Mind and Brain in Weimar Culture Cornelius Borck, McGill University Paper presented at the international conference The Cultural Alchemy of the Exact Sciences: Revisiting the Forman Thesis at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, March 23-25, 2007.

Given the centrality of Lebensphilosophie in the Forman thesis, should one not expect an

even more immediate impact of such an intellectual climate on the life sciences? The life sciences

in their notorious plurality may have lacked the same disciplinary coherence as physics and did not

undergo a similar revolution, but various strands within the life sciences come to mind that seem to

testify to similar trends.

Most of these run under the term “holism” in biology, medicine, psychology, and philosophy; from

Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s system’s biology, via gestalt

psychology or Victor von Weizsäcker’s philosophy of illness, to Kurt Goldstein’s theory of the

organism. Or one could think of the special resonances of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in

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Weimar Germany from Karl Abraham via Johannes Heinrich Schultz to Wilhelm Reich and Georg

Groddeck. Last but not least, one should think of the ascendancy of physiognomic approaches, from

the interest in graphology, shared by as different scholars as Emil Kraepelin and Ludwig Klages, to

the implementation of racialized science. In short, there would be ample opportunities to construct a

positive complement to Forman’s negative thesis with examples from the life sciences: whereas the

developments in physics were the outcome of a hostile intellectual environment, a wholesale

embracement of the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist, its extension or translation into science, appears

to be characteristic for the life sciences during the Weimar republic. However, I am somewhat

skeptical how much insight would be gained from such a pursuit, especially with regard to the

question of how science and culture articulate. Not the least because of Forman’s stimulating paper,

there is little need to continue the internalism vs. externalism debate, but much opportunity to build

on work that has been done about science in culture.

In fact, the Zeitgeist, the Lebensphilosophie, can be – and has been – linked to so many and

so different intellectual projects and scientific programs that the link itself helps rather little but

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looses much of its explanatory power as an argument. Precisely the omnipresence of

Lebensphilosophie in Weimar Germany questions its usefulness as an explanatory category for the

history of the life sciences. Rather than searching for promising applications of the Forman thesis to

the life sciences, the very ease of this applicability should call for more specific ways in

contextualizing scientific knowledge. At least three problems should be raised here.

The first is the insufficiency of Lebensphilosophie to account for the ambivalences that

characterized the intellectual culture in Weimar Germany where, for example, the nostalgic longing

for an allegedly lost richness of the Abendland’s culture went hand in hand with a passion for

America, scientific management, Taylorization, or Neue Sachlichkeit. The English title of

Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes may have been The Decline of the West, but in the

burgeoning culture of the “golden twenties,” the declining Abendland appears to have only

accelerated the rise in public esteem for the West in form of the Tiller Girls and other commodities

from the cultural industry. I am certainly not arguing against the importance of Spengler or

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Lebensphilosophie for understanding Weimar Germany, but as ferociously as some fought against

“mere civilization,” others embraced a future of rationalization, mass fabrication, and technological

innovation.

The second is the need for a more nuanced understanding of the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist

itself. Since 1971, the suggested opposition between progressive rationalism and irrational

romanticism has become much more complicated, with the recent interest for the intellectual

sophistication of the romantic period, for example, and for what has been called the “occultism of

the avant-garde” at the turn of the century. Rather than being a problem of historical diagnosis or

national styles, the Zeitgeist argument entails too simple a dualism of rational vs. irrational. The

extended debates in Germany about differences between reason and rationality, or, for that matter,

culture and civilization, indicate how complicated discussions were even within the allegedly

irrational quarters of the Zeitgeist.

The term ‘irrationality’ captures only insufficiently what was at stake in the debates about

Lebensphilosophie and which boiled less about demarcating the limits of rationality per se but more

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about its limits vis-à-vis notions of (higher) reasonability. Many different actors and programs

displayed some affiliation with Zeitgeist arguments and shared an investment in an opposition to

narrow concepts of rationality. The Frankfurt school’s famous distinction between merely

instrumental rationality and reason proper, for example, must be regarded an offspring of this

debate – and with it Habermas’ discourse ethics. Bertalanffy argued about the limits of existing

scientific explanations, as did Goldstein, but their conceptualization of reason and rationality

differed certainly very much from Spengler’s or Klages’. These differences and their co-existence

are at least as important for an appropriate understanding of the Weimar Zeitgeist.

And, finally, these debates did not match with a neat distinction of progressive modernism

versus romantic irrationality – this is the third problem. At times, the progressive and the

Lebensphilosophie became insolubly intertwined in Weimar culture. The most famous example

probably is the modernism of the Bauhaus.

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It has often been pointed out how surprisingly open the Weimar Bauhaus was towards esoteric

philosophies such as Kandinsky’s interest in theosophy and Klee’s in occultism or Johannes Itten’s

leanings towards mysticism. And yet, the same Itten conceived the famous Bauhaus Vorkurs, where

abstraction emerged as modernity’s dominant style. The Bauhaus’ modernist slogan “form follows

function” demonstrates how abstraction and rationality do not necessarily imply an opposition to

intuition or Anschaulichkeit, but function rather as their integration. As part of a more nuanced

understanding of the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist, their flirtations with intuition, empathy, and

Anschaulichkeit would have to be taken seriously as epistemological resources. The interwar period

were the formative years for high modernism and provided the basis for its critique by anticipating

many of postmodernism’s arguments, especially for today’s cultural studies. To name but two

examples, one could point to Deleuze’s rehabilitation of Bergsonian intuition in his ontology or to

the codification of Walter Benjamin in North America.

An important side of this third aspect are its historiographic implications. It entails a

perspective how the alleged irrationalism and the idea of a-causality could, at least principally, be

operationalized as driving forces for scientific developments – without taking recourse to either a

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model of mock-adaptations, plainly irrational motifs, or ideological attributions of a “mystic

weltanschauung.” An investigation of how the epistemological, the social, the cognitive, and the

material articulated with each other to the chain of historical events would, instead, result in a

historically differentiated understanding of rationality, reasonability, objectivity, causality, and

Anschaulichkeit.

In the remaining 12 minutes, I want to very briefly introduce three examples which at least

have in common that they all blur a dualism of progressive rationalism versus irrational

romanticism. Based on, and biased by, these examples I think precisely this multifariousness, the

side-by-side of rather disparate strands, to be significant for Weimar culture. Elsewhere, I argued

that such ambivalences and the uncertainty which resulted from them (and characterized Weimar

Germany also in general, social political terms) summoned up to an experimentalization of the

everyday life. In this cultural landscape, the lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist was but one of various

threads, their coming-together in their heterogeneity allowed for the emergence of

epistemologically radically new projects.

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The first example is the emergence of the electric brain out of psychodiagnostics in Weimar

Germany.

In Spring 1926, Emil Ludwig, prolific author of profitable biographies, proclaimed a very

special scientific breakthrough. According to his report in the Berliner Illustrirte, Weimar

Germany’s most widely read weekly, a little machine had recently determined an almost perfect

personality profile of himself by little more but the application of weak electrical currents to a

sequence of diagnostic spots scattered across his head.

In the cold light of today, this was just another revival of Gall’s old phrenology, thanks to

the new availability of electrical gadgets. Zachar Bissky, the guy propagating the new electric

diagnoscopy, did not hesitate to make this link to phrenology explicit in his advertising material.

And yet, this did hardly impede the stellar, though short-lived career of his invention. His success

with the new method became the news of the day. Still, one could argue that this was little more but

exaggerating hype, concocted by news thirsty media. However, phrenological-personality profiling

by means of a surprisingly simple technology enrolled quite a remarkable list of supporters and thus

forced major players into action.

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By 1926, diagnoscopy was already used for personality testing within the Swiss postal

services and clock-manufacturing industry. Soon after a first conference on the new method in

Karlsruhe, many German institutions became interested, including technical universities, police

departments, prison administrations, large industries such as the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG

and small enterprises such as those recommending diagnoscopy for marriage counseling. At many

of these places little more but curiosity may have been behind such experiments, but diagnoscopy

held a more specific promise to rational modernizers. With Fritz Giese and Robert Werner Schulte,

two young aspiring psychologists embarked on a scientific investigation of diagnoscopy. These

psychologists envisioned psychotechnics as an economically beneficial and individually rewarding

form of counseling, and hoped to get involved in the rationalization of life and labor on a national

scale. They praised diagnoscopy as efficient means for Germany’s modernization – which in their

view meant an Americanization.

The enrolment of professional psychologists by and for diagnoscopy called further players

into action. Various congresses of psychotherapy and psychology established commissions to

evaluate diagnscopy; Oscar Vogt, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research,

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discussed with Georg von Arco, German pioneer of wireless telegraphy and radio technology,

various plans how best to secretly obtain one of Bissky’s machines. On the side of the critics, there

was hardly less ambiguity about Zeitgeist and modernity; the next project Arco undertook was a

large-scale mass experiment with radio-telepathy, driven as much by personal curiosity as by a

critical agenda.

Just a few years later, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger revolutionized the neurosciences

by publishing the electroencephalogram, his recording of the brain’s electrical activity. This was

hard science, but not only the press got it wrong when they reported on the EEG as the final

confirmation of Bissky’s diagnoscopy. Like many other brain researchers (and physicists), Berger

was very much interested in extra-sensory perception and his success with the EEG increased, if

anything, his yearning for telepathic communication. The only major research grant he ever

received, he intended for an investigation of special, high frequency, psychophysiological

vibrations… Berger’s case resembles that of a perfect adaptation to the lebensphilosophische

Zeitgeist, permeating his views from his authoritarian political nostalgia to his belief in specific

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psychophysic energy and his admiration for nature’s beauty. He desired the EEG to become the

crowning stone of his scientific worldview which already to his contemporaries looked somewhat

antiquated and obscure. However, Berger’s at times stubborn search made him pursue a highly

original path of experimental inquiry. His persistence about psychic energy acted as an “enabling

constraint” steering him conceptually as well methodologically towards the new.

The second example, Fritz Kahn’s Bodyworlds.

Right next to Weimar Germany’s purported romanticism existed a biological modernism of

a peculiarly mechanistic blend which was no less successful. My example is the popular anatomy of

Dr. Fritz Kahn, a physician and science writer, who published regularly on medical topics in the

Berliner Illustrirte and the Frankfurter Zeitung. His opus magnum was a popular textbook on

anatomy and physiology for the Kosmos Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde with its more than 100,000

members. Kahn’s recipe of success was the combination of a particularly lucid style of writing with

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intriguing visuals portraying the body and its functions as machine ensembles. Subscribers to the 5-

volume set got, in addition to the over 1500 images, an oversize poster as a bonus, showing Man as

Industrial Palace and thus encapsulating Kahn’s explanatory strategy. So, at least in the popular

sector or for the purposes of a popularization of science and medicine, mechanistic models

continued to be regarded as useful. But Kahn’s visualizations show more; they unfold to a historical

epistemology of biological knowledge making and knowledge circulation. Kahn’s images show the

human body as an assembly line or an industrialized urban space, populated by anonymous workers

and other members of modern society.

Instead of stressing their mechanistic attitude, one may want to argue that these images

formed part of a larger strategy to “organicize” alien technology by recourse to the body, as, for

example, McLuhan did later with regard to communications technology. It should be noted,

however, that the images put this strategy upside down. Kahn familiarized the body’s alien organic

inside by recourse to common gadgetry, as if some techno-literacy would bear the potential to

reconnect with the body’s machinery in new ways. Man as Industrial Palace depicted a

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technological paradise that misrepresented biological bodies as it measured them by rather humble

technical artifacts. In retrospect, the alignment of cognition with something as dull and limited as

the control of a switchboard seems hardly more ingenious than the outdated industrial complex of

digestion. And this is not the most significant shortcoming. How much can an image explain that

does not lead any further as to introduce some miniature operators into its world of automata and

machines, who do exactly what the technology is said to do?

However, the images extend the common comparison of bodies and machines to a manifest

amalgamation of nature and technology. They visualize a constructivism in which technological

civilization and experimental science intervene in the biological nature of human bodies. And yet,

the many little assistants in Kahn’s images do their work so diligently and so smoothly right out in

the open of the image that it seems too simple to base a critique of the visualization strategy on their

existence. One could rather say that the limits of this visualization strategy are put on display as

well. The ambiguity of their iconography provides a key to how nature is constituted in the

contractions of the social and the scientific to a cultural construct. Precisely because Kahn took his

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mission to educate the public on the human body so seriously, he arrived at visualizations that

clearly reveal their own limitations. The images visualize knowledge together with the open

questions that come with it, they trace the optical unconscious of techno-medicine and machine

philosophy.

The last example, the “crisis of reality” and the emergence of the sociology of knowledge in

the life sciences.

The second half of the 1920 saw an escalation of crisis rhetoric in the writing about science.

This abounding crisis rhetoric should not be mistaken for a single and coherent discourse; it was a

concert of discordant and overlapping voices. Physicists debated the epistemological implications of

theoretical physics, while psychologists discussed the dissipation of their discipline into ever more

specializations, the biologists argued over the lack of a coherent framework, and the crisis talk in

medicine often comprised a holistic critique of an allegedly inhumane techno-medicine. In general,

this was not a crisis of scientific productivity but a crisis resulting from scientific productivity, as

Edmund Husserl argued in his unfinished Crisis of European Sciences.

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Somewhere among these many writings on crisis, the Naturwissenschaften published a

paper of such a title. In “The crisis of reality” the neo-Kantian philosopher Kurt Riezler argued that

the very progress of the sciences undermined their progress towards “absolute reality” (Rietzler,

1929, p. 708). Today his paper and his concerns are largely forgotten; they shared little with the

lebensphilosophische Zeitgeist but were not exactly modern either. But in their time, they motivated

a little known Polish microbiologist to an intervention. Ludwik Fleck’s response to Rietzler

undercut the discussion about a crisis by arguing for a social explanation of the intellectual

functioning of a primarily collective cognizing body. Since every act of knowing related to previous

knowledge, tradition and education, epistemology had for Fleck to start with “the social and

cultural-historical context.” In all its concrete materializations, knowledge was moulded and shaped

by its own history and by its socio-cultural context. The recent developments in physics as

documented in just the next issue of Naturwissenschaften served Fleck as welcome examples for his

idea of the primacy of the social in epistemology.

To Fleck, the “crisis of reality” provided a test case for the kind of epistemological ruptures

he was to describe in his coming monograph. A critical study of the history of science would reveal

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a continually changing and shifting enterprise, a permanent and infinite reconstruction of bits and

piece of concepts and theories. The reflexive socio-historical analysis of such changes offered a new

epistemological foundation, according to Fleck, if and only if the misguided ideal of an

approximation of the absolute were to be replaced by a democratic competition between scientific

concepts and different styles of thought. The socio-cultural analysis of the sciences he propagated

required extended time before it won recognition; the difficult process of social-cultural-scientific

negotiations had hardly begun when Fleck died. In addition to the crisis of reality, it took the

structure of scientific revolutions and Forman’s insistence on extrinsic influences on science to

rediscover his fine-grained theory of social-material-cognitive interaction in the history of the

sciences.

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