Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

90 Edward S. Ragsdale
Here it is necessary to consider the historical and intellectual context of
Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology was born as a protest against the elementaristic,
mechanistic, and reductive explanations of early psychology. This
traditional viewpoint – which largely persists today – may be rightly called
nihilistic where it relativises away the human capacity for truth and value. Where
psychology denies any genuine motivation for truth or value, and looks ultimately
to forces of blind contingency (e.g., chance genetic mutation, conditioning by
spatial or temporal contiguity) to explain order and apparent fittingness in experience,
the result is nihilism. The course of Western intellectual history seems
here to recapitulate the dialectic of extremes described in Madhyamika
Buddhism, where early faith in absolute truth and categorical values, grounded in
Judeo-Christian religion, came to be eclipsed by an equally absolute rejection of
a valid or objective basis for truth and virtue, based upon a new set of myths given
the imprimatur of science. Neither pole of the dialectic recognizes relationality as
a middle way that avoids the absolutizing blindness of each. As Asch notes, both
viewpoints agree that the “sole alternatives” are between themselves alone.
Neither do they see that the grains of truth within each extreme become sensible
only in the context of this middle way of relationality.
Enter Gestalt psychology. Recognizing both the logical inconsistency (e.g.,
Köhler, 1938/1966, 1944/1971) and the “relativistic defeatism” (Köhler,
1938/1966, p. 74) of scientific nihilism, it offers a vision and a program of empirical
study to redress this scientific prejudice. Realizing that “science can have no
more weight and sense than it itself attributes to human insight by which it is produced”
(Köhler, 1938/1966, p. 38), it set about to reacquaint us with the human
capacity for insight and value. It invites us to consider the essential order in nature
and experience, based not on self-existing absolutes, but on the dynamics of relationality
and self-organization. In uncovering a basis for objective truth and valid
value, it offers an antidote to scientific nihilism, whose deconstruction of reality
and experience left us adrift in a world without indwelling order, without beacons
of truth and value even to strive for.
Given this historical context and moral priority, it is not surprising that
Gestalt might tilt toward the side of realism or absolutism: not so much in advancing
notions of absolute or uncompounded truth, but in overlooking reification of
relational patterns themselves. While representing a greater level of truth than the
views it sought to correct, it may not have fully confronted the implications of its
own message of relationality. Instead it focused upon the need to clarify the case
for valid establishment of truth and value, in an age in which these are systematically,
if illogically, negated. Further deconstruction of implicit absolutism would
seem impossible without first making room for the human capacity for truth that
would endure it.
The situation for Gestalt psychology may not be entirely different from that of
early Tibetan Buddhism, when the founder of its Gelupka School, Tsong Khapa,