Gestalt psychology​ in Weimar culture - Ash - 1991 - Article

What is this article about?

Paul Forman proposed that quantum Acausality was a response by mathematicians to the hostile intellectual environment of the Weimar culture. This proposal was viewed as scandalous. However, his paper did attain an iconic status. Later, John Hendry stated that quantum theorists were isolated by ‘the milieu’, and that the impact of the Weimar culture was more visible in the presentation and reception of the quantum theory, than in the creation of the theory. Both of these accounts are based on two dualisms: an assumed opposition between modern and anti-modern (or rational and irrational), and the notion that culture and society are out of science.

In this article, the author discusses both dualisms. Forman and Hendry both accepted historians view on the Weimar culture. This view involved that the Weimar culture was a struggle between rational, modern, progressive views on the one hand, and irrationalist, antimodern, culturally conservative and proto-Nazi. However, Gestalt psychology does not agree with these ideas. Instead, the Gestalt psychology states that the Weimar culture is a combination of holistic terminology and experimental methods, which have the goal of the overcome the bridge between natural and human sciences. Gestalt psychology was not the only theory that had this idea. For example, Jeffrey Herf showed how ideas about technology and biomedical science interact with antimodern cultural nationalism and racism. None of these ideas are part of the Nazi ideology or practice.

The Gestalt psychology had more complex relationships with the Weimar culture compared to what the dualisms would suggest. Thus, the problem of quantum mechanics was that the procedures and the results were not universally accepted and viewed as legitimate in the physics community at that time.  In the Weimar-era psychology, there was a lot of doubt about experimental methods, in comparison to intuitive methods. The Gestalt Theory tried to respond to that doubt, by combining holism and experimentation. However, different psychologists responded to Gestalt theorists’ claim in different ways.

What can be said about Weimar culture and Psychology?

In the nineteenth century, educated habitants of Germany expressed their support for the idea of a cultivated personality, and the creation of these personalities as the purpose of education. This idea became popularized. This idea fluctuated around Germanic Kultur and Western ‘civilization’. However, as Germany became increasingly industrialized, the hierarchy that supported this idea, broke down. Later, in the Weimar period, in which there was no monarch at the top, many Bildingsbürger felt that their elite position was in a critical position. They were scared that their status of ‘bearers of culture’ would be degradated to that of mere functionaries, which was already happening to some of them. These people saw the rise of natural sciences and technology as the cause of this culture, that they did not approve of. This lead to a ‘crisis of science’, which expressed the need for a universal world-view which stems from the environment. This affected the physical science, but also all other sciences. In 1913, Heidelberg proposed a psychology of ‘world-views’, as an alternative to metaphysics and empirical psychology. He suggested a method which involved a typological use of the Gestalt category. According to Heidelberg, attitudes toward and pictures of the world were organized around one centre, from which derivations arose. There were also proponents of the ‘scientific graphology’ and ‘characterology’. This was led by Ludwig Klages. Klages used handwriting analysis, and claimed that, to discover people’s true inner lives behind their ‘masks’, handwriting could be analysed. He proposed to use this for personal selection, and not for academic psychology tests.  There was a preference for intuition and experiential immediacy, instead of experiments. Therefore, academic psychology in the Weimar era gained a status of having a specialty within philosophy. This was because many psychologists believed that their research could be used to solve philosophical problems. Later, experimental psychologist in Germany and Austria tried to regain their positions as ‘pure scientists’. Therefore, they took some distance from experimentation. This lead to a change in names for the leading association for psychology in German-speaking Europe, from ‘Society for Experimental Psychology’ to ‘German Society for Psychology’.

What is the Gestalt Theory?

Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, and Max Wertheimer were the founders of Gestalt psychology. They stated that experimental psychology had a double identity: one as a natural science, and one as part of philosophy. They tried to resolve the problems that came with this double identity, by chancing psychology’s conceptual framework. They came up with the Gestalt theory. This theory suggests three different things. First: not ‘sensations’, but clearly identifiable structures (Gestalten) are the primary constituents of consciousness, and these structures are meaningfully related to one another in ways that do not always correspond to the one-to-one connections between stimuli and sensations. Second: behaviour, as well as cognition is meaningfully structured, and behavioural structures are not impressed on organisms externally, but rather result from dynamic interactions between organisms and their environments, which are mediated by perceptual structures. Köhler’s research, which involved animal problem-solving, supported this idea. He showed that animals, similar to humans, can perceive relations in a direct manner. According to Köhler, these structural functions are characteristic of all living matter, and not only of the mind. Third, these claims do not contradict natural science. Physics, for example, also uses examples of Gestalten, such as physical systems (electromagnetic fields), which can not be described as a collection of isolated events. Thus, the brain events that underlie these Gestalten can follow the same laws as phenomenal structures. These claims made by these theorists lead to many debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. However, the theorists often emphasized their allegiance to natural science. They stated that their Gestalt theory was not a romantic-philosophical inspiration. In the beginning, they addressed their claims to a limited audience, namely experimental psychologists, philosophers, and natural scientists who were interested in epistemological issues. But, in the atmosphere of the Weimar culture, their ideas were very important, and it was also in this period that their ideas reached the broader public, which accepted their claims as a new perspective on the world.

The Gestalt theory’s political and cultural implications were clear from reviews written by Metzger and Arnheim. For instance, Arnheim reviewed a book by Gina Lombroso who wrote about the psychology of women. Arnheim opposed her claims, saying that maleness should not be equated with egotism, and femaleness should not be equated with altruism. He stated that males could be altruists too. Arnheim stated that what was needed, was a wider definition of intelligence that would recognize that quality less in abstract thoughts, and more in the reasoned grasp of a concrete situation. By stating this, he referred to Köhler’s anthropoid work. Wertheimer, in 1924, gave a lecture with the title ‘On Gestalt Theory’. In this lecture, he emphasized that the Gestalt theory emerged from concrete research. He also suggested that it could be seen as a response to a problem of that time. He offered the Gestalt psychology as a new world-view which would overcome philosophical and psychological dualism. With ‘problem of that time’,  he referred to the discontinuity between the abstractions of natural science and the dynamic quality of concrete human experience. He stated that to resolve this problem, one needs to focus on the whole (holism), instead of on single parts. Thus, instead of viewing humans as ‘part of a field’, they should be viewed as a part and a member of a group. He ended his lecture by saying that the world should not be viewed as a ‘senseless plurality’, in which everyone acts for himself. Instead, the world should be viewed as a “Beethoven symphony”, where from a part of the whole, one can grasp something of the inner structure of the whole itself. The fundamental laws are then not piecemeal laws, but structural characteristics of the whole. This view had important implications for Weimar ideologies, and for the status of psychology as natural science. However, he stated that the Gestalt theory was particularly useful for psychology, because it provides a foundation for a synthetic world-view, and it unifies discourses about nature, life, and mind, without sacrificing experimental methods. Thus, the Gestalt theorists met the needs of the minority of academics who supported the first German Republic. A lot of researchers in the Weimar era used the Beethoven metaphor to explain their rejection of industrialization, urbanization, and democratization.

The political implications of the Gestalt theory was a bit more complicated. Because, if it is important to work together instead of working in opposition, what can we then do about the political situation in Weimar Germany, which was dominated by conflict? These questions were not answered.

Another connection between Gestalt theory and Weimar culture came from Rudolf Arnheim’s work in film theory. He created a dissertation on the psychology of expression, and he showed that students could match the handwriting of famous artists with reproductions of their work, above chance.  Arnheim did a lot of work in films, and he was a supported of pure form in film. This meant that he saw film as a purely visual medium. According to Arnheim, the artistic aim of film was to create an illusion of reality and new expressive forms that lead to a transcendence from reality. According to him, adding colour and sound does not enrich film, instead it reduces it’s purity. In his ‘Film as Art’, he used direct references to Gestalt theory. This work of Arnheim was Gestalt psychology’s most important link to the Weimar culture outside of philosophy and psychology.

What about science and culture?

The Gestalt theory was received by German-speaking psychologists. However, there were several complications. First, there was a competition among leading psychological institutions and their directors, because each of them offered their own world-view. Another complication was the struggle to resolve the ‘crisis of psychology’, so to achieve a theoretical consensus despite the competition. The Gestalt theory was not able to explain the self-concepts of middle-class Germans, and thus it had not fully resolved the experimental psychology’s orientation problem. For instance, Felix Krueger claimed that there was insufficient attention paid to the role of feelings and will in the constitution of experience. He therefore proposed another holistic psychology (Ganzheitspsychologie). He placed his thinking in an anti-Enlightenment thought. Another criticism on Gestalt theory was that it seemed to neglect the emergence or ‘microgenesis’ (Aktualgenese) of the proposed Gestalten. William Stern and Karl Bühler critiqued Gestalt theory by saying that the Gestalt theorists’ references to the dependence of perception on the state of the organism at a given time was not sufficient to account for the human aspects of experience, and especially for the way in which a person’s intentions lead to their actions. Stern did not reject the Gestalt idea as a whole, but rather suggested a shift in its locus from the interaction of organism and environment to the person. Bühler based his criticism on the absence of language in the Gestalt theory. He stated that there should be a more pluralistic conceptual framework which distinguishes structure, meaning and value, but relates them to each other. Also, he claimed that the Gestalt theory did not do well in explaining affectively conditioned deviations from the ‘best structure’, or the ‘transcendent value of symbols beyond immediate experience’. All of this criticism lead to that the Gestalt theory was not well-accepted in German psychology. However, there was agreement on one point: in psychology, explaining things should involve non-physical entities and processes behind the phenomena itself. Thus, psychologists criticized the Gestalt theorists, because they claim to provide a synthesis, but leave out key dimensions.

What can be concluded?

German-speaking psychologists received the Gestalt theory in a comparable way in which relativity and quantum mechanisms were received by physicists. Both were only partially accepted. However, Gestalt psychology was not rejected because the methods were too unorthodox or too radical, but rather because the holism did not go far enough. It was unable to explain certain concepts. It was however unable to solve the crises of the Weimar culture.