I’ve been reading about the history of psychology.

And now my eyes are opened. Goodbye philosophy and religion, hello science! 

The great philosophical thinkers, it turns out, are all primitive psychologists. Groping in the dark, waiting for their naive speculations to be transcended by real science.

The ancient Hebrews mistakenly believed that “important thoughts” were the utterances of God. And “disordered thoughts,” too. Why, the Biblical Book of Samuel itself says this!

Well, what do you expect it to say? The Book of Samuel is a narrative describing history as a script written by God. From this, we can infer something about the writer’s perspective on national destiny. But we can’t infer much about what “the ancient Hebrews” believed about human psychology. Such an inference would be very weak science. 

Please, read anything in Hebrew Bible 101 before you dismiss it as an anthology of primitive thought!

Plato thought that the Great Ideas such as Justice and Goodness exist in a remote “heaven of ideas.” And that real life is just a pale imitation of this heaven.

Geez, it sounds like Plato himself lived down in the cave!

Actually, in the Republic, Plato speaks of Ideas such as “justice” and “good” as invisible ideals towards which we reach. In practice, we can never fully implement the Ideas, but continue to use them as standards to critique our practice.

And in the Symposium, Plato focuses on the Idea of Beauty. Beauty generates the energy of Love. Love inspires us to reach for Beauty in our families, sexual relationships, and creative projects.

Please, if you’re going to pontificate about Plato, crack a primary source once in a while. (The Symposium is short, funny, and accessible!)

Spinoza was excommunicated because he thought it made more sense to believe in an impersonal God than God the character in the Hebrew Bible. Slow-witted early modern Jews, still dogmatic even as the rationalist Spinoza tried to free them!

Actually, belief in an impersonal God was a rather tame view for a Jew of Spinoza’s time.  It’s mainstream Kabbalistic thinking.  Most Jews don’t believe in “the God of the Old Testament,” but in a universal force. And we really don’t know why Spinoza was excommunicated at the immature age of 23; his writ of excommunication doesn’t tell us.

Please don’t map the history of the church onto Jewish history!  If you want to use Spinoza to make a point, do a little research into his personal and intellectual history.

Okay, so I’m taking a course, and I don’t like one of the books the teacher assigned. The author trivializes philosophy and religion, celebrates science and forgets to do research.

It’s annoying.

And it’s humbling.

It’s payback!

For all those years I made fun of science, writing essays about the empiricist personality, the distortions of positivism, and the tyrannical misappropriation of science by governments in the name of war and power.

For all those years I accepted uncritically the feminist, postmodern, and environmental critiques of science as de-souling reality.

For all the trivializing I did of other people’s life work.

Now I get to see the trivializing of mine.

It hurts. And it helps me appreciate that I’ve spoken and written hurtfully.

But doesn’t help me fall much in love with empirical psychology, no sir.

I’ve looked at empiricism from both sides now, from win and lose, and still somehow, it’s empiricism’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know empiricism, at all.