Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities

In December 1919 a philosopher of twenty-eight petitioned the Prussian ministry of education in Berlin. The University of Göttingen had turned away her Habilitation thesis, the second dissertation that qualifies a scholar to lecture at a German university, because its author was a woman. Edith Stein protested that this ignored the constitution of the new republic. That thesis is this book. Its first treatise asks what causation means inside a mind, a question that, in her view, neither David Hume nor Immanuel Kant had settled. Her answer is that mental life runs under two laws at once. Moods, tiredness and freshness behave causally: a person has a limited stock of what Stein calls life-power (Lebenskraft), every experience spends or restores it, and to a drained mind colours look colourless and sounds flat. Thinking, valuing and deciding follow a second law, motivation, in which one thing gives a reason for the next and the person can accept that reason or refuse it. A psychology modelled on physics can therefore describe the first layer and will miss the second. An appendix presses the point against Hugo Münsterberg, the Harvard psychologist who had tried to found an exact science of the mind. The second treatise carries the argument to groups. A crowd only passes moods from one member to the next by contagion. Borrowing a contrast from the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, Stein then separates an association, whose members treat one another as objects for a purpose, from a community, whose members live with one another as subjects. A community, she argues, has a life-power of its own, made of what its members give to it, and no existence apart from them. The ministry answered on 21 February 1920 and granted her point in principle. Her own case did not change, and her later attempts to qualify, at Breslau and at Freiburg, also failed. Edmund Husserl, whose assistant she had been, printed both treatises in 1922 in the fifth volume of his Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, the yearbook of the phenomenological movement, and an English translation appeared in 2000.