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Somewhere Between the Beasts and the Angels: Thomistic
Philosophical Anthropology as a Schema to Reorient Modern
Psychology towards Human Experience in the Lifeworld
Adam L. Barborich
Methodist Theological School in Ohio
Modern empirical psychology, as a reductionist, materialist, and positivist science, has to a great
extent replaced philosophical psychology – or more precisely philosophical anthropology– in our
contemporary world, and this has caused modern psychology to lose sight of what was most
interesting in pre-modern psychology, namely the attempt to situate the human person in his
experience of reality in the lifeworld (lebenswelt). This has resulted in the practice of psychology
becoming detached from the realities of lived experience as its view of human nature becomes
increasingly narrow, rigid and scientistic. This is evidenced by the current “replication crisis” in
modern psychology, which has severely impacted the credibility of modern psychology as a field of
enquiry. This crisis arose with an increasing methodological standardisation that is being pursued at
the expense of interrogating the scientistic presuppositions that ground the study of modern
psychology.
this methodological turn in the mid- to late-20th century loosened the grip of theoretical
orthodoxy because psychologists could point to their methodological orthodoxy as a sign of
the legitimacy of their work. Thus, various methodological and statistical practices became
canonized as algorithms that could provide justification for research claims inasmuch as
they presumably systematized the scientific logic that might impartially indicate the strength
and likelihood of a finding. In this sense, many psychological researchers in this period were
more concerned with whether their methods conformed with the generally accepted
practices than they were with direct replication, presuming that these systems of logic would
filter out bad theories (as they failed these tests) and elevate good theories (as they passed
these tests).1
As Wiggins & Chrisopherson further note, most attempts at reforming modern psychology have
concentrated primarily on “methodological belt-tightening that focuses on greater rigor within the
received paradigm, rather than searching for and addressing potential problems at a more
fundamental level”, 2 although they also rightfully concede that these efforts are not wholly lacking
in sympathy with concerns about more foundational criticisms of psychology and the other human
sciences. In response to epistemological and ontological critiques of modern psychology, Wiggins
& Chrisopherson advocate that more attention should be paid to radical “post-positivist” critiques in
the psychological reform movement, but we contend that more attention should be directed towards
pre-modern philosophical anthropology, particularly a broadly Thomist or neo-Scholastic
philosophical anthropology, as this is a more promising method for correcting for the scientism that
permeates modern psychology. We contend that it is the problem of scientism, as identified below
by D.Q. McInerny, which is most responsible for the increasingly narrow methodological orthodoxy
that characterises modern psychology, a science that no longer focuses on “the principal subject
matter of psychology”, which is “human nature, or, more precisely, human nature as it manifests
itself in the individual human being—the person.”
1 Bradford J. Wiggins & Cody D. Chrisopherson, “The Replication Crisis in Psychology: An Overview for
Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 39, no. 4, (2019):
204.
2 Ibid. 209.
Not all the founders of modern psychology were tinged by scientism, but even many of
those who were not tended to foster an overly restricted view of science. Ever since the great
success enjoyed by the science of physics in the aftermath of the monumental work done by
Sir Isaac Newton, physics became in the minds of many scientists in other fields the
paradigm for any discipline that wanted to be considered an authentic science. This was true
of many of the founders of modern psychology. As a result of this, they attempted to fashion
a psychology which was patterned after physics, in that it was given to taking a somewhat
mechanistic attitude toward human nature, putting much stock in quantification. The ability
to quantify one’s subject matter was held up as the ultimate test of a genuinely scientific
inquiry.3
This leads McInerny to try and reorient philosophical psychology towards its pre-modern Anglo-
European predecessor in philosophical anthropology, particularly the philosophical anthropology of
St Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, who produced some of the finest works of psychology in
the history of philosophy. In this paper our analysis will broadly follow that of McInerny in
depending primarily on the categories used by Aquinas in his philosophical anthropology, although
our own analysis will use compare these categories with the modern psycho-evolutionary account
of primary emotions and a generalised account of another tradition which is critical of scientism in
modern psychology, namely, pre-modern indigenous Indian psychology. The main benefit of relying
on the categories of Aquinas for this analysis is that they provide us with a means to incorporate the
narrow findings of modern psychology into a broad holistic account of human experience in the
lifeworld. Whereas modern psychology produces data that is fragmented and primarily concerned
with specific responses to particular phenomena, a psychological science worthy of the name must
also be able to unify the specific knowledge of particulars into a more general, universal knowledge
of the reality into which man is thrown at birth. As has been noted by Jean Piaget in The
Psychology of Intelligence, the final end of the psychological science is to attain equilibrium in
thought and this equilibrium is ultimately dependent on the ability of psychology to incorporate the
results of experimentation into an axiomatic pattern that can explain the mechanism of intelligence.
The type of logico-mathematical schematisation required by to attain this end must supply rules for
“the logic of wholes”, rather than a fragmented logic of parts.4 It is precisely in this formation of a
“logic of wholes” that the categories used in the philosophical anthropology of Aquinas are most
effective.
Along with recognising that the particular schemata of psychology must be incorporated into
a more general schematisation in order to be maximally effective, Piaget also rightly views
psychology as developmental. He explicitly states that “we should perhaps look for the secret of
intelligence in children under the age of seven or eight” instead of trying to formulate psychological
laws after analyses of what are only “the final stages of intellectual development”.5 This is why we
will incorporate the Aristotelian distinction between vegetative, sensitive and rational souls into our
own analysis in order to account for distinctions in the forms of life produced by evolutionary
mechanisms despite the fact that terms like “soul” can be expected to raise the hackles of a certain
type of narrow-minded scientistic dogmatist. Likewise, we will disregard the distinctly modern
notion introduced by Descartes of a substantial distinction between mind and body, stipulating that
“experience is biological, insofar as it involves an organism in an environment, and social, insofar
as that environment is intersubjective”.6 In this sense, psychology, a term which is derived from the
3 D.Q. McInerny, Philosophical Psychology (Elmhurst Township, PA: The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, 2016), 2-
3.
4 Jean Piaget, The Psychology Of Intelligence (Milton Park, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1950), Taylor &
Francis e-library edition, 2005, 40.
5 Ibid. 25-26.
6 Shaun Gallagher, “Philosophical antecendents to situated cognition,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Situated
Cognition, eds. Philip Robbins & Murat Aydede (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37.
Greek terms psyche and logos, is a study of the soul – or as McInereny puts it, the “life principle”7–
in action in the lifeworld.
Given this, we must begin our study by focusing on the experience of all of the animate
organisms (which in a nod to Aquinas and Piaget are necessarily organic wholes, or beings, not
merely aggregations of parts) encounter in the environment, and we will begin by utilising
Aristotle’s distinction between the vegetative, sensitive and rational life principles. The self-evident
nature of any organism in its environment is activity. In human terms this is self-evident, because by
being born, an act that was in no way directed by one’s own will –if such a will or willing subject
can even be said to exist– the human person finds oneself immersed in a world of experience and
activity. In mere existence, one is voluntarily or involuntarily acting perpetually in a world of
constant change. Even deciding upon and pursuing a course of inaction or suicide is to act in a very
real sense, as the actor is caught up in a network of interrelated activities in which even refraining
from activity is an act of accepting that external forces will continue to exert themselves without
one's own input.8
However, the necessity of acting is not confined merely to the self-conscious and rational
human life principle, it is also present in the vegetative and sensitive souls of plants and animals in
the absence of consciousness, or at the very least, at far lower levels of conscious awareness. The
vegetative life principle which is best exemplified in the plant, actualises its elemental powers of
nutrition, growth, and reproduction despite its apparent lack of cognitive function and conscious
awareness. Likewise, the sensitive soul of the animal actualises the elemental powers of the
vegetative soul along with its own elemental powers of sensation, appetition and locomotion. All of
this is in accord with the principles of evolution and and also serves to underscore Piaget’s focus on
psychology as a developmental science. At the apex of this developmental schema, we encounter
the human person whose own rational soul actualises the elemental powers of both the vegetative
and sensitive souls as well as its own powers of intellect and will. It is precisely the presence of
these uniquely human powers in the natural realm (leaving aside supernatural concerns for the time
being, although it must be said that the powers of the rational soul are what opens up human
persons to the experience of the spiritual and supernatural in the lifeworld) and our concern with the
study of these powers that differentiates philosophical anthropology / psychology from the more
general study of biology, with the latter science being more amenable to a purely mathematical and
mechanistic treatment given the nature of its subject.
Having noted that man is born into the world condemned to action, he inevitably encounters
the existential problem of determining whether this life makes sense and to what end his actions are
directed, if any, in the lifeworld. This problem will inevitably be resolved where it is first
encountered, in one's own actions, and since all human activity is attributable to the powers of the
human life principle –nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetition and locomotion as
directed by intellect and will– any psychological science worthy of the name must consider the
relationships between these powers and their development in the operative functions of the human
person in the lifeworld. Here we return to the aforementioned principle that all human experience is
biological, in that the mind and body are inseparable in the interaction of the human person and the
environment. Immaterial, mental / spiritual acts, are nonetheless acts simultaneously involving the
rational powers of intellect and will with the sensitive powers of movement, sensation and appetite,
all of which are supported by the unconscious vegetative powers that sustain the human organism.
This account of the human life principle demonstrates precisely why the scientistic paradigm of
modern psychology, which is determined to reduce the triadic relation of intentional mental activity
to a dyadic physical mechanism is more suited to the study of plant and animal life than the life of
7 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 9-10.
8 Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a critique of life and a science of practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette.
(South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1984), 4.
human beings in the lifeworld. Since any reasonable account of human activity in the lifeworld
must include the immaterial rational powers of intellect and will, it is clear that psychological
sciences cannot be confined within a narrow materialistic and scientistic schema.
This distinction between the vegetative, sensitive and rational life principle is vital to
philosophical anthropology because it demarcates the boundaries between higher and lower forms
of life in terms of their possible functions in the world. Human beings (and divine beings of various
types depending on the religious background of the reader) differ from other living beings in being
able to discover abstract knowledge that is unavailable to other forms of life and in the fact that
their mode of life necessarily incorporates a complex immaterial (or in the case of certain Indian
philosophies, a more subtly material) spiritual dimension that is not amenable to examination within
a purely materialistic paradigm. However, it also follows from this account that the possibility of
knowledge and the human person’s orientation towards the spiritual realm cannot be entirely
separated from the vegetative and sensitive life principles. As Aquinas rightly states [De veritate, q.
2 a. 3 arg. 19], nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu, from which it follows that all
knowledge is necessarily bound up with sensation and all conception is built upon perception.
When animals and plants undergo biological adaptation in response to the environment in which
they live, these operative adaptations can be studied as if they are mechanistic in nature. However,
this is not true in the case of human persons because the powers of the rational soul allow for the
creation (not the mere production) of new cognitive structures into which one can assimilate the
sensible experience of objects and events in the environment into the operations of the intellect.
This is accomplished in such a way as to allow for what Piaget refers to as combinative, reversible,
substitutive, symmetrical, multipliable, relational, repeatable mental acts of abstraction that can be
variously manipulated or even annulled in an associative manner in response to new experiences of
reality in the environment.9 In this way, the intellectual powers of the rational soul and the operative
formation of knowledge are continually developed as new experiences are assimilated into the
cognitive structures of the human person. Likewise, as one develops one’s own cognitive schema to
assimilate new knowledge, an intellectual habit (habitus) is generated that allows for the
assimilation and development of a more and more refined and precise knowledge about oneself and
the totality of the environment in which one operates.
In this way, the physical, intellectual and moral operations of human beings are necessarily
intertwined and one cannot be separated from each other in lived reality. They can be separated in
the intellect through abstraction in order to analyse particular aspects of experience as particular
things to be examined while stands apart from other aspects of human psychology, but to be
scientific in a proper psychological sense, any data obtained through this process of abstraction
must be reincorporated into a larger schema of philosophical anthropology in order to obtain any
type of true understanding and real knowledge of the lifeworld. A failure to follow any intellectual
analysis of psychological phenomena with an intellectual synthesis of the results into a more
general schema creates confusion and collections of data instead of real psychological knowledge.
As we have noted, all knowledge is first found in the senses, and it is therefore necessary to
analyse the experience of sensation in the human person. Because sensation is a power that is also
found in the sensitive soul of animals –indeed when it comes to sensation, the sense faculties of
animals are often more acute than those of man– we can infer from the behaviour of all sensitive
creatures that there is a certain “spontaneity and flexibility to the responses of a sensitive creature to
its environment which bespeak, on the part of the creature, an awareness, of one kind or another, of
that environment”. We can predict that accidentally stepping on a house cat's tail will cause the cat
to cry out and flee, but there is a definite flexibility of response in regard to whether or not the cat
will cry, what kind of cry it will be, in which direction it will flee, etc. This flexibility and
spontaneity indicates that all sensitive creatures, including man, “have the capacity to assimilate
9 Piaget, The Psychology Of Intelligence, 41ff.
their environment in an immaterial way... and bring the objective within the ambit of the
subjective”10 by way of the internal senses of common sense, imagination, memory, and the
estimative sense. In man, the estimative sense which allows an animal to perceive the beneficial or
harmful character of a concrete object in its environment takes on a cogitative power that lends
itself to discursive thought in the intellect. Therefore, the main difference between man and animal
is not to be found in the reactive nature of the external and internal senses, but in acuity of the
internal cogitative sense to bridge the divide between the sensitive and rational soul in the human
person.
Along with sensation, the human being also shares in the appetitive powers of the sensitive
soul that incline one towards that which is perceived to be beneficial and produces an aversion
towards that which is perceived to be harmful. These appetitive powers work in tandem with the
internal senses in such a way that we can examine the case of one who accidentally touches a hot
stove. Hopefully, one will naturally avoid touching the hot stove because the estimative sense will
perceive the danger inherent in doing so, but if one should accidentally be brought into contact with
the hot stove, the entirety of that experience of will be unified in the common sense, will be saved
as a series of images by the imagination, and these images can then be recalled in the memory. At
this point, the appetitive power of the soul may cause one to develop an aversion to hot stoves as a
way of avoiding future accidents. In much the same way, the sensation of eating a particular
delicacy may be processed by the external and internal senses in such a way as to incline one
towards the enjoyment of that particular delicacy. It is the appetitive faculty in its concupiscible
(inclined to pursue what is suitable and avoid that which is harmful) and irascible (inclined to
overcome obstacles in pursuit of arduous goods and in the avoidance of arduous evils) powers11 that
serves as a foundation for the eleven basic passions of the human life principle.
Here we are able to point to an interesting contrast between the broadly Thomistic
philosophical anthropology we have sketched out so far and a similar account of the “primary
emotions” from modern psychology. Whereas Aquinas was able to form cognitive structures that
account for the differences between the lower and higher order functions of all types of life and
formulate an account of the passions as primary emotions stemming from the appetitive faculty of
the soul, the modern psychologist Robert Plutchik’s account of primary emotions depends on what
is referred to as a psycho-evolutionary account that attempts to reduce the primary emotions to their
utility in the quest for survival.12
On one hand, the theories of Plutchik and Aquinas are broadly similar in that both put forward
taxonomies of primary emotions that apply to all animals, the expression of which differ among
different species according to their qualitative differences. Likewise, both men agree that primary
emotions can be conceptualised as pairs of opposites (although for Aquinas anger does not have a
polar opposite). Furthermore, Plutchik and Aquinas, broadly speaking, include many of the same
emotions as primary, as can be seen below:
Aquinas Plutchik
desire–avoidance acceptance–disgust
joy–sadness joy–sadness
courage–fear anger–fear
hope–despair anticipation–surprise
love–hate
10 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 72.
11 Christopher A. Bobier, “Thomas Aquinas on the Basis of the Irascible-Concupiscible Division,” Res Philosophica
97, no. 1, (2020): 31-52.
12 Robert Plutchik, “A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion,” in Emotion: Theory, research and experience,
Theories of emotion Vol. 1, eds. R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 3-33.
anger
Although the terms are not identical, desire–avoidance is analogous to acceptance–disgust in that
the latter would serve as motivating factors for the former. However, it could be said that Aquinas is
closer to the truth in his more general description, especially at the level of animals. Interestingly,
Plutchik himself notes that most people will attest to the fact that pet dogs and cats “show emotions
as vividly as do humans”,13 which is something tI would agree with. However, while I have
regularly seen instances of desire–avoidance in my pets, I can’t say the same for disgust and
acceptance seems to be so broadly defined that it would include mere toleration / resignation in the
form of learned helplessness.
Of course, in a strict sense, it is difficult to state categorically that animals have “emotions”
per se, given their lack of intellectual and linguistic abilities. This is especially true if we accept
Plutchik’s own definition of emotion as something more than subjective experience (which animals
undoubtedly do have), namely, “a construct or inference based on various classes of experience”
(which is also something that animals possess, but in a much more limited sense). While an animal
can be trained, thereby demonstrating an ability to create some kind of cognitive structure
associating particular commands with rewards or punishments, in its natural environment the
animal does not appear to depend primarily on such mental constructions based on its experiences,
especially in its youth. Instead, its “emotional responses” appear to be primarily reactive and
instinctual. Thus we can see that Plutchik is implicitly presupposing a distinctly human framework,
which of course makes perfect sense for a psychologist, but because Plutchik has already wed
himself to a psycho-evolutionary account of emotion, he must include animal responses in his
theory. Unfortunately, as we have seen, this undermines his own account and lends support to the
more general taxonomy of Aquinas classifying emotions as “passions”, a reactive response to
external stimuli that are only later conceptualised, described and understood by the rational powers
of the soul.14
Plutchik also distrusts, for good reason given the problems of self-reporting in experimental
settings, verbal reports about emotional states. This leads him to attempt to remove the subjective
element as much as possible in his methodological considerations. However, this takes us back to
the problems we encountered in the beginning of this paper, because a narrow, reductionist concern
with abstract methodological orthodoxy comes at the expense of holistic theoretical knowledge of
real human experience in the lifeworld. Plutchik makes the common mistake of approaching
psychology as a logician rather than as a philosopher whose science begins with a universal genus
of first principles to provide a foundation for true knowledge.15 Whereas psychologists like Aquinas
and Piaget are concerned with the formulation of a logic of wholes, Plutchik and most other modern
psychologists are limited by their arbitrary methodological concerns to the study of parts, which
13 Ibid. 4.
14 This consideration also appears to lend support to the two-factor theory of emotion put forth by Schachter & Singer
in: Stanley Schachter & Jerome E. Singer, "Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,"
Psychological Review 69, no. 5, (1962): 379–399. Schachter & Singer contend that that an emotional state is a
“function of physiological arousal and of a cognition appropriate to this state of arousal. The cognition, in a sense,
exerts a steering function.” This view is very much in keeping with the philosophical anthropology of Aquinas in
which the passions are motivating factors for action that can be identified, classified and judged in the rational
faculties of the soul.
15 Here I am indebted to my teacher Prof. Peter Redpath who makes an important distinction between the generic
subject of philosophy and pre-modern science –which is the universal problem of understanding unity from
diversity– and the genus of the logician who studies abstract particulars that are completely divorced from their real
functions as operative wholes, generating principles and proximate causes. In Redpath’s view science is primarily a
psychological habit that consists of ordering the many acts of fearing, hoping, willing, imagining, conceiving,
judging, and reasoning to arrive at some sure, evident, concluding judgment as a single and holistic understanding.
Thus, a scientific conclusion is arrived at through a scientific demonstration through which the human intellect can
with certainty analogously express the unity of the genus as a whole and how its component parts distribute its
causal activity so as to effect its generic aim.
ultimately results in the generation of reams of data about particular phenomena and comparatively
little universal knowledge about the realities of human experience in the lifeworld.
This is likely why Plutchik also prefers the category anticipation–surprise to the Thomistic
category of hope–despair, because it easier to account for the immediate physiological responses of
a startled cat or the anticipation of a cat who anticipates the appearance of its toy mouse than it is to
conceive of the same cat as hoping or despairing. However, in a very real sense, the cat can be said
to “hopefully” anticipate the appearance of the toy mouse and if it should fail to appear, it is easy to
think of the cat as slinking off in despair. But what accounts for surprise? As with the relation
between hope and anticipation, Plutchik’s notion of surprise can be said to be analogous to hope and
despair, in that despair resembles hope thwarted. This is simply because, for Plutchik, surprise is
usually produced by the sudden introduction of a novel object that produces a desire (which is why
surprise is more properly a secondary emotion consisting of a desire to understand the object
coupled with a fear of the object as unknown) to know and understand the object. While this may be
more properly classified as a secondary or even tertiary emotion in a Thomistic psychology, for
Plutchik, reducing hope–despair to anticipation–surprise is a methodological way of securing his
theoretical contention that the main evolved function of cognitions in service to emotions is to
“predict the future”.16
Once again, we are seeing methodological orthodoxy affecting theoretical formulation. At
this point, one is reminded of a scene from the 1968 film Planet of the Apes in which the
protagonist Taylor, an American astronaut, is taken to a cave that was the location of an
archaeological excavation by the chimpanzee Cornelius (who has formulated a theory that a
civilisation of human beings thrived on the ape’s world during their pre-historic period). Taylor is in
the cave with Cornelius, his benefactor Zira (another chimpanzee and animal psychologist), Nova (a
mute primitive human) and the orangutan Dr Zaius. In the cave Cornelius presents his evidence of a
pre-historic human civilisation that existed prior to the current ape society, but he fails to convince
Dr Zaius (who is the Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith in the apes’ society) who quotes
the sacred scrolls of the ape’s religion to counter each of Cornelius’s claims. While this is
happening, Taylor “reconstructs the life” of a creature who if he was not a man, “was a close
relative” because he wore spectacles, had false teeth and a pacemaker, but who apparently did
indeed exist on the planet before the rise of ape civilisation. Taylor’s account seems to be a
conclusive demonstration that man existed on the planet prior to the rise of the apes’ civilisation,
but once again, Dr Zaius dismisses it out of hand, claiming that he could “give an alternate
description for everyone of those objects that's equally as inventive as yours. But it would be
conjecture, not proof”.
Anyone who has seen the film will know that Dr Zaius is absolutely correct and that his
formidable simian intellect would indeed be capable of giving alternate explanations that will place
the artefacts in the cave within his own theoretical framework, a framework in which ape society
has always been superior to that of the primitive, mute human beings who inhabit the planet.
However, it comes to pass that in the conclusion of the film we learn that Dr Zaius has actually
always known that Taylor’s reconstruction of the past was accurate. In the film Dr Zaius, in his
wisdom, hides this knowledge from others in order to protect the apes’ civilisation. However, we
can, for the sake of argument, imagine a situation in which Dr Zaius was actually unaware of the
existence of a pre-historic human civilisation and still rejects the reconstruction of the past offered
by Cornelius and Taylor. In this hypothetical situation, it would be clear to the viewer of the film
that the admittedly formidable simian intellect of the wise Dr Zaius was not hindered by a desire to
conceal the existence of a pre-historic human civilisation, instead, in this case, the viewer would see
Dr Zaius reject the more comprehensive (and true) framework of Taylor and Cornelius precisely
because he is already committed to a narrower (and false) methodological and theoretical
16 Plutchik, “A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion,” 13.
framework that is informed by a desire to decontest his own presuppositions, which are also the
dominant presuppositions in the apes’ civilisation at that moment in time.
We contend that Plutchik’s psycho-evolutionary account of the primary emotions is
analogous to the hypothetical position in which Dr Zaius is blinded by his own presuppositions and
commitment to methodological orthodoxy, while the Thomistic account of the primary emotions as
eleven passions is analogous to Taylor’s theoretical reconstruction of the past. Of course, as this is
not a film, we are not in a position to plausibly claim that the Thomistic account is undoubtedly
“true” in every respect and that Plutchik’s account is undoubtedly “false”. However, we can argue
that the Thomistic account has (1) more explanatory power and (2) is closer to the truth of lived
human experience in the lifeworld. While there is much truth in Plutchik’s psycho-evolutionary
theory of emotions, it is too reductionist and narrow to account for phenomena like the human
desire to “know” and “understand” the lifeworld and the function of the appetitive powers to
motivate human beings to desire the “good” and “beneficial” in a generic sense. Instead, Plutchik’s
commitment to methodological orthodoxy requires him to reduce that which is good and beneficial
to that which ensures survival.17 And while it goes without saying that survival of the individual and
the species is a precondition for the pursuit of other good and beneficial things, there is no good
reason to assume that ensuring survival is the primary, let alone only, factor influencing the
development of particular cognitive faculties. Likewise, reducing what Aristotle referred to as the
“desire to know” to Plutchik’s “desire to predict”18 seems to be reading modern methodological
concerns back into pre-modern philosophical anthropology. Interestingly, Plutchik’s view of
cognitive activities as a form of map making correctly leads him to follow Aristotle and Aquinas in
creating a taxonomy of emotions in order the categorise and understand them in a theoretical way,
which is precisely why Aquinas’ and Plutchik’s accounts of the primary emotions are remarkably
similar. However, while Plutchik undoubtedly constructed his theory in order to test its predictive
power in the context of modern experimental psychology, there is no evidence that Aristotle or
Aquinas constructed their philosophical anthropologies to predict anything about the actions of man
in the world. Instead, especially if we take Aristotle at his word, the primary aim of pre-modern
philosophical psychology was simply to know man and his place in the world.
Plutchik’s psycho-evolutionary presuppositions are further evidenced by his omission of the
Thomistic passions of love-hate and courage from his taxonomy of the primary emotions. Once
again, in the case of love–hate it is not difficult to see why when we consider Plutchik’s own
account of with the love relationship between mates. For Plutchik, at the level of primary emotion
the desire19 to mate is produced by the cognition “possess” in service to the primary emotion
“joy”.20 While Aquinas and Plutchik both correctly attribute this drive to mate to the appetitive
powers of the sensitive soul, a major problem in Plutchik’s theory arises in the removal of the end
toward whom the drive to mate is oriented, namely the particular other with whom one is driven to
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Interestingly, unlike Aquinas, Plutchik does not categorise desire as a primary emotion, yet it is hard to see how the
biological drive to mate can be accounted for without desire as that which motivates one to “possess” another at a
superficially level, or without love as that which motivates one to unite with a particular other (the beloved) at a
deeper level. At any level, desire more easily accounts for both the general urges to mate or to unite with the
beloved, but it is more difficult to ascribe these desires to the primary emotion of joy that accompanies attaining the
ends of love or desire . Likewise, the appetitive dimensions of love seem to be unaccounted for in Plutchik’s idea of
love as a secondary emotion consisting of joy + acceptance.
20 Plutchik, “A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion,” 16. Plutchik postulates (pg. 10) that emotions
presuppose (often unconscious) cognitions precisely because he must account for the “predictive” utility of
cognitions in ensuring survival. However, while there is undoubtedly a connection between emotion and cognition,
it is difficult to see how cognitions could have evolved in service to the emotions if emotions presuppose cognitions
unless they emerge simultaneously. If that is the case, even if said cognitions are entirely unconscious and can only
be inferred by their products, the simple fact that consciousness requires consciousness of something in much the
same way as to love necessitates the presence of a beloved indicates that Plutchik’s presupposition in unintelligible
as consciousness itself is passive and reactive.
unite. The notion of the beloved other as an end is essential to understanding love, as love is a mode
of tending towards that particular other. It is not simply an aimless drive. Indeed, even in the animal
kingdom, as any professional breeder will attest, it is obvious that a particular creature oftentimes
does not simply want to mate with any other member of the opposite sex in the same species.
Instead, there is a certain mode of tending that orients one towards the end of attaining a particular
other, and this mode of tending towards the end of union with that particular other in the mating
relation is love.21 Furthermore, although love is a reactive passion, and therefore distinct from
emotion in certain accounts inspired by Plutchik,22 this fails to account for the quality of the
affective act, which can be both immanent and transitive23 (or immanent and transcendent)24. In
response to the criticism that the passions that are, by definition, passive, and cannot be emotions,
which are only evidenced in action, it is important to draw attention to the fact there is an important
distinction to be made between immanent affective activity, which originates and terminates within
an organism, and transitive affective activity, which is an action that either originates in the
organism and terminates in a modification to an external object or originates in the external object
and terminates in a modification to the organism. It is important to note, in accord with Plutchik’s
theory that emotions are reducible to biological and social acts that can be observed by third-party
observers,25 that although the passions are passive in the Thomistic account, the affective acts they
motivate can be active, passive or both active and passive.26 According to Zaborowski, love is an
example of an affective act that is both active and passive. It is passive in that it motivates the
immanent activity of loving, but it is also active in that it motivates the transitive activity of loving
the beloved, whether or not this affective activity is mirrored by the beloved. In this case, love is a
transitive affective act even if it is not reciprocated because it is nevertheless intended to pass over
into the beloved.27 Although the primary emotion of loving is reactive because of its emergence in
the presence of the beloved and the affective act of loving is active in being directed towards the
beloved, the experience of the passion and the affective act of loving are only possible in the
external presence of the beloved.
Plutchik’s methodological considerations also force him to contrast anger with fear on the
basis that these emotions manifest themselves physically in fight or flight respectively.28 However,
this dependence on inferring the presence of emotion from the external act it motivates means that
he overlooks the primary emotion of courage in Thomistic analysis, precisely because courage
could manifest inwardly in the external act of remaining still and steadfast – an act which may not
be readily apparent to a third-party observer– but is nonetheless a very real emotional response for
the courageous organism. Courage is dismissed not because it is not a primary emotion, but because
it cannot be observed “objectively” to be a primary emotion in Plutchik’s methodological schema.
In this way, we can see that although Plutchik’s psycho-evolutionary theory is presented with
admirable methodological rigour and in accordance with the norms of modern psychology by
including numerous tables and incorporating quantitative analysis to produce a theory is both useful
and informative, it still has less explanatory power than the pre-modern Thomistic model even at
the level of the sensitive soul. From this it follows that a theory lacking explanatory power at the
level of sensitive life will likely be even less effective at the level of rational human life, which is
the subject of study for any psychological science worthy of the name.
21 Diana Fritz Cates, “Love: A Thomistic Analysis,” Journal of Moral Theology 1, no. 2, (2012): 7. 1-30
22 Warren D. TenHouten, Emotion and Reason: Mind, Brain, and the Social Domains of Work and Love (Milton Park,
UK: Routledge, 2013), 11.
23 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 49.
24 Robert Zaborowski, “Is Affectivity Passive or Active?,” Philosophia 46, (2018): 545–546.
25 Plutchik, “A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion,” 8-9.
26 Fear & Anger are always passive; Joy, Sadness, Courage, Hope, & Despair are always active; Love, Hatred, Desire,
Aversion can be both active and passive
27 Zaborowski, “Is Affectivity Passive or Active”, 549.
28 Plutchik, “A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion,” 16.
It is becoming increasingly clear how confusing the abstract model of reality (the problem of
methodological orthodoxy) for reality itself often leads modern psychology into abstract theorising
that is out of touch with lived experience in the lifeworld. Yet, this is not to devalue the human
capacity for abstraction. Indeed, in Thomistic philosophical anthropology, it is precisely this
capacity for abstraction that allows the human mind to bring the form of an object into the realm of
the intellect in order for the object to be known and understood. This is clear when we think of a
person placing one stone next to another stone, which results in two stones being physically present
to the senses. This is obvious sense knowledge that can be assimilated into our most basic cognitive
structures, but to come to the the intellectual knowledge that 1 + 1 = 2 obviously requires an
abstract act of the intellect, which takes place within the spiritual confines of the mind. The human
capacity for abstraction is that which allows for the categorisation of particular data gathered by the
senses into a universal schema of scientific genera in order to produce theoretical knowledge in the
intellectual habit that properly defines philosophy and science.
Philosophy and science are intellectual habits because the act of knowing through the
process of abstraction effects “a truly wondrous union”29 between the knowing subject and the
known object. This union can be best described phenomenologically as the revealing of the
essences of things in the world to the knowing subject. This is the process in which mere “existants”
(in hylomorphic terms, bare groupings of matter) are presented to the knowing subject and become
“things” (in hylomorphic terms, objects composed of matter and form), thereby actualising the
potentiality possessed by bare matter in the absence of the knowing subject. Likewise, it is the
presentation of “existants” to the intellect of a rational subject that allows the human person to
move beyond the level of sensation towards a “knowing” of “things” that properly discerns the
objective essences present in existants that bring into Being beings / things. A “boulder” can likely
exist in some sense as a mere material existant even in the absence of a knowing subject, but the
potentiality in this aggregate of bare matter is only actualised as a “boulder” in its fullest sense of
being when the rational subject comes to know the boulder as a boulder that is possessed of an
essential nature and is the bearer of properties that can be known and categorised in a genus
incorporated into broad schema of universal knowledge. This is a form of phenomenological
realism which acknowledges that although existants could persist physically in the absence of the
knowing subject, these existants can only exist in their fullest sense when they come into Being as
objective beings in the mind of the rational subject to whom they reveal themselves. Likewise, the
rational life principle can only actualise its potential as a knowing subject in the presence of
external objects that can be known as beings in the intellectual process of abstraction. This
unification of the subject and object is reciprocal in nature, being effected by the presencing of the
potentially infinite aspects of an object to an intellect that comes to know this object as a being and
thereby discern its nature and formal properties.
This wonderful gift of an intellectual capacity is the most important way in which human
life can be differentiated from other forms of life. Unfortunately, this same capacity for abstraction
is often used to abstract man himself from his nature as a biological organism immersed in an
environment. As we have noted, this happens quite often in modern psychology whenever the
abstract model of reality is taken to be more real than the Real. This is why the rational power of
will is categorised as an (intellectual) appetite in Thomistic philosophical anthropology. In the same
way that other appetites are essentially passive and reactive, the intellectual appetite is only
activated in the presence of beings, but in the case of the will, the beings that activate the will are
often not merely material beings which are presented to the the powers of sensation, instead they
are often abstract, immaterial or spiritual beings which are presented to the intellect. In this sense,
the will works in tandem with the intellect in processing the experience of Being in both its material
presentation to the senses and in its abstract formal presentation to the intellect. The will is a bridge
between the sensitive and rational life principles in the human being as an intellectual appetite that
29 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 100.
motivates the person to seek out what is good and beneficial to oneself as a rational organism who
seeks to thrive, and not merely to survive, in the environment in which it is situated. This is why
Aristotle claims in Metaphysics that “all men desire to know”, rather than merely claiming that all
men desire to create cognitive structures that can predict the future and ensure their material
survival. This insight about the human inclination to know and understand, an inclination that
presupposes the possession of rational faculties capable of knowing and understanding, is lost when
modern psychologists attempt to reduce psychological phenomena to purely mechanistic
interactions that must be able to be observed and quantified by third-party observation in artificially
controlled conditions. Instead, in a Thomistic philosophical anthropology, the rational powers of
intellect and will account for both sense cognition and the type of intellectual cognition that is
uniquely human.30
Thus far, we have analysed the pre-modern Thomistic philosophical anthropology as a
fruitful schema to correct problems in modern psychology that are caused by a narrow reductionist
tendency that stems from the dogmatic adherence to scientistic methodological orthodoxies that
reduce the triadic relations of intentionality and affectivity to dyadic relations of biological and
material forces in the name of “scientific” objectivity. However, Thomistic philosophical
anthropology can also correct for a countervailing tendency in certain “indigenous psychologies”31
to operate primarily in the realm of the hyper-abstract and spiritual. Like Thomistic philosophical
anthropology, these indigenous psychologies are usually pre-modern in origin and derived from
philosophical principles within religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, etc. For
this reason, indigenous psychologies also avoid the problems caused by a rigidly scientistic
methodological orthodoxy. However, especially in the case of the indigenous psychologies of the
Indian subcontinent, there is a tendency to deal with psychological phenomena is such a refined and
abstract manner as to engage in a type of theorising that idealises the detachment of the human
personality from its embodiment in the material world.
Of course, no indigenous Indian psychology denies that the human person finds oneself
immersed in a sort of “susbstantive”, but not necessarily material, phenomenality. However, since
the soteriological aim of Indic religious thought is to attain salvation from rebirth in the
phenomenal world by attaining knowledge of the absolute reality underlying phenomenal existence,
indigenous Indian psychologies tend to place far more value on the absolute spiritual reality than
they place on the phenomenal lifeworld, which is ultimately unsatisfactory in comparison to the
absolute. This is a reasonable position given the fact that we have already established that the
rational nature of the human person and the possession of intellectual faculties necessarily orients
the person towards the spiritual. Perhaps it is for this reason that Buddhist psychology restricts the
attainment of Buddhahood to those who are born into human existence on the grounds that one who
is born into a hell realm or as an animal is not equipped to attain enlightenment due to the
deficiency of his spiritual or subtle material faculties, while one who is born into a heavenly realm
is unable to attain enlightenment due to the hyper-acuity of those very same spiritual faculties. For
this reason, Indian Buddhist psychology places an exceedingly high value on human life as the
middle ground in which one can make great spiritual progress, while at the same time viewing the
function of the appetitive powers of the human life principle as hindrances that can bind the human
person to the cycle of rebirth. In this sense, it is important to note that orientalist generalisations
about the ostensible “otherworldliness” of indigenous Indian psychologies are overly simplistic
precisely because this type of Buddhist psychology is quite firmly grounded in human experience in
30 Ibid. 215.
31 Pradeep Chakkarath, “What can Western Psychology Learn From Indigenous Psychologies? Lessons From Hindu
Psychology,” in Culture and human development: The importance of cross-cultural research for the social sciences,
eds. Wolfgang Friedlmeier, Pradeep Chakkarath, Beate Schwarz (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2005): 33. “The
term ‘indigenous psychology’ is generally used to mark psychologically relevant concepts that were developed in
the culture of investigation and that need not necessarily be congruent with psychological concepts that were
developed by western mainstream psychology.”
the lifeworld to the point of privileging human life as the best ground for actualising moral and
spiritual perfection. However, it is equally important to acknowledge the presence of “a general
pessimism concerning the value of life”32 and a certain level of mistrust in the truth or goodness of
the material world, at least in any ultimate sense, within indigenous Indian psychologies.
In this sense, indigenous Indian psychologies resemble Neoplatonism in its suspicion of
gross materiality and in the idealisation of the abstract and formal. This observation is not made in
an attempt to present indigenous Indian psychology as just another sub-species of some kind of
universalised philosophical anthropology, but to demonstrate that despite its differences, indigenous
Indian psychology cannot be viewed as an entirely “alien” viewpoint by modern or Thomistic
psychologists. Instead it is simply another approach to the study of human experience that aims at
properly orienting human experience in the lifeworld towards psychological equilibrium while
defining and attempting to perfect man’s relation to the spiritual realm. And while there is a certain
pessimism about the value of worldly life in indigenous Indian psychology, it differs little from the
philosophical anthropology of Aquinas in regard to its ultimate end in the transcendent. Just as
Aquinas contends that the only worthy final end for the human person is to be found in the presence
of God in the world to come, the Indian focus on the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of human
experience in the lifeworld cannot be taken to entail that there is nothing good or beneficial to be
enjoyed in phenomenal experience, only that it is cannot be the ultimate aim of the human person to
remain mired in this conventional existence while the possibility of salvation and direct experience
of the ultimate is available to the person. When viewed from this religious perspective, any
misconceptions about “the wholly alien” nature of indigenous psychology should be dispelled. It is
by no means impossible to fruitfully analyse and compare indigenous and Thomistic psychologies
in both their religious and philosophical-scientific dimensions.
As in Thomistic philosophical anthropology, indigenous Indian psychology does not entail
any type of substance dualism and arbitrary distinction between body and mind, despite clearly
differentiating the qualitative differences between mental and material phenomena. Instead, most
indigenous Indian psychology contends that the totality of the lifeworld emerges from a type of
“prime matter” that is known in Sanskrit as prakṛti. In this view, everything that exists ultimately
emerges from prakṛti. This means that when Thomistic psychologists refer to the spiritual in the
sense of the immaterial, for the indigenous Indian psychologist the spiritual is more precisely
defined in terms of a very subtle or refined materiality due to the presence of prakṛti as a primal
material principle. In keeping with the Thomistic analysis, indigenous Indian psychology accepts
the natural tendency of the sensitive and rational life principles to categorise objects in the lifeworld
and to react to them affectively, yet the ultimate goal of attaining knowledge of this
psychophysiological process in indigenous Indian psychology is not ultimately to pursue what is
good and beneficial in the lifeworld, but to work towards an ultimate detachment from phenomenal
experience in order to attain a higher knowledge of absolute reality, which is constituted of prakṛti
and a formal universal principle of consciousness known as puruṣa. In most indigenous Indian
psychologies the operations of the mind are recognised as intentional, but they differ from the
Thomistic analysis in that it is presupposed that there is an all-pervading “pure consciousness” that
pervades the world and grounds the particular mental operations of individuals. The changing
particular experiences of individuals are said to take place in the mind, the operations of which are
differentiated from the substratum of pure consciousness, but they are also said to be participating
in this eternal, immutable principle of pure consciousness that exists independently of the mind and
is theoretically available to any person who works towards direct experience of ultimate reality over
many lifetimes through rigorous moral and spiritual practice. The unenlightened human person is
bound to the cycle of rebirth due to his ignorance of the fact that pure consciousness is available to
human experience because the absolute is in some sense hidden within the experience of
phenomenal reality by the affective reactivity of the mind. Therefore, it is only when the human
32 Ibid. 36.
person completely detaches himself from phenomenal experience and the hindrances caused by the
reactive mind that he can directly experience pure consciousness and be freed from the cycle of
rebirth.
Note that the complete detachment from phenomenal experience does not mean that the
sensory and intellectual faculties of the enlightened person stop functioning or that the person
attains some sort of unconscious state after attaining enlightenment. Instead, it is presented as one
having gone beyond affective reactivity in response to stimuli. The spiritual adept continues to see,
smell, hear, taste, feel and think in accordance with his sensitive and intellectual faculties, but he
now does so clearly and actively without regard for affective reactivity of the appetitive powers of
the sensitive soul or the intellectual appetite of will, meaning that he acts without attachment to
action or the fruits of action. In this sense, salvation is presented as a form of gnosis which leads to
a type of deification in which the spiritual adept ascends to a type of perfect intelligence as the
cluttered reactivity of the unenlightened mind is transcended by the direct experience of pure
consciousness. This is why the great religious figures of the Indian tradition are reported to have
obtained divine knowledge of the cosmos, a direct knowledge of the workings of karma, a
remembrance of all their previous existences and even omniscience.
This account of indigenous Indian psychology is necessarily generalised and simplified due
to space limitations. As such, it leaves out and glosses over countless important distinctions which
have been made in the doctrines of Buddhists, Jains and the many other philosophies, heterodox and
orthodox, which are properly categorised in the genus of Indian or Hindu philosophy. Nevertheless,
we can see in this simplified and generalised account that while indigenous Indian psychology is
grounded in human experience in the lifeworld and includes a great number of teachings that
address practical concerns in human life, it is also the case that the ultimate aim of transcending
phenomenal experience while immersed in human existence tends to colour the analysis and often
leads towards an overemphasis on the refinement of the intellect and a consequent devaluation of
embodied life in its philosophical anthropology. In contrast with the crude reductionism and
materialism of modern psychology, indigenous Indian psychology tends to move in the opposite
direction towards a refined and subtle paradigm of highly abstract idealism. This movement can be
attributed to the fact that indigenous Indian psychology does not draw the sharp distinction between
the divine intellect and the human intellect that is found in the Thomist analysis, because in
indigenous Indian psychology, any person can theoretically access the divine directly, although
historically this divine access has been practically available to only a few spiritual virtuosos. In
contrast, in the Thomist philosophical anthropology direct access to the divine presence is not
available in the created world due to the distinction between creator and creature.
It is the highly refined and theoretical final end in indigenous Indian psychology that limits
its practical use as a general schema for a post-positivist psychological science. As with modern
psychology, it is not difficult to find much that is true and valuable in indigenous Indian
psychology, but it is also easy to see its limitations as a psychological “logic of wholes”. On one
hand, modern psychology seeks to completely ignore the spiritual dimension of human existence,
while on the other, indigenous Indian psychology –especially in the hands of Buddhist and Hindu
revivalists who subscribe to a rationalistic form of modernism– tries to expand the spiritual
dimension beyond common sense perception to include phenomena like extrasensory perception
and “superconscious” meditative states into its psychological schema.
Whereas modern psychology depends on presuppositions that amputate the soul from the
science of human experience, indigenous Indian psychology –on its own account– depends on
presuppositions that can only be known by the greatest of souls after innumerable lifetimes of
rigorous religious practice. Ergo, neither is particularly promising for the creation of a schema to
remedy contemporary problems in the psychological sciences. In some sense, this would continue
to be the case even if modern psychology or indigenous Indian psychology could be conclusively
demonstrated to be objectively true and the world really did consist of nothing more than brute
dyadic interactions between predetermined material forces or the totality of experience was actually
contained within the Divine Monad, because the resultant effort to either discard the soul and
elevate the body, or to elevate the soul and discard the body, would simply not be in keeping with
how actual human persons experience the lifeworld. As we have seen in the Buddhist account of
why only humans can attain Buddhahood, at a basic phenomenological level across all cultures,
regardless of abstract theoretical concerns, the human person most commonly experiences his place
in the universe “in the dichotomous experience of being unfree, restricted, imperfect and
unredeemed, and, at the same time, being potentially powerful, great, and exalted, uniquely
endowed, capable of rising far above his environment in response to the divine moral challenge”.33
Given this, we are reminded of John Searle’s anecdote about the absurdity of a convinced
determinist saying to the waiter in a restaurant, “Look, I am a determinist–que sēra sēra, I’ll just
wait and see what I order”.34 As with Searle’s committed determinist, even if the positions put forth
by modern psychology or indigenous Indian psychology were justified true beliefs, it must be noted
that these positions would in now way reflect human experience of the lifeworld, and since the
generic subject of study for psychology is the human person, any psychological schema that
decentralises human experience will result in a distorted and deficient psychology.
In this sense, the Thomistic philosophical anthropology seems to be the most appropriate
place from which to develop a useful schema that can be used to ground a broader and more holistic
conception of the psychological sciences, a conception that accommodates the totality of human
experience in the lifeworld better than any other modern or pre-modern philosophical psychology.
Although there is undoubtedly much to be learned from the traditional paradigms found in modern
psychology, as well as in the paradigms of pre-modern indigenous Indian psychologies, it
nonetheless seems that Thomistic philosophical anthropology is the most adequate tool available to
address contemporary problems in the psychological sciences. This is true even if the Thomistic
analysis is presented in a broadly “secularised” manner that acknowledges mankind’s orientation
towards the transcendent while bracketing out more properly theological considerations about the
nature of God. Thomistic philosophical anthropology is able effectively blend the powers of
emotion, intellect and will without placing undue emphasis on one particular power over the others
because it is rooted in a true understanding that the reality of human experience in the lifeworld
demonstrates that the mental cannot be properly understood in isolation from the physical. All
experience involves sensation, and from this it follows that the human affective and intellectual
response is physiological before it is rational and this means that the biological and cognitive
faculties are inextricably bound to each other in the human person. The brilliance of Thomistic
philosophical anthropology lies in Aquinas’ recognition that all of the powers of the human soul are
interdependent and function in an operative way in relation to the human person’s situatedness as a
creature who, in the famous words of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, exists in the lifeworld
“somewhere between the beasts and the angels”.
33 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 6, no. 2 (1964): 10.
34 John R. Searle, “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology,” Philosophy 76, no. 298, (2001): 494.
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