Eduard Spranger

Eduard Spranger (Berlin, 1882 – Tübingen, 1963) was a German philosopher and psychologist working within the tradition of the human sciences. A student of Wilhelm Dilthey, he is best known for his attempt to build a theory of personality and a humanist philosophy of education, conceived partly as a reply to the experimental psychology of his day.

Spranger worked mainly in German academic life during the first half of the twentieth century. His early writings include Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (1905), on the epistemological foundations of history, and Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Humanitätsidee (1909). His best-known book, Lebensformen (1921), published in English as Types of Men, was widely read: in it he argued that types of human life are structures of consciousness. He held that personality has a biological basis but cannot be explained by biology alone, since at higher levels the soul takes part in values that cannot be derived from mere self-preservation.

The core of that work is the theory of six value attitudes: the theoretical, concerned with truth; the economic, concerned with usefulness; the aesthetic, seeking form and harmony; the social, whose highest value is love of others; the political, concerned mainly with power; and the religious, oriented toward unity and an ultimate meaning in life. Spranger did not treat these as sealed categories but as orientations that each person combines in different proportions. He also defended a holism in which the totality of the mind is present in every act, and he criticised psychologists who reduced mind and society to abstract elements.

His influence reached German pedagogy, personality theory and teacher training. Among his students was the Indian educator and philosopher Syed Abid Husain, who completed his doctoral studies with him at the University of Berlin. He is remembered today as one of the thinkers who sought to join psychology, history and values in a humanist account of the individual.