How to Treat Psychology as Part of the Humanities

On July 28th, 2021, the great publisher and writer Roberto Calasso rose into the world of forms. Here, I pay tribute to his wide-ranging oeuvre and highlight his contributions to psychology.

Much of empirical psychology is invested in quantitative descriptions of the mind. This takes the form of either statistics or brain images. Popular and positive psychology pursue visions of psychic health and mental well-being. There is also a vast collection of texts on spirituality in popular psychology, which offer self-help. We can call these forms of psychology modern because they serve the values of modernity: technical mastery, individualism, and materialism.

Rather than pursuing the modern approach of making the mystery known through quantitative analysis and practical tips, Calasso’s work reminds us of how psychology spoke to and for the unknown. His oeuvre accomplishes this goal by delivering to us the enchanted world inhabited by ancient Greeks, the Vedic peoples, and visionary artists and philosophers. This is a unique form of psychology that seeks to bring back an earlier way to encounter the phenomenon, specifically, through the contemplation of vertiginous mysteries in art and ritual.

In 1983, with The Ruin of Kasch, Calasso began a series of books that reflects on the state of knowledge, grace, and the gods during modernity. He achieved this lofty goal through erudite syncretism. Among the many texts he exfoliated for us are the Rg Vedas, the Satapatha Brahmanas, and ancient texts from Pausanius to Diodorus Siculus. He also used particular figures such as Talleyrand, Tiepolo, and Simone Weil as prisms to understand the veil of modernity.

In a series of books on exemplary figures in modernism, Calasso explores forms of secret knowledge. In La Folie Baudelaire, Calasso demonstrates how this visionary writer and critic saw something of the terrible future of the modern. Similarly, K.'s book on Franz Kafka teases out aspects of Kafka’s oeuvre that spell out a bizarre vision of reticence, isolation, and strangeness.

In The Unnameable Present, Calasso judged secularism unnatural in that it shrinks the possibilities for finding meaning in our lives. He argued that secularism entails a divestment of an individual’s bonds with the world and its past. This work directly confronts the confusions wrought by modernity, including a deep discussion of the limits and achievements of a science of consciousness. A topic to which he returns in The Celestial Hunter, a book that envisions the evolution of mind that occurred in prehistoric man as he became a hunter, took dominion over animals through metamorphosis, and built society.

Calasso’s most revelatory work concerns the space that remains for the divine in our world. He does not take a theological view à la Merton, nor does he attempt to bridge modernity and religion as many Islamic scholars have. Rather, he claims that the space for the sacred, ritual, sacrifice and congress with the gods is happening all the time. It is right under our noses and is called by different names, as it is obfuscated by secularism and capitalism.

He explores this space through Greek mythology, notably in his most popular book, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and through the study of Indian mythology as in Ka and Ardor. These magisterial works somehow blend an austere Hegelian scope with close readings, poetic statement, revelatory prose, total mastery of stories, characters, and the dense sets of relationships between diverse aspects of culture. His is a cosmopolitanism not bound by place or time that brings all things together under the penetrating, aesthetic eye of a sophisticate who loves the play and ecstasy of knowledge.

Literature and the sacred for Calasso are those spaces of the unknown that keep us in awe. By describing complex notions in a literary setting, Calasso brings us back to the feeling of the sacred, that space of mystery, which is essentially a psychological state: a sense of wonder for nature and the nature of the mind. This is Calasso’s major contribution to psychology: he connects the formal study of mind with the study of mind that we call the humanities.

He reminds us that psychology is always a form of humanities, that the human, his stories, and his sense of meaning are the mind's non-reducible core. Therefore, we must expand our understanding of the products of the mind rather than reduce them. We must remember the range of feelings humans have felt and articulated.

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Through literature, Calasso’s writings tilt our worldview enough to see the hidden story beneath modernity. This is a story about the psyche, about the promiscuous nature of thought. In Literature and the Gods, he reminds us of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s idea that the gods will always find a way to sneak back into our lives. This may occur through literature or our devotion to science, and there may arise new mythologies—even mythology of psychology.

Roberto Calasso was a great polyglot scholar of our age; he read the past and provided us enriching layers of context through which to see our present world in all its confusions and revelations. He reminds us that for the Greeks, the gods were the symbols and puppets of psychological notions. In doing so, he reveals how thin the layer of modernity that we occupy really is, how a slight melody, a lyric, a phrase wafting over the waters can shake us out of our hypnosis to reveal the terrible majesty of time.