Chapter 9 - THEORIES IN PSYCHOLOGY

Dr. Roy A. Clouser

 9.1 INTRODUCTION

As in math and physics, disagreements among theories in psychology run deep. Here, too, differences concerning the very idea of this science result from different overviews of the nature of reality. We have already seen how, in general, this comes about; namely, different ideas of the basic nature of reality affect the way a particular aspect of experience is seen to relate to all the other aspects. The resulting view of its connectedness to the others is then communicated to every concept used by the thinker investigating it, especially the concepts invented and proposed as hypotheses. And we have seen how the overviews of reality are regulated by whatever is claimed or presupposed to be divine. These same points apply to psychology as well.

Psychology arose as a distinct science in the nineteenth century with the work of thinkers such as Wundt and Von Helmholtz, and it was Von Helmholtz who first circumscribed its field as dealing with the “psycho-sensory.” Others, such as C. I. Lewis, have used the term “sensuous.” But it is clear enough that what they were concentrated on is that aspect of our experience which includes psychical or feeling qualities, such as those of love, rage, anxiety, disgust, fear, etc. It also includes the properties of the visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, and auditory senses such as red, soft, salty, acrid, and loud. And it includes the laws that relate these qualities such as the laws of association among feelings or the law that being red excludes being blue. I will continue to refer to this aspect as the “sensory,” for short.

Before examining the sample theories that will illustrate my claim of religious control for theories in psychology, let me warn that the views of reality assumed by theories in psychology are often not as clearly indicated by their advocates as the ones we just examined in math and physics. In math, for example, conflicting perspectives are usually reflected in the very titles of the theories: formalist, logicist, intuitionist, empiricist, etc. In psychology, by contrast, the names of the major theories do not correspond to the reality perspectives that regulate them, and the most widely accepted definitions of this science are too ambiguous to indicate precisely how the aspect of experience that forms its domain is understood to relate to the other aspects. The two most influential definitions of psychology over (especially the first two thirds of) the past century were: (1) psychology is the study of the human mind, and (2) psychology is the study of human behavior. The difference between these definitions represents a serious disagreement over the subject matter of psychology. The first (older) definition takes human consciousness as the focus of investigation; the second concentrates on bodily behavior. But while the newer definition rejected the first for its supposed imprecision and vagueness, the irony is that both are afflicted with the same sort of conceptual fuzziness.

To see why neither of these two definitions can properly delimit the field of psychology, we need to recall our earlier discussion of how sciences are distinguished. There we noticed that sciences have arisen to investigate single aspects abstracted from the data to be explained, or to theorize across two or more abstracted aspects so as to relate them in the explanations being proposed. But the definitions of psychology mentioned above leave its aspectual delimitation entirely in the dark.

The older definition provides no help by saying that this science concerns the human mind, since it does not say which aspect of mental life is being examined and explained. Human mental life includes acts of thought, belief, feeling, desire, and volition, any of which may be about mathematics, art, ethics, politics, or economics. Not only can such mental acts be about any aspects  of experience but — from the standpoint of our pre-theoretical experience — they also have these aspects themselves; they may be counted, beautiful, loving, treasonable, or worth money, for example. And, of course, they also have spatial, physical, biotic, sensory, and logical properties, etc., as well. So unless we know which aspect(s) of the acts or objects of consciousness form the domain of a theory, we will be left with systematic confusion resulting from this insufficient circumscription of the science doing the job.

This same sort of vagueness is true, however, of the designation “the science of human behavior,” since we need to know which aspect of human behavior is being studied and explained. Human behavior, too, exhibits all the aspects which have become fields of study for the entire range of the sciences. An act of dancing, for example, can be aesthetically beautiful, economically rewarding, physically demanding, biologically healthy, and sensorily tiring. It may at the same time celebrate a religious festival, require a lot of space, and exhibit characteristics typical of a particular culture or period in history. Obviously, no one science can claim to explain all these aspects of that behavior. Psychology must have its own “home ground,” i.e., an aspect to serve as the point of entry for its own particular study of human behavior.

Interestingly, some recent psychologists have noticed these difficulties with the accepted definitions, but dismissed them as unimportant! Isaacson, Hutt, and Blum, for example, admit that:

Their conclusion is that if psychology can be distinguished from other sciences at all, it is by 

But, of course, the problem with their attempted side-step is exactly that no one science can possibly deal with a total human. As soon as a theory offers a biological explanation it will be biology, and when it offers a physical explanation it will be physics, and if it offers a historical explanation it will be history. This is why we must look beyond the two prevailing definitions of psychology to find how in fact a particular theorist delimits its field and relates that field to the other aspects of reality. Only in that way can we penetrate to the roots of any theory’s differences from competing theories, and thus to the ontological and religious beliefs that drive it.

Our provisional list of aspects given earlier included the sensory aspect as preceded by the physical and biotic aspects and followed by logical, historical, linguistic, and social aspects. The ordering of aspects in that list is a point that will be clarified later, but for now I’ll just say that it’s supposed to be an order in which those lower on the list are pre-conditions for the appearance of those above them on the list. It may come as no surprise, then, that conflicts among theories in psychology largely concern how the sensory aspect relates to its near neighbors on the list. Curiously, it has been philosophers such as Berkeley, Hume, and Mill, along with the physicist Mach, who tried to collapse the other aspects to the sensory, while most of the thinkers in psychology have tried to explain the sensory by reducing it to some other aspect!

These trends in theories of psychology have been noticed by Jean Piaget, who divides them into those which explain it by reducing it to biology or physics (downward on our list), and those which explain it by reducing it to sociology (upward on our list).³ Piaget also refers to these trends as “reductionist,” and opposes both sorts of reduction in favor of what he calls a “constructionist” view:

While I agree with Piaget about the abandonment of “reductionist” theories, my reasons for doing so include not only the conceptual dead-ends to which he points, but also the pagan religious beliefs which inspire and sustain them. To illustrate this religious control of theories of psychology, let us begin by surveying some of the theories which exemplify the “downward” reduction of psychology to the physical and/or biological aspects — the theories which are called “behaviorist.”

9.2            THE THEORIES OF WATSON, THORNDIKE, AND SKINNER

The term “behaviorism” was coined by J. B. Watson to indicate a view of psychology which is restricted to what can be observed. By this he meant to break with theories, such as that of William James, which accept the definition that psychology is chiefly centered on consciousness. As Watson himself put it:

Watson went on to say that as he and his colleagues looked at how progress was being made in such sciences as medicine and chemistry, it appeared that the advances were always the sort that could be confirmed by repeatable laboratory experiments. With these sciences as models, Watson set out to remake psychology. He advocated that the behaviorist drop from his vocabulary “all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined.” To take their place,

 Needless to say the simple reflex arc of stimulus-response has never been sufficient to explain all animal, let alone all human, behavior. This is why E. M. Thorndike tried to expand the behaviorist theory beyond the limited explanatory power of the reflex action. Thorndike called this supplement the “law of effect.” It meant that the consequences of past behavior play a role in determining future behavior. His way of putting this point was to say that if a stimulus response is followed by a “satisfier” or reinforcer, the connection is strengthened; if it is followed by an “annoyer” or aversive stimulus, the connection is weakened. Although the terms “satisfier” and “annoyer” seem to refer to unobservable inner states of pleasure and pain, Thorndike did not slip into allowing these into his theory. In keeping with Watson’s program, he defined even these terms behaviorally:

In this way Thorndike also avoided all mention of purpose, since that is also subjective and unobservable.

Skinner built on the work of Thorndike. His task was to explain non-reflex responses and for this, he developed the concept of “operant” responses. These differ from reflex behavior, because a simple reflex can be explained by laws that relate an unconditioned stimulus to an unconditioned response, or a conditioned stimulus to a conditioned response. (Doing this for the latter pair, of course, requires knowing the history of the organism’s past conditioning.) The operant laws go beyond these, however, by relating behavior to Thorndike’s idea of reinforcing stimuli. As Skinner puts it: “the operant is defined by the property upon which reinforcement is made contingent.”⁸ The laws Skinner wants to formulate are therefore not merely those which relate a stimulus to a response, but those which relate a response to its reinforcers. Operant laws allow the prediction or control of a particular response by relating the reinforcing stimuli to the class of responses of which the particular response is a member.In operant behavior, then, we 

All this can be fairly described as an attempt to elaborate on Thorndike’s “law of effect” which, for Skinner, becomes the focal point of the entire science of psychology. On this view, the work of the psychologist is to predict or control a particular behavior by establishing the probability of its reoccurrence in relation to its reinforcers. He calls such relations the “contingencies of reinforcement”:

Common to all these theories is the total rejection of allowing into psychology anything about human mental life and experiences that is prima facie non-behavioral such as thoughts, feelings, purposes, and even perceptions.

Even this brief summary should be sufficient to establish that something very odd is going on. Since all of us constantly experience our own thoughts, feelings, perceptions, intentions, etc., why are these to be ignored by psychology? Notice how Watson spoke of James’s definition as assuming just what needed to be proven when it referred to consciousness. But are not the stimuli and responses that are supposed to take the place of thought and perception themselves known by perception and interpreted by thought? Why, then, do the behaviorists regard thoughts and perceptions as assumptions? Why do they say the existence of thoughts and perceptions need to be proven?

Such a view can only be understood as the product of these thinkers’ perspectival overview of the nature of reality. To get an accurate idea of that perspective, let us approach it by considering their view of human nature. Most other psychological theories had seen humans as comprised of two things: a mind and a body. For them, such sciences as biology and medicine study and treat the body, while the science of psychology studies and treats the mind.

By contrast, the behaviorists reject the mind-body duality. Instead, they see a human as only one thing: a body. Therefore, it is the body alone that is to be studied and explained, no matter which science does the explaining. But why do behaviorists reject the belief that there is a distinct entity called a mind? The reason is their materialist perspective on reality.

That a materialist theory of reality lies behind behaviorism can be seen in several ways, but the most obvious is that it alone can supply the reason why they want all inner experience to be excluded from any explanation of behavior. For it is not necessary to dismiss all inner experience just because one rejects the mind-body view of human nature. A theory could very well deny that a human is two things — deny, that is, that the mind is a distinct thing — but still accept that humans have inner experiences which are crucial to understanding their behavior. But if one accepts a materialist perspective, then not only would belief in a nonphysical mind be precluded, but also belief in the existence of inner, nonphysical experiences as well.

Consider the same point from a slightly different angle. If — theories aside — we simply describe what we all directly experience, we would have to say that humans exhibit all the aspects that everything else does. People take up space, move, eat, feel, reason, and speak, for example. Such deeds have, respectively, spatial, physical, biological, sensory, logical, and linguistic properties. People also have values, and acts of valuing may be aimed at truth, economy, beauty, justice, or love. But we never experience anything which is an exclusively physical body or an exclusively nonphysical mind. Those are entity hypotheses invented to explain human nature. And they are invented under the control of a perspectival overview of reality which is either proposed as a theory or simply presupposed. The perspective which regulates the mindbody duality is one that sees two particular aspects as those upon which all the other aspects of a person depend: usually the physical and the logical. From this overview, it is easy to accept that there are wholly physical things (bodies) and wholly nonphysical things (minds). The remaining aspects can then be seen as generated by the interaction of minds and bodies.

By contrast, the perspective guiding the behaviorist theories is one that sees all reality as restricted to, or dependent on, the physical aspect. That is, it holds either: (1) there exist only physical bodies and their actions, or (2) any nonphysical factors involved are entirely generated by physical bodies and their actions. This is why the crux of the difference between the behaviorists and other theories cannot be understood simply as an argument over whether there are nonphysical minds. The behaviorist perspective not only disallows minds as explaining anything, but disallows everything which is supposed to be nonphysical. It views the sensory aspect, along with all the others, as either (1) collapsed to the physical aspect of experience, or (2) entirely dependent on it. In either case, the real scientific explanation is always physical.

The two versions of materialism numbered above are reflected in the difference between the way Watson reduces the sensory aspect to the physical and the way Skinner does it. Watson takes the first version. For him, consciousness itself, along with its states and contents, are outright fictions: there just are no such entities. He says that “consciousness” is as fictional as “soul,” and ranks all concepts of mental life in the same class as the superstitions of medicine men.¹¹ Skinner, on the other hand, does not deny outright that there are inner experiences. Moreover, so far as he is concerned, the inner experiences may even have distinctively sensory and other nonphysical properties. Nevertheless, he still maintains that such inner experiences are not to figure in the science of psychology. His reason is that these experiences never cause behavior, but are instead always caused by behavior.¹²

On either version, however, the physical aspect is given the status of selfexistence. It explains and causes everything because everything depends on it, while so far as the theory goes, it does not depend on anything in turn and so is self-existent by default. In this way, the materialist perspective presupposes the religious belief in the divinity of the physical, a belief which is of the pagan variety since it regards some aspect of creation as divine. It should be clear, therefore, why behaviorism cannot be acceptable to anyone who believes in God.

As with the other casebook chapters, my purpose here is not so much to critique the theories being reviewed as to show how they are regulated by some religious belief. All the same, it is worth noticing the powerful grip the materialist faith and perspective exert on these thinkers so that they maintain their position despite the incoherencies that afflict their theories. One such incoherency can be seen in the way Skinner speaks of how conditioning controls behavior:

 But if the writing of books is like all other human activities in being controlled by our past conditioning, what does this say about Skinner’s own books? What does it say about the theory of behaviorism? To be consistent, the behaviorist would have to admit that his own theory is nothing more than the product of his own conditioning. Once that is admitted, however, there is no reason for the behaviorist or anyone else to regard that theory (or any other belief!) as true. In fact, it would mean that even if behaviorism happened to be true, no one could ever know it is true because the theory requires that every belief is held only because the believer’s conditioning makes him/her helpless to do anything else. Skinner’s claim is therefore self-referentially incoherent. Yet he says, “That’s the truth, and we have to get used to it”!

Another incoherency concerns the behaviorists’ avowed dismissal of inner states of consciousness from psychology. We have already noticed the implausibility of this claim compared with a description of what we directly experience, but I am now referring to another difficulty. This is that the behaviorist must assume that in establishing correlations between stimuli or reinforcers to responses, he has shown something that will continue to be true of the organism being studied. The correlations would yield no scientific prediction or control if what was discovered were true only for the moment it was discovered. But if they are to be considered laws, and continue to apply, they would have to describe an enduring disposition or tendency in the individual tested. Skinner flirted with this problem when he said that if being thirsty meant only having a tendency to thirst, that was acceptable. It was only objectionable if it was supposed to refer to an inner state of thirst that is a contributory cause of a person’s drinking.

The problem here is that dispositions and tendencies are inner states and are just as unobservable as are any of the other entities he and Watson wanted to ban from psychology. Nor will it do for him to postulate that there is some purely physical brain state that is simply identical to the disposition. For, as a general point, any time we’re in doubt as to whether we’re dealing with one thing or two, the claim that there is really only one thing must demonstrate that the (allegedly) two things have all the same properties. So for a brain state to be identical with a tendency, it would have to have all the properties the tendency has, and thus have both unobservable and nonphysical properties! Without nonphysical properties (as well as physical properties) a brain state would not correspond to the experience of, or satisfy the description of, a tendency. Besides, as was already pointed out, we never experience any brain state or action as solely physical; in so far as we can observe them, brains and their activities exhibit a multiplicity of aspects: they occupy space, are numerable as well as observable, etc. (Later when I critique reductionist claims in detail we will also see why it is not possible so much as to frame an idea of anything that has only one aspectual kind of properties.) Yet, despite the impossibility of reducing them to anything solely physical, Skinner has to admit that he cannot do without tendencies and dispositions. What is worse for his theory, it seems obvious that even if someone could come up with a version of it that could avoid explicitly mentioning them, the entire explanatory and predictive power of behaviorism would still require their tacit assumption. The claim that nonphysical, inner states are banned from psychology is thus at odds with the assumption that people have tendencies, so this part of the theory is self-assumptively incoherent.

Finally there is a large explanatory gap left by the laws which are supposed to show how the reinforcers are related to stimulus response patterns. These, Skinner said, are to be arrived at by establishing statistical correlations between reinforcers and responses. But even granting that the many variables involved in such a task can be sorted out and accorded their relative causal weights (and it is by no means obvious that this can be done), what would the resulting probabilities explain? Suppose we can show, for instance, that more people will vacation in the mountains than at the seashore relative to how severe the winter is. What have we explained? As Piaget has pointed out:

 The point of mentioning these difficulties is to highlight the way faith in the materialist perspective exercises its control over those who are captured by it. It illustrates that what makes the theory of behaviorism attractive to its advocates is not its explanatory power, since it is patently incoherent. Rather, its attractiveness stems from a particular vision of what science should be, which is based in turn on a specific view of the nature of reality and divinity. It is the materialist view of ultimate reality which sets the limits as to which hypotheses look plausible and which do not. It is thus much more than a “working hypothesis” or “methodological assumption” that is easily surrendered if it proves unfruitful. On the contrary, it remains a hope and a prophecy commanding loyalty in the face of the most insurmountable incoherencies. The real explanation of such loyalty is that it is rooted in the religious belief in the divinity of matter/energy. This is the driving motive of the perspective, and the real source of its power over those who do science under its direction.¹⁵

To be sure, this perspective is excused by its defenders on grounds of wanting to maximize in psychology such laudable features as precision, measurability, and economy of thought. But desirable as such features are, their importance can never override the one concern which must outweigh all others: does the theory account for the relevant data? On that point they seem to have forgotten Aristotle’s sage advice:

So even if states of consciousness are not observable, it is still hard to imagine what could be more relevant to understanding human behavior than what people think, feel, desire, and — especially — believe. Is not behaviorism itself a belief of those who advocate it? Is that belief not the reason that they “behave” as they do in pursuing psychology? The moral of the story seems clear: rather than producing genuine explanations of human perceptual and emotional experience, behaviorism has committed theoretical suicide on the doorstep to psychology.

9.3            THE THEORIES OF ADLER AND FROMM

The second of the reductionist tendencies mentioned by Piaget is one that tries to explain the perceptual and emotional aspect of life as a product of social, rather than physical and/or biological, causes. This does not mean that the advocates of such socially oriented theories ignore altogether the physical or biological aspects of humans. Rather, it means that while the physical and biotic components of humans set the basis and limits for their psychical life, they do so without determining how people think, feel, or act. An excellent example of this approach is the way Alfred Adler broke with the earlier theories of the behaviorists and of Freud. Whereas Freud had developed theories from a perspective which wants ultimately to reduce psychology to physics, Adler insisted that psychology is a social science.¹⁶ He held that the goal of psychology “is not to comprehend causal factors, as in physiology, but the direction-giving . . . [social] forces and goals that guide all other psychological movements.”¹⁷

Thus while admitting that our genetic makeup determines the sort of bodies we have and the biotic necessities of life, Adler says that even biological innate drives are handled in different ways according to people’s social orientation.¹⁸ This, he maintained, is true not only of such things as sex drives,¹⁹ but even of the way people perceive the world. Perception, said Adler, is never merely sensory copying but the product of the way people collect and arrange sensations due to the factors of their social life. As a result, people literally do not see the same thing. Because of this, it is possible for psychology to infer far-reaching conclusions concerning an individual’s inner life from the way he or she perceives.²⁰

What, exactly, are the social factors which lead human feeling, perception and behavior? According to Adler, one’s own prejudices, one’s “unconscious” presuppositions, like all human expressions, exist within a social context, and somehow express the striving for power, significance, and security.²¹

 In a word, everyone strives for “superiority.” It is this which is “the general goal of man” and “the principal conditioning factor of human life.”22 Because the drive for social superiority is the “life goal” of every person, “no person can tolerate the feelings of real or apparent inferiority.”²³ (It was in this connection that Adler coined the term “inferiority complex.”)

The social drive of each individual for power and superiority is, however, in direct conflict with that same drive in others. Left unrestrained, it would produce a chaos of constant strife which would make human society impossible. For this reason, Adler contended that the goal of superiority is “ridiculous from the standpoint of reality” (by “reality” here, he meant social reality). The individual, he insisted, makes little impression on society. What is more, each individual depends upon society for existence, so that the restraint which blocks the drive for superiority is really insurmountable: the sexes need each other, children need parents, and the family depends in turn on the larger social group. Thus the drive which is the principal determining psychological factor in human life is also in hopeless opposition to the social conditions necessary for each person’s survival. These social conditions can be preserved only through adjustments — chiefly the division of labor — by which people cooperate in order to survive rather than compete for superiority:

 Adler called the dependency of the individual on the social group the “logic of communal life” — where “logic” refers to whatever is “universally useful” and necessary to the individual’s survival. He then used these terms to express his point that everything which characterizes humans as distinctly human developed because of the “logic of communal life.” Adler claimed that not only speech, but

On Adler’s theory, then, every human is involved in a great collision. On the one hand, a solitary individual can neither survive nor reproduce, and every distinctly human capability has evolved to meet social needs. On the other hand, it is precisely society which is the source of the individual’s feelings  of inferiority, and is therefore the obstacle against which the individual struggles. The contest, however, is totally one-sided: no individual can win against society. So the conflict can only be resolved in one way:

Thus, the needs of society are to be regarded as paramount, and the individual must adjust to them. These needs then become the ultimate standard by which all values, practices, relationships, etc., are to be judged. That is, they are the standards for what is normal and abnormal in psychology.

The way individuals cope in adjusting their drive for superiority with the social conditions of survival, Adler called their “lifestyle,” which could be psychologically either normal or abnormal. In abnormal people their “maladjustment is always incongruity between lifestyle and social demands rather than inner conflict,”²⁸ so that “the cure is always to strengthen social feeling rather than attempt to restrain ‘bad’ impulses.”²⁹ Generally speaking, an abnormal lifestyle may be characterized this way:

This general point is applied to the more specific example of sex and marriage in the following way. In a normal lifestyle, 

So when a man courts a woman, he does this in a psychologically normal way if we can see by what he does that he is saying “yes” to the future of mankind.³² In this, as in every other case, it is “the immanent rules of the game of a group . . . [which are the] absolute truth” for the individual.³³

Adler’s emphasis on adjusting the individual to the needs of the social group led him to take a great interest in the social theories of Marx and Engels. In fact, he admired their work so much that he once said “Karl Marx . . . showed the way toward the final realization of social interest.”³⁴ Nevertheless, Adler rejected the historical determinism of Marx’s theory. He correctly realized that if everything is predetermined by the flow of history, there could be no norms: no right or wrong, no normal or abnormal. “If man were completely determined by circumstances,” he said, “we could not speak of errors.”³⁵ So he reversed the Marxist idea of economically controlled history, and held instead that

He thus acknowledged the need for any theory to allow that humans have genuine freedom to recognize the truth. He (again, correctly) saw that if all thought, belief, feeling, and choice are determined (i.e., forced on humans by outside conditions) then so is the determinists’ acceptance of the theory of determinism forced on them by those same conditions. In that case they could never claim to know their theory is true since the theory making that claim would be self-referentially incoherent. In other words, the theory requires that no belief is ever a free judgment made on the basis of experience or reason, but is always a compulsion over which the believer has no control.

Adler was aware that if he were simply to supplement the physical determinism of the behaviorists with social determinants, he would not end up avoiding the dilemma of determinism but would only have a more complex version of it. He would be allowing for two determining forces (physical and social) rather than only one (physical), but would not have avoided the inconsistency of assuming he is free to ascertain the truth of his theory. Nevertheless, despite his apparent recognition of this point, Adler never provides a theory of human nature that allows for genuine freedom with respect to the acquisition of knowledge. Instead he falls into precisely the two-sided determinism he seemed to realize should be avoided, by continuing to regard thoughts and feelings as rigidly determined by a person’s social orientation which is set in early childhood:

 Another problem Adler left unsolved arises from his acceptance of the needs of society as the standard for psychological normalcy. In his view,  it  is always the social needs of the group to which the individual must conform. This rules out raising the question as to whether a society itself may be abnormal. At the same time, it also results in his being forced to regard every leader who actually did achieve social superiority as abnormal!

Another good example of reductionism in the social direction is the thought of Eric Fromm, who undertook to correct the faults in Adler’s work. In his earlier works, Fromm also called himself a social psychologist and, like Adler, rejected theories which regard humans as determined by the physical/biotic aspects of their nature. He said that whereas Freud had viewed psychology as a “natural science of man,”³⁸ a human’s true nature is that of “free, conscious activity.”³⁹ Such free conscious activities are not determined by the “natural” drives of sex or hunger, but include the ways people need and deal with such things as beauty and love.⁴⁰ Also like Adler, Fromm had a great admiration for Marx. He saw the class and economic factors emphasized by Marx as determining the social side of human life. These factors are transmitted to individuals through the family, which is “the psychological agency of society.”⁴¹ Since the family itself is a product of the economic and class conditions of society, Marx gave us the way to critique and judge the sort of society and family we ought to have. A fully social psychology is not, then, left merely to deal with the individual’s adjustment to society, but can also say whether society itself is what it should be.⁴²

But Fromm’s pushing social psychology in a more thoroughly Marxist direction allows him to avoid only one of the two problems Adler had bequeathed to him. It avoids the problem of having to admit that there is no standard by which to judge a society by allowing him to say that any type of society other than a socialist one is deficient. But it does not avoid the problem that Marx’s own theory of history and society was as deterministic as the theories Fromm was rejecting. For Marx, people’s interpretations of justice or love, as well  as their conceptions of normal and abnormal, are totally determined by their socio-economic conditioning. How, then, can we be free to ascertain the norms by which to judge society if our very ideas of norms are socially determined?

At first, Fromm tried to find a way around Marx’s determinism by saying that Marxist theory should not be understood to mean that each individual is psychologically determined by economy and class. Rather, it is only the institutions of society which are structured by economics. Thus Marx should not be interpreted as teaching that the “acquisitive drive” is the overriding motive of every act of each individual, but only of the social structures in which the individual lives.⁴³ But having made that point, Fromm hedges, for he also says that

 He repeats that this does not mean that the economic factors are always the strongest, but only that they are “less modifiable” by the individual. Yet, at the same time, he again insists the role of “primary formative factors” goes to economic conditions, so that the “task of social psychology is to explain. . . psychic attitudes and ideologies — their unconscious roots in particular —  in terms of the influence of economic conditions on libido strivings.”⁴⁵ At this point, Fromm wants humans to be “essentially conditioned by history” for purposes of psychological explanation, while at the same time he wants human life to have an “inner dynamism of its own” so as to be free to discover truth!⁴⁶

This inconsistent wavering between two poles of thought comes to a head in Fromm’s Man for Himself (1947), but is most clearly addressed in The Art of Loving (1956) and The Heart of Man (1964). In the latter two works Fromm is explicit about the dilemma. Already in The Sane Society (1955), he had acknowledged that Marx had not solved it. While Marx had seen much that is true of the way society determines individuals, his view was not only “economically simplistic”⁴⁷ but unrealistic. For Marx thought not only that socialism is necessary to heal society but that it is sufficient to do so.⁴⁸ In The Heart of Man, Fromm repeats this criticism in more detail. He chides Marx for everywhere presupposing that man has an essential nature, while also saying that man creates himself in the process of history and is nothing more than the “ensemble of his social relations.”

At this point Fromm asserts that man does, indeed, have an essential nature, but that nature is to be “a contradiction inherent in human existence”!⁴⁹ The contradiction is, of course, precisely the one which he criticized Marx for not solving: on the one hand man is an animal, natural, and determined by nature and society; on the other hand man is conscious (“life aware of itself”), rational, and is “free in thought.”⁵⁰ It is through this free rationality that humans are able to know that the norm for both individuals and society is the rule of love: love thy neighbor as thyself. Thus for Fromm, as for Kant before him, human freedom lies in the (practical) reason which knows ethical truth. And like Rousseau, he sees man as essentially good in his innermost self. It is the outer determinants of the social order which make him evil.

This, however, is nothing more than saying that both sides of the inconsistency are somehow true, that a human is both free and not free in the same sense at the same time. And notice that even aside from the impossibility of such a blatant contradiction, maintaining the freedom side of the dilemma entails that there is no science of psychology as Fromm conceived of it. For if human thoughts and choices are genuinely free, and if they cause human actions, then neither the choices nor the behavior resulting from them can be wholly explained in terms of any laws — let alone be predicted or controlled through knowledge of laws.

Needless to say, attempting to accept mutually contradictory beliefs rather than develop a theory that avoids them raises even worse problems than those Fromm thinks it solves. Applied to our concepts, the logical law of noncontradiction mandates that for any concept whatever, either it includes a particular characteristic or it does not, and it cannot both include and not include the same elements at the same time. Any (putative) concept that failed to abide by this law would not merely be fuzzy or uncertain, it would literally have no meaning whatever and would fail to be a concept. Yet Fromm advocates that we reject the laws of logic and accept his claim that such mutual contradictions are illusory.

In The Art of Loving,⁵¹ Fromm attempts to develop this point in more detail. Western thought, he says, has been dominated by acceptance of logical axioms ever since they were clearly formulated by Aristotle, who added that the axiom of non-contradiction in particular is “the most certain of all principles.” As noted above, this law says that nothing can both be true and not be true in  the same sense at the same time. This means nothing can, for example, be both completely blue and completely not blue at the same time, and that no statement can be simultaneously both completely true and completely false. Over against this, Fromm claims that there is the option of “paradoxical logic,” which accepts that things can both have and not have the same quality at the same time, and that a statement can be both true and false at once. In support of this claim, he mentions that this was accepted long ago by some Chinese and Hindu thinkers, and in more recent times by Hegel, Marx, and other dialectical philosophers. So he concludes that the way to resolve the apparently insolvable dilemma of determinism and freedom is to accept both as true. We cannot see how both are true, of course, but that is because “the human mind perceives reality in contradictions.”⁵²

The program of rejecting logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs is not, however, just a harmless, whimsical hope that somehow logically incompatible beliefs can both be true. As was pointed out above, it results in nothing less than the destruction of any and every concept we could possess. Even the concept of rejecting the law of non-contradiction depends on assuming and using that law, since without it the concept of rejecting it could neither be thought nor stated. And since Fromm himself sees the concept of rejecting the law as excluding the concept of accepting it, he thereby assumes the truth of the law! Thus Fromm’s proposal is self-assumptively incoherent.

Nor is this dire consequence avoided by Hegel, Marx, or any of the other dialectical thinkers Fromm cites in the hope of convincing us that he is in good company. They one and all use the law of non-contradiction to form their concepts, to state their case, and to criticize opposing views. They then deny the very law which makes it possible for them to do those things in order to excuse an inconsistency in their own theory. The only way they bring off the sleight of hand which makes such a trick appear plausible is that they employ their denial of logic selectively; they embrace just the contradictions they wish to excuse, while otherwise reasoning in a consistent fashion and criticizing competing theories when they are inconsistent. If they were to employ their denial of non-contradiction at every point throughout their theory, the result would be a nonsense jumble that would fail to express, assert, or deny any belief whatever.

Fromm’s position is also an example of this same dogmatic selectivity. He presents his view as though there are reasons for rejecting the law of non-contradiction, and then argues that his view of the divine (he calls it “ultimate reality”) logically follows from that rejection. He ignores the fact that to make any logical inference — to see that one belief “logically follows from” another — means that the belief which is said to “follow” is required on pain of contradicting oneself. Having denied all basis for any inference, Fromm nevertheless proceeds to infer that reality itself must be an all-encompassing mystical unity which harmonizes all the contradictions which logical thought takes to be real. He then further infers that since human thought cannot help but be contradictory, ultimate reality cannot be known by thought. He gives  a summary of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist expressions of this same view, and again infers that accepting their view of the divine requires him to reject the biblical idea of God as a knowable, individual, personal Creator. He then offers still another logical inference when he insists that

In this way Fromm ends by adding self-referential incoherency to the contradictions and self-assumptive incoherency already asserted by his theory. For he makes the positive statement about God that no positive statements about God are possible.

We cannot help but ask ourselves, What drove Fromm into such a chaotic position? He started with the desire to develop a social psychology, but ended in the abandonment of logic and therefore of all science. The answer is that the real motive for Fromm’s radical shift of thought was nothing less than a religious conversion: he went from a pagan divinity belief which saw some aspects of creation as divine to a pantheist divinity belief in which the creation we experience is but an illusion contained within an all-encompassing, totally inconceivable, divinity. This is why, along with some pantheist religions, he is prepared to dismiss every difference and “opposition” found in human experience as mere appearance or illusion — logical laws included.

Fromm had actually already rejected the biblical idea of the divine from the beginning. He regarded belief in God, the transcendent creator, as merely the projection of a desire for a heavenly Father to care for us. Following Freud, he called this “a childish illusion.” So he theorized on the presupposition of the pagan type of religious belief.⁵⁴ He looked to something about the universe available to human experience and thought to be the self-existent reality on which all else depends. But pursuing psychology from this pagan religious presupposition, Fromm ran into one incoherency after another. At the same time, he noticed ever more clearly that the best of the thinkers before him had also run into them and never solved them. Consequently, he came to believe that it was not simply coincidence that so many theories built upon a pagan basis had run into contradictions, but that contradictions would arise in any theory governed by such a faith. Confronted with this realization, Fromm’s religious faith was shaken and took a new direction. He saw, as Marx had not, that giving up the logical laws and regarding all contradictions as illusory would also mean giving up materialism along with the entire pagan standpoint for theorizing. Like some Hindu, and most Buddhist and Taoist thinkers, he came to regard logical thinking as intrinsically contradictory and misleading, yielding only illusion and not reality. For anything whatever, he said, the truth is that “it both is and it is not.”⁵⁵ Thus he also joined with an emphasis of most pantheistic thinkers in advocating a non-rational, mystical experience as the way to know the truth about the one, inconceivable, divine reality. In later works and lectures he adopted a specifically Buddhist version of this view (Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 1960).

9.4            HUMAN NATURE

We have now seen some examples of how theories of psychology vary in their explanation of the psycho-sensory side of human experience depending on their overview as to how all the aspects relate. In this respect they are no different from theories having other aspects as their subject matter. But in the case of psychology the aspect characterizing the perspective for this relation is also the one (or two) the theory claims to be the essential core of human nature. As Soloman Asch has observed

J. A. Brown has applied the same point specifically to psychology:

Since the issue of human nature is one we have identified as among the revealed truths which can guide theorizing (chapter 6, note 11), we should now look briefly at what scripture says on the topic. Of course, we cannot expect  a detailed theory of human nature from scripture, but what it does tell us can help form a distinctly biblical perspective for our theory making. Moreover, it will serve a double purpose here, as it is a point often missed or underplayed by theistic thinkers as well as being largely unknown to non-theists.

The central scriptural teaching about human nature that is relevant here is that it is centered in the human self, which scripture usually calls the “heart” (though it also occasionally uses the terms “spirit” or “soul”). Each human is thus seen as an essential unity, no matter how many diverse kinds of functions an individual may display in the various aspects of creation. The term “heart” is not, therefore, used to mean simply emotion. So although we now often speak of being guided by our head (intellect) as opposed to following our heart (feelings), Bible writers speak of the heart as the central identity or selfhood of a person from which flow all the issues of life (Prov. 4:23). In the biblical view, the heart is therefore the center of thought, belief, knowledge, will, and feeling, and the seat of a person’s dispositions, talents, and innate temperament. It is thus also the root source of the good or evil a person thinks or does (Exod. 28:3; Ps. 90:12; Matt. 12:34, 35 and 15:18; 2 Cor. 3:14, 15). In this connection it is significant that scripture asserts that only God can know the human heart (1 Sam. 16:7; 2 Chron. 6:30; 1 Kings 8:39; Jer. 17:9, 10), since that is what we would expect if the heart were the ultimate subjective pole of all human activity. For in that case it could not become an object to itself, and we would be incapable of analyzing or conceptualizing it since it must itself be the agent of the analysis. This doesn’t mean we can have no idea (rather than a concept) of the human heart. But it does mean that the various ideas of its nature are always indirect reflections of whatever a person believes to be divine.

This, then, is the deeper import of the biblical teaching that humans are created “in the image of” God. That is, it is true not only of how they are,  but also of the only way they can come to understand themselves. In other words, those who do not believe in, and model their idea of human nature on, the biblical Creator, will inevitably derive their idea of human nature from the nature of whatever false divinity they substitute for God.⁵⁸

The view that the “heart” or selfhood is the agent in all the functions of human life is, for our purposes, the main guiding point to be gained from scripture about human nature. So before going on to show its significance for theories, we need to notice that this view is at odds with the notion popular among theists that a human is not an essential unity but a duality of two entities — a soul and a body (this was already touched upon in the quotes from Herberg in chapter 3). In fact, many theists believe dualism to be taught by scripture itself and to be the basis for the doctrine of life after death. Thus it is widely held that only the body dies while the soul never does, so that the body is not essential to being human.

We  have touched on this point before, but it is especially pertinent here   to recall that this view has been successfully challenged in recent years by Bible scholars of many backgrounds who have shown that this popular view is derived from the influence of Greek philosophy rather than the Bible itself. Scripture does not view the body as merely an external, unnecessary shell for the soul. Neither is the promise of everlasting life based on the teaching that the soul is naturally immortal. Rather, the scriptural idea of everlasting life is that it is assured only by the promise of God, and that what God promises is the resurrection of the whole person — that is, the resurrection of a new body — at the day of judgment.⁵⁹ This topic cannot be defended at length here, so I will merely stipulate that in what follows I will be assuming this holistic, rather than the popular dualistic, view of human nature.⁶⁰

The holistic view thus refuses to identify the human body exclusively with certain aspects of creation (for example, the spatial, physical, and biotic) while assigning other aspects exclusively to the mind or soul (the logical and volitional, for example). It rejects the position of Plato that the soul can exist separately from the body because it knows eternal, rational truths and may therefore be naturally immortal like those truths. The importance of this is that it refuses to identify human nature with any one or two of the aspects of creation under the laws of which humans exist and function. To do this would be to accept a reductionist view of human nature that would thus overestimate the role of the aspects identified as human nature as compared to the others. By contrast the biblical doctrine regards the human heart as more than the sum of all its aspects; while it functions in all the aspects alike, it cannot be identified with (be nothing more than) any one or combination of them. There is that about the heart which exceeds the aspects, stands in direct dependence on the Creator, and can be opened to a personal relationship to God. This view thus avoids every reductionist view of human nature. At the same time it explains the important sense in which humans are free in both thought and action.⁶¹ For although humans exist and function within the limits set by the laws of every aspect, the human self is not entirely the product of them or of any causal forces in creation. Rather, every human heart is the creation of God.

So I agree with Gordon Allport when he says that the reductionist views of human nature result in a series of one-sided theories. Allport says, “it is only aspects of our total life that are like computers, like biochemical compounds, rats in a maze, or like the social behavior of insects.” The way to avoid reductionist theories, he suggests, would be to have a “systematic pluralism,” but he despairs of it ever being accomplished owing to the many competing definitions of human nature.⁶² What Allport does not see, however, is that these competing definitions are themselves the results of various pagan religious presuppositions. It is because thinkers have already identified the nature of all reality with one or more of its aspects that they then identify human nature with those same aspects. This is why a reductionist view of human nature reflects a pagan view of reality that should be rejected by any theist. It was this point that first impressed Herman Dooyeweerd, and led him to begin his reform of philosophy with a non-reductionist view of human nature. That insight, he says, was 

As a consequence, he expressed the significance of the biblical view of the heart this way:

It was by taking this point about human nature as microcosm that Dooyeweerd was able to expand and apply it to the rest of created reality as macrocosm. It led him to see that while various types of nonhuman things each have a definite character, these things are like humans in that they do not have an independent, intrinsic nature that makes them what they are because it is God who makes them what they are. Their most essential feature is to depend on God.

Simple as these points sound, they have far-reaching consequences for theory making. The next chapter we will examine in greater detail why these biblical insights require the construction of a non-reductionist theory of reality, and the final chapters will present Dooyeweerd’s own proposal as to what such a theory could look like.