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Worldviews and Open-Mindedness: Pedagogical Methods, Part I

         
When I was in the college classroom introducing religious worldviews to my students (being a city college, some of the students were middle-age), I used an analogy to help them consider how a religious or spiritual worldview might differ from one that is purely secular, say, of a humanist or existentialist kind, or simply one, not necessarily coherent as a whole (perhaps in part not even intelligible) and thus more like a bricolage, assembled from this or that source, more or less intentionally, but still functioning like an ideology or worldview for most purposes in the lifeworld of the student (unlike science, religions, so to speak, can and often do proffer a ‘theory of everything’). I would ask them to consider how a physicist might describe their desks (a description that may vary a bit depending on the particular field of physics) in comparison to how they might describe them. The student would say things like, the desk is ‘hard’ to the touch, it ‘solid,’ it is this or that color, made up of parts, including metal and wood, inert, and so on.

Needless to say, and depending on how our physicist understands the nature of matter (at the very least, the desk consists of different sorts of particles dancing around, that is, anything but inert), the description of the desk by a physicist will be radically different from this everyday description that relies on our senses and basic (‘folk’) knowledge (i.e., which is dependent on a number of fairly standard concepts and categories) of what are sometimes referred to a “middle-” or “medium-sized” objects in the natural and social worlds. In any case, what we have here are two rather different accounts of the same object, two pictures, if you will. Many philosophers today, at least those who are not “scientistic” or traffic in the imperialism of science (or even one science, physics), would say that neither picture represents the one true description, that each is true, as we say, in its own way, according to the conceptual parameters of vocabulary and discourse which have been created for specific and discrete purposes and functions, one in the language of physics, the other the vernacular language of everyday life. We can have, in principle, pluralistic descriptions of the same “objects,” each being relatively true (and assuming neither aspires to ‘absolute’ truth). Insofar as theories and pictures change and evolve in the natural and social sciences, the physicist of the future may describe our desk somewhat differently from the physicist of today, while our student of the future will more or less likely say the same things about our desk (unless the material and design of desks itself changes). That may not be relevant for the analogy unless it somehow speaks to questions of custom, tradition, and norms.

Thus a religious or spiritual person and our non-religious person understands and views the same world in different ways, arguably not quite as different as the respective descriptions of our desk, although religious mysticism (one that is a significant part of more than a few religious worldviews, east and west) should be viewed as an exception, serving as a better fit or at least more akin in fact to our model of radically different descriptions. I don’t want to belabor the analogy, which was used merely to soften the students up in the sense that those who were quite ignorant, skeptical, or simply dismissive of religions altogether might as a consequence come to be a bit less judgmental or less dispositionally hostile to religious “pictures.” I also invoked numerous examples of religious art around the world as part of this attempt to soften if not alter their beliefs and attitudes on this score. I was of course not trying to convert anyone to any one religious worldview, but attempting in my awkward way to get them to be open-minded, a quality one would think should come naturally to our young charges, but given child-rearing and pedagogical practices, and the nature of our society more generally, that often does not appear to be the case. What I am doing is not dissimilar, at least in spirit, from what James Kellenberger attempts in his book, The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (University of California Press, 1985). While my analogy is quite simple and straightforward, Kellenberger’s strategy is more sophisticated, including an attempt to be less polemical when it comes to adjudicating and assessing treatments of knowledge generally and rationality or reason in particular within religious worldviews. Kellenberger discusses the two main approaches to the “cognitivity” of religion among both insiders and outsiders (or emic and etic approaches) which we will introduce with the following list:

(i) rationalist perspective v. anti-rationalist perspective

(ii) knowledge perspective v. anti-knowledge perspective

(iii) knowledge perspective v. faith perspective

(iv) cognitivist belief perspective v. non-cognitive belief perspective

(v) intellectual perspective v. inwardness perspective

Kellenberger is not happy with these crude and somewhat reductionist dichotomies so he proffers two predominant perspectives at work in the question of the cognitivity of religion: (I) one oriented negatively toward knowledge and the cognitive, the First Perspective, and (II) one oriented positively toward knowledge and the cognitive, the Second Perspective. I can only sketch a few facets of his treatment, but they should suffice by way of acquiring a strong sense of the differences between these two perspectives or orientations to the cognitivity question. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (and the so-called Neo-Wittgensteinians), in importantly different ways, exemplify the First Perspective, while the likes of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas argue that rationality or reason is inherently good and thus not necessarily at odds with religious belief (I suspect Pascal is betwixt and between these two perspectives owing to his unique approach to religious belief and faith, an approach crystallized in his locution, ‘reasons of the heart’). To be sure, Kellenberger provides us with instances of philosophers and theologians who fall into one or other perspective depending on the specific topic being addressed.

Kellenberger concludes that “both perspectives are attractive, [for] both appeal with good reason to aspects of religious sensitivity [and sensibility]. Consequently it is not surprising that some philosophers, like Robert Herbert and John Hick [and, I would add, Ninian Smart], tend toward one perspective on some issues and toward the other perspective on other issues. And it is not surprising that some philosophers, like Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, show an ambivalent tendency toward both perspectives on certain single issues.”

Kellenberger argues that whether or not we are religious adherents, “believers or non-believers,” we can see clearly that the two approaches are no less “antithetical” and “pull in different directions,” perspectives that in some measure at least, I think, are captured by and played out in the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians refer to as the ‘Old’ Testament, and thus superseded by the ‘New’ Testament). Kellenberger suspects this state of affairs leaves us dissatisfied, and thus it is natural for us to seek some sort of resolution, a via media or a “third perspective” that transcends while subsuming much of what remains salient or indispensable in the first two orientations. Before going further I should note that Kellenberger is discussing our topic primarily on the basis of presumed knowledge and familiarity with Abrahamic religions, especially Judaism and Christianity (Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, are mentioned rarely and only the latter is cited as being of some relevance to his treatment), although I am convinced his model would require little modification by way of rendering it cross-culturally applicable if not robust and I gather from scattered comments throughout the text that Kellenberger would welcome such an extension, that is, not only of the First and Second Perspectives, but a “third perspective” as well.

Kellenberger elaborates a “Third Perspective” regarding the cognitivity of religion rather than settle on a via media (it seems unlikely that this would satisfy either party) to resolve or simply attempt to weaken the conspicuous differences between the two predominant perspectives or orientations. He frankly admits that the focus of his “third perspective” will be on “its Judeo-Christian manifestations” (in keeping with the earlier elaboration of the first two perspectives), although he does not believe “that it is limited to that heritage.” In the words of Kellenberger, the “third perspective”

“… is embodied in the reflections of certain though not all mystics, in the sensibilities of the authors of various devotional works, and pre-eminently in the Psalms. … [I]n the Judeo-Christian tradition the home of the Third Perspective is in the Psalms and secondarily, in certain mystical and devotional works. At least this is true so far as written religious expression is concerned. One could also say that the home of the Third Perspective is found in the lives, the sensibilities, and the self-understanding of many individual believers.”

        
Suffice to say that had I been teaching graduate students about the cross-cultural examination of worldviews, rather than community college students who confessed to knowing very little about religions, including those in which some of them had in fact been raised, and thus assuming they had already taken undergraduate courses in the study of such worldviews, I would have used Kellenberger’s model rather than my simple if not awkward analogy by way of giving them a taste of what is unique in the comparative study of worldview pluralism wherein religious worldviews are distinguished in several important respect from non-religious or secular worldviews.

Part II will begin to fill out some of the details of what Kellenberger means by this Third Perspective of the model of cognitivity in religious worldviews.

Democratic Theory and Practice from Rhetoric to Praxis: collective reasoning, social epistemology (including science), and collective agency

The following titles concern topics that at various points overlap with each other even if their respective analyses are sometimes made in apparent ignorance in work in nearby fields of intellectual inquiry. My particular focus concerns democratic theory and practice, as well as notions of collective agency and responsibility. As in my prior post, what should be included within this list is material from psychoanalytic psychology, especially (individual and) group psychology (or ‘the psychology of groups’ or ‘social psychoanalysis’), of the sort found, for example (and thus among others), in the pioneering studies of Wilfred Bion, R.D. Hinshelwood, and James M. Glass, on the one hand, and Erich Fromm on the other (perhaps I can add those titles at a later date). Finally, it is my strong belief that this represents the kind of literature avowed Marxists, socialists, anarchists should be—or become—intimately familiar, assuming their commitment to what we now call “realistic utopias.”*

• Bohman, James and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (MIT Press, 1997).
• Brown, Mark B. Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009).
• Brown, Richard Harvey. Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication (Yale University Press, 1998).
• Cartwright, Nancy, et al. Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Christensen, David and Jennifer Lackey, eds. The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Elster, Jon, ed. Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Feyerabend, Paul. Farewell to Reason (Verso, 1987).
• Fontana, Benedetto and Gary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility (Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
• Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Garver, Eugene. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Giere, Ronald N. Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Giere, Ronald N. Scientific Perspectivism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Goldman, Alvin I. and Dennis Whitcomb, eds. Social Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Isaacs, Tracy and Richard Vernon, eds. Accountability for Collective Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011).
• Kock, Christian. Deliberative Rhetoric: Arguing about Doing (University of Windsor/Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2017).
• Kock, Christian and Lisa S. Villadsen, eds. Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
• Lackey, Jennifer. The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Lackey, Jennifer, ed. Essays in Collective Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Laden, Anthony Simon. Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013).
• Landemore, Hélène and Jon Elster, eds. Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
• Rawls, John. Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).
• Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
• Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains: Bioscience’s Promethean Promises (Verso, 2012).
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Warren, D. Michael, L. Jan Slikkerveer and David Brokensha, eds. The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995).
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

* After the late Erik Olin Wright’s conception of “real utopias” in his book, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010). This hearkens back to Otto Neurath’s principles of thinking and acting as a Marxist in Red Vienna, whose scientific and epistemic explorations in theory and practice involved architecture (e.g., the Viennese housing movement and town planning projects in England), economic history, visual education and museum science (for the masses), mathematics and logic, philosophy (but not as a professional philosopher), history, and epistemology (both individual and social), while at the same time working as “a social scientist and teacher at commercial colleges, workers’ colleges, adult education schools, and at universities,” as well as serving as a museum director and playing a pivotal role in the Vienna Circle. Neurath’s intellectual work and public activities were intended to promote and contribute to the common good by means co-operative or democratic planning in the pursuit of freedom and happiness (or eudaimonia). Neurath too endeavored to realize a “concrete Utopia,” a struggle that need not crowd out traditional utopian thought and imagination in a non-pejorative or its best sense (hence to be distinguished from the crude, impatient, and non-democratic forms of utopianism in which the means are in flagrant contradiction to the ends, in other words, where there is a failure to appreciate the necessary part played by prefigurative politics).

Toward a binational democratic state in Palestine

Argument: There is no longer a plausible or viable “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Assumptions (which case serve as premises): If one is still speaking of a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shows you have not been paying attention to the history and politics in the Palestinian territories, that you lack a basic understanding of the nature of Zionist settler colonialism and the role of Zionist nationalism in Israel politics, that you are indulging in ideological myths and fantasies that lack a meaningful orientation to social, economic, and political facts (on the ground, as we say), that you do not grasp the nature of Palestinian self-determination, that you do not sufficiently appreciate the logic, values and principled practices of democratic theory and practice and the corresponding significance of human dignity and human rights … and so forth and so on. Should you persist in believing in the possibility of a two-state solution, share your map of the geo-political boundaries of same.

A bit of relevant history

In 1939, Great Britain proposed a “one-state” solution in Palestine after concluding that the partition proposal was not acceptable to either the Jews or the Arabs. In its White Paper of the same year, the Government noted that the Mandate, which included the notorious Balfour Declaration, was not intended to convert Palestine into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population:

“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past…. [….]

It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-Government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries. His Majesty’s Government are [sic] unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which Government in Palestine will eventually take, but their objective is self-government, and they desire to see established ultimately an independent Palestinian State. It should be a State in which the two in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in Government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured.” — Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a statement presented to the Parliament (1939).

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In the Los Angeles Times last year (May 23, 2019) George Bisharat argued the case for a democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a position I heartily agree with:

[….] “The two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts – or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank. [….]

It is time to face some undeniable facts: First, despite Israel’s every effort to establish and maintain a Jewish majority, the two peoples living under Israeli rule hover at near parity, at approximately 6.5 million Jews and 6.5 million Palestinians. Second, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are destined to live together in Israel/Palestine in perpetuity. Neither people can or should be forced to leave the land in which they reside and to which they are passionately committed. Third, segregation, of which the two-state solution was a form, is not the answer. As Americans know from our own historical experience, separate is never equal. Finally, it is only equal rights and justice that can provide the foundation for a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” [….]

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In his online column at the Times (July 11), Nicholas Goldberg reports that “Peter Beinart — a Jew who keeps kosher, attends an Orthodox synagogue, is beloved by the liberal intelligentsia and has long been a supporter of two states for two peoples” has likewise announced “concluded that the two-state solution is dead, and that a single state of Jews and Palestinians is a much more promising path to peace. Beinart, a thoughtful and powerful writer who is a former editor of the New Republic, has long been critical of Israel, but has never gone this far.

In an article in Jewish Currents magazine Beinart says the 53-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, continued settlement building and now the threat of partial annexation have made it clear that a two-state solution would mean ‘a fragmented Palestine under de facto Israeli control.’ It is time, he says, to abandon the goal of a separate Palestinian state. While he doesn’t say that a binational, democratic state is the only possible answer (he also mentions the possibility of creating two separate but deeply integrated states), he writes hopefully and encouragingly about a single state in which both peoples would have a home and enjoy equal rights.

It’s obvious why that is so threatening to traditional Zionists: The creation of a single democratic state would inevitably mean the end of the Jewish state as we know it. How could the new country be truly democratic, egalitarian and binational — and officially Jewish at the same time? Beinart suggests that Jews and Israelis begin thinking in terms of a Jewish ‘home’ rather than a Jewish ’state.’” [….] The full column is here.

Essential Reading

• Abunimah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Holt McDougal, 2007.
• Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (Tal Haran, trans.) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Hilal, Jamil, ed. Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
• O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Penguins Books, 2015.

• And see this essay in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Winter 2019): “The Case for the One-State Solution,” by Abdel Monem Said Aly.

Finally, see too my compilations on (i) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (ii) Zionist ideologies.

Parapraxis/Parapraxes, Freudian “Slips,” or Fehlleistung

“The Garden of Earthly Delights” in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, c. 1495–1505, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch (born Jheronimus van Aken, c. 1450 – 9 August 1516). Click on image to enlarge.

What (some) modern people couldn’t help but notice after Freud, through their symptoms, their dreams, their slips of the tongue and their bungled ambitions—especially modern people who were no longer religious believers—was how unconscious they were, how removed from a clear sense of their own intentions, how determinedly ignorant they were about their pleasure. And, in Freud’s language, this meant how conflicted they were about their appetites, and so how fundamentally divided there were against themselves. As if people no longer knew what was in their best interests or, what their interests were; or indeed whether they had best interests. Modern people could live as if they couldn’t care less about themselves. They would, for example, risk everything or nothing at all for money or for love, for safety or for excitement. It was confounding, after Darwin, to discover that Man, as he was then called, was the animal that deliberately estranged himself from his own nature, that suffered above all, from his capacity for adaptation. In Freud’s account, it had become all too human to adapt (i.e., to assimilate and conform) at the cost of vitality. From a psychoanalytic point of view even the Darwinian facts seemed too simple. Psychoanalysis was to be a therapy in which modern people could work out for themselves what, if anything, mattered most to them: and despite the strictures of science.—Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press, 2014)

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While taking verbatim notes from a book on psychoanalysis and ethics I twice committed what I would term “Freudian slips,” in this instance, “slips of the pencil” (I always take notes from what I am reading with a mechanical pencil, writing on ‘glue top, 8-1/2 x 11 pads, narrow rule, canary’ paper). I don’t know if the slips had any sort of sub-conscious or unconscious connection with what I am reading: Ernest Wallwork’s uncommonly judicious and incisive analysis and interpretation of Freud’s writings as they concern “psychoanalysis and ethics” (including psychoanalytic ethics for analysis, in the clinic or on the couch) in his book by that title (Yale University Press, 1991), or if it was just a coincidence. While I might later tell you what the two slips were, for now I’d like to share some of my notes on parapraxis/parapraxes, Freudian “Slips,” or Fehlleistung, which includes several dictionary entries (although not in their entirety).

The primary source (although discussed in later works as well): Sigmund Freud (Anthea Bell, trans.), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Penguin Books, 2003 [1901]). As for other important sources in the Freudian corpus, we’ll defer to David Sachs:

“Among Freud’s main works, no others, if they are to be evaluated fairly, demand as much care and tact as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Nor can one appreciate them without an informed sense of Freud’s two other major works that appeared in the same astonishing half-decade: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious [also in English as The Joke and Its Relation …] and  Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The neglected book on jokes is singular for its clear and compelling statement of Freud’s view of the processes of unconscious thought, and the essays on sexuality are indispensable for his view of the materials of unconscious thought, that is, erotic and hostile wishes and resistances to them.”

Parapraxis: “Act whose explicit goal is not attained; instead this goal turns out to have been replaced by another one. When speaking of parapraxes we do not include all failures of memory, speech, or action, but just those acts which the subject is normally able to perform successfully, so that he is inclined to attribute his failure to mere lack of concentration or happenstance. Freud showed that parapraxes, like symptoms, are compromise-formations resulting from the antagonism between the agent’s conscious intentions and what he has repressed. [….]

The German term ‘Fehlleistung’—literally, ‘faulty function’—is understood by Freud as connoting not only acts proper but also all kinds of errors and slips in speech and in mental operations. The German language brings out the common denominator of all these mistakes by giving the prefix ‘ver-‘ to many of the words which describe them: das Vergessen (forgetting), das Versprechen (slip of the tongue), das Verlesen (misreading), das Verschreiben (slip of the pen), das Vergreifen (bungled action), [and] das Verlieren (mislaying).

It is worth noting that before Freud these marginal phenomena of everyday life had never been seen as connected or brought together under one heading—witness the lack of a generic concept for them.” — Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Karnac Books, 1988 [Hogarth Press, 1973 and Presses Universitaires de France, 1967])

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“[Examples of parapraxis or the ‘Freudian slip’]: going to the wrong address, speaking the wrong name, or making a wrong statement. Such ‘mistakes,’ Freud explained, were not mere accidents but determined and meaningful acts due to unconscious desires, motives, and conflicts.” — Ross M. Skelton, ed. The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)

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Parapraxis: “Errors, slips of the tongue, memory lapses, and the host of manifestations Freud discussed in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. They constitute symptomatic acts that are determined by unconscious motives; they are compromise formations between forbidden impulses or ideas and the censorship imposed on them. The principle of psychic determinism is particularly well illustrated in parapraxes.

Repression, which operates in parapraxes, rests on a counter-cathexis. Energy is shifted between ego and id functions, serving to regulate conflict involved in pleasure-seeking, as well as serving to discharge drives. Tendencies particularly subject to conflict involve sexuality, aggression, strength or weakness, and control or lack of control. Parapraxes, like all symptom formations, blend drive, defense, and adaptation.” — Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990).

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“… [P]arapraxes may be as fruitful for insight as is the analysis of more serious symptoms. Such episodic symptomatic acts usually convey a discrete message about a specific conflict, and they often rather easily yield a hidden message.” — Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (Yale University Press, 1995)

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“A change in a state of being damned up, caused by a neurotic conflict, seems possible only through a break-through of the original impulse or through an intensification of the defense. Actually, however, there is a third possibility which at first glance seems paradoxical: both may occur simultaneously. Compromises are found in which the objectionable impulse finds some substitute outlet, but the substitute outlet may help to ward of the remainders of the original impulse. A part of the damned-up energy is discharged, but in such a way as to intensify the defense against the rest. The typical neurotic symptom expresses drive and defense simultaneously. Slips, errors, and symptomatic acts constitute fairly simple examples wherein the formation of compromises of this sort can be studied in relative isolation.”

“If a person makes a slip of the tongue, it is due to the fact that unconsciously he is somehow resisting what he consciously intended to say. The analysis of a slip discloses what tendency has disturbed the original intention to speak. If a person instead of making a slip of the tongue merely begins to stammer a little, it is obvious that some unconscious motive has disturbed his intention, but we cannot guess what the motive is. If such an occasional stuttering occurs regularly as a response to a specific stimulus, knowledge of the stimulus can used as a starting point for an analysis of the disturbing factor. If, however, a person stammers not only as a reaction to a certain stimuli but does so more or less whenever he talks, the disturbing fact must be rooted in the fact that the very intention to speak has an objectionable significance. Thus some types of occasional stammering may be due to the unconscious instinctual significance of the thing the person is going to say; whereas in severe cases of stuttering the function of speech itself represents an objectionable instinctual impulse.” — Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996/1^st ed., 1945)

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“Obviously, if a person knocks down a vase by accident this will not bear any relation to his life and character. But if it is a genuine accident can we describe what is in question as an action or reaction? By a reaction I mean something like slapping someone on the face in anger, bursting into tears on hearing a distressing piece of news, twitching nervously while waiting for an interview, becoming confused, one’s mind going black [or ‘going blank’], forgetting one’s lines, just where one wants to succeed or make a good impression. It is in instances of the latter kind that Freud is not content to rest with such answers as ‘His mind went blank because he was nervous, and he was nervous because so much was at stake for him.’ This may well be true, of course, and the connection in question perfectly intelligible. Still Freud believes that there is room for probing here, a probing in the direction of something more distinctively personal. But need there be some further explanation in every case? Should we never take a statement like the above as the final explanation? Freud’s answer in connection with slips and errors was this: ‘We do not maintain—and for our purposes we do not need to maintain—that every single mistake which occurs has a meaning, although I think that probable. It is enough to prove that such a meaning is relatively frequent in various forms of errors.

Freud explains that by ‘meaning’ he understands ‘significance, intention, tendency and a position in the sequence of mental concatenations.’ Thus when, for instance, the word which a person intended to speak enables a different word to escape him, or when he inadvertently distorts it so that what comes out of his mouth is related to a different word, the word uttered or suggested may express a thought or an affective response which he was checking, though he was not aware of it. Compare with the case where the words which a person speaks in anger may reveal what he really thinks. He may himself be surprised and when he reverts to his everyday slightly deferential attitude, he may dismiss his words as a ‘lapse:’ ‘Those words were spoken in anger, they do not reflect what I think of you.’ Compare with: ‘That was not him; it was the alcohol speaking.’

Freud’s view is that there is a variety of instances in which the truth, in the sense of what a person really thinks or feels, his real reactions or preoccupations, escapes him in unguarded moments, in moments when his powers of attention and self-control are low. It escapes him in words, errors, inadvertent acts, and omissions which may look innocent, so that we are tempted to take them at face value and dismiss them as ‘insignificant’ or ‘trivial.’ We do so because there is no conscious intention on the part of the person in question, because it does not fit in with his conscious thoughts and deliberate actions. Freud’s view is that if we can take a more intimate and comprehensive view of the person, and this would involve a willingness on his part to be conversationally open with us, then we may find that it does fit in. This may change the aspect under which we see it. Such a change of aspect for him involves taking responsibility for certain thoughts and attitudes which, previously, he had been unwilling to own. 

Freud is critical of this kind of dismissiveness: ‘Here, as in still other spheres, determinism reaches farther than we suppose.’ In the previous sentence he makes it clear that an act which seems arbitrary, in the way that an error is arbitrary, is subject to determinism if it is ‘explainable through purposive ideas.’ ‘That there should be uncaused events is unthinkable.’ I commented on this earlier. ‘That there should be innocent slips, errors, or omissions, purely accidental acts, is unthinkable. Freud is inclined to go that way, but he restrains himself, and rightly so: fewer of them are innocent than we suppose. Perhaps his view is that in psycho-analysis we should not assume them innocent until they are proven otherwise, that we should start with the reverse assumption and hold on to it until we have been proven wrong. Perhaps this is the sense of his words: ‘determinism reaches farther than we suppose.” — Ilham Dilman, Freud and the Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1984)

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“Early in this century Freud became convinced that his most persuasive introduction to psychoanalysis was his account of Fehlleistungen, that is, the parapraxes of everyday life: anomalies of memory, slips of the tongue, eye, and pen, bungled actions, and—what to my mind prove most striking—combined parapraxes.

In the Psychopathology, Freud avoids examples that require ‘depth’ psychology. Though he uses the term ‘repression,’ he often employs it interchangeably with ‘suppression.’ In his first two examples he utilizes the technique of free association extensively but in both cases the associations culminate in material that is suppressed rather than repressed. As with those cases, so too with most of the other examples of parapraxes in the Psychopathology: They are not instances of the emergence of deeply ‘repressed’ ideas or affects. Nonetheless, much of the material Freud presents … illustrates basic psychoanalytic tenets. ... [A]mong the phenomena he discusses, combined parapraxes are particularly striking—at least by way of nudging me toward a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Freud’s chapter on them is, however, meager. To help supplement it, I shall briefly discuss certain phenomena closely akin to combined parapraxes, namely, accumulated ones.

Some readers of this piece may have had experiences of roughly the following kind: In the days just before an appointment that a person anticipates with barely felt anxiety, she quite atypically forgets some signal items, say, first, her money purse and, later, her keys. She then—and this too is unusual for her—makes and engagement that, unrealized by her at the time, conflicts with her appointment. She then recalls the latter and tries to postpone it, or recalls it only after the time for keeping it is past.

That sort of example of accumulated parapraxes is, as I have suggested, not unfamiliar. If one inquires among one’s acquaintances, one may learn of a number of examples similar to it. The one I have sketched—drawn from an actual case—is of some evidential value in the following ways: First, in pointing to a disposition to more felt anxiety about the appointment than was actually experienced—a disposition that helps explain the resistance to keeping the appointment; second, the odd forgetting of the signal items, episodes emblematic of the resistance, trenches on the symbolism that Freud, though hardly the first to notice, was the first to employ systematically. In the Psychopathology, Freud often adverts to that symbolism. [….] When Freud states how he came to know the meaning of the symbols, he does not depend on clinical findings. The position is rather the revers:

‘[W]e learn it from very different sources—from fairy tales and myths, form buffoonery and jokes, from folklore [that is, from knowledge about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage. [….] If we go into these sources in detail, we should find so many parallels to dream symbolism we cannot fail to be convinced of our interpretations.’

[….] On Freud’s conception, combined parapraxes concur and in some cases cooperate in trying to fulfill the same wish. Accumulated parapraxes—as I am using the phrase—repeatedly express or allude to a wish and may also work toward fulfilling it. (In my example of accumulated parapraxes, the appointment the woman forgot was with a gynecologist and concerned a question charged with anxiety.) Single parapraxes either try to fulfill a wish or express or allude to it.” — David Sachs, “In fairness to Freud: A critical notice of The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, by Adolf Grünbaum,” in Jerome Neu, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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For a withering critique of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of parapraxis, one which I think is profoundly misguided and thus mistaken, see Sebastiano Timpanaro (Kate Soper, trans.), The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism (Verso, 1976).

See too: (i) Marxism and Freudian Psychology bibliography, (ii) Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy: An Incipient “Science of Subjectivity” and Therapeutic Model, (iii) Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: A Select Bibliography; and (iv) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy: A Select Bibliography of Secondary Literature.-

Peggy Noonan: The Bitter with the Sweet

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. The news reporting is excellent. The Saturday features are terrific. But I ordinarily ignore the ignominious editorial pages except for Peggy Noonan.

She is sometimes infuriating; sometimes insightful; never boring. Last week, she was infuriating and insightful. On the racial issue. She distinguished between faculty lounge Robespierres - racial radicals (apparently the Democrats) and those who will side with Senator Tim Scott (the only Republican African-American Senator) in believing that the U.S. is not a racist country and that racism is a vice. No shades of grey; no acknowledgement that Republicans have campaigned for years on coded racial appeals.

Having established herself as willfully blind to the realities of Republican politics, she proceeds in rousing rhetoric to decimate the “sage of Mar-a-Lago.” He is a “waning figure”; his unfavorable ratings are 15% higher than his favorable ratings; a majority of Republicans said they favored the party over Trump; 44% were the other way around; he is losing air like a deflated balloon from a Thanksgiving Day Parade; and my favorite line: in running in fear from him, Republican politicians “are running from a corpse.”  

With Peggy Noonan, you take the bitter with the sweet.

Thinking about causation: here, there, and everywhere

“What we call a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

“Our tendency to perceive –to impose—narrativity and causality—are symptoms of the same disease: dimension reduction.”

“We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar ‘because’ no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does make us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality). I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations. But silent evidence masks this fact. [….] Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the ‘because’ and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence. [….] We have seen several varieties of the silent evidence that cause deformations in our perception of empirical reality, making it appear more explainable (and more stable) than it actually is. In addition to the confirmation error [or bias] and the narrative fallacy, the manifestations of silent evidence further distort the role and importance of Black Swans.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2^nd ed., 2010)

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“It is perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be identified physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them. Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality, then it is high time they were upset.”— Ludwig Wittgenstein

*    *    *      

I often forget (and thus neglect) how incredibly complex the notion of causation (i.e., cause and effect, including companion notions of ‘causal relata’ and ‘causal relations,’  ‘constant conjunction,’ ‘necessary connection,’ ‘determination,’ ‘over-determination,’ ‘relations,’ ‘dependence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘contiguity,’ ‘mechanisms, ‘chains,’ ‘feedback loops,’ etc.) can be and often is. It came to mind again while learning about “psychic determinism” in Freudian metapsychology and theory (see the two references in ‘E’ below). I will say more about that later. For now, I think it helps to begin with a taste of the myriad sources that might convey—and enable—us to deeply appreciate the aforementioned complexity of causality. In this instance, the sources are conspicuously idiosyncratic insofar as I’ve not made any systematic investigation of this concept in either philosophy or science. Some of the entries under “causation” in the (online) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are rather intimidating for non-philosophers, so I’ll avoid those but that should not prevent you from satisfying your curiosity or interest (if only because you might not find them intimidating!). For the philosophically inclined or curious, I recommend beginning with the entry on “The Metaphysics of Causation.” The sources I’ve selected to guide further explorations are (A) Indian Philosophy, (B) the philosophy of Hume, (C) Criminal and Tort Law, (D) Natural and Social Sciences, and (E) Freudian Psychoanalysis.

(A) I start in a non-standard fashion, with notions of causation (beginning with the concepts of satkāryavāda and asatkāryavāda) in Indian philosophy. Perhaps the best (‘perhaps’ because I cannot claim mastery of the relevant literature) introduction is found in Karl H. Potter’s classic work, Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies (Motilal Banarsidass, 1991 [1963]), in particular, the four chapters that commence with chapter 6, “Freedom and Causation” (pp. 93-185). For the Buddhist tradition in particular, see (i) David J. Kalupahana’s Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (University Press of Hawaii, 1975), (ii) Amber D. Carpenter, Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Acumen, 2014 [see ‘causation’ in the Index]), (iii) Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015 [again, see ‘causation’ in the Index]), and (iv) Padmasiri de Silva, An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Palgrave Macmillan, 4^th ed., 2005).

(B) For Western philosophy, I will limit myself to David Hume, because many of the arguments here revolve around what philosophers have written—and argued—about Hume’s ideas on causation. Once more, idiosyncrasy is the rule: (i) Jay Garfield, The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s Treatise from the Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019), (ii) Paul Russell, Freedom and Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1995), (iii) Constantine Sandis, Character and Causation: Hume’s Philosophy of Action (Routledge, 2019), (iv) Galen Strawson, The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford University Press, 2011), (v) Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (Oxford University Press, 2014 ed.), and (vi) Barry Stroud, Hume (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

(C) Causation is also of course prominent in law and legal theory and philosophy, especially in the areas of criminal and tort law. Here is a very limited—but I hope representative—sample of the literature: (i) Peter Cane, Responsibility in Law and Morality (Hart Publishing, 2002), (ii) Peter Cane and John Gardner, eds., Relating to Responsibility: Essays in Honour of Tony Honoré on his 80^th Birthday (Hart Publishing, 2001), (iii) John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, S.J., Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 1998), (iv) H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Causation in the Law (Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 1985), (v) Michael S. Moore, Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2009), (vi) Moore’s Placing Blame: A General Theory of the Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1997), and (vii) David G. Owen, Philosophical Foundations of Tort Law (Oxford University Press, 1995).

(D) For the natural and social sciences there is, not surprisingly, a fairly large body of literature one might cite, so once more I highlight titles I’m fond of for one reason or another: (i) Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1999) [She signed my copy of this book at a conference at our college some years ago!], (ii) Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montushci, eds., Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014), (iii) John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford University Press, 2001), (iv) Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2007), (v) Peter Galison and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996), (vi) Ronald N. Giere, Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999), (vii) Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1987), (viii) John D. Norton, “Causation as Folk Science” (2003), (ix) John D. Norton, “How Not to Think About Causation,” (2019), (x) Nicholas Rescher, Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Oxford University Press, 2000), and (xi) Paul Thagard, How Scientists Explain Disease (Princeton University Press, 1999).

(E) Here I will cite but two titles, the first, because it so thoroughly treats—and well defends—Freud’s oft-misunderstood notion of “psychic determinism” and the related charges of strict or hard determinism frequently levied against him; and the second, because it has excellent essays about the larger background and context of this topic in psychoanalysis with regard to philosophy and science: (i) Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991) [see chapters 3, “The Determinism—Free Will Problem,” and 4, “Reconciling the Paradox: Psychic Determinism and Moral Responsibility,” pp. 49-100], and (ii) Simon Boag, Linda A.W. Brackel, and Vesa Talvitie, eds. Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 2015/Routledge, 2018).

I want to conclude first by noting the fact that “psychic determinism” (wherein, for example, drives, motives, passions, and reasons have causal powers) is common to both Buddhism and Freudian psychoanalysis, hence one reason for the many works that compare the two with regard to philosophy of mind, psychology, and therapy. It is also central to Pātañjala Yoga (especially as it involves guna theory and karmic dispositions), but this is provocative material for another day. Finally, I am not encouraging any unifying or tidy inferences from these disparate domains as to the nature of causation, or anything necessarily common to the manner in which it is conceived in our sources. Indeed, perhaps a contrary and preliminary conclusion would suggest there are different kinds of causation, with each more or less suited to its particular domain, hence a number of pragmatic conceptions of cause and effect, cause and consequence.

Addendum: I thought to share one example of a doctrine in Buddhism that illustrates the cause-and-effect links in a chain (from birth to death to rebirth...) so as to account for the several causes of “suffering.” The Buddhist Doctrine of Dependent Origination* (P.) paticca-samuppāda / (S.) pratītya-samutpāda

“That being given, this comes to be; from the birth of that, this is born. That not being given, this does not come to be; from the cessation of that, this ceases.” — The Buddha

Conditioned by (1) ignorance [avidyā/avijjā] are (2) formations or karmic predispositions [samskāras], conditioned by formations is (3) consciousness [vijñāna/viññāna], conditioned by consciousness is (4) mind-and-body or name-and-form [nāma-rūpa/skandhas/kandhas], conditioned by mind-and-body are (5) the six sense fields (6 organs, 6 objects, and 6 kinds of sense consciousness) [sadāyatana/salāyatana], conditioned by the six sense fields is (6) sense-contact [sparśa/phassa], conditioned by sense-contact is (7) feeling [vedanā], conditioned by feeling is (8) craving, or inordinate or improper desire [trsna/tanhā], conditioned by craving is (9) grasping [upādāna], conditioned by grasping is (10) becoming [bhava], conditioned by becoming is (11) birth [jāti], conditioned by birth is (12) decay and death [jarāmaranam].

There are thus (in this version) 12 links to this chain of causal conditioning. Nos. 1 and 2 assume a past life and karmic process; nos. 3 through 9 refer to the conditioning of the present existence; nos. 8 – 9 to the “fruits” of the present existence that assure the production of karma for most of us, and nos. 10—12  (future ‘fruit’) to a life to come. Nos. 11—12 could be said to “contain” or are shorthand for nos. 1 – 9 or 10. The conditions in the chain are representative and significant—thus not an exhaustive list of—causes. Minimally, therefore, there are at least 3 lifetimes depicted by this schema, although it has also been understood to imply or suggest more than 3 lifetimes, as a fourth life begins anew after no. 12 and then….

What, from a Buddhist perspective, are the two “strongest” (or ‘master’) links of the chain—insofar as they assure the solidity or continuity of the chain of rebirth? At the same time, albeit from another vantage point, they might also be described as the “weakest” links—at least insofar as the Buddhist concentrates on overcoming these by way of ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom (the triune structure of the Eightfold Path)?

An individual person’s physical and mental make-up comprises five groups of conditions and functions: (1) “form” (rūpā), physical objects, here, a body; (2) “feelings” (vedanā), pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, what in contemporary philosophy might be termed cognitive qualia; (3) “perceptions” (samjña/saññā), recognition of sensory/mental objects and qualia, and which, as in empiricism, allow for ideas and concepts to be formed; (4) “mental fabrications” (samskāra/sankhārā), thoughts, volition, intentions and desires, personality traits; and (5) “consciousness” (vijñāna/viññāna), awareness of objects specific to each sensory or mental modality. These five “heaps” or “aggregates” are known as skandhas (khandhās). It is just this that we typically infer to be the “self,” mistakenly conceived of as permanent, an enduring substance that underlies experience:

“Thus Buddhist thought suggests that as an individual I am a complex flow of physical and mental phenomena, but peel away these phenomena and look behind them and one just does not find a constant self that one can call one’s own. My sense of self is both logically and emotionally just a label that I impose on these physical and mental phenomena in consequence of their connectedness. In other words, the idea of a self as a constant unchanging thing behind the variety of experience is just a product of linguistic usage and the particular way in which certain physical and mental phenomena are experienced as connected. “—From Rupert Gethin’s The Foundations of Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998

The individual subject’s tendency to identify (separately and collectively) with—or get their sense of personal identity from—the skandhas (khandhās) stems from ignorance (avidyā/avijjā) and gives rise in the first place to inordinate desire or even desire simpliciter (trsna/tanhā).

One helpful exposition in English of the “no-self” anātman (anattā) doctrine is Steven Collins’ Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1982). I think the best philosophical discussion of the doctrine, however, is Miri Albahari’s Analytical Buddhism: The Two-Tiered Illusion of Self (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

The five skandhas are in effect conditioned by the (‘Kantian’) parameters or modalities of space, time, quality, and relation. Nirvāna (nibbāna), on the other hand, is unconditioned by these parameters, as it is untouched by the “three marks of existence” (trilaksana): anitya (aniccā) or impermanence, duhkhā (dukkhā) or suffering, and anātman (anattā) or no-self.

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination implies several different propositions insofar as it claims that any object of experience depends for its existence or occurrence on the necessary and sufficient presence of its cause:

1. that all conventional phenomena have an origin;
2. that their existence depends on causes;
3. that causes operate in networks;
4. that causes operate inevitably, uniformly, and spontaneously

[The following quotations and paraphrased material is taken (with some editing) from G.C. Pande’s essay, ‘Causality in Buddhist Philosophy,’ in Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe, eds. A Companion to World Philosophies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997): 370-80.]

Thus the Principle of Dependent Origination refers not only to the general theory of causation, which is intimately bound up with the dialectical negation of the metaphysics of substance, but also to its application to the chain of human suffering ultimately grounded in the illusion of substance—especially the illusion of the ego-substance. Believing in its own individual and enduring reality, the ego invests the objects of experience with a similar reality and thus engages in action of desire and aversion for what is unreal.

• Logically, the theory explains causality as a functional relation in which the presence and absence of the cause imply the presence and absence respectively of the effect.
• Metaphysically, it denies the substantiality of cause and effect, affirming that they are no more than sequentially ordered functional composita.
• Psychologically, it replaces the notion of a permanent individual soul-substance with that of a stream of consciousness determined by immanent causality rooted in the concatenation of conative (karmic impulses or inclinations/predispositions) factors culminating in volition.
• Ethically, it affirms the moral quality of volition or free will, as voluntary action determines the hedonic (i.e., painful pleasurable, or neutral) quality of subsequent experience.

Sangharakshita says this doctrine is the “primary formulation of the Buddha’s Enlightenment on the intellectual plane, it is the historical and logical basis of all later developments in Buddhist philosophy.” In the Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, dependent origination is characterized by “emptiness” (śūnyatā) meaning the lack of “inherent” existence or essential being (among other things). This emptiness is not “nothingness” but the real mode of being of things, as cause and effect, identity and difference, entity and non-entity function within a cohesive system or complex, interconnected world of dependent origination. As Thupten Jinpa says, dependent origination and emptiness might be thought of as two sides of the same coin. We might ask ourselves at this point how all of this relates to the possibility of nirvāna/nibbāna, defined as the subject’s experience of a liberated or unconditioned mind, the phenomenal character of which is characterized in terms of immeasurable peace and true happiness, “completely untainted by the presence or possibility of mental duhkhā/dukkhā.” 

* The term “dependent origination” can be misleading for, as Buddhaghosa, one of the early and great philosophers of Buddhism pointed out, the emphasis of this doctrine is “not on origination (uppāda) but on conditions and relations.”

See too the entry on pratītyasamutpāda in Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton University Press, 2014): 669-670.

Psychoanalysis, Ethicists, and Moral Psychology

       

“In the writings of such once popular writers as Erich Fromm, Philip Rieff, Herbert Marcuse, and Erik Erikson, one looks in vain for clarity as to the precise issues in ethics that psychoanalysis is capable of illuminating. [….] [P]hilosophical ethicists have not been particularly interested in psychoanalysis by and large. Those few philosophers who have studied psychoanalysis sympathetically and in depth (e.g., [Paul] Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, [Richard] Wollheim) have been concerned only incidentally with its ethical import. To be sure, Richard Rorty has recently drawn out what he takes to be the ethical implications of psychoanalysis, but his views are based more on an impressionistic reading of how Freud supports his own post-modernist moral pragmatism than on careful study of what Freud actually holds. In the writing of most ethicists, Freud, if he is mentioned at all, is treated as the chief modern enemy of morality, whose work is best ignored or flatly condemned in the process of getting on with the task of doing traditional moral philosophy, unimpeded by the sort of depth-psychological considerations that have transformed everyday morality outside the academy.” — Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991)

Although written thirty years ago, Wallwork’s remarks remain, unfortunately, largely true, but with some notable exceptions having since surfaced. First, however, permit me to point out that Wollheim published a couple of works after this was written which suggest that he was more than “incidentally” concerned with the ethical significance of psychoanalysis. As for the exceptions, and while they are not, strictly speaking and apart from Michael Stocker, from the pens of prominent ethicists or moral philosophers, such philosophers as Ilham Dilman, J. David Velleman, John Deigh, Michael Stocker, John Cottingham, Jonathan Lear, and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty have delved deeply into the ethical ramifications and implications of psychoanalysis, each in their own inimitable fashion and thus all worth your attention should this subject interest you. Until the rise of “virtue” and “care” ethics (and the resuscitation of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers), contemporary philosophers specializing in ethics and moral philosophy virtually ignored moral psychology and so it should not be surprising that “depth-psychological considerations” were neglected as well. This specific neglect of psychoanalysis might have warranted an entire chapter in Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: An Historical Essay (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Should you want a fairly short argument on behalf of the need to integrate psychoanalytic theory and therapy into (philosophical) ethics, I recommend John Cottingham’s treatment of the principal issues in the section, “Psychoanalysis and the Ethical Domain,” from his book, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998): 131-166. As Cottingham says,

“In its initial challenge to reason, and in the hope it offers for a new kind of self-understanding, the psychoanalytic approach has inevitable implications for the traditional enterprise of philosophical ethics. Ever since Socrates, the [Western] philosophical enterprise has been seen as involving some element of self-examination [this was an early component of philosophies in Asia as well], and there is a sense in which psychoanalytic theory simply carries that process forward, albeit in a more radically introspective fashion. Ultimately, I believe, it is a mistake to think there is a fundamental discontinuity between psychoanalytic and philosophical modes of searching for the good life [to be sure, however, the aims of the former are often far more modest and limited than those of the latter mode].”

All of this is perfectly compatible with Dilman’s conclusion that “Freud’s whole idea of morality is crude and riddled with philosophical confusion,” as it is not Freud’s specific conception of morality that defines the values and practices of psychoanalysis relevant to ethics as Dilman himself and several of the philosophers listed above attest. Yet we would be remiss should we fail to neglect the fact that, in Wallwork’s words, psychoanalysts has failed generally “to appreciate the rigorous analytic and logical work of contemporary ethicists,” … [thus] not avail[ing] themselves of important intellectual resources for assessing the adequacy of their own high controversial assumptions about the nature and grounding of morality.” Here our focus is on what contemporary ethics might and should learn from psychoanalytic theorizing that falls under the heading of that subdivision within philosophy termed “philosophy of mind,” this entails psychoanalytic therapy’s contribution to philosophical ethics as well as a person’s ability to get her bearings in daily life from a moral and ethical compass. With regard to psychoanalytic therapy (the contribution of which to ethics can be distinguished from psychoanalytic theory proper), for example, the patient or analysand is offered

“… something new; that is, he learns something new about himself from the relationship [with the analyst] and this involves learning new attitudes and new values. The values in question may not be new to him at all, but he learns what it means to keep faith with them and the difficulties this involves. In the process he develops a regard for them he did not have before. One of these values is [variously termed] independence, self-reliance, freedom or autonomy. He learns to establish himself in his relationships with others on a more equal footing. He gives up his false attitudes towards them, exaggerated attitudes of false modesty and of false pride. He learns to consider and respect others without fearing to displease them. He learns to be open with them, to listen to them, without fearing to think for himself and be what he is. Above all, he learns to be close to the people for whom he cares without seeking to merge his identity with theirs or to incorporate theirs into his. This, at the same time is coming to value individual autonomy [which is rooted in moral psychological autonomy].

Certainly, in psychoanalysis the patient learns self-respect and the courage to be himself. But he also learns to respect others, to be giving in his relationships, and to value generosity. Winnicott’s notion of ‘mature dependence’ captures well the balance between these two values which can come into conflict with each other. Put it like this: on the one hand the patient comes to learn the value of independence and of relationships in which others recognize his separateness and respect him as an individual, while on the other hand he learns to acknowledge the value of a life of contact and give and take with others, enriched by affection, humour, concern, and sustained by loyalty.

Analysis, when it works, enables him to grow out of infantile and selfish orientations, particularly in his most intimate relationships. Many of the feelings and attitudes in question, such as greed, envy and jealousy, are such as to keep him in bondage and curtail his autonomy. With luck, what he discovers in himself and the support he finds in the analytic relationship help him to ‘grow out’ of such attitudes and develop a different orientation. This liberates him from cravings that thrust the self to the centre of the stage, cravings of an ego that has remained weak, hungry, and infantile. It also enables him to realize what he values for itself.

Authenticity, honesty or being truthful with oneself and others; autonomy or the freedom to be oneself, to think for oneself and act on one’s own behalf; respect and concern for others, the ability to establish relationships of affection, loyalty, and friendship; creativity, however modest, in the pursuit of one’s interests, and all the attendant capacities such as initiative, trust and generosity are the central qualities which are valued in the kind of orientation implicit in a psychoanalytic approach and promoted by psychoanalytic therapy [emphasis added]. Such qualities of characters as manipulativeness, domineeringness, vanity, cruelty, servility, meanness, egocentricity, possessiveness, mere conformity, all attitudes that are false or compulsive, such as certain forms of submissiveness or overbearingness, and such traits as signal a failure to attain certain standards of character, such as irresponsibility, fickleness and cowardice, are viewed with disfavour in the light of these values. The ‘authoritarian’ attitude, to which both Fromm and Money-Kyrle refer, is seen as violating some of these values, particularly those of individual autonomy, criticism, and independence of thought.” From Ilham Dilman’s Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988)

Further Reading

Please see my short article on “Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy: An Incipient ‘Science of Subjectivity’ and Therapeutic Model,” and this bibliography for secondary literature on “Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy.”