How to Distinguish Your Friends from the Demons

By way of an appetizer before we get to the main curse (did Petey actually just say deviled eggheads?), I've been rereading Robert Brennan's Thomistic Psychology (see sidebar), which I first read a fortnight ago. Seems longer than that, but I double-checked and it was just before Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve.

In the Introduction, Mortimer Adler makes the excellent point -- and I know it's excellent because I've made the same point many times -- psychology is not yet a true science, because it is essentially pre-paradigmatic, meaning that there is no agreement on its proper object, let alone its content.

Imagine if, say, physics, were in the same primitive stage of development. Physicists would still be arguing whether the cosmos had a beginning, about the nature of the ether, if sublunar objects behave differently than celestial ones, or whether the physics department has enough people of color.

I've mentioned that back when I started grad school, there was a required course which surveyed the main schools of psychology, from behaviorism at one end to psychoanalysis at the other.  

The mere fact that there are diverse and irreconcilable schools of psychology makes the implicit point that psychology literally doesn't know what it's talking about, since any science is supposed to be about a well-defined object. But in psychology, the objects are literally in the heads of the theorists, in that -- obviously -- only one (at most) theory can be correct, or there must be a "meta-theory" capable of harmonizing them from above. 

I say, One Principle, One Logos, One Cosmos, One Anthropos, One Bios, One Physis, all the way down and back to three.  

Having said that mean stuff about the others, Thomistic psychology makes a compelling case for being the only truly scientific psychology, demons and all. For example, it clearly defines its proper object at the outset: it is the study of the soul. It also clearly defines the soul: it is the form or principle of the living body. Human psychology therefore pertains to the soul of man, which is -- or used to be -- a rational soul. Remember?

I don't want to get too far into psychology per se, rather, just make a few points to lay a foundation as we resume our discussion of the demonic. But for a psychologist to swear on the one hand that "there is no such thing as demons," and on the other, "transgenderism is perfectly normal," is not even bullshit. 

It reminds me of the top-down, bureaucratic normalization of homosexuality back in 1973, which was before my time, so don't blame me. Not only was there no debate to settle or even define the issue, the vast body of research from <1973 was magically disappeared -- as if it were no more legitimate then Soviet psychiatry (which, ironically, has made a big comeback in wokademia, as have McCarthyism, heresy hunting, and witch burning).

The larger point is that such radical discontinuity can only occur in a pre-paradigmatic science with no stable object of study. One day sexuality has a natural telos, which is to say, reproduction. The next day you're a hater for even suggesting such a monstrosity. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bongwater. 

It's the same with regard to the trannies and other misfits: one day they're pathetic weirdos, the next day they're better than you, you deplorable heteronormative bigot. The cosmically correct response is, of course, to feel sorry for them, not hostility -- unless they become activists and start frightening the children and horses.

Adler:

the moment I received the degree [of psychology] -- supposedly a competent worker in the field -- I could not tell my students, my colleagues, or myself, what psychology was about, what its fundamental principles were...

Same. Or maybe the opposite, in that I knew what psychology was about. It's just everybody else that was wrong. Indeed, my doctoral dissertation proposed a "new paradigm" for psychology, and was even published in two different professional journals. 

Interestingly, those articles still hold up, at least to the extent they can be reconciled with the deeper and more explicit principles of Thomistic psychology I've embraced since then. Turns out I was following in the footsteps of Thomas without knowing it. Indeed, if I had known it, I would have no doubt run in the opposite direction, since I was an anti-Catholic bigot at the time, like any other modern sophisticate.

Each of the diverse schools of psychology differs

from the others, not because of contrary discoveries, but because of the "point of view" which motivated its method of research and determined the restricted field of phenomena it was willing to explore (Adler). 

"Even to a sophomore, it was apparent that the psychologists had shut the front door on philosophy only to indulge in some surreptitious 'philosophizing'" through the back. 

So. Important. Especially that little word motivated. For real science is disinterested; or, interested rather in the intelligible real and nothing else. Wishes and feelings don't enter into it. Uncorrupted by passion and other psychic crosscurrents, the intellect is actually infallible; if not, then we can all fold up our seats and go home.

Infallible? Yes, literally, in the same sense that your normally functioning senses are infallible. If that potato chip tastes salty, that's because it is salty. If the tree looks green, it's because it is green. If you hear a siren in the distance, hide behind the wall with the Murphy bed, Dupree! 

Same with the intellect, which knows a thing or two about a thing or two, and with certitude:

there is no error in intellect in its simple apprehension of the essences of things.... Where error occurs in the field of intellectual cognition, it will always be discovered in judicial acts.... (Brennan, emphasis mine).

For example, most for my former colleagues judge that essences do not exist because the soul doesn't exist because God doesn't exist, etc. Poor judgment, that's all. But is it frankly demonic? Too soon to tell. More scientific data is needed. To be continued...