“Evolutionizing and Collectivizing”

Snait Gissis (Tel Aviv University)

In the period from the mid 19th century to the late 1920s biologists, social thinkers, sociologists and psychologists dealt methodologically and epistemologically with issues related to collectivities, collective frameworks, and sociality, but this in the face of the prevalence -- if not the predominance-- of an individualist perspective. In the various, newly emerging fields of psychology/neurology several influential figures, and in particular Herbert Spencer, John Hughlings Jackson, Théodule Ribot, Sigmund Freud, in their explanatory mechanisms of selected features of individuals assumed relations of dependency of individuals on collectivities. They posited collectivities as necessary relational components in the construction and constitution of individuals. I will show that their connecting mechanisms were evolutionary, and had explicit Lamarckian / neo-Lamarckian features. Furthermore, their deployment of the collectivity was conceived as supplying the grounds for claims of necessity and universality, and in this way making their psychology a science.

“Sensory Fusion: Evolutionary and Synesthesia in Fin-de-Siècle Europe”

Robert Brain (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

One of the most auspicious points of contact between neo-lamarckian psycho-physiology and fin-de-siècle artworlds came with questions of synesthesia, the sensory pathology à la mode around 1890. Vanguard artists devoted to a Wagnerian ideal of a total work of art pursued aesthetic mechanisms to stimulate multiple sensory modalities as a means of overcoming the alienation imposed by division of labor in arts. The artists’ fascination with sensory fusion encouraged scientists and medical doctors to reconsider various pathologies of synesthesia, especially so-called color hearing. For some, color-hearing was a rare gift of exquisitely organized nervous systems; for others it was merely an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centers. Because color hearing appeared to have a hereditary component, some scientists sought its source in evolutionary development, arguing that it was an abnormal developmental differentiation of sensory functions. This paper will consider some of the evolutionary theories of synesthesia, especially those of biologists Felix Le Dantec and Raphael DuBois, who saw synesthesia as a vibratory, imitative capacity of protoplasm and lower organisms, which when recovered through artistic experience produced a healthy reintegration of the senses and, ideally, a means of fortifying the social bond. Others disagreed, like neurologist and cultural jeremiah Max Nordau, for whom synesthesia was a “retrogression" from "the height of human perfection to the low level of a mollusk," and those scientists and artists who valorized it were therefore the worst harbingers of the coming age of Degeneration.

“The Scale of Modern Warfare: Instinct, the Individual and the Crowd in the Great War”

Debbie Weinstein (Brown University)

During the early twentieth century, numerous scientists and social commentators drew on evolutionary theory to explain why people fight wars. This paper examines contrasting physiological and psychological invocations of evolution and human nature in the causes of war that, taken together, highlight the complexity of early twentieth-century thought about the relationship between individual instincts and collective behavior. On one hand, physiologists such as Walter B. Cannon argued that armed combat between nations represented an aggregation or scaling up of individual physiological processes. Cannon’s publications on the physiology of emotions such as fear and hunger included reflections on the implications of his laboratory research about the adaptive fight-or-flight response for societal conflict. By contrast, social psychologists such as Gustav Le Bon and William McDougall focused on the dynamics of groups themselves as essential features of warfare. Le Bon asserted the relevance of his earlier work on crowd psychology for understanding both military morale and home front attitudes in the psychology of the Great War. McDougall similarly emphasized group processes and the group mind in his postwar analysis of how to prevent the horrors of war in the future. Cannon, Le Bon, and McDougall thereby exemplified alternative perspectives on the relationship between instinct, human nature, and social processes, between the one and the many, which became particularly acute issues in the context of the unprecedented destruction wrought by World War I.