Psyche's Lamp;: A Revauation of Psychological Principles as Foundation of All Thought

By Robert Briffault

Embark on a profound journey into the depths of human consciousness with Robert Briffault's Psyche's Lamp: A Revaluation of Psychological Principles as Foundation of All Thought. This insightful and thought-provoking work challenges conventional understandings of psychology, proposing a revolutionary perspective on the role of psychological principles in shaping all human thought and culture.

Robert Briffault, a distinguished anthropologist, sociologist, and thinker, presents a compelling argument for the centrality of psychological principles in the development of human knowledge and societal structures. In Psyche's Lamp, Briffault re-evaluates traditional psychological theories, offering a fresh and comprehensive examination of how the mind influences every aspect of human existence.

The book delves into the intricate relationships between psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences, highlighting the interconnectedness of these disciplines. Briffault explores topics such as the nature of consciousness, the origins of belief systems, the psychological foundations of morality, and the influence of subconscious processes on human behavior.

With his characteristic clarity and intellectual rigor, Briffault examines how psychological principles underpin cultural norms, scientific paradigms, and philosophical doctrines. He argues that a true understanding of human thought requires a deep appreciation of the psychological forces at play, which have shaped our collective and individual experiences throughout history.

Join Robert Briffault in this enlightening exploration of the psychological foundations of all thought, and discover how Psyche's Lamp can illuminate your understanding of the mind and its influence on human culture. This work remains a crucial text for those seeking to comprehend the complexities of the human psyche and its role in shaping our reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Porirua Publishing
• Release date: Jun 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781991312372

Book preview

CHAPTER I — ACTION AND PURPOSE

LIFE, then, in us and in all beings, is manifested by actions. For each act, wise or foolish, that we perform we are in general able to adduce a rational justification by reference to an ulterior end, by showing, that is, that our action is a means to an end. The act is therefore described as purposive, and the end to which it is directed is called the purpose of the act. Most of our acts are thus referable to a proximate purpose, which again is conditioned by some ulterior purpose, that again by another, and so on. Our purposes, the justifications of our acts, are thus encased like a nest of Chinese boxes the one within the other. We dress that we may go out, we go out that we may be at a given place at a given time, we keep the appointment that we may advance some business upon which we are engaged, we are engaged upon it in order to earn money, we seek money in order to live, we live...Here we reach the last box of the Chinese puzzle. We wish to live, life is desirable; that must serve as a sufficient reason. Or if we want to put a better face upon the matter, we may say that it is our duty to live, that for the sake of our family, for the sake of mankind, of some ideal or other, we are willing to bear the whips and scorns of time. But whether we aim high or low, in every such reference of our motives to some ulterior principle, we come at last upon a categorical end arbitrarily pronounced to be desirable. That ‘ultimate purpose’ by which we justify our proximate and ulterior purposes stands itself in need of justification and, being ultimate, it is left unjustified. No rational account of the goal of our acts is to be formulated; for such a formulation would entail its conversion into a means by reference to some object beyond it. The concentric series upon which every act of our lives, as a purposive act, rests, regresses to a purpose, the purpose of which is not to be set down in thought. To justify that end, to name the purpose which it serves would be to give an answer to the last riddle of things. No thinker, no system of metaphysics, no fancy of mysticism or claim of revelation, has succeeded in prefiguring, even darkly and dimly, such an end. All our purposes are in the end purposeless.

The purposes which we formulate as rational justifications of our actions are, then, of quite subsidiary import. They do not represent the end of our actions, but merely various steps which we adopt as means towards that end. What we do is not to act in view of a given purpose, but to discover the means of achieving something which we are impelled to do. The impulse which prompts us to adopt a particular purpose as a means to the satisfaction of that impulse is the motive power that sets us, or any organism, in motion. It is the impulse which determines the purpose, not the purpose which determines the impulse.

We use the words ‘purpose’ and ‘motive’ as synonyms: we say that a given purpose was the ‘motive’ of such and such an action. But a purpose is not a motive. No human being was ever set in motion by a purpose. You may conceive all the purposes you please, they will not move you an inch unless you are impelled to make use of them. The attribution of motive power to a purpose—Aristotle’s ‘final cause’—is a flagitious misconception. Our actions are produced by the continued operation of an efficient cause, the impulse that actuates them; the operation is only converted into an ‘ideal end’ by the introduction of means devised by the intellect in the service of that operation, which thus becomes an intellectual category of finality by reference to those intellectual means. That finality is derived from the instrumentality, not from the active operation itself. Remove that use of means, and only the bare fact of action is left, divested of any ‘final cause.’ A purpose in view is only a particular device by which the efficient cause operates.

To have a formulated purpose in view is by no means a condition of action. It is only in difficult and unfamiliar circumstances that we devise means by the process of thought, and thus act with ‘an end in view.’ But that rational devising of means is but one of many ways in which the impulses of life operate; it is a quite exceptional mode of behaviour. We do not go about life in that scheming, designing fashion; we do not unpack our nest of Chinese boxes at every turn. That is an act of philosophy, not the ordinary procedure of life. The purposes of most of our acts are only consciously formulated as an afterthought. That formulation is a ratiocinative spelling backwards of the actual psychological process. It is an a posteriori psychological analysis, a post-mortem which we hold on our actions. Our intellectualistic analysis extends to all our acts a language derived from a very exceptional type of action; and by calling the ways and means which we employ to satisfy the impulses that actuate us ‘purposes,’ we consider that our actions are thus rationally justified, and that we are actuated by purposes. That, of course, is the purest delusion.

To explain how our actions are brought about used to be thought a fairly simple matter. It was considered—and is even now considered by some writers who ought to know better—that the question is adequately elucidated by saying that we seek what gives us pleasure and shun what gives us pain, and that the motive force of our lives is to strive after happiness.

It appears incredible that anyone accustomed to clear thinking should ever have deluded himself into accepting such an answer, upon which, as the reader knows, whole systems of philosophy and even of politics have been founded. The pleasure-and-pain theory is merely a verbal roundabout: Why do we desire a given object? Because it affords us satisfaction. Why does it afford us satisfaction? Because we desire it. In the merry-go-round of such a vicious circle there is no getting farther. The formula leads us at once into desperate difficulties when we endeavour to discriminate between one order of actions and another. The hedonistic psychologist is at once held up by his old friend the martyr, and is eventually compelled to draw up a scale of pleasures and happinesses on grounds wholly extraneous to his theory; for we have no means whatever of instituting a quantitative comparison between the pleasure of the sot and that of the saint—on the whole one would be inclined to consider the former’s more massive.

The reason of those difficulties is that it is not the satisfaction which determines the desire, but the desire which determines the satisfaction. The pleasures and pains which we seek or shun are not attributes of given objects or situations, for the same object or situation will produce various and opposite feelings in different organisms, and in the same organism at different times. Those feelings depend on dispositions within ourselves which objects and situations affect favourably or unfavourably. Pleasure is the satisfaction of our impulses, pain is their thwarting. The pleasant or unpleasant quality of a feeling is the representation in our consciousness of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the impulses that actuate us. Various forms of satisfaction, that of the glutton and that of the hero, differ not because they weigh or measure more, but because they are the satisfaction of different impulses. And since all impulses tend towards their satisfaction, the pleasure-pain theory is a tautological truism.

It is extremely questionable, however, whether the formula is even true in its tautological sense. It arose as an a priori theoretical assumption rather than as a matter of psychological induction. Is it true that a feeling of pleasure is invariably attached to the acts or to the ideas of the acts which we are impelled to do? Throughout organic life living beings are constantly submitting to all manner of pains and discomforts in their obstinate obedience to master-impulses, and it is very disputable whether in doing so any prospect or sense of greater pleasure or lessened pain enters into their conscious feelings at all. They will make excessive efforts and wade through jungles of discomfort in order to satisfy a quite moderate degree of hunger or appetite, altogether disproportionate to the heroisms manifested in indulging it. The reproductive instinct constantly chooses martyrdom with no prospect whatever of pleasure. Is the feeling of the hen-bird which turns against the dogs in defence of her brood one of pleasure? No animal, in fact, and no human being spontaneously balances his profit and loss account. The true martyr and hero, like the invertebrate organism, does not feel at all in terms of pleasure and pain. The thinker who deliberately chooses poverty, bitterness, and the kicks of asses, in the service of odious and unpopular ideas knows quite well what he is about from the standpoint of the pleasure-and-pain balance-sheet. The appeal of strong or high impulses is quite independent of the physiological contrivance of pleasure and pain. The surrender to the imperative urge of a mastering impulse is accompanied by a feeling-tone, but even the non-thinker judges it to be an abuse of language to call that feeling pleasure. Consider the appeal from a purely affective point of view of all sad, melancholy, and even harrowing feelings and interests, provided they are on a high or a fundamental plane. The appeal of tragedy, for instance, has never been satisfactorily accounted for by the analysis of the pleasure-and-pain psychology. Pleasure and pain are primitive forms of feeling which serve their purpose of guidance in the more rudimentary, physiological stages of reaction; in higher development and in connection with the more powerful, fundamental impulses they lose their importance and sink into comparative insignificance. The appeal of affective values is then sufficient in itself without assuming the primitive form of crude pleasure and pain. Where impulses are weak and hesitant, and therefore liable to be misled, they are guided by lively feelings of pleasure and pain, but where they are strong, reckless, ruthless, those leading-strings are superfluous, and are accordingly dispensed with.

The cause of our acting in a particular way is a disposition to act in that particular way. That explanation may sound unsatisfactory, and akin to that given by Molière’s physician of the dormitive virtue of opium; but it is the only one which we are entitled to give. We do not know the cause of our disposition to act, and where we cannot describe a thing by its causes we are compelled to describe it by its effects.

Ordinary human thought and the profoundest efforts of philosophers have always sought to disguise the crudity of that explanation. They have either tried to believe that we are actuated by ‘purposes,’ or by the quest of a certain thing called pleasure or happiness—notions which are quite erroneous and fallacious. Or they have given to our dispositions to act various names, such as the ‘Will,’ ‘Will to power,’ and the like. ‘Will’ and ‘power’ are words which simply mean a disposition to act. To call our disposition to act ‘Will’ throws no more light on it than if we were to call it ‘Tom’; and it has the disadvantage of suggesting misleading connotations.

The actions of living organisms are varied; human beings differ widely in their behaviour from animals and from one another. Tastes differ, likes and dislikes differ. The conative dispositions manifested in behaviour appear to be greatly diversified.

Your own personal tastes are, I make no doubt, exquisite and refined. You are, we will suppose, keenly interested in art and in science; you seek your truest pleasures in all that the human spirit has achieved of subtlest and of most precious and delicate. Those refined tastes of yours are, of course, the product of a certain education, of a certain culture; your mind is trained to higher and more perfect pleasures, taps sources of interest and gladness that for the ignorant multitude are non-existent. In short, as you will readily admit, the tastes in the things you delight in and value are acquired tastes. The Philistine to whom they are caviare will pronounce them to be ‘acquired tastes’ with a distinct note of disparagement in the expression. Those Pheidian marbles, say, the sight of which moves you with a strange thrill, that music that delights you, will cause neither pleasure nor pain to your greengrocer. He will probably prefer beer to