The Conception of Man as a Starting Point

In this section, a discussion about some conceptions that exist about what man is and his determinations. All this in order to put in its proper terms the central problem that should animate any notion of psychology, which is permeated, necessarily, by an ontological proposal of what man is. This definition is the essence that will make it possible to understand the interrelations between what happens in reality, consciousness and the spirit of individuals.

Index

1. Some conceptions about man
2. Towards a unitary vision of the science of man
3. Morality and some psychological signs
4. The idea of ​​progress
5. A closer approach to the science of man and psychology
6. The role of aesthetics and the category of meaning
7. Freud and his contribution
8. The importance of Martin Buber
9. Towards a psychological methodology with a human sense

For the development of this subsection and those that follow in this section, we have relied on the book of Becker (1993), unless otherwise cited, it is all drawn from a helpful reading of this Author. Let's see, in the first instance, the different meanings and approaches that exist around what man is.

Since the time of the Greeks there have been efforts to constitute a science of man. A science that is at the service of man. This intention was interrupted during medieval times, in which Providence, that is God, played the role that made possible the explanation of the phenomena that affected men (Becker, 1993). We believe that this fact had difficult consequences for the inhabitants of that time as the possibility of fears, anguish, fears, prejudices, etc., appeared more easily.

In the Middle Ages, societies were based on power, privilege, tyranny, coercion, benevolent paternalism, with social movements that quickly aborted. In parallel, there was a psychological notion of what the Universe was. In this conception, the Earth occupied a secondary place, inasmuch as it was separated from God. At best, Earth was a stepping stone to salvation. In that sense, and only in that sense, one can understand the divine punishment towards Adam and Eve, who commit original sin, they were incarnated and brought to Earth to seek their salvation. That is why the individuals of medieval times felt anguished and perceived a state of decadence and ruin in the world that would lead to its destruction.

Note here the tragic side of the issue, since man had no capacity for rest as he lived overwhelmed with ideas that entailed, in the best of cases, punishment; and at worst, the destruction of humanity.
The Newtonian conception of the world helps to end this period of anguish. The mechanization of nature conceived by Newton made possible the bypassing of God as the primary and regulating order of the Universe, to leave that role to man. From this moment, and in the best of scenarios, God continues to direct the Universe but in a regular and legal way, and not cataclysmic and in an angry and wrathful way.

Descartes continued with this line by stating that man differed from animals by having the capacity for reason and this was his pride and represented his freedom. However, the Newtonian influence was eminently intellectual. Unlike medieval conceptions that had broad social institutional support, the new rationalism of The Enlightenment was built on a society in decline, with social unrest and institutional changes (Becker, 1993). Here we must highlight the influence of the social aspect on the behavior of individuals. In addition to this, it must be noted that, although the religious factor was strong, and was imposed on the conscience of the people, they in any way stood up and fought for what they believed was fair. The search of man at that time, as now, consisted in the desire for order, social harmony and happiness. This search only served the intellectuals and not the society.

A subjective element of cardinal importance is pride, and the questions asked here were the following: What should a person be proud of? Of discoveries that introduce pests? Of the epidemics and famines that are generated with these discoveries? If we think about the pride of the medieval knight it may sound ridiculous to us, although socially he played a role. Nowadays, pride has a new mystique that has made possible the performance of man with dignity in more complex and essential issues than those that were played in the Middle Ages.

The problem of the science of man remains that of a unitary vision that reconciles science with the great plans of human life. Descartes was one of the first to offer a unitary system, as was Leibniz. In his works, the concepts of system, unity, interrelation, were cause for concern.

Saint-Pierre can be considered as the initiator of the science of man insofar as his claim was to achieve human well-being through his active participation. This participation is carried out through social protest against a science divorced from human affairs, that is, from the natural or physical sciences; Diderot made a similar point. Saint-Pierre was among the first to argue that man should consciously plan a better future; he advocated for the founding of a political academy and an ethics academy to influence both levels; he criticized the excessive evaluation of the physical sciences; he also sanctioned the utilitarianism of the mathematical and physical sciences for being cut off from the lives of men.

The Encyclopedia also protested against Newtonian science and raised the need for man to be the center from which all sciences should radiate. For the encyclopedists, Newtonism distorted the aesthetic sensibilities of the time. Diderot, on his part, argued that science should focus on man and the different sciences should be considered in relation to him and his needs.

This concentration of the sciences in man was a more important revolution than that of the Renaissance. In this way he returned, albeit in a different sense, to a true Athenian-type exaltation of man.

For Kant the problem was basically a moral one; the same as for Rousseau who believed in reason. He points out that science is frivolous insofar as it is not in the hands of talented and responsible people, at the service of the people. For Rousseau science only made sense if it was at the service of virtue and morality; knowledge should support the social order. For both Rousseau, Leibniz and Kant the problem of science was that it was divorced from life, from the daily occurrence of the human being.

After medieval times, the world was raised with the persistent contradiction between good and evil. How was it possible that if nature was beautiful, there were problems, there were evils? This led to a search for natural laws that man had to obey, many of which were thought to be God's gifts to man. However, man continued to seek to have a world centered on man and not on God, an issue that would make it possible to get rid of the vagaries of nature.

The previous paragraphs suggest the search for new meanings in nature. When relating this one with the man it was asked if this one had a depraved internal nature; Locke asked if God allowed this situation, and Pascal added why not everything was natural, including customs. Here a major psychological problem arises: if customs are bad, who is to blame: are they, or is it the fault of the man who is disharmonized?

Pope proposed that man could intervene between customs and morals and decided that there was no evil in the world that man could or should modify. The phrase "what is, is good" reflects a deep anguish for morality. And he hints at how these were legitimate concerns of human beings.

The Enlightenment was a time dedicated to the simplification and standardization of thought and life, as Lovejoy points out. The complacency and confidence of the rationalism of the Enlightenment led to passive meaning to the investigation of nature through the simple development of reason.

Rousseau and Hume did not accept the intellectual fashion reigning since the 16th century and prevailing during the 18th century. The first criticized passivity, while Hume showed that what happens in nature cannot really be known. At the same time, Hume pointed out that our perceptions and feelings are subjective and uncritical, separate from what happens in the external world; it destroyed the naive rationalist reliance on the investigation of nature to seek moral precepts (Becker, 1993).

Hume, faced with the moral pragmatism that had been imposed in his time, adopts the following thesis: “Whatever it is, is good”, that is, “whatever it is, it is relatively good because it is relatively Useful". This author considered the possibility of studying the passions as any natural phenomenon. Here we are getting closer to the fusion between the human and the psychological.

Diderot placed man at the center of the physical world and saw that mechanistic science could not allow the supremacy of the moral and free man; he degraded mathematics by accusing it of falsifying nature and depriving bodies of their qualitative existence; science should have a triple objective: existence, qualities and utility, and not only the mechanistic-quantitative aspect. Hume, Diderot, and Dewey posed the problem of how to be a total pragmatist and allow some sort of orderly social life. Dewey spoke of a dichotomy between knowing and doing. These two notions, knowing and doing, play a vital role in psychology today.

Vico, self-considered as the Galileo-Newton of the human sciences, stated that the social world is the work of man and that the oldest layer of human culture is that of myths and poetry; for Vico the heart of human change is in the culturally created nature of human institutions; before Comte offered a theory about the progress of reason; Anticipating Diderot, he warned that the sciences should focus on man, especially the human mind as the creation of history. Vico pointed out with good sense elements for contemporary psychology. Complementary to this, Condillac and Helvetius gave an environmentalist explanation of human behavior, based on human character and perception (Becker, 1993). The central categories of psychology were beginning to be outlined in significant ways.

Rousseau outlined the law within human nature through the exaltation of a typical ideal "primitive" man, living in a "natural state." To do this, this author overcame the existing discrepancy between reason and action by making it analytically scientific discovering an ideal model on which the preaching of a new moral conduct. However, Rousseau, in apologizing for the primitive, was accused of using this idea in a romantic and simple way. However, what was not understood is that the idea was not used as a real fact, but as an idea that expressed a moral criticism. This criticism sought the conception of a new scientific moral form in which its types and ideals formed a new image of man. The search for all this would tend to form a man truly suitable for a free, egalitarian society, an autonomous, responsible, vigorous man.

Rousseau, with his concepts of the natural state and of the social contract, showed a society "as it can and should come to be"; it was an indirect critique of the present on which a manipulative science of man was based. For this author the science of man was a discipline whose basic task was to change society, so that it was a product of freedom and not of blind necessity, as Cassirer said.

Rousseau wanted man, instead of continually and blindly following his passions in the social sphere, to begin to exercise the free direction of human affairs; thus man would choose and create the kind of world in which he wanted to live. In this way, there was no longer any doubt that it was up to man in society to free himself, to go from the individual real to the socially possible.

The concepts of freedom, progress and the type of ideal are contributions that thinkers like Vico, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Saint-Pierre left us. This theoretical framework offers the essential lines for an analytical and active science of man; a critical, "projective", moral science and an anthropodic within the vision of man, potentially under his dominion.

Adam Smith, in addition to his remarkable contribution to economics, presented man as a whole, taking into account all his motivations, emphasized the feeling of empathy that held society together, underlined man's propensity to accumulate and obtain Profits; all this under the regulatory principle of justice.

Jeremy Bentham introduced a new element to the social science scene: he tried to unite the abstract social analysis with a direct pragmatic approach to the arid problems of the society of its epoch. Bentham had no respect for English law or legal and social fictions. As a follower of Hume, he respected the passions and not the abstractions of reason. For him, science could openly serve hedonism, transform itself into an art of social life.

Bentham and Stuart Mill believed that any moral science should give the individual the greatest possible options for changing social structures. Carlyle proposed a plan of complete social reconstruction that would be carried out by a charismatic elite who would cleanse the world with transcendental powers (Becker, 1993).

The French Revolution made possible the collapse of the main feudal institutions and cleared the way for the advent of industrial society. From this moment on, consumer goods were diversified and democracy expanded. At the same time, the social ills were less clear, while there was more social freedom and equality.

Saint-Simon got to the heart of the problem, warning that industrialization was desirable, that the new rearrangement of social classes was bad, that morality was relative and happiness was very important. At first, he trusted science, but later he criticized scientists, particularly mathematicians. This author brought together all the currents of thought prior to him in a new critical unit: he linked the approaches of the Enlightenment with the problems of industrial society, suggesting a new total social reconstruction: a secular community under the supreme guidance of a science of man in society.

Augusto Comte, a disciple of Saint-Simon, developed and expanded his master's thesis. Comte created positivism and tried to make it a complete system of morals, and not just a scientific and technical method for analyzing social facts. Comte announced a "Religion of Humanity" based on love: in a new community, sociology would be at the helm. service of the social order and would be used to promote the social interest and not the selfish private interests predominant. One of the main concerns of this author was to seek the replacement of medieval morality by a new moral and scientific synthesis. For Comte positivism means the subordination of politics to morality, where science is a demonstrated faith. The science of man in society, for Comte, is the central science to which all the others contribute and are peripheral, having the idea of ​​progress as a guiding principle; One of the permanent insistence in Comte's work refers to the problem of necessary analysis versus necessary synthesis (Becker, 1993).

Fourier desired a deductive science of man at the service of human pleasures, centered on the human personality, based on the reorganization of society and the creation of institutions new; he discovered the law of "passionate attraction"; change the problem of theodicy to an active anthropody; suggests the study of the functioning of human nature; it was based on the principle of absolute doubt of scientific doctrines. Like him, Fourier also pointed to issues that are relevant today for the study of human behavior.
All the theoretical development for the construction of a science of man during the nineteenth century could not obtain the success that was expected because these thinkers were not linked to the organizations or groups that could influence the modification of the state of things. That is why jobs, hopes, everyday fears, as well as institutions and vested interests, influenced this century.

Malthus did not believe in the idea of ​​progress (to say of Becker, the main idea of ​​the science of man), so he removed it from the realm of human application; he was opposed to all social change and, as is well known, to birth control.

Kant argued that man should only interpret history philosophically to discover the new moral order; he exalted the full development of individual powers, giving a basic value to the depths of the individual's subjectivity (Becker, 1993). This is very interesting since for the first time the need to study the essence of the problems that afflict the human being is glimpsed.

Hegel affirmed that "philosophy is theodicy" and that the history of thought can be interpreted to warn what will happen and what must happen, but not to see what man should do.
Herder maintained his anthropological analysis of concrete historical and cultural situations (Becker, 1993). This influenced the behavior of individuals.

Darwin revived the ideas of Malthus, justifying the existence of social classes and inequalities as a natural product of the struggle for life (Becker, 1993). This struggle resulted in states of anguish in the people.
Spencer was convinced that important changes in human development took place in the realm of the unconscious, where creative human intervention was impossible.

According to Becker, Marx was the last character in the Enlightenment who clung to the idea of ​​progress and believed that man could and should form himself; he argued that economic influences influence social beliefs; he updated Rousseau on the critique of human alienation, added knowledge of history, the social context of economic theory, and the activist example of the Revolution. Marx subordinated the active ideal element of social life, leaving aside religion and the social forces of human nature; Instead of the dualism of an ideal type with its idea of ​​progress and its active, man-centered orientation, it put all the weight of perfectibility and progress on the law of the class struggle.

Lester Ward brought together Enlightenment ideas about progress, education, human plasticity, the need for man-centered science; for him sociology is the science of the "social forces", of the feelings and desires of man that move the social world, as well as the psychic energy that works to satisfy them, in order to achieve the happiness; he sought to obtain the greatest pleasure with the least pain.

After Ward, in American sociology, came an academic trend, centered on the quantitative, factual, description and ordering of the facts regardless of the values.

For his part, Giddings believed that the function of society was to develop and nurture the higher types of human personality; he emphasized the need for ideals; although he sought to quantify the index that would verify progress.

The previous thinkers failed in the conformation of a science of man because a conceptual system was lacking, research was lacking, and the empirical was prioritized.

To understand the social forces that animate the action of individuals and that govern social phenomena, it was necessary to unify knowledge of sociology, psychiatry and existential phenomenology, as Hard outlined, adding the important role of the phenomenon of jealousy.

For Stuckenberg, social forces were economic, political, selfish, desire, affective, recreational, aesthetic, ethical, religious, and intellectual; Ratzenhofer added health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and justice; Small pointed out that if these social forces were classified, the laws of social interaction could be organized; for Ross the social forces that explained social groups were fear, hatred, herd instinct, and suggestion; These and other thinkers, then, saw that social forces and instincts dominated sociology and saw them in feelings, desires, geographic factors, instincts, interests, institutions, groups, people, desires, attitudes, etc.

The academic, descriptive search, alternative to experimental science, focused on the study of social forces, passions or desires of men. I study the latter that psychology would have to carry out.

This attempt broadened research topics that are currently being undertaken: case studies, analysis of organizations and communication for the masses, classes and their structure, mobility and social change, public opinion, the effects of mass media, the behavior of consumers, workers, voters, peasants, workers, etc. The difficulty, however, was that the problems became specialized, and the decentralization of sociology to man was lost.
In the notes that follow, an attempt will be made to answer the problem of human passions, of social forces, which move people to act as they do.

Wilhelm Wundt affirmed that the physical facts were different from the psychic ones, he emphasized in the cultural and historical studies of the development of the human ideas; for him the mind was an apperceptive mass that functioned on levels of superordinary ideas, and not of atomistic sensations; He studied popular psychology and noted that individual perceptions participated in the social formation of concepts, and that the individual was born with totalistic points of view; he began to link social and individual psychology; for Wundt the voluntary and subjective nature of human endeavor was very important.

Returning to the Germans, we have that they accepted the coexistence of institutions with theology; for them man, in the oriental way, was dwarfed by society, by nature, by history and by the cosmos.
Dilthey spoke of an inductive and computer method for the human sciences different from that of the natural sciences, prioritizing the values ​​of man.

Lotze gave great importance to the personality, for him the individual decision instead of the transcendental mystery is what is important; made the soul scientific; he tried to show the man in all his relationships; life was a category of personal fulfillment; for Lotze, poetry, art and religion formed one of nature's horizons.
Fichte understood that the soul of the individual was made up of social contents, and he spoke of a sameness in which the subject and the object are identical; e he interpreted the development of consciousness as a dialectic between subject and object.

Schleiermacher, trying to discover the value of religion from experience, was also able to speak of the spirit in social and subjective terms.

Baldwin showed how the purely symbolic level of human activity arises from the purely organic level of animal activity; Baldwin, along with Meinong and Husserl, understood that man was the only animal that possessed two types of objects, not just object-things like other animals, but unique object-symbols.
James, Royce, Dewey, Mead, and Cooley showed how spirit was a social development that reflected the outside world with which he came into contact; They affirmed that man builds his interior thanks to society and that they fill him with the material of culture.

For Baldwin the "I" is the feeling of being, it is rooted more in what is felt inside, in what is thought and imagined than in what is actually done; Mastery of the external world is achieved through memory, reflection, and judgment.

Regarding the relationship of the individual with the social system, Marx argued that the organism needs objects outside of itself to realize itself. These are found in the basic phenomenology of alienation. For Marx, alienation refers to the organism dominated by the object. This would be another way of expressing the modern problem of schizophrenic alienation.

According to Marx, alienation exists when man objectifies himself against abstract thought or symbols. Baldwin also discovered that the individual deals only with thought and not with the difficult world of things. Today we know that the schizophrenic strives to develop a feeling of the I-I that largely bases its development in opposition to the object-symbols and not to the object-things.

For Marx, his theory of alienation should apply to the situation of workers in factories, he warned that it was It is important for the man to have active control and to make a personal emotional investment in the products of his job. In production, the objects that man produces are not his, he produces them to earn a salary, they are a means and not an end. This alienates the individual from a world in which he should participate creatively. The world of personal creation is not that of the industrial worker. Therefore, by alienating his own products, the worker also alienates himself from the world. When the worker loses his powers because he automatically manufactures products alienated from his plans, he also loses communion with his fellow men. The annulment of the self is inescapable: as soon as the individual frees himself from the responsibility of the products that he makes, he is also released from the responsibility of the total sum of the products humans. When he does not participate in his own responsible powers, all objects in his field become alienated objects for which he is not morally responsible. This is the phenomenology of immorality that ranges from political corruption to the criminal.

Simmel combined an understanding of the phenomenology of individual development with a critique of industrial society, pointing out that there was a disposition of identity at the service of the fragmentation of roles in an urban society complex; he described what is understood as schizophrenic confusion in a world in which the individual has little or no dominance, and in which he does not participate; He showed how confused the new inhabitant of the cities was before the images, objects, sensations, that he could not control, order or interpret significantly; He warned that the individual integrates himself into the world by making appropriate transactions with his objects, and thus accumulates the contents of his culture, inside and outside his personality; this internal and external world, according to Simmel, is missing from the city dweller.

Fourier combined the aesthetic emphasis of the German idealists, the hedonism of Bentham, and the post-revolutionary social critique of the new society. His analysis was based on the study of passions, these could be: Kabbalistic passion, refers to the attraction of secrecy, mystery, the need to have a conviction and participate intimately in the rich experiences, the Kabbalistic spirit is "the true destiny of man" (Simmel also wrote in relation to the social role of the secret), in this passion complicity, intrigue and machinations play their part (myths, primitive rites, religion, manipulations on the stock market, war games atomic, etc.). The next passion was called compound, derived from the "senses and the soul", referring fundamentally to aesthetic satisfaction. In Dewey's words, it was about unifying sensory and cultural experience. Fourier called the final passion papillone (butterfly) or alternate, linking the other two and hating monotony, the tiring day of twelve or eight hours of work, seeks the variety in human occupations and in daily routine (here it can be exemplified with the war that offers mystery and secrecy, with the crisis, etc.).

Veblen showed how modern man takes his everyday cheap aesthetic from the trifles of conspicuous consumption, mixing his me and his body in easy maneuvers to obtain power (war, football, can be alternative and varied).

The point, then, is to create a postal society in which man creates his own meanings, free and varied, in which social forces are mastered, so that they achieve their happiness and further development full.
Marx showed how man is a puppet of the automatic functioning of his economic institutions. Veblen, Weber, and Wright Mills filled out Marx's ideological framework and brought it up to date. Weber and Veblen demonstrated how the institutions of society operate in complex and interrelated, how the economy sinks into a pattern of intertwined ideologies and fictions social. Mills' analysis raised how society fails when man does not submit his economic life to rational control, he knew that society can function as a gigantic meaning-making drama, which continues to advance of its own accord complex.

Let us now look at how aesthetics can also serve as ethics.

Dilthey is one of the first to use the characteristic category of life and human sciences and also of psychology: the concept of meaning. The point was to find a structure in which poetic, artistic and religious meanings would be the main reality of science. Merz is the one who best elaborates the concept of meaning by studying the development of the self and the formation of the cultural worldview, as Dilthey did.

Human meanings are the superordinary data that science uses, although these meanings defy scientific matter. acceptable, Merz suggests the need to understand psychologically the independent existence of artistic creation and thought religious. To understand how man can maximize his being, how he can expand his meanings in order to live better, we must resort to the concept of homo poet.

If the science of man is the science of human personality viewed from within man, then we must develop a total ontology of human effort, it is necessary to know what man tries to do, what he tries to obtain from his world and what he tries to do. give him. No theory of action will be adequate if we do not have a clear idea of ​​this. The thinkers who have tried to offer a more elaborate idea in this regard are idealistic aesthetes such as Fourier, Comte, Baldwin, Scheler, Dewey, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. That is why we must turn to certain approaches to aesthetic theory.

When Freud stated that "dark, insensitive and loveless powers determine human destiny", we believe that his vision about the homo poet was limited since psychoanalysis is only an instrument of the science of man; biological satisfaction is not enough, it is also required to have firm meanings.

Fourier, anticipating Freud, claimed that men strive for conviction. In any case the problem has been to show what makes conviction convincing for all men, and why they want and need conviction.

In order to make reality meaningful, to stimulate his productive energies, man must offer his meanings to the world, give him his own sense of conviction. This for the homo poet is a tragic burden, and also a unique creative opportunity. Man creates his meanings, his own world, and when he does so insufficiently, he withdraws from life by either isolating himself or committing suicide. It should be noted that this type of insufficiency is also found in tribes and peoples that lose their culture, the same could be said of the peasants who emigrate from the countryside to the city. All of this can lead to schizophrenia and depression. Meanings are the superordinate category for the science of man and aesthetics, and the problems involved should be your main subject.

Huizinga stated that through the ages man has concentrated on creating his own conviction and the meaning of it. For this author, the sphere of humanly created meanings was fictitious, but seriously fictitious because in this way man gave life to the world. This was done by playing, but the concept of the game was naturally mixed with that of the sacred (on this it can be said that the creation of meanings is not a matter of game, but a deadly serious artifice, without which man has no world characteristic; play enables a deep sense of conviction).

Simmel understood that man lives in and through his social activities; He warned that there is no such "social game", because it takes place "in" society, because the social game really consists of playing society.
Becker says that when man loses the conviction of his daily social activities, the elemental and basic meaning disappears. What is at stake here is life itself.

Let us now look at conviction as an aesthetic problem.

The aesthetic experience occurs when the organic or physical body and the culturally constituted symbolic self are harmoniously united in action (Schiller, Baldwin, Dewey). The problem for man as an active being in the world does not consist in searching his body to discover the mind, but in affirming the mind and its creations in the universe. The man free of instincts adapts to life and discovers his world by creating it, becoming a homo poet.

The homo poet must solve the problem of the obvious separation and fragility of his meanings created, against the harsh backdrop of organisms and objects that nature offers gross. This means that the creations of culture, to offer maximum conviction, must be inseparably entwined in the difficult world of things that man uses as a playground. This is what gives the artwork its aesthetic quality: it represents the firm fusion of playful fiction and neutral disturbing nature, union with which man takes possession of the world, and makes it his own by infusing his meanings of it.

Art is the aesthetically human mode par excellence, and the individual is the only animal that must find his own conviction, and the aesthetic object is the most convincing possible.

For Goethe, aesthetics is the superordinate category by which man unites with himself. world, achieves the highest conviction and destroys the senselessness of irrational desire and nature gross.

Kant showed for the first time how man can achieve reconciliation, even though he is immersed in a universe that he cannot fully understand and that transcends him. Marcuse claims that Heidegger was the first to notice the important place that aesthetic reconciliation occupied in Kant.

Baldwin affirms that in the game and in the art the appearance becomes the real thing; Simmel realized the importance of deriving maximum conviction from the cultural plan.

By understanding that man is the only animal that must create meanings, the essence of love is understood. Love is the problem of an animal that must find life and in order to perceive its own being, it has to enter into a dialogue with nature. For Weber the erotic was an attraction of the world.

According to Stendhal, love, art and the good life were the three great aspects of human life, arising from a common source: spontaneity and freedom; for him the worst vice is hypocrisy.

To clarify the nature of meanings, the category "transference" is used. This refers to the tendency of man to seek stable meanings in other individuals and not in himself; It seems that the man is looking for another man because he believes that the existence of the other transcends his own in importance; all our meanings come from our transactions with others, which means that most of our existential authority is borrowed; we are literally empty until the forms of culture fill us and after we are full we cannot even affirm that our interior belongs to us.

Converting God into an object of love leads man to separate himself from the world and from his human relationships.

Let us now turn to Freud's contribution to the constitution of a science of man. Freud, in a way, sums up the most important elements of the Enlightenment and the 19th century. This author clarified how society mutilates its members through early training, a question already pointed out and outlined by Stendhal years ago; Cabanis, Tracy, and Maine de Biran emphasized the power of early habits in the formation of personality, a question that Freud will summarize later. Scheler was looking for a general theory of the nature of the self and of the social bond, which Freud developed in developing a theory of the self. development of the individual which was really a theory of the genetic development of the self and of the social bond, calling it the theory of sex. Both Scheler and Dewey criticized Freud for reducing the problematic of the individual to the realm of the sexual.

Some of Freud's contributions consisted of the following: the nature of the ego is central cortical control from behavior, it helps us to see how pleasure differs and how human perceptions and decisions are made; character formation is understood through the law of Oedipus; early training distorts the child's point of view, this prevents him from facing the adult's point of view; Freud used the notion of identification or imitation, supported by a theory of anxiety to describe the development of the personality through "identification", "defense mechanisms" and the definitive confrontation with the complex of Oedipus; Freud contributed the concept of the superego, or sense of moral duty, it is the lifestyle that the child follows to avoid anguish and to diminish the censorship of adults; adults influence the behavior of children, the child becomes the reflection of his parents and behaves as they wish even after his death; the breakdown of human relationships is explained by the fact that each individual learns in her own way to avoid anguish, in a unique family context, that is, the process of social disorganization is focused on a microcosm, in exactly the same way that Marx focused it on the level of the great social institutions; Freud developed a theory that embodies a stimulating critique of the values ​​of social conditioning; the Oedipus complex actually refers to the early learning period; for the child to avoid the overwhelm that her parents produce, he learns to behave avoiding anguish and pleasing his parents, with this the child sacrifices the possibility of having perceptions and taking broader actions for the benefit of their survival, safety and equanimity; neurosis means that there is a basic dichotomy in human experience, an incompatibility between early training and the demands of adult action; neurosis, then, is a synonym for the Oedipus complex of the early automatic worldview that they instill in the child (instincts are what is important to Freud).

Alfred Adler, for his part, paid little attention to the instinct theory approach to human motivations, and he spoke of neurosis as a lifestyle that is formed during conditioning early.
Returning to Freud, it can be said that one of his main limitations is that he turned into a biological problem what should have been a social and historical problem.

Jaspers attempted an empirical and subjective analysis, stating that the whole of man cannot be known through partial approaches.

We can consider personality as a set made up of three interdependent elements: the perception of the organism itself, the objects in its field and the values ​​that the individual learns to give to itself; These values ​​take the form of rules that they embody in the behavior that we learn to obtain the satisfaction of this world. The moment the relativity of self-esteem is broken, a schizophrenic or depressive withdrawal from society occurs. After early conditioning, the individual may come to dispense with others and feed off the early worldview that has internalized, this can lead to the individual being totally separated from the world Social. If the person clings to objects he can become very limited and his actions lead to fetishism and paranoia. Human action can be considered as a triad: feelings, a set of symbols and a field of behavior patterns.

Marx, Freud and Comte

Let's try to make a fusion between the approaches of Marx and Freud.

When man creates his meanings, he takes over the world; when he does it recreationally, with style and dignity, he "enacts the dream" of human life. The man, with his measured body movements, in dance or in ritual processions, seizes space, achieves humanly significant unity with them; he claims them for man; flags, colors, flames invade the world and give nature what it only offers in a limited way; symbolic meanings. All the separate and fragmentary aspects of everyday experience merge into an aesthetic whole, as the body and symbols participate in an integral life.

Contemporary Western culture, unlike that of the Middle Ages, lost the possibility of intensive social creation of vital meanings.

The man of the Middle Ages had a social conscience, altruistic, emphasized the duty of man to other men, were generous and established strong bonds of brotherhood. All of these were some of the main meanings of him. The man of the Renaissance and of the present day professes individualism, the complete destruction of all possibility of altruism, the fragmentation of the art of being social became a personal pleasure that from public merchandise became private; there was no new, broader, integral culture, a culture with its ideal types, its own poetic expression, its social meaning.

Comte's historical psychology can be useful for the social creation of meanings, as well as social criticism and the social prescriptions based on it. Comte sees the need for rich, varied and unitary aesthetic meanings, which is why he gives an important role to art in his system.

For Comte, particular problems depended on public affairs; he outlined an ideal of human character, a model in which man seemed to prosper better and contribute more; social interest originates from love and knowledge, and not from blind self-denial; social interest refers to the man of integrity and free who tries to make a clear contribution by uniting his meanings to the great fund of social meanings, and it does not refer to the boastful modern man, who imagines himself free because he can accumulate or deform surface meanings to suit his whim.

According to Comte, history reveals that the poetic has primacy over the scientific, in other words; unitary, total meanings have primacy over fragmentary and partial meanings; art no longer reflects important ideas capable of uniting the whole of society; the individualization of art has been combined with impersonal taste, to the point of totally depriving it of any public meaning; Comte wanted a new rational society, guided by scientific discoveries, although art would take precedence, veneration of humanity and preacher of love; his idea of ​​progress is a total social problem; for him positivist science was a branch of positivism dedicated to delineating the main problems of adaptation; art revives feelings and imposes the option of utopia of the ideal type that directs the whole of society; art encourages man and puts him at the service of human progress, science only helps to adapt progress; the recognition that necessity is a structure of meanings is something primary, it is only achieved with the union of science and art, of philosophy and poetry; social affinity and loyalty are important; the regeneration of society could only be possible with the incorporation of art into the modern order; To examine the evolution of the human spirit, it is necessary to study history since this is a record of the flowering of the human personality.

The meanings can range from conceptions about life to aspects of everyday life (eating, drinking, dressing), even the most insignificant.

Man today seeks present happiness, not future happiness; man squanders the present because he has forgotten life itself; the individual lives prisoner of the consumer society. With all this, the modern consumer man lives an illusion of freedom and has lost the possibility of creating his own. meanings as the new society has stripped him of the means to do so: transcendent social ideas, family united. The fertile rite, the sense of tradition, the feeling of having a place in history, and even living in the present.

It is time to examine Buber's work, because he really updates Fourier and translates his first thoughts into a critical ideal for our science. Our ideal must mix the problems of the individual innovator with those of society: we must have a plan for the man who offers him the maximum individual support, but at the same time gives society the maximum exaltation of the lifetime. Or, in Fourier's terms, we must give full importance to Kabbalistic passion in such a way that it is most satisfactory for the individual and most beneficial to the community. Buber offered the key to solving this paradox by reminding us that any ideal vision must be based on the basic human encounter. Look for what man is looking for, to exalt his existence and get support for himself, his basic dialogue is carried out with his peers. Simmel, as we briefly noted, also pointed this out when he claimed that man discovers his vital meanings confronting their peers, at the singular locus of the interweaving of spirit and The matter. But Buber went on to develop the basic problem of idealistic aesthetics until he turned it into a true "aesthetics of confrontation", in an ontology of interpersonal becoming in the society. Thus he offered an important contribution to an ideal type for an alignment theory.

Drawing on the basic idealistic ontology, Buber understood that man can only become himself if he creatively relates to the external world. The important thing is the transaction, without which there can be no knowledge, no powers can be tested, or being exalted. But among all that the external world offers man, he can find the greatest development of his being in the confrontation with his fellow men. The reason for this is astonishingly simple: man is the only animal in nature that has a self, and self can only develop in transactions with the self of others. Man exists in a fourfold field of relations, a singular field in all nature: he relates to the world and to things; relates to other men; it is related to the mystery of being, and to his self. Buber concluded that man can know himself, come to perceive his deep powers, and exalt his being, only relating his deep powers, and exalting his being, only relating his being with that of others (Buber, 1974). In other words, it can be said, based on our examination, that since man is an animal without instincts he must recover a fragment of reality in the most convincing way. Buber showed that for man the problem of conviction consists in trying to get in touch with the mystery and vitality of being. Only in this way does the world that he discovers seem definitely real, since he has been isolated from this vital reality by his lack of natural instincts. Furthermore, since man is the only animal that has a self, he is, as we have already observed, more "introverted" and does not have a direct natural dialogue; the human being is the only animal that “reflects”. Buber helps us to realize that the only recourse is to take advantage of this introversion, and use the self to relate it to that of others. Instead of potential poverty, it is possible to find wealth of infinite character.

Thus man can perceive the fundamental reality, or what Buber called "the absolute meaning", or the "absolute". These are his words: “Human life approaches the absolute by virtue of its dialogistic character, because despite its singularity the man cannot discover, when he penetrates the depth of his life, a being that is a whole in itself, and as such approaches what absolute. Man cannot become whole by virtue of a relationship with himself, but only in a relationship with another self. This can be as limited and as conditioned as he is; but being together, it is perceived as unlimited and unconditional ”(Buber, 1974).

Thus, Buber allows us to fuse idealistic aesthetics and the psychology of the self: man discovers what is "really real", in dialogue with the self of others: personality produces personality, and creates a greater degree of intertwined spirituality in the world of organisms. Man must be convinced that human meanings are truly valuable in the world, that the culturally elaborated plan for living has a transcendent meaning; and the only place he can see this is in another organic existence of the same type as his own, someone who is literally steeped in shared human effort. Buber uses the appropriate expression “imagine the real” to describe this need, and states: “Applied to communication between men,“ imagine ”the real means that imagine what another man at this very moment wants, feels, perceives, thinks and not as a separate content, but in his own reality, that is, in the vital process of that man... The human person needs confirmation, because man as man needs it (Buber, 1974).

The ultimate meaning for man, as Buber asserts, is found in the interpersonal realm, in the realm of "me and you." In this way, man overcomes his feeling of limitation and isolation, of the weakness of his meanings.
In its shortest possible expression, this is Buber's basic view on the interpersonal nature of human meanings and becoming. Man needs another man to discover and validate his inner powers, to develop; and he needs to see and perceive another individual to be convinced that there is absolute value, absolute meaning, in nature. It is very appropriate for man to relate to the highest organism in nature to achieve greater awareness of life, his life and the world around him. This community of the interpersonal is the best and most natural place to look for the ethical man.

Precisely at the beginning of the movements of a science of man, thinkers like Feuerbach discovered the neutral interpersonal basis for designing a truly ethical ideal. For this reason they could aspire to a science of man in society, idealistic, based on man, and that promoted ethical action. This is the great achievement of the union of ego psychology with idealistic aesthetics. This allows us to aspire to full ethical development in an interpersonal community of free men, who work together and do not oppose each other. At the beginning of the science of man it was possible to offer a scientific framework that united the best of idealism with man-centered pragmatism. This is exactly what Buber was asking for: that the interhuman be the basis of the fusion of both systems in modern times, a fusion that we have tried to justify extensively since it was outlined in the century XIX.

Buber brought this tradition up to date by bringing further naturalistic refinement to the union of idealistic aesthetics and ego psychology. Also, I can be very explicit about the political implications of this tradition; As he stated: discovering that reality is essentially interpersonal can create a science of man that overcomes narrow individualism and limited collectivism. Since the nineteenth century, these two extremes had hindered a general theory of objective action, but centered on man; A subject was needed that was ethically neutral, and a framework for the science of man that would allow All of society work to achieve a transcendent ideal, but one that is rooted in individuals. These are Buber's words: “This reality [interpersonal aesthetics] offers the starting point for a philosophical science of man; and from there, on the one hand, progress can be made to transform the knowledge of the person; and on the other, transform the knowledge of the community. The central subject of this science is neither the individual nor the community, but man in relation to man. This essence of man, especially his, can only be directly known in a vital relationship ”(Buber, 1974).

We repeat, from the point of view of the history of ideas, it is important to note that Buber continued the current of Feuerbach and Fourier, but he was not alone in this task. Max Scheler was another supremely poetic and critical thinker who, like Buber, warned that the science of man must be a science to promote life; and that, to achieve this, he must reestablish the feeling of the deepest respect and fear of being. Scheler also kept alive the broad 19th century viewpoint on the problem of science and life, and refused to submit to mainstream fashions. Scheler claimed that man above all needed a feeling of unity and participation in the universe, which was exactly what he had lost. In his study of human empathy, Scheler was able to see the effect of this loss: that depend for their subsistence all the higher forms of empathy and emotional life ”(Scheler, quoted by Buber, 1974).

Like Buber, Scheler noted that the ultimate sense of vitality and mystery in life is conveyed in the contact of man: “A decisive factor in the cultivation of the capacity to identify with the cosmos is the feeling of immersion in the total current of life, which arises and establishes itself among men in relation to their mutual position as individual life centers [italics his]. It seems to be more or less a rule (of which we have no better understanding) than the true realization of the ability to cosmic identification, but is indirectly mediated, in that feeling of unity between man and man... " (Ibid.)

Scheler's conclusive statement could also have been made by Buber: “Man initiates his identification as the life of the cosmos where it is closer and has greater affinity With Herself: in another man”.

To know the behavior of people, it is essential to understand them in the sense in which We glimpse what are the significant aspects of said person in his life and in his actions daily. To understand means to penetrate the value system of the individual whose connections are mental.

A second aspect is responsibility. Man always acts responsibly and freely. If he does not do so then his actions may become irresponsible. Polanyi says that "the study of man must begin with an appreciation of man in the act of making responsible decisions" (Polanyi, 1966: 55).

Making decisions is done with a sense of intentionality. Intentionality allows us to establish what the individual is really looking for. At the same time, having intentions implies being aware of them, knowing that they are tends towards an end and that the intention is seeking an integration between life and the actions of the person.

An essential aspect of the method we are talking about is understanding. In this regard Dilthey stated that “if the reconstruction of general human nature by psychology wants to be something healthy, alive and fruitful for the intelligence of life, it will have to be based on the original method of understanding ”(Dilthey, 1951: 222).

For Dilthey the natural sciences could be known and explained, but the human sciences must be understood and interpreted. This understanding seeks to establish a process that allows us to capture the meaning and intention of the person: “this is done mentally”, that is, of what What is involved is "the discovery of the self in the you" to do this requires an experiential participation, without which it is not possible to establish this relationship.

Martin Buber, for his part, considers that “the individual man does not contain in himself the essence of man, either as a moral being or as a thinking being. The essence of man is found only in the community, in the union of man and man, a unity that is based on the reality of the difference between 'me and you' ”(Schilpp, 1967: 42).

The humanistic method in psychology requires a philosophical foundation based on dialogue. See in this regard what Buber tells us: “the fundamental fact of human existence is the man with man. What makes the human world unique is, above all, that something happens between being and being that cannot be found in any other corner of nature. Language is nothing more than its sign and its medium; all spiritual work has been caused by that something... This sphere, I call it the "between" sphere... constitutes a protocategory of human reality... the essential does not occur in both of the participants, nor in a neutral world that encompasses both and all the others things, but, in the most precise sense, 'between' the two, as if we were to say in a dimension to which only the two have access...; this reality offers us the starting point from which we can advance, on the one hand, towards a new understanding of the person, and on the other, towards a new understanding of the community. Its central object is neither the individual nor the community, but man with man. Only in living relationship can we immediately recognize the essence peculiar to man... If we consider the man with man, we will always see the dynamic duality that constitutes the human being: here the one who gives and there the one who receives; here the aggressive force and there the defensive; here the character that investigates and there the one that offers information, and always the two together, complementing each other with the reciprocal contribution, offering ourselves, together, to man ”(Buber, 1974: 146-150).
Buber's approach is aimed at what has been called the "psychology of the encounter" whose basis of support is found in the me-you relationship. This idea presents us with a link or relationship of person to person, subject to subject, that is, a ratio of reciprocity that implies a meeting. (Martínez, 2004b).

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