STUDIES A “ASOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES FOR __ASOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. ~~ Volume 4, Number 1, January-March 1981 ABLEX PUBLISHING CORPORATION Norwood, New JerseyHUMAN STUDIES 4, 49-65 (1981) Erwin Straus and the Problem of Individuality DONALD MCKENNA Moss Duquesne University Introductions and commentaries of great works frequently serve no other purpose than to laborate the questions which have once moved the author but which have not becn stated in so many words [Straus, 1966, p. 168). INTRODUCTION In the present paper I propose to develop one central and recurrent theme of Erwin Straus’s writings, that of human individuality. My emphasis on the problem of individuality represents a necessary departure from contemporary commentary on Straus, particularly as Straus’s earlier works now become accessible to the English-speaking audience (Straus, 1925, 1927, 1930). The immediate context for Straus’s work in the 1920s and 1930s was the movement of anthropological psychiatry, a movement with strong existential overtones. Most commentary today, with its emphasis on the phenomenological aspects of Straus’s writings, overlooks this theme of individuality. If we accept the notion that the statements of an author's youth are Particularly revealing of the passions and concerns of his life, then we must take pause and reflect on the title of Erwin Straus's first Habilitations- sherift—Das Problem der Individualitit, The Problem of Individuality (1926). In this difficult and often obscure work, he attempted to articulatean ontology of individuality by means of ontological reflections on the thing, the organism, and the person.! The medical faculty in Berlin rejected this work as unduly philosophical. Straus contended, however, that issues of human ‘11 gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the following individuals who consented to interviews regarding Straus, bis life, and ideas: William F. Fischer, PhD, Constance T. Fischer, Ph.D., Edward Eméry, and John Dowd ait of Pittsburgh; Erling Eng, Ph.D.,and Mr.and Mrs, Anthony Zappone, of Lexington, Kentucky; Jacob Klein of Annapolis, Maryland; and Lucie Jessner, M.D., of Washington, D. C. William Fischer and Erling Eng, two of Straus colleagues in his Lexington years, were especially helpful in guiding my study of Straus’ writings. 'Both his approach and conclusions bear comparison to Merleau-Ponty’ similar endeavor in The Structure of Behavior. 4950 Moss individuality permeate all of medicine, that health and disease are not merely different conditions of physical organisms, and that in every instance medicine is an ethical discipline (cf. Moss, 1977). In The Problem of Individuality, Straus aligned his own efforts in medicine and psychiatry with the widespread new movement affecting the most diverse areas of the sciences and humanities in the first third of our century, a movement bearing a range of titles: “One speaks of the investigation of structural connections, of Gestalt, of the totality, of the whole, of the person, of the life, and—most comprehensively—of individuality” (Straus, 1926, pp. 27-28). This dedication to the investigation of totality and individuality involved Strausin a polemical battle against mechanism and physical realism. Tt also involved him in a task that was to occupy him for the remainder of his life. For Straus an understanding of pathology—both medical and psychological—presupposes a fully elaborated understanding of normal human individuality. “Only the man who carries in himself a virtual image of the intact whole is able to perceive a torso” (1926, p. 123). Ludwig Binswanger (1931, p. 243) wrote a lengthy evaluation and commentary on Straus’s work, Event and Experience (1930). In his opening sentence he defined the principal theme of Straus's early writings: Allof ErwinStraus' works, excepting the purely neurological ones, circle around acentral theme: the forms and laws in and according to which, in healthy times and in il, the structure and development of human individuality occurs. Whether he i dealing with the investigation of time and space experiences, with the investigation of a certain kind of behavior of the human being toward the world of fellow men—such as is found in the suggestion relationship. or exclusively with the mode and manner in which man is confronted by the world of events in which destiny places him, Straus’ gaze always penetrates to the general forms in which human experience takes plac. My pursuit of the problem of individuality in Straus’s works is organized in the following manner: First, I demonstrate how a concern for the dignity and autonomy of the individual undergirded his critiques of natural scientific psychology. Second, 1 discuss (and quite liberally) Straus’s most explicit statements about the individual. Third, 1 examine at length the relation between temporality and individuality in Straus’s writings. Time was central for Straus, so much so that he called his approach “historiological” (Straus, 1928, 1930, 1933). Fourth, I present Straus’s enduring concern with man’s need to relate himself to an encompassing whole. Fifth, and finally, I present some critical reservations as to Straus’s understanding of the individual, raised already by Binswanger (1931) and Boss (1947) and retaining validity today.ality utism, ofhis and ormal age of «and ening tral the athe dof the nis ays. izedin tyand entific -ments y and uch so 33). + relate traus's 1) and ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY SI THE CRITIQUE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY A large portion of Straus’s writings, particularly after his emigration in 1938, consisted of confrontations with modern academic psychological theory. “The Confusion of Stimulus and Object” (1963c) is perhaps a typical example, as are sections of “The Archimedian Point(1957). The immediate existential import of such pieces (i.e., their relevance to the question of human individuality) is often not apparent, However, the brief address Straus delivered in 1940 on “Education in a Time of Crisis” illuminates the connection. There Straus places the problem of the individual in an historical context: The moral basis of the Western democracies lies in a dedication to the protection of the independence of the individual. Straus asks, “What has modern psychology to say about human dignity and freedom? You may open a textbook of psychology and find that the first chapter deals with the question, ‘What is man’...? The answer is: ‘Man is a mass of protopolasm’, ... This interpretation leaves no room for freedom or dignity, because the reactions of protoplasm demand only mechanical, impersonal schemes, and they can best be controlled by political organizations which do not waste their time with such trifles as dignity..." These prescient remarks were first delivered by Straus in an address at Black Mountain College in May, 1940, 31 years before B. F. Skinner published Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In his critical writings Straus tirelessly reiterated the simple truths: ‘Acting is personal; it requires the I-world relation, it oocurs within and ego-centric environment, itis performed within a temporal horizon open tothe future, its directed toward objects susceptible to change, and itis not triggered by stimuli (1966, p. 212). Straus understood man’s individuality in a holistic biological sense. He declared that man’s individuality developed out of a “primary animal situation” which man shares with other motile beings. “Individuation is a natural relation to the world ...”(1963b). Yet, as “The Confusion of Stimulus and Object” shows, modern behavioristic psychology long ago replaced the biological mode of thinking by a machine theory. The organism is treated as an apparatus with built-in reflex mechanisms set in motion by physical- chemical stimuli. And an apparatus has no world, no environment filled with objects susceptible to change. For Straus the encounter with the world, the Allon, is the foundation of individuality, the‘I am” and the“T do” express not only self but relationships to the world. Even the animal, Straus endeavors to show, has a world physiognomically organized into zones of significance that entice, threaten, or repel. Straus concluded that the secret motive of the behavioristic Stimulus-Response theory is to show that the entire human52 Moss drama can be regarded in the same way as the sunburn reaction of skin when exposed to light (1963c). THE INDIVIDUAL Let us return to that 1940 address, because it is there that we find the most direct expression of Straus’s own convictions about individuality. At this juncture Straus had undergone, at the hands of the Nazis, the most profound disruptions of his own life, culminating in his 1938 emigration. Inthe address on education, Straus (1941) expressed the disappointment, disillusionment, and unease that had begun to grip the West already with the outbreak of the first World War. ‘Only those who have known the years before the first World War can fully appreciate the ‘magnitude ofthe crisis we are undergoing. Duringthose years most people believed that in western civilization man had reached @ more or less definitive state of historical development, In accordance with this attitude the past was interpreted in a somewhat peculiar way. We had heard about wars, about persecution, about intolerance... But we also had learned that since 1600, or somewhat earlier, when man’s eyes were opened, there had been irresistable progress. .."““There was general optimism and a feeling of security. ‘And then suddenly that shocking disappointment to optimism and security! Suddenly history with al its good and bad passions was alive again. Suddenly everything which we thought gone forever was here again, and that progressive state which we expected to be the final and lasting one had disappeared."“Today the ominous symptoms of stil greater ‘changes are showing themselves, All the principles on which the social order of the nineteenth century were laid are challenged ... There isa dissolution of the older order, but only vague signs of the new one. In this context—a grave crisis of the moral order—Straus felt compelled to state his own convictions in simple language: As individuals we are born and as individuals we die, as individuals we fel desire, pleasure and pain, As ndividualties we belong to nature, as individualities we belong to. spiritual, objective order. As individuals we are marked by some peculiarity, such as the fingerprint, ‘we become individualites in so far as we integrate objective orders and adapt ourselves to them. Asindividualities we are specimens of a zoological species, and weare restrained to the present in space and time. As individualities we are in a potential relation toward the Whole ofthe world, o the past and tothe future. Because we are all relatedto one andthe same objective order, it may beoome the norm, the means, and the object of education [Straus, 1941]. In this 1940 address, Straus expressed concern not only with the theory of human individuality but also with the practical task of educating the youngso as to enhance the development of individuality. His values are evident in the program he outlines for education. These points might also be taken as a program for Straus’s own writings, which in their form and content reflect the following themes: First, the eternal questions—to use a solemn word—must become vital questions again; the eternal problems must become visible again, not as special problems for specialists,owhen te most At this ofound address ‘nment, kof the stethe hatin orical ewhat hut we there curity. Idenly ich we Ito be seater of the order, velled to aeory of roungso nt in the ken as a flect the again; sialists, ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 53 but as problems concerning all of us and ultimately their real meaning and importance, {tis certainly not legitimate to expect education o breed geniuses; but it certainly is its funetion to establish or perhaps to re-stablish the right relation between every-day life And the eternal problems. That isthe great problemsshould penetrate and mold daily life, Yet preoccupation with them should not permit and excuse us from proving true in the small affairs of every day. Second, if “freedom” has only a negative meaning—i it means only to be fre from ‘something and to do whatever we want to do—then the individual must againexperience himself as apart of a whole, as apart ofa lasting, embracing order that hehimsel helps to form. Third, if individuality is expressed by the proper relation ofthe individual to thecentral problems and by the way the individual lives asa part ofthe whole, then it becomes each individual’ task to develop his individuality, to give to his own lifea sensible, consistent ‘meaning ans shape. ing to all our knowledge and skili INDIVIDUALITY AND TEMPORALITY In Event and Experience (1930), Straus delcared the primacy of temporality in human existence, He took as his explicit conceptual point of departure Binswanger’s concept of the “innere Lehensgeschichte,” although Binswanger (1931) disputed the accuracy of Straus’s appropriation, In any case, Straus used his understanding of human becoming to confront the causal-genetic viewpoints of both Pavlovian reflexology and Freudian psychoanalysis. In this sense, Straus believed time to be the “central problem or axis of theoretical psychology, around Which all problems must be organized” (1930). In approaching Straus’s theory of human time—which in his early “historiological” works (1926, 1928, 1930, 1933) comprises his most explicit account of the structure of individuality—it is helpful to recognize that his statements on time contain an unclarified dialectic with at least three distinct strands. Human time is comprised of first, the inwardly coherent appropriation of impinging (fateful) events; second, the outward actualization of the Eidos of the person in the objective form of the human work; and third, the immediate, lived level of biological becoming, in which the life functions display an immanent directedness toward the future. I deal in turn with each of these strands in the following paragraphs. Fatalism and the Past Straus has been called a “true Greek.” The Greek, deeply aware of the unfolding of destiny, is overcome with the tragic results of ignorance. The final words of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonnus express this well: “But cease now and nevermore lift up this lament, for all this is determined.” In shis tribute to the seventy-fifth birthday of his close friend, the German anthropological psychiatrist Emil yon Gebsattel, Straus quoted von Cr Lee eH Ee eH EIE HERE ede34 Moss Gebsattel’s own words: “What the human being does and undertakes, is itself only a small part of that which befalls him” (Straus, 1959, p. 303). Then Straus inverted this statement: “What befalls the human being, corresponds to no small part of that which is peculiarly his own, or of that which he has to make his own” (Straus, 1959, p. 304). ‘Thus Straus showed a keen awareness of the individual’s deep responsibility for his unsought destiny. This is the ethical principle permeating Event and Experience. It is also the existential issue underlying his long consideration, in that same work, of the psychic trauma; How does the fortuitous Geschehnis, the outward fact, fatefully compel an Erlebnis? While combating all concepts of natural casuality, Straus could not avoid employing a rigorous terminology of his own. He spoke of a Zwang zur Sinnentnahme, a compulsion to derive a certain sense from the event, a compulsion he described as analogous to causal relationships (Straus, 1930). Self-Actualization and the Future Nevertheless, Straus escaped the fully tragic cast of Greek fatalism. Event and Experience (1930) also reveals the significance of the future in Straus’s anthropology. For example, Straus criticized Freud for attempting to deduce the “Should,” the realm of freedom, from natural casuality. Instead, Straus pointed to an alternative foundation in the experience of time. He pointed out thatthe individual experiences himself as a becoming. The whole oressence of the person does shine through in every moment, every action, every fragmentary expression, yet none of these momentary manifestations or actualizations is definitive. As the individual subordinates the single moment to an encompassing, unfolding, potential whole, the moment itself is devalued, and its significance becomes determined through the relation to the whole, The moral sense arises as the human being orients himself beyond the factual, the present, and the partial toward a potential whole in the process of being actualized, The human experience of time beckons the individual to view his life as an unfolding, temporal whole, and invites him further to engage himself in the world in order to give an objective shape to this ever-latent whole. The once, and only once, quality of the human life infuses this task with seriousness. No matter what material and arena the individual seizes upon, and is given, for his life's activity, he always seeks the same end—to attain the whole of his being. The human work—whether of the artist or the social reformer or the researcher—is an effort at a timeless realization of this whole. Itis primarily through productive activity, or work, that the individual guides the whole of his life—its Gestalt or Eidos—ever more out of a potential and into an actualsitself Straus ito no »make deep aciple orlying x does ‘ebnis? ng zur vent, a 1930). Event traus’s leduce Straus ed out ance of every ons or oment self is to the md the cess of easan z once, :ss.No en, for : of his or the marily hole of actual ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 55 being.? Yet the inner temporal principle of the human work frustrates the individual, for the whole is never realized. In the very moment of its completion, the work leaves its creator behind: “He remains imprisoned by life and time” (Straus, 1930). Ever anew he stands before the necessity of a new beginning. As Hugo von Hoffmannsthal put it, “The whole of life is an eternal beginning again,” As long as human work retains its creative, productive moment, however, and does not degenerate to a mere means to an end, a mere labor devoid of individual meaning, it remains the principal arena for self-actualization. “Work is our answer to world, and our insertion in it, and our validation” Eng, 1978). Straus’s concept of seeking self-actualization through the work, with its emphasis on an effort to objectify the latent temporal whole of one’s life in material or cultural forms, differs substantially from the self actualization ideologies of our time. The latter portray self-actualization as the strivings of solipsistic, detached, and a-historic selves to experience all possible inner and outer feelings and sensations. For Straus, moral experience is by no means a secondary restriction of primary drive impulses, “Because ethical behavior is a behavior orginally Corresponding to the experience of time, it stands just as closeto, or just as far from, the biological foundations of the human soul as do sensation and Perception” (Straus, 1930, Chapter 7). Straus'’s interpretation reflects the existentialist understanding of ethics. Straus based the value of individual commitments and upright actions, as well as the value of general cultural horms, not on any social contract, divine precept, or natural law, but rather on an understanding of human time. Like Kierkegaard and like Max Scheler—both of whom exercised a powerful influence over Straus—he was interested in the ways in which human actions enhance the depth and inwardness of human individuality. In Event and Experience Straus stood in judgment on the neuroses and perversions that he understood as individual efforts to evade the summons to self-actualization: *Straus'early analyses of part-whole relations (Straus, 1925, 1927, 1930) appearat frst glance to be mere carryovers from the Gestalt psychologists then prominent in Berlin, Strauss use ofthe notion of Gestalt, however, hearkens back more to Goethe than to Wertheimer. The Greek dos, the Platonic essence, also scems to lurk behind Straus’ us of Gestalt, His isan existential Gestalt psychology of man and world, and man and history, with litle room for physiotogically fixed Gestatten. Throughout his life Straus read and re-read the classics of antiquity, especially Aristotle, as well as Augustine, Goethe, and Shakespeare. His psychology has more affinity wi the world view of Hamlet, of Faust, and above all with that ofthe Greeks, than it docs with any ‘modern psychology or psychologist. Strauss education atthe Lessing Gymnasium in Franifurt Jeft him convinced that the one true revolution in human thought was that of Greece in the classical period.56 Moss ‘The movement opposed to self-actualization, which attempts to flee the demand proceeding from the whole, nevertheless remains, just for this reason, bound to this whole and related to it. It can attain its aim of se¥f-abandonment, of letting oneself fall into decline, in all its degrecs up to self-destruction, only through the deformation and destruction of the forms and structures serving self actualization, Straus also stood in judgment on the general modern relaxation of traditions and mores, such as those touching sexuality. In these tendencies, Straus saw evidence of inauthenticity and moral decline: In behavior commonly praised as objectivity and veracity, we see manifested the attitude of an individual who experiences himself not as the creator of his own historical Gestalt, but rather as a creature, which, with diminished responsibility toward itself, suffers and lives through its conditions and situations as external forces and internal pressures. On the other hand, Straus believed that strict norms, such as the Catholic prohibition on divorce or the high value on virginity, emphasize the significance of the one-time, uniquely occurring decision, and force the individual to take himself seriously and to fit each individual action into the ongoing process of self-actualization (Straus, 1930). Thus Straus’s concern is, again with the development and sustenance of individuality. The movements to dissolve such cultural forms have one thing in common: “They relieve the individual of the requirement to take himself seriously, and they seek to protect experiencing from shocks and to banalize it—forcing it into the domain of states, moods, and humors.” The moral gravity of human existence is founded in the historical modality, and it is undermined by psychologies and societies lacking the proper appreciation for the historical dimension (Straus, 1930).4 in his elucidation of the ethical significance of the uniquely occurring, first-timeevent, Straus ‘echoes the formulations of the ethical spokesman in S, Kierkegaard’ Either] Or, Volume 11 “I suggest, in this context, that Straus’ social, moral, and esthetic conservatism, which drew virulent criticism in his Black Mountain College years (Duberman, 1972), was by no means a mere prejudice of his time or a momentary personalexpediency. Rather like the conservatism of Kierkegaard, it isan integeal part of an ethos, reflecting a recognition of the profound relation between cultural forms and individuality. On the other hand, the evaluation in “Critical Reservations” (page 60-2) of this paper could also be extended to show the blind spotsin Strauss esthetic, moral, and social conservatism, its obliviousness to the positive moment, the effort at self-actualization latent within artistic de-construction (e.g., cubism, pointlism, or atonal and dissonant musical forms), as well as within instances of social or moral de-construction. In this regard the spirit of Nietzche's Zarathustra would provide the playful corrective: “But Lsay: what is falling down we should still push, Everything today falls and decays: who would check it? But T-Teven want to push itad ok its ms on of acies, ade alt, ind tholic e the ve the to the sernis ments ve the 2ek to ‘0 the stence logies nsion + Straus ame IE chdrew atism of relation ‘Critical Straus's séfort at onal and In this ay. what kit? But ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 37 Biological Becoming, The Constitutional Viewpoint, and Time In addition to the historical or reflective level of human temporality—the level at which I actively relate myself to my own becoming—Straus also emphasized a vital level of temporality. He favored the idea of von Gebsattel that there is a vital bodily time, manifested in the rhythms of our physiological functions (“‘life-functions"), that can be blocked or arrested at the vital level. According to von Gebsattel, the direction of the organism toward the future is immanent in the movement of life. [Cf. von Gebsattel’s 1939 article on depression as a “vital inhibition of becoming”, Straus's 1928 article on endogenous depression, or Hans Jonas’s more recent evocation of the same themes (Jonas, 1966).} In “The Problem of Individuality” Straus turned to Driesch and the vitalistic, premodern understanding of a biological becoming. Straus criticized the tendency of the vitalists to objectify a life principle (i.e., to regard it as a separate, underlying, and real life force). Nevertheless, the vitalistic mode of understanding and the biological image of an elan vital—a pulse of life flowing through us—never lost its allure for him: ‘An organism will remain alive only so long as it is capable of joining issues with an ‘environment in a continuous process of assimilation and dissimilation, To persist, to ‘endure, means to maintain itself against the permanent threat of decay. It means to keep entropy low throughout the whole of life [1967, p. 765} For Straus birth and death are the fundamental frame within which all the events of our lives receive their peculiar meaning. Human “life time” is not homogeneous. “Placed between the first cry and the last breath, biographical years are not commensurable” (1967, p. 762). The categories of life, death, health, and disease appeared to him to be as essential to the comprehension of man’s individuality as are the existential categories of possibility, finiteness, and nothingness. Even Heidegger's being-in-the-world seemed too impersonal to Straus; man’s original homeis not the world but the earth. “Itis the territory on which man takes a position, his stand as a living bodily creature, a zoon" (1975, p. 149). Man, azoon, is a"*son of mother earth,” with eyes and ears appropriate to terrestrial conditions. The richness of Straus’s mature anthropology, with its central emphasis on man’s body—my body— lies in this confluence of the biological and existential modes of understanding. Biological is taken here in the broadest sense; Straus’s viewpoint could legitimately be called an anthropological or even ontological biology. Straus’s biological mode of understanding also defines the frame and limits within which existential self-actualization is possible, Even in this movement toward the future in self-actualization, the weight of the past is great. Straus,58 ‘MOSS believed that the general form of the individual's life and experience, their essence, suchness (Sosein), or Eidos, are predetermined by the individual's biological constitution, whereas the concrete form, the particular, the existence (Dasein), and the factual contents are a matter of historical- biographical actualization. In “The Problem of Individuality” Straus cited Aristotle’s dictum that all becoming is a transition from potential to actual being. Man’s potentialities, according to Straus, are laid down in advance in his constitution: “Thus the ‘acquired characteristics’ do not enter as new alongside the inherited, they are not a genuine acquisition and not an enrichment, rather we must see inthema delimitation of the possibilities already on hand... . Aging (i.e., the process of the narrowing in of the possible) is one of the central problems of a non- mechanistic biology” (1926, p. 98). “Even the best external circumstances can always actualize only the greatest abundance of those possibilities already on hand for an organism. Nothing can grow beyond itself... Spiritual factors do not enable the organism to develop beyond the limits set down for it, no more than do the material factors” (1926, p. 99). Man is educable but only within the limits established by his constitution. Notice the dialectic interdependence of the three strands of Straus’s view of time and ethics: The individual is responsible not only to appropriate the impinging events presented by fate but also to take them up as material to be actively crafted in the process of self-actualization, and in this process of self- actualization, the Eidos decreed by one’s biologic constitution contributes the essentials of the form to be objectified, MAN'S RELATION TO THE WHOLE: RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE In his essay “Psychiatry and Philosophy,” Straus (1963b) described the basic situation, grounded in man’s motility and upright posture, through which the human being enters into contraposition to the Allon, the surrounding world of objects and fellow humans. I experience myself in terms of a primordial biological Gestalt: | am a living, embodied, motile being, relating myself as a part to an encompassing whole. No matter how I relate myself to this encompassing whole, whether I attempt to establish my independence and separation from it, or whether I attempt to connect or surrender myself to it, a bipolar tension remains. “Primary separation is paired with primary solidarity. One relationship is not possible without the other. Separation—felt as such—calls for connection—realized as such” (1963b, p. 38). The relation of man to the encompassing whole is one of the “eternal questions” to which Straus returned again and again. In 1922Straus reviewed a series of lectures that Rudolf Steiner and the “Anthroposophical Society”their tual’s » the rical- cat all lities, as the eyare hema cess of non escan sdyon actors it, no tonly iew of ite the Ito be ofself- tes the ved the rough vn, the aterms being, I relate ish my nect or ation is out the 5 such” ‘eternal wviewed vociety” ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY. 59 presented in Berlin. Aside froma brief, not entirely favorable, reference to the importance Steiner put on upright posture as shaping man’s place in the cosmos,5 Straus focused on a critique of the “effortless solution” anthroposophy offers to the “riddle of the world”: ‘And as to the inescapable need to comprehend the whole ofthe world in some manner, which is hardly satisfied today by religion, art, and science, Steiner approaches this ned in a thoroughly easy-going form. Anthroposophy requires from its disciples the Sacrificium intllectus, and for no other sacrifice are the majority of men more ready than for this. Genuine religion requires the strength of believing. genuine philosophy the exertion of thinking, and genvine mysticism the ardour of spiritual submersion. In each ‘ase the surrender of the entire person is required. Anthroposophy, in its semblance of knowledge and its bowdlerized mysticism, presentsits believers effortlessly thesolutionto the tiddle of the world. It is a joy to become inward, as everything in the Cosmos fits together neatly and as—with the help of magic numbers and formulae—all of the mysteries of this world and of higher worlds are unveiled. (Straus, 1922, p. 960} This eternal question of man’s relation to the whole is one to which religi has most often presented answers. Straus preferred “to attempt an anthropological solution before a theological one” (1957), and displayed a profound skepticism for the lazy solutions provided so often by both speculative thought and religion, which solve the problem by dissolving it: ‘The scarch for the harmony of opposites aims “basically” at suspending the tension experienced within the rea relation of part and whole. Despite all efforts to master the whole through the mediation of discursive thought or entrusting oneself in faith tothe whole, the tension of opposition persists. The Tower of Babel remained unfinished 119636, p. 49) If we were to place Straus’s thought anywhere among those ancient disciplines concerned with man’s place in the cosmos (and Straus would have ridiculed such efforts), we might well recall that astonished wonderment with which Straus confronted the “noble trivialities” of everyday life. In this respect Erwin Straus was a philosopher. As Aristotle said: For through astonishment men have begun to philosophize, both in our times and at the beginning. The inscription adorning Straus’ headstone, “Born to see, bound to behold”, expresses his gnostic destiny. Straus’s wonder, like that of the ancients, was concretely bound to the objects of the senses: the objects and events of our spatiotemporal world. Where modern scientific man found only Thus a very special significance is attributed to the learning of the upright posture and of upright movement in childhood. The human being stands entirely differently on the earth- organization than does the animal, and to this autonomous and liberated position correspond in tum the freedom and mobility of thoughts (Straus, 1922, p. 959}." ‘This line, from Goethe's Faust If, served astitleto one of Straus’ finest essays (Straus, 1963)60 Moss, facts, Straus found enigmas and questions: How is it that a brain, which is enclosed in the dark hollow of the skull, sees light? How is it that my friend and I, who sit opposite sides of the stadium and receive entirely different light stimuli, share in the same spectacle? How is it that this physical object, my human body, is more intimately related to me than any other object in the universe? How is it that I may detect a patient with a “thought disorder” by observing his posture as he approaches me? The final paragraph of Straus’s 1935 treatise on the sense of the senses beautifully declares the intentions of his life's work: Such investigations have therefore, probably muchess practical application than natural science research. But perhaps they may claim another kind of usefulness, The knowledge ‘they seck is not meant for mastering the world, but rather, for unlocking it and making & World tha it mute into one which speaks to usin a thousand places, The fulness and depth (of our world is to be heard wherever, till now, it has been silent (1935, p. 395). CRITICAL RESERVATIONS In this article I have presented Straus and his explorations of the problem of individuality sympathetically. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Only one criticism seems necessary in the context of the present article, a criticism already voice by Binswanger (1931) and Boss (1947). | include it here because it touches the core of Straus’s understanding of the individual, In Event and Experience Straus, following a direction set down by von Gebsattel in his 1929 paper on fetishism, states that the essence of the perversions lies in their deformation of the realm of values (i.., their essential aim and meaning is to destroy, humiliate, desecrate, and deform the perverse individual himself and his partner). Binswanger (1931) stated flatly that he found the concept of deformation to be barbaric. Binswanger sought instead to place in the foreground a disturbance of the experience of community, a disturbance of our being-with-one-another, He felt that this disturbance plays amore central role in every neurosis than does deformation or moral decline. Boss also emphasized that alienation and isolation from one’s fellow man was the basic condition for the perversions, which represent desperate efforts to penetrate the hard crust of the others’ indifference, to make contact—by force, if necessary—in spite of the distance and barriers that are experienced (Boss, 1947; Moss, 1978a). Straus's view constitutes a judgment on the perversions as well as on psychopathology in genctal because he also regarded the concept of deformation as basic to the understanding of the neuroses and psychoses.? For a comprehensive treatment ofthe relevance of Straus’ anthropology to ‘psychopathology, 48 well a a summary of Strauss specific contributions toa phenomenological psychopathology, see W, Fischer (1977)vhich is y friend cnt light ect, my, t in the der” by 3traus’s tions of tural edge king a depth »roblem aly one riticism because by von + of the sssential perverse that he instead unity, a ce plays decline. nan was fforts to act—by rienced ll as on vcept of choses.” pathology, pathology, ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 61 Already in his 1930 work, Event and Experience, he used the phrase“allowing oneself to fall into decline,” as the antithesis to self-actualization. This foreshadows the emphasis Straus later placed, in his mature anthropology, on the vertical dimension in man’s existence: on physical uprightness, moral Tectitude, and the fall from these. Late in his life Straus was fascinated with the idea that schizophrenia is a deficit in man’s uprightness—a moral decline. Psychology must recover an appreciation of the moral dimension in all psychic phenomena—normal and morbid. Yet Strauss view, however rich, is attuned only to the deficit inherent in psychopathology, the negative moment, the destruction of values, and the turning away from the future. In their criticism, Binswanger and Boss pointed to the positive moment. Even extreme forms of psychopathology comprise desperate efforts to resume the process of self-actualization. Binswanger closed his critique with a lengthy reanalysis of one of Straus’s own examples, the miser, to highlight the positive moment and tendency that Straus neglected. Even in the behavior of the miser, Binswanger wrote, “the self ‘actualizes’ itself, and individuality has the world as its own” (1931, p. 273). Notice here that the very possibility of deep-seated change through Psychotherapeutic means is contingent upon the truth of the second Viewpoint. Binswanger and Boss, unlike Straus, were analytic psycho- therapists. It is also notable that Binswanger believed that psychoanalysis, in its vision if not in its metapsychological assumption, provides an invaluable mode of access to this positive moment that was neglected by Straus: ere we come to speak of Straus relationship toward poychoanalyssin genera. Inall of his writings his argumentation is often determined by the combat-atitude toward Psychoanalysis, in none so strongly as in Event and Experience, often to the injury of the vision and system of the train of thought” (Binswanger, 1931, p. 265). Straus's psychology is a psychology of the adult individual. It is a lonely Psychology: on all sides the solitary individual confronts the Allon —the alien, unknowable surrounding world inhabited by the enigmatic heteroi, Straus chose to describe man’s confrontation with nature, history, and culture, but never with Mother, Father, and Brother. Straus’s psychology is also. theory of the already upright and morally responsible adult, and not of the child Supported in its mother's arms and living at the premoral level of irrationality and helplessness plumbed by psychoanalysis. Straus did not like people to leave the vertical; one must stand upright to be judged. Eriwn Straus, we may deduce from his writings, experienced life as a labor against gravity and a labor against merely succumbing to what befalls a man. This labor is unending. For Straus, individuality is a rising up in opposition to the world and others, and every rising up implies within itself the possibility of falling. This is a Stoic view of human life, which constitutes the dark Counterpart to Straus's ecstatic Greek embrace of the possible. One must Stand up and embrace the possible. Straus deplored the Freudian paradigm of62 MOSS: the human being as “man on the couch,” passively yielding to whatever dreams and affects arise wit! There is indeed a psychology of the We-formation in Straus’s early works (Straus, 1925, 1927), but nowhere is there a psychology of the family, or of the primordial intimacy of child-parent relations.* In fact, Binswanger asserted that Straus “betrays a much too one-sided conception of the child's psyche,” especially when—in discussing sadism—Straus claims that the child takes joy not in destruction per se but rather only in his “having an effect on things” ., in a kind of feeling of agency). Human beings are by no means so simple, concludes Binswanger, and charges Straus with overlooking the irrational existential stratum of “state of mind” (Befindlichkeit), which is so decisive for the general-human (not individual) significance of actions and experiences. Let me close with an acknowledgment that neither position—neither that of the optimistic advocates of a unitary tendency toward love and self- actualization, nor that of the proponents of the moral deformation theory— has yet been fully appreciated by modern American psychologists. It would be more timely for us to endeavor to appreciate both fully than to pit one Prematurely against the other, The most persuasive reconciliation of the Positive and negative moments antedates the entire debate. It comes from Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground (1864): Andithehas no other remedy, he willplan destruction and chaos, he will devise all sorts of sufferings, and inthe end he will carry his point! He will send acurse over the world, andas only man can curse (this is his privilege which distinguishes him from other animals), he may by his curse alone attain his object, that is, really convince himself that he's a man and not a piano key. CONCLUSION My intent in the foregoing has been to establish Erwin Straus’s Preoccupation with the “problem of individuality.” The theme of individuality can be traced throughout his works in a threefold sense: First, what are the conditions and principles governing the unfolding of normal human individuality? I reiterate here that individuality, for Straus, is an unfolding of an Eidos, in the Aristotelian sense of a transition from potentiality into actuality (Straus, 1926, 1930). His later work on the upright Posture served to give greater definition to the particular frame and limits of the human Eidos.9 Second, what conditions are detrimental to the consummation of individuality? Under this category fall Straus’s critiques of ‘Cf, Moss (1978¢) for an analysis of the psychology of the family, cast in terms of the relationship between individuality and totality. SCf. Moss (1978b) for an analysis of the relationships among embodiment, motility, and ‘experience, in light of Erwin Straus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,whatever ly works or of the asserted Psyche,” takes joy a things” osimple, rrational cisive for etiences, ther that and self- theory— It would one mm of the nes from sortsof Sandas vals), he Straus’s heme of ise: First, f normal wus, is an ion from e upright Limits of dl to the itiques of ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 63 Psychological theories or therapeutic techniques, which he felt posed a threat to the dignity and autonomy of the individual (e.g., his critiques of Pavlov (Straus, 1930, 1935), of Freud and psychoanalysis Straus, 1925, 1930), and of the modern Stimulus-Response school (Straus, 1963, 1966). He showed the same vigorous opposition ot social-cultural tendencies (Straus, 1930) or religious cult movements such as anthroposophy (Straus, 1922), which offer an easy solution to the riddle of the world, or which otherwise encourage the banalization, trivialization, or leveling down of the significance of an individual's actions and experiences. Third, and finally, Straus passionately Pursued the question of the proper relation between individuality and totality. It is man’s special task and destiny to relate himself as a part to the encompassing whole (Moss, 1978c). Straus returned to this theme ever again, in his exploration of I-world relations, in his essays on the upright posture, and even in his early essays on suggestion, in which he described man's fight from solitude and immediacy into the comfort of the We-formation (Straus, 1927). Individuality, for Straus, is not a natural given but rather an ethical ‘ask, Strauss final articulation of man's unique destiny (Straus, 1957, 1963) Places him within the tradition of philosophy, dedicated to the rediscovery of wonder. REFERENCES In the preceding text all works have been cited by original publication dates, whether in German or English, in order to preserve a sense of chronology. In the following references, the version of the text actually cited Will be given a full reference; the original publication date, if different, will appear last, in parentheses, Binswanger, L. Event and experience, Concerning the work ofthe same name by Erwin Straus Geschehnis und Enebnis, zur gheichaamigen Schrift von Erwin Straus, Monauchyft ft Paychiatrie und Neurologie, 1931, 80, 243-273, Boss, M. The meaning and content of sexual perversions, New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949, (as47) Dberman, M. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: Dutton, 1972 Eng. E. 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