Die Entwicklung des Menschen: Wilhelm Wundts (1832–1920) voluntaristische Anthropologie (2022)
Fuchs, Thomas (Author)
Sudhoffs Archiv: Zeitschrift fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Volume: 106
Issue: 1
Pages: 47-85
Wilhelm Wundt sought an answer to the question of the nature of man under three keywords: idealism, dialectics and parallelism. His ideas were idealistic because he was convinced of the historical impact of ideas. For Wundt, the fundamental process of developing consciousness was dialectical. In the psychophysical as well as in the ‘Völker’-psychological processes of consciousness, consciousness developed in response to the demands that were brought to consciousness by the will and the outside world, namely in the sense of a higher development. The validity of the psychophysical laws of development for the individual and collective consciousness points to parallelism as the third fundamental figure of thought. In terms of their professional orientation, Wundt’s anthropological views progressed from human physiology to the psychophysics of human consciousness to ‘Völker’-psychological anthropology, which described humans as generic beings. Wundt saw this anthropological three-step process as rooted in the history of human development. In his physiological origins and in his most fundamental forms of community, man came from the animal kingdom. The development of his consciousness paved the way from animal to human. This process, which lies in the darkness of prehistory, emancipated man from animals and freed him from the struggle for existence. Wundt further developed the materialistic theory of evolution of nature into an idealistic theory of human evolution. According to Wundt, the moment an animal became the first human being, the validity and explanatory power of the Darwinian theory of evolution ended. The psychophysical developmental leap to human consciousness paved the way to all higher thought processes. With the psychophysical completion of human consciousness, a Völker-psychological anthropology is built up, which progresses from the individual I-consciousness to the collective psychological consciousness, from the individual will to the collective will. In Wilhelm Wundt’s deliberations, thinking consciousness and voluntary formation of society turned man into man.
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