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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This article is a continuation of the challenge begun by early phenomenologists of the reductionistic scientism of Natural Science Psychology. Inspired by five distinctions of Emmanuel Levinas, it seeks to bring a deeper interruption of the seemingly unalterable force of mainstream psychology to model itself after the hard sciences. Levinas distinguishes the experience of totality from infinity need from desire, freedom as self-initiated and self-directed from freedom as invested by and for the Other, active agency from radical passivity, and the said from saying. Five commonly accepted characteristics of science, objective, emprical, causal, reducible, and value neutral, are used to compare three approaches to psychology: Natural Science, Phenomenology (psychology as a human science), and Psychology for the Other. Using the definition of science, "knowing the phenomenon as it shows itself," this paper argue that Natural Science Psychology is the least "scientific," Phenomenological Psychology is more scientific, and Psychology for the Other is the most "scientific" with its ethical command to allow the Other to reveal her/himself. This extravagant but compelling claim is illustrated with descriptions of research and therapy.
Our phenomenological heroes, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name a few, opened our approach by confronting "psychologism": the thinker in his thinking is "only the marionettes either of psychological mechanisms or of an external history" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 48). Mainstream psychology, however, seems not to have noticed this challenge to its reductionistic tendency. You know the story: Husserl, with a few ancestors and a lot of descendents, started the critique about the same time psychology began to devote itself to the assumptions and methods of the hard sciences (Giorgi, 1970). John Watson's famous "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" and Husserl's Ideas I were both published in 1913. It is unlikely that either found its way to the other's desk. This disconnect has mostly been maintained through the century. [For a review of that era of phenomenology see Herbert Spiegelberg's Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry (1972).]
Over the past century phenomenology deepened and broadened its critique and built up a sophisticated and compelling alternative. It remains, however, missing from most curricula. Behavioral research, biological/evolutionary research, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and various versions of psychoanalysis still receive the bulk of courses, students, publications, and grants. Even the popularity of the many "Dr. Phil's" does not seem to have interrupted this main stream abundance. Like three parallel tracks, natural science, phenomenology, and self-help psychology just keep rolling on, rarely meeting. The steady growth of phenomenological psychology, existential-inspired therapies, and qualitative methods is encouraging. But, I suggest, an ethical interruption could move these developments along and deepen them.
Just when phenomenology seems to be less defensive and more proactive, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas arrives with an ethical force to disturb and intensify phenomenological psychology's progress. While he had little to say about psychology, Levinas criticized the philosophers behind what he called egological psychogogy, "rhetoric taking the position of him who approaches his neighbor with ruse" (Levinas, 1961/1969, p. 70).
Levinas said in an interview with Francois Poirie in 1986 that he was born in 1906 in Lithuania, and that he attended the University of Strasbourg, "because it was the closest" (Poirie, p. 28). In 1928-29, he traveled the fifty or so miles to Freiberg where, as he tells us, "I went to see Husserl and I found Heidegger" (p. 32). On reading the newly available Being and Time, the young Levinas was "taken by the power of the analysis" (p. 37). The following year, at only 24, Levinas moved to Paris, and published his prize-winning dissertation, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (1995/1963). As "the first book in French entirely devoted to phenomenology, according to Simone de Beauvoir's published account, it inspired the young Jean-Paul Sartre to leave Paris for Freiburg to learn the new phenomenological philosophy" (Cohen, 1994, p. 118; de Beauvoir, 1972). In 1931 Levinas was co-translator with Gabrielle Pfeiffer of Husserl's Cartesian Meditation.
In 1932 Levinas began a book on Heidegger. Shaken by the news of the Freiberg Rector's commitment to National Socialism, he abandoned this project. Cohen (1994) tells us that in 1934, "[Levinas] published an article in Esprit entitled, 'Some reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism.' It warned the French of the dangerous 'awakening of primitive feelings' across the German border, subtly linking the movement to Nietzschean and Heideggerian reflections" (p. 118).
Drafted in 1939 as a translator, captured by the Germans, and interned in a work camp, Levinas began his lifelong critique of Husserl's intentionality ("consciousness of ...") and Heidegger's ontology of Dasein, that being that is concerned about itself, perseveres and perpetuates itself, choosing for itself why, when, and where to be responsible. Beginning with a 1935 article, De l'evasion (1982/2003), Le temps et l'autre (1947/1961), De l'existence a l'existant, (written during his internment and published in 1947), Totalite and infini (1961/1969), and Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de l'essence (1974/1981), Levinas lays out what can be called a philosophy of interruption. Looking back during an interview in 1989, he said, "the great event of history ... would signify interruption of the perseverance of a being in its being .... the interruption of the conatus essendi" (Aeschlimann, 2003, p. 119). His philosophy of the interruption of one's own conatus essendi, the will to be, an interruption that interferes with the drive to expand its be-ing, describes holiness (Levinas, 1982/1985).
As practitioner of Husserl's phenomenological method, Levinas locates the interruption of intentionality of "consciousness of ..." by uncovering that which is more fundamental than any epistemological and ontological project. Prior to knowing, the face of the Other reveals herself as "otherwise than being," "beyond essence," to be further and higher than being known. Yet (here's the disturbing part) from this infinite distance, the face of the Other commands me to approach with infinite responsibility. Levinas uses the idea of "infinity" when referring to the Other as always more than ... my knowing, and my ability to fulfill my responsibility. The Other is simultaneously faraway and close-by; out of reach, yet always "in my face." (Following the lead of Alfonso Lingis, the translator of Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, I am using of the upper case Other when referring to the other person. I will also mostly use the feminine pronouns when referring to the Other since I am male and for so many years used the masculine forms.)
While I may do whatever I can, even turning away because I cannot help, my fundamental responsibility is never fulfilled. This disturbing presence of the Other disallows me to conclude that I am "Okay." The Other haunts me into what Levinas calls "insomnia" (1978/1988) with this vexing enigma: I am commanded to be responsible before I know the one to whom I am held responsible, and before I have acted in any manner of accountability; so how can I help? How can I know what is to be done? Answer: I cannot; but I must try. I may not shirk my responsibility, yet I can never hope to fulfill my obligation toward the one I will never fully know. The Other is simultaneous infinitely distant and infinitely close. This extravagant language seems over the top, not only beyond human possibility, but, as psychologists might even say, dangerous. But psychology needs a radical, "impossible-to-fulfill," approach to challenge its tendency toward the reductionism of psychologism. This command to be responsible in the face of limited knowing provides a traumatic epoche, a bracketing of my ego centrism, inspiring self-skepticism that permits a profound "clearing of the field" for a radical unknowing and openness to the revelation of otherness. The ethical commandment of a present-time "phenomenological reduction," rather than the cultural "categorical reduction," reducing the Other to a convenient category, is the interruptus of both the natural scientific and phenomenological efforts in research, therapy, and teaching. Everything begins and ends from the Other and for the Other.
The reductionism of science seemed like a good idea at the time (Hempel, 1966). Science needed to sweep away the old and take on new assumptions to assure its legitimacy. The revolution needed particular characteristics to be a real paradigm change. It loosened itself from pre-scientific, subjective cultural and personal myths and strengthened its commitment to a realistic positivism. The objective world had to be understood as absolutely Out-There independent of the In-Here of the observer. Theodore Roszak (1969) calls this split the "alienative dichotomy" (p. 218).
Besides positivism science needed a strict empiricism to observe the Out-There and count as important only what it could observe through the senses to guard against the influence of any beliefs in religion, politics, social, and familial memes. This empiricism, with its privileged role of the In-Here over the Out-There, resulted in an "invidious hierarchy" (Roszak, 1969 p. 222) where the scientist knew more about the object studied than did the one who was studied; okay in physics, but not so in psychology.
Furthermore, this Out-There had to be observed to operate from forces outside itself; everything was determined. B. F....
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