Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 73
its parts.” A whole – be it percept or concept, value or belief – is not a mere
summation of component parts. The organization and internal structure of those
parts is crucial in constituting the whole. Likewise, parts should not be viewed as
independent units, since their nature or role is shaped by the function they play in
completing the whole.
The Gestalt psychologists Karl Duncker and Solomon Asch applied this
thinking to better understand value experience and value diversity. The valuation
of a particular practice cannot be understood without reference to the context of
the whole situation within which it acquires its particular meaning. Neither absolutism
nor relativism may be sufficiently mindful of the role of situational context
in shaping meaning and value. The Gestalt view of relational determination
provides an alternative to some basic assumptions common to both.
Let us review traditional Western thinking about values and consider the
contrasting Gestalt viewpoint. As far as ethics and values go, societies have traditionally
embraced some form of absolutism. In the West, the Judeo-Christian ethic
has predominated. Such (deontological) approaches lay out moral absolutes –
laws, rules, or commandments with which to decide categorically whether a given
act is good or bad. Their moral dualism depicts those categories as ultimate and
unconditional. Such views may predispose their adherents to attitudes of condescension
toward those with conflicting views, who may be seen as ethically
immature, or less than fully human, or evil.
Our increasing exposure to diverse and conflicting moral codes, and a growing
scientific skepticism concerning the possibility of objective value generally,
has raised doubts about absolutism, and has produced a reaction against it, in the
form of ethical relativism. Relativism denies “that there are any fixed principles
of value in human relations and [asserts] that these are historically conditioned or
relative to the society” (Asch, 1952, p. 367). This view has come to dominate
psychology and the social sciences, including the new postmodern theories.
There are some problems with relativism. For one thing, its claim of basic
value differences implies there are fundamental, presumably irreconcilable divisions
that cleave humanity. For another, it weakens the idea that our moral values
have any objective sensibility or valid basis. Here relativism appears at least to
flirt with, if not succumb to, nihilism.
In 1939, Karl Duncker published a critique of ethical relativism. He began
with the unstartling fact that values tend to differ and change. Beliefs and practices
deemed ethical by one group may be scorned by another. Upon this basis
some conclude in favor of ethical relativism, “there is nothing invariable within
the psychological content of morality” (p. 39). But value conflict does not in itself
prove relativism. Duncker identified a critical but previously unacknowledged
assumption of relativism, one now embraced by philosophy (see Brandt, 1961,
1967; Frankena, 1973; Ragsdale, 1985; also Ellis, 1992). To fulfill the demands
of relativism’s basic thesis, descriptive relativism, an object or situation that