Journal of Humanistic Psychology

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Psychology : Natural Science or Humanistic Discipline?

Edward Joseph Shoben, JR
Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1965; 5; 210
DOI: 10.1177/002216786500500210
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PSYCHOLOGY : NATURAL SCIENCE OR

HUMANISTIC DISCIPLINE?
EDWARD
Teachers

JOSEPH SHOBEN, JR.

College, Columbia University

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, his Irish testiness aroused by what he reas the uncreative gentility of Victorian literature, once wrote
that &dquo;The mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century, when
man became passive before a nature mechanized....&dquo; One need share
neither Yeats literary judgments nor his general Weltanschauung to
find this insight a useful one. He was referring, of course, to the revolution in thought that, despite its earlier sources, is associated with the
name of Descartes and
to state the case in a grossly oversimplified
way - conceives of nature as a complex machine. The understanding
of that machine depends on the discovery of the laws of matter and
motion, the two irreducibles out of which the world is built. Ntoreover, man himself is a part of the great world-machine, a complicated
but straightforward product of matter and motion in interaction; thus,
his comprehension of himself and his destiny consists in his finding
them accurately reflected in the laws of the universe. Creation and
imagination, except as they abet the instrumental processes of discovering a pre-existent reality, are quite beside the point.
Pragmatically, the Cartesian vision provided a powerful support for
a burgeoning science. Francis Bacon had already indicated the animating motive and the effective reinforcements for the scientific enterprise when he disposed of the idea of knowledge for its own sake as
synonymous with using &dquo;as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a
spouse for fruit.&dquo; The ultimate aim of science, no matter how mazy
its wanderings may be, is technological: The reason for plundering
natures secrets and for solving the riddle of the great machine
for
even conceiving it as a riddle to be solved -- lies in the promise of
increased human comfort and authority. The famous chicken, refrigerated in the snow, held out the hope of fresh meat more widely available
to a larger number of dining tables; and refinements in gunpowder,
coupled with a greater knowledge of shell trajectories, meant clear
gains in military might. And the discovery and clarification of the
laws of both refrigeration and explosives exalted mans place in nature,
according him the role of the machines governor, giving him the
status of the regulatory device holding dominion over the rest of the

garded

mechanism.

It was (and is) a conception as high in attractiveness as in potency,

and we need pause only briefly to make two points to illumine its
darker corners. First, as Ashley Thorndike has pointed out, science
and its machine-model of the universe developed in the West con-

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with magic. Both were phenomena primarily of then

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; both were devoted to bending the
contours of the world to the yearnings of men, and both put a major
premium on technique. Both, in other words, had their origins in
longings for dominance and case; and if science survived and flourished
while magic became an anachronism and a curiosity, it was probably
largely because science better served those motives. Second, the notion
of nature as a machine, the workings of which are potentially fully
comprehensible to human minds, whatever its very real advantages, is
first of all a conception and not a fact; also, it is only one of the conceptions men have evolved from their experience of the world. The
Taoist idea of the Orient, for example, paints nature not at all as a
mechanical contrivance to be mastered, but as an endlessly diverting
series of events to be appreciated. One is grateful to tall mountains
for the panoramas they permit and to rivers for their cool waters that
sparkle in the sunlight. While questions of building roads or operating
water-driven mills certainly arise, they are considered within the context of this very different view of nature, not as issues arising inherently
from the Baconian or Cartesian propositions that have now become the
familiar assumptions of VB7 estemers..
The purpose of drawing this contrast is obviously not to force a
gratuitous choice between conceptions, but simply to underscore the
fact that &dquo;nature&dquo; is a man-made concept. In its history and its various
cultural settings, it reflects wide-ranging and significant differences in
its character, and it is intimately intenvoven in the fabric of the particular culture of which it is a part. When we deal with a concept of
nature, then, we deal less with an immutable truth than with a culturally embedded hypothesis, the working validity of which must be
judged at Ieast-partly in terms of its context as well as in the light of

temporaneously

perhaps more culturally transcendent considerations.

What has been said so far is prologue, a setting of the stage for an
examination of

science, conceived as it has been in the West as a tech-

nique for the ransacking of nature, as applied to man. The motive for
this application has been consistent with the original Baconian one a need, as our sway over the external world has been marvelously
extended, to gain a greater degrce of control over ourselves. This need
has been intensified by two major factors. One is a pattern of social
developments - urbanization, population growth, the emergence of
economies that are highly dependent for their maintenance on generall of which demands an increasing degree
ated human wants, etc.
of regulation to preserve a decent order in human affairs. The second
is a function of the anxiety provoked by our enlarged powers over
nature. Nuclear weaponry is only the most dramatic illustration of the
way in which our progress in understanding the world-machine has
exposed us to mortal dangers. Surcease from such threats lies, it is
said, only through a comparable progress in undcrstanding ourselves,
thus enabling us to control those impulses in us which could be our
wholesale undoing.
-

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not hard to understand our readiness, given our

heritage and our awesome triumphs in
conceptual
seventeenth-century
all types of engineering and medicine, to apply the methods of science
to human nature as well as to the external world. That readiness,
moreover, has been conformed by the very real achievements of psychology and the other behavioral sciences, which have been by no means
unproductive of solid knowledge about social structures, communication processes, the nature of human abilities, the conditions affecting
learning and perception, and a host of other topics. There remain,
however, problems of sweeping scope and significance.
One of these problems has to do with the relationship between the
investigator and the investigated in the human as opposed to the
natural sciences. In physics, chemistry, biology, and even in engineering and medicine, the research worker and practitioner stand outside
the field of their inquiry, regarding something conceived as different
from themselves. This distance lends both perspective and leverage to
their enterprise, and it implies that the thing or process studied is
unchanged by the results obtained. Presumably, E equalled mc~ long
before Einstein wrote his famous equation or the first atomic pile was
built under the bleachers at Stagg Field in Chicago. The laws of
internal combustion engines were as valid before the extraction of
gasoline as a fuel from oil permitted us to discover them as they are
now. Further, the process of discovery does not change the laws or
their working; it merely allows us to progress to other discoveries of
how the world-machine functions in its grand regularity. We do not
alter the behavior of sound waves or gravitational fields or neutrons;
we simply harness their activity to our own purposes. Our ability to
do so is a consequence of the systematic fit between the verification
operations of science and what we have here called the Cartesian
conception of nature: What is &dquo;natural&dquo; is completely lawful, i.e.,
determined by the character of the mechanicm; the verification procedures are merely the rules of observation and inference by which the
postulated regularities may be noticed and stated in generalized terms.
Our question is one of whether this highly effective system retains its
power when extended to human beings; the response is one of massive
doubt. Whereas a highly accurate proposition about the physical universe has no effect on the thing described, propositions about the social
world are likely to function as what Merton has designated as selffulfilling prophecies. As the trends in the popular literature on child
care suggest, the sheer assertion, backed with the authority of science,
that frustration evokes aggression has an effect on the frequency and
intensity with which parents frustrate children at least within those
categories of action that define frustration as it is presently understood.
The famous Footnote 11 in the Brown decision of the Supreme Court

Thus motivated, it is

represents the way in which

even poor social science becomes both a

instrument of social policy; and if the first two
Kinsey reports were, as is possible, more expressions of the sexual
Zeitgeist than shapers of it, it is also highly probable that they were

determinant and

an

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by many as a license to behave in a manner that had been

relatively inhibited prior to their publication. Whatever errors Kinseys
volumes may have contained, it is likely that they were smaller after
they became public property than they were before.

taken

There is still another way in which behavioral science has the properties of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every psychological theory contains
within it an implicit image of man, a conception - more or less
Cartesian in its quality - of what the human- species is. In the case
of psychonalysis, the model of man is that of a kind of hydraulic system
in which psychic fluids under pressure must be kept in equilibrium
through the opening and closing of various psychic valves. While it is
important not to overstress the point, it can be cogently argued, as
LaPiere has tried to do, that the widspread diffusion through society
of this image of the human beings has done much to break down older
notions of personal accountability and to promote a freer expression
of aggressive and erotic impulses. In most forms of stimulus-response
psychology, like that of B. F. Skinner, the vision of man is that of. a
highly complex slot-machine: Program the person through controlling
his reinforcement history; drop in a stimulus, and out comes a predetermined response. In computer-based information theories, on the
other hand, men are perceived as somewhat inferior electronic devices.
In so far as the mechanical and electronic models are persuasive and they are likely to be persuasive to the extent that they pragmatically accomplish some designated task - one may at least hypothesize
that they facilitate a strangely utilitarian set of attitudes among people.

Individuals, being machines, are to be evaluated as machines. They

are to be used, repaired, reused, and discarded, depending on their
efhciency. The criterion of efficiency, however, draws its authority in
this context not from science but from ethics, and we are suddenly

confronted with a moral dimension of science that never appears in

physics. The so-called &dquo;sin of the physicists,&dquo; charged against the inventors of the atomic bomb, has to do with the social use made of a
product of science, not with the exercise of a self-fulfilling prophecy
through the promulgation of an implicit model of man. It seems reasonably clear that the fit of verification operations to the conception of the
domain to be studied is far less tight in psychology and sociology than
it is in biology and chemistry. The investigation of men, since it is
carried out by men, has a significant probability of changing the object
of inquiry, and the changes are subject to moral evaluation. Something
quite different from the discovery of the laws of the timeless worldmachine is at work here, and it challenges the fundamental idea that
the methods of &dquo;natural&dquo; science can be imported wholesale to extend
our knowledge of ourselves, particularly of ourselves as judging, evalu-

ating beings
This consideration brings us to a second major problem. In a world
in which the tension between democracy and totalitarianism has a grim
and commanding reality for most of us, Professor Skinner has pursued
far more bravely and candidly than most the implications of the view
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of &dquo;natural&dquo; science for our social life. Briefly, he bluntly concludes

that it is increasingly &dquo;at odds with the traditional democratic conception of man&dquo; and that as deterministic explanations
... , become more and more comprehensive, the contribution which
may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero.
Mans vaunted creative powers, his original accomplishments in art,
science, and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him
responsible for the consequences of his choice -none of these is conspicuous in this new self-portrait.

Or, as Skinner has put it on another occasion, &dquo;Men may be free to

do as they please, but they are not free to please.&dquo;
Such may well be the case, but the thing to note is that Dr. Skinners
statement is a proclamation of .faith, not a demonstration of truth. As
a proclamation of faith, it is entirely legitimate, but it leaves ample
room for other faiths like that of democracy, which assumes a measure,
however restricted it may be, of free choice and individual responsibility in the . conduct of human affairs. Meanwhile, the competition
between behavioral science, conceived in Skinners terms, and democracy merits closer examination.
. Technologized, behavioral science - fulfilling the usual scientific
objectives of description, prediction, . and control - leads to cultural
engineering. Through operant conditioning and psychopharmacology,
through advertising-cum-pmpaganda and carefully controlled forms of
child rearing, and through subliminal suggestion and hypnopedia, the
conduct of men is to be shaped into forms congruent with the demands
of some fair new world. Furthermore, they are to want the benefits of
such manipulation; through the . management . of their motives, they
will feel no pain, only joy in being dwellers in utopia.
But who are to be the cultural engineers, and according to what
principles are they to decide the human moulds into which the rest of
us are to be poured ? Whoever they are, how are the motivators to be
themselves motivated? These questions are not merely factitious, and
they point again to the serious discontinuity between science as applied
to the nonpersonal world and science as applied to persons. When man
is both the object of science and the class to which the scientist belongs,
then whatever power may be generated is not the property of man but
o f particular men in relation to other particular men. It becomes an
instrument of control in the hands of the few..
How is this instrument of control to be wisely exercised? In one
conception, the trick would lie in analyzing the specific behaviors that
define a democratic repertoire and then, by managing the nature and
contingencies of reinforcement systematically shaping a population of
&dquo;democratic personalities.&dquo; Leaving aside for the moment the question
of why the conditioners would bother with such an exercise, one is
entitled to doubt that the specific operants appropriate to a democratic
way of life are knowable. Given a social frame of reference like that of
democracy, it. can be argued that specificity in the behavioral reperI

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toire is precisely what is not a central desideratum. Rather, thc aims of

teaching and learning in this context must be phrased in some kind of
vague but hardly meaningless language like the application of critical
intelligence to interpersonal and- societal affairs. Instead of specific
responses, this kind of objective puts a premium on a highly general
behavioral flexibility, controlled by a process called reflective thought,
informed by the imagination of possibilities as yet unrealized, and subjected to relatively articulate criteria of value. For the moment at least,
the hypothesis is tenable that such a goal is not only difhcult to achieve
through cultural engineering; it is essentially incompatible with such
method.
If, for example, we examine the element of value in our tripartite
formulation, we may ask if the conditioners are to construct a society
in which a strong sense of, say, honor is to mediate the relationships
among men. The idea of honor, however, is derivable from neither the
Cartesian world-view nor the verification procedures of science. If it
has meaning, it comes from a scanning of human experience and an
act of judgment by a person using the imperfect but distinctive instrument of his species
his critical imagination and intelligence. Like
George Eliots conccption of justice, honor is not &dquo;without us as a fact,
but within us as a great yearning,&dquo; and, acting upon that yearning,
each of-us in his quest for honor may find and consider many objects.
In the course of our seeking, we progressively clarify our functioning
notions of honor (or justice, or integrity, or any of the great moral
ideals that are unique to men); and regardless of the consensus we
achieve among us, our normative conceptions are still very much our
own by virtue of our special experience in the search for the conduct
and the style of life that best satisfy the yearning within our individual
breasts. A strong and operating sense of honor (or justice) is almost
certainly learned; but there is space to doubt that it can be directly
taught, and one again suspects that its conditioning or engineering is
a

quite unlikely.
But if one argues that traditional values, frankly muzzy as they are,
provide a poor base for deciding the contours of the good society, then
we can quite properly shift our ground. If we -assume, a little dubiously, that all men fundamentally want and prize the same things,
we can draw up a list of central human desires : food, drink, amusement, sexual gratification, aesthetic experience, opportunities to acquire
knowledge, health and longevity, etc. When the list is settled upon,
then the problem becomes the sheerly technical one of how to condition men in the behaviors that most probably assure the attainment
of these objectives. Ignoring the singular lack of success so far in the
history of psychology in formulating lists of basic wants, we can still
worry. If these motives

are indeed -the fundamental ones, on which

the cultural engineers acting in turning the rest of us into
more effective pursuers of what we like? Or to the extent that their
task imposes a restriction on the degree to which they enjoy these basic
gratifications, what reinforcement supports their altruism? It cannot be

ones are

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because of obligation or responsibility; like honor, these terms rcf~er to

values and lie outside the strict scientists lexicon. Neither can it be
because of an affectionate concern for humanity, for humanity is what
they are trying to shape, not a tradition to which they hold themselves
subject. Could it be for the straightforward delight of wielding power?
Quite possibly. But if so, then man has certainly not &dquo;won dominion
over himself&dquo;
that catchphrase which confers public popularity on
the behavioral sciences in this tense age. Rather, a few men, possessed
of the potent means, have won dominion over other men, and the
triumph of social science becomes the groundwork for oligarchy.
It is possible, of course, that the oligarchs may be benevolent,
although &dquo;benevolence&dquo; is once again one of those terms of value that
seem so hard to avoid despite the positivistic interdict against them.
The probable benevolence of the cultural engineers is suspect, however,
on two counts. First, there is the evidence of history, which turns up
few if any instances of men who, having placed themselves outside the
reach of their fellows law and above the shared traditions of civility,
have used large powers benignly. It is hardly an accident that the
words dictator and despot connote precisely the exercise of force and
control beyond the limits set by conventional concepts of humaneness,
wrung a little vaguely but with many tears and much thought from
the racial experience. Second, for those who, like the cultural engineers,
are liberated from the illusions of value and the myths of moral tradition, there is little basis left for preferring one of their impulses to
another except the relative strength of the impulses themselves. Freed
of personal conscience and social loyalty, decisions with respect to the
goals of conditioning become whimsically subject to whatever yen is
uppermost at the time in the Triebe of the conditioners
things of
the very chance that it is the business of science to minimize if not
eliminate. The newly found control of man as a part of nature, then,
turns out to be the control of many men by a few men, and those few
men turn out, in turn, to be remarkably &dquo;natural&dquo;
that is, essentially subject to their own rawest impulses. Where is the analogue to
unlocking the mysteries of the world-machine for the sake of greater
human ease and extended human dominion?
This analysis is reminiscent, of course, of Emersons
-

two

laws

discrete,

Not reconciled,

Law for man, and law for thing;

The last build town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.

The

implied objection cuts deeper, however, than the humanistic

against the anti-democratic character of a completely deterministic science applied to human affairs. Such a science is likely to
be a defective one; for while it is certainly true that man is a part of
nature and therefore obedient to the &dquo;law for &dquo;thing&dquo; that runs the
caveat

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great machine, it is simply inaccurate to say that he is nothing but a

part of nature in this Cartesian sense. We have already reminded ourselves that nature is a notion of mans own making. We can now
extend this observation by contending that the concept of nature is in
fundamental ways a product of mans experience of what is different
from himself.
Out of this experience of difference comes the condition which, in
Norbert Wieners view, makes possible the surest and most spectacular
the high degree of isolation of observed
successes in natural science
observer
from
the
that obtains, for instance, in astronomy
phenomena
or particle physics. In the social disciplines, on the contrary, observers
are inevitably and inextricably bound up with their observations. Con-

sequently,

says

Wiener,

Whether our investigations in the social sciences be statistical or

dynamic ... they can never ... furnish us with a quantity of verifiable, significant information which begins to compare with that which
have learned to expect in the natural sciences.... There is much
which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the &dquo;unscientific,&dquo;
narrative method of the professional historian.
we

If we take &dquo;professional historian&dquo; here as an omnibus category that

also includes poets. and philosophers, artists and theologians, literary
critics and students of politics, then we may understand Wiener as
saying that science has no monopoly on the angles of regard from
which it is fruitful to examine the human condition, i.e., the condition
of the only inhabitant of the globe who is inveterately given to selfscrutiny and self-evaluation. Any attempt by men to study themselves
that does not attend fully to these tendencies toward self-scnitiny and
self-evaluation is at once a contradiction in terms of a denial of the
basic experience of difference on which the scientific world-view is
founded. When man treats himself as he treats heat, light, and electricity, he denudes himself of the very traits that make him distinctive
in the universe, and his efforts at understanding are therefore sharply
curtailed. If he loses his identity as a member of the old, proud pageant
of human history, he also loses the sources of provocative insights about
himself.
In many ways, the difficulty here seems chargeable to the peculiar
susceptibility among the behavioral sciences, especially in psychology,
to logical positivism. Established as an essentially descriptive portrayal
of the logic of natural scientists, psychologists, eager for full membership in Solomons House, have taken this philosophical position as a
prescriptive set of procedural rules. Whatever the advantages of this
act, one outcome has been the strengthening of a kind of mystique of
empirical research. According to this positivistic myth, the only problems and materials which are defined as significant arc those which the
current canons of investigative method and the current quantitative
techniques can handle. Conversely, any question which cannot be dealt
with in positivistic terms is put aside as technical &dquo;nonsense.&dquo; The result

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trivial but long-standing flirtation with reductionism and a

voluntary wearing of intellectual blinders. If we know something about
anxiety, we know next to nothing about joy, zest, or love. Our attack
on the riddle of the schizophrenias, a poignant set of puzzles defined by
social evaluations not unmarked by heartbreak, still proceeds through
anagram-solutions and differential reaction times. The urgent problem of population control is as yet untouched by a psychologists, and
what passes for the psychology of art ordinarily is offensive to artists.
While we have spilled ink by the hogshead in reporting studies of
learning, we are only now coming to grips with the processes by which
children acquire skill in language or an interest in biology, and the
formal contribution of psychology to the improvement of race relations
is small and far more dependent on the liberal spirit of psychologists
than on the solidity of the knowledge produced by their science. Personal responsibility is inadmissible as a trait concept, and there have
been few investigations of character, despite Peck and Havighurst,
since the Hartshorne and May studies of more than thirty years ago.
And if we have some glimmerings of usable insight about our behavior,
we are still very much in the dark about the qualities of our experience
and the way it interacts with our overt conduct.
But to recite this only illustrative catalogue of shortcomings for
which a too ready acceptance of positivism may be responsible is in no
way to impugn quantitative methods or empirical approaches to the
human scene. As an aid to our understanding of ourselves, they are
indispensable, and as a means of explaining the actions of men, they
arc powerful if strikingly limited. Psychologys great opportunity lies
not in discarding its sturdily expanding methodological apparatus, but
in informing it with the humanistic vision, the quest for an even fuller
statement of the &dquo;law for man&dquo; as against the &dquo;law for thing.&dquo; What
this transformation most profoundly demands is a revised focus on the
source of problems. Rather than coming from the structure of a science
modeled on physics, problems could more fruitfully be derived from
direct experience of self, of interpersonal relations, of society, of
education and art, of science and religion, etc. If this is the stuff which
poems are made on, it is also the basis of humane scholarship defined
as the critical examination of human experience and behavior in the
light of history and in a context of explicit values. It is quite conceivable that psychology, concerned more with humane scholarship than
with the status of a formal science, could become the first of the
humanistic disciplines to apply systematic empirical observation to the
comprehension of the human condition.

has been

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