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CONCEPTS BECOME FORCES WHEN THEY RESIST ONE ANOTHER
Johann Herbart was a German philosopher who wanted to investigate how the mind works – in particular, how it manages ideas or concepts.Given that we each have a huge number of ideas over the course of our lifetime, how do we not become increasingly confused?It seemed to Herbart that the mind must use some kind of system for differentiating and storing ideas.
He also wanted to account for the fact that although ideas exist forever (Herbart thought them incapable of being destroyed), some seem to exist beyond our conscious awareness.
The 18th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz was the first to explore the existence of ideas beyond awareness, calling them petite(小的)(“small”) perceptions.
As an example, he pointed out that we often recall having perceived something – such as the detail in a scene – even though we are not aware of noticing it at the time.This means that we perceive things and store a memory of them despite the fact that we are unaware of doing so.
Dynamic ideas
According to Herbart, ideas form as information from the senses combines.The term he used for ideas – Vorstellung – encompasses(包含) thoughts, mental images, and even emotional states.These make up the entire content of the mind, and Herbart saw them not as static but dynamic elements, able to move and interact with one another.
Ideas, he said, can attract and combine with other ideas or feelings, or repulse(驱逐)them, rather like magnets.Similar ideas, such as a colour and tone, attract each other and combine to form a more complex idea.However, if two ideas are unalike, they may continue to exist without association.
This causes them to weaken over time, so that they eventually sink below the “threshold of consciousness”.Should two ideas directly contradict one another, “resistance occurs” and “concepts become forces when they resist one another”.They repel one another with an energy that propels one of them beyond consciousness, into a place that Herbart referred to as “a state of tendency”; and we now know as “the unconscious”.
Herbart saw the unconscious as simply a kind of storage place for weak or opposed ideas.In positing(设想) a two-part consciousness, split by a distinct threshold, he was attempting to deliver a structural solution for the management of ideas in a healthy mind.
But Sigmund Freud was to see it as a much more complex and revealing mechanism.He combined Herbart’s concepts with his own theories of unconscious drives to form the basis of the 20th-century’s most important therapeutic(治疗的) approach: psychoanalysis(精神分析).
Thoughts and feelings contain energy, according to Herbart, acting on each other like magnets to attract or repel like or unlike ideas.
MORE TO KNOW…
APPROACH
Structuralism
BEFORE
1704 German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz discusses petites perceptions (perceptions without consciousness) in his New Essays on Human Understanding.
1869 German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann publishes his widely read Philosophy of the Unconscious.
AFTER
1895 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer publish Studies on Hysteria, introducing psychoanalysis and its theories of the unconscious.
1912 Carl Jung writes The Psychology of the Unconscious, suggesting that all people have a culturally specific collective unconscious.
JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART
Johann Herbart was born in Oldenburg, Germany.He was tutored at home by his mother until he was 12, after which he attended the local school before entering the University of Jena to study philosophy.He spent three years as a private tutor before gaining a doctorate at Göttingen University, where he lectured in philosophy.
In 1806, Napoleon defeated Prussia, and in 1809, Herbart was offered Immanuel Kant’s chair of philosophy at Königsberg, where the Prussian king and his court were exiled.While moving within these aristocratic circles, Herbart met and married Mary Drake, an English woman half his age.
In 1833, he returned to Göttingen University, following disputes with the Prussian government, and remained there as Professor of Philosophy until his death from a stroke, aged 65.
Key works
1808 General Practical Philosophy
1816 A Text-book in Psychology
1824 Psychology as Science
