Christian von Ehrenfels

Christian von Ehrenfels (; born Maria Christian Julius Leopold Freiherr von Ehrenfels; 20 June 1859 – 8 September 1932) was an Austrian philosopher, and is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology.

Early life

Christian von Ehrenfels was born on 20 June 1859 in Rodaun near Vienna and grew up at his father's castle Brunn am Walde in Lower Austria. He joined secondary school in Krems and first studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and then changed to the University of Vienna.

There he studied philosophy, was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong. He earned his doctorate under the supervision of Meinong, following him after his move to the Karl-Franzens-Universität (Graz), in 1885 on the topic of Größenrelationen und Zahlen – Eine psychologische Studie ("Relations of magnitude and numbers: A psychological study"). He obtained his habilitation in 1888 at Vienna with the work Über Fühlen und Wollen ("On feeling and willing"). From 1896 to 1929 he was a professor of philosophy at the German University of Prague. Interested in his lectures were among others Max Brod, Franz Kafka and Felix Weltsch.

Gestalt psychology

The idea of Gestalt has its roots in theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernst Mach. Max Wertheimer is to be credited as the founder of the movement of Gestalt psychology. The concept of Gestalt itself was first introduced in contemporary philosophy and psychology by Ehrenfels in his famous work Über Gestaltqualitäten (On the Qualities of Form, 1890). Both he and Edmund Husserl seem to have been inspired by Mach's work Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, 1886) to formulate their very similar concepts of Gestalt and figural moment respectively. Ehrenfels' Gestaltqualitaten also influenced Stephan Witasek's investigations on complexion theory.

His analysis of the transition of a melody to another key became famous. Ehrenfels explained that a melody consists of individual sounds, but that it is considerably more than the sum of these notes. The individual notes would be able to join themselves for completely different melodies, while the melody would remain the same, if transposed into another key and containing single tones. This new opinion, that came up to a “perception of the whole” compared to its “parts” Ehrenfels called Gestaltqualitäten (figure qualities). (Compare with: Aristotle (trans. 1952) “In the case of all things that have several parts and in which the whole is not like a heap, but is a particular something besides the parts, there must be some such uniting factor”.)

Sexual ethics

Monogamy and polygamy

Ehrenfels argued in numerous cultural-scientific and sexual-political writings against the cultural harmfulness of monogamy and for the utopia of a polygynian social order. He defended the opinion that monogamy would hinder a Darwinistic reproduction-logic and procreation-selection, which would have a devastating effect on society in a cultural-biological way and therefore monogamy should be combated. With those theories, Ehrenfels exposed himself to massive criticism, because he offered with his theories unimaginable thoughts to contemporary Western conventions. The basis of Ehrenfels's thinking about a new sexual order were expressed in a series of essays published in several academic journals in Germany and Austria between 1902 and 1910. In his essays, Ehrenfels began with the argument that men are not naturally monogamous, and that monogamy was something that had come to Europe with Christianity. Ehrenfels's starting point was that with many species of animals such as whales, walruses, elephants, lions, etc., the strongest male has a harem, which for him was sufficient proof that this was what nature had intended for humanity. Ehrenfels stated that though monogamy had some useful functions such as the "iron discipline" it imposed on European men, on the whole Europeans had suffered terribly from the unnatural condition of monogamy, which had seriously interfered with the Darwinian progress of ensuring the survival of the fittest (Ehrenfels was an avid social Darwinist).

Ehrenfels wrote with disgust that monogamy was "that type of sexual life...that corresponded to the needs and capacities of women, at the cost of men". By contrast, Ehrenfels believed that women were naturally monogamous, and that all that women desired was one good husband to look after them. Ehrenfels argued that this "splitting" within men between their "day consciousness" and "night consciousness" caused men all sorts of psychological trauma, and led to men acting in irrational, often violent ways. The specific example of the sort of male irrationality brought up by Enrenfels concerning this "splitting" was that of men abusing the prostitutes they visited.

In April 1895, the German Emperor Wilhelm II had a nightmare where all the nations of Europe appeared as "prehistoric warrior goddesses" who were protected by Germany which took the form of the Archangel Michael. To the East, they were threatened by a dark, stormy cloud in which a Chinese-style dragon carried a Buddha wreathed in fire under which marched millions of Asians who destroyed all in their path, killing all whites. As a result of European monogamy and Asian polygamy, the Europeans were losing out to the Asians, and it was only a matter of time before this genetic edge allowed the Asians to destroy European civilization. Ehrenfels wrote with alarm that: "the average constitutional strength of the Chinese, their resistance to overwork and...noxious and prejudicial influences of all kinds...exceeds that of the civilized peoples of the West to an astonishing degree". Woman by contrast would be allowed only one husband at a time. Ehrenfels maintained in his new society that henceforward only the "specifically sexual element" in relations between the sexes would matter and other "motives alien to breeding" like romantic love would done away with in order to improve the white race. In Ehrenfels's vision, whites would serve as the oligarchic "Aryan" military and intellectual castes and the Asians and blacks as the slave castes supporting the whites.

Until the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-05, Ehrenfels believed that these sorts of radical changes would only happen sometime in the far-future, or as Ehrenfels put it in 1902: "the Aryan will only respond to the imperative of sexual reform when the waves of the Mongolian tide are lapping around his neck". After Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, Ehrenfels wrote "the absolute necessity of a radical sexual reform for the continued existence of the western races of men has... been raised from the level of discussion to the level of a scientifically proven fact". Subsequently, Ehrenfels made a public appeal to "manly Aryan men" who had proved themselves to be both "social winners" and "studs" to disregard monogamy and marriage, and to start impregnating as many women as possible to give the "white race" a genetic edge in the coming war against the "Yellow Peril". Both Alfred Ploetz of Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftbiologie, the journal for the widely respected Society for Race Hygiene, and Max Marcuse of the sexologist journal Sexual-Probleme, endorsed Ehrenfels's plans for a new society. Social Darwinism and racism were part of the intellectual mainstream in the West, as was the widespread belief that white men were starting to become "soft", and if white men continued to lose their masculine "hardness" inevitably this would lead to process of "racial degeneration", which would end with the whites becoming enslaved to the "Yellow Peril". The early 20th century saw what the historian Jonathan Katz called the "invention of heterosexuality", by which he meant that the ideal of romantic "true love" was discarded in popular discourse for the first time by a new discourse that celebrated sexuality and carnal pleasure as the objectives of relationships. Ehrnefels's opposition to romantic love and his unabashed celebration of sexual pleasure as part of the evolutionary duties of racial improvement fitted in well to the new age. The audience generally offered polite dissent from Ehrenfels with one participant calling his new society an "adolescent sexual fantasy".

The American historian Edward Ross Dickinson wrote the "pieces" of Ehrenfels's thinking were all mainstream, but the way he brought them together was "idiosyncratic". Dickinson suggested that these ideas were rooted in Ehrenfels's own tormented sexuality as he was both fascinated/repulsed by sex. Ehrenfels was especially offended by the Animierkneipen ("hostess bar"), a type of popular bar in Austria where the buxom waitresses wore very low-cut dresses and were encouraged to flirt with the male customers in order to get them to buy more drinks; in the Animierkneipen, the waitresses were paid commissions based on their nightly sales of alcohol. The frequency with which Ehrenfels brought up the example of how psychological "splitting" was causing men to abuse prostitutes may very well have reflected a guilty conscience on his part about past abuse that he had inflicted on the prostitutes whose services he had used. The "flight from domesticity" novels typically dealt with a ruggedly tough male who lived life on his own terms, usually alone and always in some remote frontier place, and who almost never had a relationship with a woman or children. The heroes in the "flight from domesticity" novels were usually a frontiersman, a hunter, a cowboy, a scout or some other suitably adventuresome, manly occupation. Because the heroes in the "flight from domesticity" novels lived in the wild in harmony with nature, they were always portrayed as being more morally pure and authentic than the people who lived in modern civilization. The hero in the "flight from domesticity" novels was always the strong silent type, the taciturn tough guy who lived uncompromisingly by his own code of honor and who embodied typical male values like courage and self-reliance far better than did the men who lived in civilization. Typical of the "flight from domesticity" novels were the Allan Quatermain novels by the British novelist H. Rider Haggard dealing with the adventures of a British frontiersman in 19th century South Africa; the Western novels by the German novelist Karl May dealing with the adventures of the German immigrant cowboy Old Shatterhand and his Apache best friend Winnetou in the American Old West; the Scott Allen Cameron novels by the Canadian novelist Ralph Connor about a Mountie singly-handedly upholding the law in the Rocky Mountains; and Western adventure novels by the Irish-American novelist Thomas Mayne Reid. The typical hero in Reid's novels which were extremely popular in the United States and Europe was described as being: "gallant, skillful at arms, far more at ease around men than around women, has lots of time for trappers and soldiers but little for the upper classes and intellectuals, and is much happier hunting and killing than thinking."

Tosh argued by the end of the 19th century, the burdens of being a husband and a father in a modern, industrialized, urban society were such that many men fantasized about "chucking it all" to escape domesticity; to live a life unburdened by the demands of a job, children, a wife or any other social obligation. The German historian Klaus Theweleit wrote that the same threatening water imagery was frequently used in the writings of Freikorps men during the interwar period, but the only threats were the Jews and the Communists (usually the same thing in these writings), while the Asians which threatened to subsume German men. Reviewing Theweleit's book in 1987, the American historian Paul Robinson wrote that "...one can't read it without feeling that Mr. Theweleit is onto something: the piling up of examples eventually begins to take its toll on even the most skeptical." To be in love can often mean a certain loss of self-control as those in love often invoke the images of being "swept away" or "swallowed up". Dickinson argued that for Ehrenfels, a self-proclaimed macho "manly man" and Aryan alpha male, the prospect of being in love with someone was terrifying as it meant the possibility of losing control, and he projected those fears-which were always expressed in the water imagery-onto the Asians. Ehrenfels often denied quite vehemently that marriage had anything to do with love, writing about his own marriage that marriage was: "in the final analysis the sexual provision for two persons of the opposite sex through mutual, exclusive and contractual agreement to intercourse. Our morality tries to cover the matter...instead of sexual provision we speak of a unity of souls and the contractual agreement to coitus...is more or less transparently veiled by the term 'community of bed and table'". Dickson wrote that Ehrenfels's efforts to deny that a man could ever love a woman suggested a huge fear of emotional dependence on his part.

Dickinson noted Ehrenfels's vision of humanity was a simplistic one, in which men fought and struggled to pass on their genes by impregnating as many women as possible. The existence of homosexuality and bisexuality posed a major problem for Ehrenfels's view of humanity. </blockquote>

Dickinson also argued that Ehrenfels's constant use of this sort of sexualized language of power, aggression and domination when writing about China reflected his own fear of sex, love, sexual dependence, his sexual adequacy as a man, and most of all, emotional dependence. Ehrenfels made it clear that in his proposed new society, the mentally and physically disabled would be prevented from marrying, but stopped short of explicitly advocating their murder. Likewise, Dickinson claims that Ehrenfels was opposed to antisemitism, writing there was no "Jewish bogey" threatening the "Aryan race", called antisemitism "silly" and argued that the Jews would be very useful allies for the Aryans in the coming war with the Asians. However, Lucy Tal whose company E.P. Tal had published "Ali and Nino" wrote her lawyer saying, "I had never heard of the Baroness... Also my late husband's right hand and secretary knew nothing of the Baroness. Only much later, when for some reason, we looked at Buchhaendler Boersenblatt, we discovered the Baroness as Kurban Said. Of course, under the Nazis pseudonyms were born, people unrightful had themselves as authors ..."

In the 1890s, Ehrenfels-who was a passionate fan of Richard Wagner-befriended a fellow Wagnerite, the British born German völkisch thinker Houston Stewart Chamberlain, "the Evangelist of Race". Ehrenfels, who despite being a Wagnerite and a friend of Chamberlain's did not generally associate himself with the more extreme racist and anti-Semitic wing of the Wagner movement that Chamberlain came to be the leader of. Ehrenfels never accepted Chamberlain's anti-Semitism, but he was influenced by Chamberlain's theory that the Aryan race was the greatest and best race of them all. Chamberlain was later to have an affair with Ehrenfels's wife, Baroness Emma von Ehrenfels.

Felix Weltsch

The Czech Zionist philosopher and friend of Kafka Felix Weltsch wrote many essays and memos about Ehrenfels, who himself was of partly Jewish descent. Weltsch was one of Ehrenfels's most important pupils.

Works

1876 - Hadmar von Kuering (Bourgeois tragedy)
1876 - Brutus (Bourgeois tragedy)
1876 - Richard Löwenherz (Bourgeois tragedy)
1885 - Die Brüder von Hartenstein (Drama) -, Graz 1885
1890 - Der Kampf des Prometheus (Libretto)
1886 - Metaphysische Ausführungen im Anschlusse an Emil du Bois-Reymond
1888 - Über Fühlen und Wollen: Eine psychologische Studie. Carl Gerold & Sohn, Wien 1888
1890 - "Über Gestaltqualitäten". In: Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 14 (1890), (Page 249–292) (English: "On the Qualities of Form", 1890)
1893 - "Werttheorie und Ethik". In: Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 17 (1893), (Page 26–110, 200–266, 321–363, 413–425)
1894 - "Werttheorie und Ethik". In: Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 18 (1894), (Page 22–97)
1897 - System der Werttheorie. O. Reisland, Leipzig 1898, (2 volumes)
1904 - "Sexuales, Ober- und Unterbewusstsein". In: Politisch-Anthropologische Revue 2 (1903-4), (Page 456–476)
1904 - "Die sexuale Reform". In: Politisch-Anthropologische Revue 2 (1903–1904) (Page 970–994)
1907 - Sexualethik. J. F. Bergmann, Wiesbaden 1907
1911 - "Leitziele zur Rassenbewertung". In: Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 8 (1911), (Page 59–71)
1913 - Richard Wagner und seine Apostaten. Ein Beitrag zur Jahrhundertfeier. H. Heller Wien & Leipzig 1913
1916 - Kosmogonie, Diederichs, Jena 1916
1922 - Das Primzahlengesetz, entwickelt und dargestellt auf Grund der Gestalttheorie. Reisland, Leipzig 1922
1930 - "Sexualmoral der Zukunft". In: Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, 22 (1930), (Page 292–304)

Christian von Ehrenfels

Early life

Gestalt psychology

Sexual ethics

Monogamy and polygamy

Felix Weltsch

Works

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

External links