Commentary on "Chris Walker's Interpretation of Karl Jaspers' Phenomenology"

What value is this scholarly debate about the origins of Jaspers' phenomenology to psychiatric clinicians? For one thing, it might help kindle enough interest among scholars and clinicians in Jaspers' General Psychopathology (GP) to warrant its reprinting. This would expand the psychiatrist's appreciation of the relevance of philosophy to medical thinking and patient care. In the GP, Jaspers quotes Kant's opinion that "the psychiatrist's competence is really commensurate with how far his education and knowledge would qualify him to belong to the philosophic faculty" (Jaspers 1963, 36).

Wiggins and Schwartz emphasize that Jaspers saw his phenomenology "as a method for studying exclusively mental phenomena." In contrast, Kant considered his phenomenology a part of the natural sciences; its subject matter being material phenomena "as an appearance of the external senses." In the GP, Jaspers states: "Phenomenology is for us purely an empirical method of inquiry maintained solely by the fact of the patient's communications. It is obvious that in these psychological investigations, descriptive efforts are quite different from those in the natural sciences" (55).

Jaspers' phenomenology reveals the empirical possibilities of subjective representation and thus a science of mind. The diligent application of this approach eventually established the reliability and validity of mental phenomena, such as moods, perceptions, and beliefs, thus forming the basis of modern pharmacological treatment of some mental disorders.

The empirical approach to mental phenomena is also the basis for modern attempts to understand the neural correlates of conscious experience. Consider, for example, a recent study of a visual illusion carried out in conscious subjects. A visual stimulus in constant motion produces an illusion of continued movement, but in the opposite direction, after its motion ceases. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the visual cortex of volunteers revealed increased neural activity in area V5, known to be involved in detecting motion and direction of a visual stimulus. The duration of increased neural activity coincides with the conscious experience of continued movement (Tootell et al. 1995).

Exactly how mental events correlate with brain function we do not know. The debate over Jaspers' intellectual lineage is relevant to psychiatry as the field attempts to synthesize a tradition of psychological investigations with our rapidly expanding understanding of brain function and pathology. Wiggins and Schwartz point out that Kant's approach to mental phenomena was a priori, whereas Jaspers adopted the a posteriori method. This Husserlian empiricism keeps us focused on "the precise mental experience" of individuals. However, an individual's experience, normal or abnormal, resonates with meaning and symbolism which must also be understood.

To aid our understanding and values, the General Psychopathology serves as a conduit for philosophical ideas to psychiatrists. Jaspers reminds psychiatrists to consider their views of human nature in light of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. The unique role of the psychiatrist, as Jaspers describes it (1963, 216) is in the application of knowledge to the individual case. The psychiatrist must understand the patient's experience before he/she can make predictions about social function, brain pathology, response to treatment and prognosis. Psychiatrists will be best equipped for this challenge if their medical training is complemented by exposure to the humanities a nd social sciences, including an appreciation of :he contribution of Husserl and Kant to the phenomenology of Jaspers.

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Commentary: Commentary by Fulwiler and Folstein