The Applied Science of Psychoanalytic Therapy

In my previous post, I discussed essential concepts of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, that is, his basic science. This month I want to present the practice or applied science of psychoanalytic therapy.
 
Engineers presuppose fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry, along with additional concepts unique to their specialty. Subsequently they apply all of this knowledge to specific cases to build particular, concrete machines and particular, distinct bridges to enhance human life. History, the concretes of a specific case, as well as theory, the universals of the science, are both involved in the practical application of concepts to achieve a specific goal.
 
Similarly, psychoanalytic therapists take Freud’s basic concepts of psychoanalysis, along with specific knowledge of each patient’s personality, character, and history, and apply these notions to help the individual patient become more independent and happy.
 
The essence of psychoanalytic therapy, according to Freud, is the process of talk therapy with the goal of making the unconscious conscious. It means unearthing or digging deep—he often uses archeology as a metaphor for psychotherapy—in the unconscious to find repressed ideas associated with disturbing events and to encourage the patient to re-experience the original emotions. This “abreaction,” which I suggested in my October post was an early form of derepression, became less important (33-34, 219) in Freud’s later years when he began to put more emphasis on the patient’s effort of overcoming resistance to recall and talk about what was painful and repressed.
 
The treatment method of talk therapy, as I mentioned last month, was learned from Josef Breuer (30) who encouraged his patient Anna O. to reminisce about early disturbing experiences that might have led to her conversion hysteria (paralyzed arm among other psychosomatic ailments). In the process of this therapy she said jokingly that she was chimney sweeping, but more seriously described the method as the talking cure. In the early years, Breuer and Freud called this the cathartic method, a cleansing or purifying of the soul. For some years, Freud used hypnosis to overcome resistance, gradually abandoning it in favor of the talk method of finding connections to early and forgotten events, thoughts, and emotions.
 
In the last two sentences of Lecture 31 in Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he writes, “Where it was, there should become I. [Therapeutic effort] is a cultural achievement somewhat like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (translation Bruno Bettelheim, 61, 62, my italics). That is, just as the Dutch reclaimed land from the sea, so also therapists help patients reclaim their conscious souls (the I) from the unconscious it.*
 
An important concept of therapy that Freud discovered by chance was transference, the idea that patients, as they improve, begin to associate the therapist with an important person from childhood, usually a parent, thus transferring their feelings about this person, both good and bad, to the therapist (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 29-32). Often the patients feel an unconditional love (which Carl Rogers, 61-62, in later years called an “unconditional positive regard”) from the therapist that they likely did not experience from their parents. Sometimes, though, anger and hostility may be felt, depending on the type of childhood the patient experienced. And on occasion a patient of the opposite sex may fall in love with the therapist—one young female patient flung her arms around Freud’s neck, convinced that they were in love with each other, and Breuer’s patient, Anna O, at the end of her treatment persuaded herself that she was carrying his baby!
 
Once Freud identified these transference reactions, he identified their value in therapy. Once the patient realizes these feelings toward the therapist are displacements, the patient becomes more motivated to overcome resistance to probe more deeply into the unconscious to identify forgotten, repressed thoughts and feelings.**
 
The applied science of psychotherapy as developed and practiced by Freud does not differ much from what nearly all psychologists and psychiatrists do today. Freud’s so-called free association is more of a probing of the patient’s subconscious in an uncritical, unjudgmental manner to encourage thoughts and emotions to rise to consciousness. Freud’s technique, as becomes clear in his many discussions of therapy, is not the caricature we sometimes see today with the therapist saying repeatedly, “uh-huh, uh-huh,” and not much else. In fact, Freud often explores a patient’s line of thought and offers hypotheses about earlier unconscious ideation. His goal, after all, is to help patients gain or regain their independence—Freud’s word (Outline, 26).
 
The Freudian couch? Initially a gift from a patient in 1890; the carpet covering added by Freud “gave his patients a non-medical bed to lie on” and “the sense of being sheltered from one’s daily cares.” In addition, many patients were female and in his day understandably uncomfortable talking about sex while looking at a man. Freud also did not want his patients attempting to read his facial expressions, nor did her take notes, which he believed to be distracting.
 
Free association? Einfall, according to Bettelheim (94-96), a word that  means sudden or chance idea or thought, would lead Freud to ask, “What comes to mind?” or “What is connected with that?” Freie assoziation were words used by Freud only after the technique had become established and then Einfall was described and translated into English as such. The modifier “free” or  freie, Bettelheim writes, puts too much emphasis on the need for conscious effort, rather than emotional spontaneity coming from the unconscious.
 
The fundamental rule of psychoanalytic therapy, as Freud refers to it, is that nothing is off the table for discussion (Outline, 28-29). Whatever connections come to mind, including especially painful, nonsensical, or allegedly unimportant, thoughts must be expressed while on the couch. This includes the content and memory of dreams.
 
 
Assessment of Freud. Contributions to psychology? Nearly everything—from the nature of the conscious and subconscious mind to the cause of neurosis and its treatment in therapy. Talk therapy today is the dominant technique of psychotherapists (unless, unfortunately, they are the psychiatrists who prescribe psychotropic drugs to allegedly treat and cure psychological problems). What else would therapists do but talk to their patients? What nearly all today do not do is mention the words introspection, free will, or the sub- or unconscious, the former two because they are afraid of being accused of being “unscientific” or even religious, the latter, unless they are psychoanalysts, of being accused of Freudianism.
 
Over the years, ideation has become more explicit as thinking errors in cognitive psychology and in the work of Yochelson and Samenow on the criminal personality. It has become more precise as core evaluations in the psychology of Edith Packer (chap. 1).
 
As for Freud’s alleged weak ego—the I—let me quote him in Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear (162).*** In this work, Freud points out the “numerous voices” (other psychoanalysts) who seem to want to make the so-called weakness of the I one of the “central pillars” of psychoanalysis. Freud responds: “Shouldn’t their sheer awareness of how repression actually works deter psychoanalysts in particular from so enthusiastically embracing such an extreme and partisan position?” The whole point of therapy being to reclaim and support the I.
 
What does impinge on and reduce the power of the conscious mind to control our lives is Freud’s determinism. His search for non-volitional causes of behavior is what I believe led him to focus heavily on the drives, rather than ideation, and specifically on the alleged death or destructiveness drive to explain the harmful and detrimental behavior of his patients. Though the notion of a strong unconscious has a long history, going back to Plato, free will is what enables us to learn how to introspect to explain and change our feelings deriving from an un- (or sub-) conscious “chaos” or “cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud describes it (New Introductory Lectures, 91). The chaos is something we have put there, and this means we can, through introspection, clean up the mess.
 
With good parenting and teaching, one would hope, psychology of the future will help prevent the mess from occurring in the first place.
 
 
* The standard translation (100) of the first sentence is “Where id was, there ego shall be.” Or, as I rephrased it in an updated form in Independent Judgment and Introspection (176), using the psychology of Edith Packer, “Where subconscious, mistaken conclusions were, there confident and independent self-assertion shall guide.” See Bettelheim’s discussion (61-64) of Goethe’s Faust, which Freud knew well, and Faust’s struggles to reclaim his soul from the devil—an apt analogy to describe what many of Freud’s patient’s felt, and most likely, what many patients today feel.
 
** Edith Packer minimized the value of transference, but did describe herself as a “friend for hire,” which I would say was a strong motivating force for patients who likely, at the time, did not have many good, that is, understanding and helpful, friends.
 
*** This 2003 translation uses the word “fear” instead of the customary “anxiety” because, the translator notes, it is the typical German meaning of Angst. When Freud means anxiety, he uses the word Ängstlichkeit or Angstneurose for anxiety neurosis (note 3, 264-65).
 
 
Postscript to Students of Ayn Rand. I regret having to make the following comment about Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. I see no evidence that either one read much or any of Sigmund Freud. Rand wrote that Freud was one of Europe’s “hand-me-downs” and Peikoff caricatured Freud’s view of man as an “ordure [excrement]-strewn pervert.” I believe that this post and my previous six about Freud speak for themselves. Ayn Rand said to both Nathaniel Branden and Edith Packer that she did not know anything about psychology. Having known Dr. Peikoff for many years, I do not believe he knows much about it either. A strong infusion of psychology into Ayn Rand’s philosophy is desperately needed today.

Freud as Scientist

As I have written before (1, 2), the essence of science and scientific method is “conceptualization, the mental process of generalizing to identify universals and applying previously formed universals to understand particular cases.*
 
The former is a process of induction and is called basic science, the latter a process of deduction (1, 2) and is called applied science. Most scientists perform both types in varying degrees, some spending most of their time on basic science, others on application.
 
Scientific method, which seeks to identify the distinguishing characteristic of a physical or mental entity under study and the causal relations between an entity’s attributes and other entities and their attributes, always involves experimentation—testing and trying one’s ideas against the real world. It may or may not be controlled experimentation. Statistical methodology and exact measurement (Applying Principles, 322-24) do not constitute the essence of science, but they can be adjuncts to the formation of universals and both may be helpful in applying those universals.
 
The present post rests on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1-2), which emphasizes measurement omission in the formation of concepts and therefore in the identification of universals. Looking at an individual concrete instance of a concept means considering all of the concrete’s characteristics. These include quantitative ones that are typically measured by a precise unit, as is the physical sciences. And it includes qualitative characteristics that are typically measured approximately, as in the human sciences.
 
Basic sciences are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.
 
Sigmund Freud is an excellent example of both a basic and applied scientist of human nature, of the human science of psychology. Psychoanalysis is the basic theory, while psychoanalytic therapy is the applied science or practice of the basic theory. Freud called psychoanalysis the “science of the unconscious,” or depth psychology, while psychology in general, according to Freud, is the science of the soul, which consists of three parts: our conscious reasoning mind and seat of emotions (the I—see last month’s post on English translations), our conscience (the upper I), and unconscious (the it). Freud was an atheist his entire life, as well as a determinist, so the soul for him is not immortal nor do we have free will.
 
Freud as scientist, we might say, is a post-Kantian, modern Aristotelian (see especially chap. 3).“Post-Kantian” means that consciousness has an active, creative nature or identity, while “modern Aristotelian” means that an active, creative consciousness can, guided by Aristotelian logic, accurately perceive reality. A modern Aristotelian in this sense rejects Aristotle’s naïve realism that the essence of a thing is “out there” in the thing but retains his premise of the primacy of existence. Consciousness does not create or distort reality, as Kant and many other philosophers say, or reflect or mirror it, as the naïve realists think. The modern Aristotelian holds that consciousness creates—note the different meaning here of “create,” as opposed to how the Kantians and other primacy-of-consciousness philosophers use the term—concepts and principles based on what it has correctly recognized or identified of reality.
 
As a student, Freud attended the lectures of Aristotelian scholar Franz Brentano and was influenced by him. This is indicated in particular by Freud’s frequent use of the words “nature and essence,” often followed by “origin” (cause) of a mental process that he was trying to identify. He never went looking for Kantian noumena or so-called intrinsic essences or Newtonian algebraic equations. (Freud in fact rarely mentions Kant in his writings.) He does, however, recognize that both normal and abnormal psychologies exhibit quantities of emotional energy that are measured approximately on an ordinal or qualitative scale of less and more.  
 
In Independent Judgment and Introspection (78-79), I point out how Freud spent many years working out the correct meaning of repression as distinguished from the more general concept of defense, clarifying the two in 1926 (97-99, 110-12). In those earlier years he had considered the two synonymous. He recognized finally that repression is a response to anxiety and attempt to allay it, not a cause of anxiety, as he had earlier thought. It is neurotic anxiety that gives rise to the neurotic need for repression.
 
This is conceptualization, and it is how science works.
 
Or as Freud wrote in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (31), “Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus” (that is, our mental processes), though psychology differs from physics in that psychology uses its mental processes to study and make inferences about mental processes, where physics uses the mental processes to make inferences about the external world. Both sciences often infer what is not directly perceivable. This last Freud describes as unrecognizable or invisible—“unerkennbar” in scare quotes in Freud’s German. The standard translation is “unknowable,” but Freud’s meaning clearly is not Kantian. He means that gravity and molecules are no more directly perceivable than the processes of our subconscious minds.
 
In addition, Freud points out, our awareness (through sense perception) of the physical world, provides “insight into connections and dependent relations which are present” in that world, reproduced in our minds as thought and knowledge that enable us not just to understand external reality, but also to anticipate and change it. And because the procedures of the science of psychology are “quite similar” to those of physics, says Freud, our awareness (through introspection) of the mental world provides similar insight about “connections and dependent relations” of the conscious and subconscious mind, to understand both and to anticipate and change (that is, treat through introspective analysis) their mental functioning (Outline, 83).
 
The “thought and knowledge” that accumulates in our minds, whether of physics or psychology, consist of concepts and principles, and the process of forming and applying concepts and principles is conceptualization. To put this in Ayn Rand’s terms, science is the mental process of identifying the nature of entities and their attributes—physical or mental—including in particular the motions of the entities caused by those attributes. This last is Aristotelian causality based on formal causation, or as Rand puts it, causality is “identity in action.”
 
Science thus identifies entities and their attributes and causes and effects (connections and dependent relations) by constructing and defining concepts that identify the nature and essence of those entities and attributes.**
 
To add one more point, Freud as scientist, in the words of philosopher Walter Kaufmann (80), often considers “objections and alternatives,” many of which we still hear today, but were addressed and answered by him in his time, the accusation of “pan-sexualism” just being one example. As Kaufmann writes, considering objections and alternatives is the “essence of critical thinking.”***
 
Let me conclude this post with a description of science and scientific method, especially as it applies to psychology, written by Freud in partial answer to the religious dogmatism of his critics.

This is the way of science: slow, groping, laborious. . . . Through observation one learns something new, now here, now there, and at first the pieces do not fit together. One formulates surmises and makes auxiliary constructions that one takes back when they are not confirmed; one requires a lot of patience, readiness for all possibilities, renounces early convictions lest under their compulsion one should overlook new and unexpected factors; and in the end all this exertion proves worthwhile, the scattered finds do fit together, one gains an insight into an altogether new piece of psychic processes, is done with the task and ready for the next one. Only the help that [controlled] experiments provide for research has to be dispensed with in analysis. (Kaufmann translation, 79-80; see standard translation in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 215-16).

This is conceptualization.
 
Next month: “The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis.”
 
 
* And, to emphasize, scientists are not the only ones performing these mental processes. We all perform them, generalization especially in our younger years of parental and formal education, application every day using our acquired knowledge to guide our lives.
 
** As this post demonstrates, Freud was most emphatically a scientist, which means he and  his theory of psychoanalysis are in no way “pseudo-science,” as the positivists and, especially, Karl Popper (1, chap. 1; 2, 74-75), like to say.
 
*** I would say that the essence of critical thinking is the formulation of concepts and principles that correctly recognize or identify, that is, not contradict, the facts of reality. It is the ability to perceive reality through unfiltered or discolored lenses. Considering objections and alternatives is one of the main ways we test and try our ideas against reality, that is, remove contradictions.

On Science and the Scientific Method

The purpose of science is to explain and guide, and the method scientists use, in briefest essence, is observation to raise questions followed by frequent testing and trying of alternatives to find correct answers.
 
In a single word, scientific method is conceptualization, the mental process of generalizing to identify universals and applying previously formed universals to understand particular cases. The former is a process of induction, the latter a process of deduction (1, 2).
 
We all use both cognitive processes, but scientists use them more intensely and in more concentrated areas.
 
Scientific method may or may not involve controlled experimentation with an elaborate array of instruments and it may or may not produce mathematical equations and hosts of quantitative data.
 
The ultimate aim of science is practical, to enhance human life.
 
The most fundamental science is philosophy or, as some have said, philosophy is the science of all sciences, with epistemology providing the principles of method to guide scientists in their choices and actions. The current post is based on Ayn Rand’s epistemology, especially her theory of concepts.
 
There are three fundamental special sciences: the physical that study inanimate matter and its actions; the biological that study living organisms and their behavior; and the human that study homo sapiens—the highest living organism that possesses a consciousness with the capacity to reason—and its behavior.
 
Special sciences representative of each are physics and chemistry, botany and zoology, psychology and economics.
 
All other sciences derive their basic premises from one or more of the fundamental ones. Derivative sciences are more applied than the fundamental ones and at some point may be called technology or applied sciences—engineering, medicine, psychotherapy.
 
Applied sciences are largely, though not exclusively, deductive. The fundamental sciences are largely, though not exclusively, inductive.
 
To return to our beginning concepts, the aim of science is not explanation and prediction as the logical positivists insist, but explanation and guidance. To explain means to describe the nature of an entity, its attributes, and its causal origin and effects. To guide means to provide principles of action to help human beings achieve specific goals.
 
Principles of guidance can be used to build spaceships and bridges; to diagnose diseases in plants, animals, and humans to recommend treatments; to manage small and large businesses; to make baskets (pp. 299-301); and to decide whether a specific action would be honest.
 
Ethics is a fundamental branch of philosophy that provides important principles of guidance throughout our lives.
 
Testing and trying are the etymological roots of the word “experiment” and testing and trying is what anyone who possesses the capacity to reason does to conclude that an essential distinguishing characteristic has been identified.
 
A child, for example, may throw, bounce, and chew a round, spongy thing before concluding that the round, spongy thing is a ball that bounces and rolls (but is not food). Aristotle opened twenty fertilized chicken eggs, one per day, to observe the development of chicks from beating speck of blood to live baby chicken. In this way, he tested and confirmed the hypothesis that baby birds are not born pre-formed, but grow gradually stage by stage within the egg (see Harré, chap. 1).
 
Today’s scientists test and try many options, sometimes using controlled experimentation to eliminate sources of extraneous variation. In the physical sciences, they may identify algebraic equations to explain the relationship between two or more entities or their attributes or actions.
 
The biological and human sciences, however, because of the nature of their subjects cannot be so precise. Since all concept formation, as Ayn Rand has shown (chap. 1 &2), involves measurement—measurement omission to arrive at the universal—these sciences can be quantified to a limited extent, using approximate measurements, such as greater than or less than, higher or lower, more important or less important.
 
The human sciences, of course, have the added proviso that free will reduces to absurdity the formulating of equations to predict behavior. All sciences work with universals by omitting—but certainly not forgetting—the measurements.
 
Technology or applied science uses measurements of individual cases, such as the engineer who needs to decide the best location of a new bridge or the sea captain who needs a reliable estimate of the tides in a specific harbor. The medical doctor needs to know a patient’s temperature and blood pressure and the psychotherapist needs an estimate of the kind and quantity of thinking errors an unhappy patient has made over the years.
 
Essentialization is the fundamental thinking method of scientists (and everyone else) because the essential distinguishing characteristic or essence of a concept explains and causes all or most of the other characteristics. The flat, level surface of a table explains why my glass of water sits stably on it and causes the liquid to stay within the glass. The motions of the sun and moon explain and cause the motions of water on earth.
 
Essentialization can be thought of as thinking in causes and effects.
 
Principles of guidance also explain the nature of the goals one is seeking and the steps that will cause that accomplishment. To sell a product, the salesperson must tailor his or her presentation to the prospect’s needs and wants. To build a bridge, the engineer needs to know many specifics, including precise measurements, of the width of the river and the nature and history of its soil.
 
Where does history fit in to this? Science, whether basic or applied, can be referred to as theory. History requires and uses theory to identify the nature and causes of a specific case, such as sedimentary rock embedded at a forty-five degree angle several thousand feet up on a mountainside or the nature and cause of a specific war.
 
What is called natural history uses theory from the physical sciences and human history uses theory from the human sciences to explain the nature and causes of the cases each study.
 
History is applied science.

How Do We Know Concretes?

To the layperson the title of this post must seem strange.
 
To academics, especially philosophers, the issue for a couple of millennia has been a big deal.
 
Of course we know concretes, says the layperson. We open our eyes and look out at the world—to see specific, individual, concrete people, animals, plants, and things. Reminiscing about our childhood, we can recall many specific, individual concrete events, ranging from games we played with relatives or next door friends to vacations taken with the family to the years spent in various schools.
 
And historians specialize in reporting the concretes of the past, do they not? Well, throughout the nineteenth century, and still today, historians, along with psychotherapists, medical doctors—and anyone working in applied fields—are said not to be true scientists. Only theoreticians are scientists. This is the dispute over theory versus history.*
 
To put the issue in more philosophical terms, we live in a world of particulars, yet with the exception of proper names our knowledge consists of universals.
 
Theories, science, and principles are all expressed in terms of universals. How do we use those universals to know particulars?
 
The problem arises from the theory sometimes called naïve realism—Aristotle’s improvement on Plato—that says universals are external to our minds, lodged, so to speak, in the things of reality, “out there,” but not in Plato’s separate realm.
 
Aristotle said that the form is embedded in the matter, form being his word for what in more modern terms we call essence or essential distinguishing characteristic. Matter, as in the stuff that something is made of, is what makes the thing a unique, concrete individual entity.
 
How can we know concretes when nearly all knowledge is universal? The glass on my desk, so the theory goes, contains “glassness,” the universal essence that we grasp and understand as a thing we drink liquids out of. The glass, or in my case, plastic, that the container is made of is its matter, and this includes its color and the number of ounces of liquid it can hold.
 
The matter of the glass, we could say, is that the glass on my desk is plastic, its color is blue, and it holds twelve ounces. Does that mean we have understood the concreteness of this glass?
 
No, say the critics of Aristotle’s common sense realism, because we are using universals in every word (“plastic, blue, twelve ounces”) to describe this individual concrete. We fail to get to “the thing in itself” (the thing as it really is, its identity), a problem that led John Locke, in exasperation, to conclude that the individuality of a thing is “something I know not what.” Further problems led David Hume to fail to find a “necessary connection” between cause and effect, heading us down the road to Immanuel Kant who said we can never know true, noumenal reality (where the “thing in itself” is presumed to reside).
 
And that is where we are today—reality is unknowable, concepts are arbitrary, and nothing is universal—with bad consequences in ethics and politics: values are subjective and there is no objectively valid, justifiable political or economic system.
 
Thomas Hobbes said we need a strong “public sword” to keep the peace among warring groups, each with its own arbitrary values, but today’s postmoderns want to crush any group with different values, especially those who advocate capitalism.
 
In other words, dictatorship follows from philosophy’s failure to solve the so-called problem of universals.
 
But let’s go back to our layperson who looks out at the world and sees a myriad of concrete things and their attributes. Although such a layperson may still think in Aristotle’s realist tradition by saying, “I just look and see glassness in the glass,” the conclusion is not correct, because there is in fact no essence of glassness in the thing out there. The layperson’s mind is doing more than he or she thinks.
 
What Aristotle called abstraction—mentally separating the form from its matter—is a more complicated process than he knew.
 
Concept formation, or conceptualization, is the human being’s method of turning percepts into universal concepts. How does this occur?
 
All knowledge begins at birth with perception, by observing concrete particulars. Later, when we begin to talk, we learn to form concepts, which become our universals.
 
Ayn Rand’s theory (ch. 1 and 2) holds that concepts and essential distinguishing characteristics are in our minds, not “out there” in the thing, but if we correctly identify what’s “out there,” the essences and concepts are objective, in an epistemological sense, not intrinsic or metaphysical as both Plato and Aristotle thought.
 
The process proceeds as follows. We perceive many similarities and differences among the things of the world. When we focus on one group of similar things that are somewhat similar to, but also different from, another group, we have isolated something we want to identify with a concept and word.
 
To form the concept, we focus on the characteristic(s) that explains and causes most of the others, then omit its measurements. Measurement omission in the process of abstraction is what enables us to identify the essence of the concept.
 
Using Rand’s example of forming the concept “table,” we isolate (from chairs and beds) those objects that have flat surfaces and are designed to hold smaller objects. Individual, concrete tables differ according to their measurements, but the measurements of their height, length, width, color, oval vs. rectangular top, etc., are omitted to make the concept of “tableness.”
 
The omitted measurements are still there, in reality and in the concept formation process, but they are not used (or necessary) to form the concept. Identifying that tables are flat and hold other objects is all we need to know to distinguish tables from chairs and beds and to give us the essence or essential distinguishing characteristic of tableness. Particular height, width, weight, color, shape of top, etc., are left out. A word and definition are finally assigned to complete the process of concept formation.
 
All the varying aspects of each entity in the world, including the varying measurements of all its qualities, and including its location and time of existence, are what give each entity its unique individual, concrete identity.
 
How do we know the entity as a concrete? To say it one more time, initially through perception.
 
We then identify it with a concept and word. Then, our ever expanding accumulation of concepts—our increasing knowledge—enables us to know and describe the concretes in their extensive variety, their attributes and actions and their myriad differences according to their varying measurements.
 
Assuming our concepts accurately describe the concretes they represent, that is, their referents out there in reality, and are not detached or floating, we have objective knowledge.
 
And that objective knowledge can be theory or history, basic science or applied science, general knowledge or personal knowledge. In all cases, it is knowledge of the concretes of reality.
 
Our minds are not “mirrors of nature,” as critics of “naïve” Aristotelian realism often say. They are active processors of it. Rand’s recognition of the mind’s active nature and her incorporation of it into her theory provides a major improvement on and defense of Aristotle’s epistemology.
 
We might, although she may not like it, even call Ayn Rand’s theory a “mature” realism about knowledge.
 
 
* Ludwig von Mises clarified the issue by rejecting the Hegelian-Marxist view that there are laws of history. Rather, Mises recognized that there is a valid science of individual historical events using the theories of basic sciences, especially psychology and economics, to understand and describe those events. Psychotherapists and medical doctors, in addition, use the theory of basic sciences to identify and treat their patients’ problems, which to the therapist and doctor are de facto historical events. This is called applied science.

From the Preface to Applying Principles

Applying Principles: Short Essays Based on the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Economics of Ludwig von Mises, and Psychology of Edith Packer will be published October 1. It is my first ten years of blogging. The book may be preordered at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with more information on its website books.jkirkpatrick.net. Here are edited selections from the preface.


Although I spent thirty-six years in college classrooms teaching undergraduate and graduate students business marketing, my bachelor’s degree was in philosophy. That subject influenced and underscored my entire career. As a result, I never let the day job of teaching students how to sell soap (as I would often describe my academic duties) become disconnected from its foundations in psychology, economics, or philosophy.

Indeed, I recognized early in graduate school that marketing, as well as the other business disciplines, are properly described as applied sciences that rest on those more fundamental fields. “Art” is sometimes used to describe applied science, but the usage is correct only if it is meant as a synonym. Often the word is meant to disparage applied fields because they are allegedly less precise or rigorous than “real” science, which means the physical or quantitative sciences. A student many years ago complimented me when she realized that advertising was as disciplined (her word) as finance, her major. There may not be universal equations in the applied human sciences, but the principles are universal in their appropriate context and the fields are “disciplined.”

Business as applied science is analogous to medicine and engineering. Medicine rests on biology for its more fundamental foundation and engineering on physics and chemistry. All fundamental and derivative special sciences, again in turn, rest on philosophy. All such fields are related and should be integrated, rather than isolated as they so often are in today’s academic world.

Thus, what I did when researching, writing, and teaching was to apply principles from the other, more fundamental fields, which explains my interest in epistemology and psychology, as well as the principles unique to marketing and advertising.

To illustrate further, the civil engineer whose goal is to build a bridge must know not just the fundamentals of physics and chemistry, but also the nature and composition of materials (used to build the bridge), and also the nature and behavior of rivers, which includes the history of the particular river over which the bridge will span and the nature and behavior of the river’s soil and water.

Applied science gathers all relevant concrete facts of the specific case it is working on, then uses, that is, applies, the universal concepts and principles of the fundamental sciences on which it rests, plus the narrower concepts and principles of its discipline.

Application is one of the two fundamental methods of cognition and is deductive. Generalization is the other and is inductive. We all use both every day in our lives. The two methods, as I say in my 2018 blog post, “are not the monopoly of scientists, philosophers, or academics in general.” Generalization gives us concepts and principles to guide our lives, while it also gives us theory and theoretical science. Application, which requires the previously acquired knowledge that generalization gives us, is what our medical doctors do, what Sherlock Holmes did, and what we do on a daily basis.

Application means we identify “a this as an instance of a that.” We present a cough and runny nose to our doctor and he or she quickly concludes, based on accumulated knowledge and patient history, that we have a cold. Similarly, Holmes saw that Watson was tanned and showed signs of having been wounded in a war; thus he concluded Watson recently came back from Afghanistan. And a child applies the previously learned concept of balance by shifting weight when learning to ride a bicycle. All three examples are processes of deduction, and illustrate how deduction is the predominant method of applied sciences, as well as everyday life.*

Deduction, therefore, is essentially what I have been doing when writing my blog posts. I am not in any intended way coming up with new concepts or principles, nor am I repeating the proofs of the great writers listed in my masthead, or others I may cite in a post as a reference. I take their ideas and apply them to specific issues.


The following essays are not journalistic as a newspaper column might be. I gave myself the assignment always to come up with something more fundamental than the news of the day, whether theoretical or historical, which last includes relevant citation of research.

The posts are organized into seven chapters, listed chronologically within chapter. Because of the way I write—“interdisciplinary” to use the academic jargon—one may quibble over some classifications. The chapters are “Capitalism and Politics,” “Academia,” “Education,” “Psychology,” “Epistemology,” “Youth Sports,” and “The Arts.”

I do have favorites. It was difficult to choose one per chapter, but here they are, in chapter order:

• “The Reductio of Bureaucracy: Totalitarian Dictatorship”

• “Because the Stakes Are So Small”

• “Go Fish!”

• “Look at Your Premises. Look. Look. Look!”

• “Why Don’t Facts Matter?”

• “Yes, There Is Crying in Softball”

• “Life in Three-Quarter Time”

My idea for publishing this collection comes from two books of columns: All It Takes Is Guts by economist Walter Williams and Double Standards by radio show host Larry Elder. I did not read these books from beginning to end. I skimmed the table of contents and read whatever caught my attention. Readers of this work might want to do the same.


* It is in this sense that history is also an applied science. We, as well as professional historians, look at past events, natural or human, and try to explain them, that is, identify their causes, by reference to our accumulated theoretical knowledge. Historians in the human sciences rely in particular on political philosophy, economics, and psychology. See Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, amazon.com.
 

Business Ethics, Moral Values, and the Herd Conformity of Virtue Signaling

So-called virtue signaling means showing off to the significant others of one’s group in order to maintain identity as a prominent and respected member. It is always other directed with eyes on conforming to the herd. “Sucking up” might be a vernacular way of describing the behavior. “Looking good to be good” is another way.

Genuinely virtuous behavior is an expression of one’s character and what others think of us is fundamentally irrelevant.

Ethics (or morality—the two words are synonyms), as Ayn Rand defined it, is “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.” The first part of this definition is the genus and includes not just Ayn Rand’s theory, but the other ethical theories that have been developed throughout history. More importantly to understand, the genus also includes the applied sciences and the many personal values we choose that are morally optional, such as taste in ice cream, choice of romantic partner and career, or the eating of red meat and drinking water out of plastic bottles.

Moral values are universal. Optional values are not, which means they do not have to be accepted and pursued by everyone.

The second part of the definition is the differentia that gives us a standard of moral value, as well as the derivative values and virtues that guide our choices and actions. A value is whatever we act to acquire and enjoy and a virtue is the action to acquire it. Moral values and virtues are broad abstractions and general actions, not concrete objects or specific actions.

Rand’s standard of moral value is human life as a being that possesses the capacity to reason. Her fundamental value, then, is reason with the corresponding virtue of rationality. Deriving from that standard, Rand identifies several other moral values, including honesty, courage, integrity, independence, productive work, and justice, to name several that are relevant for the present discussion.

The corresponding virtues derived from reason and rationality are telling the truth, acting against great odds or opposition, remaining loyal to one’s fundamental values, relying on one’s own mind to perceive reality, purposeful pursuit of a rewarding career, and judging oneself and others by conformity to moral and legal standards, including especially in business by the standard of the ability to do the job. Vices are the opposite: lying, cowardice, corruption, dependence, indolence, and unfairness. Irrationality means placing something higher than reason, such as faith or emotion.

At this point let me highlight the optional values that guide our lives. First, the applied sciences. The engineer has a code of values to guide his or her thinking and development processes of designing and making tools to improve human life. The end value may be to build a bridge; the principles of civil engineering are the guides. We normally do not call the actions of engineers moral virtues and the mistakes vices, unless dishonesty or cowardice is involved. The values and principles of action required of applied sciences, and the behavior of their practitioners, are assumed to be moral unless one has reason to think otherwise.

Our personal values also are assumed to be moral, but just as everyone does not have to be a civil engineer, or an engineer at all, not everyone has to like vanilla ice cream or even like ice cream at all. We all hold and pursue a large number of morally optional or personal values. Choice of romantic partner and career both are extremely personal and optional, but also complicated in the sense of requiring a great deal of thought, planning, and knowledge before making the choice. And both do have moral components, as Rand has discussed extensively (1, 2), but I am focusing here are the optional element.

As stated above, red meat and water in plastic bottles are not moral values and acting to acquire and use both are not vices. Someone putting a slab of red meat over your face such that you cannot breathe would be a moral issue, but then we would be talking about attempted murder!

In a free society, no one will stop you from refraining from eating red meat, if you think that is necessary for your physical health. But it is not a moral issue. Neither will anyone stop you from drinking water out of non-plastic bottles.

Individual rights mean that everyone has the moral right to choose whatever each person wants to eat and whatever container each wants to drink water out of. Preaching a gospel of “immoral” foods and containers is the moralization of concretes that I have written about before. It is rampant in today’s culture and a major source of “virtue signaling.”

It is also condescending and phony, condescending because the signalers are convinced they are right and everyone else is wrong and phony because the signalers are playing at ethics without a clue as to what ethics really is.

Leaders of the intelligentsia, however, do or should know better, especially when they are spewing communist/fascist propaganda, such as: “the United States is systemically racist,” “recent state laws are election suppression,” and the favorite of all Marxists, “capitalism puts profits over people.”*

Such signals as these are either false (the first and third) or highly questionable without further investigation (the second). And all, in contrast to true moral values and virtues, are political catchphrases used as virtue signals to intimidate any opponent into thinking he or she is immoral.**

For business leaders to cite and promote them is not just gutless compromise of the principles of individual rights and capitalism, but their actions bring up 1932 Germany (1, 2) when twenty-two business leaders urged President von Hindenburg (who some said was senile) to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.

The group that today’s business leaders are sucking up to is the communist/fascist left and they, the business leaders, apparently think they will be protected when the left finally takes over the US government. Think again, business leaders, and do your homework about what happened to business leaders in the USSR and Nazi Germany.

Business ethics does not differ from general ethics, as moral values and virtues are broad enough to cover all applied fields. Business leaders, therefore, need to practice Rand’s virtues. Justice is particularly relevant to business ethics and virtue signaling because it means judging each individual person according to the moral standards of honesty, courage, integrity, independence, and productive work and treating each person by his or her conformity to those standards. It does not mean judging one by membership in a group, class, race, or by sex or sexual orientation (i.e., social justice). Individual justice in society means abiding by the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights and treating everyone equally, regardless of group, class, race, sex, or sexual orientation.

All virtue signaling is manifestly unjust because it is a pretension to ethics that does not treat each individual fairly or equally. At root it is collectivist. To some virtue signaling may be a psychological problem, which means they want to be liked, but for the virtue-signaling leaders, especially our business leaders, it puts us on a dangerous path to dictatorship—as in one-party rule, show trials or worse, expropriation of private property, and censorship.

Are we there yet, business leaders?

You and many others in the intelligentsia have become true believers, to borrow Eric Hoffer’s words on mass movements. You seem to be seeking, in your desperate and foolish virtue signaling, to identify with the left’s holy cause (1, p. 12; 2).

Hoffer has many phrases to describe the true believer, but here is a choice one (p. 62): each individual member of the movement “must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness . . .  by the complete assimilation of the individual into a collective body.”

It means conformity to the herd.

In the late nineteenth century an advertising client asked his agent if he had any good ideas for ads. The agent replied, “Try honesty for a change!”

Altering this advice a bit, my suggestion to you, dear business leaders, is to try a genuinely virtuous behavior for a change—especially one of honesty, courage, integrity, independence, justice, and productive work.

A virtuous character is not a signal. It is a way of life.


* The intelligentsia does far worse. Cancel culture, according to David Horowitz, is tantamount to Nazi book burning and should be called what it is. And most or all of today’s leftist leaders are bigoted racists. Their intimidation tactics are right out of the Nazi playbook. Ominous parallels? The problem with conservatives, says Horowitz, is that they want to “play patty cake with the devil.”

** Racism, as Shelby Steele has demonstrated (1, 2), effectively ended in the 1960s with desegregation. What we have now is systemic white guilt. Issues of election irregularities or fraud are factual issues that need to be thoroughly examined, not evaded. And under capitalism, profits are earned through customer satisfaction. They are not deductions from the wages of workers; wages are deductions from profits (1, 2).