Reading: Notes Chapter 9

1.    R. Isaacson, M. Hutt, and H. Blum, Psychology: The Science of Behavior (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 6.

2.    Ibid., 7.

3.    Jean Piaget, Main Trends in Psychology (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1973). This seems a good place for a reminder that although Dooyeweerd gives an extensive defense of the list of aspects he accepts, I cannot repeat all that here and so have said  I would be using the list only provisionally. Piaget, like many other thinkers, seems to accept the same list or something very close to it. But, I repeat, neither Piaget’s criticism of reductionist theories nor my exposition of Dooyeweerd’s criticism of them depends on exactly this list being correct. The reasons for this are explained in note 4 to chapter 10.

4. Ibid., 36.

5.    J. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1925), 5.

6.    Ibid., 6.

7.    E. M. Thorndike, The Elements of Psychology (New York: A. G. Seiler, 1913), 2.

8.    B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: New York Free Press, 1965), 66.

9. Ibid., 62.

10.      B. F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement — A Theoretical Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), 7.

11.     “As a result of this major assumption that there is such a thing as consciousness and that we can analyze it by introspection . . . [there is] no way of experimentally attacking and solving psychological problems and standardizing methods” (Watson, Behaviorism, 6.)

12.     “To what extent is it helpful to be told ‘He drinks because he is thirsty’? If to be thirsty means nothing more than to have a tendency to drink, this is mere redundancy. If it means he drinks because of a state of thirst, an inner causal event is invoked. If this state is purely inferential — if no dimensions are assigned to it which would make direct observation possible — it cannot serve as an explanation. [Even] if it has . . .psychic properties, what role can it play in a science of behavior?” (Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, 33).

13.     “Skinner’s Utopia: Panacea or Path to Hell?” Time, Sept. 20, 1971, 52.

14.     Piaget, Main Trends in Psychology, 37.

15.      Richard Lewontin has frankly admitted this point: “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the. . . world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our prior adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door. . . . To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen (New York Review of Books, Jan. 7, 1997, 31).

16.     Alfred Adler, Cooperation between the Sexes: Writings on Women, Love, Marriage, Sexuality and Its Disorders, ed. H. Ansbacher and R. Ansbacher (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 305.

17. Ibid., 307.

18.     The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, ed. H. Ansbacher and R. Ansbacher (New York: Basic Books, 1956), 207.

19.     Adler, Cooperation between the Sexes, 305.

20.     Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 47-48.

21.     Adler, Cooperation between the Sexes, 176.

22.     Alfred Adler, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1964), 7-8.

23.     Adler, Cooperation between the Sexes, 281.

24.     Adler, Understanding Human Nature, 27-28.

25. Ibid., 31. 26. Ibid., 26-27.

27. Ibid., 32.

28. Alfred Adler, Superiority and Social Interest, ed. H. Ansbacher and R. Ansbacher (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 288.

29. Ibid., 295.

30. Adler, Cooperation between the Sexes, 3-4. 31. Ibid., 136-37.

32. Ibid., 135.

33. Ibid., 270.

34. Ibid., 256.

35. Ibid., 270.

36.     Ibid.

37.     Adler, Understanding Human Nature, 80-81.

38.    E. Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970), 47.

39. Ibid., 48.

40. Ibid., 52. 

41. Ibid., 117. 

42. Ibid., 119.

43. Ibid., 121-23.

44. Ibid., 121.

45.  Ibid.

46.     D. Hausdorff, Eric Fromm (New York: Twayne, 1972), 48.

47. Ibid., 90.

48.     Ibid.

49.     E. Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 117. 50. Ibid., 117-23.

51.     E. Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 61 ff.

52.     In defense of this crucial turning point in his thought, Fromm gives only a short account of the laws of Western logic to be rejected, and a number of illustrations of statements which supposedly contradict each other but are nonetheless both true. But it would be generous to say Fromm’s case is weak. First he manages to misstate the laws of logic, and then it turns out that not one of his examples is actually of mutually contradictory beliefs. They include, for instance, the Taoist saying: “Gravity is the root of lightness” (The Art of Loving, 63). In this, as in his other examples, Fromm mistakes paradoxical or unusual combinations of terms or qualities for logical contradictions.

53.     Fromm, The Art of Loving, 64.

54.     This remains true despite the many biblical elements in Fromm’s thought derived from his Jewish heritage, especially his idea of love as the norm for both the individual and society. Cf. Rabbi Jakob Petchowshi’s review of The Art of Loving, “Eric Fromm’s Midrash on Love,” Commentary 22 (Dec. 1956): 549.

55.     Fromm, The Art of Loving, 62.

56.     Solomon Asch, Psychology: A Study of a Science, ed. S. Koch (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), vol. 3, 367.

57.     J. A. Brown, Freud and the Post-Freudians (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), 15.

58.      The classic statement of this point is found in the opening of Calvin’s Institutes

(I, i, 1-2) where he says:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. . . . On the other hand, it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God.

59.      For example, Oscar Cullman, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (New York: MacMillan, 1958); also John Cooper, Body, Soul and Life Everlasting (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989).

60.     Augustine recognized that the biblical use of the term “soul” is usually equivalent to “the life of the body” and did not mean an independent rational entity as it did for Pythagoras, Plato, and other Greek philosophers (Retractiones 1, xiii.) I find that scripture is remarkably persistent (though not exceptionless) in its use of the term “heart” for the central unity of the self, while the term “spirit” usually refers to a person’s diversity (of functions, talents, dispositions, etc.). “Soul,” as Augustine noted, is usually used for a person as an embodied, biotically living being. I should add, however, that this position does not do away with every duality in the idea of human nature, even if it rejects the traditional dualisms. That is because there is still a distinction between the part of a human destroyed at death and the heart which continues beyond death as the abiding identity of the person who will be restored by resurrection to full bodily existence in God’s final kingdom.