Wolfgang Köhler

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Köhler, Wolfgang (1887-1967) One of the founders of the Gestalt school of psychology, Köhler also wrote The Place of Value in a World of Facts (1938), the result of his William James lectures delivered at Harvard in 1934. Köhler attempted to work out a theory of value, including aesthetic value, on the basis of the phenomenally objective gestalt-quality which he called ‘requiredness’. One part of a visual field, for example, may demand completion in some specific way, rather as a melody may require resolution.

1887-1967.

Estonian-born German psychologist. A founder of the Gestalt psychology movement, his works include The Mentality of Apes (1917) and Gestalt Psychology (1937).

(1887–1967). Co-founder and leading member of the Gestalt school of psychology, Köhler was born in Reval on the Baltic and educated at Tübingen, Frankfurt, and Berlin. While at Frankfurt, he became acquainted with Max Wertheimer, and both he and Kurt Koffka acted as subjects in Wertheimer's classical experiments on apparent visual motion. Between them, they evolved what became known as Gestalt theory.

In 1913, Köhler went to Tenerife to study the behaviour of anthropoid apes and was perforce obliged to remain there for the duration of the First World War. His celebrated book describing his observations and experiments appeared in German as Intelligensprüfungen am Menschenaffen (English translation The Mentality of Apes, 1925). In this book, Köhler developed the important thesis that problem solving involving detours or simple tool using comes about through sudden insight, and does not depend on fortuitous trial and error as E. L. Thorndike had contended. (This controversy was further reviewed by Koffka, who strongly defended Köhler's standpoint.)

Although the Gestalt view of problem solving as due to sudden insight has often been questioned, the idea of a 'restructuring' of the field of perception to enable key features previously hidden or unnoticed to be literally 'seen' undoubtedly describes aptly some types of problem solving — in particular visual–spatial — in both higher animals and man. Köhler further laid stress on the ways in which differences of size or brightness might apparently be perceived directly, irrespective of the actual value of the differences themselves.

Köhler was appointed to the chair of psychology at Berlin in 1921, largely on the strength of an important work on aspects of modern physics which he held to be relevant to psychological issues (Die physische Gestalten in Rühe und stationären Zustand; translated in abridged form by W. D. Ellis, A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, 1938, pp. 17–55). Though exhibiting high intellectual quality, this work is often dismissed as a synthèse manquée; none the less, Köhler believed implicitly that the road to scientific advance in psychology is by way of physics, and he attempted to justify this view in many of his later books and papers (cf. The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler, ed. Mary Henle (1971) ). All his books are essentially inspired by Gestalt thinking. The most important are: Gestalt Psychology (1929; rev. edn. 1947); The Place of Value in a World of Facts (1938); Dynamics in Psychology (1940 and 1960).

Köhler felt obliged for reasons of conscience to abandon Hitler's Germany in 1934 and emigrated to the United States, where he found a congenial home at Swarthmore College, where he remained for nearly all the rest of his long life.

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

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Quotes:

"It has sometimes been said that we find nowhere in nature an analogue of the difference between happens and is, on the one hand, and ought, on the other hand."