Einige Kapitel von Kurt Koffka's Klassiker "Principles
of Gestalt Psychology sind inzwischen in der Zeitschrift GESTALT
THEORY auch in deutscher Übersetzung erschienen.
Chapter I
Why Psychology?
AN INTRODUCTORY QUESTION
When I first conceived the plan of writing this book I guessed, though I did
not know, how much effort it would cost to carry it out, and what demands it would
put on a potential reader. And I doubted, not rhetorically but very honestly and
sincerely, whether such labour on the part of the author and the reader was justified.
I was not so much troubled by the idea of writing another book on psychology
in addition to the many books which have appeared during the last ten years, as
by the idea of writing a book on psychology. Writing a book for publication
is a social act. Is one justified in demanding co-operation of society for such
an enterprise? What good can society, or a small fraction of it, at best derive
from it? I tried to give an answer to this question, and when now, after having
completed the book, I return to this first chapter, I find that the answer which
then gave me sufficient courage to start on my long journey, has stayed with me
to the end. I believed I had found a reason why a book on psychology might do some
good. Psychology has split up into so many branches and schools, either ignoring
or fighting each other, that even an outsider may have the impression - surely strengthened
by the publications. "Psychologies of 1925" and "Psychologies of
1930" - that the plural "psychologies" should be substituted for
the singular.
Psychology has been pampered in the United States, where for many years it has
enjoyed great popularity, though it seems to me that its fortunes have somewhat
ebbed and may be ebbing more; in England, the land of conservative change, it found
for a long time as cold a welcome as any other loud and startling innovation, but
has gradually gained ground and is, in my belief, still gaining; in Germany, where
experimental psychology was born and had at first a period of rapid expansion, a
strong reaction set in soon afterwards which very definitely kept psychology "in
its place."
I confess that today I feel much less animosity towards the active enemies of
psychology - or those of them who are serious and honest - than when I was younger.
The comparison of psychology as it is today with other branches of human knowledge
has raised the question in my mind what contribution psychology has made through
the very extensive and intensive effort of the men and women who devote their life's
work to it.
No student of philosophy need fail to get some inkling of the great and deep
problems which have beset the minds of our profoundest thinkers from ancient to
modern times; no student of history need remain unaware of the terrific human forces
that have been consumed in the making and unmaking of empires and have combined
to create the world in which we are living at this moment; no student of physics
need pass his final examination without some insight into the increasing rationalisation
of our knowledge of nature nor into the inexorable exactness of experimental methods;
and no student of mathematics should leave his courses without having learned what
generalised thinking is and what beautiful and powerful results it can achieve.
But what can we say of the student of psychology? Must he have learned to understand
human nature and human actions better at the end of his course? I am not ready to
answer this question in the affirmative. But before I had an answer to the question,
what it is that a student of psychology should be able to gain from his general
course, what it is, more generally expressed, that psychology can contribute to
the imperishable possessions of our race, I did not feel justified in writing a
general book on the subjects
FACTS AND THEORIES
Nobody can reproach psychology with having discovered too few facts. A psychologist
who knew all the facts that have been brought to light by experimental methods would
indeed know much, very much. And such knowledge is today regarded as an aim in its
own right. "Find facts, facts, and again facts; when you are sure of your facts
try to build theories. But your facts are more important." This slogan expresses
the creed of a philosophy which is widely accepted today. And indeed it seems very
plausible. On the one side are the objective facts, independent of the scientist
who investigates them; on the other are Ills hypotheses, his theories, pure products
of his mind. Naturally we should attribute more value to the former than to the
latter. In psychology such a view can claim a particular justification. For thisscience consisted of a number of simple and comprehensive theories and few scientifically,
established facts before the beginning of the new era. With the advent of experiment
more and more facts were discovered which played havoc with the old theories. Only
when psychology determined to become a fact-finding science did it begin to become
a real science. From the state in which it knew little and fancied a great deal
it has progressed to a state where it knows a lot and fancies little - at least
consciously and with a purpose, though unawares it contains more fancy than many
psychologists are aware of. To evaluate this progress we have to examine what it
means to know much. The Latin adage multum non multa distinguishes between
two meanings of the word "much." The one which it discards in favour of
the other is purely quantitative. According to the latter a person who knows twenty
items knows ten times as much as the person who knows only two items. But in another
sense the latter person, if he knows those two items in their intrinsic relation,
so that they are no longer two but one with two parts, knows a great deal more than
the former, if he knows just twenty items in pure aggregation. Although from the
point of multa this person would be superior, he would be inferior from the
point of multum.
Now as I look upon the growth of science it seems to me that it began to find
itself and thereby entered a new epoch when at the time of the Renaissance it changed
from a chase for the multa to a search for the multum. Since that
time science has continually striven to reduce the number of propositions from
which all known facts can be derived. In this enterprise it has been more and more
successful, and has by its new method also discovered more and more facts which
otherwise would never have become known; it has simultaneously discarded as fancy
many a piece of knowledge which was taken as fact, and has changed the systematic
status of many other facts. It is a "fact" that heavy bodies fall more
quickly than light ones, as anyone can test by dropping a pencil and a sheet of
paper. But it is a complex, not a simple fact, whereas the simple fact is that all
bodies fall with the same velocity in a ,vacuum. From this scientific fact the everyday
fact can be derived but not vice versa. The very concept of fact, therefore, becomes
problematical.
One can look at the progress of science as a steady increase in the number of
facts known. Then one arrives at a position where much knowledge means knowledge
of multa. But a very different aspect of scientific progress is also possible:
the increasing simplicity - not of course in the sense that it is more and more
easy ,o learn, but in the sense that to him who has mastered it the system of science
becomes a more and more cohesive and unitary whole. Or otherwise expressed, science
is not comparable to a catalogue in which all facts are listed according to an arbitrary
principle, like the books in a library in the alphabetical order of their authors;
science is rational; the facts - and their order are one and the same; facts
without order do not exist; therefore if we know one fact thoroughly we know ever
so many more facts from the knowledge of this one fact. From this point of view,
much knowledge is knowledge of multum, knowledge of the rational system,
the interdependence of all facts.
SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES
Of course science never succeeds in reaching its goal. At any one moment in its
history there is a wide gap between its ideal and its accomplishment. The system
is never complete, there are always facts, old and newly discovered, which defy
the unity of the system. Apparent as this is within the compass of any individual
science, it becomes even more manifest when we consider the variety of different
sciences. They have all arisen from one common matrix. The first scientific impulse
was not directed towards different special groups of topics but was universal. In
our present terminology we can say that philosophy is the mother of all sciences.
Progressive specialisation has marked scientific progress, and our science, psychology,
was the last to gain her independence. This separation and specialisation was necessary,
but it has of necessity worked against the aim of unification of knowledge. If a
number of separately established sciences have developed, then ' coherent as each
one may be in itself, what is their mutual relation? How can a multum arise
from that multa? That this task must be accomplished follows from the very
function of science. I am the last to see the value of science in its practical
applications. The explanation of the shift of spectral lines coming from stars millions
of light years distant, is in my eyes a much greater triumph of science than the
construction of a new bridge with a record span or the transmission of photographs
across the ocean. But for all that I do not believe that science can be legitimately
regarded as the game of a relatively small number of people who enjoy it and get
their livelihood from it. In some sense science cannot be wholly divorced from conduct.
SCIENCE AND CONDUCT
Conduct, of course, is possible without science. Humans carried on in their daily
affairs long before the first spark of science had been struck. And today there
are millions of people living whose actions are not determined by anything we call
science. Science, however, could not but gain an increasing influence on human behaviour.
To describe this influence roughly and briefly will throw a new light on science.
Exaggerating and schematising the differences, we can say: in the prescientific
stage man behaves in a situation as the situation tells him to behave. To primitive
man each thing says what it is and what he ought to do with it: a fruit says, "Eat
me"; water says, "Drink me"; thunder says, "Fear me," and
woman says, "Love me."
This world is limited, but, up to a point, manageable, knowledge is direct and
quite unscientific, in many cases perfectly true, but in many others hopelessly
wrong. And man slowly discovered the errors in his original world. He learned to
distrust what things told him, and gradually he forgot the language of birds and
stones. Instead he developed a new activity which he called thinking. And this new
activity brought him great advantages. He could think out the consequences of events
and actions and thereby make himself free of past and present. By thinking he created
knowledge in the sense of scientific knowledge, knowledge which was no longer a
knowledge of individual things, but of universals. Knowledge thereby becomes more
and more indirect, and action, to the extent that it loses its direct guidance by
the world of things, more and more intellectualised. Moreover, the process of thinking
had destroyed the unity of the primitive world. Thought had developed categories
or classes, and each class had its own characteristics, modes of behaviour, or laws.
Concrete situations which demand decisions and prompt actions do not, however, fall
into only one such class. And so action, if it were to be directed by scientific
knowledge, had to be subjected to a complex thought process, and often enough such
a process failed to give a clear decision. In other words, whereas the world of
primitive man had directly determined his conduct, had told him what was good, what
bad, the scientific world proved all too often a failure when it came to answering
such questions. Reason seemed to reveal truth, but a truth that would give no guidance
to conduct; but the demand for such guidance remained and had to be filled. Thus
arose eventually the dualism of science and religion, with its various phases of
double-truth theory, bitter enmity, and sentimentalisation of science, one as unsatisfactory
as the other.
THE DANGER OF SCIENCE
Is it the tragedy of the human race that for every gain it makes it has to pay
a price which often seems greater than the gain? Must we pay for science by a disintegration
of our life? Must we deny on week-days what we profess on Sundays? As a personal
article of faith I believe that there is no such inexorable must. Science, in building
rational systems of knowledge, had to select such facts as would most readily submit
to such systematisation. This process of selection, in itself of the greatest significance,
involves the neglecting or rejecting of a number of facts or aspects. As long as
scientists know what they are doing, such procedure is fraught with little danger.
But in the triumph over its success science is apt to forget that it has not absorbed
all aspects of reality, and to deny the existence of those which it has neglected.
Thus, instead of keeping in mind the question which gave rise to all science, "what
God is, what we are . . ." it holds up such questions to ridicule, and considers
the men and women who persist in asking them as atavistic survivals.
This attitude, whose historical necessity and merit I plainly discern, must be
rejected, not because it is inimical to religion, but because it would, if consistently
maintained, block the progress of science itself by closing to its advance the gates
that lead to the most essential of all questions. In my opinion no gate should be
closed to science; by this I do not mean that today's or yesterday's science is
capable of answering the fundamental questions, as so many radicals, men of the
best motives, seem to think. Instead I believe that science, aware of its incompleteness,
should gradually attempt to broaden its base, to include more and more of the facts
which it found at first necessary to exclude, and thereby become better and better
equipped to answer those questions which mankind will not be denied. As long as
science misunderstands its task it will always be in danger of losing its position
of independence and integrity. The illegal usurper of a throne will always find
illegal pretenders. The denunciation of the intellect which has assumed such tremendous
proportions in some parts of our world with such far-reaching consequences, seems
to me the outcome of the wrong scientific attitude, although for that reason it
is no less wrong itself. I shall revert to this theme in a later chapter (Chapter
IX), and shall point out only that science if it follows the path which I have briefly
indicated will assume a different face. But I hope that such a science will, slowly
but surely, help to re-create that original unity which it had to destroy in order
to develop.
A science, therefore, gains in value and significance not by the number of individual
facts it collects but by the generality and power of its theories, a conclusion
which is the very opposite of the statement from which our discussion started. Such
a view, how. ever, does not look down upon facts, for theories are theories of facts
and can be tested only by facts, they are not idle speculations of what might be,
but theoriai, i.e., surveys, intuitions, of what is. Therefore in my presentation
of psychology I shall emphasise the theoretical aspect; many facts will be reported,
but not as a mere collection, or an exhibition of curious phenomena to be compared
to Mme. Tussaud's waxworks, but as facts in a system - as far as it is humanly possible
not a pet system of my own, but the system to which they intrinsically belong, i.e.,
as rationally understandable facts.
SCIENCE AS DISCIPLINE
Such a procedure would, however, be without value if it neglected another aspect
of science, so far omitted from our discussion, viz., the greatest possible exactness
in the establishment of facts. By its demand for exactness science frees itself
from the personal wishes of the scientist. A theory must be demanded by facts; in
its turn it demands facts, and if they fail to conform exactly to it, then the theory
is either wrong or incomplete. In this sense science is discipline. We cannot do
what we want, but must do what the facts demand. The success of science has tended
to make us proud and conceited. But such conceit is out of place. He is the greatest
master who is the greatest servant. Again and again we experience in the progress
of knowledge how apt we are to halt and stumble, again and again we find how little
we can make knowledge, how we must give our thoughts time to grow. Therefore the
pursuit of knowledge, instead of making us proud and boastful, should make us modest
and humble.
FUNCTION OF SCIENCE
To ' summarise: the acquisition of true knowledge should help us to reintegrate
our world which has fallen to pieces; it should teach us the cogency of objective
relations, independent of our wishes and prejudices, and it should indicate to us
our true position in our world and give us respect and reverence for the things
animate and inanimate around us.
SPECIAL FUNCTION OF PSYCHOLOGY
This is true of all sciences. What special claim can psychology make? To teach
us humility, what science can do that better than astronomy and astrophysics which
deal with times and distances far beyond the scope of our imagination? And what
science can discipline us better than pure mathematics with its demands for absolute
proofs? Could we then claim that psychology is particularly fitted for the task
of integration, and give this as an answer to the question from which - we started?
I think we can, for in psychology we are at the point where the three great provinces
of our world intersect, the provinces which we call inanimate nature, life, and
mind.
NATURE, LIFE, MIND
Psychology deals with the behaviour of living beings. Therefore, as every biological
science, it is faced with the problem of the relation between animate and inanimate
nature whether it is aware of and concerned with this problem or not. But to the
psychologist, one special aspect of behaviour, in ordinary parlance called the mental,
assumes paramount importance. This is not the place to discuss consciousness and
mind as such. Later chapters will show the use we make of these concepts. But we
will not reject at the outset a distinction which permeates our idiomatic speech
as much as our scientific terminology. We all understand what is meant by the proposition
that a prize-fighter was knocked out and did not recover consciousness for six minutes.
We know that during these fatal six minutes the pugilist did not cease to live,
but that he lost one particular aspect of behaviour, Furthermore we know that consciousness
in general and each specific conscious function in particular, is closely bound
up with processes in our central nervous system. Thus the central nervous system
becomes, as it were, the nodal point where mind, life, and inanimate nature converge.
We can investigate the chemical constitution of the nervous tissue and will find
no component that we have not found in inorganic nature; we can study the function
of this tissue and will find that it has all the characteristics of living tissue;
and finally there is this relation between the life function of the nervous system
and consciousness.
Two Types of Solutions of the Problems Involved in This Relation Rejected.
Anybody who would claim to have found a complete and true solution of our problems
would expose himself to the just suspicion of being either an ass or a quack. These
problems have occupied the best human minds for thousands of years, and therefore
it is more than unlikely that a solution can be found by any, other way than a slow
and gradual approach. What I think about the mode of this approach I shall again
defer to a later part of the book.
Materialism.
But here I shall reject two types of solutions that have been offered. The first
is the solution of crude materialism, which gained great momentum about the middle
of the last century and found its most popular expression in a book that around
1900 was a best-seller and is now practically forgotten. I mean Haeckel's Riddle
of the Universe. I am not sure that the United States are not even now feeling
the last ebbing wave of this flood which reached the shores of the New World long
after its crest had passed from the Old. This materialistic solution is astonishingly
simple. It says: The whole problem is illusory. There are no three kinds of substance
or modes of existence, matter, life, and mind; there is only one, and that is matter,
composed of blindly whirling atoms which, because of their great numbers and the
long time at their disposal, form all sorts of combinations, and among them those
we call animals and human beings. Thinking and feeling, why, they are just movements
of atoms. Interfere with the matter of the brain and see what remains of consciousness.
Although I have expressed this view very crudely, I believe that I have expressed
it adequately, particularly when I add that this view is not only a scientific conviction,
but as well, or even more so, a creed and a wish. It is the revolt of a generation
that saw a strongly entrenched church hold on to dogmas which science, growing up
like a young giant, had crushed - a generation that, by the successful applications
of science to technical problems, had become vainglorious and had lost that feeling
of awe which should accompany all true knowledge. just as the victorious barbarians,
be they vandals or Calvinists, destroyed thoroughly and passionately the creations
most dear to their vanquished enemies, so our materialists developed a hatred of
those parts of human philosophy that pointed beyond the pale of their narrow conceptions.
To be called a philosopher was an insult, and to be a believer was to belong among
the untouchables.
Now I bear no grudge against these men, much as I see their narrow-mindedness
and their smallness of stature. For I believe that malgré tout they
have served a good purpose. They have helped to build up an intelligentsia strong
enough to stand out against the unwarranted interference of a reactionary church
and pursue their own way, bringing up a new generation which was unhampered by theological
restrictions and therefore had no axe to grind.
As to materialism itself, it is not necessary today to refute it. I will add
only this: the materialist's claim that the problems of relationship or interaction
between matter, life, and mind were falsely put may turn out to be perfectly valid.
The hopeless error which the materialists committed was to make an arbitrary discrimination
between these three concepts with regard to their scientific dignity. They accepted
one and rejected the two others - their excuse being the intrinsic and extrinsic
success of science and the absurdities of the contemporary speculative philosophy
- whereas each of them may, as a conception, contain as much of the ultimate truth
as the others, quite apart from the stage of development which each of them may
have reached at a given time.
Vitalism, Spiritualism.
The other type of solution which I want to reject here does not deny the validity
of our problems; rather it attempts to solve them by establishing two or three separate
realms of existence, each sharply distinguished from the other by the presence or
absence of a specific factor. One can discriminate three such attempts; the first
draws the dividing line between life and mind, life and inanimate nature belonging
together (Descartes), and mind, a new and divine substance, separating man from
the rest of creation. The second, on the other hand, throws life and mind together
as directed by a power not found in inorganic nature and therefore essentially different
from it (vitalism). The third sticks to the threefold division and looks for special
active principles in each of the three realms (Scheler). Of these three, vitalism
has gained by far the greatest importance because many thorough and highly ingenious
attempts have been made to establish it as a truly scientific theory. The problem
of vitalism will therefore occupy us repeatedly in the following pages. Here I only
explain why I must reject this whole type of explanation at the outset. The answer
is simple enough, but will, without a wider context, appear somewhat unsatisfactory.
The vitalistic type of solution is no solution, but a mere renaming of the problem.
By renaming it, it emphasises the problem, and is, in that respect, much superior
to crude materialism. But by pretending that a new name is a solution, it might
do a great deal of harm to science were it widely accepted. Characteristically,
however, vitalism, not to mention the two other forms of our type, has neverbeen popular among scientists, particularly not among those nearest concerned,
the biologists. It required always a full share of personal courage to profess oneself
a vitalist, and therefore let us honour the men who were willing to sacrifice their
reputations and their careers in the service of a cause which they considered to
be a true one.
Integration of Quantity, Order, and Meaning.
By rejecting these types of solution I have implied the kind of solution our
psychology 'II have to offer. It cannot ignore the mind-body and the life-nature
problem, neither can it accept these three realms of being as separated from each
other by impassable chasms. It is here that the integrative quality of our psychology
will become manifest. Materialism tried to achieve a simple system by using for
its interpretation of the whole the contribution of one part. To be truly integrative,
we must try to use the contributions of every part for the building of our system.
Looking at the sciences of Nature, Life, and Mind, we may extract from each one
specific and particularly important concept, viz., from the first: quantity, from
the second: order, and from the third: meaning or significance (in German: Sinn).
Our psychology, then, must have a place for all of these. Let us discuss them
one by one.
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