Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler

R e e n c h a n t e d

HOLISM FROM

S c i e n c e

IN G E R M A N

WILHELM

ANNE

PRINCETON

CULTURE

II T O

HITLER

HARRINGTON

UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON. NEW

PRESS

JERSEY

a r t

Copyright © 1996 by Anne Harrington Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrington, Anne Reenchanted science : holism in German culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler / Anne Harrington. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-02142-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Life (Biology)—Philosophy. 2. Medicine—Germany—Philosophy—History. 3. Science—Germany—Philosophy—History. 4. Mind and body—Philosophy. 5. Holism—Philosophy. I. Title. QH501.H37 1996 574'.01—dc20 95-48463

This book has been composed in Times Roman Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America by Princeton Academic Press 1 3 5 7 9

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8 6 4 2

To Godehard, whose deep engagement in the life worlds of this time and place helped transform what was "just a book project" into a challenging partnership of mutual discovery. The experience was a gift I could not have requested, and will never be able to fully reckon.

C O N T E N T S

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

IX

ACKNO WLEDGMENTS

Xi

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE The "Human Machine" and the Call lo "Wholeness" The Original Goethean Vision of "Wholeness" A Fractured Nation and the Mechanists' Quest for Unity in Nature Necessary Ways of Knowing and the Mechanization of Mind and Brain Wholeness Betrayed: Political Unification and the Rise of the "Machine" Society The Place of "Wholeness" in the Fin de Steele Upheavals World War I and Its Aftermath: Science as Cultural Critique CHAPTER TWO Biology against Democracy and the "Gorilla-Machine"

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3 4 1 12 19 23 30 34

On the Way to a Biology of Subjects 38 Scientists in Their Soap Bubbles: Uexkull's Kantian Challenge to Science 44 Revitalizing Life; Umweltlehre and the Vitalist-Mechanist Controversy 48 The Shocks of World War I and Weimar 54 Toward a "Biology of the Stale" 56 Uexkull on the "Jewish Question" 62 The Fight against the "Gorilla-Machine" 63 Uexkull's Relationship to National Socialism 68 CHAPTER THREE World War I and the Search for God in the Nervous System Shock, Recovery, and the Localization of Time in the Brain World War I: Degeneration and Renewal The Biology of Instincts and the Evolutionary Arrow The "World of Orientation" versus the "World of Feeling" Morality in the Cells: The "Syneidesis " or Biological Conscience An Answer to "fgnorabimus": Monakow's Neurobiology of Scientific Knowledge CHAPTER FOUR "A Peacefully Blossoming Tree": The Rational Enchantment of Gestalt Psychology Gestalt versus Chaos: The Voice of Houston Stewart Chamberlain Gestalt versus Chaos: The Voice of Christian von Ehrenfels

72 11 82 88 92 96 98

103 106 108

Vlll

• CONTENTS

•

Max Wertheimer: Claiming Gestalt for Science and Rational Enchantment 111 The Mind's Laws of "Immanent Structuralism " 114 "A Peacefully\Blossoming Tree": Wertheimer's Vision for Weimar 117 Attacks on the Berlin Gestalt Vision 123 The Rise of National Socialism and Wertheimer's Emigration to America 128 Wolfgang Kohler 's Case to Americans for the Reality of Values in a World of Facts 130 Wertheimer's "Gestalt Logic " as an Antidote to Demagoguery 132 CHAPTER FIVE The Self-Actualizing Brain and the Biology of Existential Choice The Imperative of Regeneration in the Clinic and Society Insights from Brain-Damaged Soldiers: Actualization and Wholeness Changing Theoretical Orientations: From Reflex Theory to Gestalt Reason, Courage, and the Making of a Weimar Hero The Call for a Holistic Clinical Practice The Goethean "Schau": Toward a Holistic Epistemology Goldsteins Persecution and the Biology of Fascism Goldstein in America: The "Wholeness" in the Human Encounter The Lessons of Goethe in the Post-Hiroshima Age

140 142 145 151 154 159 162 164 169 171

CHAPTER SIX Life Science, Nazi Wholeness, and the "Machine" in Germany's Midst Gestalt, Goethe, and the Fuhrerprinzip The "Jew " as Chaos and Mechanism Holistic Medicine and the Sick Man as "Machine" Holistic Opposition: The Case of Hans Driesch Nazi Mechanism and the Decline of Nazi Holism Ambiguous Legacies: The Case of Viktor von Weizsacker

175 178 181 185 188 193 200

CONCLUSION

207

NOTES

213

BIBLIOGRAPHY

275

INDEX

303

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

Figure 1. Gerd Arntz, Fabrik [Factory], 1927. Figure 2. Goethe's vision of wholeness and teleology: "Sketches of the construction [Aufbau] of the higher plants," 1787. Figure 3. The "atomistic" human brain: localization map by Karl Kleist, 1886. Figure 4. The "machine" brain: associationist-connectionist schema of mind and brain functioning. Figure 5. George Grosz, Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, 1918. Figure 6. Fritz Lang, Metropolis, film still, 1927. Figure 7. The Wandervogel movement, youth celebrating nature in pagan Germanic ritual, date unknown. Figure 8. "Transformation Panorama" set design, Act III, from Richard Wagner's opera, Parsifal, 1904. Figure 9. Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944). Figure 10. Uexkull's "functional circle" that creates the Umwelt, or unified organism-environment system, 1934. Figure 11. The Umwelt of the astronomer looking through his telescope in a tower, demonstrates the Kantian implications of a new biology, 1934. Figure 12. Hans Driesch (1867-1941). Figure 13. Driesch's embryo experiments that gave new credence to vitalism in biology, 1891. Figure 14. Constantin von Monakow (1853-1930). Figure 15. The human brain compared by Constantin von Monakow to the functioning of a music box, 1928. Figure 16. Culturally stylized photograph of the Swiss Alps emphasizes their capacity to serve as a sanctuary from modern life, 1899. Figure 17. Monakow's schema of the Horme's progress through the various instinct levels towards final reunification with the cosmos ("World-Horme"), 1928. Figure 18. Max Wertheimer (1880-1943). Figure 19. Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932). Figure 20. Wertheimer's illustration of various "Gestalt laws," 1921. Figure 21. Felix Krueger (1874-1948). Figure 22. Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). Figure 23. Goldstein's toolbox that tested brain-damaged patients for loss of holistic "abstract capacity" (separate tests for men and women), 1941. Figure 24. National Socialist workers with shovels salute en masse, photograph supervised by Leni Riefenstahl, Nuremberg, 1934. Figure 25. Poster of the Fiihrer Principle, "March 13, 1938. One Folk, One Reich, One FUhrer."

2 6 17 22 23 26 26 35 43 47 49 50 73 81 84 91 104 109 116 125 141 167 176 180

X

. LiST

OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 26. Drawings demonstrating evidence of inferior perceptual depth capacity and spatial-compositional skills (holistic "seeing") in Jewish school children as compared to their Aryan peers ("Jewish" drawings are middle-left and bottom-left). Figure 27. Anti-Semitic cartoon from Julius Streicher's DerStUrmer representing "the Jew" as "chaos." Figure 28. Cover from holistic medical journal Der Heilpraktiker during the Nazi years, extolling "earth-water-light-air" as "sources of healthy life," 1936. Figure 29. "Priests on the Plantation": priests working on the herbal plantation at Dachau concentration camp, part of the holistic naturopathic vision of Nazi medicine, early 1940s. Figure 30. Viktor von Weizsacker (1886-1957).

183 184 188 189 201

A

C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

THIS BOOK has been a long time in conceptualization, research, and writing. The process of producing it has also been an object lesson in the. ultimately collective and community nature of even apparently solitary practices of scholarship. To say this is only a rather pedantic way of observing, with both humility and great gratitude, just how many different people over the past years have stepped in and provided help and support for this project. The initial ideas for this book were conceived during a postdoctoral tenure as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow based at the Institute for the History of Medicine of the University of Freiburg, Germany. I am indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its generous financial support of my work at that time and to the Institute's director, Eduard Seidler, and to my host and sponsor, Heinz Schott (now at Bonn), for welcoming me so warmly to the Institute and integrating me so thoroughly into its culture. Further financial support for research and writing was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1991 and by the Spencer Foundation in 1993. I am grateful for the vote of confidence shown me by all of these organizations. I hope they will be pleased with the results. Even though I may no longer recall all their names, I do remember with considerable gratitude the assistance of librarians and archivists in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, many of whom went beyond the call of mere duty by drawing my attention to uncatalogued material in neglected boxes, giving me access to photocopiers and other tools, and taking a personal interest in the questions and issues I was pursuing. In researching this project, I also had the pleasure of speaking with a range of witnesses and actors from the era, all of whom who gave generously of their thoughts and memories: Roberta Apfel, Viktor Hamburger, Richard Held, Owsei Temkin, Norbert Mintz, Aaron Smith, Frederick Wyatt. Early on, Professor Thure von Uexkull made archival material that his family controlled available to me. Through our rich but not always easy discussions, he also took me on a layered and complex odyssey at the interface.of memory and values that came to inform my telling of the story of holism in Germany in a number of ways. I hope he will feel that, in the. end, I responded with integrity to both the challenge and the inspiration he embodied for me. I am grateful to a number of undergraduate and graduate research assistants who have stepped in to help with this project over the past several years: John Griffith, Stein Berre, Kalpesh Joshi, and Tracey Cho. These students gamely took on tasks ranging from the pedantic to the quite sophisticated, and through their own intellectual nimbleness and curiosity, often provoked me to rethink matters, sometimes more thoroughly than I otherwise would have. Gretchen Hermes brought both passion and critical discrimination to her work with me on the selection and development of the illustrations and in the process taught

Xll

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

me just how powerfully images can "speak" historical truths that cannot be so easily captured in textual form. A range of colleagues, too many to name, provided feedback on earlier versions of the arguments made in this book, both as I presented them in seminars and in written form. I feel especially indebted and grateful for the support and input of Garland Allen, Cathryn Carson, Gerald Geison, Richard Held, Larry Holmes, Gerald Holton, Lisbet Koerner, Susan Lanzoni, Edward Manier, Jane Maeinschein, Everett'Mendelsohn, Diane Paul, Dorothy Porter, Roy Porter, Robert Richards, Charles Rosenberg, Barbara Rosenkrantz, Sam Schweber, Skuli Siggurdsson, Paul Weindling, and Nicholas Weiss. For several years, Richard Beyler and I engaged in productive dialogue about our mutual interests in holistic science in the German context, and I am grateful to him for those exchanges, as well as for his generosity in sharing certain archival material he had collected for his own research. Erika Keller gave the book a rich "lay-per son's" read that identified still other avenues for clarification and expansion. Allan Brandt and I had some especially fruitful discussions about the introduction to this book that left a lasting imprint on its ultimate form. Evelyn Fox Keller was both a source of scholarly insights in her own right and a much-appreciated emotional support and sounding board during the tough spells. Mitchell Ash was an exceptionally generous and engaged colleague and critic during the earlier stages of this book's conceptualization and writing, even as he worked on his definitive history of Gestalt psychology in its institutional and cultural context. As a relative newcomer into an arena where he had already done such valuable work, I had the opportunity to learn a great deal from him. I am only sorry his own book was published too late to be incorporated significantly into the arguments made here. Robert Nye took particular pains to provide helpful feedback to the book as a whole at a late stage, inspiring me to make a number of additions and enhancements to the book that would otherwise not be there. Finally, I feel enormously indebted to the rich, frank, and detailed'comments of John McCole and Peter Galison on the book as a whole that came in the final hour and that resulted in some substantive revisions and enlargments in my overall argument and analysis. Their care when it counted saved me from committing some significant errors. Obviously, any remaining weaknesses or misunderstandings are my own responsibility. While I was fending off decompensation under a looming publication deadline, my assistant Billie Jo Joy took on the onerous job of proofing and copyediting the manuscript and organizing its final compilation for delivery, in the process providing steady emotional support and encouragement, for which I will always be grateful. At the same time, Meg Alexander navigated with elegance and humor the bewildering world of copyright permissions for the illustrations, taking over a job ably begun by Diane Ehrenpreis. My husband, Godehard Oepen, came into my life about the same time as I began turning my attention to the themes and material described here, and he

. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI11 knows better than anyone else what conceiving and writing this book has entailed for me. My debt to him along the way for support and assistance— practical, intellectual and emotional—is just incalculable. I can only hope he understands how deep my gratitude goes. I am very proud and pleased that this book found a home with Princeton University Press and grateful especially to Emily Wilkinson and her assistant Kevin Downing for their competent and humane support through the process. It's good now to "let go" of the project, knowing that it is in such good hands.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

IN 1918, the sociologist Max Weber was invited to give a lecture at the University of Munich.1 The invitation came just a few months after the end of the prolonged and devastating Great War, which had ended in Germany's humili^ ating defeat, the collapse of her old regime, and the breakup of the AustroHungarian Empire. Weber knew that the students listening to his talk were hungry for existential and moral orientation and would be hoping for a message from him that addressed their demands for personal relevance and larger meaning in their studies. He did not feel able to comply. The theme he chose for his lecture was "Science as a Vocation," and his words were sober. The scientist was not a prophet, he said, and not in a position to provide any of the larger answers or transcendent grounding for life the students were looking for. Indeed, Weber was prepared to go further: the effect of science was actually to undermine all transcendent principles, systematically stripping the world of all spiritual mystery, emotional color, and ethical significance and turning it into a mere "causal mechanism." Weber profoundly regretted the existential emptiness left behind by this "disenchanted" world after science was finished with it, but he saw no alternative to a stoical, clear understanding of the inevitable. It was the "fate" of the modern individual to live in a "godless, prophetless" world: Wherever. . . rational empirical knowledge has consistently carried out the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism, there appears the ultimate challenge to the claims of the ethical postulate, that the world is a divinely ordered cosmos with some kind of ethically meaningful direction.2 As Weber well knew, many in his student audience would not have been happy with his uncompromising call to stoicism,3 but the sociologist's assessment of science as a "disenchanting" force in the modern world would hardly have surprised very many of them. Since the 1890s, an intensifying stream of German-language articles and monographs had been identifying the rise of a certain kind of mechanistic thinking in the natural sciences as a chief culprit in a variety of failed or crisis-ridden cultural and political experiments. Science had declared humanity's life and soul a senseless product of mechanism, so people now treated one another as mere machines. It was said that the spread of mechanistic, instrumentalist thinking into all areas of professional and cultural life had given rise to a cynical, this-worldly attitude and a decline in morality and idealism. Traditional ideals of learning and culture were in crisis, the young people were alienated, and the arts had degenerated into exercises in absurdity and self-absorption. The nihilistic message of scientists who apparently valued Technik over soul and integrity was even blamed for the devastation of the lost war—the first war, it was said, in which "victory

• INTRODUCTION XVI [was] no longer decided by the spiritual and mental resistance of men, but by the predominance of mechanical instruments of power."4 Weber's lecture in 1918 was intended as a direct response to the widespread mood of restless antimodernism and antiscience that was so palpable in the wake of that lost war and the fall of the Wilhelminian regime. While his sympathies were with the disaffected, the personal effect of the war on Weber had been to reinforce a profound distrust of any charismatic, irrationalist solutions to the dilemmas raised by the Machine society. His message, therefore, had been uncompromising: science could give no answers to the burning questions of existence, and it must not try, regardless of the pain and unsatisfied hungers that it left in its wake. Yet not everyone was prepared to accept Weber's conclusion that the choices were inevitably irresponsible irrationalism or grim-faced resignation. This book tells the story of a group of German-speaking scientists who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, effectively agreed with Weber's conclusion that a certain kind of mechanistic science had "disenchanted" the world. They did not, however, believe that the process of disenchantment through science was inevitably destined to continue. Instead, these men— biologists, neurologists, and psychologists—argued that a continuing commitment to responsible science was compatible with an ethically and existentially meaningful picture of human existence; but only //one were prepared to rethink prejudices about what constituted appropriate epistemological and methodological standards for science. Under the banner of Wholeness, these scientists argued, in varying ways, that a transformed biology and psychology—one that viewed phenomena less atomistically and more "holistically,"5 . less mechanistically and more "intuitively"—could lead to the rediscovery of a nurturing relationship with the natural world. What the old science of the Machine had wrought, a new science of Wholeness would heal. It would "reenchant" the world—and it had 'voiced' this idea long before Morris Berman issued a similar call to arms in his bestseller from the 1980s.6 The Machine science in dispute here was, above all, the work of the socalled biophysicist program spearheaded by leading German scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, and Rudolf Virchow. These were the men who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had fought for a total integration of physiology with physics within a reductionist framework, and who—arguing from a particular hard-line interpretation of Immanuel Kant's "critique of reason"—had asserted that all science must necessarily limit itself to mechanistic modes of explanation. Any and all other kinds of assertion were, by definition, "metaphysical" and outside the proper sphere of science.7 The rebellion against this fortress of rigor began with the fin de siecle revival of vitalism in early-twentieth-century biology, primarily associated with the work of Hans Driesch. Through its showcasing of research results in embryology, Driesch's new vitalism declared that the inability of mechanism to account for the incontrovertible results of laboratory research justified a turn

INTRODUCTION

XV11 to alternative formulations. Nevertheless, by the first decades of the twentieth century, such prominent theoreticians of holism like Adolf Meyer-Abich and Ludwig von Bertalanffy were distancing themselves from the claims of outright vitalism and proposing a range of alternatives to mechanism that were self-consciously emphasized as nonvitalistic; alternatives that often also looked back to Kant but emphasized a different reading of that legacy. Especially important for these men was the Kantian assertion that the mechanistic causal categories of human reason in fact fall short when dealing with living organisms. Kant had said that in the realm of living processes, human judgment was justified in positing a different order of causality, a teleological causality (Naturzweck) that looked at the functioning of parts in terms of the organization and needs of the whole.8 In reaching back to this aspect of Kant's legacy, twentieth-century holistic scientists were thus challenging, not only the empirical inadequacies of the nineteenth-century "Machine model" of life and mind, but also the epistemological and methodological inadequacies of the science that had created that model in the first place. The new "holistic" science of life and mind that was to replace the old Machine science was really more a family of approaches than a single coherent perspective. The need to do justice to organismic purposiveness or teleological functioning—to questions of "what for?" and not merely "how?"— was central in all cases. Beyond that need was a range of overlapping understandings. Some holism was concerned with finding alternatives to the view of the organism as a mere sum of its elementary parts and processes (what was often denounced as atomism). This form of holism aimed instead to understand apparently discrete physiological processes in terms of their roles in the total functioning of the organism. Others understood by holism an imperative to resist the tendency of the time to treat bodily phenomena and mental phenomena as separate ontological categories (so-called psycho-physical parallelism). This holism insisted instead that the task of a human holistic biology in particular must be to reground the mind in the body and to reanimate the body with the mind: psychosomatic medicine would be one of the most enduring legacies of this second holistic tradition. Still another form of holism emphasized the inadequacy of thinking that the "whole" could be considered merely at the level of the individual organism. It maintained that organismic processes and behavior only make sense when studied as part of a larger system, whether that system be the immediate lived world of the organism, nature as a "whole," or (in some cases) the cosmic logic of the evolutionary process writ large.9 But that is not all. In this process of drawing up a holism designed to challenge the many faces of the Machine in the laboratory and clinic, holistic life and mind scientists also felt increasingly free to speak to the broader question of the Machine in society and intellectual life. From Berlin to Prague to Vienna to Zurich, these scientists began to mingle their voices with those of other kinds of cultural critics, would-be reformers, and crisis-mongers. Those other voices from outside the sciences also typically used the oppositional

• INTRODUCTION XV111 imagery of machine and wholeness in order to articulate what they believed had gone wrong in politics, the community, and individual existence—and to identify roads to renewal.10 That imagery in turn had energetic links to other, overlapping political and societal oppositions of the time: Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (society), an opposition made famous by the nineteenth-century sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies;11 (German) Kultur versus (French) Zivilization; Life and Soul versus Mind and Reason, a squaring-off associated with such "life philosophers" as Ludwig Klages. The resonances across these binary clusters were strong, and new writers entering the fray found themselves either struggling to disaggregate their specific arguments from those of the collective, or else (more frequently) allowing their reliance on one trope to draw on the energies of the collective. For example, when Tonnies spoke of the noxiousness of "societies," part of his point was that "societies" were so noxious because they functioned like machines. "Gemeinschaft," he declared, "should be understood as a living organism, Gesellschaft as a mechanical aggregate and artifact."12 And when he went on to suggest that a great metropolis like Berlin exemplified all the ugliness, impersonality, and hostility inherent to modern society, well, here again, what "Berlin" was had already been partly "pre-interpreted" for both him and his readers through preexisting cultural imagery that saw that city as a kind of monstrous (or awesome) "machine." 13 What happened now when the voice of this new "anti-machine" science began to mix with those of these other, full-time cultural critics, many of whom were well known for their distrust of both science and scientists? (The life philosopher Theodor Lessing was not untypical when he decried modern man as "a species of robber-apes which has been infected with megalomania by science."14) Significantly, the result was less frequently an open struggle over values and control and more often a subtle shift in the cultural logic that ruled the larger critique as a whole. Even though science (the "old" science) had been the enemy, nevertheless it had always been a powerful enemy, with an authority that would be useful to have on one's own side. Now that it was in the process of remaking itself (the "new" science),15 now that its truths were in the service of Wholeness rather than the Machine, few objected to letting it continue to claim a unique social and epistemological authority in the larger debate. In this context, the vision of holistic nature emerging from the life and mind sciences tended to carry the most clout. This is not because researchers in the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.) felt that they had nothing to say about Mechanism, Wholeness, or the crisis of modernity—they did. There is still much to ponder in Paul Forman's now classic 1971 argument that German twentieth-century physics drew back from the mechanistic and deterministic principles to which it had been epistemologically committed, not out of empirical and conceptual necessity, but as an "accommodation" to a cultural mood that was explicitly hostile to deterministic, materialistic philosophies.16 According to Forman, the enshrining of much more culturally

INTRODUCTION

XIX congenial acausal, antimechanistic, even semimystical, interpretations of quantum theory and relativity allowed physics to transform itself from a suspect enterprise to—in the words of another historian—"the solvent of the materialism that had spread with the conquests of classical physics."17 The case of physics notwithstanding, the holistic biological and psychological sciences possessed a special authority in the larger cultural discussion about Wholeness because these sciences studied the subjects—life and soul— that served as key symbols in this time of cultural and spiritual regeneration.18 Posing their laboratory and clinical claims in metaphors and tropes encrusted with suggestive meanings and historically resonating associations, holistic life and mind scientists managed at once to engage the data and problems of the laboratory and clinic while simultaneously functioning as part of the heterogeneous field of German cultural criticism and theory. We see how, in this time of perceived intellectual and social crisis, metaphor and other connotative properties of language allowed holistic scientists to leapfrog in a range of ways across the epistemological divisions of the time that an earlier generation of science had declared must necessarily separate the secular from the sacred, the natural from the political, the mythical from the necessary. For those with the culturally and politically sensitized ears to hear the messages, the new arguments in biology, neurology, and psychology for Wholeness and against the Machine could thus gradually come to persuade simultaneously as scientific fact, salvation mythology, and psychobiological guide to cultural and political survival. How receptive were the more established perspectives in the sciences themselves to these holistic challenges? Some important disciplinary traditions seem to have been more or less indifferent. In his study of some forty-odd German geneticists from the Wilhelminian and Weimar period, for example, Jonathan Harwood found that most were basically supportive of mechanistic and materialist explanations in their discipline, while only a minority expressed some sympathy for a more holistic perspective (here often conveyed in concern with a possible role for cytoplasm in hereditary transmission).19 Conversely, disciplines like embryology, botany, medicine, psychology, neurology, and zoology seem to have taken the call to wholeness far more to heart, presumably because of the preoccupations within those fields with such phenomena as form, development, and self-regulation. Nevertheless, even in subdisciplines of the life and mind sciences that were most receptive to holism, no full consensus was reached and various established mechanistic and reductionistic perspectives continued to carry weight. The heyday of holistic thinking in German neurology, for example, coincided with a period of intensive laboratory investigation into the cellular basis of brain function that culminated in the drawing of the cyto-architectonic maps of Korbinian Brodmann and the attempts by neurologists like Oskar and Cecile Vogt to relate discrete psychic functions to histological variations in the brain. It is true that holism claimed the future of the German mind and life sciences for itself, but as late as the 1930s, this oppositional movement still knew itself best by em-

• INTRODUCTION • XX phasizing what it was not, still was caught up in the process of debating and developing its own agenda and strategies. This said, I am less interested in locating holistic life and mind science in the broader history of institutionalized science research in Germany (valuable as such a study would be) and more concerned with establishing a place for it as a neglected voice in German cultural history.20 Viewed from this perspective, it emerges as a story with a number of broad turning points, the most important of which was the First World War. The national humiliation, class fragmentation, and political polarization engendered by the loss of that war acted as a radicalizing force for many scientists involved in developing holistic reformulations of life and mind. The crises of the time seemed to demand that holism become more than just a means to a more authentic vision of life and mind; it must also become a blueprint for visualizing a more authentic future for Germany. In this uncertain time, the same flexible language and imagery that had previously connected this science to older aesthetic and spiritual traditions in Germany now stretched itself to connect it to the politics and social disarray of the postwar era as well. After 1918, in other words, holism often spoke with a political accent. For a while, the intellectual field of holistic life and mind science was able to accommodate a range of political solutions to the tensions between modernity and nostalgia, mechanism and wholeness, science and spirit, Technik and Kultur. Nevertheless, as intellectuals in the 1920s descended into greater depths of discontent, aspects of the scientific Wholeness/Mechanism oppositional imagery began to take on dimensions that both German-speaking central Europe and the rest of the world would learn to regret. Jews would be increasingly identified as both cause and as flesh-and-blood instantiation of all the worst values of the machine—summative, nonsynthetic thought, soulless, mechanistic science, rootless, mercenary social relations. An earlier tradition of intellectualized anti-Semitic "scholarship"—the bulk of it stemming from the fin de siecle years—provided ready resources for these developments. At the turn of the century, the Anglo-German race philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain had spoken of the "crude-empirical, causality-bewitched materialism" of the old mechanistic sciences that was "nothing other than the Semitic Creation-story in modern clothing."21 Otto Weininger had similarly linked the growing alleged infiltration of Jews into the medical profession with the triumph of the soulless-machine perspective in both medical theory and practice. "From the earliest times, until the dominance of the Jews," he wrote, "medicine was closely allied with religion. But now they make it a matter of drugs, a mere administration of chemicals. . . . The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these on a level with their own dead ashes."22 By the time the National Socialists had secured power in Germany in 1933, metaphorical linkages like these increasingly carried policy implications and struck increasingly ominous poses. In a 1935 article that appeared in the official medical journal of the Nazi party, Ziel und Weg, the message could hardly have been clearer. The article stressed the dissolutive,

•

INTRODUCTION

XXI sterile nature of Jewish thinking and Jewish science that could lead only to "death" and contrasted this with the "simple, organic, creative" thinking of the "healthy non-Jew," who "thinks in wholes." 23 The "racializing" of German holism and its partial absorption into the politics and mythology of National Socialism is an important part of the larger story of German holism, and is recounted in chapter 6 of this book. Nevertheless, even if we know how part of the story I tell in this book is going to "come out," it is important that we resist "discovering" the outline of a terrible future in holism's past or imagining that all holistic, vitalistic, or teleological views of nature are part of a larger "destruction of reason" that can be tracked in some straight, degenerating line from the romantics to Hegel to Nietzsche to Hitler. Such claims and temptations are familiar in the older secondary literature on modern Germany,24 but one can argue they do not do justice either to the historical contradictions of modernity in general or to the role of antimechanistic, pastoral, and alternative scientific thinking as a reaction to and comment on those contradictions. In his study of Weimar culture, for example, Detlev Peukert stresses the extent to which expressions of anxiety among German intellectuals about the consequences of modernity were found, not just among the cranky "anti-modernist" fringe sowing "cultural despair" in cheap pamphlets, but in the writings of intellectuals we would place firmly "within the modernist fold."25 In a similar way, I argue, in this book that, before 1933, various liberal, democratic, and Jewish scientists were attracted to both the intellectual and cultural promises of holism and managed to share concerns about the "mechanization" of both science and society with their more reactionary and, in some cases, anti-Semitic colleagues. As one then tracks the varied arguments across the decade, one can see how, gradually, different spokespeople for holism actually came to be as much in a state of tension with one another as they were with their mechanistic rivals, each developing arguments designed to undermine the politics and positions of the other. Yet, even as holism in some respects proved to be a pluralistic and sometimes even quarrelsome phenomenon, in other respects, it always remained a surprisingly closely knit one: certain recurring themes and problems made up a coherent conceptual grid whose architecture, without being rigid, allowed distinctions to be drawn between innovations and theoretical developments that were "inside" the frame and those that posed a threat to it. The selfdefined borders, colors, and contours of this grid clearly mark it as a "German" construction.26 That said, we should nevertheless not insist on a more rigid definition of holism's "Germanness" than was in fact operative at the time. The paper trail left by holistic life and mind scientists did not respect the political borders of Germany proper but to varying degrees embraced the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, Hungary, and Austria as well.27 Although political events like World War I had repercussions for everyone, holistic comrades-in-arms "recognized" one another in the first instance because they all (quite literally) spoke a common language, made use of certain common

INTRODUCTION xxu rhetorical conventions, and saw themselves as in dialogue (in varying ways) with common philosophical, scientific, and cultural legacies. Still, even if I stress the relative looseness with which I speak of the "Germanness" of German holism, it is true that the focus of this book privileges German cultural experience. It does not do this because of some assumption that an impulse toward antimechanistic, "holistic" approaches in science was a uniquely German phenomenon in the early decades of the twentieth century. Anyone at all familiar with this material knows that the very term "holism" (a word not generally used by Germans) was coined in 1926 by the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts.28 Additionally, two highly influential early-twentieth-century advocates of antimechanistic philosophies of science were products of French and British culture respectively: Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution, and Alfred North Whitehead, architect of an "organismic" approach to reality that came to be known as "process philosophy."29 These men were admittedly not scientists themselves, but in the United States, embryologists at the University of Chicago, such as Charles Manning Child and Charles Judson Herrick, worked during the interwar years on developing dynamic, holistic models of organismic development, while American psychologist Karl Lashley galvanized experimental psychology with his radical holistic or "equipotentialist" view of memory and intelligence in the brain.30 In this sense, one could conclude that holism had become the touchstone of the day. Moreover, there is every indication that Germany was not the only cultural setting in which holism was not an insular intellectual phenomenon but rather a vehicle for both political anxiety andsocial reformist zeal. Sharon Kingsland has emphasized ways in which embryologists like Child and Herrick at the University of Chicago used holistically oriented ideas like "emergent evolution" as part of a biological defense of liberal politics that affirmed the autonomy of the individual within a social whole. Stephen Cross and William Albury have suggested a relationship between the preoccupation in American physiology with organismic regulation and homeostasis (internal physiological balance) and broader American interwar concerns with the need to preserve social stability.31 The history of science is still waiting for some systematic comparative analysis of twentieth-century holism in the life and mind sciences that would both clarify larger unifying patterns across cultural and national contexts and also tease apart salient distinctions.32 Nevertheless, the particular story of holism in the German-speaking countries is likely to continue to have a particular prominence and importance of its own. In Germany, a sense of groundedness in cultural values mattered enormously, since there was no stable tradition of political and national identification. Industrialization had come later and harder there than elsewhere in Europe and the United States. And later, it would be the German-speaking countries that would lose a war, lose an empire, and lose the respect of the world. A great deal seemed to be in crisis, a great deal seemed to be at stake, and "the [resulting] feverish intellectual cli-

INTRODUCTION

XXI11 mate . . . created almost laboratory-like conditions in which every conceivable solution to the problems of modernity could be put to the test."33 If one of the larger rationales for studying holistic science is to understand how it could become "more than itself," could enter into a dynamic relationship with its own proliferating set of meanings, we are warranted to look at where the action is likely to have been most intense. It seems necessary to say that even though I aim to locate German holistic life and mind science in German culture, and even though I assert that this was science that became "more than itself," I do not believe that the content of this science was merely some socially driven or historically arbitrary creative product unconstrained by any demands from its own data. Certainly, I share the conviction of most of my profession that the statements of science do not "mirror" the realities of nature in some simple, detached way. At the same time, I believe that what actually makes science worth taking so seriously is the fact that it apparently does, in highly ritualized ways, engage phenomenal realities that "talk back" and whose logic is not wholly human—and yet simultaneously does so in ways richly generative of human meanings and social imperatives. In other words, ontologically, we humans are not the measure of all things, but scientific knowledge does involve a process, still not well understood, in which that which we call "natural" is brought inside human history and enabled to play a role in any number of human dramas.34 Given this, how have I understood the accounts of German holistic life and mind science written by scientists—accounts that speak very little about culture and politics, and a great deal about invertebrate animals, human brains, urchin embryos, and experimental subjects?35 Roughly put, my position has been, not that these accounts are "wrong" (though they may certainly be fashioned in self-serving ways), but rather that they are misleadingly incomplete. Here, my understanding of metaphor—its capacity to connect different orders of reality simultaneously—has allowed me to claim the story of German holistic science for German cultural history without neglecting the role, so selfevident to scientists, played by the nonhuman, the material, and the unexpected in that same story.36 Paying attention to the multiregister voice of metaphor has allowed me to see how the conceptual "content" of holistic life and mind science was also its cultural "context" but without my summarily reducing or collapsing the former into the latter. There is another way in which I have resisted the temptation to reduce or collapse my material while writing this book. In fact the book ultimately tells, not just one story about the cultural meanings of holism, but rather several. The book's heart lies in its biographical studies of four German-speaking holistic scientists active between 1890 and 1945: behavioral biologist Jakob von Uexkiill (1864-1944), clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow (1853— 1930), Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), and holistic neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). While a couple of these names are familiar today and the others are more obscure, the criteria for choosing this

XXIV

• INTRODUCTION • mix of characters was not based on present-day perceptions of a particular figure's "importance" or enduring legacy. Instead, all the main protagonists in this book were chosen for their reputations among peers as pioneers in the attempt to transform basic principles of psychology and biology along antimechanistic, holistic lines. With an age gap of 27 years between the youngest (Max Wertheimer) and the oldest (Constantin von Monakow), these four men cannot be said to represent a "generation" in the sense exploited by other cultural historians.37 Nevertheless, they drew on one another's insights and data, and even, in some cases, collaborated. They also shared active and sometimes contentious membership in the larger scientific, philosophical, and cultural community of scientific holism that included such figures as the embryologist and philosopher Hans Driesch, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, the race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the psychologist Felix- Krueger, the psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, the holistic-biology theorist Adolf Meyer-Abich, and the "medical anthropologist" and psychosomaticist Viktor von Weizsacker. All reacted strongly, yet distinctively, to the complex agenda of concerns that had been raised by the First World War. And finally, all of them, in a range of ways both subtle and blunt, employed the rich metaphorical language of Wholeness to argue for connections between developments in the clinic or laboratory on the one hand and solutions to the cultural imperatives of the time on the other. A group-biography approach was chosen, not to reproduce some hagiographic understanding of history of science as a parade of "Great Men," 38 but rather to express the spirit of what Carl Schorske calls "the empirical pursuit of pluralities." In parallel-tracking four scientists who lived and worked— again to quote Schorske—"as culture-makers in a common social and temporal space,"39 my larger goal has been to tell a story greater than the sum of its individual parts, to write a history with, not one, but multiple viewpoints and endings. Taken together, I hope such a narrative strategy will enable me to convey, at a level of detail that would otherwise not be possible, my deep sense of German holistic life and mind science as a world of tensions, ambiguous intellectual and moral messages, and shifting potential courses that elude any easy or dogmatic generalizations.40

Reenchanted

Science

Figure 1. Gerd Arntz, Fahrik [Factory], 1927. © 1995 Estate of Gerd Arntz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

C H A P T E R

O N E

T h e " H u m a n Machine" and the Call to " W h o l e n e s s "

HOLISTIC life and mind science brought a potent mixture of Salvationist optimism and bristly aggrievement to its view of the world. On the one hand, this reformist impulse was all about celebration: its leaders knew they were guiding the sciences out of the dusk of the past and toward the brightening new horizon of Wholeness. At the same time, they also spent much time glaring retrospectively at a particular enemy they believed was responsible for all of their struggles in the first place. They knew this enemy under many faces but, significantly, almost all of those guises were condemned under the same name: the Machine. The Machine that haunted holism's self-consciousness was an entity with a status much like that of "the Communist threat" that haunted the consciousness of the United States during the height of the Cold War. That is to say, it is best understood, first and foremost, as an emotionally charged image of negativity that functioned to define and drive holism's positive agenda. Nevertheless, we are also not dealing with a made-up entity constructed entirely out of rhetoric and paranoia. The Machine was so potent because there were evident realities feeding and reinforcing its various meanings (real people who called themselves mechanists, for example). Holists themselves were inclined to suppose that the specific terms of holism's relationship to the Machine were more or less transparent: "good" science simply began to assert itself against "bad" science; new worldviews began courageously to square off against older entrenched ones. In this chapter I adopt a somewhat larger perspective. What I am trying to show is the way in which the terms and conditions of a quarrel were constructed, not because there was no other possible way to think and talk, but because the mechanistic program in the life and mind sciences had come to be identified with a range of high-stake and contentious debates marking the German-speaking countries' rapid and rocky road into industrialized modernity. Over time, the terms "wholeness" and "machine" became "thick" with the meanings and feelings of urgency that were attached to those other debates. Several moments in this process were particularly decisive: the failed liberal revolution in Germany of 1848, the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the broader politics and passions of the fin de siecle Central Europe, and the outbreak and subsequent disastrous loss of World War I.

CHAPTER

ONE

THE ORIGINAL GOETHEAN VISION OF "WHOLENESS"

Early in the nineteenth century, a heterogeneous group of German scientists and philosophers who identified with the Romantic impulse of that era found themselves haunted by an image of fragmentation and mechanism that they traced back especially to Newton's establishment of the law of universal gravity. As they saw matters, this English scientist had been born into a universe of color, quality, and spontaneity and had proceeded ruthlessly to transform it into a cold, quality-less and impersonal realm of homogeneous and threedimensional space, where particles of matter danced like marionettes to mathematically calculable laws:1 Where now, as our wise men say, only a soulless ball of fire rotates, Helios in quiet majesty once guided his golden chariot. Oreads filled these heights. A Dryad lived in every tree. From the urns of lovely Najads sprang the silver foam of streams. Alas! from that living, warm picture only the shadow remains. . . . Like the dead stroke of the pendulum, Nature—bereft of gods—slavishly serves the law of gravity.2 Significantly, not all of Europe shared the despair of the German Romantics over Newton's contributions to the new modern science, and certainly not all shared the perception—least of all, Newton himself—that humanity was now condemned to live in a dead, particulate universe devoid of "dryads" or spiritual meaning.3 We are thus led to the questions: Whence this German Romantic preoccupation with the sins of Newton—and whence their particular focus on "atomization" and "slavish" obedience as the essential message of that Englishman's science? Historian John Reddick finds a partial answer to these questions in the political situation in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. Germany, in sharp contrast to France or England, lived under autocratic rule and in fragmented fiefdoms; it did not know itself as a unified political, social, or cultural entity, but rather only as "a multiplicity of state and statelets—the atomization and attendant backwardness of particularism."4 Reddick suggests that the fragmented landscape of Germany was important in cultivating a philosophical sensibility that began to look for wholeness and synthesis, not in the immediately lived realities of the everyday, but in the ideal realms of the mind and natural order. Seizing on the idealist potential lurking inside the cracks pried open by Immanuel Kant's critique of pure reason, "the mind as the giver of meaning, as the creator in a certain sense, of the knowable world [was] . . . set . . . ever more intensely at the centre of the universe."5 And gradually—on the shards of a desolate historical reality that Reddick calls the "shattered whole"—the great holistic, idealistic systems of natural philosophy [Naturphilosophie] were constructed: systems associated with names like Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and George Wilhelm Hegel.

• THE "HUMAN

MACHINE'

The natural philosophers called themselves children of Kant, even though they went in directions that would have horrified the Konigsberg philosopher. But Kant had provided early-nineteenth-century opponents of Newton's clockwork universe with another resource; one rooted not in the Critique of Pure Reason, but in the Critique of Judgment. There Kant had insisted that the innate reasoning categories of mechanistic causality that humans appropriately bring to their analysis of nonliving reality were incapable of doing justice to the activities of the living realm. To make sense of life as a phenomenon, human judgment was forced to postulate, at least for heuristic purposes, an additional principle of Ideological causality that Kant called "natural purpose" (Naturzwecke). This was a form of explanation in which the working parts of an organism were to be understood in terms of the teleology or pur- * posive functioning of the organism as a whole.6 Kant had juxtaposed his discussion of the "Ideological judgment" with a discussion of something else he called the "aesthetic judgment" and concluded by proposing that similar sorts of cognitive processes were involved in grasping the nature of living phenomena on the one hand and the nature of the beautiful and sublime on the other. And it was this assertion that first suggested to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the possibility that a science of life could be created in which "the products of nature and art [were] treated one as the other, aesthetic and teleological judgment mutually illuminating each other."7 Goethe's resulting aesthetic-teleological vision of living nature would subsequently function as one of the later generations' recurrent answers to the question of what it "meant" to be a holistic scientist in the grand German style. In contrast to the meaningless fragmentation of Newton's universe, Goethe had imagined a rich and colorful world8 shaped by aesthetic principles of order and patterning. The whole messy diversity of visible nature, he thought, could in fact be shown to be a product of a small number of fundamental forms or Gestalten. By observing and comparing the various metamorphoses of one or another form, he felt that the original or primal form of the type in question could be deduced using the pure judgments of the mind, in a manner akin to seeing the "form" of something in Plato's philosophy. Thus, flowers were to be understood as modified leaves.9 But that was only the beginning. To decompose nature into its primal forms was an aesthetic revelation, but to then understand how those same primal forms metamorphosed into ever more complex forms was a revelation of the teleological principles operating in living nature as a whole (see figure 2): In every living being, wefindthat those things which we call parts are inseparable from the Whole to such an extent, that they can only be conceived in and with the latter; and the parts can neither be the measure of the Whole, nor the Whole be the measure of the parts. So [in turn] a circumscribed living being [an organic Whole] takes part in the Infinite [the all encompassing Whole]; it has something of infinity within itself.10

Figure 2. Goethe's vision of wholeness and teleology: "Sketches of the construction [Aufbau] of the higher plants," 1787. Johann Wolfgang Goethe "Notizen und Zeichnungen aus Italien," 1787, Zur Morphologic, ed. Dorothea Kuhn, vol. 9, pt. A, Die Schriften Zur Naturwissenschaft, (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1977). Although in one sense clearly an original, Goethe was also reflective of certain larger intellectual trends of his time. Timothy Lenoir has shown that actually a significant subset of early-nineteenth-century German biologists had chosen to ground themselves in the authority of Kant's Critique of Judgment and practiced a form of modified vitalism or "teleo-mechanism" (Lenoir's term) that assumed the working of innate principles of purposiveness within the organism. The focus was on understanding how an animal's parts functioned in terms of the needs of the integrated whole. The foundations of this research program were laid down by morphologists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer and later brought to maturity by embryologists Karl Ernst von Baer and Johannes Miiller. Both of these men

THE "HUMAN MACHINE emphatically rejected the purely speculative biologies of natural philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), but both were nevertheless emphatic about the need to posit the existence of special emergent vital principles in living organisms that could account for such holistic and purposive phenomena as development and differentiation.11

A FRACTURED NATION AND THE MECHANISTS' QUEST FOR UNITY IN NATURE

By the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, this first antireductionist and teleological vision of organismic wholeness was coming under increasingly successful attack by a new generation of mechanistic scientists. Spearheaded by a closely knit group of self-identified "organic physicists"—Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Briicke, and Karl Ludwig12—this mechanistic offensive was driven by an intellectual holy grail: a vision of a science which had extended the causal-mechanistic mode of understanding to include living phenomena. The realm of the organic was to be integrated wholly with the realm of the inorganic. Once this was accomplished, science could look forward to a future as a united enterprise guided by a single, universal set of principles. The most well-known expression of this faith was articulated in the 1847 youthful manifesto of the organic physicists, that read in part: [N]o other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot be explained by these forces, one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical mathematical method or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.13 As the mechanists saw things, the greatest impediment to the attainment of their goals was "vitalistic" thinking—which they defined as any approach to the organic world that called for the. introduction of "additional" or "special" principles to account for living processes. An 1858 paper, "On the Mechanistic Interpretation of Life," by Germany's leading physician Rudolf Virchow proclaimed the message of the revolt against vitalism in terms that were loud and clear: "There is no spiritus rector, no life-spirit, water-spirit, or firespirit. . . . Everywhere there is mechanistic process only, with the unbreakable necessity of cause and effect."14 By this time, the "natural philosophy" of the early nineteenth century— partly because of its own excesses—was a rapidly sinking ship on the German cultural horizon that the chemist Justus von Liebig in 1840 would denounce as "the pestilence, the Black Death, of the nineteenth century."15 In this environment, the broadside mechanistic attack on all forms of vitalism was so successful in part because it tended to tarnish all of its opponents with the black brush of natural philosophy, overlooking or deliberately distorting the

8

'CHAPTER

ONE*

evidence that such materialistic vitalists as Johannes Muller had actually been explicit opponents of natural philosophy.16 That said, the rapid fall of the vitalistic perspective of once revered scientists like Muller—himself a teacher of several of the key mechanists, such as Helmholtz and Du-Bois Reymond—cannot be merely attributed to slander or a lot of clever rhetorical jockeying. A number of dramatic new scientific developments that followed in quick succession over the course of the 1840s and 1850s had invested the mechanistic cause with considerable plausibility, even as these developments were hardly the transparent milestones in the positive history of science that their proponents would later claim. Of these, the most important was the law of the conservation of energy, or first law of thermodynamics, associated in Germany with the work of Helmholtz17 (although parts were independently developed by the German physician Julius Robert Mayer and the British physicist James Prescot Joule).18 "The law in question," explained Helmholtz in an 1862 popular lecture on the topic, "asserts that the quantity of force which can be brought into action in the whole of Nature is unchangeable, and can neither be increased nor diminished."19 In other words, all forms of energy (mechanical, kinetic, thermal) were equivalent and could be transformed into one another. This in turn implied that such superficially diverse phenomena as electric-powered technology, human physiology, and even Newtonian laws of motion could all be understood according to the same principles. There was nothing special, nothing "extra" that was needed to understand life, including the life of human beings. As Rudolf Virchow stressed in 1858: "[T]he same kind of electrical process takes place in the nerve as in the telegraph line . . . ; the living body generates its warmth through combustion just as warmth is generated in the oven; starch is transformed into sugar in the plant and animal just as it is in a factory."20 With the first law of thermodynamics, calling living organisms "machines" was no longer to say that they were a bunch of parts operated by strings and pulleys. It was to imagine them as fields of forces. This revitalized metaphor would inspire new technologies and a great deal of productive work: Carl Ludwig's kymograph invented in 1847 measured cardiac contractions; Helmholtz's even more audacious myograph, invented in 1850, measured the force and duration of a nerve's impulse (and found it surprisingly slow). Emil Du Bois-Reymond's 1848 Investigations on Animal Electricity further argued the case for seeing electrical energy as the juice of life and soul. Most impressive was its demonstration of the existence of independent electrical "currents" in the muscles and nerves; the same sort (as Du Bois-Reymond stressed) that was found in inorganic nature.21 These findings were being established and elaborated during an unprecedented explosion of industrialization and urbanization in German-speaking Europe, and as historians like Anson Rabinbach have stressed, the new "energetic" view of living organisms was both inspired by German industrialism and seemed to sanctify it. When in 1858 Virchow compared processes in anii.

•THE

"HUMAN MACHINE"*

9

mals to those in factories, he was sending the clear message that industrialization had as "natural" a place in the new cosmic order as anything else. He was also opening his audience up to the idea that humans were, after all, just "human motors" functioning according to principles found also in the factory. Perhaps, therefore, they could be expected to produce according to its standards. Thus, from the beginning, the identification of machine-like processes with natural forces was invested with larger social and economic stakes. In turn, this blurring of the truths of scientific mechanism with the goals of industrialization would dramatically affect the ways in which later holistic critics of mechanism understood the legacy against which they were rebelling. The logic of the association implied that, to the extent that holists despised the instrumental, capitalistic values of industrial society, so much must they reject all mechanistic, atomistic approaches to visualizing problems in biology. As historian Fritz Ringer has noted, many German intellectuals in the early twentieth century never really distinguished between the fact of industrialization and the attitudinal changes which they themselves identified with it. They linked commerce with commercialism, machines with mechanistic conceptions, and the new economic organization with rationalism and utilitarianism. Such a tendency not to distinguish clearly between levels of causality led many to behave as if "materialistic" philosophers had really caused millions of people to become gradually more covetous than they had been before.22 But the example of mid-nineteenth-century physics did not only call for a reduction of all processes to mechanical causal principles; it also emphasized the extent to which the essence of Machine reality (and, as the twentieth century darkly supposed, the society that served such a reality) was summative and fractured rather than unified and holistic. In the mid-nineteenth century— notwithstanding new developments in physics that would ultimately overturn this view—the universe of Newton was still supposed, by most people, to be composed of homogeneous building blocks or atoms. Life was increasingly proclaimed as no different. Already in the early nineteenth century, the cell theory of German botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden and German physiologist Theodor Schwann had established a basic framework for understanding life in terms of its "atoms." By 1855 the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow was prepared to stress further that life was nothing more than the activities of individual cells, and that all those activities in turn could be understood as products of "mechanical matter." In an epochal paper on cellular pathology, he declared: I have shown that these tiny elements, the cells, are the actual loci of life and hence also of disease The cell is the locus to which the action of mechanical matter is bound, and only within its limits can that power of action justifying the name of life be maintained. But within this locus it is mechanical matter that is active—active according to physical and chemical laws.23

10

* CHAPTER

ONE*

Having now apparently transformed life into a machine composed of building blocks that obeyed strictly the laws of energy and motion, physiological reductionism still faced a final challenge. As the first vitalists themselves had stressed, machines are static creations that do not grow and change over time; organisms clearly do. How could one account for the ways in which organisms adaptively develop and change? Two nineteenth-century thinkers helped to show away. The first of these, of course, was Charles Darwin, whose model of evolution offered a means for imagining how apparently purposive changes in a species could in fact come into being through selection among variations created by chance events.24 Darwin's theories would be promulgated in the German-speaking countries by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose famous assertion, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny [individual development mirrors evolutionary development]" in turn brought evolution and embryogenesis into a common naturalistic framework. Haeckel, though much more of a late Romantic and much less of a consistent reductionist and materialist than his critics would later paint him, did insist that organismic recapitulation of evolutionary history must be seen as a "physiological process" resulting from "mechanically "working causes.'" 25 He was not, however, able to say much about those causes. The question of the mechanics of development would, instead, be taken up by the embryologist Wilhelm Roux, whose "developmental mechanics" became German biology's second reductionistic reply to the problem of change and growth. Roux's basic claim, tested by him in numerous ways over the course of his career, was that hereditary parts of the fertilized germ cell were unevenly distributed during cellular division or cleavage. As cleavage continued, each daughter cell was left with fewer and fewer potentialities until finally each cell was only able to express one major trait. These cells in turn divided and multiplied to produce the different tissue types associated with an entire organism.26 Such an emphasis on the quantitative causes behind the emergence of a differentiated organism, Roux stressed, was consistent with the goals of mechanistic explanation favored by physics and chemistry.27 Now, it is clear that, on one level, the cumulative effect of this collective effort to "unify" science under a reductionist, mechanistic rubric ran directly counter to the "holistic" biological impulse of the early nineteenth century. At the same time—and in an irony that largely eluded the consciousness of the actors themselves—there is also a sense in which the mechanistic push for "unification" was driven by some of the same broader cultural concerns that historians like Reddick have seen in the original Romantic-era preoccupation with Wholeness. That is to say, both the romantic and the mechanistic efforts were, in different ways, haunted by an image of a fractured Germany and were motivated by a desire to discover conditions under which some sort of synthesis and integration could be imagined and lived. The early-nineteenth-century generation of teleologists and Goethean vitalists had looked for wholeness and unifying purposiveness in the domain of higher ideals or natural and aesthetic principles. It was a sensible "solution,"

THE "HUMAN

MACHINE1

II given the professional realities of their day—one in which they had effectively renounced intervention in policy matters of the real world in return for intellectual autonomy and noninterference from the state.28 By the time the mechanists were approaching maturity, however, matters were rather different. The self-conscious "apoliticization" of the German philosophy faculties had been swamped by a rising wave of nationalism that had spread across both Germany and Austria. First triggered by the French occupation and the subsequent wars of liberation against Napoleon (1813-1815), as the decades went on, this nationalism more and more frequently wore a liberal face and dreamed of German unification under a government modeled after Britain's or France's, with a constitution that would guarantee free speech, trial by jury, and popular representation. In the universities, these were the years that saw the founding (1815) of the Burschenschaften (a type of fraternity), which aimed to unite all Christians in all German universities under its flying black, red, and gold flag—irrespective of local province, class, or caste. Scholars like Timothy Lenoir and Keith Anderton have argued that the liberal goal of national unification and the mechanistic goal of scientific "unification" were bound together.29 Why? Certainly, as Anderton notes, there were practical motivations: science, the argument went, was a methodologically universal form of knowledge that needed to be free to roam where it would, without arbitrary political regulations, tariffs, or other restrictions imposed by the current feudalized system. Another, more subtle kind of reason for the relationship between the two agendas was perhaps ultimately more potent: the order of nature and the order of society have always appeared to provide a kind of mutual justification for each other. As scientists, the mechanists thus dreamt of a thoroughly naturalized universe that had overcome all arbitrary "extra" forces and united all of its different objects under one set of rational and universal natural laws. As liberals, they dreamt of a state that had overcome all capricious and arbitrary local sovereigns and united all of the provinces and principalities under a single set of constitutional laws. In his 1848 preface to a major assault on the vitalistic perspective, "On the Life Force [Lebenskraft]" Du Bois-Reymond merged his vision of political triumph and scientific triumph together in a language suggestive enough to embrace his hopes for both: "Physiology will fulfill her destiny. . . . giving up its peculiar interests, [it] will enter completely into the great union of states of the theoretical scientists."30 In 1848 Du Bois-Reymond could be hopeful of imminent triumph, as various nationalist groups revolted across the German states, and—for a while—a vision of a newly united, liberal Germany was in sight. By the end of that year, however, the revolution had failed, the monarchies had been restored, and relations between the state and the church had been revitalized. Liberalism, its hopes deflated, went into retreat. In the years that followed, there was still a liberal discourse about Wholeness and "unity," but it had a different logic and prosody than before. As Norton Wise has noted, the classical liberalism of

12

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1848 that hadbelieved in natural rights, natural law, and social contract was now being increasingly replaced by a moderate liberalism dominated by more conciliatory organic and evolutionaryimagery of national unification. Questions of individual rights were now muted in a language that "saw unity in the whole and diversity in the parts as equally essential aspects of the organic system. . . . [And moderate liberals] claimed both greater unity and greater individual freedom in their ideal state than any social contract could support, with its aggregation of isolated individuals."31 In the sciences, this imperative to find an uneasy balancing act between individualism and unity would find echoes in even so apparently esoteric a matter as Rudolf Virchow's discussion of cell theory. Twentieth-century holists would remember Virchow's work as a landmark moment in the atomization of life; but in fact matters were not so straightforward. In his classic 1855 paper on cellular pathology, Virchow did defend the need to think about life and pathology from the perspective of its cellular processes. However, in so doing, he emphasized ways in which the reader must imagine the individual cell itself as a type of micro-whole: "The significance of the constituent parts," he said, "will at all times be found only in the Whole. [At the same time] if we advance to the last boundaries within which there remain elements with the character of totality or, if you will, of unity, we can go no farther than the cell."32 Paying deference to Wholeness now signalled a willingness on the part of liberal science to function within the framework of the reactionary realities of the day while continuing to nurse hopes of a future "unity" that had eluded the liberalism to date.

NECESSARY WAYS OF KNOWING AND THE MECHANIZATION OF M I N D AND BRAIN

To the dismay of the liberal mechanists looking for ways to work for reform within the new system, the years after the failed revolution also saw a. lot of antireligious, radical agitation from a group of overtly materialistic scientific popularizers—all unrepentant democrats. Spearheaded by such figures as Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Biichner,33 these men were largely responsible for the growing accusation from the government itself that science aimed to promote the religious heresy of philosophical materialism. Indeed; there were grounds for governmental unease. Consider the case of Karl Vogt, the biologist who had become notorious in 1846 for a remark that appeared to compare the soul with urine ("thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain as gall does to the liver or urine to the kidneys").34 His materialism was not only unequivocal, but the political agenda of that materialism was overt and provocative. In his 1849 Investigations into the Governments of Animals, he had provocatively proposed that, since one could alter secretions of the brain by altering diet, scientifically planned nutritional regimes should be able to alter thoughts and beliefs in politically progressive directions. "Since belief," t

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he wrote, "is only a characteristic of the body's atoms, a change in belief depends only on the manner and kind of the replacement of the atoms of the body."35 In case anyone had failed to understand the direction of change he was hoping for, Vogt went on in this book to depict "the clergy as cockroaches, lovers of darkness who consumed what others worked for" and to propose that "their natural enemy was the social democratic ant, which, when repressed beyond the limits of its tolerance, would unite to fight the cock^ roaches until all of them had been eliminated."36 The results of writings like this were predictable, if ironic: vilified by the reactionary ruling powers, these men all suffered professionally for their popularizing activities and in-this way actually undermined their own ability to influence the growth and legitimation of the very science to which they claimed to.be so committed.37 In contrast, (and here I am following Anderton's argument), scientists like Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, Ludwig, and Virchow managed to become highly prominent and authoritative voices in debates over the proper science-state relations and to work out a more or less professionally satisfying relationship with the monarchical powers. One of the ways in which they did this was by distancing their agenda from that of their more radical materialistic cousins and carefully insisting that a mechanistic approach to nature had nothing in common with a materialistic understanding of nature. The inspiration of Kant here was explicitly acknowledged: nothing in the human reasoning apparatus equipped science to speak with authority about such matters as the fate of the soul and the ultimate nature of reality. To the extent that materialism claimed to have answers to both these issues, it transgressed the limits of pure reason, abdicated the right to call itself "science," and revealed itself to be as "dogmatic" and "metaphysical" as the vitalism it also assailed. Not only that (the mechanists' argument continued), but because mechanism knew the limits of its explanatory powers, it also posed no challenge to the church or the faith of the people. As Virchow put it in an 1849 lecture, "There can be no scientific dispute with respect to faith, for science and faith exclude one another. Not that one makes the other impossible, or vice versa, but rather that belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops. . . . The task of science, therefore, is not to attack the objects of faith, but to establish the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go and to found a unified self-consciousness within these limits."38 The other side of the coin here was that all knowledge properly belonging to science was necessarily mechanistic because the human mind could not "know" nature in any other way. But why was the human mind limited to knowing nature in causal-mechanistic categories? The answer, said the mechanists, was that the human mind itself operated according to precise mechanistic-causal principles, whose laws (these scientists added, without a trace of self-reflective irony) were currently being elucidated by mechanistic science itself. In other words, epistemological categories that Kant had seen as

14

. CHAPTER ONE * transcendental were declared to have a naturalistic origin in the machinery of human cognition itself. What had started out looking like a doctrine of restraint and self-imposed limits had been transformed into a new empirical opportunity.39 The mid-nineteenth-century naturalization of Kantian categories of reason took a number of forms, only some of which were directly supervised by the organic physicists themselves. Helmholtz's work on optics and the psychophysiology of vision was clearly one important contribution,40 but even more important to twentieth-century holism was the intensive effort during these years to shore up the empirical evidence for a certain global theory of human cognition called "associationism." With roots in British empirical philosophy, this theory was in its heart a metaphor: an image of mental processes that was based on the way in which material atoms were believed to interact and combine in three-dimensional Newtonian space. Here, mind was conceived as a nonspatial "space" in which basic,units of mentation were joined into more complicated units according to various fixed "laws," such as "contiguity," "similarity," etc. The whole process was seen to be automatic, determined, and curiously "mindless'^much the way most people in the early nineteenth century believed machines to function. As for the units of thought themselves.—the mental atoms—they were dull, trustworthy sentries of the material world, but nothing more. Since the time of Locke, associationism had been linked with an empirical epistemology called sensationalism, which believed there is nothing in the mind other than what comes in through the special senses. Hence, associationism held that all mental atoms were derivative but reliable packets of sensory data, variously defined by the associationists as "copies," "pictures," or "representative images" of direct experience. The concept of innate, inspired, or intuitive knowledge had no place in this model. In this sense—and this is the point—the idea of associationism was at once a theory about the workings of mind and a theory about what such a mind was in a position to know about reality. It was the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) who, in an influential essay, "Signs of the Times" (1829), identified the spirit of associationism with what he called the "Age of Machinery." As he saw it, this doctrine of the mind was mechanistic because it emphasized the accumulation and sorting of external data according to fixed laws and played down, if it did not outright deny, an active, synthetic role for the mind. The doctrine, he said, "is mechanical in its aim and origin, its method and its results. It is not a philosophy of the mind; it is a mere . . . genetic history of what we see in the mind."41 As such, it was a view of human agency that encouraged individual fatalism and collective passive adherence to the instrumentalist goals of an emerging machine age. Again a model of something supposed to exist in nature had been identified with the needs and goals of an emerging industrial society, this time in England. Not only was one meant to believe, as Carlyle later stingingly noted, that the Universe was "one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine,

• THE "HUMAN MACHINE"

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15

rolling on, in . . . dead indifference"; we must turn away from all contrary evidence of the "Stupendous" in "stupid indifference," each of us having learned to see ourselves as "a mere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steamengine; a power whereby cotton might be spun, and money and money's worth realised."42 Across the decades of the nineteenth century, the British model of the associating mind functioned as both frame and practical starting point of German efforts to transform psychology into a field of empirical research that could claim autonomous scientific status for itself. Some classic signposts here included the work of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), which grafted associationist dynamics onto a more traditional unifying soul; the work of Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878) and that of Gustav Theodor Fechner (18011887), which advanced the use of quantitative methods in psychology through their focus on perception of incremental, elemental sensations; and the work of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), which leaned heavily on associationist philosophy in developing an experimental psychology devoted to precise identification of the shifting furniture of consciousness.43 By the 1870s, the mechanically associating mind had found an additional role for itself when it was incorporated into the language and practical clinical activities of neurology. The background to these developments had begun in France in the mid-1860s when the French neuroanatomist Paul Broca managed to persuade his colleagues on the basis of certain clinico-anatomic evidence (speech loss coinciding with circumscribed damage to the brain) that the "faculty of articulate language" had its seat in the left frontal lobe of the human cortex.44 In this way, he breathed new life into an older, largely discredited idea—from so-called phrenology—that the human brain organized its functions in atomistic units, with different discrete brain regions serving different functions of the mind. However, it took the pioneering 1870 work of two of their own countrymen, Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, to make German-speaking researchers really take notice of the new developments.45 The radicalness of the Fritsch and Hitzig work lay partly in the way it used experimental methods to argue for an atomistic understanding of brain function, but even more in the way it overturned a deeply rooted conviction of early-nineteenth-century brain science that even Broca had not tried to call into question: the idea that the cortex of the brain was exclusively reserved for mental activities. Since the 1830s, it had been accepted that the spinal cord and subcortical regions of the nervous system served sensory-motor functioning for the body, but the cortex remained a kind of physiological terra incognita. Fritsch and Hitzig demonstrated that, in fact, the cerebral cortex plays a role in sensory-motor activity, too—that the "body" extended to the highest levels of the brain. Applying electrical currents to the brains of dogs, the two Germans were able to produce crude movements of the body and

16

• CHAPTER ONE found, moreover, that specific brain regions seemed responsible for specific movements.46 Now, if the cortex possessed "motor centers," as Fritsch and Hitzig's work suggested, then it was logical to suppose, by analogy with the workings of spinal and subcortical structures, that it possessed sensory centers as well. And indeed the effort to identify these cortical motor and sensory centers dominated experimental physiology in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.47 This emerging conception of the brain as a sensory-motor structure consisting of discrete centers had important implications for the effort to correlate mental processes with brain processes. Could it be true, as the English neurologist David Ferrier said in 1874, that "mental operations in the last analysis must be merely the subjective side of sensory-motor substrata?"48 In 1874, a young German neurologist, Carl Wernicke, took the first step toward an answer to this question with a classic monograph on the problem of language loss (aphasia) and cerebral localization, The Aphasic Symptom Complex. Using the anatomy of sensory-motor "projections" of his teacher, Theodor Meynert, as his basic building blocks,49 Wernicke constructed a model of the brain that turned the mental atoms of the associationists into primitive units of sensory-motor "memories." In place of the mechanically associating mind functioning in some parallel universe to that of the brain, he offered a brain composed completely of sensory-motor impressions associated with localized regions. The back of this brain was specialized for processing and storing sensory data, taking in information from the outside world; the front of this brain consisted of motor projections and centers, reacting to incoming sensory information with appropriate motor behaviors. The basic architecture of Wernicke's brain, in other words, was built on the model of the sensory-motor reflex loop. Within the brain, sensory-motor units communicated with each other along so-called association fibers. They ran up and down them like so many electrical pulses along a telegraph line, interacting in accordance with the established psychological "laws of association" and generating in this way (somehow) the full complexity of mind and consciousness.50 This model of human brain functioning was an immediate success in neurology, providing a framework for the description and explanation of multiple new clinical entities that involved loss or disturbance of higher mental functions (the aphasias, the agnosias, the apraxias)51 and launching what some nostalgically recall as a "golden age" in the history of the study of the human brain (see figure three). In the day-to-day life of the clinic proper, however, the most immediate advantage of this approach to brain functioning was the way it offered neurologists a way to visualize what could be called the breakdown of the human machine.52 Generations of medical students—armed with their paper-and-pencil diagrams of brain centers and connections (see figure 4)— learned to listen to the fragmented or chaotic language utterances of their patients, not (as a later generation would complain) for the human stories they could have been telling, but rather as indicators of this or that type of damage,

Figure 3. The "atomistic" human brain: localization map by Karl Kletst, 1886. Karl Kleist, "Kriegerverletzungen des Gehirns in ihren Bedeutung fur die Hirnlokalisation und Hirnpathologie," in Handbuch der Artzliche Erfahrungen im Weltkriege 19I4-I9I8, (Leipzig, Barth Verlag, 1922-1924), vol. 44, p. 1365.

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Figure 4. The "machine" brain: associationistconnectionist schema of mind and brain functioning, L. Lichtheim, 1885. L. Lichtheim, "On Aphasia," Brain 1 (January 1885): 433. much as a mechanic might listen to the irregular sputterings of an automobile engine. In this non-dialogue, the final doctor-patient encounter generally occurred at the patient's autopsy, when the neurologist would check the accuracy of his predictions against the revealed physical state of pathology or injury in the patient's brain. The Wernicke vision of the mind and brain atomistically combining and analyzing units of sense experience was highly practical for research and practice. It was also, however—and not at all coincidentally—highly congruent with the realistic Kantianism of the mechanists. Mechanistic science turned out to be nothing much more than a formalization of the principles carried out by the human mind when it was engaging external reality. This meant that mechanistic science alone represented a validated and "natural" approach to reliable truth. Any other approaches, however seductive, could only result in superstitious polemics or meaningless assertions of faith. It was this final assertion that would enrage a coming generation that demanded more answers than were to be found in the causal clanking of physiologically mediated appearances. They would rebel against the machine model of mind and brain, not only because they knew it to be wrong, but also because they perceived it as having provided aid and comfort to the hegemonic ambitions of a mechanistic science that had smiled smugly and declared Ignoramus—ignorabimus ("we do not know and we will never know"—the famous words of Du Bois-Reymond) to any questions that had threatened the authority and all-sufficiency of its own purview.53

THE "HUMAN MACHINE" *

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WHOLENESS BETRAYED: POLITICAL UNIFICATION AND THE RISE OF THE "MACHINE" SOCIETY

While the Machine was expanding and sharpening its meanings and embedded agendas, the meanings of Wholeness were in a process of transformation as well. The chief catalyst for change here was the achievement in the 1870s of the long-elusive goal of German unification—but under a distinctly different form than originally anticipated; Instead of a liberal revolution, or even a slow evolution toward a constitutionally constituted nation, Germany was united abruptly and violently under a man, Otto von Bismarck, who had sworn to rule the new nation with "blood and iron." After first inflaming nationalist passions by leading Prussia into three wars in six years, Bismarck had subdued the liberals and the German southern states, had excluded Austria from the nationalist unification effort, and had then consolidated all the other German states under Prussian rule. A new empire, ruled in name only by the emperor William I, was declared in 1871.54 This kind of "unity," this reality of Wholeness, was not what years of fantasizing in the Burschenschaften had led some people to expect. The poet Ferdinand von Saar expressed the confusion and disappointment of.many when he wrote that he had loved Germany in the years when she had dreamt of unity, but now—united, victorious, and heavily anned—he could only mourn the worldwide loss of reverence for the authentic German heart and mind. Oh, how I loved you once, you People now grown so powerful, As divided, you still dreamt of unification!55 It is true that there were some, whether out of opportunism or conviction, who would accept the terms of the unification and even offer to sanction it with the naturalizing language of science. As late as 1892, the evolutionist Ernst Haeckel addressed a gathering of the faculty of the University of Jena, come together to honor Bismarck, who was visiting the university at Haeckd's invitation. Effusively praising the statesman's accomplishments, Haeckel proposed that the university create, on the spot, a new academic degree: Doctor of Phylogeny. He concluded by declaring that the " 'new honorary title should be held for the first time by no one else than the creative genius of modern German history, Prince Bismarck, the deeply perceptive observer and ethnologist, the practical creator of history.' " 56 For most, however, any effort to equate the original nationalist vision of wholeness with Bismarck's Germany would look hollow, and increasingly so as the century wore down. Far from representing wholeness, the Bismarckian political system was instead more likely to be identified with its antithesis, the Machine—external unification without an internal uniting vision. Bismarck's active fomenting of internal dissension in Germany along party lines, as a strategy to maintain his power, hastened the disillusionment of many who had

20

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once dreamt of serving and supporting the "national whole." He had begun by allying himself with the liberals, who (in the words of historian HansUlrich Wehler) "had finally succumbed to Realpolitik [and] . . . were willing to put up with 'Bismarck's bold tyranny . . . in the interest of creating the Empire.'" 57 The first years of unification were devoted to promoting the growth of industry and capitalism in Germany, including investments in the sciences. Simultaneously, Bismarck engaged in a systematic persecution of the large Roman Catholic minority in Germany and its political party, the Center party (a persecution tolerated by his liberal allies, many of whom had themselves anticlerical biases). This was the era of the so-called Kulturkampf. By 1879, however, Bismarck had changed tacks again. Faced with an economic depression and a perceived need for protectionist trading measures, he pursued a new set of alliances with the conservatives, ended the Kulturkampf, and instigated a stream of de-liberalization measures. His new political foe became the mildly Marxist Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the 1880s, Bismarck outlawed the SPD and tried to placate the German workers—who might otherwise have turned against him—by offering a comprehensive social security system. But divisions and dissent continued to grow. By 1890 Bismarck had lost control of the Reichstag and was considering using force to overturn the constitution when the new emperor, Wilhelm II, forced him to resign. An 1890, anonymously authored tract, Rembrandt as Teacher, by a previously unknown schoolteacher later identified as Julius Langbehn58 gave voice to a widespread sense of betrayal over these political wheelings and dealings—and to a widespread hunger among many Germans for "something more."59 Langbehn said that Bismarck had provided external unity for Germany; what was needed now, though, was a leader with the aesthetic vision to give Germany back her internal, cultural unity. For this, he pinned his hopes on the German youth. "At the time of the old Burschenschaft, German youth rose for the ideal interests of the fatherland," he reminded his readers. Today they must be prepared to fight again.60 Bismarck, however, was only one face of a Machine whose meanings were multiplying. The Machine was also the "war engine" of the Prussian army: pitiless, efficient, impersonal.61 The Machine was the coke furnaces and iron and steel factories of the Ruhr Valley, the ugly result of a process of extraordinarily rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century that had left many feeling uprooted and aesthetically revolted. In the years before 1857, pig-iron production in the German states grew by 250 percent and coal pro^ duction by 138 percent. Railway construction between 1850 and 1860 doubled the total network/from 6,000 to 11,500 kilometers. Between 1860 and 1870, coal production had again increased by 114 percent, to 26 million tons (double that of France). The railway network had again almost doubled in size to 19,500 kilometers and then increased again to 28,000 kilometers by 1875.

• THE "HUMAN

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Between 1850 and 1870, the total volume of rail freight traffic increased by a factor of 21.62 The exponential growth of industry stimulated in turn an enormously rapid process of urbanization. Between 1871 and 1890, the urban centers (communities of 2,000 or more inhabitants) absorbed three-quarters of the total increase in the empire's population.63 For every writer fascinated by the excitement and energy of the new urban lifestyle, there was another who deplored its anonymity and immorality. These were thus the years that first saw the rise of images of the city and the metropolis as dead, impersonal "machines."64 Berlin was the living embodiment of such imagery—a "stone-gray corpse" of a city (to use George Grosz's epithet) with its hordes of isolated workers, its alleys patrolled by child prostitutes, and its miles of dingy tenements where the corrupt and destitute practiced the unsavory details of their lives (see figure 5).65 With anxieties and discontents further stoked by the first of several major economic depressions in 1873, the political and cultural direction of an increasingly disgruntled German-speaking population moved to the right. The old liberal tradition of democratic "unity" gradually began to be overshadowed by a new nationalism dominated by more explicitly racist, conservative understandings of the German "nation." And in this environment, one sees the rise of new anti-Semitic imagery in which not only cities and factories but also Jews were represented as perpetrators of materialism and mechanization. In Austria in the 1880s, "while Liberal parliamentarians condemned 'the socalled anti-Semitic movement as unworthy of a civilized people,'" others defended it in the name of the " 'moral rebirth of the fatherland.' ' ,66 In the German empire, the years between 1873 and 1890 alone there were no fewer than five hundred publications on "the Jewish question," while the less literate indulged in street brawls, abusive chanting outside restaurants and shops, and the smashing of windows, all in the name of defending "German idealism" against "Jewish materialism."67 As indicated earlier, mechanistic science had from the beginning been associated with all these other faces of the Machine and indeed, to some people, seemed to sanction their existence. Moreover, in the context of an increasingly palpable Machine society, the more fundamental existential message associated with the mechanization of life and mind took on new poignancy: for years now, science had been saying that human beings were also nothing more than machines: meaningless agglomerations of physical force without souls or higher destinies. It did not take much imagination to conclude further that such a dismal ultimate status meant that people really could demand or hope for nothing better than to be mere cogs in an equally soulless social and economic system.68 In this sense, Fritz Lang's later interwar film fantasy, Metropolis, with its striking images of demoralized automaton-like workers trudging slowly through a monstrous underground city, spoke to a collective sensibility that actually had been growing for several decades (see figure 6).

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Figure 5. George Grosz, Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, 1918. © 1995 Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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Figure 6. Fritz Lang, Metropolis,filmstill, 1927. Registered in the name of Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.

T H E PLACE OF "WHOLENESS" IN THE FIN DE SIECLE UPHEAVALS

By the 1890s, however, resignation was beginning to be replaced by the first stirrings of rebellion. In his memoirs, Friedrich Meinecke, the liberal German historian, did his best to explain: In all of Germany, something new could be felt around 1890, not only politically but also culturally . . . a new and deeper longing for the genuine and true, but also a new awareness of the problematic fragmentation of modern life awoke and [we] tried to dive down again from its civilized surface into the now eerie, now tempting depths.69 The era that George Mosse has described as involving a global "change in the public spirit of Europe" eludes easy summary.70 It has been variously analyzed as: an intellectual revolt against the constraints of positivism and materialism; a social and economic process of generational rebellion against the liberal bourgeoisie; a time of aristocratic malaise and loss of faith in progress and the future; a time of bold new experiment in art and innovation in the sciences (psychoanalysis, relativity physics); a time of mass movements

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and mass politics that saw the rise of such new institutions as department stores and mass spectator sports; an era marked by a critical upsurge in antiSemitism; and an era preoccupied with cultural decadence and biological degeneration. Almost all analysts associate the varied cultural and intellectual upheavals with the birth pains of the emerging technological modern age, but differ (depending on their starting assumptions) on whether these upheavals are best understood as part of modernism itself or as an alienated reaction against it.71 Politically, 1890 was a self-evident turning point, as the old emperor died and the new one, Wilhelm II, dismissed Bismarck, lifted the Anti-Socialist Laws, and gave indications that he would be willing to institute new social reforms. In such an atmosphere, the time seemed ripe to rise up against any and all forces that would condemn one to being a cog in a Bismarckian political machine, a "human motor" in an industrialist's factory, a meaningless play of cells and atoms in a scientist's laboratory. The documents of this struggle are filled with calls to authenticity, to natural life, and above all to wholeness. Wholeness as an evocative image was now different than it had been during the era of systems-building in the time of the Romantics; and it was different again than it had been during the years of struggle for national unification. It still bore clear traces of those earlier legacies—transformed in various ways—but for the first time, it also began to privilege the growth and cultivation of the "whole" self—body and mind—as a necessary foundation for collective wholeness. In his 1849 Art Work of the Future, Richard Wagner had declared that any aesthetic effort to express what was highest and most true must necessarily draw on the united resources of the reason, the heart, and the body. An ideal of perfect wholeness also lay behind the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (unified work of art), that aimed to integrate tone, word, and visual aesthetic into an art experience that could be appreciated by the authentically unified man.72 Rebellious sons and daughters of bourgeois merchants, bankers, and university professors—educated in the German tradition of individual cultivation or Bildung—also recognized something they could respond to in that widely quoted Nietzschean summons from Thus Spake Zarasthustra: "become what you are."73 Socialist Kurt Eisner, for example, saw no contradiction between his radical collectivist politics and his self-conscious Nietzschean emphasis on the "necessity of the individualistic principle." In fact, the goal of socialism, he declared in his 1891 Psychopathia Sptritualis, was "to develop all the seeds of one's selfhood, but in the service of the whole."74 These were the years when, in the universities, academics first began to turn urgent calls for professional and national "wholeness," "oneness," and the "whole" into slogans for their fight against the fragmentation of knowledge, the shallowness of modern individualism, and the loss of community values.75 These years also saw the rise of quasi-religious movements and sects—peddling everything from vegetarianism to occult knowledge and practice to Utopian lifestyles—all with the aim of reconnecting the individual, lost in the

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cogworks of the bourgeois society, to his "higher," more "organic," more "whole" self. Also a product of this time were the youth groups (Wandervogel, or birds of passage) that rejected bourgeois, materialistic values, and enticed streams of teenagers—many of whom, a decade later, would take their idealism with them to the war front—into the countryside, where they found ways to experience community bonding and a sense of connectedness with .nature (see figure 7). Among the most highly educated strata of German cultural life, hunger to discover new forms of wholeness manifested itself in the striking phenome^ non of "bourgeois Wagnerianism."76 With an institutional focus in Bayreuth, Wagnerianism provided thousands of jaded or spiritually restless Germans with a total aesthetic immersion experience through multi-day extravaganza stagings of Wagner's operas that were performed at the Festspielhaus, a theater designed by Wagner himself.77 But Wagnerianism was also far more than just a day at the theater. Through journals, societies, and the widespread circulation of Wagner's own writings, Wagnerianism also came to function in German fin de siecle society as a kind of "high culture" escapist philosophy of art and experience—shot through with a militant pan-Germanism and a distinct dose of anti-Semitism—that promised to "protect the subject from a kind of 'transcendental homelessness,' and to offer an oasis of meaningful presence in a world that had grown senseless"(see figure 8).78 The work of Friedrich Nietzsche, rediscovered in these years, was also potent medicine for a generation alienated from the status quo and looking for wholeness. In The Birth of Tragedy, the philosopher had urged Germans to strive for a dialectical synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses that would allow them to develop and live in a condition of wholeness—psychologically, aesthetically, and politically. It was, he said, a one-sided faith in progress and scientific rationalism that had destroyed the mythic foundations of ancient culture and had ultimately produced the emptiness and fragmentation of contemporary Germany.79 The enduring influence of this sort of argument in the 1890s would hardly be diminished by Nietzsche's own later denunciation of The Birth of Tragedy as a product of youthful excess.80 For many in the generation of the 1890s, the conclusion here was clear: the Machine in German culture had many faces, but the machine-like rationality of the natural sciences was the engine that drove the entire monster. If this was so, then it followed that emancipation from a Machine society would require a challenge to the basic consensus both about what knowledge was and about how it was to be achieved. The new generation began to insist that the goal of individual wholeness required that human beings no longer restricted themselves to thinking like machines; from the highest levels of academia on down, the call went out for a willingness to explore mental possibilities beyond those of dry empiricism and passive association of ideas. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey was one of the most systematic and influential fin de siecle leaders of this challenge to the old positivist ways. Promising to replace the diluted "lymph of reason" associated with the neo-Kantian positivist phi-

*/

Figure 7. The Wandervogel movement, youth celebrating nature in pagan Germanic ritual, date unknown. Rights by Stapp Verlag Berlin.

Figure 8. "Transformation Panorama" set design, Act HI, from Richard Wagner's opera, Parsifal, 1904. Maurice Kufferath, The Parsifal of Richard Wagner, (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1904), frontispiece.

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losophy with the blood of real life, he argued that a knowledge of the whole of life's rich variety must include methods that could grasp not only the rational and analyzable but also the irrational and the holistic.81 "The basic conception of my philosophy," he declared, "is that up until now no one has put whole, full, and unmutilated experience at the basis of philosophizing, that is to say, the whole and full reality."82 The positivist-associationist view of human experience consisted of atomized sensations and impressions—blobs of color, twinges of pain. Clearly, this was a scientist's wrong-headed abstraction of a reality that in fact was rich and connected.83 Knowledge of life "as a whole" would not be achieved using the "mutilating" knives of reductionist analysis and causal explanation. With this as his premise, Dilthey proposed his famous epistemological bifurcation of scholarship into those sciences— primarily the physical sciences—that may legitimately rely on Erkldren (causal understanding) and those sciences—primarily the human and social sciences—that must derive their chief insights through the methods of Verstehen (hermeneutic interpretation). The latter differed from the natural scientific method by being dominated by a process of empathic reexperiencing (nacherleben): "The basis of the human sciences is not conceptualization but total awareness of a mental state and its reconstruction based on empathy."84 On the popular level, Julius Langbehn had been even more radical. Not content with talk of "separate but equal" epistemological realms like Dilthey, he had attacked empiricism and induction as inherently inadequate for dealing with the Wholeness of natural phenomena and denounced the scientific specialists intent on fragmenting German culture.85 Only after the structure {Gestalt) of a phenomenon had been intuitively grasped, he said, was one in a position to begin to acquire facts with meaning. Here he cited Goethe's controversial and much-maligned theory of colors {Farbenlehre)^ as a positive example of this kind of intuitive-empirical science, asserting that its total wrongness was preferable to Darwin's "partial" truths, which "delivered bricks, not buildings." 87 A seeming irony, but hardly an accidental one, in all these attacks on atomistic, mechanistic knowing is that science itself in the 1890s seemed increasingly to concur with many, if not all, of the objections raised. If More than a machine! was the emerging watchword in German-speaking culture at large, it was hardly less so in new work going on in certain labs and clinics at the time. The fact that the scientists involved insisted that this was all just business as usual—that new discoveries simply demanded new ways of thinking—made the claims all the more persuasive in the context of the broader cultural debate. Nature too, it seemed, was rebelling against the Machine. For people at that time, some events and figures in the process of theoretical reorientation came to serve as veritable touchstones for the entire project. In 1890, an important challenge to the associationist model of mental processes was issued by Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, who pointed out that indeed we seem to perceive phenomena not in terms of the putative atomistic elements out of which they are composed but rather in terms of the

28

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relationship, the patterned whole into which these elements fall. Thus, the essence of a melody lies not in its specific notes but in the meaningful order created by those notes together. This is why a melody can be transposed to a variety of keys and still be recognized. Ehrenfel's famous summation—"the whole is greater than the sum of the parts"88—became the effective clarion call of the new holistic perspective, trumpeted from one text to the next for decades. In the first years of the new century, Oswald Kulpe's school of experimental psychology at Wurzburg took the case against classical associationism still further by detailing the apparently random—even irrational—way in which the mind "associates" to arrive at a "rational conclusion" and stressing generally the relatively small role which consciousness and logic actually seemed to play in human thought.89 Soon after this, Max Wertheimer's Gestalt school of psychology in Berlin would start to challenge the associationist approach to mind still more decisively (see chapter 4). Meanwhile, in the life sciences, the embryological studies of Hans Driesch at the turn of the century had begun to challenge the mechanistic model of Wilhelm Roux and to give new life to the old idea that there are extramaterial principles at work in living organisms that are inexplicable in terms of physics and chemistry. Destroying one of the blastomeres90 of a sea-urchin egg at the two-cell stage of development, Driesch had found evidence that the cells contained remarkable reorganizing powers in the face of damage. Instead of a half-animal developing out of the remaining egg halves (as the older machine model predicted), the half developed into a whole larva that was half the normal size. These results were the starting point for Driesch's influential theory of organisms as "harmonious equipotential systems" whose properties, he insisted, could not be accounted for in mechanistic terms (see also chapter 2).91 In some German neurology clinics, other events were afoot that seemed to reinforce this widening antimechanistic impulse. Instead of merely diagnosing and studying different patterns of brain damage, clinicians were beginning to focus on the capacity of the human brain to reorganize itself adaptively following damage. Increasingly it would be said that the simple fact that brain-damaged people can get better over time—can regain lost speech and movement—was simply incompatible with the nineteenth-century machine model of the nervous system as a purely mechanical apparatus operating according to fixed laws of reflex and association. Brushing aside the nineteenthcentury explanations of recovery that had vaguely spoken of things like "substitution" and "compensation," the fighting words were spoken: machines do not repair themselves after suffering damage, and functions which "reside" in certain fixed regions of the brain cannot reappear if the brain regions that serve them have been permanently destroyed. A new, more dynamic concept of the human brain was clearly needed, one in which functioning was determined not by rigid structural arrangements, but by the ever-changing and purposive reactions of the whole nervous system.92

* THE "HUMAN MACHINE"*

29

A strong nostalgic dimension animated these housecleaning efforts, a harking back to those earlier sciences, philosophies, and cultural orientations that had been committed in various ways to seeing life "as a whole." Kant was a persistent reference point here (particularly the Kant of the Critique of Judgment), as were (more ambivalently) some of the less extravagant of his offspring among the "natural philosophers." The holistic tradition from the past that was most widely and happily pressed into service as an historical anchor, however, was that of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe's science of morphology in particular was resurrected as a "paradigm science" that could speak at once to reason and to the lived truths of the heart. Ludwig Bertalanffy, himself an architect in the interwar years of a holistic "theoretical biology," recalled the mood of the time in the following way: [T]he elementaristic and utilitarian conceptions are basic in the mechanistic world picture, and they are closely connected with the general Zeitgeist of this era. The theoretical procedure of classical physics, the triumph of technology and of the machine, the corresponding conception of organisms as living machines, the Malthusian problem of over-population leading to struggle for existence in human populations as well as in biological communities, and the principle of free competition in national economy are all different expressions of the same general view. The dissatisfaction with this view has led to the cry, "Back to Goethe."93 In taking up the "back to Goethe" call, fin de siecle holistic life and mind science emphasized a message that was also being articulated in different ways outside of the sciences: namely, that more was at stake here than just a choice between different models or explanatory styles. The discovery of Goethean principles of wholeness in natural phenomena challenged basic epistemological principles of the analytic methods of nineteenth-century science itself. Biased as that science was toward atomistic, reductionistic thinking, it could not help but see sums and machines operating according to linearcausal principles everywhere it looked. If it wished now to do justice to the new discoveries, it would have to expand its methodological and epistemological horizons. By the interwar years, some holistic researchers like Felix Krueger were prepared to echo the Goethean view that the triumph of a holistic perspective would transform science into an enterprise rooted in both reason and intuition, capable of uniting its insights with those of art and religion. Other holists, like Kurt Goldstein and Max Wertheimer, limited themselves to more dialectic proposals in which traditional analytical and empirical approaches were to be enriched and offset by moments of what was sometimes called "Gestalt seeing" or synthetic "gazing" {Schauen)—moments that revealed the organizing pattern of the whole. Exactly what was fully implied by these varied proposals to broaden the epistemological frontiers of natural sciences was unclear and much in contention. Max Weber, although a man who felt as keenly as anyone the oppressiveness of the current "disenchanted"

30

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world, would also be widely remembered for his untranslatable, sarcastic reaction to all this mystical talk about new epistemologies in the sciences— "Wer schauen will, gehe ins LichtspielT ("Whoever wants to schauen [with its double meaning of intuite and look], let him go visit the cinema!")94

WORLD WAR I AND ITS AFTERMATH: SCIENCE AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

The cry of the 1890s—inside and outside the natural sciences—for more life, more soul, more Goethe, more wholeness was, of course, raised in the face of the "other" impulse spreading across German-speaking Europe: a fascination with the idea of efficiency and Technik.95 The international image of Germany as the "machine nation" grew steadily in the years 1890-1914. A 1915 war propaganda tract by an Englishman, G. Stirling Taylor, argued [I]f this war means anything, it means a revolt against modern civilization. If the modem commercial-capitalist-machine production is right, then why, in the name of common-sense, should we crush Germany, which bids fair to be the machine nation par excellence of the world. If modern centralised government is a good thing, then let us shed our last drop of blood in defence of the monarchy of Potsdam. If religion and romance are evil things, then let us raise our voices in grateful praise of a Prussian that would destroy Rheims cathedral rather than lose a battery of guns. Every symptom of the "modern" world has reached its highest point in Prussia.96 The outbreak of war in 1914 provoked a crisis across German society in the struggle to balance the powerful seductions of modernity on the one hand against the "hunger for wholeness" on the other. Initially the call to arms seemed to satisfy the younger generation's widespread longing, nourished in the nationalism and idealism of the youth movements, to leave behind a stultifying, bourgeois existence in order to pursue something noble; something beyond one's individual petty life. Thus, Ernst Troeltsch received a resounding response when, in a pro-war 1914 speech, he identified wholeness as one of the key orienting "ideas of 1914:" The first victory we won, even before the victories on the battlefield, was the victory over ourselves. . . . A higher life seemed to reveal itself to us. Each of us . . . lived for the whole, and the whole lived in all of us. Our own ego with its personal interests was dissolved in the great historic being of the nation. The fatherland calls! The parties disappear... . Thus a moral elevation of the people preceded the war; the whole nation was gripped by the truth and reality of a suprapersonal, spiritual power.97 This idealism and faith were to die, however, in the flames of a military defeat in which it had become increasingly clear that "victory [was] no longer decided by the spiritual and mental resistance of men, but by the predomi*

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31

nance of mechanical instruments of power . . . Things had come to rule over men."98 In many ways, Germany and her allies had led the way in ensuring that all this would be so. Between 1914 and 1918, Germany watched over more new weapons development than had ever been seen in history.99 The fact that she and her allies were ultimately felled by the Machine, then, seemed to many the ultimate irony. In Austria, for example, some intellectuals would begin to say about their country's defeat what Karl Kraus had written in regard to the sinking of the Titanic: that this was God's own revenge ex machina on worshipers of the Machine. 100 As it became clear that the war was lost and Germany would have to sue for peace, the German people rose in revolt against their leaders. Revolution spread to Munich and even Berlin. The German generals themselves pressed for the emperor's abdication. Wilhelm II went into exile in the Netherlands, and the Social Democrats—the former political "outsiders" of Germany 101 — took over the government, proclaimed a republic based in Weimar, and signed the Versailles Treaty that brought the war to an end, although at enormous economic and psychological cost to Germany. The Austro-Hungarian empire (already weakened after the death of Emperor Francis Joseph I in 1916) collapsed too. On November 11, the day the armistice was signed, the emperor Charles I officially renounced the thrones of Austria and Hungary and went into exile; a week later, Austria, impoverished and a fraction of her former size, declared herself a republic. The drastic military defeat, the punitive and humiliating Treaty of Versailles, and the sudden leap into democratic republicanism all made for a situation of crisis and confusion. With no tradition of democracy to refer to, there was a widespread distrust of the political machinery of the new Republics that appeared to rule by brute numbers rather than through any higher sense of leadership. Jakob von Uexkull bitterly concluded in 1920 that with the establishment of the parliamentary Weimar Republic government in 1918, the "world-ideal of the materialists, chaos, had passed itself onto the state."102 With the war veterans still limping home, there came next the stunning news of a Marxist revolution in Russia—an event that was terrifying in its ambiguity. Was this yet another victory for the materialistic, atheistic forces of the Machine (as most conservatives in Germany concluded)? Or was it the true Wholeness of which some socialists had dreamed, a theocracy with the People made divine? With so much destroyed and so much unclear, the postwar mood was rebellious, intense, and prone to extremes. Some threw themselves wholesale into the modernist experiment—so much so that, by 1929, the educator and Protestant cleric Gunter Dehn could grouse that "one is constantly made aware that it is not socialism but Americanism that will be the end of everything as we have known it. Scarcely any proletarian girls now have their hair dressed in the old way: they wear it bobbed, of course—a style truly bereft of metaphysics. Here is a meaningful symptom of the entire attitude to life we have

32

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described."103 Others did not explicitly reject mechanism and modernity, but they did seek to infuse it with a "German" energy of rebellion and neoromanticism—as did Ernst Junger who declared in 1925 that Nietzsche had "taught us that life is not only a struggle for daily existence but a struggle for higher and deeper goals. Our task is to apply this doctrine to the machine." 104 Then there was so-called life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), the somewhat inchoate and scattered intellectual movement of the postwar years that aimed collectively to demand that the whole Enlightenment tradition responsible for the Machine in all of its faces now stand up and prove its legitimacy against Life—the only Absolute that this point of view was still prepared to acknowledge.105 Many of the epistemological concerns raised by this movement were not very different from those advanced by people like Dilthey in the 1890s, but life philosophy infused them with a far more explicit political and populist accent. The graphologist and pop philosopher Ludwig Klages, for example, spent three volumes (Reason as the Antagonist of the Soul) denouncing human rationality as a parasite that had worked across history to asphyxiate the originally intuitive and prophetic soul of primeval humanity.106 Klages would be remembered by later historians for his rule in stirring the irrationalist, antidemocratic sentiment of the waning days of Weimar. However, it is important to realize that life philosophy was not just a phenomenon of the cranky right. When Western Marxist Ernst Bloch blasted Klages as a "Tarzan philosopher,"107 he was not acting as an outraged defender of traditional Enlightenment values but as someone who resented Klages' misappropriation of a tradition to which he also felt drawn. In other words, in these years even Marxism (of the Hegelian, Western sort) found it possible to dream of a politics grounded in the absolute of "life" and strove to achieve what a former defender of that dream, Georg Lukacs, later ambivalently recalled as a "left" ethics fused with a "right" epistemology.108 Writing in 1927, Theodor Litt called attention to the fact that the "victorious breakthrough of 'wholistic' convictions" in biology and psychology during the years after the war had occurred in parallel with the explosion of interest in so-called life philosophy."109 While certainly one did not "cause" the other, the relative simultaneity of these two events, as Litt implied, was neither accidental nor insignificant for understanding the future course of both. Holistic life and mind science had established the terms of its epistemological and conceptual struggle against the Machine in the fervors of the fin de siecle years. The war and its aftermath, however, managed to infuse its argument with the Machine with heightened political and cultural stakes. Let the holistic life and mind scientists draw all the distinctions they wanted between life philosophy and their own commitment to life and wholeness—the very nature of their enterprise could not help but make them useful resources and authoritative voices in larger cultural debates that were as often hostile to traditional science as not. So.it came that in a confusing, urgent time, the scientific, antiscientific, spiritual, social, and political meanings of "life," "soul," "wholeness," and "mechanism" all tended to blur into a single story of struggle and salvation. ,

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It is with an appreciation for the full complexity and ambiguity of all of those meanings that we need to "listen," both to holism's incessant attacks on the old machine science of the past and to the precise details of its dream of a future world in which holism had "reenchanted" life and mind and cleared the way to a renewed wholeness for the German people. The self-consciousness of behavioral biologist Jakob von Uexkull is in this respect paradigmatic. A tireless, aggrieved critic of mechanistic science (see chapter 2), he sometimes allowed himself—as in the following 1921 letter to his sympathetic friend, Houston Stewart Chamberlain—to dream of better times to come: When one has sharpened one's vision for the divine and deciphered the melody of the plants and the trees, then can one say again that a 'Dryad lives in every tree.' Mythology emerges triumphantly out of dry science A rebirth is possible here, and if it would be accomplished, Germany would be the birthland.'10

•

C H A P T E R

T W O

•

Biology against D e m o c r a c y and the "Gorilla-Machine"

IN HIS TIME, Jakob Johann von Uexkull (1864-1944) could well have anticipated that his would be an enduring legacy in the annals of holistic life and mind science. Having begun his scientific career as an invertebrate physiologist, he soon broadened beyond that work and developed a widely cited holistic model of animal behavior that envisioned the organism and its environment as a single, integrated system (the so-called Umwelt). The physiologist Albrecht Bethe would subsequently hail Uexkull's early comparative physiology work as the most successful science of his peer group.' Ethologist Konrad Lorenz saluted him as someone who "knew the strings by which an animal is suspended in its environment to a degree hardly ever surpassed by an ethologist."2 Martin Heidegger called Uexkull, "one of the shrewdest biologists of our time,"3 while his friend and physiological colleague, Otto Kestner, nominated him twice for the Nobel Prize.4 Abroad, both his physiological work and his later animal behavior studies were well known and respected even by scientists with significantly different metaphysical commitments than he: Herbert Spencer Jennings, Jacques Loeb, and Conway Lloyd Morgan.5 Today, fields as diverse as physiology, philosophy, medicine, ethology, semiotics, and cybernetics acknowledge the significance and stimulation of Uexkiill's basic ideas.6 Nevertheless, Uexkiill's work remains less widely known in the late twentieth century, especially in the English-speaking world, than he and his admiring colleagues probably would have anticipated. This small fact is a useful point at which to begin his story. This is a man whose style of scientific authority and vision of biology have not translated easily across time and place. The argument that will be developed here is that this is so not because his vision and style in themselves were uncompelling, but because they were so deeply situated in certain cultural assumptions and historical reference points of the time. Even during his own lifetime, Uexkiill's campaign to construct an antimechanistic science of life and behavior did not "translate" readily into sense for all of his peers. The zoologist Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958) bluntly recalled Uexkull as a combination "eccentric mystic and physiologist," a "life-long producer of a mixture of good science and mysticism or metaphysics."7 Although in 1913 Uexkull was a top contender for the directorship of the new Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, objections from hostile colleagues concerning his alleged "wild and unsound" theorizing led to the less controversial appointment of cell biologist Theodor Boveri.8 A

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Figure 9. Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944). Uexkull TeilnachlaG, Courtesy of the Zoologisches Institut and Zoologisches Museum, Hamburg University. disappointed Uexkull would denounce Boveri's good fortune as the "death toll" for German biology.9 Uexkull was more than sixty years old before his own supporters succeeded in securing him an institutional base for his research. The Institute for Umwelt Research, affiliated with the University of Hamburg, was founded in 1926. Uexkull himself, appointed.in 1925 at Hamburg as a scientific assistant (wissenschaftliche Hilfsarbeiter; a position almost comically beneath a man of his years and experience), was finally made an honorary professor at the university in 1926, at the age of sixty-two. These blows to his pride hurt all the more because life for Uexkull had originally seemed to promise a more elevated and privileged course. Born in 1864, the fifth child of an aristocratic German Baltic family, he had spent his first years living on the family estate in Estonia, where for a time he received private tutoring at home. After a short stay in Coburg, where he was sent to a Gymnasium, the family moved to the city of Reval, where Uexkiill's father had been appointed mayor. There, the young Uexkull attended the Domschule of Reval, whose rector at that time was the father of the future Gestalt psychol-

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ogist Wolfgang Kohler. On completing his Abitur (the elite German highschool degree) in 1884, Uexkull enrolled in the Estonian university at Dorpat, where he studied zoology. During these years, Uexkiill's nationalistic consciousness was awakened and solidified through his enforced participation in the czarist-ordered "Russification" of the Baltic states. There had long been scorn among the local Baltic Germans for those in the community who identified more with Russian language and culture than with German; such people were stigmatized as "the Russianized" and were socially ostracized by their peers. In the 1870s, with the triumph of the Prussian army over France and the consolidation of Germany as a nation under Bismarck, German Baltic identification with Germany intensified beyond the level of mere allegiance to her language and culture.10 In these years of growing nationalism, it was a mark of honor for young Baltic Germans to receive poor grades in Russian language studies. Uexkull was among those who refused to learn Russian properly. As his wife later recalled, using the ironic vocabulary of ethology: "Everything in Russian signaled 'enemy' to him, that is to say, there came to be an indissoluble, subconscious connection between the language and the politics of 'Russification.'" 11 She also recalled how Baltic Germans like Uexkiill avoided the Russian law enforcement and judicial agencies; unwilling to expose their dirty laundry to the Russian "strangers," they preferred to settle disputes internally in their own way. Thus it happened that while he was a student, Uexkull insulted a fellow student, refused to apologize, and found himself challenged to a pistol duel. His opponent was an expert marksman, but Uexkull was prudent enough to avoid injury by shooting up into the air. He managed to escape with nothing worse than a flesh wound in the calf.12 As an adult, Uexkull avoided such overt confrontations, but his professional relations with colleagues were still frequently stormy. Often arrogant toward those he felt were beneath him, he was also possessed of a sharp tongue when dealing with intellectual rivals and enemies. In his publications, he was openly scornful of much that went under the rubric of "psychology" and "physiology" and especially condemned all attempts to base biology on principles of Darwinian evolutionary theory. These opinions tended to alienate him from the mainstream academics of physiology, animal psychology, and zoology, who under other circumstances would have been the most obvious supporters of his innovative scientific work.13 At the same time, Uexkull had a reputation as a wit, raconteur, and bon vivant. When he was not taking on his rivals, he could be charming—his wide circle of friends included such figures as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, fellow Baltic aristocrat and philosopher-mystic Alfred Keyserling, Prince Philipp Eulenburg, and Cosima Wagner, the powerful matriarch of Bayreuth. The Wagnerian and race philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (later one of National Socialism's self-proclaimed sources of intellectual inspiration) was an especially close, confidante over several decades, as testified by the long paper trail of correspondence stored in the Chamberlain archives at Bayreuth.14

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In 1903, at the late age of thirty-nine, Uexkull married the twenty-five-yearold countess Gudrun von Schwerin, who much later would glowingly recall life with her husband in what is still the only book-length biography of Uexkull.15 Three children resulted from that marriage: Sophie Luise Damajanti (1904), Karl Kuno Thure (1908), and Gustav-Adolf (Gosta) (1909). Middle child, Thure von Uexkull, would himself later become a pioneer in the development of psychosomatic medicine in Germany, where he would use his father's Umwelt theory as the framework for a "subjecf'-briented approach to clinical practice.16 But Jakob von Uexkull was not only a man of fiery opinions, culture, and wit—it cannot be emphasized enough that he was also an aristocrat. The special Gnade, or grace, of his noble birth and upbringing, the simple fact of his having been born into the noble Uexkull family, is central to understanding the personality and values that would be decisive in the later shaping of his bio-political worldview. This was a man who claimed membership in a family that traced an illustrious lineage back through seven hundred years of Baltic history. His wife would later recall the assertion of the historian Astaf von Transehethat "to write the history of the Uexkulls is to write the history of the Livlands." She also quoted a chronicler of the Baltics that recalled the Uexkull family as a "very self-willed lineage, irascible, violent, and always above the law."17 During long centuries of czarist rule, the Uexkulls, having won themselves considerable land and wealth as a reward for military service, helped impose German discipline on the unruly communities of Latvians and Estonians. Jakob von Uexkull later compared his family's role to that of the "wax cells" in a beehive that hold the honeycomb together and keep the honey from "flowing uselessly away," stressing in the next breath that he would not want this honeycomb metaphor to be misunderstood as meaning "that these folk were pure honey nectar."18 According to the family-generated mythology, long years in the Baltics had not tempted the Uexkulls to succumb to either alien ideology or crass opportunism. Instead, they and other Baltic German aristocrats lived according to the highest dictates of personal conscience. Holding themselves aloof from the native peasants, they taught their children "never . . . to forget that God made us German." But, for all that, their loyalty to their Russian ruling hosts was proudly unwavering—not because they loved Russia as such, but because they had entered into a contract of honor with the czar, and nothing so base as personal antipathy could compel them to violate that. For this reason, according to Uexkull, at any point in history, the czar "would be safer in the circles of the Baltic barons than in the lap of his own fickle people."19 Given this commitment to "the well-being of the whole" that "acted as a compass for the convictions of the individual," those Baltic Germans who (like Uexkull) applied for German citizenship after the Russian Revolution claimed to find themselves "fully bewildered" by the crude circus of pressure groups and party negotiations that went under the name of "democracy" in the new Weimar republic. As individuals who had experienced firsthand the

38

• CHAPTER TWO differences between a German noble and an Estonian peasant, they stood appalled before the dangerous democratic notion that any man's vote and voice was as good as any other. Uexkull argued sharply that majority rule was a medieval ideal that had been abandoned in all areas of thought, save politics. In the natural sciences, it had long been clear that truth was not something that could be decided through majority consensus; and for this reason modern science was necessarily an aristocratic enterprise in which the assertions of one genius could topple the untutored opinions of the would-be knowers. 20 Politics had yet to learn this obvious lesson, and much of Uexkiill's energy after the establishment of the republic in 1918 would be devoted to developing biologically based arguments to demonstrate the unnaturalness and absurdity of the new democratic system in Germany.

O N THE WAY TO A BIOLOGY OF SUBJECTS

In his memoirs Uexkull explained how, since early childhood, he had been possessed by the powerful mystical conviction that "there are miracles in nature."21 All the same, there was a stage in his early life when his faith in such "miracles" wavered. By age sixteen, while still a schoolboy in Reval, Uexkull had become a convinced determinist and materialist and had turned his back on Christianity. He even went so far as to refuse, on the occasion of his muchloved mother's death, to participate in the religious service held for her, in spite of the pain and isolation this cost him. 22 At age twenty, he enrolled in the zoology program at the University of Dorpat, and chose to specialize in the classification of marine life (an early focus that would also help define his future research). He was introduced here to the work of Darwin and Haeckel, especially through the lectures of one teacher, Julius von Kennel. Uexkull recalled how he was initially quite taken with the elegant power of this theory of species development through natural selection; however, as he put it, "Kennel himself completely spoiled this impression when he assured me that he would be in a position to prove the familial relationship existing between all animal'species, regardless of which ones. I rightly said to myself: this is frivolous game playing and not science. On this basis, I decided to abandon zoology and devote myself to physiology."23 His wife suggests that this antipathy toward the dogmatism of his Dorpat instructors also woke within him the first doubts about the correctness of his own earlier materialistic convictions.24 This may be, but in light of the passion with which Uexkull would fight materialism and Darwinism throughout his life, it seems likely that he would have been eager to abandon both as soon as he could reasonably convince himself of their intellectual hollowness or of the stupidity of their advocates. Significantly, though, he never developed a systematic critique of Darwin's theory—unlike, for example, his fellow Estonian from a generation earlier, Karl Ernst von Baer (the man identified by Timothy Lenoir as "the most important architect of the teleomechanist

39 • BIOLOGY AGAINST DEMOCRACY * 25 program of mid-nineteenth-century biology"). Instead, he made it increasingly clear that his fight against the Darwinian Machine was driven as much by existential, moral, and political passions as by concerns for appropriate forms of explanation in biology. Uexkull's early disillusionment with a Darwinian zoology and his recourse to a research career in physiology would define the first phase of his professional life. Leaving Dorpat in 1888 with a cand.zool. degree, he went to Heidelberg in order to learn experimental methods from the physiologist Wilhelm Kiihne. Kiihne, who had been a student of Johannes Muller and had succeeded Hermann von Helmholtz at Heidelberg in 1871, is best known today as the originator of the concept of the enzyme. He was obviously a compatible mentor for the young Uexkull. In an obituary for his teacher written in 1890, Uexkull praised both Kiihne's resistance to the fetishization of method and instrument that characterized so much late-nineteenth-century experimental science and his principled antireductionist approach to physiological problems. He noted approvingly that "[I]n physiology, he . . . saw always just biological and never physical problems, and for this reason avoided mathematical analyses of life processes."26 When his apprenticeship in Kiihne's laboratory was abruptly terminated by the death of his teacher in 1890, Uexkull began to divide his time as a private scholar between Heidelberg and the zoological station in Naples, which was run by Anton Dohrn. In 1891, he met the embryologist Hans Driesch in Naples; the intellectual attraction between the two men was immediate. Along with the physiologist Rudolf Magnus, these three men formed a little clique that worked together aggressively at scientific meetings to undermine mechanistic principles in the life sciences.27 In these first years of work, adapting methods of preparation and stimulation developed by Kiihne for frogs, Uexkull focused his attention on elucidating principles underlying muscular and nervous processes in invertebrate marine animals. One of the most significant results of this phase of his career was the discovery that invertebrates possessed distinct and separate muscles for tension and contraction. In addition, the flow of energy in the stimulated nerve net of an invertebrate such as the urchin turned out to always be in the direction of the extended muscle.28 For this experimental work and its elaborations, Uexkull would later be awarded an honorary medical doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1907.29 During these years, Uexkull also undertook whole-organism studies of locomotion in both the seaworm Sipunculus and the sea urchin and went to Paris to learn the techniques of serial cinematography developed by the French physiologist Etienne Jules Marey for the purposes of studying body movement. The fact that he was dealing in his work with animals lacking a central nervous system—"republics of reflexes," as he put it—raised new analytical challenges for him. "When a dog runs," he noted, "the animal moves its feet. When the sea urchin runs, the feet move the animal."30 Yet, as he continued with his studies, Uexkull became greatly impressed by how much "planfui

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cooperation" nevertheless existed between the isolated reflex centers and organs of these animals. Together these centers managed to move the creature about, keep it clean, fight its enemies, and capture its prey. Uexkull coined the word Bauplan, or "blueprint," to express his early impression of preestablished teleological coordination in marine animals. It was his first step in what would become a long journey of metaphor transmutation and expansion. Ultimately, Uexkiill's concept of the Bauplan would become the cornerstone of a comprehensive world view operating at once as a biological, political, and spiritual principle. In developing his explanatory models for these early experimental findings, Uexkull made liberal use of various self-confessed "fictional schemas." These were pictures or models that could account Tor his behavioral results but did not necessarily correspond to anything one would literally expect to find inside an animal (he often imagined a "nervous fluid" flowing through various tubes, feeders, reservoirs, and valves).31 The word he used for this approach to theory-building was anschaulich, an ambiguous term that can mean "concrete" or "graphic," but that also may refer to knowledge that is immediately visible or intuitively self-evident—what Karl Ernst von Baer had described as that moment when "the living forms and their connections swim before [the] soul."32 In later years, Uexkull would play with all of the ambiguities implied in the idea of Anschauung, so that this word, like Bauplan, would multiply in its meanings and resonances. Writing in the first decade of the century, a younger Uexkull explained his concern with anschaulichkeit as follows: there were two approaches to understanding life processes: one the province of what he called biology, and one the province of physiology. Physiologists concerned themselves with the material, causal substances, and forces operating within the organism. Biologists, on the other hand (and he now counted himself among their numbers), were interested in accounting for the activities of a particular animal in terms of its functional logic and underlying plan. They were like the architect for whom the structure and arrangement of the house were everything and who left questions about the mixing of asphalt and the,making of bricks to others. This- is why Uexkull could declare in 1907 that "Biology is in its essence 'Anschauung.'" A 1905 paper explained this position in more detail: It is . . . not to be complained of if we biologists, who are asking about the function of animals, look with much coolness at the end problems of physiology.... When I for example lay out the plan of structure of a worm, and in so doing use any convenient physical schema, it doesn't occur to me at all to touch upon a physical problem. One may always think of any other force as at work in the same object. I am not concerned with that. I seek only for a fitting expression in order to make the plan of the animal anschaulich?* In illuminating or "making anschaulich" a diverse range of plans or "blueprints" across species, Uexkull found himself confronted with a new kind of epistemological problem. Increasingly, he was forced to ponder the idea "that

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each animal [species] lives in a different [functional] world from every other."34 An intensive immersion during the 1890s in the works of Immanuel Kant had prepared the groundwork for this emerging new concern. Uexkull had first read Kant as a schoolboy of fifteen, but in Heidelberg he undertook a thorough study, working systematically with a small reading group that included his bachelor roommate, future historian Alfred von Domaszewski, and his physiologist friend Rudolf Magnus. For Uexkull, the Kant that emerged from these studies was a deeply psychological or subjectivist one: the a priori principles, the schemata, that allowed for experience were not of a transcendent or logical nature, but were products of constraints imposed by an organism's sensory organs and biological constitution. In unpublished autobiographical notes, Uexkull recalled a critical incident on the way toward this conclusion that occurred during a walk through the Heidelberg woods. Looking at a beech tree that rose up before him, he suddenly had the thought: "This is not a beech tree, but rather my beech tree, something that I, with my sensations, have constructed in all its details. Everything [about the beech] that I see, hear, smell or feel are not qualities that exclusively belong to the beech, but rather are characteristics of my sense organs that I project outside of myself."35 This initial revelation allowed Uexkull to return to the problem of his animals and their behavior from a new point of view. It now seemed self-evident to him that every animal, every living thing, far from being a passive product of an external world (as the mechanists and Darwinians claimed), was also, in fact, an active creator of its own "external reality." Those realities, because they were subjectively constructed by the sense organs, were different for animals with different sorts of sensory organs. Uexkiill frequently used the vivid image of a soap bubble to convey the fundamental premise of his position: "Each of us carries this soap bubble around with himself his whole life long, like a sturdy shell. It is tied to us, as we to it. Within our soap bubbles, our suns rise and set for each of us. These suns are very variable."36 By 1907 Uexkull had found a name for the "soap bubbles" that tied every subject to his own self-generated world: the Umwelten. Before Uexkull, the word Umwelt had referred to the milieu or environment and was used primarily in sociological analyses. Uexkull's decision to appropriate a familiar term for a distinctly different biological and epistemological cause would later lead to frequent misunderstandings—especially by the Nazis, who regarded all theories with an environmentalist orientation as Marxist-tainted ideologies. Be that as it may, the original message of Umwelt theory was clear: "the secret of the world is to be sought not behind objects, but behind subjects."37 In practical terms, this theory meant an empirical research program that used both field observation and experiment to piece together the "reality" that a specific animal at once created with its sense organs and then interacted with using its effector organs. Only an organism's observable behavior was to be studied: Umwelt theory took a self-consciously agnostic position on the nature of the "minds" of any animal, since such minds were assumed to be im-

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CHAPTER TWO * penetrably trapped inside the animal's species-specific "soap bubble." For this reason, Umwelt theory disdained the fashionable and anthropomorphic "animal psychologies" of the time (often Darwinian-inspired) for their hopeless philosophical naivete. As early as 1902, Uexkull had written disapprovingly: Just as there are people who believe that they can speak a foreign language, when they begin by stuttering in their own, so the comparative psychologists believe themselves able to approach the animal soul, when they in some fashion distance themselves from their own souls, or otherwise mutilate them. . . . I would like at the same time to draw to the attention of our rivals that we are not claiming that animals do not possess a psyche; rather we only claim that no empirical knowledge about this question is possible.38 In an influential 1899 publication, Uexkull, along with his colleagues Albrecht Bethe and Theodor Beer, had attacked the use of anthropomorphic "subjective" terminology in animal sensory physiology and proposed a series of "objective" substitutions.39 In place of "seeing," for example, these three men suggested speaking of "photoreception," a term which allowed one to adopt a totally agnostic stance on the question of whether what an animal experiences while using its photoreceptors had much, if anything, in common with what humans understood by seeing. This paper was to have a broad impact on the rise of behaviorism in the United States and of Pavlovian reflexology in Russia.40 The ironies of these historical developments were not lost on the antimechanistic Uexkull, who later was explicit in distancing himself from this early paper. Although he still found it laudable in its efforts to "clean up" an impossibly anthropomorphic nomenclature, he argued that it nevertheless suffered from a basic error. It treated the sense organs like mechanical apparatuses. .. . According to this perspective, the eye is a photographic camera that takes a picture of the external world, and transmits a light-sensitive plate. The eye, however, is capable of more. It throws the picture that is produced on its retina out of itself into the visual space [surrounding] that animal with eyes. If the eye did not have this capacity, the dragonfly would not be able to catch a midge in flight, nor would the dog be able to snatch at the scrap held before him. The same is true of all the sense organs. Sounds, smells, tastes, and touch are all transposed out of the body and into the subjective space of the animal, proving in this way the existence of non-physical, that is, soul-like factors. It is for this reason fundamentally false, to try to explain the lives of animals mechanistically.41 By 1909 Uexkull had outlined his subject-oriented approach to the study of animal behavior in what would become one of his most important monographs, The Outer World [Umwelt] and Inner World of Animals.42 Its most fundamental assertion was that every organism constructed a world for itself out of only those sensory features that were uniquely relevant to its own purposes or Bauplan. "This is the basic, but much too infrequently heeded fact; namely, that every living being, the moment its [sensory] organs begin to function and its body establishes a relationship to the outside world, finds

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Merkwelt

Merk-rQrgan\^ [11 Wirk-f Organs,

Receptor Merkmal-Triiqer Gegengefuge Wirkmal -Trager Efektor

Wirkmlt Figure 10. Uexkiill's "functional circle" that creates the Umwelt, or unified organism-environment system, 1934. Jakob von Uexkull and George Kriszat, Streifziige durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen/Bedeutungslehre (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), p. 27. itself in an Umwelt that is its own, constructed for its own needs."43 Each of these individual subjective realities was visualized by Uexkull as a small, selected piece of an overarching objective reality—the "thing-in-itself'— whose existence he did not deny but which could never be known in an unmediated or totalizing fashion by any biological creature. Another important thing to understand about every individual Umwelt was that it was constantly being updated. Each action on the part of the organism naturally changed the sensory reality the animal experienced, and each new reality in turn ;provoked new reactions. Merkmale was Uexkiill's term for the sensory cues used by an animal to guide its behavior; Wirkmale was his term for the responsive behaviors themselves. Together, Merkmale and Wirkmale made up the total functional reality of an organism or its Umwelt.44 And the creative eye at the center of all these rolling dynamic realities (what Uexkull later called "functional circles") was the animal itself, the unwitting generator of a play in which it was both writer and hero (see figure 10). To understand all this in concrete terms, let us take Uexkiill's description of the Umwelt of the lowly tick. From field research, it had become clear that this insect's sensory organs were set up in such a way that it interpreted all mammals—from humans to rats—as the same sort of perceptual "thing." Interestingly, such a subjective world stood in sharp contrast with the human Umwelt, in which "a mammal as a directly perceived [anschauliches] object does not exist as such; mammal [for humans] is only an abstraction of thought, a concept that we use as a means of categorization, but that we could never encounter in life."45 In the tick's encounter with the experienced "mammal," a series of sensory constructions or cues elicited in turn a series of predictable actions. The initial cue was the smell of mammalian sweat. At the outset, in other words, the tick's Umwelt consisted of nothing more than this olfactory stimulus, and its response was to drop itself from the tree branch or wherever it was down

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toward the smell. The act of dropping brought the tick into tactile contact with the mammal's hair (a second cue and enlargement of the Umwelt). Hair in turn acted as a thread that guided the insect toward the heat generated by the mammal's skin. The tactile cue "heat" acted as a signal for the tick to begin sucking blood, blood which it neither tasted nor saw. Three cues, three responses—a simple Umwelt, as Uexkull himself admitted. However, "the poverty of the Umwelt is just that which is responsible for the reliability of action, and reliability is more important than riches."46 The 1926 founding of Uexkiill's Institute for Umwelt Research at the University of Hamburg, an institute that also made use of the facilities of the Hamburg Zoological Garden Aquarium, offered an opportunity to build up a storehouse of such models of species-specific Umwelten.47 It is true that the new institute's relationship with the university's zoology faculty was shaky, owing to its explicit anti-Darwinian stance. However, Uexkull was able to cultivate more sympathy for his views with the medical and the philosophy faculties and was soon teaching a series of popular colloquia with the conservative holistic philosopher Adolf Meyer-Abich. A zoologist named Friedrich Brock, who had become an admirer of Uexkull while a graduate student working under Hans Driesch,48 became Uexkiill's first research assistant at the institute. Although widely recognized as an unremarkable thinker, certainly nowhere near the caliber of Uexkull himself, he would more or less through default become his teacher's successor in 1940.49 During the early years, institute research focused on the behavior and physiology of marine animals; however, the arrival in the late 1920s of the Greekborn psychologist Emmanuel Sarris led to the initiation of a new research direction that focused on dogs. This work attracted a considerable amount of local press attention and ultimately led to the development of new methods for training guide dogs for the blind.50 During the difficult years of World War II, when pragmatism rather than ideological merit was driving governmental funding decisions, the guide-dog program would become the institute's most important rationalization for continuing existence. At that time, with Hamburg experiencing almost daily air raids, all the young men away in the army, and Uexkull himself nearing the end of his life on the island of Capri, the dogs and training program were single-handedly maintained by one former female student, Frau Dr. Emilie Kiep-Altenloh, who later became a Hamburg senator.51

SCIENTISTS IN THEIR SOAP BUBBLES: UEXKULL'S KANTIAN CHALLENGE TO SCIENCE

Uexkull claimed, more or less modestly, that his Umwelt behavioral research program actually introduced no new ideas but simply reconceptualized and gave an empirical foundation to basic insights that had long been known in philosophy. A major philosophical work, Theoretical Biology, on which he

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worked for more than five years, attempted to clarify the ways in which this was so. In a letter he wrote to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had praised this work, Uexkull protested: "I do not have the ambition to measure myself against truly great men. I have made no contribution other than that I have simply drawn attention to fruits that had been gradually ripening on the tree of Kantian wisdom." 52 A much earlier letter to Chamberlain, though, had been more expansive in its conviction of his work's originality and especially of its potential broader cultural impact: "I am writing a treatise on theoretical biology, that will also not be an easy mouthful. However, the war has extraordinarily widened understanding of Organization, so that one may hope that in this way that the Age of the Number will be overcome."53 Uexkull's idealist psychological reading of the Kantian a priori was, of course, the Archimedean insight here: experience was not directly reflective of reality but was actively created by every subject. To that, Uexkull added the clarifications of another great German, the early-nineteenth-century physiologist, Johannes Muller. Midler's doctrine of "specific energies"—even if wrong in its physiological details—had correctly recognized that, in perception, what was directly given to consciousness was not some outside stimulus, but rather a mental representation of the state of certain stimulated sensory nerves.54 Depending on the specific energy of the nerve stimulated, one could expect different translations of an outside stimulus to be produced. Visual sensory nerves, for example, always represented incoming stimuli in terms of light, shadow, and color regardless of whether the stimulus from outside was a sunset or a blow to the head. With this recognition, it became further obvious that different species, having varying nervous systems and combinations of specific energies, must inevitably perceive reality in very different ways.55 These insights inevitably had self-referential implications for the practice of natural science, which still too often functioned as if it were capable of discovering some unvarnished reality cleansed of all traces of human subjectivity. Uexkull explained: Natural science is divided into theory and research. The theory consists of theorems that contain clear statements about nature. The form of these theorems often gives the impression that they would rest themselves on the authority of Nature itself. This is an error, because Nature gives no lessons, but rather merely shows changes in its appearances. These changes can be used by us as indications of answers to our questions. In order to achieve the proper understanding of the relationship of science to nature, we must transform every theorem into a question, and render an account to ourselves for the changes in natural appearances, which researchers had used as evidence for their answer. Research cannot possibly proceed without questions that make assumptions (hypotheses), in which the answer (thesis) is already contained. The ultimate recognition of the answer and the establishment of a knowledge-claim follows

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as soon as the researcher has found a sufficiently persuasive number of manifestations in Nature that he can interpret as positive or negative in terms of his hypothesis. The sole authority on which a knowledge-claim rests is not that of Nature, but that of the researcher, who has answered his own question himself.56 The claims of natural science, then, did not represent some transcendent realm of truth (i.e., were not objective) but were human concepts that remained fully contained in the human soap bubble; part of the human Umwelt that Uexkull called the "concept world." According to him, there had been a time in history when human concepts and human experience had stood in close relationship to each other; consequently people had resonated with the phenomenological "truth" of their culture's knowledge-claims and had felt "at home" in the universe. With the rise of modem science over the last three hundred years, however, scientific models of the universe had diverged increasingly from humanity's direct Anschauungen. First, the earth was ousted from its privileged place in the center of the universe; then a heaven of fixed, astrologically coherent stars was broken open and transformed into a senseless eternity of space; God was dethroned and annihilated, and the earth turned into a trivial grain of sand somewhere on the margins of an inconceivably large and meaningless universe (see figure ll). 5 7 A new chapter in this process of alienation had been reached with what Uexkull called the "deformed monster" of Einstein's theories, which made a mockery of all human common sense or anschaulich experience of reality.58 Setting himself against both the materialist and the positivist neo-Kantian temper of his time,59 Uexkull now suggested that Umwelt theory indicated that the docility with which humanity had choked down these increasingly nihilistic physical models had in fact been unnecessary. As he declared in a passionate letter to Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Whether... all of the . . . claims that Einstein makes about a conceptual space without center or coordinations [are true], I am not in a position to verify—they do not interest me at all either, since this space, the more it distances itself from concrete space, the more it forfeits its claims on reality. Concrete space is alone real. .. .What lies beyond our horizons, beyond our vault of heaven, is forever closed to us. We are indeed capable of building a conceptual space, in which the suns and stars move at incredible distances and in inconceivable [spans of] time. But this conceptual space is just a watering-down of our concrete space, that we gain by allowing several important elements of this concrete space to fall away.... The [true] glimpse outside our concrete space and beyond the vault of heaven is denied to us. The higher reality that reigns there remains for us unknowable, whether we now call it "Nature" or "God." . . . I am afraid that if I publicly proclaim this perspective, that they will treat me a la Galileo, and either lock me up in a madhouse or else ridicule me as an arch-reactionary.

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.-

t r s* T V ej-v^ssav-" "".*SKSSK»rj Figure 11. The Umwelt of the astronomer looking through his telescope in a tower, demonstrates the Kantian implications of a new biology, 1934. Jakob von Uexkiill & George Kriszat, Streifziige durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen/Bedeutungslehre (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), p. 27. L.

However I must just once say my piece. Perhaps no one will understand me anyway. Nevertheless, it remains a fact: "Epur non si move." I do not move around the sun, but rather the sun rises and sets in my arch of sky. The same thing occurs in a hundred thousand other arches of sky.60 Uexkiill's choice of intellectual confessor in this letter was particularly apt. In Immanuel Kant, Chamberlain had also used a psychological-idealist interpretation of Kant to argue against his age's blind adherence to rational causal science. As Chamberlain saw matters, "Kant deposed reason from its throne once and for all" and, in so doing, had revealed the self-referential, "mythical" nature of all rational-scientific abstract concepts.61 While Chamberlain did not use the Uexkull term Umwelt, he was one with his biologist friend in arguing that a key logical consequence of the Kantian critique was to set every human articulated worldview on the same level of fictitiousness as every other.62 It is true that, in the 1930s, the bitter socialist critic Joachim Schumacher would attack such readings of Kant as the "abandonment of the spirit of the Enlightenment,"an abandonment undertaken with the attitude, "Better our thickest darkness than your slinking light!" 63 As Chamberlain and Uexkull saw things, however, Kant had in fact provided them with the key out of a dark dungeon filled with senseless "facts" and into the sunlight of a world-

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CHAPTER TWO view in which the claims of science were simply more or less useful tools for interacting empirically with a reality whose deeper purposes and meaningfulness could be known only through immediate experience, intuition, and the felt imperative of moral commandment.64

REVITALIZING LIFE: UMWELTLEHRE AND THE VITALIST-MECHANIST CONTROVERSY

In Uexkiill's eyes, one scientific idea that had particularly revealed its inability to do justice to human Anschauung (to say nothing here of its existential toll) was the machine model of life. On this general point, of course, Uexkiill's complaints found widespread reverberation. By the 1890s, with Darwinism in a perceived crisis and new sciences like embryology in ascendance, the capacity of organisms to develop, change, and heal themselves was being targeted (as earlier noted) as an insurmountable barrier to any attempt to extend principles of physics and chemistry to life. In Germany and elsewhere, a range of scientists had begun to argue for an outright rejection of the model of the machine in the life sciences. The hope that the study of life could be pursued using concepts out of the physical sciences must be abandoned, they said; new theoretical assumptions must be developed to guide research into living processes. The most influential contemporary spokesperson for this position was Uexkull's friend, Hans Driesch (1867-1941) (see figure 12). When Driesch came to Jena in 1886 as a nineteen-year-old, he was—much like Uexkull—a heartfelt admirer of Darwin and Haeckel. He received his doctorate in zoology under Haeckel, who promptly offered him a job as an assistant in his laboratory; however, Driesch, who was independently wealthy, decided instead to pursue a career as a private scholar—again, much like Uexkull. In 1891 he went to the zoological station in Naples to pursue marine biological research, and here he met Uexkull, who had been working on his own research at the station since the previous year. During the previous year or two, influenced (as he explained) by arguments of biologists G. Wolff, W. His, and A. Goette, Driesch had already undergone a process of disenchantment with certain of the dogmas of Haeckel's Darwinism. As Driesch recalled things much later, these critics of Haeckel showed me a problem that Haeckel had not seen at all, and that nevertheless was apparently very significant: the question of how, through what means and energies, the individual organism actually is produced out of the egg. We have here to do, as we see, with a problem in embryology, but not simply in a descriptive and comparative sense, but in a causal sense. The saying of Haeckel, that phylogeny is the cause of embryology, in that the latter represents a brief recapitulation [of the former], even though not absolutely false, when properly interpreted, was apparently not itself adequate for the intimate illumination of embryological processes.65

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Figure 12. Hans Driesch (1867-1941). A. Wenzl, Hans Driesch: Personlichkeit und Bedeutung fiir Biologic und Philosophie von Heute, (Munich/Basel: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1951). Driesch's goal in Italy was to test and empirically develop a model of inheritance being argued by A. Weismann that at the time seemed to represent an alternative to Darwin's so-called pangenetic theory of inheritance. Darwin had believed that inheritance took place across generations through the "blending" of whole-body characteristics donated by both parents, including characteristics acquired during their individual lifetimes. In contrast, Weismann was arguing that the sexual cells were the only parts of the body involved in the transfer of inherited traits across generations. He conceived these special cells as possessing transposable mosaic-like units that he called "determinants" and that somehow encoded all heritable traits.66 The determinants of a new organism were set at birth and remained unaffected by cumulative experiences and characteristics acquired across a lifetime. Evolutionary changes across generations could occur only through mutation or through random changes in the combinations of fixed determinants.

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Figure 13. Driesch's embryo experiments that gave new credence to vitalism in biology, 1891. Hans Driesch, "Entwicklungsmechanische Studien," Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Zoologie, 1891. Driesch hoped to elucidate the embryological mechanisms underlying this model of heredity by repeating the experiments begun by the embryologist Wilhelm Roux; experiments that involved destroying one of the blastomeres of a sea-urchin egg (which he chose over the frog eggs used by Roux since they were easier to handle) and letting the other grow as it would. As discussed in the previous chapter, he found that the single blastomere of the two-cell stage of a sea-urchin egg developed, not into half an organism (that would have suggested the existence of a mosaic-like blueprint for develop-

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ment rigidly laid down inside the egg) but into a whole larva that was half the normal size (see figure 13). Clearly, machines cannot be cut in half and become identical, if smaller, machines; other principles, Driesch concluded, must be in play here.67 Further experiments at Naples revealed that when segments of the sea-urchin eggs (up to sixteen cell divisions) were moved into abnormal relative positions (a future limb moved to where a future eye should be, etc.), normal larvae still developed. All this, Driesch decided, was simply incompatible with the views of Weismann and Roux, no less than with those of Darwin. At the same time, Driesch found that none of the other organisms that he studied demonstrated the peculiarly plastic growth pattern of the sea-urchin eggs. Unclear how to proceed and frustrated by his inability to expand his empirical'base, he turned to philosophy for direction, studying the worksof Kant, Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Locke, Hume, and Alois Riehl. By 1895, even though he still lacked a broad species database, he was beginning to toy with the idea that mechanistic principles could not account for his embryological findings. Finally, jn an 1899 monograph that was the turning point in his career,68 Driesch introduced an antimechanistic concept of the embryo as a "harmonious equipotential system." Itself infinitely plastic, this system was supposed to be molded during development according to the needs of the situation by an autonomous, nonmaterial teleological principle that Driesch would soon christen the entelechy, after the teleological principle first recognized by Aristotle.69 Later Driesch would also focus on recovery from brain damage in human patients and on the. internally generated acts of higher animals as additional evidence for the fundamentally nonmechanistic nature of life and for the need to assume the intelligent functioning of a nonmaterial but causally effective agent in organisms.70 In a 1908 article, "New Questions in Experimental Biology," Uexkull himself confidently identified Driesch's work as the decisive blow against the "machine" view of life. Driesch succeeded in proving that the germ cell does not possess a trace of machine-like structure, but consists throughout of equivalent parts. With that fell the dogma that the organism is only a machine. Even if life occurs in the fully organized creature in a machine-like way, the organization of a structureless germ into a complicated structure is a power sui generis, which is found only in living things and stands without analogy. . . . It is not to be denied that the vitalists are the victors all along the line. After having put an end to Darwinism, they have seized upon the entirefieldof the production of animal form, and now threaten the last positions of their opponents.71 By 1900, Driesch had more or less abandoned a full-time career as an experimentalist and had settled in Heidelberg (virtually next door to the Uexkull family) with the aim of comprehensively working out the philosophical justification for a vitalist perspective. His Gifford lectures—"The Science and Philosophy of the Organism"—held in Aberdeen in 1907 and 1908, were an early

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fruit of these efforts. In them he conceded that entelechy would seem to pose a problem for a Kantian-informed epistemology since it could not be comprehended through the original categories of pure reason. This fact, however, did not mean that it must be judged a mere "metaphysical" concept. It meant only that a new category of understanding must be introduced into both the Kantian system and into science. Driesch called this category "Individuality" or "Constructivity." Humans were conscious of a manifestation of it in their own wills when they asked, "For what purpose?" The category also shaped their perceptions of others with whom they related from the position of an ethical standpoint. It would be impossible, Driesch felt, to feel morally obligated to another person and yet to regard him or her as a mere causal machine.72 By the time Driesch gave the Gifford lectures, Uexkull had produced the studies on Sipunculus that led him to propose the existence of a teleological principle (the Bauplan) much like Driesch's entelechy. At the same time, Driesch's journey into denser philosophical thickets was problematic for Uexkull. Increasingly, the latter shied away from making explicit use of Drieschian concepts like entelechy and psychoid and later privately admitted that he found many of Driesch's philosophical arguments "too abstract," "beyond my anschaulichen horizon." 73 As time went on, probably more than mere terminological differences separated him from his old friend, in spite of Driesch's late conciliatory assertions to the contrary.74 What never wavered, though, was Uexkiill's perception that Driesch's experiments had been the starting point for a new approach to an "exact biology" emancipated from the tyranny of outmoded linear-causal thinking. While Uexkull did not deny that some aspects of animal physiology might, at any given time, function in a machine-like fashion, he nevertheless argued emphatically that all animals were also more than machines; that is, they all also possessed extra-mechanistic properties of potentiality and self-directed creativity. The undeveloped egg cell's capacity to develop out of itself into an "adapted machine," and the adult animal's capacity to repair and adapt itself after suffering damage, were examples of organismic initiatives that could not be explained as sets of logical, linear causes and effects. Bowing to the limits of human knowledge, Uexkull concluded that science would never be able to visualize the "natural factors" directly responsible for the spontaneous creativity and intelligence of living processes. Nevertheless, much as deists of an earlier age had sought to read God's mind in His creation, so Uexkull believed that it was possible to observe and map the patterns of physical and chemical effects left behind by the "natural factors" in any particular organism. The physiologist could be compared here to someone scoring a melody that is being played by a music box and who does not assume, just because the composer is unknown to him, that the composition in question must have been created by the box itself. In Uexkull's words, "We have found no waltz in the music box; instead we overhear a melody in the succession of hormones that is played by Nature itself."75 Cellular protoplasm—that Uexkull later called the "life stuff of the or-

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ganism —was the endlessly plastic material used by Nature to build her varied musical compositions. As Uexkull explained in 1909, "In order to make the relationship between protoplasm and structure vividly clear, one should imagine that our houses and machines are not constructed by us, but rather independently crystallize out of a mash. Every stone of every house and every machine part would continue to retain a portion of extra mash in itself, that would undertake repairs and regulations as they become necessary; in addition, each house and each machine would contain a larger accumulation of original mash, that would be responsible for the production of new houses or new machines."77 Of course, not everyone in Germany's broader biological community was enamored with this style of biological theorizing. The geneticist Julius Schaxel attacked the 1921 edition of Uexkiill's Outer World and Inner World of Animals for its defense of what he called "categorical vitalism"—a view of a kind with that of Hans Driesch, and, Schaxel opined, "definitely not the right [view]."78 Jn his monograph The Organism as a Whole (1916), Jacques Loeb, probably Germany's leading advocate for an uncompromising mechanistic conception of life, also attacked Uexkull and Driesch for their vitalistic approach to the "whole" functioning of the organism. It was not that Loeb was wholly lacking in respect for these two men—he even went so far as to call them "both brilliant biologists."79 Yet, in their very brilliance lay also a dangerous capacity to sway scientific and public opinion in false directions. The Organism as a Whole was Loeb's urgent attempt at a mechanistic alternative to the problems of embryological development and the harmonious integration of inherited characteristics. Martin Heidegger was another prominent German who identified both Driesch and Uexkull as the era's key promoters of a new vitalistic biology. However, his assessment of their influence was, not surprisingly, considerably warmer than that of Loeb. In his 1929-1930 winter lecture series at Freiburg University, he hailed both men as having brought about "two decisive steps"—both accomplished, remarkably, within the framework of a "still reigning" mechanistic biology—that together "had consummated biology."80 The first of these was the recognition by Driesch of the holistic character of the organism; the second was the insight by Uexkull of the integration of the animal within its environment. This second insight had led in turn to an even more radical understanding of holism "whereby [the organism's) wholeness is not exhausted through the bodily wholeness of the animal, but rather the bodily wholeness is first itself understood on the basis of an original wholeness [with the environment]."81 Although the fact has not been widely recognized, the 1985 published version of Heidegger's 1929-1930 lectures shows that he had studied and digested Uexkiill's works at remarkable length, particularly Theoretical Biology and Outer World and Inner World of Animals.*1 It may well be, therefore, that Uexkiill's Umwelt concept contributed, in a way not yet properly recognized, to Heidegger's intriguingly similar central concept of "Being-in-the-world,"

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which Heidegger had first comprehensively articulated in Being and Time, published just a few years before the Freiburg lectures. Indeed, in a 1937 article, Uexkull would himself call attention to the similarities between his views and those of Heidegger.83 The timing of this belated recognition of affinities does not belie its truth but does suggest that Uexkiill's motivation here was not purely that of intellectual generosity. Heidegger by this time had established his reputation as one of Germany's leading academic supporters of the Hitler regime, while Uexkull was under some pressure to demonstrate the watertight ideological correctness of his Umwelt theory.

THE SHOCKS OF WORLD WAR I AND WEIMAR

Uexkiill's Umwelt.theory was, of course, not designed for Hitler's Germany but was a product of Wilhelminian Germany: all the essential concepts for his research program had been developed and presented to the scientific community before World War I. When the war broke out in 1914, he was already fifty years old, and in some ways, his most creative scientific period was behind him. Yet the war years also marked a new beginning for Uexkull as a scientist, for these were the years that began to see the expansion of Umwelt theory into a resource capable of "speaking" across a wide range of urgent concerns. Even before the war, Uexkull had already lived through a major blow to any complacency he may have developed about the world and his appointed role in it. The Russian unrest and uprising that followed the disastrous 1905 Russo-Japanese war had invaded the Baltics, where the "German barons" became particular targets of hate and resentment. Uexkiill's parental home, Heimar, was among the estates burned to the ground and, although another family estate survived for the time being (Uexkiill's beloved Werder), Uexkull was nevertheless financially devastated by these events, since his personal fortune had been invested in now all-but-worthless Russian government securities.84 A major professional disappointment also dogged his last years before the war. In 1913, he was passed over for the position of director of the new Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin, and he remained without a university affiliation or institutional base. With such a blatant rejection of his work and perspective, Uexkull began to despair for the future of biology in Germany. A few years later, he would despair for the future of Germany itself. Initially, like so many others, he was caught up in the nationalistic fervor and high hopes of the "spirit of 1914." He had never, perhaps, felt so German as at that time. As his wife recalled: If the Baits had led a special existence up to this point as wayfarers between the East and the West, between Germany and Russia, so the narrow path which had permitted this travel was [now] abruptly washed away. There were no more Baits, I

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there were only Germans and Russians. Instead of the old feudal oath of loyalty to the Kaiser (in Petersburg or in Berlin), came the call to Nation.. .. Jakob sided passionately—with Germany.85 During the first years of the war, the Uexkull family took up residence in the family castle of Uexkiill's wife, Gudrun (nee Schwerin) von Uexkull, which was located in the quiet village of Schwerinsburg, in Pomerania. (The Schloss Schwerinsburg was destroyed in the last months of World War II, and the land making up Pomerania was soon after divided between East Germany and Poland.) In Schwerinsburg, Uexkull helped to rally and organize the local workers and farmers for the war effort. For him, the issues at stake were spiritual issues—at the very least, this war was a high-minded struggle to preserve the values of German culture. In his fervent rhetoric: Why did even foreigners staying in Germany have the impression that this war was a holy war? Because German family life suddenly revealed itself before all the world, because the holy fire of idealism that had illuminated and warmed individual homes shot up toward heaven like a single mighty flame.86 When England entered the war against Germany on August 4, 1914, Uexkull was shocked. An urgent letter to Chamberlain on August 11 urged him to follow Carlyle's example in 1870 and call on his one-time countrymen to support Germany against France and Russia: "How does England come to make common cause with these culture-hating bandits? Genuine human culture can be sustained only through England and Germany together."87 When England failed to come to its senses, Uexkull revised his view of its cultural virtues, turning against it with a hate born of disappointment and betrayal.88 Uexkull was far from alone or exceptional in his rage. Gott strafe England! (May God punish England!) was the cry throughout Germany.89 As a biologist, Uexkull took advantage of the mood of the hour to make a new type of case against Darwinism: not only was this doctrine patently false on scientific grounds, it had also plainly revealed itself to be nothing more than a transparent reflection of the cutthroat market ethics of the enemy: "The German imperative of Kant requires every individual to be an autonomous lawgiver on moral issues. In contrast, Darwin exonerates the individual from this responsibility with his English imperative. . . . Darwin's position can be briefly summarized in the following way: the bigger the herd, the higher the morality."90 The paper trail of Uexkull's publications after 1914 emphasizes the extent to which the war catalyzed a change in this biologist's sense of professional identity. To be a "mere" scientist, detached from the larger world of social and cultural life, was clearly no longer acceptable, or even, perhaps, psychologically possible. The current times of crisis called for intellectuals to lecture and to wield pens no less boldly than the German soldiers had wielded their weapons in the field. Uexkull was sufficiently attuned" to the tenor of the times to realize that someone who could claim to speak with the voice of biology possessed a unique means of influencing the public on important issues and

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• CHAPTER TWO • problems of the day. "I have noticed," he wrote to Chamberlain in 1921, "that the biological mode of expression is more attractive to our contemporaries than the abstract philosophical."91 Whereas previously Uexkull had very occasionally written popular pieces on new developments in biology, he now began to publish prolifically in the general-interest press on questions of politics, appropriate government, morals, and spirituality. Ultimately, he would produce close to forty of these essays and articles over thirty years. The rest of this chapter analyzes some of the principal themes running through these works and their reception.

TOWARD A "BIOLOGY OF THE STATE"

Uexkiill's preoccupation with the "life functions" of the state began in the crucible of the war with a 1915 article entitled "Volk und Staat" (Volk and State). This paper opened with a discussion of species as a noncontroversial example of a biologically coherent collectivity whose distinctiveness was fixed by special "genes" that worked to preserve a collective Bauplan across individual members. (For Uexkull, the rediscovery of Mendel's work pointed to a tendency for traits to persist within a species group and represented just one more nail in the coffin of Darwinism.) Races were natural subdivisions of species and had genetic impulses that maintained the racial distinctiveness of each within the larger species class. In a similar way, Volker were natural subdivisions of races, each of which could be most easily identified by a shared language. Clearly, then, Germany consisted of a Volk; but it also just as clearly consisted of a political system or a nation state that was now making supreme demands on its people. It behooved one to ask, then: what was the appropriate relationship between Volk and state? Still flushed with the magnificence of the German people in that magic August of 1914, Uexkull set the state in a subordinate position to the people it ruled. In the body politic, he said, the Volk was the life stuff that created political and civic organizations and structures to further its own goals; it was not, however, a slave to these structures. In 1915, Uexkull was emphatic: "[T]he creator stands above that which it has created."92 Turning to the microstructure of the German Volk proper, Uexkull found its final irreducible unit not in the individual, but in the German family, whose dedication to the biological persistence of the collectivity across generations had translated into the "holy idealism" that had so impressed Uexkull in the early days of the war: "[T]he primary component of the Volk in all cases . . . is the family. Parents and children together form a cell that, together in conjunction with a thousand other cells, build the Volk body."93 Yet, even in this early, basically optimistic article, Uexkull betrayed a distinct uneasiness. Biology suggested that Volk and the state should always exist in perfect harmony, but clearly this was not the case. Why not? fi

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Uexkull's first answer focused on the power of the Machine—or, more specifically, on the unique human tendency to invent artificial supplements to natural existence. Birds created out of their life-stuff the wings and feathers they needed for flight. Human beings, in contrast, invented airplanes. This was all right, as far as it went, because no one supposed that the invention of airplanes somehow transformed humans into birds. In politics, however, the fatal distinction between natural structure inherent to an organism (or Volk) and mere artifice was sometimes obscured. No community would urge its members to cut off their legs so that motorcycles might grow out of the stumps (the example is Uexkiill's!), yet certain states were only too willing to undermine the natural Volk community so that some artificial political structure might grow and flourish! Permit such efforts to persist too long, and the Volk would begin to "putrefy" into a mere mass, the stupidity and cruelty of which had been analyzed by the French "crowd psychologist," Gustav le Bon.94 In 1915 Uexkull was still not prepared to consider the possibility that Germany could fall victim to such "putrefaction." Still, his disquiet grew as more and more reports of bureaucratic incompetence mingled with news of defeats at the front. In his wife's words, he "searched in vain for the 'Plan' that he saw everywhere at work in Nature. The methods of men seemed inorganic and planless to him." 95 As the war turned increasingly against Germany, news came of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. For Uexkull, this "shot heard around the world" struck painfully close to his heart. Many German friends and relatives, including a brother, suffered enormously through internment and then (upon receiving amnesty from Lenin and Stalin) a long, painful exodus out of Russia. Uexkull traveled to Estonia, only to discover that his beloved estate, Werder, had been almost wholly burned to the ground. The final blow came when the German naval forces failed to act decisively to annex the Baltics for the German Reich (as Uexkull had been urging), and these provinces became Soviet territory.96 Watching events unfold in the new Soviet Union seems to have been decisive to Uexkiill's growing conviction that he had previously overestimated the capacity of a Volk to resist degeneration into an animalistic mass. In a bitter letter to Chamberlain, dated November 20, 1917, he wrote: In Russia, the long awaited moment has come, the protoplasm of the giant amoeba [i.e., the Russian Volk] is full in the process of decomposition, and it is no longer possible to stop this natural process. Senseless pillage and murder are on the increase, and simultaneously the nightmare image looms of the most enormous famine that the world has [ever] seen. I am assured by one still very trustworthy observer, just out of Russia, that by spring people will be devouring human flesh. What a lovely theme for Russian literature.97 The image of a strong state that would severely restrict the capacity of the masses to seize power for themselves now began to haunt his socio-biological reflections. Inspired by Chamberlain's 1917 antidemocratic monograph

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Democracy and Freedom, he spoke out in early 1918 against universal suffrage—the elected officials would be "neither representatives of the Volk nor representatives of the state. They would be nothing other than representatives of the masses."98 But the realization of his worst fears was mere months away. By late 1918, it was clear that Germany could not win the war. As the emperor fled his foundering country, the new German republic was declared by the socialists on November 9,1918; two days later Germany admitted her humiliating defeat. On December 20, 1918, a devastated Uexkull wrote to Chamberlain:99 I feel moved, my most esteemed friend, to send you New Year's greetings. For I cherish the hope that we will yet weather the darkest day with the blackest spiritual night. With you alone can I truly speak in a biological way. You have enough energy and vision to feel the pulse of the deeply diseased state, even as you especially must experience the processes of decay most bitterly of all The similarity of all revolutions is something I can today no longer dismiss as something superficial. . . . It is always cancer, that is, the growth of individual cells, and the destruction of the organs that goes hand in hand with that. The most peculiar thing for me remains the delusion of the democrats, who saw the growth of the masses as a normal phenomenon, even though it already indicated the beginning of the sickness. As a result of this error, the cure that they apply misses the mark—the organism cannot be healed through renewed mass formations like the national assembly Individuals just cannot be at all enlightened. The common man does not think with concepts but with very primitive feelings and intuitions. For him, freedom is either the opportunity to rob and plunder or, in the best case, the opportunity to live undisturbed by the state. It is also not at all fair to demand from him that his Merkwelt [perceptual reality] possess a picture of the state with all its intertwined relationships of parts. The only thing that one may expect is that he carries within him a sufficiently clear picture of his immediate task, and has the will to fulfill it. And here is where the genotype comes in, that shapes him into a capable member of an occupation. This healthy basic energy exists in the Germans, and there will also never be a dearth of spiritual leaders who can cause a state organism to develop out of this material. When the sickness has worn itself out, and the stuff responsible for infection has been neutralized, the new process of growth can begin. For me, the cry for Order that is now wringing loose from hearts is the first sign of a beginning resistance. From you, as the most experienced physician in the history of the Volker, I hope for a word about the prognosis. Do you consider this cancer to be deadly, or do you believe in a recovery? . . . This letter is one of the few for which Chamberlain's answer has been preserved. The ailing English-born philosopher of Teutonic superiority responded warmly to his friend's cautious optimism. 100 Having almost despaired, he said, in the face of endless twaddle about "God's punishment, return to simplicity, reclaiming the Germany of Goethe and the Romantics, it

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etc.," Uexkiill's reasoned analysis of the situation had finally succeeded in giving him a ray of hope. He did caution, though, that there was no absolute guarantee that the life-energies of the German genotype would triumph over the limited present realities of the German phenotype.101 If Chamberlain wanted delicately to suggest here that Uexkull not become complacent about Germany's future, he might have saved himself the effort. Uexkull was the first to realize that the times required not vague hopes of salvation, but clear diagnoses and plans of action. For the next eighteen months, his mind and heart were deeply preoccupied with, working out the ideas first ventured in the New Year's letter to Chamberlain. He followed up a preliminary missive with a more systematic chapter in Theoretical Biology that explored the general feasibility of using Umwelt theory as a basis for analyzing the "state as organism." 102 This early venture into bio-politics would prompt his compatriot Thomas Mann to make the following laconic record in his diary for March 1, 1921: I have been reading here and there in Uexkull's Theoretische Biologic Noted that interest in biological questions, even of the new, less mechanistic, anti-Darwinian sort, disposes one to be conservative and rigid in political manners. Something similar can be observed in Goethe.103 Still, the suggestions outlined in those publications were mild compared with what was to come: Uexkull's widely reviewed and influential Biology of the State [Staatsbiologie]: Anatomy—Physiology—Pathology of States, published in 1920 as a special volume of the conservative journal Deutsche Rundschau. This work took a two-pronged approach to its topic. It attempted to understand the "natural" biology of healthy state systems, and it attacked the biological travesties being perpetuated by politics in Germany at the time. Uexkull began by noting that just as the family was the natural cellular unit of the Volk, so a hierarchy of different occupations made up the natural building blocks of the state. The anatomical division of labor in the state saw some people serving the organs of production, others serving the organs of distribution and exchange, and rather fewer serving the various organs of administration. In a healthy state, the organs were many and various but were firmly interconnected and finally integrated in a central terminus, literally the "brain" of the state. "From this," Uexkull wrote, "we see that the only form of organization demonstrated by every [healthy] state is necessarily the monarchy."104 For a government to grant an equal voice to all workers (as the democrats and socialists in Weimar had done) was as insanely self-destructive as if "in our body . . . the majority of the body's cells were to decide in place of the cortical cells, which impulse the nerves should transmit."105 Membership in a particular occupation was not a matter of idle personal preference but rather of accepting a role most appropriate to one's natural abilities for the good of the larger community. All roles that served the state were honorable, so long as the natural Umwelt of the individual in question

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• CHAPTER TWO * matched that required by the post itself. "Liebermann once remarked that the person who paints a good turnip is a better artist than the person who paints a poor Madonna. In a similar way, a good saddler is a better servant to the state than a poor minister."106 To the socialist's plaintive question, "Why should one man clean gutters and the other get to be a minister? After all, both are men!" he sarcastically retorted, "The entire ridiculousness of this complaint springs to the eyes when one applies it to any other object. Every chair, for example, shows the same injustice. 'Why must its legs constantly rest on the dirty floor, while its back gets to rise free in the pure air? After all, both are cut out of the same wood.'" 107 In the last pages of Biology of the State, Uexkull turned more systematically to the question of Germany's present "pathology." Capitalist democracy, of course, was a great cancerous illness. By its nature, such a state body fostered the production of masses of people who then grew in their undifferentiated power, breaking down the structured tissue of the state body like so many cancerous tumors. The press was also a persistent toxic influence, claiming a power fully independent from that of the state, whining about "freedom of the press" yet daily infecting Germany with its venom.108 Finally, there was the problem of parasites, both from within Germany's borders and from other countries. Of the latter type, England was unquestionably the greatest offender, having turned itself into the most powerful "world parasite" on the face of the planet, sucking friend and foe with equal alacrity.109 As for Germany's internal parasites, Uexkull declined to name names. Instead, he simply noted that the true parasitic nature of certain "alien races" within Germany had unmistakably been revealed during this present time of crisis. One could recognize Germany's internal parasites by the way in which they rejoiced in the overall weakening of their host and sought to seize lost jobs and other bounty for themselves. They had a thousand excuses for Germany's enemies and a thousand tricks for subtly undermining what remained of Germany's powers of resistance. Germany could not do much about them now, but once she had again recovered her strength, every necessary step would have to be taken to neutralize their destructive power.110 In talking about Germany's "parasites"—not to speak of her "poisonous press"—Uexkull never once explicitly mentioned the Jews. This does not mean, however, that the "Jewish question" was of no concern to him (a point to which I return later in this chapter). Indeed, the many references he did make (to the liberal press, the banks, etc.) were more or less transparent code terms for allegedly Jewish interests, widely used at the time by cultural critics in a time when open attacks on Jews were officially not tolerated.111 Moreover, in a letter to Chamberlain, written about a year after the publication of Biology of the State, Uexkull made his personal position clear, "The cohesive power of the Jewish Volk is admirable. For that, the Jews are completely incapable of building a state. All they produce is just a parasitic net that everywhere corrodes national structures and transforms the Volk into fermenting piles of pulp."112

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Eckart Scheerer, a German historian of psychology, locates Uexkiill's Biology of the State in a larger movement among conservative German intellectuals to visualize a "third way" between the evils of socialist Marxism on the one hand and those of liberal capitalism on the other. In the early 1920s, however, there was still considerable disagreement over exactly what this third way should be. Uexkiill's feudalistic and anticapitalistic opus was a very different work than that, for example, of the biological theorist, Oscar Hert-wig, whose book The State as Organism would attempt to reconcile the conservative ideals of political organicism with some of the practical advantages of modern capitalism. In Hertwig's monograph, factories became the organs of the state, trusts were the organ systems, highways and throughways were the vascular system, and communication systems like the telephone and telegraph were the nervous system.113 Hertwig's efforts here on behalf of industrialization and modernism can be usefully compared with attempts by certain engineers in Germany at this same time to give a "spiritualized" spin to despised principles like Technik; one that would help pave the way for the integration of technology into the reactionary politics of the Nazi years." 4 Biology of the State was widely reviewed, and press response was mixed. While many were enthusiastic, some of the most conservative readers were not happy with Uexkiill's unusual prioritizing of the authority of the State over that of the Volk.'15 On the other side of the political spectrum, Uexkiill's old friend, Hans Driesch, opposed the monograph on more principled grounds, which he expressed in words that were clear, if gently spoken. Writing in 1921, Driesch declared that, while Uexkull had made some brilliant and profound observations in Biology of the State, ultimately his basic premise that the state might properly be viewed as an organism was untenable. For Driesch, any particular empirical state could not,.by definition, be considered a true biological whole because states possessed no independent, creative entelechy. Instead, the only "super-personal" organismic entity that Driesch was prepared to recognize—and, even here, only cautiously—was a concept of mankind that recognized no national or volkisch boundaries. It is relevant in this context that Driesch, in sharp contrast to his Baltic friend, was a republican who had long defended an ideal of cultural cosmopolitanism, having himself traveled and lectured extensively in China, Japan, and the United States (compare also chapter 6). Now, he wrote: The fact that mankind can create states qualifies it to be in a certain sense a single "organism"; however the empirical individual states are, in their logical essence, much more like [inorganic] rocks than like some special construction in the context of the organic world.116 Undaunted, Uexkull reissued a somewhat expanded version of Biology of the State in 1933, a year in which many of its key themes suddenly seemed of renewed relevance. This time, the monograph made unmistakable its sharp ideological differences with the more modernist visions of bio-politicians like Hertwig by calling attention to one further deadly disease of the state: the

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"disease of technology." Above all, the blind elevation of machines over people had sucked the lifeblood of the state by creating massive unemployment.117 The revised monograph also addressed the timely question of "racial mixing" and decided that simplistic racial theories for maintaining racial purity were unconvincing on Mendelian grounds. There was, however, a more compelling argument against racial mixing: the fact that the different Umwelten of different racial groups could, only with great difficulty, if at all, ever be reconciled with one another.118 However, Uexkull went on to insist that recognizing the alien "otherness" of certain groups should in no sense lead to the conclusion that some groups must be condemned as inferior or worse. All human groups must be respected in their distinctiveness (and the obvious message was that Jews must represent no exception here) because all in the end are expressions of the same creative life energy.119 This rather guileless call for tolerance was then practically undercut by Uexkiill's hopeful concluding suggestion that the pathological decay that Germany had been experiencing for many years had now been halted by the ascendancy of the party of Adolf Hitler.120

UEXKULL ON THE "JEWISH QUESTION"

All the same, Uexkiill's implicit 1933 plea in Biology of the State for restraint and tolerance when dealing with the "Jewish question" does find clear echoes in a number of his other published essays and reviews.121 At the same time, as already indicated, Uexkull was a man who privately was tortured by an image of the Jews, especially secularized Jews, as ruthless, state-destroying parasites. He reacted with powerful emotion to the alleged evidence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy revealed in the fraudulent document, Protocols of the Elders ofZion, that spoke of a Jewish world conspiracy.122 Indeed, as he explained in a long 1920 letter to Chamberlain, he was convinced that the threatened Jewish plot had already been partly realized in the horrors of Bolshevik Russia. This country, he believed, had stamped out Christianity and effectively replaced it in people's hearts with the "soulless religion" of Judaism that denied the afterlife and focused all of its attention on a materialistic hereand-now dominated by the Machine. "Is Jehovah himself perhaps the Devil?" he demanded of Chamberlain in a 1921 letter. In addition Uexkull agreed with Chamberlain that Germany's own Armageddon was not far off; the Jews had already infiltrated all the organs of the German state: most socialists, democrats, and even centrists, were Jewish. 123 In one letter he expressed a hope that, in the end, "a very ordinary biological defect will shatter the century-old wisdom of the Jews, and lead not to the reign but to the eradication of the Jews." 124 One way or another, Germany would—must—fight back, "I think that care will be taken that even Jewish trees do not grow in Heaven." "The time of mass rule, in which the Jews flourish, will also pass away, and now we have seen through them."125 The disparity between Uexkull's public and private statements on the "Jew-

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ish question" is.best understood on several levels. Probably most relevant is Uexkull's sense of himself as someone who was personally capable of dealing with ideas and information that would be too dangerous to be trusted to the masses. Common people were notorious for misinterpreting and distorting ideas and arguments on sensitive issues like this, ultimately doing Germany more harm than good. A 1923 letter to Chamberlain was frank: "I fear that crass racial anti-Semitism just serves to strengthen the ghetto-state, in that it drives those Jews who don't want to have anything more to do with a Jewish state into its arms." 126 In addition to bearing the stamp of this self-imposed prudence, Uexkull's public statements seem to have been written with a clear, strategic awareness that the political temper of the times was against him and his cause would best be served by:making haste slowly. One 1921 letter to Chamberlain is highly revealing in this respect. Here he speaks of his intention to review a new book entitled The Cosmic Mystery, written by a Jew, Professor Karl Jellinek, and remarks: The Jews have a highly sensitive nose for coming trends. Materialism has gone rotten; now they do business with Idealism. .. . How many stupid Germans are going to fall in [the trap]? For this reason, I have undertaken to review the book in the Deutsche Rundschau, which will be quite a difficult business, since I can't simply lay my cards on the table.127 Strategies aside, one also has a sense that at least some of the apparent contradictions in Uexkiill's writings existed because he was, quite simply, a man not immune to internal contradiction. For example, while consistently applauding Chamberlain's racial diagnoses of Germany's problems throughout his friend's life, afterwards, with the Nazis in ascendancy, he stressed repeatedly that Chamberlain had never intended for people to focus so much attention on the problem of "race." 128 He claimed that "Chamberlain demanded of the Germans, not racial purity, but purity of ideas."129 In addition, Uexkull's theoretical hatred of Jews as a group did not interfere with his establishing friendly relations with particular Jews, whom he regarded as more or less "exceptions" to the general rule of Jewish-German Umwelt incompatibility. These friends included the wealthy, highly assimilated Baroness von Rothschild, who supported Uexkull's research; Otto Kestner, the physiologist, who was born Otto Cohnheim; 130 and Wagnerians Felix Gross and Arthur Trebitsch, both devoted disciples of Chamberlain and both tragic examples of Jewish self-hate.131

T H E FIGHT AGAINST THE "GORILLA-MACHINE"

All this said, it remains a fact that for Uexkull, the Jewish threat to Germany's continuing health and cohesion was very real. It was not, however, the only menace with which Germany would have to contend if she wished to survive her present dark days of trial. There was also the Machine, a menacing image

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with multiple meanings. As technology, the Machine threatened the lifeblood of the German economy. As an automated approach to assessing human worth, it dominated the soulless politics of numbers practiced by the Weimar government. As a scientific view of life created out of a mix of Darwinism and mechanistic biology—what Uexkull called the "Gorilla-Machine"132—it had stripped human existence of all higher significance and moral orientation. This was, in many respects, the most terrible Machine of all and the basis for all the others. In a 1926 play-like dialogue entitled "God or Gorilla," Uexkiilfsystematically laid out the devastating existential and social consequences wrought by the unresisted domination of this monstrous creature. The discussion takes place on board a ship bound for the United States. The hero of the dialogue is a good-natured intellectual.sharpshooter named Dr. Schlemihl. Schlemihl explains that he is going to America in order to "hunt gorillas," a reference to the Scopes trial; of the previous year, in which Schlemihl's "all too prematurely deceased friend" William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) had attacked both the veracity and morality of Darwinism. A tiny young woman named Frau Meister feeds Schlemihl the questions and objections necessary to move his argument along (and is converted to his viewpoint in the end). A journalist representing the cynical, amoral power of the press, is also pulled into the discussion, along with a privy councillor, who represents at once the dogmatic atheism and ruthlessness of the new "scientific Bolshevik Russia." Houston Stewart Chamberlain's 1921 monograph Man and God,m which celebrated Christianity as a timeless, inner religion of experience, was the intellectual starting point for Uexkull's shipboard dialogue. In his book, Chamberlain had argued that "the mental organization of humans, in contrast to that of animals, requires a God as a counterpole to its own subject."134 This psychological fact meant that, ultimately, the choices for a society did not come down to religion versus science, but rather to a choice between old gods and new gods: the old Christian God in heaven versus the "star-machine" and the satanic "gorilla-machine," worshipped "even by the so-called atheists."135 In the dialogue, Dr. Schlemihl summarizes the stakes: It is . .. for the individual person not a matter of indifference whether the world is ruled by a moral or an amoral principle. Eventually there comes a day, even for the most confirmed atheist, when he must address himself to [the problem of] the Rule of the Universe. If—instead of a Spirit who, standing over the people, produced him and his companions, and at the same time speaks his conscience to him—if he should then find nothing but a lifeless machine that mocks all his heart's yearnings, then this machine will begin to take on a satanic life. A horrible grotesque face grins at him. This is what Bryan has identified as the Gorilla. Omnipotence has fallen into the hands of an ape-like monster.136 In his 1936 memoirs, Uexkull would tell a story from his university days of a fellow student who had sunk into such existential despair after reading Darwin—and confronting the "Gorilla-Machine God"—that he committed suicide.137 In "God or Gorilla," Uexkull went a step further and related such

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individual existentialist tragedies to collective moral ones: in a world where men have been reduced to machines, experiencing themselves as mere playthings of the Gorilla God, all sense of allegiance to higher principles is lost. Only the rude mechanisms of the marketplace can continue to command obedience. 138 In one of his letters to Chamberlain, Uexkull elaborated: With the destruction of Christianity and its God, the human being stops being human and becomes something worse than a beast: he becomes a machine, the most pitiless being of all.... The machine that is no longer the servant of men, but rather their lord transforms itself simply into the Devil. He stands now before our eyes, so near, so vivid. When the machine rules, the personality perishes.139 Fortunately (to return to "God or Gorilla"), Chamberlain had taught Uexkiill that the Umwelt of human beings, alone of all species, is permeated by the felt presence of Something Eternal, of some invisible Plan beyond sense experience. The idea of heaven as a home of the afterlife and of God had been one anschaulich expression of this intuited Presence. It made simple human sense: if divinity existed, it also clearly had to exist somewhere, and the immediate human reality of a starry canopy of heaven fit the bill beautifully. Tragically, over the last several centuries, science, as everyone knew, had cracked open the canopy of stars to reveal not a divinity on a throne before which hurnanity must tremble, but a meaningless eternity of space. Science had then declared the ruler of this meaningless world to be something it called "natural law," but which Bryan (as Uexkull saw it) had more aptly recognized as the Gorilla God. On one level, this monstrous creature was, of course, a symbol of divinity like any other. It was a concept of divinity, however, that was infinitely more pernicious than the one it had replaced, since it was so contrary to humanity's inborn felt experience of divinity as a personal and moral force. So it happens that Schlemihl finally confesses in "modest tones" that his goal is to chase the scientists' Gorilla-Idol out of the heavens forever.140 At the end of the dialogue, a chastened Frau Meister apologizes to Schlemihl and promises to have "nothing more to do with the dreadful Gorilla," but rather "from now on . . . to again ask my stars in my heaven what they have to say to me."141 "God or Gorilla" was one of a number of popular pieces written by Uexkull in the 1920s that used Umwelt theory to argue for the continuing feasibility of natural piety and religious faith in the face of scientific disenchantment. Sometimes, as in "God or Gorilla," he implied that a form of Christian piety would be the result of listening to "one's own stars in one's own heaven." He was fond of remarking that, so far as he was concerned, the essence of the Christian message could be found in the New Testament assertion that "the Kingdom of God is within you."142 In other writings, however, Uexkull defended a more pantheistic and mystical vision of humanity's relationship to divinity that drew on the metaphorical resonances of his concept of the Bauplan. First developed by Uexkull to account for the behavior of invertebrate marine animals, then expanded to serve as the cornerstone of Uexkiill's bio-politics, Bauplan was now finally used by

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• CHAPTER TWO * Uexkiill to designate cosmic, "planfulness." As the "immortal spirit in Nature," 143 Bauplan saw to the individual purposiveness of individual lives but also coordinated each of those lives into a harmonious interactive whole. Uexkull liked here to visualize each organism's life as a melody, all of which the cosmic Bauplan as mighty conductor harmoniously blended together into a mighty symphony: We find that all characteristics of living things are united in a planful unity, and the characteristics of these unities are integrated in a contrapuntal way with the characteristics of other unities. In this way, one gains the impression of an allembracing harmonious Whole, because even the characteristics of non-living things interweave in a contrapuntal way into the Bauplan of the living.144 Increasingly, Uexkull identified this image of "Nature's orchestra" with Goethe's concept of "God-Life-Nature."145 In his scientific writings, Goethe had also celebrated the ways in which different organisms interacted both with one another and with the world. For him, this harmonious dance was reflective of the platonic ideal order that lay behind the whole. In what may be his most famous expression of this perspective, he had posed the question: "If the eye were not sunlike, how could it glimpse the sun?" Uexkull a g r e e d Goethe's question, indeed, spoke to the basic metaphysical principle underlying Umwelt theory. In Uexkiill's own words: "If the flower were not beelike, and the bee were not flowerlike, the harmony [between them] could never be achieved." At the same time, Uexkull finally felt compelled to go one step beyond Goethe in describing the metaphysics of inner harmony. In Science of Meaning, he proposed a correlate to Goethe's query: not just, "If the eye were not sunlike, how could it glimpse the sun?" but also "If the sun were not eyelike, it would not shine in any Heaven."' 46 In other words, Umwelt theory made clear that the infinity of melodies that are blended together by GodNature are played by subjects who create that music themselves within the confines of their individual soap bubbles. In the end, only God-Nature may be in a position to hear the entire harmonious symphony to which each subject during its lifetime contributed. At the same time, Uexkull knew that simply cultivating a Goethean sense of the sacred in Nature would not be enough for the common man. Such a man cared less about aesthetics and more about his personal destiny in the divine scheme of things; and he cared particularly about whether or not his personality stood a chance of surviving his bodily death. Uexkiill argued that Umwelt theory in fact pointed with certainty toward such survival. He explained: When somebody . . . makes the claim to me that a dead person is also not different than a broken car, then I ask him whether he believes that the builder of a car has to break his own bones every time an automobile crashes. And when he denies that, then I point out to him that the natura) law of human personality that is responsible for building the human being along with his world, is just as little affected by the death of the human being as is the builder of the car.147 *" s

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At death, Uexkull argued, the bodies of organisms (including humans) of course did become useless, and therefore a person did lose access to the familiar Umwelt which his or her body had helped make manifest. However, the subjectivity that was the expression of every person's Bauplan did not vanish but was reabsorbed in the eternal cosmic Bauplan of which it had always been a direct expression. "This plan, that encompasses our entire personality, is an . . . indestructible reality, about whose endurance there can be absolutely no doubt." 148 Or, as he proclaimed in more familiar terms in another article: "[T]he immortality of the soul . . . is absolutely certain."149 For Uexkiill, the ability of Umwelt theory to offer humanity the promise of life after death came at a particularly critical time in Germany's political history. He was hopeful that when the common people were firmly convinced of their personal immortality, this belief would encourage them to eschew the temptation to involve themselves inappropriately in state affairs. It would make clear to them that their task is "to search for equality not on earth, but in the world Beyond." 150 In this sense, the promise of life after death was not just central to a satisfying religious world view; it was also central to the stable state system that Uexkull hoped would soon replace the chaos of the current democratic republic. Lest the common man still entertain thoughts of rebelling against his "natural" place in society, Uexkull warned about the unpleasant nature of any afterlife that could await the individual who had deviated too severely from his or her given life plan. For animals, the return after death to the cosmic plan was unproblematic; the purpose of their lives had always been in seamless harmony with the purposes of life itself; they simply did what they had to do. For human beings, though, Uexkull thought that matters were rather different: "[T]he human being is not inevitably subject to natural rule; rather he is made, by Nature herself, to be Lord of his subjective rule of development."151 Was it then possible that the self-designed plans of some human personalities were too unnatural to be reincorporated into "Almighty Planfulness" after death?— and, if so, what happened then? Uexkull was not sure, but he feared the worst: "The pendulum that is raised to the left, strikes back to the right with a relentless necessity. In cases of natural law, one searches in vain for compassion and mercy."152 This was more than just alarmist talk designed to subdue the common people. Uexkull genuinely feared that nature could take revenge on Germany for her recent wayward ways. In a gloomy 1920 New Year's letter to Chamberlain, he spoke with a frankness he would never allow himself in formal lectures and publications: The consequences of not staying true to the Law of our lives must be catastrophic. Christianity, which can allay this fear, has become an empty delusion for us educated bourgeoisie. It is the educated, however, who readily grasp the biological theory of the soap bubble. The great masses understand nothing at all. For the educated, a dark time is coming, and the Demon who once was physically

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enthroned behind the canopy of Heaven, will now again rise up behind the soap bubble of the frightfully isolated individual—not, now, as a Person, but as a merciless Law.153

UEXKULL'S RELATION TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM

When in 1933 a group of pundits and ideologues—less educated than Uexkull, but no less fond of evoking the mercilessness of natural law—seized power, Uexkull was sixty-nine years old. Over the next several years, there would be increasing uncertainty about the future of his beloved Institute for Umwelt Research. The years between 1934 and 1936 saw the solicitation of numerous official evaluations of the value (especially in economically tight times) of Uexkiill's life work and that of his institute.154 For Uexkull, this process of review meant that he was forced to spend considerable time arguing for the usefulness of his institute in a climate that had little tolerance for both ideological ambiguity and "knowledge for knowledge's sake." In 1936 the University of Hamburg formally retired him, although he was able to exploit personal relations within the cultural ministry in Berlin to retain his directorship of the institute until 1940.155 All in all, the 1930s were not an easy time for him. At the same time, it also cannot be said that his relationship with the Nazi regime and its ideologues was unambiguously adversarial. Although not a party member himself,156 there is no doubt that he was delighted by the fall of the Weimar Republic and not without early hopes for the National Socialists. His social connections and bio-political publications also made it rather easy for him to be perceived by various National Socialists as a natural ally and intellectual resource—a perception that Uexkull seems to have permitted and even to have partly cultivated. Uexkiill's long-standing friendship with Chamberlain was respectfully noted by the Nazis, who also did not overlook his cordial relations with other supporters of the Hitler regime, including the Wagner family. Finally, there was a relationship of an unclear nature with the high-ranking party member and chief Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.157 Rosenberg had been an ardent disciple of Chamberlain (though Uexkull came to believed he distorted his friend's basic message), and he was also a Baltic who was born in Reval, Estonia, the town where Uexkiill's father had served as mayor and where Uexkull himself had attended Gymnasium. In 1933 Uexkull thus appeared as a figure of potential influence—not.uncontroversial, to be sure, but someone with whom it was worthwhile, during the early years of Nazi consolidation, to cultivate cordial relations. In 1934, a review of the second edition The Biology of the State appeared in the Nazi biology journal Der Biologe (apparently written by Ernst Lehmann, would-be founder of an official Nazi biology [see chapter 6]). The review praised Uexkiill for anticipating the broad blueprint of an organismic state politics now in fact being actualized, with appropriate refinements, in the policies of

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Adolf Hitler. That same year, a former research assistant of Uexkull, Lothar Gottlieb Tirala (Director of the Nazi Institute for Racial Hygiene in Munich) used Der Biologe to publish an appreciative "dialogue" that described his former teacher's "biological world view" in terms accessible to the new generation of National Socialist youth.159 Finally, as Uexkiill's institute first came under review, a letter arrived from the national headquarters of the National Socialist Student Organization. Signed by one Wolf Muller, the letter "most urgently" demanded that Hamburg University not succumb to the financial temptation to withdraw full continuing support for the Institute for Umwelt Research during the current period of reorganization. The letter concluded: "We National Socialist students will not forget Herr von Uexkiill's struggle against an all-mechanizing biology, and will energetically devote ourselves to the preservation and protection of this work." 160 In December 1937, the student division of the National Socialist Party in East Prussia went so far as to publish excerpts of Uexkiill's work, along with a picture of Uexkiill, in its propaganda rag, Der Student der Ostmark. The cover letter to Uexkiill from one Siegfried Drescher, head of the cultural division of the organization, explained that his group wished to use the writings of great German thinkers, scientists, and artists to inspire a young generation of National Socialistic students to realize contributions that the university might make to the regeneration of the German Volk. The letter closed by thanking Uexkull for the inspiration of his life's work.161 Although Uexkull had almost certainly not solicited recognition of this sort, the archives do show that he promptly sent a copy of the propaganda leaflet to the chancellor of Hamburg University (during the Nazi years, chancellors were governmentappointed dictators of the various universities) along with a brief letter summarizing the words of the Nazi student leader.162 There were appreciations, then, and appropriations during the early years. Still, it was also the case that Uexkiill's biology and politics did not map so seamlessly onto the agenda of National Socialism as some would have liked. For a time, there was even some question among National Socialist colleagues whether Uexkiill's concept of Umwelt might mean that this biology actually added up to a form of environmental!sm or "milieu theory" which could undermine the canonical race doctrines of the time. A 1936 review of Uexkiill's Institute for Umwelt Research, written by Hamburg University professor Gustaf Deuchler, was a very explicit attempt to prevent such misunderstandings: Umwelt research is in no sense in conflict with the genetic perspective, but rather enriches it; on the other hand, its philosophical and ideological [weltanschaulichen] bases stand in strict contrast with those of milieu theory. Herr v. Uexkull is perfectly right when he emphasizes that the milieu theory approach belongs to the Bolshevik world view while the Umwelt research approach belongs to the world view of National Socialism.163 Yet, even if there is no doubt that Umwelt theory was a far cry from "milieu theory," it also remained a fact that Uexkiill's biological perspective did em-

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. CHAPTER TWO * phasize different sorts of principles—principles that Uexkull feared now risked getting lost or obscured—than did most Nazi race biology. In a 1934 letter to Hans Driesch in Leipzig, a disgruntled Uexkull urged him to "drop a word" occasionally about the significance of Umwelt research for biology. "There is danger that we are going to fall victim to the new race research."164 A number of Uexkull's publications in the 1930s began to emphasize that Umwelt theory not only did not threaten race biology; properly understood, it actually promised to enrich it.165 In addition to fearing that his biology could be swamped by the new preoccupation with race, Uexkull was also deeply alarmed by the swift measures taken by the new Nazi regime to undermine the long-standing university tradition of academic and institutional independence and to turn the universities into compliant accomplices of a centralized politico-racial and militaristic agenda. Although Uexkull himself had previously lamented the Jewish infiltration of the universities166 and warmly approved of "in-house" strategies to keep Jews from securing top university positions,167 he was fully taken aback by Hitler's almost immediate purge of all undesirable university intellectuals (some 1,200 in 1933 alone, mostly Jews, liberals, and Social Democrats). In a long letter that Uexkiill apparently wrote in May 1933 and that was addressed to Eva Chamberlain, the widow of Houston Stewart Chamberlain— but was really intended for Hitler himself—he once again took the public moral high ground and declared his alarm and revulsion over the purge.168 He vehemently denied that Chamberlain had ever intended for his ideas to lead to a persecution of Jews, and he spoke of the "crass barbarism" that now required the dismissal of all conscientious and devoted German researchers of Jewish origin who failed to meet the Nazi required minimum of 75 percent Aryan blood law. Soon after, Uexkull was invited by the German Legal Academy—headed by Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer (and later the brutal governor-general of occupied Poland)—to participate in a legal philosophical discussion in the Nietzsche house in Weimar. Many important Nazi intellectuals gathered for the event. Nietzsche's own ancient sister, dressed in black silk and kid gloves and lying on a white sofa, was even on hand to greet the guests personally.169 In the evening, Uexkull gave a lecture in which he attempted to demonstrate the self-destructive nature of the Nazi restrictions on university autonomy by using the logic of his own bio-politics. He began with praise: "The new realization of National Socialism is the total state that represents a living unity built up out of organs working together."170 That said, it was important to realize that within the total state, not every institution and individual could be equally subordinate to the government; to think otherwise was to succumb to the covert continuing influence of rejected democratic perspectives. No, in the total state, the universities played a necessarily elite and special role. They were Germany's "sense organs." For the National Socialist government willfully to interfere with the free functioning of such organs was effectively like an organism deliberately deciding to punch out its own eyes. The eye, like the university, does not fight back, but the result in both cases is blindness.

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At some point during the recital of this lecture, Uexkull was interrupted by someone who declared that he was straying too far from the theme of the evening program. Then Hans Frank rose to say that he was confused by the talk but understood enough to know that he didn't like it.171 It seems that Uexkull never did'get to finish saying his piece, and the final version of this lecture was ultimately published not in the Deutsche Rundschau, to which Uexkull usually sent general-interest pieces of this sort, but in a local and obscure medical journal. The Weimar lecture was unquestionably an act of assertiveness and, as such, stands in interesting contrast to another lecture, given at almost the same time by a speaker with whom Uexkull otherwise shared certain cultural sympathies: Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's famous Rector's address, "The SelfAssertion of the German University," on May 27, 1933, at the University of Freiburg, had called for the university to give up its "much-celebrated 'academic freedom" in order to pursue the higher historical-spiritual goals that Heidegger was at that time prepared to identify with the National Socialist movement.172 Nevertheless, even as he took the opposite viewpoint, Uexkull still deliberately avoided giving any impression that he was opposed to the goals of National Socialism in general. On the contrary, he seemed instead to be suggesting that it would be in the larger interests of the government to exempt the universities from the forms of control that this government was imposing on less privileged "organs" of society. Ineffective as his pleas were, they also do not seem to have put him at any significant personal risk. True, his institute continued a precarious financial existence, but he himself was left in relative peace over the next ten years to publish and travel as he wished. In fact by 1944, his eightieth year, his reputation in Germany was of such a high nature that the University of Hamburg decided to nominate him for one of Germany's most prestigious national awards, the Goethe Prize for Art and Science. Presentation of this award would have represented the crowning of Uexkull's career. Unfortunately, the university's application on Uexkiill's behalf was lost through war-related disruptions and no prize was actually presented that year. Uexkiill's death later that year, in July, put an end to the university's hopes of trying again to secure him the Goethe Prize for the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday.173 He died on the Allied-occupied island of Capri, where he had been living—partly for health reasons—with his wife since the winter of 1940. There is a certain ambiguous irony in the fact that on the day of his funeral, the only clergyman to be found on the island was a young refugee rabbi from Vienna, who was sent by the Americans as a gesture of goodwill and who read a psalm over Uexkull's body.174

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T H R E E

W o r l d W a r I and the Search for G o d in t h e N e r v o u s S y s t e m

In 1933, the Swiss novelist Maria Waser published a testimonial book entitled Evening Encounter. Lyrically written, the book described Waser's encounter with the teachings of Russian-Swiss neuroanatomist and neurologist Constantin von Monakow (1853-1930) in the last months of his life. It explained that Monakow had turned to Waser, a well-known writer,1 to translate his lifetime of scientific insights into a language that could reach the hearts of the spiritually disillusioned generations of German-speaking Europe. She proved a willing student of his gospel of hope and a celebrator of his wisdom: [T]he man, who on October 19, 1930 so suddenly left us, was called to us to be a Helper; for we had lost our direction, but he knew the way. We had fallen into a state of disorder; he knew the Plan and the secret Will of the Living Principle. We were alienated from Nature; he stood as one initiated in the middle of her shrine. We were cheerless, but he knew the deepest joy. We were overwhelmed with sickness; the laws of healing had been revealed to him: this great physician had been called by destiny, that he might become a physician for many.2 What had Monakow taught Waser that she could speak in this way about him? He had revealed, she told her readers, the lie at the heart of the "materialistic fairy tale of the human machine"3 and put in its place a vision of the human brain as a revelation of hidden will, each cell a creation and container of divine energy, each a tiny piece of soul. And the evil specters—body as the lowly prison of the soul, body as a soulless machine ...—[all] crumble before this pure understanding of the divine unity of all that is living.4 After World War II, other people—mostly neurologists, concerned with painting an image of the past that reflected current understandings of what constituted valid science in their field—would tell a rather different sort of story about this same physician-scientist, Constantin von Monakow. There was no talk of destiny but much more discussion of Monakow's role in establishing Zurich as a center for internationally acclaimed neurology, his pathbreaking neuroanatomical work, and his sophisticated revisions of reigning concepts of brain localization theory. They did not speak of him as a prophet, but rather as one who made "an outstanding contribution to the empirically founded theory of neurology," a "prodigious worker," and a "founder" of the discipline of neurology in the twentieth century.5

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Figure 14. Constantin von Monakow (18531930). Constantin von Monakow, Vita Mea/ Mein Leben, eds. Alfred W. Gubser and Erwin H. Ackerknecht, (Bern: Hans Huber, 1970). Thus, two posthumous images claim to capture the truth about Constantin von Monakow: a more official image, in which the neurologist appears as a vigorous contributor to positivist knowledge of the human brain; and a lurking, partly obscured image in which he appears to be a spiritual leader called by destiny to reveal the occult secrets of nature. These undigested images together introduce us to a single story that is rich in contradictions: Monakow as an internally torn figure whose conservative "German" scientific personality struggled to maintain a balance with a mystical "Russian" personality;6 Monakow as a stern elitist who at the height of his career would retreat from the company of the learned to seek clarity of vision among the simple people in the Swiss mountains; Monakow as a penetrating theorist of holistic neurobiology whose most radical holistic message of all would be mostly obscured or downplayed by those concerned with defining the official nature of his legacy.7 In this sense, the ambiguities of Monakow's own life mirror many of the ambiguities inherent in the whole German holistic effort to use science as a means of healing a fragmented and disenchanted world.

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Born in the outskirts of Moscow in 1853 to an aristocratic Russian father and Polish-German mother, Monakow's ethnic identifications were divided at the outset. His father, Iwan von Monakow, worked as a censor for the political press under Nicholas I and Alexander II. His mother died when he was only four, a loss from which Monakow seems never fully to have recovered. Much later, in his autobiography, he would recall his anguished encounter with his mother's corpse: how he had stolen into the death room to find her, had tried to open her eyes, had probed her mouth and cold body, shaken her, called her name over and over—until finally a sort of understanding began to dawn, and he began to shriek and cry convulsively.8 Even in old age, as he lay dying himself, he spoke about his long years of yearning for the love of a mother.9 It is perhaps no accident that the image of "the mother" should have turned out to be a recurring metaphor in his later visionary neurobiology. Monakow's father was a stern, difficult man who now effectively abandoned his motherless children to the care of his servants. Through them, Monakow learned to believe in a vivid and frightening world of supernatural powers in which the demons and spirits of peasant lore mingled with the angels and disciples of an imposing Russian Orthodox God. The wicked Russian house demon, or Domowoi, had a particularly strong hold on his imagination; after the First World War, he would resurrect it as a half-literal, half-symbolic representation of sin and retribution. As a boy, however, Monakow coped with the terrors of evil and the supernatural by becoming almost compulsively pious. His former student, Minkowski, wrote: He prayed a great deal, enjoyed reproducing religious ceremonies for himself, eagerly read the New and Old Testament; and held sermons at the age of eight to youngsters of his own age, trying to persuade them—however unsuccessfully— that a strong faith was all that was required to transform one object into another; for example, a key into a horse!10 In 1863, coming under some form of political suspicion, Monakow's father sold his lands and brought his family to Dresden, Germany. However, the onset of the Prussian-Austrian war in 1866 alarmed the elder Monakow sufficiently that he decided to seek further refuge in politically neutral Switzerland and moved to Zurich. In 1869 the family became naturalized Swiss citizens. Now sixteen, Monakow was difficult and stubborn, an unmotivated student overshadowed by his apparently far cleverer brother and frequently at odds with his father, from whom he would later become permanently estranged. That spring witnessed another tragedy for Monakow: his much-loved sister, Maria, died in a psychiatric asylum from a lung infection. She had suffered for some time with severe depression,11 a victim of a vulnerability to mental illness that may have run in the Monakow family. Another of Monakow's brothers would be diagnosed in 1886 with dementia praecox dominated by acute religious delirium.12 In his autobiography, Monakow wrote how he awoke abruptly on the night of his sister's death with an inexplicable sense of dread; he believed for a long time afterwards that her parting had been conveyed to him in some mysterious

75 • THE SEARCH FOR GOD clairvoyant fashion. This experience initially reawakened his boyhood interest in occult and mystical phenomena, but Maria's death also seems to have represented a turning point in his inner life: a containment of vulnerabilities, a self-conscious retreat from the irrational, and the emergence of a certain defensive ambivalence manifested in a mixture of attachment and condescension toward women in general. On the one hand, he was fond of making ironic comments and jokes about the intellectual inferiority of the female sex;13 on the other, over the course of his life he developed a robust support system of highly competent women to boost his academic productivity. Monakow's decision in 1872 to study medicine was made both against his father's will and, to a large extent, against his own intellectual inclinations. Indeed, he seems to have been largely motivated by practical financial considerations.14 After a brief but intense Sturm-und-Drang period (dominated by a passionate disinterest in the medical sciences and a ravenous appetite for music, philosophy, politics, and late-night socializing in the local pubs),15 he became increasingly serious, stern, and focused on work. He embraced the no-nonsense world view of Darwinism and systematically cultivated his critical skills. As his career became increasingly productive, he also grew more imperious and irascible. He pursued work with punishing intensity, often beginning at dawn and ending only when he went to bed at night. Late in life he would reflect on the "tyrant" within him that had relentlessly driven him to produce in this way.16 Huge and heavily bearded, he once attempted to open a certain door in his laboratory—unaware that it was locked—and, in his irritation, pulled it out with the frame.17 In old age, he confessed to Maria Waser that, as a boy, he had wanted to become a general: since he could not bring himself to obey, he had no choice but to command. 18 His student, Minkowski, recalled his habit of expecting automobiles and other vehicles automatically to stop for him whenever he crossed a street, and how if they did not slow down quickly enough, he would threaten them with his cane.19 At the same time, one also can see behind the persona of the imposing German professor a vestige of the neglected and surly youth, unsure of his worthiness but determined to make good in the petty world of Swiss academic politics. He later recalled his persistent, anxious suspicion in his early career that his colleagues were superior to him, his reluctance to speak at colloquia because of his continuing awkwardness with the German language, and the way in which his scientific ambitions were driven, not only by a hungerfor knowledge, but also by an inner need to experience power, and authority as well.20 His appointment to associate professor (Extraordinarius) in 1894 by the Canton government of Zurich was made over the formal opposition of the faculty, with the result that his salary was paid by the state rather than the university.21 For many years, he was forced to support his Brain Anatomical Institute through personal funds earned in private practice. Only in 1910 did the University of Zurich finally incorporate this institute under its auspices, after the International Brain Commission22 formally recognized it as a "central interdisciplinary research institute."23

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As a German-speaking Swiss at a time when Germany still largely defined the scientific standards and norms of the academy, Monakow's primary professional identification was with the greater German-speaking neurological and psychiatric community. At the same time, Switzerland, of which he spoke as his intellectual "cradle," left its unique stamp on him as well. When Monakow's compatriot Carl Gustav Jung spoke of Switzerland, he emphasized its paradoxes: unapproachable, stiff and stubborn on the one side; in touch with a certain "primordial feeling" on the other,24 Traditional home to iconoclasts, refugees and alternative thinkers (including anthroposoph Rudolf Steiner, mystic writers like Hermann Hesse and Marie Rainer Rilke, "crisis theologians" like Karl Barthand Emil Brunner, and the Dadaists in Zurich), Switzerland, with its multiple ethnic enclaves, could also be provincial and conservative. More than even many native-born Swiss, Monakow seems to have lived out this capacity to embody opposites simultaneously. Even as he drove himself tirelessly in pursuit of exact, positive knowledge, he looked down on the values of a modernism that envisioned a society built solely on the fruits of such knowledge. A master of. the technologies of his own anatomical research, outside the laboratory he disparaged the abstraction called "technology" as a source of misguided optimism, if not outright decadence. His friend Pusirewsky recalled how, "like every living form that served, not culture but rather civilization, technology seemed to be disparagingly assessed by him as something unfruitful, if not destructive. If in contrast one should stress the time that was won [through technology] as a factor that promotes culture, he would reply cuttingly: 'Time for what? Spent how?' " 25 He was equally vehement in his distrust of the secular agenda of the Machine Age, the French Revolution, and the "Americanization" of European culture (which he derided as a "triumph of infantilism").26 A part of him was attracted instead to a vision of social relations that looked backward rather than forward—that valued myth over exact knowledge and the patriarchy of old Russia over the democracy of new Switzerland. This reactionary attitude manifested itself in his passionate devotion to the music and operas of Wagner, his continuing "warm feelings of attachment" for the old Russian feudalism he had experienced in childhood (even as Pusirewsky insisted that he "naturally condemned" the system of serfdom on which it was based), and his fascination with the insights of the classic Russian novelists like Dostoyevsky.27 Monakow, of course, was not alone in his disgrunflement with the current trends of modern society and his nostalgic attraction to more traditional alternatives. The.1880s and 1890s represented the peak years of "degeneration ist" talk across European intellectual circles, and the Zurich faculties of psychiatry and neurology were particularly preoccupied with the perceived degenerative and heritable effects of alcoholism.28 Monakow's close colleague (and sometime rival) at Zurich-^—psychiatrist, entomologist, and social reformer— August Forel, led the antialcohol effort at the university. Eugen Bleuler was another engaged believer and agitator, and Monakow himself took up the £

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cause himself after coming to Zurich in 1885, distancing himself from his previous youthful career as a devotee of the Bierstube. Discussions among medical faculty on these matters moved easily between observations of pathological anatomy, analyses of the decay of moral habits, lamentations about the temptations of big-city life, andvivid images of racial devolution. It was an expansive style of argument that would serve Monakow well in the coming decades.

SHOCK, RECOVERY, AND THE LOCALIZATION OF

TlMETN THE BRAIN Monakow began his career, however, with a focus on questions considerably more restricted. As a medical-student in the mid-1870s, he was taught by Eduard Hitzig, the Prussian neurologist who had extended the paradigm of sensory-motor localization to the cortex (and who, on the strength of that work, had recently been appointed director of Switzerland's leading psychiatric clinic, the Burgholzli, in Zurich). Bernhard von Gudden in Munich then trained Monakow in the techniques of the microtome, a device he had invented to cut brain tissue into thin slices for microscopic examination. Other teachers and influences in his formative years included such leading representatives of classical German neurology and organic psychiatry as Hermann Munk, Cornelius Winkler, and Theodor Meynert. Monakow's first major work, begun in the 1880s, looked very much like a contribution to the best of this classic, old-guard tradition. His work on the visual pathways of the brain was praised by the leading architect of the associating mechanistic brain, Carl Wernicke, as one of the most comprehensive neuroanatomical accomplishments of that era.29 These successes were followed by work on the auditory system that, together with the visual system work, would lay the foundation for twentieth-century thinking on the functional relations between the thalamus and the cortical regions of the brain. In 1897 Monakow published Brain Pathology,30 a 924-page tome that appeared as part of Nothnagel's Handbook of Special Pathology and Therapy. The revised edition, issued in 1905, was 1,319 pages—with several thousand references compiled by Monakow's personal secretary, Agnes Pariss. As one of the many "invisible women" in the history of science, the story of Agnes Pariss is worth a brief narrative deflection. An unmarried, middleaged Englishwoman, pointedly identified by Monakow and his colleagues as Miss Pariss, she had formerly worked as a secretary to the influential evolutionary theorist Herbert Spencer. A sentimental, folk-tale flavor pervades the various tellings of the story of how she came to enter Monakow's service. We learn that Miss Pariss had fallen ill with some undefined form of hysteria and, after years of fruitless treatment, was finally referred to Monakow in Zurich (he had been seeing private patients since 1877). He was able to help her where others had failed and in her gratitude she begged for the opportunity to

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offer him her services (the regular work, she argued, would also help her maintain her new-found health). According to the stories, Monakow was at first reluctant to take her on, but she insisted, and he then quickly came to appreciate the difference her skills, devotion, and unflagging energy made to his work. Having presumably no ties back in England to impede her (Herbert Spencer's death in 1903 may be relevant here), she proceeded to adapt her life wholly to Monakow's needs. With a strong background in medicine and biology (we do not learn where this was acquired) and fluent skills in a range of European languages (French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German), she did all of Monakow's literature research for him, prepared bibliographies, organized and catalogued his enormous library, translated texts both for private study and for publication, and kept up an extensive international correspondence. For all of this, she apparently received no remuneration other than the joy of being useful to "the Master and his great task."31 She died in her eighties, shortly before Monakow himself, having worked unstintingly for her Herr for some thirty years. For Monakow now, notwithstanding a solid reputation as a cartographer of the fixed-and-sliced brain, the years of the "great task" still: lay ahead. As the confident positivist era of the 1880s was giving way to the more iconoclastic and restless era of the 1890s, the focus of his own concerns also began to shift. These were the years that saw what, on the surface, looked like an extraordi^ nary new self-fashioning of identity: a transformation from empirical neuroanatomist to theorist of the living brain in health and disease; from classical neurologist to agitator for a more dynamic and organismic perspective on brain functioning. Although his later hagiographers would prefer to pretend that this transformation evolved organically according to the mysterious laws of genius,32 it is evident that the years of Monakow's shifting orientation were also years that saw him engaged in active dialogue with a range of new philosophical and psychological ideas. The "Monakow circle," later more formally renamed the Psychiatric-Neurological Society, began meeting in 1898 to discuss new directions and innovations at the interface of neurology and psychiatry, ultimately with the hope of discovering a common framework for theory and research. Participants included August Ford and Eugen Bleuler, along with his staff from the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital (including, after 1900, Bleuler's first assistant, Carl Gustav Jung). Monakow recalled that by the first decade of the twentieth century, the group was becoming particularly preoccupied with the work of the radical Viennese neurologist, Sigmund Freud. Particularly among the psychiatrists, hope was high that the presenting symptoms of such disorders as dementia praecox—understood by nineteenth-century psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin as an inherited brain disorder that followed a predetermined biological course—could actually be made meaningful by interpreting them as symbolic expressions of memories and wishes from the patient's unconscious.33 Ultimately, this process of reevaluation and experi-

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mentation would be critical in inspiring Bleuler to reject dementia praecox as a valid nosology and to create a more dynamic and optimistic psychobiological category he called "schizophrenia," which emphasized experiential aspects of the disorder. Eventually, the Burgholzli group's love of psychoanalysis led to increasing tension within Monakow's society between believers and those, largely within neurology, who were more skeptical. Consequently, in 1909, and in spite of Monakow's "warning," Bleuler and his colleagues broke away and founded their own society—the so-called Freud Organization (Freudsche Vereinigung), dedicated solely to exploring practical applications of psychoanalysis in hospital psychiatry.34 In this sense, the invasion of psychoanalysis into Zurich psychiatry ultimately had the effect of breaking up Monakow's professional hopes for fashioning a unified framework for neurology and psychiatry. Nevertheless, Zurich neurology was to continue to bear the radicalizing traces of those years of interdisciplinary intellectual exploration with psychiatry; and one of the more enduring products was Monakow's own: a notion he introduced into clinical neurology that he called diaschisis, or cerebral shock. The idea of diaschisis was his attempt to confront what was being declared as an increasingly troubling challenge for the classical mechanistic-Iocalizationist program in clinical neurology: the fact of patients' clinical recovery from permanent brain damage. As Monakow saw things, the classical localizationist theories of his teachers all failed to recognize that a local lesion to the brain not only put the damaged part of the brain out of commission, but also had the effect of throwing the entire brain into a complex state of sympathetic shock (diaschisis). A recently injured patient, therefore, might show a variety of disabilities stemming from disordered brain areas that were far from the actual lesion. These disabilities would often vanish over time as the patient's nervous system stabilized again in a new, adaptive pattern of stimulus combinations. The implications of diaschisis for future localizationist endeavors were profound. If a shock to the whole brain could affect its localized functioning, then clinicians would have to understand the full course of neurological breakdown and recovery, not just in reference to the directly damaged structure, but in relation to a dynamically functioning brain adapting to damage as a whole. In Monakow's words, "[D]iaschisis is the basic dynamic principle, it forms a bridge between those phenomena which can be localized distinctly and those which cannot." 35 Those moving broadly in the same direction received Monakow's revisionist challenge to aphasiology with a certain exultation. Eugen Bleuler rejoiced: Finally, for once, a theory that one not only can describe, but can also believe. Now [the question] is: are the theorizers of the menagerie prepared to accept without further ado that they may no longer shut up concepts and whole functions in cells, the way one imprisons lions and tigers in their cages?16

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Others found relations between Monakow's efforts and some of the neglected insights of the earlier noble representatives of German culture. In 1916, during the heat of the First World War, a German colleague, Ludwig Edinger, wrote to Monakow: I must write you about a passage respective brain function and, if you want, respective diaschisis, that I have just found in Goethe's conversations. On Gall [the founder of the brain localization theory called phrenology], he said: that it's not the small particle of the brain that causes the skull to protrude, but rather the whole part of the nervous system that happens to have its endpoint in this very particle—incredible how this man had the right intuition on every point.37 Still others found that the phenomenon of recovery from the temporary effects of brain damage offered new ammunition for the radical effort to topple the hegemony of. mechanism in biology. In "The 'Soul' as an Elementary Factor of Nature" (1903), Monakow's colleague in Germany, Hans Driesch, insisted: There are no inorganic machines whose specific functioning process remains essentially unchanged after removing any of its parts. . . . Therefore the physiological restitutions of the brain. . . cannot be accounted for in terms of its mechanistic attributes.... Physiologically, the brain is a "harmonious equipotential system."38 But important as diaschisis and recovery were judged to be, they were for Monakow still just the first stage in what would ultimately evolve into a comprehensive reformulation of how psychological functions related to the brain. Thus, in the second monumental volume of his career, Localization in the Cortex and Breakdown of Function Through Cortical Lesions,39 Monakow taught that the effects of diaschisis followed a pattern in which activities and skills acquired late in life or at a more advanced stage of species development were the first to vanish, while more primitive or more practiced functions escaped untouched. This meant that the neurologist treating a patient must not only know the site of damage, but must also relate the relative evolutionary level of the function in question to the history of the injury (its onset and various stages of functional loss and recovery). More important, this also meant that the symptoms of brain damage were not just the meaningless squeaks and clangs of a broken brain, but followed a discernible logic that was rooted in the organism's individual and evolutionary history. The mind, in both health and disease, was a process that evolved and unfolded in time. Its relationship to a spatial object like the brain was analogous to that between a melody and a music box: nobody would attempt to "put the melody (or some bars of it) into locally circumscribed parts of the [music box] cylinder." Similarly, the neurologist must never think that the functions of the living brain moved along "geometrical lines in certain groups of gyri" (see figure 15) 40 What was the alternative, then, to thinking about the brain in terms of geo-

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-B . tmmwjymmmmmwz. Figure 15. The human brain compared by Constantin von Monakow to the functioning of a music box, 1928. Constantin von Monakow, R. Mourgue, Introduction Biologique a L'Etude de la Neurologie etde la Psychopathologie, (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1928). metric lines on gyri? Monakow's contemporary Henri Bergson had asserted that since life was a process in time, it must forever elude natural science, which "can think and conceive only in spatial terms."41 As a natural scientist himself, Monakow was not prepared to go as far as that, but he did recognize the challenge involved in capturing in spatial terms his deep truth that, in the end, the brain was a four-dimensional object. He ultimately found a framework for his problem in an image of hierarchy, one of the conceptual legacies of nineteenth-century evolution to psychological and neurological theorizing. The British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson had been the first clearly to imagine that the different levels of the brain might serve as a kind of archaeological record of a species' biological history, with lower and higher levels corresponding to earlier and later phases of evolutionary development.42 Although Monakow claimed to have studied Jackson's work only after the essentials of his own system were in place,43 it is also the case that his exposure to Freudian thinking within the society in Zurich would have necessarily exposed him to a broadly Jacksonian model of conceptualizing mind, brain, and evolutionary history in a common framework.44 In his iteration, the brain was conceived as recording its own evolutionary and biographical history using "memories" of experienced excitations. In this continuous recording process, older or more primitive mnemic excitations were simultaneously overlaid by and integrated into more recent ones. Hence, any specific area of the brain (such as the so-called speech centers) actually embraced countless chronological layers of excitation (Monakow's concept of chronogenic localization). Later, Monakow's former student Minkowski would compare his teacher's attempt to integrate spatial and temporal aspects of brain functioning with Einstein's integration of time and space in modern physics during this same period.45 However appropriate the comparison, there is no question that Mo-

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CHAPTER THREE nakow was struggling with problems that found a broad resonance across many domains of fin de siecle European culture. As historian H. Stuart Hughes recalled, the challenge of understanding time and memory was the problem to which Bergson was to return again and again in an effort to define the nature of subjective existence as opposed to the schematic order that the natural sciences had imposed on the natural world. . . . [I]t was the problem with which the natural scientists were themselves contending in postulating a universe that no longer strictly conformed to the laws of Newtonian physics. . . . Finally it was the dilemma that obsessed the novelists of the first two decades of the new century . . . the tormenting question of how to recapture the immediacy of past experiences . . . that the logical memory had already stored away in neat compartments .46 At the same time, Monakow's dilemma was more than just an epistemological one; it was also a moral one, here deeply informed less by Freud than by the degenerationist thinking of his cultural milieu. His temporal view of brain functioning was predicated on the assumption that more recently evolved layers of function—in humans, those associated with rational thought and moral control—were the most vulnerable ones. This meant that, in cases of shock or damage, more refined layers broke down first, and one was then witness to a "welling up" of the suddenly unmasked primitive levels of brain function. The "return of the repressed," in other words, was always just a thin layer of nerve tissue away. "Dissolution" had been Hughlings Jackson's term for this cascading down the nervous system to more primitive, automatic, and emotional states of functioning. Monakow's term for the same sort of process was Abbau (breakdown, disintegration). It was a concept that would take on an increasingly poignant significance for him with the coming of World War I.

WORLD WAR I: DEGENERATION AND RENEWAL

The Great War affected Monakow profoundly, even though as a Swiss citizen he would experience it more as a spectator than a participant. As he recalled at the very end of his life: "As a person, I was shaken to the depths of my soul. I suffered deeply on a personal level, as if my highest ideals had been insulted."47 Suddenly, the brains in his laboratory in Zurich started to seem beside the point. With heavy symbolic ceremony, he laid aside his work on the newest edition of his book Brain Pathology, and no amount of cajoling could compel him to take the giant manuscript out of his drawer again. More pressing questions now obsessed him. His students and colleagues hardly knew what to make of the man who retreated to the reading room each day, burying himself in the study of history, politics, psychology, psychopathology, and ethics.48 Whereas before he had mostly occupied himself with the organic brain disorders (aphasia, apraxia, agnosia), leaving the problem of the neuroses to his assistants, he now devoted his time in the clinic to long probing

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conversations with the neurotic patients. Although he had, of course, been familiar with Freud's works before, he made them now a special object of study.49 His personal relationships in Zurich became increasingly tense as most of his colleagues and family members proved sympathetic to the German cause, waxing enthusiastic about the reports of military heroism published in the German newspapers. Monakow responded by insisting derisively that actually the death of a soldier in the thick of battle was not particularly heroic. The numbing of the feelings was always so intense in such a situation that a stricken soldier would hardly notice any pain or be truly aware of the gravity of his situation.50 He expressed his impatience with the hypocrisy of uncritical patriotism in an unpublished diary note dated September 7, 1914: A member of a state that is involved in a war—blinded by patriotism and onesided reporting—is rarely or only to a minuscule degree prepared to admit the mistakes and weaknesses on the side of his own nation. At the same time, he focuses his eyes uncritically on the moral weaknesses and deficiencies of the enemy nation. Only the finest high minds and the truly educated in the nations at war are free of this fault; men of this sort can be counted [on one hand]; among the female sex, those truly clean of that fault are hardly to be found.51 Thus alienated, Monakow withdrew as much as the realities of his life would allow. In the fall of 1914, he began a ritual that would continue throughout the war years: a retreat up into the Swiss mountains (see figure 16), where he sought rough quarters among the simple peasants who lived there. Here, alone, he wrote effusively on the problems of good and evil, the causes of war, the purpose of life, death, reproduction, maturity, old age, and the noble and base emotions. Reams of unpublished manuscripts from this period bear titles like "The Biology of Sin," "Religion and the Nervous System," "Guilt and Sin," and "Instinctive Life and Civilization." To Pusirewsky, who saw Monakow after his return from the first of his retreats in 1914, it was as if something had changed in Monakow's very soul: "[S]omehow the stern, remote solemnity of the mountain world seemed to surround him still."52 She recalled a conversation in 1915 in which Monakow asked if she believed in the evil spirit of the household, the Domowoi, and then affirmed his own belief in it. The Domowoi, though, was no longer for him the literal monster he had feared as a child. He now saw it as a force lurking in each of us—the "demonic powers in the human spirit" that bring discord and sorrow to families everywhere.53 Even before the war, he had been persuaded that the human capacity for civilized behavior was a highly fragile one: "[M]any so-called moral principles, laboriously acquired in life, and painstakingly maintained and protected, endure only in peaceful times that do not unsettle our existence. Every serious conflict in life puts our character and entire sense of ethics to a hard test."54 The subsequent dramatic realization of his pessimism in World War I seems to have brought him to the brink of existential despair. No longer could he

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Figure 16. Culturally stylized photograph of the Swiss Alps emphasizes their capacity to serve as a sanctuary from modern life, 1899. (Agfa Foto-Historama, Koln). believe, as he had as a little boy, that the evil workings of the Domowoi could be staved off with the pious rituals of Russian Orthodoxy. Trapped now in his convictions as a scientist, he held forth on the inefficacy of prayer.55 He became preoccupied with the claims of Russian skepticism. This was a political and cultural movement of the nineteenth century that had rejected all convenr tional morality, religious hope, and aestheticism as false, soft, and starry-

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eyed. In their place, this movement had advocated a total reliance on the "realistic," "practical," and "hard" metaphysics of the natural sciences—especially Darwinism, experimental physiology, chemistry, and physics. As leading nihilist, D. I. Pisarev (1840-1868), put it in a famous statement that would take on the force of a manifesto: "Words and illusions perish; facts remain." He concluded: "[T]he salvation and renewal of the Russian people is to be found" not in the useless lyricism of a Pushkin, but in the experimental frog.56 Tortured by the prospect of having to accept such an emotionally intolerable worldview but unable to find credibility in any of the other immediately available options, Monakow's carefully fashioned mandarin persona showed signs of crumpling. Without warning, coarse Russian swear words now began to break into his otherwise refined German. His family and friends feared for his emotional stability. He himself came to refer to these spells of nihilism as his time of Schlimmsein ("bad existence"). Although the Monakow family's vulnerability to depression may be relevant to these developments, the specific texture and focus of Monakow's despair are very much cultural products that transcend the details of his specific life story. During the war years, while many rallied to the call for sacrifice in the name of higher values, a number of intellectuals found themselves horrified by this idealization of militarism and slaughter. Carl Gustav Jung also suffered a wartime crisis so severe that he feared for his own sanity. In late 1913, he had a terrifying vision that plunged him into an extended period of struggle with his own inner demons, exorcised through compulsive writing in a fashion not unlike that practiced by Monakow up in the Swiss mountains. In Jung's later recollection of this time: I saw a monstrousfloodcovering all the northern and lowrlying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, thefloatingrubble of civilization, and,-the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.57 In Vienna, Freud found in the outbreak of, war "dreadful confirmation of what he had all along been saying about the nature of man." 58 Like Monakow, he was shocked and deeply depressed by "the narrow-mindedness shown by the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments, their uncritical credulity for the most disputable assertions."59 In his later writing, partly in reaction to the war's horrors, Freud embraced an increasingly pessimistic view of the human intellect as a "plaything" of unconscious forces, including the "primitive, savage and evil impulses" that had manifested themselves in the trenches of Europe. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he extended these thoughts into a theory of inevitable conflict between the requirements of civilization and the demands of instinct, including Thanatos, the "death instinct," expressed in savage aggressive acts against one's fellows:

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This instinct of aggression is the derivative and main representative of the death instinct we have found alongside of Eros, sharing his rule over the earth. And now, it seems to me, the meaning of the evolution of culture is no longer a riddle to us. It must present to us the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.60 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud had also refused to temper his dark vision of human nature with any formula for salvation: My courage fails me . . . at the thought of rising up as a prophet before my fellowmen and I bow to their reproach that I have no consolation to offer them; for at bottom this is what they all demand. Monakow would make a different choice. In the early years of the war, one of his assistants, G. Fuse, had written him, asking in some despair: "Where is the World Principle? And where is the righteousness of mankind actually to be sought?"61 In the mountains above Zurich, Monakow at some point resolved to find an answer to this question—resolved to seek the consolations that his age was demanding. In searching, he turned back to the only world he knew: that of medicine, biology, and the nervous system. But it was not a medicine and biology that the Russian nihilists, who believed neither in world principles nor the righteousness of mankind, would have acknowledged. By the war's end, Monakow's encounter with nihilism managed to destroy only the professed disbeliever in him. Despair had ended in revolt and then finally in a dramatic rapprochement between the mystical, "Russian" dimensions of his personality and his "German" professorial sense of himself as a neurologist who knew that the answers to questions about the human condition, however far-reaching, were to be found in a deeper understanding of the human biological constitution. What questions was Monakow asking? As befitted a physician, his first act when he went into retreat in the mountains had been to ponder a diagnosis for the current crisis. Rejecting political, economic, and ideological explanations for Europe's plight after 1914, he had concluded that the nations of Europe were in the grip of what he called a "world neurosis" that had stripped them of their civilized veneer.62 The image of "dissolution," originally developed to account for the behavior of the individual brain in a state of shock, now expanded beyond its original conceptual framework to explain the pathology of a world at war. "To make war," he wrote, "is a questionable descent into phylo genetic ally and ontogenetically old instincts, unworthy of the citizens of a truly noble, high-standing nation."63 That he should have called such a "descent" down the evolutionary ladder a "neurosis" is again most plausibly understood as one of the legacies of the Zurich society's earlier attempts to discover bridges between neurobiological thinking and psychodynamic thinking. Specifically, Freud's model of neurosis had inspired Monakow to conclude that his original concept of diaschisis

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could—in fact, must be—expanded to include not only shock and cognitive breakdown associated with organic brain damage, but also shock or trauma involving the instinctual and affective realms: cases in which intellect was left more or less intact but the individual was catapulted back to earlier, more infantile patterns of urges and feeling.64 If the current war was the precipitating shock for the collective neurosis being witnessed across Europe, nevertheless Monakow was clear that the constitutional ground for this pathology had been laid down over the course of many years. In his wartime manuscripts, he repeatedly made the suggestion that Europe would not have responded so violently to the blood-seductions of war had this society not already abandoned the grounding ethical values of Kultur and religious life. Spiritually hungry, deflated, and disoriented by the impersonal encroachments of modern science and secular lifestyles, people sought distraction in loveless sexual liaisons, alcohol, and other characterruining amusements. The rush to war, and the resulting madness on the battlefield, had been only the most drastic manifestation of a collective compulsion to fill the emptiness of modern life. As Monakow exclaimed in a letter to Pusirewsky shortly before his death: "The meaninglessness of life tortures us. That is today the disease of our age."65 Yet, though the diagnosis was grim, all was not lost. Here, the doublebarreled significance of the concept of diaschisis is important to stress. Although it emphasized, on the one hand the fragility of all the higher, civilized layers of human functioning, it had nevertheless also established itself as a clear alternative to a purely fatalistic view of human devolution or degeneration, emphasizing instead the brain's potential for regeneration and reconstitution. This meant that Europe, too, might be expected to recover from her "diaschisis," from this self-inflicted stumble down her own evolutionary ladder. "The diaschisis set loose by the war," Monakow declared, "must now finally be overcome." 66 His friend Pusirewsky recalled: Because of the insight he had gained as a neurologist into the processes of disinhibition that arise through overwhelming pressure, his faith in the regenerative energies [of humanity] was unshakable; [and] in the wild giddiness of a people torn apart in postwar time, he could see everywhere signs of recovery.67 Over the next fifteen years, the twin motifs of diaschisis and renewal would form the larger backdrop for Monakow's work on a series of increasingly ambitious publications, all with the larger aim of exploring what it would take for society to overcome the "diaschisis" of modern times: "Feelings, Morality and Brain" (1916; the only one of his interwar essays to be translated into English);68 "Psyehiatry and Biology" (1919); "Attempt at a Biology of the Instinct World" (1922); "The Syneidesis, the Biological Conscience" (1927); Biological Introduction to the Study of Neurology and of Psychopathology, a summation (written in collaboration with Bergsonian student, Raoul Mourgue) (1928; German publication, 1930); "Truth, Error and Lies" (1930); and,

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his final work, the notes for which date back to the war years, "Religion and the Nervous System (Biological Considerations)" (1930).69 Before we embark on an exploration of these publications, a few words should be said about Monakow's extensive use of obscure and difficult neologisms. It was his view that the words typically used to describe the phenomena that interested him—above all, affective processes—were over-used, imprecise, and blunted by superfluous associations. In one (not untypically misogynist) comment, he compared the everyday language of emotional life to "worn-out pieces of furniture or . . . prostitutes [kokotten]."10 In creating a fresh (one is tempted to say "virginal") vocabulary for his biology, Monakow let himself be guided by Goethe's maxim that nature thinks "not like a man [sic], but like nature." For this reason, he insisted that the scientist must struggle to not address the natural world in a vocabulary burdened with anthropomorphism or accumulated human cultural traditions.71

T H E BIOLOGY OF INSTINCTS AND THE EVOLUTIONARY ARROW

There is a nice irony in the fact that Monakow's tortured precautions to keep his language free of human traces were all taken for the sake of a project whose larger goal was both profoundly anthropocentric and deeply preoccupied with the fate of culture. What was this project all about? In an unpublished note from 1923, Monakow nicely summarized the framing premise of his postwar thinking: The chief mystery of the soul lies less in the anatomical region and in the mechanical routines of the human nervous system than in the intimate psychological organization and operation of living protoplasm, in the individual cells and especially in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic [development of the] embryo.72 Thus a neuroanatomist and neurologist of thirty years standing had emerged from his wartime nihilistic crisis persuaded that the answers to his questions were to be found less in the stable phenomena of neuroanatomy and physiology and more in the fluid protoplasmic processes—now being studied by men like Driesch and Hans Spemann—that propelled and guided the development of the organism as a whole. And the Monakow concept of the horme was key to understanding the means whereby Being was transformed into a perpetual process of Becoming. A vital energy of the species that found new instantiation in every new organism, the horme was also endowed with a "memory" of the entire history of the species: all that its untold generations had experienced and learned in their struggles and strivings to evolve. In this sense, a kind of "blood knowledge" of eons of hard-won lessons was part of the inheritance of every individual organism. Over time, the horme's memory of recurring species behavior became increasingly engrained and automatic, and found more and more overt expression in the individual organism. These were the behaviors that

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zoologists then called instinctive. "We consider the horme," Monakow wrote in 1928, "to be the primal mother of instinct."73 In making this argument, Monakow drew heavily from a body of German literature that had proposed that the problem of memory might help illuminate the problem of heredity, here conceived as the problem of how the information that creates different kinds of organisms could be preserved and passed on to succeeding generations. Darwin had been able to account for the processes through which some species characteristics are eliminated and others retained, but he had been unable to present a compelling model of how favored organisms transfer their traits to the next generation.74 This explanatory lacuna had helped provide an opportunity for a weakening of the Darwinian hegemony over explanations of evolution and a renewed interest in a variety of Lamarckian (and other) alternatives to natural selection.75 Lamarck had argued that plant and animal life respond to changes in the environment with new needs that cause them to grow new structures or leam new behaviors. They then pass these new behaviors and traits to succeeding generations in a cumulative manner. It was a small step to rephrase the issue and affirm that new generations were being painlessly provided with "memories" of behaviors and "knowledge" of how to grow useful structures that had all been laboriously acquired by ancestors. It is true that the germ plasm model of "hard heredity" developed by German embryologist Auguste Weismann argued that the cells that make up and give rise to egg and sperm are not affected by changes in any other tissues in the body. If .Weismann was right, this would make it physically impossible for any traces of an individual animal's life experience to be passed on to future generations. However, during the fin de siecle, Weismann's theory of heredity was forced to compete with a range of what seemed like plausible alternatives. Ewald Hering in Germany thus proposed that all organized matter might be stamped with a form of memory and that this matter could be passed across generations.76 This idea was developed, among others, by Ernst Haeckel77 and especially the German Lamarckian zoologist Richard Semon (1859-1918). In 1904, Semon had produced a work entitled The Mneme as a Principle of Preservation in the Transformations of Organic Processes,78 which would have an enormous—even if today, largely forgotten—influence on a wide range of contemporaries.79 Densely and intricately argued, the basic premise of the book was straightforward: stimuli associated with experiences could leave a physical trace on organic substances. Semon called these traces engrams, and argued that they were heritable. The sum of all the engrams either inherited or acquired through direct experience was the organism's Mneme. Mneme was thus a term Semon used to refer to biological memory in the widest possible sense (from an embryo rat's memory of how long to grow its tail to the processes of human memory studied by psychology).80 Monakow had first used Semon's ideas before the war to develop his concept of chronogenic localization. He took pains to insist, however, that his own understanding of how past and present experiences were encoded in the

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tissues of the organism was not identical to that of Semon. "Actually," he wrote in some early private notes, "there are no such things as engrams (Semon); there are only "ergokymes" (successive [memory traces]) whose script is flowing and never ending."81 Still, he was prepared to accept Semon's basic premise of a demonstrable biological process that allowed organisms to gain access to an always expanding flow of species knowledge that found its most fundamental expression in instinct and (in humans) intuition. All the instincts expressed by the horme could be identified materially with the secretory activities of the nervous system (it would not be too far off to say that the hormic internal secretions that interested Monakow more or less corresponded to what would later be called the hormones). Yet we would be misinterpreting Monakow grossly if we tried to reduce the hormic impulse to biochemistry (as some of his later interpreters would try to do). Even while Monakow believed his horme, or organizing factor, was rooted in protoplasm, nevertheless this energy was not a mere product of some blind, mechanistic protoplasmic or chemical process. It was a true, autonomous intelligence that had been from the beginning the lead protagonist in a drama of species change and development. It had its origins not in the world of visible, material biology, but in a domain that transcended biology and was inaccessible to direct empirical investigation.82 These views provide the backdrop to the climax of Monakow's argument: his views on the place of the horme in the cosmic evolutionary story. The starting point of his thinking here was that evolution was not a merely mechanical but a genuinely creative process and that the horme was the raw creative energy underlying the upward drive of individual organisms and species in new directions. As Monakow wrote, "We are concerned here with the propulsive tendency in every living being—with all its inherited potentialities—that drives it toward the most distant future."83 Over time, he began more explicitly to spell out the spiritual implications of this view of evolution. The hormic impulse stemmed from the force of Creation itself (see figure 17). In this sense, its stirrings in every living cell expressed an intelligence that Monakow began to call the Worldhorme. As he wrote in "Religion and the Nervous System" (1930): The sentence of a French theologian, "God works for the formation of the personality" can be understood and expressed bio-psychologically in the following way: that the "individual horme" harboring a tiny bit of the "World/iorme" (Universe) within itself, effects its ends in the inner life of the individual according to the often incalculable influences of fellow men and external relations.84 The parallels here between this vision and the evolutionary vitalism of the French philosopher Henri Bergson were conscious and deep. Bergson's Creative Evolution had offered a novel twist on the standard Lamarckian argument of the time, which had considered the individual organism as the determiner of the evolutionary course through its choices regarding use and adaptation. In Bergson's system, choice and consciousness were overshadowed by the pow-

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Figure 17. Monakow's schema of the Horme's progress through the various instinct levels towards final reunification with the cosmos ("World-Horme"), 1928. Constantin von Monakow and R. Mourgue, Introduction Biologique d L'Etude de la Neurologic et de la Psychopathologie, (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1928). erful workings of a transindividual creative force. As historian Bowler explains it, "The nonmaterial factor in evolution would have to be conceived as a basic impulse—the elan vital—injected into life at the beginning and constantly trying to express itself by organizing recalcitrant matter into ever higher states. Thus, . . . Bergson proclaimed the existence of what was, in effect, a spiritual force imposing a rational order on the development of life."85 Evolution was a story, not about the endless differentiation of more or less complex autonomous entities, as the Darwinians and most Lamarckians taught, but about the purposive striving of a single cosmic power to realize itself. As individualized expressions of this cosmic power, we each gain our cosmic significance through our place in a holistic process whose goals transcend all the finite dreams of any of its constituent parts.86 While it is not possible (and perhaps not interesting) to determine how far Bergson was a direct inspiration for Monakow's own vision of the evolutionary saga, the correspondence, beginning in 1919, between Monakow and the Bergsonian scholar Raoul Mourgue, does cast light on Monakow's later ongoing dialogue with Bergson's views.87 On Monakow's side at least, it was a dialogue dominated by great respect. In the spring of 1920, Mourgue took it upon himself to discuss Monakow's neurobiological ideas personally with his former teacher, and Monakow thanked Mourgue effusively for his efforts, adding: "What a joy it would be for me someday to have the chance to converse on this subject myself with this great scholar who has contributed so much to our knowledge of the human soul!"88 Nevertheless, Monakow ultimately came to consider his own horme concept a distinct improvement on Bergson's less disciplined intuitions. First, as a principle that only achieved actualization through its manifestation in matter, his horme avoided Bergson's dualistic distinction between the vitalistic

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• CHAPTER THREE * force itself and the physical medium through which it worked. "In my view," he wrote disapprovingly, "it is completely impossible to separate the psychic from the physical in living protoplasm."89 Secondly, the horme was an improvement on the Bergsonian elan vital because it helped explain the darker realities of life that no postwar world-view dared ignore: "[I]t seems to me that [Bergson] lacks in his term 'dan vital' [a sense for] the negative side, that is to say the component of arrest, of suppression and of degeneration (Eklisis90) in addition to the creative principle."91 There was less inevitable upward dynamic in Monakow's system, but by the same token there was a considerably greater imperative for the services of the psychiatric and neurological community, who alone would be able to understand and intervene in cases when the horme was pathologically diverted from its evolutionary course. Thus, in a set of logical steps not that different from those carried out by his Zurich colleague, Carl Gustav Jung, Monakow gave new life to the old Romantic understanding of the psychiatrist as a curator of souls, or Seelsorger. Clearly, a vision like this—sensitive to the grave realities of the day, yet finding an occasion for hope in those same realities—was in a position to provide a strong message of inspiration for a demoralized, rudderless interwar population. Maria Waser wrote in 1933 of the comfort with which Monakow's teachings had provided her after she had suffered for so long through the age of "critics of creation, defamers of God and idolizers of the Machine."92 In the specific context of postwar German-speaking Europe, the horme inspired and consoled because it suggested that Nature herself was working with mankind (and perhaps particularly wise biologists and medical men) to overcome alienation and fragmentation and help the human species recognize its true heritage in connection and wholeness. As Monakow wrote: The horme is nothing other than the activity of the universe (Worldhorme), within which we human-children are highly organized necessary parts. As such, we are temporally and partly also spatially—through free mobility—closely bound up with one another; we [also] form ties with animals and plants and also with nonorganic bodies, into which last we merge after death.... There is undeniable glory in the thought that an indelible temporal bond links us, not only with our ancestors and our descendants, but above all also with the whole rest of the organic world.93

T H E "WORLD OF ORIENTATION" VERSUS THE "WORLD OF FEELING"

Armed with this broad understanding of the horme as the carrier of instinct in the service of a cosmic evolutionary impulse, Monakow next turned his attention to conceiving its place and functioning in the human nervous system. The Jacksonian hierarchy of nervous functioning, first developed in his prewar work, remained the central scaffolding of his thinking. Now, however, next to the hierarchy he had studied as a clinical neurologist (brain structures that fi

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mediated speech, object recognition, and other functions concerned with the "world of perception and orientation", he envisioned a second hierarchical system. This other system was concerned with the "sphere of feelings and instincts" and was served not by neuroanatomical structures but by protoplasmic "secretions." In his words: In general one can say that nervous activity that possessesfirmspatial and tempoT ral components, as well as nervous activity that is marked by subjective [impressions of] causality both belong to the world of impressions (the world as idea), out of which our knowledge flows. Activity, however, that occurs independently of space and time, but is rather identifiable through subjective [impressions of] value and quality as well as blind active striving (will) must be referred to the world of feeling (the inner mirror of the "world as will").94 The embedded references here to the post-Kantian philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer ("the world as will and idea") alert us to the fact that this bifurcation of neurophysiology into two realms was to be more than just a de-. scriptive contribution to life and mind science. Monakow also had a more ambitious epistemological agenda here; a point to which I return later in this chapter. Here it will suffice to say that, in speaking of the world as "idea" and "will," Schopenhauer himself had begun by basically accepting Kant's view that human reason can only access reality in the form of mediated phenomena (the world as "idea"). However, this philosopher had refused to follow Kant in the view that absolute reality—the "thing-in-itself'—lay forever beyond experience. Instead, Schopenhauer had argued that, while it was true that human reason was restricted to knowing a world of mere appearances, through inner experience we were each nevertheless in a position to become aware of the more fundamental reality behind appearance. Looking within ourselves—or, alternatively, transported to a different level of awareness through music or the arts—we discovered a connection to a reality that stood outside the causal logic of time and space—a reality dominated by the energy of striving or will. This striving, this will, Schopenhauer proposed, was the fundamental absolute of the universe, the Kantian thing-in-itself. Reason, far from being the most authoritative interpreter of reality, had merely been created by the will to serve its own needs.95 For Monakow, a consistent evolutionary perspective on human behavior demanded a broadly similar conclusion—even as his notion of life-as-striving was a far less dark and amoral vision than that of Schopenhauer. Reason must have been developed by life—therefore, by the horme itself—in order to serve its ends. "Later logical thinking (formal operations of thought)" must be merely a "continuation of simpler . . . innervatory processes." In this sense, the brain, as he put it provocatively in a 1928 publication, "had created itself."96 To think otherwise would be inconsistent with sound biology—however subversive it might appear in other ways. By the early 1920s, Monakow had begun formally to map the instinct hierarchy of the horme—what one of his interpreters, Walther Riese, called his

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"genealogy" of the instinct world. Riese's allusion here to Nietzsche is clear and may well reflect a specific historical debt. Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" had, in its own way, attempted what was also Monakow's aim—a naturalization of morality. First published in 1887, this work may well have been imbibed by Monakow as he made his way through the literature of Wagner, Schopenhauer, and other theorists of "life" and alternatives to rationalist and empirical epistemologies.97 Monakow's disaggregation of the horme broke it down into five basic streams, or instinctual urges, that existed in an ascending hierarchical relationship. These were: (1) The instinct (prominent in the embryonic phase of life) to form and grow according to one's morphological plan; (2) The instinct to preserve one's individual being; (3) The instinct to maintain one's species through sexual behavior; (4) The instinct to feel holistically connected with the social group to which one belongs (family, nation, humanity); and finally (5) The instinct to strive for holistic unity with the cosmos—what Monakow would eventually call the religious instinct. In the normal process of development, Monakow felt that the higher (and later evolved) instincts in humans came to engulf the more primitive, survivaldriven patterns of behavior. Since, for Monakow, evolution was a progressive process, it was possible to conclude that the goals pursued by the laterevolved instincts were superior to those coveted by the more primitive instincts. In other words, the horme, in its journey through evolutionary time, had effectively left behind a record in the body of its progressive achievements. And this biological record could serve as a natural source of moral orientation for a disoriented humanity. What did the record of instinct evolution reveal? To begin with, it showed that spiritual, selfless instincts stood naturally above and over selfish, material instincts. To become civilized, we did not have to fight or repress our instincts, as Freud had thought; we merely had to learn to orient our feelings toward those higher instincts that automatically promoted biological health and internal harmony.98 The record revealed in the instinct hierarchy also had something to say to the politics of the day. Through his biology, Monakow told a moralizing story in which the individual, guided by the biological wisdom of the horme, moved from an initial preoccupation with self and survival to an identification with something beyond self. Often this process of identification began with a focus on family and the narrow community, but the nature of things was for consciousness to expand to recognize its relationship to increasingly larger entities, up to the species, the organic world and finally the cosmos. This celebration of the interconnectedness of the entire human race would lead Monakow to advocate a politics of cosmopolitanism—albeit one that bears little relationship to the "ideology of internationalism" of the time.99 For Monakow, international community was not a thing of human reason but rather of mysti-

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cal necessity—the "natural" culmination of a holistic world view in which all living creatures were united in the cosmic dynamic of hormic evolution.100 At the same time, this view did not mean that individual and national health could be achieved simply through passive surrender to our unconscious. Because each individual human instinct in the hormic hierarchy knew and cared only for its own goals, it followed that each person was "a battlefield in himself." The struggles carried out on this battlefield, however, were the stuff of life itself. "There must be struggle, it keeps us alive, makes us strong, and finally helps us triumph over confusion, leading in this way to a level of joy without which life has no value."101 Struggle was the natural dynamic that moved the life force upwards to higher levels of existence. For those unwilling to embrace the necessary, disease and moral degradation inevitably followed. Monakow was clear that pathological dynamics were set in motion when one allowed the lower drives to swamp inborn higher impulses (in analogy to the way he had understood the symptoms of brain disease to be caused by a lower-level swamping of higher functional levels in the nervous system). Such dissolution within the "instinct sphere" followed a similar vicious pattern, whether the patient was an individual or an entire nation.102 This image of hierarchical breakdown returns us to the insistent drumbeat of degeneration that played throughout Monakow's articulation of his psychobiological vision. No organism, he insisted, should be spared the natural struggles of existence, lest it fall prey to the inevitable decay and stunted growth that were a consequence of passivity and lack of striving. This explains the harsh, almost apocalyptic view he took toward the modernist, protectionist agendas promoted in his time by the Marxists and the Social Democrats. As he told Maria Waser: Do you see the marvelous wing-breadth and effortless gliding and sudden directed swoop of wild birds? Compare that to the waddling and anxious hoppingflight in the hen yard! Such a fate awaits a humanity that has been massively provided for through the State!103 Particularly severe consequences awaited those who, dulled by secularism and a soft life, neglected the uncompromising demands of the highest hormic creation of all, the religious instinct. The irreverent not only suffered from "spiritual desolation," which they invariably attempted "to repress through shallow, increasingly present-oriented pleasures." They also suffered from "a sort of ethical depravity."104 Many, if not all forms of criminality and psychiatric distress were at bottom spiritual crises: "[T]he question of biology and religion stands," Monakow opined, "in a close relationship to [that of] neurosis and psychosis."105 As indicated before, Monakow felt that the steady instinctual "dissolution" of an increasingly secular central Europe had made the acute pathological eruption of the Great War virtually inevitable. Here he pointed a particularly accusatory finger at the mechanistic sciences of the last decades for their role

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in this larger degenerative process. Modem science had lost touch with its earlier sense of reverence for God in nature, its earlier sense of itself as a holistic spiritual body of teachings (as exemplified in the works of Goethe and Burdach). Instead, it had splintered into countless specializations, shackling its special technologies and modes of knowing to the utilitarian, materialistic drives of industrial capitalism. The catastrophic results could have been anticipated. In Monakow's words: The last World War should really also be considered from this just mentioned biological perspective. Consider the almost fantastic impulse in natural scientific research towards differentiation and specialization, especially with the goal of enriching technical means and works (industrialization) and fostering or more precisely defending current or rather daily economic prosperity. This was carried out at the expense of the just interests of the Volk, yes, even at the cost of a true, higher morality and the educating of the people to strive for higher life goals (the future of the nation in the sense of just humanitarianism, loving one's neighbor, compassion and the virtues generally). Such a one-sided form of "prosperity," focused chiefly on "economic values," on the winning of power, on personal superiority, or rather the prestige of a nation, must cause a deep spiritual reaction over the long term, in the sense of a moral inferiority, a collective sense of emotional desolation and poverty also in the religious sensibility. This emerged both at the beginning of the war and in its later manifestations.106

MORALITY IN THE CELLS: T H E "SYNEIDESIS" OR BIOLOGICAL CONSCIENCE

How was a biologist of the human soul to make sense of the undeniable failings of the modern age? How was he to account for the fact that humanity had allowed its evolutionary journey to deviate down roads of spiritual desolation, suffering, and destruction? Clearly, the evolutionary process itself gave no guarantee that good would prevail over evil, and in fact it was necessary and right that this be so, since it was freedom of choice that made us truly moral beings, in the Kantian sense of that category. However, if the promptings of instincts did not lock the organism into some predetermined course, then was there anything beyond mere convention and arbitrary taste that allowed us to recognize and choose between good and evil, right and wrong? Where, in other words, within in our biological beings was the Kantian moral compass to be found? Here is how Monakow himself formulated the dilemma at hand: The question now presses itself on us: what energy in the human organism regulates the course of different instinctive requirements and processes? Who is the "judge" (or guardian) who finds a satisfactory resolution to the inevitable collisions, minor and serious, that are daily experienced within the instinct world, and especially between the primitive instincts of the Hormeterien and the [more advanced] manifold instinct levels of the Noohormeterien ... ?107 *

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His answer to this question lay in a biological principle he called the syneidesis or "biological conscience." First formally unveiled in the 1927 volume of his journal Swiss Archives for Neurology and Psychiatry, the syneidesis was proclaimed the "most sophisticated child of the horme"—what Monakow's student, Erich Katzenstein called "the guarantee of wholeness in [Monakow's] human biology."108 Its purpose was to intervene in moments of organismic and psychological imbalance and, thermostat-like, nudge the entire system back into order.109 At the most primitive levels of the instinct hierarchy (the levels involved in biological growth and change), the syneidesis was an unconscious, impersonal principle. In embryonic development, for example, it was the "compensatory factor" that intervened in cases of damage and discovered possibilities for regeneration and differentiation. In other words, at this level, Monakow identified his syneidesis with the biological intelligence Hans Driesch was calling the entelechy. In cases of temporary loss of neurological functioning or diaschisis, the syneidesis was the intelligence that helped the brain recover or find new functional strategies. As the young child developed, Monakow believed that the syneidesis continued to regulate instinctual and growth activities but that its influence remained essentially unconscious. The awakening of the syneidesis into human consciousness came only after a considerable period of neurological refinement and ethical education. This mighty event in the development of the child represented the birth of what philosophers had long called the moral sense, or conscience. In other words, human conscience or sense of right and wrong was nothing less than the conscious face of the syneidesis, or the highest and most subtle form of the biological principle of auto-regulation. For Monakow, recognizing this gave intuitive judgment in moral decision-making an authority that was rooted in the cosmic life drive itself; an authority far above that of reason and sense. As he put it in an exhortative note to his friend, Pusirewsky, who had been experiencing problems with her vision, "Avoid getting carried away with the. care of your organs (including your eyes) and [instead] place your trust blindly in the syneidesis, which unerringly carries out its duties in the depths of your soul and your organism!"110 Grounding the moralizing thrust of that remark was actually a philosophical position, rooted in the Kantian tradition, that the highest moral sense must necessarily be a power that functioned independently of any and all sensory input.111 At the same time, as a psychiatrist, Monakow saw clearly that the normal healthy functioning of the syneidesis could become dulled or diverted through the myriad siren calls of sensory existence, and perhaps especially through the mass delusions and confusions caused by propaganda, as happened in the First World War.112 The ingestion of narcotics and alcohol also undermined it—yet another reason Monakow offered for his involvement in the temperance movements of this time. The story was told of how a friend from youth visited Monakow in his last days and laughed over his decades of

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• CHAPTER THREE * strict abstinence: "How many pleasures have you allowed to elude you all these years!" Monakow's reply was stern: "The pleasure that you all buy, comes to me as a gift out of my own nature fully by itself, and without any middleman."113 Yet, while the light of moral sense could be obscured, it could never really be extinguished. Even in the worst and weakest of sinners, the syneidesis never ceased in its efforts "to bring the organism and the personality back . . . on the right vital way."114 It remained an active regulatory and potential healing power even in cases of severe psychosis, criminality, and organic damage: all instances of psychobiological regression or fixation, where the higher instinctive levels were too inadequately developed, or the level of conscious insight too poor to allow for true moral judgment. 115 The increasingly powerful, cumulative conclusion of this Swiss neurobiologist-turned-prophet was clear: not more technology or complex social planning, but rather trust in one's deepest biological impulses was all that was necessary to heal humanity and set it back on its true evolutionary course. All the wisdom and goodness any individual needed to live a moral life was already pulsing in the protoplasm of his or her cells. It was in this sense that Monakow could look out at the modern world and declare that "every tiny living fiber in us [is] so much more wonderful than all the wonders of technology and a thousand times more clever."116

A N ANSWER TO "IGNORABIMUS": MONAKOW'S NEUROBIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

In a commentary on Monakow, the holistic neurologist Walther Riese asserted that "one has to have a certain intellectual courage to withstand the adventure of [Monakow's] anthropology; for owing to the fact that the knowing consciousness is itself subject to becoming, that is to say, to change, a certain relativity of our knowledge is inevitable."117 Certainly, Monakow was quite explicit that his goal was to thoroughly naturalize the human soul within the framework of vitalistic evolution. But what would it mean finally to throw the net of neurobiology over the knowing scientist himself, to imagine not only a natural history of morality, but a natural history of science as well? Monakow's starting point for addressing this question was the Kantian insight that all human knowledge is mediated and phenomenal. He began by inviting his readers to imagine the universe on its own terms, as the Kantian thing-in-itself. No idealist, Monakow was clear that this unknowable universe had an independent reality that operated according to deep and necessary principles that Monakow—adopting a phase from Confucius—called the principles of "root-branch causality." These were the truths of the universe as they would appear free of human error or distortion: "If one imagines things without the human, then all that remains . . . in the cosmos are self-evident truths."118 ft

99 * THE SEARCH FOR GOD • The problem was that although root-branch causality represented absolute truth, the limited constitution of the "giant protoplasm human" meant that the fruits of this tree of knowledge hung forever out of our reach. Instead, the rational capacities of the human nervous system were able to access absolute root-branch reality only in a distorted, piecemeal fashion. For this reason, every scientific discovery was filled with contradictions and large gaps in understanding that the scientist automatically papered over with guesses and assertions based on prejudice and instinctual bias. At its best, then, scientific knowledge consisted of fragments of genuine discoveries about reality pieced together by the mind and ordered with various unwarranted additional assertions via a process Monakow called "agglutinated causality." This was a concept that bore some resemblances to the work of the Gestalt psychologists in Berlin, who were also exploring the ways in which the human mind seemed to organize perceptions into something more than the sum of their empirical contents. "Our knowledge is more subjective persuasion than objective truth," Monakow noted as early as 1917. He continued: [E]ven the most persuasive and unanimous experiment that can be retested for its reliability at any time forms just a tiny part of the powerful, immeasurable processes in the world. . . . Because the establishment of a fact requires, without exception, utilization of a belief system (it fills in the gaps), it turns out that every one of our truths is endowed, even if only to a small degree, with a subjective component (belief, wish).119 Still the full tale of Monakow's naturalization of knowledge is not yet told. In addition to the self-standing causality of the universe and the imperfect reconstruction of that causality by human reason, there was also a third form of causality: one that was created not by the rational faculties of the higher nervous system, but by the secretory (biochemical) world of the instinct hierarchy: "This form of causality . . . is concerned with securing the personal success of the individual in the present and the future and with bringing the syneidesis (biological 'conscience') in harmonious connection with the conscious phases of feeling."120 That causal process drew on, but was not limited to, the piecemeal "objective" truths derived from reason and perception, but it then combined those truths with the promptings of inner experience to produce a categorically new form of truth: what Monakow called "personal" or "subjective" truth. Subjective truth was a form of truth whose validity lay not in the objective realm of empiricism or logic, but rather in the correspondence between any empirical perception and the harmonious functioning of the instinct hierarchy. This conclusion led at once to a warning and a declaration of liberation from the Du Bois-Reymonds of Monakow's time, who would limit all reliable knowledge of reality to observations of causal relations in time and space. In a series of lectures in 1924 that reviewed the past fifty years of neurology, Monakow had directly defied Du Bois-Reymond's "ignorabimus"—no, "we know and will know."121 Now he went a step further: not only were certain

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CHAPTER THREE questions—such as those that concerned the human soul—fair game, but science also had no authority to challenge the higher truths of "subjectivity." And this was not only because science was itself limited and human, but because the truths of subjectivity were the truths of the horme itself. To challenge the epistemological authority of inner conviction was to set one's energies against the life force and the goals of the evolutionary process itself. Monakow's final defiant message was underscored in the last lines of Biological Introduction to the Study of Neurology and Psychopathology, in which he and Mourgue had written: With the notion of horme on the one hand, and that of value on the other hand, we have both introduced a metaphysical term into neurobiology and introduced a notion which, according to current opinion, had no right to enter science. A double heresy that we will not try to defend with any subtle arguments! The history of science is there to reassure us, in case we should have need of such comfort, since concepts that were previously forbidden in the name of positivistic science . . . less than half a century ago today are favored by certain physicists. . . . Biology should not to fall prey to mysticism, but if it would be obvious to us that [mysticism] could help to shed some light into an area still this obscure, we would not hesitate to use it!122 Monakow died on October 19, 1930. In 1936, the Schweizerische Medizinische Wochenschrift published an evaluation of his late contribution to biological theory-building that approvingly stressed the relationship between the hormic principle and the antimechanistic conceptions of both Hans Driesch and Jakob von Uexkull (chapter 2). The article also drew attention to the conceptual parallels between Monakow's holism and that of his younger colleague Kurt Goldstein (chapter 5). The article concluded that Monakow's work ultimately promised to make current habits of distinguishing among physiological, philosophical, and theological-anthropological1 approaches superfluous.123 In the years following Monakow's death, Rudolf Brun (1885-1969), a man who achieved some prominence during the interwar years for his work in fostering cross-fertilization between psychoanalysis, biology, and "school" psychiatry, used Monakow's principles to bring Freudian theory into a dialogue with evolutionary biology.124 Others emphasized the relevance of Monakow's work for developing a dynamic biological approach to personality theory.125 Eugen Bleuler, Monakow's old friend and colleague, advocated the use of the horme as an explanatory principle in psychopathology while rejecting what he saw as its creator's tendency to see it as a metaphysical entity; in his eyes, it was much more usefully conceived as a holistic physicochemical process operating in the nervous system.126 From the outset, people tended to respond to Monakow's postwar work with emotions ranging from high enthusiasm to outright irritation, and very few (with the exception of his women disciples) were prepared to swallow the

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potion whole in its original recipe. A 1926 American reviewer liked Monakow's ideas about the biology of the emotions but complained about the man's tendency to engage in metaphysical twaddle.127 A German-language reviewer of the Monakow and Mourgue volume liked the concept and development of the idea of dissolution (Abbau) but warned dryly that "if one wants to enjoy the book, one had better find a 'dynamic vitalism' appealing."128 Many disliked Monakow's neologisms, but others defended them as fundamentally necessary to his enterprise. Georg Theodor Ziehen, the well-known German psychiatrist from Halle, praised the anatomical drawings in Monakow and Mourgue's jointly authored volume but spoke disapprovingly about the authors' "very peculiar theories about causality" and suggested that Monakow had reached beyond his competence in the realm of functional physiology and especially psychology.129 Yet others were inspired and even passionate about this later work. Walther Riese in Germany, who devoted more effort than anyone else in Germany to interpreting and defending the importance of Monakow's concepts, called the Monakow and Mourgue volume "a comprehensive system of nature" rather than merely an "introduction to biology."130 A French-language review of Monakow's "Emotions, Morality, and the Brain" praised the author for having shown that the "intensive" and "extensive" life was the true foundation of morality, and morality was a necessary consequence of life: "That which had been intuition in philosophy has been demonstrated by the biologist-neurologist who has penetrated as far as the most modern investigative means of science will permit."131 And another reviewer, from Geneva, vigorously denied that there was anything mystical about the horme, since Monakow had been clear that this was a secretory system with a primary representation in the choroid plexus (in the lateral ventricles) of the brain.132 In Zurich, the spirit of the mystical Monakow was still being honored as late as 1953, the anniversary of his one-hundredth birthday.133 The Swiss Neurological Society had organized an elaborate conference in his honor,134 and lecture after lecture saluted a man who had integrated neurobiological empiricism with mysticism, who had brought into his science a "cosmic intuition for . . . the totality of creation [and] the pan-psychic nature of all phenomena," who had dared to transform himself from a garden-variety natural scientist to a "human biologist" in the broadest sense of the word, and whose understanding of his life's purpose had been informed by a Russian Orthodox perception of the world as suffering and in need of healing. At the same time at this international meeting, only those from Zurich were prepared to celebrate Monakow's more mystical interwar contributions to human biology, psychopathology, and Bergsonian vitalistic philosophy: the few invited foreign speakers (Oscar Vogt, Lhermitte, MacDonald Critchley) at this centenary celebration focused on Monakow's prewar anatomical and clinical contributions. Unlike Carl Gustav Jung, with whom Monakow has several intriguing parallels,135 the later Monakow never became a phenomenon for the masses but seems to have remained a largely "local prophet."

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His mystical message certainly had appeal, although the density and opacity of his writing doubtless turned off some prospective disciples. A more serious impediment, however, to his capacity to spread his mystical biological message may have been the relentless ambiguity of the accompanying political one. Different pieces of his vision could have appealed to so many audiences: the idealistic youth movements, whose members' dedication to higher natural principles so encouraged him; the Nietzschean devotees of the struggle principle; the advocates of "Life" as the first principle of politics; the conservative decryers of modernity; the race hygienists concerned with degeneration; and even the cosmopolitan internationalists. At the very end of his life, Monakow had begun to question his initial understanding of the Great War as a phenomenon of purely negative dimensions. It was just possible, he now suggested, that the Great War had been a necessary violent eruption with cleansing power—the "stormy preliminary stage (convulsive disruption) of a powerful spiritual world movement." 136 He found cautious hope in the idea that now "the day may be dawning, at least among the youth (youth movement), of a future that has better grasped the true biological goals of the race and a new ethical attitude for humanity, [with dimensions that are] still unclear today."137 There is, of course, no way to decide how Monakow would have reacted to the dramatic political events that would soon transpire beyond the neutral borders of his adopted Switzerland. His pacifist commitments might have led to a swift rejection, but it is clear that there are tensions in his psychobiological vision that could have pushed him in a variety of directions. A remark near the end of Maria Waser's (1933) biography of Monakow leaves us, appropriately, with the question hanging. Monakow had taught her that "when the Fiihrer sins against Nature, then she takes her revenge on the entire Volk. Pestilence spreads over the land." Waser reflected: "What a shattering impact such truths have for us especially today!" 138 But in 1933, which Fiihrer and which pestilence, of those present and those lurking over the horizon, did this disciple of Monakow's holistic vision mean to condemn?

C H A P T E R

F O U R

' A P e a c e f u l l y B l o s s o m i n g Tree": T h e Rational Enchantment of Gestalt P s y c h o l o g y

IN A SPEECH before the American Psychological Association in 1959, Wolfgang Kohler told a story about the revelation he and his peers, as young people in Germany, had experienced upon being exposed to a new approach in psychology and philosophy, known then in the United States as Gestalt psychology: There was . . . a great wave of relief—as though we were escaping from a prison. The prison was psychology as taught at the universities when we still were students. At the time, we had been shocked by the thesis that all psychological facts (not only those in perception) consist of unrelated inert atoms and that almost the only factors which combine these atoms and thus introduce action are associations formed under the influence of mere contiguity. What had disturbed us was the utter senselessness of this picture, and the implication that human life, apparently so colorful and "so intensely dynamic, is actually a frightful bore.1 Gestalt psychology (or Gestalt theory, as its practitioners called it) has been one of the most enduring international legacies of German interwar holism. To hear Kohler describe it to his American audience, it had burst onto the German scene as a breath of fresh air—a vision that had succeeded because it had been able to combine philosophical sophistication with ingenious experimental strategies. While this origin myth doubtless captured a certain emotional truth for Kohler and his audience, it hardly does justice to the far more interesting story of Gestalt theory's iconoclastic and ambivalent position in its native Germany. In fact, the legitimacy and agendas of Gestalt theory were contested in Germany from the beginning. Instead of being hailed as new, this approach to the human mind was attacked by some for having misappropriated the vocabulary of older illuminated German traditions in ways that betrayed the fundamental spirit of those traditions. Founded by Max Wertheimer before the First World War and then further advanced in collaboration with Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, and others through the Weimar years, Gestalt theory argued for the possibility of retaining a place for human significance in nature but without sacrificing rigorous experimental standards of traditional natural science. It was not an approach everyone would find congenial. At the time Wertheimer and his colleagues began developing their ideas, the idea of Gestalt (which can be literally translated as "form" or "configuration") had already been identified in the broader

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Figure 18. Max Wertheimer (1880-1943). Michael Wertheimer "Max Wertheimer: Gestalt prophet," Gestalt Theory, 2 (1980):3. holistic literature with a range of more quasi-mystical cultural values and goals, few of which had much to do with either rigor or with science. In this literature, Gestalt worked as an ordering principle in partnership with wholeness. It was a partnership that allowed writers to speak of the world as a plurality of connected wholes rather than as one undifferentiated whole; it reassured people that community, nation, and culture need not be swallowed up in an all-embracing cosmopolitanism. Gestalt's presence in holistic discourse also implied that individuals were not just engulfed by the whole but found a natural position and logic within it. Gestalt, in short, worked with wholeness to give muscle and focus to the German efforts at political, cultural, and spiritual renewal. On its own, Gestalt also extended the imaginative scope of holistic discourse in new directions. Where the primary enemy of wholeness was the machine, the enemy of Gestalt was chaos, an image with ancient mythological associations that would take on fresh meanings for many Germans in the years both before and after the First World War.2 Clearly, these two enemies were different: the Machine offered a type of unnatural, pseudo-order built up out

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of sums of atoms, while Chaos represented pure non-order. Still, both were perceived as alike in tending to level everything into meaninglessness, dissolution, and fragments. For those Germans who saw themselves fighting for the salvation of culture and the human soul, the differences between the false god of Machine-order on the one side, and the frank devil of Chaos on the other does not seem to have been so very great. Evoking Gestalt in this greater fight against Chaos did not marshal just intellectual resources but also stirred a whole range of powerful emotions and associations. In their classic 1945 essay on Nazi uses and abuses of language, linguists Sternberger, Storz, and Siiskind explained: [Gestalt] sounded like the language of the Luther Bible, within which it not rarely appeared, or the language of poetry. Indeed "Gestalt " had the weight of a key word in one illustrious area, namely in Goethe's works: it is no exaggeration to say that Goethe's use of the word marked a new epoch. [In Goethe's works] . . . "Gestalt" emerges as the glorious endpoint of entelechetic developments snatched from the danger that is given in the continual emergence of Chaos and the demonic—Gestalt is the supreme serendipity of being and appearance, the most certain thing that can be perceived, and the clearest thing that can be thought. The single and highest goal of pure intuition is Gestalt.3 In the mid-nineteenth century, developments in the physical sciences gave new urgency and concreteness to this older German image of a struggle between Gestalt and Chaos. The concept of entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, predicted a universe marked by increasing randomness culminating finally in "thermal death," in which temperatures dropped to levels too low and uniform to permit life to continue. As the British physicist Ernest Rutherford put it: "[S]cience offers no escape from the conclusion . . . that the sun must ultimately grow cold'and this earth become a dead planet moving through the intense cold of empty space."4 Science may have spoken, but not all German academics were prepared to accept this meaningless vision of apocalypse without a fight. In a 1925 lecture, "The Holy Reich of the Germans," the philosopher Leopold Ziegler was repelled, not so much by the fact that the second law of thermodynamics predicted the universe's demise, but by the fact that this demise promised to be so ignominiously modern, so devoid of mythic grandeur. In his lecture, he called upon his audience to take "heroic action" against such an "asphalt cosmos," declaring: We consider the doctrine of the unavoidable end of the world by thermal death to be a contemporary and scientific, consequently unheroic and insufficiently tragic, version of the gloomy twilight vision . . . from the northern lands.5 The socialist author Joachim Schumacher noted in 1937 that, in Germany, the law of entropy "sheltered a particularly duplicitous variety of a chaos delusion. Chaos no longer announced its presence as an erupting catastrophe, but

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rather as the beginning of an unstoppable, forward-creeping levelling process."6 From this initial assumption, translations between cosmic chaos (entropy) and political chaos (random rule of untutored masses) could be made with little strain; thus Jakob von Uexkiill could write in 1920 that with the establishment of the parliamentary Weimar Republic government in 1918, the "world-ideal of the materialists, Chaos, had passed itself onto the state."7 Schumacher suggested that for people like Uexkiill (he mentioned no names), the physicists' law of entropy would begin to look suspiciously like "Jewishcommunist egalitarianism and subversion."8

GESTALT VERSUS CHAOS: T H E VOICE OF HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN

With the chaos principle in science thus identified with political wreckage, modernism and apocalypse, any answering principle of Gestalt in science had its work cut out for it. Prior to World War I, the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain would emerge as one of the more potent attempts within the German holistic literature to imagine such an answering principle and to outline the tasks of salvation that would be asked of it. Having come to Vienna in the 1880s to pursue plant physiology (a career goal he was forced to abandon owing to ill health), Chamberlain had absorbed Goethe's fascination with the morphology of plants and the larger implications of such morphological regularities. According to Chamberlain's Lebenslehre (Theory of Life) of 1896, the presence of Gestalt was what distinguished life from nonlife: "Everything that lives has Gestalt—Life is Gestalt."9 This was an identification that would persist over time. In his best-selling Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler also declared Gestalt the epistemological category of life and history and contrasted it with the dead, exact "law" of modern physics. Gestalt was concerned, Spengler said, not with "the dead nature of Newton" but with the "living nature of Goethe."10 Chamberlain certainly agreed, but for him the most important attribute of Gestalt was its role in morphologically defining different species of organisms. Life could find expression only through the stable blueprints that science called "race" and "species." The fact that Darwinian evolution failed to understand this basic Goethean insight and supposed that species were perpetually transforming themselves in response to chance events, made that theory, for Chamberlain, the most abominable and misguided doctrine of his time: If one could not say that this craze is only the belated straggler of Romanticism and Hegelism in alliance with flat English utilitarianism, and that a hundred years will not have passed before it will bejudged as men today judge alchemy . . . [I]f we could not hope for a race of creatively great German biologists; if we did not see around us in a few individual investigators—at any rate in Germany—an energetic shaking off of this "English sickness"... we might abandon all hope for science and culture." 4

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But Chamberlain's attempts to beat back the intellectual chaos of Darwinism with his concept of Gestalt was just the beginning. To his mind, chaos threatened humanity also on a much more immediate, practical level—that of race. Race, as he defined it, was an intensified form of Gestalt, a particularly tight ordering of physical and spiritual attributes that differed for different human groups. Its reality as a basic principle of biology was, in the language of the time, anschaulich, requiring no evidence beyond itself. As Chamberlain proclaimed: "Descartes pointed out that all the wise men in the world could not define the color 'white'; but I need only to open my eyes to see it, and it is the same with 'race.'" 12 Defining the integrity of race by the integrity of its Gestalt allowed the conclusion that a key priority of every people or species must be to preserve inner coherence. For this reason, interbreeding between races, or even the acceptance of alien racial values, was a recipe for what Chamberlain called "racial chaos": an upsetting of the delicate balance of natural virtues and attributes properly belonging to individual racial groups. In his most influential work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Chamberlain emphasized how the undoubted intellectual accomplishments of Roman antiquity had first been compromised and then almost fatally destroyed by a steady drift into a state of raceless and nationless "folk chaos" (Volkerchaos): The inherited culture of antiquity . . . was not transmitted to us by a definite people, but by a nationless mixture without physiognomy . . . in which Mongrels held the whipTiand, namely . . . by the raceless chaos of the decaying Roman Empire.13 In the midst of that ancient racial chaos, Chamberlain explained, the Jews were the one people who had chosen purity of blood, but their goal was never to save or preserve European civilization but always to undermine it. The Teutonic race—golden-haired, blue-eyed, and virile—then entered history from out of the North as a high-minded opposing force to the fundamentally low Jewish race. Salvaging all that they could out of the near-wreckage of the Roman imperium, the Teutons regenerated Western civilization and created a new culture—"beyond all question the greatest that has hitherto been achieved by man." In other words, the Teutonic race actually proved themselves in history to be what the Jews had claimed to be themselves: a "chosen people," upon whose survival Western civilization depended. The Jews, meanwhile, persisted as an inferior race, but one whose strict marriage laws, which maintained blood purity, nevertheless invested them with an unfortunate knack for survival. In the modern era they emerged as an alien race whose inordinate political influence, alien ideas, and even alien blood (in shocking cases of Jewish-Aryan intermarriage) were having a chaotic, disintegrative effect on the high culture of modern German society.14 Chamberlain's reading of the struggle between the Gestalt-bearing Teutons and the chaos-sowing Jews won him great fame and served as the source for some of the key imagery

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CHAPTER FOUR * used in such National Socialist books as Alfred Rosenberg's Mythos of the Twentieth Century (finished in 1925 and published in 1930) and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927). Both of these books were broadly dominated by images of a German struggle for order (Gestalt) against Jewish chaos.15 Indeed, after his famous 1923 meeting with Hitler at Bayreuth, Chamberlain affirmed the resonances between their visions of salvation through order and spoke of his faith in Hitler's ability to impose such order on Germany: "You know Goethe's distinction between force and force! There is a force which originates in chaos and which leads to chaos, and there is a force, whose characteristic it is to shape the cosmos."16 It would not be the last time that Hitler and National Socialism would be identified with the creative ordering powers of Gestalt.

GESTALT VERSUS CHAOS: THE VOICE OF CHRISTIAN VON EHRENFELS

During his years in Vienna (where he lived from 1889 through 1909), Chamberlain became friendly with the philosopher and musician, Christian von Ehrenfels (see figure 19), an important teacher of Max Wertheimer. Chamberlain and Ehrenfels shared a love of Wagner, a preoccupation with a perceived leveling of human excellence, and a fascination with the saving power of Gestalt. To his credit, Ehrenfels consistently eschewed the anti-Semitism so pronounced in Chamberlain's work. At the same time, he went further than virtually all his peers, Chamberlain included, in using the imagery of Gestalt and chaos to tell a story of cosmic struggle with repercussions both for the immediate crisis of his time and for the future of humanity at large. Born in Rodaun near Vienna, Ehrenfels studied at the University of Vienna under Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong and received his doctorate at Graz in 1885. He taught at Vienna from 1888 to 1896, then moved to the German university of Prague, where he was a full professor from 1900 to 1929. It was in Prague that he would become Max Wertheimer's primary teacher of philosophy.17 His Czech colleague, Felix Weltsch, described him as: a philosopher, who came into life thinking. He did not philosophize through contact with books, but rather through direct intuition of cosmic actualizations. He did not sit at his desk; he wandered through city and countryside. This professor of philosophy did not conform to the stereotype of a professor, let alone of a great learned man. He resembled much more a genial hermit, a man who had been awakened by music and who was driven by Eros, who struggled with all his strength to raise life and the world into a better state.18 In 1890, while still in Vienna, Ehrenfels had published a landmark paper, "On Gestalt Qualities,"19 in which he pointed out that in contrast to the claims of associationism, we perceive phenomena not in terms of the specific elements of which they are composed, but in terms of the relationship, the pat-

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Figure 19. Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932). Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, R. Fabian, ed., (Amsterdam: Rodopi., 1986). Courtesy of R. Fabian as authorized by Mrs. Abeille-Ehrenfels. terned whole (Gestalt) into which they fall, either in time or in space. Thus, the essence of a melody lies not in its specific notes, but in the meaningful unity that emerges out of those notes. This is why a melody can be transposed to a variety of keys and still be recognized. As Ehrenfels saw it, our human perception of such ordered wholeness in a sum of elements was not evidently either a sensation nor a judgment (to draw on the categorical distinctions of his time) but "an X, an unknown factor,"20 that was something wholly different again and that Ehrenfels called the "Gestalt quality." For Ehrenfels, the question remained whether Gestalt was merely a mental factor—something the mind imposed onto reality—or an independent principle of order that the mind discovered in reality. Ehrenfels waited about twenty-seven years to affirm the latter position on this critical issue. His Kosmogonie (1916), written in the shadow of the First World War, elevated Gestalt into a cosmic principle of psychic or spiritual order that was mankind's only defense against chaos, entropy, and racial degeneration. Ehrenfels had long been an impassioned eugenicist (though, again, without any particular racist bias). Even before the war, he had argued at length that the ill-effects of modernism and technology (which artificially prolonged the lives of the unfit) could only be stemmed through the legalization of polygamy for the fit and restrictions on reproduction for the inferior.21 Now, for him, the greatest hor-

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ror of the war lay in its "counterselective" effects that systematically cut down the brightest, youngest, and strongest of the race. Kosmogonie was his attempt at an explanation and a vision of renewed hope. A great deal of existential urgency, building over several decades, also animated the writing of Kosmogonie. A growing crisis of faith had already led Ehrenfels to abandon the Catholicism of his youth (sometime in 1880) but had not stilled a religious hunger that led him to seek solace and a different level of religious truth in the music and aesthetic philosophy of Richard Wagner.22 Kosmogonie was to be an instantiation and articulation of those effectively inarticulate truths. It began with a theory of the origin of the world as the result of the interaction of two metaphysical principles, Chaos and Gestalt. Chaos, or utter randomness (entropy), was the original state of the universe. Gestalt had emerged as an ordering, unifying principle out of this randomness (an infinitely improbable but possible occurrence within a frame of infinite time). It had then persisted because Chaos was not capable of continuous destruction, even in infinite time.23 Gestalt was described in Kosmogonie as an immaterial force, "either of a direct spiritual nature or . . . hardly distinguishable in its essence from the phenomena of human consciousness."24 Its slow but ultimately triumphant striving to overcome the material principle of chaos or entropy resulted in the cosmic process science had recognized as "evolution." While this vision of dualistic struggle certainly reflected a widespread intellectual tendency of his time, with complex social and political motivations,25 the only earthly inspiration Ehrenfels was himself prepared to credit in Kosmogonie was "German music."26 From besieged and politically tumultuous Prague, he wrote: German music is still a religion for me today in the sense that, should all my arguments in this work [Kosmogonie] be refuted, I would nevertheless not sink into despair—yes, would remain persuaded, with the trust in the universe out of which this work grew, that I had pursued the essentially right path,—persuaded, because there is German music. For a world in which such a thing could come to be, must be in its most inner essence good and worthy of trust.27 Many Germans in these years were attracted to the idea that art—perhaps especially Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk—could serve as a means of "overcoming" a mundane or unpleasant earthly reality: "Bayreuth became a shrine to the transcendence of life and reality by art and the imagination, a place where the aesthetic moment was to encapsulate all the meaning of history and all the potential of the future."28 With the coming of the war, this tendency to aestheticize existence would, if anything, intensify dramatically until even destruction and death could be celebrated as aesthetic experiences, paradoxical sources of life and liberation. Yet, even as Ehrenfels jointed his cohort in seeking transcendence in a dark time within "German music," he was nevertheless not prepared completely to make art the measure of all things. As one reads Kosmogonie, it becomes clear that Gestalt, insofar as it was a philosophical articulation of the truths of Ger-

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man music, was also incomplete—incomplete because it was a pure aesthetic principle without reason or ethical goals and with no end beyond the increasing perfection and purity of itself.29 Human purpose—a child of human reason—was the necessary leaven to the endlessly creative aesthetic impulses of the cosmos. In the eternal fullness of time, Ehrenfels concluded that Gestalt had managed to produce something new and, in a certain sense, better than itself—human beings capable of "purposive desiring"30—and the universe has not been the same since. Purposive consciousness is . . . a recent cosmic blossom. It is equally today already a powerful earthly power. Can one assume that the Universal Gestalter stands alienated from, perhaps even totally unaware of this blossom created through its own working? Is it credible that we humans in and with our purposive consciousness have risen above the Universal Gestalter?—With the problem raised here, we are confronted with the . . . question concerning the ontological relationship between the Unifying Principle and its creations.31 The rise of human beings capable of planning and reason was a turning point in cosmic evolution. Since humans, like all of creation, are not separate from the Gestalt principle that created them, but part of God-Nature, the birth of human consciousness meant that the universe now knew purpose. What Ehrenfels called the Allgestalter—or God—itself took on the attributes of self-consciousness and purposiveness. "It is . . . probable that God thinks with our brains and wills via our willing."32 Working through his creation, "God searches for a guiding idea that would be capable of channeling what has been so far the instinct-driven processes of Gestalt-creation into the track of purposive consciousness. This idea has not yet been found."33 But the gist of what that idea might turn out to be was already clear: to speak of a need for a purposive channeling of evolution was just another way of describing a need for the development of a rational eugenics, now discovered as a cosmic rather than just a human imperative. In Kosmogonie, Ehrenfels thus offered an image of God and humanity in cosmic partnership that made clear that his own eugenicist activism had been his way all along of working to advance the higher causes of the cosmos.34 This was a drama that may have lacked the uncompromising comfort of the Christian religion, but— somewhat like the dramas of Wagner himself—offered in its stead an adrenalin shot of heroism that felt better suited to the urgent times.

MAX WERTHEIMER: CLAIMING GESTALT FOR SCIENCE AND RATIONAL ENCHANTMENT

Ehrenfels and Chamberlain exemplify a cultural tradition that by World War I had clearly established Gestalt as a concept both with a uniquely German lineage (Luther, Goethe, etc.) and with quasi-mystical and (usually) politically conservative resonances.35 Only with these powerful original meanings

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in mind can we appreciate all that was at stake when Max Wertheimer made the decision to use this same culturally and politically loaded word, Gestalt, to describe his socially liberal, Jewish-dominated, and empirically oriented research program in Berlin. Born in Prague on April 15, 1880, Wertheimer was the younger son of a religiously conservative, intellectual Jewish family. In Prague, he was introduced to German culture by monks at the Piarot Grammar School and to Jewish intellectual and mystical traditions by his grandfather Jakob Zwicker, "the Shamas [sexton] of the Altneuschul and of the Old Cemetery, as well as Supervisory Nurse of the Jewish Hospital."36 It was the grandfather who secretly introduced Wertheimer to Benedict Spinoza's heretical holism, whichhis father had forbidden him to read. For orthodox Jews, the heresy of Spinoza lay in his rejection of two critical premises: the idea of God as the first, efficient cause of the world; and the idea that God had purposes and desires for mankind and the rest of creation.37 Arguing that Jews need not observe the laws of the Torah, Spinoza had advocated a type of holistic pantheism that made no distinction between God and his created world. Wertheimer was profoundly influenced by his early exposure to this philosopher. The metaphysician not only gave him a framework through which to question traditional Jewish injunctions, 38 but also provided him with resources to conceive of the problem of order (Gestalt) and mind in a nondualistic way. Wertheimer's extraordinary love and talent for music, especially piano, were universally remarked upon and also came to infuse his intellectual work. Later students of Wertheimer noted that music was a type of religion for him and that improvising on the piano was "akin to a form of worship."39 Wertheimer's older brother, Walter, wrote in a journal in 1895: "There is something daemonic in his improvisations, a wonderful strength which erases all other thoughts; you just follow the melodies, which are now wild and mighty, now gentle and quiet, as though sounding from far, far away. When 1 hear him play, I can't tear myself away until he stops."40 Max Brod, one of the key figures of the Prague Circle, which promoted and experimented with literary Expressionism in the 1920s, described Wertheimer in the years just before the First World War as "a wise, temperamental young Gnome . . . a mysterious, fascinating person, small, energetic, stubborn, [with] beautiful eyes; he was bound with me also through our love of music, of piano playing." Later, visiting Prague as a young experimental psychologist, Wertheimer was a novelty to his literary friends: "He condemned our speculative rnethods, [and] was full of the tricks of his craft, of practical, sometimes humorous ideas that were intended to pull the leg of his victim, the experimental subject, [and which] enlivened his work with earthy joviality."41 Yet, even as he chided and challenged, Wertheimer's warm relations with the Prague Circle (Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Felix Weltsch, Julius Klein, Hans Kauders) also underscores his sympathy with their aesthetic and romantic agenda.42

113 THE ENCHANTMENT OF GESTALT * Portraits of Wertheimer in his prime further attest to his personal charisma and subtle capacity to command influence. As the Mandlers noted in their 1969 study of immigrant psychologists: "Some saw him as 'impatient, dogmatic, but very powerful.' Others describe him as 'charming, almost retiring.' N. R. F. Maier in his Oral History tells of his visit to Berlin and relates the impression that Wertheimer was the high priest, although Kohler seemed to be. Wolfgang Kohler was the director of the laboratory, but he always listened to Wertheimer, and if Wertheimer disagreed with something, Kohler would back down. Of the three, Wertheimer was the most philosophically and romantically oriented.43 Having launched his experimental research program some few years before, Wertheimer served in World War I as a research psychologist with the Prussian Artillery Testing Commission, a center for the development of new artillery invention. It happened that the center was located in a civilian area in Berlin (the so-called Bavarian Quarter), not far from Albert Einstein's house. Wertheimer's friendship with Einstein began during this time, nurtured by lengthy visits in which he attempted to understand the Gestalt-like psychological processes employed by Einstein to conceive the theory of relativity.44 Wertheimer's chief formal contribution to the war was an instrument, developed in collaboration with his friend Erich von Hornbostel, that could determine the direction of a firing gun or a submarine by exploiting the time difference with which the sound wave from a firing reached a soldier's two ears.45 He received the Iron Cross from the German government for this work but remained ambivalent about the whole affair. Hornbostel recalled that when Wertheimer "was given the honor of firing the first torpedo of the first submarine of the enemy" identified using his methods, he fainted on firing "because of his strong feelings against killing."46 It was during the war years that Wertheimer also became a great friend of the physicist Max Born, who recalled him as "a deep thinker, but of a different type from any I had known before: skeptical in the extreme, inclined to take nothing for granted and to regard any observation as a deception of the senses or the mind, until its truth was shown by correct psychological experiment."47 Shortly after the end of the war, with the declaration of a people's government in Germany under socialist leadership, Wertheimer teamed up briefly with Born and Einstein. The three men successfully negotiated the release of the rector and several professors at the University of Berlin who were being held by revolutionary student rebels and soldiers demanding socialist concessions from the university. In later correspondence with Born, Einstein wryly reminisced about how pleased they had all been with their accomplishments that day and how naively they had viewed it as an omen of a bright future for a newly democratic Germany.48 Politically, Wertheimer was a staunch democratic socialist committed to the promise of Weimar. One friend recalled him as being "very interested in

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• CHAPTER FOUR Marx, but by no means a Communist." 49 Another described him as "an impassioned democrat with a small d."50 Eschewing academic hierarchy and elitism in the academy as much as in politics, he was also remembered by friends as always "more the Czech provincial than the German professor."51 And always he retained his romanticism and aesthetic view on the world. Rudolf Arnheim has compared him in his later years to "one of the old rabbis in the mysterious city of Prague, where he was born . . . [with] his attentive eyes . . . deeply embedded in his tired, soft face," wearing a "little woollen cap," playing "old German folk tunes in [a] minor key" and telling "the curiously meaningful fables that life staged for him wherever he went." 52 Gestalt psychology was both shaped by and served as a most important source of inspiration for his "meaningful fables," both before and after the Hitler years and his immigration to the United States. Here follow some of the ways in which this was so.

THE MIND'S LAWS OF "IMMANENT STRUCTURALISM"

From 1898 to 1901, Wertheimer attended the University of Prague, where Gestalt psychology would find an important source of its intellectual inspiration in the fin de siecle atmosphere of philosophical theorizing. Though originally enrolled as a law student, from the beginning he studied psychology, music, philosophy, and the history of art. By 1900, he had switched to the philosophy faculty, where Ehrenfels was one of his most important teachers.53 Wertheimer resonated, not only with Ehrenfels' philosophical and psychological concerns with Gestalt and ordering principles in perception but also with his love of music and "allegiance to the primacy of aesthetic over technological values in science and philosophy."54 At the same time, it was not Ehrenfels but other mentors who would provide Wertheimer with the tools for creating his iconoclastic research program: psychologist-philosophers like Oswald Kulpe and Karl Marbe in Marburg (with whom he formally completed his doctorate) and especially Carl Stumpf in Berlin. It was Stumpf who had inspired him to believe that a psychology firmly rooted in the experimental method could, even must, be used to tackle fundamental questions of philosophy.55 Although he had actually first explored the problem of Gestalt in an early study of the principles of counting and number among primitive people,56 the experiments that were critical for Wertheimer's experimental research program were the 1912 studies on the so-called phi phenomenon. This referred to the apparent continuous movement produced by two different stimuli separated from each other in space and illuminated successively at brief intervals: One sees a movement; it is not the case that the object moved, is now in a place other than where it was before, and hence that one knows that it has moved.... But one saw the movement. What is given here psychologically?57 I

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Wertheimer concluded that this perceived "motion" was a genuine percept that was not dependent on individual sensations (since there was in fact no actual motion). That is to say, an overarching form was created out of incoming pieces of information that had an independent psychological reality. If Wertheimer had said that grins could exist apart from their Cheshire-cat owners, he would hardly have sounded more radical to contemporary ears. Mitchell Ash has the following to say about the wider significance of these studies: For Wertheimer, this was not merely one kind of apparent motion among others, but clearly the essence of motion itself. He drew two implications from this. First, the notion, derived from traditional logic, that a process must necessarily be a process of something, "is not founded on pure psychological data"; there were, indeed "pure dynamic phenomena." . . . To explain these—and this was the second point—it would be necessary to break with the conventional dichotomy between sensation and judgment. Here was a phenomenon that appeared, under appropriate conditions, with sensory immediacy and total clarity, but that could not be described as a sum of contents, or as a series of isolated events combined by a process external to them. . . . Bergson . . . had made a similar claim about motion in general a decade before. However, he had presented it as evidence of an unbridgeable gap between scientific method and the claims of intuition, while Wertheimer's aim was to show that such a gap need not exist.58 Wertheimer called the principles underlying orderly perception "Gestalt laws," and believed they were fully researchable using experimental methods. A range of simple paper-and-pencil studies were developed to make the point. Many of these took advantage of the Gestalt principle of "figure-ground" perception in which the mind perceives lines, dots, or filled regions on a page as either figure or background, depending on the total arrangement of cues. (In one classic formulation, two possible interpretations of an ambiguous drawing are equally compelling and may appear to flip into each other—e.g., a vase turns into a pair of faces and back again). Exploiting this simple technology, it was found that lines on a page set at varying distances from one another will be perceived as either "separate" or as "belonging together"; that people tend to perceive organization in a line drawing that interrupts the fewest other lines in the total field (the law of good continuation); and, that an enclosed region in a field tended to be perceived as a figure (the law of enclosedness). Other studies found that as an object moves in a field of view, its perceived shape and size remain constant (the law of constancy); and that there was a tendency for the mind to see figures in ambiguous or imperfect fields that were as "good" (simple, regular, symmetrical, etc.) as the prevailing conditions allowed (the law of Pragnanz; see figure 20).59 Wertheimer's major colleagues in these early years were Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967) and Kurt Koffka (1886-1941). Koffka, who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, always remained one of Gestalt theory's most vigorous proselytizers while also extending its reach into developmental psy-

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Figure 20. Wertheimer's illustration of various "Gestalt laws," 1921. Max Wertheimer, "Principles of Perceptual Organization," Readings in Perception, Michael Wertheimer, ed., 1958. chology.60 Kohler became particularly well known after World War I as an ape researcher who had used principles of Gestalt theory to illuminate problem-solving skills in an ape colony at a research center on the Canary Islands.61 It was actually Kohler, rather than Wertheimer, who succeeded in giving Gestalt theory its first stable institutional base when he was appointed director of the Psychology Institute in Berlin in 1921.62 That same year, he, Wertheimer, Koffka, Kurt Goldstein, and Hans Gruhle founded the journal Psychologische Forschung {Psychological Research), which served as a publication vehicle for Gestalt theory until 1938. Students and visitors began coming to Berlin and the reputation of Gestalt theory grew. Its experimental reach also began to extend beyond Berlin and beyond psychology per se. In Berlin, Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) joined the team and found in Gestalt theory a framework for studying the dynamics of groups and social conflict. In Frankfurt, holistic neurologist Kurt Goldstein and Gestalt psychologist Adhe"mar Gelb studied loss of Gestalt-like perceptual principles in brain-damaged soldiers (see chapter 5). Other researchers in neurology found that Gestalt laws provided an explanation for the mysterious processes of recovery and compensation in cases of brain damage. Writing in 1917, W. Poppelreuter noted that when certain brain-injured patients with visual field defects were shown a geometric figure in such a way that the image fell partly in the

117 • THE ENCHANTMENT OF GESTALT * "blind" area, their minds "filled in" the missing area, and they reported seeing a complete figure. He called this phenomenon "the totalizing Gestalt view."63 Finally, attempts were made within the inner circle of Gestalt theory to strengthen its philosophical and scientific rigor by making a case for conceptual continuity between it and new developments in the physical sciences. In a major statement, Physical Gestalts at Rest and in a Stationary State,64 Kohler suggested that "field" theory in physics was actually concerned with the problem of Gestalt as well—with phenomena he called "physical Gestalts" in which the whole or "field" determined the state of the parts. Examples he discussed included the distribution of particles in a fluid body and the distribution of a current of electricity in a network of wires. Kohler also pointed out that such systems, like their counterparts in psychology and biology, tended to be self-regulating, returning more or less rapidly to a state of equilibrium after disturbance.65 If physical Gestalts existed, then the next obvious step was to ask about the relationship between those Gestalts and the Gestalts that shaped conscious experience. It was likely, Kohler felt, that science would ultimately show that every psychological Gestalt mapped isomorphically onto a physical Gestalt state within the brain.66 The implications of all this work went beyond its varied effects on institutionalized experimental psychology. Wertheimer stressed that in fact Gestalt theory was attempting nothing less than a reformulation of basic principles of knowledge. By asserting that the vivid world of color and coherence experienced by humans must in fact serve as the first court of appeal in questions of reality, it aimed a direct challenge at the stifling epistemology of mechanistic science that, since the late seventeenth century, had considered nature (in Alfred North Whitehead's famous formulation) "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaning less ly."67 In that old philosophy of knowledge, only matter and motion were real, the rest was fantastical window-dressing dreamt by an erring consciousness. Gestalt theory aimed to give back to people the integrity of their consciousness. In so doing, this epistemology also affirmed what Goethe, in his way, had long known: that the basis of lived reality was not meaningless particles but rather "immanent structuralism," order, and wholeness.68

" A PEACEFULLY BLOSSOMING TREE": WERTHEIMER'S VISION FOR WEIMAR

But what did this new epistemology mean for Germany—especially for young Germans, who were searching after the lost war for answers about human existence but were largely unpersuaded by the pious pronouncements of the churches and the sterile nonanswers of modern science? On December 17, 1924, at an evening meeting of the Kant Society at the University of Berlin, Wertheimer delivered a major presentation on Gestalt theory in which he attempted to make clear just how he saw the matter.

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CHAPTER FOUR In examining his speech, we can benefit from revisiting Max Weber's famous talk, "Science as a Vocation," which had been given about five years earlier at the University of Munich and had dealt with some of the same themes that were to occupy Wertheimer. Lecturing directly in the wake of the lost war and the collapse of the old regime, Weber had known that the majority of students listening to his speech were deeply disillusioned with the values and priorities of their elders. Many, feeling themselves particularly oppressed by the dry and impersonal reality proclaimed by natural science, were demanding to know its relevance to pressing human concerns. In his talk, Weber had tackled this issue straight on. He had noted that the modern sciences were of a specialized character and inextricably bound to instrumentalist concerns. Science did not ask questions to provide humanity with answers to the burning questions of life but in order to dominate the world pragmatically. Indeed, the ultimate effect of "rational empirical knowledge" was to make questions of human meaning seem irrelevant and childish: Who, aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences, still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? If there is any such "meaning," along which road could one come upon its tracks? If these natural sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the "meaning" of the universe die out at its very roots. . . . Tolstoi has given us the simplest answer, with the words: "Science is meaningless because it gives no answers to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'" That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable.69 With its impersonal atoms and forces, science had turned humans into emotional orphans scrambling to recreate a meaningful space for themselves in the inadequate and artificial constructions of "culture" and "art. " As Weber noted: [C]ivilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become "tired of life" but not "satiated with life."... [W]hat he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very "progressiveness" it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.70 Yet, Weber was not prepared to advocate retreat into any "life philosophy" or other form of "intellectual mysticism" that denigrated reason. In the end, the message he preached to German youth was one of cosmic resignation coupled with accountability for personal choices. He well knew that the reality of the modern situation was a bitter pill to swallow, and for those who could not bear such a world, well, the doors of the churches were still open. Others might find solace, Weber thought, in the lives of small communities (including the communities of the youth movement) and in intimate circles of friends where something still "pulsated."

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Five years later, Wertheimer took the theme of scientific disenchantment to another student audience. Without any explicit reference to Weber's lectures, he nevertheless asked whether a Weberian attitude of stoicism and resignation was entirely necessary, suggesting it was actually based on a certain amount of misunderstanding. He acknowledged the apparent human poverty of the scientific world view and the efforts that had subsequently been made to affirm a radical separation of science and life: Science, it is said, has nothing to do with all these lovely things, science is sober and you must not demand of it what it cannot fulfill. You will recall the historical period of despair in science, when it was felt that by precise demarcation of the realms of science one would escape the "rationalism" and "intellectualism" of science. . . . And this attitude was manifested by its strongest and best advocates with a truly grandiose resignation.71 Yet Wertheimer was not prepared to join the "grandiosely resigned" just yet. He suggested that the apparent dissociation between knowledge and meaning, science and life was not inherent in physical reality but was instead an artifact of an outmoded epistemology and methodology. For most of his audience, Wertheimer knew, scientific knowledge was synonymous with piecemeal knowledge—knowledge that was content only when it had reduced a phenomenon down to dry, invisible particles interacting in accordance with the ironclad logic of some impersonal law: "Who would dare, scientifically, to attempt to grasp the rushing stream?" Wertheimer asked his audience. Then, in his next sentence, he deftly turned the tables on them: it was their understanding of science that was limited, not science itself: "And yet physics does it all the time! It is merely an outworn epistemological prejudice to suppose that physics deals merely in particles. On the contrary, physics has for many decades dealt just with what is flowing, streaming, controlled by wholeprocesses." 72 This was the good news of Gestalt theory—it showed that the scientific study of mind and consciousness, no less than of the physical world, could reconnect with the dynamic, whole-processes that people cared about because such processes corresponded to their lived experiences. Wertheimer argued that those who had fled from science into "idealism," denigrating the former as "materialistic," had been confusing a poor, washed-out map with a rich and complex territory; an incompetent portrait with a vital and beautiful subject. Whereas Weber argued that science had disenchanted the physical world for us, Wertheimer insisted that there was nothing unlovely or alienating about "material reality" when science was properly done: People speak of idealism as opposed to materialism, thereby suggesting something beautiful by idealism and by materialism something gloomy, barren, dry, ugly. Do they really mean by consciousness something opposed to, let us say, a peacefully blossoming tree? When one considers what one finds repellent in materialism and mechanism, and what seems great in idealism, does one find the

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material properties of the elements to be the issue? Frankly, there are psychological theories and even plenty of psychological textbooks which, though they speak continuously only of conscious elements, are more materialistic, dryer, more senseless and lifeless than a living tree which has probably no consciousness in it at all. It cannot matter of what materials the particles of the universe consist; what matters is the kind of whole, the significance of the whole, the meaning of the whole, the nature of the whole.73 This was more than just a professorial call for reforming the prevailing scientific epistemology and methodology. It was also a profoundly personal invitation to come home to a natural world governed not by alienating, senseless laws, but by principles of beauty. When Wertheimer proposed later in his talk that the world, looked at through the lens of Gestalt theory, might be compared to a Beethoven symphony, he was certainly—as Mitchell Ash has stressed—proposing that natural science could work in harmony with essential German cultural values.74 However, the connection he chose to make in this talk between laws of music, laws of consciousness, and laws of physics was not just an attempt to "overcome the sterile opposition of humanism and science" and to enhance the appeal of the natural sciences in the crisis atmosphere of Weimar.75 It was also an affirmation of a credo that declared the sufficiency of aesthetic experience—with music as the paradigm—for a meaningful human life. Years later, Rudolf Arnheim would recall that, for Wertheimer, "order, harmony and lawfulness [were] the fundamental facts of nature and . . . all deviations from them are secondary. . . . That is why he objected so passionately whenever what is wrong, evil or deformed was presented as the rule. His use of the word 'ugly' had the same metallic precision and objectivity that a low correlation has for the statistician."76 It is evident that the cultural story Wertheimer attempted to share with the students that evening in Berlin engaged as much the aesthete and musician in him as the scientist: it celebrated an epistemologically liberated world governed by laws that at once organized human thought, rushing streams, blossoming trees, and Beethoven symphonies. Scientific experimentation, carried out within the epistemological framework of Gestalt theory, became not something alienated from life, but an existentially satisfying way of understanding the principles governing the richly aesthetic reality in which human beings were rooted. As Wolfgang Kohler put it in an unpublished memorial talk for Wertheimer in 1943: "It was as though Saint Francis, whom Wertheimer so much resembled, had said, not only: 'My brother the fish or the bird,' but also: 'my great brother that majestic rock,' or 'my sister, that peaceful tune."' 77 Although at least one reviewer of Wertheimer's lecture suggested that he was attacking a caricature of an atomistic, piecemeal psychology that scarcely existed in the current day,78 many others resonated to the promise of a psychology that would restore meaning and existential immediacy to the study of human mental processes. A young Herbert Marcuse attended Wertheimer's £

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1924 Kant Society lecture and wrote the older man an appreciative letter the following day. Although he questioned whether Gestalt theory would ever be able to engage more than phenomenologically given facts in a scientific manner, he concluded nevertheless that the lecture "was for both me and my friends the most beautiful philosophical experience we have had as students."79 Some people also found in that promise a direct response to certain cultural and political themes of the Weimar years. The writer Robert Musil was a peer of the Gestaltists at the University of Berlin during the time they were all studying under Carl Stumpf and retained an interest in Gestalt theory long after he had left the psychology laboratory. For him, this approach to the mind continued to suggest a way toward a "vision of wholeness" that could avoid the anti-intellectualism and political extremism so often associated with such visions.80 As he wrote in 1922: "It is not the case that we have too much reason and not enough soul. . . . We don't think and take action with regard to our own [psychological] nature."81 For this reason, he applauded the rational holism of Gestalt theory: whoever "has the knowledge to understand it," he declared, "will experience how, on the basis of empirical science, the solution to ancient metaphysical difficulties is already implied."82 In the complicated debates of the time that looked to science to resolve questions about the "naturalness" of different political systems, Gestalt theory—at least in Wertheimer's formulations—seemed to tilt gently to the left. Mitchell Ash has found "suggestive remarks about the self and society" in Wertheimer's 1924 Berlin lecture that Ash feels suggest an attempt to use Gestalt theory to promote more collectivist thinking in politics. "For example, 'man is not only a part of a field, but a part and member of his group'; the notion of a separate ego only 'develops under very special circumstances.' Hence, just as elementary sensations are 'a late cultural derivative,* so too is possessive individualism. It is more natural, he implied, for people to work together for a common goal than to be in opposition to one another."83 At the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, leading Marxist critical theorist and Institute director, Max Horkheimer, actually entered into a sustained dialogue with Gestalt theory as part of his larger attempt to find a psychology in which to root social theory. Indeed, Horkheimer began his university career with the goal of becoming a Gestalt psychologist. He began doctoral work in 1921 with patients at the rehabilitation institute run by Kurt Goldstein and Gestalt psychologist Adhemar Gelb (see chapter 5), studying the orderly breakdown of function in the visual system. In the spring of 1922, however, Horkheimer's adviser, Friedrich Schumann, informed him that a project dealing with the topic of his dissertation had just been published in Copenhagen. Showing considerable grace under fire, Horkheimer switched his dissertation to a topic on Kant that he had pursued earlier in a seminar with the philosopher Hans Cornelius. He completed his doctorate under Cornelius in 1923.84 Even as he moved from experimental research to philosophy, however, Horkheimer maintained intellectual continuity with his initial interests.85

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• CHAPTER FOUR * Cornelius was an ideal mentor for a frustrated Gestalt theorist. At the turn of the century, he had himself persistently argued for the presence of Gestalt-like qualities of the mind that he believed shaped incoming sensory data into coherent wholes.86 Horkheimer's friend Theodor Adorno was also impressed with Cornelius' views on these matters, and wrote his own doctorate under Cornelius on Husserl's phenomenology.87 However, it was not until 1933, in a paper entitled "Materialism and Metaphysics," that Horkheimer looked explicitly to Wertheimer and his colleagues to help him defend dialectic materialism over the contemplative metaphysics of both positivism and idealism or intuitionism. He argued that positivism, which currently dominated the natural sciences, had a great deal in common with idealism and intuitionism, which the natural sciences overtly scorned. Specifically, positivism had "in common with intuitionism the subjectivist claim that immediate primary data, unaffected by any theory, are true reality." The only substantive distinction between the two was that positivism asserted in addition a "metaphysics of the elements, the interpretation of reality as a sum-total of originally isolated data, the dogma of the unchangeableness of the natural laws, [and] the belief in the possibility of a definitive system."88 Dialectical materialism, which Horkheimer wished to defend, agreed with positivism that reality was "only what is given in sense experience." At the same time, it eschewed the naive tendency of positivism to "absolutize" sensation into a totalizing framework for knowledge. The sophisticated dialectical materialist knew: Theory is always more than sensibility alone and cannot be totally reduced to sensations. In fact, according to the most recent developments in psychology, far from being the elementary building blocks of the world or even of psychic life, sensations are derivatives arising only through a complicated process of abstraction involving the destruction of formulations which the psyche had shaped.89 Here followed an extended footnote crediting the Gestaltists with having demonstrated that perception, far from being a sum of sensations, was in fact initially "given" to consciousness as a flowing totality. The analytic act that permitted the dissection of such a holistic perception into what "we call sensations" (to use Wertheimer's words) came later, if at all. In other words, the analytic form of elemental perceiving (again, after Wertheimer) was merely a "cultural product" that had "little to do" with what was "really fundamental." "[T]he whole literature on Gestalt theory," Horkheimer concluded, was not just "an unsupported philosophical rejection of the doctrine of psychic elements," but offered "strict proofs of the nonindependence of sensations."90 All this not only challenged the "absolutism" of sensation fetishized by positivism, but also affirmed what Stanley Aronowitz has termed "the core of dialectical theory": "that the world of perception is a 'product of human activity.'" 91 Earlier, Horkheimer had criticized Marxism's rejection of psychology, which it had explained away as an invention of bourgeois idealism. Horkheimer argued in contrast, that the insights of psychology were essential

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to effective historical theorizing. But what kind of psychology would do? In his 1932 paper, Horkheimer had spoken approvingly of a psychoanalysis that, like the work of his colleague Erich Fromm, would focus on humanity's less rational ideological and psychological motivations.93 As is well known, the Frankfurt school's interest in synthesizing Marxism with psychoanalysis would, if anything, intensify throughout the 1930s. At the same time, in "Materialism and Metaphysics," Horkheimer recognized an additional need in critical theory for the insights of something like Gestalt psychology. In emphasizing how reality emerged out of a dialectic between "theories" (categories, Gestalts) and sensation, Gestalt psychology, far more clearly than psychoanalysis, validated the intellectual and social significance of the-Frankfurt school in the world. In the early 1930s, it was the only psychology that offered any reason for believing in theory as an active, constructive force in material history and therefore a needed partner in the struggle to produce a more equitable, humane society. No wonder, then, that Horkheimer welcomed Wertheimer's appointment in 1929 to the faculty of Frankfurt University with what Mitchell Ash has called "remarkable praise." In a letter to the dean of the Natural Sciences Faculty, Horkheimer wrote: The emergence of a new science of life, which strives to unify physiological and psychological investigation has greater importance for real knowledge than all hasty "syntheses" of cultural totality. But I have nowhere found a higher concept of the philosophical and general weight of such strivings than in the writings of Gelb and Wertheimer.94

ATTACKS ON THE BERLIN GESTALT VISION

At the same time, the effort to unite psychology and physics—mind and matter—in a common holistic framework, would also disappoint, even repel, many who had hoped to glean a more "enchanted" and personal message from holistic science. Walter Riese, who became holistic neurology's first historian, late in life spoke disparagingly of the watered-down version of Gestalt used by the "so-called Gestalt psychologists," for whom all psychological experience was just an impersonal "field" and who had no conception of the Goethean synthesis of joy and suffering that bring experience together into a meaningful whole or Gestalt.95 For many others, it was Gestalt theory's monism, with its explicit courting of the physical sciences, that especially rankled. For advocating this aspect of the theory, Wertheimer's colleague Wolfgang Kohler came under particular fire, and one of his most spirited debating partners was the vitalistic biologist Hans Driesch. The Gestaltists, in their turn, had from the outset expressed a united scorn for the "vitalistic" solution-to mechanism that Driesch had been advocating since before the First World War (a solution that introduced a nonmaterial "added factor," the entelechy, to explain the ways in which the

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CHAPTER FOUR * whole shaped and directed its own parts). As Wertheimer put it in an unpublished lecture (probably given in the early 1930s), Gestalt theory and vitalism were both interested in the way in which the whole related to its parts, but the introduction of such Drieschian dualistic concepts as psychoid and entelechy had been obscurantist and pernicious. Wertheimer concluded by noting (in parenthesis) that Driesch "had gone over to the camp of the spiritualists." The message was clear.96 Driesch, for his part, was not a man to shrink before an argument of principle. In a feisty article published in Annalen der Philosophie (Annals of Philosophy) in 1925, he took on Wolfgang Kohler's concept of "physical Gestalts" and set out to prove it an oxymoron. Stressing his high respect for his "adversaries (and I must . . . call them 'adversaries')," he made the point that the physical systems identified by Kohler in fact proved that inorganic structures never are and cannot become true holistic systems "from themselves," "out of their own nature": They are out of their own nature only functional unities, and all "holism" . . . is forced on them through something external, namely the "topography." The latter may indeed be whole . .. [but it], the physical form, is also a product of intelligence, something that has been constructed by the physicist—a Machine, if we wish to use the word very broadly.... What does all this have to do with biological wholes and holistic organizations? Nothing at all.97 In other words, a living human mind could impose intelligent order on an inorganic object, but this in no sense endowed the object itself with any innate ordering capacities. "So Kohler himself at bottom uses the concept of the Machine for his inorganic physical structures, the same concept which according to him, when used in biology, must end in vitalism!"98 A year later, Driesch reiterated his case, this time largely in reference to Kurt Koffka (who had critically reviewed Driesch's book The Crisis in Psychology): "Koffka returns perpetually to the point that, beside vitalism and mechanism . . . there is a third option, the doctrine of 'physical Gestalts.' But this doctrine cannot exist, because there do not exist any physical Gestalts.... Kohler and his school falsely equate unity with wholeness."99 The Gestalt theorists were also sharply criticized within academic psychology itself.100 The most prolonged and bitter attack (enduring into the 1950s) was developed by Felix Krueger and his Leipzig school of Ganzheitspsychologie, an alternative holistic psychology (see figure 21).101 They claimed that everything original to their Berlin rivals was ideologically tainted and shortsighted—everything not in dispute had been long known to other psychologists. For example, Krueger complained that the Berlin researchers seemed unaware that their claim "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" had been central to the work of his predecessor Wundt, and that of others, for many years. Wertheimer and his cohort had no right to turn the idea into what Krueger interpreted as a political party slogan.102

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Figure 21. Felix Krueger (1874-1948). Felix Krueger, Zur Philosophie und Psychologie der Ganzheit: Schriften aus den Jaren 1918-1940, (Berlin: Copyright Springer-Verlag, 1953). As to what was offensive about the Berlin program, Albert Wellek, one of Leipzig's sturdiest proponents, recalled the official points of contention as follows: (1) The Gestaltists had focused narrowly on Gestalt experiences as completed events given in "the intellectual realm of consciousness" and had wholly neglected the "pre-gestalt" developmental processes that actually create Gestalts and that occur in the "pre-logical" and "irrational" domains of mind; (2) The Gestaltists were "decided epiphenomenologists, not to say materialists," who ultimately hoped to bring psychology into a common framework with physics. This "monistic" goal had the reductionistic effect of subordinating the whole realm of the mental to a mindless nonorganic principle.103 The terms of abuse—intellectualist, epiphenomenologist, materialist, monistic—were loaded with overtones, for those with the ears to hear. Mitchell Ash has stressed how the Leipzig school, by charging the Gestalt theorists with neglect of the "pre-logical" irrational role of feeling and will in experi-

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ence, "reproduced the dichotomy between German Kultur and Western civilization that was central to conservative thought at the time." 104 Identification with the values of Zivilisation impugned the Berlin school with lack of Germanness, superficiality, liberalism, rationalism, Americanism, and soullessness. Elsewhere, Wellek asserted that the Gestalt theorists' monism further allied them with the hated scientistic agenda of logical positivists like Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, who dreamt of a "unity of the sciences" rooted in physics.105 There was more than one way to "hear" the common complaint that Gestalt theory was a "psychology without a soul" because it had no theory of the experiencing subject.106 And it was no surprise to at least some critics that Gestalt theory, like psychoanalysis, seemed a product of essentially Jewish (materialistic, rationalistic, unrooted) thinking and decadent big-city life.107 As the Austrian holistic psychologist Ferdinand Weinhandl remarked in the 1940s: Gestalt psychology, "is just as much a product of authentic Jewish spirit as Husserl's phenomenology."108 Like Horkheimer, Krueger had been a student of Hans Cornelius. Probably under his influence, he concluded that all atomistic approaches to psychological experience were misguided because subjective processes were necessarily of an holistic nature.109 Later, as Wertheimer and his colleagues began arguing for the structured nature of psychological processes, Krueger would stress how much more encompassing was the Leipzig school's understanding of holistic psychological processes, how it incorporated an appreciation for the many diffuse experiences that did not (or did not yet) possess structured Gestalt. In Krueger's view, such diffuse "total experiences" were characterized by their associated affect-color or feelings: what he came to call the Komplexquaiitaten (complex qualities) of all holistic experiences. One of the major research objectives of the Leipzig school was to explore these diffuse realms of feeling, and especially to unmask the normally unconscious steps through which they slowly coalesced into conscious Gestalts (a process the school called Aktualgenese, sometimes translated as "microgenesis"). In one series of experiments developed by Leipziger Friedrich Sander, a person's effective processing of a particular stimulus was undermined by the introduction of a range of impediments (dramatically reducing presentation time, miniaturizing or enlarging the stimulus, distorting it, darkening it, etc.). The claim was that as the number of impediments to effective processing were increased stepwise, subjects found themselves becoming conscious of the normally unconscious "complex qualities" that characterized perceptual processing leading to Gestalts. Asked to describe their perceptual experiences under these degraded conditions, they used terms like "exotic," "generalhumanoid," and "animal-like-dynamic." Sander also recorded that his subjects experienced an uncomfortable sensation of "hanging," or incompletion; they felt themselves impelled to struggle toward a "cooler," more impersonal perceptual resolution or Endgestalt.uo The finished Gestalt, in other words, was the product of a powerful interaction between emotion and will. And this entire drama had been completely neglected by the Gestalt theorists, who, in

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a sense, only stood up and took notice at the point that perception was taking its final curtain call! The final important—and in a sense, most opaque—concept introduced by the Leipzig school was "Structure." This was Krueger's term to describe the Gestalter behind the Gestalt, the unconscious force that actually created all the subjective phenomena experienced (but not produced) by consciousness itself. Geutcr describes Krueger's Structure as "something Iying-behind, that which can only be inferred, something that manifests itself in the coloring of experience, becoming especially pronounced in the depth of feelings but nevertheless which has a dispositional existence. Structure was not just an explanatory model but direct Being."" 1 Operationally, Structure was the holistic pattern of a person's dispositions, capabilities, habits, and inclinations and so on. It endowed every individual with an innate urge toward wholeness and meaning and thus explained why phenomenological experience should have a holistic character. At the same time, it was the source of every person's personal identity. As the Leipzigers saw it, Structure could address, in a way that Gestalt theory could not, the fact of individual differences in perception and experience. Structure, in other words, united the study of holistic perception and cognition with the concerns of personality typology or characterology. In a society increasingly preoccupied with "racial" traits and differences, this part of the Leipzig program was particularly attractive. Initially, Leipzig focused on identifying a spectrum of perceptual and cognitive styles into which people in general could be sorted: on one end were the rational "analytic" types; on the other end were the "feeling-holistic" types driven by intuition. Transcending these two extremes and combining the strengths of both was the rare synthesizer able to combine the insights of intuition with the insights of analysis into new creative Gestalts. Wellek, recalling Nietzsche's discussion of a "strong type, in whom our [collective] strengths are synthetically united," proposed calling such synthesizers "super types." Friedrich Sander spoke of them as "Gestalt-productive" individuals, while Krueger called them "Gestalt imaginative geniuses."112 In Weimar's discontented final years, these images and metaphors allowed Leipzig to emphasize increasingly racist and conservative themes. At the Twelfth Congress of the German Society for Psychology, held in Hamburg in 1931, Krueger could suggest, to the general gratification of his audience, that the Germans as a race possessed a peculiar genius for Gestalt construction, endowed as they were with an innate capacity to synthesize holistic intuition with analytic rigor: "We Germans are actually gifted in grasping the inner reality of the world as such with our souls, and at the same time we rigorously reflect on it, scientifically research it, and simultaneously describe it in didactic terms." 113 Krueger's nationalistic tale had an increasingly apocalyptic side as well: the increasing infiltration of alien traditions into Germany meant that a people with a genius for Gestalt thinking and perception were in danger of succumbing to soulless, fragmented thinking and of losing their bonds with authentic

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community values. In a 1932 paper, Krueger acknowledged openly that his own scientific concerns were stamped by a preoccupation with the "dangerous crisis" of his time: "Life itself in this time, especially on German soil, drives our inquiries beyond normal borders, out of a more than theoretical necessity."114 In this particular paper, Krueger pointed out the dangers not only of the soulless lie of liberalism, but also (although more sympathetically) of the diffuse, frightened irrationalism of "life philosophy." Calling for hardness of vision, he found in the Leipziger tropes of Wholeness and Structure the ingredients for a synthesis that could provide direction for a crisis-laden society. Only when wholeness was tempered with order, he believed, did Germany stand a chance of defending itself against Western chaos, machine technology, a factory society, and racial degeneration. And he went on to say, in an apparent allusion to the rising National Socialist party, that philosophers, scientists, and other defenders of Kultur must cooperate with politicians for the greater good of the whole: The West will fall prey to chaos, and the less noble races will win the upper hand, unless one makes way for a reformation from top to bottom. This is what human existence needs now. Everything must be worked out new down to the last detail, so fundamentally that the political and the economic will at last be encompassed in it.... The sciences and philosophy alone will not be able to accomplish what is now mandated. Even the arts, left to themselves, are capable of little in face of the needs associated with such an historical turning point. But the greater the danger, the more necessary are these forces of order, of symbol building, of spiritual leadership [found in science, philosophy, and art]. And all the more decisively must they, in working unity with remaining events, orient themselves toward that place where everything bearing the stamp of life and all spiritual community finds its roots; that is to say, they must look toward the Whole that is constrained by inner Form.115

THE RISE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND WERTHEIMER'S EMIGRATION TO AMERICA

AS the conservative domestic attacks on the Berlin school grew more strident, Wertheimer's belated 1929 call to the "Jewish" and "red" university of Frankfurt (bound by charter mandate to racial nondiscrimination) afforded him only a fragile security. In a 1928 letter to Wertheimer, Adh^mar Gelb, the Gestalt psychologist—already on the faculty at Frankfurt—admitted how he himself, as a Jew, had "suffered terribly" over many years "out of sheer ideology," but nevertheless found hope in Wertheimer's appointment: "You will see how quickly, with due account for the personalities of the German psychologists, there will follow a radical [positive] change toward you personally and toward the entire Gestalt psychology."116

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Yet Wertheimer himself seems to have sensed that time was working against this vision of reconciliation. Even as he set about strengthening Gestalt psychology's international ties, offering exciting interdisciplinary seminars, and cultivating his relationships with Frankfurt intellectuals like Max Horkheimer, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, and socialist Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, he was also palpably uneasy with the gathering political clouds.117 One former student, Wolfgang Metzger, recalled how, in 1931, he was advised by Wertheimer to hurry up and complete his Habilitationsschrift (an advanced thesis necessary for German university teaching), if he wished to continue working under Wertheimer's sponsorship: "Certainly you have not forgotten that I am a Jew. Next March there are the Prussian state elections, and you do not know whether I, Mr. Wertheimer, can still sponsor you after those elections."118 Wertheimer left Germany voluntarily in 1933, almost as soon as the new political situation had become clear. Going first to Marienbad, Bohemia, he wrote to the University of Frankfurt and requested a leave of absence. He seriously considered, then ultimately declined, an opportunity urged on him by Buber to take up a position at the newly formed University of Jerusalem (today the Hebrew University). Wooed also by the fledging "University in Exile" at the New School in New York, Wertheimer arrived in the United States on September 13, 1933. Twelve days later, he received formal notice from the University of Frankfurt of his enforced termination as a nonAryan.119 The so-called University in Exile, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and directed by the energetic Alvin Johnson, aimed at once to offer employment to scholars fleeing National Socialism and to recreate on American soil the kind of free, interdisciplinary scholarship that Americans associated with the best of the German universities during the height of the Weimar years. Based at the Institute for Social Research in New York City and soon reconceived as the Graduate Faculty of that school, this unique European oasis helped support 178 of the almost 2,000 exiled academics who settled in the United States between 1933 and 1944, more than were sponsored by any other American university.120 Wertheimer was passionately committed to the success of this German faculty-in-exile, calling it "the most intensive, modern and interesting expression of the solidarity which modern science and civilization ever demonstrated."121 His involvement in the institute's interdisciplinary general seminar had, according to his old friend Edwin Newman, "an almost religious flavor."122 Wertheimer offered German and English classes and lectures that attracted eager students from all over New York City, including the psychologist Abraham Maslow (who attended Wertheimer's first seminar in exile, given in the fall of 1933).123 A number of historians and psychologists have examined ways in which Gestalt psychology was forced to adapt to American research agendas and values.124 At the most basic level, certain subtleties of the Gestaltists' argu-

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• CHAPTER FOUR ment necessarily suffered in the course of their translation into English. The problem, in the dry words of an anonymous reviewer of Kohler's book Gestalt Psychology, was that the word "Gestalt" simply had "too much significance in German, in English too little."125 Perhaps even more distressing, German intellectuals from various fields found their American colleagues to be "naive fellows, pedestrian, commonsensical, down-to-earth, and hypnotized by facts."126 When, for example, Karl Dallenbach asked the American psychologist E. B. Titchener what color theory he believed in, Titchener replied: "Why, I believe in none of them. Facts are all important. Carry your theories lightly."127 Kurt Koffka, who had come to the United States in 1927 to take up a position at Smith College, was blunt about the way in which Gestalt psychology had downplayed its philosophical concerns in order to enhance its Yankee palatability: When the first attempts were made to introduce Gestalt theory to the American public, that side which would most readily appeal to the type of German mentality was kept in the background, and those aspects which had a direct bearing on science were emphasized. Had the procedure been different, we might have incurred the danger of biasing our readers against our ideas.128 A more pragmatic message was emphasized instead. Given the dominance of an aggressive behaviorist psychology in the American universities during this period, the Gestaltists concentrated their energies on pointing out the empirical wrongheadedness of a psychology that rejected consciousness as an object of inquiry.129 They coupled these critiques with attacks on a range of other American pernicious ideologies: materialism, physical reductionism, naturalism, various biologically oriented doctrines like social Darwinism, and psychoanalysis, which—though it had central European origins—Wertheimer abhorred for its piecemeal view of mind and its degrading focus on sexuality.130

WOLFGANG KOHLER'S CASE TO AMERICANS FOR THE REALITY OF VALUES IN A WORLD OF FACTS

In the context of this general, not always comfortable process of immigrant adjustment and intellectual tuning, Wertheimer's colleague Wolfgang Kohler soon emerged as a voice to be reckoned with. Kohler, who was not Jewish, had been one of the few German professors with the courage officially to protest academic "coordination" under the new order. Although not dismissed for this, his institute was denounced for continuing to favor Jews at the expense of "Germans," while an increasingly Nazified student body accused junior researchers in the institute of communist activities.131 When it became clear that his institute would not be left in peace, Kohler left Berlin in 1934 for a position at Swarthmore College in the United States.

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Colleagues recalled Kohler as having been the most "German," the most arrogant, and the least accessible of the Gestaltists who emigrated to the United States. The Mandlers noted how he, at one point, referred to his book, Gestalt Psychology, as having been written for "the American children"—rrthat is to say, American academics and graduate students.132 Frederick Wyatt, a Viennese-born psychoanalyst, recalled how Kohler in America "struck [him] like a Prussian officer . . . [or] a Colonel. . . . A little bit strutting, quite gentlemanly withal, but also imperious. It was very hard.to discuss anything with him; he knew the answers."133 A Nevertheless, Kohler's aloofness toward his American colleagues should not be confused with cynicism. On the contrary, his years in America after his emigration from Germany were active and impassioned. Drawing on the German existential preoccupations and tropes of crisis from the 1920s, he repackaged them in a form fit for American readers in the 1930s and beyond. In his classic text, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (first published in 1938), Kohler looked to Gestalt theory to reclaim a place for "value" in a harsh, empty world dominated by the reductionist, positivist spirit of what he called "Nothing But" (that defined humans as "nothing but" products of chemistry and mechanics). Positivism, which had spread with the growth of natural science, had resulted in an existential crisis and loss of values so profound that people felt robbed of all "stable convictions beyond their personal interests." Under the influence of positivism, life itself had begun to seem cheap since, according to the pernicious philosophy of Nothing But, "the corpse and the living adult have the same value."134 Such a dark picture of humanity had in turn social consequences. As Kohler saw it, positivism threatened the world, not merely with the amorality of selfinterest (illustrated in capitalist America) but also with irrational fanaticism (seen in Nazi Germany). Fanaticism resulted from the fact that "most people are unable to live without a frame of reference . . . which would make their existence meaningful in spite of so much misfortune." If competent people like professors and scientists were unwilling to provide hungry souls with a credible world view, then (as Kohler put it) "people will naturally turn to surrogates, to Ersatz. Strange food will be eagerly swallowed in times of famine. 135 A nutritionist for his times, Kohler believed that Gestalt theory could provide the basis for a renewed belief in the objective existence of value without sacrificing rationalism and natural knowledge. Positivism was the enemy, not science. In explaining the ways in which this was so, Kohler argued that studies in perception had shown that psychological experience was not just an arbitrary creation of subjectivity projected onto external and ultimately unknowable objects ("subjectivism"). Perception, rather, was made up of Gestalts that resulted as much from the external world as they did from internal processes. When an object awakened a conviction of value within us (emotional, aesthetic, ethical), this value was, at least in part, an attribute of the object in question, not just a projection from ourselves. In other words, experiences of

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CHAPTER FOUR • value (something is beautiful, an act is morally elevating) were direct perceptual experiences with external references, no less than impressions of roundness, wetness, and so on. If this was the case, then it followed that there existed something in the physical world that corresponded to percepts of value. Kohler used the term "physical" here with great deliberateness. His final argument was that "value" was a special case of the Gestalt law of "requiredness" (where objects were "pulled" to relate to other objects in a certain way). Requiredness had been shown by Gestalt theory to exist in phenomena ranging from visual ordering of objects to melodies to the physical force fields described by Maxwell. In this sense, the same basic Gestalt laws could be supposed to guide the activities of electrons and the ethical interactions of human beings! This said, Kohler noted that science, up to the present time guided by positivism, had actually been inconsistent in its attempts to defend a value-free reality. While asserting that objective reality was without inherent value, it admitted that at least one animal species (human beings) could perceive value relationships in the world. Confronted with such an embarrassing Trojan horse,136 science was forced to gloss over a key contradiction in Darwinian theory, the cornerstone of all modern biology: If humans had evolved from a reality devoid of value, then why would they have emerged with normative perceptual capacities? Why should one portion of objective reality consistently discover values and norms in various other portions of objective reality when, according to science, values did not objectively exist? Kohler concluded on a note of high optimism and practicality. Guided by Gestalt theory, science could finally discard "the thesis that the functional characteristics of value are absent from nature." The world would begin to make sense again, and humanity would rediscover its existential moorings: "[T]he inconsistency [between science and experienced reality] would disappear, the unity of knowledge would potentially be established, and evolution would become a principle which [made] sense."137

WERTHEIMER'S "GESTALT LOGIC" AS AN ANTIDOTE TO DEMAGOGUERY

Like Kohler, Wertheimer was preoccupied after 1933 with the universal implications of the historically specific dilemmas of his time. Between 1934 and 1940, he produced four major papers: one on truth, one on ethics, one on democracy, and one on freedom.138 He thought that these four concepts were under grave threat from the spread of such fashionable attitudes in academia as positivism, pragmatism, and cultural relativism as well as from the rise of fascism in Europe. In fact, as he saw it, these scholarly fashions had helped prepare a field in which it became possible for the Nazis to succeed.139 The problem was not, as people like Freud were declaring, that human be-

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ings were fundamentally instinct-driven, nasty animals for whom ethical b e - ^ havior was just a matter of pragmatics, or as neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm were arguing, herd-creatures terrified of freedom. Wertheimer's cool religion of aesthetics that bound human thought with elegantly blooming trees and Beethoven symphonies recoiled before such unsavory ideas. The problem, rather, was that developments of the modern age had crippled humanity's ability to think well. The enemy was not human evil or even human loss of nerve; it was "piecemeal" thinking—strings of propositions torn from their original living context and wielded by demagogues and clever intellectuals in such a way so as to seduce basically decent people into embracing unconscionable political positions. Some years earlier, in 1912, Wertheimer had analyzed the number systems of "primitive" people and, in the process, had cast a cold, critical eye on-the classical principles of Western logic. It had long been recognized that socalled primitive people had difficulty understanding an arithmetical system that abstracted numerical units from concrete questions about the object to be counted (i.e., a system in which a unit was counted the same whether it referred to a pineapple, a grain of rice, or someone's mother). For "natural, realistic thinking people," such distinctions were in fact central to "correct" counting and logical classification. Wertheimer considered this approach to sorting out the world no less logical or intelligent than that demanded by abstract Western systems; indeed, Wertheimer saw in it the workings of a living logic rooted in the way human minds spontaneously work, and therefore perhaps truer and less artificial than the system of the West. "Naturally"thinking people did not simply shuffle through arbitrary logical operations using abstract "units" but instead operated within a larger framework of "biological relevance." They reasoned in terms of the structural logic or Gestalt of the living situation.140 There is more than a hint of a romantic Wandervogel-style critique in this early defense by Wertheimer of "natural" Gestalt logic against Western sequential logic. Now, more than twenty years later and in a greatly altered political climate, he could discover a new set of cultural imperatives in the basic arguments of that 1912 essay. Teaching people to think in "structural truths" according to "Gestalt logic" was society's best defense against ethical relativism and "piecemeal" thinking run amok and was therefore its best hope for reclaiming and protecting principles like truth, freedom, democracy, and universalist ethics. The argument can be reconstructed as it developed across the four essays. In "On Truth" (1934), Wertheimer aimed to clarify the distinction between Truth on the one hand and mere facts—mere summations of accurate individual propositions—on the other: "[I]f our world were in every instance nothing more than the sum of isolated facts, if we had to do only with 'atomic facts,' then the old definition of truth, the t and f, would be adequate." As things were, though, the world was constructed of wholes and patterns of relation,

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CHAPTER FOUR something that traditional logic failed to recognize. For this reason, facts about the world were necessary, but they were not in themselves sufficient guarantors of Truth. Instead, Truth turned out to be a matter of grasping the significance of different facts in terms of their relationship to one another and to a larger whole: "A thing may be true in the piecemeal sense, and false, indeed a lie, as a part in its whole."141 The implications of this were more than merely academic. Hypnotized by the hegemony of positivism, the public had been sold on the erroneous belief that factual information was necessarily trustworthy and was unaware of the way in which facts could be displaced from their authentic context and made into willful untruths. Germany saw this kind of deception during the First World War when newspapers, "compelled to give out reports in the exact words of the general staff," nevertheless "achieved what they wanted by the use of heavy type for some parts." By thus "shifting the emphasis, displacing the center of gravity," the newspapers were able to create a false figure-ground effect that left an impression in readers' minds "entirely opposite" to that intended by the original reporters.142 A year later, in his essay "Some Problems in the Theory of Ethics," Wertheimer pursued his argument a step further. He began by looking critically at the currently popular thesis of ethical relativity, which denied the existence of ethical universals. Ethical systems were instead regarded as "mere historical facts . . . changing with place or time." 143 For Wertheimer, this thesis was contradicted by "experience," indicating that most people, "when faced with clear, actual injustice," responded spontaneously in ways that human beings would universally consider decent and ethical: "[T]he conditions often are not so difficult, if the situation is clear, transparent, simple and actual, and if there are not conditions of blindness, etc." 144 While it was true that the "outer shell" imposed by different cultures held a considerable grip on people under most circumstances, these tended to fall away "in a serious moment," and the fundamentally "simple, good" person tended to emerge: There seem to be layers in men, and it is a question of fact what the inner layers of men really are.... I would believe that the optimistic thesis [i.e., the thesis that human beings are fundamentally good] is the right one, however difficult . . . it may be at times to penetrate to this layer.145 To engage the inner, ethical core of a person, Wertheimer continued, one must help that person analyze situations structurally and relationally with an emotional "will to do justice to the material." Ethical action of a universally recognized type, Wertheimer believed, followed spontaneously from a grasp of the Truth of the situation, as he had defined the word in his paper of 1934. Conversely, problems resulted when a person's capacity to see a situation truly (in its Gestalt or structural interconnectedness) was distorted or constrained. Wertheimer did not have to search far for an example of how such distortion might function:

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135 A young, idealistic party member is passionate in the negative evaluation of members of a certain race. It is not sufficient in such cases to give the formulation: in one system of evaluations, members of this race are positively evaluated, in another negatively. This young man perhaps behaves thus only because he has been brought to this state through suggestion, propaganda, through the wanton slander that this race is a poisonous snake. He does not really behave with respect to A (members of this race) but to a B which he has been taught to identify with this race. The real problem here lies not only in the behavior of the young man, but in the enforcement of the blind identification. . . . To take away by artifice the possibility of seeing the true situation, through the enforcement of blind judgments, of improper narrowing of the mental field, induction of blind centering, deprives man of the prerequisites for our problems.'46 Here Wertheimer comes close to suggesting that Germany's embrace of anti-Semitism and National Socialism was due to profound misunderstanding based on "piecemeal" reasoning rather than conviction—it was a sickness of logic rather than, as so many of Wertheimer's peers were saying, a phenomenon driven by powerful feeling and unleashed instinct. Similarly, in his essay of 1937 on the idea of democracy, he indicated that the widespread rejection among Germans of the Weimar government could also have been avoided if people had just been taught to look at democracy, not in terms of its isolated trappings, but in terms of the role it played in the larger Gestalt of society. For example, tackling one of the features of democracy most despised by conservative Germans—rule by brute numbers—he wrote: In order to understand such an item as the majority principle we must not be satisfied with stating it by itself. We must go on to the role it plays in the hierarchical structure of the whole. Without this, we fail to understand it at all.147 What was this role, and that of democracy in general? For Wertheimer, it was less to create a "form of government, a sum of institutions" and more to create an atmosphere in which individuals were free, fair, and tolerant of one another, and in which honesty and the pursuit of truth could proceed unfettered. Democracy was therefore the only thinkable form of government. In a passionate lecture given shortly after his arrival at the New School, Wertheimer affirmed his understanding of the intimate relationship between the collective imperative to preserve democracy and the individual imperatives to honor truth, universal ethics, and freedom. He made a commitment—he called it his "holy task"—to direct all the power of Gestalt logic (relational thinking) toward preserving these principles: We know that we are not remote from the world, even as scholars. We are not naive enough any more to hide from ourselves the dependency of our thinking on the purposes that we are aiming at, and also on the interests in which we are involved.

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The more we realize this fact, the greater our responsibility to be on our guard, to keep our eyes clear and our minds honest... . [F]acts are always arguments, and [we must]... understand and . . . criticise fairly all arguments put to us from the point from where they originated [i.e., not isolated from their natural context or whole]. . . . Looking at our task in this light we realise that our work is not merely a matter of logical [i.e., sequential] thinking. Logical thinking might be misled. We have to guard all our steps, in order to retain our independent minds and to meet the expectations laid upon us. . . . [T]hough tolerance and freedom cannot be proved by science as the only possible aims—still it goes without saying that there is no science beyond the realm of freedom, tolerance, and independence. And all those who obey the strict command of any authority in their thinking, who do not believe in liberty and freedom, forfeit their character and ability as scholars, however heroic, sincere and fair their conviction or spirit may be. . . . [T]hey have not the right to call themselves scholars, but rather defendants of a creed bound by human powers, not able any more to go their way in freedom. . . . They forfeit the right of thinking, that eternal right, that duty entrusted to mankind, that sole guarantee for enlightenment and progress.148 With the Second World War in Europe spreading and Germany in the grip of a demagogic leader bent on world conquest, Wertheimer made good on his commitment by turning yet again to the analytic power of Gestalt to help him defend the concept of "freedom" against its many enemies. His essay on the topic, "A Story of Three Days," the last and probably the best of the quartet, brings together the key insights and perspectives of his earlier essays. The essay is an autobiographical parable, steeped in religious rhetoric suggestive of a Paul Bunyan-style narrative of a pilgrim's progress and final revelation. It bears all the earmarks of being Wertheimer's final affirmation of faith in the power of Gestalt to lead the world into a post-Hitler era of freedom: I shall report what happened in the course of three days to a good man who, facing the world situation, longed for a clarification of the fundamentals of freedom. He saw: ideological devaluation of freedom had spread; freedom in the humane meaning of the word was proclaimed false, outworn, useless; and the radiance of the old idea was often exploited for other ends. . . . Even men who loved freedom deeply often felt helpless in the face of actual arguments. So it was with our man; not that he felt uncertain in many or most of the concrete issues but he felt impelled to reach a fundamental clarification. What at bottom is freedom? What does it require? Why is it so dear to me?149 In Wertheimer's story, this good man begins his quest for understanding by visiting a sociologist, who tells him that "ethical standards are relative." Does this mean, replies the man, that "our ideas of freedom [are] merely the historical standards of a certain time, now perhaps outworn? Are there no fundamental standards; are the requirements of freedom a fairy tale?" 150

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The sociologist has to concede that, yes, there are no "axioms" that would allow him "to speak of fundamental standards." The man is appalled: wasn't this "one of the factors that paved the way for political leaders proclaiming new and other national or racial ethics, willfully and efficiently?" Hard-pressed to reply, the sociologist finally proposes that freedom might have something to do with "absence of restraints, of compulsions, of external hindrances." Leaving the sociologist, the man next reads a book on culture written in 1928 "by a famous psychoanalyst" a clear reference to Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud. Here it is suggested, in line with the sociologist's thought, that freedom is indeed absence of restraint on "instinctual impulses." Yet the "famous psychoanalyst" concludes from this that freedom is therefore impossible in a civilized society, since "every culture must be built up on coercion and instinctual renunciation." The man, growing increasingly impassioned, knows that matters must be otherwise. In despair, he pays a visit to a philosopher, who informs him that science and modern philosophy had demonstrated that freedom was an illusion since everything occurred under a principle of determination or causal necessity. Bewildered by this last revelation and having already spent three days in search of wisdom from the cultural authorities of his time, the man reviews what he has learnt and suddenly finds it "strange, narrow, inadequate, superficial, . . . blind."151 Looking anew at the problem, he decides that freedom was not a thing "to be viewed piecemeal in terms of a choice, of a wish, of an 'instinctual impulsion,' etc.," but in terms of a total situation. The slave whose whole being changes upon coming to live in a new, free social environment shows that freedom involves "one's whole attitude." In this sense, understanding freedom required returning to the living situation and studying the intellectual and social conditions that made it possible, much like a "biologist studying health conditions":152 [Hje felt as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. The real question was, what kind of attitude, what rules, what institutions make for the free, what for the unfree? The real problem is not . . . that all determination, all causes and influences are factors against freedom, the problem is which ones are? This is a matter of causes and consequences; some make for freedom in men, some for unfreedom."153 These were the real issues: that people were forced to tolerate and even collude with injustice and evil; that individuals, even children, were being blinded with willfully distorted information and thus made incapable of free judgment, "robbed of what in man and society is humane." Freedom needed to be understood not in the abstract, but in terms of its living manifestations: "What matters is how men are and how they develop, how society is and how it develops. Freedom is a Gestalt quality of attitude, of behavior, of a man's thinking, of his actions" that can only emerge under appropriate, that is, democratic, social conditions.154 Wertheimer died in 1943, less than two years before the Allied forces tri-

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CHAPTER FOUR umphed over the armies of the country of his birth and brought fascist rule in Germany to a close. His final work, Productive Thinking, was published in 1945. A practical blueprint for the application of Gestalt thinking in the service of a free society, it attempted to show in concrete ways how thinking well (Gestalt thinking) is the starting point for all freedom and ethical justice: 155 Here lie great tasks for democracy. Critical attitudes, skepticism, do not suffice. What is needed is structural clearness. There is the hope that productive methods will be improved, not merely for gathering information about piecemeal facts, but also for gaining clear insight into the great lines, the basic structures of crucial situations.156 In appropriating the language of Gestalt to describe and promote their research program, Wertheimer and his colleagues Kohler and Koffka might have well anticipated considerable misunderstanding and resentment. Gestalt came laden with historical associations and mystical resonances of a sort considerably different from those that they would attempt to summon from it. Indeed, when Wertheimer was carrying out his first experiments, he apparently had some misgivings about using the old Goethean term Gestalt to describe the structural regularities in perception that were at the heart of his research program. In their discussion of the famous 1912 phi experiments, Luchins and Luchins note: [Wertheimer] once said that he had purposely used the term "phi phenomenon" in order that the reader will face the results without the metaphysical and theoretical concepts that have been used in the discussion of Gestalten and of Gestalt qualities.157 If this was a concern, then why did Wertheimer and his colleagues ultimately choose to locate their research program in the cultural discourse of Gestalt, which was largely dominated by so many values they rejected: intuitionism, idealism, political and social conservatism, even anti-Semitism? Is it possible that the use of the Goethean vocabulary by the Gestaltists signalled a desire both to profit from the power of a noble term and to rechannel that power into new directions? The Leipzig school was not wrong in its claim to have remained far more faithful to the original tradition of Gestalt than those in Berlin and Frankfurt ever did. With their empirical orientation, monistic metaphysics, largely Jewish "outsider" social status, and socialist-democratic politics, Wertheimer and the other Gestaltists were attempting to yoke together old and new in a way that may only have stood a chance of success during that brief flowering of relative tolerance in the Weimar years. There is a certain poignancy in the fact that, during the same years that former colleagues in Germany were using Gestalt to promote mystical racism and fascist politics, Wertheimer was

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defining the term as a principle of clear thinking that would help defend threatened values of freedom and democracy. The fact that he developed his arguments in exile, though, shows just how much of an "outsider" creation Gestalt theory really was, and just how compelling the message of the "other" Gestalt—that of Spengler, Chamberlain and Krueger—had remained for many Germans. 158

C H A P T E R

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The Self-Actualizing Brain and the Biology of Existential C h o i c e

WITH Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), we are introduced to a long strain in the history of German holism that extends into the United States and almost to the present time. Goldstein's vision of the "organism"—a creature driven to achieve coherence (wholeness) and prepared to confront anxiety and vulnerability to do so—was forged in the traumas of World War I. It was (i.e. the "vision") further shaped by Goldstein's ambivalent views on the effects and simultaneous inevitability of modernization and sharpened its political accent under the pressures of the rising political unrest in Germany. It then survived imprisonment and flight in 1933 and underwent a final transformation in an American exile under the shadow of Hiroshima. Like Wertheimer, Goldstein was born a Jew, and like Freud, he avoided a social identification with the spiritual traditions of his faith, regarding his Judaism more as a "destiny" than as a "mission."1 Culturally, however, he came close to embodying the realization of a central European Jewish intellectual type.2 He was bom in Katowice, a town in Upper Silesia that was then a part of Germany but has since become part of Poland. His mother was Rosalie Cassirer (an aunt of the future philosopher Ernst Cassirer), and his father, Abraham, was a prosperous owner of a lumber yard, a man with little formal schooling himself but who revered education as a means to prosperity. According to Goldstein's later friend and student Marianne Simmel, the household in which Goldstein spent his boyhood fostered considerable respect for egalitarian values: the workmen in the lumber yard regularly joined the family for the midday meal, and their conversations may have been an early source for Goldstein's later interest in socialism. There was also a strong sense of family. Goldstein was the seventh of nine children, and the family also played host to a steady stream of visiting relatives. Among these was Goldstein's cousin, Ernst Cassirer, who remained a close friend and inspiration for Goldstein until his death in 1945. Finally, what little that has been recorded about Goldstein's childhood conveys a sense of his secular family's ambivalent, ironicized awareness of the limits of reason and the dark face of existence. Although they were practical-minded "agnostic Jews," there were rooms in their house that no one ever entered because they were said to be haunted.3 The young Goldstein was quiet, serious, and bookish, earning himself the nickname "professor" from his classmates at the local public school. Indeed, a former Goldstein student, Aaron Smith, remarked later that he "never could

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Figure 22. Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). M. Simmel, ed„ The Reach of Mind; Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, (New York: Copyright Springer Publishing Company, Inc., 1968). Used by permission. imagine [Goldstein] as a child" and "never saw him laugh heartily."4 By the time the serious young student had completed the classical education of the Humanistische Gymnasium in Breslau, he had become fascinated with philosophy, particularly Kantian theory, but his father opposed the economic folly of his becoming a philosopher, calling the profession a brotlose Kunst ("breadless art"). A period of time followed in which Goldstein worked in a relative's business "wrapping up packages." When his father relented, he took off for a year of study at Heidelberg, focusing on literature and philosophy (especially the southwest German school of Geisteswissenschaft and neo-Kantianism). When Goldstein returned to Breslau with the resolve to study medicine, he focused on neurology and psychiatry. In later years, he explained that he had wanted to help the mentally ill, whom he perceived as the "unhappiest of all people."5 Probably, however, he was also attracted by the philosophical issues raised by the breakdown of mind and brain. Introduced to neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, he discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he enjoyed working in a pathology laboratory. In 1903, he received his M. D. at Breslau under the supervision of that guardian of classical mechanistic brain science, Carl Wernicke. Although others would later suppose that their perspectives must necessarily have been antithetical, Wernicke in fact remained an important lifelong mentor for Goldstein.6 Dur-

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• CHAPTER FIVE * ing the prime of his career as a biological holist, Goldstein even went so far as to cite his former teacher as a forerunner of his own attempt "to understand the symptoms of the patients psychologically and to combine this understanding with the findings of their brains."7 Yet even as Goldstein moved into medicine and then further into neurology, his attachment to the humanistic insights of literature and interest in idealistic philosophy remained undiminished: a close colleague of Goldstein, Hans Lukas-Teuber, later recalled that one of the accomplishments that Goldstein always remained proudest of was his membership in the International Pen Club.8 Much of Goldstein's efforts over four decades to reformulate basic principles in neurology and human biology grew out of a need to find some way of making the sciences, whose methodological ways he had learned to respect, do justice to the richer vision of human beings and human motivation found in literature and philosophy.

T H E IMPERATIVE OF REGENERATION IN THE CLINIC AND SOCIETY

A little-known monograph Goldstein published in 1913 on the topic of race hygiene provided an early public forum for him to work out tensions between his different internal allegiances. While it seems Goldstein never referred to this monograph after 1920 and later attacked the prejudice and hubris inherent in all race hygienic thinking,9 the race hygiene monograph is nevertheless very revealing of the complex loyalties and cultural concerns that would, over time, weave themselves into his neurobiological theories. There is, incidentally, apparent irony only in hindsight that a Jewish physician with socialist political leanings should have participated, however briefly, in German debates on race hygiene. Before World War I, medical racial hygiene "was less anti-Semitic than nationalist or meritocratic." During those years, a number of socialist physicians and medical men of Jewish backgrounds were active in the movement. 10 In his 1913 work, Goldstein reviews and comments on certain standard themes of race hygiene in a relatively conventional way: the alleged racial dangers posed by women's emancipation, the declining birthrate of white Europeans, the "yellow threat," and the need to prevent the reproduction of the genetically inferior (alcoholics, the mentally ill, people with tuberculosis, even people from socially depressed backgrounds). What sets his monograph apart, however, is the way it ultimately looks beyond questions of bad hereditary material to consider what one could describe as the cultural and spiritual causes of current degenerative trends. For decades, Goldstein believed, the German population's sense of security, capacity for idealistic belief, religious feeling, and spontaneous joy had been steadily eaten away by the new materialism. Hence the widely noted increase in nervous and mental diseases, suicides, and social unrest.

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In intellectual life, Goldstein also argued that a widespread fascination with the instrumentalist, practical methodologies of the natural sciences were undermining the future of German culture: [PJreoccupation with natural science especially has wielded a further disastrous influence, in that the whole of thought has become predominantly directed towards external nature. This has led to an overvaluing of the external, the material and to an undervaluing of the intellectual and the spiritual." Goldstein especially condemned the tendency among his colleagues to apply the atomizing, cause-and-effect thinking of natural science to realms of the human spirit where they were not appropriate. Such tendencies had turned history, philosophy, literature, and the plastic arts into materialistic caricatures of their former selves. "It is clear," he concluded, "that the life of feeling, that had already been given short shrift under the increasing valuation and practice of pure intellectual skills, would have also and especially suffered from these materialistic tendencies [pervading] the entire culture."12 Having found the chief sources of current degenerative trends in the mechanistic thinking and sterility of modern life, Goldstein warmed to his unconventional conclusion. He proposed that race hygiene should aim, not so much to regulate reproduction (although that remained important), but to facilitate the population's adjustment to the unprecedented stresses of rapid industrialization and modern living.13 Goldstein was thus prepared to accept the inevitability of modern trends out of a sense of pragmatics and realism. However, steeling himself for acceptance was far different from condoning the basic values and ideology of modernism (progress through rationalization, secularization, technological innovation, etc.). His resigned acceptance of modernism expressed itself plainly in the following passage: [S]o-called nervous degeneration has its source in a mismatch between our capacities and the demands made on us by the progress of culture.... Either we must change ourselves or change the culture.... [0]n the whole, we will be able to intervene relatively little in the powerful mechanism of culture. To abandon culture on the other hand is also an absurdity. Looked at logically, the demand for a return to Nature is a Utopia. Thus, there is nothing else we can do but change ourselves, adapt ourselves to the new conditions.14 Two pages after making this stoic declaration, Goldstein's lingering romanticism broke through as he suddenly suggested that perhaps the worst time of adjustment was already past. There were suggestions, he felt, that the "wingbeat of a new age," an age of the spirit, was now emerging on the horizon.15 And he urged race hygiene to do its part to nurture that emerging new age: The domination of intellectualism is subsiding, having outlived its usefulness. The culture of the body is being proclaimed anew; so much sport is being practiced as hardly ever before. Already the sun of a new idealism is shining over

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all.... Along these lines, I remind you of the quite different ideal breeze of the last century that blew through our literature and art in opposition to the basic direction of the '80s and '90s. I remind you of the renewed growth of interest in philosophy, of the ardent wish for new positive religious visions. We [physicians] must consciously accommodate these spiritual needs, support, and promote them. A great task of race hygiene, as I see it, is to take advantage of this powerful motivating force of human action.16 This monograph by Goldstein was based on a set of public lectures given at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Konigsberg, where he had been working for about six years. His own autobiographical notes suggest that his experiences at this clinic had heightened the romantically tempered distrust of intellectual formalism and scientism that is so pronounced in the race hygiene monograph.17 He recalled how, while working as a psychiatrist, he had felt increasingly frustrated by the hegemony of the intellectually elaborate and allegedly "scientific"—but therapeutically barren—approach to understanding mental disorders developed by the Munich psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin's emphasis on inherited constitutional factors in psychoses had encouraged many medical men to abandon questions of therapy and rehabilitation and to focus on diagnosis and prognosis as ends in themselves. Most believed that if they managed to classify each patient in accordance with Kraepelin's symptom-based nosology and then arranged for proper custodial care, they had done all that could reasonably be expected of them.18 Those who were especially ambitious might take a further interest in a particularly intriguing patient at his or her postmortem, but that was about all. The indifference to therapy that so troubled Goldstein at Konigsberg was, moreover, not a disease of psychiatry alone. With intellectual roots in the clinical schools of nineteenth-century Viennese medicine, "therapeutic nihilism" (as it was called by its critics) had become endemic through Germanspeaking fin de siecle society generally. Whether in the sickbed or in society at large, there was a tendency—cynical in some cases, resigned in others—to regard disease, injustice, and suffering as an inevitable part of life. The rule of thumb was: leave well enough alone and do not seek to meddle with natural processes; it was enough to understand them.19 One witness to the "nihilistic" medical scene at the turn of the century recounted the following vignette: A doctor who visited the hospital told me he saw a party of students sounding a woman who was dying of pleurisy or pneumonia, in order that they might hear the crepitation in her lungs as her last moments approached. She expired before they left the ward. He said something about treatment in another case to the professor who was lecturing these young men. The reply was, "Treatment, treatment, that is nothing; it is the diagnosis that we want."20 Goldstein's own desire to create an alternative to this therapeutic nihilism seems to have been a powerful (if generally unspoken) shaping force behind many of his later biological ideas. At a major conference on holistic trends in

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medicine held in 1932, he would go so far as to portray the holistic approach to medicine generally as a reaction against what he called the "therapeutic pessimism" of the late nineteenth century.21 But that is not all. The truths and imperatives that Goldstein discovered uniquely in his holistic biology represented his hard-wrought alternative to the passivity and nihilism of materialistic modern society generally. There are no easy cosmic consolations buried in Goldstein's holistic narrative, but the natural world he discovered through his science did mandate an ethic that stressed, above all other values, courage of action in the service of personal meaningfulness. The remaining sections of this chapter will attempt to demonstrate the way in which this was so.

INSIGHTS FROM BRAIN-DAMAGED SOLDIERS: ACTUALIZATION AND WHOLENESS

As stressed in previous chapters, the psychological impact of the First World War gave a heightened political and cultural urgency to the work of many holistic scientists. In the case of Goldstein, the effects of the war were, in the first instance, more pragmatic. During the war, the special difficulties associated with the assessment and care of patients who had suffered a servicerelated brain injury had led to the founding of a series of special military hospitals for those purposes.22 Soon after the war began, Goldstein was given the opportunity to organize one of these hospitals, which was to be run under military auspices. The comparative neuroanatomist Ludwig Edinger, who had become Goldstein's chief in 1914 and had counted on Goldstein's assistance in his laboratory, immediately released his assistant to take up this war-related project, saying (as Goldstein liked affectionately to recall), "Your work with human beings is of much greater importance than my theoretical work in the laboratory."23 The Institute for Research into the Consequences of Brain Injuries was founded in 1916 in the liberal city of Frankfurt, remaining in operation until Hitler came to power in 1933. As an institution, it was prominent for its vigorous efforts to develop programs for the rehabilitation of the brain-injured, toward whom the therapeutic nihilism of medicine at the time was otherwise virtually totalizing. Based in a hospital, it (in Goldstein's description) consisted of a ward for medical and orthopedic treatment, a physiological and psychological laboratory for special examination of the patients, and theoretical interpretation of the observed phenomena, a school for retraining on the basis of the results of this research, and finally workshops in which the patient's aptitude for special occupations was tested and he was taught an occupation suited to his ability.24 The fundamental charge to the institute was highly practical—to get the soldiers back into a state of at least semi-independent occupational functioning. Results seemed to be promising. In a 1919 report on the wartime effort,

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• CHAPTER FIVE * The Treatment, Care and Evaluation of the Brain-Damaged, Frankfurt Institute claimed that 73 percent of its patients were able to return to their old professions or to some related job, 17 percent had to start a new kind of job, and only 10 percent remained unemployed. This would have been welcome news for the economically strapped and weak government that had just been instated, but Goldstein followed up this good news with several, potentially more contentious assertions. He insisted that no soldier with a brain injury, even of the mildest sort, should ever be sent back to the front, because the full consequences of brain injury often first made themselves apparent only after a year or more. In addition, he advocated generous governmental compensation for injury—life-long pensions rather than lump payments—and suggested that the authorities take into account not just the extent of disability in some abstract sense, but the effect such a defect would have on the patient's capacity to practice his previous chosen profession.25 Goldstein's closest collaborator at Frankfurt was the Gestalt psychologist Adhdnar G d b (1887-1936), who initially helped him develop the tests for evaluating the soldiers and then worked with him to transform that practical task into a framework for more ambitious research. The two men worked together until 1933, when Goldstein fled Germany. Gelb's health, which had never been good, fatally broke in 1935 or 1936 under the strain and anxiety of living as a Jew in Hitler's Germany. He died before he could receive the visa that was to bring him to America on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.26 Throughout the period of his own exile, Goldstein always kept a memorial picture of Gelb above his desk, beside his favorite portrait of Goethe. In the 1920s, however, while collaborating with Gelb, Goldstein's understanding of the behavior of the young soldiers at the institute slowly acquired the status of iconoclastic truths about human biological functioning. The soldiers' struggles and experiences just did not seem adequately captured in the reigning "atomistic" principles of nineteenth-century medical science and biology. As he grew in stature in his profession, Goldstein also grew increasingly outspoken about his perception that "atomistic" neurology and physiology suffered from basic methodological and conceptual problems. He was no longer willing to accept that the only way to understand a patient with a presenting pathology was to match some behaviors to a short list of preselected symptoms and disregard everything else. He began to ask in fact whether medical diagnosis actually pointed to "a basic problem in our scientific approach to understanding the behavior not only of patients but of living beings in general."27 An alternative, he began to think, would be to make no prejudgments about the greater importance of one symptom over another but simply to study every patient "phenomenologically" or without an imposed theory. In proposing this approach, Goldstein seems to have allied himself with the broader philosophical school of "phenomenology" and its argument to "return to the things."28 He would, however, work things out his own way. His extended dialogue with the potential "to return to the things" in clinical work began with the case of a 24-year-old soldier called Schneider. Gelb and Goldstein's

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painstaking analysis of Schneider would have such a lasting impact on all their future thinking that this soldier may fairly be considered the "Anna O." of holistic neurology. In 1915, Schneider had suffered two wounds to the back of his head that penetrated into the occipital lobes of the brain. Once his wounds had healed and his physical condition had improved, Goldstein and Gelb subjected him to a battery of psychological tests to check for deficits. The test results failed to reveal any obvious perceptual defects, and the classical neuropsychological approach of the nineteenth century would probably have stopped with that. Goldstein and Gelb looked beyond the mere scores, however, and considered Schneider's total behavior during the tests. As soon they began to take a broader look, they discovered that actually Schneider was seriously handicapped in his perceptual capacities; he had, however, learned to compensate for his disorder in a variety of elaborate ways. For example, Gelb and Goldstein noted that he was able to read almost any text that was given to him by means of "a series of minute head and hand movements—he 'wrote' with his hand what his eyes saw. . . . If prevented from moving his head or body, the patient could read nothing whatsoever"—all he saw were individual lines and tracks without any overall pattern or meaning.29 Strikingly, the patient was in no sense conscious of having modified his accustomed reading habits; in some unknown way, his injured brain had established global compensatory strategies of which "he" himself was ignorant.30 Goldstein and Gelb drew a number of conclusions from this case. First of all, it was clear that Schneider's disorder was something that was very poorly captured using a classical categorization such as alexia, or loss of capacity to read. While it was true that his reading capacity was disrupted, his trouble, in fact, lay on a much deeper level, one that did not map onto any of the classic, mosaic approaches to loss of function. Simply put, it seemed to Goldstein and Gelb that Schneider had lost the capacity to see the world holistically. His brain could no longer create and experience the unified, organizing patterns that gave coherence to the onslaught of stimuli actually entering his retina. For example, Gelb and Goldstein tested him for his ability to perceive an object in apparent motion (by flashing a set of lights at different spots over a trajectory). The patient reported seeing "only a series of isolated places in space," and "could not even understand what we meant by visual perception of motion."31 Goldstein came to call this disturbance loss of the "figure-ground function" and began to argue that it will always be disturbed "wherever damage of the brain is located," even though the exact way in which the symptoms present themselves will vary depending on what part of the brain was directly damaged.32 In other words, where Wernicke's brain model had emphasized independent psychological functions without any overarching coordinating principle, Goldstein argued that the brain, regardless of the modality in which it is working, was set up to synthesize the chaos of its experience into organized wholes. Disease and damage to the brain led to a breakdown in this capacity to create Gestalts—a term Goldstein purposively borrowed from Gestalt

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• CHAPTER FIVE * theory—resulting in uncoordinated behavioral patterns isolated from a larger pattern or plan. As he now pursued his analysis with other cases in the clinic, the holistic principles learned from studying Schneider's perceptual disabilities would be extended by Goldstein to language and cognitive disorders. He began to teach that language was also not an isolated skill, as classical neuropsychology supposed, but functioned to synthesize and organize experience in ways that permeated the individual's total mental orientation. Above all, healthy language use allowed for the holistic, synthesizing activity that Goldstein called "categorical behavior," the capacity to see the abstract category to which individual, concrete events could be sorted. Patients lacking the capacity to use language in the service of categorical behavior—who had regressed to what Goldstein called a more primitive "concrete" mental attitude—might still have words at their disposal but could not "unstick" them from the concrete things with which they were associated at any particularly moment. For example, in an extensive psychological study of color-naming, Goldstein and Gelb described how patients might accurately describe a certain object as "cherrycolored," and another as "crimson." They would deny, however, or fail to see that both these specific hues could be grouped under the more overarching and abstract category "red." 33 As Goldstein put it: He has only individual words, belonging to an object like other properties, e.g., color, form, etc., but he cannot use the word if it merely represents the abstract class or category under which the object in question may be classified. He cannot use the words as symbols. The words have lost meaning in themselves.34 Even more significantly, it turned out that such patients were at the mercy of the actual, of what in fact, was. The merely possible became for such patients inconceivable: One especially interesting consequence of the modified character of speech is the fact that the patients have the greatest difficulty in speaking so-called senseless sentences, or even to repeat them on request.... One of my patients was unable to repeat the sentence, "It is raining today," on a day of sunshine; or to repeat, "The snow is black," or "2 + 2 are 5." Such patients cannot understand how to say so-called senseless things because it is possible to understand senseless sentences only if one can abstract from the given situation or from experienced facts.35 Goldstein's formulations here show the unmistakable stamp of the thinking of his cousin, Ernst Cassirer, who by the 1920s, had become a leading representative of the so-called Marburg school of neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy. This school had dedicated itself to elaborating the means or principles whereby objects come to be known or constituted in consciousness. Indeed, intensive correspondence between the two men through the 1920s shows that not only was Goldstein writing his material with a pen dipped in the thinking of the Marburg school, but that Cassirer was granting Goldstein's brain-damaged soldiers a distinct paradigmatic status in his own thinking.36 In

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one long letter to Goldstein in the spring of 1925, a time when he was in the later stages of producing his own three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer wrote: The normal person behaves to a very high degree in a "symbolic" fashion—something usually much too little recognized in my opinion—not just in his thinking, but in his behavior, his perception, even in his actions. For him, the "being" [Dasein] of individual sensory facts is secondary to what they "mean" to him. Therefore, he can step by step move his thinking towards the "ideal"—he can transform the given "Reality" of the sensory stimuli into one of the merely "Possible." This transformation into the Possible not only grounds the main part of his thinking (because the "idea" is, as [Hermann] Cohen always used to emphasize, "hypothesis"!), but also—and your cases show this so beautifully—the main part of his perception. [The normal person] treats the present as representative, and the representative as present. In contrast, in a person with soul-blindness, it is just this transformation [of sensation into representation] that is dysfunctional, if I see it right.... Thus he is only able to react to stimuli that are immediately present. As the patient does not possess . . . symbolic ideation, he sticks to the common, the given, the present—and therefore he cannot manage a free "re-presentation" fin his mind] of something not present.37 Fascinated as he was by Cassirer's formulations of his clinical material, Goldstein was also careful to stress the older clinical roots of the contrast between abstract (symbolic, categorizing) intellectual function and concrete (sensory-driven) intellectual function. He called attention in particular to the teachings of the nineteenth-century neurologist Hughlings Jackson, who more than fifty years earlier had discussed the difference between healthy people— who use words as symbols to build prepositional statements—and braindamaged patients—who may automatically "use" words without "knowing" their symbolic significance.38 In a significant break with Jackson, however, and in a clear gesture to the cultural preoccupations of his own time, Goldstein stressed that a patient's stabilization at a reduced, concrete level of functioning was not simply a product of mechanistic pathophysiology. It was also an adaptive reaction to unbearable existential anxiety.39 To confront the fact one was no longer fit to carry out tasks of which one was formerly capable, that one was a diminished personality—no longer one's self—was the ultimate horror for patients, often producing a crisis of severe anxiety and disordered behavior that Goldstein called a "catastrophic reaction."40 Understandably, patients were powerfully motivated to do anything they could to avoid the existential anxiety of catastrophe and to maintain some semblance of coherence and competence, sometimes even at the price of selfknowledge. The original case of Schneider, with his extraordinary and quite unconscious ways of compensating for his disorder, had provided the first clues about the importance of this aspect of brain damage. Goldstein, however, also began to see how other typical "symptoms" could actually be un-

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derstood as adaptive "strategies" unconsciously selected by the organism to avoid being overwhelmed by anxiety: the typical compulsive orderliness, avoidance of change of any kind, a preference for undemanding tasks and environments, a tendency toward inflexible perseveration in actions, and a frequent lack of insight into the nature or extent of the brain damage suffered ("anosognosia"). In Goldstein's words, "The symptoms that we observe are . . . not simply the effect of the damage alone but also of the reaction of the organism to this defect in its attempt, despite this defect, to come to a new order which guarantees its existence"—that is, guarantees some genuine expression of inner being.41 Thus, the laboratory of brain damage provided Goldstein with a framework for integrating an antimechanistic vision of the human brain with the concerns of authenticity and anxiety that would come to define the agenda of earlytwentieth-century existentialist philosophy. The patient's struggle to discover some matter or means of existential equilibrium showed that the human brain had a basic drive "to actualize itself according to its inner essence." Every organism, even a sick and damaged organism, needed "to realize its inborn nature as much as possible."42 For the most severely disabled, efforts at actualization were necessarily largely defensive, with an emphasis on avoiding anxiety-provoking situations: a "defective organism achieves ordered behavior only by a shrinkage of its milieu in proportion to the defects."43 Nevertheless, a meaningful new existence could be created for such patients—as the rehabilitation efforts at the Frankfurt Institute were showing. This optimistic conclusion was to become Goldstein's clearest answer to the therapeutic nihilism of his nineteenth-century heritage. It was now evident that even when a patient obviously could not be "cured" (returned to his preinjured state), that did not mean he could not be helped back to health. Becoming healthy had, however, to be understood in a new way—as a series of steps taken to help the individual recover a sense of self, to reorder his relationship to the milieu in such a way that life once again had value for him.44 Understood as such, it was also clear that becoming healthy always involved a choice on the part of the patient to accept certain environmental restrictions as the price he must pay for the privilege of regaining what Goldstein called his "essence"—a highly individual biological and subjective state of inner coherence. Because human organisms had "essence" as well as organs, sickness and health were not simply issues of malfunction and function. They became issues of free choice and value. As Goldstein explained: [HJealth is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is, rather, a condition related to a mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life. "Health" appears thus as a value; its value consists in the individual's capacity to actualize his nature to the degree that, for him at least, is essential. "Being sick" appears as a loss or diminution of value, the value of self-realization, of existence. The central aim of "therapy"—in cases in which full restitution is not possible—appears to be

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to achieve transformation of (he patient's personality in such a manner as to enable him to make the right choice; this choice must be capable of bringing about a new orientation, an orientation which is adequate enough to his nature to make his life appear to be worth living again.45 But that was not all. Recognizing the existentialist dimension of disease had in turn implications for thinking about what kind of "knowledge" was required to heal—a point to which I return later in this chapter. Increasingly, Goldstein became convinced that the healing process through which doctor and patient together identified and reestablished the latter's "essence" involved a special "holistic" process of understanding that, in the final analysis "[could] not be gained by the methods of natural sciences alone": The knowledge we need can be comprehended only by a special mental procedure which I have characterized as a creative activity, based on empirical data, by which the "nature" comes, as a Gestalt, increasingly within the reach of our experience.46

CHANGING THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS: FROM REFLEX THEORY TO GESTALT

Thus radicalized by this work in the clinic, Goldstein began to call for a major overhaul of basic principles of physiology and biology. Some fifteen years later, he recalled the state of thinking he was up against at that time: According to the fundamental philosophy within which we seniors came to maturity, the organism was seen to consist of mutually independent and only secondarily connected apparatuses with performances consistent with the activities of the apparatuses. The apparatuses were conceived, as were the performance processes, according to the reflex scheme.... To this view, the influences to which the organism is exposed seemed like a sum of stimuli, to which it reacted in a lawful manner.47 The nineteenth-century deterministic and piecemeal view of the organism appeared to have empirical support only because data had been obtained in misleading, faulty ways. Scientists, already laboring under the influence of "atomistic" thinking, artificially constrained animals in order to isolate aspects of their total behavior—for example, scratching behavior. They then supposed that the stimulus-bound, tension-reducing "reflexive" results they obtained could serve as basic principles for explaining the animal's behavior under free, natural conditions. In fact, Goldstein began to argue, these responses were artifactual—a pathology of the testing situation: "If it sometimes appears that the organism is under the influence of reflexes, then the relation of the organism to the world is not in a normal condition. The reflex and similar theories cannot be based on experimental results because we are

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• CHAPTER FIVE confronted, as in pathology, with the results of phenomena going on in isolation."48 In other words, the mechanistic animal defended by nineteenthcentury physiology had natural analogues only in the realm of pathology. In contrast, the free and healthy organism, outside of the experimental setting, responded to a field of demands in its environment in a creative fashion characterized by holistic flexibility.49 If the reflex model of central nervous system function needed drastic overhaul, its theoretical and methodological cousin—punctate localization of cerebral function—did so no less. Here Goldstein found inspiration in the spirited critiques of the Zurich neurologist Constantin von Monakow, becoming one of German neurology's most vigorous advocates of Monakow's perspectives. In a 1926 letter to his Swiss colleague, Goldstein admitted that many of his more traditional neurological colleagues in Germany, such as Hugo Liepmann and Karl Kleist, did not really understand why he, Goldstein, was so fiercely committed to Monakow's ideas, but he had no intention of backing down.50 Building on Monakow's example, Goldstein began to warn in his own writings against taking the "terrible fateful step from the localization of symptoms [asserting a connection between a damaged brain area and lost function] to the localization of function [asserting that the same brain area mediates a particular lost function in the intact brain]."51 He stressed the way in which syndromes caused by local lesions can be affected by "the condition of the rest of the brain, and even of the whole organism."52 And he paid close attention to the significance of recovery from and compensation for damage, concluding that "the classic assumption of specific, separate losses of individual performances cannot be maintained. We found, rather, that a systematic reduction . . . results, a dedifferentiation which can be evaluated properly only in relation to the whole organism."53 If Goldstein found inspiration in Monakow's iconoclasm, he was also very much attracted to the insights and conceptual possibilities in the Gestalt psychology of the Berlin school. Throughout the 1920s, he enjoyed close collegial and personal ties with the Berlin Gestalt theorists, especially Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler.54 The affinities between his work and theirs found a more permanent institutionalized form in Goldstein's appointment (which lasted until 1933) as one of the coeditors of the Gestalt theory journal Psychologische Forschung {Psychological Research),,55 For Goldstein, a chief appeal of Gestalt psychology lay in the way it provided a framework for doing simultaneous justice to the claims of the organism to wholeness on the one hand, and the continuing methodological need in science for some kind of analytic approach on the other. Borrowing and adapting the Gestalt concept of figure-background, Goldstein argued that it was perfectly legitimate to isolate a performance or a symptom as a figure or Gestalt, so long as one did not lose sight of the fact that there remained always a background. Holistic understanding must always be reestablished through a continual resetting of each successive figure (or partial understanding of function) in its immediate background (or whatever had been temporarily brackt

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153 eted out of analysis). The idea was to continue this process until one had reconstructed the whole organism itself in its Umwelt (a term Goldstein took over from Uexkiill).56 Analysis thus became a series of heuristic moments in the scientist's dialectic movement toward greater holistic understanding. For Goldstein, however, Gestalt theory did more than just provide a suggestive language for imagining what "holistic analysis" could look like. It also gave him a way of understanding some basic principles of organismic life. If scientists could learn to approach their subject using a method that constantly reinserted a provisional Gestalt back in a larger field, they would find that they were doing what came "naturally," because it was the essence of organismic life itself to create "good Gestalten"—to actively pattern its reactions in such a way as to establish an orderly holistic "fit" between itself and its Umwelt. Understanding this allowed one to realize that one of the great dangers of pathology lay in the fact that it caused organismic behavior to become rigid and unnatural and in this way brought about a breakdown of the organismUmwelt Gestalt "fit."57 In health, Goldstein made clear that the patterned dance of "adequacy" between an organism and its Umwelt was highly flexible; there was no single right solution. As he explained in Der Aufbau des Organismus {The Organism) (1934): What will turn out to be a Gestalt for an organism depends predominantly on the organism's structure. To be sure, the structure of the world is not indifferent to it.... It seems that the variety of possibilities, which the world in its entirety offers, are of such a sort that the greatest variety of creatures can find adequacy. If this were not the case it would not be possible that so many different creatures exist.58 This bountiful vision of organisms creatively establishing their own realities or orderly ways of relating to the world is strongly reminiscent of Uexkiill's Goethean vision of the "orchestra" of life. At the same time, Goldstein explicitly renounced the open-ended epistemological relativism implied in Uexkull's biology, in which no knowledge of reality is possible beyond that learned by studying the total of subjective realities generated by every species. For Goldstein, in contrast, reality had an independent structure that actually could be known in part by looking at the range of ways free organisms managed to "achieve [environmental] adequacy" or "fit" within it: [I]t certainly is probable... that corresponding to the inherent properties of the world, only a limited number of Gestalt possibilities (potentialities of patterning) really exist, i.e., that only creatures of definite organization can "be." Since, for many creatures, certain characteristics of the "good Gestalt" are qualitatively the same, it is to a certain extent possible to deduce the Gestalten from the structural organization of nature. Thus, investigation of the Gestalten does not merely teach us something about the functional patternings of the organism, but teaches us also about essential features of nature.59

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REASON, COURAGE, AND THE MAKING OF A WEIMAR HERO

AS the 1920s progressed, Goldstein became more explicit about the ways in which his views on biology, healing, and holism had the potential to function in a larger forum. Although unlike many of his peers, he never turned to writing popular pieces, he did ask what light could be cast on the human condition in general by studies of brain-damaged patients. More and more, his vision of the self-actualizing brain functioned not just as an explanatory model for neurology, but also as an existentialist philosophy and blueprint of personal politics; a politics that seems to have been at once his ego ideal and a reflection of his own liberal hopes for Germany. At the center of this larger vision was the Goldstein concept of "abstract attitude"—the capacity (generally lost in brain damage) to sort and organize experience into logical categories. Increasingly, Goldstein stressed that losing this capacity did not just involve a loss of a particular intellectual skill. It involved a basic loss of one's capacity to act as a free agent in the world. The individual lacking the ability to abstract from his experience suffered a dramatic "shrinkage of freedom" and was in "bondage to the demands of environment" and helpless to exercise choice:60 Choice is a decision based on the consideration and evaluation of the whole situation, which in turn presupposes a definite mental capacity, the capacity to abstract, particularly in the sense of being able to assume the category of possibility. Patients—such as severely brain-damaged ones—who are impaired in this capacity cannot make choices.61 In a cultural climate where "life philosophers" like Ludwig Klages were condemning conscious intellect for its inauthenticity and atomization of reality, the idea that something called the "abstract attitude" might support central values of Life such as freedom would have been far from self-evident. Yet here Goldstein was allying himself with the rationalist counterbeat of the time and declaring this capacity to actually be the bedrock of creativity, "a trait without which human culture is inconceivable":62 [A] comparison between the normal and the brain-diseased individual again offers insight into the structure of man, and into the special position which consciousness imparts to man within the whole of living nature. No matter how many performances the patients are capable of accomplishing, actually they lack every creative activity. . . . It is exactly this factual material that impresses us with the enormous significance of consciousness. This insight compels us to refute that romantic doctrine which has spread, especially under the leadership of Klages, who attempts to discredit the mind by contrasting it with the impelling "vital" forces. Klages may be right in so far as he fights against the "overgrowth" of the intellect. But he overlooks completely the fact that the "vital" forces, in the form they are characteristic for human organization, cannot even become manifest, save in reference i.

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to consciousness—the very consciousness that Klages tries to root out. Indeed, what remains after the impairment of consciousness is no longer equivalent to the nature of man at all.63 Not only was categorizing consciousness the heart and soul of humanness, but far from being a form of atomizing cognition, as Klages and others like him supposed, it was a holistic process. Indeed it was the highest holistic, synthesizing function of the brain. Organisms acting concretely could act holistically in the sense of being able to respond in an orderly fashion to immediately given stimuli. However, they were incapable of going one step further and seeing the larger Gestalt, the patterned connections between those stimuli. There was no doubt about it: human reason, to the extent that it involved seeing such connections, was a holistic capacity. It was a startling equation in the context of the times. Goldstein, however, was not yet finished. Having redefined reason (the "abstract attitude") as a holistic reshuffling of gestalts that served individual free will and choice, he next sought to link it to two other values dear both to him and to many other romantically inclined German intellectuals of the time: (1) the value of Bildung or individuation (what Goldstein called actualization); and (2) the value of personal courage. How did he do it? The rhetorical starting point was again the work on braindamaged patients and their efforts to avoid the total disorganizing state of anxiety Goldstein called "catastrophe." Goldstein had stressed how healing for such patients consisted of working in dialogue with them to help them achieve a stable reordering of their relationship to the world: one that both avoided catastrophe and gave their lives meaning. It was critical that some sort of "essence"—the inner soul or personality—find expression (actualization), but in a way that limited and contained, that avoided pushing patients into a state of acute anxiety: again, a "defective organism achieves ordered behavior only by a shrinkage of its milieu in proportion to the defects."64 The insights learned from the clinic had implications for understanding the healthy brain. In healthy people, the innate drive to achieve "essence" was no less powerful, but a great many more options were available for doing so. For example, instead of closing in on itself out of fear, the healthy brain had the capacity to reach joyfully beyond itself—to realize "essence," not by the imposition of limits, but by expansion and mastery: [W]e call that behavior normal and healthy which is produced from within by the tendency towards actualization, and which overcomes the disturbance which is generated by conflict with the world, not out of anxiety, but out of the joy of mastery.65 Yet Goldstein was far from making anxiety a pathological phenomenon alone. On the contrary, although it could be an impediment to actualization, the existentialist in him was more inclined to see it, under the right circumstances, as a creative catalyst; "in normal life . . . the individual [also] has to go through such states of disorder or catastrophe."66 Rather than being fully

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incapacitated by such states, however, the normal individual had the potential at least to rise to the challenges they posed; to confront and move through his or her crisis. A human being in a state of health, in other words, had the capacity for courage. In Goldstein's ringing formulation: "Courage, in its final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one's own nature." Here Goldstein liked to quote Kierkegaard: "To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself."67 And yet even the affirmative act of courage did not mean that anxiety was thereby conquered: the more original a human being was, the deeper was his anxiety; but if he could stand it, he had preserved his freedom and stood a chance of achieving his highest actualization.68 What made courage in the face of anxiety possible? The answer returns us to the insistent place of human reason within Goldstein's cultural story of wholeness and authenticity. Courage we are told, was made possible through the "ability to view a single experience within the larger context, that is, to assume the 'attitude toward the possible,' to have freedom of decision regarding different alternatives."69 This freedom, as we have already seen, was a gift made possible only by the abstract attitude. There is something quintessentially "Weimar" about this story told by Goldstein, that drew together such varied values and pulls both out of his own biography and out of the confused time in which he lived. During the years of fragile democratic rule in Germany, when overt anti-Semitism had been made illegal, Jews who identified with portions of the German Romantic tradition (even when that tradition might want to exclude them) often lived an existence marked by conflicting loyalties and continuing attempts at reconciliation. The "organic" architect, Erich Mendelsohn, for example, "insisted that the architect must unite what he called analysis and dynamics, reason and unreason."70 In Goldstein's case, the task was to find a home for the democratic values of reason and individual freedom in the holistic, antimechanistic universe of Goethe. At the same time, Goldstein's vision of reconciliation was mediated by a certain recognition that success was not guaranteed. His strong awareness of the limits of both human reason and human potential connected him in this sense to some of the darker strains of late Weimar culture. In contrast to, say, Monakow, who had promised his readers ultimate reconciliation with the Worldhorme, Goldstein was unable to find any principle in his reality that could guarantee an individual's success in achieving perfect wholeness.71 Every organism gave its best shot at achieving Wholeness and Gestalt in relation to the larger Whole, but all efforts were only as good as the organism could manage and therefore necessarily imperfect and incomplete. In Goldstein's words: Considered in isolation, the organism is in itself perfect, patterned [gestaltet], and vital; in regard to the whole [of Being] it is imperfect in varying degrees. The individual creature manifests the same kind of being in respect to the whole of

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Being that an isolated process in the organism exhibits in respect to the whole of the organism. [In both cases], there is displayed imperfection and rigidity. [The organism] may exist only in the whole, borne by the whole as a reflex, and as soon as that support ceases, it is doomed to death. On account of this, the creature is transitory in its essence and on the road to death.72 Yet the fact that human beings ultimately fell short in their efforts to achieve perfect harmony with the cosmos gave Goldstein's narrative a heroictragic rather than a nihilistic or simply pessimistic cast. For him, imperfection was at once the price of freedom and an opportunity for exercising courage. There was glory in the free individual's ability to confront and bear the necessary limits and imperfections of life, while persisting nonetheless in the human task of actualization and adaptation. Suffering, Goldstein said at one point, was "the characteristic of human nature, and reveals the very highest form of life in the phenomenon of freedom."73 Goldstein's philosophy of action in the face of necessary imperfection and action was to become for him a defining characteristic of the human condition. It was a philosophy that would deepen in its nuances over the 1930s and into the years of exile. It was also one that would come to serve him as a more personal justification for his own risk-taking behavior as a scientist—for his willingness to challenge fundamental principles of medicine and physiology knowing that he had no certain alternatives to offer in their stead: [T]o be aware of incompleteness does not hinder human action.... [MJoreover,... it is this very incompleteness which imbues such action with the responsibility characteristic of human nature. Thus our scientific procedure is apparently commensurable with the character of the human being in general, manifesting itself mainly in three phenomena: in the potentiality of complete devotion to [the whole of] Being, in the potentiality to keep modestly at a distance from it [the "abstract capacity"], and in the potentiality to act with free decision in placing the personality at stake.74 Goldstein's broader philosophy of the human task did not merely embody many of the contradictions and ambiguous hopes of Weimar culture; it also contributed significantly to that culture. The psychoanalyst Frieda FrommReichmann, who first met Goldstein at Konigsberg and followed him to Frankfurt, owed Goldstein her concept of the "hindrance of self-actualization" that would become the focus of the intensive psychotherapy she advocated and practiced.75 Erich Fromm, her husband, who helped her establish a private psychiatric sanitarium in Heidelberg in the late 1920s, would also find later inspiration for Man for Himself (1947) in Goldstein's existentialism. Phenomenological philosophy, already attracted to Gestalt theory, now found added inspiration in the clinical studies going on in Frankfurt. The Russian-born phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, who had published his Gottingen dissertation in the Gestalt journal Psychologische Forschung,76 also studied under Goldstein in Frankfurt in the 1920s and became impressed with the

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CHAPTER FIVE apparent empirical confirmation he witnessed at the Institute for some of Husserl's ideas about the texture of the immediate experienced world {Lebensweli). Gurwitsch's Theory of the Field of Consciousness was an attempt to organize the insights of Goldstein, the Gestaltists, William James, and Jean Piaget within a common "phenomenological framework."77 In the 1930s, Gurwitsch called Goldstein's work to the attention of the French Hegelian-Marxist-cum-phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty arranged for a French translation of Goldstein's Der Aufbau des Organismus to be published as the second volume in the Bibliotheque de Philosophie series of phenomenological works, edited jointly by MerleauPonty and Jean-Paul Sartre.78 The Goldstein text followed directly on the heels of a translation of Husserl's Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. MerleauPonty intended this ordering to show the fruitfulness of combining "pure" philosophy with "positive" knowledge.79 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty had already attempted himself to demonstrate the fruitfulness of such synthesizing work by drawing extensively on Goldstein's concepts in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Goldstein's own concern with essence as a key feature of organismic life suggest that, to a certain extent, the currents of influence between phenomenology and the brain clinic ran in both directions. The term "essence" had been a key principle of phenomenology as originally elaborated by Husserl. In it, "essence" had been defined as that which was directly and intuitively grasped by the mind, prior to any acts of analysis or judgment..In perceiving "essences," critical analysis held its breath, so to speak, and let phenomena enter consciousness without distortion. This form of receptive perception was called "displaying essence" {Wesenschau) or ideation.80 For Husserl, then, the question had been: What kind of reality revealed itself when all biases, judgments, and analytic itches were silenced and one simply looked^ Goldstein also asked this question in his attempts to develop a methodology for a theory-free, undistorted encounter with organismic existence. He went beyond Husserl, however, in his understanding of the type of knowledge gained through such an encounter. Husserl had seen "essential" reality as a value-neutral realm of being, since values were something human judgment imposed on reality and were therefore "nonessential." Goldstein saw things differently. His view was that an encounter with "essence" did more than just expose the scientist or physician to a "purer" perception of an organism or patient. Such an encounter acted as a revelation of the original Kantian proposition that mechanistic categories of causality fall short in the real of the organic—that organisms must be understood in terms of their teleological reasons rather than merely their proximate causes: This, [the organism's] being, is its raison d'etre, in line with the Goethean proposition: "the purpose of life is life itself." All individual processes take their meaning from and are determined by this being. We describe this as [the organism's] essence.81

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Within the larger world of existentialist philosophy, Goldsteinian principles were taken up and developed by the liberal Protestant theologian Paul Tillich in a range of ways, many of which have not been widely recognized. During their years together at Frankfurt, between 1929 and 1933, Tillich and Goldstein attracted some of the university's best students with several seminars that they organized together, and the collaboration and friendship continued in exile. 82 In 1959, Tillich reviewed in print the importance that Goldstein had had on his own thinking over the years, emphasizing in particular how Goldstein's analysis of the "attitude toward the abstract" had taught him how to imagine a biological grounding for the human ability to "transform everything into a 'possible,' into something which 'could not have been,' and then to ask the question of that which cannot not be, the "ground of being." Not the religious question itself, he said, but the possibility of that question ensued from this. "Kurt Goldstein is not a philosopher of religion," he concluded, "but there are few to whom philosophy of religion owes more than to him." 83 Theologian Kent Alan Meyer has suggested that the debt may even be greater than Tillich was prepared there to admit, noting how both men focused on the ultimate existential anxiety of what Tillich called "non-being" and Goldstein called "catastrophe" the necessity of courage in (re)affirming being, the significance of "essence" as the source of ultimate identity and meaning, and the connection between actualization and suffering in human existence. 84 In a 1956 letter to Tillich written on the occasion of the latter's seventieth birthday, Goldstein himself noted the surprisingly deep spiritual kinship he and his friend had developed over the years: As I sit myself down to write you birthday greetings, so much comes into my head in regard to our relationship: memories that I regard as belonging to the truly valuable [ones] of my life. How I first encountered you at a Kant congress .. . ; how I rejoiced when you were called to Frankfurt [in 1929]; the beautiful days in Davos where we grew closer and closer, not only personally but also—in spite of our so different starting positions—in our work as well, in our basic ideas about life and the human condition. So close indeed in this respect that I could present your theology students in New York with my "biological" concepts, and could bring them to a better appreciation of the deep relationships between theology and biology (as I see them!).85

THE CALL FOR A HOLISTIC CLINICAL PRACTICE

Although most of Goldstein's work focused on the individual human task, he also interwove a series of supporting themes into his work that were more explicitly professional and social: Ever since his wartime studies with Gelb, he had recognized that wholeness-seeking organisms could not be understood or helped by a medical science and biology that was locked into mechanistic,

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CHAPTER FIVE * atomistic metaphors and methodologies. He called, then, upon his profession to adopt an idea of "wholeness" that could not only capture the deeper truth of every organism's functioning and striving, but also could frame a new approach to therapy capable of understanding and serving that same organism's needs. Goldstein launched this crusading dimension of his work during a time of perceived crisis in the professional credibility of German medicine. Ringer is one of many historians who have noted how, by the Weimar period, "the theme of crisis was . . . a ritual and an obsession. . . . After announcing the crisis in their discipline, speakers tended to follow immediately with an attack upon the overspecialization and positivism of the nineteenth century. An argument in favor of new methods and concepts generally completed the pattern of these crisis proclamations."86 Thus, when Oswald Bumke, rector of the University of Munich, spoke in 1928 on the "crisis in medicine," he went so far as to declare that the profession had never been so under siege. And true to the formula of the time, he found the roots of the credibility problem in the view of the human being as a "reflex machine" that had made it impossible "to understand [the patient] with empathy." Bumke believed, though, that a movement was underway in medicine to replace the old atomistic or specialized approaches with an approach that "strives for larger perspectives, for synthesis, and for a unified image of the world." 87 Now at the height of his career, Goldstein had committed himself to acting as a significant player in the Weimar era search for synthetic and holistic solutions to the crisis of his profession. Beginning in the late 1920s and continuing until his forced exile in 1933, Goldstein was increasingly active in an effort within medicine to overcome Cartesian dualism and articulate a psychosomatic approach to medical diagnosis and therapy.88 Spearheaded by men like Viktor von Weizsacker in Heidelberg and Theodor Brugsch in Halle (Saale), attempts were made to reintroduce the unified "person" into medicine.89 Although a neurologist by training, Goldstein showed his commitment to a multidisciplinary, psychosomatic vision of human distress by participating in the founding of the International Society for Psychotherapy in 1927.90 He was also a prominent contributor to the German medical journal Der Nervenarzt, founded in 1928 and bearing the subtitle "with special attention to psychosomatic relations."91 In 1931, Goldstein produced an important programmatic statement for the psychosomatic cause that was published in the medical journal Therapie der Gegenwart. Significantly, an introduction to this paper by the editor Georg Klemperer located it in the context of the thickening "dark clouds over the medical profession's horizon" and the "steadily worsening . . . troubles and battles of the physician's situation, as he wrestles against injustice and undervaluation."92 Entitled "The Significance of the Mind-Body Problem for Medical Practice," the paper began by evoking the familiar specter of the crisis of confidence in "scientific" (somatic) medicine and blamed this discontent for

161 • THE SELF-ACTUALIZING BRAIN the growing market strength of alternative therapies, especially the therapeutics of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the end, though, the paper found both approaches inadequate and, ironically enough, inadequate in the same way: "[S]omatic medicine and psychoanalysis are both the result of the atomisticmaterialistic thinking that dominated medicine at the turn of the century."93 Although Freud had rebelled against the ruling somaticism of his day and had dared to interpret somatic symptoms as symbolic expressions of psychic distress, ultimately he had done no more than perpetuate the deeper errors of the somaticism he believed himself to have transcended.94 On closer examination, both psychoanalysis and somatic medicine turned out to share these untenable assumptions: (1) that organisms were made up of autonomous parts or regions (brain regions for the somaticists; psychic entities such as the ego and the id for the psychotherapists); and, (2) that the psychic and the physical were ontologically distinct, mutually interacting processes, with now the one, now the other dominating. Since two such opposing theoretical and therapeutic positions had managed to emerge out of such similar first principles, questions as to which side was "right" seemed rather premature, if not beside the point. What needed examination, rather, were the problems in the basic assumptions common to both. For Goldstein, both somatic medicine and psychoanalysis fell short in their failure to realize that "mind" and "body" did not point to genuine entities but were just "symbols" (human abstractions) of a holistic organismic reality that was itself inviolable. (The emphasis on the symbolic nature of these categories probably owed a debt to Ernst Cassirer.) Although the physician may not be able to avoid using words like "mind" and "brain," the only genuine ontological category he was permitted to recognize was that of the unified organism. In Goldstein's words: The mind neither acts on the body, nor the body on the mind, however much this may seem to be the case to superficial observation. Instead, we are always dealing with the reaction of the organism, the effect of which we refer at one time to something we call mental, at another time to something we call physical. [In other words], we describe the workings [of the whole organism] according to the index of the so-called psychological or physical.95 In light of this, one could even doubt the clinical wisdom of making a fundamental distinction between disorders of behavior and personality with "organic" causes (traditionally seen by neurologists) and disorders with '-'neurotic" causes (seen by psychoanalysts). Both types of disorders called for helping the organism adapt to disordered functioning. Thus, anxiety might be treated equally well with opium or with hypnosis. The choice of treatment did not depend on deciding whether the condition was a psychological or a physical problem because it was neither and both: it was a problem of the whole organism in relation to its milieu. Goldstein even concluded that many of the

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• CHAPTER FIVE * phenomena deemed so important in the psychotherapeutic process (transference, for example) could actually be seen more clearly in cases involving organic patients than in those involving so-called neurotic disorders.96 Goldstein's 1931 article also had a more general, if somewhat guarded political message for the German medical profession. The opening paragraph of the article had warned about the tendency of the time "toward the irrational and the mystical, fed by enormous dissatisfaction and doubt regarding the possibility of a rational ordering of life."97 This dissatisfaction, the paper went on, was not unwarranted; there was no question that somatic medicine did inappropriately split organismic existence into artificial dichotomies, barring from its reality the whole crucial existential and spiritual dimensions of health and disease. At the same time, all popular alternatives to classic natural science that resorted to irrational "added" principles in order to explain life were dangerous and incoherent and to be thoroughly rejected. What was the solution to medicine's professional crisis then? It was neither irrationality nor more scientific rationality of the old sort, but rather holistic rationality, an approach to health and disease that did justice to the nonmechanistic, valuerich reality of organismic existence while simultaneously remaining rigorously critical and empirical.98 Both the political message here and its timing are highly telling: a Jewish intellectual who in a 1913 monograph on race hygiene had considered the greatest danger to German society to lie in the fetishism of scientific rationality and utilitarian, mechanistic values had by 1931 become at least as sensitive to the dangers lurking in "the irrational and the mystical."

T H E GOETHEAN "SCHAU": TOWARD A HOLISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY

One year later, in 1932, Goldstein joined a group of twenty prominent medical specialists at a congress in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. The goal of the meeting was to address the crisis of medicine by establishing a consensus on the unifying principles of medicine—a professional Weltanschauung that would transcend the narrow interests of the individual specialities. In the words of one of the conference organizers, M. Sihle from Riga, "the great discontent that plagues medical circles in all cultured countries can be traced back to the lack of a truly appropriate medical Weltanschauung."99 Sihle was hopeful, however, that the era of crisis in his profession was in fact giving way to a period of renewed hope. In the 1930s, he looked forward to "not only a new historical, but also a new spiritual epoch, one which, like a dawn after the Sturm und Drang of the analytical epoch, reveals the coming of true scientific ripeness. The urge toward synthesis can be powerfully felt on all medical horizons."100 The proceedings of this optimistic conference, Einheitsbestrebungen in der Medizin, were published one year later with the financial support of the Josiah

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Macy Foundation in the United States under the editorial supervision of a leading advocate for psychosomatic approaches in internal medicine, Theodor Brugsch.101 In Goldstein's contribution, entitled "The Holistic Perspective in Medicine," he clearly outlined for the first time his own professional vision not only of a,holistic approach to clinical practice, but also of a holistic approach to knowledge of organismic life in general.102 This epistemology can fairly be considered the culmination of his cultural offering to Weimar. The guiding idea of his proposal was that biologists and physicians did not stand outside of the reality they sought to understand but were part and parcel of it. Their methodology and means of knowing therefore necessarily reflected the structure and dynamic character of their own organismic natures. Indeed, their struggles to achieve true biological knowledge—to arrive at an accurate "fit" between symbolic representation on the one hand and lived reality on the other—had itself an intimately "biological" character. It corresponded to the struggle of organismic life generally to achieve an "adequate" fit, a "true" or life-enhancing Gestalt, between itself and its milieu.103 In both science and lived existence, the quest for adequacy began with a rough idea of the desired Gestalt, which was then refined repeatedly in response to resistances from the milieu. A concept of the "whole," initially inadequate but increasingly more accurate, guided one's efforts, giving order and significance to isolated facts or experiences. Adequacy or knowledge was never achieved through a simple "adding up" of all the isolated acts or observations of which the organism was capable. Instead, there came finally a moment of creative "seeing"—a Goethean Schau—when all the pieces fell into place and became intelligible in light of a final revised Gestalt.104 Goldstein was under no illusions as to how such talk about holistic seeing and Goethe could be understood by his audience; the rhetorical resonances with the romantic irrationalism of life philosophy were unmistakable. He proceeded, therefore, to mock the lofty pretenses of his own language. Far from being mystical, he said, holistic seeing figured in the most prosaic of activities, including the common act of learning to ride a bicycle: We make purposeless movements with our body for so long until we suddenly achieve equilibrium and can correctly ride. All the [awkward] efforts before have nothing to do directly with the actual performance. They are of course necessary; we arrive at the correct performance first through the continual modification of movements, but these false movements never lead directly to the right ones. The right ones appear suddenly, when a state of adequacy between the actions of the organism and the conditions of the milieu is achieved. This adequacy is [subjectively] experienced by us [as] . . . knowledge of the proper actions necessary for bicycle riding.105 By talking about such ordinary things as bicycles, Goldstein divested the Goethean Schau of its irrationalist associations, and simultaneously, deftly reclaimed it for his own biological epistemology and research program rooted in "holistic rationality."

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GOLDSTEIN'S PERSECUTION AND THE BIOLOGY OF FASCISM

In 1930 Goldstein resigned his professorship in Frankfurt to accept a position as head of a new department of neurology at the state hospital, Moabit. Moabit's director, Georg Klemperer, was the son of a liberal rabbi and an active social democrat. Under the republic's benevolent supervision, he had devoted his energies since the end of the World War into making Moabit a hub for socially responsible and psychosomatically oriented medicine.106 Wooing a leading senior physician like Goldstein away from Frankfurt to Berlin (where Goldstein was immediately made a professor at the university of Berlin) had been a great triumph for Moabit. Within three years, though, the promise of a new chapter in Goldstein's life work was rudely broken. The hospital was seen as both "Jewish" and "red." About 70 percent of the physicians were of Jewish ancestry; some 10 percent of the members of the staff had organized themselves into unions. On March 21, an article appeared in the Volkischer Beobachter attacking Moabit for its role in the "Jewish infestation" of the Berlin municipal hospitals. The journal also listed the names of all Moabit medical staff members, including that of Goldstein, who were now to be removed from their positions because they were Jews, foreigners, or members of "Marxist" organizations. On April 1, 1933, a truckload of Sturmabteilung (SA) troops drove onto the hospital grounds, marched into the wards, and began seizing the designated staff members on the spot, wherever they happened to be. People were forcibly removed from offices, consulting rooms, and operating rooms and led away, still wearing their white lab coats. Edith Thurm, a technical medical assistant at the hospital at the time, recalled how the SA barged into Goldstein's examining room: The SA men stood there, and he sat at his desk. He was told to come along. At this he still said: "Will you permit me at least to turn my patients over to my attending physician?" The latter was not in the room. Then they said to him: "Every person can be replaced, including you!"107 It turned out that Goldstein was in particular trouble, having been singled out for "denouncement" in the style of the time by an unidentified National Socialist colleague. This colleague had declared that Goldstein was not only Jewish but also a dangerous leftist: he had, the colleague insisted, given preferential treatment to patients in the clinic with Russian background or leftist sympathies. Indeed, Goldstein was a member of the Democratic Socialist Party (SPD) and active in the Association of Socialist Physicians.108 Some sense of the nature of his leftist agenda can be inferred from a lecture, "Disease and Social Standing," that he had recently given to that association.109 The SA troops took Goldstein to one of their prisons for alleged enemies of the state, located on General-Pape-Strasse in Berlin. Goldstein was placed in a cell with a surgeon from another Berlin hospital, Dr. Erich Simenauer. Pris-

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oners here were subjected to episodes of both random and organized sadism. Simenauer would later tell how his own life was saved at that time by a note reading "Don't mistreat" scrawled on his protocol by a storm trooper who felt some indebtedness to Simenauer for an appendix operation the doctor had performed on him a short time before.' 10 Goldstein fared somewhat less well: during the week of his imprisonment, he was taken down to a basement where he was flogged with sand-filled rubber hoses. The psychiatrist Eva Rothmann (a colleague who later became Goldstein's second wife) saved him at this point by soliciting the help of the psychiatrist and Adlerian psychotherapist Matthias Goring. Goring was an erratic, occasionally soft-hearted Nazi, much of whose influence as director of a psychotherapy center in Berlin known as the Goring Institute came from exploiting links to his cousin, Hermann Goring.111 Responding now to Rothmann's appeals, Goring declared that "he would find Goldstein 'wherever they had dragged him' and have him set free." Goldstein was released after signing a paper in which he agreed to leave Germany forever.112 Abandoning most of his possessions (including a valuable library), he went alone to Switzerland. Although he remained there only briefly, he found time to help establish the Emergency Society of German Learning, which aimed to help all German academics who had been forced, like he, to leave their homeland.113 From Switzerland, he went on to Amsterdam, where friends created a temporary position for him in the Pharmacological Institute of the local university, and even found a secretary to take dictation for The Organism. A year later, a visa finally arrived granting him entry to the United States. Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, he arrived in New York City in 1935. Goldstein secured a position at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and became a clinical professor of neurology (without salary) at Columbia University. He was able to establish a clinical laboratory at the Montefiore Hospital in New York, where he worked with Martin Scheerer, also a German immigrant, on refining methods for testing abstract versus concrete attitudes in brain-damaged patients (see figure 23).' 14 On the recommendation of Harvard neuropsychologist, Karl Lashley, he became William James Lecturer at Harvard from 1938 to 1939.115 From 1940 to 1945, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a clinical professorship for Goldstein at Tufts Medical School in Bos-ton. He then returned to New York City, where he established a private practice and taught in various capacities at the City College of New York, Columbia University, and the New School. Later he served as a visiting professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. At this point in his life, he was also partly sponsored by the Jungian Bollingen Foundation. Over the years he maintained collegial relations with such fellow exiles as Max Wertheimer, Max Horkheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, Paul Tillich, Ernst Cassirer, Walther Riese, Aron Gurwitsch, Ludwig Binswanger, Karen Homey, Charlotte Biihler, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein.116 New American friends were made largely in the growing humanistic branch of American psychology and included such figures as Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, Abraham Maslow, Floyd Matson, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers.117

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Although in these ways he was able to recover at least some success and respect, Marianne Simmel (who had met Goldstein in Boston in 1942) believed that the forced emigration had nevertheless ruined Goldstein's career. During the Depression years, she noted that Goldstein hesitated to demand proper fees from his private patients and for this reason, he suffered under quite severe financial hardship at times.118 In addition, although Goldstein became an American citizen in 1940, he never quite felt at home in his new country. English always remained an awkward language for him, and he suffered under his loss of connection from the Kultur that had grounded his identity for so many decades. Simmel tells the story of how she once told Goldstein that all the tradition in the world would not help anyone to even the tiniest hamburger, be it here or in Europe. His immediate reply was "Ach was" followed by "The younger generation thinks only of its stomach," and,finallyby, "You are probably right, and that is just what is so awful." I never could argue him out of that final adjective."9 There were also other, less tangible wounds. A friend and fellow exile, Harvard Professor Robert Ulich, later reflected that the forced emigration wounded [Goldstein] beyond recovery, not only personally, but also as a reflection of the dark abyss in the depth of humanity. He spoke of the eternal human problems of sin and guilt which appeared in every man's life, and of the incapacity of even those closest to one another to help in times of distress.120 Late in life, Goldstein himself would tell an interviewer that his disappointment in the Germany he had loved was so great as a result of his experiences that he would never contemplate returning. As he put it, "The people who have such hate that they do not return, they are the ones who love."121 In 1936 Goldstein had published his first and only paper to deal directly with the problem of fascism, "Remarks on the Significance of Biology for Sociology, with Particular Attention to the Problem of Authority."122 This was a contribution to a massive, multiauthor project, "Authority and the Family," organized by the Frankfurt School, itself now largely regrouped at the Institute for Social Research in a building on Morningside Heights provided by Columbia University. One of the guiding hypotheses of their study was that a "crisis of the family" had made it possible for totalitarian societies to step in and take over the socialization and educational functions previously carried out within the home. 123 Goldstein's argument set a different emphasis: The sociological phenomena [sic] with which we want to deal first is the strange fact that a social group is not able to recognize how the rulers they brought into power may possibly use this power in a manner completely directed against the interests of this group. . . . [T]he question how is [it] possible that people do not see apparently obvious matters or react to them in such a changed way.124 Goldstein began his analysis by looking at a clinical analogue: the behavior of the organism in a state of catastrophe. Clinical studies had shown that the first impulse of such an organism was to flee from the perceived danger, but

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Figure 23. Goldstein's toolbox that tested brain-damaged patients for loss of holistic "abstract capacity" (separate tests for men and women), 1941. Goldstein and Scheerer, "Abstract and Concrete Behavior: An Experimental Study with Special Tests," Psychological Monographs, John Dashiell, ed., 53:2 (1941): 80. if flight was impossible, then the organism was "forced to come to terms with an environment it cannot master." The usual strategies included rigidity, narrowing of attention, abnormal dependence on outside authorities (such as the physician), emotional "clinging to the past" that avoids the need for any decisions or choices, seclusion from the world, abnormal seriousness and a lack of humor or sense of irony. "We may say that he is brought down to a lower level of his former self."125 For Goldstein, the patient's dependence on his physician after succumbing to a state of catastrophe was particularly relevant for understanding the political relationship currently operative between Germany's citizens and the Nazi leaders: Devotion without criticism makes him not only adore the protector and "leader" in a dangerous world, but causes him . . . to undertake dangerous tasks for his sake; he knows, of course, that he [the protector] will protect him of the consequences [H]e does not fear anything as much as to lose this relationship of dependency. For him the helper is absolute authority, obedience towards him a matter of fact.126 In other words, the people of fascist Germany, and particularly the bourgeois classes, were currently acting in a fashion comparable to the inferior behavior of a brain-damaged patient in a catastrophic state of disorganization: In our description of the patient lacking security we may recognize an image of all peculiarities wefindespecially, in certain layers of the middle classes. We note the narrowness and rigidity of their world their blindness towards . . . criticism.

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. CHAPTER FIVE their rigid clinging to modes of life and to ideals of time past; their inaccessibility to new forms or ideas, especially if they could involve insecurity; the uniformity of behavior; their being proud of everything "owned," from their own farm to their own country, coupled to a complete lack of comprehension for everything foreign; the fight against other opinions and other persons, waged with a fanatic passion and cruelty, especially under the protection of a "great man." Obedience, sacrifice, subordination, which in fact are an expression of looking for protection under another man's orders, become ideals. Authority has to become an absolute value; only then can it guarantee necessary security. We might add to all this the lack of genuine contemplation, an almost inhuman seriousness, the lack of sense of humor and of irony.127

More than just a "medical diagnosis" of a political crisis, this description is an extended insult leveled by a man betrayed by his colleagues and country. Goldstein's old political and existential idea of striving for balance, synthesis, and tolerance in a necessarily imperfect world, is forgotten here. Instead, quite suddenly, he turns to the standard hero of socialists and communists: the "worker." If any hope at all is to be expected, Goldstein tells us, it will come, not from the middle class but from the "most progressive layers of the proletariat." Unlike the bourgeois, the workers of the world were not invested in winning the support of those in power, and therefore were freed for radical action: They do not strive for security at any price, as they feel this to be impossible; they strive for a new organization of the entire social body, an organization in which they have possibilities of existence like anybody else. Their actions are determined by a principally meaningful perception, like the reaction of an organism in the course of a meaningful transformation . .. The life of the proletarian in his special situation tends necessarily toward motion, not toward rest.128 The Marxist rhetoric of this essay, so different from the rest of Goldstein's published writings, impresses the reader as a liminal moment of disjuncture in Goldstein's thought as he turned his back on Germany and prepared to begin a new life in exile. Perhaps he resorted to available socialist categories of heroism and action because his own, more ambiguous Weimar categories were so clearly inadequate to the crisis at hand. The 1930s were no longer a time for a German Jew to preach the virtues of individual actualization and philosophical accommodation to a necessarily imperfect world. By the 1940s, Goldstein's polemicism seems to have mellowed somewhat; with distance and a certain amount of renewed personal security, he could again afford to become rather more magisterial. His old friend Hans LukasTeuber recalled an evening spent at Goldstein's home in Boston in the last years of the war (Goldstein lived with his wife and children in Boston from 1940 to 1945): [W]e were among the youngest guests at one of the Goldsteins' soirees on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, with many of the other guests being senior faculty members, mostly at Harvard; the majority of those present were German emigres. I

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The talk turned, as it often did in those days, to the question of "what should be done with them," meaning the retribution to be meted out to Germans after the war. At that point Kurt Goldstein astounded everyone by saying, quite solemnly, that he did not like the drift of our talk; we were dealing with a sickness that might easily infect some other nation in its turn. To prevent a recurrence, hate should not be allowed to engender hate; those responsible should be treated as if they were patients. There was profound silence. On the wall was the portrait of Goethe, near the place where Goldstein sat. We looked across the room, and the two profiles seemed to resemble each other more than ever before.129

GOLDSTEIN IN AMERICA: T H E "WHOLENESS" IN THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER

Although its larger resonances were clearly different in America than in Germany, the role of "abstract capacity" in human psychological and neurological functioning continued to preoccupy Goldstein during his years in exile. With Martin Scheerer, he began to lay more emphasis on the hierarchical nature of the relationship between a "primitive" concreteness on the one hand, and an evolutionarily more advanced capacity to detach and abstract on the other. He also began to downplay the role of language in abstract conceptual capacity: "By no means do we imply that the conscious and volitional factor involved in abstracting operations must be inevitably accompanied by verbalization."130 Simultaneously, he came close to compromising his globalist approach to brain functioning by admitting a localized link between abstract capacity and intact frontal lobe functioning.131 This emerging interest in the relationship between abstract capacity and the frontal lobe drew him into debates over the effectiveness and safety of the then-popular psychosurgical procedure, prefrontal lobotomy and leucotomy.132 His article warning against these operations (even as it denounced the exaggerations that described all lobotomized patients as "human vegetables") was published in Scientific American in 1950.133 Goldstein now also made a distinction between the compulsive concrete behavior of the brain-damaged patient and the ability of every healthy human being to surrender to concreteness under appropriate circumstances. Much of routine life was carried out "concretely." From this principle, Goldstein was moved to deny that the alleged concrete attitude of many "primitive" people indicated an inherently lower mentality. The concreteness of primitives was instead a product of a hierarchical society which invested one or a few individuals with authority for the entire group. The others, although capable of abstraction, rarely made use of their capacity, relying instead on their leaders for all decisions.134 In other ways, the last years of Goldstein's life may have been ultimately a time of mellowing. His publications in the 1950s saw the use of striking new metaphors of wholeness: "encounter," "communion," "sphere of immediacy." The stoic hero of the Weimar years—striving to actualize his nature in spite of inevitable imperfection and death—was now supplemented, if not replaced,

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by a new image—drawn from a study of mother-infant interactions—of an infant smiling at its mother.135 Actualization, Goldstein began to stress, was always actualization in relation to others. Goldstein formalized this line of thinking in the late 1950s with the introduction of a new concept: the "sphere of immediate unity" or sphere of immediacy. This "sphere" was conceived by him as a space of connectedness created by a direct emotional encounter with another, trusted human being. It contained the wholeness born of an "I-thou" encounter or state of "communion" with a fellow organism whose reality resonated in a state of "adequacy" with one's own.136 Such experiences of "immediacy" and "communion" were usually a result of interpersonal contact, but not exclusively; Goldstein also believed that the sphere of immediacy was the foundation for religious experiences; moments of awe and existential belonging when the universe became a "thou" to the wondering organism.137 Goldstein credited this new development in his thinking to the encounter concept of the Dutch phenomenologist Frederik J. J. Buytendijk, the anthropology of Martin Buber, and the existential concepts of Ludwig Binswanger. Spiegelberg has stressed that Goldstein's sphere of immediacy aimed to describe not only a social and existential phenomenon, but an epistemological one as well. In addition to the dialectic of analysis and synthesis that had defined his understanding of knowing up to that point, Goldstein now defended a third way of knowing: that which was born through the heart's encounter with reality. This means of knowing was both "more direct and less articulate than the usual objectifying scientific approach. It widened the dimension of intuitive givenness in the context of or approach to the world."138 To put the matter in its greeting-card simplicity: Goldstein had concluded that love, too, was a means of knowledge. It is true that in Germany, Goldstein had always recognized the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. There, though, he had emphasized its significance for the patient's healing process and the high character and'courage needed by the physician who was being asked to bring not only his skills but also his whole personality to the therapeutic process. Now exiled in the United States and approaching the final years of a life whose trappings of security had been irrevocably shaken, Goldstein saluted the doctor-patient relationship as an end in itself, a moment of human wholeness through communion. Courage in the face of adversity was heroic, but over a long life, a man still grew lonely:139 The help we give patients in therapy is not an external, merely practical, activity but something that originates in the most characteristic property of man, the tendency to help and the desire to be helped. This is the expression of the original unity of man, which man has lost and must try to regain. Only if he achieves this is he able to realize himself. Man can be an individual only in this unity with the other.... [With patients] unity will be effective only if it is not a pseudo-unity, a merely external relationship, but if it is a real renewing of a lost communion. This is ultimately the value which guarantees human existence, i.e., its essential nature.140 a

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THE LESSONS OF GOETHE IN THE POST-HIROSHIMA AGE

In his final years, Goldstein not only bore an "amazing similarity in appearance" to Goethe,141 but was increasingly vocal about his sympathy with Goethe's passionate attacks on the moral and aesthetic sterility of the Newtonian world view. He remarked once about the Farbenlehre, Goethe's phenomenological alternative to Newton's physics of color optics: "Obviously, Goethe was scientifically wrong, but ultimately he was right in his protest against Newton's mechanical picture of the world. The future may show that both were right."142 In 1949. Goldstein had read a short paper in German to the Rudolf Virchow Medical Society in New York that casts some light on what he may have meant by the above remark.143 Commenting on a lecture by a colleague, Otto Meyerhof, that had discussed Goethe's methods of scientific inquiry, Goldstein proposed to ask some questions about the implications of that method for the modern situation. He was particularly interested in the implications of the current tendency to isolate scientific knowledge from human concerns, a tendency that Goethe had already detected and deplored in his own time. Invoking the grim background of Hiroshima and the prospect of future nuclear decimation, Goldstein declared: We have experienced this danger [of isolating science from human values], and researchers who have contributed significantly to the development of atomic theory see the danger, and have warned [us]. The fear that the man of today feels towards the enormous success of a science, that seems more suited to destroying the world than to helping humanity achieve a better life, is consistent with the Goethean critique.144 Goethe had the solution: it lay in a vision of scientific method and epistemology that found room in naturalistic discourse for human values and experienced human reality. He himself, Goldstein claimed, had early adopted a Goethean approach to nature and, like Goethe, had been forced to struggle against the incomprehension and prejudice of colleagues. Nevertheless, his view of science that saw human values and human morality as part and parcel of the living natural world was, he felt, "particularly important [now], because apparently suitable to confront the dangers of the atomistic natural scientific approach, and to promote a fruitful synthesis." More specifically, the holism he and Goethe advocated just might be in a position to "prevent the perspective of the physical natural sciences from leading mankind towards selfdestruction."145 Two generations and an ocean away from his roots, Goldstein in old age had come almost full circle in his long struggle against the Machine: back to the frank distrust, so pronounced in his 1913 race hygiene monograph, of every tendency to overvalue the means and the products of natural science

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over human values and experience. In a fragment of text written in 1964 or 1965 and intended for his proposed final book, which was never completed,146 Goldstein wrote (in English): [Pjeople were mostly not aware that the dangerous consequences of the discoveries of science were not an accidental effect—its use for politics—but unavoidable. . . . The progress by the application of science to all fields, also those which are related to the spiritual side of man, as education, psychology, sociology, etc., seems to be so enormous that somebody who today dares to oppose even a little this trend and warns against the fateful consequences for human existence is considered either stupid or uneducated, irresponsible or prejudiced.147 In New York, a small group of devotees in search of alternatives to the self-destructive, shallow mechanistic society of middle-class America, began to see in Goldstein the visage of a seer and spiritual leader. I present only one piece of evidence in support of this claim: the "Open Letter to Dr. Kurt Goldstein in Commemoration of His Eightieth Birthday, November 6,1958," written by Ruth Nanda Anshen, then editor-in-chief of the well-known Credo publication series.148 The letter, a minor masterpiece of kitsch and affixed with more than thirty signatures from friends and colleagues, reads in part: We are aware in you of what might almost be called an archaic world wherein the metaphysical concepts are not always formulated in theoretical language but rather in symbol, myth or rite, all of which express . . . a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things.... . . . [B]ecause you refuse to split the Godhead, you seem to us to dwell unmistakably on a height where everything is known. . . . There is a reassuring harmony within you—a harmony of nature and man, that quality which is sometimes echoed in the music of Bach who listened to the universe speak while he as mediator let this universe sing. . . . Through your intuition and knowledge, through your recognition of the limitations of scientific method, history and progress, and the need for transcendence, you introduce a new doctrine of organism which may be said to be taking the place of the materialism with which, since the seventeenth-century, science has enmeshed philosophy.... Like the water of Thales, you show us the meaning of nature, grasped in its essence, and the meaning of the psyche as well... . We thank you, Kurt, above all for your dedication to the truth that nothing will be moral or personal in ideas or in reality except what is infused in them by a secret circulation from the enduring heart.149 There have been various hagiographic interpretations of Kurt Goldstein's striking transformation over the decades from clinical researcher to Wise Man possessed of deep truths in matters of the human spirit. In 1959, for example, Frederick Weiss, president of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, found a simple explanation for the "steadily widening horizons

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of [Goldstein's] life and work" in the steady commitment of the man himself to a Goethean quotation he claimed had inspired Goldstein throughout his career: "If you want to stride into the Infinite, move but within the Finite in all directions."150 A more historically sensitive explanation can, however, be constructed. At the height of Goldstein's career in the 1920s, a confluence of intersecting scientific, clinical, philosophical, professional, and cultural concerns in Germany made his organismic biology a persuasive framework for addressing simultaneously a crisis in both intellectual life, politics, and medical professional credibility. Because German science, philosophy politics, and culture were guided by certain common images and spoke a broadly common rhetoric, his work could function simultaneously as a fruitful research paradigm and a prescriptive narrative. As Americans naturally had different intellectual, political, and cultural concerns, the "adequacy" between his transplanted vision and indigenous collective need was less precise, and certain resonances and nuances were simply not "heard" or understood in the new context. Indeed, for some psychologists not identified with that mid-century movement in the United States to recapture psychology's "lost soul," Goldstein's approach and preoccupations could seem alien at best, and irritating at worst. Behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, for example, had the following harsh reaction to The Organism: In spite of protestations to the contrary, the book is metaphysical—in the sense that the principal questions which it raises cannot be answered by experiment. The aim of the science which Goldstein propounds is to "understand the essential nature of the organism." Such statement would be avoided like the plague by most contemporary scientists. . . . [Goldstein] rejects the scientific practices responsible for our present body of biological knowledge and, in complete devotion to Being, dispenses with most of the logical devices as well.151 In American neurology, even where there was no deliberate rejection of Goldstein's project, many of his central concepts, such as the emphasis on subjective and existentialist aspects of brain disorder, simply began to seem less relevant. New technological and disciplinary developments in the 1960s—associated with the animal work of scientists like Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel on the one side, and the clinically based studies of scientists like Norman Geschwind and Roger Sperry on the other—gradually turned the attention of that field back to more "hardwired" and localizable dimensions of cognitive and behavioral functioning. At the same time, Goldsteinian psychological concepts such as actualization, which would resonate with the more rebellious and romantic faces of the 1960s context, became largely decoupled from their origins and made to serve new masters in new contexts (e.g., that of American "Third Wave" humanistic psychology).152 All this may help explain, more persuasively than hagiographies can, the gradual personalizing and spiritualizing of Goldstein's core metaphors as they

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reproduced themselves over the decades in exile. No longer speaking for a distinct cultural collectivity and historical moment, Goldstein's sole option as a man who had elected (as Rudolf Arnheim wrote him in 1958) to "preserve the living spirit of the 1920s" within him 153 was to stress the "infinite" level of that living spirit: that which stood above the flux of time. In this way alone, perhaps, could he escape becoming an anachronism—a man whose insights, both cultural and scientific, had been outstripped by history.

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Life S c i e n c e , N a z i W h o l e n e s s , and the " M a c h i n e " in G e r m a n y ' s M i d s t "National Socialism is politically applied biology" —Hans Schemm

IN THE 1930S, while German exiles like Goldstein and Wertheimer were adapting holism to new audiences and new needs, holism in the life and mind sciences "at home" was undergoing its own transformations and adaptations. When Hans Shemm in 1935 declared National Socialism to be "politically applied biology," things began to look up, not only for holism, but for the life sciences in general. After all, if the good National Socialist citizen was now seen as the man or woman who understood and revered what were called "Life's laws," then it seemed clear that the life scientists had a major role to play in defining a National Socialist educational program that would transmit the essence of these laws to every family in every village in the country.1 Obviously, certain "racially" oriented disciplines like genealogy, population genetics, race hygiene, anthropology, and (more ambivalently) Darwinian evolution2 were critical resources for National Socialism because they appeared to provide scientific validation for the eugenicist and racist doctrines enshrined by the party. But this was not the whole story. There was also a widespread feeling, especially in the early years, that what the National Socialists were saying, many holistic life and mind scientists had been affirming all along as nature's own truths.3 So much seemed familiar: the calls among the National Socialists to return to authentic "German" values and "ways of knowing," to "overcome" the materialism and mechanism of the "West" and the "Jewish-international lie" of scientific objectivity; the use of traditional volkisch tropes that spoke of the German people (Volk) as a mystical, pseudobiological whole and the state as an "organism" in which the individual was subsumed in the whole ("You are nothing, your Volk is everything");4 the condemnation of Jews as an alien force representing chaos, mechanism, and inauthenticity. Hitler himself had even used the stock imagery of conservative holism in Mein Kampf when he spoke of the democratic state as "a dead mechanism which only lays claim to existence for its own sake" and contrasted this with his vision of statehood for Germany in which "there must be formed a living organism with the exclusive aim of serving a higher idea."5 Alfred Rosenberg came even closer to sounding like a brother in the cause when he attacked the nihilism and callous indi-

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Figure 24. National Socialist workers with shovels salute en masse, photograph supervised by Leni Riefenstahl, Nuremberg, 1934. (Courtesty of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.) vidualism of the old mechanistic scientific worldview, personified in figures like Jacques Loeb, and called on the good spirits of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Kant, Plato, and Goethe to restore a purer vision of nature to Germany.6 After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, the volkisch-holistic rhetoric of National Socialism increased. Thus, party member Karl Zimmerman (who would be appointed Reich representative for policy concerning racial education) declared early on: All in all, the National Socialistic conception of state and culture is that of an organic whole. As an organic whole, the vblkisch state is more than the sum of its parts, and indeed because these parts, called individuals, are fitted together to make a higher unity, within which they in turn become capable of a higher level of life achievement, while also enjoying an enhanced sense of security. The individual is bound to this sort of freedom through the fulfillment of his duty in the service of the whole.7 Given all this, it is not hard to see why certain conservative holistic biologists and psychologists would have celebrated the coming of the Nazis as their own coming of age and good luck. "The Whole has ceased to be a dark, in-

t

Ml N A Z I WHOLENESS * comprehensible principle, and has become a universal natural phenomenon like gravitation or quantum effect," exulted Hamburg philosopher of biology, Adolf Meyer-Abich. Biologist Bernhard Diirken agreed: "We are presently experiencing a spiritual revolution of powerful proportions, and this revolution affects biology also; its pivot point is called Wholeness."8 The Nazi zoologist Heinrich Jacob Feuerborn tried to translate this triumph of Wholeness into practical policy, proposing in 1935 that the "core" of all biological education in the Nazi schools could be found in three basic principles: the doctrine of biological wholeness (the whole as greater than the sum of its parts), the theory of biological development (the dynamic creation of organismic wholes), and the teachings of heredity (the transmission of the qualities of the whole across generations). Education in these principles, he argued, was training in citizenship: "When you put the person in the community of his family, his clan, his race, his Volk, then the teachings of biological holism, development and heredity reveal the whole problem of his racial and volkisch nature and duty."9 Variations on this theme would be sung by men like Freiburg entomologist Hermann Weber, Halle morphologist Wilhelm Troll, and Tubingen botanist Ernst Lehmann, founder and editor of the official journal of Nazi teachers of biology, Der Biologe. Lehmann's case is particularly worth noting since he had early committed himself and the resources at his disposal to championing the holistic perspective as the banner under which a more authentic "volkisch" or "Aryan" biology in his country could be created.10 Lehmann's Biology in Present Life included somewhat hand-waving chapters on "individual wholeness," "transindividual wholeness," "the cosmos of life," and "volkische wholeness."11 In Biological Will: Means and Goals of Biological Work in the New Reich, he proclaimed: We have realized that a detachment of man from Nature, from the Life-Whole leads to his annihilation and to the death of the Volker. Only through a reintegration of man in the Wholeness of Nature can our Volk be restored to strength. That is the deepest purpose of the present biological task. No longer does man alone stand in the centerpoint of thinking, but rather Life as a Whole does, as it reveals itself in all living things on earth. At the same time, no reasonable biologist will overlook the significance of all that which raises men above the other organisms. Still, this striving for connectedness with all of life, indeed with Nature in general into which we are born—-that, so far as I can see, is the deepest purpose and true essence of National Socialistic thinking.12 Holistic experimental psychologists, emphasizing their new status as part of biology,13 also sought to capture a piece of the Weltanschauung pie under the new regime. In 1933, speaking at the opening of the Thirteenth Congress of the German Society of Psychology, Felix Krueger praised Hitler as a Volksmann who knew that his noble people could not live on bread alone; they needed to nourish their souls as well, and he thought psychology could

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CHAPTER SIX help. In a 1937 public lecture, "German psychology and the National Socialistic world philosophy [Weltanschauung]," Friederich Sander (professor of psychology at Jena; formerly at Krueger's Institute at Leipzig) went even further: 14

He who, with believing heart and thoughtful sense, intuits the driving idea of National Socialism back to its source, will everywhere rediscover two basic motives standing behind the German movement's colossal struggles: the longing for wholeness and the will towardss Gestalt... . Wholeness and Gestalt, the ruling ideas of the German movement, have become central concepts of German psychology. .. . Present-day German psychology and the National Socialistic world view are both oriented towards the same goal: the vanquishing of atomistic and mechanistic forms of thought: vanquishing through organic thinking, in the structure of volkisch life here, in the researching of psychological reality there.... In this way, though, scientific psychology is on the brink of simultaneously becoming a useful tool for actualizing the aims of National Socialism.15

GESTALT, GOETHE, AND THE FUHRERPRINZIP

It is no accident that Frederich Sander, in allying psychology with Nazism, should have hailed "Wholeness and Gestalt" as "the ruling ideas of the German movement."16 The concept of Gestalt, understood in the Goethean sense as the primal set of forms underlying all creation, had been critical to bioholistic principles since the early nineteenth century. In the Nazi era, it now became available as a politicized metaphor of German authenticity and return to roots. In the words of Nazi scientific popularizer Arthur Neuberg, "The cry was raised throughout the biological world: Back to morphology, back to Goethe and his typology teachings!"17 Under the strength of the Goethean cry, biological disciplines like morphology and ecology gained prestige.18 Racialist typologies of character and ability promoted by men like Jaensch, Lersch, and Klages rose to ascendancy in psychology and anthropology. Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Goethean variation of Gestalt as the basic law of life and race was also revived and enjoyed some popularity.19 Wilhelm Troll, the Halle morphologist, and Karl Lothar Wolf, the Gestalt-chemist,20 two leaders in the Goethean vanguard, waxed exuberant in their praise of Gestalt, declaring in their 1942 monograph, Goethe's Morphological Task, "Wherever Nature is, Gestalt is; just as nothing is without substance, so is nothing without Gestalt. Substance and Gestalt first united create the essence of the alternation of growth and decay of-subjected natural things."21 In the 1940s, these two men (with Wilhelm Pinder) launched a monograph series Gestalt: Contributions to a General Morphology that would attempt ultimately to demonstrate the fruitfulness of a Goethean-Gestalt perspective for virtually every discipline in the natural sciences.22

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For some people, however, the importance of Gestalt went beyond the older volkisch desideratum (here self-consciously infused with a defiant nationalism) of "more Goethe and less Newton." Certain conservative aristocratic intellectuals, while in principle applauding the triumph of the "biological" perspective over the old mechanistic, atomistic ways, nevertheless feared a certain potential for all of this talk about "wholeness" to degenerate into undifferentiated mysticism. For example, Felix Krueger—even though he had declared his readiness in 1933 to help his Fiihrer provide the people with the spiritual food of holistic psychology—soon came to deplore the empty-headed way in which "nebulously mystical" concepts of wholeness and similar ideas like Volksgemeinschaft (Volk community) and the totale Staat (total state) were being bandied about by the masses in newspapers and at mass gatherings. It was high time, he declared, for expert science to reclaim the high ground and enforce discipline over this discourse.23 Similarly, Theodor Haering, professor of philosophy at Tubingen, warned in the pages of Der Biologe in 1935 that it was crucial that people not exaggerate the romantic idea of the state as some irrationalist organismic expression of a racial whole. "[E]very true state," he said, is "never just an organic-natural creation" but is controlled and given direction by "a purposeful ruling mind." "Next to the Race principle," he concluded, "stands the Fuhrerprinzip [fiihrer principle]."24 And here, perhaps, was the crux of the matter. The fuhrer principle or "leader principle" declared that, since Adolf Hitler embodied the will of the people, his authority over them was absolute and incontrovertible. Under the Third Reich, this principle of absolute dictatorship was further extended to a "corps" of assistant leaders in a variety of governmental positions and hierarchical levels, each of whom answered to the fuhrer at the next higher level, and all of whom submitted to the will of the supreme Fuhrer, Hitler himself.25 For some, the conclusion here was clear: a truly Nazified biology and psychology must be able to accommodate the values of discipline and order inherent to the fuhrer principle no less than it embraced the values of wholeness inherent to volkisch thinking. And here is where the concept of Gestalt stepped in as a seemingly ideal analogue: a form of natural order that, like the Fuhrer, had emerged out of the whole but then, in turn, controlled that whole (see figure 25). The Austrian Nazi Ferdinand Weinhandl, in an early 1931 article, was quite confident: the fuhrer as a natural principle was "nothing other than the Gestalt quality that determines and rules the whole; [it is] the new, perhaps just developing physiognomy of the whole." 26 While others were perhaps not quite so explicit as Weinhandl, the ubiquity of discussions in the post-1933 holistic literature about the centrality of form and order in holistic processes leave little doubt about a preoccupation—whether an author used the term "Gestalt" or some allied term such as Krueger's Structure, Driesch's entelechy, or Spemann's organizer.21 The medical historian Owsei Temkin recalled how, during a 1935 visit to Baltimore, Adolf Meyer-

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Figure 25. Poster of the Fuhrer Principle, "March 13, 1938. One Folk, One Reich, One Fuhrer." Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 85, © 1989 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Press). Abich—without a trace of irony—showed the company a film meant to demonstrate a fuhrer principle in the activities of bacteria colonies (the film was entitled 'The Life-Cycle of Dictyostelium mucoroides Br. [Arndt's Phenomenon]").28 All in all, there are a number of levels on which we can and should read Arthur Neuberg's fervent assertion, reiterated through many editions of his book The Present-Day Scientific World Picture: "Where Order is, you find Spirit, you find Logos." 29 i

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THE " J E W " AS CHAOS AND MECHANISM

Since the late nineteenth century, the rhetoric of Gestalt and Wholeness had been dominated by images of struggle against an enemy, sometimes identified with "mechanism" and sometimes with "chaos." Under National Socialism, this quasi-militaristic dimension of holism's self-image would intensify in directions that more or less explicitly equated the holistic fight to reform science with the Nazi fight against everything racially foreign. In 1935, the Munich mathematician M. Casper spoke of science's history as a Manichaean conflict between men who sought to conceive "the world as a whole" and men who tried to reduce that wholeness to mechanistic first principles. "Is it coincidence," he asked disingenuously, "that within the first rank only German names appear?"30 Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger (who stayed on in Germany after his superiors fled or emigrated) spoke of holistic science as locked in a battle against the "chaotic," "mechanistic" spirit of the West. The violence of the present war, he declared in 1942, was a "visible and tangible sign" of this "spiritual struggle" that would ultimately lead to the rise of a "new world age."31 This intensification of militaristic language in the literature was accompanied by an increasing explicit tendency to superimpose the terms of the holistic struggle against mechanism onto the idea of a racial struggle between Germans and Jews, a conceit that had been popularized in the early decades of the century by people like Chamberlain and subsequently adopted by Rosenberg and Hitler himself. The rhetoric used here went beyond the familiar strategy of denouncing this or that example of "Jewish science" (psychoanalysis, Einsteinian relativity, etc.). Rather, Jewishness as a racial condition became a flesh-and-blood metaphor for the only apparently divergent ideas of chaos and mechanism; a force at once disorganizing and sterilizing, to be contained and conquered by the answering racial power of German-Aryan Wholeness. This way of thinking had a number of consequences. It was increasingly said, or implied, that the very capacity to think and see nature as a "whole" (the art of so-called Ganzheitsbetrachtung) was a trait peculiar to the "IndoGermanic" mind, while the Jewish mind was fundamentally analytic, dissolutive, and materialistic. One study, for example, claimed to have discovered evidence of inferior spatial and compositional ("holistic-perceptual") skills in the drawings of Jewish schoolchildren as compared to their Aryan peers (see figure 26).32 Another analyzed the evidence that Jewish scientists suffer from a lack of spatial perceptual capacity, as evidenced by their failure to develop roentgen stereoscopy.33 The "psychological anthropologist" Erich Jaensch— whose influence in German psychology may have been unparalleled before his death in I93934—developed a bio-psychological typology that opposed a superior "Northern integration type" (the "J" type) to an inferior "Jewishliberal dissolution type" (the "S" type).35 The "S" type, which after 1933 he also called the Gegentyp ("anti-type"), was described as intellectually rigid

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CHAPTER SIX and abstract, yet with a tendency to become easily fragmented. In addition, it was artificial, untrustworthy, and biologically soft (with a tendency toward tuberculosis and schizophrenia).36 A number of conclusions could be drawn from all these converging assertions. If it were the case that the German and the Jewish races had radically different ways of experiencing and interacting with the natural world—ways apparently rooted in their different biologies—then one possible conclusion was that no objective standard of truth could exist to which all peoples must submit; truth by definition always carried the stamp of a particular Volk and Blut and served that Volk's "political reality" and "fateful struggle."37 Indeed, as Heinz Wolff, Nazi student leader, put it, the very notion that there could exist an "objectivity" that transcended national and racial needs was a selfserving ideology in itself, rooted in a (Jewish) scientific liberalism, whose devious aim was to encourage people to forget that science was actually made by "living men," by "men of flesh and blood." Writing in 1935, the prominent Nazi holistic physician Karl Kotschau agreed: The freedom of science cannot exist in the right to concern one's self with things that are fully alien to the thinking of one's own Volk, and that possibly even serve the interests of another Volk. To be dependent on an international Weltanschauung alien to one's own Volk is intellectual slavery, not freedom.38 This was not, however, a relativism that was prepared to let a thousand flowers bloom. The truth of a science was to be judged by its capacity to promote what National Socialists, vaguely and grandly, referred to as "Life." And because National Socialism as a political movement allegedly embodied life principles, science under the Third Reich gained in authenticity and veracity to the extent that it consciously oriented itself in accordance with the politics and precepts of the movement. It followed that scientists "who failed to adhere to National Socialist precepts could be viewed, as the Fuhrer himself put it, as 'degenerate' representatives of a 'degenerate science,' as 'estranged from life.'" 39 But the "racializing" of holism's struggle against mechanism did not stop with such "biologies of knowledge" such as these. Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg had long advocated the idea that the struggle between Teuton and Jew corresponded in some ill-defined way to a struggle between the principles of life and death.40 However, it took an article written in 1935 by the physician Alfred Bottcher to make further connections and claim that the holistic struggle to overcome mechanism in science could be understood as a struggle between an Aryan life principle and a Jewish death principle; between nature and something unnatural whose "blood came out of Chaos": The Jewish way of thinking carries, like his blood that came out of Chaos, a dissolutive character. For this reason, the Jew is always attempting to split all things, to break them down to their atoms and in this way to make them complicated and so incomprehensible that a healthy person can no longerfindhis way in is

Figure 26. Drawings demonstrating evidence of inferior perceptual depth capacity and spatial-compositional skills (holistic "seeing") in Jewish school children as compared to their Aryan peers ("Jewish" drawings are middle-left and bottom-left). From Ziel und Weg, 1935. Alexander von Senger, "Erganzungen zu meiner Arbeit, 'Rasse und Baukunst'", Ziel und Weg Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen ArzteBundes, 5: 564-69.

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Figure 27. Anti-Semitic cartoon from Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer representing "the Jew" as "chaos." The caption reads: "The Jewish War God. He carries no sword forfightinghis battles, for his weapons are vulgarity, deception, and lies," 1934. Randall h. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher, (New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1983). the jumble of contradictory theories. Thus does the Jew dissolve the miracle of creation, leaving behind him a pile of rubble, a "chaos" everywhere he penetrates with his corrosive mind. The healthy non-Jew, in contrast, born out of creation, thinks simply, organically, creatively. He unifies, builds up—he thinks in terms of wholes. Briefly summarized, the blood law of the Jew advances: chaos, world revolution, death! And the blood law of the creative-heroic man advances: the organic worldview, world pacification, life! [See figure 27.J41 From rhetoric like this, it seems only a short step to the pronouncement of the holistic psychologist Friedrich Sander that all races that are inherently alienated from the German values of Wholeness and Gestalt must be "eliminated." The German word he used was ausschalten, the same euphemism later used to refer to the genocide of the Jews under the terms of the Final Solution. In his words: Whoever would lead the German Volk—after the perversion of its being, which it had to bear, defenseless—back to its own Gestalt, whoever wants to help the Volk soul achieve the goal it longs for: to purely express its own being—this 1

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individual must eliminate everything alienated from Gestalt; above all, he must nullify the power of all destructive foreign-racial influences. The elimination of a parasitically proliferating Jewry has its deep ethical justification in this will of the German essence to pure Gestalt, no less than does the sterilization, within their own Volk, of carriers of inferior genetic material.42

HOLISTIC MEDICINE AND THE SICK MAN AS "MACHINE"

As Sander reminds us here, the Jews were not the only perceived blot on the Volk community under Nazism: the congenitally weak, sick, and mentally disabled were also singled out as "ballast" and "parasites" within the organismic body of the nation; these people were to be sanitized out of the German social body through mass sterilization and, in later years, through "euthanasia" or enforced "mercy" killings. The Law to Prevent Hereditarily Sick Offspring (July 14, 1933) ordered sterilization for certain classes of people, and— via its notorious Paragraph 12—permitted the use of force against those who refused to submit voluntarily. Holistic rhetoric would offer support to Nazi eugenicist policies like these in at least two ways. The first and more straightforward of these used the trope of the supremacy of the whole over its parts to counter anti-eugenicist arguments that relied on the putative rights of individuals to reproduce or live their lives as they saw fit. Thus holistic psychologist Felix Krueger declared sternly in 1935: The state's defense and jurisdiction cannot function without harshness. Imperiously it demands the sacrifice of one's own will and even one's own life, in its capacity as a Whole that must continue to exist over all else, and to which even its noblest parts are subordinated. It is given to people that they may recognize that which is un-whole in their being, that is to say, opposed to life and hostile to development. They must make a sacrifice of their imperfection, by obeying their state and freely recognizing the ordered power above them.43 The attack of educator and scientific popularizer Bernhard Bavink on "Christian concerns against eugenics" is another case in point: On the Christian side, it is not recognized, or only half, that a Volks-body is an organic whole, and like all wholes has its own laws of life that extend beyond those of the parts. The basic principle of Christian ethics is "brotherly love" that sees in another person . . . an equally valued child of creation, and grants every "human soul" an "infinite worth." . . . To the eugenicist—to the extent that he himself is not just oriented towards the well-being of future individuals but rather thinks much more of the whole hereditary material of a Volk—there remains no alternative but to present these Christians with the very serious question: whether they could justify to God endangering the existence of their Volk in its cultural integrity through their consideration of the (alleged) "human worth" of the individual. The general acceptance of an "organic" worldview in place of a

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"mechanistic" one, that the Church has otherwise so welcomed up to this point, should henceforth really lead to some healthy restrictions against Christian individualism.44 In addition to affirming the superiority of the community over the individual, some holistic rhetoricians asserted their support for eugenicist goals by further suggesting that the "un-whole"—the infirm, disabled, and genetically inferior—represented in their own way no less an offense to the values of Wholeness than did the Jews. In this rhetoric, such individuals—somewhat like the Jews—were themselves transformed into metaphors of mechanism. Machine-people was the disdainful term used by Nazi physician Karl Kotschau—a reference to the fact that such individuals owed their survival to medical technology and were incapable of surviving outside the shelter of an artificial environment. Again the metaphorical links made the final conclusion relatively easy to draw: if such people were "machines," then their existence was clearly not in the service of Life. It followed that such people need not— indeed, should not—be protected under the life-affirming ethic of a holistic Nazi medical practice. Kotschau was very clear: Our time does not need externally controlled machine-people, but rather selfcontrolled people who have developed their own powers schooled in battles with a healthy Nature. Our time needs the heroic man, the man who is up to the challenges of the time, and who does not have to rely on the doubtful protection of an all too artificial environment. 45 Kotschau was a man potentially in a position to translate such grandiose proclamations into practical policy. In 1935, he had been appointed director of a new Reich working group to create a "New German Therapy" {Neue deutsche Heilkunde) that aimed to synthesize scientific medicine with various naturopathic and homeopathic approaches. Underwritten by Gerhard Wagner, Reich Physician, the movement also sometimes called itself "biological medicine," both to emphasize its commitment to that which was "natural" and its dedication to the principles of Life. Holism was to provide the theoretical umbrella under which this new synthesis of the best of the scientific and the traditional was to be developed. Thus Kotschau declared (and his views would be echoed and developed by such allies in holistic circles as the philosopher Adolf Meyer-Abich, the zoologist Friedrich Alverdes, and the anatomist Hans Boker):46 Biological medicine does not cast the person out of Nature, does not dissect and atomize him, but rather always examines the person in his holistic functioning and reacting.... Biological research methods impart understanding and application possibilities from old medicine and folk medicine. When we set the biological research methods by the side of the exact natural scientific methods, we arrive at that synthesis of medicine that one can properly describe as Hippocratic "complete medicine." . . . It is a contribution of the National Socialist revolution to have freed the doctor from . . . [the former] mechanistic-materialistic imprison-

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ment [Einmauerung]. The medical profession accordingly moves more and more away from the former overly fastidious and one-sided mechanistic thinking that . . . must have devastating consequences for the health of the Volk.47 What happened when Nazi medical doctors were freed from their "onesided mechanistic thinking" and began to consider "health and disease in the context of the Nature-whole?" To begin with, they discovered that the principles of Life were served only in the crucible of honest struggle, not when the sick and weakly were allowed to survive in an artificial world.48 They discovered that their primary concern should be, not those who were already sickly and useless, but rather the healthy who had the most to contribute to the Volk. And they realized that prevention and education {Vorsorge) rather than care {Fursorge) must dominate its policies. In keeping with this insight, Kotschau's "New German Therapy" worked vigorously throughout the 1930s to discourage the use of "genetic poisons" such as alcohol and tobacco, to fight environmental toxins in the workplace, and even to encourage bakeries to produce more whole-grain bread rather than less nourishing white varieties (see figure 28).49 In addition, when some form of intervention proved unavoidable, the proponents of the new therapy encouraged all physicians under the Third Reich to consider the use of supposedly natural, folk therapeutic approaches, such as herbal remedies, massage, fasting, and special diets of raw vegetables and fruits. The wisdom of Hippocrates, "the doctor does not heal; Nature heals," was widely cited.50 The medieval Swiss physician and alchemist, Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, the man who had rebelled against the stultifying scholasticism of his day and had sought means to stimulate the natural healing powers of the body, was consecrated as the official folk hero of the new therapeutic attitude. As historian Robert Proctor has put it, "Paracelsean medicine was said to embody the natural, earthbound, experimental nature of German medicine—medicine that was 'close to the people' and not based on 'a lot of complicated theories.' It embraced 'the whole man,' not just particular organs or ailments."51 A showcase hospital that combined scientific diagnostic techniques with naturopathic therapeutics, the Rudolf Hess Hospital, was even set up in Dresden in June 1934 to demonstrate the clinical feasibility of the new therapeutic philosophy.52 Ultimately, as will be discussed later in this chapter, the systematic attempt to reorient Nazi biology and medicine in holistic directions would founder under opposition from other medical leaders within the party, and especially within the SS. Yet certain fragments of the original holistic medical vision would persist to the end of the Nazi regime, albeit in increasingly perverse forms. SS Reichsftihrer Heinrich Himmler had a long-standing interest in homeopathy, herbalism, and mesmerism, and he supported some continuing research into herbal remedies on into the war years. Thus, the 1940s saw the founding of a huge plantation for growing herbs and experimental testing herbal remedies at the Dachau concentration camp. From 800 to 1,200 prison-

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flusflelluno JQIUV unfi Oolh" ***** J"iiirtt, n. n* ->->»< iw„ Figure 28. Cover from holistic medical journal Der Heilpraktiker during the Nazi years, extolling "earth-water-light-air" as "sources of healthy life," 1936. Der Heilpraktiker: Das Organ der Deutschen Heitprakitker (May 15, 1936) no. 10. ers (many of them clergy, after the Jews were selected out for extermination in 1941) labored and died under the supervision of brutal SS officers acting officially in the name of Paracelsus and other healers (see figure 29). 53

HOLISTIC OPPOSITION: T H E CASE OF HANS DRIESCH

If parts of holism were relatively easy to ally with the Nazi cause in the 1930s, this was partly because holism offered "a fund of metaphors" that proved highly malleable to the needs of totalitarian, antidemocratic thinking.54 Yet, in the end the Nazification of German holism still happened, not through some process of intellectual determinism, but because people—both opportunistically and out of conviction—came to "see" and argue that certain political conclusions must be drawn from the antimechanistic impulses of the interwar

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Figure 29. "Priests on the Plantation": priests working on the herbal plantation at Dachau concentration camp, part of the holistic-naturopathic vision of Nazi medicine, early 1940s. P. Johannes Maria Lenz, Christus in Dachau (Wien: Libri catholici, 1971), p. 358. years. Moreover, even under Nazi "coordination," the basic cultural trope that saw Wholeness Jocked in combat with the Machine would continue to be an algebraic system that could be used to good effect by both defenders and opponents of the new government. In 1933, for example, the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich could attack fascism through the lens of the same binary oppositional system used by his enemies but locate the fascist world view on the other side of the equation: fascism was not about Wholeness (not even of a perverse or deadly type) but rather was the culmination of modern civilization's mad worship of the Machine. It was possible because fascist man had let himself be transformed into a machine that was alienated from all authentic biological impulses (identified in this discourse with Wholeness) and hence capable of "machine murder": What is called civilized man is in fact angular, machine-like, without spontaneity; it has developed into an automaton and a 'brain machine'. Man not only believes that he functions like a machine, he does in fact function like a machine.55 In short, a high level of vigilance and motivation was required to keep the rhetoric and metaphysics of Wholeness safely contained within the politics of Nazism and the rhetoric of the Machine safely banished outside. This point is clearly illustrated in the important case of vitalistic embryologist and philosopher Hans Driesch. During the early, most influential years of Nazi holism, Driesch was a consistently useful resource for a range of holistic scientists

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CHAPTER SIX with Nazi nationalist leanings. Even those who rejected his vitalism could still hail him as a midwife to the new era of "German wholeness." Thus, the philosopher of biology, Adolf Meyer-Abich, who played an active role in defining the significance of holistic biology for National Socialism, declared in 1935: "Holism stands . . . on the shoulders of [Driesch's] vitalism."56 Arthur Neuberg, in his Nazified review of the "present-day world picture," was no less emphatic and was even more politically suggestive: "[T]he conviction triumphed with Driesch and [Hans] Spemann that . . . [n]o part exists preformed . . . everything can become anything and the whole determines the function that the part must undertake."57 In a 1936 letter to Driesch, the philosopher P. Gast told his friend how his terminology had been adopted in some National Socialist discussions of the Volk as a vital, biological whole. Some were arguing, he reported, that "Driesch's vitalistic, holistic-philosophy would be a splendidly appropriate scientific underpinning for National Socialist terminology."58 All in all, Driesch's prominence and resonating concepts were such that he could not be overlooked. What makes the case of Driesch unusual, however, is that this political interest in his work arose in the face of his own emphatic opposition to the Nazi regime, and his own attempts to make the language of wholeness and vitalism serve, not a fascist ideology, but a pacifist, democratic, humanist politics. The roots of his convictions went back many decades. As a self-conscious cosmopolite opposed to all forms of hypernationalism and "cults of statehood,"59 Driesch had been a member of the German section of the Pan-European and pacifist Human Rights League, whose founding group had made its base in Heidelberg.60 After the First World War, he traveled through China and Japan on a sort of diplomatic mission to restore contacts with the intellectual elite there, and (in his words) "to contribute to understanding between nations and races."61 He believed that studying foreign cultures could be an important avenue for discerning transcendent principles that united and guided all individual human communities, regardless of their surface differences.62 In the waning years of Weimar, he raised his voice repeatedly in opposition to the growing nationalistic mood of the time, arguing, both in scholarly tracts and in a series of popular newspaper articles, that his entelechy recognized no state boundaries and that therefore the only biological "whole" to which one could rightfully belong was "humanity." He opposed rising militarism in equally biological language, declaring that the militaristic actions of nation against nation needed to be recognized for what it was: "the most terrible of all sins" against the vitalistic principles of life, holistic cooperation and higher development.63 As Scheerer has summarized: [H]is Entelechy hypothesis . . . made it possible for him to fill his theoretical biological-holistic world view with humanistic spirit. [In a 1931 article he] . . . characterized the fact that living beings kill other living beings as a mistake of Nature, as "the raging of the instinct-driven life principle against itself . . . and deduced from that the biological necessity of reason.64 1

191 NAZI WHOLENESS In other articles, Driesch spoke out against the infusion of politics and cultural life with mysticism and the irrational thinking of life philosophy, neither of which had anything to do with his own rational and reasoned—as he saw it—commitment to vitalism and interest in the claims of the paranormal.65 And he condemned the role that glorification of unreason in recent philosophy and academic life played in the growing agitation of student youth, preoccupied—in his words—with "'Feeling,' 'Drive,' 'Instinct' . . . Slogans rule and not reason."66 In Leipzig on April 4, 1932, Driesch participated in a huge rally for the coalition centrist candidacy of incumbent Reich President Paul Hindenburg, who was running against challengers Adolf Hitler and Communist politician Ernst Thaelman. 67 The Monday report in the Leipzig newspaper, Leipziger Neuester Nachrichten, recorded Driesch's exhortations in defense of reason and moderation, and against the hyperemotionality that he feared was driving the citizenry into the arms of political extremists on both sides: If emotion is also often the motivating force behind important political processes, nevertheless reason, clear and cold and without affect, must illuminate political actions and problems. In the present time, feeling has become popular, while reason has been denigrated. This kind of contempt of the intellect is, however, incredibly one-sided. All progress in culture is indebted to properly applied intellect.68 After Hitler and the Nazis came to power in early 1933, Driesch was one of the first non-Jewish German professors to be forcibly retired.69 This disciplinary action, which took effect in the fall of 1933 when Driesch was sixty-six years old, had its immediate source in university politics. Specifically, Driesch refused to retract his support of a Heidelberg junior faculty member {Privatdozent) and radical pacifist E. Gumbel, as well as to reverse his earlier vocal defense of the Jewish, social-democratic philosopher Theodor Lessing. In the mid-1920s, Lessing had been persecuted and defamed by volkisch students at the Hannover Technical College for protesting rising anti-Semitism in Germany. Lessing was also attacked for having gone on record with a critic cism of then presidential candidate and war hero, Paul Hindenburg. At that time, Driesch had declared Lessing's persecution to be Germany's own version of the French "Dreyfus case." Where, he asked, would his own country find its "German Zola"? 70 After his forced retirement, Driesch received no more invitations to speak or hold seminars within Germany; however, he continued to hold occasional lectures abroad until the spring of 1935, when all public speaking and travel privileges were taken away from him.71 One of his final public appearances took place in 1934 at the Prague International Congress of Philosophy, where his defense of vitalism, "holistic" causality, and metaphysics aroused the ire of Viennese logical positivists Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Moritz Schlick. Reichenbach accused Driesch of mysticism and Carnap suggested that the concept of the "organ-

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ism" lacked the law-like character needed to qualify it as scientific. Schlick, in a lecture of his own entitled "On the Concept of Wholeness," attempted to turn the problem of "wholes" into a mere linguistic or pragmatic issue; he argued that one could just as readily chose to speak of "sums" as of "wholes" in all relevant cases.72 At this meeting, it is clear that Driesch was being attacked by the positivists, not only for his flawed epistemology, but for the totalizing, mystifying fascism these philosophers believed his philosophy was defending. Moreover, Driesch's enemies were not the only ones to "hear" in Driesch's rhetoric politics that he actually vigorously rejected; some who applauded his philosophy also failed to understand his bottom line. Hence, the discussion of Driesch's remarks by Viennese Nazi philosopher Johann Sauter (that appeared in the "Congress Report" for the Blatter fiir Deutsche Philosophie) celebrated him as a leader among the life philosophers—one of those who philosophize "with their blood."73 In Vienna, they could perhaps be excused for being out of touch. But those in the party in Germany who knew Driesch's record better were more inclined to use his case as a warning example of the fact—as one professor put it in a 1935 letter to the rector of Hamburg University—that a "holistic-planful view of life must in no sense inevitably lead to conclusions that are consistent with National Socialistic basic principles."74 One can only speculate why Driesch at Prague allowed such misinterpretations of his position to stand, although the fact that the politics of this debate all took place on an unspoken level almost surely complicated his options. His own brief report on the Prague conference, recalled in his 1938 autobiography, says nothing about his clash with the positivists—all he said here was that the German participants at the congress were all highly "tense" and that the mood was "cautious."75 Occasionally, during the 1930s and early 1940s, people would plead with Driesch to use his influence to free one or another scientist from a concentration camp, but there was little that Driesch felt he could do. 76 Indeed, one historian has, rather reproachfully, looked at Driesch's preoccupation after 1933 with natural philosophy and the claims of parapsychology and found in it evidence for the "silencing" of Driesch the politician.77 This interpretation, however, may miss a more basic opportunity for understanding. Certainly, after 1933, Driesch may have seen few options for actively opposing the Nazi government. At the same time, there is reason to believe that his heightened efforts during the Nazi years to validate the claims of parapsychology actually functioned for him, among other things, as a form of oppositional politics— a means by which the metaphysical groundwork for cosmopolitanism and pacifism could be laid, even in the midst of a regime that deplored such ideals. In his autobiography, he made the connections clear. He recalled how in 1928 he had gone to the Paris International Congress for Parapsychology and had listened to the Nobel-prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet give a talk

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in which he pointed to the weltanschauliche significance of psychical research, and expressed his great trust in its future; he then turned to general questions, professed himself a committed pacifist, and attributed a great role specifically to parapsychology in maintaining peace between nations. Each time, he closed with the words: "L'avenir est a nous." [The future is in our hands]. After consulting with my German colleagues, I took it upon myself to reply; I professed my complete accord with everything that Richet had said, and closed with the same confident words that he had used."78

NAZI MECHANISM AND THE DECLINE OF NAZI HOLISM

The holistic perspective in the life and mind sciences functioned most vigorously and effectively in the early years of the Nazi regime as what Mehrtens has called "a vehicle of transport of ideology." Nevertheless, that ideology also saw several more pragmatic implementations. For example, Ute Geuter has analyzed ways in which the holistic theory of Felix Krueger's psychology would inform new standardized psychological tests developed to assess the "total character" of an individual. These tests would be used by the military in its selection of officers and by industry in its selection of "willing" workers. Geoffrey Cocks has explored ways in which the Goring Institute in Berlin provided holistically oriented psychotherapy services during the Nazi years that were designed to promote the psychological health and efficiency of the elite members of German society. Walter Wuttke-Groneberg has documented ways in which the theoretical impulse of holistic medicine both supported and was itself reinforced by the industrial development and clinical use of various naturopathic therapies in Nazi society.79 In the years following Germany's defeat in World War II and the revelations of Nazi atrocities, a number of articles and books were published which earnestly asserted that a fundamental incompatibility had existed between the holistic approach to life and mind and National Socialist principles.80 Some authors asserted that they or their colleagues had been actively persecuted by the Third Reich government because of the perceived threats their holism posed for Nazi policies. A 1970 article entitled "Painful Awakening," for example, reported how the creator of the "New German Therapy," Karl Kotschau "was forced overnight to leave the University of Jena" owing to "considerable and threatening clashes between a research direction in medicine and biology that was monomaniacally natural scientific in its leanings, and one that was holistically oriented."81 The philosopher and historian of biology Adolf Meyer-Abich would similarly declare in 1948 that his holistic views had made him a victim of "Nazi mechanists cavorting in the Rosenberg Department [that established and oversaw training in National Socialist ideology] and the Ministry of Propaganda." 82

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• CHAPTER SIX What are we to make of statements like these? To begin with, we should unequivocably reject the conclusion of innocence and even martyrdom implied in such accounts, given that the authors wholly fail to mention their own active efforts to "coordinate" aspects of their own holistic biological "truths" with the political "truths" of National Socialism. That said, we should not overlook an opportunity to discover a genuine historical irony in such selfserving narratives. All along, holism had visualized itself locked in battle with mechanism. Now, within the hothouse atmosphere of Nazi Party politics, such a battle finally more or less literally transpired—and holism was forced into retreat, enfeebled, if not completely beaten. To understand why things unfolded the way they did, it is first important to realize that the Nazi state was never a truly monolithic entity (as earlier scholarship on its "totalitarian" nature once suggested). New, more nuanced research has instead emphasized its "polycratic" power structure in which different powers—the Nazi Party itself, big business, the army—cooperated with one another and with the dictator but also competed for influence.83 To play a high-level role in the policies and activities of the Third Reich, scientists were compelled to stake their fortunes with one or another of these cartels. It was a delicate game. Although high-ranking members of the state obviously needed the status, knowledge, and technical skills of university professors and scientists to promote and implement Nazi policies, they were more than a little ambivalent about the idea that such scientists should in any sense dictate policy of the Third Reich. For example, Rosenberg's department would increasingly indicate that it "did not want to have scientists going around providing support where they saw fit." Presumably this office "felt that establishing the day-to-day nuances of Nazi ideology was its prerogative and may well have found it inconvenient to have positions supported in a scientific paper that at the time of publication might no longer be current."84 In a somewhat similar vein, Giinter Hecht, spokesman for the party's Department of Race Politics, warned the scientific community in no uncertain terms: National Socialism is a political movement, not a scientific one . . . Therefore neither Lamarck, Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel . . . nor all of their many, in part scientifically equally significant followers and opponents—are in any sense opponents, precursors, let alone founders of the basic political principles of National Socialism. In addition, we cannot equate any teachings of a living biologist with the movement, since such a person as a researcher presents his teachings as scientific problems, whereas the principles of the movement serve political-weltanschaulich tasks alone, and become actualized alone through the Fuhrer and his political soldiers.... The professors do not carry volkische responsibility for the future; the movement does, whose Fuhrer is fully accountable and who therefore possesses as a result of this high responsibility the primal right of a political Fuhrer to sweep away anything that endangers the inner health of the Volk.85

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Now, from the beginning of the Nazi era, there had been two major factions of scientists and physicians with some influence within the government but which had mutual and long-standing disciplinary and methodological internal antagonisms. The first faction was an ideologically driven group that was sympathetic to holistic thinking and largely motivated by volkisch anti-Semitism and Aryan racial ideals.86 Drawing most of its political support from old-timers within the party, this group included people like ideologue Alfred Rosenberg; Gerhard Wagner, head of the Nazi Doctors' League; anti-Semitic propagandist Julius Streicher;87 Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess; and, holistic biologist, Ernst Lehmann, editor of Der Biologe. The second faction was made up of more pragmatic medical technocrats who wanted to use a hard-nosed form of Mendelian genetics, Darwinism, and racial biology as the basis for Nazi social policy and military strategy. This group had found a home for itself under the jurisdiction of Himmler's SS and its daughter racial organizations, the Lebensborn and Ahnenerbe.8^ It included men like human geneticist Karl Astel and his assistant Lothar Stengel von Rutkowski, at Jena; the botanist Heinz Briicher; and professor for law and race Falk Ruttke, who later took over SS training on race in occupied Poland. It was Astel who in 1935 would encourage Himmler to mastermind a takeover of university posts in racial hygiene by the SS. Following his appointment as rector of Jena University in 1939, Astel devoted his energies to transforming Jena into a leading organ for SS teachings and policies.89 When Karl Kotschau was appointed to a chair in "nature therapy" at Jena in 1934—and received the party go-ahead a year later to develop his "New German Therapy"—Astel and his technocratic colleagues were outraged by this explicit challenge to their own research orientation and political aspirations. A plot was hatched to topple Kotschau and the holistic views he stood for. Because Kotschau had hoped to bring Adolf Meyer-Abich to Jena, the Hamburg philosopher also became a prime target of the Astel group. But the ultimate scope of the attack on holism extended far beyond these two men. Other scientists who would find themselves suddenly denounced and suspect on account of their holism included biologist Bernhard Diirken, holistic animal psychologist Friedrich Alverdes, psychologist Felix Krueger, botanist and Gestalt-enthusiast Wilhelm Troll, physiologist Wolfgang Lintzcl, neurologist Armin Muller, paleontologist Karl Beurlen, "Goethean" anatomist Hans Boeker, and biologist Hans Andre—the last who, it was disapprovingly noted, had written a positive evaluation of Meyer-Abich in connection with his proposed appointment at Jena. 90 Basically, the idea of the Astel group was to "expose" holism as a form of cleverly disguised Roman Catholic dogmatism, the goal of which was to subvert the empirical, factual approach to nature that was declared by this group to be central to the ethos of National Socialism. Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg had long reserved their utmost contempt for the Roman Catholic Church, painting it as a powerful, pitiless institution run by popes and Jesuits

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in which alien, "Oriental" dogmas and voodoo practices were employed to undermine Teutonic ideals of heroism and racial purity.91 In an article published in a confidential number of the Party's Mitteilungen zur weltanschaulichen Lage (November 27, 1936),92 prepackaged tropes like these were rampant as the authors revealed the startling "truth" about holistic science and its anti-Nazi goals: It is the essence of Teutonic science and science whose direction has been determined by the Nordic race, to research the facts of nature and reality, in a manner that is uncorruptible and free from occult ideas, dogmas and theories.... The Roman Church and its holistic Catholicism have always endeavored to label this striving "heretical," "materialistic," or "mechanistic," and to shackle it through church dogmas and the "Index" of forbidden books. When that was no longer effective, a number of well-camouflaged Catholic-Jesuitic scientists, who were particularly well schooled in particular disciplines, were sent out. Their aim now was to use clever counterslogans and apparently scientific arguments to divert Teutonic science from the facts, and to steer it onto speculative and purely theoretical tracks that did not threaten the Church.... Now Catholic science has once again undertaken a skillfully organized and well-camouflaged attack on the entire exact sciences, including genetics and racial hygiene. The rallying call of this attack is "Holism" [Holismus]; in German "Ganzheits research." The holism that is being advocated in Germany is . . . a new, dogmatic and presumptuous doctrine with multiple close connections to Catholicism. It skillfully uses uncritical and muddled scientists—when possible those who superficially appear close to the Party and had avoided suspicion up to this point—who then theorize away, twist and distort all the solid German natural science, biology, genetics and racial theory that has become dangerous to the Church. In so doing, "holism" and its Jesuitic advocates make full intentional use of words that sound National Socialistic, like "wholeness" [Ganzheit], "organic," "biologic," and so on, so as to be able, as long as possible, to practice their mischief under the cover of "desired National Socialistic [teachings]."93 It is no accident that, in developing such charges of conspiracy, the Astel report deliberately eschewed the familiar German term for holism, Ganzheitslehre, and spoke instead throughout of Holismus (a term translated out of English that actually none of the accused German holists used, with the notable exception of Meyer-Abich).94 This rhetorical strategy helped subtly to enhance the impression that the object of concern was a foreign doctrine, hostile to authentic German values. The authority of a distinctly paranoid outside researcher, Ren6 Fiil op-Mi Her, was also called upon to further buttress the case for holism as a type of camouflaged Jesuitic sophistry. In 1929 FiilopMiller had published a passionate, wide-ranging book, The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits, that, among other things, had accused the Jesuits of attempting to consolidate their power by undermining the authority of the exact natural

197 NAZI WHOLENESS * sciences. Summing up, the Astel report was unequivocal: a triumph of holism would be a victory for those who denied the supremacy of genes, race, and heredity and worked to advance the false doctrines of Lamarckian environmentalism and the "symbiotic" collectivism of both Bolshevism and the Catholic state. "It is nothing other than the old battle of Spirit against Blood, Church against Race expressed here in modern form." 96 With the publication of this incendiary article, tenuous alliances and positions of influence exploded, just as the "Nazi mechanists" at Jena had hoped. Although Kotschau wrote a number of urgent confidential memos to Rosenberg's department, denying any links between Catholicism and holism, complaining bitterly about the injustice of this attack, and demanding a formal rehabilitation in the party journals, 97 nothing seems to have come of his efforts. Things went from bad to worse and finally Kotschau fled Jena in the night, much as he had said. It would be a stretch, however, to suggest that his is a story of martyrdom. By morning he had arrived in Nuremberg, where he sought and received the protection of his old friend Julius Streicher. Here, although out of the central loop of power, Kotschau would experience a sort of local rehabilitation as director of Streicher's own Paracelsus Institute.98 Adolf Meyer-Abich found it possible to remain in Hamburg, but his work was now carried out under a continuing shadow of suspicion.99 With this first significant success behind them, the mechanistic factions within the regime moved to consolidate their influence on other fronts. Ernst Lehmann's public criticism of the work of several important hard-line Nazi biologists—including Kaiser Wilhelm Institute director, Fritz von Wettstein, and racial theorist Hans Giinther—provided both a motivation and a pretense for the SS to resurrect rumors of Lehmann's Freemasonry connections.100 In 1938, this holistically oriented botanist was suddenly accused of having neglected his teaching duties in Tubingen and was summarily suspended from the university position he had held since 1922. Insiders would later identify his rival at Tubingen, Robert Wetzel, as the man behind the scheme to oust Lehmann; Wetzel, an anatomist, was a member of the SS, and an active researcher in its organization for racial culture, the Ahnenerbe.101 By October 1938, he and his allies, including Fritz von Wettstein, had further colluded to expel Lehmann from the Biologen Verband (Biologists' Organization), which he had headed since 1931, and to remove him from his position as editor of the journal Der Biologe. A new organization within the SS was now created to replace Lehmann's: the Reichsbund fiir Biologie (Reich Division for Biology). Under the direct supervision of the Ahnenerbe and ultimately of Himmler himself, this organization immediately took over the editorship of Der Biologe. A 1939 article in Der Biologe by the new editor, SS biologist Walter Greite, briskly explained the altered state of affairs and informed readers that they were all expected to become members of the Reich Division—"within our ranks, everyone simply has to belong." 102 An imperative 1939 editorial, "Biology is research about facts!" also made 95

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• CHAPTER SIX * very clear that Der Biologe would hold no further truck with the mystical, holistic views of men like Lehmann and "volkisch-political" anthropologist Ernst Krieck:103 Life's laws are not legends about some submerged past. They reveal themselves only to the researcher who is willing to recognize the facts and is prepared to draw the binding conclusions from them. Empirical research takes its starting point from the reality of Nature and extends the [resulting] concepts over and above, as far as the human spirit can go. Whoever, though, primarily sees in "Life" a "principle of Weltanschauung and a dilemma for science" [a citation from Krieck], can easily cut the ground out from under himself, fail to respect the laws of life and find the aim of his work in anti-life mental constructions.104 Now, if it is a fact that the Nazi holists effectively succumbed to their mechanistic rivals within the party, it is still not fully clear why this should have been the case. After all, the holists were not without their own political backers and were no less committed to fighting for their political lives. Why, then, were the SS "Nazi mechanists" so successful in stifling their voices? The timing of the mechanistic offensive was key here. As a number of scholars of Nazi science have stressed, the process of "coordination" across all the sciences went through two broad phases. During the early 1930s, as the Nazis focused on consolidating their ideological power base, a scientist tended to win influence and support for himself within the party by emphasizing the ideological and political messages of his science. These were, therefore, the years that saw the peak of the various "Aryan science" movements, including Ernst Lehmann's efforts to consecrate holistic biology as the "German biology" of Nazism. Beginning around 1936, however, with the acceleration of rearmament, the balance of power among the different cartels of power within the Third Reich increasingly shifted toward the army and SS police corps, while the original party ideologues declined in influence. Little by little, the practical uses of a science became more important than its ideological value. This shift had the effect of sharply increasing the influence of the so-called scientific technocrats who had allied themselves within the SS—men less concerned with ideological correctness than with efficiency and instrumentalist pragmatism. By the early 1940s, for example, as the groundwork was being laid for governmentsponsored nuclear research, "Aryan physicists" were forced formally to acknowledge the facticity of previously deprecated—but now plainly useful— "Jewish" achievements like relativity theory.105 The growing displacement of Nazi "holists" by Nazi "mechanists" within the life and mind sciences followed this same basic historical trajectory from ideology'to pragmatics. Although both holists and mechanists were, in their different ways, equally dedicated to the goals of racial "cleansing" and strengthening the "Master Race," in the end the worldview of "organicism," the calls for a return to Volk community, and even the few practical imple-

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mentations of the holistic perspective associated with developments in psychology and medicine under the Third Reich were no match for the militaristic Darwinian ethic and the practical technologies of racial management which the technocrats could offer (racial screening, sterilization, castration, and ultimately methods of mass "euthanasia"). If it is the case that a kind of mechanistic or technocratic pragmatism "won" the battle for influence within the Nazi regime, we must still be careful not to impose a simplistic understanding of "technocratism" onto all the tensions and contradictions of Nazism that were likely contained and mediated within that pragmatism. The career of Colonel Joachim Mrugowsky of the SS, chief of the Institute of Hygiene in the Waffen-SS, is a case in point. The Institute of Hygiene was, among other things, responsible for maintaining and distributing the Zyklon-B gas used at Auschwitz.106 At Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, Mrugowsky sent countless prisoners to their deaths, carried out "research" that involved injecting healthy people with lethal tubercular cultures, and executed Russian prisoners using poisoned bullets.107 At Nuremberg in 1946, he was found guilty of war crimes and condemned to death. Yet this same physician considered himself as someone vigorously opposed to the mechanizing tendencies of modern medicine and deeply committed to a holistic bio-medical perspective. After hours at Auschwitz, he was fond of retiring to his extensive private library, filled with books revering the age of Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. 108 Was Mrugowsky's common devotion to Zyklon-B gas and the high ideals of Goethe simply an example of what psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton would call psychological "doubling"—a situation in which a person responds to the intolerable stresses and paradoxes of living with competing ideals by "splitting" his beliefs and actions into separate spheres?109 Or, alternatively, is it possible that a case like Mrugowsky—or, to take another potent example, the anti-Semitic rabble-rouser and naturopath devotee Julius Streicher—tells us something important about the actual logic of Nazi medical policy, in which healing and death, the use of pesticide gas on children and Goethean holistic ideals of nature could in fact find higher reconciliation? This is the view of German historian Christian Pross, who has suggested that Lifton's theory of doubling—developed on the basis of interviews with old men who had had years to perfect their alibis—may tell us something about how doctors involved in Nazi medical crimes developed psychological strategies after the war to convince themselves and others that they had "no idea" how they could have acted as they did. To treat such assertions by old men as transparent accounts of their psychological state at the time, however, obfuscates rather than clarifies the actual politics that sustained so much Nazi criminal medicine. According to Pross: "[TJhe doubling theory psychologizes political phenomena by projecting the contradiction between healing and killing into the psyche of the individual Nazi doctor. Healing and killing, however, were an integral part of [Nazi] selective social policy."110

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AMBIGUOUS LEGACIES: THE CASE OF VIKTOR VON WEIZSACKER

Men like Mrugowsky would not survive the lost war long enough to explain the logic of their holism. But homegrown German holistic medicine and life science (as opposed to that which had continued to develop in exile) did not wholly disappear in the flames of the Allied victory. After the war, the work of neurologist and pioneering psychosomaticist Viktor Freiherr von Weizsacker (1886-1957) seemed to have survived the Nazi years unsullied by moral compromise or intellectual degradation. In 1945 a special chair was created for Weizsacker in General Clinical Medicine at the University of Heidelberg. In 1947 the Heidelberg Clinic, and the holistic perspective it represented, accrued additional moral authority when one of Weizsacker's most prominent students and younger colleagues, Alexander Mitscherlich, along with his colleague Fred Mielke, attended the "doctors' trial" at Nuremberg and published a courageous and devastating report of the proceedings.111 The book, translated into English in 1949 under the title Doctors of Infamy, argued that a certain technocratic, instrumentalist attitude within German medicine under the Third Reich had led to a perversion of the medical research ideal, while allowing physicians to wield efficient tools of mass murder. In the words of the authors: There is not much difference whether a human being is looked on as a 'case,' or as a number to be tattooed on the arm. These are but two aspects of the faceless approach of an age without mercy. . .. This is the alchemy of the modern age, the transmogrification of subject into object, of man into thing against which the destructive urge may wreak its fury without restraint.112 The idea that Nazi medical crimes involved a type of fetishizing objectivism that made people into "things" certainly found ample support in the horrifying documentation made available at Nuremberg. At the same time, Mitscherlich's relationship with Weizsacker and the Heidelberg clinic of psychosomatic medicine was probably not irrelevant to his inclination to make a mechanistic, "objectifying" epistemology and methodology responsible for the crimes of Nazi medicine. If the epistemology of scientific, technocratic medicine had in some important sense made the medical crimes of the Third Reich possible, then it followed, at least implicitly, that the-holistic and psychosomatic emphasis on the "whole person" might represent an alternative to and protection against such crimes in the future. In this context, it is not surprising that in the postwar years, Weizsacker, even more than Mitscherlich, should have emerged as a powerful moral voice in German medicine, protesting "objedification" of patients and arguing for the introduction of more humane and relational forms of clinical practice. Before the war, in the 1920s and '30s, Weizsacker had established connec-

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Figure 30. Viktor von Weizsacker (1886-1957). Viktor von Weizsacker, Vber Medizinische anthropologic, Gessamelte Schriften in 10 Banden (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), frontispiece. tions with a wide circle of the German-speaking intellectuals and scientists who had been leaders in the holistic movement. Constantin von Monakow was a revered senior colleague whom Weizsacker respected particularly for his views on how Freudian psychoanalysis might be brought into dialogue with neurology." 3 Hans Driesch was an old Heiddberg colleague as well as a close friend; it was he who introduced Weizsacker to the woman who would become his wife, Olympia Curtius.114 Jakob von Uexkull was another Heidelberg colleague, and his Umwelt concept would later be an important inspiration for Weizsacker's own idea of the patient's "Gestalt circle." The work of Wertheimer and his colleagues in Berlin would serve as the starting point for experimental work in perception that Weizsacker pursued in the 1920s l l 5 Finally, Weizsacker's clinical analyses and aspects of his existentially oriented "anthropological medicine" were significantly indebted to Kurt Goldstein; indeed, the Goldstein debt was probably greater than Weizsacker was prepared to admit.116 All of these interwoven traditions added up to a rich postwar legacy for Germany. Of greatest importance was Weizsacker's concept of the "Gestalt

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circle," which envisioned disease and physiological malfunctioning as encompassing not only inputs and outputs—perceptions and reactions—but also a "third variable": the subject and his or her direct experience of illness.-As Weizsacker conceived things, a patient's understanding of the symbolic or practical meaning of a disease shaped its actual course in a circular dialectic that brought biology and biography together into an indivisible, dialectic unity. Taken seriously, this meant that medicine ultimately had to become more than a natural science: it had to embrace also what Weizsacker called an "anthropological" perspective. Diseases with a known organic etiology were perceived as having not just a physiological but also a biographical significance, the final nature of which could only be elucidated through empathic dialogue with the patient. From the beginning, Freudian concepts like unconscious, repressed, and defensive would be central tools for illuminating these dynamics of disease, even though Freud himself had never attempted to apply such tools to the understanding of organic disorders.117 In a 1927 essay, Weizsacker told the famous story of how the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had privately admitted to a young Freud that, in cases of hysteria, there was "always" a sexual issue at stake. In his autobiographical account, Freud recalled how he had said to himself: "If he knows that, why doesn't he say so?" Weizsacker then described an encounter he had himself had with Freud, many years later, in which the old man admitted that the sudden intrusion of an accident or organic disease in the life of a patient can cure that patient of his or her neurosis. Weizsacker had then said to himself, "If he knows that, why doesn't he say so?" Weizsacker concluded it was up to him to "say so" and to develop the full clinical implications of the insight that (as he would later put it) "nothing organic is without meaning." In his 1927 essay he concluded, "It seems as if, in science, there is almost a law whereby one epoch only says the one thing, while remaining silent about the other thing, that it also knows."118 There is a deep unintended irony in Weizsacker's comment here when it is considered in light of what was to come. For here was a holism that the German postwar community had embraced as uncorrupted and probably inherently incorruptible. German interest in Weizsacker's rich corpus of clinical and medico-philosophical teachings has been on the uprise in Germany in recent years.119 Yet there was and is something incomplete still about our understanding of certain potentialities in those teachings. At a historic 1980 public forum on "Medicine and National Socialism" held in Berlin—the first of its kind in Germany120—Tubingen sociologist Walter Wuttke-Groneberg took on Weizsacker's past in a hard-hitting paper entitled "From Heidelberg to Dachau."121 The paper began with a brief discussion of the Dachau herbal plantation project and then turned to Weizsacker, a man whom Wutte-Groneberg asserted had differentiated himself from the SSphysicians of the concentration camps "not in his aim, but [only] in his method."122 Wuttke-Groneberg found cause for these shocking claims in two profesi,

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sional occasions in Weizsacker's life: a lecture series on "medical professional questions," which the psychosomaticist had offered at Heidelberg in 1933, just after Hitler's seizure of power (published 1935123); and a 1947 essay entitled "Euthanasia and Human Experimentation," which was written in reaction to the Nuremberg doctors' trial.124 In this latter essay, WuttkeGroneberg pointed out that Weizsacker, although he certainly did not try to absolve the convicted physicians of responsibility for their crimes, nevertheless failed to condemn outright the concept of physician-as-exterminator. Instead, he went out of his way to defend both euthanasia and human experimentation as a necessary part of medicine and to paint a picture of violence and human sacrifice as a necessary part of the tragedy of human history. The atrocities of Auschwitz and Dachau were caused, he said, not by the idea in itself that physicians may rightly destroy the lives of their patients, but by an indiscriminate technocratism that had led physicians to exercise their power in the absence of any rational ethic that could have guided decisions about appropriate extermination. What would such an ethics of extermination have represented for Weizsacker? Wuttke-Groneberg pointed now to the above-mentioned 1933 lecture series in which Weizsacker had for the first time defended the medical appropriateness of extermination in cases of lives judged "not worth living." At that time, Weizsacker seemed to suggest that physicians making such judgments may want to consider whether the lives in question were capable of productive work. At any rate, the physician's aim, Weizsacker argued in 1933, should not and could not be life "at any price." Instead, the medical profession—working in cooperation with the state—must develop a rational "policy of extermination" by which to guide its practices. At the Berlin conference, Wuttke-Groneberg's presentation provoked considerable heated discussion and protest, but with no consensus or clarity. The speaker was accused of having deliberately conflated Weizsacker's intellectually sophisticated and humane attempt to reintroduce the "subject" into medicine with the vulgar, subjectivist New German Therapy of the Nazis; of citing Weizsacker's discussions on death and euthanasia selectively and in a manipulative manner; and of glossing over the significance of central Weizsacker concepts like "mutuality" and "solidarity" that dictated that the extermination of any patient that was anything other than a therapeutic release would leave deadly traces on the other party.125 Yet these counterarguments were not fully successful in dispelling a general sense of unease in the audience. In his formal rebuttal to WuttkeGroneberg, Heinrich Huebschmann, one of Weizsacker's former students at Heidelberg, spoke of his admiration for the clinical compassion of the teacher he had known since 1939 but then conceded that some of Weizsacker's pronouncements from the early 1930s "deeply frightened" him. Since none of the pronouncements in question were actually entered into the record at the 1980 Berlin conference, I digress briefly from my account of this conference in order to provide a representative excerpt. In 1935, Weizsacker had argued:

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[I]n concrete decision-making itfirstbecomes clear that a social politics that tries to practice a mere politics of preservation is surrendering to an illusion. It takes over from the physicians an attitude that even they are incapable of maintaining: that of preservation at any price. As physicians we also are responsibly involved in the sacrifice of the individual for the collectivity. It would be illusory, indeed it would not be fair if the German physician thought that he need not contribute his responsible portion to a necessary politics of extermination. In the past, he was also involved in the extermination of unworthy life or unworthy reproductive capacity, in the elimination of the unworthy through internment, in a state-political policy of extermination.... B u t . . . there did not exist then (and still does not exist) a comprehensive theory of extermination to supplement the medicine that developed as a pure theory of preservation.126 In his comments, Huebschmann went on to suggest that remarks like the above—that, in his view, worked "like foreign bodies" in Weizsacker's total written corpus—were made either "opportunistically" or else in the first flush of an enthusiasm for National Socialism that would quickly fade.127 Huebschmann's bet-hedging argument may or may not have seemed fully plausible to everyone familiar with Weizsacker's work (Weizsacker continued to write about and develop his views on the place of necessary euthanasia in medicine for many years),128 but it seems to have ushered in a fragile truce on the question of Weizsacker's "brown past" that would hold for several years. Then the plot thickened. At a 1986 symposium in Heidelberg celebrating Weizsacker's one-hundredth birthday, Mechthilde Kiitemeyer, a clinician at Cologne who had helped edit Weizsacker's collected writings, was one of the invited speakers. In her presentation, she took the opportunity to declare that evidence recently unearthed in the military archives of Poland raised troubling new questions about Weizsacker's brief career as director of the Neurological Clinic and Research Institute at the University of Breslau from 1941 to 1945. In her words: In the military archive of Katowitz, Poland, over 200 patient files stemming from the years 1942 and 1943 were found, along with an explicit accompanying note containing the following content: "Neurological Research "Institute, Prof, von Weizsacker, Breslau, Neudorfer Street 118-120. Please find enclosed the fixed brain and spinal cord of child . . . (name and birthdate) that I am sending you in accordance with your letter from 25.3.1942, requesting an opportunity to investigate it neuropathologically. An excerpt from the case history is included. The supervising physician (Hecker), Province Medical Chief, Privy Councillor." We are dealing here with antisocial and handicapped children and youths from the Children's Division of the Loben Psychiatric Clinic for Youth (Lubliniec). The patient files make unmistakably clear that the brains in question were products of child euthanasia.129 Other sources supplement and confirm the gist of Kutemeyer's disturbing claims. In 1982, the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland reported that between August 1942 and November 1944, the Lui

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bliniec Hospital of Upper Silesia fatally injected 221 children on Ward B (94 percent of the patients) with the barbiturate Luminal. 13° The Ward B children were those with problems deemed "incurable" (epilepsy, mental retardation, Down's syndrome, "asocial" behavior). There is no indication that Weizsacker played any direct role in the selection and extermination of these children, but another researcher has independently corroborated—using completely different archival material located in Dortmund—that Professor Von Weizsacker's Neurological Research Institute in Breslau regularly collected the murdered children's brains from the Loben hospital (what the author called the Loben "death institute").131 At the 1986 Heidelberg conference, Kutemeyer's revelations were met with palpable discomfort. Discussion.moderator, Peter Hahn, joked feebly that Kutemeyer's contribution suggested women might be "perhaps more concrete and less illogical than Viktor von Weizsacker had thought."132 The attention of the audience was quickly deflected in other directions. At least for a while. Finally, Frau Penselin, Weizsacker's daughter, gained the floor and demanded to know more about the documents discussed by Kiitemeyer. Most of all, she demanded to know how she was supposed to understand the significance of these documents, what role her father had played in all this, and what it all had to do with his work? Before Kiitemeyer could open her mouth, the moderator, Peter Hahn, again moved in, "Unfortunately, I must now at this point interrupt. I think these questions are so important that they must be further discussed and clarified elsewhere." When a member of the audience shouted his protest with "Let the questions be answered!" Hahn chose to deal with the interruption as a disciplinary issue, and the unruly outsider eventually quieted down. 133 Ultimately, it was another, more senior physician, Dieter Janz, rather than the unpopular Kiitemeyer, who would return to Frau Penselin's question just before Hahn declared an end to the overall discussion. He was emphatic: the shipments of brains to the Breslau Neurological Research Institute (which Janz identified as having been founded by Otfried Foerster, while managing to avoid mentioning Weizsacker's name in connection with it at all)—had nothing to do with Weizsacker's work. Weizsacker had never published any neuropathological investigations and was not interested in neuroanatomy and neuropathology. The man who actually worked with the brains at Breslau was a "politically persecuted" physician from Belgium, whom Weizsacker may have been trying to protect by "covering" him with his own name. Hence, Janz concluded, Weizsacker's role in this story might be best understood as a form of local resistance'to the Nazi government.134 After reaching this conclusion, Janz went a step further and declared (without providing evidence) that Weizsacker had actually been linked during the war years to the civilian aristocratic resistance to Hitler, the so-called Kreisau Circle.135 While Janz's claims cannot be disproved at this point, it is difficult to hear a belated Persilschein [whitewashing] like this and not be tempted to respond skeptically, even in the absence of all clarifying details. On the face of it, it seems the worst of sophistry to declare that because Weizsacker merely initi-

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ated contact with a "death institute," gave a stamp of routine respectability to its activities, facilitated the resulting brain research—but was not actually interested in the neuropathological results himself—he escapes all culpability. It seems equally disingenuous to be told that, to the extent that Weizsacker was involved, it was in a selfless, even heroic capacity, since he was "covering" for a physician who had fallen out of favor with the Nazis—but who was apparently still prepared to while away his time by performing research on the brains of their victims until the political winds had shifted again. The full story has yet to emerge, but one thing seems clear: Weizsacker's commitment to a holistic, subject-oriented medicine was not enough to save him—a man capable in certain settings of deep compassion—from succumbing in some capacity to the temptations and perverse logic of a terrible time. Less clear is whether these still emerging revelations of Weizsacker's "brown past" must somehow alter or devalue the final meaning of his intellectual legacy—a question that has also been raised in different ways in the cases of Martin Heidegger,136 literary analyst Paul de Man,137 and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.138 The pained words of Weizsacker's daughter, "What does all this have to do with my father's work?" ask a question that ultimately is less about the "objective" historical record than it is about how we interpret certain historical revelations for ourselves and our own intellectual attractions and allegiances. In this sense, the question is important not because we insist on a reckoning of the deeds of the dead for its own sake, but because our awareness of the partially bad consciences of our legacies gives us the opportunity to become more responsible about possibilities that we foster in the world today. Today, for example, a grandson and namesake of the archconservative behavioral biologist, Jakob von Uexkull, is an active representative of the German Green party and founder of an ecologically oriented "alternative" Nobel Prize, awarded yearly by the Right Living Foundation at Bradford University in England.139 In a 1987 interview in the Oxford journal Green Line, the younger Jakob von Uexkull was frank in his admission that the Greens in Germany had made a conscious decision to seek out allies in minority groups because critics had pointed out that ecological-holistic statements had historically been made by Nazi and Fascist governments.140 The decision by certain leaders in the German Green Party to seek common cause with groups that had historically been oppressed by holistic thinking is of course no guarantee that the. current German Green movement (or its equivalents in other countries) will not ultimately "discover" a more repressive political agenda in its own imagery and rhetoric.141 That such a decision could be made, however, does underscore what has, in some sense, been a fundamental message of this book: that there is nothing "natural" about the political imperatives people at different times hear in nature. We are both creators and consumers of the stories we ask the natural world to tell us about how we should live our lives; and, working within the constraints imposed by our partial knowledge of things both natural and political, we may make honest choices about what we would like to hear.

C O N C L U S I O N

Words became emotional stimuli. They trailed ever larger clouds of implicit meaning. —Fritz Ringer

BOTH GERMAN life and mind science and the politics that sustained them would begin to look different after 1945—at least in the Western bloc countries—as both began the onerous task of rebuilding themselves in a more or less American image. This process of retooling was, of course, not total or immediate, and the postwar German literature did continue to produce isolated examples of the older habits of thought. One 1947 German medical editorial, for example, still thought the moment opportune to deplore the "one-sided rationalism" and "intellectualism" of modern medicine, which; the author blamed on the French Revolution. "Holism" (presumably German holism in particular) was then offered up as a needed countermeasure to such excesses.1 Vienna in the 1950s even saw the founding of a new Society for Holism Research, an event that former Leipzig holist Albert Wellek (who had been reappointed to a new chair in Mainz after the war) welcomed for its "boldness." The terms "Ganzheit" and "Gestalt" may have been tarnished by their use in the sloganistic trends of the times, he said, but modern psychology still had the right to embrace them for their revolutionary methodical promise and the wealth of research questions they raised.2 In general, though, after 1945, continuing calls by German scientists to wholeness and antimechanistic methodology could not fully ignore the previous twelve years of "sloganeering" and its consequences. Admittedly, a scholar such as Alexander Mitscherlich, whose postwar politics were unimpeachable, needed to make no apologies for using broadly holistic analytic categories to frame his psychosocial attempt to make sense of the tragedy of National Socialism.3 Others had to be more careful. For example, a 1954 volume entitled The Organic: Contributions to the Culture of Our Time, rehearsed many of the familiar old themes about the nihilistic effects of mechanism and the need for Wholeness and Synthesis. However, the authors (all scientists and scholars previously sympathetic to the Nazi regime) were careful also to emphasize that, among other things, individual freedom must be reckoned an essential value of both Wholeness and the organic perspective.4 During this same time, it became common for outside critics and commentators to speak derisively of fascism and irrationalism as if they were more or less interchangeable terms.5 Even those who avoided overly simplistic elisions of this sort did not hesitate to warn about the ways in which a fascination with mystical, totalizing, worldviews could lead people to exalt intuition and feeling over reason and clear thinking, readily playing into the hands of demagogues.6 If we were simply to accept the perspective of (his first generation of fascist

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analysts, it would be relatively easy to conclude that, to the extent that German holistic science was nourished by an 'irrational' German hunger for Wholeness, so far did it also abdicate its right to be called "real" science at all and became merely a dangerous reflection of (largely rightist) politics. Certainly, the cultural logic that prevailed in the German-speaking countries, especially after World War I, did make it easier for holism to "speak" with a conservative, antidemocratic accent. However, I have stressed that the history of German holism is a history of many stories, and the prominent cases of Goldstein, Wertheimer, and Driesch show that other political relationships were possible and, in various ways, persuasive. More problematic, though, than the idea that holistic scientific thinking take one down an inevitable slippery slope to fascism is the tempting corollary assumption that German holistic science was not "real" science because it failed to stand above all politics, culture, and emotion—in a sense, failed to stand above the taint of human history altogether. The premise of this book, as well as the thrust of a quarter century.of scholarship in science studies, is that we need alternatives to the premise (still assumed by many lay people, but rather fewer working scientists) that "real" science speaks a cool, transcendent language of necessary truth, while only "pseudoscience" or "corrupt" science betrays the mark of human interest. To deny this to be the case is not to embark on a polemical argument for a cultural or sociological deconstruction of science that in the end evaporates "nature" altogether. It is rather to defend a position grounded in theoretically informed empirical study of human history and the role of science within it. To me, it has been obvious that the holistic science produced during the 1920s was both "real" science and a profoundly cultural discourse. That is to say, it "looked" the way it did in part because laboratory embryos, invertebrate physiological reactions, damaged human brains, and human perceptual processes made claims and imposed resistances on what could be said. However, I have argued that it was not by chance that the German-speaking scientific community's interest in holistic aspects of mind and life functioning peaked when and where it did—not by chance that questions were framed in the ways they were and results analyzed in the terms that they were. Above all, I have emphasized that this was science that could continue to do the work of "real" investigation (sometimes more persuasively, sometimes less) even as it proved to be highly "porous" to the larger concerns of its time. In an unusually intense and therefore instructive sense, German holistic science swelled with multiple meanings.7 The generative capacities of metaphor have been central to my understanding of how to write about a science that so clearly did the work of "nature" and "culture" simultaneously.8 German holistic science "worked" as a multilevel discourse in part because its scientists found ways to craft their most certain truths out of words and images rich with cultural resonances, thus enabling those truths to function in culturally meaningful ways.9 In this book, I have said a great deal about the historically specific ways in which this process happened. C

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However, I also believe that the dramatic case of German holistic science challenges us to ask more basic questions about how language and metaphor transform and extend the authority and reach of science in general. I agree with Evelyn Fox Keller that "part of what it means to think about the force and efficacy of scientific knowledge is to think about the force and efficacy of language."10 The scientific adoption of normative language and culturally suggestive metaphor may be one key way in which science in its practice destabilizes a distinction it then officially and vigorously defends in its rhetoric and selfrepresentations: a distinction between what is sometimes called "fact" versus "value," between the world of natural necessity on the one side and the world of social choice and cultural meaning on the other. There may be another way in which the history of German holistic science up to 1945 makes demands on our own self-consciousness. In the immediate postwar years, the argument was often made that, because humanity had lived through a time that had almost succumbed to madness, its Iodestone must now be the unfettered rationality of free science as practiced in a democratic society. Science was both a source of material strength and a bedrock of fact upon which we could build a sane new world. When the countries allied against Hitler won a clear victory over a clear evil, however, it turned out that actually many of their citizenry had not confronted all the ambiguities in their own hearts about the technologies and scientific "can-do" attitude that had helped make them winners. As the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima burned a permanent image in the public imagination, some could not quell a suspicion that all was not well with "us" also—could not wholly quell their own anxieties about the existential and social costs of living "at home" with the Machine. In other words, a large segment of the postwar generation came to recognize both its own continuing preoccupation with "reenchantment" and "wholeness" and its own ambivalence about a science that still seemed indifferent to those hungers. In the United States, the 1960s-generation of New Leftists and hippies, traumatized by Vietnam and alienated from their elders' world, discovered a "machine" in their midst, not in the atomistic, decentralized industrial society deplored by German youth in the 1920s, but in the hypercentralized authority of an advanced capitalist "military-industrial complex." During these years, there were hopes that a way to wholeness could be found in a lifestyle that combined "consciousness expansion" with a politics that claimed, perhaps naively, to be at once charismatic and democratic in the most authentic sense of the word. As Theodore Roszak, an early sympathetic historian of this period, described the vision: In a world which more and more thinks of society as a subordinate adjunct of a gigantic technological mechanism requiring constant and instantaneous co-ordination from the center, the young begin to speak of such impracticalities as "community" and "participatory democracy." Thus they revert to a style of human relations that characterizes village and tribe, insisting that real politics can only

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CONCLUSION take place in the deeply personal confrontations these now obsolete social forms allow. .. . [They] assert the primacy of the non-intellectual powers [and] . . . deny that the true self is this small, hard atom of intense objectivity we pilot about each day as we build bridges and careers.11

The 1960s also witnessed the rise of a new chorus of attacks on science, both as a basically oppressive institution in the service of the military and big business, and (even more radically) as an epistemology with a fundamentally inadequate approach to reality. Roszak wrote in the New York Times in 1973: I have insisted that there is something radically and systematically wrong with our culture, a flaw that lies deeper than any class or race analysis probes and which frustrates our best attempts to achieve wholeness. I am convinced it is our ingrained commitment to the scientific picture of nature that hangs us up. . . . It is our reality principle, and as such the governing mystique of urban industrial culture.12 As in the 1920s, a frequent conclusion since the 1960s has been that good new science is needed to conquer bad old science. Consequently, in the ensuing years, our society has been witness to various scattershot efforts to visualize more holistic, postmodern, "New Age" sciences of life, mind, the cosmos, and the earth: sciences characterized by presumably more nurturing, relational, and "authentic" forms of knowledge. 13 In this literature, the values and epistemologies of a (good) "wholeness" are again frequently set up in opposition to those of a (bad) "mechanism." This, in spite of the fact —as Donna Haraway noted in the mid-1980s—that our imaginative understanding of the "machine" is also in the process of changing, destabilizing our capacity to use it as a self-evident contrast to the "organic." In her wry words: "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert."14 Nevertheless, the binary opposition is apparently still sufficiently robust to do useful cultural work for our time. The 1970s, for example, saw an elaborate articulation of the machine/wholeness trope emerge from the work of (mostly American, mostly West Coast) neuropsychology laboratories concerned with the differential functioning of the human brain's two cerebral hemispheres. In this iteration of the basic opposition, the right (lateral) side of the brain became the site of neglected and undervalued "holistic" modes of knowledge and being, and the left half was made the site of allegedly mechanical, piecemeal, and abstract modes of information processing, all favored in what was condemned as our logocentric, rationality-obsessed culture. "Liberating" the right brain from left brain "dominance" was, for a time, a favorite theme of paperback self-help literature.15 Significantly, as "we" lost our faith that science and reason would preserve us, we also reconstructed our memories of the sort of threat and evil that Nazism—still the ultimate morality tale of our century—had actually repre-

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sented for us. Increasingly, we became less horrified by the "irrationality" of this movement and more fascinated and appalled by its cold, technocratic instrumentalism (of course, also an important part of a larger truth).16 "Without utterly dispassionate, utterly rational technicians and administrative automatons like Adolf Eichtnann," Roszak wrote in 1969, "it is impossible to imagine the Nazi state lasting a year. Those who blame Nazism on the corrupting influence of the Romantic movement surely mistake the propagandist s surface for the underlying political reality."17 In 1979, a German psychology article published in Gestalt Theory went so far as to suggest that the essence of National Socialism had actually lain in its neglect of the "whole" and its alternate cultivation of what were basically "left hemisphere" values and habits of thought: [T]he Nazis with their calculating, book-keeping rationality were trained in piecemeal thinking to an extreme degree and viewed people as cogs [Stiicke]. It is simply false to dismiss the other form of thinking, the thinking mode of the nondominant brain half as irrational; thinking holistically is not irrational.18 In drawing attention to the persistence of concerns with wholeness and mechanism in the social discontents of the past several decades, I am not suggesting that German holistic science and our own society's experiments with holism in science are of a kind, in substance, style, or focus. I am also far from proposing that the history of German holistic science finds some sort of natural "conclusion" in the holistic science of the Western countries in the 1990s. This is not to deny the rather different question of whether any of the proposals developed by German holistic science in.the 1920s have served as resources (perhaps, in some cases, unrecognized) for one or another experiment in New Age holistic and postmodern science during our own time. Here, there is a story to be told; although I have not really tried to reconstruct it myself. It is clear that left-leaning, holistically oriented German immigrants to the United States, like Kurt Goldstein, Herbert Marcuse, and Fritz Perls, helped teach a new generation of American youthful discontents to speak an individualistic language of wholeness, human potential, and inner transformation, and that this tutelage would bear new fruit in the 1960s and beyond. Several historians have also called attention to the ways in which, in Germany itself, some advocates of holistic and vitalistic biology responded to the disruption of their partial alliance with the Third Reich by finding a new sort of political and scientific life after the Second World War—this time, in the agendas of ecologically oriented groups like the Green Party.19 More broadly, it is evident that the epistemological critiques of science that were ubiquitous during the first interwar "crisis" of modernity bear considerable family resemblance to the critiques of postmodern theorists today; Nietzsche is hardly less important to our own critics of science and modernity than he was to the generation that had witnessed World War I. Less happily, perhaps, critics like Jean-Pierre Faye have called attention to ways in which key words of the

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• CONCLUSION * vocabulary of postmodernism ("deconstmction," "logocentrism") actually had their origins in antiscience tracts written by Nazi and protofascist writers like Ernst Krieck and Lugwig Klages.20 Yet, even as details of intellectual indebtedness and continuity are important and should be clarified, I propose that we should pay more attention to a different kind of reason for our capacity to "recognize" aspects of our own rhetoric and concerns in the writings of an earlier era. Whether we like it or not, questions about the existential, cultural, and social adequacies of science—what it means to be named a "machine," what it will take to become "whole"—remain part of the unfinished business of our time. The technological triumphs of World War II and the material successes of science in the decades that followed, could distract us from these questions for a while but could not indefinitely postpone them. Because we ourselves have not satisfactorily resolved the questions, past arguments about them seem to matter more. And our attention may be particularly arrested when we appear to discover echoes of our own habits of thought in debates that then turned out to have been involved, in ways both subtle and crude, in National Socialist politics and policy, one of the great episodes of institutionalized evil of this century. Yet for us to (re)discover such connections does not mean that we must return to the point at which we began—where any holistic science, or indeed any sort of challenge to the epistemological, existential, and moral sufficiency of traditional science is branded "irrationalist" and potentially "fascist." That defense was tried, and the unrest of our own times shows us it did not work. We need to know about the history of German holistic science, not because it shows us the futility or wrongheadedness of considering alternatives to "mechanism," but because it provides us with a field in which multiple alternative versions of holistic science competed for existence. Some of these versions came out on the "right" side of history while others burned in the flames of 1945. Understanding the varying logic and influences that shaped such a range of variously compelling scientific stories will not necessarily help us bet on our own future; however, such study could challenge us to think more carefully about stories we ourselves are currently writing at the borders between our own "nature" and "culture." As we attempt to diagnose and overcome disenchantment in our souls and social arrangements, to rediscover "wholeness," we may want to better understand the ways in which we too— necessarily—mingle a range of cultural meanings and goals into our own scientific dialogues with nature.

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1. For details on the background leading up to this invitation, see Gtinther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter, 1979, Max Weber's vision of history: Ethics and method (Berkeley: University of California Press), 113-16. 2. Weber (1919, 129-56). 3. For an excellent sense of the immediate response of a number of Weber's contemporaries to his lecture, see the collection of translated essays edited by Lassman and VeIody(I989). 4. The above quote is from a German socialist analyst, Erich Wittenberg, writing from abroad in 1938. Wittenberg went on to identify the drama of the Great War as a "high-point" of rationalistic, technological thinking, and the defeat of Germany "the hour of reversal": They found themselves at the end of the world war at the graveyard of their hopes .. . Never before had a youth experienced such a total destruction of all values, sciences and arts; never before was the distance between the naive hope with which the youth were pulled into the field and the hard and cold reality so great and so unbridgeable. (Wittenberg [1938, 4: 235-36]) 5. In this book, I will be translating German-language references to ganzheit. ganzheitlich, ganzheitlichkeit, etc., as "holism," "wholeness", "the whole," etc. The German word Holismus (a translation out of the English) was rarely used in the literature analyzed for this study. 6. Berman 1984. 7. I am indebted to comments by Peter Galison and to Keith Anderton's 1993 doctoral dissertation, The limits of science: A social, political, and moral agenda for epistemology in nineteenth-century Germany, for helping me to a better understanding of both the intellectual rationale and the larger sociopolitical motivations for the epistemological "limits" nineteenth-century German mechanistic scientists imposed on the life and mind sciences. I discuss Anderton's work at more length in chapter 1. 8. The elaboration of this piece of the Kantian legacy into a research program in early nineteenth-century German biology is described in Lenoir (1982). 9. A fourth contemporary meaning of holism, only briefly explored in this book, may be called clinical holism. This holism was less overtly concerned with discovering new ways to visualize life and mind processes and more withfindingways to integrate or synthesize the theory and practice of so-called "scientific medicine" with "alternative" or traditional therapeutic practices such as herbalism and homeopathy. This holistic perspective also sometimes went under the name of Hippocraticism. For an introduction to the issues in Germany during this time, see Bothe (1991); also chapter 6 of this study. 10. Fritz Ringer (1969) is still an excellent source for getting a sense of these broader debates as they developed in the universities, even though Ringer did not include the natural sciences in his study. 11. Tonnies (1887). 12. TSnnies (1887), cited in Wise (1987, 1:398).

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13. For a valuable introduction to these issues, see Frisby (1993). 14. In Theodor Lessing's classic Untergang der Erde am Geist (Downfall of the Earth through Mind), cited in Schnadelbach (1984, 145). 15. Erich von Kahler, 1920, Der Beruf der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Bondi) was an important monograph of the time that made a great deal of this presumed distinction between "old" and "new" science. Portions of this book were translated and reproduced in the volume edited by Lassman and Velody (1989). 16. See Forman (1971). Beyond the case of quantum physics, there have been studies looking at holistic trends in chemistry and engineering. See Bechstedt (1980); and Herf(1984). 17. Heilbron (1985, 38(3/4): 230). Even as it has been very influential, this broad argument for a causal relationship between cultural discontents and conceptual developments within modern physics (often referred to as the "Forman thesis") has also been criticized on a variety of fronts: some historians have questioned Forman's rather undifferentiated view of Weimar culture as "andmodernist," others have objected to his characterization of quantum mechanics as a "German" intellectual creation; still others are at pains to either challenge or refine Forman's way of understanding science as part of cultural history. For an introduction to the issues, see Kraft and Kroes (1984); Radder (1983); and Hendry (1980). The Heilbron article cited above also lays out evidence for a broad cultural agenda within modern physics but downplays the specifically "German" nature of this phenomenon. 18. Paul Forman himself came close to conceding this point in his 1971 study of Weimar physics: [IJn the Weimar period it was the biologist who could most easily adapt his ideology and values to those of his intellectual milieu. Life, that central symbol, was his own subject. . . . Paraphrasing a spokesman for the discipline, [biology's] . .. mission is to counter the alienation from na"ure in our technical age; it provides the link between Ihe Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften because it works in part with the concept of scientific law, but also with the technique of understanding and imparting of meaning; it brings us to the edge of the irrational and leaches us to respect lhat which is beyond rational investigation. (Forman [1971, 40|) 19. Jonathan Harwood. March 2, 1995. Weimar culture and biological theory: A study of Richard Woltereck (1877-1944). Unpublished manuscript. On the German debates over "cytoplasmic inheritance," see Deichmann (1992, 88-92). 20. For an introduction to this extensive scholarship, see Science in Germany: The intersection of institutional and intellectual issues, ed. by Kathryn M. Olesko. Special issue: Osiris, 2d series, vol. 5 (1989). 21. Chamberlain (1928, 90). 22. Gilman(1991, 136-37). 23. Alfred Bottcher, 1935, Die Losung der Judenfrage, Ziel und Weg 5: 226. 24. See, for example, Lukdcs (1955); Stern (1961); Mosse (1961); Viereck (1965); and Sondheimer (1968). All of this scholarship suggesting a direct relationship between "irrationalist" directions in German intellectual thought and the rise of Nazism is closely related to the so-called Sonderweg thesis of Germany history. This is a perspective that essentially argues that, because Germany failed in 1848 to establish an enduring liberal political tradition, her subsequent history took a "special," (i.e., "deviant") path into the twentieth century, different from the presumably "normal" path followed by the westj

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em democratic countries. The fact that very rapid economic and industrial modernization in the late nineteenth century took place within a social structure that remained basically feudal and antidemocratic is supposed to have produced unbearable tensions that were predestined to collapse into dictatorship and tragedy. For an example of this argument, see Helmuth Plessner, 1959, Die verspatete Nation: iiber die politische Verfuhrbarkeit biirgerlichen Geistes (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer). One of the first and most important critiques of this thesis was launched by Blackbourn and Eley(1984). 25. Peukert(1993, 187). 26. Although I do not use the term "national style" in this book, there is clearly a sense in which I am working in that broad scholarly tradition. The literature associated with this concept goes back to Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s and has been developed in recent years by, among others, Gerald Geison and Jonathan Harwood. See Ludwik Fleck, 1935, Entstehung und Entnicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einfiihrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollectiv (Basel: B. Schwabe); Geison and Holmes (1993); Harwood (1993); and Daston and Otte (1991). 27. In much the same way that the literature produced in all the German-speaking countries of central Europe is, by common consent, called "German." Among many examples, see Michael Hamburger, 1985, A proliferation of prophets: Essays on German writers from Nietzsche to Brecht (Manchester: Carcanet Press). 28. Smuts (1926). 29. Bergson (1911); Alfred North Whitehead, 1925, Science and the modern world (New York: Macmillan Co.); Alfred North Whitehead, 1929, Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (New York: Macmillan Co.) 30. Sharon Kingsland, (1991) Toward a natural history of the human psyche: Charles Mannings Child, Charles Judson Herrick, and the dynamic view of the individual at the University of Chicago, in The expansion ofAmerican biology, ed. by Keith Benson, Jane Maienschein, and Ronald Rainger (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press); Nadine Weidman at Cornell University has recently completed doctoral research on Karl Lashley, including a discussion of his relationship to such German holistic traditions as Gestalt psychology. 31. Cross and Albury (1987). For an introduction to the scholarship on the general problem of the machine, pastoralism, and antimodernism in the Anglo-American tradition, see T. J. Jackson Lears, 1981, No place of grace: antimodernism and the transformation of American culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books); Leo Marx, 1964, The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and Herbert Sussman, 1968, Victorians and the machine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). 32. An international conference on "holistic medicine" held at the University of Montreal, Quebec, May 4-6, 1995, made an ambitious effort to engage in such crossnational comparative work; a proceedings volume of the meeting is being prepared. In the introduction to his study of German genetics, Styles of scientific thought, Jonathan Harwood discusses both the promise and the enormous difficulties involved in projects such as this. See especially pp. 1-5. 33. Peukert(1992, 188). 34. I resonate here with Charles Rosenberg who, in a recent article, noted that the relentless realities of AIDS have effectively undermined the persuasiveness of all totalizing "social constmctivist" or "discourse-theory" views of disease. He calls for science studies to move towards a "postrelativist" perspective that would reject "the clari-

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fying simplicity" of either extreme objectivism or extreme relativism. See Rosenberg, 1992, Disease and social order in America: Perceptions and expectations, in Explaining epidemics and other studies in the history of medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 261. In a somewhat similar vein, Evelyn Fox Keller has repeatedly insisted that, even as she is emphatically committed to elucidating the substance of Steven Shapin's provocative claim that "there is as much society inside science as outside," nevertheless the material, implacable, and nonhuman phenomena we call "natural" cannot be simply "named out of existence." See Keller, 1987, The gender/science system: Or, is sex to gender as nature is to science, Hypatia 2 (2): 33-44; Keller (1992); Keller, June 1994, Science and its critics, manuscript. 35. For accounts of the holistic life and mind sciences in the interwar period that emphasize empirical discovery and theoretical necessity, see Murphy (1968); Riese (1959); Hermann (1976); Entralgo and Tenlon (1978). 36. An interest in language and metaphor has also characterized recent attempts to bring the tools of literary criticism to the study of scientific texts, often in the service of an explicit antifoundationalist position—that doubts the reality of anything behind science other than a trail of endlessly regressing textual references. Evidently, this is not the position of this book, even as my own thinking has been shaped and stimulated by my encounter with the "literacy turn" in the history of science. An introduction to these developments is told by Peter Novick (1988, 1-85, 522-629). For other defenses and explanations, see, among others, Dominick LaCapra, 1983, Rethinking intellectual history and reading texts, in Rethinking intellectual history: Texts, contexts, language (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press); LaCapra, 1985, Rhetoric and history, in History and criticism (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press); and David Harlan, 1989, Intellectual history and the return of literature, The American Historical Review 94 (June): 581-609. 37. Compare Wohl (1979). 38. With regard to the challenges that face recent attempts to make biography a viable vehicle for serious scholarship in the history of science, Cathryn Carson and Silvan S. Schweber have observed: "In many areas of history the past decades have marked a shift away from attendance on great statesmen and thinkers, and toward the study of popular culture and broad social phenomena. The parallel movement in the history of science has been the rise of social history and, more broadly social studies of science. What is of interest here is no longer the particularity of the individual career, but the structures and interactions that situate and shape it. The individual focus of biography, then, with its emphasis on paths taken and choices made, might distract attention from what are seen as the real forces, institutional, social, and disciplinary, that have framed those options." See Carson and Schweber (1994). 39. Schorske (1980, xxii). 40. Other recent examples of collective biography in the history of science, undertaken from a range of methodological perspectives, include Steven J. Heims, 1980, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From mathematics to the technologies of life and death (Cambridge: MIT Press); Sam S. Schweber, 1989, John Herschel and Charles Darwin: A study in parallel lives, Journal of the History of Biology 22: 1-71; Gerald Holton, 1984, Success sanctifies the means: Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, and the transition to modern physics, in Transformation and tradition in the sciences: Essays in honor of I. Bernard Cohen, ed. by Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). I am indebted to Skuli Sigurdsson for referring me to these studies, and for his thoughtful discussion of the challenges and promise of group biography as an approach in the history of science. See Sigurdsson (1992).

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CHAPTER 1

1. For an introduction to the Romantic response to Newton's work, see Cunningham and Jardine (1990); Compare also Burwick (1986). 2. Friedrich Schiller, The Gods of Greece, cited (in original German) in Virchow (1859, 125). 3. For example, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs has explored ways in which Newton connected his work on universal gravitation to his religious beliefs and immersion in occult and alchemical thinking. See Dobbs, 1991, The Janus faces of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton's thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 4. Reddick (1990, 331). 5. Ibid., 333. 6. One of the few book-length treatments of this aspect of Kant's thinking has been provided by Zumbach (1984.) Timothy Lenoir also reviews the basic Kantian position in the opening sections of his monograph (1982). 7. The full quotation from Goethe, from which I quote only a fragment, reads: "Nun aber kam die Kritik der Urteilskraft mir zu Handen, und dieser bin ich eine hochst frohe Lebensepoche schuldig. Hier sah' ich meine disparatesten Beschaftigungen neben einander gestellt, Kunst- und Natur-Erzeugnisse eins behandelt wie das andere, aesthetische und teieologische Urteilskraft erleuchteten sich wechselweise" (Goethe, "Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie," cited in Gross (1913, 124). 8. Goethe's theory of colors was developed in self-conscious opposition to the Newtonian model, which stressed the physical, quantitative aspects of color over its phenomenological, sensual dimensions. Newton, using a prism (a technology Goethe distrusted), had argued that white light contains the spectrum of all colors. To Goethe, for whom light was an Ur-element of the world, this seemed absurd. His theory of colors envisioned it as the response of the eye to gradated encounters between the polar opposites of darkness and light. Mark Schneider notes that "by insisting on phenomenological attention to the secondary qualities of nature, Goethe hoped to make a place in science for the 'sensuous concrete' upon which Keats, for instance, saw the charm of nature to be based and which the Newtonian reduction to primary qualities (the 'touch of cold philosophy') threatened to destroy." See Mark Schneider, 1979, Goethe and the structuralist tradition, SiR (Fall): 453-478, especially pp. 469-70. See also Frederick Burwick's analysis of the Goethean Farbenlehre (1986). 9. Knight (1990, 16). 10. Cited in Meyer-Abich (1960, 297). The original citation reads: "In jedem lebendigen Wesen sind das, was wir Teile nennen, dergestalt unzertrennlich vom Ganzen, daB sie nur in und mit demselbem begriffen werden kdnnen, und es konnen weder die Teile zum MaS des Ganzen noch das Ganze zum MaB der Teile angewandt werden, und so nimmt... ein eingeschranktes lebendiges Wesen teil an der Unendlichkeit, es hat etwas Unendliches in sich." 11. Lenoir (1982), especially pp. 12-14, and 103. 12. Anderton (1993, 7). 13. Cited in Leichtman (1979, 70 n). 14. Virchow (1858, 115). 15. Reddick (1990, 335). Reddick goes on: "much later, Liebig pronounced on Naturphilosophie in more moderate, but more devastating, terms: 'We look back on German Naturphilosophie as though on a dead tree that bore the most beautiful foliage and the most magnificent flowers—but no fruit.'" 16. This is a point stressed by Lenoir (1982).

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17. von Helmholtz (1847). 18. The simultaneity of this discovery was the subject of an influential essay by Thomas Kuhn, 1959, Energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery, reprinted in The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 19. Hermann von Helmholtz, 1863, (On the) conservation of force, in Popular lectures on scientific subjects, trans, by E. Atkinson (New York: D. Appleton). 20. Virchow (1858). 21. Rabinbach (1990,66). 22. Ringer (1969, 221). 23. Virchow (1855, 82-83, 84). 24. The turn of the twentieth century, however, would prove to be something of a crisis for Darwinism, because the means by which individual variation occurred and were passed on to offspring remained elusive. See Bowler (1983). 25. Cited in Freyhofer (1982). 26. Allen (1978,29). 27. In Roux's words: "[T]he older, more restrictive concept of mechanics in the physicist's sense as the causal doctrine of the movement of masses, has been extended to coincide with the philosophical concept of. mechanism, comprising as it does all causally conditioned phenomena, so that the words 'developmental mechanics' agree with the more recent concepts of physics and chemistry, and may be taken to designate the doctrine of all formative phenomena" (Ibid., 34). 28. This is a partial simplification. For a more comprehensive discussion of these issues than I can pursue here, see Frederick Gregory, 1989, Kant, Schelling, and the administration of science in the Romantic Era, in Science in Germany: The intersection of institutional and intellectual issues, ed. by Kathryn M. Olesko, Osiris (2d sen) 5: 17-35. 29. Timothy Lenoir, Social interests and the organic physics of 1847, in Science in reflection, ed. by Edna Ullmann-Margalit, vol. 110 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science; The Israel colloquium: Studies in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, vol.3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 169-191; Anderton (1993). 30. Cited in Anderton (1993, 111). 31. Wise (1987, 396). 32. Virchow (1855, 85). 33. Their story is told in Gregory (1977). 34. Ibid., 64. Gregory notes that this remark, taken out of context, does Vogt something of an injustice (Ibid., 229 n. 47). The analogy was drawn in the course of an extended discussion on the nature of glandular secretions, in which Vogt had been using the kidney as an example throughout. 35. Ibid., 196. 36. Ibid., 196. 37. Anderton (1993, 143-^15). 38. Ibid., 28. 39. This is an interpretation of Kant's critique of reason that could and was made, but—as I hope is clear by this point—it was far from a necessary interpretation. As Robert Pippin has noted, "Kant can be understood as having inaugurated, having 'made room for,' a renewed understanding of religious faith and moral life in the face of the official Enlightenment program; as having initiated a new form of apriorism in philoso-

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phy, potentially wildly speculative and anti-empirical; as having succeeded in mounting a skeptical-empirical challenge to philosophy so sobering as to leave philosophy only tasks which Kant himself had finally and decisively resolved; or as having prepared the way for a consistently naturalistic, or psychological, or physiological account of the faculties and subjective activities without which experience could not be possible." It is this final interpretation that the mechanists had targeted for their purposes (Pippin, 1993, review of The rise of neo-Kantianism: German academic philosophy between idealism and positivism, by Klaus Christian Kohnke, The Philosophical Review 102 (4): 594-95). 40. See Lenoir (1993). 41. Carlyle, cited in Marx (1978, 168). Actually, Locke's theory of mind did include certain ideas about reflection, abstraction, and the "self as the possessor of ideas and sensations. Later David Hume would eliminate the "self from sensationism following his failure to discover any such creature through introspection. 42. Thomas Carlyle, 1933, Sartor Resartus, excerpted in vol. 2 of The Norton anthology of English literature, 3d ed., ed. by M. H. Abrams, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974), pp. 926, 949. In this essay, half autobiography, half satirical fiction, the protagonist—a German professor to whom Carlyle gives the grotesque name Diogenes Teufelsdrdckh (God-begotten Devil's Dung)—recounts the story of his spiritual travails and his ultimate triumph over the false appearances of the Machine universe. 43. Wilhelm Wundt occupies a peculiarly unstable position in partisan writings and rewritings of the history of German associationist psychology. At the turn of the century, he would be seen as the central representative of the new experimental psychology which, with its emphasis on elementary sensations linked by association, was felt by some critics to be turning psychology into a field "without a subject"—as William Stern put it in 1900 (see Ash [1990, 291-92]). Then, in the interwar years, we see his rehabilitation by such men as Felix Krueger (Wundt's successor at Leipzig). In sharp contrast to his earlier image as a dangerous "atomizer" out to deprive psychology of its soul, he was now saluted as a man who anticipated many of the key principles of the holistic program of the Berlin Gestalt psychologists and others (see Krueger (1924); compare also chapter 4 of this study). As late as 1967, Krueger's former student Albert Wellek would salute Wundt as a man who "fought against British and French sensationalism and materialism" and promoted ideas "transitional to the modern . . . psychology of totalities, psychology of wholes" (Wellek [1967, 350]). Adrian Brock in the Department of Psychology at York University (Canada) is undertaking a thorough overhauling of the traditional image of Wilhelm Wundt as an atomistic experimental psychologist. Brock focuses in this context particularly on Wundt's neglected Vblkerpsychologie. I am grateful to Brock for the opportunity to read a number of his interpretations in manuscript form. 44. See Harrington (1987, 35^9); also F. Schiller, 1979, Paul Broca: Founder of French anthropology, explorer of the brain (Berkeley: University of California Press); Walther Riese, 1947, The early history of aphasia, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 21:322-34. 45. This is not to overlook the fact that certain leading German psychiatrists at this time—Wilhelm Griesinger, Theodor Meynert, to name only two of the most prominent—were committed generally to the concept of cerebral localization as a goal that would ultimately permit the creation of a comprehensive somatic model of mental activity. I am here speaking only of the lukewarm German response to France's localization of a "language faculty" in the cortex and the tendency to draw consistently on

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homegrown traditions and discoveries. I see nothing surprising about this response, given the growing nationalistic sentiment and anti-French feeling in the German states at this time. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the unification of Germany under Bismarck came less than a decade after Broca, in Paris, opened up the cerebral localization issue with his clinical work on the patient 'Tan." 46. Fritsch and Hitzig (1870). 47. See, for example, David Ferrier, 1876, The functions of the brain (London: Dawson of Pall Mall); and Munk (1881). 48. Cited in Robert M. Young, 1970, Mind, brain and adaptation in the nineteenth century: Cerebral localization and its biological context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 129. 49. Meynert is another example of a nineteenth-century neurologist who was clearly more complex and subtle in his thinking than his holistic critics were able (or wanted) to see. On the one hand, he stands accused by them (with Griesinger) of being a "machine" clinician of the worst kind—a man narrow-mindedly fascinated with gross brain anatomy as he attempted, among other things, to reduce all mental illness to diseases of the "forebrain." On the other hand, we also have here a man whom Sigmund Freud would consistently revere as "the most brilliant genius he had ever encountered"—a man who tried to translate Schopenhauer's concept of an essential conflict between will and intellect into the language of physiology—and a neurologist who found in his results a complex philosophical-political Weltanschauung that called upon the ego to free itself from the illusory world of appearance and individual self, and to realize its holistic oneness with all others (what Meynert called mutualism). He is clearly a figure who would reward more careful study and contextualization (Freud reference is cited in Johnston (1972, 232). See also McGrath (1974, 44). 50. Wernicke (1874). 51. The aphasias are a group of disorders associated with loss or disturbance of speech and language comprehension resulting from brain damage; the agnosias involve loss of the capacity to recognize the significance of objects perceived (originally, and more eloquently, called "soul-blindness"); the apraxias involve disruptions of the capacity to carry out volitional acts. 52. Lichtheim (1886, 433-84). 53. For a thoughtful discussion, see Mandelbaum (1971), especially pp. 289-310, entitled "Ignoramus, Ignorabimus: The positivist strand." 54. See Wehler( 1985, 24-31). 55. Cited in H. Kohn, 1960, The mind of Germany: The education of a nation, (London: Macmillan), p. 181. The original text here reads: O wie liebt ich dich einst, jetzt so gewaltiges Volk, Als uneinig du noch traumtest von Einigung. 56. Cited in Gasman (1971). 57. Wehler(1985, 55). 58. For a detailed discussion of Langbehn, see Stern (1961). 59. How far Rembrandt resonated with the collective spirit of the time can be gauged from the fact that, a year after publication, Langbehn's book went into its 37th edition (Thomas [1983, 109 n.]) 60. Langbehn (1890). 61. On this theme, see Pick (1993). 62. Wehter(1985, 17).

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63. Ibid., 35. 64. SeeFrisby (1993, 88-111). 65. Hood (1989, 193, 196). 66. Schorske (1980, 131, 133). 67. Wehler(1985, 106). 68. Roger Martin du Gard's French novel Jean Barois became one of the more uncompromising European reactions to the existentialist implications of the sciences of the "human machine," notably in its ironic scene where the hero recites a kind of "mechanistic" credo of faith: "I do not believe that mind and matter are mutually exclusive entities. ... I know that my personality is but an agglomeration of particles of matter, whose disintegration will end it absolutely. "I believe in universal determinism; that we are conditioned by circumstances in all respects. .. ." "Good and Evil are mere arbitrary distinctions . . ." (Roger Martin Du Gard, 1913, Jean Barois, trans, by Stuart Gilbert [New York: Viking Press, 1949], pp. 255-56) . 69. Cited in Ringer (1969, 258). 70. This is the title of a chapter in George Mosse, 1988, The culture of western Europe: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 3d ed., (Boulder: Westview Press). 71. For a sampling of the diverse literature on this theme, see Hughes (1958); George Mosse (1964); Masur (1966); Mandelbaum (1971); McGrath (1974); McGrath, (1986); Pick (1989); Teich and Porter (1990); Ascheim (1994). 72. McGrath (1974, 60-61). 73. Cited in Thomas (1983, 3). 74. Ibid., 24. Eisner was editor of the socialist journal Vorwdrts from 1896 until his dismissal in 1905 (for revisionism). Later, he was an outspoken opponent of the war, and became head of the short-lived Bavarian Republic until his murder in 1919. 75. This point has been stressed by Ringer (1969) but with an explicit focus on the humanities and cultural sciences. 76. A second, so-called "decadent" form of Wagnerism, less relevant to this story, made Wagner a central part of a general preoccupation with sexuality, perversion, experimental art, and occult belief and practice. See Erwin Koppen, 1973, Dekadenter Wagnerismus: Studien zur europaischen Literatur des Fin de siecle (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter). 77. See Winfried Schuler, 1971, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ara; Wagnerkult und Kulturreform im Geiste volkischer Weltanschauung, vol. 12 of Neue Miinstersche Beitrage zur Geschichtsforschung (Munster: Aschendorff). 78. "Der Idealismus der Bayreuther Gemeinde ist 'Weltanschauung' in dem Sinn, dass sich ein Gedankengebaude nicht auf die Strukturen der Wirklichkeit einlaBt, um sich an ihr zu bewahren, wie es Aufgabe von Philosophie ware, sondern dass sich Philosopheme um einen Grundgedanken zum System zusammenschlieBen, primar von dem Bedurfniss getragen, das Subjekt vor ' transcendental er Obdachlosigkeit' zu bewahren und inmitten einer sinnlos gewordenen Welt eine Oase der Sinnprasenz zu bieten" (Winkler 1986, 185). 79. McGrath (1974, 59-61). 80. In his 1888 Ecce Homo, he would say of this early work, "It smells offensively

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Hegelian, and it is only in a few formulas affected by the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer" (cited in Walter Kaufmann, 1967, "Nietzsche, Friedrich," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (New York: Macmillan & The Free Press), 5: 507. 81. Jay (1984, 78). 82. Cited in Michael Ermarth, 1978, Wilhelm Dilthey: The critique of historical reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 24. 83. Dilthey (1921), cited in Hermann (1976, 593). 84. Wilhelm Dilthey, 1910, Selected writings, ed. and trans, by H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 170. 85. Du Bois-Reymond was singled out as the paradigm of the cold scientist-professor, an arrogant no-knower who would limit knowledge to mechanistic explanation. Of course, the bad guys are emphasized in such tracts, not to be praised but to be buried. Still, there is a certain irony in the fact that Du Bois-Reymond turns out himself to have publicly warned, in language not that different from Langbehn's, against Europe's capitulation to excessive realism and technology, coining an epithet to describe this process that would later be widely used: Amerikanisierung, or "Americanization" (F. Stern [1961, 131 n.]). 86. See note 8, above. 87. Cited in F. Stern (1961, 125). 88. Ehrenfels (1890, 249-92). Although Ehrenfels would be thefigurebest remembered for these insights, several others in German psychology would later complain that Ehrenfels had been given too much credit for originality and that they had anticipated key aspects of the Gestalt view of mind before him. 89. Decker (1977, 216-19). 90. After an egg has been fertilized, it experiences cleavage or cell division. One cell divides into two and the daughter cells are called blastomeres. These two cells then each cleave into four; the new cells cleave into eight, and so on. 91. Driesch (1899). 92. Riese (1959, 126-27). Compare also the arguments set out by Riese (1960, 71) and (1963, 21). 93. Cited in Bertalanffy (1951, 81-82). In this context, compare also the historical tale told inNeuberg (1944, 132-36), the section entitled "Back to Goethe" ("Zuruckzu Goethe"). 94. Cited in Wyatt and Teuber (1944, 231 n). 95. Eksteins (1989, 70-73). 96. Cited in James Webb, 1976. The occult establishment (La Salle, III.: Open Court Publishing Co.), p. 110. 97. Cited in Ringer (1969, 181). 98. The above quote is from a German socialist analyst, Erich Wittenberg, writing from abroad in 1938. Wittenberg went on to identify the drama of the Great War as a "high-point" of rationalistic, technological thinking, and the defeat of Germany "the hour of reversal": They found themselves at the end of the world war at the graveyard of their hopes. ... Never before had a youth experienced such a total destruction of all values, sciences and arts; never before was the distance between the naive hope with which the youth were pulled into thefieldand the hard and cold reality so great and so unbridgeable. (Wittenberg [1938, 235-36]) 99. New weapons developed, improved, or significantly exploited by the Germans included the Zeppelin dirigibles used for high-altitude raids on Paris and London and I

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for transport of supplies; the first truly effective military submarines that were used against the British fleet; new lightweight machine guns that brought out this weapon's offensive potential, after they had been used for some time in a defensive capacity in the trenches; long-range artilleryfieldguns and explosives; and electronic communications, including field telephones and the newly invented radio. 100. Johnston (1972, 391). 101. Compare Gay (1968). 102. J. v. Uexkull (1920, 43). 103. Peukert(1993, 178). 104. Cited in Herf (1984, 29); for other perspectives on the continuing attraction of technology in the postwar years, see Prinz and Zitelmann (1991); Eksteins (1989). 105. For a thoughtful discussion of this trend, see Schnadelbach (1984). 106. Other popular titles arguing variations on this basic theme included Theodor Lessing's Untergang der Erde am Geist (Downfall of the Earth through Mind); and A. Seidel's Bewufitsein als Verhangnis (The disaster of consciousness). 107. Schnadelbach (1984, 150). 108. Jay (1984, 179-80). 109. Cited in Forman (1971, 18). 110. Uexkull, letter to Chamberlain, 24 April 1921, Uexkiill-Chamberlain correspondence. CHAPTER 2

1. Letter from Biirger-Prinz to Rektor, Hamburg University, dated 24 February 1944, In: Akte: Goethe Preis, Hamburg Staatsarchiv (HSA). 2. Lorenz, cited in Schmidt (1980, 18). 3. Heidegger (1983, 315). 4. Hiinemorder(1979, 116). 5. Jennings (1909); Horderand Weindling (1986. 216); Loeb (1916). 6. Jennings (1909); Goldstein (1939); Meyer-Abich (1935); Thomas A. Sebeok, "Jakob von Uexkull. Neglected figures in the history of semiotic inquiry," lecture, Wiener Kongress fur Semiotik, 27 August 1976, cited in T. v. Uexkull (1980, 32); Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1968, General system theory: Foundations, development, applications, rev. ed. (New York: Braziller). 7. Goldschmidt (1956, 70). 8. Horderand Weindling (1986, 216). 9. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 29 September 1913, Uexkiill-Chamberlain Correspondence; for a considerably more positive assessment of Boveri, see V. Hamburger (1988,8). 10. G.v. Uexkull (1964,34). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 30. 13. Compare the letter of evaluation (signature illegible) written to the Prorector of the University of Hamburg, 29 October 1934 (Akte: Uexkull and Institut fur Umweltforschung [K.20.1.501]. Vol. II.): "My closer colleagues in the field are, to a large extent, not on particularly good terms with Uexkull. This has perhaps also hurt him in Hamburg. He is a typical outsider, and definitely lacks a thorough, general training in the field. It therefore happens that he is often wide of the mark, especially when dealing with theoretical considerations such as Darwin's evolutionary theory that he rejects." ("Meine engeren Fachkollegen stehen sich zum grossen Teile mit Uexkuell nicht be-

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• NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO * sonders gut. Dies hat ihm vielleicht auch in Hamburg geschadet. Er ist typischer Outsider und es fehlt ihm ohne Zweifel eine allgemeine fachliche Durchbildung. Es kommt daher vor, dass er, besonders bei theoretischen Erwagungen, z.B. iiber die von ihm abgelehnte Darwinsche Entwicklungslehre, sehr danebengreift.") 14. Stackelberg (1981); For a more nuanced evaluation of the link between Chamberlain and Nazism, see Field (1981, 447-58). Uexkiill-Chamberlain correspondence. Signature 196 (r) NachlaB HSC. Richard Wagner-Gedenstatte der Stadt Bayreuth, Germany. For his part, Chamberlain felt intellectually close enough to Uexkull to make the Baron the fictional recipient of the autobiographical letters on science and nature that he wrote for Lehenswege meines Denkens (Life paths of my thinking). He also made a number of efforts to use his personal influence to advance Uexkiill's career. These included a passionate letter in 1913 to the theologian Adolf von Harnack, then president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, that compared the "Archimedean" significance of Uexkiill's key ideas to those of Faraday and suggested that biology should properly speak of a new science of "Uexkullogy" (cited in Schmidt [1975, 125]). After Chamberlain's death in 1927, Uexkull was appointed editor of an unpublished manuscript that Chamberlain had been working on since the 1890s. This was published in 1928, with an appreciative introduction by Uexkull, as Natur und Leben (Nature and life). 15. G.v. Uexkull (1964). 16. T. v. Uexkull (1980b); Stossel (1988). 17. G.v. Uexkull (1964, 17). 18. J. v. Uexkull (n.d.). Loose reprint, Uexkiill-Chamberlain Correspondence, NuchlaB HSC. 19. Ibid., 56-57. 20. J. v. Uexkull (1923a). 21. J. v. Uexkull (1936a, 25). 22. G. v. Uexkull (1964, 24). 23. Uexkull, cited in ibid., 36. 24. Ibid., 36. 25. Nevertheless, von Baer was almost certainly an influence on and inspiration for Uexkull. For a discussion of von Baer's critique of Darwinism and construction of an alternative evolutionary model, see Lenoir (1982, 246-75). 26. Uexkull, cited in Brock (1934, 195). The self-referential nature of this obituary is underscored by the wry comments of the physiologist Albrecht Bethe (1872-1954), who published with Uexkull in 1899. Bethe recalled how his relationship with Uexkull cooled as Uexkull became too philosophical for his tastes, and he became, in Uexkiill's eyes "too much of an 'apparatus physiologist' and 'microscope devotee': indeed, I even saw some value in mathematics, which he despised" (in G. v. Uexkull [1964, 47]). Uexkiill's friend, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was considerably blunter, going so far as to declare Bethe to be Uexkull's counterimage in biological research, someone who wanted to make mathematical measure the "religion" of science (Schmidt [1975, 125]). 27. Goldschmidt (1956, 70). 28. J. v. Uexkull (1903, 1904a, 1904b, 1905). 29. Uexkiill had received the inferior cand.zool. degree from the university of Dorpat, but never actually received a doctorate in his field, having learned physiology from Kiihne without taking an advanced degree. In the 1890s, Uexkull did attempt to seeJf the zoology faculty at Heidelberg would be prepared to award him a doctoral degree on the basis of his scientific accomplishments as a private scholar.

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Goldschmidt's uncharitable but entertaining account of this episode has the aristocratic Uexkull (whom Goldschmidt misnames a count rather than a baron) visiting the zoologist Otto Butschl: He pointed to his many publications and hinted at his expectation of being given the degree without bothering much with the requirements. I suppose that Butschl was already prejudiced because of the [arrograntj attitude of . . . [the group with which Uexkull was associated, that had gathered around Hans Driesch]; in addition he was not fond of counts, and especially if they considered themselves entitled to special treatment. Thus Uexkull's demand for special consideration appeared to Butschli as an insult, a kind of attempt to bribe himself into a degree. Butschli actually blew his top and literally threw the Count out. (Goldschmidt [1956, 71]) 30. J. v. Uexkull (1900a, 73). 31. Jennings (1909, 327). 32. cited in Lenoir (1982, 76-77). 33. J', v. Uexkull, cited in translation in Jennings (1909, 333). 34. J. v. Uexkull, cited in Schmidt (1980, 10). 35. "Dies ist nicht eine Buche, sondern meine Buche, die ich in alien Einzelheiten mit meinen Sinnesempfindungen aufgebaut habe. Was ich von ihr sehe, hore, rieche oder taste, sind nicht Eigenschaften, die ausschlieBlich der Buche zu eigen sind, sondern es sind die von mir hinausverlegten Merkmale meiner Sinnesorgane" (Ibid.). 36. J. v. Uexkull (1922d, 265). 37. J. v. Uexkull (1926b, 29). 38. J. v. Uexkull (1902, 228). 39. See Beer, Bethe, and J. v. Uexkull (1899). 40. Dzendolet(1967). 41. J. v. Uexkull, cited in G. v. Uexkull (1964, 163-64). Italics added. 42. J. v. Uexkull (1909). 43. J. v. Uexkull (1922b, 244). 44. In human beings, Uexkull admitted the further existence of what he called a Vorstellungswelt, or set of collective concepts. 45. J. v. Uexkull and Kriszat (1934, 137). 46. Ibid., 28-29. 47. The history of this institute is documented in the Harhburg State Archives. See also Hunemorder (1979); Heinrich Kiihl, "Zwei Hamburger Jubilaen," Abhandlungen und Verhandlungen des naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins in Hamburg 9 (1965): 4-15; J. v. Uexkull and Brock (1930). 48. Schmidt (1980, 266). 49. During these years, Uexkiill's work would have a major influence on another pioneer of ethology, Konrad Lorenz. In a 1934 publication, Uexkull discussed Lorenz's tame jackdaw 'Tschock" and called attention to the fact that the bird's innate tendency to respond to some organisms in its Umwelt as "companions" ("mother companion," "mate companion," "flight companion," etc.) was not fixed to a certain object in itself but could be elicited by the Merkmale of a variety of unconventional objects, including Lorenz. He therefore suggested that it was the combination of Merkmale possessed by the chosen objects—not the object in itself—that had a so-called companion tone (Kumpanton) for the bird, and that thus produced the real ity "companion" (or "enemy") for the bird. See J. v. Uexkull and Kriszat (1934, 79-83). Stimulated by this discussion, Lorenz a year later addressed the problem of the

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"companion" himself—in an article he dedicated to Uexkiill:—and focused on the fact that the "companion" within a bird's Umwelt (a term he used) need not be a member of its own species. To explain this, Lorenz introduced his important concept of Pragung or "imprinting." The paper thus represented a critical stepping stone towards Lorenz's most influential contribution to ethology: the idea that animals possess inborn, speciesspecific "releaser schemas" that are set into play by signals in the environment. That concept in turn drew directly on Uexkiill's "functional circle" concept. See Lorenz (1935); Lorenz (1943); compare also Schmidt (1980, 115); and Hermann (1976, 640). 50. J. v. Uexkull and Sarris (1931b); Sarris (1935); J. v. Uexkull (1932); J. v. Uexkull (1933b); J. v. Uexkull (1934a). 51. The details of this time can be reconstructed from the documentation and correspondence in the files, "Familie-Kiep-Altenloh-25," and "Korrespondenz 1943-44," Uexkull and Institute fur Umweltforschung, Hanseat Hamburg Staatsarchiv. 52. Cited in Schmidt (1975, 122). 53. "Ich schreibe an einer theoretischen Biologie, die auch kein leicher Bissen sein wird. Aber der Krieg hat das Verstandnis fiir die Organisation auBerordentlich geweitet, so daB man hoffen darf, so werde das Zeitalter der Zahl uberwunden (Letter to Chamberlain, 22 November 1915, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). Indeed, upon publication, this book would be perceived as so difficult and counterintuitive in many of its claims that an American reviewer of the 1926 English translation of Theoretical Biology would find it remarkable that it had actually found a publisher "in these times of books on science made easy." Valuable as the book was, he felt most American readers would either fail to understand it or would find it anathema (Louis Wirth, 1928, review of Theoretical Biology, by J. v. Uexkull, American Journal of Sociology (May) 6: 995-98. 54. In reading an early draft of this chapter, Professor Robert Richards at the University of Chicago reminded me that Muller had used the term Energie, not in the blind, materialistic sense that would be defended by the later biophysicists, "but in the Aristotelian sense of actualized capacity. " In this sense Energie referred to the "quality" of the sensory information entering the special senses (R. Richards to author, 19 September 1993). 55. Compare T. v. Uexkull (1980c, 48-49); J. v. UexkUll (1923b, 255). 56. "Die Naturwissenschaft teilt sich in Lehre und Forschung. Die Lehre besteht aus Lehrsatzen, die eine eindeutige Aussage iiber die Natur enthalten. Die Form dieser Lehrsatze erweckt oft den Anschein, als stiitzten sie sich auf die Autoritat der Natur selbst. "Dies ist ein Irrtum, denn die Natur erteilt keine Lehren, sondern weist nur Veranderungen in ihren Erscheinungen auf. "Diese Veranderungen konnen wir dazu benutzen, um sie als Antworten auf unsere Fragen zu deuten. Um das richtige Verstandnis zur Natur zu gewinnen, mussen wir einen jeden Lehrsatz in eine Frage verwandeln und uns iiber die Veranderungen der Naturerscheinungen Rechenschaft geben, die die Forscher als Beweismaterial fiir ihre Antwort benutzt haben. "Die Forschung kann gar nicht anders vorgehen, als daB sie in ihrer Frage eine Voraussetzung (Hypothese) macht, in der die Antwort (These) bereits enthalten ist. Die endgultige Anerkennung der Antwort und die Aufstellung eines Lehrsatzes erfolgt, sobald der Forscher eine ihm geniigend diinkende Zahl von Erscheinungen in der Natur aufgefunden hat, die er im Sinne seiner Hypothese positiv or negativ deuten kann."

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"Die einzige Autoritat, auf die sich ein Lehrsatz stiitzt, ist nicht die Natur, sondern der Forscher, der seine eigene Frage selbst beantwortet hat "(J. v. Uexkull [1920b, 3]). 57. J. v. Uexkull (1933a, 1935, 1936b). 58. J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 22 November 1920, cited in Schmidt (1975, 124). 59. In a review of Theoretical Biology for the journal Kant Studies, the neo-vitalisl biologist Hans Driesch praised it warmly and recommended it as a needed corrective to the "dogmatic mechanism" of neo-Kantian philosophy of his time that "hampered every unitary world view [hemmt jede einheitliche Weltauffassung]" (Driesch [1921c]). 60. "Ob nun alle ubrigen Behauptungen die Einstein iiber den zentrumlosen koordinatenlosen Vorstellungsraum aufste! It, kann ich nicht nachprufen - interessiert mich auch gar nicht, da dieser Raum, je weiter er sich vom Anschauungsraum entfernt, umso mehr an Wirklichkeit einbiiBt. "Wirklich ist allein der Anschauungsraum. ".. .Was jenseits unseres Horizontes, jenseits unseres Hitnmelsgewolbes liegt, ist uns fiir immer verschlossen. Wir vermogen wohl uns einen Vorstellungsraum zu bauen, indem sich Sonne und Sterne in unerhiirten Entfernungen und in undenklicher Zeit bewegen. Aber dieser Vorstellungsraum ist nur eine Abschwachung unseres Anschauungsraumes, den wir gewinnen, indem wir einige wichtige Elemente des Anschauungsraumes fallen lassen, die Grundelemente namlich One und Richtungsschwritte willktirlich zu einer neuen Einheit umgestalten, die bald ein Zentrum besitzt, bald nicht. Der Blick iiber unseren Anschauungsraum jenseits des Hitnmelsgewolbes tst uns versperrt. Die dort waltende hohere Wirklichkeit bleibt fiir uns unerkennbar, mogen wir sie nun "Natur" oder "Gott" nennen. " . . . Ich fiirchte, man wird noch, wenn ich diese Ansicht offentlich ausspreche, a la Galilei behandeln und mich entweder in ein Irrenhaus sperren oder als Uberreaktionar unmoglich machen. "Aber einmal werde ich doch reden mussen. Vielleicht wird mich auch niemand verstehen. Aber Tatsache bleibt es doch: 'Epur non si move.' Nicht ich bewege mich um die Sonne, sondern die Sonne geht an meinem Himmelsbogen auf und unter. Das Gleiche geschieht an hunderttausend anderen Himmelsgewblben. Immer ist es eine andere Sonne, immer ein anderer Raum, in dem sie sich bewegt. "In die anderen Umweltraume ist uns die Aussicht nicht versperrt, wenn wir richtig zu beobachten verstehen. Durch die abertausend verschiedenen Umwelten wird das Universum so unendlich reich, daB wir Narren sind, wenn wir nicht davon ablassen wollen, nach der anderen Seite zu schauen, wo wir doch nur uns selbst in verzerrter Form entdecken konnen. "Dieser Brief ist fast ein Bekenntnis geworden, das ich Ihnen gegeniiber ruhig ablegen darf, ohne miBverstanden zu werden. (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 23 October 1923, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence), NachlaB HSC. 61. Stackelberg(1981, 112). 62. Lukacs (1955, 557). 63. "Besser unsre dickste Finsternis als euer stinkend Licht!" (Schumacher [1937, 49]). 64. Compare T. v. Uexkull (1980c, 29); Stackelberg (1981, 33). 65. Driesch (1951, 67). 66. Freyhofer(1982, 27). 67. Ibid., 28.

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68. Driesch (1899). 69. Driesch (1900). 70. Driesch (1901, 1903). 71. Uexkull, cited in Jennings (1909, 316). 72. M. Lightfoot Eastwood, 1910, review of The science and philosophy of the organism by Hans Driesch: The Gifford lectures, delivered at the University of Aberdeen in the year 1907. Vol. 2 (London: A.&.C. Black, 1908), International Journal of Ethics, 20: 494-98. 73. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 10 December 1921, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence, NachlaB HSC. 74. Driesch (1934). In interviews that took place in Freiburg, Germany, in 1989, Uexkull's son, the psychosomaticist Thure von Uexkull, repeatedly denied that his father was a vitalist and was highly critical of the historical judgment that would set his father in the same camp as such self-proclaimed neo-vitalists as Hans Driesch. Rightly or wrongly, contemporary judgments and habits of thought were clearly different—the two men were frequently paired, by critics and supporters alike, as Germany's two leading twentieth-century defenders of vitalism in biology. 75. J. v. Uexkull (1922b, 242). 76. Compare J. v. Uexkull (1922a, 176-77). 77. "Um sich das Verhaltnis zwischen Protoplasma und Struktur eindringlich deutlich zu machen, stelle man sich vor, daB unsere Hauser und Maschinellen nicht von uns erbaut wiirden, sondern selbsttatig aus einem Brei herauskristallisierten. Jeder Stein des Hauses und jeder Maschinenteil bewahre noch eine Portion Reservebrei bei sich, der die ndtig werdenden Reparaturen und Regulationen vornehme, auBerdem besitze jedes Haus und jede Maschine eine grOBere Anhaufung von Urbrei, die zur Erzeugung neuer Hauser oder neuer Maschinen diene" ("Das Protoplasmaproblem" in J. v. Uexkull [19091; reprinted in T. v. Uexkiill [1980b, 165-66]). 78. "[NJicht die gewiss richtige [Auffassung]," Julius Schaxel, 1922, review of Umwelt und Innenwelt der Ttere by J. v. Uexkull, Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 48 (9) (March 3, 1922). 79. Loeb (1916, 4). 80. "[Zjwei entscheidende Schritte, die Biologie vollzogen hat" (Heidegger 1983, 379, 380). 81. "[W]obei dessen Ganzheit nicht durch die Leibesganzheit des Tieres erschbpft ist, sondern die Leibesganzheit erst selbst auf dem Grunde der urspriinglichen Ganzheit verstanden wird, deren Grenze das ist, was wir den Enthemmungsring nannten (Ibid.). 82. Ibid., 311-33, 379-85. 83. J. v. Uexkull (1937, 199). 84. G. v. Uexkull (1964, 88). 85. "Hatten die Balten bisher ein Sonderdasein gefuhrt als Wanderer zwischen Ost und West, zwischen Deutschland und RuBland, so war der schmale Steg, auf dem diese Wanderung moglich war, plotzlich hinweggeschwemmt. Es gab keine Balten mehr, sondern nur Deutsche und Russen. An die Stelle des alten Lehnseides und der Treue zum Kaiser (dem in Petersburg oder dem in Berlin) trat der Anspruch der Nation . .. Jakob nahm leidenschaftlich Partei—fiir Deutschland" (Ibid., 101). 86. "Warum hat dieser Krieg selbst auf alle Fremde, die in Deutschland weilten, den Eindruck eines heiligen Krieges hervorgerufen? Weil das deutsche Familienleben sich plotzlich vor aller Welt offenbarte, weil das heilige Feuer des Idealismus, das die ein-

229 • NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO zelnen Heimstiitten erleuchtet und erwarmt, wie eine einzige machtige Flamme gen Himmel schlug" (J. v. Uexkull [1915, 66]). 87. "Weder die russische noch die franzosische Regierung Camorra hat das mindeste menschliche Recht, der Welt ihren Stempel aufzudriicken. Wie kommt England dazu, mit diesen kulturfeindlichen Banditen gemeinsame Sache zu machen? Die wahre menschliche Kultur kann nur durch England und Deutschland gemeinsam getragen sein" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, II August 1914, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 88. See, for example, the venom in J. v. Uexkull (1920a, 51). 89. Eksteins (1989, 200-201). 90. "Der deutsche Imperative Kants macht jeden Einzelnen zum selbstherrlichen Gesetzgeber im moralischen Dingen Darwin dagegen entlastet mit seinem englischen Imperativ den Einzelnen von dieser Verantwortung.... Darwins Standpunkt kann man kurz dahin zusammenfassen: Je groBer die Herde, um so hoher die Moral" (J. v. Uexkull [1917, 225, 223]). People from a range of political perspectives had made similar suggestions. Karl Marx had also once observed that Darwin had simply discovered in the natural world a version of bourgeois society writ large. "It is noteworthy," he wrote in a letter to Engels, "how Darwin rediscovers his English society with its division of labor, competition, the opening of new markets, 'inventions' and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence' among the animals and plants" (cited in Gasman [1971, 110]). 91. "[I]ch habe bemerkt, daB die biologische Ausdrucksweise unserem Zeitgenossen naher liegt als die abstrakte philosophische" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 21 October 1921, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 92. "[D]er Schopfer steht hoher als das Geschaffene" (J. v. Uexkull [1915,66]). 93. "[D]er Urbestandteil des Volkes in alien Fallen . . . ist die Familie. Eltern und Kinder gemeinsam bilden eine Zelle, die in Verbindung mit tausend andere Zellen den Volkskorper aufbaut" (Ibid., 54). 94. Ibid., 59-65. 95. "[S]uchte Uexkull vergebens nach dem 'Plan', den er tiberall in der Natur am Werke sah. Die Methoden der Menschen schienen ihm unorganisch und planlos" (G.v. Uexkull [1964, 104]). 96. Ibid., 107-11. 97. "In RuBland ist der langersehnte Augenblick eingetreten, das Protoplasma der Riesenamobe ist in voller Zersetzung begriffen, und niemand kann diesen NaturprozeB mehr aufhalten. Sinnloses Rauben und Morden hebt an, und zugleich erhebt sich das Gespenst der riesigsten Hungersnot, das die Welt gesehen. Im Fruhjahr, versicherte noch ein sehr zuverliissiger Beobachter, der eben aus RuBland kam, wird man Menschenfleisch fressen. Welch schemes Thema fiir die russische Literatur" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 20 November 1917, Uexkiill-Chamberlain Correspondence). 98. "Die nach dem Wahlgesetz erwahlten Manner sind weder Volksvertreter noch Staatsvertreter. Das Wahlgesetz behandelt Volk und Staat wie einem gleichfbrmig aus lauter gleichen Einheiten bestehenden Brei und lUBt diesen seine Vertreter entsenden." In a further colorful metaphor intended to demonstrate the absurdity of letting the masses vote on questions of state policy, Uexkull went on to ask why book reviewers should not simply count the words of any particular book in order to establish the value of the work in question (J. v. Uexkiill [1918,202]). 99. This letter reads in the original as follows:

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Londorf - Oberhessen, 30.12.1918 Sehr verehrter Herr Chamberlain! Ihnen, sehr verehrter Freund drangt es mich, einen NeujahrsgruB zu senden. Denn ich hege die Hoffnung, daB wir den dunkelsten Tag mit der schwarzesten geistigen Nacht eben iiberslehen. Mit Ihnen allein kann ich wahrhaft biologisch reden. Sie besitzen Kraft und Oberblick genug, um dem schwer erkrankten Staat den Puis zu fiihlen, obgleich gerade Sie die Verwesungsprozesse am bittersten empfinden miissen. "Eines halt uns trotz alledem aufrecht: Der deutsche Genotypus ist gut und mag der Phaenotypus noch so mangelhaft gewesen sein. Das was wir heute erleben, ist aber auch nicht die AuBerung des Phaenotypus sondern eine akute Erkrankung des Staates als Organismus. Ich kann heute nichl mehr die Ahnlichkeit aller Revolulionen als etwas AuBerliches beiseile schieben. Die Symptome geben ein allzu einheitliches Krankheitsbild in alien Fallen. Es ist immer Krebs, d.h. das Wuchem der Einzelzellen und damit Hand in Hand gehend die Zerstorung der Organe. Das Merkwiirdigste bleibt fiir mich der Wahn der Demokraten, die in der Massenbildung eine normale Erscheinung sahen, obgleich sie bereits den Beginn der Krankhcit bezeichnete. "Infolge dieses Irrtums ist auch die Kur, die sie anwenden, verfehlt, durch erneute Massenbildung wie die Nationalversammlung kann der Organismus nicht geheilt werden. Auch durch Aufklarung der einzelnen kann nur geringer Nutzen gestiftet werden. Der einzelne kann namlich gar nicht aufgeklart werden. Der gemeine Mann denkt nicht mit Begriffen sondern mit ganz primitiven Gefiihlen und Anschauungen. Fiir ihn ist Freiheit entweder die Moglichkeit zu rauben und zu pliindern oder bestenfalls die Moglichkeit, ungeniert vom Staat zu leben. Es ist auch gar nicht gerecht, von ihm zu verlangen, daB er in seiner Merkwelt ein Bild des Staates mit all seinen verschlungenen Beziehungen der Teile besitzt. Das einzige, was man erwarten darf, ist, daB er ein geniigend klares Bild seiner nachsten Aufgaben in sich tragt und den Willen, sie zu erfiillen. Und hier selzt der Genotypus ein, der ihn zu einem tiichtigen Berufsgenossen formt. Diese gesunde Urkraft ist im Deutschen vorhanden und es wird auch niemals an geistigen Fiihrern fchlcn, die aus diesem Material einen Staatsorganismus erwachsen lassen. Wenn die Krankhcit ausgetobt hat und der Infektionssloff neutralisiert ist; kann ein neues Wachstum beginnen. Fiir mich ist der Schrei nach Ordnung, der sich jetzt aus dem Herzen losringt das erste Zeichen beginnender Widerstandskraft. Von Ihnen als dem erfahrendsten Arzt in der Volkergeschichte erhoffe ich ein Wort iiber die Prognose. Halten Sie diesmal den Krebs fiir todlich oder glauben Sie an eine Genesung? Ich hoffe vom kommenden Jahr vor allem Ihre eigenc Genesung und sehnc mich dem Tage entgegen, da es mir mbglich sein wird, Sie persiinlich aufsuchen zu diirfen. Ihren Damen empfehle ich mich aufs Beste. In steter Freundschaft und Bewunderung Ihr sehr ergebener J. v. Uexkull" J. v. Uexkiill, Chamberlain NachlaB. 100. In 1923 Chamberlain would decide that Adolf Hitler represented one of the "spiritual leaders" that Uexkull and many of his conservative colleagues desperately wished for Germany. At that time, Uexkull was one of the people to whom Chamberlain would write to share personally his enthusiasm for Hitler. Uexkull's view, then and later, of Hitler is unclear, although one suspects that he would have found a badly educated, former street artist from Vienna a bit too common for his tastes. In a March

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1924 letter to Chamberlain, Uexkiill penned a few friendly but slightly jocular lines in which he expressed his pleasure over Chamberlain's enthusiastic portrayal of Hitler but hoped that the man would ultimately find himself some reliable lieutenants and staff (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 21 March 1924, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). His letter seems to be a response to an open "Letter to Adolf Hitler" that Chamberlain had published in the journal Deutschlands Erneuerung in January 1924. A second version of that portrait would appear in the Deutsche Presse in April (it is also possible that Uexkull read the second portrait in manuscript and was responding to that). 101. Houston Stewart Chamberlain to J. v. Uexkull, 8 January 1919, in Chamberlain (1928a, 2: 68-71). 102. J. v. Uexkull (1919, 79-110). 103. Mann (1982, 112). I am grateful to S. Silvan Schweber for bringing this reference to my attention. 104. "Daraus ergibt sich, daB notwendigerweise die einzige Organisationsform, die jeder Staat aufweisen muB, die Monarchic ist" (J. v. Uexkull [1920, 18]). 105. "Es ist somit ein Zustand eingetreten, der auch in unserem Korper eintreten wiirde, wenn an Stelle der GroBhirnzelle die Mehrzahl der Kbrperzellen zu beschlieBen hatte, welche Impulse den Nerven zu iibermitteln sind. Einen solchen Zustand nennt man 'Blodsinn'." (J. v. Uexkull [1920, 46]); compare J. v. Uexkiill [1918]). 106. "Liebermann hat einmal ausgefiihrt, daB derjenige, der eine gute Riibe malt, ein titchtigerer Maler ist, als derjenige, der eine schlechte Madonna malt. So ist auch ein guter Sattler ein tiichtigerer Staatsdiener als ein schlechter Minister" (J. v. Uexkull [1920,36]). 107. Ibid., 42,46. The second quote cited in this paragraph reads: " 'Warum soil der eine eine Kanalreiniger sein, der andere Minister? Beides sind doch Menschen.' Die ganze Lacherlichkeit dieser Klagen springt in die Augen, wenn man sie auf einen beliebigen anderen Gegenstand anwendet. Jeder Stuhl zum Beispiel zeigt die gleiche Ungerechtigkeit.' Warum mussen seine FiiBe dauemd auf dem schmutzigen Boden stehen, wahrend seine Lehne sich frei in die reine Luft erhebt? Beide sind doch aus dem gleichen Holz geschnitzt." 108. Ibid., 40-41. 109. Ibid., 51. 110. Ibid., 50. 111. Field (1981, 387). 112. "Bewundernswert ist dieCohasionskraft beim Judenvolk. DafOr sind die Juden vollig unfahig, einen Staat zu bilden. Was sie hervorbringen ist nur ein parasitares Netz, das iiberall die staatlichen Gebilde zersetzt und die Vblker in gahrende Stoffhaufen verwandelt" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 10 April 1921, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 113. Scheerer ("l985, 28-29). 114. Herf(1984). 115. The main critic here was H. G. Holle, who first reviewed Uexkiill's work in the volkisch journal Deutschlands Erneuerung in 1920. That review opened with the terse, unequivocal sentence: "Biology of the state—a false concept" (H. G. Holle, 1920, review of Staatsbiologie [1920] by J. v. Uexkull, Deutschlands Erneuerung. Monatsschriftfur das deutsche Volk 4: 468). Holle pursued the quarrel further in General biology as the foundation of world view, life orientation, and politics (1925). I have not actually seen the latter book; it is discussed in Paul Krannhals (1928/1936, 1: 58-60).

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116. "DaB sie Staaten schaffen kann, macht die Menschheit als Ganzes in gewissen Sinne zu einem 'Organismus,' die empirischen Einzelstaaten aber sind Gebirgen ihrem logischen Wesen nach viel ahnlicher als einer Sonderbildung im Rahmen des Organischen" (Driesch [ 1921b, 573, cited in Scheerer [1985,42]; compare also chapter 6, this volume). 117. J. v. Uexkull (1920a, 77-78). 118. Ibid., 75. 119. Ibid., 76 120. J. v. Uexkull (1933c, 71). 121. For example, J. v. Uexkull (1922c). 122. For the history of this document, see Cohn (1981). 123. J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 17 May 1920, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence. For his part. Chamberlain had once written to Uexkiill that "one can certainly say, without exaggeration that what we are experiencing today is the rule of the Jews. When newspapers speak of 80 to 100 Jews in the.so-called government, that doesn't capture the range, for among the remaining 20 there are many mixed breeds [Man darf gewiB ohne Ubertreibung behaupten, was wir heute in Deutschland erleben, ist die Herrschaft der Juden; wenn die Zeitungen erzahlen von 80 bis 100 Juden unter den sogenannten Regierenden, so langt das noch nicht, da unter den iibrigen 20 sehr viele Mischlinge sich befinden]" (Chamberlain to J. v. Uexkull, 9 January 1919, in (1928a, 2:71]). 124. "Es ist sehr moglich, daBan einem-ganz gemeinen biologischen Fehler die Jahrhundert alte Weisheit der Juden zerschellt und sie nicht zur Herrschaft sondern zur Ausrottung der Juden fuhrt" (Uexkull to Chamberlain, 17 May 1920, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 125. "Aber ich denke, es wird dafiir gesorgt sein, daB selbst die jiidischen Baume nicht in den Himmel wachsen. Die Zeit der Massenherrschaft, in der die Juden gedeihen, wird auch' voriibergehen und nun haben wir sie erkannt" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 4 July 1922, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 126. "Ich befurchte, daB der krasse Rassen-Antisemitismus zur Starkung des Ghetto-Staates dient, indem er auch diejenigen Juden, die nicht mehr von einem Judenstaate wissen wollen, diesem in die Arme treibt" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 3 April 1923, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 127. "Die Juden haben einen sehr feinen Riecher fiir kommende Zeitstromungen. Der Materialismus hat abgewirtschaftet, jetzt machen sie ihre Geschafte mit dem Idealismus.. .. Wieviel dumme Deutsche werden wohl darauf hineinfallen? Deshalb habe ich es ubernommen, das Buch in der Deutschen Rundschau zu besprechen, was recht schwierig sein wird, da ich die Karten nicht einfach aufdecken kann" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 12 February 1921, Uexkiill-Chamberlain Correspondence). 128. For example, J. v. Uexkull (1928b, 9-13). 129. Cited in Schmidt (1975, 127). 130. Goldschmidt (1956, 70). 131. Field (1981, 323-24, 397). Before World War I, Gross worked as Uexkull's research assistant, helping him complete several of his key studies on tonus in invertebrate animals. Geoffrey Field discusses his case, noting that he was a half-Jew deeply ashamed of being the product of a "mixed marriage" and who, on the eve of 1933, was "still writing tracts about the Germanic ideology and urging Jews to . .. assimilate to the heroic Teutonic ideal" (Field [ 1981,324]). Gross himself wrote about Uexkull in an

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article for the conservative Wagnerian crowd at Bayreuth, that called for a return to a Goethean view of natural science as "systematic art." See Gross (1913, 124-36). Field identifies Trebitsch as a self-hating Viennese Jew and disciple of Chamberlain. He notes how Trebitsch's "blond appearance made him the center of a sick cult in Vienna" even as his writings publicized the dangers of Jewry. He was also inordinately proud of his physical resemblance to Chamberlain himself. In the 1920s, he struggled hard to convince party officials that he could be a valuable ally in the Nazi struggle. He committed suicide in 1927, the year of Chamberlain's death (Field [1981,498 n. 8]). Field mentions that Trebitsch was convinced that Chamberlain's long years of illness were the result of "foul play," but goes no further (Field [1981, 397]). A letter by Uexkull to Chamberlain in 1926 fills in some of the details: Recently A. Trebitsch, who lives in a state of delusion, visited me, resembling you in appearance so much that one might confuse the two of you. His further claims were fantastic: all people with long skulls [a supposed Aryan physical trait] possess iron in their brains that is dispersed throughout the bodies of the rest of humanity. Now the Israeli Alliance has discovered special rays with which it can selectively treat these iron-rich brains. Both you and he are supposed to have fallen victim to these rays. He called this a scientifically proven fact. (J. v. Uexkiill to Chamberlain, 18 August 1926, Uexkiill-Chamberlain Correspondence) 132. J. v. Uexkull (1926a; 1943). 133. Chamberlain (1921). 134. "[D]ie geistige Organisation des Menschen im Gegensatz zu der der Tiere als Gegenpol sum eigenen Subjekt eines Gottes bedarf" (J. v. Uexkull [1926a, 235]). 135. Ibid. 236. 136. "Es i s t . . . fiir den einzelnen Menschen nicht gleichgiiltig, ob ein moralisches oder amoralisches Prinzip die Welt beherrscht. Einmal kommt auch fur den eingefleischtesten Atheisten der Tag, an dem er sich mit dem Weltregiment auseinandersetzen muB. Findet er dann anstatt eines Geistes, der, iiber den Subjekten stehend, ihn selbst und seine Mitmenschen erzeugt hat, und der zugleich das Gewissen zu ihm spricht, nichts als eine leblose Maschine, die all seiner Herzensnote spottet, so begirint diese Maschine ein satanisches Leben zu gewinnen. Eine scheuBliche Fratze grinst ihm entgegen. Das ist, was Bryan als Gorilla bezeichnet hat. Die Allmacht ist in die Hande eines affenahnlichen Scheusals geraten" (Ibid., 237). 137. J. v. Uexkull (1936a, 76). 138. J. v. UexkUll (1926a, 237). 139. J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 21 October 1921, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence. The full text here reads: "Mit der Ausrottung des Christentums und seines Gottes hbrt der Mensch auf, Mensch zu sein und wird etwas Schlimmeres als Bestie, er wird Maschine—das Mitleidloseste von allem. Ich habe bei der LektUre immer wieder an ihr 'Mensch und Gott' denken miissen. Es war Wort fiir Wort die Bestatigung Ihrer Lehren. Die Maschine nicht mehr Diener des Menschen sondern sein Herr wird einfach zum Teufel. So nahe, so greifbar steht er jetzt vor unseren Augen. Wenn die Maschine regiert, geht die PersOnlichkeit zugrunde. Die Bolschewisten haben keine Persbnlichkeit, sie sind fast alle seelenlose Juden. Dies seelenlose Volk konnte allein diese seelenlose Religion hervorbringen, die nur das Diesseits kennt. Und das Diesseits aller Wunder entkleidet ist eben Maschine und damit Teufel. Sollte Jehova vielleicht selbst der Teufel sein? Diese Frage drangt sich immer wieder auf."

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140. J. v. Uexkiill (1926a, 240); for more on the loss of heaven, and the need to reclaim it as a human experienced truth, see also Uexkull (1935). 141. J. v. Uexkull (1926a, 242). 142. G. v. Uexkull (1964, 124). 143. J. v. Uexkull, 1946, Der unsterbliche Geist in der Natur (Gesprache) (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag). 144. "[A]lle Eigenschaften der Lebewesen finden wir zu planmaBigen Einheiten vereinigt, und die Eigenschaften dieser Einheiten sind kontrapunktisch mit den Eigenschaften anderer Einheiten verbunden. Dadurch entsteht der Eindruck eines allumfassenden harmonischen Ganzen, denn auch die Eigenschaften der leblosen Dingen greifen kontrapunktlisch in den Bauplan der Lebenwesen ein" (J. v. Uexkull [1937, 19]). 145. J. v. Uexkull (1923/1924). 146. J. v. Uexkull, Bedeutungslehre (1940 essay originally published in Bios: Abhandlungen zur theoretischen Biologic und ihrer Geschichte, vol. 10), reprinted as a supplemental essay in the 1956 edition of Uexkull and Kriszat (1934). 147. "Wenn jemand mir . . . die Behauptung aufstellt, ein toter Mensch sei auch nichts anders als ein kaputtes Auto, so frage ich ihn, ob er glaube, daB der Erbauer des Auto sich mit jedem verungliickenden Automobil auch die eigenen Knochen brechen musse. Und wenn er das verneint, so weise ich ihn darauf hin, daB das Naturgesetz der menschlichen Personlichkeit, die den Menschen mitsamt seiner Welt erbaute, ebensowenig vom Todes des Menschen betroffen sei, wie der Erbauer des Autos (J. v. Uexkiill [1922a, 183]). 148. Dieser Plan, der unsere gesamte Personlichkeit einschlieBt, i s t . . . eine unvertilgbare Wirklichkeit, iiber deren Fortdauer gar kein Zweifel bestehen kann. (J. v. Uexkull [1923b, 264]). 149. J. v. Uexkull (1922a, 183). 150. J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 20 October 1920, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence. 151. "[D]er Mensch [ist] nicht zwangslaufig einer Naturregel unterworfen, sondern von der Natur selbst zum Herren seiner subjektiven Ausbildungsregel gemacht worden" (J. v. Uexkull [1923b, 262]). 152. "Der Pendel, der nach links gehoben wird, schlagt mit unerbittlicher Notwendigkeit nach rechts aus. Erbarmen und Gnade wird man bei den Naturgesetzen vergeblich suchen (Ibid., 265). 153. "Ist die Welt, die uns umgibt und die ihm das Sichtbare schenkt, nichts anderes als eine Seifenblase, die mit unserem Tode springt; sind wir selbst nichts als ein Teil des Gesetzes, das unseren KOrper und seine Welt formte—was wird dann aus uns nach unserem Tode. Wenn wir dem Gesetze unseres Lebens nicht treu gewesen sind, dann mussen die Folgen katastrophal sein. Das Christentum, das diese Schrecken mildern kann, ist fur unser gebildetes Burgertum ein leerer Wahn geworden. Die Gebildeten aber sind es, die die biologische Lehre von der Seifenblase sehr gut begreifen. Die groBe Masse begreift ja gar nichts. Fiir die Gebildeten wird eine dunkle Zeit kommen und der Damon, der einst hinter der Himmelsdecke korperlich thronte, wird wieder hinter der Seifenblase des einzelnen, der nun furchtbar vereinsamt ist, wieder erstehen—nun nicht mehr als Person, aber als gnadenloses Gesetz" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 27 December 1920, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence). 154. The reviews are preserved in the Hamburg State Archives (HSA); compare also Hunemorder (1979).

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155. Hiinemorder (1979, 114). 156. Memo, 14 April 1944, Akte: Goethe Preis, HSA. 157. See G. v. Uexkiill (1964, 175). 158. [Ernst] L[ehmann], 1934, review of Staatsbiologie (1933) by J. v. Uexkull, Der Biologe 1: 25. The article was signed only with initials, but authorship can be inferred from what is known about Lehmann's own perspective on the holistic elements of the Nazi biological vision. Lehmann was also editor of Der Biologe at this time; I discuss him and his journal at more length in chapter 6. 159. Tirala(1934). 160. "Wir nationalsozialistische Studenten werden den Kampf des Herrn von Uexkull gegen eine alles mechanisierende Biologie nicht vergessen und uns fiir die Erhaltung und Sicherung dieser Arbeit energisch einsetzen" (letter Nord d.NSDStBFiihrer, 24 October 1934, Akte: Hochschulwesen II, HSA). 161. "Esist indiesem Heft der Versuch gemacht worden, der jungen Generation der nationalistischen Studenten eine Reihe groBer deutscher Denker, Naturforscher und Kiinstler vorzustellen, die den jungen Studenten die Moglichkeit geben konnen, die Aufgaben, die der Universitat im Rahmen der Regeneration des deutschen Volkes durch die Bewegung Adolf Hitlers gestellt sind, zu erkennen. Wir haben uns die Freiheit genommen, in diesem Heft auch Ihr Bild und einige Ausschnitte aus Ihren Werken abzudrucken. Wollen Sie diese Tatsache als einen Ausdruck des Dankes der jungen wissenschaftlichen Generation betrachten fiir die Anregungen und Klarheiten, die ihr durch Ihre Lebensarbeit geschenkt wurden" (Drescher, 10 December 1937, duplicated in Hochschulwesen II & Personalakte, HSA). 162. Letter, 21 December 1937, Personalakte, HSA. 163. "Die 'Umweltforschung' steht in gar keiner Weise im Gegensatz zur genetischen Betrachtungsweise, sondem sie fordert sie sinngemass; dagegen stehen ihre philosophise hen und weltanschaulichen Grundlagen in einem strikten Gegenstaz zu denen der Milieutheorie. Herr v. Uexkiill hat ganz recht, wenn er die milieutheoretische Denkweise als zur Weltanschauung des Bolschwismus, die Denkweise der Umweltforschung als zur Weltanschauung des Nationalsozialismus gehorig heraustellt" (Deuchler, "Gutachten iiber das Institut fiir Umweltforschung," 16 March 1936, Akte: Uexkull and Institut fiir Umweltforschung, Bd. II, HSA). 164. "Es besteht die Gefahr, daB wir der neues Rassenforschung zum Opfer fallen" (J. v. Uexkull to H. Driesch, 19 February 1934, Driesch NachlaB (DN), Leipzig). 165. See, for example, J. v. Uexkiill (1937, 200-201). 166. J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 21 Feberuary 1921, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence. 167. J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 21 October 1921, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence. 168. The letter is reproduced in G. v. Uexkull (1964, 171-73), where it was presented as evidence of Uexkull's supposed principled opposition to the Nazi regime. Because of its importance, I attempted to locate the original letter, but the family claimed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts. 169. Ibid., 174. 170. "Die neue Erkenntnis des Nationalsozialismus ist der totale Staat, der eine aus gemeinsam arbeitenden Organen aufgebaute lebendige Einheit darstellt" (J. v. Uexkull (1934b, 195). 171. G. v. Uexkull (1964, 175). 172. Here, as Arnold Davidson points out, Heidegger was deliberately disassociat-

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ing himself from a part of the Kantian tradition to which Uexkull-rr-although he otherwise largely eschewed the "Enlightenment Kant"—remained committed. Following conflicts with the government over censorship of his work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant was moved to argue (in a separate 1798 treatise called Conflict of the Faculties) that, among the faculties of the university, philosophy should be granted absolute immunity against any encroachment of government authority: "It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university also contain a faculty that is independent of the government's command with regard to its teachings.... For withr out a faculty of this kind, the truth would not come to light (and this would be to the government's own detriment)." Quoted in Davidson (1989, 414). My more general comparison of Heidegger and Uexkiill's 1933 public pronouncements on academic freedom was shaped by my reading of this article. 173. For details, see the memos and nominating letters held in the Akte: Goethe Preis, HSA. After 1945, Uexkiill's reputation as a shrewd and inventive observer of animal behavior persisted, but the broader metaphysical aspects of his Umwelt theory began to look rather embarrassing within the self-conscious climate of postwar German scientific culture. A 1950 symposium on the "problem of Umwelt," organized by, the philosopher Helmuth Plessner, revealed remarkably little understanding, and even less sympathy for Uexkiill's principles of research. Although Konrad Lorenz offered a tempered but lively defense of certain key Uexkullian principles, one participant, Erich von Hoist went so far as to ask bluntly whether the audience thought there was really such a difference between observing the movements of an amoeba and observing the movements of a bouncing rubber ball; the objective methods of observation employed, he thought, should differ little in both cases. Others at the symposium picked up on this notion, arguing in various ways that Uexkull had exaggerated the purposefulness of animal behavior to the point of eradicating crucial distinctions between human beings and the rest of the animal world. See Helmuth Plessner, ed., 1952, Symphylosophein. Bericht iiber den dritten deutschen Kongress fur Philosophie, Bremen, 1950. 8. Symposium: Das Umweltproblem (Munich), 323-353. 174. G. v. Uexkull (1964, 264). CHAPTER 3

1. Her works include (1913), Die Geschichte der Anna Waser: ein Roman aus der Wende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt); (1920) Von der Liebe und vom Tod: Novellen aus drei Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt); (1927) Frauenfeld [Vol. 46/47 in series "Die Schweiz im deutschen Geistesleben"] (Leipzig: Huber); (1930) Land unter Sternen: der Roman eines Dorfes (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt); (1936) Sinnbild des Lebens (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt). 2. Waser (1933, 196). 3. Ibid., 14. 4. Ibid., 304. 5. See Head (1926, 1: 84-93); Yakovlev (1970); Katzenstein (1953); Riese (1958; 1959); Minkowski (1931). 6. Indeed, his Russian friend, Pusirewsky, explicitly spoke of two poorly integrated sides to Monakow's character: what she called his "Russian nature," or natural, spontaneous side, and what she called his "German nature," or stiff, systematic side. (Pusirewsky [1953, 12]).

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7. Regarding exceptions and partial exceptions: Monakow's 1916 "Gefuhl, Gesittung und Gehirn" was deemed worthy of translation into English in 1925 for the American neurological community under the title "The Emotions, Morality, and the Brain." In 1950, the successor to Monakow in Zurich, Mieczylslaw Minkowski, arranged for the republication (in German) of four major papers from Monakow's later years; these appeared together in a volume entitled Gehirn und Gewissen (Brain and moral sense). A slim, almost purely descriptive—and hence not very useful—monograph. Das Gewissen, contains a comparison of the concepts of "conscience" in Monakow, Freud, and Jung. See Sindel (1984). Riese's 1938 French monograph remains the only study of Monakow's later thought that truly engages at least aspects of it in a sustained and thoughtful dialogue. 8. Monakow (1970, 24). 9. Pusirewsky (1953, 108). 10. Minkowski (1931, 2); compare Monakow (1970, 34-35). 11. Monakow recalled: "She . . . no longer wanted to go out and spoke only when she was spoken to. Most nights were also spent sleepless. One morning, she tried to poison herself by swallowing watercolor paint, and . . . explained that she no longer wanted to live, that she was a criminal, responsible for all the misery of the world, with a heart of stone, etc. She stood around now motionless the whole day long like a painted column, mostly in front of the window, and remained silent" (See Monakow [1970, 66]). 12. Ibid., 76. 13. Pusirewsky (1953, 11,51). 14. Monakow (1980, 102). 15. Compare ibid., 104-7. 16. Waser (1933, 343). 17. Yakovlev (1970). 18. Waser (1933, 367). 19. Minkowski (1950, 85). 20. Monakow (1970). 21. See Minkowski (1950, 34-35); and Monakow's bitter account of the faculty's shameful behavior (1970, 211-17). 22. The International Brain Commission was founded in 1901 to encourage international and interdisciplinary cooperation and coordination of research in the brain sciences. Monakow was appointed a member of this commission in 1904, the only Swiss representative. Other members of the commission included Flechsig, Edinger, Munk, Nissl, Waldeyer, and Alzheimer (from Germany, which had the largest representation), Sherrington and Horsley (from England), Pierre Marie and Jules Dejerine (from France), Ramon y Cajal (from Spain), and Herrick and Adolf Meyer (from the United States). See Monakow's brief history of this commission and its goals (1970, 254^59). 23. Ibid., 227. 24. Wehr(1987, 11-12). 25. Pusirewsky (1953, 18). 26. Ibid., 21; Waser (1933, 312). 27. Pusirewsky (1953, 21). 28. For an introduction to degeneration ist thinking at the turn of the century, and the role played by research into the hereditary effects of alcohol—including work at Zurich—see Gunter Mann (1985), especially pp. 20-24. 29. Goldstein (1931, 2).

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30. Monakow (1897). 31. Waser (1933, 204). 32. See, for example, Yakovlev (1970). 33. Monakow (1970, 226-27, 244). 34. Jagella, Isler, and Hess (1994, 45). 35. Monakow (1911,250); Riese (1938b, 4; 1958). 36. E. Bleuler, undated letter, cited in Monakow (1970, 184). 37. "Ich muB Ihnen durch einen Satz ad Hirnfunktion und, wenn Sie wollen, auch ad Diaschisis schreiben, den ich eben in Goethes Gesprachen fmde. Ad Gall sagt er; Das den Schadel ein wenig emportreibende kleine Partikelchen Hirn thut's freilich nicht, sondern der gesamte Theil des Nervensystemes, der in jenem Partikelchen endet, unglaublich wie dieser Mann iiberall richtig ahnte" (4 July 1916, cited in Monakow [1970, 179]). 38. Driesch, cited in Freyhofer (1982, 45 n. 15). 39. Monakow (1914). 40. Monakow (1911,241, 248). 41. Masur (1961, 258). 42. The best single introduction to Jackson's thought are the collected articles in Jackson (1932). I also discuss Jackson's thought at length in my book. Medicine, mind and the double brain: A study in nineteenth-century thought (1987). 43. In 1921, Jackson's Croonian Lectures "Evolution and dissolution in the nervous system" were translated by Miss Pariss into French and published, along with a preface by Monakow, in the Neurologische und Psychiatrische Abhandlungen aus dem Schweizer Archiv fur Neurologic und Psychiatric, 8: 283ff; 9: 131 ff. Monakow's final work (Monakow and Mourgue [1928]), Introduction biologique al'elude de la neurologic et de la psychopathologie: integration et disintegration de lafonction cites Jackson in its index just one less time (14 times) than Sigmund Freud. 44. For example, during the time that he was first exhaustively exploring the literature for alternatives to classic approaches to brain damage (preparing for a major set of lectures given in 1910), Monakow very likely looked at Freud's 1891 monograph that had attacked strict localization ism and pronounced Jackson the chief inspiration for an alternative, developmental conception. In that monograph, Freud had written: "in assessing the functions of the speech apparatus under pathological conditions, we are adopting as a guiding principle Hughlings Jackson's doctrine that all these modes of reaction represent instances of functional retrogression (dis-involution) of a highly organized apparatus and therefore correspond to earlier states of its functional development. This means that under all circumstances, an arrangement of associations which, having been acquired later, belongs to a higher level of functioning, will be lost, while an earlier and simpler one will be preserved" (Freud [1891, 87]). More generally, it is clear that Freud's early attempts to find a more dynamic way to conceive the nature of breakdown in the brain importantly shaped essential aspects of his later thinking, some of which in turn influenced Monakow. In this sense, psychoanalysis, broadly understood, owes a significant debt to Jacksonian evolutionary perspectives. For a discussion of the link between Jackson's concept of "functional retrogression" (or "dissolution") and the Freudian later concept of regression, see, for example, W, Riese, 1958, 'Freudian concepts of brain function and brain disease,' Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 127: 287-307; and S. Jackson, "The history of Freud's concepts of regression," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Associa-

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lion 17 (3): 743-84. For a sampling of discussions on Freud's later use of Jackson's ideas on "recurrent utterances" to make sense of the "trapped reminiscences" of the hysteric, see J. Forrester, 1980, Language and the origins of psychoanalysis (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press); E. Stengel, 1963, "Hughlings Jackson's influence on psychiatry," British Journal of Psychiatry 109: 348-55. Some attempts to push the case that Freud's conception of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious also owes a debt to Jackson can be found in S. P. Fullinwider, 1983, "Sigmund Freud, John Hughlings Jackson, and speech," Journal ofthe History of Ideas 44: 51-58; and chapter 8 of Harrington (1987), "Freud and Jackson's double brain: the case for a psychoanalytic debt." 45. "So wird die Localisation . . . in keiner Weise aufgehoben, wie das Monakow vielfach irrtumlich imputiert wird; sie kombiniert sich nur mit zeitlich, genetischen und dynamischen Momenten und wird dadurch vertieft und in gewissen Sinne relativiert. Die raumlichen Faktoren der Funktion verkntipfen sich mit den Zeitlichen in einer auBerordentlichen engen, organischen und zuletzt kaum noch unterscheidbaren Weise, wie das auch in der modernen Physik, in der Relativitatstheorie, geschieht" (Minkowski [1950,58]). 46. Hughes (1958,64-65). 47. Waser (1933). 48. Minkowski (1950, 63). 49. Goldstein (1931a, 5). 50. Pusirewsky (1953, 25). 51. Monakow, "7.9.14, Aphorismen und Gedankensplitter," Monakow NachlaB (MN), Institut fiir die Geschichte derMedizin, University of Zurich, Switzerland. 52. Pusirewsky (1953, 29). 53. Ibid., 39-40, 29. 54. "Viele miihsam im Leben erworbene und sorgfaltig gepflegte und gehiitete, sogenannte moralische Prinzipien haben nur Bestand in ruhigen, unsere Existenz nicht erschiittemden Zeiten. Jeder ernste Konflikt im Leben stellt unseren Charakter, uberhaupt unsere Ethik auf eine harte Probe" (Note, January 1914, cited in Pusirewsky [1953,31-32]). 55. Ibid., 39. 56. Kline, 1967, The encyclopedia ofphilosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing & The Free Press), 262. 57. Cited in Wehr(1981, 167). 58. Hughes (1958, 369). 59. Freud, "Thoughts on War and Death," cited in Hughes (1958, 369). 60. Freud (1930, 56). 61. Cited in Monakow (1970, 262). 62. Minkowski (1950, 64). 63. Monakow, October 1914, "Aphorismen und Gedankensplitter," MN. 64. See Monakow (1924). 65. Monakow, letter of 2 June 1930, cited in Pusirewsky (1953, 86). 66. Monakow, cited in Jagella, Isler, and Hess (1994, 42). 67. "Sein Glaube an die regenerativen Krafte war unerschutterlich, durch der Einblick, den er als Nervenarzt in die Haltlosigkeit der durch iibergroBen Druck und wilden Taumel zerrissenen Menschen der Nachkriegszeit erheben und iiberall die Anzeichen des Abbaus feststellen. (Pusirewsky [1953, 48]).

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68. See Monakow (1925). 69. Monakow (1916; 1919; 1922; 1927; 1930a; 1930b); Monakow and Mourgue (1928). 70. Cited in Pusirewsky (1953, 27). 71. Riese (1938b, 23); for Monakow's own justification of the use of his neologisms, see Monakow & Mourgue (1928, 7-8). 72. Monakow, Untitled notes dated"Baden, 29.3.23," MN. 73. Monakow and Mourgue, 1930, Biologische Einfuhrung in das Stadium der Neurologic und Psychopathologie (Stuttgart: Hippkrates-Verlage), 37. This book was originally published in French, and it is noteworthy that the German edition is consistently more expansive and "Goethean" in its vocabulary choices than the original French edition. 74. Darwin did try to address the issue, with his vague—and never widely embraced—theory of "pangenesis," which proposed that all the cells of the body contain tiny particles of information that travel into the male and female gametes, where they are passed on to produce the cells of the next generation. 75. Bowler (1983). 76. Hering (1870). 77. See Bowler (1983, 68-69). 78. Semon (1904); see also Semon (1909). 79. See Daniel L. Schacter, 1982, Stranger behind the engram: Theories of memory and the psychology of science (Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); Schatzmann (1968). 80. Semon was a fascinating embodiment of many of the contradictions and tragedies of his culture in his own right. He failed to work out the full potential of his Mneme theory because, already despondent after the premature death of his wife, he would react to the news of the last Great War and the end of the German empire by wrapping himself inside a flag and shooting himself (see Goldschmidt [1955, 168]). 81. Monakow, note, "BewuBtsein, Psyche und Horme. Das Leben. Psychisch und physisch," 17 May 1918, Monakow Papers. 82. Riese (1958, 135); compare Riese (1938b, 6). 83. Monakow and Mourgue (1928, 33); Monakow and Mourgue, Biologische Einfuhrung, (1930, 7). Walther Riese elaborated on this piece of Monakow's thinking: "The evolutionary concept of C. v. Monakow simply contains few of the elements from the [Darwinian] doctrine of descendance There is [in his thought instead] . . . an anticipation of the future, the present is not comprised by the past, but by that which is not yet present; tomorrow determines today" (Riese [1938b, 10]). 84. Monakow (1930a, p. 56). 85. Bowler (1983, 56-57). 86. Compare R. Harre, 1967, "Bergson, Henri," The encyclopedia of philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing & The Free Press), 1: 295. 87. Monakow-Mourgue correspondence (uncatalogued) in MN. 88. Monakow to Mourgue, 17 April 1920, MN. 89. Monakow to Mourgue, 30 December 1919, MN. 90. Another of Monakow's neologisms, Eklisis was opposed to Klisis, and referred to a reversal of the natural tendency to move in a creative and finalistic way towards a being or a thing. 91. Monakow to Mourgue, 21 March 1923, MN. 92. Waser (1933, 46).

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93. Ibid., 265. 94. "Im allgemeinen kann man sagen, dass die mit festen ortlichen und zeitlichen Komponenten sowie die mit der subjektiven Kausalitat ausgestattete nervose Tatigkeit zu der Welt der Empfindung (die Welt als Vorstellung), aus denen unsere Erkenntnis fliesst, gehort. Die von Raum und Zeit aber an sich unabhangige, dafiir aber durch subjektive Qualitatswerte und durch blinden Aktionsdrang (Wollen) gekennzeichnete Tatigkeit muss zur Welt der Geftihle (die (Welt als Wille), Innenspiegelung dieses) gerechnet werden." (Monakow, cited in Jagella, Isler, and Hess [1994, 44]). 95. Masur (1961, 47-51). 96. "[D]as spatere logische Denken (formale Denkoperation) . . . eine Fortsetzung jener einfacheren, aber exakt folgerichtigen innervatorischen Prozesse"; "das Gehirn hat sich selbst erzeugt"(cked in Riese, 1930, review of Introduction biologique a I 'etude de la neurologie et de la psychopathologie by C. v. Monakow and R. Mourgue, Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 115: 403^10. 97. Ibid. 98. Monakow (1916). 99. Compare Forman (1973). 100. Compare Riese (1958, 125). 101. Cited in Waser (1933, 309). 102. See Monakow and Mourgue (1928, 309). 103. Waser (1933, 309). 104. Monakow (1930, 371). 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 366-67. This long passage consists almost exclusively of one long sentence which could not be translated into readable English without major grammatical modifications and prepositional bridges. The original passage reads: Der letzte Weltkrieg sollte eigentlich auch von dem soeben angedeuteten biologischen Gesichtspunkte aus betrachtet werden. Die seit vielen Jahrzehnten fast ins Phantastische getriebene Differenzierung und Spezialisierung der naturwissenschaften Forschung, insbesondere zum Zwecke einer Bereicherung um technische Mittel und Werke (Industrial isierung) und einer Forderung resp. Verteidigung wirtschaftlicher, auf das gegenwartigeresp. tagliche Gedeihen des Volkes gerichteter Interessen unter Hintansetzung, ja auf kosten einer wahren, hohere Gesittung und hohere Lebenziele anstrebenden Erziehung der Menschen (Zukunft der Nationen im Sinne gerechter Humanitat, der Nachstenliebe und Barmherzigkeit und der Tugenden uberhaupt), eine solche einseitige, hauptsachlich auf "bkonomische Werte", auf Machtgewinn, persbnliche Uberlegenheit resp. Prestige einer Nation eingestellte "Prosperitat" mufite im weiteren Verlaufe eine tiefe seelische Reaktion im Sinne einer moralischen Minderwertigkeit, einer Kollektiven Gefiihlsode und Armut auch an religiosen Gefiihlen, wie sie zu Beginn des Krieges und spater in Erscheinung trat, herbeifuhren. His former student Minkowski had these tactful words to say about Monakow's style: "He struggled with form and verbal expression, his rich associations tumbled over themselves at times, and could burden a thought to a point where it could no longer be properly received by an insufficiently prepared listener" (Minkowski (1950, 83). 107. Monakow (1927, 242). 108. Katzenstein, 1954, "Garant der Ganzheit in seiner Humanbiologie," cited in Jagella, Isler, and Hess (1994, 49). 109. Monakow (1927, 248). 110. Monakow letter, 6.8.1928, cited in Pusirewsky (1933, 62).

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111. Kant had called this moral sense the "arbitrium librum," which he had distinguished from the "arbitrium brutum," and had described in Critique of Pure Reason as "that capacity to override the press of our [immediate] sensual desires through ideas of usefulness or harm that may be even remote [jenes Vermogen durch Vbrstellungen von dem, was selbst auf entferntere Art ntitzlich oder schadlich ist, die Eindriicke auf unser sinnliches Begehrungsvermbgen zu iiberwinden]". (cited in Riese, review of Introduction biologique, (1930, 409). 112. Compare Monakow (1927, 257). 113. Waser (1933, 276) 114. Monakow (1927) 115. Ibid., 282; on the functioning of the Syneidesis in criminals, see Monakow and Mourgue (1928, 110-13); and Monakow's essay on the "biology" of crime and accountability, (Monakow, 1928, "Recht, Verbrechen und Zurechnungsfahigkeit in biologischer Beleuchtung," Schweizer Archiv fiir Neurologic und Psychiatric 22 (2): 18 Iff). 116. Cited in Waser (1933, 274). 117. Riese (1938, 5). 118. Monakow (1930b, 340). 119. "Da bei der Feststellung einer Tatsache die Uberzeugung ausnahmslos mit verwertet wird (sie fiillt die Liicken aus) so ist jede unsere Wahrheit mit einer wenn auch kleinen subjectiven Componente (Glauben, Wunsch) ausgestattet" (Monakow, note, "Causalitat," 17 August 1917, MN). 120. Monakow (1930b, 296). 121. cited in Fr. Schultz, Bonn, 1925, review of "Fiinfzig Jahre Neurologic Zwei Vortrage" by C. v. Monakow, Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir Nervenheilkunde 85: 108-111. 122. "Avec la notion de horme, d'une part, et celle de valeur, d'autre part, nous avons introduit dans le domaine neurobiologique une notion metaphysique et une notion qui, d'apres Popinion actuelle, n'a pas droit d'entrer dans la science. Double heresie, que nous n'essayerons point de deTendre a 1'aide d'arguments subdls! L'histoire des sciences est la pour nous rassurer, au cas ou nous aurions besoins de l'etre, car tel concept, tel que celui de la nature intime de la matiere, qui 6tait prohibe au nom de la science positive il y a moins d'un demi-siecle, fait aujourd'hui les delices de certains physiciens, et encore choisissons-nous l'exemple le moins audacieux. La biologie ne doit certes pas tomber dans le mysticisme, mais s'il nous etait demontre que celui-ci nous aide a y voir plus clair dans un domaine ou regnent encore tant d'obscurites, nous n'hesiterons pas a l'utiliser!" (Monakow and Mourgue [1928, 394]). 123. Katzenstein (1953, 3^1). 124. Brun (1926b). 125. Compare Kollaritis (1925). 126. Eugen Bleuler, 1923, "Biologische Psychologie," Zeitschrift fiir die gesamte Neurologic und Psychiatric 83. 127. L. L. Bernard, 1926, review of "The Emotions, morality, and the brain," by C. v. Monakow, American Journal of Sociology 31 (6): 828-30. 128. "Man muss schon an einem 'dynamischen Vitalismus' Gefallen finden, wenn das Buch ansprechen soli." M. H. Fischer, 1931, review of Biologische Einfiihrung in das Stadium der Neurologie und Psychopathologie, by C. v. Monakow und R. Mourgue, Journal fiir Psychologie und Neurologie 42: 419-20. 129. G. Th. Ziehen, 1929, review of Introduction biologique a Vetude de la neurologic et de la psychopathologie, by C. v. Monakow and R. Mourgue, Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie 111: 405-6.

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130. Riese, review of Introduction biologique, (1930). 131. "Ce qui etait intuition chez le philosophe est demontre' par le biologiste-neurologiste qui penetre aussi loin que le permettent les moyens d'investigation de la science la plus recente" (Y. Le Lay, 1929, review of "The Emotions, morality, and the brain, by C. v. Monakow, Scientia (Rivista di scienza), 45: 124-26. 132. CPaparede], 1930, review of Introduction biologique a Tetude de la neurologie et de la psychopathologie, by C. v. Monakow and R. Mourgue, Archives de Psychologie 22: 112-14. 133. 1994 also saw the publication of a special historical supplement to the Swiss Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, the journal founded by Monakow, describing him as "brain researcher, neurologist, psychiatrist and thinker." See Jagella, Isler, and Hess (1994). I am grateful to Hansruedi Isler at Zurich for a copy of this journal. 134. Reported in detail by Katzenstein (1953). 135. In his 1918 essay on "The Role of the Unconscious," Jung would stress the way in which the First World War had revealed humanity's barbarous, shadowy side, which had been repressed under the yoke of Christian ethics. Like Monakow, he would argue that only a process of individual renewal through a life lived in closer contact with the irrational and the instinctual could help Europe recover from its crisis. "Our rationalistic attitude leads us to believe that we can work wonders with international organization, legislation and other well-meant devices," he declared. "In reality only a change in the attitude of the individual" could "bring about a renewal in the spirit of nations" (Jung, [1918, 27]). Although the two men knew each other in Zurich before the war, I have found no evidence for mutual influence in the interwar years. 136. Monakow (1930a, 367). 137. Ibid., 367-68. 138. Waser (1933, 358). CHAPTER 4

1. Kohler (1959, 4). 2. Compare the analysis of Joachim Schumacher (1937). See also the contemporary testaments of Hermann Kesser, 1925, Von Chaos zur Gestaltung (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societats Druckerei); and Hermann Hesse, 1921, Blick ins Chaos. Drei Aufscitze (Bern: Verlag Seldwyla). 3. Sternberger, Storz, and Suskind (1967[1968]). 4. Keller (1995). 5. "Wir nennen die Lehre von dem unvermeidlichen Warmetod der Welt eine zeitgemasse und wissenschaftliche, folglich unheldische und untragische Fassung des diisteren Dammerungsgesichtes unserer nordlandischen Voluspa" (cited in Schumacher [1937, 94]). 6. Ibid., 93. 7. Ibid., 43. 8. Ibid., 91. 9. J. v. Uexkull (1928, 9). 10. Spengler (1918). 11. Cited in Stackelberg (1981, 140). 12. Cited in Field (1981, 216). 13. Chamberlain, Grundlagen, cited in Johnston (1972, 330) (italics added). 14. Louis L. Snyder, 1976 (1989), Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York: Paragon House), 50-51.

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15. One of the most vivid literary examples of this motif was put forward in the 1921 "Zeitroman" of Arthur Dinter, Die Sunde wider das Blut, which the author dedicated to Chamberlain (the 15th edition, consulted here, was published in 1929 by Matthes und Thost in Leipzig). The novel described a marriage between a pure, idealistic German young man and a half-Jewish woman whose "bad blood" is initially obscured but reemerges with a vengeance after the marriage. The child she bears her husband (while fortunately dying in childbirth) reverts totally back to Jewish stock, and the contrast between this nasty, conniving little boy and his "pure German" illegitimate brother (being raised in the same household) drives home the centrahty of the blood thesis. At the end of the novel, the boys' father, Hermann, risks all in order to bring the message to the German people of a mass Jewish conspiracy to destroy German values and culture. Extensively "documented" (with, for example, "evidence" that Jews considered Aryan woman mere "cattle" for easy copulation), Dinter's novel is a piece of shocking racist pornography that was one of the bestsellers of the 1920s and, according to Geoffrey Field (1981) was even read aloud in German high schools as a moralizing text. 16. Cited in Stackelberg (1981, 118). 17. Ash (1989, 52). 18. "[E]in Philosoph, der vom Leben her zum Denken kam. Er schuf nicht in Kontakt mit Biichern, sondern in unmittelbarer Anschauung des Weltgeschehens. Er saB nicht am Schreibtisch, er durchwanderte Stadt und Land. Dieser Professor der Philosophie war nicht der Typ eines Professors, uberhaupt nicht der eines Gelehrten. Er war vielmehr ein genialer Einsiedler, ein Mann, den die Musik geweckt hatte und den Eros trieb, der mit aller Kraft darum rang, Leben und Welt ins Bessere zu heben" (cited in Brod [1969, 209-10). 19. Ehrenfels, (1890). 20. Wertheimer, undated, untitled lecture, pp. 3-4. Box 2, Max Wertheimer Papers, New York Public Library (MWP). 21. In the years before the war, he had argued these views, citing the examples of the Moslems and the Mongols, before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. His opinions would attract the cautious interest of his Viennese colleague, Sigmund Freud. The relationship and conceptual links between the two men—including some intriguing parallels between Ehrenfels' concept of "chaos" and Freud's concept of the "death instinct" or Thanatos—are discussed by Rug and Mulligan (1986). Ehrenfels went to great lengths to get his eugenicist message across; his play Die Sternenbraut, which deals with the tragedy that result when eugenicist principles are neglected, played in the German Theatre in Prague, but to only moderate success. The aging philosopher's reputation was not helped by the fact that he became infatuated with one of the young actresses in the play and demonstrated his admiration for her quite publicly. Although he was a eugenicist, Ehrenfels, did eschew the anti-Semitism that was so widespread in Prague in these years, and was even prepared to take a public stand on this issue. At a noisy student gathering about 1910, that had convened to debate (and mostly condemn) his attacks on monogamy, Ehrenfels noted that one of his own ancestors had been Jewish and that he was proud of the fact—upon which, his youthful audience broke out into still more divisive and inflamed shouts and counterarguments (Brod [1969, 214, 211]). 22. Ehrenfels (1916, viii). 23. Ibid., 27.

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24. Ibid., 175. 25. "Marcionism" is a phrase adopted by historian William Johnston to describe the tendency of the beleaguered and anxious German minority in Czech-dominated Prague to think in terms of dualistic struggles, that projected "racial strife onto the cosmos" (1972, 265-70). The Christian heresy of Marcionism had taught that the world had its origins in evil and caprice, having been set into motion by the cruel Creator God of the Jews. The fundamental evil of creation was opposed in this heresy by the spiritual principle of love and salvation embodied in Jesus Christ. 26. Ehrenfels (1916, viii). 27. The original reads: "die deutsche Musik ist mir auch heute noch Religion in dem Sinn, daB ich, wenn mir alle Argumente dieses Werkes auch widerlegt wiirden, doch nicht der Verzweiflung verfiele,—doch iiberzeugt bliebe, mit dem Weltvertrauen, aus dem dieses Werk erwuchs, den wesentlich richtigen Pfad beschritten zu haben,— iiberzeugt, - weil es die deutsche Musik gibt. Denn eine Welt, die Solches bevorgebracht, muB ihrem innersten Wesen nach gut und vertrauenswiirdig sein" (Ibid., viii). 28. Eksteins (1989, 77). 29. "Das Wirken des kosmisches Gestaltungsprinzips gleicht des ktinstlerischen Genies. Zuerst ist das Werk da—'im Anfang war die Tat'—und in zweiter Linie erst, und niemals vollkommen und restlos, stellt sich das Verstandnis ein" (Ehrenfels [1916. 106]). 30. Ibid., 175-76. 31. "Das ZweckbewuBtsein ist also eine junge kosmische Bliite. Es ist gleichwohl heute schon eine gewaltige terrestrische Macht.—Darf nun angenommen werden, daB der Allgestalter dieser durch sein Wirken geschaffenen Bliite fremd, vielleicht gar unwissend gegentiberstehe?—1st es glaubhaft, daB wir Menschen in und mit unserm ZweckbewuBtsein den Allgestalter iiberragen?—Das hiermit aufgeworfene Problem stellt uns vor die—bisher noch kaum gestreifte—Frage nach dem ontologischen Verhaltnisse des Einheitprinzipes zu seinen Geschopfen (Ibid., 85). 32. Ibid., 86. 33. The original text reads: "in und mit dem Menschen sucht Gott nach einer fiihrenden Idee, welche fahig ware, sein bisher triebhaftes Gestalten in Bahnen des ZweckbewuBtseines zu leiten. Diese Idee ist noch nich gefunden" (Ibid., 207). 34. Compare Johnston (1972, 305). 35. Other important representatives of this tradition who would develop narratives along somewhat different lines include Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jiinger. For a discussion see Herf (1984). 36. Luchins and Luchins (1982). 37. AlasdairMacIntyre, 1967, "Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch), in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan & the Free Press), 7: 533. 38. On June 15, 1895, Max Wertheimer's older brother, Walter, recorded the following confrontation between an increasingly rebellious Max and his orthodox Jewish parents: Today at dinner—as usual—there was again a terrible row, which was so drastic that I am writing it down immediately after it happened, reconstructing it from stenographic notes I took during it. Papa, Mama, Max, Walter, and Uncle are conversing. Papa: "Children, what's the Sidra [prescribed Torah reading] this week?" Walter says nothing. Max: "I don't know." Mama: "But you learn these things from Hernn Wiesner." Max: "Well, uh . .." Mama: "Uh! You really should know that. You'll learn it again tomorrow." Max: We al-

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ready learned it last Sunday. But why should 1 memorize what the Sidra happens to be? Mama: "Do you know its meaning?" Max: "No, what for? To be religious you sure don't have to know what the Sidra is. ... It's completely unnecessary for religion, or for knowledge of the Bible, to know what the Sidra happens to be this week. Demanding that would be nonsense." Mama is excited; wants to rebut. Uncle shouts louder than she: "And what .. .?" Papa starts screaming, drowning him out: "Don't argue about it. Someone who firmly holds his position, who doesn't want to let himself be convinced, can't be convinced." Mama wants to scream. Papa gets up and goes to his room. Mama: "Now that's the limit, talking like that. How dare you attack what's said by someone older than you! Knowledge of the Torah is nonsense, what, that's what you're saying? ... You?!" Max: "Mama, you're lying; pardon me if I accuse you of lying, but lying won't convince me. I didn't say that knowledge of the Torah is nonsense, only such an application of it—this business of having to know just what particular Sidra it is" (cited in Michael Wertheimer [1980, 8]). 39. Luchins and Luchins (1982, 151). 40. Cited in Michael Wertheimer (1980, 8). 41. The original text reads: "Erverwarf unsere spekulativen Methoden, steckte voll von Handwerkertricks, von praktischen, manchmal humoristischen Ideen, die den Menschen, das Versuchsobjekt, zu foppen bestimmt waren, murkste mit derber Lustigkeit an seiner Arbeit herum. Ein weiser temperamentvoller fazinierender Mensch, klein, energisch, eigenwillig, schonaugig, mit mir auch durch Liebe zur Musik, zuim Klavierspiel verbunden" (Brod [1969, 95-96]). 42. Compare Luchins (1975, 21-44). 43. Mandler and Mandler (1969, 390). 44. See Max Wertheimer, (1959). 45. Born (1978, 174). 46. Von Horbostel, 1963, oral communication; in Luchins and Luchins (1985). 47. Born (1978, 173). 48. Ibid., 184-86. 49. Erika Oppenheimer, cited in Luchins and Luchins (1986, 215). 50. Erwin Levy, cited in Luchins and Luchins (1987, 78). 51. Abraham Aaron Roback, 1952. History of American psychology (New York, Library Publishers), 318. 52. Rudolf Arnheim, 1989, "Max Wertheimer," a talk originally held at the Memorial Meeting for Max Wertheimer at the New School for Social Research, New York City, 10 September 1943, Psychological Research 51: 46. 53. Michael Wertheimer (1980, 9). 54. Ash (1989, 52). 55. Ibid., 52-53. Ash also stresses in this article that German psychology's institutional and conceptual links to philosophy in thefirstdecades of this century are critical to understanding features of Max Wertheimer's career. 56. Max Wertheimer(1910). 57. Max Wertheimer (1912a, 2). 58. Ash, (1985a, 309). 59. Much of this paragraph benefited from the succinct summary of "Gestalt theory" in Richard L. Gregory, ed., 1987, The Oxford Companion to the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press), 288-89. 60. Koffka (1924).

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61. Kohler (1925). 62. Wertheimer was forced to content himself with an appointment as Aufierordentlicher Professor at the Berlin Institute. His failure to secure himself a full professorship before 1929 (at the age of 49) had partly to do with a modest publishing record, but probably somewhat more to do with his Jewish origins and political associations. 63. O. L. Zangwill, 1963, "The completion effect in hemianopia and its relation to anosognosia," in Problems of dynamic neurology, ed. by L. Halpern (Jerusalem, Israel: Dept. of Nervous Diseases of the Rothschild Hadassah University Hospital and the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School), 274. 64. Kohler (1920, 1922). 65. Philip W. Cummings, 1967, "Kohler, Wolfgang," in The encyclopedia of philosophy (New York: MacMillan & the Free Press), 4: 355. 66. Cited in Driesch (1925, 10). 67. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the modern world (1925, 55). 68. Compare Ash (1985a, 308). 69. Weber(1919, 142, 143). 70. Ibid., 140. 71. Max Wertheimer (1924, 81-82). 72. Ibid., 91. 73. Ibid., 96. 74. See Ash (1985); "Gestalt psychology under National Socialism: Institutions and ideas," unpublished talk presented at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, 16 February 1989; revised version presented to the German Studies Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 7 October 1989. 75. Ash, 'Gestalt psychology under National Socialism,' 1989. 76. Arnheim, Max Wertheimer, 45. 77. Wolfgang Kohler, untitled manuscript, p. 8, from the Michael Wertheimer private archive (Boulder, Colorado). I am indebted to Richard Held from MIT for access to this manuscript. 78. H. Kleint, 1926, review of Ueber Gestalttheorie, by Max Wertheimer, Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 99: 112-13. 79. Marcuse wrote: "Ich komme von der Phaenomenologie her, aber es waren starke Zweifel, die mir eine Weiterarbeit auf diesem Gebiet nicht erlaubten. Ich begriisste den endlichen Hinweis auf die Tatsache der Gegebenheiten als solche anstelle des ewigen Blickes auf das masslos verabsolutierte. . . . aber es war mir nicht moglich, auf ein wissenschaftliches Kriterium fiir die Richtigkeit der gesehenen Gegenstande zu verzichten.—Ich glaube, es sind ahnliche Zweifel, die mich schon an der Schwelle der Gestalttheorie hindern. ".. .Ich glaube, dass hier ein Problem steckt, das uns Jiingere alle stark bedrangt. Wir haben die Wendung mitgemacht, wir sehen deutlich den neuen Gegenstandsbereich— aber wir zogern ihn zu erarbeiten, weil uns das Werkzeug aus den Handen fallt. Wir sehen keine Moglichkeit, die Gestalt wissenschaftlich zu umzirkeln und zu erforschen, sobald es sich um andere als physikalische, psychologische, mathematische Gegebenheiten handelt, sobald also Experiment und Beweis versagen. Wollen Sie die Gestalttheorie einseitig auf diese Falle einschranken, oder gibt es ein Mittel, auch fur die anderen Gegenstandsgebiete die wissenschaftliche Arbeit zu ermoglichen?" (Letters "M," Wertheimer Archives).

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80. Compare John Marshall, 1985, review of A man with qualities: Robert Musil and the culture of Vienna, by Hannah Hickman, Nature 313 (31 January): 412. 81. Cited in Hannah Hickman, 1984, A man with qualities: Robert Musil and the Culture of Vienna:'(London: Croorn Helm; La Salle, 111.: Open Court,), 121. 82. Cited in Ash (1991a, 409). 83. Ibid., 403. 84. Gumnior and Ringguth (1973, 27 125-26); Jay (1974, 6). 85. Gumnior and Ringguth (1973, 25). They fail to provide details of the nature of this continuing influence. 86. See David D. Lindenfeld, 1980, The Transformation of positivism: Alexius Meinong and European thought, 1880-1920 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press), 118-19. 87. Jay (1974, 23-24). 88. Horkheimer (1933, 40). 89. Ibid., 42-43. 90. Ibid., 43. 91. Stanley Aronowitz, 1982, Introduction to Critical theory: selected essays, by Max Horkheimer, trans, by Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York: Continuum Pub.), xiv. 92. Horkheimer (1932). 93. Jay (1974, 100). 94. Cited in Ash (1991a, 409). 95. Riese to Kurt Goldstein, 4 November 1958, Folder R, Box 1, Goldstein Papers. 96. Max Wertheimer, Box 2, undated lecture, Wertheimer Papers, p. 2. 97. Driesch (1925, 5-6). 98. Ibid., 7. The Gestalt school's critique of Driesch's vitalism as a "Machine" theory with a "ghost" inside was expressed by Wertheimer in his 1924 lecture in the following way: Driesch . .. tries to master our basic problem [of whole systems working on parts] in a different way. Fundamentally the thesis of vitalism springs from the same problems, but from the point of view of gestalt psychology, it commits the error of trying to solve the problem by adding to what it considers to be blindly-functioning natural processes, something which in itself allows of no scientific treatments. It does so without questioning whether the physical inorganic processes can be generally characterized as piecemeal, blind, mechanical combinations of elements, which are considered by many episternologists as the only given data in physics. Koehler made a decisive contribution by demonstrating that there are processes even in organic physics which are genuine whole processes where what happens to one part is determined by the intrinsic structure and tendencies of the whole, not the other way around." (Wertheimer [1924, 92-93]) 99. Driesch (1926, 288, 291). Jakob von Uexkull, commenting on these exchanges from the perspective of his field, wrote to Chamberlain: "[A]nimal psychology again travels along its favorite dead end [die Tierpsychologie wieder einen ihrer beliebten Holzwege befahrt]. The holistic theory of Wertheimer, to which the excellent ape research Kohler has fallen victim, seems to be to be in a position to create confusion. Driesch has already opposed himself to it in his excellent dialectic and has shown that the psychologists always mix up "sums" and "wholes" (J. v. Uexkull to Chamberlain, 3 August 1926, Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence).

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100. In the secondary literature, the volume edited by Carl Graumann (1985) provides some excellent reviews and analyses both of these critiques and of the broader nature of these other schools of psychology in Germany on the eve of National Socialism. Particularly valuable are the articles by Ash, Geuter, Mattes, Prinz, and Scheerer. 101. Wellek (1954). 102. Krueger (1924, 27); compare Adrian Brock from the Dept. of Psychology, York University, 1990, "Wundt's rejection of methodological individualism," unpublished lecture for Cheiron-Europe, 3. I am indebted to Adrian Brock for the primary reference. 103. Wellek (1950, 297). The original German, reads as follows: Demgegeniiber [i.e. in contrast to Krueger and his school] hat die (vormals) Berliner Schule der sogenannten Gestalttheorie wohl hervorragenden Anteil an der Erforschung und Propagierung der Gestalttatsachen im engeren Sinne, wie sie sich vor allem an den Geschehnissen und Gebilden des Wahrnehmens und Denkens, also in den intellektuellen Bereichen des BewuBtseins aufweisen lieJJen; aber der Ganzheitscharakter des friihen, vorgestaltlichen Erlebens in den 'pralogischen,' irrationalien Phasen und Bereichen des seelischen Lebens ist dort, wie schon betont, verkannt. Vor allem aber sind die 'Berliner' insgesamt entschlossene Epiphanomenalisten, um nicht zu sagen: Materialisten. Sie bezeichnen selbst ihre Lehre als Gestalltheorie, nicht eigentliche Gestaltpsychologie weil ihr Begriff von Gestalt keineswegs auf den Bereich des Psychischen beschrankt, sondern auf 'physische Gestalten' (Kohler) ausgedehnt und hier schon an Gebilden bestatigt gefunden wird, die einer strengen Definition von Ganzheit keineswegs genugen. Dementsprechend aber wird als letzte konsequenz eine Gleichung von Psychologie und Physiologie und— was den Ausschlag gibt—von Physiologie und Physik proklamiert, indem 'unitarisch,' um nicht zu sagen: 'monistisch'—der gesamte Bereich der Natur einschlieRlich des Geistes dem einen nicht organischen, weil zugleich a/iorganischen Prinzip der 'Gestalt' unterstellt wird. 104. Ash (1990, 294). 105. Wellek (1954, 20). 106. "No Gestalt without a Gestalter!" was the slogan of this critique. See the report Das Psychologische Institut der Hamburgerischen Universitat in seiner gegenwartigen Gestalt. Dargestellt aus Anlafi des XII. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft fiir Psychologie in Hamburg 12. bis 16. April 1931 von dem Direktor und den Mitarbeitern (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1931). 107. Scheerer (1985). 108. Weinhandl (1940, 5). 109. Krueger, 1903 "Differenztbne und Konsonanz," Archiv fiir die gesamte Psychologie 2: 80. 110. Hermann (1976, 600); Wellek (1950, 599). 111. Geuter (1985, 59). 112. Wellek (1954, 35). 113. Cited in Prinz (1985a, 58). 114. "Das Leben selber in dieser Zeit, sonderlich auf deutschem Boden, treibt unsere Fragestellungen mit einer mehr als theoretischen Notwendigkeit aus sich heraus" (Krueger [1932]). 115. "Das Abendland wird dem Chaos anheimfallen und die minder edlen Rassen werden die Oberhand gewinnen, oder man gibt einer Reformation die Bahn frei, an

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Haupt und Gliedern, wie deren das Menschendasein jetzt bedarf. Es muB von neuem durchgestaltet werden, so aus dem Grunde, daB endlich das Politische und die Wiftschaft davon umgriffen werden . . . "Was jetzt nottut, das konnen Wissenschaften und Philosophie allein nicht schqffen. Auch die Kiinste vermSgen, fiir sich gelassen, wenig gegen die Not einer solchen Zeitwende. Aber je groBer die Gefahr, um so notwendiger sind diese Machte der Ordnung, der Symbolbildung, der geistigen Ftihrung. Und um so entschiedener mussen sie, in Wirkungseinheit mit dem iibrigen Tatgeschehen, sich dahin ausrichten, wo alles Lebendigen Eigentumlichkeit und zugleich alle Wesensgemeinschaft wurzelt, das ist das Ganzheitliche, welches innere Form fordert" (Krueger [1932, 138-39]. Italics added). 116. Adhemar Gelb to Wertheimer, 30 December 28, MW Papers, New York Public Library. 117. The intellectual relationship between Tillich and the Gestalt psychologists (especially Wertheimer) remains to be clarified but would reward probing. An intriguing complication here can be found in the fact that Tillich himself was committed early on to a Gestalt concept that, as I read it, derived not from the progressive traditions of Berlin and Frankfurt, but from the older Goethean-morphological tradition of Gestalt carried forward by men like Chamberlain and Spengler. In System of the sciences, written in 1923, Tillich identifies Gestalt as the defining principle that distinguishes the life and mind sciences from both the physical sciences (governed by "law") and the historical sciences (governed by "sequence"). While the language and thrust of the argument makes me doubtful of Meyer's suggestion that these ideas were indebted to some way to Gestalt psychology, I do wonder how far Tillich's later retreat from such an idealist Gestalt concept might owe something to his later extensive contacts with Wertheimer and Gelb at Frankfurt. See Tillich (1981), especially pp. 99-101; and Meyer (1989) especially pp. 283-287, 99-101. 118. Cited in Ash (1989, 57). 119. Luchins and Luchins (1986b, 217-19). 120. Rutkoff and Scott (1988, 107). 121. Wertheimer, undated, untitled lecture, p. 1, Box 5 (misc.), MW Papers, New York Public Library. 122. Newman (1989). 123. Luchins and Luchins (1987, 73). 124. See, for example, Mandler and Mandler (1969); Luchins (1975); Henle (1980); Ash (1985b). 125. Anonymous, 1931, review of Gestalt psychology, by Wolfgang Kohler, Nature 127: 160. 126. Hughes (1983, 112). 127. K. M. Dallenbach, 1953, 'The place of theory in science," Psychological Review 60: 33-39. 128. Koffka (1935, 18). 129. Compare, for example, Ash (1985b, 327-28). 130. Leichtman (1979, 53). When Wertheimer first arrived at the New School, he let himself be talked into offering a seminar on the relationship between Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis, which he taught in collaboration with fellow immigrant Karen Horney and psychiatrist Bernard Glueck, Sr. This seminar was never repeated because Wertheimer's unremitting hostility towards the theory of psychoanalysis made all dialogue essentially fruitless. The fact that the clinical method of psychoanalysis was based on free association was most irritating. As his friend Erika Oppenheim recalled:

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"Association theory was for him what the red cape is for the bull. . . . He charged at it. . . . This is the more amazing as Wertheimer himself originally invented an association test, the same kind of association test that . . . Jung invented, and in the same year.... Even when I tried to point out to him that there were really great parallels between Gestalt theory and psychoanalysis, he just would not hear of it " (cited in Luchins and Luchins [1986b, 215; 1987, 76]). 131. For reprints of relevant primary documents, including Kohler's famous 1933 "Gesprache in Deutschland" and the written accusations against the institute, see Graumann (1985, 305-9). 132. Mandler and Mandler (1968, 398-99). 133. Frederick Wyatt, interview with author, 19 February 1988. 134. Kohler, (1938, 32-33, 28). 135. Ibid., 7. 136. Compare Kohler, 1971, 'The naturalistic interpretation of man," The selected papers of Wolfgang Kohler, ed. by M. Henle. New York: Liveright), 337-55. 137. Kohler (1938, 210). 138. Hans-Jurgen Walter has recently translated these essays (written in English) into German and gathered them together (along with a foreword by Albert Einstein and some analyses of Wertheimer) in a volume entitled Zur Gestaltpsychologie Menschlicher Werte (Opladen: Westdeutsche Verlag., 1991). 139. Luchins and Luchins (1986b, 221). 140. Max Wertheimer (1912b). 141. Max Wertheimer (1934, 21). 142. Ibid., 22. 143. Max Wertheimer (1935, 30). 144. Ibid., 40. 145. Ibid., 40. 146. Ibid., 38, Italics added. 147. Max Wertheimer (1937, 45). 148. Max Wertheimer, undated, untitled lecture,p. 4, Box 5 (misc.) Wertheimer Papers, New York Public Library. 149. Max Wertheimer (1940, 52). 150. Ibid., 54. 151. Ibid., 59. 152. Ibid., 60-61. 153. Ibid., 62. 154. Ibid., 64, Italics added. 155. The extent to which, for Wertheimer, these issues came together at the most practical level is nicely illustrated in an anecdote, recounted by the Luchins. On a visit to the psychology laboratories at Yale University, Wertheimer was shown some of the animal experimentation work that two of the psychologists there were doing on social learning, Wertheimer's response was to demand to know why the rats were kept in isolation, like "prisoners," during the times between the learning trials. This kind of work, he declared—carried out in such a "prison" setting—was the "learning of prisoners" and would have little, if nothing, to teach psychology about the learning that was possible under "natural" free conditions" (Luchins and Luchins [1987, 91]). 156. Max Wertheimer, Max (1959, 245). 157. Ibid. 158. In the sense used by Gay (1968).

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CHAPTER 5

1. Simmel (1968). 2. Murphy (1968, 31). 3. Simmel (1968, 3). 4. Smith to the author, 21 February 1988. 5. Goldstein File [undated] entitled: Husserl, Edmund; Goldstein Papers, Columbia University. 6. See, for example, Goldstein (1967, 147-60). 7. In contrast, in the 1960s, neurologist Norman Geschwind would point to Wernicke's influence on Goldstein to make another kind of argument: namely, that holistic neurology was a lot of bombastic rhetoric that sounded radical but that remained, in practice, rooted in the localizationist principles of the nineteenth century (Geschwind [1964]; Teuber [1966, 300]). On the other hand, men like holistic neurologist Walther Riese would deny that the influence of Wernicke on Goldstein could have been substantive: "It may have been Goldstein's devotion to his teacher which induced him, generous as he was, to claim Wernicke as his forerunner. But it makes all the difference whether one merely combines anatomy with symptomatology, as did Wernicke, or whether one studies and interprets the nature and genesis of aphasia on its own grounds and in its own terms" (Riese [1968, 24]). 8. Teuber (1966, 300). 9. From exile in Holland in 1934, Goldstein wrote: "AH theorems hitherto advanced to suggest inferiority or superiority, as peculiar to a particular group or entity, are based upon a misconception and abuse of what is factually holistic. Instead of carefully investigating what really belongs to the essential nature of the group—apart from historic-economic patterns—they introduce unscientific axioms, as for instance the myth of blood, and others." And further, "The reality of intellect, of self-determination, which even in its most primitive form represents essential characteristics of man, dooms to failure any breeding experiment of the usual type. "However, if the regulation of hereditary conditions aims not at specific characteristics, but aspires to meliorate the human race by eliminating the unfit individuals, such endeavor presupposes a thorough knowledge of the significance of individual peculiarities for human natures. And who would venture any decision in this respect at the present state of research!" (Goldstein [1939, 455, 461]). 10. See Proctor (1988, 142); Weindling (1989). 11. Goldstein (1913, 52). 12. Ibid., 53. 13. Ibid., 54. 14. Ibid., 66. 15. Ibid., 68. 16. Ibid. 17. Goldstein (1959b, 1967). 18. Decker (1977, 53). 19. Compare Johnston (1972, 223-29). 20. Ibid., 228. 21. Goldstein (1933, 143). 22. Lotmar, 1920, review of Die Behandlung, Fursorge und Begutachtung der I

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Hirnverletzten, by Kurt Goldstein, Schweizerische Medizinische Wochenschrift Korrespondenzblattes fiir Schweizer Arzte 50: 59-60. 23. Goldstein (1967, 148). 24. Goldstein (1959b, 3). 25. Goldstein (1919). 26. Teuber (1966, 302). The exact time and circumstances of Gelb's death are somewhat unclear. Hans-Lukas Teuber, who had known both Gelb and Goldstein, gives 1935 as the year of his final physical breakdown, and seems to indicate that Gelb and Goldstein had planned to emigrate to the United States together. However, a 1936 letter from Heidelberg holistic physician Victor von Weizsacker to Goldstein (who was already in exile in New York) suggests a more lingering end. He wrote: "I recently saw Gelb; intellectually outstanding, physically [gesundheitlich] I'm not so sure. Naturally, it should not become general knowledge that he has not yet recovered his health" (24 July 1936, File W, Box 1, Goldstein Papers). 27. Goldstein (1959b, 2). 28. More specifically, the term phenomenology was a term that had become associated in Goldstein's day with a movement in European philosophy loosely grouped around the leadership of Edmund Husserl. The aim of this philosophical tradition was to bracket all metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions and to focus on experience in its essence, a term also used by Goldstein. (For details, see Spiegelberg [1972, 301-18]). 29. Gelb and Goldstein (1918 [1938]). 30. In everyday life, the patient used other sorts of isolated visual cues to orient himself in his environment and found nothing extraordinary about his activities. Gelb and Goldstein, for example, recorded the following conversation with him: "'How do you distinguish men and vehicles?' 'Men are all alike—narrow and long, vehicles are wide; one notices that at once. Much wider [spreads out his arms].' 'The shadow of a large tree: 'What is that?' 'The patient looked up at the tree then down at the shadow. 'That is a shadow.' ('How do you know?') 'Well, there is a tree and there it is dark'" (Gelb and Goldstein [1918(1938), 324]). 31. Ibid., 323. 32. Goldstein (1967, 156); compare Goldstein (1927c, 37). 33. See Goldstein and Gelb (1925). 34. Goldstein (1936b). 35. Ibid., 362. 36. Yet the influence does not appear to be widely recognized. David Lipton's study (1978) of Cassirer's life and thought, for example, makes no reference to Goldstein at any point. 37. The following reproduces in German the entire excerpt from Cassirer's letter to which I am referring, reinserting the elisions in the text made in the English translation to keep the quote to a manageable size: "Der Normale verhalt sich—was meiner Ansicht nach viel zu wenig beachtet zu werden pflegt—nicht. nur in seinem Denken, sondern in seinem Verhalten und Wahmehmen, ja auch in seinem Handeln, in hohem Grade 'symbolisch*. Fiir ihn tritt das 'Dasein' der einzelnen sinnlichen Gegebenheiten ganz hinter dem, was sie ihm 'bedeuten' zurtick. Daher vollzieht er auch fort und fort den Schritt ins Tdeelle'—er formt die gegebene 'Wirklichkeit' der Sinnesreize ins bloss 'Mogliche' um. Auf dieser Umsetzung ins Mogliche beruht nicht nur der grosste

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Teil seines Denkens (—die 'Idee' ist eben, wie Cohen immer wieder betont hat, 'Hypothesis'!), sondern auch—und das zeigen Eure Falle so ganz besonders schon—auch der grosste Teil seines Wahrnehmens. Insbesondere unset" raumliches 'Sehen' beruht geradezu darauf, da unser Gesichtsraum ein Schema moglicher Beziehungen—Leibniz sagt, un ordre des coexistances possibles—ist. Kein Inhalt ist als solcher mit seiner Stelle 'verwachsen,' mit ihr unloslich konkret—verkniipft, sondern wir konnen beide unabhiingig voneinander variieren lassen—wir konnen Inhalte ihre Stellen vertauschen, den einen in die Stelle des anderen eingehen lassen. Das geschieht bei jeder wirklichen Bewegung, die wir anschaulich erfassen, —aber es ist die Bedingung auch jeder ideellen Bewegung, jedes 'Bewegungsentwurfes.' Der 'Entwurf besteht eben darin, da eine solche Vertauschung in der Vorstellung mbglich ist. Der Normale kann demgemass ohne Muhe irgendein Objekt in einen bestimmten 'Raumpunkt hineinsehen,' in welchem dieses Objekt nicht 'wirklich,' das heisst nicht als sinnlich erfahrener Reiz vorhanden ist. Und so sieht er seine Aktionen ebenso gut, wie gegeniiber einem 'wirklichen' Ding, etwa einem wirklichen Nagel, auch gegeniiber einem 'moglichen' (bloss 'vorgestellten') Nagel aus. Er behandelt das Prasente reprasentativ, das Representative als prasent. Beim 'Seelenblinden' aber ist, wenn ich recht sehe, eben diese Umsetzung gestort. Er hat noch—besonders bei der 'assoziativen Seelenblindheit'—irgendwelche optisch-gegenwiirtigen Eindrucke—aber was aufgehoben oder stark behindert ist, ist die Funktion der mittelbaren 'Vergegenwartigung.' So kann er nur auf die prasenten Reize hin handeln—aber eben Bewegungen, die ihm vorgemacht werden, stiickweise nachmachen, ein Glied bewegen, wenn er dauerrid darauf hinsieht usf. Auch Schneider kann sich ja mit Hilfe seiner kinaesthetischen Empfindungen einen bestimmten 'Hintergrund' fur seine Bewegungen schaffen—aber er vermag diesen Hintergrund nicht wie wir zu transformieren und zu transponieren. Denn in dieser Transposition handelt es sich, wie ich dies zu nennen pfiege, um einen Akt 'symbolischer Ideation.'" (Cassirer, 24 March 1925, Folder "Cassirer," Box 1, Goldstein Papers). 38. Jackson had argued that the difference between what he called a "voluntary" and an "involuntary" act was that the former was always initially "preconceived" or "represented in consciousness" (Jackson, quoting Spencer, in "Hemispheral coordination," The Medical Times and Gazette (1868a) 2: 3591). By definition, in other words, actions could be deemed voluntary if they were accompanied by consciousness. Conversely, "the more operations are automatic, the less we are conscious of them." This explains why Jackson could argue that the speechless man who could still automatically respond to verbal commands—and who could therefore instantly hand him a brick on command—nevertheless had no "memory" of the word "brick," was not "conscious of the word itself. He has no consciousness of it [as a symbol], but [only] of the [concrete] thing it is a symbol of—a very different thing" (Jackson [1932,2: 140, 141]). Similarly, Jackson had rejected an atomistic model of language that found the meaning of an utterance in the summation of the individual words. He drew a strict distinction between language proper and the automatic, inferior functions "in which words serve." The essential character of speaking was not the capacity to utter words, but the capacity to refer words to one another in a particular manner. By themselves, the components of speech were insignificant; they took on meaning only by being organized into logical (in some sense, gestaltet) relationships (Jackson, "Notes on the physiology and pathology of the nervous system—Remarks on Broadbent's hypothesis" [1868] in Jackson [1932,2: 527]). I

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39. Goldstein's distinction between the object-oriented, defensive sense of "fear" {Furcht) and the objectless, self-arising sense of "anxiety" {Angst) was not original with him (as he himself acknowledged), but had been discussed at length by such existentialist philosophers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers. His own understanding of the distinction was developed in the course of conversations with the theologian Paul Tillich. He summarized it as follows: "The basis of fear is threat of the onset of anxiety. As manifold as states of anxiety may be . . . they all have one common denominator: The experience of danger, of peril for one's self.... In the state of fear, we have an object in front of us which we can "meet," which we can attempt to remove, or from which we canflee.We are conscious of ourselves, as the object, we can deliberate how we shall behave toward it, and we can look at the cause of the fear which actually lies spatially before us. On the other hand, anxiety attacks us from the rear, so to speak. The only thing we can do is to attempt to flee from it without knowing where to go, because we experience it as coming from no particular place. This flight is sometimes successful, though merely by chance, and usually fails: anxiety remains with us" (Goldstein [1939, 291, 293]). 40. Goldstein (1940, 91-92). 41. Goldstein (1967, 156). 42. Goldstein, Individuality lecture, Box 1, Goldstein Papers. 43. Goldstein (1939, 86). 44. Goldstein (1933, 155-56). 45. Goldstein (1959a, 183). 46. Goldstein (1959b, 9). 47. Goldstein (1933, 143). 48. Goldstein (1967, 157). 49. In criticizing the "reflex scheme" of his predecessors, Goldstein did not hesitate to take on even the more flexible model of "reflex integration" developed by Sir Charles Sherrington. For many in the early twentieth century, Sherrington's views had presented themselves as a more holistic alternative to the nineteenth-century view of the organism as a bundle of sensory-motor reflex arcs. In contrast to, say, Pavlov and the behaviorists in the United States, Sherrington stressed the extent to which sensory input at one level of the system modifies input at another, leading to a unified, hierarchical pattern of biologically purposive behavior. For Goldstein, however, the work of Sherrington (which he originally admired) was in the end like late Ptolemaic cosmology: a brave, but ultimately doomed attempt to stretch and modify a fundamentally flawed theory in the face of stubborn new facts. Sherrington's introduction of vaguely defined terms like "inhibition," "regulation," and "switching" begged more questions than it answered. 'The decision about questions as to where this inhibition and shifting [Schaltung] comes from leads repeatedly to the supposition of further apparatuses that are inhibitory in nature, cause shifts, [and] are regulatory; and so the whole process of questioning proceeds in an endless regression" (Goldstein [1933, 145-46; compare Goldstein [1927c, 25, 145-46]). 50. Goldstein to Monakow, 27 April 1926, Monakow Papers, Zurich. 51. Goldstein (1927c, 18). 52. Goldstein (1939, 256); italics original. 53. Ibid., 259. 54. Goldstein's relationship with Wertheimer specifically would later become somewhat strained as a result of a dispute over priority. Early in his career, Wertheimer had done some work in Vienna with the neurologist O. Potzl and had concluded that the

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presenting symptoms of aphasia, alexia, and cortical blindness all suggested a "need for radically new concepts of neurophysiology." Although Wertheimer never published his work on these matters, colleagues knew of it and referred to it. Later, Wertheimer would feel that Goldstein had failed to give him sufficient credit for having worked out many of the ideas about defects in "Gestalt perception" that would laterfigureso prominently in Goldstein's work. See Luchins and Luchins (1982, 161). 55. Goldstein's name was struck from the editorial board of thejournal immediately following his forced emigration from Germany in 1933. In the Goldstein archives, there is a half-apologetic, half-defensive letter from Wolfgang Kohler to Goldstein about this matter, that reads, in part, as follows: Dear Herr Goldstein, For a long time, you have heard nothing from me in regard to your letter. The latter put me in a bad spot. I could halfway respect your arguments, but halfway found your position difficult to understand. Probably a person would have to be in your situation in order fully and truly to understand. In the meantime, I could do nothing, because the publisher, with whom the matter was to be discussed, was continually away. For the current volume, I had given the order that everything should stay as it was. I was not a little surprised when it came out and your name was not listed under the editors. The behavior of those involved, including the publisher, made it highly probable in my eyes that this was not a court-ordered act, but rather an attempt to spare me a decision that truly would not have been easy. I could naturally now refuse [to engage in] any further editorial activity. That would be the end then of the journal. I will not do this. It is possible that I will in any case not stay here long—then the fate of the journal will decide itself. As long as I am here, I will try to keep it running. How I will be able to stand this work over any length of time, though, I don't know. (Kohler to Goldstein, 21 November 1933, Folder K, Box 1, Goldstein Papers). 56. Wilder (1959, 690-91). 57. Goldstein pointed out that patients whose capabilities had broken down in this way, actually behaved in a fashion consistent with what the reflex psychologists and associationists had proposed to be normal behavior. Schneider for example, was unable to "recognize" pictures of objects but could often figure out what something was by ponderously adding up the sum of carefully analyzed parts (lines, shadows, and other cues). In short, the mechanistic psychology and neurophysiology of the nineteenth century was poor normative biology but did turn out to be a reasonably appropriate approach to pathological organismic functioning. 58. Goldstein (1939, 370, 372). 59. Ibid., 372. 60. Ibid., 30. 61. Goldstein (1959a, 184). 62. Goldstein (1939, 392). 63. Ibid., 334-35. 64. Ibid., 86. 65. Goldstein (1927d, 249). 66. Goldstein (1940, 86). 67. Goldstein (193, 306). 68. Goldstein (1940, 114). 69. Goldstein (1939, 306). Goldstein made the connection even more definitively in "Health as value": "Courage . . . presupposes the highest capacity of man, his abstract capacity through which he differs essentially from all other living things" (Goldstein, [1959a, 181-82]).

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70. Gay (1969, 97). 71. Goldstein's friend, Robert Ulrich, German pedagogue and emigre who became a professor at Harvard University, noted that Goldstein sought no solace in institutionalized faith, but spoke of Goldstein's sense of deep religious "awe" before the limits of human knowledge and the "power of the Great Unknown" (Ulrich [1968, 13-15]). 72. Goldstein (1934, 318). 73. Ibid., 517. 74. Ibid., 506. 75. Fromm-Reichmann dedicated her book, Principles of intensive psychotherapy (1960) to her "teachers," citing: Sigmund Freud, Kurt Goldstein, Georg Groddeck, and Harry Stack Sullivan. 76. Gurwitsch (1929). 77. Spiegelberg (1965, 630). 78. Spiegelberg (1972, 301). 79. Merleau-Ponty to Goldstein, 30 April 1950, Folder M, Box 1, Goldstein Papers. Some indication of Goldstein's further impact on French phenomenological philosophy following this French publication can be seen in a letter to Goldstein (dated April 19, 1954) from one Edouard Thermoz suggesting a French translation of Goldstein's Human nature in the light of psychopathology (1940). Thermoz went on to ask Goldstein, "Would you agree to be placed among the supporters of a phenomenological actualism which ultimately refuses to 'explain' the organism?" (Folder T, Box 1, Goldstein Papers). 80. Spiegelberg (1972, 311). 81. "Dieses, sein Sein, is sein Sinn, entsprechend dem Goetheschen Satz: Der Zwecke des Lebens ist das Leben selbst. Von ihm aus bekommen alle Einzelvorgange ihre Bedeutung und ihre Bestimmung. Wir bezeichnen die als sein Wesen, und wenn wir vom Wesen des Organismus sprechen, so meinen wir das weder im ontologischmetaphysisch-noch in einem teleologischen Sinne, auch nicht im Sinne irgendeiner Forme des Vitalismus. Wir sprechen vom Wesen nur als Erkenntnisgrund" (Goldstein [1933, 154]). 82. Franz Walter Muller, 2 November 1965, in Albrecht and Hall (1980, 183). 83. Tillich (1959, 20-23). 84. Meyer (1989, 279-344). Meyer does not wish to argue that Tillich "simply 'took over*" Goldstein's ideas. "The most plausible explanation of the relationship between the two authors is that they shared a common vision of human nature, each developing ideas from the German intellectual tradition in their own ways, and having a mutual and ongoing impact on the development of each other's thought" (Meyer [1989, 343]). 85. Goldstein, 16 August 1956 in Albrecht and Hall (1980, 340). 86. Ringer (1969, 385). 87. Bumke, cited in ibid., 385-86. 88. Indeed, two German scholars have attempted to give belated recognition to Goldstein's (largely forgotten) role in the early history of the psychosomatic movement in Germany. See Kiitemeyer and Schultz (1984, 133-39). 89. See Brugsch and Lewy (1926); Weizsacker (1940). 90. Goldstein (1967, 149). 91. Kiitemeyer and Schultz (1984, 134). See also the article, cited by Kiitemeyer and Schultz by W. v. Baeyer, 1979, "50 Jahre 'Der Nervenarzt.'" Der Nervenarzt 50: 1. Other contributors besides Goldstein in these years included Gustav von Bergmann, Ludwig Binswanger, Karl Bonhoeffer, Otto Warburg, and Viktor von Weizsacker (discussed in chapter 6).

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92. G. Klemperer, 1931, editorial, Therapie derGegenwart 33 (January): 1. 93. Goldstein (193lb, 4). 94. Goldstein's ambivalent relationship to Freud can be traced over a lifetime of publications. Clearly, he was not only highly critical of him, but also highly indebted to him. Even his basic "holistic" approach to brain disease owed a debt to Freud, as he himself acknowledged, "I would like to stress that I was encouraged in my interpretation of the 'symptoms* by Freud's assumption that they should not be considered simple facts, but become understandable only in relation to their meaning for the individual" (Goldstein [1959b, 11]). For more, see Goldstein (1927a, 1927b, 1937, 1954a, 1954b). 95. Goldstein (1931b. 6); compare also Goldstein (1939. 335-40). 96. Compare Goldstein (1927a and 1927b). 97. Goldstein (1931b, 1). 98. Ibid., 10. 99. "Das groBe Murren, das durch die Arzteschaft aller Kulturlander geht, ist auf den Mangel an einer wirklich adaquaten arztlichen Weltanschauung zuriickzufiihren" (Sihle [1933, 2]). 100. "[NJicht. nur eine neue historische, sondern auch eine neue geistige Epoche, nach der Epoche des analytischen Sturm und Dranges eine Epoche, die wie eine Morgenrote das Nahen einer wirklichen wissenschaftlichen Reife anzeigt. Der Drang zur Synthese wird machtig fuhlbar auf alien medizinischen Horizonten" (Sihle [1933, 2]). 101. This foundation was started in 1930 by Mrs. Walter Graeme Ladd, daughter of Josiah Macy, Jr., to support medical research, particularly those aspects concerned with preserving "the unity of the patient as a psychosomatic being." In 1931, the foundation supported Dr. H. Flanders Dunbar in an exhaustive survey of the world's literature on the relation of emotion to disease; this survey led to the publication of the volume Emotion and bodily changes in 1935. Laboratories run by researchers like Walter B. Cannon, Stanley Cobb, George Draper, Walter Freeman, Foster Kennedy, and Adolf Meyer were among those to receive support from the foundation between 1931 and 1936. See the report Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation: A review by the President of Activities for the six years ended December 31, 1936, with extracts from the treasurer's reports for the years 1932-1936 (565 Park Avenue, New York, 1937). Besides Goldstein's paper discussed here, other papers published in the proceedings included such titles as: "On the problem of a synthesis between the rational and the irrational from the physician's perspective" (M. Sihle of Riga); "The physician's relationship to metaphysics" (Otfried Muller of Tubingen); "On personal norms" (L. R. Grote of Frankfurt); 'The problem of personality" (W. Enke of Marburg); and "Instinct and intuition in research, in education and in the medical calling" (E. Starkenstein of Prague). 102. In his 1967 autobiographical sketch, Goldstein identified this conference as a significant turning point in his intellectual development: For a considerable time I was nearly alone among the neurologists in my consistently holistic approach. In 1932 about twenty physicians, famous in their special fields, arranged a meeting in Austria at which they developed in principle similar holistic ideas in connection with malerial pertaining to their respective specialties. For the first time at this meeting I presented my concept and became more convinced that 1 should continue examining and treating patients in my own way. (Goldstein [1967. 158]) 103. Goldstein (1933, 150). 104. Ibid., 149; compare Goldstein (1939, 401).

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105. "Wir machen so lange unzweckmaBige Bewegungen unseres Korpers, bis wir plotzlich das Gleichgewicht zu erhalten imstande sind und in der richtigen Weise uns fortbewegen. All die Voriibungen haben mit der eigentlichen Leistung direkt nichts zu tun. Sie sind zwar notwendig, wir kommen zur der richtigen Leistung erst durch dauernde Modification der Bewegungen, aber diese fiihren als falsche Bewegungen niemals direkt zu den richtigen. Die richtigen erscheinen plotzlich, wenn eine Adaquatheit zwischen dem Vorgehen des Organismus und den Umweltbedingungen eintritt; diese Adaquatheit wird von uns erlebt, sie enthalt die richtige Erkenntnis des Vorgehens beim Radfahren" (Goldstein [1933, 150]). 106. Pross (1989, C-721); compare Pross and Winau (1984). 107. Pross (1989, C-723). 108. The Verein Sozialistischer Arzte was founded in 1924 by Ignaz Zadek with the aim of providing a "united front" of progressive physicians devoted to the cause of socialist medicine, one that stood above party squabblings. With both social democrats and communists in its ranks, the association published a journal with offices based in Berlin, Der Sozialistische Arzt, which addressed the social, political, and economic concerns of the progressive physician. Political activism, such as support for the families of communists and socialists interned by the Weimar Republic, was also a clear part of the association's agenda. In the spring of 1933, the association was declared illegal by the National Socialists, and its leading members were either arrested or forced into exile (Proctor [1988, 256-62J). 109. Pross (1989, C-723). 110. Compare Pross and Winau (1984). 111. This story is told by Geoffrey Cocks (1985). 112. Teuber (1966, 306-7). 113. I. Bach, 1962, Interview with K. Goldstein, June 1958, in Auszug des Geistes. Bericht iiber eine Sendereihe, ed. by L. Besch (Bremen: B.C. Hege), 93. 114. The co-authored monograph describing their work, Abstract and concrete behavior: An experimental study with special tests was published in 1941. 115. These lectures, only a middling success, were published in 1940 under the title Human nature in the light of psychopathology, with a foreword by Gordon W. Allport, who had become a close friend. 116. Simmel (1968, 11), "Kurt Goldstein 1878-1965," says that Albert Einstein was "an old friend" of Goldstein, although I have found no documentation of such a friendship. There is a brief letter from Einstein to Goldstein, complimenting him on his article, "The Idea of Disease and Therapy," "which made a great impression on me.... It is seldom that a psychological theory works persuasively on a lay person like me." (cited in Meyer [ 1989, 138]). In addition, the Estate of Albert Einstein (Otto Nathan, Trustee) wrote to Goldstein on June 23, 1959, asking whether he "might be interested in the analysis of Einstein's brain, which was done in Princeton Hospital in the years after his death" (Folder N, Box 1, Goldstein Papers). 117. Correspondence with all of these individuals can be found in the Goldstein archives at Columbia University. 118. Simmel, interview 15 May 1983 with Christian Pross; cited in Pross and Winau (1984, 138). 119. Simmel, "Kurt Goldstein 1878-1965", p. 10. 120. Ulrich (1968, 15). 121. Bach, Interview with K. Goldstein, (1962, 95). 122. Goldstein (1936).

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123. Jay (1974, 127). 124. Quotes are from an unpublished English version of the original 1936 article, which is in the Goldstein archives in New York: Goldstein, "Significance of biology for sociology," Folder "Social Relations," Box 12, Goldstein Papers, p. 4. 125. Ibid., 7-10. 126. Ibid., 11. 127. Ibid., 14-15. 128. Ibid., 17. 129. Teuber (1966, 308). 130. Goldstein and Scheerer (1941 [1971], 394). 131. Ibid., 388. 132. For details of this period in American psychiatry, see E. S. Valenstein, 1986, Great and desperate cures: The rise and decline of psychosurgery and other radical treatments for mental illness (New York: Basic Books). 133. Goldstein (1950). It seems probable that Goldstein was involved in some capacity with the Leucotomy Research Committee, a division of the Veterans Administration (VA) in Washington, D. C. The aim of the committee was to assess the effects of leucotomy in a coordinated project of five VA hospitals. The archive of Goldstein's private papers includes a copy of the "preliminary report on the minutes" of this meeting from the spring of 1949 (Folder "Leucotomy Research Committee," Box 8, Goldstein Papers). 134. Kurt Goldstein, 1960, Concerning the concept of primivity, in Culture in history; Essays in honor of Paul Radin, ed. by S. Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press), 99-117. 135. Kurt Goldstein (1957). 136. Meyer (1989, 208-9). 137. Ibid., 379. 138. Spiegelberg (1972, 309). 139. Goldstein's move in later life from metaphors of stoic heroism to ones of consolation and communion may have also more immediate biographical origins. HansLukas Teuber would recall how Goldstein's unfailing serenity and self-control were severely tested towards the end of the war when his wife, Eva Rothmann-Goldstein, herself a practicing psychiatrist, began to show signs of involutional depression, which ended after numerous incomplete remissions with her suicide in I960. The illness and death of this formerly vivacious and incomparably gifted woman (she was more than 20 years his junior) cast a deep shadow over Kurt Goldstein's later years. (Teuber [ 1966, 304]) 140. Goldstein (1959a, 185-86), italics added. 141. Teuber (1966, 299). 142. Ulrich (1968,14). There is a letter to Goldstein, preserved in his private papers, from a colleague and friend at Brandeis University, Norbert Mintz (still in private practice in Lincoln, Mass.) that went further than Goldstein had gone himself, in arguing for a scientific vindication of Goethe's theory of colors or Farbenlehre. The inspiration for this colleague's remarks was a physics lecture on color he had attended, given by E. Land, the man who invented the Polaroid camera. Mintz wrote: Land has been able to show that the sensation of color is completely independent of physical wavelength. By projecting a photograph with a red filter in front of it, and superimposing on top of this the same photograph projected with white light only, the person sees I-

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on the screen the photographs in full color—yellows, greens, etc. Even by projecting one in yellow and one in orange will give an image with all the colors. This is not due to simultaneous contrasts, or induction color, etc.... Thus Land concluded that "the dogma given to us by Newton, Helmholtz, and Maxwell concerning how the eye sees color is wrong, for the eye sees color independent of the physical stimulus which is necessary to produce color when using only patches of light." . .. Almost quoting Goethe, Land said, "The mistake we have inherited from Newton is to think that by allowing a little shaft of light to enter a dark room, which we then spread out and project on a screen, we will learn how the eye functions in the normal world. We must learn to talk about how the eye sees, and not about physical mechanisms or rods and cones." ... I think that his work may create a new era in color physiology and psychology ("Norby," Mintz to Goldstein, 17 November 1958, Folder N, Box 1, Goldstein Papers). For more on this, see Norbert Mintz, 1959, "Concerning Goethe's approach to the theory of color," Journal of Individual Psychology 15 (May): 33-49.1 am very grateful to Norbert Mintz for sharing both material and memories with me for this chapter. 143. Goldstein (1949). 144. Ibid., 111. 145. Ibid., 112. 146. A scrap of paper found in Goldstein's private papers indicates that Goldstein had tentatively titled this final work: From anatomy to philosophy: Late and early writings in the holistic approach. The book would have been a collection of old and new writings, thematically ordered from neurology to sociology, with some unifying metaphysical and epistemological themes (Folder "Obituaries, Condolences," Box 1, Goldstein Papers). 147. Goldstein, undated fragment. Folder "Material for proposed last book (1)," Box 8, Goldstein Papers. 148. The Board of Editors of this series included: W. H. Auden, Richard Courant, Martin C. D'Arcy, Rene" Dubos, Loren Eiseley, Kurt Goldstein, Werner Heisenberg, Mohammed Zafrullah Kahn, Robert M. Macluer, F. S. C. Northrop, Michael Polanyi, Sarvepalli Radhakrischna, James Johnson Sweeney, Paul Tillich, and Harry Wolfson. 149. [Anshen], "Open letter to Dr. Kurt Goldstein in commemoration of his eightieth birthday, November 6, 1958," Folder "Album.," Box 16 "Commemoration," Goldstein Papers. 150. Weiss (1959, 143). 151. B. F. Skinner, review of The organism, by Kurt Goldstein, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 5:402-5. 152. The advocates of 'Third Force" psychology, a movement that began in the late 1950s, were (as Abraham Maslow would put it in a statement of purpose for a proposed new journal) "interested in those human capacities and potentialities that have no systematic place either in poshivistic or behavioristic theory or in classical psychoanalytic theory, e.g., creativeness, love, self-actualization, 'higher values,' ego-transcendence, objectivity, autonomy, responsibility, psychological health, etc." (Maslow and Sutich, Statement of purpose, Box 11, Goldstein Papers). In The Road Not Taken, Meyer devotes a considerable amount of space to other details of Goldstein's legacy in the United States. For an introduction to assessments of Goldstein's American legacy towards the end of his life, see the articles in the 1959 issue of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (vol. 19), especially by Kelman, Jonas, and Weiss; the commemorative 1959 issue of the Journal of Psychotherapy (vol. 13); the Journal of Individual Psychology (vol. 15), which included tributes by

262

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX Alfred Adler, F. J. J. Buytendikj, and W. Goody. A more international assessment of Goldstein's legacy was developed in a commemorative 1949 issue of Confinia Neurologica (vol. 9), which included articles by S. Bethe, T. Edinger, E.-Fischer, J. Lhermitte, V. v. Weizsacker, H. L. Teuber, F. Fromm-Reichmann, W. Riese, and H. Werner. 153. Arnheim, 9 November 1958, File A, Box 1, Goldstein Papers. CHAPTER 6

Hans Schemm was the founder and director of the National Socialists Union of Teachers (NSLB) and, beginning in 1933, Bavarian Educational [Kultus] Minister. He was often credited with this saying, though it is not clear that it originated with him. 1. For a discussion, see Baumer (1990, 119-21). 2. As many commentators have noted. Darwinian evolution would have an ambivalent status in the "race" biology of the Third Reich. Many National Socialist leaders did like the militaristic imagery of "struggle for existence" and "survival of thefittest"and explicitly argued, with increasing success, that a vigorously selectionist Darwinian biology should form the centerpiece of Nazi policy. Others, though, were disquieted by the Darwinian doctrine of human evolution from lower species because it seemed to undermine the immutability and separateness of the Aryan race. Later, there was also some feeling among certain SS historians that Darwinism had contributed to socialism and was suspect on those grounds. The result of this lack of consensus, predictably, was a confusion of conflicting ideas whose varied implementation was driven more by pragmatics than logic. See Weindling (1989,498); and Field (1981, 301); also Kalikow (1983); and Gasman (1971). 3. The range of other historians and commentators who have addressed some of the biological and psychological literature I will be discussing includes Ash (1985b); Prinz (1985a); Scheerer (1985); Cocks (1985); Proctor (1988); Deichmann (1992); Geuter (1992); and Baumer (1991). While I have not always followed the interpretations these authors have drawn from the primary material, my debt to their scholarship and insights is gratefully acknowledged. 4. Hitler himself had gone so far as to declare in Mein Kampf that "the basic ideas of the National Socialist movement are volkisch, and the volkisch ideas are National Socialist" (cited in Louis L. Snyder, 1976 [1989], Encyclopedia of the Third Reich [New York: Paragon House], 362). In fact, however, he turned out to be much more eclectic and pragmatic in selecting the elements to be incorporated into his movement and policies than he hadfirstappeared. For this reason, he ended up alienating many of his more purist volkisch allies from such groups as the Tatkreis (Action Circle), publishers of the influential journal Die Tat. 5. Cited in Beck (1936, 84). The quote from Hitler reads in the original: "Aus einem toten Mechanismus, der nur um seiner selbst willen da zu sein beansprucht, soil ein Iebendiger Organismus geformt werden mit dem ausschlieBlichen Zwecke: einer hbheren Idee zu dienen" (Hitler [1925, 398]). 6. Rosenberg (1927, 70-71). 7. "Alles in allem ist somit die nationalsozialistische Staats- und Kulturauffassung ein organisches Ganzes. Als organisches Ganzes ist der volkische Staat mehr als die Summe seiner Teile, und zwar weil diese Teile, Individuen genannt, zu einer hoheren Einheit ineinandergefiigt sind, in der sie nur wiederum zu einer hoheren Lebensleistung fahig sind, aber auch erhohte Sicherheit genieBen. An diese Freiheit ist das Individuum durch Pflichterfullung im Dienste des Ganzen gebunden" (Karl Zimmerman, 1933, Die geistigen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus [Leipzig], 42). A

263 • NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 8. "Die Ganzheit hat aufgehbrt, ein dunkles unangreifbares Prinzip zu sein, sie ist zu einer universalen Naturerscheinung geworden wie die Gravitation oder das Wirkungsquantum" (Meyer-Abich); "Wir erleben in der Gegenwart ein geistigen Umschwung von gewaltigen AusmaB. und dieser Umschwung betrifft auch die Biologie; sein Drehpunkt heiBt Ganzheit" (Diirken). Both authors cited in Neuberg(1944 [1939], 131). 9. "Stellen wir den Menschen in die Gemeinschaft seiner Familie, seiner Sippe, seiner Rasse, seines Volkes, so rollt sich aus der Ganzhe its lehre, Entwicklungslehre und Erblehre das ganze Problem seiner rassische und volkischen Art und Verpflichtung auf (Feuerborn [1935, 103]). 10. Ute Deichmann reviews Lehmann's story and compares his efforts to the effort of the time to create a so-called "Aryan physics," an effort associated above all with the names of Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark (1992, 289-93). The standard history of the "Aryan science" movement in German physics is Beyerchen (1977). See also the range of essays on "Aryan science" in the 1980 edited volume by Mehrtens and S. Richter. 11. Lehmann (1933). 12. "Wir haben erkannt, daB eine Losl5sung des Menschen aus der Natur, aus dem Lebensganzen zu seiner Vernichtung und zum Tode der Vblker fiihrt. Nur durch Wiedereingliederung des Menschen in das Naturganze kann unser Volk zum Erstarken gebracht werden. Das ist der tiefste Sinn der biologischen Aufgaben der Gegenwart. Nicht der Mensch allein steht mehr im Mittelpunkt des Denkens, sondern das Leben als Ganzes, wie es sich in alien Lebewesen auf der Erde offenbart. Dabei wird kein einsichtiger Biologe die Bedeutung all dessen ubersehen, was den Menschen iiber die iibrigen Organismen hinaushebt. Dieses Streben nach Verbundenheit mit dem Gesamtleben, ja mit der Natur uberhaupt, in die wir hineingeboren sind, das ist aber, soviel ich sehe, der tiefste Sinn und das eigentliche Wesen nationalsozialistischen Denkens " (Lehmann [1934, 10-11]). 13. Scheerer (1985). 14. Krueger (1934, 36). 15. "Wer mit glaubigem Herzen und nachdenklichen Sinnes den treibenden Ideenkraften des Nationalsozialismus nachspiirt, wird allenthalben zwei Motive wiederfinden, die hinter dem gewaltigen Ringen der deutschen Bewegung stehen: die Sehnsucht nach Ganzheit und der Wille zur Gestalt.... Ganzheit und Gestalt, Leitideen der deutschen Bewegung, sind Kernbegriffe geworden der deutschen Seelenkunde.... Deutsche Psychologie der Gegenwart und nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung, beide sind ausgerichtet auf das gleiche Ziel, die Uberwindung atomistischer und mechanistischer Denkhaltungen, in der Ordnung volkischen Lebens hier, der Erforschung seelischer Wirklichkeit dort, Uberwindung durch organisches Denken.... Damit aber ist die wissenschaftliche Psychologie im Begriff, zugleich ein brauchbares Werkzeug nationalsozialistischer Zielsetzung zu werden" (Sander (1937, 641, 643, 649]). 16. Ibid., 641. 17. "Es ging ein Ruf durch die biologische Welt: Zuriick zur Morphologie, zuriick zu Goethe und seiner Typenlehre!" (Neuberg, [1944, 132]). 18. For specific discussions, see Deichmann (1992). 19. Willi Nielsen, 1938, Der Lebens- und Gestaltbegriff bei H.S. Chamberlain (Kiel); Waltraut Eckhard, 1941, Houston Stewart Chamberlains Naturanschauung. Series: Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag). 20. Bechstedt (1980, 142-65).

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21. "Wo immer Natur ist, ist Gestalt; wie nichts ist ohne Substanz, so ist nichts ohne Gestalt. Substanz und Gestalt erst machen vereint das Wesen der dem Wechsel von Bildung und Zerfall unterworfenen natiirlichen Dinge" (Wolf and Troll [1942, 10]). 22. Pinder, Troll, and Wolf (1942-1955). 23. W. Prinz (1985a, 69-70). 24. [J]eder wahre Staat" is "niemals ein bloB organisch-naturhaftes Gebilde" but is controlled and given direction by "einem bewuBten fuhrenden Geist." "Neben dem Rassenprinzip steht das Fuhrerprinzip" (Theodor Haering, 1935, "Philosophie und Biologie," Der Biologe 12:396). 25. Louis L. Snyder, 1989 (1976), Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York: Paragon House), 104, 106. 26. "Sie ist nichts anderes als die nun das Ganze bestimmende und beherrschende Gestaltqualitat, die neue, vielleicht erst werdende Physiognomie des Ganzen" (Weinhandl [1931b, 212]). 27. The Nobel-prize-winning embryologist Hans Spemann seems to have been an ambivalent Mitlaufer under the Nazi regime; nationalistic and conservative in his own politics but opposed to all attempts by the government to interfere with the international, free practice of science. Nevertheless, he did, at least once, publicly call attention to similarities between the Nazi Fuhrerprinzip (leadership principle) and the Organizer. Others, including the ethologists Otto Koehler and Konrad Lorenz, had apparently already drawn attention to such conceptual similarities (H. Mislin to Viktor Hamburger, 20 June 1969). However, following a particularly public 1937 assertion of the need for science at least to remain an international enterprise free of national coordination, Spemann was denied further lecturing rights at Freiburg University. I am grateful to Professor Viktor Hamburger for sharing this letter with me and discussing with me his perception of Spemann during the Nazi years (Interview 10.7.93). 28. Interview with Owsei Temkin, 29 May 1993; Sigerist (1935). 29. "Wo Ordnung ist, ist Geist, ist Logos" (Neuberg [1944 (1939), 255]). 30. Cited in Wolf and Troll (1942, 60). 31. "Wir spUren, daB die Zeit des Deutschen auch im Geistigen erst anbricht, daB das Getose der Waffen, das BlutvergieBen und die brennenden Trummer der Stadte die sichtbaren und greifbaren Zeichen auch eines geistigen Kampfes sind, mit der nicht weniger als ein neues Weltalter anhebt" (Metzger [1942, 143]). 32. Senger(1935). 33. Chantraine(1936). 34. Wyatt and Teuber (1944, 233). 35. Geuter (1992, 169). Jaensch also stressed a tendency for "S" types to emerge from "mixed" marriages and called attention to a worrying tendency for many German adolescents to pass through a temporary "S"-type stage in the course of their development. See Jaensch (1938). 36. Jaensch (1938). 37. Hitler, in Pois (1986, 72). 38. "Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft kann nicht darin bestehen, sich mit Dingen zu beschaftigen, die dem Denken des eigenen Volkes vbllig fremd sind und die vielleicht gar den Interessen eines anderen Volkes dienen. Abhangigkeit von einer volksfremden internationalen Weltanschauung ist geistige Verskalvung, nicht aber Freiheit" (Kotschau [1933-35, 135]). 39. Pois (1986, 72). 40. Lukacs (1955, 430).

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41. "Die Denkweise des Juden tragt wie sein Blut, das aus dem Chaos kam, auflbsenden Charakter. Der Jude hat daher immer das Bestreben, alle Dinge zu spalten, in ihre Atome zu zerlegen und sie damit kompliziert und derart unverstandlich zu machen, daB ein gesunder Mensch sich in dem Wust widersprechender Theorien nicht mehr zurecht findet. So lost der Jude das Wunderwerk der Schbpfung auf, indem er iiberall, wohin sein atzender Geist dringt, einen Triimmerhaufen, ein "Chaos" hinterlaBt. "Der gesunde Nichtjude dagegen, der aus der Schbpfung geboren wurde, denkt einfach, organisch, schbpferisch. Er vereinigt, baut auf—Er denkt in der Ganzheit. Kurz zusammengefaBt, fordert das Blutgesetz des Juden: Das Chaos, die Weitrevolution, den Tod! Und das Blutgesetz des schbpferisch-heldischen Menschen fordert: Das organische Weltbild, die Weltbefriedung, das Leben!" (Bottcher, "Die Losung der Judenfrage," [1935, 226]). 42. "[W]er das deutsche Volk nach der Verzerrungen seines Wesens, denen es wehrlos preisgegeben war, zu seiner eigenen Gestalt zuruckfiihren will, wer der Sehnsucht der Volksseele, ihr eigenes Wesen rein auszupragen, zum Ziele verhelfen will, der muB alles Gestaltfremde ausschalten, insonderheit muB er alle fremdrassischen zersetzenden Einfiiisse unwirksam machen. Die Ausschaltung des parasitisch wuchernden Judentums hat ihre tiefe ethische Berechtigung in diesem Willen zur reinen Gestallt deutschen Wesens ebenso wie die Unfruchtbarmachung der Trager minderwertigen Erbgutes des eigenen Volkes" (Sander [1937, 642]). 43. "Des Staates Wehr und Gerichtsbarkeit konnen der Harte nicht entbehren. Herrisch fordert er Opfer des Eigenwillens und sogar des Lebens, wie sich allerwegen einem Ganzen, das Bestand haben soil, noch seine edelsten Teile zu fiigen haben. Den Menschen ist gegeben, daB sie erkennen konnen, was an ihrem Dasein unganz, das heist Iebenswidrig und formungsfeindlich ist. Sie bringen das Opfer ihrer Fehlsamkeit, indem sie mit BewuBtsein ihrem Staat gehorchen und freiwillig geordnete Gewalt iiber sich anerkennen" (cited in Geuter [1985, 72]). 44. "Man sieht auf christlicher Seite gar nicht oder nur halb ein, daB ein Volkskorper ein organisches Ganzes ist und wie alle solche Ganzheiten seine eigenen Lebensgesetze hat, die iiber die der Teile hinausgreifen. Das Grundprinzip der christlichen Ethik ist die 'Bruderliebe' die im anderen Menschen . . . das gleichberechtigte Kind des Schbpfers erblickt, und jeder 'einzelnen Menschenseele' einen 'unendlichen Wert' zuspricht. . . . Dem Eugeniker, sofern er nicht etwa selbst sich lediglich auf das Wohl der kommenden Individuen einstellen will, sondern vielmehr an die ganze Erbmasse eines Volks denkt, bleibt nichts anderes ubrig, als diese Christen vor die sehr ernste Frage zu stellen, ob sie es Gott gegeniiber verantworten konnen, die Existenz ihres Volkes als Kulturvolk durch die Riicksichtnahme auf die (angeblichen) 'Menschenwerte' der Individuen in Frage zu stellen. Das allgemeine und von der Kirche doch sonst so sehr begriiBte Durchdringen einer 'organischen' Weltauffassung an der Stelle einer 'mechanistisehen' wie bisher sollte doch auch dem christlichen Individualismus nunmehr einige heilsame Schranken Ziehen" (Bavink [1932/33, 6061]); compare also R. Genschel, 1932/33, "Organisches Denken und Biologie-Unterricht." Der Biologe 2(11): 257-61. 45. "Unsere Zeit braucht nicht den fremdgesteuerten Maschinenmenschen, sondern den selbsteuernden Menschen, der an einer gesunden Natur seine Eigenkrafte schult. Unsere Zeit braucht den heroischen Menschen, einen Menschen, der den Anforderungen der Zeit gewachsen ist, und der nicht auf den zweifelhaften Schutz einer allzu verkiinstelten Umwelt angewiesen ist" (Kotschau, 1936, excerpt from Zum national-

266

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX * sozialistischen Umbruch in der Medizin, doc. 83, 1-2, in Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 156). Italics in original. 46. For details, see DetlefBothe (1991, 133-36). 47. "Der Biologische Medizin lost den Menschen nicht aus dem Naturganzen heraus, zergliedert und atomisiert ihn nicht, sondern sie untersucht den Menschen immer in seinen Ganzheits-Funktionen und -Reaktionen. . . . Die biologische Forschungsmethode vermittelt Verstandnis und Anwendungsmbglichkeiten der alten Medizin und der Volksmedizin. Stellen wir die biologische Forschungsmethode an die Seite der exakt naturwissenschaftlichen Methode, so haben wir jene Synthese der Medizin, die man mit Recht als hippokratische Vollmedizin bezeichnen kann.... Es ist ein Verdienst der nationalsozialistischen Revolution, den Arzt von dieser [former] mechanistisch-materialistisehen Einmauerung frei gemacht zu haben. Die Arzteschaft riickt demgemaB mehr und mehr von jenem uberspitzten und einseitigen mechanistischen Denken ab, das . . . fiir die Volksgesundheit verheerende Folgen haben muS" (Kotschau, excerpt from Zum nationalsozialistischen Umbruch in der Medizin in Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 152). 48. Ibid., 154-55. 49. Proctor (1981, 235-38). 50. "Nicht der Arzt heilt, sondern die Natur." 51. Proctor (1981, 233-34). 52. Alfred Haug in Germany was the first to write extensively about this hospital and its relationship to the "New German Therapy" Reich Working Group. See Haug (1985). 53. For details of the Dachau concentration camp herbal project, see documents 110, 1-6 (partly previously unpublished) in Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 199-202); and Projektgruppe "Volk und Gesundheit" (1982, 52-54). 54. Compare Herf (1984, 27 n). 55. Pick (1993, 211-13). The Reich quote is from p. 213. 56. "Der Holismus steht . . . auf den Schultern des Vitalismus" (Meyer-Abich [1935,28]). 57. "Mit Driesch und [Hans] Spemann kam die GewiBheit zum Siege, daB . . . [k]ein Teil gilt als vorgebildet . . . jeder kann alles werden, und das Ganze bestimmt die Funktion, die der Teil zu iibernehmen hat"(Neuberg [1944, 129]). 58. "Drieschs vitalistische Ganzheitsphilosophie diirfte sich zur wissenschaftlichen Grundlage des nationalsozialistischen Begriffssy stems vortrefflich eignen"(Gast to Driesch, 1 January 1936, cited in Mocek [1974, 138]); for an example of this kind of politicization of vitalism, compare also Conrad-Martius (1944). 59. Driesch (1927). 60. Mocek (1974, 131). 61. The travel book resulting from his Far East tour—a propaganda work for democratic humanism co-authored with his politically liberal wife, Margaret Reifferscheidt Driesch—professed in the foreword this hope: "Moge das Werk der Verstandigung unter den Nationen und Rassen dienen." See M. Driesch and H. Driesch (1925). 62. Schniglitz (1923,5). 63. Cited in Mocek (1974, 134). Italics in original. 64. "[S]eine Entelechiehypothese . . . ermbglichte es ihm . . . seine biologischganzheitstheoretische Weltanschauung mit humanistischem Geist zu erfullen. DaB Lebewesen andere Lebewesen tbten, hat er als Fehlleistung der Natur, als 'Wiiten des triebhaften Lebensprinzip gegen sich selbst,' bezeichnet und daraus die biologische 4

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Notwendigkeit der Vernunft abgeleitet. Von diesem 'biologisehen Pazifismus' schlug er eine Briicke zum Pazifismus im Sinne bewuBter politischer Stellungnahme" (Scheerer [1985, 40]). 65. Driesch (1919b). 66. Driesch (1931-3), 289). 67. At the April lOrunoff elections, Hindenburg would receive 19,359,650 votes— 53 percent—versus Hitler's 13,418,011, and Thaelmann's 3,706,655. 68. "Sei das Gefiihl auch oft die Triebfeder zu wichtigen politischen Vorgangen, so miisse der Verstand doch klar und kalt und ohne Affekt die politischen Handlungen und Probleme durchleuchten. In der Gegenwart sei das Gefuhl popular geworden, wahren der Geist degradiert worden sei. Die Verachtung des Geistes sei aber ungeheuer einseitig. Alle Fortschritte der Kultur seien dem richtig verstandenen Geiste zu verdanken" ("Professor Driesch spricht fiir Hindenburg. Kundegebung des Leipziger Hindenburg-Ausschusses," Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten und Handels-Zeitung. [4. April 1932/Nr. 95], p. 1). 69. Zieger(1968). 70. Driesch wrote in the Berliner Tageblatt for 12 June 1926: "Deutschland is nahe daran, sich ein Seitenstiick zu dem Falle Dreyfus zu schaffen —aber wird sich ein deutscher Zola finden?" (cited in Mocek [1974, 135]; compare Driesch, 1926, "Der Fall Lessing," Berliner Tageblatt und Handels-Zeitung [12 June] 55 [273]: 1). 71. Driesch (1951, 271-74). 72. See Galison (1990, 709-52); Beyler (1994, chapter 2). 73. Sauter (1934/35, 448). 74. "Auch ist nicht zu ubersehen, dass aus der mechanistischen Vorstel lungs welt Methoden von hochstem Wert erwachsen sind, wie z.B. die Methoden der modernen Vererbungsforschung, iiber deren Wert fiir Theorie wie Praxis ja kein Wort weiter gesagt zu werden braucht. Dass auf der anderen Seite die ganzheitliche Planmassigkeitsauffassung des Lebens keineswegs zwangslaufig zu Folgerungen fiihren muss, die der nationalsozialistischen Grundauffassung entsprechen, zeigt das Beispiel von Driesch"(Kraus to the Rector of Hanischen Universitat, 12 December 1935, Akte: Institut fiir Umweltforschung, Heft 501, 1920-1943, Staatsarchiv, Hamburg). 75. Driesch (1951, 274). 76. Mocek (1974, 136-37). 77. Ibid., 139. 78. "[I]n der er auf die weltanschauliche Bedeutung der psychischen Forschung hinwies undgroBes Vertrauenin ihreZukunft bekundete; er ging dann auf allgemeinen Fragen iiber, bekannte sich als iiberzeugten Pazifisten und wies gerade auch der Parapsychologie eine groBe Rolle bei der Befriedigung der Nationen zu. Beide Male schloB er mit den Worten: "L'avenir est d nous." Nach Verabredung mit meinen deutschen Kollegen ubernahm ich die Erwiderung; ich bekannte meine voile Ubereinstimmung mit allem, was Richet gesagt hatte, und schloB mit den von ihm selbst gebrauchten vertrauensvollen Worten (Driesch [1951, 239]). 79. The quote by Mehrtens was cited in Sheila Weiss, 1994, "Pedagogy, professionalism and politics: biology instruction during the Third Reich," Science, technology, and national socialism, ed. by Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 194. Weiss' article itself gives a good sense of some of the ways in which a holistic biological perspective was formally incorporated into primary- and secondary-school curricula during the Nazi years. 80. For example, Wellek (1960, 177-92); and Metzger (1979).

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81. Karl Kotschau, "muBte iiber Nacht die Universitat Jena verlassen," threatened by "erheblichen und gefahrdenden Auseinandersetzungen zwischen einer monomannaturwissenschaftlich eingestellten und einer holistich-ganzheitlich orientierten Forschungsrichtung in Medizin und Biologie" (cited in Projektgruppe "Volk und Gesundheit"[1982,48]). 82. "[S]ich im Amte Rosenberg und im Propaganda-ministerium tummelnden Nazimechanisten" (cited in Scheerer [1985, 46]). 83. See Kershaw (1993, 49). The so-called polycratic model of the Nazi state was first formulated by Franz Neumann in 1942 in his Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism, and further developed by Peter Huttenberger, who coined the term polycracy in the 1970s. 84. Geuter (1992, 170). 85. "Der Nationalsozialismus ist eine politische, keine wis sense haftliche Bewegung. . . . Somit sind weder Lamarck, Darwin und Ernst Haeckel . . . noch alle ihre vielen, ihnen zum Teil wissenschaftlich gleichbedeutenden Anhanger und Gegner irgendwelche Gegner, Vorlaufer oder gar Begriinder politischer Grundsatze des Nationalsozialismus, noch auch konnen wir irgendwelche Lehren eines der lebenden Biologen mit der Bewegung gleichsetzen, da diese als Forscher ihre Lehren als wissenschaftliche Probleme vorlegen, wahrend die Satze der Bewegung nur politisch-weltanschaulichen Aufgaben dienen und allein durch den Fuhrer und seine politischen Soldaten Wirklichkeit wurden.... Nicht der Gelehrte tragt die volkische Verantwortung fiir die Zukunft, sondern die Bewegung, deren Fuhrer allein Rechenschaft zu geben hat und deshalb das Utrecht des politischen Fuhrer besitzt, aus dieser hohen Verantwortung heraus dasjenige hinwegzuraumen, was die innere Gesundheit des Volkes gefahrdet (Hecht [1937] cited in Baumer [1990, 120-21]). 86. Weindling (1989, 496-97). 87. Stretcher, who edited an anti-Semitic propaganda rag called Der Stiirmer ultimately was condemned to the gallows at the Nuremberg Trials for his "propaganda of death" that had led to documented violence against Jews across Germany. The few secondary sources that have tracked his life and career in detail have essentially ignored his impassioned advocacy of holistic and naturopathic holistic medical perspectives during those same years. This advocacy was fueled by his belief that Jewish physicians had destroyed German medicine, and it found manifestation in his editorship of a "blood and soil" holistic medicine journal and in his founding a so-called Paracelsus Institute in Nuremberg dedicated to testing alternative and herbalist therapies. For information on these developments,-see Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 390-91) and documents 86-91. For a general introduction to Streicher, see Showalter (1982); and Varga (1981). 88. Weindling (1989, 497). 89. Ibid., 536. 90. "Der Beauftragte des Fiihrers fur die Uberwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Erziehung der NSDAP," Mitteilungen zur weltanschaulichen Lage. Vertraulich, Nr, 41/2, Jahr, 27 November 1936. Reproduced as Document 3 in Projektgruppe "Volk und Gesundheit" (1982, 43). 91. See, for example, Raimund Baumgartner, 1977, Weltanschauungskampf im Dritten Reich: die Auseinandersetzung der Kirchen mit Alfred Rosenberg. Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte. Series B, Forschungen, vol. 22 (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald-Verlag). 92. The article was published anonymously. However, Kotschau, in a confidental

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269 1937 memo to the Rosenberg-A mt, would claim that the idea of linking holism to Catholicism was originally the brainchild of Astel's assistant, Lothar Stengel von Rutkowski (29 January 1937, Bundesarchiv, Potsdam, Germany: 62 Di 1/483. I am very grateful to Richard Beyler for sharing this and the other references to this archive with me). 93. "Es ist das Wesen germanischer und von der nordischen Rasse bestimmte(r) Wissenschaft, unbestechlich und frei von okkulten Vorstellungen, Dogmen und Theorien die Tatsachen der Natur und der Wirklichkeit zu erforschen . . . "Es ist seit jeher bis zum gegenwartigen Augenblick das Bestreben der romischen Kirche und des holistischen Katholizismus gewesen, dieses Streben, als 'ketzerhaft,' 'materialistisch' oder 'mechanistisch' to bezeichnen und ihm durch kirchlichen Dogmen und den 'Index' der verbotenen Biicher Fesseln anzulegen. Wenn das nichts mehr fruchtete, so wurden einige katholisch-jesuitisch in dem bestimmten Fachgebiet besonders geschulte Wissenschaftler gutgetarnt vorgeschickt, die nun mit geschickten Gegenparolen und scheinbar wissenschaftlichen argumenten die germanische Wissenschaft von den Tatsachen abzulenken und auf fiir die Kirche ungefahrliche, spekulative und rein theoretische Bahnen hinlenken sollte. . . . "Nunmehr setzt die katholische Wissenschaft zu einem neuen, geschickt geleiteten und gut getarnten Angriff auf die gesamte exakte . .. Naturwissenschaft, einschlieBlich der Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenkunde, an. "Die verbindende Parole in diesem Angriff heiBt 'Holismus,' zu deutsch 'Ganzheitsforschung.' . . . "Der in Deutschland vertretene Holismus ist . . . eine neue, dogmatisch und anmaBend auftretende Lehre mit zahlreichen engsten Beziehungen zum Katholizismus, die geschickt unkritische und unklare, nach Moglichkeit der Partei HuBerlich nahestehende und bisher unverdachtige Wissenschaftler benutzt, um die in der Kirche gefahrlich werdende gediegene deutsche Naturwissenschaft, Biologie, Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenlehre zu theorisieren, abzubiegen und zu verfalschen. Der 'Holismus' und seine Jesuitischen Vertreter benutzen dabei mit voller Absicht nationalsozialistisch klingende Worte wie 'Ganzheit,' 'organische,' 'Biologische' usw, im moglichst lange unter dem Schein, 'nationalsozialistisch erwiinscht' zu sein, ihr Unwesen treiben zu konnen" ("Der Beauftragte des Fiihrers fiir die Uberwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Erziehung der NSDAP" [Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 40^11)]). 94. The term holism (or Holismus, as it came to be called in German) was introduced into the language by the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926 and made into a workable concept for biology by the English physiologist J. S. Haldane. As indicated, most German holists either repudiated or stolidly disregarded this whole alternative holistic tradition. The exception was Adolf Meyer-Abich, who discovered and became an enthusiast of Haldane's Holismus in the early 1930s, making use of the term in his own works and even undertaking translations of Haldane's own most important works into German. 95. Rene Fulop-Miller, 1929, Macht und Geheimnis der Jesuiten: Kulturhustorische Monographie (Leipzig: Grethlein & Co.). 96. "Es ist nichts anderes als der alte Kampf Geist gegen Blut, Kirche gegen Rasse, der hier in moderner Form zum Ausdruck kommt" ("Der Beauftragte des Fiihrers," p. 42). 97. 62 Di 1/483, Bundesarchiv Potsdam. 98. Again, see Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 390-91) and documents 86-91. 99. The archives of the Institute fiir Zeitgeschichte in Munich contain various cri-

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tiques of Meyer-Abich's work, as well as correspondence of various sorts advising against publication of certain articles or presentation of certain lectures by the Hamburg philosopher. One 1942 evaluation of a manuscript that Meyer-Abich had submitted for publication to Deutschlands Erneuerung noted that the author had hoped in his article to refute the view that holism was a Catholic-tainted doctrine, but he did so in a way that actually only confirmed the truth of the claims, even appealing to the ideas of the enemy general Smuts! (28 March 1942, MA141/8, Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich). I am again grateful to Richard Beyler for sharing these archival references with me. 100. Weindling (1989, 506). 101. Deichmann (1992, 347). 102. "Innerhalb unserer Reihen hat man eben dazu zu gehoren" (Walter Greite, 1939, "Aufbau und Aufgaben des Reichsbundes fur Biologie," Der Biologe 8 [7/8]: 238). 103. Compare, for example, Alverdes and Krieck (1937, 49-55). 104. "Lebenskunde ist Tatsachenforschung. Lebensgesetze sind keine Legende einer versunkenen Vergangenheit. Sie erschlieBen sich nur dem Forscher, der die Tatsachen erkennen will und bereit ist, aus ihnen verpflichtende Folgerungen zu Ziehen. Die Tatsachenforschung geht von der Wirklichkeit der Natur aus und erhebt die Gedanken dariiber hinaus, soweit der menschliche Geist tragt. Wer aber im 'Leben'... vorwiegend ein 'Prinzip der Weltanschauung und Problem der Wissenschaft' sieht [a citation from Krieck], kann leicht den Boden unter den FuBen verlieren, die Gesetze des Lebens miBachten und in lebensfeindlichen Gedankengebauden das Ziel seiner Arbeit finden" (RoBner [1939, 73]). 105. Geuter (1992, 281-83). 106. Lifton (1986, 31-32). 107. Projektgruppe "Volk und Gesundheit" (1982, 39). 108. See Wuttke-Groneberg (1980a, 38). 109. Lifto (1986, 418-29). 110. Aly, Chroust, and Pross (1994, 12-14). 111. One of the the points made in the original draft of this book was that the medical crimes of the Third Reich involved a far broader level of blame and responsibility than would be suggested by the trial's focus on a mere 350 physicians. Many of German medicine's leading university professors and scientists, if they did not actually collaborate in murder, nevertheless took advantage of the experimental "opportunities" being developed at the various concentration camps. "Only the secret consent of the professions of science and politics can explain why the names of [these] high-ranking scientists are constantly dropped during this trial," the authors wrote in 1947. Mitscherlich was sued for slander for making such claims and was forced to remove several particularly damning assertions from the final version of the trial report. When 10,000 copies of the German-language version of that report were then released in 1949, earmarked exclusively for members of the West German Chamber of Physicians, every last copy disappeared—presumably into the basement of the West German Chamber— and not a single book made it into broader circulation. There were no reviews, no responses at all to its release. "It was as if the book had never been written," as Mitscherlich would later recall. The book became more widely known only after its translation and publication in English. Its uncompromising tone of condemnation and self-recrimination played a role in the international rehabilitation of German medicine, even as

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271 Mitscherlich himself, ironically enough, continued to be ostracized and slandered by his colleagues at home (Aly, Chroust, and Pross [1994, 5-6]). 112. Mitscherlich and Mielke (1949, 152), with statements by three American authorities identified with the Nuremberg medical trial: Andrew C. Ivy, Telford Taylor, Leo Alexander, and a note on medical ethics by Albert Deutsch (including the new Hippocratic oath of the World Medical Association). 113. Weizsacker to Monakow, 21 October 1929, Monakow Papers, Zurich. 114. Compare Weizsacker to Frau Driesch, 21 April 1941, Driesch NachlaB, Leipzig. 115. Wyatt and Teuber (1944, 237). 116. Compare Kutemeyer's remarks in "Podiumsgesprach: Viktor von Weizsacker—heute," in Hahn and Jacob (1986, 168). Here she suggests that Weizsacker tended systematically to ignore or play down the influence of psychosomatically oriented Jewish colleagues on his own thinking. Wyatt and Teuber also believed that "Weizsacker's physiological and clinical work is clearly related to, if not often dependent on, Kurt Goldstein's work in this field" (Wyatt and Teuber [1944, 237]). 117. "Es scheint, als ob in den Wissenschaften es beinahe ein Gesetz sei, daB eine Epoche nur Eines sagt, indem sie ein Anderes, das sie auch weiB, verschweigt" (Weizsacker [1927, 177]). 118. For a sense of the breadth, see Weizsacker's collected works in ten volumes, edited by Peter Achilles. Dieter Janz, Martin Schrenk, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, 1986, Gesammelte Schriften in 10 Bdnden (Suhrkamp Verlag). 119. Compare, for example Stephan Dressier, 1989, Viktor von Weizsacker : medizinische Anthropologic und Philosophie (Vienna: Ueberreuter-Wiss.); Thomas Henkelmann, 1986, Viktor von Weizsacker (1886-1957) : Materialien zu Leben und Werk; mit einer Einfuhrung in die Gestaltkreisexperimente von Lothar Klinger (New York : Springer-Verlag); Winfried Rorarius, 1991, Viktor von Weizsdckers Pathosophie (Stuttgart: Thieme); Thomas Reuster, 1990, Viktor von Weizsdckers Rezeption der Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: From man n-Hoi zboog). 120. See Baader and Schultz (1980). 121. Wuttke-Groneberg (1980b, 113-38). 122. He wrote: "Auch v. Weizsacker geht es um einen ProzeB gegen den Kranken, der dessen Vernichtung einkalkuliert; nicht im Ziel, sondern in der Methode unterscheidet er sich von dem bisher Dargestellten" (Wuttke-Groneberg [ 1980b, 120]). 123. Weizsacker (1935). 124. Weizsacker (1947/48, 91 -125). 125. [Discussion to] Wuttke-Groneberg (1.980b, 139^10). 126. "[I]n der konkreten Entscheidung erst zeigt sich, daB eine Sozialpolitik, die nur Erhaltungspolitik treiben will, sich einer Illusion ausliefert. Die iibernimmt vom Arzte eine Haltung, die nicht einmal dieser selbst durchzuhalten vermag: die des Erhaltens um jeden Preis. Auch als Arzte sind wir verantwortlich beteiligt an der Aufopferung des Individuums fiir die Gesamtheit. Es ware illusionar, ja es ware nicht einmal fair, wenn der deutsche Arzt seinen verantwortlichen Anteil an der notgeborenen Vernichtungspolitik glaubte nicht beitragen zu mussen. "An der Vernichtung unwerten Lebens oder unwerter Zeugungsfahigkeit, an der Ausschaltung des Unwerten durch Internierung, an der staatpolitischen Vernichtungspolitik war er auch friiher beteiligt. . . . Aber . . . es gab (und gibt heute noch) keine

272

• NOTES TO CONCLUSION vollstandige Vernichtungslehre, welche die rein als Erhaltungslehre aufgebaute Heilkunde erganzt" (Weizsacker [1935, 323]). 127. Hubschmann(1980, 142). 128. For example, compare Weizsacker, 1951, "Der kranke Mensch: eine Einfuhrung in die medizinische Anthropologic," Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9, Falle und Probleme; KUnische Vorstellungen. 129. "Im Milita'rarchiv Kattowitz/Polen wurden iiber 200 Krankenakten aus dem Jahre 1942 und 1943 gefunden mit ausdriicklichen Begleitschreiben folgenden Inhalts: 'Neurologisches Forschungsinstitut, Prof, von Weizsacker, Breslau, Neudorfer StraBe 118-120. In der Anlage iibersende ich Ihnen ein nach Ihrem Schreiben vom 23.3.1942 fixiertes Gehirn und Ruckenmark des Kindes. . . . (Name und Geburtsdatum) mit der Bitte, es hirnpathologisch untersuchen zu wollen. Einen Auszug aus der Krankengeschichte fiige ich bei. Der leitende Arzt (Hecker), Prov. Ober med. Ratin.' Es handelt sich um dissoziale und behinderte Kinder und Jugendliche aus der Kinderfachabteilung der Jugendpsychiatrischen Klinik Loben (Lublinic). Aus den Krankenakten geht unmiBverstandlich hervor, daB diese Gehirne der Kindereuthanasie entstammten" ("Podiumgesprach: Viktor von Weizsacker—heute"[1986, 169]). 130. Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland (1982, 159). 131. Aly (1985, 64, 77). 132. "Podiumsgesprach: Viktor von Weizsacker—heute" (1986, 170). 133. Hahn said: "Ich mu'B an dieser Stelle jetzt leider unterbrechen. Ich glatibe, diese Fragen sind so wichtig, daB man sie an andere Stelle weiterfiihren und klaren muBte." The protests from a "Zwischensprecher" are recorded on p. 188. See "Podiumgesprach: Viktor von Weizsacker—heute" (1986, 187-88). 134. "Podiumgesprach: Viktor von Weizsacker—heute"(1986, 95). 135. On the Kreisau circle, see Roon (1971). 136. William Spanos, 1990, "Heidegger, Nazism, and the repressive hypothesis: the American appropriation of the question," Boundary 17 (2): 199-281. 137. David Lehman, 1992, "Paul de Man: the plot thickens, (the dubious character of the late deconstructionist, college professor and Nazi journalist," New York Times Book Review, 24 May 1992, p. 1. 138. Kalikow (1983). 139. Bartholomaus Grill, 1986, "Jakob von Uexkull: Ein Preis fur kleine Taten," Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt (14. Dezember) 50: 2. 140. Bramwell (1989,272-73). 141. For a discussion of a reactionary potential some people have seen in the Greens, see Hbrst Mewes, 1983, "The West German Green Party," New German Critique 25 (winter); for a warning on the repressive potential of the American "New Age," see Berman (1984, 294-95). CONCLUSION

Epigraph is from page 402. 1. Cited in Proctor (1988, 302-3). 2. Wellek (1957, 1-5). 3. Mitscherlich (1969). 4. Heske(1954, 104). 5. For a thoughtful discussion of this tendency, see Schnadelbach (1984).

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6. For example, Lukacs (1955); Viereck (1965); Stern (1961); Mosse (1961); Sondheimer(1968). A useful alternative perspective from this same generation of scholarship is the still classic Dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno [1972]). 7. The ways in which present-day scientists may evaluate that older science is here less the point than noticing its generally intact role in generating knowledge deemed acceptable by the standards of the time. 8. Compare Danziger (1990, 334). 9. Compare Smith (1992) 10. Keller (1992, 4). 11. Roszak (1969, 54-55); for a more critical reading of both Roszak and the couterculture, see Marx (1988). 12. Cited in Marx (1988, 160). 13. Some examples here, culled from on-line bibliographic databases, include (in alphabetical order): Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake, 1992, Trialogues at the edge of the west; Chaos, creativity, and the resacralization of the world (Santa Fe, New Mex.: Bear & Co.); Theodor Abt, 1989. Progress without loss of soul: Toward a wholistic approach to modernization planning, trans, by Boris L. Matthews (Wilmette, 111.: Chiron Publications); Gregory Bateson, 1971, Steps to an ecology of mind (New York: Ballantine Books); David Bohm, 1981, Wholeness and the implicate order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul); John Briggs and F. David Peat, 1989, Turbulent mirror: An illustrated guide to chaos theory and the science of wholeness (New York: Harper & Row); Margaret J. Christie and Peter G. Mellet, eds., 1986, The psychosomatic approach: Contemporary practice of whole-person care (New York: Wiley); Robert Maris Cunningham, 1977, The wholistic health centers: A new direction in health care (Battle Creek, Mich.: W. K. Kellogg Foundation); Larry Geis, Alta Picchi Kelly, and Aidan Kelly, eds., 1980, The new healers: Healing the whole person (Berkeley, Calif,: And/or Press); David Ray Griffin, ed., 1988. The reen'chantment of science: Postmodern proposals (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press); Robert Harsieber, 1989, Das Neue Weltbild: New Age, Paradigmenwechsel, Wendezeit: Entstehen eines Ganzheitlichen, Holistischen Denkens (Vienna: Hpt.-verlags Gesellschaft); Minas Kafatos, 1990, The conscious universe: Part and whole in modern physical theory (New York: Springer Verlag); David Lorimer, 1990, Whole in one: The near-death experience and the ethic of interconnectedness (London: Arkana); J. E. Lovelock, 1991, Gaia, The practical science of planetary medicine (London: Gaia Books); Carolyn Merchant, 1992, Radical ecology: Tlie search for a livable world (New York: Routledge); Douglas Joseph Huntington Moore, 1992, A metaphysics of the computer; The reality machine and a new science for the holistic age (San Francisco, Calif.: Mellen Research University Press); Shirley Nicholson and Brenda Rosen, eds., 1992, Gala's hidden life: The unseen intelligence of nature (Wheaton, 111.: Quest Books); Harry Settanni, 1990, Holism—A philosophy for ' today; Anticipating the twenty-first century (New York: P. Lang). 14. Donna Haraway, 1985, "A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 15 (2): 65-107. 15. For history and analysis, see Harrington (1987); Harrington and Oepen (1989). 16. Compare Harrington, 1996, "Unmasking suffering's masks: Reflections on old and new memories of Nazi medicine," Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, special edition: Social Suffering (winter) 125(1): 181-205. 17. Roszak (1969, 77).

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18. "[D]ie Nazis mit ihrem kalkulierten Buchhalterrafionalismus auf stuckhaftes Denken in extremen MaBe dressiert waren und Menschen als Stucke betrachteten. Es ist einfach falsch, die andere Art des Denkens, die Denkweise der nicht-dominanten Gehirn-halfte als irrational abzutun; das Denken in Ganzheiten ist nicht irrational" (Portele[1979, 35]). 19. For some references, see Bramwell (1989). 20. I am indebted to Loren Goldner at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, for bringing these details to my attention in an unpublished manuscript reviewing Faye's work.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Driesch (Hans) Papers (1924-1936), No. 250 of the archive collection of the University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. Goldstein (Kurt) Papers (1903-1965), Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University (Butler Library), New York City. I" Monakow (Constantin von) Papers, Institut fur Geschichte der Medizin, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. Rosenberg-Amt Papers and Correspondence, Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich, Germany. Uexkull (Jakob von) TeilnachlaB, Zoologisches Institut und Zoologisches Museum, Bibliothek, University of Hamburg (Uexkiill's extensive reprint collection and Institute private library; some photos). Uexkull (Jakob von) and Institut fiir Umweltforschung, Institutional Documents, Senat der Freien und Hanseat Hamburg Staatsarchiv {HSA) ABC StraBe 19, Hamburg 36, Germany. Uexkull-Chamberlain Correspondence. Signature 196 (r) NachlaB HSC. Richard Wagner-Gedenstatte der Stadt Bayreuth, Germany. Wertheimer (Max) Papers, Manuscripts and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, New York City. SELECTED PUBLISHED SOURCES

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Wertheimer, Max. 1922. Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt. I. Psychol. Forschung 1: 47-58. Republished in Sourcebook of Gestalt psychology, translated and edited by W. D. Ellis, 12-16. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1938. . 1924. Gestalt theory. A 1924 lecture to the Berlin Kant Gesellschaft. Translated by N. Nairn-Allison with a foreword by Kurt Riezler. Republished in Social Research 11(1) (February 1944). 1925. fiber Gestalttheorie: Vortrag gehalten in der Kantgesellschaft Berlin 17. Dezember 1924. Erlangen: Im Weltkreis Verlag. . 1934. On truth. Social Research 1 (2). Republished in Documents of Gestalt psychology, edited by M. Henle, 19-28. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. . 1935. Some problems in the theory of ethics. Social Research 2(3). Republished in Documents of Gestalt psychology, ed. M. Henle, 29^-41. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. . 1937. On the concept of democracy. In Political and Economic Democracy, edited by M. Ascoli and F. Lehmann. W. W. Norton & Co. Republished in Documents of Gestalt psychology, edited by M. Henle, 42-51. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. -. 1940. A story of three days. In Freedom, its meaning, edited by R. N. Anshen. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Republished in Documents of Gestalt Psychology, edited by M. Henle. 52-64. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. . 1959 (1945). Productive thinking. Edited by Michael Wertheimer. New York: Harper & Brothers. . 1991. Zur Gestaltpsychologie menschlicher Werte: Aufsatze 1934-1940. Edited by Hans-Jiirgen Walter Opladen: Westdeutsche Verlag. Wertheimer, Michael. 1980. Max Wertheimer. Gestalt prophet. Gestalt Theory 2: 317. — . 1982. Gestalt theory, holistic psychologie und Max Wertheimer. Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie 190: 125-40. Wilder, J. 1959. Kurt Goldstein—The thinker. Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. 21 November 1958. American Journal of Psychotherapy 13 (3): 687-92. Winkler, Gerhard J. 1986. Christian von Ehrenfels als Wagnerianer. In Christian von Ehrenfels. Leben und Werk, edited by R. Fabian. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wise, M. Norton. 1987. "How do sums count?" On the cultural origins of statistical causality. In The probabilistic revolution. Vol. 1, Ideas in history, edited by Lorenz Kriiger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wittenberg, Erich. 1938. Die wissenschaftskrisis in Deutschland im Jahre 1919: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Theoria: A Swedish Journal of Philosophy and Psychology 4: 235-64. Wohl, Robert. 1979. The generation of 1914. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wolf, K. Lothar, and Wilhelm Troll. 1942. Goethes Morphologischer Auftrag: Versuch einer naturwissenschaftlichen Morphologic Vol. 1 of Die Gestalt: Abhandlungen zu einer naturwissenschaftlichen Morphologie, edited by W. Pinder, W. Troll, and L. Wolf. Halle (Saale): Max Niemeyer. Wuttke-Groneberg, Walter, ed. 1980a. Medizin im Nationalsozialismus: Ein Arbeitsbuch. Tubingen: Schwabische Verlagsgesellschaft. . 1980b. Von Heidelberg nach Dachau, Medizin im Nationalsozialismus, edited by G. Baader and U. Schultz. Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft Gesundheit mbH. t is

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Wyatt, F., and H. L. Teuber. 1944. German psychology under the Nazi system,19331940. Psychological Review 51: 229-47. Yakovlev, Paul I. 1970. Constantin von Monakow (1853-1930). In The founders of neurology: One hundred and forty-six biographical sketches by eighty-eight authors, edited by Webb Haymaker and Francis Schiller. 2d ed. Springfield, III.: Thomas. Zieger, Renate. 1968. Einleitung. Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch. Eine Personalbibliographie, bearbeitet von Renate Zieger. Jahresarbeit von Bibliographic Fachschule fur Bibliothekare an wissenschaftlichen Bibliothek. Leipzig: Deutscher Platz. Thesis. Driesch Papers. Zimmerman, Karl. 1937. Ganzheit und Lebensgemeinschaft: Ein Betrachtung zur Lehrplangestaltung des Biologieunterrichtes. Nationalsozialistisches Bildungswesen: Einzige erziehungswissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bewegung 12: 259-74. Zumbach, Clark. 1984 The transcendent science: Kant's conception of biological methodology. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series. Vol. 15. The Hague: M. Nijhoff: Boston: Kluwer Boston.

I N D E X

Abbau (Monakow), 82 Ahnenerbe (Nazi genealogy organization), 195,197 Amerikanisierung, or "Americanization," 76, 222n.85 Anschauung (Uexkull), 40, 46, 48, 65, 107 anti-Semitism: after German unification, 21; anti-Semitic "scholarship," xx; infinde siecle period, 24. See also Jews "Aryan science" movements, 198, 263n.l0 association, laws of, 17 associationism: challenges to, 27-28; and German psycholoy, 15; and sensationalism, 14; as theory of cognition, 14 Astel, K.: attack on holism, 195-97; and SS teachings, 195 atomism, xvii, 27, 29; approach to brain function, 15-18, 146; atomization, 4, 12, 154; in clinical practice, 160

Carlyle, T.: on associationism, 14; "Signs of the Times," 14 Camap, R., 126; encounter with Driesch, 19192 Cassirer, E.: and Goldstein, 148-49; Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 149 Chamberlain, H. S.: anti-Darwinism of, 1067; correspondence with Uexkull, 33, 36, 45, 46-47, 55-58, 60, 62-65, 67; on Gestalt v.v. chaos, 106-8; Goethean variation of Gestalt, 106, 178; on Jewish "infiltration," xx-xxi, 107, 233n.l23; meeting with Hitler, 108; and Nazism, 224n.14, 230-31 n. 100; race as Gestalt, 107, 178. Writings: Democracy and Freedom, 57-58; Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 107; Immanuel Kant, 47; Lebenslehre (Theory of Life), 106; Man and God, 64 chaos: and entropy, 105-6, 109-10; Gestalt vs., 104-11; "Jewish chaos," 107-8, 175, 181-85 Bauplan (Uexkull), 40, 52, 56, 65-67 conservation of energy, law of, 8 Bavink, B.: on Christian concerns regarding crisis in medicine: and call for holistic apeugenics, 185—86 Bergson, H., 81; Creative Evolution, 90-91; proach, 160-62; conference on, 162-63 "elan vital," 92 Berlin school. See Gestalt psychology Dachau, herb plantation at, 187-88, 202 (theory) Darwin, C, 10, 89; theory of "pangenesis," 49, 240n.74 DerBiologe, 177, 179, 195, 197-98 "biological medicine" (New German TherDarwinism, 48; anti-Darwinism, 38-39, apy), 186-87, 193, 195,203 44, 55, 106-7; and the Third Reich, 262n.2 biophysicist program, xvi bio-politics, 59, 61,65 degenerationist thinking, 76, 82, 96, 142-43 Bismarck, O. v.: dismissal of, 24; false whole- diaschisis (Monakow), 79-80; and regeneration or renewal, 87 ness and German unification, 19-20; fomenting of internal dissension, 19-20 Dilthey, W.: challenge to positivism, 25, 27; Bleuler, E., 76, 78, 100; on localization theory, on physical vs. social sciences, 27 79; on "schizophrenia," 79 Driesch, H., 50-53, 189-93; challenge to mechanistic model, 28, 51; defense of LesBottcher, A., 182, 184 sing, 191; entelechy principle, 51-52, 61, brain damage: and brain localization, 15, 17, 97. 123, 190; vs. Gestaltists, 123-24; on 79-80; and explanations of repair, 28, 116; Haeckel, 48; organisms as equipotential sysand "Gestalt laws," 116; work of Goldstein, tems, 28, 51; as pacifist and internationalist, 145-51 190-92; political use of his work by Third brain localization: brain damage and, 15, 17, Reich, 189-90, 192; and Uexkiill, 39, 4879-80; Goldstein's view on, 152; Mona53, 61, 70; and vitalism, xvi, 51-53, 123, kow's view on, 72, 79-81, 152; sensory190-91; work on parapsychology, 191-92; motor functioning and, 15-17,77 work on sea-urchin egg. 28, 50-51. WritBrock, F., 44 ings: "The Science and Philosophy of the Burschenschaften, 11, 19

304

INDEX * stein's term, 147, 163; and National SocialDriesch, H. (cont.) ism, 108, 138, 178-79; quasi-mystical interOrganism," 51-52; 'The 'Soul' as an Elementary Factor of Nature," 80. See also vi- pretation of, 103-4, 111, 138; Wertheimer's term, 112, 138-39; and Wholeness, 104, talism 156, 178, 181, 184 Du Bois-Reymond, E., xvi, 7, 99; on Ameri"Gestalt laws," 115; and brain damage, kanisierung, or "Americanization," 222n.85. Writings: Investigations on Animal 116 Electricity, 8; "On the Life Force," 11 Gestalt psychology (theory): American version, problems of, 129-31; attacks on, 124Ehrenfels, C. v.: Allgestalter (God), 111; chal- 28; challenge to associationism, 28; defined, 103; and "figure-ground" perception, 115, lenge to association model, 27; as eugeni152; Goldstein and, 152-53; and holism, cist, 109, 111; on Gestalt vs. Chaos, 108-11; 103, 121, 124-28; as new epistemology, and new holistic perspective, 28; on pur117, 119-20; physical Gestalts, 117, 124; posive consciousness,. 111; and Wagner, social implications of, 121. See also Kohler, 110; and Wertheimer, 108, 114. Writings: W.; Wertheimer, M. Kosmogonie, 109-11; "On Gestalt Qualities," 108-9 "Gestalt seeing," 29 Eisner, K.: Psychopathia Spiritualis, 24 Goethe, J. W. v.: aesthetic-teleological view, 5; Emergency Society of German Learning, 165 attack on Newtonian view, 171, 217n.8; entelechy principle (Driesch), 51-52, 61, 97, Gestalten. 5, 27, 123, 178; "God-Life-Nature" concept, 66; the Goethean "Schau," 123,190 163; and holism, 29, 171, 178, 199; and entropy, chaos and, 105-6, 109-10 morphology, 29, 178; theory of colors "essence"; Goldstein on, 150-51, 155-56, {Farbenlehre), 27, 171, 2l7n.8; vision of 158, 159; Husserl on, 158 "Wholeness," 4-7, 29, 178 Goldstein, K., 140-74; on "abstract capacity," "figure-ground" perception, 115, 147, 152 148-19, 154-56, 159, 169; actualization and first law of thermodynamics, 8 wholeness, 150, 159, 170; in America, 165— "Forman thesis," 214n. 17 Freud, S., 78-79, 83; Civilization and Its Dis- 73; and Berlin Gestalt theorists, 152; on the biology of fascism, 166-68; boyhood and contents, 85-86, 137; Jackson's influence youth, 140-41; call for holistic clinical pracon, 238-39n.44; reaction to World War 1, tice, 159-63; call for regeneration, 142—45; 85; and somatic medicine, 161 Freudsche Vereinigung (Freud Organization), and Cassirer, 148-49; on courage, 145, 15657, 159; denouncement and detention by 79 Fromm, E.: and Goldstein, 157; Man for Him- Nazis, 164-65; "essence" and free choice, 150-51, 155-56, 158, 159; on existential self 157 anxiety, 149-51, 155, 159;finalyears, 171 — Fromm-Reichmann, F.: and Goldstein, 157 74; and Gestalt theory, 152-53; Goethean Fuhrerprinzip [leader principle], 179-80 sympathies of, 171; his holistic epistemolFiilop-Miller, R.: The Power and Secrets of the ogy, 163; and holism, 140, 145-18, 151-56, Jesuits, 196 159-63; insights from brain-damaged soldiers, 145-51; Kantian influence, 141; on Ganzheitpsychologie (holistic psychology), Klages, 154-55; and Monakow, 152; on nat124. See also Krueger, F.; Leipzig school ural science and materialism, 143; and pheGelb, A., 116, 128; work with Goldstein, 146nomenology, 157-58; political affiliations, 48 164; race hygiene monograph, 142—44, 162; Germany: failed liberal revolution, 11-12; fin redefining reason, 155-56; relationship to de siecle upheavals, 23—30; unification: Em- Freud, 258n.94; on science in nuclear age, pire formation, 19-20; World War I, 30-33, 171; self-actualizing brain, 150, 154; and 54-56, 82-88. See also National Socialism; Tillich, 159, 255n.39; and Weimar culture, Weimar Republic 156-57, 163; and Wernicke, 141-42; Gestalt: vs. Chaos, 104-11; Ehrenfels on, 108- "wholeness" in human encounter, 169-70; 11; and the Fuhrerprinzip, 179-80; work with Gelb, 146-48. Writings: Der Goethean term, 5, 27, 123, 138, 178; Gold-

305 * INDEX Aufbau des Organismus (The Organism), gious instinct, 95; and syneidesis, 97; 153, 158, 173; "Disease and Social StandWorldhorme, 90 ing" (lecture), 164; "The Holistic Perspec- Human Rights League, 190 tive in Medicine," 163; "Remarks on SigHusserl, E.: on "essence," 158; Ideas for a nificance of Biology for Sociology, with Pure Phenomenology, 158 Particular Attention to Authority," 166-68; "The Significance of the Mind-Body Prob- "immanent structuralism," 114—17 lem for Medical Practice," 160, 162 industrialization, 143; German cultural reGorilla-Machine (Uexkull), 64-65 sponses to, 8-9, 14; and the Machine, 20Green Party of Germany, 206, 212 21; new spin on, 61 Gurwitsch, A.: and Goldstein, 157-58; Theory Institute for Research into the Consequences of the Field of Consciousness, 158 of Brain Injuries, 145—16, 150 Institute of Hygiene (Goldstein), under Nazis, Haeckel, E., 10, 19, 48, 89. See also Darwin199 ism International Society for Psychotherapy, Haering,T.T 179 160 Hecht, G., 194 Heidegger, M.; Being and Time, 54; on Jackson, H. J.: Goldstein's awareness of, 149; Driesch and Uexkull, 53; renunciation of acinfluence on Freud, 238-39n.44; influence ademic freedom, 71; Uexkiill's influence on, on Monakow, 81, 82, 92; on language and 34,53-54 consciousness, 254n.38 Helmholtz, H. v., xvi, 7;firstlaw of thermody- "the Jewish question," 21; Uexkiill on, 60, 62namics, 8; myograph, 8; work on optics and 63 vision, 14 Jews: Chamberlain on, xx-xxi, 107, 232n.l23; Hertwig, O.: The State as Organism, 61 vs. the German race, 181-82; identified with Hitler, A., 108, 175, 177, 179, 181, 191 "mechanism," xx-xxi, 21, 175, 181-85; holism, 28, 269n.94; American version of, "Jewish chaos," 107-8, 175, 181-85; Jewxxii, 173-74, 211; clinical holism, 213n.9; ish self-hate, 63; removal from Moabit hosin clinical practice, 159-62; decline of Nazi pital, 164. See also anti-Semitism holism, 193-99; and Gestalt psychology, Jung, C. G., 76, 92; reaction to World War I, 103, 121, 124-28; Goethean views of, 29, 85, 243n.l35 171, 178, 199; of Goldstein, 140, 145-48, 151-56, 159-63; holistic medicine, in Nazi Kant, I., 93, 97, 141; on academic freedom, era, 185-88, 193, 199; holistic opposition to 236n.l72; aesthetic and teleological judgNazism, 188-93; and intuition, xvi; vs. the ment, 5; Chamberlain on, 47; "natural purMachine, xvii, 3, 9, 32; vs. mechanism, xix, pose" (Naturzwecke), 5; and teleological 10, 194-99, 212; of Monakow, 73, 95, 100, causality, xvii, 5; Uexkull's reading of, 41, 102; and National Socialism, xxi, 175-77, 45,47. Writings: Critique ofJudgment, 5, 6, 181; Nazificalion of, 175-77, 188-89; and 29; Critique of Pure Reason, xvi, 4-5, 13 New German Therapy, 186-87; outside Klages, L.: Goldstein on, 154-55: Reason as Germany, xxii; as pluralistic phenomenon, the Antagonist of the Soul, 32 xvii, xxi; postwar evaluations of, 207-8; "racializing"of, xxi, 181-82; recent cultural Koffka, K., 130; Driesch on, 124; and Wertheimer, 115 experiments with, 209-11; of Uexkull, 34, Kohler, W.: debate with Driesch, 123-24; em53; and Wertheimer, 29, 103, 112 igration to America, 130-32; and Gestalt Holismus, 196; Haldane's adaptation to bioltheory, 116, 123, 132; and Goldstein, 152; ogy, 269n.94 on physical Gestalts, 117, 124; on values in nature, 131-32; and Wertheimer, 103, 115Horkheimer, M.: on dialectic materialism and 16. Writings: Gestalt Psychology, 131; The positivism, 122; dialogue with Gestalt thePlace of Value in a World of Facts, 131-32. ory, 121-23; "Materialism and MetaSee also Gestalt psychology; Wertheimer physics," 122-23 horme concept (Monakow). 88-94, 100-101; Kotschau, K.: and Astel's attack on holism, and the evolutionary arrow, 90; and reli195, 197; on "machine people," 186; and

306

INDEX Machine society, xvi, xvii; reaction against, Kotschau, K. (cont.) New German Therapy, 186-87,193,195; pro- 25; the rise of, 19-21,30 materialism, 12-13,23, 142-13 tected by Streicher, 197 Kraepelin, E.: on dementia praecox, 78; Inter- mechanism, xv, xvi, 3; antimechanistic science, 25-29, 34, 51-52; in biology, 10, 28, pretation of psychosis, 78, 144 50, 80; vs. holism, xix, 10, 194-99,212; and Kreisau Circle, 205 industrialization, 8-9; Jews as, 175, 181-85; Krueger, F.: attacks on Berlin Gestaltists, 124, vs. materialism, 13; in Nazi politics, 194-99; 126-28; Ganzheitpsychologie, 124; on misvs. Wholeness, xx, 10 use of "wholeness," 179; in praise of Hitler, 177; on supremacy of the whole, 185. See mechanists: Kantian influence on, 13-14; on also Leipzig school mind and brain, 13-18; and nationalism, 10-11; quest for unity in nature, 7-12; Kiihne, W, 39 vitalist-mechanist controversy, 7, 11, 48Kulturkampf, 20 54 Kiitemeyer, M., 204-5 medicine, crisis in. See crisis in medicine Merkmale (Uexkull), 43 Lamarck, J., 89 Merleau-Ponty, M.: and Goldstein, 158; PheLang, F., Metropolis, 21 nomenology of Perception, 158 Langbehn, J.: attack on science, 27; Remmetaphor in science, xix, xx, xxiii, 208, 212 brandt as Teacher, 20 Law to Prevent Hereditary Sick Offspring, 185 Meyer-Abich, A., 177, 179-80, 186, 190, 193, 197, 269n.94 Lebenshom, 195 Meynert, T., 17; mutualism as holistic view, Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy), 32 220n.49 Lehmann, E.: and "Aryan science" movements, 177, 198; criticism and removal of, mind, machine model of, 13-18 197-98. Writings: Biological Will: Means mind-body duality, 160-62 and Goals of Biological Work in the NewMinkowski, M., 74-75, 81 Reich, 177; Biology in Present Life, \11 Mitscherlich, A. and F. Mielke, 207; Doctors Leipzig school: Aktualgenese (microgcnesis), of Infamy and its scandalous suppression, 200, 270n. Ill; ostracism and slander of, 126; attacks on Berlin Gestaltists, 124, 126270-71 n. 111; and Weizsacker's holism, 28; concept of "Structure," 127; and Ganzheitpsychologie, 124; racist, conserva- 200 tive themes, 127-28, 138. See also Krue- Monakow, C. v., 72-102; Abbau (breakdown), ger, F. 82; and Agnes Pariss, 77-78; and Bergson, 90-92; boyhood and youth, 74-75; Brain Lessing, T., persecution of, 191 Anatomical Institute, 75; and brain localiza"Life's laws," 175 tion theory, 72, 79-80; chronogenic localizlocalization. See brain localization ation, 80-81, 89; diaschisis (cerebral shock), Loeb, J., The Organism as a Whole, 53 79-80, 87; ergokymes, 90; on evolution, logical positivists, 126; attack on Driesch, 90-92, 94; and Goldstein, 152; hierarchies 191-92. See also Carnap, R. in the brain, 81, 92-95; and holism, 73, 95, Lorenz, Konrad, 34; influence of Uexkull on, 100, 102; horme and instinct, 88-94, 97, 225-26n.49; postwar defense of Uexkiill, 100-101; influence of Freud on, 78-79, 83, 236n. 173; Pragung or "imprinting," 86; and Maria Waser, 72, 75, 92, 95, 102; 226n.49 and mysticism, 73, 75, 100-102; neurobioLudwig, C, kymograph, 8 logy of scientific knowledge, 98-102; nihilistic crisis of, 84-86; and "orientation" vs. Machine, the: as brain and mind model, 13-18; "feeling," 92-96; postwar thinking, 88; reand fascism, 189; holism v5., xvii, 3, 9, 32; actions to his work, 100-101; on the search humans as, 8-9; and industrialization, 20for God, 95-96; struggle, role in evolution, 21; Jews identified with, xx-xxi, 21; rejec95; "syneidesis" and morality, 96—98; tention of the model, 18, 48; sick man as, sions of personality, 73, 76, 86; work on vi185-88; Uexkull and the "Gorilla-Masual and auditory systems, 77; World War 1, chine," 63-68; as war engine, 20, 31; alienation, 82-88. Writings: "Attempt at a Wholeness vs., xvi, xvtii-xix, 104, 189, Biology of the Instinct World," 87; Biologi209-11 cal Introduction to the Study of Neurology "machine people" (Kotschau), 186

307 * INDEX * and Psychopathology, 87, 100; Brain Pa-organic physicists, 14; manifesto of, 7 thology, 77; "Feelings, Morality and Brain," 87; Localization in the Conex and Break-Pariss, A,, and Monakow, 77-78 down of Function Through Cortical Le- phenomenological philosophy, 146, 157-58. sions, 80; "Psychiatry and Biology," 87; See also Husserl, E. "Religion and the Nervous System," 88, 90; phrenology, 15 "The Syneidesis, the Biological Conpositivism: and attack on Driesch, 191-92; science," 87; 'Truth, Error and Lies," 87 Horkheimer on, 122; revolt against, 23, 25, 78,131-32, 134 "Monakow circle," later Psychiatric-Neurological Society, 78; and breakaway Freud Orga- Prague Circle, 112 nization, 79 Psychologische Forschung (Psychological ReMourgue, R., 91, 100 search), 116,152,157 Mrugowsky, J., healing and killing, within psycho-physical parallelism, xvii Nazi holism, 199 psychosomatic medicine, xvii, 160, 163, 164, Muller, J., 8; doctrine of "specific energies," 200 45 Pusirewsky, M. v., and Monakow, 76, 83, 87, music: and Gestalt theory, 120; in holistic 97 analogies, 28, 52-53, 66, 109; and transcendence, 110, 114; Wagner and Bayreuth, 24- race biology: of the Nazis, 70, 262n.2; and 25, 110; Wertheimer's love and talent for, Umwelt theory, 69-70 112, 114 reductionism, xix; challenge to, 27, 29; in Musil, R., 121 nineteenth century physics, 9; physiological, 9-10 nationalism: and the mechanists, 10-11; Reich, W., on fascism and the Machine, 189 and racism, 21; and World War I, 30, Reichsbund fiir Biologie (Reich Division for 54-56 Biology). 197 National Socialism, xx; Gestalt and, 108, 138, Romantics, German: influence of Kant, 4-5; 178-79; holism and, xxi, 175-77, IS I; literresponse to Newtonian science, 4, 217n.8; ature of, 108; as "politically applied bioland Wholeness, 10 ogy," 175; reconstructed memories of, 210- Rosenberg. A., 175, 181, 182, 194. 197 11;riseof, 128-30; Uexkull and, 68-71; Roux, W.: and "developmental mechanics," volkisch-holistic rhetoric of, 175-77, 179, 10; and mechanism in embryology, 10, 28, 182, 184-85; Wholeness and, 177-78 50 Nazified biology and psychology, 175-80 Nazi holism, 185-88, 193-99 Sander, F: Gestalt experiments of, 126-27; on Nazi medicine, 185-88, 195, 199, 200, 202-3 "inferior genetic material," 184-85; on Nazism, reconstructed memories of, 210-211 Wholeness and Gestalt, 178, 184-85. See also Leipzig school Nazi Wholeness, 175—206; case of Weizsacker, 200-206; decline of Nazi Schneider, case of (Goldstein), 146-49 holism, 193-99; Driesch's opposition to, Schopenhauer, A., 93 188-93; eugenics and euthanasia, 185-86; science: antimechanistic reaction to, 25-29, Gestalt, Goethe, and Fuhrerprinzip, 178-80; 34, 51-52, 188; as cultural critique, 30-33; holistic medicine, 185-88, 193; Jew as as disenchanting force, xv-xvi, 65, 118-19; chaos and mechanism, 181-85 effect of language and metaphor on, 208-9; vs. faith, 13; and Machine/Wholeness opponeurology, xix; antimechanistic approach, 28; sition, 209—11; New Age holistic science, and mechanically associating mind, 15-17 209-11; scope of "real" science, 208, 212; New German Therapy ("biological mediin the Third Reich, 175-80, 182; Weber on, cine"), 186-87, 193, 195,203 xvi, 118 Newton, I.: and decomposition of white light, 217n.8; law of universal gravity, 4 second law of thermodynamics, 105 Nietzsche, F, 24, 127, 211; The Birth of Trag-self-actualizing brain, 150, 154. See also Goldedy, 25; "On the Genealogy of Morals," 94 stein, K. "nihilistic" medicine. See "therapeutic Semon, R.: heritable engrams, 89; The Mneme nihilism" as a Principle of Preservation in the TransNuremberg doctors' trial, 200, 203, 270n.l 11 formation of Organic Processes, 89

308

INDEX * 62; "God or Gorilla," 64-65; "New Quessensationalism, 14 tions in Experimental Biology," 51; Outer Smuts, J. C, and term "holism," xxii, 269n.94 World (Umwelt] and Inner World of AniSocial Democratic Party: outlawed by Bismals, 42, 53; Science of Meaning, 66; Theomarck, 20; and Weimar Republic, 31 retical Biology, 44, 59; "Volk und Staat," 56 Society for Holism Research, 207 Umwelt theory (Uexkull), 34, 41-14, 46, 65Sonderweg thesis, 214n.24 70; Institute for Umwelt Research (UniverSpemann, H.: concept of organizer, 179; dursity of Hamburg), 35, 44, 68-69; posting the Nazi years, 264n.27 Spengler, O.: Decline of the West, 106; on Ge- war symposium on, 236n.l73; and race biology, 69-70; term borrowed by Goldstein, stalt, 106 152-53 Streicher, J.: Paracelsus Institute, 268n.87; and "propaganda of death," 195, 268n.87; pro- University in Exile (New York), 129 tection of Kotschau, 197 urbanization, 8, 21 Sturm-und-Drang, 75 syneidesis, or biological conscience Virchow, R., xvi; on humans as machines, 8; (Monakow), 96-98 "On the Mechanistic Interpretation of Life," 7; paper on cellular pathology, 9-10, 12 Technik: and the "machine nation," 30; vs. soulvitalism, xvi, 10, 123; decline of, 8; and purposiveness, 6-7; vitalist-mechanist controand Kultur, xv, xx; "spiritualized," 61 versy, 7.U, 48-54. See also Driesch, H. technocrats in Nazi science, 195, 198-200, 203,211 Vogt, K.: antireligious views, 13; Investigations into the Governments of Animals, 12— "therapeutic nihilism," 144-45, 150 13 thermodynamics: entropy, chaos and, 105-6, 109-10;firstlaw, 8; second law, 105 volkisch rhetoric, 175-77, 179, 182, 184-85, 190, 191, 195, 198 Tillich, P.: and Gestalt, 250n.l 17; and Goldstein, 159, 255n.39 Wagner, R.: Art Work of the Future, 24; idea of Troeltsch, E„ 30 Troll, W. and K. L. Wolf: Gestalt: Contribu- Gesamtkunsrwerk, 24, 110; and wholeness, 24 tions to a General Morphology, 178; Goethe's Morphological Task, 178 Wagnerianism: and anti-Semitism, 25; at Bayreuth, 25, 110; "bourgeois" form of, 25; "decadent" form of, 221n.76 Uexkull, J. v., 34-71; affinity with Heidegger's views, 54; Anschauung and "fic- Wandervogel, 25 tional schemas," 40, 46,48, 65; anti-Darwin Waser, M.. Monakow and, 72, 75, 92, 95, 102 stance, 38-39, 44, 55; and antimechanistic Weber, M.: on the new epistemologies, 29-30; science, 34, 52; as aristocrat, 37-38; Baupon questions of human meaning, 118; "Scilan concept, 40, 52, 56, 65-67; boyhood and ence as a Vocation" (lecture), xv-xvi, 118 early studies, 35-36, 38; correspondence Weimar Republic: Goldstein and, 156-57, with H. S. Chamberlain, 33, 36, 45, 46-47, 163; and Social Democratic Party, 31; 55-58, 60, 62-65, 67; as critic of democUexkUIl on, 31, 59-60, 106; Wertheimer 's racy, 37-38, 58-60, 67; and Driesch, 39, vision for, 119-21 48-53, 61, 70; on Einstein's theories, 46; Weismann, A., 49 and Gorilla-Machine, 64-65; his reading of Weizsacker, V. v., 200-206; and anthropologKant, 41, 45, 47; holistic model of animal ical medicine, 202; and Driesch, 201; "Eubehavior, 34, 53; on life after death, 66-67; thanasia and Human Experimentation" Merkmale (sensory cues), 43; as mystic, 34, (essay), 203; Freudian influence on, 202; 38; and National Socialism, 68-71; reand Goldstein, 20!; and Monakow, 201; and sponse to Nazi purges, 70-71; "soap bubpatient's "Gestalt circle," 201; revelations ble" analogy, 41-42, 46; studies in animal about his Nazi past, 202-6; and Uexkull, movement, 39-40; Umwelt theory, 34, 41201; and Wertheimer, 201 44,46, 65-70; on the Weimar Republic, 31, Wellek, A., 125-27,207 59-60, 106; Wirkmale (responsive behaviors), 43; and World War I, 54-56. Writings: Wernicke, C, 77; The Aphasie Symptom ComBiology of the State [Stuatsbiotogiel, 59- plex, 17; Goldstein and, 141^12; model of brain functioning, 17-18 I

309 INDEX • Wertheimer, M., 28, 103-39; boyhood and Gestalt psychology, 152; Goethe's vision of, youth, 112-13; on Driesch's vitalism, 4-7, 29, 178; Goldstein's actualization and, 248n.98; and Ehrenfels, 108, 114; and Ein150, 159, 170; in human encounter, 169-70; stein, 113; emigration to America, 129-30; and industrialization, 3; and liberal science, "Gestalt laws," 115; "Gestalt logic," 13212; vs. the Machine, xvi, xviii-xix. 104, 189, 39; "Gestalt seeing" (Schauen, 29; and 209-11; vs. Mechanism, xx, 10; and NaGoldstein, 29, 152; his vision for Weimar, tional Socialism, 177-78; and Nazism, 189119-21; influence of Spinoza, 112; and Max 90; and New Age science, 210-11; for the Born, 113; on new understanding of science, Romantics, 10; and "unity," 10-12; and 119-20; phi experiments, 114-15, 138; and Wagner, 24; and World War I, 30-33. See politics, 113-14; talent and love for music, also Nazi Wholeness 112, 114. Writings: essay on democracy, Wirkmale (Uexkull), 43 135; Productive Thinking, 138; "Some World War 1, xx, 30-33; degeneration and reProblems in the Theory of Ethics." 134-35; newal, 82-88; Goldstein's Institute for "A Story of Three Days," essay on freedom, brain-damaged soldiers, 145-51; Monakow 136-37; "On Truth." 133-34. See also Geand, 82-88; Uexkull's Umwelt theory and. stalt psychology 54-56; Wertheimer's service as research Wetzel. R.. 197 psychologist, 113 Wholeness, xxiv; vs. Bismarckian reality, 19; Wundt, W.: and associationism in psychology, blurring meanings of, 32; and "bourgeois 15, 219n.43; changing historical representaWagnerianism," 25; degenerating into mystions of, 2I9n.43 ticism, 179; andfinde siecle upheavals, 23- Wuttke-Groneberg, W., attack on 30; and Gestalt, 104, 156, 178, 181, 184; in Weizsacker's past, 202-3

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anne Harrington is Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (Princeton).