HUMANISTIC SCIENCE AND TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES
A. H. MASLOW
A Talk given at Brandeis University, as it appeared in The Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, Vol. V, No. 2, Fall 1965, pp. 219 - 227.
This talk is not an argument within orthodox science; it is a critique (a la
Godel) of orthodox science and of the ground on which it rests, of its unproven
articles of faith, and of its taken-for- granted definitions, axioms, and
concepts. It is an examination of science-as-one-philosophy-of-
knowledge-among-other-philosophies. It rejects at the very beginning the
traditional but unexamined conviction that orthodox science is the path to
knowledge; or even the only reliable path. I consider this conventional view to
be philosophically, historically, psychologically, and sociologically naive. As
a philosophical doctrine it is ethnocentric, being Western rather than
universal. It is unaware that it is a product of the time and the place, passing
rather than eternal, unchangeable, inexorably progressing truth. Not only is it
relative to time, place, and local culture, but it is also characterologically
relative, for I believe it to be far more narrowly a reflection of the cautious,
safety-need-centered, obsessional Weltanschauung than of a more mature,
general-human view of life.
In spite of the fact that many of the great scientists have escaped these
mistakes, and in spite of the fact that they have written much to support their
larger view of science (as nearly synonymous with all knowledge, rather than
merely as knowledge-respectably-attained), yet they have not prevailed. As Kuhn
has shown, the temper, the style, the atmosphere of "normal science" has been
established not by the great ones, the paradigm-makers, the discoverers, the
revolution-makers, but rather by the great majority of "normal scientists," who
must be likened to coral-reek makers rather than to eagles. And so it has come
about that science has come to mean primarily patience, caution, carefulness,
slowness, and the art of not making mistakes, rather than courage, daring,
taking big chances, gambling everything on a single throw, "going for broke." Or
to say this in another way: Our orthodox conception of science (as mechanistic
and ahuman) seems to me one local part-manifestation or expression of the
larger, more inclusive Weltanschauung of mechanization and dehumanization of
which it is a part. (An excellent exposition of this development can be found in
the first three chapters of Floyd Matson's Broken Image.)
But in this century, and especially in the last decade or two, a
counter-philosophy has been developing very rapidly among some intellectuals,
along with a very considerable revolt against the mechanistic-dehumanized view
of man and the world. It might be called a rediscovery of man, of human
capacities, and of needs-aspirations. These humanly-based values are being
restored to politics, to industry, to religion, and also to the psychological
and social sciences. This is true also for the non-human and impersonal sciences
which have been going through a convulsion of what might be called
rehumanization. At first, they began by rejecting teleology (human purpose) from
the physical universe, which was reasonable enough. But then they wound up by
rejecting human purposes in human beings. Now this begins to change.
This change in science reflects, expresses, and is a part of a larger and more
inclusive, total Weltanschauung that we might call "humanistic."
These two great life-philosophies, which for present purposes we may call
mechanistic and humanistic, both exist simultaneously like some species-wide,
two-party system.
I consider that my effort to rehumanize science and knowledge (but most
particularly the field of psychology) is part of this larger social and
intellectual development. It is definitely of the Zeitgeist, as Bertalanffy
pointed out in 1949:
The evolution of science is not a movement in an intellectual vacuum; rather it
is both an expression and a driving force of the historical process. We have
seen how the mechanistic view projected itself through all fields of cultural
activity. Its basic conceptions of strict causality, of the summative and random
character of natural events, of the aloofness of the ultimate elements of
reality, governed not only physical theory but also the analytic, summative, and
machine-theoretical viewpoints of biology, the atomism of classical psychology
and the sociological bellum omnium contra omnes. The acceptance of living beings
as machines, the domination of the modern world by technology, and the
mechanization of mankind are but the extension and practical application of the
mechanistic conception of physics. The recent evolution in science signifies a
general change in the intellectual structure which may well be set beside the
great revolution in human thought.
Or if I may quote myself (1943) saying this in another way:
. . . the search for a fundamental datum [in psychology] is itself a reflection
of a whole world view, a scientific philosophy which assumes an atomistic world-
a world in which complex things are built up out of simple elements. The first
task of such a scientist, then, is to reduce the so-called complex to the
so-called simple. This is to be done by analysis, by finer and finer separating
until we come to the irreducible.
This task has succeeded well enough elsewhere in science, for a time at least.
In psychology it has not.
This conclusion exposes the essentially theoretical nature of the entire
reductive effort. It must be understood that this effort is not of the essential
nature of science in general. It is simply a reflection or implication in
science of an atomistic, mechanical world view that we now have good reason to
doubt. Attacking such reductive efforts is then not an attack on science in
general, but rather on one of the possible attitudes toward science.
And further on in the same paper:
This artificial habit of abstraction, or working with reductive elements, has
worked so well and has become so ingrained a habit that the abstractors and
reducers are apt to be amazed at anyone who denies the empirical or phenomenal
validity of these habits. By smooth stages they convince themselves that this is
the way in which the world is actually constructed, and they find it easy to
forget that even though it is useful it is still artificial, conventionalized,
hypothetical- in a word, that it is a man-made system that is imposed upon an
interconnected world in flux. These peculiar hypotheses about the world have the
right to fly in the face of common sense but only for the sake of demonstrated
convenience. When they are no longer convenient, or when they become hindrances,
they must be dropped. It is dangerous to see in the world what we have put into
it rather than what is actually there. Let us say that this flatly atomistic
mathematics or logic is, in a certain sense, a theory about the world; and any
description of it in terms of this theory may be rejected by the psychologist as
unsuited to his purposes. It is clearly necessary for methodological thinkers to
proceed to the creation of logical and mathematical systems that are more
closely in accord with the nature of the world of modern science.
It was the study of more highly evolved or developed individuals- that is, the
study of psychologically healthy people- that taught me about the "higher" human
possibilities. That phrase is not the most vigorous in the world, and it is hard
to specify its meanings in any succinct and non-normative way. It can be
operationally and pragmatically defined and I have done so, but it would be too
big a job at this point. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that self-
actualizing people have taught us to redefine many of our words into several
levels, or stages, of higher and lower meanings. They have taught us to see that
several levels of meanings are inherent in such words as knowledge, determinism,
science, truth, control, prediction, understanding. If I may say it in this
fuzzy way, there are higher and lower meanings for each of these words.
Perhaps another way of getting this across is to make the parallels with the
finding that at different motivation levels there are generated different
philosophies of love, of women, of life; different conceptions of society, of
happiness, and of Heaven, and even different Utopias. It should not surprise us,
then, that being at a higher level of living generates a higher, more inclusive,
more powerful conception of science, with far wider jurisdictions and with far
greater power. The taller the person, the greater the conception that he can
grasp. Only a big man can grasp big ideas or generate big ideas. You have to be
worthy of a great thought. You have to deserve it. Great thoughts don't come to
small people.
Not only does the study of healthier and stronger people generate conceptions of
a stronger and healthier science, but it also teaches us that scientific work
can itself be a good path to self- actualization if science is done correctly. I
think the textbook view of orthodox science is not such a conception. It is
clearly not necessarily true that scientific work must be a path toward
self-actualization. It can also be a flight from the world, a defense against
human emotions and impulses, a monastic renunciation of basic aspects of
humanness. It can serve as a kind of bomb-shelter against the vicissitudes of
living among people. It can be either primarily safe or primarily
self-actualizing.
Science can be a path to the greatest fulfillment and self-actualization of man.
It can test his highest powers, bring him to his greatest heights, and bring out
everything most admirable in him. The true scientist can be a model of the
fullest human development, and the life of science can be a path to the greatest
joys and satisfactions.
But it can also serve as a retreat from life and from humanness. It can be a
flight from a world seen as messy, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, a sort of
high IQ return to the womb. The scientist can be running away to it, hiding in
the laboratory, fleeing from his tired wife and noisy children, and from messy
human contacts in general. Or the scientist can go to his laboratory as to a
sacred place, going eagerly and with a sense of privilege and gratitude. He can
go in courage and boldness, with zest and anticipation, as to a kind of Olympian
wrestling match, where he takes a chance, pits his best powers against a worthy
rival, quite aware that he might fail, and yet quite willing to gamble and to
commit himself.
The Young Scientist as Monk
This is why so many brilliant students drop out of science. They are asked to
give up too much of their human nature, too many of the rewards of living, and
even some of the main values that led them to think of science in the first
place. In effect, they are asked, like monks, to renounce some very precious
aspects of "the world." And this is doubly true of just those students who are
most likely to be the creative ones, the innovators. To a certain extent,
science education is a training in the obsessional Weltanschauung. The young man
is rewarded only for being patient, cautious, stubborn, controlled, meticulous,
suspicious, orderly, neat, and the like. Some effort is made to train out of him
his wildness, his unconventionality, his rebelliousness against his elders, his
poetic and esthetic qualities, his gaiety, his B-humor, his craziness, his
impulsiveness, his "feminine" qualities, his mystical impulses, and much more
besides.
In a word, he is asked to become a military policeman rather than a commando
raider. But the truth seems to be that few young men dream of being M.P.s.
The Need to Desacralize- Desacralizing as a Defense- The Fear of Awe
The non-scientists, the poets, the religious, the artists, and ordinary people
in general, may have a point in their fear, and even hatred, of what they see as
science. They often feel it to be a threat to everything that they hold
marvelous and sacred, to everything beautiful, valuable, and awe-inspiring. They
see it sometimes as a contaminator, a spoiler, a reducer, an exsanguinator;
making life bleak, cold, and mechanical; robbing it of color, fun, and joy. Look
into the mind of the average high school student and this is the picture you
see. The girls will often shudder at the thought of marrying a scientist, as if
he were some sort of respectable monster. Even when we resolve some of the
confusions and misinterpretations in the lay mind- for instance between the
scientist and the technologist, between the "revolution scientist" and the
"normal scientist" and between the physical and the social sciences- some real
and justified complaint is left. This complaint which I shall call the "need to
desacralize as a defense" has, so far as I know, not been discussed by the
scientists themselves at all.
Briefly put, it appears to me that science and everything scientific can be and
often is used as a tool in the service of a distorted, narrowed, and
de-emotionalized Weltanschauung. To use the Freudian language, desacralization
can be used as a defense against being flooded by emotion, especially the
emotions of humility, wonder, and awe.
I think I can best make my meaning clear by an example from my experiences in
medical school (thirty years ago). I didn't consciously realize it then, but in
retrospect it seems quite clear that our professors were almost deliberately
trying to harden us, to "blood" us, to teach us to confront death, pain, and
disease in a cool, objective, unemotional manner. The first operation I ever saw
was almost paradigmatic in its effort to desacralize, i.e., to remove the sense
of awe, of privacy, of fear, of shyness before the sacred, and of humility
before the tremendous. A woman's breast was to be amputated with an electrical
scalpel which cut by burning through. as a delicious aroma of grilling steak
filled the air, the surgeon made carelessly cool and casual remarks about the
pattern of his cutting, paying no attention to the freshman students rushing out
in distress, and finally tossing this object through the air onto the counter
where it landed with a plop. It had changed from a sacred object to a lump of
fat. There were, of course, no prayers, rituals, or ceremonies of any kind as
there would certainly have been in most preliterate societies (Eliade). This was
handled in a purely technological fashion, emotionless, cool, calm, even with a
slight tinge of swagger.
The atmosphere was about the same when I was introduced- or rather not
introduced- to the dead man I was to dissect. I had to find out for myself what
his name was, and that he had been a lumber man and was killed in a fight. And I
had to learn to treat him as everyone else did, not as a dead person, but as a
"cadaver."
So also for the several dogs I had to kill in my physiology classes, when we had
finished with our demonstrations and experiments.
The new medics themselves tried to make their deep feelings manageable and
controllable, not only by suppressing their fears, their compassion, their
tender feelings, their tears as they all identified with the patients and their
diseases, their awe before stark life and death. Since they were young men, they
did it in adolescent ways, e.g., getting photographed eating a sandwich while
seated on a cadaver, casually pulling a human hand out of a briefcase at the
restaurant table, making standard medic jokes about the private recesses of the
body, etc.
This counter-phobic toughness, casualness, unemotionality (covering over their
opposites) was thought to be necessary, since tender emotions might interfere
with the objectivity and fearlessness of the physician. (I myself have often
wondered if this desacralizing was really altogether necessary. It is at least
possible that a more priestly and less engineering-like attitude might improve
medical training or at least not drive out the "softer" candidates.)
This latter is of course a debatable guess. But there are other situations in
which desacralizing can be seen more clearly as a defense.
We are all acquainted with people who can't stand intimacy, nakedness, honesty,
defenselessness, those who get uneasy with close friendship, who can't love or
be loved. Running away from this disturbing intimacy or beauty is a usual
solution, or it can be "distanced," i.e., held at arm's length. Or, finally, it
can be degutted, deprived of its disturbing quality, denatured- that is to say,
desacralized. For instance, innocence can be redefined as stupidity, honesty can
be called gullibility, candor becomes lack of common sense, and generosity is
labeled softheadedness. The former disturbs; the latter does not and can be
dealt with. (Remember that there really is no way of "dealing with" great beauty
or blinding truth or perfection, or with any of the ultimate values; all we can
do is to contemplate and to "adore.")
In an ongoing investigation of what I am calling "counter-values" (the fear or
hatred of truth, goodness, beauty, perfection, order, aliveness, uniqueness, and
the other B-values) I am finding, in general, that these highest values tend to
make the person more conscious of everything in himself that is the opposite of
these values. Many young men feel more comfortable with a girl who isn't too
pretty. The beautiful girl is apt to make him feel abashed, sloppy, gawky,
stupid, ugly, unworthy.
Desacralization can be a defense against this battering of self-esteem in those
in whom it is so shaky that it needs to be defended.
Just as obvious and just as well known to the clinician is the inability of some
men to have sexual intercourse with a good or beautiful woman unless they
degrade her first. It is difficult for the man who identifies his sex with a
dirty act of intrusion or of domination to do this to a goddess, to a madonna,
to a priestess- in a word, to a sacred, awesome mother. So he must drag her off
her pedestal above the world, down into the world of dirty human beings, by
making himself master, perhaps, in a gratuitously sadistic way, or be reminding
himself that she defecates and sweats and urinates, or that she can be bought,
or the like. Then he need no longer respect her; he is freed from feeling awed,
tender, worshipful, profane, or unworthy; from feeling clumsy and inadequate
like a little, frightened boy.
Less studied by the dynamic psychologists but probably as frequent a phenomenon
is the symbolic castration of the male by his female. Certainly this is known to
occur very widely- in our society at least- but it is usually given either a
straight sociological or else a straight Freudian explanation. Quite as
probably, I think, is the possibility that "castration" may also be for the sake
of desacralization of the male, and the Xantippe is also fighting against being
flooded and overwhelmed by her great respect and awe for her Socrates.
I feel also that, frequently, what passes for "explanation" is not so much an
effort to understand or to communicate understanding or to enrich it, as it is
an effort to abort awe and wonder. The child who is thrilled by a rainbow, may
be told in a slightly scornful and debunking way, "Oh, that's only the
scattering of white light into colors by droplets acting like prisms." This can
be a devaluation of the experience in a sort of one-up-manship that laughs at
the child and his silly naivete. And it can have the effect of aborting the
experience so that it is less likely to come again or to be openly expressed, or
to be taken seriously. It has the effect of taking the awe and wonder out of
life. I have found this to be true for peak-experiences. They are very easily
and very often "explained away" rather than really explained. One friend of mine
during post-surgical relief and contemplation had a great illumination in the
classical style, very profound, very shaking. When I got over being impressed
with the revelation, I bethought myself of the wonderful research possibilities
that this opened up. I asked the surgeon if other patients had such visions
after surgery. He said casually, "Oh, yes! Demerol, you know."
Of course, such "explanations" explain nothing about the content of the
experience itself, no more than a trigger explains the effects of an explosion.
And, then, these explanations that achieve nothing have themselves to be
understood and explained and psychoanalyzed.
So also for the reductive effort and the "nothing-but" attitude, e.g., "A human
being is really nothing but $24 worth of chemicals." "A kiss is the juxtaposing
of the upper ends of two gastrointestinal tracts." "A man is what he eats."
"Love is the overestimation of the differences between your girl and all other
girls." (I've chosen these adolescent boy examples deliberately because this is
where I believe the use of desacralization as a defense is at its height. These
boys trying to tough or cool or "grownup" typically have to fight their awe,
humility, love, tenderness, and compassion. They do this by dragging the "high"
down to the "low," where they are.)
The general atomistic techniques of dissection, etc., may also be used for this
same purpose, e.g., of making it unnecessary to feel like prostrating oneself,
of making it unnecessary to feel small, humble, unworthy, etc. One can avoid
feeling stunned or ignorant before, let us say, a beautiful flower or insect or
poem, simply by taking it apart. So also for classifying, taxonomizing,
rubricizing, categorizing, in general. These too are ways of making awesome
things mundane, secular, manageable, everyday. Any form of abstracting that
avoids confronting a comprehensive wholeness may serve this same purpose.
I wish to stress the word "may." Desacralization may be a primary gain, or an
unconscious purpose of the behavior. But it may also be an epiphenomenon, an
unsought-for by-product, a secondary gain. Or it may even be simply expressive
and without gain at all. These cautions are especially true in the realm of
science. We must remember that, for most people, there is only the one kind of
science. Identifying with science means then "buying" every aspect of it,
everything about it, in a kind of package deal, where you take the bad with the
good, for the sake of the whole, as in a marriage or a friendship.
So, the question must be asked: Is it in the intrinsic nature of science or of
knowledge that it must desacralize? Or is it possible to include in the realm of
the actual and existing reality, the mysterious, the awe-inspiring, the
emotionally shaking, the beautiful, the sacred? And if they be conceded to
exist, how can we get to know and to understand them?
We should point out that laymen are often quite wrong when they feel that the
scientist is necessarily desacralizing life. Quite simply, they misunderstand
the attitude with which the best scientists approach their work. The "unitive"
aspect of their attitude (perceiving simultaneously the sacred and the profane)
is too easily overlooked, especially since most such scientists are quite shy
about expressing it.
The truth is that the really good scientist often does approach his work with
love, devotion, and self-abnegation, as if he were entering into a holy of
holies. His self-forgetfulness can certainly be called a transcendence of the
ego. His absolute morality of honesty and total truth can certainly be called a
semi-religious attitude, and his occasional thrill or peak-experience, the
occasional shudder of awe, and of humility and smallness before the great
mysteries he deals with, all these can be called sacral. It doesn't happen
often, but it does happen, and sometimes under circumstances that are difficult
for the layman to identify with. He can't understand that a rectal examination
may be a pious, even reverent act, that it can be approached in about the same
spirit as a priest approaching an altar.
It is quite easy to elicit such secret attitudes from some scientist, if only
you assume that they exist, take them seriously, and don't laugh at them. If
science could only get rid of this quite unnecessary "taboo on tenderness," it
would be less misunderstood by the layman, and, within its own precincts, would
find less need for desacralizing.
We have learned much from self- actualizing, highly healthy people. They have
higher ceilings. They can see further. And they can see in a more inclusive and
more integrating way. They seem to find it less necessary to dichotomize things
into either-ors. So far as science is concerned, they teach us that there is no
real opposition between caution and courage, between vigor and speculation,
between toughminded and tenderminded. These are all human qualities, and they
are all useful in science. Nor is there any need in these people to deny reality
to experiences of transcendence, or to regard such experiences as in any way
"unscientific," that is, they are under no necessity to desacralize.
(This paper has been presented as it appeared in The Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, Vol. V, No. 2, Fall 1965, pp. 219 - 227.)