by ottavia spisni
This is my MA Thesis in Philosophy and History of Ideas.
Consciousness and world in Erwin Straus "phenomenology"
The ideal question of this paper is to... more
Consciousness and world in Erwin Straus "phenomenology"
The ideal question of this paper is to try to understand to what extent (theoretical and practical) a phenomenological approach to the problem of consciousness con be considered different both from positivism and behaviorism. This research is carried on specifically through the analysis Erwin Straus's work (Germany 1891 – United States 1971); Erwin Straus has been indeed a representative of the psychiatry renewal current known as phenomenological psychiatry.
The main interest of this study raised because Straus was a clinical psychiatrist who worked for many years in the United States but was trained in the European phenomenological circle. Straus became teacher of Psychiatry in Berlin and he attended Husser's lectures at the Gottinga University and also the lectures of Jung and Bleuler in Zurich. It is indeed the use made by Straus of Husserl's metodological tool to mainly outline the difference with American positivism and behaviourism.
The ideal setting of this paper helps to highlight the existing relationship between the ideas of «mind» and «brain» in order to show which are the theoretical premises of the phenomenology school inside the field of psychiatry. Moreover, the specific approach to the complex problem of consciousness here allows an understanding of the human person which is different from both the naturalist and behaviorist one and which is also alternative to the one of traditional psychiatry and psychopathology.
The first chapter is entitled “From cogito ergo sum to copio ergo sum” and is divided in three paragraphs and they respectively examine: Straus's criticism of positivistic naturalism, the shift from the idea of consciousness to the one of living experience and the relationship between feeling (Empfinden) and recognition (Erkennen) in Straus's hyletic unity of lived experience.
This chapter presents a detailed examination of the problems taken in consideration by Straus, specifically his criticism of the Cartesian model in Vom Sinne der Sinne (book published in 1935, Berlin). The issue with regard to the relation between «mind» and «brain» is still at the very basis of the most part of disputes between «sensation» «perception» and «consciousness» when Straus is writing his masterpiece.
Since more than one century a new scientific branch has taken place place: neurofisiology. A neurophysiologist such as Ramachandran challenged the scientific world with the slogan “mirror neurons will be for psychology what DNA has been for biology” and we try in the present work to underline how Straus was as much in advance with his analysis of the psychology of movement. In his analysis of the psychology of movement Straus criticizes the researchers who assume that it is possible to speak about the foundations of human and animal behaviour starting not from a description of behavior that can lead then to analyze the activity of the organ called brain, but who start from the dogmatic assumption that human and animal behavior depends on the entirety of a specific organ, called encephalus, considered as a part of the body designed for having a specific function (vision, walking, language). In this way, human brain is compared to a part of the physical world, this despite the fact that, from a strict perceptive point of view the living organism thinks those functions as being not separated from its experience of spatially and temporality themselves.
Throughout the criticism of the pavlovian reflexology and the criticism of behaviorism, Straus arrives to the analysis of those moments wherein the supposed theory in the circumstance of observation is not able to encompass and comprehend some emergent phenomena, who are, instead observed without the assistance of an additional theory.
Straus's ermeneutical proposal about the «brain» goes around this critical work: the brain appears certainly as a mediator but not between physical and psychical. In the phenomenological perspective the objectivist ideology is indeed affirmed as inadequate because of its reductionism (physicism or biologism depending on the adopted model). The aim pursued by phenomenological philosophy consists in nothing but establish, in the order of knowledge, the conditions of pure objectivity, the conditions that are congruent with the object you are focusing on, according to the dispositions of its own a-priori.
After the introduction this work presents an overview about the actual studies on consciousness, reviewing Varela's proposal of Neurophenomenology: Varela wants to put together the modern cognitive science with a rigorous approach to human experience and places his studies on the philosophical European tradition of Phenomenology.
New discoveries have once and for all undermined the idea of the functional unity of the cortical motor system, considered as the finishing line of the information processed by the associative area and void in itself of any perceptive or cognitive value.
The link between feeling, recognition and action doesn't seem to be related to a representative dimension inside the mind of something present in the cerebral structure and in its functioning, as wished, on the other hand, by the Eighteenth-century empiricism. The classical cognitive science criticized by Straus presents again theories revised from the classical cognitive science and excludes the idea of an embodied mind.
Embodied mind theory considers instead our perceptive system as a system that elaborates continuously information from the environment, leaving aside some aspects and preferring other aspects and which is able to create continuously itself. From this point comes the idea that the subject operates directly upon external objects and that feeling and recognition, knowledge and action are intimately related.
Finally we try to update the present research with the current situation of cognitive neurosciences, in particular since the complex work made by Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia about neurons with mirror properties in the human (but also animal) brain.
Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia's study seems to confirm some of Straus's intuitions about a subject which is understood as living body-ness (corporeity) and endowed with intentionality. We have to stress out that this happens since the first living months of the foetus: today we know from the ultrasound scan thecnique that the foetus inside the maternal uterus presents a rich oriented motor activity in all the different gestational ages. The foetus is able to modulate and to adapt specific motorial schemes and is able of self-coordinate for the purpose of producing organized movements towards an aim. The foetus therefore, is not a mere reactive system as wished by behaviorism and a good slice of Anglo-American philosophy of mind.
Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia's studies confirm the interdependence between the constitution of objects and of space and the elemental horizon of action. By virtue of this interdependence the impossibility of reaching the objects goes hand in hand with the impossibility of mapping the various regions of space.
In this way you can clearly observe the limits of any strictly dichotomic setting-out of how human brain works. From the categorization of objects to space representation indeed, the motor system, reveals a wide richness of functions that go beyond the simple control of movements; those functions are related to the different trends of action: the dynamic ones do not involve only our body and the objects that surround it but involve also the body of the others.
The so called 'Mirror Neuron System' in man encodes transitive and intransitive motor acts and is able to select both the act type and the sequence of movements that composes it; at last, the MNS does not need a real interaction with objects but it is also activated when the action is simply mimed.
Only if consciousness is not a pure cogito but if it has to deal with action, sense-perception and movement it is possible to release psychology from the myth of an extramundane subject: this is the main question of Vom Sinne der Sinne. Therefore, Straus criticizes rationalism in the idea of a self-sufficient reason. According to Straus, the destiny of any psychology is to re-link together the problem of sense-perception and movement's unity as modalities of Being-in-the-workd of a living being who makes experience.
Straus helds out the relation that exists between the I and the Other, suggesting this relation to be the primordial situation within existence takes form and individuality as the result of the interaction with the world.
Straus roots in some way his philosophy to biology and suggests that the relation between the modalities of being (of man) in his environment depends on the constituent tracts of his body, this mainly in his study on the upright posture.
According to Straus there are two possible ways of learning in man, one is expansive and gnostic, while the other is pathic and constricting. The gnostic learning is based upon the power of mind to reflect and to creatively negate and therefore to give man the possibility to go beyond mere existence.
Man is able to learn because he is part of the wholeness and it is because he is embraced by this wholeness that he can think his own comprehension. Learning, in the case of animal species, concerns the acquisition of habits that allow to have more precise and fast reactions. The process of acquisition of habits is of constricting type and owr main pathic feeling is the only basis upon wich the achievement of perception can develop.
Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia suggest that the meaning of actions and of interaction of the others is not given but is included and that all the difficulty is in conceiving properly this act and not to confuse it with a cognitive operation. In this sense we would like to underline in the present research some aspects of the overlap between biology and phenomenology: the discussion is about to examine to what extent some emergent and inevitable problems that belong to philosophy of science can be better undestood and in part worked out through phenomenology.
Objectivist psychology consigns the physiological mechanisms to the function or malfunction of the central nervous system and in this aspect misses to consider biology researches. Given that the subject of psychology is different from the subject of any other scientific discipline, a different approach is required and Erwin Straus has the merit of having led to a meaningful investigation of nature and of the conditions for action and to a critics of what means to be, in sense-perception and in movement, in feeling and in acting, a being who makes experience.
In the second chapter of the present work we try to underline the importance of Straus's studies about movement. The chapter is divided in two paragraphs – pure phenomenology, applied phenomenology and the forms of spatiality. The first paragraph is focused on those cases wherein the pathic feeling, that belongs to the prelogical sphere, is seriously compromised by cerebral lesions. This study, acts as a foil to show how the I-relation with the wholeness (Straus uses the Greek term allon) is an intentional relation (Phenomenology of Hallucinations, 1962).
Straus considers pathology in the individual case as a laceration of the same horizon of meaning and of Being-in-the-world that constitutes the norm for the every day life. His psychiatry therefore considers man not as a living creature related to his physical environment but has to do with man as citizen of the human world and as a consequence, the foundation of psychiatry must be found in a philosophical anthropology having an holistic view of the human person.
The essay about the Forms of Spatiality and their meaning for movement and sense-perception of 1930 (that puts Straus as direct precursor of Merleau-Ponty's work of 1945 Phénoménologie de la Perception) has been written to try to understand what happens to those people whose phenomenological residue is subtracted to any research, to find shelter in a world made of silence.
Straus made evidence of some transformations in the experience of time and of space as/if lived that determine and transform the form and the content of other experiences such as thoughts, affections, actions. In the essay Straus studies the reciprocal relation between spatial qualities, condition of movements and ways of perception. His attempt is to investigate phenomenologically the structures of spatiality, that is to inquire the primary lived experience (Erleben) of spatiality. The psychology of movement does not overlap with the psychology of action because the immediate experience of movement does not consist in projecting and perceiving the path. In this sense Straus's studies about spatiality that put the corporeity at the center of perception drop an important anchor toward a science of mind conceived as a challenge to the conscious experience. Aware of the limits of the present work we wish to have answered in a, at least, sufficient way to the opening question and to have shown, at least, in part in which ways a phenomenological approach to the complex question of living experience is different from behaviorism.
If you wish to read the full thesis please write to: ottavia.spisni@gmail.com for any copyright also refer to ©Ottavia Spisni.
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