Fechner: Inadvertent Founder of Psychophysics

Abstract

Certainly the most interesting tool that science employs in its perpetual pursuit of knowledge is the scientist, with his enthusiasms, egoisms, and prejudices, his inevitable unconscious attitudinal orientation in the consensus of contemporary opinion, which we call the Zeitgeist . One wonders what science would be like if automation could take over completely. Are there mechanical equivalents for jealousy and pride and pigheadedness and insight, and those other interacting personal forces that contribute to contemporary truth in the scientific field? Fechner never tried to found psychophysics or a new experimental psychology. He was, in his own estimation in those last forty-five years of his life, a philosopher, fighting what he regarded as the crass materialism of his day, the Nachtansicht or “night view,” as he called it, and promoting the faith that mind and soul are the ultimates of reality, the Tagesansicht or “day view.” This favoring of the clear philosophical vision in the day view as opposed to the materialistic darkness of the night view is Fechner’s panpsychism, a faith that seems mystical to most modern scientists, partly because the German word Seele does not distinguish between mind and soul, between that which compares the sensory intensities of two lifted weights and whatever it is that persists after the body’s death.