For a couple months now, a little group of people have been meeting biweekly under the name Humanist Small Group. It was started by a classicist and teaching fellow (I believe is his position) at Harvard who wanted regular fellowship with like-minded folks, more than was facilitated by the social events the Harvard humanist community hosts once a month or so.
Rick Heller has chronicled the last two meetings, the latter of which was this Saturday. As you can see, we covered a lot of standard ground, and more unexpectedly virtue ethics came up at a few points. As it did earlier this month when I stopped by the University of Chicago and sat in on a seminar by Deirdre McCloskey on virtue ethics, Christianity and capitalism. (Guess there’s more than one way to do it.)
I find all humanist/etc. groups to be fraught with theoretical difficulties. For example: Is any group labeled “humanist” a protest group against religion? If not, why does it exist? If so (and surely it is, if only to a very small degree), to what degree should religion and irreligion be a focus of conversation? But refreshingly, these have not seriously affected the actual meetings, and perhaps exist merely in my head.
A related issue that did come up, at the end, was the suggestion that the “humanist movement,” being full of individualistic, highly opinionated people, may never become unified and cohesive enough to be a real force in society. I made the suggestion that, perhaps, but perhaps there is room for more specialized groups within the wider movement. And of course there is Sam Harris’s suggestion that there be no movement at all.
The paper was a little rougher than I wanted it to be, but apparently solid enough for a good grade. I may post a synopsis here, though I’ve learned never to make blog promises.
I hope I do though, because my current classes — Social Cognition and Evidence-Based Psychotherapy (the latter just for audit, so I can have more time to play music, etc.) — overlap with the topic in interesting ways.
Still working on the paper; got a gracious extension from the professor.
The more Carl Rogers I read, the more I like him:
I love the precision and the elegance of science…. I like to create hypotheses and I like to test them against hard reality. I dislike fuzzy and personal emotional statements when they are given out as general truths, even when I respect them as expressions of the person…. But I am also a person. A therapist. An individual who has lived deeply in human relationships. Here I come up with some other values and views which have equally deep meaning for me…. such terms as personal freedom, choice, purpose, goal, have profound and significant meaning. But there are boundaries to my regard for the subjective. I find that the elaboration of the subjective alone, as in some of the more far-out existentialists, is as unacceptable to me as the rigidity of a closed, impersonal science. As I read some of these existential writers, I feel that here we are entering into a situation in which history is repeating itself. We have suffered enough from the dogmatism of an unscientific Freudianism which initially enlightened us and then bound us into a rigid straitjacket. [A]s a person I stand in both camps — the world of the precise, hard scientist, and the world of the sensitive subjective person.
I love the precision and the elegance of science…. I like to create hypotheses and I like to test them against hard reality. I dislike fuzzy and personal emotional statements when they are given out as general truths, even when I respect them as expressions of the person….
But I am also a person. A therapist. An individual who has lived deeply in human relationships. Here I come up with some other values and views which have equally deep meaning for me…. such terms as personal freedom, choice, purpose, goal, have profound and significant meaning.
But there are boundaries to my regard for the subjective. I find that the elaboration of the subjective alone, as in some of the more far-out existentialists, is as unacceptable to me as the rigidity of a closed, impersonal science. As I read some of these existential writers, I feel that here we are entering into a situation in which history is repeating itself. We have suffered enough from the dogmatism of an unscientific Freudianism which initially enlightened us and then bound us into a rigid straitjacket.
[A]s a person I stand in both camps — the world of the precise, hard scientist, and the world of the sensitive subjective person.
(“Some thoughts regarding the current philosophy of the behavioral sciences,” J. of Humanistic Psych. V:2, fall 1965, pp. 183-185)
Browsing the early issues of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology last month for my paper, I came across a review of a book by the American psychologist Eugene Gendlin. I’d seen his name once before in an unlikely place — a booklet by a British Quaker writer named Rex Ambler, whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre.
(continue reading…)
Describing the shift in mainstream American psychology since William James, Joseph Gilbert writes,
Philosophical spectulation was, with considerable clatter, abandoned as the ultimate in unscientificism…. By the majestically immaterial phenomena of consciousness the Behaviorists were as embarrassed as a group of slightly inebriated men carrying the insensible form of one of their companions across a fashionable hotel lobby.
Academic criticism is usually more genteel, so I found that amusing. Especially since one of my professors was a colleague of B.F. Skinner.
This is from an article in the journal I’m studying, which tries to enlist the ghost of James for the fight between humanistic and behavioristic psychology — since, while the latter was empirical and anti-phenomenological, both James and the humanists embraced idiography and philosophical speculation.
(from “William James in retrospect: 1962″, J. of Humanistic Psych. II:1, Spring 1962, p. 93.)
I’m writing a research paper on the humanistic psychology movement, due early next week. Specifically, it’s looking at the relationship of the early movement to “science,” which I’ll leave intentionally vague for now. To keep it manageable I’m restricting it to obviously relevant articles in the first 10 years of the movement’s flagship journal.
Blogging tidbits of my notes and drafts could be a colossal time-waster, but I think having an audience might keep me motivated. That’s the shame about papers written for a class — only one person gets to see your work.
For now, just a quote, from the first issue, which expresses one variation on the movement’s goal to be both holistic and scientific:
A truly humanistic psychology is an integration of the historical and contemporary data and theories of psychology…. the psychologist of man is suspicious when a collective psychologist claims that man is only a mechanistic stimulus-response organism. On the other hand, he is as suspicious when personalistic psychologists claim that man is only a personal being without an aspect that is measurable and without adjustment to a collectivity. (Adrian van Kaam, “Humanistic psychology and culture,” J. of Humanistic Psych. I:1, spring 1961, p. 100)
A truly humanistic psychology is an integration of the historical and contemporary data and theories of psychology…. the psychologist of man is suspicious when a collective psychologist claims that man is only a mechanistic stimulus-response organism. On the other hand, he is as suspicious when personalistic psychologists claim that man is only a personal being without an aspect that is measurable and without adjustment to a collectivity.
(Adrian van Kaam, “Humanistic psychology and culture,” J. of Humanistic Psych. I:1, spring 1961, p. 100)
