Kritik des anthropologischen Naturalismus in einer sich naturwissenschaftlich verstehenden Psychiatrie

Abstract

This article notes two presuppositions which are made when today's neuroscience conceives its research programs and when it evaluates their results: first, that explanations of human experience and behaviour are to be expected primarily from neuroscience and not from psychology or phenomennlojjy: second, that the mind is characterised by scientifically describable states and is, therefore, (explicitly or implicitly) identical with the brain. In his criticism of these presuppositions, the author argues that with the first presupposition the insight gained with the linguistic turn that all our knowledge is determined by language is abandoned and tribute is paid to the kind of materialistic metaphysics that was widespread at the end of the 19th century. Against the second presupposition, the author objects that. for instance, perceptions can phenomenologically never be grasped as mere neuroscientifically describable states because to the acts of perception, which are states only in special cases, there also belling objects of perception that cannot be reduced to subjective acts or For a more thorough foundation of this critique of neuroscientific reductionsim the author refers to Popper's Three World Theory. As parts of the (second world of the states of consciousness, thinking and knowing are subject to psychological and to a certain extent also to neurophysiological research: that, however, does not apply to their objective contents as 'inhabitants' of the third world. What belongs to the third world, e.g. the series of natural numbers on a science, has its own properties and problems that cannot be understood by a reduction to psychological states. This may be expressed in the vocabulary of the theory of culture. What we call culture is nature which has been worked on. The cultural labour processes of individuals have their correlative physiological basis in neuronal processes which today can be described in ever greater detail. The processes of cultural labour are, however, (1) never restricted to individuals but are inter-subjectively linked; (2) never mere acts or states but elements of the cultural world to which they belong and which they at the same time 'produce'. The phenomenon of human culture is, therefore, not subject to research into individual mental states: the latter in their totality do not built the reality. as, e.g., Gerhard Roth has claimed. Finally, the article points to the disastrous consequences of neuroscientific naturalism for psychiatry and demands that for the sake of the suffering human being psychiatry continue to orient itself in theory and in practice by the insights of a philosophically phenomenological anthropology, for instance, of a Helmuth Plessner.