Psychology

PSYCHOLOGY. - From the Greek ψυχή, λόγος, it is the "doctrine or science of the soul," of its nature and its operations. The term p. comes from C. Wolff (v.), who was the first to distinguish a "rational p." and an "empirical p.": the first starts from the principles of metaphysics (v.) and thus constitutes a kind of "special metaphysics," while the second is founded solely on the observation of facts of experience (v.). It is precisely in this dualism that the capital difficulty for a determination of the nature and the tasks of p. consists.

I. THE PROBLEM OF PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE

The difficulty of determining the nature of p. arises from the very position that man occupies in the world. For if, from the analytic and systematic point of view, p. constitutes a particular domain of philosophical reflection, it is clear that from the synthetic point of view p. is at one and the same time the beginning, the means and the end of the orientation of human consciousness itself, inasmuch as in man everything starts from, unfolds in and leads back to the soul. Therefore, if the soul (v.) is the "principle of life in living things," it is so first of all in man, indeed in the individual subject, inasmuch as each person can have the experience of life on his own account and only on the foundation of his own experience can he understand it in other men first, and then in animals down to the lowest degree of vegetative life. The understanding of life, elaborated by p., thus results from the complex articulation of experiences and reflections that start from one's own life and from the relations that each person has with the human and infra-human world.

1. There is first of all the relation with nature (v.) in which man moves and which moves around him; the question is therefore to determine whether every movement, of the animal, vegetable and physical world, has the soul as its principle and cause and how it can derive from it (cosmological problem: Greek philosophy). 2. There is then the relation of the soul to the body in which it dwells and which it moves to the operations of life. This is the most arduous problem of p., on which depends the ultimate answer concerning man's very destiny: whether soul and body are two complete or incomplete natures, whether the soul influences the body and the body the soul, whether the soul begins and ends its existence with the body or comes from elsewhere and goes elsewhere with death (metaphysical problem: Christian philosophy). 3. There is further, and consequently, the problem of the relation of the individual to other men, both to present individuals and to those of different civilizations and cultures, of the various races and ethnic differences that constitute the historical development of humanity (historical-anthropological problem). 4. There is finally the problem of the origin and the end of life and therefore of man's relation to the divinity (existential problem). In the historical development of p. these problems are present and interwoven in different ways and tend to predominate one over another, not however so much as to absorb the others completely, but rather in the sense of subordinating to the one indicated as principal the others, which are qualified as secondary. It is not surprising, therefore, that p. presents itself at one and the same time as the science and knowledge closest to man and is destined to remain forever unfinished, contested and taken up again: in this way p., more than following the condition of the other sciences which in the history of human thought show themselves in continuous transformation, is the reason and the stimulus of this transformation itself. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the problem of determining the nature of p. remains still open.

The enigma proper to p. is constituted in its paradoxical condition by the following moments: a) the primordial and underivable phenomenological certainty that the soul in its acting has of its own existence, inasmuch as no act can occur, whether in the cognitive sphere or in the practical and objective one, without the concomitant consciousness on the part of the individual subject (the I [v.], the individual soul) that he knows and acts. b) The unbridgeable metaphysical distance between the activities of the soul and its essence: first of all, the operations are "many" and the soul must be "one" in order to guarantee the unity of being; then, the operations are "diverse" and at times even contrasting, whereas the soul must be in itself collected, "simple" and indivisible. c) The metaphysical opposition of soul and body, inasmuch as the soul is the first invisible moving principle and (in man) of a spiritual nature, whereas the body is a visible reality that is moved by the impulses of the soul and has a material nature: it is not understood how two elements that stand at the opposite extremes of being can come together in the unity of nature. d) The functional opposition of consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness, inasmuch as while the presence of the soul to itself and of objects to the soul is precisely given in the act of consciousness (v.), such an act is bound to limits of time and space, albeit variable from subject to subject, but always inevitable: hence the problem of the relation between soul and consciousness, and between consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness.

The characteristic situation of p. consists in being at one and the same time the primary consideration that bears on the essential principle of knowing immediately present to itself (consciousness), so as to precede every other form of reflected knowledge, and in being a secondary consideration inasmuch as, in order to pass to the determination of its own nature, such a principle must reflect on its practical and noetic relation to things and have recourse to the reflected principles of metaphysics. The historical development and the stages of p. depend on the predominance and the varying emergence that in different epochs and cultures one or the other of the indicated moments obtains.

II. HISTORICAL OUTLINE

In early Greek philosophy the soul is considered predominantly as the "principle of movement of the phenomena of the cosmos"; there is therefore no concern to establish and develop a psychology, because the consideration of the soul coincides with that of being and of nature (v.). A particular interest in the soul as such emerges in Heraclitus: he affirms its profound mystery (frg. 42: "You would not reach the limits of the soul by any journey, every road treading; so deep is its logos": Heraclitus, Fragments, text and Italian trans. by R. Walzer, Florence 1936, p. 82) and the personal individuality that accompanies it, in the different destiny that the just and the unjust have after death: even if this does not agree with the rest of his cosmological conception. While the Ionian philosophers did not properly feel the problem of the soul and Parmenides limits himself to considering the problem of knowledge, Heraclitus perceives the problem of the self (frg. 101: "I investigated myself", op. cit., p. 135), whence it has rightly been said that "in Heraclitus there is found for the first time a psychology that is worthy of the name" (K. Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Gesch. der griech. Philosophie, Bonn 1916, p. 201). Nevertheless psychology as a metaphysical construction had its development in the ontological line with Anaxagoras (v.; the νοῦς as principle of cosmic order), Plato (the ψυχή, principle of sempiternal motion) and Aristotle (the ψυχή as ἀντελέχεια τεκότη of the body and at the same time as principle of all the operations of the living being). The De anima in three books by Aristotle is the first systematic treatise of psychology that has come down to us from antiquity; it constitutes the summit of Aristotelian speculation and, after so many vicissitudes in the life of thought, remains still the principal source of the consciousness of Western man: of these books Hegel wrote that "they are still, for the treatments they contain concerning the particular aspects and states of the soul, the best work and the only one of speculative interest on this object" (Enzyklop. d. philos. Wissenschaft., Philosophie des Geistes, § 378, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1949, p. 327. The same Hoffmeister found a translation made by Hegel of passages of the De anima with commentary: cf. Vorlesungen über die Gesch. der Philos., XV, part 1, Leipzig 1944, p. xiv). The originality of Aristotelian psychology lies in the synthesis of the conception of the soul as immanent form ("act of the body": De an., II, 1, 412 and 21) and transcendent form (the active spiritual νοῦς: ibid., III, 5, 430 a 11 ff.). The Epicurean and Stoic psychology is the return to materialism (v.) in polemic against the mixture of spiritualism (v.) and materialism of which Aristotelian psychology is accused; the psychology of Neoplatonism returns to the primacy of the cosmic function of the soul, but at the same time posits, with the theory of ontological emanation, the principle that will be developed in medieval psychology of the derivation of souls and lower powers from higher ones. Patristic psychology develops the concept of man in the new climate of faith and grace and draws from revelation (v.) the notions of the individual (v.), of the spirituality and personal immortality (v.) of the soul which is created directly by God; albeit with the oscillations of the Fathers on some point (St. Augustine for direct creation by God, Tertullian for absolute spirituality: cf. his proof of the materiality of the soul in De anima, ch. 7, ed. J. H. Waszink, Amsterdam 1947, pp. 9 and 148 ff.: extensive commentary with indication of sources). The most complete treatise, of eclectic inspiration, which fuses classical psychology with Christian doctrine, is the De natura hominis of Nemesius bishop of Emesa (cf. B. Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, Münster in W. 1900, p. vii ff.).

The history of psychology in the Hellenistic period, throughout the whole Middle Ages, up to the Renaissance, gravitates around Aristotle's De anima. The commentaries can have a threefold form: 1) continuous literal analysis (e.g., the great commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Simplicius, G. Philoponus); 2) paraphrase (Themistius); 3) questions (Alexander of A. himself in Ἀπορίας καὶ λύσεις). The Arabs, also in psychology as in the other fields of culture, follow Greek models; for philosophy at first the Platonic and Neoplatonic current prevails, which continues also in the commentaries on Aristotle. Avicenna (v.) follows the paraphrastic method, while Averroes (v.) adheres to and develops, with continuous reference to the Greek tradition, the literal one. Among the medievals, while St. Albert the Great follows the line of Avicenna, his disciple St. Thomas deepens the method of Averroes. In medieval psychology the two tendencies are in conflict: the Augustinian Avicennianizing school on the one hand with St. Bonaventure, who defends so-called Christian Platonism, the Thomist Aristotelian school on the other, which adheres to the principles of the Philosopher. The principal points of divergence concerned: 1) The metaphysical structure of the soul, which the Augustinian school held to be composed (and so also the angels) of matter and form, while St. Thomas defends its absolute essential simplicity (cf. De spiritualibus creaturis, a. 1). 2) The relation of the soul to its faculties: real identity for the one, real distinction according to St. Thomas (Summ. Theol., 1ª, q. 77, a. 1). 3) The mode of knowledge: the Augustinian school, following the doctrine of St. Augustine, accepts the distinction of ratio inferior and ratio superior, inasmuch as the one "intendit rationibus aeternis consulendis", while the other "insistit inferioribus per superiora dirigendis" (St. Augustine, De Trinitate, XII, ch. 3, nn. 3-4: PL 42, 88). St. Thomas instead, according to Aristotelian doctrine, attributes these functions to the agent and possible intellect inasmuch as it has the capacity to "abstract" from experience the cognition of the essence of things. In the face of Averroism, which, with the claim of integrally summarizing Aristotelian psychology, defended the existence of a single eternal and impersonal intellect for the whole human species, Thomism proves itself more active and effective.

Humanism and the Renaissance, while magnifying the primacy of man in the cosmos, exhaust their research in certain particular points (immortality of the soul, free will, providence) and offer no constructive psychology worthy of note (cf. E. Cassirer-Kristeller-Randell, The Renaissance philosophy of man, Chicago 1945, p. 5).

Modern philosophy overturned the situation of psychology. Preceded by the skepticism of the nominalist school, modern thought, especially starting from Descartes, identified "truth" and "certainty." Certainty in turn was reduced to the presence of "consciousness" to itself (the so-called cogito or "principle of interiority"). The closed "monad" of Leibniz (v.) is meant to be the resumption of the Aristotelian entelechy (v.) unified with the new principle of consciousness. English empiricism (v.), which culminates in the phenomenalism (v.) of Hume, reduces psychology to the analysis of the "elements" (impressions and ideas) of consciousness. Finally with Kant (the das Ich denke überhaupt or "transcendental consciousness") and especially with the idealist systems derived from him, "consciousness" (Bewusstsein) becomes "universal self-consciousness" (das allgemeine Selbstbewusstsein) and psychology is absorbed by metaphysics (v.). Hegel (v.) sought to distinguish between phenomenology and logic, but in the continuous labor of his thought the distinction never became clear (cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Lasson, Leipzig 1932; I, Vorrede, p. 7: phenomenology precedes the system, whereas in the Enzyklop. [cf. § 413] it is part of it); the Hegelians consider psychology a section of the "doctrine of spirit," that is, as the consideration of "subjective spirit" (cf. C. L. Michelet, Anthropologie oder Psychologie des subjektiven Geistes, Berlin 1840, p. v ff.). The fundamental error of modern psychology is to have split (already with Descartes) the nature of man into "thought" and "extension" and thus to have posed the forced alternative of materialism and idealism: thus to the predominance of the idealist principle in the first half of the 19th century there followed in the second half the predominance of positivist and materialist psychology (the "psychology without a soul," Psychologie ohne Seele, according to the expression of F. A. Lange: Gesch. des Materialismus, I, II, sec. 3; 3rd ed., Iserlohn 1877, p. 381). Nevertheless, one can recognize in modern philosophy the merit of having stimulated the search for individual interiority and the knowledge of the concrete in order to grasp that sense of man's temporal existence which classical psychology, under the dominion of "nemesis," had ignored, while medieval psychology had applied itself predominantly to metaphysical discussions. The principal error of modern psychology was in having transformed the functional, that is, operative, subjectivity of consciousness into phenomenological subjectivity, reducing the world to appearance and finally making ontological subjectivity the constitution of being (whence the accusation of "psychologism" [v.] leveled against modern thought by Gioberti). In this way consciousness itself annihilated itself by asphyxiation for having isolated and reified its intentional function (cf. the analysis of the "dogma von der Selbstbefangenheit des Bewusstseins" made by Ph. Lersch, Seele und Welt, Zur Frage nach der Eigenart des Seelischen, Leipzig 1941, especially p. 23 ff.).

In contemporary culture psychology has split into two principal directions, experimental psychology properly so called and philosophical anthropology. Experimental psychology takes upon itself the analysis, description and search for the laws of the different classes of psychic facts in order to arrive at a conception of man's behavior from the strictly scientific, that is, objective, point of view. Its historical beginning is to be placed with the discovery of Fechner's (v.) "psychic law," which aims to specify the relationship between the intensity of the stimulus and the increase of sensation; but its true methodological beginning is to be seen in the founding of the first laboratory of experimental research, brought about through the efforts of W. Wundt at Leipzig in 1879, who with his own writings and those of his pupils explored nearly all the problems of the new science, dwelling by preference on the synthetic representative and emotive functions. Among the founders of modern psychology one must remember the physicists and physiologists E. H. Weber, H. Helmholtz, J. Müller, E. Hering, J. v. Kries, who contributed to the analysis of sensations. The higher functions of memory, understanding and willing were successfully explored by the school of Külpe (v.), who, nourished by strong philosophical studies, applied for the first time with scientific criteria the method of introspection (v.), vindicating, against positivist and neo-Kantian psychology, the absolute originality of the higher life: to this orientation belong the most decided supporters of spiritualism in psychology, such as F. De Sarlo, A. Gemelli, A. Michotte, S. De Sanctis, and in America Titchener with their numerous pupils. Among the more recent orientations in psychology, up to the Second World War, mention must be made of "Gestalt psychology" (Gestaltpsychologie) founded by M. Wertheimer and developed by numerous and brilliant collaborators, such as K. Koffka, W. Köhler, K. Lewin: a related tendency is the "psychology of the whole" (Ganzheitspsychologie) of F. Krueger, Wundt's successor at Leipzig. An orientation that soon gained the upper hand in American psychology is the psychology of "behavior" (behaviour), which excludes every psychic factor, initiated by J. Watson and today represented by Tolman. Psychoanalysis (v.), founded by S. Freud, which attends to the analysis of the subconscious in order to obtain a unitary "causal" explanation of psychic life, falls within psychology, albeit tainted with philosophical preconceptions. In the Catholic field, the Catholic Universities of Louvain, Milan and Washington have for nearly half a century carried out fruitful and appreciated work in defense of a spiritualist psychology.

An original way of orienting the problems of psychology as "science of the spirit" (Geisteswissenschaft) is philosophical anthropology, which is a rigorously theoretical discipline: its beginning can be placed with the distinction made by W. Dilthey between "descriptive" and "explanatory" psychology (descriptive und erklärende Psychologie); it had its brilliant investigator in M. Scheler (cf. Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1923 and Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 4th ed., Neuburg 1949). The peculiar object of philosophical anthropology is not only the knowledge of the objective properties of man as a "natural being" (als Naturwesen), but above all the analysis of his inner inclinations according to which he "acts of himself" in his environment and forms his "conception of the world" (Weltanschauung). Unlike objective psychology, which wants to be an exact science, philosophical anthropology intends to bring out the original rhythm of the life of the spirit insofar as it "does not seek solely the truth concerning the nature of man, but claims the decision about what truth in general can mean" (M. Heidegger, Die Idee einer philosophischen Anthropologie, in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, § 37; 2nd ed., Frankfurt on the M. 1951, p. 188 ff.). This orientation, favored especially by the "phenomenology" (v.) of Husserl (v.), isolated itself as pure reflection of "truth" and a priori "on the essence of man in order to clarify the stature of his spiritual life (cf. P. Häberlin, Der Mensch, Eine philosophische Anthropologie, Zurich 1940, p. 7). According to this orientation, what is at stake is to grasp the essence of man from the dynamic and not purely static point of view, that is, to clarify the "how" (wie) and not simply the "what" (was) of his spiritual life insofar as it gives itself in the becoming of freedom, and it therefore seeks to reach man in "his original possibilities" (H. Lipps, Die menschliche Natur, Frankfurt on the M. 1941, p. 8). In this orientation philosophical anthropology meets existentialism (v.), but perhaps places the very concept of psychology as science in an insoluble crisis.

Cornelio Fabro