Idea Transcript
Mind and Brain in Weimar Culture Cornelius Borck, McGill University Paper presented at the international conference The Cultural Alchemy of the Exact Sciences: Revisiting the Forman Thesis at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, March 23-25, 2007.
Given the centrality of Lebensphilosophie in the Forman thesis, should one not expect an even more immediate impact of such an intellectual climate on the life sciences? The life sciences in their notorious plurality may have lacked the same disciplinary coherence as physics and did not undergo a similar revolution, but various strands within the life sciences come to mind that seem to testify to similar trends.
Most of these run under the term “holism” in biology, medicine, psychology, and philosophy; from Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s system’s biology, via gestalt psychology or Victor von Weizsäcker’s philosophy of illness, to Kurt Goldstein’s theory of the organism. Or one could think of the special resonances of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in
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Weimar Germany from Karl Abraham via Johannes Heinrich Schultz to Wilhelm Reich and Georg Groddeck. Last but not least, one should think of the ascendancy of physiognomic approaches, from the interest in graphology, shared by as different scholars as Emil Kraepelin and Ludwig Klages, to the implementation of racialized science. In short, there would be ample opportunities to construct a positive complement to Forman’s negative thesis with examples from the life sciences: whereas the developments in physics were the outcome of a hostile intellectual environment, a wholesale embracement of the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist, its extension or translation into science, appears to be characteristic for the life sciences during the Weimar republic. However, I am somewhat skeptical how much insight would be gained from such a pursuit, especially with regard to the question of how science and culture articulate. Not the least because of Forman’s stimulating paper, there is little need to continue the internalism vs. externalism debate, but much opportunity to build on work that has been done about science in culture.
In fact, the Zeitgeist, the Lebensphilosophie, can be – and has been – linked to so many and so different intellectual projects and scientific programs that the link itself helps rather little but 2
looses much of its explanatory power as an argument. Precisely the omnipresence of Lebensphilosophie in Weimar Germany questions its usefulness as an explanatory category for the history of the life sciences. Rather than searching for promising applications of the Forman thesis to the life sciences, the very ease of this applicability should call for more specific ways in contextualizing scientific knowledge. At least three problems should be raised here.
The first is the insufficiency of Lebensphilosophie to account for the ambivalences that characterized the intellectual culture in Weimar Germany where, for example, the nostalgic longing for an allegedly lost richness of the Abendland’s culture went hand in hand with a passion for America, scientific management, Taylorization, or Neue Sachlichkeit. The English title of Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes may have been The Decline of the West, but in the burgeoning culture of the “golden twenties,” the declining Abendland appears to have only accelerated the rise in public esteem for the West in form of the Tiller Girls and other commodities from the cultural industry. I am certainly not arguing against the importance of Spengler or
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Lebensphilosophie for understanding Weimar Germany, but as ferociously as some fought against “mere civilization,” others embraced a future of rationalization, mass fabrication, and technological innovation.
The second is the need for a more nuanced understanding of the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist itself. Since 1971, the suggested opposition between progressive rationalism and irrational romanticism has become much more complicated, with the recent interest for the intellectual sophistication of the romantic period, for example, and for what has been called the “occultism of the avant-garde” at the turn of the century. Rather than being a problem of historical diagnosis or national styles, the Zeitgeist argument entails too simple a dualism of rational vs. irrational. The extended debates in Germany about differences between reason and rationality, or, for that matter, culture and civilization, indicate how complicated discussions were even within the allegedly irrational quarters of the Zeitgeist. The term ‘irrationality’ captures only insufficiently what was at stake in the debates about Lebensphilosophie and which boiled less about demarcating the limits of rationality per se but more
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about its limits vis-à-vis notions of (higher) reasonability. Many different actors and programs displayed some affiliation with Zeitgeist arguments and shared an investment in an opposition to narrow concepts of rationality. The Frankfurt school’s famous distinction between merely instrumental rationality and reason proper, for example, must be regarded an offspring of this debate – and with it Habermas’ discourse ethics. Bertalanffy argued about the limits of existing scientific explanations, as did Goldstein, but their conceptualization of reason and rationality differed certainly very much from Spengler’s or Klages’. These differences and their co-existence are at least as important for an appropriate understanding of the Weimar Zeitgeist.
And, finally, these debates did not match with a neat distinction of progressive modernism versus romantic irrationality – this is the third problem. At times, the progressive and the Lebensphilosophie became insolubly intertwined in Weimar culture. The most famous example probably is the modernism of the Bauhaus.
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It has often been pointed out how surprisingly open the Weimar Bauhaus was towards esoteric philosophies such as Kandinsky’s interest in theosophy and Klee’s in occultism or Johannes Itten’s leanings towards mysticism. And yet, the same Itten conceived the famous Bauhaus Vorkurs, where abstraction emerged as modernity’s dominant style. The Bauhaus’ modernist slogan “form follows function” demonstrates how abstraction and rationality do not necessarily imply an opposition to intuition or Anschaulichkeit, but function rather as their integration. As part of a more nuanced understanding of the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist, their flirtations with intuition, empathy, and Anschaulichkeit would have to be taken seriously as epistemological resources. The interwar period were the formative years for high modernism and provided the basis for its critique by anticipating many of postmodernism’s arguments, especially for today’s cultural studies. To name but two examples, one could point to Deleuze’s rehabilitation of Bergsonian intuition in his ontology or to the codification of Walter Benjamin in North America. An important side of this third aspect are its historiographic implications. It entails a perspective how the alleged irrationalism and the idea of a-causality could, at least principally, be operationalized as driving forces for scientific developments – without taking recourse to either a
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model of mock-adaptations, plainly irrational motifs, or ideological attributions of a “mystic weltanschauung.” An investigation of how the epistemological, the social, the cognitive, and the material articulated with each other to the chain of historical events would, instead, result in a historically differentiated understanding of rationality, reasonability, objectivity, causality, and Anschaulichkeit.
In the remaining 12 minutes, I want to very briefly introduce three examples which at least have in common that they all blur a dualism of progressive rationalism versus irrational romanticism. Based on, and biased by, these examples I think precisely this multifariousness, the side-by-side of rather disparate strands, to be significant for Weimar culture. Elsewhere, I argued that such ambivalences and the uncertainty which resulted from them (and characterized Weimar Germany also in general, social political terms) summoned up to an experimentalization of the everyday life. In this cultural landscape, the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist was but one of various threads, their coming-together in their heterogeneity allowed for the emergence of epistemologically radically new projects.
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The first example is the emergence of the electric brain out of psychodiagnostics in Weimar Germany.
In Spring 1926, Emil Ludwig, prolific author of profitable biographies, proclaimed a very special scientific breakthrough. According to his report in the Berliner Illustrirte, Weimar Germany’s most widely read weekly, a little machine had recently determined an almost perfect personality profile of himself by little more but the application of weak electrical currents to a sequence of diagnostic spots scattered across his head. In the cold light of today, this was just another revival of Gall’s old phrenology, thanks to the new availability of electrical gadgets. Zachar Bissky, the guy propagating the new electric diagnoscopy, did not hesitate to make this link to phrenology explicit in his advertising material. And yet, this did hardly impede the stellar, though short-lived career of his invention. His success with the new method became the news of the day. Still, one could argue that this was little more but exaggerating hype, concocted by news thirsty media. However, phrenological-personality profiling by means of a surprisingly simple technology enrolled quite a remarkable list of supporters and thus forced major players into action.
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By 1926, diagnoscopy was already used for personality testing within the Swiss postal services and clock-manufacturing industry. Soon after a first conference on the new method in Karlsruhe, many German institutions became interested, including technical universities, police departments, prison administrations, large industries such as the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG and small enterprises such as those recommending diagnoscopy for marriage counseling. At many of these places little more but curiosity may have been behind such experiments, but diagnoscopy held a more specific promise to rational modernizers. With Fritz Giese and Robert Werner Schulte, two young aspiring psychologists embarked on a scientific investigation of diagnoscopy. These psychologists envisioned psychotechnics as an economically beneficial and individually rewarding form of counseling, and hoped to get involved in the rationalization of life and labor on a national scale. They praised diagnoscopy as efficient means for Germany’s modernization – which in their view meant an Americanization. The enrolment of professional psychologists by and for diagnoscopy called further players into action. Various congresses of psychotherapy and psychology established commissions to evaluate diagnscopy; Oscar Vogt, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research,
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discussed with Georg von Arco, German pioneer of wireless telegraphy and radio technology, various plans how best to secretly obtain one of Bissky’s machines. On the side of the critics, there was hardly less ambiguity about Zeitgeist and modernity; the next project Arco undertook was a large-scale mass experiment with radio-telepathy, driven as much by personal curiosity as by a critical agenda.
Just a few years later, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger revolutionized the neurosciences by publishing the electroencephalogram, his recording of the brain’s electrical activity. This was hard science, but not only the press got it wrong when they reported on the EEG as the final confirmation of Bissky’s diagnoscopy. Like many other brain researchers (and physicists), Berger was very much interested in extra-sensory perception and his success with the EEG increased, if anything, his yearning for telepathic communication. The only major research grant he ever received, he intended for an investigation of special, high frequency, psychophysiological vibrations… Berger’s case resembles that of a perfect adaptation to the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist, permeating his views from his authoritarian political nostalgia to his belief in specific 10
psychophysic energy and his admiration for nature’s beauty. He desired the EEG to become the crowning stone of his scientific worldview which already to his contemporaries looked somewhat antiquated and obscure. However, Berger’s at times stubborn search made him pursue a highly original path of experimental inquiry. His persistence about psychic energy acted as an “enabling constraint” steering him conceptually as well methodologically towards the new.
The second example, Fritz Kahn’s Bodyworlds.
Right next to Weimar Germany’s purported romanticism existed a biological modernism of a peculiarly mechanistic blend which was no less successful. My example is the popular anatomy of Dr. Fritz Kahn, a physician and science writer, who published regularly on medical topics in the Berliner Illustrirte and the Frankfurter Zeitung. His opus magnum was a popular textbook on anatomy and physiology for the Kosmos Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde with its more than 100,000 members. Kahn’s recipe of success was the combination of a particularly lucid style of writing with
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intriguing visuals portraying the body and its functions as machine ensembles. Subscribers to the 5volume set got, in addition to the over 1500 images, an oversize poster as a bonus, showing Man as Industrial Palace and thus encapsulating Kahn’s explanatory strategy. So, at least in the popular sector or for the purposes of a popularization of science and medicine, mechanistic models continued to be regarded as useful. But Kahn’s visualizations show more; they unfold to a historical epistemology of biological knowledge making and knowledge circulation. Kahn’s images show the human body as an assembly line or an industrialized urban space, populated by anonymous workers and other members of modern society.
Instead of stressing their mechanistic attitude, one may want to argue that these images formed part of a larger strategy to “organicize” alien technology by recourse to the body, as, for example, McLuhan did later with regard to communications technology. It should be noted, however, that the images put this strategy upside down. Kahn familiarized the body’s alien organic inside by recourse to common gadgetry, as if some techno-literacy would bear the potential to reconnect with the body’s machinery in new ways. Man as Industrial Palace depicted a
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technological paradise that misrepresented biological bodies as it measured them by rather humble technical artifacts. In retrospect, the alignment of cognition with something as dull and limited as the control of a switchboard seems hardly more ingenious than the outdated industrial complex of digestion. And this is not the most significant shortcoming. How much can an image explain that does not lead any further as to introduce some miniature operators into its world of automata and machines, who do exactly what the technology is said to do?
However, the images extend the common comparison of bodies and machines to a manifest amalgamation of nature and technology. They visualize a constructivism in which technological civilization and experimental science intervene in the biological nature of human bodies. And yet, the many little assistants in Kahn’s images do their work so diligently and so smoothly right out in the open of the image that it seems too simple to base a critique of the visualization strategy on their existence. One could rather say that the limits of this visualization strategy are put on display as well. The ambiguity of their iconography provides a key to how nature is constituted in the contractions of the social and the scientific to a cultural construct. Precisely because Kahn took his 13
mission to educate the public on the human body so seriously, he arrived at visualizations that clearly reveal their own limitations. The images visualize knowledge together with the open questions that come with it, they trace the optical unconscious of techno-medicine and machine philosophy.
The last example, the “crisis of reality” and the emergence of the sociology of knowledge in the life sciences. The second half of the 1920 saw an escalation of crisis rhetoric in the writing about science. This abounding crisis rhetoric should not be mistaken for a single and coherent discourse; it was a concert of discordant and overlapping voices. Physicists debated the epistemological implications of theoretical physics, while psychologists discussed the dissipation of their discipline into ever more specializations, the biologists argued over the lack of a coherent framework, and the crisis talk in medicine often comprised a holistic critique of an allegedly inhumane techno-medicine. In general, this was not a crisis of scientific productivity but a crisis resulting from scientific productivity, as Edmund Husserl argued in his unfinished Crisis of European Sciences.
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Somewhere among these many writings on crisis, the Naturwissenschaften published a paper of such a title. In “The crisis of reality” the neo-Kantian philosopher Kurt Riezler argued that the very progress of the sciences undermined their progress towards “absolute reality” (Rietzler, 1929, p. 708). Today his paper and his concerns are largely forgotten; they shared little with the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist but were not exactly modern either. But in their time, they motivated a little known Polish microbiologist to an intervention. Ludwik Fleck’s response to Rietzler undercut the discussion about a crisis by arguing for a social explanation of the intellectual functioning of a primarily collective cognizing body. Since every act of knowing related to previous knowledge, tradition and education, epistemology had for Fleck to start with “the social and cultural-historical context.” In all its concrete materializations, knowledge was moulded and shaped by its own history and by its socio-cultural context. The recent developments in physics as documented in just the next issue of Naturwissenschaften served Fleck as welcome examples for his idea of the primacy of the social in epistemology.
To Fleck, the “crisis of reality” provided a test case for the kind of epistemological ruptures he was to describe in his coming monograph. A critical study of the history of science would reveal
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a continually changing and shifting enterprise, a permanent and infinite reconstruction of bits and piece of concepts and theories. The reflexive socio-historical analysis of such changes offered a new epistemological foundation, according to Fleck, if and only if the misguided ideal of an approximation of the absolute were to be replaced by a democratic competition between scientific concepts and different styles of thought. The socio-cultural analysis of the sciences he propagated required extended time before it won recognition; the difficult process of social-cultural-scientific negotiations had hardly begun when Fleck died. In addition to the crisis of reality, it took the structure of scientific revolutions and Forman’s insistence on extrinsic influences on science to rediscover his fine-grained theory of social-material-cognitive interaction in the history of the sciences.
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