Erwin Straus and the pathic

Abstract

This paper details the significance of the ‘pathic’ mode of sensing in the work of Erwin Straus, through a consideration of its origins, etymology, and relationship with the research of his close contemporaries. The ‘pathic’ describes ‘the immediately present, sensually vivid, still pre-conceptual communication we have with appearances’. Straus came to a coherent understanding of its importance through his critique of Pavlov’s laboratory experiments on the conditioned reflex, which he then developed in phenomenological case studies where he further refined his anthropology. Not simply of relevance to the history of phenomenological psychology alone, the ‘pathic’ has an urgent contemporary implication in opposing the rise of what Straus presciently termed ‘mechanomorphic’ interpretations of human behaviour.