We murder to dissect.
[William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned, 1798][...] physical science portrays a sterile world.
[Gibson 1960, 701]
Rostock 1928De gauche à droite: K. Lewin, D. Katz, H. Werner, Mme Katz, W. Köhler, A. Michotte, E. Rubin, M. Wertheimer.
Credit [Université catholique de Louvain (1835-1969) 1947]
1In 1928, David and Rosa Katz organized a meeting in Rostock on Gestalt Psychology. Those attending were among the main figures: Kurt Lewin, David and Rosa Katz, Heinz Werner, Wolfgang Köhler, Albert Michotte, Edgar Rubin, and Max Wertheimer. Kurt Koffka, another significant figure, did not attend. Heider was on the far left in the original photograph included in Heider’s autobiography [Heider 1983], but puzzlingly has been painted out, Soviet style, in the version (as above) included in Michotte’s publications.
2As Robert Woodworth [1943, 107] nicely put it, despite their emphasis on organized wholes, this grouping was “really made up of individuals”. Even Köhler and Wertheimer, who, along with Koffka, are widely regarded as the three central figures, had their disagreements:
Students particularly enjoyed the sessions that Wertheimer attended, especially when he and Koffka disagreed. Koffka would attempt to placate Wertheimer by saying “I agree with you, I agree with you”, and would try to proceed, but Wertheimer would point out new difficulties. One result of these exchanges was that the students realized that the founders of Gestalt psychology were not like-minded, but had different points of view on important issues. [Luchins & Luchins 1988, 145]
3In fact, some of those identified as Gestaltists, did not readily use that label. “Experimental phenomenologists” might be more appropriate, say, in relation to Albert Michotte and David Katz. However, for the purposes of this paper to keep things reasonably simple, I will use the term “Gestaltist” in an inclusive way.
4Katz, in his insightful book on Gestalt psychology, insisted that it could only be understood as a reaction (revolution?), but unlike the Romantic movement, one firmly set within science itself:
The rise of Gestalt psychology can be understood only as a reaction to so-called atomistic psychology. [...] The older psychology, now condemned to death, is blamed not only for being atomistic. In describing it the publications of leading Gestalt psychologists also make use of such expressions as “associationist”, “positivistic”, “summative-aggregative”, “mosaic-like”, “additive”, “piecemeal”, “mechanistic”, and “mechanical”. Each of these characterizations is supposed to hit upon a weakness of the older psychology. In addition, atomistic psychology is blamed for having been unrealistic, spiritless, blind, meaningless, and senseless. [Katz 1951, 3]
5In short, atomism and mechanism in psychology were prejudices, and presumably also attempts for the new science to look like “real” science. Instead, as Köhler explained, psychology needed to be founded in experience:
There seems to be a single starting point for psychology, exactly as for all the other sciences: the world as we find it, naïvely and uncritically. [...] the whole development must begin with a naïve picture of the world. [Köhler 1947, 3]
6In this brief paper, I will be drawing upon a few of the letters, mainly from Köhler, to Albert Michotte, made available to me by his son (Baron Fritz Michotte de Bruxelles) to make two points about the Gestaltists: 1. Their reaction to physicalism was not sufficiently radical; 2. Their concerns were not local to psychology but extended to politics and ethics.
7Generally speaking, the Gestaltists did not challenge the physicalist description of reality as fundamental but rather invoked a second, derivative realm: The behavioural vs. the geographic (physical) environment (e.g., Koffka), or the phenomenal vs. the physical in relation to perceived causality (Michotte). Aron Gurwitsch [e.g., 2010] is the best commentator on the limits of the Gestalt revolution in contrast to more fundamental approaches to phenomenology. For me, Karl Duncker was one of the clearest among the Gestaltists to challenge the scientific ideal of objectivity that excluded subjectivity, including the subjectivity of the scientist. Consciousness is about the world:
[...] [A] worldless consciousness might be compared to a room without windows which is hung with innummerable and continually changing pictures. Apparently, the self is assumed to live locked up in this room and to ponder whether “beyond” there is perhaps a “world”. Is there such a consciousness, a consciousness epistemologically prior to, i.e., more immediately accessible than, the world? [Duncker 1947, 530]
8Instead, many of the Gestalists seemed hell-bent on beating the physicalists at their own game with their neural theory of isomorphism. Here is the Cambridge psychologist, Frederic Bartlett, complaining about what was going on:
29 xii 30
My dear Michotte
[...] What do you think of Gestalt developments? Of course everybody has read Köhler’s book and practically everybody, except a few of the more philosophically minded, was dreadfully disappointed. I can’t in the least see why it is necessary to force into Gestalt psychology all this speculative biophysics.
9In a letter to Michotte, Köhler acknowledged that “all this speculative biophysics” was, in the end, a ploy:
November 13, 1947
My dear friend,
[...]
Now, first of all about the resistance of my great and learned enemies, the Positivists.
[...] I am now working in electrophysiology. “If you do not listen to phenomenological arguments”, I tell my Positivist opponents, “I will shift the discussion to a field for which you have more respect, and will try to defeat you there”.
10Perhaps the most defiant figure among the Gestaltists was David Katz, who had studied with the phenomenologist, Husserl (on the relation of Katz’s phenomenological psychology to Husserl, see [Giorgi 2020]). But Katz mainly ignored the physicalists rather than directly challenging their philosophy, in his classic book on the experience of colour, for example [Katz 1935]:
Where do we encounter colours? First of all they are certainly to be observed in objects. A paper is white, a leaf is green, coal is black. [...] Then further: The sky is grey, the water has a green shimmer, and the air is full of beams of light. Such judgments, too, have to do with colour, and they seem to be perfectly commonplace. [...] It would be a kind of psychological perversion [...] to cast these cases aside, and, instead, begin [our] study with colour phenomena which the colour specialist has been able to produce only under the highly artificial conditions of the laboratory. Most people depart from this world without ever having had a chance to look into an expensive spectroscope, and without ever having observed an afterimage as anything other than something momentarily wrong with the eye. [Katz 1935, 3–4]
11Finally, I want to put the Gestalt approach (appropriately) in a wider context. The textbooks present Gestaltism as a local development within psychology (but see [Ash 1995], [Leichtman 1979]. But we need to bear in mind that many of the Gestaltists were exiles from Continental Europe and the rise of fascism [Mandler & Mandler 1968].
12An important feature of the research of the Gestaltists concerned dynamic displays and how expressive they can be. Koffka [1940] in his classic work on Gestalt psychology refers to the early Walt Disney cartoons:
The best examples for our argument are perhaps certain trick films after the pattern of Mickey Mouse, for here there is objectively neither motion nor emotion, but a mere sequence of strange drawings. But this sequence gives rise to objects in the behavioural world of the observers which move, and are agile or clumsy, exuberant or dejected. [Koffka 1940, 657]
13Michotte is mainly known for his research on the perception of causality based on simple displays in which one square approached another static one, and then the second one moved off. He found that under specific conditions we can see a causal connection, not a mere sequence of meaningless movements [Thinès, Costall, & Butterworth 2014].
14On the face of it, these references to schematic displays may at best seem interesting, but no more than that. Köhler in another letter to Michotte, however, made a crucial connection:
W. Köhler
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, Pa.
Department of Psychology and Education
November 28, 1944
Dear friend,
[…] Surely, we must expect the situation in your country to improve almost at once when the resistance of the Germans collapses.
A few years ago I heard that you had hit upon something of fundamental importance in our field. The letter which I now had confirms this information. It also mentions the subject of your investigation. My dear man, I cannot think of any discovery that would be so apt to start things in a better direction as this finding is. Naturally, the repercussions will extend far beyond our special discipline. For, if I am not mistaken, the doctrine that we experience nothing but facts of concomitance and mere sequence is one of the ultimate factors behind the present scepticism and the corresponding crises in every field, including that of ethics and politics. [...] [the] immediate awareness of the “nexus” of things has been for long negated in the name of science. I admit, the Positivists have meant no harm. They have nonetheless almost succeeded in destroying human culture. Am I mistaken in believing that you see your discovery in this wide context? [...]
Take care of yourself, and don’t forget that you have a friend in America.
Yours,
W. Köhler
15These wider concerns are seldom, if ever, referred to in the standard psychology textbooks. Paradoxically, Gestaltism is treated as a compartment within psychology rather than a basis for making connections beyond the limits of the current narrow discipline.