‘Teleological Mechanics of the Mind’: Herbart and Lipps on Tendency

Abstract

This article sheds light on a today mostly forgotten though highly influential thinker: Theodor Lipps. It explores the notion of ‘tendency’ in his work, a hitherto insufficiently examined yet central concept of the Munich philosopher. More specifically, the paper examines how Lipps utilizes the term to describe important structures of experience. By illuminating the various ways in which Lipps refers to tendencies, it aims to reconstruct important pillars of his theory of experience. This theory emphasizes that experience has a teleological character, striving towards the complete determination and realization of the objects as they are represented (vorgestellt) in our experience. As will be shown, the description of different tendencies serves Lipps to conceptualize the laws that govern the related dynamics of our psychic life and to distinguish and examine the diverse range of conscious phenomena within it. To unveil the core ideas that guide Lipps’s development of his proposal, the article will first identify and reconstruct the primary source for his philosophical analysis of the mind’s motions: the metaphysics of Johann Friedrich Herbart. Subsequently, Lipps’s critical examination of Herbart’s proposal will be presented. This discussion will serve as a backdrop to illustrate how Lipps integrates Herbartian themes, reformulates related concepts, and ultimately develops his unique understanding of tendency and its roles in experience. By delving into his comprehensive analysis of tendencies, it will be argued that Lipps offers a version of Herbartianism.

Introduction

Although Theodor Lipps has been discussed in the philosophical literature from time to time and the need to scientifically engage with his work has been emphasized (Depraz, 2017; Fabbianelli, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2019; Fidalgo, 1993; Gyemant, 2018; Martin, 2013; Romand & Tchougounnikov, 2021; Romand, 2021b), he belongs to the group of rather forgotten thinkers. He is still a frequent point of reference and inspiration in aesthetics, art history but also in the cognitive neurosciences, particularly regarding his conception of empathy (Einfühlung) (e.g., Espagne, 2017; Galland-Szymkowiak, 2017; Goldman, 2006; Romand 2021a; Stueber, 2006), which is certainly the most famous one on which most studies of Lipps focus on. However, many other aspects of Lipps’s work remain overlooked today.

The goal of this article is to shed light on some of these forgotten aspects of Lipps’s works and to contribute to a more comprehensive perspective on his theory of experience. More specifically, my aim is to explore the notion of tendency and the roles that Lipps ascribes to it. Lipps defines ‘tendency’ as a fundamental teleological structure underlying all striving. This structure permeates our entire psychic life, serving not only as the root of all phenomenal consciousness, or experience but also structuring and propelling it into constant motion. As I want to show, a major source of inspiration for Lipps’s dynamical theory of experience was Johann Friedrich Herbart. Although Lipps is critical of Herbart, I suggest that it is precisely the Herbartian ideas concerning the becoming of representation (Vorstellung)¹ and the role of tendencies within this process that form the main pillars of Lipps’s thought throughout his philosophical career. This synthesis could aptly be termed Lippsian Herbartianism.²

In Sect. “Prolegomena: a first approach to tendencies and the Lippsian context of their analysis”, I will start with some terminological remarks on the notion of tendency, offering a guiding thread for the subsequent sections.

In Sect. “Herbart on self-consciousness and the mind’s mechanics”, I reconstruct Herbart’s theory of experience, which he develops through a critique of idealism and a strong defense of realism. Herbart’s theory of experience seeks to conceptualize and explain how our conscious representations (Vorstellungen) of the world emerge and evolve. It posits that this process involves an interplay and a series of oppositions between external things and the individual representations they evoke within us. For Herbart, a theory of experience should not start with describing subjective acts of positing, as was common with the Fichtean idealism prevalent in his era. Instead, it should describe the origin of experience by beginning with a description of the real things and the influence they exert on the mind (Seele), i.e., the soul or subject.

Lipps dedicated his dissertation to exploring Herbart’s ontology and realism. As I will demonstrate in Sect. “Lipps’s criticisms of Herbart and the project of his own theory of experience”, while he valued and shared Herbart’s commitment to realism, Lipps critiqued Herbart for attributing too much constitutive power to real objects and their individual representations. Initiating his philosophical project, which spanned his entire academic career, with this critique, Lipps sought to develop an alternative theory of experience. His approach does not posit tendential processes between things in themselves but rather among the various representations (Vorstellungen) within the psychic context of experience (psychischer Zusammenhang). While he agrees with Herbart that real substances underpin both the conscious subject and the objects of its experience, he underscores that discussions of plurality and distinctions among different things only hold meaning within the realm of experience. This further implies that the various tendencies and their dynamics should be comprehended within the mental context—namely, through experience and the unconscious activities (Tätigkeiten) or processes (Vorgänge) that underpin the phenomenal.

In Sect. “Lipps on the notion of tendency”, I present Lipps’s concept of tendencies and their various forms, as delineated throughout the different stages of his philosophical career. Although many of his key ideas undergo shifts and significant developments, making the study of his oeuvre complex and challenging, his understanding of tendencies—inspired by Herbart—remains one of the most stable elements of his theory of experience.

Prolegomena: a First Approach to Tendencies and the Lippsian Context of Their Analysis

Before entering into more detailed analyses, I’d like to begin with some introductory remarks on the notion of ‘tendency’. In pre-theoretical contexts, ‘tendency’ generally refers to a disposition towards displaying certain features or behaviors, or to a recurring outcome that is thus expected. For instance, we may say that raspberries have the tendency to build mold rather quickly in the fridge, that cars of a certain brand have the tendency to endure more than 300.000 km, or that people from certain cultures have the tendency to have a greater sense of humor than others. In these instances, ‘tendency’ points to probabilities based on empirical observations or common belief, typically linked to specific characteristics thought to explain these probabilities.

In the theoretical contexts of philosophy and psychology, ‘tendency’ is a technical term and has a somewhat different meaning although it comes in varieties depending on the authors that use it. This makes the study of tendencies complex and difficult. To understand how Lipps employs the notion, it is useful to first consider a fairly widespread understanding of tendencies in contemporary psychology: the idea of emotions as action-tendencies (Frijda, 1987; Lowe & Ziemke, 2011). Roughly, the idea is that emotions push us towards specific actions. Take fear, for example, which primes us for flight in threatening situations. Feeling afraid, we might feel compelled to flee from the source of our fear, such as a dog or a thief. Thus, emotions propel us into certain actions and are fulfilled through these activities.

In Lipps’s work, the concept of tendency is similarly embraced but is applied in a broader, more general sense. For Lipps, tendencies are not confined solely to the realm of emotions. Instead, he views tendencies as omnipresent in the mind, driving us towards various activities. He argues that these tendencies are fundamental to the mind’s motion and its conscious activities. For example, encountering the color ‘blue’ in consciousness can activate the mind’s tendency to anticipate more blue perceptions and engage in the act of perceiving blue. However, the realization of this activity depends on competing tendencies, such as the tendency to perceive ‘green,’ which may impede the blue-perceiving tendency. Lipps posits that the conscious mind is shaped and propelled by a dynamic array of tendencies, varying in both quantity and quality.

One of Lipps’s primary goals is to formulate a theory of experience that elucidates our worldly experiences from a comprehensive philosophical standpoint. Within this framework, ‘tendency’ emerges as a key concept. He uses it to explain the formation and structural constitution of various phenomena encountered in our experience. This ranges from simple conscious contents and more complex perceptual gestalts to apperceived objects, propositions, beliefs, and includes feelings, desires, and representations (Vorstellungen). From his early dissertation on Herbart’s philosophy in 1874 to his last major work, Zur Einfühlung, in 1913, shortly before his death, the analysis of tendencies remains a cornerstone of Lipps’s efforts to elucidate our experience. This consistency is particularly noteworthy given that Lipps was a prolific thinker who frequently revised his ideas, leading to constantly evolving conceptions. As Fabbianelli (2013) insightfully elaborates in a comprehensive analysis, Lipps’s thought can be divided into distinct periods. Throughout these stages, he continually redefined the interrelationships among philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics, ultimately recognizing their deep interconnections. Initially, in his Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), Lipps was keen to delineate psychology from metaphysics. However, he eventually revisited an earlier insight from his dissertation, conceding that “(we had) to acknowledge with Herbart that the goal of metaphysics concerns the intelligibility of the given, the conceivability of experience” (Lipps, 1874: 31; see Fabbianelli, 2013: IX-XVI).

If the explanation of experience is Lipps’s overarching goal throughout his oeuvre, it is precisely our immediate experience—consciousness as it phenomenologically presents itself to us—that occupies the core of his analysis. Lipps argues that to conceptualize experience, we must turn our attention directly to this immediate experience itself. That, however, does not mean that he dispenses with the unconscious. In fact, he emphasizes the need to posit unconscious processes (Vorgänge) which make it that anything manifests in our experience in the first place (Lipps, 1883: 8, 16f., 35f., 128; 1896, 1903: 37f.). Although Lipps insists on the reality of these mental activities, he also emphasizes their elusive character, arguing that they cannot be pinned down through theoretical reflection (e.g., Lipps, 1883: 126f.). Nevertheless, he believes that acknowledging these activities is essential for making sense of experience, positing that our immediate experience inherently compels us to consider unconscious processes (Lipps, 1883: 128) Although his formulations may vary across his works, the idea that the psyche or the mind comprises both unconscious processes (Vorgänge) and conscious activities (Tätigkeiten) is a cornerstone of his ever-developing theory of experience. While it is true that Lipps’s emphasis on the phenomenal increases over time, the reader of the third edition of his Leitfaden der Psychologie (1909) is still reminded that the unconscious is a “necessary auxiliary notion” (Lipps, 1909: 85). The assumption of ‘unconscious sensations and representations’ is necessary for Lipps to account for the numerous gaps in experiential life between various conscious sensations (Empfindungen) and representations (Vorstellungen) (Lipps, 1909: 85). It is important to note that, for Lipps, unconscious sensations and representations only refer to processes (Vorgänge) of the mind, not to any content (Inhalt) (Lipps, 1883: 33). Content is a notion that is strictly limited to the phenomenal realm, content is thus always conscious content (Bewusstseinsinhalt) (Lipps, 1883: 29, 32; 1903: 40). The activities (Tätigkeiten) of the mind encompass both: the unconscious processes (Vorgänge) that underpin the potential manifestation of conscious contents (Bewusstseinsinhalte) and the conscious activities triggered by the emergence of these contents. These conscious activities enable us to apperceive and represent (vorstellen) objects (Gegenstände) based on sensations like ‘blue,’ ‘hard,’ ‘loud,’ and so on. Although there is scant mention of the unconscious in Zur Einfühlung (1913), this fundamental concept remains present and unchallenged even in Lipps’s last major work (Lipps, 1913: 189, 485f.).

The notion of tendency serves Lipps to describe and conceptualize different moments in the movement that sets in with the contact between mind and the real world, is first played out within the domain of the mind’s unconscious processes, and ultimately results in the conscious representation (Vorstellung) – and, ideally speaking, knowledge – of the world. Generally speaking, tendency refers in this context to the lawful (gesetzmäßig) pull towards specific activities in the mind through which the different phenomena of experience come about. The laws (and their corresponding tendencies) are exclusively those of the mind, as Lipps is adamant. They refer to both unconscious processes and conscious activities. However, given that the unconscious is essentially elusive, not much can be said about tendencies in the unconscious domain beyond the fact that the different unconscious processes tend to become conscious and compete over the – quantitatively – limited capacity for the conscious mind’s attention (Lipps, 1883: 160f.; 1903: 35f.). Almost all of the analyses of tendencies in Lipps, therefore, are concerned with tendencies within experience. Before taking a look at these different analyses and their role in the bigger scheme of the project of genealogically reconstructing the becoming of our concrete experience, I present and discuss the main thought of Herbart’s theory of experience. It is Lipps’s occupation with and criticism of the latter that would not only shape his own understanding of tendency but also the idea that the movement towards representation (Vorstellung) is both initiated and guided by the real things themselves.

Herbart on Self-Consciousness and the Mind’s Mechanics

Born during the era of German idealism and romanticism, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) maintained the Enlightenment’s steadfast belief in and orientation towards science. He stands out as one of the early proponents who highlighted the significance of immediate experience and the utilization of mathematics in psychological study. This contribution paved the way for approaches such as Gustav Theodor Fechner’s psychophysics (Murray & Bandomir, 2001). Herbart’s philosophical career commences with studies in philosophy in Jena under Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Despite being considered one of Fichte’s disciples, Herbart, from early on, rejects the master’s speculative idealism and quickly evolves into a staunch advocate of realism (Maigné, 2002).³ Yet, it is not the Fichtean philosophical problems as such that Herbart dismisses but the idealistic solutions to them: “psychology has all questions in common with idealism, just not its responses” (Herbart, 1825/1892: 56).⁴ In fact, according to Herbart, idealism is to be taken as the vantage point of a realist philosophy, as “there is no other thorough realism than the one that emanates from a refutation of idealism” (Herbart, 1825/1892: 55).

As early as 1798, in his Erster problematischer Entwurf der Wissenslehre, Herbart formulates a metaphysical framework investigating the ‘I’ and self-consciousness. All the topics and theses that he will later elaborate on in his Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824–25), and which resonate in the works of Theodor Lipps, already are present in a nutshell at this early stage. The short text clearly highlights the question posed by idealism that Lipps takes to necessitate a new, realist response: ‘I—what does this word mean?’ (Herbart, 1799/1887: 96). Herbart promptly emphasizes that attempting to define the ‘I’ “through a self-representation of one’s ‘I’ (ein Sich-sein-Ich-Vorstellen)” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 96) will result in a circular argument. We cannot define the ‘I’ by resorting to a representing (Vorstellen) of a representation (Vorstellung), unless, at some point, it involves a representation of something else. For Herbart, this means that pure and unaffected self-positing is impossible. It’s not as if the ‘I’ first posits and represents itself, and then, having developed itself as the ‘I’, subsequently allows for something else to be represented (vorgestellt). As he makes clear, “for itself alone the notion of ‘I’ cannot exist” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 96). It is only where something else (das Andre) is represented that the I can possibly arise. This central premise in Herbart’s philosophy carries two key implications.

First, the ‘I’ must be united or associated (vereinigt) with something else, as it cannot be conceived if it were merely in relation to itself without any external element entering the picture. Second, from this also follows that what the ‘I’ is united (vereinigt) with must not be the same as the ‘I’ itself, and therefore must be distinguished from it as the non-‘I’ (das Nicht-Ich). The question, thus, is how can the ‘I’ be united (vereinigt) with something without collapsing with it? How is the non-‘I’ united with, yet different to, the ‘I’?

To distinguish the ‘I’ from the non-‘I’ without either isolating the ‘I’ (which would render it a mere nothing) or merging it with the non-‘I’ (leading to its dissolution), Herbart suggests conceiving the ‘I’ as united with one non-‘I’ a and then differentiating this union from the ‘I's’ association with another non-‘I’ b. The underlying idea is that the ‘I’ crystallizes only against the background of a manifold non-‘I’. “In the self-positing, self (das Sich) includes at the same time 1. the positing and 2. the association (Vereinigung) with many others” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 97). The distinction between the ‘I’ and the non-‘I’ becomes apparent when the ‘I’ forms a connection with a, b, c… respectively. In order to differentiate the ‘I’ from these non-‘I’ elements, the connections must be contingent (zufällig). Herbart expresses this as follows:

Both connection (Verbindung) and disconnection (Nichtverbindung) must happen. But one annuls (aufheben) the other; one ought to be, but the other as well; so the first needs to be annulled, cease, and the other shall follow; – the ‘I’, thus, must endure over time (dauern). Hence, we cannot but surmise the ‘I's’ locus in succession, that is, we must posit it in time. (Herbart, 1799/1887: 98)

In one moment, the ‘I’ is connected with a, in the next moment, the connection is disrupted, substituted by another connection between ‘I’ and b. But for the ‘I’ to be able to posit itself, it must reside in transition (Übergang), it must prevail in the different moments of connection, while a and b, over time, prove accidental and succeed each other.

To make sense of this movement in which the ‘I’ can posit itself as persisting against the background of succeeding non-‘Is’, Herbart introduces a set of different notions. The first pair of notions are resistance (Widerständigkeit) and striving (Streben). The positing of a insofar as it ceases to connect with the ‘I’ cannot be the same kind of positing of the b that is now entering a connection with the ‘I’. Both, a and b, compete for connection with the I, but b now has “presence in the senses” (sinnliche Gegenwart) (Herbart, 1799/1887: 99) and so will annihilate the connection between the ‘I’ and a. The crux, however, is that this annihilation is not complete. “The positing of the present is connected with a continual becoming annihilated (Vernichtetwerden), not a being annihilated of the previous” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 99). The positing activity (setzende Tätigkeit) of a transforms into resistance and thus, as Herbart takes it, into a striving. If the connection between ‘I’ and b undermines the connection between ‘I’ and a, still, there remains a willing (Wollen) to posit a. Mentioning volitional phenomena at this basic stage of the constitution of ‘I’ and non-‘I’, Herbart introduces a further notion: intensity. Herbart, thus, describes the whole process as a dynamic of forces that is played out on a platform of willing (Wollen). It is particularly the willing (Wollen) and striving that connects the different associations in such a way that they are not simply posited at the same time or separately one after the other but in a way that they all constitute different moments of one single movement of transition. “We recognized the ‘I’ as a transitional one (Übergehendes) in that, by willing and opposing, the ‘I’ takes over the previous (das Vorher) into the posterior (das Nachher)” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 100). The opposition between the striving towards a and the striving towards b has an important consequence. The striving towards b will grow over time, given that it is present in the senses (sinnliche Gegenwart). Hence, it is not that a and b were posited in the same way simpliciter. What is posited is rather a striving to go from a to b. Herbart emphasizes that the whole movement does not begin in one single moment but starts from continuity, which always already contains plurality: “the Now (das Jetzt), the first instant (Augenblick) of the beginning, is the first continuity of two moments” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 101).

To sum up, Herbart’s idea is that the ‘I’ evolves against the backdrop of a plurality of non-‘Is’ that oppose each other, and which manifest for the ‘I’ precisely in their mutual impediment (Hemmung). Given these impediments, the ‘I’ cannot simply posit all the non-‘Is’ at the same time but is forced to posit a temporal process of striving in which one or the other dominates. The ‘I’, qua willing (Wollen), is the lasting (dauernd) ground of this striving activity (Tätigkeit), insofar as it is this activity.

But how, one might ask, does such a position amount to a realist view? Herbart’s realism consists in the idea that the role of the manifold non-‘Is’ cannot be played out by representations (Vorstellungen) only. If the distinction between ‘I’ and non-‘Is’ were only a matter of representation, Herbart emphasizes, the ‘I’, just on its own, would lack the features (Bestimmungen) that characterize the non-‘I’. Because, for itself, the ‘I’ is nothing (Herbart, 1799/1887: 97). In an earlier critique of Schelling, Herbart highlights that it is impossible to conceive of an ‘I’ that invents a non-‘I’ to create an opposition within itself in order to constitute itself (Herbart, 1796/1887: 9–11). The ‘I’, for Herbart, only comes into play where something else (das Andre) that is really different makes its appearance—or so tries. The non-‘Is’ that impede each other are real things. And it is precisely because they are real that they trigger representations in the first place. It is not like the non-‘Is’ emanated from within the ‘I’, rather first the ‘I’ is being forced (gezwungen) to posit this or that (Herbart, 1799/1887: 101). The movement begins with a contact. It is the contact with a manifold that instigates a “tendency to connect” (Herbart, 1799/1887: 97) in the ‘I’. This tendency not only refers to the connection between ‘I’ and one specific non-‘I’ but to the manifold non-‘Is’ as represented to the one single ‘I’ and its activity. The direction of the tendency is thus twofold: (1) towards connection with the non-‘Is’ and, by the same token, (2) towards temporal progress.

In the introduction to his later Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824), which is mostly a detailed extension of the position he had already figured out for himself more than 20 years earlier, Herbart acknowledges his alignment with Leibniz’s understanding of tendency. He cites Leibniz’s verdict that the monad’s internal actions are to be primarily seen in the monad’s perceptions as well as the tendency to move from perception to perception in the following way: “Les qualités et actions internes d’une monade ne peuvent être autre chose que ses perceptions – et ses appétitions, c’est-à-dire, ses tendances d’une perception à l’autre” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 217). While Herbart aligns with Leibniz regarding the concept of continuous progress as a fundamental aspect of the mind, he diverges on several matters. One central point concerns Leibniz’s pre-stabilized harmony (Herbart, 1824/1890: 219). Herbart contends that such a notion undermines the psychological examination of the mind and obscures the laws governing the coming and going of representations. The main objective of his psychology is to describe these laws, which leads to hundreds of pages of mathematical analyses concerning the forces of representations and their interactions. Through the study of the quantities of impediment of representations and their variation in time, Herbart’s goal is to reconstruct the “statics” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 281–337) and “mechanics” of the mind (Herbart, 1824/1890: 338–402). Although these examinations are significant extensions of his earlier positions, the basic metaphysical framework remains similar. As a cornerstone of his philosophy, Herbart emphasizes that the generation of representations within the mind is contingent upon encounters with fundamentally distinct entities. The idea of a “naked ‘I’ is a contradiction” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 274).

Another cornerstone of Herbart’s thought is the rejection of faculty metaphysics. Considering the intertwinement Herbart observes between representation (Vorstellung) and appetition (Begehren), it makes no sense to distinguish between different faculties as if they could possibly exist independently from each other. Herbart explains this intertwinement as follows: When the mind is in contact with reality, it is disturbed and engages in self-preservations that correspond to the real things, which carry out their interaction within the mind. This interaction is played out as a competition among the real things, which impede each other in how they affect the mind. Since the mind responds to these disturbances with activities of representation, the “oppositions (Gegensätze)” between the real things “translate into a striving towards representing (Streben vorzustellen)“ (Herbart, 1813/1891: 222). The competition between the real things is manifest in the mind as a process of strivings towards acts of representations that impede each other. As Herbart is adamant, that means that the domain of representing (Vorstellen) essentially involves “striving (Streben) … which, under the label of desire (Begehren), life, drive (Trieb), real activity (Thätigkeit), was wrongly considered by Fichte as a second faculty and taken in addition to the faculty of representation” (Herbart, 1813/1891: 238).⁵ According to Herbart, we cannot distinguish between appetition, volition, and representation but in abstraction: “We should finally drop the faculties (Geistesvermögen) … once and for all!” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 253). The entire process of representing is essentially structured by processes of striving and the contrasting effects of conflicting forces involved therein, resulting in a statics and mechanics of the mind (Herbart, 1813/1891: 238).

One ramification of this is that pure representation could never constitute an absolute ‘I’: such a thought is “a non-starter throughout” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 253). In Herbart’s view, the concept of the ‘I’ arises only within the context of striving and temporal progression. The ‘I’ is oriented towards the future and must be conceived of as a “drive” (Trieb): “Its forward-oriented direction, which is the reason why the ‘I’ is thought as a drive, generally refers to the direction from subject to object” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 182f.). The ‘I’ strives towards new sensations and thus towards object-representation. Subjective desire and objective representation make up the ‘I’ as one single temporal phenomenon of striving that needs to be considered holistically. While Herbart is eager to depict this as the essence of selfhood or the ‘I’ insofar as we know it from our experience, he underscores the limitation of experience-based knowledge of the mind. According to him, the quality of the mind, or soul, as it is in itself will remain unknown to us. Neither the ‘I’ nor the activity of representing capture the mind’s nature as such. The mind only engages in representing when it is interrupted by something else: “[W]e accept from general metaphysics as known that the mind or soul is a strictly simple, originally non-representing entity, but whose self-preservation results in acts of representation when disturbed by various disruptions caused by other entities” (Herbart, 1824/1890: 190). Herbart insists on pairing psychology with metaphysics, one that assumes that all motion within the mind stems from an interplay between the soul’s self-preservation drive—akin to Spinoza’s conatus—and external realities. Herbart identifies such a metaphysical position with realism. Yet, it is important to note that, on his view, our representations of the world and ourselves are shaped by the qualities of the soul. “No windows in the monads are required” (Herbart, 1825/1892: 287) because the soul is incapable of taking in any qualities of the real things as they are in themselves anyways. The representations only emerge on the basis of an encounter with reality, but reality appears according to the laws of the mind. This much, Herbart sees his realism “in full agreement with idealism” (Herbart, 1812/1888: 123). In an early text from 1796 titled “Spinoza and Schelling, a sketch”, Herbart concludes with the words: “for me, at least, the need for a synthesis between idealism and realism has become doubly palpable and urgent” (Herbart, 1796/1887: 11). This felt need still seems present in his later ontology which tries to do justice to both the notion of a mind-independent reality and the notion that our mind shapes our experience of reality.⁶ It is in this metaphysical setup that Herbart applies Leibniz’s notion of tendency. When the soul, considered in itself, is disturbed in its self-preservation by the things of the real world that are substantially different from the soul, tendencies to go from representation (Vorstellung) to representation are experienced.

In conclusion, Herbart introduces tendency and representation as expressions of the soul’s self-preservation in response to a complex reality. These concepts and related themes resonate throughout Theodor Lipps’s work, extending beyond his initial exploration of Herbart in his dissertation and beyond explicit mentions of Herbart.⁷ They remain prominent across all of his creative periods and major works, fundamentally shaping Lipps’s own notion of tendency. The following section delves into Lipps’s overarching comprehension of tendency and its integration within his Herbart-inspired yet distinctive philosophical framework.

Lipps’s Criticisms of Herbart and the Project of his Own Theory of Experience

In his dissertation, Zur Herbartschen Ontologie (1874), Lipps reflects on the realist aspects of Herbart’s metaphysical position, which he is sympathetic to: “Herbart starts from the given and assumes that it is always based on something real, and rightly so” (Lipps, 1874: 14). In fact, Lipps also defends a realist stance when he emphasizes that “we will never arrive at a truth in appearance” (Lipps, 1874: 14) if we drop it. However, Lipps expresses concerns regarding Herbart’s portrayal of the fundamental reality underlying our representations of the world. He criticizes Herbart’s depiction of the actual objects and processes that should stimulate the soul to create experiences. Essentially, he believes that Herbart assigns an excessive role to real objects when, in fact, it should be attributed more to the experiencing subject. For one, according to Lipps, it makes no sense to attribute plurality (Vielheit) to the real things as they are in themselves, that is when they are posited in absolute terms. By contrast, in experience, things are manifold, and different representations occupy our minds, but this plurality is relative to the synthesizing subject for whom all these things are given. That is, the togetherness (das Zusammen) of the different things is constituted by a single subject, whose experience provides the common background, the context in which different things can relate to each other and are held together in difference. On the transcendent level of the real, however, things are posited absolutely and not in relative terms. For Lipps, when Herbart emphasizes that space is just appearance (Schein), this actually should have prevented Herbart from positing a real manifold (Lipps, 1874: 27).

Criticizing the notion of an experience-independent plurality, Lipps also challenges the concept of oppositions (Gegensätze) that are supposed to characterize the relationship between mind-independent beings. If the substances (die Wesen) were to genuinely impede each other, this would have conceptual implications that, according to Lipps, must be avoided. For instance, the things in themselves would possess forces (Kräfte) that push against each other. Impediments of these forces would initiate striving, drives, and tendencies in the real things. However, Lipps finds this to be inconceivable:

We find in ourselves tendencies, urges for something, even if it is only in a blurred way. But with what right do we transfer this psychological condition to the unanimated? There are no strivings and drives per se, but only those that are directed toward a certain object, strivings for something. (Lipps, 1874: 19)

Striving and tendency imply a temporal structure in which something is not yet realized, only becoming possible in the future once an impeding counter-force has been removed. Lipps emphasizes that this implies that the goal is envisioned but not yet achieved, remaining a mere possibility. But how should this future possibility be a feature of the real substance (Wesen)? As he highlights: “The things themselves have no memory that they could have accomplished something if they had not been prevented from doing so, any more than they have a sense of a future possible effect” (Lipps, 1874: 20). As one might argue, striving entails a temporal horizon that seems comprehensible only in experiential terms. Therefore, attributing such a horizon to real entities, substances (Wesen), becomes nonsensical. Lipps concludes: “So there are no original forces, because the absolute position does not carry any relations; no tendencies, because thereby a lack would come into the being, which would have to be filled by the striving first” (Lipps, 1874: 21). Lipps’s rejection of the notion of mutual impediment of substances also applies to the idea that one substance could bring about a change in another:

The interaction between two things is inconsistent; it is completely inconsistent that something which belongs to one real thing becomes a determination in the other. Because nothing in the real world, as it is in itself, no matter what we call it, can pass from one to another or separate itself from it. It must also be emphasized here that everything of this kind, including stimuli, causes, impulses, determinations, as well as forces which are usually presented in a more tangible way, are either nothing or inseparable from the one substance to whom they are attributed as the active agent. (Lipps, 1874: 30)

Now, of course, in our experience of the world, we can become aware that things do have an effect on each other. But the crucial point for Lipps is that the plurality of things and their interaction is only something that characterizes the world insofar as we experience it. He emphasizes that single things (Einzelne) can only exist and relate to each other within a wider web of connection (Zusammen), something he will later call the “web of life” (Lebenszusammenhang) (Lipps, 1902a: 7ff.) or “web of reality” (Wirklichkeitszusammenhang) (Lipps, 1905: 100). Things can be separate and relate to each other only because of an all-embracing context, which is non-reducible to the sum of the single things and which qua relation is not part of the single things either (Lipps, 1874: 28). For Lipps, the relation between separated things is like the predicate of a sentence, which requires a subject. But neither each sole thing nor the sum of all sole things can play that role. From that, he concludes: “(S)uch an aggregation (Zusammenfassung) [of individual things] can only be one in our representation (Vorstellung). Only in representation can they be a subject and bear the predicate of aggregation” (Lipps, 1874: 27). Things are connected in one single reality for us, in our experience. But Lipps interprets this as subjective appearance only and ascribes to it “no significance” (Lipps, 1874: 28) as regards the world as it is in itself. If we say that our experience of the world motivates us to posit a world independent of us, then Lipps agrees. But he is against the image of a mind-independent plurality of individual substances that impede or interact with each other in any other way.⁸ He strictly warns against “a confusion of what happens in our thoughts between concepts with the process of the things to which the concepts refer” (Lipps, 1874: 25). If Herbart had emphasized the need for a synthesis between idealism and realism, Lipps seems to try to strengthen the former when he concludes his dissertation with the words:

Thus, there is nothing left for us but to renounce not only the absolute position of the simple, but every independent reality of the individual, as far as it has to be thought as acting on each other, and this everywhere, where effect of thing on thing, relations and relationships are found, i.e. in the whole context of the world, with which we engage. (Lipps, 1874: 31)

While it is true that Lipps had an inclination towards idealism, it is important to note that, throughout his oeuvre, he never tires of emphasizing that we are fully justified in positing an elusive and non-numerical X that underlies our experience, a something that cannot be known but must be posited to make sense of our experience as it unfolds.

Across his philosophical works, Lipps provides different attempts to integrate and conceptualize this necessary ground of the phenomenal within his theory of experience. These attempts concerning the unconscious or real fundament of experience vary significantly. They even lead him to proclaim an objective idealism that distinguishes between a “world substance” (Lipps, 1905: 100) and an ‘I’ that is independent of and transcends the individual ‘I’ that we experience. It is such a pure ‘I’ that he believes guarantees the unity of reality in which the world-substance finds its “integration (Zusammengefaßtsein)” (Lipps, 1905: 132).

To reconstruct these significant conceptual developments across Lipps’s oeuvre would require extended discussions that could easily provide materials for a monograph, given the more or less subtle changes Lipps’s theory of experience undergoes throughout four decades of thinking.⁹

In the following, my aim is different from such a historical approach. Instead, I take a more systematical stance by making the attempt to demonstrate how tendencies are involved in the wider and non-abiding Lippsian project to theoretically reconstruct the becoming of our experience as we live through it. The following presentation draws from distinct arguments developed in works written across the different stages in the evolution of Lipps’s thought. In doing so, I aim to offer a synthetic and integrative Lippsian account of the development and dynamics of our experience. Necessarily, this account will be somewhat selective, focusing on those elements and arguments that enable a coherent depiction of the Lippsian project. As I want to suggest, it is by combining the different arguments that spread out across his different works that it becomes evident that the conceptualization of the becoming and dynamic of our experience is among the most fundamental topics in Lippsian thought in the first place, one that, no matter how often his concepts have otherwise undergone manifold shifts and changes, would always, if only silently, guide and determine the evolution of his ideas. Focusing too much on the numerous variations and changes in Lipps’s work risks overshadowing a constant theme throughout his four decades of philosophical exploration: the attempt to reconstruct the movement setting in with the mind’s encounter with reality and to conceptualize the different moments in the associated dynamics that culminate in the subject’s experience of the world. The fact that the reader finds descriptions concerning different structures and moments of the becoming of experience in all stages of his thought testifies to how central and omnipresent the issue of the dynamics of experience was for Lipps. Focusing on the dynamics of experience, I propose that ‘tendency’ – present in nearly all his major works – is a core concept that needs to be taken into account if one wants to do justice to the Lippsian project.

Lipps on the Notion of Tendency

In this section, my aim is twofold. Firstly, I seek to present and discuss Lipps’s general understanding of tendency by circumscribing what I suggest to call Lippsian Herbartianism (Sect. “Lippsian Herbartianism” which, I argue, must be viewed in the context of his critiques and adjustments to Herbart’s concept of tendency. This general notion serves as the foundation for Lipps’s more specific analyses of the various tendencies that populate the mind during its engagement in representing (Vorstellen) the world, thus giving rise to the genesis of object-experience, a theme he endeavors to reconstruct throughout his work. Secondly, I aim to reconstruct and present the fundamental aspects of the mind’s process, which initiates with the interaction between the mind and reality and triggers a striving for the representation (Vorstellen) of reality (Wirklichkeit) (Sect. “Lipps’s explorations of the mind’s tendencies”).

Lippsian Herbartianism

To understand the notion of tendency within a Lippsian theory of experience, it is useful to explore it within what I term ‘Lippsian Herbartianism’. This approach involves a reconceptualization and development of Herbart’s psychological ideas, based on Lipps’s criticisms. While it's not possible to cover all the connections between Lipps and Herbart, I wish to highlight the following topics. These are deeply intertwined with the notion of tendency in Herbart’s work and re-emerge in Lipps’s theory.

The Encounter Between Mind and Reality

Herbart’s realism is grounded in the notion that experience, and the self-consciousness of the ‘I’ within it, can only be understood through the relationship between the mind (or soul) and a variety of different substances reflecting a manifold reality. Lipps though rejecting the notion of a reality composed of numerically distinct substances, as discussed in the previous section, embraces Herbart’s main idea. He agrees that our experience, as it is lived through by us, can only be comprehended through conceiving it as an encounter between our mind and a mind-independent reality.

Emphasis on Motion and the Temporal Process of Becoming

A central concept from Herbart posits that our experience should be seen as a process or movement originating from the interaction between the mind and reality. This process involves mental activities that lead to the presentation (Vorstellung) of the world. For both Herbart and Lipps, these activities are primarily unconscious, becoming conscious only in specific circumstances.

Opposition (Gegensatz) as a Fundamental Principle [impediment (Hemmung) and striving (Streben)]

To explain how representations (Vorstellungen) become conscious, Herbart introduces the concept of oppositions: different substances disturb the mind, prompting it to produce representations as a means of self-preservation. These substances, however, interfere with each other’s effects on the mind, affecting which representations emerge and which do not. Herbart argues that this mutual interference inherently involves striving (Streben) among the different representations. Lipps adopts the concepts of impediment (Hemmung) and striving (Streben). Yet, as highlighted in the previous section, he contends that this dynamic of mutual impediment and striving occurs solely among processes within the mind itself, or within psychic life, rather than among different substances or an external plurality of real entities.

Intertwinement Between Feeling, Willing, and Representing

Herbart understands the development of representation (Vorstellung) as a result of the mutual impediment of unconscious processes that strive towards representation. Given that representation is considered to be intrinsically permeated by processes of striving, he challenges the concept of separate and independent mental faculties. He emphasizes that feeling, willing, and representing are interwoven, corresponding to the mind’s essentially entangled activities. Lipps echoes this viewpoint, ultimately dedicating an entire monograph, Vom Fühlen, Wollen und Denken (1902), to exploring their profound structural interrelations.

Like Herbart, he takes their entanglement to be rooted in the phenomenon of striving, which can be illustrated by looking at his comprehensive definition of striving in the second edition of his Leitfaden der Psychologie (1906). To understand it, it is important to take into account Lipps’s distinction between willing (Wollen) in a narrow and a wide sense. By the wide sense of willing (Wollen), Lipps refers to the variety of the phenomena of striving, including “any being-inclined (Geneigt-sein), appetition (Begehren), desire (Verlangen), wishing (Wünschen), willing (Wollen)” (Lipps, 1906: 226). These different phenomena of striving constitute the group of “tending (Tendieren), being-directed (Gerichtetsein), aiming-for-something (Zielen auf etwas)” (Lipps, 1906: 226). If Lipps introduces striving in the chapter “The will (Der Wille)“ (Lipps, 1906: 226), he also immediately emphasizes feeling: “Such a striving we only know directly from our feeling of striving (Strebungsgefühl)” (Lipps 1906: 226; my italics). As a phenomenon, striving manifests for us both as willing and feeling.¹⁰ Lipps firmly believes that our acknowledgment of any striving in unconscious processes, to which we theoretically ascribe the goal of becoming noticed, is grounded solely in our experience of the feeling of striving. We only posit such unconscious striving as having existed before crossing the threshold into consciousness, based on this experiential evidence of feeling (Lipps, 1906: 226; 1909: 258). Feeling and willing, in the broad sense, are integral to striving. Therefore, if representation (Vorstellung) is inherently linked to striving, it becomes clear that for Lipps, as for Herbart, representation fundamentally encompasses feeling and willing as well.

Striving and a General Leibnizian Notion of Tendency

Herbart describes the fundamental experience that gives rise to any possible self-consciousness as one of a tendential process of striving; a striving in which single acts strive towards being represented. Referring to Leibniz, he characterizes this basic activity of the mind as a tendency to go from one representation (Vorstellung) to another (or from one perception to another, as Leibniz would have it). Lipps shows an orientation towards Leibnizian ideas similar to Herbart. While not a central aspect of Herbartianism, it’s important to highlight that Leibniz most likely had an influence on both Herbart’s and Lipps’s conceptualizations of tendency and striving. Although Lipps does not explicitly mention Leibniz, we see Leibniz’s ideas on tendency echoed and reinterpreted in his theory of experience. Two of Leibniz’s ideas are particularly relevant to Lipps’s work.

The first idea revolves around the concept that the mind’s structure is defined by its current state and its overarching tendency to transition towards another state:

(I)n anima duo sunt: status et tendentia ad alium statum. (Leibniz, 1860: 56)

In Vom Fühlen, Wollen und Denken (1902), Lipps emphasizes the need to differentiate within each moment of our experiential lives between “the moment of status (Zuständlichkeit)” and “that of movement (Bewegung)” (Lipps, 1902a: 19). He categorizes feelings into two types: feelings of state (Zustandsgefühlen) and feelings of movement (Bewegungsgefühlen). These feelings can dominate the foreground of our experience, manifesting as either a more settled sensation of being in a particular state or place, or as a dynamic sense of aiming or striving towards something different from our current inner state (Lipps, 1902a: 19). While these feelings may present themselves distinctly in various experiences, leaning more towards one type than the other, Lipps argues that both elements are inherently present in every single moment of experience.

The second concept concerns the general meaning of tendency. It is helpful to compare the following two quotes from Leibniz with how Lipps defines ‘tendency’ in its most general sense. In Leibniz, we read:

[A]ctive force involves an effort [conatus] or striving [tendentia] toward action [actio], so that, unless something else impedes it, action results (Leibniz, 1989: 252)

[P]rimitive forces can be nothing but the internal strivings [tendentia] of simple substances, strivings by means of which they pass from perception to perception in accordance with a certain law of their nature (Leibniz, 1989: 181)

Here, two aspects of tendency are highlighted that are crucial not only to Herbart but especially to Lipps, as they form the core of his theory of experience, which he elaborates on further. The first aspect, already discussed, involves the concept of impediment (Hemmung). The second aspect draws from Leibniz’s focus on a form of progress that adheres to the law of a specific tendency, provided it is not obstructed by external factors. For Lipps, this is the most general – and formal – definition of ‘tendency’:

[T]he word ‘tendency’… means nothing else than the existence of conditions, which have a certain success, if they are left to themselves, i.e. can work without impediment that what they are able to work … according to their nature (Lipps, 1902a: 20f.; see Lipps, 1883: 389).

Mentioning this is crucial as it underscores that, for Lipps, tendency and striving are linked to the lawfulness of processes. The drive towards a specific goal, or tendency, follows a certain law, which varies with the nature of the tendency in question. By underscoring the lawful progression of experiential movements, Lipps further aligns with Herbart, showcasing another aspect of their connection.

The Lawfulness of the Psychic Life and the Mechanics of the Mind

Herbart characterizes consciousness as a state where representations (Vorstellungen) are in constant flux, influenced by the competitive nature and impeding forces of varying representations over time. He asserts that psychology must, therefore, encompass “a statics and a mechanics of the mind” (Herbart, 1813/1891: 238), treating “mechanics as the science of the lawfulness of movements” (Herbart, 1817/1891: 447). This principle, he argues, is applicable to both nature and the mind. Herbart posits that these laws, which refer to the relations of quantitative parameters and their combined effects, should be articulated in mathematical language. Thus, the statics and mechanics of the mind focus on “the calculation of the balance and movement of representations” (Herbart, 1816/1891: 371). The “mathematical formulas” used for these calculations are what express “the general laws of the psychological appearances (Erscheinungen)” (Herbart, 1813/1891: 239). Lipps agrees that quantitative aspects are relevant when it comes to the conceptualization of the mutual impediments of psychic processes (Vorgänge). He even employs the Herbartian label of mechanics when he describes the lawful motion as a “teleological mechanics of the psychic life” (Lipps, 1902a: 132). However, unlike Herbart, his focus is on the different kinds of laws of the mind and their interplay. If the experiencing mind and its processes are characterized by striving and tendency, and, if tendency is the existence of conditions that will bring about a certain progress depending on its specific nature, as long as they are not impeded, then the question remains what exactly is it that tendency aims for. The formal definition of tendency just mentioned does not tell us anything about it – other than that tendency as such implies an aiming for another state (Leibniz: status; Herbart: Zustand; Lipps: Zuständlichkeit) and as such for temporal progress. Now, for Lipps tendency becomes the central notion to describe the laws that govern the mind’s different possible progresses. For, if the formal definition of tendency just gives us an idea that tendency refers to a certain possible progress, we still want to know what different kinds of progress in the mind are possible. After all, the constant change of representations (Vorstellungen) that we can witness in us is very complex. The manner in which our experience unfolds over time is diverse and encompasses various trajectories and phenomena. It can exhibit different directions and yet does not necessarily appear chaotic, but rather seems to follow orderly and systematic processes. According to Lipps, this happening is characterized not only by the general tendency towards progressing to further states but also by many diverse tendencies that regulate the various courses of psychic life in their specific manner. Hence, for Lipps, describing the laws that govern the mind and its experiences entails examining the various tendencies and their specific characters. It is the interplay of these qualitatively different tendencies that ought to help us make sense of the conscious phenomena we live through.

In Herbart’s framework, the focus is on real things that disturb the mind, pushing to cross the threshold of consciousness until they are represented, which he considers to be the expression of the disturbance of the mind. Contrastingly, Lipps emphasizes the pull of these things, which compete over the mind’s limited capacity to allocate the necessary psychic resources needed for the things to be represented as objects of experience. This semantic shift may explain why Lipps discusses teleological mechanics, where elements aim towards specific outcomes rather than exerting force indiscriminately, or ‘blindly’, as it were.

Experience and the Interplay Between Mind and Reality

Both Herbart and Lipps emphasize the laws governing the development and unfolding of experience, viewing these dynamics as stemming from the encounter between the mind and reality. They agree that the mind’s constitution fundamentally shapes our perception of the world; it is within the mind’s parameters that anything becomes perceptible. However, they also insist that reality itself, according to its own laws, determines how the mind engages in the world’s representation. Lipps expresses this thought, for instance, in his Grundtatsachen des seelischen Lebens (1883) as follows: “We cannot help but conceive of this real world, regardless of its reality, as a world of our representation, thus attributing the ‘I’ as the bearer, albeit only the relative bearer” (Lipps, 1883: 445). How we experience the world remains in both thinkers a matter of an irreducible interplay. For Herbart, this is the reason why we have to adopt a version of realism – it is the core tenet of realism. In Lipps, we find distinct attempts to formulate this position, which differ significantly and oscillate between more realistic and even idealistic versions. If in his early thought Lipps did not have a clear notion of ‘object’ (Gegenstand), it is around 1900 that he develops and introduces the notion of ‘demand’ (Forderung) to express the idea that it is the to-be-represented objects of thought themselves that call the mind not only for conscious attention (Zuwendung) but also for further representation and determination (Bestimmung) (see Fabbianelli, 2013, 2019). The idea is that by encountering reality, the mind is triggered to engage in the generation of conscious content, in which objects are implied. But if the objects are given in the contents, they still need to be explicated and thought (gedacht) by the experiencing ‘I’, they need to be determined (bestimmt) within what Lipps defines as the activity of apperception (Apperzeption) (Lipps, 1902b, 1903: 53ff.). I will explain this in more detail in the Sect. “Lipps’s explorations of the mind’s tendencies”. The crucial point now is that for Lipps it is the to-be-determined objects themselves, implied in the conscious contents, that call for determination and guide the experiencing mind in its activity on this trajectory towards object-determination (Gegenstandsbestimmung) and knowledge (Wissen). The mind’s laws that are important in this regard are described by Lipps within associative and apperceptive psychology.¹¹ These laws are formulated in terms of tendencies, i.e., distinct ways of pulling the experiencing mind in a certain direction and thus towards certain kinds of progress in the mind’s activity and the corresponding experience that results from it.

Striving and the ‘I’

Like his teacher Fichte, Herbart posits an intrinsic relationship between self-consciousness, the ‘I’, and striving. However, as I have reconstructed above, critical of Fichte, Herbart emphasizes that the ‘I’ can only be thought of when considered in contact with a real and plural non-‘I’. Herbart explains striving as the result of the mind being disturbed by substantially different things. These disturbances translate into the striving of the ‘I’ toward representation (Vorstellung) as a means of the mind’s self-preservation. Although striving has its origin in the real things, giving rise to Herbart’s realism that was meant as a refutation of Fichtean idealism,¹² it is intrinsically the striving of the mind and the ‘I’ when representations have passed the threshold of consciousness.

In Lipps, we also find the idea of an intrinsic conceptual interrelation between striving and ‘I’. The important developments in Lipps’s thought that the readers of his oeuvre can witness also affect his conception of the ‘I’ (Fabbianelli, 2013, 2018). For instance, it has been argued that Lipps defended a non-egological theory of self-consciousness in his earlier work, such as the Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), contrasting with his strong emphasis on the core role of the ‘I’ as the center of experience (Fabbianelli, 2013: XLVff.). Indeed, Lipps had criticized the idea of self-awareness of the representing act as the experiential basis for a notion of self-consciousness (Lipps, 1883: 18). For the Lipps of this work, acts of the mind are nothing the subject is aware of in experience. That, however, should not make us overlook that even in Grundtatsachen Lipps operates with a notion of the ‘I’ as being involved in consciousness, namely, in terms of striving, which he defines as “the true (eigentlich) core of the ‘I’ and its activity” (Lipps, 1883: 601).¹³ As Lipps emphasizes, the differentiation between the world and ‘I’ only gradually emerges in consciousness out of “what originally is a non-separate unity, the content of the world and the content of our personhood (Persönlichkeit), or shorter the world and the ‘I’” (Lipps, 1883: 408). This makes it sound like egological consciousness is something that only develops later within the process of experience rather than being intrinsic to it. That said, Lipps also says that “more and more the contents of the immediate self-feeling become salient, the feelings of pleasure and pain, of striving (Strebung) and counter-striving (Widerstrebung), which accompany all other psychic life (seelisches Leben), as the authentic fundament … of the ‘I’” (Lipps, 1883: 408). Strictly speaking, that means that wherever a feeling of striving arises, i.e., wherever an unconscious process (Vorgang) passes the threshold of consciousness and is accompanied by a feeling of striving, egological consciousness must come with it. And, indeed, Lipps also emphasizes: “We also call the contents of representation (Vorstellungsinhalte) as belonging to the ‘I’ or as our contents of representation” (Lipps, 1883: 441). The necessity to assume that each conscious moment features a sense of being mine will also become evident for Lipps in the same work – within the context of giving an account of memory and the connection of different temporal moments. He writes: “What provides the basis (Halt) to the entire sequence is the present ‘I’ that I am experiencing” (Lipps, 1883: 446).

Resolving these ambiguities present in Lipps’s early portrayal of the ‘I’, and its relationship to his mature thinking, would necessitate an in-depth discussion (see Fabbianelli, 2018). It is safe to say however that important thoughts that would characterize his later philosophy of the ego already surfaced in earlier periods. These include the idea that each moment of experience involves a sense of oneself, which Lipps would denote with the label of “self-feeling (Selbstgefühl)” (Lipps, 1883: 409), or later “I-feeling (Ich-Gefühl)” (Lipps, 1901: 13; 1902a: 6).¹⁴ Accordingly, Lipps would come to explicitly acknowledge that conscious contents and the awareness of one’s ‘I’ as the central pole of experience are mutually dependent and cannot be defined separately from each other (Lipps, 1901: 13; 1903: 12; 1905: 10). Even the distinction between the conscious ‘I’ and the real, elusive ‘I’ as underlying and being the bearer of all experience is already mentioned in Grundtatsachen (Lipps, 1883: 441).

While Lipps’s approach to the ‘I’ is undeniably unique, he retains significant aspects of Herbart’s account of self-consciousness throughout his work. These include the rejection of a pure, content-free ‘I’; the dismissal of the notion that original self-consciousness can be reduced to mere self-awareness of the act of representation; the view of striving as the foundation of self-consciousness; and the crucial role of encountering real otherness. These ideas form the bedrock for the understanding of the dynamics observed in our lived experiences.

After outlining these Herbartian aspects in Lipps’s work, two points become clear that I would like to summarize: First, fully comprehending these topics requires more elaboration, and discussing them in more depth can improve our understanding of these two underexplored philosophers. Secondly, both the notion of ‘striving’ and ‘tendency’ are most relevant to all these topoi that connect Herbart and Lipps. This is so because Lipps defines striving in terms of tendency. Tendency becomes a pivotal concept for Lipps, used to articulate the complex laws that govern the dynamics of psychic life. This spans from the unconscious interaction between mind and reality to the conscious representation of the world and objects (Gegenstände) within consciousness. In the next section, I aim to highlight the diversity of tendencies Lipps identifies and conceptualizes. This will help conceptualize how Lipps reconstructs the genesis of objects (Gegenstände) that we represent (vorstellen) in our experience.

Lipps’s Explorations of the Mind’s Tendencies

The Genesis of Representation (Vorstellung) as the General Topos

The aim of Lipps’s theory of experience is to conceptualize how the mind, in its encounter with the real world, would give rise to the consciousness of objects and ourselves as experiencing subjects. This task is one of reconstructing the movement from the mind’s unconscious activity (Tätigkeit) towards conscious representations (Vorstellungen) of reality. It concerns the becoming of conscious contents as soon as the previously unconscious representations (Vorstellungen) have crossed the “threshold of consciousness (Schwelle des Bewusstseins)” (Lipps, 1883: 160)—a further notion Lipps borrows from Herbart. Such a talk of unconscious representations should not confuse us: It is not like there are unconscious contents (Inhalte). This, as mentioned before, would be impossible for Lipps. Rather, Lipps takes it that unconscious processes (Vorgänge) once they make it beyond the threshold are accompanied by conscious contents (Lipps, 1903: 38). The point, thus, is that the conscious contents develop out of the mind’s activity and do not exist either prior to the encounter between the mind and the real world or before a process becomes conscious (Lipps, 1883: 700f.; 1903: 40). For Lipps, not all processes (Vorgänge) of the mind become accessible to consciousness, but when they do, conscious contents emerge for the experiencing subject.

To make sense of the genesis of conscious representations (Vorstellungen), Lipps resorts to the notions of force (Kraft) and energy (Energie). Force refers to the performance (Leistung) of the mind in attending to a certain object: “The attention directed at a represented object is nothing else but the psychological force of the representation of the object” (Lipps, 1903: 34). More generally, Lipps defines force as the “possibility that processes (Vorgänge) can happen in the mind in the first place” (Lipps, 1903: 36).¹⁵ The psychological force of the mind, i.e., the quantity of attention the mind can devote to any process (as well as the mind’s general capacity for activity), is limited. Since force is needed for any process to become conscious, Lipps emphasizes, that all mental processes compete with each other for being noticed. Not all mental processes can be noticed at the same time. Only those that are capable of overcoming other impeding mental processes may make it beyond the threshold of consciousness, provided they are capable of binding a sufficient quantity of the mind’s force. Lipps employs the notion of energy to define this – ultimately quantitative – parameter. Some events are more prone to capture our attention than others, some events may be registered by our nervous systems but do not make it to the conscious level, as the corresponding processes in the mind bear only a low amount of energy. As Lipps is adamant, whether or not a process will be successful in capturing the mind’s force, is not only dependent on the energy inherent in every single process but also on how the different processes relate to each other within the whole context of the mind (“psychischer Lebenszusammenhang” Lipps, 1903: 36). Regarding this competition, Lipps identifies another tendency of mental processes: the “tendency to appropriate psychic force at the expense of all others” (Lipps, 1903: 36). This interplay of mutual impediment (Hemmung) is what constitutes “striving” (Streben) and makes it a ubiquitous phenomenon in the mind: “Since ultimately every psychic event carries within it the tendency towards a specific kind of progress (Fortgang), and impediments (Hemmungen) must be overcome everywhere in psychic life, every psychic event generally has more or less the character of striving” (Lipps, 1902a: 23).

The movement from the mind’s activity towards consciousness—conscious activity—takes time. The early Lipps describes it as the “psychological time” (Lipps, 1883: 139) required for a process to develop conscious content from unconscious activity. This involves the process overcoming competing processes that impede its progression and the related movement. Lipps emphasizes that the continuity (Stetigkeit) of the process is something that is played out in the unconscious: “Now, we find nothing in our consciousness of such a continuous process of the emergence of representations. Continuity must therefore occur outside of our consciousness” (Lipps, 1883: 126). However, this refers only to the genesis of conscious contents (Bewusstseinsinhalte). What Lipps is suggesting is that we are unable to perceive the gradual emergence of, for example, a sensation (Empfindung) of redness or sourness. Once the underlying mental process has become conscious, the sensation is just there.

However, the movement does not terminate in the (unconscious) genesis of the conscious contents, which are for Lipps among the primary facts of consciousness. The movement continues within consciousness (Lipps, 1883: 11). As Lipps emphasizes, the conscious contents are continually changing, and never is there any moment of consciousness that is completely empty. For Lipps that implies that the temporal progress of consciousness is a continuity. Even a simple impression (Eindruck) has a duration and is temporally extended: “A continuity of fulfilment is inherent to any simple perception” (Lipps, 1883: 589). As Lipps highlights, appealing to Kant, “time is the comprehensive, space-encompassing form of intuition” (Lipps, 1883: 590). For Lipps, every conscious moment is subject to a continuous “transformation (Umwandlung)” (Lipps, 1903: 84). This transformation doesn’t alter the conscious content itself but rather how it is experienced. Such transformation has a corresponding conscious correlate (Bewussteinskorrelat), whereby the previous state is represented in consciousness as “earlier (früher)” and subsequent states as “later (später)” (Lipps, 1903: 84). For Lipps, the progress from moment to moment integrates the whole psychic process and constitutes a “unified context of events” that underlies the consciousness of time (Zeitbewußtsein überhaupt) (Lipps, 1903: 84).

It is against a temporally-structured and so-unified background that, for Lipps, a localization (Lokalisation) of sensations and the experience of space become possible in the first place. This is so because, according to Lipps, a spatial order (räumliche Ordnung) can only emerge where different representations (Vorstellungen) are merged together in a relevant sense. More specifically, it is the representation of the body’s position (the position of the eyeballs) that has to be correlated in time with a certain set of sensations (the specific color, shape, light, etc. when looking at a red figure from a certain angle): “it is when a specific reproduced movement connects itself with the sensation of a particular eye position that a sufficient ground for localization is given” (Lipps, 1883: 518). Although Lipps emphasizes that the representation of (bodily) movement is important in our experience of space and notably its unity (Lipps, 1883: 582), he is also adamant that representations of movement (Bewegungsvorstellungen) taken for themselves cannot bring about the differentiation between and for that matter the localization of distinct sensations (Lipps, 1883: 511ff.; 1885: 3ff.). In fact, he highlights that in order to represent movement, a primal differentiation of impressions (Einzeleindrücke) is presupposed (Lipps, 1885: 16). On the most fundamental level, the sense of movement (Bewegungsempfindung) has “no constitutive significance” (Lipps, 1883: 698). What constitutes spatiality and the differentiation of distinct sensations is rather their quality, i.e., whether they are the same and thus tend towards fusion (Verschmelzung) or are different and thus tend to hold their ground against each other (Selbstbehauptung). Tendencies and their interplay thus are at the heart of the constitution of spatiality. According to Lipps, different sensations become salient (and space opens up) where some of them resemble each other (Ähnlichkeit) and others are qualitatively distinct (Unterschied) (Lipps, 1885: 38). The individuation of single sensations thus becomes a question of how they relate to each other. It should be noted however that the experience of different conscious contents that resemble each other to a bigger and lesser degree as such is not yet the consciousness of an object (Gegenstand).

In his early works, including the Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), Lipps did not have a clear understanding of how objects (Gegenstände) relate to conscious contents (Bewusstseinhalte), something he would only begin to clarify in his Vom Fühlen, Wollen und Denken (1902) and Einheiten und Relationen (1902) (Fabbianelli, 2013: XXVII-XXXII).¹⁶ With the attempt to elucidate the meaning of ‘object’ (Gegenstand), Lipps’s emphasis on associative psychology shifts towards an emphasis on apperceptive psychology (Fabbianelli, 2013: XXXVIII). By apperception, Lipps refers to a specific activity through which a certain gestalt is apprehended and so foregrounded within the field of conscious contents:

So that the individual figures, as these particular entities detached from their surroundings, and thus also the ways in which they are organized into figure complexes or overall figures, are distinguished by me, this requires a special activity of highlighting, summarizing, interrelating, and delineating. We now call this activity the apperceptive activity or apperception. (Lipps, 1903: 114)

It is through apperception that conscious contents can give rise to the consciousness of objects, which for Lipps consists in thinking (Denken): “Contents are sensed, perceived, represented (vorgestellt); objects are thought (gedacht)” (Lipps, 1903: 55). When a red apple fills our field of sight, we perceive the redness qua sensation (Empfindung), which is the content of our consciousness. Now it is because we perceive the redness of the apple that we come to see the apple, i.e., the object. As Lipps puts it: “I look through the content at the object (durch den Inhalt hin auf den Gegenstand)” (Lipps, 1903: 55). The content thus is the vehicle through which we apperceive and relate to objects: “Through perception conscious contents arise. Through apperception ‘objects’ emerge for me” (Lipps, 1903: 54).

Lipps emphasizes though that apperception is already required for something to be a conscious content for us in the first place. There would never be a manifold of different individuated sensations if they weren’t all given to the one same experiencing subject (Lipps, 1902b: 4, 63). Defending thus what is today referred to as an egological theory of consciousness,¹⁷ he argues that the “consciousness of ‘mineness’ (‘Meinsein’)” (Lipps, 1903: 2) adheres to all conscious contents and allows for them to be related with each other in the first place. For Lipps, the ‘I’ is involved in the movement from conscious content to the experience of objects as soon as anything presents itself to the mind and makes it beyond the threshold of consciousness: to be given to one concrete ‘I’, is part of what is “essential to any conscious experience” (gehört mit zum Wesen der Bewusstseinserlebnisse) (Lipps, 1903: 12). To better understand the movement from conscious content to object, we need to take a closer look at this involvement of the ‘I’ and its apperceiving activity. This will also allow me to bring to light the role of further tendencies. But first, it is important to recognize that Lipps considers the whole movement to possess a dual structure.

The Dual Structure of the Movement: Objective Demand and Subjective Striving

Lipps emphasizes that the genesis of object-representation is a movement determined both by the object to be represented and by the subject engaging in its apperception. Since the object’s representation emerges from the interaction between object and subject, this process exhibits a dual structure. This duality allows for an analysis with a twofold focus:

(a) On the one hand, there is the demand (Forderung) of the object, as already mentioned, which calls for the ‘I’s’ attention (Zuwendung). By focusing on the conscious content, the ‘I’ inquires about the object and, in turn, receives an answer through its demand. This interaction may ultimately lead to the recognition (Anerkennung) of the object and its reality by the subject (Lipps, 1903: 60). In this context, Lipps emphasizes again the processual character and the need to distinguish between different genetic levels in the development of the experience of the object. On the most basic layer, the subject only feels a pull towards a still indeterminate object that lacks any definition (Bestimmung). The striving that is instigated thereby is “blind (zielblind)” (Lipps, 1905: 157) and only based on contents (Empfindungsinhalten), which are the “root” of all activity (Lipps, 1905: 159). Given that, at this stage, the object is not yet present as object—i.e., for Lipps, thought or known—the activity put forth by the contents is a “fully blind activity of drive (völlig blinde Triebtätigkeit)” (Lipps, 1905: 160). The striving remains blind until it transforms into a concrete examination of a specific object, i.e., into “a conscious activity of knowledge acquisition (Erkenntnistätigkeit)” that aims to determine what an object is and whether it is real and which value it might have (Lipps, 1905: 162).

Talk of such a basic blind drive activity may seem to imply that the whole movement rests on a process that knows no final point, no telos, which would undermine the idea of experience having a teleological character. However, it is important to note that, for Lipps, even the blind drive as striving and activity has an aim, even though it is not yet conscious. This aim can be expressed in a twofold way: On the one hand, blind striving has the object as its target and is also triggered by it in the first place (Lipps, 1905: 143); on the other hand, blind striving, to anticipate the dual structure of the movement, can be considered as an activity (Tätigkeit) that aims for an act (Akt) (Lipps, 1905: 152).¹⁸ That the activity was aiming for an act is ultimately manifest only in the act of “termination” (Vollendung) (Lipps, 1905: 153), which Lipps thinks is not simply the abort of an activity, but its culminating end, an experience of “snapping-up (Einschnappen)” (Lipps, 1905: 153). The reference to a blind drive activity thus should not mislead us to think that the whole movement was bereft of direction and finality. It just means that the very consciousness of the aim is itself an achievement within the movement that is initiated through the contact between the real thing and the mind. This movement grows out of the mind’s unconscious processes (Vorgänge) and has its end-point in the determination of the object, as demanded (gefordert) by the thing itself.

As Lipps further highlights, the movement towards full determination of the object finds its fulfillment in the perceptual experience of the object: “Every question, about what the actual object is that we think and take for real, is the tendency to grasp it fully ‘in intuition’ (anschaulich), in its full determination (Bestimmtheit), i.e., to have it in consciousness completely as that what it is” (Lipps, 1905: 127; see: 117). Lipps also calls this a “tendency of adequate representation (Tendenz der adäquaten Vorstellung)” (Lipps, 1905: 127), “tendency towards fulfillment (Erfüllungstendenz)” (Lipps, 1903: 164) or “tendency towards complete experience (Tendenz des vollen Erlebens)” (Lipps, 1902a: 88). The tendency exists because the object is not fully disclosed in any individual conscious content at a given point in time: “[W]ith any representation, I mean an ‘object’ that transcends the conscious content (Vorstellungsinhalt)” (Lipps, 1902a: 89). This can be exemplified by the perception of a house: “My perceptual image (Wahrnehmungsbild) is indeed just the image of one side of the house, and in this image the perceived side is perspectivally shifted (perspektivisch verschoben)” (Lipps, 1905: 36; see Lipps, 1883: 402). By seeing just one side of the house, we do not yet have full knowledge of the house, there are still sides whose qualities need to be determined but are also ‘meant’ in the perceptual act (Lipps, 1905: 36; see 1903: 10). But since the object’s demand (Forderung) concerns not only simple attention but complete determination, the “objective tendency,” which is the “last ground of striving” (Lipps, 1902a: 82f.), prevails in moving the mind: further perceptual acts engaging with the house’s sides are prompted.

(b) On the other hand, the whole movement towards the full experience of the object can be considered in terms of the activity (Tätigkeit) of the ‘I’: striving and apperceiving. The object’s demand (Forderung) and the resulting pull on the ‘I’ is, by the same token, the striving of the ‘I’ towards experiencing the object. Recalling Lipps’s critique of Herbart, we can say that, for Lipps, neither the real nor its representation (Vorstellung) “strive”; in the strict sense, it is always the ‘I’ that is striving—striving towards activity (Tätigkeit) (Lipps, 1905: 150). Lipps also talks about a “tendency to perceive (Perceptionstendenz)” (Lipps, 1902a: 89). The object’s demand is to be recognized, i.e., perceived, apperceived, and fully experienced as that what it is. This corresponds to the subject’s aim, which consists in a “certainty fully in accordance with experience” (völlige erfahrungsgemäße Gewissheit)” (Lipps, 1883: 699) or formulated as conscious activity (Tätigkeit): “The ultimate goal is the unimpeded, self-harmonious (in sich einstimmige) flow of knowing (Erkennen)” (Lipps, 1883: 699). The inquiry (Befragen) into the ‘I’ that is called for by the object’s demand to be recognized terminates in the full knowledge of the object, which needs to be brought about by the ‘I’ (Lipps, 1905: 116–121). Such striving towards knowledge (Erkenntnisstreben) is “motivated” by the conflict (Widerstreit) of objective demands (objektive Forderungen) (Lipps 1903: 114).

Both objective demand and subjective striving constitute the dual structure of the whole movement of experience: “Every striving is the psychological reverse side (Kehrseite) of an objective demand” (Lipps, 1905: 135). Both aspects are inextricably interwoven and cannot be separated from each other (Lipps, 1905: 154). The dual structure of the movement can also be described in terms of “double relations”: “I relate to an objectivity (Gegenständliches) apperceptively (apperzipierend) and, in doing so, I experience the objectivity entering into a specific relationship with me” (Lipps, 1902b: 21). The object, in its individuality and unity, remains dependent on the apperceptive activity of the ‘I’, but the direction of apperception is “provided by the object (vom Gegenstand herkommend)” (Lipps, 1905: 109). So even if a melody as a whole (Ganzes), consisting of different tones, only exists insofar as it is unified through the ‘I's’ apperception (Lipps, 1905: 11f., 98f.; Lipps, 1903: 70; Lipps, 1902b: 104), many aspects of the experience are dictated by the object. For instance, the fact that a tone has its volume, pitch, and coloration lies in the nature of a tone, whether it is perceived, imagined, or thought (Lipps, 1902b: 76). But also a single given tone in relation to all other sensations that together make up experience at a given point in time provides the “guideline of association (Leitfaden der Assoziation)” (Lipps, 1903: 240) that pre-structures the ‘I's’ striving and apperceptive activity. All related processes have a “lawful (gesetzmäßig)” (Lipps, 1883: 702) character, i.e., follow rules that pertain to or have their ground in the subject. The objects thus guide the ‘I's’ apperception according to the subjective laws of the experiencing ‘I’.

The Individuation of Conscious Contents: an Example

The idea that objects guide the ‘I's’ apperception can be further illustrated with an example that also serves to finally clarify the individuation of conscious contents (Empfindungsinhalte) in light of the interplay between objective demand and the striving ‘I’. Take the perception of a red apple again. It is located on a brown table. Consider what in normal perception (once the apple is already apperceived as a red apple on a brown table) is the line of the shape of the apple: all the points, at which we still perceive red, but have brown in the direct visual vicinity. According to Lipps, different tendencies come together at what I would like to call ‘liminal’ red and brown (because they are each located at the border to another color sensation), which becomes clear if we consider what Lipps declares as the first “law of association (Assoziationsgesetz)” (Lipps, 1903: 44). It is defined in terms of three tendencies:

• 1. “tendency of every psychic process to produce a similar psychic process”

• 2. “tendency towards a continuation of similar sensations and perceptions or expectation”

• 3. “tendency of attention to follow the guideline of similarity” (Lipps, 1903: 44)

In the points of liminal red, the ‘I’ has the tendency to produce another visual sensation (1.), namely red, which results in an expectation to perceive red (2.). Now, in the vicinity is liminal brown which will disappoint the “sensation-expectation (Empfindungserwartung)” (Lipps, 1903: 44). Indeed, the liminal line along the shape of the apple is characterized by a conflict (Widerstreit) of tendencies or strivings. In liminal red, the expectation to experience a sensation of brown is disappointed, whereas in liminal brown the expectation to experience a sensation of red is disappointed. For Lipps, “disappointment (Enttäuschung)” (Lipps, 1883: 699) is a central aspect in the movement of experience because it structures the experiential field by providing a guideline for attention. At the liminal line of red, the ‘I’ feels a tendency to move its attention along the red sensations; at the liminal line of brown, the ‘I’ feels a tendency to move its attention along the brown sensation (3.).

It is now possible to better spell out how the interplay between object and striving ‘I’ enables and leads to the individuation of conscious contents and a unifying apperception of the object. The objects table and apple have different color qualities (among others), which translate into different and partially conflicting strivings in the ‘I’. By grounding these different strivings according to the subjective laws of association, the objects motivate specific apperceptions. All red points are taken together as parts of one single object to be distinguished from the brown background because all points that are within the red sphere have a similar profile of tendencies that are in conflict with the tendencies experienced in the brown sphere. In the red sphere, the “tendency to fuse (Verschmelzungstendenz)” (Lipps, 1883: 473) will be fulfilled and motivate a unifying apperception: “Different things do not work on their own and not against each other, but rather work together and combine in particular to create a unified effect on consciousness” (Lipps, 1902a: 64). Lipps emphasizes that the association that takes place is not one of gluing already individuated distinct impressions together (Lipps, 1903: 49), but rather that association is the process of “highlighting (or foregrounding) (Herausheben)” of something within the “all-comprehensive psychic life (psychischer Lebenszusammenhang)” (Lipps, 1902a: 7). Building upon these law-like associations, the ‘I’ is motivated to perform certain apperceptions through which unity as such is constituted and different unities are individuated within the experiential field. Both object and subject are involved in the constitutional process: the objects guide the ‘I's’ apperceptive activity on the ground of subjective laws. The dynamic of tendencies, to repeat Lipps’s criticism of Herbart, thus, does not occur on the side of the real things, nor on the single representations (Vorstellungen), but on the side of the subject, the apperceiving ‘I’ and its striving (Lipps, 1903: 164).

That said, it is important to stress that Lipps is not endorsing the view that the ‘I's’ constitutive activity only refers to how objects appear “just ‘for us’”; according to his conception, the objects are constituted “in us” (Lipps, 1905: 129). Subjective consciousness is the locus of objects, it is where they are realized qua objects and obtain validity (Geltung) (Lipps, 1902a, 1902b, 1902c: 71, 78; Lipps, 1903: 61; Lipps, 1883: 159).

Different Tendencies and Their Importance: Further Examples

Before concluding this section, I want to give a few additional examples to further illustrate the importance of tendencies in Lipps’s theory of consciousness. Since striving, for Lipps, is a subjective phenomenon of the ‘I’, tendencies—ways of striving—explain a great variety of other aspects of experience and its temporal continuation, too. For Lipps, the interaction of tendencies does not only regulate how a specific representation (Vorstellung) comes about but also how different representations follow each other across time. For instance, Lipps emphasizes the changes of force a representation may undergo within the “representational flow (Vorstellungsverlauf)” (Lipps, 1883: 177f.) when it ceases to attract attention because the ‘I’ has become familiar with an impression. Lipps’s terminus is the “tendency to flow off (Abflusstendenz)” (Lipps, 1883: 334) or the “passive tendency of absorption (passive Absorptionstendenz)” (Lipps, 1902a: 123), which is defined as the tendency to lose the force to bind attention in favor of other—temporally—related representations. Lipps explains that the longer a certain content is present in consciousness, the more it is prone to build relations with other contents and the likelihood increases that attention glides off to these other contents (Lipps, 1883: 339). On the other hand, Lipps identifies an “active tendency of absorption”, which is the “tendency to absorb all psychological force or power” (Lipps, 1902a: 123). Both tendencies are in constant conflict and influence the motion.

Tendencies are also important when it comes to the influence of past experiences on present consciousness, which is governed by the “law of empirical association (Erfahrungsassoziation)” (Lipps, 1903: 44) that involves the “tendency of full recurrence of the whole” (Lipps, 1903: 45). The latter is constituted by three interconnected tendencies:

• 1. if b has followed a in the past, a has the tendency to reproduce b when a is given again

• 2. if a was correlated with b in the past, the recurrence of a will motivate an expectation of b too

• 3. the tendency of attention to follow already experienced chains of cause and effect (Lipps, 1903: 45)

Other important tendencies and strivings are identified by Lipps in the context of our consciousness of reality (Wirklichkeitsbewusstsein). For Lipps, the consciousness of reality arises out of our expectations and how experience unfolds: “every expectation is a form … of consciousness of reality” and “if expectations are complemented by … experiences (erfahrungsmäßige Zusammenhänge), then we easily come to the conclusion that it could really be like we have been expecting it” (Lipps, 1883: 402). “Suppose”, Lipps writes, “a series of identical perceptual contents, occurring sequentially in time or situated adjacent to each other in space, eludes my gaze at some point, then I also assume the presence of those perceptual contents at that specific point” (Lipps, 1883: 402). Now consider further that the experiencing subject changes the perspective of its gaze or that time has progressed and that the expectation has been fulfilled. For Lipps, this means that “a degree of certainty must be possible to arise” (Lipps, 1883: 402). Any representation (Vorstellung), he says, carries in itself a tendency towards realization (Wirklichkeitstendenz), i.e., the tendency for the experiencing subject to posit the represented object as real. Whether this tendency leads to such a position, the consciousness of reality, depends on the balance between Wirklichkeitstendenz and counter-tendencies (Gegentendenzen) (Lipps, 1902a: 74). If the former is stronger than the latter, a consciousness of reality accrues. If walking around a house and the different gazes on the house confirm the relevant expectations about its different sides, the sense of the house being real solidifies. This model of conflicting tendencies also serves Lipps to compare imagination and perception. As he emphasizes, the insight “that the golden mountains have no place in the world of real objects cannot be experienced without the attempt to assign them a position in this world” (Lipps, 1902a: 55). It is the opposition between this tendency and how the world is otherwise experienced; the object of imagination does not fit into what is already accepted as real. Lipps also suggests that tendencies play a role in distinguishing modalities and hence in the consciousness of what is impossible, possible, likely, or necessary, and relates the workings of tendencies to the feelings of doubt and (un)certainty (Lipps, 1902a: 61ff.). And the list goes on. Tendencies are decisive in all acts of consciousness, not only in perception (Vorstellung) and thinking (Denken) but especially also in feeling (Fühlen) and willing (Wollen) (Lipps, 1902a). Lipps even conceptualizes tendencies with regard to practical agency and identity when he describes the “tendency of unification (Einstimmigkeit), according to which the person tends to act in harmony with herself [i.e., her personality]” (Lipps, 1903: 281). In sum, according to Lipps, tendencies permeate every aspect of experience, intricately shaping the entire realm of our encounters with the world and giving rise to all movements within the conscious mind.

Conclusion

The primary goal of this article was to shed light on a still under-researched and often overlooked figure: Theodor Lipps. In an effort to deepen our understanding of his intricate thought, this work concentrated on exploring the concept of tendency. I have shown that this concept plays a pivotal role in Lipps’s endeavor to develop a theory of experience. This theory seeks a genealogical reconstruction of the emergence of experience and the phenomena of consciousness encountered within it. More specifically, my goals were fourfold: firstly, to show that Lipps developed his concept of tendency in dialogue with the philosophy of Johann Friedrich Herbart; secondly, that Lipps gained numerous insights in this dialogue, insights that continued to preoccupy him throughout his philosophical career resulting in a conceptual framework that presents a distinct version of Lippsian Herbartianism; thirdly, to demonstrate that the general concept of tendency is central in this Lippsian Herbartianism insofar as tendency defines striving and, as such, the entire movement of the mind; fourthly, to highlight the various specific ways in which Lipps applied this concept, under which he categorized a multitude of laws that play a role in the genesis of object-consciousness and the underlying contents of consciousness. The multifaceted analyses of tendencies in psychic life, which form the basic structures of the teleological mechanics of the mind inspired by Herbart, illustrate that Lipps has built his own conceptual apparatus to conceive of the movements of the mind and the lawfulness of lived experience. This aspect has not yet received sufficient consideration in the research literature and invites further exploration in the future.

In this context, the limitations of my own investigation should also be mentioned. As I have mentioned several times, Lipps continually revised his thinking. He persistently reevaluated his understanding of how phenomena, known from our immediate experience, emerge from the unconscious interplay between mind and reality. My focus was on the elements of his theory that have persisted in these attempts, on the one hand, and on the compilation of theoretical elements that he developed at different times, but which must be taken together—as if a puzzle—to recognize that Lipps worked throughout his life on the reconstruction of the becoming of experience. Some aspects of this reconstruction still need to be examined more closely in the future. This includes Lipps’s conception of the ‘I’ and, consequently, his extensive analyses of feelings. For Lipps, feelings are not merely how the ‘I’ manifests in experience; they are also central to the genesis of all phenomena of consciousness. This centrality is due to the fact that feelings are experienced within the context of conscious contents that arise from the mind’s contact with reality. Thus, for Lipps, it is precisely through experiencing and unfolding feelings that the world is revealed to us (Romand, 2021). Given this, it is not surprising that a close relationship exists between feeling and tendencies, a topic that should certainly be further explored in the future. Another aspect to be illuminated concerns how Lipps’s understanding of tendencies relates to his metaphysical perspectives, which change over the course of his philosophical work. This concerns, on the one hand, the interrelationship between psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics, which Lipps redefined repeatedly (see Fabbianelli, 2013), and on the other hand, the oscillation between realism and idealism that is observable in Lipps’s thought. In this context, it should also be emphasized that a possible comparison between Lipps and Fichte would be of great interest. Lipps adopted Herbart’s realism, which was developed in response to Fichte’s idealism but he also demonstrates parallels with Fichte (Fabbianelli, 2013: XXIf., XXXVII, XLII, XLIII, LXI, LXII). It should not be forgotten that striving was of essential importance also for Fichte after all. It might be though that parallels between Lipps and Fichte could be explained by Lipps’s adoption of Herbartian ideas, which in turn contain central elements of Fichtean philosophy despite all criticism. Alternatively, it’s worth considering whether Lipps’s engagement with Fichte represents an attempt to diverge from Herbart’s realism.

A direction for future research can also be identified regarding another thinker. The relationship between the Munich philosopher Lipps and the prominent phenomenologist Edmund Husserl has not yet been fully understood to this day, both in terms of mutual reception and the relationship between their respective philosophical approaches. Interestingly, Husserl’s genetic-phenomenological theory of experience, which examines the constitution of object-consciousness, also places significant emphasis on the concepts of striving, impediment (Hemmung), and tendency (see Kaiser, 1997). Therefore, exploring these concepts within Husserl’s framework, especially in light of the analysis presented here on Lipps, promises to open new avenues for future research on both philosophers.