Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801–1887)

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FECHNER, GUSTAV THEODOR
(1801–1887)

Gustav Theodor Fechner, the German philosopher, was the founder of psychophysics, and a pioneer in experimental psychology. He was born in Gross-Saerchen, Prussia, and studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, where he passed his examinations at the age of twenty-one. His interests, however, led him into physics, and by 1830 he had published more than forty papers in this field. He also wrote a number of poems and satirical works under the pseudonym of "Dr. Mises," which he also used for some of his later metaphysical speculations. A paper on the quantitative measurement of electrical currents (1831) led to his appointment as professor of physics at Leipzig. Fechner's incipient interest in psychology is shown in papers of 1838 and 1840 on the perception of complementary colors and on subjective afterimages. His experiments on afterimages, however, had tragic consequences. As a result of gazing at the sun he sustained an eye injury, and his subsequent blindness led to a serious emotional crisis. Fechner resigned his professorship in 1839 and virtually retired from the world.

A seemingly miraculous recovery, three years later, stimulated Fechner's interest in philosophy, particularly in regard to the question of the soul and the possibility of refuting materialistic metaphysics. In a work titled Nanna oder das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Nanna, or the soul-life of plants; Leipzig, 1848) he defended the idea that even plants have a mental life. This book is indicative of the panpsychistic bent of Fechner's thought, which was the major cause of the direction taken by his further work.

Psychophysics

In 1848 Fechner returned to the University of Leipzig as professor of philosophy. His desire to substantiate empirically the metaphysical thesis that mind and matter are simply alternative ways of construing one and the same reality was the main motivation for his pioneering work in experimental psychology. His Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig, 1860) was intended to be an outline of an exact science of the functional relations between bodily and mental phenomena, with a view to showing that one and the same phenomenon could be characterized in two ways. Fechner divided his new science of psychophysics into two disciplines: inner psychophysics, which studies the relation between sensation and nerve excitation; and outer psychophysics, to which Fechner's own experimental work was devoted and which studies the relation between sensation and physical stimulus. Psychophysics became one of the dominant fields within experimental psychology.

Fechner's work on the relation between physical stimuli and sensations led to a mathematical formulation that he called the law of intensity, which states that the intensity of a sensation increases as the logarithm of the stimulus, that is, by diminishing increments. When Fechner realized that his principle corresponded to the findings of E. H. Weber (1795–1878), he called it Weber's law, a name now reserved for the vaguer statement that a barely noticeable difference in stimulus has a constant ratio to the stimulus. Fechner's studies in psychophysics included a number of classical experiments on the perception of weight, visual brightness, and distance.

Panpsychism

Fechner's psychological studies were meant to confirm his theory of panpsychism. He maintained that the whole universe is spiritual in character, the phenomenal world of physics being merely the external manifestation of this spiritual reality. That which to itself is psychical is to others physical. In his Atomenlehre he argued that physics requires us to regard atoms only as centers of force or energy, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had argued; it is not necessary to suppose them to be material or extended. These atoms are only the simplest elements in a spiritual hierarchy leading up to God. Each level of this hierarchy includes all those levels beneath it, so that God contains the totality of spirits. Consciousness is an essential feature of all that exists, but this assertion does not mean, as Leibniz had supposed, that every physical entity or phenomenon has its own soul. Only certain systems, namely, organic wholes, give evidence of possessing souls, and those bodies that do not are only the constituents of besouled bodies. The evidences of soul are the systematic coherence and conformity to law exhibited in the behavior of organic wholes. Fechner regarded Earth, "our mother," as such an organic besouled whole. The stars and the physical universe as a whole are also bodies of this kind. God is the soul of the universe; He is to the system of nature as that system is to itself.

To regard the whole material universe as inwardly alive and conscious is to take what Fechner called the "daylight view" (Tagesansicht ). To regard it as inert matter, lacking in any teleological significance, is to take what he called the "night view" (Nachtansicht ). Fechner ardently advocated the daylight view and hoped that it could be supported inductively by means of his psychophysical experiments. But he also argued for the daylight view on pragmatic grounds, offering the sort of arguments that William James later found highly congenial. Fechner urged that any hypothesis that cannot be positively proved but that does not contradict scientific findings be accepted if it makes us happy. The antimaterialistic daylight view is such a hypothesis. Fechner also defended his theory by means of analogical arguments. When certain qualities are found to be present in several types of objects, we are justified in assuming hypothetically that these objects share other, undetected qualities. Entities which exhibit the sort of order that our own bodies do may therefore be assumed to be alive and inwardly spiritual as we are.

Immortality

Fechner's argument for immortality is based on the observation that many individual experiences that are forgotten or unnoticed may later be recalled into consciousness. If the soul as a whole is treated on the analogy of its individual experiences, then, since these do not vanish utterly but often return in the form of memory, the soul itself may likewise continue to exist in God's memory. Mind and body are not parallel aspects of some third substance, as in Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza; they are identical. The persistence of mind is therefore no more difficult to entertain than the persistence of the material universe itself, which is only the outward manifestation of an all-inclusive soul.

Aesthetics

Between 1865 and 1876 Fechner turned his attention to aesthetics. He published a paper on the golden section, the supposedly ideal proportion, and several papers on the controversy over two Hans Holbein paintings of the Madonna. These two paintings, one in Dresden, the other in Darmstadt, were the subject of serious debate among art critics and aestheticians. Fechner hoped to settle the question of their relative excellence by means of a public preference poll when the paintings were exhibited together.

The desire to put aesthetics on an empirical, scientific footing and to bring philosophical speculation into some sort of accord with experimental science is shown further in Fechner's Vorschule der Aesthetik (Propaedentic to aesthetic; Leipzig, 1876), a work of considerable significance for the history of experimental aesthetics. In the preface to this work Fechner stated that previous aestheticians such as Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel had theorized "downward" from universal principles to particulars. Fechner proposed to reverse this procedure, to build aesthetic theory "from below," on a foundation of empirical evidence. The word beauty, he maintained, denotes the approximate subject matter of aesthetics. It is a word applicable to everything that has the property of arousing pleasure directly and immediately. (Pleasure aroused by thoughts of the consequences of an object is nonaesthetic.) Our experiences of aesthetic pleasure are simple, unanalyzable psychic atoms. The aim of an experimental aesthetics is to discover the objects that produce such atoms, that is, the causal laws connecting aesthetic experiences with the characteristics of outer objects.

experimental methods

Fechner suggested three experimental methods for carrying out this program: the method of selection or choice, the method of production or construction, and the method of measuring common objects. The first of these methods is illustrated by Fechner's experiments with rectangles. Ten rectangles of varying dimensions but equal areas were spread at random on a table. The subject was asked to make a selection, ranking the rectangles in the order of his aesthetic pleasure and displeasure. A record was kept of his responses, with allowance being made for variation in hesitation of response. Fechner's results seemed to support the hypothesis that there exist certain ratios of length to width that possess specific aesthetic value. Most of the people tested tended to reject as unpleasant both the square or nearly square and the extremely elongated figures, with the largest number of favorable responses going to the rectangle whose proportions were 34:21. Fechner took this as empirical confirmation of the special aesthetic status of the golden section.

In the second of Fechner's methods, the subject was confronted, for example, with four vertical lines of various lengths and asked to place a dot over each line at the distance that seemed to him most aesthetically pleasing. The results were that the average distance was proportional to the length of the line. This experiment was referred to as the "inquiry into the letter 'i.'" Fechner's third experimental method involved measuring such objects as books, visiting cards, and so on, and here too he found the ratio of the golden section in a large percentage of cases.

laws of psychological aesthetics

A number of psychological laws formulated by Fechner are relevant to aesthetic experience. His principle of aesthetic threshold states that a stimulus must acquire a certain intensity before it can produce pleasure or pain. The effect will then increase gradually until it reaches a maximum point, whereupon it will decrease to the point of indifference. In the case of pleasure but not in that of pain, the effect may, after the maximum is reached, change to its opposite. Aesthetic reinforcement refers to the fact that several conditions of pleasure may, when combined, produce a total satisfaction greater than the sum of these conditions taken separately, for example, melody and harmony in music, meaning and rhythm in poetry. The principle of "uniform connection within the manifold" states that we prefer objects which are both unified and complex over objects which are homogeneous or excessively diverse. The principle of "absence of contradiction" claims that harmony and truth are aesthetically preferable to disagreement, contradiction, or error. Vagueness and ambiguity are aesthetically displeasing, as the principle of "clarity" announces. The recollection of an event portrayed in some aesthetic object may bring pleasure or displeasure, depending on whether the event reminds us of something pleasant or unpleasant: the principle of "aesthetic association." The principle of "minimum effort" states that pleasure is derived from the smallest possible expenditure of energy relative to a given end in view and not simply from the minimum expenditure of energy as such.

Conclusion

These "laws of the mind" illustrate the spirit of Fechner's philosophizing. He was one of the most versatile thinkers of the nineteenth century, laboring to reconcile an idealistic view of reality with the methodology of modern science and, in so doing, providing some of the groundwork for further developments in a number of areas of experimental psychology. His somewhat fantastic metaphysical speculations disclose a mind of poetic sensitivity, whose visions, however, he insisted on subjecting to scientific scrutiny.

Bibliography

additional works by fechner

Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tod. Dresden, 1936. Translated by John Erskine as Life after Death. New York, 1943.

Zend-Avesta oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits (Zend-Avesta, or concerning matters of heaven and the world to come). 3 vols. Leipzig, 1851.

Über die physikalische und philosophische Atomenlehre (On physical and philosophical atomic theory). Leipzig, 1850.

Über die Seelenfrage. Ein Gang durch die sichtbare Welt, um die Unsichtbare zu finden (On the question of the soul: a path through the visible world in order to find the invisible). Leipzig, 1861.

Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht (The daylight view as opposed to the night view). Leipzig, 1879.

Die drei Motive und Grunde des Glaubens (The three motives and grounds of faith). Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1863.

Elements of Psychophysics. Edited by Davis H. Howes and Edwin Garrigues. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Zur experimentellen Aesthetik. Vorschule der Aesthetik. Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 1978, 1925.

Fix, Ulla, Irene Altmann, and Gustav Theodor Fechner. Fechner und die Folgen ausserhalb der Naturwissenschaften: interdisziplinäres Kolloquium zum 200. Geburtstag gustav Theodor Fechners. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003.

Tagebücher 1828 bis 1879. Leipzig: Verlag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig; Stuttgart: In Kommission bei F. Steiner, 2004.

Note: A bibliography of 175 of Fechner's writings can be found in Elemente der Psychophysik. 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1889. Vol. 1).

works on fechner

In English

Boring, E. G. History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Century, 1929 and 1950. Ch. 14.

James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longman, 1909. Lecture 4.

James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt, 1890. Vol. 1, pp. 553–549.

Külpe, O. Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland. Leipzig, 1902. Translated by M. L. Patrick and G. T. W. Patrick as The Philosophy of the Present in Germany. London: G. Allen, 1913. Pp. 147–160.

Murphy, G. Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949. Pp. 82–94.

Perry, R. B. Philosophy of the Recent Past. New York: Scribners, 1926. Pp. 82–86.