Scientific Journal
Abstract
Explaining how sensory inputs yield coherent perceptual forms constituted an epistemological crisis of nineteenth-century elementarist psychology. This crisis surfaced in the inefficacy of its assumptions—especially the “constancy hypothesis” and the “mosaic hypothesis”—and in Ernst Mach’s difficulty accounting for form. In standard historiography, Christian von Ehrenfels’s 1890 essay on “Gestalt Qualities” is presented as resolving this crisis and as a first step toward holistic approaches to perception. Drawing on the “Active Mind” tradition and contemporary critical scholarship, and adopting an analytic-archaeological approach, this article challenges this view. It argues that Ehrenfels’s proposal was not a decisive break with elementarism but its paradoxical culmination. A close analysis of his concepts, especially his “two-stage ontology” and “one-sided dependency,” shows that he remains committed to an additive logic of “parts plus a quality,” treating organization as an external, posterior factor. This impasse can be traced to the cosmological dualism in Ehrenfels’s thought and his account of the origin of form. The resulting framework opposes the Berlin School of Gestalt psychology (Wertheimer and Koffka), which defends the priority of the whole over the parts. The study’s contribution is twofold: First, it corrects Ehrenfels’s historical position as a limit case of the old paradigm rather than the immediate starting point of the new one. Second, it reconceives the transition to Gestalt theory as an epistemological shift from an additive dualism of form and matter to a structural unity in the organization of the perceptual field.
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