Kraus's Doctrine

KRAUS'S DOCTRINE (F. Kraus). The fundamental aspect of Kraus's doctrine is his struggle against a crude morphological understanding of pathological processes. Kraus advocates an energetic view of the course of processes in the organism. In higher animals there are no diseases of individual organs: every disease causes a reaction of the whole organism due to the interdependence of parts (organs, tissues) with one another in an indivisible whole personality (Person). That is why K. calls his doctrine 'sizygistics,' i.e., the doctrine of interdependencies. The personality, according to Kraus, must be regarded as a 'wholeness' and not as a sum of parts as unitas multiplex. The organism's response to irritation is not a simple consequence of the irritation, but depends on the entire biosystem as a whole. The connections and relationships of parts in the organism should be viewed from the standpoint of the laws of hydro-thermo-dynamics of modern colloid chemistry. Life is the result of the transformation of energy in a chain of biosystems, consisting of individual vital series (Vitalreihen). This system is constantly in oscillation; its regulator is the 'deep personality' — the neuro-glandular system, from which, as from condensers, oscillations emanate in the electrical tension of the system; it regulates the relationships of K- and Ca-ions, OH and H ions, and the movement of electrolytes. An individual personality cannot be considered outside the history of the development of its species, outside the laws of heredity, its genotype as a species-moving force. The basis of development is the harmony of functions in the genotype. Diseases according to K. are 'evolutionistisch-dissolutionische Storungen der Vitalreihen.' A follower of Mach and Avenarius, K. defends the position that it is not sensations that are images of things _г but that a thing is a complex of sensations. Natural science merely describes those elements _which we perceive. The matter is only which 'collocation' of fact series we select for description. There is no qualitative difference between the organic and the inorganic, the physical and the mental. The pressure of a stone on its bed is fully comparable to the 'internal pressure' (will, striving) which the 'I' experiences before an action: 'nature strives to manifest gravity just as we strive to manifest our desires _г intentions.' We use nature for our purposes just as nature uses us. Causality is also considered by Kraus in the Machian sense and is replaced by functional relationships. The joint combination of one or the other collocations (i.e., phenomena existing in one place) into a new series, a new ideational whole — this is the cause of changes, but the new combination is always the consequence of all previously given collocations. In this lies the law of evolution. The organism is a part of the coagitations (joint actions) of the entire external world. Hence the harmony between thinking and the objective world: to think is to coagitate (coagitare), i.e., to unite separate data series into a common ideational whole. What is distinguished as a separate essence, what is regarded as an isolated existence, is nothing other than a moment in the development of the whole world, a play of serial (isolating individual series from the whole world) ideas. There is no isolated 'I,' just as there are no isolated things; things and the 'I' are temporal functions of the same vital series. The whole world in its evolution is driven by the idea of universal systematic all-unity, revealing itself in the general wholeness of the correlations of the whole world (here Kraus is close to Cohen and Bergson). Objective relationships can be constructed only by means of the categories of relation and the comprehension of the general idea. Individual relationships, limited by special experience originating from individual organs of perception, are accessible to logical thinking — the function of the cortical apparatus; but logical thinking is limited only to individual moments; therefore, there is no parallelism between what is generally possible, between reality and logical thinking. The ability to encompass relationships more comprehensively belongs only to the 'deep personality' (Tiefenperson), possessing 'Ursinn' (something like Bergson's instinct), perceiving that which, at a given moment, is represented as a whole idea for all phenomena of the world, since the deep personality has as its source the general idea common to the whole world, giving the 'vegetative Stromungen' of the entire personality. Individuality is a relatively isolated 'serial idea' of the vital process; it is only an abstract concept; only the deep personality is closely connected with nature and originates from 'Schopi'ungen der Umwelt.' Life also has supra-individual reactions (racial, species), the individual is only a temporary reaction of adaptation of the species to a given time-space; the value of all existence lies only in the process of revealing the universal evolutionary world idea. Personality is thought of by him in connection with the entire cultural evolution, and individual pathology and therapy are inextricably linked with social and species therapy in the sense of contributing to the disclosure of higher ideas. Kraus is a supporter of nomological, not anthropological, overcoming of personality. All these idealistic philosophical views of Kraus are not only completely alien to materialistic world-conception, but are also clearly hostile to it. Representing some interest in its bio-physiological part in elucidating bio-chemical relationships in the organism, the doctrine of K. in general is subject to the harshest criticism from the standpoint of dialectical materialism.