Kritik der historischen Vernunft in Zeitschriftenform

This paper deals with Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal’s 19th century journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft and its media-historical context. I will argue that the medial form of the journal enabled Völkerpsychologie’s founders to put their theory and methodology into practice by creating a forum for interdisciplinary collaboration and unification of the humanities as psychology and thus achieving their goal of a ʻcritique of historical reasonʼ, i. e., revealing the historical nature of reason, ethics, and culture in general.

Apperzeption

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag rekonstruiert erstmals den 1869 erschienenen Aufsatz »Die dichterische Phantasie und der Mechanismus des Bewußtseins« des Neukantianers Hermann Cohen. Der in der Fachgeschichte der Literaturwissenschaft unbekannte Text stammt aus Cohens vor-neukantianischer Phase und orientiert sich an der Philosophie Johann Friedrich Herbarts. Unter Rückgriff auf Herbarts Apperzeptionsbegriff, die Mythentheorie Jacob Grimms und das völkerpsychologische Konzept der ›Verdichtung‹ (Moritz Lazarus) entwirft Cohen mit Blick auf die »formalen Elemente«, die der Mythos in der Moderne freisetzt, ein Wissenschaftsprogramm der Literaturwissenschaft, das sich von der philologisch, nationalliterarisch und geistesgeschichtlich orientierten Germanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts distanziert – was den Text in die Genealogie der formalistischen Grundorientierungen des 20. Jahrhunderts einreiht.

The Young Folk Psychologist

This chapter is an account of Cohen’s early writings as a folk psychologist or anthropologist working within the new discipline of Völkerpsychologie founded by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal (1865–1870). His work was very much historicist and empiricist in orientation and investigated such topics as the origins of religion and poetry. But there was also a direction toward logic and criticism, which evolved from his early interest in epistemology and the critical philosophy. Already in these years Cohen adopted a Kantian interpretation of Plato which will be decisive for all his later philosophy.

THE FRENCH RECEPTION OFVÖLKERPSYCHOLOGIEAND THE ORIGINS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This article reconstructs French readings and debates of German approaches toVölkerpsychologie. Irrespective of its academic credentials,Völkerpsychologiewas a symptomatic approach during a transformative period in German, and indeed European, intellectual history: based on the idea of progress—both scientific and moral—and on the belief in the primordial importance of theVolk, it represented the mindset of “ascendant liberalism” in an almost pure form. The relevance and importance ofVölkerpsychologiecan be gauged from a list of scholars and intellectuals who discussed its merits as well as its problems. Moreover, the reception ofVölkerpsychologiewas not restricted to German academics: it was in France where central elements ofVölkerpsychologiehad the most profound effect on scholars who tried to establish a social science. Some of the best-known French academics and intellectuals of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries—Théodule Ribot, Célestin Bouglé, Ernest Renan, Alfred Fouillée, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss—commented extensively on the works of Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt, and developed their concepts of a “social science” that would reach beyond traditional philosophy, philology and history in a close dialogue with their German colleagues. HenceVölkerpsychologiewas not a German oddity, but an integral part of the debates that led to the establishing of the modern social sciences, as its French reception shows.