Therefore, the simple lines of the hand along with the tone and range of the voice as the individual determinateness of language—these too again acquire through the hand a steadier existence than they do through the voice, specifically in writing, namely, in its particularity as handwriting—all of these are an expression of the inner, so that as simple externality, the expression again relates itself as an inner vis-à-vis the diverse externality of action and fate.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §316 (Pinkard’s trans., emphases original)
Abstract
Robert Saudek, a Czech graphologist, journalist, diplomat, playwright, and novelist, was heavily influenced in his youth by Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. Saudek later became a pioneer in the field of psychological graphology. In this article, I examine the impact of Mauthner’s critique on Saudek’s work and evaluate whether Saudek’s approach to graphology aligns with Mauthner’s ideas. I argue that, although Saudek’s graphology is rooted in Mauthner’s critique of experimental psychology, there remains room for further development in the field of psychological graphology, centering on the analysis of language. With this in mind, I compare Saudek’s method and contemporary conceptual metaphor theory. I further suggest that Saudek’s extensive use of the autographs of well-known figures follows a method of working from examples, or specimens, which is not uncommon in the philosophy of science. Based on these findings, I propose a way of understanding Saudek’s graphology that challenges its characterization as a pseudoscience.
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Notes
For an overview of the current state of graphology, see Trubek (2017).
Topor (2021) provides an in-depth account of the relationship between Mauthner and Saudek.
“Als Leser der Sprachkritik bin ich päpstlicher geworden als der Kritikerpapst selbst” (Saudek 1907, p. 44). All translations from Saudek’s essay “Die Sprachkritik” as well as from Mauthner’s works are mine.
Reflecting on the master–student relationship, Saudek (1907, p. 21) remarks that the student sees the world through the master’s eyes, although he does not state explicitly that this applies to his reception of Mauthner.
See Saudek (1907, pp. 8ff).
Weiler (1970, p. 299) argues that Wittgenstein must have read at least the opening pages of Mauthner’s Beiträge, where the ladder analogy is presented.
The idea that knowledge is stored in language stems from Wilhelm von Humboldt; see Weiler (1970) for a detailed discussion of this. Saudek employs the “underground” metaphor, which recalls Freud’s subconscious, on several occasions.
These two aspects of the ladder analogy express the double-faced character of language as discussed above.
“So muss ich die Sprache hinter mir und vor mir und in mir vernichten von Schritt zu Schritt, so muss ich jede Sprosse der Leiter zertrümmern, indem ich sie betrete” (Mauthner 1901, I, p. 2).
The question of what it means to throw away the ladder is one of the most discussed issues in Wittgenstein scholarship. Wittgenstein maintains that the ladder that was thrown away must be recognized as nonsensical. The “traditional” reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus claims that it is illuminating nonsense. The “resolute” reading claims, by contrast, that the ladder consisting of the sentences of the Tractatus must be regarded as plain nonsense after it has been thrown away. (See Read and Lavery (2011) for an overview of this debate.) If the discarded ladder is illuminating, we can gain some insights from it. Plain nonsense is akin to complete destruction.
The term “linguistic investigation” is usually used in a broader sense than I intend here. I refer to Saudek’s method of investigating language in order to reveal knowledge stored in it as the “method of language” or “linguistic investigations.”
The term “perception” (sinnliche Wahrnehmung) is meant in its Kantian sense.
“Es ist nichts in den Worten, was nicht in den Sinnen war” (ibid., p. 24).
Mauthner argues for the impossibility of psychology in the first volume of his Beiträge, in which he writes: “Es gibt keine Psychologie, weil wir für innere Vorgänge keine wissenschaftliche Terminologie besitzen” (“There is no psychology, because we have no scientific terminology for mental phenomena”) (Mauthner 1901, I, p. 236). His target here is the Wundtian experimental psychology that was popular in Mauthner’s time. The passage continues: “Erst aus einer Kritik der Sprache könnten vielleicht einige Anfangsgründe einer künftigen Psychologie entstehen” (“Only from a critique of language could there perhaps arise some initial grounds for a future psychology”) (ibid.). My argument here is that Saudek’s psychology of handwriting can be understood as a version of this future psychology.
“Da besäßen wir endlich die lang gesuchten Gesetze des influxus physicus; [die] wären in ihren unmittelbaren Wirkungen an den Strichen der Handschrift nachzuweisen” (Mauthner 1910, p. 468).
This idea is expressed in the epigraph from Hegel’s Phenomenology at the start of this essay. Mauthner’s project is openly anti-Hegelian, which means that he doubts the existence of any such connection between the inner and outer worlds.
I employ the expressions “causation” or “psychophysical causation” as opposed to “causality” to make clear that what is meant here is not causality in a strict scientific sense.
In a letter to A. A. Roback, dated January 16, 1930, Saudek writes: “Please, don’t laugh, when I tell you that I would have doubted the whole freudian conception of repression, were it not that I have successfully decked it and traced its correctness in handwriting” (Saudek 1930).
Saudek employs this rule several times; see, for example, pp. 207, 212, 221, 227, 232. Unless stated otherwise, all page numbers refer to Saudek’s The Psychology of Handwriting (1925).
Saudek calls this process “deduction” on many occasions; see, for example, pp. 11, 15, 36, 49, 66, 71. The task of the graphologist is “to deduce psychological conclusions” from handwriting (p. 156).
See p. 247. However, “self-confidence” would be a more apt rendering of the German Selbstbewußtsein or the Czech sebevědomí.
The idea of homonymy, i.e., an expression having two or more different meanings, implies that these meanings have nothing in common (for instance, “bank” as “financial institution” and as “riverbank”). True homonyms are rare, and so encountering a pair of apparent homonyms will prompt us to seek an explanation that connects the two seemingly unrelated meanings.
See Lakoff and Johnson (1980, pp. 107–115). I do not mean to say that Saudek predicted Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory. My point is that Saudek’s reasoning is based on implicit assumptions that Lakoff and his colleagues later explicitly thematized.
Mauthner defends the metaphorical character of psychological concepts, arguing that metaphor connects linguistics and physiognomy: “Die Metapher als Grundquelle aller Sprachentwicklung führt wieder, da sie durchaus von der Sinnlichkeit ausgeht, zur Physiologie zurück und verbindet diese mit der Sprachwissenschaft” (“The metaphor as the basic source of all language development goes back to physiology, since it starts from sensuousness, and connects it to linguistics”) (Mauthner 1901, I, p. 36). Arguing that linguistic concepts are metaphorically rooted in physiological perceptions, Mauthner then applies this idea to psychological terminology: “Man achte nur einmal darauf, wie die Bezeichnungen der Psychologie fast ausschließlich von Gesichtswahrnehmungen hergenommen sind, weil das Gesicht uns die reichsten Daten für eine Welterkenntnis bietet” (“Just notice how the psychological terms are almost exclusively taken from facial perceptions, because the face offers us the richest data for a knowledge of the world”) (Mauthner 1901, I, p. 236). Psychological concepts are thus metaphorical transformations of concepts describing facial expressions.
Orientational metaphors are introduced in Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980, p. 17 and passim). In subsequent works, Lakoff and Johnson have argued that such spatial metaphors are embodied, implying that there is a connection between a person’s (typical) hand movements and their way of thinking. See Bardolph and Coulson (2014) for empirical corroboration of this idea. Saudek’s graphology—that is, his psychology of handwriting—entails countless embodied physiological presuppositions. For instance, he writes (p. 41): “It is impossible to study the psychology of writing so long as we are not acquainted with the physiology of writing and have not made clear to ourselves the mechanical and physical premises upon which writing is produced.” Although I do not pursue this promising line of inquiry in this paper, I take it as further evidence of the metaphorical character of graphological rules.
As we have seen, psychological concepts are metaphorical transformations of descriptions of facial expressions. See Footnote 24 above.
For an overview and discussion of the method, see Winsor (2003).
Saudek writes (p. 281): “If this historical fact were unknown to the analysing graphologist, he would, without being able to supply a solution of the riddle, have to indicate this transitory change of character in his analysis.”.
It is not quite clear what an experiment in graphology would be.
The method of exemplars was already long established in graphology by Saudek’s time. Many nineteenth-century graphologists had focused, sometimes exclusively, on the handwriting of well-known people. Michon’s 1879 book Histoire de Napoléon ler d’après son écriture (“The Story of Napoleon through the Lens of His Writing”), for instance, analyzes the handwriting of a single famous person: Napoleon Bonaparte.
As opposed to a “cold reading,” in which no prior knowledge is employed.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Luft and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism, which has resulted in significant improvements to this essay. This research benefits from archival investigations conducted by Michal Topor and was funded by the Czech Research Foundation under project number 21-00215S.
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Mácha, J. Robert Saudek’s graphology in the light of Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. Stud East Eur Thought (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09584-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09584-4