Metaphysics and its Place in Psychology as a Human Science

• Published in: The Journal of transpersonal psychology Vol. 55; no. 1; pp. 9 - 42
• Main Author: Cunningham, Paul F
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Stanford Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 01-01-2023
• Subjects: Agnosticism; Consciousness; Heuristic; Hypotheses; Maslow, Abraham Harold; Metaphysics; Naturalism; Nature; Philosophers; Philosophy; Research methodology; Science; Transpersonal psychology
• ISSN: 0022-524X

EHEs include mystical/unitive (e.g., conversion, psychedelic, peak-experiences), psychic/paranormal (e.g., telepathy, precognition, distant mental influence), unusual death-related (e.g., apparitions, past-life recall, near-death experiences), encounter-type (e.g., DMT entities, UFO abductions, ghost encounters), and exceptional normal experiences (e.g., lucid dreams, tears of "wonder joy, inspirations of genius) (Palmer & Braud, 2002; White, 1998). Do some EHEs actually disclose something true and factual about the nature or structure of an "outside-the-ego kind of reality," to use Abraham Maslow's (1966, p. 74) evocative phrase, that exists in some sense separate and independent of the experiencer and in a manner not dependent upon the experiencer's perception or belief in it in order that it can exist, in a way similar to apprehending the objective existence of the natural world? Maslow's science book also offers a good point of entry for any discussion about what it is like to have a truly cpen scientific naturalism-that is, a psychology of science and philosophy of nature that is comprehensive and flexible enough to permit the use of metaphysics as a heuristic in the planning of research programs in psychology as a human science; that is, a science that "joins the humanities and traditional sciences while also being separate from each" (Hunt, 2005, p. 359). Instead of being restrictive and inhibiting, it will throw open the whole range of human experiencing to scientific study, [emphasis in original] (p. 75) In this passage, we see that Maslow understood sense experience, although important, to play only a small role in human knowing and the word "empirical" to include reference to all human experience, and not just experience reducible to sense experience.