Erwin Straus and the pathic

The Umwelt and the Umgang: Uexküll, Weizsäcker, Straus

Part of the reason for his estrangement from the history of the mental sciences is probably owing to the fact that Straus had carved out a place that did not fit comfortably within the established orthodoxies of psychiatry and psychology as encephalic disciplines. His classical European education and natural exposure to Heideggerian and Husserlian philosophy, and his episodic proximity to emerging ‘existential’ questions in psychiatric research (exemplified by the work of Gebsattel and Binswanger) naturally spurred him to prise open psychiatric categories from a philosophically anthropological perspective, much as Scheler had achieved in the field of sociology.

In his endeavour to bring the expressively communicative dimensions of human experience into the optic and debate of psychological research, without supposing man to be an edification of primordial drives or the mere mechanical interplay between stimulus and receptor, Straus had an able predecessor; like many of his generation he was profoundly marked by the ‘near contemporary’ (Heidegger, 1995: 263) insights gained into the conscious operation of biological organisms by Jakob von Uexküll. Uexküll’s central thesis was that each living being is a subject that occupies the centre of its own world and therefore could not be likened to a machine ‘but only to an engineer who operates the machine’ (Uexküll, 1934/1957: 6–8). Having studied the nervous system of aquatic invertebrates Uexküll rejected the classical theory of adaptation, which proposed that living beings were forced to adapt under external pressures. Rather, his observations led him to assert that it is living beings themselves which create their own particular world, and the world, consequently, is as rich and diverse as there are beings. In his words: ‘These different worlds, which are as manifold as the animals themselves, present to all nature lovers new lands of such wealth and beauty’ (Uexküll, 1934/1957: 6). ⁶ Thus, through the subjective perception of myriad species the objective world (Umgebung) becomes the myriad worlds of subjective experience (Umwelten). The ‘fly world’, for example, is different from the ‘tick world’, and the world of the ant is different from that of the butterfly. As Heidegger (1995: 264) commented, ‘It is true that amongst the biologists, Uexküll is the one who has repeatedly pointed out with the greatest emphasis that what the animal stands in relation to is given for it in a different way than it is for the human being.’ To be sure, it was in his Bedeutungslehre that Uexküll (1940/1982: 45) raised the classical question of subjectivity and perception within the framework of theoretical biology: ‘does the meadow present the same prospect to the eyes of all those different creatures as it does to ours?’ Likewise, Straus (1966: 139) in his essay ‘The upright posture’ emphasized that, ‘Men and mice do not have the same environment, even if they share the same room. Environment is not a stage with the scenery set as one and the same for all actors who make their entrance’. This perspective was asserted in contradistinction to a physiological psychology through which the laboratory and the isolated subject provides the conditioned proof of psychological givens.

Whereas the mechanistic theorists of Uexküll’s time regarded the animal as nothing but a collection of tools connected by an integrating apparatus, Uexküll himself sought to reaffirm the subject, ‘which uses the tools, perceives and functions with their aid’, at the centre of research into the study of biological life, thereby challenging the explanatory role of physiology and the general auspices of Darwinian zoology (Uexküll, 1934/1957: 6). ‘The mechanists have pieced together the sensory and motor organs of animals, like so many parts of a machine, ignoring their real functions of perceiving and acting, and have even gone on to mechanize man himself.’ The argument was thus: tools of perception and efficacy help to create a world in which the subject forms ‘a closed unit’, or its Umwelt. Each subject perceives its environment differently, where the meaning of objects varies according to the subject’s individual perception. In his most widely circulated essay, ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men’, Uexküll proposed that the world as experienced by the tick is different from that of the bird, just as the church and its cloud-capped steeples hold a different allure and value for the child than for the adult. For Uexküll, the Umwelt was more than a scientific concept to be instrumentally applied; it was a philosophy of nature:

To some, these worlds [i.e. phenomenal world, self-world] are invisible. Many a zoologist and physiologist, clinging to the doctrine that all living beings are mere machines, denies their existence and thus boards up the gates to other worlds so that no single ray of light shines forth from all the radiance that is shed over them. (Uexküll, 1934/1957: 5)

The implication of a self-world, of an engineer or operator, and a world differentiated according to the autonomous perception of each living species or sentient form, troubled the likes of the US psychologist Karl Lashley, who in his introduction to Uexküll’s essay judged the latter’s speculations on the experience of animals to be ‘far-fetched’. Indeed, Lashley dismissed as ‘illusory and sometimes misleading’ what he observed as Uexküll’s attempt to empathize with the sensory capacities of various animals and people (the woodcutter, the child, the fox and the owl). Lashley’s dismissively thin appreciation of Uexküll’s perspectivalism, however, demonstrated a lack of familiarity not only with the etymological nuances of the Teutonic language but also with the German philosophical tradition as a whole, for he situated Uexküll’s work within those ethological studies that attempt ‘to unravel the intricate network of environmental influences which activate and modify innate behaviour mechanisms’ (Lashley, 1957: x–xi). Yet Uexküll (1934/1957: 64) had made a clear philosophical distinction between ‘environment’ and Umwelt: while the former is ‘spread around animals’, the latter is ‘built up by the animals themselves and filled with the objects of their own perception’.

Lashley’s reading of Uexküll serves as an interesting insight into the historical tension between, on the one hand, an understanding of man derived from the tradition of autopsy and later laboratory experiment and, on the other, an understanding derived from lived experience and the tradition of philosophical anthropology, as it is communicated through Uexküll’s writing. It is a tension whose stakes were clearly appreciated by Straus in his critique of the tenets of behavioural psychology:

To understand man the doer we must understand his nervous system for upon it his actions depend … ‘Since the nervous system connects stimulus with response,’ Boring emphasised, ‘action always occurs as a response to excitation.’ Boring, like so many others, ignored a number of fundamental facts … Men have been familiar with their arms and legs, with their eyes and tongues (all on a macroscopic level) but nobody ever had any experience of his brain (he may have had headaches but no brainaches), nor does the brain know itself. Our knowledge of a brain is always that of a brain as part of a human or animal body, i.e. of a brain as material object, not as a complex of stimuli received. (The terminology referring to the brain is misleading. There are brains, millions of them. THE brain as such does not exist in concreto.) … We cannot manipulate stimuli. We can touch and handle a knife as a visible object, just as we catch a ball, but we cannot catch or touch a stimulus. (Straus, 1975: 130–4)

But the minds of Boring, Lashley and others were occupied by questions of hereditarianism, cerebral organizations and behaviour, and thus Lashley (1957) in his endeavour to map human psychology through physiological laws had ‘constructed apparatus […] repeating a number of Pavlov’s experiments’, making use of ‘adequate animal quarters’ and ‘rat labs’. Therefore, the attempt to describe and narrate the world and indeed ascribe its value through the eyes of a child or woodcutter, let alone an owl or a fox, without recourse to experimental protocol and hypothesis testing, was regarded as nothing short of scientific heresy. ⁷ Lashley’s frustration was not only with Uexküll privileging factors of subjective perception over those of physiological function, ⁸ but also with the particular style and method of observation employed. Rather than finding such established terms as ‘prediction’, ‘control’ and ‘behaviour’, Lashley’s eyes were met with adjectival notions of the ‘image tone’, ‘the familiar path’, and ‘magic Umwelten’, all written in a prose belonging more to aesthetics rather than to the terminological language of modern psychology and the mathematical formalism of its procedure. ⁹

The question here is precisely how the Umwelt is to be understood, for it clearly served as a theoretical and practical antagonism to Lashley for whom, as with Ivan Pavlov, the precepts of human psychology were qualified through experimental conditions. Leo Spitzer’s landmark studies on historical semantics signal an important appreciation of the word with regard to its conceptual and linguistic underpinnings and its transposition from High Antiquity to the language of the theoretical biologist. For Spitzer the Umwelt is traceable to the ancient Greek and Orthodox idea of worldly harmony and is thus essentially a more ‘poetic’ word than a technical one:

Our modern words ambient, ambiance, environment, and umwelt ultimately derive from the Greek concept of the air or space surrounding us, periekhon – a concept later put to use in the Renaissance by Newton (circumambient medium) and by Goethe, who coined the word umwelt, translated in turn as environment by Carlyle; or that the pythagorean concept of music of the spheres reappeared in the Renaissance and in the Baroque period, with the result that the German word stimmung, originally meaning harmony, the world’s musical concord, became a rather common word signifying a state of mind. (Spitzer, 1988: 433) ¹⁰

Goethe also distinguished between the Umwelt (subjective world) and the Umgebung (objective environment) in order to draw a parallel with what French biologists called the ambient milieu, and it was this latter term that Uexküll challenged through his analysis of animal life. In addition to Spitzer, Max Scheler sheds interesting light on the concept in an extended footnote to his Formalism in Ethics:

… it is not only an error of observation but also one of philosophical relevance to reduce changes in the ‘organisations’ of living beings to ever increasing ‘adaptations’ to their ‘milieu’ in the theory of their evolution … A worm’s or a fish’s environment is not at all ‘contained’ in the human environment. The environment of different animals is always fixed by special procedures. (See J. von Uexküll; Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere.) It is only between the environment of an organisation and its members that there are any different adaptations … There is one natural object common to all (outer) environments of organisations (including man), but it is an error to think of this common natural object in terms of those categories and forms of manifolds that are necessary for the mechanical conceptualisation of natural appearances. (Scheler, 1973: 155–6)

As with Uexküll, Weizsäcker also stated that his aim was ‘the introduction of the subject into biology’, and he thus sought to determine an organism’s ‘spontaneity’ and ‘self-movement’ outside the frame of physiological givens (Weizsäcker, 1947: v, 1). Although he recognized Uexküll’s introduction of the term Umwelt into the lexicon of phenomenological enquiry, ¹¹ Weizsäcker went a step further in clarifying the distinction between the environment and the Umwelt with a greater emphasis, like Scheler and also Heidegger, on factors of mood (Stimmung), or more precisely, the sensual data constituting the lawful connection between subject and world. Stimmen, in German, signifies ‘tuning’. The common parlance ‘es stimmt’ marks the tuning between what one sees and the other says. The idea is that of a possible harmony, that is, the harmony between the world and man when he bathes in a harmony of sounds.

What Spitzer shows with his semantic history of such words is that the notion of harmony comes from the field of music and that there is a direct relation between Stimmung and Umwelt. Weizsäcker uses the notion of the Umgang to articulate the correspondence of these two terms. Notable here is the prefix ‘um’, which designates (true to the Greek periekhon) spatiality rather than temporality. Illustrative of this is Weizsäcker’s introduction of the term Umgang (commerce) into the I-world equation (Weizsäcker, 1956/2005: 67). ¹² ‘Um’ connotes ‘environ’ and corresponds to the factors of atmosphere, mood and tone. In this way, there is a dynamic of movement and feeling at the heart of the situation within which the subject finds himself. For Straus, it was these factors that were overlooked in the laboratory, where protocol pre-establishes what is to be included and excluded in the resulting ‘data’. Indeed, the laboratory is very much an environment but rarely an Umwelt, and it was Straus’s contention that the conditioned response of an isolated subject of experimentation is not the reciprocal determination of an existing and subsisting being in the world. ¹³ These appeals to the Umwelten and Umgang of sentient existence did not act to discredit the role of experiment but rather warned against the disappearance of ethical questions from the laboratory. As Portmann (1961: 49) keenly perceived, ‘we are all aware that technical and scientific advances, unaccompanied by an advance in morality, present a grave danger to the human race. All scientific experiment has to guard against contributing to this result, but biology must also take into account the rights of the living creatures’. The same warning is echoed in Plessner’s (1969: 497) observation that ‘Industry and research form a closed magic circle within which nature is increasingly controlled’. Uexküll’s phenomenological reading of the Umwelten furnishes us with precisely this: a philosophy, and indeed an anthropology, constructed around the expressively living capacities of being, through which the world gains meaning and value.

A look at the etymology of everyday German vocabulary further reveals that in most words beginning with ‘um’, not only is change and adaptation implied but also a mutuality and communion with the world: words such as ‘umarmen’ (to embrace), ‘umfassen’ (to surround, embrace, include), and ‘Umgebung’ (surroundings, environment). These imply reciprocity, movement, circumference and an engagement with the world unifying the lived perceptual field through feeling and sensation. ¹⁴ Such a vocabulary, which gave vivid expression to fluid encounter rather than static observation, helped Straus to define the limitations of contemporary psychological research. For example, in one of his early essays, entitled ‘The forms of spatiality’ (1930), Straus explored the distinction between ‘gnostic’ and ‘pathic’ experience, where, in favouring ‘sensation’ over ‘sensing’, psychology has always privileged the gnostic, in which things are ‘brought into the domain of the objective and the general’ (Straus, 1966: 3–37). He consequently defines the pathic as ‘a characteristic feature of primordial experience’; ‘the immediately present, sensually vivid, still pre-conceptual [pre-cognitive] communication we have with appearances’. Such a distinction was drawn with the guiding formulations of Goethe’s Theory of Colours, through which Straus was able to characterize colour as being ‘the mark of a thing’, in contrast to tone, which was ‘the effect of an activity’. Tone is the sonic complement of colour. The static and logical category of the gnostic was defined against its dynamic and ineffable quality, grasped as the pathic. It is important to note, therefore, that there is no possibility of privileging the one over the other, for ‘the pathic moment is complemented by the gnostic’ and the two subsist as one in our everyday communication with the world (Straus, 1966: 326). In the circumstances of scientific experimentation, however, the pathic complement of everyday life is drastically reduced, as is the sensing that marks his creaturely movement and decisions as a thinking thing. To highlight this, Straus exposed the basic presumptions of experimental research in behavioural psychology.

During the early years of Straus’s research, in the 1920s and 1930s, the figure whose work had the greatest influence on the study of behaviour was the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlovich Pavlov (1849–1936). His laboratory experiments with dogs, his theories of conditioning, and his description of the mechanism of stimulus-response as an explanation of creaturely movement, were regarded as great advances in the scientific understanding of human action. Being a form of research that objectified the animal to the highest degree, Straus tried to establish that Pavlov, whether knowingly or not, adhered to a specific philosophy in order to reject psychology in favour of physics as the model for the explanation of behaviour. As with Descartes, it was not Pavlov’s observations that urged Straus to a heated and impassioned critique, but rather the theories and descriptive generalizations to which they gave rise. More precisely, it was a particular ‘Cartesian-ism’ that had come to hallmark scientific enquiry, which had cut short and amputated the understanding of human being: ‘The phenomena referred to and explained by Pavlov as conditioned reflexes are not explicable as processes within the organism but only as the ways in which animate beings behave in encountering the world; in short, they have nothing to do with reflexes’ (Straus, 1966: 48, original italics). For Straus, knowledge of physiological processes alone was not sufficient to found psychology solidly and any attempt to do so represented an untenable reduction of the phenomenal world to physiological generalizations:

The first link in the neuro-physiologist’s train of thought was the assumption that the phenomenal world is nothing but an epiphenomenal shadow of the actual cerebral happening. In the substrate of receptors, tracts, ganglion cells, fibrillae, there was nothing to be found of the phenomenal world. (Straus, 1963: 185)

With this reduction of the world to isolated physiological processes and, in Pavlov’s case, to the mathematical formalism of stimulus-response, the human being, for Straus, ran the risk of being nothing more than a nervous system of mechanically excited receptors and motor processes. Man was quickly becoming a calculable phenomenon, with the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic tendencies of the preceding centuries fast giving way to the mechanocentric and mechanomorphic reality of the twentieth and twenty-first. Indeed, although Pavlov saw himself as a representative of science and not philosophy, Straus held that it was precisely his inherent faith in a ‘Cartesian rationalism’, in the supposed metaphysical truth of the natural sciences, that caused Pavlov to establish experimental conditions which, in privileging the isolation of receptors, disregarded the animal’s entire sensory experience (Straus, 1963: 32). This resulted in a conception of the laboratory environment, Straus noted, which led Pavlov to error in the interpretation of his celebrated experiments:

Yet we humans do experience changing situations as the same or as different, as old or as new, as alien or as familiar. As Pavlov’s experiments show, and as we know from many other observations, animals, too, find themselves now in familiar, now in alien situations. Thus, both human and animal experience must be constituted in a fundamentally different way from physical occurrences. (Straus, 1963: 87)

Straus’s contention was that the modalities of worldly experience surpass anatomical schemas and that the experiences and moments composing a life lived, articulated across historical and cultural unities, surpassed the totality of the animal organism.

Straus grounded his criticism of Pavlov from the evidence of the latter’s experiments. These were carried out, he claimed, with the intention of creating a cerebral physiology in which ‘the whole phenomenal world is to be done with once and for all’ (Straus, 1963: 38, 41). He argued that a phenomenological approach prioritizing questions of the pathic, mood, tone, sensation and feeling provided a more accurate and consistent interpretation of Pavlov’s results than the physical model, just as Weizsäcker (1956/2005: 88–9) had called for the penetration of physical space by the categories of ‘intention, expectation, surprise, and will’. Consequently, in resisting a ‘physiology of the brain’, Straus declared that ‘man thinks, not the brain’ (Straus, 1963, Part 3: 105). In doing so he appealed to the hidden forces of nature, which can be brought to light neither by scientific instruments alone nor through the direction which scientific investigation had taken.

The pathic

For Weizsäcker, classical medicine had been defined by the ‘ontic circumstance’ of causality and quantity. By prioritizing the biography of the patient in a clinical encounter, medical anthropology concerned itself with the clinician-patient dynamic, wherein is furnished authentic clinical knowledge. What Weizsäcker deemed the project of ‘medical anthropology’ defined itself against the anthropology of ‘natural scientific medicine’ and what he regarded as a logico-positivist science independent of the human subject. ¹⁵ Drawing from the I-Thou encounter in the theological reflections of Martin Buber, he understood the encounter between patient and clinician as a living relationship, a ‘pathic fluctuation’ (Weizsäcker, 1956/2005: 68). Indeed, the shared opinion of twentieth-century phenomenology was that the strict scientific objectivity holding reign over medical enquiry isolated the observer from the observed, the clinician from his patient, and the illness from man. ¹⁶ Concordantly, Maldiney (1973: 209), in his commentary on Ludwig Binswanger, wrote that ‘man is only in the situation of psychiatry if psychiatry is in the situation of man’. If there were a phrase to characterize the motives and value of phenomenological philosophy and a psychiatry open to the questions of philosophical anthropology, it would be Maldiney’s.

The Hippocratic personage of the medic philosopher, iatros philosophos, is resurrected through the work of Weizsäcker and Straus, in a world witnessing the unchallenged rise of neuro-psychological models and mechanomorphic interpretations of human and animal behaviour. ¹⁷ In contrast, the return of what Jacques Schotte (2006: 88) would call ‘humanly human’ illnesses represented a more integral approach to man, his experiences both collective and personal. A more dynamic and redefining landscape of enquiry was necessary for understanding human existence, echoing Weizsäcker’s prioritization of the ‘pathic’ as the primary characteristic and communicative dimension: ‘It is the psychological, the phenomenological and the existential philosophical way, that certainly approach much closer to the pathic character of mankind than all of the sciences.’ (Weizsäcker, 1956/2005: 74, original italics).

Straus is securely placed when read through these narratives unique to the history of philosophy and psychiatry on the Continent; however, he fails to fit comfortably within the paradigms of the more cerebrally-oriented and isolationist theories developed in the USA between the wars. Straus observed of prominent US psychologists of his day such as Hebb, Boring and Lashley that ‘they are fascinated by the idea of physiological mechanisms’ while ‘failing to grasp that the mechanism cannot understand itself’. The mechanistic, or objective, psychologists’ reduction of the relationship between an experiencing being and the world to that of an organism to stimuli, lead Straus to conclude that their work ‘requires an unrelenting intellectual asceticism’ (Straus, 1963: 121–2). The difficulty of importing philosophical approaches from the Continent to Anglo-American shores is furthermore exemplified by his friend Buytendijk, who in a letter to Straus of March 1949 remarked on his recent visit to the USA: ‘I have found many instruments but have not found in the Americans any good ideas’ (Struyker-Boudier, 1988: 86).

The significance of ‘sensation’, ‘mood’ and ‘tone’ were central to the phenomenology of Scheler and Heidegger, as much as to the psychotherapy of Binswanger. Where Scheler presented the idea of affective contagion underpinning worldly experience, Heidegger proposed the notion of Befindlichkeit to characterize how man as a sentient being finds himself within a world, not of objects, but of things and situations. Tellenbach (1980), also, in his widely respected work on melancholy, underlined the importance of what he called an ‘atmospheric diagnostic’ and in doing so drew upon Heidegger’s philosophy of mood. ¹⁸ Yet neither of these ideas was far distant from the Umwelt described by Uexküll, for they privileged the affective relation of man to his world. ¹⁹ Straus established a fierce critique of Pavlovian psychology based on this relation and carefully chipped away at the foundations upon which Watson, Lashley and Hebb had constructed their legacy of behaviourism. Thus, Straus’s phenomenological project was to situate the human being not as a species but as an experiential existent endowed with the capacity affectively to gain a preliminary awareness and psychological knowledge of the world and others through feeling. Our grasp of the world is not dependent upon an intellectual explication (Erklärung) but on a sym-path-etic comprehension (Verstandung) of the surrounding situation. Weizsäcker (1956/2005: 70) claimed that he ‘would like primarily not to explain, but to show something’ about the pathic situation of mankind.

Straus, inspired by the ‘rhythm’ of dance whose co-ordinates he likened to the sonority of music, was a ‘neuro-phenomenologist’ for whom the conditioned reflex was only ‘a late blossom of Cartesian philosophy’ and any attempt to establish a psychology of man through these mechanical laws was futile and even dangerous (Straus, 1966: 47). ²⁰ Yet he did not subscribe to the seemingly other scientific extreme of Freudian psychoanalysis, which he saw as being mistaken in its approach to consciousness: in asserting the Freudian mental apparatus to be a neuro-physiological hypothesis, Straus (1963: 16) held that the Id and the Unconscious were purely ‘solipsistic conceptions, late descendants of Cartesianism’ and, in being so, consciousness could be no more than a sense organ for the perception of psychic qualities. But Straus, Freud and Weizsäcker shared a central tenet, for unlike the general physician concerning himself with the organism and directing his attention to isolated anatomical function, the psychiatrist as with the phenomenologist addresses man in detail, as a citizen of the historical and social world, as an expression of civilization navigating the unities and relations of society through choices, as an existent individuated through events and language, both collective and personal. As Straus et al. (1969: 2) noted, ‘The object of psychiatric action is not primarily the brain, the body or the organism; it should be integral man in the uniqueness of his individual existence’. ²¹ The assertion of a more integral, phenomenological approach immediately challenged Greisinger’s time-honoured neuro-pathological thesis that ‘mental illnesses are diseases of the brain’. ²² The psychiatrist should therefore look not towards the tradition of autopsy, anatomical observation and localized functions of the nervous system, but should rather seek to understand human experience of the phenomenal world beyond physiological schemas. In this way, Straus questioned the unanimously determined role of psychiatry within medicine and the direction of the natural sciences.

Phenomenology or, more specifically, philosophical anthropology was the essence of his psychology, putting Straus at odds with the developments and representatives of behavioural and scientific research, for he wanted to situate research of the human mind in culture and, similarly to Freud, to explore the possibility of universal human truths and the cultural particularities of human expression. ²³ Rather than choosing to pursue man as mechanism and function, he regarded him as a being whose rudimentary awareness of the world was not intellectually inferred but felt through the tactility of mood and atmosphere. Thus, where Descartes had once proclaimed, ‘I think therefore I am’ and Kant had proposed an advance with ‘I am therefore I think’, it is Straus who removed the heavily intellectualized complexities surrounding the human being by simply announcing: ‘I feel therefore I am’. ²⁴

As illustrated by the experience of Buytendijk in the USA, the lack of ideas and philosophical reflection in the field of medicine was symptomatic of the inability within science to apprehend the reductive tendencies of ‘mechanistic’ approaches to the human mind (psycho) and body (somatic) which hallmarked the scientific adoption of Descartes. However, it was not Descartes’ philosophy in toto of which Straus was critical, but precisely the dualist readings that had proliferated in transitu through the sciences and which had come to define the rationality of research. Such a Cartesianism was comfortably moulded into a justification of scientific protocol, and what put Straus in direct contradistinction to the habitual convictions of the behaviourists and psychologists of his day was that what he understood to be a creative psychology contested the accepted strategy of reducing sensing to mere physiological processes alone. The world viewed by mainstream psychological research, and especially by Watson, Boring, Lashley and Hebb, was a distinctly different one from that of Uexküll, Weizsäcker and Straus. Whereas Hebb, for example, regarded the subject as a passive receiver of stimuli, Straus posited that such a benign mechanism operates secondarily in human experience because it is preceded by the immediately accessible world of sensing, where the concept of stimulus-response plays no part. Consequently, in the attempt to penetrate the depth and wealth of human experience beyond the gnostic character ascribed to phenomena through the calculative hypotheses of science, Straus emphasized the importance of what he called the pathic mode of sensing.

The pathic had long been an established suffix in neurological terminology, most notably gaining currency through the work of Henry Head and J. Sherren to designate sensibility in the peripheral nerves (the dissociation of epicritic, protopathic and deep sensation). But it is by looking at the etymology of the word that we find a number of terms that help us to understand the distinctiveness of Straus’s evocation. Traditionally, the root ‘path-’ is found in a variety of contexts. For example, in English, as with French, we have ‘pathogenesis’, ‘sympathy’, ‘telepathic’ and ‘pathology’. Decisively, however, there are three words from the Greek language which nurture it: ‘pathos’ (πάθoς), ‘paskhô’ (πάσχω) and ‘pathô’ (παθώ). From these we have ‘paskhein’ (πάσχϵιν), signifying ‘to bear’, ‘allow’, ‘to be treated in a particular way’. Also, ‘pathos’ expresses ‘passion’, ‘modification’, ‘quality’ and ‘relation’, a context where the qualities and properties of things signify modifiability, and the substantive ‘pathema’ (πάθημα) designates ‘passion’ and ‘comportment’. Furthermore, with the Greek language we have ‘ho paskhôn’ (Ό Πάσχων), the man of sentiment, impassive, in contrast to ‘ho mê paskhôn’ (Ό μή Πάσχων) as the man of the impassable, man always equal to himself. Within Aristotle’s metaphysics, there is an evocative employment of ‘pathos legetaī’ (πάθoς λέγϵται) designating a ‘subsisting’ and ‘enduring’ state where ‘the quality of things subsist as modification, the change of black into white, heavy to light and even the “sane” to the “ill”’. ²⁵ The etymology of ‘paskhein’ is thus the conceptual and linguistic source of the pathic, but as there are linguistic variants in the Greek, so too are there variants of the term’s conceptual usage. Through the Aristotelian context and its many etymological variants, the pathic emerges as a transitional and mediatory state, signifying both the indeterminacy of change as well as the integrity of the human person in being able to undergo change as modification. Human identity, at least for the philosophy of High Antiquity, is grounded in this constant enduring change and field of modifiability.

For Weizsäcker, the pathic is inscribed into a clinical vocabulary expressing the reciprocity between patient and clinician. What he deemed to be the pathic categories of Dürfen, Müssen, Sollen, Können, Wollen (may, must, should, can and will) were the deep-rooted volitional drives of Being, at times excelling to define certain forms of existence, at times falling into a volitional deficiency with states of malady. These categorical drives formed, for Weizsäcker, the pathic pentagram of life. In his Formalism in Ethics, Scheler (1973) not only referenced Uexküll but also foreshadowed Weizsacker’s work on the pathic categories by proposing a series of ‘good models’ based on a theory of value types. In their highest form these are the saint, the genius, the hero, the leading spirit and the bon vivant. These may be seen as living historical expressions of the pathic categories occurring through episodes marking all civilizations, with the saintly type analogous to the category of Dürfen, in which Weizsäcker identified something of the sacred and the saintly. ²⁶

It must be noted, however, that these categories (forming the basis to Weizsäcker’s last major work, Pathosophie), though axiomatic in character, have theological and linguistic roots that are not readily found in Straus. The latter, rather, employs the pathic as an aesthetic category in the Greek sense of ‘aisthesis’ (αίσθησις), understood as the perpetual and uninterrupted relationship between movement and sensation. ²⁷ In doing so, Straus wanted to avoid the system of primordial modal verbs and drives (aligning Weizsäcker and Freud) and their theological implication, opting instead for a more ‘climatic’ phenomenology and the dimensional structures of atmosphere which allow beings to think and to move, to choose and to decide, to act and to map a destiny.

In this way, mental events cannot be reduced to cerebral events, just as the experiencing subject cannot be replaced by a nervous system acted upon by the pure physical agents of stimuli. Straus therefore ventured to demote what he recognized as the royal province of neurophysiology – ‘the nervous system’ – to a secondary experience. What he consequently identified as a distinct weakness in the ‘mechanical’ doctrine of Pavlov, and the mathematical formalism of ‘objective’ psychology as a whole, was that a sensually vivid, pre-conceptual, pathic correspondence with the world surpasses the model of a nervous system reacting proportionally to external stimuli. Sensory input and motor output should rather be considered in terms of an integrated organism, of a body interlaced and coalescent with its world, just as in Goethe’s poetic formulation, ‘the ear is to sound and the eye is to light’.

Conclusion

In this study of Straus’s evocation of the ‘pathic’ mode of sensing, we therefore find a remarkable and instructive coherence between his clinical-psychological and ethical-philosophical concerns. On the one hand, the urgency of his life-long critique of a psychology dependent on physics for its mode of explanation hardly waned, and seemed if anything to have grown stronger amid his intellectual estrangement in the USA. On the other hand, he remained equally resolute in his commitment to understanding the human person not merely as a body but as a being, in the Hellenic medical and philosophical tradition. Each aspect of his work clearly nurtured the other.

This paper has further tried to draw attention to continuities as well as important distinctions between Straus and his near-contemporaries Uexküll and Weizsäcker, who had both also worked to bring philosophical insights into a scientific milieu. Despite the connections with such like-minded scientists and thinkers, however, Straus remains a figure unmoored from twentieth-century psychiatry, and his calling to attention the pathic mode of sensing exemplifies the desire to think of the human being (Ό Άνθρωπoς) in his broadest span, as a constant dialogue between ancient and modern.