Alfred Schütz: Sprache, Sprachpathologie und Bewußtseinsstrukturierung

This file is a single scholarly review-essay by Alfred Schütz. Its scope is Kurt Goldstein’s clinical theory of aphasia and its philosophical significance. Schütz’s central claim is that brain-injury language disorders do not merely show local failures of words or brain centers; they reveal how consciousness structures a shared world through abstraction, typification, relevance, and communicative expectation.

Nach Goldstein ist die Sprache ein Mittel, mit dessen Hilfe der einzelne die Außenwelt meistert, in ihr zurecht kommt und sich in ihr verwirklicht, und vor allem ein Mittel, das ihm ein Auskommen mit seinen Mitmenschen ermöglicht.

English translation: According to Goldstein, language is a means by which the individual masters the external world, gets along in it, and realizes himself within it, and above all a means that enables him to come to terms with his fellow human beings.

The first part reconstructs Goldstein’s organismic theory. Against atomistic language psychology and cortical localization, Schütz emphasizes that symptoms are not transparent signs of isolated damaged functions: the same outward performance may be deficit, compensation, or an apparently correct result reached abnormally. Goldstein’s decisive distinction is between concrete and abstract or categorial comportment. The concrete subject is bound to immediate objects and situations; the abstract subject can take distance, initiate action, hold possibilities together, and use symbols. This distinction gives speech pathology its theoretical force: an aphasic patient may still utter words but no longer use them as symbolic categories. Calling a knife a “Bleistiftspitzer” or “Apfelschäler” is situational pseudo-naming, not categorial naming.

Schütz then stages a philosophical convergence. Bergson’s critique of localization and account of attention to life interpret the concrete/abstract contrast as a difference in the tension of consciousness. Cassirer reads aphasia as a pathology of symbolic consciousness: if perception itself is symbolically articulated, language disorder must alter world-relation, not just speech output.

Aphasie, Agnosie und Apraxie sind eng verwandt, und bei allen dreien ist die sogenannte kategoriale Einstellung beeinträchtigt.

English translation: Aphasia, agnosia, and apraxia are closely related, and in all three the so-called categorial attitude is impaired.

Merleau-Ponty sharpens this by rejecting both physiological mechanism and intellectualism: the aphasic loses the lived unity linking body, past, future, situation, and others, so words become signs to decipher rather than a transparent medium of participation. Gurwitsch, drawing on Husserl, identifies categorial behavior with thematizing invariants; Schütz accepts the importance of this analysis but argues that the root of the problem lies earlier, in pre-predicative experience.

Husserl’s account of the Lebenswelt lets Schütz make his own conceptual move. Before explicit judgment, objects already appear within horizons of familiarity, similarity, and expectation. Passive interest selects figures from a field and relates them to prior typical experiences.

Was neu erfahren wird, ist bereits bekannt insofern, als es an ähnliche oder gleiche, vorher wahrgenommene Dinge erinnert.

English translation: What is newly experienced is already known insofar as it recalls similar or identical things previously perceived.

Section III, “Relevanz und Typifikation,” is therefore the essay’s payoff. Schütz recasts Goldstein’s “attitudes” as different relevance systems: what counts as the situation, which feature becomes typical, how far a horizon extends, and which name is appropriate all depend on relevance.

Wir wenden unser Interesse denjenigen Erfahrungen zu, die uns aus diesem oder jenem Grund für unsere jeweilige Gesamtsituation relevant erscheinen.

English translation: We direct our interest to those experiences which, for one reason or another, appear relevant to our respective overall situation.

For the normal person, who is “hell wach,” the present includes remembered pasts and anticipated futures; open possibilities of a type can guide action. In brain injury, attention to life diminishes and the specious present contracts to what is immediately within reach. Types narrow, horizons close, and names cease to function as open symbolic generalities.

Wir können die vorwissenschaftliche menschliche Sprache als einen reichhaltigen Vorrat an vorkonstituierten Typen und Merkmalen ansehen, die alle einen offenen Horizont unerforschten typischen Gehalts mit sich führen.

English translation: We may regard pre-scientific human language as a rich store of pre-constituted types and features, all of which carry with them an open horizon of unexplored typical content.

The essay’s relevance for social science lies here. Concepts such as situation, attitude, typification, relevance, symbol, communication, speech production, and understanding are not peripheral; they are constitutive of action in the social world. Schütz turns clinical pathology into a phenomenological sociology of the lifeworld: breakdowns of speech disclose the normally hidden typifications by which people communicate, recognize objects, and inhabit a common reality.