Gustav Fechner

Gustav Fechner

Gustav Theodor Fechner (born April 19, 1801 – died November 28, 1887), was a German psychologist, pioneer in experimental psychology, and famous for his work in relationship between mind and body.

Life

Gustav T. Fechner was born in a small village at Gross-Särchen, Prussia (today Germany). A son of a Lutheran pastor, Fechner was taught Latin when he was five years old. His father died when Fechner was still a young boy. Fechner attended gymnasium in Sorau and Dresden, in 1817 Fechner enrolled at the University of Leipzig, the city in which he spent the rest of his life. He received his medical degree in 1822, but decided not to practice medicine. Instead he started to write satire, under the pseudonym of Dr. Mises. Through this he criticized contemporary German society, especially its predominant materialistic worldview.

At the same time, Fechner began to study physics. In 1824 he started to give lectures on the matter, and in 1834 was appointed professor of physics in the University of Leipzig. He married in 1833. However, in 1839 Fechner contracted an eye disorder while studying the phenomena of after-images, by staring into the sun. After much suffering, Fechner resigned his professorship. The following period of Fechner’s life was rather grim, marked with suffering from near blindness, and thoughts about suicide. Nevertheless, Fechner overcame all the problems and recovered in early 1840s. In 1844 he received small pension from the university, which enabled him to continue to live and study on his own. In 1848 he returned to the university as a professor of philosophy.

His problems with sight led Fechner to turn toward more speculative and metaphysical studies. He started to research on the mind and its relations with the body. In 1850 Fechner had a sort of revelation, which led him to realize the nature of connection between mind and body. From this insight he invented psychophysics – a study of the relationship between stimulus intensity and subjective experience of the stimulus. In 1860 he published his great work - Elemente der Psychaphysik, which opened him door wide open into academic community. In late 1860s and 1870s Fechner, however, turned his interest into art. He started to study aesthetical principles of art. He even conducted something that seems to be the first public opinion poll – he invited public to vote on which painting of the two had been more beautiful. Fechner published his famous Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876, in which he explained some basic principles of esthetics. He however never lost interest in the research on mind and body, and continued to work in this area. Fechner spent the rest of his life in giving public lectures on the matter, until his death in 1887.

Works

Fechner's epoch-making work was his Elemente der Psychophysik from 1860. In it he elaborates on the Spinozistic thought that bodily facts and conscious facts, though not reducible one to the other, are different sides of one reality. Facher tried to discover an exact mathematical relation between mind and body. The most famous outcome of his inquiries is the law known as Weber's or Fechner's law which may be expressed as following:

"In order that the intensity of a sensation may increase in arithmetical progression, the stimulus must increase in geometrical progression."

Though holding good within certain limits only, the law has been found immensely useful. Unfortunately, from the tenable theory that the intensity of a sensation increases by definite additions of stimulus, Fechner was led on to postulate the existence of a unit of sensation, so that any sensation might be regarded as composed of n units. His general formula for getting at the number of units in any sensation is

S = c log R,

where S stands for the sensation, R for the stimulus numerically estimated, and c for a constant that must be separately determined by experiment in each particular order of sensibility.

Fechner's conclusions have been criticized on several levels, but the main critic came from the “structuralists”. They claimed that although stimuli are composite, sensations are not. "Every sensation," said William James, "presents itself as an indivisible unit; and it is quite impossible to read any clear meaning into the notion that they are masses of units combined." Still, the idea of the exact measurement of sensation has been a fruitful one, and mainly through his influence on Wilhelm Max Wundt, Fechner was the father of that "new" psychology of laboratories which investigates human faculties with the aid of exact scientific apparatus. If sensations, Fachner argued, could be represented by numbers, the psychology may become an "exact" science, susceptible of mathematical treatment.

Fechner also studied the still-mysterious perceptual illusion of Fechner color, whereby colors are seen in a moving pattern of black and white. He published numerous chemical and physical papers, and translated works of J. B. Biot and L. J. Thénard from French language. A different but essential side of his character is seen in his poems and humorous pieces, such as the Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel (1825), written under the pseudonym of "Dr. Mises."

Though he had a big influence in his time, the disciples of his general philosophy were few. His world concept was highly animistic. He felt the thrill of life everywhere, in plants, earth, stars, the total universe. Man stands midway between the souls of plants and the souls of stars, who are angels. God, the soul of the universe, must be conceived as having an existence analogous to men. Natural laws are just the modes of the unfolding of God's perfection. In his last work Fechner, aged but full of hope, contrasts this joyous "daylight view" of the world with the dead, dreary "night view" of materialism. Fechner's work in aesthetics is also important. He conducted experiments to show that certain abstract forms and proportions are naturally pleasing to our senses, and gave some new illustrations of the working of aesthetic association.

Legacy

Fechner's position in reference to predecessors and contemporaries is not very sharply defined. He was remotely a disciple of Schelling, learnt much from Johann Friedrich Herbart and Christian Hermann Weisse, and decidedly rejected Friedrich Hegel and the monadism of Rudolf Hermann Lotze.

As a pioneer in experimental psychology, he inspired many 20th century scientists. Before Fechner there was only psychological physiology and philosophical psychology. Fechner’s experimental method started the whole new wave in psychology, which became a base for experimental psychology. His techniques and methods inspired Wilhelm Wundt, who created the first scientific study of conscious experience. This opened the door to the scientific study of mind.

Bibliography

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1836/2005). Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tod. Weiser Books. ISBN 1578633338

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1848/1992). Nanna, oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen. D. Klotz. ISBN 388074971X

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1851). Zendavesta, oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des lenseits

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1853). Uber die physikalische und philosophische Atomenlehre.

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1860/1998). Elemente der Psychophysik. Thoemmes Continuum. ISBN 1855066572

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1876). Vorschule der Ästhetik.

• Fechner, Gustav T. (1879). Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

• Heidelberger, M. 2001. Gustav Theodor Fechner. In Statisticians of the Centuries (C. C. Heyde et al, Eds.) pp. 142-147. New York: Springer. ISBN 0387953299

• Stigler, Stephen M. 1986. The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 067440341X

External links

• Elements of Psychophysics - An extract from Elements of Psychophysics

• Introduction to Elemente der Psychophysik. - An introduction by Robert H. Wozniak

• Kleine Schriften - Fechner - Biography in German

• Weber-Fechner Law

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