Friedrich Edelhäuser: Wahrnehmen und Bewegen – Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Bewegungslehre

Abstract

How does a human being move? Are his actions an expression of his primary motor cerebral cortex or do they reflect the intentions of a human individuality? How do we see? Are we passive recipients or do we have to actively shape our seeing? What results from approaching these questions by bringing together scientific and phenomenological-philosophical insights? Can guiding viewpoints for person-centeredmedicine be gained from this? These questions are illuminated comprehensively and in many ways in the newly published book “Wahrnehmen und Bewegen – Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Bewegungslehre” (Perceiving and Moving Foundations of a General Theory of Movement) by Friedrich Edelhäuser. In doing so, the author takes us to astonishing phenomena, to reflections worth considering, and to profound questions. Using the example of looking at a mountain landscape, the first phenomena of seeing are looked at: our gaze goes inwardly through the picture, searching for various objects and contours and arranging the details into a meaningful overall context. What at first appears to be fixed thus becomes experienceable as a process. In the “objectifying” view of physiology, vision is characterized as a process akin to a camera in which light passes through a lens onto the retina and then leads to electrochemical nervous processes. In this process, the qualitative perceptions melt down into a measurable but qualityless process. Vision thus becomes an example of the stimulus-response sequence, in which an external sensory stimulus becomes electrochemical processes inside, i.e. in the brain, and is answered with a reaction. Thereby not only the quality of the perceived disappears, but also the perceiving person. In the following, this socalled third-person-perspective as an objectifying approach is supplemented by introspection, the first-personperspective. In chapter 5 “perceiving and moving” the process of seeing is examined more closely. In doing so, one becomes aware of the fact that seeing includes an inner scanning of the contour to be perceived. This unconscious movement of the eyeballs can be represented technically and shows individual movement patterns, similar to gait or handwriting. If this movement is suppressed, the perceived blurs to a gray-in-gray for a short time due to the lack of contrast. During further analysis, it is noticeable that one is not only aligned to the object to be seen with one's eye muscles, but with one's entire head and body posture. Only this self-movementmakes seeing possible. Something similar can be shown for hearing and other sensory modalities. Looking back at the mountain landscape, it becomes clear that there is a circular relationship, the perception of the image and the contours that can be found in it are guiding the scanningmovements of the eye, which in turn are conditions for what is to be seen. Thus, there is no monocausal relationship with temporal succession, but a mutually dependent one. In chapter 6 the Gestalt circle of W. V. Weizsäcker is introduced and the mutual enabling of perceiving and moving is examined in more detail. The organism-environment relationship is constituted in an encompassing, circular process of perception andmovement. Intentional attention is now examined as a further object of investigation. On the basis of optical examples, in which one can see different things in the same form context depending on intention (e.g. either a transparent cube oriented to the front or to the back), it becomes clear that perception is not something simply given or depicted, but something given up, something produced by a directed, intentional act of perception. This intentional attention influences my seeing in different ways, so it can change between center and periphery, between foreground and back-