Hans Driesch and the problems of “normal psychology”. Rereading his Crisis in Psychology (1925)

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Abstract

In 1925, the German biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch published a booklet entitled The Crisis in Psychology. It was originally published in English and was based on lectures given at various universities in China, Japan and the USA. The “crisis” in psychology of that time, in Driesch’s opinion, lies in the necessity to decide about “the road which psychology is to follow in the future”. This necessity refers to five “critical points”, namely (1) to develop the theory of psychic elements to a theory of meaning by phenomenological analysis, (2) the overcoming of association theory, (3) to acknowledge that the unconscious is a fact and a “normal” aspect of mental life, (4) to reject “psychomechanical parallelism” or any other epiphenomenalistic solution of the mind-body problem, and (5) the extension of psychical research to new facts as described by parapsychology, for instance. Driesch saw close parallels between the development of modern psychology and that of biology, namely in a theoretical shift from “sum-concepts” like association and mechanics, to “totality-concepts” like soul and entelechy. The German translation of 1926 was entitled Grundprobleme der Psychologie (Fundamental Problems of Psychology) while “the crisis in psychology” forms just the subtitle of this book. This underlines that Driesch’s argumentation—in contrast to that of Buehler—dealt with ontological questions rather than with paradigms.

Introduction

In 1925 the German biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch, who held a chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig at that time, published a small booklet entitled The Crisis in Psychology. Aged 58, he was at the top of a remarkable career. During the 1890s he had worked in Naples at the Marine Biological Station. His experiments in embryology established the idea of a ‘pluripotency’ of embryonic cells, which was one of the most influential ideas leading to modern biology. At that time, embryology was dominated by the mechanistic theory of Wilhelm Roux, like Driesch a student of Ernst Haeckel. The results of Driesch’s experiments shattered his conviction that the development of living beings could be explained by purely mechanistic principles. He eventually converted, as Mayr (1997, p. 13) puts it, from a convinced mechanist to a vitalist and a “rabid anti-Darwinian”. In 1899 Driesch presented an account of the life processes in genuinely teleological terms in his book Die Lokalisation morphogenetischer Vorgänge (The Localization of Morphogenetic Processes), which he declared in the subtitle as “Beweis vitalistischen Geschehens” (a proof for vitalistic phenomena).

In 1907 and 1908 Driesch delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen on The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, which can be regarded as the first comprehensive presentation of his neo-vitalistic ideas (Driesch, 1908). From 1909 onwards he taught natural philosophy at the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Heidelberg (which included psychology). In 1919 he was appointed full professor of systematic philosophy at Cologne and in 1921 professor of philosophy at Leipzig, but he also taught at the Universities of Nanjing and Beijing (1922/23), Wisconsin (1926/27) and Buenos Aires (1928). In 1933 he was forced by the Nazi government to retire prematurely from his chair in Leipzig because of his socialist leanings. He died in 1941 in Leipzig.

The Crisis in Psychology was originally written in English. As Driesch reports in the preface, during his stay in the USA he had been invited by Princeton University Press to contribute a volume to its scientific series. Although the editors suggested a biological topic (Driesch, 1951, p. 201), he was free to choose the subject. As he writes, he “did not hesitate” to choose the topic of “The Crisis in Psychology”, which “has formed the subject matter of a number of lectures”, which he “delivered during the years 1922 and 1923 in various parts of the world”, namely at the National University of Beijing, at Nanking and at the Imperial University of Tokyo, and, in a condensed version, at Columbia University. I quote from his Lebenserinnerungen:

“Mit den Grundfragen der Lehre von Seelenleben hatte ich mich, soweit das Leib-Seele-Problem in Frage kam, ja schon seit 1903 beschäftigt; in der Ordnungslehre und sonst hatte ich die Probleme der Denkpsychologie analysiert, hatte insbesondere den Prozess des so genannten Denkens, das ‘Nachdenken’, als einen unbewussten Vorgang erkannt und hatte auch eine Klassifikation der, um in meiner sich an Rehmke anlehnenden Terminologie zu sprechen, ‘bewusst gehabte’ Gegenstände vorweggenommen und die ‘Elementarien’ aus ihnen herausgeschält. Zu Vorlesungen in China und Amerika hatte ich diese Probleme wieder und immer wieder durchdacht. So war es also nur nötig, die bereits bestehenden Materialien in ein, in der zweiten Auflage der Ordnungslehre bereits vorgezeichnetes System zu gießen.” (Driesch, 1951, p. 201)1

(“As far as the problem of body and mind was concerned, I had already dealt with the fundamental questions of the science of mental life since 1903; in my Ordnungslehre and elsewhere I had analysed the problems of the psychology of thinking, and I had made out, in particular, the process of the so-called thinking, of reflection, as an unconscious process. Furthermore, I had carried out a classification of those objects we ‘consciously have’—according to my terminology which follows that of Rehmke—and I had singled out their elementary aspects. For my lectures in China and in America I had reasoned out these problems again and again. Thus, it was just necessary to cast the material already existing into a system which had been outlined already in the second edition of my Ordnungslehre.” (My translation, C.A.)

In the same year, namely in 1925, the first German edition of his book was finished published with the title Grundprobleme der Psychologie (Driesch, 1926).2 It was not merely a translation but had been “improved in some respect”, as Driesch writes in his Lebenserinnerungen (1951, p. 202). In 1929, a revised second German edition of this book was published. The title of the German translation was Grundprobleme der Psychologie (Fundamental Problems of Psychology), while The Crisis of Psychology forms just the subtitle of these editions. This underlines that Driesch’s argumentation—in contrast to that of Buehler (1927/2000)—dealt with ontological questions rather than with paradigms. I will return to this point later. Before I begin an interpretation of these arguments, I will try to give an overview of the main theses of his book. Some remarks about the position of this work in the historical context of the “crisis” debate and about its contemporary reception will close this presentation.

The crisis in psychology of that time, in Driesch’s opinion, lies in the necessity to decide about “the road which psychology is to follow in the future”. This necessity refers to five “critical points”, namely (1) to develop the theory of psychic elements to a theory of meaning by phenomenological analysis, (2) to overcome association theory, (3) to acknowledge that the unconscious is a fact and a “normal” aspect of mental life and not anything “abnormal” or unexplainable by serious science, (4) to reject “psychomechanical parallelism” or any other epiphenomenalistic solution of the mind-body problem, and (5) to extend psychical research to new facts, for instance to those described by parapsychology (Driesch,1925, pp. 262–65).

Let us now consider these points in particular.

Section snippets

From a theory of psychic elements to a theory of meaning

In the introduction to his book, Driesch argues that

“… in order to define psychology accurately, we must start with a certain most fundamental statement upon which all philosophy (and science) rests, namely, the irreducible and inexplicable primordial fact: I have something consciously, or, in brief, I ‘know’ something, knowing at the same time that I know.” (Driesch, 1925, p. 1)

It is exactly this fact which, as Driesch argues, cannot be grasped by those paradigms of psychology which dominated

The overcoming of association theory

In order to overcome the pitfalls of association theory, its “static” principles are to be replaced by “limiting and directing agents”, that means “unconscious causal psychical factors” as an indispensible presupposition of “a complete theory of psychical life” (ibid., p. 54 f.). The need for a theory of this kind arises, according to Driesch, when we go beyond the ‘primordial fact’ (‘Ursachverhalt’), I consciously have something—which refers to the phenomenological level—to the extended

The Unconscious as a “Normal” Aspect of Mental Life

It is already in this context that Driesch mentions “another branch of modern psychology which is to be of great importance for history and the sciences connected with it”, namely “the psychology of what is generally called the subconscious” (ibid., p. 83). The third point of his ‘crisis’ agenda deals with the role of the unconscious within the context of ‘normal psychology’. In his book on the Crisis of Psychology Driesch goes into this in more detail in the 6th chapter of the section The

The Rejection of “Psychomechanical Parallelism”

Let me now come to the fourth aspect of the crisis in psychology mentioned by Driesch. It concerns the problems of psychophysics which leads him finally to the relation of conscious and unconscious processes in mental life. He begins the discussion by pointing to an essential difference between his conception of psychophysics and that of ordinary textbooks in psychology: While most of the textbooks “stand on a ‘naïve-realistic’ platform” and “regard ‘my body’ as an accepted, self-evident fact”,

Parapsychology as a Central Topic of “Modern Psychology”

As we saw in discussing the third point of Driesch’s ‘crisis’ agenda, namely the problem of the unconscious, Driesch relates this aspect of mental life closely to paranormal phenomena. Consequently, the fifth and last point of his ‘crisis’ agenda discusses the necessity to include parapsychology within the central topics of modern psychology. This is not unusual because quite a few renowned scholars of that time dealt seriously with this topic—I just point to Dessoir, 1917, Myers, 1903, Broad,

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