Kurt Goldstein and Philosophy

It IS A Great Privilege and at the same time a dear personal satisfaction for me to extend on this occasion the New School's and its Graduate Faculty's grateful wishes to Kurt Goldstein, the revered teacher and wise friend: he is both to both, to the School and to myself. It is not altogether inappropriate—indeed, it may have a symbolical fitness—that departmental boundaries have been ignored, and it has fallen, as if by design, to a worker in a differently labeled field to pay tribute to this distinguished scholar and teacher in neurology. For as surely as Kurt Goldstein is the pride of our psychology department, as surely does he, in his intellectual approach as well as in the import of his findings, transcend the terms of a scientific speciality—demonstrating the artificiality of all such divisions precisely by what he is doing within one such division. And as surely, on the other hand, as philosophy—my “field”—often and to its detriment keeps aloof from the special sciences, as surely it for once cannot but feel affected, challenged, and enriched by the contribution which a most concrete and subject-committed competence has here been making over many decades to the cause of knowledge and understanding in general.

This is the first point of my brief commentary: Kurt Goldstein is a philosophical scientist because he is a true scientist. With no other intention than that of advancing the understanding of his particular subject, his work assumes philosophic significance and his statements have the style of philosophic statements. It is not that he “also” has a philosophical penchant and, as a kind of reprieve from the rigors of science, sometimes permits himself flights into philosophy. On the contrary, the very intimacy with concrete problems issues into philosophical dimensions, just as it was already a philosophical awareness which made the problems visible, as such, in the first place. “Method as well as theory must originate from nothing but the most concrete ev