Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies (CCBS) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Behavior and Philosophy.
http://www.jstor.org
Martin e. Morf
Windsor
Universityof
Some construe freedom as free will, others as something associated with the
can do what they
fortunate situation in which
people really want to do. The two
constructions split psychology into its two most fundamentally opposed camps on
both the levelofpraxis and of theory(Williams, 1992). In thedichotomizing spirit
of Cronbach (1957), one can think of these camps as the two disciplines of
psychology. The first discipline is that of phenomenology-based psychology,
recognizing and attributing a vital role to raw, undistorted, subjective human
experience, including the experience of freedom in the sense of "free will" and "free
choice." The second discipline is that of scientific psychology whose ontology is
determinist. Since the construct freedom plays very different roles in humanistic and
scientific psychology, a useful step in exploring the relationship between the two
may be a comparison of the two most widely known and radical interpretations of
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Comments Robert C. Pinto, and Andrew A. Sappington on earlier versions of this article are
by Mike Arons,
Please address all correspondence to Martin E. Morf, Department of Psychology,
gratefully acknowledged.
University ofWindsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4. Email: morf@uwindsor.ca.
29
plain deterministsand agree with William James (1884/1968) who argued that
soft determinism is a mugwump stance adopted by those who want to have their
cake and eat it too.
Other soft determinists choose a more
risky path: they use the termfreedom in
the sense of "free will." This path leads to difficulties. For example, in his
(1990) buttressed his case for linking soft determinism and free will with a quote
from Hebb: "If my past has shaped me to goof off, and I do goof off despite my
secretary's urging, that's free will" (Hebb, 1974, p. 75). Contrary to Hebb and
Sappington, James argues that freewill must imply indeterminism of some sort.
agency as one of various "scientific theories of free will." He did not distinguish
between Bandura's determinism and the, albeit modest, traces of indeterminism in
the thinkingof authors like Sperry (1988) and Rychlak (1981). But Bandura's
versus determinism
disagreement with Skinner is not on the indeterminism issue,
it is on the issue of environmental versus and on
personal determinism one-way
versus reciprocal (and "triadic") determinism (Bandura, 1978). Unlike Skinner,
Bandura that personal determinants which we call beliefs, goals, expectations,
holds
and so forth, are useful in accounting for human behavior. But is there any reason
to believe that he is one iota less determinist than Skinner?
In fact, Sappington himself was quite aware of Bandura's determinism and
cited a passage in which the latter rejected the idea of free will: "Persons are
neither autonomous agents nor simply mechanical conveyers of animating
environmental influences" 1182). They may not be machines.
(Bandura, 1989, p.
They may be complex systems or organisms. But they are determined. Yet,
30
occurring in accordance with fixed laws. Since the standard laws are causal in
will."
that human beings are absolutely free to choose between options (see especially
Sartre 1943/1965). He was particularly interested in options which reflect courage
or its opposite, "bad faith." Sartre's freedom is either identical with, or closely
related to, other varieties of freedom familiar under the labels free will, absolute
freedom,and liberty
freedom,transcendental ofindifference.
In sharp contrast to Sartre, Skinner not only rejected the concept of free will;
he deemed talk of "freedom," and of the "human dignity" which it implies, to be a
cause of war and other mayhem (Skinner, 1971).
While Skinner's rejection of free will clearly is representative of scientific and
31
evident because humanists value experience and eschew abstractions and theory.
In particular, they do not seem compulsively concerned with rooting key concepts
explicitly in the philosophy of the engaged and
like self and self-actualization
authentic human way of being as formulated by Sartre and Heidegger.
The relationship between Sartre and humanist psychology emerges more
experience, that is, on the lived world. Likethe early Sartre of Nausea (Sartre,
1938/1969), humanist psychologists seek to capture phenomena or experiences?
the proverbial "here and now"?in a way that is as undistorted as possible by
labels or categories.
Why Deconstruct?
32
Similarly, a behavior therapist would probably not even try to explain the
behavior of Binswanger's (1958) patient EllenWest. As Rachlin (1992) pointed
out, a major problem facing Skinnerian behavior therapists is that behavior cannot
be neatly divided into respondents and operants. Of the two it is the operants and
their reinforcing consequences that are primarily of interest to the therapist. Often
it is not clear what the reinforcers at work are. One need not go and look at the
puzzling case of Ellen West. Rachlin asks, for example, "What reinforces the act of
using his example of the rock (Sartre, 1943/1965, p. 482). By itself, Sartre's rock
or boulder is "neutral." But to hikers, whose path it blocks, it is an obstacle. To
33
nothing. He even agrees that a hiker's past has facticity, that is, that the
conditions, learning experiences and traumas the different hikers have experienced
are facts about which they also can do nothing. Presumably the same is true of
their physical states of fatigue or lively enterprise.
England (Sartre, 1948, pp. 35, 38). They are free like the resistancefighterwho is
absolutely free to choose between being executed on the spot and betrayal of his
comrade 1949, pp. 47-74).
(Sartre,
The raw experience of being free. One reason this construction of freedom
is more than a sleight of hand is its phenomenological context. Simone de
Beauvoir (1963, p. 112) graphically depicted the young Sartre's first encounter
with and his excitement on realizing that an attempt to
phenomenology
accurately describe his experience of the apricot cocktail in front of him might be
the startingpoint of fruitfulphilosophical inquiry into deep ontological issues
about what there is.
A basic tenet of phenomenology is that prereflective experience is primary,
while experience harnessed by means of concepts and categories is inevitably
derivative and distorted.Nietzsche (1866/1965) expressed this insightwhen he
rhapsodized an encounter with thunder and lightning as an experience of "pure
34
persons think of themselves and others as their choices and attribute guilt or merit
on the basis of whether the choices were cowardly or courageous.
Indeterminism. Sartre's absolute freedom implies that humans always have
more than one available way of interpreting what faces them, that the choice
between options is not completely determined by the subject's environment, past,
or physical state. There thus is some behavior, no matter how rare, which is not
everyday life (e. g., Honderich, 1993, p. 66).Second, indeterminism may suggest
the possibilityof, but does not necessarily imply,freewill. The most that can be
said is that the assumption that events of everyday life are not always fully
determined the possibility
leaves open that human choices are sometimes among
35
power of opium.
In BeyondFreedomand Dignity, Skinner (1971) argued that the notion of
freedom is not only illusory, but also dangerous. There is no free will and hence no
uniquely human dignity; when you look closely enough, you always see the
mundane determinants of the behavior. Furthermore, believing that one possesses
free will and dignity compels people to go to war to defend their sacred freedom
and revenge insults to theirprecious dignity. (Skinnermight have smiled atMel
Gibson's line in the film Braveheart: "They may take our lives, but they will never
take our freedom").
What Skinner objected to was free will. He did not, it appears, object to
(Hume, 1748/1988, p. 131). They are not free. University professors live under
conditions that (sometimes) let them spend a summer on the beach pondering the
nature of freedom. They are said to be free.
36
projects. In particular, she is always free to give up, to retreat, to camp in the
rock's shadow and hoist a sign protesting the unfairness of fate that puts obstacles
in one's path, or even to opt out of life altogether. It is these choices between
meanings assigned to things which separate Sartre from Skinner, behaviorism, and
science in general.
Heidegger. The gap between Sartre and Skinner is not necessarily the
37
being. One hears echoes here of the challenge issued by the Greek poet Pindar and
by Nietzsche: "Werde der, der du bist?Become the person you are" (cited from
Nietzsche, 1965, p. 1183). What seems important about this kind of freedom in
the present context is that it does not appear to be necessarily incompatible with
determinism.
oppressive obstacle or empowering challenge for the hikers, that is, within the
context of the hikers' project. The hikers are apparently free to give it any
superb view of the landscape. It has specific properties that make it impossible for
anyone but a lunatic to assign any but a limited range of meanings to it. For
enemy. Where Sartre endowed the prisoner with the freedom to say a resounding
"no!" to his interrogators, Merleau-Ponty describes him as having "committed
himself to this action [of resistance] . . . because the historical situation, the
comrades, the world around him seemed to him to expect that conduct from him"
(1962, p. 454). He also notes that the prisoner did not make
"a solitary and
decision: the man still feels himself to be with his comrades ... he is
unsupported
as itwere incapable of talking" (p. 454).
The later Sartre. These
readings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty harden
the suspicion that the gap between phenomenological existentialism and
determinist stances need not be an unbridgeable chasm. Indeed, itmay be that
Sartre himself, in his later years, was less the apostle of absolute freedom that he
had been in the 1930s and 1940s. Elegantly and much less sweepingly than in his
earlier writings, he defined freedom in 1970 as "the small movement which makes
of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely
38
what his conditioning has given him" (Sartre, 1970, p. 22). Of course, even this
modest claim of free will implies that some things are not completely determined.
Sartre may have moved toward determinism, but he remained an indeterminist to
the end.
It would probably be an exaggeration to say that the later Sartre had serious
doubts about his earlier interpretations of indeterminism and freedom. Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty, however, did have such doubts about Sartrean freedom, and
these doubts may open possibilities for deconstructing the dichotomies of the
worlds of Sartre and Skinner and of humanist and behaviorist psychology. On
Skinner's side there are similar hints of such possibilities. There is Skinner's
similarity to be explored further. For example, Sartre and Skinner differ on what
an act is. In particular, Skinner refused to rely on terms like intention; to him acts
were behaviors primarily determined by environmental conditions, not the
against the conventional wisdom, his focus on primary experience (as opposed to
abstractions and rational constructions), and his preference for concrete particulars
rather than grand designs. Fallon judged these characteristics to be compatible
with a phenomenological stance.
Several readers of an early version of this paper have noted that interest in art
and unconventional views may be very superficial similarities, that primary
39
particulars. The plot may thicken and the indicesmay multiply, but taken
individually these possible similarities are mere hints of areas to pursue in attempts
to bridge the gap between Sartre and Skinner.
Skinner's antirepresentationalism. The evidence seems somewhat more
clearcut on Skinner's antirepresentationalism. Postmodern thinkers, foremost
among them Jacques Derrida, have given up on metaphysics, on certainty, on
patterns projected on the brain by the sensory organs perceiving the external
world. More generally, Skinner rejected, in the best postmodern spirit, the "double
world" of subject and object, inner and outer, physical and psychological. He
made no distinction between the public and the private world, other than to
characterize the latter as less accessible because the "verbal community" finds it
more difficult to reinforce "self-descriptive" than overt responses (e. g., Kvale &
If Sartre flirtedwith determinism toward the end of his life, and if the
phenomenological existentialism
of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty does not
postulate free will, is it possible to move the house that Sartre built closer to the
house that Skinner built? Similarly, if Skinner's thinking was postmodern in some
40
something which defines humans and separates them from pigeons and rats? Did
Sartre really toywith determinism?Might Skinner have thought of himself as
authentic under some circumstances?
Questions like these raise the possibility of shaking the rigid Sartre-Skinner
dichotomy and of causing the cracks needed tomotivate and make possible efforts
of deconstruction. They suggest a possible avenue, or at least a
footpath,
connecting determinism and indeterminism on the level of human behavior.
The views of the later Sartre, and
those of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,
suggest that the potential for cracks on the Sartrean side is greater than on the
Skinnerian side. The cat is now out of the bag: The compromise between Sartre
and Skinner suggested here is much more determinist and Skinnerian than
Sartrean.
authentically. Often what people want to do is trivial: drive their car really fast, or
beat drums loudly in the middle of the night. Sometimes what they want to do is
important: quit a secure job and go back to school, make a charitable contribution
that actually hurts, speak up for an unpopular cause, refuse to give a comrade's
name to grim-faced interrogators.
But from the determinist's perspective, there is not much difference between
wanting to do something trivial like eating an ice cream, and wanting "to be true
to oneself." Ifweighty matters are involved, we tend to talk about authenticity, of
people choosing, or at least being able to choose, to do things that really matter to
them and which are in tune with the central concerns that constitute the core of
the self. In both the case of wishing to eat an ice cream and that of wishing to be
one's very own and authentic self, the real issue seems to be whether circumstances
letus do what we want to do. Is itpossible thatSkinneras well as Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty would have agreed with this type of claim? Is it conceivable that
even Sartre would not have rejected it outright?
41
References
Bandura, A. (1978). The self-system in reciprocal determinism. American Psychologist, 33, 344-358.
Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist, 44, 1175
1184.
Binswanger, L. (1958). The case ofEllenWest. InR. May, E. Angel, & H. F. Ellenberger (Eds.),
Existence(pp. 237-364). New York: Basic Books.
A contemporary
Churchland, P. M. (1988,). Matter and consciousness: to thephilosophyof
introduction
mind (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Toward a unifiedscienceofthemind/brain.Cambridge, MA:
Churchland P. S. (1989). Neurophilosophy:
MIT Press.
Hall, H. (1993). Intentionalityand world: Division I ofBeing and Time. In C. Guignon (Ed.), The
CambridgeCompaniontoHeidegger (pp. 122-140). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hammond, M., Howarth, J., & Keat, R. (1991). Understanding phenomenology. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
Hume, D. (1888). A treatise of human nature (L. A. Selby-Biggs, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Madison, G. B. (1988). The hermeneutics ofpostmodernity: Figures and themes. Bloomington, IN:
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology ofperception (C. Smith, Trans.). New York: Humanities
42
Sartre, J.-P. (1948). Existentialism and humanism. (P. Mairet, Trans.). London: Methuen.
Sartre, J.-P. (1949). Intimacy and other stories. (L. Alexander, Trans.). New York: Neville Spearman.
Sartre, J.-P. (1965). Being and nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.).
New York: Citadel Press. (Original work published 1943)
Sartre, J.-P. (1969). Nausea. (Lloyd Alexander, Trans.). New York: New Directions. (Original work
published 1938)
Sartre,J.-P. (1970, March 26). An interviewwith Sartre.New YorkReview ofBooks. 14(6), 22-31.
Skinner,B. F. (1964). Behaviorism at fifty.Science,140, 951-958. InT. W. Wann (Ed.),
Behaviorismand phenomenology:Contrastingbasesformodernpsychology (pp. 79-97). Chicago:
of
University Chicago Press.
Skinner,B. F. (1971). Beyondfreedomand dignity.New York: Knopf.
Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. New York: Knopf.
Sperry, R W. (1988). Psychology's mentalist paradigm and the religion/science tension. American
43, 607-613.
Psychologist,
Sperry,R. W. (1993). The impact and promise of the cognitive revolution.AmericanPsychologist,
48, 878-885.
Stevenson, L. (1974). Seven theories of human nature. New York: Oxford Press.
University
tocognitive
Stich, S. (1983). Promfolkpsychology The caseagainst belief.Cambridge, MA: MIT
science:
Press (BradfordBook).
Williams, R N. (1992). The human context of agency.AmericanPsychologist, 47, 752-760.
Woolfolk, R. L., & Sass, L. A. (1988). Behaviorism and existentialism revisited. Journal ofHumanist
28(1), 108-119.
Psychology,
43