The man who mistook his wife for a hat Read Online Free PDF

great musicality. I think that music, for him, had taken the place of image. He had no body-image, he had body-music: this is why he could move and act as fluently as he did, but came to a total confused stop if the 'inner music' stopped. And equally with the outside, the world … *
       In The World as Representation and Will, Schopenhauer speaks of music as 'pure will'. How fascinated he would have been by Dr P., a man who had wholly lost the world as representation, but wholly preserved it as music or will.
       And this, mercifully, held to the end-for despite the gradual
       *Thus, as I learned later from his wife, though he could not recognise his students if they sat still, if they were merely 'images', he might suddenly recognise them if they moved. 'That's Karl,' he would cry. '1 know his movements, his body-music'
       advance of his disease (a massive tumour or degenerative process in the visual parts of his brain) Dr P. lived and taught music to the last days of his life.
        Postscript
       How should one interpret Dr P.'s peculiar inability to interpret, to judge, a glove as a glove? Manifestly, here, he could not make a cognitive judgment, though he was prolific in the production of cognitive hypotheses. A judgment is intuitive, personal, comprehensive, and concrete-we 'see' how things stand, in relation to one another and oneself. It was precisely this setting, this relating, that Dr P. lacked (though his judging, in all other spheres, was prompt and normal). Was this due to lack of visual information, or faulty processing of visual information? (This would be the explanation given by a classical, schematic neurology.) Or was there something amiss in Dr P.'s attitude, so that he could not relate what he saw to himself?
       These explanations, or modes of explanation, are not mutually exclusive-being in different modes they could coexist and both be true. And this is acknowledged, implicitly or explicitly, in classical neurology: implicitly, by Macrae, when he finds the explanation of defective schemata, or defective visual processing and integration, inadequate; explicitly, by Goldstein, when he speaks of 'abstract attitude'. But abstract attitude, which allows 'categorisation', also misses the mark with Dr P.-and, perhaps, with the concept of'judgment' in general. For Dr P. had abstract attitude- indeed, nothing else. And it was precisely this, his absurd ab-stractness of attitude-absurd because unleavened with anything else-which rendered him incapable of perceiving identity, or particulars, rendered him incapable of judgment.
       Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of 'judgment'-and yet it is precisely the downfall of judgment (whether in specific realms, as with Dr P., or more generally, as in patients with Korsakov's or frontal-lobe syndromes-see below, Chapters Twelve and Thirteen) which constitutes the essence of so many neuropsychological disorders.
       Judgment and identity may be casualties-but neuropsychology never speaks of them.
       And yet, whether in a philosophic sense (Kant's sense), or an empirical and evolutionary sense, judgment is the most important faculty we have. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without 'abstract attitude' but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind-yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumptions, or the evolution, of neurology itself. For classical neurology (like classical physics) has always been mechanical-from Hughlings Jackson's mechanical analogies to the computer analogies of today.
       Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer-everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as