belongs in ethics; as the science of ζωή, it belongs in physics. In fact, in ancient times psychology was worked out in both senses without a clear distinction. This confusion continues right up to today. If we are honest, nobody today can say what psychology is. Both as a concept and a project, this discipline is entirely ambiguous. The lack of clarity goes back to the beginnings of ancient philosophy and to its ways of posing the respective questions.

The very concept of psychology is ambiguous: on the one hand, it is the science of natural life; on the other hand, it is also the science of “psyche” in a narrow sense, the science of human existence. The ambiguity is heightened by the fact that the natural science of life has expanded whereas the study of life in the sense of human existence has gone deeper. And so people either try to unite the two sciences, or they give one of them priority over the other.

Today, for example, we speak of two psychologies. One of them specifically studies the causal interconnections of mind. Here we are thinking of a natural science; and insofar as it explains mind by means of the laws of causality, we call it an explanatory (erklärende) psychology. But at the same time, we realize that mental life—so-called “lived experience”—cannot be subsumed under the laws of nature as if we treated these experiences like mere things of nature. Instead, they can be understood. We can understand the interconnections of lived experience as interconnections of human motivations—and we see that mind is a field of interconnections that can be understood. So, for causal interconnections, an explanatory psychology; for human motivational interconnections, an understanding psychology. But if we ask what the whole of this psychology is—i.e., what holds both of them together not as a summation but as the underlying wholeness—we get no answer. In fact, the question has never really been posed.

But the problem [36] is even more complicated, inasmuch as in the course of its development in the modern epoch, the study of mind has concentrated on conscious mental processes. It has focused, in a word, on consciousness—“lived experience” in the narrow sense—so that since Descartes psychology is essentially the science of consciousness. Moreover, in the development of modern philosophy, this science of consciousness has fallen into a natural-scientific methodology with the result that even the network of objects that we call understandable has been characterized as a network of nature. Therefore from another viewpoint, we have to speak of the natural-scientific method’s second breakthrough into the exploration of mind.

Nowadays, the project of psychology—if we can even delimit here a unified and self-clarified discipline—has an entirely chaotic form. Psychology is invaded by ethnology and research into the historical possibilities of the life of the primitives, by anthropology, by so-called para