Rationality within Modern Psychological Theory: Integrating Philosophy and Empirical Science 1498519709, 9781498519700

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Rationality within Modern Psychological Theory

Rationality within Modern Psychological Theory Integrating Philosophy and Empirical Science James A. Harold

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harold, James A., author. Title: Rationality within modern psychological theory : integrating philosophy and empirical science / James A. Harold. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016007517 (print) | LCCN 2016013801 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498519700 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498519717 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Psychology--Philosophy. | Psychologism. Classification: LCC BF38 .H37 2016 (print) | LCC BF38 (ebook) | DDC 150.1--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007517 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my wonderful parents. Thank you.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1 Delimiting and Defining Terms 2 Methods of Psychological Investigation: Introducing Lateral Self-Presence 3 The Objective and Transcendent Dimensions of Human Nature 4 Negative Psychology: The Influence of Rationality on Psyche 5 Going Beyond Empiricism: The Subjective and Bodily Dimensions of Psychology 6 Going Beyond Empiricism: The Objective and Rational Dimensions of Psychology 7 Positive Psychology: Seligman’s Contribution 8 The Conscious Self with Its Powers of Intellect, Will, and Heart 9 Skinner on Freedom and Causality 10 How a Broad Metaphysical Context Benefits Psychology 11 Psychologism: Reducing Logos to Psyche 12 The Psychology of Authenticity and Self-Fulfillment 13 Nothing Secret, Nothing Hidden: The Religious Dimension of Logos

1 17 27 39 61 77 89 95 109 121 135 155 173

Selected Bibliography

187

Index

191

About the Author

195 vii

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Stephen Schwarz and Ronda Chervin, for your critical reads and for all the (many) suggestions. These were wonderful, generous deeds performed out of sheer friendship. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen and Elisabeth Kramp, for your critical reads. Thank you, Kathy Giannamore, for your generosity formatting the text. Thanks to Amy King and Lexington Books for your kindness and help. Thanks also to John Crosby, Josef Seifert, and Damian Fedoryka for your mentoring and example. Your insights are everywhere in the text. I could not cite them all, so I am forced to take credit for them myself. Thank you for your teaching, your example, and your encouragement. I think I have some insight into the way Plato thought of his mentor, Socrates, with respect to my own wonderful mentors and professors. Thank you, Professor Paul Vitz, for looking over the text and for your comments: a kindness to a perfect stranger. Finally, thank you, Teresa, for all the time stretching now well past eight years—when I thought it would take two—for this project to be completed. Thank you.

ix

Chapter One

Delimiting and Defining Terms

Are we to take the rational dimensions of human nature seriously, or explain them in terms of nonrational foundations within the human psyche? Perhaps one reason for the tendency to do the latter is because studies on the nonrational are more amenable to the scientific, empirical method, while nonreductionistic principles of rationality—such as with the notions of intelligibility, logos, intelligence, truth, freedom, value, morality, etc.—require analyses that are on an essentially different level. For example, while investigations into psychopathology are more amenable to a scientific, causal, or at least correlational approach, freedom is not. Genuine free acts—if they exist—are typically understood to refer to first or uncaused causes, while empirical or natural sciences only study caused causes. The discipline that especially investigates freedom and the wider dimensions of rationality is philosophy. Thus, if it is true that rationality is real and irreducible to either sublimation or rationalism, psychology needs to have an eye for this dimension of human nature, and use philosophy as a component toward that understanding. The question, of course, is whether rationality is real and irreducible to psyche. I hope in this first chapter to give some insight into this claim, although the full argument will be the work of the text. BEGINNING AT THE BEGINNING Every science has to start somewhere. In contemporary psychology a frequent starting point is the claim that psychology is an empirical science. Another starting point, at least in Carl Rogers’s client-centered psychology and perhaps more broadly in humanistic psychology in general, is the preciousness of each human being. 1

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One of the principle tasks of a philosophy of psychology is to investigate the nature and adequacy of such claimed starting points. For example, when psychologists assert that psychology is an empirical science do they mean that it is an exclusively empirical science, or do they mean that it is one important, crucial method among other methods? That the empirical dimension is centrally important for psychology seems so obviously true as to be a mere truism. For how can one classify the various kinds of mental disorders or learning disabilities without first observing them? How can one have a developmental psychology or a psychology of perception without making actual observations? It is, however, one thing to assert that psychology is predominantly an empirical science, and another to simply assert empiricism as an exclusive starting point, with other data being at least epistemologically suspect, if not formally illegitimate. Consider again the two starting points for psychology mentioned above: that psychology is an empirical science and the preciousness of the human person. The second assertion is clearly not an empirical assertion at all, insofar as the datum of intrinsic preciousness (or value) possesses none of the empirical qualities found in material beings. For, after all, the intrinsic value of any individual being does not have a particular weight or length. It is not gaseous or solid, rectangular or circular, etc. No material predicate seems applicable to it. Yet one should think long and hard about jettisoning this quality from psychology. For it seems self-evident that the intrinsic preciousness of a person objectively ranks higher than an insect. How could such a statement be empirically challenged or disproved? Furthermore, if we assume the radical empirical position that the only source of psychological investigation is sense observation, how could that claim be empirically justified? Oddly enough, the claim that psychology is an exclusively empirical science is just as nonempirical as the assertion claiming the value of human persons. One can deal with the tension between empirical and nonempirical starting points by either giving up the absolutist claim that psychology is an exclusively empirical science or by giving up the notion of intrinsic value. Naturally one could give up empiricism without giving up the obvious truth of the central importance of empirical observation for the science of psychology. If the data of reality are all neutral, empirical facts, then all moral judgments become impossible. If, in contrast, morality really is part of the objective furniture of the world, in part constituting a rational order, then the presupposition of value could provide a particularly rich context for psychological study, insofar as we can then come to see how various deformations of value are often explained by psychological factors. And then we can as well investigate how these deformations can impede human flourishing.

Delimiting and Defining Terms

3

Intrinsic preciousness may not be the only nonempirical quality important for psychology. There are at least two other kinds of nonempirical facts that are crucial for the science of psychology. 1. There are certain formal or structural, nonempirical presuppositions, such as the first principles of being: of noncontradiction, identity, and intelligibility. These principles are instances of broad, structural, or formal metaphysical principles applying not only to psychology, but also to all the other sciences (and implicitly to our lived experience) as well. All the sciences have the right to presuppose them. If they are denied, the basic rationality of the objects of scientific study become quickly undermined, as can be seen with Carl Jung’s occasional turn from psychology to magic (chapter 10). 2. We will later investigate the inner world of conscious experience, where a person is present to one’s self as a subject who experiences phenomena. Certainly our bodies are present as sensible objects over against our conscious life. In fact, our experience of the whole material world is given to us in this way: as objects. It is only our own conscious self that is given to us as subject. If it is true that our conscious self is given to us in an essentially different way from that of the outside world (and our bodies), then we have another important nonempirical source of experience for psychology. Concerning the first point—the formal, structural presuppositions—the argument of this text will be that psychology has the right to explicitly presuppose them, even if they lack an empirical justification. It is, after all, not psychology’s business to investigate every object of study, including those philosophical principles and objects that psychology has a right to presuppose. But if psychology has the right to presuppose this formal dimension (including also the rules of logic and number relations), perhaps it can rightly accept the qualitative dimension—including intrinsic values—as well. One central argument of this book is that psychology needs to respect these nonempirical dimensions, as empirical psychology should not usurp or ignore its own legitimate philosophical foundation. To do so could lead to a crippling of the ability to nonarbitrarily interpret psychological, empirical data. For example, at the end of his life B. F. Skinner admitted, “most scientific accounts of human behavior remain a matter of interpretation.” 1 Perhaps questions about interpretation are ultimately intractable and unanswerable. Perhaps we should even admit that within empirical science the factual givens of empirical data are insufficient, and that theorists inevitably have to pragmatically “make stuff up” with respect to the crucially important formal, nonempirical dimensions of their sciences. Or perhaps these nonem-

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pirical realities reveal other methods of investigation that could help fill in important theoretical gaps within psychology and in the natural sciences. DELIMITING AND DEFINING PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY Since one of the specialties of philosophers is their desire to start “from the beginning,” it seems appropriate to begin with the term “psychology.” Etymologically, its root words are psyche and logos, meaning of course “the science of the soul.” Much of what follows will be a sustained reflection on both realities signified by these terms. I will also use the term “psychology” especially from the point of view of one seminal thinker representing each of the three classical branches of psychology: Sigmund Freud for psychoanalysis, B. F. Skinner for behaviorism, and Carl Rogers for humanistic psychology, while of course granting major variations within each of these traditions. Emphasis on these representational thinkers will make my project manageable. Naturally, I will feel free to bring in other influential figures from the history of psychology as well, with a particular focus on Martin Seligman, Victor Frankl, William James, and Carl Jung. Since this text will include philosophical reflections on rationality and psychology, it is helpful to reflect on the kind of philosophy I will use. Here I will employ philosophical reasoning not from the point of view of certain representational thinkers, but rather from a specific viewpoint of philosophical realism. By “realism” I mean an approach and ideal of “hands off,” of letting the object “speak” as opposed to superimposing—as far as possible— my own ideas and agenda upon the object. A realist wants to know reality as it is in itself. A realist philosophical approach has a tremendous advantage for psychology, because so many psychological problems are identified insofar as they fall away from an adequate realization of reality, as rationality is an the obvious measure of irrationality. But if human beings are inherently incapable of achieving an adequate relation to reality, then using this measure becomes impossible, and irrationality becomes the only norm. The central idea of realism is that some realities give evidence for being “mind independent” and that human persons can—to some extent—know these realities, with one obvious example being other persons. It seems clearly evident that personal beings present themselves to us in our experience as not being dependent on our conscious experience of thinking them. In fact, every person not only exists, but also substantially exists in the sense of existing-in-themselves as independent centers of conscious life.

Delimiting and Defining Terms

5

Other kinds of mind-independent realities include certain essential qualities and properties of such beings, such as with a person’s intrinsic value. I no more give you value than you do me, otherwise your value could be withheld by me, and vice versa. And there may also be principles and essence structures—such as principle of noncontradiction and the general essence of justice—that are meanings-in-themselves, constituted in their ideal being as independent of all human thinking. Realism thus claims that substances (like persons), inherent properties of things (like values), and universal essence structures (like justice) can be known to have reality-in-themselves independent of being constituted by human thinking. All three kinds of realities in their elemental nature and existence help constitute the factual data of both our lived experience and of reality. Furthermore, it is quite possible for someone like me to be a realist and yet also admit to mind-dependent realities. In this text I will focus on three main kinds of mind-dependent realities. The first refers to theories that attempt to explain some aspect of reality, while inevitably going beyond their factual basis. Theories inevitably go beyond facts, as everyone knows, but that does not mean we can simply dispense from facts. Otherwise we cannot distinguish utterly flimsy and unconvincing theories (such as explanations justifying astrology) from those being well established by strong factual evidence. Naturally, the greater the flimsiness of the theory, the more one is rightly inclined to look for a psychological explanation of why someone accepts it. If a theory is not supported by facts, why is it believed? Two other kinds of mind-dependent realities are those not as much concerned with theory as with perception: appearances and illusions. There are certain things that present themselves to us in our lived experience as having the being of appearances. Appearances are neither completely mind-independent nor mind-dependent and are instead a combination of both, such as with the qualities of fast and slow, big and small, colors and sounds, and ancientness and foreignness. For example, while most Americans experience the objective reality of the Chinese culture as foreign, it is obviously not intrinsically foreign in itself, but rather foreign only in relation to the subjectivity of others, such as to those not Chinese. Notice too that the subjective dimension of foreignness—together with all the other kinds of appearances—is experienced without any further “claim” for its being anything more than just an appearance. They present themselves as nothing more than subjective aspects of things. While no one thinks of the Chinese culture as intrinsically foreign, with persons there really is experienced a claim to be something more than mere subjective aspects. This means that another person given to us in experience cannot really have the being of an appearance because persons by their very nature essentially make a claim to objectivity.

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Chapter 1

Besides appearances, there are also illusions, such as dream objects that are completely mind-dependent. They only exist at the mercy of persons experiencing them, as their being is wholly constituted subjectively by someone’s conscious experience. In that respect they are utterly different from things-in-themselves, which lack any subjective contribution to their being. However, both beings-in-themselves and illusory objects are similar in that both are experienced as making a claim to objectivity, with the claim in the first case being fulfilled and in the second case not fulfilled. Thus an experience of a person can have the being of a thing-in-itself or the being of an illusion (such as when someone dreams of another person)—insofar as both things-in-themselves and illusions make claims to objectivity—but it can never have the being of a mere appearance. The fact that illusions make an unfounded claim to objectivity is what makes them dangerous. In contrast, since appearances—like ancientness and foreignness—do not make any objective claim to being fully objective properties of things, they are of no particular threat to any rational order. Applying these distinctions to my own philosophical approach, my aim is to find principles that are mind-independent in the sense of being fully objective to me (us) and to my (our) conscious life. If I encounter mind-dependent realities I want to be able to identify them properly—whether they are theories, appearances, or illusions—and not confuse them with things having a being or meaning in-themselves. Not only is my approach realist—in the sense that my thinking is measured by reality instead of visa versa—it is also phenomenological. The central idea of all phenomenology is Edmund Husserl’s battle cry for philosophers to go “back to the things themselves,” that is, to be explicitly nourished by what is experientially given as opposed to merely asserting skewed abstractions. Also within phenomenology, there is a very broad distinction between what we can call “descriptive” and “essentialist” approaches. One example of a descriptive phenomenological approach would be the writings of JeanPaul Sartre, who was an excellent observer of inner psychological states. While granting the obvious importance of descriptive analyses for psychology, my own approach will be less descriptive than essentialist. The core idea here is that existing things possess individual as well as general natures or essences that go beyond our devising, and in some cases may be beyond all possible devising. Thus, for example, not only do individual persons possess their own being, there is also a universal essence or nature of personhood. Philosophy is especially interested in unfolding the universal essence of what it means to be a person. Psychology needs to study empirical, psychological facts about persons, but these facts should (and inevitably do) presuppose universal, essentialist relations as well, such as with humanist psychology’s claim that persons

Delimiting and Defining Terms

7

possess an intrinsic preciousness, or when Freud claims that humans are beings do not in principle possess free will. That this realist approach involves an ideal—whereby I attempt to get at objective essence structures and individual, really-existing things as they are in themselves—does not mean I am always successful in achieving it. There are all kinds of perceptual, psychological, social, and moral factors that can lead me (and others) astray. Instead of looking at reality in some straightforward way, I could neurotically still be interpreting social situations in terms that only applied in my youth. I can also be individually blinded by greed or pride, or by some socially caused value blindness (such as a belief in slavery, especially in previous centuries). I can confuse an empty or skewed conceptual abstraction of a thing for its full, three-dimensional reality, exclusively interpreting the latter only in terms of the former. Also, even if in principle I can know some things as they are in themselves does not mean in some particular case I can’t confuse a thing with how it appears to me, such as when I confuse a blue haze on the horizon from a distance with a low-lying mountain. Just because things-in-themselves (for example, mountains) are mind-independent realities does not mean that their respective appearances (such as their blue color and small size, seen from far away) are similarly mind-independent. I can even confuse a thing-in-itself with a mere illusion (for example, a real versus a merely dreamed person). In fact, it is precisely those factors that blind us to grasping things as they really are that are of particular interest to psychology, both to a psychology of perception as well as to psychopathology. Thus, philosophical realism can go hand in hand with an analysis of psychological blindness and neurosis, insofar as the task of correctly identifying an error in perception or a neurotic or psychotic interpretation involves a comparison relation to truth. For how can I correctly identify blindness as blind, except in a relation to actual seeing? THE PRAGMATISM OF WILLIAM JAMES AND REALISM Perhaps the most important founder of American psychology is the pragmatist William James, who no doubt would disagree with the above analysis. His position is best understood in a direct contrast to atomistic philosophers, such as David Hume and John Locke, who maintain that experience is one of sensory bits that are strung together by association to form conscious experience. James goes in the opposite direction, whereby original experience is not of bits but of undifferentiated wholes that need to be sliced up by some psychological principle of order. The principle explaining how, as C. E. Joad puts it, “we carve out of the flux of reality the facts that interest us” is that of “emotional satisfaction.” 2 Thus James states, “‘The true,’ to put it very brief-

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Chapter 1

ly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” 3 Kurt Danziger reflects this pragmatist influence when he abandons the expectation of knowing things as they are in themselves; “What research produces is an artifactual empirical order whose relationship to the natural order is problematical. . . . If we want to ground assertions about the relationship between the two [empirical and natural] orders in anything other than blind faith, we have to begin by recognizing that the empirical order is first of all a construction, a product of rule governed intervention in some natural process.” 4 What makes the above statements intelligible is to identify the link between pragmatism and idealism. James’s pragmatism implies idealism whereby we can only know our own ideas, and thus we cannot know things as they are in themselves. Reality as it is in itself is undifferentiated or featureless, and therefore unknowable. We only really know what something is when we pragmatically “carve out” facts from this undifferentiated reality by the principle of “emotional satisfaction.” Knowledge is therefore inevitably and inextricably dependent on our likes and dislikes. In the above section I mentioned some of the various ways in which our perception and thinking really are mind-dependent. But I also differed from James (and Danziger) by thinking that we can often know—and should continually strive to know ever more fully—what is authentically given to us in experience as mind-independent from what is merely posited by us. The possibility of correctly making that distinction is why we need to work on correctly identifying the difference between facts (which we discover) and theories (which we posit), without reducing the former to the latter, as theories need to be grounded on factual evidence. We also need to identify our own prejudices and errors, a work presupposing that in principle we really can know reality as it is in itself. One central problem with James’s position is that some phenomena really are clearly given—not merely as undifferentiated from everything else, but distinctly as mind-independent realities, such as with our experience of other persons. In fact, to view other persons exclusively from James’s pragmatic perspective of “emotional satisfaction” is to radically misperceive them, as I ought to see them from the point of view of respect and love, as opposed to merely being pragmatic objects of use. Furthermore, many interesting psychological facts go undetected if we cannot in principle differentiate what is given in experience from what people interject into experience. For instance, if a person only gives importance to things—as one inevitable consequence of James’s pragmatism—then the discovery of intrinsic value becomes impossible, as everything important then becomes superimposed instead of discovered by us. This view then undercuts any psychological analysis of the various kinds of deformations of

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intrinsic value, as we shall ourselves investigate later with the phenomena of ressentiment and moral substitutes. For one can identify a substitute as a substitute only in relation to authentic moral value. For example, if there is a divergence between an obvious given of reality—such as the intrinsic preciousness of all human beings and, say, someone’s racist refusal to acknowledge that preciousness—we have the stuff of a possible psychological investigation. Is there a psychological root, perhaps stemming from some kind of inferiority complex, explaining this kind of pride? All this grants the influence psychologists see in the various ways we falsely interpret situations. But the right response to this real danger is intellectual honesty, not the cynicism and solipsism that comes from denying differentiated, pre-given reality that really can be known. THE PSYCHE The “psyche” refers to the subjective dimension of our psychic life, which is open to either a wider or narrower meaning. The wider meaning refers to one’s whole inner, conscious life, including both one’s instinctual life that is distinct from and “below” the personal self, as well as to the higher, uniquely personal dimension that is ordered to rationality. The narrower meaning refers to the realm of instincts, needs, defense mechanisms, repressions, compulsions, etc., that make up our “lower” psychological life. This second, narrower, sense is the more modern meaning of “psyche,” concerning only the nonrational and irrational dimensions of human nature and excluding the personal self. This realm is “below” the personal in the sense that one should be the master of one’s own instincts and passions, especially when they go against right reason, as opposed to being mastered by them. The psyche in this sense ought not to dominate the personal self. In this text I will typically use this term in its modern sense. When speaking of the contrast between the personal self and the psyche (in its narrower sense), I do not mean to suggest any radical divorce between what are in fact two dimensions or poles of human nature. It is granted that the psyche is also part of human nature, just as with the uniquely personal dimension. The specifically personal pole is, however, more central to human nature than the psyche. To show this, consider a person who on the basis of counseling acquires insight into his own emotional immaturity. He recognizes it as perhaps one fault among others, and even as a source of other faults, but he may also feel that he should not be identified with this or with his other faults. He could reasonably say, “I am not my faults. Please don’t identify me with them.” Of course there is an obvious sense in which he is not correct, insofar as his faults really are his. But there is also one important sense in which he is

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correct, insofar as we can speak of a deeper core of the person that is more centrally his (chapter 13) than even his faults, which refers to this personal dimension. The reality of the psychological sphere seems uncontroversial. The question is, how is it possible for the psyche to be “below” the personal self when (at times) it can dominate the ego? To answer this question let us consider the relationship between the personal self and the ego. THE PERSONAL SELF AND THE EGO Could one say that the personal self is analogous to the Freudian idea of the ego? This comparison is misleading, insofar as the “personal self” implies a personal life (chapter 3) that is completely missing in Freud, for what especially characterizes the Freudian ego is passivity. Of course the reality signified by the ego can be reactive from without, as any secondary cause can transmit impulses received to other entities. The ego can also instinctively respond to phenomena, as instincts determine the activity of the ego from within. It is just that the ego cannot freely act out of itself in the sense of being a first cause. Insofar as Freud denies personal freedom, the result is that the ego is seen as merely the passive victim of external (forces in nature) and internal causes (the id and superego). Of course there are also intermittent times in which the personal self is passive. What Freud means by “ego,” however, is something more. He means that the ego is by its very nature passive. Passivity is the central, dominant, and even necessary feature of human nature. Thus one can distinguish two senses of the term “ego”: the first is Freud’s sense, as he maintains that the self is completely reducible to ego (together with id and superego). The second sense refers to a temporary or even a dominant trait of certain personalities, of those who will not (as with stunted, fixated adults) or cannot yet (as with small children) take possession of themselves and act through themselves. In these cases a person remains (ontologically) a person, even if they are not yet acting like one. Since I will later argue for freedom and a full personal life, it is only with this second sense and meaning of “ego” that I can appropriate for myself Freud’s term. So when a person does not act like a person—perhaps from an ingrained habit of not thinking or willing for one’s self—one can then speak of such a person as an ego. But this situation may not be invariably so, as Freud maintains, even for those having this passivity as an ingrained habit. Many people in time tend to grow up: to come to know things for themselves, to form their own opinions, and to exercise their power of being a first cause via free acts.

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In this conception, the personal self—if it is rightly ordered—will be “above” the psychological, instinctual life of the psyche, in the sense that the person is (or should be) the master of his or her instincts, instead of vice versa. If, in contrast, a person’s instinctual life dominates the person, as when the (adult) person’s behavior and attitudes will be reducible to his or her ego, there is a surefire sign of psychological and/or personal disorder. It is because of the potentiality of a proper, rational order within the soul—of a person controlling his or her own instincts instead of the reverse—that one can speak of a psychological and personal health and maturity. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PSYCHIC BEING AND PSYCHIC ACTS TO CONSCIOUSNESS Besides the distinction between psyche (in its narrower sense) and what is specifically and uniquely personal, there is a second distinction that can be made within the full psychological life of the person, as “conscious life” can refer either to its two dimensions of psychic being or of psychic acts performed by this being. The first dimension (psychic being) refers to a more ontological or metaphysical reality, dealing with a really-existing being who is ordered to consciousness. The argument of this text will be that the existence of conscious being is neither some kind of mental construct (Freud) nor the product of an inference (Skinner), insofar as this being is given in direct lived experience via lateral self-presence (chapter 2). The second dimension (psychic acts) deals with acts of thinking, willing, loving, hating, despairing, etc., which presuppose psychic being and is similarly ordered to consciousness. While both dimensions are oriented to and manifest themselves in consciousness, there is no simple identification of a person’s psychic being and psychic acts with conscious life. For it is possible to have psychic being that is not conscious (such as dreamless sleep), and it is also possible to have psychic acts that are to various respects and degrees repressed and unconscious. This orientation to consciousness distinguishes psychological life from mere biological processes, like normal digestion or blood circulation, which work perfectly well outside of any link to consciousness and are not ordered to consciousness. Psychological life—in both senses of psychic being and psychic acts—is ordained to and built for consciousness, insofar as it is obviously incomplete and potentially quite distressing without it. One only need consider the horror of a permanent coma case, concerning psychic being, as well as the miseries of a simple forgetting of some fact or object— much less the deeper disorder of a repressed, unconscious experience or feeling—concerning conscious acts.

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WHAT “LOGOS” MEANS While the psychological sphere—psyche in the wider sense—refers to consciousness and subjective being, “logos” refers to order and intelligibility, both intrinsic and relational meanings that things possess. The Greek term “logos” is defined as “speech, account, reason, definition, rational faculty, proportion.” 5 Although embedded in the very name of psychology, logos is not a specifically psychological term. It is primarily philosophical (and theological), insofar as it is philosophy that studies logos from the point of view both of a personal, rational power creating, ordering, or appreciating what is intelligible (the subjective dimension of logos) and the intelligible reasons for things (its objective dimension). In this section the objective dimension of logos will be discussed, and then in the next the subjective logos. Although it may at first seem strange to bring up this idea in a psychology-oriented text, this analysis actually parallels one established mode of psychology, Victor Frankl’s logotherapy. One central difference with Frankl, however, is that my focus on logos concerns the philosophical foundations for psychology, whereas Frankl is interested in mainly applying logos to psychotherapy. Still, Frankl—among others—sees the relevance of logos’s meaning to psychology. Freud too has some sense for the relevance of the inherent meaning or reason for things when he states that repression involves a “turning away from reality.” 6 Thus, Freud implies that repression becomes a possibility when there is an inadequate response to the intelligible facts (logos) of reality. This inadequacy in turn suggests the possibility of an adequate understanding of reality, and then any psychological explanation becomes inappropriate if the account can be explained by the rational facts, that is, by logos. “Logos” is primarily a philosophical term, having a long history with many varied meanings. These variations need not be recounted here because the term is being used in exactly the same sense as it was used by one of the very first Greek philosophers of recorded history, Heraclitus (c. 500 BC). He does not use this term to mean “science,” but rather “an underlying organizational principle of the universe.” 7 Thus logos is not science, but rather that formal, intelligible dimension of reality making science possible. “Logos,” therefore, is synonymous in its objective sense with “intelligibility.” “Intelligibility” refers to the inner order of beings, which then makes for its knowability, referring as well to the relation between the knower and the object known. If reality were to possess no inner order whatsoever, if it were sheer arbitrariness and chaos, it could not be known. Logos can be divined insofar as it conforms to empirical or scientific regularities. At other times we ascertain this meaning by understanding what will later be called a priori or strictly necessary essence structures, which are studied by philosophy. If this is correct, then there are two dimensions within

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the intelligibility of logos: the empirical and the a priori. Both refer to what is universal, to some norm or type, to some general principle or species. Since the empirical and the a priori play a role throughout this text, they will be introduced here. The first dimension of the objective logos refers to the kind of intelligibility that phenomena studied by the empirical sciences (of biology, chemistry, and physics) possess. An empirical science, of course, is one whose primary methods are sense perception of really-existing individuals and inductive generalizations from them. These inductive generalizations are in turn characterized by one kind of necessity. They follow order, uniformity, and lawful relations, but they—at least in principle—could be otherwise. Thus B. F. Skinner states, “Science is . . . a search for order, for uniformities, for lawful relations among the events in nature. It begins, as we all begin, by observing single episodes, but it quickly passes on to the general rule, to scientific law.” 8 There is, however, nothing in principle absolute about such laws, as the whole empirical system could in principle have been constructed quite differently. The second dimension of the objective logos refers to knowledge of a certain kind of universal essences characterized by a strict or a priori necessity, referring to an intrinsic inability of a being to be otherwise. Later we will further investigate (chapter 6) their nature and existence, and then explore their psychological significance. In this context, I only want to identify them in contrast to empirical necessities. For example, it simply cannot be otherwise that “Responsibility presupposes freedom,” that “5 + 7 = 12,” and that “The diagonal is longer than the sides of a square (in Euclidian space).” These assertions are so intelligible that their truth can be seen simply in themselves. And while their intelligibility seems to be embedded within the logos of this world, their meaning may not be exhausted by that limited context. “Responsibility presupposes freedom” in this world, of course, but also in any other possible world as well. Maybe there exist other worlds— outside this spatiotemporal world—where responsibility does not exist, but if it does, freedom must also exist. For example, let us assume for a moment the existence of supernatural, responsible beings (like the Christian notion of angels). If these beings are responsible, they must necessarily be free. In contrast, the laws studied by the empirical sciences certainly apply to this world, but there is no implication of their applying a priori (that is, with strict absolute necessity) to any other possible world. For instance, when it comes to the universal law that all life forms on this earth are carbon-based, scientists are perfectly aware that this inductive generalization in no way necessarily implies they are so elsewhere in this universe, much less in all other possible worlds. In other words, the kind of necessity one finds within the empirical sciences is clearly not strict or absolute.

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The sciences of geometry, philosophy, and mathematics are called a priori sciences because they all primarily study objects possessing a strictly necessary and highly intelligible essence structure, and are therefore “prior” to any empirical observation. This suggests that a priori truths possess a meaning that is not exclusively tied to the particular conditions of this spatiotemporal world, and that its truth is not established by the empirical conditions of the world. If so, then a priori truths measure empirical truths, not vice versa. Both the first and second dimensions of the objective logos (empirical and a priori) are contrasted to other things that are too chaotic and arbitrary for much understanding, such as scribbling. A scribble can certainly be perceived, but it can be hardly understood, for the simple reason that there is so little to understand. It is too arbitrary and impoverished to have much meaning. In fact, it is so arbitrary that there exist few universal rules or speciesideas to grasp. And because of this relative absence of logos, there can be no science of scribbling. A scribble practically only exists in its singular thisness, as opposed to existing in the intellectual light of some universal meaning. While there exist realities having minimal intelligibility, like scribbling, it is worthwhile for psychology to note their distinction from absolute unintelligibily, 9 which refers to a complete absence of any essential structure whatsoever. Everything that really exists must possess some intelligible structure or essence. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE (RELATIVE) ABSENCE OF INTELLIGIBILITY AND WHAT IS IRRATIONAL Finally, one can note an important psychological distinction between a relative lack of intelligibility and what is irrational. The irrationality of madness is not unintelligible. Insanity does not refer to a lack of intelligibility, but to a kind of attack against it. Naturally, it is the business of psychology to identify and catalog the various kinds of insanity, a universalizing process that could not be possible if they lacked all intelligibility. On the contrary, differing kinds of insanity are open to being empirically categorized and thus are intelligible and understandable. There is, therefore, a distinction between two kinds of opposition to the idea of intelligibility: the relative absence of it as is found in scribbling (with a complete absence being impossible), and the irrationality of insanity (a contrary opposition) that is itself quite intelligible insofar as it is open to being investigated scientifically via the science of psychopathology.

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THE SUBJECTIVE LOGOS Both objective dimensions of logos (empirical and a priori) refer to the intelligibility that things have in themselves. There is as well a subjective sense of logos that denotes a specifically psychological dimension. In this sense “logos” is synonymous with the Greek term “nous,” which means “mind,” “intellect,” “reason,” whether divine or human (in this context, our focus is on the human sense). Here what is referred to is not the intelligibility of the world making science possible, but rather the intelligence of a person rightly understanding, appreciating, or creating intelligibility. This is logos in the full sense of the word, including both the subjective and objective senses together. It is worth mentioning that logos in its objective sense is the condition that enabled the ancient Greek philosophers to discover logos in the subjective sense, the personal nature of humankind. For if the world were not ordered and knowable, these philosophers could never have discovered their own rational nature. Besides the link to logos, there are other relations between intelligibility and intelligence. Not only is intelligence the power by which one grasps the intelligibility of things, intelligence is itself intelligible, which makes it a suitable object of philosophical as well as psychological investigation. Furthermore, while everything that is intelligent is intelligible, not everything that is intelligible is correspondingly intelligent. Obviously there can be a science of many things that are not themselves intelligent, such as lions, water, hydrogen atoms, synapses, etc. There cannot, however, be a science of things that are not in themselves sufficiently intelligible, such as scribbling. THE MEANING OF THE TERM “PERSON” Just as psyche has two interrelated meanings, wider and narrower, the same goes with the idea of “person.” The wider and more usual sense of (human) “person” refers to the “body/psyche” composite being. In this book, however, we shall typically use the term in its narrower meaning, referring to the personal self, with its specifically personal powers of intellect, will, and heart. The intellect refers to the personal power of soul by which a person can discover transcendent, intelligible meaning—both empirical and a priori— that (as I hope to show) is irreducible to psyche (in the narrower sense). Through this power the person can come into a relation of truth concerning the existence and nature of things. The will refers to the power of a person to act as a first cause, as opposed to being merely as determined inwardly by one’s instincts. Finally, the heart refers to that dimension of a person’s affec-

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tive or emotional life that is fully personal in the sense of being ordered to what is intelligible, such as when someone loves what deserves love. The central notion behind these three kinds of personal powers is not that they are necessarily conscious or rational but rather that they are rather ordered toward consciousness and rationality. In other words, they possess the power to adequately apprehend (intellectually) and respond (volitionally and affectively) to the intelligible. This idea of being adequate to reality is one that is completely missing from Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” (chapter 3), as Freud has no correlate to the personal in his psychology. Rationality refers to the (ontological) power of the subjective logos to apprehend and respond to the intelligible. There is as well as second sense: that persons and their ideas, beliefs, hopes, loves, etc., are rational to the degree that such acts successfully conform to right reason. Just because persons possesses rational powers does not mean they use them adequately. In fact, the use of these powers can go in two directions: either toward rationality or toward what is irrational. There is no doubt that psyche (in the narrower sense) can negatively influence personal being and its contact with reality. The intellect can be at the service of truth or some ideology. The will can be at the service of pleasure and power or for what is right and good. And our affective life can either be neurotic or adequate, as they are all measured by the objective logos. Rationality, therefore, is the key to measuring whether some response requires psychological interpretation. If the apprehension/response or product of thought is rational, that is, ordered and adequate to reality, then no psychological interpretation is required or even appropriate. If some apprehension, response, or product is disordered or irrational in some way, a psychological interpretation may be required. NOTES 1. B. F. Skinner, Upon Further Reflection (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 19. 2. C. E. M. Joad, Guide to Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1957), 450–51. 3. William James, Pragmatism (New York: Dover, 1995), 86. 4. Kurt Danziger, “Psychological Objects, Practice, and History,” in Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol. 8, ed. Hans van Rappard et al. (New York: Springer 1993), 15–47. 5. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 110. 6. The full quotation is as follows: “The notion of a current conflict, of a turning away from reality, of a substitutive satisfaction obtained in phantasy, of a regression to material from the past—all of this . . . had for years formed an integral part of my own theory” (emphasis added). Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘Wolf Man’),” in the Freud Reader, trans. Peter Gay (Yale: Norton, 1989), 421. 7. Peters, Greek, 111. 8. B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 13. 9. Even chaos theory presupposes some minimal intelligibility, as it is all about finding the intelligible amid seemingly random and unintelligible phenomena.

Chapter Two

Methods of Psychological Investigation Introducing Lateral Self-Presence

In this chapter I want to identify (without developing) the nature of the empirical method, and then note various limitations that may necessitate the acknowledgement of two further methods or avenues for psychological research. I will introduce lateral self-presence in this chapter, and in chapter 6 the method of intellectual intuition. As self-presence is our most direct access to inner, conscious being, intellectual intuition—together with empirical intuition—is our access to logos. THE NATURE OF THE EMPIRICAL, SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND ITS LIMITATION The empirical method can be summarized as follows: (sense) perception or observation of really-existing sensible particulars, inductive generalization from these observations, and inference to best explanation. It is observation (or empirical intuition 1) that provides our contact with sensual, individual, really-existing reality, as opposed to the two other inductive, inferential methods. Induction and inference to best explanation, however, are crucial for understanding the data, without which we do not yet even have science. Still, they both go beyond the actual data, having the character of generalizations and reasonable inferences. This is why scientists rightly claim to never have an absolute (in the sense of strictly necessary and exceptionless) universal knowledge, since these generalizations can always be refined by further observations or even replaced by other, better explana17

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tory models. For example, if we observe that one, then fifty, then five thousand zebras—by repeated observations—are striped, it is reasonable to inductively conclude that all zebras are striped, even though no one has or could ever observe every single member of the whole class of zebras, including those yet to be born. What characterizes individuals into some biological species—as well physical events into some empirical law (such as the law of gravity)—is that which is common to all instances of that species or law. Thus there is an important difference between individual, empirical instances (individual zebras) and its respective species idea (zebraness): while the former reality is in principle public as well as (to varying degrees) directly or intuitively given via sense perception, its respective species is not, and instead is merely inductively inferred. While we of course can see individual zebras, no one has ever seen zebraness, which is a kind of mental, scientific abstraction. It is a conceptual construction, even though its meaning content is nonarbitrary, grounded in concrete, factual observations of individual zebras. Whereas observation and induction are at the very center of empirical research, there is another empirical approach within this method that is fruitful and used extensively throughout all the sciences, including psychology and philosophy. It is not enough simply to inductively generalize from single instances to its respective type, as one also want to understand the phenomena. Thus empirical science strives to give what Samir Okasha terms “inference to best explanation.” He gives some examples of this method: Quite often, modern science is successful in its aim of supplying explanations. For example, chemists can explain why sodium turns yellow when it burns. Astronomers can explain why solar eclipses occur when they do. Economists can explain why the yen declined in value in the 1980s. Geneticists can explain why male baldness tends to run in families. Neurophysiologists can explain why extreme oxygen deprivation leads to brain damage. Gilbert Harman then gives insight into when such inferences are applied, “Presumably such a judgment will be based on considerations such as which hypothesis is simpler, which is more plausible, which explains more, which is less ad hoc, and so forth.” 2

Let us now turn to one limitation of this method for psychology. Kurt Danziger mentions two broad categories of objects of psychological research: “Psychological objects may be certain categories of people, such as experimental subjects,” as well as “terms of which psychology organizes its subject matter. Such categories as ‘learning,’ ‘motivation,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘behavior,’ ‘personality,’ and so forth.” 3 Within both of these broad categories we can distinguish inner and outer dimensions. The outer refers to the sensual, empirical experience of bodies of persons and their behavior, and the

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inner refers to their own conscious experience. “Learning,” “motivation,” and “intelligence,” each have to have some reference to inner conscious experience, both our own and others. The problem is this: if the object of empirical intuition is sensible in nature and the object of psychological investigation (among other things) refers to nonsensible psychic states, how can psychology methodologically explain its knowledge of nonsensible phenomena? BODILY EXPRESSION AND INNER CONSCIOUS STATES There is one respect where this “inner” and “outer” problem can be partially bridged: with the phenomena of bodily expression, for inner subjective states of others can be directly or intuitively given via the medium of bodily expression, and bodily expression is open to being observed. We are often able to discern the inner, conscious states of others—their distress, depression, confusion, hope, joy, and happiness—through the medium of their body, and especially through their face and eyes. Bodily expression then refers to an intuitive glimpse into the inner life of others as expressed through their body. When it comes to grasping one’s own inner life, however, bodily expression is obviously not applicable. I do not need to intuit my own conscious states through my body because I am already present to my own conscious experiences from within. While bodily expression is more open to empirical investigation, the privacy of personal, subjective experience is far less so, for none of us are on the inner side of the subjective life of anyone else and one aspect of the empirical method is its verification of observations by others. If some observation or experiment cannot be repeated or verified in some public way, the results could easily be challenged. And if there is no possibility of a direct confirmation, verification will become weaker, more indirect, and hypothetical, such as through the self-report of others presumably having similar experiences. In general, the object of empirical observation refers to a sensible experience of individual, really-existing phenomena that are grasped from without. Our own conscious acts (willing, loving, etc.) are in contrast given from within and are clearly not sensible. Yet I can sometimes intuitively grasp another person’s inward experience through their bodily expression. Expression thereby presupposes without replacing inner psychic states. The above seems obvious to most everyone, except to the behaviorist John Watson, who famously denied the very existence of inner conscious states. He states: From the time of Wundt on, consciousness became the keynote of psychology. It is the keynote of all psychologies today except behaviorism. It [conscious-

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Chapter 2 ness] is a plain assumption just as improvable, just as unapproachable as the old concept of soul. And to the behaviorist the two terms are essentially identical, so far as concerns their metaphysical implications. 4

If consciousness is identical to soul, then a denial of soul is a denial of consciousness. He continues by noting that no one has “touched a soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience. With the development of the physical sciences which came with the Renaissance, a certain release from the stifling soul cloud was obtained.” 5 Certainly Watson’s solution in one sense solves the problem of the empirical method needing to be ordered to immaterial, private conscious acts: he just denies their existence. But the problem with that “solution” is that it contradicts obvious experiential (even if nonempirical) facts, which he himself oddly presupposes . . . even in the above quotation. For his own denial of conscious acts itself presupposes an inner conscious act of denying, similar to his conscious act of making an assumption (as he plainly asserts in the extract just above), making Watson’s assertion incoherent and self-referentially false. B. F. Skinner deals with the problem of the privacy of inner conscious experience by claiming that our knowledge of the conscious states comes via an inference, that is, indirectly as a conclusion from behavior. Behavior, after all, is observable and public. This solution, however, also seems highly problematic. For it suggests that persons are alienated from their own conscious experiences, insofar as they must infer them. It is also questionable whether the bodily expression of others is reducible to inferences, since we can immediately intuit inner conscious states through the medium of their bodies. To test this last statement, try making weird, frightening faces to a small baby, just old enough to be able to focus on faces, and see what happens (an experiment not recommended). Even small babies are able to intuit the bodily expressions of others, which argues against some inferential theory claiming that expression is nothing but a product of social enculturation, whereby bodily expressions become associated with certain inner feelings over time. The process of social enculturation is as yet small with young babies, and even though they clearly intuit expressive behavior. Then when we consider the unique privacy of each person’s own conscious life, it is manifestly evident that this inner life cannot be the result of some inference, as if we were so alienated from our very self that we can only reach it indirectly by observing ourselves. It is in fact just the opposite. Our encounter with ourselves (laterally as the one performing conscious acts) is the utter high point of immediacy, where the realities of consciousness and being dovetail. There is no more direct contact with being than our contact with the being of our own self, which is at the very heart of psyche. Let us now investigate the nature of this immediacy we have with ourselves.

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LATERAL SELF-PRESENCE AS ANOTHER INTUITIVE SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE Self-presence refers to that “inner,” subjective dimension of our conscious lives where persons are immediately aware of themselves as the ones performing conscious acts, whether of perceiving, thinking, willing, loving, hating, promising, grieving, self-reflection, etc. These conscious acts are themselves composed of two (objective and subjective) dimensions. Their objective dimension refers to their intentional nature, insofar as they are all essentially “about something.” Intentional conscious acts necessarily and essentially refer to a “consciousness of something.” The meaning of the philosophical, technical term “intentional” includes the normal English sense of the term—of something “done on purpose”—but is as well a far broader idea. Other acts, such as loving, willing, promising, thinking, perceiving, deducing, as well as intending, are all intentional in the sense that they are necessarily tied to some conscious object. There is as well a subjective dimension to intentional conscious experiences, which is where we find self-presence. Self-presence is in itself nonintentional in nature, insofar as it refers to the experience of the self, not as an object of consciousness but as the conscious subject performing intentional acts. I am, in other words, on the “inside” of my own conscious acts. Besides this subjective pole of self-presence, these intentional acts also have an objective pole, insofar as they are all “about something.” Both poles are constitutive of personal, conscious experience. For example, consider the intentional experience of grief. Since grief is always about something it is one kind of intentional act, as a person cannot have the experience of grief unless it is over some sad event, such as a death of a friend. Here the experience necessarily requires some object (awareness of some sad event), as this object rationally explains the experience. Also, assuming for instance a person’s conscious life is filled by some sad fact, there is no intimation that this person is unaware of herself laterally (and subjectively) as the one grieving. In fact, our experience tells us just the opposite: of course we are aware that we are the ones grieving—or willing or loving—because we are subjectively present to ourselves, even when we are not objectively reflecting back upon ourselves as an object of consciousness. All object-directed intentional conscious experiences (including selfreflection, where I make myself an object of consciousness) are distinct from self-presence, and yet they are all simultaneously united with it to form one unified experience, insofar as they are all acts consciously performed by a person. Thus when Watson states, “No one has ever touched a soul, or has seen one in a test tube,” he is ignoring or not caring to notice this subjective, non-intentional dimension of our conscious life, assuming that our conscious life is exclusively objective. No one claims these inner acts or the conscious

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self (both given laterally) are objects “over against” our subjective life, which is the only direction Watson is checking. They are rather consciously given as inner, private acts of our own subjective being, which are subjectively given. This confusion—of thinking that our conscious life is exclusively objective without any subjective dimension—then allows him to ridicule the idea of soul (or the conscious personal self) as somehow being unreal, a relic of some outdated religious prejudice against the modern science of psychology. Not only does self-presence exist and is even a continuously experienced conscious dimension (to varying degrees) of our subjective being, it is what allows persons to give themselves over to intentional objects. As we’ll see in chapter 5, the greater the self-presence, the more persons are able to give themselves to the intentional object. Furthermore, lateral self-presence needs to be distinguished from both self-reflection and excessive self-reflection. Self-reflection, in contrast to self-presence, is intentional, insofar as I bend back upon myself and make it an object of consciousness. Naturally, self-reflection in itself is a great good and is indispensable for our knowledge of our self. If a person possesses an intense self-presence but lacks any self-reflection, he or she will not really know him- or herself (insofar as the fullness of knowledge is essentially intentional in nature, while self-presence alone is non-intentional). The danger is not with self-reflection, but with excessive self-reflection, where a person is so (intentionally) self-absorbed as to “crowd out” those intentional acts and responses that are directly aimed at objects other than the one’s self. One example of excessive self-reflection is with persons who have, perhaps, been in psychological therapy too long, such that they come to adopt a perpetual attitude of observing themselves live life as opposed to simply living life, thus becoming abstracted spectators of themselves. Also with excessive self-reflection there is a real, continual danger of making one’s self the “theme” of every situation, and then of being unable to properly enter into other situations where the self is not thematic. Of course there are also times when one’s self is rightly the theme of a situation—such as when someone is in counseling—but there are many other times when one’s self is not the theme. This is especially the case with our affective life, where it is impossible to genuinely be joyful or angry while at the same time observing oneself being joyful or angry. These affective responses require a kind of presence in a situation that is impossible to achieve in an attitude of abstracted self-reflection. Notice that self-reflection does not replace but rather presupposes selfpresence, insofar as in self-reflection persons are obviously laterally present to themselves as the ones reflecting back upon themselves. Thus lateral selfpresence is a dimension of all intentional conscious acts and responses, including self-reflection.

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Notice too that our experience of material reality is almost 6 always given via sense perception, which is intentional in nature. In contrast, our most intimate contact with our self is given non-intentionally, via self-presence. Thus while Danziger and others are obviously correct that motivation, for instance, is a suitable object area of psychological study, it is in no way clear how the empirical method alone—with sense observation as its exclusive source of knowledge—completely explains our contact with it. For the nature of observation is to exclusively look at things from without, which are on the object side of our conscious experience, while motivation—considered as a “inner” mental experience—is originally and most directly given only on the subjective pole of conscious experience. Someone can question the above assertion in at least two ways. First, cannot non-intentional “mental processes” be objectively (or intentionally) considered, in a fashion similar to our observations of mountains, trees, and lakes? This is of course true. Persons can objectify these mental processes by reflecting back and conceptualizing them. My point is that prior to any objectification and conceptualization, they are experienced on the subject side of our conscious life. Any adequate investigation of mental processes must do justice to their subjective, “inner” dimension. Second, it seems that I am using the language of “inner” exclusively for the inner subjective life of persons. Why can’t we also speak of the “inner side” of material realities, such as with rocks, as well? Naturally, there is in an obvious sense of the inner dimension of material things. But from the point of view of empirical observation, the “inner” stuff of the rock is in a sense just as available to us from the outside via observation as the “outer” of what we actually observe of the rock. Someone can of course break the rock open and observe it, again, from the outside. The “inner” of the rock then is from that point of view no different from the “outer” of the rock. In contrast, there is no direct givenness possible of the inner conscious life of another person from the outside. Thus we have two radically different senses of the term “inner,” as applied to material objects and as applied to conscious experience. HOW NOT DOING JUSTICE TO SELF-PRESENCE CAN LEAD TO THE DENIAL OF THE SELF What difference does self-presence make to the discipline of psychology? Besides our inmost, direct, and original contact with the central objects (such as our inner conscious life) of psychological study, consider what happens when empirical psychologists take seriously (assuming deadly consistency) their empiricism—with its exclusive concern for the objective dimension of

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conscious experience—and then try to find the self. From that point of view one never reaches the conscious self because self-presence of myself (and my conscious acts) is not an observing from without, but rather is a kind of “dwelling with myself” from within. If one ignores this indwelling experience, the result is the feeling that the self is somehow unreal, as was already literally asserted by Watson. This is also how many other influential psychologists speak of the self. Consider what Freud says about the conscious self: “Being conscious is in the first place a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain character” (emphasis in original). 7 Thus Freud does not speak of the ego as a really-existing subject. Similarly B. F. Skinner states, “It may seem inconsistent to ask the reader to ‘keep a point in mind’ when he has been told that mind is an explanatory fiction.” 8 It is not just psychologists but also philosophers who have completely missed the subjective dimension of conscious life. The father of modern empiricism, David Hume, also misses lateral self-presence when he states, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” 9 Hume’s error seems identical with and perhaps is the source of the very same error coming from these psychologists. One reason why many psychologists do not do justice to the reality and being of the self is because the self is not open to their preferred empirical method of investigation. It is granted that the self cannot be reached that way, as a sense appearance. But that does not mean that the self is somehow unreal or inaccessible. It is just not given empirically as a sensible object, but rather as that being to whom sensible objects are intentionally given. KAROL WOJTYLA’S OBJECTIONS AGAINST “THE COSMOLOGICAL APPROACH” AS FOUND IN EMPIRICISM To lose touch with this most intimate contact with the self that is found in lateral self-presence leads to what the philosopher Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) calls “the cosmological approach,” where the person is interested in the events and things of the world without being mindful that one is a conscious subject who is present to the things of the world. Wojtyla states, “My lived experience discloses not only my actions but also my inner happenings in their profoundest dependence on my own self. . . . In my lived experience of self-possession and self-governance, I experience that I am a person and that I am a subject.” 10 Wojtyla contrasts self-presence from “the cosmologi-

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cal approach,” whereby the person is only seen in light of an object of consciousness. Wojtyla’s point is that much of philosophy up to the twentieth century was dominated by the cosmological approach. One difference, however, between someone like Aristotle and Hume is that Aristotle (it seems to me) would have been far more open to the phenomenon of self-presence than Hume, for with Aristotle there is only an absence and no contradiction. Adjusting his philosophy to this further dimension would be minimal. With Hume there is an explicit opposition with his radical empiricism. Interestingly, Wojtyla offers a second criticism of the cosmological approach, which also applies to an exclusively empiricistic psychological methodology. His criticism is that the cosmological approach leads only to a species understanding that is ultimately opposed to an appreciation of the uniqueness of each individual person. Thus he states, “The human being is then given to us not merely as a being defined according to species, but as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject.” 11 It is not just Aristotelian metaphysics that emphasizes the species knowledge over the individual, modern psychology—to the degree that it is lockstep with the inductive, empirical method—also tends to look at individual, really-existing things as merely concrete representatives of their respective species. Later (chapter 10) we will investigate what difference this emphasis on an exclusive orientation to species knowledge makes when applied to persons. NOTES 1. Empirical intuition is one of two kinds of intuition: empirical and intellectual (a priori). What unifies both meanings is the idea of intuition, which is meant to suggest some kind of direct or immediate experiential contact with the datum known, as opposed to any kind of indirect, inferential knowledge. 2. Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 40. Okasha goes on to quote Gilbert H. Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1965), 89. 3. Danziger, “Psychological Objects,” 15–47. 4. John Watson, Behaviorism (New York: Norton, 1958), 5. 5. Watson, Behaviorism, 4. 6. Later, in chapter 5, I will note one exception: for there is a unique experience of our own bodies from within, via what will later be called a leib experience. 7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (Norton: New York, 1960), 4. 8. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam, 1972), 21. 9. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 252. 10. Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays, trans. Theresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 214. 11. Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible,” 213.

Chapter Three

The Objective and Transcendent Dimensions of Human Nature

The last chapter focused on the “inner” side of the person, an analysis that alone could give the impression of the self as some kind of monad, separated from everything not itself and enclosed within itself. In this chapter I want to investigate its objective dimension, what Robert Sokolowski terms “the publicness” 1 aspect of the person, which are given as objects of our conscious experience. In this chapter I want to investigate the psychological significance of the ability of a person to establish relations with reality. Furthermore, in knowing the logos of transcendent reality one can then come to discover the rational nature the conscious self. PSYCHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOR TRANSCENDENT RELATIONS WITH REALITY While granting the difficulties involved in achieving a true objective evaluation of reality, it seems strange to write off the possibility of achieving some truth, insofar as all of empirical science, including psychology, would be itself undermined. In this section I want to present evidence for fully objective or transcendent relations by first looking at what happens psychologically when such relations are removed. Consider those psychological experiments where volunteers enter sensory-deprivation tanks. While some participants will speak of the advantages these experiences give for mediation and relaxation, there is also the darker side, leading many other participants to start hallucinating. There is something inherently distressing and disordered about persons who are continuously “thrown back upon themselves,” thwarted from achieving 27

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intentional relations with reality. Perhaps the only reason why some people find these tanks positively rewarding is because they are able to inwardly achieve a relation to some transcendent being or reality; otherwise they too would (eventually or quickly) go insane. There is also a philosophical correlate to the above experience, and that is with philosophers who theoretically maintain that persons cannot attain to any transcendent relation to reality. This position inevitably leads a philosopher to being solipsistically thrown back upon him- or herself, unable to then achieve an objective relation to reality. Philosophical solipsism makes people sick too. PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSCENDENT, RATIONAL RELATIONS Intentionality alone, however, does not guarantee the full objectivity of the objects perceived, insofar as I can be intentionally present not only to mindindependent realities but also to mere appearances and even to illusions. Intentionality, therefore, is only a necessary and not yet sufficient condition for full transcendence. And yet, do we really want to maintain—a la the Matrix movies—that our experiences, say, of other persons are only illusory? Isn’t it manifestly clear that with some intentional conscious experiences we really do reach substantial, mind-independent beings? Even granting the problems associated with reaching truth, discussed in chapter 1, it remains odd to claim our experience of other persons is reducible to mere appearances or illusions. No one really thinks that. Rather, some intentional experiences are rational in the sense of actually reaching—transcendent to the confines of the self—real being and of adequately responding to it, while granting that other intentional experiences either do not reach real being or their response is not fully rational. And of course they can also be irrational. Whether rational or not, the beginning point for moving away from solipsism is to recognize the intentional character of conscious acts. I do not just love; I love someone. I do not just grieve; I grieve over someone or something. These conscious experiences can either be adequate or not adequate to the logos of the phenomenon. If they are adequate, there is no point in suspecting a psychological motivation for the experience. It is only if these objects are in a particular way inadequate to reality that the possibility of a psychological explanation becomes appropriate. Two examples will be helpful. First, imagine a person being fearful of going outdoors. What is the object of that person’s fear? Let us say it is the fact that a terrible battle is raging outside. One would then rightly surmise that this fear is rational, since fear is manifestly appropriate to the grave, objective danger. Any attempt to concoct some kind of psychological expla-

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nation for this fear would be clearly inappropriate because the battle rationally explains the response of fear. Second, consider the case of a fear that does not seem to be motivated by this or any other kind of actual, objective danger. Imagine this fear is simply one of going outdoors as such. In this case, no psychologically sophisticated person would throw up her hands and claim that this irrational fear is unintelligible. She would rather suspect the intelligible reason for this fear goes back to psychological factors. Taking both examples together, the term “rational” refers to affective, volitional, or intellectual responses that are adequate to reality, while “irrational” refers to those responses that are not. Thus rationality is on the side of what is specifically personal, referring to a person’s adequate apprehension of and response to reality. In contrast, caused effects on the psyche, such as hallucinations following from some biochemical disorder, are certainly intelligible but not rational. Naturally, there are intelligible reasons explaining both of the above examples. But only the first is rational, while the second is intelligible but not rational. Without intelligibility the central condition for the possibility of science would be missing, and intelligibility in the objective sense is the measure of rationality in the subjective sense. The above distinction—between rationality and irrationality, with only the latter calling for a specifically psychological explanation—is significant for at least three reasons. First, just as there is a danger of reducing all science to empiricism, so is there the analogous danger of reducing all meaning to a psychological meaning. To combat this tendency, it is important to admit to a realm of nonpsychological, intelligible meaning. For rationality in the subjective sense is measured by logos in the objective sense. Second, if there are rational, nonpsychological meanings that can be known, it follows that the being of the person is capable of apprehending and adequately responding to that which is intelligible. In fact, possessing the power of rationality is what uniquely and exactly characterizes a person. Finally, third, just as irrationality suggests possible psychological involvement, so giving a rational response to the world is a sign of psychological health. It is only when someone is acting irrationally that a psychological (whether neurotic or psychotic) component is considered. One mark of neurosis is a narrowing of one’s adequate, rational contact with reality, just as the mark characterizing psychosis is an actual break with rational reality. INTEGRATING THE PSYCHE WITH THE RATIONAL DIMENSION OF HUMAN NATURE How is the psychological (or the narrower meaning of psyche) related to the rational dimension of human nature? One way is to visualize this relation via

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psychic “maps,” inspired by the famous iceberg topographical map 2 of the psyche offered by Freud. Whereas Freud focused exclusively on the psychological dimension of the person, I want to expand upon his idea of a psychological map by including both the psychological and the rational (or uniquely personal) dimensions, albeit without his iceberg motif. The first two of these maps will help us with interpreting certain aspects of the last three maps, with the third map showing some of the relations between the psychological and rational life of a person. And then the fourth and fifth maps will imaginatively illustrate the rational and ordered from the irrational and disordered personality. Rationality is a sure sign of what is specifically personal. However, just because human beings are rational in the sense of being ontologically ordered to transcendent reality obviously does not imply that they must then act in a rational way. Later, in chapter 8, I will discuss more fully the three spheres— the intellect, will, and heart—within human nature where this aim toward rationality can be found. In a more generic sense, these three personal powers of soul go in one of two directions: both finding out what is (the intellect) from reality, and then adequately responding to (the will and heart) what is the case in reality. The central point uniting all three powers of personal soul—besides being ordered to rationality—is transcendence, that is, the power to go beyond all appearances and illusions to know reality as it is in itself, as well as the power to go beyond one’s instincts and needs to respond properly to reality. Thus I can come to know, at least to a certain extent, the existence of real individual things in their universal, essential nature and properly respond to them. It is also obvious that this is not always possible. Some phenomena can simply be beyond my intellectual powers to grasp. And it was already noted in chapter 1 how persons can be blinded by psychological, cultural, emotional, and moral factors. Turning now to what is “below” the personal, there exists the diverse realm of needs, instincts, emotional immaturities, repressions, and so on that have some kind of relation to our conscious life but are as well not fully personal in nature. These psychological mechanisms are distinguished from rational powers in not being ordered to rationality, insofar as needs and instincts can be found in pure animals. And yet in persons, this realm still needs to be ordered from without, by our rational nature. Furthermore, the psyche is also distinguished from normal bodily functioning, like brain synapses and blood circulation, which are typically outside of our normal conscious life and are therefore “nonconscious.” Nonconscious biological operations in turn seem radically different from unconscious psychic contents that are ordered to consciousness, even if they are for some reason repressed.

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Let us begin this analysis of the relation between psyche and the person with a concrete example of a simple perception: let us say, perceiving a cow. The cow is given to us as an object of perception, just as we can also imagine the cow simultaneously perceiving us. Notice that our perceiving the cow does not exhaust our consciousness insofar as we are aware (laterally) that we are the ones perceiving the cow. In contrast, the cow’s conscious experience of perceiving may be very different. Perhaps the experience of the cow is merely one of “a perceiving is taking place” as opposed to a real cognitive act “that a perception is taking place.” If so, this might help explain the “dead eyes” that the cow so clearly demonstrates when we look into its eyes. The cow seems to be both conscious and yet strangely unconscious. It is conscious in the sense of having sense perception, and yet unconscious in that it lacks to a great extent or even completely this inner, lateral conscious life. It is as if animals are sensually only passively into things because they lack any centeredness found in personal, conscious life, whereas persons, in contrast, are centered in themselves (laterally) as they go out into the world (intentionally) and can thereby far more actively give themselves to mind-independent beings. Thus we need to account for the bipolarity of personal consciousness that is—to whatever degree (or completely)—missing in animals. Let us visually represent this bipolarity of a personal act of perception the following way: just as it would be radically incomplete to attempt to explain an act of perceiving a cow without the cow, so it seems just as incomplete to explain this act of perceiving without the person who experiences him- or herself (laterally) as the one perceiving the cow. Figure 3.1 is a visual demonstration of this. The oval in the depiction represents the personal self, with its specifically personal powers of intellect, will, and heart, and who is consciously given laterally via self-presence. The arrow tip represents the transcendent object known—in the above example, the cow—and the shaft of the arrow represents the connection (that is, the personal act) between the subject and object known. Naturally, there are also other distinctly personal acts besides that of perception 3: that of willing, promising, loving, hating, grieving, and deducing, among many others. All of these other acts have a similar structure. They are all intentional or “about something” that is (to varying degrees) transcendent to the self. And they all are acts or responses performed by personal subjects, who are consciously present to themselves via self-presence. There is also one further, crucial, point. The person who loves or wills or promises has to be the very same being who also knows and perceives. There obviously cannot be two beings—one knowing and another responding with love—because responses like loving and willing presuppose knowing, for I obviously cannot will or love what I do not first know. Since all these acts

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Figure 3.1. Representing an intentional, transcendent act (whether of knowing, willing, loving, etc.) performed by the personal self.

clearly interpenetrate each other, these acts must then be given to only one individual subject. Now we can represent the analysis of the above paragraphs visually as in figure 3.2. Everything already noted above about the oval, arrow, and arrow tip, applies to this second map. The difference of course is that there are a multitude of arrows, representing different acts and responses. And we can also add that the different lengths and widths of the arrow shafts represent the relative ontological “height” (length) of the object known and the “adequacy” (width) of the transcendent connection. For it is one thing to know simple transcendent truths about numbers and squares; it is another to know transcendent truths about justice and God. And it is one thing to know them

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Figure 3.2. Intentional, personal acts.

in a straightforward, truthful way, and another to know them as skewed through the prism of one’s own needs and prejudices. So far we have only depicted the uniquely personal side of human nature. Let us continue building this image by adding the psychological dimension, “below” the personal self, and apply the above partial images to a third graphic (figure 3.3). One way of representing the psychological is to draw a second oval line outside of the solid oval representing the personal self, but not outside where the arrow tips represent a person’s contact with extramental, transcendent realities. Everything inside the second oval represents a person’s full psycho-

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Figure 3.3. Person (personal self) and psyche (psychological life).

logical life: the conscious personal self and psyche. And yet with the psyche we find a kind of externality to the personal self. These psychological mechanisms are of course “mine,” and therefore distinct from all purely extramental realities, such as mountains and zebras and tables. But they also do not inhabit the innermost center of my personal existence either. Their externality to my own inner personal existence is especially experienced when I feel victim to my own instincts and obsessions. It seems there is something only vaguely analogous between the dynamisms of the lower psyche and the act character of our personal life, where we will or know or love out of our personal self. The dynamism of the psyche does not refer to any personal act. One can note some of the differences between psyche and personal self by seeing how the psyche is both passive and dynamic in different respects. The instincts and insecurities of the psyche are passive in that they merely happen to a person, as opposed to being performed by the person. But they are also dynamic, insofar as they can inflict themselves upon the personal self—whether in the form of urges or as repressed contents—urging us in one direction or another. This dynamism, therefore, proceeds from a “place” outside of the person, as it comes from the psyche. In figure 3.3 we might notice the lines connecting the personal self to these psychological dimensions (of instincts, needs, repressions, etc.). They also—together with purely extramental realities—connect with the conscious self via an arrow, the tip of which represents the possible transcendent relation of the person to them. For it is not just extramental realities that can be transcendently known, as inner psychological realities can also be objective-

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ly and intentionally known via self-reflection as well. I can know the truth about my own inner, psychological life. They are obviously inwardly known, but not laterally in the sense of encountering one’s inmost personal being. They are rather known as objects of our inner conscious life. Compared to extramental realities they are immanent within our subjective life, but they do not constitute our innermost chamber of personal existence. They are realities that lie within the second, outer oval, which, together with our personal self, represents the whole of our inner psychological life. Notice that the rectangles represent various psychological mechanisms that are partly outside of the second oval. What is outside this outer oval represents extramental reality, and the fact that these rectangles lie partly outside the second oval is meant to suggest that, while the link between these boxes and extramental reality is not rational, there are still various relations between them and transcendent reality. Thus, for instance, our biological needs and instincts become inflamed if they are not met, our defense mechanisms, phobias, and emotional insecurities become operative especially in situations where they are conditioned to respond, and our repressions need to be reinforced in those situations when and where they threaten exposure. The point here is that their psychological, immanent nature does not completely insulate them from what Freud calls “the reality principle,” even though they are not related to extramental, transcendent reality in any fully personal way. AN ORDERED VERSUS DISORDERED PSYCHOLOGICAL/PERSONAL LIFE The previous three maps are meant to help us come to understand the final two maps below, which refer to an imaginative picture of the human psychological/personal life that is ordered (fourth) and disordered (fifth). Thus, the fourth map will represent the point of view of a normal, relatively healthy psychological and rational state, while the fifth will depict the state of a person lost in his or her instincts and obsessions. The fourth map refers to the normal, not in the sense of “average” but in the sense of “healthy.” Here I am thinking of someone who is not dominated by his or her psychology. It is possible for someone to be the master of his or her own instincts and urges. He or she can rise above his psychological and social conditioning. This state of affairs can be represented as in figure 3.4. What differentiates the third from the fourth map is the power and selfpossession—represented by the larger size—of the personal self in the fourth map. Notice that, even in the case of a psychologically and rationally adjusted normal person, what we have called the psychological dimension does not simply disappear. Needs and instincts are primarily biological realities, hav-

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Figure 3.4. A rationally ordered psyche with a strong personal life.

ing their important and proper function within the body/soul composite being. And both psychological adjustment and rationality are relative terms. Even a person is who basically psychologically adjusted can still have psychological issues. Now let us investigate the situation where a person does not rise above his or her psychology (figure 3.5). Because these psychological mechanisms do not inhabit the innermost chamber of our personal existence, there is with them a certain externality and relative independence from the conscious self, as anyone who has experienced being buried under his or her instinctual life can attest. Instincts and needs can inflict themselves upon me; inferiority complexes and emotional immaturities can bring me down; repressions can close off a certain portion of what should be available to me in my conscious life. The self is beaten down and neutered in relation to them (as with Freud’s notion of the ego), while they in turn inflict themselves upon the ego, operating as a kind of death instinct going even against its own welfare. It is as if they all form relatively independent centers of being over and against the personal self, despite their being unified in one psychic life. From a subjective point of view, this lower psychological life can be so strong as to threaten to bury the person. One could say with Oscar Wilde, “I have ceased being the captain of my own soul.” Here Wilde is obviously not speaking about enslavement from without as from within. And yet as terrifying as this situation is, it is not yet the bottom. A person’s rational life could

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Figure 3.5. An inflamed, disordered psyche with a weak personal life.

become so buried that he can even be led to define his very self simply in terms of addiction or vice, as if his inmost center is his addiction, and even glorifying in it as if it were the acme of freedom. Then from an objective point of view, it is all too clear how such persons are unable to rise above their psychology to come to adequate relations with mind-independent reality, as they will habitually see things only from the prism of their own psyche. This state of affairs—with their responses being constantly “tinged” by their own neurosis and unfettered instincts—is represented in the diagram by some of the arrows not fully exiting the outer circle that represents a person’s psychology. One of the themes of this book is the idea that rationality helps explain both psychological dysfunction and health. Thus, the next chapter will consider some of the rational dimensions of negative psychology, while chapter 7 will do the same with positive psychology. NOTES 1. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119–22. 2. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 18. 3. A “distinctly personal perception” is one that includes the intellectual “light” of understanding (chapter 6).

Chapter Four

Negative Psychology The Influence of Rationality on Psyche

Is the position of depth psychology (following Freud) correct that the relation between psyche and person is invariably unidirectional, going exclusively from psyche to ego? Let us grant the direction of this influence of psyche on the person. Can the personal dimension also have an impact on psyche? In this chapter I will develop five arguments for why we ought to take the rational dimension of the person seriously insofar as possessing the power to influence psyche. FIRST: THE PERSON IS WHAT UNIFIES PSYCHE In this first argument I want to identify why it is that we experience ourselves (in normal experience) as one. What is it that unifies our psychological experience? It is not to be found in the diverse phenomena of the needs, emotional immaturities, instincts, desires, and defenses of the psyche, which are really manifold realities, 1 but rather by the personal self, symbolized in the last chapter by the inner oval in each of the “maps.” Just as biologically the life principle is the principle unifying every individual life into one being, such that when that life principle dies the matter of that being falls apart, so analogously the being of the person is what ontologically unifies our psychological life together into one being. This unification of psyche leading back to the personal self can also be consciously experienced by varying degrees: the stronger the sense of personal self, the stronger the experience of unity and oneness. The person who is master of his or her instincts will in an especially strong way experience 39

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his or her personal identity and individuality, whereas others more lost in their instincts and neuroses will instead be more dissipated and pulled in many different directions, thereby decreasing their unified sense of self. SECOND: THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALITY ON A PERSON’S PSYCHOLOGICAL LIFE The second argument for the influence of the rational on the psyche refers to the reverberations within the psyche coming from acts performed by the personal self. What characterizes personal, conscious life is its act character, such as when a person goes beyond all appearances and illusions to get to know something as it is in itself, or freely wills a new state of affairs from his or her personal self. These acts can reverberate in the psyche. In contrast, Freud thinks there are no such reverberations because there are no original acts coming from the person, as the ego is merely a passive victim trying to reconcile instinctual forces coming directly from the id and indirectly from the id via the superego. Thus he states, “Psychoanalysis early became aware that all mental occurrences must be regarded as built upon a basis of the interplay of the [libido] forces of the elementary instincts” (emphasis in original). 2 Thus for Freud the basis for what he terms “cathexis” or “charge” of mental energy or libido comes from these elementary instincts, as opposed to any rational relation. Even the energy of the superego comes from the libido. All meaning, especially all philosophical, moral, and theological meaning, should then be exclusively interpreted in the light of the satisfaction of instincts, and the function of these meaning superstructures is really only meant to hide this link to instinctual gratification for the sake of social acceptance. Such rationalisms become necessary in a situation where a straightforward, undisguised selfish satisfaction of needs is impossible, given a social setting where desirable goods are few, power is limited, and everyone wants the same things. In that situation naked selfishness needs to be veiled (via sublimation) in order to be socially acceptable. In this view philosophy, morality, and religion become nothing but tactics for justifying and appropriating what you want from others, as they (including yourself) may be stupid and naïve enough to actually believe your own rationalizations. Then we should not think of the so-called necessary essence structures as being meanings-in-themselves, for that leaves out what is really behind them, which is merely (disguised and sublimated) instinctual gratification. There is no such thing as unsublimated meanings. Meanings are invariably relativized in the sense of always being built upon and explainable only in terms of other things, such as instincts.

Negative Psychology

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The above explanation is extraordinarily cynical, despite the fact that in certain concrete instances cynicism is perceptively correct (insofar as sometimes we really do sometimes hide our baser motivations with high-sounding rationalizations). Freud’s own cynicism, however, is so global as to embrace all meaning (outside of science), and his impact on psychology has contributed to most depth psychologists ignoring logos altogether and only looking at how persons are energized and motivated by instinctual needs (from “below”). But what if persons can also be motivated from meanings-in-themselves, such as a person being motivated by what is authentically good and true (from “above”)? If so, then these objects should be taken seriously in their own right, which in turn can reverberate in our psyche. It is this reverberation of person on psyche that I want to investigate here. The term “reverberation” is meant to suggest that a distinctly personal life can impact the psyche, just as the psyche clearly impacts the person and dominates the ego. And this impact (of person on psyche) can either be positive or negative. Here I will mostly focus on its negative impact. Later, in chapters 12 and 13, the positive impact will be emphasized. Before beginning, however, there are two interpretations of this rational reverberation within psyche that I want to exclude from this analysis. First, consider the idea of personal experiences in the Freudian sense—discussed just above—of meanings that are really nothing more than sublimations of libido. I obviously want to exclude this interpretation, insofar as my interest is with the direction coming from a genuine transcendent personal relation to the psyche. Second, consider the experience of encountering something in our normal, waking world, and then later the same experience comes back again—in some strange, fractured way—in our dreams. It seems that certain conscious experiences can somehow become transposed, even to some extent as an effect of some mysterious causal chain, into the dream world of the psyche. This experience could very well begin from a personal, intentional, and transcendent source—or at least from images from our normal awakened life—and then reverberate later in dreams. But it is not yet what I mean by a rational/personal reverberation. Everyone, including Freud, admits to this kind of influence of ego-consciousness on psyche. Dreaming after all does not seem to be a fully personal act, as even dogs appear to dream. What is meant here by personal reverberation goes beyond this relation, as it presupposes a rational life of the person going beyond the passive ego. Below are three instances of a real personal reverberation on psyche, where (it seems to me) it is not reasonable to hold the interpretation that this so-called rational reality is nothing but a superstructure grounded in psyche. Instance 1: Consider the psychological fruit of persons who are genuinely morally and religiously transformed (distinguishing them from seemingly similar, but in actuality radically different, self-righteous hypocrites).

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Transformed persons can become the masters of their passions, not merely in the sense of an external dominance from without—that is, by one’s naked will dominating the lower instincts—but inwardly by a movement of character formation, where the psyche is genuinely at peace with the person, who is as well at peace with God and their own conscience. Their goodness victoriously pervades through their character, transforming their psyche. A modern example is someone like the late Teresa of Calcutta. Psychiatrists Terruwe and Baars also have a sense for it when they state, Nevertheless, when reason denies the demands of the emotional life, the latter, no matter how great its resistance, will sooner or later become tranquil again and abide by the judgment of reason. Or, at least, there will be a balance between the two with reason providing the necessary guidance. It is important to note that this will not result in an abnormal mental condition with the human soul, for it is the nature of the emotional life to be subject to reason. 3

Instance 2: Consider a person who continually gives into his or her instincts and desires. Instead of psyche being in harmony with the person, with the right order of rationality over instinct and the freedom of spirit being preserved, the reverse happens, and the experience of the person is that of being submerged by his or her desires and passions, with the exercise of freedom being overwhelmed. Here the person devolves into ego, who in turn becomes enslaved at the beck and call of the id. Instance 3: Another example of personal reverberation in the psyche concerns what happens when people theoretically deny what they otherwise most clearly see. For example, consider the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche, who seemed to have had an existential experience of God despite his theoretical atheism. Nietzsche’s theoretical idea of God is similar to Freud’s in being a mere human invention, although his emphasis is less on sublimation from the psyche as it is on that God is nothing but interpersonal idea concocted by society. In the nineteenth century, when the communal idea of God was in fact dying out in the minds of many in Europe, Nietzsche coined the phrase “God is dead” 4 because such an idea can only live and thrive in an unscientific age. This theoretical explanation, however, is flatly contradicted by Nietzsche’s own experiential encounter with God. Consider the following passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Fourth Part, where Nietzsche thinks he has a genuine experiential encounter with God. Who warm’th me, who lov’th me still? Give ardent fingers! . . . And shaken, ah! By unfamiliar fevers, Shivering with sharpened, icy-cold frost-arrows,

Negative Psychology By thee pursued, my fancy! Ineffable! Recondite! Sore-frightening! Thou huntsman ’hind the cloud-banks! Now lightning-struck by thee, Thou mocking eye that me in darkness watcheth: —Thus do I lie, Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed With all eternal torture, And smitten By thee, cruelest huntsman, Thou unfamiliar—God . . . How can a mere idea be a hunter? How can a mere idea stare at me from the dark?

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Now we skip to the end of the poem, where Nietzsche becomes aware of God’s love for him and his desire to be in a relationship with him. Yet despite all that, he rejects God. Away! There fled he surely, My final, only comrade, My greatest foe, Mine unfamiliar— My hangman-God! . . . —Nay! Come thou back! With all of thy great tortures! To me the last of lonesome ones, Oh, come thou back! All my hot tears in streamlets trickle Their course to thee! And all my final hearty fervor— Up-glow’th to thee! Mine unfamiliar God! My pain! My final bliss! 6

One finds with this experience a power unmistakably reverberating from person to psyche, shaking one at the foundation of one’s being. Notice in this poem that any idea of God as being nothing but an interpersonal product of human thinking has completely fallen out. The whole force and pathos of this poem is that Nietzsche thinks he has encountered the Living God, not some mere socially concocted idea. One can also add that neither the Freudian nor the Jungian position can do justice to this experience of Nietzsche: Freud because he thinks the idea of God is through and through merely an illusion, with the real energy of the psyche coming only from instinct and not from any transcendent experience, and Jung because he thinks this idea is merely a subjectively produced archetype (chapter 11). There is nothing upsetting about these ideas because, after all, they are all at most intersubjective thoughts.

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Something different is going on with Nietzsche. Maybe his experience can be appreciated by locating other examples from one’s own experience. A person may not have to think long before identifying others who in their life also have difficulty throwing off the yoke of religion, which may be one explanation for their surprisingly virulent hatred of it. If Christianity, say, really were some unsubstantiated fantasy, why are people so upset with it, and Nietzsche so distressed? Perhaps they remain on some psychological level unconvinced that God in fact does not exist and that religion is stupid, despite their own willingness to believe such things. Someone could object and say that most people simply do not in fact sense the psychological/existential weight and impact of spiritual questions concerning God, truth, the moral law, and so on. It seems that Nietzsche is the overly sensitive oddball. Most people do not encounter God like this or locate other spiritual realities reverberating in their psyche. In fact, there are no doubt many sophisticated, intelligent, and well-educated people who think Nietzsche’s concern is a joke. Yes, of course there are many such people. But just because many seem asleep to spiritual realities at one point of their life does not mean they will always remain so. People are in some cases awakened by existential shocks—war, beauty, love, illness, and the prospect of death 7—and in other cases they simply find themselves changed by the course of their life, or by silence and reflection. If psychologists do not take the objective and subjective logos seriously, they will not do justice to the various possibilities of rational relations having an existential impact on the psyche. If this is true, then one should give up viewing the psyche as if it were some kind of closed or immanent system whose relation to the outside world is merely causal (from without) or instinctual (from within), independent of any relation to a person’s rational life. THIRD: DISTINGUISHING PERSON FROM PSYCHE VIA CONSCIENCE AND SUPEREGO A third way to note the influence of rationality on the psyche is by first clearly distinguishing the superego and conscience. Some psychologists, like Freud, will explain the personal reality of conscience in terms of the psychological reality of superego. But I do not think there is any necessity to choose one over the other, as both phenomena exist, as I will show below. The Superego For Freud the superego is the product of an infantile identification with some significant other, who then judges one’s own actions and attitudes in the light of that other. Rudolf Allers summarizes this activity in this way:

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The superego contains all the ideals, moral precepts, social conventions and the rest which rule over the life of the mature person. . . . It has no instinctual basis of its own. . . . The superego owes its existence to a process called “identification” which has a certain resemblance to transference. Identification means indeed that an individual places himself in imagination in the place of another whom he wants to be like or whose place he covets. . . . The main thing is that the adoption of ideals, convictions, and so on, is also considered by Freud as an effect of causes which go back ultimately to the instinctual organization. 8

Superego formation is thus explained by a kind of identification going in the direction of introjection, whereby the ego identifies with some other—as having power and authority—who then “takes in” the ideas or attitudes of that other as one’s own. Freud describes the psychological process of introjection, which is constitutive of the superego, as follows: So long as we had to concern ourselves with the study of what is repressed in mental life, there was no need for us to share in any agitated apprehensions as to the whereabouts of the higher side of man. But now that we have embarked upon the analysis of the ego we can give an answer to all those whose moral sense has been shocked and who have complained that there must surely be a higher nature in man: “Very true,” we can say, “and here we have that higher nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves.” 9

Notice the last phrase, “and later we took them into ourselves.” The philosopher John Crosby gives a clear characterization of introjection by contrasting it with projection. He states, “We know what it is to project our inner feelings on to another, as when we are irritated at someone and proceed to project something blameworthy onto him or her. Well, there is also the reverse movement—not projection but introjection—whereby we take some other into ourselves, identifying ourselves with that other.” 10 The “other” is typically some parent or other authority, whose opinions and feelings the child takes in via identification. The infantile nature of the superego is revealed when one notes that the opinions/feelings the child identifies with are not fully received on the spiritual, intentional level. Crosby explains, The child who introjects the paternal authority will comply with the paternal prohibitions all on his own, even at those moments when he knows that the father is not looking. The father now has his own representative in the mind of his son or daughter; this representative observes the child even in the absence of the father. It is not that the paternal authority motivates the respect of the child; such a relation would involve elements of intentionality and understand-

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Thus, what Crosby suggests is not merely that the “content” of this introjection lacks the rationality of morality, but even more fundamentally that it lacks even the rationality of intentionality. We can make this last point evident by comparing some introjected object with a genuine intentional object, such as grief. With intentionality, awareness of the intentional object “explains” the experience. As previously noted in chapter 2, with a real intentional act—such as with grief—the experience is impossible without some object (some sad event) motivating it. In contrast to genuine intentional experiences, the crucial reality with introjection is not its object at all, which seems to be quite replaceable with any other object. The introjected object does not determine the quality of the experience, as with real intentional objects. The central locus of the introjection is rather the psychological process itself. Thus, it would be silly to take the actual introjected content seriously, as what really explains the experience is the psychological mechanism, with the object merely being an ideological superstructure, just as Freud describes. What counts is not the intelligibility of the introjected norms, but rather psychological power relations between a dominating other and a correspondingly weak ego. Freud thinks introjection is the crucial idea for explaining the phenomenon of the superego, which is not pathological (except in adults) as long as its application refers merely to an immature stage of childhood development. While this phenomenon is found in the psyche before the advent of reason and is natural enough in early childhood, it is clearly an infantile way for an adult to appropriate norms. For, after all, the inner nature of the primitive object of introjection is utterly distinct from any specific rational consideration of transcendent moral norms. Since the point of superego introjection is neither rationality nor intelligibility (logos), it follows that just as any particular content can be projected, so in principle any particular content can be introjected. Superego formation, therefore, does not formally aim or focus on authentic morality whatsoever, while conscience in contrast at least aims at representing authentic moral norms (while granting that this representation can at times be erroneous). Superego formation is in contrast automatic and immature—in the sense of bypassing rational relations—built on introjection and having the function of repressing those ideas and attitudes not fitting with the object of the introjection. It is one thing, of course, to admit to the phenomenon of introjection, even including it as a normal stage of childhood development; it is quite another to explain conscience in terms of identification and introjection. While the central note of superego formation is immaturity (whether of age or personality), conscience—assuming the reality of the moral law and

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the ability of a person to know and rightly respond to that law—can be a fully personal, mature, and rational power of soul. If the moral law is one aspect of logos, then giving the due response to what is authentically morally relevant is fully rational. And if some application of conscience is immature or mistaken, it will be because the person performing the action is immature or mistaken and not because conscience is itself essentially infantile. In contrast, every superego introjection is essentially prepersonal, and therefore immature and spiritually nonrational. Finally, the claim that all morality is explained by superego introjection and consequent sublimation presupposes the philosophical interpretation of the natural moral law as if it were merely an invented superstructure. Without this supposition the psychological reduction of conscience to superego would be wildly inappropriate, insofar as it attempts to explain a rational faculty in terms of nonrational categories. Conscience Reverberations in Psyche Notice with real moral evil we have something utterly new and different from the superego: a certain mark upon a person’s soul and the guilt that inevitably follows, whether consciously experienced or not. In this section, however, my focus is not specifically on the moral as its concurrent psychological component, that is, on the reverberations that result from some contemptible moral action. These reverberations do not necessarily presuppose any explicit theoretical moral orientation, insofar as moral skeptics and relativists can also feel them. In fact, below are some stories of people who come to the moral realm not via argument or direct insight into moral norms themselves, but indirectly, via the recognition of the horror of their own action, leading to inevitable self-loathing and self-contempt. The first comes from one of the novels of Dostoyevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky tells the story of a wealthy man who, upon falling in love with a girl, murdered her because she did not return his affections and was even about to marry someone else. By skill and luck it turned out to be a perfect crime, with no one suspecting him. At first his conscience did not seem to reprove him, as it was absolutely insupportable to him—as he told himself—that she should marry someone else. But many years after the crime, Dostoyevsky notes, “he began to be bitterly and ominously haunted by the blood of his murdered victim, by the young life he had destroyed, by the blood that cried out for vengeance. He had begun to have awful dreams.” 12 “He had begun to have awful dreams.” Here we surely see again the power of the moral sphere and of conscience reverberating within the psychological life of the person. It is not just the superego repressing the id, because of the objectively rational element of the evil of the murder. Here it

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is not some automatic psychic mechanism acting upon an immature ego, as it is rather the conscious self who is repressing his conscience. A second example comes from the psychologist Igor Caruso: This case history reveals the very problem of the stricken conscience: the girl fell ill because she had, while nursing her dearly-beloved father, suppressed certain thoughts: these thoughts, we later find, were tantamount to wishing her father’s death. The girl realized, in fact, that her father’s illness represented, both for him and her, a trial beyond their strength. For one instant she therefore wished her father’s death. But she rejected this fleeting thought; or rather, and this is the difficulty, she did not reject it, but immediately repressed it because it seemed to her too monstrous to fit in with the ideal image she had of herself. She simply could not have a wish like that! 13

In this example, Caruso thinks the repressor agent is not the superego but the girl’s own freely chosen attitude of pride, which in turn led to an identification of herself with her own idealized image of herself that then brought about the repression. For, instead of humbly acknowledging that she sometimes does not or cannot live up to what she sees as right and good, an attitude that would not lead to any repression whatsoever, she rather represses any knowledge of her own shortcomings (including the impossibility of her situation of unremitting care for another) for the sake of her idealized image as a really good girl who would never wish her father’s death. But perhaps Caruso’s interpretation—of spiritual pride as the repressor— in the above case is mistaken. Maybe the repressor here is really some infantile introjected idea in the girl’s superego and not pride, that then lead to her repression. Which interpretation is right? It seems that the problem here is with an interpretation of the facts, instead of any kind of obvious reference to the facts themselves. The point is not that Caruso is necessarily right over Freud in this particular case, but that Caruso could be right. His position seems perfectly reasonable, perhaps even the more probable interpretation in that particular case. But even concerning Freud’s own explanation, he cannot himself help but bring in logos and with it some intimation of rational life. For the very heart of Freud’s own notion of repression—as central to both his ideas of neurosis and psychosis—is the idea of a flight from reality. Thus Freud states, “Or, to express it in yet another way, neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it; psychosis denies it and tries to substitute something else for it.” 14 Denying the existence of reality only makes sense if a being possesses the power of coming into contact with reality in the first place. It seems that Freud cannot help but make reference to rational relations.

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FOURTH: HOW RESENTMENT CAN REVERBERATE IN THE PSYCHE IN A CONCRETE CASE The above analysis can now be applied to a specific case concerning resentment, which in turn will provide a transition to this chapter’s final topic (the fifth argument) of ressentiment, with the following magnificent story by Corrie Ten Boom. Ten Boom tells of forgiving bitter injustices performed by a former Nazi guard at the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck. One of the very worst of these guards was a man who sometime after the war apparently had a religious conversion and then happened to come to a public talk given by Ten Boom, ironically, on the topic of forgiveness. Normally Ten Boom would not accept invitations or even travel to Germany, and she had only come back this time at the strong request of a dear friend. Maybe she had not wanted to evoke her terrible memories of camp life, with perhaps the underlying subtext of having to deal with her own buried resentments and inability—at a deeper level—to forgive. At the talk she instantly recognized this former Nazi guard sitting front row center, though he did not recognize her, as while at the camp she had been only a child, one of many thousands of children to have gone through the camp. After the talk, he came up to her to tell her of his conversion to Christianity. Ten Boom writes of this exchange: “You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,” he was saying. “I was a guard there.”. . . “But since that time,” he went on, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fraulein”—again the hand came out—“will you forgive me?” . . . It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. . . . And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm and sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. “I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart.” (emphasis added) 15

The theoretical work of this chapter can now be tested with the above example, by making the following four points. First, the resentment she had for the Nazi guards in general and for this person in particular did not exist merely on a purely rational, theoretical level. It is evident from this passage that there was a clear psyche dimension buried deep beyond conscious recognition. She may have been almost completely unaware of her own continued resentment and inability to genuinely, fully forgive. It is after all one thing to forgive on a formal, verbal, volitional level, which, given the horrors she suffered, would not be nothing. But it is quite another to really forgive from one’s heart. Yet her emotional explosion following having barely been able

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to extend her hand by inches strongly suggests not only a moral, but also a psychological breakthrough from these deeper resentments she had hardly noticed before. Her psychological mechanism was, after all, subtler: avoidance rather than overt resentment. Despite her religious and moral seriousness, psychological and moral work was still needed. Once avoidance was not possible in this situation, she had to confront her subterranean resentments and inability to forgive at a deeper level. Second, one might wonder what would have happened had such resentments not been addressed. Ten Boom speaks to this point: “Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and horrible as that.” 16 Third, I want to develop what contemporary philosopher Ronda Chervin calls “a valid moment.” 17 By this term she means an insight into value so intense as to penetrate and even contradict a person’s superficial philosophy as well as any well-entrenched neurotic stance and outlook. Normally, insights are rational only in the sense of inhabiting a purely theoretical or intellectual sphere. In contrast, a valid moment refers to a particularly strong intentional, rational affect 18 going beyond the theoretical to reverberate in the psyche and sometimes even the body, which explains Ten Boom’s electrical “current [that] started in the shoulder, rac[ing] down my arm and sprang into our joined hands.” 19 Finally, fourth, the valid moment is quite powerful, not only when experienced and remembered but also for a time afterwards as it continues reverberating consciously in the background of one’s conscious life. This “reverberation,” however, will in time eventually wear off, falling back into the passivity of memory, thereby giving psychological “space” for the old resentments to come back and take their old place within a person’s soul and psyche. For this reason there needs to be some way for these insights to be incorporated more permanently within a person’s character. In the case of Holocaust victims like Ten Boom, while she obviously had a breakthrough with insight into her inability to forgive, psychological/spiritual work would be required to develop a “spirit of forgiveness.” Superactual Consciousness of Moral Virtues and Vices Imagine someone reading the story of some great and virtuous personality, like a St. Francis of Assisi, and thinking that she wants to be just like him. So she tries to volitionally impose in an exterior way Francis’s own way of thinking and living onto her own life . . . until something irritating happens, leading to some immature outburst exposing the whole charade. Here it is

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obvious that the realm of authentic moral virtue is deeper than some attitude merely imposed exteriorly by the will. Authentic virtue needs to include the will, but it also must somehow integrate one’s whole character and psyche as well. How can that happen? With Corrie Ten Boom, we see how certain attitudes—like the spirit of forgiveness—are deeper than simply an attitude existing merely on the formal, theoretical level (of her Christianity), and even deeper than her valid moment that will continue to reverberate in her psyche for a time and then eventually die out. How can certain attitudes envelop us as a whole person, including our personal self as well as our psyche? Perhaps it becomes clear how it is that even after the glow of her valid moment passes, a spirit of forgiveness needs to be exercised and explicitly assented to again and again, with all other lingering resentments unequivocally and consciously faced and disavowed. Merely repressing again such resentments—because good Christians do not have resentments!—will not do. This is asserted while recognizing (and hardly being able to imagine) the horrors she went through as an innocent victim in a Nazi death camp. Thus it is not difficult to suspect that her resentments will not simply become nonexistent, even after the tremendous insight provided by the valid moment. And when at some later date these resentful feelings start reemerging back into her conscious life, now she has the incredibly difficult work of confronting them with the antidote of forgiveness. Not only that, her insight into forgiveness with this ex-Nazi prison guard provided by the valid moment needs to then be extended to all the other brutal guards (and further to everyone else), all the while recognizing and not burying the seriousness of their offenses against her. For moral and psychological health this spirit of forgiveness provided by the valid moment must not be allowed to die out. It must rather become a prism through which she (and all of us as well) should then look at the world. That is, her “spirit of forgiveness” should penetrate into her whole character, as we sometimes notice with other great personalities who really do possess that spirit. Thus there are certain ongoing attitudes that should (in a moral sense) consciously and continuously reverberate throughout a person’s soul—including their psyche—through time. Dietrich von Hildebrand’s term for any attitude that lives on—not just on the level of conscious intentions and attitudes, but also at a deeper level of our psychological life, “coloring” it in various ways when one then looks out into the world—is “superactual consciousness.” Moral virtues are one example of such a consciousness. Hildebrand’s characterization of them 20 is that they are not just attitudes living passively in memory until actualized, but rather attitudes that consciously “live” and shape our personal life across time, both on the background (in which they then act as an implicit prism through which the virtuous person sees reality) and in the foreground of

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consciousness (such as when people explicitly focus on the rational legitimacy of the virtue or their need for it to grow within their souls). The content of superactual consciousness can refer to moral virtue, but it can also refer to any contrary attitude of moral vice, such as with anger or an inability to forgive, which can similarly live superactually through time within one’s soul. Just as an individual act of forgiving (existing only briefly in time) can take on a whole new dimension when superactualized (as it then becomes a generalized attitude living through time, as well as a prism through which one habitually looks at reality), so too can anger take on a new (horrific) life when it is not confined to a single response but as well diffuses out into a person’s whole psychological life, similarly acting like a prism, “coloring” the way this person looks at reality. Notice what happens psychologically when individual acts of anger superactualize into a vice: the anger becomes “unhinged” from its original motivating object and generalizes both outwardly (to other persons and situations) and inwardly infecting one’s whole psychic life. The outward movement in turn invites a further rationalization justifying the anger that is now projected onto other persons. This inward movement of superactualized anger spreads in such as way as to “soak” one’s own soul with its deadly poison, making its host sick. In both instances—of moral virtues and vices—when these attitudes are implicit on the background of consciousness, they can still be “fed” and strengthened by thematically actualizing them on the foreground of consciousness. One effect of this strengthening is the formation of a kind of dynamism, such that even when the virtue or the vice is implicit, there remains a drive for that virtue or vice to break through into actual consciousness and become explicit. Thus the man possessing the vice of anger will habitually look for occasions to vent his spleen, and the man possessing some moral virtue will look for occasions to express that virtue in action. Just as these attitudes strengthen when actualized, so will they weaken to the extent one ceases to fuel them by being motivated by them. They will especially weaken—although not necessarily be immediately destroyed— when their contrary attitude is explicitly asserted. 21 Thus, with respect to our vices, we can have not only the strategy of trying to “starve” them, but also by the strategy of actualizing individual actions and inner responses that correspond to their contrary virtues. Notice that thematically starving the vice need not (in the slightest) involve repression, as the angry person practicing the opposing virtue is all too aware of his anger, together with its illegitimacy in those cases where he gradually comes to see how his anger has generalized to other objects not worthy of that response. Furthermore, even though both repression and some implicit superactual content will possess a dynamic character, continually threatening to break through into actual consciousness, the actual expression

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in both cases is very different. With repression the effect is a violent splitting apart of one’s conscious life, leaving some content unconscious; with the superactual virtue there is a unifying of the personality into moral character, with nothing being pushed out of consciousness. It is one thing for a person to give a morally due response either as an individual inner response or as performed in an action, with both being limited within the context of a certain span of time. It is another for a person to give a due response that superactually “lives” in that person’s conscious life over time. It is especially in superactual possession where moral values are fully realized, now as moral virtues and actualized in a person’s moral character even during those moments when they are not being exercised by some inner response or action. FIFTH: RESSENTIMENT As a fifth argument for rationality impacting the psyche, I want to turn away from authentic moral value to consider one of its shoddy imitations, to see what light a proper understanding of them can yield for the thesis of rationality impacting psyche. While authentic values are intrinsic to the being possessing them and thus are not constituted in any relation to persons, the ressentiment “values” we shall investigate below are indeed partly constituted by personal, psychological factors, and as such are—or should be—of particular interest to psychology. Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Scheler give one such instance with their analysis of ressentiment. Ressentiment is similar to resentment in being originally “sparked” by a certain personal response, which in the case of ressentiment is an attitude of looking at things in and through a comparison, together with an attitude of pride and an inability to forgive. This attitude then dialectically intertwines both the person’s self and psyche into an especially explosive mix. Since there is no English word that correlates to this phenomenon, I will follow Scheler’s analysis, as well as his English translator who keeps the German term, ressentiment. Scheler describes ressentiment in this way: Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. 22

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Understanding ressentiment is well worth the effort, as it describes a surprisingly common psychological phenomenon that goes unnoticed by those psychologists who do not take personal life and logos seriously. The goal here is to further bring out the role of our personal/rational life with respect to the phenomena of repression by elucidating some of Scheler’s insights. This text can only briefly summarize Scheler’s rich phenomenological analysis of ressentiment by noting and delineating what seems to me to be three distinct stages leading to its formation in a personality. Revenge and Envy Concerning the first stage, let us say a person starts with an attitude that fosters the cultivation of any one of the following: revenge, envy, hatred, the impulse to detract, or spite. It does not matter whether these attitudes are themselves a response to some real or merely apparent injustice. Although ressentiment can begin from any one of these entry points, Scheler maps out the attitude he thinks is most common: the spirit of revenge and envy. Ressentiment is not an inevitable consequence of an attitude of revenge. What is also necessary is that a person’s response to some perceived slight or injustice be delayed because of the foreseen impotence of the response. If the response to the slight is immediate, then the psychological energy will be projected outward and be dispersed. If, however, it is delayed because the other is judged as being too powerful, then to react immediately with open anger and resentment could be disastrous, inviting a counterattack. The setting for ressentiment then has to be one of weakness, together with the feeling of pride and superiority over the other. This person really is better than the stronger other person, and he even tends to blame that other (who is the object of the resentment) for his own weakness. This leads to the spirit of revenge, wanting “tit-for-tat,” which is the first stage of ressentiment. Consider envy. Let us say a person, for whatever reason, is envious of another. If the other is someone in authority, like a boss, that person will be in an inferior position. What begins with envy leads to dislike. This dislike is typically felt as justified because the natural, automatic tendency for us all is to want to justify everything that we in fact feel, thus calling for rationalization (“That guy is a jerk,” etc.). It is relatively rare and a sign of emotional maturity when a person will not automatically endorse his or her own spontaneous feelings, but instead explicitly evaluates them according to right reason. Even worse, there is also a temptation to blame the other for possessing some good we desire. “It’s your fault that I am not as smart (handsome, athletic, etc.) as you.” Naturally, such outrageous sentiments cannot be verbalized, as to objectify them is to immediately see through them. They rather must remain felt and implicit. And as with revenge, this dislike from envy

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cannot be explicitly expressed because of one’s own impotence and fear of retaliation. Repression What characterizes the second stage of formation of ressentiment in a personality is repression. Feelings of revenge, envy, and impotence are all experienced as unpleasant. Naturally, there is a tendency to ignore or even to push out of consciousness unpleasant things. Also, as was just noticed, to verbalize is often to expose. The grounds for these toxic feelings must therefore remain hidden and implicit. Hiding them, however, leads to either a dissociation of the feelings from the object motivating them or even to the burying of the unpleasant feelings themselves. To somehow repress these feelings, of course, is not to say they are destroyed. They are rather “buried alive,” to borrow Terruwe and Baars’s expressive phrase. Furthermore, once the feelings are unhinged from their objects via repression, the psychological result is a generalizing out of the poison within these feelings throughout the person’s whole personality, especially within the psyche. Thus such people will tend to be outwardly and consciously friendly. They often think of themselves as polite, considerate people. But just beneath that “pleasant” facade one finds a psyche full of bottled-up anger, venom, and the spirit of revenge, all seeking to be expressed. As Scheler puts it, this kind of feeling “is, as it were, always ready to burst forth and betray itself in an unbridled gesture, a way of smiling.” 23 Unhinged from its objects, this emotional poison will “radiate out” in all directions from within the psyche. The ressentiment person needs to somehow discharge this poison, which will typically take the form of an impulse to detract and to spite. These responses are different from the original feelings of revenge and envy, insofar as the first emotions are far more closely tied to their original motivating objects than this second set of responses. Furthermore, the impulse to detract and to spite are also not merely reactive, as with revenge and envy, insofar as they actively seek their objects. Here the psychological inner poison has gotten so strong, has built up so much pressure, that it must seek expression and discharge. However, this person still feels him- or herself to be in a position of weakness and inferiority, requiring that this spite and malice continue to be disguised. So far the focus has been on the subject and the steps leading the person to ressentiment. Consider now the object, whether the perceived evil one is avenging or the good that is envied. Notice that these objects are never looked at simply and directly in their own individual nature. They are always seen in a relation to something else. In fact, if one looks at motivating objects simply in their own nature outside of any relation, the attitude of ressentiment would never develop. Ressentiment only blossoms when a person looks

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at reality “in and through a comparison,” which Scheler illustrates with the example of the fable of the fox and the sour grapes. 24 The fox desires the grapes, but they cannot be reached. However, instead of putting up with the tension of the good of the grapes and his inability to reach them, the fox merely says, “The grapes must be sour.” Here one is at the threshold of the “transvaluation of values,” that is, of the full flowering of the attitude of ressentiment. The Full Actualization of Ressentiment In this third stage, the person begins to see that death, suffering, and poverty are positive goods, whereas life, happiness, and strength are false and even to be pitied. Nietzsche terms this the “falsification of the value tablets.” That is, instead of saying “The grapes are sour,” one rather says, “Not having grapes is good!” and “Poverty is good!” The psychological phenomenon of ressentiment becomes creative of new “values,” a total inversion of authentic values. Oddly enough, from a metaphysical point of view, not even God himself can create a new kind of value. For example, it is beyond all devising that justice and love are good, that personal beings possess intrinsic value and are more precious than rocks. Put another way, justice and love are by their very inner natures intrinsically and necessarily good. They cannot not be good, which as an a priori necessity cannot be negated even by a fiat from God. God could no more make justice evil than He could create a square circle. 25 This absolute necessity is what grounds the goodness of all intrinsic value as radically uninventible. And it is not just value in general, but specific values of justice, beauty, love, gratitude, and so on, that also share in this uninventibility. They all possess a strictly necessary, inner-essence structure of goodness. If the above is correct, then one can grant both the infinite richness and variability of value that is in fact found in different cultures and eras, as well as the vast manifold of differing conceptions of what is and what is not of the nature of value, while at the same time holding that there are not essentially competing and contradictory intrinsic values themselves. There is one authentic value system by which we can then measure the infinite variety of individual beings that are beautiful and good. This is what allows us to rightly condemn what is clearly and obviously given as contemptible, such as the human sacrifice one finds with the ancient Aztecs or killing people for racist reasons one finds with the Nazis. The Aztecs and the Nazis do not merely offer different, incommensurable “value” systems; they rather give instances of moral horror from authentic morality that is in turn one dimension of right reason (logos). While there are not alternative and contradictory value systems in being, they are found in thinking. Individual persons and cultures will have differ-

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ent, contradictory, and competing systems of value opinions. Naturally, if all values really are reducible to nothing but what various cultures say they are, which is exactly the thesis of value relativism, then it follows that all such systems are not only inventible, but also ultimately equal. No one would be any more correct than anyone else. While it is obviously not the object of this text to critique value relativism in general, there is one critique of this theory one can make from the point of view of rational psychology, specifically concerning our topic of ressentiment. The criticism is this: The claim of value relativism obscures very interesting psychological realities that are revealed if one takes seriously the logos of objective value. Specifically, the (second dimension of the) objective logos is not and cannot be the product of any devising will and instead refers to fully objective realities. If this is the case, and the product of ressentiment morality is exposed as merely being a product of thinking, then this “morality” is not what it claims to be. Let us now investigate how these created ressentiment “values”—in quotation marks because authentic kinds of values are radically uninventible— come into being. They are a continuation of the processes of (1) not looking at values in and through themselves, but only through a comparison—the person in relation to another—with that other being perceived as stronger and responsible for one’s own weakness. This leads to (2) the impulse to detract and (3) the need for both “getting back,” and yet (4) the further need to disguise one’s animosity (because the other is perceived to be stronger). How can one do this better than by depreciating the strength and the values of that other? Not in the name of spite or some kind of explicit animosity, of course, but rather in the name of Christian charity. Then the possibility of a direct confrontation becomes far less because the ressentiment is not overtly hostile at all. It appears the opposite, as one now quietly pities the other. So mere depreciation of the envied other is not enough. That is still too negative (remember how unpleasant these repressed feelings are) as well as more open to the possibility of direct confrontation from a position of weakness. Instead of this negativity, one will feel even better with the positivity of aping Christian morality: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “The meek shall inherit the earth.” So one must then exalt the opposite: instead of strength, elevate (the “value” of) poverty; instead of power, weakness; instead of health, sickness, and so on. Voila! A new “value” system! Thus it is not enough to go and slander some individual desired good, such as this particular cluster of grapes. One must go on to “slander life,” as Nietzsche puts it, by extolling the opposite of life’s values. The result is a total inversion of values. As Scheler states, “Once the sense of values has shifted and the new judgments have spread, such people—who are envied because they positively possess real values—cease to be enviable, hateful and worthy of revenge. They are unfortunate and to be pitied, for they are

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beset with ‘evils.’ Their sight awakens feelings of gentleness, pity and commiseration.” It is this aspect of ressentiment morality that Nietzsche utterly confuses with Christian morality. 26 The central point is this: ressentiment “value” is not really an instance of authentic value at all. Real values have no subjective, relativistic dimension in their constitution, but rather refer to that which is uninventibly importantin-itself. Ressentiment “value” in contrast is merely a made-up fiction. If so, then ressentiment “value” and authentic value are not coequal realities on the same metaphysical plain, as the ethical relativists suppose. Ressentiment “value” is of human devising, whereas authentic value is not of human (or even divine) devising at all, but rather is the uncreated nature of what is good-in-itself. NOTES 1. The psychologist Salvatore Maddi describes Freud’s notion of the id (roughly analogous to my notion of psyche). He states, “Whenever you encounter a reference to the id, all you need do is remember that it is a summary term for all the instincts postulated by Freud.” Salvatore Maddi, Personality Theories: A Comparative Analysis (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1968), 24. 2. Sigmund Freud, “The Libido Theory,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Reiff (New York: Collier, 1978), 180. 3. Anna A. Terruwe and Conrad W. Baars, Loving and Curing the Neurotic (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1972), 49. 4. The famous quotation is this: “‘Whither is God’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I.’” “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 96. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, trans. Thomas Common, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909–1913), 306–7. 6. Ibid., 309–10. 7. B. F. Skinner is one such example. Just before his death he admitted that during his life he only pretended to be an atheist, and at the end came back to his Protestant faith. See Psychology Today 17, no. 8 (Sept. 1983: 25). 8. Rudolf Allers, The Successful Error (New York: Sheed, 1940), 29–30. 9. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 32. 10. John Crosby, Personalist Papers (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2004), 95. 11. Ibid., 97. 12. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, in Great Books of the Western World, trans. Constance Garnett (Chicago: Benton, 1952), 161. 13. Igor Caruso, Existential Psychology: From Analysis to Synthesis (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 39–40. 14. Sigmund Freud, “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Reiff (New York: Collier, 1963), 202. 15. Corrie Ten Boom, Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul, ed. Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Patty Aubery, and Nancy Mitchell (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1997), 4. 16. Ten Boom, Chicken Soup, 4. 17. Ronda Chervin, “The Valid Moment,” in Wahrheit, Wert und Sein, ed. Balduin Schwarz (Regensburg: Verlag, 1970), 147–55. 18. There are other feelings that are not rationally proportioned to some object (dislike stemming from envy) and other feelings that are not even intentional (headache from a low-

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pressure system). In contrast, the love a good husband has for his spouse can be both intentional and rational. 19. Ten Boom, Chicken Soup, 4. 20. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1953), 241–43. 21. Moral vices will continue to have a hold on a personality even if one is continually disavowing some illegitimate feeling. Disavowal does not lead to the destruction of the feeling, only its modification (insofar as it is now “seen through” for what it is). While disavowal will help lead to a deeper moral transformation of the psyche, the actual transformation at this deeper level is typically slow. 22. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 45–46. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. Ibid., 73. 25. One obvious objection concerns the belief in the omnipotence of God. If God is allpowerful, could he not do everything, including make justice evil? To this objection Thomas Aquinas responds, “[T]here may be doubt as to the precise meaning of the word ‘all’ when we say that God can do all things. If, however, we consider the matter aright, since power is said in reference to possible things, this phrase, God can do all things, is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things possible.” Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, Ltd., 1926) (1, q. 25, a. 3). Furthermore, by making justice evil, God’s will would then be set against his own nature, which is Goodness itself. 26. For Scheler’s analysis of the manifold distinctions between authentic Christian morality and ressentiment morality, see his Ressentiment, 83–113.

Chapter Five

Going Beyond Empiricism The Subjective and Bodily Dimensions of Psychology

Earlier empirical science was distinguished from empiricism, with the latter position holding that all knowledge is empirically based. This second position is of special interest because such influential psychological thinkers as Freud and Skinner, among many others, implicitly hold it. In fact, empiricism seems so ingrained within the general milieu of psychology that these psychologists hardly needed to explicitly assert it. Though it is not this text’s principal aim to be prescriptive, the theme of the next two chapters will be to develop a critique of psychological empiricism, while further developing two meaningful alternatives for broadening psychology beyond empirical facts. This chapter will focus on the bodily and psychic dimensions—focusing on the subject—while chapter 6 will concentrate on the rational and the objective relations to reality. Specifically, this chapter will further develop the nonempirical source of lateral self-presence, building on chapter 2, and in the next chapter the nonempirical source of intellectual intuition. The first criticism of psychological empiricism will involve a brief discussion concerning the relationship between the psyche and the human body, which will help answer a possible objection that the emphasis of this text on subjective dimension is forgetful of the body. In dealing with this objection the hope is to “turn the tables,” so to speak, and claim that there is one sense in which psychological empiricism is itself forgetful of the body, insofar as it leads (if taken seriously and consistently) to a kind of alienation from one’s own body. In fact, I will argue that in various ways alienation inevitably follows from an exclusive application of a strict empiricism. 61

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THE PERSONAL SELF AS DISTINCT FROM THE BODY In this first argument, I want to establish that the personal self is essentially distinct from the body, and that its immateriality makes it largely inaccessible to the empirical method. Psychology is about the psyche and the personal self, and distinguishes itself from physiology by considering the human body not only from its influence on behavior and mental processes, but also from the point of view of the personal self who experiences and performs conscious acts. Thus on this view the body is not the primary object of psychological investigation, although it is obviously important for helping to explain conscious experience and the conscious self. Someone can wonder if and why this is so. Why can’t we say that what thinks or loves is the brain and not the self? Perhaps the brain is the self. Isn’t this a more careful, scientific way of thinking? To answer this question, notice that when you or I think, will, deduce, or promise, we are consciously present to ourselves as the ones performing these acts. They do not occur independent of the “I” that is ourselves. This point is asserted not as some kind of theory or hypothesis, or even as an inference. It is asserted as a direct (or immediate) conscious experience, which all readers can instantly verify for themselves. For conscious experience is never “My brain is thinking” (which is an inference), but always “I perceive, I think, I will, I love,” and so on. 1 In fact, the claim that it is my brain that thinks is sheer theory, insofar as the brain is not consciously experienced at all. To understand the relationship between the brain and consciousness, compare it by analogy to another relationship less controversial: between carbon dioxide and plant life. Granting that both relations (brain to consciousness and carbon dioxide to plant life) are almost completely different, there could still be various analogical similarities, one of which is that the first term of each relation acts as a condition for the possibility of the respective second term. A condition is an enabling factor, making for the possibility of something else. Thus it seems clear that carbon dioxide is an empirically necessary condition for the possibility of plant life. It is obviously not identical to plant life, for no one sees carbon dioxide and water regenerating, reproducing, photosynthesizing, and so on. It is rather what plant life must use in order to sustain it, as opposed to being identical to plant life itself. That is clearly one central relation existing between the brain and consciousness, as the brain is an empirically necessary condition for consciousness. The question is whether it is more than that. Maybe the brain is (1) somehow identical to the self or (2) the efficient cause of consciousness. Consider these options in turn.

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The Thesis that the Brain Is Identical to the Self Notice that, with respect to the above example of the relation of (1) carbon dioxide to (2) plant life, the criterion for an essential distinction between them is this: If the necessary features of (1) are different from and even contradictory to the necessary features of (2), then (1) and (2) cannot be identical, which of course is the case with carbon dioxide in relation to plant life. For obviously carbon dioxide cannot regenerate or reproduce or photosynthesize. I want to now understand the relationship between the brain and the conscious self by noting the following four points: Point 1: Neither the personal self nor the acts performed by the self are in any way perceivable by the senses. This point becomes evident when one asks how much the self weighs, or how long it is, or whether it is colored, solid, or gaseous. None of these optional 2 material predicates makes any sense as applied to the self. Thus, while every material being must possess some of these predicates, none of them applies to any conscious act. For example, if someone is simultaneously perceiving something and is joyful, nobody thinks the act of joy is “above” or “two inches to the left” of the act of perceiving. Nor are these acts colored or oval in shape. None of these optional material predicates are applicable because of the immateriality of both the conscious self and to the conscious acts performed by the self. In contrast, some optional material predicates are applicable to the brain, which is the condition for their being perceived by the senses. Point 2: Notice this about the nature of matter: that in a sense there is no inside and, as a result, no center to individual material things. Of course there is the material inside “stuff” of a rock, but that “inside” is also accessible to us “from the outside,” that is, from observation. All matter seems to be like that, including the brain: There is no inside in the sense of an inner, conscious life that is only available to the subject from within. No matter how far down one goes—cells, DNA, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings— one never comes to acts of thinking or willing, which lie on a different level of being altogether from matter (similar to mind power being on a different level altogether from water power). The assertion that the brain is conscious is really only a hypothesis, at most an inference. In contrast, the being of the conscious self is given on the “inside,” that is, consciously given as its own. The reality of this “inside” is not a mere hypothesis, inference, or abstract concept as its reality is immediately experienced from within. Not only is it consciously experienced, it is also “conscious being,” our most intimate contact with being. For, while material beings are given only “over against us,” as common objects of perception with other persons, our personal, subjective being is exclusively given only to me (and only to you) in an immediate self-presence without

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any subject/object (or intentional) dichotomy. We are all only on the inside of our own conscious life, and not on the inside of any other being. Furthermore, if persons really are free, then this centeredness of the self is further confirmed, as every free being must be centered in itself as a condition for the possibility of freedom. For example, if we really were centered in something else, as nothing but parts of some larger whole of, say, the state, our individual freedom would be clearly lost. We can certainly play a limited role within the state without granting that our being is wholly reducible to that role. In contrast, there is no intrinsic “centeredness” found in material beings. One can find no real inner ontological center to individual material beings, which is why they can be so easily divided up and reconstituted into other things. Even bodily matter formed and ordered into one being by a life principle can be divided and reconstituted into other things (insofar as, for example, chicken meat can become human flesh). This is utterly different from the “I,” which in normal life is never consciously experienced as many, but only as one, and can never be reconstituted into anything else. Point 3: The brain, like every other organ in our body, is made up of parts. In contrast, the being of the self is perfectly one, which is evidenced by its being indivisible. While it is true that the self has many different powers, including an intellect and will, notice that when anyone wills or thinks, it is the whole self that wills and the whole self that thinks. It is not part of the self that wills and another part that thinks. Strictly speaking, it is not my will that wills. It is my self who wills. I will and you will. Thus willing and thinking should not be thought of as constitutive parts of the self, as bricks and walls are constitutive parts of a house. They are rather powers of personal self. 3 Notice the relation of material parts to its whole: take some of the parts away from a material thing, one by one, and that thing will obviously be diminished. Take away enough real sections, and the material whole will eventually cease to be. This implies that parts can in principle be separated from the whole, possessing a certain kind of reality of their own. And as real parts, they can synthetically be built up into new wholes. The brain is obviously one example of a material thing that can be explained in this way. In contrast, the powers of willing and thinking cannot be separated from the self who thinks and wills any more than the power of growing can be separated from the living seed. And since it is the whole self that performs these activities, these powers of willing and thinking are not really (material) parts of the self at all. Someone could object: If the self is one, what about the psychological phenomenon of multiple personalities? In response, one needs to distinguish personalities from (the ontology or being of) the person. Personality is largely a psychological/cultural/genetic phenomenon, insofar as it is principally the product of a developed pattern of conscious experiences, of a “style of life,” as Alfred Adler puts it.

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Consider some of the influences that constitute a personality, such as (1) inherited factors of genetic traits, (2) cultural and family styles, (3) the persona a person partially adopts in relation to the particular social milieu of the moment, as well as (4) being a product of the (self-determinative) moral decisions one makes about one’s life. Since none of these factors are constitutive of the ontological/substantial being of the person, a personality is not to be identified with but rather presupposes personal being. The psychology of the person, in the exclusive sense of the conscious personal self, is very different from the psychology of personality. The person is psychological in the sense of that being who performs psychic acts, as opposed to the being of a personality, which is partly the product of such acts (see point (4) above). Since persons are characterized as really-existing beings, and even as substantially (chapter 6) really existing, they are utterly distinct from mere personalities. A personality, in contrast, is obviously not itself substantial, insofar as it is grounded—not in itself (as with every substance)—but in the substantial being of the person. Still, there is an obvious relation between personality and person insofar as personality not only presupposes but also helps reveal the person. This relation, however, also presupposes a distinction between them, as it is the person who is the primary reality, with the secondary reality being the personality or persona. Certainly there are radical instances of persona change, where there really are cases of alternating, independent multiple personalities within one person. Here the distinction between a personality and the person is so great that the person may not be legally or morally responsible for actions. However, the fact that we rightly identify such instances as deeply disordered shows again that personality is not reducible to person. Multiple personalities are disordered because it belongs to the nature of a personality to reveal the person and because the self is one. Finally, there is also a distinction between multiple personalities and spiritual possession. If someone is possessed by demons—assuming for a moment that such states of affairs actually exist—they are possessed by one or more other (demonic) persons, not by other personalities. Thus there are two distinct kinds of disordered states: multiple personalities and demonic possession. In the first case one requires a therapist, in the second, an exorcist. And both kinds of states are in turn distinct from the person in the sense of the conscious, personal self. Point 4: One might ask if there is any physical correlate to our experience of personal identity. It seems not, for, not only is our brain made up of parts (as opposed to the unity of our conscious experience), it is also constantly sloughing off and regenerating new cells from among our brains’ estimated one hundred billion neurons. Biologists tell us that different cell

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structures have different rates of cell exchange, even though in the brain this rate is much slower. In contrast, since our self is one and thus not made up of real parts, there is nothing analogous to the idea of cell exchange (whether this rate of exchange is slow or fast). In fact, our experience is just the reverse; few of us have any difficulty saying, “Back when I was three years old . . .” Consider that phrase: “back when I was three.” One cannot simply substitute the “brain” for this “I,” even given its slower rate of cell exchange in relation to the rest of the body, because over the course of a typical lifetime persons will in effect generate materially different brains. If our brains are materially different over the course of a lifetime—via normal cell exchange, aging, and in some cases from concussions and strokes—how do we account for the perfect self-identity that we in fact sense when saying “back when I was three”? How could this “I” then be the brain? Someone could respond and say, “It is not the brain as a whole that remains the same over time, but only certain cells within the brain—perhaps those cells (such as cerebral cortex neurons) that are not replaced from birth. 4 Since the brain as a whole grows and changes over the course of time and our (ontological) self-identity does not change over time, any correlation between them seems at best weak. A far better correlation would be with these cerebral cortex neurons, insofar as they are never replaced.” The problem with this adjusted theory is that these never-replaced brain cells are many and still change, and thus the unity of even these brain cells is not one of a simple identity. That is, while our personal identity is ontologically and experientially (unless disordered) one, these cells are themselves made up of many parts and are internally constantly changing, with some of these cells over the course of a lifetime possibly becoming damaged or even destroyed. In contrast, a person’s ontological self-identity remains perfectly the same. Thus neither the brain nor any part of the brain is really a fit candidate for the personal identity of a perfect oneness we in fact experience with our very self. In making this argument I am not claiming that the self never changes. It obviously does change, just not in the sense of one person becoming another kind of thing or another person. In other words, there is feature change but not identity change. Maybe this person is terribly incapacitated or even in a permanent coma. But notice that this terrible tragedy happens to this one, self-identical person, and not to someone else. The Thesis that Biochemistry Is the Efficient Cause of Consciousness Some psychologists, like Freud, consider the brain as the real cause—as opposed to an empirically necessary condition—of rational conscious activ-

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ity. While a condition is an enabling factor, a cause is more than a mere condition. For example, a certain brain temperature is the condition for normal brain functioning, which in turn is an empirically necessary condition for conscious life. But nobody thinks that the mere temperature of the brain both empowers and accounts for the rational content of what someone actually thinks. A genuine cause is something more than a mere condition; it is that through the power of which something comes into being, endures in being (for example, steel beams holding a building up), or changes. Thus if some factor A effects a change to B, then A not only empowers the change but also is the intelligible reason for explaining that change to B. Thus if a thing does not in fact empower a change, it will not be the cause. And if some phenomenon cannot theoretically explain some change, there may be some question as to whether the relation is a real cause or a mere correlation. All of the above can be asserted while admitting that the brain may very well cause—in both dimensions of empowering and theoretically accounting for—a vast range of bodily and psychic activity, from controlling blood pressure to pumping the heart to influencing certain kinds of depression and schizophrenia, the effects of which can be consciously experienced. Certainly our biochemistry and brain physiology are at least empirically necessary conditions for our personal life. Without their functioning we could not even have life, much less a conscious life. But now the claim is more: that certain conscious experiences, such as depression, can be caused by biochemical factors, such as alcohol (acting as an depressant), which shows that the relation between the brain and consciousness can sometimes be more than just an empirically necessary condition for consciousness. Thus, we cannot rightly assert that biochemistry only serves as a condition for the possibility of consciousness. Rather, our claim is that biochemistry and brain physiology cannot be the cause determining the contents of our rational thinking. Thus, for example, biochemically caused depression is nonrational because it is not rationally motivated. The link between chemical depressants and our conscious experience of depression is surely intelligible, just not rational. Biochemically caused depression, therefore, is utterly different from a rationally motivated depression that is intentional (or “about something”), such as caused by the death of a loved one. Let us further investigate the above claim. We shall begin with the thesis, grounded at least in an inference to best explanation, that there exists such a thing as knowledge in the sense of justified true belief. After all, science itself would be undermined if this were not the case. Given that assumption for the sake of the argument, it is clearly not the case that all conscious activity is reducible to mere effects of biological causal chains because that would unhinge the connection between, say, any justified true belief and the

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rational reason for maintaining that belief. The reason why I think, for example, that “2 + 2 = 4” is because of its luminous self-evidence and not because I’ve been caused to think it. If, in contrast, it were true that biochemistry causes all conscious thought, the connection between that assertion and its intelligible evidence would be undermined. For then what accounts for my thinking that “2 + 2 = 4” would not be the evidence for that thought, but the mere fact of the existence of a particular set of brain processes. What then makes one set of brain processes more or less true than another set of brain processes? On this account, the actual intelligible content would become irrelevant and the biochemistry becomes everything, as the biochemistry would completely determine the content of our thinking, “crowding out” into irrelevance the supposed intelligible evidence. In one sense this irrelevance of rational evidence does not pose a problem to any thinker who maintains all (nonscientific) thought to be an ideological superstructure masking a person’s libidinal interests, which is Freud’s position, for there is no claim to rationality to begin with. In another sense, however, it does pose a problem for even these thinkers insofar as it undermines the rationality of their own positions. For how does scientific thinking escape the charge of nonrationality, if all thinking is the mere effect of nonrational causal chains? If biochemistry is the “real” reason for our beliefs—as opposed to rational evidence—how does one even know that our biochemistry causes our beliefs? If you only think something because you have been caused to think it, there is not yet any rational evidence for its truth. This means that you really don’t know that biochemistry causes our beliefs, even though you have been biologically caused to think and assert it. What if your biochemistry causes you to think that biochemistry causes beliefs while my biochemistry causes me to think it does not cause them? Who is right? In fact, the position that our biochemistry causes our beliefs is exactly on the same level as a person hallucinating extraterrestrials in the attic after taking psychedelic drugs. How can we call this latter way of thinking irrational if all our own beliefs are similarly merely biochemically caused? The distinction between rational and irrational beliefs is then undermined. Certainly there are good and bad, rational and irrational, reasons for things, but not good and bad causes for things. Reasons and causes are, therefore, two utterly different kinds of phenomena, despite granting their relationship. One relationship is that all of the causal chains grounding our biochemistry (that is, within our brain and nervous system) can also serve as the empirically necessary conditions for the very possibility of our having a conscious, rational life. Another relationship is that biochemical causes can themselves be appealed to as one kind of intelligible explanation. They are intelligible but nonrational.

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Finally, there is the situation of a confused muddle of semi-rationality mixed with causal forces constituting the contents of objects of dreams. This semi-rationality goes back to the rationality of personal life, which then comes back in dreams all jumbled together with the nonrationality of biological causal forces. Even in this case the principle stands that nonrational processes can never explain rationality in the sense of giving rational reasons, explanations, and justifications for things. If so, whatever intelligibility found in dreams must then go back to rationality, which is jumbled together with other biochemical causal processes affecting consciousness. The Role of the Body in Psychology Even if we grant that the self is not the brain and that consciousness is not reducible to mere effects of causal chains, someone could object: It seems from what has been said so far that the body has little role in psychology. In response I can happily admit to the obvious: the body is of crucial concern to psychology. It is, however, one thing to say that the body is one central concern and another to say that it is the epicenter of psychology. Its epicenter is not the body, but rather psyche and the personal self. One can certainly admit to this while at the same time investigating the role the body plays in influencing and being influenced by psyche. The body is not the center, but neither is it a minor, inconsequential dimension of our humanness or of the science of psychology. If the human body were the epicenter of psychological investigation, it would be challenging to distinguish psychology from physiology. Psychologists are interested in the body insofar as it affects (and is affected by) psyche, as opposed to an interest primarily in the body itself, as with the physiologist. Thus the difference between these two sciences certainly presupposes some kind of distinction between mind (psychic being) and body, while of course granting the large overlap between them. The center of psychology is psyche, as the very name of psychology already suggests, by which I mean (chapter 1) either the total psychological life of the person or that dimension of conscious life existing “below” the person. If one means the total psychological life, then psyche is close in meaning to the notion of soul, the latter term especially emphasizing psyche as the life principle of a body. And while certain material beings lack any life principle whatsoever, other nonhuman beings are alive, full of life or soul. Thus there are other kinds of soul or life principles besides those of human beings, as there are animal souls and even vegetative life principles as well. Naturally, psychology is primarily interested with the souls of human beings, who possess a certain kind of life principle, capable of conscious experience, such as thinking, willing, loving, promising, despairing, and so on. This kind of being possesses an inner, psychological life as well as one

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that can express its inner life through words and from the medium of its body. Thus a specifically human soul means, on the one hand, the conscious, personal self, with its uniquely personal powers of intellect, will, and heart, as well as those animal and vegetative powers that human persons also possess, such as nutrition, reproduction, sensation, regeneration, perception, and instinct, which, together with one’s body, are all constitutive of what it means to be a human person. Dualism versus Radical Dualism Someone could object: Perhaps the real reason why I think the body is not the epicenter of psychology is because of some Platonic (the body as a mere prison house for the soul) or Cartesian (the body/soul relations being merely causal) dualism. For, after all, from what was just said above, I do maintain a real distinction between body and soul, insofar as the necessary features of the soul are missing with those of the body, and vice versa. Thus I have to espouse some kind of dualism in order to account for the distinctions mentioned above and to avoid either a crass materialism or bodiless spiritualism. The question then becomes whether I can distinguish the dualistic position I am defending from the radical dualism espoused by Plato and Descartes. Let me here mention five phenomenological and metaphysical differences (among many others) between these two dualistic positions that allow me to accept the first while rejecting the second, radical dualistic positions of both Plato and Descartes. First, we mentioned earlier the experience of bodily expression. This phenomenon shows that the soul is immersed in the body while the body is expressive of soul, all going beyond mere causal relations only admitted by Descartes. Thus for instance a baseball bat can be in a causal relation to a ball, changing its direction when the bat hits the ball, but nobody would say the bat is somehow immersed in the ball, as the soul is immersed in the body. Thus causal relations alone cannot account for bodily expression. Second, notice that if someone physically hits another person, the person hit does not say, “You hit my body” but rather, “You hit me.” The “I” is clearly given in this experience as unified with the body. Third, besides the physical pain typically involved in death, there is also the horror of the experience of losing the grip the soul has on the body. Something so close to and united with the soul is being wrenched from it, which is horrifying. Fourth, notice also what happens to the human body once the soul leaves the body in death: it ceases to be a human body and completely dissolves into something else. It seems that the soul is not only the principle uniting the manyness of psyche into one being; it is also the principle uniting and forming the human body into one being. Finally, fifth, as developed in the following, there is also the leib experience, whereby I feel my body “from within.” This experience shows

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again the close unity of body and soul going beyond both above forms of radical dualism. Korper and Leib This section began with the objection that perhaps the overall argument of this text is forgetful of the bodily aspect of psychology with this emphasis on the psyche as the epicenter of psychology. Now we can mention one way in which it is psychology—considered as a pure empirical science—that is forgetful of the body. It seems there is a sense in which psychology alienates people from their bodies, insofar as it approaches the topic of the body only empirically, that is, as an (intentional) object of perception. There is another, far more intimate, way we have contact with our bodies than as an empirically observable object of consciousness. This contact refers to the way we feel our bodies from within and not merely as an object of perception from without. Empirical sciences, including empirical psychology, assume in sense perception a normal perceptual orientation to external objects from without. We, for example, stand in one place and perceive—especially with the sense of sight—some other object “over there.” Our contact with our own bodies, however, includes this orientation of perceiving it “from without,” but also includes as well an inner orientation. We not only perceive our own bodies as an object of perception but also feel them “from within,” which is reflected in the German language with the following two terms: korper and leib. The experiencing of one’s own body “from within” refers to leib, while experiencing the human body as an object of perception refers to korper. Leib is similar to self-presence in that both are experienced as coming from within, although what is experienced differs. The being that is selfpresent is the conscious subject, whereas the being that is felt via leib (that is, from within) is the body. The being, however, experiencing the body as leib is not the body, but the soul. The experience of amputees establishes this point, as they will often say that they feel their amputated limb as hurting, even though the limb has ceased to exist as part of the body. Thus it is not the body that feels the body from within (leib), but the conscious self that feels the body from within. It is interesting to note that, while our hands are experienced as both leib and as korper, our brain is experienced only as korper. In that one respect, the brain is actually further removed from the conscious experience than our hands, for we at least feel our hands from within while we only experience our brain “from without,” that is, as an object of perception. The main point, however, is this: the empirical method, insofar as it appeals to observation of things from without, does as little justice to leib as it does for self-presence. Just as in empiricism self-presence is unrecognized

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or denied as a source of knowledge, so is the far more intimate leib experience of the body unrecognized, as only the korper experience is acknowledged. Thus to exclusively apply the empirical method to our bodies—which is precisely what empiricism demands—in fact entails a certain alienation from our bodies, insofar as this far more intimate leib experience of our body is ignored or denied. SELF-ALIENATION In this second argument I want to show that one consequence of an exclusive empirical approach is a failure to grasp one’s self laterally, leading to an alienation from one’s self. That is, if we encounter ourselves merely as an object of a sense perception and never in this more intimate way as subject, what inevitably follows is a loss of a sense of self. Whereas the first argument led us to consider one form of alienation—from the leib experience of one’s own body—if one consistently identifies all knowledge with empirical knowledge, this second argument will consider two further ways in which alienation results from a radically empirical point of view: alienation as forgetfulness of self and alienation resulting from superficiality. Alienation as Forgetfulness of Self, Weakening Self-Presence Empiricism involves forgetfulness of self, insofar as it does not take seriously our contact with our self via lateral self-presence. With self-presence there is a bipolarity of our conscious life instead of an exclusive focus on the objective dimension, whether of material objects or of the self given in in self-reflection. Thus together with this intentional (objective) dimension there is a second, subjective (non-intentional) dimension, insofar as we are present to ourselves as the one performing intentional acts. If we were not present to ourselves, we would be strangely absent from ourselves, like the earlier example of the cow (chapter 3), who both sees us and yet does not seem to be present to itself as the one seeing us. Consider what follows if—like the cow—our conscious life lacked selfpresence. Such a person becomes strangely alienated from him- or herself. The person’s experience becomes not “I think” or “I will” but rather “Thinking (or willing) has taken place.” Such a thought is decidedly odd, for no one then asks, “Who is thinking (willing, etc.)? Let me reflect back and investigate . . . Hark! It is ‘I.’” Someone could respond that self-knowledge is exclusively given through self-reflection. But even with self-reflection one could ask: How do I know—right now—that I am presently reflecting back upon myself? It would seem that this knowledge would require a second self-reflection. But that

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only postpones the problem, for then how do I know of this second selfreflection? That would seem to require a third act. This line of reasoning clearly leads to an infinite regress. On the contrary, in self-reflection I am aware of encountering myself not only as object of self-reflection but also as the subject who—in a non-intentional way—is present to one’s self doing the reflecting. There is always a subjective anchor in our own conscious being when performing these acts, such that when I perform them I am aware that it is I who perform them. Superficiality Leads to Self-Alienation Not only is there a link between alienation and the relative absence of selfpresence, there is also a link between alienation and a consequent superficiality and the loss of meaning that is implied in an exclusively empiricist worldview, insofar as the object of empirical intuition is always empirical and never value facts. Alienation, the (relative) absence of self-presence, a value-free world, and superficiality all go together and all imply each another, as they all follow from a consistently applied empiricism. For consider when this anchor of self-presence seems particularly weak, such as when I watch cartoons too long. In time I will become slackjawed with glassy eyes. 5 In such instances there is a tendency toward a kind of self-forgetting, by which I mean a loss of a certain measure of self-presence, and toward a merging of consciousness with the object perceived. This kind of personal, conscious life seems to characterize the character Prince Valium in the screwball comedy movie Spaceballs, who was so absent from himself that he was unable to simultaneously say and interiorly mean “I do” even at his own wedding to a beautiful princess. The prince was oddly “vacant.” The following principle can help us underscore this connection between self-presence and superficiality: The stronger the self-presence, the more persons can give of themselves to some intentional object. And the more persons can give of themselves, the more they can overcome alienation and solipsism. The contrary is also true: The less self-possession, the less the power one has to give of one’s self, with the effect of the greater consequent alienation. Naturally persons cannot become so distracted and dissipated that they completely lose this lateral possession of themselves. But they can by degrees approach this loss of a sense of self when they are too long in contact with superficial realities, such as when someone works on some repetitive task for too long on an assembly line or lives in a value-free world. This superficiality can in a sense become soul killing. It does not merely characterize a person’s relation to intentional objects, it also has a predictable effect upon the subject as well: persons in time will become lost and alienated from themselves.

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What then especially increases self-presence? One way is via the volitional act of “collecting” one self, of pulling one’s self together such as to consciously stand in one’s center, which is known as “recollection.” My focus here, however, is on a second approach to increasing self-presence, which can be seen by noticing the link between self-presence and the significance and depth of some intentional object. If a person is facing something essentially deep and significant, there is a natural tendency of that person to “come to herself,” that is, to actualize her self-presence at a deeper center in her being, precisely in this confrontation. For example, an experience of magnificent beauty or heroic goodness has a natural tendency to awaken us and take us to our depth. This process is not necessarily volitional. For those who are not already hard-hearted, facing something great and noble will naturally or organically lead people to actualize themselves at a deeper center, leading to a kind of self-discovery concomitant to the intentional experience. And of course there is also the possibility of persons volitionally collecting themselves to stand in their center to adequately engage some high value. In both cases, whether organically or volitionally, the result will be a deeper actualization and intensification of personal experience. In contrast to this intensification, sometimes persons cannot locate their selves because they become lost in some object whose demands on them are too shallow and weak. Sometimes persons cannot locate their selves because the object is (in some nonrational way) making demands upon them that are too strong, such as when they experience another person as overbearing and their own ego as too weak to resist them. In such cases persons tend to lose contact with their selves and are unable to establish a spiritual space whereby they can more fully possess themselves. Whether the object makes demands that are either too weak or too strong, the result is (in one respect) the same: objects other than one’s self come to dominate and determine the person with a consequent lessening of the sense of self-presence, which is the crucial idea behind the further notion of authenticity, the topic of chapter 12. NOTES 1. Thus Robert Sokolowski states, “[W]e might say, for example, that the brain feels pain, or that my brain recognizes my grandmother, or that the brain causes my thoughts. These statements are confused because it is not my brain but I myself that feel pain, recognize people, and think.” Phenomenology of the Human Person, 193. 2. For example, if a being is gaseous, it is material. But the converse relation—that if a being is material, it is therefore gaseous—is of course not true. 3. Naturally there are other powers of soul that are not specifically and uniquely tied to persons, such as the powers of growing, nutrition, perception, reproducing, etc. These are powers of soul, but not uniquely powers of personal life (or spirit), as they are found in nonpersonal living beings.

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4. See Olaf Bergmann et al., “Evidence for Cardiomyocyte Renewal in Humans,” Science 324 (2009): 98. 5. I owe the above expressive phrase—being slackjawed with glassy eyes—as well as much of this analysis on self-presence to John Crosby. See The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996), chapter 3.

Chapter Six

Going Beyond Empiricism The Objective and Rational Dimensions of Psychology

This chapter continues arguments against psychological empiricism begun in the last chapter. While the central theme of chapter 5 concerned the subject, that is, the body and the psyche, the theme of this chapter concerns the objective dimension of logos, of both empirical and intellectual intuition, which are our main contact with objective reality. We can begin with the following observation, which seems thoroughly uncontroversial: If philosophy is to be of any service to the science of psychology, it needs to do better than merely spinning theories in some ivory tower that are not grounded in some factual basis in reality. There needs to be some contact with reality that differs from empirical observation, which— simply as a matter of fact—is not the domain of philosophers. Even granting that both psychological and scientific theory often goes beyond some factual basis via inference to best explanation, such inferences themselves eventually need to be grounded in something beyond mere air, for otherwise we can’t distinguish science from science fiction. Thus a philosophical debating society pondering sheer abstractions disconnected from reality will also not help science. Assume for a moment a new source of philosophical and objective knowledge going beyond the empirical: what would it be, and how would it be known? Lateral self-presence was already mentioned for psyche. Is there a corresponding source of a specifically philosophical knowledge for logos? If there is such a source, philosophers—including positive psychologists and those within the humanist tradition—have an answer to the charge of merely spinning groundless theories. 77

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Earlier, the objective logos was introduced, with its two dimensions of empirical and a priori. The first dimension of this logos deals with meaningful but non-(strictly)-necessary essences studied by the empirical sciences, whose source of knowledge ultimately goes back to empirical intuitions, inductions, and inferences to best explanation from sense observation. The second dimension refers to an insight (intellectual intuition) into strictly necessary and highly intelligible facts, not only of philosophy but also of mathematics and geometry. If insight exists, we have not only an answer to the charge that philosophy is reducible to a mere debating society, but also a further criticism against a radical empiricism, which reduces all direct knowledge to only empirical intuition. The controversial point is whether there really exists this “seeing” of intellectual intuition or insight, which is altogether different from a literal seeing or (more generally) sense perception. Plato calls insight a seeing with the “eye of the mind.” The task of this chapter is not only to establish this kind of seeing, but also to see its relation to empirical seeing and its significance for psychology. Counting the two criticisms against psychological empiricism from the last chapter, in this chapter two further criticisms will be made. INTELLECTUAL INTUITION (INSIGHT) This third criticism concerns the claim of psychological empiricism to have exclusive access to all the factual data of our knowledge. If another source of knowledge can be established, that claim will be falsified. In the history of philosophy, another kind of knowledge has been claimed, which is called “a priori knowledge,” a term that is used in this text to refer to an insight into facts that are strictly necessary or absolute in nature. Although the idea of absolute knowledge has ugly connotations and of course there are many senses in which this kind of claim is false, it is not false or ugly in every respect. For what it suggests is something neither false nor ugly, but rather a discovery of something whose truth survives the vagaries of time and place. For example, there is a clear independence from the relativities of time and space that “The institution of slavery is morally abhorrent.” Many people who theoretically deny the existence of absolute knowledge would in unguarded moments speak rightly of the evil of slavery in terms of absolutes. They would implicitly and correctly think of this institution as really (and even obviously) morally abhorrent. Consider the rational ground for the moral evil of slavery: it lies in the self-evidence of the basic disconnect between the nature of persons (as possessing the power of freedom) and this external servile state. Notice too that this insight has a clear independence from the further historical fact of the

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failure of many people (and cultures) to see it, and this independence shows that slavery is not wrong because I (we) think it, but, rather, I (we) think it because it is wrong-in-itself. Usually the condemnation of absolutes refers to a condemnation of someone else’s absolutes, while one’s (implicit) own goes undetected and not condemned. My point is that some absolute truths may be quite legitimate, if they refer to a priori principles that are strictly necessary and highly intelligible. Thus, it seems strictly (and even obviously) true that killing people for racist reasons is simply wrong. It is as wrong as “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line (in Euclidean geometry),” “Responsibility presupposes freedom,” and “5 + 7 = 12” are correct. It is important to note that the criterion for a priori truth is not their being obvious—as with the above examples—but their being strictly necessary and highly intelligible. This intelligibility could still be present with propositions that are difficult to understand, such as with many propositions in mathematics, geometry, and philosophy. And, of course, there are many other propositions within these disciplines—as we already noticed with the empirical sciences—that go beyond the evidence and are on the level of inferences to best explanation. The highpoint of evidence, however, is when one can go beyond some inference to best explanation to point to an actual empirical observation or a priori insight (intellectual intuition) as evidence for truth. And between empirical and intellectual intuition, the very highpoint of evidence is intellectual intuition, insofar as it measures empirical intuition, not the converse, as for instance it makes no sense for someone to say, “I know an instance of responsibility where there was no freedom” or some concrete case where 5 + 7 did not equal 12. The above stands even while accepting that often people think and live by false absolutes. The problem is not with absolutes, but with the falsity of many so-called absolutes (which are neither strictly necessary nor highly intelligible), just as that the problem is not with empirical research, but with false and doctored empirical research. The situation completely changes with other facts on the first level of the objective logos, concerning meaningful but nonnecessary states of affairs (chapter 1). These facts do not yield highly intelligible and strictly necessary truths. This is the level of most psychological research. For example, if I want to classify the different kinds of mental illness, I cannot just “close my eyes” and inwardly perform an insight to intellectually and inwardly “see” what they are. I must instead “open my eyes” to see if the multitude of psychological symptoms as found in the world can be intelligibly grouped into different psychological categories. This psychological work of classifying the different kinds of mental illness is clearly empirical and not a priori.

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Besides being dependent on actual observation and inductive generalization, there is no insight into a priori universals. This is not to say there is no intelligibility of empirical laws. Dr. Fritz Wenisch gives especially clear contrasting examples—albeit from physics and not psychology—of the above two kinds of intelligibility: a priori and empirical. He states: Suppose that a person observes two pieces of metal moving together after they have been placed a short distance from one another. He may ask, “Why is this so?” and someone may tell him that one piece is charged positively, that is, it has an excess of protons over electrons, while the other is charged negatively, that is, it has an excess of electrons over protons, and that electrons and protons attract one another. Does the person now understand why the two pieces move together? He can give an explanation for this phenomenon, but is it a real explanation in view of the fact that the explanation is given in terms of something which is itself entirely unexplained? The explanation is given in terms of the fact that electrons and protons attract one another. And while this same fact can form a part of an explanation of phenomena as different as the functioning of a battery and the working of an electric motor, it itself is totally unexplained. Why is it that protons attract electrons rather than it being the other way around? This is as unknown even to the most sophisticated electrical engineer as it is to the person who has no clue about physics, and who does not know why the two pieces of metal in the example used before attract one another. Thus, the fact in terms of which the explanation is given is unintelligible. . . . On the other hand, suppose that I ask, “Why is in Euclidean space a straight line the shortest connection between two points?” You might say things like the following, “All other lines are longer than the straight line, don’t you see?” If I finally get it, it will be clear to me that the very natures of two points and a line demand that the straight line is the shortest connection. If states of affairs to be known by insight are called intelligible, reference is made to the possibility for this clear understanding of the “Why?” Interestingly, however, even though this “Why?” is open to our inspection, no significant statement can be made in terms of providing an explanation. The reason for this is that one does not have to explain an intelligible state of affairs by means of reference to another state of affairs. The state of affairs in question is self-explanatory. 1

IS INTELLECTUAL INTUITION REDUCIBLE TO INDUCTIVE GENERALIZATION? Perhaps so-called a priori truths are really reducible to empirical, inductive generalizations. To investigate this theory, let us work by example. Consider the truth that the diagonals of a square (in Euclidean space) are longer than the square’s sides. How do I (we) know this truth? Well, one could point to some empirical study, whereby researchers draw one hundred squares of

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different sizes and measure their diagonals in relation to their sides. Then, lo and behold: by applying the empirical method of observation and induction one can now infer that for every square—considered as a universal—the diagonal is indeed longer than its sides. Perhaps we do not need insight after all. With intellectual intuition, we are suggesting another mode of verification altogether: that persons can achieve an insight or intellectual intuition into the universal nature of squareness sufficient to directly “see” (with “the eye of the mind”) the fact that for every square the diagonal is by its inner nature longer than its sides. However strange this way of “seeing” appears—especially to those who are empirically trained—the claim is that with respect to the universal-essence structures of squares as it is to love, this kind of insight can be achieved. With the following second example we can distinguish these two methods more clearly. Consider the principle that the diagonals of squares are exactly equal. The truth of this assertion is easy to grasp, and yet it is not and cannot be grounded in any empirical observation or generalization from really-existing squares because it only works with perfect squares and never with any really-existing, actually drawn squares. Because all such squares are all inevitably imperfectly drawn, even by the most precise instrumentation we can devise, their diagonal lines can never in fact be absolutely, exactly equal. This truth has to be derived from something other than what is empirically given or from any inductive generalization from what is empirically given. Although most nonphilosophers will hardly ever explicitly focus on the formal, universal-essence structures of love (or justice, person, squareness, etc.) as such, these structures still exist (in an abstract and ideal sense). Though typically implicit, many such truths are embedded within the totality of actual conscious experience for practically everyone, even for those who theoretically deny their existence. STRICT EMPIRICISM LEADS NOT TO REALISM BUT TO SUBJECTIVISM AND RELATIVISM Finally, in this fourth argument I want to investigate the putative realism of the empiricism. One of the attractive qualities of empiricism is its claim to realism, and it is obviously true that some facts are empirical. However, besides the question as to whether all facts are empirical (the third criticism above), it is also a question as to whether even straightforward empirical facts need some kind of a priori support, without which they inevitably become subjectivized and relativized. In this section I want to investigate three ideas—substantial existence, value, and causality—whose universal nature is really given via intellectual

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intuition and not at all empirically. I also want to show not only the distinction between the a priori universal and its respective concrete instantiation, but also their union in the concrete sense experience. It is not at all the case that empirical and rational viewpoints refer to mutually exclusive ideologies. Rather, concrete empirical observation and intellectual understanding in the light of a priori universals typically go together and imply each other. In fact, seeing reality by means of this unity is a normal, rational way of perceiving things. Consider the opposite: if someone does away with the above universal categories—in favor of a strict empiricism that focuses only on the sense appearances alone (such as colors, sounds, quantity, volume, length, width, etc.) and inductive generalizations from them—what is left is a view of reality that is subjective, value-free, desubstantialized, and relativized. 2 Let us investigate each of these a priori categories in their turn. And then later (chapter 6) apply these three ideas for our rational psychological analyses. First, think of someone who perceives a mountain. He will certainly perceive the empirical sense appearances of blueness and smallness of the mountain from a distance, but through them he will also (intellectually) grasp the substantial real existence of the mountain itself, which certainly goes beyond the datum of the sense appearance alone. The term “substance”— considered as a universal—refers to that dimension of every real being that exists-in-itself as an endpoint in reality and is not a part or property of something else. As is commonly known, this idea became the central category of Aristotelian philosophy. While this notion is obviously philosophical in nature, everyone has a pretheoretical (implicit) sense for it, such as when we perceive the substantiality of such things as the concrete mountain straight in front of us. From this philosophical (as well as from common-sense) understanding one can now apply the above distinction between the perception of sense qualities or appearances and the substantial being grasped through them, with the latter being grasped—not empirically as a mere sense datum, but as a thing-in-itself. Although the substantial dimension of a being is not found within an empirical intuition of the sensible appearance, it is through the sense quality that one can then grasp (intellectually) its substantial nature. This is not to suggest that the substantiality of the mountain is somehow grounded in our subjectivity and then superimposed onto the appearance. Rather, it is through an understanding of the sense perception that one can then intellectually grasp its own inherent substantiality (assuming of course it really is a mountain and not some illusion of one). Consider what happens when the empirical intuition of a being is simply identified with the totality of that being: all that remains is only the sensible appearance with its substantial existence being denied. Then we cannot know a thing as it is in itself because the only object given to us is the empirical

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appearance. The “thing” is then reduced to its appearance, and the empiricist philosopher George Berkeley becomes right when he asserts that being is perceiving. Thus Berkeley states that “all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those [material] bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceived or known.” 3 Thus Berkeley maintains that the material world—such as, for instance, a mountain—only exists in our act of perceiving it. The question is this: Which position is more abstract, more fantastic, and the less commonsensical? Is it the one that includes the frankly philosophical position of a mind-independent world of substantial realities that exist-inthemselves (independent from our act of perceiving it), or the one that denies it? 4 If the notion of substance is admitted, there needs to be another source of knowledge besides sense perception of sense appearances, so that through this idea one can then come to understand the substantial nature of individual things in the concrete world. This power not only protects and explains our knowledge of the idea of substance formally considered as a universal, it also justifies our knowledge of individual persons or mountains as substantially real things from a fantastic abstractionism whereby the world is desubstantialized, which occurs with a radical empiricism, such as with the philosophy of Berkeley. Who, after all, thinks of other persons as having the being of a mere appearance, dependent upon our act of perceiving them? Second, consider a person who really has no existential, lived sense for the principle of causality, that for every change there are causes to explain it. Events follow one after another but without this person having even an implicit, much less explicit, sense for what causality is at all. Such as state of affairs seems hardly imaginable. Yet there are empiricists, such as David Hume, who theoretically deny this principle. Naturally, they are clever enough not to deny the everyday experience of so-called causal relations. What Hume does is subjectivize them away. He thinks that so-called causal relations are not grounded in reality (presupposing the mind-independent principle of causality to explain change), but rather that these relations are merely explainable in terms of association and psychological expectation. The reason for this subjectivization is that Hume cannot find in (empirical) experience the necessity found in the application of this causal law. Thus he states, When we look about us towards external Objects, and consider the Operation of Causes, we are never able, in a single Instance, to discover any Power or necessary Connexion; any Quality, which binds the Effect to the Cause, and renders the one an infallible Consequence of the other. We only find the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. 5

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One can test Hume’s explanation with the following example: that “Heat expands bodies.” At first glance this causal relation seems to be something far more than a mere correlation, as heat seems to actually possess the power to expand a body. Yet, if Hume is right, causal relations are reducible to mere correlations combined with a psychological expectation, and then the further idea of the power to effect change, becomes lost. On the other hand, Hume seems correct to note that if one is only influenced by the empirical intuition alone, the actual causal connection (or nexus) between the cause (the fire) and the change (the smoke) is not actually given. Perhaps the reality of the principle of causality can be defended against Hume by distinguishing its empirical application in some concrete case with the universal, from a priori principle of causality as such. Just because the universal principle—that for every change there is a cause (or causes) to explain it—is strictly necessary in no way guarantees an interpretation of it is correct in some particular instance. Perhaps on one occasion the connection is not really causal but merely correlational. Either way, the universal principle of causality could still remain true, while granting that this principle still needs to be correctly applied in individual cases. Something similar can also be said about substantiality. Just because this notion possesses a strictly necessary essence structure in no way guarantees that in some specific instance a person could confuse a mountain with an dreamed illusion of it. Thus with both substance and causality, it is important to identify exactly where the strict, absolute necessity lies. It is not with respect to the putative substantial existence of this individual mountain or a claimed causal connection in some particular instance, but rather on the level of the universal principle as such. Therefore, whether or not there is an actual casual relation in some particular instance has nothing to do with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the universal principle itself: that if there is a change there must be a cause to explain it. The question is whether there is an intellectual intuition into that (universal) principle. This is exactly my argument: that besides empirical intuition, there is intellectual intuition by which we can intuit strictly necessary relations, one of which refers to the universal principle of causality, and another to the general essence of substantiality. Consider, third, the notion of intrinsic preciousness (value): that certain things are precious in themselves, and that certain kinds of things are objectively more precious than other kinds of things. Thus for instance one can rightly assert that the being of a person is objectively more precious than that of an insect. This is the clearest of facts—it is nonsense to call this a mere theory or hypothesis—even though it is an insight that is given in different ways: to the wise it is given both theoretically (that is, philosophically) and existentially in their life experience, and to practically everyone else it is given only pretheoretically in lived experience (including to radical empiri-

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cists, even though not theoretically accepted). Both of these kinds of experiences—whether theoretical or pretheoretical—go back to and are grounded in intellectual intuition. The point is that, while this apprehension of intrinsic preciousness is given, it is not given empirically, as if it is something that can be sensually observed, measured, and weighed. Intrinsic preciousness is a reality that should not be dismissed as lacking full objectivity because it has no empirical warrant, as it is a datum only given to the “eye of the mind,” via intellectual intuition. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE UNIVERSAL Notice the individual and universal dimensions in each of the above three examples of a priori truths. The individual refers to the really-existing, ontological dimension, whether it is this substantial thing (a ball or mountain), this particular event (fire causing smoke), or this quality (the intrinsic preciousness of this person). These three aspects help constitute the material— not necessarily in the sense of matter, but rather in the sense of individual and qualitatively real—dimension. Besides this material dimension, there is a formal, universal, and structural dimension by which one can then understand this “matter.” The formal dimension includes the universal notions of substantiality, the principle of causality, and the idea of intrinsic preciousness. The object of intellectual intuition refers to these necessary-essence structures within this formal dimension. They are the ultimate, metaphysical “home” or ground for that which is known via insight. It is this formal dimension that then helps us to understand the “matter” of our lived experience. So far the emphasis has been on how to understand the individual, reallyexisting things of the world in the intelligible “light” of this formal, universal dimension of the necessary-essence structures. The reverse, however, is also true, as one can come to this formal dimension on the occasion of first coming to properly understand some individual instantiation of it. Thus, just as the (strictly necessary) universal essence helps one to understand the particular, so the individual instance helps one to come to an insight into its respective universal. From some particular instance one can then ask: What is substance? What is the principle of causality? What is intrinsic preciousness? Here one can go beyond a mere pretheoretical and implicit sense of these things to a real theoretical understanding of them. Granted, the objects of this theoretical understanding are universal abstractions. Yet these abstractions are so intelligible as to be directly intuited and having a meaning-inthemselves, as opposed to mere conceptual constructions of the mind, like zebraness or Freud’s idea of the ego, which are not intuited.

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The realm of the a priori can thus be derivatively applied to individual particulars, insofar as they are “made according to” or participate in their respective universals. And these particulars can in turn be understood within the light of their respective a priori universals. But the proper realm of the a priori as such is the realm of the universals themselves, that is, the universals as universals. To do away with them ultimately involves doing away with the intelligible light (logos) of the world, because even objects grasped empirically need to be rationally understood by their light. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A PRIORI TRUTH FOR PSYCHOLOGY Assuming the persuasiveness of the above case for intellectual intuition, in this section I want to focus on why a priori truth is important—not just philosophically, as the primary and ultimate source of its knowledge, but for psychology and the other disciplines. Point 1: There is a logical dimension of a priori truth, such as for instance the formal, logical principle of noncontradiction and the informal, logical principle of the error of begging the question. It is not just psychology, but all of the sciences that rightly presuppose these basic principles. None of them are established empirically. They rather judge the empirical, not the reverse. And the a priori principles of mathematics are as crucial for B. F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism as they are for the empirical sciences. Point 2: While psychologists are understandably wary of forcing their own moral views on clients (chapter 11), it also seems perfectly reasonable that they should want their clients to be in a relation to truth. Why is that? Perhaps one reason is because of the basic a priori intuition that truth is better than error. That insight seems to be the ultimate, even if implicit, ground for why counselors rightly want their clients to give up some illusory worldview and look at reality in a more straightforward, honest, truthful way. That truth is better than error is not merely some truism—especially in this culture that often thinks that any interest in truth is hopelessly naïve—it is also a priori, timelessly true. It is not the only reason, of course, as there is the further practical point that living in a neurotic (erroneous and illusory) worldview inevitably leads to all kinds of destructive secondary symptom formations, both physical and psychological, not to mention the utter frustration of continually acting in a world not conforming to one’s worldview. Point 3: There is the crucial problem concerning meaning, especially ultimate meaning. Psychologists are of course free to ignore and even deny the realm of the a priori, but the problem of meaning—especially that meaning tied to value and morality—will not simply go away. It will come back, if not theoretically, then existentially, as psychologists ply their counseling

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trade. It is not a stretch to note the importance of ultimate meaning in counseling, for consider the opposite: without the a priori there is no ultimate reason for anything. Naturally, that a loss of meaning can have profound psychological effects on persons is not news to therapists. Victor Frankl thought the psychological crisis of the twentieth century was that of the void of meaning, hence his logotherapy. Point 4: Perhaps ultimate meaning is also tied in various ways to authentic human flourishing. It is granted that people often think, along with Carl Rogers, that self-fulfillment can be exclusively explained in terms of immanent—as opposed to transcendent—psychological categories, independent of any relation to logos and ultimate truth. But if this is not true, then it is not sufficient for psychology to simply prescind altogether from such meaning. In the next chapter we shall further investigate this point with positive psychology’s emphasis on love. Point 5: Reflect on how psychological explanations will often—and even inevitably—implicitly presuppose a priori meanings. To show this, consider the following three explanations justifying someone’s behavior. Sometimes (1) a person is tempted to justify his behavior by the very highest motives, appealing to lofty a priori meanings as justice, love, etc. Unfortunately, however, this person may actually be influenced or even dominated by base (or at best mixed) motives, despite the smokescreen of what he might say and even himself believe. It is all too common in these instances that people try to shield themselves and others from seeing their real motives. Still, there are other occasions (2) when a person really is motivated “from above” by rational aims or impulses, such as from nobility, love, selflessness, etc. If this is true, then it pays for psychology to take seriously the objective logos by trying to genuinely understand what nobility and love mean in their own nature and without the reflexive need to continually debunk them by explaining them “from below,” as if they are nothing but disguised rationalizations. Finally, there are other times (3) when a person rightly sees how she ought to be motivated by what is higher, however short of that ideal her actual response is. If she is honest with herself, she will not only notice that discrepancy, but also her seemingly automatic tendency and temptation to rationalize her shortcomings away and to repress insight, which, if successful, makes this final category of motivation indistinguishable from the first, devolving (3) back into (1). To explain all motivation in terms of the pleasure principle and some ideological superstructure built upon the pleasure principle, such as with Freud’s idea of sublimation, ultimately misreads and discounts both motivations (2) and (3). More importantly, it misreads human nature by ignoring or denying humankind’s specifically personal nature, and the hope that people lost in neuroses and addictions should rightly expect.

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Point 6: Perhaps positive psychologists and others in the humanistic tradition do not need to think of themselves as somehow less rigorous or inferior when they cannot point to some empirical observation as evidence for their insights, as there also exists a priori evidence based on insight into strictly necessary truths (together with lateral self-presence for psyche). If a priori evidence is possible and psychologically relevant, notice how it is then not the humanist psychologists who are not rigorously going back to the facts, but the empiricists themselves, insofar as they dogmatically ignore other kinds of evidence. Point 7: Finally, one effect of admitting to the reality of rational meaning going beyond mere sublimation is that such a stance leads to taking other disciplines seriously. Philosophy and theology will not then automatically strike psychologists as mere ideology, whose meaning must be seen through or reduced to its “real” underlying psychological meaning. In fact, if there is authentic moral and religious truth, whose nature is nonideological as well as nonpsychological, and which is even constitutive of reason itself (logos), then being in a right relation to such truth may have a role in the final end of a person’s self-flourishing (chapter 13). In the next chapter, we shall investigate the school of positive psychology (together with humanistic psychology) that at least implicitly and pretheoretically senses the rational dimensions of human nature. Then in chapter 11, the focus will be what happens when psychologists explicitly repudiate this philosophical richness of understanding and turn to an epistemologically “thin” conception of reality, where all (nonscientific) meaning is reducible to psychological meaning. NOTES 1. Fritz Wenisch, “Knowledge,” unpublished papers, 73. Thank you, Professor Wenisch, for sharing your notes with me. 2. As Protagoras long ago saw, there is always a subjective and relative component to all sensible appearances. This is why he thought that all propositions about them are true, because no one can make a mistake about how something appears to himself. Thus, if all knowledge is reducible to sensible appearances, error is impossible and “man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras is the father of relativism, and all knowledge of things as they are in themselves then becomes impossible. 3. George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. Colin M. Turbayne (Indianapolis: Bobb-Merrill, 1957), 6. Berkeley, however, was not a pure empiricist insofar as he maintained that the mind was a “thing-in-itself,” as opposed to all material being, which only exists in being perceived. 4. See Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 159. 5. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (New York: Washington Square, 1963), 69.

Chapter Seven

Positive Psychology Seligman’s Contribution

Now I want to turn to a relatively new movement initiated by Martin Seligman, called positive psychology, as evidence that the themes of this book— especially the rational nature of the person—are not something eccentric to the whole of the discipline of psychology, as there are mainstream psychologists who see it as well. These psychologists will be inspired by an existential sense into the nature of love, even if they do not explicitly appeal to intellectual intuition as the ground for this sense. However, just as we need lateral self-presence to do justice to the subjectivity of the personal self, so do we need intellectual intuition to help us do justice to highly intelligible realities, such as the reality of love, which is the centerpiece of positive psychology. This last point also highlights a problem with positive psychology, insofar as its adherents cannot get out of the empirical method what they actually see. And this in turn opens them up to criticism from the more “objective” and “rigorous” psychological empiricists, who accuse these theorists of a lack of scientific rigor. Yet, these humanists have an implicit, pretheoretical sense for the rational dimension of human nature, without the reductionism of reducing the rational to the psyche, which many of these scientists— together with Freud and Skinner—fail to see. INTRODUCING POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY As Paul Vitz notes, 1 what characterizes this school—in relation to more traditional psychology—is (1) its orientation to the future, as opposed to the heavy emphasis on the past, (2) in its being proactive, as opposed to being a 89

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victim, and (3) investigating the possibility of human development, as opposed to the more traditional orientation with the neurotic and abnormal. While granting that many positive psychologists will appeal to an exclusively empirical methodology, the fact remains they quite definitely have in mind what I mean by the personal self, insofar as they admit to the powers of soul to establish adequate relations with intelligible reality. They therefore say and mean that human beings are persons capable of love, without the reductionism of explaining the rational in terms of nonrational (sublimated) instincts. While psychology appropriately studies psychopathology, it also needs to recognize the greatness of human nature, with its ordination toward transcendence. This ordination demands taking intelligible meaning and rationality seriously, as meaning can only be built on logos. Contemporary psychology is far better at explaining the motivation underlying neurosis than in explaining the motivation of such great personalities as Socrates, Thomas More, and Martin Luther King Jr. If psychology cannot accept ultimate meaning and genuine heroism, then we cannot really explain the motivation behind such people. The content of negative psychology refers to coming to terms with the past and on fixing “past traumas, abuse and neglect caused by other people.” In the same passage, Seligman states the focus of positive psychology as being more oriented to the future, on discovering “human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future-mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, the capacity for flow and insight, to name several.” 2 Whereas negative psychology tends inevitably toward determinism, with the ego being passively acted upon by outside forces, positive psychology relies on action and the will. “No longer do the dominant theories view the individual as a passive vessel ‘responding’ to ‘stimuli.’ Rather, individuals now are seen as decision makers, with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful, efficacious, or, in malignant circumstances, helpless and hopeless.” 3 Positive psychology obviously sees a role for negative psychology, as dysfunction from within the psyche needs to be addressed. However, in addition to correcting psychological disorders, positive psychology is also about prevention. “Indeed, the major strides in prevention have largely come from a perspective focused on building competency, not correcting weakness.” 4 Building competency is within their free initiative. What the deterministic approach especially lacks, which in contrast is the focus of positive psychology, is “the study of strength and virtue.” 5 Discussing this turn—from determinism to freedom, from victim to agent, from models exclusively targeting disease to models also capable of (recognizing) health—does not negate nor conflict with the real discoveries of negative psychology. There is contradiction and conflict only if negative

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psychology usurps the proper place of positive psychology, that is, where all behavior is a priori considered disordered and determined, with the possibility of an ordered, rational life being denied. GROUNDING INSIGHTS CONCERNING LOVE BEYOND THE EMPIRICAL METHOD Seligman thinks that psychological health is built upon love and that, if so, psychology cannot simply be about illness or even just psychological health, but must also be about a proper understanding of the objective, strictly necessary essence of what love is. The focus of this section will be on doing justice to our knowledge of what love is, building upon the foundation of a priori knowledge, discussed in the last chapter. My claim is that love is only really understood in the “intellectual light” of its a priori essence structure. Then any attempt to explain it from below, in terms of instincts (Freud), as an inductive empirical generalization (on the first level of the objective logos), or relativistically in terms of culture, will all fail by simply affirming and inevitably repeating the shortcomings of the prevailing culture. Let us begin with what positive psychology means by the term “love.” The positive psychologists Hendrick and Hendrick ask, “What is more important than love for a happy human life? Our answer is ‘nothing is more important,’ and in this response we advocate love as being a centerpiece of a positive psychology.” 6 In the same text, John Harvey states, “Acceptance and respect are high on the list of the prototypical features of love.” 7 One might add that what is implied in the notion of respect—as one of Harvey’s characteristic marks of love—is the further idea of worth, for one only (rationally) respects that which is experienced as being worthy of respect. It seems then that with his emphasis on cultivating an attitude of respect for the beloved in place of other attitudes that only focuses on merely a using relationship with another, Harvey approaches Karol Wojtyla’s notion of the positive formulation of the personalistic norm: that the only adequate response to the person is one of love. 8 What is interesting about these studies from Hendrick and Harvey is how empirical they appear. They both cite an impressively large number of empirical, psychological studies to support their position. But the question is whether these studies fully account for their understanding of love. I submit that they do not. In fact, if such studies were the exclusive source of this knowledge, persons would be utterly and completely at a loss to explain it. Empirical or cultural studies do not explain love, as they rather presuppose some implicit pretheoretical, a priori grasp of it. What they can do is provide the occasion—with concrete examples—for someone to then intuit its universal, a priori essence. But it is only on the basis of an essence experience of

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love that we can really then understand our concrete, individual experiences of it. This understanding goes in two directions: it can be implicit or as explicitly formulated and expressed by philosophers. Both of these senses presuppose a living, existential contact with the a priori essence structure of love. For example, if one looks carefully at what these studies say, all sorts of assertions about love can be discovered that are completely unsupported by any empirical evidence whatsoever, no matter how detailed their citations might otherwise be. As evidence, consider the two quotations cited in the previous paragraph. The second quotation (Harvey) was cited by an empirical study, but the first one (from Hendrick and Hendrick)—the one that made the sweeping claim that nothing was more important than love for a happy life—was not at all cited by any study or experiment whatsoever, despite its centrality not only for positive psychology but universally for every happy human life. Someone could object: Do we really need an empirical study to tell us that love is important for a happy life? Can’t we figure some things out—on the ultimate basis of intellectual intuition—on our own, without some expert or experiment having to tell us such things? Yes, exactly. The same thing could be said about the second quotation, although with the second quotation—concerning how respect and acceptance are features of love—the authors at least footnote, with the citation presumably justifying what is asserted in the text with some empirical or cultural study. But is that study really needed to tell us this? In the previous chapter we developed the idea of a priori insight on the second dimension of the objective logos, concerning strictly necessary and highly intelligible essence structures. It turns out that the generic notion of intuition not only refers to empirical intuition of sense particulars, but also to intellectual intuition of (highly intelligible) universal essences. If the essence of love is rationally grounded a priori, then perhaps we can give these positive psychologists a way of appealing to reality via an intellectual—together with empirical—intuition. And then the empirical scientists do not completely possess all the facts about what love is. For example, that love is intrinsically good, that love is better than hatred, that a real lover desires the objective welfare of the beloved, and that lovers yearn to be together and united are all a priori truths, among many others. 9 Such truths are irreducible to mere cultural givens; they are rather rational principles that measure culture (chapter 12). No apologies are necessary when positive psychologists appeal to them, even if they all lack an empirical warrant. Only with the philosophy of empiricism is the lack of an empirical warrant identical with a lack of any warrant. Although positive psychology does not explicitly appeal to intellectual intuition or insight as one of its sources of knowledge, there are other re-

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spects in which admitting to this new source of knowledge is not only congenial but also presupposed. Consider what Seligman says about what competent psychotherapists do: they try to help their clients build strengths. For example, four of his twelve strengths are “Insight,” “Realism,” “Rationality,” and “Finding Purpose.” 10 Certainly by insight he no doubt means having a concrete prudential sense for particular human situations, as opposed to the sense given in this text: of understanding universal and strictly necessary essence structures. But these two senses of the term are not unrelated. For example, let us say some guy is interested in a girl, and that the girl is wondering if he is serious. What are the criteria by which she could measure the degree of his seriousness? Having an adequate notion of what love is in its abstract nature (considered as a universal essence structure) would help her. For then she could ask herself: Does he really care about my objective good? (It belongs to the general essence of love to care about the real objective good of the beloved). Does he want a using relationship with me, or does he respect me as a person, willing to make a commitment to me? (Ideas of respect and commitment are also necessarily found in the universal-essence structure of love, especially of spousal love). Understanding this essence structure (at least implicitly) is clearly a step toward realism. Finally, the girl could realize that it is not only this guy who needs to live by the standards of love, but that she herself needs to as well. Perhaps her life is too bound up in emphasizing accidentals (prestige, money, etc.) and she needs to refocus on what is objectively more important, such as the demands of love. Perhaps the call to love is in some mysterious way bound up with the ultimate purpose and meaning of her life and being (finding purpose). NOTES 1. Paul Vitz, “Psychology in Recovery,” First Things, no. 151 (New York: Institute on Religion and Public Life, 2005), 19–20. 2. Martin Seligman, “Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. Shane J. Lopez and C. R. Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Thus Seligman states, Psychology is not just the study of disease, weakness, and damage; it also is the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is wrong; it also is building what is right. Psychology is not just about illness or health; it also is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play. And in this quest for what is best, positive psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, self-deception, or hand waving; instead, it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behavior presents in all its complexity. (“Positive Psychology,” 4)

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6. Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick, “Love,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. Shane J. Lopez and C. R. Synder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 472. 7. John Harvey, “Relationship Connection,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. Shane J. Lopez and C. R. Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 425. 8. Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981), 41. 9. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, trans. John F. Crosby and John Henry Crosby (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009). 10. Seligman, “Positive Psychology,” 7.

Chapter Eight

The Conscious Self with Its Powers of Intellect, Will, and Heart

While chapter 11 will deal with psyche to the exclusion of logos (psychologism), this chapter will focus on the logos of psyche. Specifically, I am interested in the reality of the personal self, together with its powers of intellect, will, and heart. THE REAL EXISTENCE OF THE PERSONAL SELF Because the being of the conscious self is directly given to us in our lived experience—as the subject of all our conscious acts—no proof is necessary in order to establish its existence. For that which is self-evidently given hardly needs proof from something else. It was already noted in chapter 2 how philosophers and psychologists have missed this datum by looking in the wrong place: as if it were an (sensible) object of consciousness instead of the (immaterial) subject who is conscious. Not only does the self exist, there is a sense—if conscious acts are granted—in which it necessarily exists. To show this let us assume the existence of psychic acts, which even the skeptic must grant because acts of doubting or denying some alleged truth—their stock in trade—are themselves examples of conscious acts. Let us even assume (for the sake of the argument) that everything doubted or denied by the skeptic should in truth really be doubted and denied. In other words, the skeptic is right and everything a nonskeptic holds as true is really either unknowable or false. Given these assumptions, it remains necessarily true that the skeptics doing the doubting or denying must themselves exist because a nonexisting being can neither doubt nor deny anything. Only an existing being can perform such 95

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acts. Thus Augustine rightly asserts, “Si fallor, sum” (If I error, I am), 1 for a nonexisting being cannot possibly be in error or doubt. This chapter, therefore, will not be about proving the real existence of the conscious self, but rather about establishing its specifically personal and rational nature. Thus, the focus will be on the intellectual, volitional, and affective life of human beings, which are all powers of psyche (in its wider sense). Before beginning, however, one might remember that the intellect, will, and heart are specifically and uniquely powers of personal soul. We can in no way simply replace the conscious, personal self with these powers ontologically “hanging in the air.” These powers, no less than conscious acts, must presuppose a being who possesses and performs them. THE NATURE OF THE INTELLECT What is the evidence for the existence of the specifically personal power of intellect? Evidence is given by recognizing the products of intellect, such as the reality of science. Beings without intellects cannot develop science or understand—in the intellectual “light” of universal concepts and essence structures—what is intelligible, such as the essence of numbers or number relations or the concept of ego or zebraness, or know the value and beauty of things. It is interesting that Max Scheler attributes to the “highest apes, such as chimpanzees,” “genuine acts of intelligence” that go beyond “instinct and associative processes.” His empirical evidence for animal intelligence goes back to German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. Scheler states, “Between the animal and its goal-object (a fruit, usually a banana) were interposed complicated detours, obstacles or objects that could serve as ‘instruments’—for example, boxes, ropes, sticks, even sticks that had to be fitted together, procured or made. It was then observed if, how and by what (presumably) mental capacities the animal knew how to achieve its goal, and what the fixed limits were in its performance.” 2 If this interpretation is true that some animals possess a kind of intelligence, what then distinguishes animals from what is distinctly personal? Scheler calls this kind of rationality, found in the highest animals, “practical intelligence,” which is the power to intellectually reach concrete, practical ends, such as obtaining food. Persons, in contrast, possess an intellectual power essentially going beyond practical intelligence. Thus, in contrast to animals, persons can understand some universal essence structures as universals, simply in themselves, as well as understand concrete, individual, really-existing things in the (intellectual) light of their respective species.

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Both Kohler’s research and Scheler’s interpretation look convincing. 3 For how can the construction and use of tools for given ends be explained merely in terms of some kind of conditioning? However, granting this point does not mean they understand such things as what a banana is, in light of its respective species or genus. Furthermore, it is one thing when some understanding refers to the product of empirical inductive generalizations (which could then lead them to the possibility of doing science); it is quite another when this understanding is comprehended against the background of eternity (or what Scheler calls “the world,” which could then lead them to the possibility of doing philosophy and mathematics). In both senses, animals fail to understand phenomena in light of their respective universals. Thus, it is not the presence or absence of intellect that distinguishes the higher animals from the person, insofar as some animals clearly possess practical intellects. What distinguishes them is the presence or absence of a specifically personal intellect 4—or more generally to also include the will and the heart—what Scheler calls “spirit”: If we put at the head of this concept of spirit a special function of knowledge which it alone can provide, then the essential characteristic of the spiritual being, regardless of its psychological make-up, is its existential liberation from the organic world—its freedom from its dependence upon all that belongs to life, including its own drive-motivated intelligence. The spiritual being, then, is no longer subject to its drives and its environment. Instead, it is “free from the environment” or, as we shall say, “open to the world.” 5

Animals perceive things in their utter “thisness,” but not in the light of their species and genus or in terms of any universal essence. Thus of course they see persons, but they cannot understand that being as a person, via any conceptual or essential universal “light.” Such a state of affairs is hardly imaginable. For example, imagine perceiving a person, but in the absence of any universal categories: of person, human, eyes, master, clothes, hair, face, being, animal, living, etc. Without personal intelligence (subjective logos), there is no grasping the inner intelligibility (objective logos) of things in the light of universal essences. Three Objections against Intellect First, if what characterizes persons is the presence of intellects, what about those persons who do not seem to possess them, such as babies in the womb or others in permanent comas? Since they do not yet or cannot know, how can we say that understanding is what distinguishes persons from animals? In response, it is important to distinguish the presence of a power of soul—such as with intellect and will—from the exercise of that power. Just

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as, by analogy, tomato seeds possess the power to bear fruit even when they are not presently—as seeds—bearing fruit (which explains our motivation to sow tomato seeds instead of rocks), so can it be rightly granted that persons possess the power of thinking or willing even when they are not in fact performing these activities. Furthermore, just as these tomato seeds possess the power of bearing fruit and yet can be frustrated with the exercise of that power, such as from the lack of water or sunlight, so similarly (and tragically) can comatose persons even be permanently frustrated from the exercise of their intellect. The point is that what characterizes an individual being as a person is certainly the presence of some uniquely personal activity. But the absence of that activity does not necessarily mean the absence of its personal nature. For what characterizes a nonpersonal being is not merely the absence of some uniquely personal activity (persons in dreamless sleep are not thinking or willing either), but rather the absence of a uniquely personal power. A second objection: someone could claim that animals too can perform intellectual operations, implying an understanding that goes beyond the practical intelligence considered by Scheler. We know of many astonishing powers that even insects possess. For example, spiders “know” how to paralyze a moth for the purpose of giving their newly hatched baby spiders something to eat, as they can only feed on living insects. So the mother spider stings one particular vein (apparently the others will not work), and gives its victim neither too much venom, which would kill it, nor too little, which would allow the moth to get away. While the action of the spider is nothing less than amazing, no one thinks that spiders possess a theoretical knowledge of how to do this. However amazing it is, it seems clearly an instance of the spider’s possessing an inborn instinct as opposed to any kind of personal knowledge. Thus the objector confuses the objective and subjective dimensions of logos, confusing intelligibility with intelligence. What the spider does is intelligible and meaningful, relating to its final end or purpose, which is its own continued life and that of its species. But that does not mean it is itself intelligent or rational. One also needs to distinguish personal knowledge from animal learning by association, whether of the operant or Pavlovian kind. A real personal knowledge is characterized by some kind of intellectual penetration and understanding of what is known. Learning by association alone—without any understanding—obviously does not yet meet that criterion. Consider a third objection: someone may think, as did Freud, that it is not only willing but also thinking—in fact our whole personal life—that can be accounted for by causal processes. In contrast, in chapter 5 the argument was made that a person’s biochemistry and physiology is at most an empirically necessary condition for the discovery of truth and not its cause, for there needs to be a certain “space” for the possibility of being convinced by evi-

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dence, as opposed to biochemical and psychic determinism working independent of evidence. In fact, to explain rationality by biochemical causes violates a principle elucidated by C. S. Lewis that rationality, in the sense of the power to understand and respond to the intelligible, could never be explained by nonrational processes. Lewis states, Nature is quite powerless to produce Rational thought: not that she never modifies our thinking but that the moment she does so, it ceases (for that very reason) to be rational. For, as we have seen, a train of thought loses all rational credentials as soon as it can be shown to be wholly the result of irrational causes. When Nature, so to speak, attempts to do things to Rational thoughts she only succeeds in killing them. 6

Philosophers are not alone in making this point. Even Freud himself implicitly appeals to Lewis’s principle: Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully even to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means, and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavor is to arrive at correspondence with reality—that is to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfillment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call “truth.” 7

In the above quotation, for Freud “individual factors and affective influences” refer to nonrational forces, and “scientific thinking” seems simply synonymous with rationality itself. The question of course is whether the nonrational forces of a person’s brain physiology and brain chemistry also undermine all “scientific thinking.” The answer is clearly in the affirmative, because, if all thinking is explained biochemically, reasons and evidence are all swallowed up by their nonrational causes. The intellect, every bit as much as freedom, needs to have an independence from determining causes—as well as from other kinds of pressures— in order to rationally “weigh” the evidence according to right reason. For example, consider trying to think clearly in a situation that is chaotic and dangerous, or where there are tremendous forces pressing us to interpret a situation in one particular way, such as a judge deciding a case where that ruling could personally cost or gain the judge a fortune. In order to really know what one ought to do or how the judge ought to judge in justice,

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persons need to withdraw from these pressures and to recover themselves, creating that “space” by which they can think clearly. It is only within that “space” that a person can then ask, “What is it that I really see, know, and think?” The Existence of the Power of Intellect After facing some possible objections against the thesis of the power of personal intellect in human beings, consider now some of the positive reasons (both philosophical and psychological) for why human beings really do possess this ontological power of intellect. Point 1: Consider Freud’s description of “being conscious” as a “term,” his claim that spiritual activity is reducible to biochemical processes, his reduction of all nonscientific meaning as mere ideology, and his denial of freedom (and its orientation toward rationality) in humans. While all these things involve a denial of the personal power of the intellect, Freud still cannot consistently and fully deny the intellect. To do so involves cutting off the branch he himself is sitting on, for he cannot have “correspondence with reality” (from his quotation above) without rationality, truth, logos, and a personal life. Only beings possessing an intellect can reason scientifically and know truth. Point 2: Persons capable of identifying the intelligibility (logos in the objective sense) of things—whether empirical or a priori—prove their power of intellect, for not only does the reality of intelligibility presuppose intelligence, grasping the inherent intelligibility of something is also the work of intelligence (logos in the subjective sense). Animal knowledge in contrast is too impoverished because its basis is the application of their practical intellect to sense perception, including of course instinct and conditioning. Yet conditioned “knowledge” without understanding hardly qualifies as knowledge, and instinctual “knowledge” is also not really an instance of any kind of learning, as it only refers to an inborn pattern of reacting grounded in the species. Point 3: If our later critique of psychologism (chapter 11) is correct, the power of intellect is presupposed because then the actual explanation of nonpsychological phenomena is given via the knowledge of the facts themselves as opposed to any psychological reductionism. On the other hand, if psychologism is correct, our understanding of the psychological basis of seemingly nonpsychological phenomena is also given intellectually. Either way, the intellect is presupposed. Point 4: Finally, the strongest argument for the power of intellect in human beings is our power to know via intellectual intuition, insofar as we can know some strictly necessary truths.

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THE NATURE OF THE WILL In this section I want to present one version of the classical understanding of freedom, both in its nature and existence, and contrasting it with animal voluntariness. The central idea of all classical versions of freedom lies in the power of a free being to be a first or uncaused cause. Such a being is neither merely determined from without, as a mere link in a causal chain, nor exclusively determined from within, as with pure animals unable to rise above their instincts. Later in chapter 9 we will investigate Skinner’s challenge to this understanding with his radical behaviorism, which is actually a version of soft determinism or compatibilism. Von Hildebrand distinguishes two dimensions of a specifically personal notion of freedom: freedom of action and inner response. In the first instance a person may be free to change a fact about the state of the world, such as changing the fact of a child’s drowning to not drowning. In the second instance—concerning the inner response—a person possesses the power to inwardly say “yes” or “no” to a state of affairs. Perhaps someone has the will but lacks the power to change a state of affairs, such as from having cancer to not having it. Still, it is possible to freely either accept this fact (in the spirit of resignation) or not (in an angry despair). These two dimensions can be performed either by freedom of choice or spontaneous freedom. Freedom of choice refers to a deliberative decision between at least two viable alternatives. Thus a person can perform some action aiming at changing some fact about external reality or not, and similarly can either inwardly say “yes” or “no” to a state of affairs. Freedom of choice, however, reveals an even more basic kind of freedom, which von Hildebrand terms a “spontaneous freedom.” Stephen Schwarz describes it in this way: “I cannot freely choose between x and y unless I can first, and more fundamentally, simply and freely choose x, or simply choose y, by the power of free basic choosing.” 8 For example, the experience of “rushing into the pool because a child was floundering” is actually an example of spontaneous freedom insofar as there is in fact no choice (assuming no other competing obligations). While granting that there is a choice theoretically and in principle between doing or not performing that action, in fact—from the point of view of motivation—there is no actual choice: I (we) would attempt to save the child. Just as the idea of intellect—in the sense of understanding things in light of their universal essences—is rightly linked specifically and uniquely to persons, insofar as this understanding of the power of intellect is constitutive of what it means to be a person, something analogous can be said of the power of will. Thus this power, rightly understood, also helps distinguish persons from animals.

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Volition in Contrast to Animal Voluntariness The specifically personal power of will is something more than animal voluntariness, where the principle of action lies within the animal itself. Just as we tried to do justice to the nature of animals by noting the existence of an animal’s practical intellect, explaining that animal learning goes beyond mere conditioning, so with animal voluntariness we have a power that goes beyond saying that an animal is merely some kind of complicated machine working by way of secondary causality. For the inner voluntariness of animals is in no way reducible to the operation of efficient causes one finds with machines. Animal voluntariness is similar to personal freedom insofar as it comes “from within” as a power of soul, while the operation of a motor is determined “from without” via external causal chains. In fact, there is no “inner” to a motor, as its whole operation is reducible to external causal chains. Animals, in contrast, possess inner powers of soul: of instinct, sense perception, and even a practical intellect, together with this inner voluntariness, where the principle of an animal’s action lies within the animal itself. Despite the similarity of this “inner” dimension, animal voluntariness is distinguished from personal freedom in being determined inwardly via its instinctual patterns. There is no going against its own instincts, and thus the animal is imprisoned within them. In contrast, the central idea of freedom is of its character being a first cause, insofar as it is neither determined extrinsically (like a machine) nor intrinsically (via one’s instincts). It rather refers either to an act exercised by a person or an ontological power that is necessarily tied to the nature of being a person, with this power remaining actualized in a person’s nature even when some free act is not being exercised. Freedom in both these senses is tied to the idea of an act or power being a first or uncaused cause. This idea is so foundational that even determinists like Freud could not at times help but presuppose it, such as when he stated that “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other” (emphasis in original). 9 The Existence of the Will In this section I want to give evidence for the reality of freedom by appealing to lateral self-presence (saving the challenge against it by Skinner for chapter 9). It seems to me—similar to what we said earlier about the existence of the personal self—that this is more a problem of recognizing what can be selfevidently given rather than proving its existence. Let us unfold this explication by which we can come step by step to recognize this power of personal soul in operation.

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Point 1: The beginning focus is not with those intentional objects of conscious life given on the objective pole of our inner, conscious experience, which can be shared with others (as, for example, when fans in a stadium watch a football game). Rather, the focus is with the inner, subjective pole of our conscious experience, which is experienced inwardly and is unique to each person. Point 2: This inner pole has to be strengthened in order for the person to become especially present to one’s self as the one performing intentional acts and responses. This strengthening can occur by a conscious act of collecting one’s self to stand in one’s center, and it can also occur naturally and organically—although not necessarily—when one encounters a situation that is essentially deep (such as when someone takes a serious vow). Point 3: The result of intensifying one’s self-presence is an increase of consciousness, not just on the objective pole—where one is more able to give one’s self to the object by being more present to it—but also on the subjective pole of one’s conscious life. This increase of subjective presence could perhaps be expressed in this way: “I not only know, but I know that I know,” and this increase also entails resisting all influences that draw us away from ourselves in ways contrary to what we really think or will. The result is the spiritual space by which the conscious self can now think and act. The power of deterministic positions against freedom presuppose only a weak instance of lateral self-presence, where this space is not fully and successfully maintained against those psychic forces that can draw us away from ourselves. The argument here is not that we are always conscious in a collected state, where we continuously possess ourselves in a deep lateral self-presence. It is rather that we can and no doubt occasionally do “collect ourselves” to achieve a deeper form of self-presence. When this happens the experience of our own freedom becomes especially clear, in contrast to other experiences that can easily draw us away from ourselves. It is only during those times when someone is living more superficially that he can become confused with thinking that he is free when in fact someone else is actually manipulating him and his desires. In contrast, when a person securely possesses himself, when he dwells with himself and is present to himself, and especially when he is in an explicitly conscious relation to what is intrinsically precious, there is no temptation to be manipulated by someone else drawing us off from ourselves. For when we acquiesce to our instinctual needs, we open the door to manipulation from without, thereby giving us only the illusion of inner freedom. Point 4: Consider the case of a person who is drawn off in ways contrary to what she truly thinks and even wants, such as when the lure of what is experienced as being subjectively satisfying threatens to overwhelm our free spiritual center. Everyone knows what happens when a person continually gives into to the “itch” of the subjectively satisfying: the space of

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that person’s inner freedom becomes eroded. This erosion is not in the sense that she loses her personhood or power of freedom, but rather that the experience of her freedom becomes progressively buried by the growing power of the needs and instincts of the psyche. This is why it is so important to rediscover and reenergize this space over against those forces that erode our experience and exercise of freedom. It is as if the determinist only notices the itch and not the freedom of the person who can opt either to scratch or to refrain from scratching. It is of course not one or the other but both, with the primary, more important reality being freedom. This above example is similar to what was earlier said about the intellect: where I am so strongly influenced by the opinions of some significant other that my own thinking becomes paralyzed. In those circumstances I can fail to notice that I am no longer thinking for myself, as I introject the thinking of someone else. Sometimes these “others” are not individual persons, but are instead the intellectual atmosphere of a culture, tribe, or subculture (for example, a gang), which can also threaten not only my thinking for myself but also my willing for myself. Here we must grant such cases where I am so drawn off from myself that I am in effect controlled by forces outside myself. The point is not to assert that such experiences do not exist—they certainly do exist—but that their existence is disordered and certainly not the norm. To focus exclusively on the disorder is to forget the right use of these personal powers. It is yet another example of the victory of negative over positive psychology. Point 5: Finally, we might consider whether there is a kind of motivation where there is emphasized a real space and independence from the lure of the environment, where someone has to withdraw from the pressures and pleasures of the environment to discern what ought to be done and respond adequately to it. As we shall develop later (chapter 9), the value response is one such candidate for someone being the master of the environment instead of its slave. Self-Determination: Disposing of One’s Self in Freedom The above argument has focused on locating our freedom in the interiority of self-presence, whereby the person dwells within him- or herself, as well as the freedom-like dimension of practically all our personal, intentional conscious experiences. The heart of this interiority of freedom is self-determination, whereby my freedom extends not only to choosing between different goods in the world or to the degree to which I will regulate my passions, but also to my making a decision about my very being, as to what kind of person I will become. This deepest kind of freedom—of self-determination—is especially given when persons confront themselves in conscience. Crosby states,

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I know that in deciding whether or not to act in accordance with the dictate of my conscience I will at the same time decide about myself, I will dispose over myself. If I act as my conscience admonishes me, I am aware of affirming myself in a certain way, of willing my deepest human integrity. And if I act against my conscience I am aware of radically compromising myself. This is why persons who are caught up in a moral crisis will sometimes speak as if what binds them to do the right thing is not so much the good that they act to preserve, but rather the integrity of themselves—as if they would split apart as persons by acting against their conscience. We find, then, on the subjective pole of the moral action a being-handed-over to oneself, a being-subject to one’s own freedom, which is directly parallel to the self-presence that is found on the subjective pole of all intentional acts, as we saw. 10

Thus in willing I not only dispose over the object of my will, I also dispose over myself, which Crosby calls self-determination. It is one kind of determination that is actually compatible with freedom (others will be discussed in chapter 9) that is related to freedom in being the determinate effect of free acts. For notice that, while the act of disposing over myself is within my freedom, the determinate effect on my character resulting from that free act is not similarly within my freedom. For example, remember Dostoevsky’s character of the wealthy man (chapter 4) who murdered his ex-girlfriend. The man freely intended her murder, thereby exercising his freedom of selfdetermination. But once he exercised this freedom with the actual murder, he was not free with what kind of person he had then become—a murderer— together with the inevitable self-loathing his action engendered. This emotional consequence is solely the fruit of the man’s free action, and no therapy or encounter group session can or even should evaporate it. Any attempt to “talk it through” to anything other than forgiveness, redemption, and/or punishment is inevitably superficial and leads only to a further repression of conscience, with the guilt being “buried alive.” This disgust cannot be destroyed—as manifested by Lady Macbeth’s continual washing of her hands—it can only be forgiven, cynically ignored, or further repressed. Moral guilt does not exist merely at the pleasure of our freedom, as if it has only a psychological and volitional existence. No, it has a kind of being that is independent of whether it is willed or not, and its being—in contrast to the psychic experience of pain—can even be independent of conscious experience. THE NATURE AND EXISTENCE OF THE PERSONAL HEART Up to this point the primary focus has been on the two specifically personal powers of intellect and will. Both of these powers are rational in being oriented toward logos. If they are functioning properly in a rightly ordered soul, they will be ordered toward being and to the objective good.

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Although classical philosophy has for centuries recognized the ontological powers of intellect and will as constitutive of personal being, recently there has been some support for identifying a third fundamental power of personal being, that of the heart as the center of rational affectivity. 11 While there are philosophers who subsume the heart under volition (freedom of the will), there are good reasons to recognize the heart as a distinct power of personal being from volition. Certainly there are similarities between the heart and the will, insofar as both are ordered to the good 12 and have the character of responses. However, there are also clear differences between them, insofar as the responses of the heart are essentially felt and are not within the person’s direct (volitional) power, whereas the will is never itself felt and is always—insofar as that person is conscious—directly within the power of the person. 13 Because affections are never within our direct power, von Hildebrand speaks of the “gift” character of rational affective responses that are both intentional and adequate to values and disvalues on the object side. It is, however, no gift for a person to rejoice—let us say, out of a secret envy—over the downfall of another. Rejoicing over some misfortune or evil, while an affective response, is obviously not rationally appropriate. When this feeling is correctly identified for what it is—an ugly evil—then such a feeling will be experienced as a curse, just the opposite of a gift. Also, there are other feeling states that are not even intentional in nature, such as feelings of euphoria or depression that are biochemically caused and are not at all motivated. And there are other feelings that are similarly experienced as curses, such as obsessive feelings that also arise spontaneously from the psyche, similarly outside of the control of the person. The gift character of our affective life concerns only those feelings that are rationally appropriate, with the measure of rationality being the appropriateness of the feeling with respect to the value or disvalue motivating them. This is what Pascal means when he states, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” 14 The “reasons” in the above quote do not refer to the demands of logic, much less to some nonrational standard for feelings, but rather to the rationality of the affective response being adequate to intrinsic value. This interpretation fits perfectly with the idea that value is not only reasonable; it is part of the ultimate reasonability of logos itself. Values are not reducible to whatever it is a person happens to feel; they are rather what—on the object side—make a person’s feelings rational and appropriate. 15 It is an obvious fact that if a person risks his or her life to save a child’s life, such an action is perfectly reasonable on the basis of the value of the child’s being and life. If a person risks his or her life to save a gerbil, such an action would not be fully rationally appropriate. Consider now the application of a distinctively personal affectivity to psychology. If a person’s feelings are somehow appropriate to the world of

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value, then there is no need for any further psychological interpretation. Such feelings are perfectly rational and appropriate. However, if a person’s feelings are inappropriate to what is important-in-itself (or at least to the objective logos of a situation), then there is here a warning flag of possible psychological involvement, especially if the inappropriateness is not only not recognized but also appears to have been (to whatever degree) repressed and rationalized away. It is a step to psychological and personal health for a person to identify any such rationalization, like with the above example of the envious person, and to recognize any envy for the ugly and pathetic evil that it is rather than making excuses for it. Making excuses seem synonymous with lying to oneself, which is one source of so much psychological mischief, especially since the lie never seems to be completely successful, never seems to become the new truth, and in the end leads to further repression and self-loathing. Notice our automatic default tendency to defend our feelings—no matter how disordered or inappropriate they may be—and to even give reasons and excuses for them. This automatic solidarity with our own feelings needs to be given up, a point that is completely missed by Carl Rogers (chapter 11). Rogers’s psychology cannot (as far as I can see) adequately respond to the charge of superficiality because there is no role of intrinsic value measuring the adequacy of a person’s feelings in his psychology. In contrast, Skinner seems to simply ignore the realm of feelings altogether—except as objects for manipulation—and they are therefore not useful to him in his project of manipulating the environment for the goal of controlling and helping society. In contrast, we ought to take our affective life seriously, insofar as our affections can be rational when they are in accord with truth and with intrinsic value. This chapter has explained and justified in a specifically philosophical way what is unique about our personal nature, as well as its psychological significance. In the next chapter, I will investigate B. F. Skinner’s dual challenge against our rational nature: with his attack on freedom (psyche in the wider sense) as well as his attack on efficient causality (logos). NOTES 1. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book XI, 26, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1948), 168. 2. Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Farrar, 1981), 31. 3. The correctness of their interpretation is far more convincing in the light of further contemporary empirical research on higher-order animals. See Alasdair Macintyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 16–41.

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4. In what follows, I will use the term intellect to refer exclusively to personal intellect, and reserve the term practical intellect for animal intelligence. 5. Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Farrar, 1981), 37. 6. C. S. Lewis, Miracles in The Best of C. S. Lewis (New York: Baker Books, 1969), 224. 7. Sigmund Freud, “A Philosophy of Life,” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, ed. and trans. Joan Riviere, Lecture XXXV, in The Freud Reader (New York: Norton, 1989), 789. 8. Schwarz, “What is Freedom?” (Kingston: University of Rhode Island Press, 2005), 7. 9. Freud in Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Norton, 1969), 197. Originaly published in The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1960), 40. 10. John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1996), 88–89. 11. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007). 12. By “the good” I do not only mean “the objective good” of intrinsic value, but also “the subjective good” of the importance of the subjectively satisfying. Thus there are at least two generic forms of the good: the objective and the subjective. 13. That is, to say “yes” or “no” to a state of affairs. Naturally, some change in the state of the world may very well be beyond the power of the person in question to produce. I am certainly able to will to jump ten inches off the ground, but whether I can actually effect that state of affairs is of course another question. 14. Blasé Pascal, Pensees, translated by W. F. Trotter (New York: Dutton, 1958), 78 (#277). 15. See E. Christian Brugger, “Psychology and Christian Anthropology,” Edification, 3:1 (2009), 7.

Chapter Nine

Skinner on Freedom and Causality

This chapter concerns Skinner’s attack on both freedom and causality. I also want to briefly contrast Skinner’s soft determinism with Freud’s hard determinism, and then focus on Skinner’s attack against the classical understanding of freedom. At the end of the chapter, we shall evaluate Skinner’s empiricist attack on efficient causality and see if his reduction of causal relations to “functional relations” can be successfully maintained. B. F. SKINNER’S COMPATIBILIST CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM Most people at first find the Skinnerian attack on freedom to be strange, insofar as it goes against their own naïve lived experience. However, his argument for soft determinism (or compatibilism) may seem at first surprising, and then compelling. While hard determinism takes the view that a person’s whole inner conscious life is the result of specific antecedent causal factors, soft determinism does not—at least in any formal sense—consider causal factors at all. They rather investigate motivation and claim that, while persons are free to will what they want, what they want is not within their freedom. Thus the experience of freedom is not denied; it is rather compatible with determinism that comes from desires that are fixed and therefore manipulable. In the particular version of compatibilism that Skinner espouses, however, the relation of freedom and determinism is not one of equals, insofar as the determinism of what is actually reinforcing (from the environment) is the primary reality (principium), with “freedom” being the secondary (principiatum) and ultimately illusory conscious experience. In the Skinnarian version of determinism an attack is made on the notion of a robust inner freedom, 109

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whether expressed in actions or inner responses, whereby freedom is the primary reality and the motivating object the secondary reality. Thus with genuine inner freedom, while motivation is necessary for a free act, the motivating object only has the character of “inviting” a free response, and is thereby the secondary and not the primary reality. For Skinner, in contrast, this relation between motivating object and inner free act is reversed, with the motivating object being the primary, determining reality. The motivating environment, or that which is positively reinforcing, is obviously for Skinner the primary reality, which simply means people choose what they like. From that apparently reasonable assumption (inference to best explanation), one can go on to accurately predict behavior on the basis of an analysis of positive (and of course negative 1) reinforcement schedules. Consider the evidence for Skinnerian compatibilism: people really are influenced by what they see as attractive. Sometimes this influence is overwhelming, such as with some addiction that dethrones even the conscious experience of their freedom. Far more often, however, is the experience of “freedom” whereby a person is motivated to will certain actions over others. Skinner points out that, even in these cases, their behavior is—simply as a matter of fact—subject to manipulation by those who control what entices, or to use his term, “positively reinforcing” them. The central feature of Skinner’s argument for his soft determinism is that we can without explanatory loss completely dispense with “inner” freedom and simply study environmental patterns of behavior. If, in contrast, “inner” freedom really exists and the “autonomous man”— or autonomous person, if you will—is in fact a genuine first cause, freedom would become mere arbitrariness and the science of psychology—devoted to discovering these intelligible patterns of behavior—would not exist. Skinner thinks that when people actually explain their experience of freedom, where their so-called free act is interpreted as a first or uncaused cause, what they imply is the absence of any sort of motivation whatsoever. The result is arbitrary freedom, implying an absence of rationality explaining behavior. Freedom in the sense of a first cause puts the inner person in the driver’s seat when it is really the motivations found in the environment that drive the choices people make. FOUR MORE KINDS OF DETERMINATION RELATED TO FREEDOM In the above section, evidence for Skinner’s compatibilism was given: people are clearly motivated by what is positively reinforced by the environment. This determination of motivation—or at least the notion of determination in

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general—seems destructive of inner freedom, as determination and freedom seem mutually exclusive. One, however, wonders if that is really so. Is it possible to distinguish those kinds of determination that are not only compatible but even strictly necessary for freedom from others that really are destructive of inner freedom? We already mentioned in the last chapter how the freedom of selfdetermination is compatible with freedom. In this section we shall add four more. Adding them all together, the second and third kinds of determination are strictly necessary to the classical understanding of freedom, as necessary conditions for freedom. It is only the fourth and fifth kinds—referring to “hard” and “soft” determinism—where determination involves a real contradiction to inner freedom. Discussing all five kinds is important because Skinner tends to make the mere fact of determination evidence for determinism, just as for him arbitrariness and indeterminacy are surefire marks of inner freedom (of the “autonomous man”). After self-determination, the second kind of determination concerns the object of the will, which is the intention. Concerning volitional responses, notice that a person never merely wills but always wills something. Specifically, a person either inwardly says “yes” or “no” to a specific state of affairs 2 or intentionally tries to change some fact about the state of the world by his or her willing. A person never merely wills, but always and necessarily wills some determinate state of affairs that is in some way important to the subject. Let us call this state of affairs the “object,” which is as well the “intention” of the will. Take, for example, the assertion “I rushed into the pool because a child was floundering.” The object of the action is clearly determinate, in the sense of wanting to change a quite definite fact about the state of the world, in this case the state of the child drowning to the child not drowning. A similar desire to change some fact about the world is presupposed for every action of the will. A third kind of determination refers to the motive, which is reason for the volitional response. Thus there is a distinction between what is willed, which is the intention, and the reason for the willing, which is the motive, such as when Shakespeare’s Macbeth willed the death of King Duncan (his intention) for the sake of himself becoming king (his motive). Insofar as willing is rational, there must always be a reason or motive for some willing. Reasons provide a link between the intellect and the will, for just as (in rational thought) there are reasons for the opinions people have, so when these reasons become the explanation for some willing we call them “motives,” such as the conviction Macbeth has when he wants himself to be king. The will is rational insofar as it is oriented to reason, as the actual willing of some action goes back to reasons or motives. But as noted before, being oriented to reason is something different from actually being rational. The rationality of the will (in the sense of presupposing intentions and motives) in

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no way contradicts the possibility of some motives being irrational (or inadequate to the logos of the situation). Formally or structurally the will is rational insofar as it presupposes motives, but these motives could be completely inadequate (and therefore irrational) to the actual demands of reason in some particular case. Motives are rational in the sense of aiming at rationality, despite the fact that in some individual case there could be a good or bad, rational or irrational (if the motive for some willing involves some kind of attack upon rationality), objective or subjective, explicit or implicit, conscious or to varying degrees unconscious reasons for willing. In contemporary psychology irrational motivation is granted. The question is whether rational motivation is also possible, with its emphasis on negative psychology and its general ignoring of the rational nature of the person. And yet such motivation is clearly given in our lived experience. Take again the above case of a drowning child. The reason for someone’s willingness to rescue the child is typically grounded in the intrinsic preciousness of the child. If so, then the motivation for this action is rational, objective, explicit, and fully conscious. In this case the volitional reason or motive “determines”—in the sense of “explains”—the willing of this fact, but without any implication that it was forced by anything else outside of a person’s freedom, because motives are best understood as an invitation for a person’s free response. In the above example it is the overriding importance of the child’s life and value. Thus the determination of the motive is clearly no objection to freedom. Neither the determination of the intention nor the motive is detrimental to the possibility of real freedom. The next two kinds of determination, however, are antithetical to authentic freedom. Thus what is at stake is not the above two kinds of determination, which are perfectly and even necessarily found in freedom, but of determinism, whether of a hard (Freud) or soft (Skinner) version. The fourth meaning of the term “determination” refers to a hard determinism, whereby efficient causes—such as biochemical and physiological causes—circumvent the person’s forcing some action. Here Freud’s hard determinism clearly goes beyond determination in the above sense of a motive, insofar as motives only refer to an invitation to our freedom. Freud is obviously aware that his idea of causal determination is utterly destructive of freedom. His position is that our whole psychic life is nothing but the effect of biological, causal forces, which is a position we already rejected in chapter 5. Skinner’s compatibilism or “soft” determinism is a fifth kind of determination, referring to the idea that our will is simply subservient to those motivating factors in the environment that “entices” us. 3 If so, why make any reference to some “autonomous man,” and simply not simply focus on those factors in the environment that control behavior?

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Concerning the fifth, Skinner emphasizes that he is not dealing with causal determinations. It is not so much “A causing B,” in the sense of A’s somehow forcing B as in a hard determinism, but rather “A enticing B,” where B typically feels the experience of being free to will A, but where A is really the driver in motivating or enticing the response of B. Otherwise, for Skinner there is no other rational reason for the motivation, leading to sheer arbitrariness, which—together with the feeling of being free—is his conception of what freedom is. At the end of this chapter I want to evaluate and then defend the principle of efficient causality against Skinner’s rejection of it in favor of “functional relations.” Let us, however, first see how freedom can be rationally grounded. IN DEFENSE OF THE RATIONALITY OF FREEDOM Skinner thinks that rationality of behavioral science makes the idea of freedom impossible, insofar as he maintains the choice before us is between the rationality of science or the arbitrariness of freedom, and arbitrariness is simply not found given the patterns of behavior uncovered by his radical behaviorism. Therefore, freedom is illusory. It is granted that these patterns reveal that motivation is not being properly explained in terms of unprincipled arbitrariness, but does that thereby make freedom and autonomy impossible? Skinner thinks so, as he states: The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. 4

The controversy between arbitrariness (of freedom) and rationality (of functional relations) seems similar to another famous controversy in ancient Greece between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides thought that being is and that non-being is not. Since being already is, there can be no such thing as becoming or change. Heraclitus thought that since everything about everything changes at every moment, only becoming exists, not being. In this controversy Parmenides has reason on his side (for what is more rational than the idea that being is and not-being is not?), while Heraclitus has experience on his side, for change is an obvious fact of experience. But if Heraclitus is right, we could not know anything because, if at one moment I come to know that “S is P,” and if everything about everything changes at every moment, then at the very next moment “S is not only not P,” but also “S is not even S.”

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This leads to utter skepticism, concretized in the famous line of Heraclitus’s that one cannot step into the same river twice, which his nihilistic pupil Cratylus corrects so as to say that one cannot even step into the same river once! The trick to solving this puzzle is to find a dimension of being that does not change and another dimension that does change. Thus Aristotle maintains that only one dimension of the individual being is in constant flux—its unformed matter—while the inner form of that being is stable and not changing throughout the life of the being, thus accounting for both change and rationality. Our task, it seems to me, is to work out something analogous to the Aristotelian solution. Instead of denying freedom in favor of rationality (as Skinner prefers), or of denying (or ignoring) rationality for the sake of freedom (as Sartre and Rogers prefer), one should seek to explain both rationality and freedom. This relation between freedom and rationality can be investigated by first noting what Skinner means by the term “arbitrary.” For when he speaks of freedom he has the nonrationality of arbitrariness in mind. Here arbitrariness means mere randomness in the sense of an absence of reasons granting no rational explanation. Thus, Skinner states, Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. 5

In contrast to this understanding of freedom—in terms of arbitrariness—the classical view is that freedom implies rationality, in the sense that there are always reasons (that is, motives) for a person’s willing. In fact, it is the motive that makes the action appropriate or inappropriate, rational or irrational, with regard to the reality of logos. By misunderstanding the nature of the classical notion of freedom as being nonrational, it is easy for Skinner to present the following stark choice: between rationality and science, on the one hand, and arbitrariness and freedom on the other. There is, however, a second far more important meaning of the term “arbitrary freedom,” referring not to an absence of reasons or motives, but to the subjectivity of rationality. Subjectivity in this context does not refer to the being of the subject, but to a kind of importance—of the subjectively satisfying—that is constituted by the subject. This kind of importance is partly

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constituted by the subject, specifically by some person’s pleasure. For example, people are motivated to drink a Coke, not from any intrinsic goodness of the Coke itself, but because drinking it gives them pleasure. It is from the point of view of pleasure that makes the Coke important. (Thus the importance of the Coke has the being of an appearance, where there is a subjective dimension together with no claim to objectivity). In such cases there are reasons for drinking the Coke, and in a broad sense there is rationality, but there is also a note of subjectivity and relativity in that rationality. The changeable note of the subjectively satisfying—going back to the instability of pleasures without being more firmed grounded in the logos of intrinsic value—gives the freedom of willing what is subjectively satisfying its arbitrary nature. Perhaps drinking the Coke gives me pleasure now, but not two hours from now. Henceforth, when I speak of arbitrary freedom this is the sense I will mean. For both Skinner and the adherents of classical freedom think that arbitrary freedom in the first sense—referring to a freedom without reasons or motives—is absurd, as it goes against any rational understanding. As we shall see, the real question is whether there is another kind of freedom besides this second sense of arbitrary freedom, referring to the arbitrariness of mere subjective pleasure. If one identifies freedom with arbitrary freedom for willing what is merely enticing, Skinner’s analysis is formidable, as it makes sense to look at the antecedents of what is pleasurable, that is, of what it is in the environment that could yield the pleasures of the subjectively satisfying. These antecedents become positively reinforcing—insofar as they can signal (as the “independent variable”) the bringing about of pleasure (as the “dependent variable”)—which then offers the key to the control and manipulation of others. For in controlling them one can control other persons who are subject to their alluring character. HOW VALUE HELPS GROUND THE RATIONALITY OF FREEDOM Although the psychology of B. F. Skinner and the philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand are very different, there is one point of convergence: what Skinner thinks as positively motivating is very similar to what von Hildebrand terms “the importance of the subjectively satisfying,” especially with respect to the “pull” the subjectively satisfying importance has on the person. Thus von Hildebrand states, “The attraction of the subjectively satisfying . . . lulls us into a state where we yield to instinct; it tends to dethrone our free spiritual center. Its appeal is insistent, ofttimes assuming the character of a temptation, trying to sway and silence our conscience, taking hold of us in an obtrusive manner.” 6 This description (especially when stripped from any

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moral implications) seems to characterize how in general Skinner sees motivation, especially with the idea of inner freedom being “dethroned” and replaced by what is enticing. Both thinkers see how what is enticing can explain motivation. In the case of Skinner, what is positively reinforcing—or that which has the importance of the subjectively satisfying (to use von Hildebrand’s terminology)— completely explains all motivation. Granted that this motivation is not determinative in any causal way, there remains a “pull” of what is subjectively satisfying, attracting persons in ways according to their self-interests. It is this rationality of self-interest that is the reason why Skinner thinks that genuine inner freedom makes no sense. Concerning freedom, however, Skinner’s view is incomplete, insofar as he thinks of it exclusively in terms of what is enticing or positively reinforcing. For while von Hildebrand thinks there is nothing wrong with being motivated in individual cases by what is (legitimately 7) subjectively satisfying, for a person to be completely at the “beck and call” of this kind of importance and motivation is for him a disordered way of being. In so doing a person cedes his or her inner freedom to those desires and instincts that are essentially “below” the personal self. The goal for von Hildebrand is for persons to continually reestablish the supremacy of the person over their desires and instincts, creating the “space” for freedom within the conscious life of the person. The problem is that Skinner does not have a place in his psychology for value motivation, as he reduces all motivation to what is merely subjectively satisfying. Thus he states, “To make a value judgment by calling something good or bad is to classify it in terms of its reinforcing effects.” 8 What is needed is another dimension of freedom going beyond the arbitrariness of the subjectively satisfying that is both rational and respectful to the autonomy of the person. This motivation is found with intrinsic value. It is the contemplation of value that supplies us with the “psychic space” needed for freedom to especially flourish. If the above is true, “authentic freedom” is especially given in the value response. This in turn undercuts Skinner’s idea of what exclusively motivates behavior: that which is positively reinforcing or enticing. This point can be illustrated by going back to an earlier example concerning envy. Let us say a person finally recognizes that the real basis for his own dislike for another person comes not from any objective factor; it merely comes from his own envy. As a result he explicitly and consciously repudiates his envy and strives to appreciate and even befriend the person he envies. This response is clearly not motivated by what is subjectively satisfying. It is completely lacking in any positive enticing dimension, and is instead motivated by the desire to give the due response to the value of the person envied.

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Someone could object: Are we not merely substituting one taskmaster for another? Isn’t this clearly indicated by the extrinsic ought character of the value response? Yes, but one wonders whether the value response needs to be extrinsic to inner freedom. Could a value response also come from a settled right relation to the world of value? It seems quite possible to interiorize a value-responding attitude coming from a character rightly ordered. Consider, for example, Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, as he makes a principled but extremely dangerous position against the king (which will end up costing More his life), when he states, “I will not give in [to the king] because I oppose it—I do—not my pride, not my spleen, nor any of my appetites, but I do—I!” (emphasis in original). 9 Here his value responding approach is quite definitely his own. Let us try to understand this internalized value-responding approach further by considering the example of a small child being told not to touch a hot stove. As long as the child does not understand the reasonability of the command, it will appear as a mere external prohibition to the child. But once the child touches the stove and get burned, the child will rationally understand the prohibition, which then leads to proper internalization. Here we have an instance where both rationality and internalization especially come together. It can be the same way with the rationality of the value response with persons whose moral character has been rightly formed, as we shall later further develop (chapter 12). THE PRINCIPLE OF EFFICIENT CAUSALITY It is not just freedom that Skinner thinks is not rationally grounded; it is also the notion of efficient causality. He explains, The terms “cause” and “effect” are no longer widely used in science. They have been associated with so many theories of the structure and operation of the universe that they mean more than scientists want to say. The terms which replace them, however, refer to the same factual core. A “cause” becomes a “change in an independent variable” and an “effect” a “change in a dependent variable.” The new terms do not suggest how a cause causes its effect. 10

Skinner takes over David Hume in asserting that what is given in any empirical change is reducible to repeatability, contiguity, and succession. Skinner thinks that the connection between cause and change, and specifically between the power of the cause to make a change in the effect, goes beyond any empirical intuition of the empirical facts themselves. Thus causal relations can only be established psychologically via repeated and repeatable observations of some change, engendering expectation. Since expectation is a

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psychological addition to the data of the empirical facts, the notion of cause as an objective reason explaining change has to be dropped. Skinner then goes on to make a concession to our normal way of speaking and says that he will keep on using the terms “cause” and “effect,” just so long as the reader remembers his particular meaning of the terms, which are really “functional relations.” A functional relation is nothing but an association or correlation between some stimulus cause (referring to independent variable) and behavioral effect (referring to a dependent variable) whereby “the new terms [independent and dependent variables] . . . merely assert that different events tend to occur together in a certain order.” 11 Thus Skinner retains Hume’s ideas of contiguity, constant conjunction, and succession while jettisoning the notion of a real (or fully objective) causal connection having the power to produce the effect. These correlations between independent and dependent variables serve as the hard data for science. Continuing the above quotation, Skinner states that while “such terms as ‘meaning’ and ‘intent’ appear to refer to properties of behavior, they usually conceal references to independent variables.” 12 The main explanatory vehicle for Skinner is precisely those independent variables found in the environment and is open to quantitative analysis, while “meaning” and “intent” are for Skinner secondary, epiphenomenal realities. Thus the hard data of psychology are for Skinner correlational and quantitative. They do not refer to efficient causes, much less to either final or formal causes. Any qualitative analysis of the objective hierarchy of value is out of the question. 13 And the other possible sources of intelligibility, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, are similarly either denied or at least not formally emphasized as parts of the methodology of psychology. Why does Skinner turn away from the phenomenon of causation for the sake of functional relations? There are at least two reasons for this change. First, these notions are unnecessary for Skinner’s behaviorism, for he will work by what is positively reinforcing, or, in other words, by a “soft” determinism, rather than by a “hard” or causal determinism, as characterized by the psychology of Freud. Second, the notions of “cause” and “effect” are dropping out of modern science. David Hume thinks that the causal nexus, or that power through which some effect comes into being, is merely subjectively superimposed by some observer by habit and not actually empirically intuited in objective experience. Here I want to give a defense of efficient causality against this subjectivistic interpretation of Hume, which includes both first (freedom) and secondary (or caused) causes. One can begin by first noting the truth that Hume sees, which is that this causal nexus—or the power that connects the cause with the effect—is typically not intuitively given. Consider the notion that “Heat causes expansion.” What is empirically given here is repeatability, contiguity, and succession, just as Hume claims, and indeed the power of heat to bring about expansion

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is really only inferred and not, strictly speaking, given. This characterizes all the examples of the supposed causal relations of events in nature that interest science: they all seem to be described by the fact that the causal connections are only inferred, just like the above example. It is what leads Hume to conclude that all causation is like that. But that is not universally the case, as there are some cases where this causal nexus is itself directly given in the experience. For consider the case where I am present to myself as the one bringing about the inner response of a “yes” or “no” to a state of affairs. Here I am clearly present to myself as the one inwardly saying this “yes” or “no.” This “I” is immediately given—on the subjective pole—insofar as I am clearly the subject effecting this inward act. Still, it is granted that in most other cases there is an absence of directly intuiting causal connections. But even in those cases, it is one thing to say that in the causal relations we have investigated there is no direct, intuitive evidence of a causal connection (nexus); it is quite another to say there is absolutely and in principle no causal nexus and hence no causality. This point can be made evident by analogy. It seems that the causal relation of “Heat causes expansion” is—in one respect—very much like the species understanding that “All crows are black,” insofar as neither assertion goes back to an intuition into some universal empirical law or species. Concerning crowness, an understanding of that species is really only from a mentally constructed concept. Granted that the content of this idea is not arbitrary, there is still no intuitive grasping into the universal essence of crowness. But that does not mean the product of the inductive generalization is not important and useful to science. It is extremely important, forming the theoretical backbone for all the natural sciences. Perhaps something similar can be said with causal relations in nature: taking as an example “Heat causes expansion,” the precise causal nexus between expansion and heat is not empirically given, just like the universal species of crowness. But that does not mean we cannot appeal to the principle of induction and say that there probably is a connection, based on repeated observations giving greater evidence of a possible causal connection. This interpretation is further bolstered if there is a viable theoretical explanation of the physics and chemistry involved by elucidating and justifying this causal connection—which would be missing with mere correlations (such as between sunrises and traffic jams in Southern California)—thus appealing to inference to best explain. Just because there is no strict empirical warrant for most causal relations does not mean there is thereby no warrant for all such relations. Nor does it mean that that there could be a reasonable inference to best explanation to some putative causal relation, such as the chemical explanation for why heat expands matter, as opposed to mere correlations where such explanations are

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lacking. And it certainly does not mean that the principle of causality is somehow suspect. It is nothing less than breathtaking what Skinner is willing to sacrifice for his empiricism. He thinks he is making the sacrifice of freedom for the sake of the rationality of his behaviorism, but really his behavioristic principles— rightly understood as explaining the motivation for what is enticing—are actually compatible with both freedom and efficient causality. They are only incompatible with radical empiricism. NOTES 1. I am prescinding from this negative dimension of operant conditioning simply for the sake of simplicity. 2. In this text I will use “state of affairs” and “fact” synonymously. 3. The above notion of “enticing” is not Skinner’s term, but it seems to capture his view of the motivation of positive reinforcement. 4. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom, 11–12. 5. Ibid., 14. 6. Von Hildebrand, Ethics , 38. 7. The pleasure derived from what is experienced as subjectively satisfying is not inherently wrong or evil. It does, however, become wrong if a person is willing to sacrifice a high value, especially a morally significant value, for the sake of what is merely pleasurable. 8. Skinner, Beyond Freedom, 99. 9. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (London: Samuel French, 1962), 98. 10. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, 23. 11. Ibid., 36. 12. Ibid. 13. This purely quantitative approach to the hard data of psychology reminds us of what Etienne Gilson said of Descartes and Leibniz: “We are fully justified in refusing to be victimized by the genius of others. Not having made the mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Leibniz, we cannot be tempted to submit all questions to the rules of mathematics; but our very mediocrity should at least help us to avoid such a mistake.” Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 6.

Chapter Ten

How a Broad Metaphysical Context Benefits Psychology

This chapter will investigate how respecting a broad rational context can help psychology. Specifically, by “broad” I am not referring to those principles that only characterize personal being (being qua person), which were thematic in chapter 8, but rather to those principles whose object includes persons, as well as everything else that is (being qua being). The three principles we shall investigate in this chapter are the principles of intelligibility, noncontradiction, and identity. It is of course possible to grant the truth of these principles while thinking that this topic in a psychology text is, well, strange. What possible impact could such principles have on psychology? There are two preliminary points: first, as was already noted, psychology has a right to protect its legitimate philosophical presuppositions, which include these very broad presuppositions giving psychology structure and context. To challenge these principles is in effect to challenge rationality, for without them a rational relation to reality becomes impossible, thereby making science impossible. And, second, revisiting principles can help every science not only expose faulty assumptions and silent presuppositions, but also identify other possible areas of fresh exploration perhaps not noticed or emphasized before. I hope to show in the following that having a sense of these principles is beneficial for their science. THE LOGOS OF THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF BEING I want to investigate the psychological significance of three main metaphysical principles, called “first principles.” The principle of intelligibility is that 121

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everything that is possesses some inner rationality or inner meaningfulness, and is therefore in principle knowable. The principle of noncontradiction is that something cannot both have and not-have a given predicate at the same time and same sense. Finally, the principle of identity is that everything that is, is identical with itself and is not another. What is a first principle? A first principle is all encompassing insofar as it is applicable to absolutely everything, that is, to all of being. All these first principles are known a priori, that is, as strictly necessary and highly intelligible truths. But not every a priori principle is a first principle. Something else is needed: besides being all encompassing, these principles must possess an ultimacy not derived from anything else more ultimate, and thus they must be self-evidently given. 1 As Thomas Nagel puts it, “Science is driven by the assumption that the world is intelligible. . . . That assumption is behind every pursuit of knowledge, including pursuits that end in illusion.” 2 Here Nagel implies that these principles are not derived from science but presupposed by it. He calls them assumptions. But they are not just arbitrary assumptions; they are rather reasonable and justified assumptions, as I hope to show in the following. Psychology has the right to presuppose them because their reasonability is grounded in an insight into the nature of being as such. Since these principles are all principles of being, and since there is literally nothing outside of being, these principles then must necessarily (a priori) apply to all other possible worlds. Naturally, other contingent worlds outside of space and time do not necessarily have to exist—and perhaps no other worlds exist—but if they do, they too must obey these a priori truths of being qua being. Thus, for instance, an angel cannot both exist and not-exist simultaneously. Empirical laws, in contrast, can certainly be different in other possible worlds. For example, in a dream world it is possible to have objects that contradict the physical, biological laws of the universe. Thus in dreams and fairy tales cows can fly and moons dance, and while these events contradict the physical laws of the universe, even a dream world cannot contradict the principle of noncontradiction or identity. No one claims that empirical laws are absolute. Only a priori laws are absolute, including these first principles. While these three first principles are about being from the point of view of being (being qua being), the principle of efficient causality—discussed in the last chapter—is a first principle only from the point of view of beings that change, or being qua change. If there exist some being that does not change (in the sense of actualizing potentialities)—such as the Judeo-Christian notion of God—this principle would not apply to such a being. Now I will turn to the first principles themselves and see how they open up lines of investigation and provide context for the discipline of psychology.

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THE PRINCIPLE OF INTELLIGIBILITY This principle asserts that everything that is, is in principle knowable by some mind. Although it applies to everything that is, there will be varying degrees and kinds of intelligibility, varying from rich to impoverished intelligibility. But in each case—whether rich or poor—there must be some definite meaning, form, structure, and essential structure. There cannot be a total absence of intelligibility, although this principle does not presuppose any particular intensity of intelligibility. It just claims that there must be some intelligibility. All beings, in other words, possess some definite essence, which is as well a necessary condition for their being known. This principle can be investigated from two different and closely related points of view. First, there is the inherent intelligibility of being—such as that every being possesses some inner meaningfulness and form—that is an intrinsic property of everything that is. Then there is, second, the knowability of this intelligibility, referring to the relation between the intelligibility of a being to some knower. In chapter 1 two different levels of the objective logos or intelligibility were discussed, one referring to empirical regularities and the other to the realm of the a priori. The first kind refers to empirical intelligibility, is achieved when some phenomenon follows regular patterns that can be empirically investigated, such as “Heat expands bodies.” Now let us add that, although empirical regularities refer to one measure of intelligibility, this intelligibility is limited by the fact that with empirical data there is no further intuition into the universal species or general laws themselves. One can only know of the pattern by observing concrete, individual occurrences and reoccurrences of it in the real and then applying the principle of induction to establish the law. The (empirical) intuition, therefore, is exclusively with the particular observations, not with their corresponding universals, a point noticed by C. S. Lewis: It follows that what we usually call the laws of nature—the way weather works on a tree for example—may not really be laws in the strict sense, but only in a manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means “what stones always do”? . . . In other words, you cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves, any law about what ought to happen, as distinct from what does happen. The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean “what nature, in fact, does.” 3

In contrast, the second kind of intelligibility refers to necessary and highly intelligible essence structures, which are so great that one can directly “see” into the universal essence structures themselves. Here there really is, as Lew-

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is stated above, a transcendent “law” at stake over and above simply “what nature, in fact, does.” The a priori principle of intelligibility—that things make sense—while itself a principle of philosophy, is related to the empirical sciences insofar as some sense for this principle (which is also part of our Western cultural heritage) is what gives scientists confidence of being able to study intelligible relations. Thus, if there is a particular empirical phenomenon that is not understood by scientists, nobody throws up their hands and asserts that it is intrinsically unknowable or that the facts are accountable only by the arbitrary will of God. They rather work on the right assumption that a rational explanation is available, even though they do not yet know what it is. The reasonability of that rational assumption is grounded in the principle of intelligibility. THE PRINCIPLE OF NONCONTRADICTION After introducing this principle, I want to investigate Jung’s challenge to it, as he theorizes that this principle only goes back to a certain psychological archetype, thereby explaining it as a principle about thinking instead of a principle about being. The principle of noncontradiction is this: a thing cannot both have and not-have a given predicate at the same time and in the same respect. It is crucial to understand that this classical understanding of the principle is about being and not about some content thought. Different people can obviously take contradictory positions; even one and the same person can inadvertently contradict him- or herself. Insane people can explicitly believe contradictory theses. People, therefore, can certainly think contradictory propositions. But for one and the same person to think contradictory positions is to make a mistake, precisely because being is so constructed that one and the same thing cannot both exist and not exist simultaneously. Thus, this principle is about being, not thinking. To make this principle about thinking is to psychologize it. Sometimes people think it is an objection against noncontradiction that dream objects exist, but they do not exist extramentally: thus they both exist and do not exist. But this is really no objection at all; as the right meaning of the principle is that something cannot both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense, as opposed to the two different senses presupposed by the objection. One can make the following ad hominem argument against those who attempt to psychologize it. Imagine someone claiming that an experimental rat both finished a maze and did not finish it at exactly the same time and in exactly the same respect. Who in psychology thinks of this as a legitimate

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possibility, even among those otherwise theoretically lost in psychologism? This is absurd and no one really thinks of it as a legitimate possibility. THE JUNGIAN INTERPRETATION Carl Jung not only conflates thinking with being, he also confuses mere paradoxes with true contradictions. Thus one Jungian commentator, Sanford L. Drob, states, It would not be an exaggeration to say that for Jung the “coincidence of opposites” is the key principle of his entire psychology. Elaborating on the basic Freudian insights that there are no contradictions in the unconscious and the personality develops as a result of psychological conflict, Jung articulated a conception of the whole “self” which unites the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and impersonal as a whole host of other archetypal oppositions (e.g. between anima and animus, shadow and persona, etc.). 4

For example, Jung states, It is a pity that Schiller is so conditioned by his type, otherwise it could never have occurred to him to look upon the co-operation of the two instincts [sensuousness and spirituality] as a “task of reason,” for opposites are not to be united rationally: tertium non datur—that is precisely why they are called opposites. It must be that Schiller understands by reason something other than ratio, some higher and almost mystical faculty. In practice, opposites can be united only in the form of a compromise, or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, although different from both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and of neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living. 5

In response, we might begin by noting that this principle in no way excludes paradoxes, shades of gray, or the phenomenon of the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorium), all of which can and do coexist with respecting noncontradiction. Thus a paradox is merely a “seeming opposite” as opposed to any true contradiction, such as the Christian notion of God being the infinite fullness of both justice and charity. How that works (if true) is mysterious and beyond our comprehension, but that does not mean it is formally contradictory, like for instance if someone were to assert that God is both just and not-just, or both love and not-love, which really are strict contradictory opposites. By emphasizing such things as paradoxes one wonders whether Jung is really serious about his psychology formally rejecting the ontological principle of noncontradiction. Yet, Jung also states that “reality is meaning and absurdity,” 6 and, “It remains an open question whether the opposition be-

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tween the two standpoints can ever be satisfactorily resolved in intellectual terms.” 7 Here he seems to be genuinely claiming that rationality and reason constitute only one dimension of being, which not only can be prescinded from but also synthesized into a further whole. Thus he states, According to the central concepts of Taoism, tao is divided into a fundamental pair of opposites, yang and yin. Yang signifies warmth, light, maleness; yin is cold, darkness, femaleness. Yang is also heaven, yin earth. From the yang force arises shen, the celestial portion of the human soul, and from the yin force comes kwei, the earthly part. As a microcosm, man is a reconciler of the opposites. Heaven, man, and earth form the three chief elements of the world, the san-tsai. 8

The existence of two mutually antagonistic tendencies, both striving to drag man into extreme attitudes and entangle him in the world, whether on the material or spiritual level, sets him at variance with himself and accordingly demands the existence of a counterweight. This is the “irrational third” tao. Hence the sage’s anxious endeavor to live in harmony with tao, lest he fall into the conflict of opposites. Since tao is irrational, it is not something that can be got by the will, as Lao-tsz repeatedly emphasizes. It seems then clear that he is claiming a realm of being, the tao, where there is an absence of all rationality going beyond mere paradoxes and coincidence of opposites. Let us then take Jung and Drob at their word. They not only explicitly deny the principle of noncontradiction—at least as applied to the whole of being—they also think that their denial involves an attack upon rationality itself. What follows from that? One consequence of Jung’s position is that it leads to self-referentially false assertions, where there is a contradiction between what a proposition is “saying” and what it is “doing.” Let us apply this idea to Jung’s claim that there is the tao, “the irrational third,” different from either being or not being, where the principle of noncontradiction does not apply. Imagine someone then responding, “Oh, so the sphere of the tao is where the principle of noncontradiction does not apply . . . and does apply.” This interpretation of course has to be rejected by Jung, for in asserting that this “irrational third” sphere exists (having no rationality), he also must assume in that sphere that the contradictory opposite reality (that rationality does apply) is excluded. It obviously does not make any sense to assert that both are true. He is thereby himself presupposing what it is he is rejecting. There is another way to evaluate the tao (the principle of irrationality). Instead of considering it as somehow containing contradictory opposites, perhaps one could evaluate it as containing contrary opposites. This application, however, like the coincidentia oppositorium and paradoxes, would not be any affront to the principle of noncontradiction at all, for this principle only refers to the impossibility of any contradictory opposition between

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something both existing and not-existing, or between having and not-having a given predicate (at the same time and sense). In contrast, the difference between rationality and irrationality is not a contradictory opposition at all. It rather only refers to a contrary opposite. For example, the contradictory opposite of the quality of love is a simple absence of love (not-love). The contrary opposite of love is more than that. It refers to that quality which attacks love, which is hatred. This distinction—between contradictory and contrary opposites—is important because with contraries there really is an opening to a “third” option. Thus for instance between love and hate there is the possibility of a neutral attitude, a third approach. In contrast, concerning the opposition between love and not-love there is no third option, but only mutual exclusivity absorbing all the possible options. It is either one or the other. 9 Thus the principle of noncontradiction only concerns contradictory oppositions. This is an important formal, structural consideration for all of science, including psychology. But psychology is also materially interested in the contrary opposition to rationality, which is irrationality. Thus, it is important not to confuse these two different kinds of opposition. For, notice, I argued in chapter 1 that both rationality and irrationality are intelligible, which is why there exists a science of irrationality (psychopathology). The problem with something both existing and not-existing simultaneously is not that it is irrational, but that it is intrinsically absurd. It seems that Jung confuses irrationality with absurdity. By failing to distinguish the irrational from what is a priori absurd, he destroys the necessary condition for the very possibility of psychology as a science. The above inference—which involves an attack on science—is not lost on Jung himself, for his explication of the realm of the tao leads him to explicitly leave psychology for what he terms “magic.” He states, “Whenever I want to learn and understand something I leave my so-called reason at home and give whatever it is that I am trying to understand the benefit of the doubt. I have learned this gradually, because nowadays the world of science is full of scary examples of the opposite.” 10 Also, “It is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn. One cannot understand magic. One can only understand what accords with reason. Magic accords with unreason, which one cannot understand. The world accords not only with reason but with unreason.” 11 Perhaps there are some who do not blink at the occasional replacement of psychology for magic. Logos, however, forever trumps magic because logos is never superseded by anything because logos encompasses all of being. All of science is ultimately a formulation of logos itself, as logos precedes science (in being its intelligible ground). It is only magic—in Jung’s sense with its total negation of all rationality—that is antithetical to logos. But since the

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principle of noncontradiction obtains for all of being, Jung’s understanding of magic does not exist. The fact of the matter is that magic too must have some rational basis, whether in some slight of hand or, perhaps, some kind of supernatural explanation (black magic). It is simply false to assert there is no explanation for magic. Thus even magic itself is encompassed within logos. THE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY One wonders what this principle could possibly add to psychology beyond, of course, what is the most abstract, the broadest, and the most obvious structural addition. Oddly enough, what this principle helps explain is the concrete individuality of persons, as opposed to the real temptation of empirical psychology—as well as all the sciences, including philosophy—to see persons merely as instances or specimens of a species. The principle of identity is this: everything that is, is identical with itself and not another. Because everything is itself and not another, everything is individual and, so to speak, its own. This principle, however, does not apply in the same way to everything that is. Certain kinds of things are more or less perfectly “individual” than other kinds of things. Thus not every being is individual in exactly the same (univocal) way. Some possess this perfection of individuality in different (analogous) kinds of ways, some greater and others in a weaker way. When it comes to the kind of being of a person, there exists a real perfection of individuality. Thus, while the principle of identity requires only a minimum of individuality as a condition for the possibility of something to be at all, a person is a being that far exceeds that minimum. It is worthwhile contrasting the individuality of persons to other kinds of things lacking this perfection. Here I will be summarizing the work—including some of his examples—on this topic by John Crosby. 12 Consider an individual newspaper of the same day and edition. Its individuality is so weak that it does not really matter which newspaper of that same day/edition one buys, for what is important is not its particular individuality but rather what is common to all other newspapers of that same edition and day. In contrast, the individuality of a living organism, such as an insect, is greater than that of a newspaper, although there is nothing particularly insulting if one treats a particular insect merely as a representative or specimen of its species. There is of course a real difference between the individuality of persons as opposed to insects or rats. The being of a rat is, to a very large extent, exhausted by its role as a specimen, insofar as it is in its particular form merely an instantiation of the whole of the species. I am not saying its individual form or essence is a universal, but rather that its individual essence

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adds nothing new to the species as such. It is as if the whole of that universal form (species) is merely instantiated or repeated in the individual, which is why it is no insult to a rat to treat it as a specimen of its species. In other words, with things like newspapers and rats—and in general to practically everything within in the nonpersonal realm—knowledge of the universal (or communicable) dimension is more important than the uniquely individual (or incommunicable) dimension, as the universal form is simply instantiated in the individual. And since the empirical method is centered on illuminating the individual in light of its universal via induction, this method is especially appropriate with respect to that realm of nonpersonal beings. This approach, however, while appropriate to insects and rats, clearly does not perfectly fit the study of persons, as each individual person adds something irreplaceably new and more to the general essence of humanness. In other words, Socrates is not reducible to a mere instantiation of his species in the way that a rat is in relation to its nature. Here the primary “note” with respect to persons is not their communicable dimension—their humanness— but rather their incommunicable dimension: the “thisness” of this individual. Thus there is a perfection of individuality with respect to persons that is missing with nonpersonal beings, which is why I cannot rightly treat persons in the same way in which I can treat nonpersonal beings. With every individual person—and not just with world-historical personalities like Socrates— we are dealing with something new and irreplaceable. Another way of getting at the uniqueness and perfection of the individuality of persons is to see them in relation to other nonliving substances. In this contrast one sees how persons, in an especially perfect way, are centered in themselves. For example, consider the individuality of a pail of water. Its individuality is really mostly defined extrinsically from what it is not, such as from the shape and size of its container. There is a surprisingly impoverished intrinsic individuality to the water-in-the-pail (considered as a unity), which is made evident when that water is thrown into a swimming pool. Then the substantiality of the water-in-the-pail is instantly lost and becomes instead merely a part of the larger substantiality of the water-in-the-pool. The point here is that the individuality of the water-in-the-pail is only extrinsically defined, insofar as there is lacking an inner center of the water (such as what we do find with persons, and in a weaker way by biological matter formed by some life principle), which could then serve as the basis for an intrinsic individuality. And it is also clear that the water-in-the-pool is in exactly the same situation as the water-in-the-pail. If the surrounding area of the pool is flooded, the substantiality of the water-in-the-pool is similarly lost and that water becomes merely a part of the larger substantiality of the water-in-theflood. But it is not just water; everything purely material (that is, matter that is not formed by any life principle) is like that. For example, is a slight rolling

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hill on a plain a substance or merely a part of the larger substance of the plain? If the hill is high enough we tend to think of it as a substance distinct from the surrounding plain. Thus the mountainous butte is substantial in relation to the desert floor, but that distinction is also merely extrinsic, that is, dependent on its distinctiveness from what it is not. Thus the mountain seems to be in a similar situation as the water-in-the-pail, whose individuality is similarly merely extrinsically defined. In contrast to all matter, persons are in an especially perfect way centered in themselves. To see a person as nothing but an extension of the will of, say, a slave owner, is really to misperceive that person. Even if a person sees himself as nothing but a function he serves of some larger whole of society, whose importance only lies in that function (like some bodily organ serving the whole body), he tragically misperceives himself. This is why a utilitarian ethical approach that tries to effect the greatest good for the greatest number of individuals, while making perfect sense with respect to nonpersonal beings, becomes disrespectful when applied to persons, insofar as it fails to do justice to the incommunicability of each irreplaceable person. This is also why using a person as a scapegoat, such as framing the person for a crime he or she did not commit for the end of, say, preventing some race riot where scores of people could be killed, remains deeply immoral, even granting the accuracy of the utilitarian calculus (dozens of lives versus one) in that instance. To treat a person as nothing but an instance of a species, that is, as a mathematical one among many according to some utilitarian calculus, remains insulting and dehumanizing. One way of getting at this dimension of individuality within personal being is this: persons are beings whose center lies in themselves. By “center” is meant specifically a personal center, whereby a conscious self is able to initiate new causal chains (free will) and form their own convictions (intellect). For any being capable of being a first cause cannot have its center be outside itself, because then it would become a mere link in a causal chain. It rather must be centered within itself, standing in itself, which in turn is evidence for its substantiality, as a substance is that which is grounded in itself and is not a part or property of something else. Persons—in a primary metaphysical sense—cannot lose their being centered within themselves by playing a part within some larger social whole, as a pail of water can instantly lose its substantiality by becoming a part of a still larger pool, because the water really has no intrinsic center to begin with. In contrast, the substantiality of a person is intrinsically maintained by its own center. This is also why the psychological experience of “losing one’s individuality”—as in the experience of “losing one’s self” via emotional contagion of a lynch mob or a fringe cult—refers only to the psychological and not to the ontological level of being. Persons do not cease to be persons in lynch mobs or fringe cults; they only cease acting like them.

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Another way of pointing out this individuality of personal being is through the experience of love. Imagine someone telling some new, aggrieved widower, “You can always marry again.” Saying such a thing is obviously insensitive, even though it is in principle true. One reason for the inappropriateness of such a comment is that the lover has an insight into the irreplaceability of the beloved. The lover is not interested in the human species as the biologist is interested in some species of plant. The lover does not merely love “woman,” he loves this woman. He especially sees her irreplaceability and individuality, and as a result he especially sees how she ought not be treated as a mere specimen of the species. Thus when it comes to understanding the psyche—in the wider sense including the personal self—some thought should be given to its individual and irreplaceable nature. This irreplaceability, however, is also not the complete story of the person, because every human person is also a member of a species type that contains many other members. It was already noticed in chapter 2 how species knowledge is decisively important for understanding the individual. This includes species knowledge of human persons. Just as exclusive attention to the communicable dimension of human nature is incomplete (such as with a purely empirical scientific approach) without the incommunicable, the same is true with respect to an exclusive attention to its incommunicable dimension. Therefore, what I am advocating here is not just one, exclusive approach to the person, but also multiple psychological approaches. Besides this irreplaceability and uniqueness of this individual there needs to be as well a species understanding of their humanity; and besides an empirical, psychological, scientific approach there is as well a personalist (psychological and philosophical) approach. It is helpful to remember that a person is never completely captured in terms of generic categories, whether empirical or philosophical. This is especially important because this point opens up the possibility of a whole new avenue of psychological research, as is found in great literature. Great literature, as opposed to pulp fiction and harlequin novels, tells the truth about persons. And it is not just the person in some generic sense, but rather individual persons in their fascinating individuality. Here it is well to remember that we are limited not only by our own individual appetites and needs, but also by the fact that we are on the “inside” only of ourselves. While expressive behavior of others is given (outwardly) via sense perception, not everyone (inwardly) thinks and feels as you or I, and as a result there is a clear benefit for psychologists to get into the inner life of others. One great means of doing this is by reading people like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, who are no doubt better at understanding the inner experience of others than we are. Reading great literature gives us a three-dimensional

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empathy, as well as opening up a theoretical understanding of others’ inward experiences. HOW THESE METAPHYSICAL PRINCIPLES UNIFY OUR KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE Not only are these philosophical first principles presupposed by the other sciences, they also help unite them together to form a single vision of reality, including our lived experience. For if persons are careful in their assertions to not go beyond what is strictly given to them—recognizing theories, hypotheses, inductive inferences, appearances, and illusions for what they are—there will be nothing in their assertions that contradict other insights from any other discipline. The reason is because of the a priori principle that truth does not contradict itself. Not only will psychologists then take other disciplines seriously, they will also take our naïve lived experience seriously as well. For there is something quite disordered about treating a highly abstracted, scientific “test-tube” approach as if it were the only real and legitimate approach, so commonly associated with psychologism and scientism. It is quite possible to confuse scientific abstractions with the full reality of things (as Skinner confuses functional relations with intelligibility), which can lead scientists to fail to see other crucial dimensions of reality, such as authentic value, substantial being, or ultimate meaning. The results from such a method will in many crucial respects be quite far from reality, despite the honor of appearing strictly scientific. Consider also that this “test-tube” approach has the terrible effect of getting people to stop thinking for themselves until the “experts”—or, what is really more common, the scientific popularizers—speak. People still need to think for themselves while appreciating the limits to the scientific approach. And when it comes to a priori truths, including the above first principles, scientists have no more authority pronouncing on them than anyone else. A priori truths measure science, not the reverse. There is a clear psychological advantage for people to trust their own genuine a priori insights, rather than waiting on the experts. Thinking for oneself from one’s own lived experience does not imply any distrust of legitimate scientific findings, provided the scientists stay within the proper bounds of their expertise, without making (in effect) philosophical or pseudotheological claims, going far beyond what any scientific finding could reasonably yield. Naturally, concerning authentic scientific findings an attitude of docility, implying respect for truth, is perfectly appropriate. Thus it is possible and desirable to have an integrative view of all the disciplines together, with each discipline respecting the order and boundaries

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of the others, and with philosophy providing the formal, metaphysical structures by which all the other disciplines find their proper place. Psychologism and scientism upset that balance (just as with philosophism and rationalism—ignoring the empirical for the a priori—in previous ages) by interpreting all meaning as if it were exclusively psychological or scientific in nature. In reality the formal “glue” that holds the sciences together is neither psychologism nor scientism, but rather metaphysics and logic, which in their formal structure are so abstract as to give each science its own “space” and freedom needed in order to flourish. How hard is it to ask that people respect the principles of noncontradiction and identity? Yet such “space” is not given by psychologism, as philosophy, ethics, and religion become substantially altered—and even skeptically “seen through”—if the formal structure of everything is psychological. For how can theology really be taken seriously if Freud is right in thinking it is nothing but psychologically induced illusion? If Freud is right and psychology is ultimately at the basis of theology, theology is destroyed. NOTES 1. The notion of self-evidence sounds problematical, even vaguely illegitimate, but it is not really so when sufficiently explained. It is because every proof presupposes self-evidence. Thus for instance let us say one can prove A in terms of B. What justifies B? If it is proposition C, what justifies C? Eventually one of these terms has to be self-explanatory, otherwise we have an infinite regress, because logically if C (or D . . . Z . . . ) cannot be justified, then B and A cannot be justified either. 2. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 16. 3. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 27–28. 4. “A Rational Mystical Ascent: The Coincident of Opposites in Kabbalistic and Hasidic Thought.” As of January, 2010, www.newkabbalah.com/Coinc.htm#_ftnref93.Pdf., 23. 5. Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Revised Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 105. 6. Carl Jung, Red Book, fourth edition (New York: Norton, 2009), 242. 7. Jung, Psychological Types, 84. Both this and the above quotes of Jung are taken from Sanford Lewis Drob’s blog, as of January, 2010, http://theredbookofcgjung.blogspot.com/ 2009/11/coincidence-and-conflict-of-opposites.html. 8. Jung, Psychological Types, 216–17. 9. This point in turn sheds light on the principle of intelligibility, insofar as everything that is either does exist or does not exist, is personal or is not personal, or is living or is not living, etc. Since all these contradictory opposites take up all the possibilities, everything that is must have within its essence one or the other of these contradictory opposites. In other words, everything that is must then have some kind of essence structure. 10. Jung, The Red Book, 313. 11. Ibid., 314. 12. John Crosby, Selfhood, 41–81.

Chapter Eleven

Psychologism Reducing Logos to Psyche

“Psychologism” refers to the attempt to explain all meaning—or at least large domains of meaning—exclusively in terms of psychology. Robert Sokolowski characterizes psychologism in this way: Psychologism is the claim that things like logic, truth, verification, evidence, and reasoning are simply empirical activities of our psyche. In psychologism, reason and truth are naturalized. Laws of truth and logic are taken to be highlevel empirical laws that describe how our minds function; they are not seen as constituents of the very meaning of truth and reason. For example, in psychologism, the principle of noncontradiction would be taken simply as a statement of how our minds work; it would state how we happen to arrange our ideas; it would not be seen as governing how things have to reveal themselves. . . . Psychologism, along with biologism, treats meaning and truth as a matter of empirical fact, not as a dimension that underlies and hence transcends the empirical, not as a dimension that belongs to the being of things. 1

This chapter will mainly focus on two instances of psychologism, going back to Carl Jung and Carl Rogers. Jung’s psychologism is especially made evident by the fact that he subjectivizes a priori essence structures. Rogers’s psychologism is very different from Jung’s; while he too will exalt and defer to science, he also emphasizes and promotes freedom (within the personal dimension of psyche) and even intrinsic value (within logos), ideas that are normally outside the scope of both empirical science and psychologism. His notion of value, however, is utterly minimalistic, having no impact of limiting and (in other directions) expanding a person’s freedom. Absolute free-

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dom holds complete sway for Rogers, but without being augmented by any meaning within logos itself, thus psychologizing freedom. In both of these moderated forms—and especially in its pure form—what is denied by psychologism are meanings (to one extent or another) independent of psychological taint. Thus in its pure form, not only are all claims to knowing things—especially if the contents are philosophical or theological— as they are in themselves denied, but also all meanings-in-themselves and all things-existing-in-themselves as independent realities from some perceiver, are similarly denied. In contrast to psychologism, I made the case in the last chapter that psychology should come to a closer relation to other disciplines, not just to the natural sciences, but also to philosophy and to literature, and treat them seriously as independent sources of knowledge and truth, as opposed to “seeing through them” to another (psychological) reality that “really” explains them. Psychologism (and scientism) pose dangers—especially in our specialized sciences—because the more people are immersed in (and narrowed by) a particular field, the more difficult it becomes to see that field in relation to a greater whole. An analogy here might help: Think of how broadening it is for someone to learn another language and culture. Ways of thinking and categorizing things that were earlier assumed to be invariable and absolute are now relativized by other, different ways of thinking and categorizing that characterize other languages and culture. Something similar can be said about psychology (and by extension to all the other disciplines). This field is brought out into relief when it is seen in light of other meanings that are not themselves psychological in nature, which is why it is worthwhile for psychologists to understand both dimensions of the objective logos, as well as great literature. However, the argument here is not that psychology ought to respect the other disciplines for their sake; it is rather that psychology ought to respect these other disciplines for its own sake. Psychology has much to gain when it respects its own proper limits. Others have rightly ridiculed the attempts of some leading psychologists, like Freud, to explain everything psychologically. 2 For after all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, having its own nature and essence independent of any symbolic, psychological meaning. PSYCHOLOGISM IN JUNG Concerning Jung, Rudolph Allers asserts, “For Jung, God is not a transcendent reality of whom man may achieve some knowledge by natural reason but, rather, an archetype, a basic tendency in human nature.” 3 It is interesting to note that this charge—of psychologizing away the transcendent God—has

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been strenuously rejected and reinterpreted by Jung as a charge of atheism, which he then distinguishes from his own agnostic position. Thus Jung states that it is a “misunderstanding that the psychological treatment or explanation reduced God to nothing but psychology. It is, however, not a matter of God but of ideas of God. . . . It is man who has ideas and creates for himself images, and these things belong to psychology.” 4 Allers’s charge of psychologism does not presuppose the further charge of atheism, however, because his criticism is compatible with either atheism or agnosticism, insofar as the distinction between an immanent archetypal idea of God versus its transcendent reality seems to have no psychological impact upon him (as opposed to Nietzsche). For Jung all psychological influence about God comes from the psyche and not from the existence or nonexistence of the transcendent reality of God. It seems then that Jung escapes the more radical form of psychologism, whereby religion is merely treated as an illusion and is simply reducible into psychology, which is clearly Freud’s position in his work The Future of an Illusion. The charge, however, is not that Jung reduces theology and religion to psychology, but rather that he inhabits a purely psychological world whereby the question of the reality and truth about God does not have any (psychological) impact for him. 5 Jung’s psychologism becomes more evident in contrast with Plato. It is common knowledge that Jung psychologizes the Platonic Ideas (or strictly necessary essence structures). That is, instead of asserting the transcendent nature of the Ideas, as Plato did, Jung interprets them as primordial, archetypal images and symbols ultimately found in the collective unconscious of our collective human nature. Thus, instead of seeing them as transcendent (ideal) realities applicable to all reality due to their timeless and incorruptible inner intelligibility and strict necessity, Jung sees them merely as immanent features of the way we arbitrarily happen in fact to think. There is a big difference in saying, for example, that the ultimate structure of being is such that everything that is must obey the principle of noncontradiction, and saying that the minds of persons are so constructed that they must think in noncontradictory ways. The first approach says something about reality as it exists-in-itself and is therefore fully objective; the second only says something only about the structure of the human mind and is therefore only subjective and relative (to our particular way of thinking). Similarly, there is a big difference between the timeless Ideas of Justice and Goodness and, say, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, insofar as the former Ideas or essence structures have a meaning and justification that escapes the exclusive context of this world, and could thereby possibly reverberate in eternity. The idea of the Wise Old Man only reverberates in our minds. Whatever one thinks of the Platonic Ideas, they are for Plato logos itself, rationality itself, in the objective (a priori) sense. They are the ultimate foun-

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dation of all reason and all being. For him these fully objective and timeless essence structures determine the nature of everything that is and that ought to be. Plato’s so-called idealism is then fully on the side of realism. TWO WAYS IN WHICH A PSYCHOLOGISTIC EXPLANATION OF EVENTS IS PERCEPTIVELY CORRECT It is one thing to assert that in varying ways and degrees a global interpretation of meaning in psychologistic terms is incorrect; it is another to assert that in specific instances what sometimes masquerades as an objective meaning is actually psychologically motivated and constituted. In this section I want to show how in two respects—concerning moral substitutes and the phenomenon of repression—psychology can help us understand seemingly objective phenomena. The crucial point, however, is that even with both of these instances, to properly identify them as psychologically tainted, one must first have an objective criterion of rationality (logos), which can then serve as the measure for their psychological explanation. Going beyond Psychologism: The Psychology of the Moral Substitutes Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand discuss another way—besides the topic of ressentiment discussed earlier (chapter 4)—in which a person maintains a position concerning moral norms for psychological reasons, via moral substitutes. 6 What is a substitute? A substitute is an explanation for why a person feels he or she ought to do or think, but it is not a truly moral explanation. It is rather a nonmoral or extramoral explanation. 7 Specifically, the explanation is psychological, as there are those who in their own life do not or cannot overthrow their own moral sensibility, and yet they also do not want to conform their life to meet its demands. Since living a life that authentic moral norms condemn is painful—as it inevitably involves an inner spiritual conflict between one’s conscience and a person’s own faults and vices—it becomes easier to change one’s conception of morality than one’s life. Thus the key to understanding which particular moral substitute operates with different persons is to first grasp something of their individual psychology, and especially their particular moral faults. The von Hildebrands give an interesting example of a moral substitute with the notion of honor. This idea (together with the other moral substitutes) can be relative either to general, cultural factors or more exclusively to the individual alone. An example of the second, more indivdualistic kind of relativity is with Tolstoy’s character Vronsky, from the novel Anna Karinena. Tolstoy’s description of him is this:

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Vronsky’s life had been especially happy, because he had a special code of rules which infallibly determined all he ought to do and ought not to do. This code embraced a very small circle of duties, but the rules allowed no manner of question and as Vronsky never had occasion to go outside of this circle, he had never been obliged to hesitate about what he had to do. These rules prescribed unfailingly that it was necessary to pay gambling debts, but not his tailor’s bills; that it was not permissible to tell lies, except to women; that it was not right to deceive anyone except a husband; that insults could be committed, but never pardoned. 8

As one can see, Vronsky’s notion of honor is highly eccentric and practically unique to him alone. While his code has obviously little to do with authentic morality, it has much to do with Vronsky’s own psychological character— and in particular the weaknesses of his character—for he subconsciously gravitated to a substitute that did not attack his own moral failings, specifically his own promiscuity and arrogance. Were he ever to accept authentic moral norms, he would have to confront these moral failings. To avoid the pain of this confrontation and the work of genuine conversion he instead chooses as his ideal this substitute of honor. This “choice” has to be unconscious, for it seems too cynical for most people—and especially for compromised moralists—to consciously invent new contents of the moral law. So instead of doing the work necessary to conform their lives to authentic morality, these people subconsciously adopt a moral code that instead conforms to their own life. They then fool themselves into assuming that the product of their creation has real moral significance. People who accept moral substitutes can be contrasted with two other types: First are those who have a direct and conscious contempt for morality. These people are characterized by a straightforward kind of shamelessness. They lack the psychological dimension—at least concerning morality—of fooling themselves. If they invent new contents to the moral law, it will often be merely for the sake of cynically manipulating others for their own ends. They will not themselves actually believe (like Vronsky) that the product of their own invention is actually morally relevant. Psychopaths, among others, typically fall into this category. The second contrast refers to those who accept the moral law as it is and who struggle in their life to conform to it. This kind of person is similar to the first in that there is no specific note of fooling themselves, as with those people who adopt moral substitutes. People in this second contrasting group accept (to varying degrees) a confrontation and inner conflict with their own conscience. Those who accept substitutes have, in a sense, the best of both worlds: they can live the life they want while at the same time being able to hold their heads up high. In contrast, those in the second contrasting group have, again

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in a sense, the worst of both worlds: they neither live the life they want nor can they hold their head up high. But they are in a relation to truth about themselves and about (moral) reality, and as a result there is humility but not self-deception. Those accepting moral substitutes do not need humility, because they unconsciously gravitate to the particular substitute that does not condemn their life. What they do is empty out, so to speak, the content of authentic morality while keeping to its formal, structural elements. Examples of these formal elements include the following: consciousness of living under a law, a relation to conscience, the feeling of guilt if one transgresses this law, and peace if one follows one’s conscience, etc. All these structural aspects of morality are kept, while the qualitative content of what actually constitutes the moral law—such as the actual content of something like the Ten Commandments—is to varying degrees emptied out and replaced by something completely different, such as with some notion of honor (like Vronsky’s), or with other substitutes, like decency, tolerance, the laws of the state, etc. What is psychologically interesting in this context is not only that the substitute is a product of a subconscious choice, but also that the particular substitute that is adopted is not randomly selected from some group of possibilities, but preferred for psychological reasons. No one particularly likes to be justifiably afflicted by one’s own conscience, and one rather obvious way to deal with it is to subconsciously find a substitute that does not condemn the individual faults of one’s own moral character. Thus they have a “perfect” solution; instead of the spiritual combat of confronting their own moral deficiencies, they subconsciously “choose” a moral substitute that not only does not condemn them but also even encourages their vice. While the topic of moral substitutes should clearly be of interest to psychology, grasping their nature and existence requires some understanding of authentic morality. For consider what is necessary to grasp the psychological dimension of these substitutes. First, one has to have a realist approach to morality. If psychologists consider all morality to be reducible to psychological attitudes, they will then—oddly enough—miss their psychological significance. In order to see a substitute as a substitute, they first need to have an idea of genuine morality and then grasp the difference between them. And second, one then needs to be open to the possibility that what can be repressed is not only the forces of the libido, as Freud thought, but also authentic conscience and one’s awareness of the authentic moral norms. The Philosophical Basis for Rationally Motivated Repression One of the main psychological mechanisms behind the moral substitutes is repression, as one needs to repress an understanding of obvious moral norms while simultaneously asserting one’s own substitute. In this section I want to

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understand rationally motivated repression. One can begin by introducing the following philosophical principle about the nature of motivation in general: that it takes something important to motivate—whether volitionally or affectively—a person. In other words, that which is experienced as neutral (in importance) cannot motivate anyone. The term “importance” here refers to the power something has to motivate a person’s will or heart. The importance of some experienced object should not be thought of as if it were some overwhelming efficient cause, because importance alone is not sufficient to actually move a person to act. Something else is also necessary: the will. For example, just because the soda machine beckons me when I am thirsty does not mean I will automatically buy a drink. Motivation alone does not force or determine behavior like an efficient cause. It rather has the character of an invitation (chapter 9). However, just because motivation is not sufficient for willing does not mean it is not necessary, for no one wills in a vacuum. Willing some action always involve a prior knowledge of something given as important, which then becomes the motive for the will. Just as knowledge presupposes some object to be known, so does willing presuppose some good seen as important. Furthermore, the kind of importance at stake can be either objective or subjective in nature. It is objective if the motivating object possesses an importance-in-itself, and then the value of the affective or volitional response is in turn measured by its adequacy to that motivating value. Thus, if a person gives the due response to a being for the sake of its value, such an action is fully rational because intrinsic values are presented to us as highly intelligible. In contrast, there are other things presented to us in our experience as having only subjective importance, referring to an importance that is given as being exclusively dependent on our desires and needs and pleasures. While this response can be personal in the sense of being freely willed, in another respect it can as well be something less than a fully personal response if one feels impelled to appease one’s instincts. There is then a big difference in motivation between genuine love (value responding) and merely lust (subjectively satisfying). The above principle of motivation—that it takes something important to motivate a person—is important in the history of psychology because it provided the rationale for Freud’s great discovery of the phenomenon of repression. 9 As was just noted, while some motivation can be merely subjective, it cannot be nonexistent. Something must present itself to us as being in some way important in order to motivate a person. A good application of this principle comes from Freud, who implicitly appealed to it in order to explain his incredulity toward the explanations female hysterics would give (early in his career) as to why they were so upset. One could imagine his skepticism if one of them were to answer through her tears, “Because 2 + 2 = 4!”

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It is not difficult to understand Freud’s incredulity, just as I was skeptical earlier about Vronsky’s confusion of his bizarre notion of honor with authentic morality. Just as a mere mathematical equation alone is clearly too neutral to motivate any kind of emotional response, so analogously is it difficult to believe that an intelligent man might not understand the need to ask forgiveness when called for, without some kind of psychological involvement. Something else is needed to explain this moral density, some kind of moralvalue blindness or the application of a moral substitute. Similarly, Freud rightly surmised these people were not consciously lying to him. Rather, they were lying to themselves by repressing the true object motivating their affective response. Karen Horney has noticed an interesting aspect of rationally motivated repression, which is that it never seems to be quite successful, never able to fully convince the subject doing the repressing, thus requiring continuous and all the greater energy to keep the repressed contents down. Repression then becomes psychologically exhausting. She states, This means that fundamentally we cannot fool ourselves, that actually we observe ourselves better than we are aware of doing, just as we usually observe others better than we are aware of doing—as shown, for example, in the correctness of the first impression we get from a person—but we may have stringent reasons for not taking cognizance of our observations. For the sake of saving repetitive explanations I shall use the term “register” when I mean that we know what is going on within us without our being aware of it. 10

Once the links are seen among motivation, importance, and consciousness, one can now go on to evaluate the adequacy (or inadequacy) of the response to the objective importance found in the object. Again, the question of repression only comes up if the response is somehow inadequate to the inherent rationality (logos) of the object itself. THE PSYCHOLOGISM OF CARL ROGERS The rest of this chapter will be devoted to investigating psychologism from the point of view of Carl Rogers. As already noted, Rogers does not explicitly challenge logos; rather, he mostly ignores it. Still, he does not completely share Freud’s antipathy to rationality and logos. In fact, Rogers gives various openings to personal being with his notion of freedom—insofar as will and intellect are rational powers—as well as his acceptance of the logos of intrinsic value. On the other hand, the charge against Rogers to be investigated here is that, while accepting the notion of intrinsic value, he never appeals to this idea to explain motivation, perhaps thinking of it as a threat against personal freedom. He then goes on to interpret freedom in a way that ex-

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cludes any reference to logos, in effect identifying freedom with mere arbitrary freedom. Rogers psychologizes freedom. While admitting to both the reality of intrinsic value and to freedom, he does not seem to notice how logos can pose a reasonable limit to arbitrary freedom and that the deepest meaning and achievement of freedom is to will, not just what one arbitrarily desires, but what is intrinsically right and good. Thus he states, “I find that when clients are free to be any way they wish, they tend to resent and to question the tendency of the organization, the college, or the culture to mold them to any given form.” Also, self-actualizing clients “do not, in other words, choose to be anything which is artificial, anything which is imposed, anything which is defined from without.” 11 Certainly these quotations alone do not definitively prove the absence of any rational limit to arbitrary freedom. However, after some searching I have not found a single statement in Rogers’s corpus of writings to suggest how a person’s freedom could rightly be constricted by logos. Every restriction on freedom seems for him to be illegitimate. 12 In fact, self-actualization for Rogers seems merely to be a matter of choosing freedom and rejecting those—such as some domineering other or the (introjected) opinions of someone—who hinder a person’s simply willing what it is he or she wants to be. THE LINCHPINS OF ROGERIAN PSYCHOLOGY One central theme of Rogerian psychology is that what really actualizes persons is being in a relationship with others. Relationships are crucial, not merely for the therapeutic encounter, but also for the actualization of the person in general. Rogers’s “overall hypothesis” is that if he as a therapist “can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.” 13 Rogers goes on to explain each of the three main “clauses” of his central hypothesis. The first concerns a certain type of relationship he seeks to provide for his clients, which is “the more that I can be genuine in the relationship, the more helpful it will be.” 14 The second clause refers to “a sensitive empathy with each of the client’s feelings and communications as they seem to him at that moment.” 15 The third refers to a condition needed for psychological growth, which is: “the more acceptance and liking I feel toward this individual, the more I will be creating a relationship which he can use.” Thus we have three values of the Rogerian system: “being genuine,” “being accepting,” and a “sensitive empathy.”

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Here one can rightly agree with Rogers that these values are crucial for all relationships. But they do not fall from the sky, and neither are they merely the product of the arbitrary musings from Rogers’s mind. The reason why these values “ring true,” rightly understood, is because they go back to and are grounded in the preciousness of each person, the qualitative values of truth and love, and the final end of persons to act rightly toward these values. It is because persons are important-in-themselves and ordered to truth and love that a person should be genuine, accepting, and empathetic. Thus the value of truth and love are central aspects of logos and essential for the full actualization of psyche. In the next two subsections, I will examine the two Rogerian values of “accepting others” and “sensitive empathy.” Then the following chapter will investigate the third Rogerian value of “authenticity,” which will lead to a study of the relationship between authenticity and logos. And then finally to the furthest reaches of the relationship of authenticity and logos, the topic of chapter 13. “Accepting Others” Rogers states, By acceptance I mean a warm regard for him [the client] as a person of unconditional self-worth—of value no matter what his condition, his behavior, or his feelings. It means a respect and liking for him as a separate person, a willingness for him to possess his own feelings in his own way. It means an acceptance of and regard for his attitudes of the moment, no matter how negative or positive, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past. 16

This passage has always struck me as odd, insofar as it appears to be both attractive and repellent. It is attractive because every person is indeed a being of high intrinsic value, a point that Rogers rightly affirms. On the other hand, there is also a note of unreality about it, as if Rogers does not seem to care about what sort of person that person actually becomes, as long as what one decides is the product of his or her own choice, as opposed to some external or introjected other. Thus Rogers’s idea of success is for persons to “not wish to be what they ‘ought’ to be, whether that imperative is set by parents, or by the culture, whether it is defined positively or negatively. They do not wish to mold themselves and their behavior into a form that would be merely pleasing to others. They do not, in other words, choose to be anything which is artificial, anything which is imposed, anything which is defined from without.” 17 Here one sees why Rogers does not consider value as a standard of behavior and motivation, insofar as he thinks that all external factors, without

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any apparent principle of limitation, can become a threat to a person’s freedom. Thus, in a conflict between freedom and value, or put more broadly, psyche and logos, freedom and psyche should always win. Since freedom should win and self-actualization is automatic (if therapeutic conditions are right), it follows that acceptance of others has to be unconditional. The question comes up: Is there a legitimate sense in which love is not unconditional? Naturally with certain kinds of love—such as with parental love (in contrast to friendship love)—there is an important unconditional sense to them, as good parents will love their children no matter what. But even with parental love there is also an appropriate conditional sense. Thus, contrary to Rogers, the psychiatrist Scott Peck asserts, “The period of unconditional affirmation lasts only as long as infancy. As psychological adults we have all learned, to a greater or lesser degree, that in order to be loved it is our responsibility to make ourselves lovable.” 18 There is an obvious real advantage to the empathetic sympathy and genuine acceptance that Rogers has for his clients. The question is whether there are reasonable limits to an unconditional acceptance of others and whether these limits are also of psychological value for self-fulfillment. Upon reflection, it seems that there are indeed such limits, which are even required by the nature of interpersonal relationships, and these limits are themselves grounded in logos. For consider what happens to someone not bounded by logos, such as when someone is unable to submit to anything higher than one’s own arbitrary freedom. This approach could lead to what Erich Fromm terms “malignant narcissism.” Peck thinks the central characteristic of malignant narcissism is “an unsubmitted will.” He states, “all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience. . . . They believe in what is true rather than what they would like to be true.” 19 In contrast, a malignant narcissist only cares about the exercise of his or her own arbitrary freedom. The problem is not only that the narcissist goes against some external (moral) law, but also that narcissism is itself psychologically destructive as it leads to an inevitable self-loathing. Furthermore, the question is not whether Rogers dislikes narcissism; it would be surprising if he did. The question is whether his unidirectional self-actualizing and empathetic position—if conditions are right—could at any point condemn narcissism on purely theoretical grounds as objectively negative, as this requires logos. Certainly such a critique can be pressed while admitting to what Rogers sees. Besides the inherent value of his clients and the value of freedom, there is also the value of persons taking possession of themselves. Taking possession is certainly an achievement. There is a tremendous value for persons to act as persons when they consult what they themselves think and feel as opposed to merely following the crowd or, worse, confusing their own thinking with that of some introjected other. 20

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The question then is how is it possible to combine the insights of Rogers on the autonomy of the self, while still having respect for what is intrinsically precious and good? Are these two ideas irreconcilable, so that whenever I bow before that which is precious-in-itself I am somehow illegitimately drawn off from myself? What about the situation where I see what is right and (intrinsically) good, but do not love or even desire it? If I then still bow to this value, am I then becoming inauthentic? It was earlier stated (chapter 9) how rationality can help properly internalize a response, such as with the example of how a child can internalize the command not to touch the hot stove once burned, thereby realizing the rule’s reasonability. On the basis of this example we can discern an important psychological principle: that logos is the ground for mature internalization. Now this insight can be applied to the problem of the interiority of one’s own freedom versus the exteriority of the call of values for persons to respect them. As noted in chapter 4, the notion of value—considered either as a universal essence structure or as a real property of some individual thing or action—is not some made-up idea of philosophers or culture; rather it possesses a determinant, pre-given nature that is not only reasonable but also one dimension of rationality itself. For example, it belongs to the nature of value to be one intelligible ground for an “ought.” It is perfectly intelligible that one ought to respect that which is precious-in-itself, such as with Rogers’s own example of the intrinsic value of his clients. This manifest reasonability provides the key of understanding how to combine without violence respect for a person’s autonomy, on the one hand, and the call by the nature of the value for a person to a right, due adequate response, on the other. How? Because of value’s inner rationality there is even less of an assault on the person than the command of the parent for the child not to touch the hot stove, for its luminous intelligibility of what is intrinsically precious is even more reasonable and accessible than any mere empirical cause and effect relation. Notice what happens to people when they respond in just this way: “I see the value at stake; I see its justness and beauty; I . . . I (!) will that I should give not just any response, but the right and adequate response due to it in truth.” Here all arbitrariness falls away, and the mysterious connection between value and self-discovery becomes evident, insofar as giving an adequate response to that which is precious-in-itself has the effect of actualizing a deeper center of a person’s being. Just as people lose themselves in some degrading vice, such as when irrational impulses and instincts overwhelm a person’s free spiritual center, so in a contrary fashion people find themselves by turning to the logos.

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“A Sensitive Empathy” A sensitive empathy is the second of the three central values for Rogers. He explains empathy in this way: Acceptance does not mean much until it involves understanding. It is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre—it is only as I see them as you see them, and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. . . . Thus the relationship which I have found helpful is characterized by a sort of transparency on my part, in which my real feelings are evident; by an acceptance of this other person as a separate person with value in his own right; and by a deep empathic understanding which enables me to see his private world through his eyes. 21

There is much about the above Rogerian analysis that rings true. What can be added is both a theoretical “filling out” of what he says as well as a critique. Consider the following four points: Point 1: In the quotation above Rogers states, “It is only as I see them as you see them, and accept them and you, that you feel really free.” Here Rogers is getting at the unique nature of empathy. It is not really an understanding of someone considered as an object; it is rather an understanding of someone considered as a subject, standing in their own shoes, so to speak. The nature of empathy becomes clearer when contrasted to self-presence, whereby a person in self-presence experiences herself laterally from the inside and as her own subject, as opposed to both self-reflection and being observed by someone else as an object. Naturally, lateral self-presence always refers to a self-presence of one’s self, whereas empathy refers to an encounter with another, just not from the point of view of an object of consciousness, but also and especially as a subject. For I cannot experience others as they experience themselves (laterally); I can only experience myself in that way (again, via lateral self-presence). And yet to a certain degree, through empathy, I can have a sense for the inner experience of another as a subject, insofar as I can sometimes locate within myself what it is that the other is subjectively experiencing. Perhaps I have gone through a similar kind of experience, or perhaps I just recognize the potentiality in myself to have that experience. Point 2: What is the relation between authenticity and empathy? Could there be a clash between both realities? For example, what happens if the therapist does not feel the affective dimension of love toward the client? Feelings, after all, are famously fickle, having a real independence from the will as they arise spontaneously within the soul. Does a therapist still have an obligation to give the client an artificial or even false response of acceptance,

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even if it flies in the face of the therapist’s own feelings? For example, if the client is a malignant narcissist one wonders if such warm feelings from the therapist are appropriate, or even possible. The difficulty of giving a proper affective response applies even when one is relating to one’s own child or spouse; conjuring up feelings of love for a narcissistic client will obviously be that much more difficult. The question is whether a more exclusively volitional affirmation when no affective response is present is sufficient as an authentic response? This question is not so easy for Rogers to answer, insofar as he unreservedly associates authenticity with feeling when these two factors can clearly be separated. Rogers, however, does not seem to notice this fact, such as when he states, “The relationship which I have found helpful is characterized by a sort of transparency on my part, in which my real feelings are evident.” 22 This claim to emotional transparency by Rogers—that he is always affirming his clients from his heart—comes off as so Pollyannaish as to be quite unreal. He consistently assumes that giving the adequate response to some value (like acceptance of another) will come naturally and easily, without any possibility of conflict. But it is an undeniable fact of our lived experience of occasions where a person’s feelings are not only opposed to some intrinsic value, they can also be opposed even to what a person wills. Point 3: Crosby makes an interesting distinction between his understanding of empathy and the psychological phenomenon of identification: Now Scheler wants to say that the empathetic understanding of another, as well as the loving sympathy for another, is not a turning to the other by way of identification; you do not lose yourself in the person with whom you empathize, or feel that you and the other are one; no, it is essential to empathy and sympathy that you experience yourself as a distinct person, irreducible to the one for whom you have empathy and sympathy. Thus empathy finds a way into the subjectivity of another without creating the illusion that the other and I are really one. The other remains other and yet is subjectively approached by me through my empathy. Scheler thinks that identification is situated at the level of psychic life in human beings, where experiences of amalgamation are possible, whereas empathy and sympathy are situated at the level of properly personal life, where persons remain intact as distinct persons even in the closest forms of union and communion. 23

Empathy then does not involve identification, where a person confuses his or her feeling or thinking with the feeling or thinking of another. With empathy there is no such confusing my being with that of other person, for I clearly experience my experience as mine, even though I am also feeling for the other. Here there is a further application of the basic distinction made earlier between psyche and personal life. In the above quotation Crosby explains

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how empathy is clearly grounded in a more mature personal life. This is in contrast to identification, which is a “spiritually more primitive form” where the “distinctness of persons breaks down.” 24 Point 4: Finally, Rogers thinks that empathetic understanding is the only legitimate point of view by which he approaches his clients, which is why he says he is opposed to “any type of moral or diagnostic evaluation.” He is aware of the real danger of “pigeonholing” people by defining them in such a way as to possibly limit their potential. Still, while granting the clear advantages of the empathetic approach, one wonders if there are also limits to it not seen by Rogers. Crosby offers the following counterexample in which knowing other persons as persons is specifically not empathetic: [Consider] the example of Nathan confronting David with the wrong he had done [having Bathsheba’s husband murdered to hide David’s own adultery, in 2 Kings, 12]: Nathan is not interested in empathizing with David but in awakening his conscience. It is not at all important for Nathan’s task as prophet that he feels keenly “what it is like” to be tempted as David was tempted, in fact it would be almost comical if Nathan in this encounter with David made a great point of his own vulnerability to adultery and murder. . . . Other persons can mediate self-knowledge to me by seeing me from their point of view; I overcome illusions about myself and gain new self-knowledge by seeing myself with the eyes of others . . . the act of the other seeing me from his point of view is precisely not an act of empathy by him. For here the other is seeing me from his point of view and not from mine. 25

No doubt Rogers could respond by saying that he agrees with Crosby in general, that is, of the legitimacy of mediating self-knowledge to another from their own point of view (such as with how Nathan speaks to David); it is just not appropriate in the counseling relationship, which works far better with his notion of empathy (such as if Nathan would mediate with David from David’s own point of view). There is obviously a tremendous advantage for a therapist to be “inside” as far as possible into the subjective experience of the other, to be sympathetic and uncritical toward the client, giving the client much needed psychic “space” to grow. But just as with Nathan toward David, there is also an advantage to a therapist’s at least having a wider understanding of the client’s situation, even if that point of view is not necessarily shared with the client. An exclusively empathetic relationship with the client seems myopic. Shouldn’t the therapist have at least some notion of psychological health from her own expertise or some idea of where she wants the patient to go (both implying some relation to logos), which then implies a distinction between where the client in fact is as opposed to where he or she needs to go? Furthermore, what about helping clients become aware of and then face the consequences of

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their own free choices, instead of merely facilitating some kind of rationalizing with a purely empathetic approach? SHOULD THE THERAPIST BE A MORAL TEACHER? What about the case of a client lost in a moral vice? Let us say this person fails to look on his or her own situation from a moral point of view. Just how far can a therapist go in thrusting his or her own moral prescriptions, which presumably come from right reason (logos), onto the counseling relationship? Rogers thinks that all moral considerations are off limits, not only because it implies a critical approach outside the therapist’s own empathetic method, but also because it conflicts with the absolutization of freedom. And yet, if there really is a link between self-fulfillment and moral goodness, it seems rather difficult to prescind altogether from moral considerations. As Rogers rightly sees, one of the primary goals of therapy is to help persons discover themselves, to strengthen themselves so as to come into contact with what they themselves think and feel. Well, to be lost in moral vice is also to be psychologically lost, where people have difficulty even locating their freedom in the face of ever-growing instinctual urges. On the other hand, in order for such self-exploration to bear fruit, the person undergoing therapy must be accorded freedom and respect. Part of respecting the person is to grant that person a certain spiritual “space” in which they can form their own opinions. Thus Victor Frankl states, A doctor will always have to beware of forcing his philosophy upon the patient. There must be no transference (or, rather, counter transference) of a personal philosophy, of a personal concept of values, to the patient. The logotherapist must be careful to see that the patient does not shift his responsibilities onto the doctor. Logotherapy is ultimately education toward responsibility; the patient must push forward independently toward the concrete meaning of his own existence. 26

While Frankl shares Rogers’s concern of the therapist not imposing his or her own categories onto the client, he also seems to hold a far more sophisticated position than Rogers. For while Rogers simply ignores logos or transcendent considerations (including moral considerations) for the sake of freedom, Frankl asserts that the psychotherapist “cannot proceed without making value-judgments,” yet “must guard against imposing his own outlook upon the dissimilar personality of the patient.” 27 There is, therefore, with Frankl a tension between freedom and responsibility that is missing in Rogers. In contrast to Rogers, Frankl’s therapeutic approach seems similar to the famous dialectical method of Socrates. Socrates is the father of ethics and thus is focused on logos, yet he steadfastly

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refused to give people answers, including ethical answers, preferring instead to elicit them in dialogue with his interlocutors. His motive was not to play games. He rather respected their autonomy and wanted them to see the truth of things for themselves, instead of merely providing them with answers from the outside. Similarly, Frankl takes moral considerations seriously, even as he is careful not to allow these to compromise the autonomy of the patient. For example, A young man came to his doctor to ask advice about a decision he was facing. His fiancée’s girl friend had virtually invited him to go to bed with her just once. Now the young man was wondering how he ought to decide, what he ought to do. Should he betray his fiancée, whom he loved and respected, or should he ignore this opportunity and keep the faith which he felt he owed her? 28

There is a tremendous difference here between Rogers and Frankl. One of Rogers’s clients demonstrates that he has integrated Rogers’s own psychological method when he declares, “I’ve always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I’m going to just be me—rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous.” 29 Frankl, while respecting his patients’ autonomy, does not—like Rogers— prescind from logos, and specifically from moral considerations. He continues, The doctor refused on principle to make the decision for him. However, he quite rightly tried to clarify for the patient where his true wishes lay and what he thought he was going to accomplish in either case. . . . Without the necessity of the doctor’s pointing the way, the patient then knew what course he ought to choose. He made his decision, made it independently. It was independent not in spite of, but actually because of this clarifying conversation. 30

Finally, consider the contrast between what Frankl and Rogers think constitute authenticity. For Frankl, to find out “where his true wishes lay” required that the young man, prompted by the therapist, undertake a moral reflection, while at the same time respecting the other’s freedom and autonomy. Yet it is this kind of reckoning that could reveal one’s own true self, especially when the self could also be obscured, overwhelmed, or even buried—in this case—by his lust. Rogers thinks finding his self merely involves consulting his feelings, which are not only independent from but can be at times opposed to any other considerations, including those grounded in logos. Thus with Rogers there is a near-total victory of psyche over logos. It is in this sense that Rogers falls victim to psychologism.

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Later, in chapter 12, the question will come up as to whether there can be reconciliation between freedom and logos. Is the tension between them mutually exclusive, or can there be some kind of higher synthesis whereby freedom is perfected by logos? The possibility of reconciliation is intimately connected with the further topic of what constitutes genuine self-fulfillment, whereby a fully flourishing person is simultaneously most free while simultaneously respecting/reverencing reality (logos). If this is possible, there is no need to sacrifice one for the other. We can have both. NOTES 1. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 114. 2. Freud’s psychologism was discussed in chapter 4. It is moderated by the fact that he does not ground empirical science in psychology, but the reverse. Thus his psychologism is swallowed up by his scientism. It would be strange for him—as an outspoken materialist—to treat material, biological realities as being nothing but sense appearances. If so, then the real target of his psychologism is not science or material reality but rather the putative insights of philosophy, morality, and theology. 3. Pravin Thevathsan, “Carl Jung’s Journey from God,” Catholic Culture: Living the Catholic Life (website), accessed July, 2010, www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm? recnum=4676. The Allers quote is not attributed. 4. Carl Jung, “Zur Psychologie der Trinitatsidee,” Eranos Jahrbuch (1940–1941): 50. 5. Concerning this Jungian immanence, Aidan Nichols points out, “The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber has already judged Jungianism a new religion of pure psychic immanence that obliterated the otherness of God.” Aidan Nichols, “The Rebellious Discipleship of Father Victor White: Theology and Psychology in a Critic of C. G. Jung,” in Philosophical Psychology: Psychology, Emotions, and Freedom, ed. Craig Steven Titus (Arlington: IPS Press, 2009), 175. 6. Dietrich von Hildebrand with Alice Jourdain, Graven Images: The Substitutes for a True Morality (New York: McKay, 1957). 7. This formulation is practically a quotation from Professor Stephen Schwarz. Thank you for pointing out in an especially clear way the psychological significance of the moral substitutes. Many of the insights of this section go back to Professor Schwarz. 8. Von Hildebrand, Graven Images, 3. 9. Both this motivational law and its role for the discovery of repression by Freud are briefly discussed in von Hildebrand, Ethics, 25–26. 10. Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937), 69. 11. Carl Rogers, “A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals,” Pendle Hill pamphlet, no. 108 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1959), 11, 12. 12. See also Leonard Geller, “The Failure of Self-Actualization Theory: A Critique of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 2 (1982): 56–73. See also Henry H. Lamberton, “Carl Rogers’s View of Personal Wholeness: An Evaluation and Critique from a Christian Perspective,” Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (website), accessed October 26, 2011, www.aiias.edu/ict/vol_10/10cc_277-296.htm. 13. Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person, (Boston: Haughton, 1961), 33. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 34. 16. Carl Rogers, “Becoming a Person,” (Austin: University of Texas, Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, 1956), 3. 17. Rogers, “A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals,” 12. 18. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie (New York: Touchstone, 1983), 161. 19. Ibid., 78.

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20. Introjection does not refer to the case whereby a person confuses his or her identity with the other, but rather where a person confuses his or her own ideas and opinions with those of another. 21. Rogers, On Becoming a Person, 34. Emphasis in original. 22. Ibid., 34. 23. Crosby, Personalist Papers, 39. 24. Ibid., 38–39. 25. Ibid., 41. 26. Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (New York: Random House, 1973), xv–xvi. 27. Ibid., 275. 28. Ibid., 277. 29. Rogers, “A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals,” 11. 30. Frankl, Doctor, 277–78.

Chapter Twelve

The Psychology of Authenticity and Self-Fulfillment

In the last chapter, two of the three “linchpins” of Rogerian psychology were discussed: “accepting others” and a “sensitive empathy.” This chapter will investigate Rogers’s third linchpin of authenticity or “being genuine,” as well as those steps that are constitutive of genuine authenticity, beginning with the dimension of psyche and leading inexorably to the logos dimension. The goal is to make evident the fact that the higher dimensions of self-fulfillment can only be understood in light of logos. The aim of this chapter is not to make a contribution to negative psychology, analyzing the various ways in which people are inauthentic. Rather, our focus will be almost exclusively on positive psychology. While granting that psychologists need to be particularly focused on the negative dimension, this emphasis could be fruitfully set against the background of what fully actualizes a person. It was already noted what happens when there is an exclusive concern with negative psychology: it leads to the view that everything about human nature is disordered and dysfunctional, as with Freudian psychoanalysis. THE RELATION BETWEEN AUTHENTICITY AND SELF-FULFILLMENT Authenticity, or what Rogers terms “being genuine,” obviously does not refer to the ontological being of a person, as a person can obviously exist without being authentic. It rather refers to a certain way or style of life, that is, to those individual acts and responses of a person, which in turn help build up a

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style or pattern of personality. And the more a personality reveals the person, the more authentic the personality becomes, and, by extension, the person. It seems then that authenticity is more linked to psyche than to logos. Thus, the greater the authenticity, the more the being of the person and the person’s personality tend to merge into a unity. Authenticity implies truth, but more in the sense of being true to one’s self, that is, to being true to what one genuinely thinks and feels. The notion of self-actualization or self-fulfillment, 1 in contrast to authenticity, seems more linked to logos, insofar as it implies a fullness of being that can only be attained when persons pursue whatever it is that genuinely fulfills them. Practically everyone admits to the psyche dimension of authenticity, where a person’s personality is “true” in accurately reflecting the being of the person. Such people know their mind and thus are able to will what they want, as being more independent of external pressure and the internalized introjected other. The question is whether there is a further dimension of selffulfillment that requires not only the authenticity of the psyche, but also a relation to logos. For it seems impossible to imagine someone living in his own private world, knowing perfectly well his own mind and being true to his self and to his own feelings, but unable to establish realistic and truthful relations to the world. Such a person may be authentic in some immanent psychological sense but not at all self-fulfilled. Perhaps there are, furthermore, analogous senses of being authentic that apply not only (and primarily) to personal character but also (secondarily) to kinds of freedom and to kinds of importance—such as between the importance of value with that of the subjectively satisfying (chapter 9)—depending on how each of these kinds of freedom and importance foster authenticity and self-fulfillment in persons. All of these differing senses of authenticity imply freedom and independence from both internal and external pressures, and so they obviously pose a theoretical problem for someone like Skinner. Skinner thinks that independence from the enticing character of the environment is illusory. For Rogers, independence is not only not illusory; it is the very goal of therapy, of “becoming a person.” There also seems to be a problem for Rogers, insofar as he wants to reduce his idea of self-actualization to simply authenticity, thereby emphasizing psyche at the expense of logos. Thus for him, self-actualization is simply being genuine or true to one’s self, and especially to one’s own feelings at each moment. Thus being genuine does not refer to “any fixed state.” For Rogers, there is no true self or essential core of the person over and above an individual’s being true to his or her self at each moment. Just as being genuine is in each moment of a continual becoming, so is self-actualization. “The good life . . . is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized.” It is “a process, not a state of being.” 2

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Thus Rogers’s whole focus seems to be on authenticity—that is, being authentic in each individual encounter, action, and response—with his notion of self-actualization apparently being simply synonymous with authenticity, and both being outside of any transcendent relation to logos and growth in character. CARL ROGERS’S NOTION OF AUTHENTICITY (“BEING GENUINE”) Rogers understands authenticity in this way: I have found that the more I can be genuine in the [counseling] relationship, the more helpful it will be. This means that I need to be aware of my own feelings, in so far as possible, rather than presenting an outward façade of one attitude, while actually holding another attitude at a deeper or unconscious level. . . . It is only by providing the genuine reality which is in me, that the other person can successfully seek the reality in him. 3

In a successful course of therapy, Rogers asserts that the individual will discover within himself the capacity to use this relationship [therapist/client] for growth. . . . Whether one calls it a growth tendency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency, it is the mainspring of life. 4

Thus both being “genuine” and “self-actualization” refer to one and the same process by which persons discover their freedom, which admits to two dimensions. First, there is a clearing of the ground, identifying all those factors—the inhibitions, repressions, defenses, immaturities, infantilisms, etc.— that hinder a person’s being genuine, that (in Rogers’s words) are “perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of himself.” 5 What goes hand-in-hand with persons confronting and overcoming their defenses is, second, that they become more and more aware of their own feelings as their own. As Rogers puts it, the client is able to place “an increasing trust in his organism.” In choosing what course of action to take in any situation, many people rely upon guiding principles, upon a code of action laid down by some group or institution, upon the judgment of others. . . . Yet as I observe the clients whose experiences in living have taught me so much, I find that increasingly such individuals are able to trust their total organismic reaction to a new situation because they discover to an ever-increasing degree that if they are open to their experience, doing what “feels right” proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying. 6

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One consequence of neurosis is an inability to accurately see and respond adequately to reality. Just as importantly, neurotics are also unable to discern what they themselves think and feel. They are instead too busy thinking about what someone else thinks, looking through the prism of some introjected other, or to bowing to the pressures of the moment, instead of simply being in touch with their own self. Thus Rogers explicitly rejects any authority or principle outside the self, as he states in various parts of his book On Becoming a Person: Civilization hitherto has looked for the orientation of society through an imposed “system” derived from some extrinsic authority, such as religion, “cultural” education, or political suasion. . . . Our necessity, therefore is to secure the free flow of forces in the environment so that the order inherent in the material we are studying may emerge. 7

Also, It is to experience that I must return again and again; to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience. 8

The only qualification Rogers is willing to concede that might interfere with a person’s doing what “feels right” is that “his organism would not by any means be infallible,” that is, “sometimes data would be missing.” 9 What Rogers rightly realizes is the importance of seeing things for oneself. But he does not distinguish between being unduly compelled by the mere opinions of others and being justly convinced by them if what they say corresponds to right reason (logos). Nor does he distinguish being true to one’s feelings and being true to what is authentically good and just, even if they contradict one’s feelings. Rogers’s whole emphasis is on psyche, not logos. Thus one critic, Henry H. Lamberton, states that actualization of one’s self becomes a moral obligation. But humanism’s understanding of individual and social pathology creates an even more far-reaching moral imperative. This is the imperative to avoid imposing values on others. The logic of this moral stance is clear. Since the self is good and obligations and expectations placed on us by others are the cause of individual and social pathology, then teaching others how to live is not only unnecessary, but individually dehumanizing and socially destructive. 10

It is therefore not surprising that Lamberton then makes the charge of relativism against Rogers’s humanistic psychology:

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The humanistic understanding of personhood and wholeness fosters a public morality that Hauerwas . . . has aptly referred to as “vulgar relativism,” namely, a relativized view of most ethical principles combined with a non-relativized view of the principle of toleration. 11

As far as I can see in reading Rogers, Lamberton is right, as there are no other factors for him—outside of a person consulting his or her own feelings and being true to them, going back to psyche—that are constitutive of selfactualization. Self-actualization is simply a matter of being true to one’s self: it is all psyche and the logos of right reason is irrelevant. This kind of relativism is more individualistic, as opposed to the more usual cultural or historical relativism one finds elsewhere that is “shared” by many individuals within a culture or era. Of course there is a feeling of freedom that accompanies the overcoming of one’s defenses and attending at long last to one’s own feelings. Freedom, however, is for Rogers the only goal and the determinism of defenses and lack of information the only dangers. There is therefore no need to worry about the basic fallenness of human nature, 12 which, if acknowledged, would complicate the complete trust one would otherwise have in one’s own feelings. Because Rogers does not see this fallenness, he feels free to state, “It will be evident that another implication of the view I have been presenting is that the basic nature of the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy. . . . Man’s behavior is exquisitely rational.” 13 Thus human nature is for Rogers not deeply disordered. There is then no need to conquer one’s own selfishness and pride. “The only control of impulses which would exist, or which would prove necessary, is the natural and internal balancing of one need against another, and the discovery of behaviors which follow the vector most closely approximating the satisfaction of all needs.” 14 Therefore for Rogers the work of maturing, of growing up, of “becoming a person,” as he puts it, is exclusively subjective or psychological, in the sense of learning how to own one’s own thinking, willing, and feeling. Thus, there is no objective dimension to authenticity. Only psyche counts; logos counts for nothing. THE PSYCHE DIMENSION OF AUTHENTICITY Although Rogers ignores logos, reducing self-fulfillment to authenticity of the psyche, he does see the importance of psyche for authenticity and selffulfillment. It is with psyche that the following analysis of authenticity will begin, which will later dovetail into an analysis of the role of logos for selffulfillment, insofar as authenticity and genuine human flourishing interpenetrate.

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The claim will not be that Rogers’s notions of authenticity and “being genuine” are somehow wrong-headed, but that they are fatally incomplete. Thus the following analysis will attempt to incorporate his insights and then go beyond them. One central characterization of authenticity is that authentic persons possess themselves. Authentic persons act and think through themselves, resisting those pressures that force them to think and act through someone else. The idea is that authentic persons possess strength of personality, of being able to find themselves in their own thinking and feeling despite whatever pressures come. Authentic persons “own” their own acts. This idea of ownership is especially found with respect to volitional acts, insofar as they are not only about what they will, but also—on the subjective side—about self-determination. In willing I determine and dispose of myself. This is why people like Rogers and Sartre place such emphasis on freedom. For Rogers, the increase of freedom is the true goal of therapy. Self-possession and self-ownership imply self-presence. Consider the various ways in which there can be an increase of self-presence and therefore authenticity: First, the more some response is “owned,” the more conscious and free that response becomes. This is why psychopaths appear—at least in this one sense—to be authentic: because they are so shameless, they typically have no reason to lie to themselves. They tend to own their manipulation and do not see anything wrong with it. Their orientation is to be aware of their own manipulative tendencies and even embrace them, although they occasionally have to hide them from others for practical reasons. In contrast, while persons with moral scruples may in fact do some of the very same things that pyschopaths do, they will suffer from disturbed consciences and as a result will subsequently face the temptation to repress their inner conflicts. Should they (in some subconscious way) elect to repress, they will become especially inauthentic. It is an odd fact—and one that should not have been lost on Rogers—that shameless personalities always appear more authentic than compromised moralists. Second, an affective response is in one respect more authentic than if it is merely willed but not felt. This does not imply that our feelings should be some kind of absolute guide for authenticity, but it does imply that an affective response is a more complete response than merely a volitional response alone. For example, consider a generous act that is not only willed but also felt from the heart, versus one that is only willed. This heartfelt response is clearly more authentic—in the sense of being a more complete gift of self— than one merely willed. Rogers especially identifies the person with that person’s feelings. Thus he states,

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What I have gradually learned from experiences such as this [clients expressing their feelings in therapy], is that the individual in such a moment, is coming to be what he is. When a person has, throughout therapy, experienced in this fashion all the emotions which organismically arise in him, and has experienced them in this knowing and open manner, then he has experienced himself, in all the richness that exists within himself. He has become what he is. (emphasis in original) 15

It seems to me that while identifying and not repressing one’s feelings are crucial to authenticity, that does not mean that one should therefore simply carte blanche follow their promptings. For there are two further factors (missing in Rogers) that also ground authenticity: how intrinsic value can especially actualize the person and how this actualization then deepens a person’s self-presence. We shall begin to develop these points below—insofar as psyche overlaps logos—and then explicitly turn to them below. Third, recall (chapter 9) the example of a child finally realizing the reasonability of not touching a hot stove, which revealed the principle that the more a person can grasp inherent intelligibility and rationality (logos) of reality, the more the intelligibility of reality can be internalized and made “one’s own.” Notice also that the higher the truth grasped, the deeper the consequent actualization can become because persons have to actualize themselves at a deeper level in order to adequately grasp the more profound intelligibility. It is one thing to grasp basic principles of logic and math, which even the psychopath can grasp as much as anyone else. It is another to grasp insights into the nature of value, and in particular the moral values, which are especially alien to the worldview of the psychopath. The fourth factor also seems to go completely beyond the psychopath. Consider how certain exceptional persons possess themselves in such as way as to be able to give themselves—in friendship and in love—to others. Here I am thinking specifically of someone like the late Pope John Paul II. His selfpossession was so strong that he was able to be individually present to many within a large group, one at a time, in rapid succession. It seemed like even in the midst of the crowd in the second he focused on you he was completely with you, fully present to you. In contrast, Spaceballs’s Prince Valium (chapter 5) was little more than merely physically present even at his own wedding, and was completely unable to be adequately present to his bride. While self-presence provides one key to understanding authenticity, it is not identical with it, insofar as the object of authenticity is the personality insofar as it reveals the person, while the being who is self-present is not the personality, but the person. Still, the correlation is such that the greater the self-presence (of persons to themselves) the greater the authenticity.

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THE PROBLEM WITH PSYCHE ALONE: MASLOW’S OPENING TO LOGOS Rogers sees that inauthenticity is destructive of all relationships, including counseling relationships. The question, however, is whether being genuine— specifically in the first two senses discussed previously, that is, of possessing one’s self and being true to one’s own feelings—is sufficient for self-fulfillment and fulfillment. It does seem to be a necessary condition, insofar as it really is a “linchpin” for all healthy relationships. The question is whether being genuine is sufficient for self-actualization. Rogers seems to think so. In fact, he thinks being genuine is simply identical with self-fulfillment. Thus there is no further self-actualized state to aim for, as authenticity only lies in each individual act itself (and not to any “fixed state”), and therefore not in any settled state of virtue. However, in ignoring moral virtue Rogers also ignores logos, which leads him to the inability to (theoretically) distinguish a psychopath from a genuine, selffullfilled person. 16 Rogers at one point seems to be aware of this kind of objection, and responds: An even more common reaction to the path of life I have been describing is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, destructive. . . . But the whole course of his experience in therapy contradicts these fears. He [the client] finds that gradually he can be his anger, when anger is his real reaction, but that such accepted or transparent anger is not destructive. . . . He can feel and be his sexual feelings, or his “lazy” feelings, or his hostile feelings, and the roof of the world does not fall in. The reason seems to be that the more he is able to permit these feelings to flow and to be in him, the more they take their appropriate place in the whole complexity of his feelings. He discovers that he has other feelings with which these mingle and find a balance. He feels loving and tender and considerate and cooperative, as well as hostile or lustful or angry. 17

Not every psychologist is as sanguine as Rogers concerning the integrative possibilities of being genuine outside of logos. Abraham Maslow also takes up the core ideas of the psyche dimension of authenticity, summarized by his term “autonomy.” He then makes an interesting distinction between two kinds of autonomy: what he terms “selfish” or “insecure autonomy” from “secure-high dominance”: Very broadly and without too much inaccuracy, we can say that insecure autonomy and strength is a strengthening of the personality as over against the world, in an either/or dichotomy in which they are not only quite separate, but also mutually exclusive, as if they were enemies. We might call this selfish autonomy and strength.

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Secure high-dominance was another matter altogether. Here there was affection for the world and for others, big-brotherly responsibility and a feeling of trust and identification with the world rather than an antagonism and fear toward it. The superior strength of these individuals was therefore used for enjoyment, for love, and for helping others. 18

Thus, for Maslow, it is not enough to be autonomous, knowing one’s own mind and feelings. What is also necessary is the further dimension of unselfishness. This, of course, introduces a frankly moral category, insofar as unselfishness seems to be a constituent element of all moral values. Thus Maslow’s notion of “secure high-dominance” provides an explicit break from the morally neutral idea of Rogerian authenticity. The whole idea of something having moral significance outside of one’s own feelings is foreign to Rogers, as he is so busy trying to free himself from all “guiding principles” and “code[s] of action laid down by some group or institution” 19 that he cannot now turn around to make use of moral categories to protect his notion of self-actualization from the horrors of malignant narcissism. It seems his psychology is better suited to the narrower world of the therapist’s office, where people of relative good will come “to a light-shedding process par excellence,” as M. Scott Peck describes it. 20 For, after all, psychopaths are constitutionally opposed to any “light shedding” and thereby tend to avoid therapeutic confrontation. But the moment one steps out of these confines to deal with human nature as broadly found in the world, including people who can be deeply evil and/or disordered, then Rogers’s psychology appears not only naïve and superficial, but also defenseless against the appropriation of his own categories by those who would be widely considered evil and disordered. Whereas Rogers wants his clients to exclusively look at themselves and their own feelings, the positive psychologist James Averill thinks that, while our feelings need to be our own, they also need to conform to some standard. Thus he states, “emotional concepts presume not only beliefs about the nature of emotion per se but also beliefs about how a person should respond when emotional” (emphasis in original). 21 Averill thereby introduces the idea of adequacy of our emotions to some transcendent standard. On the other hand, what Averill means by “emotional concepts” are merely “folk theoretical” or “folk concepts about emotions.” Thus it seems that Averill merely substitutes a cultural relativism for Rogers’s individual relativism based on one’s own feelings. But just as mere feelings are no sufficient ground for measuring actions and attitudes, neither are “folk concepts,” insofar as they too can be either morally good or evil. Some cultural practices, such as slavery, are quite immoral. In contrast, both cultural norms and individual feelings need to conform to morally relevant values and goods rationally based within the objective logos. These are meanings-in-them-

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selves (chapter 1), quite independent to any kind of relativism, whether cultural or individual. At least Averill sees that our individual feelings are insufficient measures of adequacy of personal response, as they themselves need some transcendent measure. Rogers in contrast blithely assumes that being authentic to one’s feelings will automatically lead to self-actualization. It is as if human nature for him is not fundamentally wounded, thereby not allowing him to see a rather obvious point about the human condition. STEPS THAT INCREASE THE LOGOS OF AUTHENTICITY The subjective (psyche) dimension of authenticity refers to self-presence, and especially to the idea of one “owning” one’s own acts and responses, for after all, my thoughts and actions need to be mine and not some introjected other’s. While self-possession is undoubtedly psychologically essential, after Maslow’s contribution it seems that something else is needed. The task of this section is to begin to evaluate the logos dimension of authenticity (extending into the next chapter), ending in the full self-actualization of persons. Although this dimension will refer more to logos than to psyche, it will presuppose and build upon the subjective dimension previously discussed. Since one main thesis of this book is to argue for openness to other nonpsychological meanings, there may be included moral and metaphysical meanings that are not normally associated with psychological texts, if and only if they help illuminate our topics of authenticity and self-fulfillment. While the psyche dimension of authenticity refers primarily to the subjective aspect of authenticity, the logos dimension will point more to the objective aspect of self-fulfillment, where the theme of truth becomes—in a stepby-step analysis—increasingly important. The germ of this theme was already noticed with respect to psyche, insofar as the authentic person needs to be true to him- or herself. However, since persons are built to be in a transcendent relation to reality, they need to be true not only to themselves but also to those truths that have been vouchsafed to them. Consider now a first step going beyond authenticity rooted mostly in psyche: concerning those persons who, in one sense, take their own opinions very seriously. These people are not like psychopaths, who explicitly and with self-awareness manipulate others to fit their self-aggrandizing ends. While their thinking is more serious than psychopaths’, their seriousness is tempered by the fact that they are not particularly interested in whether their own opinions are true. Remember the earlier example of the character Vronsky from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (chapter 11). For all his weaknesses, Vronsky is more authentic than a psychopath, insofar as he actually cares about his (moral) principles, as silly as they otherwise are. Naturally, if he

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really cared about transcendent truth, he would seriously look for authentic moral norms as opposed to settling for mere moral substitutes, such as with his own ridiculous notion of honor. While Vronsky has many failings, cowardice is not one of them, as he is willing to die for his notion of honor. Also in chapter 11 we mentioned how it belongs to the nature of a moral substitute (such as Vronsky’s notion of honor) for there to be a definite note of subjectivism and relativism, insofar as the substitute he subconsciously “chooses” circumvents any confrontation with his own real moral faults. Thus there is no question of any full transcendence going beyond the self (and what is constructed by the self) to touch meanings-in-themselves. A second step refers to those persons who not only take an interest in “their principles” but also are actively seeking what is true (especially in the sense of existentially significant moral, metaphysical, and religious truth) and are ready to submit to them when they find them. The idea is that a person who actively seeks truth (logos) is in that respect more authentic than someone else who does not care about it. It is quite possible for people to actively seek truth without finding it, or at least without finding it straightaway once they begin searching. On some level, they have a sense of truth’s importance, which of course explains their search. Such persons are clearly more authentic than mere dilettantes, or than someone like Vronsky, who does not think in terms of truth at all. Naturally, it is one thing to search for what is true and another to actually find it. The second step refers to the search. The third step refers to its actual discovery. Of course one can grant that despite significant milestones (such as with “valid moments” discussed in chapter 4), the discovery of truth is a continual process throughout a person’s life. If the nature of authenticity is that of personality revealing the person, then whatever helps accomplish this will be an aid to authenticity. It was already mentioned how the discovery of truth, especially existentially significant truths, results in the deepening of a person. For a person has to enter into his or her depth in order to know and respond adequately to that which is good and precious and true. Encounters with what is authentically good and true will then lead to self-discovery, which is a tremendous aid for personality revealing person. LOGOS IMPEDING AUTHENTICITY: SARTRE’S OBJECTION Someone (like Sartre) could object, “If authenticity is about revealing the person, about what we think and feel, about our being free and true to ourselves, about resisting all pressures not coming from us and what we will, what about the competing, potentially distracting influence of logos itself?

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Does not this interest similarly take us away from ourselves and threaten our being true to ourselves?” One could no doubt grant the obvious illegitimacy of the introjected other dominating a person’s thinking and feeling, as well as the “enticing” external pressures coming in from without, for when they reach a certain proportion these certainly inhibit and even overthrow (as with addiction) the exercise of one’s freedom. But what if external pressures refer to the transcendent, objective logos, such as some moral or religious truth? Could they as well illegitimately dominate and inhibit our freedom? This is not as strange as it first may sound. It may even explain some of the dissent many people have against organized religion and “absolute truth.” 22 Perhaps it is less that people find the arguments for timeless truth in themselves unconvincing than it is that they view those arguments as a threat to their own personal freedom. One theoretical expression of this feeling about how truth limits freedom comes from Sartre, whose psychology in one respect seems similar to that of Rogers, even if not in temperament (the sunny Southern Californian optimist displays none of Sartre’s black despair). The similarity lies in their all-encompassing emphasis on freedom, although Sartre differs in emphasizing the divorce from any pre-given logos while Rogers merely ignores it. Sartre thinks existence is prior to essence, and that essence (that is, intelligibility, logos, and especially “value” 23) is simply an invented product of our own hard work. This is why Sartre maintains that every person is ultimately responsible for all meaning. He thereby espouses a radical freedom and authenticity whereby he thinks all meaning and intelligibility is merely a product of our will. It then follows that any pre-given meaning is inauthentic, insofar as it is not one’s own. The problem is that Sartre pits freedom against any pre-given objective logos. In contrast to Sartre, truth is clearly not a product of freedom (otherwise we would all be smarter and richer than we in fact are). The structure of truth has an uninventible, a priori nature that refers to the adequacy of assertions to reality, as opposed to it’s being a mere construct of our will. Still, there is a relationship between truth and willing insofar as it is in truth that our freedom becomes possible, as it is an a priori that I cannot will what I do not first know, and the ultimate end and fullness of knowledge is truth. Right reason and insight into truth are keys not only for knowledge but also for me to not be illegitimately drawn off from myself. Not only do I not have to fear being estranged from myself by my response to truth, but in fact the contrary holds: in knowing some truth I am able to make a fact about reality my own (and here I find myself using the language associated earlier with the notion of authenticity). This is why a real teacher can respect me as a person by appealing to my intellect straight through my freedom. The teacher does not need to manipulate or propagandize me, or dazzle me in

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such a way as to try to make me accept thoughtlessly what he or she has to say to me. Instead, the teacher can appeal to the inner necessity and intelligibility of some truth so that I can come to see them for myself. In seeing them in this way, instead of interiorizing and introjecting the teacher, the exact opposite occurs: I achieve a basic independence from that teacher and actualize myself at a deeper center. And this deeper self-actualization actually makes the distinction between my self and my teacher all the greater, insofar as I see this truth for myself. This independence is the polar opposite of mere propaganda and psychological manipulation where no real independence from the propagandist is ever achieved. THE DIALECTICAL RELATION BETWEEN TRUTH AND FREEDOM On the other hand, everyone sees how at times logos can impede our (arbitrary) freedom. What about those inevitable occasions when we sense our pleasures and lusts going in the opposite direction of the logos of the moral law? Oddly enough, it seems that Rogers never addresses this rather unexceptional situation. The closest instance I found is the following: “Another tendency [of his client’s moving toward self-actualization] of this sort seems evident in the client’s moving away from the compelling image of what he ‘ought to be.’” 24 This “ought to be” that Rogers is here considering, however, does not refer to an unambiguous moral ought, for he also states, “Some individuals have absorbed so deeply from their parents the concept ‘I ought to be good,’ or ‘I have to be good,’ that it is only with the greatest of inward struggle that they find themselves moving away from this goal.” 25 Obviously, a parent’s concept of “good” need not necessarily refer to an authentic moral norm, as it could also refer to a corrupted moral norm or to an introjected (superego) idea, both of which would justify a movement away from it. However, this quotation is also sufficiently ambiguous as to also refer to authentic moral norms as well. It is not clear from Rogers’s writings what he would say if there actually were an explicit conflict between what a person feels and what that person sees as genuinely morally good. Rogers probably thinks that what a person “ought to do” (in a real moral sense) will somehow be identical with what he or she genuinely feels, which is implied by his glorification of human nature, “when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy.” 26 Let us test this above solution with the example of a husband who, let us say, is contemplating cheating on his wife. Let us further stipulate—for the sake of the argument—that this betrayal of his good and trusting wife is in fact morally contemptible, and yet when he consults his feelings his lust wins out. In the conventional Rogerian analysis of this problem, it seems there is

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here an instance of authentic morality playing the role of the external force— in this case outside of a person’s own desires and will—which inhibit the husband’s psychological freedom. Supposing this man has internalized within his conscience the notion that cheating on his wife as morally evil, even this inner sense will be exterior in relation to his feelings, which Rogers has identified with the real self. And since he has to be “true” to his feelings, it follows that he (in the immanent psychological sense of being authentic) “should” sleep with the other woman. In this view, freedom does not appear to have any intrinsic link to (moral) truth. It is rather reducible to arbitrariness in the sense of following one’s feelings, that is, doing what one subjectively likes, which in the end comes to following the importance of what was earlier called the subjectively satisfying. The above case concerns the moral law restricting freedom. Everyone is of course aware of such cases. The question is whether this relationship between the moral law and freedom is invariably restrictive. Is there an inner connection between freedom and logos, perhaps not noticed by Rogers, where persons following logos could even increase the range of their inner freedom? Is arbitrary freedom the final and deepest word on the reality of freedom? To see if logos can increase the range of freedom, consider the example of a man asking a generous person for help in moving. Let us say that the generous person responds, “I would love to help you.” Then the generous person inwardly thinks, “Helping someone move is surely a drag” (the generous person would feel this as much as anyone else), “but my presence will make it easier on this person, and I’ve been looking for ways to help him for quite some time. This is perfect.” Here there is not only a real victory of goodness, but also a tremendous expansion of freedom, whereby a person is so free that he or she is able to overcome a sense for his or her own inconvenience and lethargy to joyfully do a favor for a friend. Here the joy (out of generosity) overwhelms other feelings the generous person no doubt also has about the inconvenience. Furthermore, since this particular response of love and generosity participate in the timeless a priori essence structures of the universal Ideas of love and generosity, and since these essences are in part constitutive of rationality itself, it follows that this response is not only perfectly rational, but also in fact far more rational than any empirical law, including of course the rationality of the qualitatively empty “functional relations” someone like Skinner is so keen on defending. Although really-existing individual instances of actions motivated out of love and generosity may be fewer than we all would like, they are by no means rare and certainly not nonexistent. If genuine, they definitely should not be explained away in some reductionistic Freudian manner, and neither should they be explained as if they were some kind of automatic, entelechial human inclination tending unalterably toward self-actualization—when freed

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from all inhibitions to one’s freedom—as Rogers supposes with his naïve trust of human nature. Changing the above example slightly, imagine someone asking a lessgenerous person for help in moving. Let us further stipulate that this lessgenerous person has previously resolved to “practice the virtue of generosity,” insofar as he perceives this as a weakness of his character. When someone asks him for help, he recalls his resolution and manages to respond (expressionlessly, through tight lips and monotone voice), “Why yes, I’d love to help you move,” even though his heart screams in protest. The question is this: is his response in this situation inauthentic? It is not inauthentic at all. Certainly he is trying to hide his loathing out of charity, and of course the fuller affective response would be more genuine. But this in no way involves him denying, much less repressing his feelings. He knows all too well what he is feeling in assenting to help and correctly grasps it as a sacrifice. Thus, he can be fully present to his feelings and still despite them assent to help, for—contra Rogers—his feelings are not his ultimate guide. This example poses a problem both to Rogers and to Skinner: Rogers must admit that this response is that person’s own—going back to both his right reason and to what he has already willed—despite the fact that (in the above case) his feelings run counter to his response. This example shows that ownership and even the genuineness of a response need not always go back to a person’s feelings. To Skinner the problem is that the freedom of this response is perfectly rational, even though it does not go back to what is positively reinforcing or enticing, which for Skinner is the only possible motivator of free actions. In contrast to all “positive reinforcement” motivation, that person’s assent to help is reasonable because of his interest in helping a friend and because he wants to grow in virtue. Both self-possession and inner rationality ground the authenticity of this free response. Thus the debate between freedom and rationality is not an “either/or” but rather a “both/and” proposition. With Rogers we have freedom, but without the rationality of value as motivation for human action, and with Skinner we have a formal rationality but without either freedom or value. Where both freedom and rationality are especially found is with authentic value. In chapter 1 it was stated how through an experience of the intelligibility of the world the ancient Greeks were able to discover their own spiritual power of intellect, and thereby their personal nature. Similarly, in discovering the world of value and especially of moral preciousness one is able to discover a deeper dimension of freedom, and thereby discover yet again—this time through the avenues of the will and the heart—other dimensions of our personal existence.

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An authentic personality is one that reveals the person. Not only do I find self-revelation but also self-determination in freedom, and precisely in selfdetermination toward goodness do I thereby become who I really am. For I only become who I am in moral goodness, just as those lost in some vice lose contact with their self. The person lost in vice is like the prince who has become the beast in Disney’s magnificent movie Beauty and the Beast. He simply cannot find himself until he loves. The next chapter will investigate further possible dimensions of selfactualization that in a more radical way depend on logos. This kind of selfactualization cannot occur outside—not only of logos, but also of specifically religious presuppositions, such as the real existence and nature of an allgood, all-powerful God. NOTES 1. I will use the terms “self-fulfillment” and “human flourishing” synonymously. Rogers’s own term for these realities is “self-actualization,” a more dated term, that I will sometimes use when discussing Rogers’s psychology. 2. Rogers, On Becoming a Person, 185–86. 3. Carl Rogers, “Becoming a Person,” 2–3. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Rogers, On Becoming, 187. 6. Ibid., 189. 7. Ibid., 62. I am grateful to Henry H. Lamberton for this and the next quotation, in his illuminating article “Carl Rogers’ View of Personal Wholeness: An Evaluation and Critique from a Christian Perspective,” Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies, accessed July 10, 2014, http://www.aiias.edu/ict/vol_10/10cc_277-296.html. 8. Rogers, On Becoming, 23–24. 9. Ibid., 190–91. 10. Lamberton, “Carl Rogers’ View,” 11. 11. Ibid., 13. 12. In asserting the “basic fallenness of human nature,” I am not way appealing to any religious doctrine, such as that of original sin. Original sin does not exactly refer to the phenomenon of fallenness; it is rather one explanation for it. 13. Rogers, On Becoming, 194. 14. Ibid., 195. Thus Rogers sounds very much like the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, who looked at the world from an exclusive need-satisfaction point of view, but advised caution. You must balance your pleasures, not go into excess, because in being careful you can maximize (as Rogers puts it) “the satisfaction of all needs.” 15. Ibid., 113. 16. Without a transcendent reference to intrinsic value grounded in the objective logos, it is very hard, not only for Rogers but also for psychology in general, to distinguish authentic values from the “values” of the psychopath. For example, consider the positivist psychologist Edwin Locke’s description of moral value: “The most fundamental of all values are moral values—that which the individual considers good or right.” Here Locke cannot help but radically subjectivize moral values. Edwin A. Locke, “Setting Goals for Life and Happiness,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. C. R. Synder and Shane J. Lopez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 301. 17. Rogers, “A Therapist’s View,” 20–21. 18. Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1971), 158.

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19. Rogers, On Becoming, 189. 20. Peck, People of the Lie, 77. 21. James R. Averill, “Emotional Creativity: Toward ‘Spiritualizing the Passions,’” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 174. 22. The argument could be pressed to the point of absurdity (reductio ad absurdam) in this way: it is not just moral and religious realities that can limit freedom, even empirical facts could do exactly the same thing. 23. For example, Sartre states, “Freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values.” “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Marxist Internet Archive, 1946, accessed February 12, 2015, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm. 24. Rogers, “A Therapist’s View,” 8. 25. Rogers, On Becoming, 168. 26. Ibid., 194.

Chapter Thirteen

Nothing Secret, Nothing Hidden The Religious Dimension of Logos

The argument of the last chapter was that genuine human flourishing could not be fully understood by an immanent psychological analysis, excluding all logos relations to transcendent value. The goal of this chapter is to press an understanding of human flourishing to its furthest limits, by which it dovetails toward the frontiers of religion. For just as there is a common boundary between philosophy and psychology—together with science and literature with psychology—so is there one between a natural theology and psychology. Naturally, if upon further metaphysical reflection it turns out that God does not in fact exist, then these further dimensions of self-fulfillment of human nature become impossible. Psychologists hardly need to be told how a response to God can go in a negative direction. A negative, disordered direction can be expressed by religious narrow-mindedness and bigotry, hypocrisy and self-righteousness, and inappropriate conscience formation and false guilt, and so on. The above principle—that the more significant the truth, the greater the possibilities of self-flourishing—thus has a mirror opposite: the more significant the truth that is twisted and abused, the worse the effect on the person. While investigating these various kinds of deformations is extremely important for psychology, specifically for negative psychology, the focus of this chapter will be on positive psychology and the further possibilities of human flourishing. The question is whether and in what respects being in a right relationship with the true God can be an aid to self-fulfillment. We find a growing openness within psychology to studying the psychological and social benefits that come from religious belief. 1 Paul Vitz has noted this change—at least in some quarters of mainstream modern psychol173

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ogy—away from a dominating secularistic, if not outspoken atheistic/materialistic approach. 2 This chapter will follow that trend and develop it further on the basis of the second dimension of the objective logos, noting how in various ways belief in the Living God can lead to genuine self-fulfillment. However, concerning religious propositions I remember that this work is psychological and philosophical. It is not a theological text. It therefore needs to stay within the bounds of natural reason, and thus there will be no appealing to any kind of claimed divine revelation, nor to the teachings of some church or religious authority that all go beyond evidence given by natural reason alone. On the other hand, we also claimed that human reason is able to reach timeless and unchanging truth. Reaching God is more than this, of course, but unaided human reason can at least reach the realm (in timeless reality) that is the proper home of such a being, if such a being exists. Furthermore, the existence of God has always been seen as a properly philosophical and not exclusively theological issue, even though such arguments go beyond the particular scope of this book. I want to show in the following the relation between religion and self-fulfillment in a proper and rigorous philosophical way, without any appeal to some positive religious revelation or authority. I want to avoid as much as possible the charge of being overtly theological, and of presupposing or pressing some religious agenda that may not be shared by a large segment of readers. The goal is not to make a contribution to religion but to psychology, even though it is also true that this text shares no antipathy to religion. Still, there may be some readers who, for whatever reason, cannot accept the presupposition made here: of the existence of an all-good and all-powerful, personal God. For those who think of the existence of such a being one bridge too far, then reading this chapter will be of little interest. Since many earlier topics of this text will return here, this chapter can serve as a summary chapter for these earlier themes. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF BEING IN A RIGHT RELATION TO GOD In chapter 12, three steps were discussed that can lead a person toward a fuller realization of the self: first, the need for genuineness in the sense of being true to what a person thinks, even if there is little interest of whether one’s own opinions are themselves true (like Tolstoy’s character Vronsky); second, the authenticity of a person who wants his or her opinions to be in line with truth and is searching for truth, even though truth has not yet been found; and third, the self-possession of someone who has actually discovered some deep truth, and then strives to be faithful to it in his or her life. Natural-

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ly, the nature of the truth discovered is important, with the general principle being the more significant the truth, the greater the possibilities of actualizing the person. Now I want to further develop this third step, considering what follows if the truth discovered is that of the Living God, assuming for the sake of argument that such a being exists. What follows will unfold only if two further conditions—one being objective and the other subjective—are met. The objective condition (besides God’s existence) is that a person can be in a loving relationship with this (all-good and all-knowing) personal God. The subjective condition is that this person responds adequately and generously to that being. Furthermore, my interest is not in some phony idol gods that are greatly explained anthropomorphically as projections of our own human attitudes and needs, which psychology and philosophy can rightly expose. Rather, I want to discover evidence for growth in self-fulfillment when persons give a generous, loving response to the Otherness of a transcendent, Living God. This evidence will be unfolded in the following eight points: Point 1: Consider whether the Living God cares about truth. Imagine this situation: A person makes a serious, well-publicized lie, but through luck and skill completely gets away with it. His lie becomes the accepted “truth” by society, by later historians, and even by all subsequent generations. No one is the wiser and his lie is never exposed. In fact, even the liar himself in time comes to believe his own lie. Should we then interpret this state of affairs as the new “truth”? It seems obviously silly to think that the transcendent, omniscient God is similarly fooled, or that the lie ceases to be repugnant merely because it is universally believed. It is also clear that this lie—by its inner form as a lie—remains abhorrent to God and that what society or history believes means nothing. Point 2: Not only does the Living God care about truth, such a being would also care about the moral goodness of finite persons as well. To see this, imagine God saying to his creatures, “I don’t care what kind of person morally you become; all that matters is that you merely externally express your assent to my majesty and authority.” This kind of religion, cut off from any moral calls to authentic conversion to moral goodness, is superficial and unreal. It is unreal not only to the serious Christian, it is even unreal to serious non-Christian pagans like Socrates who, on trial for his life in 399 BC, asserted, Apart from all question of appearances, gentlemen, I do not think that it is right for a man to appeal to the jury [by trying to prejudice them] or to get himself acquitted by doing so; he ought to inform them of the facts and convince them by argument. . . . It follows that we must not develop in you, nor you allow to grow in yourselves, the habit of perjury; that would be sinful for

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There is nothing illegitimate and anthropomorphic about the idea of God taking an interest in the truthfulness and goodness of finite persons. The significance of moral values is not like the significance of economics and business, whose importance and meaning really is confined within the context of this world. To a being who can create infinite worlds with infinite resources, purely economic issues of supply and demand are simply superseded. In contrast to the laws of economics, which can thereby be transcended, truth and goodness can only be infinitely fulfilled and never transcended. This is why it is not at all ridiculous—even to many atheists— that if an all-good God were to exist, he would not take an interest in the moral affairs of persons. For the ethical is, as Kierkegaard saw, “the very breadth of the eternal.” Psychologists become superficial and unserious if they try to psychologize and relativize away legitimate connections between morality and truth with religion. They also lose a potentially powerful ally of authentic religion, which actually promotes psychological health and authenticity by having a respectful attitude to reality and truth. Point 3: The third relation between God and authenticity concerns selfpossession. Here we shall apply the principle that the more significant the truth, the deeper the possibilities of self-actualization and of making some truth one’s own. Even if the object of these truths does not specifically address the Living God, because the ultimate home of all existentially significant truth lies in the “one, absolute world,” in coming into a relation with these truths one enters into a context and sphere where God can especially be found. Thus there is something to be said of Augustine’s formulation that God is inwardly nearer to us than we are to ourselves. 4 One does not then have to go outside of one’s self to encounter God. Rather, one can look for God in one’s self by intensifying one’s self-presence. One way to achieve an increased self-presence is by entering into a deeper relation to what is authentically good and beautiful and true in this world. In that quiet solitude one can then enter into the realm where God especially haunts. For if God is Goodness, Beauty, and Truth Itself, one can then see the connection between God and the actualization of this deeper self-presence. The next point will make evident that in encountering God in this way one does not need to be a Christian; one does not even have to be a theist. Rather, what is needed is sensitivity to one’s own human nature, specifically

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with an existential sense of how the person is built for God, which is in fact what we find with the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche. Point 4: Consider again Nietzsche’s own experience of God, already (more fully) quoted above in chapter 4, such as: —Nay! Come thou back! With all of thy great tortures! To me the last of lonesome ones, Oh, come thou back! All my hot tears in streamlets trickle Their course to thee! And all my final hearty fervor— Up-glow’th to thee! Mine unfamiliar God! My pain! My final bliss! 5

Nietzsche was theoretically an atheist, but this does not mean he did not have a real experience of God, whom he then subsequently and explicitly rejects. Although the basis of his experience seems to be a negative absence or longing for God, Nietzsche also attributes to God such positive qualities as knowing his own inmost thoughts, of wanting to come into a relationship with him, and of knowing that this relationship is the source of his own ultimate happiness. In this fourth point, I want to investigate the negative dimension of Nietzsche’s experience of God, and in point five the positive dimension. One important basis for Nietzsche’s encounter with God is an elucidation of an aspect of human nature we can also experience ourselves, if we care to look and identify it. There is a kind of negative infinity within our own human nature, that is, an emptiness within contingent persons that only God can fulfill. 6 There is after all something ultimately superficial and frustrating about the promise of the next material thing making us happy. Sensitive souls will realize that, while material things may promise much, they deliver little. In contrast, love relationships with other contingent persons can certainly make us genuinely happy, but no creature is up to the task of making us definitively, absolutely happy. To burden another finite person with such an expectation borders on idolatry, a load no mere creature can or should bear. While love relationships with other persons—as opposed to material things—are a genuine source of happiness, notice what happens when a person enters into such a relationship: they ignite in that person the desire to become absolutely, definitively happy. She now has a taste for what genuine happiness is and yearns for more. It is really a yearning without end, a yearning not at all experienced (paradoxically) by the hedonist, who in a frantic search for pleasure completely misses authentic happiness.

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This is why philosophers sometimes speak of a negative infinity of finite, personal beings. Persons are specifically and uniquely built for God, insofar as only persons are capable of this kind of yearning. Thus if for some reason a person comes to spurn this relation, as with Nietzsche, there can be experienced a real despair (“my heart’s final flame”). In fact, it is because of this negative infinity that many postmodern philosophers are very close to being right, because they have an insight into the inadequacy of the things of the world to really satisfy our human nature. They sense that human nature is absurdly built for something more and other than the trinkets that can be found in this world. And since there is nothing else than this world, they like Nietzsche quite reasonably despair. Since they think that God does not exist, all such yearnings will be in vain and any ultimate human flourishing becomes illusory and impossible. Then life really becomes ultimately absurd, just as Sartre claims. Point 5: In chapter 8 the freedom of self-determination was discussed. Normally, with willing one first thinks about freedom of choice. Freedom certainly includes choice about external goods, but extends far more radically to include also a subjective disposing about one’s own self and existence. This is the freedom of self-determination, which is intimated in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons when Sir Thomas More asserts to his daughter, “When a man takes an oath [before God], Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And, if he opens his fingers [in making a false oath] then he needn’t hope to find himself again.” 7 This experience of the threat of losing one’s self in moral evil is not limited to Thomas More. It is found everywhere a person cares to look: even the morally bad man, for all his moral blindness, instinctively shrinks from God. Conversely, as was just noted above, one can also see how persons find themselves in (moral) goodness. Naturally, the claim is not that every morally good person has in fact found God, rather that in decisively turning away from moral evil at least one major impediment to finding God is overcome. Furthermore, the ultimate home of the timeless nature of moral goodness is in that same “one absolute world” where God is also to be found, which suggests that an offense against morality may also be an offense against God (as the non-Christian Socrates rightly saw), especially if God is himself all-good. And finally, there is in conscience an experience of the unseen presence of a being who is able to penetrate the inner recesses of a person’s subjective life, and who is present to our transgressions. In point 4 above we noted how the absence of God explains the negative dimension of Nietzsche’s despair. In this point we see how the unseen presence of God in conscience provides the positive dimension, thus explaining why it is that Nietzsche thinks God is penetrating his most inward thoughts.

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Point 6: The interconnectedness of authenticity, moral goodness, and God can, oddly enough, be brought out more deeply by considering the uniqueness of each individual person. Here one might reflect again on the reason why a person cannot be treated as a specimen. As discussed in chapter 10, Crosby says that a specimen “embodies the whole idea or model that it instantiates,” whereas with human beings, “each unfolds or represents something in ‘the human person’ that only it can unfold or represent.” 8 It is from this reality of the uniqueness of each individual person that philosophers (such as Sartre) and psychologists (such as Rogers) could pose the following objection, which I might characterize as follows: “Considering the incredible diversity of individual human beings in the world and in history, how could there be but one universal and unchanging solution for each one of them, such as moral goodness or God? Is not the idea of a one, absolute moral law for all a kind of straightjacket? Is this nothing but a ‘one template solution’ for the incredible diversity, not only of different cultures spreading across different eras, but also and especially for each individual person of the many billions, living and dead?” Notice this objection could be stated either from the point of view of morality or from that of God. Naturally, in this context we shall develop an answer to the above objection from the point of view of the personhood of God. Specifically, I want to investigate how it is that God is the answer to the incredible diversity of each human being, that is, of all humanity. In the abstract, it seems fantastic to assume one template to account for this wild diversity, until one remembers that the relation here is between finite and infinite personal being. By “infinite” I mean what is unlimited and without end. There is no limiting principle to the infinite being of God. For however rich the idea of “each individual human person” is in its own right—so rich that in every instance (and then multiplied by many billions) the general essence of “humanness” is inadequate to capture all of what each individual human person is—this idea is not so rich as to not be captured, so to speak, by the personal being of the infinite God. Thus the idea that “each individual human person” finds his or her home and “solution” in the infinite God is sound. Although Dietrich von Hildebrand makes this point in a specifically Christian way, it is not a uniquely Christian idea. He states, “He who is immersed in the life of Christ, he in whom Christ is truly imitated, the saint, becomes a personality, no matter what his ‘essential endowments’ are.” 9 The point is that in appealing to persons to not only turn to moral goodness but also to respond in love to God, one is not really limiting them. What is limiting is their narrow egoism and selfishness. It is these attitudes that throw persons back upon the subjectivism of their own desires and needs, limiting them to the point of moral and psychological suffocation. In other words,

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expansion and liberation come from seeing and loving the way God sees and loves. Thus Josef Pieper states, The ultimate perfection attainable to us, in the minds of the philosophers of Greece, was this: that the order of the whole of existing things should be inscribed in our souls. And this conception was afterwards absorbed into the beatific vision: “What do they not see, who see Him who sees all things?” 10

Consider also von Hildebrand: This dying to oneself, does not, however, mean the giving up of individuality. On the contrary, the more a man becomes “another Christ,” the more he realizes the original unduplicable thought of God which he embodies. Of course, this is only possible because Christ is the “Son of Man,” because the whole of humanity is contained in Him, and above all, because He is not only man, but the “entire fullness of the Godhead lives in His heart.” 11

The charge I imagined coming from people like Sartre and Rogers is how morality and religion limits human freedom. While granting the reasonability of this objection from the point of view of arbitrary freedom, the deeper, more important truth is just the opposite: moral goodness is a freeing experience, and true religion is our access to the infinity of the divine. It is arbitrary freedom that is limiting, as its ground is inevitably the immanence of the subjectively satisfying. Point 7: Consider the following line from Christian Scripture: “No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to who we must render an account” (Hebrews 4:13). Consider also the following variation of the above quotation: that there are some contingent persons who want in their turn to become transparent to God. These people want nothing secret, nothing hidden from God. Thus they seek to expose all that is hidden and shameful and contrary to the objective logos, and with God’s help such persons attempt to identify and root these things out. We just mentioned above (point 5) how immoral persons shrink instinctively from God. In imitation of Adam and Eve, they want to hide themselves—especially certain dimensions of themselves—from Him. In contrast to them, there are others who strive to become completely open to God. Recall how authenticity was earlier (chapter 12) described: an authentic person is one who reveals him- or herself both to his or her own self and to others. Here we have with this kind of person an instance of their seriously striving—in contradistinction to all self-righteous hypocrisy—to be religiously and morally transformed, opening themselves to the all-seeing God by wanting to be transparent to Him.

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This is obviously not the place to philosophically investigate the assertion that each human being is a creation by an all-good God. Let us assume our created nature for the sake of the argument. It is at least a priori evident that persons did not create themselves, as nonexisting beings cannot do anything, including create anything. If it is true that contingent persons are created by God, then God is not only the author of the existence of each and every contingent being, including contingent persons, He also has an idea of each, individual person that He wills to create. Let us call this idea the essential core of the person. Similar to point 6, I want to underscore the uniqueness of each individual human being, as opposed to being a mere instantiation of the human species. Earlier (chapter 10) it was noted how animals really are formally reducible to mere instantiations of their species, which is why it is not an abuse to treat them as mere specimens of their species. Persons are not like that. Individual persons add to the notion of humanness, in contrast to animals that merely repeat in their individuality the universal form of their species. 12 If this is true, then God has an idea of what each of us is as an individual person, in all our wonderful diversity. Let us grant that this view is utterly opposed to postmodern thinking, which claims that “post-modern identities are infinitely fluid,” as Ted Benton and Ian Craib put it. 13 But this is not the case for at least two reasons: First, there is a set universal essence structure of what it is to be a person—a being that essentially entails possessing determinant powers of intellect and will that are simply missing with other kinds of being. If our earlier reasoning is correct (chapter 5), a conscious personal self cannot become a mountain because the necessary features of a personal self are just not found in a mountain, and vice versa. And secondly, this individual personal being also has a set individual essence structure that is not reducible to its universal nature. This set structure is in conjunction with and modified by its universal essence and by the freedom of self-determination. Here we need something analogous to the problem of rationality and freedom noted earlier (chapter 9), where what we need is not Heraclitus alone, representing fluidity and process emphasized in postmodernism, but a synthesis of both Heraclitus and Parmenides, with the latter representing determinant structure and being. The postmodern idea that our lives are so fluid that—like ever-changing matter—we can become anything we want (an idea repeated by Rogers, who claims that self-actualization is “a process, not a state of being”) is illusory. In contrast, we possess a perfection of individuality of being this determinant person, and it belongs to our vocation as persons to become the individual that is our essential core of what God made us to be. If so, then in our essence we are not any person we arbitrarily decide to be, which overemphasizes self-determination, just as we are not ultimately our own faults, immaturities,

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vices, neuroses, and insecurities. They are in us but not identical to us, as they too are not the core of who we are. There are two experiences where the distinction between the core of a person’s individual essence and the empirical self—which include a person’s faults, immaturities, selfishness, and neurosis—is especially made clear: in the experience of being criticized by a mere critic as well as by someone who really loves that person. The critic may accurately and perceptively see a person’s faults, but despite his insights he does not see her in her depth, that is, he does not see her in her essential core, in the way God made her to be. Despite his perceptiveness, he remains too superficial. In contrast, the genuine lover—as opposed to someone merely infatuated—is capable of seeing her faults as clearly as the critic, but this person sees something more and other: since he sees her essential core, he has a glimpse of the idea that God has of her. The mere critic will then miss the crucial distinction between her faults and the core of her being. What does this distinction—between the lover and the critic—have to do with authenticity? Earlier authenticity was described as personality revealing the person. Now it can be added that the person revealed—the authentic person—is not exactly what we called the empirical or factual self, for, if it were, we would repeat the same mistake as the critic. No, the real essence of each human person is found in the thought that God, who is our author and creator, has of each one of us. The more our personality reveals that image— that magnificent creature God made each one of us to be—the more authentic we become. And we have here a further reason why authenticity cannot become unhinged from logos and objective goodness, because it is moral goodness that especially reveals the inner core of the beautiful person each one of us is. Moral evil in contrast only buries us under the weight of our own passions and vices, where we cease being “captains of our own souls.” Point 8: Finally, the fruit of moral goodness and love is happiness. There are at least two effects on a person who comes to stand in a right relation to value: besides the deepening of soul there is as well the fruit of a genuine or authentic happiness. This relation to happiness is further evidence of how a due response to value—including the highest value of God—leads to the full flourishing of the person. Happiness is the fruit of genuine selffulfillment. There are two aspects of the delight of happiness to consider. One is when a person encounters something that is intrinsically precious-in-itself. This encounter often has the effect of lifting us up (sursum corda). In every value there is an aspect of beauty, and it is this aspect that especially moves our heart, engendering a deep happiness. When those persons who are not yet hardened or embittered encounter something deeply beautiful and good, their hearts ascend.

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Another aspect of this happiness is the moment of transcendence itself, of the experience of going beyond one’s self in order to “connect” with realities outside of one’s self. While this connection at times can certainly be only partial and sometimes even misleading, when it is adequate to the highest values, this moment of transcendence gives delight. Here we have the mirror opposite of the horrors of solipsism. In contrast, that which is merely subjectively satisfying promises happiness that never quite delivers. If a person fails to obtain the object of his desire, he is frustrated. If he achieves it, he becomes sated and bored. Furthermore, with this kind of importance—in contrast to intrinsic value—there is little transcendence and no movement toward God. Persons are rather thrown back upon themselves, that is, their own pleasures and instincts. Notice the link between happiness and self-fulfillment, which in this sense includes not only a relation not only to logos, but also to God. It is difficult to imagine a self-fulfilled person not being happy or a happy person who is not self-fulfilled, while of course granting also the role that life circumstances (money, health, liberty, friends, profession, etc.) play with respect to happiness. Despite the role of circumstances, it still seems relatively easy to imagine the possibility of a person in favorable circumstances— with fame, health, youth, and money—being intensely miserable, especially if alone or lost in some addiction, while also imagining a fully flourishing person having at least the crucially necessary—even if perhaps not sufficient (if this person is in horrific circumstances)—condition for happiness. While positive happiness is something more than happy circumstances, it is also more than a mere psychologically immanent authenticity. The mere pursuit of psychological authenticity alone—to the exclusion of any relation to logos and especially to the value of love—is surely not enough for selffulfillment. As Crosby states, And this much seems indeed to be true . . . that the happy person shows an exuberance in acting, a freedom and generosity and readiness to initiate, which flow from his happiness and do not just lead to it. . . . It is clear that persons who cultivate nothing more than their own authenticity and never transcend themselves so as to become morally good, know nothing of this power of acting. 14

Since all value and love have their ultimate source and fullness in God, persons who respond most fully and perfectly to God will, oddly enough, be the happiest. I say “oddly enough” because this conclusion seems counterintuitive. Perhaps one can explain it by first giving an image of what is meant, and then its justification. The image is this: imagine a beautiful church with magnificent stained-glass windows. From the outside, these windows will appear to be dark, cold, and lifeless. In order to see them properly, one obviously needs to go into the church and see them from the inside. Only

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then do the lights, colors, and beauty shine forth. Similarly, God and the moral law will appear to someone who is looking at them only from the “outside,” that is, from the point of view of divine commands and moral laws inhibiting their arbitrary freedom, as similarly cold and forbidding. One needs to go beyond that point of view towards an internalization of these truths in one’s own heart to see how they in fact provide, not only a roadmap to happiness, but also beauty in their own intelligible being. Only from “within” can it be seen that the reality of God and moral law are in no way inhibitive to real self-fulfillment. Instead of inhibitors, they are rather pointers showing us how to extend the range of authentic freedom. The claim is this: The happiest and most self-fulfilled people are really the saints, even though it may also be true that the lives of the saints are filled with incredible challenges and hardships. Happiness, however, is not the same thing as comfort, and whatever difficulties these remarkable people encounter in their lives ought not to blind us to their deep and concurrent happiness. In moral goodness and in the love of God they really have become who they are. They are indeed self-fulfilled—or at least they are on that road—not just with respect to the uniquely personal dimension of their lives, but also psychologically and emotionally, insofar as the effect of justice and charity is peace, including inner psychological peace. Insofar as the lower dimensions of the soul (psyche in the narrower sense) are ordered and formed by what is higher (logos), the result will tend toward peace within the psyche. This is not to say that there is no mental illness among the saints, as the sources for mental illness go beyond moral and religious integration. 15 For example, one obvious further root is not personal but somatic. Everyone knows that a mental illness like depression can have nothing to do with rational and intentional relations, as it can just as easily stem from biochemical causes like alcohol, drugs, fluctuating brain chemistry, and so on. Another possible root for mental illness can go back to early-childhood experiences that for whatever reason leave a mark on a personality that cannot be fully overcome, even by psychological, moral, and religious transformation. Then there is as well as a person’s basic temperament. Some people inherently possess difficult personalities, oftentimes seemingly from simple genetics, insofar as one can sometimes see the very same tendencies running down from generation to generation within certain families. People have to face not only physical but also basic psychological and emotional handicaps as well. In contradistinction to Rogers, it seems that everyone is basically wounded in one direction or another, with some being more psychologically wounded than others. While these tendencies can be transformed by holiness, they are not necessarily taken away. For example, persons with Asperger’s will still possess this syndrome even when they are transformed by holiness. There is something incredibly beautiful and impressive about someone with

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some psychological or genetic handicap being spiritually transformed. But however impressive a transformed handicap is, it is still something different from the simple absence of it. The claim of this text—as a philosophy-of-psychology text—is that psychology needs to take an interest in the transcendence and rationality of the person to adequately account for authenticity and self-fulfillment. This claim is not made for some ideological or theological reason, but because that idea actually turns out to be crucial from the point of view of the psychology of authentic human flourishing. And human flourishing in turn implies not only subjective but also objective dimensions, not only the immanence of psyche but also the transcendence of logos—subjectively, because being in the presence of the divine a person can achieve a particularly intense self-presence, where psyche and the personal self can be at peace with one another; and objectively, because authenticity is measured, not by mere feelings, but by truth, and by being in the truth before God who is Truth itself. Finally, we can conclude this text by noting again our central thesis: that besides our biological and psychological nature, there is as well a distinctly rational dimension to human nature. At times this dimension can be ignored, obscured, or theoretically denied. But to completely and consistently deny it is to deny the very possibility of all science, including the science of psychology. Intelligibility and rationality are linked, as it is in our understanding of the intelligibility of the world that we come to discover our own rationality and intelligence. The discipline that especially studies human rationality is philosophy. Psychology cannot simply ignore philosophy. To declare an independence from philosophy by adopting a purely empirical framework is actually to artificially graft a philosophical empiricism onto psychology. Furthermore, any such empiricism inevitably leads to basic philosophical presuppositions going unexamined. This occurs even when confronted with counterfactual evidence concerning such central nonempirical data as the existence of the conscious personal self as well as inner, conscious experience. There is as well a trajectory from a pure psychological empiricism to psychologism, which inevitably denies transcendent meaning, objective morality, and intrinsic value. While morality and value are not themselves direct objects of psychological investigation, various forms of value blindness and moral substitutes—invisible without a proper understanding of value—are psychologically significant. And there is a clear link between the right response to the world of value and morality with psychological fulfillment. Psychology need not choose between empirical and nonempirical facts and experience, as it can have both. This is a difference between a one- and a three-dimensional approach, with empirical psychology adding one crucially

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important dimension, but with philosophy adding other significant dimensions of meaning and depth to the discipline of psychology. NOTES 1. See Kenneth I. Pargament and Annette Mahoney, “Spirituality: Discovering and Conserving the Sacred,” in The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. Shane J. Lopez and C. R. Snyder (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), 646–59. 2. Paul Vitz, “Psychology in Recovery,” First Things (website), March 2005, www.firstthings.com/article/2005/03/psychology-in-recovery. 3. Plato, “Apology,” in The Last Days of Socrates (New York: Penguin, 1965), 68–69. 4. Saint Augustine states, “You are all my good, you the almighty, who are with me even before I am with you.” The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 232. 5. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, 309–10. 6. See Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999), 17. 7. Robert Bolt, www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss2/library/man_for_all _seasons.html. 8. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person, 250. 9. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality (Manchester: Sophia, 1986), 25. 10. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Mentor, 1963), 82. 11. Von Hildebrand, Liturgy, 27. 12. One obvious objection comes from the relation between human owners and their pets, especially dogs. These pets seem to take on a certain individuality missing with animals merely found in nature. It is as if their nature is raised by being in a relation to human love, analogous to human nature being raised by the love of God. They are animals, and yet they can still mysteriously participate to an amazing degree in a personal world. 13. Ted Benton and Ian Craib, Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 172. 14. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person, 237–38. 15. Here I am thinking of people like Saint Matt Talbot (an alcoholic) and Saint Joseph Labre (who may have suffered from schizophrenia).

Selected Bibliography

Allers, Rudolf. The Successful Error. New York: Sheed, 1940. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 2nd Edition. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, Ltd., 1926. Augustine. De Civitate Dei, Book XI, 26. In Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. 2. Edited by Whitney J. Oates. New York: Random House, 1948. _____. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Doubleday, 1960. Benton, Ted, and Ian Craib. Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought. 2nd Edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Bergmann, Olaf, et al. “Evidence for Cardiomyocyte Renewal in Humans.” Science 324, no. 98 (2009): 98–102. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by Colin M. Turbayne. Indianapolis: Bobb-Merrill, 1957. Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons. London: Samuel French, 1962. Brugger, E. Christian, “Psychology and Christian Anthropology,” Edification 3, no. 1 (2009): 5–19. Caruso, Igor. Existential Psychology: From Analysis to Synthesis. New York: Herder and Herder, 1964. Chervin, Ronda. “The Valid Moment.” In Wahrheit, Wert und Sein. Regensburg: Verlag, 1970. Crosby, John. Personalist Papers. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2004. _____. The Selfhood of the Human Person. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996. Danziger, Kurt. “Psychological Objects, Practice, and History.” In Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol. 8. Edited by Hans van Rappard et al. New York: Springer, 1993. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. In Great Books of the Western World. Translated by Constance Garnett. Chicago: Benton, 1952. Dubay, Thomas. The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999. Dulles, Avery. “Truth as the Ground of Freedom: A Theme from John Paul II.” Grand Rapids, MI: Acton, 1995. Frankl, Victor. The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. New York, Random House, 1973. Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘Wolf Man’).” From The Freud Reader. Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. _____. The Ego and the Id. Translated by Joan Riviere. New York: Norton, 1960. _____. “The Libido Theory.” In General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Edited by Philip Reiff. New York: Collier, 1978.

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Selected Bibliography

_____. “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis.” In General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Edited by Philip Reiff. New York: Collier, 1963. _____. “On Narcissism.” In The Standard Edition. Vol. 14. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. _____. “A Philosophy of Life.” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Lecture V. New York: Hogarth Press: 1933. In The Freud Reader. Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. Geller, Leonard. “The Failure of Self-Actualization Theory: A Critique of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 2 (1982): 56–73. Harman, Gilbert H. “The Inference to the Best Explanation.” The Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (Jan. 1965): 88–95. Gilson, Etienne. The Unity of Psychological Experience. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999. Harvey, John. “Relationship Connection.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology. Edited by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hendrick, Susan, and Clyde Hendrick. “Love.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology. Edited by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Horney, Karen. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. New York: Norton, 1937. Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. _____. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Washington Square, 1963. James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Dover, 1995 Joad, C. E. M. Guide to Philosophy. New York: Dover, 1957. Jung, Carl. Red Book, 4th Edition. New York: Norton, 2009. _____. Psychological Types. Revised Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. _____. “Zur Psychologie de Trinitatsidee.” Eranos Jahrbuch (1940–1941): 50. Lamberton, Henry H. “Carl Rogers’ View of Personal Wholeness: An Evaluation and Critique from a Christian Perspective,” accessed October 26, 2011, www.aiias.edu/ict/vol_10/10cc_ 277-296.htm (DOI not available). Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1960. _____. Miracles. In The Best of C. S. Lewis. New York: Baker, 1969. Locke, Edwin A. “Setting Goals for Life and Happiness.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology. Edited by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Macintyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999. Maddi, Salvatore. Personality Theories: A Comparative Analysis. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1968. Maslow, Abraham H. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 1971. _____. Towards a Psychology of Being. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968. May, Rollo. Love and Will. New York: Norton, 1969. Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nichols, Aidan. “The Rebellious Discipleship of Father Victor White: Theology and Psychology in a Critic of C. G. Jung.” In Philosophical Psychology: Psychology, Emotions, and Freedom. Edited by Craig Steven Titus. Arlington, VA: IPS Press, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1968. _____. “The Gay Science.” In The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1968. _____. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Common. Edited by Oscar Levy. Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909–1913. Okasha, Samir. Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pargament, Kenneth I., and Annette Mahoney. “Spirituality: Discovering and Conserving the Sacred.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology. Edited by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pascal, Blasé. Pensees. Translated by W. F. Trotter. New York: Dutton, 1958.

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Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie. New York: Touchstone, 1983. Peters, F. P. Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: Mentor, 1963. Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974. _____. “Apology.” The Last Days of Socrates. New York: Penguin, 1965. Rogers, Carl. On Becoming a Person. Boston: Haughton, 1961. _____. “Becoming a Person.” Austin: University of Texas, Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, 1956. _____. “A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals.” Pendle Hill pamphlet no. 108. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1959. Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Translated by Peter Heath. New York: Schocken Books, 1961. _____. Man’s Place in Nature. Translated by Hans Meyerhoff. New York: Farrar, 1981. _____. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath. New York: Schocken Books, 1961. Schwarz, Stephen. What Is Freedom? Kingston: University of Rhode Island, 2005. Seligman, Martin. “Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology. Edited by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Skinner, B. F. Upon Further Reflection. New York: Prentice-Hall 1986. _____. Science and Human Behavior. New York: MacMillan, 1953. _____. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Bantam, 1972. Sokolowski, Robert. Christian Faith & Human Understanding. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2006. _____. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. _____. Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ten Boom, Corrie. Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul. Edited by Jack Canfield, et al. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1997. Terruwe, Anna A., and Conrad W. Baars. Loving and Curing the Neurotic. New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1972. Von Hildebrand, Dietrich. The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007. _____. Ethics. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1953. _____. What Is Philosophy? New York: Routledge, 1990. _____. The Art of Living. With Alice von Hildebrand. Manchester, NH: Sophia,1994. _____. Graven Images: The Substitutes for a True Morality. With Alice Jourdain. New York: McKay, 1957. _____. The Nature of Love. Translated by John F. Crosby and John Henry Crosby. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009. _____. Liturgy and Personality. Manchester: Sophia, 1986. Vitz, Paul. “Psychology in Recovery.” In First Things. New York: Institute on Religion and Public Life, March 2005. Watson, John. Behaviorism. New York: Norton, 1958. Wenisch, Fritz. “Knowledge.” Unpublished papers. Personal collections of Professor Fritz Wenisch. No date. Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility. Translated by H. T. Willetts. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981. _____. “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” In Person and Community: Selected Essays. Translated by Theresa Sandok. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Wild, John. Introduction to Realistic Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1948.

Index

alienation, 72–74; forgetfulness of self, 72–73; leib, 71; superficiality, 73–74 Allers, Rudolf, 44–45, 136–137 animal nature: intelligence, 96; voluntariness, 102 appearances, 5–6 a priori, 13–14, 86, 92, 181; significance for psychology, 86–88 arbitrary freedom, 114–115; as relative absence of reasons, 114; as subjectively satisfying, 114–115; in contrast to the rationality of freedom, 115–117 archetype. See Carl Jung Aristotle, 25, 114 Augustine, 176 authenticity, 155–156, 180; affectivity, 160–161; logos, 161, 182; moral goodness, 182. See Carl Rogers on “being genuine”; self-possession, 160, 161 Averill, James, 163–164

Caruso, Igor, 48 cause. See efficient cause Chervin, Ronda, 50, 165. See also valid moment coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorium), 125; in contrast to paradox, 125, 126 compatibilism (soft determinism). See determinism conscience, 44–46, 139, 178; in relation to psyche, 47–48; and self-determination, 104–105; in relation to moral substitutes, 138, 140. See also superego consciousness: distinguishing nonconscious from unconscious states, 30; objective and subjective dimensions, 21–22; in relation to conscious being, 11; intentional, 21 cosmological approach, 24–25 Crosby, John, 45–46, 75n5, 105; on individuality, 128–131, 178

Baars, Conrad. See Anna Terruwe behaviorism, 4, 118, 120 Benton, Ted, 181 Berkeley, George, 88n3 bodily dimension of human nature, 62–69; relations between brain and consciousness, 63–66, 66–69 Bolt, Robert, 178

Danziger, Kurt, 18, 23 determinism, 109; hard, 112; kinds of, 110–112. See also B. F. Skinner; soft, 112 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 47, 105 Drob, Sanford, 125, 126 dualism, 70

191

192

Index

efficient causality, 66–69, 83–84; in relation to rational consciousness, 66–67; principle of, 117–120, 122 ego, 10–11, 36; in relation to personal self, 10–11; two senses of, 10 empathy, 147, 147–148. See also Carl Rogers empirical (scientific) method, 17–19 empirical intuition, 17, 19 empiricism, 2, 61; criticisms, 62–66, 72–74, 78–80, 81–85; objective dimension, 61–74; subjective dimension, 77–88 envy, 54 expression, bodily, 19–20 first principles, 122; unifying being and knowledge, 132 Frankl, Victor, 4, 12, 86, 150–151 freedom. See also arbitrary freedom; spontaneous freedom; will: existence of, 102 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 5, 12, 24, 43, 46, 48, 61, 91, 98, 132; Freudian cynicism, 41; iceberg topographical map, 35; rationality of science, 99, 100; reality principle, 35. See also ego; id; superego functional relations, 118 God: in negative psychology, 173; in positive psychology, 173; in relation to psychological fulfillment, 174–183; omnipotence of, 59n25 happiness, 183–184 hard determinism. See determinism Harvey, John, 91–92 Hendrick, Susan and Clyde, 91–92 heart, 15. See also personal powers of soul; nature and existence of, 105–107; rationality of, 106 Heraclitus, 12, 113, 181 Horney, Karen, 142 Hume, David, 7, 24, 25, 88n5 Humanist psychology, 1, 6 Husserl, Edmund, 6 id, 40, 58n1 idealism, 8

identification, 148 identity, principle of, 121, 128–131 illusion, 5–6 immanence: in Jung, 152n5 importance, 141; in relation to repression, 141 individuality. See identity, principle of inductive generalization, 13, 91; as an objection against insight, 80–81 inference: in contrast to expression, 20; in contrast to the unique privacy of personal existence, 20; inference to best explanation, 18, 119 insight. See intellectual intuition instinct, 30; in relation to rationality, 30; in relation to love, 91 intellect, 15. See also personal powers of soul intellectual intuition (insight), 77, 78–80; in relation to inductive generalization, 79–81; into strictly necessary universal essence structures, 84, 85–86 intentionality, 21, 31; in relation to what is non-intentional, 21; introjection, 46; transcendence, 28 intelligibility, 12; a priori, 13–14, 123; as synonymous with logos, 2; degrees of, 123; dimensions of, 12–14; empirical, 12–13; in relation to rationality, 100; principle of, 121, 123–124 intention, 111; in relation to motive, 111 intrinsic preciousness. See value introjection, 45, 46–47, 48 irrationality, 14; in contrast to a lack of intelligibility, 14 intuition, 25n1, 92. See also empirical intuition; intellectual intuition James, William, 4, 7–8 Jung, Carl, 3, 4, 43; magic, 127–128; Plato, 137; principle of noncontradiction, 125–128 Kohler, Wolfgang, 96–97 korper, 71; in relation to self-presence, 69; empiricism, 71 Lamberton, Henry, 158–159 lateral self-presence. See self-presence

Index leib. See korper Lewis, C. S.: on rationality, 98–99, 123 Locke, John, 7 logos, 12–14; in relation to mature internalization, 146; objective, 12, 78; subjective, 12, 15 logotherapy, 12. See Victor Frankl love, 91–93, 131; in relation to instincts, 91 Maslow, Abraham, 162–163, 164 meaningful but non-necessary facts, 79 meanings-in-themselves, 3, 40–41 mind-dependent reality, 5–6, 8 mind-independent reality, 4–5, 28 moral substitutes, 138–140; repression of, 141 moral virtue, 51–52; See also superactual consciousness motivation, 104; compatibilism, 110; rational and irrational, 112; subjectively satisfying, 103; value, 104 motive, 111–112; in relation to freedom, 112 multiple personalities, 64–65; in relation to spiritual possession, 65 Nagel, Thomas, 122 negative psychology, 90, 155, 173. See also positive psychology Nietzsche, Friederich, 42–44, 53, 56–57, 176–177, 178; See also ressentiment noncontradiction, principle of, 124–128; Jungian interpretation of, 125–128 Parmenides, 113, 181 Pascal, Blaise, 108n14; affectivity, 106 Peck, Scott, 163 Pieper, Josef, 179–180 personal identity, 65–66 person, 15–16; centered-in-themselves, 130; irreplaceability, 131; narrower and wider meanings, 15 personal powers of soul, 15–16; heart, 105–107; intellect, 96–102; will, 102–105 personal self: distinct from the body, 62; person in the narrower sense, 15; real existence of, 95–96; united with the body, 70–71

193

phenomenology, 6 philosophy: method of investigation, 12–13, 78–81; of this text, 4; versus “spinning theories,” 77 Plato. See Carl Jung positive psychology, 88, 89–93. See also negative psychology; Martin Seligman pragmatism, 8 Protagoras, 88n2 psyche, 9–10; as one, 39; in relation to person, 34; in relation to rationality, 29–37, 40–44; reverberations in psyche, 41–44 psychic acts, 11 psychic being, 11; Freud, Sigmund, 11; in relation to bodily processes, 11; in relation to consciousness, 11 psychoanalysis, 4 psychologism, 100, 132, 135–136; in Freud, 152n2; in Jung, 136–138; in relation to repression, 141–152; in Rogers, 142–152 radical dualism. See dualism rationality, 2–16, 30, 105; and philosophy, 1; in relation to efficient causality, 67–68; measure of irrationality, 29; of freedom, 115–117; of health, 29; of the heart, 106–107 rationalization, 52 realism, 6–7, 16–5, 140 repression, 48, 52, 55; rationally motivated, 140–142 relativism, 56–57 resentment, 49–50 ressentiment, 53–58 revenge, 54 Rogers, Carl, 1, 4, 107, 142–143, 179, 180, 184; “accepting others,” 144–146; “being genuine” (authenticity), 155–161; logos, 159; “sensitive empathy,” 147–149; self-actualization, 156, 157 Sartre, Jean Paul, 6, 163, 165–166, 179 Scheler, Max, 53–58, 59n26, 98; Distinguishing personal and animal intelligence, 96–97 self-evidence, 133n1

194

Index

self-fulfillment: in relation to feelings, 160–161, 163; in relation to authenticity (being genuine), 155–156, 162; in relation to empathy, 145. See also Rogers on self-actualization self, personal, 10–11 self-determination: in freedom, 104–105, 111 self-presence, 17, 21–22, 158–162; and the denial of self, 23–24; and the empirical method, 61, 71; as self giving, 22; compared to leib, 71; in relation to superficiality, 73; in relation to the brain, 62; what decreases, 74; what increases, 74 self-reflection, 73, 103; excessive, 22; forgetfulness of self, 72 Seligman, Martin, 4, 89, 91, 92. See also positive psychology Skinner, B. F., 3, 4, 20, 24, 61, 86, 102; compatibilism, 114; concerning value, 116; on efficient causality, 118; on motivation, 114–115, 115–116, 120; on the rationality of freedom, 113–115 soft determinism (compatibilism). See determinism Sokolowski, Robert, 27, 74n1, 88n4 solipsism, 28 spontaneous freedom, 101 subjectively satisfying, importance of, 103, 108n12; in relation to B. F. Skinner, 112 substantial existence, 81–83

superactual consciousness, 51–53 superego, 40; in relation to conscience, 44–47 Ten Boom, Corrie, 49–51 Terruwe, Anna, 42 Tolstoy, Leo, 138–139, 164–165 truth, 164, 173, 174, 175; absolute, 79; in relation to freedom, 167–169 universal essence structures: in relation to individual beings, 85–86, 181 valid moment, 8, 50, 51, 165 value (intrinsic importance), 2, 8; as a mind independent reality, 5; in contrast to value relativism, 56, 91; in relation to personal autonomy, 146; in relation to ressentiment, 53; ressentiment “value,” 56, 57–58, 84–85 Vitz, Paul, 89, 173 Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 51, 94n9, 120n6, 179, 180; concerning the moral substitutes, 138–140; on the will, 101 Watson, John, 19–20, 21, 24 Wenisch, Fritz, 88n1 Wilde, Oscar, 36 will, 15; existence of, 102–104; nature of, 101–102. See also personal powers of soul; spontaneous freedom Wojtyla, Karol (Pope John Paul II), 24–25, 94n8

About the Author

James A. Harold is professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He holds a PhD in philosophy from International Academy of Philosophy, an MA in psychology from Pepperdine University, and an MA in philosophy from University of Dallas. Since there were tremendous psychological insights gained from all these educational experiences that went in very different directions, this book is his attempt to integrate and reconcile them together. He is also author of An Introduction to the Love of Wisdom: An Essential and Existential Approach to Philosophy.

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