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English/German Pages 545 [546] Year 2015
Philosophy from an Empirical Standpoint: Essays on Carl Stumpf
Studien zur Österreichische Philosophie Gegründet von Rudolf Haller † Herausgegeben von Mauro Antonelli
BAND 46
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/soph
Philosophy from an Empirical Standpoint Essays on Carl Stumpf Edited by
Denis Fisette Riccardo Martinelli
BRILL RODOPI leiden | boston
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941194
This series is a joint publication of Brill Rodopi and Königshausen und Neumann, Würzburg. ISSN 0167-4102 isbn 978-90-04-29909-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29910-8 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE THE RECEPTION AND ACTUALITY OF CARL STUMPF. AN INTRODUCTION Denis Fisette I.
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HISTORICAL SOURCES Introduction Riccardo Martinelli
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The Young Carl Stumpf. His Spiritual, Intellectual, and Professional Development Wilhelm Baumgartner
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Practical Epistemology: Stumpf’s Halle Logic (1887) Robin D. Rollinger
II.
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Carl Stumpf’s Debt to Hermann Lotze Nikolay Milkov
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Stumpf und die Monadologie der Herbartianer Stefano Poggi
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THEMES Introduction Riccardo Martinelli
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Carl Stumpf’s Philosophy of Mathematics Carlo Ierna
151
Carl Stumpf über Sachverhalte Arkadiusz Chrudzimski
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Stumpf on Categories Riccardo Martinelli
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Table of Contents The Autonomy of the Sensible and the Desubjectification of the a priori by Stumpf Dominique Pradelle Stumpf on Abstraction Guillaume Fréchette Ästhetik als praktische Philosophie: Zur impliziten Ästhetik von Carl Stumpf Christian G. Allesch
III. INFLUENCES Introduction Riccardo Martinelli
229 263
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A Phenomenology without Phenomena? Carl Stumpf’s Critical Remarks on Husserl’s Phenomenology 321 Denis Fisette Stumpf’s (Early) Insights and Marty’s Way to His (Later) Sprachphilosophie Laurent Cesalli On Stumpf and Schlick Fiorenza Toccafondi Love, Emotions and Passion in Musil’s Novellas “Unions” in the light of Stumpf’s Theory of Feelings Silvia Bonacchi IV. ARCHIVALIA Introduction Denis Fisette
359 385
405
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Introduction to Stumpf’s Lecture on Metaphysics Denis Fisette
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Metaphysik. Vorlesung Carl Stumpf Edited by Robin Rollinger
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Table of contents Introduction to Carl Stumpf’s Correspondence with Franz Brentano Denis Fisette
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Stumpf’s Einleitung zu Brentanos Briefen an mich, followed by selected letters from Brentano and Stumpf 491 Carl Stumpf and Franz Brentano Edited by Guillaume Fréchette Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf / Bibliographie der Schriften von Carl Stumpf Denis Fisette INDEX OF NAMES
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PREFACE
The purpose of this book is to highlight Carl Stumpf’s contributions to philosophy and to assess some of the aspects of his work. This book brings together several specialists of Stumpf and the school of Franz Brentano, and includes fourteen original studies (in English and German) on the various aspects of Stumpf’s philosophy, and some of his unpublished writings. This book is divided into four sections, and also includes a general introduction on the reception and actuality of Stumpf’s philosophy. The first section examines the historical sources of his philosophy, the second examines some of the central themes of his work and the third examines his relationship to other philosophers. The fourth section consists of notes taken by Husserl during Stumpf’s lectures on metaphysics in Halle, Stumpf’s introduction to the edition of his correspondence with Brentano, which he prepared in 1929, and some important letters pertaining to this correspondence. This book also provides a comprehensive bibliography of the works of Stumpf. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the participants for their valuable contributions to this volume, Denis Courville for providing the linguistic revision of the manuscript, Federico Skodler and Nicoletta Taurian for the editing. We also wish to thank the following persons and institutions that allowed us the use of Stumpf’s manuscripts: T. Binder and the Brentano-Archiv der Forschungsstelle und des Dokumentationszentrums für österreichische Philosophie (Graz); W. Baumgartner and the Franz Brentano Forschung (Würzburg); U. Melle and the HusserlArchives (Leuven); Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin); Handschriftenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (Berlin); Privates Stumpf-Archiv (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt); Archives of the History of American Psychology (Akron, Ohio, USA); Houghton Library, Harvard College Library (Boston); Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich).
THE RECEPTION AND ACTUALITY OF CARL STUMPF. AN INTRODUCTION DENIS FISETTE (UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC À MONTRÉAL)
Abstract. This study aims to account for the reception of the philosophy of Carl Stumpf since the turn of the twenty-first century and to emphasize the actuality of some of the aspects of his philosophy. The present text is subdivided into several sections, each corresponding to one of the main topics discussed in the recent literature on the work of Stumpf. In the first section, I try to show, using his classification of sciences, that Stumpf’s empirical work is driven by a unitary philosophical program. I then examine the ramifications of this program in several areas of philosophy that have been the subject of recent commentaries and publications. I begin with the commentaries on the recent publication of Stumpf’s thesis on mathematical axioms, which stress Stumpf’s contribution to the philosophy of mathematics and to theory of knowledge, and more specifically to the debate on logical psychologism that Frege and Husserl will address a few years later. I conclude this section by examining the second of two major themes in the work of Stumpf that have been the subject of several recent studies, namely, on the one hand, logic and the nature of states of affairs and, on the other hand, Stumpf’s contribution to the mind-body problem and to the topic of relations. The third section is divided into two parts. In the first one, I try to briefly account for the vast literature on Stumpf’s contribution to psychology understood broadly enough as to include his work on the psychology of sound, Gestalt psychology, animal psychology and the psychology of child development. I provide, in the second part of this section, a summary of his studies in the area of aesthetics and musicology in general, i.e. his contribution to the history of music and its origins, to ethnomusicology, and to acoustics. Although this study does not aim at being exhaustive, it provides an overview of the important aspects of Stumpf’s contribution to philosophy.
The work of Carl Stumpf has never aroused as much interest as it has since the turn of the twenty-first century. Over the past fifteen years, in addition to the publication of numerous translations and reprints of Stumpf’s writings, several articles and books have been devoted to examining and evaluating different aspects of his work. The recent re-
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ception of Stumpf’s work is very diversified and it reflects the interdisciplinary nature of his research and his many accomplishments at an academic as well as an institutional level. Indeed, Stumpf is considered as one of the main architects of what has been called the “new psychology”, and he is also regarded as the founder of the Institute of Psychology in Berlin, which is at the root of Gestalt psychology. It is within this institute that many of Stumpf’s students received their education, the best known being Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Lewin along with the author of The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil. In 1900, Stumpf created the phonograph Archives on the basis of phonograph recordings of a Siamese troops that were then in Berlin, and which are now under the protection of the UNESCO. (A. Simon, 2000) We owe him many studies in the general field of musicology and in particular, in history of music, acoustics, and ethnomusicology, where he is regarded as a precursor to twentieth century contributions to the fields. Several of these studies were collected in the journal Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, which he himself founded in 1898, and in the monumental work that he published with his assistant E.M. von Hornbostel in 1923 under the title Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft.
*** As a student of Franz Brentano and Hermann Lotze, the supervisor of Husserl’s habilitation thesis, a correspondent of Frege and of William James, Stumpf is first and foremost a philosopher. He may have published more extensively in the field of empirical sciences than in that of philosophy proper, but his research and publications were nevertheless undoubtedly driven by a unitary philosophical project. His philosophical work is rich and diversified, as shown by the recent publication of some of his important studies and many articles and books on various aspects of his philosophical work, which I will briefly comment in this study. In a recently published intellectual biography of Stumpf, H. Sprung (2006) shows that Stumpf had an outstanding academic career thanks in part to the support from Lotze, Brentano and later Dilthey. At the age of 22, he held a position in Göttingen along with Lotze and then held five important chairs of philosophy at Würzburg, Prague, Halle, Munich and Berlin. Stumpf had therefore taught philosophy for over fifty years and the lecture notes and sylla-
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bus that survived the destruction of most of his manuscripts during the Second World War show the richness of his teaching and the diversity of his interests in philosophy (see section IV Archivalia in this volume and D. Fisette, 2015d). *** The contemporary reception of Stumpf was first marked by an interest in his work in the field of psychology and his contribution to the history of this discipline. Among the pioneers in this field, let us first mention the research of the historian Mitchell Ash in the early 1980s on the origins of Gestalt psychology,1 in which he deals extensively with Stumpf’s contribution to Gestalt psychology. Worth mentioning in this context is the contribution of H. and L. Sprung in their studies on Stumpf’s contribution to the history of psychology. 2 In the field of philosophy, the contemporary reception of Stumpf was originally associated with his student Husserl in the classic work of the historian of phenomenology H. Spiegelberg’s (1982) The Phenomenological Movement in which an entire chapter is devoted to Stumpf. However, Spiegelberg’s evaluation of Stumpf’s contribution to the phenomenological movement is based on the distinction between the philosophical and the non-philosophical use of this term. Brentano and Stumpf do not satisfy this criterion because, according to Spiegelberg, both remained distant to a phenomenological philosophy in the sense of the phenomenological movement. (Spiegelberg 1982, 20) Spiegelberg nevertheless recognizes the merits of the scientific and experimental work of Stumpf, but he denies his contribution to phenomenology and philosophy in general, arguing that one merely finds in his work an “experimental phenomenology”. (Spiegelberg 1982, 61) This judgment reflects a negative bias against Stumpf’s philosophy along with a bias in favor of a version of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. 1
M. Ash (1995, 2000-2001). Ash’s thesis in The Emergence of Gestalt Psychology. Experimental Psychology in Germany, 1890-1920, which he defended at Harvard in 1982, was widely quoted even before the publication of his book in 1995. On the reception of Stumpf’s work in the XIXth and the beginning of the XXth century, see. D. Fisette, 2006. 2 H. and L. Sprung (2003) summarize their contribution to the rediscovery of Stumpf since the mid-1980s in the field of the history of psychology. They also trace Stumpf’s major contribution to the birth and development of the “new psychology”.
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Husserl’s transcendentalism in the Göttingen period (1901-1916) has in fact influenced many philosophers in the twentieth century, but it nevertheless has been the subject of harsh criticism from Husserl’s first students—especially the young Munich phenomenologists, whose diagnosis of Husserl’s transcendental turn converges in many respects with Stumpf’s in § 13 of his posthumous Erkenntnislehre.” (see. D. Fisette, 2015a) The studies of Karl Schuhmann in the late 1990s on the close relationship between the young Husserl and Stumpf contributed, at least in part, to correct Speigelberg’s bias. As a specialist of Husserl’s work, Schuhmann has shown not only that the young Husserl’s debt to the philosophy of Stumpf is significant, but that his research in Halle does not merely belong to the prehistory of transcendental phenomenology, but is rather its main source.3 The latest reception of Stumpf’s work in philosophy is on a par with what might be called a revival of Brentanian studies in Europe and with many publications in recent years on the history of Austrian philosophy and the philosophy of Franz Brentano and his students.4 Thanks to the works of R. Chisholm in the late 1950s and to those of the “Manchester Connection” (K. Mulligan, P. Simons and B. Smith) since the late 1980s, Brentanian studies today are interested not only in the work of Brentano himself but also increasingly in the work of contemporary philosophers. (see D. Fisette and G. Fréchette (eds), 2013) Although the first student of Brentano, Stumpf, like his student Husserl, carried out his research primarily in Germany rather than in Austria (where Brentano and most of his followers were based), his contribution to Brentano’s philosophical program was significant, as shown by numerous studies and collective works devoted to Stumpf’s work at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century. This does not mean that the value of Stumpf’s work in the field of philosophy has to be measured solely with respect to his contribution to Brentano’s program. But it is nevertheless clear that Brentano remains a key 3
The works of K. Schuhmann (1996, 1997, 2000-2001) are mainly based on Stumpf’s lectures and syllabi in Halle that Husserl himself transcribed. The original manuscripts are kept at the Husserl Archives in Leuven (see D. Fisette, 2015d). 4 Although Stumpf cannot be considered a positivist in the strict sense of the term namely because of his interest in metaphysics, which we will discuss later, and his predilection for the study of mental phenomena, let us recall M. Schlick’s positive discussion of Stumpf’s philosophy in a review of Stumpf (1911) as well as in his book Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre. (see F. Toccafondi, 2015)
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reference in the major philosophical works of Stumpf, including his posthumous Erkenntnislehre, which is also dedicated to Brentano. The centenary anniversary of Stumpf’s foundation of the Institut of Psychology and the Phonogram Archive in Berlin, along with Stumpf’s hundred and fiftieth anniversary (1848-1936), gave rise to several publications on the topic of his work, some of which are of relevance to his philosophy.5 Over the past fifteen years, in addition to studies devoted to his work, several books written by Stumpf have been reprinted, and some of his most important contributions have been translated into several foreign languages.6 In this regard, let us mention the recent edition of his monumental Erkenntnislehre by M. Kaiser-El-Safti, which his son Felix Stumpf, on the recommendation of Max Planck, published posthumously (Stumpf, 1939-1940), as well as the publication of Stumpf’s habilitation thesis (Stumpf, 2008) on mathematical axioms that he defended successfully in 1870 under the direction of Lotze in Göttingen. The contemporary reception of Stumpf’s work gave rise to conflicting appraisals by historians on the specific nature of his scientific research and particularly on the status of Stumpf as a philosopher. For example, Spiegelberg (1982, 61), as we said, recognizes the merits of the scientific and experimental work of Stumpf, but denies his contribution to phenomenology and philosophy in general. On the other hand, the historian of psychology E. Boring raised doubts as to the 5
The volume IX of the journal Brentano Studien prepared by W. Baumgartner (2000/2001) collects various studies on Stumpf’s philosophy. This journal also published over the years several studies on Stumpf that will be discussed in this study. S. Besoli and R. Martinelli (2001) edited a special issue of the Italian journal Discipline Filosofiche with the title “Carl Stumpf e la Fenomenologia dell'esperienza immediata” which includes several important studies on the philosophy of Stumpf. The collective work published by M. El-Safti and M. Ballod (2003) contains several studies on the work of Stumpf on musicology and language. More recently, in 2009, the journal Gestalt Theory published a special issue on Stumpf and most of the articles published in that issue are reproduced in a recently published book by S. Bonacchi and G. H. Boudewijnse (2011). Worth mentioning is the recent foundation of a Stumpf Gesellschaft in Germany, whose members are primarily historians of psychology. This society regularly publishes books related to Stumpf’s empirical work (see U. Wolfradt, M. Kaiser-El-Safti, H.-P. Brauns (eds), 2010; Kaiser-El-Safti, M. & M. Ebeling (eds), 2011). 6 The translations of Stumpf’s works in foreign languages are listed in the general bibliography of Stumpf’s works at the end of this volume (see the last section entitled “Translations in several languages”).
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value of Stumpf’s empirical work, notably because of his repeated criticisms of some of the representatives of physiological psychology of the time and his polemic with W. Wundt (see E. Boring, 1929), which he understands as a “mistrust of the mediation of psychological facts by elaborate experimentation”. (E. Boring, 1942, 116) This short-sighted assessment raises the question of the status of philosophy in the work of Stumpf and its relation to his empirical research. Given the diversified and interdisciplinary nature of his work, and the lack of a comprehensive study on it,7 the question arises as to whether his work belongs to a unitary philosophical project. The question of the status of Stumpf as a philosopher has been raised recently (D. Münch, 2002-2003; D. Pradelle, 2015) but the vast majority of Stumpf’s commentators emphasizes his philosophical contribution and the major influence that he had not only on Husserl but also on the history of German philosophy in general. But this issue has also been discussed by historians of psychology who sometimes tend to oversee the specifically philosophical dimension in his empirical writings. Stumpf expressed himself several times on the relationship between philosophy and his empirical research. For example, in his report on the activities of the Institute of Psychology, Stumpf (1910b, 106) stresses the importance of theoretical exercises in several areas of psychology and explains in his autobiography that he gave all the more importance to these theoretical exercises as he never considered experimentation as “a cure for psychology”. (Stumpf, 1924, 16) This idea is confirmed by several testimonies, including that of W. Wertheimer who, in an allocution in honor of Stumpf on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, said that Stumpf taught them „überall den Blick auf die großen prinzipiellsten Zusammenhänge gerichtet zu halten; in früchtbarer Arbeitsgemeinschaft von Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie, im Angesicht der höchsten Probleme der Philosophie zu arbeiten. Keiner von uns mag sich in die Stube der Einzelwissenschaft sperren lassen“. (in M. Ash, 2000-2001, 129) In his inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin in 1895, Stumpf raises again the question of the relation of his empirical research with his philosophy, and points out that even if his empirical work has often led him to leave the beaten 7
Although there is no comprehensive study of Stumpf’s works, there are some useful summaries which provide an overview of the main aspects of his work (see D. Fisette, 2015e, 2006) and on its recent reception (see G. Fréchette, 2010, M. Kaiser-El-Safti, 2011).
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path of philosophy and has made him an outsider in some departments of philosophy, his empirical work should not be understood “as if for [him], the central task of philosophy does not reside in the grandiose conception of the soul as it was prefigured in this high spirit by German philosophy, and as if he had the project of replacing philosophy by a specialized research or by a positivist cult dedicated to facts”. (Stumpf, 1895, 737) On the contrary, says Stumpf, in all these specialized areas, from psychology to acoustics through ethnomusicology and animal psychology, philosophy has always remained the “master of the house”. But this justification only partially answers the question about the unity of his empirical research and of his philosophical project. Stumpf’s work on the classification of sciences enables us to locate more precisely the place of philosophy in the system of sciences and to understand in what sense philosophy has always remained at the heart of his concerns in his empirical research. The starting point of this classification is the cardinal distinction made in Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint between two classes of phenomena, physical phenomena and mental phenomena, or what Stumpf calls sensory phenomena and psychical functions. (See R. Martinelli, 2003; R. Rollinger, 2008b) Stumpf distinguishes two main classes of functions, intellectual and emotional functions. All functions that fall under one of these two classes entertain a hierarchical relationship that range from the simplest to the most complex functions, in such a way that the functions of the second class presuppose and are based on the lower-order functions of the first class. The class of intellectual functions subsumes several species of acts, beginning with sensory perception, which gives access to first-order phenomena, and presentations, which are linked to second-order phenomena, in addition to the functions of abstraction and that of judgment. Stumpf distinguishes the affective functions or the class of emotions from the class of intellectual functions, the former being as complex as the latter in that it includes emotions, desire, and will. The psychical functions have a specific structure that is characterized by the distinction between the content of a function and its relation to an object. This relationship is characterized in turn by the notion of specific content that Stumpf describes with the concept of Gebilde (product), and by the quality and matter of an act. In an act of judgment, for example, the quality of an act is an affirmation or a ne-
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gation, and it is characterized linguistically by the copula “is” or its negation. The “matter” (Materie) of a judgment is what remains when one disregards the affirmation and negation, i.e. the mere complex of presentations (subject and predicate without the copula). In addition to its quality and matter, the judgment conveys a specific “formation” or product (Gebilde) that Stumpf sometimes calls a state of affairs. They are “correlates” of thought and distinguish themselves from the individual act, of which they are the content, through their objective character. All other functions, from the simplest to the most complex, have their specific content. For example, the act of abstraction, which is responsible for the formation of concepts, has a concept as its specific content. In the field of more complex functions such as emotion, desire and will, Stumpf maintains that we must also presuppose specific contents which he calls values. The domain of psychical functions, which internal perception gives access to, belongs to descriptive psychology which constitutes the foundation of one of the two branches of Stumpf’s classification of sciences, namely the Geisteswissenschaften. The other branch is that of natural sciences and it is based on physics. In the perspective of Stumpf’s Erfahrungsphilosophie, physics takes as its starting point the phenomena of external perception, and its task is to explain the regularity of phenomena by using the laws of physics. But Stumpf is not a phenomenalist, he advocates instead a form of critical realism that he conceives as the antithesis of the kind of phenomenalism he sees in the work of classical empiricists and E. Mach. Nevertheless, Stumpf agrees with the latter that all concepts, including the concept of causality, originate from the contents of sensory experience and are the result of a process of abstraction. However, Stumpf clearly distinguishes the question of the origin of concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, from the question of the origin and justification of knowledge, which falls within the theory of knowledge. This distinction is at the heart of his habilitation thesis and we shall have the opportunity to return to this important issue. Descriptive psychology, understood as the science of simple functions, is the foundation of the human sciences, which constitute, with physics and the natural sciences, one of the two main axes of Stumpf’s classification of sciences. The human sciences such as aesthetics and ethics, are closely related to the major classes of the simple functions such as the class of emotions in ethics, for instance, and are defined as
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the sciences of complex functions. (Stumpf, 1906a, 21) From these two main classes, Stumpf distinguished within his classification three neutral sciences whose task is to study the structure of the contents of psychical functions and sense phenomena in general. The first neutral science is phenomenology, which studies phenomena or sensory content, the second is the theory of relations, whose field of study is very broad as to include among other things the relations and laws of structures underlying notably sensory contents, and finally eidology which is responsible for the study of psychical products (Gebilde). They are characterized as “neutral” sciences in order to mark both the distinctiveness of these three domains of study compared to that of the traditional sciences, and because their respective domain of study extends to all other sciences. They serve as “propaedeutic” sciences in the sense that the study of their respective domain is a prerequisite and an essential step for both natural and human sciences upon which they depend: “They are the atrium and the organon of every other science provided that the purpose of each of these sciences include their object, and that any research makes use of the laws and concepts of relation”. (C. Stumpf, 1906a, 39) Stumpf sometimes associates this broad field of research with the theory of knowledge understood also in a very broad sense. We shall later return to this important issue. Now, within this division of sciences, philosophy is meant to be the last science responsible for the common issues to all sciences, i.e. to the natural and human sciences as a whole, but which are not specifically handled by any per se. That is why philosophy is considered to be the most general science of all the sciences, and it is defined “as the science of the most general laws of the mental and of those of reality in general”. (Stumpf, 1906a, 91) Stumpf reiterates this position in his autobiography: However one may formulate the difference between mind and nature, everybody distinguished them in some manner. The philosopher, however, looks for what they have in common. Thus philosophy is primarily the science of things in general, or metaphysics, to which the gateway is epistemology. But that philosophers since olden times have generally regarded psychology as belonging to their proper field is due to the fact that psychic elements have been much more prominent than the physical in forming fundamental metaphysical conceptions. Therefore, it is to the point to define philosophy as the science of the most common laws of the psychical, and of the real, in general
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Denis Fisette (or conversely). This is the only way in which we can justify the inclusion of logic, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of law, pedagogy, and other branches in the domain of the philosophical sciences; the connecting link is always essentially psychology, which, therefore, must not forget − absorbed in experimental detail − the nobler phenomena of mental life which cannot be investigated in this manner and the great general questions. (C. Stumpf, 1924, 414-415)
Philosophy thus understood is first philosophy and its main task is to investigate the laws that ensure the cohesion and unity between mind and nature that underlies this classification. It is closely related to metaphysics or to what Stumpf also calls “metapsychical” insofar as it presupposes psychology as much as physics. But unlike traditional metaphysics, which is thought of a priori, the version of metaphysics that Stumpf repeatedly taught since his first lecture on metaphysics in Wurzburg, is a metaphysics based on experience insofar as it is continuous with the empirical sciences and proceeds inductively, i.e. bottom up. (see D. Fisette, 2015e) It is within the perspective of this classification of sciences that Stumpf’s empirical works take on their full philosophical meaning. Indeed, regarding first the field of psychical functions, Stumpf distinguished physiological psychology, which addresses the causal explanation of this class of phenomena, from descriptive psychology, that is, the philosophical discipline that corresponds to what we now call philosophy of mind. This is confirmed by Stumpf who emphasizes “the impossibility of separating psychology from the corpus (Organismus) of the philosophical sciences”. (Stumpf, 1906, S. 91) As descriptive psychology, it has precedence over experimental psychology in that it provides it with its explanandum. But as Stumpf explained, aside from his Psychology of Sound, which is a study that belongs to the realm of psychical functions (Stumpf, 1906a, 31), most of his empirical works belong to the domain of phenomenology. (Stumpf, 1924, 425) And as in the field of psychical functions, Stumpf recognizes a methodologically privileged status to phenomenology over the other sciences. Referring to the work of the physiologist E. Hering and to the debate between nativism and empiricism, Stumpf wrote: In this regard, offer is always on the side of phenomenology, and demand on the side of physiology. Hering has rightly pointed out that
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what comes first in color theory is the analysis and description of phenomena, and only secondarily the formulation of hypotheses about the corresponding organic process. (Stumpf, 1906a, 31)
From this point of view, the analysis and the description of the “perceived” (Sehding) is to be prior to its physiological or neurological explanation because, as what figures on the side of offer, it is analysis that provides a science like physiology with its descriptum. Nevertheless, the field of phenomenology remains neutral in the sense that “there is a phenomenology, but no phenomenologists”. (Stumpf, 1906a, p. 32) The analysis and the description of the perceived, however, is the task of philosophy and it represents the basis of Stumpf’s philosophical edifice as a whole. That is why, even in his most empirical research, philosophy remains for Stumpf the “master of the house”.8 Given the number and the diversity of commentaries on Stumpf’s work since the turn of the twenty-first century, I will proceed to group them along general themes and briefly comment on their overall contribution to the study of Stumpf. I will pay particular attention to comments that focus specifically on Stumpf’s philosophy, taking into account the many works that concern more specifically Stumpf’s place in the history of psychology (see M. Kaiser-El-Safti, 2011). Let us first mention Stumpf’s biography that we owe to H. Sprung (2006) in a book of nearly 500 pages that bears the somewhat enigmatic subtitle “From philosophy to experimental psychology”. This book serves as an important contribution with regard to the numerous manuscripts left by Stumpf, on which this biography relies, and the excerpts reproduced in the last part of the book along with several other unpublished documents. This book therefore provides significant additional information to that found in Stumpf’s autobiography and in many biographies that Stumpf himself had devoted to philosophers such as Brentano, Lotze and James. More recent studies, including the study of W. Baumgartner (2015, 2002), place greater emphasis on the close relationship between, on the one hand, the young Stumpf and, on the other, Brentano and his students. Stumpf maintained close ties with several of Brentano’s students, especially with his friend Anton Marty (L. Cesalli, 2015), who was also his colleague in Prague from 1880 to 8
Conversely, one might ask, following Stumpf: „Warum sollte nicht auch Philosophie das Experiment zu Hilfe nehmen, wo sie es gebrauchen kann?“ (Stumpf, 1906, 91)
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1884, Franz Hillebrand (Stumpf, 1982-1983), his own student Husserl, and to a lesser extent K. Twardowski who had been his student in Munich. (see D. Fisette and G. Fréchette, 2007) Historical background This last remark brings us to the topic of the historical background of Stumpf’s philosophy, which has been the subject of several studies in recent years. The two important names associated with the young Stumpf’s philosophical formation are those of Franz Brentano and Hermann Lotze. His debt to Brentano is well documented in his autobiography and in the three biographies, which Stumpf (1918, 1919, 1922) has devoted to him after his death in 1917. But opinions diverged as to what Stumpf’s position in his later work might be towards Brentano’s philosophical program. Some claim that Stumpf is a truly orthodox Brentanian (K. Schuhmann, 1996) while others argue that Stumpf gradually distanced himself from Brentano’s thinking and had moved closer to that of Lotze. (Ewen, 2008; Milkov, 2015) The truth must lie somewhere in the middle if we are to judge on the basis of Stumpf’s many testimonies in his biographical articles and in his substantial correspondence with Brentano where he unequivocally acknowledges his debt to his erstwhile mentor and teacher. Stumpf is certainly not an orthodox Brentanian, but to say that he entirely departed from Brentrano’s philosophical program is exaggerated and displays a misunderstanding of his philosophical work. For Brentano, with whom Stumpf maintained a rich correspondence until his death in 1917, remains even in his posthumous work (also dedicated to Brentano) one of his main interlocutors. In a text written in memory of Brentano, Stumpf unequivocally reiterates his unfailing commitment to his philosophy: My whole understanding of philosophy – the correct and mistaken methods of philosophizing, the basic and essential doctrines of logic, the theory of knowledge, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics – and which I still maintain today, are his doctrines. (Stumpf, 1919, 43; see 1924, 27 f.)
Of course, Stumpf disagrees with Brentano on several crucial points, namely on the question of sensory perception and the domain of phenomenology, and we know moreover that the issue of emotions and sensory feelings led to a controversy between the two philosophers
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that lasted almost twenty years (see D. Fisette, 2015f, 2013). However, like most of Brentano’s students who had slightly deviated from their master’s teachings, Stumpf remained faithful to Brentano’s philosophical program. In this respect, the attitude of Stumpf towards Brentano is not very different from that which he attributes to other of Brentano’s students: The pupils of Brentano naturally have many things in common as a consequence of sharing the same starting-point; many others, however, because of the necessity of change, additions, and continuations are simultaneously felt by those who proceed in the same direction. (Stumpf, 1924, 413)
This stands out clearly from Stumpf’s critical review of the phenomenology of his student Husserl in section 13 of his posthumous work, where he tries to show that Husserl’s program in the first book of Ideas is in many ways indebted to Brentano’s descriptive psychology (see Fisette, 2015e). Stumpf’s debt to Lotze’s philosophy is certainly significant but it is not very well documented in the literature. Most studies on the relationship between Stumpf and Lotze emphasize Lotze’s theory of local signs (see W. R. Woodward, 1978; Fisette, 2006, 2012; B. Centi, 2011) and the problem of the origins of space perception, which is in fact the central theme of Stumpf’s Raumbuch. (Stumpf, 1873; M. Kaiser-El-Safti, 1994; D. Pradelle, 2015) In this book, dedicated to Lotze, Stumpf provides a summary of the debates between philosophers, scientists and psychologists on the question of the origin of space perception since Fechner. In the preface to this book, Stumpf explains that his starting point is the controversy between nativism and empiricism as presented by Helmholtz in his Handbuch (H. von Helmholtz, 1910, vol. 3, § 25) while his inspiration lies in Lotze’s (1852) Medizinische Psychologie. However, the position defended by Stumpf in § 5 of this book is based on Brentano’s ontology and on the concept of “psychological part” or attribute (in the sense that space is considered as an attribute of the visual field). This underlies his entire argument against empiricism and his defense of a form of nativism close to that of the physiologist E. Hering. That said, Lotze’s influence on the thought of the young Stumpf is not limited to his doctrine of local signs, as Stumpf repeatedly recognized. (see R. Rollinger, 2008; N. Milkov, 2015; D. Fisette, 2009b) Beyond the question of influence, Stumpf as-
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signs a central role to Lotze’s thought in the history of philosophy and associates him with a renaissance of philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century. (Stumpf, 1907) History has proved him right, since, apart from the major influence that Lotze had on the course of philosophy in Great Britain, two of his students, W. Windelband and more specifically G. Frege, also had a lasting influence on the history of philosophy even today. Philosophy of Mathematics The recent publication of Stumpf’s habilitation thesis Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik raises many questions that have been the subject of some recent commentaries. The first question relates to the importance of mathematics in the philosophy of Stumpf and it has been commented upon by W. Ewen (2008) and more recently by C. Ierna (2015). The second question relates to psychologism and has been raised by D. Münch (2002-2003) in his commentary on Stumpf’s important 1891 article “Psychology and Theory of Knowledge”. Münch clearly saw that this question was at the heart of Stumpf’s reflection in the first part of his habilitation thesis, in which he sides against J. S. Mill and Kant on the nature of mathematical axioms, an issue that has been the subject of a recent book by W. Ewen (2008). Finally, the position advocated by Stumpf on the foundations of mathematics, to the extent that it is similar to that of Frege and of the young Husserl, raises many questions regarding the historical connections between Stumpf and Frege, and particularly the influence that Stumpf might have had on his student Husserl. One of the plausible hypotheses put forward by commentators is based on their common relationship to Lotze, since both were students of Lotze in Göttingen in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Stumpf’s habilitation thesis focuses on the nature and origin of mathematical principles or axioms. Its starting point is the following question: Is there knowledge of scientific importance, which is in no way based immediately nor mediately on experience; and if there is such knowledge, what is its source? (Stumpf, 2008, Bogen 1-1)
The habilitation thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, Stumpf examines two antagonistic positions which prevailed at the time, namely J. S. Mill’s empiricism, according to which there is no
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knowledge that is not acquired mediately by induction, and Kantian transcendentalism which claims that our knowledge of general principles of mathematics is based on synthetic a priori judgments. Stumpf rejects both options and seeks to show, in the second part of his thesis, that axioms and mathematical propositions are analytic a priori; they are not acquired through experience but are the result of a process of deduction from concepts. In the critical part of his work, Stumpf poses the problem of the origin of the laws and principles of logic and mathematics as follows: if, as Mill thinks, these principles are inductive in nature, then they do not constitute necessary truths; if, on the contrary, they are necessary truths, then the question arises as to whether they are synthetic a priori judgments as Kant claims or analytic a priori propositions as Stumpf claims. Against Mill, Stumpf argues that the axioms are not the result of an empirical generalization based on an inductive process and that arithmetic, like geometry, is a deductive science based on a priori and necessary truths, which are justified through the evidence of internal perception. (Stumpf, 2008, Bogen 5-4) Stumpf therefore agrees with Kant that axioms are necessary truths, but he denies that they are based on synthetic a priori judgments. Stumpf argues that Kant’s synthetic judgments presuppose a kind of “mental machinery” (Stumpf, 2008, Bogen 16-3) to account for their formation and involve numerous assumptions, including the a priori forms of sensibility, intuition, and the Denkformen that Stumpf considers as mere constructions. Stumpf especially criticizes Kant’s thesis on the origin of the necessity of our knowledge of the axioms in intuition in that it has the consequence of making our knowledge dependent upon experience. However, Stumpf argues that intuition understood in the Kantian sense is inductive and only leads to concepts and never to propositions. That is why Stumpf claims that the very idea of synthetic a priori judgments is a contradiction in terms. Axioms and propositions are analytic judgments which are constructed deductively from concepts. We can see that Stumpf’s fundamental argument against empiricism and transcendental criticism rests on the fundamental distinction between concept and proposition, and this distinction has a major philosophical significance in Stumpf’s subsequent work on the theory of knowledge, which will be later discussed. In his habilitation thesis, Stumpf is more concerned with delimiting the field of logic and mathematics from that of psychology. In this re-
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gard, Stumpf clearly distinguishes the question of the origin of concepts, which is a psychological question, from the logicomathematical domain to which propositions and axioms belong. For, as Stumpf argues in his posthumous work, one can agree with empiricism on the psychological origin of concepts while admitting that there is a priori knowledge that is independent of experience. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 126) For Stumpf admits that the basic concepts of arithmetic (the concept of number) and geometry (the concept of space) have their origin in experience. In his Raumbuch, published three years after his habilitation thesis, Stumpf provides a demonstration of the thesis that the concept of space has a psychological origin. However, the position one takes on this issue is distinct from that which one adopts regarding the nature of propositions and necessary truths in the logico-mathematical domain. For, in this domain, one is solely concerned with axioms and propositions that can be deductively inferred, and one also assumes the origin of the axioms and their justification as necessary truths. Stumpf argued in 1870 that these axioms are analytic a priori propositions and that arithmetic and geometry are deductive sciences. There is a remarkable continuity in the work of Stumpf with regard to his positions from his habilitation thesis to his posthumous work, not only on the question of the foundation of mathematics but also on the matter of the theory of knowledge. One of the main theses he advocates in Erkenntnislehre is based on the distinction between the origin of concepts and the origin of knowledge. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, § 1) Stumpf revisits the theme of mathematical axioms (Stumpf, 19391940, §§ 12-13) in the context of a critical discussion of Husserl’s doctrine of formal and regional ontologies. C. Ierna (2015), for instance, claims that Stumpf’s conception of the concept of number in Erkenntnislehre is the same as the one he advocated in his habilitation thesis and in his Halle lectures, and Stumpf’s position is very similar to that of Brentano and his students. (see W. Ewen, 2008, 162 f.; C. Ierna, 2014) In this regard, Stumpf’s influence on his student Husserl’s habilitation thesis regarding the origin of the concept of number, including Husserl’s conception of symbolic presentations, is to be considered. (see D. Münch, 2002, 31-37) Now, what is the place of mathematics in Stumpf’s classification of sciences? This question was left open in our earlier remarks because the classification criteria that we used were based on the cardi-
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nal distinction between phenomena and psychical functions, which underlies the main division between the natural and the human sciences. But as Stumpf explained in his paper “On the Classification of Sciences,” unlike the method with which most classifications that are meant to be normative proceed, a classification that describes the state of a science as it is practiced at a given time in history cannot rely on a single criterion of classification; and its task is to show how several criteria are intertwined in many ways as to form “several wave systems that separate to form independent centers”. (C. Stumpf, 1906a, 88) This is why one must use a new criterion based on the distinction between a priori and a posteriori methods in order to delineate mathematics, including geometry, from the other sciences. Indeed: The most tangible characteristic that is offered to us to delineate the mathematical sciences from all other sciences is that of the difference in method, i.e. the a priori method as opposed to the a posteriori method. Despite the opposing effort to assimilate mathematics to the natural sciences, this distinction persists, and in my opinion, it persists rightly. The attempt by J. St. Mill to derive inductively the principles of mathematics (and logic) from a collection of several individual experiences manifestly runs in circles. (C. Stumpf, 1906a, 65)
This applies a fortiori to geometry which Stumpf, unlike Kant, refuses to build on the concept of intuition, by arguing that it is an analytic a priori science, like any other branch of mathematics. The position he advocates in 1906 is therefore not different from that he advocated thirty five years earlier in his habilitation thesis. (see Ewen, 2008, 157ff.) As an a priori science, one could say that mathematics is actually presupposed by all other sciences as Stumpf suggests in referring positively to Auguste Comte’s hierarchy of the positive sciences. (C. Stumpf, 1906a, 88) For, according to Comte, the hierarchy between sciences within his classification presupposes that all sciences, from physics to physiology, logically depend on mathematics, which is the most simple science and is the most autonomous with regard to all other sciences. In this regard, Stumpf here adopts a position akin to Brentano’s who followed Comte’s criteria for classifying the sciences, with the important difference being that psychology replaces sociology within Brentano’s system of sciences and that the field of psychical functions is, according to Stumpf, independent of all other sciences. (see D. Fisette, 2014b)
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Theory of Knowledge The theory of knowledge occupies a central place in Stumpf’s philosophy in his later works, especially in Erkenntnislehre, and we know that this discipline has always been at the heart of his teaching until the end of his career in Berlin. We have seen that Stumpf associates it with both the neutral sciences and the question of the foundation of knowledge, specifically with the ultimate justification of knowledge. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 7, 124) One of the central questions of the theory of knowledge is psychologism, which serves as the subject of an article published in 1891 under the title “Psychology and the Theory of Knowledge”. (see D. Münch, 2002; G. Fréchette, 2013) Stumpf advocates a form of critical realism that he opposes specifically to Kantian idealism, and which maintains that the outside world is a supposition or a hypothesis. Moreover, it asserts that the only material that we have for formulating such a hypothesis are the concepts drawn from experience that enable us “to calculate the course of events”. As such, one of the main tasks of the theory of knowledge is to account for the most general modes of knowledge of the outside world. (Stumpf, 1891, 503) Stumpf distinguishes the theory of knowledge as a field of study from psychology on the basis of the cardinal distinction between the domain of concepts and that of propositions or necessary truths, as put forth in his habilitation thesis. The research on the origin of concepts, as we said, is a task specific to psychology. In contrast, the theory of knowledge is limited to the search for, and the justification of, “the most general and immediately evident truths” (Stumpf, 1891, 501), such as laws and axioms that are necessary for knowledge. Yet, these axioms are nothing but propositions that we assume to be true and necessary, and they have their origin in the content of a specific class of psychical functions, namely judgments. Since the contents of judgments are formations or products (Gebilde) which, as we said, belong to eidology, the field of research of the theory of knowledge is therefore linked to that of this neutral science which also includes states of affairs, as we will see later. One must therefore avoid confusing the question of the nature of the axioms with that of the psychological origin of concepts, but one can no more entirely separate the theory of knowledge from descriptive psychology since axioms are originally the contents of a specific class of psychical functions, i.e. the contents of judgments or contents of
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propositional attitudes whose justification is the task of the theory of knowledge. (Stumpf, 1891, 495-496; 1939-1940, 124) In the light of this distinction, one can better understand the significance of the debate on psychologism such as Stumpf describes it in his paper of 1891. Stumpf opposes two schools of thought on the question of the relationship between the theory of knowledge and psychology: Kantian criticism9 that dissociates the theory of knowledge from psychology, and psychologism that Stumpf defined in this paper as “the reduction of all philosophical investigation, and especially all epistemological investigations, to psychology”. (Stumpf, 1891, 468) The argument in favor of psychologism boils down to the idea that “knowledge is itself a mental process and accordingly the study of its conditions would be a psychological investigation”. (Stumpf, 1891, 468) The criticism of psychologism, on the other hand, argues that a psychological investigation can never lead to “knowledge of general and necessary truths”. (Stumpf, 1891, 469) Now since the conditions of possibility of knowledge, i.e. the forms of intuition and thought, are themselves a priori and therefore not analysable (Stumpf, 1891, 493), psychology is therefore useless for Kantian criticists. The position adopted by Stumpf in this debate consists in conceding to criticism that necessary truths are irreducible to facts while admitting, with psychologists, that psychology is essential to the theory of knowledge. Hence the main mistake he attributes to Kantianism, which consists in refusing the assistance of psychological research in the theory of knowledge. (Stumpf, 1891, 493, 500) The field of psychology is understood here in a sense that is broad enough as to include sensory phenomena and mental functions because, in 1891, Stumpf did not explicitly distinguish the field of phenomenology from that of descriptive psychology. Now the main criticism he addresses to Kant focuses on the dichotomy between form and matter, and it is primarily the Kantian doctrine of phenomena (the manifold of intuition) that he holds responsible for its most obvious “mistakes”. In this 9
Kant’s position that serves as a starting point in Stumpf’s paper “Psychology and Theory of Knowledge” is that of the neo-Kantian W. Windelband, another student of Lotze, who already used the term “psychologism” in 1877 in a pejorative sense to denounce those who, like Fries and Beneke, advocated a psychological interpretation of his doctrine. (W. Windelband, 1877, 224 f.) Windelband uses the term “psychologism” several times in this text, particularly in relation to the psychological interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental deduction. (W. Windelband, 1877, 248, 259)
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article from 1891, Stumpf reiterates the main criticism that he addressed to Kant in his Raumbuch, namely his doctrine of space as a subjective form and his conception of sensations as amorphous and unstructured matter designed to support the synthetic and unifying activity of the understanding. (Stumpf, 1873, 15 f.) Stumpf argues against the Kantian constructivism that the field of sensory phenomena has its own structure and its own laws which are not imposed from without by categorical synthesis. Space is not for Stumpf an a priori form of sensitivity but a partial content (Theilinhalte) or attribute of consciousness that entertains relations of dependency with the visual field, for example. That is why, according to Stumpf, the Kantian space understood as an a priori form of the external sense is ultimately a mere abstraction. For space, like any elementary concepts, is for Stumpf an abstractum that is formed by the understanding on the basis of sensory contents and belongs, accordingly, to the realm of entia rationis cum fundamento in re. (1891, 479; 1939-1940, 23) Once liberated from these metaphysical presuppositions, there is no reason therefore to refuse the assistance of psychology and phenomenology in the theory of knowledge. However, this critique of the Kantian theory of knowledge does not make Stumpf an advocate of psychologism. For Stumpf acknowledges with critical philosophy that we must maintain a strict concept of necessity and thus oppose the reduction of the principles and laws of logic and of science in general to simple empirical generalizations. Stumpf here refers explicitly to J. S. Mill and maintains that the laws of nature and the principles of logic such as the principle of noncontradiction, for example, cannot be acquired merely by induction and are irreducible as such to a process of empirical generalization or “an accumulation of observations”. (Stumpf, 1891, 499-500) This raises the question of the relationship between the position adopted by Stumpf in his 1891 article on the debate on psychologism and the position adopted by Husserl and Frege on the same issue several years later. Münch (2002, 50) argues that Stumpf’s position not only comes close to that of Husserl, but it also constitutes the background of Husserl’s critique of psychologism in his Logical Investigations. Ewen (2008, 13, 22) argues instead that Stumpf is closer to the antipsychologistic positions of Frege. But since they do not provide a clear definition of what is meant by “psychologism” and do not clearly present Stumpf’s, Frege’s, and Husserl’s respective arguments
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against psychologism, there is no way to settle this debate. Nevertheless, I have reason to believe that the position of Stumpf on the issue of psychologism is closer to that of Husserl than to that of Frege and I shall briefly explain why, given the historical and philosophical importance of this question. The theme of psychologism, which Husserl relates to the foundational debate on logic in the Prolegomena, essentially uses the theoretical framework that we find in Stumpf’s article of 1891. Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism are certainly original, but the position he adopts on the matter of theory of knowledge is largely indebted to that of Stumpf. In the Prolegomena, Husserl refers twice to Stumpf’s article: first, in a footnote to § 18 in order to indicate that, following Stumpf in his article, he uses the term “psychologism” without any “evaluative colouring,” while in the second (Husserl, 1982, 335), Husserl refers to the passage (Stumpf, 1891, 469) in which Stumpf formulates his argument against psychologism, i.e. that it can never lead to necessary truths. Husserl adds that even if Stumpf is mainly concerned, in this article, with the theory of knowledge and not with logic as such, this “is not an essential difference”. Moreover, the starting point of Husserl in his Prolegomena is the same as that of Stumpf in his habilitation thesis, namely the opposition between J. S. Mill (Husserl, 1982, 40) and Kant (Husserl, 1982 41-42) on the relationship between logic and psychology. This opposition is expressed concretely in the controversy over psychologism by the normative anti-psychologism that Husserl attributes to the Kantian tradition and to Frege,10 and the logical psychologism with which are 10
Husserl refers to this passage from the preface to Grundgesetze der Arithmetik: “Daß die logischen Gesetze Richtschnüre für das Denken sein sollen zur Erreichung der Wahrheit, wird zwar vorweg allgemein zugegeben; aber es geräht nur zu leicht in Vergessenheit. Der Doppelsinn des Wortes “Gesetz” ist hier verhängnisvoll. In dem einen Sinne besagt es, was ist, in dem andern schreibt es vor, was sein soll. Nur in diesem Sinne können die logischen Gesetze Denkgesetze genannt werden, indem sie festsetzen, wie gedacht werden soll. Jedes Gesetz, das besagt, was ist, kann aufgefaßt werden als vorschreibend, es solle im Einklange damit gedacht werden, und es ist also in dem Sinne ein Denkgesetze. Das gilt von den geometrischen und physikalischen nicht minder als von den logischen. Diese verdienen den Namen “Denkgesetze” nur dann mit mehr Recht, wenn damit gesagt sein soll, daß sie die allgemeinsten sind, die überall da vorschreiben, wie gedacht werden soll, wo überhaupt gedacht wird”. (Frege, 1893, XV) Opinions diverge as to whether Frege would rank alongside the Kantians or the phenomenologists. Some argue that Frege’s antipsychologistic argument is based on normativity and it is precisely on this point that he differs from the
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associated J. S. Mill, Wundt, A. Bain, and T. Lipps, for example. Following Husserl’s diagnosis, this controversy stems from the fact that both sides conceive of logic in two different ways: the psychologistic party only considers logic from the point of view of its method, i.e. as a technology dependent on psychology, while anti-psychologistic sympathizers only consider it from the point of view of its theoretical content and therefore as a theoretical discipline entirely independent from psychology. Within this difference between two conceptions of logic correspond two different conceptions of the laws of logic: as these laws “serve as norms for our knowledge-activities, and laws which include normativity in their thought-content, and assert its universal obligatoriness”. (Husserl, 1982, 101) This distinction corresponds concretely to that of logic understood as a normative and practical discipline (as a Kunstlehre of knowledge) and of logic understood as a theoretical and ideal discipline. According to Husserl, the confusion underlying the debate between psychologism and antipsychologism can be explained by the fact that the first party, when it claims to base logic on psychology, only considers the practical-normative aspect of logic, while the arguments of the opposing party rely on logic understood as a theoretical discipline. Thus, if one only considers the practical aspect of logic, the claims of psychologism to base logic on psychology are perfectly legitimate. However, Husserl criticizes the antipsychologistic partisans who conceive logic in strictly normative terms, and thus ignore the essential difference between the proper content of logical propositions and their practical application (Husserl, 1982, 102), i.e. between the use of a proposition for normative means and its theoretical content, which is in principle separable from the idea of normativity. To acknowledge the validity of this distinction is to acknowledge that the real argument against psychologism does not lie in the opposition between the normative character of logical laws and the natural laws of psychology, but in the distinction which rests on the ideal character of the logical laws. position of Husserl. Others, like M. Dummett for example, dispute this interpretation of Frege’s logic as a normative science. According to Dummett, there are no significant differences between the positions of Husserl and of Frege: “a characterization of logic as a normative science is quite superficial, for logic is best regarded as the theoretical science underlying the relevant normative principles; the important question is the proper characterization of the subject-matter of this theoretical but non prescriptive science”. (M. Dummett, 1991, 225)
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Kantians are right to emphasize the theoretical content of logic and to argue, against psychologism, that the propositions of logic are independent of the “properties of human nature in general”. But they are wrong to conceive this propositional content and logic in general in terms of normativity. Husserl suggests two arguments against normative antipsychologism. First, normativity is not a decisive argument against psychologism because “every normative and likewise every practical discipline rests on one or more theoretical disciplines, inasmuch as its rules must have a theoretical content separable from the notion of normativity (of the ‘shall’ or ‘should’), whose scientific investigation is the duty of these theoretical disciplines”. (Husserl, 1982, 33) Thus, the principles of logic are not normative propositions for any normative proposition presupposes a certain type of evaluation that refers to non-normative propositions and disciplines. Second, logic, understood as a normative discipline, in turn requires a psychological basis. Husserl is not saying that psychology provides its essential foundation, but he nevertheless concedes to psychologism that “psychology helps in the foundation of logic”. (Husserl, 1982, 45) Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism thus differ from those of Frege whose critique of psychologism rests on the normative character of logic. Frege argues that the main error of psychologism is to confuse the normative character of the laws of logic - what ought to be - with the use of these laws to describe “what is”. Finally, unlike Husserl and Stumpf, Frege’s antipsychologism amounts to entirely dismissing the field of mental phenomena, thereby creating an unbridgeable gap between this field of investigation and that of logic and philosophy as a whole. That said, there are many parallels that can be drawn between the positions of Stumpf and of Frege on the foundation of mathematics and on psychologism. (see W. Ewen, 2008, 97 ff.) Several attempts have been recently made to explain these parallels, and these accounts all rely on their mutual relationship to Lotze during their stay in Göttingen in the early 1870s, while Stumpf, after his habilitation, was Privatdozent (1870-1873), and Frege pursued his studies in mathematics (1871-1873). If we follow the research of Ewen (2008, 97 f.), although it can be assumed that the two philosophers met during this period, we have no written evidence that confirms this. Historical testimony says neither whether Frege attended Stumpf’s lectures in Göttingen on Aristotle’s metaphysics, which he taught for three con-
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secutive years, nor whether he attended his lecture on “inductive logic with a particular focus on the problem of natural science” that he taught during the summer semester of 1873. Nevertheless, the correspondence that Frege and Stumpf exchanged in the early 1880s seems to confirm that the two philosophers knew each other. In any case, an explanation of the elective affinities between Stumpf and Frege might be found in the work of Lotze. Since the influential works of Dummett on Frege, there is a vast literature on the Lotze’s alleged influence on the thought of the young Frege that I cannot comment here. And as I mentioned earlier, Stumpf’s debt to Lotze is attested in many of his writings, particularly in an article celebrating the centenary of Lotze’s anniversary in Kant Studien. In this article, Stumpf provides us with the information needed to answer a question debated by commentators on the reasons which led him to undertake research on the nature of mathematical axioms in his habilitation thesis. Ierna (2015, 15) rightly emphasizes the influence of Brentano’s lecture on logic. Another viable hypothesis is Brentano’s article on Auguste Comte and positivism published in 1869, given the many references made to Comte in Stumpf’s habilitation thesis. However, if we rely on one of Stumpf’s indication in his article on Lotze, Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s theory of ideas might be another plausible hypothesis. (Stumpf, 1918, 7) Lotze’s well-known interpretation of Plato’s Ideas is to be found in the third book of his Logic published later in 1874 in the famous chapter entitled “The world of ideas”. In this chapter, the central criticism that he addressed to both Plato and Kant is based precisely on the distinction between concept and proposition. (H. Lotze, 1912, 521-522) And we know that this distinction is also to be found in Husserl whose Platonism is construed on the basis of Lotze’s notion of validity (Geltung) put forth in his Logic. (see Stumpf, 1939-1940, 89) Logic and States of Affairs The dispute over psychologism raises the question of the status of logic in the philosophy of Stumpf. Since Stumpf has practically never published on logic in his lifetime, his commentators mainly rely on Stumpf’s lectures’ syllabus on logic that he taught in Halle and the notes taken by Husserl during these lectures. As we said earlier, Stumpf’s lecture on logic relies heavily on Brentrano’s lectures on logic “Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen” that Brentano taught in Vienna in 1884-1885. Following Brentano, logic is
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conceived as a practical science that deals primarily with judgments and contents of judgments belonging to a class of psychological functions which Stumpf distinguished from those of presentations and emotions. One of Stumpf’s original contributions to logic rests on the notion of state of affairs which was already used in the history of philosophy and especially by Lotze. (see B. Smith, 1989, § 2) Stumpf already used this notion in his lectures on logic in 1888 (Q 13, 4) and it is now known that it has been subsequently taken over by many philosophers including Husserl and Wittgenstein. Stumpf conceives it both as a specific content of judgment and as its objective and necessary correlate, which is expressed linguistically in “subordinate clauses” (daß-Sätzen) or in the form of “substantivized infinitive”. It therefore corresponds to what Stumpf called axioms. In 1906, Stumpf associates it with the concept of formation or product (Gebilde) and applies it to both intellectual and emotional functions, where in the latter case it is conceived as a value (also called Wertverhalt) on which ethics and practical philosophy in general are based. These Gebilde are objective entities that are related both to the concept of objective in Meinong, to that of objectity in Husserl and to Bolzano’s concept of “proposition in itself.” (Stumpf, 1906b, 30) For this student of Lotze, the doctrine of Gebilde is not incompatible with the Platonic theory of ideas though “without its metaphysical conclusions”. (Stumpf, 1906a, 33) One can certainly entertain a formation such as a state of affairs without having it as an actual content of judgment, but it is then a mere abstraction. (G. Fréchette, 2015) This is because, says Stumpf, “the state of affairs cannot be immediately given for itself independently of any mental function, and therefore effectively. It can only be real as the content of a judgment that is actually taking place. [...] So, functions (and indeed only the conscious functions which are properly present) are facts immediately known, while the Gebilde are facts only regarded as contents of functions”. (Stumpf, 1906a, 32) Objectivism is an important issue in Stumpf’s philosophy since it provides one of his main arguments against psychologism. In his contribution to this volume, A. Chrudzimski compares Stumpf’s conception of states of affairs with those of Marty and of Meinong and points out that Stumpf’s conception raises many problems. He attributes to Stumpf a form of immanentism in the matter of states of affairs and argues that Stumpf consequently conflates propositional contents with their objective correlates. This apparent confu-
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sion raises many questions with regard to his conception of truth. According to Chrudzimski, Stumpf seems to hesitate between an Aristotelian position (states of affairs are in the things themselves which have their own structure) and a conceptualist position (they are apprehended as indivisible and structured wholes). The difficulty lies in the use of the concept of Gebilde to refer both to the objective correlate of an act of judgment and to its partial content which is dependent and can only be isolated from the act of judgment by abstraction. In a passage where Stumpf comments on the concept of state of affairs in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, he clearly makes the distinction between the content or meaning of an act of judgment and its object, the state of affairs: Husserl rightly pointed out that the concepts of “equiangular triangle” and “equilateral triangle” are different even if they refer to the same thing. He speaks of a different “meaning” with the same “object”. Similarly, the judgments “a > b” and “b < a” have a different meaning but they express the same state of affairs. (Stumpf, 1906b, 34)
Stumpf’s works on the logic of probabilities (Stumpf 1892, 1938), which also belong to logic, have received little attention among his commentators (see A. Kamlah, 1987) as well as part of his work on language which will be discussed later. Metaphysics and Ontology The theme of metaphysics in Stumpf has been the subject of recent studies (see K. Schuhmann, 1999; D. Jacquette 2000-2001; R. Rollinger, 2008b; R. Martinelli, 2011, 2015), and in this volume, we publish Husserl’s notes taken during Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics, which he taught in Halle during the late 1880s. This document allows us to precisely delimit this vast field of research. Following Brentano, Stumpf distinguished four main branches of metaphysics: transcendental philosophy, which focuses on the justification of our knowledge of the external world, ontology whose domain includes, in addition to the categories, the topic of psychophysical relations and that of causality among other things; thirdly, theology which is concerned with the evidence of the existence of a foundation of the world; and finally, cosmology which deals namely with issues related to the actual infinite. Since I already commented Stumpf’s metaphysics in my
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introduction to his lecture on metaphysics (see D. Fisette, 2015e), I will only add a few remarks on the literature on the subject. Stumpf pays particular attention in his writings to two topics related to the domain of ontology (D. Jacquette, 200-2001, R. Martinelli, 2015), namely categories and psychophysical relations. In Erkenntnislehre, he examines the categories of thing (substance), cause, necessity (legality), truth, reality, equality, and number (Stumpf 1939-1940, 13) and claims that these Grundbegriffe or categories have their origin in (internal and external) perception. This is primarily the case of the concept of necessity which, as we saw, is the heart of his critique of psychologism. Stumpf agrees with Hume and J. S. Mill that we cannot observe necessary relations in nature, but he argues that internal perception provides many cases of necessary relations such as mathematical axioms or in the perception of three consecutive sounds where one of them is necessarily intermediate (as to the pitch) between the other two. (Stumpf, 1939, 48) The concept of necessity, as the concept of causality, is formed through a process of abstraction and can then be used, hypothetically, to explain natural events based on causal laws. Moreover, as Rollinger (2015) rightly pointed out, we also find in Stumpf an original account of tropes which influenced the young Husserl. The second metaphysical topic to which Stumpf attaches great importance in his writings is that of psychophysical relations. Unlike most of his contemporaries, including Brentano and Husserl, Stumpf unequivocally rejects the doctrine of parallelism according to which the physical and the psychological are aspects of one and the same reality and he advocates, following Lotze, a form of interactionism that rejects monism in favor of dualism. The position that Stumpf advocates in “Leib und Seele” and in his two studies on Spinoza, is summed up in a passage of his posthumous book, in which he wrote: The discredited dualism however, according to which everything in the world, including the mental and physical, stands in thoroughgoing interaction (directly or indirectly), now appears as the true monism. According to interactionism, the world is, despite the diversity of its parts, a unified organic whole. Thus the parallelistic view proves to be impractical and contradictory, and therefore the theory of interaction remains, for the time being, the best guide through the maze of this great problem. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 822)
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One of Stumpf’s arguments in favor of interactionism and against parallelism is Darwin’s theory of evolution (Stumpf, 1910, 78-79) to which he attaches great importance since the 1880s, and notably in a preparatory study to the second volume of his Psychology of Sound, which is entitled “Musikpsychologie in England. Considerations on the derivation of Music from Language and from the Process of Evolution in Animals” (see E. Valentine, 2000). 11 In an article entitled “Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie,” Stumpf compares the influence of Darwin’s theory on science to that of the Copernican revolution on astronomy. (Stumpf, 1899a) Stumpf’s interest for Darwin’s theory is clearly expressed in his works on psychophysical relations, the origins of music, animal psychology as well as in those on child development. In his lecture on metaphysics as well as in his paper “Leib und Seele,” Stumpf’s main target is Mach’s phenomenalism and neutral monism, which amount to reducing physical objects and subjectivity to functional relations between sensations (or elements) and it inevitably leads, according to Stumpf, to idealism and solipsism. In 1919, Stumpf published a very interesting study on Spinoza’s parallelism in which he proposes an original and unorthodox interpretation of Spinoza’s Ethics. He argues that Spinoza’s parallelism if well understood has nothing to do with the psychophysical parallelism which was dominant at that time since Fechner. According to Stumpf, the heart of Spinoza’s parallelism rests on the distinction between act (or mental state) and the immanent object towards which it is directed. (Stumpf 1919b, 19) This act-content parallelism has its source in Aristotle and it has been transmitted to Brentano and Husserl via many philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to Descartes and Spinoza. Stumpf argues that this interpretation is consistent with Spinoza’s pantheism insofar as the distinction between act and its immanent content has been transposed to God in Spinoza’s Ethics. For since God’s intellect is considered by Spinoza as the only possible subject, intentional acts and contents are then necessarily two of his numerous modes or attributes. (see R. Martinelli, 2011) Despite his criticism of psychophysical parallelism, Stumpf advocates, like Spinoza, a form of pantheism that is consistent with his deterministic and mechanical conception of nature. 11
In 1909, he went to Cambridge to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Darwin as he explained in his autobiography. (Stumpf, 1924, 23)
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In Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf recalls that pantheism imposed itself over him in 1876 in the course of several discussions with Brentano on theism. This was the position that he already advocated in his lectures on metaphysics in Würzburg and later in Halle, which are published in this volume. Stumpf’s main argument against theism is its inability to satisfactorily resolve the problem of evil in the world. However, as Stumpf pointed out in Erkenntnislehre (1939-1940, 681, 798, 17), in his last writings, Brentano moved closer to a form of pantheism similar to that of Spinoza.12 Empirical Psychology Stumpf’s scientific contribution to the field of empirical psychology has since been highlighted by several studies published in recent years. In addition to the numerous studies that explore Stumpf’s relationship to psychologists such as Külpe (W. Baumgartner, 1997), Herbart (M. Kaiser-El-Safti, 2009, 2010, 2011; S. Poggi, 2014), Helmholtz (H.-P. Reinecke, 2003) Wundt (U. Wolfradt, 2011), or to H. Ebbinghaus (see U. Wolfradt & M. Kaiser-El-Safti (eds), 2010), several other studies have highlighted Stumpf’s diversified contribution to several sub-disciplines of psychology including the psychology of sound, Gestalt psychology, animal psychology, the psychology of child development, etc. The most important of Stumpf’s contributions to the field of psychology, understood in the narrow sense of the science of psychical functions, is his Psychology of Sound, published in two volumes. (Stumpf, 1883, 1890) This complex and unfinished work attracted much interest at the time and was reviewed by philosophers such as Meinong and Natorp and by psychologists such as J. Sully, H. Ebbinghaus, and especially W. Wundt who, in his anonymous review of the first volume of the book, criticized Stumpf’s method and the hypothesis of the relativity of sensations to judgment. (see C. G. Allesch, 2003) Recall, however, that this book is not a phenomenological study of sounds but rather a study of the “judgments about sounds,” and it therefore belongs to the field of psychology in the narrow sense. (Stumpf, 1906a, 31) Stumpf makes it clear, however, that the judgment in question is not categorical but a judgment of a particular type which he calls apprehension or apperception. More12
Stumpf (1939-1940, 798) here refers to a 1915 dictation that A. Kastil has published in his edition of Vom Dasein Gottes. (F. Brentano, 1929, 446 ff)
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over, Stumpf claims that there are sensory contents which are not related to judgments or any other mental functions such as space as he had demonstrated in his Raumbuch. (see J. Bouveresse, 2006) Two of Stumpf’s important contributions in this book (Kaiser-ElSafti, 2011, 38-39) rest on the famous concept of fusion (Verschmelzung) by which he characterizes the phenomenon of consonance. This phenomenon in turn constitutes the foundation of music, and of the theory of relations (Mehrheit, Steigerung, Ähnlichkeit, Verschmelzung, Teil und Ganzes) that Stumpf develops in the first volume of this work (Stumpf, 1883, § 6). In a well-known passage of the second volume of this work, Stumpf defines fusion as follows: Alle Empfindungsqualitäten treten, wenn sie aus aufeinanderfolgenden in gleichzeitige uሷbergehen, ausser in dieses Verhältnis der Gleichzeitigkeit noch in ein anderes Verhältnis, dem zu Folge sie als Teile eines Empfindungsganzen erscheinen. Aufeinanderfolgende Empfindungen bilden, als Empfindungen eine blosse Summe, gleichzeitige schon als Empfindung ein Ganzes. (Stumpf, 1890, 64)
Stumpf’s theory of fusion led to a debate with Brentano (see Allesch, 2003; R. Martinelli, 2013) and the importance of this notion in Husserl’s phenomenology is well-known, particularly in relation to Husserl’s conception of figural moments. (C. Ierna, 2009) In the field of psychology, Stumpf is also known for his account of the famous case of Clever Hans, which aroused great interest in the early twentieth century and represented a significant step in the development of experimental psychology. (H. Baranzke, 2001; W. Prinz, 2006; H. Gundlach, 2006) In his autobiography, Stumpf described the circumstances that led him to become interested in the peculiar case of a horse that had apparently mastered the elementary techniques of counting: In 1904, having just returned from a celebration of Kant’s anniversary in Königsberg, after the lecture I was requested by a member of the Board of Education, to which Mr. von Osten had appealed, to investigate the matter, since the Board did not know just what attitude to assume in regard to the affair. That this was not a case of intentional deception was evident from the fact that the horse responded to the wellknown African explorer, Mr. Schillings, just the same as to Mr. von Osten. Therefore an investigation seemed not out of place. I fully realized the extraordinary difficulties involved; the excitement aroused in
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the city and even in foreign countries by the daily reports of the strange case in the newspapers; the curiosity of the crowds which sought admission; the peculiarities of Mr. von Osten; the unfavorable locality; etc. The irresistible desire to determine the facts induced me to undertake the investigation, and we finally succeeded in revealing the facts, mainly by virtue of the keen eyes and iron patience of my assistant, Pfungst. In this case there were many interesting, more general results. Unintentionally, Mr. Von Osten had confirmed by an experiment in a grand style Aristotle’s theory of the absence of abstract reasoning in animals. For, if a method so carefully planned pedagogically as that which this former teacher of mathematics had used with untiring patience on his horse effects only the recognition of an unconscious movement of the head, then such failure must be due to the incapacity of the pupil. This solution, it is true, was not accepted everywhere. (Stumpf, 1924, 406-407)
We know that Stumpf’s assistant, O. Pfungst devoted an entire book to the case of Clever Hans in which he presented the results of the investigation that he and Stumpf conducted. (see Stumpf, 1907a, 7-15) Recently, H. Gundlach (2006) questioned the complete authorship of Pfungst of this book, arguing that Stumpf believed in the higher intellectual capabilities of the horse and that he wrote large parts of the book, thereby concealing his “error” behind the name of his student Pfungst.13 Similarly, Stumpf contributed to the foundations of the research conducted by Köhler (1925) on chimpanzees in the anthropoid station in Tenerife. Stumpf was also interested in other similar phenomena, such as the study of child prodigies like Pepito Arriola and many others. He founded in 1901 the Society for Child Psychology and contributed two studies on the topic. (Stumpf, 1900, 1901) 13
That Stumpf contributed extensively to the writing of this book is one thing, but that he advocated the thesis of a superior intelligence in animals is questionable. In his review of A. Marty’s 1885 dissertation on the origin of language, Stumpf criticizes Marty, who attributes the absence of an articulated language in animals to their inability to form concepts. As M. Ballod (2003, 245 ff.) pointed out in his article, Stumpf argued against Marty that “what is meant by superior thinking is abstract judging and reasoning, but not the mere formation of abstract concepts”. (Stumpf, 1875, 186) Here, one recognizes here the distinction between concept and judgment that is central in his habilitation thesis. In the light of this distinction, one could grant animals the capacity to form concepts without admitting that they have higher intellectual capabilities.
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As we said, in 1900, Stumpf established the Institute of Psychology in Berlin, which was at the origin of the movement in psychology called Gestalt psychology. With the exception of Max Wertheimer, who wrote his dissertation in 1904 under the direction of Külpe in Würzburg, the other psychologists of the Institute of Berlin, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, Kurt Lewin, Egon Brunswik and Adhemar Gelb underwent their apprenticeship in psychology and philosophy under the supervision of Stumpf. This is also the case of Robert Musil and C. von Allesch, who was known at the time for his work in the field of aesthetics. However, as M. Ash (2000-2001) pointed out, although the Gestaltists in Berlin had initially adopted Stumpf’s phenomenological standpoint, they departed significantly from Stumpf’s conception of mind. (F. Toccafondi, 2009) Despite Stumpf’s significant contribution to the debate on Gestalt and psychology in general, he was one of the main targets of Köhler (1913) in the famous article where he introduced the constancy hypothesis, and which is sometimes considered as the very beginning of Gestalt psychology. Stumpf replied to this objection in his posthumous book by saying that Köhler was wrong in eliminating founding contents in favor of the constancy hypothesis. The following passage from his book Erkenntnislehre summarizes the main issues at the heart of this dispute: In the presentations of the theoreticians of Gestalt psychology, it is as if there was absolutely no sound and no color, nothing absolute in our sense perceptions, but only Gestalts. Gestalts alone seem to be the only original data while sounds, colors and everything that we call phenomena would only come apart by means of abstraction. (Stumpf, 1939, 242)
In summary, Stumpf claims that, in this conception of Gestalt, “the forest hides the trees”. For Stumpf admits that the whole is prior to its parts and that each part, in virtue of its nature, is conditioned by the whole. However, he cannot allow that one may perceive a Gestalt without presupposing a founding content or what he also calls first order phenomena such as color or sound, for example. Stumpf’s conception of Gestalt is closer to that of Bühler (see D. Fisette, 2015b) and it consists in a “complex of structural relations”. (Stumpf, 1939, 246) Another passage from his posthumous work summarizes perfectly the theoretical issues at stake in Stumpf’s criticism of his students:
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The conception of the perception of Gestalts advocated here presupposes: 1. The possibility of perceiving relations; 2. The possibility of unnoticed content of consciousness; 3. The distinction between phenomena and mental functions as heterogeneous contents of consciousness. If one admits these three theses, then our theory is founded. If one challenges it, then one will be led to the native Gestalt psychology, but also to all the difficulties that come with it. (Stumpf, 1939, 254)
According to Stumpf, the cost for adhering to the native theory is nothing less than the abandonment of the very principles of descriptive psychology and of phenomenology. Moreover, apart from the difficulties mentioned by Stumpf in this passage, Gestalt psychology conveys philosophical presuppositions which are at the heart of the dispute. The first is a form of sensualist naturalism that Stumpf rejects. The second assumption concerns the metaphysical question of psychophysical relations in Köhler and the attempt to introduce the concept of Gestalt in the field of physics. Stumpf believes that Köhler’s isomorphism thesis, which postulates the existence of an identity relation between the structural laws of the psychical world and that of the physical world, presupposes the theory of psychophysical parallelism that Stumpf rejects as well. Music and Aesthetics In the general field of musicology, in addition to his numerous studies on acoustics, which for the most part have been collected in his Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, and his 1926 work Sprachlaute (see B. Pompino-Marschall, 2003), as well as his studies on ethnomusicology (see G. Schwörer-Kohl, 2011), published in his Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, whose fourth volume contains the study on Romanian folk music by the famous composer Béla Bartók (1922-1923, see V. Lampert, 2008), we also owe to Stumpf several studies on the history of music. (Stumpf, 1885, 1896, 1897, 1911) In his autobiography, Stumpf listed his work in this field and stressed the importance of his contribution in two of his works: To the systematic science of music belong, besides my works on physical and psychological acoustics, especially the treatise, Psychology of Music in England, and the book about the beginning of music. In the treatise, which is an introduction to the later works on
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His classic work, The Origins of Music,14 the renown of which has been contributed to by the famous anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir (1912) thanks to his positive 1912 review, has recently been published in English. The work is accompanied by a study of H. de la Motte-Haber (see also H. de la Motte-Haber, 2011), in which she evaluates the contribution of Stumpf in the light of recent studies on the origins of music, and by the English translation of Stumpf’s autobiography. This book is the culmination of more than twenty five years of empirical and theoretical research investigations in the field of musicology and is divided into two main parts: the first, entitled “The Origin and Archetypes of Music Making” deals with the theoretical aspects of the debate on this issue. This part consists of five sections. In the first entitled “Recent Theories”, three theories on the origin of music are discussed, namely that of Darwin, that advocated independently by Rousseau, Herder, and Spencer, and finally that of Wallaschek and K. Bücher. All these theories are rejected in favor of that proposed by Stumpf in the second chapter entitled “The Origin and Archetypes of Singing”. Stumpf’s theory is based mainly on the famous concept of fusion that he developed in his Psychology of Sound. The third chapter entitled “Primitive Instruments and their Influence” traces the history of musical instruments among primitive peoples. In Chapter IV “Polyphony, Rhythm, and Intoned”, Stumpf examines the music of primitive peoples with regard to forms of polyphony, rhythm, and the relation between song and speech. (see W. Deutsch, G. Sommer and A. Willam, 2003) The last chapter, “Paths of Development,” is a study of the different stages in the development of music. This part is complemented by a series of explanatory notes including an annotated bibliography of studies on the exotic music from 1882 to 1911. The second 14
On Stumpf’s contribution to comparative musicology, cf. Die Anfänge der Musik (Stumpf, 1911), E. Sapir (1912), E. M. von Hornbostel (1933), M. Müller (2003), and A. Simon (2000).
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part of the book, “Songs of Primitive Peoples” is a study of music among primitive peoples in different countries of the world and is based on several songs of which Stumpf offers the transcription and a detailed musical analysis. (see H. Günther, 2003) The book is supplemented by eleven photographs of old musical instruments and a brief comment from Stumpf. Moreover, as shown recently by C. G. Allesch (2015, 2003), although Stumpf has devoted only one article specifically to the theme of aesthetics, this topic is raised very frequently in his work, namely in his book Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung which combines three of his papers on emotions and sense feelings. (Stumpf, 1928b) This issue has given rise to a long discussion in his correspondence with Brentano on whether pleasure, and especially aesthetic pleasure procured by a work of art, is intentional or phenomenal in nature. (See D. Fisette, 2013, 2015d) In his article “Aesthetic Enjoyment and Tragedy,” Stumpf summarizes the problem of aesthetics as follows: Every work of art bears within itself its primary purpose [which consists] in the production of an aesthetic enjoyment. And here, in this immediate effect, lies the enigma. (Stumpf, 1910a, 5)
This action or effect (Wirkung) of the artwork is immediate in a way comparable to the experience that we have of pain, for instance, and it excludes on the part of the agent, any difference in culture, specialized knowledge of contemplated objects or worldview (historical, cultural or other). Stumpf acknowledges that sensations can act aesthetically on a subject without the contribution of conceptual thought or representation. However, the full aesthetic sentiment is forced upon us only when the sensations and combinations of sensations “are entangled in an act of relational thinking”. That is to say, “an aesthetic affect presupposes a judgment on a state of affairs, on a fact”. (1899, 8) The feeling of pleasure is immediately linked to an activity as sensory pleasure is to sensations, but it is not yet an emotion in the strict sense. To become an emotion in the enjoyment (Entzücken) provided by a work of art, the relations intuited in a unitary and immediate way must become an object of consciousness, and therefore an intentional object. Hence the dual origin (or source) of aesthetic experience: the first is what he calls the fullness (Fülle) of formal relations involved in a true work of art among its parts, while the second is derived from the properties of the object or, more precisely, of the state of affairs.
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(Stumpf, 1899, 8; 1924, 54) The first source is phenomenological and resides in the formal relations which are given directly to consciousness. The second source is more complicated because it presupposes the processing of the phenomena and sensory data through judgment. (Stumpf, 1926, 2-3) These two sources, however, form a unitary content that can only be distinguished by abstraction. The works and teachings of Stumpf in the field of emotions have had some influence on the literary work of the young Robert Musil. We know that Musil went to Berlin in 1903 to undertake his studies in philosophy, physics and mathematics. In 1908, he defended successfully, under the direction of Stumpf, a doctoral thesis on the work of Ernst Mach. (R. Musil, 1908) Haller (2003) summarizes in his study some of the general aspects of the complex relationship between E. Mach, Stumpf and Musil’s dissertation. But another important aspect of the relationship between Stumpf and the famous Austrian writer concerns Stumpf’s influence on Musil’s literary work, which gave rise to a vast literature. (see e. g. K. Mulligan, 1995) The last name on the list is that of S. Bonacchi (2015) who claims that Musil’s novels The Temptation of Quiet Veronika (Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika) and The Perfecting of Love (Die Vollendung der Liebe), which were published in 1911, along with unpublished theoretical fragments from 1908, bear traces of Stumpf’s theory of emotions. One of the important sources of inspiration for Musil’s work is the work of Traugott K. Oesterreich (1910) who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Kant and metaphysics in 1905 under the supervision of Stumpf. Another source of Stumpf’s theory of emotions, in addition to his articles of 1899 and 1907 on this topic (Stumpf, 1928b), is Stumpf’s lecture during the winter semester of 1906-1907 on psychology, in which he attaches great importance to the theme of sense feelings and emotions. It is more than likely that Musil attended this lecture. References Stumpf, C. (1939-1940) Erkenntnislehre, 2 vol., Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth; 2nd ed. Lengerich: Pabst science publisher, 2011. –– (1938) “Studien zur Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung”, Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physikalisch-mathematische Klasse 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1-59. –– (1928a) William James nach seinen Briefen, Berlin: Pan Verlag; also in Kant Studien 32, no. 2-3 (1927), 205-241.
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–– (1928b) Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 140 p.; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (eds), Carl Stumpf — Schriften zur Psychologie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997, 229-382. –– (1926) Die Sprachlaute; experimentell-phonetische Untersuchungen (nebst einem Anhang über Instrumentalklänge), Berlin: Springer. –– (1924) “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung, vol. V. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1-57. –– (1922) “Franz Brentano, Professor der Philosophie, 1838-1917”, in A. Chroust (ed.), Lebensläufe aus Franken II. Würzburg: Kabitzsch & Mönnich, 67-85. –– (1920) “Franz Brentano, Philosoph”, Deutsches biographisches Jahrbuch 2, 54-61. –– (1919a) “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in O. Kraus (ed.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Oskar Beck, 87-149. –– (1919b) “Spinozastudien”, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Verlag der Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-57. –– (1917a) “Zum Gedächtnis Lotzes”, Kant-Studien, vol. 22, 1-26. –– (1917b) “Die Attribute der Gesichtsempfindungen”, Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, vol. VIII, 1-88. –– (1911) Die Anfänge der Musik, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– (1910a) “Die Lust am Trauerspiel”, in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1-64. –– (1910b): “Das psychologische Institut”, in Max Lenz (ed.), Geschichte der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 3, Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 202-207. –– (1910c) Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– (1907d) “Einleitung” in O. Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten. Der Kluge Hans, Leipzig: Barth, 7-15. –– (1907e) “Der Rechenunterricht des Herrn v. Osten”, in O. Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten. Der Kluge Hans, Leipzig: Barth, 175-180. –– (1906a) “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften”, Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Klasse, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-94. –– (1906b) “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen”, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Klasse, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3-40. –– (1903) Leib und Seele. Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie. Zwei Reden, Leipzig: Barth. –– (1899): Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie, Berlin: Lange. –– (1898-1924) Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, vol. 1-9. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– (1896) Tafeln zur Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin: Speyer & Peters. –– (1895) “Antrittsrede”, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Reimer, 735-738. –– (1891) “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 19, zweite Abt., München: Franz, 465516.
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–– (1890) Tonpsychologie, vol. II. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (1885) “Musikpsychologie in England”, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, vol. I, 261-349. –– (1883) Tonpsychologie, vol. I. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (1873) Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. Stumpf, C. & E. M. von Hornbostel, (eds) (1922-1923): Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (4 vol.). München: Drei Masken; reprint by Olms: Hildesheim, 1975. Allesch, Ch. (2015) “Ästhetik als praktische Philosophie: Zur impliziten Ästhetik von Carl Stumpf”, 295-315. –– (2003) “Zur Rezeption von Stumpfs Tonpsychologie”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 225236. –– (2000/2001) “Stumpfs Ästhetik”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 199-214. Ash, M. (2000-2001) “Carl Stumpf und seine Schüler”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 130-142. –– (1998) Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ballod, M. (2003) “Über die Anfänge der empirischen Sprachpsychologie”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds), Musik und Sprache, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 237-249. Baranzke, H. (2001), “Nur kluge Hänschen kommen in den Himmel. Der tierpsychologische Streit um ein rechnendes Pferd zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts”, in F. Niewöhner & J.-L. Seban (eds), Die Seele der Tiere, Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 333–379. Bartók, B. (1922-1923) Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramures, Sammelbände für Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, vol. IV, Munich: Drei Masken. Baumgartner, W. (2015) “The young Carl Stumpf. His spiritual, intellectual, and professional development”, 61-74. –– (ed.) (2000-2001) Brentano Studien, Special issue on Carl Stumpf, vol. 9. –– (1997) “Carl Stumpf und Oswald Külpe - ein Vergleich”, Brentano Studien, vol. 7, 53-80. Baumgartner, W. & Baumgartner, E. (2002) “Der junge Carl Stumpf”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 23-50. Besoli, S. & R. Martinelli (eds) (2001) “Carl Stumpf e la fenomenologia dell’esperienza immediata”, Special issue on Carl Stumpf, Discipline Filosofiche, vol. 11, no 2. Blaukopf, K. (2003) “Spekulative Ästhetik oder empirische Forschung? Spuren von Carl Stumpfs Denkweise in der Vorgeschichte des Wiener Kreises”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 109-116. –– (1995) Pioniere empiristischer Musikforschung, Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. Bonacchi, S. (2015) “Love, Emotions and Passion in Musil’s Novellas “Unions” in the light of Stumpf’s Theory of Feelings”, 407-424. Bonacchi, S. and Boudewijnse, G.-H. (eds) (2011) Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation, Wien: Krammer.
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Bonacchi , S. & G. Boudewijnse (eds) Gestalt Theory, Special issue on Carl Stumpf, vol. 32, no. 2 (2009). Boring, E. (1929) “The Psychology of Controversy”, Psychological Review, vol. XXXVI, 97-121. –– (1942) Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Bouveresse, J. (2004) Langage, perception et réalité, vol. II, Physique, phénoménologie et grammaire. Paris: Jacqueline Chambon. Brentano, F. (2008) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, T. Binder & A. Chrudzimski (eds), Franz Brentano, Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, vol. I, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. –– (1929) Vom Dasein Gottes, Aus seinem Nachlasse herausgegeben, eingeleitet und mit erläuternden Anmerkungen und Register versehen von Alfred Kastil, Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag. –– (1869) “Auguste Comte und die positive Philosophie”, Chilianeum. Blätter für katholische Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben, vol. II, 15-37. Centi, B. (2011) “Stumpf and Lotze on Space, Reality, Relation”, in S. Bonacchi & G. Boudewijnse (eds), Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation, Wien: Krammer Verlag, 69-81. Cesalli, L. (2015) “Stumpf’s (Early) Insights and Marty’s Way to His (Later) Sprachphilosophie”, 361-385. Chrudzimski, A. (2015) “Carl Stumpf über Sachverhalte”, 173-201. Deutsch, W., G. Sommer & A. Willam (2003) “Kann Singen Sprechen und Sprechen Singen sein?”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 165-183. Dummett, M. (1991) Frege and other Philosophers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ewen, W. (2009) ”Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik von Carl Stumpf”, Gestalt Theory, vol. 31, no. 2, p. 129-141. –– (2008) Carl Stumpf und Gottlob Frege, Würzburg: Königshausen &. Neumann. Fisette, D. (2015a) “A Phenomenology without Phenomena? Carl Stumpf’s Critical Remarks on Husserl’s Phenomenology”, 323-355. –– (2015b) “Introduction to Archivalia”, 425-434. –– (2015c) “Introduction to Stumpf’s Lecture on metaphysics”, 435-444. –– (2015d) “Introduction to Stumpf’s correspondence with Brentano”, 475-491. –– (2015e) “Carl Stumpf”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/stumpf. –– (2014a) “Phénomènes sensibles et fonctions psychiques: Karl Bühler et le programme de Stumpf”, in J. Friedrich et L. Cesalli (eds), Between Mind and Language – Anton Marty and Karl Bühler, Basel: Schwabe Philosophica, 103140. –– (2014b) “Franz Brentano et le positivisme d’Auguste Comte”, Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, vol. 35, no. 1, 85-128. –– (2013) “Mixed feelings. Carl Stumpf’s Criticism of James and Brentano on Emotions”, in D. Fisette and G. Fréchette (eds) Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013, 281-305. –– (2012) “Segno, spazio, percezione. La teoria dei segni locali”, Paradigmi, 2, 4760.
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–– (2009a) “Love and Hate: Brentano and Stumpf on Emotions and Sense Feelings”, Gestalt Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, 115-127. –– (2009b) “Stumpf and Husserl on Phenomenology and descriptive Psychology”, Gestalt Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, 175-190. –– (2006) “La philosophie de Carl Stumpf, ses origines et sa postérité”, in Carl Stumpf, Renaissance de la philosophie, Paris: Vrin, 7-112. Fisette, D. & G. Fréchette (eds) (2013) Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam: Rodopi. –– (2007) “Le legs de Brentano”, in Fisette, D. & G. Fréchette (eds) À l’école de Brentano, Paris: Vrin. Fréchette, G. (2015) “Stumpf on Abstraction”, 263-293. –– (2013) “Kant, Brentano and Stumpf on psychology and anti-psychologism”, in S. Bacin et al. (eds) Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Berlin : De Gruyter, 739-748. –– (2010) “Actualité de Carl Stumpf”, Dialogue, vol. 49, 267-285. Frege, G. (1976) Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Hamburg: Meiner. –– (1893) Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, begriffsschriftlich abgeleitet, vol. I, Jena: H. Pohle. –– (1884) Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl, Breslau: Koebner. Gundlach, H. (2006) “Carl Stumpf, Oskar Pfungst, der Kluge Hans und eine geglückte Vernebelungsaktion”, Psychologische Rundschau, vol. 57, no. 2, 96-105. Günther, H. (2003) “Notation, Hören und Lesen von Sprache und Musik”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 151-163. Haller, R. (2003) “Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach und Robert Musil”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 95-108. Helmholtz, H. von (1910) Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 3rd ed., 3 vol., Hamburg: L. Voss. Hornbostel, M. von, (1933) “Carl Stumpf und die vergleichende Musikwissenschaft”, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, vol. 1, no. 1, 25-28. Husserl, E. (2004) Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893-1912), Husserliana, vol. XXXVIII, Berlin: Springer. –– (1975) Logische Untersuchungen: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Husserliana XVIII, Berlin: Springer, 1975; transl. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, vol. I, second ed., London: Routledge, 1982. –– (1984) Logische Untersuchungen: Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkenntnis, Husserliana, XIX/1 and XIX/2, Berlin: Springer, 1984; transl. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 & 2, second ed., London: Routledge, 1982. Ierna, C. (2015) “Carl Stumpf’s Philosophy of Mathematics”, 151-172. –– (2009) “Husserl et Stumpf sur la Gestalt et la fusion”, D. Fisette (ed.) Philosophiques, Special issue on Edmund Husserl, vol. 36, no. 2, 489-510. Jacquette, D., (2000-2001) “Carl Stumpf on the Ontology of Relations”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 229-250. Kaiser-El-Safti, M. & M. Ebeling (eds) (2011) Die Sinne und die Erkenntnis, Schriftreihe der Carl Stumpf Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
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Kaiser-El-Safti, M. & M. Ballod (eds) (2003) Musik und Sprache. Zur Phänomenologie von Carl Stumpf, Zur Phänomenologie von Carl Stumpf, Wuሷrzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kaiser-El-Safti, M. (2011) “Die Aktualitat von Carl Stumpf”, in Kaiser-El-Safti, M. & M. Ebeling (eds) (2011), 9-54. –– (2010) “Carl Stumpf, Edmund Husserl und Johann Friedrich Herbart. Eine neue Sicht auf die phänomenologische Bewegung”, in Hermann Ebbinghaus und Carl Stumpf – Hallesche Perspektiven auf die Geschichte der Psychologie, Lengerich. –– (1994) “Carl Stumpfs Lehre vom Ganzen und den Teilen”, Axiomathes, vol. 5, no. 1, 86-122. Kamlah, A. (1987) “The Decline of Laplacian Theory of Probability in the Interpretations by Stumpf, von Kries, and Meinong”, in L. J. Daston, M. Heidelberger, L. Krüger (eds) The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1, Ideas in History, Cambridge: Bradford Books, 91-116. Kamleiter, P. (2000/2001) “Carl Stumpfs Analysen des Hörempfindens und die Implikationen der „Würzburger“ für die Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie”, Brentano Studien, vol. IX, 167-198. Köhler, W. (1925) The Mentality of Apes, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. –– (1913) “Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuchungen”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, vol. 66L, 51-80. Lampert, V. (2008) “Bartók and the Berlin School of Ethnomusicology”, Studia Musicologica, vol. 49, no. 3-4, 383–405. Langfeld, H. S. (1937) “Carl Stumpf: 1848-1936”, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 50, 316-320. Lewin, K. (1937) “Carl Stumpf”, Psychological Review, vol. 44, 189-194. Lotze, H. (1852) Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele, Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchandlung. –– (1912) Logik. Drei Bücher vom Denken, vom Untersuchen und vom Erkennen, second ed., G. G. Misch (ed.), Leipzig: Meiner. Martinelli, R. (2015) “Stumpf on Categories”, 203-227. –– (2013) “Brentano and Stumpf on Tonal Fusion”, in D. Fisette and G. Fréchette (eds) Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 339-357. –– (2011) “Intentionality and God’s mind: Stumpf on Spinoza”, in Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer, 51 - 67. –– (2003) “Descriptive Empiricism: Stumpf on Sensation and Presentation”, Brentano Studien, vol. 10, 81-100. Milkov, N. (2015) “Carl Stumpf’s Debt to Hermann Lotze”, 101-122. Motte-Haber, H. (2011) “Die Rezeption von Carl Stumpf in der Musikpsychologie”, Schriftenreihe der Carl Stumpf Gesellschaft, 1, Frankfurt/M. et al. Müller, M. (2003) “Carl Stumpf auf dem Wege zur vergleichenden Musikpsychologie”, M. El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds.), op. cit., Würzburg: Königshausen, 211223. Mulligan, K. (1995) “Musils Analyse des Gefühls” in Hommage à Musil, Berlin: P. Lang, 87-110. Muሷnch, D. (2002) “Die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung Carl Stumpfs”, Brentano Studien, vol. 10, 11 – 66 .
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Musil, R. (1908) Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs, Berlin: C. Arnold. Oesterreich, T. K. (1910) Die Phänomenologie des Ich in ihren Grundproblemen, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. Pfungst, O. (1907) Das Pferd der Herrn von Osten. Der Kluge Hans, Leipzig: Barth. Poggi, S. (2014) “Stumpf und die Monadologie der Herbartianer”, 123-143. Pompino-Marschall, B. (2003) “Carl Stumpf und die Phonetik”, in M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, 131-150. Pradelle, D. (2015) “Autonomy of the sensible and de-subjectification of the a priori by Stumpf”, 229-262. Prinz, W. (2006) “Messung kontra Augenschein: Oskar Pfungst untersucht den Klugen Hans”, Psychologische Rundschau, vol. 57, no. 2, 106-111. Reinecke, H.-P. (2003) Hermann von Helmholtz, Carl Stumpf und die Folgen. Von der musikalischen Akustik zur Tonpsychologie. Über ein Kapitel Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, in, M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, 185-199. Rollinger, R. (2015) “Practical Epistemology: Stumpf's Halle Logic (1887)”, 75-100. –– (2008a) Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, and Meinong on Mind and Object, Frankfurt: Ontos. –– (2008b) “The concept of causality in Stumpf’s epistemology”, Ibid., 263-300. –– (2008c) “Stumpf on phenomena and phenomenology”, Ibid., 139-156. –– (1999) Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Sapir, E. (1912) “Review of Carl Stumpf (Die Anfänge der Musik)”, Current Anthropological Literature, vol. I, 275-282. Schlick, M. (1925) Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre second ed., Berlin : Springer. –– (1911) “Rezension von: Carl Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge ; Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie; Vom ethischen Skeptizismus”, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie, vol. 35, 443-444. Schönpflug, W. (2006) “Der Kluge Hans – eine Ikone der Psychologie? Kommentar zu Gundlach (2006) und Prinz (2006)”, Psychologische Rundschau, vol. 57, no. 2, 187-188. Schuhmann, K. (2005) Selected papers on phenomenology, C. Leijenhorst and P. Steenbakkers (eds), Berlin, Springer, 2005. –– (2000-2001) “Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff in seiner Hallenser Zeit”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 63–88. –– (1997) “Elements of the logic of Carl Stumpf”, Axiomates, vol. 8, no. 1, 105-123. –– (1996) “Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)”, in Albertazzi. L. et al. (eds) The School of Franz Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 109-129. Schwörer-Kohl, G. (2011) “Die Musikethnologie Carl Stumpfs am Beispiel der siamesischen Musik”, Schriftenreihe der Carl Stumpf Gesellschaft, 1, Frankfurt/M. et al. Simon, A. (ed.) (2000) Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Berlin: VWB. Smith, B, & Mulligan, K. (1982) “Pieces of a Theory”, in Smith, B. (ed.) Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, München: Philosophia Verlag, 15-109. Smith, B. (1989) “Logic and the Sachverhalt”, The Monist, vol. 72, no. 1, 52-69. Spiegelberg, H. (1982) The Phenomenological Movement, 3rd ed., The Hague: Nijhoff. Sprung, H. (2006) Carl Stumpf - Eine Biografie, München: Profil Verlag.
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Sprung, L. & H. (2003) “Die Wiederentdeckung Carl Stumpfs und seine Einbettung in die Geschichte der Neueren Psychologie”, M. Kaiser-El-Safti & M. Ballod (eds) Musik und Sprache, 53-71. Sprung, H. (ed.) (1997) Carl Stumpf — Schriften zur Psychologie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Toccafondi, F. (2015) “On Stumpf and Schlick”, 387-405. –– (2009) “Stumpf and Gestalt Psychology: Relations and Differences”, Gestalt theory, vol. 31, no. 2, 191-211. Valentine, E. (2000) “Carl Stumpf and English Music Psychology”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, p. 251-265. Windelband, W. (1877) “Ueber die verschiedenen Phasen der Kantischen Lehre vom Ding-an-sich”, in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, vol. I, 224ff.. Wolfradt, U. & M. Kaiser-El-Safti, H.-P. Brauns, (eds) (2010), Hermann Ebbinghaus und Carl Stumpf – Hallesche Perspektiven auf die Geschichte der Psychologie, Lengerich: Pabst science publisher. Wolfradt, U. (2011) “Carl Stumpf – Wilhelm Wundt Unterschiedliche Wege zur psychologischen Erkenntnis”, Schriftenreihe der Carl Stumpf Gesellschaft, 1, Frankfurt/M. et al. Woodward, W. R. (1978) “From Association to Gestalt: The Fate of Hermann Lotze’s Theory of Spatial Perception, 1846-1920”, Isis, vol. 69, no. 4, 572-582.
PART I. HISTORICAL SOURCES INTRODUCTION (RICCARDO MARTINELLI)
In his Autobiography Stumpf offers an illuminating account of his intellectual and professional development. (Stumpf 1924) A pupil and a lifelong friend of Franz Brentano, Stumpf was also influenced by Hermann Lotze; significantly, his education also included scientific training with the physicist Wilhelm Weber and with the mathematician Felix Klein. Besides this, Stumpf’s musical education should not be underestimated, along with his permanent love for music – and deep scientific interest in its manifold expressions. (e. g. Stumpf, 1883, 1890, 1897, 1898, 1911a, 1911b) All of these influences variously affected Stumpf’s mentality and activities throughout his whole professional life, that was exceptionally long and successful. Having been appointed professor in Würzburg in 1873, Stumpf retired more than fifty years later; short before his death, in 1936, he was still at work on his philosophical masterpiece, Erkenntnislehre, which was published posthumously. (Stumpf 1939-1940) After Würzburg, Stumpf went to Prague, Halle and München and, in 1894, he became professor and Director of the Institute of psychology in Berlin. This change, a consequence of Wilhelm Dilthey’s decision (Sprung 2006, 124 ff.), draws a dividing line within Stumpf’s career. By 1894, he had attained reputation as an autonomous philosopher and psychologist – not as a more or less orthodox Brentanian. Rather, due to his respectable scientific training and to his considerable engagement in experimental activities, Stumpf eventually and consciously figured as an “outsider” (Stumpf 1924, 397) within the philosophical community of his time. In 1907, in his inaugural address, Stumpf doesn’t even mention Brentano among the promoters of the ongoing “renaissance of philosophy”, which had roots in an increasing commitment to natural sciences. (Stumpf 1907a) However, this did not prevent Stumpf from acknowledging his debt to Brentano on other occasions, without any contradiction. (e. g. Stumpf 1919) Simply, Brentano could not fit into
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the ideal portrait of a philosopher-natural scientist (Naturwissenschaftler) celebrated by Stumpf, who rather made reference to the physician Lotze and to the physicist Fechner as predecessors. (Stumpf 1907a, 165) As a consequence of his institutional duties, Stumpf’s activities in Berlin covered a rather wide range of scientific disciplines like acoustic physics (Stumpf 1899), child psychology (Stumpf 1900), animal psychology (Stumpf 1907b), linguistics and phonetics (Stumpf 1926), ethnomusicology (Stumpf 1886, 1901, 1911a), etc. However, his personal involvement in psychological experimentation during the Berlin years is lighter than in the 1880s, when he was concerned with the problem of tonal fusion. (Stumpf 1890) Notwithstanding these manifold activities, Stumpf never abandoned philosophy, as witnessed by his lessons, many essays and the monumental, two-volume Erkenntnislehre. Far from exhausting his biography, these brief introductory hints are meant to show why the role of Carl Stumpf frequently puzzles historians of science and (even more deeply) historians of philosophy. Unsurprisingly, there is disagreement about his sources of inspiration and about the main influences over his thought. On the one hand, Stumpf constantly and frankly recognizes his debt to Brentano; on the other hand, many of Stumpf’s ideas evidently diverge from Brentano's doctrine, so that supplementary sources and influences must be searched for. As a matter of fact, Stumpf was able to keep many heterogeneous influences together and yet to develop, without any eclecticism, an original philosophical approach of his own. Needless to say, this is usually the hallmark of an outstanding philosopher. Rather than arguing with contrasting interpretations, however, scholars should eventually cope with Stumpf’s high complexity as a scientist and as a philosopher – complexity that has frustrated any attempt to force his thought into categories of interpretation. The essays of this section are likely to be very helpful in this critical path. Wilhelm Baumgartner’s paper The young Carl Stumpf: his spiritual, intellectual, and professional development provides a detailed account of Stumpf’s early years. (Baumgartner 2015) On the basis of a number of unpublished or hardly accessible evidences, Baumgartner illustrates the role of Brentano and Lotze in mentoring Stumpf throughout his early career as a student in Würzburg and Göttingen. The essay also considers his change of attitude towards the Catholic Church and the circumstances experienced during his graduation, his teaching activity
Part I. Historical Sources: Introduction
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as a Privatdozent and, later on, his professorship in Würzburg as a successor of Brentano. Robin Rollinger’s essay Practical Epistemology: Stumpf’s Halle Logic (1887) offers an instructive account of Edmund Husserl’s notes on the lectures in logic held by Stumpf at Halle in 1887. (Rollinger 2015) Although Stumpf’s logic, defined “practical epistemology” (praktische Erkenntnislehre), generally follows Brentano’s and Trendelenburg’s approach, it also shows an original re-elaboration. For Stumpf, logic is an artificial doctrine or technique (Kunstlehre), that teaches how to judge correctly. Accordingly, in his lectures Stumpf touches upon judgements and presentations, and deepens many aspects of their interconnection. Most remarkably, Stumpf advocates the possibility of individual abstracta, i.e. the entities that have been recently discussed under the heading of tropes. As Rollinger notes, it is difficult to find anything of that kind in Brentano’s writings; and this explains why Husserl quotes Stumpf rather than Brentano, when introducing tropes (in Husserl’s terminology “moments”) into his mereology. In the following essay, Nikolay Milkov analyzes in depth Stumpf’s debt to Lotze. (Milkov 2015) As Milkov notes, the diffusion of a NeoBrentianian attitude during the last twenty years was instrumental to the effort to rescue Stumpf from oblivion. However, Neo-Brentanians tend to support a one-sided interpretation of Stumpf’s philosophy, so that they typically end up underestimating “his importance and idiosyncrasy as a philosopher”. Milkov’s analysis of Lotze’s influence over Stumpf aims at asserting Stumpf’s autonomy. Considering the philosophical education of Stumpf’s generation, the importance of Lotze’s and other thinkers’ ideas is confirmed, thus challenging the idea of Brentano as a “lonely genius” who reintroduced Aristotelianism and Scholastic intentionality into the philosophical debate. Rather, Milkov argues, Lotze preceded him under various aspects. Though Stumpf agrees with Brentano’s criticism of Lotze’s “local signs”, many crucial aspects of Stumpf’s thought recall Lotze, more than Brentano. One striking example, is that Stumpf had a nondogmatic idea of philosophy and a related unwillingness to establish a “school”. In his essay Stumpf und die Monadologie der Herbartianer, Stefano Poggi tackles the issue of Herbart’s heritage. (Poggi 2015) In an indirect way, Herbart influenced Stumpf considerably. Poggi shows
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that Herbart’s ideas acted as unavoidable touchstones for many outstanding psychologists of his time. Besides the Herbartians, such as C.S. Cornelius and M.W. Drobisch, also non-aligned thinkers like Lotze, Brentano, Fechner, Lange and Wundt should be mentioned in this context. No surprise, then, that Stumpf critically discusses Herbart’s psychology, e.g. when he introduces his concept of fusion (Verschmelzung) and his metaphysical theses of the soul as a monad. References Baumgartner W., (2015) “The young Carl Stumpf. His spiritual, intellectual, and professional development”, 61-74. Milkov, N. (2015) “Carl Stumpf’s Debt to Hermann Lotze”, 101-122. Kraus, Oskar (1919) Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, München: Beck. Poggi, S. (2014) “Stumpf und die Monadologie der Herbartianer”, 123-143. Rollinger, R. (2015) “Practical Epistemology: Stumpf’s Halle Logic (1887)”, 75-100. Sprung, Helga (2006): Carl Stumpf. Eine Biographie. Von der Philosophie zur experimentellen Psychologie, München-Wien: Profil. Stumpf, Carl (1883): Tonpsychologie, vol. I. Leipzig: Hirzel; repr. Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1886): “Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer”, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2, 405-426. –– (1890): Tonpsychologie, vol. II Leipzig: Hirzel; repr. Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1896): “Eröffnungsrede”, Dritter International Congress für Psychologie in München vom 4-7 August 1896, München: Lehmann, 3-16; published (with modifications) under the title: “Leib und Seele”, in Stumpf 1919, 151-182. Quoted from Stumpf 1910. –– (1897): “Geschichte des Consonanzbegriffs. Erster Teil. Die Definition der Consonanz in Altertum”, Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,1. Classe 21, 1. Abteilung, München, 1-78. –– (1898): “Konsonanz und Dissonanz”, Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 1, 1-108. –– (1899): “Über die Bestimmung hoher Schwingungszahlen durch Differenztöne”. Annalen der Physik und Chemie, N.F. 68, 105-116. –– (1900): “Zur Methodik der Kinderpsychologie”, Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie und Pathologie 3 (1), 1-21; also in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 161-196. –– (1901): “Tonsystemen und Musik der Siamesen”, Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, 3, 69-138. –– (1907a): Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie, Rede zum Eintritt des Rektorates der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 15 Oktober 1907, Berlin: Francke; also in C. Stumpf 1910, 161-196.
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–– (1907b): “Der Rechenunterricht des Herrn v. Osten”, in O. Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten. Der Kluge Hans, Leipzig: Barth, 175-180.
–– (1910): Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth. –– (1911a): Die Anfänge der Musik, Leipzig: Barth. English tr. by D. Trippett, The Origins of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 31-185.
–– (1911b): “Konsonanz und Konkordanz. Nebst Bemerkungen über Wohlklang und Wohlgefälligkeit musikalischer Zusammenklänge”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 58, 321-355; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 6, 151-165. –– (1919): “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in O. Kraus (ed.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Oskar Beck, 87-149. –– (1924): “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Sebstdarstellung, V, Leipzig:Meiner, 1-57. –– (1926): Die Sprachlaute; experimentell-phonetische Untersuchungen (nebst einem Anhang über Instrumentalklänge), Berlin: Springer. –– (1939-1940): Erkenntnislehre, 2 vols., Leipzig: Barth.
THE YOUNG CARL STUMPF. HIS SPIRITUAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WILHELM BAUMGARTNER (UNIVERSITY OF WÜRZBURG)
Abstract. The young Carl Stumpf first came in contact with the philosophy of Franz Brentano on the occasion of Brentano’s habilitation. Stumpf’s interest in the philosophy of Brentano was sparked so much so that he decided to study with him. Brentano in turn recommended Stumpf to go to study under Hermann Lotze at the Göttingen University. After his doctoral exam, Stumpf returned to Würzburg to continue his studies with Brentano, and to study theology to become a catholic priest like his mentor. Yet, again under the influence of Brentano, his Christian worldview was shaken considerably. So he went back to Göttingen to undertake his habilitation under the supervision of Lotze. Stumpf was appointed Privatdozent, and in 1873, he was appointed full professor of Philosophy at the University of Würzburg.
1 The student Carl Stumpf in Würzburg, in Göttingen, and again in Würzburg. The Privatdozent in Göttingen In his autobiography, Stumpf reports: [A]t the age of seventeen, I entered university. […] In Würzburg I followed the proper Bavarian custom of attending lectures on general subjects. […] During the second semester I decided to study jurisprudence […] But towards the end of this semester came the great change brought about by the addition of Franz Brentano to the faculty. […] His personality, his manner of thinking and teaching […] produced […] a complete change […] in me. Everything else had vanished before the great problems of philosophical and religious regeneration. Keen thinking had scarcely been in my line so far, and was rather irksome. It was only through Brentano’s iron discipline that the craving for logical clearness and consistency became second nature. Besides Brentano's lectures, I also took courses in natural science, as he considered both the substance and the methods of science important for philosophy. His dissertation, wherein he presented the thesis that the
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Wilhelm Baumgartner true philosophical method is none other than that of natural science, was and has ever remained a lodestar to me. In order to attain some practical knowledge along this line, I worked in the chemical laborato1 ry [...]. (Stumpf 1930, 391 f)
When in the fall of 1867, Stumpf, at Brentano’s advice, continued his studies with Lotze at the University of Göttingen, a lifelong mutual correspondence began (cf. Sprung 2006). Stumpf now lived with Lujo Brentano, the brother of Franz Brentano, in Göttingen Burgstraße 46, and missed the latter’s company. He asked for further spiritual and scientific advice “at a distance”. As a sign of the close friendship between the two, Stumpf expressed the hope that Brentano had “not yet ‘dismissed’ (forgive the expression)” him and that he “holds the common bond” by which he was tied up with him. [Stumpf to Brentano, October 30, 1867, fragm.] On the other hand, Stumpf was warmly welcomed in Lotze’s home and family. Lotze once even calls him “dear angel” (letter of September 30, 1872; Pester 2003, 574), and Stumpf describes Lotze as a “fatherly friend”. “His mental attitude had a greater influence on me than Brentano had really wished, although the fundamental epistemological lines that I followed were always those that Brentano had impressed upon my mind”. (Stumpf 1930, 392) In reply to Stumpf’s above mentioned letter, Brentano thanks his “dear friend” Stumpf for his letter and invokes God’s assistance upon him. He returns to Stumpf’s (which have not been preserved) remarks on Lotze: I am not surprised about what you are telling me about Lotze. […] I am far from approving all of Lotze`s views. He is especially by far much too influenced by Kant’s criticism. When I had recommended him more than others, I did so because […] Lotze, in spite of all of what he is lacking, is excellent in many respects, Most notably in his method of philosophizing, in his regard for experience and observation, in the way he makes use of the results of natural science, and in the caution and scrupulousness of his assertions, he differs from most scientists of our time, and I do not know anyone from whom you could learn more in this respect. You should not wonder about his ignorance of the Middle Ages and his lack of esteem for it. It seems to me that he also has very limited knowledge of Ancient philosophy. There are many signs of this in his writings. […] As far as the topic of 1
For further information see Fisette 2009, Sprung 2006, Baumgartner 2002.
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your dissertation is concerned you should not be worried by the fact that Lotze is not familiar with Ancient philosophy. […] Of course, you should make use of Lotze’s friendly offer. If you show me first what you are going to present to him, I will readily go through it. […] Just concentrate on your questions and carefully execute them. (Brentano to Stumpf, November 3, 1867)
After reading Lotze’s Microcosm, Stumpf had some metaphysical and psychological questions, especially concerning space perception and the theory of “local signs”. […] There is so much I carry in my unfinished thoughts as I miss the strong help of your maieutic. [...] I beg your pardon if I ask unskilful questions as I am not yet familiar with psychological problems. […] You are familiar with his [scil. Lotze’s] theory of local signs. Yet, it seems that a perception of this sort does not obtain. […] Lotze explicitly asserts that he does not consider the essence of spatiality itself but only how we attain an indivisible and unextended consciousness of it. […] He holds that for an extended soul, too, the perception of extension without local signs is impossible. For he seems to hold that a unity of an extended being is unthinkable, and the extension implemented into things would be but a sum of accidents. Yet it seems that the perception of extension is as simple as color perception and that it can be perceived by a unitary yet extended soul. […] What worries me is: 1) whether there is a koine aisthesis in every sensual receptive perception, or whether the concept of extension is formed by psychological experience and then transferred into the external world; 2) whether the effect produced by the sensation of extension, and similarly of color and time, is changeable and would consist merely in a sensation of moving ‘phenomena’; 3) how could there be concepts in an extended soul? - Referring to the capacities of the soul, Lotze seems not to establish a distinction between sensation and understanding as strongly as Aristotle did. Furthermore, in analogy to space perception, he seems to assume that in addition to a concept there is a common image, say of a horse. – Lotze does not explain why he accepts such a special sort of the capacity of feeling, and its relation to the will. – His explanation of God’s effectiveness from afar through his almightiness. – What to think about Lotze’s Weltbeseelung? Is it a possible assumption or but a zoontic presentation? I am going to finish my dissertation within the 3 week vacation of Christmas and will then hand it over to you for inspection. In Trendelenburg’s ‘Philebi consilio’ I have found a relevant discussion which is unclear to me. You perhaps know his opinion better than I
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Wilhelm Baumgartner do. God is said to look at the idea of the good, his thoughts. But how can he be good if he is not this thought itself; by their participation? Isn’t Trendelenburg forced at once to transfer the ideas and the materia thereof into God? […] My spiritual mentor, I ask you to pray for me. I, too, will express my wishes for your well-being this way and then submit everything to God’s benevolence. […] Would you please inform me soon about how you are and what you are going to carry out this year, and if you have the time and the inclination, please provide some philosophical nutrition for your very much obliged Carl Stumpf. (Göttingen, December 7, 1867)
Brentano answers (December 31, 1867) to Stumpf’s “many questions […], all of which are not asked in the same clarity”, especially the psychological ones. First he warns Stumpf that he should not mix up the koine aesthesis, which is that inner sense by which we perceive our own sensitive functions, with the perception of the koina aistheta to which next to movement, number etc. extension belongs as well. We perceive these by the same outer senses by which we perceive the so-called idia aistheta like color, warmth etc. For further information you should refer to my Psychology of Aristotle. (Brentano 1867)
As far as the reception of extension is concerned, Brentano asks Stumpf not to mix up (like Lotze and other Herbart scholars) two things: the sensual reception of something extended and the perception of the largeness of something extended. Brentano dissolves the issue whether or not there are concepts inherent in an extended substance by referring to the fact that “concepts only take place in the mental, not extended part of the soul”, and again hints at his Psychology. As to the question of feeling and will, Brentano writes that it is not easy to determine whether they are “acts of different capacities”. But from the so-called activity of will and passion of feelings Stumpf should not conclude that there is a difference; for the will is not an active, but a passive faculty. In reply to Stumpf’s metaphysical doubts, Brentano rejects the “old obsolete hypothesis” of the remote yet immediate effect that bodies produce towards one another through God’s almightiness. This hypothesis destroys what it should make clear, and abolishes the integral
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coherence of the world. Brentano proposes a coherence thesis by maintaining that the mediator function is inherent to the bodies themselves in relation to one another. Brentano strictly rejects the hypothesis of the animation of the world [Weltbeseelung] as a “superstition and fairy tale”. He adds: A word about your dissertation. Trendelenburg’s view about the relation of the Platonic God and the ideas is wrong. I believe that your reading of the Philebus is correct. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, he told us: […] The idea of the good is the image of God, not God. […] Your remarks against this interpretation are entirely correct. Just carry on with your work quickly.
Stumpf did so, and was reading assiduously. He offers some insights into his industrious studies: Besides Lotze’s lectures, I also attended those of the physiologist, Wilhelm Weber. The latter, besides Brentano and Lotze, developed and formed my manner of scientific thinking. The modest old man […] had developed by the most intense mental effort a system of physics, which, better than any logical lecture, revealed to the student the methodology of inductive thinking. […] Ever since, physics has seemed to me the ideal inductive science. Friedrich Kohlrausch’s research course introduced me to this method of investigation. Today such preparation, at least for the psychologist, is standard of course; but at that time a philosopher in the chemical and physical laboratory courses was a white raven − a rara avis. (Stumpf 1930, 392 f)
2 Stumpf’s graduation: the dissertation, the oral exam, the defense of theses As to the dissertation thesis on The Idea of the Good in Plato (Stumpf 1869), Stumpf writes: I wrote it with a special view regarding its logical form, and this may have been why Lotze, who at first maintained a skeptical attitude towards my subject and advised against it, in the end, changed his mind. The method, which I had derived from Brentano, and indirectly from Aristotle, namely, to prepare for the final argument by a complete disjunction of possible opinions and a refutation of all but one, is found in many of my later writings. (Stumpf 1930, 393)
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The method mentioned here by Stumpf is Brentano’s “logic of proof” of theses and (presumed) knowledge which Brentano has applied not only in his Logic [Brentano 1956], but throughout in his works, and in his letters too. (It is no wonder that his refutations are often harsh, which has had the effect of earning him some difficulties in his life, in his scientific career, and in his private life. Stumpf was a consequent thinker, too, but much more flexible, it seems.) As to the dissertation, Brentano had offered “to go through it before you submit it to him [Lotze]”. He went on: don’t waste time in collecting more literature. You may add some later. Don’t deviate, concentrate on your questions. If you apply them carefully, your work will be comprehensive enough”. (Brentano to Stumpf, November 3, 1867)
In order not to disrupt the course of lectures, Stumpf was going to finish his work “during the Christmas vacation”, and then handed it over to Brentano “for inspection”. (Stumpf to Brentano, December 7, 1867) Over Christmas, Stumpf had written “a good deal” of his dissertation and delivered the central part “containing the arguments” to Lotze, on New Year’s Day. “Today […] he told me that he has no further reservations as far as the thesis is concerned, and that it will make a very good comprehensive dissertation”. (Stumpf to Brentano, January 22, 1868) Stumpf soon finished it. In Lotze’s opinion “this very successful first work of an incoming master of science certainly will honour our faculty”. (Pester 2003, 373 f; Sprung 2006, 67) On August 2, 1868 Stumpf writes to Brentano that his work “has been evaluated by Lotze as very good. […] I share with you this new so that you may be pleased with your scholar”. For his oral examination, Stumpf states: “Brentano’s oral instruction and writings had naturally given me a pretty thorough grounding in Aristotle’s teachings.” (Stumpf 1930, 393) The exam went very well, with some assistance from above, as it seems: “If you tell me the date, I intend to dedicate the celebration of mass to God so that he may help you and bless all of your future steps. If God is with us, who could be against us?” (Brentano, July 27, 1868). Stumpf confirms on August 2, 1868:
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My honored teacher, thanks to our Savior who never leaves us, I gladly past yesterday’s exam. Lotze immediately after told me that I have earned the best mark. […] Lotze had first asked me about the interpretation of Aristotle (Metaph. 1,6) […] ; then about the different kinds of scientific investigations (descriptive, mechanical explanation, speculative), their value etc., their applicability especially to psychology. […] With Weber I could do even better. […] I share with you this news so that you may be pleased with your scholar.
With respect to the defense of his theses in the disputation, the final act of the doctoral promotion on August 12, 1868, he reports the same day to Brentano that it “went very well, too. […] Thank God, it’s over.” 3 Carl Stumpf as a student of theology Now a doctor of philosophy, Carl Stumpf had decided to follow in Brentano’s footsteps and to become a Catholic priest. He discussed with Brentano where to pursue his theological studies. After considering some of the advantages and the disadvantages of different universities, Stumpf decided to go back to Würzburg. Brentano advised him: you should come here [to Würzburg] and stay in town for a year instead of going into the seminary immediately. Then we will have much more contact with one another so that we fill some philosophical gaps, study Saint Thomas. […] for a better use of philosophy in your theological studies. But if you already came to any other decision you should not follow my opinion. (Brentano to Stumpf, July 27, 1868)
Stumpf followed Brentano’s recommendation and settled in Brunnengasse 2, Würzburg (according to the University calendars of 1868 and 1868/69). After my graduation in August 1868, I returned to Würzburg to continue my philosophical studies with Brentano and to begin at the same time my studies in theology. In the fall of 1869, I entered the ecclesiastical seminary in Würzburg where I was initiated into the liturgical ceremonies of the Church, the ascetic regulations, which I observed most conscientiously, and all the details of religious exercises. […] Within the walls of the seminary, however, even in the spring of 1870, the second, still more fundamental regeneration overtook me, and here again under Brentano's influence. The whole structure of the Catholic-Christian dogmatic theology
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Wilhelm Baumgartner and Weltanschauung crumbled to dust before my eyes. In a terrible agony of the soul I had to give up my chosen life work, my ideal. In July, I took off the black robe. I had not been ordained as of yet, so there were no serious complications. But I had to find my way back to the world, and I was to feel for a long time to come many favorable as well as unfavorable after-effects of this year. (Stumpf 1930, 393 f)
4 The Privatdozent in Göttingen In the context of the declaration of papal infallibility to which he was an ardent opponent (cf. Brentano 1955; cf. Freudenberger 1969, 146 n; 407-437), Brentano analyzed “the situation” and the possible consequences for Stumpf: On the one hand there were no longer any good reason to become a priest and to stay in a church reigned by “blind leaders” and “inner tyranny”. On the other hand, Brentano had experienced that there is nearly no hope for an academic career for a priest (Brentano to Stumpf, March 15, 1870). Stumpf, on “Saint Joseph’s Day, 1870”, resists Brentano’s suggestions because an “abyss” had opened before him, and his “entire soul” revolted against this. His attitude changed. Soon, however, I decided to go to Göttingen to obtain an instructorship in philosophy. Upon my entrance into the seminary, Lotze had written me a letter: “[…] Your decision to become a priest I can accept only with deep respect for your conscientious conviction, and, although it destroys a cherished hope of mine, still I realize the full extent of the blessing that your strong spirit may carry with it in your calling; I realize this all too well and know better than to consider opposing your decision in any way. Nevertheless, forgive me, I who loves you so dearly, one urgent, rather than serious, request: Do not now in your early youth, which you are still enjoying, take such a decisive step, an irrevocable one, too rashly! Everything else I leave to your good judgment, your consideration; but this one thing I beg of you! […] There is just one point that is troublesome, which I would like to mention here: Life is long, and yours, I hope, will be measured for you as long as for the most favored. Is it, then, necessary to settle all your doubts concerning the most important matter at once? Perhaps you are tormenting yourself too much by meditating incessantly about things which might be put aside for the time being, not that you have declined to make any binding decision; then, after your mind has had some rest and recreation, you can return to these problems with a greater calm-
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ness, impartiality, and receptiveness. (Stumpf 1930, 394; see also Lotze’s letter in Pester 2003, 547)
Lotze was once again Stumpf’s mentor. Stumpf was welcomed into his home. There he became acquainted with the Göttingen milieu of scientists and musicians, including his later wife, Hermine Biedermann. Stumpf then worked on his Habilitationsschrift “concerning mathematical axioms”. At the end of October, 1870, he writes: I became instructor in Göttingen. I have never published this dissertation, as the non-Euclidian way of thinking to which Felix Klein had introduced me was, after all, a little beyond me. […] I began my lectures with Ancient philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, whom I studied intensively for a whole year. As my first more serious work, I attempted a critical history of the conception of substance, over which I racked my brain most awfully until I abandoned the problem, and, during Easter of 1872, I took up the psychological theme of the origin of the conception of space. In the relation between color and extension I believed, and still believe, to find a striking example or analogue of the relation which metaphysics assumes to exist among the qualities of a substance. Thus the new problem was connected to my old work. (Stumpf 1930, 395 f)
A central piece of Stumpf’s investigation on “psychological parts” (Stumpf 1873, §§ 5-6) was inspired by Brentano’s lectures on metaphysics in which he had developed a theory of “physical”, “logical”, and “metaphysical parts”. The relations of color and extension, and that of substances and qualities, are explained by Brentano in such a way that color per se includes extension, and qualities include substances. In addition, Stumpf and Brentano discussed relevant questions in their correspondence. In December 1872, Stumpf finished the book (cf. his foreword), and in January 1873, it was published. He announces to his mentor on January, 17: “Yesterday, I have received the author’s copies of my book. I hurry to send you one with the warmest thanks; for the value it contains is your property. […] You have been witnessing its origin”.
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Wilhelm Baumgartner Stumpf’s work on the conception of space (Stumpf 1873) appeared at a time rather propitious for my advancement, as there were vacancies in philosophy in five universities. In Vienna I was considered as a second choice, but at Würzburg, where Brentano and Lotze had spoken for me, an offer materialized, and in the fall of 1873 I was settled in my new position as professor. (Stumpf 1930, 396)
Under the protection of Lotze, Stumpf had good chances of being offered a professorship in Dorpat, Halle, Gießen, Vienna and Würzburg. Brentano congratulated the young Stumpf who just was announced Privatdozent. “I did not believe that even before this success you could give me such enjoyable news. […] It is a sign of Lotze’s highest benevolence that he has voted in your favor in Dorpat”. (Brentano to Stumpf, October 29, 1870) As to Stumpf’s chances in Halle, Brentano was informed by his brother Lujo, and told Stumpf on January 31, 1871 that: “As to Lotze’s plan concerning Halle, I am afraid that it will be in vain. You will meet obstacles, no less than I did. I have heard of a statute in Halle according to which only Protestants can be nominated”. As for Gießen, Brentano had informed the Würzburg rector magnificus, Edel, that Stumpf would accept to go to Gießen. This helped Stumpf in his Würzburg case. When Brentano had decided to resign from his Würzburg professorship, he thought of Stumpf as his possible successor. “Would you like to come here [to Würzburg]? Perhaps I can do something in favor of it. If you can obtain a call to Vienna it would be inopportune to neglect this opportunity. (Brentano to Stumpf, February 6, 1873) Lotze reports his activity in the Würzburg case, too: I have found some benevolent opinions of him [Stumpf] in Gießen, and in Würzburg. […] it seems that in Würzburg a certain influence […] hinders his recommendation with respect to the royal ministry. Let’s hope, in any case! I will at least do all my best to say to whoever asks me that I recommend the nomination of our young friend to any university […]. (Lotze to Brentano, February 16, 1873; see Pester 2003, 582 f.)
As for Vienna, Stumpf had a family connection to Wilhelm Scherer, then Professor of German literature at the University of Strasburg, and before that, at the University of Vienna. He also had spoken favorably
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of Stumpf’s nomination – yet in Vienna, when Stumpf had just received his nomination in Würzburg. Now Stumpf asks Scherer to plea for Brentano in Vienna. Scherer writes to his great cousin: Whether I should congratulate you for your nomination in Würzburg, I don’t know. I don’t like to give up the idea of seeing you in Vienna. […] You in no way would hinder Brentano. [...] Brentano is mistaken as far as his chances in Vienna are concerned. I never have heard the slightest about it. […] The faculty has proposed 1. Albert Lange, and 2. you. You cannot refuse unless for some reason you intend not to be nominated and Brentano […] applies […] I would like to know whether I may assure Vienna that you would accept a position in the summer of 1874. (Scherer to Stumpf, July 7, 1873)
Stumpf stayed in Würzburg. Years before there had been a first opportunity for Stumpf in Aschaffenburg, where his parents had settled. It was the vacant post of regens of the Aschaffenburg Lyceum. (The Lyceum was the remnant of the Karls Universität Aschaffenburg which in turn had been the substitute of the University of Mainz during the Napoleonic war) Brentano informs Stumpf at the time that he “could get the position because the minister has some interest in your family […]. Your salary would start with 900 fl. and then would increase up to 1500 (which is the status of a university professor)”. (Brentano to Stumpf, July 14, 1871) 5 Stumpf the successor of Brentano in Würzburg Before Stumpf could settle in his new position, a long lasting debate concerning the creation of a new (second) chair in philosophy at the University of Würzburg had taken place. In the summer of 1869, Franz Hoffmann, the only professor ordinarius, had asked the philosophical faculty for a second chair in philosophy “as for a long time in most universities in Germany there were two chairs in order to fulfill the complex duties within the philosophical disciplines”. The faculty agreed to “look for a solution for if the only professor was to become ill lessons could not take place.” (ARW, Acts of the University of Würzburg, 1596) In fact, Hoffmann quite often did not deliver lectures due to his illness. The Privatdozent Brentano compensated the loss, such that his lectures were attended by many students, ranging from more than 100 up to some 300 students (of the then 600 – 650 in the entire university, according to the inscrip-
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tion lists). Hoffmann was not amused by Brentano’s success. First, Hoffmann, a scholar of Schelling’s and Baader’s philosophy, had supervised Brentano’s habilitation and had suggested that Brentano should deliver his habilitation lecture on Schelling’s philosophy. Brentano did so, but in a rather critical attitude towards Schelling (Brentano 1866). So far, so bad. But things became even worse. First, Brentano delivered lectures not only on the history of philosophy, as Hoffmann had suggested, but also on metaphysics. Second, Hoffmann was an ardent anti-infallibilist and has assumed that Brentano was a “disguised Jesuit” serving the other party. (What an irony!) Brentano as “a medieval scholasticist” would have better fit in the theological faculty. At any rate, Hoffman believed that he could not be able to maintain a scientific and church-independent standpoint, and in addition, he considered Brentano’s recent writings as but a few unimportant ones. Hence, Hoffmann strictly voted against Brentano’s nomination for a philosophical professorship. Brentano on June 26, 1870 had handed over a petition to the philosophical faculty asking to be promoted to professor extraordinarius. (Cf. ARW 389). The faculty decided to postpone it and to deal with it in combination with the implementation of a second full professorship. Brentano then on August 6, 1870 made a direct appeal to the ministry of church and education affairs in Munich. The Würzburg faculty felt passed over; the senate of the university then had to deal with the case. On Brentano’s behalf, Stumpf had asked Lotze for support in the Brentano’s case. Lotze had indeed written to the university senate, stating his “warmest recommendations”. Nevertheless, the senate followed Hoffmann’s suggestions that Brentano “should deserve to become professor ordinaries […] in the theological faculty”; it would be improper if he alone would “reign the philosophical studies in its entirety”. (Brentano to Stumpf, February 2, 1871). The senate and the philosophical faculty then discussed the possibilty of nominating someone professor ordinarius, and Brentano extraordinarius, and the case was once again postponed. Brentano was not amused at having to endure “one intrigue after the other”. He went to the ministry in Munich where he received the assurance of a promotion “towards the end of June” 1871. (Brentano to Stumpf, June 2, 1871) Yet, nothing happened. Brentano now planned a trip to England for scientific purposes and asked the university for a leave of absence
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in the summer of 1872. “I am learning English and take courses with a lady. I take pleasure in the idea of going to England around Easter, especially to meet Mill”. (Brentano to Stumpf, November 8, 1871) Because of Brentano’s absence and Hoffmann’s illness, no philosophical lectures were given in the summer term of 1872. Now, the university was forced to carry out the former decision. The first attempt failed: the plan of the senate to call Friedrich Lange was turned down by the ministry because of his supposed “communism”. The second plan failed too: the proposal for the habilitation of Werner Luthe was turned down because Brentano had overtaken part of the opposition at the Habilitationscolloquium in such a logically convincing manner that the candidate had failed. (See Brentano to Stumpf, February 25, 1872) [T]he old embarrassment remains. And I thought of you. If you would come here for your habilitation you would be the natural heir of my college. […] What if Lotze would recommend you? […] Who knows, perhaps both of us could be nominated at the same time. […] This would be the best of all (Ibid.).
While staying in England, Brentano was finally appointed. “I was now informed that I am in fact appointed professor extraordinarius”. (Brentano to Stumpf, London, May 21, 1872) The following year, Brentano resigned, and Stumpf received the letter of appointment. I do not have to tell you how delighted I am about your recent news. There were still intrigues in Würzburg as I can see. But now – if I am not misled – complete victory over them has been gained. You will get […] a position free of future sorrow and independent of economic circumstances. And if the plan for my appointment in Vienna could be realized, the state of suppression of our entire philosophical line would come to an end, and the time would have come to demonstrate its effectiveness under unsuppressed conditions. (Brentano to Stumpf, June 23, 1873)
The time had come. Stumpf in 1873 was appointed in Würzburg, and Brentano was to be appointed in Vienna in January 1874.
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References ARW = Archiv des Rektorats der Universität Würzburg. Baumgartner, Wilhelm et al. (eds). 2013, Brentano, Franz und Carl Stumpf, GesamtKorrespondenz 1867-1917. Würzburg: Franz Brentano Forschung. www.franzbrentano.org. (First version. Complement in progress. Rights reserved). Baumgartner, Elisabeth and Wilhelm Baumgartner. 2002. „Der junge Carl Stumpf“, Brentano Studien, vol. IX, 23-50. Brentano, Franz. 1867. Die Psychologie des Aristoteles. Mainz: Kirchheim. Fisette, Denis. 2009. “Carl Stumpf” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stumpf. Freudenberger, Theobald. 1969. ‚Die Universität Würzburg und das erste vatikanissche Konzil. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchen- und Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts‘ in Quellen und Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Würzburg I (1). Oberkofler, G., (ed.).1989. Franz Brentano. Briefe an Carl Stumpf 1867-1914. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt (Part-edition). Pester, Reinhardt. 2003. Hermann Lotze. Briefe und Dokumente. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Sprung, Helga. 2006. Carl Stumpf. Eine Biografie. Von der Philosophie zur experimentellen Psychologie. München / Wien: Profil. Stumpf, Carl. 1869. „Verhältniß des platonischen Gottes zur Idee des Guten“, Erster Artikel in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Neue Folge vol. 52, no. 1, 83-128. Zweiter Artikel Ibid., no. 2, 197-261. –– 1873. Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Leipzig: Hirzel. –– 1930. “Autobiography” in Murchison, Carl (ed.) History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 1, 389-441. (Translation from the original German version in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, Band 5. Leipzig: Meiner 1924, 204-265). Stumpf, Carl and Wilhelm Scherer. Correspondence. (Transcript by Franz Brentano Forschung, Würzburg).
PRACTICAL EPISTEMOLOGY: STUMPF’S HALLE LOGIC (1887) ROBIN D. ROLLINGER (INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE CZECH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES)
Abstract. Carl Stumpf regarded logic as practical epistemology. He elaborated on this concept of logic in his Halle lectures (1887). Here Edmund Husserl’s notes from these lectures are examined. As practical epistemology, logic is a Kunstlehre pertaining to judgment. Though Stumpf concedes that both talent and exercise play a role in making judgments correctly, he also insists that practical epistemology can nonetheless improve our ability to judge, for it provides us with the means of testing them. It is also necessary, however, first to consider judgments as well as their founding presentations in relation to language. Although language can be beneficial, it can also be a hindrance, especially due to equivocation. Names are used to expressed presentations, whereas statements are used to express judgments. Important distinctions among names and their corresponding presentations is that between individual and general ones, but also the distinction between concrete and abstract ones. Here it is of the utmost importance for Stumpf that abstract and general presentations do not coincide, for he stresses that abstractions yield both individuals and universals. In the former case he has a clear notion of moments or (in contemporary terms) tropes. This is a notion that Husserl took from Stumpf. Finally, in his considerations of testing cognitions he divides them into immediate ones and mediated ones. The immediate ones are again divided into inner perceptions and axioms. While immediate perceptions in all cases involve the identity between perceiver and perceived, axioms are in all cases modeled after the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. In the testing of mediated cognitions Stumpf makes a division between deduction and induction. Like his teacher, Franz Brentano, he recommends reforms in logic by means of the reduction of judgments in all cases to existential ones and dealing with induction in terms of probability theory.
1 Introduction Many of the prominent students of Franz Brentano shared his concern for reforms in logic.1 Though some of them, such as Edmund Husserl, 1
Brentano’s own logic was presented in two different lecture courses (1869-1877 and 1878, 1884/85). The volume that is partly derived from the earlier lecture course,
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took a path that ultimately led far from Brentanian orthodoxy,2 others stayed very close to this original orientation,3 not only in the conception of logic as such but also in terms of its underlying psychological doctrines and indeed its “empirical standpoint”.4 In the summer semester 1887 in Halle Husserl in fact attended lectures of Carl Stumpf on logic which adhered closely to Brentanian orthodoxy (in its early phase). Husserl’s notes on these lectures have been preserved in the Husserl Archives and merit careful examination.5 Here I shall discuss the content of these lectures. Though it would be tedious to draw atBrentano 1956, is not at all reliable. A full discussion of Brentano’s early logic will be found in my forthcoming book Franz Brentano’s Early Logic and Epistemology. As regards some of the attempts at the reform of logic in his school, see Höfler / Meinong 1890 and Husserl 1896. 2 See Husserl 1900 and Husserl 1901. Concerning the relation between Husserl and Brentano, including their differences regarding the conception of logic, see Rollinger 1999 and Rollinger 2004. 3 A case in point would be Anton Marty. Though Marty did not publish a full-scale logical investigation of any kind, it is clear from his work that he adhered to the Brentanian conception of logic. On this point, see Rollinger 2009 and Rollinger 2012. For a fuller discussion of his Brentanian philosophy of langauge, see Rollinger 2008, 73-86 (previously in Rollinger 1998) and Rollinger 2010. Stumpf shows his appreciation for the work of Marty, a fellow student from Brentano’s early years in Würzburg, in Q 14/14a: “Marty in particular has ... made it completely credible, psychologically speaking, how the inital beginnings of linguistic signs could be developed on the basis of mere psychological preconditions [Besonders Marty hat ... es psychologisch durchaus glaubwürdig gemacht, wie die ersten Anfänge der Sprachzeichen aufgrund bloßer psychologischer Vorbedingungen sich bilden konnten]”. Here it is Marty 1875 which Stumpf is citing. This work is now available in English translation in Rollinger 2010, 133-234. 4 Here we may be reminded of the logical reforms summarized in Brentano 1874, 302 ff. (Brentano 2008, 251 ff.) and republished in Brentano 1911, 71 ff. (Brentano 2008, 253 ff.). 5 Stumpf (Q 14), which corresponds for the most part to Brentano’s early lecture course on logic (EL 80). Here I shall cite Husserl’s notes on Stumpf’s Halle logic by its archival signature. The number and letter followed by a slash indicates the page number of the manuscript. Husserl also had a lithographed copy of the main sections (so-called Diktate) of Stumpf’s lectures from the summer semester 1888 (Q 13), which have been translated into English in Rollinger 1999, 311-337. While these later lectures are apparently by and large the same as the ones from the winter semester 1886/87, the later ones contain one significant addition, namely Stumpf’s formulation of the concept of a state of affairs (Sachverhalt). (See Rollinger 2013, 137 ff.) This concept is indeed important not only for Stumpf’s later development, but for Husserl’s as well. See Rollinger 1999), 89-93 and 313.
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tention to all the instances where Stumpf agrees with Brentano, it will be worthwhile to point out those where he diverges somewhat from the path of his mentor. 2 Definition and Value of Logic At the outset Stumpf defines logic as practical epistemology (praktische Erkenntnislehre). This highly suggestive formulation of the task of logic is apparently not taken from Brentano, though it is certainly not contrary to the Brentanian conception of logic. Historically speaking, it puts the logical doctrines under consideration in a current of thought that includes other prominent thinkers, such as Brentano’s own mentor, Adolf Trendelenburg.6 Philosophically speaking, it suggests a direction that could be taken in epistemology and logic (in some revised form of course) that receives little attention in contemporary philosophy. The purely theoretical aspect of such disciplines has gained the upper hand through the prevalence of symbolic logic. Nonetheless, the possibility of logic as practical epistemology peacefully coexisting with symbolic logic is not to be dismissed out of hand. The practical epistemology which Stumpf taught in Halle was regarded as a Kunstlehre (Q 14/1a, 2b). The application of this term to logic, which apparently goes back as far as Schleiermacher’s lectures on dialectic in the early nineteenth century,7 cannot be properly translated into English.8 It is to be contrasted with “art” (Kunst). It is not itself an art, but rather consists of the doctrines or teaching (Lehre) whereby we are instructed in the practice of an art. As there is a difference between the art of painting, for instance, and the instructions 6
Stumpf refers to Trendelenburg in Q 14/16a, 52b, though no particular work by this philosopher is mentioned, whose mature views in logic are to be found in Trendelenburg 1870. 7 Schleiermacher, (ed.) Jonas 1834, 444 (Schleiermacher 1903, 19). Before these lectures appeared to the general reading public, however, the term was used in this way already in Beneke 1832. Beneke was indeed an advocate of a practically and empirically oriented philosophy when Hegelianism dominated Prussia and most of the German speaking world. By the time Brentano and his school arose, however, there was a radically different climate of thought in that world, much more sympathetic to an empirical approach and indeed scornful towards the Hegelian philosophical orientation. 8 It is translated as “technical science” and “technical discipline” in Sigwart 1895, 1 and 10 respectively. Another option would be “technology”, as found in Husserl 2001, 13.
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on how to paint, there is a difference between doing logic and presenting a Kunstlehre about how to do logic. Brentano, however, characterized logic quite simply as an art. Perhaps he could not stomach using a term that specifically arose from German Idealism. Be this as it may, the contrast between logic as an art and logic as a Kunstlehre is a significant one. Moreover, the latter seems to be the more acceptable characterization. If we may state this characterization in Bolzanian terms,9 a logic textbook is a how-to manual, not itself the full-scale execution of the art in which it instructs us. The question of course remains as to what logic instructs us to do. According to some, it instructs us in thinking (Denken). According to others, it instructs us in inferring (Schließen). Stumpf rejects both of these characterizations of the Kunstlehre under consideration. It is not concerned with all of thinking, for thinking involves presentations as well as judgments. The Kunstlehre that guides us in presenting, however, is aesthetics rather than logic. Presentations are, to be sure, a concern of logic insofar as they are foundations for judgments. Whenever we judge, we accept or reject something that we present. Yet, logic has no concern for presentations beyond the role they play in founding judgments. Nor can logic be defined as the Kunstlehre that is concerned only with inferring. In this case it would be limited to assessing knowledge by means of proof, whereas there is also immediate knowledge. “There must be such immediate cognitions”, says Stumpf: All our proofs rest on premises [...] There must at some point be premises which are not themselves proven, or otherwise we would go into infinity, and nothing at all would be proven. For these immediate cognitions, which must exist, certain rules are also necessary, for it is clear that statements are often regarded as immediately evident which are not at all so. Already in ordinary life we have the experience of an opponent considering a statement as obvious which seems very doubtful to us. He demands that it should appear to everyone else also as immediately certain. In political life, but also in science, etc. However, the opposite also occurs sometimes: that people regard something that is really self-evident and does not require proof as doubtful and 9
The characterization of a science in terms of its representation in an appropriate textbook is defended and elaborated on at length in Bolzano 1837, which is in fact mentioned in passing by Stumpf (Q 14/54a).
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seek to give proofs for it. Even the law of non-contradiction “A cannot be and not-be at the same time” is doubted by some people.10
The doubts about the law of non-contradiction, according to Stumpf, hail from the Hegel and his followers. “His whole system, one can say, consists of paradoxes”.11 While this tendency to embrace contradictions may seem somewhat extreme, one can easily find less sophisticated minds engaging in doubt about the law of non-contradiction. Be this as it may, Stumpf in general is entirely right in seeing disputes about the immediately evident as a common feature of both philosophy and everyday discourse. Practical epistemology should therefore provide us with ways of settling such disputes. The definition of logic that Stumpf defends is accordingly one that lies between the two that were mentioned above. It is for him the Kunstlehre of correct judgment. This practical discipline that instructs us in how to judge, however, must not be confused with the doctrine of judgment “which is purely theoretical, the theory about how we in fact think, the analysis of the process of thinking as it is done in the case of man and animals, whether it is correct or not”.12 This theoretical endeavor is part of psychology rather than logic. Though logic indeed depends on this part of psychology, it is not to be identified with 10
Stumpf Q 14/2a: “Es muss solche unmittelbaren Erkenntnisse geben. Alle unsere Beweise ruhen auf Prämissen, diese wieder etc. Da muss es einmal Prämissen geben, die nicht selbst bewiesen sind, sonst kämen wir ins Unendliche, und es wäre gar nichts bewiesen. Für diese unmittelbaren Erkenntnisse, die es geben muß, sind doch auch gewisse Regeln notwendig, denn es zeigt sich, dass vielfach Sätze für unmittelbar einleuchtend angesehen werden, die es keineswegs sind. Schon im gewöhnlichen Leben macht man die Erfahrung, dass ein Gegner einen Satz, der uns sehr zweifelhaft erscheint, als etwas Selbstverständliches betrachtet. Er stellt an jeden anderen den Anspruch, dass es ihm auch unmittelbar sicher erscheint. Es wirken sehr viele Motive zusammen, um dergleichen falsche Zuversicht zu erzeugen. Im politischen Leben, aber auch in Wissenschaft etc. Aber auch das Umgekehrte tritt mitunter ein, nämlich dass man etwas, das wirklich durch sich selbst einleuchtet und des Beweises nicht bedarf, für zweifelhaft hält und Beweise dafür zu geben sucht. Sogar der Satz des Widerspruchs A kann nicht zugleich sein und nicht sein’ ist von einigen angezweifelt worden”. 11 Stumpf Q 14/84b: “Sein ganzes System besteht, kann man sagen, aus Paradoxien”. 12 Stumpf Q 14/3a: “die rein theoretisch ist, die Lehre, wie man faktisch denkt, die Zergliederung der Denkprozesse, wie sie sich im Menschen und Tier vollziehen, mag sie richtig sein oder nicht”.
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it.13 While the truths of a theoretical discipline are intrinsically related, the only unity that they have in a practical discipline lies in its goal. A practical discipline may therefore draw upon various truths which are not intrinsically related in order to reach its goal, and thus disparate theoretical sciences may be of use to logic. The theory of probability, for instance, is to be utilized in the logical treatment of induction. This theory and the psychological theory of judgments belong to different sciences because they are concerned with completely different spheres of truth, and yet they are brought together in practical epistemology because they both are of service in instructing us on how we can judge correctly. Though correct judgment as the goal of logic is no doubt something of great value, as indeed this has been acknowledged for centuries, doubts have been raised about the value of this discipline not because the goal is worthless, but rather because it allegedly fails to advance us towards this goal. The opponents of logic point out that natural talent (“genius”) and practice are what we need in order to make correct judgments. Though Stumpf does not deny the value of these factors in the pursuit of knowledge, he nonetheless asserts that people who have both can nonetheless profit from knowing the rules that logic teaches. People of genius and well practiced in judging have come to the wrong conclusions or have reasoned in the wrong way. The ontological proof of Anselm, later defended again by Descartes and Leibniz, is on Stumpf’s view fallacious, though its proponents are among the most eminent intellects of all times. The same goes for the Cartesian proof that empty space cannot exist because if it did bodies would be separated by nothing (Q 14/5a). There remain open questions not only in philosophy, but also in science, simply because it has not been definitively established what constitutes a proof. In this connection Stumpf mentions atomism and Darwinism (Q 14/5b-6a). Theological disputes, such as those raised by Hume in his rejection of 13
Here of course Stumpf may seem open to the charge of psychologism as was later made (though not against him, but against many other nineteenth century logicians) in Husserl 1900. Husserl (who in fact borrowed the very term “psychologism” from Stumpf 1892), however, allows for logic as Kunstlehre to be dependent on psychology and only argues that a pure logic, strictly as a theoretical discipline, must be seen as free of all psychology. In Stumpf’s Halle logic, however, a pure logic in this sense is not within his intellectual horizons. As regards Stumpf’s later development on this topic, this is a matter best left for another discussion.
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miracles, likewise remain unsettled due to a lack of agreement about what makes up a proof (Q 14/6b). There have likewise been great thinkers, e.g. Francis Bacon, who have advanced science precisely because they have reflected on method, i.e. logic (Q 14/7a). Stumpf also points out that things are analogous in fine art and poetry, which are not exclusively products of genius and practice, but also of theoretical reflection (Q 14/7a). While he thus concludes that logic is of great value, he does however concede, “Logic, as it is still often presented today, as it is particularly presented in German textbooks, is not what it should and could be”.14 This statement is by and large an indictment against scholastic logic which continued to prevail in the pedagogy of the late nineteenth century. In this connection Stumpf is particularly aware of the lack of consideration of probability theory in such textbooks, in spite of the fact that mathematics had already advanced considerably in this area. Hence it is Stumpf’s conviction that a properly revised logic will be of great use. This will be the case not only for its applications in everyday life, but for science. “Some sciences such as sociology, also metaphysics and other sciences”, Stumpf significantly adds, “are thus in part still far behind at present, because they are not sufficiently clear about the correct method”.15 3 Thoughts and their Expression in Language Before Stumpf enters into considerations of testing judgments and the discovery of new truths, he finds it necessary to enter into preliminary elaborations on thoughts (primarily presentations and judgments) and their expressions in language. The precedent of dealing with logical matters together with language can be found in the work of important 14
Stumpf Q 14/7b: “Die Logik, wie sie heute vielfach noch dargestellt wird, wie sie namentlich in den deutschen Schulbüchern dargestellt wird, ist nicht das, was sie sein sollte und könnte.” Which textbooks Stumpf has in mind here cannot be said with certainty, although he frequently cites Friedrich Überweg, whose logic was published in many editions. (Überweg 1874 was published shortly after the author’s death and contained extensive revisions, which had in fact already been adopted in the English translation, Ueberweg 1871.) While that author takes into account some of the nineteenth century innovations in logic, the Aristotelian syllogistic logic still remains at the core of his work. 15 Q 14/7a: “Einige Wissenschaften wie die Gesellschaftswissenschaft, auch die Metaphysik und andere Wissenschaften sind zum Teil deswegen noch heute weit zurück, weil sie sich nicht hinreichend klar sind über die richtige Methode”.
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thinkers (Q 14/10a). This is found in Plato’s Cratylus and Aristotle’s De Interpretatione and later again in the work of the scholastics who surpassed Aristotle in their considerations of language while staying in close contact with his thought. The entire third book of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding is also devoted to language, which is of course an important topic in Mill’s System of Logic as well. The tendency of dealing with logic and language together was taken to the extreme by some thinkers in the nineteenth century. While some regard the unity of thinking and speaking as “essential” and accordingly maintain that logic should take into account far more combinations than disjunctive, conjunctive, and hypothetical ones since language exhibits more than these, this view is regarded by Stumpf as a “decisively erroneous, exaggerated one of the real situation”.16 It is important only to recognize that there is a close associative connection between thinking and speaking such that it is impossible for us to have complex thoughts without using language, at least inwardly. Seeing precise parallels between judgments and their expression in language would in fact be detrimental to the concerns of logic. According to Stumpf, the influence of language on thought has both advantages and disadvantages. By providing signs that are distinct to our senses, they allow us to distinguish concepts which would otherwise be difficult to distinguish. These signs are also very helpful aids to our memory. In some cases they are moreover much simpler than our thoughts and thereby facilitate very complex intellectual operations. Such features of signs are especially conspicuous in the case of mathematics. Finally, in language a great store of knowledge (e.g. concerning classification) is conveyed to us. The disadvantages of language, however, are to be found when different thoughts are associated with the same sign and when the same thought is associated with different signs. These disadvantages are familiar under the headings of equivocation and synonymy respectively. Stumpf especially emphasizes the dangers of the former. Equivocal uses of signs may be easily detected in mathematics, where they result in absurd conclusions. “In metaphysics”, Stumpf adds, “one does not easily notice such things”.17 16
Q 14/10b: “eine entschieden irrtümliche, eine Übertreibung des wahren Sachverhalts”. 17 Q 14/19a: “In der Metaphysik merkt man dergleichen nicht so leicht.”
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In view of such concern with equivocation one might expect a theory of meaning, for an equivocal word and sign is, after all, one that has more than one meaning. Unlike Brentano, however, Stumpf does not put forward a theory of the meaning of linguistic expressions. From his attendance at Brentano’s lectures in Würzburg he was no doubt well aware of how unstable and difficult this theory was.18 As already indicated, the theoretical basis of logic for Stumpf is primarily the psychological theory of judgment, for as the “doctrine of correct judging” (Lehre vom richtigen Urteilen) is in need of such a theory (Q 14/20a). This point is made quite elaborately in his Halle lectures on psychology: Logic must go back to the essence of judging, to the different classes of judgments, the expression of them in language, which is indeed also a psychological function. It must also sort out different motives of judging, attend to motives of feeling, habits, exhibit the origin of prejudices, etc. Otherwise a logic that would abstain from being purely formal logic would be useless from the outset.19
As for mental phenomena of other kinds, presentations are also of interest for logic insofar as judgments are founded upon them.20 In the late nineteenth century in Germany, however, Brentano and his orthodox followers had to make it clear that there is indeed a difference between presentations and judgments, for the view that mental phenomena divide into thinking, feeling, and willing was still quite prevalent. Thus Stumpf elaborates as follows: 18
See Rollinger 2009. This topic will be explored further in my forthcoming book on Brentano’s logic. 19 See Stumpf (Q 11-1/4): “Die Logik muss zurückgreifen auf das Wesen des Urteilens, auf die verschiedenen Klassen der Urteile, den Ausdruck derselben in der Sprache, die ja auch eine psychologische Funktion ist. Sie muss auch verschiedene Motive des Urteilens auseinanderhalten, die Gefühlsmotive, Gewohnheiten beachten, die Entstehung der Vorurteile aufzeigen etc. Sonst würde eine Logik, die davon absähe, eine rein formale Logik, von vornherein nutzlos sein.]” 20 It is of course well known that for Brentano the distinguishing feature of mental phenomena in contrast with physical ones is their intentional relation to an object (or content). Though Stumpf apparently does not feel compelled to lay down this criterion in the Halle logic, he certainly does so in his lectures on psychology from the winter semester 1886/87: “Every mental state has a content, is consciousness of a content [Jeder psychische Zustand hat einen Inhalt, ist Bewusstsein eines Inhalts.]” (Q 111/77).
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Robin D. Rollinger If I say: a golden mountain, I have a mere presentation. If I say: A mountain is made of gold, I make a judgment. It is here not a distinction in content, for instance, that is present to us. In both cases mountain and golden are under consideration, a golden mountain. That which is presented in both cases is the same. Neither is it a distinction in intensity, for instance, with which I present the content in one case and the other. The presentation can be equally clear to me in both cases. Nor is the distinction between me seeing in one case and presenting merely in imagination in the other case. I can have merely a presentation of the imagination in both cases, etc. Hence, no distinction that is to be found within the genus “presentation”. Something new that is added, the same content, but a new mental state that relates itself to it. It is no longer merely presented, but it is also judged: affirmed, negated. This is what especially characterizes the judgment: Every judgment is an assertion or denial.21
In view of this sharp distinction between presentations and judgments, Stumpf likewise sees an equally sharp distinction between certain linguistic expressions. The ones whereby presentations are expressed are names (Namen), whereas the ones whereby judgments are expressed are statements (Aussagen) (Q 14/21b f.). Presentations are for Stumpf the mental states on which those of the other classes, namely judgments and acts of love and hate, are based.22 While these are in some cases intuitions (Anschauungen) rather than concepts, he does concede, “Concepts, however, play a very special role”. 23 Presentations are moreover divided in two different 21
Stumpf (Q 14/21a): “Sage ich: ein goldner Berg, so habe ich eine bloße Vorstellung. Sage ich: Ein Berg ist von Gold, dann fälle ich ein Urteil. Es ist hier nicht ein Unterschied etwa in dem Inhalt, der uns gegenwärtig ist. In beiden Fällen handelt es sich um Berg und golden, einen goldenen Berg. Das, was vorgestellt wird, ist in beiden Fällen dasselbe. Es ist auch nicht etwa ein Unterschied in der Stärke, mit der ich im einen und anderen Fall den Inhalt vorstelle. Die Vorstellung kann mir gleich deutlich sein in beiden Fällen. Es ist auch nicht der Unterschied, dass ich es im einen Fall sehe, im anderen Fall bloß in der Phantasie vorstelle. Ich kann in beiden Fällen bloß eine Phantasievorstellung haben etc. Also kein Unterschied, der innerhalb der Vorstellungsgattung zu finden ist. Ein Neues, das hinzukommt, derselbe Inhalt, aber ein neuer psychischer Zustand, der sich auf ihn bezieht. Er wird nicht mehr bloß vorgestellt, er wird auch beurteilt, bejaht, verneint. Das ist es, was das Urteil vor allem charakterisiert: Jedes Urteil ist eine Behauptung oder Leugnung. 22 While Stumpf often speaks of presentations in this way, he also uses the term in reference to their content. 23 Q 14/23b: “Freilich spielen die Begriffe eine ganz besondere Rolle”.
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ways, namely by content and by extension. While the extension is all the objects that fall under the concept (e.g. the individual human beings that fall under the concept of man), the content consists of those features (Merkmale) which an object must have in order to fall under the concept (e.g. whatever features an object must have in order to be a human being). The first distinction between presentations that Stumpf makes in terms of their content is the one between simple and complex presentations. The composition of the content in the case of a complex presentation requires further elaboration, for Stumpf maintains the following: ... three manners of compositions are to be distinguished: 1) the physical composition or the composition from physical parts. By this we mean the ones that border on each other: hand and foot. If they do not border on each other immediately, they do so mediately. In this case there are other parts in between, which again border on these. The parts are connected by boundaries. Likewise in the case of temporal sections. In contrast with these, however, we speak 2) of metaphysical parts in the case where properties of a thing or its appearance are under consideration, different moments, aspects of a phenomenon: extension and color. Both interpenetrate each other inwardly. They are given together in one and the same phenomenon. Nonetheless, they can be separated from each other in a certain way: color, intensity. In the otherwise unitary phenomenon we can sort out the two: velocity and direction of a motion. There is no motion that would not have both. I can nonetheless separate them in thought. [...] 3) Logical parts. Parts of this kind do in fact play a special role in logic. It is what we call genera and differentia within a genus. [...] Let us present redness = red color. In the presentation “red” two things are thus contained: color, i.e. the genus, and red, e.g. the differentia. We must therefore separate these two components in this presentation “redness”. They are neither physical nor metaphysical parts. Redness itself is a metaphysical part in contrast with extension, for instance. But this metaphysical [part], which is in its manner metaphysically simple, can still be logically dismembered insofar as we extract a generic concept and thereby gain also a differentia, again a special type of analysis within our presentation.24 24
Q 14/24a ff.: “Drei Weisen der Zusammensetzungen sind zu unterscheiden: 1) die physische Zusammensetzung beziehungsweise die Zusammensetzung aus physischen
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The metaphysical and logical parts are moreover characterized as abstract. The simplest presentations are indeed to be found among the abstracta. These are presented through a focus of attention, according to Stumpf. Though physical parts may of course also be presented in this way, the focus on these is something that animals as well as man is capable of whereas only man can attend to metaphysical and logical parts (Q 14/25b-26a).25 The attention theory of abstraction was one that Stumpf held in common with other students of Brentano,26 but apparently not one that he took from Brentano himself. Simple names, according to Stumpf, need not express simple presentations. The name “garden”, for instance, is simple, but the presentation that it represents is obviously complex (Q 14/26a). Teilen. Darunter verstehen wir solche, die aneinander grenzen: Hand und Fuß. Grenzen sie nicht unmittelbar aneinander, so mittelbar. Es sind dann andere Teile dazwischen, die wieder an jene angrenzen. Durch Grenzen hängen die Teile zusammen. Ebenso bei zeitlichen Abschnitten. Demgegenüber sprechen wir aber 2) von metaphysischen Teilen in dem Fall, wo es sich um Eigenschaften eines Dinges handelt oder einer Erscheinung, verschiedene Momente, Seiten einer Erscheinung: Ausdehnung und die Farbe. Beide durchdringen sich innerlich, in einer und derselben Erscheinung sind sie zusammen gegeben. Dennoch können sie in gewisser Weise auseinandergehalten werden: Farbe, Intensität. In der sonst einheitlichen Erscheinung können wir beides auseinanderhalten: Geschwindigkeit und Richtung einer Bewegung. Es gibt keine Bewegung, die nicht beides zugleich hätte. Beides durchdringt sich. Dennoch kann ich es in Gedanken auseinanderhalten. ... 3) Logische Teile. Diese Art von Teilen spielt in der Tat eine besondere Rolle in der Logik. Es ist das, was man Gattungen und Differenzen nennt innerhalb einer Vorstellung. ... Stellen wir Röte vor = rote Farbe. In der Vorstellung Röte ist also zweierlei enthalten: Farbe, das ist die Gattung, und rot, das ist die Differenz. Wir müssen also in dieser Vorstellung Röte diese beiden Bestandteile auseinanderhalten. Es sind weder physische noch metaphysische Teile. Die Röte selbst ist ein metaphysischer Teil gegenüber der Ausdehnung z.B. Aber dieser metaphysische , der in seiner Weise metaphysisch einfach ist, kann logisch noch zergliedert werden, indem wir einen Gattungsbegriff absondern und dadurch wieder eine Differenz gewinnen, wieder eine besondere Art von Analyse innerhalb unserer Vorstellung”. 25 What is missing is Stumpf’s Halle lectures on logic and psychology is the explicit distinction between dependent and independent parts, as this is found in Stumpf 1873, 108 ff., where metaphysical (also called psychological) parts are regarded as dependent and physical ones as independent. 26 Alexius Meinong was one of the students of Brentano who held this theory. Edmund Husserl, also a student of Brentano and a student of Stumpf as well, came to reject this theory. See Rollinger 1993.
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A second division between concepts in terms of their content is that between those which are “usually connected with an unrestricted number of other features” (Q 14/26a) and those which are not so connected. The former Stumpf calls substantial, the latter accidental. Our concept of an organism, for instance, is a substantial one, whereas our concept of four meters is not. This division is not one that Brentano presents in his lectures on logic, though the notion of a substance and its accidents certainly plays a crucial role in his metaphysics. In sum, as far as the content of a concept is concerned, it is on Stumpf’s view either simple or complex and either substantial or accidental. Further distinctions between concepts are made regarding their extension. Among distinctions of this kind is the one between universal and individual presentations. Stumpf explains in the following passage: By the extension of a presentation we mean the number of objects or contents that fall under it. Saying this is the same as my saying: in which it is contained as logical part. Man: The presentation is contained in many single objects of presentation: Socrates, Aristotle, etc. “Man” is in all cases included in these, more particularly included as a logical part. Thus I say: the presentation “man” has this extension. We therefore use the word “extension” only here and ascribe it to a presentation whenever it [the presentation] is a logical abstractum. Hence, the presentation “man” joins together several properties (substantial properties), each of which is thought of in a logically abstract way, and these are equally contained in Socrates and Plato, etc. A presentation is universal when it is contained in others as a logical part, and all the more universal, the more the others in which it is contained. It is individual when it is contained in no others as a logical part. Plato: we can say that this is a presentation that is logically contained only in itself, only in one object. The content itself is the extension. As a physical part, such an object can enter into much else: Europe. Also as a metaphysical part an individual presentation can be contained in another one: This figure on the blackboard, while we disregard color, extension, etc., is a metaphysical part of a concrete presentation. But this metaphysical part is especially picked out through abstraction. It is, however, something individual, not a logical part of some other presentation. It does not enter into another presentation as a logical part. We accordingly see that the distinction between abstract and concrete is not coextensive with the distinction between universal and individual presentations.
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Here we find a very important point in Stumpf’s logic: namely that an abstractum can be individual or, as we may also say, that there are abstract particulars. In contemporary terminology these are “tropes”.28 27
Q 14/29a-b: “Unter dem Umfang einer Vorstellung verstehen wir die Zahl der Gegenstände oder Inhalte, die darunter fallen. Das ist dasselbe, als wenn ich sage: in dem sie als logischer Teil enthalten ist. Mensch: Die Vorstellung ist in sehr vielen einzelnen Vorstellungsgegenständen enthalten: Sokrates, Aristoteles etc. In diesen ist überall "Mensch" eingeschlossen, und zwar als logischer Teil eingeschlossen. Deswegen sage ich, die Vorstellung Mensch hat diesen Umfang. Wir gebrauchen also das Wort Umfang nur da und schreiben ihn einer Vorstellung zu, wenn sie ein logisches Abstraktum ist. So vereinigt die Vorstellung Mensch die Vereinigung mehrerer Eigenschaften (substantieller Eigenschaften), jede davon logisch abstrakt gedacht, und diese sind gleichsehr in Sokrates und Platon etc. enthalten. Eine Vorstellung ist allgemein, wenn sie in anderen als logischer Teil enthalten ist, und um so mehr allgemein, in je mehr anderen sie als logischer Teil enthalten ist. Sie ist individuell, wenn sie in keinen anderen als logischer Teil enthalten ist. Platon: Man kann sagen, das ist eine Vorstellung, die nur in sich selbst, nur in einem Gegenstand logisch enthalten ist. Der Inhalt selbst ist der Umfang. Als physischer Teil kann ein solcher Gegenstand in vieles andere eingehen: Europa. Auch als metaphysischer Teil kann eine individuelle Vorstellung in einer anderen enthalten sein: Diese Figur der Tafel, während wir von der Farbe, Ausdehnung etc. absehen, ist ein metaphysischer Teil der konkreten Vorstellung. Aber dieser metaphysische Teil wird besonders durch Abstraktion herausge. Aber es ist etwas Individuelles, es ist nicht ein logischer Teil irgendeiner anderen Vorstellung. Sie geht nicht als logischer Teil in eine andere Vorstellung mit ein. Wir sehen hiernach, dass der Unterschied von abstrakt und konkret nicht ganz zusammenfällt mit dem Unterschied von allgemeinen und individuellen Vorstellungen. Nur das logisch Abstrakte deckt sich mit dem Allgemeinen und das logisch Konkrete mit dem Individuellen, dagegen das metaphysisch Abstrakte braucht nicht allgemein zu sein”. See Q 11-2/475: “The logical abstracta are the usual universal concepts. The metaphysical abstracta are the aspects, moments of a phenomenon, e.g. the direction and the velocity of a motion, the intensity and quality of a color or of a tone. These are also abstracta. It is thought that leads us to concepts such as intensity, hence a kind of abstraction, but not completely the same as the logical one. Only the abstracta of the first kind (the logical ones) are always also universal concepts. [Die logischen Abstrakta sind die gewöhnlichen allgemeinen Begriffe. Die metaphysischen Abstrakta sind die Seiten, Momente einer Erscheinung, z.B. die Richtung und Schnelligkeit einer Bewegung, die Stärke und Qualität einer Farbe resp. eines Tones. Das sind auch Abstrakta. Es ist das Denken, welches uns zu Begriffen wie Intensität führt, auch eine Art von Abstraktion, aber nicht ganz dieselbe wie die logische. Nur die Abstrakta erster Art (die logischen) sind immer auch Allgemeinbegriffe.]” 28 See, for instance, Campbell 1990, Simons 1994, and Lowe 2006.
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While the classification of parts as physical, metaphysical, and logical is taken from Brentano, it is difficult to find in his writings an explicit statement in favor of tropes. The clarity with which Stumpf states his position on this matter, however, cannot be doubted. Perhaps this is why Husserl, who also allows for tropes (which he often calls “moments”), draws from Stumpf rather than Brentano in his theory of parts and wholes.29 Most names, says Stumpf, are both abstract and universal. Though this point may be conceded in logic and philosophy generally, there are, he adds, many philosophers who nonetheless ascribe universality to names only and not to presentations. Such a position, called “nominalism”,30 is wrong because it involves the confusion between universal names with collective names (Q 14/30a f.). In Stumpf’s consideration of presentations we also find a treatment of relations among them. These are considered with respect to content (Q 14/31a-32b) and to extension (Q 14/33a-b). In this connection Stumpf also discusses the rule “the greater the content, the smaller the extension and vice-versa”, which he limits to logical parts (Q 14/33b34a). He also thinks that there are highest genera, but lowest species only within definite categories or with respect to substantial concepts (Q 14/34b-34b). As already indicated, Stumpf regards statements as the expressions of judgments. While he acknowledges a variety of statement forms, he also maintains that there is not a corresponding variety of forms of judgment. Statements may be existential, especially those which consist of a name combined with “is” or “is not” (Q 14/35a ff.). Here the name expresses the underlying presentation (the matter), whereas the “is” or “is not” indicates whether the presented object is accepted or rejected (the quality). According to Stumpf, the meaning of “is” in an existential statement is the same in all cases. There are not, for example, distinct meanings of “being” for things, for truths, and for moral laws (Q 14/37a).31 When objects of such diverse kinds are said to be, 29
Husserl 1901, 227 ff. It was Stumpf 1873 in particular that inspired Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes, though he does not make use of Stumpf’s terminology in that work, “psychological” rather than “metaphysical” parts. Cf. Husserl 1901, 409. 30 When contemporary philosophers speak of nominalism, they usually mean a purely ontological view, namely the view that there are no extra-mental and extra-linguistic universals. 31 Here Stumpf is rejecting a view that he had been taught by his dissertation adviser,
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the difference lies only in what is accepted or affirmed, not in special modes of being. In all such cases the existential statement, according to Stumpf, is not a case of predication. There are of course other variations of existential statements, such as ones that are formed by the expressions “there is” (es gibt) and “there is not” (es gibt nicht) as well as the impersionalia, e.g. the statement “it is raining” (Q 14/37a39b).32 There are on Stumpf’s view also statements in which “is” or “is not” is used as a copula (Q 14/39b ff.). Such statements are categorical or predicative. Statements of this kind of course have a special place in traditional logic. They have been classified as universal affirmative (A), universal negative (E), particular affirmative (I), and particular negative (O). Stumpf maintains that all predicative statements can be translated into existential ones. This does not necessarily involve asserting the existence of the subject. In the case of A, e.g. “all men are mortal”, the corresponding existential statement would be “there are no immortal men” (Q 14/39b ff.). In the case of I, e.g. “some men are happy”, we can say: “there are happy men” (Q 14/43b), in the case of O, e.g. “some men are not musical”, “there are unmusical men”, and finally in the case of E, e.g. “no men are omnipotent”, “there are no omnipotent men”. In the nineteenth century it became more and more a tendency of logicians to take into account other forms of statements besides the four which have just been considered. Among these were hypothetical and disjunctive statements. According to Stumpf, statements of this kind can also be translated into existential ones. The statement “if the reading of thermometer is under 0, water freezes” can be translated into “there is no 0 reading of the thermometer and non-freezing of water” (Q 14/49a ff.). The statement “he is slow or dumb” can be translated into “there is one of the two, his slowness or his dumbness” (Q 14/49b ff.). Hence, Stumpf maintains that statements which are not formulated as existential can in fact be reformulated as existential ones without any loss of meaning. The existential formulation for him best represents the mental act of judging. Such an act is the acceptance (“X is”) or a rejection (“X is not”). Hermann Lotze. 32 Here Stumpf refers to the series of articles that Marty began publishing in 1884 on statements of this kind (see Marty 1916) as well as Miklosich 1883.
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Among the various distinctions that Stumpf makes between judgments, the one between truth and falsehood is particularly important for logic. First of all, judgments are either true or false. No other bearers of truth and falsehood come into play for Stumpf.33 While he accepts the traditional definition of truth as a correspondence between the judgment and reality, he warns against a possible misunderstanding of this, as he explains in the following passage: If I mean by reality nothing but the truth itself, the definition is tautological. If reality is meant in the sense of that which I present, what is before me in my consciousness as the content to be judgment, and the definition can mean that my judgment must correspond with the nature of this content presented by me, we would allow for the definition. [...] Usually, however, what is meant by reality is more, objective reality as it is independently of my consciousness. In this case an essential distinction would of course be given. Yet, the definition does not cover all cases. If I take a negative judgment “there is no sphinx”, the judgment is in fact true. Where is the reality here? Is the objective reality perhaps the sphinx which is not? Or the sphinx?! The thought can only correspond with the thought, with the content that is given to me as one to be judged. The same in the case of hypothetical propositions: If I were a bird, I would fly to you. Furthermore, the mathematical propositions (geometry). Hence, in the sense that Aristotle, the scholastics, and a few moderns understand the definition, we cannot 34 allow for it. 33
By the early twentieth century other candidates for the status of truth bearer entered prominently into the discussion, particularly Husserl’s propositions and Meinong’s objectives. See Husserl 1900, Husserl 1901, and Meinong 1902. Already in the nineteenth century a similar option had been put forward in Bolzano 1837, which came to have considerable influence on Husserl. See Rollinger 1999, 69-82. 34 Q 14/57a-b: “Mit dieser Definition kann sehr Verschiedenes gemeint sein. Wenn ich dabei unter Wirklichkeit nichts anderes verstehe als die Wahrheit selbst, dann ist die Definition tautologisch. Wird gemeint Wirklichkeit im Sinn dessen, was ich vorstelle, was mir als zu beurteilender Inhalt in meinem Bewusstsein vorschwebt, und die Definition kann besagen, mein Urteil muß mit der Natur dieses von mir vorgestellten Inhalts übereinstimmen, dann würden wir die Definition zugeben. Wir haben es aber deutlicher ausge. Aber gewöhnlich versteht man dabei unter Wirklichkeit eben mehr, die objektive Wirklichkeit, wie sie ist, unabhängig von meinem Bewusstsein. Dann würde allerdings ein wesentlicher Unterschied gegeben sein. Allein die Definition trifft doch nicht auf alle Fälle zu. Nehme ich ein negatives Urteil: Es gibt keine Sphinx, so ist doch das Urteil wahr. Wo ist da die Wirklichkeit? Ist etwa die objektive Realität die nichtseiende Sphinx? Oder die Sphinx?! Es kann allein der Gedanke mit dem Gedanken, mit dem Inhalt, der mir als zu beurteilender gegeben ist,
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Accordingly both the truth makers as well as the truth bearers, according to Stumpf, are in the mind, though he proceeds to insist that the possibility of inferring an objective reality beyond the mind is not thereby dismissed (Q 14/57b). Another important distinction that is of great importance is of course the one between evident and blind judgments. The task of practical epistemology is to help us in making evident ones and avoiding blind ones. Now that we understand his views of presentations and judgments as well as their expression in language, let us consider how he attempts to fulfill the task which is indeed the very heart of logic as he conceives of it. 4 Testing Cognitions Cognitions (Erkenntnisse) in Stumpf’s terminology are evident judgments. As we have already seen, there are, according to him, two kinds of cognitions, namely judgments that are immediately evident (unmittelbar evident) and ones that are evident via other judgments. The latter are called mediately evident (mittelbar evident). While the characterization of logic as the Kunstlehre of inference would only allow this discipline to test whether a judgment is mediately evident, Stumpf’s broader definition of it allows it to test whether a judgment is immediately evident. There are two types of immediately evident judgments. “In inner perception”, says Stumpf, “we have the first genuine and immediate cognition of matters of fact... There is, however, yet another rock that stands just as firm: universal cognition of axioms”.35 The former are a posteriori and latter a priori. Stumpf maintains that an inner perception is in fact one with the inwardly perceived mental phenomenon. Here again practical epistemology draws upon psychology, as he elaborates in the following passage: übereinstimmen. Ebenso bei hypothetischen Sätzen: Wenn ich ein Vöglich wär, flög ich zu dir. / Ferner die mathematischen Sätze (Geometrie). Also in dem Sinn, wie Aristoteles, die Scholastiker und einige Neuere die Definition verstehen, können wir sie nicht zugeben”. 35 Q 14/75a: “In der inneren Wahrnehmung haben wir die erste echte und unmittelbare Tatsachenerkenntnis... Es gibt allerdings noch einen Fels, der ebenso fest steht: die allgemeinen Axiome”.
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Psychology shows that so-called inner perception is not an independent mental state alongside that state which we perceive in us. I have a feeling and am conscious of this. ... These are not two states, the feeling and the perception thereof, but rather a single state regarding which we can distinguish these two sides or moments. For this reason we speak of conscious mental states. We designate consciousness as a property of states. Otherwise very peculiar consequences would arise. If, for instance, my auditory sensation is a mental state, and if now my consciousness of this auditory sensation is also a state, more particularly a new mental state, it would follow that I would have to hear the relevant tone twice; once insofar as as it is the content of the auditory sensation, and then insofar as it is a content of the second act, of my consciousness of the auditory sensation, perception of the auditory sensation. We find it, however, simply as a matter of fact in us. The perception of hearing must therefore be only one act with the hearing itself. It is a peculiarity of mental acts that they involve this “selfconsciousness”. What we mean by this self-consciousness, however, is not that consciousness of a person, as this develops only gradually in a person, by which one relates everything that one sensuously apprehends to a person. What is meant here is only that there is simultaneously also given with every mental state its consciousness, the selfreflection of this state, as it were.36 36
Q 14/75a-b: “Die Psychologie zeigt, dass die sogenannte innere Wahrnehmung nicht ein selbständiger psychischer Zustand ist neben demjenigen Zustand, welchen wir in uns wahrnehmen. Ich habe ein Gefühl und bin mir dieses bewusst. ... Das sind nicht zwei Zustände, das Gefühl und seine Wahrnehmung, sondern es ist ein einziger Zustand, an dem wir nur diese beiden Seiten oder Momente unterscheiden können. Deswegen sprechen wir von bewussten psychischen Zuständen. Wir bezeichnen das Bewusstsein als Eigenschaft der Zustände. Sonst würden sich ganz eigentümliche Konsequenzen ergeben. Wenn z.B. meine Gehörsempfindung ein psychischer Zustand ist, und wenn nun mein Bewusstsein von dieser Gehörsempfindung auch ein Zustand ist, und zwar ein neuer psychischer Zustand, so würde folgen, dass ich den bezüglichen Ton zweimal hören müßte: einmal, insofern er Inhalt der Gehörsempfindung ist, und dann, insofern er Inhalt des zweiten Aktes ist, meines Bewusstseins von der Gehörsempfindung, Wahrnehmung von der Gehörsempfindung. Wir finden ihn aber bloß einmal faktisch in uns. Es muß also die Wahrnehmung des Hörens mit dem Hören selbst nur e i n Akt sein. Es ist nur eine Eigentümlichkeit der psychischen Akte, dass sie dieses “Selbstbewusstsein” mit sich führen. Wir verstehen hier unter Selbstbewusstsein allerdings nicht jenes Bewusstsein einer Persönlichkeit, wie es sich im Menschen allmählich erst entwickelt, wonach man alles, was man empfindet, auf eine Persönlichkeit bezieht. Was hier gemeint ist, das ist nur dies, dass mit jedem psychischen Zustand zugleich sein Bewusstsein, gleichsam die Selbstspiegelung dieses Zustandes mitgegeben ist”.
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This intrinsic unity of the act with its unity is Stumpf’s criterion for a posteriori immediate cognition. It is to be found only in the case of inner perception. While Stumpf accordingly regards inner perception is an immediate cognition that is in all cases accompanied with mental acts, this does not mean that one is never err about one’s own mental acts. Such a mistake can occur, for instance, when we misclassify such acts. It is also possible to err by ascribing something outwardly perceived to inner perception. When someone ascribes a pain, for instance, to a phantom limb, this is indeed an error, but the error does not belong to inner perception. Another erroneous belief is to be found in the view that objects of the imagination are inwardly perceived. The act of imagining a golden mountain, for instance, is most certainly inwardly perceived, but the golden mountain is not. Nor are the things we dream about inwardly perceived, though the mental states that occur while we are dreaming are. Outer perception, according to Stumpf, is a case of instinctive judgment rather than immediate cognition. This is not to say that is impossible to know that there is an external world. The fact that there is sometimes a regularity to be observed among our sensations, but sometimes not, is for Stumpf a problem that “cannot be solved in any other way but by means of the assumption of a world of objective things which has effects on our consciousness”.37 Here, however, we have an inference rather than immediate cognition. Another instance where we may erroneously think that we have immediate evidence is memory (Gedächtnis), which can, like the sensations in outer perception, be taken to indicate something objectively beyond consciousness, but only by means of inference. As for the universal cognition of axioms, Stumpf maintains that the immediate evidence here is to be found in the grasp of the laws of non-contradiction and of the excluded middle. There are of course infinitely many cases in which these laws can be applied. We can know, for instance, that it is not the case that God exists and at the same time does not exist. We can also know that either God exists or God does not exist. While infinitely many instances of immediate cognition are thereby yielded, Stumpf says that the laws of non-contradiction and of 37
Q 14/78a: “Dies läßt sich nicht anders lösen als durch die Annahme einer Welt von objektiven Dingen, die auf unser Bewußtsein einwirken ...”.
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the excluded middle are schemata for all such instances. These two laws, however, cannot be reduced to each other because they differ in quality, as he explains thus: The first is negative: The existence and non-existence of A together is not. The second, however, is affirmative like every disjunction. It affirms something, more particularly one of the two: there is either A or the non-existence of A. An affirmation, however, can never in reality be reduced to a negation and vice-versa.38
Historically speaking, one other candidate for the axioms which can be immediately cognized would be the law of sufficient reason. This law could mean that every event or occurrence has a reason, i.e. an efficient cause. In this case it is the law of causality (Kausalgesetz), which is not regarded by Stumpf as an actual axiom, but rather to be proven empirically. 39 Insofar as the law under consideration means that nothing may be asserted without a sufficient reason, it is merely a definition of evidence. A judgment is evident only when there is a sufficient reason for it, whether this reason is to be found in the judgment itself (immediate evidence) or in another judge (mediate evidence). The immediate evidence of the laws of non-contradiction and of the excluded middle, according to Stumpf, cannot be contested by the skeptic, who inevitably presupposes these laws. Here we see the Aristotelian argument: He presupposes both axioms, but especially the law of noncontradiction. By denying it he makes use of the law. He asserts that A can be and also not be. By asserting this statement, he eo ipso denies the opposite.40 38
Q 14/80a-b: “Der erste ist negativ: Es ist nicht die Existenz und die Nichtexistenz von A zusammen. Der zweite aber ist affirmativ wie jede Disjunktion. Er bejaht etwas, und zwar eins von beiden: Entweder es ist A oder das Nichtsein von A. Aber eine Affirmation lässt sich niemals auf eine Negation, und umgekehrt, in Wirklichkeit zurückführen.” 39 Stumpf does not further elaborate on this view in his Halle lectures on logic. As regards his later investigations concerning the law of causality, see Rollinger 2008, 263-326 (previously in Rollinger 2001). 40 Q 14/83a: “Er setzt beide Axiome aus, insbesondere aber den Satz des Widerspruchs. Indem er ihn leugnet, bedient er sich des Satzes. Er behauptet, es kann A sowohl sein als auch nicht sein. Indem er diesen Satz behauptet, leugnet er eo ipso das Gegenteil”.
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Nor can they be inductively proven, contrary to the view that John Stuart Mill holds. Since all axioms fit the schemata of these laws, they are in this sense analytic. Stumpf rejects the Kantian thesis that there are in addition synthetic judgments a priori. All of mathematics for him consists of analytic judgments. Here of course the implication is that whatever is mathematically known to be true must somehow fit the schemata of the law of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle, though Stumpf does not explore this implication, which could very well be called a kind of “logicism” in the sense of the philosophy of mathematics that was later to be defended by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. There are cases of pseudo-axioms, according to Stumpf. “Metaphysics and the history of science are teeming with such only apparently analytic statements”.41 Though he refers to John Stuart Mill’s treatment of this topic in A System of Logic (Book III, Chapter V) as a “very instructive consideration (sehr instruktive Betrachtung)” (Q 14/93b), he differs from Mill on one very important point, namely in his view that there are actually cases of genuine axioms. The fact that philosophers have put forward propositions as if they were axioms, although they are not in fact so, is nonetheless undeniable. We have just seen that the law of causality, which had previously been taken to be axiomatic by some philosophers, is in fact not so. Sometimes an appeal is also made to what we can and cannot present in support of claims about what can and cannot exist. We cannot, for instance, imagine space as finite and thus the claim has been made that space is infinite. In response to this particular argument, Stumpf points out, “We cannot imagine an infinite space. Indeed, this is even less conceivable than the former.” 42 Wherever an alleged axiom cannot be formulated in terms of either the law of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle, it is not a genuine axiom for Stumpf. If it is true, it must be derived from other axioms or proven empirically. We can accordingly summarize Stumpf’s practical epistemology as it pertains to immediate cognition in the following way. If the judg41
Q 14/98b: “Die Metaphysik und die Geschichte der Wissenschaft wimmeln von dergleichen nur scheinbar analytischen Sätzen”. Here of course Stumpf does not mean metaphysics (see his lecture notes on this topic in the present volume) as he himself elaborated on it in his lectures, but rather as a historical datum. 42 Q 14/94b: “Wir können uns in Wirklichkeit keinen unendlichen Raum vorstellen. Ja, dieses ist noch weniger denkbar als das erste”.
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ment is not a priori and therefore allegedly factual, it is not immediately evident if there is no identity between the act of judging and the accepted object. If the judgment is by contrast allegedly a priori, it is not immediately evident unless it fits the schemata of the law of noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle. There is thus no doubt that Stumpf is working within the empiricist tradition. Though he did not agree with Mill about axioms, he was in this respect closer to earlier empiricist thinkers. And while Humean skepticism is sometimes viewed as a dead end of empiricist thought, Stumpf is much more confident about what can be achieved through inference. Here we can only be brief regarding Stumpf’s treatment of inferences, for he discusses them in the contrast with traditional views. A consideration of all the fine points in this regard would take us far afield in our attempt get an overview of his practical epistemology. As tradition demands, Stumpf divides them into deductive ones and the inductive ones. However, he does not follow the traditional characterization of deduction as inference from the general to the particular or that of induction as inference from the particular to the general. Induction for Stumpf is simply any inference whereby the premises make the conclusion probable. While this approach to induction would hardly seem controversial nowadays, it was in fact hardly considered until the final decades of the nineteenth century. As for deduction, Stumpf of course makes use of his characterization of judgment as acceptance or rejection, best formulated by means of existential statements. The implication of this view of judgment entails numerous revisions of traditional logic which are too numerous to cite here. An obvious example would be a change the view of the immediate inference that was traditionally allowed from an A statement (“All human beings are mortal”) to an I statement (“Some human beings are mortal”). Since an A statement for Stumpf is negative (“There is no human being that is not mortal”), it cannot entail a statement that affirms that anything exists (in this case a mortal human being). Moreover, the analysis of syllogisms into modes and figures as well as the traditional rules for deductive inference have to be changed in view of the new theory of judgment. Accordingly Stumpf maintains that this psychological theory will be of great consequence for that branch of practical epistemology which involves the testing of mediated cognitions.
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5 Conclusion We have seen that Stumpf characterizes logic as practical epistemology, more particularly as the Kunstlehre of correct judgment. This discipline for him is in large measure based on the psychological theory of judgment, but also involves considerations of the presentations that underlie judgments and also of the linguistic expressions of both presentations and judgments. The central psychological theory in this discipline turns out to be the characterization of judgment as acceptance and rejection, best expressed in existential judgments. As for the testing of whether such judgments are really instances of knowledge, Stumpf deals with immediate cognitions as well as with inferences. The immediate cognitions for him are either ones in which there is an identity between the act of judging and the object of judgment or ones that fit the schemata of the law of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle. The former are a posteriori and the latter a priori (or analytic). As for inferences, these are acceptable only when they follow the rules of syllogistic inference, as revised in accordance with the above-mentioned theory of judgment, or when they are made in accordance with the laws of probability. Further details of this reform of logic would best be presented in an edition of the relevant manuscripts. For the time being, however, the above sketch will have to suffice for providing us with a picture of philosophy from an empirical standpoint in the domain of logic. We therefore see in Stumpf’s practical epistemology a direction in the empiricist tradition that diverges significantly from the one taken by Humean skepticism, but also from John Stuart Mill’s views (especially with regard to the status of axioms), and most certainly from the later empiricist tendencies.
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References Beneke, Friedrich Eduard. 1832, Lehrbuch der Logik als Kunstlehre des Denkens. Berlin / Prosen / Bomberg: Ernst Siegfried Mittler. Besoli, Stefano and Martinelli, Riccardo (eds.) (2001), Carl Stumpf e la fenomenologia dell’esperienza immediata. Macerata: Quodlibet. Bolzano, Bernard. 1837. Wissenschaftslehre. Sulzbach: J. E. von Seidel. Brentano, Franz (1874): Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. –– (1869-1877): Logik. Manuscript EL 80, preliminary edition in http://gandalf.uib.no/Brentano/texts. Harvard: Houghton Library. –– (1878-85): Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen. Unpublished manuscript EL 72. Harvard: Houghton Library. –– (1911): Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. –– (eds) Binder, Thomas and Chrudzimski, Thomas (2008): Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte / Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos-Verlag. Campbell, Keith (1990): Abstract Particulars. Oxford: Blackwell. Höfler, Alois, in collaboration with Meinong, Alexius (1890): Logik. Prague / F. Tempsky. Leipzig: G. Freytag. Husserl, Edmund (1900): Logische Unterschungen. Vol. I: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer. –– (1901): Logische Untersuchungen. Vol. II. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer. –– (trans.) Findlay, J.N. (2001): Logical Investigations. London / New York: Routledge. Jacquette, Dale (ed.) (2004): The Cambridge Companion to Brentano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraus, Oskar (1919): Franz Brentano: Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre. Munich: Oskar Beck. Lowe, E. J. (2006): The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marty, Anton (1875): Über den Ursprung der Sprache. Würzburg: A. Stuber. Marty, Anton, (eds) Eisenmeier et al. (1916): Gesammelte Schriften. II. Band, erste Abteilung: Schriften zur deskriptive Psychologie und Sprachphilosophie. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer. Masaryk, Thomas (1887): Versuch einer concreten Logik. Classifikation und Organisation der Wissenschaften. Vienna: Carl Konegen. Meinong, Alexius (1902): Über Annahmen. Leipzig: Johann Ambroius Barth. Miklosich, Franz (1883): Subjectlose Sätze. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller. 2nd edition. Mill, John Stuart (1872): An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Questions Discussed in his Writings. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. –– (1882): A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and Methods of Scientific Investigation. New York: Harper & Brothers. Poli, Roberto (ed.) (1998): The Brentano Puzzle. Aldershot / Brookfield / Sydney / Singapore: Ashgate.
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Rollinger, Robin D. (1993): Meinong and Husserl on Abstraction and Universals: From Hume Studies I to Logical Investigations II. Amsterdam / Atlanta: Rodopi. –– (1998): “Linguistic Expressions and Acts of Meaning: Comments on Anton Marty’s Philosophy of Language”, in Poli 1998, 215-226. –– (1999): Husserl‘s Position in the School of Brentano. Dordrect / Boston / London: Kluwer. –– (2001): “La causalità nella Erkenntnislehre di Stumpf“, in Besoli (2001), 163-199. –– (2004): “Brentano and Husserl”, in Jacquette (2004), 255-276. –– (2008): Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, and Meinong on Mind and Object. Frankfurt: a. M.: Ontos. –– (2009): “Brentano’s Logic and Marty’s Early Philosophy of Language”, Brentano Studien 12 (2006/09): 77-98. –– (2010): Philosophy of Language and Other Matters in the Work of Anton Marty. Rodopi: Amsterdam / New York. –– (2012): “Marty’s Descriptive Semasiology in Relation to Psychology and Logic”, Paradigmi 2, pp. 23-46. –– (2013): “Immanent and Real States of Affairs in Husserl’s Early Theory of Judgment: Reflections on Manuscripts from 1893/1894 and their Background in the Logic of Brentano and Stumpf”, in Schaar, Maria van der (2013), 133-150. –– (forthcoming): Franz Brentano’s Early Logic and Epistemology: A Study Based on Manuscripts. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi. Schaar, Maria van der (ed.) (2013): Judgement and the Epistemic Foundation of Logic. Dordrecht / Heidelberg / New York / London: Springer. Schleiermacher, Friedrich, (ed.) Jonas, L. (1834): Dialektik (from the Friedrich Schleiermacher’s literarischer Nachlass zur Philosophie). Berlin: Reimer. Schleiermacher, Friedrich, (ed.) Halpern, I. (1903): Dialektik. Berlin: Mayer & Müller. Sigwart, Christoph, (trans.) Dendy Helen (1895): Logic. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. New York: Macmillan & Co. Simons, Peter (1994): “Particulars in Particular Clothing: Three Trope Theories of Substance”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994), 553-575. Stumpf, Carl (1873): Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (Q 11): Vorlesungen über Psychologie. Husserl’s lecture notes from the winter semester 1886/87 in Halle (two notebooks). Leuven: Husserl Archives. –– (Q 14): Logik und Enzyklopädie der Philosophie. Husserl’s lecture notes from the summer semester 1887 in Halle. Leuven: Husserl Archives. –– (1892) “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, Abhandlungen der philosophischphilologischen der königlich bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 19, 467-516. –– (1919): “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in Kraus (1919), pp. 87-148. –– (trans.) Rollinger (1999), “Syllabus for Psychology”, in Rollinger (1999), 285-309. –– (trans.) Rollinger (1999), “Syllabus for Logic”, in Rollinger (1999), 311-337. Üeberweg, Friedrich, (trans.) Lindsay, Thomas A. (1871): System of Logic and History of Logical Doctrines. London: Longman, Green, and Co. Überweg, Friedrich (1874): System der Logik und Geschichte der logischen Lehren. Bonn: Adolph Marcus. Fourth edition.
CARL STUMPF’S DEBT TO HERMANN LOTZE NIKOLAY MILKOV (UNIVERSITY OF PADERBORN)
Abstract. Our objective is to present Carl Stumpf as an autonomous philosopher and psychologist, not simply as another member of the school of Franz Brentano. To this purpose, we explore the relatedness of Stumpf to the supervisor of his two dissertations, Hermann Lotze. Lotze communicated two main ideas to Stumpf: (i) the importance of experimental scientific investigations for philosophy; (ii) the independence of the content of human knowledge, both of experience and of judgment, from the knowing subject.
1 ‘Stumpf, who will save you from Brentano?’ Carl Stumpf (1848–1937) is a key figure in the fin de siècle germanophone philosophy. Unfortunately, after World War I, interest in Stumpf as a philosopher waned. One of the reasons was that already in the 1920s the attention of mainstream philosophers shifted to the rising rivalry between analytic and continental philosophy. The authors of Stumpf’s Festschrift of 1923 were mainly psychologists from the Berlin Institute of Psychology, founded by Stumpf himself in 1906. The interest in Carl Stumpf’s philosophy was revived only in the last twenty years. In this respect the Neo-Brentanists rendered a great service.1 But while association of Carl Stumpf to Franz Brentano fostered the former’s studies, it also gave rise to one-sided interpretations of Stumpf as a philosopher. In this regard his importance and idiosyncrasy as a philosopher has remained overlooked. In this connection it should be noted that before World War II, Carl Stumpf was considered an autonomous philosophically-oriented psychologist in his own right, not simply another member of Franz Brentano’s school. (Moog 1922, 157–61; Lehmann 1943, 107–13) 1
The Carl Stumpf Society was founded only in 2010. See. http://www.carl-stumpf.de/
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One of the objectives of this paper is to free Stumpf from Brentano: to try to see him as an autonomous philosopher. There is no better means for achieving this aim than to study the relation between Carl Stumpf and his PhD and Habilitation Thesis supervisor Herman Lotze − Stumpf received his PhD in 1868, and his Habilitation in 1870 − at the University of Göttingen. Between 1870 and 1873 Stumpf was also an Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) at the University of Göttingen where Lotze was a distinguished Professor. Soon Lotze became his ‘devoted fatherly adviser’ (1917, 5). The professor and his student were so close that in 1869 Lotze seriously contemplated the possibility of visiting Stumpf in Würzburg or Aschaffenburg during the summer vacation. (Lotze 2003, 541) It is therefore no small wonder that Stumpf’s first book Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (1873), which was praised by figures such as William James and Bertrand Russell, was dedicated to Lotze. But it was not only Lotze that helped Stumpf in distancing himself from Franz Brentano, his teacher and source of inspiration. In his Selbstdarstellung Stumpf also remembered that his real interest in the sciences first developed in Göttingen where he also studied physics under Friedrich Kohlrausch and Wilhelm Weber. Along with the mathematician Felix Klein, Stumpf founded the ‘Eskimo Society’, a group of young scientists that read papers in different academic disciplines − Stumpf presented the position of philosophy. (1924, 8) In these years Stumpf also became acquainted with Leipzig psychophysicists Fechner and E. H. Weber. Of course, Stumpf was explicit about the fact that Franz Brentano had played a central role in his philosophical development. Later Stumpf remembered: My whole understanding of philosophy, the correct and mistaken methods of philosophizing, the basic and essential doctrines of logic and epistemology, psychology, ethics and metaphysics, which I still maintain today, are his doctrines. (1919, 144)
But he also noted that ‘[Lotze’s] way of thinking had influenced my thinking more than Brentano wanted it to be the case, despite the fact that the outline of my epistemology remained that of Brentano’s. (Stumpf 1924, 4–5) Finally, was also cautious enough to note that ‘in general, such questions of property can be better judged by third par-
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ties, since those who do not pertain to the family can easily discern family resemblances.’ (1919, 144) This will precisely be our task in this paper: We shall try to outline which parts of Carl Stumpf’s philosophy were developed under Brentano’s influence and which parts under Lotze’s, profiting from the distance in time. 2 Zeitgeist Traditionally, philosophers are classified according to the countries in which they were born, received their education and made their academic careers. But it can be also insightful to group together philosophers that were born in the same year. If we follow this approach, we shall see that many influential European philosophers were born in 1848: the year of sweeping political revolutions all over Europe, particularly in Germany. Besides Carl Stumpf, in that year were also born Gottlob Frege, Wilhelm Windelband, Hermann Diels, Johannes Rehmke and Johannes Volkelt, in Germany, and Arthur Balfour and Bernard Bosanquet, in the United Kingdom. The question arises: what shaped the philosophical formation of this group of philosophers? Our guess is that it was the outstanding figure of Hermann Lotze. In 1864 Lotze published the third volume of his Microcosm, the first two volumes, being issued in 1856 and 1858 respectively, made him one of the most worldwide established philosophers of the time. At least four of our authors, Windelband, Frege, Stumpf, and Bonsanquet, were clearly influenced by Lotze: Windelband was his closest follower, Frege discussed Lotze’s ‘greater’ Logik in his ‘17 Key Sentences to Logic’, and Bosanquet was instrumental in the translation of the same book by Lotze and also of his ‘greater’ Metaphysics into English (1885–6). (Milkov 2010) The present paper will show that Lotze also considerably influenced Carl Stumpf. Of course, there were also other philosophers at the time that had shaped the character of philosophers born in 1848. One of them was Lotze’s oldest ally in the fight against subjectivism in philosophy, Adolf Trendelenburg. Another figure of the same era was Otto Liebmann, a former student of Lotze, whose famous book Kant und die Epigonen (1865) gave birth to Neo-Kantianism. A legion of other scientifically oriented philosophers also inspired and educated the 1848 generation: Fries, Herbart, and Fechner, among others. This point speaks against the claim that ‘the years from 1830
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to 1870 circa were a period of a crisis and decline for philosophy in Germany.’ (Libardi 1996, 31) We see here exactly the opposite. Between 1840 and 1870 German philosophy was on the rise: it prepared the philosophical Renaissance that Stumpf speaks about in his 1907 inaugural address given as the rector of the University of Berlin. The historical mission of the 1848 generation was that it realized (materialized) its achievements. Unfortunately, many of these developments has remained overlooked until today. 3 Historical Context of the Introduction of the Concept of Intentionality by Brentano In order to correctly appreciate the respective influence of Brentano and Lotze on Carl Stumpf, we must first investigate the relationship between Lotze and Brentano as philosophers. There are both differences and affinities between them. Some authors claim that ‘there was, to be sure, great mutual respect between Brentano and Lotze, as indicated by the fact that Brentano sent two of his pupils,2 Anton Marty and Carl Stumpf, to study with Lotze and also by the fact that Lotze played an important role in Brentano’s call at the University of Vienna in 1874.’ (Rollinger, 2001 112) In truth, we can scarcely speak about symmetry in the relationship between Lotze and Brentano; neither was their relationship simply a matter of mutual respect. Without any doubt, Lotze appreciated Brentano as a rising star of German philosophy. This is clear from the fact that he was instrumental in Brentano’s appointment as a professional philosopher. This fact, however, is not to be overestimated. The criteria that led Lotze to support young philosophers were threefold: ‘Has the person the knowledge that is a necessary in philosophy today; does he also have a command of the scientific methods; and is he deadly serious in his philosophical interests? Lotze recommended Brentano on the basis of these criteria’, no more than that. (Baumann 1909, 179) Furthermore, when in June 1872 Brentano and Stumpf visited Lotze in his home near Göttingen (for some reasons, everyone called it ‘the cafe grinder’), ‘Lotze was friendly but discreet [schweigsam], as he 2
In fact, there were at least three: Brentano also sent his pupil Johannes Wolff to study with Lotze. (1919, 103)
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often was.’ (p. 125) Apparently, Brentano’s visit to Lotze in his home was of no extraordinary importance for the latter. In short, while Brentano learned much from Lotze, Lotze scarcely learned anything from Brentano. To be sure, Lotze was 21 years older than Brentano and started early his career so that (as we already have mentioned) he was a well-established philosopher well before Brentano had habilitated in 1866. This point was already noted in the literature: ‘[Trendelenburg and Lotze] are also … Brentano’s teachers. The historical–philosophical importance of Brentano consists in that he had revealed in an exemplary way the strength of these influences in the full variety of their forms.’ (Orth 1997, 18) To remind the reader, Brentano’s first publication on Aristotle in 1862, which was also his PhD Thesis (Brentano 1862), was dedicated to Trendelenburg. Also Brentano’s most distinguished achievement–the (re)introduction of the concept of intentionality in philosophy–was prepared by Adolf Trendelenburg and Hermann Lotze with the concept of experienced consciousness that has a process character. Decisive [at that] is the thesis about the absolute difference between psychical and physical appearances and about the primacy of the psychical phenomena over the physical. (Orth 1997, 24)
Two further points are of importance in this respect: (i) Lotze considered the concept of mind as a ‘phenomenological expression’. (ibid., 21 f.) We have no singular referent for the soul but varieties of psychical phenomena that are to be described. In this sense Lotze also used the term ‘descriptive (or empirical) psychology’. (ii) The presupposition of intentionality is satisfied by Lotze’s conception of substance as an entity ‘that is capable to effect and to suffer.’ (1879, 481) This whole story shows that Brentano was not a ‘lonely genius’ that advanced his philosophy in complete isolation from other contemporary philosophers. In this respect the attitude of the NeoBrentanists towards the source of their inspiration, Franz Brentano, is similar to the attitude of the Neo-Fregeans, such as Michael Dummett, towards Gottlob Frege. It is believed in both cases that Brentano and Frege were solitary thinkers. Even the picture of Brentano, drawn by some more objective historians is incomplete. For instance:
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In fact, the Aristotelian Renaissance itself was part and parcel of a massive movement against Kant’s formalism that was initiated in Germany by Friedrich Schleiermacher and was continued by such philosophers and logicians as Trendelenburg, Lotze and also Frege. The latter in particular insisted that his logic, in contrast to that of George Boole, was not a formal logic, but a logic of content. 4 Further Points on which Lotze Preceded Brentano But there were also three other points on which the ideas of Lotze and Brentano were related to one another. Of course, we are not going to explore their genealogical connection since this task goes well beyond the scope of our study. We will only insist here on the fact that whereas some authors uncritically maintain that these ideas were introduced in philosophy by Franz Brentano, they were in fact put forth, perhaps in a somewhat different form, by Hermann Lotze well before him. (i) Priority of Judgment in Mental Life. Similarly to Brentano 20 years later, Lotze radically enhanced the role played by judgment in our mental life. Lotze, in particular, insisted that judgment is not the result of an association of two presentations. In this respect, he was opposed to the British empiricism of Hume and Mill. In Stumpf, too, the judgment plays a primary role in our perception of sounds, colours and space, and also in our emotions and volitions. (ii) Content of Mind. Lotze also introduced the concept of ‘content’—both in connection with experience and judgment. The content of our experience is the perceptual data of our knowledge; the content of judgments consists in the states of affairs.3 (Milkov 2002) Among other things, the concept of the content of perceptions gave rise to the concept of sense-data. The latter was developed under Lotze’s influence first by Josiah Royce (Royce was one year long Lotze’s student in Göttingen), and then by William James; this concept was much later espoused by the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, G. E. 3
Cf. § 8, (ii).
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Moore and Bertrand Russell. (Milkov 2001) This shows, among other things, how Lotze’s ideas, which are clearly related to that of Brentano, also found resonance in other philosophical traditions that have little to do with Brentano. (iii) Objectivism. Well before Brentano, Lotze had stopped the exploration of the subject–object opposition, which was at the centre of philosophy since Kant. Instead, he directed his attention to the order that is characteristic of both matter and mind. The concept of relation especially played a role within Lotze’s theory of order. He used to repeat: ‘it belongs to the notion and nature of existence to be related.’ (Lotze 1885, ii. 587) Beatrice Centi is right when she maintains that, according to Lotze, to think means to relate: for him, space is an ‘inter-related seriality’. (Centi, 72) This, however, does not mean that Lotze never spoke of individuals. Indeed, what is related are the individual contents of perception. In other words, Lotze’s relationism presupposes an ontology of individuals. 5 Relatedness and Divergence Between Brentano, Lotze and Stumpf: Descriptive Psychology Stumpf himself maintained that ‘Lotze’s views concur with those of Brentano only very partly [sehr teilweise].’ (1919, 102) Negative as this statement might appear, it makes clear that on some points, at least, the positions of Lotze and Brentano coincide. The general point on which Lotze, Brentano and Stumpf all agree is that philosophy is a part of science: it is a very general science. It thus forms a continuum with science.4 As Stumpf puts it, philosophy is ‘after-science’ (Nachwissenschaft); it investigates the common laws of all sciences. It is a theory of the world (Welttheorie). (1906, 43) In more specific terms, Stumpf held that both Lotze and Brentano explored the ‘structural characteristics of mental functions’. 5 (1924, 46) The point is that in the realm of appearances, there are such things as ‘immanent laws of structure’, which are rather different from the causal laws—the latter being not valid in this realm. (1906, 28) But what were these ‘laws of structure’? They consisted mainly of two types: those explored by descriptive psychology, and those ex4
A thesis later revived by Quine. In his book on William James, Stumpf identifies ‘Lotze and Brentano [as] the great masters of analytic psychology and introspection’. (1928b, 28) 5
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plored by, what we shall call, ‘philosophical logic’. We are going to discuss the former in the lines of this section below, and the latter in §6. *** Following Brentano, Stumpf severely criticized Kant’s formalism. Kant’s distinction between form and matter was not made on the basis of psychological anlysis but through empty metaphysical deliberations. But ‘nothing can be epistemologically true and psychologically false.’ (Stumpf 1891, 482) That is the reason why Kant’s formalism was harmful for the development of both philosophy and psychology. Indeed, space, time and causality, characterized by Kant as a priori forms of human reason, are nothing but contents of consciousness. Each of them has its own internal multiplicity. (Ibid., 485) Historically, Brentano opposed Kant by following some of the ideas of Aristotle.6 Roughly, while Kant was more of a constructivist philosopher, Brentano was a kind of monolithic philosopher. While Kant developed a particular ‘predilection for constructions’, Brentano and Stumpf tried to bring to light the ‘things themselves’. To be more exact, Brentano introduced the discipline of descriptive psychology as a science in an effort to provide sound foundations to philosophy as a whole. Its task is to reveal and describe the building blocks of both science and philosophy. It should be noted that while descriptive psychology was the discipline of Brentano and his school, Lotze in fact practiced it for decades. More specifically, his analysis of the content of perception was in fact a form of descriptive psychology. Brentano insisted that description is prior to explanation and to genetic psychology in general, ‘which seeks to find the laws of mental event as unfolding in time’. (Smith 1994, 27) But the very distinction between ‘genetic’ and ‘descriptive’ science was introduced by Lotze who strongly distinguished between the given, or what is, what happens, e.g. what changes (i.e. what is ‘genetic’), and what is valid. Let us also note that in following with the physiologist Ewald Hering, Carl Sumpf characterized the descriptive psychology as nativist: it explores the origin of our mental states: ‘Nativists are those [scientists] who assume the initial [Ursprüngliche], [and] empiricists are 6
Ultimately, Brentano’s move paralleled Leibniz’s turn back to Aristotle (in Leibniz’s case, to Aristotle’s ‘substantial forms’) as a means against the radically mechanistic philosophy of Locke and Descartes.
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those who embrace genetic explanations.’ (1883, 96) In other words, Stumpf identified ‘empirical psychology’ with ‘genetic psychology’. Brentano, in contrast, understood descriptive psychology as empirical psychology. For our study, it is of special importance to understand that both Lotze and Stumpf combined nativism and experimental psychology. In other words, in contrast to Brentano, Stumpf was both a descriptive psychologist and, at the same time, an external (non-introspective) experiential psychologist, who checked with experiments the results at which he arrived with his nativist descriptions, without, however, committing a ‘genetic fallacy’, that is, without becoming a genetic psychologist. Brentano’s psychology, in contrast, ‘was empirical [not in Stumpf’s sense] without being experimental.’ (Libardi 1996, 36) In fact, Brentano advanced a new kind of empiricism that can also be called ‘introspective empiricism’. Furthermore, exactly like Lotze, Stumpf was not only a philosopher but also a scientist. In contrast to this, despite the fact that in his dissertation Brentano had declared that ‘the true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural science’ (Thesis iv), he never did ‘real science’. 7 (Ewen 2008, 21) In particular, Brentano was never concerned with psychological experiments, preferring instead armchair introspective psychological research. In this connection, it should be noted that in his Address to the Berlin University as its Rector in 1907, ‘The Renaissance of Philosophy’, Stumpf repeatedly referred to Fechner and Lotze as his predecessors, not to Brentano. The short hegemony of the idealistic systems in Germany ended with a catastrophe: they became obsolete already in the 1840s. In the 1850s and 1860s, Fechner and Lotze arrived on the scene by developing a bottom-up philosophy that started from the sciences and verified their philosophical statements with the new discoveries and theories of science. Some authors explain Stumpf’s statement on the basis of the ‘confessional biases of that epoch’ in Germany, having in mind that he read his address at the Prussian—and protestant— Berlin University. (Münch 2006, 57 n. 21) In truth, it refers to a genu7
Among other things, this point found its expression in Brentano’s negative attitude to the Einstein Special’s Theory of Relativity—he found it ‘incoherent’.
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ine difference between Carl Stumpf’s and Franz Brentano’s philosophy.8 Apparently, ‘Stumpf had a drastically different idea of what scientific methodology actually is. Unlike Brentano, he left no place for any prominence of inner perception and its alleged evidence.’ (Martinelli 2006, 82) This provides Riccardo Martinelli enough reason to call him an empiricist.9 As we have already seen, however, Carl Stumpf understood himself as a nativist, not as an empiricist. But what Stumpf meant when he criticised empiricism was, in fact, the ‘genetic’ approach in psychology, practised by colleagues of his such as Wilhelm Wundt. *** Finally, we must also mention a point on which Brentano openly criticised Lotze. Above all, it was the latter’s theory of local signs which explains the relation between mind and matter in terms of our perception of space and movement. According to Lotze, what we directly see when perceiving a movement are only patches of colour. What enables us to perceive the fact of movement is the effort that we ourselves make in perceiving the movement. Lotze calls this stimulus a “local-sign.” It is a means of transforming sense-perceptions into space-values. (Milkov 2010, § 3(e)) Stumpf accepted Brentano’s criticism. Apparently, Brentano and Stumpf were against the increased role of free will in judgment, which Lotze’s theory introduced. In other words, they were against the involvement of a conscious, will-informed action that constitutes our reality. It must be noted that Lotze embraced this theory following an idea of J. G. Fichte. In other words, it was the trace of German Idealism in his philosophy—a trace that both Brentano and Stumpf felt to be incompatible with their objectivist intuitions. 6 From a Strict Analytic Method to Philosophical Logic The extensive use of experimental methods in descriptive psychology was only possible because both Lotze and Stumpf took an idiosyncratic analytic method as the starting point of descriptive psychology. Of course, Brentano’s descriptive psychology was also an analytic 8 9
We shall address this point again in § 9. This is also the case for Schuhmann (2000/1), 63 ff.
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psychology. 10 In following with further ideas of Lotze, however, Stumpf added important new elements to it. Most importantly, Stumpf insisted that psychological analysis is possible in two ways: (i) through inner observations; (ii) through outer observations and experiments. (1879, 5) We can add to this that the former method was mainly followed by Brentano, whereas the latter mainly by Stumpf. In short, Stumpf’s analytic psychology held that through analysis [Zergliederung] of ‘impressions’, we reach the ultimate elements of concepts that we use in the ordinary thinking; elements that in the scientific thinking are combined in different ways, according to their needs. (1891, 491)
In contrast, Kant was not interested in the origin of space, time and causality but in what these concepts contribute to the scientific discourse. Besides, Kant failed to analyse these in ‘intuitions’, so they remained complex ideas. Space, for example, is perceived through different senses that grasp different parts of it: place, magnitude, etc. Stumpf’s final objective was to shed light on the ‘absolute contents’ of our mind, especially on our ideas of space and time. In this connection, he argued against the conception of the relativity of perception, defended by Fechner among others. According to the latter, every perception receives its meaning through its connection with other perceptions. In contrast, Stumpf held that tones, smells, colors, and tastes, are the sums of absolute qualities. (1883, 137) Furthermore, Stumpf explored the psychological origins (Ursprunge) of our ideas by way of an analysis of complex ideas into their constituents. An important point here is that the complex is not just a sum; but it is also not an ‘organic unity’. The relation between complexes and elements is a relation between parts and whole. And there are parts that are independent from the whole, and there are also parts that are ontologically dependent on them. We shall call this type of philosophical analysis ‘philosophical logic’. It presents an alternative way of disclosing immanent laws of structure to that of descriptive psychology. The exploration of philosophical logic was another way in which Stumpf was indebted to Hermann Lotze. Defining element of Lotze’s philosophical logic was 10
See George Stout’s Analytic Psychology (Stout 1886) written under Brentano’s influence.
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his method of recasting specific problems of German Idealism in a refined, logical form. A typical example was his approach to studying thought. Lotze connected thinking to two ‘logically different’ domains, valuing and becoming, and considered that each of them be explored by a special science: while logic investigates the validity of thinking, (genetic) psychology investigates the development of thinking. A typical discovery made by Stumpf in philosophical logic was that a kind of space is already given with the idea of quality: we cannot imagine space without colour, neither colour without space. This idea of Stumpf profoundly influenced Edmund Husserl’s theory of ‘grounding’ (fundieren): there are concepts that exist autonomously, and other kind of concepts that are ontologically dependent on autonomous concepts. Husserl himself explicitly acknowledged his debt to Stumpf on this point,11 a point that was unknown to Brentano. (Husserl 1901). We will end this section by pointing out that Stumpf’s analytic psychology was unexpectedly close to some of the leading ideas of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy. Above all, the program for investigating ‘absolute contents’, as developed in Tonpsychologie (1883–1890), was closely related to the ontology of Russell’s logical atomism. 12 In addition, Stumpf’s conception of judgment was very close to that of Frege, as developed in his famous paper ‘On Sense and Reference’. Indeed, Stumpf was explicit that judgment plays a central role not only in art or in politics, ‘but already in the most elementary spontaneous [unwillkürlicher] comprehension and interpretation of sense-impressions.’ (1899, 5) It is active in every spatial orientation. A similar position is defended in Tonpsychologie: Judging, as we understand it, does not always consist in deliberations and is not always connected with language, not even with inner speech. In many situations it is immediately and instantly connected with sense impressions. (1883, 4) 11
Husserl did so even in the short summary of his Logical Investigations, vol. 2, which he himself composed. (Husserl 1901) 12 One explanation of the fact that Stumpf’s ontology is so close to the analytic philosophy of Russell is the influence that Hermann Lotze exerted on the early Russell. (Milkov 2008)
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Similarly, Frege claimed that with every ‘serious’ thought that we have when we are awake (i.e. not in a game, or in a daydream), for example, ‘It’s raining now!’, we already judge a situation as true or false: ‘the step from the level of thought to the level of reference (the objective) is already done [in it]’.13 (Frege 1892, 34) 7 Further Points of Similarity Between Lotze and Stumpf We have already noted that although Stumpf started his philosophical development as a devoted Brentanist, he gradually distanced himself from the theoretical position of his teacher—despite the fact that emotionally, he remained Brentano’s loyal devotee. Moreover, most of Stumpf’s differences with Brentano were the result of his apprenticeship with Lotze. We have already mentioned some specific ideas that Stumpf inherited from Lotze. In this section, we will further add three points of influence that can be only expressed here in more general terms. (i) Stumpf as Non-Dogmatic Philosopher. Similarly to Lotze, and in contrast to Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf was not a dogmatic philosopher. He claimed that exactly like science, philosophy is to be a cooperative study and not just a matter of schools and sects. (1907, 194; Münch 2006, 14) A good example of this stance, as developed by Lotze, was that even Stumpf’s open criticism of his theory of local signs didn’t harm the personal friendship between teacher and student (1917, 5). The attitude of Franz Brentano to his students was exactly the opposite. A prominent case was Stumpf’s discussion with Brentano whether pleasure has content or not. More particularly, Stumpf rejected Brentano’s position that sense perceptions (bodily pain, pleasure, etc.) have content. Only our emotions have content in the form of particular states of affairs. 13
Some authors insist, referring to Paul Linke (1876–1955), that ‘many of Frege’s theories had been developed within Brentano’s school.’ (Hill 1998, 45) In fact, the otherwise enigmatic similarity between Frege and Brentano’s school can be easily explained by Frege’s connection to Lotze’s logic, which is an established fact. (Gabriel 1989) If we connect this point with Lotze’s relatedness to Brentano as we have already established, then the genealogical circle of influence gets closed. Parts of Frege’s logic reveal similarities to Brentano and his school since both Brentano and Frege adopted vital ideas from Hermann Lotze.
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Stumpf’s disagreement with Brentano on the nature of emotions had disastrous consequences: [Brentano] blamed Stumpf in a bitter tone for his deviations from the original doctrine, and suggested, as wrote Stumpf in his preface, ‘that I seemed to be a dissident for him’. […] There followed a long controversy in the correspondence and in a series of published papers, which lasted until Brentano’s death in 1917. (Fisette 2011, 40–1)
The effect of this attitude from his teacher was clearly negative for Stumpf’s intellectual development. Above all, it narrowed the scope of his philosophical explorations. Later Stumpf remembered: I admit that this was one of my motives for developing a considerable amount of time to the area of the psychology of sound and acoustical observation. There I could hope to achieve something useful without taking a position of agreement or dissent with regard to a great number of unpublished views of the teacher. It was the same with Marty in philosophy of language and Kraus in philosophy of law. (1919, 145)
(ii) Stumpf Didn’t Found His Own Philosophical School. One upshot of Lotze’s theoretical liberalism was that he didn’t found his own philosophical school. This was out of question precisely because of the ‘exceptional considerate liberality [of Lotze] in relation to every personal development. The individual person was for him an untouchable sanctity.’ (1917, 10) In a radical contrast with Brentano, Lotze instructed his readers to regard his philosophy as ‘an open market, where the reader may simply pass by the goods he does not want’ (Lotze 1874, p. 4). Similarly to Lotze and in contrast to Brentano, Stumpf never founded a school of philosophers, despite the fact that among his pupils there were such prominent figures as Edmund Husserl, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewin.14 (To some extent, Stumpf can be only considered as the father of the school of Gestalt-psychology.) Apparently, this was also the main reason why Stumpf, the philosopher, was overlooked for decades − a fate he shared with his teacher in philosophy Hermann Lotze. We further maintain that the difference in method of teaching, dogmatic or liberal, was not simply a William Jamesian matter of 14
We are going to discuss Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewin as philosophers in § 9.
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temperament. It reflects the difference in the philosophical method employed by Brentano, on the one hand, and Lotze and Stumpf, on the other. While the philosophy of Brentano was more of a deductive and synoptic nature, the philosophies of Lotze and of Stumpf were supposed to be led by empirical research—thus it proceeded from the bottom-up, and was developed step-by-step, piecemeal. Stumpf himself maintained that ‘[Brentano’s] advantage was in the deductive part of the [nativist] method, in the foundation of most general perspectives.’ (1919, 147) It cannot be a surprise, therefore, that Brentano was close to other deductive philosophers, like Husserl and Frege, also in another respect: he was dogmatic in regard to any further elaboration of his philosophy. Closer to Lotze and Stumpf, in contrast, were some empirically-oriented philosophers, such as Russell and Carnap, who practiced an ‘open door policy’, encouraging the correction of their own philosophy through their students. (Milkov 2012) (iii) Theoretical Persistency. Finally, Lotze and Stumpf were also akin in the fact that they both didn’t radically change their position in philosophy. In contrast, Brentano’s philosophy has its Part One and Part Two: while the early Brentano was a descriptive psychologist, in his second, ontologically-oriented phase, he developed an idiosyncratic philosophy of reism. 8 The Concepts of Space and State of Affairs An important characteristic of Carl Stumpf as a philosopher was that he inherited Lotze’s interest in the question of the external world: a stance that put space, time and numbers at the centre of his philosophy. Among other things, this point is supported by the fact that in his Göttingen years (1868–1873), Stumpf was also on good terms with the philosopher Julius Baumann, to which precisely the concepts of space, time and numbers were of prime importance.15 Unfortunately, Stumpf didn’t develop his ontological interests in full. As a young philosopher, he was diligently working on a theory of numbers and even wrote his Habilitation Thesis on this subject. (1870) Still in Göttingen, however, his friend Felix Klein convinced him that new developments 15
Baumann’s Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit und Mathematik in der neueren Philosophie (1869) was the book which Frege most often referred to in his Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884): it was Frege’s main source of historical information in the philosophy of arithmetic.
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in mathematics made his position inconsistent. In consequence, Stumpf decided not to publish it. With regard to Stumpf’s philosophy of time, apparently, he felt hampered in developing it because of the paralyzing effect that Brentano had on his students as we have already noted: indeed, Brentano worked on the psychology of time perception. Be that as it may, the only area in which Stumpf fully developed his ontological intuitions was the problems of space and state of affairs. (i) Space. Similarly to Kant, Lotze held that space and time are forms of intuition that make our knowledge possible. In contrast to Kant, however, he distinguished between extension and place or moment. Extension is a conceptual (formal) notion and refers to an infinite multiplicity of possible directions. Only a place in space or a moment in time, however, makes them reality.16 With this conception, Lotze tried to preserve the objective character of space and time, opposing in this way Kant’s subjectivism. Stumpf further developed Lotze’s objective conception of space and time into the idea that places and moments are perceptual contents (Sinnesinhalte). These are psychological phenomena. ‘A perceived space is not composed of multiple identical impressions, but a unity in which we can discern [through analysis] different parts.’ (1873, 126) Moreover, the order is ontologically dependent on content: indeed, ‘there is no order which is not based on an absolute content.’ (Ibid., 275) (ii) States of Affairs. Following Smith (1992) and also Stumpf himself, many philosophers today maintain that the concept of states of affairs was introduced by Stumpf himself in the manuscript of his lectures on logic (1888). Beatrice Centi has recently added to this that Stumpf also ‘uses the term Sachverhalt before the year 1888, in a less technical but not less significant sense due to its generality, in the same way as he uses the term series.’ (Centi, p. 77) More especially, Stumpf’s concept of states of affairs as the concept of judgment was ‘rooted in a wider concept of state of affairs expressing the intrinsic and totally subject-independent relationality of reality.’ (Ibid., p. 78) Indeed, Stumpf constantly explored the way in which contents relate to one another: ‘how does space and quality relate to one another [sich 16
Among other things, this position deeply influenced Bertrand Russell’s philosophy of space and time. (Milkov 2008)
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zueinander verhalten]?’17 (1873, 107, 114) This was actually the tenor of the Raumbuch. In fact, however, the use of the concept of state of affairs in the Raumbuch, which Centi refers to in support of her claim, refers neither to the content of judgment, nor to the contents’ relations to one another. Rather, it is used in the trivial sense of a case (casus) as it is also predominantly used in contemporary ordinary German, especially in the legal discourse. In contrast, in his ‘great’ Logic (1874), i.e. much before 1888, Lotze repeatedly refers to the concept of states of affairs in the sense of the content of judgment. (Milkov 2002) Apparently the Neo-Brentanists are reluctant to recognize this fact because they fail to realize that Lotze had already introduced the concept of content of judgment as well as that of the content of perception in philosophy. 18 Otherwise, it is really the case that the concept of states of affairs is rooted in a relativist ontology: in the relativist ontology of Lotze, however, which was developed much earlier and genealogically preceded that of Carl Stumpf. Indeed, Lotze spoke about contents that relate to one another already in his ‘lesser’ Logic. (1843, 25) 9 Carl Stumpf’s Philosophical Acolytes Looking at Carl Stumpf as another member of Brentano’s School, some authors ask the question: ‘was Stumpf, who has established his reputation as an experimental psychologist, a philosopher at all’? (Münch 2006, 12) The author who poses this question, Dieter Münch, eventually answers affirmatively. But the very fact that it was posed says much about the state of Stumpf studies today. One of the arguments for denying Stumpf the status of a philosopher is that, ‘apparently, Stumpf lacks the philosophical ambition that characterizes Brentano and his school. He had neither Brentano’s sense of mission, nor the relentless defending stance, typical of Marty, Kraus and other followers of Brentano.’ (Ibid., 13) We can’t join this relief. Stumpf had both a strong philosophical interest, and also a clear philosophical message. These, however, didn’t follow in the direction of the mainstream Brentano’s school members. 17
This is also a part of Wittgenstein conception of states of affairs advanced in the Tractatus: ‘In states of affairs the objects are combined in a definite way [verhalten sich die Gegenstände … zueinander].’ (2.031) 18 Cf. § 3, (b).
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One of the reasons for denying Stumpf the status of philosopher is that, allegedly, he had just one philosophical pupil—Edmund Husserl. This claim is not true either. In fact, Stumpf also exerted a lasting influence on the Berlin Group formed around Hans Reichenbach (1928– 1933) and on the Society for Scientific Philosophy (1927–1935) which had a program parallel to the program of the Vienna Circle and the Ernst Mach Association, yet was at the same time clearly different from it.19 To be more exact, Stumpf influenced the Berlin Group mainly through his closest pupils, Kurt Lewin und Wolfgang Köhler, who were also members of the Board of the aforementioned Society. Lewin and Köhler also took part in the first Conference of Exact Philosophy in Erlangen in March 1923 and were instrumental in establishing the Zeitschrift für exakte Philosophie in 1923 (the journal never appeared). (Milkov 2011, xiv) Both of them later contributed papers to the legendary journal of scientific philosophy Erkenntnis (1930–9). Köhler also acted as a reader of the Doctoral Theses of the core members of the Berlin Group Walter Dubislav and Carl Hempel. In addition, between 1920 and 1929, Hans Reichenbach and Paul Oppenheim worked closely together with Kurt Lewin. Rudolf Carnap, in his The Logical Construction of the World, and Hans Reichenbach, in Philosophy of Space and Time (both 1928), made extensive use of Kurt Lewin’s term of genidentity. (cf. Padovani 2013) Finally, another core member of the Berlin Group, Kurt Grelling, explored (partly together with Paul Oppenheim) the logical aspects of Gestalt theory. That Carl Stumpf’s philosophy is related to the scientific philosophy that developed in the second half of the twentieth century is also clear from a number of claims he made. We have already noted (in § 5) that Stumpf repeatedly spoke about the ‘catastrophe’ resulting from the supremacy of the philosophy of the German Idealism between 1790 and 1840. The ‘Renaissance of philosophy took place in the midnineteenth century following the (re)introduction of the special sciences–especially psychology–into it. In reading some of Stumpf’s papers, one gets the impression that what Bertrand Russell and Hans Reichenbach later called the ‘rise of scientific [mention it] philosophy’ took place in fact already in the 19
In short, while the Vienna Circle defended logical positivism, the Berlin Group defended the philosophy of logical empiricism. (Milkov 2013)
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1850s and 1860s in Germany thanks to such scientifically oriented philosophers as Fechner and Lotze. Both of them were not only philosophers but also scientists: Lotze was also a Professor of medicine and Fechner was also a physicist. This is how the rebirth of philosophy was realized. To Stumpf, it is important that ‘philosophers learn and are trained in a specific craft [Handwerk] which means that they have to have experience in some concrete area of either humanities [Geisteswissenschaften] or natural sciences’. (1907, 179) Only experts trained in this way can produce ‘a philosophy which has an exact concept-formation and strict proofs’. (Ibid., 180) It is precisely this approach that made Leibniz the great philosopher as he is still regarded today.20 Most importantly, Carl Stumpf’s program for the renewal of philosophy was very close to that of Hans Reichenbach not only in the direction it followed but also in its content. Indeed, Stumpf advanced a kind of empirical philosophy (Erfahrungsphilosophie) that progresses step by step, and whose aim is to achieve a ‘relative conclusion’,21 so that ‘every higher step [of science] conveys new life-impulses [to philosophy]’. (Stumpf 1907, 170) Similarly, according to Reichenbach, every significant scientific discovery and theory is to be logically explored in order to distill the constitutive principles of the renewed science. (Milkov 2011, ix) In this connection it should be noted that Reichenbach was Carl Stumpf’s student at the University of Berlin. Apparently, Stumpf’s lessons didn’t remain without a trace in Reichenbach’s formation as a philosopher. And the main reason why the relation between Stumpf and Reichenbach didn’t develop in full form was ideological rather than theoretical. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Carl Stumpf was notably regarded as an anti-social-revolutionary philosopher, while for Reichenbach the revolution in philosophy was part and parcel of the social revolution. (Milkov 2012, § 5) In more detail, being a Chancellor of the Berlin University, Stumpf was engaged in a conflict (he himself spoke of a ‘war’) with the left-wing ‘free student 20
Carl Stumpf started the German Leibniz Academic edition in 1923, writing for it an enthusiastic preface. (The edition is still not finished. See http://www.leibnizedition.de/) 21 See with the concept of ‘relative a priori’ as developed in Friedman 2001. Friedman’s main point of inspiration in elaborating this conception was the scientific philosophy of the early Hans Reichenbach.
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movement’ (cf. 1908); ultimately, he dissolved that society. Later the society was restored and, understandably, its members saw Stumpf as another old-fashioned ‘bourgeois’ philistine. At the beginning of the 1910s, Hans Reichenbach was a very engaged member of the freestudents movement and, by all accounts, inherited the negative attitude towards his philosophy professor from the older fellow-students. One should also note that psychologically, Reichenbach was very sensitive in respect of who supported his endeavors and who, he believed, was against them. References Baumann, Julius. 1869. Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit und Mathematik in der neueren Philosophie nach ihrem ganzen Einfluß dargestellt und beurteilt, Berlin: Reimer. —— 1909. ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Hermann Lotze’, in Annalen der Naturphilosophie 8: 175–182. Bonacchi, Silvia and Boudewijnse, Geert-Jan (eds.). 2011. Carl Stumpf. From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation, Vienna: Krammer. Brentano, Franz. 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg: Herder. Centi, Beatrice. 2011. ‘Stumpf and Lotze on Space, Reality, Relation’, in Bonacchi, Silvia and Boudewijnse, Geert-Jan (eds.): 69–81. Ewen, Wolfgang. 2008. Carl Stumpf und Gottlob Frege. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Fisette, Denis. 2011. ‘Love and Hate: Brentano and Stumpf on Emotions and Sense Feelings’, in Bonacchi, Silvia and Boudewijnse, Geert-Jan (eds.): 37–49. Frege, Gottlob. 1892. ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, NF 100: 25–50. Friedman, Michael. 2001. Dynamics of Reason, Stanford: CSLI. Gabriel, Gottfried. 1989. ‘Einleitung des Herausgebers: Objektivität, Logik und Erkenntnistheorie bei Lotze und Frege’, in H. R. Lotze, Logik, Drittes Buch. Vom Erkennen (Methodologie), Hamburg: Meiner, xi–xxxiv. Hill, Claire Ortiz. 1998. ‘Introduction to Paul Linke’s [paper] “Gottlob Frege as Philosopher” ’, in Roberto Poli (ed.), The Brentano Puzzle, Aldershot: Ashgate: 45–47. Husserl, Edmund.1901. ‘Selbstanzeige: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil’, in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 25: 260–3. Libardi, Massimo. 1996. ‘Franz Brentano (1838–1917)’, in Arbertazzi, Liliana (ed.) The School of Franz Brentano. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 25–79. Lehmann, Gerhardt. 1943. Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, Stuttgart: Kröner. Lotze, Rudolf Hermann. 1843. Logik, Leipzig: Weidmann. —— 1874. Logik, Leipzig: Hirzel. —— 1879. Metaphysik: Leipzig: Hirzel.
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—— 1885. Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and his Relation to the World, 2 vols., E. Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones, Trans., Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. —— (2003). Briefe und Dokumente, ed. by R. Pester, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Martinelli, Riccardo. 2006. ‘Descriptive Empiricism: Stumpf on Sensation and Presentation’, in Brentano Studien 10: 81–100. Milkov, Nikolay. 2001. ‘The History of Russell’s Concepts “Sense-data” and “Knowledge by Acquaintance” ’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 43 (2001), 221–31. —— 2002. ‘Lotze’s Concept of “State of Affairs” and Its Critics’, in Prima philosophia 15: 437–50. —— 2008. ‘Russell’s Debt to Lotze’, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, 39:2 (June 2008), 186–93. —— 2010. ‘Rudolf Hermann Lotze’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lotze/ —— 2011. ‘Einleitung: Hans Reichenbachs wissenschaftliche Philosophie’, in Hans Reichenbach, ‘Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie’ und andere Schriften zur Wissenschaftstheorie, Herausgegeben, eingeleitet und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Nikolay Milkov, Hamburg: Felix Meiner: vii–xliv. —— 2012. “The Construction of the Logical World: Frege and Wittgenstein on Fixing Boundaries of Human Thought”, in Elisabeth Nemeth et al. (eds.), Crossing Borders: Thinking (Across) Boundaries, Proceedings of the 9th Congress of Austrian Philosophical Society, Vienna, 151–61. —— 2013. “The Berlin Group and the Vienna Circle: Affinities and Divergences”, in Milkov and Peckhaus (eds.): 3-32. Milkov, Nikolay, and Peckhaus, Volker (eds.). 2013. The Berlin Group: Conference Proceedings, Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, Boston Studies Series. Moog, Willy. 1922. Die deutsche Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Enke. Münch, Dieter. 2006. ‘Erkenntnistheorie und Psychologie: Die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung Carl Stumpfs’, in Brentano Studien 10: 11–64. Orth, Ernst Wolfgang. 1997. ‘Metaphysische Implikationen der Intentionalität. Trendelenburg, Lotze, Brentano’, in Brentano Studien 7: 13–30. Padovani, Flavia. 2013. ‘Genidentity and Topology of Time: Kurt Lewin and Hans Reichenbach’ in Milkov and Peckhaus (eds.): 97-122. Rollinger, Robin. 2001. ‘Lotze on the Sensory representation of space’, in Albertazzi Liliana (ed.) The Dawn of Cognitive Science: Early European Contributors. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 103–122. Schuhmann, Karl. 2000/2001. ‘Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff in seiner Hallenser Zeit’ in Brentano Studien 9: 63–88. Smith, Barry. 1992. ‘Sachverhalt’, in Ritter J. and Gründer, K. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel: Schwabe, vol. 8, 1102–1113. —— 1994. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, Chicago and La Salle (Ill.): Open Court. Stout, George. 1886. Analytic Psychology. London: Allen & Unwin. Stumpf, Carl. 1870. Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik, Wolfgang Ewen’s transcription of Stumpf’s Habilitation. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008.
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—— 1873. Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: Hirzel. —— 1883. Tonpsychologie, vol. I, Leipzig: Hirzel. —— 1888. Logik. Karl Schuhmann’s transcription of the lithographed text Q13. Husserl Archive, Cologne. —— 1890. Tonpsychologie, vol. II, Leipzig: Hirzel. —— 1891. ‘Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie’, in Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Philologische und Historische Klasse, 19: 465–516. —— 1899. ‘Über den Begriff der Gemütsbewegung’, in 1928a, 1–53. —— 1906. ‘Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften’, in Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Berlin: Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1–94. —— 1907. ‘Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie’, in 1910, 161–96. —— 1908. ‘Vom ethischen Skeptizismus’, in 1910, 197-224. —— 1910. Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth. —— 1917. ‘Zum Gedächtnis Lotzes’, in Kant-Studien 22: 1–26. —— 1919. ‘Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano’, in Kraus, Oskar (ed.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, München: Beck: 87–149. —— 1924. ‘Selbstdarstellung’ in Schmidt, in Raymund (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, 5. Band. Leipzig: Meiner: 205–265. —— 1928a. Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Barth. —— 1928b. William James nach seinen Briefen, Berlin: Pan Verlag.
STUMPF UND DIE MONADOLOGIE DER HERBARTIANER STEFANO POGGI (UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE)
Abstract. The essay highlights the indirect influence exerted by Johann Friedrich Herbart over Carl Stumpf. Like many other – or most – psychologists of the XIXth century, Stumpf could not avoid an in-depth confrontation with Herbart’s doctrines. All the more so since Stumpf was influenced by Hermann Lotze who, in turn, had directly polemicized against Herbart and Herbartians like Cornelius or Drobisch. To be sure, Stumpf never shared Herbart’s proposals. Nevertheless, in many important cases he developed his views within the context of a discussion with Herbart. The essay focuses upon two main themes, involving psychological and metaphysical issues: the problem of sensation (and perception), and that of consciousness.
1 Einleitendes Es ist leicht, den Nachklang von einigen bedeutenden Thesen Herbarts in den psychologischen (und in den philosophischen) Schriften Stumpfs zu erfassen. Ein Nachklang ist jedoch keine Zustimmung: in der Tat, ist Stumpf in vielen Hinsichten sehr polemisch gegenüber den Thesen Herbarts. Es ist aber auch wahr, dass für Stumpf die Herbartsche Auffassung der Psychologie in den meisten Fällen als bedeutender Vergleichspunkt, um seine eigenen Positionen festzustellen, gilt. Man könnte jedoch behaupten, dass die Erwägung einiger Grundannahmen der Stumpfschen Psychologie (in erster Linie in den Fällen der Theorie der Raumvorstellung und der Analyse der Tonempfindung) nur auf der Basis einer gründlichen Kenntnis der Hauptsätze der Herbartschen Psychologie möglich sei. Kein Wunder: Herbarts Versuch einer Neubegründung der Psychologie bleibt während des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland in jeder Hinsicht die Hauptvoraussetzung aller Programme einer wissenschaftlichen Psychologie. Wir besitzen trotzdem keine ausführliche Darstellung der Beziehung Stumpfs zur Herbartschen Psychologie. Eine solche Darstellung könnte eine bedeutende Lücke in der Literatur schließen. Auch die Herbart-Literatur wartet noch auf viele Ergänzungen: das gilt sowohl
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für Herbart als auch für die Herbart-Schule, die als wesentlicher Bestandteil der deutschen Debatte über Psychologie und deren Beziehungen zur Philosophie (in erster Linie zur Logik und Erkenntnistheorie) im 19. Jahrhundert gilt. Die Auseinandersetzung Stumpfs mit der Herbartschen Psychologie (und Philosophie) sollte sogar als eine Auseinandersetzung, nicht nur mit Herbart sondern auch (und in vielen Hinsichten vor allem) mit der Herbart-Schule betrachtet werden. Und zur selben Zeit setzen sich auch jene Psychologen und Philosophen mit Herbart und mit der Herbart-Schule auseinander, deren Hauptinteresse, wie bei Stumpf, an einer wissenschaftlichen Behandlung der Psychologie liegt. Wir stehen also einem breiten Spektrum von Problemen gegenüber. Man sollte in erster Linie die Herbartsche Konzeption der philosophischen Methode in Erwägung ziehen, weil es in der Tat die philosophischen Ideen Herbarts sind, die eine zentrale Rolle in der Entstehung und Entwicklung der psychologischen Debatte der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts spielen. Wir dürfen außerdem die verwickelten Formulierungen der Statik, Mechanik und Dynamik der Vorstellungen in der Psychologie als Wissenschaft nicht außer Acht lassen. Dem ist noch nicht genug: auch die damaligen physiologischen und besonders neurophysiologischen und neuropathologischen Anschauungen sollten in Betracht gezogen werden, weil sich einige der prominenten Vertreter dieser Forschungsrichtung (es reicht die Namen Johannes Müller und Wilhelm Griesinger zu erwähnen) direkt auf Herbart beziehen, um die passenden Begriffe für ihre Auffassung des psychischen Lebens herauszufinden. Es ist selbstverständlich unmöglich, diese verschiedenen Aspekte der Herbart-Rezeption aufzuzählen und sie einer, wenn auch eiligen Untersuchung zu unterziehen. Wir werden uns also auf einige Hauptmerkmale dieser Rezeption bei Stumpf beschränken. Es steht jedenfalls außer Frage, dass wir uns sowohl auf Herbart als auch auf dessen Schüler und Anhänger beziehen. Wir widmen unsere Aufmerksamkeit in erster Linie der Rezeption der Herbartschen Auffassung des Empfindungs- und Wahrnehmungsprozesses einerseits und des Bewusstseins andererseits. Stumpf teilt mit Herbart ein großes Interesse für die Tradition des Empirismus. Das bedeutet bei Stumpf eine stetige Auseinandersetzung nicht nur mit den Ansichten Lockes und dessen Nachfolger, sondern auch mit den Vertretern des Schottischen Empirismus. Bei Stumpf wird der
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Akzent viel auf die neuesten Entwicklungen eines empiristischen Standpunkts bei James Mill, A. Bain und John Stuart Mill gelegt. Stumpf – der anders als Herbart eine stets kritische Stellung gegenüber Kant einnimmt – scheint kein besonderes Interesse für die Untersuchung des Bewusstseins zu hegen. Die Frage nach dem Bewusstsein – genauer nach dem höchsten Grade desselben, d.h. nach dem Selbstbewusstsein und dessen verschiedenen „Schwellen” – bildet selbstverständlich für den Fichte-Schüler Herbart eine Frage von erstem Rang, wenn nicht die echte Hauptfrage. Für Stumpf steht vielmehr die Erforschung der unteren, einfacheren Stufen des psychischen Lebens, wie sie sich in der Entfaltung des Wahrnehmungsprozesses von der Empfindung bis zur Vorstellung darstellen im Vordergrund. Das hat aber keine Nähe Stumpfs zu einer physiologisch orientierten Deutung des psychischen Lebens und somit zum psychophysiologischen Standpunkt Wundts zur Folge. Das Verhältnis Stumpfs zu Fechner und somit zum Programm der Psychophysik liefert den besten Beweis dafür. Die feste Überzeugung, dass die psychischen Prozesse eine eigentümliche Struktur besitzen, hängt mit der klaren Ablehnung jedes reduktionistischen Versuchs zusammen. Fechner selbst ist derselben Meinung. Wir müssen uns doch jeder voreiligen Verallgemeinerung enthalten. Die Sache ist nicht nur in einer psychologiegeschichtlichen Hinsicht zu behandeln. Wir können in der Tat nicht umhin, die Beziehung Stumpfs zu Herbart (und zur Herbart-Schule) auch von einem philosophischen Standpunkt aus zu untersuchen. Es sind die Ansichten Herbarts über die Realität und deren Erkennbarkeit, die in den Vordergrund treten: vor allem die Auffassung des erkennenden Subjekts als ein Wesen, das – als Trieb einer fortdauernden vorstellenden Tätigkeit – den typischen Charakter einer individuellen Seele zeigt. In der Auffassung Herbarts erzeugen die, daraus entspringenden unendlichen Reihen von den „zufälligen Ansichten” unter denen die Objekte der Erkenntnistätigkeit zu betrachten sind, das Gesamtbild der Realität, wenn nicht die Realität selbst. Wenn auch in veränderter Form, findet die Monadologie von Leibniz in der Realitätsauffassung Herbarts eine bedeutende Erneuerung. Wir dürfen sogar von einer Monadologie Herbarts und der Herbart-Schule sprechen. Man sollte sich auf diese neue Formulierung der Ideen Leibniz beziehen, um einige wesentliche Züge der Stumpf’schen Auffassung der psychischen Tätigkeit klarzustellen.
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Aber bei Stumpf ist es in der Tat nicht leicht die Spuren einer direkten Aufmerksamkeit für die Monadologie Herbart’scher Prägung nachzuweisen. Die monadologische Realitätsauffassung Herbarts und seiner Schule wird im Gegenteil in Betracht gezogen und auch vor allem von Fechner und Lotze heftig bestritten. Es ist aber zugleich auch wahr, dass die Ansichten Fechners und Lotzes einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf Stumpf ausüben. 2 Herbarts Monadologie und ihre Folgen In der Auseinandersetzung Herbarts mit der Frage einer Monadologie spielt die logisch-ontologische Auffassung einer Realität, deren Erklärung nur auf der Basis der Anwendung einer „Methode der Beziehungen” zwischen den „zufälligen Ansichten” möglich wäre, eine große Rolle. Und die Debatte der Herbart-Schule entwickelt sich besonders in Österreich und in Böhmen in dieselbe Richtung. Das Interesse für Herbarts Ansichten bildet ein Hauptmerkmal der Debatte des Bolzano-Kreises, innerhalb dessen die logisch-ontologischen Fragen als Fragen von höchster Bedeutung behandelt werden. Ein klarer Beweis dafür wird von dem Bolzano-Anhänger Robert Zimmermann geliefert. Zwischen 1847 und 1849 werden von Zimmermann eine deutsche Übersetzung der Leibnizschen Monadologie und zwei größere Abhandlungen über das Verhältnis Leibniz-Herbart publiziert (Zimmermann, 1849). Die Meinungen von Leibniz und Herbart bezüglich der Kausalität und des Geschehens werden ausführlich behandelt. Und Zimmermann legt vor allem den Akzent auf die Herbartsche Ablehnung einer wirklichen, realen Kausalität, an deren Stelle die „ruhende”, die „ideale” Kausalität der Monaden tritt (Zimmermann, 1849, 36-48; 42-44). Das hat natürlich zur Folge, dass die seelischen Vorgänge als Beispiel eines wirklichen Geschehens dem reinen Sein als Seienden gegenübergestellt werden. Aber in derselben Zeit ist sich Zimmermann klar darüber, dass Herbart eng an seine metaphysische Überzeugung gebunden ist. Die Psychologie – der Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Neubegründung der Psychologie – bildet ohne Zweifel die Hauptaufgabe Herbarts und „den vorzüglichsten Stolz seiner Schule”, aber das erlaubt uns keineswegs die Vermutung, „dass er [Herbart] durch diese seine metaphysische Überzeugung die Wirklichkeit und die Zulässigkeit der inneren Zustände in der Seele, als einem einfachen Seienden, welche wir: Vorstellungen nennen, habe bestreiten oder gar völlig aufheben wollen” (Zimmermann, 1849, 36).
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In seiner Psychologie als Wissenschaft – und schon früher in der ersten (1816) Ausgabe seines Lehrbuchs zur Psychologie – hatte Herbart klar festgestellt, dass die Seele, als Substanz, „keiner anderen Modificationen fähig ist, als der Selbsterhaltungen gegen Störungen durch andre Wesen”. Diese Selbsterhaltungen besitzen die Form einer Vorstellung und das Selbstbewusstsein oder das Ich müssen als die Erscheinungsform eines Inbegriffs von solchen Selbsterhaltungen betrachtet werden. Als treibender Kern jener Selbsterhaltungen, äußert die Seele eine Kraft, die keineswegs mit der „organischen oder vegetativen Lebenskraft” gleichgestellt werden kann. Auch diese letztere könnte als eine Einheit dargestellt werden, aber als eine solche, die in der Tat „keine reale Einheit, sondern ein allgemeiner und noch sehr unbestimmter Begriff” ist (Herbart, 1824-1825, VI, 285-286). Die einzige reale Einheit ist die Einheit der Seele, die den „sehr begreifliche[n] metaphysische[n] Grund, weswegen entgegengesetzte Vorstellungen einander widerstehen” bildet. „Eben dieser Grund erklärt ohne Mühe die Verbindung unserer Vorstellungen. Und alle diese Vorstellungen – so schreitet Herbart fort – würden nur Einen Act der Einen Seele ausmachen, wenn sie sich nicht ihrer Gegensätze wegen hemmten und sie machen wirklich nur Einen Act aus, in wiefern sie nicht durch irgend welche Hemmungen in ein Vieles gespalten sind” (Herbart, 1824, 374 ff.).1 Es ist hier nicht der Ort, die Triftigkeit der Herbartschen Auslegung (genauer: Umgestaltung) der Monadologie von Leibniz in Frage zu stellen. Wir beschränken uns auf die Feststellung, dass die Erneuerung der Monadologie durch Herbart den Ansatz einer lebendigen und folgenreichen Diskussion bildet. Sowohl bei Brentano als auch (und früher) bei Lotze ist es nicht schwierig, viele und bedeutende Spuren einer bestimmten Aufmerksamkeit für die Auffassung der Seele als eine Art von dynamischer Einheit nachzuweisen. In der Medicinischen Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele − 1852 publiziert – setzt sich Lotze kritisch mit dem monadologischen Standpunkt Herbarts auseinander (Lotze, 1852, 153-154). Der „realistischen Metaphysik” Herbarts wird der Vorwurf gemacht, „die Vorstellung einer einfachen, unveränderlichen und beziehungslosen Substanz” eingeführt zu haben. Eine Vorstellung von dieser Art sei „ein falscher Schulbegriff, dem nichts Objectives entsprechen könne”. Die 1
Sperrungen im Original.
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Voraussetzung der Unveränderlichkeit der Seele bildet jedenfalls „ein deutliches Hinderniss für alles Geschehen”. Man darf in der Tat alle Veränderungen der äußeren Welt auf die Entstehung eines Scheins reduzieren. Aber die „Entstehung dieses Scheines in uns ist doch ein wirkliches Ereigniss”, obgleich es „nicht von neuem nur für einen dritten Beobachter zu geschehen scheint”, wie im Falle der „für uns entfernte[n] Doppelsterne”. In diesem Falle, stellt sich die Veränderung nur „in dem Geiste eines Beobachters” dar, aber sie ist doch immer Veränderung. Es gibt in der Tat kein Hindernis, die Veränderlichkeit „aus den Substraten der äussern Welt” völlig zu eliminieren. Aber in derselben Zeit ist es auch klar, dass die Veränderlichkeit „aus der Natur der Seele [...] nie zu entfernen” ist: „so lange man zugibt, das Vorstellen eines Gegenstandes sei ein anderer innerer Zustand der Seele, als das Vorstellen eines andern”, soll die Seele als „ein veränderliches Subject der Erscheinungen” betrachtet werden. Das hat jedoch weder zur Folge, „dass sie in beständiger Bewegung begriffen, noch dass der Wechsel ihrer Zustände regellos sei” (Lotze, 1852, 154155). Die Ansichten Lotzes über die Natur der Seele gehen in der Tat zu seinem Beitrag (Seele und Seelenleben) zu dem von R. Wagner herausgegebenen Handwörterbuch der Physiologie zurück (Lotze, 1846). Sowohl in dieser frühen Arbeit, als auch später (Lotze, 1856-1864) trat die Hauptvoraussetzung Lotzes in den Vordergrund, nämlich die These des grundsätzlich psychisch-dynamischen Charakters der Materie selbst (Lotze, 1852, 14). Das bedeutete keineswegs eine Vermengung der Seelenkraft mit einer (übrigens nur angenommenen) Lebenskraft. Diese letztere ist nur als „eine Resultante verschiedener einfacher Kräfte” zu betrachten, während die Einheit der früheren auf eine „gegebene Thatsache” wie die „Individualität des Bewusstseins” beruht. Es liegt außer Zweifel, dass die „Nothwendigkeit, dass das allen Seelenerscheinungen zu Grunde liegende Substrat eine völlige individuelle Einheit sein müsse” (Lotze, 1846, 150-151). Eine, der wesentlichen Anforderungen Herbarts wurde grundsätzlich akzeptiert, wenn auch mit der klar ausgesprochenen Überzeugung, dass die monadologische Ontologie Herbarts zu verwerfen sei. Neben Lotze, spielt Brentano eine entscheidende Rolle in der Entwicklung der Ansichten von Stumpf. Und in vielen Hinsichten ist die Auseinandersetzung Brentanos mit Herbart eine gründlichere. Die Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt von Brentano erscheint in
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der Tat mehr als zwanzig Jahre nach Lotzes Medicinische Psychologie und folglich ganz inmitten der Debatte um die Begründung einer wissenschaftlichen Psychologie (Brentano, 1955). Brentano zeigt kein besonderes Interesse für jene ontologischen Voraussetzungen der Herbartschen monadologische Auffassung der Seele, die Lotze – dreißig Jahre früher (Lotze, 1843) − einer streng kritischen Prüfung untergezogen hatte. In der Tat ist Brentano mit Herbart und mit der Herbart-Schule im Prinzip einverstanden, die Annahme einer Seele als Kern des psychischen Lebens als unentbehrlich zu betrachten. Das bedeutet keineswegs, dass wir zur Annahme eines substantiellen Trägers der psychischen Erscheinungen verpflichtet sind. Der Fall der Frage nach der Unsterblichkeit der Seele liefert den klarsten Beweis dafür. „Denn wenn auch der, welcher die Seelensubstanz leugnet, von einer Unsterblichkeit der Seele im eigentlichen Sinne selbstverständlich nicht reden kann, so – behauptet Brentano an einem Ort seiner Psychologie wo er sich mit Hume, Lange, Bain, J.S. Mill auseinandersetzt – ist es doch durchaus nicht richtig, dass die Unsterblichkeitsfrage durch die Leugnung eines substantiellen Trägers der psychischen Erscheinungen allen Sinn verliert” (Brentano, 1955, 24). Der Herbartschen Auffassung der Seele als eines einfachen realen Wesen, stellt Brentano die Tatsache der Einheit des Bewusstseins entgegen. Es gibt in der Tat für Brentano eine reale Einheit des Bewusstseins. Aber Einheit bedeutet keineswegs Einfachheit: „indem wir – so Brentano – die reale Einheit des Bewusstseins behaupten, behaupten [wir] damit keineswegs, dass es etwas völlig Einfaches sei; nur werden die Teile, welche es unterscheiden lässt, als blosse Divisive einer realen Einheit zu betrachten sein” (Brentano, 1955, 234). Brentano widmet in der Tat seine Aufmerksamkeit auch einigen anderen bedeutenden Aspekten der Herbartschen Behandlung der Psychologie, wie z. B. der Analyse der Gefühle. Und auch in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit dem englischen Associationismus scheint sich Brentano an Herbarts Ansichten anzulehnen. Aber es ist vor allem die Auseinandersetzung mit den Fragen, die eng mit der Auffassung der Seele und des Bewusstseins verbunden sind, die den Kern der Beziehung Brentanos zu Herbart bildet. Und in der Entwicklung und Ausgliederung dieser letzteren wird von Lotze eine unentbehrliche Vermittlungsrolle gespielt. Das verhindert keineswegs, dass Brentano nicht mit Lotze, sondern mit Herbart einverstanden sei. Gegen Herbart, hatte sich Lotze entschieden für die Unmöglichkeit, die Vor-
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stellungen als Grundlage für die anderen psychischen Phänomene anzunehmen, geäußert (Brentano, 1955, 113). Brentano seinerseits lehnt sich direkt an Herbart – und genauer an dessen Psychologie als Wissenschaft an – um von der Stellungnahme Lotzes Abstand zu halten. Die Kritik Lotzes – und deren Erneuerung durch den Neukantianer J.B. Meyer – gründet sich nach Brentano auf einen beschränkten und starren Begriff von Vorstellung (Brentano, 1955, 114). Die Monadologie Herbarts gilt in vielen Hinsichten als die beste Darstellungsweise des psychischen Lebens. 3 Fechners kritische Stellungnahme Wir sollten niemals die Bedeutung der zentralen Rolle vergessen, die in der Debatte um die Begründung einer wissenschaftlichen Psychologie in den 60er und 70er Jahren von der Psychophysik Fechners gespielt wird. Fechner erklärt sich für den Atomismus und seine Stellungnahme gegenüber der Herbartschen Monadologie scheint mit seinen atomistischen Überzeugungen eng verbunden zu sein. An mehreren Stellen äußert sich Fechner sehr kritisch gegen Lotze – und also auch gegen Herbart. Das bedeutet selbstverständlich nicht, dass die Auffassungen dieser beiden gleichgesetzt werden, auch wenn es wahr ist, dass Herbart und Lotze als Hauptvertreter (neben Descartes) der These eines einfachen Seelensitzes angeführt werden. Fechner äußert sich in diesem Sinne vor allem in einem Kapitel seiner Elemente der Psychophysik, aber in derselben Zeit – und als die Frage nach dem Leib-Seele Verhältnis in den Vordergrund tritt - hebt er die Notwendigkeit einer klaren Unterscheidung zwischen Einheit und Einfachheit der Seele hervor. In den „monadologischen Systemen” wird „die Einheit der Seele von der metaphysischen Einfachheit eines Grundwesens hinter der Mannigfaltigkeit der Seelenerscheinungen abhängig” gemacht. Eine solche Ansicht ruht auf ausgesprochenen metaphysischen Voraussetzungen, aber von einem streng wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt aus gelten diese Voraussetzungen als absolut entbehrlich. „Denn an sich – so Fechner - könnte nichts hindern, einer metaphysisch einfachen Seele ebenso das Vermögen zuzutrauen, durch ihr Wirken gleichzeitig ein System von Bewegungen verschiedener auseinander liegender Körperteile zu vermitteln, ohne nach dem Prinzipe des Stosses die Bewegung von den einen zu den anderen erst sukzessiv überzupflanzen, als die Sonne vermöge ihrer Gravitationswirkung faktisch ein solches besitzt”. Von diesem Standpunkt aus, ist die Fol-
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gerung klar: „es ist nicht abzusehen, wiefern eine metaphysische Einfachheit der Seele nötigen könnte, vielmehr von einem bestimmten physischen Punkte, als von einem körperlichen Zusammenhange aus den Angriff auf die übrige Körperwelt zu nehmen” (Fechner, 1907³, Band II, 409-410). Der These von der Einfachheit des Seelensitzes werden dennoch in den beiden monadologischen Systemen von Herbart und von Lotze unterschiedliche Bedeutungen zugeschrieben. Das System Herbarts als solches scheint „bestandfähig” zu sein auch wenn „die Ansicht vom einfachen Seelensitze fällt”. Es ist in der Tat „nicht an diese Ansicht streng gebunden”, im Widerspruch „scheint es mit dem Lotzeschen Systeme” zu sein. Lotze – auf dessen Mikrokosmos bezieht sich Fechner (Fechner, 1907, I, 371 ff.) – „identifiziert die einfachen Seelenwesen mit den einfachsten Elementen der Körperwelt, als welche innerlich die Seelenerscheinungen zu geben vermögen, indes sie nach aussen nur physische Erscheinungen vermitteln”. Die Seele ist in der Monadologie Lotzes, „bloss ein seinem Wesen nach gleichartiges, seiner Stellung und innerer Entwicklung nach bevorzugtes Atom inmitten des Systemes der an sich ihm ebenbürtigen gleich seelischen Körperatome” (Fechner, 1907, II, 410-411). Die Auseinandersetzungen Lotzes und Herbarts mit dem Leib-Seele Problem bleiben jedenfalls grundverschieden: Lotze behandelt die Frage mehr unter dem wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt, wo Herbart sich fast ausschließlich an die Metaphysik anlehnt. In der Behandlung der Frage nach den Leib-Seele Verhältnissen besitzen die monadologischen Systemen einige Vorteile: aber es ist unumstößlich, dass die von ihnen vorgeschlagenen Lösungen jener Frage als höchst unbefriedigend zu betrachten sind (Fechner, 1907, II, 411-412). Die stark kritische Stellungnahme gegen die monadologische Ansicht findet jedoch ihre klarste Äußerung in einem polemischen Werk Fechners - Ueber die Seelenfrage -, das 1861 erscheint, d.h. in demselben Jahr der Elemente der Psychophysik (Fechner, 1907). Fechner hebt die einigende Leistung der Seele hervor. „Von dem, was wir Seele, Geist nennen, ist erfahrungsmässig nichts aufzeigbar – so Fechner als ein durch eine Bewusstseinseinheit verknüpfter Zusammenhang und Auseinanderfluss von Erscheinungen, die ich Selbsterscheinungen nenne, sofern jede Bewusstseinseinheit der andern gegenüber solche nur für sich selber hat” (Fechner, 1907, 207). Der „Charakter relativer Einheit oder Einfachheit gegen das Körperliche” bildet also das
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Hauptmerkmal des Geistigen. Aber das bedeutet nicht, dass der monadologische Standpunkt als der einzig berechtigte Standpunkt zu betrachten sei. Im Gegenteil: Fechner lehnt entschieden jede Monadologie ab und seine Polemik richtet sich wesentlich gegen die Monadologie Herbarts und Lotzes. Mit „dieser gilt es einen Kampf auf Tod und Leben” zu führen, weil diese „neuere Monadologie statt der einfachen Atome als letzte Halt- und Anknüpfungspunkte die einfachen Wesen hinter den Atomen, gewonnen hat. Nicht durch letzte Analyse der Welt der Erscheinung, sondern aus der Zerstörung dieser Welt als eines Scheines”. Aber die Welt wird auf dieser Weise „eine gespenstige Welt hinter der wirklichen Welt”, und die Physik „fürchtet sich vor Gespenstern” (Fechner, 1907, 212, 217, 222). 4 Die Herbart-Schule Die anti-monadologische Polemik Fechners während der 60er Jahre wird von Seiten der Herbart-Schule entschieden zurückgeworfen. Der Herbartianer C.S. Cornelius bestreitet in einer Besprechung der zweiten Ausgabe von Fechners Atomenlehre die These eines wesentlichen Unterschieds zwischen Einheit und Einfachheit der Seele (Cornelius, 1865). Es gibt jedenfalls eine entscheidende Tatsache – nämlich „dass die verschiedenartigsten geistigen Zustände in ein Bewusstsein fallen können”: diese Tatsache „deutet mit Entschiedenheit auf ein Wesen hin, in dem alles geistige Geschehen von statten geht”. Eine „simultane Mannichfaltigkeit einfacher Vorstellungen” – „und zwar eine Mannichfaltigkeit in der Form der Einheit” – bildet den Hauptcharakter unserer Raumanschauung. Wir sind also berechtigt zur Voraussetzung „dass sämmtliche einzelne Vorstellungen Thätigkeiten eines und desselben Wesens sind”, eines „gemeinsamen, streng einfachen Träger[s]” aller Sinnesempfindungen (Cornelius, 1865, 412413). Der Versuch Fechners einer Entwicklung und Umgestaltung der Herbartschen „Synechologie” muss verworfen werden. Als „Lehre vom Stetigen” sollte die Herbartsche „Synechologie” die Philosophie der Mathematik begründen und endlich zu einer Theorie „von der Materie und von den scheinbaren Causalverhältnissen” leiten (Herbart, 1828-1829, 251 ff). Der psychophysische Standpunkt leitet Fechner jedenfalls, sich mit den Leib-Seele Verhältnissen auseinanderzusetzen und auf der „Synechologie” ein System solcher Verhältnisse zu begründen. Die Atome sind als die letzten Elemente jenes Systems zu betrachten und zwischen den Atomen gibt es in der Tat einen stetigen
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Durchgang, eine lückenlose Verbindung. Das System erscheint als ein solches, das „in äusserer Erscheinung den Körper, in innerer Erscheinung (Selbsterhaltung) die bewusste Seele gibt” (Cornelius, 1865, 415). Für die „synechologische” Ansicht Fechners also gelten die Seelenzustände als Bewegungszustände: das könnte auch als Antwort auf die beiden Fragen nach den Leib-Seele Verhältnissen einerseits und nach dem Sitz der Seele andererseits betrachtet werden (Cornelius, 1865, 416). Aber dieser Richtung folgend scheint sich „die synechologische Ansicht Fechner’s in eine dunkle idealistischpantheistische Weltansicht” zu verlieren, in eine Weltansicht also, die näher zur Hegelschen als zur Herbartschen Psychologie ist (Cornelius, 1865, 417-418). Die Vorstellungen erscheinen in der Tat als innere Zustände der Seele, aber in im selben Moment auch mit dem Körper – und so mit den Atomen - verbunden. Aber die Verbindung der Seele mit den Atomen – so formuliert Cornelius die Hauptthese seiner Verteidigung des monadologischen Standpunkts – ist auf das einfache Entstehen der Vorstellungen beschränkt, während das Fortbestehen dieser letzteren – d.h. des gesamten psychischen Lebens – von der individuellen (und unsterblichen) Seele gesichert wird. In den 50er und 60er Jahren scheint die Herbart-Schule einstimmig die Eigentümlichkeit des Psychischen hervorzuheben. Daraus folgt die Anerkennung der Schwierigkeit einer direkten Anwendung der naturwissenschaftlichen Methode zur Behandlung dieses letzteren. M.W. Drobisch selbst kann – in seinen Ersten Grundlehren der mathematischen Psychologie aus dem Jahre 1850 (Drobisch, 1850) – nicht umhin, die mathematische Behandlung der psychischen Prozesse als hochproblematisch zu beurteilen. Im Prinzip gibt es eine Analogie zwischen der Astronomie und der Psychologie: auch eine mathematische Theorie „der concreten Thatsachen der innern Erfahrung im strengen Sinne des Wortes” soll auf einer abstrakten Mechanik – in diesem Falle einer „psychischen Mechanik” – beruhen. Aber zugleich gibt es auch einen klaren Unterschied „zwischen den gesetzmässigen Bewegungen im Raume und den gesetzmässigen stetigen Klarheitsveränderungen unserer Vorstellungen”. Dieser Unterschied wird „bei jeder möglichen Umgestaltung der mathematischen Psychologie fest bestehen”: es liegt in der Tat außer jedem Zweifel, „dass die Veränderungen in unserm Innern weder in periodischer Regelmässigkeit wiederkehren, noch in ununterbrochener Continuität aufeinander folgen”. Und die Untersuchung jener Veränderungen hat „nur von der Betrach-
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tung und Analyse der psychologischen Data auszugehen” (Drobisch, 1850, x-xi). Die ehrliche Anerkennung des hochproblematischen Charakters einer mathematischen Psychologie durch Drobisch ebnet den Weg zur Kritik dieser letzteren. Die bekannteste unter diesen Kritiken ist diejenige von F.A. Lange, der seine Abhandlung Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie (1866) einer ausführlichen Auseinandersetzung mit den Ansichten von Herbart und Drobisch widmet (Lange, 1865). Langes Überzeugung der Unannehmlichkeit der Herbartschen Auffassung findet jedoch eine wirkungsvolle Äußerung in dem Kapitel Die naturwissenschaftliche Psychologie des dritten Abschnitts seiner Geschichte des Materialismus (Lange, 1926). Aus gutem Grund wirft Lange ein klares Licht auf einen versteckten, aber wesentlichen Zusammenhang Herbarts mit den Ansichten der gegenwärtigen Physik. Lange kritisiert in erster Linie den Herbartschen Begriff der Seele: in der Metaphysik Herbarts ist es leicht, einen Punkt zu entdecken, „der eine merkwürdige Analogie mit den metaphysischen Anfangsgründen der Naturwissenschaften unserer heutigen mathematischen Physiker darbietet”. In der Tat existiert „nach Herbart eine Vielheit von einfachen Wesen, welche sich jedoch von Leibniz’ Monaden sehr wesentlich unterscheiden”. Wenn diese letzteren „die ganze Welt – als Vorstellung – aus sich hervor [bringen]”, die „Realen” – d.h. die Herbartsche Umgestaltung der Monaden von Leibniz – „sind für sich genommen ganz vorstellungslos”. Die „Realen” wirken also aufeinander ein und „sie streben diese Einwirkungen von sich abzuwehren”. Der Herbartsche Seelenbegriff ist also hochproblematisch, wenn nicht widerspruchsvoll. Als „ein solches einfaches Wesen”, als ein „Reales”, befindet sich die Seele in Konflikt mit andern einfachen Wesen. „Ihre Akte der Selbsterhaltung – so Lange und es lohnt sich ein langes Zitat wiederzugeben – sind Vorstellungen. Wie ohne Druck kein Gegendruck, so würde ohne Störung kein Vorstellen sein. Neu ist hier jedenfalls und für den zukünftigen metaphysischen Hausgebrauch beachtenswert die Anschauung, nach welcher die Seelentätigkeit in einer Rückwirkung auf eine äußere Einwirkung besteht. Man muss damit notwendigerweise die Ansicht der neueren Molekular-Theoretiker vergleichen, nach welcher der Begriff einer Kraft dem einzelnen Atom durchaus nicht zukommt und eben nur in der Wechselbeziehung mehrerer Atome statthat. Herbart ist freilich nie darüber ins Klare gekommen, dass er konsequenterweise sagen hätte müssen, dass alle Vorstel-
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lungen nicht in der ‘Seele’, dem einfachen Wesen, liegen, sondern dass sie Wechselbeziehungen zwischen den einzelnen Realen bestehen, wie die physikalischen Kräfte zwischen den Atomen. Mit dieser Konsequenz seiner Grundanschauung hätte Herbart zahllose Widersprüche vermieden, die sich daraus ergaben, dass die Seele einfach und unveränderlich, ohne alle inneren Zustände sein und doch die Vorstellungen in sich tragen sollte. Er erhält dadurch eine Art von Unsterblichkeit der Seele, die aber einem ewigen Tode gleichkommt, wenn sich keine andern einfachen Wesen finde, die mit ihr in eine so enge Wechselwirkung treten wie die Bestandteile des Leibes. Das heisst einen hohlen Begriff teuer zahlen.” (Lange, 1926, II, 300-301). Die Nähe Langes zu dem wachsenden Interesse für die mögliche Anwendung der Ergebnisse der Physiologie der Sinnesorgane auf die psychologische Analyse des Seelenlebens verhindert aber nicht, dass sich Lange selbst der hochproblematischen Folgerungen solcher Anwendung bewusst ist. Seine Stellungnahme ist nicht grundverschieden von der Meinung vieler Herbartianer über die Fruchtbarkeit einer systematischen Anlehnung der Psychologie an die Physiologie. In dieser Richtung äußert sich z.B. auch Drobisch in einer Besprechung von Wundts Vorlesungen über die Menschen-und Thierseele (Drobisch, 1864).2 Die Trennung der Psychologie von der Metaphysik bildet jedenfalls eine wesentliche Forderung, die Drobisch selbst „vor mehr als zwanzig Jahren […] empfohlen und versucht” hatte. Aber in derselben Zeit muss man auch anerkennen, „dass es ein fühlbares Bedürfniss ist, in der Einleitung zur Psychologie den Begriff der Seele zu erörtern, die entgegengesetzten Ansichten vom Wesen derselben kritisch zu beleuchten, insbesondere die Einheit der Seele hervorzuheben, auf welche sowohl die rein intensive Beschaffenheit alles dessen, was in die innere Wahrnehmung fällt, als das überall hervortretende Streben unsers Geistes, alles Viele und Mannichfaltige zusammen zu fassen, zu vereinfachen und zuletzt in dem Brennpunkt des Ichs zu vereinigen, hinweist”. Wundts Überzeugung, „die Herbartische Psychologie stehe und falle mit der Herbartischen Metaphysik”, ist als ein großer Irrtum zu betrachten. Auch Lotze, „der sich lieber zu den Gegnern als zu den Anhängern Herbart’s zählt”, hat die „kritische Erörterung” des Seelenbegriffs „an die Spitze seiner medicinischen Psychologie gestellt”. Es gibt also keinen Grund zu behaupten – wie Wundt – „dass das me2
Drobisch bezieht sich auf Wundt, 1863-1864 und Wundt, 1862.
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taphysische Axiom, auf welches die ganze Herbartische Psychologie aufgebaut sei, sich direct durch das Experiment widerlegen lasse” (Drobisch, 1864, 318-319). Man sollte in Gegenteil die Fruchtbarkeit der Herbartschen Erklärung der Verhältnisse zwischen der Intensität der psychischen Tätigkeit und den bewussten und unbewussten Stufen dieser letzteren anerkennen. Herbarts Auffassung der Einheit des Seelenlebens sollte keineswegs als naiv und dogmatisch beurteilt werden: „Herbart gab schon dem Seelenleben Einheit, als er die Scheidewande der Seelenvermögen niederriss, Vorstellungen, Gefühle und Strebungen auf eine einzige Art der Seelenthätigkeit zurückführte, der Association das Princip der Hemmung der Vorstellungen durch ihre Gegensätze hinzufügte, die Reihenbildung der Vorstellungen, sowie ihre unmittelbare und mittelbare Reproduction daraus ableitete und zeigte, wie aus der Verflechtung aller dieser Fäden allmählich das ganze Gewebe unsrer Intelligenz, die Fluctuation unsrer Gemüthszustände und die Energie unsres Begehrens und Wollens entstehen” (Drobisch, 1864, 319-320, 327). Wie auch von Cornelius – in einer Entgegnung auf Langes Kritik der Herbartschen mathematischen Psychologie – hervorgehoben wird, fehlt die Meinung, „dass Herbart überall mit sich selbst in Widerspruch gerathe, wo von einer Vielheit in Bezug auf die einfache Seele die Rede ist” an guten Gründen. „Die Vorstellungen als innere Zustände der einfachen Seele sind nicht reale Wesen”: sie sind „als Thätigkeiten der einfachen Seele einfach, aber sie sind nicht die Seele selbst, die sich auch dadurch, dass sie auf verschiedene Weise thätig ist, nicht in verschiedene Wesen spaltet. Vielmehr ist und bleibt die Seele in allen ihren Zuständen mit sich selbst identisch, da sich im Conflict mit anderen Wesen eben durch ihre Thätigkeit sich selbst erhält, als was sie ist” (Cornelius, 1866, 328329). 5 Stumpf und Herbart Es ist endlich die Zeit gekommen, zu Stumpf überzugehen. Schon die ersten Schriften von Stumpf – und vor allem die Lotze gewidmete Abhandlung Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (Stumpf, 1873) – liefern viele bedeutende Zeugnisse einer gründlichen Auseinandersetzung mit Herbarts Ansichten. Die Erwägung der Herbartschen Auffassung von den Reihenformen beschäftigt also Stumpf in dem ersten Kapitel seiner Abhandlung (Stumpf, 1873, 3036). Herbarts Ansichten spielen eine wesentliche Vermittlungsrolle im
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Übergang von Kants „Theorie der subjectiven Formen” zu den neuen Versuchen (Bain, E. H. Weber, Lotze, J.S. Mill) einer Erklärung der Raumvorstellung, sowohl auf der physiologischen als auch auf der psychologischen Ebene. Im Zentrum der Darstellung von Stumpf steht selbstverständlich die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Vorstellungen: die Lösung dieser Frage bildet die Voraussetzung zur Entwicklung jener „Theorie der psychologischen Theile”, die als eigentlicher Kern der Darstellung von Stumpf zu betrachten ist. Stumpf bezieht sich in erster Linie auf Herbarts Psychologie als Wissenschaft und behandelt besonders die Frage – man sollte auch die Äußerungen Herbarts in seinem Lehrbuch der Psychologie (Herbart, 1824, 388) berücksichtigen – nach der wirklichen Bedeutung der Anschauung in der Entwicklung eines widerspruchslosen Raumbegriffs. Die Entstehung der Raumvorstellung bildet jedoch nur eine Seite – wenngleich von besonderer Beweiskraft – einer allgemeineren Fragestellung, d.h. jener nach dem Wahrnehmungsprozess. In dieser Hinsicht gilt die psychologische Auffassung Herbarts als unentbehrlicher Bezugspunkt für Stumpf. Das bedeutet aber keineswegs, dass Stumpf mit den Ansichten Herbarts einig sei. Das gilt vor allem für den monadologischen Seelenbegriff Herbarts, oder genauer für die Hypothese von der „Punctualität der Seele” (Stumpf, 1873, 115-116). Stumpf erklärt sich gegen eine solche Hypothese: der Einfluss Lotzes auf seine Stellungnahme scheint bedeutend, wie die Mittheilung Lotze’s, die Stumpf als Anhang zu seinem Buch abdrucken ließ, ohne jeden Zweifel beweist. Auch andere wesentlichen Aspekte der Herbartschen Auffassung des Wahrnehmungsprozesses werden von Stumpf in Betracht gezogen. Das gilt vor allem für die Theorie der „zufälligen Ansichten”, von welchen die Wahrnehmung jedes Gegenstands in ihrer Wirklichkeit gesichert wird. Diese Auffassung ist in der Tat von besonderer Bedeutung für Stumpf, der sich daran für die Entwicklung seiner Theorie der „Theilinhalte” anlehnt, wenn auch mit der nicht nebensächlichen Präzisierung, „dass die Beziehungen, welche wir hier in den einheitlichen Inhalt hineinlegen, keineswegs zufällige sind; nicht wir verändern unseren Standpunct und sehen denselben Inhalt nach Belieben von verschiedenen Seiten, sondern er selbst verändert sich, und zwar wirklich” (Stumpf, 1873, 140). Stumpf sieht jedoch mit Distanz die Rolle, die die Herbartsche Psychologie der Metaphysik und insbesondere der Ontologie zuschreibt. Zu seinen kritischen Bemerkungen
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über die Möglichkeit einer wirklichen „Mechanik der Seele” gesellt sich eine noch vorsichtigere Stellungnahme gegenüber jeder Psychologie, die der Analyse der Innerlichkeit eine zentrale Rolle zuschreibt (Stumpf, 1873, 311 ff.). In dem oben erwähnten Anhang waren die Äußerungen Lotzes sehr vorsichtig gegenüber jedem voreiligen Durchgang von der physiologischen zur metaphysisch-ontologischen Ebene (und umgekehrt). Im Hinblick auf seine Theorie der Localzeichen, äußert Lotze die Überzeugung, dass seine „Gedanken von der Localisation der Gesichtseindrücke” mit „bestimmten metaphysischen Voraussetzungen über die Natur der Seele” in „keiner nothwendigen Verbindung” stehen (Stumpf, 1873, 315). Die Frage nach der „Punctualität” oder nach „der stetigen oder unstetigen Ausdehnung” der Seele hat in der Tat keine Bedeutung, wie auch der Versuch, „alles psychische Leben auf geradem Wege aus den Wechselwirkungen der Nervenelemente abzuleiten”. Die einzige, wirkliche Frage bleibt im Fall der Raumvorstellung (aber die Frage hat selbstverständlich eine allgemeinere Bedeutung) jene nach der Art der „vorstellenden Thätigkeit”, die die Orte der verschiedenen Sinneseindrücken „zum Gegenstand einer Anschauung” macht (Stumpf, 1873, 315-316). Nicht die positive These einer „Punctualität” der Seele – die These nämlich, die Seele wirke „nur von einem punctuellen Ort aus”, sondern die entschiedene Zurückführung jeder Ausdehnung der Seele trifft die Zustimmung Lotzes. Die Behauptung, dass die Seele als „ein Wesen von verschwindender Ausdehnung” zu betrachten sei hat eine sonderbare Bedeutung. „Sie führt – hebt Lotze hervor – [...] am anschaulichsten zu der Folgerung, dass eine Vielheit von Eindrücken, die sich in bestimmter räumlicher Ordnung der Seele annähern, bei dem wirklichen Übergang in sie jede Spur dieser räumlichen Ordnung verlieren und durch eine Vielheit nur simultaner, nicht mehr räumlich aussereinander befindlichen sondern nur noch qualitativ unterschiedener Eindrücke ersetzt werden muss. Aus dieser Vielheit unräumlicher innerer Zustände der Seele, für welche die Coexistenz verschiedener gehörter Töne eines Accordes als Gleichniss gelten mag, hat die vorstellende Thätigkeit des Subjectes, dessen Zustände sie sind, die räumliche Ordnung von Grund aus neu zu construiren.” Wenn eine solche „Construction” vollendet wird, wird auch ersichtlich, dass „die vorher unräumlichen Eindrücke” nun in keinem „erzeugten wirklichen Raume auseinandertreten”. Dieser Raum und die Ordnung der Eindrücke in demselben sollten vielmehr
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als ein Bild betrachtet werden, „ein Bild, das nur in der Anschauung und für sie existiert, und an dessen (räumlichen) Eigenschaften die vorstellende Thätigkeit nicht Theil nimmt, welche es für sich, als Gegenstand ihres Vorstellens, erzeugt” (Stumpf, 1873, 316-317). Die Notwendigkeit eines Gleichgewichts zwischen Empirismus und Nativismus in der Beobachtung der Gesetze des „psychischen Wirkens” in dem Ursprung der Raumvorstellung wird also von Stumpf in direktem Anschluss an Lotze verteidigt (Stumpf, 1873, 311312). Wie Lotze, kann Stumpf nicht umhin, die aktive Rolle, die von der psychischen Tätigkeit, von der Seele gespielt wird hervorzuheben: er lenkt unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf das „Factum” der „Mechanik der Seele”, „jener erstaunlichen Mechanik der Seele, welche es ihr [der Seele] ermöglicht, aus dem geringfügigsten Material die reichste und feinste aller Vorstellungen zu gestalten”. „Nichts – schreitet Stumpf fort – fürwahr gleicht der Leichtigkeit und Sicherheit, mit welcher wir jeden Augenblick verwickelte und mannichfaltige Raumverhältnisse der Aussenwelt erkennen. Und doch ist keine Vorstellung ursprünglich ärmer als diese” (Stumpf, 1873, 311). Aber die Untersuchung dieser „erstaunlichen Mechanik der Seele” darf sich keineswegs in „die höheren Fragen über die Natur der Seele, über ihre Geistigkeit oder Materialität, über punctuellen oder ausgedehnten Seelensitz” einmischen (Stumpf, 1873, 309). „Weder konnte uns Herbart’s punctuelle Seele veranlassen, die Ursprünglichkeit der Raumvorstellung aufzugeben, noch – Stumpf hat keine Zweifel darüber - Joh. Müller’s ausgedehnte Seele, diese Ursprünglichkeit zu behaupten” (Stumpf, 1873, 310, Anm.). Aber es ist gleichzeitig nicht schwierig, bei Stumpf eine gewisse Neigung zugunsten des ersten zu bemerken: nicht aus metaphysischen oder ontologischen Gründen – die von Stumpf – im Einklang mit der Kritik Lotzes gegen Herbart - ausdrücklich verworfen werden, sondern im Hinblick auf die Schwierigkeiten einer physiologischen Erklärung wie jener von Müller. Und – wie eben bemerkt – ist diese Neigung Stumpfs in der Tat mit dem Standpunkt Lotzes zusammenfallend, mit der Überzeugung nämlich, die Tätigkeit der Seele niemals als eine in der Ausdehnung wirkende zu betrachten sei (Stumpf, 1873, 316). Es wäre natürlich möglich, eine Menge von weiteren bedeutenden Zeugnissen des Interesses Stumpfs für die Herbartsche Auffassung des Wahrnehmungs- und Vorstellungsprozesses in der Abhandlung von 1873 zu finden. Stumpf erwägt unter anderem mit einem besonderen
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Interesse die Ansichten Herbarts über den Prozess der sogenannten „Verschmelzung”, der für das Verständnis nicht nur der Raumwahrnehmung von höchster Bedeutung ist und sich mit sonderbarer Klarheit in der Tonwahrnehmung darstellt. Außerdem setzt sich Stumpf mit der Frage nach der Möglichkeit einer direkten, a priori Wahrnehmung nicht nur von Qualitäten, sondern auch von deren Verhältnissen auseinander (Stumpf, 1873, 32-33, 122). Einige der Hauptthemen der darauffolgenden Forschungsarbeit Stumpfs zeichnen sich schon mit Klarheit ab: das gilt in erster Linie für die Tonpsychologie, aber wir sollten auch jene späteren Arbeiten, wo Stumpf einige Fragen erkenntnistheoretischen Inhalts behandelt, nicht vernachlässigen (Stumpf, 1883-1890, I, 118-119; Stumpf, 1891). Wie bekannt, ist die Rolle dieser Arbeiten Stumpfs in der Entwicklung der gestaltpsychologischen Auffassung von höchster Bedeutung; und dazu kommt ein dauernder Einfluss der Ansichten Herbarts und besonders des Herbartianismus auf jene Debatte, vor allem wenn wir die enge Verbindung Meinongs und der Meinong-Schule mit der Herbartschen Tradition in Betracht ziehen. Es liegt selbstverständlich außerhalb des Rahmens dieses Beitrages, eine, wenn auch skizzenhafte Darstellung dieser Entwicklungen zu versuchen. Die zentrale Rolle der Ansichten Herbarts hat sich nichts desto weniger bestätigt: Herbart und die Herbartianer liefern der Debatte um die Begründung einer wissenschaftlichen Psychologie einen bedeutenden Beitrag. Ihr Beitrag – das gilt in erster Linie für den Fall Fechners – ist sogar als entscheidend zu betrachten. Aber die Bedeutung der Herbartschen Ansichten in der Entwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie liegt nicht nur auf der psychologischen Ebene. Herbart und die Herbart-Schule verteidigen auch die Notwendigkeit einer strengen und ausführlichen Definition vom philosophischen Standpunkt aus jener Begriffe, die sich als unentbehrlich für die Begründung und für die Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Erforschung der psychischen Tätigkeit erwiesen haben. Oder, mit anderen Worten, haben Herbart und die Herbartianer festgestellt, dass viele von den meistgebrauchten Begriffen der Psychologie auf unerklärten Voraussetzungen ruhen und zu echt widersprüchlichen Folgerungen verleiten können. Man soll immer die psychologischen Fragen von den philosophischen auseinanderhalten; aber es ist unmöglich, ihre tatsächliche Verbindung auf der begrifflichen Ebene zu leugnen. In dieser Hinsicht, hat die Herbartsche Auffassung der Philosophie als
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„Bearbeitung der Begriffe” eine wesentliche Aufgabe zu erledigen. Und das gilt vielleicht vor Allem für einen jedoch hochproblematischen Begriff wie der Begriff von Seele und jenem, mit diesem letzteren eng verbunden, von Bewusstsein. Daraus resultiert die Herbartsche Umgestaltung der Monadologie Leibnizscher Prägung, die als wesentlicher Bezugspunkt – wenn auch öfters aus polemischen Gründen – fast jedes Begründungsversuchs einer wissenschaftlichen Psychologie gilt. Wir haben nur annährungsweise einige Aspekte der Debatte um die Herbartsche Monadologie und um die diesbezüglichen Fragen behandelt. Und in der Tat haben wir uns auf die unmittelbaren Voraussetzungen der früheren Entwicklung von Stumpf beschränkt. Aber schon in der Behandlung eines übrigens zentralen Problems wie die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Raumvorstellung ist es leicht, die Hauptzüge der späteren erneuernden Auffassung Stumpfs gegenüber der psychologischen Wirklichkeitsanalyse festzustellen. Und die Thesen Herbarts – die psychologischen und die philosophischen Thesen Herbarts – werden von Stumpf mit vollem Bewusstsein als unentbehrlicher Bezugspunkt angenommen. „Wir dürfen aber Herbart nicht verlassen – behauptet Stumpf am Schluss seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der Herbartschen Theorie der Reihenformen als Grundlage einer möglichen Erklärung der Raumvorstellung – ohne den Verdiensten, die er sich um die deutsche Philosophie in dieser Sache erworben hat, Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen. Sein Verdienst besteht vor Allem im Nachweis des Ungenügenden in der Kant’schen Theorie und in der kräftigen Erneuerung der Nachforschung. Es besteht sodann in der scharfen Trennung der metaphysischen Fragen über die Natur dessen, was der Raumvorstellung in der Wirklichkeit entspricht, von der psychologischen Fragen nach der Entstehung dieser Vorstellung; was namentlich nach den abstrusen Deductionen Fichte’s als der erste Schritt zu einer verständlichen Behandlung der Sache zu rühmen ist. Es besteht endlich auch in der Zerlegung der psychologischen Fragen selbst” (Stumpf, 1873, 35-36).
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References Brentano, F., 1955, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt [1874], mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen und Register hrsg. von O. Kraus, I Band, Hamburg, Meiner. Cornelius, C.S., 1865, „Besprechung von G.T. Fechner, Atomenlehre”, Zeitschrift für exakte Philosophie im Sinne des neueren kritischen Realismus, VI, 1866, 323 ff. –– 1866, „Besprechung von: F.A. Lange, Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie”, Zeitschrift für Philosophie im Sinne des neuen kritischen Realismus, V, 1865, 412-418. Drobisch, M.W., 1864, „Ueber den neuesten Versuch die Psychologie naturwissenschaftlich zu begründen”, Zeitschrift für exakte Philosophie im Sinne des neueren kritischen Realismus, IV, 313-348. –– 1850, Erste Grundlehren der mathematischen Psychologie, Leipzig, Voss. Fechner, G.Th., 1907, Ueber die Seelenfrage. Ein Gang durch die sichtbare Welt, um die unsichtbare zu finden, [Leipzig, Amelang, 1861], II. Auflage, besorgt von E. Spranger, mit einem Geleitwort von Fr. Paulsen, Hamburg u. Leipzig, Voss. –– 1907, Elemente der Psychophysik [1860-1861], 3e Aufl., 2 Bände, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel. Herbart, J.F., 1964, Sämtliche Werke in chronologischer Reihenfolge, 19 Bände, hrsg. von K. Kehrbach und O. Flügel [1887-1915], Scientia, Aalen. –– 1828-1829, Allgemeine Metaphysik nebst den Anfängen der philosophischen Naturlehre [2 Bände, Königsberg, Unzer], in: Herbart, 1964, Bände VII und VIII. –– 1824-1825, Psychologie als Wissenschaft. Neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik [2 Bände, Königsberg, Unzer], in: Herbart, 1964, Bände V und VI. –– 1824, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie [Königsberg, Unzer], 2e Aufl., in: Herbart, 1964, Band IV. Lange, F.A., 1926, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart [1873-1875], 2 Bände, hrsg. von H. Schmidt, Leipzig, Kröner. –– 1865, Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie. Ein Versuch zur Nachweisung des fundamentalen Fehlers bei Herbart und Drobisch, Duisburg, Falk & Volmer. Lotze, R.H., 1989, Kleine Schriften zur Psychologie, Eingeleitet und mit Materialien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte versehen von R. Pester, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York-London-Paris-Tokyo-Hong Kong, Springer. –– 1856-1864, Mikrokosmos. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit. Versuch einer Anthropologie, 3 Bände, Leipzig, Hirzel. –– 1852, Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele, Leipzig, Weidmann. –– 1846, Seele und Seelenleben, in R. Wagner (Hrsg), 1842-1853, Band III, 1. Wiederabgedrückt in: R. H. Lotze, 1989, 112-234. –– 1843, „Herbarts Ontologie”¸ Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie, 11, 1843, 203-234. Stumpf, C., 1891, „Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, Abhandlungen der I. Classe der kön. Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 19, 467-508. –– 1883-1890, Tonpsychologie, 2 Bände, Leipzig, Hirzel. –– 1873, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig, Hirzel.
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Wagner, R. (Hrsg), 1842-1853, Handwörterbuch der Physiologie mit Rücksicht auf physiologische Pathologie, 4 Bände, Braunschweig, Vieweg. Wundt, W., 1863-1864, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele, 2 Bände, Leipzig, Voss. –– 1862, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehnmungen, Heidelberg und Leipzig, Winter. Zimmermann, R., 1849, Leibnitz und Herbart. Eine Vergleichung ihrer Monadologien. Eine von der kön. Dänischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Kopenhagen am 1. Jänner 1848 gekrönte Preisschrift, Wien, Braumüller.
PART II. THEMES INTRODUCTION (RICCARDO MARTINELLI)
The essays of this section aim at illustrating and discussing some of Stumpf’s philosophical interests and themes. Needless to say, no claim of exhaustivity can be raised here. Rather, the essays offer an exemplification of Stumpf’s method and style in philosophy, thus testifying to his depth, perspicuity and originality. Some historical and philological remarks may be needed, or helpful, for a correct reading of this section. The topics under discussion range from the philosophy of mathematics, originally developed by Stumpf in his habilitation thesis of 1870 (Stumpf 2008), and the theory of categories as exposed in his posthumous work, written in the 1930s, i.e. sixty years later or so. (Stumpf 1939-1940) In between, Stumpf’s philosophical production was irregular from a quantitative point of view. Stumpf always worked intensively and wrote a lot (Fisette 2015a), but many titles in his bibliography clearly fall within the scope of what we should call scientific rather than philosophical research. Nevertheless, this very distinction is possibly irrelevant in this case: for instance, Stumpf’s influential Tonpsychologie relies partly on purely philosophical discussions, partly on experimental evidence. (Stumpf 1883, 1890) This coexistence does not imply that Stumpf fell victim to methodological confusion or schizophrenia. In his view, philosophers should go through scientific training and scientific practice. They should carefully attempt to attain true scientific preparation, at least in one field of research. (Stumpf 1924, 396-397) In fact, epistemology and metaphysics are autonomous, but they must never contradict any scientifically ascertained truth (Stumpf 1891, 482). Accordingly, philosophy should always work within the framework of scientific truths, especially those established by physics and psychology, so that working experimentally, for instance on some issue concerning the theory of perception, can indirectly contribute to philosophy – including metaphysics and ethics. (Stumpf 1890, V-VI)
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In spite of Stumpf’s frank avowal that he should have written more on philosophy than he actually did (Stumpf 1924, 397), one can easily identify a uniform intent and a consistent theoretical project behind this undoubtedly intermittent philosophical production. As a consequence of his self-confessed negligence as a philosophical writer, in some cases (e.g. aesthetics or ethics) modern scholars are compelled to reconstruct Stumpf’s philosophical thought on the basis of relatively short or insufficient textual evidence. To sum up, although Stumpf’s philosophical production is poor if compared to his professional lifespan, he has nevertheless left us a considerable philosophical corpus. Moreover, some of his scientific texts include relevant philosophical sections; and even when this is not the case, they are conceived by Stumpf as an indirect contribution to setting the background for some philosophical question. It is no surprise, then, that Stumpf’s ideas reveal much more coherence and constancy than the intermittence of his production could suggest, as shown by some of the essays presented here. Carlo Ierna discusses Stumpf’s philosophy of mathematics on the basis of Stumpf’s habilitation thesis Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik of 1870, the late Erkenntnislehre and (partly) unpublished lectures given by Stumpf during the 1880s. (Ierna 2015) Many of Stumpf’s mathematical tenets, in Ierna’s view, are common to what is called the “Brentanist” approach to mathematics, as exemplified by the fact that Stumpf possibly perused Brentano’s lectures for his own didactic purposes in Halle. What emerges is a remarkable continuity within Stumpf’s philosophy of mathematics, whose central assumption is that mathematical axioms are essentially analytical. In Carl Stumpf über Sachverhalte Arkadiusz Chrudzimski tackles one of the most successful notions introduced by Stumpf into the philosophical vocabulary, that of “state of affairs” (Sachverhalt). (Chrudzimski 2015) Following a detailed account of Brentano’s position on propositional entities, Chrudzimski discusses a passage from Stumpf’s Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen, where Stumpf adopts a somehow unfavorable position towards the question, since he admits propositional entities only as immanent contents. In a sense, Chrudzimski argues, this is consistent with Stumpf’s acknowledgment of simple objects as structured entities; yet, this makes Sachverhalte superfluous to him. Swaying between Aristotelianism and conceptualism, in Chrudzimski’s interpretation, Stumpf ends up with favoring
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the latter, that is, he would eventually subscribe to Brentano’s early claims. The paper Stumpf on Categories by Riccardo Martinelli discusses the content of the first part of the Erkenntnislehre, where Stumpf gives an empirical explanation of the origin of categories. (Martinelli 2015) Since his very beginnings as a philosopher, Stumpf had repeatedly but not systematically dealt with this problem, which (somehow unexpectedly) turned out to be closely related to the topic of his Raumbuch of 1873. Rather than with bundles, in Hume’s sense, inner and outer perception presents us with wholes of attributes, within which we choose and subsequently abstract what is most relevant to certain scientific or pre-scientific purposes. In Stumpf’s opinion, then, this general process accounts for the origin of most categories, including substance, causality, and number. A comparison between Stumpf’s views and those of Brentano’s and Trendelenburg’s, and a brief discussion of Stumpf’s interpretation of Spinoza are also provided in the essay. The striking divergence from Brentano on this crucial philosophical theme illustrates Stumpf’s original philosophical stance. In Stumpf on Abstraction Guillaume Fréchette carefully reconstructs Brentano’s and Stumpf’s ideas concerning abstraction (Fréchette 2015). Stumpf partly follows Brentano on his path to three different accounts of abstraction (monistic, ‘ennoetistic’ and weakly dualistic). In his Raumbuch of 1873, Stumpf endorses a monistic view: abstraction serves e.g. to think of extension separately from color. In the Halle period, Stumpf integrates Brentano’s subsequently developed ‘ennoetism’ into his account of abstraction. With the second volume of the Tonpsychologie (1890), however, Stumpf departs from the ennoetistic approach and begins to develop his mature view. Together with a theoretically and terminologically renewed account (noticing i.e. perceiving is prior to judging) he now carefully distinguishes abstraction from generalization. The latter process gives rise to Gebilde, higher formations of thought like, for instance, sets (and numbers) or universal concepts. Since the Gebilde always depend on mental functions, Stumpf avoids Platonic realism; nevertheless, they are supra-individual and, in this sense, objective. With this, as Fréchette shows, Brentano and Stumpf eventually endorse different views on abstraction: whereas Stumpf “started to argue for the necessity of a specific abstractive function called generalization, Brentano argued for a conception of abstraction as a higher-order presentation”.
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Along with a detailed reconstruction of these complex themes, the essay also introduces and discusses Husserl’s criticism of Brentano’s theory of abstraction in the Logical Investigations. Husserl and Stumpf (who exchanged letters on this theme) shared some common view. Nevertheless, Fréchette argues, Husserl’s sharp criticism of the allegedly empiricist Brentanian conception of abstraction holds only if one assumes that generalization involves a kind of psychologistic hypostatization that Stumpf was indeed able to avoid. Dominique Pradelle’s The Autonomy of the sensible and the desubjectification of the a priori by Stumpf introduces the general hermeneutical question of the importance of Stumpf’s philosophy and the worthiness of any investigation on his work. (Pradelle 2015) Does Stumpf merely serve as a historical interest because of his interactions with other philosophers of his time (Brentano, Husserl and others), or does he deserve attention as a philosopher? Pradelle argues in favor of the latter. Though not explicitly committed to this task, Stumpf actually opens up “important lines of philosophical thought” and prefigures some “key lines” of subsequent philosophy. Most remarkably, Stumpf’s insights include (among others) the two theses hinted at in the title: the autonomy of sensibility and an objectively – rather than subjectively – oriented idea of the a priori. Opposing both associationism and Kantianism, Stumpf maintains that all sensible data have a holistic and non-atomistic character; at the same time, he desubjectifies the a priori, i.e. he focuses on the intrinsic constraints of perceptual items that eventually reveal their internal structure. The interaction between these aspects is investigated on the basis of Stumpf’s concepts of space and mereology. Together with his intuitive method, which provides a powerful antidote to constructivism and intellectualism, the above-mentioned features of Stumpf’s thought anticipate many aspects of phenomenology, urge for a reform of ontology and for a new concept of perception, which is to be further developed by the Gestaltists. The essay by Christian Allesch, Ästhetik als praktische Philosophie: Zur impliziten Ästhetik von Carl Stumpf considers a specific aspect of Stumpf’s philosophy, i.e. aesthetics. (Allesch 2015) As the title says, Allesch discusses a methodological problem, represented by the “implicitness” of Stumpf’s claims in this field. Although many of Stumpf’s works provide important scattered hints at aesthetic issues, he avoided tackling the problem systematically (e.g. in a mon-
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ograph) and direct involvement with on-going debates among specialists. At the time, a shift from a normative approach to empirical (psychological) methods was taking place in aesthetics. Since Stumpf considers this discipline part of practical philosophy, Allesch notes that he principally thinks of aesthetics as complying with a normative paradigm; yet, he is open to a psychologically-oriented approach to aesthetics, as revealed by his many psychological studies concerning music. References Allesch, Ch. (2015) “Ästhetik als praktische Philosophie: Zur impliziten Ästhetik von Carl Stumpf”, 295-315. Chrudzmski, A. (2015) “Carl Stumpf über Sachverhalte”, 173-201. Fisette, D., ed., (2015), “Bibliography of Carl Stumpf’s Publications / Bibliographie der Schriften von Carl Stumpf”, 531-543. Fréchette, G. (2015) “Stumpf on Abstraction”, 263-293. Ierna, C. (2015) “Carl Stumpf’s Philosophy of Mathematics”, 151-172. Martinelli, R. (2015) “Stumpf on categories”, 203-227. Pradelle, D. (2015) “Autonomy of the sensible and de-subjectification of the a priori by Stumpf”, 229-262. Stumpf, C. (1883): Tonpsychologie, vol. I, Leipzig: Hirzel; repr. Bonset: Amsterdam 1965. –– (1890): Tonpsychologie, vol.II, Leipzig: Hirzel; repr. Bonset: Amsterdam 1965. –– (1891): “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 19, zweite Abt., München: Franz, 456516. –– (1907): Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie, Rede zum Eintritt des Rektorates der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 15 oktober 1907, Berlin: Francke; also in Stumpf 1910, 161-196. –– (1910): Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth. –– (1924): “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung, vol. 5, Leipzig: Meiner, 1-57; eng. transl. in C. Murchison (ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, Worcester: Clark University Press, 1930, 389-441. –– (1939-1940): Erkenntnislehre, 2 vols., Leipzig: Barth. –– (2008): Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik, W. Ewen (ed.), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
CARL STUMPF’S PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS CARLO IERNA (UNIVERSITY OF UTRECHT)
Abstract. Like most of Franz Brentano’s students, Carl Stumpf showed an interest in the philosophy of mathematics. In particular, Stumpf wrote his habilitation thesis On the Foundations of Mathematics, used mathematical examples in central parts of his lectures, and later returned to the topic in the posthumously published Erkenntnislehre. I will try to show the development and the continuity of Stumpf’s position on the basis of his writings and (unpublished) lectures on logic and psychology, taking into account the Brentanist approach to the philosophy of mathematics that developed in the 1880s and 1890s in the School of Brentano.
1 Introductory remarks In this paper I will provide an account of Carl Stumpf’s approach to the foundations of mathematics from his earliest to his latest works, with a particular focus on the middle period. This discussion is situated within the historical and intellectual context of the School of Brentano and the Brentanian philosophy of mathematics developed therein.1 With respect to the philosophy of mathematics, especially regarding the basic concepts of arithmetic, Stumpf has an important place as Franz Brentano’s first student and as mentor to Edmund Husserl. In the following contribution I will of course consider Stumpf’s most explicitly mathematical works, such as his 1870 habilitation thesis Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik (On the Foundations of Mathematics) 2 and his posthumous work, Erkenntnislehre (Theory of Knowledge), 3 particularly the section on the concept of number. There are some works that address Stumpf’s philosophy of 1
Regarding the idea of a “Brentanian Philosophy of Mathematics” see Ierna 2009. Recently published as: Stumpf 2008. 3 Stumpf 1939. 2
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mathematics,4 and they do so naturally also by focusing on these obviously relevant texts. In order to not merely repeat or summarize such accounts, I will concentrate on Stumpf’s mostly unpublished lectures from the 1880s.5 In addition to elucidating the position he takes in his very first and in his very last works, my contribution can shed light on his position in the crucial intermediate phase. From the mid-1880s to the early 1890s numerous treatises were produced regarding the basic concepts of arithmetic and, therefore, of mathematics, both by mathematicians as well as by philosophers, specifically by Brentanists, such as, for instance, Kerry, Husserl and von Ehrenfels. Both Brentano and Stumpf clearly influenced their pupils in this regard maingly through their lectures, which therefore represent a highly significant source for establishing their respective positions and the relationships between them. 2 Background Stumpf’s philosophical development and career have already been discussed quite extensively elsewhere,6 but I will point out a few elements that are of particular relevance for our discussion. Stumpf had almost completed his first year of studies in Würzburg when he attended Franz Brentano’s public habilitation defense in July 1866, where he advanced the famous thesis “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est” (“The true method of philosophy is none other than that of natural science”). 7 His confidence and eloquence made a deep impression on Stumpf, prompting him to dedicate his life to philosophy.8 4
E.g. Ewen 2008. Ewen does not take any of Stumpf’s lectures into account, not even the syllabi of his lectures on psychology and on logic published as appendices two and three in Robin Rollinger’s Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano (Rollinger 1999). Ewen also seems to jump from the discussion of Stumpf’s habilitation thesis of 1870 to Stumpf’s 1907 Einteilung der Wissenschaften and the posthumous Erkenntnislehre, while his main aim is to produce a comparison between Stumpf’s views and Frege’s position in the 1884 Grundlagen. 6 Consider, for instance, Stumpf 1919 and Stumpf 1917; Schuhmann 1996 and Rollinger 1999, pp. 83-123. 7 Brentano 1929, 136-7, engl. transl. by Smith (1994, 28). 8 Stumpf 1883, V. 5
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The way in which Brentano defended and explained his theses showed such a superiority with respect to his opponents, that I decided to attend his lectures in the winter […] We were especially pleased that he did not consider any other method for philosophy than that of the natural sciences and took this as the foundation of his hopes for a rebirth of philosophy.9
Stumpf became Brentano’s “eldest”, i.e. first, student10 and together with Anton Marty, formed the very first generation of the School of Brentano. As would also be the case with Husserl almost a decade later, Brentano, being merely a Privatdozent at the time, had to send Stumpf elsewhere to obtain his promotion. So in the summer semester of 1867 Stumpf went to Göttingen for three semesters to study with Lotze: “In the year 1867/68 I studied psychology, history of philosophy after Kant, natural philosophy and practical philosophy with him.”11 In the summer semester of 1868 Stumpf obtained his doctorate with a thesis on Das Verhältniss des Platonischen Gottes zur Idee des Guten (The Relation of the Platonic God to the Idea of the Good). The next semester he returned to Würzburg and continued to attend Brentano’s lectures until the summer semester of 1870.12 Following Brentano’s example once again, Stumpf began in October 1869 to study theology at the seminary. In the wake of Brentano’s religious struggles and the controversy concerning the question of papal infallibility, less than a year later Stumpf decided to quit theology and returned to Lotze for his habilitation. Stumpf obtained his habilitation in philosophy in October 1870 with the work Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik. During the vacation I completed a work on the topic of mathematical axioms and obtained my habilitation at the end of October 1870 in Göttingen. However, I did not publish this work, as the non-Euclidian approach, to which Felix Klein introduced me, in the end was a little beyond me.13 9
Stumpf 1919, 88 f. Stumpf confirms that he attended Brentano’s lectures on the history of philosophy (WS 1866/67), metaphysics (SS 1867) and logic. 10 Stumpf 1919, 145. 11 Stumpf 1917, 7. 12 On history and on metaphysics I (WS 1868/69); on metaphysics II (SS 1869); on history I and on deductive and inductive logic (WS 1869/70). See Schuhmann 1996, 110. 13 Stumpf 1924, 211.
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After a few years in Göttingen as a Privatdozent, Stumpf went to Würzburg in 1873, thus becoming a full professor, in 1879 to Prague and in 1884 to Halle, where he was to stay five years (1884 - 1889). Then he moved to Munich (1889) and then finally to Berlin (1894), where he remained for the rest of his life and established his school, founding a psychological institute (1900) and serving as rector (1907/1908).14 In addition to sharing the goal of the School of Brentano regarding the renewal of philosophy as science and to Stumpf’s later specialization in the philosophy and psychology of sound and music, like so many other Brentanians, he also lectured and wrote on the subject of the philosophy of mathematics.15 Little is known about Stumpf’s motivations for choosing this topic for his habilitation.16 However, it is likely that Brentano’s lectures on metaphysics and logic might have contributed to his decision. Brentano often discussed topics relating to the philosophy of mathematics in his lectures and it is probable that a precedent can be found in his lectures for many of the points Stumpf makes. While Stumpf had gone to Lotze to undertake both his dissertation and habilitation, thereby forging strong personal and philosophical ties with him in the process,17 the influence of Brentano is usually regarded as more significant. Indeed, if Brentano’s lectures on metaphysics in the early 1880s are indicative of the content of the lectures, which Stumpf attended before writing his habilitation essay, we must conclude that he was certainly inspired by them. On the basis of the remaining notes from his lectures on metaphysics,18 we can see that Brentano discussed the nature of the mathematical axioms. He attempted to prove the analyticity of these axioms in the context of a discussion of Euclid and asked whether there “[a]re there any synthetic axioms?”19 From there Brentano launches into extensive critiques of Kant and Mill, discussions of deductive and inductive, analytic and synthetic as well as a priori and 14
See Schuhmann 1996, 113; Sprung 2002, 91, 95. I will not go into his discussions of space and geometry here, which constitute a quite separate and extensive topic, as does the topic of the theory of probability. 16 Ewen 2008, 32: “We can glean nothing from the collected letters and documents regarding Stumpf’s motivation to write a habilitation thesis on a mathematical topic”. 17 See also Baumgartner 2002, 27. 18 Brentano 1882/83 (Ms. Q 8: Metaphysik), mainly in the first part on Transzendentalphilosophie. 19 Brentano, 1882/83 (Q 8), 205: “Gibt es synthetische Axiome?”. 15
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a posteriori distinctions. If this is indicative of the background of Stumpf’s habilitation essay, his main question (“Is there significant scientific knowledge that is not founded either immediately or mediately on experience, and if so, what is its source?”) fits very well in the context of Brentano’s overall discussions. 3 The Habilitation Thesis As Stumpf’s habilitation thesis has already been extensively discussed elsewhere,20 I will only summarize here some of its main points that are connected to the further discussion of his position in his lectures.21 In his habilitation thesis Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik (literally “On the Fundamental Propositions of Mathematics”, usually translated as “On the Mathematical Axioms”) Stumpf argues, against John Stuart Mill and against Immanuel Kant, that mathematics is neither inductive nor synthetic, but a deductive, analytical a priori discipline. The critique of Mill’s theory has shown that the mathematical axioms (as well as its propositions) cannot be founded on induction, but that they must be necessary a priori. The critique of Kant’s theory has shown that they cannot be synthetic a priori. The only remaining possibility is: that they must be analytic.22
Stumpf want to show through analysis how the basic propositions of mathematics can be decomposed into elementary concepts and how these can be reduced to tautologies. 23 The fundamental concepts of mathematics, which are found in elementary arithmetic, are “number” as well as relations such as “equality”, “difference”, “more” and “less”.24 A number is a “sum of unities” (“Summe von Einheiten”), i.e. “1+1+ …”, and unity is the negation of difference.25 Counting comes down to establishing relations of difference, i.e. discerning different unities and then “grasping these acts [of differentiation] together in 20
See Ewen 2008. A table of contents of Stumpf’s habilitation thesis can be found in Baumgartner 2002, 28. 21 The following is in part based on my brief discussion of Stumpf in Ierna 2009. 22 Stumpf 2008, 18-2. 23 Stumpf 2008, 19-1. 24 Stumpf 2008, 19-2. 25 Stumpf 2008, 19-3.
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thought: one and one and etc.”26 The concept of number is what is given through this “comprehension” (Zusammenfassung). To perform such an operation, we merely need the concept of a “thing in general”, i.e. “something” (Etwas), and then we count “a thing and an other thing, etc.” Any thinkable thing can be counted in this way. Stumpf goes on to briefly present the other basic concepts in a similar style, and then states that “the whole of arithmetic and algebra” follows straightforwardly from these simple (“they might look trivial”) definitions: no experience, no induction and no a priori synthesis are required.27 The axioms of arithmetic, according to Stumpf, are so general that they do not in fact apply exclusively to arithmetic itself, but also to geometry, and in general “simply everywhere” (schlichtweg überall). They are “presupposed by all sciences with the same right and the same need”. 28 Among the basic propositions or axioms of “arithmetic, algebra and geometry” 29 discussed by Stumpf are the Euclidean common notions such as: “things which are equal to a third are also equal to each other”,30 “equals added to equals yield equals”,31 the principle of commutativity of operations,32 and the idea that “the whole is greater than the part”.33 Mathematics itself does not presuppose any “truths, judgments, facts”, but instead requires “presentations, objects, definitions”.34 Mathematics appears to be presuppositionless in that it presupposes no truth derived from other sciences or from experience, while other sciences require, and hence presuppose, the tools of mathematics. Interestingly, as we will also see later on, Stumpf bases the possibility of conceptualizing higher, i.e. bigger, numbers on the development of the system of numerals. Without such a system of regular sign construction we probably could not conceive numbers beyond three.35 Higher numbers are conceived, within such a system, with the help of 26
Stumpf 2008, 19-3. Stumpf 2008, 20-1. 28 Stumpf 2008, 20-2. 29 Stumpf 2008, 20-4. 30 Stumpf 2008, 21-1, which would seem a rough formulation of the principle of transitivity. 31 Stumpf 2008, 22-1. 32 Stumpf 2008, 22-4. 33 Stumpf 2008, 23-1. 34 Stumpf 2008, 35-4. 35 Stumpf 2008, 24-1. 27
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relations to lower numbers. For instance, we cannot conceive 100 except as 10 times 10. While Stumpf does not explicitly talk about proper and symbolic presentations in the Brentanian sense, we have effectively a very early sketch of this distinction. Improper or symbolic presentations of number would simply be presentations through relations. Higher numbers are presented “mediately” through their relations to lower numbers and, in progressive analysis, may be reduced to numbers that can be “immediately” conceived as merely consisting of sums of unities. Stumpf, similarly to Husserl, argues that “by constructing a numerical system, we have constructed the higher numbers themselves”,36 i.e. it is only by constructing a system of signs for the concepts we can conceive them at all, albeit improperly, symbolically. Stumpf will return to the topic of symbolic presentations and signs in mathematics in his lectures delivered in the 1880s. 4 The Lectures on Logic and Psychology As Schuhmann argues,37 due to the lack of other materials, the remaining notes (conserved at the Husserl-Archives Leuven) detailing the lectures that Stumpf held in Halle in the 1880s are among the most revealing sources for understanding Stumpf’s development and his place in the Brentano School. This is particularly true with respect to topics concerning the elementary concepts in the philosophy of mathematics. The lectures we will take into consideration here are those on Psychology and those on Logic respectively delivered in the winter semester of 1886/8738 and in the summer semester of 1887.39 While they do not discuss philosophy of mathematics per se, they often contain examples or digressions relating to and involving mathematical topics. This is especially relevant in cases where mathematical examples are used to illustrate central concepts of Brentanism. Moreover, more than 15 years after his habilitation Stumpf also addresses again part of his habilitation thesis in these lectures, specifically his arguments in favor of establishing mathematics as a deductive, analytical, and a priori science and his refutation of Mill and Kant. This indicates a high degree of continuity and suggests that we can probably assume the pres36
Stumpf 2008, 24-2. Schuhmann 1996, 113-115. 38 Stumpf 1886/87 (Ms. Q 11/II: Vorlesungen über Psychologie). 39 Stumpf 1887 (Ms. Q 14: Logik und Enzyklopädie der Philosophie). 37
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ence of a Brentanian influence throughout, from the early period up to and including the 1880s, on Stumpf’s thought. In order to introduce the notion of symbolic presentations, in his lectures on logic Brentano provided the following example: We improperly present that of which we have no precisely corresponding presentation and often can have none. […] We name objects, the single features of which we could presumably grasp, but which are for us no longer presentable due to their complication. A million, a billion, we cannot properly present any longer and we name them without understanding the name precisely.40 Language aids our thought in the same way as the signs of the mathematician aid his calculation when he uses them instead of more complex expressions. From now on he considers the reference only as the object to which this sign refers; similarly as he already does with most ordinary number signs, where the sum of numbers passed a certain limit. Who could conceive of a million in any other way but as of a great number, as a 1 with six zeroes? Thus we have an example here, where language helps out thought in such a way, that it overcomes difficulties of the highest degree, even overcoming impossibilities.41
If we then consider Stumpf’s lectures on psychology, we see close similarities with the definition of symbolic presentations to the point that it even would seem that Stumpf perused Brentano’s lectures in the preparation of his own, as he repeats the same examples almost verbatim: § 29. Symbolic Presentations. By this we mean those presentations which occur only as signs for others by replacing them for the use of judgement. Seldom is the case where a name completely expresses a 40
Brentano Ms. EL 80/13060, quoted from Rollinger 2009, 81 f. Brentano 1884/85 (Ms. Y 2: Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen I), 29 f. “Endlich fördert die Sprache auch noch in der Weise das Denken wie die Zeichen des Mathematikers seine Rechnung fördert, wenn er sie statt eines komplizierten Ausdrucks setzt. Er denkt von nun an an das Bezeichnete nur in dem Sinne eines von diesem Zeichen Bezeichneten; ähnlich macht er schon bei den meisten gewöhnlichen Zahlzeichen, wo die Summe der Zahl über ein gewisses Maß hinausgewachsen ist. Wer kann eine Million anders denken als eine große Zahl, etwa 1 mit sechs Nullen. Hier haben wir also ein Beispiel, wo die Sprache dem Denken in der Art zu Hilfe kommt, daß sie über Schwierigkeiten des höchsten Grades, ja über Unmöglichkeiten hinweghilft.” 41
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thought; but only usually a certain part of it. Sometimes, as in the case of larger numbers, the adequate presentation [adäquate Vorstellung] is altogether impossible for us and we think, instead of it, the indeterminate concept of a large number together with certain relations of the number we mean (we intend) [der gemeinten (intendierten) Zahl] to other numbers. E.g. 1000 = 10x100, 100 = 10x10.42 The importance of names is still greater in cases in which a presentation is altogether completely unthinkable. In these cases the linguistic sign performs a similar function as the numerical sign does for the mathematician. A million: one can easily perform operations in thought with these contents, which are in themselves enormous and cannot be fully thought out.43
Stumpf, like Brentano, uses a mathematical example to elucidate the concept, thereby reinforcing the idea that mathematics is to be understood as a science entirely based on symbolic presentations, i.e. signs. While Husserl extensively thanks Brentano for the “deeper understanding” of the significance of the distinction between proper and improper (symbolic) presentations, he also refers to Meinong’s Hume Studien II, where “indirect presentations” are defined through relative determinations and attributes. Indeed, Meinong regarded Husserl’s claim that Brentano had made this distinction “all along” in his lectures as a veiled accusation of plagiarism and claimed himself authorship of it.44 However, Husserl’s most direct sources are probably the lectures delivered by Stumpf, which he attended while writing his habilitation thesis, which would form the basis for the Philosophy of Arithmetic. Besides in the definition of symbolic presentations, there are (unsurprisingly) other parallels with Brentano’s lectures with respect to topics relating to the philosophy of mathematics. For instance, in his logic lectures from 1887, Stumpf briefly discusses the “English logicians” De Morgan, Boole, and Jevons: 42
Stumpf 1886/87, 504. Translation from Rollinger 1999, 301. Stumpf 1886/87, 510: “Noch größer wird die Bedeutung der Namen da, da wo eine Vorstellung vollständig überhaupt nicht denkbar ist. Da übt das sprachlichen Zeichen eine ähnliche Funktion wie das Zahlzeichen für den Mathematiker. Million: Mit Leichtigkeit operiert man im Denken mit diesen an sich ungeheuren und nicht auszudenkenden Inhalten”. 44 Meinong to Husserl, 19-6-1891, see Husserl 1994, 129. With regard to this discussion, also see Ierna 2009, 7-36. 43
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Carlo Ierna Other English logicians, who were also mathematicians, wanted to apply the formal language of mathematics: De Morgan, Boole, Jevons, and in Germany Wundt. According to these logicians deduction, for example, is nothing other than the inference of a third equation from two given equations on the basis of substitution.45
Brentano had made the same point in his lectures on logic in 1884/5, while discussing Boole and Jevons 46 and specifically quoting and commenting Jevons’ opinion that all judgements are equations (Gleichungen).47 Like Brentano, Stumpf places mathematics at the top of the scientific hierarchy: “the most exact science: mathematics”.48 Its concepts and laws find application everywhere, since everywhere there is “something” that can be counted. To what exactly does mathematics owe this status as being the most rigorous and exact of sciences? What is its foundation? For Kant, mathematics was the prime example of a science built on synthetic a priori judgements, which are capable of providing new knowledge. We ask: are there really a priori synthetic judgements, resp. are the examples adduced by Kant really of this kind? Let us take mathematical propositions [Sätze]. Already pure arithmetic contains a priori synthetic judgements. 5 + 7 = 12: in 5 lies nothing of 12, in 7 there is likewise nothing, and also nothing in 5 + 7. It is a different concept from the concept of 12 after all. Such is the case of all arithmetical propositions. They are not after all purely tautological. They do not repeat the subject, they add something new.49 45
Stumpf 1887 (Ms. Q 14: Logik und Enzyklopädie der Philosophie), 53a-b: “Andere englische Logiker, die zugleich auch Mathematiker waren, wollten geradezu die mathematische Formelsprache in Anwendung bringen: De Morgan, Boole, Jevons, in Deutschland Wundt. Der Schluß z.B. ist nach diesen Logikern nichts als die Herleitung einer dritten Gleichung aus zwei gegebenen Gleichungen aufgrund der Substitution.” 46 Brentano 1884/85 (Y 2), 36-37 47 Brentano 1884/85 (Y 2), 38-39. 48 Stumpf, Q 14, 4b. Compare Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London, 1995, 17, 21; Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Leipzig, 1874, 28 f., 34. 49 Stumpf 1887 (Q 14), 86b: “Wir fragen: Gibt es wirklich synthetische Urteile a priori, bzw. sind die Beispiele, die Kant angeführt hat, von solcher Natur, wie sie ihnen Kant zuschreibt? Zunächst die mathematischen Sätze. Schon die reine Arithmetik enthält synthetische Urteile a priori. 5 + 7 = 12: In 5 liegt nichts von 12, in 7 auch nichts,
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After providing an outline of Kant’s arguments and examples, Stumpf strongly opposes such a view and argues instead that mathematics is essentially analytic: The propositions are analytic. The subject really contains the predicate. Let us take 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 means: 1 + 1, and 3 means: 1 + 1 + 1. If we substitute the concepts for the signs, then the proposition is identical. The difference with respect to the previous version lies only in the fact that the units [Einheiten] in the second version are grouped differently, that is, every unit is placed on a par with every other, while in a certain sense we place them into brackets: (1 + 1) + 1 = 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 + (1 + 1). This is a different grouping of the units. Only this lies in the concepts of sum and of number, that is, the grouping of the units does not make any difference. This is established right from the start in the concept of sum. This is why the proposition is evident a priori: a + b = b + a, a proposition that many have regarded likewise as a synthetic a priori proposition.50
When we properly understand the concept of number and elementary arithmetical operations, we see that different numbers such as 5, 7, and 12, instead of being toto genere different and thus involving a form of synthesis, turn out to consist of the same basic building blocks: unity and addition. This was also Brentano’s view: auch in 5 + 7 nichts. Es ist doch ein anderer Begriff als der Begriff der 12. So in allen arithmetischen Sätzen. Sie sind doch nicht rein tautologisch. Sie wiederholen nicht das Subjekt, sie fügen etwas Neues hinzu”. 50 Stumpf 1887 (Q 14), 87a: “Die Sätze sind analytisch. Das Subjekt enthält wirklich das Prädikat. Nehmen wir 1 + 2 = 3, dann bedeutet 2: 1 + 1, 3: 1 + 1 + 1. Setzen wir die Begriffe für die Zeichen, so ist der Satz identisch. Der Unterschied gegenüber der früheren Fassung liegt nur darin, daß die Einheiten in der zweiten Fassung verschieden gruppiert sind, jede Einheit gleichwertig neben der anderen steht, während wir gewissermaßen Klammern setzen: (1 + 1) + 1 = 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 + (1 + 1). Es ist eine verschiedene Gruppierung der Einheiten. Allein das liegt im Begriff der Summe und der Zahl überhaupt, daß die Gruppierung der Einheiten keine Unterschiede macht. Das bedingen wir uns von vornherein im Begriff der Summe aus. Deshalb leuchtet ja auch der Satz apriori ein: a + b = b + a, ein Satz, welchen ebenfalls manche als einen synthetischen Satz bezeichnet haben apriori.”
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Carlo Ierna A multiplicity, a number, is composed from smaller numbers, 12 from 6 + 6. But when you go further back, you reach the unity. Is that still a number? It is not a number at all. Thus multiplicity is ultimately composed of non-multiplicity.51
Also in his lectures on metaphysics Brentano argued much in the same vein against Kant and Mill, presenting his own solution in terms of a decomposition of the sum 7 + 5 = 12 into a summation of units distinguished only by their grouping.52 Unsurprisingly, Husserl, as pupil of both Brentano and Stumpf, defended broadly the same position. 53 The main difference with Kant consists in their psychological analysis of the concept of number which allows the reduction to simplest elements, such as unity, and which can then explain the “synthesis”, or rather, the construction of new numbers in such a way that it consists simply of tautologies on a deeper level. One of the necessary conditions of this analysis, however, is the fundamental distinction between proper and symbolic concepts and the role of signs therein: In propositions that involve higher numbers, already with 7 + 5 = 12, there is a further difference in that we do not present larger numbers in a complete and proper way [in vollständiger und eigentlicher Weise vorstellen], by considering every unit for itself. We use signs, such as “12” [or] “7” for the concepts that we do not completely and exactly think of. These propositions then are only mediately evident. They can be reduced to propositions of a simpler kind. We think e.g. 7 = 5 + 2 (where 5 and 2 are presented properly), then 9 = 7 + 2, etc. In this way we can reduce [zurückführen] the propositions of higher numbers to 51
Brentano 1884/85a (Ms. Y 3: Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen II), 47: “Eine Vielheit, eine Zahl setzt sich zusammen aus kleineren Zahlen, 12 aus 6 + 6. Aber wenn Sie weiter zurückgehen, kommen Sie auf die Einheit. Ist das noch eine Zahl? Es ist gar keine Zahl. So setzt sich im letzten Grunde die Vielheit aus Nichtvielheit zusammen.” 52 Brentano 1882/83 (Q 8), on Kant 165-176, Mill is briefly discussed in 177 ff. and again Mill and the nature of mathematics, 242 ff. 53 See Husserl 1970, 132 and Husserl 2003, 139. Husserl develops his discussion in dialogue with Frege’s argument in the Grundlagen that number is the answer to the question “How many?”. Husserl then points out that one and zero cannot be positive answers to the question, since they are “not-many”. Nevertheless zero and one can be introduced as numbers on computational grounds.
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those of lower numbers. If the first propositions are analytic, then the later ones are also analytic.54
The requirements for a proper conception of numbers beyond a certain limit, whether 5, 10, or 12, are simply too demanding for the limited cognitive capacities of the “narrow mind of man”.55 Beyond such a limit we have to operate with signs, with symbolic numbers, which explains why we do not immediately see that nothing new is synthesized in our acts and we must analyze and reduce such “higher” numbers first to properly conceivable ones in order to grasp the analytic nature of the equations involved. Every number conceived symbolically can in the end be reduced to a normal form consisting merely of units and addition. Hence Stumpf’s conclusion that: “the whole of mathematics is nothing but an abbreviated counting.”56 This conception of course explains the focus of the entire School of Brentano (and of the present article), with respect to the philosophy of mathematics, on elementary arithmetic as foundation for the whole of mathematics. Stumpf was also concerned with such fundamental mathematical concepts in his lectures on Psychology from 1886/87, where he introduces mathematical concepts as a special class: Finally a special class of concepts, the mathematical concepts: the concept of number, of counting and the geometrical concepts. Here again we find special and very significant difficulties. It is certain that regarding the concept of number the perception of relations plays a role. When I say, here are two things a b, then it is clear that I must have distinguished each one from the other and that thus the perception of a difference plays a role. When I say, there are three things, a b c, then one could at first answer that this is a double perception. I perceive the difference of a and b and the difference of b and c. But this 54
Stumpf 1887 (Q 14), 87a f.: “In Sätzen, bei welchen höhere Zahlen vorkommen, schon bei 7 + 5 = 12, ist noch ein Unterschied, daß wir größere Zahlen nicht mehr in vollständiger und eigentlicher Weise vorstellen, indem wir jede Einheit für sich denken. Da gebrauchen wir Zeichen wie das Zeichen 12, 7 für die Begriffe, die wir nicht vollständig und genau denken. Allein diese Sätze leuchten dann mittelbar ein. Sie lassen sich auf Sätze einfacherer Art zurückführen. Wir denken etwa 7 = 5 + 2 (wo 5 und 2 eigentlich vorgestellt werden), dann 9 = 7 + 2 usf. So können wir die Sätze für höhere Zahlen auf die für niedere Zahlen zurückführen. Sind die ersten Sätze analytisch, so sind die späteren auch analytisch.” 55 Also see Stumpf 1886/87 (Q 11/II), 611 f. on “Enge des Bewußtseins”. 56 Stumpf 1887 (Q 14), 114a: “die ganze Mathematik [ist] nichts anderes als ein abgekürztes Zählen”.
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Carlo Ierna would be circular. When I say, double perception, then I reintroduce the concept of number again with the “double.” Thus, there must also be here relations of a more complex kind, relations of a higher order, on which the concept of number is based.57
It is noteworthy, especially in connection with Husserl’s early works, that Stumpf here mentions the concept of number and the act of counting as fundamental notions in mathematics. These were also the main focus of Husserl’s work during these years and were clearly due for a large part to the influence of Stumpf’s lectures. Additionally, the suggestion that relations would form the basis of the concept of number is developed more extensively in Husserl’s habilitation work and subsequently in the Philosophy of Arithmetic. Indeed, Husserl takes over quite literally Stumpf’s account of “relations of relations”, including its pictorial representation.58 However, the main issue remains the role of symbolic presentations in mathematics. Since there are presentations that we cannot ever properly and completely conceive of (such as “Europe”, “the earth”, “the solar system”), these will always remain symbolic, characterized by merely contingent (pictorial) associations. This is of course also the case of numbers beyond a certain threshold: 1000, indeed maybe already 20, 10. How many items can one present exactly sensuously and at the same time be aware of their number as such? One will not get much beyond 5 this way. Through sensuous intuition [sinnliche Anschauung] we will not be able to distinguish 20 from 21, except through counting, i.e. mediating presentation. Thus a concrete presentation of 1000 [is] impossible. Yet the child can calculate with it easily. This happens because it counts with number signs. 57
Stumpf 1886/87 (Q 11/II), 494: “Endlich eine besondere Klasse von Begriffen, die mathematischen Begriffe: der Begriff der Zahl, des Zählens und die geometrische Begriffe. Hier finden sich wieder besondere und sehr bedeutende Schwierigkeiten. Das ist gewiß, daß beim Begriff der Zahl die Wahrnehmung von Verhältnissen eine Rolle spielt. Wenn ich sage, hier sind zwei Dinge a b, so ist klar, daß ich beide voneinander unterschieden haben muß, daß also die Wahrnehmung eines Unterschiedes eine Rolle spielt. Wenn ich sage, es sind drei Dinge a b c, so könnte man zunächst antworten, es ist eine doppelte Wahrnehmung. Ich nehme den Unterschied von a und b wahr und den Unterschied b und c wahr. Aber das wäre ein Zirkel. Wenn ich sage, doppelte Wahrnehmung, so habe ich mit dem “doppelt” den Zahlbegriff wieder hineingenommen. Es müssen also hier auch Verhältnisse komplizierter Art, Verhältnisse höherer Ordnung sein, die dem Zahlbegriff zugrunde liegen.” 58 See Stumpf 1886/87 (Q 11/II), 493 and Husserl 1970 (Über den Begriff der Zahl, 321, and Philosophie der Arithmetik, 53), transl. in Husserliana 2003, 338, 54.
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These are sensuous presentations, also vocal presentations [Lautvorstellungen]. These signs are linked to a certain content of presentation: the concept of a more or less greater number. Further, the presentation of certain relations of this number to other numbers. 1000 = a large number that stands in relation to the large number 100 by being its tenfold, this 100 again, etc. Thus develops the remarkable art of economizing with surrogates. At the same time, the relations between numbers are precisely the important factor for mathematical thought. Numbers are only important to us because of the relations that hold between them.59
As mentioned above, whether at 5, 10, or 7±2, our minds do arrive at a limit and require signs in order to go beyond it. It is only through the mediation of signs that we can obtain a presentation, even if only an improper one, of “large” numbers. Indeed, if we take seriously the claims that zero and one are not numbers (not multiplicities of units)60 and that “we can hardly count beyond three in the proper sense”,61 this leads to the quite extreme (finitist) view that properly speaking the only numbers are two and three. Numbers beyond the threshold are obtained through relations to other numbers, i.e. symbolic presentations of large numbers are intelligible due to their ultimate reducibility to proper presentations of smaller numbers. Apart from this foundation, mathematics is symbol manipulation: operating with signs as surrogates for the unattainable properly presented numbers. 59
Stumpf 1886/87 (Q 11/II), 506: “1000, ja vielleicht schon 20, 10. Wieviel Exemplare kann man sich genau sinnlich vorstellen und dabei der Zahl als solcher bewußt sein? So wird man nicht viel über 5 bekommen. Durch sinnliche Anschauung wird man nicht 20 von 21 unterscheiden können, es sei denn durch Zählen, also vermittelnde Vorstellung. Also eine konkrete Vorstellung von 1000 unmöglich. Doch rechnet das Kind damit in Leichtigkeit. Es geschieht, indem es mit Zahlzeichen rechnet. Das sind sinnliche Vorstellungen, auch Lautvorstellungen. An diese Zeichen knüpft sich ein gewisser Vorstellungsinhalt: Begriff einer mehr oder minder großen Zahl. Ferner die Vorstellung gewisser Verhältnisse dieser Zahl zu anderen Zahlen. 1000 = eine große Zahl, die im Verhältnis zu der großen Zahl 100 steht, daß sie das Zehnfache davon ist, dieses 100 wieder etc. So entsteht die merkwürdige Art, mit Surrogaten zu wirtschaften. Indessen sind gerade für das mathematische Denken die Verhältnisse der Zahlen das Wichtige darin. Die Zahlen sind uns nur wichtig wegen der Verhältnisse zwischen ihnen.” 60 See Brentano 1884/85a (Y 3), 47. 61 Husserl’s habilitation thesis (Husserl 1970, 339; Husserliana 2003, 357).
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Carlo Ierna The algebraic and arithmetical sign systems are the grandest and subtlest that we have. From the signs themselves certain relations become immediately apparent. In the case of arithmetical signs: certain relations are already indicated by the position of the sign. 62
Arithmetic and algebra provide systems of signs that allow precisely the construction of “large” numbers through the regular application of relations. For instance, in the decimal system each step left in the position of a numeral indicates a tenfold increase in magnitude. While we can only conceive higher numbers with the help of this system, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex and therefore increasingly “improper” numbers through signs, this does not, according to Stumpf, challenge the a priori nature of mathematics. While we do need the crutch of sense-perceptible signs to calculate with higher numbers, mathematics remains a priori through and through. Not all immediate pieces of knowledge are called a priori truths, but only the class of axioms (a). Whenever perception is involved we already have a posteriori knowledge. However, we do not call a priori truths only the immediate insights from the concepts (axioms), but also all judgements that can be inferred through deduction from them. If we assume that all mathematical knowledge is deducible from the axioms, then every mathematical theorem should be considered as a priori knowledge.63
In general we can see that Stumpf still holds broadly the same views as he did at the time of his habilitation and we can notice that his position shows many parallels with Brentano’s. This continuity confirms the existence of a significant Brentanian influence on Stumpf’s habilitation work. 62
Stumpf 1886/87 (Q 11/II), 507: “Die algebraischen und arithmetischen Zeichensysteme sind die großartigsten und feinsten, die wir besitzen. Aus den Zeichen selbst sind gewisse Relationen unmittelbar ersichtlich. Bei den arithmetischen Zeichen: daß durch die Stellung des Zeichens schon gewisse Relationen angedeutet werden.” 63 Stumpf 1886/87 (Q 11/II), 547 f.: “Apriorische Wahrheiten nennt man nicht alle unmittelbaren Erkenntnisse, sondern nur die Klasse a) der Axiome. Überall, wo eine Wahrnehmung beteiligt ist, haben wir schon eine aposteriorische Erkenntnis. Wir nennen aber apriorische Wahrheiten nicht bloß die unmittelbaren Erkenntnisse aus den Begriffen (Axiome), sondern auch alle Urteile, die daraus durch Folgerungen hergeleitet sind. Nehmen wir an, daß die gesamte mathematische Erkenntnis aus Axiomen herleitbar ist, so wäre jeder mathematische Lehrsatz als eine apriorische Erkenntnis zu bezeichnen.”
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5 The Erkenntnislehre In his posthumous work on Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf dedicates a central chapter to the concept of number. Moreover, we find throughout the work many observations concerning not only the basic concepts of arithmetic, but also more generally the epistemology and ontology of mathematics: The relations of numbers and magnitudes form the object of mathematics. Here we do not merely recognize [erkennen] that something is thus and so, but that it must necessarily be thus and so and cannot be otherwise. 2 x 2 is not just = 4 in fact, but with absolute necessity, and indeed this is not merely a case of psychological necessity, to judge so as false judgements can also be psychologically necessary, as any superstition that has become second nature, but it is a matter of objective necessity [eine sachliche Notwendigkeit].64
Stumpf underscores once again that relations of numbers and magnitudes form the core of mathematics, but additionally he clearly rejects psychologism in mathematics. Mathematics as an analytical a priori discipline consists of necessarily true propositions or judgements, whose necessary truth lies in the subject matter itself. Relations of numbers are relations of ideas, in Hume’s parlance: If this concerns only relations among concepts, as is the case with the propositions of pure mathematics, then only logical possibility comes into questions (which the mathematician regards as existence of the conceptual composition [Begriffszusammensetzung]).65
Contrary to applied mathematics or to the natural sciences, pure mathematics does not deal with physical possibilities, but only with logical possibilities. On this level, non-contradiction already involves what may be indicated as “existence”. In this sense, mathematical objects do not exist either in the physical or in the psychical domain: There is knowledge [Erkenntnisse] that does not regard reality at all, whether physical or psychical, whether outer or inner, since it only concerns, strictly and seriously, what follows if certain presuppositions are made. For instance the proposition […]: “If A=C and B=C, then A=B.” Even though there would be no exact identicals anywhere 64 65
Stumpf 1939, 48-49. Stumpf 1939, 54.
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Carlo Ierna in the world, still this logical connection would be evident and true. It is essentially a mere hypothetical judgement. However, all propositions of pure geometry are also of this kind, since nowhere in the world there is a mathematically straight line, or even any line in the mathematical sense at all, nowhere a triangle with a precisely straight angle, yet the theorems [Lehrsätze] regarding these are valid in all strictness, and they can be proven precisely for all of these constructions [Gebilde] that are never and nowhere exactly realized. Indeed, it all depends on what is not realized [verwirklicht] […]. What the mathematician calls the existence of his objects, is not real existence, but only non-contradiction [Widerspruchslosigkeit].66
In the chapter on the concept of number Stumpf underscores the conceptual nature of numbers: “Numbers are concepts” (“Zahlen sind Begriffe”).67 Every number expresses a general concept and is not a label for any perceptual content. When we perceive pluralities or quantities, we do not merely perceive the elements of the quantity, but also the quantity itself and as such.68 Plurality itself cannot be considered as a relation between sensory contents, since every relation already presupposes the presence of a plurality of members. This of course leads us to the following question: Do we need to first perceive each of the elements of a plurality by itself before we can achieve an impression of plurality? According to Stumpf this is not the case as experience would deny this. The general impression of a plurality does not necessarily involve that of a temporal ordering. 69 Nevertheless, there are other requirements: “A certain equality in kind [Gleichartigkeit] of the elements is required for a perception of quantity [Mengenwahrnehmung]”. There must always be an impetus [Antrieb] for the collection [Zusammenfassen] given by an apparent similarity [Gleichartigkeit] that crosses a certain threshold.70
While this is not to say that whoever perceives the plurality has to group its elements under a certain concept, it does suggest that, like for Husserl at the time of the Philosophy of Arithmetic, a certain level 66
Stumpf 1939, 59 Stumpf 1939, 97. 68 Stumpf 1939, 98. 69 Stumpf 1939, 99-100. 70 Stumpf 1939, 100. 67
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of “Einheitlichkeit” and Gestalt does play a role in the perception of quantities as quantities. Where Ewen points out that Stumpf excludes that Gestalt would be of relevance to the concept of number, he sees this as a veiled critique of Husserl’s position71, which I do not think is the case. Husserl does not introduce the concept of Gestalt in the (symbolic) concept of number, but only in the (symbolic) concept of quantity (Menge). Husserl’s and Stumpf’s basic definition of (properly conceived) numbers as the result of counting, i.e. addition of units, is the same. 72 Units or unities (Einheiten) and zero are not numbers properly speaking, but are introduced into the field of numbers as possible results of operations.73 This is a position that, as we already saw, was expressed by Husserl in the Philosophy Arithmetic. Stumpf argues that such an “extended” concept of number, involving “improper” or “quasi” numbers, must remain the province of the mathematician. Stumpf often mentions the issue of synthetic vs. analytic a priori judgments and provides once again an extensive critique of Kant’s theory of the synthetic a priori.74 Stumpf’s conclusion is that the distinctions between analytic/synthetic and a priori / a posteriori are not orthogonal, but congruent: a priori truths are those that can be proven through the analysis of the concepts involved. All analytic judgements are a priori and all synthetic judgements are a posteriori.75 However, Stumpf makes a quite fundamental distinction between the deductive and inductive sciences, which he points out is not identical with the a priori and a posteriori distinction. Mathematics is analytic (and hence a priori) and additionally a wholly deductive discipline. Theoretical physics and astronomy may be deductive, but are certainly not a priori. 76 As Stumpf had already pointed out in 1907 in his “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften”: The difference in method shows itself as the foremost characteristic that serves to distinguish mathematics from all other sciences: the a priori as opposed to the a posteriori.77 71
Ewen 2008, 164. Stumpf 1939, 109. 73 Stumpf 1939, 119. 74 Stumpf 1939, 201 ff. 75 Stumpf 1939, 205. 76 Stumpf 1939, II, 374. 77 Stumpf 1907, 65. 72
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6 Concluding Remarks In conclusion we see how Stumpf’s approach to the fundamental concepts of arithmetic and the philosophy of mathematics in general is a part of the School of Brentano and develops out of core concerns within it. Apart from the development of his own position, Stumpf’s interest in and engagement with mathematical topics from a Brentanist point of view is also significant due to the ties that bind him to Brentano and Husserl as pupil and master respectively. From his first to his last works we have seen that there is great continuity in the basic position that Stumpf takes towards mathematics as an analytical, deductive and a priori science. He endorses at all stages of his thought central tenets from the Brentanist approach: number is a multiplicity of units, given by the mental operation of counting and “Zusammenfassung” (“grasping together”, i.e. collecting) operated on “somethings”, in which case one and zero are not, properly speaking, numbers. Also higher numbers, beyond our presentational capacity are to be understood as presented improperly, i.e. symbolically, through signs provided in a systematic way by a (positional) numeral system. Numbers are neither empirical facts, nor platonic entities, but essentially conceptual in nature, without being purely subjective creations, but have “existence” in the sense of being logically possible, i.e. noncontradictory. Mathematics, then, is objective, presuppositionless and the most exact science. However, here we have broached but part of the mathematical issues in the School of Brentano. We have discussed above the fundamental concepts and operations that constitute the foundations of basic arithmetic and mathematics. A further problem (besides space and geometry) is posed by the application of mathematics: first, in the justification of the use of quantitative mathematical methods in psychology in general (an issue famously raised by Kant) and second, more specifically, the justification of the application of the calculus of probability as a tool in psychological experiments. I hope however that the sources and theories presented here can serve as a first step towards further work on such topics and more generally towards a more comprehensive and detailed account of the philosophy of mathematics in the School of Brentano.
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References Manuscripts Brentano, Franz. 1882/83. Ms. Q 8: Metaphysik. –– 1884/85. Ms. Y 2: Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen I. –– 1884/85a. Ms. Y 3: Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen II. Stumpf, Carl. 1886/87. Ms. Q 11/II: Vorlesungen über Psychologie. –– 1887. Ms. Q 14: Logik und Enzyklopädie der Philosophie. Primary Brentano, Franz. 1874. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. –– 1929. Über die Zukunft der Philosophie. Leipzig: Meiner. –– 1995. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (18901901) (ed. L. Eley) (Husserliana XII). Dordrecht: Nijhoff. –– 1994. Briefwechsel. Vol. I: Die Brentanoschule. Dordrecht: Kluwer. –– 2003. Philosophy of Arithmetic. Psychological and Logical Investigations, with Supplementary Texts from 1887-1901 (tr. D. Willard) (Husserliana Collected Works X). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Stumpf, Carl. 1883. Tonpsychologie. Bd. 1, Leipzig: Hirzel. –– 1907. “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften”, Abhandlungen der Königl. Preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin. –– 1917. “Zum Gedächtnis Lotzes”, in Kant - Studien, XXII. –– 1919. “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in Kraus, Oscar (ed.) Franz Brentano: zur Kenntnis seines Lebensund seiner Lehre. München: Beck. –– 1924. “Selbstdarstellung”, in Raymund Schmidt (ed.) Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Leipzig: Meiner. –– 1939. Erkenntnislehre. Bd. 1, Leipzig: Barth. –– 2008. Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik (ed. W. Ewen). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Secondary Baumgartner, Elisabeth, and Wilhelm Baumgartner. 2002. “Der junge Carl Stumpf” in Brentano Studien (2000/2001), IX: 23-50. Ewen, Wolfgang. 2008. Carl Stumpf und Gottlob Frege. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Ierna, Carlo. 2009. “Relations in the Early Works of Meinong and Husserl” in Meinong Studien III: 7-35. –– 2011. “Brentano and Mathematics” in Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, 55/1: 149167. Rollinger, Robin. 1999. Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano (Phaenomenologica 150). Dordrecht: Kluwer. –– 2009. “Brentano’s Logic and Marty’s Early Philosophy of Language” in Brentano Studien XII: 77-98. Schuhmann, Karl. 1996. “Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)”, in Albertazzi, Liliana, Massimo Libardi, and Roberto Poli (eds.) The School of Franz Brentano, Dordrecht, Kluwer.
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Smith, Barry. 1994. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago: Open Court. Sprung, Helga, and Lothar Sprung. 2002. “Carl Stumpf in Berlin (1894-1936)” in Brentano Studien (2000/2001), IX: 89-116.
CARL STUMPF ÜBER SACHVERHALTE ARKADIUSZ CHRUDZIMSKI (UNIVERSITY OF SZCZECIN)*
Abstract. In diesem Aufsatz besprechen wir die Ontologie der Sachverhalte, die Carl Stumpf vorgeschlagen hat. Wie viele Vertreter der Brentano-Schule stützt sich hier Stumpf auf die reiche Ontologie der intentionalen Beziehung, die Brentano in seinen Vorlesungen aus der so genannten „mittleren“ Periode vorgeschlagen hat. Stumpf modifiziert jedoch die übernommene Lehre in einer unerwarteten Weise. Brentano sprach nämlich sowohl von immanenten als auch transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten. Stumpf hingegen führt nur die immanenten, aber keine transzendenten Sachverhalte ein, was alle potentiellen Vorteile einer derartigen Erweiterung der Ontologie zunichte zu machen scheint. Wir zeigen jedoch, dass sich die Position Stumpfs erklären lässt, wenn man zwei wichtige Punkte beachtet. Zum einen sind die Brentanoschen Objekte (der nominalen Form) bereits höchst komplizierte Entitäten, die in vielen Aspekten Sachverhalte ersetzen können. Zum anderen verwendet hier Stumpf, wie es scheint, einen konzeptualistischen Erklärungsmuster, den man auch bei dem frühen Brentano oft findet.
1 Propositionale Entitäten Der Streit um die Natur und Legitimität der propositionalen Entitäten stellt eines der wenigen ontologischen Themen dar, das man in erster Linie mit der zeitgenössischen Philosophie assoziiert. Propositionale Entitäten sind Gegenstände, die als ontologische Korrelate den vollständigen Sätzen in einer ähnlichen Weise zugeordnet werden, wie die (nominalen) Objekte den nominalen Ausdrücken (etwa den Namen oder den Deskriptionen). Aus der Perspektive einer schulmäßigen Geschichte der Philosophie sieht es so aus, als ob man erst gegen Ende * Das ist eine erweiterte und verbesserte Version meines Aufsatzes: A. Chrudzimski, “Wozu brauchte Carl Stumpf Sachverhalte?”, Brentano Studien, 10 (2002/2003), 67– 82. Bei der Umarbeitung habe ich auch einige Teile des folgenden Aufsatzes verwendet: A. Chrudzimski, “Sachverhalte, Objekte und Supervenienz. Brentano, Marty und Meinong”, Brentano Studien, 12 (2006/9), 99-119. Die Arbeit an diesem Aufsatz wurde vom polnischen Nationalen Zentrum der Wissenschaft unterstützt (NCN, Grant: 2012/07/B/HS1/01595).
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des 19. Jahrhunderts begonnen hat, solche Entitäten ontologisch ernst zu nehmen.1 Die Vorgeschichte des Problems findet sich in den klassischen Stellen der Wissenschaftslehre, wo Bolzano von den Sätzen an sich lehrt. (Bolzano 1837, Bd. I, § 19) Eine sprunghafte Entwicklung der Ontologie der propositionalen Entitäten hat allerdings in der Brentano-Schule stattgefunden. Die Kulmination dieser Entwicklung bildet ohne Zweifel die Theorie der ausserseienden Objektive Meinongs. (Meinong 1910) Eine parallele, unabhängige Linie finden wir bei Frege, der jedem Satz als seinen Sinn einen propositionalen Gedanken zuordnet. (Frege 1892, Frege 1918/19). 2 Der Kern der Theorie, der den Auffassungen von Frege und von Meinong gemeinsam ist, lässt sich folgendermaßen zusammenfassen: (1) Jede Aussage (sowohl wahre als auch falsche) hat als ihr ontologisches Korrelat eine propositionale Entität. Diese propositionale Entität ist das, was man normalerweise Bedeutung des Satzes nennt. In Zusammenhang mit der Auffassung, die die Intentionalität der Sprache auf die Intentionalität der durch die Sprache ausgedrückten psychischen Zustände zurückführt, betrachtet man diese propositionale Entität zugleich als den Inhalt der entsprechenden propositionalen Einstellung (propositional attitude), die durch die entsprechende Aussage ausgedrückt wird. Der Satz „Schnee ist weiß” bedeutet also, dass Schnee weiß ist. Und dasselbe, d.h., dass Schnee weiß ist, ist auch der Inhalt des Urteils, das durch diesen Satz ausgedrückt wird. Es gibt also – so behauptet man – etwas, was die Bedeutung dieses Satzes und der Inhalt dieses Urteils ist. Dieses „etwas” ist die propositionale Entität, dass Schnee weiß ist. (2) Sollten zwei verschiedene Sätze dieselbe Bedeutung (bzw. zwei propositionale Einstellungen denselben Inhalt) haben, müssen sie sich auf dieselbe propositionale Entität beziehen. Die propositionalen Entitäten sind demgemäß intersubjektiv. Sie können als numerisch dieselben durch viele Subjekte „erfasst werden”. Sie bilden die ontologische Grundlage der intersubjektiven Kommunikation. 1
Das bedeutet allerdings nicht, dass man die Thematik in der früheren Philosophie nicht finden kann. Die vergessenen Ursprünge der Problematik können bei den Stoikern gesucht werden, die von den nicht körperlichen Bedeutungsentitäten (darunter auch von den Bedeutungen von ganzen Sätzen) unter dem Namen „Lekton” gesprochen haben. Vgl. dazu Bocheński 1970, S. 127 f. Zu den interessanten Theorien der propositionalen Entitäten im Mittelalter vgl. Cesalli 2007, Cesalli 2012. 2 Zur Geschichte der Sachverhaltsontologie vgl. Rojszczak/Smith 2001.
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(3) Wahrheit und Falschheit sind primär Eigenschaften dieser propositionalen Entitäten. Ein wahrer Satz (bzw. ein wahres Urteil) ist ein Satz (Urteil), der (das) eine wahre propositionale Entität bedeutet (zum Inhalt hat). Ein falscher Satz (falsches Urteil) ist ein Satz (Urteil), der (das) eine falsche propositionale Entität bedeutet (zum Inhalt hat). Die propositionalen Entitäten werden also als die primären Wahrheitsträger betrachtet und sie brauchen natürlich keine zusätzlichen Wahrmacher, denn die Wahrheit / Falschheit wird nicht als eine relationale sondern als eine absolute (monadische) Eigenschaft interpretiert. Wer die Zuschreibung der Wahrheit / Falschheit zu den objektiven propositionalen Entitäten als besonders unnatürlich empfindet, kann stattdessen vom Bestehen bzw. Nicht-Bestehen der entsprechenden propositionalen Entität sprechen und die Bezeichnung „wahr / falsch” für die entsprechenden Sätze bzw. psychische Zustände reservieren. Die eigentlichen Wahrheitsträger wären in diesem Fall Sätze bzw. Urteile. Wahrheit und Falschheit würde als ihre relationale Eigenschaft interpretiert und als Wahrmacher würden die „bestehenden” Sachverhalte, die oft auch „Tatsachen” genannt werden, funktionieren. Das alles ist jedoch natürlich nur eine Frage der sprachlichen Konvention. Meinong verwendet beispielsweise beide Redeweisen. (Vgl. Meinong 1910, 94; Meinong 1915, 38 ff.) Was wichtig ist, ist die Tatsache, dass die propositionalen Entitäten nicht nur intersubjektiv, sondern auch objektiv sind. Sie sind nicht nur als streng identisch von vielen Subjekten erfassbar, sondern darüber hinaus ist ihre Wahrheit oder Falschheit (bzw. ihr Bestehen oder Nicht-Bestehen) von der aktuellen und möglichen kognitiven Tätigkeit der Subjekte (insbesondere davon, ob die entsprechenden Sätze bzw. Urteile epistemisch begründet sind bzw. begründet sein können) völlig unabhängig. Die propositionalen Entitäten bilden demgemäß die Grundlage der Objektivität der Wahrheit. (4) Die ontologische Frage, die dadurch noch nicht entschieden ist, ist, ob auch die bloße Existenz der (bestehenden und nicht bestehenden) propositionalen Entitäten von der kognitiven Tätigkeit der Subjekte in dieser Weise unabhängig ist. Gibt es propositionale Entitäten, die von niemandem erfasst werden? Eine starke Version der Theorie suggeriert, dass es solche propositionale Entitäten auf jeden Fall gibt. Sowohl Meinong als auch Frege nehmen diese stärkere These an.
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(5) Im Rahmen einer solchen Theorie ist es sehr natürlich anzunehmen, dass die logischen Verhältnisse primär zwischen den so verstandenen propositionalen Entitäten bestehen. Die Autorität der Logik kann demgemäß auf gewisse objektive Verhältnisse gegründet werden. (6) Die propositionalen Entitäten können schließlich eine Sache erklären, die für viele Philosophen ein großes Rätsel bedeutete: Worauf beziehen sich die Dass-Phrasen, die grammatisch als eine merkwürdige Art von Namen zu funktionieren scheinen? Der referierten Theorie zufolge beziehen sie sich natürlich auf die propositionalen Entitäten. 2 Brentano Es ist eine Ironie der Geschichte, dass die Theorie der propositionalen Entitäten ihre Entwicklung zum großen Teil den deskriptivpsychologischen Analysen Brentanos verdankt. Die Ironie besteht darin, dass alle grundlegenden Elemente der Intentionalitätstheorie Brentanos eigentlich dafür sprechen, dass die propositionalen Inhalte völlig überflüssig sind. Seine offizielle Theorie, die Brentano in der Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Brentano 1874/2008) präsentierte, sieht folgendermaßen aus. Die psychischen Akte zerfallen in drei Gruppen: Vorstellungen, Urteile und Gemütsbeziehungen. Eine Vorstellung besteht darin, dass ein Subjekt einen Gegenstand einfach „vor seinem geistigen Auge“ hat. „Wir reden von einem Vorstellen,“ schreibt Brentano, „wo immer uns etwas erscheint.“ (Brentano 1874/2008, S. 219) Was uns in dieser Weise in der Vorstellung erscheint, ist nach der Lehre der Psychologie ein immanenter Gegenstand. Wir können hier auf die Einzelheiten dieser schwierigen Lehre nicht näher eingehen.3 Es muss genügen, dass die Entität, die als Ziel eines Vorstellungsakts fungiert, in ihrer Existenz von dem betreffenden psychischen Akt abhängig ist. Sie ist etwas, was von dem entsprechenden psychischen Akt buchstäblich „erzeugt“ wird. Die Urteile und Gemütsbeziehungen bauen sich nach Brentano auf die Vorstellungen in der Weise auf, dass der vorgestellte Gegenstand entweder (in einem Urteil) bejaht oder verneint (bzw. angenommen oder verworfen) wird oder (in einer Gemütsbeziehung) mit einer positiven oder negativen emotionalen Einstellung aufgefasst wird. Im Folgenden lassen wir die Gemütsbeziehungen beisei3
Für die Einzelheiten siehe Chrudzimski 2001 und Chrudzimski 2004.
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te und konzentrieren uns ausschließlich auf die Urteile. Das Schema der offiziellen Lehre Brentanos sieht folgendermaßen aus:
Urteil
+/– ,, I
''
I
'
\
I \
Vorstellung
Subjekt
''
,,
immanentes Objekt
Was für diese Urteilslehre wichtig ist, ist die Tatsache, dass die Urteile keine neuen gegenständlichen Strukturen erzeugen. Die urteilsmäßige Bejahung / Verneinung (wie auch die positive oder negative emotionale Einstellung) sind psychische Modi, denen auf der gegenständlichen Seite keine neuen Elemente entsprechen. (Brentano 1874/2008, S. 241) Alles was wir in unserer Ontologie der Intentionalität brauchen, sind also nach dem Brentano anno domini 1874 (außer den psychischen Subjekten) nur die immanenten Gegenstände. Diese These wirkt auf den ersten Blick etwas befremdlich, denn die Frage, die sich sofort stellt, lautet: „Was macht ein bestimmtes Urteil wahr bzw. falsch?“. Der immanente Gegenstand kann es kaum sein, denn diesen gibt es immer, wenn es einen betreffenden psychischen Akt gibt. Wir brauchen also, wie es scheint, zumindest die transzendenten Gegenstände. In Bezug auf Brentano funktioniert aber diese Argumentation nicht und die Antwort, warum es so ist, liegt in seiner epistemischen Auf-
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fassung des Wahrheitsbegriffs.4 Nach Brentano ist nämlich ein Urteil nicht dann wahr, wenn es mit einem Stück der Realität „übereinstimmt“, sondern dann, wenn es auch von einem mit Evidenz Urteilenden gefällt werden könnte. Diese Definition, die sich reichlich dem irrealen Konditional und den normativen Begriffen bedient, hat natürlich ihre Probleme. Auch auf sie können wir aber in diesem Aufsatz nicht näher eingehen, was aber äußerst interessant ist, ist die Tatsache, dass man im Rahmen der Theorie, die Brentano in seiner Psychologie entwickelt hat, nicht nur auf die propositionalen Entitäten sondern auch auf die transzendenten Objekte der psychischen Akte offensichtlich verzichten kann. Dank seiner Epistemisierung des Wahrheitsbegriffs braucht er nicht nur keine propositionalen Wahrmacher, sondern überhaupt keine Wahrmacher. Brentano blieb zwar zeit seines Lebens ein Realist, der an die von unserer kognitiven Tätigkeit unabhängige Realität nie zweifelte, es ist aber interessant zu sehen, dass ihn seine Intentionalitätstheorie keineswegs dazu zwang. In diesem Aufsatz werden wir uns aber mit der Epistemisierung des Wahrheitsbegriffs nicht beschäftigen. Was für uns interessant sein wird, ist die Idee, dass man im Rahmen einer nach Brentanos Richtlinien entwickelten Intentionalitätstheorie auch bei der realistischen Auffassung der Wahrheit als Wahrmacher keine Sachverhalte, sondern nur die Objekte der nominalen Form braucht. Die Idee ist, dass man für das bejahende Urteil „A ist“ als Wahrmacher nur den Gegenstand A (und nicht etwa einen seltsamen „existentialen Sachverhalt“, dass A existiert) braucht und dass das verneinende Urteil „A ist nicht“ eher durch die bloße Abwesenheit von A, als von einem (noch seltsameren) negativ-existentialen Sachverhalt, dass A nicht existiert, wahr gemacht wird. Diese Idee wird aber erst dann richtig interessant, wenn man zeigt, dass sich alle Urteile als Existenzurteile uminterpretieren lassen. Brentano versucht in der Tat die vier klassischen kategorialen Formen (i, o, e und a) in eine Sprache zu übersetzen, die nur mit den nominalen Termen und den existentialen „ist“ bzw. „ist nicht“ operiert. Die Übersetzung sieht folgendermaßen aus (vgl. Brentano 1911/2008, S. 413–419): 4
Die epistemische Auffassung des Wahrheitsbegriffs wird normalerweise erst dem späten Brentano zugeschrieben. In Wirklichkeit finden wir sie aber in allen Perioden seiner Philosophie. Vgl. dazu Chrudzimski 2001, Kap. 2.
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Ein S ist P [(∃x)(Sx ^ Px)] =Df. Ein P-seiendes S ist. Ein S ist nicht P [(∃x)( Sx ^ ¬Px)] =Df. Ein nicht-P-seiendes S ist. Kein S ist P [(∀x)(Sx 䵭¬Px)] =Df. Ein P-seiendes S ist nicht. Jedes S ist P [(∀x)(Sx 䵭Px)] =Df. Ein nicht-P-seiendes S ist nicht.
Wenn wir die Bezeichnung „ein P-seiendes S“ als Zusammenfügung „PS“, die negative Eigenschaft nicht-P als „*P“ und das existentiale Annehmen bzw. Verwerfen als „+/–“ symbolisieren, nimmt die Übersetzung die folgende Form an: (i) (o) (e) (a)
+PS +*PS –PS –*PS
Wir nehmen hier an, dass der Negationsoperator „*“ immer den kleinsten Skopus hat, d.h. dass die Notation „*PS“ als „ein nicht-Pseiendes S“ und nicht etwa als „ein nicht-P-seiendes nicht-S“ zu lesen ist. Um „ein nicht-P-seiendes nicht-S“ zu bekommen, müssen wir „*P*S“ bzw. „*(PS)“ schreiben. Brentanos Übersetzung sieht sehr elegant aus, und die Perspektive, dass man die propositionalen Entitäten aus der Ontologie verbannen kann, ist in der Tat sehr attraktiv. Es sieht also so aus, als ob man im Rahmen der Brentanoschen Intentionalitätstheorie tatsächlich keine propositionalen Entitäten braucht. Was den Punkt (1) betrifft, so braucht Brentano die propositionalen Entitäten nicht als Bedeutungen der Aussagen oder als Inhalte der Urteile einzuführen, weil seine Urteilstheorie eine nichtpropositionale Theorie ist. Ein Urteilen besteht in einem mentalen Annehmen oder Verwerfen eines vorgestellten Objekts. Dieses Annehmen bzw. Verwerfen besteht ferner nicht darin, dass man dem Objekt eine merkwürdige Eigenschaft der Existenz bzw. Nicht-Existenz zuschreibt. Es ist vielmehr ein mentaler Modus, der als solcher keine objektiven Korrelate braucht. Als das einzige Objekt des Urteils bleibt also bei Brentano dieselbe Entität, die auch das Objekt der zugrundeliegenden Vorstellung bildet. (Brentano 1874/2008, S. 241) Die Frage der Intersubjektivität, die mit dem Punkt (2) zusammenhängt, wurde von Brentano nie richtig thematisiert. Es ist allerdings
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klar, dass er die Lösung dieses Problems nicht in den ontologischen Garantien, sondern in normativen Operatoren suchen würde. Die Bestätigung der obigen Behauptung finden wir vor allem in den Brentanoschen Analysen des Wahrheitsbegriffs. Im Gegensatz zu den Philosophen, die die Objektivität der Wahrheit durch die Objektivität der wahrmachenden Entitäten sichern wollen (Punkt (3)), bevorzugte Brentano eindeutig den normativen Diskurs. Der primäre Wahrheitsträger ist bei Brentano das Urteil; und ein Urteil ist wahr, wenn es mit einem maximalen Grad der epistemischen Begründung (mit Evidenz) gefällt werden könnte. (vgl. Brentano 1930, S. 139) Die propositionalen Entitäten in der Rolle der Wahrheitsträger oder Wahrmacher werden dadurch überflüssig. Die Verstärkung der Ontologie der propositionalen Entitäten wie im Punkt (4) kommt demgemäß natürlich nicht in Frage und auch was die Natur der Logik betrifft (Punkt (5)), so wollte sie Brentano immer als eine rein normative Wissenschaft, als eine „Lehre vom richtigen Urteil”, verstehen. Die Logik bezieht sich demgemäß auf kein besonderes gegenständliches Gebiet. Sie behandelt stattdessen die Bedingungen der Richtigkeit der Folgerungen und operiert mit normativen Begriffen. Die ontologischen Probleme durch die Verwendung des normativen Diskurses zu neutralisieren, war übrigens eine typische Technik Brentanos. Es bleibt also nur das Argument (6) – die Beobachtung, dass wir in unserer Sprache dass-Konstruktionen haben, die als Namen zu fungieren scheinen –, und dieses war in der Tat der Grund, warum Brentano in seiner „mittleren“ Periode,5 die propositionalen Entitäten eingeführt hat. In Zusammenhang mit seiner deskriptiven Methode hatte er zu dieser Zeit eine starke Tendenz, jede Entität zu akzeptieren, auf die wir uns durch sprachliche Mittel beziehen können, die grammatisch als nominale Ausdrücke aussehen. Erst nach 1904 ist er bezüglich der Oberflächengrammatik unserer Sprache sehr misstrauisch geworden und erklärte die Mehrheit von den inzwischen eingeführten Entitäten für Fiktionen. Auf jeden Fall sah er um 1890 den zwingenden Grund, warum wir die propositionalen Entitäten einführen müssen, darin, dass wir solche Entitäten manchmal vorzustellen scheinen. Das geschieht am deutlichsten in den Urteilen höherer Stufe wie z.B. „Es ist leider 5
Zur Entwicklung der Ontologie Berntanos siehe Chrudzimski 2004. Die Ontologie der mirttleren Periode wird dort im Kapitel 4 behandelt.
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so, dass Hans seeine Prüfungen nicht bestanden hat.” Sehr klar kann man diesen Mecchanismus in Brentanos Vortrag Über den Begrifff der Wahrheit (1889)) beobachten. (Brentano 1930, S. 3–29) Die proopositionalen Entitätenn wurden also von Brentano paradoxerweise nichht als ontologische Korrrelate der Urteile, sondern als ontologische Korrrelate gewisser ungewööhnlichen Vorstellungen eingeführt. Sobald jedochh die propositionalen Entitäten eingeführt wurdeen, ist es eine sehr natüürliche Entscheidung, anzunehmen, dass sie die ontologischer Korrellate der Urteile darstellen. Brentano hat diese Entscheidung getrofffen und in seiner Logik-Vorlesung aus den sppäten achtziger Jahrenn (Manuskript EL 80, vgl. S. 34–36) finden wir das folgende ontologgische Schema der intentionalen Beziehung:
immanenter
transcc:ndcnter
[nhalt
Inhalt
Urteil Sein/
/~::::::~:-
..-... -___
v-,~•
'
N.
.-----••• , -~
__
1.,,.
.,'
-----
Subjekt
Nich-Sejn
0
immancntes
tnmsccndcntes
Objekt
Objekt
Korrespondenz
Diese alternativee Intentionalitätslehre, die sich bei Brentano fiindet, können wir als „inoffiziell“ „ bezeichnen, weil sie ihren Ausdrucck eigentlich nur in den d unpublizierten Manuskripten gefunden hat. Es E ist allerdings zu beetonen, dass trotz ihres inoffiziellen Charakterss ihre Wirkung auf Breentanos Schüler viel stärker war als die der offiziiellen Lehre der Psychoologie.
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Die Einzelheiten dieser Lehre können wir hier nicht näher besprechen. 6 Die Hauptpunkte können folgendermaßen zusammengefasst werden: Jede Vorstellung bezieht sich auf einen Gegenstand. Da der äußere Gegenstand manchmal nicht existiert, führt Brentano ein immanentes Objekt ein. In der Psychologie dient dieses Objekt aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach als das einzige Ziel des Aktes. Zur Zeit der Logik-Vorlesung nimmt Brentano jedoch an, dass sich die Vorstellung gewissermaßen „durch” das immanente Objekt auf den äußeren Gegenstand bezieht. Das Urteil besteht in einem mentalen Annehmen bzw. Verwerfen des vorgestellten Objekts, was wir in unserem Schema durch das Zeichen „+/–” symbolisieren. Die propositionalen Entitäten, die wir in unserem Schema finden, resultieren sozusagen aus einem „Einbetten” des nominalen Objekts in das Existieren bzw. NichtExistieren. Da sich nach Brentano alle Urteilsformen prinzipiell auf die existentiellen Formen reduzieren, ist die grundlegende Form der propositionalen Entität die, dass A existiert / nicht existiert, was Brentano typischerweise als Sein / Nichtsein von A ausdrückt. Alle Urteile haben ihre immanenten propositionalen Korrelate (angenommenes / verworfenes A). Was jedoch die transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten betrifft, so lässt sich aufgrund des Manuskripts der LogikVorlesung nicht mit aller Sicherheit sagen, ob nur den wahren oder auch den falschen Urteilen solche transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten entsprechen – mit anderen Worten: ob Brentano nur die bestehenden oder auch die nicht-bestehenden transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten einführt. Der Vortrag Über den Begriff der Wahrheit suggeriert indessen, dass er auch die nicht-bestehenden transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten akzeptiert. 3 Radikale und gemäßigte Reformversuche Weder Brentano noch seine Schüler sind bezüglich dieses ontologischen Schemas unkritisch geblieben. Der späte Brentano ist in die extreme, reistische Richtung gegangen. Nach 1904 verwirft er alle Entitäten, die nicht zur Kategorie der realen Dinge gehören. Alle immanenten Entitäten und alle propositionalen Inhalte wurden als philosophisch irreführende Fiktionen der Sprache zurückgewiesen. Auch die Schüler Brentanos, die seinen Reismus nicht annehmen wollten, haben 6
Für die Einzelheiten dieser Lehre siehe Chrudzimski 2001, S. 62-66 und Chrudzimski 2004, S. 168-175. Vgl. auch Rollinger 2009, Fréchette 2011, Fréchette 2013.
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jedoch versucht, diese reiche Ontologie der intentionalen Bezieehung zu reduzieren. Meinong M hat zwar die transzendenten propositionnalen Inhalte, die er Objektive nannte, zur zentralen Kategorie seiner OntoO logie gemacht, allle immanenten Entitäten hat er jedoch verworfenn.7 Der späte Antton Marty hat einen ähnlichen Weg eingeschlagenn. Im Gegensatz zu Meinong M akzeptiert er allerdings nur die besteheenden transzendenten Innhalte.8 Wir erhielten konsequenterweise das folggende Schema:
transcendenter lnbalt
Urteil Sein/ Nicht-Sein
+-
Vorstellung
keine immanente Entitaeten
transcendente-s Objekt
Subjekt
In diesem Aufsaatz möchten wir uns allerdings auf die Theorie konzentrieren, die Carl C Stumpf in seinem Aufsatz Erscheinungenn und psychische Funkktionen (1907) formuliert hat. Diese Theorie geeht in die im Vergleichh zu Marty und Meinong entgegengesetzte Richhtung, indem sie die proopositionalen Entitäten nur in der Form der immaanenten Inhalte akzepptiert. (Stumpf 1907, S. 32) Bei Stumpf finden wir w also das folgende Bild B der intentionalen Beziehung: 7
Was allerdings diee Lehre Meinongs ein wenig kompliziert, ist die Tatsache, dass d er die psychischen Inhaalte im Stil von Twardowski (Twardowski 1894) akzeptiertt. Vgl. dazu Chrudzimski 20 007, Kap. 3. 8 Vgl. dazu Marty 1908, 1 S. 399. Der frühe Marty hat das Brentanosche Schem ma der Logik-Vorlesung akkzeptiert. Marty akzeptiert auch keine psychischen Inhalte im m Still von Twardowski. Zu ur Einzelheiten der Lehre Martys vgl. Chrudzimski [im Errscheinen 2014].
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Arkadiusz Chrudzimski immanenter lnhalt
.----
Urteil ~
i ''
~
?
;-"genom-menes
•
verworfenes
' ---Vo-rs-tell-un-g
__
_;_! ~:/_,-----,,--.,
-immaneotes ObJekt Subjekt
transcendentes
ObJekt Korrespondenz
Diese Theorie wirkt w auf den ersten Blick etwas befremdlichh. Sie scheint nämlich gewissermaßen g fast alle erdenklichen Schwierigkkeiten der Theorie der propositionalen p Entitäten zu vereinigen, bei einem m generellen Verzichht auf irgendwelche Profite, die uns die proposittionalen Entitäten bietten können. Sie scheint die ungünstigste Form zu sein, welche die Theorie der propositionalen Entitäten überhaupt annehhmen kann. Wir haben geesagt, dass die Argumente (1)–(5) eigentlich nichht der Grund waren, waarum Brentano seine propositionalen Entitäten eingee führt hat. Paradooxerweise war es ausschließlich der Punkt (6), deer die ganze Bereicheruung der Ontologie auslöste. Nichtsdestoweniger können die transzenddenten propositionalen Inhalte, sobald sie einmal eingeführt werden, im Prinzip auch für die Lösung der Probleme (11)–(5) verwendet werdeen. Für Stumpf, der nur immanente Inhalte anniimmt, ist jedoch die Löösung der Punkte (2)–(5) aus dem ersten Abschnittt von vornherein ausgeeschlossen. Im Besonderen ist es nicht klar, waas bei dieser Auffassunng mit dem Wahrheitsbegriff geschieht. In der transt zendenten Realittät haben wir keine propositionalen Entitäten, diie als Wahrmacher funnktionieren könnten. d strukturierte Objekte 4 Einfache und Die Antwort, diee wir von den Vertretern der Brentano-Schule errwarten könnten, ist, dass wir die propositionalen Entitäten in der Funnktion
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der Wahrmacher gar nicht brauchen, und es ist sicherlich auch die Antwort, die wir von Stumpf hören würden. Nach der nichtpropositionalen Urteilstheorie Brentanos sollte sich nämlich die ganze ontologische Komplexität der propositionalen Entitäten in die nominalen Objekte verlegen lassen. Es ist die Voraussetzung seiner Theorie, dass die Objekte, über die man im Rahmen der Brentanoschen deskriptiven Analyse verfügt, eine genug reiche Struktur besitzen, um alle Aufgaben der propositionalen Entitäten übernehmen zu können. Gerade Stumpf besteht wiederholt darauf, dass bereits die Objekte unserer primitivsten Akte eine reiche innere Struktur haben. In seinem Buch Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung argumentiert er, dass die Objekte der Empfindungen keine einfachen Elemente sind, die erst von irgendwelchen bewussten oder unterbewussten Mechanismen „synthetisiert” werden müssten. Sie haben schon von vornherein mindestens zwei Aspekte – qualitative und örtliche Bestimmung –, die sich auf eine einzigartige Weise gegenseitig fundieren, so dass sie real untrennbar sind. (Stumpf 1873, S. 114, 136).9 Trotz ihrer realen Untrennbarkeit lassen sie sich jedoch in Gedanken unterscheiden, einander gegenüberstellen und voneinander prädizieren. Bereits die Objekte unserer primitivsten Akte haben also eine ontologische Struktur, die sich in einem Urteil artikulieren lässt. In der Tonpsychologie wird die Geschichte noch komplizierter. Stumpf untersucht dort die Musikphänomene und entdeckt weitere interessante Fundierungsverhältnisse, wie im Besonderen das berühmte Verschmelzungsphänomen. Stumpf zufolge sind uns z.B. Akkorde zunächst als einfache Phänomene gegeben. Wir hören sie als Ganze. Nichtsdestoweniger lassen sich die Töne, aus welchen Akkorde bestehen, bei ein wenig Übung „heraushören”. Die These Stumpfs ist, dass die Töne eines Akkordes in einem einzigartigen Verhältnis der Verschmelzung (vgl. Stumpf 1890, S. 128 ff.) zueinander stehen, so dass sie uns als ein organisches Ganzes erscheinen. Wir haben es also wieder mit einem (nominalen) Objekt zu tun, das innerlich sehr subtil strukturiert ist. (Stumpf 1891, S. 485).10 9
Vgl. auch Fisette 2009, S. 178. Brentano hat eine komplizierte Theorie der verschiedenen „Teile” der Objekte entwickelt. Vgl. Brentano 1982, S. 12–27, 88 ff. Räumliche und qualitative Bestimmung nennt er die sich durchwohnenden Teile des Objekts. 10 Die nächste Frage, die die Richtung der Forschung der Gestaltpsychologie bestimmt hat, ist, ob aus einer solchen Verschmelzung eine zusätzliche, unreduzierbare
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Stumpf behauptet, dass solche verschmolzenen Töne im Objekt des Hörens auch dann „vorhanden” sind, wenn sie vom Subjekt nicht bemerkt (nicht „herausgehört”) werden (was übrigens in der Regel gerade der Fall ist) und sieht dann keine Gründe, warum es in solchen Objekten auch die prinzipiell unmerklichen Aspekte nicht geben könnte. Er schreibt: Unsere eigenen Empfindungsinhalte sind uns auf direktem Wege nicht bis zu den letzten Feinheiten durchsichtig. Wir müssen die Scheidung zwischen Ding an sich und Erscheinung in gewissem Sinn ein zweites Mal machen bezüglich der Erscheinung selbst. (Stumpf 1907, S. 36.)
Es ist also Stumpf zufolge nicht der Fall, dass wir in unserer kognitiven Aktivität mit der einfachen Objekten beginnen, die erst durch gewisse höherstufige Akte in die strukturierten Entitäten verwandelt werden. Die Struktur ist im nominalen Objekt bereits vorhanden, selbst wenn wir es gelegentlich simplifizierend als ein völlig homogenes Ganzes erfassen. Die Konsequenzen dieser Auffassung für das Problem der propositionalen Entitäten sind nicht schwer einzusehen. Es scheint nämlich, dass man in dieser Situation keine Gründe hat, einen Sachverhalt (z.B. dass das Objekt A rot ist) als etwas mehr zu betrachten, denn als eine bloße „Entwicklung” der inneren Struktur eines nominalen Objekts (nämlich eines roten A-Objekts). Die propositionale Form, in welcher derselbe Inhalt erfasst wird, scheint keine unreduzierbare ontologische Bereicherung zu implizieren. Wir sind geneigt zu sagen, dass man es hier bloß mit einer syntaktischen Variante, bloß mit einer anderen Redeweise zu tun hat. Der letzte Satz ist natürlich eine Vereinfachung und muss kommentiert werden. Die Redeweise, die anstatt bloßen Namen Sätze verwendet, ist natürlich keineswegs bloß eine andere Redeweise. Denn sie ist in der Tat die einzige Redeweise, die aus grammatischen Gründen zulässig ist. Alles, was wir sagen möchten, müssen wir in Sätzen sagen. Der Punkt unserer Argumentation besteht jedoch darin, dass im Rahmen der Ontologie, die Stumpf zu akzeptieren scheint, diese grammatischen Tatsachen keineswegs implizieren, dass man neben den nominalen Objekten noch irgendwelche propositionalen EntiQualität (eine Gestaltqualität) resultiert. Vgl. dazu Chrudzimski 2013.
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täten in der Welt einführen muss. Die grammatischen Regeln haben also in diesem Fall keine direkte ontologische Relevanz. Im Hintergrund vieler Argumentationen, die die Unentbehrlichkeit der propositionalen Entitäten aufzuzeigen versuchen, steht eine feste Überzeugung, dass es eine solche direkte ontologische Relevanz auf jeden Fall geben muss. Man behauptet z.B. sehr oft, ohne dafür zu argumentieren, dass sich die Semantik der Aussagen ohne solche propositionalen Referenzstrukturen nicht erklären lässt. Normalerweise lässt man als einen geeigneten Wahrheitsträger oder Wahrmacher nur eine Entität der propositionalen Form zu. Wir haben jedoch gesehen, dass im Rahmen der Theorie Brentanos diese Denklinie ganz verfehlt wäre. Ohne zusätzliche Voraussetzungen erscheint jedenfalls die Behauptung der Unentbehrlichkeit der propositionalen Entitäten als ein bloßes Dekret. Die propositionalen Inhalte werden erst dann zu einer unreduzierbaren Kategorie (und das obige semantische Argument wird erst dann wirklich plausibel), wenn man die nominalen Objekte so philosophisch präpariert, dass sie an und für sich als aller Eigenschaften und aller Struktur beraubt erscheinen. Solch eine „Entfärbung” der nominalen Objekte erscheint übrigens sehr oft als eine natürliche Konsequenz einer philosophischen Analyse. Wenn wir einmal beginnen, dem Objekt seine Eigenschaften gegenüberzustellen, dann scheint es, dass wir eine nicht arbiträre Endposition erst dann erreichen, wenn wir auf der einen Seite alle Bestimmungen des Objekts als seine Eigenschaften haben, denen wir auf der anderen Seite höchstens nur noch ein bloßes Substrat gegenüberstellen können. Diese Tendenz tritt besonders deutlich beim frühen Wittgenstein auf. Wir finden sie aber auch beim späten Meinong. Der Anhänger einer solchen Auffassung würde natürlich sagen, dass ein Brentanosches strukturiertes Objekt in Wirklichkeit nichts anderes ist, als eine Art „kognitiv zusammengedrängter” Sachverhalt. Im Rahmen einer solchen Auffassung sind die propositionalen Entitäten in der Tat unentbehrlich. Wenn alle nominalen Objekte „einfach” sind, dann sagt uns die Aufzählung dieser Objekte natürlich nicht, wie die Welt aussieht. Darüber hinaus muss präzisiert werden, welche Eigenschaften sie haben und in welchen Relationen sie zueinander stehen. Denn die „Natur” der einfachen Objekte impliziert keine ihrer Eigenschaften und keine ihrer Relationen (was im Grunde bedeutet, dass die einfachen Objekte eben keine Natur haben).
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Und wenn wir die Eigenschaften und Relationen auf die ähnliche Art und Weise zu Objekten machen, die „neben” den Individuen aufgelistet werden können, erreichen wir dadurch nicht viel. Denn die Aufzählung der Objekte, Eigenschaften und Relationen sagt uns wieder nicht, welche Objekte welche Eigenschaften haben und welche Objekte in welchen Relationen stehen. Wir brauchen immer noch einen Nexus, der ein bestimmtes Objekt mit einer bestimmten Eigenschaft (bzw. mehrere Objekte mit einer Relation) verbindet.11 Wenn also A ein einfaches Objekt ist, müssen wir außer A noch eine Tatsache haben, dass A F ist oder dass A zu B in Relation R steht. Wenn man die Geschichte der Philosophie ein wenig kennt, kann man auch bemerken, dass die Relationen in der Regel erst im Rahmen eines solchen ontologischen Schemas zu einem wirklich wichtigen Teil des ontologischen Instrumentariums werden. Solange die nominalen Objekte als qualitativ bestimmte Strukturen betrachtet werden, hat man eine starke Tendenz, die Relationen als eine deutlich schwächere Form des Seienden zu betrachten, die sich prinzipiell auf die monadischen Eigenschaften der Objekte reduziert. Die Brentanosche Tradition geht eindeutig in diese Richtung. Brentano und seine Schüler haben generell die Kategorie der Relation ontologisch entwertet. Die Tatsache, dass Hans größer als Lisa ist, ist durch die absolute Größe von Hans und durch die absolute Größe von Lisa impliziert. Die räumlichen Relationen finden ihre Erklärung in den absoluten räumlichen Bestimmungen der Objekte usw. Brentano steht hier wohl unter dem Einfluss von Aristoteles, der darauf bestand, dass „das Relative am wenigstens ein Wesen und etwas Seiendes ist”. (Metaphysik, 1088a 30–31) Bei den Relativen soll kein selbständiges Entstehen und Vergehen stattfinden in dem Sinne, in dem dies bei den monadischen Eigenschaften der Fall ist. Das Relative entsteht und vergeht abhängig davon, wie sich die monadischen Eigenschaften der Fundamente der Relation verändern. „[O]hne verändert zu werden, wird dasselbe bald größer, bald kleiner oder gleich sein, wenn das andere der Quantität nach verändert ist.” (Metaphysik, 1088a 34–1088b 1) Und was Stumpf betrifft, so besteht er explizit da11
Dieser Nexus kann natürlich wiederum zu einem Objekt gemacht werden; das bedeutet jedoch nur den Anfang eines unendlichen Regresses.
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rauf, dass jeder Relation „ein absoluter Inhalt” zugrunde liegen muss.12 Zusammenfassend kann man sagen, dass man in der ganzen Brentano-Schule eine starke Tendenz hatte, alle Relationen als intern im Sinne Russells zu betrachten. Die Relationen, die sich so verhalten, supervenieren, wie man heute sagt, auf die monadischen Qualitäten von ihren Gliedern und bilden, nach der Formulierung Armstrongs „ontological free lunch“.13 Für einen Anhänger der einfachen Gegenstände, die erst im Rahmen eines Sachverhalts zu einer Struktur zusammengesetzt werden können, gibt es jedoch keinen Grund, den monadischen Eigenschaften im Vergleich zu den Relationen irgendeine ontologische Priorität zuzumessen. Weder die Tatsache, dass A F ist, noch die Tatsache, dass A zu B in Relation R steht, ist durch die Natur von A und B impliziert, und zwar präzise deswegen, weil A und B eben keine Naturen haben. Die These Wittgensteins: „Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.” (Tractatus, 1.1) ist also für jeden, der die genannten Dinge als „Objekte ohne Eigenschaften” betrachten will, gewissermaßen analytisch. Es scheint jedoch, dass sie im Rahmen der Ontologie Stumpfs keineswegs einleuchtend ist. Wenn die Dinge keine einfachen, eigenschaftslosen Atome sind (und insbesondere dann, wenn sich alle Relationen ontologisch auf ihre monadischen Eigenschaften reduzieren lassen), dann kann die Welt ohne Probleme als „die Gesamtheit der Dinge” aufgefasst werden. Wir können also zwei ontologische Positionen unterscheiden: (A) Die „atomistische” Position: Dinge sind absolut einfach, nur Sachverhalte haben eine Struktur. Die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen ist demgemäß wesentlich „mehr” als die Gesamtheit der Dinge. (B) Die „aristotelische” Position: Dinge haben eine innere Struktur, deswegen brauchen wir keine Sachverhalte. Mit anderen Worten: Alle Sachverhalte stecken bereits in den Dingen; die Dinge lassen sich als 12
Vgl. „Entweder versteht man hier unter Lage [...] was wir Ort nennen, und dann ist sie keine Relation [...]; oder man versteht darunter die Beziehung der Punkte zu einander (oder zu einem dritten), und dann liegt dieser Relation, wie jeder, ein absoluter Inhalt zu Grunde, das sind eben hier die beiden Orte; denn man meint eine örtliche Beziehung.”, Stumpf 1873, S. 124. „So kann es Beziehungen zwischen Empfindungen geben, aber schliesslich müssen doch irgend welche absolute Inhalte vorhanden sein, welche wir auf einander beziehen.”, Stumpf 1883, S. 13. 13 Zum Begriff der internen Relation vgl. Russell 1910; Johansson 1990.
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Sachverhalte „ausrollen”. Die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen bietet uns keine neuen Informationen im Vergleich zur Gesamtheit der Dinge.14 5 Konzeptualismus Die Konsequenzen unserer Analyse scheinen für die Position Stumpfs nicht ganz eindeutig zu sein. Einerseits erscheint es als eine kohärente Entwicklung, dass er keine transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten eingeführt hat. Als ein Anhänger der Konzeption der qualitativ bestimmten, strukturierten Objekte braucht er nämlich im Grunde keine zusätzlichen propositionalen Strukturen. Die Welt Stumpfs ist die Gesamtheit der Dinge, wie langweilig dies auch klingen mag. In dieser Situation stellt sich jedoch eine berechtigte Frage, warum er dann die immanenten propositionalen Entitäten eingeführt hat? Um die Motivation für diesen Schritt zu verstehen, müssen wir auf einen zusätzlichen Aspekt der Situation aufmerksam machen. Es geht darum, dass die Frage, in welchem Sinne die nominalen Objekte der Vorstellungen im Rahmen der Brentanoschen Tradition als strukturiert und artikulierbar betrachtet werden können, keineswegs eine selbstverständliche Antwort findet. Was z.B. für Brentano sehr charakteristisch ist, ist eine Art der unentschiedenen Oszillation zwischen der Auffassung, die die Eigenschaften, die von den Dingen prädiziert werden können, als ontologisch ernst zu nehmende individuelle Aspekte dieser Dinge betrachtet, und der „konzeptualistischen” Theorie, die nur von einer fiktiven Teilung in Gedanken spricht. Der junge Brentano (1862–1867) bevorzugt generell die Theorie, die die realen Dinge als real unteilbare Ganzen betrachtet und die die prädizierbaren Eigenschaften als Fiktionen des Verstandes interpretiert. Diese Fiktionen können allerdings richtig prädiziert werden, und das ist der einzige Sinn, in dem sie als Fiktionen cum fundamento in re bezeichnet werden können. (Wir können hier wieder die charakteristische Priorität des normativen Diskurses in den Analysen Brentanos beobachten.) In seiner mittleren Periode (vor allem um 1890) neigt er hingegen dazu, die individuellen Eigenschaf14
Man kann natürlich auch eine mittlere Position hinzufügen, nämlich dass es einerseits strukturierte Dinge gibt, andererseits aber auch Sachverhalte, die sich auf derartige strukturierte Dinge nicht reduzieren lassen. Diese Position würde vielleicht sogar am besten der heutzutage üblichen Versionen einer „gemäßigten“, „common-sense“ Ontologie entsprechen. Für die Zwecke dieses Aufsatzes brauchen wir sie aber nicht näher zu untersuchen.
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ten als ontologisch ernst zu nehmende Bestandteile der individuellen Dinge zu betrachten. Es scheint, dass im Platzieren der propositionalen Strukturen ausschließlich „im Geist”, welches wir bei Stumpf finden, auch solche „konzeptualistischen” Überlegungen mitspielen könnten. Außer den zwei oben genannten Positionen bezüglich der Einfachheit bzwKomplexität der nominalen Objekte können wir also noch eine dritte Position auflisten: (C) Die „konzeptualistische” Position: Dinge sind insofern einfach, als jedes Ding vom ontologischen Standpunkt aus betrachtet ein unteilbares Ganzes bildet. Sie sind jedoch insofern komplex, als sie in einer artikulierter Weise richtig erfasst werden können. Es scheint, als ob Stumpf in seinen Analysen zwischen den Positionen (B) und (C) schwankte. Konsequent durchgeführt muss (C) die immanenten Objekte und Sachverhalte als fiktive Entitäten interpretieren. Diese Interpretation ist für den jungen Brentano charakteristisch. In der Periode 1862–67 subsumiert er das „objektiv im Geist Seiende” unter den Begriff des Seienden im Sinne der Wahrheit und betrachtete es generell als ontologisch harmlos. (Vgl. Brentano 1862, S. 37 ff.; Brentano 1867, S. 80) In seiner Metaphysik-Vorlesung vom Jahre 1867 (Manuskript M 96) entwickelt er eine konzeptualistische Theorie, die die realen Dinge als unteilbare Ganzheiten betrachtet, deren ontologische Struktur nur vom Geist stipuliert wird. Diese Struktur ist also im Grunde fiktiv. Sie ist allerdings keine grundlose Fiktion, denn gewisse solche Strukturierungen sind richtig (d.h. sie können in evidenten Urteilen an Dinge angewendet werden). In diesem, und nur in diesem Sinne sind sie als Fiktionen cum fundamento in re zu betrachten. (Vgl. M 96, Lektion XLIII, S. 31972).15 Im Laufe der Zeit (generell seit der Psychologie und besonders in der Periode 1880–1890) werden jedoch die immanenten Entitäten ontologisch immer ernster genommen. Wie ernst sie Carl Stumpf nimmt, ist nicht ganz klar. Er betrachtet sie sicher nicht als einfach fiktiv. Andererseits betont er jedoch den charakteristischen Kontrast zwischen den nominalen und propositionalen Inhalten der psychischen Akte. Die Objekte der nominalen Form erscheinen nämlich, phänomenologisch genommen, als etwas äußeres, 15
Die konzeptualistische Metaphysik des jungen Brentano besprechen wir genau in Chrudzimski 2004, Kap. 3.
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vom Bewusstsein logisch Unabhängiges (selbst wenn ihnen in Wirklichkeit keine Realität entspricht). „Zu einem Ton” – schreibt Stumpf – „gehören mit begrifflicher Notwendigkeit nur die Merkmale der Höhe, Stärke u.dgl. [...]. Das Merkmal des Wahrgenommenwerdens gehört nicht dazu.” (Stumpf 1907, S. 11 f.) Die propositionalen Inhalte werden hingegen von vornherein als etwas aufgefasst, was von der kognitiven Tätigkeit des Subjekts ontologisch abhängig ist. „[D]er Sachverhalt” – lesen wir – „kann nicht für sich allein, unabhängig von irgendeiner Funktion [d.h. von einem psychischen Akt] unmittelbar gegeben und damit auch real sein. Nur als Inhalt eines aktuell stattfindenden Urteils kann er real sein.” (Stumpf 1907, S. 32) Stumpf stellt ausdrücklich diese subjektiv bedingte Natur der propositionalen Inhalte den prima facie vom Bewusstsein unabhängigen nominalen Objekten der Erscheinungen gegenüber. Die Asymmetrie der immanenten und transzendenten Seite der intentionalen Beziehung erweist sich also als noch tiefer greifend. Wenn wir die Situation vom phänomenologischen Standpunkt aus betrachten, erscheinen uns die nominalen Objekte als transzendent und vom Bewusstsein ontologisch unabhängige Entitäten. (Es kann sich natürlich herausstellen, dass es keine solchen Entitäten gibt; das ändert jedoch nichts daran, dass sie uns eben in dieser Weise erscheinen.) Die propositionalen Entitäten haben wir hingegen nur als immanente Inhalte der psychischen Akte gegeben. Stumpf scheint also anzunehmen, dass man sich in jedem Urteil auf ein transzendentes Objekt durch einen immanenten propositionalen Inhalt bezieht. Das immanente nominale Objekt sollte also in unserem Schema eigentlich gestrichen werden. In einem Urteil bezieht man sich auf ein Objekt, indem man dieses Objekt mental auseinandernimmt, was zur Folge hat, dass als immanente vermittelnde Entität ein propositionaler Inhalt auftritt. Die Artikulierung der inneren Struktur des Objekts nimmt immer eine propositionale Form an. Wenn die innere Struktur des Objekts in dieser Weise „mentalisiert” werden könnte, wäre es auch gewissermaßen verständlich, warum man neben den Objekten noch immanente propositionale Inhalte einführt. Vom ontologischen Standpunkt aus sind die propositionalen Inhalte überflüssig, sie tragen im Vergleich zu den nominalen Objekten keine zusätzlichen ontologischen Informationen, weil unsere Objekte bereits strukturierte Objekte sind. Die Komplexität der Objekte besteht jedoch ausschließlich darin, dass sie in einer artikulierten
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Weise richtig erfasst werden können, und ein solches Erfassen kann nur „durch” einen propositionalen (immanenten) Inhalt zustande kommen. Die einzige Weise, in der sich die Komplexität des Seienden offenbart, wäre danach eine propositionale Umgestaltung. 6 Eine konzeptualistische Auffassung der Negation Bevor wir unsere Untersuchung abschließen, versuchen wir einen interessanten Punkt zu zeigen, wo eine solche konzeptualistische Auffassung ihre Stärke zeigt. Die frühen Kritiker der Brentanoschen Urteilstheorie – vor allem Meinong und Husserl – haben in erster Linie darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass die ontologische Einfachheit der Brentanoschen Sachverhalte durch die innere Komplexität der involvierten Objekte ausgeglichen wird, so dass es sehr fraglich erscheint, ob die resultierende Entität noch als ein nominales Objekt zu betrachten ist. Der einfachste Punkt, an dem man hier die Lehre Brentanos angreifen kann, wären die Relationen. Es ist nämlich ziemlich wenig plausibel, dass sie sich wirklich alle als intern im Sinne Russells interpretieren lassen. Diesen Punkt werden wir hier aber nicht entwickeln, denn er hat für die Theorie Stumpfs keine Bedeutung. Wie wir gesehen haben, hat Stumpf Brentano in dieser Sache geglaubt. Es stellt sich allerdings heraus, dass uns die innere Struktur des Objektes Probleme auch dann bereiten kann, wenn wir das Problem der Relationen als erledigt betrachten. Wenn wir uns die Brentanosche Übersetzung von vier klassischen kategorischen Formen in die Erinnerung rufen sehen wir, dass man hier mit den Zusammenfügungen von Termen und ihrer Negation zu tun haben. Brentanos Urteilstheorie und die damit zusammenhängende Reform der traditionellen syllogistischen Logik wurde von seinen Schülern mit Begeisterung angenommen. Die Erklärungen, die er in seiner Psychologie bezüglich seiner „Reform der Logik“ gibt, fallen jedoch ziemlich knapp aus. Im Jahre 1891 publizierte deshalb Franz Hillebrand ein Buch unter dem Titel Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen Schlüsse (Hillebrand 1891), in dem er versuchte, Brentanos Urteilslehre ausführlich und systematisch darzustellen. Das Buch wurde 1892 von Meinong rezensiert. Bereits in dieser Besprechung, zehn Jahre bevor er in Über Annahmen seine konsequent propositionale Intentionalitätstheorie entwickelte, sagt Meinong deutlich, dass er die existentielle Urteilstheorie Brentanos nicht akzeptiert und macht dabei auf zwei wichtige Prob-
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leme aufmerksam. Die „Entdeckung” der existentiellen Urteilsform „A ist”/„A ist nicht” und die Einsicht, dass sie auf keine Kombination der kategorischen Formen reduzierbar ist, hält er zwar für wichtig, die Ansicht Brentanos, dass alle kategorischen Urteilsformen auf eine solche existentielle Form reduzierbar sind, sei aber verfehlt. (Meinong 1892, S. 205 f) Meinongs Kritik zeigt, dass das eigentliche Problem in der Kernidee Brentanos liegt, nach der sich die ganze syntaktische Komplexität, die in einem Urteil involviert ist, in sein Objekt verlegt und für das Urteil selbst nur eine existentielle Position bzw. Negation übrig bleibt. Die zwei wichtigsten Punkte der Kritik betreffen die Operationen der Negation und der Zusammenfügung von Termen, die Brentano für seine existentiale Reduktion brauchte. Der letztgenannte Kritikpunkt, den Meinong in seiner HillebrandRezension gegen Brentanos Urteilslehre erhebt – das Problem der Komposition –, ist sehr allgemein. Um ein kategorisches Urteil der Form „Ein S ist P” richtig wiederzugeben, reicht es nicht, argumentiert Meinong, die Existenz von S und die Existenz von P anzuerkennen. Was noch dazu kommen muss, ist die Anerkennung einer verbindenden Relation, die zwischen S und P bestehen muss, wenn diese zwei Elemente ein und dasselbe Objekt konstituieren sollen. Denn ein S und ein P könnte es ja geben, ohne dass sie irgendetwas miteinander zu tun hätten. Es ist also in Wahrheit diese Relation zwischen S und P, schreibt Meinong in seiner Rezension, die in dem kategorischen Urteil „Ein S ist P” anerkannt wird. Sie ist der Gegenstand, der in jedem Urteil der Form „Ein S ist P” anerkannt wird und deshalb muss auch sie den Gegenstand der zugrunde liegenden Vorstellung bilden. (Meinong 1892, S. 210) Zehn Jahre später, in der ersten Auflage von Über Annahmen, kommen Meinong jedoch ernsthafte Bedenken bezüglich seines damaligen Vorschlags. Dass das Bestehen einer Relation, die S und P verknüpft, in einem kategorischen Urteil der Form „Ein S ist P” anerkannt werden muss, steht für ihn nach wie vor fest. Ist es aber wirklich der Fall, dass die genannte Relation dabei vorgestellt wird? Eine psychologische Untersuchung bestätigt diese Hypothese keineswegs. Bei einer psychologischen Analyse eines kategorischen Urteils können wir zwar ohne Probleme die Vorstellungen von S und P hervorheben, von der Vorstellung einer verbindenden Relation fehlt jedoch, wie uns Meinong jetzt versichert, jede Spur. (Meinong 1902, S. 144, 148) Die
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Theorie, die Meinong in seiner Hillebrand-Rezension formuliert hat, scheint damit jeder psychologischen Grundlage zu entbehren. Jetzt hält Meinong aber eine andere Lösung der Schwierigkeit parat. Seit er unter seinen Gegenständen propositionale Entitäten hat, die nicht durch eine Vorstellung, sondern erst durch einen „urteilsähnlichen“ psychischen Zustand (ein Urteil oder eine Annahme) dem Subjekt präsentiert werden, ist er nicht länger auf die intentionale Kraft einer Vorstellung angewiesen. Die verknüpfende reale Relation zwischen S und P wird zwar nicht vorgestellt, sie wird aber trotzdem intentional berücksichtigt, und zwar indem das betreffende Subjekt das Urteil fällt (bzw. die Annahme macht), dass S P ist. Die kopulative Form „S ist P“, die Brentano auf eine existentiale Form „Ein Pseiendes S ist“ zurückführen wollte, erweist sich also nach Meinong als prinzipiell unreduzierbar.16 Zusammengefasst heißt das, dass Brentanos Übersetzung deshalb nicht funktionieren kann, weil die strukturierten Objekte, die sie braucht, bereits Sachverhalte enthalten. Wir haben hier die grundlegende metaphysische Kontroverse zwischen einem Wittgensteinschen und einem Aristotelischen Weltbild, die wir bereits oben besprochen haben. Nach der Wittgensteinschen Auffassung sind die primitivsten Elemente der Wirklichkeit, die „Objekte“ genannt werden dürfen, absolut einfach. Alles, was irgendwelche Komplexität oder Struktur aufweißt, muss als ein Sachverhalt interpretiert werden. Die Bezeichnung „komplexes Objekt“ ist dementsprechend strenggenommen ein Oxymoron und die so genannten komplexen Objekte können nur verkappte Sachverhalte sein. Nach der Aristotelischen Auffassung haben wir hingegen sehr wohl strukturierte Entitäten der nominalen Form. Wir haben gesehen, dass Brentano und seine konservativeren Schüler – darunter auch Stumpf – eindeutig der letzten Auffassung huldigten. Diesen Einwand legen wir also beiseite.17 16
In der ersten Auflage von Über Annahmen wird diese These nur sehr zögernd aufgestellt. Vgl. „Ich habe meine Bedenken gegen die wirkliche ‘Zurückführbarkeit’ [der kategorischen Form auf die existentielle Form] hier nicht verschweigen zu sollen gemeint: ich hielte es aber derzeit noch für allzu gewagt, dieselben zur Grundlage für die uns jetzt in der ersten Linie beschäftigende Untersuchung der Annahmen zu machen.“, Meinong 1902, S. 149. In der zweiten Auflage (Meinong 1910) werden „Seinsmeinen“ (A ist) und „Soseinsmeinen“ (A ist B) als zwei gleichberechtigte und aufeinender unreduzierbare Formen des Meinens anerkannt. 17 Ähnlich wie im Fall der Relationen, kann es natürlich wohl sein, dass am Ende des
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Interessanter für unsere Perspektive ist das Problem der Negation. Denn auch Brentano selbst hat es ganz klar gesehen. Dass sich in einigen Brentanoschen Formen (o und a) Negativa (ein nicht-P) finden, widerspricht nämlich einer weit verbreiteten Meinung, dass ein negatives Charakteristikum nie aus einer bloßen Vorstellung resultieren kann. Da es auch die Meinung Brentanos war, vervollständigt er schon in den achtziger Jahren seine Urteilstheorie durch die Einführung der so genannten Doppelurteile. Eine einfache existentielle Reduktion, behauptet jetzt Brentano, ist nicht immer möglich. Um alle Urteilsformen wirklich in den Griff zu bekommen, muss man neben den einfachen Existenzialurteilen eine zusätzliche Urteilsform einführen, die gewissermaßen zwei Urteile in Beziehung zueinander setzt. Eine unselbständige Prädikation baut sich hier auf einem Existenzialurteil auf. Seine offizielle Formulierung dieser Lehre kann man erst im Anhang zur Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (1911) finden. Nach dieser Formulierung haben wir es mit einem Doppelurteil dann zu tun, wenn ein Objekt zuerst in einem einfachen Existenzialurteil: (i) A ist anerkannt wird, und dann diesem Objekt eine Eigenschaft zugeschrieben oder abgesprochen wird. Wir dürfen uns aber nicht vorstellen, dass dieses Zuschreiben oder Absprechen in einem Urteil der folgenden Form geschieht: (ii) A ist B, (iii) A ist nicht B.
bzw.
Nach Brentano gibt es nämlich solche Urteilsformen gar nicht. Das Zuschreiben oder Absprechen wird in einem neuen Existenzialurteil verwirklicht, das das Urteil (i) in gewisser Weise voraussetzt und dadurch von ihm in einem gewissen Sinne eingeschränkt wird. Die Form dieses Existenzialurteils ist: (ii*) Ein B-seiendes [und im Urteil (i) anerkanntes] A ist, bzw. Tages nicht Brentano, sonder seine Kritiker recht behalten. In diesem Aufsatz werden wir jedoch nicht versuchen, diese Fragen zu entscheiden.
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(iii*) Ein B-seiendes [und im Urteil (i) anerkanntes] A ist nicht.18 Bei der Interpretation der Formen (ii*) und (iii*) soll man nicht vergessen, dass die in den eckigen Klammern auftretende verbindende Formel „[und im Urteil (i) anerkanntes]” sich auf kein Element bezieht, das zum Inhalt des Urteils gehört. Durch diese Formel wurde die psychische Struktur wiedergegeben, in welcher die zwei Urteile miteinander verbunden werden. Wir haben es hier mit einem neuen Modus des Urteilens und nicht mit einem neuen gegenständlichen Element zu tun. Die Einführung des speziellen Modus des Doppelurteils betrachtete Brentano als eine Rettung seiner Reduktion der vier kategorischen Urteilsformen auf die Existenz-Urteile. Meinong bewertete sie jedoch als ihre endgültige Niederlage. „[I]ch vermag nicht zu verstehen,“ schreibt er, „wie dergleichen vertreten werden kann, ohne [dass] die Reduktionstheorie [der kategorischen auf die existentialen Urteilsformen] aufgegeben ist.“ (Meinong 1892, S. 214) Meinong ist zwar damit einverstanden, dass die Negation nie „die Sache einer Vorstellung“ sein kann,19 nichtsdestoweniger ist sie seiner Meinung nach ontologisch ernst zu nehmen. Sie ist etwas, was dem Gegenstand des psychischen Aktes zukommt und das heißt, dass sie nicht in einen bloßen psychischen Modus verlegt werden darf, dem auf der gegenständlichen Seite nichts entspricht. Sie muss in einer gegenständlichen Struktur ihren Platz finden, und wir sehen, dass diese Struktur nicht nominal sein kann, wenn die These aufrechterhalten werden soll, dass alle Vorstellungen positiv sind. Unter diesen Voraussetzungen bildet also die Negation einen Prüfstein, an dem man die „Propositionalität“ einer Entität messen kann. Eine Entität ist genau dann propositional, wenn sie eine Negation involvieren kann.20 Zumindest die Form „a ist nicht F“ erweist sich also 18
Vgl. dazu die Erläuterungen in Brentano 1911/2008, S. 414 f. Vgl. auch Marty 1895, S. 63 f.
19
Vgl. Meinong 1902, S. 136. Schon in den Hume-Studien II schreibt Meinong deutlich, dass in allen Fällen, in denen man es anstatt mit positiven Inhalten „mit bloßer Negation“ zu tun hat, etwas mehr als eine bloße Vorstellung involviert sein muss. Da Meinong zur Zeit der Hume-Studien II Annahmen noch nicht kannte, hieß es dort, dass dieses „mehr“ ein Urteil sein muss. Vgl. Meinong 1882, S. 103. 20 Auch Frege behauptet, dass die Negation erst auf der Ebene eines „fertigen“ Gedankens (d.h. eines propositionalen Inhalts) auftreten kann. Die Negation ist nämlich nach ihm eine Funktion, die als ihr Argument bereits einen „fertigen“ Gedanken (eine
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als auf eine einfache existentielle Form unreduzierbar. Die syntaktische Form „... ist nicht...“ kann weder aus einer Vorstellung abstrahiert werden, noch in einen psychischen Modus verlegt werden. Nach Meinong bildet sie eine gegenständliche Struktur, deren Erfassen nur im Rahmen eines propositionalen Aktes möglich ist. Kann uns die konzeptualistische Auffassung, so wie man sie bei Stumpf finden kann, bei diesen Problemen helfen? Eine solche Auffassung besteht im Grunde darin, dass man in der begrifflichen Domäne wesentlich mehr Artikulierung und Komplexität postuliert, als in der Domäne der Wahrmacher. In Anwendung an Stumpf bedeutet das, dass man unter den immanenten Entitäten gewisse Formen findet, die in der transzendenten Realität fehlen. Wäre es also möglich, die Negation vollständig in die immanenten Strukturen zu verlegen und zu behaupten, dass die ganze transzendente Realität „positiv“ ist? Die Antwort lautet, dass es tatsächlich möglich ist. Nehmen wir irgendeinen Brentanoschen Satz, der negative Terme verwendet, etwa: „Es gibt ein nicht-schwarzes Pferd“. Was müsste in der Welt existieren, damit dieser Satz wahr ist? Die Antwort ist einfach: Der genannte Satz ist genau dann wahr, wenn es in der Welt ein Pferd gibt, das eine Farbe hat, die mit der Farbe Schwarz nicht identisch ist. Die Farbe, die dieses Pferd hat, braucht jedoch keineswegs eine „negative“ Farbe zu sein. Selbst wenn wir annehmen, dass es in der Welt ausschließlich positive Farben gibt – was übrigens ganz vernünftig klingt –, können wir für jeden negativen Satz einen passenden Wahrmacher finden.21 So weit so gut, die Tatsache, dass wir in unserer WahrmacherTheorie wahrscheinlich keine ontologisch ernst zu nehmende Negation brauchen, bedeutet aber noch lange nicht, dass auch unsere Intentionalitätstheorie ohne sie auskommen kann. Der Satz „Es gibt ein nicht-schwarzes Pferd“ kann zwar durch die Anwesenheit eines weißen Pferdes wahrgemacht werden, er bedeutet aber nicht, dass es ein weißes Pferd gibt. Wenn wir also die Bedeutung dieses Satzes (oder den Inhalt des Gedankens, dass es ein nicht-schwarzes Pferd gibt) negative Ausdrücke erklären wollen, würden wir alle möglichen positiven Wahrmacher aufzählen müssen. Proposition) braucht. Vgl. Frege 1919, S. 155f., Frege 1923, S. 37. 21 Für den allgemeinen Satz der Form (i) „Es gibt kein S, das nicht-P ist“ brauchen wir keinen besonderen Wahrmacher einzuführen. Wir können annehmen, dass der Satz (i) genau dann wahr ist, wenn der Satz (ii) „Es gibt ein S, das nicht-P ist“ falsch ist; und dies ist genau dann der fall, wenn der Satz (ii) keinen Wahrmacher hat.
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Es gibt ein nicht-schwarzes Pferd bedeutet: Es gibt ein weißes Pferd; oder Es gibt ein braunes Pferd; oder …………………………; oder …………………………; oder …………………………; oder …………………………; oder Es gibt ein rotes Pferd; oder Es gibt ein grünes Pferd; oder …………………………; oder …………………………; oder etc…
Das Problem ist allerdings, dass eine solche Theorie keine psychologische Plausibilität zu haben scheint. Es ist höchst unwahrscheinlich, dass wir im Falle eines negativen Urteils eine solche (möglicherweise unendliche) Kollektion von möglichen Wahrmachern wirklich „vor unseren geistigen Augen“ als seinen Inhalt projizieren. Wenn wir eine psychologisch brauchbare Intentionalitätstheorie liefern wollen, müssen wir über eine viel „kompaktere“ konzeptuelle Struktur – eine, die die rechnerischen Kapazitäten unseres Geistes nicht so offensichtlich sprengt – verfügen. Das Verwenden von Negation (in diesem Fall von negativen Begriffen) scheint zu dieser Rolle sehr gut zu passen und ein Ersatz für sie ist nicht so leicht zu finden. Es scheint also, dass eine Intentionalitätstheorie, die psychologisch plausibel sein will, auf jeden Fall gewisse konzeptuellen Elemente einführen soll, die für die Negation verantwortlich sind. Es ist aber zugleich vernünftig anzunehmen, dass einer solchen Negation keine ontologisch ernst zu nehmenden Strukturen in der wahrmachenden Realität entsprechen. Die Asymmetrie, die bei Stumpf zwischen den (propositionalen) konzeptuellen Strukturen im Geiste und den (nominalen) Wahrmachern in der transzendenten Realität herrscht, scheint also zumindest im Falle der Negation eine gute Berechtigung zu haben.22 22
Die Auffassung der Negation als etwas in diesem Sinn „rein Konzeptuelles“ finden wir in einer sehr deutlichen Form bei Roman Ingarden. Vgl. dazu Chrudzimski 2010 and Chrudzimski 2012.
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References Aristoteles 1980. Metaphysik, Griechisch-Deutsch, Bd. I/II, Hamburg: Meiner. Bocheński, Józef Maria 1970. Formale Logik, Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber. Bolzano, Bernard 1837. Wissenschaftslehre, Bd. I–IV, Sulzbach. Brentano, Franz 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles, Freiburg i. Br.: Herder. –– 1867. Die Psychologie von Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom nous poietikos, Kirchheim Verlag: Mainz am Rhein. –– 1874/2008. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, in: T. Binder / A. Chrudzimski, (eds.), Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, Bd. I), Frankfurt a.M.: Ontos-Verlag 2008, S. 1–289. –– 1911/2008. “Anhang zur ‘Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene’”, in: T. Binder / A. Chrudzimski, (eds.), Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, Bd. I), Frankfurt a.M.: Ontos-Verlag 2008, S. 391–426. –– 1930. Wahrheit und Evidenz, hrsg. von O. Kraus, Hamburg: Meiner. –– 1982. Deskriptive Psychologie, hrsg. von R. M. Chisholm und W. Baumgartner, Hamburg: Meiner. –– [EL 80]. Logik. Das Manuskript der Logik-Vorlesung. –– [M 96]. Manuskript der Vorlesungen zur Metaphysik, die Brentano seit 1867 in Würzburg gehalten hat. Cesalli, Laurent 2007. Le réalisme propositionnel. Sémantique et onologie des propositions chez Duns Scot, Gauthier Burley, Richerd Brinkley et Jean Wyclif, Paris: J. Vrin. –– 2012. “States of Affairs”, in: John Marenbon (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 421–443. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz 2001. Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. –– 2004. Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. –– 2007. Gegenstandstheorie und Theorie der Intentionalität bei Alexius Meinong, Dordrecht: Springer. –– 2010. “Composed objects, internal relations, and purely intentional negativity. Ingarden’s theory of states of affairs”, Polish Journal of Philosophy 4 (2010), No. 2 (Fall), 63-80. –– 2012. “Negative States of Affairs: Reinach versus Ingarden”, Symposium. The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 16 (2012), No. 2 (Fall), 106-127. –– 2013. “Gestalt, Equivalency, and Functional Dependency. Kurt Grelling’s Formal Ontology”, in: Nikolay Milkov / Volker Peckhaus (Eds.), The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism, Dordrecht: Springer 2013, 245261. –– [2014]. “Marty on Truthmaking”, in: L. Cesalli / J. Friedrich (Eds.), Anton Marty, Karl Bühler – Philosophers of Language, Bern: Schwabe, 201-234. Fisette, Denis 2009. “Stumpf and Husserl on Phenomenology and Descriptive Psychology”, Gestalt Theory 31 (2009), No 2, 175–190. Frege, Gottlob 1892. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100, 25–50; in: Frege 1967, 146–162.
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–– 1918/19. “Der Gedanke”, Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1, 58–77; auch in: Frege 1967, 342–362; zitiert nach der ersten Auflage. –– 1923. “Logische Untersuchungen. Dritter Teil: Gedankengefüge“, Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, 3 (1923–26), Heft 1 (1923), 36–51; auch in: Frege 1967; zitiert nach der ersten Auflage. –– 1967. Kleine Schriften, ed. J. Angelelli, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1967. Fréchette, Guillaume 2011. “Contenu et objet du jugement chez Brentano”, Philosophiques, 38 (2011), No. 1 (printemps), 241-261. –– 2013. “Austrian Logical Realism? Brentano on States of Affairs”, in: G. Bonino, J. Cumpa, G. Jesson (eds.), Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Investigations, Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag 2013. Hillebrand, Franz 1891. Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen Schlüsse, Wien: Hölder. Johansson, Ingvar 1990. “Marty on Grounded Relations”, in: Mulligan 1990, S. 151– 156. Marty, Anton 1895. “Über subjectlose Sätze und das Verhältnis der Grammatik zu Logik und Psychologie“ VI–VII, Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 19 (1895), 19–87, 263–334. –– 1908. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, Halle: Niemeyer. Meinong, Alexius 1882. “Hume Studien II: Zur Relationstheorie”, in: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. II, 1–183. –– 1892. “Rezension von: Franz Hillebrand, Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen Schlüsse”, in: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. VII, 197–222. –– 1902. Über Annahmen, 1. Auflage, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth [teilweise wiederabgedruckt in: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. IV, 385–489]. –– 1910. Über Annahmen, 2. Aufl. (Gesamtausgabe, Bd. IV). –– 1915. Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (Gesamtausgabe, Bd. VI). –– 1969–78. Gesamtausgabe, hrsg. von R. Haller et al., Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt. Mulligan, Kevin (ed.) 1990. Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics. The Philosophy and Theory of Language of Anton Marty, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Rollinger, Robin 2009. “Brentano’s Logic and Marty’s Early Philosophy of Language”, Brentano Studien 12 (2006/09), 77–98. Russell, Bertrand 1910. “Some Explanations in Reply to Mr Bradley”, Mind N.S, 19 (1910). Rojszczak, Artur/Smith, Barry 2001. “Urteilstheorien und Sachverhalte”, in: O. Neumaier (ed.), Satz und Sachverhalt, Sankt Augustin: Akademia Verlag, 9–72. Stumpf, Carl 1873. Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: Hirzel. –– 1883. Tonpsychologie, Bd. I, Leipzig: Hirzel. –– 1890. Tonpsychologie, Bd. II, Leipzig: Hirzel. –– 1907. “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen”, Abhandlungen der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Bd. IV, 1–39.
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Twardowski, Kazimierz. 1894. Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, Wien: Hölder. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1969. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, in: Schriften, Bd. I, Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp.
STUMPF ON CATEGORIES RICCARDO MARTINELLI (UNIVERSITY OF TRIESTE)
Abstract. Stumpf’s doctrine of the categories is of great importance for our understanding of his philosophy. This theme had been widely discussed among German thinkers after Kant; Brentano himself had repeatedly dealt with it since his early works. However, Stumpf considerably diverges from Brentano on this crucial philosophical topic. Although a systematic discussion can be found only in Stumpf’s posthumous Erkenntnislehre, his core ideas on the categories can be traced to his early work on space of 1873. In fact, Stumpf claims that the peculiar relationship between extension and color is analogous to the relationship that holds between substance and accidents. Thus, like any other category, substance empirically stems from perception. Sensory experience, for Stumpf, is made up of perceptual wholes, whose attributes are typically bound to each other, rather than separately given in bundles, as Hume and other associationists used to assume. Thus, the achievements of Stumpf’s (and others’) holist psychology effectively contributes a solution to this classic metaphysical problem.
1 The Categories in Stumpf’s Philosophy Stumpf deals with the problem of categories in the first volume of the Erkenntnislehre, posthumously published in 1939. Yet, his doctrine does not represent a late philosophical achievement. Rather, Stumpf had been concerned with a crucial problem concerning categories long since. As he notes in his Autobiography of 1924: I attempted to sketch a critical history of the concept of substance, over which I racked my brain most awfully until I abandoned the problem, and, during Easter of 1872, I took up the psychological theme of the origin of the concept of space. (Stumpf 1930, 395-396, transl. revised)
Although these words may suggest a gap between the two topics, a closer look at the question reveals a different picture. Stumpf notes:
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“in the relation between color and extension I believed, and still believe, to find a striking example or analogue of the relation which metaphysics assumes to exist among the qualities of a substance. Thus the new problem was connected with my old work”. (Stumpf 1924, 396) Later on, in the Erkenntnislehre he still insists that the two questions are intimately related to each other by a common “fundamental idea” (Grundgedanke). The “inseparable link” of extension and color is a qualified instance of the part-whole relation that links together substance and its attributes. (Stumpf 1939, 24) and accounts for many other categories too. This persistent Grundgedanke, ranging from the beginning to the end of Stumpf’s philosophical work, also affects many of its intermediary stages. As we shall see, one can identify it within many of Stumpf’s works: in his habilitation thesis on the foundations of mathematics (Stumpf 1870), in his first book on the origin of the idea of space (Stumpf 1873a), in the two published volumes of the Tonpsychologie (1883 and 1890), in his criticism of Kant and of NeoKantian philosophers (Stumpf 1891), in his ideas on the classification of sciences and of psychic functions (Stumpf 1906a and 1906b), on the relation of body and soul (Stumpf 1896), on perception and its attributes (Stumpf 1917, 1918) and, finally, in his studies on Spinoza. (Stumpf 1919b) In sum, Stumpf’s theory of the categories epitomizes his entire work, showing – against any misunderstanding – its common sources, aims and the intimate coherence of his psychological and philosophical writings. Accordingly, any attempt to understand and interpret Stumpf’s thought should take the problem of categories into account. All the more so, since this theme is tremendously helpful in determining Stumpf’s place among the philosophers of his time. Actually, a wideranging discussion concerning the Kategorienlehre had taken place in German philosophy during the whole nineteenth and the early twentieth century. (see e.g. Baumgartner, Gerhardt, Konhardt and Schörich 1976; Ferrari 2003) After an early phase dominated by the discussion of Kant’s doctrine, the debate had been animated by the renaissance of Aristotelianism. One of its most preeminent supporters was Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, among whose pupils was Stumpf’s teacher Franz Brentano, who dedicated to Trendelenburg his early work Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. However, Brentano was far from simply duplicating his teacher’s doctrine,
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and did not share Trendelenburg’s insistence on “movement” as the hidden basis of the categorial process. (Trendelenburg 1846, p. 366 ff.) Rather, Brentano stressed the preeminence of the meaning of Being “according to the figures of the categories” and insisted particularly on the category of substance (Brentano 1862, 72 ff.) With this step, Brentano laid the foundation for his own original approach to philosophy. (see Antonelli 2001; Jacquette 2011) It is within this context that Stumpf’s ideas about the categories should be situated and interpreted. Given the importance of Brentano for Stumpf’s thought, one could reasonably expect him to adopt, or at least to re-elaborate in some way, Brentano’s views on this crucial question. But even a very superficial glance at the Erkenntnislehre reveals an enormous distance from Brentano. True, Stumpf shares Brentano’s (and Trendelenburg’s) opposition to Kant’s apriorism and his inclinations towards Aristotelianism. Yet, as we shall see, they have little else in common. As far as substance is concerned, Stumpf explicitly maintains his independence and claims a closer adherence to Aristotle: “we can subscribe to the results neither of the early, nor of the late Brentano; rather, we adhere to the old Aristotle”. (Stumpf 1939, 79) Moreover, Stumpf relies upon many other sources: Hume is most frequently quoted, yet many other classics like Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz and Berkeley are discussed in the Erkenntnislehre, together with more contemporary thinkers of the day like Herbart, Lotze and Beneke. The result is an original approach to categories. Stumpf adopts a “psychological” method in dealing with the problem of categories. No special mention of Brentano’s approach to psychology is made here by Stumpf, who rather considers the British empiricists – most notably, Locke and Hume – as forerunners of the psychological approach to categories. (Stumpf 1939, 10) Yet, Stumpf claims, the developments of modern psychology make Hume’s skepticism untenable. When compared with the old associationism of empiricism, psychological holism as developed by Stumpf (i.e. with much less radicalism than the Gestaltists) provides new solutions to the problem of categories. This step consciously brings Stumpf back to Aristotle, making Kant’s apriorism pointless and Brentano’s strong ontological commitment unnecessary. In this sense, Stumpf can legitimately assert that the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) “comes back to itself via psychology”. (Stumpf 1939, 24)
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In his 1891 essay Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie Stumpf had already stated: The ultimate task of this psychological work (although not exclusively performed by psychologists) would be a genetic analysis of the most elementary relational concepts. It would considerably differ from the table of the categories obtained by the “critical” way. Particularly, one should take into account the manifold relations occurring between the parts of a whole. In fact, we speak of “parts” in many different senses. But we are still rather far from this goal. (Stumpf 1891, 491)
Later on, in the Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf came much closer to fulfilling this purpose. However, as we have seen, the book was published posthumously and under historically unfavorable circumstances in 1939-1940. This might explain the limited posterity of his ideas: Stumpf’s doctrine of the categories failed to stimulate reactions, reviews and discussions. As to the reasons for this delay in publishing his philosophical theories, Stumpf wrote: Although I fully appreciate the Aristotle’s saying that theory is the sweetest of all, I must confess that it was always a joy and a comfort to move from theory to observation, from meditation to facts, from my writing-desk to the laboratory; and, thus, in the end, my writing-desk was neglected and has not produced a single textbook or compendium, which indeed ought to have been its first duty, even at the time when I was an instructor. However, I never intended to spend so much of my lifetime on acoustics and musical psychological studies as I did later on. I had counted on a few years. But it was, after all, not musical science but philosophy that always remained the mistress of the house, who, it is true, granted most generously great privileges to her helpmate. (Stumpf 1930, 397, transl. revised)
This self-confessed negligence – later redeemed by the Erkenntnislehre – cannot be seen as the result of a desertion of philosophy in favor of experimental psychology. (see also Stumpf 1890, V f.) In Stumpf’s eyes, this very alternative would sound meaningless and illposed. Stumpf permanently considered metaphysics as an afterscience (Nachwissenschaft, Stumpf 1906a, 42) profiting from the many progresses of all sciences, including psychology. Stumpf’s development of a theory of categories in the Erkenntnislehre puts these permanent claims of his into effect.
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In what follows I shall first (§ 2) discuss Stumpf’s definition of the categories and his methodology. Secondly (§ 3), I shall illustrate his analysis of the categories, and attempt a general interpretation. Finally, (§ 4) I shall compare his views with Brentano’s doctrine. 2 Defining Categories Stumpf defines categories, i.e. the “fundamental concepts” (Grundbegriffe), as follows: “very general concepts, constantly used in all sciences and in common thinking, regardless of the particular matter”. (Stumpf 1939, 10) These concepts occur both in the natural sciences and in the Geisteswissenschaften, no less than in non-scientific, everyday thinking. After all, Stumpf believes that Aristotle’s theory of categories “put for the first time […] natural thinking into a scientific form”. (Stumpf 1939, 16) In the Erkenntnislehre (and elsewhere) Stumpf insists on the fundamental difference between concepts and knowledge: concepts are a certain kind of mental presentations (Vorstellungen); knowledge consists of judgments (Urteile) that link concepts together. Accordingly, Stumpf separates the question of the origin of categories from that of the origin of knowledge. The former, Stumpf claims, is a psychological issue; the latter is an epistemological (erkenntnistheoretisch) one. (Stumpf 1939, 6-7; Stumpf 1891, 470471) The whole structure of the Erkenntnislehre corresponds to this distinction. The first part of the book deals with the origin of concepts, and especially of categories. The second and largest part is devoted to the problem of the origin of knowledge1. On the same basis, Stumpf also introduces a classification regarding his own thought. Philosophers, he notes, are commonly considered “rationalists” or “empiricists” according to the particular weight they assign either to rational or to experiential knowledge. Yet rationalism in this sense, i.e. regarding the origin of knowledge, does not necessarily imply a denial of the empirical origin of concepts. Locke, for instance, was an empiricist as to the origin of concepts, but not as to the origin of knowledge. (Stumpf 1939, 5-6) In the Erkenntnislehre Stumpf provides several proofs of his strong propensity towards this position. As far as the origin of concepts – including categories – is concerned, he is rigorously an empiricist. The interesting views ex1
See § 1: Die Grundbegriffe (Kategorien) (Stumpf 1939, 1-123); § 2.: Wege des Erkennens (Stumpf 1939, 124 ff. and Stumpf 1940). Only the first section will be systematically considered in what follows.
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pressed in his 1919 essay Empfindung und Vorstellung also bear witness to this attitude. (Stumpf 1918; see Martinelli 2003) Nevertheless, “against any extreme empiricism” Stumpf affirms that knowledge implies “a priori foundations”. (Stumpf 1940, 855) In this sense, then, he is no empiricist. Every concept is taken from perception, yet there can be “a priori knowledge, whose determination does not require further experiences”. (Stumpf 1939, 126)2 Psychology, Stumpf claims, has no right in determining the nature of concepts: only the problem of their origin is to be a concern of psychology. However, the two problems of the “meaning” and of the “origin” converge in the case of elementary concepts. “When we show […] the origin of a concept in us, arising from our perceptions, we illustrate at the same time its original meaning”. (Stumpf 1939, p. 9) How else could one explain what is “red” to someone who can see perfectly but (for some reason) is unable to grasp the chromatic similarity of a red rose and a red apple? Whenever the origin of a concept can be shown in this way, Stumpf suggests, this ought to be done. And, despite any sceptic objection, this can be done for all of the categories. Stumpf’s central claim is that all of the categories stem from perception (Wahrnehmung). This holds, at least in a negative form, that perception offers the “unavoidable basis and the material” for the construction of categories. (Stumpf 1939, p. 9) Anyone would concede that concepts like “red” or “color” (no less than “space” for Stumpf) have something to do with visual experience. Yet, as far as categories are concerned, philosophers debate harshly. Sketching the general outlines of the problem, Stumpf notes that Kant’s views contrast with the claims of the “psychologists”, who indicate perception as the “original site” of categories (also Stumpf 1891, pp. 467-468) Kant’s opponents may speak of “impressions” (Hume), or of “Erlebnisse” (Dilthey), or finally – in a rather Goethean vein – of primal phenomena (Urphänomene). In any case, they share the aim of “resuming the enterprise of the English School” against Kant, who cut the Gordian knot instead of solving the problem. (Stumpf 1939, p. 11) Stumpf repeatedly insists on the inconsistency of Kant’s solution as a whole. Unless 2
An analysis of these “a priori foundations” cannot be given in this essay. A third meaning was introduced by Helmholtz, who spoke of empiricism vs. nativism as to the origin of the idea of space. Yet Stumpf explicitly rejects this distinction. (Stumpf 1873b, 363; see also 1873a, 7)
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one has proven that there is a common source for all the categories, the correct methodology is that of investigating each of them separately. It was especially Hume who gave a luminous example of the application of this psychological method to a radical critique of the traditional categories. Nevertheless, in Stumpf’s eyes, Hume failed too, because he did not consider the possibility of a successful derivation of many categories from perception (not generally “experience”), and especially from inner perception. Stumpf’s step beyond Hume is made possible by a different and more qualified concept of perception (Wahrnehmung). Stumpf defines “perception” quite precisely: perceiving means “noticing something” (das “Bemerken von etwas”). (Stumpf 1939, 11)3 For instance, hearing a chord without distinguishing within it the individual notes means perceiving the chord; in contrast, the single notes are “heard, but not perceived”. Given this definition, Stumpf maintains that one should consider on the one side, the dichotomy of outer perception (or senseperception) and inner perception; on the other, that of absolute and relative contents. The former distinction is taken from Brentano. Nevertheless, there is a striking difference: Stumpf does not allow for any special epistemic gap between inner and outer perception. Whereas Brentano insisted over and over again that the “so-called” outer perception is totally deprived of the special evidence of the innere Wahrnehmung (e.g. Brentano 1874, 119), Stumpf considers both forms as equally valid – and, under some circumstances, equally suspect – sources of knowledge. (Stumpf 1883, 22, Stumpf 1939, 217) After all, and surely not by chance, Stumpf does not even mention Brentano in this context; rather, he refers to Locke’s “reflection” (Locke 1975, 105) Secondly, Stumpf’s concept of perception is characterized by the inclusion of relations (Verhältnisse). Perceiving is something different than registering collections of isolate or “absolute” contents. Given that perceiving is tantamount to “noticing” (bemerken), nothing prevents us from including relations among the “noted” things. Stumpf remarks: “we neither produce these relations, nor do we lay them onto the given sense-material; rather, we can only perceive them within it”. (Stumpf 1939, 12) The above illustrated theory of perception, Stumpf believes, offers “the key” to solving the problem of categories. (Stumpf 1939, 13) 3
See also Stumpf 1883, 96 and 106 ff.; Stumpf 1906b, 16 regarding the development of this notion within Stumpf’s thought.
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Stumpf can now specify his central claim: categories originate in the first place in inner perception (although not exclusively, given some significant exceptions) and in the perception of relations. 3 Analyzing Categories In the Erkenntnislehre Stumpf discusses the following categories: “thing (substance), cause, necessity (legality), truth, reality, equality, number”. (Stumpf 1939, 13) This is, however, neither an ordered “table” of categories, nor even a complete list. Stumpf simply speaks of “seven of the most important fundamental concepts”. Moreover, he eventually adds additional categories, as we shall see in § 3.5. Finally, Stumpf warns that the above listed terms are no more than empty words, unless one has determined the “meaning that one can assign them in scientific usage” and shown “whether these meanings can be explained by a reference to some specific perception”. 3.1 Substance Stumpf first deals with substance (Substanz), a concept which he identifies with “thing” (Ding)4. Any substance, for Stumpf, has three main features: 1) it accounts for the unity of a plurality of properties, 2) it persists in the course of their changes, and 3) it is the basis on which properties are based. (Stumpf 1939, 19) By contrast, Stumpf considers that it is unnecessary to ascribe “simplicity”, another traditional attribute, to substances. In a brief sketch of the history of this category, Stumpf notes that Aristotle’s definition of substance remained almost unaltered until Locke, who still allowed for it but thought of it as unknowable. After him, Hume claimed that this concept is always illusory and deceptive: things (substances) are mere “bundles” of properties. As it is well known, Hume’s criticism prompted Kant to consider substance as a category in the sense of a “form of thought” (Denkform). However, Stumpf notes that Hume’s and Kant’s contrasting views share the common assumption that perception offers no evidence of the origin of this category. (Stumpf 1939, 18) The two philosophers draw their opposite conclusions from this allegedly undisputed fact. By contrast, Stumpf claims that we do find within perception all the necessary elements to form the idea of substance: 4
For an introductory discussion on substance and thing (independent of Stumpf) see Robinson 2009.
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there are appearances within perception, whence the first character of the concept of substance can be obtained. Such appearances do not intuitively and concretely exhibit a mere bundle of properties, but rather a unitary whole [Ganzes]. (Stumpf 1939, 22)
The experience of perceptual wholes provides us with the idea of a “togetherness” of properties, i.e. with the first of the above listed characters of substance, namely that “substance accounts for the unity of the plurality of properties”. Sense-perception offers several instances of whole-part relations. In each instance of reciprocal inherence of the “attributes” of perception (color and extension, pitch and intensity, etc.), one experiences a perceptual whole. The relation of a perceptual whole is thus transferred to many other “whole groups of properties, which we are able to connect by virtue of this concept”. (Stumpf 1939, 26) This “transfer” (Übertragung) means that we do not always perceive substance – or any other category – within appearances. Nor anything of this kind is necessary. Once a certain concept is acquired through experience, it can be applied to all further experiences. (Stumpf 1891, 489) With this, the first of the three features of the concept of substance (see above) originates from perception. The same, Stumpf shows, is valid for the other two. (Stumpf 1939, 31-39) Stumpf’s theory of perception, characterized by the idea of “perceptual whole”, deploys here its considerable philosophical implications. It is not possible to identify his theory with that of Gestalt psychologists. We should not be misled by Stumpf’s anti-associationist commitment and his liberal, non-dogmatic attitude as a teacher. (see Ash 1995; 2001) Rather, one of the most typical features of Stumpf’s theory is the idea of the “attributes” (Attribute) of sense-perception. Color and extension, for instance, are attributes of visual perception. For Stumpf, these two attributes are inseparably linked together in any visual occurrence. Stumpf had maintained this fundamental principle since his Raumbuch, where he used to speak of “psychological parts”. (Stumpf 1873a, 106, 109) In the analysis of substance in the Erkenntnislehre he simply draws more general conclusions from the same argument. The “attributes” – extension and color – are now considered as an instance, among others, of the relation linking any substance to its properties. In the same way, pitch and intensity are interlaced in any perceived tone. One would be totally mistaken, Stumpf explains, to think of these features as the outcome of habit, as if we
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originally perceived extensionless colors (or colorless extension) and pitchless tonal intensities (or non-intensive pitches). “It is simply false – Stumpf maintains – that our senses always provide us with “scattered members”, i.e. mere bunches of impressions without any order and connection». (Stumpf 1939, 23) Remarkably, inner perception can also serve as a source for the concept of substance. (Stumpf 1939, 24) The unity of consciousness, or one’s “character” as compared with one’s single actions, may illustrate this claim. One of the most remarkable consequences of Stumpf’s argument is that substance does not lie “behind” or “beyond” appearances. (Stumpf 1939, 40) Substance lies within appearances. Substances, i.e. things, are nothing else or “more” than wholes of properties. Thus, Hume was right and wrong at the same time: a substance or thing “actually consists only of its properties (including known and unknown forces and dispositions), yet they form not a bundle, but rather a whole”. (Stumpf 1939, 28) Stumpf discussed many other related questions. No privileged “substantiality” can be allowed to those groups of appearances that one usually calls “soul” and “body”. (Stumpf 1939, 29) Rather, modern developments in the “philosophical analysis” of substance and causality are among the factors that make a new solution to this problem possible. (Stumpf 1896, 92) Furthermore, Stumpf’s definition accounts for the scientific use of the term “substance”, e.g. in chemistry. (Stumpf 1939, 14, 36) In sum, substance is an “experiential concept” that we abstract from the “appearances” given in sense-perception and from inner reflection upon our “psychical functions”. Both of these sources offer abundant material to form the concept of a whole-part relation, which is then transferred and generalized so that we can conceive of a thing or substance as a “whole of properties”. 3.2 Causality, Necessity, Possibility As to causality (Kausalität), Stumpf initially concedes something more to Hume: “here, of course, sense-perception should be discarded”. (Stumpf 1939, 42)5 Nevertheless, he believes, inner perception compensates for this loss, as it was already noted by many German and French thinkers until Beneke6, William James and Brentano. 5
On Stumpf’s treatment of causality see Rollinger 2001. See Beneke’s Metaphysics (Beneke 1840, 284), a book considered by Stumpf to be “excellent in many respects”. Stumpf also approves of his definition of reality 6
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Stumpf’s argument runs as follows: within inner perception we perceive ourselves as active beings: this activity, together with its outcomes, forms a whole. Stumpf’s example is the activity of reading a text. The reader pays attention to what he reads. Now, Stumpf argues, the reader’s activity, i.e. his attention, is not detached from the read and understood words (or images, or concepts). Stumpf concludes that “deliberate attention does not simply precede, but rather endures during all the process and forms together with its results a unitary whole”. (Stumpf 1939, 43) Attention and the understood concepts can be compared with a machine and its products. But there is a considerable difference, since we are conscious of our producing activity and of its connection to its results. Cause and effect form a whole. Consequently, one actually finds within inner perception a basic instance of the relation of cause and effect. Given that the notion of a perceptual whole plays a pivotal role in both cases, the concepts of causality and substance partially coincide. Nevertheless, causality differs from substance, because it arises from the impression of an “oriented” wholeness. The entire process of reading a text is informed by attention and volition, and not vice versa. In this sense, Stumpf speaks of “unilateral conditionality” (einseitige Bedingtheit) or “being-caused” (Verursachtsein). The properties and states, whose whole we have called a substance, condition one another reciprocally. By contrast, the kind of conditionality that defines the essential character of the concept of causality is one-sided. (Stumpf 1939, 44)
The concept of causality is then transferred to physical phenomena and applied to natural sciences. Within scientific contexts, causality is often defined as the regular and necessary consequence of a consequent from an antecedent. Causal “dependence” (Bedingtheit) is thereby analyzed into its two components: temporal sequentiality and regularity, i.e. necessity. For Stumpf, however, temporal consequentiality is no indispensable requisite: mental attention and what results in the act of reading (i.e. understanding the text) are not temporally separated. Rather, attention must (Stumpf 1906b, p. 10) Moreover, Beneke’s treatment of substance (Beneke 1840, 171) and his attitude towards Hume (271-272; 286) resemble Stumpf’s ideas on the matter.
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persist throughout the process in order to achieve its effect. Likewise, Stumpf regards the necessary connection of cause and effect as supplementary: strictly speaking, causality does not imply necessity. Necessity (Notwendigkeit), rather, must be considered as another category, mainly independent of causality. Once more, a comparison with Hume serves as a good introduction to the discussion. For Hume, the idea of a necessary relation has no solid foundation: no correspondent impression can be shown to account for it7. One experiences a necessary connection only whenever relations of ideas are concerned. Stumpf claims, by contrast, that this occurs in the case of sensory perception, too. Given three tones, for instance, one of them is necessarily intermediate (with respect to the pitch) between the other two. (Stumpf 1939, 48) The category of necessity originates in this way, i.e. from the reflection upon some events within our minds. Both mathematical truths and sensory occurrences of the aforementioned type can offer material for such reflections. Once the concept is made available, Stumpf maintains that we apply it hypothetically to natural events. (Stumpf 1939, 50) And rightly so. Although outer perception offers no instances of a necessary relation, we take it from inner perception and think of nature as if we were able to grasp fully and adequately the necessity of its laws, thus attaining the real essence of natural things. The next term on Stumpf’s list, possibility (Möglichkeit), can be easily defined. Possible is anything that is not contrary to any necessary law. Accordingly, this category is twofold: logically possible is anything that does not contradict a logical law, physically possible is anything that does not contradict a physical law. Interestingly, Stumpf discusses some secondary forms of possibility, including the Aristotelian notion of “disposition” (hexis) and the Kantian concept of “problematic judgment”. (Stumpf 1939, 55-57) Besides this, this section can be seen as an appendix of the previous one. 3.3 Truth and Reality The most unusual of Stumpf’s categories is truth (Wahrheit). Strictly speaking, Stumpf admits that truth is a property of judgments. On the basis of the distinction between the origin of categories (concepts) and the origin of knowledge (judgments), truth should not be considered at 7
“We have sought in vain for an idea of power or necessary connexion, in all the sources from which we could suppose it to be derived” (Hume 1748, VII.2, 61)
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this stage. Yet, Stumpf suggests the following three aspects to be taken into account: 1) the meaning of the concept of truth; 2) the way truths are acquired, and 3) the enumeration of some reliable truths. (Stumpf 1939, p. 57) The first of these issues, then, can be legitimately considered at this stage. Stumpf criticizes the classical definition of truth as the correspondence of an idea with reality. Rather, truth should be defined in terms of correspondence of the “quality” (affirmation/negation) with the “matter” (the “complex of presentations”: Vorstellungskomplex) of a judgment. (Stumpf 1939, p. 61) Stumpf introduces here the concept of “evidence” (Evidenz) or “insight” (Einsichtigkeit). Formally speaking, evidence is not identical with truth: a “blind” judgment can be true by chance. Nevertheless, evidence represents the proper basis of truth. (Stumpf 1939, 62) Finally, Stumpf makes a wide and interesting comparison between his own definition of truth and the ones given by nominalism, conventionalism and pragmatism. (Stumpf 1939, 67-75) Dealing with the category of truth, Stumpf omits to exhibit its origin within perception. One could expect him to defend the view that the concept of truth originates from the inner perception of evidence, but this is not explicitly stated. In the following chapter Stumpf considers the category of reality (Wirklichkeit, Realität) together with that of being, or existence (Existenz). For Stumpf, reality is essentially distinguished by a capability of acting, as expressed by the renowned German motto “wirklich ist, was wirkt” (real is what works). (Stumpf 1939, 75) This classical definition of reality offers many advantages over any other. First and most remarkably, the category of reality is kept distinct from that of substance. The concept of substance is not identical with that of “reality”, but merely “equipollent” with it. The capacity to act is a character of all substances; yet, the concept of substance is not exhausted by this (or any other) definition of what is real. (Stumpf 1939, 15)8 In fact, a substance (thing) can be a mere object of thought, such as for instance a fairy princess with her enchanted manor. But only real things properly act. In a derivative sense, we can say that the fairy princess acts too: for instance, she breaks a curse and marries a prince. Yet this is a derivative use. The reality in this respect is always the “thinking individual”, i.e. it is he or she who thinks of the acting fairy princess. Moreover, Stumpf argues, 8
This distinction becomes more intelligible in light of Stumpf’s polemic against Brentano: see below, § 4.
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our definition is in agreement with the fact that, among all things that can be considered and described as real, the psychical life of the thinking individual legitimately reclaims pride of place, as far as knowledge of reality is concerned. (Stumpf 1939, 76)
Like the previous main categories, reality too has to do with the idea of wholeness. In a previous essay, Stumpf had established that the ultimate source of our concept of reality is “the whole of what is immediately given”. (Stumpf 1906b, 10) The argument is borrowed from Beneke: yet Stumpf does not share Beneke’s conclusion that reality coincides accordingly with psychical nature. Rather, we are presented with some immediate data of this kind in both inner and outer perception. None is more distinctively related to reality than the other. Thus, it is on the basis of both appearances and psychical functions that we form the notion of reality, which is later generalized and transferred to other domains. 3.4 Equality and Number The last two categories considered by Stumpf are equality and number. The section on equality (Gleichheit) is one of the most difficult of all. Stumpf’s argument works somehow recursively: the experience serving as a basis for the construction of this concept is – at its core – that of the construction of concepts in general, i.e. abstraction or generalization. (see Stumpf 1902) In other words, one attains the category of equality (in its most general form) by reflecting upon the process of abstraction that occurs within inner perception, by means of which concepts are obtained. According to this recursiveness, Stumpf introduces a lexical distinction: instead of “inner perception” (innere Wahrnehmung), one should speak in this case of the “innermost perception” (innerste Wahrnehmung). (Stumpf 1939, 93) As Stumpf had noted sixty years earlier in Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik (Stumpf 1870, 20.2), equality cannot be considered in general. Rather, one should always raise the question: equal in respect to what? Accordingly, equality should not be understood in a preeminent sense as mathematical equality, i.e. as equality in respect to magnitude. Many instances of equality also occur within sense-perception, where the concept can be defined as the highest degree of similarity. Furthermore, two different states of mind – say, two feelings like my present and past rage – are “equal” insofar as they are instances of
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rage despite any differences. It is then appropriate, Stumpf claims, “to conceive of the concept of equality in its most general meaning and to search for its source within perception”. (Stumpf 1939, 84) Stumpf’s general definition of this category rests on the presence of an identical class to which the supposedly equal things belong. This experience is gained through reflection upon one’s “innermost perception”, in the above illustrated sense. The most appropriate definition of equality is then “identity with respect to the species” (Identität der Art nach). (Stumpf 1939, 86; see already Stumpf 1870, p. 20.1) According to Stumpf, this definition comprises mathematical equality, sensory equality, and any other instance. Stumpf stresses the condition upon which “equal objects fall under an identical (identisch) class-concept, and not under the same (gleich) class-concept”. (Stumpf 1939, 88) When two subjects think of the number two, or I myself think of it on different occasions, there are just as many different acts of thought (Denkakte) and just as many different objects – or “formations” (Denkgebilde) – of thought. This multiplicity corresponds to the psychological aspect of the word “concept”. Nevertheless, there is “only one single and always identical concept in the sense of a ‘meaning’ (Bedeutung) or of something ‘conceived’ (des Gedachten)”. (Stumpf 1939, 88) This double-sidedness is quite typical: concepts are subjective and objective entities at once. Objectiveness, however, does not mean that concepts dwell somewhere “outside any thinking subject and independently of him”; rather, concepts are “outside the single thinking subject and independent of his present act of thought”. As soon as we enter the realm of concepts, we enter another world, an ‘allo genos’ in fullest sense, so that a new counting begins. That, which is psychologically a multiplicity, becomes here a unity, unitary in its species (monoeides), and, so to speak, an individual. (Stumpf 1939, 88-89)
With this strong anti-ontological limitation, Stumpf can nonetheless maintain the ideality of concepts and appreciate the permanent value of Plato’s philosophy, the “true and highly significant core of the theory of ideas”, as recently underlined by Lotze and, after him, by Husserl. Yet concepts should never be hypostatized. His overt antiplatonism, in sum, does not prevent Stumpf from recognizing the ideality of mathematical entities.
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Finally, Stumpf discusses the concept of number (Zahl). He begins his exploration with a provocative question: where are Hume’s “impressions” in the case of number? In other terms: do we find within perception any trace of its origin? Stumpf’s answer is: it resides in the impression of multiplicity (Mehrheit) or set (Menge); furthermore in the impression of the relation of increase and decrement between sets. (Stumpf 1939, 98)9
Stumpf identifies the mathematical concept of set, at its core, with that of multiplicity. Now, the impression of multiplicity comes from senseperception. Outer perception plays here a crucial role: the sense of sight especially is involved in the process. Stumpf explains: Multiplicity belongs to the fundamental facts that we perceive with and within sense-contents. These facts are so to speak embedded in them as immanent features. It is not properly a relation between senseimpressions, since any relation, in turn, presupposes a multiplicity. For this reason, however, multiplicity is the general basis for any relation (die allgemeine Verhältnisgrundlage). Thus, from the point of view of the possibility and of the conditions of its perception, multiplicity can be put on the same level with the relations occurring among the sensible contents and, whenever no misunderstanding is to be feared, it can be considered a fundamental relation (Stumpf 1939, 98-99)
Stumpf had already dealt with this problem in the first volume of the Tonpsychologie. (Stumpf 1883, 96) Any relation between two given tones (e.g. similarity, or tonal fusion) is perceived “with and within” the sensory content. The same holds for multiplicity. Looking at the night sky we are compelled to assume a multiplicity of stars (provided that there is a certain set of primitive skills, common to men and animals)10. For this reason, Stumpf notes, Aristotle (and Locke) counted multiplicity among the “common sensibles”. Remarkably, it would be mistaken to believe that in order to perceive a multiplicity one needs to perceive each single element of it. This is rather exceptional in ordinary perceptual circumstances. What is actually required is a certain 9
See also Stumpf 1870, p. 19.2. Stumpf discusses Cantor’s definition of set (Cantor 1895, 481) Stumpf 1939, 107 ff. 10 Non-human animals can also compare multiplicities: see Stumpf 1939, 103.
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homology among the elements, i.e. some common properties linking them together. (Stumpf 1939, 100) The concept of multiplicity, however, is only the first step towards a definition of number. The above mentioned relations of increase and decrement are directly given in sense-perception, too. Once more, Stumpf’s Tonpsychologie offers an excellent example. We perceive differences in the intensities of sounds, and also differences of differences, e.g. between two musical crescendo. No preliminary fixation of a unity of measure is needed at this stage. (Stumpf 1939, 101) Finally, Stumpf introduces the concept of series (Reihe). A series is “an ordered multiplicity”: all of its elements, as far as a certain property is concerned, show a similar order. For instance, single notes haphazardly struck on a piano make up a series as to their temporal succession, but not as to their pitch. With this, Stumpf can proceed to define number. His preliminary definition is: a number is a certain member of the “series of sets, ordered according to their magnitude”. (Stumpf 1939, 108) Since any ordered multiplicity is in turn a series, this series is a “series of series (‘second-order’ series), ordered according to magnitude”. This second-level series may be called the series of numbers. Yet, this is not enough. Stumpf introduces a further condition: numeral series should be obtained through the addition of unities. (see Stumpf 1870, p. 19.2) Accordingly, numbers are defined as “multiplicities consisting of added unities” (sums), and their series, the series of numbers, is the series of sums. Stumpf recalls then his theses concerning equality (see above) and applies them to sets. Consequently, mathematical equality is defined as “conceptual identity under the respect of magnitude”. (Stumpf 1939, 114) Again, Stumpf warns against any hypostatization of numbers. Furthermore, he insists that each single number is a general concept, not an individual, that the concept of number does not imply any hint at the concept of time; finally, he addresses some question concerning non-natural numbers and infinite sets. (Stumpf 1939, 117 ff.) 3.5 Space, Time and additional Categories Stumpf considers incomplete any table of categories “that has consideration only for the needs and the sources of natural scientific research (naturwissenschaftlicher Forschung)”. (Stumpf 1939, 122) No less than natural sciences, both the Geisteswissenschaften and everyday
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thought reveal categories of their own. In all these cases, human thought makes use of a variety of fundamental concepts. Accordingly, in a chapter entitled “Other fundamental concepts”, Stumpf insists that the above illustrated discussion does not exhaust the list of categories. This claim has wide-ranging philosophical implications. Stumpf begins by adding remarks concerning the concepts of space and time. (Stumpf 1939, 121) As noted above, Stumpf believes that Kant was wrong in denying the perceptual (“intuitive”, in Kant’s terms) root of categories. Conversely, however, Kant was also wrong in considering space and time as (pure) intuitions.11 Rather, space and time are categories too, at least in Stumpf’s sense. As shown in Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, the mental presentation of space originates from perception. This presentation occasionally admits a high level of generality, so that it can be included among the categories. The same – perhaps with supplementary difficulties – holds for time. (see Stumpf 1891, 473 ff., 487) In addition, Stumpf lists the categories of variation, continuity, movement, limit, the infinitely small and the infinitely big. (Stumpf 1939, 121) However, he simply mentions them and indicates the need to provide a psychological account of their origin following his general principles. Furthermore, Stumpf claims that some other categories correspond to the most common grammatical forms. Any grammatical usage of connectives reveals elementary “relational concepts” (Verhältnisbegriffe). Connectives used in natural language, Stumpf argues, imply just as many forms of thought: the usual reduction to the few operators currently adopted in formal or mathematical logic (boolean operators) is insufficient from the point of view of a theory of categories. Concepts used in natural language may also include, for instance, such connectives as “partly… partly…; either… or...; neither… nor ...” etc. (Stumpf 1939, 122) Let us now recapitulate some of Stumpf’s central claims. Stumpf first considers seven categories: substance, causality, necessity, possibility, truth, reality, equality, number. Outer perception offers the basis for two of them, namely substance and number (as well as sensible equality); all the others are grounded in inner perception. However, substance has a twofold source: its origin can be traced also within inner perception. Necessity and possibility belong to a closely related 11
Stumpf was quite explicit on this point since his habilitation thesis (Stumpf 1870, p. 15.4)
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pair. Although truth, strictly speaking, is no category, it deserves attention as a frequently used concept. Number implies a duplicity: specifically with respect to the concept of number as such and each numeral: the former category is related to that of equality, the latter, to that of multiplicity. Thus, although multiplicity does not appear in the list, it could be considered as an autonomous category, once more grounded in outer perception. Equality, in turn, has a double aspect: sensible equality and rational equality. Causality is somehow related to necessity, yet – no less than reality – it claims independence. Both causality and reality have their basis in inner perception, under rigorous exclusion of outer perception. Nevertheless, causality and substance have much in common: they essentially consist in a reciprocal inherence, which is bidirectional in the case of substance and onesided in that of causality. At any rate, Stumpf’s list of categories should be understood as an open one: many other fundamental concepts occur within both sciences and natural language. In his Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf sets the fundamental lines and the “heuristic maxims” of a doctrine of categories. His basic principle is that one should make every effort to “reveal the ultimate foundations of simple concepts, including relational concepts, within outer or inner perception”. (Stumpf 1939, 123) Kant’s (and many others’) allowance for a priori “forms of thought” could be admitted only after having fully accomplished this task, and provided that some cases would still remain unexplained. But this condition is far from being fulfilled. Rather, psychological analysis reveals to be the most suitable methodology in dealing with all categories, all the more so in light of the remarkable progress in psychological methods and results that has occurred since Hume’s times. Stumpf concludes: Philosophy should get rid of the habit of appearing on the scene while claiming the need for a complete and self-contained system that can answer all questions. Its scientific character, rather, is proved just from the fact that philosophy always leaves open many more questions than those it provides answers for. (Stumpf 1939, 123)
4 Brentano and Stumpf on Categories Since his works on the several senses of being in Aristotle, Brentano had been deeply concerned with many of the above discussed themes. This fact calls for a comparative analysis of Stumpf’s and Brentano’s
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ideas. Two main issues can be distinguished: in the first place, the young Brentano subscribes to a realistic interpretation of the categories. (Brentano 1862, 80) Secondly, the principal articulation of being, for him, is that of substance and accident: this establishes a strong asymmetry between substance and all the remaining categories. (Brentano 1862, 148) What did Stumpf maintain concerning these two questions? Let us begin with the former matter. By the middle of the XIXth century, three main interpretations of the meaning of categories were available. Categories were understood as (1) forms of thought i.e., so to speak, empty slots (“loci”) ready to receive things; (2) concepts occurring in propositions, i.e. predicates; (3) characteristic articulations of being, i.e. ultimate genera. The first option clearly exemplifies Kant’s choice, while both Trendelenburg and Brentano openly reject it. Yet, whereas Trendelenburg favors the second option (Trendelenburg 1846, 20), Brentano definitely adopts the third one (Brentano, 1862, 80) Needless to say, Stumpf rejects Kant’s approach too. We are left, then, with the remaining two possibilities. Though Stumpf does not explicitly put things in this way, he is clearly far from any realistic interpretation in the above defined sense. Rather, he offers a moderate version of the second option. As we have seen, categories for Stumpf are essentially concepts, not genera of being. Although concepts are not “merely” grammatical entities, i.e. propositional predicates, Stumpf rigorously avoids any ontological commitment and rejects any hypostatization. As a consequence, he neither needs a fixed list of categories, nor considers substance as a special and pre-eminent category. Furthermore, Stumpf’s insistence on categories corresponding to the connectives of ordinary language also suggests a predicative approach to the whole question. However, Stumpf develops a strongly modified version of the predicative approach to the categories. As his many quotations reveal, Stumpf is much more receptive than Trendelenburg or Brentano (and most German philosophers of the time) to the methodology developed by Locke – whom he particularly admires –, Berkeley and Hume12. Accordingly, though it is undeniable that categories occur within predication, Stumpf urges to investigate the conditions that make this oc12
By contrast, Brentano accuses Hume of superficially over-simplifying philosophical problems (Brentano 1933, 141)
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currence psychologically possible and epistemologically (erkenntnistheoretisch) meaningful. As to the second point, Stumpf is likewise distant from Brentano in the definition of substance. Firstly, he criticizes Brentano’s identification of “thing” (or substance) with “reality” (Reales). As a result of this correspondence, Brentano identified substance with the “essence” (Wesen) and the “ultimate subject” that is contained in each accident as a part of it. (Stumpf 1939, 41) 13 By contrast, as we have seen, Stumpf identifies “substance” with “thing” (generally regardless of reality) and considers accidents to be contained within substances. In short, although Brentano and Stumpf share the idea that the relation of substance and accident has to do with part-whole relations, they interpret this fact quite in opposite ways: for Brentano, substance is a part; for Stumpf, substance is the whole. The criticism of Brentano’s “substantial parts” in the Erkenntnislehre is rather sharp. Though Stumpf generally allows for some unperceived (i.e. unnoticed, according to his definition) parts within experience14, he also clearly states that no abstraction of concepts can ever proceed from these parts. (Stumpf 1939, 41) Furthermore, Stumpf notes that Brentano in his late years embraces the hypothesis of a unique worldly substance (Weltsubstanz). (Stumpf, 1939, 17)15 Although Brentano avoids a direct identification of this unique substance with God, in Stumpf’s eyes this move makes his late philosophy somehow similar to a form of Spinozism. Actually, Brentano as a young man had already been concerned with this problem. In 1862 he explicitly agreed with Plotinus’ remark that the sensible and the intelligible substances cannot be assimilated: accordingly, Aristotle’s ten categories fail to individuate the most authentic sense of Being, i.e. the intelligible 16 . Brentano approvingly comments: “in any case, there can be no genus in which both God and the corporeal substances fall”. (Brentano 1862, 148) Brentano seems to oversee (perhaps deliberately) the potentially serious consequences of this dualism for his own ontology, where substance plays a pivotal role. Be it as it may, Stumpf subscribes neither to the first nor to the second Brentanian doctrines of substance. 13
See e.g. a text of 1914 in Brentano 1933, 11; also Kraus 1919, 53. Stumpf had been criticized by Wolfgang Köhler (1913) for this reason. 15 Stumpf quotes Kraus 1919, 55. See also a text of 1915 in Brentano 1933, 298-299. 16 Plotinus, Enn. VI, 1.1, 15-30 (Plotinus 1988, 15). 14
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All this said, Stumpf’s attitude towards Brentano should not be misunderstood. Unsurprisingly, in the Erkenntnislehre no less than elsewhere (e.g. Stumpf 1919a), Stumpf declares his intellectual debt towards him. After all, Brentano widely relied upon the testimony of inner perception in dealing with many categories, and credited Aristotle with the thesis that categories have an “empirical origin”. (Brentano 1933, 114) As a matter of fact, even though his views radically differ from those of his first teacher in philosophy, Stumpf takes from Brentano’s lessons some of the elements upon which he builds his own doctrine. Most notably, Stumpf declares that the “fundamental thought” (Grundgedanke) of the inseparable connection of color and extension, similar to that of substance and its properties, came to his mind after some “discussions” (Unterredungen) with Brentano, who insisted on the importance of Aristotle’s “common sensibles”. (Stumpf 1939, 24)17 However, as early as 1867, Stumpf had begun to develop a different view on Aristotle’s common sensibles and on the perception of space. (see Brentano 1989, 4, 6) Some conclusive remarks concern Stumpf’s attitude towards Spinoza, for whom substance consists of nothing else than “the totality of the essential attributes” (Gesamtheit der wesentlichen Attribute). (Stumpf 1939, 16; see Martinelli 2011) For this reason, as Stumpf had already noted in his Spinozastudien, he should be almost considered a forerunner of Hume. For Spinoza substance is not, as for earlier philosophers, something that pervades, affects and dominates the attributes, making up their unity and thereby forcing them to behave coherently, but only the totality [Gesamtheit] of the attributes. (Stumpf 1919b, 8)
Most notably, Stumpf notes that the two known attributes of thought and extension have nothing in common with each other. Stumpf’s insistence on this aspect, rather than on God as unique substance, curiously yet coherently makes Spinozism converge with his own dualistic view of the world. (Stumpf 1896, 91-92) This has remarkable consequences for Stumpf’s metaphysics as a whole. Since substance is not paired with being in a special manner, there is no need to think of the remaining categories as merely accidental. In other terms, Stumpf 17
The same thought, Stumpf notes, has a considerable weight in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and later in the Ideas.
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puts all categories, including substance, on the same ontological level: and this fact, in turn, finds its most remarkable expression in the idea that substance is nothing else than the whole of its attributes. In sum, Stumpf’s talk of the “attributes” of perception as the basis of his analysis of the categories is perfectly coherent with his interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics. References Antonelli, Mauro, 2001, Seiendes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano, Freiburg, Alber. Ash, Graham Mitchell, 1995, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890-1967. Holism and the Quest for Objectivity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. –– 2001, “Carl Stumpf und seine Schüler: von empirischer Philosophie zur Gestaltpsychologie”, Brentano-Studien, 9, 117-148. Baumgartner, Gerhardt, Konhardt and Schörich, 1976, “Kategorie” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, hrsg. von J. Ritter, Basel-Stuttgart, Schwabe, 1976 ff., vol. IV, cols. 714-776. Beneke, Friedrich Eduard, 1840, System der Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie, den natürlichen Grundverhältnissen des menschlichen Geistes abgeleitet, Berlin, Dümmler. Brentano, Franz, 1862, Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles, Freiburg i.B., Herder; repr. Hildesheim, Olms, 1960. –– 1874, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. In zwei Bänden, Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot. –– 1933, Kategorienlehre, mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Alfred Kastil, Hamburg, Meiner. Cantor, Georg, 1895, “Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre”, Mathematische Annalen, 46, 481-512. Ferrari, Massimo, Categorie e a priori, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003. Hume, David, 1748, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in David Hume: The Philosophical Works, ed. by Th. H. Green and Th. H. Grose, London, 1882, repr. Aalen, Scientia, 1964, vol. IV, 3-135. Jacquette, Dale, 2011, “Brentano on Aristotle’s Categories: First Philosophy and the Manifold Senses of Being”, in Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, 55, 169-197. Kastil, Alfred, 1932, “Einleitung des Herausgebers”, in Brentano 1933, iii-xxxi. Köhler, Wolfgang, 1913, “Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 66, 51-80. Kraus, Oskar, 1919, Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, mit Beiträgen von Carl Stumpf und Edmund Husserl, Beck, München. Locke, John, 1975, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martinelli, Riccardo, 2003, “Descriptive Empiricism. Stumpf on Sensation and Presentation”, Brentano-Studien, 10, 2002-2003, 2nd ed. 2006, 81-100. –– 2011, “Intentionality and God’s Mind. Stumpf on Spinoza”, Carl Stumpf: From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation, ed. by Geert-Jan Boudewijnse and Silvia Bonacchi, Wien: Krammer, 51-67.
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Plotinus, 1988, Enneads, with an English Translation by A.H. Armstrong, vol. VI, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press. Robinson, Howard, 2009, “Substance”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Ed.), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2009/entries/substance/. Rollinger, Robin, 2001, “La causalità nella Erkenntnislehre di Stumpf”, in Stefano Besoli and Riccardo Martinelli (eds), Carl Stumpf e la fenomenologia dell’esperienza immediata, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2001, 163-199 (english version: “The Concept of Causality in Stumpf’s Epistemology” in Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object, Frankfurt am Main: Ontos-Verlag, 2008, 263-299). Stumpf, Carl, 1940, Erkenntnislehre, vol. 2, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– 1939, Erkenntnislehre, vol. 1, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– 1924, “Carl Stumpf”, in Raymund Schmidt (hrsg.) Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, Band 5, Leipzig: Meiner, 204-265; quoted from the engl. transl. “Autobiography” in Murchison, Carl (ed.) History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 1, 389-441. –– 1919a, “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano,” in Oskar Kraus (ed.) Franz Brentano: Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Beck, pp. 87-149; “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano,” in L. McAlister (ed.) The Philosophy of Franz Brentano, London: Duckworth, 1976, 10-46. –– 1919b, “Spinozastudien”, Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, n. 4, 3-57. –– 1918, “Empfindung und Vorstellung,” Abhandlungen der Königlich- Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, vol. 1, 3-116. –– 1917, “Die Attribute der Gesichtsempfindungen,” Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, vol. 8, 1-88. –– 1910, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– 1906a, “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften,” Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Classe, Berlin, Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-94. –– 1906b. “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen,” Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Classe, Berlin, Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3-40. –– 1902, “Abstraction und Generalisation”, Sitzungsberichte der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 Mai, 593. –– 1896, “Leib und Seele,” in Stumpf 1910, 65-93. –– 1891, “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, I. Classe, XIX, 2. Abtheilung, Franz, München 466-516 (2-52). –– 1890, Tonpsychologie, vol. II, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– 1883, Tonpsychologie, vol. I, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– 1873a, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– 1873b, “Selbstanzeige: Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung”, Gottingische Gelehrte Anzeige, 10, 5.3.1873, pp. 361-370.
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–– 1870, Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik, ed. by W. Ewen, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 1846, Geschichte der Kategorienlehre. Zwei Abhandlungen, Berlin: Bethge, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1963.
THE AUTONOMY OF THE SENSIBLE AND THE DESUBJECTIFICATION OF THE A PRIORI BY STUMPF DOMINIQUE PRADELLE (UNIVERSITÉ PARIS IV)
Abstract. This paper focuses on Stumpf’s book on the psychological origin of the representation of space Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Husserl read this book while he was preparing a Raumbuch about the genesis of the representation(s) of space. Furthermore, attention is payed to Stumpf’s critical interpretation of Kant’s “metaphysical exposition” of space in the Transcendental Aesthetics. Finally, I discuss Stumpf’s attempt at explaining the genesis of space as aistheton koinon deriving from the aistheta idia (different types of sensations). Stumpf’s neoAristotelian stance will appear as anticipating Husserl’s transcendental constitution of space.
What are the incentives for taking an interest in the philosophy of Carl Stumpf? Does he not provide more than enough reason to have his thought relegated to an outmoded period of philosophy, and to catalogue his work within the museum of academic curiosities from the turn of the 20th century? Moreover, does he not deliberately dissociate his work on the origin of the representation of space from every sort of philosophical or metaphysical question, asserting in his introductory remarks that his study “will not be of much forthright use to either the geometer or the metaphysician” (Stumpf, 1873, v)? Does he not defend a scientistic conception of metaphysics, which he holds to depend on the results of the various sciences – declaring in his Selbstdarstellung that “metaphysics can only be usefully elaborated by starting from below [von unten], in continuity with the sciences, from whose results it must arrive at still further generalisations” (Stumpf 1924, 50)? Moreover, did he not think that the method of philosophy should be dictated by the epistemological paradigm provided by the natural sciences, and as a general rule advocate transposing the methods of
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the latter within philosophy? In this regard, he declares, in reference to Brentano, “One of the central theses in his habilitation thesis, according to which the method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences, was and remains for me a guiding principle.” Stumpf thus interprets the Brentanian thesis in a radically different manner than Heidegger, for whom Brentano anticipates the need for phenomenology to return to the knowledge of the things themselves in their proper domain. (Heidegger, 1979, 24) Ultimately, by being opposed to the speculative style of philosophical theoria, Stumpf ended up devoting the greater part of his academic career to carrying out a number of psychological and physiological experiments within the laboratory, notably in the domain of acoustics, on the basis of which he elaborated his theory of consonance and fusion. Does this not mean his thought may be of a certain interest to musicologists, acousticians, and psychologists, but offers much less to philosophers?1 We would do well to wonder whether his sole claim to fame is limited to having incited, with his Raumbuch, Husserl’s interest in the problem of space. As is well known, this resulted in the Husserlian project of editing a new Raumbuch (see Husserl, 1983a; Brisart, 2007) and then, in 1907, of developing a constitutive phenomenology of space (Husserl, 1973) and elucidating the fundamental principles of phenomenology (Husserl, 1950a). Is Stumpf merely to be credited, thanks to his theory of the psychologische Theile (psychological parts) or Theilinhalte (partial contents), with having permitted Husserl to elaborate a theory of Fundierung (foundation) and of the foundations of formal ontology (Husserl, 1984, 263-291) (as well as the contemporary research in mereology that lays claim to them), as well as the essential connection between sensorial contents and (temporal and spatial) forms (Husserl, 1973, 65-71; see Popescu, 2003, 122-124)? On the other hand, could he indeed be considered the true founder of mereology (Popescu, 2003, 132), as well as of Gestaltpsychologie? In short, as an intellectual and philosophical figure, does any intrinsic interest in Stumpf simply come down to his links with the cluster of intellectual luminaries who came to typify cultural and philosophical life in Germany at the turn of the 20th century – in the first place 1
On this point, it is worthwhile consulting the autobiographical account given by Stumpf himself: Stumpf 1924, 13-27 and 53-57.
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Brentano, as well as Marty, Mach, Hering, W. James, Cantor, Husserl, Wundt, Helmholtz, Mommsen, and Dilthey, among others?2 The central goal in this article is to show that, despite suffering from a lack of recognition, on the contrary Stumpf opened up crucially important lines of philosophical thought. He certainly was not explicitly committed to undertaking such pioneering work, and only later would others come to elaborate the significance of his findings in a more systematic fashion. Nonetheless, it is fair to say such areas of thought would perhaps not have been discovered without his pioneering work. Stumpf’s thought is, in this respect, an example of a landmark philosophical exploration of certain themes emerging, so to speak, from below the surface of an ostensible field of inquiry. Once these themes are taken up and framed anew, their conceptual implications acquire capital importance. Here, then, we shall not treat Stumpf as an antiquated museum piece, but instead as a figure whose work prefigures key lines of thought in the subsequent development of German philosophy. 1 Stumpf’s fundamental intuitions Our approach here will not consist in explaining, step by step, the development of Stumpf’s respective positions, for instance by drawing attention to their mooring in one or other domain of thought. Rather, the aim is to highlight the essential philosophical tendencies submerged within his work. In other words, in deviating from standard methods of genetic exegesis, we seek to show how these tendencies in Stumpf came to exert a strong influence in the history of philosophy and in the subsequent development of phenomenology. 1) The first fundamental theme consists in an appeal to an intuitionist method, that is to say, a return to what is actually given – in opposition to what he calls the “constructivist method” that in his view is closely tied to the “speculative dogmatism” characterizing the Kantian doctrine (Stumpf, 1924, 30). Counter to any kind of speculative constructivism – that is, against any manufacture of conceptual artifices or methodological fabrications in the fashion of post-Kantian philosophers – Stumpf makes a case for building up philosophy von unten (from below). It is a question, in other words, of grounding philosophy in experiential data or in exper2
Concerning these encounters, see again Stumpf 1924, 4-27.
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iments. In such a return to what is given, one can discern the teleological anticipation of the “principles of principles” formulated by Husserl in § 24 of the Ideen I; namely, the need to return to the originally given intuition as legitimating source of all possible knowledge. (Husserl, 1976, 51) Furthermore, it appears to anticipate the Heideggerian call to be attentive from the beginning to what is given zunächst und zumeist (first and foremost), by not imposing any distorting theoretical project upon that which is presented in experience. (Heidegger, 1979, 131, 203 ff.; Heidegger, 1927, 63 ff.) The question then is how best to understand, within the framework of Stumpf’s thought, the exact nature and scope of that which is “really given” or truly intuitive, in contrast to that which is artificially constructed.3 2) Stumpf’s writings make frequent appeal to the basic principle of the autonomy of the sphere of the sensible or (in Husserlian terminology) of the hyletic domain – that is, its independence vis-à-vis noetic activities, which Stumpf classifies as psychische Funktionen (psychic functions). In taking up the Brentanian project of a classification of psychic phenomena,4 Stumpf in fact proposes a systematic distinction between two fundamental classes of experiences: on the one hand, phenomena (Erscheinungen), contents of sensations obtained by the senses (Inhalte der Sinnesempfindungen); on the other, the psychic functions (psychische Funktionen), which encompass all acts, states, and experiences, and which denote the acts of attending to phenomena or of analysing the properties or intrinsic relationships particular to them. 5 A cardinal methodological motive surfaces in this concern to sort various experiences; the possibility of considering the sensuous or sensible domain of experience in a distinct and autonomous manner, as being infra-noetic or pre-predicative, anterior to any psychic activity capable of modifying sense data or of producing new objects on their 3
Stumpf nevertheless provides some precise clarifications in Stumpf, 1906, 31-32. Brentano, 1911. On the fundamental importance, for Stumpf, of the works and teachings of Brentano, cf. the explicit avowals in Stumpf 1924, 4 and above all 27: “I would say at the start that my conceptions, understood as broadly as possible, rely on ideas initially inspired by Brentano”. However, over and above these remarks, the influence of Brentano can be discerned throughout Stumpf’s work. 5 Stumpf, 1906, 4-5. The same goes for Stumpf 1924, 40: “The idea that relationships between sensations can be directly perceived in them and with them is a view I have defended and continue to defend”. 4
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basis – in short, anterior to any psychic activity capable of constituting the hyletic sphere as an autonomous theoretical object. An important counterpart to this position lies in a further claim by Stumpf, namely, that there are laws and specific structures that govern this autonomous sphere, prior to any intervention by acts of thought – no matter how basic they might indeed be. This view importantly anticipates one of Husserl’s basic positions according to which a rigorous form of nomological conformity not only holds sway over the domain of thought, but is also already born out in the domain of sensuous affectivity or of pre-predicative experience.6 Elsewhere, Stumpf designates this science of sensuous phenomena as phenomenology7 – meaning with this term, not the investigation of an a priori correlation between the structured multiplicity of conscious experiences and the unity of meaning of objects of experience, but rather the two disciplines that Husserl respectively called eidetics of the perceptual world (ensemble of worldly ontologies, Husserl, 1974, 278 and 297) and hyletic phenomenology. 8 In other words, phenomenology for Stumpf encompasses both the science of the structural forms belonging to the objects of pure sensuous perception and the science of the forms rooted in the contents that are included in the sensuous fields of experience. 3) Furthermore, Stumpf lays out a concept of sensibility that is neither purely empirical nor atomistic in character. The domain of the sensible cannot in fact be restricted to the sole province of sensations, and that which is sensed or perceived is likewise irreducible to a multiplicity of punctiform sensations or impressions. By consequence, Stumpf’s concept of the sensible not only encompasses the pure hyle, but the morphé as well – keeping in mind that this is to be taken not in the Husserlian sense of the intentional 6
This is the object of the entire first section of Husserl, 1973, 8 sq. and of ch. I of Husserl, 1954, 73 ff. 7 Stumpf 1924, 39-40: “The search for sensible phenomena as such, which attracts so much attention today, is not driven by psychology, but rather by phenomenology, which is a preparatory science practiced as much by physicians and physiologists as by psychologists.” 8 Husserl, 1976, 196 (trasl. 207): “Phenomenological considerations and analyses which specifically concern stuff can be termed hyletic-phenomenological [hyletischphänomenologisch]”.
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aims that contribute to the constitution of objects, but rather as the structural forms immanent to sensorial materials:9 This new form of psychology rightly includes among the latter [scil. the Inhalte der Sinnesempfindungen] the spatial extension [räumliche Ausdehnung] and the distribution of visual and tactile impressions [Verteilung der Gesichts- und Berührungseindrücke], for whatever is quantitative in sense contents is given in the same way as what is qualitative. (Stumpf, 1906, 4)
In other words, the contents of sensation are not limited to being a scattered multiplicity of singular impressional data – as a result of which they would be endowed with neither temporal nor spatial extension – but form a perceptual whole or a field incorporating both global structural forms (temporal succession, spatial extension, perhaps even causal connection) and the temporal and spatial relationships (Verhältnisse) circumscribed by the former. Consequently, a holistic principle governs the perceptual sphere; that is, there is a primacy of the whole vis-à-vis the parts, properties, and relationships that can be delineated within it after the fact. This is precisely where Stumpf anticipates a core anti-atomistic principle of Gestaltpsychologie: wholes are not formed through a synthesis or composition on the basis of parts that lack any intrinsic ties between them – that is, through a noetic activity exercised upon a multiplicity of punctiform sensible impressions. In themselves, they do not constitute tota synthetica; rather, they are tota analytica10 that pre-exist any parts (understood here in a broad sense that includes properties and relations) one can distinguish within them. 4) Correlatively, Stumpf defends an anti-associationist and antiKantian principle, which goes hand in hand with a methodological approach founded upon the concept of psychological parts (psychologische Theile) or partial contents (Theilinhalte). 9
We have borrowed the term Strukturformen from §103 of Husserl, 1974, 278, where it is claimed that real ontology deploys the Idea of a possible world “according to the structural forms that essentially belong to a world” – thereby indicating temporality, spatiality, causality, etc., that is, precisely the structures that Stumpf considers as given in the phenomena themselves. 10 With this phrase, we refer to Kant’s terminology for the form of the whole belonging to time and space as pure intuitions: Kant 1926, 293 and 540-541 (Refl. 3789 and 4424-4425). See Fichant 1997, 31.
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This approach consists in distinguishing amongst the forms of necessary co-belonging (notwendige Zusammengehörigkeit) that bind together the parts of a whole given in a representation. On its basis, Stumpf sheds light on the criterion required to uncover an essential (eidetic) connection between various represented contents: the impossibility of such contents being represented separately by imagination. In this way, Stumpf embarks upon an implicit but fundamental reevaluation of the role of imagination in philosophical knowledge, which prefigures the Husserlian thesis according to which phantasy constitutes an essential element of all eidetic sciences.11 With this move, Stumpf also sets up a twofold re-elaboration of the traditional metaphysical criterion for substantiality. In his classic text dealing with the category of substance as such, the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes distinguishes between an ontological and an epistemological criterion for substantiality. Ontologically speaking, substantiality refers to the possibility of existing independently of any other thing (or, when appropriately defined with respect to finite entities, the possibility of existing solely in virtue of being dependent upon God). However, the criterion for recognizing substantiality resides in the ability to conceive the thing in question separately from anything else (in contrast to modes, which cannot be thought of separately). Separate conceivability thus becomes the key factor in determining the ontological status of substance.12 With respect to this classical conception of substantiality and any possible knowledge of it, Stumpf argues for a double shift in the meaning of substance. On the one hand, separability is no longer stressed as a criterion of substantiality. Rather, emphasis is laid upon the inseparability of represented contents. Stumpf’s main interest does not reside in the ontological status of substance (in opposition to the ontological deficiency of modes), and instead runs toward a methodological delineation of connective relationships between contents. Framed in neo-Kantian terms, the focal point of Stumpf’s thematic interest lies not so much in 11
Husserl, 1976, 148: “daß die “Fiktion” das Lebenselement der Phänomenologie, wie aller eidetischen Wissenschaft, ausmacht”. 12 Descartes, 1647, 47: “Lorsque nous concevons la substance, nous concevons seulement une chose qui existe en telle façon qu’elle n’a besoin que de soi-même pour exister (….)”; “il faut seulement, pour entendre que ce sont des substances, que nous apercevions qu’elles peuvent exister sans l’aide d’aucune chose créée”.
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the nature of substance per se, but in the function a substance fulfils, which is to say, the relation between a substance and its modes: I believed (and still believe) that the relation between colour and extension was to be seen as a striking example or as an analogon of the relationship that metaphysics holds to exist between the properties of a substance. (Stumpf 1924, 8)
On the other hand, Stumpf transfers the epistemological criteria of separability and inseparability from the realm of pure thought (where they were situated in classical thought) to that of imagination and sensuous representation. The necessary relationships shown in this way in fact belong to the domain of sensuous representation, that is, to the hyletic or (as Stumpf called it) “phenomenological” level (Stumpf 1924, 39-40). This shift entails a re-evaluation of sensibility, which is henceforth held to be the key in disclosing essential connections or a priori relationships amongst represented contents. 5) Finally, a fundamental consequence of these analyses consists in the de-subjectification of the a priori. This conception of the a priori is radically opposed to Kant’s, for whom the a priori denotes the formal component in all knowledge, that is, its subjective form. In fact, in Stumpf’s view, the classification of knowledge as either a priori or a posteriori is no longer a question of its origin, but rather comes down to the necessary validity of a relationship: It is not only contents of mathematical representations that stem from a priori knowledge; those forms of knowledge, as well as other forms that contribute to the enlargement of our understanding, have their source in all the contents of representation (Stumpf 1924, 33).
In Kant’s philosophy, the a priori character of a certain kind of knowledge tended to be identified with its mathematical character, its internal provenance (in opposition to the external origin of sensuous impressions) and its status as subjective form (in opposition to the material of knowledge). In Stumpf’s approach, the question whether a kind of knowledge is a priori or a posteriori no longer has anything to do with where it comes from. That is, it has nothing to do with whether such knowledge originates within the subject and its pure structures (i.e. a formal, internal provenance of knowledge) as opposed to the material of sensations (a material, external origin of
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knowledge). The a priori status of knowledge is to the contrary evinced in the consciousness of the impossibility of separating the contents of representation, which for their part can have a sensuous nature and an external origin. This is, for example, the impossibility of separating a sound from its duration or from its intensity, or a colour from its extension across a surface. Accordingly, what this perspective opens up is nothing less than the possibility of reformulating the traditional doctrine of the categories. This is because one can delineate the fundamental concepts expressed in the universal structures of the being as being – while at the same time ceasing to take either the forms of judgment or the forms of objectifying acts of thought as the guiding threads of analysis. Instead, since Stumpf’s approach turns on the question of “the origin of the fundamental concepts (the categories)”, we must always investigate the original phenomena [ursprüngliche Erscheinungen] that constitute the foundation of their perception,
given that in certain forms of intuition, we directly perceive the internal interpenetration of the parts of a whole [Ganzes]. (Stumpf 1924, 31, emphasis added)
In this way, Stumpf re-anchors the ontology and the ensemble of a priori structures in sensibility, that is, in the intrinsic structure of perceived or experienced sensuous contents. In a paradoxical manner, this move does not lead to a subjectification of the concept of the a priori, but rather to its de-subjectification! This is because, on the one hand, sensibility here does not refer to a subjective faculty possessing certain inherent properties, with which every human or finite subject is endowed. Rather, the concept of sensibility at stake here is that of the properties and the relationships of hyletic contents such as they can be intuited from the moment such contents are given. On the other hand, if the sensible contents can only be given to a being endowed with sensibility (and, more precisely, endowed with a form of sensibility furnished with certain de facto sensorial fields: visual, tactile, etc.), then the necessary connection between contents holds true for any and all subjects − namely, for every sub-
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ject in general, on condition that each is endowed with a sort of sensibility that permits it to perceive contents of that type. As a result, ontological structures and laws enjoy universal or absolutely unconditional validity in a fashion radically different from the anthropological scope of the Kantian a priori. Whereas for Kant the a priori forms of sensibility only have validity “for us humans” (für uns Menschen)13 or, in any case, for “all finite thinking beings”,14 the categories and forms of the whole that belong to sensuous phenomena – that is, the forms of connection between the sensuous material and the structural forms that belong to them – possess a validity that is necessarily imposed upon anyone that might be presented with such phenomena. 2 Application of Stumpf’s principles to the problem of the origin of space Let us now attempt to clarify the way in which these principles are already at work in the analysis of the origin of representation of space, as presented in Stumpf’s Raumvorstellung text from 1873. In the first place, it is important to keep in mind the larger scope of Stumpf’s undertaking. What should one understand as “the origin of the representation of space” (Ursprung der Raumvorstellung)? To what end should one speak of the representation of space, rather than simply speaking of space itself? Is it a matter of opposing to actual space, understood as objective and external to the mind, the purely subjective and internal representation that we have in us (in a more traditional language, the idea of space)? And what is meant by the term origin? Does the notion that this origin is psychological in character entail that it has an empirical origin or a temporal genesis, or that it is in fact a production of a Raumvorstellung on the basis of sensations and through synthetic acts of thought? Stumpf’s introduction provides a helpful set of preliminary answers to these questions. 1) In the first place, what sort of meaning is attached to the term ‘space’? 13 14
Kant, 1998 (KrV), B 41-42, B 59, B 62, B 51, B 68. Kant, 1998, B 72.
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Above all, it is neither possible nor necessary here to provide a definition of space more precise than the one with which each person comes to be acquainted in everyday life [wie er Jedem aus dem täglichen Leben bekannt ist]. (Stumpf, 1873, 2)
Here, space is minimally defined as the common basis shared by distance (Entfernung), place or position (Lage), size (Grösse) and direction (Richtung); furthermore, it is understood as that to which the determinations of juxtaposition (nebeneinander) are related, such as right and left, here and there, great and small; lastly, it is that in which external bodies and the body proper are situated, as well as being something manifested in touch and sight (Stumpf, 1873, 2). By consequence, Stumpf does not refer to space such as it is defined by physicalistic or geometric thought, that is, as relative to a metric, to ideal shapes and their possible transformations (translations, rotations, similitudes, projections, etc.). Instead, Stumpf exclusively focuses upon pre-scientific or perceptual space, where spatial determinations are vague, and not exact, in character. This is because distance, direction, position, and size are treated here as correlates of a simple, everyday subjective evaluation, divested of any pretence to objective validity or exactitude. The line of questioning pursued by Stumpf is not based upon the epistemological problem of mathematical and physicsoriented knowledge of space, in the hope of arriving at a deeper description of the types of spaces and their structure, but is rather oriented toward remaining true to the common notion of space, which furnishes an adequate basis for the vague spatial determinations of everyday experience. This sort of analysis already evinces the primacy of intuition in Stumpf’s methodological approach; namely, the requirement to remain faithful to the indeterminate space of everyday experience, and not to replace it with any sort of conceptual artifice that would lead to a mere theoretical construction.15 Moreover, given that there are representations and structures that are inherent to vague experience and that are prior to any project of arriving at exact knowledge, they must be seen to form a thematic domain in their own right. Stumpf’s goal will be to clarify the laws of formation of such structures and representations belonging to that particular domain. 15
This is precisely the basis on which Stumpf criticises Herbart and Bain.
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2) What sort of meaning, within this perspective, should be attributed to the expression Vorstellung? Stumpf employs an analogous sort of framework here. Just as he eschews scientific definitions of space, Stumpf also nullifies conceptual distinctions employed in traditional philosophical discussions of space. He dispenses with the Kantian distinction between intuition and concept, and with Helmholtz’s opposition between sensation of space (Raumempfindung) and representation or perception of space (Raumvorstellung oder -wahrnehmung). In their stead, he proposes a threefold distinction between classes of representation: actual (wirklich) versus phantasy and memorial representations (Phantasieund Gedächtnis-), concrete versus abstract representations (concrete vs abstracte), and simple versus composite representations (einfache versus zusammengesetzte: Stumpf, 1873, 2-3). Without going into the detailed analysis of these oppositions, it should be noted that Stumpf endorses (without explicating its grounds) the primacy of actual representation or perception over any form of presentification: “The most original [datum] [das Ursprünglichste] is sensation or actual representation.” (Stumpf, 1873, 3). This move entails, from the outset, that Stumpf’s project of psychological analysis has nothing to do with taking representations of space to be derived from actual sensuous representations by the mediation of either retentions, memories, associative operations within imagination, or synthetic acts of thought. His analysis is instead always carried out at the level of actual (strictly perceptual) representations, taken individually, in order to isolate their proper content, without ever reconstructing some or other hypothetical model of the genetic derivation of space on the basis of psychic processes that are not given in experience. Here, Stumpf’s focus on intuition demands that the scope of analysis be limited to the content proper to the perceptual experience of space, without inscribing within it the genetic relationship between the different intentional modes directed at space. Significantly, in so doing, one is able to dispense with the bevy of empirical models purporting to explain the formation of the idea of space. 3) The concept of that which is ursprünglichst refers to the concept of Ursprung – an essential notion in this context. What is meant by the latter? What method is to be applied to the pre-scientific or everyday representation of space, if this can be attributed neither to an empirical, i.e. an associationist formation, nor to a synthetic construction?
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The answer to this question, while not being explicitly articulated, is at least hinted at in the last pair of antithetical properties of representations, namely their simple versus composite character. Stumpf writes that the search for the origin of the representation of space embodies the very “essence of psychological analysis” (Wesen der psychologischen Analyse). (Stumpf, 1873, 1) What does this mean, and what ought to be understood as analysis within the domain of psychology? By inquiry into the psychological origin of a representation, we mean investigation of the representations on the basis of which such a representation has been formed [sich gebildet hat], as well as the manner in which it is formed on the basis of the former [Art und Weise, wie sie sich daraus gebildet]. (Stumpf, 1873, 4)
This simple reference to the “mode of formation” of a new representation on the basis of pre-existing representations remains unclear as long as its specific nature is not clarified, since there is room for different conceptions of it. One could employ here, in the first place, an associationist conception, according to which a representation (for instance, a visual one) calls up another one; one might invoke a neoKantian conception here, according to which one representation would be produced through a synthetic connection to earlier representations; another option is a kinaesthetic conception, according to which the representation would be a mix of sensuous impressions and muscular sensations; lastly, there is Stumpf’s conception, which holds that the elucidation of the mode of formation does not involve anything like a process of genesis, but instead has to do with the decomposition or resolution (Auflösung) of a composite representation into more simple representations. Stumpf thus argues for a shift away from the genetic paradigm to which the expression “mode of formation” seems to refer in the first place; the psychological analysis does not evince anything like a process of formation, but takes chemical analysis as its methodological paradigm, under the form of a decomposition of composite materials into their constitutive elements 16 . This shift evinces the Brentanian 16
Stumpf 1873, 5: “We can call the mode of inquiry described here, in analogy with chemical analysis [in Analogie zur chemischen Analyse], psychological analysis. For the latter as well, the aim is to break down composite materials, which we typically
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principle that Stumpf ceaselessly espouses, namely, where philosophical method is seen as wholly congruous with the methodology of the natural sciences – and which he understands in the sense of a necessary contribution, within philosophy, of methodological paradigms proper to the natural sciences. 17 Consequently, two methodological routes are open to the psychologist, in analogy with the natural sciences: internal observation (rein innerliches Beobachten) and experimentation (Experimentieren). (Stumpf, 1873, 5) What does this mean? 4) This method of analytic resolution into respective elements derives its justification from the fact that the representation of space is a “highly composite representation” (sehr zusammengesetzte Vorstellung) (Stumpf, 1873, 6) – a composition that is itself grounded in the status of aistheton koinon that Aristotle attributes to space in De anima.18 The latter is in fact not at all perceived by a sense faculty that would be specifically assigned to space (in which case it would be an aistheton idion), but is rather (…) co-perceived [mit wahrgenommen] by the distinct senses (….) [S]pace has to be a content that is perceived collectively by means of different senses [durch mehrere Sinne gemeinsam wahrgenommen], and that, secondly, is perceived by a sense conjointly with another content [von Einem Sinn zugleich mit einem anderen Inhalt wahrgenommen] (for example, chromatic quality). (Stumpf, 1873, 6)
On this basis, one can then classify the different types of theories regarding this co-perception of space – that is, the manner in which it is conjointly perceived with a content proper to one of the five senses – and in function of the nature of possible relationships of composition of representations. A first set of alternatives is that either space is not a particular content, but only something that is composed in a certain way on the basis of sensorial contents or aistheta idia (Herbart), or that it is indeed a particular content (besondere Vorstellung). This case employ, into their elements [zusammengesetzte Stoffe auf ihre Elemente zurückzuführen].” 17 Stumpf 1924, 4. Heidegger understands this Brentanian principle in a radically different way: not as importing the explicative paradigm of the sciences into philosophy, but conversely, as the need for philosophy to be guided by the nature of the domain of objects to be studied, as all sciences do, that is, as the anticipation of the phenomenological imperative to return to the things themselves. (See Heidegger, 1979, 24) 18
De an., III, 418 a 12 ff., 425 a 13 ff. and 428 b 18 ff.
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raises a second set of alternatives: either space is a quality proper to one of the senses, namely that of muscular sensation (A. Bain), or it does not belong to any of the senses, in which case it has the status of aistheton koinon. In this case, there arises a third set of possibilities: either there is no genesis of space on the basis of sensuous contents, with space being a form opposed to any sensuous material (Kant, Lotze), or indeed Stumpf’s theory holds true: [the representation of space] forms, conjointly with the sensible quality, which is represented in a spatial manner [räumlich vorgestellt wird], one sole content, indivisible according to its unique nature [einzigen seiner Natur nach untrennbaren Inhalt], and which [space and quality] are only parts thereof [nur Theile sind]. (Stumpf, 1873, 7)
Nevertheless, the meaning of this unitary character of the spatialsensuous representation remains an open question, as does, correlatively, that of the mereological relationship that presides over the hyletic sphere. 3 The intuitionist principle and perceptual holism Before delving into Stumpf’s own contribution to these questions, we should first become acquainted with the critical perspective that complements it. In so doing, we shall be able to understand better the intuitionist principle that characterises his method, as well as the antiatomistic principle underlying his doctrine of perception. In actuality, a keen respect for the data of intuition drives Stumpf’s criticisms of Herbart’s and Bain’s positions. Against those authors, Stumpf argues for the fundamental requirement not to substitute, in place of the Raumvorstellung that is actually given to us in perception, any sort of conceptual construction or extrinsic explication that would lead back to the “psychological pre-conditions” (psychische Vorbedingungen) of its acquisition. In the second place, Stumpf’s critique is supported by an antiatomistic thesis founded on the refutation or deconstruction of the supposition according to which “only non-spatial qualities are originally sensed” [nur unräumliche Qualitäten] (Stumpf, 1873, 32). Stated in positive terms, this thesis is identical with the principle of perceptual holism, which is to say, with the primacy of perception of the
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whole over that of parts, or of the entire field over that of particular objects found within it: we first perceive the entire visual field [wir nehmen zuerst das ganze Gesichtsfeld wahr] and it is only subsequently that we distinguish parts in it [und unterscheiden dann daran Theile], then, in them, still other parts, etc.. (Stumpf, 1873, 59)
The idea of sensuous content is adapted in conformity with the holistic principle; in place of the concept of element or atom of sensation (that is, of singular sense datum), Stumpf proposes the global concept of a field (Feld) of sensations, namely, of a totality of simultaneous sensuous contents, between which certain relationships can be distinguished, albeit only after the fact. The field is not a totum syntheticum resulting from the synthetic composition of isolated sensations, but a primitive, perceptually-given totum analyticum, where such sensations can be isolated through decomposition. The genesis of this field does not take place thanks to a composition of elementary parts, but rather through the decomposition of an initial whole. 1) In considering the alternatives to Stumpf’s approach to the representation of space, it is worthwhile to consider Herbart’s theory of serial forms (Theorie der Reihenformen), as presented in Psychologie als Wissenschaft. Herbart’s principle of explanation is genetic in character; since the representation of space does not constitute a particular content, the goal of his analysis is to retrace the manner in which, on the basis of qualitative sensuous data coming from the different senses (in the first place, visually and tactilely) and in conformity with psychological laws to be determined, a number of diverse spatial representations are formed. The qualities belonging to a particular sense faculty can indeed be linked to each other in different manners, and one of them in particular (the most articulated one) is most closely affiliated with spatial representation; when we perceive a surface through touch or sight, we move our eyes or our fingers across it. Now, through such movement, we acquire a series of successive representations, where the strongest is the one that is currently sensed and actually perceived, while past impressions decrease in intensity. Moreover, by reversing the course of our eye and finger movements, we have the reverse series of past representations, which is to say, the same series of sense data in reverse order (Stumpf, 1873, 30-31). If, at that moment, we quickly retrace this series of sensuous impressions,
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we acquire the representation of their spatial simultaneity, by dissociating the representation of simultaneity from the succession of representations: This successive series of qualities [Aufeinanderfolge von Qualitäten], which occurs so rapidly that it can produce the impression of what is simultaneous [Eindruck des Gleichzeitigen] – this is space. (Stumpf, 1873, p. 31)
2) A second example of extrinsic genetic explication is furnished by the theory of Alexander Bain in his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind from 1920. This theory is namely an attempt to show how representations of space derive from the “association of certain simple originary elements” [Association gewisser einfacher ursprünglicher Elemente] (Stumpf, 1873, 36), according to certain unspecified laws of association. It is not a question of deriving space from solitary visual and tactile representations, as with Herbart, “but of conjoining a new sense to them and by insisting in particular on it” [mit Hinzunahme und vorwiegender Betonung eines neuen Sinnes] (Stumpf, 1873, 37) – namely muscular sense (Muskelsinn). The genesis of the presentation of space takes place thanks to the association of traditional sense data with muscular sensations endowed with duration, intensity, and speed. If, for example, one slides one’s hand across a tabletop, one has a sensation of movement (Bewegungsempfindung) linked to tactile sensations in constant flux, which together form a series. If we reverse the movement, we then have the same series of tactile sensations, but in reverse order. If we make the same movement more rapidly, this in no way alters the serial order of tactile sensations: All this taken together produces this sensation of permanence, ordered stability, and co-existence that we habitually attribute to space; and space is nothing other than the complex of sensations [Empfindungskomplex] described in this way. (Stumpf, 1873, 44)
With respect to the assumptions made by these two theories, Stumpf formulates a twofold critique, thanks to which we can pick out two of Stumpf’s own crucial positions regarding these phenomena. a) His critique is in the first place directed at the reductionist supposition of these genetic doctrines. They do not seek to conform with
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the intuitive – non-artificial – representation of space that we actually have in everyday and pre-scientific experience, but substitute for it a complex and artificial theoretical construction. Herbart reduces the space of experience with which we are intimately familiar to a complex of sensations endowed with decreasing intensities, amalgamations (Verschmelzungen), and reproductions. (Stumpf, 1873, 31-34) As for Bain, he reduces the representation of space to the association of a continuous sensation of movement and a series of visual and tactile sensations ordered in a fixed series. (Stumpf, 1873, 54) The everyday representation of space – the one we all have, which does not presuppose any deeper knowledge of our world, and which serves as the basis for vague notions of position, movement, and direction – is not reducible to any such schemas or associative complexes of sensations. Whatever function the latter may indeed have as psychic pre-conditions for the acquisition of the representation of space, they must for all that be understood as distinct from such an acquisition: The concept of series [Folge] has to be taken seriously, so that it is not claimed that ‘this or that is space,’ but that ‘this or that is the psychic pre-condition [psychische Vorbedingung] for the representation of space.’ In short, we have to consider these elements as a psychic excitation stimulus [psychischer Reiz], which is something Herbart refuses to do. (Stumpf, 1873, 34)
Stumpf advances a similar sort of critique concerning Bain’s theory, which states that: (…) these sensations of movement, etc., would not only be occasions [Anlässe] for forming representations of space, but would be the representations of space themselves, and that the entire meaning of the latter [ihre ganze Bedeutung] would be included in those sensations of movement, etc.. (Stumpf, 1873, 53)
Here again, the problem is that while such sensations of movement may, properly speaking, only constitute the occasion or the condition of the acquisition of the Raumvorstellung, they do not truly belong to the content of its meaning. In Stumpf, this critique goes together with a quasiphenomenological or intuitionist requirement, according to which one must remain faithful to the representation of space such as it is given
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in everyday perceptual experience, without allowing it to get entangled with conceptual artifices or methodological fabrications. In Husserlian terms, this means, on the one hand, things must be approached in terms of the meaning they have for the consciousness through which there is experience of them, without ever overstepping the bounds of their given meaning in order to construct some other hypothetical meaning for them; on the other, it means the things themselves must be described without ever conflating them either with the noetic acts directed at them or with the psychic conditions of those acts. b) Secondly, Stumpf’s critique targets the atomistic presupposition inherent to these theories, according to which sensations in their most basic form have neither space nor extension. Such a supposition necessitates a genetic explanation of the passage from such nonextensive sensations to the representation of extension. One thus find in Herbart the claim that one only originally experiences non-spatial sensations [ursprünglich nur unräumliche Qualitäten empfunden werden]; the development of space on the basis of the former [Entwickelung des Raumes aus derselben]; finally, the mathematical conception of this development and the concepts and laws that are proposed on its grounds. (Stumpf, 1873, p. 32)
The grounds for this thesis lie in the idea of the ‘inextensivity’ of the soul, of its simplicity, and of its purely intensive character (in respect to the Leibnizian view):19 in being simple, having no distinct parts, and being purely intensive, the soul is not extensive and cannot directly perceive something extended; 20 its representations of extension are wholly mediate in character, formed by composition of elementary unextended content.21 19
Stumpf, 1873, 116 : “[t]he soul is a simple punctiform entity [die Seele ist ein einfaches (punctuelles) Wesen]; how could it immediately grasp something extended [Ausgedehntes unmittelbar erfassen]?” 20 Stumpf, 1873, p. 117: “Representing is something completely intensive [etwas gänzlich Intensives]; it thus cannot originally contain something extensive [ursprünglich nichts Extensives enthalten]”. 21 Stumpf, 1873, p. 119: “Objective extension […] cannot initially emerge in the soul or be represented by it; however, […] as content of representation, it has to be reconstructed by the soul on the basis of intensive sensations [aus intensiven Empfindungen
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In the refutation of Bain’s theory, one can discern Stumpf’s central arguments against the punctiform or inextensive character of visual sensations. According to this theory, one is initially limited to perceiving mathematical points that have to be linked up with each other – only in a second moment – by eye movements. In response, Stumpf argues, on the one hand, that mathematical points are in essence unable to be represented, which means it is absurd to consider them as the primitive data of representation. On the other hand, and more importantly, the supposition that these points are not just mathematical but also function as minima visibilia clashes with the fact that in perception there is a primacy of the whole over the parts, and of the visual field over the elementary forms of extension that comprise it. The visual field is not progressively composed by a synthesis of elementary minima visibilia, but is rather immediately given as a whole (Ganzes) whose elements can only be distinguished by a process of analysis: We do not first perceive such minima in order then to compose something out of them. Rather, we first perceive the entire visual field [nehmen zuerst das ganze Gesichtsfeld wahr], and only afterwards do we distinguish parts in it [unterscheiden dann daran Theile], etc. (Stumpf, 1873, 58-59).
Here, Stumpf’s understanding of perception falls under the guiding principle of perceptual holism closely linked to Gestalt psychology, applied to diverse global configurations that are, as Stumpf underlines time and again, original and non-composite in character. Accordingly, we can immediately distinguish a small circle from a small square without progressively having to form a perception of them;22 we perceive a line as a whole, without first having to draw it from thought, as Kant claims.23 From the first moment, we perceive the whole sky as a whole, and not as a multitude of discrete surfaces from which the whole sky has had to be composed (Stumpf, 1873, 82). wieder aufgebaut werden]”. 22 Stumpf, 1873, 60 : “They are spatially dissimilar [sie sind räumlich ungleich]”. 23 Stumpf, 1873, 61 – in opposition to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Transzendentale Deduktion, § 24, B 154: “We cannot think a line without drawing it in thought, we cannot think of a circle without describing it”. (Kant, 1998, 258)
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We should thus bear in mind the cardinal consequence of these analyses; space cannot simply be made out to be the product of a synthesis of disjointed, inextensive sensations. The origin of the representation of space does not denote an empirical genesis of space on the basis of inextensive sensations and acts of reflection. To the contrary, the original status of the phenomenon of space has to be acknowledged; the term “original” (ursprünglich) means, quite precisely, that the spatial form is co-presented or co-perceived originally or from the beginning with certain sensuous contents, meaning that relationships of spatial exteriority are given in actual phenomena, and are not added on through a psychic activity that brings them into relation with each other. In other words, spatial relationships are not something that has to be added on by relational thought to sensuous contents that in themselves are bereft of intrinsic relations. To the contrary, these spatial relationships already co-belong to these contents. Stumpf thus anticipates the distinction made by Husserl between two forms of synthesis; the one, produced by thought, results in a positing of relations external to the material of knowledge (for example, that of the ensemble as collection of pure somethings). The other consists in relations inherent to contents themselves (for example, the relationships of temporal succession, of co-existence and of spatial position, etc.: Husserl, 1970, 38). 4 Theory of psychological parts or of partial contents Apart from the aforementioned critiques, the core of Stumpf’s 1874 text is devoted to his so-called theory of psychological parts or partial contents – meaning, in particular, the eidetic connection between matter and form. To this end, Stumpf elaborates a theory of the relations between the diverse components of a global content. Let us recall Stumpf’s guiding principle, as subsequently formulated in his 1906 text cited above: The new form of psychology rightly includes among the latter [the sensuous contents belonging to the five senses] the spatial extension [räumliche Ausdehnung] and the distribution of visual and tactile impressions [Verteilung der Gesichts- und Berührungseindrücke], for whatever is quantitative in the sense contents is given in the same way as what is qualitative. Between the phenomena, there are certain relationships [Verhältnisse]. They are always given in and with two phe-
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The concept of phenomenon or sensuous content, that is, of that which is actually given, is not just limited to sensations, but also includes all the forms of connections between them, in that they are inherent to the sensuous contents themselves. It is thus necessary to distinguish these relationships from syntheses that result from higher psychic functions, for which Stumpf reserves the name “formations” (Gebilde). The relationships are “immanent” to sensuous contents and “independent of any intellectual functions”. (Stumpf, 1906, 23) In “not [being] created by mental functions [durch die Funktionen nicht geschaffen], but only observed [konstatiert] by them,” they behave “just like absolute contents” (Stumpf, 1906, 22) and “belong to the material of thought” [zum Material des Denkens gehören]. (Stumpf, 1906, 22) By contrast, formations are the correlates of higher mental functions, for example, of acts of collecting or grouping (Zusammenfassungen) contents that are not linked together by “any material affiliation [keine sachliche Zusammenhörigkeit], or by any common relation that establishes a connection between parts [keine verbindenden gemeinschaftlichen Beziehungen der Teile]”. (Stumpf, 1906, 29) For this reason, an ensemble (Inbegriff) cannot be confused with grouped material, nor with the function of grouping; it is only the correlate of the latter. The concept of an immediate datum (das unmittelbar Gegebene) thus comprises two kinds of relationships: material (sachlich) relationships that are immanent to contents and that are simply extracted from phenomena, and relations as formations produced by a higher act of grouping (or of relating). The first sort are phenomenal and necessary, whereas the second result from a synthetic act and are contingent in that regard; since the latter sort of connection is established by thought, it can equally be dissolved by thought and thus is contingent. With regard to space and relationships of spatial co-existence, the problem is thus exclusively one of determining the class of contents and relationships to which they belong. Is it a matter of an intra-phenomenal content and immanent relationships, or a question of a higher-order formation and of relations resulting from one or other sort of grouping? 1) Stumpf’s criticism of Bain’s associationist theory enables one to see how space and relationships of spatial co-existence have to be distinguished from any sort of higher-order Gebilde.
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Bain explains the genesis of space as occurring by way of an association of sense data with muscular relations – whereby such an association in fact denotes a form of psychic function that produces new relations. However, on the one hand, it is possible to completely dissociate series of sensations, kinetic feelings, and the representation of space from each other, since each can be experienced in distinct fashion, isolated from the others; for example, one can sing a series of notes without the representation of space, or have a spatial representation unaccompanied by any muscular sensation. (Stumpf, 1873, 5456) The connection between series of sensations and space, just as between muscular sensations and space, is thus not immanent and necessary to phenomena, but is only a contingent aspect of them. On the other hand, Bain assumes that that there is an original separation between sensuous contents, which then can only be linked together as a result of association; in his view, there are only aistheta idia, but no aistheton koinon. However, the concept of association is inapplicable here; while association consists in recalling an absent content by way of a present content, the relationship between colour and extension is a relation between two present contents! (Stumpf, 1873, 48-49) 2) If space is not something produced either by association or by synthetic grouping, this is because it is distinguished by a form and an ensemble of original relationships that are immediately given or internal to phenomena. However, what sort of status should be ascribed to it? Is it an a priori form of subjectivity that comes to be imposed upon all sensuous material and distributes it spatially? Here, Stumpf advances a decisive critique of the Kantian theory of the subjective forms (subjective Formen) – that is, regarding Kant’s conception of subjectivity and the formality of the a priori. Kant characterises the a priori nature of space as subjective and formal because he fails to pinpoint the essential connection between sensuous material and form. Instead, he starts by separating them off from each other. In fact, Kant does indeed understand matter as “being formed from the beginning” (sofort schon geformt) by time and space, such that the idea of a sensuous quality deprived of any spatial-temporal form (eine Qualität, die nicht geformt wäre) remains inconceivable. (Stumpf, 1873, 12-13) Moreover, in his initial definition of matter and form, Kant correctly claims that any ordering rests upon an “absolute positive content that is at its foundation” – such that space is identified
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with an absolute formal content that grounds all forms of ordering and all spatial relations.24 However, this absolute space is in Kant’s account equated with a sort of absolute formal content that remains irreducible and opposed to sensations; it is that in which they come to be ordered. As a result, the formal principle of space is taken to be opposed to all sensuous qualities and as being imposed upon the latter in an extrinsic manner.25 Form is understood to be “superimposed by us” (durch uns hinzugebracht, Stumpf, 1873, 14) on a material intrinsically devoid of form, thereby setting the stage for the presupposition driving associationist theories. This is none other than the idea of a sensuous material originally devoid of any extensive dimension, from which arises the need to explain its acquisition of extensive properties. Now, if we turn the question around for a moment, “how is such an opposition conceivable?” Moreover, “what is the basis for the polarity” (Stumpf, 1873, 14) between matter and form, if they can never be given separately? What sort of argument, model, or thought experiment would lead one to distinguish something that, in the phenomena themselves, is never given in isolation? In this regard, Stumpf focuses his attention on the second argument in Kant’s metaphysical exposition of space, by which Kant separates the spatial form from all sensuous material. Writing that “die Qualitäten können wir hinwegdenken, den Raum nicht,” Kant’s argument is that it is possible to represent space without qualities, but not to represent qualities without space. (Stumpf, 1873, 19) However, such an argument hardly accords with actual experience: 24
Stumpf, 1873, 15: “There is not order or relation without a positive content, which is found at its foundation [keine Ordnung oder Relation ohne einen positiven, absoluten Inhalt, der ihr zugrunde liegt], and enables something to be able to be ordered in such a precise manner. If not, why and how could we distinguish one form of order from another?” This claim is reaffirmed in the text from 1906: “The spatial and temporal distributions of sensuous phenomena are in no wise to be defined as mere relationships [bloße Verhältnisse]. The difference between right and left, now and before is for our consciousness an absolute distinction. However, in these differences in place and in absolute time, relationships are grounded” Stumpf, 1906, note p. 4). 25 Stumpf cites the key passage from the beginning of the Transcendental Aesthetic: “Da das, worinnen sich die Empfindungen allein ordnen und in gewisse Form gestellt werden können, nicht selbst wiederum Empfindung sein kann […]”. (A 20/B 34 (emphasis added); Stumpf, 1873, 14)
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the fact itself is an illusion. […] One absolutely cannot represent space without any quality – e.g. through sight without any colour, by touch without any feeling of contact – nor, in a more general manner, separated from any sense whatsoever [abgetrennt von allen Sinnen]. (Stumpf, 1873, 19)
If one considers the thought experiment invoked by Kant, in which thought is divested of all colour, what would remain would not be the pure form of space, but only obscurity, that is, a black expanse (“alle übrigen Farben weggedacht, bleibt Schwarz (eine schwarze Fläche)”). (Stumpf, 1873, 23) Such imaginary experiences thus evince the phenomenon of the reciprocal inseparability of space and sensuous qualities. And this inseparability of matter and form does not exhibit a purely subjective or psychical character, but rather appears to be objective or ontological in nature. This is because it is not a matter of mere subjective inability to represent each separately. It rather comes down to a consciousness of the objective impossibility for such contents to be separated: [C]ontents of which, according to their nature, the one cannot be thought without the other, can no longer be thought of as objectively existing without each other [auch nicht als objectiv ohne einander gedacht werden]. (Stumpf, 1873, 22)
In short, this inability to be represented otherwise is not attributable to a subjective impossibility inherent to consciousness insofar as it is separated from contents. Instead, it points to a consciousness of an objective impossibility – that is, the realisation, intuitive corroboration, or evidence of a necessary connection between contents. It is a “datum in consciousness of apodictic evidence”.26 Stumpf’s description consequently entails the de-subjectification of the a priori; when things appear to us spatially, this is not because space is, for us and in us, an a priori form of sensibility ready to be imposed upon all sensuous material. Rather, they appear in space because extension holds an infrangible and apodictic connection with visual and tactile qualities – no matter the type of subject that perceives such qualities! In this way, the a priori nature of space no longer relies on being grounded in the status of a subjective form. 26
Here, we have purposely paraphrased Husserl’s famous arguments in § 7 of the third Logische Untersuchung (Husserl, 1984, 242-243)
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3) Stumpf expresses this relationship of inseparability of extension and qualities with the help of a mereological conceptual framework, that is, a certain conception of the relation between psychic parts or partial contents within a unitary whole. Within this framework, he can thus elaborate a general theory of relationships of representation conjoined in function of co-belonging (Zusammengehörigkeit) and lineage (Verwandtschaft) of contents of representation. (Stumpf, 1873, 106 sq) The perspective of Zusammengehörigkeit allows him to distinguish between two classes of contents: independent or autonomous contents (selbständige Inhalte), and partial contents (Theilinhalte). Here, independence is defined by the possibility of a separate representation, whereas the partial character of a content depends to the contrary on the impossibility of such a representation: we are confronted with independent contents with regard to which, according to their nature, we can also represent individual elements of a complex of representations; however, we are equally confronted with partial contents where this is not the case. (Stumpf, 1873, 109)
Accordingly, space and qualities are partial contents of one same whole. They cannot in fact be represented separately, but “are, in virtue of a necessity stemming from their very nature, apprehended in and together with each other” (naturnothwendig in und miteinander erfaßt), just as the quality and the intensity of a sound are. (Stumpf, 1873, 273) If one reduces to nil the surface across which a colour is spread, it disappears as a quality, which proves that it is co-affected (mit afficirt) by the change in extension (Stumpf, 1873, 113), and that each cannot be simply seen as mere terms within a sum (bloß Glieder einer Summe).27 According to this view, a certain status can be attributed to space; it becomes a form or absolute content that is perceived just as immediately as qualities are, and is perceived conjointly with them, given that it forms alongside them a unified and indivisible whole. Space is a koinon aistheton,28 which together with the idia aistheta (the qualities) form an unbreakable whole: 27
Stumpf, 1873, 114. Likewise, see p. 273: “Daß bei jeder Änderung der Ausdehnung die Farbe mitafficirt wird.” 28 Stumpf, 1873, 6 (where Stumpf makes reference to Aristotle and Locke) and 301: “With Aristotle, we must consider space as a true aistheton koinon”.
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space is perceived just as originally and directly as the qualities [ebenso ursprünglich und direct wahrgenommen wird, wie die Qualität]; and this is because they form one sole, indivisible content [einen untrennbaren Inhalt bilden]. (Stumpf, 1873, 115) (…) the “attributes” such as quality, intensity, extension, etc., do not form a sum, but a whole whose parts are in fact only abstractions made after the fact. (Stumpf 1924, 31)
4) The foregoing then sets the stage for understanding the paradoxical status attached to the notion of Ursprung in this account of the origin of the representation of space. Since for Stumpf space is from the beginning (originally!) co-perceived in all sensuous representation, his account of its origin is able to forgo any model of space based on its temporal genesis or its active production. The term ‘origin’ here thus has little to do with either an original genesis or primitive acquisition that would be conditioned by certain types of punctiform impressions (visual, tactile, muscular) or by acts of thought (association, acceleration of ordered suit of sensations). Instead, the question of origin in this context simply concerns the disclosure of the eidetic relationship that grounds the necessary co-presence of space in all sensuous representation. This is why no recourse can be taken here – as would Condillac – to the methodological artifice of a primitive formation, of a first-time hypothesis out of which spatial representation would be fashioned. The question of origin for Stumpf refers to its mode of necessary presence in every perception of a spatial type.29 In Stumpf’s classification of representations, this means the representation of space is actual (wirklich), that is, truly acquired and perceptual in character (and not just a product of imagination or memory), and that its representation is concrete, that is, intuitive (and not just produced by thought; Stumpf, 1873, 3). If we may risk phrasing the matter paradoxically, ‘origin’ denotes a structural genesis: namely, the elucidation of the autonomous structuring of sensuous contents according to immanent forms (time, space). This is why nativistic theories constituted a decisive im29
Stumpf, 1873, 127: “It has thus equally become clear that, when it is a question of the representation of space such as we have considered it here, it could not simply be a matter of its incipient formation [erstmalige Bildung], but of its genesis in each case in which we have such a representation [ihre Entstehung in jedem Falle, wo wir sie haben]”.
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provement over empiricist positions,30 but only on the express condition that nativism be sufficiently distinguished from assumptions about the innateness of space and time; while the innatist view holds certain representations to be innate, that is, constitutive of the human mind (or of finite subjectivity), nativism claims that formal contents like space are co-given with certain sensuous impressions, to the point of constituting a “native a priori”.31 This status as native a priori does not mean that the forms of representation inhere within a type of (human or finite) sensing subject instead of God, but instead entails the inherence of a formal content in certain impressional contents. It is therefore not a noetic necessity in the subject, and is thus free from any supposition as to the nature of the perceiving subject. 5 De-subjectification of the analysis of partial contents: the method of independent variation 1) A remaining difficulty concerns a Berkeleyian sort of problem. By what right, asked Berkeley, can abstract ideas be distinguished from each other, if the latter cannot de facto be perceived discretely and distinctly (Berkeley, 1996, 9-11)? Stumpf confronts the same issue; what enables thought to break an intuitive whole down into separate partial contents, if the latter can only be co-perceived within that whole? Framing the problem in terms of space: if space and colour constitute the inseparable contents of an “indivisible whole” (untrennbarer Inhalt; Stumpf, 1873, 7, and 115) or a “unitary whole” (einheitlicher Inhalt; Stumpf, 1873, 129 and 135), then how do we come to distinguish between them and to identify them as distinct parts? Is this differentiation a legitimate act of thought, or a falsification of the immediate intuitive data? Precisely within that field of experience where contents are not able to be represented in a separate state [getrennt] (Stumpf, 1873, 109-110), is it possible and appropriate to separate them? In a word, “how do we come to distinguish the two [scil. quality and place], and what is the meaning of such a distinction?” 32 Is the 30
Stumpf 1924, 44: “This conception, according to which a colour is hardly possible without extension, just as extension is impossible without some or other quality, and according to which, for this reason, the first visual sensations have to appear spatially (nativism), almost completely prevailed over empiricism which, at the time of Lotze, was predominant among psychologists”. 31 See Husserl 1950, 114: “Ein Reich des ‘eingeborenen’ Apriori”. 32 Stumpf, 1873, 129: “How do we come to distinguish both, and what is the meaning
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mereological framework a legitimate one here, or must we renounce using concepts of the whole and the part in this context? Doesn’t this problem establish the necessity (recognised in fine by Stumpf) of abandoning the mereological concept of “psychological parts”? 33 What is the nature of psychological parts, if their distinguishing feature does not lie in how they are different parts of a concrete and intuitive representation? Through which sort of analytical method of thought do we manage to resolve a unitary intuitive whole into individual elements, in accordance with the chemical paradigm of the decomposition of material into its elementary constituents? The method of independent (non-concurrent) variation is the key to Stumpf’s response here; psychological parts are not anything other than the possibility, for a content that is in itself unitary [in sich einheitlicher Inhalt], to change in diverse manners 34 [verschiedenartiger Veränderungen].
Let us try to map out his line of reasoning here. If we limit consideration to the case of simultaneously perceived qualities, the guiding principle seems to dictate that “one can only distinguish that which one has perceived separately”. 35 For example, in an orchestral arrangement, one can only analyse the overall sound and distinguish single sounds if they have already been heard in a separate state. Are we then entitled to transpose this principle of differentiation of the field of simultaneous qualities to the case of partial contents (Stumpf, 1873, 134-135)? The case of the whole formed by space and sensuous qualities presents in this respect an altogether different difficulty. Namely, space is never able to be perceived separately, such that it is impossible to refer back to the antecedence of an isolated perception! of this distinction? [wie kommen wir dazu, beide zu unterscheiden, und welches ist der Sinn dieser Unterscheidung]?” 33 Stumpf 1924, 40: “Husserl worked out the conceptual aspect of these considerations [on the psychological parts]. I returned to the question in my essay on the attributes of visual sensations, and I abandoned the expression ‘psychological parts,’ which I found inadequate”. (emphasis added) 34 Stumpf, 1873, 274. See also 135: “Die verschiedenen Änderungsweisen des einheitlichen Inhalts A”. 35 Stumpf, 1873, 132: “Unterschieden wird nur, was getrennt wahrgenommen worden ist”.
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The case of partial contents thus requires that, instead of insisting upon the possibility of separating the contents themselves, we turn attention to how different modes of change within those contents can be delineated. For instance, it is possible to vary just one parameter of a sound (its intensity) while leaving the rest unchanged (pitch, timbre), in such a way as to highlight its intensity as a capacity of independent change. (Stumpf, 1873, 135-136) Likewise, one can observe the size of a surface, the intensity of a colour, the space of a coloured swath, etc., by making each vary in a separate manner. Although actual (perceptual) representations enjoy a certain primacy vis-à-vis imaginary ones, phantasy can become a vital element of analytical knowledge, counterbalancing the holistic character of intuition. Each modality of separable or independent variation allows one to detach from the intuitive whole a concept of partial content. 2) Does Stumpf thus anticipate the Husserlian method of eidetic variation, by which one arrives at the intuition of material essences (Husserl, 1954, 410-420)? While it might be going too far to say Stumpf’s is a method irreconcilable with eidetic variation, we should at least note that it is a method employed for purposes that run completely counter to Husserl’s aims. For example, in Husserl, the eidetic variation of colour serves to show the eidetic connection between colour and extension, and thereby to evince the eidetic invariance of extension. For Stumpf, on the other hand, the same variation makes plain how colour can be the Theilinhalt of an intuitive complex – while bringing extension into relief would, for its part, be effected by an independent variation of size and position. Variation in each case is thus put at the service of entirely antithetical ends. In Husserl, the goal is the demonstration of the synthetic laws of essence by which contents are bound together; in Stumpf, it is the demonstration of the degrees of analytic freedom available within the intuition of wholes. That is, for the first, it is an instrument for uncovering the synthetic a priori; for the second, it serves to disclose analytic constituents of the representation. 3) One final issue is inspired by Gestalt psychology. If we only perceive unitary wholes that include both extension and qualities, does the analytical perusal of extension constitute an artificial procedure
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that abstractly distorts, after the fact, the intuitive data of our perception?36 Without overly complicating matters, any suitable response here must nonetheless reflect a sufficient degree of nuance: The result is thus the following: the plurality under question in the unity [fragliche Mehrheit in der Einheit] rests upon an act of putting oneself in the position of something [Hineindenken]. […] However, it is not arbitrary [nicht willkürlich], but necessary [nothwendig]. This is because any similarity and any distinctness are imposed upon us by the content itself [vom Inhalt selbst aufgedrungen]. To use the Scholastic term, we establish a distinctio cum fundamento in re. (Stumpf, 1873, 139)
On the one hand, in order to break down the unitary whole into its components, one adopts a method analogous to the one used by Herbart in metaphysics, namely, arbitrary variation of points of view.37 Its aim is to separate space from qualities shown together with it, by successively adopting distinct points of view, in order to produce an independent variation (namely, by first varying the relationships of size and position, and then the qualities). Thus, these extrinsic points of view of the variation are truly transposed into (hineingedacht) contents of representation by thought or imagination. On the other hand, however, variation does not come down to an arbitrary subjective will, but remains cum fundamento in re, as imposed by the nature of contents themselves – such that in variation there is no trace of a methodological artifice bringing along with it a set of conceptual artifices. The differentiation of space from colour is in fact only the analogon of a natural process of thought, namely, the spontaneous realisation of the attributes of a thing on the basis of what we experience of it in such and such circumstances. For example, even if we do not currently perceive something, we still spontaneously attribute a colour to it because we know that that thing has the capacity to awaken in us certain visual impressions; we thus transpose into the thing, under the form of a permanent property, something that 36
This also appears to be suggested by the formulation cited above from the Selbstdarstellung. (Stumpf 1924, 31) 37 Literally, Methode der zufälligen Ansichten: “method of arbitrary points of view”. (Stumpf, 1873, 140)
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is only a potential way for it to act upon our senses in conjunction with certain circumstances.38 The formation of general concepts has to do with the same tendency; they denote something that is not detachable from the capacity to perceive lone representations.39 The same holds true, finally, for how partial contents are shown. A kind of hypostasis is certainly involved here (given that we have no separate intuition of them), but only one that is grounded in an actual capacity to invoke independent variation of one sole component of the representation. An operative possibility is thus converted into a property of the representation. It is no doubt for this reason that Stumpf took so long to renounce the mereological conceptual framework. Strictly speaking, extension is not a real part of the unitary whole that is the coloured surface, for it only shows itself through variation. What we refer to as a separate formal entity is thus only the correlate of an operative possibility, and has no ontological permanence of its own. 6 Conclusion If Stumpf’s thought has an unsung import within the history of philosophy, specifically from a teleological perspective, this is for several key reasons. 1) He offers an interpretation of the Brentanian methodological requirement that leans toward an intuitionist imperative, or toward a return to the intuitive data of perception, without any theoretical construction built upon conceptual artifices. 2) He stresses the autonomy of the sensuous sphere, which is considered as governed by specific laws available to descriptive elucidation, as well as the demonstration of the holistic principle that holds sway within that sphere. 3) Stumpf undertakes the de-subjectification of the a priori, that is, he defends a thesis according to which the a priori laws of the sensuous sphere are the necessary connections between noematic contents 38
Stumpf, 1873, 136-137 : “There we find a particular trait of our usual manner of thinking; when a thing only does or undergoes something under certain circumstances, this is ultimately only a capacity or a possibility in relation to that thing. However, we seem to transpose this possibility or capacity onto the thing itself [verlegen wir in das Ding] as if it were a property that is actually and constantly inherent within it”. 39 Stumpf, 1873, 136-137.
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of representation, and not forms of necessity grounded in the structure of finite subjectivity. 4) He also argues for the de-subjectification of the analytic dimensions of the phenomenon, running parallel to that of the a priori: just as any form of ordering is based on an absolute positive content, any mode of variation allowing a whole to be analysed according to its parts is likewise a possibility grounded in the structure of the represented contents. 5) These crucial positions within Stumpf’s doctrine together entail a need to reform ontology (specifically, the ontology of the doctrine of the categories). Stumpf did indeed envision the principle behind this reform without necessarily having realised it; given that the categories denote the modes of connection between psychological parts of a unitary intuitive whole and lend themselves to identification through independent variation of dimensions of the sensible, the categories are wholly anchored in the perceptual sphere. One can discern there the emergence of a recurrent theme in the germinal stages of phenomenology, namely, the re-evaluation of sensibility – understood not as a faculty, but as a general heading for the elucidation of the structures and laws of sensuous contents – and the sensuous mooring for every analysis of the higher functions of thought. All these are powerful lines of thought that in our view bring to the fore the subterranean, but nonetheless central role played by Stumpf in the further elaboration of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.40 References Berkeley, G. 1996. Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, H. Robinson (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press. Brentano, F. 1911. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Zweiter Band: Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, Hamburg, Meiner (1925, 19712). Brisart, R. 2007. “Les premières articulations du fonctionnement intentionnel: le projet d’un Raumbuch chez Husserl entre 1892 et 1894 ”, Philosophiques 34/2 (2007), pp. 259-272. Descartes, R. 1647. Principes de la philosophie, in Œuvres, ed. by Ch. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris, Girard, 1897-1913, vol. IX/2. Fichant, M. 1997. “L’espace est représenté comme une grandeur infinie donnée: la radicalité de l’Esthétique,” Philosophie n° 56. Heidegger, M. 1927. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Niemeyer. –– 1979. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, in Martin Heideggers Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt a.M., Klostermann, Bd. 20. 40
Translated by Basil Vassilicos.
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Husserl, E. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, in Husserliana: Edmund Husserl - Gesammelte Werke, vol. I (Hua I), Den Haag, M. Nijhoff. –– 1950a. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II, Den Haag, M. Nijhoff. –– 1954. Erfahrung und Urteil, Hamburg, Glaassen & Goverts. –– 1970. Philosophie der Arithmetik, Hua XII, Den Haag, M. Nijhoff. –– 1973. Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, Hua XVI, Den Haag, M. Nijhoff. –– 1974. Formale und transzendentale Logik, Hua XVII, Den Haag, M. Nijhoff –– 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, erstes Buch: allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Hua III/1, engl. transl. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. 1, General introduction to a pure phenomenology, in Collected Works, Vol. II, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1983. –– 1983a. Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie, Hua XXI, Den Haag, M. Nijhoff. –– 1984. Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901), Hua XIX/1, Den Haag, M. Nijhff. Kant, I., 1926, Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, in Kantʼs gesammelte Werke, Berlin, de Gruyter, Bd. XVII. –– 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Popescu, V. 2003. “Espace et mouvement chez Stumpf et Husserl,” Studia Phænomenologica, vol. III, n° 1-2/2003. Stumpf, C. 1873. Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig, Hirzel. –– 1906. “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen,” Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philos.-historische Klasse, Berlin, Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (in Stumpf, 1997, 101142). –– 1924. “Carl Stumpf” (Selbstdarstellung) in R. Schmidt, (Hrsg.) Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Bd. 5. Leipzig, Meiner, 1-57. –– 1997. Schriften zur Psychologie, ed. by H. and L. Sprung, Frankfurt a.M., Lang.
STUMPF ON ABSTRACTION GUILLAUME FRÉCHETTE (UNIVERSITY OF SALZBURG)
Abstract. From the point of view of Husserl’s critique of empiricist theories of abstraction in the Logical Investigations, it seems that Brentano and most of his students would have endorsed the presupposition of Locke’s theory of abstraction, which Husserl labels as the ‘psychological hypostatization of the general’. For Husserl himself, but also for most of his followers, the motivation behind this critique is that the descriptive psychology of the School of Brentano leads to psychologism if one doesn’t accept Platonic ideal objects. In the following article, I argue that Husserl’s critique doesn’t do justice to the accounts of abstraction developed in the school of Brentano. I take here the particular case of Carl Stumpf, showing that not only does Husserl’s accusation miss its target, but also that it attributes indirectly to Stumpf a position that he didn’t defend. I suggest that even before the Logical Investigations, Stumpf formulated the basis of an account of abstraction in terms of generalization, an account which will later turn out to be in many ways compatible with Husserl’s theory of Spezies in the Logical Investigations, and which provide a viable alternative both to Platonism and to Empiricism, thereby calling for a reassessment of the positions on abstraction in the School of Brentano.
1 Abstraction in the School of Brentano It has often been stated that the account of perception developed in the school of Brentano owes much to the British Empiricist tradition, and in particular to Locke. According to Brentano’s account (and to the accounts of many of his students), what the mind perceives are not external objects but so-called contents, which are caused by external objects. With the exception of the term ‘content’, to which he prefers ‘idea’, Locke would agree with this description. In addition, from very early on Brentano agreed with Hume to the effect that inseparable parts of a visual perception, like the form and the colour of a perceived object, may be distinguishable through exercise and practice, but that these parts are inseparable in the real act of perception. Distinguishing between them is then nothing other than a distinctio ra-
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tionis – which is the work of abstraction understood as a psychological function. In this context, it is not surprising to see that Brentano and his school tackled the problem of abstraction along similar lines to the British Empiricists. Like the British Empiricists, Brentano and his school were concerned with the possibility of abstraction as a mental faculty, and correlatively, with the possibility of the existence of such abstract entities. In his published writings at least, Brentano himself didn’t take great pains to debate the metaphysical aspect of the problem of abstraction – namely the question of whether there are abstract objects, or universals. Throughout his career, he regarded Platonic realism as a mistake in which being is attributed to universals, and thus he considered the position indefensible: universals in the Platonic sense never were part of his ontology.1 In his view, the problem of abstraction is primarily of an epistemological or psychological nature: do abstract presentations constitute a specific category of mental activities, distinct from concrete presentations, or do they belong to the same category? In the latter case, how are they to be distinguished from concrete presentations? Is abstraction a well-defined mental operation distinct from the mere perception of intuitive presentations and their contents? Considering only his published works, it might seem that Brentano never really settled these questions. Over the course of his career, he and his students developed different accounts of abstraction. Without clearly arguing for a core position, Brentano was originally inclined to favour the view that abstract and intuitive presentations are simply two varieties of one single intentional mode – namely, presenting. As two varieties of presenting, distinct in virtue of, among other things, their respective degrees of intensity, abstract and intuitive presentations basically belong to the same class of mental acts on this view. This position has been widely discussed among Brentano’s students, 1
It is therefore surprising to read in Rosen (2012), that ‘the common theme [between Frege, Bolzano, and Brentano and his pupils] is the felt need in semantics and psychology as well as in mathematics for a class of objective (i.e., non-mental) supersensible entities’. Although this may apply to the first two philosophers mentioned, it is definitely not the case for Brentano. See, for example, the early Brentano in his 1867 lectures on metaphysics: ‘all arguments, on which is based the supposition of ideas outside the individual, are void’ (‘Alle Argumente, worauf die Annahme der Ideen ausser den Einzeldingen ruht, sind nichtig’). (M96, B 17311) On the mistake of Plato’s realism, see also Brentano. (1925, 276); (1925a, 136); (1976, 200); (1986, 76)
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and he himself called it, in his Vienna lectures on logic, a ‘monistic’ or ‘noetic-monistic’ position. This was generally opposed to the socalled ‘dualistic’ or ‘noetic-dualistic’ view, according to which intuition and abstraction consist of two different modes of intentional relation.2 In discussion and correspondence with Marty and Stumpf between the 1870s and the end of the 1890s, Brentano later came to refine his views on the relation between intuition and abstraction, moving from a ‘monistic’ account to a weak ‘noetic-dualistic’ view. Since they exchanged extensively on these issues, since Brentano considered Stumpf his most promising student,3 and since the views developed by the teacher evolved constantly, a closer look at the conceptions developed mutually by Stumpf and Brentano might give us a privileged view on the debates surrounding the problem of abstraction in the school of Brentano. As a matter of fact, the evolution of their respective views on abstraction is rather peculiar: they both first advocated for a ‘monistic’ account in the early 1870s, then developed, between the mid-1880s and the mid-1890s, using different resources, a socalled ‘ennoetist’ account along the lines of the first account, according to which abstraction works in conjunction with attention, which is an act of interest. Finally, at the end of the 1890s, they both rejected the ennoetist-monistic view of abstraction for very different reasons: even if it makes sense to say that both Stumpf and Brentano came to endorse a weak version of dualism, this doesn’t do justice to the divergence in their respective positions. Where Stumpf started to argue for the necessity of a specific abstractive function called generalization, Brentano argued for a conception of abstraction as a higher-order presentation. At first glance, getting a better look at the development of abstraction in the early school of Brentano might seem to be a mere philological exercise, in particular from the perspective of Husserl’s critique of empiricist theories of abstraction in the Logical Investigations:4 without mentioning Brentano as an advocate of such theories, Husserl thought that Twardowski’s largely Brentanian account of general 2
See Brentano, EL72, 12333. Marty borrows this distinction from Brentano in his lectures on descriptive psychology from 1894/95. See Marty (2010, 115). 3 See Brentano’s letter to Stumpf of 1903, in this volume. 4 See especially the 5th Chapter of the second Logical Investigation, Husserl (1901, 184).
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presentations suffered from the mistakes of Locke’s theory of abstraction, which he called the ‘psychological hypostatization of the general’ – a form of psychologism. 5 Stumpf’s theory of abstraction in terms of selective attention to partial contents (Stumpf 1890) is also subject to Husserl’s criticisms given in different places of the second Logical Investigation.6 Finally, since Marty, in correspondence with Husserl about the second Logical Investigation, objected to Husserl’s criticisms and explicitly advocated for a ‘psychological hypostatization of the general’,7 it makes good sense, at least from Husserl’s perspective, to see the abstraction theories of Stumpf and Brentano and the psychologism in the theory of knowledge as two sides of the same coin.8 Still today, this narrative seems to be dominant when it comes to characterizing Husserl’s position in the Logical Investigations and his criticism of psychologism, which are seen against the background of his philosophical upbringing as a member of the School of Brentano.9 The idea behind this narrative, to put it crudely, is that the descriptive psychology of the School of Brentano leads to psychologism if one doesn’t accept Platonic ideal objects.10 However, there are good reasons to question this narrative, precisely when one considers the evolution of the accounts sketched above. If Husserl’s accusation that a ‘psychological hypostatization of the general’ might apply to some of Brentano and Stumpf’s early accounts of abstraction, this clearly doesn’t do justice to the accounts developed in the late 1890s, as I 5
Husserl 1901, 121ff. See especially Husserl (1901, §§19 and 40). 7 See HUABW01, 75ff. 8 It seems that Husserl already held this view in 1897, when he writes to Natorp that his Logical Investigations, on which he was still working, were ‘directed against the subjectivist-psychologizing logic of our time (thus against the standpoint which I advocated earlier as a pupil of Brentano)’ (HUABW05, 43). 9 Husserl himself contributed decisively to the understanding of his phenomenology as fundamentally distinct from Brentano’s philosophy. See, for instance, the preface of the second edition of the Logical Investigations (Hua XVIII, 7), or his ‘Reminiscences of Brentano’: ‘I was an enthusiastic pupil […] still, it was not to be that I should remain a member of his school’. (Husserl 1976, 53) 10 Huemer (2004, 203) formulates the idea very clearly: ‘Only after having accepted the realm of ideal objects, could Husserl give up Brentano’s empirical standpoint’. Others, like Willard (2002, 80), see the critique of psychologism as incompatible with the School of Brentano: ‘Husserl ceased to be in the School of Brentano at some point in the 1890s’. 6
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want to show. In Stumpf’s case in particular, not only does the accusation miss its target, but it also attributes to Stumpf a position that he didn’t defend. In fact, as I will suggest, as early as 1896 – 5 years before the publication of the Logical Investigations – Stumpf formulated the basis of an account of abstraction in terms of generalization, an account which will later turn out, with some exception, to be in many ways compatible with Husserl’s theory of Spezies in the Logical Investigations. In what follows, I start with a reconstruction of the different accounts of abstraction in the school of Brentano, including Stumpf’s, which led to the so-called weak dualist view defended by the school between 1891 and 1902 (sections 1 to 3). In the second part of the paper (sections 4 and 5), I show how Stumpf’s later account of abstraction remained true to Brentano’s rejection of Platonic ideal objects, while also offering an account of the ‘products’ or Gebilde of abstraction compatible with the objectivity of concepts and propositions – a demand which Brentanian descriptive psychology wouldn’t be able to meet, at least according to Husserl and the narrative surrounding the development of his phenomenology. More generally, the reconstruction provided here aims to show that, contrary to what is supposed by the received view based on Husserl’s critique of psychologism in the Logical Investigations, there is no ‘standard psychologistic account’ of abstraction defended by the School of Brentano, neither by Brentano himself, nor by Stumpf or Marty – who usually are considered to be the most representative members of the school. 2 The starting point: the ‘monistic’ account of abstraction As is commonly known, Brentano held the view that judicative and emotional mental acts are based on more primitive ones, namely presentations. These in turn are also based on a variety of primitive presentations called sensations. When I judge that the Eiffel Tower exists, my judgment is an acceptance of the presented object: the Eiffel Tower. Now the Eiffel Tower is not an object of sensation: sensations have as objects sensory qualities like colours and tones and their properties, like intensity, constancy, luminosity, etc. This is the reason why Brentano suggests that the presentation of an object such as the Eiffel Tower is an ‘abstract presentation’ based on single simple presentations: sensations of colour, of different shapes in spatial organization, etc. In other words, I don’t have ‘the Eiffel Tower’ as an object of
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presentation in intuition when I present it. Rather, I am presented intuitively with single colours and shapes, which build the content of my sensation and which Brentano calls ‘physical phenomena’. For an ordinary object such as the Eiffel Tower to become the content of a presentation, multiple acts of sensation are necessary, as well as the functions of analysis and abstraction. This is why Brentano calls presentations of ordinary objects and of properties abstract presentations: they involve an operation (of abstraction) on single acts of sensation. Such an operation may or may not be involved in a mental act: for example, seeing a red patch doesn’t involve this operation, while seeing different patches of red organized in space in the shape of a ball, i.e., seeing a red ball, involves such a operation of abstraction. In his published works, Brentano rarely discusses the nature and the role of abstraction – neither the psychological process nor the result of this process, namely abstract entities. However, his lectures and correspondence contain some useful precisions that make a reconstruction of his account of abstraction possible, and with it a reconstruction of some of the core issues regarding abstraction and abstract objects in his school. Taking these lectures as a starting point, we can roughly distinguish between four accounts of abstraction in Brentano’s works. The first account is developed as part of his theory of parts and wholes in the Würzburger metaphysics lectures of 1867, where, influenced by Aristotle (Met. 1034 b32), he proposes a distinction between three kinds of parts – thus formulating the problem of abstraction for the first time. Brentano distinguishes there between 1) physical parts, like single corns (parts) in a pile of corn (whole); 2) logical parts of an object, which are parts of the definition of its concept. For example, the property of being coloured is a logical part of the property of being red; and virtue is a logical part of courageousness. In his 1867 lectures, before turning to a non-propositional theory of judgment, Brentano used the locution ‘[…] is a logical part of_’ interchangeably with ‘[…] can be predicated of _’. And 3) metaphysical parts, which are non-physical parts, and are the determinations of an object, or its categories: substance, location, space, time, thinking, accidents, etc. In contrast with physical parts, which are themselves physical, metaphysical parts are called abstract parts or abstracta:11 an abstractum in this sense would be, for instance, the substance of 11
See Brentano, (M96, B17193).
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the telephone on my desk, taken in isolation from the other parts of the metaphysical whole in which the telephone inheres. Considered without its location, its spatial extension, its colour, etc., the telephone is nothing but an abstract object. The same holds for any other metaphysical part isolated from the whole.12 Following this account, taken from the Metaphysics lectures, Brentano goes on to say that an abstract presentation is obtained by taking in isolation a metaphysical part from the metaphysical whole, like the abstraction of [the substance of] Socrates without his accidents, or one of the accidents of ‘the great Socrates’ taken in abstraction from the metaphysical whole. Nothing is said here on the psychological operation of abstraction; Brentano is simply saying that abstract objects, like virtue, courageousness, or Socrate’s courageousness, are abstract in virtue of being isolated and non-autonomous parts of metaphysical wholes. However, these abstract objects are pure fictions. They are also called Essenzen, Spezies, Praedicamente, or Divisiva. In his view, these are simply fictio cum fundamento in re. Abstracta, or metaphysical parts, ‘are only determined as different things through a fiction of our understanding’.13 Abstracta are therefore divisiva: they are created by the mind ‘as entities’, but they are not genuine entities in Brentano’s early ontology.14 Stumpf endorsed this initial account in his book on spatial perception (Stumpf 1873). There, he argues that contents are generally presented ‘together’ (zusammenvorgestellt), but that this togetherness comes in two categories: autonomous contents (selbständige Inhalte) can be presented both together and separately, while partial contents (Teilinhalte) can’t be presented separately. Colour and extension, for instance, are Teilinhalte in this sense. This is where abstraction comes into play: in order to present extension separately from colour, I must make abstraction of it. Stumpf suggests an analogy between predication and the abstraction operated on partial contents, such that I can’t have a presentation of a property of an object without having a presentation of the object of which it is predicated. So in ‘copper is heavy’, heaviness is an abstractum, or a partial content, of the presentation of copper, since there is no heaviness without a body that has this quali12
See M 96, MS 31985 and 31535; see also Baumgartner (2013, 23). German original: ‘Sind nur durch Fiktion des Verstandes wie verschiedene Dinge gesetzt’ (B17359). 14 See also Chrudzimski & Smith (2004), 204. 13
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ty.15 Along the same lines as Brentano’s conception of metaphysical parts, Stumpf suggests that we see predicative relations as metaphysical wholes in which the single parts (here copper, and heaviness) are thought as a unity (i.e. as a metaphysical whole). The point about the inseparability of space and quality, and the analogous case of inseparability concerning presented predicates and their subjects, supports Stumpf’s view that space is a primitive element in presentations. To him space is as primitive as sensed qualities, e.g. colours, telling us that ‘there is a visual space, i.e. a particular sensory content which is sensed directly, in the same way as colour qualities and as a consequence of optical nervous processing, and which possesses all the characteristics we attribute to space’. (Stumpf 1873, 272) In his discussion of differentiation and perception (Stumpf 1873, 130ff), Stumpf develops a psychological application of Brentano’s theory of metaphysical (abstract) parts. When hearing a chord, both the inexperienced and the trained music listener perceive a unitary sensation, or a whole constituted by parts; while the trained music listener is able to distinguish the parts of the whole, the inexperienced music listener only has access to the unitary sensation. The differentiation of parts is conditioned by experience, training, and memory. It is indeed on this basis that a trained music listener will be able to distinguish between single tones in the hearing of a chord. While it is true to say that, strictly speaking, when listening to a C chord, both listeners hear the same chord and have the same presentation content, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that the single parts of the heard chord are equally perceived by both the inexperienced and the trained music listener. Presentation contents are by definition unitary contents, which may or may not be perceived distinctly.16 However, the distinctness of the perception doesn’t change anything with regard to the unitary nature of the content. Even if the single tones C, E, and G are not perceived by the untrained music listener when she hears a C chord, she still is presented with the same content as the trained music listener hearing a C chord. As Stumpf puts it, the […] plurality in unity rests on an operative thinking (hineindenken). Every content […] is in itself fully unitary, although a 15
Stumpf (1873, 113–114). Compare Stumpf 1873, 133: ‘We only distinguish what has been perceived separately’.
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plurality of relations attaches immediately to it for us, in the way these are fixed by linguistic expressions. The decomposition of the content itself is therefore only virtual, although it is not arbitrary, but necessary, since every similarity and every distinction is imposed upon us by the content itself. We operate – to quote an expression of the Scholastics – a distinctio cum fundamento in re’. (Stumpf 1873, 139)
The same kind of operative thinking is at play when it comes to general concepts: ‘we use to […] to treat [general concepts] as qualities or entities, or generally as something which would inhere the things or at least the individual presentations. General concepts only designate something which understanding makes with the individual presentations, or more precisely, the possibility, from the side of the latter, to sustain this operation’ (Stumpf 1873, 137). This position is in line with Brentano’s in the metaphysics lectures, and shares its conceptualist orientation. Abstract concepts, and abstracta in general, are therefore seen as the result of an operation realized on unitary contents. Since this operation is only virtual, the abstracta are merely conceptual. They are not ‘in’ things, yet they are nevertheless not purely linguistic entities, since they are grounded in things. To which extent should this account be labelled a ‘monistic’ account? The basic reason for calling Stumpf’s account monistic is that it characterizes abstraction as belonging to the category of mental operations (operating here on the class of presentations as a whole), and not to the category of mental acts or phenomena. As a consequence, primitive sensations, but also imaginative presentations, memory presentations, and even symbolic presentations all belong to one single class of mental phenomena. This makes it a ‘monistic’ account of abstraction since presentations involving abstraction (like the presentation of a single tone in a chord) are not categorically distinct from presentations that don’t involve abstraction (like the indistinct presentation of the chord). In both cases, we face one and the same content, with its ‘necessary’ or intrinsic decomposition structure. Since the operation realized on the contents by abstraction is merely ‘virtual’, socalled ‘abstract presentations’ are not structurally different from intuitive presentations. This is the gist of the monistic account. 3 The Ennoetist Account The second account of abstraction is first discussed in 1875 and seems to have been held, although with important variations, through differ-
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ent periods and until around 1900 by Brentano, Stumpf, and Marty. By 1875, Brentano had developed the view according to which abstracta, considered as collectives, are so-called intentional entities or immanent objects.17 In correspondence with Stumpf in 1876, Brentano recalls a discussion they had in 1875 in Vienna, in which he exposed a ‘new hypothesis’ to Stumpf concerning abstraction.18 Following this new hypothesis, abstracta can only be represented distinctly as parts in concreta, but not as such outside of them. Brentano also refers to Berkeley for support for this view. 19 More generally, he underlines that there is no authentic (or autonomous, ‘im eigentlichen Sinn’) abstract presenting.20 Along these lines, he began to leave the conceptualist account given in his metaphysics lectures aside, instead adapting his theory of abstraction as a part of his descriptive psychology. It is precisely in this context that he developed his theory of ennoetism. Brentano says of ennoetism that it shares with nominalism the idea that there is only one kind of presenting activity for both concrete and abstract presentations – in this sense, ennoetism is a form of monistic position – but that this one activity is guided by a more or less important degree of interest, which can allow the subject to focus on parts of the presentation.21 Such an account shares aspects of Mill’s conception of abstraction, according to which: we have, properly speaking [no general concepts]; we have only complex ideas of objects in the concrete: but we are able to attend exclusively to certain parts of the concrete idea; and by that exclusive attention, we enable those parts to determine exclusively the course of our thoughts. (Mill, 1979, 309)
Following Mills’ theory, but also Brentano’s in this respect, I can form the general concept of the colour red by focusing my attention on parts of a concrete presentation of a red object; but this doesn’t mean that I 17
See also EL72, 12342f. ‘[O]ur act of presentation, our whole self, as inner perception shows us, is a unity. The immanent object of the unitary complete presentation is a collective’. 18 See Baumgartner (ed.) (1992, 37). 19 See Berkeley (1734, §10): ‘[…] Extension, Figure, and Motion, abstracted from all other Qualities, are inconceivable’. The same passage was also discussed favorably against Kant’s understanding of space in Stumpf (1873, 24). 20 See Baumgartner (ed.) (1992, 42). 21 See for instance Brentano (EL72, 12340).
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have a general or abstract presentation of red (or that I am presenting red under a different mode) when I think about what is shared in general by red things.22 In his Vienna lectures on logic (EL 72), Brentano explains his theory in the following way: [I]n relation with the question of universals, it appears that when I also have no other presentations than individual presentations, in a certain way, I do have them [i.e. universals] – namely as partial presentations circumscribed through a particular interest – and this way is sufficient to give to the general name not simply a plurality of equivocal individual meanings, as the nominalists wanted, but rather a unitary, truly general sense. (Brentano EL 72, 12349)
As such, there is a sense in which we can say that Fred and his friend both form the same general concept of red, provided that they focus their attention on the same features of the presented object. In this way, the abstract name ‘colour’ is not a simple fiction, as it was in Brentano’s first account of abstraction in the Metaphysics lectures, instead it has a ‘truly general sense’, without requiring the acceptance of abstract entities in one’s ontology. This account introduces general presentations as having abstracta as intentional entities, isolated on the basis of an act of interest. These acts of interest are directed towards parts of presentation contents that are not intuitive as such. In other words, redness as an object of presentation is constituted by intuitive and non-intuitive parts: the intuitive parts are the visual content or individual presentations and its properties (hue, brightness, constancy, etc.), while the non-intuitive parts (the property of being a colour) are co-present in the presentation content, but are not accessible in presentations as such. Thanks to an act of interest in the relevant part of the presentational content, we can isolate the abstract presentation, which otherwise would simply be an indistinct part of the intuitive presentation of the red colour. But how does this work? According to ennoetism, the partial presentations that are focused upon are the object of a particular interest. These partial presentations are concepts – and thereby act as mediator for further psychical activities – on the sole basis of the act of 22
Compare Brentano (EL72, 12005): ‘Ennoetism is satisfactory. Without assuming a multiple mode of presenting, ennoetism gives an account of the difference between intuition and concept and an account of conceptual abstraction and combination’.
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interest directed towards them. Therefore, no parts of presentations are intrinsically conceptual; they are made conceptual by an act of interest: [T]here is only one mode of presenting activity, […] [but] through the detaching and unifying force of a particular interest, directed exclusively upon one or certain parts of the complete presentation, these parts of presentation can become mediator of nomination and presentational basis of judgings and emotional activities.23
Following this account, when I see a red table, the presentation of the table is a partial presentation, which in itself is not intuitive: I see only patches of colour. But this partial presentation contributes to the individuation of the object of my presentation. This contribution is not effected on the basis of a new mental activity – it’s just that this ‘partial presenting’ becomes the object of an act of attention. This attention is judgmental: I see the red table and I judge that ‘this presenting shows a red table’ or that ‘this presenting of a red table exists’. The focus thus bestowed upon the partial presentation of the table ‘elevates’, so to speak, the partial presentation to the level of a mediator (Vermittler) or a sign. According to ennoetism, concepts are to be considered as modified intuitions: they are modified thanks to the focus bestowed upon them by specific judgments or acts of interest or attention. As suggested en passant in the last quote, Brentano thinks that this interest, as the key element for abstractive thinking, also works with multiple partial presentations. Such an interest ‘can be directed unitarily toward multiple particular parts of a presentation’. (EL72, 12350) So, for example, I can hear and enjoy or take interest in a series of tones unitarily (einheitlich), and this enjoyment or interest is distinct from the enjoyment or interest taken in the tones individually, although at no point does it involve something like ‘fusion’ (Verschmelzung) of presentations: ‘that which “fuses” is the particular unitary interest’. (see EL72, 12350) I can also have a unitary interest in the multiple tones of a chord, which would make the presentation of the chord (or the melody) an abstract presentation. Finally, and more generally, the ennoetist theory can also account for compound con23
See Brentano (EL72, 12340). Interestingly, we find in Marty (1894/2010, 125) the exact same sentence.
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cepts, like disjunctive, reflexive, or contradictory concepts.24 In this way, the unitary interest directed toward multiple parts of presentations serves as an explanans for the fact that abstract presentations are not obtained through the mere sum of single intuitive presentations, without introducing a second mode of presenting, and correlatively, without having to accept abstract objects – which would be the objects of such a mode of presenting. In Halle, Stumpf partly integrated Brentano’s ennoetism into his account of abstraction, which was being developed at around the same time. The account developed in his psychology lectures, but also in his Tonpsychologie, can be summarized in the following way: an abstract feature gets isolated from the whole, although it is not, as such, thought of more precisely (vervollständigt). In some sense, one could say that the abstracted feature is an incomplete partial presentation. However, this isolating of the abstract feature doesn’t involve any change in the presenting activity as such: abstracting the feature doesn’t give me another presentation. Rather, it has what Stumpf calls a judicative difference: it is a noticing (Bemerken), a mode of perceiving belonging to the class of judgments (affirmations). Stumpf’s view of abstraction in the second volume of his Tonpsychologie (1890) bears many similarities to Brentano’s ennoetist account, but there are two important differences. First, Stumpf considers abstraction to be a function of judicative (bemerken) acts. Isolating a part from the whole of my presentation is for Stumpf a noticing of this part; it is not as such an act of interest. Noticing involves analysis, which means a noticing of a plurality, and relations (vergleichen). It is the noticing itself (and not the ‘noticed partial presentations’) that is subject to the interest (Stumpf speaks here of pleasure, (Lust)) involved in an abstractive process. In Stumpf’s view, while abstract parts of a presentation content are noticed thanks to the judicative act of noticing, this noticing can itself be conditioned by attention (Aufmerksamkeit), which Stumpf calls a ‘pleasure in noticing’ (Lust am Bemerken).25 Stumpf’s example is the hearing of the strokes of the clock: when suddenly the clock starts striking, I cannot but notice the strokes. The individual strokes are parts of my individual intuitive au24
See Brentano (EL72, 12357). Stumpf doesn’t affirm that every noticing is conditioned by attention. Extreme pain, for example, comes to perception without any need for attention. See Stumpf (1890, 282).
25
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ditory presentation, which are noticed as individual strokes. What makes me perceive them as a series of strokes – what makes me notice the strokes – and eventually allows me to reproduce in auditory imagination the series of strokes (and eventually allows me to count them as a series of seven strokes in this reproduction), is the pleasure I take in noticing them. This pleasure in noticing is also characterized by Stumpf as a ‘will to notice a content (as part of a whole) or the will to notice something in a content (parts or relations thereof)’. (Stumpf 1890, 284) In other words, what ones notices in perception are parts of a whole or the relations between the parts of a whole. Noticing isolates the parts or the relations between them, and the pleasure taken in noticing allows one to identify parts or relations between parts that are not only extended in space, but also extended in time. In this way, Stumpf’s account paves the way for the perception of temporally extended abstracta, like melodies. The second difference between Stumpf’s account of abstraction in Tonpsychologie and the Brentanian ennoetist account is correlated with the first. While in the Brentanian ennoetist framework it is the unitary act of interest that warrants the perception of complex wholes (like melodies or chords) as unitary objects of the same mode of presenting, rather than intuitive presentations – I hear melodies and chords in the exact same way as I hear single tones, according to the ennoetist view – the view advocated by Stumpf is based on fusion: it is an intrinsic property of some of the partial contents of a presentation that they have a more or less important degree of fusion. (Stumpf 1890, 65f.) Octaves, for instance, will have the highest degree of fusion in auditory perception, followed by fifths, fourths, etc. 26 I can single out some of the partial presentations of a general presentation by noticing them, but this singling out doesn’t necessarily depend on interest, and there is no unitary interest that binds the parts together.27 Rather, according to Stumpf in the Tonpsychologie, at least for some sensory cases like hearing tones, a multiplicity can be perceived directly without the help of a unitary act of interest. On this basis, Stumpf rejects the thesis that interest is an essential part of the abstrac26
There is an interesting debate in the correspondence between Brentano and Stumpf on fusion. See Brentano (1989). See also Martinelli (2013) for an account of this debate. 27 See Stumpf (1890, 282): ‘Not every noticing is an attending (Beachten), i.e. conditioned through and supported by attention’.
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tive process, although it is obviously involved in cases of attention. By introducing the idea of fusion, Stumpf allows for cases where multiplicities are perceived as such, and not as a single intuitive content. In short, although interest plays a role in abstraction, it doesn’t play the central role attributed to it by the Brentanian ennoetist account of abstraction. It should be noted in passing that Stumpf’s model of attention as pleasure taken in noticing the parts of a whole was also adopted by the early Husserl. In an early paper of 1893, Husserl clearly uses Stumpf’s distinction between the pleasure taken in noticing parts of the whole and the whole itself.28 Through distinguishing between the intuitive presence of an object in front of us – the intuition proper, e.g. the single tones heard – and the mere consideration of it in its absence – e.g. representing the tones (Repräsentation) as a melody –, Husserl suggests a similar account of the ‘intending something absent’ involved in the representation as that suggested by Stumpf in the case of noticing. Similarly to the act of noticing, in Husserl’s account the representation is moved by a feeling of pleasure taken in noticing, a ‘rein im Gegenstand aufgehende Lust am Bemerken’. 29 The fulfilling of the representation is characterized as a ‘liberation of tension’, ‘release of inhibition’, or a ‘discharge’.30 In other words, the pleasure taken in noticing is realized thanks to the fulfilled intuition, in which the noticed parts are given. While relying on Stumpf’s view of attention as Lust am Bemerken, Husserl however rejected in his 1893 paper the view that noticing is a kind of judgment; although he interprets this noticing as being moved by the pleasure taken in it. If ennoetism is a monistic view, as Marty and Brentano contend – i.e., a view in which the intuitive and abstract presentations are only gradually, and not categorically distinguished – it seems that Husserl had already rejected ennoetism by 1893. Since the representation (or noticing) constitutes for Husserl a different mode of consciousness than the intuition (Hua XXII, 115–116), the isolating role of abstraction is not performed by a judicative form of noticing; rather, abstraction is a representative function. 28
Husserl refers indeed to Stumpf (1890, 279ff.) in this paper. See Hua XXII, 293, 411. 30 Husserl speaks of ‘Lösung der Spannung’ (Hua XXII, 407, 411), ‘Befreiung’, ‘Erlösung der Hemmung’ (Hua XXII, 296), and ‘Entlastung’ (HuaXXII, 415). 29
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4 Abandonment of Ennoetism and Weak Dualism Although Stumpf’s account of attention as Lust am Bemerken bears important similarities to Brentano’s ennoetist conception of abstraction, the account developed in the Tonpsychologie departs significantly from the ennoetist account championed by Brentano between the 1880s and the 1890s. Brentano’s abandonment of ennoetism is clearly exposed in ‘Abstraction and Relation’, written in 1899, where he rejects the ennoetist account of abstraction for a different reason: before even being the focus of attention, the partial presentations must somehow be structured in a way that allows attention to isolate the relevant parts.31 This structure is what Brentano calls a thought (Gedanke), which involves both intuitive and predicative elements: If a being is presented, such that an object in the external world obtains, this external object is never presented exhaustively, but rather, as one says, in terms of certain features, but not in others. As a consequence, every object in the external world can be an object of different presentations. One grasps it in terms of these features, [while] another [grasps it] in terms of other features, others either completely or partially. Or, what means the same, there are different presentations, the objects of which are identical with each other. Something white, for instance, can be something sweet. Presentations that differ in content have the same object. (The features that are taken up in the presentation are its content.) […]. Then again, it can happen that a presentation becomes indeterminate by not taking up the object in all of its features. Such presentations are called general presentations, general concepts […]. Such general presentations are not found among our intuitions, but rather only among our thoughts which are formed from intuitions by means of abstraction. (Here the expression “thought” is restricted to a class of presentations. Very often judgments are also included under this term.) […] Thoughts are partly of intuitive, partly of predicative unity. The latter is given when the objects for presentations that differ in content are identified, and hereby a presentation of this identical [object] is formed. (Brentano 2013, 434)
It is likely that Stumpf also endorsed Brentano’s motives for rejecting ennoetism. A few years after the publication of the Tonpsychologie, 31
A similar point is made in 1894/95 in Marty (2010, 125ff.) and is discussed at length in the correspondence between Brentano and Marty.
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Stumpf makes an interesting remark in a letter to Brentano of the 17th March, 1896 – a few months before the Munich congress of psychology of 1896 – which indicates that he complemented his earlier view of attention as Lust am Bemerken with a view of abstraction or synthesis (Zusammenfassen) as a distinct kind of presenting: Concerning the “synthetic function”, on which I announced [a lecture] (which I will most likely not deliver, since I will be given enough time to speak in the opening address), I mean the synthesis of contents into different groups, e.g. in tonal impressions, where we add in thought [hineindenken] different rhythms, or in points, which can be unified into a figure, but also in abstract characteristics. It seems to me that there is here a function, which, in a certain sense, constitutes the opposite of perception, although numerous misunderstandings attached to such a notion since Kant. I intend to discuss them briefly. I don’t know however if you will agree with me on this thesis.32
Stumpf didn’t give the lecture announced in 1896 in Munich. But a similar lecture, if not the same lecture, was held in 1902 at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The lecture didn’t survive in a written form, but an abstract has been published in the protocols of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences: On Abstraction and Generalisation. Abstraction is the distinction of parts which cannot be given in isolation. The production of general concepts rests on a different act, to which, in analogy with other classes of intellectual functions, are also assigned particular products (Gebilde).33
Where Brentano, in Abstraction and Relation, speaks of abstraction as the product of thoughts (and not of presentations or judgments, as was the case in his account of ennoetism), which ‘are partly of intuitive, partly of predicative unity’, Stumpf suggests, rather (and at about the same time), that we introduce a function of synthesis, which would be a completely different act to the presentation or the judgment. In his published works at least, Brentano didn’t develop this account much further. In his lectures on descriptive psychology of 1891, we can already find elements suggesting that he had abandoned 32 33
See Stumpf’s letter to Brentano, March 17th, 1896, in this volume. Stumpf (1902, 593).
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ennoetism by that time. Indeed, in these lectures, the distinction between presentations, judgments, and acts of love and hate is given a marginal role; in fact, Brentano focuses there on the distinction between fundamental and superposed (supraponierte) acts: abstract presentations are said to be superposed on intuitive presentations in the same way as the judgment that the table exists is superposed on the presentation of the table.34 Since superposition of y on x means that x is one-sidedly separable from y, this also means that Brentano rejected the monistic view of the relation between intuitive and abstract presentations as early as 1891. In Marty’s lectures on psychology from 1894/95, an alternative account to ennoetism is proposed, which follows Brentano’s idea of a superposition relation between intuitive and abstract presentations: We assume with Aristotle a double presenting, that is [we assume] an abstract presenting beside the intuitive presenting, but we don’t [consider] the first in causal relation with the second, but rather in such an inner cohesion, that only one-sided separability subsists […] In our case, we can also call conceptual thought a superposed presenting. Through the assumption of such a superposed presenting, the phenomena of analysis and abstraction are explained in their particularity. (Marty 2010, 132)
In Marty’s account, intuitive and abstract presentations constitute two different modes of presenting, connected together by a relation of onesided separability, as Brentano suggested in his lectures on descriptive psychology in 1891. However, Marty adds that abstract ‘superposed’ presentations are correlated with predicative judgments, thanks to which the elements of the former are ‘thought together’: The key to our yet unsolved problem of conceptual synthesis lies in the particular phenomena of predicative judgements. [Predicative judgments] are namely nothing else than predicative synthesis, produced through reflection on those syntheses which are operated in judgment by the one who predicatively judges. The so-called synthesis in understanding is first and foremost a synthesis in judgment. (Marty 2010, 140f.) 34
See Brentano (1982, 84).
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Using Brentano’s own terms as a starting point, I propose to call this view a weak dualism, since it acknowledges a categorical distinction between intuitive and abstract presentations (which ennoetism rejected), while providing abstract presentations with a status of ontological dependency. The account is weak not only for an ontological reason, but also due to the contribution of the activity of judging – although not qua act of interest, but qua predicative function – to the formation of abstract concepts. 5 Stumpf’s late account of abstraction Already in the second volume of the Tonpsychologie, Stumpf had parted ways with ennoetism for two main reasons: abstraction from sensory content doesn’t necessarily involve an act of interest, but even when parts of a presentation are isolated and thereby noticed, it doesn’t always follow that these parts are attended to (beachtet). Noticing is a judicative function that doesn’t necessarily imply an act of interest. By introducing the idea of a synthetic function in his letter to Brentano in 1896, Stumpf made the first clear step in the direction of a dualist account of abstraction. The lecture on abstraction in 1902 in Berlin most likely confirmed this orientation. However, it was not before 1906/07 that Stumpf’s dualist account of abstraction was exposed in publications.35 In his papers on phenomena and mental functions (Stumpf 1906, 1906a), Stumpf distinguishes between two abstracting processes: the first, which he calls abstraction in the normal sense, consists simply in the isolation of single parts from a whole. This process of abstraction has a psychological reality, but it concerns only the distinction between concrete and abstract. The distinction between individuality and generality is not obtained through this process of abstraction. It rather involves what Stumpf calls generalization, which we will discuss later. While he shares with Brentano and Marty the basic idea behind weak dualism – according to which there is an abstract presenting superposed on intuitive presenting (Stumpf speaks of sensory contents, or sensations, as first-order phenomena and of abstract contents, or 35
In the notes of his Logic lecture from 1903, he also distinguishes between abstraction as a feature of perception and generalisation of logical parts, which leads to general concepts. See Stumpf (1903, 94).
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presentations (Vorstellungen) as second-order phenomena)36 – he definitively abandons the idea, defended by Brentano and Marty and still present in his Tonpsychologie, that perceiving and noticing are forms of judgment. In Stumpf (1906) and afterwards, perceiving and noticing (which he uses synonymously) are considered to be primitive functions, which actually precede and ground judgment. In the 1906 article, Stumpf doesn’t expand on the reasons that led him to change his mind about the nature of perception. However, parts of his motivations obviously lie in the fact that, even in the Tonpsychologie, noticing (considered then as distinct from an act of interest and as a judicative function) wasn’t considered an essential component in abstractive processes – so that, for example, the single tones in the perception of a chord are given as fused and are therefore perceived as a unity, without any contribution from further mental functions like noticing or attention. Therefore, there is a perception of structured wholes that is not constituted by a judicative act. The abstraction at play in the perception of these structured wholes is described in 1906 as a secondorder phenomenon, but the function to which it belongs is the same as the perception of first-order phenomena. Perception of first- and second-order phenomena is thus taken to be the most primitive mental function, upon which are based two further categories of functions: intellectual and emotional functions. This conception of perception as non-judicative and as the most primitive mental function has further consequences on Stumpf’s conception of abstraction, which also distances him further from Brentano’s core position: if the most primitive forms of perception are nonjudicative by nature, then what is given in these forms of perception is nothing over and above the phenomena themselves. Since judicative, or more generally intellectual functions are based on the primitive function of perception, predication (and with it the attribution of properties to a subject) is something that occurs only on an intellectual level. Therefore, on the primitive level of perception, we do not perceive any objects with their properties; we simply and strictly perceive phenomena.37 Rejecting the Brentanian thesis of perception as being judicative thus brings Stumpf to the conclusion that our access to objects and our 36 37
See Stumpf (1906, 16). On Stumpf’s conception of object, see Stumpf (1906, 34).
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access to phenomena are two different kinds of access to the world. We have access to phenomena by simply perceiving them, but our access to objects is mediated by a function distinct from perception, and thus of abstraction understood as a part of perception dealing with second-order phenomena. This function is what Stumpf calls generalization. Generalization is a synthetic function (Zusammenfassen) and aims at forming concepts, which are our way of accessing objects. Zusammenfassung or generalization is a function that has different kinds of correlates, depending on which kind of generalization is involved. These correlates are called by Stumpf ‘Gebilde’ – a term that is not easily translated.38 The most general correlate of generalization is the set (Inbegriff), or what Stumpf calls ‘the whole of what enters into consciousness as the specific result of a synthesis’ (1906, 29). More specifically, correlates are, for instance, concepts (as correlates of grasping or forming concepts), or gestalt-qualities, like melodies or geometrical figures (as correlates of grasping a form), but also states of affairs (as correlates of judgings and intellectual functions in general) and values (as correlates of emotional functions). These Gebilde, or ‘products’ of generalizations, enjoy relative independence from actual thought: when I say ‘Vienna is the capital of Austria’, the state of affairs expressed by the sentence is independent of my concrete judging voiced by the sentence. ‘We can conceptually think a Gebilde without its being momentarily content of the corresponding function, e.g. a state of affairs, without momentarily having a judgment of which it constitutes the content’ (1906, 32). This is the case, according to Stumpf, when we understand the meaning of a thatclause in isolation from the propositional attitude (e.g. a belief or an affirmation). In this sense, believing that Vienna is the capital of Austria is certainly different from assuming that Vienna is the capital of Austria, but the that-clauses express something identical, which is the state of affairs. However, this doesn’t make the reality of the Gebilde independent from my actual thought. In order for a Gebilde to be real, it must be the content of an actual thought. Moreover, the Gebilde is logically dependent upon the function of judging as such: I can have access to states of affairs only on the basis or with the help of an intellectual function of judging. Another way to spell out Stumpf’s point would be 38
‘Form’, ‘construct’, or ‘entity’ are possible translations.
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to say that Gebilde, like states of affairs or concepts, are merely virtual entities which, in given cases, are realized thanks to concrete judgments or concept formations. In this sense, their reality is ontologically dependent upon concrete functions: ‘Gebilde are facts only insofar as they are contents of functions’ (1906, 32). However, Gebilde as such (as ‘virtual’ entities, as I suggest we call them) are independent of concrete or individual functions. Whoever thinks of a Gebilde in this way, as ‘virtual’ Gebilde, also necessarily thinks of the judging function (1906, 33). In other words, the concept of Gebilde has the concept of thinkability as one of its constituent parts. The objectivity of Gebilde is thus inseparable from the way they are given to us. As a matter of fact, Stumpf rejects the view that Gebilde are immediately given: functions (like perception, but also intellectual and emotional functions) are immediately given – there are no unconscious perceptions – ; phenomena are given together with the functions (neben ihnen); but Gebilde are only mediately given. That is, ‘virtual’ Gebilde can only be thought together with the thought of the corresponding function, while real Gebilde are thought through the corresponding (concrete) function. Therefore, Gebilde enjoy a particular status: (1) they remain invariable, or identical, despite variations in propositional attitudes or variations in their thinkers;39 but at the same time, (2) their reality is ontologically dependent upon concrete functions, although (3) ‘virtual’ Gebilde are independent from concrete functions. Thesis (2) clearly prevents us from understanding (1) as conceptual realism in the Platonic sense. But what, if not precisely a variety of the conceptual realism rejected by Stumpf, will ensure the truth of (1)? This is obviously the role played by thesis (3): virtual Gebilde are precisely those which remains invariable or identical despite variations in propositional attitudes, or despite variation in the thinkers of Gebilde. Are such ‘virtual Gebilde’ really a way of avoiding conceptual realism or Plato’s theory of ideas? In Stumpf (1906a), he underlines that his account ‘doesn’t need us to go back to Plato’s doctrine of ideas, since objectuality (Gegenständlichkeit) is not the same thing as reality’. (Stumpf 1906a, 10) But a few pages later, when giving the name ‘eideology’ to the ‘science of Gebilde’ (Stumpf 1906a, 33), he adds 39
See also Stumpf (1906, 30, 33); (1906a, 7); (1939, 88), where he speaks of (virtual) Gebilde as ‘invariants’.
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that ‘the name could and should remember us to the Plato’s doctrine of Ideas. The investigations comply in fact with the ones that Plato conducted and had in mind, although not with their metaphysical consequences’ (ibid.). It seems, therefore, that what I called the virtuality of Gebilde, or their ‘objectuality’, as Stumpf puts it, offers a warrant for the objectivity of Gebilde without the metaphysical hypostatization involved in Plato’s doctrine of Ideas. Many influences are at play here. First, the vocabulary of objectuality (Gegenständlichkeit) is obviously borrowed from Bolzano, whom Stumpf mentions as a forerunner of his idea of state of affairs. (Stumpf 1906, 32) According to Bolzano, propositions of the form [A has b] are equivalent to propositions of the form [the idea of an A that has the property b, has objectuality]. By ‘objectuality’, Bolzano means the property, for an idea, of having an object. In this sense, Stumpf’s virtual Gebilde, like the Bolzanian subject-ideas of true propositions, have objectuality, which is here distinct from their reality. Second, since (virtual) Gebilde have the same status as Bolzanian ideas in themselves (Vorstellungen an sich), and since ideas in themselves are components of propositions in themselves, it makes good sense to see Stumpf’s ‘virtual Gebilde’ as bearing similarities to Leibniz’s ‘cogitatio possibilis’ – which was, according to Bolzano, the closest relative to his concept of propositions in themselves. That is, both the ‘cogitatio possibilis’ and the ‘virtual Gebilde’ have ‘thinkability’ (Denkbarkeit) as part of their intension. 40 Third, and more importantly, Lotze – who supervised both Stumpf’s PhD and Habilitation thesis – clearly influenced Stumpf’s conception of virtual Gebilde through his conception of generalization and, in particular, the conception of the kind of existence enjoyed by these functions. In his Logik, Lotze says that the particular mode of existence enjoyed by true propositions is ‘validity’ (Geltung), used in a similar sense to Stumpf’s term ‘objectuality’.41 We also find in Lotze the idea that the realm of propositions is a ‘world of thinkables’ (Welt des Denkbaren).42 As a matter of fact, Stumpf explicitly acknowledges the influence of this idea of Lotze in his conception of Gebilde.43 This in40
See Leibniz (1765, 524ff). See also Bolzano (1837 I, 92, 121) and Stumpf (1906, 33). 41 See e.g. Lotze (1874, 511). 42 Lotze (1874, 16; 18; 19; 504). 43 See Stumpf (1939, 89).
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fluence was long-lasting, since Stumpf’s dissertation from 1869, written under Lotze’s supervision, deals precisely with Plato’s conception of Ideas – Stumpf tried to show, obviously under the influence of Lotze, that Plato was committed to a metaphysical hypostatization of ideas, although his theory didn’t constrained him to such a position.44 Thanks to the distinction between realized Gebilde, which are ontologically dependent upon concrete functions, and virtual Gebilde, which are ontologically independent from concrete functions but remain logically inseparable from the concept of a function, Stumpf offers an account of abstraction that isn’t based on a metaphysical or psychological hypostatization of the general. Insofar as they are realized, Gebilde are products of synthesis, or generalization, as a particular (intellectual) function of consciousness, which itself is distinct from the basic function of perception. In other words, in order for me to have access to the concept of a rectangle, I must have had at some point individual presentations of different rectangles, which I generalized into the concept of a rectangle. This generalization is an intellectual function, distinct in kind from the function of abstraction involved, for instance, in imagination (which, as we have seen, is considered by Stumpf to belong to the domain of phenomena). Generalization gives me access to the concept of a rectangle in that it allows me to form the concept ‘rectangle’. In this sense, ‘a concept [or Gebilde] C has been formed’ and ‘a Gebilde C has been realized’ are synonymous locutions. This conception of generalization doesn’t lead to the Platonic hypostatization of ideas, since the ‘objectuality’, or ‘virtuality’, or ‘validity’ of Gebilden doesn’t depend upon their formation or realization. 6 Stumpf vs Husserl As suggested by the letter from Stumpf to Brentano from 1896 quoted earlier, Stumpf began to develop the idea, in a projected lecture on synthetic functions, of a specific function of synthesis for the formation of concepts – distinct from the abstraction involved in perceptive functions like sensing, presenting, or imagining. In this sense, he advocated a dualist conception of presentations and concepts. This project was then conducted in 1902 in a lecture entitled ‘Abstraction and Generalization’. In the final preparations for this lecture, Stumpf 44
See Stumpf (1869, 22; 54).
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wrote to Husserl to ask him about a general overview of his position in the second Logical Investigation. Husserl’s answer to this lost letter shows that the account presented by Stumpf in his 1902 lecture and his 1906 articles shares much with Husserl’s own outline of his position, but also with many of his ideas in the second Logical Investigation. In the following quote from Husserl’s outline of 1902, the central theses are numerated from [1] to [6]: [1] I see red, I sense it and I don’t mean (meinen) “this there”, but rather the red in specie. And I don’t simply mean it […] rather, [2] I operate in an adequate way the consciousness of generality, red in general is given in itself, so that I now can say: [3] the idea of redness has validity, the being of the general, or, what is equivalent but not identical, [4] something red as such (ein Rotes als solches) is possible (an ideal possibility) […] [5] [T]o the constitution of generality belongs therefore […] a content, which is ideated, and an act, which ideates it, which grasps it specifically[…] [6] The content makes up the matter (Stoff), which is different from case to case, and, through the generalizing conception (Auffassung) from case to case, the intentional constitution of the different general objects. (HuaBW1, 170f.)45
Many of the theses presented in this outline are also defended by Stumpf, but there remain a number of differences between Husserl and Stumpf’s conceptions of generalization. Two differences seems particularly significative: First, Stumpf uses a similar distinction to Husserl’s distinction in [1] between seeing (or sensing) ‘this red’ and meaning the red in specie. In the first case, Stumpf speaks of the perceptive function and of its phenomena, while in the second case, he speaks of generalization and Gebilde: “meaning the red in specie” would be, in Stumpfian terms, generalizing or forming (bilden) a Gebilde. Even if there is an evident structural similarity between both theories, there still is a difference in the description of the relation between the thinker and the ideal Spezies: where Husserl speaks of a ‘consciousness of generality’, Stumpf rather speaks of generalization as a process of forming Gebilde. While it makes sense to say that Stumpf and Husserl would agree on the thesis that an individual red object in45
In writing his letter, Husserl obviously paraphrased parts of a paragraph of the Prolegomena. Compare Husserl (1900, 128ff.), the paragraph beginning with “A red object stands before us…”.
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stantiates a species (or a Gebilde), it seems that Stumpf would rather say that in order for an individual object to instantiate a species, an operation of generalization is necessary. In other words, one is only mediately given with a Gebilde.46 This is substantially different from Husserl’s [2]: while operating a consciousness of generality, ‘red in general is given in itself’. To put it simply, the relation of instantiation is sui generis according to Husserl, while it is necessarily correlated with an operation of generalization according to Stumpf. The idea that acts may grasp ‘specifically’ some contents, or that acts may grasp the ideal species, as formulated by Husserl in [5], is rejected by Stumpf. Second, it is disputable whether Stumpf would also agree with Husserl that [3] and [4] are only equivalent theses. To be sure, Stumpf agrees with what I take to be the basic line of theses [3] and [4]: the validity (or ‘objectuality’) of the idea is equivalent to the (ideal) possibility of an instantiation of this idea. Stumpf explicitly argues for this thesis in Stumpf 1906.47 However, if validity has thinkability as part of its intension, as Stumpf contends in our reconstruction, a valid ‘virtual’ Gebilde is nothing other than a possibly realized Gebilde – or, to put it in Husserlian terms, the possibility of something red as such is nothing other than the validity of the idea of redness. Therefore, in Stumpf’s view, [3] and [4] would not only be equivalent, but also synonymous. This nuance seems important for Stumpf’s concerns about the Platonic hypostatization of ideas. Following Lotze and Leibniz, Stumpf wants to avoid the Platonic hypostatization of ideas and considers validity in terms of the possibility of Gebilde, and not in terms of ideal being. Curiously, Husserl seems to follow Bolzano in rejecting the idea that the possibility of a Gebilde is part of the definition of what validity, or objectuality, actually is.48 46
Stumpf (1906, 32f.) See Stumpf (1906, 32): ‘We understand the meaning of a that-clause, when it is pronounced for itself, although it doesn’t express an affirmation, but only the content of a possible affirmation, true or false’. 48 Compare for instance Bolzano (1837), I: 92 ‘We can think the concept of a proposition in itself without reminding ourselves that it has the property of being thinkable. This makes it sufficiently clear that the indication of this property does not belong in the definition of this concept’ (see also pp. 99, 104 and 124 for similar assertions). Stumpf (1906), 33, opposes explicitly to this view: ‘when we conceptually think a Gebilde, e.g. a state of affairs in the utterance of an isolated that-clause, the corresponding function, namely judging, must necessarily be thought along in its general 47
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Despite these differences, Husserl’s and Stumpf’s accounts of abstraction share two essential features: 1) generalization or meaning (meinen) are considered by Stumpf and Husserl as functions that aren’t operated at the level of sensory phenomena. They belong to the realm of intellectual functions (Stumpf), or what Husserl would call the realm of the intentional. 2) Correlatively, what is generalized is an invariant (Stumpf), or to put it in Husserlian terms, what is meant is a species. One could still object that the account of generalization discussed here was developed after the publication of the Logical Investigations. Therefore, it couldn’t really be used as an element supporting our thesis that Husserl’s critique of empiricist theories of abstraction in the 2nd Logical Investigation, being directed against the theories of abstraction of the School of Brentano, was at least partly misguided. However, the reconstruction of the different stages of Stumpf’s (and Brentano’s) theories of abstraction between the 1870s and the late 1890s, and the comparison between Husserl’s species account of abstraction and Stumpf’s concept of Gebilde, showed that this objection has, at most, only limited validity. Despite numerous modifications over the years, our reconstruction showed that there were two main accounts of abstraction developed in the early school of Brentano represented by Brentano, Marty, and Stumpf: 1) the monistic (or monistic-ennoetist) account, according to which abstraction is a function of presentations, eventually obtained with the help of interest, attention, or more generally judgments, and 2) the weak-dualist account, according to which abstraction belongs to a higher-order (dependent) category of presentations (Brentano), or to a specific synthetic function leading to the production of Gebilde (Stumpf). Since the weak dualist account was defended by Brentano, Stumpf, and Marty already in the early and mid 1890s, it seems that Husserl missed his target when associating the empiricist conception of abstraction with the position held by the Brentanians. concept’. Husserl’s thesis [3] seems curious in this context, since he usually distinguishes his conception of propositions as species and Bolzano’s conception of propositions in themselves, referring precisely to Lotze in order to support his own view. On this question, see Künne (2013), §2. It seems that Stumpf attributed to Husserl the Bolzanian view, at least in Stumpf (1939, 89): “in recent times, influenced by Lotze’s Logic, Husserl underlined this true and highly meaningful core of the doctrine of Ideas. Whether he himself went too far into objectification, this may remain an open question here”.
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A further objection is still possible: even if Husserl didn’t take into consideration the weak dualism defended by Brentano, Stumpf, and Marty in the 1890s, it is still questionable whether this position is able to avoid the psychological hypostatization of the general, that is, the position according to which universals are intentional (immanent) objects. Here again, I think that our reconstruction gives an answer to the objection: In 1906, Stumpf considers the concept of Gebilde as including the concept of thinkability among its parts. In order for them to be species, they must be thought of as correlated with a function. This conception is, I suggested, not only a fundamental difference with Husserl’s account of species, it is also coherent with a recurring idea in the different accounts of abstraction presented in our reconstruction, according to which abstract objects can only be represented distinctly as parts in concreta (see the ennoetist account, sect. 2). The same idea was expressed by the Millian thesis, endorsed in ennoetism and elsewhere, that we form concepts (either by focussing on or by generalizing parts). In sum, the objection against Husserl’s misguided reading of the allegedly empiricist Brentanian conception of abstraction holds only if one considers the correlation of Gebilde with functions as a commitment to the psychological hypostatization of the general. Coherently with some of the basic ideas of ennoetism and with the weak dualist account, Stumpf’s account in 1906 showed that this wasn’t the case.49 References Baumgartner, W. (ed.) (1992) ‘Ein Brief Franz Brentanos an Carl Stumpf vom 10.02.1876. Eingeleitet und herausgegeben aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlaß Brentano’, in Acta Analytica, 8, 33–42. Berkeley, G. (1734/1997) A Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, ed. J. Dancy, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Brentano, F. (1925), Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkt. Zweiter Band. Von der Klassifikation der Psychischen Phänomene, O. Kraus (ed.), Leipzig, Meiner. –– (1925a) Versuch über die Erkenntnis, A. Kastil, F. Mayer-Hillebrand (eds.), Leipzig, Meiner. 49
A first version of this paper was presented in Prague in May 2014. I thank Kevin Mulligan, Laurent Cesalli, Ion Tanasescu, and the other participants at the conference for their constructive comments. I also thank Johannes L. Brandl for his comments on a second version of this paper. This paper was written with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (M1403-G15).
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–– (1976) Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und Kontinuum, R. Chisholm and S. Körner (eds.), Hamburg, Meiner. –– (1982) Deskriptive Psychologie, W. Baumgartner u. R. Chisholm (eds.), Hamburg, Meiner. –– (1986) Über Aristoteles, R. George (ed.), Hamburg, Meiner. –– (EL 72) Logik. Wiener Vorlesung. Manuscript conserved at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). –– (M 96) Metaphysik. Vorlesung 1867. Transcription of Brentano’s lecture manuscripts, Franz-Brentano Archiv (Graz). –– (2013) ‘Abstraction and Relation’, in D. Fisette and G. Fréchette (eds.), Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 431–447. Bolzano, B. (1837) Wissenschaftslehre (in four volumes), Sulzbach, Seidel’sche Buchhandlung. Trans.: Theory of Science (eng. Trans. By R. Goerge and P. Rusnock) 4 volumes, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Chrudzimski, A and Smith, B. (2004), ‘Brentano’s Ontology: From Conceptualism to Reism’, in D. Jacquette (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 197–220. Husserl, E. (1900) Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Halle, Niemeyer. English translation: Logical Investigations (vol. 1), London, Routledge (engl. Transl. by J. Findlay). –– (1901) Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band (erster Teil), Halle, Niemeyer. Eng. transl.: Logical Investigations (vol. 2), London, Routledge (engl. Transl. by J. Findlay). –– (HuaBW1) Briefwechsel, Band 1: Die Brentanoschule (K. and E. Schuhmann eds.), 1994. –– (HuaBW5) Briefwechsel, Band 5: Die Neukantianer, (K. and E. Schuhmann eds.), 1994. –– (HuaXVIII) Logische Untersuchungen. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, (E. Holenstein ed.), 1975. –– (HuaXXII) Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), (B.Rang ed.), 1979. –– (1976), ‘Reminiscences of Franz Brentano’, in L. McAlister (ed.), The Philosophy of Brentano, London, Duckworth, 47–55. Huemer, W. (2004), ‘Husserl’s Critique of Psychologism and his Relation to the Brentano School’, in Chrudzimski, A. & Huemer, W. (eds.), Phenomenology and Analysis: Essays on Central European Philosophy, Frankfurt, Ontos, 199–214. Künne, W. (2013), ‘Intentionalität: Bolzano und Husserl’, in S. Centrone (ed.), Versuche über Husserl, Hamburg, Meiner, 99–144. Leibniz, G.W.F (1765), Oeuvres Philosophiques Latines et Françoises de feu Mr. De Leibniz, tirées de ses manuscrits qui se conservent dans la bibliothèque royale à Hanovre, et publiées par M. Rud. Eric Raspe, Amsterdam, Jean Schreuder. Lotze, R.H. (1874) Logik. Drei Bücher vom Denken, vom Untersuchen und vom Erkennen, Leipzig, Hirzel. Trans.: Logic. In Three Books of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge, eng. trans. Ed. By B. Bosanquet, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1884. Martinelli, R. (2013), ‘Brentano and Stumpf on Tonal Fusion’, in D. Fisette and G. Fréchette (eds.), Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 339–358.
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Marty, A. (1897), ‘Sprache und Abstraktion’ in 3. Internationaler Kongreß für Psychologie in München, p. 281–284. –– (2010) Deskriptive Psychologie, M. Antonelli (ed.), Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann. Meinong, A. (1889), ‘Phantasie-Vorstellung und Phantasie’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 95, 1889, 161–244; Reprinted in GA I, S. 193–271. Mill, J.S. (1865/1979), An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings, Toronto, Toronto University Press (Vol. 9 of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill). Rosen, G. (2012) ‘Abstract Objects’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/ (last accessed 15th January, 2014). Stumpf, C. (1873), Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig, Hirzel. –– (1891), Tonpsychologie, vol.2, Leipzig, Hirzel. –– (1869) Verhaሷltnis des platonischen Gottes zur Idee des Guten. Halle: C.E.M. Pfeffer. –– (1903), Logik. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Sommersemester 1903. Manuscript, lecture notes. Humboldt University, Berlin. –– (1902) ‘Abstraction und Generalisation’, in Sitzungsberichte der Koሷniglich – Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, Reimer, 593. –– (1906) ‘Erscheinungen und Psychische Funktionen’, in Abhandlungen der Koሷniglich – Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, PhilosophishHistorische Classe. Berlin, Verlag der Koሷnigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3–40. –– (1906a) ‘Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften’, in Abhandlungen der Koሷniglich – Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe. Berlin, Verlag der Koሷnigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1–94. –– (1939) Erkenntnislehre, Vol. 2, Leipzig, Johann Ambrosius Barth. Twardowski, K. (1903), ‘Über begriffliche Vorstellungen’, in Vorträge und Besprechungen über das Wesen der Begriffe (Philosophische Gesellschaft an der Universität zu Wien, ed.), Leipzig, Barth, pp. 1–28. –– (1996), ‘Funktionen und Gebilde’, J. Brandl (ed.), Conceptus, 29 (75), pp. 157– 189. Eng. Transl. ‘Actions and Products’, in K. Twardowski (1999), On Actions, Products, and Other Topics in Philosophy, (J. Brandl and J. Wolenski (eds.)), Amsterdam, Rodopi, 103–132. Willard, D. (2002), ‘Book Review: R.D. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano’, in Husserl Studies, 18, 77–81.
ÄSTHETIK ALS PRAKTISCHE PHILOSOPHIE: ZUR IMPLIZITEN ÄSTHETIK VON CARL STUMPF CHRISTIAN G. ALLESCH (UNIVERSITY OF SALZBURG)
Abstract. Carl Stumpf published many significant contributions in psychological aesthetics but never wrote a separate monographic work on aesthetics. He also abstained from taking part in the controversies within aesthetics of his time. In this contribution I aim at reconstructing from passing remarks in several writings, which general line Carl Stumpf’s aesthetics would have followed, if he had carried out it explicitly. In this context we have to consider that Stumpf’s writings were published in a time of change from a normative philosophical to an empirically based approach in aesthetics. Stumpf welcomed this development since in his research on music perception he followed himself an empirical approach. On the other hand, his conception of aesthetics was that of a “practical philosophy” following rather normative intentions.
1 Einleitendes Carl Stumpf hat im Unterschied zu anderen namhaften Fachvertretern seiner Generation – erwähnt seien etwa Theodor Lipps, Johannes Volkelt, Max Dessoir, Ernst Meumann oder Stephan Witasek – keine eigenständige monographische Darstellung der Ästhetik geschrieben, obwohl er zumindest in einem Teilbereich der Ästhetik, nämlich der Tonpsychologie, einen entscheidenden Beitrag zur psychologischen Ästhetik des musikalischen Erlebens geliefert hat. Von daher stellt sich die Frage nach dem Stellenwert der Ästhetik im Rahmen des philosophischen Denkens Carl Stumpfs und darüber hinaus die – möglicherweise durchaus spekulative – Frage, welche grundsätzliche Richtung eine Ästhetik von Carl Stumpf eingeschlagen hätte, wenn er sie denn geschrieben hätte. Im Schriftenverzeichnis Stumpfs scheint nur eine einzige Schrift auf, die den Begriff ‚Ästhetik’ im Titel trägt, nämlich der 1910 gemeinsam mit Erich von Hornbostel für den IV. Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie verfasste Beitrag Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Gerade in diesem Beitrag gehen die Autoren aber kaum auf allgemei-
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ne ästhetische Fragen ein. Auch in den übrigen Schriften Stumpfs selbst begegnet man dem Begriff ‚Ästhetik’ eher selten. Im Vorwort zur Tonpsychologie (1893) verweist Stumpf zwar darauf, dass das „Reich der Töne“ in besonderer Weise ein Feld sei, in dem „sich die Psychologie mit den philosophischen Schwesterdisciplinen“ begegne, und verweist dabei explizit auf die Ästhetik, deren „Principienstreitigkeiten“ sich gerade hier, wie er meint, „am schärfsten zugespitzt“ hätten. Er geht aber im weiteren Gang der Untersuchung auf diese „Principienstreitigkeiten“ mit keinem Wort mehr ein. Diese Zurückhaltung erscheint insofern erstaunlich, als die von Stumpf angesprochenen „Principienstreitigkeiten“, nämlich die Frage nach Gegenstand und Methoden der Ästhetik, damals eine zentrale Streitfrage in der Philosophie darstellten, in die auch Schüler Stumpfs unmittelbar involviert waren. So hat etwa Gustav Johannes von Allesch im Jahr 1909 mit einer Arbeit Über das Verhältnis der Ästhetik zur Psychologie bei Stumpf in Berlin promoviert, einer Arbeit, in der die Streitfragen im Zusammenhang mit einer psychologischästhetischen Grundlegung der Ästhetik und die Einwände ihrer Gegner eingehend diskutiert wurden. Hier wird Stumpf zwar mehrfach zitiert, jedoch mit Aussagen, in denen die damals im Vordergrund stehenden ästhetischen Streitfragen nur indirekt angesprochen waren. Es erscheint daher zusätzlich von Interesse, zu fragen, weshalb er sich in diesem ästhetischen „Prinzipienstreit“ so vornehm zurückgehalten hat. 2 Die empirische Wende in der Ästhetik Worum ging es aber überhaupt in diesem Streit? Er wurzelt im Wesentlichen im Versuch Gustav Th. Fechners, das neue empirische Selbstverständnis, zu dem die Psychologie im 19. Jahrhundert zunehmend gefunden hatte, auch auf die Erforschung ästhetischer Urteile zu übertragen. Fechners Vorschule der Ästhetik (1876), die die historische Grundlage für die empirische Erforschung des Ästhetischen in der Folgezeit legte, erhob zwar nicht den Anspruch, eine metaphysische Behandlung des Ästhetischen abzulösen oder zu ersetzen, wohl aber den Anspruch, diese auf eine solide Erfahrungsgrundlage zu stützen. Die metaphysischen Konstruktionen der Ästhetik des 19. Jahrhunderts charakterisierte Fechner als „Riesen auf thönernen Füßen“ (s. dazu Allesch, 1987; 2006). Diese „Ästhetik von oben“ wollte Fechner mit einer „Ästhetik von unten“, einer psychologisch-empirischen Untersuchung realer ästhetischer Urteile untermauern. Zu diesem Zweck
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leitete Fechner aus eine Vielzahl von Experimenten und Beobachtungen, die er in den 1860er Jahren durchgeführt hatte, eine Reihe von psychologischen „Principen“ ab, die der ästhetischen Wahrnehmung zugrunde liegen. Die Veröffentlichung dieser „Principe“ löste einen Sturm der Entrüstung auf Seiten der wertorientierten philosophischen Ästhetiker aus, die auf diese Weise das metaphysische Prinzip des Schönen dem Gutdünken statistisch gemittelter Laienurteile preisgegeben sahen. Als besonders heftige Kritiker taten sich etwa Benedetto Croce und Eduard von Hartmann hervor; letzterer unterstellte Fechner, er halte sich nur deshalb so lange mit dem Sammeln von Erfahrungsrundlagen auf, weil es ihm an „Zutrauen zur synthetischen Kraft seines spekulativen Denkens“ mangle (v. Hartmann, 1886, S. 329). Der Konflikt wurde verschärft, als Theodor Lipps im 1903 erschienenen ersten Band seiner Ästhetik diese überhaupt zu „einer psychologischen Disziplin“ erklärte, da das Ästhetische nur durch seine Fähigkeit beschrieben werden könne, bestimmte Wirkungen hervorzubringen, und diese seien nun einmal psychologische Tatsachen. In den darauf folgenden Jahren erschien eine Reihe kritischer Streitschriften, die für eine werttheoretisch-erkenntnistheoretische oder empirisch-psychologische Begründung der Ästhetik Partei ergriffen oder (eher selten) eine vermittelnde Position suchten. Ebendiese Schriften bilden den Gegenstand der Dissertation von Gustav Johannes von Allesch (Über das Verhältnis der Ästhetik zur Psychologie), die dieser 1909 bei Carl Stumpf einreichte und im folgenden Jahr in der Zeitschrift für Psychologie publizierte. Insofern war Carl Stumpf zumindest mittelbar in die damals aktuellen Streitfragen involviert. 3 Stumpfs Haltung gegenüber der psychologischen Ästhetik Dass Stumpf – ebenso wie sein Schüler Johannes von Allesch – einer psychologischen Begründung der Ästhetik im Sinne Fechners zuneigte, ist sehr wahrscheinlich. In einer Fußnote seines Vortrags Die Lust am Trauerspiel von 1887, der unmittelbar in die Zeit der Publikation von Fechners Vorschule der Ästhetik fällt, sprach Stumpf wörtlich von der „noch immer bösartig wuchernden spekulativ-metaphysischen Ästhetik, welche von der ‚Weltstellung’ des Schönen oder vom Schönen als einem ‚Moment der absoluten Idee’ beginnt, dann erst zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung und endlich zur psychologischen Analyse übergeht“. Demgegenüber sprach sich Stumpf klar für einen indukti-
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ven Zugang aus: „Eine psychologische Ästhetik muss aber im Gegenteil aller historischen in ähnlicher Weise zugrunde liegen, wie die Physiologie einer erklärenden Geschichte der organischen Lebensformen“ (1887, S. 53 [Anm.]). Obwohl dieser Text erst 1910 in den Philosophischen Reden und Vorträgen veröffentlicht wurde, gibt es keinen Hinweis darauf, dass Stumpf seine Meinung geändert hätte. Eine weitere, sehr deutliche Parteinahme für eine empirischpsychologische Ästhetik finden wir in einer Rede, die Carl Stumpf zur Eröffnung des III. Internationalen Kongresses für Psychologie 1896 in München gehalten hat. Wie Stumpf in dieser Rede anmerkt, war es im Vorfeld dieses Kongresses zu einer Debatte gekommen, ob man den für den vorangegangenen II. Kongress (London 1892) gewählten Titel „Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie“ beibehalten oder auf die Spezifizierung „experimentelle Psychologie“ verzichten solle. Stumpf merkte dazu in seiner Rede an, er habe sich eigentlich für die Beibehaltung des ursprünglichen Titels „Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie“ ausgesprochen, weil dieses Beiwort „gegenüber gewissen bloß räsonnierenden, abstrakt deduzierenden Richtungen, die in Deutschland noch nicht ganz ausgestorben sind, immerhin nützlich“ wäre (Stumpf, 1896/1910, S. 68). Er habe sich aber dem Wunsch des Organisationskomitees gefügt, den Zusatz „experimentell“ zu streichen, da „die Unentbehrlichkeit des Experiments nunmehr schon fast allgemein zugegeben sei und es heute ebensosehr darauf ankomme, den Schein der Einseitigkeit zu vermeiden und das Zusammenarbeiten aller Richtungen zu fördern, denen der Ausbau einer wissenschaftlichen Psychologie am Herzen liegt“ (ebd., S. 68 f.). Wenngleich Stumpf innerhalb eines erfahrungswissenschaftlichen Zugangs eine breite Vielfalt unterschiedlicher methodischer Ansätze vertreten wissen wollte, gibt seine Abgrenzung dieses erfahrungswissenschaftlichen Zugangs vom „bloßen Räsonnement“ doch einen deutlichen Hinweise darauf, dass er den Bemühungen um eine psychologischempirische Grundlegung der Ästhetik mit großer Sympathie gegenüber gestanden sein dürfte. Einen weiteren Hinweis mag man in Stumpfs Rede „Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie“ anlässlich der Übernahme des Rektorats der Universität Berlin im Jahr 1907 sehen. Stumpf (1907a/1910, S. 163) spricht darin von einem „schnellen Altern der idealistische Systeme“ des 19. Jahrhunderts, durch das „ein stetiges, organische Fortwachsen einer wissenschaftlichen Gedankenwelt“ (ebd., S. 164) unterbrochen
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wurde. Der neuerliche Aufschwung der Philosophie im letzten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts sei nicht von der Philosophie selbst ausgegangen, sondern „dem Mediziner Lotze“ und „dem Physiker Fechner“ geschuldet, die aus einer „fachmännischen naturwissenschaftlichen Bildung“ und einer „in naturwissenschaftlichem Geist betriebenen Psychologie“ in der Philosophie „neues Leben“ erweckt hätten (ebd., S. 165 f.). Nur auf dem Boden einer neuen, aus den Einzelwissenschaften hervorwachsenden „Erfahrungsphilosophie“ könne eine „gedeihliche Fortentwicklung“ der Wissenschaften erwachsen (ebd. S. 169 u. 178). 4 Zur Stellung der Ästhetik innerhalb der Wissenschaften Es wäre aber voreilig, aus dieser expliziten Hervorhebung Fechners zu schließen, dass Stumpf auch in Bezug auf die Ästhetik Fechners Konzept einer „Ästhetik von unten“ vorbehaltlos gutgeheißen hätte. Vielmehr ist davon auszugehen, dass Stumpf in wesentlichen Fragen der Ästhetik mit seinem Lehrer Franz Brentano konform ging, der zwar Fechners empirische Neubegründung der Ästhetik in ähnlicher Weise gewürdigt hat, wie dies Stumpf in seiner Rektoratsrede für die allgemeine Wissenschaftsentwicklung getan hat, ihm aber in einigen grundsätzlichen Fragen ausdrücklich widersprach. Diese grundsätzliche Kritik kommt vor allem in den Vorlesungen über Ausgewählte Fragen über Psychologie und Ästhetik deutlich zum Ausdruck, die Brentano im Wintersemester 1885/86 an der Wiener Universität abgehalten hat und die 1959 aus dem Nachlass publiziert wurden (Brentano 1959/1988). Brentano widersprach Fechner vor allem dort, wo dieser das Elementare des ästhetischen Eindrucks im formal Einfachen des Wahrnehmungsreizes suchte (Brentano 1988, 22ff.; vgl. dazu Allesch 1989): „Dass und wie sehr etwas schön sein werde“, so heißt es bei Brentano, „lässt sich nicht auf Grund von elementaren Wohlgefälligkeiten deduzieren, die durch Erfahrung begründet sind und die in eine gewissen Verbindung gesetzt werden, sondern muss durch direkte Erfahrung erprobt werden“. Zwar plädierte auch Brentano für den von Fechner empfohlenen Weg „von unten“, aber ihm dünkt, „der wahre Weg von unten wäre der, welcher mit der Betrachtung der vollkommen schönen Werke anhebt, mögen sie auch noch so kompliziert sein“. Es sei, so argumentiert Brentano (1988, S.23), eine Voreingenommenheit, zu glauben, „das Elementare sei das Niedrige“ und das Komplexere sei nur „von oben“ zu begreifen. Das ganzheitliche Den-
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ken, das Brentano hier in der psychologischen Ästhetik einfordert, hat ja in weiterer Folge gerade über Carl Stumpf seinen Weg in die Arbeiten der Berliner Gestaltpsychologie gefunden (siehe dazu die Einleitung von H. und L. Sprung zu Stumpf, 1997, S. 25 ff.), auch wenn Stumpf in seinen Schriften nirgends explizit auf Brentanos Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik Bezug nimmt. Was die Frage der Einordnung der Ästhetik in den Kanon der Wissenschaften angeht, die ja nicht zuletzt dadurch zur Streitfrage geworden war, dass Theodor Lipps in seiner Ästhetik 1903 die Ästhetik provokativ als „psychologische Disziplin“ reklamiert hatte, so scheint Carl Stumpf die Ästhetik als wissenschaftliche Disziplin zunächst doch recht eindeutig der philosophischen Seite zugeordnet zu haben. In der Einleitung zum ersten Band der Tonpsychologie, der allerdings fast zwei Jahrzehnte vor der Ästhetik von Lipps erschien, spricht er von der Ästhetik ausdrücklich als von einer „philosophischen Schwesterdisciplin“ der Psychologie (Stumpf, 1883, S. vii). In diesem Kontext findet sich auch eines der wenigen Zitate, die zeigen, dass Stumpf den in der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit vehement ausgetragenen Streit um die Grundlegung der Ästhetik sehr wohl bewusst wahrgenommen hat. Seine Stellungnahme beschränkte sich allerdings auf einen halben Satz, nämlich auf die Aussage, dass sich die „Principienstreitigkeiten“ der Ästhetik gerade auch in der Tonkunst „am schärfsten zugespitzt“ hätten; im weiteren Gang der Untersuchung geht Stumpf allerdings auf diese „Principienstreitigkeiten“ mit keinem Wort mehr ein. Vieles spricht dafür, dass die Besitzansprüche, mit denen die einander bekämpfenden Lager der wertphilosophischen und der empirisch-psychologischen Ästhetik einander die Zuständigkeit für ästhetische Phänomene streitig machten, für Stumpf aus seinem Wissenschaftsverständnis heraus gar nicht nachvollziehbar waren. Stumpf sah ja – ähnlich wie Wundt – die Psychologie im engen Verbund mit der Philosophie und teilte keineswegs die Unvereinbarkeitsvorstellungen zwischen Philosophie und Experimentalpsychologie, die manche Vertreter dieser beiden Lager damals hegten. Um diese Rivalitäten zu verstehen, ist es hilfreich, sich in Erinnerung zu rufen, dass die zunehmende Praxis, auf frei werdende, „klassische“ philosophische Lehrstühle Professoren zu berufen, die sich eher der neuen Experimentalpsychologie verpflichtet fühlten als den traditionellen philosophischen Fachinhalten, im Jahr 1913 zu einem von über hundert Dozenten der
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Philosophie des deutschen Sprachraums zu einem gemeinsamen Aufruf in der Zeitschrift Logos geführt hatte, die diese Entwicklung kritisierte und forderte, den Experimentalpsychologen eigene dafür deklarierte Lehrstühle zuzuweisen. Wundt hat damals bekanntlich mit einer sehr emphatischen Gegenschrift, Die Philosophie im Kampf ums Dasein (1913), geantwortet und darin die Beibehaltung der Fächergemeinschaft von Philosophie und Psychologie gefordert. Carl Stumpf hat den Aufruf im Logos so wie auch Wundt nicht unterzeichnet und dürfte wohl mit ihm in dieser Frage weithin einer Meinung gewesen sein. Dies geht etwa auch eindeutig aus den Bemerkungen hervor, mit denen Stumpf seine Schrift Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften (1906) abschließt. Stumpf definiert hier die Philosophie als „Wissenschaft von den allgemeinsten Gesetzen des Psychischen und denen des Wirklichen überhaupt“ und billigt somit der Philosophie eine übergeordnete Kompetenz für die Gegenstände der inneren und der äußeren Erfahrung zu. Daraus resultiert für Stumpf, ähnlich wie dies Wundt in seiner eben erwähnten Streitschrift wenige Jahre später zum Ausdruck bringen sollte, die „Unmöglichkeit einer Abtrennung der Psychologie vom Organismus der philosophischen Wissenschaften“ (Stumpf, 1906, S. 91). „Warum“, so fragt Stumpf in diesem Zusammenhang, „sollte nicht auch Philosophie das Experiment zu Hilfe nehmen, wo sie es gebrauchen kann?“ In dieser offenen, pragmatischen Sicht der im Felde der Ästhetik konkurrierenden Wissenschaften liegt wohl der Hauptgrund dafür, dass sich Stumpf an den aufgeregten „Principienstreitigkeiten“ in der Ästhetik erst gar nicht beteiligte. 5 Ästhetik als „praktische Disziplin“ Wenngleich Stumpf in seiner Schrift Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften nur beiläufig auf die Frage der Einordnung der Ästhetik zu sprechen kommt, lassen sich aus seinen Ausführungen doch einige weitere Hinweise auf seinen Standpunkt ablesen. Er ordnet die Ästhetik dort gemeinsam mit der Ethik und der Logik dem Bereich der „praktischen Wissenschaften“ zu, „die zum Guten, Schönen, Wahren leiten, anders gesagt: die in Hinsicht des Wollens, des Geschmackes, des wissenschaftlichen Urteils das Richtige vom Verkehrten unterscheiden und innerlich verwirklichen lehren“ (Stumpf, 1906, S. 88). Es besteht also doch wieder ein Unterschied zwischen Stumpf und den meisten Vertretern der psychologischen Ästhetik, und zwar insofern, als Stumpf
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der Ästhetik letztlich eine normative Aufgabe zuweist, was ihn wiederum stärker mit den Vertretern des wertphilosophischen Ansatzes verbindet als mit den konsequenten Empirikern, denen es um das ging, was faktisch als schön angesehen wird und nicht um die Fundierung „richtiger“ ästhetischer Urteile. Dies verbindet ihn auch mit Franz Brentano, denn auch für diesen ist die Ästhetik „jene praktische Disziplin, welche uns lehrt, mit richtigem Geschmack Schönes und Unschönes zu empfinden, das Schönere vor dem minder Schönen zu bevorzugen, und uns Anweisungen gibt, um es hervorzubringen und für die Gesamtheit eindrucksvoll und wirksam zu machen“ (Brentano, 1959, S. 5). Die zum Teil wörtlichen Anklänge der Definition Stumpfs an jene Brentanos sind ein weiterer Hinweis darauf, dass Stumpf mit den Wiener Vorlesungen Brentanos vertraut war. Um die ‚implizite Ästhetik’ Carl Stumpfs einordnen zu können, ist es daher notwendig, sich näher damit auseinanderzusetzen, was Stumpf unter einer „praktischen Disziplin“ verstand. Er geht darauf in der Schrift Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften relativ ausführlich ein. Zunächst grenzt er sich hier explizit von der gängigen Meinung ab, eine „praktische Disziplin […] habe nur zu lehren, wie etwas gemacht wird und am besten gemacht wird, sie habe aber in keiner Weise Werturteile abzugeben“ (Stumpf, 1906b, S. 85). Bloße Zweckmäßigkeit im Sinne der Optimierung der Mittel, wie man ein bestimmtes Ziel erreicht, könne nicht das Ziel einer praktischen Wissenschaft sein. Sonst könnte es ja etwa auch, wie Stumpf an dieser Stelle ausführt (ebd., S. 86) als legitimes Ziel der Pädagogik als praktischer Disziplin angesehen werden, „mit Passion der zweckmäßigsten Heranbildung von Schurken nach[zu]sinnen“. „Zweckmäßigkeit“ in dem Sinne, wie sie die praktischen Wissenschaften verstehen müssten, wenn sie dem allgemeinen Ethos von Wissenschaft als einem der „unbestrittensten Güter der Menschheit“ gerecht werden wollen, involviere also „stets den Begriff eines wertvollen im Unterschied zu einem wertlosen oder unwürdigen Ziele“ (ebd.). Noch deutlicher tritt dieses normative Element in einer Festrede zutage, die Stumpf 1899 am Stiftungstag der Kaiser WilhelmsAkademie für das militärärztliche Bildungswesen gehalten hat. Sie trug den Titel Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie (Stumpf, 1899a/1910) und zielte ebenfalls darauf ab, dem Missverständnis der praktisch-philosophischen Disziplinen als reinen Tatsachenwissenschaften entgegen zu wirken. So wie sich die Päda-
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gogik als praktische philosophische Disziplin nicht nur auf die Erforschung der Wirksamkeit von Erziehungsmaßnahmen beschränken dürfe, sondern sehr wohl auch Maximen des erzieherischen Handelns zu formulieren habe, so dürfe sich auch Ästhetik nicht auf die Rolle einer „bloßen Kunstgeschichte“ reduzieren lassen (ebd., S. 97 f.). Wenngleich die Entwicklung der Kunst durch ihre Vielgestaltigkeit ein „weitherziges Geltenlassen der verschiedensten Richtungen“ nahe lege, solle man doch „nicht aufhören, innerhalb jeder Richtung das Seichte, Geistlos-Äußerliche, Nachempfundene vom Tiefen, Wahrhaften, Eigenartigen zu scheiden und dem ungebildeten Geschmack des Neulings den des Reifen, Erfahrenen als maßgebend gegenüberzustellen” (ebd., S. 98 f.). Man werde überdies, so fährt er fort, „stets von Zeichen des Verfalles reden, wo eine raffinierte Technik den Mangel ursprünglicher Empfindung verdecken muß“. Über die dabei angewandten Kriterien könne man sehr wohl streiten, etwa mit Tolstoj, der „nur die Erweckung religiöser Gefühle als Kunstzweck gelten lässt und zugleich alle Werke streichen will, die nicht seinen russischen Bauern verständlich sind“. Außer Streit aber sollte die Aufgabe der Ästhetik gestellt werden, sich für Wertaussagen mit Argumenten zu munitionieren, „die aus den Daseinsbedingungen der Kunst und ihrer Stellung innerhalb menschlicher Lebenszwecke hergenommen werden“. „Die Ästhetik“, so schließt Stumpf diese Argumentationskette, „würde ihre Aufgabe schlecht erfüllen, wenn sie solchen Fragen kleinlaut aus dem Wege ginge“ (ebd., S. 99). Mit diesem normativen Verständnis der Ästhetik als praktischer philosophischer Disziplin stand Stumpf dem wertphilosophischen Standpunkt der Gegner einer psychologischen Begründung der Ästhetik wie etwa Jonas Cohn oder Eduard von Hartmann im Grunde näher als dem psychologistischen Ästhetik-Konzept eines Theodor Lipps. Auch Cohn hatte ja explizit zwischen „Wissenschaften, die ihre Objekte ohne Rücksicht auf unsere Absichten und Wertungen betrachten“, und solchen, in denen „Werte in Bezug auf die Berechtigung ihres Anspruchs untersucht“ werden, unterschieden und das Ziel der Ästhetik mit dem Ziel einer „kritisch erfassten Logik und Ethik“ als eine prinzipiell vom Ziel der Psychologie zu sondernde Aufgabengruppe abgegrenzt (1904, S. 135 f.). Was Stumpf freilich wieder deutlich von Jonas Cohn abhebt, ist die Einschätzung der Rolle der Psychologie bei der Suche nach gültigen Normen und bei der Analyse dessen, was Cohn den „Forderungscharakter“ des ästhetischen Wertes nannte.
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Nach Cohn stellte die Psychologie für die Ästhetik nur eine „Hilfswissenschaft“ dar, die „die allgemeinen Gesetze des Seelenlebens kennen lehrt, deren sich auch die ästhetische Wirkung bedient“ (1901, S. 11). Stumpf dagegen findet in seiner Schrift Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften sehr viel positivere Worte zum Stellenwert der Psychologie für die Ästhetik. Die Forderung einer Logik, Ästhetik, Ethik ohne jede Rücksicht auf Psychologie sei, so schreibt er dort (1906, S. 34 f.), „wie man auch im Übrigen die Aufgaben dieser Wissenszweige bestimmen mag, schlechthin widersinnig“, und, mit kritischem Blick auf Husserls Bemühungen, die Phänomenologie als reine Wesenswissenschaft von der Psychologie abzuschotten: „Das Scheuklappenrezept versagt überall, wo empirische Zusammenhänge mitwirken und nicht rein deduktive Ergebnisse möglich sind.“ So führt Stumpf denn auch die Ästhetik gemeinsam mit einer Reihe weiterer Disziplinen wie „Ethik, Logik, Rechtsphilosophie, Religions-, Sprach-, Sozialphilosophie usw.“ als „der Philosophie verbündete Disziplinen“ an, die sich „von psychologischem Blute“ nähren; es seien ja „gerade die psychologischen Untersuchungen, deren sie samt und sonders in gleich hohem Maße bedürfen“, durch die „diese so verschiedenartigen Zweige philosophischer Forschung“ zum gemeinsamen Forschungsprojekt „der Philosophie“ verbinden könnten (ebd., S. 90). Der Unterschied zwischen den beiden Auffassungen in Bezug auf das Verhältnis zwischen Psychologie und Ästhetik ist also durchaus grundsätzlicher Natur und keineswegs nur ein gradueller Unterschied. Jonas Cohn, der in den 1890er Jahren bei Wundt studiert und in dessen Labor experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Gefühlswirkung von Farben durchgeführt hatte, hat sich von seinen psychologischästhetischen „Jugendsünden“ später sehr klar distanziert (vgl. dazu Allesch, 1998). Hatte er in den methodologischen Vorbemerkungen zu einem Experimentalbericht aus dem Jahr 1894 noch die psychologische Behandlung seines Gegenstands explizit verteidigt, ja sogar für die „einzig zulässige“ erklärt und seine experimentelle Arbeitsweise ausdrücklich in die Tradition Fechners gestellt (Cohn, 1894), so hat er sieben Jahre später in seiner Allgemeinen Ästhetik (1901) die Kompetenz der Psychologie für die Behandlung ästhetischer Fragen so grundsätzlich in Frage gestellt, dass er von den Verteidigern der psychologischen Ästhetik geradezu als deren Hauptgegner gesehen wurde. Das zentrale Argument von Cohn lautete, dass „die Psychologie Wertunterschiede so wenig kennt, wie die Körperwissenschaft“ und
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daher auch „an sich kein Interesse daran“ habe, „das ästhetische Gebiet als ein besonderes abzugrenzen und etwa von dem des Angenehmen zu unterscheiden“; aus diesem Grund werde eine „rein psychologische Ästhetik“, „...so verdienstvoll ihre Untersuchungen auch sein mögen, stets an dem Fehler der Prinzipienlosigkeit leiden“ (Cohn, 1901, S. 9 f.). Eben jene Reduktion der praktisch-philosophischen Disziplinen wie der Pädagogik und auch der Ästhetik auf reine Tatsachenwissenschaften, die Carl Stumpf in seiner Schrift Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften als Fehlentwicklung beklagt und zu überwinden trachtet, wird also bei Cohn auf deren verhängnisvolle Vermengung mit der „werterelativistischen“ Psychologie zurückgeführt. Damit steht Cohn in diametralem Gegensatz zu Carl Stumpf, der die Ausgrenzung der Psychologie aus dem ästhetischen Gegenstandsfeld beenden und die psychologische Betrachtungsweise in das Aufgabengebiet einer in sehr umfassendem Sinne verstandenen Philosophie reintegrieren wollte. Es ist daher wohl auch kein Zufall, dass Johannes von Allesch in seiner 1910 veröffentlichten Dissertation Über das Verhältnis der Ästhetik zur Psychologie der Widerlegung der Auffassungen von Jonas Cohn breiten Raum gibt – sicherlich mit Billigung seines Doktorvaters Carl Stumpf. Im Verständnis der Ästhetik als einer „praktischen Philosophie“ stimmte Stumpf durchaus auch mit seinem Lehrer Franz Brentano überein, der ja, wie bereits ausgeführt, die Ästhetik in seinen Wiener Vorlesungen die Ästhetik explizit als eine „praktische“ Disziplin, und zwar, wie ebenfalls bereit ausgeführt, als „jene praktische Disziplin“ definiert hat, „welche uns lehrt, mit richtigem Geschmack Schönes und Unschönes zu empfinden, das Schöne vor dem minder Schönen zu bevorzugen, und uns Anweisungen gibt, um es hervorzubringen und für die Gesamtheit eindrucksvoll und wirksam zu machen“ (Brentano, 1959, S. 5). Wie Stumpf betont auch Brentano die unmittelbare Angewiesenheit der Lehre vom Schönen auf die Psychologie: So stamme etwa der Begriff des Schönen „so wie seine verschiedenen Unterarten jedenfalls aus psychischem Gebiet“ (ebd., S. 17). „Von größter Bedeutung für die Ästhetik“ sei insbesondere „die der Psychologie angehörende Lehre von der Phantasie“ (ebd., S. 36). Der scheinbare Widerspruch zwischen Brentanos wertphilosophischer Sicht des Schönen und seiner Sympathie für eine psychologische Begründung der Ästhetik ist zu lösen, wenn man annimmt, dass sich ästhetisches Forschen nicht auf eine platonische Idee des Schönen richtet, sondern
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auf eine seelische Funktion, auf den wertenden Akt als Aspekt seelischer Intentionalität. Interessant ist in diesem Zusammenhang Brentanos Bemerkung, Fechner hätte wohl kaum in seiner Unterscheidung von „Ästhetik von oben“ und „Ästhetik von unten“ die erstere als „philosophisch“ und die letztere als „empirisch“ eingrenzen und damit diese Begriffe in Gegensatz bringen können, wenn er von der Philosophie des Aristoteles ausgegangen wäre anstatt von der Schulphilosophie seiner Zeit (ebd., S. 20). Carl Stumpfs Bemühen um eine umfassendere Konzeption von Philosophie, die auch den Beitrag ihrer „praktischen“ Teildisziplinen in angemessener Weise einschließt und würdigt, zielt in die gleiche Richtung. Es mag vor diesem Hintergrund interessant sein, darüber zu spekulieren, warum Stumpf nicht direkt in den Streit zwischen wertphilosophischer und psychologischer Ästhetik eingegriffen und die Parteinahme weitgehend seinem Schüler Johannes von Allesch überlassen hat. Eine mögliche Deutung ist, dass Stumpf in dieser Kontroverse tatsächlich zwei Seelen in seiner Brust spürte: Inhaltlich war er zwar aus seinem breiteren, an Brentano geschulten Verständnis von Empirie heraus von der Notwendigkeit einer psychologischen Fundierung der Ästhetik überzeugt, aber andererseits konnte er wohl auch mit dem Psychologismus eines Theodor Lipps wenig anfangen, und in vielen Punkten teilte er vermutlich auch die Argumente der wertphilosophischen Position zugunsten einer normativen Aufgabe der Ästhetik. Daher vermochte er wohl auch nicht eindeutig für die psychologische Seite Partei ergreifen. 6 Zur Rolle der Gefühlswirkungen Wie bereits angedeutet, bildete die Frage der Gefühlswirkung des Ästhetischen einen zentralen Punkt in den damaligen Auseinandersetzungen um die Einordnung der Ästhetik in das Spektrum der Wissenschaften. Gerade Jonas Cohn hatte ja der Fechnerschen Ästhetik immer wieder vorgeworfen, dass sie ästhetische Gefühlswirkungen ausschließlich am Maßstab von Lust und Unlust messe und dass daher jede psychologische Ästhetik zwangsläufig in einem von objektiven Wertmaßstäben unabhängigen Eudämonismus ende. Es liegt daher nahe, in den Versuch einer Rekonstruktion des ÄsthetikVerständnisses von Carl Stumpf vor allem auch jene seiner Schriften einzubeziehen, die sich unmittelbar mit Gefühlswirkungen befassen. Hier ist in erster Linie sein 1899 in der Zeitschrift für Psychologie und
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Physiologie der Sinnesorgane veröffentlichter Beitrag Ueber den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung zu nennen (Stumpf, 1899b). Stumpfs generelle Position zur Gefühlsproblematik in der Psychologie ist vor allem durch seine Gegnerschaft zur der von ihm als „sensualistisch“ charakterisierten Gefühlstheorie von William James und Carl Lange gekennzeichnet. In der Ästhetik waren vor der Jahrhundertwende mehrere Schriften erschienen, die auf eine Erklärung des ästhetischen Erlebens durch affektive Prozesse, insbesondere Lust-UnlustReaktionen abzielten bzw. ästhetisches Erleben mit derartigen Reaktionen bzw. sogar mit den diesen zugrundeliegenden physiologischen Abläufen mehr oder weniger gleichsetzten. Beispiele dafür finden sich bereits in Grant Allens Physiological Aesthetics (1874) oder in Georg Hirths zweibändigem Werk Aufgaben der Kunstphysiologie (1891), vor allem aber in einer ästhetischen Schrift von Stumpfs Hauptkontrahenten Carl G. Lange mit dem Titel Sinnesgenüsse und Kunstgenuß (1903), in der dieser ästhetische Gefühle auf vasomotorische Reaktionen zurückführte, was den an sich eher zurückhaltenden Johannes Volkelt veranlasste, in seinem System der Ästhetik (1905, Bd.I, S. 269 f., Fußn.) von einer „Holzhackerpsychologie“ zu sprechen, die „sich erdreiste, der Ästhetik neue Bahnen weisen zu wollen“. Später hat dieser Ansatz einen noch radikaleren Ausdruck in der ästhetischen Theorie der Schriftstellerin und Ästhetikerin Vernon Lee (Lee & Anstruther-Thomson, 1912; Lee, 1913; s. dazu Lanzoni, 2009; Allesch, 2012) gefunden, die – unter ausdrücklicher Berufung auf James und Lange – ästhetische Empfindungen und Erfahrungen vor allem auf den organischen Mitvollzug durch psychophysiologische Prozesse zurückführt. Stumpf geht in seiner Schrift von 1899 davon aus, dass Affekte grundsätzlich auf der Beurteilung eines wahrgenommenen oder vorgestellten Sachverhalts beruhen und dass „die Beschaffenheit des Affects von der Art, wie unserem Denken diese Thatsache erscheint, in erster Linie abhängt“ (Stumpf, 1899b, S. 54). Diesem allgemeinen Prinzip ordnen sich ästhetische Affekte aber nicht automatisch unter. Empfindungen wirken, so Stumpf, „abgesehen von allen associierten Vorstellungen und Gedanken“ nicht ästhetisch: „Erst wenn Empfindungen und namentlich Combinationen von Empfindungen von einem sei es noch so wenig entwickelten ‚beziehenden Denken’ umsponnen werden, beginnt auch das ästhetische Fühlen“ (ebd.). An „ästhetischen Gemüthsbewegungen“ sind nach Stumpf „zwei Quellen hauptsächlich
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betheiligt“, nämlich einerseits „die unerschöpfliche Fülle der dem wahren Kunstwerk innewohnenden formellen Beziehungen aller Theile aufeinander“ und andererseits „die Eigenschaften des dargestellten Sachverhalts“ (ebd., S. 55). Im Unterschied zu vielen anderen Autoren der damaligen Zeit reduziert Stumpf jedoch das ästhetische Wohlgefallen nicht auf eine reine Lustempfindung. Er schreibt dazu: Das aus der leichten Bethätigung unserer intellectuellen Kräfte fließende Lustgefühl würde ich nicht schon als einen Affect bezeichnen, da es ebenso unmittelbar an diese Bethätigung geknüpft ist wie die sinnliche Annehmlichkeit an die sinnlichen Empfindungen. Aber es geht sogleich in einen Affect, in das Entzücken über das Kunstwerk über, sobald die empfangene Förderung unserer geistigen Lebensthätigkeit (oder, was dasselbe ist, die Mannigfaltigkeit der nunmehr einheitlich überschauten Beziehungen) Gegenstand des Bewusstseins wird. Und dieser Affect ordnet sich offenbar unter den aufgestellten allgemeinen Begriff. Was aber die aus der inhaltlichen Seite des Kunstwerkes fließenden Gemüthsbewegungen angeht, so lässt sich ein dargestellter Sachverhalt in Worten allerdings nur bei den redenden und bildenden Kunstwerken, und da nicht immer, angeben. Die von der absoluten Musik in uns angeregten Vorstellungen in Bezug auf die Verknüpfung und Aufeinanderfolge von Ereignissen überhaupt lassen sich nicht mit Bestimmtheit in Worte übersetzen. Dennoch ist der Unterschied nur graduell, und die Frage bleibt nur, wiefern sich sagen lässt, dass die mit den associirten Vorstellungen verbundenen Gemüthsbewegungen auf einer Erkenntniß oder Beurtheilung ruhen. Die Antwort wird sein, dass wir den dargestellten Sachverhalt zwar nicht als einen momentan wirklichen aber als einen möglichen, im Bereich des menschlichen Erlebens liegenden erkennen. Bei den fabelhaftesten Erfindungen der Phantasie müssen wenigstens gewisse Züge charakteristisch an Erfahrungen anklingen. Je weniger dies der Fall ist, um so weniger werden sie uns packen. Wenn wir Wahrheit in der Wissenschaft, im Leben, in der Kunst verlangen, ist es zwar Wahrheit in nicht genau gleichem Sinn; aber in allen Fällen liegt darin der Hinweis auf die Bethätigung unseres Urtheilsvermögens ausgesprochen. (Stumpf, 1899b, S. 55 f.)
Aus dieser Darstellung wird doch recht deutlich, in welche Richtung eine Theorie des Ästhetischen gegangen wäre, wenn Carl Stumpf sie explizit formuliert hätte. Gerade in der Abkehr von einer rein sensualistischen Deutung und in der Einbeziehung der Phantasie zeigt sich auch ein gewisses Maß an Eigenständigkeit dieses Ansatzes im Kon-
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text der damals publizierten Konzeptionen der psychologischen Ästhetik. Auch in seinem 1906 auf dem II. Kongress der Gesellschaft für experimentelle Psychologie in Würzburg gehaltenen Vortrag Über Gefühlsempfindungen hält Stumpf an seiner scharfen Unterscheidung zwischen „blossen Gefühlsempfindungen“ und dem „ästhetischen Wohlgefallen“ fest, das „durch augenblicklich stattfindende Denkfunktionen und sonstige Zwischenglieder der gesamten Seele vermittelt ist“ (1907b, 47 f.). Auch in Bezug auf die Frage nach der Natur ästhetischer Gefühlsempfindungen hat Stumpf also eine ausgleichende Position eingenommen. Die Ausklammerung der Affekte aus der Ästhetik, wie sie etwa Herbart propagierte, erschien ihm ebenso unplausibel wie der Emotionalismus der sogenannten ‚Gefühlsästhetik‘. Dass er zu den polarisierenden Streitfragen, die in der damaligen Zeit die ästhetische Diskussion beherrschten, zwar theoretisch und sachlich Position bezogen, aber nicht Partei ergriffen hat, hat allerdings auch zur Folge gehabt, dass er von beiden Streitparteien selten erwähnt wurde; ein Schicksal, das ihm auch in anderen Arbeitsfeldern immer wieder widerfahren ist. Tatsache ist aber, dass Stumpfs Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Empfindung und Urteil in der ästhetischen Erfahrung der heutigen, integrativen Auffassung von Kognition und Emotion sehr viel näher kommen als viele andere psychologisch-ästhetische Theorien seiner Zeit. 7 Zur Einfühlungstheorie Eine ähnlich differenzierte Position hat Carl Stumpf auch gegenüber einem im Bereich der psychologischen Ästhetik damals dominierenden Erklärungsansatz vertreten, nämlich der vor allem von Theodor Lipps propagierten „Einfühlungstheorie“. Schon in der Schrift Ueber den Begriff der Gemütsbewegung von 1899 hatte Stumpf die Vorstellung, der Kunstgenuss ließe sich „durch eine Art Hypnotisierung“ erklären, in der der Genießende „seine Persönlichkeit zeitweilig mit derjenigen der handelnden oder gemalten Individuen vertausche“, mit den sarkastischen Worten kommentiert, damit höre die Kunst auf und beginne die Geisteskrankheit (1899b, S. 54 f.). In seinem Spätwerk, der Erkenntnislehre von 1939, zeichnet Stumpf im Zusammenhang seiner Darstellung der inneren Wahrnehmung (§ 19) ein überaus differenziertes Bild von den Möglichkeiten der „Einfühlung in fremdes Seelenleben“. Dabei warnt er ausdrücklich vor erkenntnistheoretisch
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problematischen Vorstellungen wie etwa der eines „Hineinverlegens“ eigener Zustände in „fremdes Seelenleben“. „Fremdes Seelenleben“ könne grundsätzlich „nur mittelbar zu unserer Kenntnis kommen“, und alle Kenntnis davon sei „offenbar nicht nur psychologisch, sondern auch logisch an die Sinneseindrücke gebunden und ohne sie auf natürlichem Weg überhaupt unmöglich“ (Stumpf, 1939, S. 370). Es handle sich also um ein „symbolisches“ Vorstellen und Denken, das wiederum nicht möglich sei ohne begriffliches Denken und „wie jedes begriffliche Denken Allgemeinbegriffe voraussetzt“ (ebd. S. 368 f.). Je nach dem Ausmaß, in dem dabei „das aktuelle eigene Erleben überwiegt“ und sich damit das Bewusstsein abschwächt, „dass es nur Symbol des fremden sein soll und umgekehrt“, entstehen „zahllose Unterschiede des Einfühlungsvorganges“, die wohl auch daran zweifeln lassen, dass es sich hierbei um ein einheitliches und grundlegendes Phänomen der ästhetischen Wahrnehmung handelt, wie dies etwa von Lipps dargestellt worden sei. Stumpfs trocken kommentierender Satz: „Aber auch da wird eine nüchterne exakte psychologische Beschreibung manchen Dämpfer aufsetzen müssen“ (ebd., S. 370) scheint mir nicht nur im konkreten Kontext der Auseinandersetzung mit der ästhetischen Einfühlungstheorie, sondern weit darüber hinaus für die gesamte Herangehensweise Carl Stumpfs an die psychologisch-ästhetischen Streitfragen seiner Zeit symptomatisch zu sein. Carl Stumpfs Ästhetik hat nichts an sich von der fordernden, fast streitsüchtigen Art, mit der ein Theodor Lipps seine zentralen Themen verfolgte; sie ist gekennzeichnet von einer bohrenden, selbstkritischen Disputation und Entwicklung theoretischer Konzepte. Kühnen Entwürfen und Vereinfachungen, wie sie im umfangreichen ästhetischen Schrifttum der damaligen Zeit gang und gäbe waren, hat Stumpf eher misstraut. 8 Das Verhältnis der Tonpsychologie zur Ästhetik Vor diesem Hintergrund ist wohl auch seine Tonpsychologie (1883/90) zu beurteilen, die ich bisher nur am Rande erwähnt habe. Als Ziel dieser Schrift gibt Stumpf die Aufgabe an, die psychischen Funktionen zu beschreiben, welche durch Töne angeregt werden. Mehr leistet sie auch tatsächlich nicht, und genau dies rechtfertigt auch die Frage, wieweit es sich hier tatsächlich um eine ästhetische Schrift handle. Mit guten Gründen unterscheidet die systematische Musikwissenschaft zwischen Musikpsychologie und „Musikästhetik“.
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Hält man an dieser Einteilung fest, so ressortieren die beiden tatsächlich erschienenen Bände von Stumpfs Tonpsychologie eindeutig zur Musikpsychologie und nicht zur Musikästhetik. Für den ersten Teil der Tonpsychologie räumt Stumpf ja auch explizit ein, er gehe auf die „eigentlich musikalischen Probleme“ noch nicht ein, und selbst im Vorwort des zweiten Bandes findet sich die Bemerkung, die dort gebotene Darstellung des Verhaltens unseres Bewusstseins gegenüber mehreren gleichzeitigen Töne erfolge „abgesehen noch von aller eigentlich musikalischen Auffassung“. Die Tonpsychologie ist aber ein hervorragendes Beispiel für das, was Brentano als ‚deskriptive Psychologie‘ oder ‚Psychognosie‘ beschrieben hat. Sie nimmt in ihren Untersuchungen zur Wahrnehmung von Tönen, Klängen und Intervallen wesentliche Forschungsintentionen und in mancherlei Hinsicht sogar die theoretischen Konzepte der modernen kognitiven Musikpsychologie vorweg, war also schon zu ihrer Zeit ein durchaus zukunftsweisendes kognitionswissenschaftliches Werk, das in manchem seiner Zeit voraus war. Eine ästhetische Theorie in dem Sinne, wie Stumpf selbst den Begriff ‚Ästhetik‘ verstand, war sie wohl nicht. Mit dem, was in der Auffassung mancher ein Herzstück der Musikästhetik darstellt, nämlich die Theorie der Konsonanz, hat sich Stumpf in den beiden tatsächlich erschienenen Bänden seiner Tonpsychologie nur auf einer sehr grundlegenden Ebene auseinandergesetzt. Man solle nicht glauben, so beeilt sich Stumpf im Vorwort zum 2. Band der Tonpsychologie festzustellen, „dass in den gelegentlich bereits eingestreuten Bemerkungen hierüber meine Theorie der Consonanz, der Musik überhaupt auch nur in ihren Grundzügen angedeutet sein solle“ (1890, S. VII). Tatsächlich hat Stumpf seine Auffassungen zur Konsonanz nicht als systematischen Teil der Tonpsychologie entwickelt, sondern in eigenen Aufsätzen, etwa in der Schrift Konsonanz und Dissonanz in den Beiträgen zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft (1898). Es ist auch zu bezweifeln, dass sich die beiden geplanten weiteren Bände der Tonpsychologie überhaupt in Richtung dessen entwickelt hätten, was Stumpf als die Aufgabe der Ästhetik als Wissenschaft ansah. In der Vorrede zum zweiten Band kündigt Stumpf als Inhalt des dritten Bandes „die Intervallurteile oder das eigentlich musikalische Denken“ an und als Inhalt des vierten Bandes eine Untersuchung der „Ton- und Musikgefühle“. Damit verbleibt er letztlich auf der Ebene einer „Tonpsychologie“ als Tatsachenwissenschaft, und es gibt in seiner Ankündigung keinen Hinweis darauf, dass eben jenes Überschrei-
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ten einer bloßen Analyse der musikalischen Phänomene in Richtung auf eine Beurteilung ihres künstlerischen Wertes, das Stumpf in den Schriften und Reden seiner Berliner Zeit als die wesentliche Aufgabe der Ästhetik als „praktischer Philosophie“ dargestellt hat, überhaupt in der Konzeption dieses gewaltigen Forschungsprojektes enthalten war, das Stumpf letzten Endes auch nicht vollenden konnte. Gegen eine Interpretation der Tonpsychologie als einer unvollendeten Ästhetik spricht auch die Tatsache, dass sie auch in der geplanten Form auf die ästhetische Domäne des Musikalischen beschränkt geblieben wäre. Während sich die großen Ästhetiken der damaligen Zeit, etwa das ab 1905 erschienene, in drei Bänden insgesamt über 1.700 Seiten umfassende System der Ästhetik von Johannes Volkelt oder etwa die gleichfalls mehrbändige Ästhetik von Theodor Lipps, gleichsam mühelos über die Vielfalt der ästhetischen Erfahrungsfelder von der Malerei über die Poetik bis hin zur Architektur und zur Gebrauchskunst des Alltags hinweg bewegten und in der enzyklopädischen Darstellung der ästhetischen Erscheinungen geradezu ihr Ziel und Gliederungsprinzip sahen, verblieb Stumpf in jener Domäne, die ihm am nächsten lag, nämlich der Musik und in der Analyse ihrer tonalen Strukturelemente und Wahrnehmungskorrelate. Sein ästhetisches Denken bewegte sich gewissermaßen nicht in die Breite, sondern in die Tiefe, nämlich von der Analyse der elementaren „Tonurteile“ über die „Intervallgefühle oder das eigentlich musikalische Denken“ bis hin zu den „Ton- und Musikgefühlen“, wie es die geplanten Inhalte der Tonpsychologie zum Ausdruck bringen. Seine konsequente empirische Orientierung und wohl auch sein Hang zur Gewissenhaftigkeit und Genauigkeit hatten dabei zur Folge, dass er in die einzelnen Phasen dieser Forschung mehr Lebenszeit investierte als die bedeutenden Ästhetiker seiner Zeit für ihre theoretisch-systematischen Überflüge aufwendeten. 9 Schlussfolgerungen Die Gründe dafür, warum Stumpf keine explizite Ästhetik veröffentlich hat, obwohl sie sehr gut in den systematischen Aufbau seines Werkes gepasst hätte, sind also wohl vor allem in seiner Persönlichkeit und seinem Arbeitsethos zu suchen, und es sind wohl ähnliche Gründe wie die, die die Vollendung seiner Tonpsychologie verhindert haben. Auch Fechner ist letztlich mit seiner Absicht gescheitert, das Gebäude der Ästhetik von den Niederungen der elementaren empiri-
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schen Wirkungsforschung bis zu den lichten Höhen der Metaphysik zu entwickeln. Für Projekte dieser Art reicht ein Menschenleben ganz einfach nicht aus. In weiser Selbstbeschränkung hatte sich Stumpf selbst auf das Feld des Musikalischen eingeengt; ein System der gesamten Ästhetik in dieser enzyklopädischen Art zu entwickeln, hätte wohl die Dimensionen der Wundtschen Völkerpsychologie erfordert. Insofern sind wir darauf angewiesen, die implizite Ästhetik, die hinter seinen einschlägigen Gedankengängen und Argumentationen steckt, aus einzelnen Aussagen und Anmerkungen mühsam zu rekonstruieren. Wenn wir dabei vom zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext ausgehen, so erscheint es mir wichtig zu beachten, dass Stumpfs Wirksamkeit in jene Zeit fällt, in der vor alle durch Fechner der Anstoß kam, das Gegenstandsfeld der Ästhetik nicht nach dem Vorbild der idealistischen Ästhetiken des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts deduktiv aus irgendwelchen metaphysischen Anfangsgründen herzuleiten, sondern induktiv aus empirischen Forschungstatbeständen aufzubauen und auf diesen zu begründen. Diese empirische Wende der Ästhetik hat Stumpf ausdrücklich unterstützt, da sie seinem eigenen Methodenverständnis entsprach. Stumpfs eigene tonpsychologische Forschungen sind ein geradezu paradigmatisches Beispiel für diese neue empirischpsychologische Forschungsrichtung. Einen weiteren zentralen Aspekt seiner ‚impliziten Ästhetik’ bildet die Tatsache, dass er die Ästhetik gemeinsam mit der Ethik im Bereich der ‚praktischen Wissenschaften’ verortet. Als „praktischer Philosophie“ kam der Ästhetik aus der Sicht von Carl Stumpf vorrangig die Aufgabe zu – wenngleich gestützt auf empirische Untersuchungen –, ‚richtige’ von ‚falschen’ ästhetischen Urteilen zu scheiden und Kriterien zu entwickeln, nach denen ‚wertvolle’ von ‚wertloser’ Kunst unterschieden werden konnte. Mit diesem Verständnis, das Stumpf auch mit seinem Lehrer Brentano verband, stand Stumpf wiederum den Vertretern der wertphilosophischen Ästhetik näher, die in ihrer überwiegenden Mehrheit die psychologische Ästhetik ablehnten. Aus diesem Grund hat er den zum Teil sehr heftigen Zuständigkeitsstreit zwischen psychologisch-empirischer und wertphilosophischer Ästhetik wohl mit großer innerer Gespaltenheit erlebt und, da er wesentliche Punkte in beiden dieser kontroversiellen Positionen als berechtigt empfand, diese Kontroverse vermutlich als unsinnig empfunden. Dies ist aus meiner Sicht der Grund, warum er sich an den theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen dieser Zeit nicht beteiligt hat, umgekehrt aber
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auch von den Streitparteien nicht als Ästhetiker wahrgenommen wurde. Ungeachtet dessen lässt sich seine Position in den theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen dieser Zeit doch einigermaßen klar verorten, wenngleich sie nicht den damaligen Lagerbildungen entsprach. Gerade deshalb erscheint es mir aber wichtig, zumindest den Versuch einer Rekonstruktion dieser seiner ‚impliziten Ästhetik’ zu unternehmen, weil sich damit auch ein neuer Ausgangspunkt ergibt, die expliziten und veröffentlichten Antworten und Aussagen Anderer zu den ästhetischen Streitfragen der damaligen Zeit zu hinterfragen und zu relativieren. Im Grunde hat aber Stumpf diesen von ihm im Vorwort zum ersten Band der Tonpsychologie eher geringschätzig angesprochenen „Principienstreitigkeiten“ wenig Bedeutung beigemessen. Im Rahmen einer Ästhetik als „praktischer Philosophie“ lag ihm wohl eher eine kritisch-wertende Beurteilung der künstlerischen und kunsttheoretischen Entwicklungen seiner Zeit am Herzen und wohl auch die Frage der wissenschaftlichen und pädagogischen Implikationen derartiger Wertungen. Auch dazu hat Stumpf aber keine systematische Schrift veröffentlicht, und aus den wenigen veröffentlichten Dokumenten und Lebenszeugnissen sind nur spärliche Hinweise auf seine konkreten Auffassungen abzuleiten. Es wäre zu wünschen, dass eine systematische Aufarbeitung unerschlossener Quellen dazu weitere Bausteine liefern kann. References Allen, Grant. 1874. Physiological Aesthetics. Reprint der Ausgabe 1877, New York: Garland 1977. Allesch, Christian G. 1987. Geschichte der psychologischen Ästhetik. Göttingen. Hogrefe. –– 1998. ‚Psychologische oder kritische Begründung der Ästhetik? Über die widersprüchliche Beziehung Jonas Cohns zur empirisch-psychologischen Ästhetik‘ in Jahnke, Jürgen et al. (Hrsg.), Psychologiegeschichte – Beziehungen zu Philosophie und Grenzgebieten. München: Profil-Verlag: 305-317. –– 2006. Einführung in die psychologische Ästhetik. Wien: Facultas. –– 2012. ‚Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)‘ in Betzler, Monika, Maria-Doria Cojocaru und Julian Nida-Rümelin (Hrsg.) Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart in Einzeldarstellungen (2. Aufl.). Stuttgart: Kröner: 548-442. Allesch, Gustav J. von. 1910. ‚Über das Verhältnis der Ästhetik zur Psychologie‘ in Zeitschrift für Psychologie 51: 401-536. Brentano, Franz. 1988. Grundzüge der Ästhetik, aus dem Nachlass hrsg. v. F. MayerHillebrand (1959). Reprint Hamburg: Meiner.
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Cohn, Jonas. 1894. ‚Experimentelle Untersuchungen über die Gefühlsbetonung der Farben, Helligkeiten und ihrer Combinationen‘ in Philosophische Studien 10: 561-603. –– 1901. Allgemeine Ästhetik. Leipzig: Barth. –– 1904. ‚Psychologische oder kritischen Begründung der Ästhetik‘ in Archiv für systematische Philosophie 10: 131-159. Hartmann, Eduard v. 1886. Die deutsche Ästhetik seit Kant. Berlin: Duncker. Hirth, Georg. 1891. Aufgaben der Kunstphysiologie. München: Hirth. Lange, Carl G. 1903. Sinnesgenüsse und Kunstgenuß. Beiträge zu einer sensualistischen Kunstlehre. Wiesbaden: Bergmann. Lanzoni, Susan. 2009. ‘Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy’ in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45: 330–354. Lee, Vernon. 1913. The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Vernon and Clementina Anstruther-Thompson. 1912. Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: Lane. Lipps, Theodor. 1903/06. Ästhetik – Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, 2 Bde., Hamburg und Leipzig: Voss. Stumpf, Carl. 1883/90. Tonpsychologie, 2 Bde. Reprint Amsterdam: Bonset 1965. –– 1887. ‚Die Lust am Trauerspiel‘ in Stumpf, Carl. Philosophische Reden und Vorträge. Leipzig: Barth 1910: 1-64. –– 1896. ‚Leib und Seele‘ in Stumpf, Carl. Philosophische Reden und Vorträge. Leipzig: Barth 1910: 65-93. –– 1898. Konsonanz und Dissonanz. Leipzig: Barth. –– 1899a. ‚Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie‘ in Stumpf, Carl. Philosophische Reden und Vorträge. Leipzig: Barth 1910: 94-124. –– 1899b. ‚Ueber den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung‘ in Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21: 47-99. –– 1907a. ‚Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie‘ in Stumpf, Carl. Philosophische Reden und Vorträge. Leipzig: Barth 1910: 161-196. –– 1907b. ‚Über Gefühlsempfindungen‘ in Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 44: 1-49. –– 1997. Schriften zur Psychologie, neu herausgegeben, eingeleitet und mit einer biographischen Einführung versehen von Helga Sprung unter Mitarbeit von Lothar Sprung. Frankfurt/M.: Lang. –– 1939/40. Erkenntnislehre, 2 Bde.; Reprint Lengerich: Pabst 2011. Stumpf, Carl und Erich von Hornbostel. 1911. ‚Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst‘ in Schumann, Friedrich (Hrsg.) Bericht über den IV. Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie in Innsbruck. Leipzig: Barth: 256-269. Volkelt, Johannes. 1905/17. System der Ästhetik, 3 Bde., München: Beck. Wundt, Wilhelm. 1913. Die Philosophie im Kampf ums Dasein. Leipzig: Kröner.
PART III. INFLUENCES INTRODUCTION (RICCARDO MARTINELLI)
Reconstructing Stumpf’s influence over the philosophers and scientists of his time is a fascinating task. All during his teaching activity, from the late 1870s to the 1920s, Stumpf came into contact with an impressive number of relevant philosophers and scientists of his time: teachers, colleagues, students etc. Quite often, he influenced them in various ways. However, one should bear in mind that Stumpf never aimed at establishing an orthodoxy or founding a “school”. (Stumpf 1924, 44) Most of his advanced students developed their research autonomously and, on several occasions, they overtly criticized some aspects of Stumpf’s doctrines. This is one of the most striking divergences between Stumpf and Brentano: Stumpf is undoubtedly far from any scholastic attitude; rather, he displays a genuinely scientific mentality and firmly believes that both science and philosophy undergo real progress through time. Accordingly, it is quite normal for a student to surpass his teacher’s doctrines in some respects. This attitude and mentality is perfectly epitomized by Stumpf’s liberal attitude towards all of his students, including e.g. Wolfgang Köhler, with his sharp criticism of Stumpf’s psychological doctrine of unnoticed sensations. (Köhler 1913, 78) Stumpf’s influence can be ascertained both within the School of Brentano and (in the Berlin years) beyond it. In Prague, Stumpf cooperated with Anton Marty, critically interacted with Ernst Mach and met William James, who became a close friend and a lifelong correspondent. (Stumpf 1928) Most remarkably, Stumpf influenced Edmund Husserl, who followed Brentano’s advice and went to Halle in order to study under Stumpf’s supervision. (Fisette 2009, 2015, Rollinger 1999) The young Husserl borrowed many elements from Stumpf, and dedicated to him his first philosophical monograph, Logische Untersuchungen. (Husserl 1975, 1984) Many of Stumpf’s ideas influenced other Brentanians, especially after the publication of
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Tonpsychologie (Stumpf 1883, 1890). In a review of the second volume (1890) and some subsequent writing, Alexius Meinong discusses and – at least for a while – integrates the concept of tonal fusion into his doctrine of relations. (Meinong 1891, 1891a) During the Munich years, Stumpf critically interacted, among others, with Theodor Lipps. Thereafter, in Berlin, Stumpf’s network of relationships dramatically increased as a consequence of his institutional role as Professor and Director of the Institute for Psychology. (Sprung 2006) Stumpf’s theory and experimental practice influenced the founders of the Gestalt theory – Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka – and many young students like Erich von Hornbostel, Kurt Lewin, Adhémar Gelb, Johannes von Allesch, and Robert Musil (Ash 1995, 2000); furthermore, Stumpf compared notes with other psychologists (Karl Bühler, Oswald Külpe) (Kaiser El-Safti, 1997) and – besides his colleagues Wilhelm Dilthey and Benno Erdmann – with philosophers like Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach. In his article A Phenomenology without Phenomena? Carl Stumpf’s Critical Remarks on Husserl’s Phenomenology, Denis Fisette shades new light on the relationship between the two philosophers. (Fisette 2015) Based on wide documental evidence, the essay illustrates the long-lasting dialogue between Husserl and Stumpf on phenomenology. Instead of insisting on some occasionally harsh tones, Fisette shows the manifold implications of this dialogue for both thinkers. Husserl’s varying definitions of phenomenology in the Logical Investigation, in Ideas I and in the Freiburg period can be significantly read in close relationship with Stumpf’s reception of his work. The essay also discusses Stumpf’s own definition of phenomenology – a neutral and preliminary science, dealing with sensory phenomena – and Husserl’s rejection of it, and offers as an appendix a letter addressed by Stumpf to Felix Klein. Stumpf took interest in Husserl’s developments from Halle to Göttingen, and the two philosophers maintained a close relationship for more than fifty years. He discusses Husserl's views in his 1906 Academic essays and in the posthumous Erkenntnislehre of 1939-40. Stumpf appreciated Husserl’s early definition of phenomenology (Logical Investigations); by contrast, no less than many others, Stumpf harshly criticized Husserl’s Ideas I. Significantly, the parallelism established between psychology and transcendental phenomenology by the last Husserl ends up by confirming Stumpf’s critical argument that phenomenology and psy-
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chology are two faces of the same coin, as Husserl himself finally seems to concede. The relationship of phenomenology with descrpitive psychology is at stake throughout the whole debate: thus, the debate concerning phenomenology also involves an evaluation of the role played by Brentano. In the essay Stumpf’s (Early) Insights and Marty’s Way to His (Later) Sprachphilosophie, Laurent Cesalli investigates Stumpf’s “seminal influence on Marty’s philosophical development”, as revealed in his 1876 review of Anton Marty’s first book Über den Ursprung der Sprache. (Cesalli 2015) Although we now tend to consider a book review as a minor text, this was not necessarily true of Stumpf’s and Marty’s time. Rather, in this “programmatic” review Stumpf systematically points out the methodological grounds for applying sound empiricism to the psychological issue of the origins of language. Relying upon the correspondence of Marty with Brentano, Cesalli convincingly shows that the ideas expressed by Stumpf in this review (and probably in the personal exchanges of views) explain the shift that occurred around the 1880s in Marty’s ideas on this topic. Moreover, Stumpf’s review makes Marty’s philosophical assumptions even more explicit than they are in the book itself. In this way, Stumpf contributed to orientate Marty’s later choices. Fiorenza Toccafondi’s paper On Stumpf and Schlick consists of an in-depth analysis of the role played by Stumpf’s doctrines in Schlick’s Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre. (Toccafondi 2015) As far as the concept of knowledge is concerned, Schlick recognizes very little importance to psychology; he himself suggests that all the passages on these topics in his work are mere “incidental remarks”. However, Toccafondi argues, Schlick possesses an excellent familiarity with most psychological questions, including with Stumpf’s theses. From this point of view, Schlick’s masterwork can be seen as an important step towards the reception of Stumpf’s ideas. Schlick seems to consider Stumpf as a representative of Brentano’s (and others’) theory of evidence based on inner perception. Remarkably, he shares the critical objections raised by the Gestaltists against Stumpf’s doctrine. In her paper, entitled Love, Feelings and Emotions in Robert Musil’s “Unions” in the light of Carl Stumpf’s Theory of Emotions Silvia Bonacchi draws attention on the influence of Stumpf’s theories on the Austrian writer Robert Musil, who studied philosophy and psychology (1903-1908) in Berlin. (Bonacchi 2015) Before dropping the-
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se matters in favor of literature, Musil wrote his dissertation on the topic of Mach’s phenomenalism under Stumpf’s supervision. Musil’s own philosophical ideas mainly concerns emotions, a theme that pervades his literary production as well. As Bonacchi shows, Musil’s insights on emotions blossomed at an early stage, before he wrote his masterpiece, The Man without Qualities. The three novels gathered in The Unions already show a deep influence exerted by Stumpf’s doctrines of sense-feelings. References Ash, M. G. (1995), Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967. Holism and the Quest for Objectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –– (2000) “Carl Stumpf und seine Schüler: von empirischer Philosophie zur Gestalt psychologie”, Brentano Studien, 9, 130-142. Bonacchi, S (2015) “Love, Emotions and Passion in Musil’s Novellas “Unions” in the light of Stumpf’s Theory of Feelings”, 407-424. Cesalli, L. (2015) “Stumpf’s (Early) Insights and Marty’s Way to His (Later) Sprachphilosophie”, 361-385. Fisette, D. (2009), “Stumpf and Husserl on Phenomenolohy and descriptive Psychology”, Gestalt Theory, 32, 175-190. –– (2015) “A Phenomenology without Phenomena? Carl Stumpf’s Critical Remarks on Husserl’s Phenomenology”, 323-355. Husserl, E. (1975) Logische Untersuchungen: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Husserliana XVIII, Berlin: Springer. –– (1984) Logische Untersuchungen: Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkenntnis, Husserliana, XIX/1 and XIX/2, Berlin: Springer. Kaiser El-Safti, M. (1997), “Carl Stumpf und Oswald Külpe. Ein Vergleich”, Brentano Studien, 7, 53-80. Köhler, W (1913), “Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 66, 51-80. Meinong, A (1891), “Rezension von: Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, Band II”, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. VII, 161-173. –– (1891a), “Zur Psychologie der Komplexionen und Relationen”, in Gesamtausgabe, vol.1, 281-303; engl. transl. “On the Psychology of Complexions and Relations”, in On Objects of Higher Order and Husserl’s Phenomenology, M.-L. Schubert Kalsi (ed.), The Hague-Boston-London,Nijhoff, 57-72. Rollinger, R. (1999) Husserl’s position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Sprung, H. (2006) Carl Stumpf – Eine Biografie, München: Profil. Stumpf, C. (1883), Tonpsychologie, vol 1, Leipzig: Hirzel; repr. Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1890), Tonpsychologie, vol. II, Leipzig: Hirzel; repr. Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1924) “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung, vol. 5, Leipzig: Meiner, 1-67; engl. transl. in C. Murchison (ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, Worcester: Clark University Press, 1930, 389-441.
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–– (1928): William James nach seinen Briefen, Berlin: Pan Verlag, 47; also in Kant Studien, 32, 1927, 205-241. Toccafondi, F. (2015) “On Stumpf and Schlick”, 387-405.
A PHENOMENOLOGY WITHOUT PHENOMENA? CARL STUMPF’S CRITICAL REMARKS ON HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY DENIS FISETTE (UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC À MONTRÉAL)
Abstract. This study is a commentary on Carl Stumpf’s evaluation of Husserl’s phenomenology as presented in the Logical Investigations and the first book of Ideas. I first examine Stumpf’s reception of the version of phenomenology that Husserl presented in the Logical Investigations and I then look at §§ 85-86 of Ideas I, in which Husserl seeks to demarcate his “pure” phenomenology from that of Stumpf. In the third section, I analyze the criticism that Stumpf, in § 13 of his book Erkenntnislehre, directs toward to the new version of phenomenology that Husserl develops in Ideas I, and in the fourth, I summarize the Spinozist interpretation of the noetico-noematical correlations that Stumpf proposes in his two studies on Spinoza. The last section addresses Husserl’s self-criticism regarding the Cartesian aproach to the reduction in Ideas I and the parallelism that the late Husserl establishes between intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology. I try to show that the version of phenomenology that Husserl develops during the Freiburg period anticipates in many respects Stumpf’s criticism and partly confirms the latter’s diagnosis of the version of phenomenology advocated in Ideas I.
One hundred years after the publication of the first book of Husserl’s Ideas, we are still far from having reached a consensus regarding the philosophical implications of this work and its contribution to the philosophical program of the founder of contemporary phenomenology. Soon after its publication in 1913, this book received a mitigated reception (to say the least) from Husserl’s first students (the Munich phenomenologists); it gave rise to many controversies on the ins and outs of Husserl’s phenomenology and on the book’s central theme, that is, intentionality. It is in this book that Husserl introduced the concept of noema, which represents the heart of his theory of intentionality, and we know that since the 1960s the reception of Ideas I has been the subject of a vigorous debate which still arouses a great deal of interest from Husserl’s commentators even today. But the
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main issue in this debate is not merely exgetical, it concerns the relevance and value of Husserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intentionality in the domain of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It is in light of these debates that Stumpf’s critical evaluation of his student Husserl’s work acquires its full significance. Stumpf’s evaluation is of particular interest in Husserl studies given that these two students of Brentano maintained a close relationship for over fifty years and that Stumpf followed with great interest the evolution of Husserl’s thought from the Halle period (1886-1901) to that of Göttingen (1901-1916). The latter period is characterized by the transcendental turn to which Husserl subjected his phenomenology in the first book of Ideas. That said, Stumpf’s evaluation of the two versions of phenomenology that correspond to these two periods is significantly different. Indeed, as shown by Stumpf’s scattered remarks on the Logical Investigations in his two important articles published in 1906 (Stumpf 2006a, 2006b), Husserl’s phenomenology constitutes a major contribution not only to descriptive psychology, but also to the theory of knowledge, ontology and logic. However, in his book Erkenntnislehre, published posthumously, Stumpf takes a very critical attitude towards the new version of phenomenology that Husserl develops in the first book of Ideas and offers an insightful and enlightening analysis of the philosophical program that Husserl develops in this book. Stumpf’s diagnosis covers the main aspects of Husserl’s project in this book, including the idea of a “pure” phenomenology, his conception of formal and regional ontologies, the doctrine of the noeticonoematical correlations, and the method of the reduction. Stumpf raises the question whether this new version of phenomenology, which claims to overcome the program of the Logical Investigations, merely relapses into the prejudices of a tradition that Stumpf and all the other students of Brentano, including the young Husserl, had forcefully criticized. In this regard, it is clear from Stumpf’s remarks on Ideas I that what is at stake is the value of the philosophical program that constitutes the common starting point of these two students of Brentano. In this study, I propose to examine, first, Stumpf’s reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in the Logical Investigations. I will then turn to §§ 85-86 of the first book of Ideas in which Husserl compares his “pure” phenomenology with Stumpf’s. In the third section, I analyze Stumpf’s criticism of the account of phenomenology offered in
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Ideas I in § 13 of his book Erkenntnislehre, and in the fourth, I will summarize the main points of the Spinozist interpretation of the noetico-noematical correlations that Stumpf proposes in his two studies on Spinoza. The last section focuses on Husserl’s self-criticism regarding the Cartesian approach to the phenomenological reduction in Ideas I and on the parallelism that Husserl establishes between intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology. I put forward the hypothesis that the version of phenomenology that Husserl develops during his Freiburg period anticipates in many respects Stumpf’s criticism and partly confirms his diagnosis in Erkenntnislehre. 1 Stumpf and the Phenomenology of the Logical Investigations The name of Carl Stumpf is known to Husserl’s readers insofar as it occurs frequently in the works that Husserl published during the Halle period. We also know that it was Stumpf who, under the recommendation of Brentano, of whom he was also the first student, supervized the young Husserl’s studies in Halle and his habilitation thesis on the origin of the concept of number. What is less known, however, is the close relationship that Husserl and Stumpf maintained throughout their lives and the major influence that Stumpf exercised on the young Husserl during the Halle period. These facts, however, were recognized in Husserl’s seminal book on phenomenology, which is dedicated to Stumpf in recognition of his reverence and friendship.1 I cannot, in this study, account for the personal and scientific relationships that these two philosophers have maintained during this period (see R. Rollinger 1999, D. Fisette 2009), and I shall confine myself to a brief review of Stumpf’s remarks on the Logical Investigations in two important papers published in 1906 by the Academy of Sciences in Berlin under the titles “On the Classification of Sciences” and “Phenomena and Psychical Functions”. The first important point that stands out from Stumpf’s reading of the Logical Investigations is that the version of phenomenology that Husserl presents in the general introduction of this book is intended to be a direct contribution to Brentano’s descriptive psychology, despite the significant revisions that Husserl imposes on it in the last two stud1
A letter from Stumpf to his friend Felix Klein provides evidence of Stumpf’s high esteem for his student Husserl. In this letter dated June 4, 1901 Stumpf recommends to the famous mathematician Husserl’s candidacy for a position in Göttingen. This letter is reproduced in the appendix.
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ies of this work and the severe criticism that he directs torard Brentano in the appendix of this book. Stumpf first refers to Husserl’s definition of phenomenology in the general introduction of this book as descriptive psychology, which is understood as a preliminary science to genetic psychology: Pure phenomenology represents a field of neutral researches, in which several sciences have their roots. It is, on the one hand, an ancillary to psychology conceived as an empirical science. Proceeding in purely intuitive fashion, it analyses and describes in their essential generality − in the specific guise of a phenomenology of thought and knowledge − the experiences of presentation, judgement and knowledge, experiences which, treated as classes of real events in the natural context of zoological reality, receive a scientific probing at the hands of empirical psychology. (Hua XIX, 1/ 166; see also §6)
Stumpf rightly emphasizes the importance of the distinction which Husserl refers to in this passage between descriptive and genetic psychology, a distinction that Brentano already taught in his lectures in the mid-1880s and which Husserl attended during his studies in Vienna. However, as Husserl explains in § 7 of the fifth Investigation (Hua XIX / 1, 336-350), which has been subtracted from the second edition of the book, descriptive and genetic psychology are not two independent disciplines but two aspects of a single discipline: Psychology’s task − descriptivly − is to study the ego-experiences (or conscious contents) in their essential species and forms of combination, in order to explore − genetically − their origin and perishing, and the causal patterns and laws of their formation and transformation. (Hua XIX/1, 347/88)
Following Brentano, Husserl claims that the task of descriptive psychology is to describe and analyze what genetic psychology, i.e. the physiological or experimental psychology at the time, explains causally. Methodologically, the description of conscious experience has precedence over the explanation of these phenomena because the analysis of the explanandum is an essential step prior to its explanation by genetic psychology. Stumpf suggests that it is primarily to avoid the confusion between these two aspects of psychology that Husserl opted for the term phenomenology which he defines, in the Logical Investigations, as de-
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scriptive psychology. (Stumpf 1906b, 200) But the choice of this term is questionable, according to Stumpf, because in identifying phenomenology with descriptive psychology, Husserl runs the risk of confusing two distinct domains of research, i.e. sensory phenomena and psychical functions, and in so doing of eradicating the close relationship that Husserl wants to maintain between descriptive and genetic psychology. As Stumpf points out in a footnote that Husserl comments in Ideas I, phenomenology and psychology must fulfill very different tasks: I use here the term phenomenology in another sense and I want to keep the term “descriptive psychology” for the mere description of the experiences of mental acts which is more appropriate for this purpose because, in fact, the object, namely the basic psychical function, is common to descriptive and genetic psychology, and because this common object may be obscured by the choice of a completely different expression. (Stumpf 1906b, 200)
The term phenomenology, as used by Stumpf in his two treatises of 1906, refers in fact to a research domain that is distinct from that of descriptive psychology, the latter of which is limited to psychical acts or to what Stumpf calls psychical functions. The field of phenomenology, in Stumpf’s sense, pertains only to sensory phenomena or what Husserl also calls, following Brentano, physical phenomena. The distinction between phenomena and mental functions is of importance in order to understand another objection that Stumpf directs toward Husserl’s classification of the sciences regarding the distinction between descriptive psychology and the natural sciences. Stumpf again refers to § 7 of the fifth Investigation in which Husserl criticizes Mach’s phenomenalism and the Hume-Berkeley view according to which corporeal phenomena are reduced to aggregates of sensations or elements. Husserl criticizes phenomenalism for confusing the “phenomenon, understood as an intentional experience, and the corresponding object” and thus conflating the complex of lived experiences or sensations with the complex of objective properties. It is in this context that Husserl resorts to internal perception as a criterion of demarcation between descriptive psychology and natural sciences, and proposes a definition of psychology that he again here takes over from Brentano:
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Stumpf agrees with Husserl’s criticism of phenomenalism, but he rejects the arguments put forward by Husserl regarding his distinction between descriptive psychology and natural sciences, including genetic psychology, because, on the one hand, Stumpf does not consider that internal perception is a reliable criterion and, on the other hand, he does not admit that natural sciences and descriptive psychology are distinguishable solely in function of their object of study because psychical phenomena, on the basis of which Husserl defines descriptive psychology, also constitute the object of genetic psychology. This objection equally applies to the field of physical phenomena or to what Stumpf calls phenomenology because Stumpf believes that this domain of investigation is common to descriptive psychology and to the natural sciences. That is why Stumpf argues that this distinction only concerns ultimately “the material that is used in the formation of the object”. (Stumpf 1906b, 186-187)2 Another important aspect of descriptive psychology to which Stumpf pays particular attention in his two treaties of 1906 concerns Husserl’s pure logic. In the passage where Husserl puts forth his definition of descriptive psychology in the general introduction to his Logical Investigations, he clearly indicates that phenomenology is not confined to the role of a propaedeutic to genetic psychology. For its primary philosophical task consists in the analysis and elucidation of the fundamental concepts and laws of logic: Phenomenology, on the other hand, lays bare the “sources” from which the basic concepts and ideal laws of pure logic “flow,” and back to which they must once more be traced, so as to give them all 2
Stumpf does not seem to take into account Husserl’s criticisms of Brentano in the appendix to the Logical Investigations. (see Fisette 2010) However, in Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf argues against Husserl that the source of the problem in Brentano’s theory of perception is not to be found in his conception of physical phenomena, but in his theory of perception as judgment. (Stumpf 1939-1940, 218-219)
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the “clearness and distinctness” needed for an understanding, and for an epistemological critique, of pure logic. (Hua XIX/1, 3/166)
This is the main task which is assigned to phenomenology understood as a theory of knowledge in the Logical Investigations. This dual task assigned to phenomenology is at the origin of the apparent tension between the critique of psychologism, which is the main issue of the first volume of the Logical Investigations, in which Husserl challenges the contribution of psychology to logico-mathematical questions, and the remaining parts of the book in which the analysis and description of the fundamental concepts of logic belong to a phenomenology of knowledge understood as descriptive psychology. This tension has been clearly identified by Stumpf (1906b, 200). He first refers to a footnote in the Prolegomena in which Husserl discusses the work of Külpe and Elsenhans with regard to his critique of psychologism and its bearing on psychology. He claims that even if philosophy has nothing to expect from a genetic explanation of logic, descriptive psychology still remains at the foundation of genetic psychology and pure logic: I should probably have said exactly the same before beginning my present investigations, or before realizing the insoluble difficulties in which I was plunged by a psychologistic view of the philosophy of mathematics. Now, however, having the best reasons to see the error of such a view, I can rejoice and take the liveliest interest in the otherwise very promising development of scientific psychology, but not as one who expects philosophical enlightenment from it. I must, however, add, to guard against misunderstanding, that I sharply distinguish empirical psychology from the phenomenology (taken as a pure theory of the essences of experiences) that underlies it (as epistemology underlies it in a wholly different manner). This will become clear in the actual Investigations which follow these Prolegomena. (Hua XVIII, 235-236/319-320)
Stumpf interprets this passage as claiming that the logical psychologism that Husserl criticizes in his Prolegomena only concerns the genetic aspect of psychology and not descriptive psychology as such. For Stumpf understands logical psychologism as the thesis according to which the laws and principles of pure logic are reducible to the laws of genetic psychology, whatever form it may take, be it the oldest form of associationist psychology or Wundt’s physiological psychol-
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ogy, for example. For Stumpf, there is no contradiction between Husserl's criticism of logical psychologism and the important function which he assigns to phenomenology understood as descriptive psychology: When theorists of knowledge oppose, as Husserl in particular does, the amalgamation of psychology with “pure logic,” then it is genetic psychology they have in mind, but not descriptive psychology which, in the penetrating research of Husserl, represents its privileged object and is used almost at every point. Description, distinction, classification of lived acts and the study of their finest connections penetrate the whole work. (Stumpf, 1906b, 200)3
Stumpf is also sympathetic to Husserl’s project of a pure logic as a theory of science as presented in the last part of the Prolegomena, as confirmed by his remarks in his book Erkenntnislehre which I will discuss later. In this regard, Stumpf’s doctrine of formations (Gebilde) is of particular interest to Husserl’s logic because it deals with the “necessary correlates” of psychical functions (Stumpf, 1906a, 156 ff.) and with the specific contents of each class and subclass of mental functions. For example, Husserl's notion of moments of unity falls under the concept of formation as well as states of affairs, which were first introduced by Stumpf in his logic lecture of 1888 and which refer, at first approximation, to the specific content of the class of judgments. Stumpf emphasizes the importance of this distinction between the content and the object of an act (Stumpf 1906b, 171) in the Logical Investigations, and in this case, between the content of an act of judgment (its propositional content or meaning) and its object that Husserl conceives following Stumpf, as a state of affairs. Like Husserl, 3
The theme of psychologism, which Husserl associates with the debates on the foundation of logic in the Prolegomena, essentially reproduces the theoretical framework used by Stumpf in his 1891 article on the relation between psychology and the theory of knowledge. In the Prolegomena, Husserl refers twice to this article: firstly, to a footnote in § 18 in order to indicate that, as Stumpf in this article, he uses the term psychologism without any “pejorative nuance”. In the second (Hua XVIII, 63), Husserl refers to a passage (Stumpf, 1891, 469) where Stumpf uses the Kantian argument against psychologism, i.e. that logical psychologism can never provide general and necessary truths. Husserl says that although Stumpf deals only with the theory of knowledge and not specifically with logic in his article, it “is not an essential difference”. (see D. Fisette, 2014a)
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Stumpf recognizes the objective nature of the Gebilde that he explicitely equates to Bolzano’s propositions in themselves (Stumpf 1906a, 157-159, 1906b, 214) and like Husserl, he recognizes the distinction between the meaning of an act of judgment and its object, i.e. the state of affairs, as confirmed by the following passage: Husserl rightly pointed out that the concepts of “equiangular triangle” and “equilateral triangle” are different even if they refer to the same thing. He speaks of a different “meaning” with the same “object”. Similarly, the judgments “a > b” and “b < a” have a different meaning but they express the same state of affairs. (Stumpf 1906a, 161)4
The field of study of the Gebilde and states of affairs falls within what he calls eidology (see C. Stumpf, 1906b, p. 197 ff.) which, like the domain of relations and that of phenomenology, is a neutral domain, i.e. a field of research that does not belong to the class of natural sciences, nor to that of human sciences. Stumpf further claims that this neutral science constitutes a preliminary domain of research to all sciences. 2 Husserl and Stumpf’s Phenomenology In §§ 85-86 of Ideas I, Husserl refers explicitly to Stumpf’s two Academy treatises of 1906 and responds to the objection that has been 4
However, the use made by Stumpf of the notion of Gebilde does not always seem to respect this important distinction when he says, for example, that a Gebilde is the objective correlate of an act of judgment that is expressed linguistically in “subordinate clauses” or when he identifies this concept to that of “objective” (Objektiv) in Meinong or that of objectivity in Husserl. (Stumpf, 1906a, 158) According to him, this Gebilde is originally a partial content that is dependent of an act of judgment and that can only be isolated by abstraction. Hence the central place in Stumpf’s philosophy of the theory of abstraction and concept formation and the importance he attaches to Husserl’s analyzes in the second Investigation. (Stumpf, 1906a, 159) In the last chapter of the second Investigation, Husserl opposes the classical theory of abstraction according to which there would be only one kind of parts (fragments, separable parts) to that of Stumpf who distinguishes from these “independent” parts the “dependent partial content”. (Hua XIX /1, 248) We cannot rule out a direct influence of Husserl on the theory of abstraction that Stumpf advocates from 1906 and on his theory of Gebilde as evidenced by a letter from Husserl to Stumpf dated from 1902 in which Husserl provides further precisions on the subject of his second Investigation. (Husserl, Briefwechsel, 169-173) It is probably no coincidence that Stumpf introduced his concept of Gebilde in a lecture delivered in 1902 under the title “Abstraction and Generalization”.
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discussed above regarding the choice of the term phenomenology to designate the field of descriptive psychology. We saw that Stumpf disagreed with this terminological choice arguing that, from the point of view of the researchers in psychology, it was likely to confuse the domain of sensory phenomena (= Stumpf’s phenomenology) with that of psychical functions or acts (= Stumpf’s descriptive psychology), which are for Stumpf and Brentano two distinct domains. Husserl’s response to Stumpf’s objections in Ideas I clearly shows that their dispute over phenomenology is no longer merely terminological, because the new meaning that Husserl confers to phenomenology in this book is quite different from both the phenomenology referred to in his Logical Investigations, understood as descriptive psychology, and that of Stumpf, understood as the field of sensory phenomena. In Ideas I, Husserl establishes a correspondence between two distinctions: Stumpf’s distinction between mental functions and phenomena, which is a psychological distinction, and that presented in the Logical Investigations between acts, defined as intentional Erlebnisse, and “primary contents”. In the §85 entitled “Sensual Hylè and Intentional Morphè,” Husserl replaces the notion of primary content with the well-known expression of “hyletic Data or stuff-Data” (Ideas I, 205), by which he refers to a very broad field that includes: color-Data, touch-Data and tone-Data, and the like, which we shall no longer confuse with appearing moments of physical things - coloredness, roughness, etc.- which “present themselves” to mental processes (erlebnismaßig) by means of those . Likewise the sensuous pleasure, pain and tickle sensations, and so forth, and no doubt also sensuous moments belonging to the sphere of “drives”. (Hua III, 172/203)
The changes that affect his conception of intentionality, however, are not only terminological. Husserl acknowledges his debt to Brentano who deserves the credit for having characterized the concept of “psychical phenomena” in one of its delimiting determinations by the peculiarity of intentionality. Precisely as a result he brought the “psychical” into the sphere of vision of our times in that distinctive sense which had a certain emphasis but was not annulled in the historical signification of the word. (Hua III, 175/206)
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However, he makes substantial changes to the structure of intentional acts by introducing the noetico-noematical correlations, which I will later comment on.5 In the light of this new terminology, we can establish a correspondence between, on the one hand, Stumpf’s psychology of functions or Brentano’s descriptive psychology and Husserl’s noetic, and on the other hand, between Stumpf’s phenomenology and what Husserl calls the “Hyletik”. In § 85 of Ideas I, Husserl uses the opposition between form and matter, or more precisely, the opposition between intentional morphè and sensory hylè, and conceives of the relation between these two terms in a way that is reminiscent of Kant’s well-known formula: “formlose Stoffe” (formless stuffs) and “stofflose Formen” (stuffless forms). At first glance, these formless materials reflects more closely the account of sensory phenomena criticized both by Husserl and by Stumpf – as indicated in the latter’s book on the origin of space perception – than the sensory phenomena of phenomenology. For the expression seems to suggest that the field of sensory phenomena is itself amorphous and unstructured, and whose organisation is thus dependant on the intentional morphè, which “animates” it by imposing its own categories from without. If this is indeed the case, then the introduction of the notion of hylè not only marks a change in terminology, but also differs significantly from the conception of primary contents, understood as wholes structured by relations that are not imposed from without but are inherent to the phenomena themselves. As Stumpf rightly pointsout in his posthumously published book Erkenntnislehre, this is particularly true of the theory of wholes and parts, which Husserl took over from Stumpf and which he systematically 5
Husserl prefers to avoid the notion of psychical phenomenon or of intentional experience (act) in Ideas I and uses instead the notion of “noesis” which he describes as follows: “These noeses make up what is specific to nous in the broadest sense of the word; it refers us back, according to all its actual life-forms, to cogitationes and then to any intentional mental processes whatever”. (Translation changed, Hua III, 174/205) In § 86 of this book, he seems to identify the notion of noesis with that of function in Stumpf’s sense and says that the most important problems of his phenomenology are functional problems. Moreover, Husserl introduced the notion of noema in Ideas I immediately after this long comment about Stumpf in § 88, which is entitled “Real and intentional components of experience. The noema”. The noema is considered as the non-real or “irreal” component of an act and it corresponds to what is commonly called an intentional content. The equivalent concept in Stumpf is that of formation (Gebilde) which is also considered the correlate of an act.
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developed in the third Investigation. As confirmed by another remark in § 86 of Ideas I, the close relationship that Husserl establishes between noesis and hylè explains why phenomenology, in the sense of Stumpf, is subordinated to what he calls, in Ideas I, eidetic psychology: On the other hand, the idea of the hyletic eo ipso is transferred from phenomenology to the basis of an eidetic psychology which, according to our conception, would include Stumpf’s “phenomenology”. (Hua III, 179/210)
Husserl’s response to Stumpf further suggests that this new version of phenomenology, which in fact has, according to Husserl, “a completely different signification” (Ideas I, 210) than Stumpf’s phenomenology, does not give equal importance to the field of sensory phenomena as Husserl did during the Halle period. For in subordinating the hyletic to psychology and in setting apart “pure phenomenology” from psychology (whatever its definition might be), Husserl seems to take a path that diverge significantly from Stumpf’s philosophical positions and the one he advocated in Halle. 6 This is at least Stumpf’s diagnosis in Erkenntnislehre, which I propose to examine in the next two sections. 3 Stumpf’s Criticism of “Pure” Phenomenology in Ideas I Husserl’s clarification about the nature of his phenomenology in the first book of Ideas is the starting point of Stumpf’s comments on the new version of Husserl’s phenomenology in the fourth part of § 13 of his book Erkenntnislehre. Stumpf himself recognizes, in accordance with Husserl, that the dispute over the meaning of phenomenology is no longer a matter of mere terminology given the wide gap not only between the two versions of Husserl’s phenomenology, but also between the “pure” phenomenology of Ideas I and Stumpf’s own version in Erkenntnislehre. In the following passage, Stumpf compares Ideas I’s version of phenomenology with that advocated by Husserl in his Logical Investigations: 6
Husserl claims indeed that only “superficial readers of both writings have confused more than once Stumpf’s concept of phenomenology (as the doctrine of “appearances”) with ours”. (Hua III, 178/210)
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What Husserl originally meant by “pure phenomenology” was nothing other than the descriptive or phenomenal psychology of Brentano, more spcifically the analysis and description of the experiences of thinking. But later he developed a more general concept of phenomenology understood as the science of a priori eidetic knowledge, which constitute the foundation of all empirical sciences. (Stumpf 19391940, 185-186)
The first question raised by Stumpf in his examination of Ideas I’s philosophical project is whether this new version of phenomenology constitutes a significant and viable contribution to the research conducted by Husserl during his Halle period. The value of this contribution is measured on the basis of Brentano’s philosophical program as it was carried out in the Logical Investigations, and his evaluation focuses accordingly on the aspects of this “pure” phenomenology by which Husserl departed from the fundamental principles of the philosophical program in his Logical Investigations. One of Stumpf’s important concerns in his reading of Ideas I regards his own phenomenology, i.e. the field of sensory phenomena and its place in this pure phenomenology. In this regard, he seeks to demonstrate that “pure” phenomenology, insofar as it brackets at the outset this dimension of experience, is at the end a “phenomenology without phenomena”. In this section, I will briefly discuss some of the arguments that support Stumpf’s criticism and I will address, in the following section, his Spinozist interpretation of Husserl’s parallelism between noesis and noema, which he proposes in Erkenntnislehre and in his two studies on Spinoza. The first tangible sign of the modifications that the Logical Investigation’s definition of phenomenology underwent is its dissociation from descriptive psychology. That is confirmed by Husserl in the introduction to the first book of Ideas where he recalled that soon after the publication of his Logical Investigations, he was led to abandon the definition of phenomenology as descriptive psychology and to criticize the philosophical naturalism which he attributes to Brentano and to several contemporary psychologists. In this introduction, Husserl says “that pure phenomenology, access to which we shall prepare in the following essay […] is not psychology and that neither accidental delimitations of its field nor its terminologies, but most radical essential grounds, prevent its inclusion in psychology”. (Hua III, 2/XVIII) In addition to the reasons of principle raised by Husserl in
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this passage, the gap created between pure phenomenology and psychology also depends, as Stumpf pointed out in Erkenntnislehre, on the narrow definition of psychology in this work. For Husserl conceives psychology in the narrow sense of a “science of facts” or as “matters of fact in the sense of D. Hume’s”, and in this sense psychological phenomena are considered as “real” events. In contrast, the new phenomenology differs from the latter both with respect to its tasks and to the ontological status of its objects: it is a “science of essences” and of the laws of species on which the empirical sciences and philosophy in general are based, while the phenomena and objects with which it deals are defined as “unreal”. (Hua III, 4/XX) Stumpf wonders whether these two criteria justify such a radical separation between this new phenomenology and descriptive psychology. For, as Stumpf reminds us, psychology since Aristotle cannot be reduced to a science of facts dealing with the biography of, say, the “inner experiences of Johann Nepomuk Oberniedermaier born in Straubing in 1741”. It has always been defined, instead, as a regional ontology and as a science of the laws of structure of psychical life. And these laws, as Stumpf claims, are the specific objects of descriptive psychology in the sense of Brentano, but also of Lotze and all their predecessors. This descriptive psychology is nothing but a phenomenology or regional ontology in the sense of Husserl, and he himself made a significant contribution in his the Logical Investigations. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 194)
Stumpf therefore accuses Husserl of ignoring the important contributions of Brentano and of his students to the question of regional ontologies, an issue to which we shall later return. That said, the first obstacle that stands before an understanding of Husserl’s philosophical project in Ideas I is its style, which is reminiscent of the great German “thinkers” of the early nineteenth century. Stumpf criticizes his use of a new technical vocabulary without justifying it, and he notes the lack of relevant examples to clarify many aspects of the doctrine which remain abstract and sometimes obscure. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 188-9) But beyond the style of the book, Husserl’s philosophical project in this book is comparable to that of Kant and to a critique of pure reason, as Husserl implicitly suggests in the following passage where he quotes Kant:
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The insight will be awakened that genuine philosophy, the idea of which is the actualizing of absolute cognition, is rooted in pure phenomenology; and rooted in it in a sense so important that the systematically strict grounding and working out of this first of all genuine philosophies is the incessant precondition for every metaphysics and other philosophy “that will be able to make its appearance as a science”. (Hua III, 5/XXII)
Stumpf rightly distinguishes between Husserl’s philosophical project and the role assigned to pure phenomenology in this passage. The philosophical project is on a par with the idea of a pure logic and of a universal doctrine of science whose model is the theory of definite multiplicities developed by Husserl during his research on geometry and arithmetics in Halle. 7 Hence the importance granted to this research on axioms in his phenomenology. That said, Stumpf’s assessment of Husserl’s phenomenology in Ideas I occurs in the context of a study on axioms which is a central theme not only in Stumpf’s Erkenntnislehre, but already in his habilitation thesis which focused on mathematical axioms. (Stumpf, 1870; D. Fisette 2015, 24-27) In Erkenntnislehre, his starting point lies in the distinction between formal or logical axioms, which concern arbitrary objects, and material axioms (gegenständliche) that apply to objects of a given type. Stumpf discusses formal axioms in § 12 and the class of materials axioms (regional or objective) in § 13. In the fourth part of § 13, Stumpf evaluates primarily Husserl’s contribution to material axioms and proposes in the fifth part of this section, a critical examination of his pure phenomenology. The importance that Stumpf grants to Husserl's doctrine of essences and regional ontologies is motivated in part by this topic’s importance in Husserl’s phenomenology, whose main task, among other things, consist in the search of essences, i.e, to quote Husserl, of “axioms, immediately evident judgments 7
Stumpf refers to this passage of Ideas I where Husserl says: “Connected with this is the practical ideal of exact eidetic science which, strictly speaking, only recent mathematics has shown how to actualize: it has shown how to bestow on any eidetic science the highest degree of rationality by reducing all of its mediate steps of thinking to mere subsumptions under the axioms of the particular eidetic province, these axioms having been assembled once for all and reinforced with the whole set of axioms belonging to ‘formal’ or ‘pure’ logic (in the broadest sense: mathesis universalis) – unless, of course, from the very beginning it is a matter of that logic itself”. (Hua III, 32-33/17; see D. Fisette 2003)
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to which indeed all the other judgments in a mediate grounding lead back”. (Hua III, 14/13) This task is divided into two parts, the first concerns the search for material axioms and it employs regional ontologies. Pure phenomenology, however, investigates the more general species in view of founding the project of a transcendental philosophy. Let us beginn with the classification of axioms that Stumpf proposes in Erkenntnislehre and examine his conception of the class of regional axioms. The thesis defended by Stumpf is that this class of axioms only refers to “elementary intuitions”. (Stumpf 1939 to 1940, 167) That is why this class of material axioms is divided into three sub-classes that correspond in part to the domains of the neutral sciences that we discussed above, namely phenomenology and eidology, and partly to that of psychology. (Stumpf 1939 to 1940, 169) Stumpf relates these material axioms to the laws of essences underlying Husserl’s regional ontologies and emphasizes the importance of these ontologies for the foundation of the individual sciences, namely for the foundation of the natural sciences. He raises the question as to what is the original contribution of Ideas I to regional ontologies in comparison to the major contributions of Meinong and of Brentano in this domain, but also of Stumpf himself and of Husserl in his Logical Investigations. Stumpf maintains that this research related to regional ontologies can be understood as an extension of Brentano’s (and Lotze’s) initial program of a psychognosie, and this “program is nothing but a regional or phenomenological ontology in the sense of Husserl”. (Stumpf 1939-1940, 194) In this respect, Brentano’s contribution to a regional phenomenology and to the formulation of material axioms and of a priori principles of psychology as a whole is not negligible. Stumpf considers the following examples: “everything that is mental is in a certain way directed towards an object (and according to Brentano’s late conception, towards something real), and every judgment includes within itself presentations” (Stumpf 1939-1940, 160-1); “that all psychical acts are based on presentations, and that every act is directed towards a primary and a secondary object (towards itself) in three different modes: representational, judicative (evident), and emotional”. (Stumpf 1939-1940, 182) According to Stumpf, these principles underly the phenomenology of the Logical Investigations and some of these principles are presupposed in the more ambitious and comprehensive project of Ideas I. Stumpf associates his own contribution to
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the formulation of axioms with his early work on the origin of space perception (Stumpf, 1873, § 5), to his Psychology of Sound (Stumpf, 1890, § 6) and to his two Academy articles of 1906 in which several important structural laws are formulated. In the field of eidology, which we discussed above, the formations (Gebilde) also involve general and necessary laws that structure all kinds of formations in this domain. (Stumpf 1939-1940, 161-162) States of affairs, for example, obey specific principles that he calls, following Bolzano, Folgerungsaxiome or laws of inference, which also belong to the domain of eidology. But the field of elementary sensory phenomena, i.e. Stumpf’s phenomenology, remains perhaps the main issue in his discussion with Husserl because, from the point of view of the Erfahrungsphilosophie advocated by Stumpf in Erkenntnislehre, this domain is the ultimate source of all concepts in that it provides the raw material for the formation of concepts. As a domain of “neutral” research, it is common to both the natural sciences and to psychology, and as a propaedeutic, it represents the common starting point of all the empirical sciences. This amounts to saying that for Stumpf a regional ontology, whose task is to formulate the essential material axioms of all empirical sciences, must begin with first-order phenomena and with sense perception that provides a direct access thereto. This was also Husserl’s starting point in the third Investigation in which he formulated the main axioms of his formal ontology and of his theory wholes and parts whose origin lies in the primary relations that structure the sensory material: The distinction between independent contents of representation and simple partial content (I also once called “psychological parts”) was developed by Husserl in his Logical Investigations in his theory of wholes and parts, and the example of color and space also plays a decisive role in his phenomenology. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 24)
In this regard, the contribution of the young Husserl to regional ontologies is more substantial than that in Ideas I which, according to Stumpf, contributes “nothing essentially new” in that respect. Another important point raised by Stumpf in Erkenntnislehre concerns the question of the justification of the axioms that Husserl addressed in § 5 of Ideas I. We said that species are axioms or general principles based on immediate and evident judgments, which serve as the common basis for all other judgments. Husserl argues that these
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axioms require a noetic foundation, i.e. “in order to make them matters of insight – a certain seeing of essences which one could designate also (in a modified sense) as a seizing upon essences; and this seeing too, like the eidetic intuition which makes essences objects, is based on sighting but not on experiencing individual single particulars”. (Hua III, 27/13) That is why this Wesenschau only operates at the level of imagination, merely on presentations or imaginations (Phantasiesichtigkeiten), and there is “consciousness of what is sighted, as sighted; it ‘appears’ but is not seized upon as factually existent”. (Hua III, 27/13) Stumpf wonders why Husserl confines his phenomenology to mere imaginary presentations in his search for the general laws of regional ontologies and empirical sciences, and how he justifies, in the case of material axioms, this sharp distinction between what Stumpf calls first and second order phenomena, i.e. between mere presentations and contents of sense perception. What is at stake for Stumpf is nothing less than his own phenomenology and the domain of first order phenomena, whose bracketing within Husserl's doctrine of essences, shortcircuits the field of sensory phenomena as a whole. Stumpf believes instead that (regional) axioms relate exclusively to sensory intuitions (Stumpf 1939-1940, 167, 190) and he cannot see why one should restrict the investigation to mere imaginary presentations when one aims at elucidating the general laws of contents of sensory experience. In a passage of his treatise of 1917 on the attributes of the visual field, Stumpf already formulated his reservations about this method: When phenomenology in the sense of Husserl promises to provide, as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but on the new basis of a vision of the species, a priori principles of phenomena from which we could take an apodictic stance on the question of the intensity of color, we would all be very grateful to him. But I am afraid that in order to be convinced, the phenomena must be examined individually and very precisely within every sense. (Stumpf, 1917, 36-37)
Stumpf considers that all the issues relating to sensory phenomena, including kinestheses to which Husserl devoted a remarkable study in his lectures of 1907 Thing and Space, cannot be treated solely by mere thought experiments; one must also take into account the sensory experience and genetic psychology which are indispensable in this research. Deprived of this phenomenological basis, the Wesenschau and
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the Ichblick, which Husserl compares explicitly to a mind’s eye (Hua III, 118), is not very far removed from the intellectual intuition of Schelling and it recalls, as Stumpf ironically said, the “Nirvana of the penitent Indian gazing at his navel”. (Stumpf, 1939 -1940, 192) One of the sources of the problem in Husserl’s doctrine of the Wesenschau resides, according to Stumpf, in the specific difference that is presupposed between mere imaginary presentations and the contents of sensory perception such as intensity, vividness (Lebhaftigkeit), clarity, etc. Stumpf maintains against this thesis, which he also attributes to Brentano, that there is a gradual difference, and not a partition, between presented contents and contents of sensation or sensory phenomena. (Stumpf, 1918) This thesis is, by the way, not unlike the old distinction between esse and essentia, which played a key role in Arabic philosophy, in the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and in Spinoza. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 187) Any eidetic science must disregard the existence of its objects, and pure phenomenology, as Husserl explains it in § 60 of Ideas I, must bracket, by means of the phenomenological reduction, the existence of its objects and by the same token, all material eidetic disciplines. In his commentary on this section, Stumpf raises serious doubts regarding the very practicability of this method and wonders what we can win in such a way if we have to disregard, in our investigation, not only the field of phenomenology (as defined by Stumpf) but also that of descriptive psychology. Stumpf then warns against the dangers of this method in the hands of Husserl’s students and of “phenomenologists” who adopt the phenomenological attitude and, while comfortably sitting at their desk, engage in eidetic variations, phenomenological reduction, adumbrations, etc. “What can be more comfortable, asks ironically Stumpf, than intuiting essences of any arbitrary objects by looking, while sitting at one’s desk, at the smoke of a cigar?” (Stumpf 19391940, 199) Stumpf takes as an example the work of Husserl’s students on sensory perception and deplores this way of dealing with the perceived as it completely ignores, as this method requires, the psychological and physiological theories. (Stumpf 1939-1940, 319) Stumpf believes that this method ultimately leads to superficial results, and takes as an example the theme of attention which has always arisen a
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great deal of interest in his work in psychology.8 In his commentary to section 92 of Ideas I where Husserl presents his theory of attention, Stumpf sees in this theory the proof that this method ultimately leads to trivialities: The theory seems rather to lead to nothing but the most traditional and popular view according to which (following Lotze’s sarcastic remark) attention is comparable to a candle with which the soul moves around in its dark rooms and lights sometimes this room and sometimes another. Yet these are only images, stones instead of the bread of truly illuminating knowledge. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 195)
As for the search for “formal” axioms in this book, Stumpf claims that he did not succeed in finding any (Stumpf 1939 to 1940, 193) and he questions the signficance of the opposition between the predicates “regional” and “pure” through which Husserl distinguishes regional axioms from those of pure phenomenology. Stumpf argues that the opposite of “regional” is not “pure” but rather “universal” axiom, and he criticized Husserl for confusing “universal” (formal axioms being more universal because they have more extension) and “pure” as Husserl uses this predicate in expressions such as “purified transcendental consciousness”, “pure ego,” or “pure Ichblick”. Hence Stumpf’s criticism of the very idea of a “pure” phenomenology: it is an empty framework, a “chimera, or even a contradiction in itself” (Stumpf 1939-1940, 192) in the sense that the field of sensory phenomena plays no role in the research domain of this phenomenology purified by the phenomenological reduction and it is therefore a mere “phenomenology without phenomena”. Stumpf concludes that there is nothing in this new version of phenomenology that in principle justifies the bracketing of descriptive psychology, let alone phenomenology understood as the domain of sensory phenomena. 8
It is difficult to establish the connection between this theory of attention in Ideas I and that which Husserl develops in his lectures of 1904-1905 on perception. In an important manuscript of Husserl (“Notes on the Doctrine of Attention and Interest”) published as an appendix to these lectures (Hua XXXVIII, 159-189), he carefully examines Stumpf’s theory of attention understood as “Lust am Bemerken” that he defends in his Psychology of Sound.
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4 A Spinozist Interpretation of the Noesis-Noema Parallelism Let us now consider another option available to Husserl in order to justify the main distinction between descriptive psychology and pure phenomenology. It is based on the fundamental distinction between noesis and noema put forth in Ideas I, which, in Stumpf’s own terms, can be formulated as follows: [You] did not take into account the fundamental distinction between acts and contents of consciousness. Phenomenology is not only about the essence of acts, but also about the essence of contents or, in the terminology of Husserl, not only about the noesis but also about the noema. If one also accepts that with respect to the noesis, phenomenology coincides (sich decken) with descriptive psychology, then there remains for it the infinitely rich field of research of noematical essences and of axioms relating thereto. (Stumpf 1939-1940, 195)
The noema is indeed the non-real component of an act or, in other words, its intentional content. Stumpf’s equivalent notion is that of Gebilde, which, as we said, is the intentional correlate of a mental function and it belongs to the neutral domain of eidology. It is in this perspective that Stumpf tries to situate the Husserlian noema in the domain of his transcendental phenomenology while the noesis, which is a real component of psychical life, belongs to Husserl’s eidetic psychology. Between the noesis and the noema, between eidetic psychology and transcendental phenomenology, there is a form of parallelism that Husserl understands as follows: Perception, for example, has its noema, most basically its perceptual sense (Wahrnehmungssinn), i.e., the perceived as perceived. Similarly, the current case of remembering has its remembered as remembered, just as its , precisely as it is “meant,” “intended to” in ; again, the judging has the judged as judged, liking has the liked as liked, and so forth. (Hua III, 305306/214)
Stumpf conceives the perceptual noema or the perceived as perceived as an intentional content that is distinct both from the act and its object and whose function is to mediate the relation between the act and its object.9 9
This is confirmed by this excerpt from Stumpf’s studies on Spinoza: “Das, worauf
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In Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf claims that the idea of noeticonoematical correlations comes from a long tradition which goes back to Aristotle, and he proposes an original interpretation of the notion of correlation based on Spinoza’s parallelism between the attributes of thought and that of extension: An historical glance at Spinoza’s doctrine of attributes is of particular interest here. According to Husserl, the noetical behaves, with respect to the noematical, just like the attributes of thought and of extension behave in Spinoza: “una eademque res, sed duobus modis expressa”. And in the same way as in Spinoza, the laws of nature are at the same time the laws of mind, noetic laws are also simultaneously noematic laws. It could even be shown that we have here more than a simple analogy, and that namely the Spinoza correctly understood had nothing else in mind with his talk on thought and extension, than the acts and contents of the divine thought. His [Husserl’s] doctrine of the parallelism between acts and contents of consciousness has its origin in [...] Aristotle and Spinoza, and like many others, he has acquired it through his scholastic studies. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 196)
Let us leave aside for the moment the historical thesis advanced in this passage. The appeal to Spinoza aims at showing, against Husserl’s objection formulated above, that the noetico-noematical parallelism cannot be used as an argument for separating pure phenomenology from descriptive psychology because it follows from Spinoza's principle mentioned above (“the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”) that, in the same way that, for Spinoza, the laws of nature are at the same time the laws of thought, the laws in the domain of the noetical and in that of descriptive psychology are also the laws of the noematical and of pure phenomenology. In addition, in taking into account another principle of Spinoza’s Ethics (una eademque res, sed duobus modis expressa), descriptive psychology and phenomenology should be considered, according to Spinoza’s parallelism, as one and the same discipline applied to two classes of objects. Under these conditions, Stumpf argues that we can no more separate descriptive psychology from pure phenomenology, nor a phenomenology of acts from a phenomenology of noematical sich Wahrnehmen und Denken beziehen, ist nicht das mentale, sondern das reale Objekt; die species sind nur das, wodurch, aber nicht das, was wir erkennen. Erst wenn der Geist auf sich selbst reflektiert, wird er diese species gewahr”. (Stumpf 1919b, 14)
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content then we can have an arithmetic of pears and an arithmetic of nuts. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 196) This Spinozist interpretation of the theory of intentionality in Husserl’s Ideas I as well as the thesis of its Aristotelian origin that Stumpf advances in this passage have been developed extensively in Stumpf’s two studies on Spinoza published in 1919 by the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. (Stumpf, 1919b) Stumpf proposes an original and unorthodox interpretation of the parallelism of Spinoza in his Ethics and seeks to show, among other things, that this parallelism, when well understood, has nothing to do with the psychophysical parallelism which was dominant at the time ever since Fechner. Stumpf maintains that Spinoza’s parallelism, when well understood, is a parallelism between an act and the immanent object towards which it is directed. (Stumpf 1919b, 19) Stumpf further contends that the act-content parallelism has its source in Aristotle and it has been conveyed to Husserl through many philosophers from Aquinas to Brentano and from Brentano to Husserl. It is in this context that the sketch of a letter of Husserl to Stumpf takes its full value. In this letter, Husserl commented positively the two studies on Spinoza and emphasizes its important contribution to the drawing a connection between intentionality and Spinoza’s doctrine of attributes: It is a highly important step forward in the interpretation of Spinoza that the relationship to intentionality be the focus of this study, and that all aspects of Spinoza’s doctrine of attributes be then clarified from this point of view; there is no doubt that a fundamental layer in the contradictory whole of Spinoza’s doctrine of attributes is brought to light in a clear and decisive manner.10 (Husserl, Briefwechsel, 174)
Even if Husserl does not explicitly say that he endorses this interpretation of Spinoza’s thesis in the sketch of his letter to Stumpf – but we shall see in the next section, the parallelism that Husserl defends during the period of Freiburg is not very far from that of Spinoza –, by recognizing the value of Stumpf’s interpretation, he thereby does not 10
Unfortunately, I cannot examine in this study the contents of Husserl’s extensive letter of Stumpf’s interpretation of Spinoza. It is an illuminating commentary on various aspects of the doctrine of parallelism in Spinoza’s Ethics, which is based on the psychological interpretation of Stumpf and the distinction between act and intentional content.
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exclude the possibility that his doctrine of the noetico-noematical correlations can be understood along these lines. This is further supported by the fact that in this study, Stumpf explicitly targets Husserl’s phenomenology when he says that Spinoza’s law of parallelism thus understood “is a matter of descriptive psychology (Husserl would rather say “phenomenology” because it is based a priori on a ‘vision of essences’”. (Stumpf, 1919b, 33-34) In his two studies on Spinoza, Stumpf’s point of departure is the accepted view at the time according to which Spinoza was considered to be the founder of psychophysical parallelism which postulates the existence of a world independent of consciousness and whose changes accordingly occur in parallel with the contents of consciousness. Stumpf calls this version of parallelism “transcendent” and opposes it to an “immanent” version of parallelism based on the distinction between act and content, and according to which these two aspects evolve in parallel within consciousness. Psychophysical parallelism is said to be transcendent from this point of view because it tranposes the parallelism of act-content onto the outside world as constituting the support of the intentional contents of consciousness. (Stumpf, 1919b, 34) This immanent version of parallelism formuled on the basis of an interpretation of Spinoza’s seventh principle, as stated in the second part of his Ethics (“The order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things”), is considered by Stumpf a principle of descriptive psychology. Stumpf further contends that this interpretation is consistent with Spinoza’s pantheism insofar as the distinction between an act and its immanent content is transposed to God. For since God’s understanding is considered by Spinoza as the only possible subject, intentional acts and their contents are necessarily two of his innumerable modes or attributes. (1919b, 19, 24) In support of his interpretation of Spinoza’s psychological parallelism, Stumpf offers a historical genetic account of intentionality, and more specifically of the relationship between intentional act and its content, which he traces back to Aristotle’s De Anima. (Stumpf, 1919b, 10) But it is clear that Husserl’s theory of intentionality in Ideas I conveys some of the same traditional assumptions when one considers the connections that Stumpf made in Erkenntnislehre between Husserl’s noetico-noematical correlations and Spinoza’s parallelism. This historical genetic account is strongly influenced by the work of Brentano and it presupposes the theory of intentionality formulated in
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his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. For example, when Stumpf (1919b, 11) attributes to Aristotle the paternity of the distinction between intentional content and immanent object, he relies on Brentano’s habilitation thesis on the psychology of Aristotle. (see F. Brentano, 1867, 80 ff., 113 ff.) But in doing so, he also presupposes an immanent interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, which is in fact the subject of many debates in Brentanian studies. (see Fisette (ed.), 2013, section II) For the notion of intentional content presupposes, in Stumpf as in Husserl, the twofold distinction between, on the one hand, noesis and noema, and on the other hand, that between the noema and the referent of the act or its object, a distinction that one hardly finds in Brentano’s writings on intentionality. Be it as it may, after having traced the filiation from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, and then from the latter to Descartes and Spinoza,11 Stumpf claims that Brentano took over from this tradition the distinction between act and immanent object which he also understands in terms of psychological parallelism: That is how Brentano, starting from Aristotle, emphatically took over the distinction between the mental activity (the act) and its immanent object which he used as the main characteristic to distinguish psychical phenomena, as opposed to physical phenomena; and he took as the basis of his classification of acts the different modes of “relation to an object”. (Brentano, 1874, 115, 260 ff.) Between the immanent object and the act directed towards it, there is also, according to Brentano, a constant parallelism particularly with regard to intensity. (Stumpf 1919b, 157)
Stumpf refers in this passage to the topic of intensity that Brentano developed systematically in his Munich conference on individuation (see Brentano, 1907) where he argues that the intensity of sensations 11
I am only mentioning here the genetic account of the relation between act and immanent intentional content that Stumpf develops extensively in his studies on Spinoza. He shows that we find the equivalent of this distinction in the history of philosophy, and later in Spinoza and Descartes “im Geiste intentionaliter oder objectiv, in der Wirklichkeit formaliter, in Gott eminenter — Ausdrücke, die in gleichem Sinn auch noch von Descartes und dem jungen Spinoza gebraucht werden”. (Stumpf, 1919b, 14) Stumpf also found in Thomas Aquinas the idea that these mental contents have a mediator between the act and its referent, and that this idea constitutes “die Keime” of the subsequent research on the knowledge of the outside world. (1919b, 14) On Stumpf’s two studies on Spinoza, see R. Martinelli (2011).
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is due both to the act of sensing (the presentation) and to its content (or immanent object) and that both run in parallel. (Stumpf, 1919b, 17-18) It is well-known that this question is at the heart of a lively debate between Brentano and Stumpf that I shall not comment here. (See D. Fisette, 2013) 5 The dual Life of the late Husserl’s Phenomenology In order to complete this study, I will briefly review some aspects of Husserl’s self-criticism regarding the version of the phenomenological reduction in Ideas I, notably from his writings belonging to the period of Freiburg. This self-criticism coincides with the important role that Husserl assigns to intentional psychology from the early 1920s and the close relationship that he establishes between the latter and transcendental phenomenology. I want to show that several aspects of this selfcriticism confirm Stumpf’s diagnosis in Erkennislehre and, more specifically, the thesis according to which pure phenomenology and (descriptive) psychology are parallel and inseparable. In this section, I shall first examine Husserl’s self-criticism directed at the method of reduction that he used in Ideas I and the support of what he calls the psychological way to reduction; I will then turn to the role that Husserl assigned to eidetic psychology in his phenomenology and to the so-called duplicity (Doppeldeutigkeit) or dual life of phenomenology; finally, I will discuss the idea of a parallelism in phenomenology between intentional psychology and transcendental philosophy. From the mid-1920s, Husserl undertook a revision of the conception of phenomenology as defended in Ideas I. For example, in connection with Gibson’s translation of the first book of Ideas in the late 1920s, Husserl undertook a thorough revision of some aspects of this work, which mainly concerned the method of the reduction and the ambiguous relation between psychology and transcendental philosophy in the first edition of this work. This is confirmed in particular by Husserl’s annotations in the margin of the Fundamentalbetrachtungen in this book (see K. Schuhmann, Hua III, introduction) and by several remarks in Husserl’s Postscript (Hua V) to Ideas I published in 1930. Moreover, as evidenced by many lectures, manuscripts and published books written from 1920, from the lecture on phenomenological psychology delivered between 1925 and 1929 (Hua IX) to the Crisis (Hua VI), these revisions, far from being limited to the new edition of this book, reflect the major changes that Husserl’s phenomenology under-
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went during this period. However, these changes coincided with the increasingly significant role granted to intentional psychology within phenomenology and concerned the most important points that Stumpf had identified in his commentary on the first book of Ideas. In his lectures on first philosophy from 1923-1924 (Hua VII, VIII), Husserl already distanced himself from the version of the method of the reduction as it was carried out in 1913 and he then clearly distinguished between two ways of using this method, or, as he sometimes says, two ways of accessing the actual field of transcendental philosophy. The first, which is that of the first book of Ideas I, is the Cartesian way, which is modelled on the methodological use of doubt as advocated by Descartes in his Meditations, but purified from Descartes’ errors. (Hua VI, § 43) It is characterized, on the one hand, by its starting point, i.e., by the knowledge of the transcendental subjectivity, and it proceeds then to a “criticism of the experience of the world by highlighting the possibility of the non-existence of the world”. (Hua VIII, p. 177; Hua VII, §52) On the other hand, as in Descartes, this pathway assumes the apodictic character of the evidence with which pure subjectivity is given. (Hua VIII, § 46) Husserl calls the latter the direct pathway because it is meant to lead directly to transcendental subjectivity. But as Husserl pointed out in the Crisis, the Cartesian way, by neglecting the preliminary analysis of the empirical ego, has the immense disadvantage of presenting transcendental subjectivity “into view as apparently empty of content, since there can be no preparatory explication; so one is at a loss, at first, to know what has been gained by it, much less how, starting with this, a completely new sort of fundamental science, decisive for philosophy, has been attained”. (Hua VI, 188-9/ 155) Contrariwise, the new path that Husserl adopted in several of the writings belonging to the Freiburg period consists in the indirect pathway, which passes through what he calls intentional or phenomenological psychology and which serves as a propaedeutic to transcendental phenomenology. (Hua IX, § 16) The starting point of the indirect pathway is more natural in the context of a philosophy based on a phenomenology of lived experience, and therefore of a philosophy that proceeds from a bottom-up approach, i.e. of a philosophy that takes its starting point in the intramundane experience and in the natural attitude. The question which then guides the phenomenology that adopts the psychological way is no longer that of the possibility of the non-existence of the outside world, but
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“the immediate evidence that may pre-exists all sciences”. (Hua VIII, 41) Its advantage over the first approach to the reduction is to provide “a broader and more profound understanding of the subjectivity as such”. (Hua VIII, 164) However, Husserl warns those who might be tempted to identify this phenomenological psychology with Brentano’s descriptive psychology in light of which, as we saw, Husserl defined his phenomenology in the Logical Investigations. For while Husserl acknowledges his debt to Brentano’s discovery of the intentionality of consciousness, he argues in the same breath that his “pure” psychology is distinct from Brentano’s psychognosie: However great is the veneration and gratitude with which I remember my teacher and his genius, and as much as I consider his transformation of the scholastic concept of intentionality into a descriptive foundational concept of psychology to be a great discovery, without which phenomenology would never have been possible, nevertheless an essential distinction has to be drawn between pure psychology in my sense, a psychology contained implicitly in transcendental phenomenology, and Brentano's psychology. (Hua III, 154/422)
The main criticism that Husserl directs toward to Brentano during the Freiburg period is his commitment to a kind of naturalism that he closely relates to Brentano’s views on physical phenomena and to the function of the psychophysical causality in his psychognosie.12 However, Husserl’s phenomenological psychology remains a descriptive science whose task is to analyze the most general specific character of 12
In the Crisis, Husserl associates Brentano’s naturalism with the parallelism between descriptive and genetic psychology, that Husserl himself advocated in his Logical Investigations. The following excerpt, which I draw from the Crisis, clearly summarizes the meaning of the criticism of the kind of naturalism which he imputes to Brentano: “Unfortunately, in the most essential matters he [Brentano] remained bound to the prejudices of the naturalistic tradition; these prejudices have not yet been overcome if the data of the soul, rather than being understood as sensible (whether of outer or inner "sense"), are [simply] understood as data having the remarkable character of intentionality; in other words, if dualism, psychophysical causality, is still accepted as valid. This also applies to his idea of a descriptive natural science, as is shown by [his conception of their] parallel procedure—setting the task of classifying and descriptively analyzing psychic phenomena completely in the spirit of the old traditional interpretation of the relation between descriptive and explanatory natural sciences”. (Hua VI, 236-237/234)
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psychical life, i.e. intentionality. (Hua IX, § 4, 47-49) Husserl assigns to psychology the dual function of reforming empirical psychology and of serving as a preliminary stage (Vorstufe) to transcendental phenomenology. But the main question raised by this passage of the Postscript is in what sense intentional psychology is implicit in transcendental phenomenology. This passage suggests that psychology, as a propaedeutic to transcendental philosophy, is an integral part of phenomenology and it is in this sense that it constitutes an unavoidable step to transcendental philosophy. This is what seems to confirm Husserl at the beginning of his Amsterdam lectures when he says that phenomenology has a dual identity and a twofold meaning: In the further course of its development it [the phenomenological] presents us with a double sense of its meaning: on the one hand, as psychological phenomenology, which is to serve as the radical science fundamental to psychology; on the other hand, as transcendental phenomenology, which for its part has in connection with philosophy the great function of First Philosophy; that is, of being the philosophical science of the sources from which philosophy springs. (Hua IX, 303/214)
In other words, the duality of phenomenology and of psychology is not based, as Husserl suggested in Ideas I, on an ontological criterion, but it rests on a semantic criterion (double meaning of phenomenology) and an epistemic criterion (dual mode of apprehension). Husserl further suggests that there is a thematic, if not an ontological identity, between intentional psychology and transcendental philosophy, but a dualism with respect to their respective functions within transcendental phenomenology. Husserl seeks to reconcile this aspect of his phenomenology, which operates on the ground of common sense and whose function, as required by the indirect pathway to the reduction, is to serve as a Vorstufe to transcendental philosophy, with the other face of transcendental phenomenology being what Husserl defines as first philosophy (or a theory of science) and whose task is to provide phenomenology with its ultimate justification. (Hua V, 192) Indeed, it appears that psychology, like any other regional science, is no longer, during the last period of Freiburg, entirely divorced from transcendental phenomenology. Husserl thus seems to recognize with Stumpf that psychology is implicit in and inseparable from transcendental phe-
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nomenology when he tries to account for the relationship between these two branches of transcendental phenomenology by using the idea of parallelism. Indeed, Husserl speaks of an overlapping (Deckung) of phenomenological psychology with transcendental phenomenology (Hua IX, 82; Hua VI, § 72, Hua I, 71/76-7), arguing that the content of one overlaps or coincides with that of the other. It follows from this remarkable parallelism, says Husserl, that “to every eidetic, as well as to every empirical, constatation on the one side, a parallel must correspond on the other side. (Hua V, 190/414) We now see that this duality of meaning within transcendental phenomenology and the idea that psychology is implicitly contained in the latter is based on the notion of parallelism, which in turn justifies, on the one hand, the results of the intentional analysis at the level of the natural attitude as a prerequisite for transcendental phenomenology and, on the other hand, the idea that intentional psychology constitutes a propaedeutic to the latter. This parallelism within phenomenology raises two problems that are at the heart of Husserl’s philosophical concerns during the Freiburg period. The first concerns the specter of psychologism while the second relates to the meaning and justification of the philosophicotranscendental reduction. The form of psychologism at stake during this period differs from the logical psychologism in the Logical Investigations, in that transcendental psychologism rests on the outright reduction of phenomenology to a mere descriptive psychology of consciousness. Hence the name of transcendental psychologism (Hua XVII, 340) which ignores, as Husserl explained in his Cartesian Meditations, the philosophical implications of this simple nuance that distinguishes these two parallel lives of phenomenology. To be sure, pure psychology of consciousness is a precise parallel to transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Nevertheless the two must at first be kept strictly separate, since failure to distinguish them, which is characteristic of transcendental psychologism, makes a genuine philosophy impossible. We have here one of those seemingly trivial nuances that make a decisive difference between right and wrong paths of philosophy. […] Accordingly the difference between the sense of a psychological, and that of a transcendental phenomenological exploration of consciousness is immeasurably profound, though the contents to be described on the one hand and on the other can correspond. (Hua I, 76-7/32; see Hua V, 192)
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That is because, to make use of the Husserlian jargon, this psychology, to be pure, remains at the level of the doxa and conveys therefore many beliefs that can only be justified at another level of analysis borne by transcendental phenomenology. The transition from psychology to transcendental phenomenology is made possible through this methodological artifice that Husserl calls the transcendental reduction, which occurs specifically as a change of attitude and which “withdraws the whole foundation for the natural attitude and at the same time all the validities constituting this foundation”. (Hua VIII, 200) The last justification that Husserl is searching for with his transcendental philosophy is ultimately this fundamental belief in an external world which underlies the Urdoxa and which, by this change of attitude, acquires its transcendental value: In other words: Instead of positing a world in advance, this pregiven world, and then only asking how this self-evidently existing world is to be determined truly, this world is instead treated as noema. (Hua IX, 328/235)
The question is how a simple change of attitude that accompanies the phenomenological reduction, regardless of whether it makes use of the direct or indirect pathway, may confer to this mere “nuance” such a significant philosophical value because, ultimately, Husserl's transcendental philosophy is based on a change of attitude that confers to it its “transcendental meaning”. For, Husserl argues, “what at first seems so odd, i.e., attending to the nuance, the nuance that conducts one from a pure inner psychology to transcendental phenomenology, actually is what decides between the being or non-being of a philosophy”. (Hua V, 192/415) Husserl relies on the good faith of philosophers to grasp the meaning and the philosophical implications of this “phenomenological conversion” and the Selbstbesinnung made possible by the transcendental reduction. 6 Final remarks It stands out clearly that Husserl’s phenomenology during the Freiburg period anticipates several of Stumpf’s objections to the phenomenology of Ideas I and thus confirms Stumpf’s diagnosis in Erkenntnislehre. It could also be shown that several lectures and working manuscripts written during this period, including Experience and Judgment, correct the impression left by § 85 of Ideas I regarding the
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conception of primary contents. For Husserl provides an analysis of sensory experience and of what he calls passive syntheses that is closer to the position he advocated during the Halle period, and therefore to that of Stumpf, than that he suggests in the first book of Ideas. (see D. Fisette, 2014) It also appears that the parallelism that the later Husserl establishes between psychology and transcendental phenomenology confirms an important argument in Stumpf’s Erkenntnislehre, namely that phenomenology and psychology are identical and inseparable because, as Husserl pointed out in his Amsterdam lectures, they are two faces of the same coin. But even if these modifications partly confirm Stumpf’s diagnosis, the form of parallelism advocated by the last Husserl does not escape the criticism that Stumpf directed toward parallelism everywhere in his work. Because, unlike Brentano and Husserl, for example, but in agreement with Lotze, Stumpf advocates a form of interactionism which, according to him, has the adventage of being more consistent with his critical realism and his pantheistic worldview. In his treatise on Spinoza, Stumpf’s criticism of parallelism is of the same kind as his later criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology, i.e. that it inevitably leads either to a form of phenomenalism à la Mach or to Schelling’s natural philosophy, and in both cases, to solipsism and idealism. This warning is directed a fortiori at Husserl’s noetico-noematical correlations and his parallelism between intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology: If the variations of acts were always parallel to those of their contents, then we should ask ourselves what justifies, in fact, this distinction, and if the so-called psychical world could not be described by using the concepts and expressions [used to describe] the physical world, and vice versa; this is what actually want, in their own way, the pure phenomenalist and sensualist psychology, as well as the speculative philosophy of nature. (Stumpf, 1919a, 36-37)
Stumpf believes that we can avoid the pitfalls of parallelism by advocating a form of interactionism, based on a form of critical realism, which postulates the existence of an external world independent of experience, and in which acts and sensory contents (or mental functions and phenomena) can vary independently from one another, i.e. that a psychical function can vary without any variation in the corresponding phenomenon, and vice versa. (Stumpf 1906a, 15)
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Now, if one takes into consideration Stumpf’s many objections to Husserl, the question arises as to whether it is justified, in these circumstances, to regard in Husserl’s phenomenology a form of extension of Brentano’s initial philosophical program despite Husserl’s own account that seems to prove the contrary. Stumpf undoubtedly knew Husserl’s memoirs on Brentano (“Reminiscences of Franz Brentano”) in which, while acknowledging his debt to Brentano, he recalled that his own conception of philosophy had departed significantly from the teachings of the master both in regard to the method or the philosophy of history, and also with respect to descriptive psychology and Kantianism in general. If, however, Stumpf believes that Husserl's phenomenology follows in the footsteps of Brentano (Stumpf, 1920, 60), it is because he conceives of Brentano’s program broadly enough as to include philosophers like Meinong, Twardowski and himself who also significantly deviated from the teaching of Brentano. Stumpf believes that some of these philosophers tend to overestimate their originality with respect to the philosophy of Brentano whereas Husserl, according to Stumpf, “does not underestimate the power and richness of the seed propagated by his master”. (Stumpf, 1919a, 219) It is in this broad sense that Stumpf, in his autobiography, speaks of the kinship between the students of Brentano: Between the students of Brentano, there are naturally many ties of kinship due to a common starting point, and some other relations that are attributable to the need felt by those who adopted the same orientation, to change, pursue, and complement the doctrine. (Stumpf, 1924, 28)
We have seen that in his commentary on Husserl in Erkenntnislehre, Stumpf has identified several of these relations by focusing on the field of mental phenomena, intentionality, and ontology, but it could be shown that these relations also extend to ethics, value theory, philosophy of language and to all human sciences. History has mainly emphasized the contribution of these philosophers to the theme of intentionality, which has always been the central theme of Husserl’s phenomenology, and in this respect, his debt to Brentano cannot be underestimated.
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APPENDIX Letter from C. Stumpf to Felix Klein, June 4, 1901 Carl Stumpf an Felix Klein
Berlin, 4.6.1901
Lieber Freund, Ich war auf Deine Mitteilung hier bei Elster und erfuhr, dass noch nichts geschehen ist, dass aber demnächst die Aufforderung zu Vorschlägen an die Facultät ergehen soll. Husserl veranlasste ich, Dir seinen II. Band zu schicken, und hoffe, dass Du wie ich die Überzeugung gewinnen wirst, dass Ihr augenblicklich keinen Wuሷrdigeren vorschlagen könnt. Es steckt darin, mag man uሷbereinstimmen oder nicht, eine außerordentliche Summe von Nachdenken, ein sehr selbstständiges, vertieftes Auffassen aller Fragen. Meines Erachtens ist seit vielen Jahren kein so bedeutender Beitrag zur Logik und Erkenntnistheorie erschienen. Dilthey hat sich ähnlich ausgesprochen. Dass Ihr auch einen durchaus verlässigen und umgänglichen Kollegen an H[usserl] haben wuሷrden, kann ich verbuሷrgen. Nun noch eins: Kommt jemals auf meine Beteiligung an dieser ganzen Sache die Rede, so ermächtige ich Dich zu sagen, dass ich weder an der vorjährigen Action der Regierung noch an der Errichtung des Extraordinariats den allergeringsten Anteil habe. Dies alles ist aus der Initiative der Regierung hervorgegangen, ohne dass ich auch nur ein Wort davon wusste. Nachdem nun aber das Extraordinariat einmal eingesetzt ist und besetzt werden soll, ist es freilich mein dringender Wunsch, den verdienten Mann, welchen lange Jahre mit Unrecht zuruሷckgesetzt worden ist bei dieser Gelegenheit an mich zu einer Stellung zu verhelfen und ihn vor Verzweiflung zu retten. Aber es wäre mir in jedem Betracht unangenehm, wenn es ohne die Einwilligung der Fakultät geschähe – Du hast ja der Effekt Deiner Mitteilung auf mich gesehen –, und ich maße mir auch nicht an, durch meine nur fuሷr
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Dich bestimmten empfehlenden Worte das Urteil der dortigen Fachmänner vorzugreifen. Die kleine „Beneke“-Abhandlung habe ich mit größtem Interesse gelesen. Hier liegt ohne Zweifel ein Cardinalpunkt der ganzen Naturphilosophie (ich habe auch einmal, in der Rede uሷber den Entwicklungsgedanken, auf die Schwierigkeiten des Stetigkeitsprinzips hingewiesen). Aber wer soll die Aufgabe lösen? Du wirst Dich schon selber daran machen muሷssen. Ganz umfassend aber – mit Einschlag auch der psychophysischen Verhältnissen – könnte die nur ein zweiter Leibniz lösen, auf den wir mit Sehnsucht hoffen. Herzlicher Gruß, auch an Deine verehrte Frau von Deinem alten C. Stumpf Wenn Du Willhausen siehst, bitte ich, ihn auch zu gruሷßen, ich wollte noch zu ihm, fand aber die Zeit nicht mehr.
References Brentano, F. (2008) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, T. Binder & A. Chrudzimski (eds.), Franz Brentano, Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, vol. I, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag; Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. C. Rancurello, D. Terrell and L. McAlister, London: Routledge, 1995. –– (1979) Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie, R. Chisholm (ed.), Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1979. –– (1867) Die Psychologie des Aristoteles. Insbesondere seine Lehre vom Nous Poietikos, Mainz: F. Kirchheim. Fisette, D. (2015) “The Reception and Actuality of Carl Stumpf. An Introductio”, 1153 . –– (2014) “Sensory Perception and Primary Contents in the Late Husserl”, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (forthcoming). –– (2013) “Mixed Feelings”, in D. Fisette & G. Fréchette (eds.) Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam: Rodopi. –– (2010) “Descriptive Psychology and Natural Sciences: Husserl’s early Criticism of Brentano”, C. Ierna et al. (eds) Edmund Husserl 150 Years: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, Berlin : Springer, 135-167. –– (2009) “Husserl in Halle (1886-1901)”, Philosophiques, vol. 36, no. 2, 277-306.
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–– (2003) “Husserl’s Programme of a Wissenschaftslehre in the Logical Investigations”, in D. Fisette (ed.) Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003, 35-58. Føllesdal, D. (1969) “Husserl’s Notion of Noema”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 66, no. 20, 680-687. Husserl, E. (Hua I) Cartesianische Meditationen, Husserliana Band I, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973. –– (Hua III) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Husserliana Bd. III, Den Haag, Nijhoff, 1950; trans. F. Kersten, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Collected Works, vol. 2, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982. –– (Hua VI) “Die Krisis der europaïschen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie”, in Husserliana Band VI, Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1954. –– (Hua VII) Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Erster Teil, Kritische Ideengeschichte, Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1956. –– (Hua VIII) Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Zweiter Teil, Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1959. –– (Hua IX) “Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925”, in Husserliana, Bd. IX, Den Haag, Nijhoff, 1962; transl. T. Sheehan and E. Palmer, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931), Collected Works VI, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. –– (Hua XII) Philosophie der Arithmetik, Husserliana Bd. XII, Den Haag : Nijhoff, 1970; transl. D. Willard, Philosophy of Arithmetic, Collected Works X, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. –– (Hua XVII) Formale und transzendentale Logik, Husserliana Bd. XVII, Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1974; trans. D. Cairn, Formal and Transcendental Logic, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969. –– (Hua XVIII) Logische Untersuchungen: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Husserliana Bd. XVIII, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1975; transl. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, second ed., London: Routledge, 1982. –– (Hua XIX/1) “Logische Untersuchungen: Unterschungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis”, in Husserliana, Bd. XIX/1, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1984; transl. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 & 2, second ed., London: Routledge, 1982. –– (Hua XIX/2) “Logische Untersuchungen: Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkenntnis”, in Husserliana, Bd. XIX/2, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1984; transl. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 & 2, second ed., London: Routledge, 1982. –– (Hua XXXVIII) “Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893-1912) ”, in Husserliana, Bd. XXXVIII, T. Vongehr & R. Giuliani. (Hrsg.), Berlin: Springer, 2004. –– Briefwechsel. Die Brentanoschule, Bd. 3, E. Schuhmann & K. Schuhmann (Hrsg.), Berlin: Springer, 1994. Martinelli, R. (2011) “Intentionality and God’s Mind. Stumpf on Spinoza”, G. Boudewijnse & S. Bonacchi (eds.), Carl Stumpf. From philosophical reflection to interdisciplinary scientific investigation, Wien: Krammer, 51 67.
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Österreich, T. K (1951) F. Überweg Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, quatrième partie: Die deutsche Philosophie des XIX. Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart, 12e ed., Graz: Akademie Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt. Rollinger, R. (1999) Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Stumpf, C. (1939-1940), Erkenntnislehre, 2 vol., F. Stumpf (ed.), Leipzig: Barth. –– (1924) “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.): Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, vol. V, Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1-57. –– (1922) “Franz Brentano, Professor der Philosophie, 1838-1917”, A. Chroust (ed.), Lebensläufe aus Franken, vol. II, Würzburg: Kabitzsch & Mönnich, 67-85. –– (1920) “Franz Brentano. Philosoph”, Deutsches biographisches Jahrbuch, vol. 2, 54-61. –– (1919a) “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in O. Kraus (ed.) Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, München: Oskar Beck, 87-149. –– (1919b) Spinozastudien, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Verlag der Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, pp. 1-57. –– (1918) Empfindung und Vorstellung, Berlin, Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. –– (1917) Die Attribute der Gesichtsempfindungen, Berlin, Köninglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, no. 8, 1917. –– 1910. “Leib und Seele”, in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1910, 65-93. –– (1906a) “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen”, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3-40. –– (1906b) “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften”, Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Klasse, Berlin: Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-94. –– (1890) Tonpsychologie, Bd. II, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (1873) Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (1870), Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik, W. Ewen, (ed.), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. Woodruff Smith, D. (2007) Husserl, London: Routledge.
STUMPF’S (EARLY) INSIGHTS AND MARTY’S WAY TO HIS (LATER) SPRACHPHILOSOPHIE LAURENT CESALLI (UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE)
Abstract. This paper deals with Stumpf’s seminal influence on Marty’s philosophical development, and more precisely, with the programmatic character of Stumpf’s 1876 review of Marty’s first monograph (Über den Ursprung der Srpache, 1875). Stumpf appears to identify in this work of youth the philosophical principles out of which Marty’s later Sprachphilosophie will grow. This is quite remarkable for, as Stumpf perspicuously notes, Marty himself, provided he was aware of these principles and their significance at all, does not put any emphasis on them. Although Stumpf’s review is by far not the only text in which the two thinkers interact, the following pages focus on this piece and its impact on the subsequent works of the Swiss philosopher – a choice justified by the fact that this aspect of the Stumpf-Marty relationship nearly didn’t receive any attention until now.
Anton Marty’s (1847-1914) discovery of Brentano’s way of doing philosophy – back in the winter term of 1868, in Würzburg – can faithfully be described as his own (philosophical) “Way to Damascus”. 1 In those days, however, another event took place the consequences of which can hardly be underestimated: Marty’s first encounter with Carl Stumpf, another young promising student who had been attending Brentano’s lectures from 1866 onward. 2 By ‘the consequences of this first encounter’ I do not mean the lifelong friendship 1
Marty notes in his diary: “Eine neue Welt geht mir auf.” In 1892, Stumpf writes to Brentano: “Diese These [vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est – the fourth of the twenty-five Habilitationsthesen defended by Brentano on the 14th of July, 1866] und was damit zusammenhängt war es auch, die Marty und mich mit Begeisterung an Ihre Fahne fesselte”. (Kraus 1916, 4). 2 Stumpf (1924), 4; Sprung (2006), 62.
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and intellectual relationship which bound Stumpf and Marty, 3 but rather what one may describe as Stumpf’s seminal influence on Marty’s philosophical development, and more precisely, the programmatic character of his 1876 review of Marty’s first monograph. (Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1875) In the eyes of the contemporary Martyian scholar, Stumpf appears to identify in this early work the philosophical principles out of which Marty’s later Sprachphilosophie will grow. This is quite remarkable for, as Stumpf perspicuously notes, Marty himself, provided he was aware of these principles and their significance at all, does not put any emphasis on them.4 Although, as we shall see,5 Stumpf’s 1876 review is by far not the only text through which the two thinkers interact, the present paper will focus on this piece and its impact on the subsequent works of the Swiss philosopher – a choice justified by the fact that this aspect of the Stumpf-Marty relationship nearly didn’t receive any attention until now.6 To begin with, however, I shall introduce some relevant elements about Stumpf’s and Marty’s lives and works. 1 Bio-bibliographical elements Beyond their (chronological) pole-position among Brentano’s disciples, Stumpf and Marty develop their own philosophical approach – the psychology of perception for the former, and the philosophy of language for the latter – on the basis of a common ground (Brentano’s philosophy of mind) and within a common perspective (the treatment of philosophical questions according to the methods of natural science). The least one can say is that such an approach was not domi3
Stumpf (1919), 102 (see the text quoted below, n. 11). Besides Kraus (1916) mentioned above, see also and Fisette & Fréchette (2007), 13-160, Sprung (2006), 62-141, and Rollinger (2010), 9-47. 4 Stumpf (1876), 188-189. 5 See below, notes 21 and 23. 6 To my knowledge, there is no study specifically dedicated to the relation between the philosophies of Stumpf and Marty. However, many relevant elements can be found in Fisette & Fréchette (2007). A first but limited sketch is offered by Cesalli (2009), 134-136. As for Stumpf’s review, it is practically absent from the literature: it is mentioned en passant in Rollinger (2010), but does not play any significant role; the same holds for Fisette (2006) and there is no trace of it in Smith (1994), Baumgartner (2003), Chrudzimski (2006) and even in Sprung (2006) and Ewen (2008).
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nant in the German speaking world of the time,7 although there were some notable exceptions, such as Fechner and Lotze. On Brentano’s recommendation, both Stumpf and Marty wrote their doctoral dissertation under the supervision of the latter.8 Marty and Stumpf also initially shared a strong theological orientation, a path they soon left however, although only Brentano and Marty made it to priesthood9. From the Würzburger years onward, Stumpf and Marty would become (and would stay) close: in his autobiography, Stumpf describes Marty as “his best friend” in Würzburg,10 and in one of the article he dedicates to Brentano he notes: Im Herbst 1868 fand sich Marty aus Schwyz unter seinen Zuhörern ein, und es entspann sich das enge Freundschaftsverhältnis, das uns untereinander und mit dem gemeinsamen Lehrer zeitlebens verbunden hielt.11
In 1873, Stumpf becomes professor in Würzburg; two years later, just after (and thanks to) the publication of his first book, Marty was appointed to a similar position in the newly created university of Czernowitz. (the home of Paul Celan, today’s Tchernivtsi, in West Ukraine) 1879 is certainly one of the key years in Stumpf’s and Marty’s lives: the former is appointed professor in Prague, while the latter publishes his second monograph (Die Frage nach der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes), a work which will play a determinant role in his accession to a position in Prague just a year after Stumpf.12 In 1884, Stumpf leaves Prague for Halle (where the young 7
Stumpf’s Wiedergeburt der Philosophie (Stumpf 1907) is mainly directed against the idealist systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel which are characterized by an aprioristic, philosophically sterile attitude and a contempt for natural sciences. 8 Stumpf: Verhältnis des platonischen Gottes zur Idee des Guten (1868); Marty: Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1875). 9 Brentano became a catholic priest in 1864, Marty in 1870. Stumpf entered the Priesterseminar of Würzburg in 1868 and left it in 1870. Marty and Brentano both abandoned their ecclesiastic position in 1873. 10 Stumpf (1924), 11. 11 Stumpf (1919), 102. 12 Immediately after his own arrival in Prague, in December 1879, Stumpf recommended Marty “in the first place” for the succession of Löwe. In the same year, Brentano delivered a report to the University of Prague in which he deplored the philological orientation of philosophy as it was taught in that Faculty and pleaded for a “philosophical turn” by suggesting the appointment of Stumpf (as a psychologist) and
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Husserl will join him in 1886 in order to prepare his Habilitation) and Marty begins the publication of two of his major works, both in the form of articles series in the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie: Über Sprachreflex, Nativismus und absichtliche Sprachbildung (10 articles between 1884 and 1892)13 and Über subjectlose Sätze und das Verhältnis der Grammatik zu Logik und Psychologie (7 articles: 3 in 1884, and the last 4 in 1894 and 1895).14 In 1892, Brentano holds a programmatic lecture – Über die Zukunft der Philosophie15 – in Vienna, a text directed against the Rector Exner and his hostility toward the use of scientific methods in humanities. 16 Marty and Stumpf, when becoming themselves Rectors – in 1896 in Prague for Marty, in 1907 in Berlin for Stumpf – will also express their views on the nature, state and fate of philosophy.17 The texts of Stumpf’s to which Marty will react in print all date from the same period: Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen,18 Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie 19 , and Vom ethischen Skeptizismus, 20 In his Untersuchungen of 1908, he devotes several pages to the first of these treatises,21 which is also discussed in a separate review (probably written Marty (as a philosopher). In the following year, this recommendation will have become reality. Although both Marty and Stumpf were appointed professors of philosophy, Stumpf mainly worked in the field of the psychology of sound – see Sprung (2006), p. 100-102. 13 Marty (1916a). 14 Marty (1918). 15 Brentano (1968). 16 Gilson (1976), 70. 17 Marty’s Rektoratsrede (1896) bears the rather neutral title Was ist Philosophie? (Marty 1916b) while Stumpf goes one step further in talking of Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie (Stumpf 1907) – After Halle, Stumpf changed for Munich (1889) and finally for Berlin (1894). 18 Stumpf (1906a) – see below, footnote 21. 19 Stumpf (1907a) – see below, footnote 23. 20 Stumpf (1908) – see below, footnote 23. 21 Marty (1908), 388-390: here, Stumpf’s notion of Erscheinung is criticized, which Marty understands to be immanent perceptual content (Sinnesinhalt); besides the fact that Marty now rejects immanent objects (he accepted them until 1904), he also notes a lack of coherence in Stumpf when it comes to distinguishing immanent entities (die empfundene Farbe) and objects (“die Farbe schlechtweg, d.h. etwas, was, wenn es wäre, in Wirklichkeit unserer Farbenempfindung adäquat wäre”). In another passage (ibid., 399-406), Marty expresses his disagreement with Stumpf’s theory of Gebilde (Begriffe, Sachverhalte), which are explicitly described as mind-dependent, immanent
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in 1908). 22 Finally, a double review published in 1909 discusses Stumpf’s Rektoratsrede of 1907 as well as his conference on ethical scepticism of 1908.23 To the best of my knowledge, there is no other significant discussion of Stumpf’s works by Marty (and vice-versa). 2 Marty’s first monograph and his Sprachphilosophie Considered retrospectively and as a whole, Marty’s philosophy of language develops out of the following central insight: language and thought are intimately related, and yet, there is nothing like a parallelism or a strict correspondence between the two.24 In Marty’s terms: “Grammatik” (language) and “Logik” (psychology, philosophy of mind) cannot ignore each other and yet, one has to separate what belongs to the former – i.e. speech in its external and internal forms25 – and what pertains to the latter – i.e. thought (judging in the first place, but also presenting, loving and hating). The appropriate relation, inentities. Here, Marty insists that states of affairs (Sachverhalte) and states of values (Wertverhalte) exist as non-real, mind-independent entities. On Stumpf’s theory of states of affairs, see Chrudzimski (2006) and Fisette (2006), 26-38. 22 Marty (1920). The criticisms developed in this review are essentially the same as the ones presented in the Untersuchungen (see the previous footnote). 23 Marty (1916d). Concerning Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie, Marty fully agrees with Stumpf’s (Brentanian) conception of philosophy: after the dark ages of Idealism where feeling and will eclipsed reason and experience, and philosophy dangerously flirted with poetry (“konfundierte Entdeckung mit Erdichtung”, 163), there has come a time of renaissance since 1860: serious philosophy is now again (vide Leibniz) based on science whose method it follows without losing its specificity. – On Stumpf’s conception of philosophy, see Fisette (2006), 105-112; on Marty’s conception of philosophy, see Marty (1916b). As for Zum ethischen Skeptizismus, Marty also agrees with Stumpf (and Brentano) that beyond the diversity and apparent incompatibility of contingent systems of ethical rules prevailing in different times and cultures (such is indeed the main argument to cave in to scepticism), there are objective values and corresponding Wertgefühle. They possess a kind of practical evidence, analogue to the theoretical evidence of a true judgment. – For Marty’s theory of objective values, see Marty (1908), 363-383. 24 In the first part of his article of 1893 “Über das Verhältnis von Grammatik und Logik” (Marty 1920, 59-68) Marty criticizes the two extreme positions, which consist in a thorough segregation or in a total fusion of the two disciplines. Along the same lines, see also the conclusion of the articles Über subjectlose Sätze (Marty 1918, 301307). 25 The external form of speech is whatever belongs to it and can be perceived externally; the internal form of speech is not externally perceivable; it is what links a linguistic expression to its meaning without being part of it (i.e. auxiliary presentations facilitating the association of sound and meaning) – see for example Marty (1918), 67.
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stead, is this: grammar has to take logic into account because names and sentences are primarily designed to express thought; and logic has to take grammar into account because even if (in principle) thought is independent of language, it is a fact that the latter influences the former.26 At the crossroads of logic and grammar lies the theory of meaning (Bedeutungslehre). The philosophical analysis of language leads to its initial question – what is linguistic meaning? – and the domain of philosophical psychology is the (only) domain in wich one can hope to find an appropriate answer: Sprachphilosophie or deskriptive Bedeutungslehre is nothing but Sprachpsychologie.27 Marty’s book on the origin of language is obviously a “genetic” work (as opposed to a “descriptive” one) – a distinction which, as such, will be introduced only later by Brentano. 28 In the foreword, Marty makes an observation which clearly prefigures the genetic/descriptive distinction: whereas his study on the origin of language is of philosophical interest because it offers a remarkable case of application and probation (Anwendung und Bewährung) of psychological principles, another type of study would be even more philosophically interesting, namely the study of the (positive and negative) influence exerted by language on thought – a point which will be central in the second (and more important) part of Stumpf’s review.29 Marty adds that he considers the distinction between the two approaches – a diachronic account of how language developed vs. a synchronic description of the relations between thought and language – as a necessary one (although it is not commonly made), and alludes to possible 26
On that subject, see section III of the third part of Marty’s Nachlass, a section eloquently entitled: “Vom Nutzen und Schaden der Sprache für das Denken” – Marty (1950), 79-85. 27 See Mulligan (1990) as well as Cesalli (2009), 122-126. 28 Brentano introduces it in the late 1880s (no later than 1887) – see Baumgartner and Chisholm in Brentano (1995), p. xv-xvi, as well as Antonelli in Marty (2011), xxvixxviii. The genetic approach is interested in chronological and causal developments, while the descriptive one only considers the laws and structure of a given phenomenon as it exists and functions now. Accordingly, Marty’s first book is an example of genetic philosophy of language, while his Untersuchungen of 1908 are (probably) the most sophisticated example ever of a work in descriptive philosophy of language. For recent studies on Marty’s conception of the origin of language, see Fryba-Reber (2007) and Rollinger (2010), 8-47. 29 See below, section 3.3, point ii).
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further works of his in this area.30 In the conclusion of the book, Marty clearly makes us understand: a) that distinguishing between the genetic and descriptive approaches is the only appropriate way to formulate an adequate theory of the origin of language, and b) that failing to make such a distinction leads to the antinomies31 which have traditionally characterized the debate on the matter.32 Apart from this methodological and somehow premonitory consideration in the foreword, there is another short passage in Über den Ursprung der Sprache in which today’s readers easily recognize the main lines of Marty’s later research. After having presented Humboldt’s position – according to which language is much more than a perceivable expression of thought, it is the manifestation of a mysterious, instinct-like Sprachkraft33 –, Marty denounces Humboldt’s idea that this instinctive force is somehow primitive and thus, nonanalyzable, a claim which represents a fatal flaw for such an approach. Indeed, it postulates a kind of essential unity (Wesenseinheit) between thought and language, something which, according to Marty, is simply incompatible with the diversity of the facts observed.34 Marty argues the following: language, as a human means of communication, exists in many forms; this would not be the case if language were a necessary and essential expression of thought. Furthermore, were something like a Humboldtian Sprachkraft at work, we should conclude that the different words used in different languages to name the very same things express different concepts of those things (i.e. from the differ30
Marty (1875), iv-v. See Stumpf’s remark at the very end of his review, text quoted below, note 69. 31 For example what one could call the Süssmilch-Rousseau-circle: language derives from thought, but thought presupposes language. See Marty (1875), 74-77, as well as 8. 32 Marty (1875), 137-138: “Obgleich gegenwärtig die Sprache aufs Engste mit dem sogen. abstracten Denken zusammenhängt, so darf doch ihr Ursprung nicht daraus, sondern muss aus den sogen. niederen Erkenntniskräften hergeleitet werden. Da diese Bestimmung für die Auffassung des Sprachursprungs sehr wesentlich ist, da sie, wie wir nachher sehen werden, gewissermaßen das Wort des Rätsels gibt, durch welches auch die mannigfachen Antithesen in dieser Frage begreiflich werden, so wollen wir sie nach den speciellen Beweisen, welche die vorangegangene Untersuchung an die Hand gibt, noch durch einige nachträgliche Betrachtungen erhärten”. 33 K. Heyse and E. Renan are also presented by Marty as advocates of such a Humboldtian position (Marty 1875, 10-16). 34 Marty (1875), 15-16.
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ence between ‘Wolf’ and ‘loup’, one should infer a difference in concepts in “German” and “French” minds), which is absurd. But if one tries to account for the differences at the level of words by invoking contingent circumstances (habit, mother tongue, etc.), then the very idea of an instinctive and universal Sprachkraft becomes thereby undermined: the existence of a universal linguistic instinct would make contingent factors necessarily irrelevant. 3 A programmatic review: Stumpf on Über den Ursprung der Sprache Stumpf’s 1876 review is divided into two parts. In the first one 35 , Marty’s book is presented and discussed in a quite classical way: the method, structure and main results of the work are presented, and one (apparently) minor objection is raised; in the second part36, Stumpf expresses his view on the philosophical significance and potential which, in his opinion, is present in Marty’s work. Between the discussions of those two parts, I shall insert a section on the genesis of Marty’s first book, based mainly on letters exchanged between himself and Brentano in the years 1873-1874.37 3.1 A solid method and a possible shortcoming Stumpf’s review is highly positive and laudatory. It insists on the felicitous collaboration of (serious, i.e. science-based) philosophy with “neighbouring-sciences” interested in language (Sprachforschung, Kulturgeschichte, Anthropologie, Zoologie). His main line of thought, expressed quite rhetorically (if not provocatively) in the first lines of the text, consists in the claim that the philosopher, by tackling the issue of the origin of language with his own tools and methods, eventually brings light to an area which, before that, was fumbling around in the dark: Der Philosoph, sonst immer auch dabei, blieb ferne. Das war nun bloss correct zu nennen, solange die der historischen Forschung zugänglichen frühesten Sprachstufen das Hauptinteresse in Anspruch 35
Stumpf (1876), 172-187. Stumpf (1876), 187-191. 37 Prof. W. Baumgartner (Franz Brentano-Forschung, Zentrum für Geschichte der Psychologie, Universität Würzburg) kindly gave me access to the key passages of the Brentano-Marty correspondence between 1873 and 1874. 36
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nahmen und von da aus nur nebenbei auf den Ursprung des Sprechens selbst Vermuthungen gewagt wurden. Nachdem aber Einige, in der richtigen Erkenntnis, dass an die Quelle selbst mit dem Kahne doch nicht zu kommen sey, heraus und auf die Berge stiegen, ist es für den Philosophen Zeit, sich beizugesellen, hier ist er ja recht eigentlich zu Hause. Und wenn jetzt die Uebung des Steigers sich mit den Kenntnissen Jener von der Stromrichtung verbindet, wenn klare und sichere psychologische Deductionen durch das sprachlich gegebene Material in möglichstem Umfange verificirt werden, so kann und muss das Ziel erreicht werden.38
The benefits brought about by philosophy in this matter are especially obvious with respect to the method of investigation, a method which one could characterize as a kind of “fictional-empiricism”: Man muss in unsrer Frage von Adam anfangen. Manche fangen noch früher an, indem sie auf die Entwicklung des Menschen aus dem Thierreich zurückgehen. Die frühesten Existenzbedingungen unseres Geschlechts bleiben in beiden Fällen schwer zu bestimmen: und doch scheint es nöthig, irgend einen concreten Zustand der Spracherzeuger als Ausgangspunkt der Deduction sich klar und bestimmt vorzustellen. Der Verf sucht sich nun von dieser schwierigen Frage unabhängig zu machen, indem er Verhältnisse fingirt, im Vergleich mit welchen die faktischen in jedem Falle, wie man auch über den Ursprung und Urzustand des Menschen denken möge, günstiger waren. Nur die elementarsten psychischen Functionen und eine gewisse Fertigkeit in willkürlichen Bewegungen setzt er voraus; und zeigt in seinem ersten Kapitel, wie hieraus irgend welche, wenn auch zunächst rudimentäre Verkehrs- und Mittheilungsformen entstehen mussten. 39
Marty’s clever methodological position consists in escaping the speculative option strongly suggested by the manifest absence of empirical data. Fictional empiricism is not a kind of unbound speculation: the postulated initial conditions must be minimal, plausible and compatible with the actual state of the art in psychology. Once those initial 38
Stumpf (1876), 172. Stumpf (1876), 177. It should be reminded here that Stumpf himself in his book on the representation of space (Stumpf 1873) discusses the opposition between nativists (e.g. Hering) and empiricists (e.g. Helmholtz), and sides with the latter – on that point, see Fisette (2006), 38-50.
39
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conditions are fixed, one can “observe” what must have gone on in order to eventually yield language as it exists now. The driving force of language development is a blend of communication intention (Mittheilungsabsicht) and casual associations: the emergence of language was absichtlich aber planlos – a formula which neatly expresses the gist of the so-called “empiricoteleological” conception of language:40 Nicht wahllos sondern planlos ist also die Devise, welche – hier wie auch in Bezug auf die Entstehung von Recht und Staat – prägnant den Unterschied zwischen dem richtigen und unhaltbaren Empirismus bezeichnet. Wer die intellektuelle Grundlage dieses planlos zweckmäßigen Tuns klargelegt hat, der hat der Erfindungstheorie, aber zugleich auch dem Nativismus, der in irgendeiner Form an fertige Instinkte appelliert oder die Entstehung der Sprache kurzweg als unerklärliches Wunder hinstellt, definitiv den Boden entzogen.41
The only serious critical point raised by Stumpf in his review is the following: regarding the issue of the possibility of animal speech, Marty argues that animals do not possess a language proper because they lack the capacity to form abstract presentations; 42 at the same time, as Stumpf perspicuously remarks, Marty insists that language can and must develop out of initial conditions which certainly do not include the capacity to form abstract thoughts:43 Es fragt sich, ob dadurch nicht die Hauptthesis, dass die Sprache nicht durch höheres Denken, sondern wesentlich durch Ideenassociation u. dergl. entstand, alterirt wird? – Ich glaube dies allerdings nicht. Doch wird sie dahin zu interpretieren sein, dass unter dem höheren Denken das abstracte Urtheilen und Schliessen verstanden wird, nicht aber die blosse Bildung abstracter Begriffe. Der Verf hätte dies, wenn es seiner Meinung entspricht, wohl passend angefügt; oder noch besser vielleicht die Mittbetheiligung abstracter Vorstellungen, wie er sie 40
See Mulligan (1997). Marty (1916a), 158. This text (published in 1890) expresses the idea in a very concise way, but one also finds it clearly formulated in earlier works, namely in the conclusion of Marty’s first monograph (Marty 1875, 138-144), in his book on the sense of colours (Marty 1879, 97), as well as in his first article (1884) on subjectless sentences (Marty 1918, 16-19). 42 Marty (1875), 147-150. 43 Marty (1875), 63-73. 41
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annimmt, schon vorher bei der Darstellung der Sprachbildung an der betreffenden Stelle besprochen.44
The point raised by Stumpf, however, is not a minor one, for it simply follows from this objection that either the set of initial conditions postulated by Marty is incomplete, or that his claim that animal do not possess language is false… 3.2 The tortuous genesis of a work (1873-1875) As the correspondence between Brentano and Marty in the years of 1873-1874 makes clear, Stumpf exerted a significant influence on Marty’s doctoral thesis. 45 In Brentano’s later opinion expressed in 1916, this influence was rather negative: hatte unter Zustimmung von Stumpf sich eine ganz andere Ansicht über den Ursprung der Sprache gebildet und mir dieselbe brieflich ausgesprochen. In meiner Antwort verwarf ich dieselbe gänzlich und gab ihm jene Auffassung als die richtige an, an welche er sich sofort mit jener ihm eigenen Wahrheitsliebe anschloss, um sich für alle Zukunft an sie zu halten.46
Provided Brentano is alluding to his correspondence with Marty between spring 1873 and autumn 1874, he appears to be somehow dramatizing the situation (to his advantage). The letters exchanged while Marty worked on his doctoral dissertation reveal that the work he eventually presented in 1875 only remotely corresponds to the one he had in mind in 1873. As a matter of fact, Marty started to write a piece centred on a critique of “English nominalism” (Berkeley, Hume, Mill) with respect to the problem of the meaning of names and verbs47, a plan to which Brentano had nothing serious to object.48 At 44 Stumpf 45
(1876), 186. In what follows, the correspondence is quoted according to Baumgartner’s transcriptions. 46 Brentano (1966), 287. 47 Marty to Brentano (28.05.1873): “Ich habe sodann meine Gedanken über die abstrakten Vorstellungen etwas ausgeführt, weil ich gerade in die Kritik des neueren Nominalismus der Engländer den Schwerpunkt meiner Arbeit verlegen möchte”. And later (15.06.1873): “Stumpf fügt den Rath bei, ich solle mich nicht in’s Detail einlassen über die Bedeutung und Funktion der Nomina und Verba und dgl. Er hat gewiß recht und ich hätte dies auch ohnedies nicht gethan – da dies zum großen Theil abgedroschen und mehr Sache der Grammatik ist”.
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that time, it even seemed that the work was just about to be finished and sent to Lotze.49 The final version of the work, however, was only sent to Lotze in late spring 1875, and in a letter written sometime in “autumn 1874”, Marty writes to Brentano: Wie Ihnen Stumpf, der am Samstag nach Würzburg gegangen ist, mitgetheilt hat, haben wir eine Änderung an der Arbeit beschlossen, Weglassungen im Kapitel über den Nominalismus, wodurch anderswo eine Zufügung nöthig wurde; vor Allem aber Berücksichtigung neurer und neuester Literatur zur Frage über den Sprachursprung, was über Erwarten Zeit und Anspruch nahm und manche Änderungen nach sich zog.
Brentano still did not have any fundamental objection to this change of orientation. He only points to a difference of degrees in the systematic role that Marty attributes to habit and experience: Lieber Freund! […] Wenn etwas meine und Ihre Ansichten trennt, so ist es wohl nur der Umstand, dass ich der Gewohnheit und Erfahrung, die wie Aristoteles sagt auch bei Thieren wirkt, eine größere Macht zuschreibe, als Sie zu thun geneigt sind. In vielen praktischen Beziehungen ersetzte dieser Factor vollkommen die mangelnde Erkenntnis des Allgemeinen (vgl. Metaphysik, A, 1), vielleicht auch in gewissem Umfange in Beziehung auf die Sprachbildung. […] Was die Ordnung des Materials betrifft, so liegt mir der Plan doch nicht so klar vor, dass ich in dieser Beziehung wagen möchte, einen Rath zu geben. Doch bin ich nirgends auf etwas gestoßen, was mir als Fehler auffiel.50
In short then, the influence of Stumpf on the final version of Marty’s doctoral thesis seems to have consisted in re-orienting the work away from strictly semantic questions (the meaning of names and verbs) to the problem of the origin of language – a move which Brentano does not seem to disapprove of in any way. This is an invitation to remain 48
Brentano to Marty (13.06.1873): “Dass ich mit Ihrer Vertheidigung der allgemeinen Ideen einverstanden bin, brauche ich nicht erst zu bemerken.” 49 Brentano to Marty (13.06.1873): “Da Ihre Sache Eile hat, […]. […] Doch, Sie bedürfen ihrer [sc. Arbeit] wohl sehr bald.” Marty to Brentano (13.07.1873): “Ich sollte freilich etwa am 20ten einen Theil zur Einsicht an Lotze senden […]. […]. Entschuldigen Sie meine Eile.” 50 Brentano’s letter to Marty dated November, 22nd, 1874.
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cautious when reading historical or autobiographical statements such as the ones made in the letter of 1916 quoted above. What seems to be corroborated by the facts, however, is that Brentano did influence Marty’s work in suggesting that he puts a stronger emphasis on habit and experience – but there is no trace of a “ganz andere Ansicht ” and its “gänzliche Verwerfung ” alluded to in 1916. In this respect, two observations can be added here: first, it appears that Marty’s original topic (the meaning of names and verbs) quite exactly prefigures his future work in the field of what he would call deskriptive Bedeutungslehre; but – and secondly – he does not seem to see the philosophical potential of such a topic in 1873: according to him, the problem is rather banal and belongs to grammar, as if grammar were not of any philosophical relevance. 51 If such a scenario is correct, then one can suppose that Marty quite radically changed his mind between 1875 and 1884.52 My hypothesis, as indicated above, is that Stumpf’s review – and more precisely, the conclusions he reaches in that text but which he certainly shared privatim with Marty – played a significant role in this change of mind. 3.3 The philosophical potential of Marty’s first monograph The second part of Stumpf’s review is articulated in two steps. In the first one, he points at the philosophical principles at work in Marty’s book; in a second step, Stumpf delineates further possible develop51
See the end of the passage quoted above (n. 46) from the letter of 15.06.1873, where Marty says that the topic is “abgedroschen” (banal) and “mehr Sache der Grammatik”. 52 1884 is the year in which Marty starts his monumental articles series Über subjectlose Sätze which, as the subtitle indicates, deals precisely with the relation between logic and grammar. In the opening pages of the first article (1884), Marty qualifies the problem of the meaning of subjectless sentences as being “hochwichtig” for the philosopher (Marty 1918, 4). See as well the following passage from the last article on subjectless sentences (1895) – Marty (1918), 302: “[…] gehört […] mit zu den Ergebnissen unserer Untersuchung, dass eine systematische Emanzipation der Logik von der Grammatik geboten ist. Aber natürlich heisst Emanzipation hier nicht einfach Ignorieren des Sprachlichen und Grammatischen. Vielmehr können wir auch dreist sagen, unsere Untersuchung über die subjektlosen Sätze habe zu dem Resultate geführt, dass eine Rücksichtnahme der Logik auf die Grammatik gefordert sei; […] Die Verflechtung und zwar eine durch besondere Stärke und Dauer der Gewohnheit sehr innig gewordene Verflechtung unserer Urteile und Begriffe mit sprachlichen Vorstellungen ist Tatsache”.
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ments which, in his view, could well follow from the salutary association of linguistics (Sprachforschung) and philosophy. i) Stumpf identifies four fundamental points (Grundaussichten) which, in his opinion, will have some impact on “further important questions”:53 Ich meine vor allem die unerlässliche Bedingung aller Klarheit: den Dualismus von Denken und Sprechen […]. Weiter, und im engen Anschluss daran: die primäre Bestimmung des Sprechens als Verkehrsmittel. […] Weiter: die principielle Coordination dieses Mittheilungsmittels mit anderen; […] Endlich: die Coordination der Muttersprache mit den fremden in allen erwähnten Puncten. 54
In those few lines, Stumpf points to the essential features of Marty’s philosophy of language so to speak avant la lettre, for the reader does not find them expressed with such clarity and conciseness anywhere in Über den Usrprung der Sprache. To be sure, those points are the systematic presuppositions of Marty’s work of 1875, but one gets the impression that the author lacks the critical distance required to be explicit about them.55 Reformulated in perhaps more familiar words, the four points identified by Stumpf are the following: language is not a mechanical (necessary, natural, instinctive) emanation of thought; language is primarily a means of communication; language is the most efficient means of communication humans could find; language’s nature and functions are governed by universal (i.e. trans-idiomatic) laws. As Stumpf underscores, the two first elements are intimately linked: to speak is definitely more than to “think aloud”, and the intention to communicate (to interact efficiently and purposefully with others) puts specific constraints on the nature and development of language: it must work as a means of communication, and be distict from 53
Stumpf (1876), 187. Stumpf (1876), 187-188. 55 This might also be linked to the relative emergency in which the book was published. Marty needed it in order to get his position in Czernowitz. Lotze wrote his report on the work on 23.06.1875, and in a letter from 06.05.1875, Brentano says that the Unterrichtsminister (Karl Ritter von Stremayr) considers Marty for the position, provided he completes his doctoral thesis (I am grateful to W. Baumgartner for this information) – and one might reasonably guess that the publication of the book was also part of the requirements. 54
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a mere externalization. Before turning to more speculative reflections, Stumpf makes the following, insightful statement: “Die Sprache”, welcher jene erste Begeisterung [i.e. die nativistische] galt, war eine platonische Idee, eine personificirte Abstraction. Menschenwert gleich anderen konnte sie nicht seyn, nicht Wert der Einzelnen, nicht ihr Eigenthum. Das ist sie jetzt: und darum sollte sie uns weniger theuer seyn? Wir stehen hier vor einer merkwürdigen Wandlung. Wir reden noch ebenso von “der Sprache”, aber wir denken statt des Singulars den Plural, ja statt des Substantivs das Verbum. In dieser Wandlung des Subjectes liegt etwas von der Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie, und in dieser Geschichte selbst ein allgemeiner Zug. Die Sprachphilosophie hat, um der Kürze halber Comte’s Ausdruck zu gebrauchen, ein theologisches und ein metaphysisches Stadium durchgemacht, und sie steht im Begriff, in das positive einzutreten.56
These remarkable lines express two central ideas. First, the “deidealization” of language. The merit of Marty’s empirico-teleologicopsychological approach is to have brought the focus back to what language actually is, namely a concrete communicational practice – action (“das Verbum”) instead of abstraction (“das Substantiv”). Second, the impact of such a move (“die Wandlung des Subjectes”) on the evolution of philosophy of language. The free-floating “metaphysical” speculation about language will possibly not be taken seriously anymore: the application of empirical psychology – and, in a Brentanian perspective, one could even say, of philosophy – on (traditionally) linguistic questions leads to the emergence of Sprachphilosophie as a new discipline (the denomination itself is certainly not new57, but it now definitely becomes an equivocal term). ii) As for the philosophical perspectives opened by Marty’s work, they all regard the question of how language, as it now exists, contrib56
Stumpf (1876), 188-189. Herder uses the term ‘Sprachphilosoph’ in his own Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and in 1807 Humboldt (Alexander) proposes to introduce the discipline Philosophie der Sprache in the Academy of Sciences of Berlin. In both cases, however, the term designates something totally different from what Marty will understand by Sprachphilosophie. 57
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utes to thought (“die Leistungen der Sprache, wie sie jetzt ist, für das Denken”58). In this regard, Stumpf distinguishes two aspects. a) On the one hand, the contribution of language to thought is a formal one (formell). The idea is that, besides actual speech, there exists a mentalized speech consisting in sound presentations (Lautvorstellungen). Such an internalized language evolved according to the same principles as the ones governing the evolution of external speech: Das Zeichensystem, welches in der Gestalt der Lautvorstellung sich zum einsamen Denken gesellt, wurde durch analoge Prozesse wie die bei der ersten Bildung wirkenden für dasselbe mehr und mehr nutzbar gemacht, und enthält jetzt einen ähnlichen Reichtum von Kunstgriffen, wenn auch von geringerer Strenge und Consequenz, wie das der Mathematik.59
The mention of mathematics in this context alludes to the works of another of Lotze’s student, Gottlob Frege, with whom Stumpf was apparently in close contact.60 Sure enough, what Frege describes in his Begriffsschrift (1879) is precisely not a kind of internalized speech – in the own words of its author, we are dealing with “eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens”. Stumpf, however, in the continuation of the above quoted passage, makes an a parte observation, noticing that besides internalized speech, thought consists in pure (i.e. speech-independent) logical operations with respect to which linguistic elements are not optimizing, but perturbing factors: Uebrigens scheint doch selbst beim abstracten Denken das innerliche Sprechen nicht so allgemein betheiligt, dass jeden Begriff eine entsprechende Lautvorstellung begleitete; vielmehr dürften beständig, untermischt mit den durch die Sprache getragenen, auch eine Reihe 58
Stumpf (1876), 189. Stumpf (1876), 189. 60 See Ewen (2008), 34-41. Stumpf’s own Habilitation (1870) bears the title Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik. The work was only published recently by Ewen (Stumpf 2008). Interestingly enough, and as a consequence of an (understandable) mistake of classification by G. Katkov, the only letter of Frege to Marty (29-08.1882) turns out to be a letter to Stumpf – see the convincing arguments put forward by the editors in Frege (1976), 162. 59
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mehr oder weniger elementarer abstracter Denkprozesse, Urtheile, Schlüsse ganz wortlos vor sich gehen. Sodann ist gewiss, dass die Betheiligung der Sprache, wo sie stattfindet, in manchem Betracht auch unvermeidliche Nachteile bringt.61
Still with respect to the formal contribution of language to thought, Stumpf mentions mental elements, which are not sound presentations but “other signs”, and which, by way of “bold and non-deliberate substitutions” turn out to be very useful: “a thought for another, an image for a thought, a part for the whole”.62 In this case, we are dealing with the contribution of non-verbal forms of language (the substitutions at play are useful in the process of meaning and communication, and thus, fall under the concept of language). b) On the other hand, language contributes to thought at a material level (materiell), that is: not as far as mental signs are concerned (as was the case with the formal contribution), but with respect to what is expressed or signified in thought by language: “Nach der materiellen Seite interessieren die Philosophie vorzüglich die Beziehungen der Sprache zum logischen und metaphysischen Denken”. 63 Logical thought is whatever contributes to (or has to do with) the practice of cognition (arguments, demonstrations) and correct judgment, a discipline which, according to Stumpf, belongs to the practical branch of philosophy.64 Metaphysical thought, by contrast, represents the highest theoretical branch of philosophy: it is not concerned with prima facie objects (they are described by the specific, and thus, lower disciplines), but with the most general laws and relations prevailing among 61
Stumpf (1876), 189. Ewen (2008) does not mention Stumpf’s review of Marty’s first book, and the name of Frege does not even appear in Sprung’s biography (Sprung 2006). It does not take much, however, to think that Stumpf’s ideas in 1876 are somehow akin with the ones Frege will put forth in print three years later. 62 Stumpf (1876), 189-190: “Ferner scheint es, dass statt der Lautvorstellungen auch andere Zeichen fungieren, dass oft selbst ein Gedanke für den anderen eintritt, ein Bild für den Begriff, ein Theil für das Ganze; sehr kühne, unwillkürliche, im Ganzen doch nützliche Substitutionen. Dies und vieles Andere wäre specieller zu untersuchen.” 63 Stumpf (1876), 190. 64 Stumpf 1886-1887, in Rollinger (1999), 311: “By ‘logic’ we mean the practical doctrine of cognition or the guide to correct judging. We include it in philosophy, for it draws its presuppositions for the most part from a philosophical science, psychology.”
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objects of any type – metaphysics is not a “theory of knowledge (Wissenstheorie), but a theory of the world”.65 On the material side then, the contribution of the study of language to thought is that of a Sprachkritik66 whose aim is to fight the illusions of the Sprachlogik yielded by a “monistic” conception of the relationship between language and thought: Aber leicht wird man solche Sprachlogik überschätzen, und schwer zugeben oder in der Forschung festhalten, dass eine Menge sprachlicher Formen für die Erkenntnis der wahren Denkprozesse und der wirklichen metaphysischen Verhältnisse geradezu hinderlich ist.67
True, science in general and philosophy in particular are dependent on language, but language should never be considered as a reliable source of logical or metaphysical knowledge. Thus, the main contribution of the study of language to philosophy consists in the clarification and elucidation of the intricate relations between thought and its various forms of public expression. Stumpf concludes his review with a statement which is at the same time explicitly programmatic and dubitative: 65
Stumpf (1907b), 42-43: “Es seien die Erscheinungen in sich selbst, es seien die psychischen Funktionen, es seien die Gebilde, auch die Verhältnisse in und zwischen diesen Gegenständen, endlich die jenseits der Erscheinungen liegenden physischen Gegenstände besonderen Wissenschaften oder Wissenschaftgruppen zugeteilt: so entsteht schliesslich die Frage nach gemeinschaftlichen Gesetzen und nach dem einheitlichen Zusammenhang aller dieser vorher unterschiedenen Gegenstände. […] Man sieht, von allen Seiten drängen die Fragen heran, und keine Disziplin der reinen Vernunft kann dem menschlichen Geiste wehren, ihrer Klärung nachzugehen. Nicht blos eine Wissenstheorie, sondern in der Tat eine Welttheorie ist es, die trotz alles Widerspruches der Erkenntniskritiker unabweislich gefordert werden muss”. 66 The (later) works of Fritz Mauthner will take up the same line, see for example Mauthner (1901), 1-2: “Will ich emporklimmen in der Sprachkritik, die das wichtigste Geschäft der denkenden Menschheit ist, so muss ich die Sprache hinter mir und vor mir und in mir vernichten von Schritt zu Schritt, so muss ich jede Sprosse der Leiter zertrümmen, indem ich sie betrete. Wer folgen will, der zimmere die Sprossen wieder, um sie abermals zu zertrümmern.” – An image which is nowadays systematically associated with Wittgenstein and the ending of the Tractatus (proposition 6.54). Mauthner’s Sprachkritik is mentioned by Wittgenstein (4.0031) but negatively: “Alle Philosophie ist Sprachkritik. Allerdings nicht im Sinne Mauthners”. 67 Stumpf (1876), 190.
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Wir sehen deshalb den Arbeiten […], zu welchen der Verf unserer Schrift nach der Vorrede Lust zeigt, insofern mit den besten Hoffnungen entgegen; zweifelhaft jedoch darüber, ob die grosse Menge sachlich logischer und metaphysischer Untersuchungen, welche einer Kritik der bezüglichen Sprachformen nach dualistischem Princip nothwendig vorausgehen muss, in dem Rahmen einer Monographie über Denken und Sprache passend zu vereinigen wäre. Nur jene erste Frage nach dem allgemeinen und formellen Charakter der Leistungen, die das Denken von der Sprache empfängt, scheint einer rein psychologischen Detailbetrachtung fähig.68
Marty’s subsequent works show not only that the line of investigation sketched by Stumpf in the second part of his review is an extremely promising one, but also that his doubts about the feasibility of a unitary monographic study dealing with all the relevant aspects are not justified. From 1879 onwards (Über die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Farbensinnes), Marty will indeed produce a series of counterexamples, the most remarkable of which being the monumental first volume of his Untersuchungen (1908). 4 From the origin of language to the descriptive theory of meaning By way of a conclusion, I shall give three concrete examples of what I take to be clear traces of Stumpf’s influence on Marty’s philosophy of language. i) Stumpf’s insistence on the fruitful association of philosophy (i.e. philosophical psychology) and the study of language (Sprachforschung) 69 delineates the profile of what will become Marty’s own field of expertise, namely a Sprachphilosophie or deskriptive Bedeutungslehre understood as an application of Brentano’s descriptive psychology to (apparently) linguistic matters 70 – a discipline which Marty also occasionally calls Sprachpsychologie. 71 68
Stumpf (1876), 190-191. See above, section 3.1. 70 In the letter of 1906 that Marty addresses to his editor Niemeyer in the perspective of the publication of his Untesuchungen, one reads, concerning the questions addressed in the planned book: “ Fragen, die an den Grenzen von Psychologie und Logik einerseits und der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft andererseits liegen […]”. (Marty 1940, 49). 71 See for example the table of contents of the Untersuchungen (Marty 1908, xv-xvi). 69
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Contrary to what its denomination might suggest, this discipline is not exclusively centred on strictly linguistic issues: “upstream” of the linguistic means and their semantic properties (and closely related to them), it also comprises a sophisticated philosophy of mind whose main achievement is an original theory of intentionality understood as “mental assimilation” (ideelle Verähnlichung) of a thinking subject with a (non-immanent) object72; “downstream”, so to say, it leads to a remarkable ontology in which non-real entities (relations, collectives and states of affairs) coexist with real entities (substances and accidents).73 ii) Another of Stumpf’s fundamental insights consists in his underscoring the so-called dualist point of view as the sine qua non condition for clarity in the philosophical study of language.74 As we saw above, the dualism at stake is the one of language and thought. In spite of the fact they cannot be considered as being totally independent from one another (genetically: language presupposes thought; descriptively: language expresses thought), the temptation to postulate a strict parallelism between the two must be resisted by all means. This Leitmotiv can be followed throughout Marty’s philosophy.75 The author of the Untersuchungen himself clearly links the dualism thesis with his empirico-teleological theory (of the origin) of language: Allein ganz offenbar sind die Gründe, die von vornherein die Hoffnung zerstören, in irgend zuverlässiger Weise Logik auf Grammatik bauen zu können. Nicht ein Parallelismus, sondern mannigfache Diskrepanz ist zwischen grammatischen und logischen Kategorien zu er72
On Marty’s theory of intentionality, see Chrudzimski (1999) as well as Cesalli & Taieb (2013). 73 On Marty’s ontology, see Smith (1994), 83-124. 74 See above, section 3.3, point i). 75 Marty (1879), 63: “Die Sprache ist nicht aus einem Bestreben entstanden, das einsame Denken durch ein paralleles System von sinnlichen Zeichen zu symbolisieren. Es gibt keinen solchen Trieb im Menschen. Zur Sprachbildung führte blos das Verlangen nach Mittheilung, und darum wurden auch die Ausdrucksmittel nur so weit ein genauer Abdruck der Gedanken, als es der Zweck der Verständigung unumgänglich erheischte”. See also Marty (1908), 527 : “Das allzu grosse Vertrauen auf den Parallelismus zwischen der Struktur und Beschaffenheit unserer sprachlichen Ausdrücke und der in ihnen sich äussernden psychischen Phänomene trägt mit die Schuld an mancher grundverfehlten Weise der Beschreibung der letzteren, die wir bei Psychologen und Grammatikern finden”.
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warten angesichts der vielfachen Zwecke, denen die Sprache zu dienen hat, und der eigentümlichen Art ihrer Entstehung.76
Although not expressis verbis among Stumpf’s seminal insights of 1876, one can notice here that Marty’s “pragmatic-semantics”77 follows quite naturally from those premises. Since thought and language are not just two forms of essentially one and the same phenomenon, the manifestation of one’s own mental states cannot be sufficient for communication. The gap resulting from the non-parallelism between thought and language necessitates the development of specific tools aimed precisely at bridging it by acting in some efficient way upon others’ minds. iii) Finally, the distinction of what Stumpf calls the formal and material contributions (Leistungen) of language to thought78 prefigures at least three central aspects of Marty’s later Sprachphilosophie. First, the overall hylemorphic structure of his approach to language: the linguistic form (the means of expression and of communication) is distinguished from the linguistic matter (the meaning or Bedeutung); but meaning itself is analyzed in terms of matter and form, the former being expressed by so-called “autosemantic” expressions, and the latter by “synsemantic” ones.79 Second, the idea that mental elements distinct from sound-presentations (Lautvorstellungen) play a useful role in the process of meaning and communication might have put Marty on the way to his theory of the inner linguistic form80. Third, the clari76
Marty (1918), 17. This text was written in 1884 (first article of Über subjectlose Sätze). 77 Marty explains linguistic meaning in terms of speakers’ intentions to influence the minds of listeners, namely: the (immediate, but secondary) intention to manifest one’s own mental states (Kundgabe) and the (mediate, but primary) intention to influence others’ mental states (Bedeutung). In this context, speaking is presented as being primarily a kind of action performed with the help of words which are nothing but vocal tools. See for example Marty (1908), 284-285, 384, 436. On this topic, see Liedtke (1990), Mulligan (1990) and Cesalli (2008). 78 See above, section 3.3, point ii). 79 This hylemorphic structure determines the structure of the Untersuchungen as a whole (i.e. including the parts published by Funke as Marty’s Nachgelassene Schriften – see Marty 1940, 1950a and 1950b) – on the whole architecture of the Untersuchungen, see Cesalli (2009), 126-130. 80 More precisely, what Stumpf seems to anticipate here is Marty’s notion of figurative inner linguistic form which is not to be confused with meaning – see Marty (1918), 67-76, and Marty (1908), 134-150, as well as note 25 above.
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fication of the complex relations holding between thought and language, i.e. the Sprachkritik that Stumpf identifies with the material contribution of language to thought, 81 is precisely what Marty will achieve in different fields from his articles Über subjectlose Sätze to his last monograph Raum und Zeit: whenever something is unmasked as being a Fiktion der inneren figürlichen Sprachform82 – and this is undoubtedly Marty’s favourite line of attack in his merciless (and endless) polemics against Kant, Wundt, Steinthal, Sigwart and many others –, we are presented with the results of the sharpest Sprachkritik. *** It is of course difficult (if not impossible) to provide unquestionable evidence that Stumpf’s early insights are responsible for Marty’s philosophical development. The hypothesis in favour of which I argued in the preceding pages is indeed a weaker one. What I hope to have shown – and further investigations might very well amend this claim in one direction or another – is that Stumpf’s 1876 reflections on the philosophical significance and potential of Über den Ursprung der Sprache substantially contributed to provide Marty’s subsequent works with their characteristic orientation, and thus paved the way to his later Sprachphilosophie. References Baumgartner, Wilhelm. 2003. ‘Le contenu et la méthode des philosophies de Franz Brentano et Carl Stumpf’ in Les études philosophiques 64(1): 3-22. Brentano, Franz. 1966. Die Abkehr vom Nichtrealen. Briefe und Abhandlungen aus dem Nachlass. Hg. u. eingel. v. F. Mayer-Hillebrand. Hamburg: Meiner. –– 1968 [1893]. Über die Zukunft der Philosophie. Hg. v. O. Kraus. Hamburg: Meiner. –– 1995 [1887-1891]. Descriptive Psychology. Translated and edited by B. Müller. London: Routledge [Introduction by W. Baumgartner and R. Chisholm]. Cesalli, Laurent & Taieb, Hamid. 2013. ‘The road to the ‘ideelle Verähnlichung’ – Anton Marty’s Conception of Intentionality in the Light of its Brentanian Background’, in Quaestio 12: 171-232. 81
See above, section 3.3, point ii), b). There are countless examples: propositional judgments (Marty 1918), immanent objects (Marty 1908, 385-417), universals (Marty 1908, 415-417 and 440-447), the idea that grammatical cases express spatial (ant not logical) relations (see Marty 1910, 10-60), and mistaken conceptions about space, time, substances, accidents and their relations (Marty 1916).
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Cesalli, Laurent. 2008. ‘Faire sens. La sémantique pragmatique d’Anton Marty (1847-1914)’ in Revue de philosophie et de théologie 140: 13-29. –– 2009. ‘Martys philosophische Position innerhalb der österreichischen Tradition’ in Brentano Studien 12: 121-181. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz. 2006. ‘Wozu brauchte Stumpf Sachverhalte?’ in Brentano Studien 10: 65-80. –– 1999. ‘Die Intentionalitätstheorie Anton Martys’ in Grazer Philosophische Studien 57: 175-214. Ewen, Wolfgang. 2008. Carl Stumpf und Gottlob Frege. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Fisette, Denis. 2006. ‘La philosophie de Carl Stumpf, son origine et sa postérité’, in C. Stumpf (2006): 11-112. Fisette, Denis & Fréchette, Guillaume (dir.). 2007. Husserl, Stumpf, Ehrenfels, Meinong, Twardowski, Marty. A l’école de Brentano. De Würzbourg à Vienne. Paris: Vrin. Frege, Gottlob. 1976. Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel. Herausgegeben, bearbeitet, eingeleitet und mit Anmerkungen versehen von G. Gabriel, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, C. Thiel, A. Veraart. Hamburg: Meiner. Fryba-Reber, Anne-Marguerite. 2007. ‘Postérité de Brentano et la linguistique Suisse. Anton Marty (1847-1914)’ in O. Pot (dir.), Origines du langage. Une encyclopédie poétique. Paris: Seuil: 491-522. Gilson, Lucie. 1976. ‘Franz Brentano on Science and Philosophy’ in Linda L. McAlister (ed.) The Philosophy of Brentano. London: Duckworth: 68-79. Kraus, Oskar. 1916. ‘Martys Leben und Werke. Eine Skizze’ in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. I.1. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 1-68. Kretzmann, Normann. 1967. ‘History of Semantics’ in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, London: Collier MacMillan, 358-406. Liedtke, Frank. 1990. ‘Meaning and Expression: Marty and Grice on Intentional Semantics’, in K. Mulligan, ed. (1990): 29-49. Marty, Anton. 1875. Über den Ursprung der Sprache. Würzburg: A. Stuber’s Buchhandlung. –– 1879. Die Frage nach der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes. Wien: Karl Gerold’s Sohn. –– 1908. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer. –– 1910. Zur Sprachphilosophie: die “logische”, “lokalistische” und andere Kasustheorien. Halle: Niemeyer. –– 1916a [1884-1892]. ‘Über Sprachreflex, Nativismus und absichtliche Sprachbildung’ [10 articles] in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. I.2. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 1-304. –– 1916b [1896]. ‘Was ist Philosophie?’ in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. I.1. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 6993. –– 1916c [1893]. ‘Über das Verhältnis von Grammatik und Logik’ in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. I.1. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 57-99.
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–– 1916d [1908?]. ‘Zwei akademische Reden von C. Stumpf’ in in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. I.1. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 157-167. –– 1916e. Raum und Zeit. Hg. v. J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer. –– 1918 [1884-1895]. ‘Über subjectlose Sätze und das Verhältnis der Grammatik zu Logik und Psychologie’ [7 articles] in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. II.1. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 3-101 and 116-307. –– 1920 [1909]. Besprechung von C. Stumpf: Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen, in J. Eisenmeier, A. Kastil, O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Anton Marty. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. II.2. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer: 113-119. –– 1940. Psyche und Sprachstruktur. Mit einer Einleitung und Anmerkungen herausgegeben von O. Funke. Bren: A. Franke. –– 1940. Psyche und Sprachstruktur. Nachgelassene Schriften I, hg. v. O. Funke. Bern: A. Franke. –– 1950. Über Wert und Methode einer allgemeinen beschreibenden Bedeutungslehre, hg. v. O. Funke [Nachgelassene Schriften III], Bern: Francke. –– 1950a. Satz und Wort. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzunge mit den üblichen grammatischen Lehren in ihren Begriffsbestimmungen. Nachgelassene Schriften II, hg. v. O. Funke. Bern: A. Franke. –– 1950b [1926]. Über Wert und Methode einer allgemeinen beschreibenden Bedeutungslehre. Nachgelassene Schriften III, hg. v. O. Funke. Bern: A. Franke. –– 2011 [1894-1895]. Deskriptive Psychologie, Hg. v. M. Antonelli & J. C. Marek. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann [Einleitung v. M. Antonelli]. Mauthner, Fritz. 1901. Zur Sprache und Psychologie. [Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Bd. 1]. Stuttgart: Cotta. Mulligan, Kevin. 1990. ‘Marty’s philosophical grammar’ in K. Mulligan (ed.), Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics. The Philosophy and Theory of Language of Anton Marty. Dordrech: Kluwer: 11-27. –– 1997. ‘The Essence of Language: Wittgenstein’s Builders and Bühler’s Bricks’. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 2: 193-216. Rollinger, Robin. 1999. Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano. Dordrecht: Kluwer. –– 2010. Philosophy of Language and other Matters in the Work of Anton Marty. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schuhmann, Karl. 1996. ‘Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)’ in Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi, Roberto Poli (eds.), The School of Franz Brentano. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 109-129. Smith, Barry. Austrian Philosophy. The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago: Open Court. Sprung, Helga. 2006. Carl Stumpf. Eine Biographie. Von der Philosophie zur experimentellen Psychologie. München: Profil Verlag. Stumpf, Carl. 1873. Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Leipzig: Hirzel. –– 1876. ‘Anton Marty, Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache. Würzburg 1875’ in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Neue Folge 68: 172-191.
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–– 1886-1887. Syllabus for Logic. Translated by R. Rollinger, in Id. (1999), p. 311337. –– 1906a. Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen. Berlin: Verlag der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. –– 1907a. Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie. Rede zum Antritt des Rektorates der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin gehalten der der Aula am 15. Oktober 1907. Berlin: Schade. –– 1907b. Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Verlag der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. –– 1908. Vom ethischen Skeptizismus. Rede zur Gedächtnisfeier des Stifters der Berliner Universität, König Friedrich Wilhelm III, in der Aula am 3. August 1908. Berlin: Schade. –– 1919. ‘Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano’ in O. Kraus (Hrsg.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre. München: Beck: 87-149. –– 1924. ‘Carl Stumpf’ in R. Schmidt, (Hrsg.) Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Bd. 5. Leipzig: Meiner: 1-57. –– 1997. Schriften zur Psychologie. Neu herausgegeben, eingeleitet und mit einer biographischen Einführung versehen von Helga Sprung unter Mitarbeit von Lothar Sprung. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. –– 2006. Renaissance de la philosophie. Quatre articles de Carl Stumpf. Introduction et traduction française par Denis Fisette. Paris: Vrin. –– 2008. Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik. Herausgegeben von W. Ewen. Würzburg: Könnigshausen & Neumann. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961 [1921]. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. The German text with a new translation by G. F. Pears and B. McGuiness, with an Introduction by B. Russell. London: Routledge & Kegan.
ON STUMPF AND SCHLICK FIORENZA TOCCAFONDI (UNIVERSITY OF PARMA)
Abstract. The extracts directly concerning psychological issues are considered by Schlick himself as “incidental remarks” within the general framework of the theory of knowledge developed by Schlick in Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre. Nevertheless, Schlick’s knowledge of psychological questions turns out to be far from superficial, and this is particularly true with regard to Stumpf. The paper intends to focus on those aspects pertaining to Stumpf’s perspective that Schlick both appreciated and criticized. In particular, the paper concentrates on the concepts of psychic function, sensation (Schlick accuses Stumpf of “psychological atomism”), and contents of consciousness, showing that Schlick’s Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre can be regarded as an important moment in the history of Stumpf’s reception.
1. According to Schlick, as it is well known, the level of intuition (Anschauung), contents of consciousness, and of acquaintance (kennen) are wholly irrelevant to the dimension of knowledge (erkennen) (Schlick 1918/1925, 83). If the hallmark of the contents of consciousness is to become directly aware and to be indubitable (one cannot doubt, for example, about a sensation that he has), nevertheless they have an individual, private, variable nature: therefore, they are not endowed with a public, intersubjective validity. Knowledge (erkennen), instead, makes use of concepts and consists in designating objects in a univocal, unambiguous way. It aims at correlating one sign with one object and one sign with one fact through judgements, with a relationship between objects: knowledge becomes therefore a rigorous operation of denomination and comparison. Through concepts we get “absolute constancy and determinateness” (Schlick 1918/1925, 20), which are never encountered in the sphere of kennen and of erleben. Schlick emphasizes also that it is undoubtedly true that the concept must make use of “some mental reality” throughout the actual cognitive process: images, words, names, written signs. Still, – as shown
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also by Husserl in his Logische Untersuchungen, which Schlick refers to (Schlick 1918/1925, 21, 22 passim) – the latter does not form the meaning of the concept, being solely useful to represent it. A suitable theory of the knowledge, concludes Schlick, is thus completely disengaged from the psychological realm, hence from the representational level, from the erleben. Fully in line with this framework, in his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre Schlick considers his reflections on the psychological issues as “merely incidental remarks” (Schlick 1918/1925, 23). However, exactly in Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre this kind of remarks and comments are very frequent and far from being marginal, showing, on the contrary, the deep knowledge and the considerable command by Schlick of both the psychological topics in general and, so to speak, the state-of-the-art of the psychology of that time. And then again, before being summoned to Vienna, his interests towards the psychology had been of particular relevance both during the time spent in Zürich (1908-1910) and the one spent in Rostock (1911-1921). In Zürich Schlick wrote Das Grundproblem der Ästhetik in entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung (published in “Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie” in 1909), where he first confronted the Graz School, and Stephan Witasek, in particular. During the years he taught in Rostock, where Emil Utitz had been entrusted with the courses of psychology, he dedicated only one summer semester to psychology in 1917 (“Psychologie des Fühlens und Wollens”), but he wrote several reviews of texts dealing with psychology. Exactly the abovementioned colleague Emil Utitz (who had taken Ch. von Ehrenfels’s classes in Praga, later becoming a well-known and committed member of the Brentanian circle of Anton Marty) is likely – but only likely – to have provided Schlick with a further occasion for his confrontation with psychology in general, and the issue of the Gestalt perceptions in particular. 1 Schlick started to get interested in the Berlin Gestalt School around 1920 (its effects, as we will see in a short time, are evident in the second edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre). Such interest was undoubtedly favoured by the arrival in Rostock of David Katz as tenured professor in 1919; he acted as go-between between Schlick and the Berlin School. Schlick’s attention towards Gestaltpsychologie 1
For the reconstruction of the years spent by Schlick in Zürich and Rostock, refer to Kluck 2008, 64-67 and 73-77.
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had become prominent since 1921, as it is witnessed by the correspondence with Wolfgang Köhler in the years 1921-1925. Another important figure in strengthening this relationship is undoubtedly Albert Einstein, tied, as it is well-known, to Max Wertheimer by a close relationship. In his letter to Schlick of 1922, Einstein talks very highly of Wertheimer, who aspired to be summoned to Göttingen or to Kiel (where Schlick had taught in 1921 after the years spent in Rostock and before his summoning to Vienna). The project shared by Schlick, Hans Reichenbach (the leading exponent of the “Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie”, which even Köhler belonged to) and the Gestaltpsychologie of giving rise to a shared journal is to be framed in those years. Schlick actively committed himself to this project and wrote to Bertrand Russell (who should have been one of the journal collaborators together with Einstein) in regard to this matter, talking highly of Köhler and his works. (Kluck 2008, 106-109) But let’s now talk about that which interests us the most, that is the comparison between Schlick and Stumpf, which is pretty interesting from several points of view. First of all, as we will see, as for the notion of the intuitive data that Schlick adjusted. A notion that fully absorbs some ideas expressed by Stumpf on the sensible synthesis and that, at the same time, also shows how much they weighed against Kant’s theory of knowledge at that time. Secondly, it is a very interesting comparison because it reveals the divergences – duly and properly detected by the Author of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre – between the perspective of Stumpf and the one of Köhler, Koffka and Wertheimer. As already mentioned, the profound sharing of the Berlin Gestaltism emerges in an evident way in the second edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1925). It occurs in an explicit form (for instance, as happens in the case of the stimulus notion) as well as when some ideas of the Gestalt psychology – which was very topical back then – echo in Schlick’s text without being directly recalled. As rightly observed by Steffen Kluck, the appreciation of the Berlin School by Schlick was undoubtedly favoured by its interest in the physiological correlates of the experience and its being oriented towards the natural sciences. (Kluck 2008, 94) A paragraph introduced in the second edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre proves this stance. There, Schlick took note of the isomorphistic solution elaborated by Köhler in his Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand (1920) with great satisfaction, deeming it to be an
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example in favour of the “epistemological parallelism” he had envisaged. (Schlick 1918/1925, 319-320 passim, 301) Köhler’s isomorphistic theory was aimed at showing that there are physical and physiological processes that cannot be reduced to simple cause-effect relationships, and that can exhibit real “Gestalt qualities”. To show this he resorted to the properties exhibited by the inorganic systems in stationary equilibrium (as, for instance, in the electrostatic field, the structure taken on by an electric charge transmitted to a homogeneous conductor). In this context, the brain physical processes could therefore be considered as the physiological correlates of the Gestalt phenomenal experiences: contrary to what was assumed by Graz School, it would then no longer be necessary to resort to hypothetical interventions of non-sensory mental factors to explain these latter. Schlick welcomed and embraced Köhler’s theory at the same time as he criticised the reasons of psychophysic interactionism in a systematic and clipped way (which, instead, Stumpf was favourable to, as Schlick does not fail to point out. (Schlick 1918/1925, 302) But besides appreciating Köhler’s perspective as far as the psychophysic issue is concerned, Schlick also radically adopted the non-atomistic view of the sensational world typical of the Gestaltpsychologie. The influence exerted by Gestalt conceptions on this topic is fully evident in the second edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, where it coexists (and clashes) with unaltered passages of the first edition. Those passages had been written over the years spent in Rostock, and had been characterised by psychological elementism, by associationist psychology, by the principle of the “schöpferiscen Verbinudungen” of Wundt, by the Produktionstheorie of Graz School and, therefore, by an atomistic view of the sensible world. (Kluck 2008, 97-99) The reception of the Gestaltpsychologie proved to be crucial exactly on those topics as well as for Schlick’s criticism to some aspects of Stumpf’s perspective and for the ambivalent appearance he took on in the second edition of the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre. On the one hand, in fact, Stumpf appears as a forerunner and promoter of an innovative psychological layout, and, on the other hand, as an advocate of ideas and principles restraining this same perspective. The interest in comparing Schlick with Stumpf also stems from the same issues which come into play in such comparison; issues still open to be debated today and which a lot of questions still linger on, waiting to be answered: the topic of inattentional blindness,
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the distinction between the sensational level and its being noticed, the issues of the Cartesian notion of consciousness. But let’s start from the aspects Schlick welcomed of Stumpf’s perspective to later pass on to the ones he criticised. 2. First of all, Schlick confronts Stumpf in a paragraph which has a primarily significant objective in the general picture of the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre: to define the nature of concepts and clearly distinguish them from the representations. As it has been already said, Schlick is interested in the Erkennen level, therefore the psychological issues are completely insignificant from a gnoseological, epistemic point of view. However, Schlick indulges in psychological digressions on the fundamental topic of the “conceptual function”. Just in regard to this topic, he acknowledges the higher role played by Stumpf than anyone else in having focussed the attention of the psychological investigation on the psychic acts and functions (even the conceptual function is an expression of those functions). “The insight that these functions are of basic significance in understanding mental life is an important achievement of modern research”: Schlick precisely credits Carl Stumpf – rather than Husserl and Külpe’s School – with the success of this conquer. Stumpf – Schlick notices, obviously referring to Erscheinungen und psychisce Funktionen – “sees as the prime task of psychology the study of precisely these functions”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 23) But there is also another aspect – which is far more important – in relation to which Schlick showed to bear Stumpf’s perspective well in mind. In the paragraph 40 of the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, Schlick criticises the Kantian concept of the intuitive data (the “manifold of intuition”), and the influence of Stumpf’s reception is precisely very evident on this fundamental topic. As it is well known, according to Kant the material given in the intuition is free of form and any type of relation; they are not already encountered in the material intuitively given, rather it is established by the subject, the intellect and its forms a priori. To Schlick, on the contrary, intuitive data are not at all amorphous, inert, non-structured, relation-free contents of consciousness: this is that which Schlick wonders about in these pages “whether it is true that the relations on which knowledge rests are already found in the material given intuitively or whether they are first called into being by judgements”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 367) Schlick deals with this
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topic by introducing a distinction between two kinds of relation, but in both cases it is evident how much Schlick bore Stumpf’s indications in mind. The relations of the first kind substantially correspond to that which Stumpf had already envisaged in his Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (1873) with regard to the independent and non-independent contents distinguishing themselves in the representational complexes. For instance, the relation between extension and colour is a relation between parts absolutely non-independent of each other: the variation of the represented colour quantity entails, in fact, a variation of the extension of that which we represent to us. In the same way, if the extension of a represented object is changed, even the quantity of colour we represent to ourselves must necessarily vary. From Stumpf’s point of view, it is evident that in these cases we are not in presence of parts held together by habits or an associative nexus: on the contrary, there is a mutual, original dependence between them. (See Stumpf 1873) Schlick’s considerations are completely akin in this respect. If, while observing my right hand, I see that, writing, the thumb is to the left of the index, not only the spatial relation of the two fingers, but also the colour of the hand skin “is given and contained” in this perception. And this is because – as Schlick points out, directly identifying the Gestalt nexus of this relation, – “color and intuitive spatiality are both qualitative data and stand on one and the same level with respect to their being given by the senses. The color elements, for example, have inseparably connected with them not only intensity but also spatial relationship. The latter are perceived just like the elements; an experience of a “Gestalt-quality” is generated, and on that basis we can simply correlate concepts with the relationship” (Schlick 1918/1925, 367). The same considerations are to be made for temporal relationships. Just think of the sounds and the experiences of the duration, simultaneity and succession: “there is an immediate difference for experience between four-quarter time and six-eighth time, a difference that is likewise to be conceived of as a difference in Gestalt-quality”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 368) Unlikely the ones just described, the second type of relationships does not seem instead to be fulfilled, immediately perceived by intuition, but rather be the fruits of a judgement, of the intervention of a judging consciousness. For instance, the difference between two sensations or the similarity between two images is not “really at hand” in the same way as the colours or the spatial arrangement of that which
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appears in those images are at hand: “when I say that the carpet pattern in my room and the rug pattern in the room of a friend are similar or that a colour and a sound are different, I express relations. But it seems as though these relations actually have existence only through and in the judgement”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 368-369 passim) However, Schlick thinks that a more attentive analysis of this second kind of relations would disclose something different. The relations of the second type do not undoubtedly emerge as “something just as objectively present” compared to the ones of the first kind: the difference between a melody I listen to now from another one perceived a few years earlier is not “something that now exists objectively” as the notes of the melody I am currently listening to are. Nevertheless, it is as true that the structural relation of a sense experience, that is the experience through which the similarity or difference between any two consciousness data is ascertained “is really present in consciousness”, and, according to Schlick, this is “a fact; it is encountered just as any other fact”. This fact can be designated through a judgement, but such judgement follows the fact, it is not the assumption in order to grasp that relation. (Schlick 1918/1925, 372 373 passim) In the cases described, Schlick states: the judgement follows afterwards; and there can be no question of its having to precede that experience temporally or logically, or of its containing that experience. (Schlick 1918/1925, 373)
The relation experiences are then “simply encountered”, they “do not owe their existence to any “thinking”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 373) According to Schlick, the intuitive data and their corresponding experiences have the intrinsic characteristic of already containing some relations. In his Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen Stumpf, in turn, had talked of relationships in terms of given (“gegeben”), ascertained (“konstatiert”) contents, as something immanent (“immanent”) to the sensible material. (Stumpf 1907, 4, 22, 23) This being entirely in step with the direction indicated by Stumpf in this context is explicitly declared by Schlick by quoting a passage of Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen whose substance, despite the terminological differences, is completely the same as Schlick’s passage mentioned above: “relationships between appearances are given us in and with any two appearances; they are not inserted by us, but are perceived in and with the appearances. Relationships belong to the material of the
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intellectual functions; they themselves are neither functions nor the products of functions”. (Stumpf 1907, 4, cf. Schlick 1918/1925, 373) It is very interesting to notice that in the paragraph 40 of the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre we had briefly recalled that a very important term occurs frequently, which the Author almost insists upon: vorgefunden (encountered), which is used to indicate nexuses and intrinsic relationships to the intuitive data coming before the judgement, thinking, intellectual functions. To resume a phrase coined in the very famous lectures given by Husserl in the winter semester 1920/1921, we might consider this kind of contents as a form of passive synthesis. (see Husserl 1966) Husserl’s terminological choice was undoubtedly an apt one, because it effectively expresses the idea of the character of our sensible syntheses which are not always creative, thus immediately enhancing the contrast with the Kantian synthesis, characterised, instead, by a constitutive creativity. But we have to bear in mind that – besides Husserl – the passivity of sensible syntheses is actually a recurring theme in the German philosophical and psychological culture of the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. The notion of this passivity preferentially coalesces in the term vorgefunden and, as we are going to see now, in those terms very akin. The concept of vorgefunden clearly appears with the function we have already mentioned first in the Logik (1880) by Rudolph Hermann Lotze – together with Franz Brentano, the great master of Stumpf – and he is recalled by his former student exactly on this topic even in his Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen. (Stumpf 1907, 22) To this regard, Lotze talks of “relations between the impressions we are subjected to (leiden)” and that are at the root of our thinking activity (“Tätigkeit des Denkens”) (Lotze 1874/1880). 2 Wilhelm Dilthey in turn put the perception and themes of vor-finden in relation in the socalled Breslauer Ausarbeitung (Dilthey 1982, 80) more or less in the same years. Later, at the beginning of the XX century, not only a Kantian notoriously sui generis as Emil Lask (Lask 1912/1923, 414), but also an Author more genuinely close to Kant’s perspective like Fritz Münch, did likewise use the term vorgefunden (encountered) to indicate that which appears in the intuitive data, without being introduced by the subject (See Schlick 1918/1925, 382 and Münch 1913): by the way, just such a fact is emphasized by Schlick – and not by 2
About which, see Smith1989. Refer to Centi 2011 on Lotze and Stumpf.
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chance – in the pages we had just taken into account. Besides, it is observed that the German language is notoriously rich and variegated, but the meaning of the verbs also chosen by other Authors to express the passive aspects of subjectivity is univocal: Martin Heidegger would use the term begegnet (Heidegger 1927/1976, 111, 117) in the context of his criticism to Kant’s transcendentalism, whilst both angetroffen and vorgefunden are found in Wolfgang Metzger (Metzger 1941, 61-76 passim, 12). Going back to Stumpf, that which should be highlighted here is that he surely played a very important role in this process, that is in disclosing the contents intrinsic determinations of the givenness level, of the Gegebenheit: of that which we could define the theme of the Vorgefundenheit and its anti-Kantian implications. In addition to Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic and Third Logical Investigation, a witness of the very prominent role played in this regard by Stumpf’s views is clearly expressed by Max Scheler in his Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis (1912/1950). (Scheler 1912, 25) But just Schlick himself gave authoritative evidence of the importance held by Stumpf on such a topics: as we have already pointed out, when he talks of vor-gefunden, he directly refers to that which Stumpf had stated on the “given” (gegeben), merely “ascertained” (konstatiert) nature of certain characteristics relating to content of the sensible material. 3. We have just analysed that which Schlick appreciated of Stumpf, that is a concept of the sensory contents as containing intrinsic determinations and relationships. This aspect will be developed by the Gestalt students of Stumpf well beyond the boundaries within which Stumpf had conceived it. In the second edition of his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, Schlick proved to be well informed of Gestaltists’ theses, and he actually joined them up to he considered the salient aspects of Stumpf’s psychology as expression of regressive views, still dwelling upon legacies of atomistic-oriented psychology. Schlick faces once more Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen. The pages discussed by Schlick concern the well-known topic of the perception of a sound now as an undivided unit (that is as chord), and then as formed by three elements (e.g. C, E, G). According to Stumpf’s views, the passage from the chord unitary perception to the perception of the single notes forming it occurs without a variation of the corresponding sensible phenomena: in his opinion, this variation
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solely regards the dimension of our mental functions. (Stumpf 1907, 17) To back up this thesis, Stumpf produces the following examples, not mentioned by Schlick: the first unitary impression of a piece of food, that is later divided into a sweet and an acid component; a skin sensation that is later divided into a pressure sensation, a cold sensation and a bothersome one. According to Stumpf, the objective stimuli and the consequent physiological processes remain unchanged in those cases. He states that it is our attention level that changes, the “function of noticing”. It is thanks to the “function of noticing” we can identify the components of a sensible contents that completely eluded us at first. (Stumpf 1907, 17) “Similarly – Stumpf states in a passage that profoundly recalls today’s discussions on the inattentional blindness – when you leave a theatre lost in thought, looking at streetlight lamps of a lit street or listening to the strokes of a tower clock, and your attention is directed to the row of lights or the following strokes, you shall say that there were some lights just earlier, and sound impressions of the same kind at the same spatial or temporal distance […]”. (Stumpf 1907, 18) Stumpf, consequently, rejects the theories of William James, Hans Cornelius and Felix Krueger. According to them, in fact, in the passage from a unitary impression to the distinction of its components, there would be an “effective transformation” of the intuitive contents introduced by the distinction act, “a sort of transubstantiation of the sensible contents”, Stumpf polemically remarks. (Stumpf 1907, 17, note) Instead, he shares Alexius Meinong’s and Anton Marty’s views. The main argument brought forth by Stumpf against the theory of sensible contents transformation is that should we accept such a theory, we would be compelled to admit a sort of multiplication of sensible entities in every sensory field where blendings arise (of which a chord is just an example). For instance, a C–E–G chord should correspond to a dimension of the sounds we cannot place in the musical scale, until it is not separated from the listener in its components, since it coincides with neither C, nor E, nor G. All in all, we would obtain “some new dimensions of the sounds realm”, that would add to the ones considered in the usual classification of sounds, allowing us to thoroughly exhaust the phenomenal description of our experiences in all the other cases. (Stumpf 1907, 19) In conclusion, Stumpf states, when psychologists appeal to the “function of noticing” to explain the passage from a unitary perception to the following identification of its compo-
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nents, they do something which is entirely common in other fields of science: chemists, for instance, do not do anything different when they assume those elements (hydrogen and carbon) to pre-exist in a substance (e.g. in carbonic acid), which they actually obtain only after having broken it down. Unlike Stumpf, Schlick claims that the change in experiences might be led back to an actual variation of sensations. Schlick first dwells upon the mentioned comparison of the job done by psychologists and the one done by chemists, deeming it to be entirely improper. Carbonic acid is not a datum of consciousness, rather a concept, a hypothetical chemical formula (H2CO3) designating something that is supposed to exist beyond the sensory world, transcending that which is immediately given to us. Things are different, though, in the case of contents of consciousness. Neither hypotheses nor assumptions are made on the components or properties of that which is given to us (e.g. a chord we listen to). In the case of the given, components, properties and relationships are what they are, they are “something entirely removed in its determinations from our will or needs”. In those terms, Schlick states that “the given is simply the actual, and is prior to all our assumptions […] It makes no sense to advance assumptions about the composition of something with which we are acquainted; there is no place for them”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 155) He believes that every consideration regarding the passage from the listening to a chord to its division into its own components should precisely start from this assumption. In the first place, Stumpf did not fully understand that contents of consciousness that are in any case “a brute fact, which cannot be […] declared to be an illusion” (Schlick 1918/1925, 156) correspond to both the perception of the chord and of its components. In other words, the two perceptions differ, but in both cases we are confronted with eminently sensory experiences, and not with hypotheses or assumptions. In order to exactly answer for the sensory nature of the two experiences, Schlick deemed it to be unsatisfactory to appeal to the mere intervention of mental acts – as Stumpf had done, instead. He deemed it necessary, instead, to assume that the sensations are actually very different indeed in the two cases. Against Stumpf’s perspective, Schlick points out that nothing matters if the sound meant as physical process is the same in both cases, because the same identical physical stimulus may give rise to completely different sensations according to the conditions in which the recipient finds himself/herself.
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If the recipient is watchful with respect to the environment surrounding him/her and its stimuli, sensations and the respective physiological correlates will turn out to be quite different than they would prove to be, should the mental attitude of the subject be of any other kind. (Schlick 1918/1925, 180) To support this position, Schlick directly refers to Kurt Koffka (Schlick 1918/1925, 156 notes), and the kinship between that which has been asserted by the former and the concept of stimulus elaborated by the latter since the first half of the ’10s is actually well evident. According to Koffka, stimulus means the ensemble of relationships that are established, under different circumstances, between the organism and the outside world and, given such circumstances, from the physiological processes determined by such relations. “In characterizing a real object as a stimulus – we read in one of several Koffka’s passages we could quite on this matter – we do not refer to any absolute property of that object, in and by itself, but only to the object’s relation to a living organism. The question whether or not there can be stimuli for certain processes in the organism cannot be decided therefore solely by a physical examination of the objects”. (Koffka 1915, 375) But Schlick seems to echo both Köhler and Koffka even when he accused Stumpf of being victim of modes of thought already outdated at that time in the psychological research, still oriented to the psychological atomism, to the abused vision of the sensory world as a mosaic of stimuli. In fact, Schlick wonders what the idea of finding again, still unchanged, the same elements in different mental experiences is, if not “a remnant of atomistic modes of thought in psychology, which even those who expressly condemn them fall back into al times”? (Schlick 1918/1925, 156) From this point of view, Stumpf’s accusation is outspoken and without reserve: […] the sound heard as a unit is something other than the chord as analysed. The moment we assert that the former is composed of the same sensations as the latter, we have slipped back into psychological atomism, which actually does commit an “impermissible reification” by looking upon different structures of consciousness as if they were mosaics put together from unchanged elements. (Schlick 1918/1925, 156)
Similar considerations had been developed by both Köhler, just against Stumpf, in his essay Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und
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Urteilstaüschungen, published in the “Zeitschrift für Psychologie” in 1913, and Koffka in the famous debate he had engaged in with Vittorio Benussi in 1914–1915. Köhler’s essay, as it is well known, targets the idea of unnoticed sensations (unbemerkte Emfindungen) and of errors of judgement (Urteilstäuschungen) as “ancillary” hypotheses of one of the most essential theses of the sensory psychology: the “constancy hypothesis” (Konstanzannahme). In extreme synthesis, one used to think that a certain perceptive experience should always correspond to a given physical stimulus. The experiences infringe this thesis (e.g. the wide range of optical illusions or the triad of sounds perceived now as a chord, then as succession of well distinct notes, for instance C–E–G) were led back to two factors of the errors of judgement and unnoticed sensations. This notion seemed to be proven by the fact that certain mistakes or perceptions were initially unitary, then their single components were acknowledged and could be amended thanks to the attention or intervention, as claimed by Stumpf, of the “function of noticing”. Köhler, on the contrary, stated it was the time to conceive stimulus as something essentially different and, in particular, to quit the idea of a dot-like correspondence – one-to-one between local stimuli and sensations – assuming viceversa the influence exerted on the perceptive given by the relational properties of the parts forming the stimulus as well as of the intervention of “central nature” factors, not only the peripheral ones. (See Köhler 1913) As far as Koffka’s dispute with one of the leading representative of the Graz school, Vittorio Benussi, it must be shortly remembered that the latter had made a distinction between two types of representations: the “sensory” ones and the “non-sensory” ones. In his opinion, the sensory representations are the ones that remain constant if the sensory stimuli originating them remain constant, solely depending on the physiological processes which occur in peripheral sensory organs: if stimulation conditions remain unchanged, for instance, a red surface will continue appearing red, and not otherwise. Instead, in the case of “non-sensory representations” – among which Benussi also includes Gestalt perceptions and different kinds of perceptual illusion – we are facing stimuli and constant stimulating conditions that may generate entirely different perceptive experiences. For instance, a series of white and black vertical stripes may appear both as a white surface cut across by black streaks and a black surface cut across by white
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streaks. This is that which the renewed principle of Gestalt plurivocity (Gestaltmehrdeutgkeit) theorised by Benussi consists of: given the same stimulating conditions of peripheral organs, entirely different Gestalt impressions may occur. According to this principle, one cannot consequently talk of specific stimuli in the case of such perceptions: Gestalten are actually reizlos (free of stimuli), they are not determined by sensory factors ascribable to physiological processes, but to psychological factors such as, for instance, the tendency to grasp the object as a whole or attitudes the subject takes on each time they face the stimulus, being more or less aware. Koffka considers the concept of non-sensory representations as expression of the above-mentioned Konstanzannahme, the hypothesis of the univocal correspondence between stimuli and perceptual data. In Benussi’s theory, in fact, the intervention of the non-sensory factors (responsible for the so-called Gestalt plurivocity) occurs on constant defined sensory data; but these data – as already noticed by Köhler against Stumpf – may be defined in such a way by only assuming the Konstanzannahme. But this is an assumption to be entirely proved, since – as we have already said – that which is to be meant by stimulus must be established not as much considering the physical stimulus per se, rather considering that which it becomes in its entering in a relationship with the organism, its status and its structures. The most peculiar hypothesis of the associationist psychology or the so-called psychological atomism – the Konstanzannahme – and the linked thesis of the unnoticed sensations are then preserved in Benussi’s theory as a simple prejudice, without any kind of demonstration. (Koffka 1915, 25 ff., 39) 4. Entirely in step with this way of dealing with the matter, Schlick asserts that, in talking of elements that remain unchanged in different experiences, Stumpf makes an “impermissible reification” of sensible content, a “reification” that does not acknowledge that which consciousness actually is, that is to say that “the stream of consciousness is a true Heraclitean flux”, that “every state of consciousness is a unity and cannot really be analysed like, say, a chemical compound whose individual components exist also independently of each others”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 156-157) At this regard it is interesting to highlight that exactly the adhesion to a Jamesonian model of conscious-
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ness 3 and the conviction about the impossibility “to distinguish between a content of consciousness and its being perceived” (Schlick 1918/1925, 154) are at the root of a whole series of criticisms that Schlick addresses to those points and assumptions of Stumpf’s perspective in which he showed to remain adherent to the Brentanian perspective. Let’s go back, once again, to the possibility of perceiving the sound now as a chord, then as an ensemble of more elements. Attributing the difference between the two experiences to the intervention of the act or mental function of noticing means to introduce a distinction between sensations (or contents of consciousness) and their being noticed; between, on the one hand, the level of consciousness and its contents, and, on the other hand, the one of a consciousness looking at the other one. But such a distinction – which, as we are going to see, is in turn strictly linked to the notions of inner perception and evidence – is entirely unacceptable to Schlick. At a general level, the considerations through which Schlick criticises Stumpf’s positions (as well as Külpe’s) remind arguments that had a widespread success in the philosophy of mind of the XX century, chiefly thanks to Gilbert Ryle and, later, to Daniel C. Dennett4. According to Schlick, the mentioned distinction between the contents of consciousness and their being noticed is the expression of a vision of the mind that has deep and at the same time unique roots: the Cartesian model of self and consciousness, the Cartesian distinction between esse and cogitare, between the self as existing substance and its thought or cognitive activity. According to this model, consciousness emerges as a sort of “stage” (Schaubühne) on which several mental elements appear – “after having waited somewhere in the wings” – to be linked or separated upon self’s calling (kantian “spontaneity” of the intellect – according to Schlick – just joined this current of thought). (Schlick 1918/1925, 161 passim) But the idea of an inner eye introduced by analogy with the outer eye – that is with the objectualobservative model typical of the perceptual reality, – is entirely meta3
Consciousness – Schlick states, resuming James’s successful expression, must be considered as “simply an existing process”, as “stream of consciousness”, “ceaseless change of qualities”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 161 passim) 4 I refer to the image of the little man in the brain, of the ghost in the machine targeted by Gilbert Ryle (Ryle 1949) and, above all, to the criticism of the Cartesian theatre idea of consciousness – and of that sort of interior reporter and lonely spectator of that which happens there – developed by Daniel C. Dennett. (Dennett 1969; 1978; 1991)
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physical according to Schlick, and it also represents a ill-omened assumption that has heavily influenced the development and language of psychology. The distinction between sensations and their being noticed is an emblematic example of such an assumption –an assumption that fatally leads Stumpf’s theory to “metaphysical” outcomes. Such a distinction, in fact, would seem to transform sensations to something akin to a thing-in-itself, something that transcends consciousness but which can act on the latter. Schlick states: “a doctrine with such consequences must naturally be characterized as metaphysical. Anyone who adopts it speaks of sensations in the same sense in which one might speak of a thing-in-itself, which lies at the base of, say, the perception of a table”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 158) The criticism to the notions of evidence and internal perception is strictly linked to this. Of course, in regard to these topics, Schlick widely focusses his attention (and his criticisms) to Franz Brentano, “the most vigorous champion of self-evidence and internal perception” (Schlick 1918/1925, 152), as well as to the notions of “adequate” perception and “inadequate” perception introduced by Husserl, as well as to the developments given to the matter by Hugo Bergmann (ibid.). Nevertheless, chiefly in discussing the evidence notion, Schlick does not fail to criticise the psychology of Stumpf and, at least in these pages of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, the modes through which the latter intended to investigate the acts and mental functions. In the opening of the paragraph 20, dedicated to the criticism of the “socalled internal perception”, exactly a passage (and not by chance) of Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen is targeted by Schlick and quoted as an example of all that which is wrong, in his opinion, in the assumption of the concepts of “evidence” and “internal perception”. The first thing to be noticed is, according to Schlick, that the abovementioned idea of consciousness as a sort of theatre underlies the use of expressions such as self-evidence (Evidenz) or “being evident” (einleuchten). In other words, consciousness is thought “as if consciousness stood there face to face with and inspecting truths and the facts of its own consciousness”, to that which occurs in it. Exactly such an assumption brings along the need of finding a criterion capable of determining the correctness of that inspecting: such criterion is identified in the evidence. The same also applies to the notion of “internal perception”. In fact, the implicit assumption that consciousness stands in front of certain contents of consciousness and looking at
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them means to consider the latter not as something organic to consciousness, rather as something outside it, as “severed from the subject or the ‘I’”. For this reason an act that is imagined similar to the one of the perception tout court is made come into play, by which consciousness comes into contact with external things. In other words, it is assumed that the “I” can notice its own internal statuses as well as it is able to notice the things of the world existing outside us by means of ordinary perception. Nevertheless, in the case of the contents of consciousness we are not dealing with external things, but stages of the “I”: just in order to coming out of the impasse generated by considering contents as something facing the “I”, this type of approach thinks “to tie them intimately to it” through the concept of “internal” perception. Moreover, since the analogy between consciousness and perception tout court drags the sensory organs in, the comparison was completed by talking of “internal sense” for the internal perception, a concept that – Schlick cares to emphasize – as it is well known “played a not inessential role in Kantian philosophy”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 151152) The notion of internal perception is therefore to Schlick nothing else than a make-believe, or better, the direct consequence of an entirely wrong idea of consciousness, which is unduly assimilated to a sort of interior eyes. 5 According to Schlick, on the contrary, among mental functions there is no trace of something “as internal perception”, which specifically and constantly “consists in noticing the contents of consciousness”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 158) More simply, says Schlick, “noticing is identical with awareness” (“Bemerktsein ist identisch mit Bewusstsein”) (Schlick 1918/1925, 156): therefore, the merits of Wundt’s battle against “the false distinction between consciousness and the process that are supposed to constitute its contents” (Schlick 1918/1925, 161) seem “invaluable” to him, contrary to that which also Stumpf had stated. 5
“The stream of consciousness is simply an existing process; the “I” is the unified interconnection of this process, not a person who inspects and guides it”. (Schlick 1918/1925, 162)
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References Centi, B. (2011): ‘Stumpf and Lotze on Space, Reality, Relation’, in S. Bonacchi/ G.H. Boudewijnse, (eds): Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation, Wien: Krammer, 69-81. Dennett, D. (1969): Content and Consciousness, London; Routledge & Kegan Paul. –– (1978): Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Cambridge: Bradford Books/MIT Press –– (1991): Consciousness explained, Boston: Little Brown and Company. Dilthey, W. (1982) ‘Grundlegung der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum zweiten Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1870-1895)’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. XIX, H. Johach & F. Rodi (eds.), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982. Heidegger, M. (1927/1976): ‘Sein und Zeit’ (1927), in M. Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 2, F. W. von Herrmann (ed.), Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1976. Husserl, E. (1891/1970): ‘Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen’ (1891), in Husserliana, vol. XII, L. Eley (ed.), The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. –– (1901/1984): ‘Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis’ (1901), in Husserliana, vol. IX, The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. –– (1966): Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918-1926, in Husserliana, vol. XI, M. Fleischer (ed.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Köhler, W. (1913): ‘Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstaüschungen’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 66, 51–80, Eng. trans. ‘On Unnoticed Sensations and Errors of Judgment’, in M. Henle (ed.): The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler, New York: Liveright, 1971, 13-39. –– (1920): Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand. Eine naturphilosophische Untersuchung, Braunschweig: Vieweg. Koffka, K. (1915), ‘Zur Grundlegung der Wahrnehmungspsychologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit V. Benussi’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 73, 11–90, 1915, Eng. trans. ‘Reply to V. Benussi’, in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, W. D. Ellis (ed.), with an Introduction by K. Koffka, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938, 19503, 371-378. Kluck, S. (2008): Gestaltpsychologie und Wiener Kreis. Stationen einer bedeutsamen Beziehung, Freiberg/München: Alber, 2008. Lask, E. (1912/1923): Die Lehre vom Urteil, Tübingen: Mohr, 1912, in E. Lask: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, E. Herrigel (ed.), Tübingen, Mohr, 1923, pp. 283463. Lotze, H. R. (1874/1880): Logik. Drei Bücher vom Denken, vom Untersuchen und vom Erkennen, 2nd edition: Leipzig: Hirzel, 1880 (first edition 1874), vol 1. Metzger, W. (1941): Psychologie. Die Entwicklung ihrer Grundannahmen seit der Einführung des Experiments, Dresden und Leipzig: Steinkopf. Münch, F. (1913): ‘Erlebnis und Geltung. Eine systematische Untersuchung zur Transzendentalphilosophie als Weltanschauung’, in Kant studien, 1913, Ergänzungsheft Nr. 30. Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind, New York: Barnes and Noble.
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Smith, B. (1989): Logic and the Sachverhalt, The Monist, 72 (1), pp. 52-69. Scheler, M. (1912/1950): ‘Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis’ (1912), in M. Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze, Bern/München: FranckeVerlag, 1950, Eng. trans. ‘The Idols of Self-Knowledge’, in Selected Philosophical Essays, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 3-97. Schlick, M. (1918/1925): Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag, 1918, 19252, eng. trans. General theory of knowledge, with introduction by A.E. Blumberg and H. Feigl, Wien//New York: Springer, 1974. Stumpf, C. (1873): Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel –– (1883-1890): Tonpsychologie, 2 vols., vol. I. (1883), Leipzig: Hirzel; vol. II (1890), Leipzig: Hirzel. –– (1907): Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen. Abhandlungen der Königlich Preußissischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Abhandlungen IV, 1-40.
LOVE, EMOTIONS AND PASSION IN MUSILʼS NOVELLAS “UNIONS” IN THE LIGHT OF STUMPFʼS THEORY OF FEELINGS SILVIA BONACCHI (UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW)
Abstract. The Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) studied philosophy and psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin (1903-1908) and was a student of Carl Stumpf. With him also studied future gestalt-psychologists. The intellectual impulses he received at this time had a determining influence on his thinking and on his way of understanding knowledge and literature. The present paper attempts a reconstruction of how Musil tried to transpose psychological theories on the Ego and on human feelings, which Stumpf discussed with his students, into a narrative structure. This will be achieved through an analysis of Musil’s novellas “The Temptation of Quiet Veronika” (Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika) and “The Perfecting of Love” (Die Vollendung der Liebe), which were published in 1911 in the collection “Unions” (Vereinigungen). The aim is to show how Musilʼs conception of literature as a particular dimension of “non-ratioïd” knowledge was developed during his studies in Berlin and is closely connected with the theories Stumpf presented to his students, above all, with his theory of emotions.
1 Introducing the problem The importance of Carl Stumpf to the intellectual and scientific formation of a whole generation of philosophers and psychologists of different orientations is well known and has been described in several studies.1 Less well known is the fact that Carl Stumpf significantly influenced one of the most important European writers of the 20th century: the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880-1942), known to the wider 1
A series of relevant studies are contained in Bonacchi/Boudewijnse 2011 (among them: Fisette 2011a, Fisette 2011b, Martinelli 2011, Toccafondi 2011). For collected papers on Stumpf´s work see Baumgartner 2002, Kaiser-El-Safti/Ballod 2003, Besoli/Martinelli 2001. For an explanation of the areas of influence of Stumpf, see Sprung 2006: 142-169.
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public as the author of the novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man without Qualities”) (I, 1930-II, 1932), a work which is characterised by an impressive intellectual density. Moreover, not everyone knows that Robert Musil studied philosophy and psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin (1903-1908) at the same time as other future gestalt-psychologists, art philosophers and phenomenologists.2 Musil participated actively in the seminars and lessons of philosophy and psychology which Carl Stumpf and his assistants held; he also took part in psychological experiments at the Institute of Experimental Psychology founded by Stumpf in 1900. He went on to obtain his doctoral degree by writing a dissertation on the thinking of the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, in which he tried to convince Stumpf’s critics of Mach’s radical phenomenalism and sensualism. After the conclusion of his studies, Musil decided to give up a promising academic career to become a writer.3 Why? Was it a denial of his intellectual formation up till then? Or was it a conscious decision to achieve cognitive goals with instruments other than scientific research, i.e. to gain knowledge through literature? Further elements can help us to make some hypotheses regarding this decision to give up his scientific career for literature. In 1908 Musil was a well-known author, he had already published in 1906 the work Die Verwirrungen des Zögling Törless (“The Confusions of Young Törless”), which enjoyed remarkable success with the public. The decision to dedicate himself to literature was signaled by the publication of the collection Vereinigungen (“Unions”) (1911), which consists of two novellas: Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika (“The Temptation of Quiet Veronika”) and Die Vollendung der Liebe (“The Perfecting of Love”), which are very closely intertwined, a “narrative diptych”. The novellas date back to the final period of his studies and are the result of an attempt to transfer scientific (psychological and philosophical) theories about the structure of consciousness, and the function that feelings have in structuring the Ego, into a literary space. Particularly, “Unions” can be considered a true and proper “experiment”, 4 in which Musil explores new ways of literary expression. 5 2
For a detailed reconstruction of this time see Bonacchi 1998 and 2008. Musil rejected a proposal from the philosopher Alexander Meinong to become his assistant at the University of Graz. 4 See Bonacchi 2009. 3
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Several investigations have shown that the intellectual parameters of Musilʼs way of understanding literature are strictly bound to – although do not coincide with – his psychological and philosophical studies in Berlin and particularly with the philosophical framework of his professor and doctoral supervisor Carl Stumpf.6 2 Stumpfʼs Analysis of Emotions Carl Stumpf took an integrative approach and a position of mediation in the philosophical debate on the nature of feelings which took place in academic circles during the first decade of the Twentieth Century. In his descriptive psychology he tried to reconcile Franz Brentanoʼs theory of intentionality with a critique of psychological associationism, scientific empiricism and philosophical idealism. He developed a scientific interdisciplinary concept which involved both philosophical as well as psychological investigation. This method of intermediation which Stumpf came up with in collaboration with his assistants and students led finally to assumptions that prepared the way for the future developments of these theories in phenomenological thinking and in Gestalt theory. Stumpfǯs theory of feelings has to be seen in the context of his wider philosophical program of the “rebirth of philosophy” which he presented in the paper Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie (“The Rebirth of Philosophy”) (1907). This was a new vision of the goals and methods of philosophical investigations after the crisis of the great systems of the 19th century, i.e. Idealism and Positivism. It is important to stress that in the crucial years 1906-1907 Stumpf came to a turning point in his thinking and revised his previous positions. His papers of this period are devoted to just a few topics, which Stumpf considered essential for the development of his thinking: the problem of establishing new foundations of philosophy after the fall of the great systems (in the above mentioned Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie), the classification of sciences in relation to the investigated reality (Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften, “The classification of sciences”, 1906), the specific methods of investigating a given phenomenological reality (Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen, 5
Musil revealed some years later his conception of the knowledge of the poet in his essay Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters (“Draft about the knowledge of the poet”) (1918). 6 See for example Misselhorn 2008: 86.
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“Phenomena and psychic function”,7 1906), and lastly the theory of feelings, sense-feelings and emotions (Über Gefühlsempfindungen, “On sense-feelings” 1907). The close connection between the first three papers has been the object of important investigations (see Fisette 2006: 12ff.), but the connection of these papers with the paper about sense-feelings has not yet been fully explored. In the paper dedicated to the rebirth of philosophy (Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie, 1907), Stumpf stressed that after Hegel’s death a “catastrophe” occurred in philosophical thinking.8 The breaking of idealistic systems led to materialism, which is a “nonphilosophical orientation”. The “new” philosophy has to find a new basis which will allow it to unify empirical research, exactness and methodological strength. (Stumpf 1907: 8) According to his teacher Franz Brentano, Stumpf postulated that this new philosophy had to be carried out with methods oriented to natural sciences (Stumpf 1907: 16), and also with inductive methods, as the “Erfahrungsphilosophie” in the tradition of Hermann Lotze had shown, but at the same time it must be based on strict logical foundations utilising deductive methods. In connection with the new appreciation for Kant via New Kantianism, Stumpf considered the possibility of creating new foundations for a theory of knowledge based on logical and mathematical studies (Stumpf 1907a: 17f.), but at the same time he rejected the radical antipsychological positions of the New Kantians, considering psychology an important element for the theory of knowledge.9 The world as phenomenal evidence (i.e. evidence transmitted via phenomena) was a new field of scientific investigations which required the founding of a new discipline and a new scientific terminology. The new discipline was “phenomenology”, a type of “propedeutics”, i.e. a preparatory science for both psychology and natural sciences. (Stumpf 1907a: 21) Phenomenology was designed to investigate “phenomena”, that is to say, how the world (the outer and inner world) is “given” to the subject via phenomena. Stumpf sought to indicate a way out of the di7
I prefer the English translation “psychical functions” to “mental functions” because “psychical functions” encompasses “emotional” and “intellectual” functions. 8 See Stumpf 1907a: 5: “Zwischen Hegel und der Gegenwart liegt vielmehr unzweifelhaft eine Katastrophe” (“Between Hegel and the present time there is no doubt that a catastrophe has occurred”). 9 For Stumpf´s mediating position between nativism (Kantianism) and the “philosophy of experience” see Fisette 2009.
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chotomy of a functional psychology, as Herbart proposed it, according to which phenomena are just the way in which psychical functions are given, and a psychology of phenomena (sensualism), whose precursor can be recognised in Ernst Mach, according to whom psychical functions are groups of phenomena. Stumpf claimed that a central problem in the foundations of sciences lays in language, which is not able to give exact definitions of psychological concepts.10 The problem of a lack of exactness regarding concepts affects psychology significantly (Stumpf 1907a: 17f.). The language of exact sciences, which investigate the physical world, cannot be transferred to the psychological sphere, and especially not to the description of psychical functions. Philosophy and psychology particularly reveal their limits in the study of the human mind, which cannot be reduced to the investigation of the system of thinking and categorisation, but has to be extended to the investigation of feelings and emotions, and particularly to the investigation of how emotional components are intertwined with perception, sensations on the one hand and higher intellectual faculties (such as judgments and assumptions) on the other. These assumptions anticipate a philosophical issue which leads to critical realism, according to which there exists a physical world, whose regularities and objective laws are investigated by natural and exact sciences, and a phenomenal world, which also has specific regularities and structural laws. The physical world and the phenomenal world both have their own rules and organisational structures. The structural laws of the phenomenal world cannot be reduced to those of the physical world, they have to be investigated with special methods and explained with specific conceptual means. It is nevertheless conceivable that there is a relationship, even a sort of “congruence”, between the physical and psychological-phenomenological laws, which guarantee objectivity and intersubjectivity. Hence psychology, philosophy and phenomenology are sciences which integrate with each other. From the philosophical, psychological and phenomenal points of view the analysis of consciousness had for Stumpf a fundamental meaning. In the structure of the Ego emotions have a very important place, so the investigation of consciousness had to start with an analysis of emotions. In his paper Über den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung 10
For this reason Stumpf used to open his papers with painstaking terminological disquisitions.
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(1899), Stumpf made a fundamental distinction between complex “emotions” (Gefühle, such as joy, envy, disgust), which are intertwined with intellectual components, and sense-feelings (Gemüthsempfindungen), such as the sensations of pain and pleasure. Stumpf moved therefore from descriptive psychology to the analysis of emotions through an analysis of psychical functions, i.e. “mental states” (Fisette 2009). The classification of psychical functions is based on the distinction between two classes: “intellectual functions” and “emotional functions”. Emotional and intellectual functions are structured in the same way. In the phenomenal given reality it is difficult to grasp a clear distinction between them, which is the task of descriptive psychology. The class that is intellectual functions subsumes, in a hierarchy from the most simple to the most complex, acts ranging from sense perception to judgment. Emotional functions have to be subdivided into “passive emotional functions” (passive feelings, i.e. emotions) and “active emotional functions” (active feelings, i.e. desire and will). “Sense of value” (Wertgefühl) is the specific content of the class that is active feelings, while the content of emotions is states of affairs (Sachverhalte). Stumpf had further distinguished in his paper of 1899 between unbestimmten Gefühlen (“vague feelings”), or Stimmungen, which are not directed at an object, and therefore have no specific energy, and bestimmte Gefühle (“clear feelings”), which are directed at objects. The evaluative element of emotions (sense of value) lies in the positive or negative stance (Stellungnahme) with respect to the judged state of affairs. Stumpf developed his theories about emotions in Über Gefühlsempfindungen (“On sense-feelings”, 1907). That paper was the result of a discussion, prompted by Stumpfʼs lecture at the Congress of the Society for Experimental Psychology in Würzburg (April 1906), with several disputants who represented the whole spectrum of philosophical and psychological points of view. 11 In Über Gefühlsempfindungen Stumpf polemicised against the sensualistic theory of emotions of James-Lange, according to which emotions are 11
Representatives of the most notable psychological schools of the time took part in the discussion (Ebbinghaus, Krueger (Gefühle als Gestaltqualitäten), Jerusalem, Hughes, von Frey, Wirth). The core question was to do with the difference between Empfindung (sensation) and Gefühl (sentiment). The discussion is synthetically reported in Stumpf 1907c.
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the same as sense-feelings. 12 In his paper Über den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung (1899), Stumpf had stressed that sense-feelings (Gemüthsempfindungen), i.e. “algedonic sensations” (Stumpf 1928: 68), such as those relating to pain and pleasure, are sensory qualities, like sound and colour; while emotions (Gefühle) are intentional states directed toward “states of affairs”. In his paper of 1907 Stumpf on the one hand distanced himself from the theory of emotions of his teacher and mentor Franz Brentano, according to which sense-feelings are the result of intentional acts, and on the other hand he clarified his position through a critical confrontation with different theories that were current in the debate that was ongoing at the time. In the paper of 1907 Stumpf argued that “pleasure” and “pain” cannot be classified as emotions because they have no cognitive fundament and they are localised. So he raises the question: What are pain and pleasure? One possibility is to consider sense-feelings as something which is “added” to sensations. If we consider sense-feelings in the phenomenological evidence, they are given as Begleiterscheinung, that is to say, something “more”, like a “gestalt quality”. But Stumpf does not see enough arguments for this thesis. He shows that when we use words such as “Zorn, Angst, Trauer, Eitelkeit und Entzücken” (“anger, fear, sadness, vanity and delight”) we do not refer to feelings, but to “Gesamtzustände” (Stumpf 1907b: 7), i.e. “complex states”, which have a psychological “core”, but are not reducible to sense-feelings. Stumpf raises a set of further questions: for example, whether physical pain and spiritual pain, and similarly physical joy and spiritual joy, have a common psychological core. Stumpf comes to the conclusion, that sense-feelings can be regarded as sensory qualities, like sounds and colours, while emotions are intentional states directed towards objects and do not have a precise location. Sensations of pain are related to an instinctive repulsion regarding objects, sensations of pleasure with an instinctive attraction. Some sense-feelings are localised (pain, pleasure), others are not (tiredness, freshness). Stumpf also proposes the following classification of sense-feelings: a) corporal (body) sense-feelings, without the participation of intellectual functions, such as pain caused by wounds or pleasure from sexual sensations or from tickling; b) sense-feelings 12
According to the James-Lange-Theory, an emotion is no more than sense-feelings, which can be aroused by perceptions or thoughts (James 1950, II: 450).
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that are bound to sensations, which derive, for example, from temperature, smell, taste, or touch; c) sense-feelings which are bound to complex perceptions and apperceptions.13 Stumpf comes to the conclusion (Stumpf 1907b: 40f.), that sense-feelings are the foundation of emotions (Stumpf 1907b: 15), but also that they are connected more to the “objects” of consciousness (“gegenständlicher Teil”) than to the “states” of consciousness (“zuständlicher Teil”).14 In this sense they need to undergo further (emotional) processing by the Ego in order to be recognised as part of its unity. Because emotions are at the same time part of the Ego and part of the world, phenomenological instruments (which are at the same time “instruments of consciousness”) are necessary to grasp their unity. For Stumpf there are no emotions without non-affective foundations, like thoughts (judgments and assumptions), perceptions or fantasies. The relationship between emotions and thoughts is caused by the principle of co-variation. The paper by Stumpf prompted many critical reactions. In Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie (“Investigations into the psychology of the senses”, 1907) Brentano argued that pleasure and pain are affects and therefore intentional phenomena with the same structure as judgments and affects.15 Stumpf later developed his reflections further on the nature of feelings and sense-feelings,16 but for the aims of this paper we will concentrate on his position of 1907. 3 Robert Musilʼs Theory of Feelings According to Kevin Mulligan, Musil’s analysis of emotions is the core (Herzstück) (Mulligan 1995: 87) of his philosophical efforts. Mulligan considers Musil to be an author who followed in the footsteps of Brentanoʼs doctrine of intentionality.17 In the opinion of Mulligan, Musil 13
In this sense Stumpf explains phenomena as analgesia, anesthesia, hyperalgesia and asthenia (Stumpf 1907b: 17). 14 Stumpf´s stance is in opposition to Oskar Külpe who considers emotions to be a particular type of elements of consciousness (Stumpf 1907b: 23). 15 Brentano distinguishes between sensations which are affects from sensations which are not (like auditory or visual sensations). These sensations are called “concomitant sensations”. For Brentano the existence of pleasure and displeasure is guaranteed by the self-evidence of inner perception. 16 See Stumpf 1916. 17 “Musils philosophische Positionen sind in vielen Hinsichten durchaus diejenigen der Erben Brentanos” (Mulligan 1995: 87).
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brought to life the different positions argued in the debate of the time regarding the nature of feeling in his romance “The Man without Qualities”, realising them narratively through the principle of essayistic perspectivism. I agree with this contention, but I would like to show that Musil had dealt with the problem of emotions much earlier than in that novel. His first encounter with a broad theory of feelings took place in Berlin and it was mediated by Carl Stumpf. Musil developed his theory of feelings in his unpublished theoretical work Bemerkungen über Apperceptor (“Remarks on Apperceptor”, TB II, 927934, dated circa 1908) and transferred his conclusions to a literary space, i.e. in the two novellas Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika (“The Temptation of Quiet Veronika”) and Die Vollendung der Liebe (“The Perfecting of Love”), which were published in 1911 in Musil’s collection Vereinigungen (“Unions”). In this paper we shall focus on Die Vollendung der Liebe, which Musil considered the better of the two (see Briefe I: 69).18 “Unions” received strong reactions from critics and the public. The average reader could easily feel disoriented after reading the texts. The usual clarity of Musilʼs prose is missing here, a thin narrative thread links a string of images, bold metaphors and associations in which the external and internal worlds are interwoven.19 The two novellas can be considered experiments carried out in a literary work rather than a laboratory (for a wider analysis see Bonacchi 2009) in which Musil tests, in ways that had never been matched in contemporary literature, the outer reaches of literary expression. However, what is presented in the stories is not the introspection of inner impulses within the psyche, followed by a representation of psychological processes on the basis of this introspection; furthermore, any reader who expects a “stream of consciousness” style will be disappointed. Instead, Musil opens up a pathway between the realms of the psychological and the physical, between the inner and outer worlds, by means of a series of correlations expressed in metaphors, images and associations. As he explained in a letter to Franz Blei: “Die Vergleiche, Bilder, den Stil diktiert nicht der Autor, sondern sie sind psychischen Konstituenten 18
For a detailed analysis of Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika see Bonacchi 1999a. See Bonacchi/Payne 2007: 176: “It is as if this narrative thread sets in motion impressions, vague images, half-formulated ideas that are at the very edge of the attention, and glimpsed out of the corners of the mind’s eye”. 19
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der Person, deren Gefühlkreis sich in ihnen umschreibt”. 20 (“The comparisons, the images, the style are dictated not by the author but are psychological constituents of the person whose emotional range finds linguistic expression within them”). “Unions” is made up of stories of women who get caught in forcefields between two men, who are quite different from each other. In “The Temptation of Quiet Veronika”, Veronika has to decide between Johannes and Demeter, the former reserved and spiritual, the latter overtly sexual, assertive and full of life. The narrative concentrates, in its first part, on the thoughts and feelings of Johannes, and in the second part on those of Veronika. “The Perfecting of Love” is concerned with Claudine, who also gets caught up in two relationships: the first with her husband, something that seems to be “a perfect love”, the second with a ministerial counselor, the Ministerialrat, who is, just like Demeter, quite primitive, overtly sexual, assertive and energetic. At the start of the story the reader is introduced to the loving couple, Claudine and her husband. Claudine leaves to visit her daughter in another part of the country but, because of heavy snowfall which cuts the town off, her visit is prolonged and Claudine attracts the attentions of the counselor, who manages in the end to seduce her. This sexual encounter is the culmination of the narrative. Most of the story is the reconstruction of thoughts and emotions within Claudineʼs mind, however these thoughts and emotions are constantly traced back to images and comparisons which connect her interior and external world. The plot is very simple and can be reduced to just a few phrases (see Bonacchi/Payne 2007: 179f.), leaving the majority of the narrative to trace accurately the “inner” path which leads from an intense feeling of love and commitment to infidelity.21 From a narrative 20
See the letter of Musil to Blei of 15 July 1911 (Briefe I, 87). Musil writes: “Ich hatte den Weg zu beschreiben, der von einer innigen Zuneigung beinahe bloß binnen 24 Stunden zur Untreue führt […]. Da bildete sich in mir die Entscheidung: den ‘maximal belasteten Weg’ zu wählen/den Weg der kleinsten Schritten/ den Weg des allmählichsten, unmerklichsten Übergang. Das hat auch einen moralischen Weg: Die Demonstration des seelischen Spektrums mit den stetigen Übergängen von etwas zu seinem Gegenteil.” (“I had to describe the path that leads, almost within the space of 24 hours, from an intense feeling of commitment to infidelity […]. Within me the decision took shape to choose the ´path of maximum load´/the path of the shortest steps/the path of gradual, most imperceptible transition. This has a moral value: demonstrating the moral spectrum with constant steps away from something to its opposite”), GW II (1978): 972. 21
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point of view these assumptions mean that fictional writing has to achieve within readers a process of understanding regarding narrative realities (people, facts, events, stories) through a conscious construction of states of minds.22 For Musil “reality” is a shared system of construction and interpretations of the outside world that the writer can evoke through language, whose coherence is not necessarily produced by causal laws, but much more by psychological motivation and emotional connections. 23 Hence, in the novella, you have two conceptions of reality which come to a head: Claudineʼs world is accessible to the reader through the narrative perspective and it seems largely removed from the flux of cause and effect, while the world of the counselor is, conversely, static, fixed and ruled by causality. Claudineʼs mind has been appropriated by the philosophical and psychological consciousness of her creator, i.e. by Musil himself. In this process a complex relationship is being set up, combining three realms: the world of experience and the modes of perceptions within the reader, the words with which the text of the novella is composed, and the author himself as the “director” of this interchange. Musil makes consciousness the central protagonist of his novella. Claudineʼs consciousness is structured by feelings, not by knowledge, which reveals an illusion – the illusion that a word can “grasp” reality in a definitive way. Musil writes that Claudineʼs life was “dominated by an inexplicable, unremitting betrayal that one commits in every instant, by cutting loose from oneself without knowing why” (“und plötzlich schien ihr in einer schlagschnellen Erhellung ihr ganzes Leben von diesem unverstehbaren,unaufhörlichen Treubruch beherrscht, mit dem man sich, während man für alle andern der gleiche bleibt, in jedem Augenblick von sich selbst loslöst, ohne zu wissen warum […]”, GW 6: 179). In the narrative, words are containers that do not always work in expected ways; they contain, and they leak, they present, re-present and mis-present.24 On the one hand, we have the narra22
More about the constructions of narrative by Musil can be found in Bonacchi/Payne 2007: 181. 23 In this regard see Salgaro 2012. 24 So in the following passage: “Im nächsten Augenblick war nun mehr ein Lichtes, Nebelndes, Entschwindendes ringsum. Sie blickte um sich; still und gerade standen die Häuser um den Platz, am Turm schlug die Uhr. Rund und metallisch sprangen die Schläge aus den Luken der vier Mauern, lösten sich in Fallen auf und flatterten über die Dächer. Claudine hatte die Vorstellung, dass sie dann weit und klingend über das
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tive’s attempts to give form to what is considered the essence of human consciousness, its iconological spatial structure; on the other, the veracity of all these attempts is placed in question by an awareness, that no word can hold and weave into the pattern of life the “defenseless frailty of the ultimate human potentialities” (“Gebrechlichkeit der innersten Menschenmöglichkeiten”, GW 6: 190). The title of the piece reveals that the key words are “Liebe” (love) and “Vollendung” (perfecting). But what is “love”? What does this word encompass? At the beginning of the narrative the author describes Claudine and her husband and the feeling she has that this relationship is something stiff, rigid, frozen in geometric immobility. 25 What connects two people in such a fast way is often called “love”, but here it is presented as something static which imprisons Claudine. Images of enclosure, stiffness and rigidity recur in this beginning part of the story. The whole novella can be seen as a journey in which the female protagonist, Claudine (as her very name suggests: The Enclosed), frees herself from this situation of prison and enclosure. The “perfecting of love” means that she reaches a fluid and dynamic emotional balance. The author of the novellas presents not external facts, but the internal changes that lead to this new emotional balance. Land rollen mussten (…)” (GW 6: 182) (“And then everything seemed to disappear in a vortex of misty light. She glanced about her; there were the houses as before, standing straight and silent about the square. In the tower the clock began to strike. Round and metallic the chimes came bowling through the apertures in the tower, scattering as they fell, and skimming away over the roofs. Claudine imagined them rolling on over the countryside, far away, resounding (…)”). It is not possible here to analyse the text in a detailed way, so I shall express just a few considerations regarding this passage. Home, houses, rooms, and doors are all recurrent images in this narrative. “Houses” are for Claudine impressions structured by the mind. They enclose space in ways that recall the making of meaning through the use of the words. Claudineᦤs mind draws an analogy between creating a sense of place and the house of words, between habituation and habitation. See Bonacchi/Payne 2007: 186f. 25 See GW 6: 190: “Der Arm der Frau aber ragte von der Kanne weg und der Blick, mit dem sie nach ihrem Manne sah, bildete mit ihm einen starren, steifen Winkel./Gewiss einen Winkel, wie man sehen konnte; aber jenes andere, beinahe Körperliche konnten nur diese beiden Menschen in ihm fühlen, denen es vorkam, als spannte er sich zwischen ihnen wie eine Strebe aus härtestem Metall und hielte sie auf ihren Plätzen fest […]“ (“The woman’s arm stood out from the teapot, and the gaze with which she looked across at her husband formed an angle with the line of the arm, a rigid pattern in the air./Yes, there was an angle: that was evident. But there was something else, something almost physical, that only these two people within it could feel, to whom this angle was as taut as a steel strut, holding them fast in their places).
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Musil’s narrative revolves around many intellectual and philosophical references, the most important of which are the philosophical debate about Gestalt qualities and Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich’s discussion about “sthenicity” and “asthenicity” 26 in the light of Carl Stumpf’ s theory of feelings. It is important to consider the extent to which Musil set himself the task of bringing his knowledge of contemporary psychology into his work as a creative writer. Musilʼs notes “Remarks on the Apperceptor” throw light on his intentions in these stories. The notes open with a statement on human perception which relies on the following tripartite structure: the ultimately unknowable realm of external reality; the perceptive apparatus of the individual that has evolved to relate to this unknown; “apperception”, the facility that resides within each individual human being that evaluates perceptions and, in loading them with emotion and reflections, endows them with a “sense of value”. Apperception is built around the notion of the “apperceptor” (the organ of the brain carrying out the process of “apperception”) as expounded by Wilhelm Wundt. In his Grundriss der Psychologie (“Outline of Psychology”) published in 1896, Wundt defined apperception as the intervention of the Ego in perception. Apperception takes place when the Ego helps to arrange, evaluate, and give emotional colour to that which is perceived. A central assumption in Stumpf’s, and later in Musilʼs, theory of feelings is the Wertgefühl (“sense of value”), which is, as Wundt had already postulated, guaranteed by apperception. Without apperception, human life would have no meaning, the individual no sense of (self-)worth. The experience of love in Die Vollendung der Liebe is a search for value in just this sense, but not in the way Wundt intended it, as a sort of psychophysiological device, but as a particular form of cognitive and emotional balance. Basing this aspect of his thinking on Wundt’s theories and above all on his theory of feelings,27 apperception is located by Musil in a centre called the “apperceptor,” which is perhaps found in the frontal lobe of the brain and which sends out signals to the sensory and motor systems. 28 In his expositions Musil integrated Wundt’s thinking with other elements taken from such researchers as Ernst 26
For a detailed analysis see Bonacchi 1998: 93-98, Bonacchi 1999a und 1999b, Bonacchi/Payne 2007: 191 and Bonacchi 2009: 202f. 27 See Wundt 1899. 28 See Wundt 1918/I, 378.
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Mach and Konstantin Oesterreich, mediated by Stumpf. The postevolutionistic perspective of Mach provides the philosophic framework of Musil’s “Remarks on the Apperceptor;” that the first existential task of the human being is self-preservation. Every human action is at the same time a reaction to the “irritations” that are emitted by the external world or the environment of the human being; they are responses to the constantly changing tasks set by the environment. Musil’s apperceptor mediates between a world that is perceived intellectually and one that is experienced emotionally. The intellectually registered, “apperceived” world is linked with the objective world through the intellectual factor and is basically constant; thus this factor guarantees the extra-subjective validity of the world that is being apperceived by the subject. By means of the emotional factor, however, the apperceived world is always something singular. Thus one reality always has two sides: a generally valid side and a personal and singular side. Accordingly, the world can be seen, by turns, as something fixed and rational and something mobile, singular and visionary, according to which of the two factors is switched on. When the correct relationship exists between the two factors, the human being is well adjusted and can fulfill his or her existential tasks. States of depersonalisation and depression (here Musil borrows from Oesterreich) serve as evidence of a disturbance in the balance between the emotional and the intellectual factors. The emotional factor of the apperceptor is, for Musil, of fundamental importance for the balance between the individual and environment. The emotional factor permeates the external and internal worlds with the same emotional colouring or tone. The world is no longer felt to be alien and threatening but is adjusted to the Ego and vice versa. The world is, for the subject, compact and receptive, albeit only when the individual has an immediate emotional relationship to the world. Musil gives, as Stumpf already did, the name Gebilde (“complex formations”) to these emotionally coloured inner and outer worlds. They are “represented”, i.e. they are second order phenomena. Carl Stumpf took the psychical Gebilde to be the correlate of a psychical function, a result of the way an individual relates to an object and his “growing out of” the interpenetration between object and subject. The emotional factor of the apperceptor is the basis of orientation in the world. This means that it has to be dynamic and always capable of making adjustments. It has to possess the capacity to set up constantly renewed forms of balance that respond to life’s chal-
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lenges. If the emotional factor does not change when the outer circumstances change, then the individual adjusts to the world – this process is an “asthenic” one. When the emotional factor changes, the individual adjusts the world to himself or herself by assimilating the world or destroying it – this process is “sthenic”. Thus the emotional factor has to fulfill a function of vital importance: the preservation of the life of the individual through an adjustment between the individual and the world, for only that which adjusts survives. The harmony between the emotionally coloured inner and outer worlds is decisive for the stability and the degree of adjustment of the Ego. Between the emotionally coloured inner and outer worlds a third element is set up that is intended to maintain the state of balance between the two; this is the sense of value. When the sense of worth or value is not in balance, the individual loses their ubi consistam, they lose their grip on the world and dissolve. The irrational breaks out. The sense of value involves an ability to rise above things, a sense of being in the centre and being able to maintain this position. The stability of a world guaranteed by apperception is a result of the balancing of different forces, above all by the balance of intellectual and emotional factors produced by the sense of value. In this sense the “sense of value” is “constructed” as an “object of higher order”. Claudineʼs mind, subjected to a flood of perceptions, emotions and feelings, tries to assemble them into a pattern, an “object of higher order”, which is permeated by an inner energy that holds it together. She, as the subject of this phenomenological experience, can affirm herself as an “I”, i.e. she acts “sthenically” in that she opens out her own range of feelings over the world she is warding off in one phenomenological act. In a draft written around this time Musil writes: “In der Liebe liegt ein spezieller Fall der Änderung des emot.[ionellen] Faktors des Apperceptors vor” (Mappe VII/6, 184) (“Love is a special case where the emot.[ional] factor of the apperceptor changes”). Musil attempts in his early narrative to dispel a fallacy that consists in considering “reality” to be something given and which is governed by causal rules according to “ratioïd” logic. Reality in its phenomenogical evidence is the result of a “Spiel höherer Notwendigkeiten” (GW II, 950), (“a game of higher necessities”); it can be the object of knowledge merely thanks to the poetʼs “non-
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ratioïd” logic.29 In the complex play of inner volitive movements, perceptions and half-repressed desires, Musil attempts in his narrative to show the possibility of new ways of literary narration, far away from the fallacy of causality, founded on the dynamic theory of emotional and intellectual functions initiated by Stumpf. References Baumgartner, Wilhelm et al. (2002) (eds): ‘Carl Stumpf ’, in Brentano-Studien, vol. 9. Dettelbach: Röll. Besoli, Stefano/Martinelli, Riccardo (eds) (2001): ‘Carl Stumpf e la fenomenologia dell’esperienza’, in: Discipline filosofiche, vol. XI, 2. Bonacchi, Silvia/Boudewijnse, Geert-Jan (2011) (eds): Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer. Bonacchi, Silvia (1998): Die Gestalt der Dichtung. Bern et al.: Lang. –– (1999a): ‘Na Vronerl, […] und wann werden wir da so dastehn?’: Zur Rolle der Gefühlspsychologie in einer Vorstufe der Novelle Robert Musils Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika, in: Daigger, A. (ed.): West-östlicher Divan zum utopischen Kakanien. Bern et al.: Lang, 317-332. –– (1999b): ‘Claudine e Veronika: Musil, la critica delle varianti e la meccanica delle passioni’, in: Intersezioni XVII, Vol. 1 (1997), 65-80. –– (2008): ‘Robert Musils Berliner Studienjahre’, in: Daigger, A./Henninger, P. (eds): Robert Musils Drang nach Berlin. Bern et al.: Lang, 37-83. –– (2009): ‘Robert Musils Vereinigungen als Erzählexperiment’, in: Calzoni, R./Salgaro, M. (eds): Experiment um Neunzehnhundert. Der Versuch als Vermittler zwischen Wissenschaft und deutschsprachiger Literatur. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht unipress, 191-205. –– (2011a): ‘Carl Stumpf: Leben, Werk, Wirkung’, in: Bonacchi, S./Boudewijnse, G.J. (eds): Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer, 7-20. –– (2011b): ‘Ein Dichtungsbegriff mit Gestalteigenschaften: Robert Musils Aufsatz „Literat und Literatur” (1931)’, in: Metz-Göckel, H. (eds): Gestalttheoretische Inspirationen: Anwendungen der Gestalttheorie – Handbuch der Gestalttheorie II. Wien: Krammer 2011, 141-166 . Bonacchi, Silvia/Payne, Philip (2007): ‘Musilʼs ʼDie Vollendung der Liebe’: Experience Analyzed and Reconstituted’, in: Payne, P./Bartram, G./Tihanov, G. (eds): A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil. Rochester: Camden, 175198. Brentano, Franz (1907): Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie. Hamburg: Meiner. Fisette, Denis (2006): Renaissance de la philosophie. Quatres articles. Paris: Vrin. –– (2009): ‘Carl Stumpf’, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stumpf/, last: 20.1.2013) 29
See the essay Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters (“Sketch of a Poet’s Knowledge”, 1918).
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–– (2011a): ‘Love and Hate: Brentano and Stumpf on Emotions and Sense Feelings’, in: Bonacchi, S./Boudewijnse, G.-J. (eds): Carl Stumpf: From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer, 3749. –– (2011b): ‘Stumpf and Husserl on Phenomenology and Descriptive Psychology’, in: Bonacchi, S./Boudewijnse, G.-J. (eds): Carl Stumpf: From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer, 153-68. Haller, Rudolf (2003): ‘Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach und Robert Musil’, in: Kaiser-ElSafti, Margret/Ballod, Matthias (2003) (eds): Musik und Sprache. Zur Phänomenologie von Carl Stumpf. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 95-108. James, William (1950): Principles of Psychology. Volumes I/II. New York: Dover Publications. Kaiser-El-Safti, Margret/Ballod, Matthias (2003) (eds): Musik und Sprache. Zur Phänomenologie von Carl Stumpf. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Martinelli, Riccardo (2011): ‘Intentionality and God’s mind: Stumpf on Spinoza’, in: Bonacchi, S./Boudewijnse, G.-J. (eds): Carl Stumpf: From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer, 5168. Misselhorn, Catrin (2008): ‘Naturalismus zwischen Empirismus und Idealismus – Robert Musils philosophische Lebensjahre in Berlin’, in: Daigger, A./Henninger, P. (eds): Robert Musils Drang nach Berlin. Bern et al.: Lang, 85-106. Mulligan, Kevin (1995): ‘Musils Analyse des Gefühls’, in: Böschenstein, B./Roth, M.-L. (eds): Hommage à Robert Musil. Bern: Lang, 87-110. Musil, Robert (1978): Gesammelte Werke in neun Bänden. Hrsg. von Adolf Frisé. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt [GW 1-9] –– (1980): Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs und Studien zur Technik und Psychotechnik. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt [Beitrag] –– (1981): Briefe 1901-1942. Hrsg. von Adolf Frisé unter Mithilfe von Murray G. Hall. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt [Briefe I] –– (1981): Briefe 1901-1942: Kommentar, Register. Hrsg. von Adolf Frisé unter Mithilfe von Murray G. Hall. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt [Briefe II] –– (1983): Tagebücher. Hrsg. von Adolf Frisé. Neu durchgesehene und ergänzte Auflage. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt [TB I] –– (1983): Tagebücher: Anmerkungen, Anhang, Register. Hrsg. von Adolf Frisé. Neu durchgesehene und ergänzte Auflage. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt [TB II] Oesterreich, Traugott Konstantin (1906/1907): ‘Die Entfremdung in der Wahrnehmungswelt und die Depersonalisation in der Psychasthenie: Ein Beitrag für Gefühlspsychologie’, in: Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie. Leipzig: Barth, Bd. VII. H.6 (1906), 253-276; Bd. VIII. H. 1/2 (1906), 61-97; H. 3/4 (1906), 141-174; H.5 (1907), 220-237; Bd. IX. H.1/2 (1907), 15-53. Reisenzein, Rainer (1992): ‘Stumpfʼs cognitive-evaluative Theorie der Emotion’, in: Sprung, L. & Schönpflug, W. (eds): Zur Geschichte der Psychologie in Berlin. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 97-137. Salgaro, Massimo (2012): Robert Musil teorico della ricezione. Bern et al.: Lang. Sprung, Helga (2006): Carl Stumpf: Eine Biographie. Von der Philosophie zur Experimentellen Psychologie. München/Wien: Profil Verlag.
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Stumpf, Carl (1899): ‘Über den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung’, in: Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21, 47-99. –– (1906a): Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen. Philosophische und historische Abteilung der königlich-preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin, 1906, Abh. IV, 1-40. –– (1906b): Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften. Philosophische und historische Abteilung der königlich-preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin, 1906, Abh. V, 1-94. –– (1907a): Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie. Rede zum Antritt des Rektorates der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. Gehalten in der Aula am 15. Oktober 1907. Berlin: Universitäts-Buchdruckerei von Gustav Schade (Otto Francke). –– (1907b): ‘Über Gefühlsempfindungen’, in: Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 44, 1-49. –– (1907c): ‘Über Gefühlsempfindungen’, in: Schumann, F. (ed.): Bericht über den II. Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie. Leipzig: Barth, 209-213. –– (1916) ‘Apologie der Gefühlsempfindungen’, in: Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 75, 39-53. Toccafondi, Fiorenza (2011): ‘Stumpf and Gestalt Psychology: Relations and Differences’, in: Bonacchi, S./Boudewijnse, G.-J. (eds): Carl Stumpf: From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation. Wien: Krammer, 169-190. Wundt, Wilhelm (1899): ‘Bemerkungen zur Theorie der Gefühle’, in: Philosophische Studien 15, 149-182. –– (1918): Grundriß der Psychologie. 2 Bde. 13. Auflage. Leipzig: Krön.
PART IV. ARCHIVALIA INTRODUCTION (DENIS FISETTE) The following section is divided into three parts. It includes 1) Husserl’s notes from Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics (1886-1887), 2) Stumpf’s introduction to an edition of Brentano’s letters addressed to him along with selected letters of Brentano and of Stumpf, and 3) a bibliography of Carl Stumpf’s publications. Husserl’s notes from Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics are important in that they account for both an aspect of Husserl’s training in philosophy during his early period in Halle and also for Stumpf’s views on metaphysics given that he did not publish much on that issue. The second part of this section focuses on a manuscript of an introduction by Stumpf to an edition of his correspondence with Brentano, which he prepared for publication in 1929 but was never published. This document reveals unknown aspects of Brentano’s relationship with his pupil. This document is accompanied by a selection of unpublished letters both from Brentano and from Stumpf, which the latter refers to in the manuscript of this introduction. Finally, the third part comprises the most comprehensive bibliography of Stumpf’s publications to date. It relies in part on the bibliography published by Stumpf at the end of his autobiography (Stumpf, 1924), which is incomplete and does not include his publications after 1924. In addition to Stumpf’s works published during his lifetime or posthumously, I list the translations of his works in several languages, as well as some of the syllabi and some of his students’ lecture notes that I found in several institutions. Although most of Stumpf’s manuscripts were destroyed during the Second World War, part of his correspondence and several other manuscripts have survived and are partly accessible at one of the following institutions: Brentano-Archiv der Forschungsstelle und des Dokumentationszentrums für österreichische Philosophie (Graz); Franz Brentano Forschung (Würzburg); Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin); Handschriftenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (Berlin); HusserlArchives (Leuven); Privates Stumpf-Archiv (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt);
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Archives of the History of American Psychology (Akron, Ohio, USA); Houghton Library, Harvard College Library (Boston); Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich)1. Although there is unfortunately no Stumpf Nachlaß, his library, sold in part to a wealthy Japanese named Sakuma, was partially preserved and is currently housed in the library of the University of Kyushu in Japan. (see M. Takasuna, 2006, 450-456) Finally, thanks to the Internet, books, audio material, and manuscripts of Stumpf are now available in digital form on the sites of “Internet Archive” and “The Virtual Laboratory” of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). Worth mentioning are Stumpf’s lectures, transcripts and syllabi, which are partly accessible in the aforementioned institutions, because they provide substantial information on topics addressed only superficially in Stumpf’s published writings. His lecture on metaphysics, which we publish in this volume, is one example among others, since several other manuscripts on logic, psychology, theory of knowledge, and philosophy in general also exist. Thanks to Karl Schuhmann, a pioneer in the studies on Stumpf’s philosophy, and to his student Robin Rollinger, we now have access to reliable transcriptions of several syllabuses that Stumpf made available to his students in order to facilitate their understanding of his lectures. These documents may be found in the Husserl Archives in Leuven (Belgium) together with Husserl’s notes on these lectures under the signature Q11-Q13: (1886-1887): Psychologie. Vorlesungen Wintersemester 18861887, nach Diktaten from - Stumpf, transcriptions from R. Rollinger, E. Schuhmann, and K. Schuhmann, 25 p ; transl. R. Rollinger, “Syllabus for Psychology”, R. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, 284-309. (1886-1887): Psychologie. Vorlesungen Wintersemester 18861887, Mitschrift E. Husserl, transcriptions from R. Rollinger, E. Schuhmann, and K. Schuhmann, 645 p. (1887): Logik und Enzyklopädie der Philosophie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1887, Mitschrift E. Husserl, transcriptions from E. Schuhmann and K. Schuhmann, 204 p. (1888): Logik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1888, nach Diktaten von Stumpf, edited by K. Schuhmann, 27 p. transl. R. Rollinger, “Syl1
H. Sprung (2006, p. 391-398) provides a list of the main archives and institutions possessing Stumpf’s manuscripts.
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labus for Logic”, R. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, 311-337. As Schuhmann and Rollinger have pointed out in several publications, these documents constitute both an important source for accounting for Husserl’s early thought and a significant complement to Stumpf’s works in philosophy. (K. Schuhmann, 2005, 2000-2001, 1997, 1996; R. Rollinger, 1999, 2008; D. Fisette, 2009) There are also several Mitschriften from Stumpf’s lectures that can be found in several archives and libraries. Some of these lectures notes are already known, namely his lecture on psychology of the winter semester 1910-1911 (Mitschrift from H. Birven)2, and others that I recently found out are not. The first one is a substantial manuscript (239 p.) constituted by notes taken by Stumpf’s pupil, the well-known gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, during a lecture on psychology that Stumpf delivered during the winter semester of 1906-1907 at the University of Berlin. (H. Langfeld, 1937, 33) This manuscript is preserved in a library at the University of Princeton and it is known to Stumpf’s scholars thanks to the article “Stumpf’s Introduction to Psychology” published by another student of Stumpf, the American psychologist Herbert Langfeld (1937). Langfeld’s paper is based on this lecture and it provides a brief description of its content. Here is the table of contents from Stumpf’s lecture on psychology: Psychologie (Wintersemester 1906-1907) (247 p.) Einleitung §1 Was ist Psychologie? Definition §2 Was leitet sie? Wert für das gegenwärtige Leben §3 Wie leitet sie es? Methode 1. Über die direkte Ermittlung der Tatsachen 2. Indirekte Ermittlung der Tatsachen a. Sprachliche Beschreibung b. Bewegungen und Handlungen 3. Ermittlung der Gesetzte 4. Hilfsmittel der Exaktheit a. Anatomie und Physiologie b. Experiment c. Messung 2
The table of contents of Stumpf’s lecture on psychology of the winter semester of 1910-1911 is reproduced in H. Sprung (2006, 143-144).
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I. Teil Spezielle Psychologie und Psychophysik Kapitel I Anatomisch-physiologische Vorbemerkungen über das Nervensystem Kapitel II Lehre von den Sinnes-Empfindungen §1 Empfindung, Wahrnehmung, Auffassung §2 Gesichts-Empfindungen §3 Gehörs-Empfindungen §4 Die übrigen Sinnes-Empfindungen a. Geschmack b. Geruch c. Temperatur und Berührungssinn d. Bewegungs- oder kinästhetische Empfindungen e. Tastsinn f. Gleichgewichts- oder statischer Sinn g. Gefühlssinn h. Verbreitung der Sinnes im Tierreich i. Besondere Vorzüge der verschiedenen Sinne für das Leben §5 Von der spezifischen Energien §6 Stärke der Empfindung und psychophysische Gesetzte §7 Verschiedene Entstehungsweise von Empfindungen Kapitel III Über den Unterschied der sinnlichen Vorstellungen von Empfindungen Kapitel IV Von der Entstehung der Vorstellungen §1 Unmittelbarer Anschluss an die Empfindungen §2 Reproduktion der Vorstellungen §3 Allgemeine Regel der mechanischen Reproduktion §4 Bedingungen für die Sicherheit der mechanischen Reproduktion §5 Zentralisierung und Verkürzung der mechanischen Reproduktion §6 Intellektuelle Reproduktion §7 Physiologische Reproduktion §8 Einfluss allgemeiner körperlicher Dispositionen auf die Reproduktion §9 Amnesien, Hypermnesien, Paramnesien §10 Individuelle Unterschiede in der Reproduktion 1. Unterschiede in materialer Hinsicht 2. Unterschiede in formeller Hinsicht §11 Die neueren experimentellen Untersuchungen über das Gedächnis
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1. Ergebnisse in Bezug auf die Bildung der Assoziation 2. Ergebnisse über Vergessen und Wiedererlernen 3. Sonstige Fragen Kapitel V Psychologie des Raumes §1 Die Argumente des Empirismus §2 Die empiristischen Theorien und ihre Unmöglichkeit §3 Die positive Begründung §4 Lösung der empiristischen Argumente §5 Ergänzungen Kapitel VI Psychologie der Zeit §1 Von der Zeit-Wahrnehmung oder von der Entstehung von der Zeitvorstellung §2 Von der Schätzung der Zeit Kapitel VII Vom Zusammenfassen Kapitel VIII Von der Abstraktion und Generalisation Kapitel IX Vom symbolischen Vorstellen Kapitel X Von den Vorstellungen psychischen Zustände Kapitel XI Vom Urteil §1 Charakteristik der Urteils-Funktion §2 Entstehung von Urteilen Kapitel XII Von den Gefühls-Empfindungen §1 Charakterisierung der Gefühls-Empfindungen §2 Entstehungs-Bedingungen der direkt erregten GefühlsEmpfindungen Kapitel XIII Von den Gemüts-Bewegungen oder Affekten Kapitel XIV Von den Begehrungen Kapitel XV Von der Aufmerksamkeit Kapitel XVI Von den unwillkürlichen Bewegungen Kapitel XVII Von der Entstehung der WillensHandlungen §1 Wie entsteht der Wille? §2 Wie entsteht die Macht des Willens? §3 Rückbildungen, die in gewissem Sinne wieder Fortbildungen sind II. Teil Allgemeine Psychologie und Psychophysik Kapitel I Klassifikation der psychischen Vorgänge oder Funktionen
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Denis Fisette Kapitel II Von der Einheit des Bewusstseins Kapitel III Vom Unbewussten im Seelenleben
Unfortunately, Langfeld did not mention in his article the existence of another series of extensive notes presumably taken by Koffka during Stumpf’s lecture on logic and theory of knowledge delivered during the summer semester of 1907. This is a valuable document given that Stumpf did not publish much on logic during his lifetime and the careful notes taken by Koffka provide information that partly fills this gap. Stumpf’s lecture is divided into two parts, the first deals with traditional logic and its reform whereas the main subject of the second part is the theory of knowledge. The table of contents provides an overview of the rich content of this lecture.
Logik und Erkenntnistheorie (Sommersemester 1907) 203 p. Inhaltsverzeichnis Logik Teil I: Das Wesentliche der traditionellen Logik Kapitel I : Von den Begriffen §1 Vom Verhältnis der Begriffe zu den Einzelvorstellungen und zueinander §2 Lehre von der Definition und Klassifikation §3 Kant’s Lehre von Materie und Form Kapitel II : Von den Urteilen §4 Definition und Einteilung §5 Von Gegensatz und [...] der Urteile (Opposition, Conversion, Contraposition) §6 Vom Unterschied der analytischen und synthetischen sowie der apriorischen Urteile §7 Lehre von den Axiomen Kapitel III Von den Schlüssen §8 Einteilung der Schlüsse §9 Regeln für die einfachen kategorischen Syllogismen §10 Die übrigen Schlüsse Teil II Radikale Reform-Systeme §1 Mängel der traditionellen Logik
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§2 Quantification des Prädikate und algebraische Logik §3 Die Reduktion aller Urteile auf Existential Urteile. Teil III Revidierte Logik I. Abschnitt Logische elementar Logik Kapitel I Vom Denken in allgemeinen § 1 Übersicht der intellektuellen Funktionen §2 Vom Material des Denkens §3 Von den unterscheidbaren Teilen des Denkinhaltes §4 Vom Wesen und Entstehen der einfachsten Begriffe §5 Kausalität und Substanz §6 Zusammengesetzte Begriffe §7 Sprechen und Denken Kapitel II Vom Urteilen in besonderen §1 Vom Wesen des Urteils §2 Von den Existential und impersonal Sätzen §3 Von den kategorischen Sätzen §4 Von den grammatisch zusammengesetzten Aussage Formen §5 Einteilung der Urteile §6 Verhältnisse zwischen Urteilen §7 Von der Entstehung des Urteils II. Abschnitt Kanonik oder Lehre von der Kriterien der Wahrheit Kapitel I Die unmittelbaren Erfahrungserkenntnisse (Wahrnehmungserkenntnis) Kapitel II Die unmittelbar apriorischen Erkenntnis oder die unmittelbar einleuchtenden allgemeinen Wahrheiten §1 Übersicht der Axiome §2 Täuschungen in Bezug auf die Axiome Kapitel III Von den unmittelbaren Erkenntnissen oder den Schlüssen § 1 Von den allgemeinsten Vorschriften zur Prüfung von Schlüssen §2 Die wichtigsten Schlussfehler §3 Vom Begriff und der Bestimmung der Wahrscheinlichkeit §4 Täuschungen hinsichtlich der Wahrscheinlichkeit §5 Theorie der Induktion
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III. Teil Methodik §1 Die Ziele des Erkennens §2 Von der Aufstellung der Fragen §3 Von der Hypothesenbildung a. von den wesentlichen Operationen b. Von besonderen Hilfsmitteln §4 Von der Beweisführung und zunächst vom direkten Beweis durch Beobachtung und Experiment §5 Spezielles über den Beweis von kausal-Verhältnissen durch Beobachtung und Experiment §6 Direkter Beweis durch Folgerung §7 Vom indirekten Beweis §8 Vom Aufbau wissenschaftlicher Darstellung §9 Von der Einteilung und dem Entwickelungsgang der Wissenschaften In addition to Koffka’s lecture notes of 1906-1907, there is also a large handwritten manuscript based on Stumpf’s lecture on logic and the introduction to philosophy during the summer semester of 1903. These lecture notes are, however, too sketchy to provide a reliable idea of the lecture’s content. Finally, the philosopher Alexander Pfänder, a student of T. Lipps and Husserl, attended Stumpf’s lectures in Munich during the winter and the summer semesters of 1893 and took a series of notes, which can be found in Pfänder’s papers in Munich. In the winter semester of 1893, he attended Stumpf’s lectures “Über Willenshandlungen” and “Logik and Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik”. The first series of notes that he took consists of a manuscript of 16 pages on the principles of ethics and freedom of the will. The second document (Pfänderiana J I-1P) is based on Pfänder’s notes taken during Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics during the summer semester of 1893. This 40 pages manuscript is composed of two series of handwritten notes: the first pertains to teleology (1-8) and the infinity of the world (8-9); the second part (13-27) is partly based on notes probably taken from Stumpf’s lecture on logic (28-40) and metaphysics. The pieces on metaphysics provide a useful complement to Stumpf’s Halle lecture on metaphysics that we publish in this volume. Among Stumpf’s other documents, which have survived and are scattered around the world, let us mention his correspondence with several philosophers and scientists of which only a fraction has been pub-
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lished to date.3 The most important of these is his correspondence with Brentano that contains more than one hundred unpublished letters from Stumpf to Brentano between 1867 and 1914. In 1929, Stumpf prepared for publication most of the letters he addressed to Brentano until his death in 1917, but the project was never carried out.4 We publish in this volume the introduction that Stumpf wrote for the publication of his correspondence with Brentano, in which he provides, as we said above, substantial information on his personal relationship with Brentano. We also publish some of Stumpf’s letters to Brentano to underpin Stumpf’s remarks on Brentano in this introduction. (see D. Fisette, 2015) Stumpf’s correspondence with his cousin Wilhelm Scherer is also a substantial source of information on Stumpf’s life and career in the period between his studies in Würzburg during the 1860s until Scherer’s death in 1886. Scherer was a well-known Germanist at the time, he is the author of Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1868) and he held important positions in Vienna, Strasbourg and Berlin. He served as an intermediary between his friend W. Dilthey and Stumpf in the early 1880s and we know that Dilthey is directly responsible for the hiring of Stumpf in Berlin in 1894. (See M. Ash, 2000-2001) This substantial correspondence has been preserved in the Archives Scherer in Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz) and large excerpts from this correspondence have been reproduced in Stumpf’s intellectual biography published by H. Sprung (2006). Several other of Stumpf’s letters have survived, the most important being those he exchanged with several students of Brentano, such as A. Marty, A. Meinong, G. Adler K. Twardowski and the positivists H. Reichenbach and M. Schlick (Franz BrentanoForschungsstelle, Graz). Finally, there are several letters from Stumpf to his student W. Köhler which are preserved in Philadelphia (The Archives of the American Philosophical Society). References Ash, M. (2000-2001) “Carl Stumpf und seine Schüler”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 199214. 3
See the list of Stumpf’s correspondence with E. Husserl, W. James, H. Lotze, F. Hillebrand and F. Brentano in the general bibliography of Stumpf’s works at the end of this volume (“Correspondence section”). 4 Part of Stumpf’s manuscript serves as the basis for G. Oberkofler’s edition of Brentano’s letters to Stumpf. (Briefe an Carl Stumpf 1867-1917)
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Brentano, F. (1989) Briefe an Carl Stumpf 1867-1917, G. Oberkofler (ed.), Graz : Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt. Fisette, D. (2015) “Introduction to Stumpf’s Lecture on Metaphysics”, 435-444. –– (2009) “Husserl à Halle (1886-1901)”, Philosophiques, Vol. 36, no. 2, 277-306. Frege, G. (1976) Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, G. Gabriel (ed.), Hamburg : Felix Meiner. Husserl, E. (1994) Briefwechsel. Die Brentanoschule, vol. I, E. et K. Schuhmann (eds.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 157-178 James, H., (ed.) (1920) The Letters of William James, 2 vol., Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. Langfeld, H. S. (1937) “Stumpf’s Introduction to Psychology”, The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 50, no. 1, 33-56. Lotze, R. H. (2003) Briefe und Dokumente (1833 – 1893), R. Pester (ed.), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Rollinger, R. (2008) Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, and Meinong on Mind and Object. Frankfurt: Ontos. –– (1999) Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Scherer, W. (1868) Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Berlin : Weidmann. Schuhmann, K. (2005) Selected Papers on Phenomenology, C. Leijenhorst and P. Steenbakkers (eds.), Berlin, Springer, 2005. –– (2000-2001) “Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff in seiner Hallenser Zeit”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 63–88. –– (1997) “Elements of the Logic of Carl Stumpf”, Axiomates, vol. 8, no 1, 105-123. –– (1996) “Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)”, in Albertazzi. L. et al. (eds.) The School of Franz Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 109-129. Sprung, H. (2006) Carl Stumpf - Eine Biografie, München : Profil Verlag. Stumpf, C. (1982-1983) “Carl Stumpf an Franz Hillebrand: Briefe 1894-1920”, in G. Oberkofler (ed.), Tiroler Heimat, no. 46-47, 145-157. –– (1928) William James nach seinen Briefen, Berlin: Pan Verlag. –– (1924): Carl Stumpf. in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung, vol. V. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1-57 –– (1901): “Bericht C. Stumpfs über Lotze‘s Briefe an ihn”, in R. Flackenberg, Hermann Lotze, Stuttgart: Fromanns Verlag, 1901, 193-194. Takasuna, M. (2006) “Die Stumpf-Sammlung in Japan”, in H. Sprung (2006), 450456.
INTRODUCTION TO STUMPF’S LECTURE ON METAPHYSICS DENIS FISETTE
The manuscript that we publish in this volume under the title “Metaphysik. Vorlesungen von Stumpf” has been transcribed by Husserl himself from notes taken by another of Stumpf’s students during a lecture on metaphysics that he delivered at the University of Halle.1 It is located in a notebook along with notes from Marty’s lecture on genetic psychology (1889) and fragmentary notes from Brentano's lecture on descriptive psychology (1887), which are kept at the Husserl Archives in Leuven under the signature Q 10. This manuscript probably dates from the winter semester 1886-1887 (see R. Rollinger, 1999, 201) and has been authenticated by Karl Schuhmann in his article “Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)”, which is a commentary on Stumpf’s syllabi and notes from his Halle lectures. The third part of this section briefly summarizes the content of this manuscript. (K. Schuhmann, 1996, 124-128) Despite the somewhat nebulous origin of this manuscript and some of its shortcomings, its value cannot be doubted both for Husserl studies and for the study of Stumpf’s philosophy. For in Stumpf’s published writings one can only find scattered remarks on metaphysics and Stumpf had not published anything substantial on this topic. However, he repeatedly stresses the importance of metaphysics throughout his writings, especially in his autobiography. (Stumpf, 1930, 414, 435) Stumpf’s interest in metaphysics dates back to his studies with Brentano in Würzburg. (see C. Stumpf, 1919, 97 ff.)2 He attended Brentano’s lecture on metaphysics in Würzburg and 1
The cover page of the manuscript, which was written by Malvine Husserl, bears the name of Carl Deetjen, about whom we only know that he was a student in philosophy at Halle in the late 1880s. The only evidence we have is the list of members of the Goethe Society in Halle published in the Vierte Jahrschrift der Goethe-Gesellschaft in 1888 (p. 34), in which figure the names of the student in philosophy Carl Deetjen and Carl Stumpf in the membership of the city of Halle. (L. Geiger, 1889) 2 K. Schuhmann (1996, 114) reports that Stumpf handed over all his lecture notes to
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took extensive shorthand notes in an in-quarto volume of 822 pages. (C. Stumpf, 1919a, 104) These lecture notes served probably as the basis for Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics, which he repeatedly delivered at Göttingen, Würzburg, Prague, Halle and later in Munich. We also know that soon after his habilitation thesis in Göttingen in 1870, Stumpf began writing a critical history of the concept of substance, a project that he soon abandoned as he explained in his autobiography: As my first real serious work, I attempted to undertake a critical history of the concept of substance, over which I racked my brain most awfully until I abandoned the problem, and, during Easter of 1872, I took up the psychological [396] theme of the origin of concept of space. With respect to the relation between color and extension I believed, and still believe, to find a striking example or analogue of the relation which metaphysics assumes to exist among the qualities of a substance. Thus the new problem was connected with my old work. (Stumpf, 1930, 395-396)3
This is in substance the position he took in § 5 of the Raumbuch. Moreover, in the preface to his edition of Stumpf’s last work Erkenntnislehre, his son Felix Stumpf stated that his father had planned a general overview of his philosophy which was to include, in addition to the two volumes on the theory of knowledge published shortly after Stumpf’s death, two other books, one on ethics and another on metaphysics. Yet the documents that were to be used for the other two parts of this project appear to have been destroyed during the Second World War. Hence the importance of these lecture notes on metaphysics, as well as the syllabus and lecture notes on logic that survived this destruction. (see D. Fisette, 2015b) This document written by Husserl is also valuable for this as of yet unknown period in the development of the young Husserl’s thought. His debt to Brentano in Vienna (1884-1886) and to Stumpf in Halle the Brentano archives in Prague. 3 Stumpf explicitly related this critical history of the concept of substance to the central thesis of his Raumbuch in a footnote to the first volume of Erkenntnislehre (C. Stumpf, 1939-1940, 24), in which he claims that the central idea of an inseparable link between size and color, for example, occurred to him during his conversations with Brentano, and this idea refers to the Aristotelian doctrine of an “indivisible content of perception”.
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(1886-1889) with respect to logic and descriptive psychology, for example, is relatively well documented. (see K. Schuhmann, 2005, 2000-2001, 1997, 1996; R. Rollinger, 1999, 2008; D. Fisette, 2009) However, the situation is different regarding Husserl’s interest on issues relating to metaphysics. It is now known that a few months after defending his habilitation thesis on the concept of number, Husserl delivered, in 1887, his inaugural lecture at the University of Halle on the topic “Über Ziele und Aufgaben der Metaphysik” which unfortunately has never been recovered. We also know that metaphysical questions were central in his teaching in Halle. Indeed, several lectures taught by Husserl during this period were either specifically on metaphysics, or on related topics such as theism, free will, or on the proofs of the existence of God. (see H. Gerlach and H. Sepp, 1994, 35 f.) Now, since little remains of Husserl’s lectures during this period, the readers of the work of the young Husserl can see in these lecture notes the background and the starting point of the young Husserl’s thought on metaphysics. That said, the content of Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics justifies its publication. It actually contains valuable information about the main branches of metaphysics, the delimitation of this vast field with respect to science and philosophy, the most important debates of his time on that subject, and the relevance of metaphysical questions in philosophy. The lecture is divided into four sections, each corresponding to the four main branches of metaphysics: the theory of knowledge or transcendental philosophy, which occupies the major part of the document and which focuses primarily on the possibility of our knowledge of the external world. The second section regarding ontology is discussed by Stumpf in his lecture on the basis of the two following questions (463): I. Parts of things; II. Causes and laws of things. The third branch of metaphysics is theology, which deals with the proofs of the existence of a foundation of the world. The last branch of metaphysics is cosmology, and one of the main topics discussed in the lecture notes is whether there is a logical contradiction in the concept of actual infinite. In his lecture, Stumpf presents at the outset the traditional definition of metaphysics understood as “the science of the general determinations and laws of the effective, of the real” (die Wissenschaft von den allgemeinen Bestimmungen und Gesetzen des Wirklichen, des Realen) (443), and then asks what is the specific place of this disci-
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pline in the system of the sciences. As he will do later in his article “On the Classification of Sciences,” Stumpf proposes to approach this issue from the perspective of the classification of the sciences and what he later called a philosophy of experience (Erfahrungsphilosophie). This classification is based indeed on the cardinal distinction put forth in Brentano’s book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint between two classes of phenomena, mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Although Stumpf does not refer to the notion of intentionality in his lecture on metaphysics, one finds in his lectures on psychology of 1886-1887 the notion of “content” as a criterion for the classification: “Every mental state has a content, is consciousness of a content. On the contrairy, a physical phenomenon does not include in this way a content” (Jeder psychische Zustand hat einen Inhalt, ist Bewußtsein eines Inhalts. Dagegen ein physisches Phänomen schließt nicht in dieser Weise einen Inhalt ein)”. (Q 11-1, 52) This distinction between two classes of phenomena is at the basis of Stumpf’s classification of sciences, and it confers to psychology and physics a privileged role within the system of sciences. For these two disciplines lie at the foundation of the general division between natural and human sciences within the system of the sciences. As Stumpf explained in his lecture, this classification makes a first delineation of the domain of metaphysics possible: Let us call that science that seeks to explain all phenomena of physical life and to trace them back to their ultimate causes, physics in the broadest sense, and psychology the science that seeks to achieve the same in the psychical domain, then metaphysics has to deal with those phenomena which belong together to these two major domains. In both we speak of parts, changes, and laws. (444)
In other words, metaphysics accounts for general issues that are common to these two broad categories of disciplines, but which are not specifically studied by any of them. But unlike classical metaphysics, which is built a priori, metaphysics as it is taught by Stumpf in his lectures on metaphysics, is based on experience, it is continuous with the empirical sciences and it therefore proceeds in bottom-up fashion. (C. Stumpf, 1906a, 50.) Hence Stumpf’s definition of metaphysics put forth in his lecture “as the science of the general determinations and laws of the domains of internal and external experience” (als die Wissenschaft von den allgemeinen Bestimmungen und Gesetzen auf dem
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Gebiete der äußeren und inneren Erfahrung). (2)4 The field of internal experience is that of psychical phenomena, or of what Stumpf calls mental functions, which internal perception provides access to; the domain of external experience is that of physical phenomena through which we gain access to the objects of the external world. Although Stumpf unequivocally rejects the phenomenalist conception of science, he nevertheless advocates the empiricist theory of the origin of concepts in experience, which provides the foundation and the material for the formation of concepts. This is the central thesis of Stumpf’s Raumbuch: space is a moment or an attribute of the visual field, for example. (Stumpf, 1873, § 5) This thesis is reiterated without any modification at the beginning of his posthumous work Erkenntnislehre, where Stumpf argues that the formation of elementary concepts such as sound and color, as well as the general concepts of relation, causality, law, reality, etc. have their origins in experience, and more specifically in sensory contents. All these concepts are the result of a process of abstraction based on sense perception. These core concepts are concepts of relation (Verhälnisbegriffe) whose study falls within that branch of metaphysics that he calls, following Brentano, ontology. However, the question of the origin of concepts, which belongs to psychology understood in a broad sense, should not be confused with the question of the origin and justification of knowledge, which falls within the theory of knowledge. (see C. Stumpf, from 1939 to 1940, § 2) This definition of the theory of knowledge (or what is also called transcendental philosophy) explains why this discipline constitutes the first branch of metaphysics whose task is to study the conditions of possibility and the justification of our knowledge of the external world. By outside world, Stumpf means the “sum of things that exist independently of my sensation, which can also in part possess a psychical life, and interact with each other and with me in a lawful manner” (Summe von Dingen, welche unabhängig von meiner Empfindung existieren, zum Teil auch selbst psychisches Leben besitzen können und aufeinander und auf mich in gesetzmäßiger Weise einwirken). (454, see 449) In the first part of his lectures, Stumpf discusses several 4
This definition corresponds exactly to the one Stumpf proposes in his lectures on metaphysics in Munich: “Die Metaphysik ist also die Wissenschaft von den allgemeinsten Bestimmungen und Gesetzten auf dem Gebiete der äußeren und der inneren Erfahrung”. (Pfänderiana J I-1P, 29)
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sceptical objections to the possibility of our knowledge of the external world, which I will not comment here.5 Stumpf’s central concern in the first part of his lectures rests on the distinction between three positions on the existence of the external world. The first, which he attributes to the Scottish philosopher T. Reid, for example, is called “common sense” realism (or intuitive theory) which maintains that “it is immediately obvious that there is in fact an outside world” (es sei unmittelbar gewiss, dass es überhaupt eine Außenwelt gebe). Against common sense realism, Stumpf opposes different versions of phenomenalism, that he attributes to Berkeley (esse est percipi, 450), Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill (the doctrine of permanent possibilities of sensation, 450), and Ernst Mach (his doctrine of elements), and whose common denominator is the thesis that “there is only mind, no body” (Es gibt nur Geister, keine Körper). Stumpf claims that these forms of phenomenalism lead directly to one form or another of idealism and solipsism, and he traces the source of this common phenomenalist error to the confusion between act and content of perception. Stumpf advocates a position that is halfway between naive realism and phenomenalism, namely what he calls mediate (mittelbar), indirect or hypothetical realism, which is commonly known as critical realism, and claims that “the existence of the outside world is a truth and also knowledge that is however not immediate but mediate” (Die Existenz der Außenwelt ist eine Wahrheit und auch eine Erkenntnis, aber diese Erkenntnis ist nicht eine unmittelbare, sondern eine mittelbare). (450) Stumpf argues that since the explanatory power of this realistic hypothesis has a higher degree of probability compared to the remaining hypotheses, we must adopt it. (456) 5
A sceptical argument that he discusses in these lectures is the classical argument of the subjectivity of knowledge that Stumpf examines in connection with the Kantian doctrine of space and time as a priori forms of subjectivity. Stumpf raises the following question: “Was muß als objektiv existierend angenommen werden, damit die Regelmäßigkeit der Erscheinungen und ihrer Aufeinanderfolge erklärt wird?” (p. 451). Stumpf replies that, from the perspective of critical realism, there must exist, outside of us, something analogous to the spatiotemporal relations that we represent intuitively. And since physics (and geometry) is mainly if not exclusively concerned with relations involved in the laws it uses in order to explain the regularities of phenomena, the sceptical argument amounts to admitting “dass nur unsere Relationsbegriffe subjektiv gültig seien (Einheit, Vielheit, Ganzes, Ursache etc..)”. (p. 459) Hence Stumpf’s solution to the sceptical argument that rests on the objectivity of relations.
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Ontology is the second main branch of metaphysics that deals, on the one hand, with the traditional theme of the categories, i.e. of the substance, its properties and relations, and on the other hand, with the causes and laws of things. Stumpf conceives of substance as a whole whose properties or moments are parts that bear relations of dependence to the whole. Unlike a sum, such as a herd of sheeps, for example, whose parts are separable, the parts of a whole are inseparable and can only be considered in themselves through abstraction or as abstracta. The paradigmatic example of a whole is consciousness whose unity must be understood as a whole consisting of mental functions (Q 11-1, 100-101). Following Brentano, Stumpf distinguishes three classes of parts: the physical, metaphysical, and logical parts. Physical parts, such as the spatial delineation of part of an object or the chemical elements of a body, are discussed in this lecture in relation to arguments that Stumpf opposes to atomism. The notion of metaphysical part refers to a property or an attribute of a thing or of a physical phenomenon such as the speed and direction of movement, for example, and this class of parts occurs both in the field of sensory phenomena (such as the extension and the intensity of a color or of the visual field) and in the psychological domain of mental functions (presentations which, as in Brentano, constitue the founding class in the classification of mental functions, can be conceived as parts or attributes of judgments or emotions, for example). These metaphysical parts are said to be dependent in that they cannot exist independently of the whole of which they are parts. There is not much in these lecture notes regarding the class of logical parts, except that they relate to genera and species, i.e. that the most general parts such as the human race, for instance, are included in the less general parts such as the species “rational animal”. Several other topics only mentioned in these notes also belong to the field of ontology, such as the theme of relations which is central in Stumpf’s works from his Raumbuch (§ 5) to Erkenntnislehre (19391940, 222 f.), including his Psychology of Sound (§ 6) and “On the Classification of Sciences”. (C. Stumpf, 1906a, 37-38) In the latter, Stumpf considers that the field of relations is so important for all sciences that he ranks the theory of relations among one of the three neutral sciences whose study is a prerequisite to both natural and social sciences. Another important topic that belongs to ontology is the mind-body problem. In his studies on Spinoza (Stumpf, 1919b) and in
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a short essay entitled “The Body and the Soul” (C. Stumpf, 1903), Stumpf criticizes the theory of parallelism that was dominant in the nineteenth century since Fechner and advocates instead a form of interactionism which recognizes the causal action of the psychical on the body and vice versa. (See D. Fisette, 2015a) Theology is considered as the third branch of metaphysics. Its main purpose lies in the search for a foundation or a principle of the universe. Stumpf distinguishes three types of proofs for the existence of such a basis. (467-468) He rules out the first two, i.e. the ontological argument and the cosmological argument, and seems to defend the physico-theological or teleological proof based on Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Another central question associated with this branch of metaphysics, the most difficult of all questions (C. Stumpf, 1924, 52), concerns the origin and meaning of evil, which Stumpf discusses in this lecture in relation to Lotze’s criticism of Leibniz’s theory of theodicy (464-465). Moreover, the problem of evil is Stumpf’s main argument against theism in his final work: The only decisive explanation for the existence of evil in the world is that the absolute itself is bound by the laws of nature, and that the latter are not opposed to the former in any extrinsic way, but rather pertain to its essence. This however is to proceed from theism to pantheism. (C. Stumpf, 1939-1940, 796)
Stumpf explains in this book that he abandoned as early as 1876 the form of theism advocated by Brentano (C. Stumpf, 1939-1940, 681, 798) and adopted a form of pantheism à la Spinoza. But Stumpf also observed in this work that Brentano himslef, in his last dictations, moved closer to a form of pantheism similar to that of Spinoza: But towards the end of his life, as shown by his last dictation, Brentano came closer, in very essential points and for reasons of strict necessity, to a more pantheistic vision reminiscent of that of Spinoza. (Stumpf, 1939-1940, 681)6
Cosmology is the fourth branch of metaphysics. It is delimited by the general question of the finite or infinite character of the world in space and time. Unfortunately, Husserl’s lecture notes on metaphysics con6
Stumpf (1939-1940, 798) refers in this passage to a dictation of 1915 that A. Kastil had published in his edition of Vom Dasein Gottes. (F. Brentano, 1929, 446 ff)
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tain no information on this issue. In turn Pfänder’s notes on Stumpf’s lecture on metaphysics contain some general remarks on the noncompatibility of the finitude of the world with God’s infinity. Stumpf also addresses the issue of infinity in his second study on Spinoza. (Stumpf, 1919b) But the Husserl’s and Pfänder’s lecture notes corroborate Stumpf’s general conclusion on cosmology: the world is “an eternal creation out of nothing” (eine ewige Schöpfung aus Nichts). References Brentano, F. (1929) Vom Dasein Gottes, Aus seinem Nachlasse, herausgegeben, eingeleitet und mit erläuternden Anmerkungen und Register versehen von Alfred Kastil, Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag. Fisette, D. (2015a) “The Reception and Actuality of Carl Stumpf. An Introduction”, 11-53. –– (2015b) “Introduction to Archivalia”, 425-434. –– (2009) “Husserl à Halle (1886-1901)”, Philosophiques, vol. 36, no. 2, 277-306 Geiger, L. (ed.) (1889) Goethe_Jahrbuch, Mit dem vierten Jahresbericht der GoetheGesellschaft, vol. II, Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1889. Gerlach, H. and H. Sepp, (eds.) (1994) Husserl in Halle, Peter Lang: Bern. Rollinger, R. (2008) Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, and Meinong on Mind and Object. Frankfurt: Ontos. –– (1999) Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Schuhmann, K. (2005) Selected Papers on Phenomenology, C. Leijenhorst and P. Steenbakkers (eds.), Berlin, Springer, 2005. –– (2000-2001) “Stumpfs Vorstellungsbegriff in seiner Hallenser Zeit”, Brentano Studien, vol. 9, 63–88. –– (1997) “Elements of the logic of Carl Stumpf”, Axiomates, vol. 8, no 1, p. 105-123. –– (1996) “Carl Stumpf (1848-1936)”, in Albertazzi. L. et al. (eds.), The School of Franz Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 109-129. Stumpf, C. (2015) “Metaphysik Vorlesung von Stumpf”, 445-474. –– (1939-1940), Erkenntnislehre, 2 vol., Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– (1924) “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung, vol. V, Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1-57; English tr. by T. Hodge & S. Langer, in C. Murchison (ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, Worcester: Clark University Press, 389-441, 1930. –– (1919a) “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in O. Kraus (ed.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Oskar Beck, 87-149; English tr. “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano” by L. McAlister, in L. McAlister (ed.), The Philosophy of Franz Brentano, London: Duckworth, 1976, 10-46. –– (1919b) “Spinozastudien”, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Verlag der Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-57. –– (1906a) “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften”, Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-94.
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–– (1906b) “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen”, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, p. 3-40. –– (1903) Leib und Seele. Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie. Zwei Reden, Leipzig: Barth. –– (1883) Tonpsychologie, vol. I. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (1873) Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
METAPHYSIK VORLESUNG VON CARL STUMPF (DEETJEN)1
[179] Die Meinungen über die Metapysik gehen sehr weit auseinander. Die einen nennen sie die Königin der Wissenschaften, die anderen sprechen sich sehr geringschätzig über sie aus. „Sammlung von Spitzfindigkeiten und Hirngespinsten“ etc. (Faust). Im allgemeinen: „frommes Streben, das keine Aussicht hat“. Auch hier werden wie sonst häufig die Tadler weniger wissen, was sie tadeln, als die Lober,2 was sie loben. Über die Auslegung des Namens großer Streit. Man hat das τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά erklären wollen als Gegenstand der Wissenschaft, welche sich mit dem Hinter- (Über-)natürlichen beschäftigt. Diese Wissenschaft ist aber eigentlich die Theologie; und außerdem verträgt sich die Auslegung nicht recht mit der Grammatik. Der Name hatte ursprünglich eine ganz äußerliche Bedeutung. Andronikus. Daher ist es ganz lächerlich, von einer Metageometrie oder Metamathematik zu reden. Definition: Metaphysik ist die Wissenschaft von den allgemeinen Bestimmungen und Gesetzen des Wirklichen, des Realen. Wo findet sich im System der Wissenschaften ein Platz für die Metaphysik. Jedenfalls ist sie eine abstrakte Wissenschaft. Aber apriori oder aposteriori? Seit den ältesten Zeiten Spaltung in die zwei Lager der Aprioristen und Empiristen. Zu den ersteren gehören vor allem die Eleaten, und eine der ihren ähnliche Lehre stellte Herbart auf, der je1
This title page of the manuscript was written by Malvine Husserl in longhand. The rest of the manuscript is written in the hand of Edmund Husserl. Though most of the manuscript is written in Gabelsberger stenography, Husserl wrote a few words in longhand. 2 The word Lober is no longer in use, but it was used in the nineteenth century.
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doch nicht an der Einheit alles Seienden festhielt, sondern Pluralist ist. Noch näher steht den Eleaten Spinoza. (Es gibt nur eine absolute Substanz: alle Vielheit, alle Veränderung in dieser Substanz.) Nach derselben apriorischen Methode kam Hegel zu einer ganz entgegengesetzten Anschauung (mittels weniger Schlüsse). Das ist schon sehr verdächtig. Es erklärt sich aber daraus, dass jeder in den Begriff andere Merkmale hineingelegt hatte, die dann natürlich in ihm gefunden werden (Mill). Fehlgriffe beweisen aber nicht Unrichtigkeit. Wir können aber ruhig das weitere Experimentieren denen überlassen, welche Lust dazu haben. Uns bietet die empirische Methode begründete Aussicht auf Erfolg in metaphysischen Forschungen. Nennen wir jene Wissenschaft, welche alle Erscheinungen des physischen Lebens zu erklären und auf ihre letzten Gründe zurückzuführen strebt, Physik im weitesten Sinn, und jene, welche das gleiche auf psychischem Gebiete zu erreichen sucht, Psychologie, so hat sich die Metaphysik mit jenen Erscheinungen zu beschäftigen, welche diesen beiden großen Gebieten gemeinsam zukommen. In beiden spricht man von Teilen, Veränderungen, Gesetzen. Man wir also die Metaphysik geradezu definieren können: als die Wissenschaft von den allgemeinen Bestimmungen und Gesetzen auf dem Gebiete der äußeren und inneren Erfahrung. Wenn sich daneben auch Gesetze apriori ableiten lassen, umso besser. In neuer Zeit besteht ein mächtiger Zug zur Metaphysik, besonders von Seiten der Naturforscher. Ob ein Weg gangbar ist, was immer erst dann erkannt wird, wenn er betreten wird. Wir stimmen Kant bei, dass es notwendig ist die Grenzen der Erkenntnis zu untersuchen. Die Metaphysik ist die allgemeinste Wissenschaft, nicht aber die höchste Wissenschaft, wenn anders eine Wissenschaft umso höher steht, je allgemeiner sie ist. Sie ist konkreteste Wissenschaft, insofern es ihre Aufgabe ist, die Begriffe so knapp als möglich den Tatsachen anzupassen. Sie ist die schwierigste Wissenschaft, da zugleich die größte Kenntnis im Erfahrungsgebiet verlangt wird. Andererseits ist sie aber die ungenaueste, da der kleinste Fehler verhängnisvoll wird. Er hängt vom Gemüt ab etc. Wir begreifen nun auch die eigentümliche Geschichte der Metaphysik. Sie ist die älteste und in gewissem Sinn auch jüngste Wissenschaft und wird in gewissem Sinn auch immer die jüngste, weil abhängigste Wissenschaft bleiben. Häufig wird hingewiesen auf die Ori-
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ginalität und Jugendfrische der griechischen Philosophie. „Die Philosophie ist eine Mutter, welche unter dem Undank ihre Kinder liebt“ (Lotze). Die Standpunkte der verschiedenen philosophischen Auffassungen sind allerdings schon im Altertum begründet. Aber Originalität um jeden Preis ist ja auch nicht das Ziel der Wissenschaft, sondern die Wahrheit. Hauptteile der Metaphysik 1. Erkenntnistheorie oder Transzendentalphilosophie. (Subjektivität und Relativität der Begriffe. Aufdeckung und Lösung von Widersprüchen) 2. Ontologie. Begriff und Kriterium der Wirklichkeit. Über Teile etc. Monismus und Dualismus. Ursachen und Gesetze des Seienden. 3. Theologie. Frage nach dem ersten Grund und besondere Untersuchungen über Teleologie. 4. Kosmologie, von der Welt als einem Ganzen handelnd.- Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit der Welt. Entwicklung. Dies sind die Hauptteile der Metaphysik, wie sie von jeher unterschieden wurden, mit Ausnahme des ersten, welchen Kant einführt, Locke aber schon antizipiert hatte. Religionsphilosophie, Naturphilosophie, Geschichtsphilosophie sind besondere Gebiete der Metaphysik, welche herausgehoben werden. 1 Erkenntnistheorie Möglichkeit der Erkenntnis, besonders der Außenwelt. Gegenüber dem Skeptizismus aller Zeiten. Schon im Altertum gab es Skeptiker. 1. „Alles ist ewige Veränderung, daher unerkennbar”. Plato hat daher die ganze Erkenntnis der Sinnenwelt preisgegeben. 2. Ein anderes, ebenfalls antikes Argument stützt sich auf die Tatsache der Sinnestäuschungen und Träume. Weitere Argumente: 3. „Alles was wir wahrnehmen, sind doch nur unsere sinnlichen Empfindungen”. 4. Relativität alles unseres Vorstellens, insbesondere in räumlicher und zeitlicher Beziehung; die absolute Größe der Dinge ist unmöglich zu erkennen.- Ebenso bei der Zeit und Bewegung.- Die sinnlichen Qualitäten ebenfalls relativ. Aber nicht bloß relativ, sondern auch subjektiv.- Diese Lehre tauchte zuerst auf in Bezug auf unsere Sinnesvorstellungen: Farben, Töne, Gerüche, Geschmäcke. Die Interferenz des Lichts beweist, dass das Licht, so wie wir es wahrnehmen, nicht objektiv sein kann. Unsere Empfindungen entstehen nicht direkt durch Einwirkung der Objekte, sondern
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durch Vermittlung der Nerven. Kant versucht auch Raum und Zeit als subjektiv zu erweisen. Gründe zum Teil erkenntnistheoretisch („nur synthetische apriorische Gesetze geben uns eine Erkenntnis. Und setzen voraus die Existenz apriorischer subjektiver Formen”), zum Teil psychologische („Diese Vorstellungen können nicht durch Wahrnehmung erworben werden, müssen also apriori sein”). Diese Ansicht wurde von späteren Psychologen ausgeführt. „Raumempfindung entsteht durch eine allmähliche Verknüpfung verschiedener Vorstellungen”. Ähnlich bezüglich der Zeit. (Die Gegenwart allein ist nicht die Zeit. Vergangenes aber kann man nicht sehen, nicht hören, nicht empfinden). Hume: auch der Kausalbegriff, dessen wir doch zur wissenschaftlichen Erklärung der Wirklichkeit unbedingt bedürfen, wird uns nicht durch die Wahrnehmung gegeben (weder in der äußeren noch in der inneren Erfahrung). Und dasselbe weist Hume hinsichtlich des Substanzbegriffs nach. Diese Argumente bewogen Kant, auch Kausalität und Substanz als bloße subjektive Formen, als Formen des Denkens zu erklären, während Raum und Zeit Formen der Anschauung. Aber nicht nur relativ und subjektiv sind unsere Vorstellungen, sondern es sind auch Widersprüche darin enthalten. So z.B. bezüglich des Raumes. Angenommen der Raum sei, als was ist er zu fassen? Da sind nur drei Möglichkeiten. Der Raum ist 1. entweder Substanz und dann als etwas Ausgedehntes ein Körper 2. ist eine Eigenschaft 3. Beziehung. Gegen 1. wird gesagt: als Körper müßte der Raum wieder in einem Raum sein etc. ins Unendliche. Gegen 2.: Der Raum bleibt, wenn der Körper sich bewegt, er geht nicht mit. Gegen 3.: Eine bloße Beziehung kann der Raum schon darum nicht sein, weil es keine Beziehung gibt ohne ein Fundament, ohne eine absolute Eigenschaft. Es gibt ja räumliche Beziehungen (vor, hinter etc.), aber diese müssen gründen in räumlichen Eigenschaften. Dies nun hat manche dahin geführt, den Raum überhaupt zu leugnen. Er ist nichts Natürliches und Kreatürliches, sondern Gott selbst. Raum = das sensorium Dei (Newton). Das ist absurd. Denn der Raum ist teilbar; aber zwei Meter vom lieben Gott?! Besondere Widersprüche sind im Begriff der Größe, besonders von den scharfsinnigen Eleaten, bemerkt worden. Hier ist der Begriff des
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Teils entscheidend. Z.B. Ein Ausgedehntes muß aus unendlich vielen Teilen bestehen. Nun ist aber eine unendliche Zahl von Teilen an sich schon eine Absurdität, denn schon der Begriff einer unendlichen Zahl schließt eine Absurdität ein. Denn auch die unendliche Zahl muß doch eine bestimmte Zahl sein. Eine Zahl erhält ihre Bestimmtheit durch die letzte Einheit, welche aber bei der unendlichen Zahl ex hypothesi fehlt. Die unendliche Zahl wäre eine gerade und ungerade Zahl zugleich. Ersteres, weil ihre Hälfte unendlich, letzteres, weil unendlich 1 = unendlich. Folglich gibt es nicht unendlich viele Teile, folglich keine körperlichen Dinge. Ferner. Haben die Teile einer Größe selbst wieder eine Größe oder nicht? Wenn letzteres: so 0 + 0 + 0 + ...., was unmöglich angenommen werden kann. Angenommen, ersteres wäre der Fall, so fragt es sich, ob diese Größe unendlich klein ist oder nicht. Wenn letzteres, so ergibt sich für die Ausdehnung des Ganzen eine unendliche Größe. Wenn ersteres, so = unendlich kleine Größe, dann müßte sich also eine Größe ergeben, die hinzugefügt nichts vergrößert, abgezogen nichts verringert. Ferner: Es müßten sich doch diese Teile berühren. Kontinuum. Es ist aber unmöglich, dass zwei Punkte sich berühren. Oder bei entgegengesetzter Ansicht entgegengesetzte Schwierigkeiten. Aus den zwei Punkten, die sich berühren sollen, erhalten wir eine unendliche Anzahl von Punkten. Berührungsproblem (Pascal). Dauer bei der Zeit dasselbe wie Ausdehnung beim Raum. Schwierigkeiten in den Bewegungsproblemen. (Zeno, 450). Seine vier Probleme sind auf zwei zu reduzieren. Fliegender Pfeil: Absurdität, dass etwas an zwei Orten zugleich sein kann, und ferner, dass zwei Raumpunkte aneinander grenzen sollten. Achill: unendliche Teilbarkeit.- Ähnliche Schwierigkeiten lassen sich in Bezug auf andere Veränderungen der Größe geltend machen: z.B. Expansion der Gase. Schwierigkeit der Dinge mit Eigenschaften (auch den einzelnen Atomen sind Eigenschaften zuzusprechen). Absurdes Verhältnis, dass ein und dasselbe zugleich rot und weich sein soll. Denn zwei können doch nicht zugleich eins sein. Besonders schwierig, da doch rot und weich heterogen sind. Eher sollte man es für möglich halten, dass etwas zugleich rot und grün sei. Dagegen von alters her die Scheinauskunft: „Einheit dem Wesen nach ist nicht Einheit dem Subjekt nach. Das Ding ist nicht die vielen Einheiten, sondern hat dieselben.” Dagegen Herbart: Das involviert genau dieselben Schwierigkeiten. Jetzt ist dreierlei zu unterscheiden: z.B. der Körper, die Schwere und das Be-
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sitzen der Schwere. Nun ist entweder dieses Besitzen eine Eigenschaft oder es muß ein Besitzen des Besitzens einer Eigenschaft angenommen werden etc. ins Unendliche. Oder wenn der Körper selbst der Besitzer der Schwere ist, so ist er auch der Besitzer der Farbe etc. Und dann dieselbe Schweirigkeit wie oben. Manche sagen: Vielleicht gebe es wirklich Widersprechendes. Hegel: „Alles wahrhaft Wirkliche muß Widerspruch in sich schließen”. Andere, die sich entschlossen hatten, den Unsinn für wirklich zu halten, schafften alle Vorstellungen von Bewegung, Teil, Ding mit Eigenschaften etc. hinaus. So Herbart (es gibt nichts Sicheres, aber Wahrscheinliches), was dann allerdings etwas ist, wobei man sich nichts denken kann. Die Möglichkeit der Erkenntnis der Innenwelt wird ebenfalls bestritten. Widerspruch im Begriff des Ich (Ich des Ich etc.). Bestreitung der Gültigkeit der Axiome. „Unser Wissen ist entweder analytisch oder synthetisch. Wenn analytisch, so nichts Neues, wenn synthetisch, so nichts Begreifliches. Also keine Evidenz, keine Erkenntnis”. Angriffe gegen die Theorie des Schließens, besonders gegen die Möglichkeit des induktiven Verfahrens. Gegen die gesamte Erkenntnis: „Ich kann meiner Erkenntnisfähigkeit doch nicht blind vertrauen. Ich kann sie aber auch nicht prüfen, denn dazu müßte ich bereits Erkenntnisfähigkeit voraussetzen. Circulus vitiosus.” Dieser Schluß wird auf alle Erkenntnis überhaupt angewendet. Also auch gegen die Axiome. Ist meine Natur einmal falsch eingerichtet, so versteht es sich von selbst, dass ich nicht aus meinen Irrtümern herauskann. Ein absoluter Skeptizismus ist ein unhaltbarer Standpunkt. Man kann nicht daran zweifeln, dass man zweifelt.- Daher auch die Skeptiker aller Zeiten keinen Gebrauch davon machen. (Pyrrhon reißt vor einem tollen Hund aus. Und Hume sagt, dass ihm beim Tarockspielen sein ganzer Skeptizismus flöten gehe.) Ferner stellt der Skeptiker positive Behauptungen als Bedingungen auf. Wie kann er das? Indem er diese beweisen will, stützt er sich wieder auf andere Tatsachen. Münchhausens Zopf. Der akademische Skeptizismus ist ebenfalls unmöglich. (cf. Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung: 11/12 x 11/12 etc. Es gab auch nicht eine andere Wahrscheinlichkeit.) Die Lösung der meisten Schwierigkeiten liegt darin, dass wir tatsächlich evidente Erkenntnis haben. Axiome und innere Wahrneh-
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mung. Zeugnis des Bewußtseins. Und dass es Wege der mittelbaren Erkenntnis gibt, besonders durch Syllogismus und Induktion. Mit der Behauptung, wir hätten verschiedene Erkenntniskräfte, von denen eine die andere prüft, läßt sich nicht viel machen. Wenn auch a durch b, b durch c, c durch d geprüft wird, wodurch wird d geprüft? Doch wieder durch a oder b etc. Also Zirkel. Wir prüfen unsere Erkenntnis durch unsere Erkenntnis. Aber bildet etwa das Vertrauen auf unsere Erkenntniskräfte eine Bedingung zur Erkenntnis? Offenbar nicht. Wir erkennen durch die Erkenntniskräfte als Mittel und Werkzeug, nicht aber als Prinzip. „Wir können aber diesen Kräften doch nicht blind vertrauen und sie auch prüfen”. Das Dilemma ist in dieser Form unvollständig. Ich kann auch sehend vertrauen. Unser Vertrauen zu den Erkenntniskräften ist nicht ein blindes Vertrauen, noch ein erzwungenes. Notwendiger Zwang ist etwa dann vorhanden, wenn wir z.B. blind glauben müßten, dass die Zahl der Fixsterne eine Quadrimillion + 1 sei. Hier aber haben wir einfach Evidenz. Es bleibt uns übrig eine Erwiderung auf die Bezweiflung einer Möglichkeit einer Erkenntnis der Außenwelt.3 Außenwelt = Summe von Dingen, welche unabhängig von meiner Empfindung existieren (von denen auch ein Teil selbst psychisches Leben besitzen kann) und welche in gesetzmäßiger Weise auf mein Bewußtsein und mein Empfinden einwirken. Indem die Vorstellungen uns sicher sind, sind uns auch die Inhalte der Vorstellungen als wirklich gegeben. Die Erscheinungen sind uns als Erscheinungen unmittelbar sicher. Wie ist es aber mit der Wirklichkeit?4 Diskussion darüber besonders in neuer Zeit besonders lebhaft. Zwei extreme Anschauungen5 1. Die intuitive Theorie. Es ist unmittelbar einleuchtend, dass es eine Außenwelt gibt und dass sie so ist, wie sie uns erscheint. Eine gemäßigte Form des Intuitivismus behauptet, es sei unmittelbar gewiß, dass es überhaupt eine Außenwelt gebe. Diese Anschauung hat die Meinung des gemeinen Mannes und des common sense auf ihrer Seite. Kinder, Tiere. Besonders der Schotte Reid etc. erhoben den gemei3
Außenwelt m. Blaust. unterstr. Wirklichkeit m. Blaust. unterstr. 5 Zwei extreme Anschauungen m. Blaust. unterstr. 4
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nen Menschenverstand zur Richtschnur der Philosophie. In Deutschland Jacobi (Glaubensphilosophie). 2. Die phänomenalistische (idealistische) Theorie. Es ist selbstverständlich, dass es keine Außenwelt gibt. Berkeley, einer der schärfsten Köpfe 1710 und viele Anhänger. Diese Lehre auch heute noch mehr vertreten als die intuitive. „Es gibt nur Geister, keine Körper”. In Frankreich unabhängig von Berkeley Ansätze zur phänomenalistischen Theorie bei Malebranche. In England die ganze empiristische Schule, in neuer Zeit besonders Mill und Bain. Gerade die extremsten Empiristen. In Deutschland ein Apriorist, Fichte. Fichte, Bestimmung des Menschen (eine der wenigen Schriften Fichtes, die man verstehen kann). Bei allen ein Hauptargument: Alles was ich wahrnehme, ist mir nur als Wahrgenommenes bekannt. Was ich Raum nenne, ist eo ipso nichts anderes als ein Inhalt meiner Wahrnehmung. Ich spreche immer nur von Wahrnehmungsbildern. Alles was ich vorstellen mag, ist und bleibt eine Vorstellung. Berkeley: esse = percipi. Fichte: in allem Wahrgenommenen nimmst du lediglich deinen eigenen Zustand wahr. „Es ist unsinnig, eine Materie anzunehmen und den Raum auszustopfen.” Über die positive Theorie der Außenwelt nach diesen phänomenalistischen Philosophen. Berkeley: Gott ist es, der mit einer gewissen Regelmäßigkeit (Naturgesetze) diese Bilder in uns erweckt. Ähnlich Fichte, der aber keinen Gott, sondern eine unpersönliche Weltordnung statuiert. Eine Ordnung aber wäre allerdings eine Wirkung, die einer Ursache bedürfte. Fichte selbst ist später von dieser pantheistischen Unklarheit zurückgekommen und hat einen mehr persönlichen Gott angenommen. Mill bildete die Theorie der permanent possibilities of sensation in psychologischer Analyse aus, der auch Bain beipflichtet. Z.B. ich sehe jetzte den Ofen, habe gewisse Gesichtempfindungen; wenn ich darauf fortsehe und nun sage, der Ofen besteht fort, so heißt das: es besteht die Möglichkeit, diesen Ofen, wenn ich will, wiederzusehen: fortdauernde Möglichkeit der Empfindungen. Von ähnlichen Muskelempfindungen (die also bekannt sein müssen) erwarte ich gleiche Gesichtsempfindungen usw. Die Sprache nun hat für diese fortdauernden Möglichkeiten Namen erfunden, welche nun zu der Meinung verleiten, als würde mit ihnen eine besondere Realität bezeichnet (Hypostasierung). Aber die Theorie ist nicht vollständig. Es gibt Gruppen von permanenten Möglichkeiten, welche wieder besondere
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Tatsachen sind, und auch zu solchen Hypostasierungen verleiten (z.B. Apfel etc.). Diese Gruppen sind es besonders, welche wir als Substanzen, als Dinge bezeichnen. In der Mitte zwischen6 diesen extremen Theorien liegt 3. Der Realismus7 oder genauer: der mittelbare oder erschlossene Realismus gegenüber dem intuitiven Realismus. Die Existenz der Außenwelt ist eine Wahrheit und auch eine Erkenntnis, aber diese Erkenntnis ist nicht eine unmittelbare, sondern eine mittelbare. Auch diese Theorie unterliegt mehreren Modifikationen bei verschiedenen Philosophen. * ad 1)8 Die intuitive Theorie9 ist besonders vielen Einwürfen ausgesetzt. Die extreme Theorie (der extreme Intuitionismus):10 „An unsere Sinnesempfindungen ist unmittelbar die Evidenz geknüpft, dass die Dinge genauso existieren, wie sie empfunden werden, und auch dass sie existieren unabhängig von unserer Empfindung”. Letzteres bedarf keiner Widerlegung. Aber auch die erstere Behauptung ist sehr fraglich. Wenn die Evidenz sich an die Empfindung knüpft, warum nicht auch an die Phantasie? Es stellt sich mehr und mehr heraus, dass zwischen Empfindungen und Phantasievorstellungen nur ein gradueller Unterschied besteht. Umgekehrt haben unsere Träume oft dieselbe Lebhaftigkeit wie die Sinnesempfindungen, dennoch halten die Intuitionisten hier nicht den Gegenstand für wahr. Unsere Empfindungen widersprechen einander vielfach. Ein Körper erscheint z.B. dem Auge als Dreieck, dem Tastsinn als Pyramide. Auch Empfindungen desselben Sinnes widersprechen sich. So erscheint dem Auge dieselbe Linie in horizontaler Lage länger als in vertikaler. Jedes Ding kann in Wirklichkeit doch nur eine absolute Größe haben. Dennoch erscheint uns alles, je nach der Entfernung, in unendlich vielen verschiedenen Größen. Man sagt: Man muß sich auf den Tastsinn verlassen. Aber auch der Tastsinn ist Täuschungen unterworfen. Interferenz des Lichts. 6
In der Mitte zwischen m. Blaust. unterstr. Realismus m. Blaust. unterstr. 8 ad 1) Einf. m. Blaust. 9 Die intuitive Theorie m. Blaust. unterstr. 10 der extreme Intuitionismus m. Blaust. unterstr. 7
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Unsere Empfindungen sind offenbar nur Wirkungen von den Dingen und wir haben nicht von vornherein die Garantie, dass die Wirkungen den Ursachen qualitativ gleich sein müssen. Man beruft sich auf Kinder und Tiere, welche offenbar an die Existenz einer Außenwelt glauben. Für die Erklärung dieses Glaubens bestehen mehrere Theorien. Hartmann: unbewußte Schlüsse. Wir können von diesen keinen Gebrauch machen. Wie will man Kindern und Tieren unbewußte Schlüsse zuschreiben, wenn man ihnen nicht bewußte Schlüsse zuschreibt? Hartmann versucht es allerdings die Schwierigkeit zu lösen, indem er sagt, das Unbewußte denke in jedem von uns. Deus ex machina. Es gibt andere Erklärungen dafür, dass alle Menschen und Tiere ohne Reflexion an die Existenz einer Außenwelt glauben. Es wird nämlich, solange nicht etwas entgegensteht (besonderes Mißtrauen), alles für wahr gehalten, was in die Erscheinung tritt. Man hält die Sinneserscheinungen deswegen für wirklich, weil man zuerst alle Erscheinungen für wahr hält.- Wir halten aber die Sinneserscheinungen auch für etwas von uns selbst Unabhängiges, unabhängig nicht von unserem Bewußtsein, sondern von unserem Körper. Diese Trennung von eigenem und fremden Körper kommt gleichfalls ganz mechanisch zustande. Gemäßigter Intuitionismus.11 „Soviel wenigstens ist unmittelbar sicher und wissenschaftlich einleuchtend, dass es eine Außenwelt überhaupt gibt.” Der gemäßigte Intuitionismus unterscheidt also zwischen Subjekt und Objekt. Für ihn ist die Existenz eines Objekts im allgemeinen gewiß. Die beste Stütze der extrem intuitionistischen Theorie, die Allgemeinheit des Glaubens, fällt in diesem Fall fort. Die Existenz von irgendetwas im allgemeinen ist nicht wohl zu bekämpfen, ohne seine Bestimmtheiten. (Es gibt Bäume - es gibt Laubbäume). Gegensatz zwishen Zustand und Inhalt dieses Zustands. Der Inhalt ist aber nichts Objektives, sondern nur etwas Subjektives. ad 2)12 Die phänomenalistische Theorie.13 Sie ist phänomenal auch in einem anderen Sinn, als es erstaunlich ist, dass so große Denker wie Mill sich mit solchen fortdauernden Möglichkeiten beholfen hatten. Widersprechende Konsequenzen: 11
Gemäßigter Intuitionismus m. Blaust. unterstr. ad 2) Einf. m. Blaust. 13 Die phänomenalistische Theorie m. Blaust. unterstr. 12
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Alle geben zu, dass außer dem Ich noch andere psychische Wesen existieren. Es wird also eine Außenwelt im allgemeinen von allen diesen Forschern anerkannt, nur ist sie keine physische, sondern eine psychische Außenwelt. Damit ist im Prinzip schon ein Realismus zugegeben. Der vermeintliche Phänomenalismus wäre also als Spiritualismus zu bezeichnen, und der eigentlich konsequente Phänomenalist oder Idealist wäre nur der Solipsist. Die Argumentationen der Phänomenalisten beziehen sich immer nur auf die materielle Außenwelt. Berkeley: esse = percipi. Wenn überhaupt etwas aus dieser Argumentation folgt, so folgt eo ipso auch die Unmöglichkeit der Existenz fremder psychischer Wesen. Wer zuviel beweist etc. Das ist freilich nur ein argumentum ad hominem. Fehler der Argumentation der Phänomenalisten: Alles was ich wahrnehme, ist nur meine Empfindung. Allerdings ist der primäre Inhalt meiner Wahrnehmung eine Farbe, ein Ton etc. Erst sekundär nehme ich auch den psychischen Vorgang selbst wahr. Die Unterscheidung wird erschwert durch die Zweideutigkeit der Sprache: Vorstellung = Akt des Vorstellens = Inhalt. Ebenso Wahrnehmung = Akt der Wahrnehmung = Inhalt der Wahrnehmung. So ist der Satz: In allen Wahrnehmungen nimmst du nur den Zustand wahr, von vornherein schon mißverständlich (Fichte). Es ist also gegen den Phänomenalismus einzuwenden: 1. Die Phänomenalisten verwechseln in unserer Wahrnehmung den Zustand und den Inhalt derselben. Das was wir wahrnehmen aber ist primär, nicht der Zustand unserer Wahrnehmung. 2. Wir vermögen nicht bloß primäre Inhalte vorzustellen, sondern auch zu beurteilen. Dies wird von den Phänomenalisten vernachlässigt. Wir nennen eine Materie existierend, auf welche sich eine Bejahung mit Recht bezieht. Nun soll darin ein Widerspruch liegen, dass die primären Inhalte unabhängig von der Vorstellung existieren sollen, während wir von ihnen doch nur Kunde haben als Inhalte des Vorstellens. Allerdings ist das vulgäre Bewußtsein hier in einer Unklarheit befangen, aber einen Widerspruch möchten wir das nicht nennen. Die Namen für Bäume, Häuser etc. bezeichnen die Inhalte unseres Vorstellens, aber auch die Dinge außerhalb unseres Vorstellens. Trennt man beides, so entsteht allerdings ein Widerspruch, wenn man sagt: „Haus, Baum etc., sofern sie Empfindungsinhalte sind, existieren auch außerhalb unserer Empfindung”. Fügt man aber hinzu: Bäume, Häuser etc. sind auch unabhängig von der Empfindung existierende Objekte,
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welche den Empfindungsvorstellungen gleichen, so ist kein Widerspruch mehr vorhanden. Dieser Satz läßt sich allerdings wissenschaftlich nicht halten. Vom Standpunkt des Phänomenalismus läßt sich nun replizieren: Etwas was den Empfindungsinhalten gleich wäre, ist ein Abstraktum. Ist es nun ein wissenschaftliches Verfahren, etwas, das wir nur in dieser Weise kennen, anders wie als Fiktion zu verwenden? Wir kennen z.B. ein empirisches Ausgedehntes nur in Verbindung mit Schwere. Dennoch ist eine Trennung von ihr durchaus nicht unwissenschaftlich. Ebenso wird in der Psychologie und anderwärts von unbewußten psychischen Zuständen gesprochen. Dies ist offenbar Abstraktion, aber trotzdem wird man nicht sagen können, dass diese Annahme entsprechendes enthielte. ad 3) 14 Realistische Theorie. 15 Eine logische Unmöglichkeit liegt also in der realistischen Auffassung nicht vor. Läßt sich nun aber zu ihren Gunsten vielleicht auch ein positives Argument beibringen? Als Definition des Begriffs der Außenwelt halten wir fest: „Summe von Dingen, welche unabhängig von meiner Empfindung existieren, zum Teil auch selbst psychisches Leben besitzen können und aufeinander und auf mich in gesetzmäßiger Weise einwirken.” Wir können zu einem Resultat natürlich nur auf dem Wege der Kausalschlüsse gelangen. In einer einzelnen Empfindung finden wir keinen Anhalt. Wir müssen auf den Zusammenhang, die Aufeinanderfolge unserer Empfindungen achten. Würden wir eine absolute Regelmäßigkeit unserer Empfindungen vorfinden, so wäre die Annahme einer Außenwelt kaum gerechtfertigt: abc...z abc....z etc. Sie könnte in der Natur unserer Empfindungen selbst liegen, eine Hypothese, welche sogar bei weitem einfacher wäre. Es zeigt sich aber faktisch weder eine absolute Regelmäßigkeit noch eine absolute Unregelmäßigkeit. Mit jenen permanenten Möglichkeiten der Empfindungen hat es also schon seinen Haken. Keineswegs erfolgt immer auf eine Empfindung eine bestimmte erwartete andere. Dass es Kausalgesetze der Empfindungen gebe, ist jedenfalls eine falsche Hypothese, denn sonst würde immer auf Blitz Donner folgen müssen. Gewisse Erscheinungen sind immer vorhanden, insbesondere solche, die durch wilkürliche Erregung meiner Muskelgefühle ins Bewußtsein treten (Bewegungen be14 15
ad 3) Einf. m. Blaust. Realistische Theorie m. Blaust. unterstr.
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stimmter Art), welche uns zur Annahme äußerer Dinge treiben. Ich spaziere z.B. wiederholt in einer Allee. Es treten in mein Bewußtsein dieselben optischen Bilder wie früher, wenn meine Bewegung relativ zu den Gegenstände dieselbe ist und, was besonders wichtig ist, ich kann die Veränderungen voraussehen. Indem wir nun diese Hypothese einführen, gewinnen wir wieder ein Mittel zur Erklärung von tausendundeinen Erscheinungen. Einwände aus der Bestimmung der Wahrscheinlichkeit. 1. „Ihr nehmt eine unendliche Anzahl von Dingen an, und wenn wir auch für jedes einzelne die Wahrscheinlichkeit 1/2 annehmen, so potenziert sich doch die Unwahrscheinlichkeit ins Unendliche”. 2. „Dass die Dinge aufeinander kausal einwirken sollen, ist gleichfalls von unendlich kleiner Wahrscheinlichkeit”. 3. Ferner: „Es sollen Wesen außer mir existieren, welche ganz derselben Empfindungen, Vorstellungen etc. fähig sind wie ich. Während doch dieser mein Fall nur einer ist unter unendlich vielen Möglichkeiten!”. Widerlegung: ad 1. Der erste Einwand beruht auf einer falschen Auffassung der Lehre von der Komplikation der Hypothese. Wenn ich z.B. gar nichts wüßte über die Anzahl der Füße, welche ein Tier besitzt, so ist die Annahme, dass es hundertfüßig sei, von vornherein nicht unwahrscheinlicher, als dass es zehn- oder sechsfüßig sei. So ist es auch ganz einerlei, wie groß die Anzahl realer Dinge außer mir angenommen wird. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass überhaupt etwas außer mir angenommen wird, ist 1/2 und nicht 1/∞. ad 2. Was den zweiten Einwand betrifft, so handelt es sich hier nicht darum, dass ein Ding unendlich oft nacheinander wirkt, sondern darum, ob es gesetzmäßig, mit Notwendigkeit, wirkt, so dass es für einen Geist, der alles durchschauen könnte, evident sein müßte, dass z.B. auf ein gegebenes A ein B folgt. Der Begriff des Gesetzes sagt gar nichts über eine bestimmte Anzahl. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit einer Gesetzmäßigkeit ist wiederum = 1/2. ad 3. Der dritte Einwurf ist schon darum nicht rechtskräftig, weil der Zusatz nur notwendig ist zur Erklärung gewisser Erscheinungen, nicht aber zur Statuierung der allgemeinen Theorie. Aber auch allgemein genommen ist die Theorie nicht unendlich unwahrscheinlich, da wir ja absolut nicht eine durchgehende Gleichheit annehmen. Bezüglich der Punkte 2. und 3. ist aber besonders zu bemerken, dass doch auch der Phänomenalismus eine psychische Gesetzmäßigkeit und die Existenz anderer psychischer Wesen annimmt.
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Fragen wir nun, mit welcher Wahrscheinlichkeit sich die Richtigkeit unserer Hypothese berechnen läßt, so ist dieselbe in dieser Richtung geradezu eine unendliche. Formel: P = p/p1+p2+… Alle Voraussagen etc. schließen die Berechtigung der Realitätshypothese in sich. Es ist eine pure Täuschung, wenn man behauptet, dass die Erscheinungen, Sinnesempfindungen es sind, auf welche die Naturgesetze sich beziehen, wie im Anschluß an Kant die moderne Naturforschung vielfach behauptet.- Die Unregelmäßigkeiten verschwinden nur unter der Voraussetzung, dass objektive Dinge bestehen, die regelmäßig aufeinander wirken. Nur so läßt sich nicht nur das Vorhandene erklären, sondern auch Zukünftiges voraussagen.- Man mache sich einmal die Schwierigkeit klar: Naturgesetze, z.B. das Fallgesetz, als psychische Gesetze auszusprechen. Es ist nicht möglich, alle subjektiven Bedingungen aufzunehmen. Das Fallgesetz soll sich danach nicht auf objektive Körper, sondern auf mögliche Empfindungen beziehen, also ein Gesetz möglicher Empfindungen. Wenn ich am Platz wäre, so würde ich den Körper die Erde berühren sehen. Aber wieder: die Bewegung meines Körpers gegenüber fremden Körpern. Das müßte auch durch Gesetze der Sinnesempfindungen ausgedrückt werden, und so in infinitum. Der Erklärungswert der realistischen Hypothese besitzt eine Wahrscheinlichkeit, die alles andere übertrifft. Zur Erklärung der Tatsachen und Gesetze unserer Sinnesempfindungen gibt es aber außer dieser noch zwei Hypothesen. 1. Es gibt ein unbewußtes Agens in mir, welches dieses ganze Weltbild produziert („die produzierende Kraft”, Fichte). 2. Ein bewußtes mächtiges Agens (Gott oder Teufel) außer uns entwirft dieses ganze Weltbild in uns (Berkeley). Beide Hypothesen sind ebensowenig fähig, Voraussagen zu erklären wie der Phänomenalismus. ad 1. Das Unbewußte als Erzeuger der Außenwelt resp. des Bildes der Außenwelt. Nehmen wir an, dass diese Kraft nicht nach festen Gesetzen wirke, so können wir16 keine Regelmäßigkeit erklären, nichts voraussagen. Man müßte also eine Mehrheit von solchen Unbewußten annehmen, die nach festen Gesetzen mit- und gegeneinander wirken usw. Es entsteht eine große Komplikation, durch welche schließlich 16
Rb. m. Bleist. vgl. 2.
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die Hypothese des Unbewußten vollständig in die der Außenwelt übergeführt wird. ad 2. Wieder: Dieses mächtige Agens außer uns kann nicht etwas sein, was gesetzlos wirkt. Es muß also in sich selbst Teile besitzen, welche geometrischen Gesetzen gehorchen und nach physikalischen Gesetzen untereinander und auf uns Wirkungen ausüben müßten. Wir werden also wiederum auf alle jene Eigenschaften geleitet, welche der Realist der Außenwelt beilegt. Somit ist die Existenz einer Außenwelt in der Tat als bewiesen zu erachten, und zwar im strengsten Sinne des Worts. Wenn etwas über die Beschaffenheit der Dinge geschlossen werden kann, so ist dies nur auf demselben Wege möglich. Immer ist die Frage: Was müssen wir voraussetzen, um die Regelmäßigkeit der Erscheinungen, der Voraussagungen etc. zu erklären? * Wir kommen nun zurück auf die skeptischen Einwände gegen die Möglichkeit einer Erkenntnis überhaupt (cf. S. 180). Ad 1. „Alles ist ewige Veränderung, daher unerkennbar”. Dieser Einwand ist heutzutage ohne Sinn. Die Gesetze der Veränderungen sind die eigentlichen Naturgesetze. Selbst die kontinuierlichen Veränderungen hat die Wissenschaft ihrer Untersuchung unterworfen (Infinitesimalrechnung). 2. Ein anderes, ebenfalls antikes Argument stützte sich auf die Tatsache der Sinnestäuschungen, insbesondere Träume und Visionen. Manchmal träumt mir im Traum. Schon Aristoteles hat richtig erwidert: Wer in Lydien ist und träumt, er sei in Athen, der geht, wenn er erwacht, doch nicht auf den Areopag. Man kontrolliert eben die Erscheinungen durch Wahrnehmungen, welche sich an frühere Erfahrungen anlehnen. 3. „Alles was wir wahrnehmen, sind doch nur unsere Empfindungen. Wir sind niemals imstande, unsere Vorstellungen mit den Dingen selbst zu vergleichen. Ich kann also nicht wissen, ob irgendein Ding wirklich meiner Vorstellung entspricht.” Aber wir können die Vorstellungen untereinander vergleichen und da wenigstens gewisse Beziehungen der Dinge unter sich und zu uns erschließen. 4. „Relativität aller unserer Vorstellungen, besonders von Raum und Zeit”. Die Behauptung ist nicht so ohne weiteres richtig. Die Übertreibung ist, obschon von Wundt festgehalten, wenigstens bei den sinnlichen Qualitäten ganz einleuchtend. Wenn wir da gar nichts Ab-
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solutes hätten, so würden wir auch keine Zwischenqualitäten wahrnehmen. Die relativen Bestimmungen sind aber kein Nachteil, sondern ein großer Vorteil der Wissenschaft. Die relativen Bestimmungen sind ganz allein für uns von Wert. Auch die Urmaße, welche wir zu Bestimmungen der Relativität benutzen, sind ganz willkürlich. Die allerdings konventionelle Natur derselben schadet aber gar nichts. 5. „Subjektivität unserer sinnlichen Empfindungen”. Ein Einwand, der dem Kantschen System zugrunde liegt. Die Gründe Kants sind aber nicht stichhaltig. Weder die erkenntnistheoretischen (synthetische Urteile a priori) noch die psychologischen (die Erwerbung durch Wahrnehmung unmöglich ohne Apriori), welch letztere von der modernen Psychologie durchgehend zurückgewiesen werden.- Aber selbst wenn der Raum eine für uns apriorische Form wäre, so würde das nichts beweisen für die Unmöglichkeit eines objektiven Raumes. Es kann mir sogar die Raumvorstellung im alten Sinn angeboren sein, und doch könnte die wirkliche Außenwelt meinen Vorstellungen entsprechen. Trotzdem kann aber die Außenwelt räumlich und zeitlich nicht so beschaffen sein, wie ich sie mir vorstelle. Jede Beziehung auf ein Zentrum kann unmöglich objektiv sein. Dies ist besonders klar einzusehen bei der Zeit. Objektive und subjektive Zeit.- Wir sind stets nur berechtigt, das als objektiv anzunehmen, was als integrierender Teil der Hypothese der Außenwelt erschlossen wird. Die Hauptfrage ist: Was muß als objektiv existierend angenommen werden, damit die Regelmäßigkeit der Erscheinungen und ihrer Aufeinanderfolge erklärt wird? Brauchen wir dazu Raum und Zeit, wie wir sie vorstellen, so sind sie bewiesen. Nun sind Raum und Zeit dasjenige, was Geometrie und Physik etc. überall voraussetzen. Aber diese Voraussetzungen sind allerdings noch einer gewissen Beschränkung fähig. Notwendig ist nur, dass etwas existiert, was dem Raum und der Zeit analog ist und gleiche Verhältnisse zeigt wie unsere Vorstellungen, die wir uns räumlich und zeitlich anschaulich machen. Die ganze Geometrie und Physik spricht nur von Verhältnissen. Der geometrische Satz: Zwei Größen, einer dritten gleich etc., bleibt auch bei Veränderung des Verhältnisses richtig, z.B. in Bezug auf Ton, Farbe etc. Ebenso bei allen physikalischen Gesetzen, z.B. s = gt2/2, wo dann nicht notwendig die Objektivität des Raums als Inhalt zu statuieren ist. „Abstand” in räumlicher Sprache findet sein Analogon auf sehr vielen Gebieten von Qualitäten, z.B. bei den Tönen, daher die ganze Geometrie des Raums
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zu übertragen ist auf das Tongebiet, ebenso wie auf die Zeit. Was wir verlangen müssen, wenn unsere Naturwissenschaft fortbestehen soll, das ist die Objektivität von Verhältnissen, wie sie in den geometrischen und physikalischen Gesetzen ausgesprochen sind. Es muß also, wenn es auch keinen Raum gibt, wie wir ihn vorstellen, doch etwas Objektives vorhanden sein, was z.B. drei Dimensionen hat. Was dieses Dreidimensionale eigentlich sei, davon haben wir keine Vorstellung. (Die Mathematiker rechnen mit allen möglichen Dimensionen. Riemann und andere sprechen ganz ungeniert von dreidimensionalen Farben.) Alles Objektive muß kontinuierlich sein bis in die kleinsten geometrischen Details.- Empirisch kennen wir ein Analogon zum Raum nicht. Die Zeit ist ein Analogon in Bezug auf eine Dimension, die Farbe in Bezug auf zwei Dimensionen. Aber wenn es uns auch empirisch nicht gegeben ist, so ist das kein Beweis, dass ein solches Analogon überhaupt nicht existiert. „Bisher ist der Beweis noch nicht erbracht, dass Raum und Zeit nicht objektiv, so wie sie uns erscheinen, existieren könnten. Da weder für noch gegen entscheidende Argumente vorliegen, so ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit beiderseits = 1/2.” Das scheint nicht richtig zu sein. Wenn wir willkürlich einen Fall statuieren, so ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit für denselben nicht 1/2, sondern 1/∞. Nehmen wir nun auch den Fall an, dass der Raum, so wie er uns erscheint, objektiv sein könnte, so wissen wir doch nicht, ob nicht unendlich viele Formen möglich sind, in welchen dieselben Verhältnisse herrschen.- Es scheint, als ob damit für die andere Hypothese, dass Raum und Zeit nicht objektiv existieren, eine physische Sicherheit gegeben ist.Trotzdem hindert uns nichts, auch nicht die Metaphysik, von Raum und Zeit zu reden und diese Vorstellungen zu benützen als Äquivalente. Sie sind die Anschauungen, mit denen wir operieren. Es ist sehr wohl denkbar, dass Zeiten kommen, wo wir die Anschauung von Raum und Zeit, so wie wir sie haben, wissenschaftlich nicht mehr werden brauchen können. Schon jetzt eine gewaltige Abweichung durch die Abstraktion von dem Raumzentrum etc. Manche Physiker halten sogar schon den Tag für gekommen, dass man das Objektive nicht mehr als dreidimensional, sondern als vierdimensional auffassen muß (Zöllner). Eine Konzession an den Skeptizismus ist bisher noch nicht gemacht. Dies würde nur geschehen, wenn man zugeben müßte, dass unsere Relationsbegriffe nur subjektiv gültig seien (Einheit, Vielheit,
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Ganzes, Ursache etc.). Wenn wir nicht einmal die Begriffe Ursache und Wirkung anwenden dürften, um von den Erscheinungen zu dem Objektiven hinüberzukommen, dann wäre alles aus. Mag der Ursprung der Kausalität sein, welcher er will, so ist damit gegen ihre Objektivität nichts bewiesen. Einzig entscheidend ist wieder nur, ob wir diese Begriffe notwendig zur Erklärung der Aufeinanderfolge gebrauchen. Darüber aber ist kein Zweifel möglich. Dem Kausalbegriff können wir kein anderes als Analogon subsituiert denken wie etwa dem Raum. Wir müssen ihn nehmen, wie er ist, sonst fällt die ganze Naturwissenschaft dahin. Kant glaubt natürlich, dass sie trotzdem erhalten bleibe. Aber unsere Naturgesetze sind keine Erscheinungsgesetze. Das ist auch der Grund, warum wir Kant fortwährend schwankend finden, was bis jetzt keiner seiner Interpreten aufzuheben vermochte. Es bleiben nun der letzte: 6. der Angriff im Bezug auf die angeblichen Widersprüche im Begriff der Größe, des Dings mit Eigenschaften, des Raums und der Zeit.- Alle diese Widersprüche sind aber nur scheinbar. Es ist auch schon von vornherein unwahrscheinlich, dass in so einfachen Begriffen Widersprüche vorhanden sein sollten. Sie rühren hauptsächlich von der Nichtbeachtung folgender Unterschiede her. 1. Einheit - Einfachheit. Ein einheitlicher Zustand kann gleichwohl Teile haben. Was „Teile” sind, ist nicht zu definieren, wohl aber an Beispielen aufzuzeigen. Farben, Töne etc. besitzen qualitative Intensität, sie sind einheitliche, aber keine einfachen Empfindungen. Momente oder gewöhnlich Teile: das was wir an einfachen Dingen noch unterscheiden können. Widersprechend wäre eine Farbe und zwei Farben etc. 2. Aktuelle Unendlichkeit - potentielle Unendlichkeit. Eine Linie ist ins Unendliche teilbar, was die Ausdehnung betrifft, nicht in Bezug auf Atome. Bei solcher Teilung kein Widerspruch (negativ). Das aktuell Unendliche ist eine Größe, welche über alle erfahrungsmäßige Größe hinausgeht (positiv). Ob dies möglich, ist fraglich. Aristoteles leugnet sie. 3. Kontinuum - Diskretum. Oft sagt man, ein Kontinuum sei eine Summe diskreter Einheiten. Wer dies zugibt, kommt allerdings nicht mehr aus den Widersprüchen heraus. Ein Kontinuum ist selbst eine Einheit. Eine Linie ist eben eine Linie, und zwar ins Unendliche zu teilen, aber nicht von vornherein aus unendlich vielen Teilen zusammengesetzt. Die Linie bleibt eine Linie, solange sie nicht geteilt ist. Wird sie geteilt, so werden aus ihr eben mehrere Linien.
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4. Grenze - Teil. Auch der Begriff der Grenze ist wieder ein metaphysischer Grenzbegriff, der keine Definition zuläßt und nur anschaulich zu machen ist. Die Grenze ist kein Stück (Teil) des Körpers. Bei solcher falschen Auffassung müßten wir die Grenze vom Körper abtrennen können, so dass der Körper grenzenlos gemacht werden könnte. 5. Fließendes - ruhendes Sein (Wirklichkeit). Es sind bildliche Ausdrücke. Beispiel eines fließenden Seins: Größenveränderungen. Kontinuierlicher Wechsel einer Größe: Expansion etc. Andererseits für ruhendes Sein: Größe, die ein Körper zu einer Zeit unveränderlich besitzt. Bezüglich des Ortes derselbe Unterschied. Die Zeit hat nur fließendes Sein. Die Bewegung nichts als ein fließender Ort. Eine Bewegung ist nie ganz auf einmal. Sie ist in jedem Augenblick zum Teil nicht. In jedem Augenblick kann man den Teil der Bewegung, der schon vergangen ist, abscheiden von dem Teil, welcher erst kommt. Z.B. eine Bewegung A |__|__|__|__| B in drei Stadien. Man darf nie versuchen, eine Bewegung auf einen ruhenden Zustand zurückzuführen. Die Bewegung ist ferner eine Einheit. Schon Aristoteles erkannt diesen Unterschied der Seinsformen (Bewegung = ἐνέργεια ἀτελής). Trotz der aller dieser Vorstellungen sind die Schwierigkeiten noch nicht gelöst. Denn wir benützen sie als Analoga des Wirklichen. Alle diese Widersprüche, wenn es welche wären, würden sich ebensogut in den wirklichen Analogis wiederfinden. Betrachten wir den Einwand, dass der Raum weder als Substanz noch als Eigenschaft noch als Beziehung aufgefaßt werden kann, die einzigen Möglichkeiten einer Existenz. bemerke ich: Der Raum kann allerdings weder 1. noch 3. sein. Als Beziehung ist er nicht denkbar („der Raum sei nichts anderes als das Nebeneinander der Körper”), denn jede Beziehung muß wieder auf einer absoluten Bestimmung gründen. Aber als Eigenschaft kann der Raum doch ohne Widerspruch und Unmöglichkeit gefaßt werden! Man könnte allerdings sagen: „Wenn ein Körper sich bewegt, so kann sich doch der Raum (Ort), wo er war, nicht mitbewegen; eine Eigenschaft aber muß sich mitbewegen”. In der Tat bleibt auch der Ort des bewegten Körpers nicht. Wenn ein Körper sich von A nach B bewegt und nun ein anderer Körper nach A kommt, so ist der Ort dieses zweiten Körpers nur scheinbar wieder derselbe. Wir müssen unterscheiden zwischen individuellem und spezifischem Ort (so wie ja
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auch zwei verschiedene Körper wohl dieselbe spezifische, nicht aber individuell dieselbe Farbe haben können). Wenn man sagt, die Luft nehme nun denselben Ort ein, den vorher ein Körper G gehabt hat, so ist das nicht individuell derselbe Ort. Der Körper G nimmt fortbewegt nicht den Ort mit, sondern er verliert ihn einfach und nimmt einen anderen Ort an, so wie ein Körper eine Farbe verliert und eine andere annimmt, ohne dass ein anderer Körper die verlorene Farbe übernimmt. Auch das Gesetz, dass niemals zwei Körper denselben Ort einnehmen können, verleitet uns dazu, statt einer spezifischen individuelle Gleichheit anzunehmen - ähnlich beim Stoß. Die Bewegung geht vom ersten Körper auf den zweiten über, aber nicht individuell die gleiche, sondern nur spezifisch dieselbe. Kann es dann einen leeren Raum geben? Eine logische oder metaphysische Unmöglichkeit besteht nicht. Ein leerer Raum zwischen zwei Atomen ist ein Nichts, aber er erscheint uns als ein Etwas, nämlich als eine schwarze Fläche. Dies aber infolge der Einrichtung unserer Netzhaut. Etwas Wirkliches wäre aber dann der Raum nicht. Ausdehnung. „Ein Ausgedehntes muß unendlich viele Teile haben, Eine unendliche Zahl von Teilen ist aber an sich schon ein Absurdum. Denn jeder der unendlich vielen Teile muß entweder eine Ausdehnung haben, dann würde durch Summation eine unendliche Größe entstehen; oder er ist unendlich klein, dann aber kann nie durch Summation eine endliche Größe entstehen.” Die Frage nach der unendlichen Zahl ist aber auszuschließen. Dass keine aktuell unendliche Anzahl von Teilen existiert, ist sicher. Aber alle Schwierigkeiten lösen sich durch die potenzielle Unendlichkeit.Jedes Ausgedehnte ist ein Kontinuum. In einem solchen gibt es Diskreta nur der Möglichkeit nach. In jedem Augenblick, wo in der Teilung Halt gemacht wird, haben wir eine endliche Größe und eine endliche Anzahl. Das Punktproblem. Der fliegende Pfeil ruht. Zunächst ist zu erklären der Begriff des Zeitpunktes. Er ist wie der Raumpunkt eine Grenze, nichts Reales. Die Frage: „Welchen Ort hat der Pfeil in einem Augenblick?” ist absurd. In einem Augenblick kann nichts existieren. Alles was ist, kann nur in der Zeit sein, und sei sie noch so klein. Es wäre ebenso absurd zu fragen, ob eine Linie in einem Punkt gerade oder krumm sei, oder Ähnliches. In jeder Zeitstrecke kommt dem fliegenden Körper ein besonderer Teil der Bahn als Ort zu; und so teilbar ins
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Unendliche. Nur der Zeitpunkt kann keinen Ort haben, doch läßt sich für einen Zeitpunkt in der Bahn eine Grenze angeben.- Es gibt keinen nächsten Augenblick. Es grenzt eben nur eine Zeit der Ruhe an eine Zeit der Bewegung und zwar in einem Punkt. Aber diese Grenze rührt nicht wieder an eine Grenze. Allerdings muß der Körper unmittelbar, wenn er den einen Ort verläßt, einen anderen Ort einnehmen. Das ist aber nicht ein ruhender, sondern ein sich bewegender. Ebenso löst sich der Achill. Das Ding mit mehreren Eigenschaften. Die Schwierigkeiten wurden namentlich durch Herbart verschärft; Einfachheit und Einheitlichkeit des Dings verwechselt. So mag es auch Teile in Wirklichkeit geben trotz der Einheitlichkeit des Dings. 2 Ontologie Zwei Hauptfragen: I. Über die Teile der Dinge II. Über Ursachen und Gesetze der Dinge I. Teile: a) physische, b) metaphysische, c) logische. a) Physische Teile: Die Ausdehnung, so wie wir sie vorstellen, ist ins Unendliche teilbar. Eine andere Frage ist, ob auch die Körper ins Unendliche teilbar sind, oder ob es kleinste, nicht weiter teilbare Körper . Atomistik. Demokrit, in unserem Jahrhundert besonders französische Physiker (Fresnel, Cauchy). Es wird behauptet, dass man ohne diese Theorie gar nicht auskommen könne. In Deutschland E. H. Weber. Von ihm stammen die Hauptargumente zur „Atomenlehre“ Fechners. Mit vielen wichtigen Argumenten aber kamen die Chemiker (17 vor der Chemie). Seit dem Altertum eine Reihe von Umgestaltungen sowohl in Bezug auf das, was man „Atome” nennt, als auch in Bezug auf die Beweise (cf. die vorzügliche Übersicht in Langes Geschichte des Materialismus). Bei allen qualitativen Änderungen keine Transsubstantiation, sondern Dislokation der kleinsten Teile. Besonders gewichtig die Argumente der modernen Chemie für die Annahme von Atomen. Es haben sich verschiedene Gesetze als allgemein gültige bei den chemischen Prozessen herausgestellt: 17
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1. Stete Erhaltung des Gewichts. Das chemische Produkt hat immer genau dasselbe Gewicht wie die einzelnen Stoffe zusammengenommen. 2. Das Grundgesetz der Verbindung in bestimmten, stets gleichen Gewichtsteilen. 3. Grundgesetz der multiplen Proportionen 4. Grundgesetz der Universalität des chemischen Elements. Derselbe Stoff führt immer dieselbe Gewichtszahl mit sich, mit welchen anderen Stoffen er sich auch verbinden mag. Atomgewicht. Außerdem lassen sich besonders leicht viele andere Tatsachen aus der Atomtheorie erklären. Z.B. Dismerie wie C10 H16 = alle Terpene. In unserem Jahrhundert sind noch besondere Argumente dazugekommen durch die Theorie der Gase, die sich auch in festen Verhältnissen ihres Volumens verbinden. In ganz besonderem Maße ist eine dritte Reihe chemischer Gesetzmäßigkeiten entscheidend geworden, die der Wertigkeit oder Valenz der Elemente (entdeckt und entwickelt durch Kékulé). Element der 1. Klasse: einwertig, z.B. H. Also HCl Elemente der 2. Klasse: zweiwertig, z.B. O. Also H2O Elemente der 3. Klasse: dreiwertig, z.B. P. Also H3P etc. etc. Da hat sich die Lehre von der Atomenverkettung entwickelt: H-OH. H-O-O-O-Cl. Worauf mag nun die Verschiedenheit der verschiedenen Atome beruhen? Auf verschiedenartigen Zusammensetzungen? Dadurch würde man zu der Ansicht der gleichwertigen Uratome kommen. Als Urstoff gilt vielfach der Wasserstoff. Argumente und Bedenken gegen die Atomistik I. „Unsere Erfahrung zeigt uns doch Teilbares.” Wir müssen aber zu der Erfahrung nicht nur dasjenige rechnen, was durch direkte Beobachtung beobachtet wird, sondern auch die Schlüsse. Manche haben diesen Einwand von vornherein abgeschnitten, indem sie die Atome rein mathematisch punktuell als Kraftzentren dachten (Fresnel, Weber, Fechner, Lotze). Es ist aber sehr fraglich, ob ein aktuell unendlich Kleines möglich ist, ob nicht Punkte nur als Grenzen gedacht werden können (siehe oben). Heutzutage steht dieser Ansicht diejenige von der verschiedenen Gestalt der Atome gegenüber. II. Die Wirkung der Atome aufeinander läßt sich nicht recht vorstellen. Entweder müssen sie durch Stoß aufeinander wirken oder aus der Ferne. Die erstere Annahme ist die älteste, aber auch wieder die
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neueste, wie denn die demokritische Lehre überhaupt viele Berührungspunkte mit der heute herrschenden zeigt.- Für die erstere Annahme sind nun die Gesetze des elastischen Stoßes anwendbar. Aber wie ist eine Zusammendrückung der Atome möglich? Zweite Annahme: Die Fernewirkung ist besonders von französischen Physikern und von E. H. Weber zugrunde gelegt worden. Von jeher haben aber die Philosophen gegen die Möglichkeit einer Fernwirkung (actio distans) geeifert. Die apriorischen Gründe gegen die Fernwirkung haben nichts recht Stichhaltiges vorzubringen gewußt. Dagegen scheint die Erfahrung offenbar gegen dieselbe zu sprechen. Versuche, die Gravitation als Übertragungserscheinung zu erklären. Faraday faßt Elektrizität und Magnetismus als Übertragungserscheinungen. In neuester Zeit eine starke Stütze dieser Auffassung durch die großartige Entdeckung, dass Licht und Elektrizität dasselbe sind (Maxwell - Herz). Weber hat schon früher die Gravitation auf elektrische Gesetze zurückzuführen gesucht, so dass Licht, Elektrizität und Gravitation dasselbe wären. Die Annahme von relativ, nicht absolut leeren Räumen zwischen den Atomen als Verdichtungszentren würde alle obigen Einwände gegenstandslos machen. Das große Weltganze wäre dann ebenfalls kein Kollektivum, sondern ein Kontinuum. Kehrt man aber zu der Annahme eines stetig erfüllten Raumes zurück, dann ist nicht anzugeben, was als Individuum zu gelten hat. Ein sicheres Charakteristikum dafür fehlt. Auf psychischem Gebiete ist die Einheit des Bewußtseins eben die Einheit; daraus ist die Persönlichkeit abgeleitet. b) metaphysische Teile. Kategorienlehre. Unterscheidung der Relationen und der absoluten Inhalte (physische und psychische), z.B. Raum und Zeit. Besonders die Frage nach der Substanz und den Eigenschaften. Ist die Substanz identisch mit dem Ganzen der Eigenschaften oder ist sie noch etwas hinter den Eigenschaften? Ich bin der ersteren Meinung. Allerdings ist immer etwas zu denken hinter den Eigenschaften, wie sie uns erscheinen. c) logische Teile. Frage nach der objektiven Bedeutung der Gattungen und der Arten. In welchem Sinn sind wir berechtigt, diese unsere Untescheidungen auf die Wirklichkeit zu übertragen? Substanzielle Merkmale. Cf. Logik. Weitere Hauptfragen der Ontologie: Verhältnis vom Physischen zum Psychischen Begriff der Ursache und des Kausalgesetzes
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Allgemeine Gesetze der Physik (Trägheit, Wechselwirkung, Gleichheit von Wirkung und Gegenwirkung, Erhaltung der Kraft) und der Chemie. 3 Theologie Grundlagen der natürlichen Theologie: Beweise für das Dasein eines Weltgrundes. 1. Ontologischer Beweis aus dem Begriff Gottes (s. Logik) 2. Kosmologischer Beweis, welcher aus der Bedingtheit der irdischen Dinge auf eine erste Ursache schließt, entweder zeitlich oder der Natur nach (wie z.B. Aristoteles: πρῶτον κινοῦν). Einwände: a) dass eine unendliche Reihe sekundärer Ursachen möglich sei. b) Im besten Fall ist vielleicht eine erste Ursache anzunehmen, welche aber nicht als Gott in unserem Sinn zu bezeichnen ist, da sie vielleicht sogar materiell sein kann. 3. Physikotheologischer Beweis. Lebhaft ist darüber die Diskussion in neuester Zeit durch den Darwinismus. Zweckmäßige Entwicklung der Dinge, die uns umgeben, und in uns selbst. Es ist nicht Tatsache, dass es Zweck in der Welt gibt, dennoch besteht ein durchgängiger Anschein der außerordentlichen Zweckmäßigkeit; besonders im Gebiet des organischen Lebens über die Maßen erstaunlich. Selbst Erscheinungen, die anfangs als dysteleologisch erscheinen, lösen sich meist später. Z.B. wurde lange Zeit die Unvollkommenheit des Auges hervorgehoben. Aber das Auge ist doch kein optisches Instrument, sondern ein Teil des Organismus. Es soll nicht sehen helfen, sondern das Sehen ermöglichen und hat viele Vorzüge, welche optische Instrumente nicht besitzen (Muskelbewegungen, Akkomodation etc.). Helmholtz: Gerade das Auge gibt uns ein Beispiel für das, was organisch gesetzmäßig ist. Lange: Verschwendung der Lebenskeime. Aber diese sogenannte Verschwendung findet sich umso mehr, je schwieriger die Bedingungen zu erlangen sind, unter denen sich die Lebenskeime entwickeln. Funke bezeichnet gerade diese Erscheinung „als großartiges Beispiel der Zweckmäßigkeit” (Analogie: nur ein geringer Teil der Schallwellen des Redens gelangt in das Ohr des Hörers, die meisten gehen wirkungslos im Raum verloren). Liegt hier nun für die Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre immer ein Fall unter unendlich vielen möglichen vor oder nicht? Jeder einzelne Fall ist der einzige unter unendlich vielen Möglichkeiten, welcher allein mit
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der Art und Weise übereinstimmt, wie ein verständiges Wesen einrichten würde. Für jeden einzelnen Fall ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass er ohne alle Ursache bestehe, 1/∞. Erklärungsversuch von seiten des Darwinismus und der Theologie. Entwicklungslehre: Aus jedem beliebigen noch so ungeordneten Anfangszustande mußte sich irgendein geordneter, anscheinend teleologischer Zustand notwendig herausbilden infolge der in der Natur wirkenden mechanischen Kräfte. Der erste, der dies nachzuweisen suchte, war Laplace (Sonnensystem). Lamarck: Zoologie. Neueste Zeit besonders Darwin. Darwin selbst war weit davon entfernt, seine Theorie für bewiesen zu halten. Er war einer der bescheidensten Entdecker. Allerdings manche Bedenken: Vererbung erworbener Eigenschaften? (Weismann). Für den Kampf ums Dasein mußten gewisse Organe schon eine beträchtliche Größe erreicht haben, um überhaupt dienlich zu sein: z.B. Flügel; die anfänglich rudimentären Organe können nichts nützen. Dieser Einwand ist jetzt allgemein anerkannt. Das zeigt jedenfalls, dass das Darwinsche Prinzip nicht das einzige und nicht einmal hauptsächliche Prinzip der Entwicklung sein kann. Vielfach Annahme allgemeiner innerer Triebkräfte, die den Organismus zu Umbildungen nötigen, dabei aber sprungweise wirken, z.B. bei Schmetterlingen (Metamorphose: Raupen etc.). Weiteres überlassen den Untersuchungen der Naturforscher. Müssen wir in Bezug auf den Urzustand (wir wollen uns denselben erst als zeitlich bestimmt denken) besondere Voraussetzungen machen oder nicht? Antwort: Wir müssen Voraussetzungen machen, infolge deren das obige Problem genau in derselben Schärfe in Bezug auf den Urzustand wiederkehrt. Denn wir können für jedes Organ eine unendliche Anzahl von ganz ungeordneten Zuständen ausdenken. Für jeden dieser Zustände muß aber ein besonderer Anfangszustand angenommen werden; denn aus einem Urzustand kann, wenn alles nach streng mechanischen Gesetzen entsteht, immer nur ein besonderer Endzustand hervorgehen. Is also der gegenwärtige Zustand ein solcher, der allein zweckmäßig ist unter unendlich vielen sinnlosen, so gilt dasselbe auch in Bezug auf den Urzustand, aus dem er mit menchanischer Notwendigkeit entstanden ist. Es könnte sich also nur aus einem Urzustand dieser äußerst zweckmäßige Endzustand entwickeln (Fechner, Brentano, Lange). Dies also der Grund, warum viele der hervorragendsten Naturforscher veranlaßt wurden, den Darwinismus nur als die eine
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Seite aufzufassen, die mit der teleologischen nicht in Widerspruch steht. Wenn wir den Urzustand, z.B. den Gasball Laplaces, als durchaus gleichartig annehmen, so ist auch dies ein Fall unter unendlich vielen möglichen. „Diese Tatsache eröffnet uns einen Abgrund der Verwunderung” (Lotze). Der Darwinismus verweist auf Homologien. Hier haben wir Homologien der weitgehendsten Art. Erweitern wir die frühere Annahme, so habe wir bei ewiger Zeit nur einen relativen Urzustand, dafür dann wieder einen Urzustand etc. in infinitum. Dadurch wird aber der logische Schluß absolut nicht verändert. Die Frage der Teleologie reduziert sich also auf eine Frage der Wahrscheinlichkeit. Eine geordnete Welt, wäre sie auch eine andere als diese, ist immer ein ausgezeichneter Fall unter unendlich vielen Möglichkeiten. „Die Existenz Gottes ist ebenso gewiß wie die einer Außenwelt” (Cartesius). Man kann allerdings manche Einwände gegen die Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre erheben; aber nur, wenn man sie nicht versteht. Wir erschließen zuerst einen ordnenden Urgrund der Welt, den wir den Verstand (νοῦς) nennen mögen. Dieses Prinzip ist zu fassen als beständige Grundlage und Ursache alles Naturwirkens, nicht etwa als nur einmal wirkend. Ob Schöpfung im engeren Sinn oder ewiges Bedingtsein der Welt, ist hier noch nicht zu entscheiden (siehe Kosmologie). Jedenfalls nicht, wie Anaxagoras meint, anfängliche Trennung von νοῦς und Materie, da sonst wieder teleologische Verhältnisse da wären, die einen Grund haben müßten. Denn wie wirkt das eine auf das andere? Gott, ἐν ὧ ἥρτηται ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ πάση ἡ φύσις (Aristoteles). Wir können nicht annehmen, dass das Denken durch die Objekte bedingt sei, sondern es müßte ein schöpferisches Denken sein, welches nicht Wirkung, sondern Ursache ist. Kurz, das Denken ist das Wirken.- Auch die Unterscheidung von Verstand und Wille ist ungerechtfertigt, da sie schon eine Organisation vorausetzt. Gott ist vollständig einfach. Ferner ergibt sich leicht das Prädikat der Unendlichkeit, nämlich aus der Unbedingtheit. Nun noch die Hauptfrage nach der ethischen Seite: die alte Frage, ob die Summe des Guten oder die Summe des Übels in der Welt größer sei. Theodizee. Pessimismus - Optimismus. Wenn die Intelligenz des ersten Wesens eine unendliche ist, dann muß es auch ethische Einsicht haben, und da bei ihm voluntas et intellectus idem sunt (Spino-
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za), so werden wir umso mehr von einer unendlichen Güte sprechen, wenn die ethische Einsicht ebenfalls mit 18 zusammenfällt. Gott ist ein ἄριστον ἢ ἀναλογὸν τι in übertragenem Sinn (Aristoteles). Bei einem vollkommen einfachen Wesen kann nicht von einer Wahl gesprochen werden (Trennung der Vorstellung vom Willen und untereinander). Daher kann man nicht sagen, dass Gott diese Welt unter unendlich vielen möglichen gewählt habe; sie muß vielmehr die einzig mögliche sein. Das hat mit Recht Lotze gegen Leibniz hervorgehoben. Dies ist eine Notwendigkeit, in welche wir allerdings nicht den Schein einer Einsicht haben, da sie sich auf Tatsachen bezieht, die wir transzendente Notwendigkeit nennen. Uneigentliche anthropomorphe Ausdrucksweise. Ebenso ist der Unterschied von Mitteln und Zwecken in Bezug auf Gott anthropomorph und verliert seinen Sinn. Daher sind alle Versuche einer Theodizee, welche alles Übel in der Welt auf göttliche Zwecke zurückführt, hinfällig. Ob man nun diese Auffassung als theistisch oder pantheistisch, Gott demnach als personal oder unpersonal, als immanent oder transzendent etc. bezeichnen will, hängt von den Definitionen ab, welche man diesen Ausdrücken gibt. IV. Kosmologie Liegt im Begriff des aktuell Unendlichen ein logischer Widerspruch? Kant meint, dass die Auffassung der Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit gleichberechtigt seien. Das hängt zusammen mit seiner Auffassung der apriorischen Formen. Die Antinomien, eine Reihe ganz unnötiger Paralogismen, mit denen sich gar nichts beweisen läßt. Der Satz des Widerspruchs behält immer seine Wahrheit. Gründe für die Endlichkeit der Welt nach Raum und Zeit:19 „Mit astronomischen und physikalischen Erwägungen. Z.B. wenn unendlich viele Fixsterne existierten, so müßte in jedem Punkt der Welt eine unendliche Helligkeit bestehen.” (Olbers). „Wäre die Welt unendlich, so gäbe es keinen Gravitationsmittelpunkt, also in jeder Stelle der Welt ein Druck = ∞.” Aber es kommt doch auch auf die Verteilung der Materie an. Es kann sogar der Raum unendlich und dennoch die Masse im erfüllten Raum endlich sein (1/2 + 1/4 + …). Es könnte ferner eine Welt exis18 19
Blank space in manuscript. Gründe für die Endlichkeit der Welt nach Raum und Zeit m. Blaust. unterstr.
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tieren, welche so weit von der unsrigen entfernt ist, dass die Wirkungen auf die unsrige unendlich klein sind. So könnten sogar unendlich viele Welten existieren, und zwar könnte der zwischen ihnen liegende Raum erfüllt sein, aber so, dass er als leer anzusehen wäre. Die einzelnen Welten: Dichtigkeitszentren. Endlichkeit der Welt der Zeit nach. Als eine Folgerung aus dem zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie (Clausius). 1. Hauptsatz lautet: Die Summe der Spannkräfte und lebendigen Kräfte ist immer dieselbe (Gesetz von der Erhaltung der Kraft). 2. Hauptsatz: Die lebendigen Kräfte setzen sich immer in Spannkräfte um infolge des Umstands, dass aus einem kälteren Körper nur dann Wärme in einen wärmeren übergeführt wird, wenn gleichzeitig mechanische Kraft ausgeübt wird. In umgekehrter Richtung ist das nicht der Fall. Daher geht immer Wärme von den wärmeren auf die kälteren Körper über, und immer größer wird der Vorrat von Kräften, die nicht wieder zurückverwandelt werden können. Daraus wurden aber kühne Folgerungen auf den Endzustand der Welt von Thomson und Helmholtz gezogen. Andere haben daraus die Endlichkeit der Welt der Zeit nach (einen zeitlichen Anfang der Welt) gefolgert. So Fick: „Denn sonst müßte der Prozeß schon abgelaufen sein”. Diese Schlüsse setzen voraus, dass die Summe der Kräfte eine endliche sei, und diese Voraussetzung wird von den Physikern fast immer stillschweigend gemacht. Bei der Annahme einer unendlichen Masse und eines unendlichen Kraftvorrats würde es aber möglich sein, dass ein erstarrtes System wieder zum Leben erwachte, z.B. durch Zusammenstoß, und so würde eine gewisse Periodizität von Leben und Tod oder von Wachen und Schlafen zu statuieren sein. Apriorische Begründung: Es ist unmöglich, einen20 aktuell unendlichen Raum und eine aktuell unendliche Zeit vorzustellen. Dies ist richtig. Aber unsere Vorstellungsfähigkeit ist kein Kriterium. Widersprüche ergeben sich sich schon aus der Unmöglichkeit der Annahme einer unendlichen Zahl, und speziell der Begriff einer unendlich großen Größe ist ebenso absurd wie der Begriff einer unendlich kleinen Größe, die man um nichts weder vergrößern noch verkleinern kann. Andere Widersprüche: In jedem Punkt einer unendlichen Linie ist dieselbe halbiert. 20
statt einen Ms. dass ein
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a______b_____x Ist ax = ∞, bx = ∞, so ab = 0 etc. Bezüglich der Zeit ist zwar eine Unendlichkeit in der Richtung der Zukunft nicht unmöglich, wohl aber eine Unmöglichkeit nach rückwärts (Schöpfung im engeren Sinn). Diese Argumente sind der Überlegung wohl wert; aber es ist sehr charakteristisch, dass selbst Thomas von Aquin und andere den zeitlichen Anfang der Welt nicht für logisch beweisbar hielten. Die aktuelle Unendlichkeit ist in neuerer Zeit auch von Mathematikern untersucht worden, insbesondere von Cantor, der sogar Sätze aufstellte: Hauptsatz v + a = ∞ (große Schärfe). Ein Widerspruch scheint in einer aktuell unendlichen Zahl in der Tat nicht zu liegen. Eine unendliche Zahl ist eine Zahl, welche größer ist als jede abzählbare Zahl; sie ist eine Zahl in anderem Sinn als eine gewöhnliche Zahl. Cantor unterscheidet daher Zahlen und Anzahlen (Brentano: Zahlen und Unzahlen). Alle Widersprüche resultieren nur, wenn man diese beiden Arten vermischt.- Ebenso ist es auch mit einer unendlich großen Ausdehnung. Der Name Größe wird gewöhnlich für etwas Meßbares gehalten. Dieses Kriterium auf die unendliche Größe übertragen bewirkt Widersprüche. Z.B. oben, dass ab = 0. Oder ax = ∞ + ab; bx = ∞. Das unendlich Kleine macht ganz besondere Schwierigkeiten. Problem der Berührungspunkte. In der Tat scheint eine unendlich kleine Ausdehnung nicht möglich zu sein. Auch Cantor ist dieser Meinung. Die Lösung scheint darin zu liegen, dass alles Ausgedehnte Teile haben muß. Nun hat wohl das unendlich Große, nicht aber das unendlich Kleine Teile. Punkte sind Grenzen, und Grenzen haben keine Teile. Es ist denkbar, dass man recht hat, wenn man eine räumlich und zeitlich unendliche Welt statuiert. Die Annahme von der Unendlichkeit der Welt ist ebenso widerspruchsfrei wie die der Endlichkeit. Wir kommen also auf anderem Wege zu einem ähnlichen Ergebnis wie Kant, jedoch gewissermaßen zu einer Umkehrung. Die Entscheidung der Alternative hängt ausschließlich an der Auffassung des Gottesbegriffs. Da doch von vornherein kein Zeitpunkt vor dem anderen etwas voraus hat, was bestimmt den vorausgesetzten göttlichen Willen zur Schöpfung mit diesem Zeitmoment? Man zieht sich gewöhnlich zurück auf die Freiheit, nach welcher eine Vernunftentscheidung ohne jeden Grund möglich ist. Doch ist dieser Ausweg für uns unbrauchbar (siehe oben).
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Daher ziehen wir den Schluß: eine ewige Schöpfung aus Nichts. Und gleichermaßen will es nicht gelingen, die Endlichkeit der Welt zu vereinigen mit der Unendlichkeit Gottes. Sonst: Warum nicht größere Fülle, größere Ausdehnung?
INTRODUCTION TO CARL STUMPF’S CORRESPONDENCE WITH FRANZ BRENTANO DENIS FISETTE (UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC À MONTRÉAL)
We publish in this section a manuscript written by Stumpf entitled “Persönliche Verstimmungen” (“Personal Irritations”) and some unpublished letters from Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf which support the information contained in this manuscript. This document was intended to serve as an introduction to an edition of Stumpf’s correspondence with Brentano which he prepared for publication in 1929. The manuscript was discovered along with the complete correspondence between Stumpf and Brentano in the Archives of F. MayerHillebrand at the University of Innsbruck (G. Oberkofler, XXI), which suggests that Stumpf had passed on the whole document to MayerHillebrand who is known for her editions of Brentano’s manuscripts. In the late 1920s, Stumpf collaborated with Mayer-Hillebrand (1975, 226-229) to prepare the manuscripts of his friend Franz Hillebrand for publication, and it is likely on this occasion that he handed over her these documents. They were kept at the University of Innsbruck (G. Oberkofler, in F. Brentano, 1989, XXI) and they formed the basis of G. Oberkofler’s edition of Brentano’s correspondence with Stumpf. (F. Brentano, 1989) But Stumpf’s introduction of 1929 clearly indicates that the initial project was to include, in addition to his introduction, his own letters to Brentano that Oberkofler did not publish in his edition. Stumpf’s letters to Brentano are kept at the Brentano Archives in Graz. This document contains important information regarding Stumpf’s personal and scientific relationship with Brentano and it completes the account provided in his autobiography as well as in his three biographical articles on Brentano on the matter. The first and most substantial of these biographies, published by O. Kraus (1919) under the
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title “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano”, focuses on the life, teaching and publications of Brentano during the Würzburg period. The second, “Franz Brentano, Philosoph” published in 1920, presents an overview of Brentano’s philosophy and presents a description of his major works. In the third, published in 1922, Stumpf complements his description of Brentano’s philosophical programme and stresses the latter’s influence on the history of philosophy in Austria and his students’ contribution. Stumpf’s manuscript, which we publish here, contains several remarks on his personal and scientific relationship with Brentano and aims, as Stumpf explains, to protect himself against the objections that could possibly be raised on the basis of the information provided in this correspondence. Stumpf is in fact seeking to clarify five events in his personal relationship with Brentano which are well documented in this correspondence. The first relates to Brentano’s reaction to Stumpf’s resignation from his chair in Prague and his relocation to Halle in 1884; the second concerns both Brentano’s reaction to Stumpf’s decision to accept a position in Berlin and the initiatives taken by Brentano to fill the vacant chair in Munich; the third concerns his attitude towards Brentano during the third International Congress of Psychology held in Munich in 1896 which Stumpf co-organized with T. Lipps; the fourth concerns Brentano’s reaction to an article on emotions published by Stumpf in 1899; finally, in 1903, Stumpf received three bitter letters from Brentano in which he criticizes Stumpf’s ingratitude as a result of having lost contact with him for over a decade. The document also includes informative comments on the dispute between Stumpf and Brentano in Würzburg in 1876 on the issue of theism as well as his own justification for having lost contact with Brentano. Stumpf’s introduction to his correspondence with Brentano is supplemented by a selection of letters from Stumpf, Brentano, Lipps, and von Hertling which document these five troublesome episodes in Stumpf’s personal relationship with Brentano. 1 Prague The story begins on July 14, 1866, when Stumpf met Brentano for the first time during the latter’s habilitation thesis at the University of Würzburg. This encounter was crucial for the young Stumpf who recalled, in one of his writings in memory of Brentano, that he has been impressed by the elegant but sharp way with which Brentano argued and defended his theses, and particularly the fourth thesis according to
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which the true method of philosophy is nothing other than that of the natural sciences. The deep impression that Brentano’s disputatio left on the young Stumpf encouraged him to attend Brentano’s lecture the next semester and to undertake studies in philosophy. In 1867, however, Stumpf moved to Göttingen to pursue his studies with Hermann Lotze because Brentano was not habilitated to supervise theses, and the latter believed that the environment in Göttingen would allow Stumpf to improve his education in the natural sciences and to write his dissertation. After having successfully defended his dissertation on the idea of the good in Plato, Stumpf returned to Würzburg in 1868 and met Anton Marty for the first time. In 1869, Stumpf returned to Göttingen and defended successfully, in 1870, his habilitation thesis on mathematical axioms before publishing, in 1873, a book on the origins of space perception, which he dedicated to Lotze. This work allowed him to obtain, the following year, Brentano’s chair in Würzburg which he held for five years. Stumpf thus began his teaching in Prague in the fall of 1879 and held that position until 1884. After five years in Prague, Stumpf was nominated in Halle in August 1884 thanks namely to Dilthey’s assistance. A few months earlier, in April 1884, Brentano went to Prague in the course of a trip to Paris. Stumpf had probably informed Brentano of his intention to leave Prague and of moving to Berlin. But Brentano did not give up his plan to keep Stumpf in Austria, and he contacted the Minister B. von David to promote Stumpf’s candidacy in order for him to obtain Brentano’s chair in Vienna which was still vacant at the time. This is confirmed by Stumpf in the introduction to his correspondence with Brentano, in which he explains that by refusing the position in Vienna, Brentano would be more likely to recover his chair that he had to abandon in 1880. But this is not the main reason at the heart of Stumpf’s decision to refuse a potential position in Vienna and to leave Austria definitely. In his correspondence with Brentano and in several other writings, Stumpf mentions several other factors that motivated this decision. The first reason is political: Stumpf argued that Prussia was a more civilized environment for himself and his family than Austria. In the document that we publish in the present section, Stumpf is more explicit and first recalls that his rather intensive activity during his years in Prague had profoundly affected his health (both mentally and physically), and he admits that one of the main reasons
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for leaving Austria was “his insuperable nostalgia for his German homeland”. Brentano reacted strongly to Stumpf’s decision to definitively leave Austria and accept a position in Halle. He never concealed his disappointment and it is clear that this event marks the beginning of the estrangement between the two philosophers. For Brentano never took seriously the reasons given by Stumpf for not considering a position in Vienna and he saw in Stumpf’s decision a sign of ingratitude towards Austria for which he received a preferential treatment in Prague. This is confirmed by a long letter from Brentano to Stumpf that we reproduce here in which he harshly criticizes Stumpf for drawing such a dark portrait of Austria in order to justify his decision and for overestimating the social and political situation in Prussia. But above all, he criticized Stumpf for not measuring the devastating consequences of his decision on Brentano’s plans for Austria. (Letter from Brentano to Stumpf of 05-10-1884) Stumpf’s comments on the effects of this unfortunate episode on his relationship with Brentano show that he had not measured how deeply his decision to leave Austria had affected Brentano. For instance, in his introduction, he merely explains Brentano’s reaction on the basis of his hatred for Prussia whereas Brentano was mainly concerned by the consequences of Stumpf’s departure on the institutional situation in Prague. As Brentano explained to Marty,1 he feared that Stumpf’s position might not be filled (adequately), that Stumpf’s nomination in Vienna would be forever compromised, that Stumpf’s collaboration with Marty would be 1
In a letter dated July-August 1884, he wrote to Marty: “Ihr letzter lieber Brief brachte keine gute Nachrichten. Denn dass Stumpf nach Halle geht, ist sehr zu beklagen. Ich bedauere es im Interesse von Prag; die Stelle wird nicht wieder besetzt. Ich bedauere es in seinem Interesse. Er wird dadurch fuሷr Wien unmöglich. Ich bedauere es im Interesse seiner Familie. Sein Knabe wird nun auch im preußischen Luሷgengeist erzogen werden. Ich bedauere es im Interesse des Gerechtigkeitssinnes. Selbst Philosophen sehen uሷber den Charakter höchster Ungerechtigkeit und Perfidie, wie ihn ein Staat nur tragen kann, hinweg u. schören denen Treue, die ihr Vatersland ungerecht mit Krieg uሷberzogen und erniedrigt haben. Ich bedauere es, weil es dem schönen Zusammenwirken mit Ihnen ein vorschnelles Ende macht. Ich bedauere es, weil es, aufrichtig gesprochen Stumpf in Gefahren bringt. So trefflich er ist, gerade seine sanfte Liebenswuሷrdigkeit und Arglosigkeit macht ihn oft mehr als gut fremden Einfluሷssen zugänglich. Ich fuሷrchte die bei ihm schon erschuሷtterte Überzeugung von gewissen höheren und begluሷckenden Wahrheiten wird vielleicht ganz verloren gehen. So viel hält mich ab, ihm Gluሷck zu wuሷnschen, obwohl sich gewiss Niemand herzlicher als ich daruሷber freut, dass er Anerkennung findet“.
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definitely ruined, and that Stumpf’s philosophical positions would likely change due to external influences (perhaps from his allies in Berlin). In any case, Stumpf’s decision to leave Austria raised doubts in Brentano’s mind regarding Stumpf’s fidelity, and it marks the beginning of a series of disputes between the two philosophers which lasted until Brentano’s death in 1917. 2 Berlin The second episode that Stumpf comments on in this document relates to Brentano’s reaction to Stumpf’s decision to resign his chair in Munich which he had held since 1889 in order to accept a chair at the University of Berlin. It also involves the series of steps taken by Brentano to fill the position left vacant in Munich as a result of Stumpf’s resignation. Brentano’s reaction was similar to the one he had when Stumpf decided to accept a position in Halle, and it is also based on his opinions on Prussian policy and on his doubts about Stumpf’s chances to flourish in the Prussian capital. Brentano’s doubts were unfounded, however, if we judge by Stumpf’s many accomplishments in Berlin and the distinguished career he had in the music capital until his retirement in 1921. (see H. Sprung, 2006; M. Ash, 1995) As to the candidature of Brentano in Munich, we know that because of the many unfulfilled promises of the Austrian Ministry to rehabilitate Brentano and to provide him once again with his chair at the University of Vienna, Brentano had decided to definitively leave Austria (see F. Brentano, 1895 15 ff.) and it is in this context that he undertook several actions to fill Stumpf’s chair in Munich. Stumpf had to justify himself against Brentano’s accusations according to which he had not done everything in his power to assure the hiring of Brentano in Munich. And indeed, as confirmed by several sources, the main obstacle to Brentano’s hiring in Munich was his cousin Georg von Hertling who, mainly for religious reasons, used all his political influence to block the candidacy of Brentano and even threatened to resign his professorship. (see L. Brentano, 1930; G. von Hertling, 1919) 3 The Munich Congress in 1896 The third event relates to Brentano’s topic which he submitted for participation in the Third Congress of Psychology in Munich, which Stumpf and T. Lipps, who had succeeded him in Munich, were the co-
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organizers. Recall that Stumpf had first approached Mach as the keynote speaker of this Congress, but Mach had declined the invitation due to his health condition. Stumpf then turned to Brentano who proposed to address the issue of the intensity of sensations in his talk. But Stumpf reminded him that, in the context of open sessions, the subject was far too specialized as these sessions were primarily intended for a general audience of scientists and non-scientists who were not necessarily interested in these kinds of questions. Stumpf thus suggested him either to discuss a topic of more general interest within the theory of knowledge such as causality or the origin of concepts, or otherwise to save his original topic for a talk in a special section of the Congress, in which case his time would be reduced to 20 minutes (including discussions). Brentano reacted once again very badly and, as stated in his letter to Marty that we publish in this document, Brentano saw in Stumpf’s behaviour another manoeuvre directed against him. He then considered two hypotheses to explain Stumpf’s behaviour: Either he acts, as Hillebrand once, as a scientific guardian of the question of phenomenal green, or he does not want me to give a lecture that contradicts his own dogmas and his Psychology of Sound, and refutes them in essential respects.
Brentano’s suspicions were partly founded. For his allusion to Hillebrand in this passage shows clearly that he was aware of the mitigated reception of his lectures on the issue of the phenomenal green that he delivered at the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna in 1893. The physiologist Ewald Hering, of whom Hillebrand was then the assistant in Prague, was present at this conference and, in a letter to Hillebrand dated February 25, 1893, he discussed Brentano’s talk by saying that it consisted in “entirely fantasized things were told, as is understandable in laymen”. E. Hering, 1986, 193) Hillebrand and Stumpf partially agreed with Hering’s judgment on Brentano’s views on colours, although Stumpf’s criticism of Brentano’s doctrine of sensations rests more specifically on Brentano’s deductive mode of thinking which he tended to favour at the detriment of empirical research: Already in the correspondence of 1876, and then again in the 80s, but especially in Brentano’s talk at the Congress in 1896 and in his treatises on the psychology of sensations, his predominantly deductive way of thinking was for me something which was foreign to my own
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character. Although he was a master in the realm of inner observation and made repeatedly successful observations in the field of colors, he had however a much greater confidence in the general principles and considerations than those which seemed compatible with the spirit of inductive research, and he was therefore led, in my opinion, to purely hypothetical or violent interpretations. 2
Brentano’s second hypothesis rests in part on his dispute with Stumpf’s theory of tonal fusion which the latter developed in the two volumes of his Psychology of Sound, and which will be discussed later. Brentano maintained his original program for the Congress and gave a talk entitled “Zur Lehre von Empfindungen” (published later under the titre “Über Individuation, multiple Qualität und Intensität sinnlicher Erscheinungen” in Brentano, 2009, 127-160) which, as Brentano said to Marty, attracted much interest from the audience. But Brentano had to stop mid-way through his presentation, and he was once again so angered that he abruptly decided to leave Munich without informing Stumpf. Stumpf’s presidential address in the Congress, published under the title “Leib und Seele” in which he criticized the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism and defended a form of interactionism, had not pleased Brentano who suspected him of defending a form of materialistic monism. Yet the main target of Stumpf (1903) 2
Stumpf’s judgment on Brentano’s work in the field of colours and sensations is confirmed in a letter to Hillebrand on the occasion of the publication by Brentano in 1907 of his book Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie which he asked him to review: “Meinerseits bin ich aber in der ganzen Sache nicht recht urteilsfähig, ich fühle mich sowohl in Hinsicht der Beobachtungsfähigkeit wie der Kenntnis der Tatsachen und der Literatur im Farbengebiete nicht auf der Höhe. Da möchte ich nun Ihnen, der Sie ja mit Brentanos philosophischen Theorien ebenso wie mit dem Farbengebiet vertraut sind, nahelegen, die Besprechung zu übernehmen. Wenn Sie, wie ich vermute, sachlich abweichen und nicht alle Schlüsse zwingend finden, werden Sie doch den respektvollen Ton treffen, den man einem Manne wie Brentano schuldet. Überdies ist sicher auch manches in dem Buch, dem man zustimmen oder das man als des Nachdenkens und der eingehenden Prüfung würdig bezeichnen kann. Ich rechne für meine Person dazu auch die Hauptthese betreffs des Grün; Verschiedenes macht mir doch Eindruck in den Argumentationen, auch kommt es mir (wie einigen meiner Laboratoriumsherren) vor, als sei selbst in einem „gelblichen Gruሷn“ noch Blau enthalten was ja nach der bisherigen Lehre unmöglich wäre, nach Brentano dagegen notwendig“. (Stumpf, 1982-1983, 149) The review of this work from Brentano was finally done by Stumpf’s student T. K. Oesterreich (1909).
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in the published version of this address as in many other writings was precisely the sensualist monism of Ernst Mach. Moreover, another metaphysical question that had divided the two philosophers was that of theism, which Brentano advocated until his later writings. As early as 1876, Stumpf disassociated himself from theism in order to adopt a form of pantheism à la Spinoza. (See D. Fisette, 2015) 4 The Controversy over Emotions (1899-1917) The fourth episode in this dispute pertains to their long discussion on emotions which lasted until the death of Brentano in 1917. In fact, this discussion goes well beyond the issue of emotions since it touches many aspects of Brentanos’s psychology. This discussion is also paradigmatic of the attitude of Brentano towards the work of his students. As Stumpf explained in his memoirs to Brentano (Stumpf, 1919, 44), Brentano was particularly sensitive to his students’ deviations from his own doctrines. This is a fortiori the case of Stumpf’s works on emotions. The starting point of this controversy was the publication in 1899 of Stumpf’s paper “On Emotions” in which he distinguished emotions such as joy, sadness, anger, hope, envy, disgust, etc.., from what he calls “Gefühlsempfindungen,” i.e. sense feelings or affective sensations.3 Unlike emotions, affective sensations refer to pain or bodily pleasures such as sexual pleasure, pleasure or discomfort associated with sensations of specific senses such as temperature, noise, taste, sounds, colors, etc. The essential difference between sense feelings and emotion is the intentional nature of the latter. Briefly put, according to Stumpf’s account of intentional states in 1899, an emotion or what is also called an affect is “a state of a passive sentiment which refers to a judged state of affairs”. (Stumpf, 1899, 10) It is therefore a state that belongs to the class of emotions (and to a subclass of passive sentiments), which, like in Brentano’s account, presupposes an act of judgment and a state of affairs. In contrast, Gefühlsempfindungen are not, strictly speaking, sentiments, contrary to what the term suggests, nor functions or intentional states, but rather sensory qualities just like colour and sound. This is the thesis in dispute. 3
Stumpf proposes to translate into English Gefühlsempfindungen by “emotional sensations” (Stumpf, 1928, 68) but for the sake of simplicity and to avoid the term emotion that we shall reserve for translating the term Gemütsbewegung, we shall use “sense feelings” or “affective sensations” for this purpose.
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Brentano acknowledges receipt of Stumpf’s article (1899) in a long letter (which we have published in the present section) in which he accuses him, with a rather paternalistic tone, of deviating from the original doctrine. According to Brentano, Stumpf's position in this article differs in several respects from the positions he advocated in his Psychology. He first points out that one does not find in this article the classification criterion that Brentano conceives of in this letter in terms of intentional inexistence. Brentano also deplores the abandonment of his tripartite classification in favour of a classification based on the two main classes of intellectual and emotional functions. Hence the question of what justifies subsuming presentations and judgments under a single class. Brentano further questions the validity of the distinction, in the second class, between passive sentiments, to which emotions belong, and the sub-class of active sentiments to which belong desire and will. But above all Brentano criticized him for not taking into account his own doctrine of emotions. According to him, one may only call affect or emotion the complex states of mind that can only be found in “humans [who show] higher order mental activities based on general presentations”. (Brentano, 1989, 121) But Brentano also considers that there are affective states like pleasure and displeasure, aesthetic enjoyment, etc., which do not belong to the class of sentiments but are nevertheless intentional states. They do not involve a judgment and a state of affairs or any other activity related to abstract thought as is the case for emotions. Finally, their positions differ on the general issue of sensations, and in particular to that of intensity and tonal fusion. In a letter dated early September 1899, which is reproduced herein, Stumpf acknowledges receipt of this Brentano’s stern letter and responds by saying that in the absence of any publication on these issues since the publication of Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874, it is rather difficult to take into consideration his actual views on the issues discussed in Stumpf’s paper of 1899. Stumpf believes that he remains in agreement with the original doctrine on most of the points raised by Brentano in his letter and, to quote Stumpf once again, “with each mental state, including that of sensation, a consciousness is linked to these states; but when I characterize an affect through the recognition of a state of affairs, as opposed to mere sensory pleasure or pain, I am not talking about what is com-
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mon to all mental states, but only about a particular judgment that is added.” This is the position which Brentano seemed to defend in his Psychology of 1874. Let us bear in mind Stumpf’s effort in this letter to minimize the differences that separate Brentano’s doctrine and his own diagnosis of the dispute, which ultimately hinges on the distinction between sensory pain and emotion proper as well as on musical affective stimuli (Gefühlsregungen), issues over which both are in complete disagreement. Seven years later, in a letter dated 12-06-1906, Stumpf informed Brentano of the forthcoming publication of a lecture delivered at Würzburg on the topic of sense feelings [Gefühlsempfindungen] and claimed to advocate Brentano’s position according to which sensed feelings fall under a class of sensations, corresponding to that which sensualists combine with the affective coloring of higher order senses. In this lecture, which bears the title “On Affective Sensations”, Stumpf claims that he then agrees with Brentano’s position on the basis of a conversation that he had with him at the time. In this article, Stumpf compares three theories of emotional sensations, and argues that Brentano and he defend the third, which is summarized in the following passage: The so-called sensory feelings or affective tone of sensations are themselves sensations (Sinnesempfindungen). Therefore, they do not belong to the functional side but to the objective side of consciousness, not to the mental states but to the material, provided that colours, sounds, and noises belong to the objective side and to the material of consciousness and in the same way that we usually do it. (Stumpf, 1928, 93)
But this is not the Brentano’s position as confirmed by the correspondence and a long footnote to his article “From the Psychological Analysis of Sound Qualities in their First Proper Elements” published in 1907. Brentano discusses once again Stumpf’s doctrine of tonal fusion but he is mainly concerned with the question of sensory pleasure and pain as well as his dispute with Stumpf on the issue of sense feelings. Brentano summarizes in 5 points the main issues in his debate with Stumpf. (1928, 237) 1. For Stumpf, sensory pleasure and pain are themselves sensory qualities, such as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. For Brentano, these are affects or emotions, and therefore psychical phenomena.
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2. There is nothing in common for Stumpf between sensory pleasure and the enjoyment of the mind; for Brentano, on the contrary, sensory pleasure is an enjoyment (Wohlgefallen) directed towards an act of sensing, i.e. a presentation. 3. According to Stumpf, sensory pleasure and pain, when they appear, can no longer be recognized as really existing. According to Brentano, pleasure and pain, like seeing and hearing, are asserted (verbürgt) in their reality through the evidence of inner perception as in Descartes, while the existence of color and sound is not. 4. Another issue pertains to Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects. According to Brentano, the first is something of a sensory and qualitative nature, while the second is the act of feeling itself which is related to the primary objects in different modes, i.e. presenting, evident judging and sometimes emotionally. (Brentano, 237) 5. That unlike Brentano, in distinguishing pleasure and displeasure from purely aesthetic enjoyment, Stumpf tends to exclude pleasure and displeasure provided by a musical piece, for example, from the field of aesthetics. (Stumpf, 1928, 238) It took a decade for Stumpf to reply to Brentano’s objections. He published in 1916 an article entitled “Apology of Affective Sensations” in which he addressed the objections of several psychologists and philosophers like Ribot, Titchener, Ziehen, and Brentano. He pointed out that his view of affective sensations was not new since it had been advocated in the sensualist tradition by Mach, Condillac, and Hobbes, with the difference being, however, that Stumpf, as we saw, refuses to reduce emotions to feelings or affective sensations. (see D. Fisette, 2013) In this paper, Stumpf now recognized his significant disagreements with Brentano not only on the issue of sense feelings, but also on several other fundamental aspects of descriptive psychology. He acknowledged further that he misunderstood the doctrine of Brentano in his 1907 article when he associated it with the third theory. In fact, it is clear from what we said above, that the position of Brentano on sense feelings is much closer to the second theory according to which sense feelings constitute a “new kind of psychical states which are added to the sensation and which belongs to the same kind of act as emotions”. (Stumpf, 1928, 109) Stumpf responds point by point to the five objections which Brentano had addressed to him in his contribution to the Congress of
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Rome, as I have summarized above. I shall only enumerate the relevant aspects of Brentano’s psychology that are at stake in this debate. (see D. Fisette, 2013, 2009) Stumpf first acknowledges the heterogeneous nature of affects or emotions that fall under the class of functions, and that of sensory pleasure and displeasure, which belong to the realm of sensory phenomena. This raises the question of the relationship between sensory phenomena and intentional acts. Stumpf recognizes that sensory pleasure or displeasure are distinct from aesthetic enjoyment since they presuppose psychical functions and they relate to states of affairs. As sensory phenomenon, the reality of pleasure and displeasure cannot, by definition, be justified by the evidence of internal perception as it only applies to intentional states. For, according to Brentano’s doctrine of primary and secondary objects, the acts of love and hatred are always directed toward a sensing, i.e. an act of sensation, and not towards its content or, in Brentano’s terminology, towards a secondary and not a primary object. The enjoyment produced by a perfume is not an enjoyment of the smell as such, but of the act of smelling. Finally, in response to Brentano’s objection that Stumpf would be forced to completely exclude the emotional sensations (Wohl- und Wehegefülle) the approval and musical inconvenience (Gefallen und Mißfallen), Stumpf argues that despite the heterogeneous nature of these two elements they are both essential to the experience of aesthetic enjoyment, emotional sensation is a necessary though not sufficient conditions for aesthetic enjoyment. A final letter from Brentano to Stumpf (30/07/1916) provides further details on their dispute. Brentano acknowledges receipt of Stumpf’s article “Apology” and again accuses him of not understanding certain principles of his psychology and of not taking into account his research in the field of sensations, including what he calls concomitant sensations (Mitempfindungen). Brentano emphasizes a significant change in one important aspect of his psychology in that he henceforth distinguishes between sensations that are affects and those, as seeing and hearing, which are not. Pleasure and displeasure naturally belong to the domain of emotions. Another important aspect of the debate pertains to the evidence of inner perception. The issue is whether this fundamental thesis of Brentano’s philosophy, which in fact is primarily a dogma of his theory of knowledge, may legitimately be used as an argument in the field of psychology as does Brentano when he claims that the existence of pleasure and displeasure is justified through the
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evidence of inner perception. 4 Brentano then wonders whether Stumpf does not call into question the authority of epistemic evidence in the field of psychology. In 1928, Stumpf collected his three main articles on emotions (Stumpf, 1899, 1907, 1916) in a book entitled Emotion and Affective Sensation (Stumpf, 1928), for which he wrote a substantial introduction in which he proposes his own classification of psychical functions. Here again, Stumpf’s main interlocutor is Brentano, and one can see in this introduction an attempt made by Stumpf to demarcate his own classification of mental functions from that of Brentano. The main objection addressed to Brentano (Stumpf, 1928, p. X) essentially reiterates the main arguments as stated above, namely that pleasure is limited to psychical phenomena in Brentano’s philosophy in such a way that sensory pleasure and displeasure necessarily fall under the concept of sentiment of functions or “Funktionsfreude”. We can now see that this controversy has a significant bearing on descriptive psychology understood in the narrow sense as the science of mental states or functions. It denotes significant differences between the two philosophers on several issues, including the classification of acts into two classes; the principle of this classification (intentionality); the class of intellectual functions vs. the two classes of presentation and judgment; the class of emotions and the distinction between passive and active sentiments; external perception and the evidence of internal perception; the doctrine of primary and secondary objects and Brentano’s conception of consciousness; concomitant sensations and finally aesthetic enjoyment. Most of Stumpf’s deviations can be reduced to the question of the relationship between affective sensations which he understands as 4
At the end of this letter, Brentano returns to Stumpf’s remark whereby the evidence in the perception of pleasure and pain belongs to the theory of knowledge and not to psychology. That is what he challenges: “Fast könnte man auf die Vermutung geführt werden, Sie glaubten nicht mehr an die ausschließliche unmittelbar Evidenz der inneren Wahrnehmung. Der Fall von sinnlicher Lust und sinnlichem Schmerz wird aber demselben sicherlich nicht abträglich sein können, solange man das Bewusstsein davon bewahrt, dass Lust und Fühlen der Lust, Schmerz und Fühlen des Schmerzes ein und dasselbe sind; denn das Fühlen des Schmerzes ist doch wahrlich ein Gegenstand der inneren Wahrnehmung”. (Brentano, 1989, 151)
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sensory phenomena, and sentiments (and emotions) as a class of higher-order functions. This raises two distinct issues: first, that of the relationship between the field of sensory phenomena and that of psychical functions, which Brentano conceives of in a representationalist perspective; secondly, the hierarchical relationship between elementary and complex functions. Brentano’s solution to that problem rests on the principle that any mental state is either a presentation, or it is based on a presentation. Stumpf agrees with Brentano that there is a relationship between the lower-order founding acts and the higherorder founded acts, such as the will for example, but he unequivocally rejects the status of founding acts attributed to the class of presentation by Brentano. For Stumpf, this status is only attributable to sensory perception which corresponds to what Brentano called external perception. In his 1907 paper on affective sensations, Stumpf points out that the revision he proposed to Brentano’s initial classification (which he had himself adopted until 1899) was primarily motivated by his research on sensory perception (Stumpf, 1928, 95) On the one hand, sensory perception is considered the most basic mode of consciousness which gives direct access to the field of sensory phenomena (the contents of perception); on the other hand, the rehabilitation of sensory perception (against Brentano’s representationalism) brings about a major revision of the status of presentation and judgment in Brentano’s classification, and it is this revision that motivated Stumpf to subsume them under the class of intellectual functions. Stumpf does not dispute the fundamental role of judgment, more specifically that of states of affairs (contents of judgment) for the class of sentiments, but he does not recognize the force of Brentano’s arguments to provide it with the rank of Hauptgattung to the extent that these arguments are not drawn from psychology as such, but rather from the theory of knowledge (evidence) and from logic (the principle of the reduction of categorical judgments to existential judgments). 5 Generalabrechnung (1903) The fifth episode which Stumpf commented briefly in his text “Persönliche Verstimmungen” refer to three letters that Brentano addressed to him in 1903, which can be considered as a general règlement de compte with Stumpf on the main events that have marked their personal relationship since Stumpf’s departure from Austria in 1884. Because of the unjustified nature of the accusations that Bren-
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tano addressed to him in these letters, he decided to exclude them from his project of the publication of the correspondence. Stumpf nevertheless indicates that the main accusation that Brentano addressed to him in these letters was his ingratitude both personally and scientifically towards him. Stumpf explains Brentano’s Verstimmung by the long interruption of his personal relationship with him which he justifies by invoking health reasons and the heavy task that he had to assume in Berlin. Stumpf reproduced in this document an excerpt from his response to Brentano in which he looks back on some episodes which marked his personal and scientific relationship with Brentano and claims he has always acknowledged his debt to him and his loyalty had never been called into question. Stumpf invokes his academic career in Göttingen and his contributions to science and philosophy, which is, according to him, a testimony to how he succeeded in fructifying his master’s teachings. This is clearly confirmed by Stumpf’s publications after Brentano’s death, including his introduction to his correspondence with Brentano in 1929, the three biographical writings he devoted to Brentano, and his posthumous book Erkenntnislehre which he dedicated to Brentano and in which the latter represents his main interlocutor. References Stumpf, C. (1982-1983) “Briefe an Franz Hillebrand (1863-1926)”, Tiroler Heimat, vol. 46- 47, 145-157. –– (1939-1940) Erkenntnislehre, 2 vol., Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth; 2nd ed. Lengerich: Pabst science publisher, 2011. –– (1928) Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 140 p.; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (eds), Carl Stumpf — Schriften zur Psychologie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997, 229-382. –– (1924) “Carl Stumpf”, in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung, vol. V. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1-57. –– (1922) “Franz Brentano, Professor der Philosophie, 1838-1917”, in A. Chroust (ed.), Lebensläufe aus Franken II. Würzburg: Kabitzsch & Mönnich, 67-85. –– (1920) “Franz Brentano, Philosoph”, Deutsches biographisches Jahrbuch 2, 54-61. –– (1919) “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”, in O. Kraus (ed.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Oskar Beck, 87-149. –– (1916) “Apologie der Gefühlsempfindungen”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, vol. 75, 330-350; also in C. Stumpf, Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Barth, 1928, 103-140. –– (1907) “Über Gefühlsempfindungen”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, vol. 44, 1-49; also in C. Stumpf, Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Barth, 1928, 54-102.
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–– (1906a) “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften”, Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-94. –– (1906b) “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen”, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3-40. –– (1903) Leib und Seele. Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie. Zwei Reden, Leipzig: Barth. –– (1899) “Über den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, vol. 21, 47-99; also in Stumpf, Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Barth, 1928, 1-53. –– (1890) Tonpsychologie, vol. II. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. –– (1883) Tonpsychologie, vol. I. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. Ash, M. (1998) Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brentano, F. (2009) Schriften zur Sinnespsychologie, T. Binder & A. Chrudzimski (eds), Franz Brentano, Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, vol. II, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. –– (2008). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, T. Binder & A. Chrudzimski (eds), Franz Brentano, Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, vol. I, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. –– (1989) Briefe an Carl Stumpf 1867–1917, G. Oberkofler (ed.) Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt. –– (1911) Von der Klassifikation der Psychischen Phänomene, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; reprint in Brentano, 2008, 291–426. –– (1907) Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; reprint in Brentano (2009), 85–206. –– (1896) “Zur Lehre von der Empfindung”, in Akten des Dritten internationalen Kongresses fuሷr Psychologie in Muሷnchen, Muሷnchen: Lehmann, 110–133; reprint under the title: “Über Individuation, multiple Qualität und Intensität sinnlicher Erscheinungen”, in F. Brentano (1907) p. 51–98 and in F. Brentano (2009), 126–158. –– (1895), Meine letzten Wünsche für Österreich, Cotta: Stuttgart. Brentano, L. (1931) Mein Leben im Kampf um die soziale Entwicklung Deutschlands, Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag. Fisette, D. (2015) “Introduction to Stumpf’s Lecture on metaphysics”, 435-444. –– (2013) “Mixed feelings. Carl Stumpf’s Criticism of James and Brentano on Emotions”, in D. Fisette and G. Fréchette (eds) Themes from Brentano, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013, 281-305. Hering, E. (1986) “Aus den Briefen von Ewald Hering an Franz Hillebrand”, H. Hamann (ed.) Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Wien: Kommission der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 183-203. Hertling, G. von (1919) Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, vol. I, Muሷnchen: Verlag der Jos. Kösel’schen Buchhandlung. Kraus, O. (1919) Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Beck.
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Mayer-Hillebrand, F. (1975) “Selbstdarstellung”, L. J. Pongratz (ed.), Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen, vol. II, Hamburg: Meiner, 224-269. Oesterreich, K. (1909) “Rezension von Brentano, 1907”, Deutsche Literaturzeitung, vol. 42, 2644-2645. Sprung, H. (2006) Carl Stumpf - Eine Biografie, München: Profil Verlag.
STUMPF’S EINLEITUNG ZU BRENTANOS BRIEFEN AN MICH FOLLOWED BY SELECTED LETTERS * FROM BRENTANO AND STUMPF EDITED BY GUILLAUME FRÉCHETTE (UNIVERSITY OF SALZBURG)
1 Stumpf’s Introduction to his Correspondence with Brentano Carl Stumpf: Zu Brentanos Briefen an mich. (Ostern 1929) Unser Briefwechsel reicht von 1867 bis zu Brentanos Todesjahr 1917. Aber es muss eine größere Anzahl von Briefen bei meinen vielen Umzügen verloren gegangen sein, da einige Jahrgänge (1878, 1881, 1883, 1888, 1897, 1900-02, 1913-14) fehlen und doch sicherlich kein Jahr ganz ohne Briefwechsel vergangen ist. Nachdem ich als Student der Rechte, 18 Jahre alt, im Juli 1866 der Habilitation Brentanos beigewohnt und im nächsten Semester seine Vorlesung über Geschichte der Philosophie zu hören begonnen hatte, suchte ich ihn, von diesen Eindrücken innerlichst ergriffen, Ende 1866 auf und erklärte, seinem Beispiel und seiner Leitung folgend, Philosophie und Theologie studieren zu wollen. Ich hörte denn auch im Sommer 1867 seine erste Metaphysikvorlesung und durfte seinen freundschaftlichen Umgang genießen. Auf häufigen Spaziergängen in Würzburg und Aschaffenburg führte er mich in sein Geistes- und Gemütsleben ein. Es war ihm nicht bloß um die intellektuelle Schulung, sondern auch um die geistliche Führung meiner Seele zu tun und ich brachte ihm denn auch unbedingtestes Vertrauen und glühende Verehrung entgegen. Die Würzburger, denen die hohe dunkle, ernste Gestalt *
The edition of the following collection of letters is based on the originals and/or copies reposited at the Franz Brentano Archives at the University of Graz, the University Library Archives in Innsbruck and the University of Graz and the Houghton Library at the Harvard University. We thank these institutions for giving us access to these documents.
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Carl Stumpf - Franz Brentano
Brentanos bald auffiel, sollen seinen mageren Trabanten auch wohl für einen jüngeren Bruder gehalten haben. Des Abends am Mainufer, wo seine Wohnung lag, konnte er nach den scharfen logischen und ontologischen Untersuchungen von der Seligkeit schwärmen, die ihm die Meditation und Kontemplation, die betrachtende Versenkung in die Geheimnisse der Religion und in das Leben Jesu gewährten. Im Herbst 1867 ging ich auf seinen Rat nach Göttingen, um bei Lotze zu hören und zu promovieren. In dieser Zeit beginnt die Korrespondenz. Weitere [2] Lebensumstände, die zum Verständnis der Briefe in Betracht kommen können, sind aus den gedruckten biographischen Darstellungen zu entnehmen. Doch sei einiges hier noch näher ausgeführt. Schon 1876 (ich war 1873 in Würzburg Professor geworden, Brentano 1874 nach Wien berufen) kamen mir Zweifel in Bezug auf die höchsten Fragen, auf die es Brentano am meisten ankam, nämlich die Entstehung der Seele und die Theodizee. Darauf beziehen sich mehrere seiner Briefe aus diesem Jahre. Es ist der Sammlung auch eine Abschrift von stenographischen Aufzeichnungen beigelegt (130a-e)1, in denen ich damals den Kern unseres Gedankenaustausches skizzierte. Ich war nicht zum Atheismus übergegangen, aber die ungeheure Summe des Übels schien mir mit dem vom Christentum übernommenen Gottesbegriff nicht mehr vereinbar. Ebenso leugnete ich keineswegs die Geistigkeit und Unsterblichkeit der Seele, fand es aber nicht notwendig, einen jedesmaligen unmittelbaren Schöpfungsakt Gottes für die Entstehung einer individuellen Seele anzunehmen, sondern hielt ihre Einordnung in den empirischen Kausalzusammenhang als regelmäßige natürliche Folge bestimmter organischer Vorbedingungen für möglich. Diese Diskrepanz unserer Anschauungen ist auch später niemals wieder verschwunden und hat Brentano vielen Kummer gemacht, obschon auch sein eigener Gottesbegriff infolge des Übergangs zum absoluten Determinismus starke Umbildungen erfuhr. Es sind aber später bei ihm auch persönliche Verstimmungen gegen mich aufgetreten, an denen ich mich unschuldig wusste, und zwar, so weit ich konstatieren konnte, fünfmal und in steigender Schärfe: 1. Bei meiner Übersiedlung von Prag nach Halle 1884. 2. Nach Annahme des Berliner Rufs 1893. 3. Bei und nach dem Münchener internationa1
[editor’s note: this collection of notes is not part of the documents reposited at the University Library Archives in Innsbruck (also available at the Franz Brentano Archives at the University of Graz.]
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len Psychologenkongress 1896. 4. 1899. Und 5. 1903. Ich erfuhr von diesen Verstimmungen erst durch seine Briefe aus den eben genannten beiden Jahren und habe damals gleich auf seine Vorhaltungen geantwortet. Bei persönlichem Wiedersehen ist das alte innige Verhältnis des aus tiefstem Herzen dankbaren Schülers zu dem selbstlos spendenden Lehrer vom ersten Moment an wieder dagewesen und geblieben. Aber da möglicherweise in seiner Korrespondenz mit Marty oder anderen Freunden aus den betreffenden Jahren sich Klagen oder Anklagen finden könnten, und da ich die Dokumente des letzten und schärfsten Konfliktes 1903 in die vorliegende Abschriftensammlung nicht aufgenommen habe, möchte ich hier die Geschichte dieser Verstimmungen, so weit ich sie übersehe, wenigstens kurz skizzieren, um mein Andenken gegen Vorwürfe, die etwa später auf Grund solcher Briefstellen gegen mich erhoben werden könnten, zu schützen. In Prag war ich gleich im ersten Jahre nach einem überaus schweren Familienerlebnis und den Anstrengungen des ersten Semesters, in welchem ich die mir selbst bis dahin beinahe fremdgebliebene praktische Philosophie zu lesen hatte, mit den Nerven zusammengebrochen. Die Aufregungen der nationalen Kämpfe, die Arbeiten an der Tonpsychologie, das Dekanatsjahr, die schlechten sanitären Verhältnisse der Stadt ließen mich nur langsam genesen. Eine unüberwindliche Sehnsucht nach dem deutschen Vaterland und der Wunsch, unsere Kinder dort aufwachsen zu sehen, bestimmten mich, obschon ich an Marty einen idealen Freund und Kollegen hatte, den Ruf nach Halle 1884 sofort anzunehmen. Der Ministerialreferent David2 schrieb mir, als ich ihm dies anzeigte, man hätte gehofft, mich einmal für Wien zu gewinnen. Aber die sichere Stellung in dem friedlichen Halle lockte mich mehr als die ungewissen Hoffnungen auf Wien; auch durfte ich annehmen, man werde sich eher zu Brentanos Wiederanstellung entschließen [3] wenn die Möglichkeit, ihn durch seinen Schüler zu ersetzen, weggefallen wäre. Es scheinen aber gerade durch meinen Weggang für ihn gewisse Schwierigkeiten entstanden zu sein, die ich nicht voraussehen konnte. In meinem raschen Entschluss fand er Undank gegen Österreich, dem ich doch wahrlich meine besten Kräfte jahrelang gewidmet hatte, und nahm besonderen Anstoß an dem 2
[Editor’s note: Benno von David was counselor of the court and ministerial director at the ministry of education in Habsburg Vienna.]
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Übergang nach dem ihm verhassten Preußen. Dieser Preußenhass ging in seinen Wurzeln wohl auf eine Familientradition zurück (der Vater war 1838 nach seiner Beteiligung am Kölner Bischofsstreite aus Preußen ausgewiesen worden); er war aber bei Brentano auch in den Erlebnissen des Jahres 1866 und in seiner moralischen Verurteilung der Bismarck’schen Politik begründet. Auch mir schien vieles an Bismarcks Handlungen verwerflich. Mein Herz gehörte aber dem neuen Deutschland und die Energie und der Gemeingeist waren doch Charakterzüge des preußischen Wesens, die Respekt erwecken konnten, während das alte Österreich, insbesondere seit dem Ministerium Taffe („es wird fortgewurstelt“3) in dieser Hinsicht nicht imponieren konnte. Später hat mir Brentano, dessen Liebe zu Österreich so schlecht vergolten wurde, den erneuten Übergang zu Preußen bei der Übersiedlung von München nach Berlin nicht mehr so übel genommen. Im Sommer 1893 erhielt ich den Ruf nach Berlin. Brentano, dessen Aussichten auf Wiederanstellung in Wien sich trotz aller Versprechungen als trügerisch erwiesen hatten, richtete nun sein Augenmerk auf München. Ich habe es natürlich an Bemühungen in dieser Richtung in der Fakultät, Senat, im Ministerium nicht fehlen lassen. Aber auch in München herrscht die kirchliche Strömung, die Zeiten des Kulturkampfes waren längst vorüber, Hertling erklärte rundweg, niederzulegen, wenn Brentano käme, kurz [4] der Plan war vollkommen aussichtslos, und es war sehr ungerecht, wenn mir Brentano später den Vorwurf machte, dass ich nicht alles getan hätte, was in meinen Kräften stand. Die mir übertragene Leitung des internationalen Psychologenkongresses im August 1896 brachte eine ungeheure Korrespondenz mit sich. Es war mir gelungen, auf dem Programm des Kongresses, dessen beide Vorgänger unter dem Zeichen der Parapsychologie standen, die okkultistischen Vorträge gegen die normalpsychologischen ganz in den Hintergrund zu drängen. Ich konnte auch Brentano zur Teilnahme und zu einem Vortrag bewegen. Bei diesem Vortrage musste ich leider, da die Redezeit nun einmal bei jedem derartigen Massenversammlung kurz zugemessen ist und die Vorträge nachher doch gedruckt wurden, nachdem er schon weit über die Redezeit hinaus gesprochen hatte, ihn notgedrungen um Abkürzung bitten. Damit mag 3
[Editor’s note: this expression was popular in Germany and Austria at the end of the 19th century, especially in social-democrat newspapers, as a way of discrediting haphazard administrative measures and political decisions.]
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ich ihn wohl gekränkt haben. Ich war in diesen Tagen selbst gehetzt wie ein gejagter Hase, musste jedem Rede stehen und helfen und fand nicht die Muße, mit ihm allein zu sein. Auch dies hat nach einem seiner Briefe eine Verstimmung bewirkt. Während der Abschiedsversammlung im Rathause war er plötzlich verschwunden und reiste ab, ohne mir ein Wort zu sagen. Aber vielleicht hatte dies andere Gründe. Dagegen weiß ich aus seinen Briefen 1903 (s.u.), dass er in meiner Eröffnungsrede über Leib und Seele, die ihm zuerst gefallen hatte, nachträglich eine Art Liebäugeln mit dem Materialismus erblickte, woran ich doch nicht im entferntesten gedacht hatte.4 1899 erfuhr ich durch den Brief vom 18. August, der der vorliegenden Sammlung eingefügt ist, dass meine Abhandlung über den Begriff der Gemütsbewegungen in mehrfacher Beziehung seine Missbilligung erregt hatte und dass ich ihm überhaupt als ein Abtrünniger erschien. Meine Antwort [6] darauf liegt gleichfalls bei den Briefen. Aber auch, was ich in meinem Beitrage zu dem Buche von O. Kraus 4
[Editor’s note: Brentano expressed his first doubts on Stumpf’s monism upon reception of the first volume of his Tonpsychologie in 1885. See for instance this excerpt of a letter from Brentano to Marty, dated December 13, 1885: “…In Stumpfs Tonpsychologie habe ich erst größere Partien aufmerksamer besehen. Sie ist außerordentlich fleißig gearbeitet mit einem rühmenswerten Streben nach Klarheit. Viele Argumente auch recht scharfsinnig. Dagegen finde ich den systematischen Aufbau nicht sehr glücklich; vieles ermüdend breit und an manchen Stellen scheint er uns in Ansichten und Gesinnungen doch sehr entfremdet. Was sollen z.B. s.22 die Äußerungen über die Evidenz? Zweifelt er wirklich an die Evidenz der inneren Wahrnehmung und hofft noch auf einen Aufbau der andern Erfahrungswissenschaften? Wenn ihn das irrige Wähnen, etwas sei evidente Wahrnehmung, zweifeln macht, ob je eine evident sei, sieht er nicht ein, dass dasselbe Argument gegen die Evidenz der Axiome gerichtet werden könnte? Und hat man nicht am Satz des Widerspruchs gezweifelt? Aber S. 96 scheint er von aller Evidenz überhaupt nichts wissen zu wollen. Es soll da nur einen Unterschied der Urtheilsfunction bei gleichem Inhalt geben können, den v. Anerkennen und Verwerfen! Fatal ist mir auch sein gar liebenswürdiges Berücksichtigen des edlen “Monismus”, wo er durch gar nichts dringlich provoziert erscheint...”. In Brentano’s letter to Stumpf dated February 3, 1903, this accusation is explicit: “Und so ist denn einen alles Übrige, was bei Ihrer Fortentwicklung zu beklagen war, jetzt in verstärktem Maße eine traurige Wirklichkeit geworden. Manchmal, wie wenn ich Sie als Vorstand des internationalen psychologischen Kongresses durch Verschiebung von Wortbedeutungen, wie der des Monismus Anhängern entgegengesetzter Ansicht sich gefällig erwiesen sah, erschienen Sie mir schier zur Methode eines Dilthey herabgesunken, Sie, die Sie einst meine schönste Hoffnung, der Liebling unter meinen Lieblingen gewesen!!”]
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über Brentano (S. 144ff) über das Verhältnis Brentanos zur literarischen Produktion seiner Schüler bemerkte, wäre hier zu vergleichen. Im Februar 1903 sah sich Brentano infolge der elfjährigen Pause unseres persönlichen Verkehrs5 und schwarzer Gedanken über meinen Charakter, die sich bei ihm angesammelt hatte, zu einem überaus bitteren Brief, einer Art Generalabrechnung veranlasst. Diesen Brief und zwei ihm weiter folgende habe ich aus der vorliegenden Sammlung ausgeschlossen – nicht meinetwegen, da meine Lebensführung offen genug daliegt, sondern wegen der schreienden Ungerechtigkeiten, zu denen er sich durch bloße Einbildungen hingerissen ließ, und die sein eigenes Charakterbild entstellen würden, bedächte man nicht, dass auch sie zuletzt in seiner Liebe zu mir wurzelten. Ruft er mir doch zu: „Sie, der Sie einst meine schönste Hoffnung, der Liebling unter meinen Lieblingen gewesen sind!“ Um was es sich handelt, kann man aus einem längeren Passus meiner Antwort ersehen, den ich hierher setzen will. ....Sie wissen nichts von mir, nichts von meinem inneren und äußeren Leben, und Sie häufen eine Beleidigung [7] auf die andere, greifen meine wissenschaftliche und persönliche Ehre in der rücksichtslosesten Weise an. Ich bin derselbe, der ich stets war, gehe meinen geraden Weg, arbeite von früh bis spät mit Aufgebot aller Kräfte, erfreue mich der Hochschätzung der weitesten Kreise und einer beständig zunehmenden Hörerzahl (jetzt gegen 200). Wenn es Dozenten gibt, die mit Schönreden, Oberflächlichkeit oder Dogmatismus oder mit Heranziehung der Tagesfragen noch mehr von sich reden machen, so kümmert mich dies nicht, und es ist mir neu, dass Sie darauf Gewicht legen. Aber wenn meine Nachfolger [Erdmann in Halle, Lipps in München] denen ich einen völlig verwahrlosten Boden erst zubereitete, mehr Zulauf haben, sei es ihnen gegönnt. Wenn ein „bedeutender hiesiger Kollege“ meinen Namen nicht kennt, kann es sehr wohl gegenseitig sein. Wir sind hier 217 Professoren (das Heer der Privatdozenten nicht gerechnet, unter denen, wie Sie wissen, es auch bedeutende gibt). Davon 5
In meinem Beitrage zu dem Buch von Kraus ist S. 140 von einer 18jährigen Pause die Rede. Das war aber gegen mich selbst ungerecht. Denn ich hatte nach dem Tode seiner ersten Frau den Vereinsamten im September 1894 in Schönbühl aufgesucht. Auf einer italienischen Reise mit meiner Frau 1899 hatten wir ihn leider in Florenz nicht angetroffen, da er nach Palermo gereist war, sonst wäre die Pause überhaupt nur auf wenige Jahre beschränkt geblieben.
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kenne ich jetzt nach 9 Jahren vielleicht 80 persönlich, 60 mit Namen, die übrigen gar nicht. Als ich im vorigen Jahre Dekan war, kam es mindestens zehnmal vor, dass Extraordinarii meiner eigenen Fakultät sich mir vorstellten, von deren Existenz und Wissenschaft ich keine Ahnung hatte. Das geht jedem hier so. Im übrigen bin ich jetzt auch von der Gesamtheit der Ordinarii zum Senatsmitglied gewählt, habe selbst bei der Rektoratswahl Stimmen erhalten, also mögen Sie sich über die Unwissenheit Ihres Gewährsmannes beruhigen. Über diese Vorwürfe könnte ich lachend hinweggehen, über die Gesinnungslosigkeiten aber, deren Sie mich zeihen, kann ich es [8] nur unter schärfsten Protest......Sie wissen gut genug, dass ich den Berliner Ruf zuerst in aller Form ablehnte, dass ich dann schweren Herzens eine wiederholte Anfrage annahm, als ich einsah, dass die bayrische Regierung meine Bestrebungen nicht weiter unterstützten, kein Seminar gründen werde etc. Und dies selbst nur die Folge meines Verhaltens gegen Hertling in der Akademiefrage: ich, und ich allein, hatte gegen seine Aufnahme in der Akademie protestiert und sie tatsächlich damals verhindert, während sie vom Hof gewünscht und von den servilen Herrn Wölfflin, Carrière, etc. beantragt war. Das ist mein Strebertum, und genau so ist es noch heute. Sie hätten es gestern in der Fakultät, aus der ich nach einer vernichtenden Philippika gegen einen kaiserlichen Günstling um halb 11 in der Nacht zurückkam, mit anhören können. Und Sie hätten es in München, als ich in der Fakultät, im Senat, im Ministerium bis zur äußersten Grenze des Möglichen für Sie eintrat, der weder der Regierung, noch der Majorität genehm war, gleichfalls mitanhören können. Oder in Halle, als ich mich mit [I.E.] Erdmann und Haym, meinen älteren Fachgenossen, und dem sämtlichen übrigen Dekanabiles überwarf, indem ich gegen die schmähliche Doktorenfabrikation und gegen leichtsinnige Habilitationen opponierte. Sie hätten dann nebenbei auch die Erklärung dafür gewonnen, warum gewisse Herren über meinen Weggang befriedigt sein mussten. Bedenken Sie bei alledem noch, dass ich diese unaufhörlichen Anstrengungen und Aufregungen seit 30 Jahren einem schwächlichen [9] Körper anbringen muss, der den Militärarzt bei der Ausmusterung zu dem Ausruf: „Homo maxime debilis!“ veranlasste, für den die Versicherungsärzte eine Lebensversicherung nur unter einschränkenden Bedingungen zuließen, dass vor allem fast keine Nacht mir den not-
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wendigen Schlaf bringt und meine Nerven vollständig ruiniert sind, während Sie sich vorzustellen scheinen, dass ich nach Erlangung einer fetten Pfründe es mir hier wohl sein lasse! Luther [dessen Wormser Dictum mir Brentano zum Muster vorgehalten] ist bei all seinem Heldentum, auf das ich keinen Anspruch erhebe, doch zu einer ansehnlichen Leibesfülle gekommen. Mit einem robusten Körper, wie ihn, z.B. Paulsen hat, wollte ich schon noch etwas mehr leisten..... Ich bin Allen treu geblieben, die mir im Leben näher getreten sind, auch denen, die sich von mir abwandten. Ich bleibe es auch Ihnen und denke in unaussprechlicher Dankbarkeit an alles Gute in Wissenschaft und Gesinnung, das mir von Ihnen in hochgemuter Jugendzeit, im idealen Doppelverhältnis des Lehrers und Freundes geschenkt ist.... Ich schloss mit einer Übersicht der Funktionen, die mir in Berlin aufgehalst worden waren und zu wissenschaftlicher Korrespondenz, so, wie er sie wünschte, absolut keine Zeit ließen: außer den Vorlesungen und Übungen die Leitung des sich immer mehr vergrößernden psychologischen Instituts mit den lästigen administrativen Obliegenheiten, den eigenen Ex-[10]perimentalarbeiten und die Sorge für die fremden, allwöchentlich eine Akademie- und eine Fakultätssitzung mit zahlreichen Promotionsprüfungen, allwöchentlich Staatsprüfungen, Mitgliedschaft staatlicher und akademischer Kommissionen, Gutachten für das Ministerium und auswärtige Fakultäten, Leitung des Vereins für Kinderpsychologie usw. Den enormen Zeitverlust von 1 ½ - 3 Stunden täglich infolge der Entfernungen hatte ich dabei nicht einmal erwähnt. Ich war nun doch schon 55 Jahre alt und glaubte, als Dozent an 6 Universitäten, als Forscher durch viele wissenschaftliche Arbeiten meinem Lehrer Ehre gemacht zu haben und niemals anderen als sachlichen Motiven gefolgt zu sein. Darum hatten mich seine Vorwürfe aufs allertiefste verwundet, ja, ich muss sagen, sie hätten mir fast die Liebe aus dem Herzen gerissen, und leider geben einige frostige oder allzu scharfe Wendungen in meiner sofortigen Antwort davon Zeugnis. Wie er selbst die Tragweite seines Briefes empfand, geht daraus hervor, dass er den Empfang meiner Antwort zuerst nur in wenigen Zeilen anzeigte, die ‚Geliebter Freund!“ überschrieben waren, es aber vor Erregung auf den nächsten Tag verschob, sie zu lesen. Er hatte offenbar mit der Möglichkeit gerechnet, keine Antwort zu bekommen, was mich heute noch mit Entsetzen erfüllt.
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Es folgten weitere Briefe dicht aufeinander, aber die volle Aussöhnung, und zwar im ersten Augenblick, schuf erst das persönliche Wiedersehen im nächsten Jahre. Wenn ich mich jetzt frage, wie es kam, dass in unserem persönlichen Verkehr überhaupt eine so lange Pause eintreten konnte, so finde ich hauptsächlich 4 Ursachen. Die Notwendigkeit, mein in Berlin über alles Maß angestrengtes [11] Nervensystem nach meiner Weise, durch ausgedehnte Fußwanderungen in den Bergen während der Ferien wieder aufzufrischen. Brentano kannte diese Art der Erholung nicht; ich weiß nur von einer großen Fußwanderung von Wien nach München. Er war breitschulterig und muskulös, von prachtvoller Konstitution und konnte sich darum auch in Martys körperliche Schwächen nicht so leicht hineinfühlen. Familienverhältnisse, die Schwierigkeit der Ferieneinteilung durch die absurden preußischen Schulferien, die Pflege der Beziehungen zu meinen vereinsamten Schwestern und dergleichen. Diesen Grund ließ Brentano überhaupt nicht gelten, sondern erklärte ihn für einen schier unglaublichen Vorwand, was mich schwer verletzen musste. Ich konnte und kann ihm in diesem rein persönlichen Dingen ebensowenig wie irgend einem andern ein Urteil zugestehen. Schwere Gemütsdepressionen in jenen Jahren, die ihm unbekannt sein und bleiben mussten. Das mir selbst damals nicht voll bewusste aber darum doch nicht weniger wirksame Bedürfnis, einmal einige Jahre in meiner wissenschaftlichen Entwicklung ausschließlich den Antrieben und Anlagen meiner eigenen Natur zu folgen. Schon in der Korrespondenz von 1876, dann wieder in den 80er Jahren, besonders aber durch Brentano Kongressvortrag 1896 und seine sinnespsychologischen Abhandlungen war mir seine vorwiegend deduktive Denkweise als etwas meinem eigenen Wesen Fremdes entgegengetreten. Obschon er auf dem Gebiete der inneren Beobachtung Meister war, auch im Farbengebiet unaufhörlich beobachtete, schenkte er doch allgemein Prinzipien und Erwägungen ein viel größeres Zutrauen, als mit dem Geiste induktiver Forschung vereinbar schien, und kam so meines Erachtens zu gewaltsamen oder rein hypothetischen Deutungen. Vergleiche seine Rückführung der Intensitätsunterschiede auf solche der räumlichen Verteilung unmerklicher Empfindungselemente oder seine Hypothese vom
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Tonweiss und Tonschwarz. Meine eigenen Neigungen wandten sich dagegen immer mehr der der vollen Breite der Tatsachen zu, aus denen sich die allgemeinen Gesichtspunkte sozusagen von selbst ergeben sollten. Auch in der Gotteslehre schien mir Brentanos Neigung und Vertrauen zur Deduktion immer mehr zu überwiegen. In der ersten Zeit hatte noch die ausführliche Darlegung des Scheines der Theologie den Mittelpunkt gebildet, später trat diese immer mehr zurück gegen die rein deduktiven Beweisführungen, die aus der Existenz eines einzigen Atoms auf die eines unendliche vollkommenen Wesens und daraus wieder auf die einer schlechthin besten Welt schlossen, während mir das wirkliche Aussehen der Welt, die Realität und Größe des Übels neben der Zweckmäßigkeit der Naturerscheinungen andere Wege zu weisen schienen. In allen diesen weltlichen und göttlichen Dingen bewunderte ich die Feinheit und Schärfe seiner Gedankengänge, fand ich mich aber nicht von ihrer zwingenden Kraft überzeugt, weil mir immer gewisse nicht selbst verständliche Voraussetzungen dabei noch mitzuwirken schienen. Es war also in der Tat nach 1896 eine Art von geistiger Entfremdung eingetreten, die nicht meine Freundschaft, Dankbarkeit und Verehrung beeinträchtigte, mich auch nicht geradezu von einem Besuch abhalten konnte aber doch das Bedürfnis danach weniger als früher empfinden ließ. Dies alles lag bei Marty anders. Er war kein Wanderer, konnte vollständig über seine Ferien disponieren und stand seiner methodischen Geistesverfassung nach Brentano näher als ich, der eigentlich ein philosophierender Naturforscher geworden war. [11] Nur gegen einen Vorwurf in diesen Brentanobriefen von 1903 weiß ich mich nicht genügend zu verteidigen. Er klagt, dass ich ihm, der um 1899 schwer erkrankt war und sich jahrelang nicht ganz erholen konnte, kein Zeichen der Teilnahme habe zukommen lassen. Ich tat es zwar 1899 (s.d. Brief aus Wengen), habe mir auch weiterhin immer durch Marty, den Treuesten der Treuen, über Brentanos Leiden berichten lassen, versäumte aber, wie es scheint, direkte teilnehmende Erkundigungen einzuziehen, was auch durch die obigen Umstände nicht entschuldigt ist und wofür ich noch dem Verstorbenen Abbitte leiste.
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2 Stumpf’s move from Prague to Halle (1884) 2.1 Stumpf an Brentano, 16.08.1884 Verzeihen Sie mir, dass ich so spät über den erhaltenen Ruf und das inzwischen Geschehene an Sie berichte. Ich war seitdem in ununterbrochener Hetze. Marty hatte Ihnen über die Ankunft des Rufes geschrieben; und über Ihre Ansichten in dieser Richtung hatte ich ja Ihren Brief von früher her, dessen Argumente ich inzwischen wohl im Auge behalten haben, ohne dass ich Ihnen ganz zustimmen konnte. Dass ich die Möglichkeit nach Wien zu kommen, für immer verliere, ist gewiss; während auf der anderen Seite mir Berlin in der Tat keineswegs gewiss ist. Aber ich gestehe, dass ich Wien nicht mehr als letztes Ziel ansehen möchte; ich würde mich dort kaum völlig zufrieden fühlen. Das österreichische Staatswesen und Unwesen ist mir verleidet, und namentlich möchte ich meinen Sohn nicht da groß werden lassen. So vieles auch in Preußen unerfreulich ist, es herrscht dort Ordnung, Pflichtgefühl, Arbeitsamkeit; es dominieren nicht unzivilisierten Nationen über zivilisierte. Petersen hat nun wirklich seine Söhne nach Deutschland geschickt. Hirschfeld hat den Ruf nach Straßburg zwar abgelehnt aber offenbar nur, weil ihm der nach Berlin schon in Aussicht stand, den er nun erhalten hat und sicherlich annehmen wird. Für Sie liegen die Dinge immerhin anders; Sie haben nicht Sorge um Kinder, Sie haben nur Ihre Wirksamkeit, Ihr und Ihrer Frau Wohlbefinden zu berücksichtigen. An David habe ich kürzlich geschrieben, um vorläufig wegen des Termins der Entlassung anzufragen. Er antwortete, dass ich wohl zum 1. Oktober schon enthoben werden könnte; dass ich aber doch, wenn ich irgendwelche Wünsche hätte, sie aussprechen möchte. Sein Brief ist äußerst liebenswürdig, aber was soll ich antworten? Materiell werde ich mich in Halle gut stehen; und wenn ich auch ein paar fl. mehr in Österreich bekäme, so wäre doch alles andere wie vorher. Inzwischen bin ich nun also in Berlin und Halle gewesen. Ich bekomme 7500 Mark, einen für Halle sehr hohen Gehalt. Die Wirksamkeit dort und die kollegialen Verhältnisse sollen erfreulich sein, 1600 Studenten. Man wohnt bequem und gesund, wenn auch die Stadt ein Nest genannt werden muss. Ich habe in Berlin zugesagt und erwarte das Dekret in nächster Zeit, um dann um die Entlassung in Wien einzureichen. Für Ihre Angelegenheiten ist die Sache vielleicht nütz-
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lich; man sieht, dass wir nicht durchaus uns auf Österreich kaprizieren. Schwer wird mir die weitere Trennung von Ihnen und die Trennung von Marty. Marty wird indes für den Winter zweifellos Urlaub nehmen müssen; und ist er besser, so kommen ihm ja dann meine Wiener Aussichten zu Gute, sei es früher oder später. Ich muss heute schließen. Nehmen Sie beide die herzlichsten Grüße von mir und uns allen hier. Ihr trotz alledem immer getreuer C. Stumpf 2.2 Brentano an Stumpf, 5.10.1884 Lieber Freund! Die jüngeren Vorgänge in Prag müssen wohl auf einen nervösen Menschen einen besonders peinlichen Eindruck machen; sonst könnte ich die Bitterkeit nicht begreifen, mit welcher Ihr letzter Brief über Österreich spricht. Denn persönlich wenigstens, dächte ich, haben Sie sich über den Staat nicht zu beklagen. Er hat Sie in ehrender Weise berufen, hat Ihnen günstigere Bedingungen gewährt als Sie sie früher hatten, hat Ihre späteren Wünsche und Vorschläge nicht missachtet, Ihnen den Kollegen gegeben, den Sie verlangten, und das Seminar errichtet so, wie Sie es begehrten. Ja die Vorteile, die er Ihnen gewährte, haben sicherlich wesentlich dazu beigetragen, dass Ihnen jetzt in Halle ein außergewöhnlich hoher Gehalt geboten wird. Sie sagen freilich, in Preußen sei wenigstens Ordnung. In Österreich scheint Ihnen also keine Ordnung zu sein. Aber ich denke, Ihr Gehalt ist Ihnen immer pünktlich ausgezahlt und, weder auf dem Katheder noch in Ihrer Wohnung, sind Sie angefallen und gestört worden. Wenn aber den Tschechen da und dort einmal durch die Finger gesehen wird, glauben Sie wirklich, dass im Deutschen Reiche nichts Ähnliches vorkommt, wenn es gilt, die Sympathien gewisser Klassen einer Bevölkerung zu gewinnen? Da scheinen Sie nichts davon zu wissen, wie Manteuffel 6 im Elsass sich gegen die Elsässer und namentlich gegen ihre Notabeln benimmt. Ich bin jüngst durch Straßburg gekommen und könnte manch Stücklein davon erzählen. 6
[Editor’s note: Edwin von Manteuffel was a Prussian Generalfeldmarschall and was appointed Governor-General of occupied Alsace-Lorraine in 1879.]
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Ich könnte mehr sagen, aber dies wenige reicht schon hin, um das zu entkräften, was Sie in Ihrem Briefe vorbringen. Und zu was für weitgehenden Konsequenzen haben Sie sich durch eine so wenig umsichtige Erwägung verführen lassen! Da soll es schließlich gegen das Gewissen eines tugendhaften Vaters verstoßen, zuzugeben, dass sein Sohn zum Bürger eines Staates wie Osterreich und nicht zu einem preußischen Rekruten heranwächst! Es scheint ja fast Preußen bei Ihnen an die Stelle der alleinseligmachenden Kirche zu treten! Und doch hat dieses Preußen mehr fast als jeder andere Staat seine Hände mit unschuldigem Blute besudelt, hat in seiner Geschichte Ungerechtigkeit an Ungerechtigkeit - was nach Ihnen scheint’s nicht ein Fehler gegen die “Ordnung” ist – gereiht, Deutschland und seine Verbündeten verraten, gelogen und betrogen, ja zu Ihren Lebzeiten und unter Ihren Augen seine Brüder und Bundesgenossen schändlich und schwurbrüchig niedergetreten. Österreich hat damals wie fast immer – und mit Recht nannte darum auch Arndt 7 gerade diesen deutschen Staat “an Ehren reich”– die Sache der Treue und Gerechtigkeit vertreten. Wenn ich nun noch sage, dass an unseren gegenwärtigen Zuständen in Österreich wesentlich Bismarck die Schuld trägt, wie er denn auch jetzt noch nie den Mund auftut, um über unsere Kämpfe zu sprechen, als um die Deutschen zu beleidigen und zu verhöhnen, so habe ich, denke ich, genug gesagt. Was in anderer Beziehung, und vielleicht auch für mich, Ihr Schritt für eine Bedeutung haben kann, will ich nicht ausführen. Die Reue, die Ihnen daraus entspringen könnte, wäre unberechtigt; denn Sie hatten von dem allem sich offenbar nichts klar gemacht. Und wenn Sie auch ein so schönes Wirken, wie es Ihnen sonst in Aussicht stand, kaum finden werden, so kann ich nicht wünschen, dass Sie freudlos und mit lahmen Flügeln Ihre neue Bahn durchfliegen. Im Gegenteile wünsche ich Ihnen und der Sache der Wahrheit alles Gedeihen. Ich habe Ihnen spät geantwortet, da, was ich zu schreiben hatte, weder mehr einen praktischen Nutzen haben konnte, noch, wie ja niemals missbilligende Worte, eine angenehme Botschaft für Sie war. Ja ich hätte ganz geschwiegen, wenn nicht die Freundschaft Offenheit 7
[Editor’s note: Ernst Moritz Arndt, German author. The quote is taken from his famous patriotic song „Des Deutschen Vaterland“ from 1813.]
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verlangte. Seltsam ist’s, dass ich, dem Sie persönlich immer eine so volle, edle und seltene Dankbarkeit bewahrt haben, in gewisser Weise einen Undank Ihnen vorrücken muss! Was die Bücher anlangt, die ich durch Ihre freundliche Vermittlung erhalten, so werde ich Sorge tragen, daß die beiden nach Prag gehörigen vor dem Zwölften in Ihren Händen sind. Das Bonitzsche Lexikon werde ich, da Sie mir die Wahl lassen, und ich es in den nächsten Tagen (ich arbeite gerade noch an den Artikeln für die Akademie) vielleicht nicht nötig habe, Ihnen nach Halle schicken. Lange bedarf ich seiner auch nicht mehr. Und nun schließe ich - meine freimütigen Worte geben mir zu dem Attribut heute ein besonderes Recht - als Ihr aufrichtiger Freund Franz Brentano
3 Der Ruf nach Berlin 1893 3.1 Brentano an Stumpf, 8.9.1893 Schönbühel, 8. 9. 1893 Es ist eine sehr ernste Frage, in der Sie mich zu Rate ziehen, und als wahrer Freund darf ich die Antwort nicht versagen. Dennoch zögerte ich zu schreiben, da ich das Für und Wider sorgsam erwägen wollte. Ich selbst würde in Ihrem Fall nicht nach Berlin gehen. Wenn nicht andere Gründe, würde mich der bestimmen, dass die preußischen Traditionen aller Moral entgegen sind, und ich in der drohenden Verpreußung der Deutschen, die sich sogar unter unseren Augen zu vollziehen begonnen hat, das Verderben des alten Charakters meines Volkes erkenne. Meine Söhne möchte ich nimmermehr unter solchem Einfluss erwachsen lassen. Mich selbst würde ich in allen meinen edlen Empfindungen, in stetem Konflikt mit der herrschenden Stimmung, einmal um das andermal verletzt finden usw. Ich glaube, dass Sie hier anders fühlen und gestehe, dass ich dies bedaure. Aber ich zürne Ihnen darum nicht. Ich sehe, dass viele Menschen, denen es an trefflichen Eigenschaften nicht fehlt, sich mit dem Gedanken, dass die Geschichte bei jedem Staat schwere ethische Vergehen aufweise, trösten, und so in die Verhältnisse, wie sie Gott zugelassen, fügen.
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Indem ich mich nun auf Ihren Standpunkt versetze, scheint mir gegen Ihre Übersiedlung nach Berlin nur etwa die Rücksicht auf Ihre Gesundheit zu sprechen. Inwieweit diese einen solchen Schritt unrätlich erscheinen lassen könnte, wissen Sie besser als ich zu beurteilen. Der Sommer in Berlin ist, glaube ich, für die Nerven wenig erquicklich, doch folgen der Herbst und seine Ferien, die Sie ja immer in frischester Luft verleben können. Es freut mich, dass es Ihrem Neffen, der uns so freundlich besuchte, bei uns gefallen hat. Schade, dass er keine Zeit hatte, durch mancherlei Ausflüge die herrliche Gegend besser kennen zu lernen. Der Sommer war hier sehr angenehm und hat uns alle erquickt. Marty war ein paar Wochen hier. Dann zog es ihn zu den Schwestern und deren Kindern. Jetzt sind meine Schwester Sophie und ihre Tochter bei uns, ein mannigfach begabtes Mädchen. Sie hat eine kleine Büste meines Knaben gefertigt, die sehr reizend ist und ist auch musikalisch und dichterisch veranlagt, was ihr umso besser steht, als sie mit diesen Gaben ein einfach treuherziges, anspruchsloses Wesen verbindet. Ich denke, sie begleitet uns für ein paar Wochen nach Wien. Eben erhielt ich das Blatt der Deutschen Zeitung, in welcher ein Brief von mir über den Selbstmord abgedruckt ist.8 Ich war schriftlich darüber „interviewt“ worden und dachte, da selbst Jesus den pharisäischen Interviewern die Antwort auf etliche Fragen nicht schuldig blieb, ich dürfe nicht schweigen. Freilich suchte ich ihm wie in dem offenen Mut auch in der Klugheit ähnlich zu sein, und klerikalen Widersachern keine Handhabe zu bieten. Daher das Beispiel mit dem „Herrn und Kaiser“. Ich lege Ihnen einen Ausschnitt bei. Mit freundlichen Gruß an die lieben Ihrigen, dem auch meine Frau Ihre besten Grüße an Sie und Ihre Frau Gemahlin beifügt, bleibe ich in alter Treue Ihr ergebener Franz Brentano 3.2 Brentano an Marty, 11. September 1893 (Excerpt) [...] Stumpf hat nun den Ruf nach Berlin erhalten und wird ihn voraussichtlich annehmen. Er schrieb mir darüber 2 Briefe. Die Bedingungen 8
[Editor’s note: Franz Brentano, “Das Recht auf den Selbstmord” in Deutsche Zeitung, Vienna, September 6, 1893, p. 4.]
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seien glänzend. Ich schrieb ihm, dass ich an seiner Statt nicht gehen würde, aus Motiven, die, wie ich zu meinem Bedauern schon wisse, bei ihm und manchem sonst edelgesinnten nicht ebenso mächtig seien. Ich werde ihm darob die Freundschaft nicht kündigen. Außer ihnen sehe ich, außer etwa Gesundheitsrücksichten, nichts was ihn ernstlich abhalten könne. Dass er in Berlin epochemachend wirken werde, ist mir nicht wahrscheinlich. Ob sein Einfluss auf Besetzung anderer Lehrstühle segensreich sein werde, ist auch zweifelhaft. Er müsste es anders treiben, als bisher in solchen Fällen. Und dann, woher die Leute nehmen. Sie, Hillebrand und welchen dritten Würdigen könnte er nennen? [...] 3.3 Brentano an Marty, 30. Oktober 1893 (Excerpt) Lieber Freund! Herzlichen Dank für die guten Nachrichten. Es ist sehr erfreulich, dass Ihr Wirken in Prag Jahr für Jahr weitere Kreise zieht. Trotzdem habe ich Stumpf gemahnt, sowohl im Allgemeinen bei den Vorschlägen für seinen Münchner Stuhl gewissenhaft zu sein, als insbesondere Sie zur Berufung zu empfehlen. Selbst im Fall es aussichtslos wäre, halte ich es für Pflicht, Sie zu nennen. Man gibt dadurch zu erkennen, dass man es für unrecht hält, dass es aussichtlos ist. Und es ist dies das beste Mittel, es für ein andernmal hoffnungsvoller erscheinen zu lassen. Aus demselben Grunde – unter uns gesagt – muss ich es missbilligen, dass er mich nicht nennen wird. Qui tacet consentire videtur. Der Spruch hat auch hier Wahrheit. Und wenn Dilthey, so muss umsomehr Stumpf es missbilligen, dass man tut, als wenn ich nirgendwo zu gebrauchen wäre. Davon habe ich nun geschwiegen, aber für Sie die Stimme erhoben und auch Hille[brand] als einen bezeichnet, an den man recht wohl denken könne, da er, so gut wie einst Stumpf in Würzburg, mir, jetzt in München Stumpfs Nachfolger werden kann. Selbst G. Elias Müller ist, wenn auf die Gesamtheit der philosophischen Disziplinen geachtet wird, kaum so gut geschult. Und wen dann sonst? Sie wissen, dass ich Hilles Schwächen kenne. Aber seine Vorzüge haben sich im simultanen Contraste. [...]
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3.4 Brentano an Marty, Wien, 23. Dezember 1893 (Excerpt) [...] Stumpf hat mich schon lang gebeten, Ihnen über die Münchner Affäre Mitteilung zu machen, natürlich diskret. Mein Brief hat gewirkt. Für mich sowohl als Sie versuchte Stumpf sich einzusetzen. Dann glaubte er sich, auf mich beschränken zu sollen, und in der Kommission würden mit 4 gegen 2 Stimme ich 1., Müller 2., Lipps 3. Loco vorgeschlagen. Der Vorschlag fiel in der Fakultät, da Hertling erklärte, wenn ich komme, werde er aus der Fakultät scheiden, nicht aus sachlichen sondern aus persönlichen Gründen. Im Senat wird er vielleicht wieder aufgenommen. [...] 3.5 Undatierter Brief Brentanos an Hertling (Draft, Excerpt): Lieber Georg! Ein Wort unter uns! Denn ich verspreche Dir, niemand soll, was Du auch antworten mögest, sofern Du es nicht selber wünschtest, davon erfahren. Du willst nicht, dass ich nach München gerufen werde, und tust das Äußerste, dies zu vereiteln. Ich beschwöre Dich, bedenke, wie wenig dies Deiner würdig ist. In unserer Familie gab es viele Gegensätze. Der zu Dir und mir kann nicht größer sein als der, welcher zwischen Clemens und Bettina bestand. Auch hat er mit ärgerlichem Witz und heftigem Tadel gar manchmal dazu die Angeklagte loggezogen. Aber nie haben sie die [2] Familie durch öffentliche Gehässigkeit geschändet. Wir sind uns fremd seit langem. Keinem mag das Bild des Anderen recht anschaulich vor Augen stehen. Vielleicht hat es bei Dir einer Wahnvorstellung Platz gemacht, dass Du meinst, wenn ich komme, werde ich Dich und Dein Wirken schädigen. Vor Gott versichere ich Dich, dass, so weit es in meiner Macht liegt, das Gegenteil der Fall sein wird...
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Der Münchner Kongress 1896
4.1 Stumpf an Brentano, 17. März 1896 Verehrtester Lehrer und Freund! Besten Dank für Ihren lieben Brief, den ich sogleich beantworte, um wegen des Vortrages Einverständnis herbeizuführen. Dass Sie kommen wollen, freut mich sehr. Die Zeit von 20 Minuten ist nur für die Sektionsvorträge bestimmt, die in den allgemeinen Sitzungen können bis zu ¾ Stunden dauern. Allerdings wird man sich bei der enormen Menge der bereits angemeldeten Vorträge so kurz als möglich fassen müssen, zumal doch auch Diskussion stattfinden soll. Unter den Ihnen ins Auge gefassten Themen scheinen mir die über Sinnesempfindungen weniger geeignet, da sie sofort zu weit führen, wie Sie ja selbst beifügen und schließlich für größeres Publikum nicht einmal so interessant sind. Dagegen würde ich glauben, dass die “Vererbung von Erkenntnissen”, sowie die nach dem “Ursprung des Begriffs, Ursache oder Substanz“ sich trefflich eignen. Es wäre erwünscht, wenn Sie ein Thema wählten, dass sich für eine allgemeine Sitzung eignet und auch die Behandlung danach einrichteten. Es werden ja an diesen allgemeinen Sitzungen gewiss etwa 300 Personen und nicht bloß Fachmänner teilnehmen; sie finden in der Aula der Universität statt. Ich sende gleichzeitig das Verzeichnis der bisher angemeldeten Vorträge. Natürlich ist ein solcher Embarras nur in zahlreichen Sektionen zu erledigen, die gleichzeitig miteinander tagen. Durch dieses Verzeichnis angelockt, hat nun auch Wundt zugesagt und “Über die Zukunft der Philosophie“ angekündigt. Der Sekretär hatte ihm auf eigene Faust zugeredet. Mir ist es eine Verlegenheit, da ich jeder persönlichen Berührung mit ihm ausweichen werden. Übrigens hat er in dem neuen Grundriss der Psychologie meine Definition der ...Verschmelzungslehre ganz brav adoptiert, natürlich ohne Quellenangabe. Herzlichste Grüße von Ihrem C. Stumpf Verte! Bei der “synthetischen Funktion”, worüber ich angekündigt habe (wahrscheinlich allerdings nicht vortrage, da ich mit der Eröffnungsrede schon hinreichend zu Worte komme) meine ich das Zusammen-
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fassen von Inhalten zu verschiedenen Gruppen, z.B. bei Schalleindrücken, wo wie verschiedenen Rhythmus hineindenken können, bei Punkten, die zu Figuren vereinigt werden, aber auch bei abstrakten Merkmalen. Es scheint mir hier doch eine Funktion vorzuliegen, die gewissermaßen den Antagonisten des Wahrnehmens bildet, obschon sich gewiss zahlreiche Missverständnisse seit Kant daran geknüpft haben, die ich kurz hier besprechen wollte. Allerdings weiß ich nicht, ob Sie mir in der These selbst beistimmen. 4.2. Stumpf an Brentano, 11. April 1896 Berlin W. Nürnbergstr. 14 Verehrter Lehrer und Freund! Ihr Thema will ich sogleich dem Sekretär in München mitteilen. Aber es ist fraglich, ob ich im Lokalkomité durchsetzen kann, dass Ihr Vortrag über dieses Thema in eine der öffentlichen Sitzungen verlegt wird, wo eine große Anzahl von praktischen Juristen, Medizinern und dgl. sitzen werden, die dafür weder Verstand noch Interesse haben; in den Sektionssitzungen aber ist eben nur 20 Minuten Zeit, kann also nicht mehr als eine sehr kurze Mitteilung gemacht werden. Wollen Sie doch noch eine Änderung vornehmen, so bitte ich es der Abkürzung halber direkt an Frh. V. Schrenck-Notzing, München, Max-Jos. Str. 2, zu schreiben. Für Übersendung Ihrer Schrift wäre ich selbstverständlich dankbar, ich möchte ja gern alles, was Sie veröffentlichen, auch besitzen. Besten Gruß Ihr C. Stumpf 4.3. Brentano an Marty, nach dem 28. Mai 1896 (Auszug) [...] Kaum hatte ich meinen Brief nach München geschickt, so gelangte dieser da an9. Sie werden aus ihm ebenso wie ich ersehen, was Stumpf geschrieben hat. Das Ganze ist sein Werk und es bleibt mir nur die 9
[editor’s note: see letter 4.4., Lipps an Brentano, May 28, 1896.]
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Wahl zu 2 Hypothesen. Entweder er spielt ähnlich wie Hillebrand einst in Bezug auf das phänomenale Grün den wissenschaftlichen Vormund, oder er will nicht, dass ich einen Vortrag halte, der seinen eigenen Dogmen und seiner Tonpsychologie widerspricht und sie in wesentlichen Stücken wiederlegt. Das letztere wäre gar erbärmlich. Und nun bedenke man, dass er lieber als mir die freie Selbstständigkeit lassen, mich von den allgemeinen Vorträgen ausschließen, ja ein Mach’sches Gesalbader an die Stelle treten lassen wollte, im Widerspruch mit dem Interesse auch Ihrer Stellung! Das ist aus meinem alten Stumpf geworden! Wie lächerlich ist der ganze Unfug. – Denn in der Tat ist es nicht schier unerhört, dass man einer Persönlichkeit, die man irgend für bedeutend hält, solche Vorschriften geben will? Und ist es nicht klar, dass das Interesse an einen Vortrag a priori viel mehr durch die Person des Sprechenden als durch den Titel bestimmt ist und dass zumal ein unbestimmt gehaltener Titel, wo die Person interessiert, das Interesse nicht eigentlich beeinträchtigen kann? [...] 4.4. Lipps an Brentano, 28 Mai 1896 (Auszug) Das Komité für den Kongress wünscht, dass Sie die Freundlichkeit hätten, in allgemeiner Sitzung vorzutragen. Es scheint aber mir, wie auch Stumpf, das von Ihnen angekündigte Thema für diesen Zweck zu intim. [...] Stumpf erwähnte gelegentlich, dass Sie an einen Vortrag über Psychologie der Kausalität gedacht hätten. Für einen solchen Vortrag würde ich speziell Ihnen sehr dankbar sein [...]. 4.5. Brentano an Marty, 6. August 1896 Lieber Freund! Eben fahre ich nach dem Grundlsee (Villa Jurie am Grundlsee bei Aussee). Ich scheide mit gemischten Eindrücken. Lipps, Ebbinghaus, leider auch Stumpf ziemlich schwach. Ehrenfels Vortrag, wie zu erwarten, gründlich verkehrt, allseitig verworfen, doch formell gut. Er selbst wie immer sympathisch voll wahrer Sympathie für mich. Das Verhältnis wird sich gut gestalten. Die Begegnung mit Hering meine Erwartungen übertreffend. Stumpf meinte, meine Auffassung sei empiristisch!! Ich zeigte ihm leicht das Unpassende dieser Bezeichnung. Der Vortrag wurde nur zur Hälfte gehalten. Eine Prinzessin kam. Damit sie nicht warte, musste mit einem neuen begonnen werden!! Eine
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Reihe von Professoren verschiedener Länder ließen sich mir vorstellen mit der Versicherung, wie viel sie meinen Schriften zu danken hätten. Auch jüngere Doktoren, die sich bald habilitieren. 5 Stunden in continuo richteten sie an mich Frage an Frage und erschienen wie zu unserer Schule gehörig. Gewiss, die Zukunft ist unser. Die Gegenwart aber ist zerfahren und verworren. Herzlich, Ihr FB
5. Gefühlsempfindungen 1899 5.1. Brentano an Stumpf, 18.08.1899 Schönbühl Lieber Freund! Ihre Karte an Marty nahm uns die Hoffnung, Sie dieses Jahr hier zu sehen. Das ist betrübt, war doch das Wiedersehen beim Kongress in München so gut wie keines, und so droht unsere Freundschaft aus Mangel an Betätigung des Umgangs, der ihr Leben ist, an Atrophie zu leiden. Es kamen zugleich Ihre literarischen Gaben, Zeichen Ihrer nie versiegenden Fruchtbarkeit. Mit Interesse las ich die 2 Abhandlungen, deren jede mir Gutes bot, die eine das empirische Material bereichernd, die andere, indem sie Lehren von Ribot, James, Lange, u.a. die ich nur indirekt und unvollkommen gekannt, mitsamt den wesentlichen Argumenten, auf welche sie sich stützen, in klarer Darstellung mir vor Augen führte. Dafür bin ich Ihnen aufrichtig verpflichtet und habe mich auch an gar mancher treffenden Bemerkung und der Überlegenheit, mit welcher Sie einzelnen Argumenten entgegentreten, zu erfreuen Gelegenheit gehabt. Ich denke, mein Beifall wird Ihnen nicht verdächtig sein, weil er in gewissem Sinn aus väterlichem Munde stammt. Ich glaube mich nicht eitel zu rühmen, wenn ich mich nicht zu denen rechne, die für die Fehler ihrer Kinder oder auch nur für die eigenen die Augen schließen. Fort und fort, auch seit unser wissenschaftlicher Verkehr fast aufgehört hat, habe ich gesucht, mich selbst berichtigend, fortzuschreiten.
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Sie würden, heute alles überblickend, wie in einer umgebauten Stadt sich vielleicht gar nicht so schnell mehr orientieren können. So mag dies denn auch der Grund sein, warum ich bezüglich der Affekte wesentlich anders denke als Sie. Doch, scheint mir, trägt hier nicht nur ein Weiterschreiten auf meiner Seite, sondern auch ein Entfernen von Ihnen selbst von unseren einst gemeinsamen Anschauungen die Schuld an der Divergenz. So findet sich in der Abhandlung, welche eine Frage psychischer Klassenbildung behandelt, nicht ein Wort, welches die Verschiedenheit der intentionalen Inexistenz des Objektes als wichtiges Einteilungsprinzip anerkannte und zu Hilfe nähme. Ebenso nicht die geringste Andeutung der Dreiheit der Grundklassen unter diesem Gesichtspunkt. Ja S. 60, wird von einer engeren “Verwandtschaft” der Vorstellungen und Urteile gegenüber den Gefühlszuständen gesprochen, welche sie als “intellektuelle Zustände” zusammenfassen lasse. Ich wäre begierig zu hören, worin diese engere Verwandtschaft bestände. Ich selbst finde nur das negative Charakteristikum gemeinsam, dass sie beide nicht Gefühle sind; auf diese Weise ließen sich aber auch Urteile und Gefühle zusammenfassen, insofern beide nicht Vorstellungen sind usw. Sie aber sagen, dass “niemand diese Verwandtschaft leugne” der eigenen Mutterschule nicht mehr gedenkend. Ebenso behandeln Sie S. 59 Empfindung und Vorstellung (Begriffe, die für Ihre Untersuchung von eminenter Wichtigkeit sind), als sei ihr Verhältnis noch gar nicht geklärt. Wieder behandeln Sie so den Begriff des Urteils, der ebenfalls in ihrer Definition des Affekts eine bedeutende Rolle spielt. Und indem Sie leugnen, dass der Sinnesschmerz und die Sinneslust die Anerkennung eines Sachverhaltes, ein Urteil, involvieren, scheinen Sie entweder die Erkenntnis, die in jeder Empfindungstätigkeit von dieser Tätigkeit gegeben ist (besonders entwickelt und mit Unterscheidung, welche negative Doppelurteile involviert, in jeder distinkten Empfindungstätigkeit, wie wenn die Farben Rot und Blau sinnlich merklich auseinandertreten, nicht in Violett verschmelzen), nicht zu kennen oder nicht als Urteil gelten zu lassen. Wiederum scheinen Sie fast durchgängig zu ignorieren, dass in jeder Lust- und Unlustempfindung eine Mehrheit von Beziehungsweisen zum Objekt gegeben ist, von denen die eine jedenfalls mit der bei den Affekten gegebenen den allgemeinen Charakter gemein hat. Nur einzelne Male scheint das Gegenteil der Fall (wie wenn das Zahnweh, das als Empfindung S. 59 zur intellektuellen Klasse ge-
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hörte, S. 60, oben auch zur Gefühlsklasse gerechnet, und wenn S. 63 unten in den Organempfindungen zwischen der Empfindung selbst und ihrem Gefühlston unterschieden wird), was dann wie ein Widerspruch gegen die im Allgemeinen festgehaltene Lehre berührt. Ebenso sehe ich in der Bestimmung, dass die Begehrungen auf Sein-sollendes, die Gemütsbewegungen, z.B. Freud und Leid, Hoffnung (welche, wie Sie auch ausdrücklich behaupten, kein Begehren involvieren würde??), Furcht, Zorn, usw. auf einen Sachverhalt gehen, eine, ja eine vielfache, Entfernung von den Lehren, in die Sie einst eingeweiht worden sind, und ich verstehe nicht, wie sie sich rechtfertigen ließe. Wiederum finde ich zwar gelegentlich die wichtige Unterscheidung der psychischen Funktionen in allgemein animalische und spezifisch menschliche gestreift (wie bei den ästhetischen Gefühlen), aber das Moment, worin der Unterschied wurzelt, nirgends bezeichnet. Und doch ist auch dies etwas, was bei der Frage nach dem Wesen des Affekts von höchster Bedeutung ist. Aristoteles würde keinen Affekt, der nicht dem sinnlichen Teil des Seelenlebens zufiele, wie keine Phantasie, die nicht diesem angehörte, anerkannt, sondern nur etwa wie eine aisthétiké phantasía und logistiké phantasía, ein aisthetikón páthos und logistikón páthos im sinnlichen Teil des Menschen unterschieden haben, das Reich der menschlichen páthe kann nach ihm entweder gar keine andern oder doch nur in der Weise andere Elemente als das der páthe des Tieres enthalten, wie (nach modernen Erfahrungen) das Sehvermögen des Normalsichtigen andere Elemente als das des Rotblinden enthält. Eine auf eine Allgemeinheit gerichtete Gemütsbewegung (z.B. Haß des Diebstahls im Allgemeinen) würde er nicht zu den páthe (nach Quintillian der entsprechende Ausdruck für affectus) gerechnet haben. Der wesentlichste Unterschied, der nach ihm zwischen dem aisthetikón páthos und dem logistikón páthos bestehen würde, wäre ein genetischer, äußerlicher, nicht ein deskriptiver, immanenter, durch die Eigenheit des Objekts in sich gegebener. Wiederum finde ich in dem, was Sie über das Gute (agathón) und sein Verhältnis zum orektón sagen, eine zwar wie es scheint unbewusste, aber darum nicht minder beträchtliche Abweichung von dem, was einst Aristoteles und ich selbst Ihnen darüber gelehrt. Das orektón ist nach Aristoteles nicht immer ein Gutes. Es begreift eben alles, worauf die órexis sich liebend richtet oder richten kann, auch wenn es nicht der Liebe würdig ist. Zudem umfasst die órexis nach Aristoteles, wie Anstreben und Flie-
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hen, auch Hoffen und Bangen, Lust und Leid usw. - Und in der Tat, in dem Sinn und mit gleicher Wahrheit und Sicherheit, mit welcher man sagen kann: agathón estin oú pánta ephíeai kann man auch sagen: “Für gut darf man halten, was für alle ein Gegenstand der Hoffnung ist”, “für gut darf man etwas erklären, wenn alles sich darüber freut”, und ganz allgemein gesprochen: “Das darf man wohl als etwas Gutes gelten lassen, was von allen geliebt wird”. Sie aber, ich kann nicht verstehen, wodurch beirrt, stellen dies unverkennbar in Abrede. Der gemeinsame Charakterzug von édesthai und bulesthai und allem andern phileín und miseín, welcher die Klasse von Liebe und Hass zu Gut und Schlecht ähnlich, wie der gemeinsame Charakterzug von Anerkennung und Verwerfung die Klasse des Urteiles zu wahr und falsch, in Beziehung setzt, wird gänzlich verkannt. Ja Sie finden nicht einmal beim sinnlichen Schmerz und beim Schmerz über den Tod eines Freundes eine Einheit des Begriffes. Der Ausdruck “Schmerz” soll hier äquivok sein, nur etwa eine Analogie bestehen. Aber Analogien bestehen auch zwischen Bejahen und Lieben, Verneinen und Hassen und zwischen lichten Farben und hohen Tönen, dunkeln Farben und tiefen Tönen und wieder zwischen lichten Farben und kühlen Tastempfindungen (der “hellanwehende Nordwind” sagt schon Homer) und dunkeln Farben und Wärmeempfindungen usw. Dennoch bezeichnet die Sprache sie gemeiniglich nicht mit gleichen Namen. Wie kommt es denn, dass dort - und nicht bloß in unserer deutschen, sondern in allen Sprachen der Welt, alten wie neuen - der gleiche Name zur Bezeichnung verwandt wird? (lype-lyperón opp. hedy; dolor, douleur, dolore, Schmerz, Pein, pain usw. usw.). Ein Unterschied besteht freilich, und ein bedeutender; der nämlich, dass das Objekt bei dem Sinnesschmerz eine sinnliche Qualität ist, die räumlich ausgedehnt erscheint und jedem ihrer quantitativen Teile nach Gegenstand eines besonderen Teils des darauf gerichteten Gefühls ist; wie denn Ähnliches auch von dem daran geknüpften sinnlichen Anerkennen gesagt werden muss. Damit hängt zusammen, dass hier Intensität und eine gleiche Intensität, wie in der Qualität, auch in dem Gefühl (und in der Anerkennung) gegeben ist, während eine solche anderen Schmerzen (wie anderen Urteilen) fehlt. Ohne Fragen ein mächtiger Unterschied, der aber das Gemeinsame nicht aufhebt. (Bei der Trauer und höheren Freude fehlt es freilich nicht an Intensität, aber ebenso nicht an der Begleitung sinnlicher Empfindungen und ich zweifle nicht im mindesten, dass in diesen allein die Intensität gegeben ist. So
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bei Archimed, wenn er sein heureka ruft; so bei Newton, wenn er, da die Verlesung der berichtigten Daten Punkt für Punkt mit seinen mathematischen Deduktionen aus dem Gravitationsgesetz übereinstimmte, vor Erregung innehalten muss; so bei Leibnizens Erben, wenn er vor Freude über die Nachricht vom Schlag getroffen wird, und in jedem anderen, wie ähnlich mächtigen, auch schwächeren Falle. Da haben wir nun wieder etwas, was für die Frage nach dem Affekt, und schon für die nach seiner Definition selbst, von ganz vorzüglicher Bedeutung ist. Aber freilich handelt es sich hier um etwas, wo sich mehr noch als Ihre Entfernung von den früher Ihnen feststehenden Sätzen, auch die Folgen meines Weiterforschens geltend machen. Freilich sind es hier zunächst nur solche, von denen Sie schon aus meinem Münchner Vortrag Kenntnis haben konnten. Aber ich berührte dort alles mit so kurzem Wort, dass, nur ein längeres Verweilen bei den darin niedergelegten Gedanken Ihnen hätte klar machen können, wie wohlbegründet sie sind, und was alles sie involvieren. Und dass Sie ein solches sorgfältiges Erwägen ihnen nicht gewidmet haben, das konnte ich schon aus Ihrer kurzweg ablehnenden Bemerkung der Stelle ersehen, wo ich die Verschmelzung der Töne berühre. Es begegnete Ihnen hier zu behaupten, dass ein Nebeneinander von Tönen in keiner Erfahrung begründet sei. Haben Sie da auch nur überlegt, dass Sie selbst lehren, Töne, die tiefer seien, erscheinen ausgedehnter, Töne, die höher seien, minder ausgedehnt? Wenn diese zusammen erscheinen, wie ist es widerspruchslos denkbar, dass sie in ihrer Ausdehnung sich decken? Ist dies aber nicht der Fall, wie wäre ein teilweises Nebeneinander vermeidlich? Ihre Behauptung war also durch Ihre eigenen Beobachtungen als falsch erwiesen. Und doch schien sie Ihnen das Recht zu geben, in gar geringschätziger und definitiver Weise über den ganzen Gedanken das Verdammungsurteil auszusprechen. So schnell sind meine einstigen Jünger mit dem Urteil fertig, wo der Altmeister erst nach jahrelangem Erwägen einer Frage zu urteilen und das Urteil zu veröffentlichen für gut findet!10 So haben Sie denn auch 10
Seltsam insbesondere, wie wenig Sie ahnten, dass die wissenschaftliche Welt für Gedanken wie den, welche ich zu Grunde legte, recht wohl vorbereitet ist. So kam mir gerade gestern wieder in Boltzmanns „Unentbehrlichkeit der Atomistik“ folgende Stelle unter. „Die Gesichtswahrnehmungen entsprechen einer endlichen Zahl von Nervenfasern, werden also wahrscheinlich durch ein Mosaik besser dargestellt als durch eine kontinuierliche Fläche. Ähnliches gilt auch von allen übrigen Sinnesemp-
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die neue Intensitätslehre keines ernsten Studiums gewürdigt. Sonst würden Sie sie wohl angenommen haben oder [nicht] zu so absonderlichen Behauptungen wie Meinong und Konsorten gelangt sein, im Widerspruch mit den Mathematikern aller Zeiten Größen oder Teile zu statuieren, oder das principium indiscernibilium für diese Teile zu leugnen (was ich in einer dem Vortrag beigefügten Anmerkung als notwendig erweise, wenn die alte Intensitäts- und Größenlehre festgehalten wird). Sie werden mir gewiss Nachsicht schenken, wenn ich eine solche Nichtbeachtung von Seiten eines einstigen Schülers unangenehm empfinde. Doch ist es nicht sowohl verletztes Selbstgefühl als der Nachteil, den ich andern daraus erwachsen sehe, was mich bei solcher Vernachlässigung betrübt. Man weiß ja, was auch sachlich das Totschweigen bedeutet. Es hemmt die Wirkung auch des Klarerwiesenen, während die Bekämpfung selbst ihm schließlich nur zu vollstem Siege mitverhelfen wird. Und wenn Sie solche Geringschätzung zur Schau tragen, wer sollte nicht geneigt werden zu glauben, dass der ganze Gedanke keines Augenblicks der Erwägung würdig sei? So droht denn Ihr Verhalten, wie für Sie selbst in der vorliegenden Untersuchung, auch für andere von Nachteil zu sein. Von ähnlich tiefgreifender Bedeutung für Ihre Fragen wären die Fortbildungen der Lehre von dem sinnlichen, Mensch und Tier gemeinsamen Seelenleben, beginnend mit der Feststellung der wahren Grenzen des Reiches der Phantasmen und endend mit der Feststellung der wahren Schranken des ganzen tierischen Seelenlebens, die unvergleichlich engere sind, als wir früher gewähnt, so dass keine Wahl bleibt als entweder den Affekt anders zu definieren als Sie es getan, oder dem Tiere keinen Affekt, sondern nur (um Ihren eigenen Ausdruck zu gebrauchen) Pseudoaffekte zuzuschreiben. In Wahrheit besteht, was man beim Tier Affekt nennen möchte, nach meiner wie James’ Überzeugung, nur aus Sinnesgefühle (das von jeder Sinneserscheinung untrennbare, auch Lust und Schmerz einfachster Art zu Grunde liegende Gedächtnisphänomen mit kurzer zeitlicher Ausdehnung in der Sinneserscheinung miteingeschlossen gedacht) und nur findungen. Ist es da nicht wahrscheinlich, dass auch die Modelle für Komplexe von Wahrnehmungen besser aus diskreten Teilen zusammengesetzt werden?“ Schon vorher wird gesagt, darauf dürfe man sich nicht berufen, dass die Anschauung lückenlos scheine, denn „wir vermögen in Wirklichkeit die benachbarten Teile nicht zu unterscheiden“.
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James’ Behauptung des peripherischen Charakters aller dieser Sinnesgefühle ist etwa hier zu beanstanden. Nun erscheint es aber als sehr unpassend, den Tieren die Affekte ganz abzusprechen und somit Ihre Definition des Affekts als unannehmbar. Auf ein anderes Moment, welches Ihre Absicht bei der Definition als verfehlt erscheinen lässt, habe ich schon hingewiesen, indem ich geltend machte, dass auch solche Gefühlsphänomene, welche Sie von den Affekten auszuschließen beabsichtigen, an dem, wie Sie glauben, für diese unterscheidenden Merkmale „Urteil“ teilhaben. Und zudem treten Sie selbst, wie mich bedünkt, in der späteren Erörterung mit Ihrer Definition in Widerspruch, wenn Sie, nachdem Sie (S, 48 vgl. S, 97 oben) den Affekt als Gemütsbewegung definiert haben, dann (vgl. S, 71, S, 75, S, 94) auch eine Vielheit von Gemütsbewegungen, zu welcher auch noch Empfindungen gehören, zusammen als einen Affekt gelten lassen. Hier wäre, wie immer Gleichzeitigkeit und Gemeinsamkeit der Ursache vorliegen mag, konsequent nicht von einem Affekt, sondern von einer Vielheit von Affekten, ja eventuell von einer Vielheit psychischer Tätigkeiten, die nur teilweise ans Affekten bestünde, zu sprechen. Wenn Sie mich fragen, wie denn ich den Affekt definieren würde, so antworte ich: Bei der Frage, wie ein Namen zu definieren sei, kann, damit sie nicht zum bloßen Wortstreit werde, ein Dreifaches als maßgebend berücksichtigt werden: 1) der Sprachgebrauch 2) die Bildung einer wissenschaftlich wichtigen Klasse 3) gewisse Eigentümlichkeiten, welche von denen, zwischen welchen die Frage schwebt, gemeinsam und unzweifelhaft dem mit dem Namen zu Bezeichnenden zugeschrieben werden. Sie haben insbesondere teils auf das erste, teils auf das zweite geachtet. Wenn ich den ersten Gesichtspunkt maßgebend mache, so sage ich: Der Ausdruck „Affekt“ ist äquivok. Im weitesten Sinn bezeichnete “affectus” bei den Lateinern jede Art von Gemütstätigkeit dem Sinne, in welchem ich in meiner Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt den Namen gebrauche, anfangend von Sinneslust und Sinnesschmerz bis zu den geistigen Akten der Willensbetätigung und Bevorzugung, Hier nur ein paar Belege: Cicero ad Brut, ep, 16. afficere voluptate. Id,
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Fam. ep, 19 affici dolore, Juvenal, sat. 12 v, 10 im Sinne von cupiditas, Labeo digest. lib, 44 tit. 7 lex 55 für libera voluntas (“In omnibus rebus, quae dominium transferunt, concurrat oportet affectus ex utraque parte contrahentium,”), Ebenso Ulpian lib, 43 tit. 4 lex 1: “Hoc edicto neque furiosum neque pupillum teneri constat, quia affectu carent”, Und Paulus lib, 3 tit. 5 lex 18: “Erit igitur negotiorum gestorum actio, quia gerendi negotii mei habuit affectum” und so weiter. Im engeren und eigentlicheren Sinne ist aber affectus von den Lateinern insbesondere für das griechische páthos. Ich wies schon auf die Stelle Quintillians hin, die dies beweist, lib. 6.2.: “Affeetuum duae sunt species: aIteram Gräci páthos vocant, quam nos vertentes recte ac proprie affectum dicimus; alteram éthos cuius nomine, ut egoquidem sentio, caret sermo Romanus”. Solche Äquivokationen bestehen auch in neuerer Zeit. Man kann also in erster Hinsicht nichts tun als die Mehrheit der Bedeutungen unterscheiden und jede definieren. Wenn ich den zweiten Gesichtspunkt maßgebend mache, so erkenne ich leicht, dass das wissenschaftliche Interesse die Beschränkung auf eine Gebrauchsweise empfiehlt. Aber welche soll bevorzugt werden? - Unter den mehrfachen Gebrauchsweisen, welche üblich waren und sind, entsprechen mehrere wichtigen Klassen (z.B. schon die allgemeinste für die ganze dritte Grundklasse; dann auch die für páthos, welche alle sensitiven Betätigungen der dritten Grundklasse, alle jene, die eine Intensität haben, im Unterschied von solchen, die auf Allgemeines gehen, darunter begreift u. dergleichen). Der hier zuletzt genannte wäre vielleicht der wissenschaftlich empfehlenswerteste Gebrauch. Es erübrigt der dritte Gesichtspunkt. Hier scheinen mir folgende Momente als allgemein oder nahezu allgemein zugestanden in Betracht zu kommen: 1) Wo es sich um Affekte handelt, handelt es sich um Erscheinungen, welche eine Intensität haben, was immer für eines Grades. Es gilt hier von dem Ausdruck Affekt ähnliches wie von dem Ausdruck Aufregung, Emotion. 2) Wo es sich um den Begriff des Affektes handelt, handelt es sich um einen solchen, dem in seiner Allgemeinheit genommen, auch Tiere unterliegen. Nur gewisse Klassen von Affekten werden ihnen von manchen Forschern abgesprochen. Diese zwei Punkte stimmen zusammen und führen bei genauer wissenschaftlicher Untersuchung dazu, dass nur eine sensualistische
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Auffassung des Affekts richtig ist. Zu ihnen kommt aber noch, als etwas, was wenigstens die meisten festhalten, 3) dass nicht alle einfachen Schmerz- und Lustgefühle zu den Affekten zu zählen sind. Und 4) dass vielmehr nur solche sinnliche Gemütstätigkeiten oder komplizierte Seelenzustände, welche sinnliche Gemütstätigkeiten einschließen, Affekte zu nennen seien, welche beim Menschen aus höheren, auf allgemeine Vorstellungen gegründeten Gemütstätigkeiten zu entspringen pflegen und, wo dies nicht der Fall ist, wie namentlich durchwegs wenn sie beim Tiere auftreten, irrführend die Deutung auf einen solchen Ursprung nahelegen. Man könnte sie logistiká páthe und pseudo-logistiká páthe nennen. Sie selbst sagen manches, was Sie vorbereitet zeigt, zu einer solchen Definition überzugehen. So insbesondere, S.50 unten “ob man nun ...” bis “immer noch verwandt genug erscheint”. (Insbesondere in den Worten “mit Rücksicht auf ihre Herkunft aus früheren int. Tätigkeiten”. Diese, wenn sie nicht gegenwärtig gegeben sind, können ja nicht die Objekte bieten, vielmehr nur ganz äußerlich und exklusiv genetisch, sogar nur mittelbar ursächlich sich verhalten). Ferner S. 52 bei der Zusammenstellung von “Hunger” und “Nahrungstrieb”, (Diesen letzteren im prägnanten Sinne würde nach mir kein Tier jemals haben, so wenig wie einen solchen Trieb zu Fortpflanzung oder eine Begierde nach einem zu bauenden Neste u. dergleichen), Wiederum S. 53 bei der (berichtigenden) Deutung von Exners Worten über den jungen Jagdhund, wiederum in dem, was S. 74 ff (§ 7) gesagt wird, besonders S. 75 unten ('“Ich möchte übrigens keineswegs eine völlige Unvergleichbarkeit des wirklichen und des Pseudoaffekts behaupten“) und S. 76, wo Sie von den Fällen sprechen, wo der Affekt gewissermaßen auf umgekehrtem Wege zustande kommt. Der Fromme faltet in Andacht die Hände; der die Hände faltende Fromme bekommt Andachtsgefühle. Zwischen den Andachtsgefühlen (im geistigsten Sinn) liegen sinnliche páthe. Bei dem Entstehen auf umgekehrtem Weg geht das Händefalten nicht direkt den geistigen Andachtsgefühlen voran, wie es ihnen beim gewöhnlichen Entstehen nicht direkt gefolgt ist. Das dazwischen liegende ist das eigentliche páthos, das wie das Händefalten selbst ganz gleichartig ist in beiden Fällen. Mit Recht sagen Sie auch (ebenda), dass hier “die gewöhnlichen Assoziationsgesetze” wirken. Nicht aber kann ich Ihnen zustimmen, wenn Sie glauben, dass
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diese hier dazu dienen, die Erscheinung Ihrer Definition von Affekt zu subsumieren. Das ganz gleichartige páthos tritt vor seinen gewöhnlichen intellektuellen Vorbedingungen und somit zunächst ohne diese auf, Es ist als ganz gleichartig auch dann schon Affekt und nicht Pseudoaffekt zu nennen. Es ist ein pseudologistikón páthos aber kein pseudo-pathos. Sie sehen, wie meine sensualistische Affektlehre Ihre für James und Lange vielleicht unbeantwortliche Frage (S. 84), warum man gerade nur gewisse und nicht alle Gefühlszustände zu den Affekten rechne, gar wohl zu beantworten imstande ist. Sie schließt aus, dass je ein Affekt auf Objekte des abstrakten und eigentlich sogenannten Denkens gehe, und leugnet, dass jeder notwendig von Denktätigkeiten bedingt sei. Sie erkennt aber doch eine gewisse Beziehung zu diesen Denktätigkeiten an. Wo es sich um Affekte handelt, handelt es sich um Gefühlserscheinungen in der beim Menschen von den Denkgemütstätigkeiten, welche keine Affekte sind, beeinflussbaren sinnlichen Sphäre, in der aber die gleichen Erscheinungen wie die von höheren Gemütstätigkeiten erzeugten unter gewissen Umständen auch ohne deren Einfluss auftreten können. Ja es trifft sich, dass solche Erscheinungen gegeben sind, während die höhere geistige Gemütstätigkeit eine entgegengesetzte ist. Diese hat dann Mühe, die Affekte zu unterdrücken, da vielmehr sie manchmal die höhere Gemütstätigkeit durch eine entgegengesetzte zu verdrängen die Kraft haben. “Das Fleisch streitet wider den Geist”, sagt die Schrift. Und auch Aristoteles spricht darum von einem Kampf der höheren und niederen órexis, von denen bald die höhere die niedere (wie Himmelssphäre die Himmelssphäre) bald aber auch (durch die Macht der Assoziation) die niedere die höhere fortreiße. Die höhere übt nach ihm eine politiké arché, keine entschieden feststehende despotiké arché. Bei Tieren haben wir hier im Verhältnis zum entsprechenden Menschlichen etwas, was an das Verhältnis von instinktiver zu vernünftig geordneter Tätigkeit erinnert, ja ihm wesentlichst verwandt ist. Das also in Kürze von Ihrem leider noch immer körperlich leidenden alten Lehrer! Nehmen Sie es trotz der Unvollkommenheit der Redaktion freundlich auf, wie es wahrhaftig herzlich gut und teilnehmend gemeint ist! Verzeihen Sie auch, wenn er noch über eine Stelle Ihrer Schrift sein Befremden und seine Missbilligung ausspricht! Sie erwähnen einmal des Descartes, eines eminenten und von keiner traditionellen
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Lehre geknechteten, um die deskriptive Psychologie (schon durch die Scheidung der 3 Grundklassen, aber auch durch die De Passionibus und durch die Entdeckung der Reflexe) hochverdienten Geist. Und Sie nennen ihn mit spöttischem Ton einen Mönch und behandeln seine psychologischen Bestrebungen schier, als ob sie nach der Kapuzinerkutte röchen. Diese Äußerung ist gewiss gänzlich unbegründet und geeignet, das Studium Descartes, das unserer Jugend noch immer dringlich empfohlen werden muss, in Misskredit zu bringen. Descartes ein Mönch? - Etwa weil er die gebildeteren Teile der Erde (Italien war damals den anderen Ländern in der Kultur voraus) ähnlich wie einst Thales und andere griechische Denker, wissbegierig durchwanderte? Oder weil er als Krieger die Schlacht am Weißen Berge mitkämpfte? Oder weil er einst jenen Seeleuten, die er in fremder Sprache seinen Tod planen hörte, mit kühnem Herrscherwort zu gebieten wagte, und sie durch seine imponierende Energie zu untertänigem Gehorsam zu zwingen wusste? Oder etwa weil er mit den vornehmsten auch der Edelfrauen, wie mit der Pfalzgräfin Elisabeth und der Königin Christine in freiestem sichersten Auftreten zu verkehren verstand? (Verheiratet war er nicht, aber doch Vater eines geliebten Töchterchens, auch wurde ihm, wenn auch mit Unrecht ein geschlechtlich ausschweifendes Leben vorgeworfen, worüber er gelegentlich scherzt). Oder etwa darum, weil er wie kein anderer seiner Zeit von dem Geist der neuen Forschung beseelt, allseitig an ihren Bestrebungen teilnahm, die neuere Mathematik gründete, der Physik und Physiologie Impulse gab, die Wichtigkeit der Medizin für die Moral betonte und in der Philosophie denjenigen für seinen liebsten Schüler erklärte, der von der ganzen aus dem heidnischen Altertum und kirchlichen Mittelalter überlieferten Philosophie nichts wisse? - Wundern Sie sich nicht jetzt selbst ein wenig, wie Ihnen ein so ungerechtfertigtes spöttisches Wort entschlüpfen konnte? Verzeihen Sie mir! Verzeihen Sie mir! Es regte sich hier in mir ein gewisses Gefühl der Entrüstung; denn der Hohn galt einem der Männer, die ich vor anderen als meinen Lehrer zu verehren und andern als Lehrer zu empfehlen habe! Und nun Lebewohl! Möge Ihnen die Schweizer Reise viele Genüsse und Ihren Nerven, deren Kraft Sie in so rühmlichem Fleiß in Anspruch nehmen, volle Erholung bringen! Auch Ihrem Rudi Heil auf seiner Künstlerbahn! An Ihre Frau Gemahlin und Ihr Frl. Schwester
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Toni, die ich in freundlichstem Andenken halte, meine besten Grüße! Meine Frau dankt für die Ihrigen und erwidert sie. Auch Marty grüßt. Herzlich Ihr alter Freund Franz Brentano P.S. Ich glaube nicht fehlzugehen wenn ich annehme, dass die Frage nach dem Affekt Sie ganz besonders mit Beziehung auf die musikalischen Genüsse interessierte. Sie möchten, um deren Adel Rechnung zu tragen, sie über die sinnliche Sphäre in die geistige erheben. Gewiß ist auch hier, soweit es sich um intensive Erscheinungen handelt, alles sensualistisch zu begreifen. Gilt dies doch sogar von den Freuden der Entdeckung und des guten Gewissens. Aber schon diese Zusammenstellung schließt die Besorgnis einer Erniedrigung aus, die mit der Würde einer so edlen Kunst unverträglich wäre. Ich begreife aber, dass ohne weitgehende Ausführung des Gedankens ins Einzelne hinein hier viele Bedenken sich aufdrängen. Äußerungen wie S. 85 lassen sie genugsam erkennen. Ohnehin ist, was ich hier schrieb, ein langer Brief, aber eine kurze Abhandlung. Um als solche erschöpfend zu sein, müsste er noch lange fortgesetzt werden. Ich bemerke nur, dass, wo schon die Dekomposition der Gerüche in ihre psychischen Elemente unüberwindliche Schwierigkeiten bietet, es kein sehr kräftiges Argument gegen eine sensualistische Theorie der musikalischen Gefühle sein kann, dass die betreffenden Empfindungselemente „nicht aufzutreiben“ sind. Und wenn im Einzelnen nicht aufgetrieben, können sie doch, wie gerade wieder der Vergleich mit den Gerüchen zeigt, ihrem allgemeinen Charakter nach aufs strengste als sinnlich erwiesen sein. Man hat sie (vgl. dafür Ihren Bericht über den taubgewordenen Franz und seine Gefühle bei guten und schlechten Kompositionen, deren Vortrag er beiwohnte) keineswegs direkt auf die Erscheinungen von Tönen und Tonverbindungen gerichtet zu denken. Nochmals Lebewohl! 5.2. Stumpf an Brentano, September 1899 Wengen, Schweiz, Anf. September 1899 Ihren langen, inhaltsschweren Brief vom 18.8. erhielt ich vor 8 Tagen in Zermatt. Inzwischen sind wir weiter gewandert über die Gemmi und haben uns auf einige Zeit hier niedergelassen, wo ich den ersten
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ruhigen Tag benütze, um Ihnen für die eingehende Besprechung meiner Aufsätze, die Entwicklung Ihrer eigenen Anschauungen und die freundschaftlichen Grüße an uns alle herzlichst zu danken und die wärmsten Wünsche für Ihre Wiedergenesung auszusprechen. Ihre Krankheit macht mich recht besorgt, hoffentlich gelingt es durch eine entsprechende Lebensweise und die Fürsorge Ihrer verehrten Frau, die ich bestens zu grüßen bitte, sie zum Rückzug zu bringen. Es ist lange her, dass wir in wissenschaftlicher Korrespondenz standen. Der Grund davon liegt sicherlich nicht in der Erkältung unsrer persönlichen Beziehungen, sondern einzig in der Schwierigkeit, sich durch Korrespondenz ausreichend zu verständigen, und diese Schwierigkeit wird sich, fürchte ich, auch diesmal geltend machen. Was ich aber sicher zu erreichen hoffe, das ist die Beseitigung der Verstimmung, die sich verschiedentlich in Ihrem Brief kundgibt. Und darauf drängt es mich an erster Stelle einzugehen. Sie beklagen sich erstens, dass ich Ihrer neuen Intensitätslehre kein ernstes Studium gewidmet habe, dass ich sie in der Konsonanzschrift kurzweg ablehne, dass ich sie geringschätze und totschweige. Ich denke also an der betreffenden Stelle geradezu auf sie als auf eine Anschauung hingewiesen zu haben, durch welche man die Verschmelzungsunterschiede psychologisch tiefer begründen könnte. Mehr wusste ich in der Tat darüber in diesem Zusammenhang nicht zu sagen, da ich vorläufig nicht sehe, wie man für die Détails der Konsonanzlehre fruchtbare Konsequenzen daraus ziehen könnte und bei einem solchen Versuch, wenn ich ihn auch gewagt hätte riskiert hätte, mit Ihren Intentionen, die ich ja fast ausschließlich aus Ihren kurzen Andeutungen in der Kongressrede kenne, in Widerspruch zu kommen und Ihre Lehre in falscher Form ins Publikum zu bringen, was Ihnen doch noch weniger lieb hätte sein müssen. Ich wiederhole bei dieser Gelegenheit eine schon früher ausgesprochene Klage und Bitte: Sie erschweren die Berücksichtigung und Verwertung Ihrer neueren Anschauung dadurch, dass Sie nichts als solche kurzen Skizzen darüber publizieren. Das Mittel, damit durchzudringen, besteht einzig und allein darin, dass vor allem Sie selbst détaillierte Darstellungen veröffentlichen. Nur dann ist man imstande, die Prinzipien überhaupt zu verstehen, ihre Tragweite zu erkennen und sich von ihrer Übereinstimmung mit den Tatsachen zu überzeugen. Es erscheint mir, ganz offen zu sprechen, als ein unbilliges Verlangen,
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dass selbst ein so alter Schüler wie ich durch so kurze Darlegungen sich sogleich von einer so gänzlich neuen und kühnen These überzeugt finden und sie an Ihrer Stelle vor dem Publikum vertreten soll. Sie machen mir noch besonders zum Vorwurf, dass ich ein Nebeneinander von Tönen nicht in der Erfahrung begründet finde, und insofern Ihrer Lehre direkt entgegenarbeite, während doch selbst nach meiner eigenen Behauptung ein solches Nebeneinander bei jedem Zusammenklang stattfinden müsse. Ich habe aber in der Tonpsychologie, als ich die verschiedene Ausdehnung im gewöhnlichen Sinne sondern nur in übertragenem Sinne zu verstehen sei. Deswegen darf man auch daraus nicht ohne Weiteres die Konsequenzen ziehen, welche sich ergeben würden, wenn es sich um eine räumliche Ausdehnung im gewöhnlichen optisch oder haptisch räumlichen Sinn handeln würde. Aber auch, wenn eine solche Folgerung berechtigt wäre, so würde sie noch nicht besagen, dass man die Töne mosaikartig nebeneinander hörte, so wie aus 3 Arten von Steinchen ein Mosaik zusammengesetzt ist. Dies aber allein würde, so viel ich sehe, Ihrer Lehre entsprechen. Ich meine also in der Tat, dass sie durch die direkte Erfahrung in diesem Gebiete nicht bestätigt ist; was ja aber nicht hindert, sie hypothetisch in Bezug auf unwahrnehmbar kleinste Teilchen unserer Empfindungen zugrunde zu legen oder zu postulieren. 2. Es erregt Ihre Missbilligung, ja selbst ein gewisses Gefühl der Entrüstung, dass ich von Descartes als einem philosophischen Mönch rede. Sie fragen sich, was mich dazu bewegen konnte, und führen viele Eigenschaften an, welche ihn von den Mönchen unterscheiden. Aber was ich im Auge hatte und womit ich durchaus nichts Nachteiliges gegen diesen auch von mir hochbewunderten Forscher aussagen wollte, liegt doch, meine ich, nicht so fern: sein absolut zurückgezogenes Leben während der ganzen späteren Lebenszeit. Hat er doch fast alle Korrespondenz, außer mit Mersenne, vermieden und seinen Aufenthalt immer gewechselt, um nicht aufgesucht und in die weltlichen Händel gezogen zu werden. Ich denke mir, dass ein so einsamer Mensch leichter dazu kommt, sich die Aufgabe einer tabellarischen Klassifikation der Gemütsbewegungen zu stellen, als ein mitten in der Welt lebender, dem das eigene und fremde Leben fortwährend die tausendfältigen Varietäten vor Augen führen, welche die Aufführung festen Spezies hier ebenso erschweren wie in der Botanik und Zoologie. Und ich meine, dass die Erkenntnis des Wesens der Affekte gegenwärtig auch ungleich wichtiger und interessanter ist, als diese Klassifika-
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tion, wobei ich aber weit entfernt bin, deren Wert überhaupt zu leugnen. Darin sind Sie vielleicht anderer Ansicht; aber an dem “Mönch” nehmen Sie hoffentlich nach der gegebenen Erklärung keinen Anstoß mehr, es lag darin wirklich nicht der geringste Vorwurf oder gar Hohn, ebensowenig wie ich Thomas von Aquin in höhnischem Tone einen Mönch nennen würde. Im Gegenteil: Wie manches Mal möchte der geplagte Berliner den Descartes um seine Einsamkeit beneiden! Ich wende mich nun zu den sachlichen Einwänden gegen meine Schrift. Diese rühren, wie Sie bereits hervorheben, teilweise davon her, dass ich Anschauungen, die ich früher mit Ihnen teilte, nicht mehr zu akzeptieren scheine, teilweise davon, dass Sie selbst weitergeschritten sind. Nun kann ich von vornherein keine Verpflichtung anerkennen, Ihren früheren Anschauungen treu zu bleiben, wenn Sie selbst in vielen, höchst wesentlichen Punkten sich davon entfernen. Wenn Sie daher eine Reihe von Abweichungen von dem, was einst Sie selbst oder gar Aristoteles gelehrt, anführen, so kann ich darin allein doch keine Widerlegung erblicken. Und selbst wenn ich aus bloßer Pietät oder aus einem Autoritätsglauben zu dem Sie mich wahrlich nicht erzogen haben, jederzeit das, was Sie beibehalten haben, beibehalten, das, was Sie umgestürzt haben, auch in meiner Überzeugung umstürzen wollte: ich bin ja gar nicht genügend informiert, was geblieben und was geändert ist; Sie könnten die Dreiteilung der Seelenzustände und anderes ebenso Fundamentales seit Jahren aufgegeben haben, ohne dass ich es erfahren. Ich muss hier wieder auf den bedauerlichen Umstand zurückkommen, dass außer Marty niemand auf der Welt von aller oder auch nur einem größeren Teil Ihrer seit Jahrzehnten geleisteten Geistesarbeit Kenntnis hat. Sie müssen mir daher verzeihen, wenn ich in der bloßen Konstatierung von “Abweichungen” kein Argument und keinen berechtigten Vorwurf erblicke. Nur dann wäre der Vorwurf gerecht, wenn die Abweichungen leichtsinnig erfolgten. Aber Sie kennen mich hoffentlich zu gut, als um mir einen Trieb zu grundlosen Neuerungen zuzutrauen. Was ich in unablässiger Arbeit nach und nach in Vorlesungen an Änderungen vorgenommen haben – und dessen ist allerdings nicht wenig – das habe unter dem Zwang der Sache, so wie ich sie eben nach besten Kräften, wenn auch freilich Ihnen gegenüber ungleich geringeren Kräften, zu erkennen glaubte. Was nun die Ausstellungen im einzelnen betrifft, so bin ich im höchsten Grade verwundert, auf so viele bei Ihnen zu stoßen, nachdem
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ich den ganzen Aufsatz Marty geschickt und dieser nur 3 oder 4 Bemerkungen über einzelnen Wendungen gemacht hatte, die wohl alle berücksichtigt finden wird (z.B. über den Ausdruck “Entstehung der Urteile aus Vorstellungen” und dgl.) Da Marty über Ihre gegenwärtigen Anschauungen unterrichtet sein dürfte, so glaubte ich hienach auch ganz in Ihrem Sinne gesprochen zu haben, und sehe nun mit dem größten Erstaunen, dass Sie gerade die Meinung teilen, die ich bekämpfe. Ich kann mir die nur so erklären, dass Marty angesichts dieser Kluft überhaupt darauf verzichtete, hier eine Vereinigung anzustreben und sich deswegen auf ein paar mehr redaktionelle Bemerkungen beschränkte. Was Sie mir in Bezug auf die Lehre von den 3 Grundklassen, von Empfindung und Vorstellung, Empfindung und Gefühl vorhalten, das ist nun aber teilweise nicht einmal eine wirkliche Abweichung meinerseits. So bin ich z.B. mit Ihnen nach wie vor der Meinung, dass mit jedem psychischen Zustande, auch der Empfindung, eine Bewusstsein desselben verbunden ist; aber wenn ich Affekte gegenüber bloß sinnlichen Schmerzen oder Lüsten durch die Anerkennung eines Sachverhaltes charakterisieren, so ist hier nicht von diesem, allen psychischen Zuständen gemeinsamen, sondern von einem hinzukommenden besonderen Urteil die Rede. Die gemeinsame Bezeichnung “intellektuelle Zustände” für Vorstellungen und Urteile scheint mir mit Aristoteles (nous) und den meisten Psychologen bis zum heutigen Tage zweckmäßig, ohne dass ich darum ihre wesentliche Verschiedenheit leugnete. Die Verschiedenheit der “intentionalen Inexistenz” scheint mir eben zwischen beiden doch nicht so groß, wie zwischen ihnen und den Gefühlen; ähnlich wie die Hauptfarben zusammengenommen der schwarzweißen Reihe gegenüberstehen, obschon unter den ersteren doch auch wesentliche qualitative Verschiedenheiten bestehen. Ich weiß nicht, ob man verlangen kann, dass diese relative Verwandtschaft noch näher definiert wird, ob man sich hierüber nicht eben mit dem Zeugnis des Bewusstseins begnügen muss. Indessen scheint mir überhaupt nicht allzu viel daran zu liegen, ob man diese zusammenfassende Bezeichnung “intellektuelle Zustände” akzeptiere oder nicht, und in manchen Fällen und Betrachtungen wäre gewiss auch die Zusammenfassung der Urteile mit den Gefühlen gerechtfertigt. Dass ich Fühlen und Begehren schärfer unterscheide als Sie, mag wohl richtig sein, ist aber für die gegenwärtige Abhandlung, wie da-
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selbst bemerkt, nebensächlich; in der Abhandlung über den Willensbegriff denke ich darauf einzugehen. Wesentlich dagegen ist hier die Unterscheidung, die ich zwischen dem sinnlichen Schmerz und dem Affekt-Schmerz mache, und ich kann einen Gegenbeweis nicht darin finden, dass alle Sprachen der Welt das gleiche Wort für beide Zustände gebrauchen; so wenig als es ein Identitätsbeweis ist, wenn man vom Glanz der Sonne und dem Glanz der Rede spricht und in allen Sprachen der Welt sich dergleichen metaphorische Anwendungen sinnlicher Ausdrücke finden. In unserm Falle scheint die Übertragung genügend dadurch motiviert, dass es sich beide Male um negative Gefühlszustände handelt und dass ähnliche Reaktionen sich an beide knüpfen. Ganz unversöhnlich ist wohl der Gegensatz unserer Auffassungen der musikalischen Gefühlsregungen. Wie viel Denktätigkeit (wenn auch nicht notwendig abstrakter Art) schon in den einfachsten Melodien eingebettet liegt, hoffe ich in einer bald erscheinenden Abhandlung in den “Beiträgen” eingehend nachzuweisen. Zwischen den rein sensuellen Gefühlen und den durch abstraktes Denken vermittelten liegen doch noch die, welche konkretes Denken, Wahrnehmen, Vergleichen, Erwarten, usw. voraussetzen, in der Mitte. Wenn nun auch nicht überzeugt, bin ich doch durch Ihre Darlegungen in vielen Punkte intensiv angeregt worden, und bleibe Ihnen dankbar dafür, dass Sie trotz Ihrer körperlichen Indisposition so viel Zeit daran wendeten, mich über Ihre Anschauungen und deren Grundlagen, die Intensitätslehre und die Unterscheidung des menschlichen und tierischen Lebens naher zu informieren. Die Betonung dieser Kluft scheint mir bei der Definition des Wollens durchaus wesentlich und unumgänglich; bei den Affekten glaubte ich sie umgehen zu können. Aber Sie fassen offenbar, wie Sie auch hervorheben, die Grenzen des tierischen Seelenlebens auch selbst in Hinsicht der Phantasmen außerordentlich viel enger als früher, und dies ist ein Punkt, über welchen ich aus Ihrer Darstellung nicht klar zu werden vermochte. Ich stelle die Möglichkeit gewiss nicht in Abrede, dass ich auf verkehrten Bahnen wandle und nach dem Bekanntwerden mit Ihren Anschauungen in ihrem ganzen Zusammenhang mich genötigt sehen werde, die meinigen umzubilden; in welchem Falle es ohne das geringste Widerstreben, ohne Kampf gegen Eitelkeit oder Trägheit geschehen wird. Aber einstweilen lassen Sie mich diese Bahn weiterge-
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hen, ohne darin Undankbarkeit und Leichtsinn zu erblicken. Kann ich es einrichten, nächsten Herbst Sie in Schönbühl zu besuchen, oder etwa Ostern in Italien, so wird die mündliche Aussprache wenigstens leichtere Verständigung ermöglichen als der schriftliche Verkehr, den ich während des Semesters ohnedies gar sehr beschränken muss. Nach der Rückkehr erwartet mich schon wieder die Pflicht, im November einen Akademievortrag zu halten, wobei ich den 2. Teil der Willensstudien vorlege. Dieser soll dann nach einem Abkommen mit dem Verleger mit den “Gemütsbewegungen” zusammen als Büchlein erscheinen. Zugleich soll das dritte Heft der “Beiträge”, worin u.a. die obige Untersuchung stehen soll, gegen Ende des Jahres gedruckt sein. Dazu die Kollegien, das Seminar, worin immer mehrere experimentelle Arbeiten überwacht werden müssen, und die Amtsgeschäfte. Wir hatten im Sommer jede Woche 2 lange Sitzungen, außerdem die Akademiesitzung. So kann ich also nicht hoffen, brieflich auch nur über wichtigste Punkte mit Ihnen einig zu werden. Mündlich würden auch Verstimmungen, wie ich sie zu meinem größten Leidwesen bei Ihnen hervorgerufen, in wenigen Minuten ausgeglichen sein. Aber eine volle Überzeugung meinerseits könnte nur dann erzielt werden, wenn das Ganze Ihrer Anschauungen in systematischem Zusammenhang schriftlich oder gedruckt vor mir läge, da nun einmal in der Philosophie alles mit allem enger zusammenhängt als anderwärts. Möchte es Ihnen möglich sein, Ihren Schülern und der Wissenschaft eine solche zusammenhängende Darstellung zu übergeben: das ist und bleibt mein sehnlichster Wunsch.... Carl Stumpf
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE PUBLICATIONS OF CARL STUMPF BIBLIOGRAPHIE DER SCHRIFTEN VON CARL STUMPF DENIS FISETTE
Books –– (2008): Über die Grundsätze der Mathematik, W. Ewen (ed.), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. –– (1939-1940): Erkenntnislehre, 2 vol., Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 873 p. –– (1928a): William James nach seinen Briefen, Berlin: Pan Verlag, 47 p.; also in Kant Studien XXXII (2-3), 1927, 205-241. –– (1928b): Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 140 p.; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (eds), Carl Stumpf — Schriften zur Psychologie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997, 229-382. –– (1926): Die Sprachlaute; experimentell-phonetische Untersuchungen (nebst einem Anhang über Instrumentalklänge), Berlin: Springer, 1926, 419 p. –– (1911): Die Anfänge der Musik, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth; reprint by Olms: Hildesheim, 1979, 209 p. –– (1910c): Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 261 p. –– (1896): Tafeln zur Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin: Speyer & Peters, 30 p. [P. Menzer contributed to the third edition in 1910 and to the fourth in 1928]. –– (1890): Tonpsychologie, vol. II. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 582 p.; reprint by Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1883): Tonpsychologie, vol. I. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 427 p.; reprint by Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1873): Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 324 p.; reprint by Bonset: Amsterdam, 1965. –– (1869): Verhältnis des platonischen Gottes zur Idee des Guten, Halle: C.E.M. Pfeffer, 110 p.; also published in two parts in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Neue Folge 52 (1), 83-128; (2), 197-261.
Books edited –– (1898-1924): Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft. vol. 1-9. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. –– (1914): Naturphilosophie und Psychologie. vol. 1. Naturphilosophie. written by Erich Becher, Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1914, 427 p.
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–– Stumpf, C. & E. M. von Hornbostel, (ed.) (1922-1923): Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (4 vol.). München: Drei Masken; reprint by Olms: Hildesheim, 1975, LXI, 1050 p. –– Stumpf, C., Th. Lipps & A. von Schrenck-Notzing, (ed.) (1897): Dritter Internationaler Kongress für Psychologie in München vom 4. bis 7. August 1896. München: Lehmann, 490 p.
Articles in scientific journals –– (1938): Studien zur Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physikalisch-mathematische Klasse 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1-59. –– (1929): Zum Grundgesetz der assoziativen Reproduktion, Ninth International Congress of Psychology, held at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 1st to 7th, 1929. Nendeln: Lichtenstein, 1974, 63-64. –– (1926): Sprachlaute und Instrumentalklänge. Zeitschrift für Physik 38, 745-758. –– (1925): Phonetik und Ohrenheilkunde. Beiträge zur Anatomie, Physiologie, Pathologie und Therapie des Ohres, der Nase und des Halses 22, 1-8. –– (1924a): Carl Stumpf. in R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellung V. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1-57. –– (1924b): Singen und Sprechen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 94, 1-37; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 9, 1924, 38-75. –– (1923): Vorwort [to G. W. Leibniz Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe]. first series 1. Darmstadt: Reichl, 23-30. –– (1922a) Franz Brentano, Professor der Philosophie, 1838-1917. in A. Chroust (ed.), Lebensläufe aus Franken II. Würzburg: Kabitzsch & Mönnich, 67-85. –– (1922b): Lieder der Ballakuda-Indianer. in C. Stumpf & E. M. von Hornbostel (eds), Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft I. München: Drei Masken, 87-103. –– (1922c): Phonographierte Indianermelodien. in C. Stumpf & E. M. von Hornbostel (eds), Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft I. München: Drei Masken, 113-126. –– (1922d): Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen. in C. Stumpf & E. M. von Hornbostel (eds), Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft I. München: Drei Masken, 127-177. –– (1921a): Zur Analyse der Konsonanten. Beiträge zur Anatomie, Physiologie, Pathologie und Therapie des Ohres, der Nase und des Halses 17, 151-181. –– (1921b): Veränderungen des Sprachverständnisses bei Abwärts fortschreitender Vernichtung der Gehörsempfindungen. Beiträge zur Anatomie, Physiologie, Pathologie und Therapie des Ohres, der Nase und des Halses 17, 182-190. –– (1921c): Gedächtnisrede auf Benno Erdmann. Sitzungsberichte der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 497-508. –– (1921d): Über die Tonlage der Konsonanten und die für das Sprachverständnis entscheidende Gegend des Tonreiches. Sitzungsberichte der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1921, 636-640. –– (1920): Franz Brentano, Philosoph. Deutsches biographisches Jahrbuch 2, 54-61. –– (1919a): Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano. in O. Kraus (ed.), Franz Brentano. Zur Kenntnis seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Munich: Oskar Beck, 87-149.
Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf
531
–– (1919b): Spinozastudien. Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Verlag der Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-57. –– (1919c): Zur Analyse geflüsterter Vokale. Beiträge zur Anatomie, Physiologie, Pathologie und Therapie des Ohres, der Nase und des Halses 12, 234-254. –– (1918a): Die Struktur der Vokale. Sitzungsberichte der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 333-358. –– (1918b): Empfindung und Vorstellung. Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 1, 3-116. –– (1918c): Über den Entwicklungsgang der neueren Psychologie und ihre militärtechnische Verwendung. Deutsche Militärärztliche Zeitschrift. Zentralblatt für das gesamte Heeres-und Marine-Sanitätswesen 47 (15-16), 273-282. –– (1918d): Trompete und Flöte. Festschrift Hermann Kretschmar zum 70. Geburtstag, Leipzig: Peters, 155-157. –– (1917a): Zum Gedächnis Lotzes. Kant-Studien 22, 1-26. –– (1917b): Die Attribute der Gesichtsempfindungen. Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 8, 1-88. –– (1916a): Apologie der Gefühlsempfindungen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 75, 330-350; also in C. Stumpf, Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Barth, 1928, 103-140; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 227-382. –– (1916b): Binaurale Tonmischung, Mehrheitsschwelle und Mitteltonbildung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 75, 330-350; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 9, 1924, 17-37. –– (1916c): Verlust der Gefühlsempfindungen im Tongebiete (musikalische Anhedonie). Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 75, 39-53; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 9, 1924, 1-16. –– (1914-1915): Bemerkungen und Selbstbeobachtungen (Anhang zu S. Baley, „Versuch über die Lokalisation beim dichotischen Hören“). Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 70, 366-372; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 8, 1915, 102-108. –– (1914a): Ziele und Wege der neueren Psychologie. in W. Krötzsch (ed.), Das Kind und die Schule, Ausdruck, Entwicklung und Bildung, Leipzig: Dürr, 23-32. –– (1914b): Über neuere Untersuchungen zur Tonlehre. F. Schumann (ed.), Bericht über den VI. Kongress für experimentale Psychologie in Göttingen vom 15-18 April 1914, Teil I, Leipzig: Barth, 305-348; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 8, 1915, 17-56. –– (1911a): Konsonanz und Konkordanz. Nebst Bemerkungen über Wohlklang und Wohlgefälligkeit musikalischer Zusammenklänge. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 58, 321-355; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 6, 151-165. –– (1911b): Differenztöne und Konsonanz. Zweiter Artikel. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 59, 161-175; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 6, 116-150. –– (1910a): Die Lust am Trauerspiel. in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1-64.
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–– (1910b): Konsonanz und Konkordanz. in Festschrift zum 90. Geburtstag seiner Exzellenz des Wirklichen Geheimen Rates Rochus Freiherrn von Liliencron, Dr. theol. und phil. Überreicht von Vertretern deutscher Musikwissenschaft, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 329-349. –– (1909a): Die Anfänge der Musik. Beilage der Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung, December 18, Berlin, 1593-1616; also in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 1910, 225-261. –– (1909b): Akustische Versuche mit Pepito Arriola. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 4, 105-115; also in Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung 2, 1910, 1-11. –– (1909c): Beobachtungen über Kombinationstöne. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 5, 1-142; also in Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 55, 1910, 1-142. –– (1908): Vom ethischen Skeptizismus. Rede zur Gedächnisfeier des Stifters der Berliner Universität König Friedrich Wilhelm III, 3. August 1908, Berlin: Francke; also in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 1910, 197-224. –– (1907a): Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie, Rede zum Eintritt des Rektorates der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 15 Oktober 1907, Berlin: Francke; also in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 1910, 161-196. –– (1907b): Über Gefühlsempfindungen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 44, 1-49; also in C. Stumpf, Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig, Barth, 1928, 54-102; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 296344. –– (1907c): Über Gefühlsempfindungen [und Diskussion mit Ebbinghaus, Jerusalem, Krueger und Wirth u. a.]. in F. Schumann (ed.), Bericht über den II. Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Würzburg vom 18. bis 21. April 1906, Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 209-213. –– (1907d): Einleitung. in O. Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten. Der Kluge Hans, Leipzig, Barth, 7-15; reprint by Fachbuchhandlung für Psychologie, Frankfurt a. M., 1983. –– (1907e): Der Rechenunterricht des Herrn v. Osten. in O. Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten. Der Kluge Hans, Leipzig: Barth, 175-180; reprint by Fachbuchhandlung für Psychologie, Frankfurt a. M., 1983. –– (1906a): Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften. Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1-94. –– (1906b): Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen. Abhandlungen der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe, Berlin: V. der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3-40; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 101-142. –– (1906c): Über Gefühlsempfindungen. in F. Schumann (ed.), Bericht über den II. Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Würzburg vom 18-21 April 1906, Leipzig: Barth, 209-213. –– (1905a): Über zusammengesetzte Wellenformen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 39, 241-268; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 4, 1910, 62-89.
Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf
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–– (1905b): Differenztöne und Konsonanz. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 39, 269-283; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 4, 1910, 90-104. –– (1904): Die Demonstration in der Aula der Berliner Universität am 6. Februar 1903. Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 5 (11), 431-443. –– (1903): Leib und Seele. Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie. Zwei Reden, Leipzig: Barth. –– (1902): Über das Erkennen von Intervallen und Akkorden bei sehr kurzer Dauer. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 27, 148-186; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 4, 1910, 1-39. –– (1901a): Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 3, 69-138. –– (1901b): Eigenartige sprachliche Entwickelung eines Kindes. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie und Pathologie 3 (6), 419-447. –– (1901c): Beobachtungen über subjektive Töne und über Doppelhören. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 3, 30-51. –– (1900a): Zur Methodik der Kinderpsychologie. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie und Pathologie 3 (1), 1-21; also in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 161-196; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 183-222. –– (1900b): Die Berliner Aufführungen klassischer Musikwerk für den Arbeiterstand. Preußische Jahrbücher 100, 247-265. –– (1899a): Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie, Berlin: Lange, 5-32; also in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 1910, 194-224; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 71-100. –– (1899b): Über den Begriff der Gemüthsbewegung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21, 47-99; also in Stumpf, Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung, Leipzig: Barth, 1928, 1-53; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 243-295. –– (1899c): Über die Bestimmung hoher Schwingungszahlen durch Differenztöne. Annalen der Physik und Chemie, Neue Folge 68, 105-116. –– (1899d): Bemerkung zur Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 3 (5), 671-672. –– (1899e): Beobachtungen über subjektive Töne und über Doppelhören. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21, 100-121. –– (1898a): Erwiderung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie des Sinnesorgane 18, 294-302. –– (1898b): Konsonanz und Dissonanz. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 1, 1-108. –– (1898c): Neueres über Tonverschmelzung. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 2, 1-24. –– (1898d): Zum Einfluss der Klangfarbe auf die Analyse von Zusammenklängen. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 2, 168-170. –– (1898e): Die unmusikalischen und die Tonverschmelzung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 17, 422-435.
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–– (1897a): Geschichte des Consonanzbegriffs. Erster Teil. Die Definition der Consonanz in Altertum. Abhandlungen der Königlich bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1. Classe 21, 1. Abteilung, München: Franz, 1-78. –– (1897b): Die Pseudo-aristotelischen Probleme über Musik. Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Abhandlungen, Berlin: Reimer, 1-85. –– (1896a): Eröffnungsrede des Präsident, Prof. Dr Carl Stumpf. Dritter International Congress für Psychologie in München vom 4-7 August 1896, München: Lehmann, 3-16; published (with modifications) under the title: Leib und Seele. in C. Stumpf, Philosophische Reden und Vorträge, Leipzig: Barth, 1910, 65-93; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 151-182. –– (1896b): Schlussworte des I. Präsidenten, Prof. Dr Carl Stumpf. Dritter International Congress für Psychologie in München vom 4-7 August 1896, München: Lehmann, 166-168. –– (1896c): Über die Ermittelung von Obertönen. Annalen der Physik und Chemie. Neue Folge 57, pp. 660-681. –– (1896d): Selbstanzeige [Über die Ermittelung von Obertönen]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 12, 69-70. –– (1895a): Antrittsrede. Sitzungsberichte der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Reimer, 735-738. –– (1895b): Hermann von Helmholtz und die neuere Psychologie. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Neue Folge 8 (3), 303-314. –– (1894): Bemerkungen über zwei akustische Apparate. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 6, 33-43. –– (1893): Zum Begriff der Lokalzeichen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 4, 70-73. –– (1892a): Über den Begriff der mathematischen Wahrscheinlichkeit. Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Classe der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 20, München: Franz, 37-120. –– (1892b): Über die Anwendung des mathematischen Wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriffs auf Teile eines Kontinuums. Sitzungsberichte der philosophischphilologischen und historischen Classe der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 20, München: Franz, 681-691. –– (1892c): Phonographierte Indianermelodien. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 8, 127-144. –– (1892d): Selbstanzeige [Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 3, 197-198. –– (1891a): Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie. Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 19, zweite Abt., München: Franz, 465516. –– (1891b): Mein Schlusswort gegen Wundt. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 2, 438-443. –– (1891c): Bemerkung zu S. 290 des vorigen Heftes. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 2, 426. –– (1891d): Wundts Antikritik. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 2, 266-293. –– (1890a): Selbstanzeige [Tonpsychologie, vol. II]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 1, 345-351.
Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf
535
–– (1890b): Über Vergleichung von Tondistanzen. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 1, 419-462. –– (1887): Mongolische Gesänge. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3, 297304; also in C. Stumpf & E. M. von Hornbostel (eds), Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft I, 1922, München: Drei Masken, 105-112. –– (1886a): Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2, 405-426. –– (1886b): Über die Vorstellung von Melodien. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Neue Folge 89 (1), 45-47. –– (1885): Musikpsychologie in England. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft I, 261-349. –– (1878): Aus der vierten Dimension. Philosophische Monatshefte 14, 13-30. –– (1874) Die empirische Psychologie der Gegenwart. Im neuen Reich 4 (2), 201-226. –– (1873): Selbstanzeige [Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung]. Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 10, 361-370. –– Stumpf, C. & H. Rupp, (1927): Franz Hillebrand. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 102, 1-5. –– Stumpf, C. & G. J. von Allesch (1921): Über den Einfluss der Röhrenweite auf die Auslöschung hoher Töne durch Interferenzröhren. Beiträge zur Anatomie, Physiologie, Pathologie und Therapie des Ohres, der Nase und des Halses 17, 143-150. –– Stumpf, C. & Hornbostel, E. von, (1911): Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 6, 102-115. –– Stumpf, C. & K. L. Schaefer, (1901): Tontabellen. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 3, 139-146. –– Stumpf, C. & M. Meyer, (1898a): Maßbestimmungen über die Reinheit consonanter Intervalle. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 18, 321-404; also in Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 2, 84-167. –– Stumpf, C. & M. Meyer, (1898b): Erwiderung. Annalen der Physik und Chemie. Neue Folge 65, 641-644. –– Stumpf, C. & M. Meyer, (1897): Schwingungszahlbestimmungen bei sehr hohen Tönen. Annalen der Physik und Chemie. Neue Folge 61, 760-779.
Articles in Newspapers –– (1921a): Sinnespsychologie und Musikwissenschaft. Helmholtz’ Grundlegungen, Helmholtz zum 100. Geburtstag. Erinnerungsblatt der Vossischen Zeitung, Vossische Zeitung Berlin, August 28, no. 404, Annex 4, 1. –– (1921b): Zahl und Maß im Geistigen. Vossische Zeitung Berlin 245 (1-3), May 21; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 223-226. –– (1920): Beethovens Ewigkeitswert. Zum 150. Geburtstag des Meisters. Vossische Zeitung Berlin 2, December 16. –– (1908): Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv. Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, February 22, 225-246; reprint in A. Simon (ed.) Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000, Berlin: VWB, 2000, 65-84.
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–– (1907): Richtungen und Gegensätze in der heutigen Psychologie. Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung, October 19, Beilage, 903-914; reprint in H. Sprung & L. Sprung (1997), 143-150. –– (1904): Das Pferde des Herrn von Osten. Der Tag, September 3. –– (1903): Grammophon und Photophonograph. Eine Betrachtung zur angewandten Logik. Der Tag, March 1. –– (1897): Das Wunderkind Otto Pöhler. Vossische Zeitung, January 10, 4. –– (1881): Rudolph Hermann Lotze. Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung 489, July 18, 6. –– Stumpf, C. & W. Engelmann, (1903): Zur Demonstration in der Aula der Berliner Universität am 6. Febuar 1903. Der Tag 151, March 31, 1-3.
Reviews –– (1900): E. Mach [Analyse der Empfindungen]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 21, December 15, 3291-3294. –– (1898): Louis Waldstein [The Subconscious Self and its Relation to Education and Health]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 19 (19), May 19, 743-744. –– (1895): James Mark Baldwin [Handbook of Psychology, vol 1-2]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 8, 293-298. –– (1893a): G. Engel [Die Bedeutung der Zahlverhältnisse für die Tonempfindung]. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9, 242-244. –– (1893b): Hugo Münsterbergs [‘Vergleichung von Tondistanzen’]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 5, 114-117. –– (1892a): Hermann Lotze [Kleine Schriften, vol. III]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 13 (15), April 9, 491-492. –– (1892b): Jacques-Louis Soret [Des conditions physiques de la perception du beau]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 13 (26), June 25, 843-844. –– (1891): Götz Martius [‘Über die Reaktionszeit und Perceptionsdauer der Klänge’]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 2, 230-232. –– (1890a) Herbert Spencer [The Origin of Music. in Mind, Octobre 1890, 449-468]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 1, 511; also in Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 7, 1891, 142-143. –– (1890b): C. Lorenz [Untersuchungen über die Auffassungen von Tondistanzen]”, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 1, 140-141. –– (1889): Theodor Wittstein [Grundzüge der mathematisch-physikalischen Theorie der Musik]. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 5, 345-347. –– (1888a): W. Wundt [Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 2 vol., third ed.] & E. Luft [Über die Unterschiedsempfindlichkeit für Tonhöhen]. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4, 540-550. –– (1888b): G. Engel [Über den Begriff der Klangfarbe]. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4, 146-150. –– (1887a): Hermann Lotze [Kleine Schriften, vol. II]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 8 (6), February 5, 195. –– (1887b): Harald Höffding [Psychologie in Umrissen auf Grundlage der Erfahrung]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 8 (31), July 30, 1107-1109. –– (1886a): Alexander J. Ellis [On the Musical Scale of various Nations]. Reprinted with additions and corrections from the Journal of The Society of Arts 33
Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf
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(1668), 27 March 1885, in Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2, 511524. –– (1886b): Hermann Lotze [Kleine Schriften, vol. I]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 7 (18), May 1, 626-628. –– (1886c) Ernst Mach [Analyse der Empfindungen]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 27, July 3, 947-948. –– (1886d): Herbert Spencer [Systeme der synthetischen Philosophie]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 7 (34), August 21, 1194-1196. –– (1885): Theodor Lipps [Psychologische Studien, vol. I & II]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 6 (45), November 7, 1580-1581. –– (1884a): Gustave Engel [Aesthetik der Tonkunst]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 5 (42), October 18, 1545-1546. –– (1884b): Hermann Lotze [Diktate aus den Vorlesungen]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 5 (28), June 12, 1011-1013. –– (1883): Otto Bähr [Das Tonkunst unserer Musik]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 4 (25), June 23, 889-890. –– (1882a): Hermann Lotze [Grundzüge der Psychologie]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 3 (34), August 26, 1212-1213. –– (1882b): Hermann Lotze [Grundzüge der praktischen Philosophie]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 3 (34), August 26, 1213. –– (1882c): Edm. Pfeiderer [Lotzes philosophische Weltanschauung nach ihren Grundzügen]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 3 (34), August 26, 1213. –– (1882d): H. Ehrlich [Die Musik-Aesthetik in ihrer Entwicklung von Kant bis auf die Gegenwart. Ein Grundriß]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 3 (21), May 27, 747. –– (1882e): Eduard Hanslick [Vom musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst, sixth ed.]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 3 (21), May 27, 747-748. –– (1881a): G. Engel [Das mathematische Harmonium]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 1 & 2 (35), August 27, 1387. –– (1881b): R. Beyersdorf [Die Raumvorstellung. Metaphysische Untersuchungen]. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 1 & 2 (1), January 1, 4. –– (1876a): Anton Marty [Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Sprache]. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Neue Folge 68, 172-191. –– (1876b): Théodore Funck-Brentano [La civilisation et ses lois. Morale sociale]. Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes 45, 643-645. –– (1872): H. Romundt [Die menschliche Erkenntnis und das Wesen der Dinge]. Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 2 (51), 2031-2034. –– (1871): Georg Freiherr von Hertling [Materie und Form und die Definition der Seele bei Aristoteles. Ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie]. Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 133 (2), 1288-1301.
Reports –– (1912): Das psychologische Institut. Chronik der königlichen Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität zu Berlin 25, Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 89-90.
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–– (1911): Das psychologische Institut. Chronik der königlichen Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität zu Berlin 24, Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 89-90. –– (1910d): Das psychologische Institut. in Max Lenz (ed.), Geschichte der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 3, Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 202-207. –– (1908): Referat von Robert Musils Dissertation. in R. Musil (1992): Pour une évaluation des doctrines de Mach, Fr. trans. M. Demet, Paris, P.U.F., 171-175. –– (1886): Referat von Edmund Husserls Habilitationsschrift. in H. Gerlach & H. Sepp, (ed) (1994): Husserl in Halle, Peter Lang : Bern, 171-174. –– Stumpf, C., B. Erdmann, & A. Riehl, (ed), (1910): Das philosophische Seminar. in Max Lenz (eds), Geschichte der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 3, Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 201-202. –– Stumpf, C. & A. vom Rath & A. Heubaum (1903): Wilhelm Dilthey zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, Berlin (Privatdruck), 10 p.
Meeting reports of the Royal Academy of the sciences of Berlin –– (1918): Über die Attributenlehre Spinozas. Sitzungsberichte der KöniglichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, November 14, 991. –– (1917a): Über die Synthese von Vokalen und Instrumentalklängen. Sitzungsberichte …, November 1, 575. –– (1917b): Die Attribute der Gesichtsempfindungen. Sitzungsberichte…,18, 569. –– (1916): Über Empfindung und Vorstellung beim Gesichtssinne. Sitzungsberichte …, October 26, 1117. –– (1915): Zur Analyse der Vokale. Sitzungsberichte …, July 22. –– (1914): Zur Analyse der Vokale. Sitzungsberichte …, May 28, 651. –– (1913): Über Empfindung und Vorstellung. Sitzungsberichte …, March 13, 295. –– (1912): Über die Veränderlichkeit zentral bedingter Gefühlempfindungen. Sitzungsberichte …, February 22, 209. –– (1911): Über die Bedeutung des Ähnlichkeitsverhältnisses bei der mechanischen Reproduktion der Vorstellungen. Sitzungsberichte …, March 2, 249. –– (1910e): Über Strukturverschiedenheiten der Wahrnehmungsinhalte. Sitzungsberichte …, February 17, 147. –– (1909): Über das allgemeine Causalgesetz. Sitzungsberichte …, February 4, 213. –– (1908): Zur Theorie des inductiven Schlusses. Sitzungsberichte …, January 16, 59. –– (1907): Beobachtungen über Combinationstöne. Sitzungsberichte …, January 10, 1. –– (1906): Über die Einteilung der Wissenschaften. Sitzungsberichte …, January 18, 37. –– (1905): Erscheinungen und psychische Functionen. Sitzungsberichte…, January 19, 103. –– (1904): Über die Abgrenzung der Willenshandlungen. Sitzungsberichte …, February 4, 257. –– (1903): Über den Willensbegriff, III. Sitzungsberichte …, March 12, 321. –– (1902): Abstraction und Generalisation. Sitzungsberichte …, May 29, 593. –– (1901): Über den Willensbegriff, II. Sitzungsberichte …, October 31, 1045. –– (1900): Über Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen. Sitzungsberichte …, November 8, 997.
Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf
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–– (1899): Über die Tiefunterschiede der Gesichtsempfindungen. Sitzungsberichte …, November 23, 867. –– (1899): Über den Willensbegriff, I. Sitzungsberichte …, January 12, 1.
Correspondence –– (2013): Franz Brentano und Carl Stumpf. Gesamt-Korrespondenz 1867-1917, W. Baumgartner et al. (eds), Würzburg: Franz Brentano. –– (2006): Dokumente. in H. Sprung, Carl Stumpf – Eine Biografie, München: Profil Verlag, 399-449. –– Husserl, E. (1994) Briefwechsel. Die Brentanoschule, Bd. I, E. Schuhmann & K. Schuhmann (eds), Berlin: Springer. –– (1933): Brief an F. Stein. in A. Simon (ed.) Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000, Berlin: VWB, 2000, 219-221. –– (1922): Brief an Minister für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung. in A. Simon (ed.) Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000, Berlin, VWB, 2000, 106109. –– (1901): Bericht C. Stumpf's über Lotze's Briefe an ihn. in R. Flackenberg, Hermann Lotze, Stuttgart: Fromanns Verlag, 1901, 193-194. –– (1894-1920): Briefe an Franz Hillebrand (1863-1926). Tiroler Heimat 46-47, 1982-1983, 145-157. –– (1892): Brief an Gottlob Frege. in G. Frege, Briefwechsel, G. Gabriel et al. (ed.), Meiner: Hamburg, 1980, 171-172. –– (1868-1879): Briefe an Hermann Lotze. in E. W. Orth & R. Pester (eds) (2003): Hermann Lotze. Briefe und Dokumente, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. –– James, H., (ed.) (1920): The Letters of William James, 2 vol., Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. –– Brentano, F. (1876): “Ein Brief Franz Brentano an Carl Stumpf vom 10.02.1876”, W. Baumgartner (ed.), Acta Analytica 8, 1992, 33-42. –– Brentano, F. (1867-1917): Briefe an Carl Stumpf 1867-1917, G. Oberkofler (ed.), Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1989, 169 p.
Lectures transcripts and syllabus –– (1910-1911): Psychologie. Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1910-1911, Mitschrift von H. Birven, 128 p. –– (1907): Logik und Erkenntnis Theorie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1907, Mitschrift (K. Koffka), 203 p. –– (1906-1907): Psychologie, Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1906-1907, Mitschrift (K. Koffka), 239 p. –– (1903): Logik. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1903, Mitschrift (author unknown), 313 p. –– (1893a): Logik und Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1893, Mitschrift von A. Pfänder, 40 p. –– (1893b): Über Willenshandlungen . Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1893, Mitschrift von A. Pfänder, 16 p.
540
Denis Fisette
–– (1888): Logik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1888, Diktaten von Stumpf, edited by K. Schuhmann, 27 p. –– (1887): Logik und Enzyklopädie der Philosophie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1887, Mitschrift E. Husserl, transcriptions from E. Schuhmann and K. Schuhmann, 204 p. –– (1886-1887a): Psychologie. Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1886-1887, Mitschrift E. Husserl, transcriptions from R. Rollinger, E. Schuhmann, and K. Schuhmann, 645 p. –– (1886-1887b): Psychologie. Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1886-1887, Diktaten from Stumpf, transcriptions from R. Rollinger, E. Schuhmann, and K. Schuhmann, 25 p; transl. R. Rollinger, “Syllabus for Psychology”, R. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, p. 284-309.
Translations in several languages –– (forthcoming): Tone Psychology, English tr. of Tone Psychologie, by R. Rollinger, Burlington: Ashgate. –– (2012a): The Origins of Music. English tr. of Die Anfänge der Musik. Ed. and translated by D. Trippett, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 31-185. –– (2012b): Carl Stumpf: A Self-Portrait. English tr. of “Carl Stumpf”, by D. Trippet in The Origins of Music, 189-252. –– (2009a): Psicologia e teoria della conoscenza. Italian tr. of “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie” by R. Martinelli in R. Martinelli (ed.), Carl Stumpf – La rinascita della filosofia. Saggi e conferenze. Macerata: Quodlibet, 3-49. –– (2009b): Il corpo e l’anima. Italian tr. of “Leib und Seele” by R. Martinelli in R. Martinelli (2009), 51-65. –– (2009c): Fenomeni e funzioni psichiche. Italian tr. of “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen” by R. Martinelli in R. Martinelli (2009), 67-99. –– (2009d): La classificazione delle scienze. Italian tr. of “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften” by R. Martinelli in R. Martinelli (2009), 101-181. –– (2009e): La rinascita della filosofia. Italian tr. of “Wiedergeburt der Philosophie” by R. Martinelli in R. Martinelli (2009), 183-199. –– (2009f): Autobiografia. Italian tr. of “Carl Stumpf” by R. Martinelli in R. Martinelli (2009), 183-199. –– (2007): Souvenirs de Franz Brentano. French tr. of “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano” by M. Vaudreuil, in D. Fisette & G. Fréchette (eds), À l’école de Brentano, Paris: Vrin, 175-224. –– (2006a): Autobiographie. French tr. of “Carl Stumpf” by D. Fisette, in D. Fisette (ed.) Carl Stumpf. Renaissance de la philosophie, Paris: Vrin, 255-307. –– (2006b): Phénomènes et fonctions psychiques. French tr. of “Phenomena und psychische Funktionen” by D. Fisette, in D. Fisette (2006), 133-168. –– (2006c): De la classification des sciences. French tr. of “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften” by D. Fisette, in D. Fisette (2006), 169-254. –– (2006d): La renaissance de la philosophie. French tr. of “Wiedergeburt der Philosophie” by D. Fisette, in D. Fisette (2006), 115-132. –– (2003): Samoizlozhenie. Russian tr. of “Carl Stumpf” by S. Potseluev, Logos 3 (2).
Bibliography of the Publications of Carl Stumpf
541
–– (2000): The Berlin Phonogramm Archiv. English tr. of “Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv” by R. Riggs, in A. Simon (ed.) Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000, Berlin, VWB, 65-84. –– (1999a): Syllabus for Psychology. English tr. of “Vorlesungen über Psychologie, 1886-1887” by R. Rollinger, in R. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 285-309. –– (1999b): Syllabus for Logic. English tr. of C. Stumpf “Vorlesungen über Logik, 1886-1887” by R. Rollinger, in R. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 311-337. –– (1995): Ongaku no Hajime, Japanese tr. of Die Anfänge der Musik by Kin-ichi Yûki, Hosei Daigaku Shuppankyoku. –– (1992a): Autobiografia intellettuale. Italian tr. of “Carl Stumpf” by V. Fano, in V. Fano, (ed.) Carl Stumpf — Psicologia e metafisica. Sull’analiticità dell’esperienza interna, Firenze: Ponte alle Grazie, 21-72. –– (1992b): Apparenze e funzioni psichiche. Italian tr. of “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen” by V. Fano, in V. Fano, (1992), 73-102. –– (1992c): Psicologia e teoria della conoscenza. Italian tr. of “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie” by V. Fano, in V. Fano, (1992), 103-136. –– (1992d): La suddivisione delle scienze. Italian tr. of “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften” by V. Fano, in V. Fano, (1992), 137-209. –– (1976): Reminiscences of Franz Brentano. English tr. of C. Stumpf “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano” by L. McAlister, in L. McAlister (ed.), The Philosophy of Franz Brentano, London: Duckworth, 10-46. –– (1930): Carl Stumpf. English tr. of “ Carl Stumpf” by T. Hodge & S. Langer, in C. Murchison (ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, Worcester: Clark University Press, 389-441. –– (1927): Proiskhozhdenie muzyki, Russian tr. of Die Anfänge der Musik, Leningrad, 1927. –– (1913): Dusha i telo. Russian tr. of Leib und Seele & Die Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie. Zwei Reden, in Novye idei v filosofii 8, Saint Petersburg. –– (1912): The Psychology of Tone. English tr. of Tonpsychologie, vol. II, §§ 19-20 by B. Rand, in B. Rand, The Classical Psychologist, Boston: The Riverside Press, 1912, p. 619-632. –– (1909): Yavleniya i psikhicheskie funktsii. Russian tr. of “Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen”, in Novye idei v filosofii 4, Saint Petersburg. –– (1897): Un enfant extraordinaire. French tr. of “Das Wunderkind Otto Pöhler”, La Revue scientifique 7, 336-338. –– (1896): L’âme et le corps. French tr. of “Leib und Seele”, La Revue scientifique 6 (11), 321-326. –– (1895a): Hermann von Helmholtz and the New Psychology. English tr. of “Hermann von Helmholtz und die neuere Psychology” by J. G. Hibben, Psychological Review 2, 1-12. –– (1885b): Sur la représentation des melodies. French tr. of “Über die Vorstellung von Melodien”, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 20, 617618.
INDEX OF NAMES
A Allesch, C. G. 39, 42, 45, 299, 307, 318 Allesch, G. J. von 296, 297 Anselm of Canterbury 80 Anstruther-Thompson, C. 307 Antonelli, M. 205 Aquinas, T. 38, 345, 347 Aristotle 34, 67, 81-82, 87, 205206, 218, 221, 224, 242, 268, 336, 346-347 Arriola, P. 41 Ash, M. G. 13, 16, 42, 433, 479 B Bacon, F. 81 Bain, A. 32, 125, 137, 243-251, 440, 452 Balfour, A. 103 Baranzke, H. 40 Bartók, B. 43 Baumann, J. 104 Baumgartner, W. 21, 39, 56, 204 Beneke, F. E. 212, 216 Benussi, V. 399-400 Bergmann, H. 402 Berkeley, G. 205, 222, 256, 272, 327, 371, 440, 452 Bolzano, B. 35, 174, 285-286, 289, 331 Bonacchi, S. 46, 319, 415 Boole, G. 159-160 Boring, E. 15-16 Bosanquet, B. 103 Bouveresse, J. 40
Brentano, F. 12-14, 17, 21-23, 27, 34, 37-39, 55-58, 61-72, 75-78, 83, 86-89, 101-117, 127-130, 147, 148, 151-162, 166, 170, 176-198, 204205, 207-212, 221-224, 230, 263282, 287-290, 299-302, 305-306, 317, 319, 324-327, 332-355, 361368, 371-375, 379, 394, 401-402, 409, 410, 414, 425, 433, 435-437, 440, 442-443, 475-489, 493-509 Brentano, L. 479 Brunswik, E. 42 Bühler, K. 42, 318 C Cantor, G. 231 Carnap, R. 115, 118 Centi, B. 23, 107, 116, 117 Cesalli, L. 21, 319 Chisholm, R. 14 Chrudzimski, A. 35, 36, 146 Cohn, J. 303-306 Comte, A. 27, 34 Condillac, É. B. de 485 Cornelius, C. S. 133, 396 Croce, B. 297 D Darwin, C. 38, 44, 442 Dennet, D. C. 401 Descartes, R. 38, 235, 347, 349, 391 Dessoir, M. 295 Deutsch, W. 44 Diels, H. 103
544
Index of Names
Dilthey, W. 12, 55, 208, 231, 318, 394, 433 Drobisch, M. W. 58 Dummett, M. 34 E Ebbinghaus, H. 39 Elsenhans, T. 329 Ehrenfels, Ch. 388 Ewen, W. 22, 24, 26, 30, 169 F Fechner, G. T. 55, 58, 103, 296299, 313, 345, 363 Ferrari, M. 204 Fichte, J. G. 110, 452 Fisette, D. 12, 14, 20, 22-23, 27, 37, 42, 45, 145, 317, 318, 325, 337, 347, 354, 410, 427, 433, 436, 437, 442, 482, 485, 486 Fréchette, G. 14, 22, 28, 35, 147 Frege, G. 12, 24, 30, 103, 105, 112, 113, 376 Freudenberger, T. 68 Fries, J. F. 103 G Gelb, A. 42, 318 Gerlach, H. 437 Grelling, K. 118 Gundlach, H. 41 Günther, H. 45
Herbart, J. F. 39, 57-58, 64, 103, 123-139, 205, 242-245, 259, 309, 411, 445 Herder, J. G. 44 Hering, E. 20, 231, 480 Hermann, R. 394 Hertling, G. von 479 Hillebrand, F. 21, 193, 480 Hirths, G. 307 Hoffman, F. 71-73 Hornbostel, E. M. von 12, 295 Hume, D. 37, 80, 106, 205, 208214, 218, 221-222, 224, 263, 327, 336, 371 Husserl, E. 13-14, 16, 22-24, 26, 30-36, 38, 57, 75-77, 112, 115, 148, 151-153, 157-159, 164, 169-170, 193, 217, 230-233, 249, 258,265267, 277-278, 287-290, 317, 318, 323-355, 364, 388, 391, 394-395, 402, 425, 432, 435, 436, 442-443 I Ierna, C. 24, 26, 34, 146 J Jacquette, D. 36, 37, 205 James, W. 12, 21, 102, 106, 212, 231, 396, 400, 412 Jevons, W. S. 159-160 K
H Hans, C. 40-41 Hartmann, E. von 297, 303, 454 Hegel, G. W. F. 79 Heidegger, M. 230, 232, 395 Helmholtz, H. von 23, 39, 231, 240
Kaiser-El-Safti, M. 15, 21, 23, 3940, 318 Kamlah, A. 36 Kant, I. 24-25, 27, 29-34, 40, 62, 106-108, 111, 116, 153-155, 157, 160-162, 169-170, 204-205, 208210, 220-222, 236-238, 240-243, 248, 251-253, 333, 336, 340, 389, 391, 394, 395, 403, 410, 448
545
Index of Names Katz, D. 388 Klein, F. 55, 102, 115, 318, 356-357 Kluck, S. 389, 390 Koffka, K. 12, 42, 318, 389, 398400, 427 Köhler, W. 12, 41-43, 114, 118, 317, 318, 389-390, 398-399, 434 Kohlrausch, F. 65, 102 Kraus, O. 117, 475, 498 Krueger, F. 396 Külpe, O. 39, 42, 318, 329, 391, 401 L Lampert, V. 43 Lange, C. G. 58, 73, 134-135, 307, 412 Langfeld, H. 427 Lanzoni, S. 307 Lask, E. 394 Lee, V. 307 Lehmann, G. 101 Leibniz, G. W. 80, 205, 285, 288, 442 Lewin, K. 12, 42, 114, 118, 318 Libardi, M. 104 Lipps, T. 32, 295, 300-303, 306, 309-312, 318, 432 Locke, J. 82, 205, 209-210, 218, 222, 263, 266 Lotze, R. H. 12, 21-24, 34-35, 37, 55-58, 62-66, 69-70, 101-118, 126,131, 153-154, 205, 217, 243, 285, 288, 299, 338, 342, 354, 363, 372,376, 394, 443, 447, 477 M Mach, E. 18, 38, 46, 231, 317, 327, 354, 408, 411, 420, 440, 480, 482, 485
Martinelli, R. 17, 36-38, 110, 147, 208, 224 Marty, A. 21, 35, 104, 117, 153,183, 231, 265, 267, 272, 277, 280-282, 289-290, 317, 319, 361-382, 396, 434, 435, 477-481, 507-513, 528 Mayer-Hillebrand, F. 475 Meinong, A. 35, 140, 159, 174, 183, 193-197, 318, 338, 355, 396, 434 Metzger, W. 395 Meumann, E. 295 Milkov, N. 22-23, 57, 103, 106, 107, 115, 117, 118 Mill, J. S. 24-25, 30-32, 37, 82, 96, 98, 106, 125, 154-155, 157, 272273, 371, 440, 446, 452 Mommsen, T. 231 Moog, W. 101 Morgan, A. De 159 Motte-Haber, H. 44 Mulligan, K. 14, 46 Münch, D. 16, 24, 28, 117 Musil, R. 12, 42, 46, 318, 319, 407409, 414-422 O Oberkofler, G. 475 Oberniedermaier, J. N. 336 Oppenheim, P. 118 Österreich, T. K. 46, 420 P Pfänder, A. 432, 443 Planck, M. 15 Plato 34, 81, 87, 217, 264-267, 285286, 288, 447, 477 Plotinus 223 Poggi, S. 39, 57 Pompino-Marschall, B. 43 Popescu, V. 230
546
Index of Names
Pradelle, D. 16, 23, 148 Prinz, W. 40 Pfungst, O. 41 R Rehmke, J. 103 Reichenbach, H. 118-120, 318, 389, 434 Reid, T. 440 Reinecke, H.-P. 39 Ribot, T. 485 Rollinger, R. D. 17, 23, 36, 57, 104, 317, 324, 426, 427, 435, 437 Rousseau, J. J. 44 Russell, B. 96, 389 Ryle, G. 401 S Sapir, E. 44 Scheler, M. 395 Schelling, F. W. J. 72, 341, 354 Scherer, W. 433 Schleiermacher, F. 106 Schlick, M. 318, 319, 387-403, 434 Schuhmann, E. 426, 427 Schuhmann, K. 14, 348, 426, 427 Schwörer-Kohl, G. 43 Seep, H. 437 Simon, A. 12, Simons, P. 14 Smith, B. 14, 35, 116 Socrates 87, 269 Sommer, G. 44 Spencer, H. 44 Spiegelberg, H. 13-15, Spinoza, B. 37-39, 205, 224-225, 323-325, 341, 344-347, 354, 441, 442, 446 Sprung, H. 12-13, 21, 433, 479 Sprung, L. 13, 55 Stumpf, C. passim Stumpf, F. 15, 436
T Titchener, E. B. 485 Toccafondi, F. 42, 319 Trendelenburg, F. A. 57, 63-65, 77, 103, 105, 204-205, 222 Twardowski, K. 22, 434 V Volkelt, J. 103, 295, 312 W Wagner, R. 128 Wallaschek, R. 44 Weber, E. H. 137 Weber, W. 55, 65, 102 Wertheimer, W. 16, 42, 318, 389 Willam, A. 44 Windelband, W. 103 Witasek, S. 295 Wittgenstein, L. 35, 189, 195 Wolfradt, U. 39 Woodward, W. R. 23 Wundt, W. 16, 32, 39, 58, 160, 231 300, 301, 329, 390, 419 Z Ziehen, T. 480