Brief Lecture Notes for Unit 8
A person is only free when she has three options.
-- Viriginia Satir
See also text chapter 18.
This last unit of the course is a bit of a paradox. In many ways it is, in my view, the most important. It is also by far the most difficult for me to write about in a linear, structured manner. As a result these notes may seem even more like a stream-of-consciousness narrative than the earlier notes were.
What goals do I have for this unit? First, I want to try to help you find your way out of the thicket of eclecticism, and start developing a defined point of view of your own regarding the nature, origin, and functioning of human personality. Second, I want to help you get, as much as possible, a birds'-eye view of personality as an organic unity -- to view personality wholistically and synthetically, not just as a collection of separate bits and pieces. Third (and by far most audaciously), I want to do my part to try to counter what I think is a very unfortunate trend in contemporary academia: the tendency for teachers (and students) to specialize and compartmentalize until, in the final analysis, they have learned more and more about less and less, ending by knowing everything about nothing. In other words, I want to cross a few (gasp) disciplinary and departmental lines and help you to cultivate a mental grid that will help you link the material from this class to other classes, in other departments. In other words, I want to make my contribution, limited as it may be, towards helping you to become a person who can think globally, critically, and "worldviewishly" about the human condition. Along the way, if we also manage to stem the decline in Western civilization as well, that would be commendable, but optional.
What, by the way, is a "worldview"? (In order to develop something, it helps to begin by knowing what that something is. If you have no goal, any road will take you there; or, as Lily Tomlin once put it, "I always wanted to be somebody, but I see now that I should have been more specific.") I will use the term "worldview" to mean any comprehensive set of assumptions about reality, whether religious or secular in nature. This is consistent with how the term is commonly utilized in both the anthropological (e.g., Redfield, 1960) and the psychological (e.g., Lillard, 1998) literature. As defined by Barnouw (1973), a worldview is "the way [a person or group of people] regard the universe, their most comprehensive attitudes toward life, and their conception of the structure of things". In other words, it is a mental grid through which all the rest of your thinking and your experience can be filtered. Many of the differences between personality theorists are really worldview differences; when they appear to be arguing about data (empirical matters), they are really arguing about the shape of the table (philosophical or, even, metaphysical matters). Of this, more later.
With minimal apologies to the history and philosophy departments (what they don't know won't hurt them, in any case; let's not tell them), I'm going to give you enough of the history behind the so-called "modernist-postmodernist debate" that is ripping academia apart at the seams these days to give you a sense of what that dispute is all about, and how it directly impacts the study of personality (and psychology in general). Once you understand these concepts, you'll start seeing examples of them everywhere. You won't be able to stop it: a funny (or tragic, depending on the circumstances) thing about the human brain is that it is much easier to start noticing something than it is to stop doing so. The brain is a pattern-recognition system. Sometimes, this process gets out of control. That's when I go to work. I carry a badge.
Ideas don't arise in a vacuum; that's why it's so hard to think creatively when you're cleaning the carpet. Usually, ideas are reactions (often tragically one-sided overreactions) to some preceding idea. (For more about that, read Hegel for about five minutes, which is all most people can take at one sitting; please don't wait for the movie, since negotiations to have Leonardo di Caprio play Hegel have recently broken down.) What we call "modernism" and "postmodernism" are both overreactions to something that came before: modernism was an overreaction to the excesses of the preceding ("medieval") point of view, and postmodernism is an overreaction to the excesses of modernism. (As a culture, we are much better at extremes than we are at finding a middle ground; ours seems to be a very polarizing culture, for better or worse.) The fact that I am, fundamentally, a medieval thinker -- my calendar tells me that it is the year 2002, but I always have to work to remind myself that it isn't really 1002 -- gives me some degree of objectivity, or at least equally bemused and ideologically balanced skepticism, as I consider the other two points of view discussed below.
By "modernism" is meant the point of view that unaided reason can provide a gateway to objective truth, that we can think our way into Utopia. This is part and parcel of the nineteenth-century view of science, and tends to invest heavily in empirical evidence, impersonal logic, and the merits of "hard" science and technology. Like most things, modernism, which has tremendously shaped the culture in which we live today, is a two-edged sword. On the positive side, technology has dramatically improved our lives, at least during those infrequent periods when your computer has not locked up; it has improved the standard of living for many people (leaving many more others, it should be noted, in a worse condition of poverty than before, while doing unpleasant things to the environment along the way). It has also yielded tremendously useful insights about the nature of physical reality, about the way the cosmos really works. However, it has some significant drawbacks, among them its tendency toward reductionism and determinism. If the world is one giant machine, then what are we but just parts of that machine? Ultimately, extreme modernism not only leads to a tremendous pessimism, but it takes from us all that makes us uniquely human or that makes life worth caring about: dignity, freedom, significance. Worse, it leads to a logical contradiction that forces us ultimately to conclude that human thoughts are strictly determined by mechanistic causes, which means, of course, that there is no logical reason to trust them or invest them with any validity. As Lewis wrote, if modernism is true, we can know no truths, including the truth that modernism is true. It cuts its own throat; and long before that, it comes to strike many people as confining, narrow, restrictive, one-sided, and depressing. Consider this quote by my role model (although now that I've lost some weight, I don't look quite as much like him) G.K. Chesterton:
[The extreme modernist] is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point... the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chessboard white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black... He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.
By "postmodernism" is meant the view that there are no real (that is, objective) truths, only subjective experiences and power politics. Postmodernism is, in essence, a reaction -- a fairly recent one -- to these excesses of modernism; an attempt to wrest meaning and diversity out of the jaws of the inherent meaninglessness and sameness of the modernist view taken to extremes, without (and here, of course, is where I think the whole world has gone wrong) peeking backward at the medieval view to see whether, in fact, the answer might be lurking there all along. The beginnings of postmodernism can be traced back to the early 1900's (and perhaps even further back than that, going all the way back to Kant), helped along by the scientific discoveries of Einstein which threw the entire nineteenth-century cosmology into a cocked hat; but it really came into its own only in the 1960's. Where modernism trusts science and reason, postmodernism trusts art and intuition; where modernism emphasizes logic and the values of the "head" (LH), postmodernism emphasizes experience and the values of the "heart" (RH); where modernism seeks to stand proudly above nature (even though it paradoxically insists that we are nothing more than a small piece of it), postmodernism seeks to stand alongside it or proudly within it; where modernism is etic and nomothetic, postmodernism is emic and idiographic; where modernism is positivistic, postmodernism is constructivist; where modernism is about power, postmodernism is about alienation; modernism focuses on the thing observed, postmodernism on the values, experience, agenda, and life milieu of the observer. To use a common though flawed analogy, if modernism is masculine, postmodernism is feminine, or perhaps feminist. Modernism carries a calculator; postmodernism carries a rose in one hand and uses the other to form a clenched fist.
Postmodernism, too, has an up side and a down side. On the positive side of the ledger, it reminds us forcibly that people don't always agree, and that this may be a good rather than a bad thing. It encourages us to listen, really listen (always a difficult thing to do), to what others are saying, and to listen more carefully the more they disagree with us; to try to see the world through their eyes, rather than merely sitting in judgment on it, and all the more so the less power, status, and social influence the speaker has. (Regrettably, many postmodernists are not quite as good at listening as they think they are. But at least they acknowledge it as a virtue.) It reminds us that we are often less defensibly certain than we think we are, and that none of us has a corner on the market of truth or virtue. On the down side, it can lead to a tremendous degree of intolerance -- towards those it sees as intolerant; it cannot exclude sheer nonsense from consideration, because it has no intellectual criteria by which to do so; and it is, in its own way, just as pessimistic about the world as modernism is, because it believes that none of us really knows anything about anything, and because it views the world as purely adversarial, without even the excuse of truth or justice to provide an excuse for the contest. Hence the interesting paradox that both modernism and postmodernism can end in despair, one because it ends with nothing to justify thought, the other because it ends with nothing to justify action; naturally I think that there is a Third Way that looks gloomier than either of the alternatives but actually leads (unlike either of them) to defensible optimism, but I won't digress further on that score, unless you ask me.
Modernism asserts that through logic and science we can encounter objective reality; postmodernism says that there is no such thing as objectivity, only the "stories" or subjective viewpoints that each of us has. Modernism seeks to discover a top-down view of all of reality; postmodernism seeks to discover, in a bottom-up fashion, little snapshots of each person's (or group's) individual, subjective realities. It tends to be all that modernism was not: anti-technology, and trumpeting the virtues, not of logic, but of tolerance. (To a modernist, the greatest insult is to call someone irrational, unscientific, or a flawed thinker; to a postmodernist, the greatest insult is to call someone inauthentic, insensitive, or "totalizing".) Inherently skeptical about truth claims, it happily listens to the narrative of the individual, but refuses to generalize from that narrative to the lives of other individuals.
Turning from these lofty concepts, it comes as no surprise that the scientific disciplines of the university are dominated largely by modernists, while the humanistic disciplines are dominated largely by postmodernists, with medievalists like myself lurking softly in the background trying to carefully avoid being noticed. (Thus, it is difficult for a scientist and an artist to understand each other's point of view; human thought has become hopelessly compartmentalized, for reasons that would take me much too far afield to explore here, but if you have never read William Butler Yeats' poem "The Second Coming", do so.)
Why this lengthy digression? In part, because if you don't understand these distinctions, it's not clear to me that you can think cogently at all about the differences that exist between one theoretician and another. Using these concepts, you should now be able to take a look back at the schools of thought in personality and classify them into modernist and postmodernist camps. (Frankl, perhaps, is a closet medievalist, though like me he knows when to wear his gang colors and when not to.) Try it: can you do it? As a starting point, it's crystal-clear that nearly all behaviorists are modernists, while nearly all phenomenologists are postmodernists; do you see why?
Because the assumptions of modernism and postmodernism are opposed at nearly every point (uniting only in their stubborn refusal to accept that curmudgeons like me got it right a long time ago), it isn't possible (at least not if one values intellectual consistency) to accept both points of view. This is easier for modernists (who think in terms of logically defensible/indefensible, or true/false, or right/wrong) than postmodernists (who think in terms of tolerant/intolerant, or authentic/inauthentic, or powerless/powerful) to accept, but true eclecticism is invariably a form of muddle-headedness. You have to choose: is science a gateway to truth or just one of many human social games? Are people just mechanisms, or just (in some fashion that postmodernists don't quite have figured out, because they don't like the medievalist response) more than that? Of course you can see merits in all the different points of view; they can all contain some truth or some value. But where do your fundamental loyalties, and your foundational assumptions, lie? Do we gain our best insights into reality by way of logic and science (modernism), or by way of myth and experience (postmodernism), or by way of... well, something else altogether? Of course you are free to accord an important, though secondary, status to the other ways of knowing above, if you don't have too sharp of a philosophic axe to grind. You can admire scientists even if you are not a scientist; you can cherish artists, even if you are not an artist. (As Lewis wrote, I like bears, but I have no desire to live in the zoo.) But ultimately you can only have only one primary intellectual allegiance: only one principle at a time can be non-negotiable, can be a court of last resort, can be an ens entium. "Purity of heart is to will one thing" (Kierkegaard).
Beyond classifying theories of personality (which, if they have risen to the level of being a school of thought, are really metatheories or worldviews) into these three categories of modernism, postmodernism, and medievalism, one can compare and contrast them in a variety of lesser but still important ways. We can use the familiar terms empiricism vs. nativism, or static vs. dynamic, or reductionistic vs. nonreductionistic; I'll spend some time in class doing just that (and won't clog up this already too-long set of notes with those terms now). But don't focus so much on the trees that you miss the forest; all these terms line up neatly into the three camps above with few exceptions. And when they don't, it helps to remember that these are dichotomous constructs, and as we learned in the unit on Kelly, constructs are always bounded by a range of convenience.
How do you begin to develop your own worldview? It helps to acquaint yourself with what others before you have thought (that's what much of this class has been about). It helps to remember Mortimer Adler's too-often neglected advice, "Comprehension should always precede criticism." (In other words, in Jungian terms, do your Perceiving first, your Judging second.) It helps to cultivate what Edward de Bono calls "the habit of twin hypotheses": in other words, get in the habit of asking yourself, "What have I overlooked?" or "How else might we think about this?" It helps to develop both a sense of humor and a high degree of intellectual humility, but I don't see a course in the cultivation of virtue in the current timetable.
The textbook readings for this section are, for the most part, exemplars of the different points of view outlined above. Guinness is a medievalist (or neo-medievalist) like me writing critically about modernism; Mouissaieff-Masson and, to a lesser extent, Belenky and friends are postmodernists; I threw Pipher in, though she defies description, because she has some very important things to say about how personality changes over time and how it reflects the facts about historical embeddedness (which are very dear to postmodernists, and which represent one of the most important intellectual contributions of postmodernism to which the rest of us should take heed). Read them in that light, remembering that many authors aren't kind enough to declare their allegiances and biases up front; you have to play detective, remembering that truth does not become any more true when it is shouted rather than whispered.
Study Guide 8
Summarizing the above notes in the form of a study guide is a sheer impossibility, but here goes:
1. What is meant by modernism? By postmodernism? How do they differ?
2. Be able to recognize instances of each point of view, including the ability to classify specific theories of personality in this fashion.