I’m noticing in my first semester of college review that I first learned two aspects of the same things at the same time. In developmental psychology, it was humanistic psychology, of the Lewin-Maslow varieties. It’s exciting to see in my notebook a half-page with my first encounter with “hierarchy of needs”, “self-actualization”, and “peak experiences.” Over in moral philosophy, there’s Kant and the autonomous self, with a will separate from the physical and social influences on behavior.
I don’t have any recollection of an ah-hah at the time, a particular “wow!” of seeing something in two disciplines and looking at them from two different angles. What I do recall, and have told people about many times, is exactly where I was sitting in Hilles Library as I read the assigned pages in Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, and the wow of the idea that each human being has the same fundamental and equal dignity. I certainly wouldn’t have thought differently before, so I’m not sure about the wow. I didn’t talk in those days in the idiom of Tzelem Elohim, the biblical “image of God.” I think I found it thrilling that the politics of equality that I believed in both in terms of racial justice and socioeconomic equality now had such a profound philosophical basis. I certainly remember highlighting a million passages, trying to wrap my head around what makes Kant’s argument for this distinct from other thoughts I would have encountered before, or indeed what makes it an argument at all. This “rational being”, what was he getting at, and why did this dry concept accomplish so much for him?
Over in psychology, I think I was resonating to the idea that humanistic psychology was trying to assess the reality of a self that can choose, that can propel its own development sometimes, indeed that controls and knows itself. The notes say that the other psychological theories, which start each in their way from “what can be said scientifically”, don’t penetrate the hard-to-measure or impossible-to-measure self. The humanistic psychologists worry that this kind of science misses something real about human development. I’m not sure looking back that it’s really about development the same way the other theories are. I asked myself just now why these are theories of development at all, as opposed to just theories of personality that could say something on the side about development. But if the self is real in some sense, even if most of what can be said is from self-report, then it should be trackable even if imperfectly.
I hadn’t remembered some ingenious attempts to establish the validity of the “self” and self-awareness. In some studies, people were asked to evaluate different properties, and to evaluate themselves as measuring up or not. They seemed to establish people’s ability to assess themselves critically, even people who are schizophrenic or have some kind of antisocial disorder. People could distinguish their real from the ideal self, and make predictions about their own future apparently (this isn’t entirely clear in my notes how far this extends). Such insights could then provide a basis for therapy, grounded in helping people value their alignment with their ideal and articulate how to get toward other aspects of that ideal. This would be a different kind of therapy from the problem-oriented therapies from the Freudian or cognitive-behavioral schools.
Needless to say, these questions continue to be foundational for me, even as I have come to add everything from Maimonides to Kahneman into the mix. I knew that the apparatus to articulate and explore these questions came from my first semester and didn’t need the actual notes to verify that. But it’s exciting to read them in my own hand from that time nonetheless!
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