n[1-1]
Throughout the text of the book above, the first number inside the parentheses refers to the corresponding works listed in the Bibliography; where applicable, page numbers in Roman type follow the bibliographic reference. For example: (18, 41, 45), would mean pages 41 and 45 in the eighteenth book listed in the Bibliography.
n[1-2]
I do not mean to imply that "rehumanization" as a world view is necessarily the last word, Even before rehumanization has been well established, the shape of a world view beyond it is already beginning to be discernible. I shall speak below of selfless person-transcending values and realities, i.e., of a higher level of humanness, self-actualization, authenticity, and identity, in which the person becomes part of the world rather than its center.
n[1-3]
"In his law of the growth of the great kingdoms Newton was performing for political history a function similar, mutatis mutandis, to his discovery of the laws of motion (it was universal and it was simple), though he considered that prophets like Daniel had anticipated him by depicting the same history of the 'four kingdoms' in hieroglyphic language. Newton never wrote a history of men - they do not seem to count as individuals in his narrative - but of bodies politic as he had written a history of bodies physical. These agglomerations did not spring into being suddenly; like the physical planets they too had an 'original,' a history of creation, an extension in space which could be marked chronologically, and they too would have an end. Newton's chronological writings might be called the mathematical principles of the consolidation of empires because they dealt primarily with quantities of geographic space in a temporal sequence; the individuals mentioned in his histories, usually royal personages, were merely signposts marking the progressive expansion of territories; they have no distinctive human qualities. The subject matter of his history was the action of organized political land masses upon one another; crucial events were the fusion of previously isolated smaller units or the destruction of cohesive kingdoms by quantitatively superior forces. Moreover, Newton's principles of the consolidation of empires were equally true throughout the geographic world, in China as well as in Egypt.
"When men did at times obtrude into his histories, Newton almost unconsciously imputed simple motives to their actions. His kings are automatonlike agents in the acquisition of power and the extension of dominion. When on rare occasions he examines them more closely they invariably operate in terms of the seventeenth-century balance of power principles, If an empire is in a state of distraction alliances are made by its enemies to take quick advantage of its weakness, Royal lust for acquisition is based on 'vanity' and other such staples of contemporary literary psychology. All dynasts, ancient and modern, look alike; they merely have different titles, and the theaters where they perform have different place names. They have no more character, either psychological or historical, than persons described in Apollodorus' Library . Newton found no proofs of the glory of God, as John Ray had, in the complexities and beauties of the organic world; he sought His impress almost exclusively in laws of the physical-astronomical universe. It was not the passions of men in history but the principles of the physical-astronomical universe. It was not the wondrous combination of parts in the eye but the principles of optics which stirred his imagination. It was not the passions of men in history but the principles of the physical growth of monarchies and the chronology of kingdoms that moved him. Everything human is alien to him - at least insofar as he expressed himself on mankind. His history hardly ever records a feeling, an emotion. Nations are for the most part puppets, neutral as astronomical bodies; they invade and they are in their turn conquered; they grow larger and kingdoms coalesce - nothing more until Rome arises to rule the world."
F. Manuel, Isaac Newton; Historian (Harvard Univ, Pr., 1963), pp. 137-138.
n[2-1]
When the person becomes an object of knowledge for himself, the situation becomes even more complicated. Generally it is better for him to have a skilled helper, which at once generates various subtle relationships between the person and his helper. How unusual this relationship may become was brought home to me dramatically in a psychotherapy class for psychiatric residents run by Dr. William Murphy, perhaps ten years ago. "I place upon my patients the fullest load of depression and anxiety that they are able to bear", he said. Remember this is a psychotherapist trying to understand his patient and also helping this person to know himself better. I am not sure that this was meant as an epistemological statement, but it most surely was just that. Granted that this relationship between knower and known is different from the more "normal" epistemological relationship between a histologist and the slides that he is studying, and granted also that the latter relationship has been the model one, yet I believe it is clear that theories of knower-known relationships must be broadened to cover the former as well as the latter.
n[3-1]
"There are many ways of coping with such anxieties and some of these are cognitive. To such a person, the unfamiliar, the vaguely perceived, the mysterious, the hidden, the unexpected are all apt to be threatening. One way of rendering them familiar, predictable, manageable, controllable, i.e., unfrightening, and harmless, is to know them and to understand them. And so knowledge may have not only a growing-forward function, but also an anxiety-reducing function, a protective, homeostatic function. The overt behavior may be very similar, but the motivations may be extremely different. And the subjective consequences are then also different. On the one hand we have the sigh of relief, the feeling of lowered tension, let us say, of the worried householder exploring a mysterious and frightening noise downstairs in the middle of the night with a gun in his hand. This is quite different from the illumination and exhilaration, even the ecstasy, of a young student looking through a microscope who sees for the first time the minute structure of a cell, or who suddenly understands a symphony or the meaning of an intricate poem or political theory. In the latter instances, one feels bigger, smarter, stronger, fuller, more capable, successful, more perceptive.
"This motivational dialectic can be seen on the largest human canvases, the great philosophies, the religious structures, the political and legal systems, the various sciences, even the culture as a whole. To put it very simply, too simply, they can represent simultaneously the outcome of the need to understand and the need for safety in varying proportions. Sometimes the safety needs can almost entirely bend the cognitive needs to their own anxiety-allaying purposes. The anxiety-free person can be more bold and more courageous and can explore and theorize for the sake of knowledge itself. It is certainly reasonable to assume that the latter is more likely to approach the truth, the real nature of things. A safety-philosophy or religion or science is more apt to be blind than a growth-philosophy, religion or science" (43, 61-62).
n[3-2]
See Horney's Neurotic Personality Of Our Time for excellent differentiations of the neurotic needs for love, safety, respect, etc. from healthy needs for love, safety, or respect.
n[4-1]
A personal note may help to keep a balance between these dialectical tendencies and to guard against the either-or choice of mutual exclusiveness that is almost a reflex in our society. In the psychoanalysis of my own intellectual and scientific life, I have found it necessary to avoid temptations from both overcaution and overcourage, overcontrol and overimpulsiveness. I think this kind of perpetual conflict, this necessity for daily choices between retreat and advance, conservation and boldness, etc., is a necessary and intrinsic part of the life of the scientist. Polanyi (60) has made this even clearer with his demonstrations that scientific knowledge is "personal", that it necessarily involves judgment, taste, faith, gambling, connoisseurship, commitment, responsibility.
n[4-2]
"Hysterical" and "schizoid tendencies" are both desirable standard equipment for the well-rounded, versatile, and flexible scientist (in whom they are not dichotomized from the rest of his personality and are therefore not pathologized). As I have already said, it is difficult to conceive of the extreme hysteric or the extreme schizophrenic as at all wanting to be a scientist or as able to be. The extreme obsessional can be a scientist of a certain kind, or at any rate, a technologist.
n[6-1]
This world of experience can be described with two languages, a subjective, phenomenological one and an objective, "na?vely realistic" one, as Niels Bohr pointed out long ago. Each one can be close to the language of everyday life, and yet neither describes life completely. Each has its uses and both are necessary.
Psychotherapists have long since learned to differentiate these languages and to use them differently. For instance, in the analysis of interpersonal relationships, they try to teach their patients to say, in a nonblaming, nonprojecting way, "Somehow in your presence I feel small" (or "rejected", or "angry", etc.) rather than saying "You don't like me", "You think you're better than I am", "Stop trying to dominate me", or "Why do you enjoy making me feel stupid?" That is, they teach them to experience their emotions as being inside themselves rather than automatically projecting them outward, as most people do. This obviously important differentiation is too huge to pursue any further here.
n[6-2]
A much fuller treatment of this topic is available in (45).
n[6-3]
A simple example of the way in which experiencing meshes with rationality is seen in the technique of "brainstorming", in which criticism is postponed to a second stage after all the crazy and wild ideas have been permitted to emerge. Very similar is the Primary Rule of psychoanalysis. The patient is taught not to select from or edit his free associations, as they emerge into consciousness and into speech. After they have been said out loud, they can then be examined, discussed, criticized. This is an example of the way in which "experiencing" is a cognitive tool for finding portions of the truth which other methods fail to find.
n[6-4]
It was said of a certain book in an unintentionally amusing way that it was "a forthright, courageous and highly rigorous study on the difficult problem of woman's sexuality, about which so little is known". Could it possibly be more clear that the word "known" is used here in a special sense, a sense that is chosen but that is not the only possible choice? In the experiential sense it is hard to think of anything better known than female sexuality. Has any phenomenon evoked more curiosity, speculation, theorizing, and careful and loving investigation and personal attention? And will any verbal description be of much use until personal experiencing has occurred? And yet this same example will serve beautifully to show not only that experiential knowledge is prepotent to abstract knowledge but also how limited mere experiential knowledge can be. This statement is correct if it refers to shared, public, structured, organized knowledge. There is in truth little "developed scientific knowledge" of female sexuality, although there could easily be.
n[6-5]
"The scientific method, as far as it is a method, is nothing more than doing one's damndest with one's mind, no holds barred" (Percy Bridgman, 8).
n[6-6]
Is all therapy self-therapy? Do they want to keep on curing themselves? Do they need to? Is this a way of giving oneself love and forgiveness? of embracing one's past and assimilating it, transforming it into something good? Does this not suggest that other helping activities, e.g., psychotherapy, education, parenthood, may possibly be seen in a new light with the aid of this paradigm? And does not this possibility in turn suggest the great question, "To what extent is any personal and interpersonal knowing a knowing by identification, i.e., a self-knowing? How useful is such a point of view?"
n[6-7]
There are many such situations. Drug and alcohol addiction are two better-known examples. But it is also being discovered that Negroes had better deal with Negroes in many situations, Indians with Indians, Jews with Jews, and Catholics with Catholics. The generalization can be pushed far, although sometimes it gets more and more diluted in the process, e.g., women with women, orphans with orphans, spastics with spastics, homosexuals with homosexuals, etc.
n[6-8]
Is the diplomate, the Ph.D., the M.D., the professional, the only person permitted to be wise? knowledgeable? insightful? to discover? to cure? Must there be a laying on of hands by some bishop before one is permitted to enter the holy of holies? to forgive sins? Is it really wise and functional to demand a college degree as a prerequisite for so many jobs rather than seeking actual education, knowledge, skill, capacity, suitability for the job? Is a classroom really the only place or the best place to get educated? Is all knowledge conveyable in words? Can it all be put into books? into courses of lectures? Can it always be measured by written tests? Must any mother defer to any child psychologist? Are ministers in charge of all religious experiences? Must one take courses in "Introduction to Creative Writing", "Intermediate Creative Writing", and "Advanced Creative Writing" before writing a poem? Will a living room chosen by an expert, certified, and professional interior decorator make me happier than my own choice? These questions deliberately push to the extreme. Only so long as we remain watchful and suspicious of the dangers of bureaucratizing, of politically structured organizations, and of churches may we soberly acknowledge their necessity. And only if we remember how easily a technologist can become a means specialist, forgetting about ends, can we use him well and avoid the dangers of "rule by experts."
Someone has defined technology as "the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
n[8-1]
"... Science should resolutely set its face against anything which would limit its scope, or which would arbitrarily narrow the methods or perspectives of its own pursuit of knowledge.
"Valuable as have been the contributions of behaviorism, I believe that time will indicate the unfortunate effects of the bounds it has tended to impose. To limit oneself to consideration of externally observable behaviors to rule out consideration of the whole universe of inner meanings, of purposes, of the inner flow of experiencing, seems to me to be closing our eyes to great areas which confront us when we look at the human world . . .
"In contrast, the trend of which I am speaking will attempt to face up to all of the realities in the psychological realm. Instead of being restrictive and inhibiting, it will throw open the whole range of human experiencing to scientific study" (65,80).
n[8-2]
Collating from various of Northrop's writings, we have the two sets of phrases to describe the two kinds of knowledge or of reality. On the one hand, Concepts of Postulation: the theoretic component of things, the theoretic continuum, the theoretically known, the scientifically known, the inferred, the theoretically inferred, inferred facts. Contrasted with these are Concepts by Inspection or by Intuition: the esthetic component of things, the esthetic continuum, the ineffable, the purely factually given, transitory sense data, the empirically known, impressionistically known, immediately apprehended, empirically immediate, pure fact, purely empirical. immediately experienced, pure observation, the sensuous qualities.
n[8-3]
Toward maps, graphs, formulas, schemata, equations, diagrams, blueprints, abstract art, X- rays, outlines, condensations, pr?cis, summaries, symbols, signs, cartoons, sketches, models, skeletons, plans, charts, recipes.
n[9-1]
When an interviewer confessed to Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of the screenplay "Last Year at Marienbad", an incomplete understanding of the movie, the writer laughed and said. "Moi non plus". This is certainly not an uncommon reaction any more Sometimes, I feel, it is an "in" thing to do, even a point of pride, to confess to lack of conscious meaningfulness in one's own artistic products and even to imply that the question itself is old-fashioned. This deliberate effort to renounce or to destroy meaningfulness sometimes appears to symbolize destruction of the establishment, of authority, and of traditions and conventions (whose falsehood seems to be taken for granted). Consciously or unconsciously it is intended as an attack upon hypocrisy, as a blow for freedom, for authenticity. It is as if a lie were being destroyed. This kind of obvious dichotomizing gives way easily before hierarchical-integrative attitudes.
n[9-2]
T. S. Eliot, when asked, "Please, Sir, what do you mean by the line: 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'?" replied: I mean, 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree' ... " (Stephen Spender, "Remembering Eliot", Encounter , XXIV [April 1965], 4). Picasso has been similarly quoted' "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand it? But in the case of a painting people have to understand."
n[9-3]
In the very creative or great scientists I felt that, as is their custom, they integrated both qualities instead of giving up one in favor of the other. Even so I found it useful to make this typological differentiation, and so did some of the people I talked with and some whose personal accounts I have read. The question for them is when to be tough and when soft, rather than which to be - hard or soft. Within psychology, my impression remains that some such polar differentiation may separate those "typical" experimental psychologists (who are poor clinicians) from the "typical" clinical psychologists (who are poor researchers), even though the one small research that I completed does not strongly support this guess (55).
n[11-1]
"If you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results; he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool". (William James)
n[12-1]
Sahakian, W., and M. Sahakian, Realms of Philosophy (Schenkman Publishing Co., 1965), pp. 3,4.
n[12-2]
Writers At Work: Second Series (Viking, 1963), p. 344.
n[13-1]
See esp. Northrop (59), Watson (75,76), and Kuhn (30).
n[13-2]
"... Biology will run dry unless it becomes more receptive than it is presently to unsuspected phenomena, unpredictable on the basis of what is already known. Science does not progress only by inductive, analytical knowledge. The imaginative speculations of the mind come first, the verification and the analytical breakdown come only later. And imagination depends upon a state of emotional and intellectual freedom which makes the mind receptive to the impressions that it receives from the world in its confusing, overpowering, but enriching totality. We must try to experience again the receptivity of the young ages of science when it was socially acceptable to marvel. What Baudelaire said of art applies equally well to science: 'Genius is youth recaptured.' More prosaically, I believe that in most cases the creative scientific act comes before the operations which lead to the establishment of truth; together they make science. "Many great experimenters in all fields of science have described how their ideas were determined in large part by unanalytical, visionary perceptions. Likewise, history shows that most specific scientific theories have emerged and have been formulated gradually from crude intuitive sketches. In this light, the first steps in the recognition of patterns or in the development of new concepts are more akin to artistic awareness than to what is commonly regarded as the 'scientific method.' " (R. Dubos, The Dreams of Reason [Columbia University Press, 1961], pp. 122-123.)
n[14-1]
By this term I mean removal or destruction of either emotion or ceremony. Here I follow Eliade's usage (18) in spite of etymological difficulties which have been pointed out to me by S. Joseph Peake. "Desanctification" would be more correct in referring to feelings; "desacralization" refers more to ceremonies and rites. I shall use the latter word to cover both feelings and ceremonies.
n[14-2]
It is possible that this kind of "tough" training is necessary for a surgeon. That is debatable. But for a psychotherapist? for an "interpersonal knower" through caring and love? Clearly it is an antipsychological training!
n[14-3]
We do have much useful knowledge of persons and societies, but I would maintain that much of it comes from heterodox sources, i.e., from humanistic science rather than from mechanistic science.
n[14-4]
"All science is only a make-shift, a means to an end which is never attained . . . all description is postponed till we know the whole, but then science itself will be cast aside. But unconsidered expressions of our delight which any natural object draws from us are something complete and final in themselves, since all nature is to be regarded as it concerns man; and who knows how near to absolute truth such unconscious affirmations may come? . .. We shall see but little if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding". (Thoreau)
n[14-5]
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
- WALT WHITMAN