Today we will read and discuss an excerpt from the lecture the german philosopher Martin Heidegger gave in 1951 with the title “What is Called Thinking”. The text refers to issues relevant to the subject of today’s meeting, especially regarding brain and consciousness.

In the excerpt, Heidegger discusses the meaning of idea. The term “idea” means the representation of things somewhere inside ourselves, in the soul, the consciousness, the brain. Let us recall here the latin term translated as “idea” and “representation”: perceptio. The word is related to the verb percapere, which means to conceive, to seize. Therefore, representation is conception. In representation I perceive and conceive each thing. Representation occurs as reception, perception and conception. In principle, understanding something means conceiving and representing something inside myself. We could see this in our familiar psychiatric-psychotherapeutic practice: When we listen to a patient, we simultaneously receive his words as well as the evidence of our own observation, and we withdraw in a sort of internal laboratory where we process all this material in order to understand, that is to reach a diagnosis, an interpretation, an advice.

But each time we think, whether in science or everyday life, we consider more or less obvious that thinking is a process taking place inside ourselves, as we withdraw in the internal laboratory which is called, among other things, brain and synapses, consciousness and unconscious, psyche and psychic organ. Here the ideas of things are created. This is somehow the framework of the excerpt from Heidegger’s lecture.

Is there anyone among us who does not know what it is to form an idea? When we form an idea of something of a text if we are philologists, a work of art if we are art historians, a combustion process if we are chemists we have a representational idea of those objects.

Which means: we have conceived and understood it.

Where do we have those ideas? We have them in our head. We have them in our consciousness. We have them in our soul. We have the ideas inside ourselves, these ideas of objects.

However, the “ideas of objects” are not their images formed in an inner mirror. Initially here, in the idea, namely in the representation and conception they acquire substance and meaning, they become real.

Now it is true that a few centuries ago philosophy began to meddle in the matter, and by now has made it questionable whether the ideas inside ourselves answer to any reality at all outside ourselves. Some say yes; others, no; still others say that the matter cannot be decided anyway, all one can say is that the world that is, here, the totality of what is real is there insofar as we have an idea of it. "The world is my idea." In this sentence Schopenhauer has summed up the thought of recent philosophy. (...) Schopenhauer himself says the following about this axiom in Chapter One, Volume Two of his main work: (...) "however immeasurable and massive the world may be, yet its existence hangs by one single thin thread: and that is the given individual consciousness in which it is constituted."

Already this brief reference could make us wonder. Because it reminds us that the obvious and dominant perceptions, such as the idea of the world inside consciousness, is not some indisputable and unwavering truth, is not the certainty of a fact, such as that of e.g. the sun rising from the east and setting in the west. The worldview as “will and representation” appeared in a certain era and already today, in the postmodern society, has subsided. It reflects a diagnosis of the spirit of the modern period and remains within the limits of its significance and gravity.

Nevertheless, many times we tend to take it literally, proclaim it as a belief, and indeed, in our field, we psychologize it and speak of e.g. “internalization” as a natural process of development, such as e.g. the walking of the baby and the hair growth of the teenager. Thus, we still perceive what is called “consciousness” as a fact, as an almost anatomical or functional entity.

Given this discord among philosophers concerning what the forming of ideas is in essence, there is patently just one way out into the open. We leave the field of philosophical speculation behind us, and first of all investigate carefully and scientifically how matters really stand with the ideas that occur in living beings, especially in men and animals. Such investigations are among the concerns of psychology. Psychology is today a well-established and already extensive science, and its importance is growing year by year. But we here leave to one side the findings of concerning what it calls "ideas"; not because these findings are incorrect, let alone unimportant but because they are scientific findings. For, being scientific statements, they are already operating in a realm which for psychology, too, must remain on that other side of which we spoke before.

A famous phrase of Heidegger says: “Sciences don’t think.” What does he mean by that? Scientific results are possible only if they are based on firm presuppositions. Thus, e.g. the psychopathological examination of a psychotic patient, where his thinking and feeling are discussed, is possible only if Psychopathology has already a clear and more or less unquestionable idea of the meaning of “thinking” and “feeling”. If suddenly Psychopathology questioned itself, if it saw thinking and feeling as issues meriting question and bewilderment, it will lose the ground under its feet, it would collapse as science. So, Psychopathology, in order to exist and have results, must, in Heidegger’s sense, not think!

It is no cause for wonder, then, that within psychology it never becomes clear in any way what it is to which ideas are attributed and referred to - wit, the organism of living things, consciousness, the soul, the unconscious and all the depths and strata in which the realm of psychology is articulated. Here everything remains in question and yet, the scientific findings are correct.

Correct means consistent with their conditions. I can e.g. speak of an intelligent person, not in general, not absolutely, but according to the conditions under which I define intelligence, for example as performance on the IQ test.

So I can talk as a scientist, as a neurophysiologist, about stress. But let’s not forget that what I say as a scientist is always correct under certain conditions. Foremost I must make measurable and quantifiable what we call “stress”. That is to define it in such terms that would allow me experimental and statistical research. It is the process of the so called "operationalization". Under this premise, I can reach correct conclusions, that is conclusions which meet my conditions.

The trap can be found in a generalization, when I forget that e.g. the one found intelligent, is so only in terms of the IQ test and similar performances. This “intelligent” doesn’t refer to all the situations in his life. Similarly, when I speak of “stress”, I can only speak of the reaction and the neurophysiological changes I observe in e.g. aplysia californica, a type of slug, when I hit its tail. The distance between that and what I might refer to when I say that I have stress, would be more relevant to chaos theory.

If we nonetheless leave science aside now in dealing with the question what it is to form ideas, we do so not in the proud delusion that we have all the answers, but out of discretion inspired by a lack of knowledge.

At this point of our text, Heidegger’s speech takes a turn:

We stand outside of science. Instead we stand before a tree in bloom, for example and the tree stands before us. The tree faces us. The tree and we meet one another, as the tree stands there and we stand face to face with it. As we are in this relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are.

The tree emanates within the open field of the world.

This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of these 'ideas' buzzing about in our heads. Let us stop here for a moment, as we would to catch our breath before and after a leap. For that is what we are now, men who have leapt, out of the familiar realm of science and even, as we shall see, out of the realm of philosophy. And where have we leapt? Perhaps into an abyss? No! Rather, onto some firm soil. Some? No! But on that soil upon which we live and die, if we are honest with ourselves. A curious, indeed unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we really stand. When anything so curious as this leap becomes necessary, something must have happened that gives food for thought. Judged scientifically, of course, it remains the most inconsequential thing on earth that each of us has at some time stood facing a tree in bloom. After all, what of it? We come and stand facing a tree, before it, and the tree faces, meets us.

What happens here, that the tree stands there to face us, and we come to stand face-to-face with the tree? Where does this presentation take place, when we stand face-to-face before a tree in bloom? Does it by any chance take place in our heads? Of course many things may take place in our brain when we stand on a meadow and have standing before us a blossoming tree in all its radiance and fragrance - when we perceive it. In fact, we even have transforming and amplifying apparatus that can show the processes in our heads as brain currents, render them audible, and retrace their course in curves. We can - of course! Is there anything modern man can not do? He even can be helpful now and then, with what he can do. And he is helping everywhere with the best intentions. Man can - probably none of us have as yet the least premonition of what man will soon be able to do scientifically. But - to stay with our example - while science records the brain currents, what becomes of the tree in bloom? What becomes of the meadow? What becomes of the man - not of the brain but of the man, who may die under our hands tomorrow and be lost to us, and who at one time came to our encounter? What becomes of the face-to-face, the meeting, the seeing, the forming of the idea, in which the tree presents itself and man comes to stand face-to-face with the tree?

Therefore now “idea” not inside ourselves but with its second meaning, as standing of the one next to the other.

What becomes of the man? Many complain that doctors don’t talk, don’t explain, are in hurry etc. Perhaps we are missing that for the doctor who is focused on the brain, the heart, the intestine, the body, man is found nowhere, and cannot be found nowhere. The doctor, as a doctor, has nothing to say. As a man, he can. But not as a doctor, because, to exaggerate, he doesn’t have, and shouldn’t have a man in front of him. If he were to communicate as man-to-man, he would cease to be a doctor. This is an interesting question, whether the psychotherapist, where he opens up in a therapeutic conversation, a human conversation with his client, can be a scientist...

When Ideas are formed in this way, a variety of things happen presumably also in what Is described as the sphere of consciousness and regarded as pertaining to the soul. But does the tree stand "In our consciousness", or does It stand on the meadow? Does the meadow lie in the soul, as experience, or Is It spread out there on earth? Is the earth In our head? Or do we stand on the earth?

It will be said In rebuttal: What Is the use of such questions concerning a state of affairs which everybody will in fairness admit immediately, since it Is clear as day to all the world that we are standing on the earth and, in our example, face-to-face with a tree? But let us not sip too hastily Into this admission, let us not accept and take this "clear as day" too lightly. For we shall forfeit everything before we know It, once the sciences of physics, physiology and psychology, not to forget scientific philosophy, display the panoply of their documents and proofs to explain to us that what we see and accept is properly not a tree but in reality a void, thinly sprinkled with electric charges here and there that race hither and yonder at enormous speeds. It will not do to admit, just for the scientifically unguarded moments, so to speak, that, naturally, we are standing face to face with a tree in bloom, only to affirm the very next moment as equally obvious that this view, naturally, typifies only the naive, because pre-scientific, comprehension of things. For with that affirmation we have conceded some thing whose consequences we have hardly considered, and that is: that those sciences do in fact decide what of the tree in bloom may or may not be considered valid reality.

Freud: “In our view, the perceived phenomena should subside under the strivings which we simply assume.” e.g. the manifest content of a dream should subside under the assumed unconscious desire that gave birth to it. Relevant to this is the question raised by Dimitris Skaragas in the preface of his new book: “Is it the genes which determine human behavior and development of mental disorders?”

If Physics, Physiology, Psychology determine what applies to man as reality, what would the reality of that man be? What would his image be? It would be something like the image we see in the program of the Meeting: