the face of theoretical advances the practitioner must guard against being wedded to methods and perspectives that have become obsolete. I would like to discuss here a major change in basic psychological ideas; one that is now perhaps most pronounced in Germany but is also proceeding in similar ways in other countries. I am referring here to a change that seems to require me to voice a strong cautionary note concerning the practices of psycho-technicians and their methods. This expectation seems all the more justified given that within the domain of theory itself the new understanding is leading thinking away from a stance that is remote from day-to-day life and toward one that is more realistic; one that is much more directly connected than its predecessor to culture and its practical demands. I am referring here to that point of view called ‘personalism,’ and to the scientific domain of personality research based on that point of view, namely, ‘personalistics.’ A thoroughgoing explanation of the concept of person, which is at the core of this theoretical perspective, would require many hours. Instead, an abbreviated and compressed presentation must suffice here; one that channels the essence of the person into two key notions: the person is a unified whole and has depth.

Point I: The Person Is a Unified Whole No aspect of being human—one’s consciousness contents, one’s body parts and movements, one’s achievements and experiences, one’s capabilities and inclinations—is ever something discrete or isolated, or significant in and of itself, or knowable as a self-contained entity, but is ever and always but a non-independent ‘moment’ of a living, self-activated and coherently structured entirety, one which we call the human individual. The human being is not a mosaic and therefore cannot be described as a mosaic. All attempts to portray a human in terms of an ordered sequence of test results are fundamentally false. Of course, that does not obviate the need for such analyses, because without investigating the particulars, each of which demands focused research, scientific work is not possible. The above does mean, however, that such analysis never discovers

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‘elements,’ i.e., simple entities that only need to be recombined in order to re-establish the whole. It also means that the real meaning of every particular that is isolated [through testing] is realized only through its place in the total personality. This means, in turn, that every analysis must be supplemented methodologically by ascertaining the relevance of what is revealed by that analysis to the overall functioning of the whole person. The importance of this principle will be illustrated through two examples. (a) The splitting of the human into a physical side and a mental side is an abstraction that, while necessary for certain scientific tasks, was for other tasks a severe limitation. Nor was it sufficient to note the many relationships between the two domains and, in turn, attempt to eliminate the separation after the fact through physiological psychology. Even here at this conference we find, on the one hand, psychologists who are seeking to build bridges leading from the psychological to the physical, and, on the other hand, physiologists and doctors who are attempting to establish relationships leading from bodily processes to what are regarded as ‘secondary’ psychological phenomena. In both cases, inquiry proceeds from the assumption that the mental and the physical are, initially, separate domains of investigation, and it is just this assumption that is problematic. There are behavioral phenomena that are immediately personal in nature. In their unitary goal-directedness they are beyond (or better: before) the separation into the domains of the physical and mental. Both moments are so integrated with one another and with their common personal foundation that it is impossible to comprehend them in isolation. These phenomena are psycho-physically neutral. Consider a willful act, or an expressive movement, or a speech utterance, or an athletic performance. In each such instance of a personal act, it is certainly possible to isolate its motoric features on the one hand, and its accompanying consciousness contents on the other, but in the process of doing this one rips asunder the meaningful coherence of the happening as a whole. Borders and lines of separation are imposed that are neglectful of the personal meaning of the activity. To cite an example of direct relevance to psycho-technics, consider i­ nvestigations

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of dexterity. When we are executing a test of dexterity, are we testing just a bodily-motoric action, or just conscious and unconscious mental processes? Neither: we are testing a unitary personal act that permits us to draw conclusions concerning a personal capability or incapability whose physical and mental aspects, though of course present and important, are nevertheless entirely secondary to the unity within which those aspects are embedded. Even the conceptual distinction between ‘physical and ‘mental’ work, or between ‘handworkers’ and ‘headworkers’ is problematic. Every work performance is, as such, psychophysically neutral, even when the physical and mental proportions are accented in varying strengths, and even if the goals of the performance are at times primarily material and at other times primarily psychological. I need only mention here the concept ‘monotony,’ which is of major importance for psycho-­technical questions—and it becomes immediately clear the extent to which a seemingly a-mentalistic and purely bodily activity depends upon the deepest drives or motivational inhibitions of the person and can therefore have very strong psychological consequences. (b) I turn now to my point concerning the altered attitude toward ‘elemental tests’. An analogy to natural science has long since led, in psycho-technics, to the dogma, still dominant today, that can be formulated as follows: the more a human performance is broken down into its component functions, and the more isolated and precisely we are able to investigate those component functions, the closer we come to a true understanding of the nature of the performance. This has often resulted in the use of highly complicated and precise apparatuses to attempt to measure exactly the simplest components of the performance: reaction times, precision of visual estimations, sensitivity to and memory for simple sense stimulations and muscular enervations, attention to uniform stimulus sequences, etc. However, that dogma can no longer be maintained today. Indeed, one is almost inclined to maintain the opposite: with the decomposition [of performances] into elementary tests and their isolated application we do not draw closer to the essence of a personality but instead move further away. A longer reaction time in the case of an individual, as measured by a reaction time apparatus, is not an indication that this

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individual will react too slowly when engaged in a meaningful life task. Or: a test of visual estimation ability, carried out by requiring the subject to bisect or segment into thirds various lines—a task that is meaningless in and of itself—tells us nothing about how the subject would behave in dealing with an interesting and meaningful task of spatial configuration. We must understand in like fashion the limited and unstable value of the most elementary test methods that have been worked out. In the case of visual estimation, for example, correlations are unsatisfactory both between the results obtained with alternative testing methods and between test results and relevant performance measures in practical professional life. The same is true in the case of other simple tests.1 An act that is embedded in the total context of personal life is just something entirely different from a superficially similar act executed on demand in an isolated and meaningless way. The reason for this is that every personally anchored act can draw its fuel from the most variable regions of an individual’s capabilities, and not only from some special capability which, in overly simplified fashion, has been designated as the one that produces the performance in question. It is, then, just here where we find the idiosyncratically unified and meaningful structure of the personality: in the fact that it possesses a reservoir of possible resources from which the individual will select the one(s) most appropriate to a given goal. To mention here just one example: a visual deficiency can be compensated by bodily movements or through logical/mathematical reconstructions, and under certain conditions these ‘substitute functions’ (Ersatzfunktionen) can result in high achievement capabilities, provided only that the task as such offers the possibility of drawing on all of a person’s strengths. These considerations have two important implications for the practice of psycho-technical testing methods: • First: we must extend further and further the principle of the ‘work sample.’ What is understood by this principle in Germany is that testing methods require inherently meaningful behaviors comparable to

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those involved in a given profession. The work sample is differentiated from actual work performance by a simplification (but one that never extends to a dissolution of an act into its ‘elements’) achieved by experimental control, variation, and measurability, and an exclusion, to the greatest possible extent, of prior knowledge and practice effects. It elicits to a much different extent than does a more elementary test a reaction of the overall personal dynamic, and enables, over and above the [determination of ] objectively measurable performance scores, an observation of the style of performance, of the extent to which substitute functions are utilized, etc. • Second: alongside the foregoing, tests of specific functions will continue to have value, but under altered perspectives. The testing of very elementary partial abilities will be relatively de-emphasized in favor of tests that that allow the subject a certain spontaneity of performance, through the choice of the most appropriate behaviors in that individual’s particular case. The practice of attributing each discrete test result to a discrete capability will be abandoned (this calls for a revision of the usual schemata used by expert evaluators). Still, one will be able to utilize a long sequence of different kinds of tests for the formulation of diagnoses and prognoses. Indeed, studies of the worth of tests have shown that the scores resulting from skillfully arranged test sequences correlate highly with assessments made in applied settings (praktische Bewährungen). How is this to be explained theoretically? Not by supposing, as in the past, that such a test sequence delivers a mosaic-like picture of simple, isolated ability groups. On the contrary, the explanation is achieved by appreciating that the isolated test performances represent a reaction of the whole personality, accentuating particular aspects and moments. A multiplicity of such tests examines in each case the whole person, always emphasizing new facets or, as one might say, under respectively different ‘centerings’ [of the person]. The result of the entire test sequence is thus not a mere juxtaposition of elements but instead a system of differentially positioned and centered cross-­ sections of the active personality.

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Point II: The Person Has Depth Personality research has discovered a new dimension within the person. Personal life combines or joins together not only the coincidence and succession of circumstances and processes into a horizontally extended entirety, but instead has volume, i.e., a vertical structure, that is constructed of layers of varying depth. In every person, there are layers that are near to the surface and produce that person’s immediate expressions and contact with the external world, and also layers that lie deep below the surface, that are not outwardly expressed, and that remain unknown to other persons, and often even to oneself, although they can find expression through the strongest dynamics. There are layers at which one can stand at the heights of the refined and differentiated culture of one’s era, and other layers of a more archaic kind, where animalistic and primitive drives of times long past are dominant. There are layers at which one is a mature adult entirely in keeping with his age, and other layers where one’s childhood and pubescence live on. There are layers at which one earnestly displays responsibility for all of the consequences of one’s actions, and other layers at which one is frivolously playful about things and about oneself, living in an illusory world, and, finally, between-levels at which consciousness of seriousness contrasts in peculiar ways with one’s overtly playful demeanor—“serious play”—(Ernst-Spiel). There are many more kinds of layering, but their listing here is unnecessary for our purpose, which is to point to the existence of layers of depth. What heretofore has gone under the name ‘depth psychology’— psychoanalysis, individual psychology—has, indeed, the fundamental fact of the depth dimension correctly recognized, but has then unjustifiably diminished the problem through gross oversimplification. The danger is that this depth is reduced to two layers by distinguishing between a primary ‘core’ and a secondary ‘shell.’ The resultant problem is that the ‘core’ is then seen as some sort of element within the person with an ascertainable content, and that everything else is then seen as

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second-order derivative, as a mere re-fashioning of the core or as foreign element imposed from the outside. Psychoanalysis fell victim to this danger by making the sex drive the core force of the personality; Adlerian individual psychology likewise fell victim to this danger with its concepts of the compensation and power drives. Obviously, one could with equal justification propound many other aspects or ‘moments’ of personal life as the absolute ‘core,’ and then regard all others as variations, sublimations, disguises and expressions thereof. In contrast to all such dualistic conceptions of the person, personalistic theory adopts decisively the holistic perspective, even with respect to the conception of depth. It is not that this or that particular level constitutes the essence of the person. It is instead the facts of the layering itself, of their interpenetration, their complementarity, and their opposition. It is not one or another singular primary drive that determines the uniqueness of each individuality, but instead their overall tonus. Even if the effective forces at the various layers give rise to the most diverse oppositions, and even apparent fissures, the entire system is subject to a personal unity in which every layer has its place, its necessity, and its meaning. It would be completely inappropriate to understand expressions such as ‘surface’ level and ‘outer’ level as negatively evaluative. Those sides of being that project the person outward and place her within the context of the outer world are no less ‘essential’ than those sides that are part of her alone, perhaps even as part of a fundament of which she is not conscious. What is most essential are the structural interrelationships existing between the various levels. So: what is the lesson for psychotechnics of this new theoretical understanding? It is clear that the result of experimental testing speaks directly only to the surface level [of the personality]. Because in any such testing the person is reacting to an outer prompting (the task) with an act that is directed outwardly and recognizable to another person. The fact that an experiment always and everywhere engages only the reactive person—or, better, the reactivity of the person—has long since given rise to the need for a method more adequate for reaching a person’s spontaneous activities and behavioral patterns. For this reason, I myself have consistently emphasized that no experimental method, however refined it might be, can ever

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render superfluous the method of [unobtrusive] observation. The latter ought also to be methodologically refined, with observational schemes, instructions, etc. further worked out. The observational method would also be made useful for the purposes of self-observation, by eliciting from the examinee statements concerning his wishes, inclinations, the motives behind his choice of profession, etc. But this does not suffice to answer our question. Observational methods are also concerned, just as is experimentation, with what is visible and audible, with what is extending outward, that is, with aspects of the outer layers of the personality. And even the self-observations of the individual convey only that which has ascended to the level of consciousness. So, we must dig deeper: to the lower layers, into the engine of half- and totally unconscious impulses, into the entangled interrelationships of these deep layers to those that are closer to the surface and are accessible to the experimenter, observer, and self-observer alike. In short: we must interpret. Certainly, efforts along these lines have been undertaken for a long time now. The psychoanalyst interprets; the graphologist interprets; even the psycho-technician interprets in the moment that she goes beyond the bare presentation of experimental findings. Up to now, however, this sort of interpretation has fallen far short of scientific rigor, breadth, and discipline. For one thing, it is one-sided in all instances where a simple core of the personality is assumed, and with reference to which everything else is then assumed (psychoanalysis). Moreover, interpretation is dilettantish in instances of the sort that often occur with graphologists and also psycho-­ technicians, where every distinctly isolated characteristic is attributed to some depth characteristic (e.g., a trait or an inclination of talent). It is beyond the method of science and is purely intuitive, as is the case with many occupational advisers, to whom are attributed a finely developed feel for the essential features of respective individualities. But how rare is this wonderful talent; and then: where is the guarantee that that such an intuitively fashioned portrayal of a person corresponds to reality? This work of creating a personalistic method of interpretation will require decades; but it must be started immediately. For if up to now we have developed the computational methods of correlation suitable for investigating the horizontal relationships between the multiple facets of individuals, we must now shift our attention to the vertical relationships

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leading from the surface into the depth of the individual, and from there back again to the upper layers. The meaning of a poor performance that has been observed experimentally can be very different, depending upon whether it has issued from a low capability, or from a deep-seated drive blockage, or from personal angst or state of shock over the particular testing situation. This is a case where the vertical connections and tensions between attitude and aptitude must be investigated, mindful that by attitude is meant the entirety of one’s personal inclinations. It is not only the individual’s conscious interest, wishes, and impulses of will that are of interest but also the orientation of that individual’s basic drives (Triebeinstellungen). Once again, the question arises as to the extent to which the larger personal depth out of which emerges an occupational tendency—a single-minded love of the work, the feeling of being completely fulfilled by a task—can overcome the narrow limits that seem to be imposed by the results of a direct assessment of a ‘performance capability’ in the narrow sense captured by an aptitude test. And vice-versa: it is yet to be determined whether or not a person who is, according to a performance test, well suited to a certain kind of work, might possibly have in her deeper levels opposed tendencies that would ultimately make the satisfying and successful practice of that occupation impossible. Adler’s theoretical concept of “overcompensation” comes in for consideration here, whereby a defect can, under some circumstances, form the basis of a strong impetus to a combative overcoming of the impediment and to the development of a higher performance capability that is actually based on the initial inferiority. But there can also be an under-compensation, which up to now has hardly been observed, so that a higher talent can engender little interest or be taken for granted, with the ultimate result being a failure in precisely that domain of high ability. Another group of problems concerns the many substantive relationships between occupational activities and drive layers. Suppose that we encounter an individual with a particularly intense or unstable drive complex: should we now expect that an occupational choice lying along these lines serves to discipline and sublimate this drive complex in a positive way, or should we expect the opposite: that, in a contradictory way, the occupational choice will lead to a self-defeating, one-sided, and

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undisciplined expression of the drive complex? One thinks about the ambivalent significance of the urge toward neatness for the occupation of a milliner, or on the role of erotic provocativeness for the actress and dancer, or on the significance of sadistic and bloodthirsty stirrings for the butcher and for the surgeon, or on the relationship of the acquisitiveness drive to the occupation of the merchant, the banker, etc. It is precisely because these and so many other instances entail an ambivalence that the interpretive diagnosis and, even more, prognosis, is extraordinarily difficult. But recognizing the problematic is itself a step in the right direction, and, today, that is not the case among countless psycho-technicians and occupational counselors. There are additional problems with depth psychology that I can only mention here without pursuing them in greater detail. One of these is the peculiar connection that certain people have to particular materials: some can exercise their strengths with wood but not with iron; others with paper but not with cloth. They are just as attracted to some or other material as they are incorrigibly repulsed by others. Another problem is that of monotony, a phenomenon mentioned earlier. What good is the greatest suitability for certain activities if the worker has to repeatedly perform them year after year, leading to mental breakdown? But now if current psycho-technical research shows that there are types of persons who can cope with monotony,2 then belonging to this type or some other can be far more important for work performance and work satisfaction than the performance sample as has been conceived in psycho-technics up to now. Depth psychology also provides an important suggestion for the forming and re-forming of our psycho-technical tests. With the tests that have been used heretofore, the goal of the experimenter and the intent of the examinee are the same: the examinee is consciously and intentionally oriented toward the results that the examiner wants. But one of the most fundamental insights of depth psychology is that intention can just as readily conceal as reveal the deeper layers of the personality. Even the so-­ called traits of “will” such as diligence, endurance, punctuality, conscientiousness, attention to detail, etc. do not reveal themselves most clearly in instances where their revelation is consciously being strived for, but instead when they are an unconscious factor in the course of pursuit of

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some other objective. For example: if one observes an examinee in a wire-­ bending task, the final result toward which he is consciously striving is not the only, and perhaps not even the most characteristic aspect of his being; [What might be more important] instead are certain formal features of his work of which he is not thinking at all and perhaps does not even know about. Recently, psycho-technical researchers (Valentiner, Roloff, among others) have taken this perspective by deducing indirectly certain traits of will and character from such unintentional components of work. This certainly shows a way to overcome the complaint about methodological one-sidedness that has so often been raised about psycho-­ technical methods, in that those methods neglect characterology. But we must also resolve to incorporate more decisively into our psycho-­technical inventory such methods as are now proper to the newly established characterology. I mean the “method of expression,” that is extended primarily to that side of human behavior that lies apart from the intentional will, i.e., to facial contortions (Gesichtsspiel), postural contortions, rhythm and pace of body movements, characteristics of handwriting, etc. Here, too, it is clear that much that is currently dilettantish must be eliminated or refined. Unfortunately, the rapid diversion of these methods into purely commercial uses has seriously hindered efforts to examine through patient detail work scientifically valuable core ideas. But one need only mention the name Klages to show that these characterological methods of expression will be recruited in a serious way to the task of diagnosing humans. It was mistaken and short-sighted of real psychology and psycho-technics to refuse to engage with these methods for so long. All the more pleasing it now is to find ourselves at the beginning of a scientific psychology of expression, that, partly due to its new methods (think, for example, of film), will distance itself from the attempts of the earlier characterology. In concluding, I offer one additional comment on the possibility for practical applications of the new personalistic perspective. Psycho-­ technical aptitude diagnosis has two very different tasks: one has to do with the competition-based selection of applicants for a certain occupation or commercial concern. The other has to do with advising youth who are entering occupational fields. There were primarily external reasons for the field’s preoccupation for a time with the first task: industry

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needed only to attract the most talented among the rising generation; the large transportation industries were only interested in those with extraordinary attention, presence of mind, endurance, etc. to hire for jobs as locomotive engineers, chauffers, etc. Psycho-technical methods were developed in consideration of the urgency of this task. Then, later, as the social aspect of occupational counseling came into consideration, the same methods were at first applied automatically to this new task. This led to many problems, because the question of occupational counseling—Which occupation is the best for this individual?—is entirely different from the question of competition-based selection—Which individuals are best suited for this occupation or factory?” The different questions demand different methods. While the psycho-technology of competition-­ based selection is concerned only with the narrowly defined performance ability of the examinee for one specific domain of performance (namely the one that is of most importance to the factory) and is indifferent to all of those individuals who do not possess the relevant performance ability, occupational counseling, in contrast, concerns itself with the whole person whose occupational decision must be made in consideration of the entire structure of his personality. Moreover, occupational counseling is concerned with the positive advising of all those who seek counseling, including those who are unsuited to the occupation that they first had in mind. It follows that the ability tests in occupational counseling must be constructed much more in the fashion of personality tests than is the case in competition-based testing for selection. In the former case, it is not the determination of difference scores and ability profiles in and of itself, but personal meaning that is decisive. This requirement demands a substantial re-designing of psychological method,3 and it also demands of occupational counselors a thorough foundation of psychological knowledge. In this domain, the domination of experimental apparatus technology and computational procedures is entirely inappropriate. On the other hand, it is certainly to be wished that the psycho-­ technology of competition-based selection not remain uninfluenced by the personalistic perspective. There is first to consider its methods: we saw that the very determination of a special performance capability is possible only with procedures that go beyond the simple mosaic-like constellation of the results of elementary tests. The corporations that engage in

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competition-based selection procedures should remember that they are dealing not with machines or materials, whose quality and economic significance for the corporation might, in fact, be exhaustively expressed numerically, but with human beings, whose occupation is a part—indeed, an essential part—of their entire personal life. Just because it will not be at all easy for the economically-concerned corporation to sufficiently infuse into its business interests concern for these social and personal considerations, it would be most desirable if psycho-technical tests and aptitude diagnoses were increasingly submitted to public authorities who, acting for the public good and having no financial stake in the test results, would be well-positioned to take into consideration the overall structure of examinees’ personalities. These persons can be found in psychological institutes and in psychological departments of occupational counseling offices. The beginnings of such a movement are already visible in certain places.

Notes 1. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text: [Findings relevant to this point that have been obtained in our Hamburg Institute are reported in a book by Dr. Roloff titled Aptitude and Testing: Psychotechnical Studies, which appeared as a special issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology (Hamburg Studies of Aptitude Research Nr. 9), Leipzig, 1928.]. 2. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 2  in the original text: [Refer to the work completed at our Hamburg Institute by H. Wunderlich: “The effect of repetitive inescapable work on the structure of personality.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 25, p.  321 and forward; published separately in ‘Writings on the Psychology of Work Aptitude,’ volume 31, 1925.]. 3. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 3 in the original text: [That this restructuring of the method of diagnosing psychological aptitude for the purposes of occupational counseling is already occurring is to be seen in some of the most recently published literature. Here will be mentioned only the recently published book by Hellmuth Bogen: “Psychological Foundation of Practical

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Occupational Counseling (Langensalza, 1927) and the brochure by Hildegard Grünbaum-Sachs: “Depth Psychology and Occupational Counseling, Leipzig, 1927 (Writings on the Psychology of Occupational Aptitude and of Economic Life, Nr. 33).].

Reference Stern, W. (1929). Persönlichkeitsforschung und Testmethode [Personality research and the methods of testing.]. Jahrbuch der Charakterologie, 6, 63–72.

8 The Personal Factor in Psychotechnics and Practical Psychology

Translator’s prefatory remarks: The translated text presented in this chapter was authored by William Stern and originally published in 1933 (Stern, 1933). Stern had presented a version of the article at the Seventh International Conference for Psychotechnics in Moscow in 1931. Highlighted in this work is the need to distinguish between what he calls ‘transpersonal’ objectives of psychotechnicians, on the one hand, and the genuinely personal concerns of occupational counselors, on the other. In the former case, the primary objective is to optimize outcomes for organizations, while in the latter case the aim is to direct individuals toward occupations for which their specific talents, interests, and life circumstances best suit them. Especially worthy of note here is Stern’s criticism of a position, often adopted by psychotechnicians, that he called the ‘harmony argument.’ According to that argument, recommendations formulated with the objective of optimizing the transpersonal objectives of organizations serve simultaneously, and by default, to optimize the personal objectives of individual clients. In many cases, Stern argues, this argument is not valid, and the fact of this matter points to the need for a more genuinely personalistic perspective.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_8

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The Nature and Concerns of Psychotechnics If we seek to define the concept of psychotechnics not according to the theoretical program that it demands1 but instead according to the way of speaking about it that has been worked out—and, indeed, internationally—we come to the statement: Psychotechnics is the practical science of regarding human attributes and ways of behaving from the standpoint of their best possible utilization in economics, work, and occupational life. This definition makes apparent that psycho-technics actually has two quite distinct objectives: one is aimed at the human being in its characteristics and ways of behaving; to this extent, psychotechnics is a part of anthropology, psychology, and physiology. Psychotechnics also applies to areas of culture such as economics, work, and occupation; and to this extent psychotechnics is aligned most closely with the disciplines of sociology, national economics, the science of work and occupation. At the same time, the above definition asserts that these two objectives are not on the same level, that, on the contrary, knowledge of human—or personal—factors is secondary to those other factors that we might label ‘transpersonal.’ Certainly, the domains of economics, work and occupation that should be advanced by psychotechnics are ‘human’ affairs, but not in such a way that they have to do with the single human individual, that self-contained, self-activating, distinct human being that we call a ‘person,’ and certainly not to that individual person, knowledge of whom is sought, as part of the goal of application. Let us consider first just the transpersonal factors, i.e., the true objectives of psychotechnics. Here we find that psychotechnics does not develop these factors from within, but instead receives them from the outside. This goal-setting from without is the greatest determinant of the nature of the scientific work of psychotechnics. The tasks of psychotechnics are vastly different, and require such different methods, when, for example, the objective is to further optimize the economic productivity of the company by learning about and sorting workers, than when, for example, the task is to optimize sales by noticing human needs and appealing to them through advertisements, or when, in the interest of

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optimizing the protection of the public from accidents, the task is to correctly select the operators of public transit vehicles and police officers. But it is not only the particular objective that determines the work of psychotechnics. There is also the overall structure of the economic and social relationships within which this work is to be performed. The interests of private companies place demands on psychotechnics different from those placed by government agencies. At a time in which rich and varied job possibilities are available only to individuals who are suited for those jobs, psychotechnics has a very different significance than in times of great unemployment, when bare existence is so pressing that the question of suitability is of less importance. What is the point of mentioning these well-known facts here? To underscore the fact that psychotechnics is not on a level with the exact natural sciences, which, like chemistry or physiology, have a general validity independent of place and time. Instead, psychotechnics is a support discipline within cultural science, whose structure and domain of tasks depend to a great extent on temporal, geographical, and social conditions. It follows that the ‘law-likeness’ of psycho-technical insights is not to be compared with the exactness of natural laws, but has instead, at most, the character of ‘rules’ (Regel) that are to a high degree determined by situational considerations. It seems to me that an international congress is the ideal place to draw attention to this constraint, because it then becomes understandable that the—unquestionably desirable—international convergence in terminology, problematics, and methods can overcome certain borders and make only more valuable the exchange of experiences and problems between various countries that are engaged in psychotechnics under varying social conditions and current circumstances. The fact that the objectives of psychotechical work are determined from without is true of many other practical sciences as well, for example the applied natural sciences. But here again one must guard against extending the parallels too far. The chemist who prepares explosives receives his objective from others: at times its purpose will be to cause explosions in mines; at other times, such as in war, the material will be used to blow up bridges. The immediate goal of his work, to produce explosives, is and remains, in and of itself, neutral with respect to the

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goals that it will serve, and so has no single meaning in and of itself. Drawing parallels between psycho-technics and the technical or economic special sciences would be similarly inadequate. This is so because the psycho-technician does not work on machines or on wares (in short: on ‘things’), but instead on human beings, and human beings are and remain, under all conditions, centers of their own meaning and values. They remain ‘persons’ even when they are studied and treated from the standpoint of a transpersonal goal. It would be much more appropriate to regard doctors and hygienists as cases analogous to psychotechnicians, because those professionals, too, work on human beings. To those researchers and practitioners, it is obvious that in their work they must consider the well-being and the pains, the health and healing of the individuals on whom they are working, even when they are working in the interest of transpersonal goals such as public health or the discovery of a new medication or the prevention of an epidemic. Working on human beings must always entail working for those very human beings. So, what is the current situation in modern psycho-technics with respect to these demands? The psychotechnician has very good reason to take this question seriously, because if today the word ‘psychotechnics’ is uttered with disdain in many circles, that is due to the suspicion, whether openly expressed or not, that psychotechnicians not only intercede but actually interfere in the lives of the individuals they deal with, and that they degrade individuals into mere means to the realization of transpersonal objectives. Now psychotechnicians will counter this accusation with the argument, one I term the ‘harmony argument,’ that in the service of other goals, psychotechnical tests in and of themselves work to the advantage of those to whom they are applied. One reason for this is that such tests place each individual in that position appropriate to his/her performance capability. A second reason is that, more generally, psychological tests serve to convince all that personnel selection is not capricious or arbitrary, but is instead justified on the basis of objective test results. Without doubt, this ‘harmony argument’ holds in many cases. Nevertheless, one may not rest content with this, but must instead at least appreciate the existence of a problem. In this connection, I raise just a few especially

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problematic points. (1) In competition-based selection (Konkurrenzauslese), the psycho-technician is generally interested only in those who are positively chosen. The individuals who are not chosen simply disappear. What happens to them is outside the concern of the psychotechnician. But for those persons, the effects of not having been selected are often not limited to disappointment over a hope, but can lead to a stigma, and one that is felt more intensely the greater one’s belief in the validity of the test. (2) Those who are favored in the selection process are so on the grounds that they have a special performance ability. But whether or not this is their strongest capability, or whether the overall structure of the personality might favor another occupation, is not investigated and not considered. On the contrary: the ascendance of some other inner occupational tendency is only made more difficult, because the individual has already been designated as suited for something else. (3) Considering only some particular performance capability is understandable given that, previously, greater emphasis in determining one’s occupation was placed on other factors—social, familial, political, religious—that, as such, are of no immediate relevance to occupational adeptness and suitability. But the danger of one-sidedness in the opposite direction is present as well, where the significance of non-psychological facets of the individual’s entry into occupational life is underestimated, and that one overlooks among the psychological factors those imponderables that, although eluding every attempt at measurement, can nevertheless be very significant, as, for example, a long-time adherence to a particular sort of occupational work. (4) The presence of a psychotechnician’s expert testimony can have consequences for the evaluated person that extend far beyond the objectives of the expert testimony. More will be said about this at the conclusion of this presentation. So, it must be demanded of psychotechnics that it concern itself more than has heretofore been the case with the repercussions of its procedures for the affected individuals, and that it formulate, based on a consideration of these repercussions, guidelines for reforming its procedures. For even if psycho-technics is to be nothing more than an aid to the economy, it nevertheless is always fateful for the human beings whom it affects.

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 uman Work as Performance, Experience, H and Expression If psychotechnics characteristically subordinates personal goals to transpersonal goals, a distinction must be drawn between psychotechnics and another scientific perspective in which, from the beginning, both classes of goals are treated as equally justified and stand in reciprocal relationships. Decision-making within psychotechnics should serve to bring about not only what is ‘economically sensible’ but also what is ‘individually favorable’ (Bogen). Terminologically as well, we must distinguish this other perspective from psychotechnics. It is no mere coincidence that psychologically-oriented occupational counseling—I am thinking primarily of this—nowadays rejects the label ‘psychotechnics.’ I propose to speak of ‘practical psychology.’ We define this as ‘the practical science of human attributes and ways of behaving and experiencing from the standpoint of their reciprocal relationships to various domains of life.’ The domain of application of practical psychology is, as this definition already indicates, broader than that which concerns us just now, because it also includes the utilization of psychological knowledge for problems having to do with the administration of justice, of child-rearing, and of well-being. In the remainder of this discussion we will limit ourselves to the practical psychology of economic and professional life. It will be shown that these considerations have much in common with psycho-technics, and draw much from the latter, especially in the domain of methods, yet because of the different emphasis on personal factors have essentially different tasks. Human work must be viewed in three ways: as performance, as experience, and as expression. (a) Work as performance: human work is a means of propagating transpersonal values. Accordingly, and as we have already seen, this is the real object of psychotechnics. But now as a component of the problem of performance, practical psychology must take into account the strongly personal anchoring of human work activity. What we call performance capability and performance readiness is not only the

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sum of those superficial partial abilities that are directly required for the production of certain performances—such as sense memory, special perceptiveness, dexterity, etc.—but also those that flow from deeper personal levels of drive, will, and interest. Here, high levels of specific abilities can, under certain conditions, become secondary if opposed by strong constraints emanating from underlying drives. Likewise, concern about lesser degrees of certain capabilities can be reduced if there is a strong will to work, or if a deeper and irrepressible inclination inclines the person to a certain occupation and brings into play surrogate functions. It is the responsibility and often-­ difficult task of the occupational counselor to investigate and take into consideration these possibilities and to harmonize to the fullest extent possible the interests reflected by transpersonal considerations with those of the personality under consideration. (b) Work as experience: Here we encounter the specifically psychological question: What is the relationship of the person to work in general, and to his/her particular work specifically? Regarding work in general: What requires investigation here is the entire range of emotional reactions, from enthusiasm about work, ranging over the various grades of pleasure with work, from feelings of languor or ambivalence to the negative reactions of being strangled by or disinterested in work, or of shyness about work or loathing it, and these investigations must be carried out not only in consideration of theoretical interests but also out of concern for practical matters: which factors of the economic, social, and corporate situations are those that produce the feelings in question, and what provisions can be considered in order to raise one’s pleasure in work and to limit the impulses counter to work? For example, if we consider the various factors involved in work pleasure, such as the pleasure of certain motoric movements, the pleasure of earnings, the pleasure of competition and of productivity, the pleasure of advancing the common good, etc., we find that each of these factors is associated with specific objective conditions that are involved in the work. The psychological effects of rhythm, of forced tempo, of piecework pay, of group work, of monotony on the individual worker must be examined. Relevant here as well is the problem that, unfortunately, is so great just now for

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many, namely, the problem of unemployment. We urgently need a practical psychology of unemployment, because the mental damage resulting from unemployment that is long-lasting and has no foreseeable end can under some circumstances be more fateful than the purely economic and social effects of unemployment. There is then to consider the attitude of the person toward a certain kind of work: the wish for a certain occupation, occupational choice prior to embarking on a certain occupational life, occupational satisfaction or disappointment, one’s convictions about some occupation, the fickleness of one’s feelings toward work while engaged in it. (c) Work as expression: Since it is human nature to express outwardly what is within, and since work is itself a psychophysically neutral behavior, we must finally ask ourselves: How does the person express herself in her work? How does one present oneself in one’s work? To what extent does one seek and find the essentially human in his work? How does the person form and develop herself through and in work—or, perhaps, independently of—or even in opposition to— her work? Is one’s work but one, and perhaps a relatively less important, side of his essential being? Here, too, the eminently practical question arises as to whether and to what extent contemporary economic work is suited to convey one’s personality, to form it and to fulfill it?

Implications for Diagnostic Methods What perspectives on practical methods of diagnosis emerge from the called-for consideration of personal factors? First of all, we should compare and contrast mono- and poly-­ symptomatic methods. The ‘mono-symptomatic’ method is one according to which [consideration of ] a particular kind of symptom or a homogenous group of symptoms is regarded as entirely sufficient. In principle, therefore, purely quantitative testing is ‘mono-symptomatic,’ even when it entails a

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sequence of different tests, as is the case with the a strictly graphological interpretive method that takes into consideration very different characteristics of handwriting. Here we have before us simultaneously the two primary and currently dominant mono-symptomatic methods: the performative-­psychological (leistungspsychologische) and the expressive-­ psychological (ausdruckspsychologische). These two can themselves be contrasted from yet another perspective. In the one method, the relationship is determined quite directly between symptom (e.g., as revealed by a wire-bending test) and a diagnosis of dexterity quite directly. Actually, such a determination is too direct and linear and so is superficial. It fails to take into consideration the personal grounding of one’s performance capability. In the other method, the relationship between symptom (e.g., the contours of handwriting) and diagnosis (e.g., the examinee’s reliability) is too indirect and therefore too vague and ambiguous. One can acknowledge that graphology and other methods of interpreting expression give us insights into the general outlines of character and certain capabilities. But it is a long way from these general characteristics to ‘character of work,’ or from inferred capabilities to specific occupational performance capacities, and such inferences often lead astray. The personalistic perspective accords with the fact that the person always and everywhere lives and functions as a whole, yet can seem quite different when viewed within various larger contexts. Thus, is it possible that the character of a person within the context of her family life, or in an erotic context, or in her political activity can seem quite different than it does within the context of her occupational and work life, and it is only this point that is relevant to the questions with which we are concerned just now. Here we see the danger of interpretive methods tied exclusively to the psychology of expression—quite apart from its inherent uncertainties. But on the other hand, such methods should not be entirely negated, because they can provide valuable insights when used in combination with other methods. This moves us into the domain of poly-symptomatic methods. When we discuss ‘poly-symptomatic’ methods, we can have in mind the possibility of one and the same procedure, e.g., an experimental test, functioning symptomatically in a variety of different ways. Alongside numerical performance scores, there is the possibility of analyzing

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mistakes and making behavioral observations—whereby not only the performance on the task but also the examinee’s behavior toward co-­ workers and toward the work material can be important for the overall judgment. Studies by Wunderlich and by Katzenstein in our [Hamburg] institute show ways in which the bare scaffolding of mere test scores can be filled out, and how not only the drives underlying performance but also important strands of the ‘character’ of the examinee’s work can be made apparent.2 Additional symptom groups can be revealed by statements that the examinee makes about himself, his childhood, development, occupational wishes, interests, etc. Here I can point to the successful use that has been made of such statements by Bogen, whose data were obtained partly through normal conversation and partly by means of a questionnaire that the examinee filled out, answering questions about herself. Admittedly, this method requires a talent that is not possessed by every researcher, and certainly not by the average researcher, in this area: the ability to discern deeper meanings in an examinee’s statements. This special ability is required because it is not the examinee’s own ideas about the development and current state of his character that is in question here, but rather the deeper needs, drive orientations, constraints, and tensions that are at work beneath the surface that the diagnostician must ascertain in order to formulate professional opinion and give advice. But a simplistic poly-symptomatic method cannot do this, either. When such a method is applied systematically, it can lead to a summative sequence of various findings, which can then be combined into a profile or list of traits. Work of this sort is now widely regarded as ‘personality research,’ especially in America. Admittedly, there are many cases in which the use of such a ‘standard method’ suffices. These are the simpler, straightforward cases in which individuals can be assigned their relative positions in economic life. These are cases that are covered by the above-mentioned ‘harmony argument.’ But when the questions become more complicated—and it is just the more complicated cases that engage the occupational counselor, the juvenile officer, the institutions concerned with psychopathologies—it is necessary to pay attention not only to the serial arrangement of many symptoms but to their interrelationships and rank-orderings within the

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personality, and these interrelationships and rank-orderings differ from case to case. Bogen speaks of a ‘total procedure’ that constantly directs attention to the totality of the examinee as a person, seeking out in each case the indicators and symptoms that lead to the deepest core of the personality. In one case that could be the peculiarity of her handwriting or a trauma that surfaces out of recollections from childhood. In another case, the key might be seen to lie in the effective performance on certain tests. In a third case, the focus might be on the judgments that the examinee makes of himself. It is in the selection of the respectively characteristic symptom groups, in the full and constant access to the various domains of symptoms, and in the delicacy with which the decisive strands, tendencies and capabilities for an examinee’s occupational and work life can be deduced where we find the professional practical psychologist. I recognize that we have sketched here an idealistic picture. The routine exercise of such a total procedure is currently precluded by wholly external conditions: the sheer mass of tasks and the limitations of personnel, certainly within psychotechnics but also to a great extent within occupational counseling. It has also been noted several times that for the great majority of cases a more limited effort in the area of method suffices. But even in such cases it is of great significance that one knows what is being left out, and that one gives some accounting for if and why that is being done. It is also important for one to avoid the belief that by means of some single procedure, whether psychotechnic/experimental, graphological/interpretive, or psychoanalytic, that one has captured the examinee’s personality. In conclusion I mention one last limitation: such comprehensive portrayal of a personality can also exceed the boundaries of what a diagnostician may include in her expert testimony. That testimony should not become a kind of résumé (Steckbrief) in which the examinee’s psychological structure including intimate details, weaknesses and imbalances are set forth with hard words and thus made accessible to others. Questions arise here that extend deep into the professional ethics of the psychologist. One need only call to mind the mischief that has occurred in connection with the testimonials given by graphologists: a corporate leader with a position to fill arranges for a written application to be professionally interpreted, and, in this way, becomes familiar with characteristics of

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the applicant without the applicant having any knowledge of the claims that have been made, with alleged exactness, about his honesty or dishonesty, drives, etc. In the face of such unrestrained extension of judgments about character it must be continuously emphasized that it is not an examinee’s total character but only her characteristics relevant to work and profession, i.e., her “work character,” that is of proper interest to the psychotechnician and practical psychologist. More difficult is the question: should professional testimonies be open or secret? In comparison with occupational counseling, it is more often the case in psychotechnics that the examinee does not gain any knowledge about what is claimed about him in an expert’s testimony. In view of this circumstance it seems at first blush to be an entirely clear moral requirement that an examinee would have a right to knowledge of those characteristics that would determine her work capability and, under certain circumstances, her occupational fate. But there are also counter-­ arguments here. It is just human nature for a psychologist to formulate a testimony that would be accessible to the examinee in such a way that much material would have to be played down and other material colored that, objectively considered, would belong in the testimony. And for the examinee himself, knowledge of the contents of an expert’s testimony can be a psychological and characterological danger, to the extent that favorable comments could make one vain and lazy, while unfavorable comments could rob one of all optimism and hope of success. It hardly seems possible to give a generally valid solution to this difficulty. It must suffice now to have raised this concern about expert testimonies and to emphasize, that here—to a greater extent than with respect to other questions— the tact of the psychologist must determine her behavior in individual cases. I come to the end. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention once again as I conclude that the theme of my lecture has not been ‘psychotechnics’ comprehensively considered, but instead just the ‘personal factor’ within psychotechnics. For me, the question has simply been: What do psychotechnics and practical psychology mean for the individual persons who are subjected to their methods? It is just because this question is usually de-emphasized in discussions about the nature and significance of psycho-technics that I thought it appropriate to give it special attention here.

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I am well aware that in certain respects the personalistic approach runs counter to views that for reasons of location predominate at this conference. But as already indicated, I see it as the task of an international congress for the representatives of various nations and cultures to try to learn from and inform one another about the differences in the problems they face and their attempts at solutions.

Notes 1. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 2  in the original text: [This holds also for the program to which I introduced, in 1903, the terminology ‘psycho-technics’ in an article titled ‘Applied Psychology,’ published in Beiträge zur Psychologie der Aussage (Contributions to the Psychology of Testimony), Volume 1, pp. 4–45. 2. TRANSLATOR NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 3  in the original text: [See in particular: Betti Katzenstein, ‘The Ascertainment of the Character of Work from the Standpoint of Psychological Aptitude. Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie, 41, 69–137. Also published separately in: Writings on the Psychology of Occupational Aptitude and Economic Life, 43. 1932.].

Reference Stern, W. (1933). Der personale Faktor in Psychotechnik und praktischer Psychologie [The personal factor in psychotechnics and practical psychology]. Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie, 44, 52–63.

9 Meaning and Interpretation

Translators prefatory remarks: This text is a translation of a work published by William Stern in 1930 as Chapter 3 in a book titled ‘Studies in the Science of Persons (Stern, 1930). In this text, Stern expounds upon, first, the central theoretical role that accrues to the consideration of meanings in personalistic psychology, and secondly, the methodological importance of procedures of interpretation through which those meanings are constructed. The piece reflects vividly the breadth and depth of Stern’s personalistic views, and his convictions about the indispensability of qualitative methods in a personalistic psychology.

Meaning In discussing the personalistic theory of interpretation and meaning it is especially difficult to exclude world view/metaphysical considerations entirely and to remain entirely within the realm of scientific theory. As the discussion proceeds, it will at best be possible to limit the discussion, basically, to formal considerations, and to leave considerations of the substantive meaningful content out of the discussion. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_9

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The first point to be made here is that a science of the person is not possible without positing ontological “meanings,” because “meaning” points to sensible coherence, is “sense of other” (“Fremdsinn”) on the basis “of sense of self ” (“Selbstsinn”). But the person is always located within sensible coherences of whatever kind, within which she assumes the position of “sense of self ” or “sense of the other” or both simultaneously. From this perspective, two formal preconditions suffice to establish scientifically the personalistic theory of meaning: 1. Every person has a sense of self, is by nature a sense-whole (without compromising his relationship to other meaningful wholes). Within personalistics, this claim is beyond all discussion because it is the precondition for personalistics having any object at all, and hence for existing as a science. 2. Every person is part of other sense-wholes and stands in relationship to them (without compromising the simultaneous maintenance of her own sense-wholeness). The material nature of those “transpersonal” carriers of meaning (other persons, supra-individual unities such as state, people, humanity, ideas, cultural values) is outside the realm of this discussion.1 Consistent with these two tenets, there are two basic kinds of ‘meaning’ in personalistics: meaning for the person and meaning of the person. If the person as such is understood as the carrier of meaning, then we must say not that the person ‘has’ meaning but rather that the person lends meaning. Everything else—the world and its various features—‘has’ meaning for the person insofar as it uses or damages the person, advances or limits one, prompts one into activity or rest, contributes to one’s survival and development, enshrouds or displays one. In this sense, every biological, psychological, and cultural discussion of moments related to the person is simultaneously a determination of meaning, because only if one could completely ignore how such moments relate to the whole person—which is impossible—would the discussion of the meanings of those moments be rendered superfluous.

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On the other hand, regarding the person as belonging to meaningful wholes of a different kind—outside of or over him—bestows on that person ‘transpersonal meaning,’ and indeed one and the same person can now have the most divergent meanings as a consequence of the divergence, yes even the infinity, of the influential carriers of meaning in his world. From this standpoint one can understand how the person can be partitioned when regarded from different perspectives and different scientific disciplines. It is one thing to view the person transpersonally as a natural entity and quite another thing to view her as a member of a community, or as a collaborator in various domains of objective culture, or as a determining factor in the historical process of humanity and peoples. These widely different considerations are not to be understood merely as manifestations of the one-sidedness of individual investigators or as methodologically necessary oversimplifications, but rather as essential characteristics of the person’s own meaningful being. But these characteristics are only possible because the person is being regarded not simply in term of himself, but rather in terms of his meaning, i.e., relative to other centers of “sense.” Never can these outer-centered perspectives on the person substitute for the centered perspective, in which the person herself appears as a meaning-endowing center of sense. This is the personalistic perspective. But by the same perspective, this fundamental tenet of personalistics concerning the relationship to the whole must be applied to these various transpersonal meanings of the person: the relationships of the person to outer centers of sense (meaning) only really become ‘personal’ relationships when they are embedded in the individual person’s sense of self. So we encounter here the concept of “introception” (Introzeption). A thorough treatment of this concept within the framework of the larger philosophical system cannot be given here. For personalistics as science, the role of this concept consists in the fact that it unifies the structure and meaning of the person: introception is the embodiment of the various meanings of the person in his own being; it is therefore, the thoroughgoing structuring of this system of meanings into the unitary and unique form (Gestalt) of the personality.

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One cannot reach the essence of a person without understanding her meaningful relationship to a god and to the world, to communities and to fellow humans, to spiritual and material forces. Even then, one cannot do justice to a person as person simply by listing these relationships or presuming that that is all there is. Beyond this, one must recognize the unique totalization and individualization of all of the individual meanings in the overall meaning structure of this particular personality. In the domain of meanings, Leibniz’s dictum really holds, with but a small variation: Every person mirrors the world from his standpoint. One ought not think that these considerations already overstep the boundaries of a strictly theoretical science. The application of the concept of ‘introception’ here is meant neither metaphysically nor ethically (as is the case in the personalistic world view). Instead, the meaning here is purely methodological and epistemological. The concept is necessary as a counter to all attempts to make any particular meaning-relationships, be they naturalistic, religious, economical, humanistic, or whatever, into the essence of the person. The temptation is extraordinarily great to reduce the human being to some or other meaning-formula, depending upon the researcher’s particular disciplinary specialty: as the son of God, or as the highest level in the development of life forms, as a participant in the economy or as a member of a people, as the carrier of eternal and general human characteristics or as a singular factor in an historical process. The image of the person is distorted to the extent that one or another of these meanings is privileged, but also to the extent that one includes them all simply by regarding them alongside one another. An adequate picture is achieved only by taking into account the introceptive fusion of all of these meanings in the entirety of the personality. This is what establishes the necessity of a general science of the person with priority over all of the other more specialized disciplines. So much for the transpersonal meaning of the person. The remainder of this chapter has to do exclusively with meaning for the person, or with “personal meaning.” Now, everything that is not the person herself is related to her in terms of meaning and acquires through and from the person a derived sense (meaning). Our interest here is in everything, that is not the person himself, including his own parts,

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functions, conditions, and dispositions as well as environmental objects, conditions, etc., that stand in some relationship to him. The biologist asks about the meaning of metabolism and inner secretion, but also about the meaning of climate and vitamin-rich foods. The psychologist investigates the meaning of intelligence, of infantile experiences, of repression, but also the meaning of different domains of physical stimulation or suggestions emanating from the environment. When the cultural scientist wants to understand the essence of an historically famous personality, she investigates the significance of certain affects and drives, but also the significance of genetic endowment and environment. These examples serve to show how the concept of “personal significance” is not only psychophysically neutral but also neutral with respect to the inner-outer dimension. Every object of personalistic investigation can be and must be so understood. This ‘must be’ stands in need of further clarification. Naturally, it does not mean that for each and every little step in research on human beings the question of significance would arise for the particular object of immediate concern. That would only cripple scientific work. In psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies there are always tasks of description, of classification, of deducing laws and type, the explanation of specific occurrences in terms of natural laws—all tasks lying outside the scope of the problem of personal meaning. The value of the methods and findings that are worked out scientifically in all of these directions will not only be maintained but will surely increase with further research. But none of these ways of proceeding, whether considered alone or in combination, will do full justice to the human being as person, because they are all fundamentally impersonal—applicable in the same way within objective science as they are within personal science. Indeed, many of the procedures developed in the older sciences have simply been brought to bear in the same way in personalistic science. For a special science of the person, that which can be achieved through the above-named research activities is the necessary procurement and overview of material for further investigation; but then that material must be submitted to the principle of holism, i.e., it must be understood in terms of its personal significance. Hence, the problem of personal significance forms, at the very least, the background of every more focused research on the human being.

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Moreover, the scientific procedure for grasping this personal significance, namely ‘method of interpretation,’ must occupy a central position in personalistic methods. Before we turn to the problem of method, it is necessary to discuss an ontological question. Can that which we call ‘personal significance’ be circumscribed more closely? It is nearly identical with the concept of teleological significance. On this view, the personal significance of some given moment refers to its role in the domain of, and in the service of, the person’s goal system. In fact, this way of relating personal significance to teleological significance is at first compelling. If one asks about the ‘significance’ of the eye, or of memory, or of the house of one’s parents, it appears that an answer could be in the form of a statement about the sense of and extent to which those matters can serve the immanent goals of the person. We know that such a perspective is ascendant in biology and has been extended to other disciplines. Clearly, this view also has a legitimate and widely applicable role to play in personalistics, too. But this view is no longer the sole dominant one. We arrive here at a very important point in the course of our thinking, where it is decided whether, fundamentally, personalistics can only be a biology of the human individual—perhaps a somewhat sublime one—or something more and different. In fact, personalistics is something other than biology, and indeed just because personal significance emerges here in two quite different forms: alongside the teleological or utility significance we find the symbolic or radiant significance (Strahlbedeutung).2 Being a unitas multiplex, a person radiates his being and sense across everything that is part of him. Hence, each of the person’s moments represents his essence. The representation is never complete, but neither is it ever merely piecemeal or fragmentary, but is instead perspectival. A person expresses herself in gaze as well as in gestures, in the flow of feelings as in thinking, in bodily constitution as in temperament, in works as in the configuration of personal space, differently in each of her moments, in quite variable immediacy and strength, with changing accentuation of one or another feature, yet in every case as an entire person. And hence there is in every moment, though not the person himself, a meaning that somehow represents the person, or allows the person to shine through, or

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even betrays the person (in cases where he seems to be disguising himself ). The moment is flesh of the person’s flesh, spirit of his spirit, and yet not all of his material or mental self. This strange duality of identity and not-identity is the real essence of the symbol. The relationship of the radiance significance to the utility significance just discussed is not a simple one. At first, every personal moment can in principle be regarded in terms of both aspects of significance. The significance of the human eye can be articulated on the one hand through reference to studies investigating the teleological role of vision in orienting the person to her world, and on the other hand by establishing how central characteristics of a person are expressed by her gaze. Other examples: the utility significance of intelligence can be seen in terms of a general ability to adjust oneself to the new challenges of life; its expressive significance in terms of a configured moment in the overall mental structure of the person. An illness has teleological significance insofar as it threatens the existence of the person, or impedes the fulfillment of certain life tasks and in this way threatens the entire goal system, or leads to inner defensive reactions of the organism so as to regain the old state of psychological balance or achieve a new one; an illness has expressive significance in that, just because it is a condition of least resistance, it provides a view of otherwise hidden characteristics of the personality, and because the ‘how’ of being sick is itself characteristic of the sick person. But even if every personal moment contains both kinds of significance, the proportions can vary widely. The foot has its clearly circumscribed teleological significance, as does the eye, but the eye is expressive, and thus symbolically significant to a much greater extent than is the foot. Even more limited is the expressiveness of the lung and its functions, even though its utility significance is unarguable. Or in the domain of the psychological: The special content of knowledge acquired from the outside can be very significant teleologically (e.g., for passing an exam, or for coping with an occupational task); but those aspects of knowledge and education that have been appropriated to originally spontaneous interests or are internally coordinate with the dominant features of one’s motivational system are infused to an incomparably greater degree with the essence of one’s personal being. Or in the domain of the cultural: the

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arrangement of one’s room might be entirely ill-suited for the particular life goals of the resident (teleological significance), but perhaps it is this very indifference with respect to optimal goal suitability, or the aesthetic capriciousness in the choice of colors and forms, or the reliance on old-­ fashioned advice that most fully expresses the personality of the resident (symbolic significance). The relative proportions of these two aspects of significance is further complicated by the fact that symbolic significance can itself assume a teleological function. Since a symbol is ‘transparent,’ it can inform an observer about all deeper-lying layers of the person and, finally, about the latter’s most essential characteristics: the symbol becomes a symptom. This gives rise to the theoretical need to distinguish two ways of handling personal symbolism, which admittedly are intimately related to one another: studies of expressiveness, on the one hand, and studies of symptoms, on the other. We regard a personal symbol as an ‘expression’ when it issues from the person; we call it a ‘symptom’ when it is seen to be informative about the person. At the same time, the foregoing makes clear that the now newly-­ developing science of human expression finds its theoretical home neither in psychology nor in physiology—not even in a psychophysiology— but instead only in personalistics. For we are dealing here not with the relationship between a bodily expression and a mental condition, but instead with the relationship of a salient symbol (which can be both bodily and mental, e.g., as much in bodily movement as in an affectladen ideational complex) to the person in his totality.3

Interpretation The procedure through which meanings are determined is interpretation. Although this procedure has been extensively applied over the ages, whether naively or reflectively, whether one-sidedly or in a more balanced fashion, it is, even up to now, still hardly explicated in theoretical-­ scientific terms. The lack of clarity here is already reflected in the relevant terminology. Comparing, for example, expressions such as “handwriting

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interpretation” (Schriftdeutung) and “character interpretation” (Charakterdeutung), we notice two quite different applications of the word. This is because the object of the verb “to interpret” is in one instance a particular given (“handwriting”) from which the interpretation proceeds, and in the other instance a state of being toward which the interpretation is directed. To achieve discursive clarity here, it is suggested that reference be made in one case to “interpretive material” and in the other case to “interpretive objective,” and to speak of ‘interpretation’ (deuten) when dealing with interpretive material and ‘construal’ (erdeuten) in cases of interpretive objective. A style of handwriting is interpreted (ge-deutet), whereas a trait of character is construed (er-deutet). Performance on a test is interpreted; one’s suitability to a particular occupation is construed. The findings of a medical test for the presence or absence of an illness are interpreted; the existence of a sickness is construed. A conscious experience is interpreted; the teleological or symbolic role played by this experience in the personal structure of the experiencing person is construed. If we compare this terminology with that used above in connection with the term “meaning” (Bedeutung), we have the following: something that has meaning is interpreted; something that lends meaning is construed. Hence, the person in her totality can be interpreted only when what is of concern is not the person’s sense of herself but is instead her ‘being’ regarded in terms of her transpersonal significance. (So, for example: Hegel interprets the historical personality as a megaphone and the agent of the un-personal idea pressing for realization.) This kind of interpretation—which essentially belongs to the narrower domain of cultural studies and not to personalistics—can be called “transpersonal interpretation.” In contrast, a person’s sense of himself is not interpreted but is instead construed, and, as a consequence of this kind of interpretive activity, ‘understood’ (verstanden). We are concerned here only with the method of ‘personal interpretation,’ which determines the meaning of personal moments for the person herself. There are two forms of personal interpretation, corresponding to the two kinds of personal meanings mentioned above: teleological interpretation and symbolic/symptomatic interpretation. Teleological interpretation (referring to a purpose served) (‘Dienstdeutung’) arranges each particular eventuality in the goal

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structure of personal wholeness, i.e., grasps that eventuality in terms of its serviceability with respect to that meaning structure. This way of interpreting is bipolar, since it establishes the extent to which the eventuality in question is useful or damaging; or whether it hinders or furthers the personal goal system. But in either case (and not only when the examination turns out positively with respect to the goal system) the interpretation proceeds ‘teleologically.’ Such teleological interpretations are so prevalent in all biological, morphological, psychological, and cultural perspectives on the human individual that it seems almost inconceivable how long it was believed that strictly ‘natural science’ procedures could keep out all such interpretations. For example, if we investigate a criminal in terms of the extent to which his personality reflects his ancestry and environmental influences, his own drive tendencies, imitation and suggestion, his interests and intelligence, all of these factors are being interpreted teleologically. If we establish in physiology and psychology that ‘practice’ simultaneously has reinforcing, energy-saving and energy-increasing meaning—when we speak biologically of self-regulation, immunization, adjustment—when psychoanalysis establishes repressions, or individual psychology establishes the over-compensation for inferiorities—everywhere the perspective is oriented by the meaningful goal structure of the person. It is this perspective which guides the selection of the personal moments to be investigated and determines the facets thereof to be investigated. Teleological ‘interpretation’ is by no means identical to teleological ‘explanation’ (i.e., to a causal analysis leading back to a causa finalis). It is, for example, possible for an investigator to regard teleological explanations as fundamentally impossible or inappropriate; but still that investigator is in no position to avoid teleological interpretation.4 Moreover, it is entirely possible in considering the single case that a fact that clearly cannot be ‘explained’ on the basis of the person’s striving for a goal (e.g., being wounded by a falling stone) still has a positive or negative meaning for the goal structure of that person, and so must be interpreted teleologically. The topic of symbolic-symptomatic interpretation requires a more thorough treatment here. During recent decades this kind of interpretation has won such a large place in various sub-disciplines within the

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science of human beings that it is high time for a fundamental discussion of the procedure. One encounters symptomatic interpretations relating to the human person being offered by the astrologist as well as the graphologist, by the biographer as well as the poet or novelist, by the sales person who would tell from the face of the customer her readiness to buy; by the psycho-­ technician, who tests this sales person for his suitability to that profession; by the “eyeball” diagnostician as well as by the practicing doctor; by the theoretical psychologist as by the psychotherapist; by the judge who studies the physiognomy of the accused, and by the accused who studies that of the judge. Interpretation is used in black magic and in everyday life, in the highest art and in strict science. This state of affairs is what makes it so difficult to circumscribe the nature of a strictly scientific symptom interpretation, which must be our specific concern here. But despite this one cannot make the mistake of trying to exclude interpretation from scientific methods just because it can bring science suspiciously close to superstition and dilettantism. Certainly, this danger exists; unconstrained interpretive effort, reveling in symbolism, uncritical detection of symptoms threatens bit by bit scientific interpretive work and sometimes slips through the cracks into such work. But that is no reason to forbid interpretation—which is impossible anyway. Instead, this should lead to the critical expression of such problems and to the correct placing of interpretive methods within the overall set of personalistic methods. A precondition for the method of interpretation is the duality of interpretive material and interpretive objective. So, before interpretation proper there must be a kind of grasping of the personality in its totality. Certainly, there are here, too, certain givens about person X that are the preconditions for X being understood by Y; but these givens—as well as, seen objectively, they function symbolically—are and remain embedded in the entirety of person X in such a way that their perception by Y and the step from this perception to that of interpretation do not occur as separate acts. This kind of grasping is fundamental to all naïve communication of persons. The mother, who immediately ‘sees’ that her child is sick takes no account whatsoever of the fact that it is perhaps the slumped posture, a feverish shining of the eyes, and/or a changed intonation of the

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voice that are the symptoms that make her knowledge possible. She immediately sees through the diffuse overall form of the expression (as through a colorless, fully transparent pane of glass the separate existence of which is not noticed at all) to the overall change. This grasping of the personality is called pre-interpretive understanding. Other names, through which the specific nuances (not to be discussed further here) of the act are marked, are ‘empathy’ and ‘intuitive human knowing.’ Merely working with this latter capability (which for many people is heightened to the point of genius) is not science. But on the other hand, it must be emphasized that scientific interpretive method cannot dispense entirely with pre-interpretive understanding. The latter accomplishes the first preparation for the result, provides a vague preliminary outline of the person, which must then be newly configured and colored, and also more or less essentially corrected. But without such an overall impression—however provisional and tentative—genuine interpretation has no target to guide the way. Great medical diagnosticians have placed great store by this original, not-further-justifiable ‘personal view,’ which is needed in order to determine the symptoms to which they will attend and what those symptoms signify with respect to the isolated findings of the examination. Likewise, one must wish this same ability for the practical psychologist, for the educator, for the judge, for the minister, for the politician—not in the sense that they would then feel secure enough to ignore methodical symptomatology, but rather in the sense that they would value the initially still formless ‘appearance on the horizon’ as a first orientation for seeing the direction to the goal and for being able to see that goal ever more clearly as it is approached. Obviously, the other danger is not a slight one: that the pre-interpretive understanding leads to a mind set into which the symptom interpretations are then forced while everything that does not fit that mind set is overlooked or explained away. Ideally, work of this sort consists of an elastic ability to alternate between intuitive understanding and discursive interpretation of a kind where the two support and deepen one another, so that in the repeated back and forth gradually the picture of the personality becomes both more flexible and more certain. We come now to the interpretive procedure itself, for which, as already said, the gathering of the material for interpretation is a pre-condition. If

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this occurs in a way initiated by the person herself, we are dealing with genuinely expressive phenomena: an audible characteristic of speech, a behavior, a peculiarity of facial configuration or countenance, lameness of a limb, a writing sample, or a work of some sort are such “spontaneous” symptoms. In contrast to these are the ‘artificial’ or ‘experimental’ symptoms, which are gathered by the interpreter with an eye toward subsequent interpretation. For example, one takes a reading of body temperature, or blood structure (here understood as deeply embedded aspects of the person’s being) at a certain location by means of a thermometer or blood test; the same holds for any measure taken for the specific purpose of personal diagnosis, such as illness examinations, educational achievement tests, psychological tests, etc. The great preference for experimental symptomatology results from the fact that, by artificially isolating symptoms they can be made manifest, and, in turn, meaningful relationships can be established that, precisely as a result of their original embeddedness, are not directly accessible to the interpreter. But this advantage brings with it the disadvantage, sometimes overlooked, that the artificially elicited symptom can lose much of its symptomatic significance simply as a result of the fact that it has been dis-embedded. Because the greater the salience, the greater is its foreignness to the person the very depth of whom the interpreter is trying to reach by the interpretation of the symptoms. Hence, each of the two symptom groups has its special significance, but also its special limits. For this reason, a guideline for all personalistic interpretive work should be to include both spontaneously expressed symptoms as well as those that are experimentally elicited, and to use them in mutually complementary ways. Our considerations up to this point have established the totality of the person as the goal toward which all interpretation strives. But this cannot mean that every interpretive act must run directly from the interpretive material to this final goal. Few symptom interpretations relate directly to ‘the person.’ Much more often they relate to specific components of the person: to forms, conditions, dispositions, phases, types, abnormalities, etc. The total person turns out to be a limiting concept that simply determines the direction of the interpretive act.

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But it is just this directionality that is decisive for all personal interpretation. Without exception, the direction goes from the isolated moment to the whole; clearly in many stages. For example: from a clearly delineated symptom of an illness to an acute illness itself; from here to a (half-­ chronic) bodily constitution, from here to the total structure of the person. Or: from an unsuccessful or inappropriate behavior (Fehlhandlung) to a repressed complex, from here to a more general motivational structure. Or: from a feature of handwriting to a characteristic emotional state, from here to an overall character structure. This directionality of the interpretive course, toward totality, reflects at the same time the direction from outer to inner, from surface to depth, from what is currently realized to the person’s dispositional potentialities. Methodologically speaking, it is of great importance to distinguish this course toward knowledge from one that relates an isolated moment to another isolated moment. Let us call the relationships involved in interpretations leading into the depths ‘vertical relationships’ (the terminology requires no further clarification), and thereby distinguish them from the ‘horizontal relationships’ that are the objects of other methods. For decades, scientific work having to do with the person was oriented primarily toward the establishment of ‘horizontal’ relationships. This involved decomposing and linking, establishing functional, causal, and comparative relationships, expressing the level of probability of covariations by means of correlational measures, etc. In this work, certain methodological perspectives had proven their usefulness, and the temptation was to carry these methods over into work on vertical relationships as these latter became recognized as research tasks. But the application of those methods in this way is inadmissible: interpretation has its own methodological structure. This can be made clear through the consideration of two primary points. There are two preconditions for all investigations of horizontal relationships. First, the objects of investigation must be of a homogeneous nature. The concern is always with some or other givens that are made salient with respect to and aligned alongside each other, and then studied in terms of their relationship to one another. Second, the direction of the relationship must be unambiguously linear. A definite (functional, causal,

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or correlative) relationship between a and b is established which is as unambiguous as the entities between which that relationship exists. The relationships are established in a fashion analogous to that according to which natural objects are investigated in natural science; they have no specifically ‘personal’ character. Neither of the above preconditions holds in the case of interpretation. It has already been mentioned that the two components, the material to be interpreted and the interpretive objective are not on the same level of abstraction. This is obvious in those instances where, for example, a disposition is inferred from a physical or mental phenomenon, because the latter is ‘acute,’ i.e., here-and-now, while the former is chronic, i.e., potential, not-yet-Gestalt. The same is true in instances where the interpretation leads from a disposition to a person. But also, cases of apparent sameness and horizontal arrangement of the components being related turn out, upon closer inspection, to be of this latter sort. Here are some examples of apparently horizontal interpretive relationships: if a handicapped limb is the basis for an inference to a brain tumor, the inference is from a bodily organ to a bodily organ. If one uses criminal behavior as the basis for an inference about certain motivations, it is the case that the two components belong to the different spheres of the physical and the mental, but they are nevertheless homogeneous in their objective character, namely as current, salient, and distinct factualities. There are also apparent instances of a horizontal interpretative process in cases where a disposition is being related to a disposition, so, for example, when one uses the combinatorial abilities of an individual (as demonstrated on some sort of test) as the basis for drawing inferences concerning aptitude for a particular occupation. How can cases such as these be reconciled with our thesis above? Clearly, ‘horizontal’ interpretations entail movement from something known to something yet to be known, but there is a fundamental difference between this process and that of genuine interpretation (even if, in practice, the two processes are often—perhaps even always—combined). The former process is really a matter of drawing a conclusion, the justification for which stems from the impersonal fact of the empirically determined rules for linking the two components of the relationship. A handicapped leg justifies the inference of a brain tumor in just the same

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way as a certain chemical reaction in some substance justifies the inference that certain elements are contained within that substance. And any conclusion about a person’s aptitude for some occupation based on a test of her combinatorial abilities requires for its justification evidence of the test’s validity, i.e., when it has been shown empirically that where a certain test performance is obtained, a certain level of occupational aptitude is also regularly found. In a horizontal inferential process such as this, then, the basis for the inference no longer has the nature of a symbol or a symptom, but rather that of a ‘sign;’ it is more of a relatively coincidental index for the conclusion; it is not a conceptual connection but only an inference based on an empirical regularity of coincidence. In such cases, so long as one remains in the domain of horizontal inferences, a reversal of direction is possible, something that in the case of genuine interpretation is entirely precluded. The doctor tending to a person who has suffered a brain injury can deduce from this ‘sign’ that there must be some paralysis without first establishing that empirically, just as he could deduce, reasoning in the opposite direction, that if there is a paralysis there must be a [brain] injury. A genuinely personal interpretation results from such a deduction in the moment at which both components of the deduction are understood as linked to one another by an overarching personal sensory connection, and where the second component of the deduction (the interpretive goal) is understood as the stronger and more deeply seated totality. From this we see the second distinguishing feature of horizontal inferences. The relationship between symptom and interpretive goal is not linear but is instead radial, and, at that, radial in both directions. That is: a symptom can be interpreted in many different ways; a given interpretation can be based on many different symptoms. This ‘multi-­interpretability’ (Vieldeutsamkeit) (‘poly-symptomaticity’) is not at all simply a mere failure of subjectivity that stems from the inadequacy of the interpreting researcher. It is, on the contrary, the methodological correlate of that objective ‘poly-symptomaticity’ that we identified above as the defining characteristic of personal existence. Since every interpretive objective is an entirety in comparison with the symptom, it can be addressed from various angles. It can be interpretively inferred (erdeutbar). On the other

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hand, one and the same symptom must sensibly belong to various interrelated wholes and can therefore have many different significations. In contrast to the needed polysymptomatic interpretive procedure, there is currently a widespread inclination toward a monosymptomatic view, which is among the strongest impediments to a truly scientific interpretive method. On this latter view, a single symptom area is selected as the only point of entry into the secrets of personal traits and states. The belief is that one can access everything in this way, and so it is believed that within the selected symptom area it is sufficient to categorize and differentiate specific symptomatic attributes, and in this way to be able to do justice to the most diverse interpretive tasks. Thus is a to-be-­interpreted personal inclination (personale Bestimmung) repeatedly allocated to a particular symptomatic attribute, as if one were dealing with two adjacent elements between which a clear, linear functional relationship existed. All of those areas of inquiry having to do with understanding human beings, with character interpretation, therapy, fortune-telling, advice about one’s future, one’s marriage, or one’s occupation are now crawling with monosymptomatic interpretations of this sort. In the light of what has been said above it scarcely needs to be repeated that all such interpretations are inadequate. Indeed, they stand in contradiction to the essence of the person who would thus be understood. This much can be said without concerning oneself at all with the particular kind and the special ‘symptom value’ of the absolutized symptom domain. The graphologist looks only at one’s handwriting; the palm reader only at the lines in one’s hands, the psychoanalyst only at unintended forms of behavior and aspects of experience, the follower of Binet only at an examinee’s reactions to certain inflexible tests, the depth psychologist (after Rorschach) only at a person’s interpretation of ambiguous inkblots, the followers of Bissky only at various galvanic outputs following electrical stimulation of the skull, the hair diagnostician only at the hair on the neck, etc., etc. In each of these cases, there may well be partial truths, sometimes more, sometimes fewer—in some cases quite many, in other cases vanishingly few. But quite independent of all of this, the ‘only’ is always and fundamentally false. All that one can derive from these procedures is that there are a great many and disparate ways of interpretation, each making its own absolutists claims.

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There are many different motives for this worrisome preference for the monosymptomatic. The first and foremost of these is convenience. In some specific and sharply delineated symptom domain it is at first easy to gather together a large amount of interpretive material, so that one no longer has to look right or left for more. Thus might one collect and study only handwriting samples, or one learns how to study the skull with the methods of Bissky, or one learns the procedure for studying intelligence a la Binet, and then works as a specialist. Along with this comes the convenient linear categorization: symptom a goes with trait α, symptom b goes with trait β, etc. It seems possible to capture the human being (or that particular aspect of the human being that is in question, such as his illness or her occupational future) in terms of some such list of inferred attributes, which is derived from a corresponding list of interpreted signs. This tendency toward the monosymptomatic is naturally reinforced by the primitive sensibilities of the audience for such interpretations, because the receivers of these characterizations believe that they themselves are owners of distinct and rigid traits about which they wish to learn in a way that lines the traits up next to one another in the most unambiguous way possible. At a much higher level, there is another motive toward the monosymptomatic stemming from scientific research. If a researcher has discovered some sphere of symptoms, she is easily disposed to over-evaluate it and to become one-sided. Such an isolation is justified only so long as the newly discovered facts are used simply as signs (see above) of another personal fact, but still not personally anchored in a genuinely interpretive sense. This can be clarified with an example from experimental psychology. When Ebbinghaus formulated his well-known ‘method of supplementation’ 30 years ago (task: in a text with gaps in it, the missing words must be sensibly supplied), he determined that good students performed much better than average students, who in turn performed much better than poor students. On this basis, the results of the test proved to be ‘signs’ of school performance categories. But Ebbinghaus went further: he viewed his test results as a symptom of ‘combinatorial abilities,’ indeed, as a symptom of overall achievement abilities. He was thus of the opinion that so complex and many-sided a disposition as ‘combinatorial ability’

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could be grasped mono-symptomatically, though by now we have long known that many areas of combinatorial abilities can be grasped only with quite other testing methods, and still others not with experimental methods at all but only through direct observation. There could be many instances in which the determination of a single “sign” fully suffices as a basis for drawing a conclusion concerning the existence or non-existence of some other factuality, for example, in medicine, when the task requires the determination of whether or not the patient has diabetes, diphtheria, or syphilis. In such instances, there is no need for a polysymptomatic approach. But even these cases are a world apart from a fundamentally monosymptomatic approach, because the doctor adjusts the domain from which he has taken the sign to the particular problem under investigation (e.g., in one case conduct a urinalysis, in another case a throat culture), while the ‘eyeball’ diagnostician mechanically and stereotypically focuses attention on the area around the eyeball in an attempt to diagnose as much as possible on that basis alone. It is for cases such as this that I reserve the expression ‘monosymptomatic.’ A very important argument against the monosymptomatic approach emanates from the differential-psychological perspective: the value of a symptom in a given domain can be very different for different persons. Consider, for example, the monosymptomatic research on expressiveness that is to be taken most seriously: graphology. The requirement of such research is not only that personality characteristics are expressed in handwriting (which is true), but also that the characteristics in question apply to every person, thus rendering persons comparable to each other in terms of those characteristics (which is not generally true). It can be that person X expresses herself especially honestly, revealing deep material in a finely nuanced way. For X, then, handwriting can be a highly valuable symptom. For person Y, in contrast, handwriting might not be especially revealing, even though that person is not deliberately attempting to be unrevealing. Instead, Y’s personality characteristics might simply be more tellingly revealed in other symptoms: countenance, gate, gestures, tone of voice, activities, test results, or whatever else. But just because these other possibilities are not present to the graphologist, she might unknowingly happen to catch Y at an uncharacteristic moment and, as a result, use

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only a handwriting sample as the basis for an interpretation that does not do justice to Y’s essence. Here is a similar example from experimental psychology: there are individuals who respond to tests in very characteristic ways simply because they are predominantly reactive individuals. But there are others for whom tests are only superficially revealing because their peculiarities are only expressed spontaneously, and hence outside of the confining demands imposed by structured questioning. If one investigates both kinds of people mono-symptomatically, with a single, common series of tests, the results can deliver valuable symptoms for the former but have only very limited value for the latter. (A concrete example: there is a large research project ongoing in California, in which an attempt is being made to identify throughout the state the most talented youth so as to identify the cohort of leaders in the coming decades. In this project, all of the creative talents that are not identified by the intelligence quotient, but instead are characteristically revealed by symptoms that can be detected only non-experimentally, must be ignored.) The critique of a monosymptomatic approach to interpretation simultaneously entails positive demands for methods suited to a polysymptomatic approach. To return to a point suggested earlier: with every single symptom, the person is grasped at a different point. And just as when one tugs on a towel at a certain point the rest of the towel also moves, it is nonetheless true that the overall movement is less at those points lying further from the point at which the towel has been grasped. On the other hand, when in the course of interpretation many different symptoms are considered, one is not only tugging at many different points, but one is also tightening the overall fabric, revealing more about its structure, its firmness or looseness at certain points, where it is strongest and weakest. Likewise, the structural characteristics of the person are more recognizable when that person is regarded in terms of a multiplicity of symptoms. This idea is so obvious that it need not be belabored further here, though something should be said concerning its limits and pitfalls. The mere piling up of a multiplicity of symptoms will not yield a picture of an individual’s personality. The danger here is that one easily slips into a mechanical arrangement of symptoms yielding, at best, a mosaic, a

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profile, a summary value; but a grasping of the person (or a personal trait) in his (or its) entirety cannot be achieved this way. Mosaics provide, for example, many medical descriptions of cases. All possible symptoms are investigated and reported. Information about the condition and size of all organs, about reflexes, about chemical reactions, and about the results of tests of mental condition are organized according to some given rubric, and with this accomplished many empirical investigators believe that the major part of their investigations is completed. In reality, all that is accomplished to this point is the collection of the raw material out of which the selection of the symptoms essential for this particular person and the illness in question must proceed. But even then it is not sufficient just to lay out the interpretive results derived from a consideration of these characteristic symptoms. On the contrary, each interpretive result must be regarded as a snapshot, from one perspective among others, of the total person. And out of this multiplicity of perspectives the overall diagnostic picture is removed from its shell. (It has already been noted above, on pp. 70/71 in original text, that the intuitive ‘non-­ interpretive’ understanding must supplement the process just described.) The principle of ceaselessly orienting the multiplicity of symptoms around the unitas of the person has also been neglected in other places. I mention here only that even in the pure ‘psychography’ there exists the danger that an investigator will be content with just a chain of discrete bits of data—be they an observational checklist with numerous rubrics, an inventory of behaviors (in behavioristic investigations), a colorful sequence of experimental testing methods (e.g., in the service of occupational aptitude testing),5 or a ‘case study’ undertaken for purposes of an institutional commitment. The scientific study of persons has confined itself primarily to analytic matters: it has made significant accomplishments in the qualitative and quantitative elaboration of isolated symptoms. It has also endeavored to incorporate the partial results of such studies into inter-individual comparisons through comparative/statistical studies of the correlations between discrete functions. But the discipline has also neglected the task of synthesizing the multiplicity of information about single individuals into a comprehensive personalistic portrayals. On occasion attempts toward such syntheses have been made, but with methods that belong to the domain of an impersonal objectivity and

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so cannot do justice to the truly personal wholeness of character. Such ‘exact’ syntheses appear, for example, in the form of personality profiles or mathematically computed personality indexes. In a profile, the levels achieved in a sequence of symptomatic tasks are portrayed graphically in such a way that in their relative vertical extensions form a jagged profile line that is supposed to provide an overall picture of the subject’s personal traits. We have here once again the linear arrangement of symptoms to traits and the rigid, uncoordinated juxtaposition of many traits, such as ‘memory,’ ‘attentiveness,’ ‘combinational ability,’ ‘spatial orientation,’ etc. The connected lines suggest greater overall coherence than they really offer. At best, such portrayals are a convenient means of presenting a collection of isolated findings, but this has nothing to do with [genuine] totality. The other extant approach to synthesis is the ‘personality index,’ that combines a sequence of different values into an overall number referring to something such as the condition of bodily strength, the level of intelligence, the degree of knowledge, or something else. In such a number— in stark contrast to a profile—the differentness of the individual measures disappears completely; in their place appears a summary number that balances out the different numbers that went into its computation. Now, indeed, the unity of the person is expressed in the sense that that unity contains a characteristic level—be it of the person’s overall health condition or overall degree of mental activity. But the unitary nature of the level does not mean that it exists at a steady level through the entire person and can therefore be clearly represented by a single numerical level-­ indicator. On the contrary, the level is much more modulated; it rises and falls and so is individually configured. As a result, then, two individuals of the same level of intelligence (and equivalent IQs) can never have qualitatively equal levels of intelligence. But this essential aspect of personal modulation is lost in the personality ‘index.’ In conclusion, we must say of the polysymptomatic approach: the isolated identified symptoms as well as their rigid connections to one another offer only the raw materials for the interpretation of personality. This approach must leave sufficient room for the selection and accentuation of the symptoms and for the determination of their relative importance and interconnections so that it can be used in conjunction with the intuitive

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personal view oriented toward the overall picture. One should consider the judgments about and appraisals of personality that are obtained from truly professional doctors, psychological specialists, interpreters of expressions (such as graphologists): for these individuals, the many identified symptoms are but the instruments by means of which, through respectively different ways of applying and combing them, the most characteristic melodies and harmonies of their subjects can be heard.

Notes 1. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text: [What is called in the text ‘sense of self ’ or ‘autochthones sense unity’ is identified and elaborated as ‘self value’ in Philosophy of Value. In that work, the attempt has been made to construct a hierarchical system of self values, and to assign the individual person, who is self, his place within this system. All problems having to do with material sense and meaning must be left out of consideration here.] 2. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 2 in the original text: [This distinction is directly analogous to that drawn in the Philosophy of Value between utility value and radiance value. Many of the ideas thoroughly developed in that work can be carried over directly from axiological to epistemological considerations and, with that, be applied to the problem of significance. See especially Philosophy of Value, p. 44, pp. 126ff., and pp. 295 ff.] 3. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 3 in the original text: [Regarding this personalistic conception of the problem of expression see also Philosophy of Value, Chapter 7, continuing from p. 147.] 4. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 4 in the original text: [As is well-known, Kant in his Critique of Judgment identified this dualism as one of those pertaining to the constitutive principle of knowledge, the principle of regulative judgment.] 5. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 5 in the original text: [See my lecture ‘Personality Research and Methods of Testing.’ Jahrbuch der Charakterologie, 1929, 6, 61–72. (In French: Journal de Psychologie, 1928, 25, 5–18.]

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Reference Stern, W. (1930). Studien zur Personwissenschaft. Erster Teil:Personalistik als Wissenschaft [Studies in the science of persons. Part One: Personalistics as science]. Leipzig: Barth.

10 Conceptual Work Matters

At the height of his career, William Stern was well known and highly regarded both in his native Germany and elsewhere, and an examination of published reviews of his various works reveals the widespread enthusiasm with which his personalistic perspective was endorsed (cf. Lamiell, 2010). Alas, proponents of his views were not nearly sufficient in number to prevent them from falling into obscurity soon after his death. As a consequence, very few twenty-first century psychologists have had any opportunity at all to consider what a personalistic psychology in Stern’s intellectual patrimony might look like. The primary objective of the present volume is to help fill this lacuna in the disciplinary literature. It is doubtful, however, that Stern’s personalistic orientation will ever have the “long and bright day” in psychology that Gordon Allport confidently forecast for it in 1938 (refer to Chap. 1 of this book), absent widespread acknowledgement within the mainstream of certain deeply problematic paradigmatic practices that are masking the need to even consider such a framework. Among those problematic practices are (1) the long-standing and persistent use of aggregate statistical methods as a basis for claims to scientific knowledge about individuals, (2) the uncritical appeal to dubious understandings of measurement, (3) the continued © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_10

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reliance on null hypothesis significance testing as a means of advancing psychological theory, and (4) the sharp dichotomizing of qualitative and quantitative research methods (see Lamiell & Slaney, 2020). At their root, all of these problems are conceptual in nature, and a prerequisite for addressing any of them effectively is going to be a much wider appreciation within psychology’s mainstream than now exists for the rudimentary fact that conceptual work matters. In consideration of the crucial significance of this point for any revival of personalistic thinking in psychology, I conclude the present work by briefly considering the point further, drawing on several pertinent observations made by Stern himself.

Conceptual Work Matters Writing about the currently prevailing disinterest among mainstream psychologists in conceptual issues, Machado and Silva (2007) observed: Despite its importance for scientific progress, conceptual analysis is acknowledged less than experimentation and mathematization … [One reason for this is that] as heirs of the scientific revolution—seen mostly through the lenses of the Enlightenment—psychologists know the importance of its two major novelties: experimentation and quantification. Naturally, there has been less explicit concern for that aspect of science that existed before the scientific revolution, that aspect present in medieval and classic Greek science, namely, conceptual analysis. Science has always included the screening of concepts and arguments for clarity and coherence. … Even during the course of the scientific revolution conceptual analysis … was not abandoned in favor of experimentation and mathematization … (Contemporary) psychologists should replace the currently dominant view of the scientific method with one that assigns conceptual analysis its proper weight. This richer view of method would express historian of science William Whewell’s famous dictum that science consists of the colligation of facts and the clarification of concepts. (Machado & Silva, 2007, pp. 679–680, emphasis added)1

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William Stern well understood the crucial importance of conceptual analysis to an intellectually healthy psychology, and he further understood what scholars Bennett and Hacker (2003) have pointed out to contemporaries: conceptual clarity is the fundamental objective of philosophical discourse. This is why Stern insisted that maintaining scholarly bridges between psychology and philosophy was essential for the intellectual health of psychology generally, and for the prospects of a specifically personalistic psychology in particular. He addressed himself quite pointedly to this issue in a 1917 monograph that he intended as a kind of précis of Volume II of Person and Thing, the publication of which was being delayed by a paper shortage in Germany: In its problems, methods, and its current findings, psychology has established itself as a distinct discipline. In doing so, it has to a large extent tried to make itself independent from philosophy. But let us not deceive ourselves: the impact of philosophy throughout psychology is far more significant than it might seem to be at first glance, and the claim here is not merely that philosophy has provided psychology with a point of departure. Basic philosophical convictions determine not only the preconditions and the general conceptual basis of psychological work, but are also contained within specific conceptualizations and interpretations of psychological phenomena, extending into the formulation of every particular question and every individual explanatory category. (Stern, 2010, p. 111).2,3

With specific reference to his critically personalistic philosophy, Stern continued: Not only are scientific psychology and personalistic philosophy not foreign and indifferent to one another, but, on the contrary, necessarily belong together. Personalism alone, it seems to me, is able today to vouchsafe for psychology those basic principles that are required for its development but which the discipline itself has not yet been able to fully admit because of its own dogmatic presuppositions. Personalism is suited to the task of clearing away countless half-clarities and illogicalities from which the psychology of our time suffers. Personalism is also able to bring into psychology a series of new perspectives, or to place what is already well known in new lights

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and interrelationships, and in this way clear a path for a fundamental advance. (Stern, 2010, pp. 111–112)4

It had been but a scant four years prior to the publication of Stern’s 1917 monograph that his senior and decidedly like-minded disciplinary colleague, the renown Wilhelm Wundt, had forcefully warned in a 1913 essay that if the intellectual bridges that then existed between philosophy and psychology were to be destroyed, … philosophy will lose more than it will gain, but psychology will be damaged the most. Hence, the argument over whether or not psychology is or is not a philosophical science is, for psychology, a struggle for its very existence. (Wundt, 1913, foreword)5

Notwithstanding the efforts by Stern and Wundt (and the sympathetic convictions of a relative handful of their contemporaries), the intellectual currents at that time were running strongly in the opposite direction, especially in American psychology. In the ascendance of behaviorism during the years after John B. Watson (1878–1958) published his manifesto for that orientation (Watson, 1913), Watson arrogated to himself, just 15 years later, license to proclaim the obsolescence of philosophy: With the behavioristic point of view now becoming dominant, it is hard to find a place for what has been called philosophy. Philosophy is passing— has all but passed, and unless new issues arise which will give a foundation for a new philosophy, the world has seen its last great philosopher. (Watson, 1928, p. 14)

Deterred neither by behaviorism’s widening appeal in the 1930s nor by the rashness of its then most prominent spokesperson, Stern confidently reiterated, in what was to be his last major work, his convictions concerning the indissoluble disciplinary bonds between philosophy and psychology. In General Psychology from the Personalistic Standpoint, the text published in German in 1935, Stern wrote:

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The separation of two independent approaches—the metaphysical and the empirical—is no more possible within scientific psychology than in lay psychology or artistic psychology. On the contrary, a symbiotic relationship between philosophical considerations and methodological findings is unavoidably necessary. The conviction, still now widespread, that psychology could or should become a discipline fully independent of philosophy leads either to a psychology without a psyche or to scientific work that incorporates a worldview and grounding epistemological presuppositions that are not consciously recognized. (Stern, 1935, p. 10)

If by 1990 the obsolescence that Watson thought was imminent for philosophy in 1928 had instead befallen behaviorism (cf. Skinner, 1990), the positivist-empiricist orientation that was so intellectually hospitable to that -ism remained firmly entrenched in scientific psychology’s paradigmatic beliefs. To this day, that orientation dominates mainstream thinking about what constitutes a truly scientific psychology (see, e.g., Costa & Shimp, 2011). This long-running domination has effected what Gantt and Williams (2018) have recently characterized as the scientistic ‘hijacking’ of psychology, a highly untoward intellectual development the dangers of which Stern foresaw very early on in his personalistic efforts. In Volume I of Person and Thing, published in 1906, Stern explicitly declared his opposition to that strain of scientism tied specifically to psychology: One ought not to think that the system of thought that I call ‘critical personalism’ has been shaped by my engagements in the domain of scientific psychology. On the contrary: I oppose psychologism, [a view that] would subordinate metaphysical considerations, which are simultaneously meta-­ psychological, to the science of consciousness. (Stern, 1906, p. viii, emphasis and brackets added)

In a letter to Jonas Cohn dated October 5, 1916, Stern expressed the hope of persuading his readers of the need to preserve a strong bridge between psychology’s empirical and methodological concerns, on the one hand, and the discipline’s conceptual challenges, on the other. He then asked rhetorically: “When will humanity again have any interest in such

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problems?” (Stern letter to Cohn, October 5, 1916; cited in Lück & Löwisch, 1994, p. 102). What was disrupting widespread interest in such problems in 1916, of course, was World War I. Stern knew, however, that at that same time another disruption of interest in such problems within the discipline of psychology was already brewing in the increasingly widespread sentiment favoring the divorce of psychology from philosophy. He also knew that, as Wundt (1913) had presciently forecast, that divorce would have untoward consequences for psychology that would endure long after the war’s conclusion (cf. Lamiell, 2013). Ironically, Stern himself perhaps saw a glimmer of hope for better in a development he mentioned in what appears to have been his second-to-­ last letter to his friend and philosopher colleague, Jonas Cohn. In the letter, which was dated July 16, 1937, some three years after Stern had fled Nazi Germany for Durham, North Carolina (USA) and assumed membership on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Duke University, Stern wrote: It will interest you to know that next year I’ll also belong to the Department of Philosophy—something that is rare in the U.S due to the sharp separation of philosophy and psychology. (Stern letter to Cohn, July 16, 1937; cited in Lück & Löwisch, 1994, p. 180)

Less than nine months after this letter to Cohn was written, Stern was dead. What is fully apparent now, more than 80 years on, is that his dual appointment in Philosophy and Psychology at Duke in 1937 had been no harbinger of any re-establishment of strong intellectual ties between the two disciplines. On the contrary, psychology’s scientistic devaluation of conceptual/philosophical work has continued to this day, making it fair to say that the ‘psychologism’ that Stern explicitly disavowed in the quotation from his 1906 book cited above is now thoroughly enmeshed within the canonical fabric of psychology’s mainstream (Lamiell, 2018). Absent a radical and lasting change in this regard, it is difficult to see how Stern’s vision of a personalistic psychology could ever be realized. Perhaps the present volume will help to galvanize movement in this direction, leading eventually to a psychology radically different from that which

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now dominates mainstream thinking. In any case, this work should serve to acquaint curious contemporary scholars with a significant but to date widely invisible chapter in psychology’s history. Surely William Stern’s ideas deserve no less than this.

Notes 1. William Whewell lived from 1794–1866. 2. The cited reference here is to my English translation of the entirety of Stern’s 1917 monograph. 3. It is of relevance to point out here that Stern stipulated as a precondition of his accepting the offer of a professorship in Hamburg that he would be able to offer coursework in philosophy as well as psychology (Bühring, 1996). This precondition was met in 1919 when, upon the formal opening of the University of Hamburg, the first course that Stern taught was Introduction to Philosophy. 4. Refer to endnote 2. 5. For an English translation of the full text of Wundt’s (1913) essay, see Wundt (2013).

References Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Bühring, G. (1996). William Stern oder Streben nach Einheit [William Stern, or the quest for unity]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Costa, R., & Shimp, C. (2011). Methods courses and texts in psychology: “Textbook Science” and “Tourist Brochures”. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 31, 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021575. Gantt, E. E., & Williams, R. N. (Eds.). (2018). On hijacking science: Exploring the nature and consequences of overreach in psychology. London, UK: Routledge. Lamiell, J. T. (2010). William Stern (1871–1938): A brief introduction to his life and works. Lengerich, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers.

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Lamiell, J. T. (2013). On psychology’s struggle for existence: Some reflections on Wundt’s 1913 essay a century on. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33, 205–215. https://doi.org/10.1073/a0033460. Lamiell, J. T. (2018). On scientism in psychology: Some observations of historical relevance. In E. E. Gantt & R. N. Williams (Eds.), On hijacking science: Exploring the nature and consequences of overreach in psychology (pp. 27–41). London, UK: Routledge. Lamiell, J. T., & Slaney, K. L. (Eds.). (2020). Scientific psychology’s problematic research practices and inertia: History, sources, and recommended solutions. London, UK: Routledge. Lück, H. E., & Löwisch, D.-J. (Hrsg.) (1994). Der Briefwechsel zwischen William Stern und Jonas Cohn: Dokumente einer Freundschaft zwischen zwei Wissenschaftlern [Correspondence between William Stern and Jonas Cohn: Documents of a friendship of two scientists]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Machado, A., & Sila, F. J. (2007). Toward a richer view of the scientific method: The role of conceptual analysis. American Psychologist, 62, 671–681. https:// doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.62.7.671. Skinner, B. F. (1990). Can psychology be a science of mind? American Psychologist, 45, 1206–1210. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-­066X.45.11.1206. Stern, W. (1906). Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung. Erster Band: Ableitung und Grundlehre [Person and thing: System of a philosophical worldview. Volume One: Rationale and basic tenets]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1917). Die Psychologie und der Personalismus [Psychology and personalism]. Leipzig: Barth. Stern, W. (1935). Die allgemeine Psychologie auf personalistischer Grundlage [General Psychologie from a Personalistic Standpoint]. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Stern, W. (2010). Psychology and personalism (J. T. Lamiell, Transl.). New Ideas in Psychology, 28, 110–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2009. 02.005. Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158–177. Watson, J.  B. (1928). The ways of behaviorism. New  York, NY: Harper and Brothers. Wundt, W. (1913). Die Psychologie im Kampf ums Dasein [Psychology’s struggle for existence]. (2nd ed.). Leipzig: Kröner. Wundt, W. (2013). Psychology’s struggle for existence (J.  T. Lamiell, Trans.). History of Psychology, 16, 195–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032319.

Name Index1

A

D

Adler, Alfred, xi, 142 Allport, Gordon W., viii, 1, 128n4, 187 Anastasi, Anne, 112, 113, 128n1, 129n9 Aristotle, Aristotelian, 3, 10

Democritis, 33 Descartes, René, 36 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 8, 9 E

Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 180

B

Bacon, Francis, 35 Bennett, M. R., 189 Büchner, Ludwig, 43

F

C

G

Cohn, Jonas, 3, 4, 17, 129n7, 191, 192 Costa, Russell E., 191

Galileo Galilei, 35, 36 Gantt, Edwin E., 191

Freud, Sigmund, 72, 126

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3

195

196 

Name Index

H

R

Hacker, P. M. S., 189 Häeckel, Ernst, 43 Hartmann, Eduard von, 72 Hume, David, 36

Rickert, Heinrich, 120 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 16, 59, 126 Rychlak, Joseph F., 20n6 S

K

Kant, Immanuel, 37, 58, 61n3, 185n4 Kepler, Johannes, 35 Köhler, Wolfgang, 7 L

Leibniz, Gottfried, 33, 166 Löwisch, Dieter-Jürgen, 3, 17, 129n7, 192 Lück, H. E., 3, 17, 129n7, 192

Shimp, Charles P., 191 Slaney, Kathleen L., 188 Spencer, Herbert, 41, 43 Spinoza, Baruch, 36, 42, 70 Stern, Clara, vii, 1, 13, 14, 16, 20n8 Stern, William, vii–xi, xv, xvi, 1–19, 45–60, 63–75, 79, 111–128, 133–146, 149–161, 163–185, 187–193, 193n2, 193n3 T

M

Münsterberg, Hugo, 111, 112, 118, 119, 129n7, 129n8

Thorndike, Edward L., 111, 112, 116–119, 128n5, 129n8 Tyler, Leona, 130n9 W

N

Newton, Isaac, 35, 36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 108n8, 126 O

Ostwald, Friedrich, 43, 125

Watson, John B., xi, 190, 191 Wertheimer, Max, 7 Whewell, William, 188, 193n1 Williams, Richard N., 191 Wundt, Wilhelm, 19, 21n11, 113, 128n2, 129n6, 190, 192, 193n5

Subject Index1

A

C

Appropriation (of other’s goals), 12

Causa finalis, 49, 57, 172 Causation/causality/causal effectiveness/causal necessity, 4, 10, 31, 37, 42, 43, 47–49, 52, 53, 56–58, 61n3, 120 Compulsion, 58, 60, 61n3 Conflict, 71–73, 100 Conscious/consciousness, 5, 6, 10, 36, 41–43, 49, 53–56, 58, 63–65, 67, 69, 71–75, 76n4, 79–81, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90–92, 98–101, 103, 107, 109n14, 125, 134–136, 139–142, 171, 191 Critical personalism/critically personalistic, viii, ix, xi, xii, 1, 4–7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 46–50, 55, 76n3, 189, 191

B

Being, xvi, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 25–28, 30–33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 46–48, 50–55, 65, 66, 68, 70–73, 76n4, 76n5, 81–83, 87, 91, 96, 97, 103, 104, 107, 109n13, 113, 114, 116, 119–121, 124, 134, 140, 142–144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 165–169, 171–175, 177, 179, 180, 182, 189 Biography, 112, 122–128, 130n12 Body, 3, 7, 23, 36, 38, 40, 42, 49, 64, 81, 134, 144, 175  Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. T. Lamiell, Uncovering Critical Personalism, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3

197

198 

Subject Index

Culture, 32, 33, 35, 37, 42, 43, 58, 71, 120, 121, 134, 139, 150, 161, 165, 181 D

Development, viii–x, xv, 2, 4, 5, 10, 12–17, 19, 32–43, 55, 59, 60, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71, 75n1, 80, 92, 97–107, 109n13, 111, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 130n9, 142, 158, 164, 166, 189, 191, 192 Diary project, 4 Disposition, 12, 14, 58, 59, 66, 67, 71, 167, 175, 177, 180 E

Elements, 5–8, 25–27, 29, 30, 34–37, 39, 41, 43, 44n3, 46–48, 51, 54, 64, 67–70, 135, 138–140, 178, 179 Embeddedness, 68, 109n10, 175 Enlightenment, 188 Entelechy, 3, 10–11, 57–59, 66 Experience, xi, 9, 14, 27, 47, 49, 53, 55, 63, 65, 67, 68, 71–75, 76n8, 79–92, 98–101, 103–105, 108n3, 126, 134, 151, 154, 155, 167, 171, 179 Expressiveness, 169, 170, 181

G

Gestalt psychology, 7, 68 Goal-directedness, 40, 41, 49, 59, 66, 135 Goals, 6, 10–13, 25, 31, 34, 37, 39, 42, 47, 49–60, 65–67, 70, 72, 76n4, 80, 97, 100, 123, 124, 136, 137, 143, 150–152, 154, 168–172, 174, 175, 178 H

Harmony argument, 149, 152, 158 Hierarchy, principle of, 51 I

Idea/ideas, xvi, 2, 3, 6, 10, 33, 47–49, 71, 73, 75, 82, 83, 87, 98–100, 102, 109n11, 113–116, 120, 134, 144, 158, 164, 171, 182, 185n2, 193 Idiographic inquiry, 120 Impersonalism, 7, 23, 25–43, 45, 48, 49 Indeterminacy, 58 Individualism (vs. personalism), 15–18, 33 Individuality, 47–50, 111–128, 130n12, 140, 141 Interpretation/interpretive methods, 157, 173, 174, 179 Introception, 12, 47, 52, 60, 65, 76n3, 165, 166

F

Familiarity, vii, 23, 81, 99, 109n12, 127 Forget/forgetting, 88 Freedom (of behavior), 16, 31, 55–60, 61n3

L

Laws/lawfulness, 3, 6, 8, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 41–43, 49–51, 54, 56, 57, 60, 68, 69, 99, 105,

  Subject Index 

109n13, 113, 120, 121, 130n11, 151, 167 Lie/lying, 13, 14, 16, 25, 38, 58, 64, 86, 96, 97, 139, 144, 159 Life, x, xv, 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 13, 18, 32, 35–37, 39–41, 53–55, 60, 63, 66–69, 71–73, 75n1, 80–82, 84–89, 91–93, 95, 96, 99–101, 103, 105, 106, 108n3, 113, 114, 122, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 146, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156–159, 166, 169, 170, 173 M

Memory, 8, 72, 81, 82, 98, 114, 136, 155, 168, 184 Mind, 7, 23, 27, 36, 41, 43, 54, 64, 145, 157, 159, 174 Mneme, 81, 84 Mono-symptomatic diagnostic methods, 156, 157 Multifaceted unity (unitas multiplex), ix, 48, 49, 51, 67, 86, 168 N

Naïve personalism, 7, 23, 25, 26, 48, 49 Nomothetic inquiry, 120–122, 128n4 O

Objective, objectivity, 9, 25, 36, 49–51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 65, 66, 73, 74, 76n5, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93–98, 101–104, 106, 107, 112, 114, 120, 121, 124,

199

130n11, 144, 149–153, 155, 165, 167, 171, 173, 177, 178, 183, 187, 189 Observation, observational methods, 4, 13, 14, 18–19, 42, 46, 68, 72, 80, 98, 107, 116, 122, 138, 141, 158, 181, 188 P

Perception, vii, 7, 36, 73, 74, 84, 87, 90, 93–96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 109n11, 114, 173 Person (vs. thing), 5–6 Personalism (vs. individualism), 15–18, 33 Personality index, 184 Person-world convergence, 13–14 Physical, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12–14, 24, 26, 37, 39, 47–49, 51, 53, 54, 63–65, 67–70, 76n5, 80, 122, 135, 136, 167, 177 Poly-symptomatic diagnostic methods, 156–158 Potentiality, 12, 14, 58, 59, 66, 94, 176 Practical psychology, 149–161 Protuberance, 68 Psychological, viii, xi, 3–5, 7–9, 14–17, 21n10, 24, 26, 32, 33, 36, 37, 41, 43, 54–56, 58, 63–65, 68–75, 75n1, 79–81, 85, 95, 97–100, 103–106, 113, 114, 118, 120, 122, 125, 127, 134–136, 145, 146, 146n3, 152–155, 159, 160, 164, 169, 172, 175, 181, 185, 188, 189 Psychologism, psychologistic, 42, 43, 191, 192

200 

Subject Index

Psychophysical neutrality, 7–9, 50, 53–55, 76n5 Psychophysical parallelism, 42, 54 Psychotechnician, 149, 152, 153, 160 Psychotechnics, psychotechnology, psychotechnical, 111, 119, 133, 135–137, 140, 143–146, 149–161, 161n1 Purpose, purposes, 8, 10, 13, 24, 28, 33, 56, 65, 139, 141, 146n3, 151, 171, 175, 183

T

R

U

Reactivity, 65, 140 Recognition, viii, 9, 85, 96, 98, 99, 112, 121 Recollection, x, 73, 79–107 S

Scientism, scientistic, 191, 192 Self, 11, 12, 60, 74, 91, 101–103, 164, 165, 169, 185n1 Self-determination, self-­ determining, 59, 64 Shaping, 88–91, 93, 97 Spontaneous, spontaneity, 31, 37, 40, 43, 59, 60, 65, 138, 140, 169, 175 Subjective, subjectivity, 56, 58, 73, 74, 87, 88, 94, 96, 101–103, 178

Teleology, teleological, 3, 10, 11, 31, 39, 40, 42, 44n2, 49, 53, 57, 61n3, 168–172 Test, tests, testing, 75, 115, 118, 119, 129n6, 133–146, 152, 153, 156–159, 171, 173, 175, 177–183, 188 Thing (vs. person), 5–6 Transpersonal, 94, 97, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 164–166, 171 Trans-personal, 95

Unconscious, unconsciousness, 33, 63, 71, 72, 81, 98, 100, 109n14, 136, 141, 143 V

Values, valuation, viii, 3, 15, 19, 25, 31–36, 42, 53, 55, 58–60, 65, 70, 71, 76n5, 90, 91, 107, 120, 127, 137, 138, 152, 154, 164, 167, 174, 179, 181–184, 185n2 Vitalism, 3, 39 W

Weltanschauung, 4 Whole, wholeness, xi, 6–8, 23, 26, 28, 34, 36, 39, 40, 46–50, 53, 54, 64, 65, 67–70, 98, 118, 134–138, 145, 157, 164, 165, 172, 176, 179, 184