Psychophysical parallelism

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
portrait of Christoph Bernhard Francke , around 1700; Duke Anton Ulrich Museum , Braunschweig

As psychophysical parallelism is the so-called a philosophical position mind-body problem referred. According to her, there is a parallelism of events between a psychological and a physical phenomenon. This assumption is intended to solve problems that result from the interactionist solution of the mind-body problem.

History of theory

In the 17th and 18th centuries

In the context of the mind-body problem, the use of the term “ parallelism ” can be demonstrated for the first time by the modern philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz . In his main work, the Essais de Théodicée , he speaks in two places of a parallelism between a realm of grace and a realm of nature (" parallélisme harmonique des Regnes de la Nature et de la Grace") or between a realm of Purposes ( final causes ) and a realm of effects ( effect causes ) exist (" parallélisme des deux regnes, de celui des causes finales et de celui des causes efficientes "). The realm of grace or purposes denotes the psychic, the realm of nature or effects the physical phenomenon. With the thesis that these areas are parallel, Leibniz encounters a decisive difficulty in the interactionist solution of the mind-body problem, as proposed by René Descartes . The latter recognized that the same quantity of movement or force was always retained, but not the same direction of movement. From this error it follows that the Cartesian assumption of a mere change in direction of the movement of a body via the pineal gland is accompanied by the assumption of a so-called physical influence ( influxus physicus ). A physically effective influence in the area of ​​physical phenomena from a power source outside this area contradicts the law of conservation of energy . The assumption of a psychophysical parallelism eliminates this contradiction in that every physical phenomenon finds its counterpart in the psychic realm and every psychic phenomenon its counterpart in the physical realm. This would merely make it appear as if a psychological event could cause a physical and a physical event a psychological one, while this appearance had its real reason in a parallelism of the events. This parallelism is guaranteed by the perfect creation of God, who has set up both phenomena in advance so that they always coincide ( hypothèse des accords ).

Leibniz, however, rarely speaks of a "parallelism" and prefers the term " harmony ". In his famous monadology there is no longer any question of parallelism. Instead it says:

“The souls act according to the final causes [...]. The bodies act according to the cause of the effect [...]. The two realms, that of the effect causes and that of the final causes, are harmonious with each other. "

- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz : : Monadology § 79th

With the concept of harmony Leibniz distinguishes himself from the similarly parallel proposal of the later so-called occasionalism ( systema causarum occasionalium ) and contrasts it with his “system of pre-established harmony ”. According to Leibniz, occasionalism tries to save Cartesian psychology by assuming the occasional (occasional) assistance of God ( concursus dei ). This position amounts to the fact that the parallelism of the phenomenal areas is restored in the event of a deviation from one another, as if by a constant divine miracle ( deus ex machina ). This assumption of a subsequent intervention by God in world events, however, violates the universally recognized perfection of God and his creation. Because if God had to correct his own creation, then he could no longer be considered perfect, since he could also have made his own creation better.

However, the occassionalist Arnold Geulincx is far closer to Leibniz's parallelism than Leibniz himself sees. His famous clock parable , which Leibniz cites several times to illustrate his own position, probably out of ignorance without citing the source, also amounts to the fact that God had parallelized the various phenomena in advance. Leibniz was therefore confronted early on with the allegation of plagiarism and the construction of a straw man argument . In contrast to the parallelism of Geulincx's provenance, Leibniz 'strictly rejects the substantive distinction between the various phenomena. While the Geulincxian parallelism remains committed to the Cartesian substance dualism, Leibniz speaks explicitly against the Cartesian distinction between a psychic ( res cogitans ) and a physical substance ( res extensa ) and advocates assigning the psychic and physical phenomena as different perspectives on just one realm of being understand. Instead of two sequences of events that would run independently, substantially different and parallel to one another, as Geulincx assumes, the Leibnizian parallelism is based on two interlocking realms or perspectives on the world. For this purpose, Leibniz uses the metaphor of an “ imperium in imperio ”, which for him has the meaning that every effect cause corresponds to a final cause. Leibniz is thus, alongside Baruch de Spinoza, a significant forerunner of modern identity theories .

The Leibniz system of pre-established harmony was still called "pre-stabilism" by Immanuel Kant. It was not until the end of the 19th century, based on Gustav Th. Fechner's psychophysics and his explicit reference to monadology, that it became customary to include the system of pre-established harmony under the title of “psychophysical parallelism”. This transference, however, ignores the fact that the pre-established harmony pursues a far broader purpose than merely being a suggestion for a solution to the mind-body problem.

In the 19th and 20th centuries

Gustav Theodor Fechner

In the 19th century, psychophysical parallelism was understood as a variety of property dualism that originated from Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887). Fechner also invented the term " psychophysics ". His view was very widespread among physiologists, psychologists, philosophers, and physicists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. With Fechner, the psychological and physical areas have no causal influence on each other, as with Leibniz. The reason for this non-causal relationship and the parallelism, however, does not lie in a pre-established harmony, as with Leibniz, but in the different perspective that is taken on things. Fechner uses Leibniz's analogy of clocks to explain it: While for Leibniz body and soul are like two clocks that were set to the same time by their creator and therefore run parallel to each other without causal influence, for Fechner body and soul are, so to speak, a single clock, which is viewed from two different perspectives: from the external to the clock and from the internal to the clock itself. The psychic is therefore what is given from the perspective of the first person, while the physical includes what is given from the third person. Accordingly, the parallelism does not go back to a common cause, namely God, as in Leibniz, but to the correlated appearance of perspectively different properties of one and the same property bearer. From this point of view, the psychological and physical side of man concern the way in which he is given. Fechner himself called his solution to the mind-body problem “identity view”. The expression "psychophysical parallelism" has probably become naturalized by the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt , who also represented psychophysical parallelism for low psychological functions.

Fechner tried inductively to justify that his two-sided theory is applicable not only to humans, but also to the universe as a whole. He believed that he could infer this panpsychism from the systemic character of the universe, which was completely analogous to the systemic character of man. So the reasoning is similar to that in modern functionalism (philosophy) of the philosophy of mind . However, the assumption of his panpsychism is logically independent of the assumption of psychophysical parallelism in relation to humans. Many authors therefore spoke of "psychophysiological parallelism" in order not to expose themselves to suspicion of panpsychism. (The founder of the general system theory Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote his dissertation on Fechner's system ideas.)

In the case of the Austrian philosopher Alois Riehl, Fechner's teaching was combined with the theory of the soul which Immanuel Kant developed in the chapter on paralogisms of the transcendental dialectic of his Critique of Pure Reason . This “identity theory”, as Riehl called it, was also the focus of the physicist and philosopher and head of the “ Vienna Circle ” Moritz Schlick in his work General Knowledge of Knowledge (1918) and discussed it there, as well as parallelism itself.

present

In the late 1950s was an initial variety of the physicalist and reductionist " identity theory " ( English identity theory ) of John Smart and Herbert Feigl (Moritz Schlick temporary assistant and students), in the US in 1930 emigrated developed what Ullin Place then built . At the present time, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel takes similar positions.

The psychophysical parallelism lives on in the speech of neurophysiology from the neural correlate , which is sought by this science for mental performance in the neural substrate, mostly through imaging processes .

literature

  • Oskar Kuhn: The refutation of materialism. Verlag Gebr. Geiselberger, Altötting 1970, pp. 113-129.
  • L. Addis: Parallelism, interactionism, and causation. In: PA French, JTE Uehling & HK Wettstein (eds.): Causation and causal theories. (= Midwest studies in philosophy Volume 9) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1984, 329-344.
  • Uwe Meixner : The Two Sides of Being: A Reassessment of Psycho-Physical Dualism. Mentis, 2004, ISBN 3897853760 Review
  • T. Natsoulas: Gustav Bergmann's psychophysical parallelism. In: Behaviorism 12 (1984), 41-69.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Peter Bieri (Ed.): Analytical Philosophy of Spirit. 2nd Edition. Athenäum-Hain-Hanstein-Verlags-Gesellschaft, Bodenheim 1993, ISBN 978-3-8257-3006-2 , pp. 5-7.
  2. ^ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Considérations sur la doctrine d'un Esprit Universel Unique . Quoted from Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (Ed.): The Philosophical Writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. 6, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1885, p. 533.
  3. ^ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Essais de Théodicée etc. I, §§ 18 & 74. Verlag François Daniël Changuion, Amsterdam 1710, quoted from Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (ed.): Die Philosophische Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. 6, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1885, pp. 113 & 142.
  4. ↑ See Hans Poser: Leibniz 'Philosophy. About the unity of metaphysics and science. Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-534-26846-7 , pp. 281-284.
  5. ↑ See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Monadologie § 80. Quoted from Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (Hrsg.): The Philosophical Writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. 6, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1885, p. 620 f.
  6. ↑ See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances etc. In: Journal des Sçavans. Paris 1695, pp. 294-306.
  7. ↑ Cf. Hubertus Busche: Supernaturality and windowlessness of the monads. In: Hubertus Busche (Ed.): Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Monadology. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004336-4 , pp. 73-80
  8. ↑ See Thomas Leinkauf: Pre-stabilized Harmony. In: Hubertus Busche (Ed.): Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Monadology. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004336-4 , pp. 197-209.
  9. ↑ Quoted and translated from Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (Hrsg.): Die Philosophische Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. 6, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1885, p. 620.
  10. ^ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Essais de Théodicée etc. I, § 59. Verlag François Daniël Changuion, Amsterdam 1710, cited above. n. Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (ed.): The philosophical writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. 6, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1885, p. 135.
  11. ↑ See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Extrait d'une lettre de M. Leibniz sur son Hypothèse de Philosophie etc. In: Journal des Sçavans. Paris 1696, pp. 451-455.
  12. ↑ Cf. Dirk Evers: God's choice of the best of all possible worlds. In: Hubertus Busche (Ed.): Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Monadology. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004336-4 , pp. 129-143
  13. ↑ See Rainer Specht: Commercium mentis et corporis. About causal ideas in Cartesianism. Friedrich Frommann Verlag (Günther Holzboog), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1966, pp. 172-175.
  14. ↑ See Simon Foucher : Réponse de MSF à M. de LBZ sur son nouveau systême etc. In: Journal des Sçavans. Paris 1696, pp. 422-426.
  15. ↑ Cf. Eduard Zeller: About the first edition of Geulincx 'Ehtic and Leibniz' Relationship to Geulincx 'Occasionalismus. In: Report of the meeting of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin . Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1884, pp. 673-695.
  16. ↑ Cf. Raphael Borchers: On the substance-dualistic misunderstanding of Leibniz's hypothèse des accords. In: Philosophical Yearbook . Vol. 123, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2016, pp. 38–57.
  17. ↑ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum Cartesianorum II, § 64. Quoted from Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (Ed.): Die Philosophische Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. 4, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1880, p. 391.
  18. ↑ See Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer: The monadological structure model of the world. Leibniz between Descartes and Kant. In: Herta Nagl-Docekal (Ed.): Leibniz read today. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2018, pp. 25–53.
  19. ↑ See Critique of Judgment, § 81. Quoted from Kant's Collected Writings (Academy edition). Vol. 5, published by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1913, p. 422.
  20. ↑ Cf. Gustav Theodor Fechner: The day view versus the night view. Breitkopf & Härtel Publishing House, Leipzig 1879, pp. 246-252.
  21. ↑ See Hans Poser: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for an introduction. Junius Verlag, Hamburg 2005, pp. 26–42
  22. ↑ Moritz Schlick: In: General Knowledge . Julius Springer Verlag . Berlin, 1918. S. 178ff and The Knowledge of Reality 543ff.
  23. ↑ Patrice Soom: From Psychology to Neuroscience . Ontos Publishing House . Heusenstamm, 2011. p. 6. ISBN 978-38683-8108-5 .