UC Berkeley

During the 1860s and 1870s in Germany, a concept that had once been at the core of religious disputations on salvation and at the center of Enlightenment moral philosophies became an empirical scientific object. This concept, the will, signified in these earlier contexts the human capacity for moral freedom; in the context of science, the will became the essence of psychological activity. German experimental psychologists used the will to study the boundary of voluntary and involuntary behavior, the evolution of consciousness, and the organization of the mind. They linked the will to physiological processes, measured its speed and efficacy, and classified its various expressions in behavior. What had once earmarked humans as partially beyond nature became inscribed within nature. By extension, the once transcendent quality of human freedom was considered a natural fact. This dissertation examines the naturalized psychological will in the German sciences of behavior and the mind between the 1860s and 1910s. It examines the theories and practices that sustained the will as a scientific object in the late nineteenth century and the conditions that contributed to the psychological will’s obsolescence in the early twentieth century. When the term ‘will’ began to disappear from psychology, however, what the term had stood for was absorbed into other psychological concepts.

This dissertation makes a two-part argument in five chapters. First, I argue that the psychological will had a conceptual structure that embraced the regularity of psychological processes as much as the mind’s ability to interrupt and change them, exhibiting both a determinism and a freedom that had belonged to earlier philosophical meanings of the will. Second, while in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the concept of willing encapsulated the idea that the mind was organized by both regulative and resistive capacities, by the turn of the century, experimental psychologists began extending the will’s conceptual structure to new terms, particularly to ‘thinking’. Thinking was subsequently conceived as a form of willpower, a power capable of resisting and altering habituated mental associations.

Chapter 1 offers a pre-history of the psychological will and shows how the will became an object of psychological study in the early nineteenth century at the intersection of German psychology, pedagogy, and philosophy. The Enlightenment cultural imperative to raise children toward the ideals of Bildung and Mündigkeit, which together referred to a type of moral competence to think for oneself, speak for oneself, and comport oneself in accordance with the right values, led philosophers and pedagogues to develop a theory of learning that could be put into practice. Through the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Johann Friedrich Herbart, I show how this endeavor required cultivating the will through the proper exercise of perception. Herbart’s view of the will’s psychological development made the will into a psychological concept and altered dominant philosophical understandings of morality and the self.

Chapter 2 documents how the psychological will was imagined by one of experimental psychology’s chief exponents, Wilhelm Wundt, beginning in the 1860s. I argue that the will and the new experimental psychology were co-constitutive in theory. Wundt designated the will as a primitive, originary facet of the mind, involved in all psychological phenomena, while he cast the science of psychology to be precisely the study of the interconnection of these phenomena of inner experience. Wundt’s vision of the psychological will was not accepted wholesale, and this chapter also follows the different ways contemporary psychologists interpreted the psychological will, at times to be more material, at times more abstract, even as all upheld the will as a fundamental feature of the mind. Chapter 3 examines the experimental correlative to the grand unified theory of the will that undergirded experimental psychology by showing how reaction time experiments and regimented observations of invertebrates and neonates fortified the will as a legitimate scientific object.

Chapter 4 analyzes the subfield of Denkpsychologie, the psychology of thinking, that branched out from experimental psychology in the 1890s. While psychologists of thinking, led by Wundt’s former laboratory assistant Oswald Külpe, accepted the will as a constitutive, regulative, and resistive feature of the mind, they extended these qualities to the function of thinking, which they saw as an expression of the will. Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation by showing how the conceptual structure of the psychological will that had been carried over into thinking was also transferred into new visions for the mind’s organization in psychological fields of the early twentieth century; namely, in the studies of intelligence, Gestalt, and personality. By then, the will had taken on other connotations, and it was now cognitive processes in general that maintained an open organizational structure.

This conceptual history of the will in German psychology reveals the different ways that human freedom has been reconciled with the scientific, materialist commitment to natural laws. As debates about free will persist in the sciences today, attention to this history can show how contemporary imaginations of the mind deploy concepts such as openness, plasticity, and agency to describe how human behavior exhibits a freedom that goes beyond nature yet remains within nature’s bounds.