HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF FREE CHOICE* JAMES E. ROYCE, S. J.

Seattle Universdy

The determinants of human behavior have been the concern of thinking men from ancient philosophers down to current psychologists. We are rarely satisfied with knowing merely what man does, without trying to understand why he does it. Theories of personality are to a large extent theories of motivation.

Perhaps the most puzzling part of the whole problem is the extent, if a t all, to which man is able to determine his own behavior. Although the child discovers fairly early in life that he has a will (or at least a won’t), the notion hardly appears in most text books of introductory psychology-and the word “will” practically never, except perhaps in derision.

That this latter fact may be a matter of fads is suggested by Charles Spearman’s two-volume work Psychology Down the Ages (11) wherein he shows how often psychologists have thrown something out the front door under one name, only to bring it in a few decades later through the back door under a different name. Thus Bourke (2), Adler (1)) Sorokin (10) and others have traced the fluctuations of opinion on free choice over the centuries.

Poets and dramatists, from Homer and Seneca through Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam to T. S. Eliot and Gabriel Marcel, portray the struggle of man against fate and fortune. As man evolved from the preoccupation with sheer physical survival to a reflective state, he recognized there were certain forces in his world over which he was powerless. Whether described as the haphazard chances of fortune, or embodied in some global scheme called fate, or personified as the will of the gods, the fact was there. Certain things were inescapable. Zeno’s slave argued to this effect: “Master, according to thy teachings it was determined that I should steal from thee, and thou should not beat me for that for which I am not responsi- ble.” Zeno’s reply amounted to: “It is also determined that I will beat thee.” Oriental philosophies are aften tinged with varying degrees of fatalism, though they usually do not avow rank determinism. But they lack the “I am the master of my fate” optimism which characterizes much of Western attitudes, especially American and French.

Plato in his humanistic vein developed the notion of human freedom and dig- nity to some extent, but his exposition needed the work of his pupil Aristotle to clarify the relations between knowledge and volition. These two ancient Greeks laid the foundations for Western thinking on the subject.

The early Christian centuries, and especially the writings of Augustine, see the question to a great extent as correlative to the problem of evil. Prompted by their theistic leanings to blame man rather than God, they became acutely aware of man’s freedom to rebel against God’s plan.

Of more interest to the psychologist, however, is the evidence of considerable

*Presented as part of a symposium “Whatever Happened to the Will in American Psychology?” co-sponsored by Divisions 1 and 26 at the annual convention of the American Psychological Associa- tion in San Francisco, Aug. 31, 1968.

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HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF FREE CHOICE 49

sophistication during this period in a recognition that freedom has limitations. The ascetical writings of the Fathers of the Desert clearly acknowledge the powerful pull which unconscious influences can exert on the will, and show amazing awareness of the subtleties of rationalization and compensation. Behavior is at least partially determined by emotion, habit, ignorance, spontaneous likes and dislikes, external stimuli , organic drives, and physiological conditions, and to that extent freedom of choice is limited.

The applications of all this become apparent in canon law, which for centuries considered factors which diminish culpability while civil law was still taking a “guilty or not guilty” all-black-or-white approach. Although progress was gradual in developing the notion, the basic idea of limited imputability was clear early in Christian thought, and underwent early and thorough refinement. It is unfortunate that the Zeitgeist of the age of rationalism, in which scientific psychology was born, led psychologists to ignore this whole development. For it is precisely such con- siderations which counteract the unrealistic “ghost in the machine” stereotype of will, which caused the word to be unacceptable in modern psychology.

Moreover, the medieval philosophers analyzed the causality involved in voli- tion, concluding that the will-act is anything but uncaused. The act of choice has, and must have, two adequate or sufficient causes: a motive as final or teleological cause, and the agent or person willing as efficient cause. They saw the motive as sufficient but non-necessitating because of man’s intellectual ability to recognize a finite good as limited: desirable, but less than compelling because not an infinite good seen as allowing no alternatives. This seems more logical than to say that every motive is necessitating, which would have two impossible consequences : man would have to do everything which appealed to him, and he would have to follow even contradictory motives.

At the time of Calvin, the question of volition was tied up with the problem of predestination. This was a return to the old pagan notion of fate, but in a theistic context. It is of interest to the psychologist largely because i t tended to make the whole concept of responsibility irrational in the eyes of many people, and to confuse the roles of cognition and volition. “If God knows what I am going to do . . .” is really an irrelevant argument, but unfortunately it is still brought in (If man freely chooses, that is precisely what God would know and it would be contradictory that His knowledge made the choice not-free.).

Descartes held free choice, but only because the body could not interfere with the soul in this respect-a reason hardly acceptable to modern philosophers and psychologists alike, with their recognition of the unity of man and the importance of organic, animal factors. Locke endowed man with will, but one wonders how well this could be defended on the premises of his sensism. Kant held freedom at least as a postulate of practical reason, but seemed to despair of philosophical proof.

Another trend was the extreme voluntarist view which, opposing the intel- lectualist stress of Aquinas, made the will paramount in human nature. In varying forms this notion appeared in some medieval Franciscans, and in the tradition represented by such writers as Schleiermacher, von Hartmann, and especially Nietzsche. This latter fathered much of modern thought on volition, and his in- fluence is seen in such diverse areas as the “will to power” of Alfred Alder and the Superman of Adolf Hitler.

50 JAMES E. ROYCE, S. J.

The existentialist philosophers, from Kierkegaard on, tend to emphasize and even exaggerate freedom, blithely ignoring its limitations. They examine widely its implications for man, praise it, even complain about being condemned to freedom. They seem less concerned about detailed analysis of the empirical evidence.

As was argued elsewhere (7), a principal reason for the psychologist ehying away from it seems to be that the term (‘free will” somehow acquired the connota- tion of uncaused act, behavior without motive, some little supernatural d e w ex machina within man which acted contrary to the laws of causality.’ Other reasons would be the desire of the scientist to predict and control, and the importance of unconscious determinants.

Just where the notion of uncaused act arose is not clear. We have already seen that medieval philosophy affirmed just the opposite. There is some suspicion about a passage or two in Leibniz. The whole development from Calvin through Descartes and Kant tended to make volition seem somewhat irrational and arbitrary. But the main sources of what is undoubtedly a complex phenomenon are probably in the age of scientism which immediately preceded the birth of experimental psychology in Wundt’s laboratory a t Leipzig.

Classic physics served as a model during this era. The rapid growth in science was due in great part to progress in mathematics and the techniques of quantitative measurement. Since final cause or motive could not be measured, i t was counted as nothing. Hence any theory of volition which looked to motive as part-cause could be distorted into a theory of non-causality. Moreover, the efficient causality of the agent himself in determining the influences of motives (by selecting one among alternatives) could not be directly observed or measured, so the whole idea of volition could be dismissed as unscientific. In a few decades the early experimenters would be asking a subject to choose between two colored liquids “for no reason”-- clear evidence that choice had come to be looked upon as an unmotived act. Aban- donment of this view has permitted the subject to reappear in experimental litera- ture (6) .

Now that P. Bridgman, W. Heisenberg, R. Oppenheimer, and other physicists are chiding the psychologists for patterning their science after an outmoded physics (9), the tide is beginning to turn in the area of volition. Rogers, Maslow, Cantril, Allport, Rollo May, Nuttin, some of Festinger’s followers, and a host of others from various backgrounds have discovered that inner subjective variables can be experimentally investigated, including the self as a part-determiner of behavior. In psychoanalytic circles the ego is no longer a mere battleground between impulsive id and inhibiting superego, but a real causal force (5 ) . The announcement of the XVIth International Congress of Psychology, while listing many topics under all other divisions of the program, listed only one topic under Motivatian, namely, “Volition and ego psychology.”

Many symposia, articles, and controversies in current books and psychology journals indicate that the topic is very much alive today (3, 5, 6, 8). Texts in adolescent psychology and personality adjustment frequently speak of the person himself as “the third determinant” besides heredity and environment, e.g., Coleman (4). Social psychologists are applying quantitative methods to the study of values

‘For a fuller discussion of this and further references, see Chapter 11 of Man and Meaning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), by J. E. Royce.

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in human behavior. K. Lewin’s followers point out that the phenomenological field includes the subject himself, who “restructures the field” by his choice. Michotte has studied the perception of finality (teleological causation). Clinical-counseling research is investigating the decision-making process and value selection. And as Spearman might have predicted, what was thrown out as “free choice” is now being brought in as “soft determinism” or self-determination.

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. COLEMAN, J. C. Personality dynamics and efleclive behavior. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1960.

ADLER, M. J. The idea of freedom. 2 vols. Garden City: Doubleday, 1958, 1961. BOURKE, V. J. Will in vestem thought. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1964. CHEIN, I. & IMMERQLUCK, L. “Comment.” Americun Psychologist, 1967, W, 77-79.

Pp. 32-35,61-72. 5. HOLT, R. R. & others. “Ego Autonomy Re-evaluated.” Zntenzat. J a r . Psychiatry, 1967, 3, 481-536.

6. MCCLELLAND, D. C. “Conscience and the Wili Rediscovered.” Contemporary Psychology,

7. ROYCE, J. E. “The Ghost of Free Will.” Presidential address to Division 24 of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, 1965. A P A Div. 94 Newslettet, 1966, 1 , n. 3, 3-5. Available on tape from Sound Seminars (New York: McGraw-Hill).

SCRIVEN, M. “An Essential Unpredictability in Human Behavior.” In B. Wolman BE E. Nagel (Eds.), Scientific psychology, New York: Basic Books, 1965. Pp. 411-425.

SEVERIN, F. T. (Ed.) Humanistic viewpoints in psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. 10. SOROIUN, P. Sociul and cultural dynamics. New York: American Book, 1941. Vol. 2, pp.

11.

1957, 8, 177-179.

8.

9.

339-349. SPEARMAN, C. Psychology down the ages. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1937.