Haley Conaway's Archive

I would classify Maslow as a restoration philosopher.  His hierarchy of needs does several things that clearly depict a restorative theme.  First, he restores the humanity to humans from the Behaviorist view of man.  He says that the needs at the bottom of the hierarchy are basic and more similar to those needs of other animals, but the higher up the hierarchy you go, the more uniquely human the needs become.  Second, Maslow’s hierarchy emphasizes self-actualization.  Self-actualization is a restorative concept in itself.  It essentially means reaching one’s potential.  Self-actualizing requires “a great deal of honest knowledge of oneself,” which is a restorative trait of humanistic psychology.  He says that self-actualizing people are concerned with all humans instead of with only their friends, relatives, and acquaintances, they have a strong ethical sense but do not necessarily accept conventional ethics, they are creative, etc.  These traits reveal a restored view of man– that he is more than an animal and has a hope of becoming great.  Not only does it restore humanity to the behavioristic machine man, but Maslow’s hierarchy even seems to be a formula for restoring man.  If he can meet his lower needs, working up the ladder, he can eventually become a full, thriving individual with the capacity to care, create, and appreciate the world.

I would classify Jung as a Redemption philosopher because of his work with archetypes and with categorizing people as introverts or extroverts.  Rather than behaviorists who claimed everything was learned and reinforced, Jung resonated more with evolutionary psychology saying that people had a collective unconscious which was the cumulative experiences of humans throughout their entire evolutionary past.  He explained human actions as coming from inherited archetypal projections from the past.  These inherited archetypes predispose people to see things in certain ways and to respond to them accordingly, thus affecting our actions.   Jung emphasizes the inherited predispositions, but he said that the “self” synthesizes the components of the personality to bring unity and wholeness to the personality.  He said the goal of life is first to discover and understand the various parts of the personality and then to synthesize them into a harmonious unity- which he called “self actualization.”  He also described people as naturally introverted or extroverted, but that a healthy and mature individual would have a good balance of both.

I would call Jung a Redemption philosopher because he seems to add some redeeming qualities to the Evolutionary perspective.  For some, the idea that people are the way they are at birth- because of inherited traits, is a bleak idea.  However, Jung brings some hope by theorizing a synthesizing unit that brings possibility for change.  While he still believed people were products of their past with stable traits, he also believed that understanding these traits could help one to change, adapt, and thrive in the world.

The ideas of inheritance and the measurement of intelligence were exciting and fascinating new ways of looking at the world.  However, Galton took this knowledge and ran too far with it.  Before the measuring of intelligence through sensory acuity, the differences between successful and non-successful people were chalked up to character– as Darwin said, “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect only in zeal and hard work.”  It must have been amazing to imagine that people were so much more than their character- that perhaps there were uncontrollable inheritances that pre-determined one’s behavior or success in life.  While these new ideas opened up a whole realm of possibilities in the discovery of truth and for scientific thought, it also brought about some dangerous conclusions on how to deal with man’s inherited differences .  Such an empirical way of viewing man lead to an inappropriate desire to control and enhance him.  Galton’s conclusion was eugenics– a type of breeding in order to improve society.  As he said, “I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature…I conclude that each generation has enormous power … and maintain that it is a duty we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that , without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth.”  Galton suggested that the government pay for couples who have desirable characteristics to be married.  I classify this view of man under the fall because in it, man and society become the sum of their empirical parts.  When this idea was fleshed out with full conviction, it was known as the Holocaust.  Racial cleansing, infanticide, and prejudice are all fallen outcomes of this purely scientific view of man.

I would categorize Rousseau as a Creation philosopher because he attempts to reCREATE the meaning of man.  He says that, “man is born free and yet we see him everywhere in chains.”  Rousseau aims to deconstruct the social structures and expectations that other people and societies put on individuals.  He describes a social contract where, “each of us places in common his person and all of his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one body we all receive each member as indivisible part of the whole”  This is an interesting quote to me because it reminds me of several verses in the Bible about the Body of Christ– that each member of the Body has something unique and specific to offer, and all together we make a fully functioning body– and this to the point that one member cannot say to the other, “I do not need you.”  This is a creation idea because all things work together in harmony.  The individuals act in accordance with their own good nature (in the creation story, God creates it and says it is good).  In Rousseau’s utopia “The state, in relation to its members, is master of all their wealth.” Rousseau says something else that reminds me of Creation: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.  He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit.  He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions… He destroys and defaces all things.”  Rousseau thought that education should concentrate on natural impulses rather than correct and change them.  This kind of thinking brings us back to our beginnings and restores dignity and value to the natural state of man.  I wanted to categorize him as creation rather than recreation/ restoration because these ideas, while they may have been good and restorative, also set up the thinking that set the stage for many disastrous events in history– it set the premise for the “fall” if you will.

While the idea of empiricism began to overtake the previous idea of rationalism, Francis Bacon saw that a marriage of the two was was the best way to go about the sciences.  Bacon believed that scientists should follow two rules: “lay aside received opinions and notions, an the other, to restrain the mind for a time from the highest generalizations.”  He believed that there were four sources of error that could contaminate scientific observation and research.  These, he referred to as idols- the idols of the cave, the tribe, the marketplace, and the theatre.  All these idols refer to the different biases that the scientist or observer may have.  This focus of Bacon’s and the critique of the way to do science resembles the Biblically historic stage of Redemption.  Bacon claimed that we can only command nature by obeying her, hence concluding that “knowledge is power.”  By this understanding of human weakness, he is able to actually make humanity stronger.  The book claims that Bacon was ahead of his time in insisting that scientists rid themselves of bias. I classify him as a redemption philosopher because this understanding comes with a hindsight of the fall.  Seeing the mistakes in the the sciences and philosophies of the medieval period, he sees the affects of the fall and desires to correct it in hopes of a better future of scientific inquiry.  There is also an element in redemption of knowing our weakness. Bacon embraces the Renaissance focus on humanity, but claims his fallenness and seeks to correct it.  Ultimately this idea has transformed the way empirical data is collected.

Plato’s Theory of Forms is a response to the fall to bring redemption to the world.  Plato’s Allegory of the Cave attempts to show that there is a higher reality than what we perceive in the physical world.  His Theory of Forms states that everything in the empirical world is a manifestation of a pure form (idea) that exists in the abstract.  I think this idea is a way to redeem the shallow way that “thoughtless” people live their lives.  Plato introduced the concept that thought, ideas, or knowledge enhance the way people live.  While this seems fairly obvious in our post-platonic world, this idea was revolutionary in the way that people viewed life and the pursuit of knowledge.  He believed that an object’s essence was equated with its form, and you could only know an object’s purpose with the knowledge of its form.  This was a revolutionary way to view the world.  He believed that the soul had a rational component that was immortal, so in a sense, immortal rationality and knowledge redeems the futility and transience of the purely physical world.  If a person suppresses the needs of the body and concentrates on rational pursuits, he would free the soul from the adulterations of the flesh.  This idea may have informed the Christian idea of the duality of body and soul- that to deny the flesh is to enhance the soul, which is a manifestation of the fallen world of “flesh” being redeemed to a higher reality of the “spirit.”