Abstract
In times characterized by a decreasing interest in the past, a book devoted to a figure from the early history of psychology as a science calls for our attention by its very existence. Araujo’s book on Wundt is a strong argument in favor of an historical perspective and research on history. He locates its value not only in themselves as offering evidence, and appreciation, of impressive past human achievements, but also in providing a better orientation when making decisions in the present and envisaging future developments of the sciences and humanity in general.
In spite of discursive declarations of “the end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), grounded in the belief that humanity had found a solution to the task of socio-political organization in the form of the universalization of Western liberalism, the new shape of liberalism, neoliberalism, has proven to be very productive in making history. At the same time, however, neoliberalism fails to acknowledge how it turns individual and collective subjectivities away from an interest in history. The epistemological foundations of liberalism and neoliberalism alike, joined with their political and ideological power, are among the main forces that repress insight into the historicity of human beings and their achievements, including the sciences, and cultivate an ahistorical attitude. Therefore, to advocate strong historical arguments under a neoliberal regime has, in my view, some subversive potential, even though this might not be recognizable at first glance.
Araujo’s book is not only distinguished by its deviation from the contemporary privileging of liberal presentism and its implications for the status of history and the historical in general. It is a reappraisal of the history of psychology from multiple perspectives. Araujo offers a reassessment of the dominant historiographic narratives but also critical reconsiderations of alternative accounts aimed at overcoming the constraints of traditional accounts of the history of psychology.
By attending to Wundt in the search for the philosophical foundations of psychology, Araujo questions the cornerstone of the dominant origin story of psychology, according to which Wundt presumably liberated psychology from the constraints of its philosophical past. Through historical and logical arguments, Araujo presents his main thesis: Wundt developed his psychologies—Wundt indeed proposed several psychologies even though his experimental psychology has become the dominant version within traditional histories of the discipline—as a means to serve his philosophical project, namely to build a new, scientifically informed Weltanschauung. Araujo applies a developmental approach, reconstructing emergence, development, and abandonment, and a novel narrative of Wundt’s psychological and philosophical ideas. Thus, there is more than one Wundt, and even the historiographically dominant Wundt becomes different after Araujo’s book.
However, it is not only a broader scope or a longer time perspective that distinguishes Araujo’s book from others, it is the historical argumentation. Through exploring the history of Wundt’s views, Araujo justifies and finds support for his main thesis, namely that Wundt’s psychology ultimately served philosophical purposes. Further, he advances an even stronger claim—without knowing and understanding Wundt’s philosophical system, it is not possible to understand Wundt’s psychology. Thus, Wundt’s philosophy is not only the external context of his psychology. Wundt called it scientific philosophy, because the anti-metaphysical philosophy to which he was committed, and which had become a new Zeitgeist in the second half of the 19th century, relied on the insights of the empirical sciences. There are, however, questions which cannot be answered by the empirical sciences; one example in the case of psychology is the nature of mind. These are questions to be discussed within philosophy, and Wundt was convinced that no scientific progress could make philosophy obsolete. Instead of mutual exclusion, Wundt understood the relation between the sciences and philosophy to be mutual dependence. Araujo’s thesis then is a radical reappraisal, given that psychology’s anti-philosophical attitude was imposed as a criterion of its scientific status at its inception and dominant historiographic accounts have incorrectly ascribed this attitude to Wundt himself.
Araujo offers a detailed analysis of Wundt’s writings, including archival material at Heidelberg and Leipzig University, and impressive insights into the secondary and relevant philosophical literatures. The implications of this analysis though are not restricted to the historical scholarship that has shaped the dominant model of psychology as a natural science. Although Wundt argued that psychology has a privileged place among other Geisteswissenschaften, thanks to its way of dealing with human experience, a great part of post-Wundtian psychology has been oriented to the goal of subjecting psychology to a natural science model. Araujo draws attention to the epistemological issues widely discussed by Wundt and shows their relevance for understanding contemporary developments in psychology. Araujo also discusses Wundt’s strong methodological program for psychology: “It is Wundt’s emphasis on induction, together with his enthusiasm for the experimental method, which defines the preponderantly methodological character of his psychological reform” (p. 31). Moreover, Araujo criticizes interpretations of Wundt as anti-empiricist and anti-positivist. Further, he shows that the program of experimental psychology was developed by Wundt already in the early 1860s, thereby calling into question the widely shared view in existing historiographic research that Wundt’s experimental psychology was born in Leipzig in late 1870s.
The main thesis that Wundt’s psychology is part of his philosophical project determines the structure of Araujo’s book. The introductory chapter contextualizes this new research on Wundt and argues for its justification given omissions and even false interpretations in the available Wundt scholarship. Araujo understands his study as a philosophical history of psychology, and therefore the focus is on philosophy as the framing and motivating force for Wundt’s psychological project. Additionally, Araujo reminds us that Wundt was highly appreciated as a philosopher, quoting Rudolf Eisler (1873–1926), who called Wundt “the Leibniz of the nineteenth century” and Wilhelm Stern (1871–1938), who considered him “one of the most universal living Gelehrten” (p. 12).
In justifying his choice of looking for the philosophical foundations of Wundt’s psychology, Araujo reviews other approaches, including Kurt Danziger’s and Martin Kusch’s. Araujo is very critical of Kusch’s social interpretation of knowledge, i.e., his sociologism, and his application of a sociology of knowledge approach to Wundt’s psychology:
However, Kusch’s analyses are far from convincing. … he fails to show how Wundt’s psychological theory as a whole, not to mention its underlying philosophical program, could be a social institution. Kusch ignores the fact that the theory was not collectively accepted or, to use his own criterion, that no collective had a self-referential belief about it. Moreover, even if this was granted, the social character of Wundt’s psychological theory (or parts thereof) cannot explain crucial aspects of the latter. (p. 14)
However, in my view, Araujo does not do justice to Kusch and his approach. Social interpretations do not replace other interpretations. But the same applies to philosophical interpretations. They pose different questions and cannot address questions about why new discourses, including scientific ones, emerge under certain socio-political and cultural conditions and why discourses change with socio-cultural alterations. Such changes cannot be explained only as expressions of an isolated internal logic of thinking. The Sociology of Knowledge was developed many decades before Kusch, in the late 1920s (Mannheim, 1929), and has offered new insights into the dynamics of knowledge production. Moreover, this approach has much to offer to psychology, with its inclination to individualize and psychologize social issues.
Returning to the structure of Araujo’s book, Wundt’s two psychologies and the philosophical preparation for the transition from the first to the second are reconstructed developmentally. In the first psychology, presented in Wundt’s early writings, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (BTS; 1862) and Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (VMT; 1863), mental processes were understood as logical processes (inferences). Araujo calls this psychology a logical theory of mind, or Wundt’s panlogism. This theory entailed two further theses: there are unconscious mental processes and, more specifically, there are unconscious inferences. Even though the idea of unconscious mental processes was already known in Wundt’s time, Araujo carefully analyses the existing historiographic accounts of the origin of the idea of the unconscious inference and sees limitations in the widely shared view that Helmholtz was a forerunner of Wundt’s concept of unconscious inference. Araujo provides evidence that “at least with regard to the use of the term, Wundt used it earlier than Helmholtz did” (p. 69).
To Araujo’s analysis and his vast references, I would add that Wundt’s introduction of unconscious mental processes and their relation to conscious ones is strikingly similar to Freud’s justification for assuming the existence of unconscious mental processes. In Wundt’s words:
We believe ourselves to have completely demonstrated that the assumption of unconscious logical processes is able not only to explain the results of the perceptual processes but also that in fact it correctly reveals the real nature of these processes, even though the processes themselves are not accessible to our immediate observation. (BTS, as cited in Araujo, 2016, p. 39)
To my knowledge, this is missing in both Wundt and Freud scholarship (even though Freud referred to Wundt in other contexts).
Another important aspect of the reappraisal of Wundt concerns his insights into the limits of individual psychology and the necessity of complementing it with a psychology that deals with phenomena emerging from our living within groups. Contrary to the widespread belief that Wundt made this turn only in the last two decades of his life, Araujo provides evidence that these insights were present and published already in Wundt’s early writing. However, Araujo claims that despite this, “Wundt’s position had an essentially individualist character” (p. 54). I would argue instead that Wundt’s position on this is rather ambivalent. If we consider that the main theories of moral development that appeared in the 20th century (e.g., Piaget, Kohlberg) are very individuocentric, in the sense that their subject matter is the individual, Wundt’s argument that we need to transcend the individual in order to be able to understand moral consciousness is indeed revealing.
Chapter 3 has an intermediate position in the book as it deals with Wundt’s abandonment of his first psychological project. The main source of Araujo’s argument here is the book that made Wundt famous, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology), published in 1874, with the aim “to demarcate a new scientific field” (as cited in Araujo, p. 81). Another valuable source is Wundt’s autobiography, published under the title Erlebtes und Erkanntes (Experience and Realization, 1920). The term, physiological, in the title of the Grundzüge already suggests the direction of the change—away from unconscious processes toward considering unconscious processes as physiological. The second edition of the Grundzüge, published in 1880, defined Wundt’s new physiological experimental psychology, in Araujo’s view.
For that change to be accomplished, Araujo argues, philosophical support was needed. Indeed, after Vorlesungen, Wundt devoted several years to philosophical studies. Araujo stresses that Wundt’s reception of Kant’s critical philosophy greatly influenced his abandonment of the first theory, even though Wundt rejected Kant’s transcendental apriorism. In the preface to Grundzüge, Wundt thanked Kant for the formation of his philosophical position. Notably, in 1860s Germany, Neo-Kantianism was flourishing.
Wundt contrasted his previous psychological theory with his new philosophical studies, especially his new epistemological insights deriving from Kant’s critical philosophy, and concluded that his entire theory of the unconscious was a new case of that old ontological mistake—a transposition of the logical forms of consciousness onto a reality outside of our consciousness. However, Wundt’s reception and appropriation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in no way makes him a Kantian or a transcendental idealist in a strict sense. (p. 111)
Araujo refutes externalist accounts of Wundt’s move toward philosophy and argues for Wundt’s immanent interest in philosophy and the necessity of philosophy for his psychological project.
Although existing publications on Wundt have traced many influences on his first psychological project, Araujo has detected some new ones (e.g., Francis Bacon and Schopenhauer). The same holds true for Wundt’s second and final psychological project. Even though Araujo speaks of rupture—and indeed in the new psychological theory none of the first project’s main theses remained—the abandonment of the thesis of unconscious mental processes from the first theory could be understood as a continuation and radicalization of the empirical program that was the motivating force behind Wundt’s psychology from the beginning. In support of my interpretation, I would refer to the references to consciousness and psychology as a science of consciousness in the new psychological theory. Indeed, Wundt developed a new theory of consciousness in which conscious processes were granted a broader scope (in Wundt’s first psychological project perception was supposed to be unconscious, and only representations and concepts conscious) and new functions: “The central point here is that mental processes only acquire their logical form in developed consciousness when language and abstract concepts come into play” (p. 100).
Such statements on the relation between consciousness and language (concepts) suggest that Wundt could be considered a forerunner of the cultural-historical theory of Vygotsky (1934/1962), who argued that the introduction of words radically transforms thinking (and other higher mental functions). To my knowledge, in the existing Vygotsky scholarship Wundt is not considered as a possible inspiration.
In order to provide support for his thesis that Wundt abandoned the first psychological theory, Araujo refers to Wundt’s text, Die physikalischen Axiome und ihre Beziehung zum Causalprincip (The axioms of physics and their relation to the principle of causality; PAC), published in 1866. He claims that “this text contains the key to elucidating [Wundt’s] abandonment of the logical theory of the mind, even though it does not contain any direct mention of psychology” (pp. 93–94). The importance of this text lies, in Araujo’s view, in the ontological critique that concepts should not be confused with phenomena. As far as psychology is concerned, Araujo argues that Wundt had “to exclude the unconscious dimension from psychological analysis and to elaborate a new theory of consciousness that would be the basis for his new and definitive psychological system” (p. 98).
Thus, it is reasonable to claim that we are dealing here with Wundt’s new psychology as the basic psychological phenomena—sensation, perception, and consciousness—were conceptualized differently compared to his first psychological project. From the fact that Wundt developed two different theories of perception we can derive some important general epistemological lessons. Far from being a pure recording of stimuli coming from an object, perception is a complex process of “psychical synthesis.” Theories of perception cannot be less than psychical synthesis of a second order. As perception belongs to the subject matter of psychology, and perception is a psychical synthesis, this justifies the autonomy of psychology, i.e., its irreducibility to biology or physiology, and consequently its raison d’être. Contrary to the dominant reception of Wundt’s psychology as a natural science, Wundt insisted that psychology has its own subject matter, different from natural sciences, and that is immediate experience. In the fourth chapter, Araujo analyses Wundt’s conception of scientific philosophy. In the second half of the 19th century, there was an urgent need to reform philosophy by linking it to the empirical sciences:
As a particular empirical science, psychology will receive from logic (in its broader sense) a logical, epistemological, and methodological foundation. In its turn, psychology will contribute to the ultimate goal of philosophy, namely, the elaboration of a worldview (general metaphysics), through its link with philosophy of spirit (special metaphysics). (p. 134)
The relation between philosophy and particular sciences is still an issue that deserves examination, even more so as psychology has inherited a strong anti-philosophical attitude.
Next, Araujo offers a detailed analysis of Wundt’s logic and his theory of knowledge as a necessary foundation of any science, including psychology. Araujo argues: “Wundt’s initial philosophical insight into ontological illusions evolved into a general theory of knowledge, which in its turn would have an impact on the establishment of his mature psychological project” (p. 134). Ascribing such an important role to a theory of knowledge expresses a general reflective attitude that characterizes Wundt’s theorizing, a feature not present in much mainstream contemporary psychology. In Wundt’s view, logic, theory of knowledge, and methods of scientific research are internally linked, as reflected in the subtitle of his Logic (1880): An investigation into the principles of knowledge and the methods of scientific research. Logic starts with an analysis of thinking as thinking is a presupposition of knowledge. Again, Wundt adopted a developmental perspective in examining thinking and its forms starting with concepts, and following its higher developmental forms, judgments, and logical conclusions. From another developmental angle he differentiated perceptual (everyday knowledge), intellectual (scientific knowledge), and rational (philosophical knowledge) knowledge. Araujo analyses Wundt’s understanding of the concepts of objects, substance, causality, purpose, and experience in general. In relation to experience specifically, he analyzes Wundt’s position on Kant, neo-Kantianism, positivism, and empirio-criticism. Contrary to Danziger’s claim that Wundt was anti-positivist (Danziger, 1979), Araujo defends a more differentiated view:
It is true that Wundt criticized different forms of positivism. However, as we have seen, this did not preclude him from admiring and sharing some ideas with positivism in general, such as the search for empirical laws, the rejection of speculative metaphysics, and the search for a new theory of knowledge. (p. 163)
Indeed, Wundt relied on different, even opposing traditions (including idealism, realism, Kant’s critical philosophy), but also transcended them, going, as he himself said, beyond Kant (rejecting his transcendental apriorism).
Coming to the concluding part of his analysis of Wundt’s mature and final psychological project, Araujo claims “that the theoretical foundations of his scientific psychology are a consequence of the logical and epistemological principles he developed in the 1870s and 1880s” (p. 167). Araujo also refers to Wundt’s own admission regarding the dependence of psychology on epistemological concepts as elaborated in his text from 1904, Über empirische and metaphysische Psychologie (On Empirical and Metaphysical Psychology; EMP): “These are essential because only with their help is a secure demarcation of psychology possible in relation to other areas, especially to natural science” (as cited in Araujo, 2016, p. 169). This is probably one of Wundt’s main claims about psychology. Previously, Wundt devoted a whole text to the definition of psychology (Über die Definition der Psychologie; On the Definition of Psychology; UDP), published two years after Dilthey’s Ideen zu einer beschreibenden und zergliedernden Psychologie (Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology; 1894). Wundt defined psychology in the following way:
Psychology inverts this abstraction performed by natural science in order to be able to investigate experience in its immediate reality. It provides, therefore, information about the interactions between the subjective and objective elements of immediate experience and about the emergence of the particular contents of the latter, as well as of their relationship. Thus, the mode of knowledge of psychology is, in opposition to that of natural science, immediate and intuitive, to the extent that the substrate of its explanations is concrete reality itself, without the use of auxiliary abstract concepts. (as cited in Araujo, 2016, p. 171)
Like Dilthey, Wundt ascribed a foundational role among other human sciences to psychology as the general science of immediate experience.
In discussing Wundt’s psychological methodology, Araujo stresses necessary modifications that would, in Wundt’s view, secure the progress of psychology. Wundt showed the limits of self-observation and inner perception as a psychological method for studying immediate experience, and insisted on their difference. Taking into account the potential of experiments, which led the natural sciences to progress, Wundt argued for experimental self-observation as a viable methodological solution for psychology.
Finally, Wundt’s mature psychological project presupposed defining Völkerpsychologie (VP), its subject matter, its methodological specificity, and the relation between experimental physiological psychology and Völkerpsychologie. Völkerpsychologie complements individual psychology as it deals with phenomena that are products of human life in communities (language, myth, and customs) and cannot be derived from individual consciousness. Therefore, Völkerpsychologie is necessary if psychology wants to approach human experience in its totality, including both processes and products. Araujo concludes:
VP plays a double role in Wundt’s project. On the one hand, it is a necessary complement to experimental or individual psychology in the search for the universal laws of mental life. On the other hand, it serves as one of the foundations for the philosophy of history, which, by unifying the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, will lead to a final Welt-anschauung. (p. 190)
To conclude, I recommend Araujo’s book as an excellent theoretical and historical study. It is historically situated both in Wundt’s time and in the reception of Wundt up to the present. It is faithful to evidence from a variety of sources, but takes a critical stance toward other, existing interpretations. It is very relevant to contemporary discussions of psychology in the face of the discipline’s increasing fragmentation, lack of reflection, and historical amnesia. It can serve as an inspiration for raising questions even on issues that seemed to be solved. Reading Araujo’s book inspired me to envisage and even try new reappraisals.
