5 - Idealism's campaign against psychology

Summary

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE IDEALIST ‘REVOLUTION’

The two decades following the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 saw a succession of attempts to redefine the fundamentals of philosophy. To some this ‘Revolution of the Spirit’ seemed as radical as the political revolution across the Rhine: Friedrich Schlegel adventurously claimed that the French Revolution, Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science) and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) were ‘the greatest tendencies of the age’. Its impact on German psychology was complex. The Idealists disliked the way psychology tended to analyse concepts down to their sensuous elements and to divide the mind into discrete faculties. Either way, it denied the unity of mind and therewith the basis of ethical autonomy. The Idealists' own theories of cognition were designed expressly to make psychology redundant. Despite short-lived successes, this endeavour largely failed. For practical and institutional reasons it proved impossible for the Idealists to make a clean break with the tradition of psychology. Idealist philosophy was deeply marked by its contact with psychology: like it or not, the Idealists' theories of cognition depended in important ways on eighteenth-century psychology. Moreover, for philosophical reasons the prospect of a clean break was a chimera. In the long term the effect of Kant's attempt to eradicate psychology achieved the opposite. In attempting to drive psychology out of philosophy, Kant drove it into science, whence, now armed with the weapon of scientific method, it mounted a reinvasion of philosophy, which has had profound consequences for its subsequent history.