Language, Language Disturbances, and the Texture of Consciousness

Alfred Schütz’s essay, first published in 1950 and republished in English in 1967, brings Kurt Goldstein’s investigations of aphasia into dialogue with philosophical accounts of consciousness. Moving from neurological findings to phenomenological interpretation, Schütz asks whether language disturbances are adequately explained as a loss of abstract thought. His alternative emphasizes the temporal horizons, typifications, and selective interests that organize ordinary experience.

Goldstein’s organismic approach interprets symptoms within the patient’s overall behavior, including protective adaptations to injury. Schütz highlights the qualitative character of this transformation:

Impairment does not mean simply a disturbance of mental capacity in general but involves a disturbance in a qualitative way, a personality change.

This approach challenges the assignment of isolated linguistic faculties to discrete brain regions. Different consequences of damage in different locations do not establish a corresponding localization of normal performances.

Yet this fact permits only the conclusion that separate parts contribute differently to the function of the brain, not that separate parts of the cortex are related to separate functions.

Goldstein instead understands speech through the organism’s relation to its situation. His distinction between concrete and abstract attitudes contrasts dependence on immediate circumstances with the capacity to change perspectives, entertain possibilities, and employ categories. A patient may identify a knife as an apple parer or pencil sharpener according to its current use, yet fail to name it as a knife. Goldstein interprets this as a disturbance of categorial activity rather than simply a missing verbal memory. Schütz takes the distinction seriously while reserving judgment:

In view of the importance of the distinction between concrete and abstract attitudes, we shall have to examine their legitimacy later in our discussion.

The philosophical comparisons clarify what is at stake. Bergson explains disturbances through altered attention to life and tensions of consciousness rather than destroyed stores of word-images. Cassirer interprets aphasia as damage to symbolic organization extending beyond speech into perception. Merleau-Ponty challenges the assumption that ordinary understanding depends on categorical subsumption, stressing embodied familiarity and intentional connections among present experience, past, future, and human surroundings. Gurwitsch links Goldstein’s findings to ideation: patients struggle to disengage invariant structures from particular instances and explore possible variations.

Schütz questions whether ideation supplies the appropriate explanatory level. Drawing on Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil, he distinguishes prepredicative receptivity, predicative judgment, and conceptual generalization. Familiarity with types already operates before explicit judgments or universal concepts. Recognizing a dog involves expectations about behavior and unseen characteristics without requiring a judgment that the animal exemplifies a universal. Such empirical types remain open to correction through further experience.

This account shifts the problem toward prescientific typification, but an appeal to interest alone does not explain why one object or characteristic becomes significant in a particular situation. Schütz’s answer centers on systems of relevance. What Goldstein describes as concrete and abstract attitudes may express different principles for selecting objects, noticing traits, and exploring horizons of possible experience. The contrast need not signify the simple presence or absence of abstraction.

Schütz consequently proposes that brain injury can narrow the temporal field through which experience acquires significance. Ordinary practical situations connect present perceptions with remembered precedents and anticipated possibilities. In extreme disturbance, immediate experience and its nearby temporal horizons may remain while more remote recollection and anticipation cease to organize conduct. Linguistic impairment would then concern the texture of consciousness, not merely access to words.

Language preserves constituted types together with possibilities for further exploration. Naming connects an object encountered now with earlier experience and prospective uses, but relevance determines how far classification needs to proceed. Identifying an Irish setter ordinarily requires no further classification as an object of the external world. Similarly, the patient’s immediate situation may offer no reason to move from apple parer to knife; alternatively, a name may have become attached to an isolated experience and lost its wider horizon. Schütz presents these explanations as hypotheses. Their contribution is to connect language and symbolic understanding with the temporal and situational organization of everyday knowledge.