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
elaborate the questions which have once moved the author but which have not been 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
p r o b l e m of i n d i v i d u a l i t y represents a necessary d e p a r t u r e 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-
shcrift--Das Problem der Individualiti~t, The Problem of Individuality
(1926). In this difficult and often obscure work, he attempted to articulate an
ontology of individuality by means of ontological reflections on the thing, the
organism, and the person.l The medical faculty in Berlin rejected this work as
unduly philosophical. Straus contended, however, that issues of human

*1 gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the following individuals who consented to

interviews regarding Straus, his life, and ideas: William F. Fischer, Ph.D., Constance T. Fischer,
Ph.D., Edward Emery, and John Dowds, all of Pittsburgh; Erling Eng, Ph.D., and M r. and Mrs.
Anthony Zappone, of Lexington, Kentucky; Jacob !~!ein 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's similar endeavor in
The Structure of Behavior.

49
 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, a n d - - m o s t comprehensively--of individuality" (Straus, 1926, pp.
27-28). This dedication to the investigation of totality and individuality
involved Straus in a polemical battle against mechanism and physical realism.
It also involved him in a task that was to occupy him for the remainder of his
life. F o r Straus an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of p a t h o l o g y - - b o t h 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:
All of Erwin Straus'works, exceptingthe purely neurologicalones, circlearound a central
theme: the forms and laws in and according to which, in healthy times and in ill, the
structure and developmentof human individuality occurs. Whether he is 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 place.

M y 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
a u t o n o m y of the individual undergirded his critiques of natural scientific
psychology.
Second, I discuss (and quite liberally) Straus's most explicit statements
about the individual.
Third, I e x a m i n e at length the relation between t e m p o r a l i t y 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.
 ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 51

T H E CRITIQUE O F PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES

AND T H E P R O B L E M O F 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, ' W h a t is m a g i ' . . . ? The answer is: ' M a n 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 occurs within and ego-ccntric
environment,it is performedwithina temporal horizonopen to the future, it is directed
toward objects susceptibleto change,and it is 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 lacings. "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 a m " a n d the"I 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

d r a m a c a n be r e g a r d e d in t h e s a m e w a y as t h e s u n b u r n r e a c t i o n o f s k i n w h e n
e x p o s e d to light ( 1 9 6 3 0 .

THE INDIVIDUAL

L e t us r e t u r n t o t h a t 1940 a d d r e s s , b e c a u s e it is t h e r e t h a t w e find t h e m o s t
d i r e c t e x p r e s s i o n o f S t r a u s ' s o w n c o n v i c t i o n s a b o u t i n d i v i d u a l i t y . A t this
j u n c t u r e S t r a u s h a d u n d e r g o n e , at the h a n d s o f the N a z i s , t h e m o s t p r o f o u n d
d i s r u p t i o n s o f his o w n life, c u l m i n a t i n g in his 1938 e m i g r a t i o n . I n t h e a d d r e s s
o n e d u c a t i o n , S t r a u s (1941) e x p r e s s e d t h e d i s a p p o i n t m e n t , d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t ,
a n d u n e a s e t h a t h a d b e g u n t o grip t h e W e s t a l r e a d y w i t h t h e o u t b r e a k o f t h e
first W o r l d W a r .

Only those who have known the years before the first World War can fully appreciate the
magnitude of the crisis we are undergoing. During those years most people believed that in
western civilization man had reached a 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 all 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 still greater
changes are showing themselves. All the principles on which the so~al order of the
nineteenth century were laid are challenged... There is a dissolution of the older order,
but only vague signs of the new one.

I n this c o n t e x t - - a g r a v e crisis o f t h e m o r a l o r d e r - - S t r a u s felt c o m p e l l e d t o

state his o w n c o n v i c t i o n s in s i m p l e l a n g u a g e :

As individuals we are born and as individuals we die; as individuals we feel desire, pleasure
and pain. As individualities we belong to nature, as individualities we belong to a spiritual,
objective order. As individuals we are marked by some peculiarity, such as the fingerprint;
we become individualities in so far as we integrate objective orders and adapt ourselves to
them. As individualities we are specimens of a zoological species, and we are restrained to
the present in space and time. As individualities we are in a potential relation toward the
whole of the world, to the past and to the future. Because we are all related to one and the
same objective order, it may become the norm, the means, and the object of education
[Straus, 1941].
I n this 1940 a d d r e s s , S t r a u s e x p r e s s e d c o n c e r n n o t o n l y w i t h t h e t h e o r y o f
h u m a n i n d i v i d u a l i t y b u t a l s o w i t h t h e p r a c t i c a l t a s k o f e d u c a t i n g t h e y o u n g so
as t o e n h a n c e t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f i n d i v i d u a l i t y . H i s v a l u e s a r e e v i d e n t in t h e
p r o g r a m he o u t l i n e s f o r e d u c a t i o n . T h e s e p o i n t s m i g h t a l s o be t a k e n as a
p r o g r a m f o r S t r a u s ' s o w n w r i t i n g s , w h i c h in t h e i r f o r m a n d c o n t e n t r e f l e c t t h e
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,
 ERW1N STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 53

but as problems concerning all of us and ultimately giving to all our knowledge and skill
their real meaning and importance.
It is certainly not legitimate to expect education to breed geniuses; but it certainly is its
function to establish or perhaps to re-establish the right relation between every-day life
and the eternal problems. That is, the great problems should 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 "frcedom" has only a negative meaning--if it means only to be free from
something and to do whatever we want to do--then the individual must again experience
himself as a part of a whole, as a part of a lasting, embracing order that he himself helps to
form.
Third, if individuality is expressed by the proper relation of the individual to theeentral
problems and by the way the individual lives as a part of the whole, then it becomes each
individual's task to develop his individuality, to give to his own life a sensible, consistent
meaning ans shape.

INDIVIDUALITY AND TEMPORALITY

In Event and Experience (1930), S t r a u s delcared the p r i m a c y o f
temporality in h u m a n existence. He t o o k as his explicit conceptual point of
departure Binswanger's concept o f the "innere Lebensgeschichte, " although
Binswanger (1931) disputed the accuracy of Straus's appropriation. In any
case, Straus used his understanding of h u m a n 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, a r o u n d which all problems must be
organized" (1930).
In a p p r o a c h i n g Straus's theory of h u m a n t i m e - - w h i c h in his early
"historiological" works (1926, 1928, 1930, 1933) comprises his most explicit
account o f the structure o f individuality--it is helpful to recognize that his
statements on time contain an unclarified dialectic with at least three distinct
strands. H u m a n time is c o m p r i s e d o f first, the i n w a r d l y c o h e r e n t
appropriation of impinging (fateful) events; second, the outward
actualization o f the Eidos o f the person in the objective f o r m o f the h u m a n
work; and third, the immediate, lived level o f biological becoming, in which
the life functions display an i m m a n e n t directedness t o w a r d the future. I deal
in turn with each o f these strands in the following paragraphs.

Fatalism and the Past

Straus has been called a "true Greek." The Greek, deeply aware of the
unfolding o f destiny, is o v e r c o m e with the tragic results o f ignorance. The
final words o f Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonnus express this well: "But cease
now and nevermore lift up this lament, for all this is determined." In this
tribute to the seventy-fifth birthday of his close friend, the G e r m a n
a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l p s y c h i a t r i s t Emil v o n Gebsattel, S t r a u s q u o t e d y o n
54 MOSS

Gebsatters 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 S traus
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 easuality, Straus could not avoid
employing a rigorous terminology o f 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
that the individual experiences himself as a becoming. The whole or essence 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 e n d - - t o 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. It is 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
 ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 55

being. 2 Yet the inner temporal principle o f the h u m a n w o r k frustrates the

individual, for the whole is never realized. I n the very m o m e n t o f its
completion, the w o r k leaves its creator behind: " H e remains imprisoned by
life and time" (Straus, 1930). Ever anew he stands before the necessity o f a
new beginning. As H u g o von H o f f m a n n s t h a l put it, " T h e whole of life is an
eternal beginning again."
As long as h u m a n w o r k retains its creative, productive moment, however,
and does not degenerate to a mere means to an end, a mere labor devoid o f
individual meaning, it remains the principal arena for self-actualization.
" W o r k is our answer to world, and our insertion in it, and o u r validation"
(Eng, 1978). Straus's concept o f seeking self-actualization t h r o u g h the work,
with its emphasis o n an effort to objectify the latent temporal whole o f one's
life in material or cultural forms, differs substantially f r o m the self-
actualization ideologies o f our time. The latter portray self-actualization as
the strivings o f solipsistic, detached, and a-historic selves to experience all
possible inner and outer feelings and sensations.
F o r Straus, moral experience is by no means a secondary restriction o f
p r i m a r y drive impulses. "Because ethical behavior is a behavior orginally
c o r r e s p o n d i n g to the experience of time, it stands just as close to, or just as far
from, the biological foundations of the h u m a n soul as do sensation and
perception ~ (Straus, 1930, C h a p t e r 7). Straus's interpretation reflects the
existentialist understanding o f ethics. Straus based the value o f individual
c o m m i t m e n t s and upright actions, as well as the value o f general cultural
norms, not on any social contract, divine precept, or natural law, but rather
on an understanding o f h u m a n time. Like Kierkegaard and like M a x
S c h e l e r - - b o t h o f w h o m exercised a powerful influence over S t r a u s - - h e was
interested in the ways in which h u m a n actions enhance the depth and
inwardness o f h u m a n individuality.
In Event and Experience Straus stood in j u d g m e n t on the neuroses and
perversions that he understood as individual efforts to evade the s u m m o n s to
self-actualization:

2Straus'early analyses of part-whole relations(Straus, 1925, 1927, 1930)appear at first glance

to be mere carryovers from the Gestalt psychologists then prominent in Berlin. Straus's use of the
notion of Gestalt, however, hearkens back more to Goethe than to Wertheimer. The Greek
Eidos, the Platonic essence, also seems to lurk behind Straus's use of Gestalt. His is an existential
Gestalt psychology of man and world, and man and history, with little room for physiologically
fixed Gestalten. 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 with
the world view of Hamlet, of Faust, and above all with that of the Greeks, than it does with any
modern psychology or psychologist. Straus's education at the Lessing Gymnasium in Frankfurt
left 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, neverthelessremains,just for this reason, bound to this whole
and related to it.
it can attain its aim of self-abandonment, of letting oneself fall into decline, in all its
degrees up to self-destruction,only through the deformation and destruction of the forms
and structures serving self actualization.

S t r a u s also stood in j u d g m e n t o n the general m o d e r n r e l a x a t i o n of

traditions a n d mores, such as those t o u c h i n g sexuality. I n these tendencies,
Straus saw evidence of i n a u t h e n t i c i t y and m o r a l decline:

In behavior commonly praised as objectivityand 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.

O n the other h a n d , S t r a u s believed that strict n o r m s , such as the C a t h o l i c

p r o h i b i t i o n o n divorce or the high value on virginity, emphasize the
significance of the one-time, uniquely occurring decision, a n d force the
i n d i v i d u a l to take himself seriously a n d to fit each individual action into the
o n g o i n g process of self-actualization (Straus, 1930).3 T h u s Straus's c o n c e r n is
again with the d e v e l o p m e n t a n d s u s t e n a n c e of individuality. T h e m o v e m e n t s
to dissolve such cultural forms have one thing in c o m m o n : "They relieve the
i n d i v i d u a l of the r e q u i r e m e n t to take himself seriously, a n d they seek to
protect experiencing from shocks a n d to banalize i t - - f o r c i n g it into the
d o m a i n of states, moods, a n d h u m o r s . " T h e moral gravity of h u m a n existence
is f o u n d e d in the historical modality, a n d it is u n d e r m i n e d by psychologies
a n d societies lacking the proper a p p r e c i a t i o n for the historical d i m e n s i o n
(Straus, 1930). 4

31nhis elucidation of the ethical significanceof the uniquelyoccurring, first-timeevent, Straus

echoes the formulations of the ethical spokesman in S. Kierkegaard's Either~Or, Volume II.
41 suggest, in this congext, that Straus's 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 personal expediency.Rather, like the conservatismof
Kierkegaard, it is an integral 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 spots in Straus's
esthetic, moral, and social conservatism its obliviousness to the positive moment, the effort at
self-actualization latent within tartisti¢ de-construction (e.g., cubism, pointillism, 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 Zarathgstra would provide the playful corrective:"But I say: what
is falling down we should still push. Everything today falls and decays:who would check it? But
I--I even want to push it.
 ERWlN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 57

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 yon 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 yon 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, p r e m o d e r n u n d e r s t a n d i n g 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 tong 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 itselfagainst 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. H u m a n "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 home is not the world but the earth. "It is
the territory on which man takes a position, his stand as a living bodily
creature, a zoon" ( 1975, p. 149). Man, a zoon, 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 b o d y - - m y b o d y - -
lies in this confluence o f 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 m o d e 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 in them a
delimitation of the possibilities already on h a n d . . . 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 growbeyond 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 (I963b) 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: I 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 1922 Straus reviewed
a series of lectures that Rudolf Steiner and the "Anthroposophical Society"
 ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 59

p r e s e n t e d in Berlin. A s i d e f r o m a brief, not entirely favorable, reference to the

i m p o r t a n c e S t e i n e r put on upright p o s t u r e as s h a p i n g m a n ' s place in the
cosmos, 5 Straus focused on a critique of the "effortless solution"
a n t h r o p o s o p h y offers to t h e " r i d d l e o f the world":
And as to the inescapable need to comprehend the whole of the world in some manner,
which is hardly satisfied today by religion, art, and science, Steiner approaches this need
in a thoroughly easy-going form. Anthroposophy requires from its disciples the
Sacrificium intellectus, and for no other sacrifice are the majorityof men more ready than
for this. Genuine religion requires the strength of believing, genuine philosophy the
exertion of thinking, and genuine mysticism the ardour of spiritual submersion. In each
case the surrender of the entire person is required. Anthroposophy, in its semblance of
knowledge and its bowdlerized mysticism, presents its believers effortlessly the solution to
the fiddle 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].
T h i s e t e r n a l q u e s t i o n o f m a n ' s r e l a t i o n to the w h o l e is one to which religion
has m o s t o f t e n p r e s e n t e d a n s w e r s . S t r a u s p r e f e r r e d " t o a t t e m p t a n
a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l s o l u t i o n before a theological o n e " ( 1 9 5 7 ) , a n d d i s p l a y e d a
p r o f o u n d skepticism for t h e l a z y solutions p r o v i d e d so often by b o t h
s p e c u l a t i v e t h o u g h t a n d religion, which solve t h e p r o b l e m by dissolving it:

The search for the harmony of opposites aims "basically" at suspending the tension
experienced within the real relation of part and whole. Despite all efforts to master the
whole through the mediation of discursive thought or entrusting oneself in faith to the
whole, the tension of opposition persists. The Tower of Babel remained unfinished
[1963b, p. 49].
I f we were to place S t r a u s ' s t h o u g h t a n y w h e r e a m o n g those ancient
disciplines c o n c e r n e d w i t h m a n ' s place in the c o s m o s ( a n d S t r a u s w o u l d have
ridiculed such efforts), we might well recall t h a t a s t o n i s h e d w o n d e r m e n t with
which S t r a u s c o n f r o n t e d the " n o b l e trivialities" o f e v e r y d a y life. I n this
respect E r w i n S t r a u s was a p h i l o s o p h e r . A s A r i s t o t l e said:

For through astonishment men have begun to philosophize, both in our times and at the
beginning.

T h e i n s c r i p t i o n a d o r n i n g Straus" h e a d s t o n e , " B o r n to see, b o u n d to

b e h o l d " , expresses his gnostic destiny. 6 S t r a u s ' s w o n d e r , like t h a t o f the
ancients, was c o n c r e t e l y b o u n d to the objects o f the senses: the objects a n d
events o f o u r s p a t i o t e m p o r a l w o r l d . W h e r e m o d e r n scientific m a n f o u n d 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
turn the freedom and mobility of thoughts [Straus, 1922, p. 959]."
6This line, from Goethe's Faust il, served as title to one of Straus's 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 investigationshave, therefore,probably much less practicalapplicationthan natural
science research. But perhaps they may claim another kind of usefulness.The knowledge
• /.
they seek is not meant for masteringthe world, but rather, for unlocking It and makinga
world that is mute into one whichspeaks to us in a thousand places.The fulnessand 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). I 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.e., 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. H e felt that this disturbance plays
a more 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 c o n t a c t - - b y
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 general because he also regarded the concept of
deformation a s basic to the understanding of the neuroses and psychoses. 7

~For a comprehensivetreatment of the relevanceof Straus'anthropology to psychopathology,

as well as a summary of Straus's specificcontributions to a phenomenologicalpsychopathology,
see W. Fischer (1977).
 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
rectitude, 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 Straus's 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 w o r m 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 metapsychologieal assumption, provides an invaluable
mode of access to this positive moment that was neglected by Straus:
Here we cometo speak of Straus' relationshiptoward psychoanalysisin general. In all of
his writings his argumentation is often determined by the combat-attitude toward
psychoanalysis,in noneso stronglyas in Event and Experience. oftento the injuryof the
vision and systemof 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--t-he 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 a 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 within.
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, s 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"
(i.e., 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):
And if he has no other remedy, he will plan destruction and chaos, he will devise all sorts of
sufferings, and in the end he will carry his point! He will send a curse over the world, and as
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 is 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

sCf. Moss (1978c) for an analysis of the psychology of the family, cast in terms of the
relationship between individuality and totality.
9Cf. Moss (1978b) for an analysis of the relationships among embodiment, motility, and
experience, in light of Erwin Straus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
 ERW1N 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 flight
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
task. Straus's final articulation of man's unique destiny (Straus, 1957, 1963)
places him within the tradition of philosophy, dedicated to the rediscovery of
wonder.

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In the preceding text all works have been cited by original publication
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Geschehnis und Erlebnis, zur gleichnamigen Schrift von Erwin Straus. Monatschrifif~
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Eng, E. Locating Erwin Straus. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 1976, 7(1), 1-14.
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Jonas, H. The phenomenon of life: Toward a philosophical biology. New York: Delta, 1966.
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64 MOSS

Moss, D. M. Medard Boss and daseinanalysis. In Existential PhenomenologicalAIternatives in

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 ERWIN STRAUS AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUALITY 65

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