Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

The Anthropological Fallacy

The Anthropological Fallacy

The anthropological fallacy is Giegerich’s name for “the confounding of psychology with anthropology” — the assumption that the soul is an attribute of persons, something they have, something located in them, and therefore something that psychology can study as one would study any other feature of human beings (Giegerich 2020, p. 133).

The fallacy has a philosophical pedigree. Kant split the soul into two: the bestimmendes Selbst (determining self), which could never be the object of scientific investigation, and the bestimmbares Selbst (determinable self), which alone was psychology’s subject. “In this way, the psyche is relegated to an ontologically secondary status… it is given no more than the status of an epiphenomenon… as logically it is not credited with the status of a substance in its own right” (Giegerich 2020, p. 133). The motive, Giegerich suspects, is egoic: a soul positivized as an attribute of persons can be possessed, managed, clinically addressed. A soul that is its own substance cannot.

The corrective is what Giegerich calls the psychological difference — the distinction between the human being and the soul. Psychology is not the study of people’s psychologies; it is the study of the soul’s self-relation, its “absolute-negative interiorization,” its logical life. Hillman’s archetypal-psychology-charter, Giegerich argues, remains within the fallacy to the extent that it keeps “the idea of a ‘being’ or ‘personality’ as the reference point and positive substrate of psychology” (Giegerich 2020, p. 133).

Relationships

Primary sources