INTERNAL HUMAN LIMITATIONS

Steven James Bartlett

Reality is in many ways fundamentally defined by limitation. For a thing to have limits means that it has boundaries, which all things necessarily have so that they may have the identities they do and be distinguished from all that they are not.

At one time, the idea of limit conveyed the positive meaning of landmark: A king’s dominion was identified by landmarks or limits that his subjects were expected to respect and defend. Over time, the notion of limit as a landmark has disappeared in favor of the restrictive, confining, narrowing sense of limitative boundaries. This meaning of limitation expresses the idea that there are fixed points between which something is permitted or is possible.

These restrictive boundaries can themselves have a good or a bad connotation. In the good sense, for example, a healthy organism has certain inbuilt constraints upon its growth: They prevent dwarfism, as a minimal boundary, as well as gigantism, at the opposite extreme. Similarly, a healthy ecosystem has natural constraints that set fundamental conditions which must be met and which, if not satisfied, disrupt the ability of organisms to make their home there. The same is true of good human health, which requires the satisfaction of many conditions which, again, if undermined lead to poor health or perhaps death. When these essential conditions are no longer met the negative connotation of limitation becomes very evident.

The negative sense of limitation often leads us to flinch when we are made consciously aware that we’re subject to limits. Our minds recoil at slavery, racism, and imprisonment because the limits they impose take away a person’s or a group’s freedom—a freedom which, however much we value it, is never unbounded and never unrestricted, for there are social, cultural, and physical constraints that form the boundaries of what we associate even with living in freedom. Here again we find points between which is defined an area of desirability or of what is permitted.

We therefore judge some boundaries to be good and some not although both kinds are restrictive. Physical reality is defined by conditions prescribed by rule, which we call physical laws, as are other dimensions of reality, whether—to mention but a few—they are purely conceptual in the world of ideas, or psychological, cultural, ecological, or legalistic, among others.

We may flinch when the shoe pinches restrictively, but at the same time we need to recognize that without such limitative “pinches” much goes wrong which we also do not like. Cancer provides a good example of a physical process that trespasses beyond the physiological limits of good health. The demoralizing consequences of the unrestricted growth of malignancy are familiar to many.

The boundaries that function as limits to health, growth, and what we value are seldom brought to our explicit awareness. Indeed, we seem often to wish to avoid consciousness of such limits.

This avoidance is itself a form of limitation. When an individual or a group buries its head in the sand in order to avoid awareness of his, her, or its limitations, we encounter a certain meta-variety of internal limitation. This variety of internal limitation is often psychologically based, emotionally constituted, subject to passionate denial and equally passionate defensiveness. But it can also be built into our social, political, religious, legal, and educational policies, all of which often express, subtly or manifestly, the deeply rooted wish to avoid reminders of their and their creators’ internal limitations.

In my view, these interlinked phenomena make up a subject of considerable interest in their own right. They are, I have proposed, one of the last remaining frontiers of cognitive and behavioral science. That the investigation of these frontiers has been neglected should come as no surprise, if what I’ve said so far is true. This area, the investigation of internal limitations of human psychology, has been a lifelong interest of mine.

Such internal psychological limitations have a few special characteristics not already mentioned in connection with the concept of limits as boundaries. Most prominent among these psychological characteristics is that of acting as a block to individual and social development. This is a strong expression of the negative aspect of limitation. A block to positive development and growth is not only undesirable, but harmful.

We recognize this when we see a young person who shows outstanding musical talent as a violinist suddenly lose the use of one hand through an accident or illness. This disability is a crushing block to an anticipated future of positive development and growth. The person is harmed not only on a physical level, but his or her potential as a future skilled violinist has been lost.

In the general theory of disease, as it has been formulated in medicine and in the science of pathology, harm is at the core of the meaning of sickness and dysfunction. Sickness and dysfunction are essentially limiting: They block satisfying living; sometimes they also obstruct future development and in this sense destroy a person’s, a group’s, or a nation’s capacity to realize an anticipated potential.

In my work, I’ve examined a wide variety of forms of internal human limitation. I have done this not because I’m enamored with the negative restrictions upon human life, but out of a realization that we cannot overcome our worst shortcomings unless we become explicitly and critically aware of them. My interest has been in helping people overcome and develop beyond forms of internal human pathology, beyond internal blocks to positive growth that are destructive and harmful to the realization of human potential.

Here are some of the areas I have studied in various publications: 

1. internal limitations that stand in the way of the meaningful use of many concepts basic to scientific and to everyday thought. I’ve called these conceptual pathologies. (See the list of sources cited below, at the end of this article: Bartlett, 1971; 1975; 1976; 1980; 1982; 1987 (with Suber); 1992; 2005, Part III; 2011). These internal conceptual limitations lead us to use the basic vocabulary of our thinking—specifically certain key ideas that we routinely and unselfconsciously apply—in ways that we do not realize are self-destructive; they are self-destructive because they are fundamentally misleading. They delude us into thinking and acting in ways that are harmful. They are delusions over which we tend to have no control because we are victims of our own erroneous and uncritical thinking.
   
   
2. internal limitations that are at the core of the psychology of normality and that result in pathology. I’ve appropriately named these pathologies of normality. (Bartlett, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2011). We are now well-aware that the majority of psychologically normal people are disposed to think, feel, and behave in harmful ways when circumstances are right. We have abundant convincing experimental evidence of this, and of course centuries of human history to substantiate it.
   
   
3. psychological constraints that block the ability of people to learn from past mistakes and to improve their individual, social, and environmental conditions, condemning people to vicious circles of repetitive, self-destructive thought and behavior. Here lies a crucial but entirely neglected area of study, the psychology of stupidity. (Bartlett, 2005, Chap. 18; 2011, Chap. 8-10). We have yet to recognize that human stupidity is not merely a lack of intelligence, but that it possesses a powerful dynamic of its own, leading to recalcitrant stubbornness, active avoidance of self-knowledge, suppression of original thought in others, and a self-reinforcing mindset that expresses inherent self-limitation.
   
   
4. handicapping deficits that limit people to a low level and quality of consciousness, conduct, and outlook that are inherently barbaric (Bartlett, 1993a, b; 2011, Chap. 5).
   
   
5. limitations that impede individual and group consciousness of culture. This was a phenomenon foremost on the minds of the Scholastics, but is now unfamiliar. The phenomenon was called acedia. (See Bartlett, 1994a; 2011, Chap. 4 and 6);
   
   
6. internal psychological limitations that block the continued survival of the world’s rich diversity of species as a result of an intransigent human psychology of heedless reproduction and environmental exploitation (Bartlett, 2005, Chap. 17; 2006; 2011, Chap. 1); and two more specialized forms of limitation:
   
   
7. internal psychological limitations that obstruct the constructive development of the discipline of philosophy (Bartlett, 1986a, 1986b, 1989); and
   
   
8. internal psychological limitations that block the human recognition of animal rights (Bartlett, 2002, 2007, 2008).
   
   

All of these limitations are internal—i.e., they are intrinsically built in as basic characteristics of normal human psychology, and in various ways they act to slow, to impede, and at times to bring to a complete stop the advance of human knowledge, of culture, and of the development of attitudes and behavior that we associate with human moral conduct and aesthetic sensibility. At times in human history, the complete stop they have caused has been more than this: It has been regressive, as reoccurrences of barbarism have testified during periods of decadence and decline of civilizations. When these limitations block moral development and cultivation, they encourage human aggression, destructiveness, and cruelty, and discourage the broadening and deepening of human compassion.

At the same time, many of these limitations are destructive because they obstruct positive, constructive relationships between individuals, between their societies, and between human and non-human species. Some are destructive to the environmental conditions necessary not only to sustain life, but to make healthy, satisfying, uncrowded, peaceful, and aesthetic living possible. Most of these internal psychological limitations are able to function exceedingly well in their obstructive capacities precisely because they remain unrecognized, but more often because their recognition by professional psychologists and psychiatrists and by the wider public is strongly resisted and subject to widespread denial thanks to deeply vested interests, group and species pride, and fanatical ideological commitments.

The internal human psychological limitations that I’ve mentioned only in passing here cannot of course be examined in detail in this brief, general introduction. As is shown in the publications cited below, they qualify as real, non-metaphorical pathologies to which we close our eyes to our own detriment. They affect the great majority of people and yet are widely ignored or willfully denied. These pathologies are so widespread in their incidence and prevalence that they contrast with conventionally endorsed DSM diagnostic categories, which are instead intended to differentiate from the larger population a special subset of individuals who, the DSM-propounders claim, are afflicted with “mental disorders.” The pathologies of internal psychological limitation that are in view here instead affect the greater population, not a relative minority. Despite this difference, they attract our genuine therapeutic concern for the same reason as do conventionally understood cognitive, affective, and behavioral problems: because they hinder people psychologically, because they lead to suffering and disability, and because they impede the ability of people to reach their personal goals in life. In referring to “internal limitations” within the framework of psychology, this is both clinically appropriate and historically legitimate. At the same time, we need to recognize that here we have in view pathologies that extend well beyond a medically narrow conception of psychological disorder.

This discussion concerning the internal limitations of human psychology continues in my book, Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health (Praeger, 2011). (Click on the title to read further about this work.)

Bartlett, Steven James (1971). A relativistic theory of phenomenological constitution: A self-referential, transcendental approach to conceptual pathology. 2 vols. (Vol. I: French; Vol. II: English). Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris. University Microfilms International #7905583. For further information, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1975). Metalogic of reference: A study in the foundations of possibility. Starnberg, Germany: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Bartlett, Steven James (1976). The idea of a metalogic of reference. Methodology and Science, 9(5), 85–92.

Bartlett, Steven James (1980). Self-reference, phenomenology, and philosophy of science. Methodology and Science, 13(5), 143–67.

Bartlett, Steven James (1982). Referential consistency as a criterion of meaning. Synthese, 52, 267-82. For a copy of this paper that includes updated references, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1986a). Narcissism and philosophy. Methodology and Science, 19(1), 16–26. For further discussion, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1986b). Philosophy as ideology. Metaphilosophy, 17(1), 1–13. For further discussion, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1989). Psychological underpinnings of philosophy. Metaphilosophy, 20(3–4), 295–305. For further discussion, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (Ed.) (1992). Reflexivity: A source book in self-reference. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.

Bartlett, Steven James (1993a). Barbarians at the door: A psychological and historical profile of today's college students. Methodology and Science, 26(1), 18–40. (A concurrent publication in the Netherlands of Bartlett, 1993b.) For further information, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1993b). Barbarians at the door: A psychological and historical profile of today's college students. Modern Age, 35(4), Summer, 296–310. (Readers of this version of the paper are asked to refer to the "Note to Our Readers" printed in this journal in Vol. 36, No. 3, page 303.) For further information, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1994a), The loss of permanent realities: Demoralization of university faculty in the liberal arts. Methodology and Science, 27(1), 25–39. For further information, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (1994b). The psychology of faculty demoralization in the liberal arts: Burnout, acedia, and the disintegration of idealism. New Ideas in Psychology, 72(3), 277–89. For further information, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (2002). Roots of human resistance to animal rights: Psychological and conceptual blocks. Animal Law, 8, 143–76. Electronically republished by the Michigan State University's Detroit College of Law, Animal Law Web Center, and maintained on an ongoing basis at http://www.animallaw.info/articles/arussbartlett2002. htm.

Translated into German, "Wurzeln menschlichen Widerstands gegen Tierrechte: Psychologische und konceptuelle Blockaden," and available online at http://www.simorgh.de/animallaw/bartlett_33-67.pdf

Translated into Portuguese, Bartlett (2007); available online at http://www.animallaw.info/journals/jo_pdf/brazilvol3.pdf.

For an introduction to the topic of the psychology of animal rights and copies of these papers, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (2005). The pathology of man: A study of human evil. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Bartlett, Steven James (2006). The ecological pathology of man. Mentalities/Mentalités: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 20(2), 1–18. For a copy, click here.

Bartlett, Steven James (2007). Raizes da resistencia humana aos direitos dos animais: Bloqueios psicologicos e conceituais. Brazilian Animal Rights Review (Revista Brasileira de Direito Animal), 2(3), July/December, 11–66. [A translation into Portuguese of Bartlett (2002).] Available online at http://www.animallaw.info/journals/jo_pdf/brazilvol3.pdf.

Bartlett, Steven James (2008). The humanistic psychology of human evil: Ernest Becker and Arthur Koestler. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 48(3), 340–63. DOL 10.1177/ 0022167807305249.

Bartlett, Steven James (2009). From the artist's perspective: The psychopathology of the normal world. The Humanistic Psychologist, 37(3), 235–56.

Bartlett, Steven James (2011). Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Bartlett, Steven James & Suber, Peter (Eds.) (1987). Self-reference: Reflections on reflexivity. Dordrecht, Holland: Martinus Nijhoff. (Now published by Springer Science.)