Thomas Nagel’s Case for Antireductionism

The currently most widely held view of the world is materialist. According to this view phenomena which appear immaterial have, or could only have, a materialist explanation. These phenomena could, in other words, be reduced to causal chains as physics and chemistry present them.

If we accept that view, mind, consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought and value are mere appearances. And of course the only sciences that could legitimately deal with humanity would be physical sciences. And only medical therapeutics could deal with mental health problems. There would be no place for a psychotherapy which operated mind-to-mind.

There has always been a stubborn belief that such reductionism does not hold water and in 2012 there was published a cogent work of philosophy which revisited this ancient philosophical territory, Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press).

Quoting from page 13: The conflict between scientific naturalism and various forms of antireductionism is a staple of recent philosophy. On the one side there is the hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences, including biology. On the other side there are doubts about whether the reality of such features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at the most basic level only of physical facts – facts, however sophisticated, of the kind revealed by the physical sciences.

And from page 16: My guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought, or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature.

This short book is recommended as a rewarding read, revealing the gaping hole in the materialist conception of the world. Science’s great challenge is to find a conception of the world that has a place in it for the mind, and an explanation both of its existence and its emergence.

Why should psychotherapists be concerned about this argument? Why shouldn’t we leave this argument to the philosophers and the scientists? Because the materialist prejudice invades our own territory. We too are prone to reductionism. The most insidious is not actually the crass reduction to physical causes but the assumption that only psychological mechanisms are at the root of human functioning and suffering: psychologism. We are prone to omit the social-embeddedness of humans, and their connectedness with the cosmos.

by Harry Dowling Posted on April 13, 2013
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Integration in Psychotherapy

Over the past century there has been a great proliferation of approaches to psychotherapy. Each school elaborates its own theory and practice, its own concepts and assumptions, and in its own language. The terrain of psychotherapy is a patchwork of fields separated by impenetrable hedges. Each school of thought is in competition with the others but at the same time acting as if the others were not there. Each is unintelligible to the others without a dedicated effort of translation and understanding. It is very unlikely then that real advances in the art and science of psychotherapy can spread beyond the schools where they are made.

In any other field we might expect to see competing theories and practices, it is true, but we would also feel that unity was being approached stepwise as the whole field moved conscientiously and cooperatively in the direction of truth.

I do not count the effort at integration, where psychotherapy and counselling courses lump together a few of the separate traditions, perhaps hoping that the students themselves will synthesise something useful. The Integrative students I have met for the most part think that they have been given a bundle of distinct tools, that they can select from. There is no integration here.

And indeed given the sheer number of distinct traditions, it would take millennia of each talking and listening to each before common platforms could emerge.

There is a better way. By rising above the field onto a philosophical plane we could establish the parameters of a genuine advance in psychotherapy. Fundamental to this undertaking is the need to establish a clear view of human nature in its connection with the world. It would need to be able to distinguish from each other both the apithology and pathology of the soul. This is what this series of postings hopes to contribute to.

It could be objected that theory is not as important as the practice of psychotherapy. And it is quite likely that experienced and wiser psychotherapists will resemble each other over time and learn to see beyond the limitations of theory. But theory whispers so seductively and so insistently into our ears as we practice. And if the theory misleads us, is not our practice in jeopardy?

by Harry Dowling Posted on March 6, 2013
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Childhood and Parenthood

As Alison Gopnik notes in The Philosophical Baby, the dependent stage of childhood presupposes the care-giving parent. The exploratory and experimental stage in development requires sustaining and supporting adults, protecting the child and putting their own interests second. This practical altruism is at the root of Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgefühl, usually translated as community feeling or social interest. Where this is fully developed it extends to an interest in the welfare of all. The child too has the rudiments of this feeling, both in the need for contact and in its interest in other people. The child senses that its security depends on the community feeling.

Defeating, undermining or weakening this bond is the self-centred, self-concerned impulse of the adult. Where this frustration of the bond is deep, the child feels the vulnerability of its world and seeks to defend it. Seeing life as a field of danger, the child finds and elaborates a system of defence.

by Harry Dowling Posted on February 25, 2013
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The Bounded Self-Determination of Character

Our embeddedness in two worlds of causation, the physical and the teleological, is a key problem in psychotherapy. To understand ourselves and our fellows we have to grasp and comprehend both aspects of our contradictory nature.

We are up to a point determined by our physical nature. We are up to a point determined by the the imprints and models we have from our cultural environment and personal history. So far nature and nurture. But we are also up to a point self-determining by our creative responses. To neglect our self-determining and creative side means to see ourselves as predetermined and in lock-step with physical causation. That is to say to entirely miss our human nature. Psychotherapists gravitate toward this position whenever they succumb to reductionist temptations. Such a temptation was Freud’s adoption of instinct-determination, which contradicted and poisoned his more promising psychogenetic approach. [Rudolf Aller’s book The Successful Error is recommended as a clear exposition of Freud’s temptation to appear scientific.]

To neglect our physical and cultural determination means to overestimate our creative aspect and leave the real world entirely. There would appear then to be no limits or bounds to human possibility.

To operate with both feet on the ground we have to see our world as that of bounded self-determination. To see both sides operating within the individual is a difficult but essential undertaking. We have to be able to discern both aspects in the character, if we are to have any prospect of a healing intervention.

by Harry Dowling Posted on September 24, 2012
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The Dialectic of the Soul

The philosophic foundation of Adlerian psychotherapy lies in its dialectical understanding of the soul in the world. This is expressed by Gustav Emil Mueller, who probably had no connection with Adler or his movement, in his book Dialectic: a way into and within philosophy.

An action is always perceived as being purposive. It is characterised by meaning or intending something beyond itself. Tell me what you believe in, what you strive for, and I can tell you what you are. An action begins with a feeling of discrepancy between my wishes and the situation. If my wishes are frustrated by an obstacle I am compelled to take a look, to form a clearer perception of the obstacle, whereupon I build my plans to remove or alter the obstacle in order to suit my desire. … The soul is perceived in its actions as individuated. Individual means unique and indivisible. You cannot separate any action of feeling, desire, thinking, dreaming, and so forth, from the self which is inseparable from them as their unity.

by Harry Dowling Posted on August 20, 2012
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The Soul in Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy, therapy of the soul, requires as its basis an understanding of the soul.
The Soul is singular in that it is both a part of the natural world of causation and a creative power exerting influence on and in that world. The soul is in the world of physical determination and in the world of self-determination, telos.
When our goals change a realignment begins. This is the real basis of psychotherapy, counselling, coaching, training and education. For the psychotherapist it is fundamental: the client, every client can change, providing that he can see the world and himself within it with different eyes. This new view changes the view of what is required and thus changes the client’s goals.

by Harry Dowling Posted on August 11, 2012
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The Soul’s Creativity

The Soul as the organ of awareness and action must respond to the impinging demands of the environment. The Soul responds from its particular awareness, limited by its time and place, by its experience and accumulated knowledge and belief. Thus its view of the world, and its view of itself in the world, is bounded, constrained, biased and idiosyncratic. Its response is likewise idiosyncratic.

Both the view of the world and the response are creations of the soul. The Soul is by nature creative. The child-soul creates its causal maps (Gopnik) and its maps of human interactions and relationships. Having done so, it then perceives or interprets the world through these maps.

The client who comes to psychotherapy and counselling brings with him his creation, a life plan elaborated from the causal maps and equipped with ingenious and highly individual strategies for preserving the self value feeling through all its trials.

by Harry Dowling Posted on July 24, 2012
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The Feeling of Self Value

Colwyn Trevarthen is a practised and astute observer who can home in on the meaning of commonplace interactions of children and adults. In a recent lecture he talked about a photo taken in 1907 of a Blackfoot couple with their young daughter standing between them. The child is evidently well cared for and is proud of her central position between her parents. Trevarthen insists on identifying the child’s feeling as pride.

This is striking because of the negative connotations of pride. Here we are invited to think of a pride unconnected with the sin of pride. The child feels proud to be herself, to enjoy the love and attention of her parents, and to belong in their company, to feel confirmed.

Such a child, possessing the imagination to create counterfactual fictions, also knows, even without direct and harrowing experience, what it would mean to experience the loss of pride and confirmation, shame. Shame is our basic anxiety as social beings.

Alfred Adler identifies this as the Selbstwertgefühl, the feeling of self value, the self evaluation. This lies at the core of the self and is its root preoccupation. The child and the adult that have been deeply discouraged and led to feel deep and lasting shame have a desperate need for pride, for a positive self evaluation, and will construct one from any material at hand or invented for this purpose. Unable to experience the pride of confirmation of self value that comes from belonging and shared meaning, a pathological, easily offended pride is produced, aggressively directed at others and in competition with them. Instead of a pride in belonging, a pride in not belonging!

by Harry Dowling Posted on July 6, 2012
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The Child Maps the World

Alison Gopnik shows us in her book The Philosophical Baby how the child playfully builds up its map of the world, always seeing the counterfactual alternatives, alternative possibilities. Instead of seeing the child as some kind of defective, unfocussed adult, she demonstrates that childhood is the Research & Development stage of our lives.

“Human beings don’t live in the real world… we live in a universe of many possible worlds… that we call dreams and plans, fictions and hypotheses. They are the product of hope and imagination.”

Learning and imagination are two aspects of the same process of the soul’s movement into reality, towards absorption and mastery of it. At the same time as learning how the world is, the child is learning to see what the world could become, how it could be changed. The child is by nature an active participant in the world, an insatiable learner and imaginer of worlds.

The evolutionary advantage of counterfactual thinking is that it allows us to change the world.

This activity of learning, imagining and acting is the basis of all human creativity and productivity. From the many possible counter fictions we choose the goals of action.

Over the course of childhood we establish a causal map of the world, both of the physical world and of human relationships.

by Harry Dowling Posted on June 20, 2012
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Intersubjectivity

The work of Colwyn Trevarthen at Edinburgh University demonstrates that the child is born equipped for social interaction, and expecting to be a subject among subjects. The child interacts with its environment, both natural and social.

The video evidence he has collected is so compelling that no room is left for doubt: the child’s world is one of intersubjectivity.

In one piece of video we see a father holding hidden in his coat a premature baby. The baby utters short passages of squeaks, pausing for a response from the adult. A dialogue is established in which both parent and child play equal and determining roles. The roots of social interaction, language and musicality are revealed.

by Harry Dowling Posted on June 11, 2012
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