The recovery of meaningful thinking. Review of Sigmund Koch, Psychology in Human Context: Essays in Dissidence and Reconstruction. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, Pb. UKP17.00, pp.441. ISBN 0-226-44931-9.

Thirty five or more years ago, Sigmund Koch was well known in the mainstream of psychology as a passionate dissident. He died in 1996. Between 1959 and 1963 he edited the monumental six-volume work: Psychology: a Study of a Science. The volume under review, stands in for the long-planned volume 7, the “postscript” to the study. Neither he nor the tenor of his corrosive critique of psychology is now well known. It deserves to be. I began my own explorations of what a more adequate psychology might look like with his 1964 claim - reproduced on page 90 of this book - “that modern psychology has projected an image of man which is as demeaning as it is simplistic...” Then, although I saw his views as a point of departure for my own, I found only negativity in his dissidence. There is, however, new work in this volume. And I now I find his attempts at reconstruction very agreeable. In a review as short as this it is difficult to do them justice.

              His critique of mainstream psychology is centered in its exclusion of “the agent of inquiry” (p.8), and in its adoption of ameaningful thinking. By this he means the tendency to regard knowledge “as the result of ‘processing’ rather than discovery... [That it is] the almost automatic result of... an assembly line, a methodology... That [in] inquiring action... rules totally displace their human users... [thus leading to a] conception of knowledge [that is] fictionalistic, conventionalistic” (p.28). This all leads to what he sees as a “pathology of knowledge” (pp.397-402). Among many other “‘epistemopathic’ peregrinations” (p.396), the inquiring impulse can lead to the “use of jargon and ‘word magic’;” it can result in “single-principle imperialism;” in the tendency to conceptualize “the cognitive enterprise as so throughly rule-regulated as to make the role of the cognizer superfluous” (p.398); and in the tendency “to persist so rigidly, blindly, patiently in the application of the rules - despite fulsome indications of their disunity - that the behavior would have to be characterized as schizophrenic in any other context” (p.398). Such thinking is also a-ontologistic in that the object of inquiry - we human beings - become “faceless” to each other, our unique and distinctive otherness and creativity disappears.

              What is to be done? He has two reconstructive themes to offer: a theory of definition, and the concept of “value-properties.” As “science is the work of humans” (p.9), he says, prior to any methodology is the embedding of any field of inquiry within “a language community” whose members are able to discriminate, and to communicate amongst themselves about such “subtle relational qualities” as dignity and grace. Indeed, more than a mere theory of definition, Koch begins to outline here an account of meaningful language use reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s language games and forms of life. Thus, “psychologists will have to accept it,” he says, “that scientists in their best moments do not merely manipulate symbols or apparatus: they perceive meanings, subtle relational unities, contrasts, transitions, and recurrences, in their experience. So do poets. And artists” (p.174). Of course, if we turn to writers and painters, we find they work in terms of such relational notions as harmony, symmetry, unity in variety, dynamic tensions, styles of painting and writing. These are recognizable and nameable “value-properties.” But just as we move around in our everyday world, we find ourselves “answering” to the othernesses around us as if they issued “action-guiding advisories” to us. Walking along the sidewalk, we see the people around us directly as on a course to collide with us or as avoiding us. If we didn’t, if we had ‘to work it out’ every time, we would soon not make the effort to venture out. Un-namable value-properties influence all our everyday movements.

              Koch wants a psychology adequate just to our ordinary, everyday amazingness, a psychology which recognizes how wonderful we and all our abilities are, and which does not demean their continuously creative nature by attempting to assimilate them to crass and simplified, rule-regulated processes. We need a place for particular, one-off, first-time, creative events. Is this too much to ask?