19th Century Psychology

Romanticism, Idealism and Existentialism

The Legacy of the Enlightened

While the Empiricists, Rationalists, and Materialists were certainly saying important things, it was not they who necessarily moved the masses

For the French, the eventual revolution did not come about because of the philosophers but the intellectuals who read them and spread their message (the philosophes)

Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau etc. Voltaire’s influence was unmatched

20000 letters to over a thousand different correspondents Very wealthy, very connected with powerful folk

With him and others we see the key themes of progress, nature, and freedom, and their ideas permeate the culture of France and beyond

The Legacy of Kant

Kant set the tone for German philosophy of the 19th century

German philosophy would largely abstain from purely empirical/materialistic approaches and take on his transcendental idealism and yield Romanticism

The environment would eventually find the likes of Fechner, Wundt and others in its midst and eventually the founding of a scientific psychology

Romanticism

Romanticism and existentialism were reaction to and criticisms of the ideas of the philosophy of the enlightenment

Age of Reason Age of Enlightenment in its long form of

1600-1800 Age of Enlightenment

18th century of European philosophy Romanticism emphasized the

‘irrational’ or emotional components of human nature.

Existentialism

Stressed the meaning of human existence, freedom of choice, and the uniqueness of each individual

The most important aspects of humans are their personal, subjective interpretations of life and the choices they make in light of those interpretations

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712-1778 Rousseau emphasized feelings in contrast to

reason as the important guiding force in human nature

The best guide for human conduct is a person’s honest feelings and inclinations.

For Rousseau, humans are basically good – born good but are made bad by societal institutions.

Anti-Hobbesian “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains”

Not the egoist push and pull of others’ thinking The social contract

What should happen: Man gives up absolute freedom in order to become more free than before

How? The General Will The will for the common good

Problem in how that will is to be specified, assuming there is one in the first place

Rousseau

Humans are, by nature, social animals who wished to live in harmony with other humans

He suggested that education should take advantage of natural impulses rather than distort them

Educational institutions should create a situation in which a child’s natural abilities and interests can be nurtured

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832 Sorrows of Young Werther resulted in

an epidemic of suicides Goethe viewed man as hopelessly

alone in an immense universe, torn by the stresses and conflicts of life

Life consisted of opposing forces, love and hate, life and death, good and evil and other various knuckle tattoos

The goal of life should be to embrace these forces rather than to deny or overcome them

Man finds himself through activity Life is love and passion

He made contributions to science – insisted that intact, meaningful psychological experience should be the object of study, rather than meaningless isolated sensations (an early phenomenologist)

The German Idealists

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770-1831 Of his influence on European

thought, perhaps only Descartes and Kant surpassed

‘Inventor’ of phenomenology The study of conscious experience Would later influence the existential

work of Søren Kierkegaard and Sartre Wrote of the Absolute, the Ineffable,

Soul, Art and Religion, but unfortunately not in an easy to understand manner

Hegel saw the universe as interrelated unity called The Absolute

True knowledge is attained by relating isolated instances to the “whole”

Hegel

Disagrees with Kant regarding the subjectivity of reason, and suggests the truths of reason are necessary, nonarbitrary and final

Distinguishes reason and cause Cause

John is dead because a trigger was pulled Reason

John slept with Bob’s wife, Bob found out etc. In other words, reason is prior to cause

The effect is only contingently related to cause, but necessarily related to the reason

Hegel

The development of the soul (i.e. philosophy of mind)

Natural soul Exists as pure being (pure egoism) Knows only itself

Feeling soul Gains sensibility Knows itself as different from that which it feels

Actual soul Can receive external objects and distinguish itself

and the contents arising from sensory experience It is at this last stage at which we can talk of

consciousness and mind

Hegel

Consciousness also passes through stages Sensuous consciousness

Allows for the reception of sense data Sense perception

Application of the universal What is this? Leads to a contradiction between an object and

class Intellect

Recognizes the ultimate reality of universals of which the objects are merely instances

Becomes self-conscious (awareness of the idea of self)

Hegel

Our understanding progresses toward the absolute by the dialectic process which is to first have a thesis (a point of view) and an antithesis (opposite point of view) which in turn is followed by a synthesis (a compromise between the thesis and the antithesis) which is a new point of view

This new point of view now becomes the thesis for the next dialectic process

Hegel

Concepts of self-awareness, self-actualization, consciousness-raising etc. used by contemporary psych folk have their roots in Hegel

The Id, Superego, and Ego of Freud akin to the thesis, antithesis and synthesis of Hegel

Other ideas would have direct influence on gestalt, existential philosophers and psychologists

Arthur Schopenhauer

1788-1860 The World as Will and

Representation Not a friendly type

Disliked pretty much most German philosophers (especially the ‘pedantic scribbler’ Hegel) except for Kant

Schopenhauer

Phenomenon vs. Noumenon World as experienced vs. the thing-in-itself

Latter unknowable for Kant He equated Kant’s noumenal world with “will”

A mindless, aimless, non-rational urge at the foundation of all of our instinctual drives, and at the foundational being of everything

The world as will and representation The world has a double-aspect, as will and as representation Will and representation are one and the same reality, regarded

from different perspectives (the will does not cause representations)

Reduces the 12 categories to one, cause and effect, which, given the intuitive (a priori) notions of space and time, explain all of human experience

We can understand the world as various manifestations of this general principle

Schopenhauer

In humans, this force manifests itself in the will to survive This will to survive causes an unending cycle of needs and need

satisfaction Most human behavior is irrational

An unending series of pains due to unsatisfied need which causes us to act to satisfy the need, followed by a brief experience of satisfaction (pleasure) followed again by another need to be satisfied and on it goes.

Much like Hindu and Buddhist thought

The will is blind because the intellect which could make it otherwise is a function of the brain, which is one of the phenomenon realized by the will

Thus suffering is inevitable: I can do what I will, but what I will is not up to me

A way of looking at life is as the postponement of death, people do not cling to life because it is pleasant, rather, they cling to life because they fear death

Schopenhauer wrote of positive and negative impulses, the unconscious, repression, and resistance before Freud, who suggested his ideas of the UnC had roots in Schopenhauer*

*Though he claims not to have read him until late in life

Søren Kierkegaard

1813-1855 Outspoken critic of organized

religion, thought most meaningful relationship with God was one which was personal and not dictated by the church

Truth is always what a person believes privately and emotionally

Truth cannot be taught logically, truth must be experienced

Disagreed with Hegel as he did not take into account personal existence or recognize the personal nature of God

God the dominant theme in K’s works

Kierkegaard

For Kierkegaard the approximation of personal freedom occurs in stages

Aesthetic stage – people are open to many types of experiences, do not recognize their ability to choose.

Live on a hedonistic level Ethical stage

accept responsibility for making choices but use as their guide ethical principles established by others

Religious stage people recognize and accept their freedom and have a personal

relationship with God People at this stage see possibilities in life that usually run

contrary to convention, tend to be nonconformists Either/Or

Two ways of life ethical vs. aesthetic Aesthetic being more sense driven (hedonistic) and with all the faults

that entails, ethical- we are always wrong to God Reject both for religious

Kierkegaard

One of the key notions is the concept of dread (angst) The call of the eternal in the world of the

senses Truth is constituted by subjectivity

Not relativistic (like Nietzsche), but that one cannot remove it from our existence

We are caught between time and eternity, and our choices determine what we will ultimately find to be true

In the end it will be between us and God, and so the truth is personal

Karl Marx

1818-1883 “Pupil of that mighty thinker (Hegel)” Marx’s philosophy was largely a uniting of

many tenets empiricism, materialism, Hegelianism etc., though much of his influence was outside the realm of psychology proper

However, what we do get from him is something beyond an individual psychology to which the field has almost exclusively been addressed to up until this time

Marx saw individuals as more similar than different and largely the product of outside social and historical forces

Society is responsible for any one person’s failures or successes

In that sense he was perhaps 100 years early with such ideas

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

1844-1900 “God is dead… and we have killed him” Almost more of a moralist than

philosopher, suggested a means for living to many

“Psychology shall again be reorganized as the queen of the sciences, to serve and prepare for which the other sciences exist. For psychology is now once again the road to the fundamental problems”

With Nietzsche we get an acknowledgement of the unconscious forces working within us, along with a sense of the culture in which we abide

Nietzsche

Nietzche proposed two aspects of human nature Apollonian aspect

Rational side, desire for tranquility, predictability and orderliness

Dionysian aspect Irrational side, attraction to creative chaos and to

passionate, dynamic, experiences He believed that Western philosophy had

emphasized the intellect and minimized the human passions, result was lifeless rationalism Being a fan of Schopenhauer, did take note of

Buddhist thought as offering something worthwhile

Nietzsche

Urged a fusion of the two aspects – not a totally irrational, passionate life but a life of reasonable passion

The Ubermensch, is one that will take life and make it his own, guilt-free and yet in control of his actions

His life is an exercise of complete power without negativity Most men incapable of this

Nietzsche

The will to power Different from Schopenhauer’s conceptualization,

rejects the metaphysical for the most part There is more than just a survival instinct,

operating beyond consciousness there is a will to exert force and go beyond the mundanity fo life

It is a subjectivity that does not allow for an objective truth (thing-in-itself) What we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of

metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." Back to Protagoras

Truth is power

Nietzsche

In contrast to Kierkegaard this truth is social rather than individual The better is the stronger

Going ‘beyond good and evil’ means going beyond socially determined attitudes

Present morality is against nature, and is the imposition of the slave/herd morality upon the supermen E.g. through religion

For the Superman anything is possible, truth and science are as nothing