Abstract
Christian Wolff was very influential in eighteenth-century psychology, especially in the German tradition. This is uncontroversial. However, there is little literature on the reception of his work in nineteenth-century psychology. The goal of this chapter is to address this gap by providing a case study centered on Wilhelm Wundt. We show that Wundt was well aware of Wolff’s psychological program and that he often referred to Wolff in order to establish his own program. More specifically, Wundt recognized that Wolff played a crucial role in the systematization of psychological terminology. At the same time, he was highly critical of Wolff’s metaphysical assumptions and rejected his rational psychology as well as the idea of mental faculties. We find that, in his attempts to demarcate his new psychological program and to distance himself from Wolff, Wundt ended up misunderstanding important aspects of Wolff’s psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to find a thorough discussion of Wolff’s psychology. Citations of his work do not show a proper treatment of his ideas. Sometimes, one has the impression that he was more cited than read.
- 2.
It seems that Wolff’s psychological program did not have a significant impact upon the establishment of French or North American scientific psychology. If one takes, for instance, Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) and William James (1842–1910) as representatives of the new scientific psychology in France and the USA, respectively, one will find but a few scattered references to Wolff’s psychology (e.g., James, 1890/1981, pp. 199, 386; Ribot, 1870, p. 19).
- 3.
Traditional accounts of the history of German psychology recognize the influence of Wolff’s psychological program in eighteenth-century German culture, but very little, if anything, is said about its reception in the nineteenth century (e.g., Dessoir, 1912, pp. 64–108; Klemm, 1911, pp. 60–65; Sommer, 1892, pp. 1–23). More recent accounts have not changed this pattern. For instance, Bell (2005, pp. 19–53) shows the pervasive influence of Wolff’s psychology in German literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century, praising “a series of innovations grounded in Wolff’s system” (p. 29). When it comes to the nineteenth century, however, the most one gets is the claim that Wolff’s idea of psycheometria preempted “by more than a hundred years the development of psychometrics” (p. 19).
- 4.
The Wundt translations were made by the first author. The Wolff translations were made by both authors.
- 5.
Up to this point, Wundt had been discussing the limitations of the deductive method of metaphysical psychologists, who derived psychological theories from a priori metaphysical hypotheses, such as the immateriality or simplicity of the soul. For him, this submission of psychology to metaphysics, as represented by J. F. Herbart (1776–1841), for example, led the former to stagnation.
- 6.
A year later, in the first edition of his Vorlesungen über die Menschen-und Thierseele (Lectures on the human and animal mind), Wundt repeated the same pattern of interpretation: he used Wolff’s division of psychology to illustrate the insufficiency of traditional psychological methods and the need for reform (Wundt, 1863, p. 4). Again, he understood Wolff’s psychology primarily in methodological terms.
- 7.
Initially, Wundt conceived of this supra-individual level of psychological analysis in two different ways, first, as social or moral statistics providing descriptive and correlational analyses of social phenomena (marriages, suicides, births, deaths, etc.), and second, as Völkerpsychologie, a psychological analysis of complex cultural products, such as language, myths, and customs. For a detailed account of this methodological reform, see Araujo (2016, Chap. 2).
- 8.
Wundt was well acquainted with the experimental tradition in both psychophysiology and psychophysics that had preceded him. His point, however, was that psychological experiments should not be restricted to those elementary forms. This is precisely what he would later develop in Leipzig.
- 9.
Later, in his mature system, Wundt would speak not only of basic concepts but also of basic principles that guide psychological research, such as the principle of psychophysical parallelism and the principle of psychical causality (e.g., Wundt, 1911).
- 10.
In the German tradition, the word Seele can be translated either as soul or as mind, depending on the specific context in which it appears. In Wundt, the term refers to the subject matter of psychology, which is not conceived of as a metaphysical substance. In this sense, we prefer “mind” to “soul.” For more details, see Araujo (2016).
- 11.
Wundt refers here to paragraph 643 of Rational Psychology (Wolff, 1734, §.643).
- 12.
As for sensation, Wundt says that “the word Empfindung has also been used, since Christian Wolff, as a translation of the Latin sensus, sensatio” (Wundt, 1902–1903, vol. 1, pp. 354–355). With regard to representation, he says that “Wolff first introduced the word [Vorstellung] into psychological terminology” (Wundt, 1902–1903, vol. 1, pp. 348–349).
- 13.
At this point, Wundt went awry in his referencing to Wolff’s Psychologia Empirica. Instead of Part I, second section, first chapter, Wolff defines sensation only in §.65, which belongs to the second chapter of the second section in Part I (Wolff, 1732, §.65).
- 14.
It is important to note that this is only the initial and still immature theory of emotional life that appears in the first edition of Wundt’s Grundzüge. In his mature system, he would modify it. Be that as it may, this initial formulation is sufficient to show his opposition to what he understood Wolff’s conception to be.
- 15.
We will see later (cf. Sect. 17.5) that Wundt postulated a third class of mental phenomena that occur together with feelings and representations: the will (der Wille). Accordingly, every mental process has three irreducible dimensions: the intellectual, the affective, and the volitional. Whereas the first is related to the apprehension of objects and the second to the corresponding subjectivity, the will refers to the class of phenomena that give direction to the mind, from simple impulses to complex choices that lead to action. The implications of Wundt’s theory of the will will be seen later. For now, this is sufficient to clarify his opposition to Wolff.
- 16.
Wundt refers here to paragraph 511 of the Psychologia Empirica, in which Wolff offers the following definition: “pleasure is the intuition or the intuitive knowledge of the perfection of anything, whether true or apparent” (Wolff, 1732, §.511, p. 389).
- 17.
Wundt uses two passages from the Psychologia Empirica to substantiate his reading of Wolff. See Wolff, 1732, §§.603 and 509.
- 18.
Following Wundt, the lower part of knowledge consists of sense, imagination, and memory, while the higher part involves attention, reflection, and understanding. The lower part of desire comprises pleasure, desire, and affect, while the higher part is composed of the will and freedom (Wundt, 1874, p. x). In sum, the soul can be divided into four main classes, so that every mental phenomenon would have to fit into one of them. It is important to note that Wundt did not indicate the paragraphs in which Wolff proposed such a division of the faculties and its parts; instead, he referred to the 1738 edition of Wolff’s Psychologia Empirica in general.
- 19.
Later, Wundt would criticize Wolff’s theory, affirming that it consists “merely in a superficial classification of mental processes, in which general concepts―such as memory, imagination, sensibility, understanding, etc.―are treated as unitary fundamental forces of the mind” (Wundt, 1906, p. 4).
- 20.
In the last edition of his Grundzüge, Wundt clarified this point further: “they [the mental faculties] are not merely taken as class names for certain domains of inner experience, which in fact they are, but one considers them as forces by means of which the particular phenomena are produced” (Wundt, 1908–1911, vol. 1, p. 11).
- 21.
By real interpretation (wirkliche Interpretation), Wundt means concepts that refer to reality as given in experience, as opposed to abstract nouns.
- 22.
Wundt used the term voluntaristiche Psychologie to characterize his psychological theory for the first time in 1895 (Wundt, 1895, p. 166).
- 23.
In his mature discussions on intellectualism, Wundt does not mention Wolff as a typical representative. Instead, his focus is on Leibniz and Herbart. However, there can be no doubt that Wolff is implied in those discussions.
- 24.
For a detailed analysis of the development of Wundt’s voluntarism, see Araujo (2016).
- 25.
For a full account of the main theses regarding Wolff’s division of psychology in the literature, see Pereira (2017).
- 26.
In the eighteenth century, neurophysiological knowledge underwent a great expansion, which led to new empirical discoveries and various controversies: “It [the eighteenth century] saw the classic and time-honored ideas of neurophysiology―animal spirits moving in hollow nerve conduits to and from the ventricles of the brain―being gradually replaced by ideas more in accord with anatomical reality. It also saw an enormous increase in interest in the nervous system as the source of many of the ills of both body and mind, along with new therapies” (Whitaker et al., 2007, p. 3). For a general overview of this transformation and the ensuing debates, see Brazier (1984) and Duchesneau (2012).
- 27.
For a detailed analysis of the peculiar character of Wolff’s rational psychology, see the contribution from Corey Dyck to this volume.
- 28.
Wundt was not the first to formulate this accusation. It was already present in Wolff’s time, causing him to make some specific defenses on this point in his Schutzschriften, which followed his Deutsche Metaphysik, and especially in his Anmerckungen zur Deutschen Metaphysik. For more details about the controversies regarding Wolff’s psychology, see the contributions from Thiago Pereira and Saulo Araujo as well as from Ursula Goldenbaum to this volume.
- 29.
Wolff conceives of the will in two different senses: as an empirical act of the soul (volitio) and as faculty or potency (voluntas). See, for example, Wolff (1738/1968, §.882). However, he does not always follow his own distinction.
- 30.
It should be noted that in his Psychologia Rationalis, Wolff attributed to the soul “an inclination to change a present perception,” which he called percepturitio (Wolff, 1740/1972, §.481, p. 396). According to him, every perception brings in itself such a tendency or inclination (conatus).
- 31.
This was already explicit in his German writings (e.g., Wolff, 1726, Ad §.873). In this sense, one can say that Wolff’s reinforcement of the same point in his Latin writings represents one more step in his attempt to defend himself against the old charge of determinism, which had contributed to his expulsion from Halle. For more details, see the contribution from Ursula Goldenbaum to this volume, as well as Biller (2018) and Pečar et al. (2015).
- 32.
To illustrate this distinction, Wolff uses an interesting analogy: “who would say that ignition and melting are the same just because both effects take place due to a force of fire?” (Wolff, 1740/1983b, Ad §.873, p. 533).
- 33.
For a more in-depth discussion of this complex problem in Wolff and Wolffianism, see the contribution from Stefan Heßbrügger-Walter to this volume.
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Araujo, S.d.F., Pereira, T.C.R. (2021). “The Most Excellent Psychological Systematist”: Wolff’s Psychology in the Eyes of Wilhelm Wundt. In: Araujo, S.d.F., Pereira, T.C.R., Sturm, T. (eds) The Force of an Idea. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74435-9_17
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