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Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography 1st Edition Mark Rowlands
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P REF ACE
Many of the canonical phenomenologists have had a critical if not adversarial relationship to the empirical sciences, at least at certain points in their careers. Heidegger, for example, famously tells us that science does not think, and that it knows nothing of the “nothing”. While this kind of view has certainly not been unanimously embraced by phenomenologists, and while Heidegger himself can be read otherwise (at least in regard to his early work), there has been much more agreement that phenomenology is methodologically distinct from scientific practice and, as such, is antithetical to any account in which philosophy is envisaged as strictly continuous with science. Philosophical naturalism, for example, has been seen as the original sin for phenomenology, which in some influential versions instead portends to offer an independent and autonomous means of defining the subject matter and explananda that any scientific enquiry investigates. Husserl, of course, inaugurated phenomenology in this way, initially to ground and justify the sciences more rigorously than in the circular manner evinced by philosophical naturalism and psychologism. Since the publication of his Logical Investigations (1900–01), there has been a variety of metamorphoses and reinventions of phenomenology, indeed to such an extent that Paul Ricoeur calls it a tradition of heresies. While these post-Husserlian heresies have in general tended to lessen the commitment to non-naturalism, they have not simply abandoned it. They have sometimes used scientific findings in their theoretical works, both positively and more often negatively (to point out biases or prejudices; to show how the relevant sciences “point beyond themselves”), but they have also all retained some allegiance—at least in name—to classical transcendental
phenomenology and its attempt to ascertain the conditions that must obtain for the practice of empirical science to be possible. More generally, phenomenologists have explored the constitution of something like beingin-the-world in ways that grant lived experience, and the first-person perspective, a significant philosophical role. Even if Merleau-Ponty and others have proclaimed there to be a truth of naturalism, and thus transformed phenomenology in significant ways, nonetheless there is but a truth of naturalism; it is not the truth, the end of the matter for philosophy.
Perhaps in the last 30 or so years, however, the phenomenological scene has, at least implicitly, become more fractured on this question. Even if we rule out those understandings of the term “phenomenology” that are frequently used in the analytic tradition and are basically synonymous with qualia or “what it is like”, much divergent work traffics in the name of phenomenology even while being avowedly indebted to its continental scenes of emergence (Germany and France, in particular). While it might be debated whether or not this plurality is a virtue or the sign of an inability to constitute a research programme that builds knowledge (as philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger complain), the contemporary phenomenological scene is one in which the question of phenomenology and its relationship to science is more contested than ever. Many understandings of phenomenology and its methods remain essentially committed to core Husserlian precepts. Others seek to move beyond even Merleau-Ponty’s work (which makes significant use of empirical science, both early and late in his career) to naturalise phenomenology and, perhaps more controversially, to phenomenologise naturalism. To give a short and selective account of this latter trajectory, Hubert Dreyfus and John Haugeland’s work in the 1970s and 1980s took some steps in these directions, both in emphasising normativity and in challenging some of the dominant models of mind and cognition by drawing on phenomenological insights and empirical findings. Likewise, in The Embodied Mind (1991), Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch take Varela’s and Mauratana’s biological work concerning genes and the empirical conditions for temporal experience, and seek to give them a much broader philosophical remit. Varela soon also came to propose a research programme that he called “neuro-phenomenology” (1996), which aimed to better understand the relationship between third-person neuroscience and (largely) first-person phenomenology; indeed, he even claimed to have a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Jean Pettitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy influentially
called for a naturalising of phenomenology in their co-edited book of that name (1999) and various special issues of journals have come out on this theme in recent times. More generally, work in what has come to be called 4e cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive—has come to play a significant role in cognitive science, psychology, neuro-biology, and related fields. Work in this vein almost invariably draws significantly on phenomenological authors and works, and puts them to various empirical uses, whether in regard to robotics, social cognition, online and offline intelligence, and so on, much of which is addressed in the contributions in this book. So, while there is something to the “transcendental-empirico doublet” that has dominated consideration of the relationship between phenomenology and science throughout the twentieth century, there are also emerging trends within both phenomenology and empirical science that deny or complicate this stark opposition, and call for more systematic consideration of their inter-relation, sometimes siding with (often weak) forms of naturalism, sometimes not.
There are perhaps two main reasons for this shift, and they are not strictly the result of classical transcendental phenomenology having been refuted. Perhaps Husserl was right that we all see essences but interpret them away from an epistemological perspective. Perhaps he was also right in resolutely insisting on the distinction between philosophy and science and in the asymmetrical and grounding relationship that he thinks phenomenology nonetheless enjoys. But such views are not regularly defended, and that is at least partly because a lot of the recent interest in phenomenology has been shaped by investigations into how phenomenology relates to analytic philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the question of naturalism within phenomenological philosophy has returned. Even if one takes naturalism to be a philosophical construal of science as some sort of unified entity, rather than something immanently grounded in the various different sciences themselves, work in all of these areas seems at minimum to embrace a liberal or pluralistic form of naturalism. Physicalism and naturalism may not be the only games in town, but they remain the orthodoxy. Additionally, speculative realists like Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have attempted to return phenomenologists to the scene of what they call a “correlationist” crime. They contend, in short, that phenomenology is constitutively unable to take seriously the claims of empirical science, at least not without adding a subjectivist caveat concerning the intelligibility of scientific claims “for us”. Whatever the fate of this philosophical trajectory as a positive programme, the negative
critique of phenomenology has undoubtedly garnered much attention, and in Brassier’s work (2007), it is at least partly directly derived from a reading of Wilfrid Sellars’ naturalism and Paul Churchland’s eliminativism about the mental. As such, the question of phenomenology and science, phenomenology and naturalism, is very much a live one today, albeit often in the background of much work that is being done in what we might call empirically minded phenomenology, which often seems to embrace something like Gilbert Ryle’s motto: just do it. In “Ordinary Language”, at least, Ryle infamously maintains that: “preoccupation with questions about methods tends to distract us from prosecuting the methods themselves. We run as a rule, worse, not better, if we think a lot about our feet. So let us … not speak of it all but just do it” (Ryle 2009, 331). Although Ryle acknowledges the inevitability of meta-philosophy, he asks us here to judge the meta-philosophy by what the philosophy produces, in a manner that is characteristic of some of the current work connecting phenomenology and empirical science. But this is not always so simple to do, and nor is it necessarily desirable, as Tim Williamson and others have argued in other contexts (2008).
Indeed, to bring this point home, some remarks are in order about where we, the editors, are coming from. While we often can agree on a philosophical point, we rarely agree on the appropriate broader conclusion or consequences that derive from this or that more restricted claim. It that sense, it is perhaps appropriate to say (with Gilles Deleuze) that one needs to be provoked to think, and our dialogues and disputations have motivated the idea behind this book, and our specific contributions within it. While there is an old problem in which respect for one’s peers seems to require a shift in credulity and a resulting epistemic convergence, in general we have perhaps not moved a lot, although first-personal accounts of such matters are not necessarily trustworthy. But it is often only when faced with an equally adept opposition that one’s own views can become better formed and reach a higher level of sophistication.
With this background in mind, our goal in collecting the contributions in this volume is to present the reader with different ways of approaching this renewed interest in the relationship between phenomenology and science. To facilitate this, the book begins with a historical discussion about the ways in which the early phenomenologists interacted with and were influenced by the proponents of Gestalt psychology, which illuminates to what extent the phenomenologists envisioned how their approach differed from, and was continuous with, a more empirically minded programme.
Following that, we have several contributions on the more abstract question of methodology, particularly the related questions of whether phenomenology can be naturalised, that is, amended to be consistent with scientific practice, and whether the perspective of science is somehow incomplete or limited, thereby necessitating a phenomenological alternative. We have also included some excellent chapters on the emerging trend that places phenomenological insights into fruitful dialogue with scientific findings, especially those from cognitive science. The idea behind this neo-phenomenological movement is to show the mutual illumination between phenomenology and science, at least in regard to topics that seem to require the resources of each, including imagination, cognition, temporality, affect, imagery, language, and perception. Modifying Kant’s dictum to the present context, one could go so far as to say, “Science without phenomenology is blind; phenomenology without science is empty.”
More, of course, could and will be said about the proper way of seeing the fit between phenomenology and science. With the current selection of essays, we hope to add to and push forward the absolutely necessary discussion about phenomenology’s proper place in an intellectual landscape dominated by those disciplines that partake in the scientific method. At least one of us thinks that the success of science more or less serves as a death notice for the phenomenological method—we’ll let the reader guess which one of us that is after reading our respective contributions—but the dissenting papers that follow present a compelling case for phenomenology’s continuing vitality. That a range of opinions, from the positive to the negative, about phenomenology’s relationship with science are presented below is a strength of this volume. But it also serves as a testament to the openness and liveliness of the ongoing debate about the future of phenomenology in a world that is dominated by science, both within academia and beyond.
Melbourne Jack Reynolds
Ricky Sebold
6 Affect as Transcendental Condition of Activity Versus Passivity, and of Natural Science
David Morris
7 Losing Social Space: Phenomenological Disruptions of Spatiality and Embodiment in Moebius Syndrome and Schizophrenia
Joel Krueger and Amanda Taylor Aiken
8 Phenomenology of Language in a 4e World
Andrew Inkpin
9 Intercorporeity: Enaction, Simulation, and the Science of Social Cognition
Shaun Gallagher
10 Multiperspectival Imagery: Sartre and Cognitive Theory on Point of View in Remembering and Imagining
Christopher Jude McCarroll and John Sutton
11 Imaginative Dimensions of Reality: Pretense, Knowledge, and Sociality
Michela Summa
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jack would like to acknowledge his co-editor, Ricky, and various other MA and PhD students at La Trobe University, where matters related to this book were debated on many occasions. Since then, Deakin University has allowed the seeds that were sown at La Trobe to become an unruly sort of tree. His colleagues in philosophy at Deakin have made the past couple of years a pleasure, and the support of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, have been important in bringing this project to completion. His most consistent indebtedness remains with his family—Jo, Rosa, and Penny.
I (Ricky) would also like to thank my co-editor, Jack, for his work on this volume and for always humouring my withering attacks on phenomenology with grace and providing useful correctives when arguments become slightly exaggerated. My thoughts on the relationship between phenomenology and science have also benefitted from countless discussions with both current and former postgraduate students at La Trobe University and audiences at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy annual conference. La Trobe and now Ormond College have both provided me with an environment conducive to exploring this topic and compiling this book. Last, but certainly not least, my partner Laura has been a supportive force during this project, and for that, and much else, I thank her.
N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS
Amanda Taylor Aiken is a visiting research fellow in philosophy at Durham University. She specialises in applied phenomenology and has a particular interest in debates surrounding intersubjectivity and interpersonal understanding. Her current work seeks to understand the spatiality of social interactions. She also teaches philosophy at Luxembourg University.
Aaron Harrison is a PhD candidate at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His research focusses primarily on the intersections of twentieth-century philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and phenomenology) and psychology, with a special focus on perception, meaning, and philosophical methodology.
Andrew Inkpin is a lecturer in Contemporary European Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His book Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language recently appeared in MIT Press.
Joel Krueger is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works on various issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with a particular emphasis on embodiment, emotions, and social cognition. He also works on Asian and comparative philosophy, philosophy of music, and pragmatism.
Christopher Jude McCarroll is a research assistant in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. He works on perspective in episodic memory and imagination. His PhD, Point of View in Personal Memory: A Philosophical Investigation, was awarded in 2015.
David Morris is professor and chair of Philosophy at the University of Concordia. His main interests are in phenomenology (esp. Merleau-Ponty) with a focus on the philosophy of the body, mind, and nature in relation to current biology and cogni-
tive science. He is currently studying the problem of the genesis of meaning and sense, in relation to biological and perceptual phenomena. His book The Sense of Space was published by SUNY Press in 2004.
Jack Reynolds is professor of philosophy and Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Australia. He has written five books: Phenomenology and Naturalism (forthcoming 2017); Chronopathologies: The Politics of Time in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (2012); Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy (2010, with James Chase); Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (2004); and Understanding Existentialism (2006).
Richard Sebold received his PhD in philosophy from La Trobe University in 2013 where he was a lecturer until 2015. He is now Head of Ethics and Global Challenges at Ormond College at the University of Melbourne. His thesis was published as a book in 2014 as Continental Anti-Realism: A Critique.
Marilyn Stendera has recently completed her PhD in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, where she also teaches in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. Her doctoral dissertation, “Dasein’s Temporal Enaction: Heideggerian Temporality in Dialogue with Contemporary Cognitive Science”, explores intersections between Heideggerian phenomenology and various approaches in recent cognitive science, with a particular focus on the role that Heidegger’s model of temporality might have in that dialogue.
Michela Summa earned her PhD at the Universities of Pavia and Leuven in 2010. She is currently postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Philosophy Department of Julius Maximilians Universität Würzburg. From 2009 to 2015, she was active at the Section for Phenomenology of the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg. She has published a monography on Husserl’s theory of spatial and temporal constitution (Spatio-Temporal Intertwining: Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic, Springer 2014) and has several papers in international journals and books.
John Sutton is professor of cognitive science at Macquarie University. He works on memory and skilled movement. Some of his recent papers appear in the journals Interaction Studies, Psychology of Consciousness, Mind & Language, Psychology of Music, Journal of Mental Imagery, and Discourse Processes.
Michael Wheeler is professor of philosophy at the University of Stirling. Prior to this, he held posts at the Universities of Oxford, and Dundee. His primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology, artificial intelligence, and artificial life) and philosophy of mind. His book Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step was published by MIT Press in 2005.
CHAPTER 1
‘At Arm’s Length’: The Interaction Between Phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology
Aaron Harrison
IGestalt psychology is well known in phenomenological circles for its considerable influence on Aron Gurwitsch and on Merleau-Ponty. There is also a growing recognition of its influence of Sartre. Major contributions have also been made by scholars of Austrian philosophy in showing how Gestalt psychology and phenomenology arose out of the same intellectual milieu. The common origin of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology undoubtedly goes some way to explaining the readiness with which Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre appropriated Gestalt ideas, as well as the eagerness with which Gestalt psychologists incorporated or responded to phenomenological ideas. This mutual interaction, however, was far from uncritical.
Differing conceptions of phenomenology will obviously result in at least subtly differing attitudes to Gestalt psychology. There is reason now to collect some of the diverse literature on the relationship between Gestalt psychology and individual phenomenologists, and attempt to offer some rough generalisations about the relationship as a whole. By examining several points of historical interaction between the two schools, I will show how Gestalt psychologists celebrate their affinity with phenomenology, while refusing to cede their naturalistic scruples, and how some of the major phenomenologists appropriate Gestalt insights, while selfconsciously transforming the context and significance of those insights.
In this way, phenomenology and Gestalt psychology keep each other at arm’s length.1
In Part I, I will outline some general historical background and trace some specific incidents of interaction between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. In Part II, I will examine this relationship in more detail. Part III will deal with the Gestalt psychologists’ use of phenomenological methods, Part IV will introduce the phenomenological critique of Gestalt psychology, before Part V examines in rough outline how Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre appropriated Gestalt psychology while still acknowledging the phenomenological critique. Finally, Part VI will speculate as to the significance of this history.
Phenomenology, Psychology, and Phenomenological Psychology
In the background of this story about the relation between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology lies the complex historical relation between phenomenology and psychology in general. At the turn of the twentieth century, when phenomenology was conceived, psychology and philosophy were still negotiating their boundaries. Phenomenology, as a philosophical investigation into the essential structures of consciousness, bears perhaps a closer relation to psychology than many other philosophical projects. Its investigations are often investigations into roughly the same phenomena as psychology studies though from a different perspective, a philosophical or transcendental perspective as opposed to a scientific or natural perspective. This intimacy demands attention from new generations of phenomenologists as they renegotiate their relation to psychology as a humanistic discipline, as a scientific discipline, or as a philosophical discipline. Even Husserl acknowledged the possibility of a phenomenological psychology, a scientific psychology which utilises the methods of phenomenology, though without adopting a transcendental attitude (e.g. Husserl 1977). Phenomenological psychology proceeds by way of essential psychological structures to the explanation of particular facts. Such a discipline is valid, for Husserl, though requires transcendental phenomenology as its ultimate ground.
This history is crucial for understanding the contemporary project of naturalising phenomenology. For partisans, one could mine this history of conflict and cooperation for promising proposals on the best way to enact this project. However, while the general distinctions between phenomenology and psychology are important, this aspect of the history of the
relation of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology will have to remain largely in the background of our story. Instead of focusing on the differing attitudes to psychology among the major phenomenologists, I will focus instead on specific references to Gestalt psychology, how the phenomenologists appropriated Gestalt psychology, and the uses to which Gestalt psychology was put.
This focus is necessary, since it is far too easy to see phenomenologists’ references to experimental psychology and conclude, as does Gallagher, that ‘these theorists have already provided a positive response to the question of whether phenomenology can be naturalized’ (Gallagher 2012, 111). It is true that these phenomenologists make use of empirical psychology, and it is even true that they recognise some convergence between empirical psychology and transcendental phenomenology, such that the boundaries between the disciplines are not always clear. However, at least with respect to Gestalt psychology, the empirical findings of the psychologists are not incorporated into phenomenology qua empirical science but rather require translation into the idiom of transcendental phenomenology in order to be exploited. While the precise terms of the exploitations differ among the phenomenologists considered, it is generally the case that Gestalt psychology is present in phenomenology despite rather than because of its naturalism. In fact, as we will see, Husserl, Gurwitsch, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty seem generally to share an anti-naturalistic critique of Gestalt psychology despite the willingness of the latter three phenomenologists to exploit their empirical findings.
Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology
In 1912, Max Wertheimer published a paper analysing the perception of motion. By showing his subjects white strips appearing at varying intervals, he was able to identify the optimal speed at which subjects would perceive not only two lines appearing in quick succession, but one line moving from one position to another. He also identified a stage at which subjects ceased even to perceive an object moving from one place to another, and saw instead just motion. He argued that what we perceive when we perceive motion is not individual sensations organised according to nonperceptual processes. We immediately perceive motion. Such motion is a Gestalt, an organised form which is neither an emergent property of, nor reducible to, more primary elements (Wertheimer 1965, 163–168; Ash 1995, 125–134).
This study is often taken to mark the birth of Gestalt psychology, though in fact Wertheimer released two other papers exploring Gestalt concepts prior to this (Wertheimer 1938, 265–273; Wertheimer 2014, 131–133). As the term is commonly used, Gestalt psychology is synonymous with the Berlin school, the school of psychology founded by Wertheimer and his colleagues, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and associated with Carl Stumpf’s psychological institute at the University of Berlin.
This common account of the birth of Gestalt psychology has come under occasional challenge. Barry Smith traces the beginning of Gestalt psychology to Christian von Ehrenfels, and his idea of ‘Gestalt qualities’ (Smith 1988). The consciousness of a melody, Ehrenfels says, cannot be reduced to the consciousness of each individual note. The consciousness of melody is the sum of the individual notes as well as a particular unifying property, called a Gestalt quality (Ehrenfels 1988). Wertheimer was at one time a student of von Ehrenfels and was influenced by his ideas on Gestalt qualities. If von Ehrenfels’ work is taken as the start of Gestalt psychology, then it is clear that Wertheimer and the Berlin school are only a few of those to productively respond to his work, and they are far from his most faithful students. Gestalt psychology, therefore, should have a considerably wider reference than just the work of the Berlin school, incorporating at least the Würzburg and Graz schools as well. Even at the height of research into Gestalt psychology, Karl Bühler, another claimant to the label, bemoans the fact that the term ‘Gestalt psychology’ has ‘passed into family ownership’ (Ash 1995, 310).
This terminological problem certainly has the flavour of an interminable historical dispute, solved by convention rather than argument. It is compounded when we introduce variants, such as ‘Gestalt theory’, incorporating mathematics, logic, epistemology, anthropology, politics, and ethics, and acknowledge that not all those who contributed to Gestalt theory were working in the Gestalt tradition. My goal is not to solve this problem; I only mention it because the potential breadth of the term ‘Gestalt psychology’, the various psychologists and philosophers that it might include, illuminates the problematic relation between the Berlin school and the phenomenological tradition. Between Gestalt theory, broadly construed, and phenomenology, broadly construed, there is considerable overlap. Christian von Ehrenfels inherits his philosophical and psychological framework from Brentano, who, as we know, was a profound influence on Husserl. Stumpf was also a student of Brentano, and as well as working closely with the Berlin school, he was a friend, sympathiser, and effective
critic of Husserl. Don Ihde calls Gestalt psychology ‘a stepchild of early phenomenology’ (Ihde 2012, 37), which captures quite well the relationship that Spiegelberg describes as one of ‘action at a distance’ (Spiegelberg 1972, 67). On this view, the Berlin school came to maturity with the ideas of Stumpf and Ehrenfels, and only later incorporated insights from Husserlian phenomenology, which they dutifully married to Stumpf’s experimental method.
Against the idea that Husserl influenced the Berlin school ‘only late and casually’ (Spiegelberg 1972, 67), certain facts must be noted. Wertheimer and Koffka were both familiar with Logical Investigations prior to even the earliest Gestaltist papers of 1910 and 1912 (Ash 1995, 108; Spiegelberg 1972, 72–73). Koffka even made some concessions to Husserl in his early work.2 Both Koffka and Köhler were sensitive to Husserl’s arguments against naturalism and psychologism (Koffka 1936, 570–571; Köhler 1939, 45). None of these facts are decisive. Even the significance of the Berlin school’s use of the term ‘phenomenology’ to describe their method can be overstated, considering the contested nature of that term in the early twentieth century (see Schumann 2013). The historian of psychology, Edwin Boring, notes that Husserlian phenomenology and ‘phenomenology’ as a very general term for the study of experience intermingle in the intellectual climate of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe such that it becomes easier to incorporate certain insights from Husserl’s phenomenology into naturalistic psychology (Boring 1957, 367–368).
The phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch offers the most detailed and sustained attempt to incorporate Gestalt psychology into phenomenology. As a student in Berlin in 1919–20, he developed a relationship with Stumpf, with whom he learned both philosophy and psychology (Embree, in Gurwitsch 2009a, 41–42). Although in proximity to the Psychological Institute of Berlin, he may not have come into contact with the Berlin school at this time. He recalls meeting Wertheimer for the first time in 1925 or 1926 (Gurwitsch, in Grathoff 1989, 107). Köhler would have only just returned to Berlin from Tenerife (Asch 1968, 111). And Koffka was then setting up a psychological laboratory in Giessen (Ash 1995, 211). It is therefore plausible that he did not have early contact with the main figures of the Berlin school. After studying briefly with Husserl in Freiberg, Gurwitsch went to Frankfurt, and worked with Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein (Embree, in Gurwitsch 2009a, 42–43). Gelb and Goldstein were sympathetic to many Berlin school ideas and certainly
contributed to the wider Gestalt tradition. This intellectual environment clearly had an impact, since Gurwitsch’s dissertation from the Frankfurt years was devoted to the relations between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.
‘Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: studies on the relation between Gestalt theory and phenomenology’ was published in Psychologische Forschung, the organ of the Gestalt psychologists (Gurwitsch 2009b, 193–318). It was reportedly well received by Wertheimer (Gurwitsch, in Grathoff 1989, 108). Gurwitsch attempts to address ‘certain phenomenological problems with the help of Gestalt-theoretical theses, to supplement Husserl’s analyses by insights arrived at in Gestalt theory, as well as to correct some of his tenets, and in general to advance phenomenology along these lines beyond the stage reached by Husserl’s Ideen’ (Gurwitsch 2009b, 195). The influence of Gestalt psychology can hardly be overstated, both in its impact on his thought and the earliness with which it took effect. Nevertheless, Gurwitsch remained a critical disciple of Husserl throughout his life, and used Gestalt psychological findings primarily to inform a ‘noematic’ phenomenology.
Gurwitsch lectured in France in the 1930s, at the same time as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were developing an interest in Gestalt psychology. Embree speculates that Merleau-Ponty may have heard Köhler’s lecture in 1929, though at the very least he was familiar with Gestalt psychology by the time he met Gurwitsch in 1933 (Merleau-Ponty 1980a, 7; Embree 1980, 90–91).3 In this year, Merleau-Ponty applied to undertake a research project in perception, in which he would investigate the potential for synthesis between philosophical and experimental approaches to perception, in light of the challenge posed by Gestalt theory to traditional psychology (Merleau-Ponty 1980a, 7–8). Elaborating on this project the following year, Merleau-Ponty chastises the Gestalt psychologists for failing to develop the epistemological consequences of their project, eluding to Husserl’s phenomenology as the means to do so (Merleau-Ponty 1980b, 11–13, 17). In Structure of Behaviour, for instance, Merleau-Ponty so radicalises the Gestaltist views that he argues the concept of form should not be merely a guiding principle in the investigation of physical, biological, and psychology facts, but the fundamental ontological principle in which these three domains participate (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 132–136).
The Gestalt influence undeniably persists in Phenomenology of Perception, which is replete with references, discussions, and criticisms of Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka, Lewin, Gelb, Goldstein, Katz, and others (Merleau-Ponty
2002). Even in The Visible and The Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s last work, he is still concerned with Gestalt concepts (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 20–21, 192).
Less well known is the effect that Gestalt psychology had on Sartre (Morris 2008, 2010; Mirvish 1984, 1987, 2001; cf. Embree, 1979, 19). Much of Sartre’s early efforts were devoted to phenomenological psychology and to the problems which emerge at the juncture of phenomenology and psychology. At roughly the same time as Merleau-Ponty’s early investigations into the nature of perception, Sartre was engaged in a project on the philosophy and psychology of imagination. This became The Imagination, published in 1936 and The Imaginary, written at the same time but published in 1942 (Elkaïm-Sartre, in Sartre 2004, vii).4
The Imagination lacks overt references to the Berlin school. It does devote substantial attention to the Würtzburg school, finding in them a misguided attempt at experimentally testing Husserlian phenomenology (Sartre 2012, 69). The Imaginary contains few but striking references to the Berlin school, showing a clear intention to utilise Gestalt psychology as that empirical approach most compatible with phenomenology (Sartre 2004, 120–121).
A similar intention is found in his Sketch for a theory of the Emotions, in which Sartre presents Gestalt psychology as the last stage before a properly phenomenological psychology of emotion. While previous theories of emotion make the arch-mistake of considering emotion as a reflective conscious state (when in fact it is a fundamental attitude to the world), Sartre singles out Gestalt theory, and in particular Tamara Dembo, as the only possible exception. Here he cites Köhler, Lewin, and Dembo, and makes use of a long quotation from Paul Guillaume (Sartre 1971, 41–43).
Locating Gestalt theory in Sartre’s major phenomenological work Being and Nothingness is less straightforward, though still clear once we know what we are looking for. The best clue occurs in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir in January 1940:
I’m coming back to dogmatism by way of phenomenology, I’m keeping all of Husserl, the being-in-the-world, and yet I’m reaching an absolute neorealism (in which I integrate the Gestalt theory). Well! You’ll say, what a hodgepodge. Well, in fact, not at all: it is very sensibly organised around the idea of Nothingness or pure event at the core of being. (Sartre, in Beauviour 1993, 43)
Sartre makes good on this general assessment of his work. He uses Gestalt figure/ground terminology to explain how absence and distance—as
negatité—are concretely present in the world (Sartre 1978, 21). He uses nothingness to explain how Gestalten are formed as the negation of their background (Sartre 1978, 9, 108), and how one form becomes another (Sartre 1978, 20). Nothingness, Gestalt theory, and phenomenology are thereby intimately interrelated. In addition, Sartre makes extensive use of Kurt Lewin’s concept ‘hodological space’ to account for how our environment is initially instrumentally structured according to our desires and possibilities (Sartre 1978, 279, 322–324).
Other phenomenologists warmed to or had contact with Gestalt psychology, even if they were not greatly or openly influenced by it. Alfred Schutz obviously had some familiarity with the Gestalt work on musical theory, but held them in less high regard than did his friend Gurwitsch (Schutz, in Grathoff 1989, 178, 140–141). In the USA, the simultaneous emigration of leading Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists made for fruitful ground. Köhler, for instance, was on the board of review of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and encouraged Spiegelberg with discussions of phenomenology (Spiegelberg, in Kaelin and Schrag 1989, 171). Embree recounts learning phenomenology from Gurwitsch and Dorian Cairns and being encouraged to read and appropriate what insight he could find in the work of the Gestaltists (Embree, in Kaelin and Schrag 1989, 134).
There is also some evidence that Heidegger was familiar with the Gestaltists as well. Unsurprisingly, Heidegger knew Ehrenfels’ work on Gestalt qualities, but he was also highly approving of the work of Wertheimer and Lewin, as well as that of Gelb and Goldstein. He said of Gelb, for instance, that ‘he will one day write the new psychology’ (Radloff 2007, 22–23). However, this evidence appears scant and what influence Gestalt ideas did have on Heidegger are probably peripheral influence of the wider Gestalt tradition.
Over the ensuing decades, the importance of Gestalt psychology as an influence on phenomenology, on Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty especially, has won them a place as a footnote in the history of phenomenology. More recently, in an introduction to phenomenology, Stephan Käufer and Anthony Chemero include an entire chapter on Gestalt psychology (Kaufer and Chemero 2015). Ultimately, however, it is unclear whether their inclusion is meant to indicate that this school itself embodies a moment in the history of phenomenology or whether they are only of interest for their influence on Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and as ancestors of the phenomenological strand of cognitive science. In favour of
the former interpretation, Käufer and Chemero argue that ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and radical embodied cognitive science are not simply influenced by phenomenology, but are phenomenology. If naturalism and experimental methods are no barrier to phenomenology, then perhaps they do consider Gestalt psychology to be a school of phenomenology. This ambiguity is entirely appropriate, considering the way that phenomenologists have appropriated Gestalt psychology as phenomenology, while at the same time recognising the ultimate conflict between these disciplines.
II
Phenomenology in Gestalt Psychology
The most striking correspondence of Gestalt psychology with general phenomenology is the former’s use of the term ‘phenomenology’ for their descriptive procedures. Unfortunately for our historical purposes, this term is not used consistently and is often defined only vaguely. In Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology, for instance, phenomenology means ‘as naive and full description of direct experience as possible’ and cites as exemplary some rough distinctions between things and ‘not-things’, living things and dead things, artificial things and natural things, as well as problematic cases like fog, ghosts, light, terror, and cold (Koffka 1936, 70–73). He is clearly describing the world as it occurs to us (to him) in a kind of crude and unsophisticated manner. In that sense, his descriptions are naive in the extreme. They are not, however, as ‘full’ as possible. While phenomenology is clearly meant to establish the explanandum for psychology, it is not immediately clear whether phenomenology must be done once and for all before experimental psychology takes place, or whether one might experimentally discover facts about phenomenology, which will then establish more fully the phenomenon to be explained.
The tension between ‘naïve’ and ‘full’ is a variant on the problem of analysis, such that before beginning to investigate a phenomenon, we must know what it is we are meant to understand, but we can’t do this without first investigating it. I don’t suggest that the Gestalt psychologists present a solution to this problem, just that their phenomenological method exhibits this tension, that ‘description’, ‘observation’, and ‘phenomenology’ are used to refer to both the pre-scientific specification of
the phenomena to be investigated scientifically and the descriptive scientific investigation into those phenomena themselves.
In characterising the nature of Gestalt phenomenological procedure, we can note that, as with Husserlian phenomenology, the Gestaltists are constantly having to defend themselves against the charge that their psychology is just another iteration of introspectionism (Köhler 1992, 67–99; Koffka 1924). Introspectionism, they say, begins with an analytic attitude. It locates primitive elements, in most cases ‘sensations’, and attempts to account for complex phenomena by proposing higher order mental functions operating on these sensations. This is achieved in experimental settings by, for instance, isolating a point of light or a patch of colour from its context with the aid of a sheet or board with a small hole cut out, or, in more sophisticated experiments, with the aid of a tachistoscope. This analytic attitude restricts the available data to be described to the extent that, if it is the only perspective considered, it falsifies the phenomena under consideration (Koffka 1924, 153–154). The Gestaltists adopt a holistic attitude that is not so much opposed to the analytic attitude, as it does account for that attitude by identifying it as a change in the conditions of the situation described.5 Insofar as the introspectionist changes the conditions of the situation, they are no longer describing the same phenomenon. The new phenomenon is neither more ‘primitive’ nor more true; it is just different.
In place of this analytic attitude, the Gestalt psychologists will describe how structures are experienced in context. Wertheimer expresses his derision, ‘take two faces cheek to cheek. I see one (with, if one wishes, ‘57’ brightnesses) and the other (with its ‘49’), but not in the division 66 plus 40 or 6 plus 100. Theories that would suggest that I see ‘106’ there remain on paper; it is two faces that I see’ (Wertheimer 1965, 202). That perception is organised in just such-and-such a way, into Gestalten, will be one of the Gestalt psychologists’ most fruitful, and certainly most well known, areas of research. And unlike theories which suggest a disorganised plenum of experience subsequently organised by higher order mental processes, the Gestaltists will locate as much organisation in immediate experience as possible without resorting to non-perceptual states or processes. In this sense, Gestalt psychology is a ‘critical reformulation of nativism’ (Köhler 1972, 21).
The perceptual Gestalten are not mental entities of the same order as sensations. Rather they are features of the world as it is experienced. While psychology may employ ‘subjective’ methods (Köhler 1992, 20–25), its
primary subject matter is still behaviour. To the extent that the Gestaltists discover principles of perceptual organisation, it is in the service of a theory of human behaviour. To understand my behaviour, one must understand ‘my desires and intentions, my success and disappointments, my joys and sorrows, loves and hatred, but also my doing this rather than that’ (Koffka 1936, 40). This will involve grappling with ‘phenomenal behaviour’, how a subject experiences their own behaviour, as well as ‘apparent behaviour’, how the subject behaves according to the experience of psychologists themselves. Together, these accounts will reveal ‘real behaviour’ (Koffka 1936, 40–41).
Real behaviour must be both described and explained. Explaining behaviour will involve relating it to the physical world via the Gestalt variant of psycho-physical isomorphism. Prior to this psycho-physical explanation, Gestalt psychology demands rigorous description, which is itself not isolated from explanatory elements.
As far as the use of the term ‘phenomenology’, there is some ambiguity about whether it is coextensive with this descriptive goal. Köhler’s use of the term is often distinctly philosophical. He says that ‘problems of ultimate principle’ will not be solved until ‘we go back to the sources of our concepts, in other words, until we use the phenomenological method, the qualitative analysis of experience’ (Köhler 1939, vii), and that ‘Phenomenology is the field in which all our concepts find their final justification’ (Köhler 1939, 102). He also more strictly restricts phenomenology to the phenomenal realm:
It is most essential for phenomenological statements that they never be confused with hypotheses or even with knowledge about the functional genesis of phenomenal data. Where a thing has come from, to what its existence or that of its properties is due, is a valid question, but for the most part not a question for phenomenology. What properties the thing actually has – this is the question of phenomenology. (Köhler 1939, 69–70)
However, it is not clear that Köhler can sustain such a strict separation between functional explanation and phenomenal description. The kind of description that both Köhler and Koffka envisage, the description of meaningful behaviour as it appears in experience, involves describing behaviour in accordance with goals, motives, expectations, and so on. This is already explanatory in the sense that it is contextualising specific behaviours by their role as part of a wider set of behaviours. Where there is dispute, these
descriptions must be substantiated experimentally. The ‘phenomenological statements’ explicitly adopt the character of hypotheses which stand or fall on the weight of experimental evidence (Koffka 1924, 155–156). In other words, determining ‘what properties a thing has’ involves hypothesis and experiment. Furthermore, in cases where the subject is a non-human animal or a child, facts about how they experience their environment will only be derived under experimental conditions. In this way, ‘[f]unctional and descriptive facts belong closely together, and we can use the former to test the latter’ (Koffka 1924, 160; cf. Koffka 1936, 72).
Husserl’s critique
In intention, method, and experimental design, the Gestalt psychologists are trying to preserve meaning within a strictly naturalistic psychology. Moreover, they argue that the role of psychology is to execute just this project for the sake of the unity of scientific discourse. The psychologist’s role is to integrate, not just the natural and human sciences, but scientific and humanistic or artistic discourse in general. It is therefore predictable that they would steer towards, if not run aground on, Husserl’s critique of psychologism.
Against Husserl’s extensive arguments in Logical Investigations that logic and meaning could never be given a psychological explanation, Koffka offers this brief defence of Gestalt ‘psychologism’:
[Husserl’s] argument rested on the assumption, implicit or explicit, in all ‘psychologistic’ theories, that psychological relations were mainly factual or external. A ‘psychologism’ based on this assumption has indeed been refuted by Husserl and other philosophers. But this refutation does not affect our psychologism – if our theory can rightly be given the name – since in our theory psychological and physiological, or rather psycho-physical, processes are organized according to intrinsic or internal relations. This point can only be alluded to. It means that in our theory psychology and logic, existence and subsistence, even, to some extent, reality and truth, no longer belong to entirely different realms or universes of discourse between which no intelligible relationship exists. (Koffka 1936, 570–571)
The concept of a Gestalt, an autochthonously organised whole with internally related parts, is meant to escape Husserl’s critique not by reducing logical relations to causal or external relations but by locating those
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promised us a tropical thunder-storm from those black clouds in the south, and went forward to give ship’s orders, advising us to make all haste below when the first drop should fall, as in an instant a sheet of blinding rain would surround the decks, against which the double awnings would be no more protection than so much gauze, and through which one could not see the ship’s length. The clouds remained stationary, however, and we missed the promised sensation, although we waited for hours on deck, the ship moving quietly through the soft, velvety air of the tropic’s blackest midnight, and the lightning-flashes becoming fainter and fainter
MAP OF JAVA.
II
IN “JAVA MAJOR”
In the earliest morning a clean white lighthouse on an islet was seen ahead, and as the sun rose, bluish mountains came up from the sea, grew in height, outlined themselves, and then stood out, detached volcanic peaks of most lovely lines, against the purest, pale-blue sky; soft clouds floated up and clung to the summits; the blue and green at the water’s edge resolved itself into groves and lines of palms; and over sea and sky and the wonderland before us was all the dewy freshness of dawn in Eden. It looked very truly the “gem” and the “pearl of the East,” this “Java Major” of the ancients, and the Djawa of the native people, which has called forth more extravagant praise and had more adjectives expended on it than any other one island in the world. Yet this little continent is only 666 miles long and from 56 to 135 miles wide, and on an area of 49,197 square miles (nearly the same as that of the State of New York) supports a population of 24,000,000, greater than that of all the other islands of the Indian Ocean put together. With 1600 miles of coast-line, it has few harbors, the north shore being swampy and flat, with shallows extending far out, while the southern coast is steep and bold, and the one harbor of Tjilatjap breaks the long line of surf where the Indian Ocean beats against the southern cliffs. Fortunately, hurricanes and typhoons are unknown in the waters around this “summer land of the world,” and the seasons have but an even, regular change from wet to dry in Java. From April to October the dry monsoon blows from the southeast, and brings the best weather of the year—dry, hot days and the coolest nights. From October to April the southwest or wet monsoon blows. Then every day has its afternoon shower, the air is heavy and stifling, all the tropic world is asteam and astew and afloat, vegetation is magnificent, insect life triumphant, and the mountains are hidden in nearly perpetual mist. There are heavy thunderstorms at the turn of the monsoon, and the one we had
watched from the sea the Hallowe’en night before our arrival had washed earth and air until the foliage glistened, the air fairly sparkled, nature wore her most radiant smiles, and the tropics were ideal.
It was more workaday and prosaic when the ship, steaming in between long breakwaters, made fast to the stone quays of Tandjon Priok, facing a long line of corrugated-iron warehouses, behind which was the railway connecting the port with the city of Batavia. The gradual silting up of Batavia harbor after an eruption of Mount Salak in 1699, which first dammed and then sent torrents of mud and sand down the Tjiliwong River, finally obliged commerce to remove to this deep bay six miles farther east, where the colonials have made a model modern harbor, at a cost of twenty-six and a half million gulden, all paid from current revenues, without the island’s ceasing to pay its regular tribute to the crown of Holland. The customs officers at Tandjon Priok were courteous and lenient, passing our tourist luggage with the briefest formality, and kindly explaining how our steamer-chairs could be stored in the railway rooms until our return to port. It is but nine miles from the Tandjon Priok wharf to the main station in the heart of the original city of Batavia—a stretch of swampy ground dotted and lined with palmgroves and banana-patches, with tiny woven baskets of houses perched on stilts clustered at the foot of tall cocoa-trees that are the staff and source of life and of every economical blessing of native existence. We leaped excitedly from one side of the little car to the other, to see each more and more tropical picture; groups of bare brown children frolicking in the road, and mothers with babies astride of their hips, or swinging comfortably in a scarf knotted across one shoulder, and every-day life going on under the palms most naturally, although to our eyes it was so strange and theatrical.
At the railway-station we met the sadoe (dos-à-dos), a twowheeled cart, which is the common vehicle of hire of the country, and is drawn by a tiny Timor or Sandalwood pony, with sometimes a second pony attached outside of the shafts. The broad cushioned seat over the axles will accommodate four persons, two sitting each way. The driver faces front comfortably; but the passenger, with no
back to lean against but the driver’s, must hold to the canopy-frame while he is switched about town backward in the footman’s place, for one gulden or forty cents the hour.
Whether one comes to Java from India or China, there is hasty change from the depreciated silver currency of all Asia to the unaltered gold standard of Holland, and the sudden expensiveness of the world is a sad surprise. The Netherlands unit of value, the gulden (value, forty cents United States gold), is as often called a florin, a rupee, or a dollar—the “Mexican dollar” or the equivalent “British dollar” of the Straits Settlements, a coin which trade necessities drove British conservatism to minting, which act robs the Briton of the privilege of making further remarks upon “the almighty dollar” of the United States, with its unchanging value of one hundred cents gold. This confusion of coins, with prices quoted indifferently in guldens, florins, rupees, and dollars, is further increased by dividing the gulden into one hundred cents, like the Ceylon rupee, so that, between these Dutch fractions, the true cents of the United States dollar that one instinctively thinks of, and the depreciated cents of the British or the battered Mexican dollar, one’s brain begins to whirl when prices are quoted, or any evil day of reckoning comes.
No Europeans live at Tandjon Priok, nor in the old city of Batavia, which from the frightful mortality during two centuries was known as “the graveyard of Europeans.” The banks and business houses, the Chinese and Arab towns, are in the “old town”; but Europeans desert that quarter before sundown, and betake themselves to the “new town” suburbs, where every house is in a park of its own, and the avenues are broad and straight, and all the distances are magnificent. The city of Batavia, literally “fair meadows,” grandiloquently “the queen of the East,” and without exaggeration “the gridiron of the East,” dates from 1621, when the Dutch removed from Bantam, where quarrels between Portuguese, Javanese, and the East India Company had been disturbing trade for fifteen years, and built Fort Jacatra at the mouth of a river off which a cluster of islands sheltered a fine harbor. Its position in the midst of swamps was unhealthy, and the mortality was so appalling as to seem
incredible. Dutch records tell of 87,000 soldiers and sailors dying in the government hospital between 1714 and 1776, and of 1,119,375 dying at Batavia between 1730 and August, 1752—a period of twenty-two years and eight months.[1] The deadly Java fever occasioning this seemingly incredible mortality was worst between the years 1733 and 1738, during which time 2000 of the Dutch East India Company’s servants and free Christians died annually. Staunton, who visited Batavia with Lord Macartney’s embassy in 1793, called it the “most unwholesome place in the universe,” and “the pestilential climate” was considered a sufficient defense against attack from any European power.
The people were long in learning that those who went to the higher suburbs to sleep, and built houses of the most open construction to admit of the fullest sweep of air, were free from the fever of the walled town, surrounded by swamps, cut by stagnant canals, and facing a harbor whose mud-banks were exposed at low tide. The city walls were destroyed at the beginning of this century by the energetic Marshal Daendels, who began building the new town. The quaint old air-tight Dutch buildings were torn down, and streets were widened; and there is now a great outspread town of red-roofed, whitewashed houses, with no special features or picturesqueness to make its street-scenes either distinctively Dutch or tropical. Modern Batavia had 111,763 inhabitants on December 31, 1894, less than a tenth of whom are Europeans, with 26,776 Chinese and 72,934 natives. While the eighteenth-century Stadhuis might have been brought from Holland entire, a steam tramway starts from its door and thence shrieks its way to the farthest suburb, the telephone “hellos” from center to suburb, and modern inventions make tropical living possible.
The Dutch do not welcome tourists, nor encourage one to visit their paradise of the Indies. Too many travelers have come, seen, and gone away to tell disagreeable truths about Dutch methods and rule; to expose the source and means of the profitable returns of twenty million dollars and more for each of so many years of the last and the preceding century—all from islands whose whole area only equals that of the State of New York. Although the tyrannic rule and
the “culture system,” or forced labor, are things of the dark past, the Dutch brain is slow and suspicious, and the idea being fixed fast that no stranger comes to Java on kindly or hospitable errands, the colonial authorities must know within twenty-four hours why one visits the Indies. They demand one’s name, age, religion, nationality, place of nativity, and occupation, the name of the ship that brought the suspect to Java, and the name of its captain—a dim threat lurking in this latter query of holding the unlucky mariner responsible should his importation prove an expense or embarrassment to the island. Still another permit—a toelatings-kaart, or “admission ticket”—must be obtained if one wishes to travel farther than Buitenzorg, the cooler capital, forty miles away in the hills. The tourist pure and simple, the sight-seer and pleasure traveler, is not yet quite comprehended, and his passports usually accredit him as traveling in the interior for “scientific purposes.” Guides or efficient couriers in the real sense do not exist yet. The English-speaking servant is rare and delusive, yet a necessity unless one speaks Dutch or Low Malay. Of all the countries one may ever travel in, none equals Java in the difficulty of being understood; and it is a question, too, whether the Malays who do not know any English are harder to get along with than the Dutch who know a little.
Thirty years ago Alfred Russel Wallace inveighed against the unnecessary discomforts, annoyances, and expense of travel in Java, and every tourist since has repeated his plaint. The philippics of returned travelers furnish steady amusement for Singapore residents; and no one brings back the same enthusiasm that embarked with him. It is not the Java of the Javanese that these returned ones berate so vehemently, but the Netherlands India, and the state created and brought about by the merciless, cold-blooded, rapacious Hollanders who came half-way round the world and down to the equator, nine thousand miles away from their homes, to acquire an empire and enslave a race, and who impose their hampering customs and restrictions upon even alien visitors. Java undoubtedly is “the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world,” and the Javanese the most gentle, attractive, and innately refined people of the East, after the Japanese; but the Dutch in Java “beat the Dutch” in Europe ten points to one, and there is nothing so
surprising and amazing, in all man’s proper study of mankind, as this equatorial Hollander transplanted from the cold fens of Europe; nor is anything so strange as the effect of a high temperature on LowCountry temperament. The most rigid, conventional, narrow, thrifty, prudish, and Protestant people in Europe bloom out in the forcinghouse of the tropics into strange laxity, and one does not know the Hollanders until one sees them in this “summer land of the world,” whither they threatened to emigrate in a body during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
III
BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST
When one has driven through the old town of Batavia and seen its crowded bazaars and streets, and has followed the lines of bricked canals, where small natives splash and swim, women beat the family linen, and men go to and fro in tiny boats, all in strange travesty of the solemn canals of the old country, he comes to the broader avenues of the new town, lined with tall tamarind- and waringentrees, with plumes of palms, and pyramids of blazing Madagascar flame-trees in blossom. He is driven into the long garden court of the Hotel Nederlanden, and there beholds a spectacle of social life and customs that nothing in all travel can equal for distinct shock and sensation. We had seen some queer things in the streets,—women lolling barefooted and in startling dishabille in splendid equipages,— but concluded them to be servants or half-castes; but there in the hotel was an undress parade that beggars description, and was as astounding on the last as on the first day in the country Woman’s vanity and man’s conventional ideas evidently wilt at the line, and no formalities pass the equator, when distinguished citizens and officials can roam and lounge about hotel courts in pajamas and bath slippers, and bare-ankled women, clad only in the native sarong, or skirt, and a white dressing-jacket, go unconcernedly about their affairs in streets and public places until afternoon. It is a dishabille beyond all burlesque pantomime, and only shipwreck on a desert island would seem sufficient excuse for women being seen in such an ungraceful, unbecoming attire—an undress that reveals every defect while concealing beauty, that no loveliness can overcome, and that has neither color nor grace nor picturesqueness to recommend it.
The hotel is a series of one-storied buildings surrounding the four sides of a garden court, the projecting eaves giving a continuous
covered gallery that is the general corridor The bedrooms open directly upon this broad gallery, and the space in front of each room, furnished with lounging-chairs, table, and reading-lamp, is the sittingroom of each occupant by day. There is never any jealous hiding behind curtains or screens. The whole hotel register is in evidence, sitting or spread in reclining-chairs. Men in pajamas thrust their bare feet out bravely, puffing clouds of rank Sumatra tobacco smoke as they stared at the new arrivals; women rocked and stared as if we were the unusual spectacle, and not they; and children sprawled on the cement flooring, in only the most intimate undergarments of civilized children. One turned his eyes from one undressed family group only to encounter some more surprising dishabille; and meanwhile servants were hanging whole mildewed wardrobes on clothes-lines along this open hotel corridor, while others were ironing their employers’ garments on this communal porch.
A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN.
We were sure we had gone to the wrong hotel; but the Nederlanden was vouched for as the best, and when the bell sounded, over one hundred guests came into the vaulted diningroom and were seated at the one long table. The men wore proper
coats and clothes at this midday riz tavel (rice table), but the women and children came as they were—sans gêne.
The Batavian day begins with coffee and toast, eggs and fruit, at any time between six and nine o’clock; and the affairs of the day are despatched before noon, when that sacred, solemn, solid feeding function, the riz tavel, assembles all in shady, spacious diningrooms, free from the creaking and flapping of the punka, so prominent everywhere else in the East. Rice is the staple of the midday meal, and one is expected to fill the soup-plate before him with boiled rice, and on that heap as much as he may select from eight or ten dishes, a tray of curry condiments being also passed with this great first course. Bits of fish, duck, chicken, beef, bird, omelet, and onions rose upon my neighbors’ plates, and spoonfuls of a thin curried mixture were poured over the rice, before the conventional chutneys, spices, cocoanut, peppers, and almond went to the conglomerate mountain resting upon the “rice table” below. Beefsteak, a salad, and then fruit and coffee brought the midday meal to a close. Squeamish folk, unseasoned tourists, and wellstarched Britons with small sense of humor complain of loss of appetite at these hotel riz tavels; and those Britons further criticize the way in which the Dutch fork, or most often the Dutch knife-blade, is loaded, aimed, and shoveled with a long, straight stroke to the Dutch interior; and they also criticize the way in which portions of bird or chicken are managed, necessitating and explaining the presence of the finger-bowl from the beginning of each meal. But we forgot all that had gone before when the feast was closed with the mangosteen—nature’s final and most perfect effort in fruit creation.
After the riz tavel every one slumbers—as one naturally must after such a very “square” meal—until four o’clock, when a bath and tea refresh the tropic soul, the world dresses in the full costume of civilization, and the slatternly women of the earlier hours go forth in the latest finery of good fortune, twenty-six days from Amsterdam, for the afternoon driving and visiting, that continue to the nine-o’clock dinner-hour. Batavian fashion does not take its airing in the jerky sadoe, but in roomy “vis-à-vis” or barouches, comfortable “milords” or giant victorias, that, being built to Dutch measures, would
comfortably accommodate three ordinary people to each seat, and are drawn by gigantic Australian horses, or “Walers” (horses from New South Wales), to match these turnouts of Brobdingnag.
Society is naturally narrow, provincial, colonial, conservative, and insular, even to a degree beyond that known in Holland. The governor-general, whose salary is twice that of the President of the United States, lives in a palace at Buitenzorg, forty miles away in the hills, with a second palace still higher up in the mountains, and comes to the Batavia palace only on state occasions. This ruler of twenty-four million souls, who rules as a viceroy instructed from The Hague, with the aid of a secretary-general and a Council of the Indies, has, in addition to his salary of a hundred thousand dollars, an allowance of sixty thousand dollars a year for entertaining, and it is expected that he will maintain a considerable state and splendor. He has a standing army of thirty thousand, one third Europeans, of various nationalities, raised by volunteer enlistment in Holland, who are well paid, carefully looked after, and recruited by long stays at Buitenzorg after short terms of service at the sea-ports. After the Indian mutiny the Dutch were in great fear of an uprising of the natives of Java, and placed less confidence in native troops. Only Europeans can hold officers’ commissions; and while the native soldiers are all Mohammedans, and great consideration is paid their religious scruples, care is taken not to let the natives of any one province or district compose a majority in any one regiment, and these regiments frequently change posts. The colonial navy has done great service to the world in suppressing piracy in the Java Sea and around the archipelago, although steam navigation inevitably brought an end to piracy and picturesque adventure. The little navy helps maintain an admirable lighthouse service, and with such convulsions as that of Krakatau always possible, and changes often occurring in the bed of the shallow seas, its surveyors are continually busied with making new charts.
The islands of Amboyna, Borneo, Celebes, and Sumatra are also ruled by this one governor-general of the Netherlands Indies, through residents; and the island of Java is divided into twenty-two residencies or provinces, a resident, or local governor, ruling—or, as
“elder brother,” effectually advising—in the few provinces ostensibly ruled by native princes. A resident receives ten thousand dollars a year, with house provided and a liberal allowance made for the extra incidental expenses of the position—for traveling, entertaining, and acknowledging in degree the gifts of native princes. University graduates are chosen for this colonial service, and take a further course in the colonial institute at Haarlem, which includes, besides the study of the Malay language, the economic botany of the Indies, Dutch law, and Mohammedan justice, since, in their capacity as local magistrates, they must make their decisions conform with the tenets of the Koran, which is the general moral law, together with the unwritten Javanese code. They are entitled to retire upon a pension after twenty years of service—half the time demanded of those in the civil service in Holland. All these residents are answerable to the secretary of the colony, appointed by the crown, and much of executive detail has to be submitted to the home government’s approval. Naturally there is much friction between all these functionaries, and etiquette is punctilious to a degree. A formal court surrounds the governor-general, and is repeated in miniature at every residency. The pensioned native sovereigns, princes, and regents maintain all the forms, etiquette, and barbaric splendor of their old court life, elaborated by European customs. The three hundred Dutch officials condescend equally to the rich planters and to the native princes; the planters hate and deride the officials; the natives hate the Dutch of either class, and despise their own princes who are subservient to the Dutch; and the wars and jealousies of rank and race and caste, of white and brown, of native and imported folk, flourish with tropical luxuriance.
Batavian life differs considerably from life in British India and all the rest of Asia, where the British-built and conventionally ordered places support the same formal social order of England unchanged, save for a few luxuries and concessions incident to the climate. The Dutchman does not waste his perspiration on tennis or golf or cricket, or on any outdoor pastime more exciting than horse-racing. He does not make well-ordered and expensive dinners his one chosen form of hospitality. He dines late and dines elaborately, but the more usual form of entertainment in Batavia is in evening
receptions or musicales, for which the spacious houses, with their great white porticos, are well adapted. Batavian residents have each a paradise park around their dwellings, and the white houses of classic architecture, bowered in magnificent trees and palms, shrubs and vines and blooming plants, are most attractive by day. At night, when the great portico, which is drawing-room and living-room and as often dining-room, is illuminated by many lamps, each lovely villa glows like a fairyland in its dark setting. If the portico lamps are not lighted, it is a sign of “not at home,” and mynheer and his family may sit in undress at their ease. There are weekly concerts at the Harmonie and Concordia clubs, where the groups around iron tables might have been summoned by a magician from some continental garden. There are such clubs in every town on the island, the government subsidizing the opera and supporting military bands of the first order; and they furnish society its center and common meeting-place. One sees fine gowns and magnificent jewels; ladies wear the heavy silks and velvets of an Amsterdam winter in these tropical gardens, and men dance in black coats and broadcloth uniforms. Society is brilliant, formal, and by lamplight impressive; but when by daylight one meets the same fair beauties and bejeweled matrons sockless, in sarongs and flapping slippers, the disillusionment is complete.
The show-places of Batavia are easily seen in a day: the old town hall, the Stadkirche, the lighthouse, the old warehouse, and the walled gate of Peter Elberfeld’s house, with the spiked skull of that half-caste rebel against Dutch rule pointing a more awful reminder than the inscription in several languages to his “horrid memory.” The pride of the city, and the most creditable thing on the island, is the Museum of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (“Bataviaasch Genootschap von Kunsten en Wepenschappen”), known sufficiently to the world of science and letters as “the Batavian Society,” of which Sir Stamford Raffles was the first great inspirer and exploiter, after it had dreamed along quietly in colonial isolation for a few years of the last century. In his time were begun the excavations of the Hindu temples and the archæological work which the Dutch government and the Batavian Society have since carried on, and which have helped place that association among the foremost learned societies
of the world. The museum is housed in a beautiful Greek temple of a building whose white walls are shaded by magnificent trees, and faces the broad Koenig’s Plein, the largest parade-ground in the world, the Batavians say. The halls, surrounding a central court, shelter a complete and wonderful exhibit of Javanese antiquities and art works, of arms, weapons, implements, ornaments, costumes, masks, basketry, textiles, musical instruments, models of boats and houses, examples of fine old metal-work, and of all the industries of these gifted people. It is a place of absorbing interest; but with no labels and no key except the native janitor’s pantomime, one’s visit is often filled with exasperation.
There is a treasure-chamber heaped with gold shields, helmets, thrones, state umbrellas, boxes, salvers, betel and tobacco sets of gold, with jeweled daggers and krises of finest blades, patterned with curious veinings. Tributes and gifts from native sultans and princes display the precious metals in other curious forms, and a fine large coco-de-mer, the fabled twin nut of the Seychelles palm, that was long supposed to grow in some unknown, mysterious isle of the seagods, is throned on a golden base with all the honors due such a talisman. The ruined temples and sites of abandoned cities in Middle Java have yielded rich ornaments, necklaces, ear-rings, headdresses, seals, plates, and statuettes of gold and silver. A room is filled with bronze weapons, bells, tripods, censers, images, and all the appurtenances of Buddhist worship, characteristic examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of India, which even more surprisingly confronts one in these treasures from the jungles of the far-away tropical island. A central hall is filled with bas-reliefs and statues from these ruins of Buddhist and Brahmanic temples, in which the Greek influence is quite as marked, and Egyptian and Assyrian suggestions in the sculptures give one other ideas to puzzle over.
The society’s library is rich in exchanges, scientific and art publications of all countries; and the row of reports of the Smithsonian Institution, the Geological Survey and Bureau of Ethnology, are as much a matter of pride to the American visitor as the framed diplomas of institutes and international expositions are to the Batavian curator. The council-room contains the state chairs of
native sovereigns, and portraits and souvenirs of the great explorers and navigators who passed this way in the last century and in the early years of this cycle. Captain Cook left stores of South Sea curios on his way to and fro, and during this century the museum has been the pet and pride of Dutch residents and officials, and the subject of praise by all visitors.
The palace of the governor-general on this vast Koenig’s Plein is a beautiful modern structure, but more interest attaches to the old palace of the Waterloo Plein, the palys built by the great Marshal Daendels, who, supplanted by the British after but three years’ energetic rule, withdrew to Europe.
IV
THE KAMPONGS
The Tjina, or China, and the Arab kampongs, are show-places to the stranger in the curious features of life and civic government they present. Each of these foreign kampongs, or villages, is under the charge of a captain or commander, whom the Dutch authorities hold responsible for the order and peace of their compatriots, since they do not allow to these yellow colonials so-called “European freedom”—an expression which constitutes a sufficient admission of the existence of “Asiatic restraint.” Great wealth abides in both these alien quarters, whose leading families have been there for generations, and have absorbed all retail trade, and as commission merchants, money-lenders, and middlemen have garnered great profits and earned the hatred of Dutch and Javanese alike. The lean and hooked-nosed followers of the prophet conquered the island in the fifteenth century, and have built their messigits, or mosques, in every province. The Batavian messigit is a cool little blue-and-whitetiled building, with a row of inlaid wooden clogs and loose leather shoes at the door; and turbaned heads within bow before the mihrab that points northwestward to Mecca. Since the Mohammedan conquest of 1475, the Javanese are Mohammedan if anything; but they take their religion easily, and are so lukewarm in the faith of the fire and sword that they would easily relapse to their former mild Brahmanism if Islam’s power were released. The Dutch have always prohibited the pilgrimages to Mecca, since those returning with the green turban were viewed with reverence and accredited with supernatural powers that made their influence a menace to Dutch rule. Arab priests have always been enemies of the government and foremost in inciting the people to rebellion against Dutch and native rulers; but little active evangelical work seems to have been done by Christian missionaries to counteract Mohammedanism, save at the town of Depok, near Batavia.
In all the banks and business houses is found the lean-fingered Chinese comprador, or accountant, and the rattling buttons of his abacus, or counting-board, play the inevitable accompaniment to financial transactions, as everywhere else east of Colombo. The 251,325 Chinese in Netherlands India present a curious study in the possibilities of their race. Under the strong, tyrannical rule of the Dutch they thrive, show ambition to adopt Western ways, and approach more nearly to European standards than one could believe possible. Chinese conservatism yields first in costume and social manners; the pigtail shrinks to a mere symbolic wisp, and the well-todo Batavian Chinese dresses faultlessly after the London model, wears spotless duck coat and trousers, patent-leather shoes, and, in top or derby hat, sits complacent in a handsome victoria drawn by imported horses, with liveried Javanese on the box. One meets correctly gotten-up Celestial equestrians trotting around Waterloo Plein or the alleys of Buitenzorg, each followed by an obsequious groom, the thin remnant of the Manchu queue slipped inside the coat being the only thing to suggest Chinese origin. The rich Chinese live in beautiful villas, in gorgeously decorated houses built on ideal tropical lines; and although having no political or social recognition in the land, entertain no intention of returning to China. They load their Malay wives with diamonds and jewels, and spend liberally for the education of their children. The Dutch tax, judge, punish, and hold them in the same regard as the natives, with whom they have intermarried for three centuries, until there is a large mixed class of these Paranaks in every part of the island. The native hatred of the Chinese is an inheritance of those past centuries when the Dutch farmed out the revenue to Chinese, who, being assigned so many thousand acres of rice-land, and the forced labor of the people on them, gradually extended their boundaries, and by increasing exactions and secret levies oppressed the people with a tyranny and rapacity the Dutch could not approach. In time the Chinese fomented insurrection against the Dutch, and in 1740, joining with disaffected natives, entrenched themselves in a suburban fort. The Dutch in alarm gave the order, and over 20,000 Chinese then within the walls were put to death, not an infant, a woman, nor an aged person being spared. In fear of the wrath of the Emperor of China, elaborate
excuses were framed and sent to Peking. Sage old Keen-Lung responded only by saying that the Dutch had served them right, that any death was too good for Chinese who would desert the graves of their ancestors.
After that incident they were restrained from all monopolies and revenue farming, and restricted to their present humble political state. An absolute exclusion act was passed in 1837, but was soon revoked, and the Chinese hold financial supremacy over both Dutch and natives, trade and commerce being hopelessly in the hands of the skilful Chinese comprador. The Dutch vent their dislike by an unmerciful taxation. They formerly assessed them according to the length of their queues and for each long finger-nail. The Chinese are mulcted on landing and leaving, for birth and death, for every business venture and privilege; yet they prosper and remain, and these Paranaks in a few more generations may attain the social and political equality they seek. It all proves that under a strong, tyrannical government the Chinese make good citizens, and can easily put away the notions and superstitions that in China itself hold countless millions in the bondage of a long-dead past. The recent exposure of Chinese forgeries of Java bank-notes to the value of three million pounds sterling has put the captains of Batavia and Samarang kampongs in prison, and has led to wholesale arrests of rich Chinese throughout the island.
Native life swarms in this land of the betel and banana, where there seems to be more of inherent dream and calm than in other lands of the lotus. The Javanese are the finer flowers of the Malay race—a people possessed of a civilization, arts, and literature in that golden period before the Mohammedan and European conquests. They have gentle voices, gentle manners, fine and expressive features, and are the one people of Asia besides the Japanese who have real charm and attraction for the alien. They are more winning, too, by contrast, after one has met the harsh, unlovely, and unwashed people of China, or the equally unwashed, cringing Hindu. They are a little people, and one feels the same indulgent, protective sense as toward the Japanese. Their language is soft and musical —“the Italian of the tropics”; their ideas are poetic; and their love of
flowers and perfumes, of music and the dance, of heroic plays and of every emotional form of art, proves them as innately esthetic as their distant cousins, the Japanese, in whom there is so large an admixture of Malay stock. Their reverence for rank and age, and their elaborate etiquette and punctilious courtesy to one another, are as marked even in the common people as among the Japanese; but their abject, crouching humility before their Dutch employers, and the brutality of the latter to them, are a theme for sadder thinking, and calculated to make the blood boil. When one actually sees the quiet, inoffensive peddlers, who chiefly beseech with their eyes, furiously kicked out of the hotel courtyard when mynheer does not choose to buy, and native children actually lifted by an ear and hurled away from the vantage-point on the curbstone which a pajamaed Dutchman wishes for himself while some troops march by, one is content not to see or know any more.
These friendly little barefoot people are of endless interest, and their daily markets, or passers, are panoramas of life and color that one longs to transplant entire. Life is so simple and primitive, too, in the sunshine and warmth of the tropics. A bunch of bananas, a basket of steamed rice, and a leaf full of betel preparations comprise the necessaries and luxuries of daily living. With the rice may go many peppers and curried messes of ground cocoanut, which one sees made and offered for sale in small dabs laid on bits of bananaleaf, the wrapping-paper of the tropics. Pinned with a cactus-thorn, a bit of leaf makes a primitive bag, bowl, or cup, and a slip of it serves as a sylvan spoon. All classes chew the betel- or areca-nut, bits of which, wrapped in betel-leaf with lime, furnish cheer and stimulant, dye the mouth, and keep the lips streaming with crimson juice. In Canton and in all Cochin China, across the peninsula, and throughout island and continental India, men and women have equal delight in this peppery stimulant. The Javanese lays his quid of betel tobacco between the lower lip and teeth, and so great seem to be the solace and comfort of it that dozing venders and peddlers will barely turn an eye and grunt responses to one’s eager “Brapa?” (“How much?”)
