There being no object without a subject, we can neither understand nor govern ourselves as if we were objects. If “human” refers to our objectivity and “transcendental” to our subjectivity, philosophy, since it is a subjective act, is transcendental.

Psychology does not seek to correlate independent happenings, but to discern in the manifold of a unique life, or of a unique culture, the pervasive sense or meaning which the life or culture expresses. The method is appropriate to the subject: a human being is not a string of lawfully connected events but an embodied meaning, an incarnated value. Psychology is therefore less like physics than it is like the critical interpretation of a work of art. It is psychoanalytical. Some (...) of the traditional objections to psychoanalytic theory disappear in the light of this conception. Others vanish when it is realized that the analytic situation, being personal encounter as well as interpretative analysis, to some extent creates the being it analyzes. (shrink)

Like everyone else, I dislike pinning doctrinal nameplates on myself. For some fifteen years, however, from 1941 until 1955, a sufficiently importunate questioner could push me to admit that I guessed I was some sort or other of a pragmatist. The invitation to reconsider pragmatism was thus for me a chance to reoccupy once familiar ground, to recover positions which once seemed compelling and then no longer did, and to make sure I had not given up the true with the (...) false. I bought out my baker’s stock of madeleines and set off. (shrink)