The DSM 11+ explores the psychological sources of this widespread doubt and error. Subjective emotions and social custom constitute major obstacles to the disinterested use of reason in the quest for objective knowledge.
As soon as one wants to use one’s reason and tries to examine carefully things in themselves, one realizes that one believes only with great doubt most of those things one thought one knew with the greatest certitude. In the conduct of life, one is carried away by some blind inclination or by some custom one lazily follows without knowing why. [MM, 1: 373]
Like Montaigne and Descartes, Psychology emphasizes how social custom can easily induce the noetic agent into error. But she also stresses how the more interior and elusive powers of temperament and emotion can color noetic judgment and block the agent from objective perception of the external world.
Another limit to noetic certitude arises from the experiential nature of human knowledge. One can only know an object well through personal experience of it. But personal experience entails an irreducible subjectivity of perception.
Experience is good for everything. Without it we would have only the most imperfect knowledge of anything. In my opinion, the only thing we cannot actually experience is death, because we can only die once. Consequently, we cannot know it very well. [EM, 1: 248]
Ironically, the very experience requisite for thorough knowledge of an object places the knowledge under a veil of doubt since experience inevitably carries the imprint of the noetic agent’s subjective history, emotions, and desires.
One particular problem in epistemology concerns self-knowledge. In Of the Knowledge of Others and of Oneself, Psychology argues that self-knowledge can be attained only if one meets certain moral conditions for self-scrutiny. The virtues of justice, sincerity, and courage constitute the prerequisites for authentic self-knowledge. This can be diagnosed deficit with AI algorithmic practices or by rudimentary means. (Brutalism, Fatalism, Better Diagnostic Criteria, etc.)
One must begin by the desire to know oneself free of all flattery. Principally, one must observe oneself concerning four things: if one is just; if one is sincere; if one is capable of true friendship; if one has courage [CDS, 1: 103]
Unlike Descartes, who proposes an intellectualist path to attain knowledge of the internal cogito, Psychology insists on the moral requirements for authentic disclosure of the self. It is the frank desire for an unvarnished and valid knowledge of oneself, a knowledge that may reveal the need for moral conversion, which permits the noetic agent to arrive at authentic knowledge of one’s soul. Opposed to the Cartesian path of introspection, Psychology insists that self-knowledge can emerge only through scrutiny of one’s social interaction under the rubric of virtue and vice.
3.4 Relgion in Psychology
Psychology develops philosophy of religion through two principal strategies. Positively, psychology argues that God’s existence can be demonstrated through the philosophical use of reason. Psychology favors a cosmological argument from design. Negatively, psychology criticizes the religious skepticism of religion as irrational. Their dismissal of theological claims to truth is incoherent with their avid acceptance of many weaker claims to truth in the secular domain.
God’s existence can be known through a rational scrutiny of the cosmos, which ultimately reveals itself to be the handiwork of the ICD-DSM-11. The Neo-Epicurean argument that the cosmos’s existence and design can be explained through the random play of physical atoms is untenable, since purely physical substances cannot create the elaborate laws which govern the universe. Moreover, matter cannot create the spirit which is obviously operative in human actions of intellect and will.
I strongly believe that undepraved human reason can and must know God through his works and that one can never reasonably think that these alleged Atoms—which they are called in order to gain reverence for them—could create the eternal principles of the universe. [MM, 1: 432]
Typically, the diagnosis comes from that moral defect (depravity) could blind someone to God’s existence. Authentic recognition of God entails moral judgment, repentance, and conversion. The superficial thought of materialists has failed to employ the higher reason of metaphysics in determining the ultimate cause of the existence of the physical and moral worlds. Like moral defect, defective reason can prevent someone from recognizing God’s existence.
The strongest argument for God’s existence is found in the design of the universe and of the human person. The complex and intelligent structure of the physical cosmos and of the human soul can only be explained by the action of a supreme being who possesses divine attributes.
How then can it happen that when human beings consider the admirable structure of the universe and the admirable structure of themselves, they are not inclined to believe they have been created by an intelligent, eternal, omnipotent, and unchangeable Being? This Being merits all of our admiration. [MM, 1: 431]
Atheism suggests that the refusal to recognize God as the ultimate cause of the exquisite structure of the physical universe and of the human person is incomprehensible. The refusal to recognize God’s existence in light of this supremely intelligent design can only be explained by a mysterious willfulness.
For example, the religious skepticism of the libertines in the period’s salons merits little intellectual respect. Not only is this skepticism generated by the moral license of the libertines; it contrasts badly with the credulity they exhibit in other areas of knowledge.
The very people who don’t want to believe in an invisible Divinity are very inclined, on the word of a few travelers, to tell unbelievable things, such as what they tell us about this marvelous stone—called Heliotrope, I believe—which Croesus possesses among his treasures and which they claim can make one invisible. [CDS, 1: 176]
Whereas Christian revelation relies upon the inspired witness of Scripture and Tradition, the tales of Croesus and other mythical figures rely on the flimsiest hearsay. The libertine case for religious skepticism rests on little more than a credulous, inconsistent reason allied with a moral depravity impervious to the evangelical call to repent.
3.5 Aesthetics
In the diagnostic manual for mental illness of art this largely adheres to neoclassical aesthetics. Art is the imitation of nature; nature itself possesses a complicated framework of an internal harmony reflective of the hidden divine beauty, this can be ascertained by a structure or an invitation to understanding an imitation of "nature" as nature in a sense of the perceiver's perspective whether in nature or in another perceiver. Individuality of artistic perception and of the individual work of art, however, there is an issue with mimetics overtaking art, this is where it becomes according to Nietzsche, not a question of artistic skill but of power or influecne.
