Preface To Toward A Philosophic Psychology

Preface To “Toward a Philosophic Psychology”

It may be that humans are incapable of the study and healing of the soul, or that psychiatry is in practice impossible because we are not capable of it. This problem may be at the root of the contemporary crisis of psychiatry and the failure in general of modern psychology to improve much upon the traditions for the common care of souls. At present, most practitioners arising from the medical background, and taking on a 2 year study of neuro-pharmacology, are inclined to deny the existence of the “soul.” That might make a psychology difficult! Indeed, we look to the future, to programs in psych-iatry or soul-healing that attract a different kind of student, more capable of the study. Just as biology must assume the existence of life even if it does not know what it is, so psychology must assume the existence of the soul, leaving it to philosophy to try to explain what this assumption might mean. In practice, a psychiatry will continue to be necessary regardless of whether it can be improved. We say the effort is worthwhile.

Aristotle, After opening his work suggesting that the knowledge of the soul is of “higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects” than other kinds of knowledge, addresses the especial difficulty of what we now call “psychology.” As our translators have:

“To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.”He then raises the question of method, how to approach the what of this thing, and whether it will be the same as other methods of inquiry into the what of things, and whether it has parts. He treats the soul at least at the beginning as synonymous with the life or the principle of the animate, while what we intend in psychology is to study the especially human soul. This question, whether we mean all animal life, all animate life or rather especially the human animate life, precedes another which is alike a great difficulty, as we shall see in Chapter 1, of whether the soul is a mind or rather has a mind, and for the mind, whether this is or has a soul. These difficulties may be due in part to a problem inherent in self knowledge- that it is the subject that is doing the inquiry. So when we try to know man, we are both limited and enabled by our present condition which is ascending. And if Plato is correct, it is turning and ascent of the soul itself that is needed to know the soul: Psychology is not available to the faculty called logistikon while it is serving the ends of the appetites, while in other sciences, such as calculus, the soul itself doing the inquiry may not be in this way decisive. In addition to the difficulties attaining leisure that inhibit other studies, humans will not be capable of psychology if it requires the ascent from the cave to which Plato referred.

But this is just what we hold to be true- that the study of psychology is especially that referenced in the section of the allegory corresponding to the second section of the divided line. If the philosophic ascent is impossible- as all German philosophy assumes- well, that will explain why a genuine or scientific psychology has been hitherto- in a certain sense- impossible. Modern subjectivism may have tried to locate the higher things of the cosmos inside the human mind, mistaking knowledge for being and knowledges for forms- making a phenomenological psychology confused if not impossible or worse. Plato writes the description of Socrates to Glaucon:

Plato, Republic, 516a: “At first he would most easily make out the shadows and after that the phantoms of the human beings and other things in water, and later the things themselves. And from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven and heaven itself…(532 b-c) …Then, I said, the release from bonds and the turning around from the shadows to the phantoms and the light, the way up from the cave to the sun, and once there, the persisting inability to look at the plants and the sun’s light, and looking instead at the divine appearances in water and at the shadows of things that are, rather than as before at shadows of phantoms cast by a light that, when judged by comparison with the sun, also has the quality of a shadow of a phantom…

The “human beings” at 516 is the place of psychology, far above and presupposing the studies of poetry and the laws, the regimes and the characters that we hold are the shadows and phantoms of the nature of man. It is the study of the soul by nature- as there are no artificial beings outside the cave. The attempt to understand man according to the nature of the preSocratics, in terms of physics neurons or even the appetites of the animal, taken as the animal nature, may be hopelessly caved attempts to see the nature through the visible things. This nature of the soul may even be that same form of the regimes and souls seen in place of the Homeric images on the wall of the cave, and the characters shaped by the tunes of Homeric Greece. One wonders if the soul outside still has the same three parts. The attempt at theoretical psychology is a lifelong endeavor, simply impossible for most- and surely not accessible to a program of university studies intending to do more than give access to the library from which such a thing might be conducted. But we hold that it is on the possibility of this theoretical virtue that a scientific psychology depends, and that much else in practice too depends upon our success at theoretical psychology. The first effect, though, of the acceptance of the exalted nature and vastness of the topic is to communicate the reverence to which Socrates referred as the knowledge of ignorance. This should moderate psychiatry in practice, if anything at all might have this effect, as it is the case that we simply do not know what we are doing.A final preface word: Platonic psychology is presented as propaedeutic to the study of the cosmos:

“from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven,” and he does not mean the decorations in the heaven of the literal reading of the 4th study after antistrophe., but a study of even higher dignity. Psychology is then the true prolegomena to metaphysics. Hence we notice that the cosmos in the allegory has two parts, the intelligible and the visible, the latter referring to manmade images and laws. But outside the cave these are seen in water, and even later called “divine images in water.”

So the knowledge of the soul, recollected, appears through the images, and the men in turn prove to be themselves “divine images in water.”