1 Introduction

Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), a microbiologist who created a theory that inspired Thomas Kuhn to write The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962) is widely renowned mainly for two concepts: “thought style” and “thought collective.” I argue that the third most important concept specific to Fleck’s theory is Stimmung/nastrój. I give two equivalents of this concept because Fleck formulated his theory in two languages—Polish and German—which presents a significant challenge to translators, both when translating between Polish and German and also when translating into a third language Footnote 1. In this case, Stimmung/nastrój is easily translated between the two original languages.Footnote 2 I recognize it as a musical metaphor and claim that musical metaphors are important for an understanding Fleck’s theory. However, Stimmung/nastrój is usually translated into English as “mood”, which serves to remove the musical aspect of Stimmung/nastrój in English translations of Fleck. This concept is important for Fleck’s theory, because Stimmung/nastrój is a condition for the origin and persistence of thought style, including the thought style of modern science.

2 Stimmung/Nastrój as an Underestimated Concept in Ludwik Fleck’s Theory

In the corpus of Fleck’s philosophical writingsFootnote 3 Fleck uses the term “style” 456 times (196 in German and 260 in Polish), of which it is connected with the attributive “thought” 263 times (125 and 138 respectively), while “collective” is used 407 times (200 in German and 207 in Polish), of which 133 are connected with the attributive “thought” (88 and 45 respectively). Other highly frequently used concepts in his philosophical texts include “science,” “knowledge,” “syphilis,” “Gestalt,” “concept,” and “development” but Fleck’s use of these concepts does not depart from their common meanings.

The third term that is both integral to Fleck’s theory and frequently found in his texts is the concept of Stimmung/nastrój, which appears 96 times (41 times in German and 55 in Polish). An analysis of frequently used attributives in connection with this term reveals its most important features—it is first of all “specific” (20); it is “common/shared” (14), “collective” (13) or “social” (11); and it is also “intellectual” (12) or “of thought” (3).Footnote 4

That translating Stimmung/nastrój, was a challenge for English translators of Fleck is seen in the fact that, notwithstanding the fact that it was translated most often as “mood,” it was also rendered as “prevailing attitude,” “disposition,” “feeling,” “atmosphere,” “frame of mind,” and “tidings” in various places. Such variance in translations is evidence that the translators didn’t recognize the term as a concept that is important to Fleck's theory. No deep analyses of this concept exist in critiques of Fleck’s writings—only around a dozen texts dedicate a paragraph or two to it, and most of them consist of long quotations or are just paraphrases of Fleck’s words.Footnote 5

3 Difficulties with Translating Stimmung/Nastrój into English

The German word Stimmung has an entry in the Dictionary of Untranslatables. The concept “rests on an analogy between the musical (tuning of instruments) and the psychological (a person’s way of being in agreement, his or her mood)” (David 2014, p. 1061), and this analogy is impossible to express in one word in English, because Stimmung has three intertwined meanings: harmony, mood, and atmosphere, “while its English or French counterparts (‘mood,’ ‘atmosphere,’ ‘attunement,’ ‘ambiance,’ ‘humeur,’ ‘état d’âme,’ ‘accord,’ etc.) usually embrace only one or two” (Krebs 2017, p. 1420). What does this word mean today and what is the etymology of this word?

In contemporary German, there are four groups of meanings of Stimmung. The first group is (folk) psychological: 1a. “concrete temporary individual mood” (state / frame of mind), 1b. „concrete temporary state of mind among a group”, “certain atmosphere in a group”, 1c. “being subject to transient states of mind”. The second meaning is defined in aesthetic terms—2. “impression emanating from some object and affecting one's emotions and state of mind”. The third meaning is social and political—3. “prevailing [public] opinion [Meinung], attitude that takes sides for or against someone, something”. The fourth group is musical—4a. “the normatively binding pitch of an instrument”, 4b. “the attunement of a musical instrument”, which may be correct or incorrect with respect to the norm in 4a. (“Stimmung” from Duden).

Etymologically, Stimmung is derived from the verb stimmen—“producing sound and language” using one's voice. (“Stimmung” from Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch) From this origin, all musical meanings (4. above) are derived. From the musical meanings, the folk psychological concept of Stimmung was derived “in transfer of musical idea [Vorstellung], especially to inner forces of man.” (ibid.) Of the four contemporary groups of meanings, the first three are derived from the fourth. Besides the folk psychological concepts, the second contemporary meaning, the “impression emanating” from the work of art also comes from the musical meaning, which we will further discuss in the context of art history.

In contemporary Polish there are two main meanings of the lexicalized noun nastrój: I. relating to a person—a "mental state that persists in someone over a period of time", II. relating to a place or time—"impressions and feelings that people have when they are in a certain place at a certain time". Although none of these meanings relates directly to music, it is clear that nastrój has the same etymological source as verbal noun nastrojenie, which means (1) attunement—process or result of tuning of an instrument or (2) disposition/temper of a person. The latter meaning of nastrojenie was also one of the meanings of nastrój as far as in the 1960s. At that time, the largest dictionary of the Polish language gives an obsolete meaning of nastrój as “accordance, harmony”, which is clearly musical (Doroszewski 1958–1969). Both Polish expressions nastrój and nastrojenie are etymologically derived from the verb stroić with a prefix na-. That verb meant "to prepare something" and "to set a definite, proper tone". The noun strój (without a prefix na-) meant “something in order” in the sense of being ready to use. (Boryś 2005) Today strój means first of all “dress”, but also a “set of sounds to which the vibrating elements of a musical instrument are tuned” or “A sound system based on a specific reference frequency”. (“Strój” from SJP PWN).

Hence, in modern usage, Stimmung/nastrój may refer variously to the psychological state of an individual (the internal), to a place or time (the external), or to the interpersonal (social mood etc.). All these meanings originated from primarily musical meanings that were present both in Polish and German from a long time. The only subtle difference between nineteenth century Stimmung/nastrój and contemporary “mood” in all these three languages is that the latter is primarily understood as being transitory although it persists over a period of time. Formerly Stimmung/nastrój also referred to more persistent feelings, to attitude, to temper: “Originally the word [Stimmung] did not suggest a changing, temporary condition, but rather a stable ‘tunedness’ of the soul” (Spitzer 1944, p. 413). In this short quotation, Leo Spitzer, author of the most exhaustive study on the meaning of Stimmung to date (See also: Spitzer 1945), alludes to the musical source domain of this concept. Stimmung/nastrój refers both to the process and effect of tuning a musical instrument (tuning its parts, such as strings, in relation to each other) or an orchestra to the same, pre-defined correct pitch—tuning/being tuned in harmony with each other, as well as being ready to play. There has to be harmony between the separate instruments or parts of one instrument in order for the orchestra or instrument to perform its proper function. Unifying/integrating but also cognitive functions are the most important roles played by Stimmung/nastrój, which “stands in the tradition of the ancient Greek idea of world harmony or ‘musica mundana’, to which the good human subject is attuned” (Krebs 2017, p. 1420). Although today “mood” comes closest to capturing the meaning of Stimmung/nastrój (since it concerns feelings without an object), the connection with music is completely lost, whereas in Fleck’s theory musical metaphors are not dead metaphors. Fleck does not as much copy the notion of mood from art history as he adapts it, bringing back to life the metaphor from which this aesthetic notion derives. In introducing it, he does not refer directly to art history.

4 Theory of Thought Styles and Thought Collectives in the Context of the History of Art

Even though it was suggested (Babich 2003; Zittel 2012) that Fleck’s concept of style has something in common with that from the history of art, there are no systematic analyses of such affinities. In Fleck’s texts themselves there are no signs of any such relationship (no footnotes, no references), but there is a biographical connection through which such an association becomes plausible. Fleck’s father and uncles were painters (they had a company called Bracia Fleck—Fleck Brothers); they were not only standard wall painters but also decorators who painted polychromies that also had an artistic value, inter alia in the local synagogue, polytechnic and Town Hall in Lwów. So if there was—to use Fleck’s term—a circulation of thought between Fleck and art history, it might be mediated by his father. Furthermore, the writings of art historians Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl were widely discussed in Polish intellectual milieu, especially in the Austrian partition of the Commonwealth of Poland, so it is also likely that Fleck was familiar with their thoughts. It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into great detail on this point, but nevertheless I would like to indicate some general analogies between Fleck and art history to justify why Fleck’s use of Stimmung/nastrój may be understood in a similar way to how the concept is used in art history.

Art historians (such as Wölfflin and Riegl) and Fleck both dealt with development of modes of vision (seeing) and drew lines of development of style, lines that are abstract (virtual), not just reconstructions of something that existed in reality. Art historians and Fleck equally claimed that what we see is not something that simply exists because, as Heinrich Wölfflin wrote, “men have at all times seen what they wanted to see” (Wölfflin, 1915/1932, p. 17). Fleck showed that usually we see what we know—what we are taught to see: “To see, one has first to know […]. One has to acquire a directed readiness to see” (Fleck 1947/1986, p. 134). Art historians and Fleck equally claimed that we shouldn't assess the relevance of art (in regard of imitation of nature) and scientific knowledge (in regard of truth) from the past in contemporary terms because the means of expression and methods as well as meaning of words change over time. Furthermore, the aforementioned art historians set themselves in opposition to the notion of imitation of nature, as did Fleck to the notion of reality (and truth):

“It is a mistake for art history to work with the clumsy notion of the imitation of nature, as though it were merely a homogeneous process of increasing perfection.” (Wölfflin, 1915/1932, p. 13)

“We approach the ideal, ‘absolute’ reality not even asymptotically since it changes incessantly, renews itself and moves away from us at the same pace as we are advancing.” (Fleck 1929/1986, p. 55)

A year after the first edition of Fleck's book, it was reviewed by Leon Chwistek, a Polish painter, logician and mathematician. The review is quite enthusiastic. Chwistek notes that Fleck's concepts may also be applied to the description of the development of art. Referring to examples of prepared illustrations in scientific texts, Chwistek paraphrases Fleck's words: "The point is that precisely when we make an effort to render nature as faithfully as possible, we are in fact only being faithful to our culture." (Chwistek 1936, 6) He continues: "In writing about these matters [the relation between faithfulness to nature and faithfulness to culture], Dr. Fleck emphasizes the analogy that exists in this respect between science and art. I do not know, however, whether he realizes that his studies have colossal significance for the theory of art.” (Chwistek 1936, 7). Chwistek then gives an example of impressionist painting which was to be “by definition a liberation from ready-made schemes, a surrender to the immediacy of color impressions” but it led to a new scheme, which “bear no resemblance to nature at all”.

The very concept of Stimmung was quite important in art history, too. In 1899, for instance, Alois Riegl published a paper titled Die Stimmung als Inhalt der Modernen Kunst [Stimmung as Content of Modern Art] (Riegl 1899). The protagonist in that essay is walking in the mountains and admiring views that awaken in him “an unspeakable feeling of soulfulness, calming, harmony... this intuition [Ahnung] of order and lawfulness over chaos, harmony over dissonances, and calm over movements is what we call Stimmung.” But the Stimmung is broken by a chamois which scares our hero—he is “thrown back into the struggle for existence.” The goal of all modern painting—concludes Riegl—is to “bring to man at every wish” this Stimmung—which is something that “nature gives man only in rare moments.” With regard to bringing that Stimmung to man, modern painting (and art in general) is more effective than nature itself, and modern art is complementary to modern science. It is clear that the mood of which Riegl speaks does not emanate from the object, that it is a state of attunement of the individual's mind with the music or harmony of the “musica mundana”.

5 The Ambiguous Notion of Mood

There is a passage in the English translation of Fleck’s (1935a) book in which he uses musical metaphors explicitly.Footnote 6 It is about the work of people around August Wassermann, who were working on a diagnostic method for syphilis, and made the discovery by accident, so to speak:

“It is also clear that from these confused notes Wassermann heard the tune that hummed in his mind but was not audible to those not involved. He and his co-workers listened and ‘tuned’ their ‘sets’ until these became selective. The melody could then be heard even by unbiased persons who were not involved... The community of those who made the tune audible and of those who listened increased steadily.” (Fleck 1935a/1979, p. 86)

Since we will return to this quotation later in the article, let us now stop at noting that there are no quotation marks in the German original. This passage is puzzling, and the translators have put certain words—“tuned” and “sets”—in quotation marks to minimize its puzzlement. The result is that these quotation marks, in fact, suggest that this is merely a rhetoric metaphor that implies we're dealing with something like a radio set here. However, for instance, Stefan Symotiuk (who probably read Fleck's book in English translation, because Polish one appeared in 1986) suggested that this is not only a rhetoric metaphor, whereas he adopted the radio analogy: “Groups of men are for him [Fleck] similar to radio sets, tuned to the reception on a certain wavelength... This analogy is strengthened by his use of the term nastrój—mood, tune—in the acquisition of knowledge which in Polish suggests the 'tuning up' of a receiving apparatus.” (Symotiuk 1983, p. 576) This is clearly an overinterpretation. There is no other place in Fleck's writings that could be interpreted as radio metaphors. This example, however, shows that even someone for whom Polish was the mother tongue had trouble with understanding the concept of Stimmung/nastrój.

Fleck attributes Stimmung/nastrój to the collective rather than the individual, therefore using it in a sense closer to the “social mood”. The latter is today intuitively assumed to have originated as a transfer from the psychological to the social, so it is “group psychology”: “Fleck explicitly invokes the dynamics of group psychology in accounting for the exchanges within thought collectives: Lively exchange of ideas elicits a special collective mood which solidifies into a ‘community’ with a definite social structure”. (Kistner 2014, p. 4) This nuance can have a significant impact on understanding Fleck's theory, especially in English, in which the first meaning of “mood” is psychological (both “mood” and “mind” have the same etymological source).

This is probably a reason of some charges of Thomas Kuhn against Ludwik Fleck. In 1979 in the Foreword to American edition of Fleck’s book Kuhn referred to Fleck's theory as “vaguely repulsive perspective of a sociology of the collective mind” (Kuhn 1979, p. ix) and further he wrote: “a thought collective seems to function as an individual mind writ large because many people possess it (or are possessed by it). To explain its apparent legislative authority, Fleck therefore repeatedly resorts to terms borrowed from discourse about individuals.” (Kuhn 1979, p. x) At first, it may appear that Kuhn has confused collective with style, as it is the style that functions as a mind, because it is a bit unusual to refer to people “possessing” a collective (i.e., a group of people), whereas one can say they “possess” a mind—or a style. Then Kuhn gives an example of a term borrowed from a discourse concerning individuals: “tenacity of closed systems of opinion” (Fleck 1979, p. 30) and if one checks the German original, it turns out that this “tenacity” is die Beharrungstendenz der Meinungssysteme, die als geschlossene Ganzheiten auftreten (Fleck 1935a, p. 38). The German Beharrung primarily refers to inertia in the physical sense, whereas “tenacity” would be Beharrlichkeit. It becomes clear that this charge is based on the English translation of Fleck and cannot relate to Kuhn’s early reading of Fleck in German in 1949. In another example that refers to this tenacity, he briefly and cryptically quotes Fleck as follows: “Elsewhere he [Fleck] accounts for this tenacity in terms, for example, of ‘trust in the initiated, their dependence upon public opinion, intellectual solidarity’ (chap. 4, sec. 3).” (Kuhn 1979, p. x) And when we encounter this phrase in the third section of the fourth chapter of Fleck’s book, it turns out that it is not related to “tenacity”, and that this phrase is only the beginning of a sentence that directly continues as follows: “between equals in the service of the same idea, are parallel social forces which create a special shared mood and, to an ever-increasing extent, impart solidity and conformity of style to these thought structures [Denkgebilde].” (Fleck 1935a/1979, p. 106) So the phenomena quoted by Kuhn are social forces which create “mood”. This does not seem to be an accidental misunderstanding. For someone who read Fleck in original, Kuhn’s charges seem at least strange, since it is really hard to find too many terms “borrowed from individual psychology for application to a collective” (Kuhn 1979, p. xi). Kuhn's charges (though unfounded) become meaningful only if and when we assume that he understood mood as an individual's psychological mood, and it is only Stimmung (not Beharrungstendenz) that he might have misinterpreted in such a way as to stay with the impression of overuse of psychological metaphors by Fleck. However, Kuhn's impression was lasting because he repeated his charges in 1995: “It was clear it [thought collective] was a group, since it was collective, but [Fleck’s] model [for it] was the mind and the individual. I just was bothered by it, I could not make use of it. I could not put myself into it and found it somewhat repugnant.” (Kuhn et al. 2000, p. 283) This interpretative mistake was also made by the editors of the American edition of Fleck's book. In the Preface, Thaddeus Trenn wrote: “The frequent appearance of ‘mood’ for Stimmung is generally interchangeable with ‘disposition’ throughout the text; ‘temper’ or even ‘temperament’ could have been used in most contexts.” (Trenn 1979a, p. xvii).

I argue that reading Stimmung/nastrój in the context of the history of art and analyzing it as a musical metaphor can help to both interpret its meaning as Fleck intended and reveal the role it plays in Fleck’s theory, thus leading to a better understanding of his writings. On the example of Kuhn, we can also see that, to contemporary language users, that “psychological mood of a person” might appear as the first meaning of “mood”, and that the concept of “social mood” is a transfer from the individual to the social. As we have seen, the history of this notion was rather a bit different. Originally “mood” meant attunement with the harmony of the spheres (musica universalis), these were feelings without a specific object, but they were not transitory individual moods. The mood did not have its origin within the individual, it existed independently of the individual, the individual could, as it were, achieve it. And since the state of attunement could be achieved by several individuals, a community of people who achieved the mood could arise. Later, this meaning of mood, laden with a certain metaphysics, was transferred to groups of people. From the fact that in contemporary German, Stimmung is more typically used for the atmosphere in a group than for individual states of mind, it is evident that the mood (harmony of group of minds) exists outside the psyche of the individual and the individual, as it were, joins something that began outside his individual psyche.

6 What is Stimmung/Nastrój According to Ludwik Fleck?

6.1 Stimmung/Nastrój Occurs During a Conversation (Interchange of Thoughts)

To explain what the thought collective is, Fleck recalls the common experience of conversation.Footnote 7 A collective occurs when two or more people meet and interchange thoughts. Although collectives that emerge from such absorbing conversations are often transient (i.e., not lasting) in nature, during this process people are able to express thoughts that they would not have been able to express alone. This is so because a special Stimmung/nastrój arises that is usually broken (or at least modified) if another person joins the conversation, but which often returns when the same people meet again. If such a state lasts for a longer time, a “thought formation [Denkgebilde/twór myślowy]” is produced—from common understanding and mutual misunderstandings—that belongs not to any single individual from the collective; rather, its carrier and author is the collective itself. If the Stimmung/nastrój is very intensive, it may lead to collective hallucination; if it is disciplined and uniform it leads to worldviews or “real [wirklich] picture,” as in science.Footnote 8

Fleck’s comparison of the collective with persons engaged in absorbing conversation is not a metaphor; it shows how collectives occur in general—through an interchange of thoughts between people. It is impossible for the collective to occur if there is no specific Stimmung/nastrój first, if there are no shared feelings. The thought style appears only later, in the form of “slender rudiments” (Fleck 1947/1986, p. 150)—and vanishes, or begins to live its own independent life, provided that the collective turns out to be lasting. Stimmung/nastrój is “the force which maintains the collective and unites its members” (Fleck 1936/1986, p. 101). Stimmung/nastrój integrates members into one collective even if they live in different places and times, and even if they don’t know each other.

7 Stimmung/Nastrój is About (Accordance of) Feelings

Fleck criticizes Wilhelm Jerusalem in his book, and claims that there is no thinking that is free from feelings (according to Jerusalem, a higher level of thinking—theoretical thinking). According to Fleck, such a notion may denote only thinking that is free from “momentary, personal Stimmung,” but it “flows from the average collective Stimmung. … There is no freedom from feelings in itself nor pure reasonableness in itself—how could these be ascertained? There is only accordance of feelings [Gefühlsübereinstimmung] or difference between feelings, and the uniform accordance of feelings of a society within its scope is called freedom from feelings. It enables communicable [mitteilbares] thinking without major deformation, i.e. formal, schematic [thinking], conceivable [erfaßbares] in words and sentences, [thinking] to which the power of establishing independent existences was acknowledged just by means of feelings [gefühlsmäßig]. Such thinking is then called reasonable”. (Fleck 1935a, p. 56).Footnote 9

According to Fleck, it is enough to read or hear just a few phrases in order to realize if someone is our colleague, if we understand each other, if we are members of the same collective. Between members of the same collective, Fleck claims, there is instantaneous solidarity and trust, whereas between members of completely different collectives there is unfamiliarity and hostility, because the others seem irrational. And they seem irrational because Stimmung/nastrój of that collective is different.

8 Stimmung/Nastrój as Gravitational Field

Fleck twice calls Stimmung/nastrój a “driving force” [siła popędowa] (Fleck 1934, p. 182, 205) and twice a “motor” [motor] (Fleck 1934, p. 204) (Fleck 1946/1986, p. 119). In the case of the modern science collective, Stimmung/nastrój is a force which gives general direction to cognitive work (Fleck 1935a/1979, p. 89), while particular direction is given by pre-ideas (Fleck 1934, p. 182, 205). In addition, when speaking of Stimmung/nastrój, Fleck uses the metaphor of a gravitational field,Footnote 10 in which collective work is water and truth or “true” cognition is the sea. Strictly speaking, Fleck uses this metaphor to explain how it is possible that a discovery may arise from false assumptions and errors: There is no straight way to the sea; the direction traveled by a single drop is often wrong; single drops often whirl around, turn back, stick to something, or evaporate, but thanks to the gravitational field, all rivers finally end up at the sea.

For Fleck, the issue of parallel discoveries shows that there is a necessary common direction of cognitive work among people who may never meet.Footnote 11 This is not transcendental necessity, it is necessity stemming from Stimmung/nastrój, because the latter directs perception.

9 Stimmung/Nastrój Defines Perception—Discovery as Gestalt and Gestalt of Concept

What we see is dependent on Stimmung/nastrój because the latter “produces the readiness for an identically directed perception, evaluation and use of what is perceived, i.e. a common thought-style.” (Fleck 1936/1986, p. 101) Fleck even writes that one author is ready to see something through his particular Stimmung, as if it were glasses, glasses that define which Gestalt we are able to see.Footnote 12 Fleck makes use of the findings of Gestaltpsychologie, where no pure observation exists—we see Gestalts, so what we see is dependent on what we already have in our mind. For Fleck, our “readiness to directed perception” is an ability to see certain Gestalts, an ability which we are trained to acquire: being introduced to a style (a discipline of science, for instance) “is a training in giving in to the specific nastrój of the collective.” (Fleck 1936, p. 25).Footnote 13

Fleck defines discovery as “seeing a new Gestalt, a new whole, a new content, where there was previously senseless chaos” (Fleck 1934, p. 205), and although he does not use the word “metaphor” in this paragraph when describing the process of discovery—the richness of “comparisons” and “similarities” at the beginning of the process, which are then set aside when the concept is ready (Fleck 1947/1986, p. 140)—it is as if we are reading a text on the role of metaphors in science: “What is our behaviour when for the first time we face an object which is unknown to us? Just as a child does when watching a smeared ink-blot. He sees in it a wing of a bird, leaves of a tree, a flower, two horses grown together, an angel, in other words forms [postacie] known from other sources. These forms [postacie] mutually displace themselves, they disappear, make room for one another, vary, oscillate.” (Fleck 1947/1986, p. 139) The Polish noun postać used by Fleck in this passage, rendered as "form" by the translators, is the German Gestalt.

There is a moment of chaos, when nothing is certain; “confused, chaotically thrown together partial motifs of different styles, contradictory Stimmungen, drive the undirected seeing back and forth” (Fleck 1935a, p. 99).Footnote 14Stimmung/nastrój (but not the personal contradictory Stimmungen) is responsible for the direction which leads to the appearance of a new whole, because the integrating function of Stimmung/nastrój is not restricted to members of the collective. It also connects into a whole our perceptions. When Fleck gives an example of the early concept of syphilis he even calls it “the Gestalt of concept [postać pojęciowa].” (Fleck 1934, p. 181).

10 Musical Metaphors in Fleck’s Theory

As is already noticeable, Fleck’s texts are rich with metaphors. This is so because he was trying to create new concepts. As metaphors go, they are not well-defined, so there is no unequivocal definition of Stimmung/nastrój to be found in Fleck. There were no collectives of sociologists of science at that time, so the addressees of his most important texts are first of all philosophers of science (and of medicine), who had well-established concepts of discovery, observation, fact, experiment etc. Fleck’s strategy in general consisted in applying new metaphors to these abstract domains in order to reduce them to absurdity while simultaneously creating new concepts with the same metaphors. In his texts, to “discover” in fact means to “invent,” while to “observe” means to “see Gestalt.” A fact is something that comes into existence, develops, and dies out, and an experiment is only confirmation of accordance with theory—one experiment doesn’t change anything if the collective is not ready to accept it, i.e. the Stimmung/nastrój must change first. The most important concepts that Fleck is trying to introduce are well known: thought style and thought collective; the third is, I contend, the underestimated concept of Stimmung/nastrój. It is probably underestimated because a wider scholarly reception of Fleck commenced from his translations into English language, and the musical metaphors and connotations, so important to understanding this concept, are largely lost in translation.

10.1 Inner Harmony (of Illusions) of Thought Style

For Fleck, Stimmung/nastrój is the source of both discovery and error,Footnote 15 and error also has a place in the “dominant view about the origin of knowledge”—which is one of the reasons why Fleck develops his theory of thought styles and thought collectives—what he ironically calls the veni, vidi, vici epistemology, which is focused on two elements of cognitive relation—the subject and the object: the subject observes and he already knows. The harmony of illusions of this view is protected by the fact that “cognizing modifies the one who cognizes harmoniously matching him to that which is cognized” (Fleck 1935a, p. 93),Footnote 16 which is why it is not possible for the author of the discovery to know anything about the first ideas, since he is already a different person. We know about this thanks to early publications on these first, often chaotic experiments and observations. Apart from subject and object there is thought style, which is a harmonious whole, a third element of the cognitive relation, which in fact should be the proper subject of epistemological investigation.

Fleck refers to a story from Gustave Le Bon to present this as “a paradigm of many discoveries”—the story of mass suggestion during a search for a missing boat on the sea—the crew saw this boat, heard shouts, and witnessed signals, but in the end it turned out to be a tree with branches and leaves drifting in the water: “The stimmungsmäßige Gestalt-seeing and its sudden change: the different Gestalt-seeing … The disciplined uniform and generation-long Stimmung of a collective produces the ‘real [wirklich] picture’ just as the feverish one produces a hallucination. In both cases change of Stimmung (change of thought style) and change of picture proceed in parallel.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 118).Footnote 17

According to Fleck, when people see the same picture they are in harmony with each other. Harmony is obviously a musical metaphor, it means “being in accord/agreement,” “complementing one another.” Fleck titled one of the chapters of his book On the tendency of systems of opinion to persist [Beharrungstendenz] and the harmony of illusions to underline that this inner harmony of the style protects members of the collective against seeing that which is contradictory to the “real” picture, as seeing it would have broken the harmony, i.e. destroyed the whole.

10.2 Coloring/Undertone of Concepts

It is not that thought styles do not change; indeed, they develop, and a change within a style has to be harmonious, because everything is interconnected: “each new fact harmoniously—though ever so slightly—changes all earlier facts” (Fleck 1935a/1979, p. 102), eventually even facts in distant disciplines. Usually, the change is slow and starts with a shift in the meaning of words, which also takes place during mutual interaction. Fleck writes about the change of coloring or undertone of concepts, “it is less important to study entire views and theories … The style aura [aura] of concepts changes, following it the views change. We should first of all examine the aura of concepts and their style-coloring [zabarwienie], reflected in the linguistic habit regarding the use of certain words, especially their metaphorical use. Only this opens the way to the study of the thought-style of a given epoch.” (Fleck 1939a, p. 154)Footnote 18 In this passage, Fleck uses zabarwienie in meaning “timbre”, “tone color” or “undertone”, and aura is exactly the same as meaning of nastrój.

But Fleck writes not only about color and undertone but, in his German works, also about accent or stress in a phonetical sense (-betont), where all these expressions metaphorically characterize emotionalFootnote 19 or ethical affairs.Footnote 20 If the coloring changes, in time the proper meaning also changes or is even destroyed, as in the case of the Absolute of philosophers in the modern science thought collective: “Just as the shared Stimmung within a thought collective strengthens the value of thought, so does the change of Stimmung during the intercollective wandering of thoughts evoke a change of these values across a whole scale of possibilities: from a minor change of coloring [Färbungswechsel], through an almost complete change of meaning, to the destruction of all sense.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 116).Footnote 21

The coloring of our style is usually obvious and natural for us, but in products of different thought styles it is eye-catching. We see it for instance in the figures of old anatomical figures, in which motifs (another term from art history) “sound” (klingen) that are completely unnecessary according to our style (Fleck 1935a, p. 147),Footnote 22 such as the death motif in old skeletal representations or, more modernly, the basket motif in the representation of the chest.

10.3 Handbook Concepts Set the Tone

According to Fleck, inner harmony of the style is stronger than “logical construction of thinking” within an individual, which is why a person may be a carrier of a few (usually quite) different (and often opposing) thought styles. Such persons are carriers of an intercollective circulation of thoughts.Footnote 23 But Fleck also writes about an intracollective one. Fleck distinguished between esoteric and exoteric circles within a thought collective. The esoteric group consists of specialists (who deal with uncertain journal knowledge) in the center and more outside general experts (who, inter alia, write handbooks and make knowledge more stable; these are responsible for handbook knowledge), while the exoteric circle consists of a generally educated and wider audience (to whom textbook and popular knowledge—certain facts and things—is addressed). However, the specialists make discoveries, they are not independent from those who are farther from the center—especially in such democratic collectives as the modern science collective. Every specialist was once a student and learned from textbooks,Footnote 24 and every specialist who wants to be understood has to describe his discovery in relation to the concepts existing in handbooks. Handbook science “chooses, mixes up, fits and connects exoteric, foreign collective and strictly specialist knowledge into a system. Concepts originating in this manner set the tone and oblige every specialist.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 131)Footnote 25 The handbook concepts determine what the members of a given thought collective are able to see; they “set the tone.” And when the tone is set, everybody should know how to play so as not to be out of tune.

10.4 Fine-Tuning to Thought Style

If new elements of knowledge appear they need to be fine-tuned [dostrajanie] to the style of the old ones. (Fleck 1936, p. 3)Footnote 26Dostrajanie is a Polish verbal noun derived from the already mentioned verb stroić, suppelemented with the prefix do-. Its meaning is very close to nastrojenie—“to tune a somewhat out of tune instrument” and “to adjust a musical instrument so that it produces sounds compatible in pitch and purity with those of another instrument”. If we were to read, for instance, medieval scholars, their claims may seem strange to us, but their systems of thought, Fleck claims, were as coherent as ours—they also took into account the “deception of senses” and their observations were also critical, “though it was different from the present-day form, because criticism is about stylizing, fine-tuning [dostrajanie] to the thought-style.” (Fleck 1935b, p. 72).Footnote 27

Another example is a contemporary specialist in one field of science who is a layman outside his field—if he thinks about cognition (as a layman), he draws upon concepts from popular knowledge and fine-tunes [dostraja] the products of thought from his field to these popular concepts. (Fleck 1936, p. 32)Footnote 28 This is also the reason why contemporary harmonies of illusion of epistemology persist, as their concepts are popular (in Fleck’s sense) and so widespread that every scientist uses them when thinking about their own work (which seems obvious, because they are laymen in epistemology), but specialists in epistemology should try to create new specialist concepts.

10.5 Being in Certain Tune and Retuning Oneself

While handbook concepts set the tone, members of the collective (if they are to be such) have to be in certain Stimmung/nastrój to see its concept Gestalts. And to see other Gestalts we need to retune ourselves: “It is impossible to see both these worlds simultaneously since the observations of an artist require a special nastrój which disappears when we retune [przestroić się] to readiness to police observations; and vice versa.” (Fleck 1947, p. 75).Footnote 29

If we want to see something different—different Gestalts—we need to use different handbook concepts. The problem of retuning also applies to collectives or societies. The process of enacting such a change needs some time, and during this process different Gestalts flicker; at one moment we see one Gestalt, then we see another. If there were no such a period of unrest “it would have been impossible to retune [przestrojenie] society, i.e. to create a different intellectual nastrój enabling new Gestalts to be seen.” (Fleck 1935b, pp. 73–74).Footnote 30

When someone makes a scientific discovery, i.e. he becomes able to see a new Gestalt, this is just the beginning. One has to “create directed interests, and to destroy hostile interests. One has to create different thought readiness and bring people up to it. If it succeeds, all of the participants will see the new Gestalt directly, visually, as if it were a truth independent of people, one, eternal. Only the next retuning [przestrojenie] will enable one to see that it [truth] had its own style conditions and that it was a result determined historically.” (Fleck 1935b, p. 75).Footnote 31

10.6 Collective Work as an Orchestra Playing

There are also several more passages in which Fleck uses musical metaphors quite explicitly. In one of them he writes about “communal work,” which may be additive like lifting the weight, or collective work proper “comparable to a soccer match, a conversation, or the playing of an orchestra,” which are not simply additive. Fleck asks: “How could the performance of an orchestra be regarded as the work only of individual instruments, without allowing for the meaning and rules of cooperation? It is just such rules that the thought style holds for thinking.” (Fleck 1935a/1979, p. 99) In his Polish text (Fleck 1934), which has not yet been translated into English and which is contentwise a very short version of his German book (Fleck 1935a), he uses a very similar metaphor when writing about the discovery of the Wassermann reaction (emphasizing that it was an effect of collective work): “A complex group play took place here, the course of which is not a simple sum of individual works, just like a choral chant is not a simple sum of individual voices.” (Fleck 1934, p. 204).

At the time of Fleck’s writing, performing the Wassermann reaction was such a kind of collective work. “To adjust to each other [Aufeinandereinstellen] all five reagents”, experience is required and “even, may there be forgiveness for the word, orchestral proficiency, if, as usually, the reaction is performed by an ensemble.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 104)Footnote 32 The change of one person—continues Fleck—produces disturbance in the process of reaction, even if the new person had worked well in another ensemble. It is not the same collective if one person is changed, because the Stimmung/nastrój has changed, as it was in the case of conversation.

10.7 Agreement/Accordance Instead of Cacophony

In addition to the metaphors mentioned above, we also have to mention uses of the German verb stimmen and the Polish verb zgadzać się. Not all of their uses are musical metaphors, but some harmonize with them. As, for instance, in this quotation: “For instance, many theories pass through two periods: a classical one during which everything is in striking agreement [alles auffallend stimmt] followed by a second period during which the exceptions begin to come to the fore.” (Fleck 1935a/1979, p. 9).

It is obviously easily spotted in German, since the noun Stimmung is derived from the same root as the verb stimmen, and in Polish the verb is derived from a different root to nastrój. If we derive a noun from the same root in Polish it will be zgoda, which was translated as “consensus/agreement” in the English translation: “The consensus omnium [zgoda ogółu] is not the touchstone of science, for there is never a consensus omnium, but only the agreement [zgoda] of ‘our collective’.” (Fleck 1946/1986, p. 127).

Such an agreement or accordance means that within a collective, circulation of thoughts takes place more or less without any major transformations. It is not possible for thought to circulate without any transformations at all. In our collective changes appear, too, but thanks to the shared Stimmung/nastrój, these changes are minor:

“The circulation of thoughts never takes place without transformation. If I think of something, it is always accompanied by a reservation, a contradiction, a deviation, a whole complex of experiences. If I express the thought, I miss these resonating tones, I decide to emphasize a certain chosen direction at the expense of another, I only create a certain thought, fitting myself to the collective to which I am speaking. […] what I say is always different from what I think. What is understood is also always different from what I have said, etc. There are special forces within thought collectives that make these transformations not chaotic, but directed... If they didn’t exist the origin and settlement of opinions, systems of sciences would be impossible, because instead of thought cooperation, there would be only a cacophony of divergent, chaotic momentary thoughts.” (Fleck 1934, p. 205)

Everybody has in his own mind concerning the resonating tones, because individual thinking is multidirectional, Stimmung/nastrój is the force to which—if one wants to be understood—he has to fine-tune himself, he has to miss these resonating tones, so there might be agreement or harmony with the Stimmung/nastrój—not a cacophony.

10.8 To Listen, to Tune, to Cognize—Discovery as Hearing of a Melody and Making It Audible

Let us once again recall a quote from Fleck, but in a different translation, which refers to the very beginnings of the discovery of the Wassermann reaction—to the first chaotic experiments, to the fact that the authors of subsequent discovery didn’t know exactly what they were looking for: “It is also clear that in these confused sounds that Wassermann heard the melody that hummed within him but this was inaudible for those not involved. He and his co-workers listened and turned their apparatuses until these became selective and the melody was also audible for those not involved (unbiased)... The parish of those who were making this melody audible and the listeners grew steadily.” (Fleck 1935a, pp. 92–93).

These metaphors may harmonize with other musical metaphors. We might have the impression that there are confused sounds, chaotic “cosmic” vibrations, and Wassermann, the leading researcher—not without considerable effort—can hear a melody within himself. He is a resonator or resonating chamber, he is both listening and tuning his apparatus (from the preceding paragraphs we know that Apparaten refer to methods and experiments) by turning something like a tuning peg in a violin or guitar—so receiving becomes selective, parts of the apparatus are in tune, so the melody may be intensified and heard by others.Footnote 33 This is Stimmung/nastrój in the sense of attunement. We have to be in the Stimmung/nastrój to hear the music from cosmic vibrations and to transmit it further. The process of gaining this attunement—which was a collective work proper—enabled the historic discovery of the Wassermann reaction.

Wassermann here is in fact compared to an artist. This resonates with how the artist, in an entry on Stimmung, was described by David Welberry—someone who “is distinct from a regular person because of the artist’s ability not only to sense this Stimmung, but also to recognize its laws, and to reproduce it.” (Wellbery 2018, p. 9).

According to Fleck, the difference between science and art in regard to creation is not that in the former creation is free and in the latter it is reproduction of something that exists independently. Fleck sees the difference between science and art in the "social density" which is greater in the scientific collective. However, "the more frontal the researcher's institution, the fewer collectives around him, the more similar his work becomes to that of an artist." (Fleck 1939b, p. 173)Footnote 34 The role of art in the Riegl’s essay was to give the Stimmung to man at every wish (which nature gives in rare moments)—in this sense science gives us the Stimmung, the feeling that we are above the struggle for existence, that we live in the world of things that are under our control.

According to Fleck, our Stimmung/nastrój, our attunement, defines what is considered to be real; it defines our world. Erik Wallrup begun his book about the role of Stimmung in listening to music as follows: “Music captivates the listener. And when the listener is captured by music, there seems to be nothing else in the world—the music is world” (Wallrup 2015, p. 1). And that’s the essence of Stimmung/nastrój. The Gestalts worked out in collective work are our world—the “real” world.

All the musical metaphors that are the background of Fleck’s concept of mood might be interesting for other representatives of the social studies of science, since music metaphors may provide a path to an alternative to the dominant view of science. This idea was expressed, for instance, by Bruno Latour, who most probably was not aware of the use of musical metaphors in Fleck's texts (he neither mentions “mood” nor Stimmung). He only quotes the English version of the above-cited passage on Wassermann who heard the melody in confused sounds (Fleck 1935a, pp. 92–93), and he then adds his wish: "Fleck’s originality here is in breaking away from the visual metaphor (always associated with the bridge-crossing version) and in replacing it by the progressive shift from an uncoordinated to a coordinated movement. I wish the dancing together to a melody to which we become better and better attuned, could replace the worn out metaphor of an 'asymptotic access' to the truth of the matter." (Latour 2007, p. 12).

11 Stimmung/Nastrój in Modern Science

It is not an accident that Fleck devoted the last paragraphs of his opus magnum to the Stimmung/nastrój of modern science. This is because there would be no collective, no thought style without it, therefore it should be investigated: “particular Stimmung influences not only the work method but also the results of the work, i.e. it manifests itself concretely as a readiness for directed perception.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 148).Footnote 35 In Fleck's conception, mood (Stimmung/nastrój) determines what is perceived by (the members of) the collective.

In the collective of modern science “creative Stimmung is dominated by the realizing performance and goes down to a certain disciplined, uniform, and discreet level.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 110)Footnote 36 It “is expressed in shared reverence for... the ideal of objective truth, clarity, and accuracy. It consists of the belief that the revered is achievable in the distant, possibly infinitely distant future. Of the glorification of sacrificing oneself to its service. Of a particular hero worship and particular tradition. This would be the fundamental pitch of the shared Stimmung, in which the scientific thought collective realizes itself.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 148).Footnote 37

In the collective of modern science—we are talking about its epistemological aspect—everybody is equal, every scientist has to efface himself (his personal “resonating tones” to continue this metaphor), so we might call this collective democratic. Also, every type of knowledge is equal—old knowledge has no privilege over the new.Footnote 38

The specific Stimmung/nastrój of modern science is then “realized in a particular drive to the corresponding objectification of the created thought formations [Denkgebilde].” (Fleck 1935a, p. 149)Footnote 39 This “becoming an object” is connected with the circulation of thoughts within the collective—what is thought in the esoteric center becomes a fact and thing at the exoteric edge. Within this circulation, thoughts are depersonalized by use of technical terms and specific symbols, and in this way meanings are fixed. Striving for vividness and a closed system is the next factor. A maximum of information, maximum of mutual connections is demanded, “in the belief that the more connections are recognized, the closer one comes to the ideal of objective truth.” (Fleck 1935a, p. 149)Footnote 40 The closed system of science is in this sense open to new information—in contrast to dogmatic knowledge.

Fleck is aware that this Stimmung/nastrój, the “fundamental pitch” is changing and researchers are losing faith in the ideal of objective truth. “There is no doubt that science is becoming a servant of politics and industry, to the great detriment of its cultural mission. In almost all countries throughout the world politicians and industrialists dispose of scientists, often decide on their work and sometimes even on their beliefs and convictions. This happens not only because some modern scientific activities require large resources. A more dangerous factor is the growing opportunism of many, mainly young, scientists to whom science is only a modern path to a good career.” (Fleck 1986a, p. 153).Footnote 41

For Fleck, this is another argument to develop his theory. Scientists lose their faith because the ideal (taken from “popular” epistemological knowledge) is inadequate to their everyday practice—this is the reason why there is demoralization among young scientists and that scientific values are being replaced by political and business ones. For Fleck, the only hope is to develop a new discipline which will give us a knowledge-view [Wissensanschauung] rather than a worldview [Weltanschauung]. (Fleck 1929, p. 430)Footnote 42 We should read Fleck not only as someone who formed proto-concepts of Kuhn (paradigm—thought style; scientific community—thought collective), but we should also think about research on Stimmung/nastrój of contemporary science since “a directed, collective, cognitive nastrój leading to a common thought style is only a formed subject for research on science.” (Fleck 1939a, pp. 152–153).Footnote 43

12 Conclusion

In Ludwik Fleck’s philosophical writings, it is not only the concepts of “thought style” and “thought collective” that are important, but the concept of Stimmung/nastrój also plays a significant role; indeed, it is essential to being able to fully understand the former two concepts. In order to understand what the Stimmung/nastrój is for Fleck, it is necessary to take into account all the musical metaphors surrounding it. Most of these metaphors are lost in the English translations of his texts, which is why there is a need for new critical editions of philosophical writings of Fleck to be written.

Stimmung/nastrój integrates people in the process of interchanging of thoughts into a collective and directs their perception. Stimmung/nastrój concerns an accordance (attunement) of feelings, of which solidarity and trust are fundamental (while feelings of unfamiliarity and hostility are felt towards different collectives), and thinking of people whose feelings are on the same level and thus regarded as rational thinking. For Fleck Stimmung/nastrój is also a force that gives the collective work proper general direction; within the collective this direction is considered to be necessity. Stimmung/nastrój integrates not only the members of the collective but also what is perceived into a Gestalt, and the process of making new discoveries is the process of learning to see new Gestalts; before a new Gestalt appears there is a restless cognitive Stimmung/nastrój.

The concept of Stimmung/nastrój helps to break the epistemological subject-object dichotomy and move the interest to another element—which in fact should be the proper subject-matter of the investigation—thought style. It appears if there is a non-momentary thought collective, and the latter appears only because the shared Stimmung/nastrój unite people into such a whole. In his efforts to create in fact a new discipline Fleck uses various metaphors—both to reduce to absurdity of traditional epistemological concepts (observation, experiment, fact etc.), and to conceptualize the new concepts (thought style, thought collective and Stimmung/nastrój).

According to Fleck, the collective, and this what is perceived by it, is integrated into a whole by Stimmung/nastrój (attunement or tune)—its inner harmony (which is in fact harmony of illusions) protects members against seeing this what would destroy this harmony. Thought styles change but the change is harmonious (seen as Gestalt-switch only after some time) and starts with a change of “aura” of concepts. For particular thought styles handbook concepts set the tone, and if we want to see facts of different thought styles we need to retune ourselves. In products of our thought various motifs sound. If there appear new elements of knowledge, they need to be fine-tuned to the existing thought style, to its Stimmung/nastrój. If there were no shared Stimmung/nastrój, there would be cacophony of individual thoughts. Collective work is like the playing of an orchestra, the process of discovery is the tuning of the methods and experiments so they become selective and attuned. In this process, researchers are like artists who can both sense the Stimmung/nastrój and reproduce it—they are like resonating chambers that make the melody audible.

Wasn't Fleck also such a resonating chamber? Hadn’t he heard earlier what became obvious to most philosophers of science a few decades later? When he was developing his philosophical theory, there were not many collectives around him which would limit his freedom of creation, there were analytically-minded philosophers of science and historians of science. Ilana Löwy compared Fleck to an artist in a sense, juxtaposing his epistemological works with the works of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (commonly known as Witkacy), “one of the leading Polish artists of the interwar era”: “Fleck’s epistemology, while less overtly iconoclastic, may also be seen as an attempt to radically question the ways we perceive and interpret external reality. […] Both [Fleck and Witkacy] strived to unsettle the existing concept of reality, and to construct a different one, developing new, original conceptual or material tools that could enable this to happen. Both attempted to modify the rules of the game in their respective domains […]. Finally, their efforts encountered a similar fate: initially viewed as incoherent, confused, and disorganized, with time they came to achieve a self-explanatory coherence.” (Löwy 2008, p. 382).

Fleck's works are works from the early days of discovering the influence of language, culture, society and the very Stimmung/nastrój on the content of science. His philosophical texts are full of comparisons and metaphors. Therefore, they might have been necessarily ambiguous and would have appeared so especially to his contemporaries, but over time his theory “achieved a self-explanatory coherence”, because the mood of the contemporary science collective changed enough to learn to see the Gestalts that Fleck was seeing. Fleck's “frontal” philosophical work, which aimed to create a new discipline of knowledge first by adopting and changing the meanings of existing terms, was more similar to the work of an avantgarde artist who strives to change our way of seeing without being able to resort to an established canon of forms of artistic expression. In 1929 Fleck wrote: “In great creative moments, however, the newly emerging science is simply an artistic creation that one can only admire and never 'prove' and determine 'objectively'. For there never existed nor exists a scientific demand for fundamental changes because each moment already has a superabundance of fundamental content.” (Fleck 1929/1986, p. 53) The forty-years-late reception of Fleck’s theory of thought styles and thought collectives by philosophers, sociologists and historians of science is a confirmation of his claim.