A Note on Mary Whiton Calkins's Psychology-Philosophy Distinction

Abstract

one of the most significant developments in the history of science in the United States is the emergence of psychology as a distinct academic discipline. Until the early twentieth century, psychology courses were usually taught in philosophy departments (Campbell 39; Kuklick 154–56; Pickren and Rutherford 3–10). Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) was among the philosopher-psychologists who played a pivotal role in separating the two disciplines. However, in contrast to her male colleagues, such as G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) and John Dewey (1859–1952), Calkins's contributions to both philosophy and psychology are decidedly less known. This paper recaptures Calkins's vision for a clear distinction between psychology and philosophy in relation to her concept of the self, a concept central to both her psychological and philosophical work. It explores possible tensions in Calkins's effort to consistently uphold the distinction she drew between psychology and philosophy, specifically with respect to her treatment of the psychological self as both subject, or I, and object, or Me. These tensions, in turn, might evoke important questions about the relationship between the two disciplines today.Calkins studied at Harvard under William James (1842–1910), George Palmer (1842–1933), Josiah Royce (1855–1916), and Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916). She had come to Harvard because Wellesley College, where she was then teaching, recognized the growing importance of experimental psychology and the need to include a laboratory-based approach in its curriculum (R. Calkins, “Mary Whiton Calkins” 7). At the time, psychology was establishing itself as a scientific discipline in the United States, with James having founded the first psychological laboratory at Harvard in 1875.Calkins was an instructor of Greek at Wellesley at the time, following her master's degree in philosophy and classics from Smith College and a period of study in Greece. When the then Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley proposed that Calkins be offered a position in the department of “Mental Philosophy”—including both psychology and metaphysics—she accepted on the condition that she be allowed a year to study psychology in depth (R. Calkins, “Mary Whiton Calkins” 8–9). During her studies at Harvard, she founded the Wellesley Psychological Laboratory, the first psychology laboratory at an American women's college (Furumoto 351; Strunk 197–98; Taylor and Glasscock 46–47). Although she completed all of the work for the doctorate in psychology in 1895, Harvard denied the PhD due to her gender (Furumoto 346).Despite being denied her doctoral degree, Calkins continued to publish prolifically in both psychology and philosophy. In recognition of her contributions, she was elected the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and later, in 1918, of the American Philosophical Association (Furumoto 354; Zedler 104). Central to Calkins's work in both fields was the concept of the self, or person—terms that she used interchangeably. Although the self was central to both her psychology and her philosophy, Calkins never failed to emphasize the distinction between the psychological concept of self and the philosophical concept of self. She formulates this distinction in one of her articles as follows: At the outset it must be insisted that any conception of the self is taken over, by philosophy, from psychology conceived as doctrine of conscious selves. This view of the relation of philosophy to the psychology of selves need not obscure the difference between the two methods of treatment. . . . But to the end he [the philosopher] must include in his concept of self essentially what the psychologist should mean by the term. (M. Calkins, “Self and Soul” 273)As we can see, Calkins argued both for the distinction and the conceptual primacy of the psychological concept of self, from the philosophical concept of self. To understand her position and the possible challenges in upholding it, we may best start with a basic understanding of Calkins's psychological concept of self. In A First Book in Psychology, Calkins wrote: “[P]sychology is most naturally, consistently, and effectively treated as a study of conscious selves in relation to other selves and to external objects” (vii). She argued that the psychological self is a scientific fact, stressing that selves are as inherent to observation as are “qualities, things, moments, and events” (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 491). She goes on: In truth, if one admit, as one must, that ‘selves’ are as obvious a category as ‘things’ in every-day experience, then a science of selves must be possible, for science is distinguished from the unreflective consciousness only by its critical and systematic method, so that every object of ordinary observation is ipso facto an object for science. (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 492)Calkins maintained that we may distinguish scientific facts on the basis of three criteria: “(1) [I]t is one-of-many; (2) always a dependent bit of reality, never the self-dependent whole; and (3) it is taken for granted or assumed, without question of the nature of its reality or of its own relation to the whole-of-reality” (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 491). The psychological self satisfies all these criteria, allowing it to be critically observed and classified “on the basis of their relation with each other and with facts of every other order” (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 491).Calkins further argued that critical observation of the self as psychological or scientific fact occurs in introspection. She held steadfastly to James's claim that in psychology, “introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always,” and she consistently defended introspection as the fundamental method of psychology (M. Calkins, First Book 6; James, Principles 185). Calkins described introspection as asking oneself questions like “How do I actually feel?” and “What do I mean when I say that I perceive, remember, believe?” (M. Calkins, Introduction 9). She admitted that answers to these questions are not infallible, as introspection was vulnerable to James's “psychologist fallacy,” that is, “the error of supposing that my present consciousness of a certain situation must exactly resemble my past experience of the same situation” (M. Calkins, Introduction 10). In order to avoid the dangers of the psychologist's fallacy, the introspecting subject must be trained, and introspection may be supplemented by psychological experiment, in which the studied facts are to be repeated, isolated, and varied at will (M. Calkins, Introduction 10). But however useful, Calkins emphasized that psychological experiment may only “supplement and strengthen introspection” because psychological experiment can only deal with the physical stimulation of psychic facts, and never with the psychic fact itself (M. Calkins, Introduction 11).James's strong influence on Calkins was not limited to her methodological considerations, but extended to the premise of her psychological approach, which is that “consciousness does not occur impersonally” (M. Calkins, First Book 1; Bella 71–72). Calkins emphasized that “consciousness . . . always is a somebody-being-conscious. There is never perception without a somebody who perceives, and there never is thinking unless some one thinks” (M. Calkins, First Book 1). She acknowledged in her autobiography that this statement is greatly inspired by the chapter “The Stream of Consciousness” in James's The Principles of Psychology, in which he famously claimed “whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like” and proceeded to emphasize that the first characteristic of thought is that it belongs to a personal consciousness (James, Principles 226; M. Calkins, “Autobiography” 31). It is Calkins's contention that James did not fully acknowledge the consequences of this statement by failing to recognize the self as the basic fact of psychology (M. Calkins, Introduction 445–46; M. Calkins, “Reconciliation” 65). In the terms of Michela Bella, “the basal fact of psychology is for Calkins the ‘conscious self,’ whereas, for James, it was the unity of ‘each passing wave or field of consciousness’” (78).Now that we have a basic understanding of Calkins's psychological concept of the self, we can begin to explore an issue that may challenge her proposed distinction between the psychological and philosophical concept of self, especially given the conceptual primacy she assigns to the former. Following her psychological premise that consciousness does not occur impersonally, Calkins uses introspection to analyze how all mental processes can be described as a self in relation to an environment. In one of her last writings, she provides a summary of these descriptions: In recognition, for example, I am conscious of myself as persisting, as the same self who earlier perceived this same object; in rebellious volition I individualize myself, set myself up against other selves, realize myself as unique. In feeling and perceiving I am conscious of myself as passively related to my environment, whereas in willing and in affirming I am aware of myself as in active, creative relation to surrounding objects. (M. Calkins, “Philosophic ‘Credo’” 202)Calkins believed descriptions such as these indicate how the self “is essential to the adequate description of our actual experience” (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 113). She stated that other psychological systems, such as the structuralism of Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927) and the functionalism of Hall and Dewey, do use the first-person singular pronoun “I” or the first-person singular reflexive pronoun “myself” in their psychological descriptions, but fail to acknowledge the self by referring to consciousness as “contents,” “processes,” or “functions” (M. Calkins, “Reconciliation” 78–79).It is noteworthy that in Calkins's own description above, the self is referred to both in the first-person singular pronoun and the first-person singular reflexive pronoun. This raises the question of whether Calkins's psychological approach distinguishes between these two, in the sense in that, for example, her mentor James makes a distinction between the “I” and the “empirical Me” (James, Principles 291; James, Psychology: Briefer Course 43–62; Bordogna 514–17). In Psychology: Briefer Course, James names the experiencing I, “the self as knower,” and the empirical Me, “the self as known,” stressing that “the Me” is the person's awareness of its personal existence, but that it is always “I who is aware” (43–62, 174).The question of the distinction between the I and the Me is also raised by a contemporary of Calkins, Josephine Nash Curtis (1889–1941), in her critical examination of Calkins's self-psychology. Curtis had been a student of Calkins at Wellesley who then pursued her doctoral work with Titchener at Cornell. In her examination of Calkins's psychology, Curtis writes that James's distinction between the self as knower and the self as known is implied throughout Calkins's psychology. To prove her point, she takes a passage from Calkins's A First Book in Psychology, which states: A person or an impersonal fact, to which the self is related, is called its object—that of which it is conscious. . . . I am always . . . conscious of the private personal object, myself. . . . There are certain externalized objects, in particular my body, of which I am so persistently and attentively conscious that I often seem to regard them as part of myself. And finally, pre-eminent among the objects of my environment, are the other selves. (3–5)Curtis argued that if self-psychology is to study both selves and the self as “private personal object,” that is, “myself,” the expectation is that the distinction between the two is made explicit and held consistently, “so that we might know whether we are talking of selves, or of selves as objects of themselves at the moment” (Curtis 85). As a matter of fact, Calkins was aware of the need for this transparency from her early work on. In her first articles on psychology as science of selves, she wrote: It is true that the self-as-fact-for-science is a less artificial and secondary construction than the mere content-of-consciousness, but none the less it is itself ‘unreal,’ in the sense that it is a ‘remodeled’ form of intimately real immediate experience. (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 497)Calkins emphasized that the self as scientific fact is a “‘remodeled’ form of intimately real immediate experience,” that is, the first-person experience that is referred to with the first-person singular pronoun. She stressed that “scientific study is always, indeed, reflective observation and is never immediate experience,” and scientific facts are always “a remodeling of reality, even if, referring to her other Harvard mentor Hugo Münsterberg's “Psychology and History,” the science is ‘history’ and its facts ‘subjective will-attitudes’ or ‘selves’” (M. Calkins, “Psychology as Science” 497). If psychology studied the self as scientific fact, then it was a study of the self as reflected on, that is, of what we would refer to with the first-person singular reflexive pronoun, “myself.”However, this leaves the role of the self in “intimately real immediate experience” unexplained, which, as Curtis rightly stressed, is unsatisfactory with respect to the fact that it is implied in Calkins's psychological descriptions. If consciousness never occurs impersonally, in the sense that “I am always . . . conscious of the private personal object, myself,” it was not simply the ’Me’ that was examined in Calkins's psychology as science of selves, but the ‘Me as reflected on by the I’ (M. Calkins, First Book 3–5).By the time of A First Book, around 1910, Calkins acknowledged that her distinction between the I and the Me was unclear. She noted, however: It must be pointed out that certain real difficulties attend this classification of the self's objects. There is, first, the difficulty of conceiving the self as both subject and object. And there is, second, the difficulty involved in conceiving the ‘thing,’ the externalized object, as independent of all selves, when yet the self is related to it and conscious of it. But both these are difficulties only for the metaphysician. The psychologist who, like every scientist, must accept certain facts, without looking for their ultimate explanation, rests in the first case on the immediate certainty that I am conscious of myself. (M. Calkins, First Book 5)Calkins strongly believed that the inherent ambiguity between the I and the Me, or, “the difficulty of conceiving the self as both subject and object,” was a philosophical rather than a psychological problem. With “the metaphysician,” Calkins meant the philosopher, as she stated, “unambiguously that by ‘philosophy’ I mean ‘metaphysics’” (M. Calkins, “Philosophic ‘Credo’” 199). On multiple occasions in her work, Calkins repeated this effort to distinguish psychological subject matter from philosophical subject matter (M. Calkins, Introduction 4; M. Calkins, Persistent Problems 3–4; M. Calkins, “Self in Scientific Psychology” 499–500; Kampen). She stressed that metaphysics was “the attempted study of the self-dependent whole of reality, or of partial realities as related to this fundamental whole” (M. Calkins, Introduction 4). By contrast, the sciences studied only parts of the self-dependent whole of reality, the scientific facts mentioned in section 1. Calkins emphasized that metaphysics and psychology should differ in their object of study, as it is the only positive criterion that sets philosophy apart from the sciences. The negative criterion, according to her, is that philosophy “does not seek and classify facts, but rather takes its materials ready-made from the sciences, simply reasoning about them and from them” (M. Calkins, Persistent Problems 4). If the negative criterion were the sole distinction, philosophy would not be a separate discipline, as it would merely become “the explanatory side of science” (M. Calkins, Persistent Problems 4).Thus, following Calkins, we must turn to her philosophy for an explanation of the relation between the I and the Me. Curtis thought the same, and points us to The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, in which Calkins admits to “the existence of another sort of knowledge, in which there is no recognition either of subject or of object—in which, rather, subject and object coalesce in the experience of my consciousness of myself, as knowing and thinking, feeling and willing” (M. Calkins, Persistent Problems 359; Curtis 86). In this passage, Calkins describes the experience of self-consciousness as an experience in which the I and the Me “coalesce” in the sense that the distinction between the two is no longer recognized. In other words, Calkins's philosophical concept of self admits no distinction between the self as knower and the self as known.This argument against the distinction between the I and the Me fits with the metaphysical system Calkins defends throughout her life. This system is called absolute personalism, a monistic idealism in which reality “is one all-including (and accordingly complete) self of which all the lesser selves are genuine and identical parts, or members” (M. Calkins, “Philosophic ‘Credo’” 209; McDaniel 574). Considering that, for Calkins, all is one, all is personal and all is mental, it makes sense to argue against the distinction between subject and object on a metaphysical level, especially in relation to knowledge of the self.However, the manner in which Calkins formulates the coalescence of subject and object, stating “in the experience of my consciousness of myself,” leaves one to wonder about the status of this knowledge (M. Calkins, Persistent Problems 359). If the coalescing of subject and object is part of the experience of self-consciousness, does it not belong to the “the immediate certainty that I am conscious of myself,” that is, a certainty that lies at the basis of psychology as a science of selves (M. Calkins, First Book 5)? If we recall the exposition of Calkins's self-psychology given in the first paragraph of this paper, specifically Calkins's claim that the philosopher “must include in his concept of self essentially what the psychologist should mean by the term,” this question becomes even more pressing (M. Calkins, “Self and Soul” 273). To summarize, Calkins maintained that the difficulty in explicating the I–Me relation was philosophical rather than psychological. Yet her further claim that the coalescence of subject and object belongs to the experience of self-consciousness invites the question of whether the difficulty might not instead fall within the scope of psychology, particularly in light of her insistence that the philosopher “must include in his concept of self essentially what the psychologist should mean by the term” (M. Calkins, “Self and Soul,” 273). Taken together, these considerations reveal both Calkins's effort to draw a boundary between philosophy and psychology and the internal tensions that call that distinction into question.As one of the first prominent American philosopher-psychologists, Calkins made an effort to establish psychology as a genuine science and defend philosophy as an independent discipline. In this paper, I explored a potential tension Calkins faced in sustaining her distinction between psychology and philosophy. This tension concerned her difficulty of distinguishing between the self as subject—I—and the self as object—Me—in her psychological descriptions. Calkins aimed to solve this difficulty by arguing that the I-Me question belonged to philosophy. Yet the way in which Calkins formulated the philosophical argument for t

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