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What exactly is a "human
science"? In view of the diversity of perspectives
it embraces, a precise definition of the term
"human science" is elusive, and ultimately
depends on your definitions of "human"
and "science". Nevertheless, the term
"human science approach" in psychology
refers to a variety of kindred perspectives that
share some common roots and assumptions about
the goals and methods of our discipline.
The first person to treat psychology as a human science
was Wilhelm Dilthey, whose two volume treatise, Introduction
to the Human Sciences appeared in 1893. Dilthey argued
that the natural sciences employ experimental and quantitative
research methods which seek to predict and control the
behavior of objects, and are therefore inappropriate to
the study of human history, psychology or art. The study
of human minds and their artifacts requires a separate
methodology which does not seek to predict or control
people's behavior, but which seeks instead to understand
it.
To grasp what Dilthey was getting at, consider the distinction
between the German words "erklaren" and "verstehen".
Erklaren means to explain objects, events and processes
in terms of antecedent causes in naturalistic terms, as
the natural sciences do. It applies equally to the behavior
of inanimate matter, other animal species, and to human
beings, considered from a materialistic and deterministic
point of view.
As a result, the process of "erklaren" seeks
to render the world intelligible by minimizing, abolishing
or transcending human subjectivity, and by explaining
the contents and qualities of experience in terms of natural
processes that go on outside of it. So, for example, gravity,
gamma rays, natural selection are not objects of experience,
though they shape our experiential world profoundly.
The word verstehen, by contrast, applies only to human
behavior, and the attempt to render human subjectivity
intelligible in its own terms. It is an intersubjective
or interexperiential process of understanding the other
person in light of the meanings with which they themselves
endow their situation or surroundings, and of their own
intentions, relative to the meanings that they attribute
to the behavior of others, which Dilthey termed hermeneutics.
By contrast with "erklaren", which seeks to
bracket or eliminate subjective experience, "verstehen"
seeks to elucidate it fully by attending carefully to
the contents of consciousness, and the tacit or "lived"
meanings that are embodied unconsciously in the structures
of human subjectivity.
After Dilthey, two movements in Continental philosophy
that embraced and espoused a human science perspective
were phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology stresses
that there is a world of immediate or "lived"
experience that precedes the objectified and abstract
world of natural-scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, however,
in our scientistic culture, we tend to view the world
through the prism of multiple abstractions divorced from
the foundations of human experience.
To regain the freshness of primordial experience often
requires that we unlearn old habits of thought through
patient and unbiased attention to the nuances of "subjective"
experience, while questioning many widespread cultural
preconceptions about organism and environment, mind and
body, subjectivity and objectivity, facts and values,
perception, memory, affect, volition, and so on.
Existentialism stresses that despite disparate social
and historical situations, differences in age, gender,
ability and so on, all people, by virtue of their mortality,
partake of the same basic structure of existence -- of
throwness, contingency, and the need to infuse or confer
value and to impart meaning to life through action and
decision, and take responsibility for their personal destiny.
Like phenomenology, existentialism took root in a mood
of deep disenchantment with the 19th and 20th century European
zeitgeist. By the end of the 19th century, the rapid growth
of the natural sciences promised abundant moral and material
blessings on all believers in the cult of progress. In this
brave new world, positivists proposed that philosophy should
assume her mission, as handmaiden to the natural sciences.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were two notable thinkers who
refused positivism's stifling embrace, and argued that the
real goals of philosophy, self knowledge and freedom, are
not to be found on this path, and that the ideology of progress
obscures alarming trends toward conformism, banality and
routine self-deception.
These concerns, echoed to varying degrees by subsequent
existentialists, informed the development of existential
phenomenological psychology. Historically, the psychology
department at Duquense has emphasized existential and
phenomenological approaches to the study and treatment
of mental disorder. Nowadays, however, we define ourselves
and our approach less narrowly, and see the pursuit of
psychology as a "human science" as one which
draws deeply on non positivist traditions in Continental
philosophy.
Thus hermeneutics, psychoanalysis and depth psychology,
feminism, critical theory, and post-structuralism are
explored alongside existentialism and phenomenology in
the department’s ongoing project to develop psychology
as a human science. Underlying this project is a concern
for the multiple meanings of human life, the importance
of cultural diversity in pursuing a truly human science,
and the liberation and well being of persons individually
as well as in community.
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