German Holism Revisited: Really?

Abstract

Anne Harrington, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, has written a so far very well-received book on the history of holism in Germany. The biographies of four men are at its center: Jakob von Uexkull, Constantin von Monakow, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Goldstein—although Christian von Ehrenfels, Wolfgang Kohler, Hans Driesch and others receive considerable treatment as well. It is not clear on which basis the four main characters were selected. To a good extent, the book parallels Mitchell G. Ash’s Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967 (1995). Reenchanted Science belongs to the American ‘Science Wars’ framework, in which Harrington is a bridge-builder between the hard-nosed natural scientists and those theoreticians who seem to threaten the absolute truth-claim of the former. Commendable as this is, in order to locate the development of science in the social-political context of its time, one needs some working knowledge about this context. Harrington’s knowledge of Nazi Germany, however, is but slight; that of the German Empire and World War I, slighter still and mainly based on 25-year-old textbook-style accounts, rehashing outdated cliches (see pp. 19–21, 24, 31, 58). While one cannot expect original research on every subject in a book like this, there are by far too many secondary and even tertiary