When did Christian von Ehrenfels die?
Christian von Ehrenfels
Christian von Ehrenfels (also Maria Christian Julius Leopold Freiherr von Ehrenfels; 20 June 1859 – 8 September 1932)[2] was an Austrian philosopher, and is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology.
Christian von Ehrenfels
Ehrenfels's ideas were not widely accepted by the public, but the very fact that he was allowed to publish essays on his new society in intellectually prestigious, learned academic journals in Germany and Austria show that his ideas were part of the intellectual mainstream in the first years of the 20th century.[22] Both Alfred Ploetz of Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftbiologie, the journal for the widely respected Society for Race Hygiene, and Max Marcuse of the sexologist journal Sexual-Probleme endorsed Ehrenfels's plans for a new society.[23] Social Darwinism and racism were part of the intellectual mainstream in the West as was the widespread belief that white men were starting to become "soft", and if white men continued to lose their masculine "hardness", inevitably this would lead to process of "racial degeneration", which would end with the whites becoming enslaved to the "Yellow Peril".[24] In the early 20th century saw what the historian Jonathan Katz called the "invention of heterosexuality", by which he meant that the ideal of romantic "true love" was discarded in popular discourse for the first time by a new discourse that celebrated sexuality and carnal pleasure as the objectives of relationships.[25] Ehrnefels's opposition to romantic love and his unabashed celebration of sexual pleasure as part of the evolutionary duties of racial improvement fitted in well to the new age.[26] Katz noted that those who saw sexual desires as the core of relationships between men and women almost always justified this with reference to human "need", "drive" or "instinct" to pass on their genes.[27]