Fechner’s ‘Day View’

November 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Gustav Fechner, the 19th century philosopher and pioneer psychologist, is most known for developing the science of psychophysics, the investigation of the relationships between physical events and stimuli and the appearance of these stimuli in consciousness. In addition to this work, (which he apparently regarded as something of a diversion to his major interests), Fechner is primarily associated with a metaphysics which attempts to unite concepts of body and mind. Echoing some of the monist ideas of Spinoza, and latterly Muller and others, Fechner regarded all phenomona as having both a physical and a psychological dimension. In the language of his day Fechner referred to this psychic dimension as ’soul’, although there is no absolute necessity to embrace the full theological implications of this terms to appreciate the distinction he is making. In looking out into the world, Fechner would claim, our experience is not only of the material substances that make up that world but also a kind of ‘liveness’ which animates that experience. This does not apply only to those aspects of experience which we usually associate with liveness, plants and animals predominantly, but that this liveness is a component of being itself. Fechner goes on to critique what he saw as an overly materialistic and empiricist way of looking at the world which he felt denied this liveness, and referred to this way of looking as the ‘night view’, a sterile and ultimately bleak way of looking which evacuated the world of meaningfulness, in contrast to what he called the ‘day view’ in which the world is witnessed in its full liveness. It is important to note that this quasi-panpsychist viewpoint that Fechner argued for does not attribute the world, or the materials of the world, with specific agency; he is not arguing for a crudely animist way of looking in which spirits haunt every rock and tree, but of a more abstract and distributed notion of what we would now refer to as consciousness. This has some resonance with the work of David Chalmers, for example, in contemporary consciousness studies, who similarly argues against theories of consciousness as an emergent phenomena and in favour of a conception of it as a omnipresent aspect of being.

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