GA20:15-16 – consciência

Bewusstsein

The natural sciences of that time were defined by the great tradition of Galileo and Newton  . Most notably, the domain of the natural sciences was expanding into the physiological and biological sphere. Thus, on the heels of the physiological, psychic life entered into the horizon of inquiry of the natural sciences. It entered first through those areas most closely associated with the physiological, through life as it expresses itself in the sense organs. To the extent that psychic life is explored by means of the methods of natural science, such an exploration is a psychology of the senses, sensation, and perception, and is intimately associated with physiology. Psychology became physiological psychology, as Wundt’s major work shows. Here domains were found in which even psychic life, mind, could be disclosed by the investigative means of natural science. One should also keep in mind that the task of psychology then, under the influence of British empiricism (and going back to Descartes  ) was conceived as a science of CONSCIOUSNESS [Wissenschaft vom Bewusstsein]. In the middle ages and in Greek philosophy, the whole man was still seen; inner psychic life, what we now so readily call CONSCIOUSNESS, was apprehended in a natural experience which was not regarded as an inner perception and so set off from an outer one. Since Descartes   the concept of psychology, in general the science of the psychic, is altered in a characteristic manner. The science of the mental [Wissenschaft vom Geistigen], of reason [Vernunft], is a science of CONSCIOUSNESS [Bewußtseinswissenschaft], a science which arrives at its object in what is called inner experience. Even for physiological psychology the approach to the theme of psychology is from the start taken for granted. Its conception was given a purely external formulation by way of a contrast: not a science of the soul as a substance but of the psychic manifestations of that which gives itself in inner experience. Characteristically, the natural sciences, in their methodological import, here entered into a domain which was traditionally reserved for philosophy. The tendency of a scientific psychology is to transpose itself into the domain of philosophy itself, indeed even to become, in the course of further development, the basic science of philosophy itself. GA20EN   §4