Psychology, Philosophy, and Wisdom

Written by Tammie Byram Fowles, PhD, LISW-CP

Interview with Dr. Stephen Palmquist, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong Baptist University

Tammie: What led you to study and teach philosophy?

Stephen: A complete answer to this question would occupy a whole book--or at least a lengthy chapter. I'll give you an abbreviated version, but I warn you, even in the form of a "nutshell" it's not going to be short!

Before going to college, I had never thought of studying or teaching philosophy. During the first year of my B.A., many new friends told me they thought I would make a good pastor. With this in mind, I decided to major in Religious Studies. From the middle of my junior year until the end of my senior year, I also served as a part-time youth minister in a local church. Seeing how churches work from the inside made me think twice about my original plan. After graduating, I realized that there were only a handful of occasions when I really enjoyed being a youth minister and those were the few times when one of the youth had an "aha" experience while talking with me. It then struck me that learning about and encouraging others to have such experiences was (is) my true calling. On the assumption that university students are much more open to having such experiences than the average church-goer, and knowing that in any case "church politics" can often work against those who tend to stimulate such experiences, I decided to set a new goal of becoming a university professor.

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While I was serving as youth minister, I also took two classes, called "Contemporary Marriage" and "Love and Sex in Contemporary Society", which aroused my interest in this topic. The fact that I was newly married when I took these classes made them especially relevant. Due to my utter disagreement with the theories of love endorsed by the teacher of the former class, I failed the first test. But after an exchange of lengthy letters debating the quality of my (essay) answer to the main test question, the teacher agreed to allow me to skip all further tests in his class, including the final exam, and to write one long (40-page) paper instead. I ended up extending that project through the following summer and writing over 100 pages on the topic "Understanding Love".

My college education was so fulfilling that I felt ready to live a life of learning without going through any additional formal education. However, I knew I could not get a job as a university teacher without having a higher degree, so I applied to do a doctorate at Oxford. I chose Oxford not because of its reputation (which I think is largely over-rated), but for three very specific reasons: students can go directly from a B.A. to a doctorate without first obtaining a Masters; students are not required to attend any classes, do any coursework, or take any written exams; and one's degree is based entirely on the quality of a written dissertation. I wanted to develop and perfect my ideas on love without being distracted by other requirements, so when I found out about the Oxford system, I thought "I might as well get a degree while I'm at it!" Fortunately, I was accepted by the Faculty of Theology.

I chose Theology because I had been a Religious Studies major in college and because the only philosophy class I had taken as an undergraduate was a required Introduction class that was extremely unenlightening--so much so that I had not yet realized that my own interest in what I now call "insight" was slowly transforming me into a philosopher. No sooner had my first supervisor read the paper I had previously written on love than he informed me of a major problem: my theory of love was based on a specific theory of human nature, yet I had largely ignored a 2500 year tradition of writing on the latter subject. When I asked what that tradition was, my supervisor answered: "philosophy".

In response to this revelation, I spent my first year at Oxford reading the original writings of 25 major western philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Of all the philosophers I read, only Kant seemed to express the kind of balanced and humble point of view I believed was correct. But when I began reading the secondary literature on Kant, I was shocked to discover that other readers did not think Kant was saying what I understood him to be saying. By the end of my third year, when my thesis was already two-thirds written, I decided the issues relating to Kant were so important that they had to be dealt with first. So, much to my supervisor's surprise, I changed my topic to Kant, and put love-and-human-nature on the back burner indefinitely.

By the end of my seven years in Oxford, I was convinced (thanks to my studies of Kant) that I am a philosopher and that teaching philosophy would be the best way for me to fulfill my calling to encourage others to learn to have insights for themselves. Ironically, I had no degree in philosophy and had only ever taken one philosophy class. The odds were against me. But Providence smiled upon me at just the right time, and I was offered an ideal position teaching in a Religion and Philosophy Department at a university in Hong Kong, where I still am twelve years later.

Tammie: You coined a new term, "philopsychy." What does this mean and how might it better serve us?

Stephen: The word "philopsychy" is simply a combination of the first half of the words "philosophy" and "psychology". The word "philo" means "love" in Greek, and "psychy" means "soul". So "philopsychy" means "love of the soul" or "soul-loving".

I coined the word for two reasons. First, I noticed a significant degree of overlap between the interests of some philosophers and some psychologists--namely, those in both disciplines who view their scholarship as a means of increasing self-knowledge. The second reason is that many philosophers and psychologists practice their discipline in ways that actually work against the ancient "know thyself" maxim. In the twentieth century we have witnessed the strange phenomenon of philosophers (literally "wisdom-lovers") who no longer believe in "wisdom" and psychologists (literally "ones who study the soul") who no longer believe human beings have a "soul". Instead, the former see their task as nothing more than (for example) performing logical analysis on word usage, while the latter see their task as nothing more than (for example) observing people's behavior and assessing it in terms of empirical principles such as stimulus-and-response.

The new word is needed to enable the former type of philosophers and psychologists to distinguish themselves from those who do not believe in ideals such as wisdom-loving or soul-studying. It also has two secondary implications.

First, the word will prove to be especially useful to people like me, who find themselves interested in both philosophical and psychological methods of gaining self-awareness. Second, it can also be put to use by anyone who wishes to gain self-knowledge, even if they are not professional philosophers or psychologists.

Many (if not most) members of the Philopsychy Society, for example, fall into this category. There are scientists, scholars of religion, poets--you name it. Anyone who believes the path to self-awareness requires "care for the soul" (one's own and others') and is committed to developing a deeper understanding of how this works can be referred to as a "philopsycher".