bWatson, Sr., R.I. (1978). The great psychologists. (4th
edition). New York: J.B. Lippincott Co.
CHAPTER 9
KANT AND HERBART:
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHICAL
PSYCHOLOGY
As one approaches the present day, it becomes less necessary
and more impracticable to say anything about the general scientific
and cultural heritage of the years in question. With the increased
complexity, the sheer amount of relevant knowledge, and the increase
in the number of those making contributions to psychology, the
background for the great psychologists has to be presented in
increasingly narrow perspective. The pace has now quickened with
various more or less simultaneous developments taking place that
cannot be discussed together because they belong in different
patterns of intellectual development.
The previous chapter carried British associationism through the
work of Alexander Bain whose principal works first appeared in
1855 and 1859. In order to discuss continental philosophical psychology,
which is to culminate in the work of Kant and Herbart, a return
is now made to 1732, the date of publication of Wolff's Empirical
Psychology.
WOLFF AND FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY
Implicitly or explicitly, a doctrine of faculties had often been
met in earlier views of psychology. The soul was conceived as
carrying on its functions, such as knowing, remembering, feeling,
and willing, by making use of corresponding faculties. The first
important proponent of eighteenthcentury German faculty psychology
was Christian von Wolff (1679-1754 ), Professor at Halle. To place
him in temporal perspective, his principal psychological works
appeared after those of Berkeley but before those of Hartley.
However, he was most influenced by Leibniz, not by the British
empiricists. His view is representative of the several versions
of faculty psychology prevailing on the continent in the period
from the middle of the eighteenth century through most of the
nineteenth century. In no sense is he to be numbered among the
greatest of psychologists. However, his influence upon Kant makes
him deserve a brief statement.
Wolff's Empirical Psychology' made its appearance in 1732, followed
two years later by his Rational Psychology.2 He saw the tasks
of these two psychologies as interrelated. Rational psychology
deduced from metaphysical conceptions the soul's activities, the
actual existence of which was then to be demonstrated by empirical
psychology.3 Following similar thinking on the part of Leibniz,
Wolff held that rational psychology gave clear and distinct ideas,
while empirical psychology yielded only obscure, confused ideas
of things. Rational psychology depended upon reason; empirical
psychology upon sensation. At one extreme were the confused idea
of sensation, and, proceeding through several steps of degrees
of clarity, at the other extreme were the clear ideas of reason.
In short, mental activities consisted of degrees of reason or
degrees of clarity of ideas.
The central theme of his faculty psychology was that, while the
soul is unitary4 and lacks parts ,5 it has different powers and
faculties. According to Wolff, faculties are "potencies of
action" which are expressed in powers.' The major dual classification
of groups of faculties are knowing on the one hand and feeling
and desire on the other.' Knowing is further subdivided into perception,
memory, understanding, and reason. To take memory as an example,
if asked why something is remembered, Wolff would reply that it
is because one has a faculty of memory. Unfortunately to ascribe
a mental activity to a faculty served to explain it, making further
analysis unnecessary. It was not apparent then, as it was to become
later, that the doctrine of faculties was self-defeating and circular.
Wolff's distinction between empirical and rational psychology,
although misplaced in emphasis, was prophetic of changes to come.
His distinction clarified the existence of two psychologies, even
though Wolff derogated empirical psychology and defined it so
as to make it dependent upon rational psychology. As the influence
of Locke and the other British associationists began to be felt
in succeeding generations, the relative emphases of the two psychologies
began to shift in favor of empirical psychology.
KANT AND TRANSCENDENTAL MENTAL ACTIVITY
Immanuel Kant, (1724-1804), never more than sixty miles from
his birth place in East Prussia, lived a wholly uneventful external
life while serving as a Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Konigsberg. In fact, mast of the stories his chroniclers tell
concern nothing more than interruptions to his bachelor routines-the
consternation of his neighbors when one day he didn't take his
accustomed walk at the usual precise hour ( a lapse accounted
for by his becoming enthralled with Rousseau's Emile), or the
crisis brought about by fast-growing poplars which obscured his
view of a church steeple at which it was his habit to gaze while
meditating (a problem solved by the owner of the trees who obligingly
cut the tops), or, when fame came to him, the trouble he had to
go to m changing restaurants for his noonday meal in order to
avoid sightseers. Without much loss one can pass on to his views
of psychology.
The influence of Kant upon continental thought proved to be enormous.
Although not without opposition ( his successors, in fact, setting
out immediately to "correct" his views), he dominated
philosophical thinking for more than a generation. His gigantic
shadow could not be ignored. His successors had to come to terms
with him in one way or another. His work most relevant to psychology,
Critique o f Pure Reason,8 appeared first in 1781. This publication
was followed in 1788 by his Critique o f Practical Reason9 and
in 1790 by his Critique o f Judgment.l0 The very titles of these,
his three most important works, show that they must bear some
relation to psychology. However to say that his inquiry was related
to psychology is by no means the same as saying his approach was
psychological in nature. On the contrary he repeatedly insisted
it was not. His philosophical task was conceived to be the question
of the validity of knowledge, in contrast to psychology which
was seen as the empirical search for laws of mental functioning.
The distinction he made between a theory of knowledge and psychology
is one that holds reasonably well to this very day.
Kant held that all knowledge begins with experience, but it does
not necessarily arise out of experience." What he meant by
this apparent paradox is a major theme in this account.
At first Kant did little more than critically elaborate Wolffs
rationalist and faculty doctrines. Reading Hume, as has so often
been quoted, he was "roused from his dogmatic slumbers."
As indicated in Chapter 8, for Hume causality was neither self-evident
nor capable of logical demonstration. Kant, convinced by his argument,
realized that this same lack of certainty must be true of all
other principles fundamental to philosophy and science. There
are two alternatives: either to accept Hume's skepticism or to
find a priori principles that are free of the defect Hume had
found. General laws inductively proved from the data of experience
can be possible only if rational principles, independently established,
can be derived which are a priori and true before experience .12
The alternative of skepticism Kant, as a rationalist, could not
accept, so his task became to establish that a priori principles
are possible, despite Hume's cogent objection. He, therefore,
set for himself the task of demonstrating the existence of these
principles.
In agreement with Hume, Kant held that all known objects are
phenomena of consciousness and not realities of the mind. But,
unlike Hume, the known object is not a mere bundle of sensations
for it includes "unsensational" characteristics or manifestation
of a priori principles. Kant insisted that the scientist and the
philosopher approached nature with certain implicit principles,
and Kant saw his task to be that of finding and making explicit
these principles. He proceeded to derive them from careful inquiry
into the logical forms of judgment that we make about the world.
These various transcendental principles, or "categories,"
as Kant13 called them, are activities of the mind and a priori
in that they are independent of sense experience, are universal
and are necessary. Consider the argument expressed in the following
statement: Events follow other events according to rules. Every
event is both a cause and an efect. Nature, itself, is a system
o f causal relations. These statements were accepted then, as
now, as valid, although they are of such a nature as to be impossible
of experiential verification. Kant argued that by their sheer
universality they are rendered a priori. Hence, one of his principles
or categories was causality. This particular illustration was
chosen since it also served to answer Hume. We cannot know causality
from experience, but we do know it a priori. Other of the twelve
categories of understanding of Kant include unity, reality, totality,
existence or nonexistence, community or reciprocity.14
Kant reinforced the argument based upon his categories of understanding
with that of intuitive forms of sensibility which are also held
to be prior to experience. Space and time are intuitively knowable,
a priori.'-' Kant held that consciousness of time and extension
in space are certainly real and not data of the bodily senses.
All objects of perception are located in space and time, without
which objects would not be perceptible. We go on from them to
perception of content through experience. We take space and time
for granted, so they are, in this sense, intuitive. They are the
forms of intuition as distinguished from the contents of experience.
The forms of sensibility of space and time join the transcendental
principles and, together with them, become the means of structuring
and understanding the world.
Before dealing with the mind, the more general problem of Kant's
view of mathematics and science must be mentioned. Kant was very
much concerned with scientific problems. The profound impression
science had made upon him is strikingly demonstrated by Kant's
emphasis upon space and time and causality. To him, mathematics
is the source of scientific knowledge.16 This follows because
much of mathematics represents a priori, absolute, non-empirical
judgments, requiring no further proof. He advanced the aphorism
that an empirical inquiry is as scientific as it contains mathematics.l7
Science, to Kant, is exact, quantitative, and mathematical.
Kant dealt specifically with the problem of the mind.l8 The great
rationalists, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, although differing
among themselves, had sought to know mind through mind. Kant attacked
what he considered to be their fallacious belief that mind is
a substance. Without attempting to state his argument, suffice
it to say he demonstrated to his satisfaction that mind is unsubstantial.
Rejection of mind as substance, i.e., as occupying space, had
direct implications for psychology as a science. It followed that
mental processes can not be measured, since they have only the
dimension of time, not space.19 If it has but the one dimension
of time, psychology as an experimental science is impossible,
because there is no other variable with which to relate temporal
events.
Rejection of mind as substance did not mean that Kant rejected
the concept of the mind. Rather, he lifted it to the pinnacle
of his system, since he held mind to be the means whereby the
categories and concepts are known. The mind, without being spatial,
orders perceptual phenomena through the innate principles of time
and space and supplies us with the categories which make it possible
to understand experience, to make incoming sensations meaningful.
In a manner reminiscent of Plato, the mind is an active agency
which composed the raw material of the world into an order of
conceptualized phenomena. Kant was, however, no idealist since
the mind does not create the world; there are "things in
themselves" with independent existence.
"Apperception" was Kant's term for the process of assimilating
and interpreting new experiences by which the mind gave them meaning.
There was unity in every act of perception. In recognizing an
object we can find the bits and hatches that are the elements
of the associationists, for example, the hearing elements and
the seeing elements of the coach of Berkeley; but these elements
are meaningfully organized a priori, not through association:
The mind has acted to form a unitary experience, to create an
object within a meaningful context. There is an active mind which
organized the experience with the help of space and time and the
Kantian categories. Kant viewed mind as active apperception. For
example, apperception was emphasized as a process by which new
experiences were taken hold of and brought into relation with
other elements in the mind. This was not passive impression, but
rather an active grasping.
"Things in themselves," the causes of things, are unknowable.
Locke and Hume are right, Kant agreed, in saying that knowledge
comes from sensory perception; but this is perception not of things
as they really are, but only as they appear to us (phenomena).
Thus, Kant was fostering a phenomenal view. We perceive phenomena,
not as they are, but the way our mind makes us see them. The mind
selects, according to the structures arising from the categories,
from the welter of impinging sensations and imposes upon them
the unity inherent in the principles.
It is not surprising that faculty psychology which was simultaneously
rationalistic, relatively free from appeal to empiricism, and
tending to lend itself easily to the support of religious views,
proved congenial to Kant. The categories, from this perspective,
are powers of the mind. Kant classified mental faculties into
cognitive (knowing), feeling, and desire and the subdivision of
the cognitive faculty into understanding, judgment, and reason.
20 He also wrote a book on his version of psychology, Anthropology
in its Practical Aspects, a popular but relatively unimportant
treatise. It had three parts roughly comparable to the more or
less similar divisions of his three Critiques (Pure Reason, Judgment
and Practical Reason) which also helped to lend his support to
the three-fold classification of mental powers.
Kantian thinking and writing occurred before the emergence of
psychology as an experimental science. The immediate effect of
his philosophical pronouncements about mind and the impossibility
of experiment was to block advance in the move of psychology toward
becoming an experimental science. In larger perspective and as
a more delayed influence, he helped to create a desire to make
psychology both experimental and mathematical. Such was his prestige
that never again could it be forgotten that science was mathematical.
Kant is even sometimes "blamed" for helping to create
psychology's love for mathematics.21 It has been said that some
psychologists, even in our own day, become too enamored of mathematics
leading to a state of affairs where if a problem was quantifiable,
no matter how trivial, it was scientific, while an important problem
able would be disdained .22
Kant also helped to keep subjectivism alive in that he stressed
the importance of mental phenomena, as such, in a day when they
could be believed to be reducible to physiological processes .23
He helped to direct psychology toward phenomenalism24 in holding
that events are appearances. Moreover, his view that his ultimate
principles lie outside the context of experience made Kant the
great champion of nativism in that human beings have innate "given"
ways of knowing that are true but not dependent upon experience.
This stress on unity of organization with its nativistic base
was to have its later effects upon Gestalt psychology.
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