Abstract
This article investigates the origins of the experiences involved in the diagnostics (detection and normative evaluation) of biological entities in image-based medical praxis. Our specific research aim presupposes a vast discussion regarding the origins of knowledge in general, but is narrowed down to the alternatives of anthropomorphism and biomorphism. Accordingly, in the subsequent chapters we will make an attempt to investigate and illustrate what holds the diagnostic experiential situation together—biological regularities, manifestation via movement, conscious synthesis, causal categories, or something else. We argue that as long as knowledge originates out of practices, a promising way forward is to oscillate between the prominent although controversial ideas of the history of philosophy and observations of concrete human practices, such as, in our chosen example, image-based medical diagnostics of biological pathologies. Although a number of thinkers are involved in the discussion, Aristotle and Husserl are most important here as the representatives of historical paradigms on the matter. The body in this research was not taken solely as the physical entity (Körper) but rather as a transcendental, constitutive structure where diagnostic and biological processes synchronize in teleological movement (Leib). However, philosophical speculations are illustrated by actual radiograms, the interpretation of which brings us back to the aforementioned question of primacy regarding cognition.
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Notes
It is interesting to note that a great many radiologists have photography as their true hobby.
Ryle’s correlation between “ways of” and “motivation for” can also be fruitfully approached through Shutz’s terms of “in-order-to” and “because-of”.
The question of whether previous experience plays a role has been particularly controversial. On the one hand, structuralists like Wundt argued that past experience was the sole determinant of which region of the visual field was perceived as figure. On the other hand, Gestalt psychologists such as Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler considered the structuralist position untenable because it drew too heavily on memory to be useful for real-time perception. They also pointed out that novel objects can be perceived easily, which is inconsistent with a theory in which only past experience causes perceptual organization.
Is an image something more than the information it conveys? F. Kittler (1997) states that any medium can be translated into another, hence the very concept of “medium” loses its meaning. However, if we show how human perceptual capacities matter here, that is that an image becomes informative also due to the power it has to affect us perceptually, its content cannot be calculated independently of our embodied engagement with the image itself.
See in this regard an impressive analysis of Ernst Gombrich’s reflections on the “work of hand” (Moser-Ernst, 2018).
For Descartes, animals act as if they had a certain inwardness, a certain subjectivity, but ultimately they are mere automatons. They have inwardness just “as if”, because really only humans have it, and humans extend subjectivity to animals by way of animacy. In other words, Descartes’ idea of the animal automaton prompted him to admit of only one exception to the universal rule of lifeless matter, i.e. the being whose inwardness is directly given to him, and that is I myself in my own lived experience. Thus, life is reduced to consciousness here.
Jonas’ interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as “care” and its mortality, states that differently from Husserl’s “pure consciousness” it presupposes the body with all its materiality.
For example, biology, as universal, is about the invariants of life, and not just human or earthly life. In this sense, “transcendental” pertains to any organism that is embedded and enacts its lifeworld.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that sight and touch belong to the same order of perception (making little difference between “tactile palpation” and “palpation with the look”) and that they function in similar ways.
A kind of basic minimalism for Aristotle is the sign of reflection as with heavenly bodies, which are defined only by regularities of movement. Radiology images, on the other hand, are highly minimalist.
Although Aristotle should be criticized in this context for not taking an evolutionary approach to the frames of motion that can change, evolve. Secondly, in movement one does not grasp a static essence; movement does not presuppose a constituting entity, but constitutes it.
Aristotle and Locke (followed by Husserl) each originated two different approaches to the problem of time that have shaped the history of the concept of time (Gallagher, 2011). Whereas Aristotle orients his reflection on time towards nature, with a clear emphasis on what it is for beings to be in time, Locke orients his reflection towards subjectivity, in its essential manifestation as consciousness, with a clear accent on what it is for consciousness itself to be in and of time. For Aristotle, time “follows” movement while the Husserlian understanding of time presupposes that successive objects (e.g. notes in a melody) can only be represented as successive if apprehended simultaneously within a single act of consciousness.
To it we can add a special mode of observation of biological processes enabled by the radiology imaging.
Aristotle makes a distinction between the whole (πãν) considered as aggregate—where the arrangement of the parts is indifferent as to the nature of the thing, as happens for example, stream of water, and the whole meant as óλoν—in which the arrangement of parts directly affects the nature of the thing, for example, melody.
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Briedis, M. Embodied cognition and the imaging of bio-pathologies: the question of experiential primacy in detecting diagnostic phenomena. HPLS 46, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00609-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00609-7