ABSTRACT

Freud’s theories fall half-way between two brilliant but wrongheaded monolithic attempts to account for human behaviour, which have shared between them the task of correcting the Cartesian theory of mind. On the one hand there is the view that Descartes was right in seeing the physical world as a world of mechanical causation, wrong in seeing the mental world as exempt from its impact except through the slender medium of the pineal gland. What has to be done is to assimilate the explanation of mental states and occurrences to the explanation of physical states and occurrences. The eighteenth-century exponents of this view such as Diderot and de La Mettrie find their contemporary heirs in the American ‘behaviour-theorists’ such as Tolman and Hull whose various theories of learning seek to exhibit behaviour as consisting in a set of responses to external stimuli, the nature and quality of the response being determined by predisposing causal factors. These theories have so far only found a whole precise exemplification in the behaviour of rats, but their application to human beings has generally been considered by their exponents as only a matter of time, effort and experiment. At the other extreme, there are those who admire the Cartesian autonomy of mind so much that they regret any suggestion of dependence upon or interrelation with the physical at all. Such are the French existentialists of the present day, Sartre and his disciples. For Sartre all important human behaviour is the fruit of human decision. You are what you are because of what you have decided. This is asserted not just of actions but also of attitudes and emotions. Your sadness is the result of

your choosing to be sad. There are no antecedent conditions which determine human behaviour. The difficulty with both of these positions is that each conflicts with some quite undeniable feature of human behaviour. For clearly on the one hand the work of appraisal and argument that goes on in the mind affecting and altering all our conduct can never be adequately described in terms of stimulus and response if only because-a Kantian insight-the validity of reasons as reasons cannot be dealt with in causal terms. On the other hand a great deal of the life of the mind clearly takes the shape that it does because of formative environmental and biological conditions. But equally clearly each of these positions states a legitimate starting-point for approaching human behaviour. One may ask ‘Why?’ and expect an answer in terms of reasons, intentions, purposes and the like; or one may ask ‘Why?’ and expect an answer in terms of physiological or psychological determining antecedent conditions. This dichotomy remains untouched when the misleading character of other dichotomies such as that between the mental and the physical, or the inner and the outer aspects of human behaviour, has been noted.