~ 9 Naturalism As Prejudice ~
In The Outsider, a book by the Black Existentialist author Richard Wright, Cross Damon repeats in his mind the view of “woman as body of woman”. She is thus devoid of spirit in his view. The existential issue with naturalism in general is precisely that the spirited, human, thoughtful, and ethical life of freedom, of consciousness, is collapsed down to physicalism, to mere nature. It is what prompted Beauvoir’s ironical first words in “Chapter 1: Biological Data” of her The Second Sex: “Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a womb, an ovary; she is a female: this word is enough to define her.”[1] Such are the “objective”, biologically-inherent, or pre-given “facts” typically lorded over women and trans people. However, science itself (as well as concretely existing life and culture), is animated by thought; that is, subjective spirit. Truth is a matter of constant changing or “becoming” towards objectivity, not the expert’s mere factual “being”, as if he has objective certainty in his possession, followed by his gullible adherents. With all our prodigious, valid science acquiring influence in our age, however, scientism obnoxiously latches on as dogmatism; prejudice; even nihilism. Such is the particular case with Turgenev’s Bazarov, the nihilist, as he says of “The Women Question” in Russia and of Kukshina, a freethinking woman: “as far as I've observed”, he says, “the only female freethinkers are ugly monsters” and, to Arkady regarding Ánna Sergéyevna:
"What a delectable body!" continued Bazarov. "Perfect for the dissecting table."
"Stop it, Evgeny, for God's sake! That's unspeakable."
"Well, don't get angry, my little one. What I meant was—she's first-rate. We'll have to pay her a visit."
– Fathers And Sons.
Epictetus’ Discourses prejudicially said that “A woman is by nature smooth-skinned and delicate, and if she is covered with hair, she is a prodigy, and is exhibited at Rome among the prodigies. But the same applies to a man if he is not hairy, and if by nature he is devoid of hair, he is a prodigy”. Epictetus’ word “prodigy” is elsewhere interpreted to mean “monster”, as in Bazarov’s usage. But, again, hair just grows where it grows – and where it doesn’t – by nature. By Epictetus’ absurdity here, one understands natural law claims to be moralistic ones pertaining to one’s own choices (what is within our power). So it is not pertaining exclusively to an actual nature. That is to say, his argument is not evidenced in the external “nature” but in his internal idea of it. Lastly, he is also moralizing about controlling the body yet his Enchiridion said the body is not in our control.
Just as one’s moral edicts can be disguised with “by nature”, so too can dogmatic scientism, i.e., naturalistic prejudices, be disguised as science. The very issue of pseudo-science is that one can sophistically write and speak in the form of scientific validity without having scientific content itself, just as performative historical understanding (condensing the French Revolution to a few paragraphs), isn’t actual-historical understanding. On that note, Plato’s description of sophistry was having public speaking ability, the ear of young rich men, and the rhetoric of profession rather than profession’s actual understanding[2]. Today, where the lie’s truth is assumed, dogmatism and prejudice can be masked with the rhetorical use of “truth” and “facts” – or even “offensiveness” that’s assumed to be aligned with truth because one must “risk being offensive” (as Peterson told Cathy Newman), as opposed to other minds reacting to someone possibly being inaccurate about the world.
Regarding sophistry, Kierkegaard aptly identified an analogy with our era’s universal culture, i.e., “Enlightenment”: “In one sense this universal culture is very rich and in another very meager. It deceives itself and others and does not detect at all that it always uses the same magnitudes.”[3] Still, through Enlightened study as it is authentically intended, Enlightenment must have the capacity to acknowledge its own defects, negativity, and impassioned, subjective interests – or else it’s noisy, resentful conduct, as in naturalists today.
A pre-revolutionary sentiment of naturalism could be found in the French colonial Louisiana administrator Duclos de Montigny, who said in 1715 regarding intermarriage between colonizers and First Nations, “Experience shows every day that the children that come from such marriages are of an extremely dark complexion...half-breeds who are naturally idlers, libertines and even more rascals.”[4] This “naturally” is what needs to be understood by naturalistic prejudice. At once it assumes that all in this group carry this innate characteristic – universal and unchangeable. Yet it is also a pretence to change such a nature, even to “kill the Indian in the child”, as in Canada’s Deputy Superintendent to Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, or else eliminate the group en masse. This can be done through bureaucratic absurdities coined, for example, by the fastidious accountant of Indian Affairs, Lawrence Vankoughnet, another ascetic of Canada’s commercial society. Regarding dispossessed First Nations starving on the reserve land they were forced on to, Vankoughnet said they’d only be helped by the government “if they showed a disposition to help themselves”[5].
As for the antiquated concept of “idleness”, that lives on today in Haidt/Lukianoff’s own Persecution Complex, their own self-victimization, regarding bourgeois values. Haidt/Lukianoff cite them as, “Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness.”[6] Bourgeois values as such are just a moralistic paradigm, however, neither universal nor humane. It is a virtue-signalling in its own right – devoid of free choice. The actual order of things in mechanical society is mindlessness. So said Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson writing in An Essay on the History of Civil Society:
Many mechanical arts, indeed, require no capacity; they succeed best under a total suppression of sentiment and reason; and ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand, or the foot, is independent of either. Manufacturers, accordingly, prosper, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.
– As quoted in The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism by Michael Perelman, 191.
This certainly gave impetus to Europe’s Penitentiaries, US Industrial Schools, and Canadian Residential Schools as the supreme ascetic ideals. Most racism and sexism actually has an underlying intentionality of disciplinary economics – it is not merely arbitrary bigotry – just as Scott ordered of Indian Affairs regarding First Nations potlaches, “You should suppress any dances which cause waste of time, interfere with the occupations of the Indians, unsettle them for serious work,…or encourage them in sloth and idleness”. An extensive study of naturalism and economics is needed. It assigns a Division Of Labour. It assigns mere factuality, objectivity, or a role, to the governed in accordance with the intentions and uses of the governing.
Where the issue of racial slavery was concerned during the French Revolution itself, a naturalistic fact claim of disciplinary conservatism/reaction was to argue of African slaves: “their hard nature requires that one not treat them with too much indulgence”[7]. That might still be underlying the racial disparity of today’s prison sentencing then, as documented in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. It becomes a matter of disciplinary role-designation, too, counter to liberality, for the liberal Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie legal editor, Boucher d’Argos, to write that, “Woman, due to the fragility of their sex and their natural delicacy, are excluded from many functions and incapable of certain activities”[8]. Much later, it was also by way of naturalistic dogmatizing and prejudices in the natural sciences itself that Husserl anxiously wrote The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), and this correlated exactly with Nazi Germany doing its hateful work, fueled by its own naturalistic racial prejudices[9]. To give credit to Weikart’s critics that his book From Darwin To Hitler didn’t offer a direct link between Darwin and Hitler, the key to the trend happens to be the progress of naturalism more generally, as in Hitler directly citing the British Naturalist Houston Stewart Chamberlain[10].
While contributing to Black Existentialism in Wretched Of The Earth, Franz Fanon documented Doctor J.C. Carothers as yet another naturalist going so far as to psychologize the rebellious and decolonizing movements in Africa. Carothers wrote in a World Health Organization report that, “The African uses his frontal lobe very little” and the peculiarities of African psychiatry “can be envisaged in terms of frontal idleness”[11]. Carothers embellished this partial Euro-Supremacism with the sophistical rhetoric of natural science, to be sure: "These are the data of the cases that do not fit the European categories. They are culled from several parts of Africa-east, west, and south-and, on the whole, the writers had little or no knowledge of each other's work. Their essential similarity is therefore quite remarkable."[12] Fanon takes this naturalistic prejudice to its rational conclusion regarding the threat of the disobeying colonized:
It is a neurologically comprehensible reaction, written into the nature of things, of the thing which is biologically organized. The idleness of the frontal lobes explains his indolence, his crimes, his thefts, his rapes, and his lies. And the conclusion was given to me by a sous-prefet now prefet: "These instinctive beings," he told me, "who blindly obey the laws of their nature must be strictly and pitilessly regimented. Nature must be tamed, not talked into reason." Discipline, tame, subdue, and now pacify are the common terms used by the colonialists in the territories occupied.
– Franz Fanon, Wretched Of The Earth, 228.
It pays to remind folks that as Burke gave birth to conservatism, he also wrote, not just against the French Revolution but also against Smith and liberalism[13], that: “instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.”[14] More generally, then, I’m sure conservatism’s prejudices can be graphed exponentially over time as a law.
John Adams wrote of “natural aristocracy” as the following: "By aristocracy, I understand all those men who can command, influence, or procure more than an average of votes; by an aristocrat every man who can and will influence one man to vote besides himself. Few men will deny that there is a natural aristocracy of virtues and talents in every nation and in every party, in every city and village."[15] Adams was a liberal yet also something of a reader of stoics whose natural law possibly informed this “natural aristocracy” ideal, as well as US conservatism today, going by Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which maintains stoical ideas. Kirk quotes Adams where Seneca’s Tranquility Of Mind might be relevant:
Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart; it compels them to rouse their reason, to assert its empire over their passions, propensities and prejudices, to elevate them to a superiority over all human events, to give them the felicis animi immotam tranquiltatem [unmoved tranquility of a happy mind]; in short, to make them stoics and Christians.
Yet stoics have a tendency not to actively doubt their own natural law as being in flux (even in contradiction) in existence and involving the active willing of each and all. From their natural law, as in Adams’ aristocracy, illiberalism could arise. Where “living according to nature” was concerned for Nietzsche, he said to stoics in Beyond Good & Evil, “while pretending with delight to read the canon of your law in nature, you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to dictate and annex your morals and ideals onto nature – yes, nature itself” (10). More broadly, he also said of the ascetic ideal regarding stoics, priests, philosophers, and scientists regarding nature, or what could be subject-less truth for them: “we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded….”[16] Such is fundamentally a problem, also, with Peterson not turning his own doubtful eye towards his own reification and naturalization of hierarchy through “competency”, which is also subject to flux and each of our active wills.
Where feminist protestors compare Peterson to Nazis, one should consider the premises analytically: 1) he favors many liberal bourgeois values and basically identifies as a middle-class liberal, 2) he credits George Orwell as having a profound “emotional” and“analytic sense” of fascism, in his words[17], and yet 3) Orwell blatantly wrote, in the context of his anti-fascist participation in the Spanish Civil War, that the “liberal bourgeoisie” are “the very people who are the supporters of Fascism when it appears in a more modern form”[18]. Fascism, after all, wasn’t the only one to take nostalgically from Ancient Rome. Classical liberalism did too.
What tracks is that a) reading Dostoevsky and b) writing a seemingly-innocuous list of rules for life don’t actually salvage someone from becoming a Nazi.
1. Be good to everybody, especially to mother, father and Else [...].
2. Do not talk much, think a lot.
3. Be alone often.
4. Try to make your peace with life.
5. Get up at 8 and go to bed at 10.
6. Read and write the bitterness out of your soul.
7. Take plenty of long walks, especially alone.
8. Do not neglect your body.
9. Try to come to terms with God.
10. Do not despair.
These were Goebbels’ rules for life, years before he became the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist[19]. In 1927, Goebbels wrote a play, The Wanderer, to promote Nazi ideology, yet a reviewer described it as an “artless mixture of medieval, Expressionist and Naturalistic elements” [20]. So it goes with naturalists like Peterson.
According to Robert Leeson in “Clerical Fascism: Portugal, Spain, and France”, French Marshal Philippe Pétain “admired Franco’s elimination of communists—and the resulting ‘peace and stability’ and ‘the restoration of the traditional Spanish values of the soil, the church and national service’”[21]. After France’s capitulation in 1940, Pétain was called to serve as the puppet chief of state for the Nazis. Pétain wrote resentfully and in a scapegoating manner that “My country has been beaten and they are calling me back to make peace and to sign an armistice ... This is the work of thirty years of Marxism.”[22] So it is with Peterson’s resentful scapegoating of Marxism for universities in general where he dislikes them, especially against the social or human sciences that happen to not lean right.
As Nazi Germany occupied France, Pétain, as collaborator, inverted the Robespierre-coined slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity” into a new national slogan for Vichy France: “work, family, fatherland”. Pétain actually wrote of it saying paternally:
When our young people … approach adult life, we shall say to them … that real liberty cannot be exercised except under the shelter of a guiding authority, which they must respect, which they must obey…. We shall then tell them that equality [should] set itself within the framework of a hierarchy, founded on the diversity of office and merits.… Finally, we shall tell them that there is no way of having true brotherhood except within those natural groups, the family, the town, the fatherland.[23]
Leeson explains further that “Pétain Vichy France resembled Pinochet’s Chile: the secular and liberal traditions of the Third Republic were replaced by the ‘French state’–an authoritarian, paternalist, Catholic society. According to Pétain, Vichy France would be ‘a social hierarchy…rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men.’”[24] If Peterson isn’t a self-identified Nazi and doesn’t like Nazis, his ideas are nevertheless analogous to Nazis and collaborators; that is to say, if his obnoxious favouring of hierarchy over equality, and naturalism and duties over existential freedom, are to be understood.
It must pain today’s orderly conservatives, however, that we, the people, don’t all oblige the naturalization of their households, workplaces, and societies into disciplinary penitentiaries, barracks, or usefulness. But it’s actually true that, whether coming from revolutionary liberal US or revolutionary liberal France, appeals to Spartan or Roman nostalgia molded liberal nations more into “armed camps” (as Camus said of the Soviet Bloc[25]), rather than nations of free and proud citizens in the end. Commenting on all the allusions in classically liberal US to Sparta and Rome, Daniel Shays of Shays’ rebellion wrote that “Sparta was little better than a well-regulated camp; and Rome was never sated of carnage and conquest.”[26] Whitham also documented of Madame Roland: “War, that high school of public virtue, she wrote; also that peace led to degeneration, that only blood regenerated men”[27]. Similar was the appeal Burke made during the early French Revolution to have French soldiers not mix with the “feasts and civic entertainments” of civilians but regimented back “to an obedience to their officers” and “the austere rules of military discipline” – to be literally “mere instruments” in his words[28]. In turn, Madame Roland and Napoleon both put these mere instruments to use through their rallies to war, which resulted in mass objectification, dehumanization, collective murder, and absurd regression for history and all humanity. Marat, the demagogue, still foretold that the same soldiers would “be ready, on the slightest provocation, to assail their own fellow-citizens.”[29]
Anne-Josèphe and Claire Lacombe participated in the August 10 insurrection in 1793 that ushered in France’s republic. Following that event, however, Monsieur Roland called for an independent fighting force to protect the Convention against the “anarchy” of the capital. This could have been a direct threat to the sans-culottes’ political influence, or that of the lower class more generally, which might have backfired on him as karma against a ruling, middle-class elite[30].
Tracing historical-psychological literature in Literature And Existentialism, this passage by Sartre emulates Kierkegaard as much as it does Husserl.
the psychology of Corneille, Pascal and Vauvenargues was a cathartic appeal to freedom. But the merchant distrusted the freedom of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous and without exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more believed in human freedom than the scientist believes in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief motive of his psychology was self-interest. For the writer it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an appeal to absolute freedoms, but of exhibiting the psychological laws which determined him to readers who were likewise determined.[31]
If the same Materialistic Psychology in Ignatieff’s A Just Measure Of Pain can be explicitly traced to the development of US psychology, then the social coercion that we saw in the modern developments of France’s Salpêtriere hospital and Britain’s Pentonville prison weren’t Europe’s mere once-offs. As a US philosopher and psychologist, William James wrote the historic 1892 essay A Plea for Psychology as a ‘Natural Science’. But in it he said:
All natural sciences aim at practical prediction and control, and in none of them is this more the case than in psychology to-day. We live surrounded by an enormous body of persons who are most definitely interested in the control of states of mind, and incessantly craving for a sort of psychological science which will teach them how to act. What every educator, every jail-warden, every doctor, every clergyman, every asylum-superintendent, asks of psychology is practical rules. Such men care little or nothing about the ultimate philosophical grounds of mental phenomena, but they do care immensely about improving the ideas, dispositions, and conduct of the particular individuals in their charge.
A Plea for Psychology as a ‘Natural Science’, 148.
William James was the father of US psychology and the first to teach a psychology course in the US. But in his essay, he actually rejected the mind’s own activity so as to achieve natural science status for the study of the mind. This was almost explicitly to spite philosophical inquiry. Yet a similarity inheres between philosophy where it studies the mind and psychology as it is the study of the mind. Psychology could still even be a subcategory within philosophy. To gatekeep either field from each other where one is only theory, the other, practical science is, therefore, nonsensical and a prejudice.
Every special science, in order to get at its own particulars at all, must make a number of convenient assumptions and decline to be responsible for questions which the human mind will continue to ask about them. This physics assumes a material world, but never tries to show how our experiences of such a world is ‘possible.’ It assumes the inter-action of bodies, and the completion by them of continuous changes, without pretending to know how such results can be (147).
If psychology couldn’t be bothered with the “how” of its own field, we can, then, signify James’ essay as the dogmatic turn psychology officially and prejudicially took away from philosophy, away from ethics and reason — and as a pretext for irresponsibility and social control.
But Existential philosophy rears its head as the philosophy of freedom! Gabriel Marcel coined the term “Existentialism” almost after the fact of existential philosophy’s development through Sartre and Beauvoir. If he was also antagonistic of what he called “technics”[32] in his philosophy, then he rounds off all existential philosophy as a spirited rejection of the dispiriting (mechanical) philosophies of modernity altogether. Objectivists or naturalists such as Saad or Peterson who now buzzword “existential” or “existential threat”[33], then, seem to be ignorant and unread of massive expanses of existential philosophy as it actually developed. In a derogatory tone, Nietzsche himself described 19th century European philosophy as, “the doctrine of objective, ‘will-less’ contemplation as the only way to truth; also to beauty; the mechanism, the calculable rigidity of the mechanical process; the alleged ‘naturalism’, elimination of the choosing, judging, interpretive subject as a principle - also the belief in ‘genius’ in order to have a right to submission.”[34] So it is today, on the right. Kierkegaard also wrote explicitly in his journals that, “In our times, it is especially the natural sciences that are dangerous”[35], that, “In the end, all corruption will come from the natural sciences”[36], and further still, “If the natural sciences had been as developed in Socrates’ time as they are now, all the Sophists would have been researchers in the natural sciences.”[37] We can find that Kierkegaard roasts the natural scientist as unambiguously as he does performative Christianity and the middle-class as they all overextended their naturalistic pretensions, and against spirit.
The hypocrisy is this, that the natural sciences are said to lead to God. Yes, indeed, they do lead to God—in a superior manner, but this is simply impertinence…. all such scientism becomes especially dangerous and corrupting when it also wants to enter the precincts of the spirit. Let them treat plants and animals and stars in that way, but to treat the human spirit in that way is blasphemy, which only weakens the passion of the ethical and the religious. Simply eating is much more reasonable than speculating microscopically about digestion. And worshiping God is certainly not, like eating, something inferior to making observations, but is absolutely the highest thing.
Thus we learn from physiology how the unconscious comes first and then the conscious, but how the relationship is then finally reversed, and the conscious exerts partial formative influence on the unconscious. And then the physiologist waxes aesthetic and sentimental, speaking of the noble expression of a cultivated personality, character, attitude, etc. Good Lord, what is all this? A bit of triviality and at most a bit of paganism…. Materialistic physiology is comical (in killing one believes one can find the spirit that gives life); modern, more intellectual-spiritual physiology is sophistical.
– Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Volume 4: Journals NB-NB5, 63.
Kierkegaard could already be anticipating the messianic (and dogmatic) pretenses of Sigmund Freud and depth psychology, then, as the undermining of free will – of actual individualism – as what was termed “psychical determinism”[38]. Depth psychology is precisely this notion of subconscious and unconscious traits underlying the full consciousness of the patient. But how can these non-conscious facets not originate in the consciousness of the doctor as he constructs and projects them? As an adherent of both Freud and Jung’s depth psychology – as seen in Beyond Order, Peterson gives no credence to the problem of free will being explicitly undermined by their psychoanalysis. Szasz’s The Myth Of Psychotherapy and Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies accuses psychotherapy and psychoanalysis of medicalized priestliness because Freud, Jung, and others failed to ground either fields scientifically.
James’ A Plea for Psychology as a ‘Natural Science’ can be considered historic but where a plea doesn’t always make it so, as Szasz argued[39]. James wrote as his idealistic/utopic conclusion that, “The kind of psychology which could cure a case of melancholy, or charm a chronic insane delusion away, ought certainly to be preferred to the most seraphic insight into the nature of the soul. And that is the sort of psychology which the men who care little or nothing for ultimate rationality, the biologists, nerve-doctors, and psychical researchers, namely, are surely tending, whether we help them or not, to bring about.”[40] Freud also had this ambition to disassociate from philosophy[41] in Europe and yet he galivanted around with obscurantist theories of the human mind in such a way that psychoanalysis became its own abstract philosophy – as sophistry and pseudo-science – in the psychological field. His “psychical determinism”, too, implies the metaphysical belief of determinism against free will. Metaphysical belief is philosophical belief. Therefore, Freud was still doing philosophy.
As a staunch critic of Freud, Sartre fostered his own psychological theories in a Husserlian direction. Husserl’s Philosophy as Rigorous Science describes the naturalist view in criticism of it: “All beings are of a psychophysical nature, that is, univocally determined in accordance with firm laws” and “If we take formal logic as an exemplary index of all ideality, then, as is well known, the formal-logical principles, the so-called laws of thought, are interpreted by naturalism as the natural laws of thought”. Contra the spontaneity and activity of full consciousness, Szasz explained of depth psychology (the fully conscious, the sub-conscious, and the un-conscious division of the mind): “In Freud’s view, persons do no act; they are moved by impulses that are largely unconscious. They are moved, moreover, in directions that are generally venal and vile. Freud’s contention that man has no free will is pivotal to the rest of his theory”[42]. Relevant to such a sentiment, Eugen Fink was featured in the appendix to Husserl’s Crisis Of The European Sciences where Husserl criticized naturalistic psychology. There Fink wrote:
Is it not a typical preconceived opinion of all "idealism" that the "spirit," the "soul," "consciousness," makes up the full being of man; whereas we are gradually progressing more and more, through a "depth psychology" that is certified by its therapeutic successes, through the results of modern biology, etc., toward the insight that the sphere of consciousness, the domain of idealistic philosophy, ultimately represents a derivative dimension of "life"?
– Appendix VIII: Fink's Appendix on the Problem of the "Unconscious”, The Crisis Of The European Sciences, 385.
Depth psychology is a process, then, of subverting consciousness with the chimerical referencing and constructing of a subconsciousness and unconsciousness but as realized by another’s mind, the psychoanalyst, in naturalistic self-certainty. Freud himself was transparent in his psychoanalytic purpose as materialistic and reductionist psychology: “The intention of this project…is to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitively determined states of specifiable material particles.” Szasz repudiated that in The Myth Of Psychotherapy as “epistemological nonsense” (108). Rightly so, because it attempts to materialize the immateriality of the human mind.
Being a “physician of the soul” is also contradictory but it nevertheless became the role of psychiatry as Rush proclaimed it in the US. Szasz explained this “physician of the soul”:
In the vocabulary of religion, McNeill observes, “The ‘disorders’ of the soul are ‘sins’; the guide, or physician, of souls diagnoses the patient’s case in terms of sin, and applies the remedies in rebuke, counsel, and penance.” But when the disorders of the soul are changed from sin to sickness and the psychiatrist displaces the priest as the physician of the soul, the patient’s case is diagnosed in terms of psychopathology; and the remedies now become constraint, electricity, and chemistry. (32)
As mentioned earlier, this was the same consequence 18th century Enlightenment Deists had in de-subjectivizing the individual, as much as it was the consequence Husserl warned of against 19th century naturalism and psychology in all his works. In spite of Husserl being proven right, Szasz claimed that Freud nevertheless chose to “redouble his efforts and insist ever more stubbornly that in psychoanalysis he had created a science of ‘mental life’, a science that is ‘like any other’ in its power to offer causal explanations for what it observes and influences” (108). He thus peddled his theories as mere sophistic rhetoric or else as the jargon-heavy dogmas of scientism, which could amount to the same from a “physician of the soul”. Jung, according to Szasz, decried Freud and Adler for maintaining a mere scientific guise as opposed to Jung’s own ventures into religion, literary commentary, and myth. Yet, upon reading or listening to Jung’s The Psychology of The Unconscious, it seems that Jung wanted to have his cake and eat it too regarding being at once priestly and psychoanalytic. Jung himself, quoted by Szasz:
“It is…the priest or the clergyman, rather than the doctor, who should be most concerned with the problem of spiritual suffering. But in most cases the sufferer consults a doctor in the first place, because he supposes himself to be physically ill, and because certain neurotic symptoms can be at least alleviated by drugs.” Jung concludes that “healing may be called a religious problem…. Religions are systems of healing for psychic illness…. That is why patients force the psychotherapist into the role of a priest, and expect and demand of him that he shall free them from their distress. That is why we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with the problems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologians.”
– The Myth Of Psychotherapy, 181.
Szasz traces the “physician of the soul” to philosophy, not religion, which might make philosophy responsible for the categorical errors in the psychological and psychiatric fields. “The idea that the philosopher’s function is to be a physician of the soul is taken for granted by many post-Socratic philosophers, especially by the Stoics”; in the context of Seneca, Szasz writes that “The cure of grief by personal counsel, and even more often by consoling letter, becomes a mainstay of the cure of souls, both among the Stoics and the Christians who replace them”; “Cicero (106–43 B.C.) provides what may be one of the earliest articulations of the idea that the person suffering from a sick soul cannot be his own healer but must entrust himself to the care of an expert: ‘The soul that is sick cannot rightly prescribe for itself, except by following the instruction of wise men.’ These wise men, or physicians of the soul, should, of course, be philosophers, experts in the use of words.”[43] Of course, “wise men”, or experts in the use words, are sophists, not philosophers altogether who should be experts in truth, and Szasz was aware of this troublesome distinction.
Kierkegaard said nature is sophistical. If that is so and nature is the physical, then to be a physician of the soul is sophistical regarding mental health. The physical is the opposite of the soul, which is the immaterial and the mind. Therefore, to be a physician of the soul is contradictory. But the physicians of the soul in our time don’t want to really credit mind, or consciousness, to the individual because it undermines their own professionalism, their expertise in curing souls through self-help, motivational speaking, and teaching morals. But that’s how one profiteers off of the personal troubles of others rather than truly alleviates them. In an important sense, patients are as much irresponsible as the therapist. Indeed, Szasz referenced Pierre Janet, the pioneer French psychologist, regarding the dependence and willed un-willingness that hampers the actual individual from developing out of professional therapy.
Janet premises his claims on the tacit assumption that patients want to be lied to, that they want to infantilize themselves and paternalize their therapists. “There are some [patients],” he declares, “to whom, as a matter of strict moral obligation, we must lie.” Why lying should be a matter of moral obligation on the part of a physician, Janet does not further explain. Perhaps, once more, he assumes as obvious that the doctor’s relationship to his patient ought to be like that of a Platonic guardian to the citizen: the former “owes” it to the latter to pacify him with “noble lies.”
– The Myth Of Psychotherapy, 204.
Janet also happened to inform Freud, Jung, and Adler directly. Jung even studied under Janet. Peterson’s own idyllic hope is that he’ll be remembered as an “honest man” as he peddles their theories, but honesty (as the ground beneath his feet) crumbles, since it is the same ground under the psychotherapeutic profession as one that excuses lying and invents mental problems. Psychotherapy could be peddled rhetoric, not actual truth, as it might be the case with stoics and naturalists. But clinical psychology, which should have more of a research bent than psychotherapeutic or psychiatric practice, should be doing far more research into psychotherapy and psychiatry. They could be corrupted pseudoscience and dishonesty, just as philosophy could generate sophistry.
Nature, so decided by the stoic “sage”, should be the purview of all. Wisdom specialized by the sophist, the wise man or “sage”, should be the purview of all, just as therapeutic or mental health should also be the purview of friends, family, and community altogether, not specialized in therapy, psychiatry, or the clinic. That’s my concern to be leveled against therapeutic culture as it defers responsibility of its mental problems to the professional. This once again is the problem of Division Of Labor overspecialization. Concerning psychologists’ self-help books promoting their ideas, as promotion of mental medicalization – rather than the end of it, this isn’t the democratization of mental health. It’s the expert’s dissemination unto folk psychology as the widespread and nefarious pathologizing of one’s children, friends, loved ones, and oneself. But that’s what widespread self-diagnosing implies: self-pathologizing on the basis of scientific jargon, determined averages of what’s “normal”, and the stoical “ordering” of one’s consciousness, not medical reality. This might be the case with the over-diagnosing of ADHD in the general public over the last couple years. Following Sarah Fay’s Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, Allen Frances, the task-force-leader editor of the DSM-IV, spoke regarding widespread ADHD self-diagnosis: “Our goal was to prevent diagnostic inflation from growing and our conceit was to think we had succeeded in holding the line. We were wrong. It turns out that the impact of the diagnostic system is not in the words as written, it’s in the way words come to be used” (142). Similar to that defeated sentiment, the Danish-German-American psychologist and coiner of “identity crisis”, Erik Erickson, wrote that “We must grudgingly admit…that even as we were trying to devise, with scientific determinism, a therapy for the few, we were led to promote an ethical disease for the many.”[44]
In Psychology Of The Unconscious, Jung writes in a philosophical mode and thus is subject to philosophical consideration:
Anaxagoras developed the conception that the living primal power of “nous” (mind) imparts movement, as if by a blast of wind, to the dead primal power of matter…. This nous, which is very similar to the later conception of Philo, the [cosmic order] of the Gnostics and the Pauline [spirit] as well as to the [spirit] of the contemporary Christian theologians, has rather the old mythological significance of the fructifying breath of the winds, which impregnated the mares of Lusitania, and the Egyptian vultures. The animation of Adam and the impregnation of the Mother of God by the [spirit] are produced in a similar manner. The infantile incest phantasy of one of my patients reads: “the father covered her face with his hands and blew into her open mouth.”[45]
It’s apparent even here in Jung’s interpretation, then, that spirit is symbolically attributed to masculine activity, or “impregnation”, upon what’s assumed to be a passive, object femininity, but that is a prejudice. Mind is consciousness as all humanity ought to cultivate it. Then, not only does consciousness as subjectivity play the active role – regardless of sexual orientation – as a blast of wind or gust, analogously akin to Hegel’s “geist” or spirit, against “dead” matter (which is nature, as much as it is objectivity). Yet Jung concedes that this blast of wind is neither a slight breeze (subconscious), nor a non-wind (unconscious) but a full blast of power.
Miss Miller was a subject of Jung’s psychoanalysis in Psychology of The Unconscious. Regarding her referencing one literary passage and not another, Jung wrote that
the criticism which we hear equally from our medical colleagues, and from our patients, is generally based on such arguments. This misunderstanding arises from the fact that the law of causation in the psychical sphere is not taken seriously enough; that is to say, there are no accidents, no “just as wells.” It is so, and there is, therefore, a sufficient reason at hand why it is so.
– Psychology Of The Unconscious, 59.
That may be true. But then one can easily attribute error to Jung’s own causal determinations of the patient’s actions “at hand” as psychoanalyst, as one who might psychologically project their own mind as the other’s mind[46]. If causal determinism of the mind does exist, then Jung was terrible at tracing it because he predicted that Miss Miller was going to suffer a schizophrenic break when she never did. To attribute schizophrenia, then, to Miss Miller’s mind only ends up proving how error-prone Jung’s psychoanalysis actually was. He had to admit he projected his ideas, his consciousness, as her consciousness. In the fourth lecture Jung gave at a seminar on analytical psychology in 1925, he said “I took Miss Miller’s fantasies as such an autonomous form of thinking, but I did not realize that she stood for that form of thinking in myself.”[47] As a form of ascetic discipline of his own thoughts, Jung continued,
…[S]he became an anima figure, a carrier of an inferior function of which I was very little conscious. I was in my consciousness an active thinker accustomed to subjecting my thoughts to the most rigorous sort of direction, and therefore fantasizing was a mental process that was directly repellent to me. As a form of thinking I held it to be altogether impure, a sort of incestuous intercourse, thoroughly immoral from an intellectual viewpoint.”[48]
Of course, this speech is by no means an actual redemption arc for an insecure male. Jung tried to save face a few words later as he shamelessly wrote, “passive thinking seemed to me such a weak and perverted thing that I could only handle it through a diseased woman. As a matter of fact, Miss Miller did afterwards become entirely deranged”[49]. Jung nevertheless chattered and self-affirmed. He assumed she would suffer “dementia precox”, i.e., schizophrenia, but she was admitted to a mental hospital for entirely different reasons[50]. He attributed his idealism to Miller’s “human nature” what didn’t actually exist there. So it could be with the pathologizing of Anne-Josèphe, radical leftists today, and so forth….
The Salpêtrière hospital in Paris variously employed famed doctors to naturalize and materialize the immaterial psyche. But a link between Pinel and Esquirol’s mode of psychiatric imprisonment based on “the passions” and Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis exists. It is the callous and sophistic exhibitionism of patients by Jean-Martin Charcot. Szasz explains in Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies that, “In 1862, at the age of thirty-seven, Charcot became the director of the Salpêtrière and created the greatest neurological clinic of the nineteenth century.…” (37) There, Charcot hypnotized and exhibited patients in the throes of alleged hysteria. “Hysteria”, as ungovernable emotional excess, originates in the Greek “hystra” or uturus, which fundamentally implies woman as much as it assumes emotional outbursts are unwilled and biological, neither spirited nor conscious. As early as the ancient Babylonians and Greeks, uncontrollable “Hysteria” was historically attributed to women for such varied things as their willingness to not have children or not be married. But at least other Salpêtrière doctors, as in Étienne-Jean Georget, had the hindsight to acknowledge that hysteria does not strictly occur in women, so that is something in the way of progress. But hysteria has since been mystified under the more medically euphemistic term Histrionic Personality Disorder….
Charcot’s fabrication of mental illness was unpacked by Georges Guillain when he wrote of Charcot’s public exhibitions of hysterical patients that “some of these patients…were agile comedians and excellent imitators. Moreover, the assistants and interns of Charcot made the mistake of having them repeat their spectacular crises in front of the physicians and medical students”[51]. Charcot himself admitted before audiences of the dishonesty of their showmanship in hysteria as malingering, but then he attributed hysteria to that as well, as the non-falsifiability of his scientific theory. Later in life, Charcot admitted to his private secretary, Georges Guinon, that much of his theory on hysterics needed to be revised. “Charcot had foreseen the need of dismembering his theory on hysteria and was preparing himself to dynamite the edifice to which he had personally contributed so much in building. Is it not interesting that perhaps I am the only one today to be aware of this fact?”[52] Nevertheless, Charcot impressed Freud so much at his theatrical performances that Freud became Charcot’s undying follower in doctoring hysterics. Freud wrote:
I will tell you in detail what is affecting me. Charcot, who is one of the greatest of physicians and a man whose common sense is touched by genius, is simply uprooting my aims and opinions. I sometimes come out of his lectures as though I were coming out of Notre Dame, with a new idea of perfection.[53]
Szasz explained,
Qua neuropathologist studying hysteria, Charcot was like the proverbial workman whose only tool is a hammer and who therefore treats everything like a nail that needs hammering: he saw abnormal movements and treated them as the symptoms of neurological disease (neuropathology). Freud, neuropathologist-turned-psychoanalyst, was like the crooked art collector who knowingly buys a forged masterpiece authenticated by experts as an original and resells it at a handsome profit: he saw abnormal behaviors and treated them as if they were the symptoms of mental diseases (psychopathology).
– Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies, 37.
A clear analogy between Charcot and Freud is the dynamic between Peterson and his followers. Sophistry is pernicious and could indeed inject itself into our everyday, folk psychology where scientific naturalism is taken for granted, i.e., remains unquestioned. One can contribute Jung’s “law of causation in the psychical sphere” to naturalistic psychology more broadly than to the dogmatics of Freud, Jung, or Adler specifically. The natural laws of thought rendered the individual unfree, determined, so the individual is far more predictable for commercial regularity, or mindless certainty. But naturalistic psychology is now so engrained in our minds as folk psychology – and as medicalized conformity rather than actual disease diagnosis – that it will take decades of studying and discourse to unpack for society or the polis. That is, in politics. Szasz explained:
People abhor being baffled by the dangers that face them, which is why they prefer false explanations to none…. Bizarre, unpredictable behaviors also baffle people and make them feel endangered. Attributing such conduct to mental illnesses comforts them. It is for this reason that people now “know” what causes mental diseases—bad brains, bad genes, bad chemicals, bad societies, bad parents. The idea that there are no mental diseases discomforts people and is therefore rejected.
– Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies, 38.
Seeing as he busies himself with so many public speaking tours, it’s clear Peterson is proficient in rhetoric, as sophists were, but he’s repeatedly been proven wrong in his political and historical arguments against leftism and will continue to promote such arguments, in spite of him sporting a BA in political science. Despite being of the psychology field, he has a particular, ideological agenda that precludes him from looking too deeply into the phenomena he talks about, let alone at himself when “pathologizing” on the grounds of projected resentment. So it is with Hicks, Shapiro, Murray, Haidt/Lukianoff, and Saad. Discipliners rather than liberators – gaslighting[54] rather than truth-telling, by their sophistry (as Kierkegaard himself defined it in The Concept of Irony), political naturalists today dogmatize over their resented opponents – whose individualities they hope to silence. And these naturalists are to be rejected because they are also incapable of recognizing themselves as ideologues telling us to reject ideologues.
Each having a mind of our own, humans are infinitely more than the naturalist reducing humanity by analogy[55] to rats, bees, wolves, or lobsters[56] to rationalize their hierarchy or their social and economic order. This is why Wilhelm Dilthey insisted that the natural sciences should not be the human sciences. Humanity is a matter of having one’s own mind – subjectivity – a consciousness of self, which is embodied in nature. But nature is not reducible to itself – to objectivity and pure physiology – without the human perceiver and valuer. Kierkegaard:
physiology extends itself across the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, exhibiting analogies, and analogies that are not really supposed to be analogies, inasmuch as human life from its first germ is qualitatively different from the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom…. O, vile sophistry, which extends itself microscopically and telescopically into folio volumes and yet, in the final analysis, qualitatively understood, produces nothing, nothing, though it indeed fools people out of their simple, profound, passionate admiration and wonder, which give impetus to the ethical.
– Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Volume 4: Journals NB-NB5, 65.
Taking Kierkegaard’s writing in stride, Haidt/Lukianoff, Peterson, and Saad’s incessant analogies in their psychology books between the human and the non-human is quintessentially naturalistic and dehumanizing. Such is the tendency of stoics, ascetics, and natural scientists, I believe, who have the conceited ambition to impart the objective and timeless truth of the human being, yet through the non-human! Peterson in the Forward to the abridged Gulag Archipelago:
Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world.
So claims Peterson in rhetoric, and exactly as Kierkegaard described a researcher of the natural sciences, or else an objective observer who believes he isn’t animated by his own ideology. He doesn’t know enough to realize he argues against “free, stable, and productive democracies”, not for them, since many individuals in democratic society, his society, do demand better than what he offers. And his appeals to the laws of animals and planetary bodies makes Kierkegaard the perfect foil to Peterson in every respect, as the iron rule, but where Peterson isn’t an abstract universalizer by making truth claims about nature. Rather, he is a concrete, particular sophist projecting his own ideals as “reality”. The same could be said of psychology and psychiatry having the pretensions to forego important fields of philosophy, e.g., epistemology, reasoned critique, and ethics, as we find out in the next section.
[1] The Second Sex, 41.
[2] Plato, The Sophist and Gorgias.
[3] Concept of Irony, 204.
[4] Belmessous, Saliha. Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy, 342.
[5] Daschuk, James. Clearing The Plains, 134.
[6] The Coddling Of The American Mind.
[7] A New World Begins, 53
[8] Ibid, 53.
[9] Weikart, Richard. From Darwin To Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, And Racism In Germany.
[10] Ibid, 220.
[11] Wretched Of The Earth, 226-7.
[12] Ibid, 227.
[13] Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, 54.
[14] Burke, Reflections, 74.
[15] Quoted in The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.
[16] On The Genealogy Of Morality, 87.
[17] “Jordan Peterson Reacts To Red Skull Comic”, uploaded by Ben Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJ88nRzAdg
[18] Homage To Catalonia.
[19] Longerich, Peter, Goebbels: A Bibliography, 45-6.
[20] Ibid, 239.
[21] Leeson, Robert, “Clerical Fascism, Portugal, Spain, and France”, Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part IX: The Divine Right of the ‘Free’ Market, 362.
[22] Ibid, 361.
[23] Ibid, 362.
[24] Ibid, 363.
[25] Camus, Albert. The Rebel, 226.
[26] Ricks, Thomas E., First Principles.
[27] Men And Women Of The French Revolution, 130-1.
[28] Burke, Reflections, 182.
[29] Marat, Jean-Paul, Writings Of Marat, 39.
[30] Hanson, Paul, The Jacobin Republic Under Fire, 42.
[31] Literature And Existentialism, 116.
[32] Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy Of Existence.
[33] As 12 Rules for Life and The Parasitic Mind do frequently.
[34] Nietzsche’s Last Twenty Two Notebooks: complete.
[35] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 4: Journals NB-NB5, 11.
[36] Ibid, 62.
[37] Ibid, 69.
[38] Szasz, Thomas, The Myth Of Psychotherapy, 124.
[39] Szasz, Thomas, Psychiatry: A Science Of Lies, 49.
[40] James, William, A Plea for Psychology as a ‘Natural Science’, 53. Also, see Thomas Szasz, Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies.
[41] Szasz, Thomas, “Inculpating”, Psychiatry: The Sciences Of Lies, 49.
[42] Szasz, Thomas, The Myth Of Psychotherapy, 123.
[43] Szasz, Thomas, The Myth Of Psychotherapy, 29.
[44] As quoted in Thomas Szasz’s “Mental Health As Ideology”, Ideology And Insanity, Essays On The Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man, 72.
[45] Jung, Carl, The Psychology Of The Unconscious, 492.
[46] Karl Jaspers is quoted in General Psychopathology as saying “The tendency to make causal speculation the main thing has a disastrous effect on our empirical knowledge of the varied forms of psychic abnormality”, One Century of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology, xiv.
[47] Jung, Carl, “Lecture 4”, Introduction To Jungian Psychology: Notes Of The Seminar On Analytic Psychology Given in 1925, 28.
[48] Ibid, 28.
[49] Ibid, 28-9.
[50] Ibid, 29.
[51] Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies, 41.
[52] Psychiatry: The Science Of Lies, 44.
[53] Ibid,
[54] The 1940 film adaptation of Gaslight is crucial viewing today, just as Stephanie Sarkis’ book, Gaslighting, is a crucial read/listen.
[55] Rollo May, “Introduction”, Existential Psychoanalysis, 9.
[56] Peterson, Jordan. 12 Rules For Life.