Abstract
In the introductory Chapter, I argued that psychological modes of understanding are pervasive in today’s Western culture. Roger Smith concludes that modern society is a Psychological Society. In the twentieth century, “everyone learned to be a psychologist, everyone became her or his own psychologist, able and willing to describe life in psychological terms” (Smith, 1997:577). In this chapter we turn our attention to the roots of Psychological Society with a special focus on the effects of psychologization on our moral lives. How have we learned to think about morality in an age dominated by psychological modes of understanding? How is it even possible to think about morality from the perspective of a psychological worldview? In order to answer these questions, we need to know what “the psychological worldview” is, how it arose historically, and how this worldview relates to our conceptions of morality and normativity.
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Notes
- 1.
I distinguish between “subjectivization” as the process where something becomes internalized, finding its source in the “inner world” rather than the outer, and “subjectification” as the process where humans are made subjects in specific ways. The latter term owes much to Michel Foucault and his analyses of “the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Foucault, 1994b:326), which will be discussed in later chapters. My claim is that psychology has been equally involved in the subjectivization of morality and the subjectification of human beings.
- 2.
The concept of social imaginary resembles Foucault’s (2001) notion of episteme, which notably figured in the early parts of his work. But while Foucault understood the episteme as something like an unconscious cultural code to be made explicit by structural analysis, Taylor rejects the idea that the social imaginary can be fully expressed in explicit doctrines. It is lived rather than thought, based on habitual, bodily practices rather than underlying social rules.
- 3.
It was also the century when the term “psychology” gained a usage. According to Raymond Williams’s Keywords (Williams, 1983), the word “psychology” entered the English language in the seventeenth century in the sense of “a doctrine of souls,” but in the scientific sense of “empiric psychology,” the word was first used by Hartley as late as 1748, where he took up Wolff’s German definition from 1732. Williams adds that the word was not much used before the nineteenth century.
- 4.
In his archeology of the human sciences, Michel Foucault was even led to claim that: “Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist” (Foucault, 2001:336). This does not mean that human beings did not exist, but that “man,” as a privileged object of research, did not exist. Foucault also touches upon the advent of psychology, and argues that “the new norms imposed by industrial society upon individuals were certainly necessary before psychology […] could constitute itself as a science” (p. 376). In The Order of Things, Foucault introduces another of the themes of this book in his declaration that “Modern thought has never, in fact, been able to propose a morality” (p. 357). The reason for the inability of modern thought (psychology included) to propose a morality is that for modern thinkers, “any imperative is lodged within thought” (p. 357), i.e., within the thinking subject rather than in “the order of the world.”
- 5.
Hume and Rousseau were in fact personal friends, and when Rousseau had to flee from France – where his book Émile was burned in public immediately after its publication in 1762 – Hume arranged for him to come to England.
- 6.
I do not think Rousseau himself used this word, but there is agreement among interpreters that his philosophy amounts to (and indeed inaugurated) a form of self-realization thinking (Wokler, 2001).
- 7.
Dewey’s account owed much to Hegel’s argument (1821) that individual subjects do not emerge in the course of history before complex social formations governed by a legal system come into existence (see Brinkmann, 2004a).
- 8.
We do not experience a self, Hume argued, and therefore there is no such thing: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat and cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist” (Hume, 1978:252).
- 9.
Taylor (2004) distinguishes between a formal mode of social embedding (a level on which we are always socially embedded) and a material mode of social embedding (a level of content, where we may indeed learn to be individuals) (p. 65).
- 10.
Quoted from the internet edition of The Confessions at:
http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions_enchiridion.txt.
- 11.
Sometimes the natural sciences also work like this: In astronomy, once the mechanical clock was invented, the universe itself quickly came to be understood as one such mechanical clock (Gigerenzer, 1996:37).
- 12.
Galileo died in 1642 after having created the first consistent mathematical theory of motion, and having claimed that the book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics.
- 13.
Of course, this is rarely a conscious and voluntary process. Often, as Foucault has taught us, we identify with specific representations of ourselves only through processes of subjugation and domination. Much more on this in the following chapters.
- 14.
Taylor defines modernity as “that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution)” (Taylor, 2002:91).
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Brinkmann, S. (2011). The Psychological Social Imaginary. In: Psychology as a Moral Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7067-1_2
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