|
Article Excerpt
Sokolowski, R. (2006). Christian faith & human understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the human person. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
This volume points back to the author's earlier theological works (1) and points forward to the long-awaited major work on the human person with which we may hope he will soon present us. Of course, his numerous well-known other works in philosophy inform the discussions on almost every page. The range of the essays reaches from the most fundamental notions of theology, to details of the central Christian teachings on the Trinity and the Eucharist, to the foundations of a philosophy of the person, and finally to very practical matters, such as what precisely Roman Catholic bishops are supposed to do and what a Roman Catholic seminary's curriculum should look like. Thus the essays may be thought of as, besides a foretaste of the new work on the person, amplifications of Sokolowski's basic theses on foundational theology and rich Quaestiones Disputatae of special interest to both philosophers as well as Catholic Christians. In what follows we will confine our discussion to what in this volume presumably interests most the readers of this journal on phenomenological psychology, i.e., Robert Sokolowski's thoughts on the soul, the person, and the profession and nature of therapy, namely Part III, "The Human Person," pp. 151-236 and "The Art and Science of Medicine" and "Religion and Psychoanalysis" in Part IV, 237-249, 268-285. We will refrain from the rich theological discussions, Parts I and II, pp. 9-150, except in so far as they inform his theories of phenomenological psychology and therapy. Similarly we will omit discussion of Part IV, "Faith and Practical Reasoning," 237-310, except for the discussion of psychotherapy.
Psychology with or without a Psyche
It is perhaps surprising for the reader to learn that in the bibliography of Robert Sokolowski's writings (2) one finds enough material for a volume on philosophical and phenomenological psychology. Today with the ascendancy of the reductionism of cognitive and neural science, the "psychology without a psyche (or soul)" has received perhaps its strongest statement. It is a great pleasure to read Sokolowski's reflections on these developments, and the not-yet published work on the person will surely provide many other occasions for philosophical delights. An example is the question he poses: Given that we speak of "artificial flowers," which most would agree are not flowers, and "artificial light," which surely is light, is "artificial intelligence" to be thought of as more like artificial flowers or artificial light? What would it look like and how would it behave if it was as artificially intelligent as artificial light is light? (3) Perhaps no less important for the substance of this book is the question whether there could be "artificial persons" and whether establishing that they were artificially intelligent was sufficient for establishing that they were "persons."
Another point he makes is that a person whose brain is being studied is not aware of the data in the brain which the student of the brain is in a position to correlate with the subject's experiences. Furthermore, when the student of the brain wishes to find out what the person is thinking, she cannot determine it by consulting the "brain-signs" or the "brain-language." Whatever data she has do not say anything, nor are they likenesses of anything. They are neither language nor pictures and therefore their meaning is not embodied in them. Again, although they can be interpreted in the light of the subject's reports of his experience, of themselves they do not say anything. The student of the brain must inquire of the person whose brain she is studying what he is experiencing; or she must infer from the behavior of the person what he is seeing, e.g., from the animation or direction of his gaze. The brain does not tell us this. (4)
Sokolowski will not take this datum to serve a dualist position, yet it is an important one to consider in the face of proposals of facile reductionisms or identity theories.
Sokolowski has a long-standing critique of the tendency by philosophers to use terms like "picturing" and "representation" in epistemology and psychology as well as in neurology and brain science. The chief point he wishes to make is that in most of these discussions the precise, i.e., eidetic-phenomenological sense of, e.g., "picturing," is overlooked. Picturing is a distinctive form of intentionality and may not be confused with perception, imagining, and signitive and linguistic intentions (like reading or listening to someone, or speaking and writing to someone). If we blend these we are likely to make colossal mistakes. (5) Furthermore, as Husserl has taught, if we seek to understand cognition by a process of intervening representations we find ourselves stuck in a hopeless morass of conceptual issues, e.g., how we could possibly know this process of representation in fact described the workings of the brain or mind. But furthermore such constructs fly in the face of the lived cognitive experience. This latter is best explicated by Husserl's theory of intentionality, foremost perceptual intentionality. (6)
Given the fundamental philosophical distinctions between spirit, intellect, soul, and person, the question arises which of these a "phenomenological psychology," which presumably is not a psychology without a psyche, properly studies. In Chapter 10 of the volume under review, entitled, "The Soul and Transcendence of the Human Person," Sokolowski sketches a regional ontology of soul and spirit. (7) Although der Zeitgeist in academic and learned circles reduces the human to materiality, rationality to neurological processes, and human behavior to a continuum with animal behavior in accord with Darwinan narratives, Sokolowski's position is decidedly against this current. A philosophical challenge is both to respect the materiality of our humanness and not to forget that we in our spiritual activities are truly involved in materiality, and yet to show that human spiritual activity truly transcends materiality, space, and time.
Sokolowski suggests that we be disposed to think of the old term "soul" in terms of "animation" because then we will not be tempted to think that the animation of something could be apart from the thing animated. He prefers that we use a third-person perspective in regard to "animation" where we may uncover "soul" as a public visible principle or source. As Husserl might put it, it is publicly evident in a way analogous to how a mark "comes to life" as indicating a meaning in contrast to when it appears as a mere accidental smudge. As the principle, the soul accounts for the particular form of life and unity of the thing.
In the human the soul is the source or principle of the spiritual life as well as the bodily organic one. Sokolowski here says soul is not open to introspection and perhaps he intends to include all senses of first-person awareness. He would seem to say this here (p. 154) because he has primarily in mind that it is the animation of the bodily organs that elude consciousness and yet are available in third-person observation. Later, when discussing psychotherapy and the "psychoanalytic voice" we will see perhaps how "soul" is, after all, also a unique first-person experience that is also evident in the second- and third-person.
Parenthetically we may note that for Husserl soul is the realm of what solicits spirit or the "I" and that upon which the "I" acts; foremost it is the realm of instinct and drive as well as the residual acts of spirit that become retained and habitualized. Perhaps most basically it is the realm of passive association and synthesis. In this latter aspect it is the realm where primary processes and trauma are retained and enabled to be effectively in play in present experience. In this respect it is what psychoanalysis was groping for with its notion of the "unconscious." And in this respect the realm of soul is itself a phenomenological theme available first of all in the first-person experience and not merely in the public behavior evident only in a second- and third-person perspective. (8) This Husserlian sense of the realm of soul would seem to be implicit in Sokolowski's discussions of psychoanalysis and he will show how soul here is manifest in an important way in the second- and third-person to the analyst. See below.
The distinction between soul and spirit is captured by Sokolowski's contrast between furniture and (the Catholic notion of) angels, neither of which have soul. Angels are spirits who think, decide, ponder, etc., but they do not animate bodies. They are "pure spirits." Furniture, like all forms of "objective spirit," is residually spirit and contains traces of subjective spirit but spirit is present only by way of what transcendent reason or transcendent spirit has effected. Reason...
|
