Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler

By Anne Harrington

By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework.


Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691218083

Anne Harrington

Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, as well as the author of three books, including Reenchanted Science and The Cure Within. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Reenchanted Science

Reenchanted Science

HOLISM IN GERMAN CULTURE

FROM WILHELM II TO HITLER

•   ANNE HARRINGTON   •

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1996 by Anne Harrington

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 1999

Paperback ISBN 0-691-05050-3

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Harrington, Anne

Reenchanted science : holism in German culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler /

Anne Harrington.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-02142-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN: 978-0-691-21808-3

1. Life (Biology)—Philosophy. 2. Medicine—Germany—Philosophy—History.

3. Science—Germany—Philosophy—History. 4. Mind and body—Philosophy.

5. Holism—Philosophy. I. Title.

QH501.H37 1996

574’01—dc20 95-48463

http://pup.princeton.edu

R0

To Godehard, whose deep engagement in the life worlds of this time and place helped transform what was just a book project into a challenging partnership of mutual discovery. The experience was a gift I could not have requested, and will never be able to fully reckon.

•   CONTENTS   •

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  xi

INTRODUCTION  xv

CHAPTER ONE

The Human Machine and the Call to Wholeness  3

The Original Goethean Vision of Wholeness  4

A Fractured Nation and the Mechanists’ Quest for Unity in Nature  7

Necessary Ways of Knowing and the Mechanization of Mind and Brain  12

Wholeness Betrayed: Political Unification and the Rise of the Machine Society  19

The Place of Wholeness in the Fin de Siècle Upheavals  23

World War I and Its Aftermath: Science as Cultural Critique  30

CHAPTER TWO

Biology against Democracy and the Gorilla-Machine  34

On the Way to a Biology of Subjects  38

Scientists in Their Soap Bubbles: Uexküll’s Kantian Challenge to Science  44

Revitalizing Life: Umweltlehre and the Vitalist-Mechanist Controversy  48

The Shocks of World War I and Weimar  54

Toward a Biology of the State  56

Uexküll on the Jewish Question  62

The Fight against the Gorilla-Machine  63

Uexküll’s Relationship to National Socialism  68

CHAPTER THREE

World War I and the Search for God in the Nervous System  72

Shock, Recovery, and the Localization of Time in the Brain  77

World War I: Degeneration and Renewal  82

The Biology of Instincts and the Evolutionary Arrow  88

The World of Orientation versus the World of Feeling  92

Morality in the Cells: The Syneidesis or Biological Conscience  96

An Answer to Ignorabimus: Monakow’s Neurobiology of Scientific Knowledge  98

CHAPTER FOUR

A Peacefully Blossoming Tree: The Rational Enchantment of Gestalt Psychology  103

Gestalt versus Chaos: The Voice of Houston Stewart Chamberlain  106

Gestalt versus Chaos: The Voice of Christian von Ehrenfels  108

Max Wertheimer: Claiming Gestalt for Science and Rational Enchantment  111

The Mind’s Laws of Immanent Structuralism  114

A Peacefully Blossoming Tree: Wertheimers Vision for Weimar  117

Attacks on the Berlin Gestalt Vision  123

The Rise of National Socialism and Wertheimer’s Emigration to America  128

Wolfgang Köhler’s Case to Americans for the Reality of Values in a World of Facts  130

Wertheimer’s Gestalt Logic as an Antidote to Demagoguery  132

CHAPTER FIVE

The Self-Actualizing Brain and the Biology of Existential Choice  140

The Imperative of Regeneration in the Clinic and Society  142

Insights from Brain-Damaged Soldiers: Actualization and Wholeness  145

Changing Theoretical Orientations: From Reflex Theory to Gestalt  151

Reason, Courage, and the Making of a Weimar Hero  154

The Call for a Holistic Clinical Practice  159

The Goethean Schau: Toward a Holistic Epistemology  162

Goldstein’s Persecution and the Biology of Fascism  164

Goldstein in America: The Wholeness in the Human Encounter  169

The Lessons of Goethe in the Post-Hiroshima Age  171

CHAPTER SIX

Life Science, Nazi Wholeness, and the Machine in Germany’s Midst  175

Gestalt, Goethe, and the Führerprinzip  178

The Jew as Chaos and Mechanism  181

Holistic Medicine and the Sick Man as Machine  185

Holistic Opposition: The Case of Hans Driesch  188

Nazi Mechanism and the Decline of Nazi Holism  193

Ambiguous Legacies: The Case of Viktor von Weizsäcker  200

CONCLUSION  207

NOTES  213

BIBLIOGRAPHY  275

INDEX  303

•   ILLUSTRATIONS   •

Figure 1. Gerd Arntz, Fabrik [Factory], 1927.

Figure 2. Goethe’s vision of wholeness and teleology: "Sketches of the construction [Aufbau] of the higher plants," 1787.

Figure 3. The atomistic human brain: localization map by Karl Kleist, 1886.

Figure 4. The machine brain: associationist-connectionist schema of mind and brain functioning.

Figure 5. George Grosz, Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, 1918.

Figure 6. Fritz Lang, Metropolis, film still, 1927.

Figure 7. The Wandervogel movement, youth celebrating nature in pagan Germanic ritual, date unknown.

Figure 8. Transformation Panorama set design, Act III, from Richard Wagner’s opera, Parsifal, 1904.

Figure 9. Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944).

Figure 10. Uexküll’s functional circle that creates the Umwelt, or unified organism-environment system, 1934.

Figure 11. The Umwelt of the astronomer looking through his telescope in a tower, demonstrates the Kantian implications of a new biology, 1934.

Figure 12. Hans Driesch (1867-1941).

Figure 13. Driesch’s embryo experiments that gave new credence to vitalism in biology, 1891.

Figure 14. Constantin von Monakow (1853-1930).

Figure 15. The human brain compared by Constantin von Monakow to the functioning of a music box, 1928.

Figure 16. Culturally stylized photograph of the Swiss Alps emphasizes their capacity to serve as a sanctuary from modern life, 1899.

Figure 17. Monakow’s schema of the Horme’s progress through the various instinct levels towards final reunification with the cosmos (World-Horme), 1928.

Figure 18. Max Wertheimer (1880-1943).

Figure 19. Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932).

Figure 20. Wertheimer’s illustration of various Gestalt laws, 1921.

Figure 21. Felix Krueger (1874-1948).

Figure 22. Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965).

Figure 23. Goldstein’s toolbox that tested brain-damaged patients for loss of holistic abstract capacity (separate tests for men and women), 1941.

Figure 24. National Socialist workers with shovels salute en masse, photograph supervised by Leni Riefenstahl, Nuremberg, 1934.

Figure 25. Poster of the Führer Principle, March 13, 1938. One Folk, One Reich, One Führer.

Figure 26. Drawings demonstrating evidence of inferior perceptual depth capacity and spatial-compositional skills (holistic seeing) in Jewish school children as compared to their Aryan peers (Jewish drawings are middle-left and bottom-left).

Figure 27. Anti-Semitic cartoon from Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer representing the Jew as chaos.

Figure 28. Cover from holistic medical journal Der Heilpraktiker during the Nazi years, extolling earth-water-light-air as sources of healthy life, 1936.

Figure 29. Priests on the Plantation: priests working on the herbal plantation at Dachau concentration camp, part of the holistic naturopathic vision of Nazi medicine, early 1940s.

Figure 30. Viktor von Weizsäcker (1886-1957).

•   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS   •

THIS BOOK has been a long time in conceptualization, research, and writing. The process of producing it has also been an object lesson in the ultimately collective and community nature of even apparently solitary practices of scholarship. To say this is only a rather pedantic way of observing, with both humility and great gratitude, just how many different people over the past years have stepped in and provided help and support for this project.

The initial ideas for this book were conceived during a postdoctoral tenure as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow based at the Institute for the History of Medicine of the University of Freiburg, Germany. I am indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its generous financial support of my work at that time and to the Institute’s director, Eduard Seidler, and to my host and sponsor, Heinz Schott (now at Bonn), for welcoming me so warmly to the Institute and integrating me so thoroughly into its culture. Further financial support for research and writing was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1991 and by the Spencer Foundation in 1993. I am grateful for the vote of confidence shown me by all of these organizations. I hope they will be pleased with the results.

Even though I may no longer recall all their names, I do remember with considerable gratitude the assistance of librarians and archivists in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, many of whom went beyond the call of mere duty by drawing my attention to uncatalogued material in neglected boxes, giving me access to photocopiers and other tools, and taking a personal interest in the questions and issues I was pursuing. In researching this project, I also had the pleasure of speaking with a range of witnesses and actors from the era, all of whom who gave generously of their thoughts and memories: Roberta Apfel, Viktor Hamburger, Richard Held, Owsei Temkin, Norbert Mintz, Aaron Smith, Frederick Wyatt. Early on, Professor Thure von Uexküll made archival material that his family controlled available to me. Through our rich but not always easy discussions, he also took me on a layered and complex odyssey at the interface of memory and values that came to inform my telling of the story of holism in Germany in a number of ways. I hope he will feel that, in the end, I responded with integrity to both the challenge and the inspiration he embodied for me.

I am grateful to a number of undergraduate and graduate research assistants who have stepped in to help with this project over the past several years: John Griffith, Stein Berre, Kalpesh Joshi, and Tracey Cho. These students gamely took on tasks ranging from the pedantic to the quite sophisticated, and through their own intellectual nimbleness and curiosity, often provoked me to rethink matters, sometimes more thoroughly than I otherwise would have. Gretchen Hermes brought both passion and critical discrimination to her work with me on the selection and development of the illustrations and in the process taught me just how powerfully images can speak historical truths that cannot be so easily captured in textual form.

A range of colleagues, too many to name, provided feedback on earlier versions of the arguments made in this book, both as I presented them in seminars and in written form. I feel especially indebted and grateful for the support and input of Garland Allen, Cathryn Carson, Gerald Geison, Richard Held, Larry Holmes, Gerald Holton, Lisbet Koerner, Susan Lanzoni, Edward Manier, Jane Maeinschein, Everett Mendelsohn, Diane Paul, Dorothy Porter, Roy Porter, Robert Richards, Charles Rosenberg, Barbara Rosenkrantz, Sam Schweber, Skuli Siggurdsson, Paul Weindling, and Nicholas Weiss. For several years, Richard Beyler and I engaged in productive dialogue about our mutual interests in holistic science in the German context, and I am grateful to him for those exchanges, as well as for his generosity in sharing certain archival material he had collected for his own research. Erika Keller gave the book a rich lay-person’s read that identified still other avenues for clarification and expansion. Allan Brandt and I had some especially fruitful discussions about the introduction to this book that left a lasting imprint on its ultimate form. Evelyn Fox Keller was both a source of scholarly insights in her own right and a much-appreciated emotional support and sounding board during the tough spells. Mitchell Ash was an exceptionally generous and engaged colleague and critic during the earlier stages of this book’s conceptualization and writing, even as he worked on his definitive history of Gestalt psychology in its institutional and cultural context. As a relative newcomer into an arena where he had already done such valuable work, I had the opportunity to learn a great deal from him. I am only sorry his own book was published too late to be incorporated significantly into the arguments made here. Robert Nye took particular pains to provide helpful feedback to the book as a whole at a late stage, inspiring me to make a number of additions and enhancements to the book that would otherwise not be there. Finally, I feel enormously indebted to the rich, frank, and detailed comments of John McCole and Peter Galison on the book as a whole that came in the final hour and that resulted in some substantive revisions and enlargments in my overall argument and analysis. Their care when it counted saved me from committing some significant errors. Obviously, any remaining weaknesses or misunderstandings are my own responsibility.

While I was fending off decompensation under a looming publication deadline, my assistant Billie Jo Joy took on the onerous job of proofing and copyediting the manuscript and organizing its final compilation for delivery, in the process providing steady emotional support and encouragement, for which I will always be grateful. At the same time, Meg Alexander navigated with elegance and humor the bewildering world of copyright permissions for the illustrations, taking over a job ably begun by Diane Ehrenpreis.

My husband, Godehard Oepen, came into my life about the same time as I began turning my attention to the themes and material described here, and he knows better than anyone else what conceiving and writing this book has entailed for me. My debt to him along the way for support and assistance—practical, intellectual and emotional—is just incalculable. I can only hope he understands how deep my gratitude goes.

I am very proud and pleased that this book found a home with Princeton University Press and grateful especially to Emily Wilkinson and her assistant Kevin Downing for their competent and humane support through the process. It’s good now to let go of the project, knowing that it is in such good hands.

•   INTRODUCTION   •

IN 1918, the sociologist Max Weber was invited to give a lecture at the University of Munich.¹ The invitation came just a few months after the end of the prolonged and devastating Great War, which had ended in Germany’s humiliating defeat, the collapse of her old regime, and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Weber knew that the students listening to his talk were hungry for existential and moral orientation and would be hoping for a message from him that addressed their demands for personal relevance and larger meaning in their studies. He did not feel able to comply. The theme he chose for his lecture was Science as a Vocation, and his words were sober. The scientist was not a prophet, he said, and not in a position to provide any of the larger answers or transcendent grounding for life the students were looking for. Indeed, Weber was prepared to go further: the effect of science was actually to undermine all transcendent principles, systematically stripping the world of all spiritual mystery, emotional color, and ethical significance and turning it into a mere causal mechanism. Weber profoundly regretted the existential emptiness left behind by this disenchanted world after science was finished with it, but he saw no alternative to a stoical, clear understanding of the inevitable. It was the fate of the modern individual to live in a godless, prophetless world:

Wherever. . . rational empirical knowledge has consistently carried out the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism, there appears the ultimate challenge to the claims of the ethical postulate, that the world is a divinely ordered cosmos with some kind of ethically meaningful direction.²

As Weber well knew, many in his student audience would not have been happy with his uncompromising call to stoicism,³ but the sociologist’s assessment of science as a disenchanting force in the modern world would hardly have surprised very many of them. Since the 1890s, an intensifying stream of German-language articles and monographs had been identifying the rise of a certain kind of mechanistic thinking in the natural sciences as a chief culprit in a variety of failed or crisis-ridden cultural and political experiments. Science had declared humanity’s life and soul a senseless product of mechanism, so people now treated one another as mere machines. It was said that the spread of mechanistic, instrumentalist thinking into all areas of professional and cultural life had given rise to a cynical, this-worldly attitude and a decline in morality and idealism. Traditional ideals of learning and culture were in crisis, the young people were alienated, and the arts had degenerated into exercises in absurdity and self-absorption. The nihilistic message of scientists who apparently valued Technik over soul and integrity was even blamed for the devastation of the lost war—the first war, it was said, in which victory [was] no longer decided by the spiritual and mental resistance of men, but by the predominance of mechanical instruments of power.⁴

Weber’s lecture in 1918 was intended as a direct response to the widespread mood of restless antimodernism and antiscience that was so palpable in the wake of that lost war and the fall of the Wilhelminian regime. While his sympathies were with the disaffected, the personal effect of the war on Weber had been to reinforce a profound distrust of any charismatic, irrationalist solutions to the dilemmas raised by the Machine society. His message, therefore, had been uncompromising: science could give no answers to the burning questions of existence, and it must not try, regardless of the pain and unsatisfied hungers that it left in its wake.

Yet not everyone was prepared to accept Weber’s conclusion that the choices were inevitably irresponsible irrationalism or grim-faced resignation. This book tells the story of a group of German-speaking scientists who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, effectively agreed with Weber’s conclusion that a certain kind of mechanistic science had disenchanted the world. They did not, however, believe that the process of disenchantment through science was inevitably destined to continue. Instead, these men—biologists, neurologists, and psychologists—argued that a continuing commitment to responsible science was compatible with an ethically and existentially meaningful picture of human existence; but only if one were prepared to rethink prejudices about what constituted appropriate epistemological and methodological standards for science. Under the banner of Wholeness, these scientists argued, in varying ways, that a transformed biology and psychology—one that viewed phenomena less atomistically and more holistically,⁵ less mechanistically and more intuitively—could lead to the rediscovery of a nurturing relationship with the natural world. What the old science of the Machine had wrought, a new science of Wholeness would heal. It would reenchant the world—and it had ‘voiced’ this idea long before Morris Berman issued a similar call to arms in his bestseller from the 1980s.⁶

The Machine science in dispute here was, above all, the work of the so-called biophysicist program spearheaded by leading German scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, and Rudolf Virchow. These were the men who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had fought for a total integration of physiology with physics within a reductionist framework, and who—arguing from a particular hard-line interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s critique of reason—had asserted that all science must necessarily limit itself to mechanistic modes of explanation. Any and all other kinds of assertion were, by definition, metaphysical and outside the proper sphere of science.⁷

The rebellion against this fortress of rigor began with the fin de siècle revival of vitalism in early-twentieth-century biology, primarily associated with the work of Hans Driesch. Through its showcasing of research results in embryology, Driesch’s new vitalism declared that the inability of mechanism to account for the incontrovertible results of laboratory research justified a turn to alternative formulations. Nevertheless, by the first decades of the twentieth century, such prominent theoreticians of holism like Adolf Meyer-Abich and Ludwig von Bertalanffy were distancing themselves from the claims of outright vitalism and proposing a range of alternatives to mechanism that were self-consciously emphasized as nonvitalistic; alternatives that often also looked back to Kant but emphasized a different reading of that legacy. Especially important for these men was the Kantian assertion that the mechanistic causal categories of human reason in fact fall short when dealing with living organisms. Kant had said that in the realm of living processes, human judgment was justified in positing a different order of causality, a teleological causality (Naturzweck) that looked at the functioning of parts in terms of the organization and needs of the whole.⁸ In reaching back to this aspect of Kant’s legacy, twentieth-century holistic scientists were thus challenging, not only the empirical inadequacies of the nineteenth-century Machine model of life and mind, but also the epistemological and methodological inadequacies of the science that had created that model in the first place.

The new holistic science of life and mind that was to replace the old Machine science was really more a family of approaches than a single coherent perspective. The need to do justice to organismic purposiveness or teleological functioning—to questions of what for? and not merely how?—was central in all cases. Beyond that need was a range of overlapping understandings. Some holism was concerned with finding alternatives to the view of the organism as a mere sum of its elementary parts and processes (what was often denounced as atomism). This form of holism aimed instead to understand apparently discrete physiological processes in terms of their roles in the total functioning of the organism. Others understood by holism an imperative to resist the tendency of the time to treat bodily phenomena and mental phenomena as separate ontological categories (so-called psycho-physical parallelism). This holism insisted instead that the task of a human holistic biology in particular must be to reground the mind in the body and to reanimate the body with the mind: psychosomatic medicine would be one of the most enduring legacies of this second holistic tradition. Still another form of holism emphasized the inadequacy of thinking that the whole could be considered merely at the level of the individual organism. It maintained that organismic processes and behavior only make sense when studied as part of a larger system, whether that system be the immediate lived world of the organism, nature as a whole, or (in some cases) the cosmic logic of the evolutionary process writ large.⁹

But that is not all. In this process of drawing up a holism designed to challenge the many faces of the Machine in the laboratory and clinic, holistic life and mind scientists also felt increasingly free to speak to the broader question of the Machine in society and intellectual life. From Berlin to Prague to Vienna to Zurich, these scientists began to mingle their voices with those of other kinds of cultural critics, would-be reformers, and crisis-mongers. Those other voices from outside the sciences also typically used the oppositional imagery of machine and wholeness in order to articulate what they believed had gone wrong in politics, the community, and individual existence—and to identify roads to renewal.¹⁰ That imagery in turn had energetic links to other, overlapping political and societal oppositions of the time: Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (society), an opposition made famous by the nineteenth-century sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies;¹¹ (German) Kultur versus (French) Zivilisation; Life and Soul versus Mind and Reason, a squaring-off associated with such life philosophers as Ludwig Klages.

The resonances across these binary clusters were strong, and new writers entering the fray found themselves either struggling to disaggregate their specific arguments from those of the collective, or else (more frequently) allowing their reliance on one trope to draw on the energies of the collective. For example, when Tönnies spoke of the noxiousness of societies, part of his point was that societies were so noxious because they functioned like machines. Gemeinschaft, he declared, "should be understood as a living organism, Gesellschaft as a mechanical aggregate and artifact."¹² And when he went on to suggest that a great metropolis like Berlin exemplified all the ugliness, impersonality, and hostility inherent to modern society, well, here again, what Berlin was had already been partly pre-interpreted for both him and his readers through preexisting cultural imagery that saw that city as a kind of monstrous (or awesome) machine.¹³

What happened now when the voice of this new anti-machine science began to mix with those of these other, full-time cultural critics, many of whom were well known for their distrust of both science and scientists? (The life philosopher Theodor Lessing was not untypical when he decried modern man as a species of robber-apes which has been infected with megalomania by science.¹⁴) Significantly, the result was less frequently an open struggle over values and control and more often a subtle shift in the cultural logic that ruled the larger critique as a whole. Even though science (the old science) had been the enemy, nevertheless it had always been a powerful enemy, with an authority that would be useful to have on one’s own side. Now that it was in the process of remaking itself (the new science),¹⁵ now that its truths were in the service of Wholeness rather than the Machine, few objected to letting it continue to claim a unique social and epistemological authority in the larger debate.

In this context, the vision of holistic nature emerging from the life and mind sciences tended to carry the most clout. This is not because researchers in the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.) felt that they had nothing to say about Mechanism, Wholeness, or the crisis of modernity—they did. There is still much to ponder in Paul Forman’s now classic 1971 argument that German twentieth-century physics drew back from the mechanistic and deterministic principles to which it had been epistemologically committed, not out of empirical and conceptual necessity, but as an accommodation to a cultural mood that was explicitly hostile to deterministic, materialistic philosophies.¹⁶ According to Forman, the enshrining of much more culturally congenial acausal, antimechanistic, even semimystical, interpretations of quantum theory and relativity allowed physics to transform itself from a suspect enterprise to—in the words of another historian—the solvent of the materialism that had spread with the conquests of classical physics.¹⁷

The case of physics notwithstanding, the holistic biological and psychological sciences possessed a special authority in the larger cultural discussion about Wholeness because these sciences studied the subjects—life and soul—that served as key symbols in this time of cultural and spiritual regeneration.¹⁸ Posing their laboratory and clinical claims in metaphors and tropes encrusted with suggestive meanings and historically resonating associations, holistic life and mind scientists managed at once to engage the data and problems of the laboratory and clinic while simultaneously functioning as part of the heterogeneous field of German cultural criticism and theory. We see how, in this time of perceived intellectual and social crisis, metaphor and other connotative properties of language allowed holistic scientists to leapfrog in a range of ways across the epistemological divisions of the time that an earlier generation of science had declared must necessarily separate the secular from the sacred, the natural from the political, the mythical from the necessary. For those with the culturally and politically sensitized ears to hear the messages, the new arguments in biology, neurology, and psychology for Wholeness and against the Machine could thus gradually come to persuade simultaneously as scientific fact, salvation mythology, and psychobiological guide to cultural and political survival.

How receptive were the more established perspectives in the sciences themselves to these holistic challenges? Some important disciplinary traditions seem to have been more or less indifferent. In his study of some forty-odd German geneticists from the Wilhelminian and Weimar period, for example, Jonathan Harwood found that most were basically supportive of mechanistic and materialist explanations in their discipline, while only a minority expressed some sympathy for a more holistic perspective (here often conveyed in concern with a possible role for cytoplasm in hereditary transmission).¹⁹ Conversely, disciplines like embryology, botany, medicine, psychology, neurology, and zoology seem to have taken the call to wholeness far more to heart, presumably because of the preoccupations within those fields with such phenomena as form, development, and self-regulation. Nevertheless, even in subdisciplines of the life and mind sciences that were most receptive to holism, no full consensus was reached and various established mechanistic and reductionistic perspectives continued to carry weight. The heyday of holistic thinking in German neurology, for example, coincided with a period of intensive laboratory investigation into the cellular basis of brain function that culminated in the drawing of the cyto-architectonic maps of Korbinian Brodmann and the attempts by neurologists like Oskar and Cécile Vogt to relate discrete psychic functions to histological variations in the brain. It is true that holism claimed the future of the German mind and life sciences for itself, but as late as the 1930s, this oppositional movement still knew itself best by emphasizing what it was not, still was caught up in the process of debating and developing its own agenda and strategies.

This said, I am less interested in locating holistic life and mind science in the broader history of institutionalized science research in Germany (valuable as such a study would be) and more concerned with establishing a place for it as a neglected voice in German cultural history.²⁰ Viewed from this perspective, it emerges as a story with a number of broad turning points, the most important of which was the First World War. The national humiliation, class fragmentation, and political polarization engendered by the loss of that war acted as a radicalizing force for many scientists involved in developing holistic reformulations of life and mind. The crises of the time seemed to demand that holism become more than just a means to a more authentic vision of life and mind; it must also become a blueprint for visualizing a more authentic future for Germany. In this uncertain time, the same flexible language and imagery that had previously connected this science to older aesthetic and spiritual traditions in Germany now stretched itself to connect it to the politics and social disarray of the postwar era as well. After 1918, in other words, holism often spoke with a political accent.

For a while, the intellectual field of holistic life and mind science was able to accommodate a range of political solutions to the tensions between modernity and nostalgia, mechanism and wholeness, science and spirit, Technik and Kultur. Nevertheless, as intellectuals in the 1920s descended into greater depths of discontent, aspects of the scientific Wholeness/Mechanism oppositional imagery began to take on dimensions that both German-speaking central Europe and the rest of the world would learn to regret. Jews would be increasingly identified as both cause and as flesh-and-blood instantiation of all the worst values of the machine—summative, nonsynthetic thought, soulless, mechanistic science, rootless, mercenary social relations.

An earlier tradition of intellectualized anti-Semitic scholarship—the bulk of it stemming from the fin de siècle years—provided ready resources for these developments. At the turn of the century, the Anglo-German race philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain had spoken of the crude-empirical, causality-bewitched materialism of the old mechanistic sciences that was nothing other than the Semitic Creation-story in modern clothing.²¹ Otto Weininger had similarly linked the growing alleged infiltration of Jews into the medical profession with the triumph of the soulless-machine perspective in both medical theory and practice. From the earliest times, until the dominance of the Jews, he wrote, medicine was closely allied with religion. But now they make it a matter of drugs, a mere administration of chemicals. . . . The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these on a level with their own dead ashes.²² By the time the National Socialists had secured power in Germany in 1933, metaphorical linkages like these increasingly carried policy implications and struck increasingly ominous poses. In a 1935 article that appeared in the official medical journal of the Nazi party, Ziel und Weg, the message could hardly have been clearer. The article stressed the dissolutive, sterile nature of Jewish thinking and Jewish science that could lead only to death and contrasted this with the simple, organic, creative thinking of the healthy non-Jew, who thinks in wholes.²³

The racializing of German holism and its partial absorption into the politics and mythology of National Socialism is an important part of the larger story of German holism, and is recounted in chapter 6 of this book. Nevertheless, even if we know how part of the story I tell in this book is going to come out, it is important that we resist discovering the outline of a terrible future in holism’s past or imagining that all holistic, vitalistic, or teleological views of nature are part of a larger destruction of reason that can be tracked in some straight, degenerating line from the romantics to Hegel to Nietzsche to Hitler. Such claims and temptations are familiar in the older secondary literature on modern Germany,²⁴ but one can argue they do not do justice either to the historical contradictions of modernity in general or to the role of anti-mechanistic, pastoral, and alternative scientific thinking as a reaction to and comment on those contradictions. In his study of Weimar culture, for example, Detlev Peukert stresses the extent to which expressions of anxiety among German intellectuals about the consequences of modernity were found, not just among the cranky anti-modernist fringe sowing cultural despair in cheap pamphlets, but in the writings of intellectuals we would place firmly within the modernist fold.²⁵ In a similar way, I argue in this book that, before 1933, various liberal, democratic, and Jewish scientists were attracted to both the intellectual and cultural promises of holism and managed to share concerns about the mechanization of both science and society with their more reactionary and, in some cases, anti-Semitic colleagues. As one then tracks the varied arguments across the decade, one can see how, gradually, different spokespeople for holism actually came to be as much in a state of tension with one another as they were with their mechanistic rivals, each developing arguments designed to undermine the politics and positions of the other.

Yet, even as holism in some respects proved to be a pluralistic and sometimes even quarrelsome phenomenon, in other respects, it always remained a surprisingly closely knit one: certain recurring themes and problems made up a coherent conceptual grid whose architecture, without being rigid, allowed distinctions to be drawn between innovations and theoretical developments that were inside the frame and those that posed a threat to it. The self-defined borders, colors, and contours of this grid clearly mark it as a German construction.²⁶ That said, we should nevertheless not insist on a more rigid definition of holism’s Germanness than was in fact operative at the time. The paper trail left by holistic life and mind scientists did not respect the political borders of Germany proper but to varying degrees embraced the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, Hungary, and Austria as well.²⁷ Although political events like World War I had repercussions for everyone, holistic comrades-in-arms recognized one another in the first instance because they all (quite literally) spoke a common language, made use of certain common rhetorical conventions, and saw themselves as in dialogue (in varying ways) with common philosophical, scientific, and cultural legacies.

Still, even if I stress the relative looseness with which I speak of the Germanness of German holism, it is true that the focus of this book privileges German cultural experience. It does not do this because of some assumption that an impulse toward antimechanistic, holistic approaches in science was a uniquely German phenomenon in the early decades of the twentieth century. Anyone at all familiar with this material knows that the very term holism (a word not generally used by Germans) was coined in 1926 by the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts.²⁸ Additionally, two highly influential early-twentieth-century advocates of antimechanistic philosophies of science were products of French and British culture respectively: Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution, and Alfred North Whitehead, architect of an organismic approach to reality that came to be known as process philosophy.²⁹ These men were admittedly not scientists themselves, but in the United States, embryologists at the University of Chicago, such as Charles Manning Child and Charles Judson Herrick, worked during the interwar years on developing dynamic, holistic models of organismic development, while American psychologist Karl Lashley galvanized experimental psychology with his radical holistic or equipotentialist view of memory and intelligence in the brain.³⁰ In this sense, one could conclude that holism had become the touchstone of the day.

Moreover, there is every indication that Germany was not the only cultural setting in which holism was not an insular intellectual phenomenon but rather a vehicle for both political anxiety and social reformist zeal. Sharon Kingsland has emphasized ways in which embryologists like Child and Herrick at the University of Chicago used holistically oriented ideas like emergent evolution as part of a biological defense of liberal politics that affirmed the autonomy of the individual within a social whole. Stephen Cross and William Albury have suggested a relationship between the preoccupation in American physiology with organismic regulation and homeostasis (internal physiological balance) and broader American interwar concerns with the need to preserve social stability.³¹

The history of science is still waiting for some systematic comparative analysis of twentieth-century holism in the life and mind sciences that would both clarify larger unifying patterns across cultural and national contexts and also tease apart salient distinctions.³² Nevertheless, the particular story of holism in the German-speaking countries is likely to continue to have a particular prominence and importance of its own. In Germany, a sense of groundedness in cultural values mattered enormously, since there was no stable tradition of political and national identification. Industrialization had come later and harder there than elsewhere in Europe and the United States. And later, it would be the German-speaking countries that would lose a war, lose an empire, and lose the respect of the world. A great deal seemed to be in crisis, a great deal seemed to be at stake, and the [resulting] feverish intellectual climate . . . created almost laboratory-like conditions in which every conceivable solution to the problems of modernity could be put to the test.³³ If one of the larger rationales for studying holistic science is to understand how it could become more than itself, could enter into a dynamic relationship with its own proliferating set of meanings, we are warranted to look at where the action is likely to have been most intense.

It seems necessary to say that even though I aim to locate German holistic life and mind science in German culture, and even though I assert that this was science that became more than itself, I do not believe that the content of this science was merely some socially driven or historically arbitrary creative product unconstrained by any demands from its own data. Certainly, I share the conviction of most of my profession that the statements of science do not mirror the realities of nature in some simple, detached way. At the same time, I believe that what actually makes science worth taking so seriously is the fact that it apparently does, in highly ritualized ways, engage phenomenal realities that talk back and whose logic is not wholly human—and yet simultaneously does so in ways richly generative of human meanings and social imperatives. In other words, ontologically, we humans are not the measure of all things, but scientific knowledge does involve a process, still not well understood, in which that which we call natural is brought inside human history and enabled to play a role in any number of human dramas.³⁴

Given this, how have I understood the accounts of German holistic life and mind science written by scientists—accounts that speak very little about culture and politics, and a great deal about invertebrate animals, human brains, urchin embryos, and experimental subjects?³⁵ Roughly put, my position has been, not that these accounts are wrong (though they may certainly be fashioned in self-serving ways), but rather that they are misleadingly incomplete. Here, my understanding of metaphor—its capacity to connect different orders of reality simultaneously—has allowed me to claim the story of German holistic science for German cultural history without neglecting the role, so self-evident to scientists, played by the nonhuman, the material, and the unexpected in that same story.³⁶ Paying attention to the multiregister voice of metaphor has allowed me to see how the conceptual content of holistic life and mind science was also its cultural context but without my summarily reducing or collapsing the former into the latter.

There is another way in which I have resisted the temptation to reduce or collapse my material while writing this book. In fact the book ultimately tells, not just one story about the cultural meanings of holism, but rather several. The book’s heart lies in its biographical studies of four German-speaking holistic scientists active between 1890 and 1945: behavioral biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow (1853–1930), Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), and holistic neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). While a couple of these names are familiar today and the others are more obscure, the criteria for choosing this mix of characters was not based on present-day perceptions of a particular figure’s importance or enduring legacy. Instead, all the main protagonists in this book were chosen for their reputations among peers as pioneers in the attempt to transform basic principles of psychology and biology along antimechanistic, holistic lines.

With an age gap of 27 years between the youngest (Max Wertheimer) and the oldest (Constantin von Monakow), these four men cannot be said to represent a generation in the sense exploited by other cultural historians.³⁷ Nevertheless, they drew on one another’s insights and data, and even, in some cases, collaborated. They also shared active and sometimes contentious membership in the larger scientific, philosophical, and cultural community of scientific holism that included such figures as the embryologist and philosopher Hans Driesch, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, the race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the psychologist Felix Krueger, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, the holistic-biology theorist Adolf Meyer-Abich, and the medical anthropologist and psychosomaticist Viktor von Weizsäcker. All reacted strongly, yet distinctively, to the complex agenda of concerns that had been raised by the First World War. And finally, all of them, in a range of ways both subtle and blunt, employed the rich metaphorical language of Wholeness to argue for connections between developments in the clinic or laboratory on the one hand and solutions to the cultural imperatives of the time on the other.

A group-biography approach was chosen, not to reproduce some hagiographic understanding of history of science as a parade of Great Men,³⁸ but rather to express the spirit of what Carl Schorske calls the empirical pursuit of pluralities. In parallel-tracking four scientists who lived and worked—again to quote Schorske—as culture-makers in a common social and temporal space,³⁹ my larger goal has been to tell a story greater than the sum of its individual parts, to write a history with, not one, but multiple viewpoints and endings. Taken together, I hope such a narrative strategy will enable me to convey, at a level of detail that would otherwise not be possible, my deep sense of German holistic life and mind science as a world of tensions, ambiguous intellectual and moral messages, and shifting potential courses that elude any easy or dogmatic generalizations.⁴⁰

Reenchanted Science

Figure 1. Gerd Arntz, Fabrik [Factory], 1927. © 1995 Estate of Gerd Arntz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

•   CHAPTER ONE   •

The Human Machine and the Call to Wholeness

HOLISTIC life and mind science brought a potent mixture of Salvationist optimism and bristly aggrievement to its view of the world. On the one hand, this reformist impulse was all about celebration: its leaders knew they were guiding the sciences out of the dusk of the past and toward the brightening new horizon of Wholeness. At the same time, they also spent much time glaring retrospectively at a particular enemy they believed was responsible for all of their struggles in the first place. They knew this enemy under many faces but, significantly, almost all of those guises were condemned under the same name: the Machine.

The Machine that haunted holism’s self-consciousness was an entity with a status much like that of the Communist threat that haunted the consciousness of the United States during the height of the Cold War. That is to say, it is best understood, first and foremost, as an emotionally charged image of negativity that functioned to define and drive holism’s positive agenda. Nevertheless, we are also not dealing with a made-up entity constructed entirely out of rhetoric and paranoia. The Machine was so potent because there were evident realities feeding and reinforcing its various meanings (real people who called themselves mechanists, for example).

Holists themselves were inclined to suppose that the specific terms of holism’s relationship to