Over the weekend I read Theodore Dalrymple's Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality, and took away a nice augment to a recent blog post. Dalrymple, being a retired psychiatrist himself, speaks a tad bleakly about his profession. While he admits that psychology has some positive outcomes (I found it to smooth some edges for me), his issue that eventually it reaches a clear limit and can be counter-productive.
Ultimately, we find that psychology contributes little to human understanding. As that can only come from outside our ruminations and desire to chase the happy state.
Dalrymple suggests that fine literature has been an aid in understanding the human condition, and gives man a perspective on tragedy that can locate us outside ourselves. I am going to quote a section from his book, where he refers to Samuel Johnson's novella Rasselas as an example of literature that can assist us in embodying a deeper understanding of humanity. This touched me somehow, maybe because I relate to the limits of philosophy and having a purely intellectual understanding that is not in service to something higher...
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, travels the world in search of a way of life that is perfect. Each place that he visits seems to him at first to be full of promise, but on closer examination he finds that every place, and every condition of Man, has its drawbacks, disadvantages, discontents, and inconsistencies. In Cairo, Rasselas finds a professor of philosophy who eloquently preaches a noble stoicism.
He showed, with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful government, perturbation and confusion; that she betrays the fortresses of the intellect to rebels, and excites her children to sedition against reason, their lawful sovereign. He compared reason to the sun, of which the light is constant, uniform and lasting; and fancy to a meteor, of bright but transitory lustre, irregular in its motion, and delusive in its direction.
Rasselas is deeply impressed:[He] listened to him with the veneration due to the instructions of a superior being. . .and he tells his guide during his peregrinations, Imlac, that: “I have found . . . a man that can teach all that is necessary to be known. . .”
Imlac warns him to “Be not too hasty . . . to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.”
But Rasselas, being young, does not heed the warning because he “could not conceive how any man could reason so forcibly without feeling the cogency of his own arguments.”
The day following the lecture, Rasselas visits the philosopher at his home and finds him utterly disconsolate because “my daughter, my only daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever.” He continues, “My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end. . .”
Rasselas, still full of the lecture, replies in best callowyouth fashion: “Sir . . . mortality is an event by which a wise man can never be surprised: we know that death is always near, and it should therefore always be expected.”
To this the philosopher returns a cri de coeur which the American Psychiatric Association would do well to note: “Young man . . . you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of separation.”
Rasselas persists a little in the rational stoicism that he has learned at the philosopher’s feet: “Have you, then, forgot the precepts . . . which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same.”
The philosopher replies: “What comfort . . . can truth and reason afford me? of what are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will not be restored?”
Rasselas, reproved, “went away convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical sound, and the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences.”
What Johnson captures so brilliantly is the inherent tragic dimension of human existence, a dimension that only literature (and other forms of art), but not psychology, can capture, and which indeed it is psychology’s vocation to deny and hide from view with a thin veneer of science. Without an appreciation of the tragic dimension, all is shallowness; and those without it are destined for a life that is nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short.