Insight and Responsibility

Ossorio: Okay, let’s see. There are two of these here. One is: "How does an individual’s insight fit into the scheme of Descriptive Psychology?" Second is: "What is the role of personal responsibility in Descriptive Psychology?"

To both of these, I would give fairly parallel answers. In a formal system, one of the tricks of the trade is how much you accomplish by not saying something as contrasted with the things you accomplish by saying something. And these two are a case in point. There is nothing, basically nothing I’ve written, that ever mentions insight or personal responsibility. They are simply not mentioned at all. On the other hand, it is not an accident that nothing that is written runs counter to these notions. And in fact, what is written makes these more or less inevitable.

For example, if you think of the definition of Deliberate Action, as one where the person knows what he’s doing and has chosen it, one of the things that guarantees is that a person is the author of his own behavior. Now by our standards, by our common standards, the author of that behavior is responsible for it. So built into the system, even though it’s never mentioned, is this central place of personal responsibility. It’s there. You just can’t see it.

Now the same thing goes for insight except that it’s a little different in detail. Insight is not a phenomenon. That’s one reason why there are no positive statements about insight. Insight is one of those hybrid terms, like creativity, that partially involves a description, but also partly involves an evaluation. Since it involves an evaluation, it isn’t a phenomenon that you can simply describe.

What sort of thing do you call an insight? When do you say a person has insight? Well, at a minimum when he comes to see or understand something, but we do that almost every moment of our lives. You look around you, you see things. You look around you, you understand things. Why don’t we call that insight? Well the evaluative component has to do with difficulty. We call it insight when it’s a difficult achievement, when it’s something not easily come by, when it’s something that not everybody could manage. Then we say, "Ah, he has insight."

So it’s because it’s the kind of concept that involves an evaluation as well as a description that there’s nothing directly written about it. The description part of it is not that interesting. It’s only when you add the evaluation part and put them together, then it becomes interesting.

Audience: [inaudible] that discriminated between responsibility for deliberate action and responsibility for personal characteristics as the two kinds of responsibility found in most systems of law and most systems of therapy ...

Ossorio: I am dubious about that responsibility for person characteristics.

Audience: It was a notion of negligence: that one knows, or ought to know, the implications of being a certain sort of person.

Ossorio: Oh, okay. Good enough. That works for knowledge. For most person characteristics, it doesn’t make sense because you don’t choose your person characteristics.

Audience: I'm saying it's the same as the ordinary legal notion that has to do with tort except for the notion of negligence.

Ossorio: But we are all familiar with the famous statement "You should have known better". So as I say, it does work with knowledge, and that’s about it.

Audience: I have a question about responsibility. It seems like that’s a second sort of thing that’s built onto the concept of action. In order for somebody to be held responsible, you have to have somebody holding him responsible. Once you get into that, you get into social ways, expectations, standards, and who to hold responsible, who not to hold responsible. In an accident you are responsible only if you had meant to hit the person, or if you were doing something illegal, like going too fast, you might be held responsible, or might not, depending on the circumstances. But, what we are talking about does not seem to derive from the concept of intentional action; it has to do with other people being moral agents, and collectively assigning responsibility or not, in sometimes very, very complicated ways.

Ossorio: There are, I think, two different concepts of responsibility at work here. The one that I brought out amounts simply to a reaffirmation that it is behavior. That's what it amounts to to say he’s responsible for it as an author. It’s his work. It’s his thing. Now, that has nothing to do with the other things that you brought out, except as I mentioned, that by our common standards that makes him responsible. And that’s the connecting link to the kind of thing that you’re talking about.

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© 1999 Peter G. Ossorio