302

Chapter 15

entific form we will get two “fundamentally different theoretical disciplines

The existence of two psychologies is so obvious that it is accepted by all. The

disagreement is only about the precise definition of each science. Some emphasize some nuances, others emphasize others. It would be very interesting to follow all these oscillations, because each of them testifies to some objective tendency, to a striving toward one or the other pole, and the scope, the range of contradictions shows that both types of science, like two butterifies in one cocoon, still exist in the form of as yet undifferentiated tendencies.

But now we are not interested in the contradictions, but in the common factor that lies behind them.

We are confronted with two questions: what is the common nature of both sciences and what are the causes which have led to the bifurcation of empiricism into naturalism and idealism?

All agree that precisely these two elements lie at the basis of the two sciences, that, consequently, one is natural scientific psychology, and the other is idealistic psychology, whatever the different authors may call them. Following MUnsterberg all view the difference not in the material or subject matter, but in the way of acquiring knowledge, in the principle. The question is whether to understand the phenomena in terms of causality, in connection with and having fundamentally the same meaning as all other phenomena, or intentionally, as spiritual activity, which is oriented towards a goal and exempt from all material connections. Dilthey [1894/1977, pp. 37-41], who calls these sciences explanatory and descriptive psychology, traces the bifurcation to Wolff, who divided psychology into rational and empirical psychology, i.e., to the very origin of empirical psychology. He shows that the division has always been present during the whole course of development of the science and again became explicit in the school of Herbart (1849) and in the works of Waitz. The method of explanatory psychology is identical to that of natural science. Its postulate—there is not a single mental phenomenon without a physical one—leads to its bankruptcy as an independent science and its affairs are transferred into the hands of physiology (ibid.). Descriptive and explanatory psychology do not have the same meaning as systematics and explanation—its two basic parts according to Binswanger (1922) as well—have in the natural sciences.

Contemporary psychology—this doctrine of a soul without a soul—is intrinsically contradictory, is divided into two parts. Descriptive psychology does not seek explanation, but description and understanding. What the poets, Shakespeare in particular, presented in images, it makes the subject of analysis in concepts. Explanatory, natural scientific psychology cannot lie at the basis of a science about the mind, it develops a deterministic criminal law, does not leave any room for freedom, cannot be reconciled with the problem of culture. In contrast, descriptive psychology

will become the foundation of the human studies, as mathematics is that of the natural

sciences [Dilthey, 1894/1977, p. 74].

Stout53 [1909, pp. 2-6] openly refuses to call analytic psychology a physical science. It is a positive science in the sense that it investigates matter of fact, reality, what is and is not a norm, not what ought to be. It stands next to mathematics, the natural sciences, theory of knowledge. But it is not a physical science. Between the mental and the physical there is such a gulf that there is no means of tracing their connections. No science of matter stands to psychology in a relation analogous to that in which chemistry and physics stand to biology, i.e., in a relation of more general to more special, but in principle homogeneous, principles.