In the background of this story about the relation between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology lies the complex historical relation between phenomenology and psychology in general. At the turn of the twentieth century, when phenomenology was conceived, psychology and philosophy were still negotiating their boundaries. Phenomenology, as a philosophical investigation into the essential structures of consciousness, bears perhaps a closer relation to psychology than many other philosophical projects. Its investigations are often investigations into roughly the same phenomena as psychology studies though from a different perspective, a philosophical or transcendental perspective as opposed to a scientific or natural perspective. This intimacy demands attention from new generations of phenomenologists as they renegotiate their relation to psychology as a humanistic discipline, as a scientific discipline, or as a philosophical discipline. Even Husserl acknowledged the possibility of a phenomenological psychology, a scientific psychology which utilises the methods of phenomenology, though without adopting a transcendental attitude (e.g. Husserl 1977). Phenomenological psychology proceeds by way of essential psychological structures to the explanation of particular facts. Such a discipline is valid, for Husserl, though requires transcendental phenomenology as its ultimate ground.

This history is crucial for understanding the contemporary project of naturalising phenomenology. For partisans, one could mine this history of conflict and cooperation for promising proposals on the best way to enact this project. However, while the general distinctions between phenomenology and psychology are important, this aspect of the history of the relation of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology will have to remain largely in the background of our story. Instead of focusing on the differing attitudes to psychology among the major phenomenologists, I will focus instead on specific references to Gestalt psychology, how the phenomenologists appropriated Gestalt psychology, and the uses to which Gestalt psychology was put.

This focus is necessary, since it is far too easy to see phenomenologists’ references to experimental psychology and conclude, as does Gallagher, that ‘these theorists have already provided a positive response to the question of whether phenomenology can be naturalized’ (Gallagher 2012, 111). It is true that these phenomenologists make use of empirical psychology, and it is even true that they recognise some convergence between empirical psychology and transcendental phenomenology, such that the boundaries between the disciplines are not always clear. However, at least with respect to Gestalt psychology, the empirical findings of the psychologists are not incorporated into phenomenology qua empirical science but rather require translation into the idiom of transcendental phenomenology in order to be exploited. While the precise terms of the exploitations differ among the phenomenologists considered, it is generally the case that Gestalt psychology is present in phenomenology despite rather than because of its naturalism. In fact, as we will see, Husserl, Gurwitsch, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty seem generally to share an anti-naturalistic critique of Gestalt psychology despite the willingness of the latter three phenomenologists to exploit their empirical findings.

In 1912, Max Wertheimer published a paper analysing the perception of motion. By showing his subjects white strips appearing at varying intervals, he was able to identify the optimal speed at which subjects would perceive not only two lines appearing in quick succession, but one line moving from one position to another. He also identified a stage at which subjects ceased even to perceive an object moving from one place to another, and saw instead just motion. He argued that what we perceive when we perceive motion is not individual sensations organised according to non-perceptual processes. We immediately perceive motion. Such motion is a Gestalt, an organised form which is neither an emergent property of, nor reducible to, more primary elements (Wertheimer 1965, 163–168; Ash 1995, 125–134).

This study is often taken to mark the birth of Gestalt psychology, though in fact Wertheimer released two other papers exploring Gestalt concepts prior to this (Wertheimer 1938, 265–273; Wertheimer 2014, 131–133). As the term is commonly used, Gestalt psychology is synonymous with the Berlin school, the school of psychology founded by Wertheimer and his colleagues, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and associated with Carl Stumpf’s psychological institute at the University of Berlin.

This common account of the birth of Gestalt psychology has come under occasional challenge. Barry Smith traces the beginning of Gestalt psychology to Christian von Ehrenfels, and his idea of ‘Gestalt qualities’ (Smith 1988). The consciousness of a melody, Ehrenfels says, cannot be reduced to the consciousness of each individual note. The consciousness of melody is the sum of the individual notes as well as a particular unifying property, called a Gestalt quality (Ehrenfels 1988). Wertheimer was at one time a student of von Ehrenfels and was influenced by his ideas on Gestalt qualities. If von Ehrenfels’ work is taken as the start of Gestalt psychology, then it is clear that Wertheimer and the Berlin school are only a few of those to productively respond to his work, and they are far from his most faithful students. Gestalt psychology, therefore, should have a considerably wider reference than just the work of the Berlin school, incorporating at least the Würzburg and Graz schools as well. Even at the height of research into Gestalt psychology, Karl Bühler, another claimant to the label, bemoans the fact that the term ‘Gestalt psychology’ has ‘passed into family ownership’ (Ash 1995, 310).

This terminological problem certainly has the flavour of an interminable historical dispute, solved by convention rather than argument. It is compounded when we introduce variants, such as ‘Gestalt theory’, incorporating mathematics, logic, epistemology, anthropology, politics, and ethics, and acknowledge that not all those who contributed to Gestalt theory were working in the Gestalt tradition. My goal is not to solve this problem; I only mention it because the potential breadth of the term ‘Gestalt psychology’, the various psychologists and philosophers that it might include, illuminates the problematic relation between the Berlin school and the phenomenological tradition. Between Gestalt theory, broadly construed, and phenomenology, broadly construed, there is considerable overlap.

Christian von Ehrenfels inherits his philosophical and psychological framework from Brentano, who, as we know, was a profound influence on Husserl. Stumpf was also a student of Brentano, and as well as working closely with the Berlin school, he was a friend, sympathiser, and effective critic of Husserl. Don Ihde calls Gestalt psychology ‘a stepchild of early phenomenology’ (Ihde 2012, 37), which captures quite well the relationship that Spiegelberg describes as one of ‘action at a distance’ (Spiegelberg 1972, 67). On this view, the Berlin school came to maturity with the ideas of Stumpf and Ehrenfels, and only later incorporated insights from Husserlian phenomenology, which they dutifully married to Stumpf’s experimental method.

Against the idea that Husserl influenced the Berlin school ‘only late and casually’ (Spiegelberg 1972, 67), certain facts must be noted. Wertheimer and Koffka were both familiar with Logical Investigations prior to even the earliest Gestaltist papers of 1910 and 1912 (Ash 1995, 108; Spiegelberg 1972, 72–73). Koffka even made some concessions to Husserl in his early work. ² Both Koffka and Köhler were sensitive to Husserl’s arguments against naturalism and psychologism (Koffka 1936, 570–571; Köhler 1939, 45). None of these facts are decisive. Even the significance of the Berlin school’s use of the term ‘phenomenology’ to describe their method can be overstated, considering the contested nature of that term in the early twentieth century (see Schumann 2013). The historian of psychology, Edwin Boring, notes that Husserlian phenomenology and ‘phenomenology’ as a very general term for the study of experience intermingle in the intellectual climate of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe such that it becomes easier to incorporate certain insights from Husserl’s phenomenology into naturalistic psychology (Boring 1957, 367–368).

The phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch offers the most detailed and sustained attempt to incorporate Gestalt psychology into phenomenology. As a student in Berlin in 1919–20, he developed a relationship with Stumpf, with whom he learned both philosophy and psychology (Embree, in Gurwitsch 2009a, 41–42). Although in proximity to the Psychological Institute of Berlin, he may not have come into contact with the Berlin school at this time. He recalls meeting Wertheimer for the first time in 1925 or 1926 (Gurwitsch, in Grathoff 1989, 107). Köhler would have only just returned to Berlin from Tenerife (Asch 1968, 111). And Koffka was then setting up a psychological laboratory in Giessen (Ash 1995, 211). It is therefore plausible that he did not have early contact with the main figures of the Berlin school. After studying briefly with Husserl in Freiberg, Gurwitsch went to Frankfurt, and worked with Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein (Embree, in Gurwitsch 2009a, 42–43). Gelb and Goldstein were sympathetic to many Berlin school ideas and certainly contributed to the wider Gestalt tradition. This intellectual environment clearly had an impact, since Gurwitsch’s dissertation from the Frankfurt years was devoted to the relations between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.

‘Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: studies on the relation between Gestalt theory and ph...