Against the Psychologization of Philosophy
I.
Reducing a thinker’s work to his character and disposition has been the fashionable thing to do for a long time now. We say that Nietzsche hated the church because of his daddy issues, or because he was a weakling compensating his inferiority complex with bombastic will-to-power prose. Or, if we are Nietzscheans, we say that the Apostle Paul was a sneaky fraud whose talk about the primacy of love was just his way of gaining power without actually having it in him. Similar theories have surely been advanced for every philosopher, thinker and mystic known to man: fatherlessness, repression & internalization; defense mechanisms, complexes & ticks; provincialism, sexual frustration & disappointment; poverty, carelessness & bad experiences; the list is endless.
But strangely (or not), we never seem to psychologize those opinions and thoughts we agree with—especially those the current zeitgeist takes for granted. And so, we are quick to blame Schopenhauer’s rants against women on his mommy issues; but when it comes to his—for the time—very unusual interest in eastern religion and philosophy, well, that’s just because he was ahead of his time! We simply admire him for his great wisdom and clarity of thought here, which certainly had nothing to do with his temperament or life experience, much less their negative aspects. However, if we were consistent, we might just as well say, in good psychologizing fashion, that his interest in Indian philosophy can be explained by his inferiority complex vis-à-vis the learned men of his day, which drove him to escape towards obscure texts instead of tackling the classics of his own culture.
The problem with psychologizing people’s insights is that we arbitrarily stop the buck at a point of our convenience. Some things we take as self-evidently true and in no need for psychological relativization. Certainly the one who advances those psychological arguments never applies them to himself: what if it is he who just talks in psychological language because he was humiliated once by his classics teacher and is on a crusade against philosophy ever since, seeking to undermine the whole thing with his reductio-ad-temperament? What if the real reason he talks about Kant’s cold personality which supposedly explains his cold philosophy is his intellectual inferiority complex due to his daddy having called him a retard for all his life? What if the evolutionary psychologist just reduces metaphysical ideas to survival and reproduction because of his childhood-conditioned incapability to see real beauty, true selflessness and minds capable of transcending the mere will of this world?
We could play this game endlessly. At which point are we prepared to actually take someone’s thought on its own merits? To acknowledge that there is such a thing as true and good thought, as opposed to faulty and degrading thought? Or correct, logical, insightful ideas, as opposed to chaotic, misleading and stupid ones?
II.
To add to the pantheon of psychologizations, the real pathology here seems to be this: by offering a so-called explanation for why someone advanced this or that idea, we belittle it: we don’t have to take it seriously. The implication here is that if we name a cause (the psychology), then dealing with that which is caused (the ideas) would be a waste of time, the wrong place in the causal chain to focus our attention on. But we ought not to forget that for all the hype of “natural causation,” causality only takes shape in the human mind: it is us who pick out causes for our convenience from an infinity of possible interdependent candidates woven into the hyperdimensional matrix of reality. Which means that we usually have an earthy reason for focussing on a certain element in the causal chain, which in the case of shifting attention from someone’s argument to his biography, is to dismiss the argument. What’s really important here, we imply, is not a thinker’s observation or its inner logic, but the “root” of it all, namely his psychology.
This works so well because it is generally true that chasing for “root causes” is a utilitarian endeavor: we name the cause so that we can fix a problem important to us. When our car breaks down, and we see smoke coming from the engine, we will rather say “it’s because the cooling liquid ran out” than “it’s because explosions in the engine caused a lot of heat.” The latter, to our minds, is trivial and unimportant; it’s the cooling liquid that we should focus on if we want to know what’s going on here and resolve the issue. Similarly, when someone names a thinker’s psychology as the cause for his theories, we instinctively ignore the latter and focus on the so-called root cause; but this is just a mind trick playing on our relationship with causality, not an actual argument for why we should prioritize psychological explanations over the content of the thought in question.
III.
Now, it is obviously true that there is some connection between a person’s temperament, circumstances in life and personal history, on the one side, and the ideas he argues for on the other. But the nature of this connection is not one of causality; it is more like the relationship between a house and the terrain it is built on, between the soil and the blossom, between a mountain range and man’s captured gaze towards it. It would be absurd to say the terrain caused the house, the soil the flower, or the mountain the gaze; nonetheless, they played a crucial part in giving rise to the phenomenon in question.
And so it is with psychology and thought: yes, a happily married man full of love for his wife probably won’t base his philosophy on the evilness of women and the spirit-crushing institution of marriage; in fact, he might write a book about how marriage has made civilization possible, and how important it is. And yes, the unmarried (or married) man who has been tortured by the women in his life as long as he can remember, on the other hand, might write the definitive text about what wicked deeds women are capable of and why marriage is a trap to avoid. Assuming that both men are rich, insightful thinkers, both books might be full of timeless truths, wit and uplifting observations, even though they argue for different things. It’s just that each man has a different background, a different temperament, and therefore a different perspective. But in the end, since both are directed towards truth, those perspectives must come together—not in a synthesis or compromise of some sort, but simply in the sense that both are expressing something real, just like two blossoms can both be beautiful in almost opposite ways.
IV.
A useful distinction to make here, it seems to me, is between the quality of someone’s experience and its form: the quality is about the depth of perception, the subtle richness and nimbleness of the mind’s movements, about someone’s skill—rooted in Being—of using his mind to illuminate existence. Such quality of experience has to do with a long-standing taste for truth and, based on that, the perfection of one’s faculties.
The form of experience, on the other hand, is where we find the usual psychological categories: personality traits, preferences, life circumstances that form one’s character and are in turn formed by it, and so on. To an extent, the form is arbitrary—it is based on environmental or hereditary quirks, preferences and tastes, tolerance or lack of tolerance for certain things, etc. They form the terrain on which to build one’s home. But they don’t determine its design, much less the spirit of the place: whether it will turn out to be a beautiful home where the right people love to dwell, or a shitty hut overrun with fools, will be decided not by form (the terrain), but by quality.
The same form of experience—a similar temperament, similar preferences and so forth—can give rise to splendid thoughts, truthful observations and brilliant arguments, if based on a high quality of experience; or vile sophistry, poisonous rhetoric and degrading ideas if rooted in a low quality of experience. The error here is to assume that a great soul always produces exactly the same kind of lifestyle and tastes, in other words, to take what is contingent as necessary. The quality of the soul—of someone’s experience— cannot be easily measured, and while it’s true that it can be known by its fruits, discerning these often isn’t as straight-forward as we would like, and itself requires the subtle gaze rooted in high-quality experience which alone can go beyond our merely contingent likes and dislikes.
The biographies of thinkers are often quite revealing. But let’s be on guard against the tricks our minds play with us when our inborn drive towards utilitarian causality belittles the actual arguments advanced by them. Instead let’s take these biographies as the forms enabling intelligent observation and penetrating reasoning, as opposed to “explanations” for why someone said something we may disagree with. We shouldn’t dismiss someone’s insights that way, just as we shouldn’t blindly accept someone’s theories just because he has a biography or temperament that happens to be like our own.
Some forms, it is true, are so inherently ugly and chaotic that we can safely assume no sensible thought can come of them, just as some soils are so poisoned and degraded that no flower will make them its home. But we can’t turn this rather trivial observation into a general rule, thereby confusing form and quality.
Let’s stop fantasizing about the supposed psychological motivations of thinkers, but read them and ponder what they had to say—even when it goes against the zeitgeist and our existing beliefs. Especially then, in fact.
For a related discussion, see also my essay about McGilchrist’s work:
This is the longest definition of "ad hominem" I have ever read.
Seriously though, this is a good point to be making, how we short circuit actually engaging with a writer's arguments by just saying "well, they only say that because...". That might be a slightly useful heuristic if we are incapable of engaging with the argument and putting it in the ground, perhaps because we are unfortunately discussing something unfalsifiable, but generally it is a mental trap.
As you say, knowing someone's background can help contextualize their arguments, for instance casting light on their perspective, or highlighting hypocrisy, but generally I think we should be agnostic of the author's "reasons" for writing something and focus on the truth of their arguments. For example, people always fuss that Grotius wrote "The Free Sea" because he was commissioned to write a defense of the Netherlands' capturing of a Spanish ship (if I am recalling the countries correctly) but that is besides the point; sure, it was motivated reasoning, but the reasoning is dead sound in any case. No one points out gaps or leaps of assumption that would normally mark motivated reasoning, but instead just say "Well, he was hired to make an argument" as though that makes the argument invalid.
Perhaps a distinction: psychologizing and the "psychologizing fallacy." I think psychologizing can be helpful in some cases, as it brings a sense of healthy distrust, disabusing one from fanboying over an impressive thinker. However, it's essential to avoid the psychologizing fallacy, where one dismisses someone's views due to presumed unexamined motivations behind those views. Besides, psychologically uncalibrated individuals often focus on aspects of reality that others often overlook.