Fechner und die Folgen außerhalb der Naturwissenschaften: Interdisziplinäres Kolloquium zum 200. Geburtstag Gustav Theodor Fechners ed. by Ulla Fix. Tübingen, From Cosmology to Ecology: The Monist World-View in Germany from 1770 to 1930 by Eric Paul Jacobsen

Abstract

MLR, IOI.3, 2006 89I and stimulating account of an important tendency in nineteenth-century German letters. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY ROBERT C. HOLUB Fechner und die Folgen auJ3erhalb der Naturwissenschaften: Interdisziplindres Kollo quium zum 200. Geburtstag Gustav Theodor Fechners. Ed. by ULLA Fix. Tiibin gen: Niemeyer. 2003. E48. ISBN 3-484-7004I-6. From Cosmology toEcology: The Monist World-View inGermany from I770 to I930. By ERIC PAUL JACOBSEN. (German Life and Civilization, 43) Oxford, Bern, Brussels, Frankfurt a.M., New York, and Vienna: Peter Lang. 2005. 40I pp. ?42; SwF 93; E64.20. ISBN 3-039Io-306-7. In the current wave of interest in the connections between scientific thought and literary writing, Gustav Theodor Fechner (I80I-87) has come to be seen as a fas cinating link figure for the German-speaking world. For in his life and his writings he combined a commitment to precise empirical research (he is remembered by ex perimental psychologists for establishing an important principle of visual perception) with speculation on the world of nature in its entirety based on the notion that all matter is in some sense animate (panpsychism). These two dimensions of Fechner's work, which tend to appear in the perspective of later times asworlds apart, were not represented by separate phases of his career, but were pursued in conjunction and evidently viewed by him as integrally connected. While he was teaching physics at Leipzig from I834 to I839 he was also publishing on poetry and its role in achiev ing an integrated view of the world, and during the period when he published his most important speculative writings-Nanna oder Uber das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (i 848), Zend-Avesta oder Uber die Dinge desHimmels unddesJenseits: Vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung (i 85 I)-he continued towrite essays on such specific scientific issues as electro-dynamics and the theory of atoms. The writings of his later years, which include Elemente der Psychophysik (i86o) and Vorschule der Asthetik (I876), show him drawing simultaneously on both parts of his intellectual enquiry. While the speculative side of Fechner's thought was always controversial among scientists and tended to be dismissed as outmoded by the end of the nineteenth century, his writings continued to be widely read in the early twentieth century. Wilhelm Bolsche, Paul Scheerbart, Alfred Doblin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Franz Kafka, as well as Bruno Taut and the architects of the 'Gliserne Kette', all showed a keen interest in Fechner's ideas. The contributions to Fechner und die Folgen auJ3erhalb der Naturwissenschaften, the proceedings of an interdisciplinary colloquium held at the University of Leipzig in 2001, point to several reasons for taking Fechner seriously as a representative of the condition of scientific thinking in his time, as well as in a broader cultural context. Michael Heidelberger demonstrates the empiricist foundations of Fechner's world-view-he held that all physical phenomena, including living organisms, could be accounted for by physical laws-while also explaining the precise senses inwhich Fechner distinguished his position from that of reductive materialism: he argued that additional laws were needed to explain the inherent tendencies of organic phenomena, avoided the attribution of psychic phenomena to physical causes, and proposed instead a functional relationship between the two (this is the basis of the psycho-physical parallelism often associated with his name). Itwas in response toFechner's position, as Heidelberger shows, that such later thinkers as Ernst Mach, Alois Riegl, and Charles Sanders Peirce were able to develop influential intellectual positions of their own. By comparing Fechner's arguments with those of a contemporary, the astrophysicist 892 Reviews and spiritist Karl Friedrich Z6llner, the mathematical expert Riidiger Thiele is able to show how sternly Fechner resisted occult thinking, and in particular the notion of a 'fourth dimension' where spirits might reside; and Dirk Evers explains how Fechner integrates the principles of physics, Romantic nature philosophy, and the Christian precept of divine benevolence into a conception of God as the supreme bond connecting all natural phenomena. In the opening essay of the volume, Gert Mattenklott surveys Fechner's writings as testimony to an integral personality and an integrated project, bringing out in particular the role of metaphor in expressing...