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ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 48 ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 48 ANDREAS RYDBERG Inner Experience An Analysis of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Germany Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Geijersalen (Eng6-1023), Engelska Parken, Humanistiskt centrum, Thunbergsvägen 3P, Uppsala, Friday, 9 June 2017 at 10:00 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in Swedish. Faculty examiner: Kristiina Savin (Lunds universitet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper). Abstract Rydberg, A. 2017. Inner Experience. An Analysis of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Germany. Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 48. 245 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-554-9926-6. In the last decades a number of studies have shed light on early modern scientific experience. While some of these studies have focused on how new facts were forced out of nature in so-called experimental situations, others have charted long-term transformations. In this dissertation I explore a rather different facet of scientific experience by focusing on the case of the Prussian university town Halle in the period from the late seventeenth till the mid-eighteenth century. At this site philosophers, theologians and physicians were preoccupied with categories such as inner senses , inner experience, living experience, psychological experiments and psychometrics. In the study I argue that these hitherto almost completely overlooked categories take us away from observations of external things to the internal organisation of experience and to entirely internal objects of experience. Rather than seeing this internal side of scientific experience as mere theory and epistemology, I argue that it was an integral and central part of what has been referred to as the cultura animi tradition, that is, the philosophical and medical tradition of approaching the soul as something in need of cultivation, education, disciplination and cure. The study contains four empirical chapters. In the first chapter I analyse the meaning and function of experience in Christian Wolff’s philosophy understood as spiritual exercise and cultura animi. In the second chapter I examine experience in the theologian Hermann Francke’s cultura animi, focusing particularly on the relation between scientific experience and what scholars have referred to as religious experience. In the third chapter I chart aesthetic experience in Alexander Baumgarten’s aesthetics. In the fourth chapter I examine the role of experience in the medicine of Georg Ernst Stahl, Friedrich Hoffmann and their followers. The analysis of medical experience channels the discussion into questions regarding the relation between the cultura animi tradition and the kind of attitudes, practices and processes that have been connected to modern objectivity. Keywords: scientific experience, inner experience, inner senses, living experience, psychometrics, psychological experiments, cultura animi, spiritual exercise, meditation, aesthetics, Pietism, Enlightenment, Christian Wolff, Hermann Francke, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Ernst Stahl, Friedrich Hoffmann Andreas Rydberg, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Box 629, Uppsala University, SE-75126 Uppsala, Sweden. © Andreas Rydberg 2017 ISSN 1653-5197 ISBN 978-91-554-9926-6 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-320753 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-320753) To my Family Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 9 1. Writing histories of scientific experience ............................................................ 11 Towards a new understanding of early modern philosophy and science ..... 14 Material, method and translations ....................................................................... 20 Disposition ............................................................................................................. 22 2. The Wolffian ladder of experience ...................................................................... 27 A philosophical cultura animi ................................................................................. 32 Descartes ............................................................................................................ 33 Leibniz ................................................................................................................ 36 Tschirnhaus ....................................................................................................... 39 Wolff .................................................................................................................. 42 The dangerous Wolffian practice ................................................................... 48 Inner experience .................................................................................................... 53 The inner senses ............................................................................................... 54 Operating with the inner senses ..................................................................... 56 Inner experience ............................................................................................... 60 Wolff’s psychology as cultura animi ................................................................. 62 Experimental experience ...................................................................................... 66 The role of the experimental experience ...................................................... 67 Measuring intensive magnitudes .................................................................... 72 Psychometrics ................................................................................................... 75 Experimenting on the soul ............................................................................. 77 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 84 3. Francke and the living experience of God .......................................................... 86 Religious experience .............................................................................................. 88 Early modern religious experience ................................................................ 89 Living experience .............................................................................................. 94 The Orphanage cultura animi ......................................................................... 103 Scientific experience in Francke’s cultura animi ................................................ 111 Scientific experience in early modern rhetoric and philosophy .............. 112 Living experience in Orphanage science and cultura animi ....................... 114 Reconciling histories of religious and scientific experience ..................... 123 Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 127 4. Baumgarten and the aesthetic experience ......................................................... 129 Towards a new understanding of Baumgarten’s aesthetics ........................... 130 Breaking with the epistemological paradigm ............................................. 130 Aesthetics as moral education and spiritual exercise ................................ 133 The Happy Aesthetician ................................................................................ 137 Aesthetic experience ............................................................................................ 140 Aesthetic representation ................................................................................ 141 Aesthetic truth ................................................................................................ 146 Contextualising aesthetic experience ................................................................ 148 Epistemological and pedagogical discourses on vividness ...................... 148 Rhetorical and religious discourses on vividness and the living ............. 152 Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 157 5. Medicina cultura animi and experimental psychology ....................................... 158 Early modern medical experience ..................................................................... 161 Epistemic technologies of medical experience .......................................... 161 Medical experience in Stahl and Hoffmann ............................................... 163 The Stahlian therapy of the living organism .................................................... 167 Stahl’s medicine of the living organism ...................................................... 168 Stahlian medicine at the Orphanage ............................................................ 174 Alberti and the therapy of the internal senses ........................................... 179 From mechanical physiology to experimental psychology ............................ 185 Hoffmann’s mechanical physiology ............................................................ 186 Measuring the soul ......................................................................................... 189 Experimental psychology .............................................................................. 195 Cultura animi and objectivity .......................................................................... 201 Conclusions
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