Empirical Psychology and Dietetics of the Soul: Between Medicine and Philosophy: Two aspects of Nascent Psychology in the Czech Lands and Austria during the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era

Abstract

The aim of this study is to present the two most notable forms of ‘psychology’ in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century in the Czech Lands and Austria (since they still formed largely one political, cultural, and intellectual space at the time, and their universities followed similar rules). This is a period that usually receives very little attention in overviews and textbooks of the history of psychology. Scholars in the Age of the Enlightenment and Romantism, i.e., those who were active before 1848, especially in ‘our’ part of the world, tend to be as good as forgotten. 

In the first part of the paper, psychology is presented as a theoretical academic discipline taught as part of introductory courses to philosophy: its aim was to analyse the conditions of human thought as the necessary precondition for any ‘philosophy’. At this time, the Czech Lands and Austria were gradually adopting Christian Wolff’s thoughts and, somewhat later, Herbartian philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy. Some scholars, however, could not resist Kant’s and Hegel’s attraction, although the spreading of their thought system was proscribed. In general, this part of the study focuses on the development of empirical psychology. At its core is an analysis of the work of a remarkable Enlightenment scholar, Gottfried Immanuel Wenzel, a native of Choceň and professor of philosophy at a lyceum in Linz, whose work on psychology was clearly based on familiarity with contemporary medical theories. His achievements are compared to the thoughts of Philipp Carl Hartmann Hartmann, a native of Vienna, and his work on the physiology of thought from 1820.

The second part of this contribution focuses on the dietetics of the soul as a practical form of prophylaxis, the protection of mental health, based on much older concepts of classical dietetics and theories of ‘passions of the soul’. This is a distinct ‘psychological’ genre that has essentially become independent, has literally established itself in separate publications, and has enjoyed a relatively large readership. We investigate the concepts of four thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century: Wenzel’s dietetics of the soul, conceived of as a guide to a healthy and long mental life, Hartmann’s guide to a happy life, Bronn’s guide to a beautiful life (kalobiotics), and Ernst Feuchtersleben’s dietetics of the soul from 1838, which became the classic work of this genre. 

In the second half of the nineteenth century, these two Late Enlightenment and Romantic forms of psychology were surpassed and half-forgotten, due both to the development of experimental psychology and to the refocusing of (not only Austrian) psychiatry on the anatomy of the brain and biological factors in general. Several of the subjects addressed by this early psychology – such as the unconscious, our dreams, but also what we would call ‘mental hygiene’ or mental wellbeing today – resurfaced as late as the twentieth century, but by then without any reference to the long-forgotten nineteenth-century scholars.