What Phenomenology Changes in Practice — Part 3 of 3
Homework I Set Myself Eleven Years Ago
February 2015. A post from my basic training in Munich ends like this.
The perceptual is close to the phenomenology of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl. If the timing allows, I would like to take up its relation to phenomenology in this column.
(from “Phase III (6) — Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept“)
This series is that answer. It took eleven years.
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl all turned up in Part 1 and Part 2. But one question is still unanswered.
The First of the Five Principles
Part 1 listed Rolfing’s five principles. Wholism, support, adaptability, palintonicity, closure. The first of them is Wholism.
Don’t see the body as the sum of its parts; see the whole as a whole. But why should that be so? Part 1 said what the principles do. It did not touch this.
Anatomy sees the body in parts. There are muscles, bones, joints. It is a powerful way of seeing, and it works. A practitioner uses that knowledge. And is told, all the same, to see the whole.
Rolfing did not create this opposition.
I Already Had It, from a Book on Management
The day before the five principles, the same training log has something else in it. The closing chapter of The New Realities (1989) by Peter Drucker. The chapter is called “From Analysis to Perception — The New World View.”
My father gave me that book around 1990, when I was studying for university entrance exams. I had asked him why the socialist countries were collapsing. What came back was not an answer but a way of seeing.
In that final chapter:
In a mechanical phenomenon the whole is equal to the sum of its parts and therefore capable of being understood by analysis. Biological phenomena are however ‘wholes’. They are different from the sum of their parts.
(from “Phase III (8) — Seeing and Perceiving (2): The Sum of the Parts Is Not the Whole“)
Before anyone taught me the first of the five principles as theory, I had the same proposition from a book on management. Twenty-five years earlier. The 2015 post simply sets the quotation down. It does not notice that the principle I was about to be taught said the same thing.
Drucker Named the Source
And in that same chapter, he says where the proposition came from.
Indeed we had begun well before the computer to shift towards perception. Almost a century ago, in the 1890s, configuration (Gestalt) psychology first realized that we hear ‘cat’ and not ‘C”A”T’. It first realized that we perceive.
The 1890s. Gestalt psychology.
And a few lines earlier in the same chapter, Drucker says something about perception itself. The analysts, he writes, asserted that intuition can neither be taught nor trained. Against that:
In the biological universe, however, perception is at the centre. And it can – indeed it must – be trained and developed.
That is Part 2’s question. Can seeing be taught? In 1989 Drucker had already written that it can.
This part goes where he pointed. What was in the place Drucker named? And why does it come from the same root as phenomenology?
What “Gestalt” Means
One word first.
Gestalt is an ordinary German word for shape, or form, or a configuration. It was not a technical term to begin with.
It became one because a certain property needed a name. A form as a whole, which no amount of examining the parts will produce.
Drucker’s example works as it stands. Hear C, then A, then T, and no cat arrives. Hear the three together and you hear “cat.” “Cat” is in none of the three.
The same happens in music. Sing a tune high or sing it low, and it is the same tune. Not one of the sounding notes is the same. Replace every part and the same thing survives. Use exactly the same notes in a different order and you get a different tune.
A whole that cannot be reduced to its parts. That is a Gestalt.
And here it reaches the treatment room. The claim behind Wholism is that the body is the same kind of thing. Examine the muscles one at a time and the way that person stands does not appear.
A note in passing: this is not Gestalt therapy. That is the psychotherapy Fritz Perls began. The name is shared; the lineage is not. What follows is Gestalt psychology.
One more. The same closing chapter comes up in another series — the passage where Drucker, borrowing from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, says a philosophy that asks about perception rather than analysis might be called a Critique of Pure Perception (see “Perception, Not Analysis — Why a Philosopher Was Hired to Evaluate Artificial Intelligence“). One chapter is the fork for two different series.
What Was Going On a Hundred Years Ago
Here is the road this part travels, before we start down it.
Something was underway in Vienna in the 1880s. Removing from the foundations of a discipline whatever does not appear to the senses. Brentano, from Part 1, is inside that movement; so is Mach, who dropped absolute space.
The movement produced a book. Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations, 1886.
Two lines run out from the people who read it. One becomes Gestalt psychology. The other becomes phenomenology. The 1890s Drucker named is the decade they part.
The names below are not biography. They come in the order of how far each one carried this single turn — the one who noticed the wholeness, the one who named it, the ones who settled it by experiment, and last, the one who tied the two halves back together.
And then it comes back to Wholism.
That is the whole shape. If you want the detail, read on.
If you would rather skip the history, go to “What Are You Looking At”. That section sets out how phenomenology and Gestalt psychology differ inside a session. Read from there to the end and it holds together.
“There Is No Such Thing as Mach’s Philosophy”
Part 1 met Ernst Mach twice. Once as the man who dropped absolute space and absolute time because nothing observes them. Once as the man Husserl named as phenomenology’s forerunner.
So what did Mach think he was doing?
Not philosophy, he insisted. When the neo-Kantian Richard Hönigswald published a critique of Mach’s philosophy, Mach’s reply was that there is no such thing as Mach’s philosophy — at most a methodology of natural science and a psychology of cognition. He says it in The Analysis of Sensations, in the preface to Knowledge and Error, and in Space and Geometry.
So what was the “philosophy” he wanted no part of? The preface to the second edition of The Analysis of Sensations (1900) gives it. One and the same view underlies his work in the critique of knowledge, in physics, and in sense physiology: that everything metaphysical is superfluous and should be struck out as something that disturbs the economy of science.
A chapter added to the third edition (1901) says the same. His aim is to exclude every metaphysical question. And then: everything we can know about the world necessarily appears within sense-sensation, and this sense-sensation can, in ways that can be specified, be freed from the personal influence of the observer.
What Mach called “philosophy” and kept at arm’s length was metaphysics. Arguing about what does not appear to the senses. Absolute space was one instance of it.
Set this beside Brentano from Part 1. Brentano stopped the methods of physics from coming into psychology. Mach threw metaphysics out of physics. Both are removing an unseen assumption from inside a discipline.
Holism, Despite the Name
The position Mach set out in The Analysis of Sensations (1886) is usually called a monism of sensory elements.
The philosopher Gen Kida traces this whole sequence in a book called Mach and Nietzsche: A History of Thought at the Turn of the Century. Most of what this part draws on comes from there, and Kida sums the position up as follows.
The name makes it sound like taking a body apart into pieces. Reduce the world to elements, then build it back up. It looks like it belongs in the same row as Wundt’s elementist psychology from Part 1.
It does not.
Mach’s point is that we ordinarily look with both eyes, and for practical purposes we see bodies in space rather than colors and shapes. What matters is not the separate elements of the complex, but the physiological-optical complex as a whole.
We do not perceive light and shade. We perceive things in space. Mach explains this as a habit — the habit of attending to a fairly large, spatially interconnected mass of light-sensations. Seeing a figure against a ground, he says, is a decisive moment in perception, and he demonstrated it with reversible figures and puzzle pictures.
Then the musical case. When a sequence of tones begins on a different note but keeps the same ratios of vibration, we recognize the two as the same melody directly, through sensation — just as we recognize equal form in figures that are geometrically similar and similarly placed. Equal melodies on different themes, Mach says, can be called tonal configurations of equal or similar tonal shape.
Transpose it and you still know the melody. Not one sounding note is the same. It is heard as the same thing all the same. So the melody is in none of the individual notes.
Kida’s conclusion is that Mach’s monism of sensory elements plainly aimed at a kind of holism — turning toward wholes that cannot be reduced to a collection of elements — and not at anything like the elementist, reductionist psychology of Wilhelm Wundt that dominated the period.
Despite the name, he is on the holist side. He uses the word “element” while looking at what a collection of elements cannot deliver.
The Wholeness Got a Name
A Paper of Twenty-Odd Pages
Mach had noticed the phenomenon. He did not give it a name.
The name came from Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), in an 1890 paper, “On Gestalt Qualities.” It is barely twenty-odd pages long.
It is no accident, Kida writes, that a paper written under the impetus of Mach’s idea in The Analysis of Sensations became the starting point of Gestalt psychology.
Why a melody? Because Ehrenfels was a musician. He was besotted with Wagner, studied counterpoint and harmony with Bruckner, and composed. That a tune survives transposition was an everyday fact for him.
He was the eldest son of an Austrian baronial family and signed away both the title and the right of inheritance to his younger brother so that he could write. He wrote plays. He wrote several large books. Nearly all of it was forgotten, and these twenty-odd pages remained.
“Sensing” Was Not Clear
Ehrenfels did not simply take Mach over. He credited him, and then said the formulation was not clear.
What he objected to was the word in Mach’s claim that we can directly sense spatial and tonal Gestalten, melody included.
Mach himself grants that only what is present right now is sensed. A melody unfolds in time, so it cannot be an object of sensation. Ehrenfels guessed that Mach used “sensation” anyway in order to insist that a Gestalt is not produced by any intellectual work of the subject — and criticized the vagueness.
In its place he introduced the Gestalt quality.
In perceiving a Gestalt, alongside the elementary sensations that answer to the physical stimulus, there is something further: more than their sum, and distinguishable from it. That is the Gestalt quality. Ehrenfels defines it as a positive content of presentation bound up in consciousness with the presence of complexes of mutually separable presentations — and he calls those complexes the foundation of the Gestalt quality.
The argument is simple. Wholly different combinations of notes yield the same melody. The very same notes in a different order yield a different one. So the melody lies in a layer independent of the elements.
Someone Else Was Reading the Same Book
Another man enters here.
The year after Ehrenfels’s paper, in 1891, Edmund Husserl — also a student of Brentano — published Philosophy of Arithmetic.
Why a book on arithmetic? Because Husserl was a mathematician first. He took his doctorate in mathematics at Vienna with a thesis on the calculus of variations, and in Berlin he was assistant to Karl Weierstrass, who stood at the center of analysis at the time. The move to philosophy came after.
And where he stood is the point. Mathematics at the time was in the middle of driving intuition out. No more drawing a figure and saying “you can see it, so it holds” — rebuild everything from number and logic alone. Weierstrass led that work.
Someone on the side doing the driving-out ran into what could not be driven out. Where does number itself come from? Philosophy of Arithmetic asks that.
And the answer that came back was that a wholeness is already given before you count. The intuition that had supposedly been removed returns at the very bottom.
Ehrenfels came in through music; Husserl came in through number. The same thing, by a different door.
In that book Husserl proposes the concept of the figural moment — very close indeed to Ehrenfels’s Gestalt quality.
His examples make it plain. A row of soldiers. A heap of apples. A line of trees. A flock of birds. We walk into a hall full of people, he writes, and at a single glance judge that there is a great crowd; we look up at the night sky and at a single glance judge that there are a great many stars.
Nobody counted. And it is still taken in as a whole. Investigating how number comes about, he ran into the wholeness that precedes counting.
And this book is Husserl’s first step toward phenomenology.
One more thing has its source here. The “rigorous” in “philosophy as a rigorous science,” which Husserl held to all his life, comes from that mathematical workshop. Do for philosophy what Weierstrass did for analysis — he is reported to have put it that way.
And the Amsterdam Lectures quoted in Part 1 open on the rigorous scientific method at the turn of the century. The same word.
Where They Parted Was a Single Book
So which of the two came first, Ehrenfels or Husserl? Husserl answers it himself, in a note in Philosophy of Arithmetic. Ehrenfels, he says, was prompted toward his investigation by Ernst Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations, as Ehrenfels states at the opening of his own paper; and since he had himself read that brilliant physicist’s book immediately on publication, it is likely that the memory of that reading influenced the course of his own thinking.
Both of them had read the same book by Mach.
1886: The Analysis of Sensations. 1890: Ehrenfels’s “On Gestalt Qualities,” the first step of Gestalt theory. 1891: Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, the first step of phenomenology.
The place where phenomenology and Gestalt psychology parted was not a person. It was a book.
Three lines run from Brentano’s students toward it. To say it in advance: Gestalt psychology was not made by the line that inherited Ehrenfels.
Husserl. To phenomenology.
Alexius Meinong. Husserl’s senior in the same school. He founded Austria’s first experimental psychology laboratory at Graz and developed Ehrenfels’s Gestalt quality. This is the Graz school. Ehrenfels himself studied under Meinong first.
Carl Stumpf. He became professor and head of philosophy at Berlin, and he took over from Brentano the revolt against Wundt’s elementist psychology. The three men who took that revolt from him became the Berlin school. It is those three who establish Gestalt psychology.
Phenomenology and Gestalt psychology are not two separate fields with separate births. They are lines that part from one teacher and one book.
That said, Husserl did not simply take Mach over. He kept the term “phenomenological method” and refused the evolutionary epistemology underneath it. In the Logical Investigations of 1900 he attacked Mach’s principle of the economy of thought as a biological grounding of logic and epistemology. Some of it he took; some of it he threw out.
What Changed After That
Ehrenfels gave the wholeness a name. But that far, it is a concept.
And the Graz school had a limit. They still had the elements underneath. A physical stimulus causes individual sensations; the sensations are the foundation; the Gestalt sits on top of them. Stimulus and sensation correspond one to one — they could not drop that premise. It is called the constancy hypothesis.
The Berlin school made it their target. Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967). Gestalt psychology comes into being at the point where that premise breaks.
What broke it was not an argument. It was one experiment.
Motion with Nothing Moving
Frankfurt, 1910. Wertheimer runs a stroboscope experiment with Koffka and Köhler as his subjects.
Two points of light a fixed distance apart flash at a suitable interval. Motion is seen, running from one to the other. Nothing anywhere is moving. There are two lights, and each went on and off.
Change the interval and the appearance changes. Simultaneous, and you see two lights at once. Long, and you see them alternate. At the optimal interval, motion is perceived. Wertheimer named it phi motion.
The result became the 1912 paper “Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion.” With it, Gestalt psychology was born.
Why was this decisive?
On the older account, perceiving motion was secondary. First you perceive where an object is. Those position-perceptions accumulate, and motion-perception forms on top of them. Parts first, whole assembled afterwards.
Phi motion refutes it. Motion is perceived while no moving object is perceived. Motion with nothing moving. The order in which parts come first collapses here.
Motion is not on the side of the stimulus. It is on the side of perception.
It is also why film works. Still frames in a row are seen moving.
From here the laws of how perception forms wholes were worked out. Figure and ground. Things near each other group. Things alike group. A nearly closed line is seen closed. What Mach wrote as “a figure on a ground” was laid out again as law. It is still the basis of design, of how type is set, of how a screen is laid out.
Where the Constancy Hypothesis Came From
One step back. Where did the constancy hypothesis come from in the first place?
Psychology breaks away from philosophy and becomes a science in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it borrowed two assumptions from physics. That an objective world exists in its own right, and that complex things are explained once you break them into simple elements and rebuild them.
So the mind had to come apart into elements too. The concept used for that was sensation. A stimulus excites a sense organ, the excitation travels to the center, and it becomes sensation. Between them, a one-to-one correspondence — that is the constancy hypothesis.
And on that assumption, explaining perception ran aground. In Kida’s words: what you run into, unavoidably, is a whole that cannot be reduced to an arithmetic collection of elements — the phenomenon of Gestalt.
Part 1’s epoché dropped the same thing. What Husserl suspended was the assumption that an objective world exists.
Mach dropped it in physics, Husserl dropped it in psychology, and the Berlin school broke the constancy hypothesis at the far end of it. All three are dropping one and the same assumption.
Out by a Different Road, in the Same Place
Mach returns once more here.
The three of the Berlin school did not study under Ehrenfels or the Graz school. They come through Stumpf, from Brentano’s side. In the order of history it is one stream — Mach to Ehrenfels to the Graz school to Berlin. In terms of who taught whom, it was a different road.
And they arrived somewhere that overlapped with Mach.
Koffka wrote later that he came across a passage on this problem in Mach’s work quite by chance, and was astonished.
Citing a paper by Jun’ichi Murata, Kida goes as far as to say it is not impossible that the Berlin school was more faithful to Mach’s spirit than the Austro-German school that inherited his Gestalt quality directly.
Kida himself enters a reservation about how far that holds. Let it stand here as a view that exists.
The shape is clear enough regardless. One and the same movement — start again from what appears to the senses — came out in the same place by separate roads.
And Gestalt psychology is the study of seeing. Part 2 said that the hardest thing in Rolfing is not touching but seeing. That seeing has been studied for a hundred years by a field that grew from the same root as phenomenology. So what is the difference between the two?
What Are You Looking At
Phenomenology asks about the one who is looking. Gestalt psychology investigates how what is seen comes about.
A session makes it easy.
A client is standing. The practitioner is looking. Say one shoulder appears to be up.
The Gestalt question runs like this. Why did that appear? Up is up relative to something. It looked that way because it was compared to the other shoulder. Change what it is compared with and what appears changes. Take both shoulders together as ground, and now the whole ribcage stands up as figure. What you are making figure, and what you are making ground — that settles what appears.
The phenomenological question runs like this. Why did you look at the shoulder first? Was it because the booking said stiff shoulders? Is that one word keeping the rest out of sight? The same shape as the pulled hamstring in Part 1.
One inspects the side of how things appear. The other inspects your own side.
A second, common scene. After the session the client says they feel lighter.
From the Gestalt side the question is lighter than what. The comparison changed, which is why it feels that way.
From the phenomenological side the question is whether the practitioner is listening already certain it must have got better.
Both drop a premise. What they drop is different. Phenomenology drops your own way of seeing. Gestalt psychology goes at the conditions under which the appearance holds together, and breaks them from outside.
Phenomenology’s Side Did Not Accept It
It does not end tidily.
Two things that set out from the same Mach, formed in parallel and in contact around the same circle of Brentano’s students. So how did they regard each other?
Husserl was cold toward Gestalt psychology throughout. In the afterword to Ideas he writes that atomistic psychology and Gestalt psychology alike remain, in principle, within psychological naturalism.
Pile the mind up like grains of sand, or hold that nothing appears except as part of a whole — in principle there is no difference at all. Neither has come out of treating consciousness as one of the things of nature.
Two things that set out from the same book, and one of them went on unacknowledged by the other.
The Next Generation Tied Them Back Together
In the next generation the verdict reverses.
Merleau-Ponty. Part 1 had him as the man who took the body head-on. In a note in Phenomenology of Perception he holds that what Gestalt psychology carried out was a mode of reflection of the same kind as the one Husserl’s phenomenology theorized, and that its criticism of the constancy hypothesis has, in essence, the same value as the phenomenological reduction.
The Gestalt psychologists found the phenomenon and attacked the constancy hypothesis. Merleau-Ponty grants that work a value equal to Husserl’s reduction.
Not unreservedly, though. As description it is right. The moment it tries to give itself a theoretical frame, it falls back into a naive realism — that is how he saw it. A mental Gestalt gets founded on a physiological one, and that in turn on a physical one. It had to be taken over and then carried further.
The man who taught Merleau-Ponty German phenomenology was Aron Gurwitsch, an émigré from Lithuania. He had studied Gestalt psychology in Berlin and read Husserl on top of that. Knowing both from the inside, he put the relation this way. Gestalt theory too, he says, turns out to be a psychology founded on the idea of intentionality — except that the meaning inhabiting every mental phenomenon does not derive from any pure activity of mind. It is an indigenous meaning, constituted of itself by the organization of what are called the elements.
Meaning is not conferred from this side. It stands up over there, of itself. Where phenomenology said consciousness is directed toward, Gestalt said it gathers itself from over there. One and the same thing, said from opposite sides.
What the teacher was cold toward, the next generation took back up.
Two lines that parted meet again here. And the one who brought them together worked on the body.
Where Gestalt psychology went from there belongs on the perception side (see “Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?“).
Where Wholism Came From
Ehrenfels in 1890. Drucker in 1989. Exactly a hundred years. And in 1990 that book came to me from my father. In 2015 I remembered it in a classroom in Munich, and in the same week I was taught Rolfing’s five principles.
Wholism was not something Rolfing thought up. It had taken over a question settled a hundred years earlier.
Ida Rolf’s Answer
Part 2 took up the question of how seeing gets taught. Ida Rolf’s answer, I wrote, was to throw people into the water.
But that was not all of it. When she began teaching, the curriculum came in two stages. Auditing, and Practitioner.
In Auditing you do no work at all. You watch other practitioners, continuously. It is called the Saturation Method. Keep supplying information until it saturates, and wait for the eye to grow.
It was never systematized as a method. But as a design of time, it existed. And the shape survives in the curriculum now. A great deal of basic training is spent watching other practitioners.
Six sessions a day, sixty in a ten-series. Your own hands move for twenty of them. For the other forty you are watching.
Grasp It with the Brain and You Lose It
My basic training instructor said it again and again. Grasp it with the brain and body reading is lost.
Bring back the giraffe drawing from Part 2. Shapes arranged on a page; the moment you have the concept giraffe, a giraffe rises out of it. Not one line was added. What changed is the one looking.
Let the analytical mind take over and this stops happening. While you are counting parts, the whole does not appear.
Mach wrote the same thing: we perceive things in space, not light and shade. Ehrenfels wrote the same thing: the melody is in none of the individual notes. And Drucker wrote that we hear “cat,” not C, A, T.
All of it is one proposition.
What I Couldn’t Place Gets a Name
Part 1 opened with a list of names that came up in a class in August 2014. Descartes, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Goethe. Phenomenology, structuralism, Gestalt. And I wrote that I had no idea why they were there.
Gestalt is answered for here.
Suspend judgment, I was taught. Wait for what is to show itself, I was taught. The sum of the parts is not the whole, I was taught. What looked like three separate teachings comes out of one root. A movement in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century to strike from the foundations of a discipline whatever does not appear to the senses.
Phenomenology came out of it, and Gestalt psychology came out of it. One went toward the practitioner’s “Being,” the other toward how the body is seen. Over eleven years I had taken the two in separately.
That they looked separate was a fact about me, and nothing else. Merleau-Ponty had long since seen them as one thing.
It did not come from one teacher. It came from one turn, a hundred years ago.
Sources
The sequence running from Mach through Ehrenfels and Husserl to the Berlin school follows Gen Kida, Mach and Nietzsche: A History of Thought at the Turn of the Century (Shinshokan, 2002; Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2014). The book is in Japanese and has no English edition.
What Mach, Ehrenfels, Husserl, Koffka, Merleau-Ponty and Gurwitsch say above is given as prose rather than as quotation, deliberately. Kida quotes them in Japanese translation; turning those passages back into English would produce sentences that are not in any of the originals. Readers who want the exact wording should go to the originals — Mach’s Die Analyse der Empfindungen (1886), Ehrenfels’s “Über Gestaltqualitäten” (1890), Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) and the afterword to Ideen, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception (1945).
The Drucker passages are quoted from the English edition of The New Realities (1989), closing chapter, “From Analysis to Perception — The New World View.”
This article is the main text behind Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers. The articles that take up the subjects touched on here are gathered there, group by group.