In the late 1990s / early 2000s, when this essay was written, it seemed important to understand the relationship between things that are scientific, things that are spiritually valid but not scientific, and things that pretend to be scientific but are neither spiritual nor scientific. That final category is called pseudoscience, and science and esotericism have a dual interest in shooting it down.
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Can a body of knowledge or information be useful, valid, spiritual, without meeting the criteria of being a 'science'. Must all cultural interaction regard science as the only valid norm? It's sadly rare for this to be debated in a disinterested way: either you are a partisan of science, or an opponent. This note takes the different view that 'science' as generally defined and understood is a necessary part of our total knowledge, essential in its own area, but not the only valid wisdom.
So what is science? It is any field of knowledge grounded in general principles of enquiry and directed towards the discovery of general laws of its specific area, based on empirical phenomena. These laws, whether of biology, physics or human nature, are presumed to be of general applicability, teachable to others, verifiable by others and independent of human liking or disliking. Although the current definitions of science don't treat psychic experience as empirical phenomena, there is no reason why this couldn't be the case.
These criteria have been part of our traditional thinking about science since the time of Plato. In various dialogues, he developed the idea of an 'organised body of knowledge', distinguishing it from the 'groping' of mere empirics, people with a knack for bringing things about, without knowing quite how. A science, as opposed to a mere knack, knows the principles, the general laws that apply in a particulat field, and works from these presumed general laws to the particular case he or she is confronted with. There is of course room to modify or replace certain rules, but it is almost always assumed that there are some such rules or formulae.
This kind of systematic thinking was particularly clear in mathematics, and offered a way of distinguishing true medicine from quackery (many of Plato's examples are medical, and Western medicine owes much to the Greek medical writers Galen and Hippocrates). Nonetheless, it throws up endless problems in dealing with the natural world in all its life and complexity. Scientists have had to completely change their formulations, physics being one of the most drastic examples. But empirical science labours under the eternal contradiction of its search for fixed principles, which it then tends to undermine, as has been understood since at least the time of the Skeptics.
Now, it is usually taken for granted that knowledge of importance has always to be scientific in the way described above. I contend that this is incorrect. Not only that, but the craving of essentially non-scientific spheres like therapy and other forms of healing to be thought of as scientific is one of the great mental catastrophes of our time.
In a word, this catastrophe is pseudoscience. The word pseudoscience is usually applied to such fringe activities as astrology, auras, alchemy and so on. Many pseudosciences are also, by this token, pseudoreligions, in that neither mainstream religion nor mainstream science wants anything to do with them. But the ultimate pseudoscience, infinitely more pernicious than any of the above (which hardly ever hurt anyone, and can even do good) is the so called 'science of the soul', psychology as it has been since Freud.
I have no intention of criticising Freud personally. We are simply concerned with the foundations of what he brought about, and how he affected the way we think of the human being. So let us start by looking at him in historical context, to see what he was trying to do, and then evaluate it.
Freud was a doctor with a background in hypnotism (Mesmerism) and a special interest in brain physiology. His early education took place in the second half of the 19th century, which witnessed the spread of positivistic science, but also the impulse of Romanticism with its imaginative and polemically anti-scientific tendency. This was the era of Frankenstein, where questions of the relation of the life of the soul to machinery, of human passion to the rigid impersonal order, became acute. Mesmerism in the popular mind quickly grew to embody the flavour of the period, especially in such images as the devilish, charismatic male overwhelming the passive woman with some strange force, powerful and invisible as the magnetism and electricity so startling the scientists. It was the emancipated Faustian dream of total power over subjugated nature, the soul rendered into mere putty in the hands of the magician-scientist.
Such images evoke the age: the weird, sadomasochistic complex of sex, the subjugated feminine, the powerful scientist (probably with intense, hypnotic eyes), the soul unveiled and in man's power. It was Freud's destiny to popularise this dynamic and spread it over the world. As is well-known, he was a practised hypnotist, and the couch on which the 'patient' passively sits is a sign of the relationship of mechanically powerful man to malleable woman that we know all too well. For such control to be possible, and accessible to ordinary men without weird 'odic' powers, there had to be a 'science of the soul': a mechanically efficient method of altering the very psyche. The psyche itself was beginning to be identified with mere brain functioning, but as brain science wasn't much advanced in Freud's time, he had to begin a different way- with the so-called 'talking cure'.
When I argue that the kind of 'science of the soul' Freud envisaged is impossible, I don't mean to bar science from researching consciousness, in its own way. If science could just be scientific, it would content itself with investigating neural physiology in conjunction with psychology, putting aside its confused, misconceived and irrelevant desire to deny consciousness or to cram everything into the models of inorganic science. Brain science commits a similar error to Freud-style psychology: it wants to apply a method where it doesn't belong. But when the taboo against having a conscience in science is removed, scientists will no longer allow themselves to be possessed by the impulse to destroy the spirit.
As for the 'healing arts', they must have the courage to admit that they aren't, and can't be, scientific in the same sense as the natural sciences. It is true that they may still need to contend with the arrogance of some scientists who denounce them and those who visit them as stupid, misguided, mentally-deficient etc. But market forces will continue as usual, and the arrogance of these scientists will continue to be ignored. Yet ultimately soul healing must be recognised as a separate category of knowledge from science. Our culture is used to thinking of a split between science and belief: but there is a third category, an intimate domain which doesn't claim to be science because it can't claim to be universal. It is neither objective nor subjective, quite; it is 'personal'. As each person's life is unique, their own knowledge is unique too: and that personal experience is true knowledge, whereas science is really only a 'lingua franca'.
All this is not to say that there is any kind of ban on scientific investigation of psychology, the nervous system etc. However, those of us who have any understanding of the forces that science is contacting have a duty to be concerned with contemporary science, and to challenge not the phenomena but the metaphysical dogmas of materialistic science.
Freud marks the point where the 'unconscious' becomes an issue for materialistic science, where such things as sex and dreams become the subject of serious thought. Jung, in turn, allowed occultism and myth into the mainstream: neither entirely good nor bad, this was necessary. These ideas spread through the bizarre 'viral' social form of therapy (and its influence). We know the evils of this social form, but how else could these ideas live when the paradigm of mainstream medicine is materialistic science? The mainstream has no way of investigating the psyche except by brain research and pharmaceuticals, and the deeply troubling field of behaviourism.
The tendency of 'psychology' is to ignore free will, and to wish to explain human action in anything but a spiritual way. 'Why do people feel, think and act the way they do' is asked in a pernicious way, and answers sought through generalising abnormal, pathological phenomena. But the religious and spiritual traditions have much to say about the soul, especially that way of thinking called 'hermeticism'. There is indeed a 'link between body and soul', ignored by the Cartesian tradition. Without it, it is unintelligible how bodily changes can affect the mood and the power of understanding. Clearly, the 'brain-state' has much to do with what we experience as 'the mind'. Yet it would be wrong to speak of the brain 'determining' us; rather, the nervous system is itself the expression and vehicle of the spiritual. Artifically interfering with the nervous system is indeed interfering with our spiritual liberty, although it has great resilience. We are not 'ordered' by some inert body: we are the very life of that body, and (mysteriously) also exist in the interaction of the spoken word.
---
Can a body of knowledge or information be useful, valid, spiritual, without meeting the criteria of being a 'science'. Must all cultural interaction regard science as the only valid norm? It's sadly rare for this to be debated in a disinterested way: either you are a partisan of science, or an opponent. This note takes the different view that 'science' as generally defined and understood is a necessary part of our total knowledge, essential in its own area, but not the only valid wisdom.
So what is science? It is any field of knowledge grounded in general principles of enquiry and directed towards the discovery of general laws of its specific area, based on empirical phenomena. These laws, whether of biology, physics or human nature, are presumed to be of general applicability, teachable to others, verifiable by others and independent of human liking or disliking. Although the current definitions of science don't treat psychic experience as empirical phenomena, there is no reason why this couldn't be the case.
These criteria have been part of our traditional thinking about science since the time of Plato. In various dialogues, he developed the idea of an 'organised body of knowledge', distinguishing it from the 'groping' of mere empirics, people with a knack for bringing things about, without knowing quite how. A science, as opposed to a mere knack, knows the principles, the general laws that apply in a particulat field, and works from these presumed general laws to the particular case he or she is confronted with. There is of course room to modify or replace certain rules, but it is almost always assumed that there are some such rules or formulae.
This kind of systematic thinking was particularly clear in mathematics, and offered a way of distinguishing true medicine from quackery (many of Plato's examples are medical, and Western medicine owes much to the Greek medical writers Galen and Hippocrates). Nonetheless, it throws up endless problems in dealing with the natural world in all its life and complexity. Scientists have had to completely change their formulations, physics being one of the most drastic examples. But empirical science labours under the eternal contradiction of its search for fixed principles, which it then tends to undermine, as has been understood since at least the time of the Skeptics.
Now, it is usually taken for granted that knowledge of importance has always to be scientific in the way described above. I contend that this is incorrect. Not only that, but the craving of essentially non-scientific spheres like therapy and other forms of healing to be thought of as scientific is one of the great mental catastrophes of our time.
In a word, this catastrophe is pseudoscience. The word pseudoscience is usually applied to such fringe activities as astrology, auras, alchemy and so on. Many pseudosciences are also, by this token, pseudoreligions, in that neither mainstream religion nor mainstream science wants anything to do with them. But the ultimate pseudoscience, infinitely more pernicious than any of the above (which hardly ever hurt anyone, and can even do good) is the so called 'science of the soul', psychology as it has been since Freud.
I have no intention of criticising Freud personally. We are simply concerned with the foundations of what he brought about, and how he affected the way we think of the human being. So let us start by looking at him in historical context, to see what he was trying to do, and then evaluate it.
Freud was a doctor with a background in hypnotism (Mesmerism) and a special interest in brain physiology. His early education took place in the second half of the 19th century, which witnessed the spread of positivistic science, but also the impulse of Romanticism with its imaginative and polemically anti-scientific tendency. This was the era of Frankenstein, where questions of the relation of the life of the soul to machinery, of human passion to the rigid impersonal order, became acute. Mesmerism in the popular mind quickly grew to embody the flavour of the period, especially in such images as the devilish, charismatic male overwhelming the passive woman with some strange force, powerful and invisible as the magnetism and electricity so startling the scientists. It was the emancipated Faustian dream of total power over subjugated nature, the soul rendered into mere putty in the hands of the magician-scientist.
Such images evoke the age: the weird, sadomasochistic complex of sex, the subjugated feminine, the powerful scientist (probably with intense, hypnotic eyes), the soul unveiled and in man's power. It was Freud's destiny to popularise this dynamic and spread it over the world. As is well-known, he was a practised hypnotist, and the couch on which the 'patient' passively sits is a sign of the relationship of mechanically powerful man to malleable woman that we know all too well. For such control to be possible, and accessible to ordinary men without weird 'odic' powers, there had to be a 'science of the soul': a mechanically efficient method of altering the very psyche. The psyche itself was beginning to be identified with mere brain functioning, but as brain science wasn't much advanced in Freud's time, he had to begin a different way- with the so-called 'talking cure'.
When I argue that the kind of 'science of the soul' Freud envisaged is impossible, I don't mean to bar science from researching consciousness, in its own way. If science could just be scientific, it would content itself with investigating neural physiology in conjunction with psychology, putting aside its confused, misconceived and irrelevant desire to deny consciousness or to cram everything into the models of inorganic science. Brain science commits a similar error to Freud-style psychology: it wants to apply a method where it doesn't belong. But when the taboo against having a conscience in science is removed, scientists will no longer allow themselves to be possessed by the impulse to destroy the spirit.
As for the 'healing arts', they must have the courage to admit that they aren't, and can't be, scientific in the same sense as the natural sciences. It is true that they may still need to contend with the arrogance of some scientists who denounce them and those who visit them as stupid, misguided, mentally-deficient etc. But market forces will continue as usual, and the arrogance of these scientists will continue to be ignored. Yet ultimately soul healing must be recognised as a separate category of knowledge from science. Our culture is used to thinking of a split between science and belief: but there is a third category, an intimate domain which doesn't claim to be science because it can't claim to be universal. It is neither objective nor subjective, quite; it is 'personal'. As each person's life is unique, their own knowledge is unique too: and that personal experience is true knowledge, whereas science is really only a 'lingua franca'.
All this is not to say that there is any kind of ban on scientific investigation of psychology, the nervous system etc. However, those of us who have any understanding of the forces that science is contacting have a duty to be concerned with contemporary science, and to challenge not the phenomena but the metaphysical dogmas of materialistic science.
Freud marks the point where the 'unconscious' becomes an issue for materialistic science, where such things as sex and dreams become the subject of serious thought. Jung, in turn, allowed occultism and myth into the mainstream: neither entirely good nor bad, this was necessary. These ideas spread through the bizarre 'viral' social form of therapy (and its influence). We know the evils of this social form, but how else could these ideas live when the paradigm of mainstream medicine is materialistic science? The mainstream has no way of investigating the psyche except by brain research and pharmaceuticals, and the deeply troubling field of behaviourism.
The tendency of 'psychology' is to ignore free will, and to wish to explain human action in anything but a spiritual way. 'Why do people feel, think and act the way they do' is asked in a pernicious way, and answers sought through generalising abnormal, pathological phenomena. But the religious and spiritual traditions have much to say about the soul, especially that way of thinking called 'hermeticism'. There is indeed a 'link between body and soul', ignored by the Cartesian tradition. Without it, it is unintelligible how bodily changes can affect the mood and the power of understanding. Clearly, the 'brain-state' has much to do with what we experience as 'the mind'. Yet it would be wrong to speak of the brain 'determining' us; rather, the nervous system is itself the expression and vehicle of the spiritual. Artifically interfering with the nervous system is indeed interfering with our spiritual liberty, although it has great resilience. We are not 'ordered' by some inert body: we are the very life of that body, and (mysteriously) also exist in the interaction of the spoken word.