Chapter 11: Towards a Hermeneutical Psychology Before Idiography

If psychology had foundations, it would not be enough to say that they are cracked. Instead, one would need to say that psychology grounded itself in a crack. It grounded itself in the crack between the subject and the object. This is the same crack that A. N. Whitehead called the bifurcation of nature, the product of careless abstraction. It is the crack that had terrorized Descartes into formulating his two substances of thought and extension and that Kant had papered over by means of his critiques. It is the same crack that would come to divide the natural sciences from the human studies. If you imagine a map of the Americas with the human studies occupying the North and the natural sciences occupying the south, then psychology is located at the Isthmus which both separates and joins these two great land masses. This is a position of maximal relevance, but at the same time, a position from which half-truths are highly likely. Mixing a half-truth coming from the North with a half-truth coming from the South does not, unfortunately, add to a whole truth.