The language of the integrative theory: Reflections on Gerd Jüttemann's Historische psychologie

Introduction

Gerd Jüttemann is a prominent name in the post-war German psychology. He has recently published a programmatic article in the German journal Erwägen-Wissen-Ethik (Deliberation-Knowledge-Ethics) in which he explains the main tenets of his theoretical approach Historical psychology (Jütteman, 2011a). The publication raised many commentaries—some of them contained in the aforementioned issue—to which the author takes position (Jüttemann, 2011b). This article offers the opportunity to present a significant theoretical development of recent German-speaking psychology in the international context. First, it will be necessary to situate the theory in the socio-cultural context of contemporary German psychology. Then, we present the main statements of Jüttemanns's Historical psychology, after which we raise the question of how successful the intended integration has turned out to be. Finally, we conclude with some observations on the characteristics that a metalanguage involved in any integrative theory should have.

A brief socio-cultural context for the notion of fundamental theory

It should be noted that Jüttemann (2011b) frames his model as a “fundamental theory” [Fundamentaltheorie]. Teo (2011) rightly observes that this notion sounds counterintuitive for most North American psychologists. What exactly is a “fundamental theory?” Generally speaking, American psychology works with the implicit metatheory that scientific knowledge grows through an accumulative process, where each new theory either complements or replaces the previous one. Since Kuhn (1962), many certainly accept that the progressive accumulation of knowledge suffers radical transformations due to periodic “scientific revolutions.” But no matter how groundbreaking those revolutions may be, they are occasional interruptions of the unique developmental line of progressive knowledge. Normal science is the default state; scientists are indeed trained to produce knowledge during this developmental phase. As a consequence, American psychology is overflowing with micro-theories for every possible psychological concept. It values the current approaches to topics, while disregarding past ones, and concentrates on following established research methods rather than reflecting on the theoretical approaches that bring to life the very concepts about which they inquiry (Toulmin & Leary, 1992). Theoretical construction takes place only after sufficient accumulation of individual pieces of empirical evidence. The appropriate research should be empirically based, delimited, and take positions with respect to the latest studies on the topic. In this widely expanded model of doing scientific psychology, a theory is the summative compound of a variety of small pieces of experimental evidence.

Despite the pervasiveness and homogeneity of this form of understanding science in psychology, it is important to take into account that this vision of knowledge construction became hegemonic only after centuries of socio-historical developments (Daston & Galison, 2007; Valsiner, 2009, 2010). Thus, to understand the idea of a fundamental theory, we need to take into account that it emerged in a completely different socio-cultural and historical milieu. By the end of the 18th century, about two generations before the rapid process of industrialization in Germany, there were important intellectual movements in philosophy and literature, notably German illuminism—the Aufklärung—and romanticism. Both movements are largely responsible of the image of German philosophy—and human sciences by extension—as particularly profound, difficult, stylistically idiosyncratic or even obscurantist (Smith, 1991). Inheritors of Kant and Fichte, German intellectuals of the first decades of 19th century, understood that the main task of philosophy is to throw light onto the fundamental problems of humankind. Against a sort of “popular philosophy” of the Enlightenment and British empiricism, German philosophers undertook the mission of founding a strict philosophy that supported the basis or fundament for the growing natural sciences. This first philosophy was called basal science [Grundwissenchaft] or fundamental science [Fundamentalwissenschaft] (Falckenberg, 1893; Smith, 1991). Hillary Putnam describes the German philosophical style as redemptive: “… almost every German philosopher has seen philosophy as having some kind of salvific mission, a notion that continues to inform the character of German philosophy” (Borradori, 1994, p. 59).

A fundamental theory is also not another micro-theory in the accumulative construction of knowledge according to the implicit conception of science exists in most part of American psychology. Rather, it is a rational reconstruction of a new perspective concerning an issue. The search for a fundamental theory implies reflection on the subject matter and investing time in defining the correct units of analysis in the discipline. Using Auerbach's terms (2003), the construction of a fundamental theory is a vertical rather than a horizontal effort; it does not put theories in a continuous unique developmental line, but it seeks for their roots and hence their similarities and differences. Stylistically, it is not unusual that the “redemptive” mission of a Fundamentaltheorie involves the goal of integrating theoretical polarities or apparently exclusive approaches at a higher level of abstraction—a process modeled by Hegel through the concept of dialectic logic (see Valsiner (2010)). As is well known, this is precisely what Kant aimed at, by bringing together empiricism and rationalism in one and the same theory of knowledge. Kant could not tolerate the aporia of the theory of knowledge in which Hume left philosophy, so he assumes the salvific mission of putting order to philosophy once again by bringing solid ground to scientific knowledge.

Contemporary German psychology of course looks radically different from 19th century philosophical theories. Besides the normal evolution of science as a social process, in the German case, the academic system suffered a radical intervention to adapt to the socio-political situation after World War II. The adaptation included not only the general denazification of academia (Taylor, 2011) but also the progressive replacement of German vernacular approaches with American theories and scientific practices—a process known as Americanization [Amerikanisierung] of German psychology (Groeben, 1997). This process—in addition to the precedent forced emigration of Jewish academics by the Nationalsozialist dictatorship—completely transformed the landscape, radically cutting (or at least importantly) post-war German psychology from its roots. ¹

Yet, there still supervenes a particular culturally bound way of doing human science that differs in important ways from the globalized empirical–logical approach to science. Gerd Jüttemann's theory illustrates one of these cases. His fundamental theory attempts to present an integrative developmental psychology, gathering human biological evolution with the socio-historical evolution of humankind (Jüttemann, 2011a).

What historical psychology is about

Jüttemann's (2011a) research program has many positive aspects—such as the arguments in favor of the historicity of mind and its diagnostic of the limitations of contemporary evolutionary psychology. It has also been criticized in many respects. Given the space limitation in this review, we wish to point out only two deficitary aspects of this theory, which need to be resolved before any attempt to raise an integrative theory in psychology.

The successful history of the human soul that Jüttemann describes is easier to follow if you live in Europe, North America, or Japan. It is unfortunately harder to agree with when you take into consideration the zones of the globe that seem to be ignored or minimized when making such self-pleasing statements. We are referring not only to the vast regions of poverty in the contemporary world, but also to the hundreds of native peoples extinguished by the colonization of Western culture throughout history. ³ Facing such anthropological diversity and the variety of historical evolutions of peoples, it is rather difficult to identify the unique progressive line of development described by Jüttemann. The only way to recognize such upward linearity is to focus exclusively on Western culture. It is Western man and not necessarily the whole of humankind that is more clever, happier, and more peaceful today than ever before. This latent ethnocentric character behind Jüttemann's notion of development has also been criticized elsewhere (Chakkarat, 2011; Friedlmeier, 2011; Kölbl, 2011; Reichholf, 2011; Spode, 2011; Thies, 2011).

It is important to note that development is a notion applied to an intergenerative individual that is neither a person nor a particular community. Thus, like Rickert's historical individual, the intergenerative individual covers the socio-cultural collective as well as the human individual. Jüttemann (2011a, p. 6) himself refers to it as “an abstraction” that spans from the individual subject to the collective quasi-subject. By introducing such abstract terminology, Jüttemann follows the interesting strategy of building a third language to bridge the individual-society gap, that is, a vocabulary to talk about the history of the psyche at both the individual and collective levels, which comes from neither psychology or sociology. Neologisms, such as autogenesis and secondary evolution, are in fact intended to apply not only to persons but also—and simultaneously—to societies. The strategy, however, shows some limitations.

First, although the introduction of the intergenerative individual allows going into the “psychology of the history of humankind” from the viewpoint of psychology, the price to pay is high: the replacement of the human mind for a new psychic instance, namely the spirit of a historically deployed intergenerative individual: “But it makes little sense to talk about psychic change of a plant, an animal, a particular individual or a folk […] the concept of psychic change can be used adequately only to the history of humankind” (Jüttemann, 2011b, p. 118). There is of course nothing nonsensical in talking about psychic change in a particular individual, but from Jüttemann's point of view, it is: “It sounds in fact absurd to talk about the psychic change of a person (instead of her curriculum vitae) … . The term “psychic change” alludes hence, according to this usage, only to supra-individual social formations, particularly to the whole of humankind” (Jüttemann, 2011b, p. 119f, emphasis added). The focus on supra-individual social entities leads Jüttemann to rescind the properly psychological aspects of his theory. This fact is eloquently expressed through the obliteration of the ontogenetic and microgenetic levels of developments when Jüttemann (2011b) explains the three lines of development of psychic change: (a) long-term bioevolutive change; (b) medium-term socio-cultural development; and (c) short-term inter-generational transformation. The ontogenetical level is missing (Rath, 2011) as well as the microgenetical. Such evolutive dimensions are relevant when we are thinking of persons; but take note that here we are thinking of an abstraction—the historical individual—, which by definition does not experience her Umwelt since she is not a living being. Elsewhere, we have endorsed Harré's (2002) and Brinkmann's (2010) position that personal grammar has primacy in a psychological theory (Gaete & Cornejo, 2012). Psychology is the study of the individual person—which does not mean that every psychological approach should be about persons, but rather that every psychological theory must be brought back to the person. From this, it follows that the study of supra-personal stances should be subsidiary to the better understanding of the person. However, the link between the abstract language of historical–sociological provenience and personal grammar is unfortunately lacking in this theory.

A second limitation to the strategy of creating an abstract language to bring persons and societies together is paradoxically the psychologization of collectives. Despite Jüttemann's efforts to disconnect his neologisms from psychological interpretations, the fact is that several of them make sense insofar as they indirectly refer to a psychological notion. This is by instance the case of autogenesis. Jüttemann emphasizes that this notion has no evaluative components—in opposition to concepts like self-realization. Nonetheless, persons cannot suppress the psychological–physiognomic dimension when reading definitions of autogenese such as: “… to make the best of one's self and of one's life” (Jüttemann, 2007, p. 18). Thus, when autogenesis is implemented beyond the personal level, it looks, from a sociological viewpoint, like a psychologization of collectives: “… the individual motives are transferred to the ‘collective autogenesis’ depicting the societies as homogeneous entities that function as ‘carriers’ of collective spiritual processes” (Slunecko & Wieser, 2011, p. 90; emphasis in original). The abstract neologisms used by Jüttemann cannot avoid awakening the impression that collectives are in some way agentive entities, but “collectives are not entities endowed with will and consciousness or soul” (Wimmer, 2011, p. 113). ⁴

At this point, it becomes evident that the third language used by Jüttemann to fill the gap is psychologically too sociological and sociologically too psychological. This leads us to a last reflection point: is it necessary to build a unique common language to overcome the micro-macro problem in psychology (Cornejo, 2007)?

Conclusions

Gerd Jüttemann assumes the redemptive task of bringing together the socio-cultural historicity of the human being with its bioevolutionary development. To this aim, he argues for the adoption of a historical—i.e. a diachronic—perspective of human beings and cultures. Thus, he summarizes the goals for a Historical psychology in two main questions: (a) how have individual minds construed culture? and (b) how has culture configured the modern mind? Human beings have created culture but at the same time have been created by it. The author approaches this twofold challenge by defining a unit of analysis at a higher level of abstraction than persons and cultures, namely the intergenerative individual. This quasi-agentive stance undergoes psychic change through inter-generational modifications, but also in the medium-term through the sociocultural development and in the long-term through bioevolutive development. The whole process is motivated by an individual and collective process of autogenesis, defined as the universal human aspiration “to make the best of one's self and of one's life.”

We have pointed out that the set of neologisms introduced by Jüttemann consists of a third language—non-psychological and non-sociological—whose goal is to permit the integration of sociocultural and evolutive developments covering persons and societies. By doing this, terms like autogenesis and heterogenesis acquire the function of a metalanguage that permits integrating languages for describing particular stances of the intergenerative individual (persons, cultures). Is it also necessary to build an abstract language to do integrative psychology? Unavoidably, whenever a theoretician integrates different approaches or different aspects of an object of knowledge, she is indeed constructing a metalanguage to bring different models into a common theoretical matrix. The question is therefore whether the metalanguage in which the integration is being produced has been constructed from scratch. What we have learned in this case is that a highly abstract metalanguage jeopardizes the specificities of the disciplinary objects being covered. Jüttemann's metalanguage is ultimately unable to adequately describe the psychological contents of the persons and the anthropological peculiarities of specific communities. Does this mean that the search for integrative models in psychology is a chimerical enterprise? Not at all. There are interesting contemporary attempts in a rather pragmatic way of thinking (e.g. Groeben, 1986, 1997; Harré, 2002) that argue for the theoretical and methodological pluralism—or the coexistence of different grammars—as consequence of the multidimensionality of psychology's object of knowledge. In these cases, however, the metalanguage in which the integration takes place is a basic common language that is nearer to ordinary language than to an abstract metaphysical one.