Can You Think Without Pictures? The Munich Philosophers Who Said Yes
A Meeting in Munich That Changed Everything
In 1895, the philosopher Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) started a club in Munich. It was called the Academic Society for Psychology, and its members wanted to answer a huge question: what is the relationship between philosophy and psychology? Lipps himself was both a philosopher and a trained psychologist. By the end of the 1890s, he had settled on a bold position. He believed that ethics, metaphysics, and logic are really just part of psychology. His view even had a name: psychologism. If psychologism were true, then the laws of logic—like the law that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time—are really just laws about how human minds work. For example, a psychologized version of that law would say: “It is psychologically impossible for a person to judge that p and that not-p at the same time.” That would mean logic, ethics, and metaphysics all depend on the human mind.
Not everyone agreed. Some thinkers suspected that logic and morality are about something that exists independently of us—something objective. The fight was already simmering when, in 1902, a young member of Lipps’s circle named Johannes Daubert showed up with a two-volume book. It was Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) Logical Investigations. Daubert began discussing it at the club meetings. What Husserl argued in that book sent a shockwave through Munich.
Logic Does Not Live Inside Your Head
Husserl’s big idea was anti-psychologism. He devoted the whole first volume to showing that the laws of logic and ontology are not psychological. His key insight was intentionality: mental acts are directed at objects and facts that are not just parts of our consciousness. When you think about a triangle, your act of thinking reaches beyond your mind to something—a shape with its own structure, its own rules. Those rules don’t depend on your brain. For the young philosophers in Munich, this was electrifying. It meant there is a world of objects—logical, ethical, aesthetic—that have their own being, not manufactured by our feelings or thoughts.
Many of them started calling this an “objectivist” turn. Moritz Geiger (1880–1937) spoke of a “turning to the object.” Soon, students began traveling to Göttingen to study directly with Husserl. By 1906, an invasion had begun: Moritz Geiger, Alfred Schwenninger, and others left Munich to work under Husserl. Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), a brilliant young philosopher, completed his teaching qualification there and became the heart of a new Göttingen circle. The movement was growing—and it was about to develop its own, sometimes critical, voice.
Thinking Without a Picture: The Blind Act of Meaning
Here is one of the most radical ideas to come out of those circles. Husserl had claimed that perception and thinking are both “objectifying acts” that share the same basic kind of intentionality. But several phenomenologists—Alexander Pfänder (1870–1941), Reinach, and later Theodor Conrad (1890–1966)—said no. There is a fundamental split between two kinds of mental activity.
On one side is presenting (Vorstellen). This includes perception, imagination, and memory—any act that makes an object intuitively present to you. If you look at a tree or imagine its shape, the tree is, in some sense, “in front of” your mind. Presenting is always intuitive and, in principle, can last as long as the object stays present.
On the other side is meaning something (Meinen), which these philosophers often simply called thinking. When you understand a speaker and mean the same objects they are talking about, you typically do not have those objects intuitively present. Pfänder gave the example of a lecture: you hear the words, and you mean the things the speaker means, but those things are not shown to you. Thinking, they argued, is blind—it has no intuitive content. Reinach added a striking point: to mean an object is “temporally punctual.” It makes no sense to ask, “How long did you mean the Eiffel Tower?” You just mean it in an instant, while a perception can stretch over many seconds.
Crucially, a thinking act and a presentation can never fuse into one hybrid act. The “of‑ness” of seeing is not the same as the “of‑ness” of thinking. Some phenomenologists—Reinach, Conrad, Geiger, and others—believed that only meaning acts are truly intentional in the strict sense, while presenting is a more direct, non-conceptual consciousness of a thing. This was a direct challenge to Husserl’s idea that all objectifying acts belong to one genus. It meant that when you think without a picture, your mind is doing something uniquely linguistic and “blind.”
The Power of a Promise: How Words Make Real Bonds
The young phenomenologists did not stop at thinking and perceiving. They looked at how our minds interact with other people. One of Reinach’s most celebrated contributions was a theory of social acts. A social act is an action of the mind that must be heard and understood by another person to succeed. The paradigm case is a promise.
Reinach argued that a promise is not the same as reporting an inner state. Saying “I promise to help you” is not identical to saying “I have a strong feeling of willingness to help you.” Instead, a genuine promise requires three conditions. The addressee must perceive the words, understand the content, and recognize what kind of act it is—that this is a promise, not an order or a question. When those conditions are met, something real comes into the world: the promise creates an obligation for the promisor and a claim for the promisee. Those are not physical things, but they are not mere feelings either. They are objective, social facts that bind people together.
Other acts, like orders, bets, and apologies, work in the same way. Reinach’s idea left a deep mark. Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) later extended it to certain forms of love: being loved can only be fully reciprocated when the loved person is aware of it—the act needs to be “heard.” Edith Stein (1891–1942) explored how communities and even states can perform social acts. The upshot is that our social world is built not just out of physical stuff, but out of mental acts that rely on being grasped by others.
Why Realism Matters—Then and Now
There is one more twist. In 1913, Husserl published a new book, Ideas, in which he placed something called transcendental philosophy at the center of his work. He now spoke of a necessary correlation between reality and consciousness. For many in the Munich and Göttingen circles, this sounded like a drift toward idealism—the view that reality depends on the mind. They pushed back hard. They reaffirmed a robust realism: reality, including values and logical structures, exists independently of any subject, human or transcendental. The clash became known as the realism–idealism controversy, and it shaped the rest of phenomenology.
Why does all this matter for you today? Think about a time you made a promise to a friend. If promises were only feelings inside your head, breaking one would just be a change in your emotions—nothing serious. But you likely felt something different: a bond that was real, almost like an invisible thread. The Munich and Göttingen philosophers argued that intuition is exactly right. Similarly, when you solve a math problem, the truth you discover doesn’t depend on your brain chemistry; it has a necessity of its own. Even when you see a beautiful landscape or sense that an action is unfair, you might be picking up on real value-properties that exist in the world, not just projecting your own reactions. These ideas are not just historical curiosities. They invite you to take seriously the idea that thinking is a peculiar, blind, word-shaped kind of pointing, and that the bonds we make with others—through speech, empathy, and shared experience—are as genuine as the ground beneath your feet.
Think about it
- If you can think about the number five without forming any picture in your mind, does that show that thinking and imagining are fundamentally different? Could a machine “think” if it never forms images?
- Suppose you promise a friend to keep a secret, but your friend doesn’t hear you. Is a promise still created? What if your friend hears but thinks you are joking?
- If values like fairness or beauty are real features of the world, how would we check whether a value-judgment is correct? Is that more like checking the length of a table, or is it a different kind of checking?
