Reality and Expression. On Ideal-Realism in Psychology

All sciences incorporate philosophical problems. When confronted with the problem of determining its own subject-matter, psychology implicitly attends to the philosophical problem of reality. Especially since the advent of criticism in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the opposing positions of idealism and realism have engaged with this problem. Consequently, the different attempts of solution engender possible approaches to scientific psychology. A third way beyond idealism and realism is ideal-realism which has not yet been exhaustively discussed in the history of philosophy. It is a tradition which originated in Romanticism and developed throughout the 19th century. Already in the work of Novalis, the corresponding approach to psychology has been called Realpsychologie. To reconstruct the doxographic development of ideal-realism and to investigate how its solution to the problem of reality prepared Realpsychologie is the purpose of the investigation. It shows that three versions of the tradition can be distinguished, associated with Romanticism, Wilhelm Dilthey, and the so-called object-phenomenology respectively. Yet, the latter of these accounts did not arrive at conceptual completion. Thus, ideal-realist Realpsychologie still offers unexploited potential for the further advancement of theoretical psychology. It points towards a critical psychology of expression as the answer to the problem of the discipline’s subject-matter.