Editing Wilhelm Wundt (section)

== Philosophy ==

=== Wundt's philosophical orientation ===
In the introduction to his ''Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie'' in 1874, Wundt described [[Immanuel Kant]] and [[Johann Friedrich Herbart]] as the philosophers who had the most influence on the formation of his own views. Those who follow up these references will find that Wundt critically analysed both these thinkers' ideas. He distanced himself from Herbart's science of the soul and, in particular, from his "mechanism of mental representations" and pseudo-mathematical speculations.<ref>Wundt: Grundzüge,1874, Chapter 19.</ref>  While Wundt praised Kant's critical work and his rejection of a "rational" psychology deduced from metaphysics, he argued against Kant's epistemology in his publication ''Was soll uns Kant nicht sein?'' (What Kant should we reject?) 1892 with regard to the forms of perception and presuppositions, as well as Kant's category theory and his position in the dispute on causal and teleological explanations.

[[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]] had a far greater and more constructive influence on Wundt's psychology, philosophy, epistemology and ethics. This can be gleaned from Wundt's Leibniz publication (1917) and from his central terms and principles, but has since received almost no attention.<ref>Fahrenberg, 2016a.</ref> Wundt gave up his plans for a biography of Leibniz, but praised Leibniz's thinking on the two-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1916. He did, however, disagree with Leibniz's [[monadology]] as well as theories on the mathematisation of the world by removing the domain of the mind from this view. Leibniz developed a new concept of the soul through his discussion on substance and [[actuality]], on dynamic spiritual change, and on the correspondence between body and soul ([[Psychophysical parallelism|parallelism]]). Wundt ''secularised'' such guiding principles and reformulated important philosophical positions of Leibniz away from belief in God as the creator and belief in an immortal soul. Wundt gained important ideas and exploited them in an original way in his principles and methodology of empirical psychology: the principle of actuality, psychophysical parallelism, combination of causal and teleological analysis, apperception theory, the psychology of ''striving'', i.e. volition and voluntary tendency, principles of epistemology and the perspectivism of thought. Wundt's differentiation between the "natural causality" of neurophysiology and the "mental causality" of psychology (the intellect), is a direct rendering from Leibniz's epistemology.<ref>Fahrenberg 2016a.</ref>

Wundt devised the term [[psychophysical parallelism]] and meant thereby two fundamentally different ways of considering the postulated psychophysical unit, not just two views in the sense of Fechner's theory of identity. Wundt derived the co-ordinated consideration of natural causality and mental causality from Leibniz's differentiation between causality and teleology ([[principle of sufficient reason]]). The psychological and physiological statements exist in two categorically different [[reference system]]s; the main categories are to be emphasised in order to prevent [[category mistake]]s. With his epistemology of mental causality, he differed from contemporary authors who also advocated the position of parallelism. Wundt had developed the first genuine epistemology and methodology of empirical psychology.

Wundt shaped the term apperception, introduced by Leibniz, into an experimental psychologically based apperception psychology that included neuropsychological modelling. When Leibniz differentiates between two fundamental functions, perception and striving, this approach can be recognised in Wundt's motivation theory. The central theme of "unity in the manifold" (unitas in multitudine) also originates from Leibniz, who has influenced the current understanding of [[perspectivism]] and viewpoint dependency.<ref>Fahrenberg: Zur Kategorienlehre, 2013, S. 288–296.</ref> Wundt characterised this style of thought in a way that also applied for him: "…the principle of the equality of viewpoints that supplement one another" plays a significant role in his thinking – viewpoints that "supplement one another, while also being able to appear as opposites that only resolve themselves when considered more deeply."<ref>Wundt: Leibniz, 1917, S.117.</ref>

Unlike the great majority of contemporary and current authors in psychology, Wundt laid out the philosophical and methodological positions of his work clearly. Wundt was against the founding empirical psychology on a (metaphysical or structural) principle of soul as in Christian belief in an [[immortal soul]] or in a philosophy that argues "substance"-[[ontologically]]. Wundt's position was decisively rejected by several Christianity-oriented psychologists and philosophers as a ''psychology without soul'', although he did not use this formulation from Friedrich Lange (1866), who was his predecessor in Zürich from 1870 to 1872. Wundt's guiding principle was the development theory of the mind. Wundt's ethics also led to polemical critiques due to his renunciation of an ultimate transcendental basis of ethics (God, the Absolute). Wundt's [[evolutionism]] was also criticised for its claim that ethical norms had been culturally changed in the course of human intellectual development.<ref>reception analysis, see Fahrenberg 2011, 2015a.</ref>

Wundt's autobiography<ref>Wundt: Erlebtes und Erkanntes, 1920</ref> and his inaugural lectures in Zurich and Leipzig<ref>Wundt, 1874; Wundt, 1875.</ref> as well as his commemorative speeches for Fechner<ref>Wundt, 1901.</ref> and his Essay on Leibniz<ref>Wundt, 1917</ref> provide an insight into the history of Wundt's education and the contemporary flows and intellectual controversies in the second half of the 19th century. Wundt primarily refers to Leibniz and Kant, more indirectly to [[Johann Gottlieb Fichte]], [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]], [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling]] and [[Arthur Schopenhauer]]; and to [[Johann Friedrich Herbart]], [[Gustav Theodor Fechner]] and [[Hermann Lotze]] regarding psychology. In addition to [[John Locke]], [[George Berkeley]], [[David Hume]] and [[John Stuart Mill]], one finds [[Francis Bacon]], [[Charles Darwin]] and [[Charles A. Spencer|Charles Spencer]], as well as French thinkers such as [[Auguste Comte]] and [[Hippolyte Taine]], all of whom are more rarely quoted by Wundt.<ref>Araoujo, 2016; Fahrenberg, 2016a.</ref>

=== Metaphysics ===

Wundt distanced himself from the metaphysical term soul and from theories about its structure and properties, as posited by Herbart, Lotze, and Fechner. Wundt followed Kant and warned against a primarily metaphysically founded, philosophically deduced psychology: "where one notices the author's metaphysical point-of-view in the treatment of every problem then an unconditional empirical science is no longer involved – but a metaphysical theory intended to serve as an exemplification of experience."<ref>Wundt: Grundriss der Psychologie, 1896, p. 22.</ref> 
He is, however, convinced that every single science contains general prerequisites of a philosophical nature. "All psychological investigation extrapolates from metaphysical presuppositions."<ref>Wundt: System der Philosophie, 1919, Volume 1, pp. IX f.</ref>  Epistemology was to help sciences find out about, clarify or supplement their metaphysical aspects and as far as possible free themselves of them. Psychology and the other sciences always rely on the help of philosophy here, and particularly on logic and epistemology, otherwise only an immanent philosophy, i.e. metaphysical assumptions of an unsystematic nature, would form in the individual sciences.<ref>Wundt, System der Philosophie, 1897, p. 33.</ref>  Wundt is decidedly against the segregation of philosophy. He is concerned about psychologists bringing their own personal metaphysical convictions into psychology and that these presumptions would no longer be exposed to epistemological criticism. "Therefore nobody would suffer more from such a segregation than the psychologists themselves and, through them, psychology."<ref>Wundt: Die Psychologie im Kampf ums Dasein. 1913, p. 24.</ref> "Nothing would promote the degeneration [of psychology] to a mere craftsmanship more than its segregation from philosophy."<ref>Wundt: Die Psychologie im Kampf ums Dasein. 1913, p. 37.</ref>

=== System of philosophy ===
Wundt claimed that philosophy as a general science has the task of "uniting to become a consistent system through the general knowledge acquired via the individual sciences." Human rationality strives for a uniform, i.e. non-contradictory, explanatory principle for being and consciousness, for an ultimate reasoning for ethics, and for a philosophical world basis. "Metaphysics is the same attempt to gain a binding world view, as a component of individual knowledge, on the basis of the entire scientific awareness of an age or particularly prominent content."<ref>Wundt: System der Philosophie, 1919, Volume 1, p. 17.</ref> Wundt was convinced that empirical psychology also contributed fundamental knowledge on the understanding of humans – for anthropology and ethics – beyond its narrow scientific field. Starting from the active and creative-synthetic apperception processes of consciousness, Wundt considered that the unifying function was to be found in volitional processes and the conscious setting of objectives and subsequent activities. "There is simply nothing more to a man that he can entirely call his own – except for his will."<ref>Wundt: System der Philosophie, 1897, p. 377.</ref> One can detect a "voluntaristic tendency" in Wundt's theory of motivation, in contrast to the currently widespread cognitivism ([[intellectualism]]). Wundt extrapolated this empirically founded volitional psychology to a [[metaphysical voluntarism]]. He demands, however, that the empirical-psychological and derived metaphysical voluntarism are kept apart from one another and firmly maintained that his empirical psychology was created independently of the various teachings of metaphysics.<ref>Wundt: System der Philosophie, 1919, Volume 1, p. IX f.</ref>

Wundt interpreted intellectual-cultural progress and biological evolution as a general process of development whereby, however, he did not want to follow the abstract ideas of [[entelechy]], [[vitalism]], [[animism]], and by no means [[Schopenhauer|Schopenhauer's]] volitional metaphysics. He believed that the source of dynamic development was to be found in the most elementary expressions of life, in reflexive and instinctive behaviour, and constructed a continuum of attentive and apperceptive processes, volitional or selective acts, up to social activities and ethical decisions. At the end of this rational idea he recognised a practical ideal: the idea of humanity as the highest yardstick of our actions and that the overall course of human history can be understood with regard to the ideal of humanity.<ref>Wundt: Ethik, 1886, p. 577.</ref>
[[File:Portraitbüste 0686-90 F22838.jpg|thumb|{{center|Wilhelm Wundt portrait bust by [[Max Klinger]] 1908}}]]

=== Ethics ===
Parallel to Wundt's work on cultural psychology he wrote his much-read ''Ethik'' (1886, 3rd ed. in 2 Vols., 1903), whose introduction stressed how important development considerations are in order to grasp religion, customs and [[morality]]. Wundt considered the questions of ethics to be closely linked with the empirical psychology of motivated acts<ref>(Grundzüge, 1902–1903, Vol. 3.</ref> "Psychology has been such an important introduction for me, and such an indispensable aid for the investigation of ethics, that I do not understand how one could do without it."<ref>Wundt: Ethik, 1886, Vorwort p. III.</ref> Wundt sees two paths: the anthropological examination of the facts of a moral life (in the sense of cultural psychology) and the scientific reflection on the concepts of morals. The derived principles are to be examined in a variety of areas: the family, society, the state, education, etc. In his discussion on [[free will]] (as an attempt to mediate between [[determinism]] and [[indeterminism]]) he categorically distinguishes between two perspectives: there is indeed a natural causality of brain processes, though conscious processes are not determined by an intelligible, but by the empirical character of humans – volitional acts are subject to the principles of mental causality. "When a man only follows inner causality he acts freely in an ethical sense, which is partly determined by his original disposition and partly by the development of his character."<ref>Wundt: Ethik, 1886, p. 410.</ref>

On the one hand, Ethics is a normative discipline while, on the other hand, these 'rules' change, as can be seen from the empirical examination of culture-related [[morality]]. Wundt's ethics can, put simply, be interpreted as an attempt to mediate between Kant's [[apriorism]] and [[empiricism]]. Moral rules are the legislative results of a universal intellectual development, but are neither rigidly defined nor do they simply follow changing life conditions. [[Individualism]] and [[utilitarianism]] are strictly rejected. In his view, only the universal intellectual life can be considered to be an [[end in itself]]. Wundt also spoke on the idea of humanity in ethics, on human rights and [[human duties]] in his speech as Rector of Leipzig University in 1889 on the centenary of the [[French Revolution]].

=== Logic, epistemology and the scientific theory of psychology ===
Wundt divided up his three-volume ''Logik'' into General logic and epistemology, Logic of the exact sciences, and Logic of the humanities. While logic, the doctrine of categories, and other principles were discussed by Wundt in a traditional manner, they were also considered from the point of view of development theory of the human intellect, i.e. in accordance with the psychology of thought. The subsequent equitable description of the special principles of the natural sciences and the humanities enabled Wundt to create a new epistemology. The ideas that remain current include epistemology and the methodology of psychology: the tasks and directions of psychology, the methods of interpretation and comparison, as well as psychological experimentation.