Wilhelm Wundt and the Crisis in the Relationship with Avenarius
Russo Krauss exposes Wilhelm Wundt’s position on some fundamental issues of the philosophical and psychological debate at the turn of the century, such as: the antinomy between idealism and realism; the apparent contradiction between physiological explana
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Wilhelm Wundt and the Crisis in the Relationship with Avenarius
3.1 The “Ideal-Realistic” Approach Avenarius’ ideas represented a radicalization of Wundt’s position, thus undermining the fragile balance that was typical of the solutions proposed by the latter. Already Wundt had tried to merge idealism and realism. Already Wundt had stressed the link between cerebral processes and psychical phenomena. Already Wundt had sustained the complementarity of psychology and physiology. Nonetheless, Wundt approached these issues trying to find compromises. Conversely, Avenarius was not afraid to take them to their radical consequences. Concerning the first problem—the opposition between idealism and realism—Wundt dealt with it at the end of his Grundzüge der physiologischen psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology): The facts of consciousness are the foundation of all our knowledge, and therefore, the outer experience is only a special domain of inner experience. Even though this leads to a necessary assumption of objective existence, still the form in which we apprehend that existence is in essence codetermined by the characteristics of consciousness. […] Idealism seizes hold of these results of the critique of knowledge. Since outer experience is a part of the inner experience, it views the world as a reflection of consciousness. As long as it combats the claim of the materialists, it keeps the upper hand, but when it passes on to attempts at explanation of nature, it runs aground on unyielding reality. Despite the ubiquitous traces of subjective influences on the forms in which we apprehend reality, they point © The Author(s) 2019 C. Russo Krauss, Wundt, Avenarius, and Scientific Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12637-7_3
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42 C. RUSSO KRAUSS no less clearly to an objective existence that would persist even if we had no intuitions or concepts. […] Realism seeks to give equal justice to these different sources of knowledge. However, if it wishes to be in full harmony with the results of the critique of knowledge, it must recognize the priority of inner experience. Thus, psychology in particular necessarily leads beyond pure realism to ideal-realism. (Wundt 1874, 860, trans. 1980, 173–74)
As we can see, the contradiction between two alternative positions is suddenly considered as solved by a mediation, as if the long-standing controversy between idealism and realism could be settled simply by coining a new term. Wundt does not explain how to reconcile the fact that “all our knowledge” is based on consciousness, with the assumption of “different sources of knowledge.” Hence, unsurprisingly, already in the second edition of the book Wundt reworked this passage. […] Inner experience has immediate reality for us, whereas the objects of outer experience are only mediately given to us, precisely since they must go through the inner experience to become objects of our representation and our thought. This circumstance, which awards the indisputable victory to the idealisms over the other worldviews, d
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