ON LIFE

Views from a Philosopher-Psychologist

and Psychologist-Philosopher

Steven James Bartlett

f there are two disciplines capable of shedding light on how we can best live, very likely philosophy and psychology would come to mind. When they do, it is largely because of the stereotyped connotations the two fields of study have acquired during their histories, despite the loss of these connotations during the twentieth century. During the last century, philosophy has shifted its focus away from the building of theoretical systems formulated with an intent to embrace the totality of human experience, and instead, and especially in the Anglo-American world, has become ever more closely intent upon analyzing such microcosms as natural and formalized language use. Similarly during the past century, psychology has transformed the broader perspective, for example, of Bucknill and Tuke’s more humane “moral treatment” of psychologically troubled patients, of the wide cultural awareness of Freud, Jung, and Fromm, of Menninger’s integrative standpoint, of van den Berg’s phenomenological approach and Frankl’s logotherapy. In this process of transformation, today’s psychology has generally come to embrace an experimental laboratory-centered, behavior-focused, nosology-inflating, statistically-based dominant paradigm.

Despite these signs of tightening scopes of concern in favor of increased exactitude and practical application, relinquishing the sometimes romantic and perhaps grandiose ambitions of past philosophy and psychology, the two disciplines still come to mind as potentially rich resources from which to learn how humanity and how individuals may best live.

Relatively few philosophers have the incentive, the time, and the energy to obtain a second professional training in psychology, while the reverse is also true of psychologists. In case this is of interest to some readers, the following are a few very general and brief reflections about life and how best it may be led from someone who has had the opportunity to engage in basic research in both fields. The justification for these views, for which there exist compelling reasons and strong evidence, cannot of course be given in these abbreviated comments: The evidence and rationale for most will be found in my published work, to which there are occasional links in what follows.  Only a few of many possible topics are considered; the list may occasionally be expanded as time permits. The first topics apply to the question how best human beings might live in ways conducive to solving the species’ most pressing problems, and the last topics relate to living the life of an individual.

Topics

• The psychology of belief
• Relinquishing comfort zones
• The need for more polymaths
• Self-cultivation
• Happiness
• On political silence
• A personal philosophical precept

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF

One of the undeniable truths about the human species is that its wide variety of beliefs divide people from one another and are responsible for the majority of human conflicts. Fortunately, a study of epistemology has a salubrious effect upon a willing, capable, and open mind, helping to distinguish knowledge from mere belief. For certain minds—and these are comparatively rare—rationality and conviction go hand-in-hand—that is, valid reasoning entails conviction, and conviction requires rational grounds.  If a person endowed with such a mind develops even a modest level of epistemological skill in thinking, he or she is soon inclined to develop a lack of respect for the privileging of mere belief, for belief that has no empirical or rational basis. Were we only to disagree about those things for which we have solid evidence or rational proof, we would disagree but seldom and the majority of conflicts would be matters of history. This obviously presents us with an ideal, far indeed from our present reality.

Unfortunately, training in epistemology is a blessing relatively few receive, and when they do, their study of epistemology tends to be confined to the analysis, repetition, and discussion of the views of past philosophers. As a result, it is rare that students in classes of epistemology will be required to develop their own reflective, critical thinking skills in epistemological analysis. This, too, could be a boon to humankind, since sometimes a few dashes of salt will flavor a dish.

A study of the psychology of belief tells us several important things about the human psychological constitution: that people are most frequently inseparably married to their cherished beliefs; that it is difficult to motivate them to reflect upon and evaluate the merits of those beliefs; that changing the fundamental beliefs that people prefer to have is most often an exercise in futility and will usually lead to push-back in the form of indignation or aggression; and that, paradoxically, the more the beliefs of an individual or group of people are challenged, the more stubbornly entrenched in those beliefs will their propounders tend to become.

This vicious circle of belief is very difficult to break into—or out of. The circle throttles its victims very effectively in a noose that strangles their own growth and development, while, on a larger social scale, it does this to entire societies which are held in the grip of ideologies they will part with only over their own dead bodies.

I have pointed to two specialized areas of study: In philosophy, to epistemology, and in psychology, to the psychology of human belief. When the research conclusions I have reached in these two areas of study are, so to speak, added together, the resulting picture is not especially encouraging: To make the human situation better, as Einstein has commented, we need better people—but in particular, we need more of a certain kind of people: people who not only are intelligent in the usual cognitive senses, but who are morally intelligent, a little-studied form of intelligence of which doubtless we as a species sorely stand in need. (For further information concerning moral intelligence, click here.)

But we not only need a greater percentage of morally and cognitively intelligent people, we are in need of more people who, as mentioned in the opening paragraph, have minds which are such that rationality and conviction are interconnected with one another. Such people have what might be called an in-built aversion to being trapped in vicious circles of baseless belief. In partnership with such people, it is easy to solve problems: They don’t bring a lot of extraneous belief-baggage with them; they pay attention to facts, think logically, and are inclined to think, feel, and act in morally positive ways. And as I am quick to repeat: they are still comparative rarities.

They constitute an ideal type, one that is a sure-fire solution to the problem posed by the vicious circle of belief. But how we are to gain more of them among the expanding human population, that is of course the challenge. Which leads directly to the next topic:

RELINQUISHING COMFORT ZONES

The various “comfort zones” defined by our species’ preferred beliefs might just as well be encircled by a dangerous fence—sometimes electrified and lethal, and at other times and places only barbed and painful. Different societies, political groups, nations, and religions have erected their own fences to keep believers inside, and non-believers out. Walls of intolerance, censorship, persecution, and worse are testimony to the power of mere belief to turn men, women, and children into patriot-defenders/imperialist-invaders, revolutionists/terrorists, and bullies/mass killers. And yet most beliefs—the varieties that erect fences of intolerance and alienate people from one another—are unfounded, that is, they have no factual, empirical, rational basis.

There is no doubt that hermetically sealed, self-encapsulated sets of beliefs provide their believers with psychologically important human gratifications: Such beliefs comfort and console; they offer the warm glow of group acceptance and support; they lift from the individual’s shoulders his responsibility for himself and bestow upon him an authorized group identify. Exclusionary systems of belief give their adherents a sense of special meaning and uniqueness that distinguish and differentiate them from propounders of alien beliefs. The human desire for differentiating identity is very strong.

Zones of comfort permeate human life, from gang membership to political parties, from the approval offered by small-scale groups to society-wide popularity, from the imprimatur stamp of peer-reviewed validation to research models that are fashionable. Although comfort zones provide emotional reinforcement, buttressing the individual’s own fragile sense of solitary identity, they also are, as they have been throughout human history, enormously destructive.

A zone of comfort establishes boundaries beyond which lies that which cannot be accepted comfortably. All too often, people and their leaders have opposed new ideas—and of course even more energetically have opposed the innovators who originate them—which they judge to be unacceptable because those ideas are uncomfortable; only later, often too late for the discoverers, the popular opposition is proved wrong. The history of creative innovation is a history of the struggle of originators to gain acceptance for their ideas, discoveries, and creations despite opposition from those whose comfort zones of belief are threatened.

Conformity, defense of the status quo, embrace of the current fashion—all are similar psychological dispositions that limit individual and social growth and development. They express dispositions which bring about stagnation, and which close the minds of the majority to serious and open-minded consideration of genuine, lasting solutions to mankind’s most critical problems.

When we encounter the counterintuitive, when we recognize that common sense is violated, the fences are made visible that we ourselves have constructed in order to confine ourselves within restrictive, limiting zones of comfort. When these fences are made visible, we then are given an opportunity: to expand our horizons and to grow and develop in new ways, or to re-entrench ourselves in the familiar, the comfortable, and the confining, and to wait while the major problems we cause overtake us.

THE NEED FOR MORE POLYMATHS

In its original meaning, to be a “polymath” (from the Greek polymathēs) is to be very learned (the Greek mathēma means learning). In contemporary usage the word is used sometimes to refer to an ideal, to someone with encyclopedic knowledge, a state that is no longer humanly possible. Here, what I mean by a polymath is an individual who seeks to develop expert-level skills in multiple areas. A polymath is the opposite of a dilettante who may have many interests, but whose skills and knowledge don’t advance beyond a superficial amateur level of attainment. Before gender sensitivity set in, polymaths were called “Renaissance men.” But as we’re no longer in the Renaissance, ‘polymath’ will do.

The more that human knowledge accumulates and the more that skills become increasingly technical, the greater is the challenge that faces individuals who would become more than narrowly educated persons. They are often fearful, convinced that they have too little time to broaden and deepen interests unrelated to their constricted specialties. This belief is self-limiting, and it is both unfortunate and undesirable. This brief reflection provides the occasion to protest against this sort of narrow self-limitation, and to give what I hope will be recognized to be a non-tendentious personal example of a researcher who has not been afraid of trespassing beyond the confines of a single specialty.

In a sense, a website like this gives a sketch, a caricature, of a person’s principal interests and work, and could function almost as a fragmentary form of intellectual autobiography. (For interested readers, see “A Brief Conceptual Autobiography”.) This website has been designed to focus on my main research interests, and therefore it offers information concerning books I have authored, edited, or co-edited, and refers occasionally to some of my papers and essays. The site does not aim at comprehensiveness and therefore does not include references or access to all I have written.

As readers will quickly see who peruse the materials accessible here, central to my approach to research has been the recognition that disciplinary divisions are both unfortunate and unnecessary human fictions. The fact that we create and endorse such divisions is more an expression of the mental and motivational limitations of individual people than it is a fact about reality, which is essentially continuous, a reality that we, to our own detriment, compel to undergo Procrustean dismemberment into territorially protected regions isolated from one another. It should be, but most often is not, the intent of education and of the professions to encourage the widest possible comprehension by each individual person of the greatest portion of reality and of our human knowledge of it that he or she is capable of, extending well beyond an individual’s specialized area of training. But unfortunately again, this is rarely the case.

The table of contents for this website summarizes some of the main areas in which I’ve been interested and done research. But this is no more than a bare-bones skeleton, very incomplete at that, describing some of the research interests I’ve been privileged to cultivate to varying extents during my life. So that the reader will recognize that, in urging the case for more polymaths, I’ve tried to practice what I preach, and not get the impression that all I’ve done with my life is write books and papers in psychology and philosophy, I should include a short more personal note: I’ve had the greatly appreciated opportunity to devote a significant portion of my time to other serious interests, among them fine art (various media, etching, sculpture), music (playing violin, flute, classical guitar, various sizes of recorders, making historical reproductions of recorders at low pitch, and repairing and restoring string instruments and transverse flutes), reading and writing fiction and poetry, pursuing projects in science (searching for new antibiotics, telescope design and construction), and of course there has been the teaching of a wide variety of university-level classes that reflect my research interests.

From an autobiographical list of this sort, the reader will see that I have taken the rejection of disciplinary divisions to heart. In urging the case for more polymaths, I have sought in a modest way to study and learn widely. But a disclaimer should be included, otherwise the above listing would border on the ridiculous: I’ve never been able to “multitask” (to which I am categorically opposed in human thinkers, although not in computers), so each of the endeavors I’ve mentioned has been a one-at-a-time, serious, and concentrated project. There is no substitute for single-minded, absorbed, single-focused concentration.

SELF-CULTIVATION

Sir Richard Burton’s perceptive gem, The Kasidah of Haji Abdu, published in 1880, is today little-known. His unique book once saw a period of popularity among the well-read, but now awaits the occasional curious reader on the more dusty shelves of some libraries. The Kasidah is a rare personal manifesto that urges self-cultivation above all other things (Burton adds: “with due regard for others”).

The Kasidah is divided into two main parts: the first is written in verse, the second is a reflective prose commentary. Here is a sample from the first part: 

With Ignorance wage eternal war,
to know thy self forever strain,
Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is
thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane;
That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste;
that deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes;
Creates the thing that never was,
the Thing that ever is defies.

Burton combines in his singular thoughtful style the Socratic maxim to know one’s  self, with the injunction allegedly expressed by Buddha as he died: “Appo deepo bhava” or, in Biblical language, “be thou a light unto thyself.” Today, with iPhones pressed to the ear and social networking saturating available time, such aphorisms can seem quaint and out of place and certainly from another time.

But some things do not change, and the fact that each of us inhabits a unique world of experience appears to be one of those unchangeable features of existence. As The Kasidah puts it:

Physically I am not identical in all points with other men. Morally I differ from them: in nothing do the approaches of knowledge, my five organs of sense..., exactly resemble those of any other being. Ergo, the effect of the world, of life, of natural objects, will not in my case be the same as with the beings most resembling me. Thus I claim the right of creating or modifying for my own and private use the system which most imports me; and if the reasonable leave be refused to me, I take it without leave.

This is a strong self-affirming (objectors might say “self-centered”) declaration, a potentially rebellious declaration of independence from the common, shared world, and a staking out of a universe of one’s own, in which private concerns, cares, and purposes take precedence.

To place the highest valuation on the cultivation of the self flies in the face of the primacy of the Social Group propounded by both democrat and socialist; it also marks the basic difference between the goals of the Mahayana Buddhist, who declines enlightenment while others are still imprisoned in struggle and suffering, and the Hinayana Buddhist, whose primary commitment is to reach a high state of spiritual development—so that at least the one person for whom he or she is most directly responsible will become enlightened.

Both ways, the social and the individual, have the potential to bring about better people, and I do not plan to debate the comparative attractions of the two poles: It is enough to recognize that at one extreme lies a public, complex, shared “garden,” filled with noise, crowding, and a sense of community, and at the other extreme is a simple garden plot of one, quiet and removed. Which of these two extremes most attracts a person is, for this brief reflection, not the beginning but the end of a discussion not to be found here. Sir Richard Burton points to the smaller garden of the self, a garden which, I have found, most people permit to become an overgrown and tangled jungle.

Because of lives filled with distractions, work, and daily problem-solving, the notion of cultivating a private “garden” seems almost unattainable, and yet it can, if one wishes, be done. In my view, the purpose is not to attain a garden whose path leads to some variety of so-called spiritual enlightenment, but rather to achieve a private mind that is well-furnished, much as a home of many rooms can be furnished—with fine art, beautiful furniture, filled with great music and many books.

In such a garden/home—to combine the two metaphors—the most important furnishings have still to be mentioned: they are the thoughts and the cares that fill such a mind on a daily basis—the skills and knowledge attained, the sensibilities cultivated, and the memories acquired through the regular application of those skills, knowledge, and sensibilities. The construction of the house of the mind is accomplished with care; its result is that important ideas have been examined and clarified or replaced with others more adequate; the mind has come to know itself and has come to understand others, their merits and their shortcomings, for what they are; well-developed and well-articulated answers to fundamental questions of life have been found; there is a sense of inhabiting a home built with craftsmanship and attention to detail.

HAPPINESS

There are very few single useful prescriptions for happiness that are applicable to the immense diversity of individuals. Systems of belief (see The Psychology of Belief, above) have of course served as the primary means to achieve human comfort and, for some, perhaps even happiness. But when such beliefs are baseless, without persuasive evidence or compelling reason, they offer little for the critical mind, the reflectively self-conscious independent thinker.

During enough reading to fill a small library, one particular prescription has stood out as having potential value for any person, regardless of his or her personality, goals in living, tastes, dispositions, or situation. There are other prescriptions that are widely applicable, but among them this prescription constitutes a worthwhile and universal guide to happiness. To quote J. S. Mill:

Those only are happy...who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.... The enjoyments of life...are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now becomes the basis for my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment; that is, for the great majority of mankind.
 

                                                  —J.S. Mill, Autobiography

On Political Silence

In a letter to Bertrand Russell, dated April 30, 1940, American philosopher Ernest Hocking wrote: “I have been cultivating the great and forgotten right of the freedom of silence, which it is hard to maintain in this country.” What Hocking had in view is the right to maintain political silence—the right to choose to be silent concerning political affairs, and therefore implicitly the right to ignore them.

This “right of the freedom of silence” is seldom mentioned, much less discussed. Instead, Western society has largely come to presume that it is the “responsibility” of any “good citizen” to be politically engaged: to be reasonably knowledgeable of political policies and events, to vote in elections, to oppose social or political injustice, etc.

This responsibility is not one that democratic society generally considers to be discretionary, and yet, if in a democracy one is free, it conceivably should follow that one is free not to be involved in political affairs. Hocking apparently considered this freedom to be a democratically authorized right.

Since this issue is rarely reflected upon, readers may be interested in a paper, “Silence: Freedom or Crime?,” that seeks to make explicit some of the key variables that underlie a wide variety of positions that have been taken concerning political silence. The paper reviews several of these, including recommendations of Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Milton Meyer, and Thoreau. These views are then examined in terms of the values that traditionally have formed the basis for condemnations or defenses of political and social silence, of marginal commitment, or of individual non-participation or complicity. The paper does not expect to settle the issue, but rather to increase our sensitivity to it, and to its complexity.

For a copy of “Silence: Freedom or Crime?” click here.

A Personal Philosophical Precept

"Conviction and Rationality" -- The author's statement of an enduring personal precept, and also an implicit encomium to individuals whose psychology establishes a dependable bridge between their rational convictions and their conduct.

For a copy of "Conviction and Rationality" click here.