Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

72 Edward S. Ragsdale
This relational approach has echoes of Mahayana Buddhism, in particular
the Madhyamika, or “Middle Way” school founded by Nagarjuna near the beginning
of the Common Era. Madhyamika’s central teaching is the relational interdependence
of all phenomena. This principle serves as an antidote to the habitual
tendency to impute independent existence to persons and things. Both Gestalt
theory and Buddhism view reality and experience as relational facts, and both
view absolutism and relativism (cf. nihilism) as mistaken departures from relational
understanding. Buddhism may be further helpful in revealing the full measure
of this relationality, and in clarifying the moral significance relational
understanding may hold. I hope that the benefits of mutual illumination of one
viewpoint in light of the other might offset the obvious risks of comparing traditions
so widely separated by time, culture, and institutional nature.
Gestalt Psychology
Let us first consider Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology was founded in
Germany in 1912 by Max Wertheimer, who joined with Kurt Koffka and
Wolfgang Köhler to build a scientific psychology relevant to human experience
and respectful of the human capacity for insight and value. Gestalt theorists maintained
faith in the unity of science, seeking to reveal the ultimate compatibility of
mental and physical realms. They rejected the standard model – common to both
introspectionism and behaviorism – of reducing mental events to atomistic and
mechanistic processes in mind or body, which entails a relativism of thought and
value. Rejecting traditional assumptions of elementarism, mechanism, and reductionism,
Gestalt psychologists developed a field approach for psychology, to
address problems in perception, cognition, interpersonal relations, and value.
A few words should be said about Köhler’s (1938/1966, 1944/1971, 1947,
1959, 1969) work on the psychophysical foundations of value, and the role – in
mind and body – of invariant dynamics as a third principle of causation beyond
heredity and learning. Köhler expanded psychology’s common view of value as a
subjectively imposed, ego-driven product of the exigencies of mutation or conditioning,
to reveal it as a fact of nature that is neither ego-bound nor utterly dependent
on the contingencies of genetics or learning (see also Köhler, 1950/1961).
Value experience may depend substantially upon processes of invariant dynamics
found throughout nature (see also Henle, 1977, 1985; Ragsdale, 1999). If so,
reductive and relativistic explanations will not suffice. While this view invites
comparison to Buddhist teachings concerning the uncreated mind, that is not a
goal of the present work.
Let us narrow our focus to one aspect of the wider view: that of the relational
determination of meaning and value. Gestalt psychology’s relational viewpoint is
reflected in Köhler’s famous statement “the whole is different from the sum of