Thinking, Experiencing and Rethinking Mereological Interdependence

Summary The present article is a partly ontological, partly Gestalt-psychological discussion of the thinkability of structures in which parts and whole are interdependent (MI). In the first section, I show that in the framework of E. Husserl’s formal part–whole ontology, the conceptualization of such an interdependence leads to (mereo)logical problems. The second section turns to and affirms the experience of this interplay between parts and whole, exemplified with B. Pinna’s recent research on meaningful Gestalt perception. In the final section, I take the experienceability of MI as a justification to suggest a way of rethinking it. This entails an implementation of the process of foregrounding and backgrounding displayed by reversible figures and originally described by E. Rubin. This can avoid both an identity relation between parts and whole and their mutual exclusion as well as hierarchization due to their apparent differences. It would also guarantee the inherent dynamics of interdependence.

Deutschland-Bilder. Imagologische und kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven

Like all those pictures of other countries, which are treated in imagological research, images of Germany are also complex, mediated by social history and historical experience, misunderstanding, misrepresentation and ideological assumptions. On the whole, these images represent the expectations and experiences of the observer even as they can truly be connected with the history, or social and cultural affairs, of the population. Thus, these images appear to be reversible figures that are simultaneously true and the products of subjective perception.

Aspects and Abstracta

Philosophers of perception and psychologists first studied ‘multistable’ or ‘reversible’ figures, Kippbilder, in the nineteenth century. The earliest description of the phenomenon of a ‘sudden and involuntary change in the apparent position’ of a represented object occurred in a letter written by Louis Albert Necker in Geneva to Sir David Brewster on 24 May 1832 and published six months later in the Philosophical Magazine. The picture in question would become known as the Necker cube.