Adolf Jost

Adolf Lothar Jost (born August 22, 1874 in Graz , † October 20, 1908 in Sorau ) was an Austrian psychologist . The so-called "Jost's sentences" on learning and remembering go back to him. He also published the pamphlet Das Recht auf dem Tod in 1895 , which is the starting point for a broad discussion of euthanasia in the German-speaking world .

Life

Adolf Jost was born the illegitimate son of the civil servant's daughter Leopoldine Pischl. In 1884 he was led by Dr. Ignaz Lothar Jost adopted, who was presumably also his father. He attended grammar school in Graz until 1892 and then studied philosophy , mathematics and physics in Graz and Göttingen. Jost probably heard from Alexius Meinong in Graz , who was to open the first experimental psychological institute there in 1894 . In Göttingen , Jost worked with Hermann Ebbinghaus and Georg Elias Müller on the psychology of memory .

After receiving his doctorate in 1897, Jost returned to Graz in 1900. In the meantime he also stayed in Grenoble . In 1905 he left Graz with an unknown destination. At that time, he stated that his profession was writing. A newspaper article in the Hannoversche Courier of February 15, 1908 with the title "A shocking fate" reports that Jost had become terminally insane in Berlin. Accordingly, after the death of his father, he passed through his considerable inheritance in Vienna and traveled to Berlin with the last of his money to work as a journalist. Apparently, with signs of paranoia , Jost first went to a private mental hospital. From there, it is said, as a terminally ill person, he should first be transferred to a state insane asylum and then to his home country.

The Göttingen mathematician Wilhelm Lorey reported in 1908 that he had met Jost in Vienna in August 1907 . Jost lived in a small town in the Vienna Woods and lived on the fortune of his late father. Three quarters of a year later he had received a letter from Jost from the Sorau state mental institution ( Niederlausitz ). Jost was found in Berlin, where he had traveled to look for work at the Reuters press agency , completely penniless in a state of twilight. In Sorau , Jost had recovered somewhat until he had several "epileptial seizures" on September 29th. According to Loreys, Jost remained in a state of severe drowsiness until his death on October 20, 1908. The autopsy revealed meningitis as the immediate cause of death . Jost was buried on October 23 in the prison cemetery.

The "Jost's sentences"

In Göttingen, Hermann Ebbinghaus had undertaken experiments to research the psychology of memory to remember senselessly constructed syllables in order to be able to exclude influences such as associations . Jost took up this method when he dealt with the distribution of the repetitions in this context. For example, he memorized sets of twelve syllables, which in all cases were repeated twenty-four times on other days, but in different distributions. Jost could remember better on the second day than on the first and on the third again better than on the second, even if the experiments were switched to other learning. He then formulated two conclusions:

"I. If two associations are of the same strength but of different age, a new repetition is of greater value for the older one.
II. If two associations are of the same strength, but of different age, the older one falls less off over time. "

- Adolf Jost : The association strength in its dependence on the distribution of the repetitions 1897, p. 472.

Jost's sentences represent the foundations of learning psychology recognized to this day .

"The right to death"

As early as 1895, Jost published the 53-page brochure Das Recht auf dem Tod in Göttingen . Apparently his father suggested it to him. He took his own life in old age and in his suicide note asked his son to commit suicide if he was no longer happy with life.

Jost posed the question “'Is there a right to death?', That is, are there cases in which the death of an individual is desirable for himself as well as for human society at all?” ( The right to the Death , p. 1) He was no longer just concerned with legitimizing suicide, but also addressed "the problem of the incurably mentally or physically ill". Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and the Austrian writer Lazar Baron von Hellenbach , but above all in recourse to the utilitarianism of David Hume , for example , Jost defined the value of an object through its relationship to joy or suffering:

“According to a purely natural point of view, the value of a human life can only be composed of two factors. The first factor is the value of life for the person concerned, that is, the sum of the joy and pain that he has to experience. The second factor is the sum of the benefits and harms that the individual represents for those around him. [...]
The value of human life cannot just become zero, but also negative, when the pain is as great as it usually is in the case of terminal illness. In a sense, death itself represents the zero value and is therefore still the better than a negative life value. "

- The right to death , p. 13 u. 26th

On the one hand, Jost demanded a "right to death" in the case of incurable illness. On the other hand, he also applied this principle to incurably insane people who, in his opinion, led not only useless, but also highly torturous lives and who also consumed “a considerable amount of material value” ( The Right to Death , p. 17). With this, Jost addressed current problems in the discussion about euthanasia to this day. But he also developed lines of argument that were used to legitimize the murders of the sick during the Nazi era .

Jost's book remained largely unknown, if not unnoticed. Similar ideas were discussed in the environment of the " Deutscher Monistenbund " Ernst Haeckel , although Haeckel probably did not know Jost's writing. Roland Gerkan, a member of the Monistenbund, who suffered from lung diseases, put a draft law on euthanasia up for discussion in a letter to Wilhelm Ostwald, which was also published in the Monistenbund magazine . Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, on the other hand, who with their booklet The Release of Destruction Unworthy of Life (1920) contributed most momentarily to the further development of the German euthanasia debate, referred to Jost. In historical representations, the beginning of a broad German-language discussion about euthanasia and also about active euthanasia "life unworthy of life" is dated to the appearance of Jost's pamphlet.

Publications

• The right to death. Göttingen, Dietrich 1895, this edition online at archive.org .
• The association strength as a function of the distribution of the repetitions. In: Journal for Psychology and Physiology of the Sensory Organs 14, (1897), pp. 436–472 (also as a Separatum: Leipzig, Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1897).

literature

• Udo Benzenhöfer : “The right to death”. Comments on a paper by Adolf Jost from 1895. In: Recht & Psychiatrie 16 (1998), pp. 198–201.
• Udo Benzenhöfer: The good death? History of euthanasia and euthanasia. 2nd Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-30162-3 .
• Horst Gundlach: Adolf Lothar Jost, b. Pischl. In: History of Psychology. News bulletin of the section on the history of psychology. 14, H. 2 (1997), p. 15 f. ( PDF file; 0.17 MB )
• Hans-Walter Schmuhl: Racial hygiene, National Socialism, euthanasia. From prevention to the destruction of “life unworthy of life” 1890–1945. 2nd Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1992, ISBN 3-525-35737-0
• Markus Zimmermann-Acklin: Euthanasia. A theological-ethical investigation. 2nd Edition. Universitäts-Verlag, Freiburg (Switzerland) 2002, ISBN 3-7278-1148-X ; Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) and Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-451-26554-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Benzenhöfer: The good death? , P. 82.
2. ^ W. Lorey: D. Adolf Jost † . In: Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Blätter 5 (1908), p. 183f.
3. ↑ Benzenhöfer, The Good Death , pp. 85f.
4. ↑ Benzenhöfer, The good death? , P. 90.