The Human Context

160 Pages·1968·10.717 MB·English

by  Paul A. Senft (auth.)

the human context
publishes work in English, French, Spanîsh, German and Italian, and first, authorized translations rrom
these and other languages. Its aims are twofold: ta explore the conceptual and methodological links be
tween the Sciences of Mao such as Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology and Sodology in their implicit
philosophical assumptions; ilS model is trans-cultural. from a mainly European vantage-point.
Dr. Jean Gui/hot, Neuropsych. et Docteur es-Lettreset
Editorial Board:
Sciences Humaines, Att. Maison Nat. de St. Maurice
Dr. J"hn B. O'Mal/ey, Dept. of Social Sciences, Univer (1).9 Rue Franquet, Paris 15e, France
sity of Liverpool, Liverpool 7, England Prof DolI. Mara Stlvini Paumo/i, Vie Vittorio Veneto 12,
CelKSl Gross, Dept. of Humanities, Chelsea College Milan, Italy
ofScience and Technology, University of Landon, Dr. JOSt Mo. Gal14rt Capdevila, Jefe Clinica del Patronato
landon, England National de Asistencia Psiquiatrica, Dante 63, Bar
Dr. Salman Raschid, England celona, Spain
Praf Dt. Dieftr !anBen, Director. UniversitaUkliniken Prof Eusene T. Cendlin, Dept. of Psychology, Univer
Mainz, 6500 Mainz, Langenbeckstrasse 1, Fed. Rep. sity of Chicago, Chicago, III. 60637, U.s.A.
of Germany wren R. Mosher, Chief, Center for Studies of Schi
Erau Doz. Dr. Christa Kohler, Abteilung fur Psychothe zophrenia, National Institute of Mental Health, 5<45<4
rapie und Neurosenforschung. Karl-Marx-Univer Wisconsin Ave., Chevy Chase. Md. 20203, U.s.A.
sitat, 701 Leipzig, Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse 25, Prof Bernard G. Rosen/hal, Dept. of Sociology, Illinois
German Dem. Rep. Institute of Technology, Chicago, III. 60616, U.S.A.
Responsible Editor: Paul A. Senfi, 17 Platt's Lane, London N.W. 3, England
Each volume of the review will contain about 500 pages yearly, in three or four issues ! Chaque volume
de la revue comportera environ 500 pages par an, en trois ou quatre fascicules.
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t>e
AII contributions, correspondence an editorial matters and books for review should adressed to:
Priere d'adresser les contributions, toute correspondance relative il la redaction ainsi que les livres pour compte
rendu il:
The Responsible Editor, Dr. Paul A. Senft, 17 Platt's iane, London N.W. 3, England (Tel. [phone])
ISBN 978-94-015-1618-1 ISBN 978-94-015-2747-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-2747-7
"THE HUMAN CONTEXT"
Summer I968
Uncertainty Violence and Hope *
J
I.
Aiming at the certainty of Knowledge in interdisciplinary science
or
Groping for insight into being: - finding the ultima ratio in the use of
"mighty force."
To join the host of periodicals that compete for contributors, readers, and their own
survival, will not in itself establish a claim to attention. Nor can such a claim be
reinforced by a title to corporate representation: the HUMAN CONTEXT is not the
institutionalized voice of a professional grouping discussing its scientific subject
matter and promoting its own interests. Individual initiative has brought it into
existence, independence must safeguard its life, and a global perspective will remain
its arduous objective. Its concern is with the human sciences as such, though seen
from the vantage-point of its originators whose field is psychotherapy, philosophy,
psychoanalysis, sociology.
The scientific universe is expanding with increasing speed into galaxies of self
enclosed specialities, leaving all human vision of past totalities in fragments. The
specifically human sciences, so recently born and still at the very beginning of their
operational efficacy, often appear already beyond the reach of unifying insight.
Specialization overgrowth is ofter blamed for it. But who can dispute that special
ization is an instrumental necessity, that it differentiates areas and "isolates factors"
in the selective concretization of the means to achieve the self-contained rationality
of ends? The emphasis on wholeness and Humanity does not always meet with
rejection by a "narrow empiricism" when the scientist suspects the nebulous vastness
of all-embracing "totalizations" and listens unmoved by an eloquence which obscures
the scrutiny of means. "Concentration on facts," the basic postulate of positivism,
is indeed the daily bread of all sciences, always provided that it does not pour con
tempt on the search for the hidden epistemology of assumptions implicit jn such
concentration, and refrains from damning such a search as "obscurantist meta
physics," or simply "meaningless" in its linguistic illogic. "Concentration on facts"
is dependent on "concentration on meaning" and both must remain open to the
a
* Une traduction fran;;:aise de cet essai sera publiee - cause des evenements des derniers
mois en France - dans la prochaine edition.
11 The Human Context
renewed scrutiny of both meaning and fact. They both result from the analysis of two
structures: that of human experience, and that of language in which experience is
embedded and transformed; this dual scrutiny forms the epistemology which has to
be held in check by its own genesis. The HUMAN CONTEXT will aim at an orien
tation which could be called an "open phenomenology," a fundamental analysis of
the process of human experience, which on its pages shall itself become a dia-Iogous
experience of intellection. Its openness is best described in the words of Husserl's
Cartesian Meditations: "Every attempt of the historically developed sciences to
attain a better grounding or a better understanding of their own sense and per
formance is a bit of self-investigation on the part of the scientist. But there is only
one radical self-investigation, and it is phenomenological." It is a freely evolving
direction, but its freedom should not be mistaken for neutrality or interdisciplinary
eclecticism.
"Neutrality" in the human sciences is a particularly dubious claim. The employ
ment of strictly scientific methods is supposed to exclude all objectives containing
value-decisions. It is also held that the a posteriori nature of scientific findings is
incompatible with the "subjective" choice of a pre-set purpose which will influence
the application of methods. This double denial is today under attack even from many
"exact" natural scientists, who face the ever-present challenge of values in their own
fields. And it proves altogether pretentious in the case of the human sciences, the
necessarily "conjectural character" of which is often contrasted with the natural
sciences.
As to the practical attainments of "interdisciplinary" research, they lead into
blind alleys if they merely co-ordinate "findings" which are not transformed into
totalized insights or give rise at least to concepts of "multi-causative wholes." Each
science struggles with the twofold problem of - first - how to define its single vari
ables statistically, operationally, or in qualitative meaning-contexts and - second -
how to establish the interdependence of these variables so that in the special field of
the particular science a model of one-way causation can become acceptable. "Inter
disciplinary" links among several sciences demand, moreover, supervening criteria
for the interrelatedness of models which are not only heterogeneous to each other but
have been constructed, to begin with, from heteronomous constituent variables. The
concept of "multi-causative wholes" depends, it seems, on a methodological ground
work which goes far beyond "interdisciplinary" co-ordination of data; these always
require an analytical comparison of their conceptual categorization and such a
confrontation inevitably leads into basic problems of epistemology. Thus the call for
"interdisciplinary" collation of expertise may well hide the discomfort about the
scientifically inaccessible nature of "totalized insight" and a resistance to ac
knowledge it as a transcendent act of cognition on the phenomenological model.
"Totalized insight" has in some scientific ears the ring of "speculative metaphy
sics," worthless as "Knowledge" by any degree of certainty. But if "certainty of
Knowledge" is the true scientific ambition, it is still pursued against the background
Uncertainty, Violence and Hope iii
of queries which are today no longer even discussed. Science offers increasing certain
ty of Object-Knowledge in the sense of more and more precise operations with things
in the World. Strangely enough, the Knowledge of certainty in the human experience
of Being decreases to the same extent at which objects become accessible to operations
by men and men themselves are transformed into objects similarly operable by other
men. Certainty of Knowledge has in modern European history become sharply
divorced from the certainty of Being. It is the gulf between the two (un-)certainties
that brought about the urgency which seems to drive on scientific object-knowledge
to multiply and specialize - as if to cover up the collapse of all existential certainty.
In spite of Heidegger's well-nigh incomprehensible call to heed our "oblivion of
Being" and return to the queries of the Pre-Socratics, his philosophy-poetry seems to
survive more insistently than some other contemporary schools. But Parmenides
confronts Being and Thought only to show that this is what human mortals do as
they uproot themselves in the divinely founded Oneness of Being. Heidegger's notion
of Being radically breaks with all traditional metaphysics so abhorred by the scien
tism of empirical philosophers who avoid rather than come to grips with traditional
metaphysics which continuously shadows them. The "Great Chain of Being," the
gradually perfectible Scheme of Cosmic Rationality is not that of Heidegger, nor
has it anything to do with contemporary ontological phenomenology. It is surely no
coincidence that it was Heidegger, and no other among the twentieth-century phi
losophers, who was found to be of direct appeal to at least one group of human
scientists. His ontology speaks to psychiatric clinicians on the search for the under
standing of some basic facts: the operational concepts of psychogenesis, ofthe becoming
of the Person, Self, Identity, the certainty and disintegration of Being as the roots
of experience in World and Time - these empiricists brought up in the medical
traditions of tangible evidence were no a priori partisans of metaphysical "her
meneutics." They were men of the "physis" and remained committed to "praxis."
In more than one sense, European psychology and some biological philosophy
signifies the reverse direction which natural science has taken since the seventeenth
century. John Locke's philosophy of sense experience is the true foundation of the
theory of Knowledge on which empiricism based its philosophy. But when his
scepticism severely distinguished between the certainty of Knowledge that science
can offer as factual truth, from the uncertain Knowledge which sense experience
makes possible only in the form of intuitive Knowledge of our own existence, he took
his clues from a physician, Sydenham, and the chemist, Boyle. Although he had a
great deal to say about "personal identity," such self-knowledge was only possible
with the help of the introspective association of ideas in Time. There was no other
approach to establish any identity of the person, and he advised men to "employ
their minds with variety, delight and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with
their own constitution." They should "not lose our thoughts into the vast ocean of
being and should busy themselves with what may be of use to us, for of that they
are very capable." His scepticism and pragmatism was opening the door to that kind
iv The Human Context
of phenomenalism which could link him with Freud and William James. But he also
led the way which banished experience from European philosophy and relegated the
study of the sources of all human experience, the human Subject, to a negligible place.
In an all too summary fashion one could say that there are three sources from which
certainty of Knowledge are obtained. r) From axiomatic faith in God's existence and
creativity; 2) from Cartesian doubt allayed in logical induction to ontological proof;
and 3) from the scientific evidence found by the team of Baconian experimenters.
Only axiomatic faith unites certainty of knowledge with a sense of certainty of being.
Neither Bacon nor Descartes can convincingly do this. Both offer inference in various
ways through science or the inbuilt Cogito. Posterity, insofar as it followed Descartes
who eventually "resolved to make my studies within myself," studied the human mind
as a mental entity, not the total experience of the human person, and succumbed to
an irreconcilable dichotomization between matter and spirit. Not until Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer and eventually Husserl, has "intuition" regained its significance as the
search for the synthesis of all human experiential modalities. The great variety of
philosophical and psychological conceptions which go under the blanket name of
"Existentialism" today signify nothing but a return to the emphasis on and the
departure from experience as the only focus in a state of doubt, conflict and an ab
sence of all sense of secure being. But what kind of experience can we talk about
after man has lost sight of God who - according to Pascal - went into hiding, and
after man became uncertain of the truth of his sense-perception, :.:.ccording to Hume.
And what kind of answers could be attempted to the sharp split of dichotomized
cognition such as Berkeley's doctrine brought to a head?
Here was a philosophy which was untrue in fact yet consistent in its logic. It
radically denied the existence of matter. To recall James Boswell's famous description
of how Dr. Johnson refuted this doctrine has a particular significance today. The
answer he offered was the actual behaviour of the objects themselves of which we
have total experience. But what in this context is "experience"? If it is sense-per
ception then we meet the doubts of the cogito and those of Hume. If it is logical
inference reaching the point at which synthetic judgement becomes possible, then it
can, as we know today, still be empirically falsified. Dr. Johnson was "striking his
foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it. 'I refute it
thus'." It is not only the observed behaviour of objects in human experience, but
also the test of human experience through the behaviour of the objects which consti
tutes Dr. Johnson's total experience. If this is the account of the reciprocal related
ness between acts of being, - in man's experience - a particular conjunction of these
can constitute ontological evidence. But more topically Dr. Johnson's rebounding
kick may be seen in the light of a paradigm: it is the ultima ratio of a man who
having lost both certainty of knowledge and his assurance of being, has to resort to
the experience of an act of violence to re-establish both.
It was the advice of a man of the Baroque to "employ our minds with variety,
delight and satisfaction," and it was the craftsman of the Baroque who was "to busy
Uncertainty, Violence and Hope v
himself with what may be of use to us." John Locke's empiricism passed through the
wealth of sense-perception to the wealth of objects which can be produced for our
enjoyment if we make it serviceable. Baroque art and diligent craftsmanship draws
its richness of sense-perception from a Manichaeen division of light and shade. Could
it be that the age of Baroque made experience luxuriate before it started on the road
towards extinction? Nothing succeeds like anxiety in creating the success of Augustan
Reason and the flight into the graceful clarities of mathematics. There are precepts of
human experience which seem to re-appear in the most diverse circumstances of
history. ThePythagoreans are drawn to the music of the Spheres in mathematical
formulas and their mystical sect of puritans have supplied the secrets of the hermetic
traditions for two thousand years. Descartes, the physician and mathematician, was
drawn to the sect of the Rosicrucians, and Newton was preoccupied with ghosts.
Anxiety turns man - man's rationality - into the rationalization of "acting out" - the
question is only what. European man seemed particularly prone to exteriorize his
split identity in the manufacture and accumulation of things. Before their stark
reality human experience recedes into realms of the Subjective, which is the realm of
ideas, of imagination and of the "Conceits" as opposed to the impersonality of force
and energy. Hobbes' "passions" can be rationalized into a necessary "Social Contract"
best regulated by principles of a new, atheistic physiological psychology. God enters
the scene transformed into a Universal Engineer and Cosmic Clockmaker. With
pathogenic conflicts at her very constitution, Europe had to cross the threshold on
which Antiquity had to stop short and decline: to arrive at the pervasive mechani
zation of a whole civilization, to establish with the help of science and technology
an exterior hold over existence, the interior synthesis of which has failed. Her history
is the strangely new spectacle of survival by the sheer capacity of renewing "illness
gains". Her recurrent disturbances of the structures of human experience are over
come sometimes only by total withdrawal from it and by "projecting" herself into
the construction of things ("occupational therapy" is the widespread practice in
conventional psychiatry). For much of the end of nineteenth-century thought, human
experience no longer represents the concern with appearance that screens Being or
Essence; it is the sheer epiphenomenal function of precisely definable realities. These
are: Matter in the history of man, Fact in the context of experimentally derived truth,
and Motive-power of instinctual Energy. Marx's Political Economy, Mach's Em
pirical Positivism, and Freud's Psychoanalysis. Their common postulate is a complete
scientific anaesthesia for the dissection of human experience and its reduction to
matter, energy and fact.
For the metaphysics of the Schoolmen, Being and Essence were beyond and behind
all human experience. For the logical positivist of the late nineteenth century,
experience was either unverifiable Subjectivity or the verifiable source of objective
data. In neither case was there any room left for "metaphysics." What logical posi
tivism called protocollary verification was a code of rules which were governing
statements on observed facts. Problems about the nature of facts and the procedure
vi The Human Context
which leads to verification, however, became so contested that linguistic analysis
discarded all concern with the relevance of experience altogether and confined itself
to the investigation of the possible codes of statements, irrespective of any problem of
empirical verification. Experience, World, Reality were not the concern of the phi
losopher; what he should be doing was the sole search for the meaning of statements
which do not cancel each other out through their inner linguistic inconsistency. Only
in this way can philosophy clear its table radically from all metaphysical meaning
lessness, or the sheer tautology of factual definitions which add nothing to know
ledge. Certainly, the demand to confine all philosophy to a therapeutic function, that
is to correct the faulty use of language, could have brought all philosophy and not
only traditional metaphysics to its final end, at least in the sense in which Whitehead
defined its task, "to rationalize mysticism." The tools of therapy are Logic, that is, sym
bolic Logic, and pure Mathematics. On the condition, of course, that they change their
historical human significance from an ancient status of being the ultimate cognitive
structures of ontological essences, - to being systemic links between statements in
which human thought can be admitted as fully legitimate in language. Symbolic
Logic and Mathematics have in this way no longer a link with the content of human
thought either; they are its ultimate terms of reference. In the last resort they are as
absolute a body of propositions as any other in the history of philosophy. What is,
however, undoubtedly novel about this philosophy is its achievement of certainty
- certainty without either knowledge or being. It is a kind of functional autonomy -
of Nothing in its linguistic performance. Curiously enough, it is, in a sense, not unlike
the concept of Consciousness at which Sartre arrives on ontological grounds. But
whilst Sartrian philosophy sometimes commits Consciousness to choice, decision, and
even to violence in action, the linguistic analyst is committed to Nothing.
2.
The European Self-experience: abandoned in the Universe,
striking roots in ethnic groups which condensate and burst into violence.
Science, as an interdisciplinary effort, is the modern heir to the liberal open-minded
ness of a humanist philosophy. It is methodologically non-committed and forever
open to scepticism in matters of truth and evidence. It is the successor of the en
cyclopaedic enlightenment. Before the growth of the human sciences as sciences,
humanist rationalist philosophy leaned heavily on the classical literary tradition:
in descriptive, aesthetic experience there was a force of cohesion which could never
be found in schools of philosophy or scientific methodology. The classical tradition
had lasted as long as aesthetic experience continued to shape itself in the one mould
which gave unity to European history: it was antiquity in mediaeval preservation.
When the latent presence of classicism received the impulse of the Renaissance and
set Europeans on the road towards discoveries, they found everywhere outside Europe
Uncertainty, Violence and Hope vii
a plurality of closed worlds beyond their vision, but there to grasp. With the waning
of the Middle Ages the same inner plurality, latent within the European world,
revealed itself. The vernacular roots of language flowered into the individuality of
national existences which disclosed a variety of chthonic cultures. They led to the
articulation of an ethnic selfhood which remained submerged from the very beginning
of its history. It is this which renders the European situation unique and without
comparison or precedent. The consciousness of the European never knew an identity
or continuity from these separate chthonic origins of the earliest primary groups to
the wider growth of social formations which eventually led to the attempt of a rational
synthesis in an all-embracing society. The mythological structures of European past
experience were broken off and never evolved into religious system of the same
homogeneous order.
To begin with, Christianity was trans-ethnic, a religious syncretism from non
chthonic, societal and synthetic sources, planfully superimposed as a spjritual and
institutional universality on the ethnic Self. European history begins with alienation
from its roots; the perceptual organization of the World and its ideatic meaning is
divorced from its original phenomenal experience. European history starts with what
Kleinian psychoanalysts have discovered in the baby, with broken linkages, knife
edged separations, splitting evaluations and antithetic object percepts. The history of
European letters is a testimony of the convulsive breakthroughs and revivals of
chthonic origins which, in sociology or psychoanalysis, go under the name of "Re
gressions." Only recently Jung interpreted the Hitlerian cataclysm as the work of the
re-emerged world of Wotan in the Teutonic Collective Unconscious. European
political history was for centuries dominated by the struggle of the two sovereignties,
the "Two Swords" (the antithesis between Divine and Royal sanction). Its philosophy
which, particularly in the work of the scholastics, was exercised by the query of
Being and Thought could no longer be identified as the original problem of Parmenides.
It was gravely underpinned by the divisions between original ethnic authenticity and
historically imposed aesthetic modes of experience. The dispute on genesis in Europe
grows into an unbridgeable axiological rift between idealism and materialism; the
Freudian Unconscious, the "seething cauldron of the Id" which erupts into rational
Consciousness has its roots in the bipolarity of the Life versus Death forces of Nature.
For Marx, culture rises like a rainbow of mystification over an underworld of ex
ploited labour surplus-value.
But most of these inherently antithetical world views mature into systems only
much later. The watershed is the fifteenth century. Two painters tell its story and its
meaning. Hieronymus Bosch and Leonardo da Vinci have the traumatically heighten
ed self-awareness of this age in common, but otherwise show the two different stages
and, maybe, the two different possibilities of evolution which are recognizable to the
perception of a psychoanalyst. To Bosch, the "World-Object" undergoes continued
splitting and the persecutory evil aspect of it has the upper hand. There is little trace
in Bosch's vision of the binding glory of God when the Middle Ages go out in the
Vlll The Human Context
teeming schizoid twilight of Man's oddly innocent, but devil-possessed greed. Leonardo
is the great "Repairer" of guilt. Like Bosch, he is the lonely, self-centred centre of a
divine universe; he knows the agony of the autonomy of Man (which is, perhaps, the
original sin of Man). But he reconstructs the "World-Object." He is no longer pos
sessed and can step back: his advice to the painter is "To look into stains on the walls
and see there an infinite number of things". Even the "names in the sound of church
bells" become fully autonomous objects that have an open appearance, hidden action,
a public present ion of their contents and a submerged form full of latent meaning.
This new animism of the Renaissance is not the magic of Bosch's animatistic spirit
ualism, but that of human experience, the richness of object percepts, the emancipated
rationality of which may still be unpredictable and invisible in their relatedness but
in their infinite dimensions have a wealth of possible self-reference. There is here in
the making what shall in future become the requirement of "clear and distinct ideas,"
the striving after certainty at the price of a distance in which affect becomes de
tachable from cognition and cool observation, measurement and calculation becomes
possible.
Galileo already discriminates between the primary and secondary qualities of
objects which faith-bound Man, without distance to his own experience, could never
have discerned. The Universal Man of the Renaissance could bequeath to the Euro
pean future the divorce of art from science, of faith from pure thought, and of sen
sation from vision, because he was Universal only through holding the multifarious
worlds of his experience together with the imprint of his omnipresent individuality.
Autonomous Man was a lonely giant, but it was for the greater glory of God that the
Renaissance, far from being anti-Christian, restored ancient polytheism as an allegory
of human power. The split between Good and Evil could be healed in Man's endow
ments activated in the service of a divine universe; the classical deities were employed
as the symbolic personalization of human predicaments and human powers to meet
them. The Renaissance humanist notion of "repair" was reconstructive harmony and
he expressed it superlatively in real and imaginative projects of city architecture.
His design of a city piazza was Ego-centred, that is, perceived, planned, anticipated
and judged. Harmony depended on him; its ascendency was that of the ordering
intellect, not that of a lived experience, lived then as the mediaeval totality of
"Erlebnis" or "Vecu". It was the planned harmony, not the unity of experience as in
the early Middle Ages, and which was to return again as the romantic nostalgia of
European consciousness, recurring in cycles during rational enlightenment, industri
alization and reified mass culture. Harmony redeemed Man by the sheer virtue of
proportion and a proportionate existence which led to beauty. The world was to be
ruled by Harmony which equated the supremacy of human cognition, not the de
humanized centralization of force which will bring "Megalopolis" into existence. The
same force which - when accepted as the arbiter of social values held by opposing
groups - will turn the modern European city into a power-centre where enlisted
violence becomes the criterion of strength and the right of action, as Machiavelli was