ABSTRACT
One of the key features of discussions among psychology, philosophy, and the sciences/humanities around 1900 was a tendency toward comprehensive integrations. This chapter reconstructs, based upon a number of key authors of the international debate on the relative vs. absolute status of values and on the mutual bearing of psychology on other sciences (reference authors are, among others, Hugo Münsterberg, Wilbur Marshall Urban, and Heinrich Rickert), the conceptual means that were developed for making these integrative projects possible. Important conceptual strategies to this effect include the adoption of novel forms of feelings and a re-thinking the relationship between abstraction and concreteness; the idea of an “open system” summarizes these innovations. This has direct implications for our understanding of relativism: While the pluralism that seems to be inherent in value ascriptions (in ethics, aesthetics, epistemology…) could be seen as amounting to a relativist threat, it could also be perceived as an opportunity to develop a discourse level at which the pluralist openness could be accommodated within an integrative perspective: It will be shown that the open integrations could be seen as preserving what is attractive in relativist positions (the supple tuning in to individual differences) while countering the threat of losing any sort of standards.
