A Human Being Is Not a Diagnosis
We increasingly live in a world in which almost every form of human behaviour is given a psychological explanation. Every attitude, every decision, and every conflict can apparently be traced back to some psychological pattern.
Someone who avoids intimacy probably has attachment issues. Someone who seeks approval may suffer from low self-esteem. Someone who challenges authority might have a problem with authority. And someone who refuses to conform may be displaying signs of a problematic personality structure.
Things become particularly interesting when uncomfortable opinions are no longer treated as arguments but as symptoms. Instead of engaging with what someone says, we turn our attention to why they might be saying it.
This can certainly be illuminating. But it can also be an elegant way of avoiding the argument altogether.
Perhaps we have grown so accustomed to explaining human behaviour psychologically that we have overlooked a crucial distinction: being able to explain a person does not mean we have understood them.
Psychology and philosophy have grappled with many of the same questions for centuries. Why do we act as we do? How free are our decisions? What shapes our thinking? And why do we sometimes find it so difficult to understand ourselves?
Yet the two disciplines differ fundamentally in their approach. Psychology seeks to understand how human beings function. Philosophy asks what it means to be human in the first place.
At first, this may sound like a rather academic distinction. In practice, however, it leads to two very different conceptions of human nature.
Consider ten of psychology's most important insights from a philosophical perspective.
One of psychology's great insights is that we do not fully know ourselves. Freud made the unconscious a central element of his theory. Our actions, he believed, are often influenced by motives that remain inaccessible to our conscious minds.
Socrates had already urged human beings to know themselves. Yet there is a remarkable difference between the two approaches. For Freud, our lack of self-knowledge is a psychological problem that can be investigated. For Socrates, it is the starting point of philosophy.
The psychologist searches for the hidden causes of our actions. The philosopher first asks whether we can ever truly know who we are.
And perhaps the very idea that we might one day understand ourselves completely is itself an illusion.
Cognitive psychology shows that people do not simply react to events but to their interpretations of those events. What one person experiences as a catastrophe, another may regard as an opportunity.
Epictetus had expressed this thought almost two thousand years ago. It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our judgements about them.
Kant went a step further. He asked whether we can perceive reality at all independently of the structures of our own thinking.
Here we encounter an essential difference. Psychology investigates why two people experience the same event differently. Philosophy asks whether there is any reality beyond our perception that we can actually access.
Psychology seeks to understand our interpretations and, where appropriate, change them. Philosophy examines the conditions that make interpretation possible in the first place.
Skinner demonstrated how strongly human behaviour is shaped by its consequences. We are more likely to repeat behaviour that is rewarded and avoid behaviour that is punished.
This provides a powerful explanation for many aspects of human behaviour. But it also raises an uncomfortable question: If our behaviour is shaped by reward and punishment, how free are we?
Aristotle would have agreed with Skinner on one important point. He, too, believed that character and virtue develop through repeated action. We become just by acting justly and courageous by performing courageous deeds.
Yet Aristotle was not merely interested in how habits develop. He wanted to know which habits make a good life possible.
Skinner can explain why someone develops a particular behaviour. Aristotle asks whether that behaviour is good.
An explanation is not a justification.
This may be one of the most important distinctions between psychology and philosophy.
Attachment research shows that our earliest relationships influence our later expectations of intimacy, trust, and security.
Bowlby and Ainsworth fundamentally changed our understanding of human development. Our childhood often remains with us far longer than we realise.
But what follows from this?
Sartre would probably have objected that although we have a past, we are not identical to it. We always find ourselves in a particular situation, but that situation does not deprive us of every possibility of choosing how to respond to it.
This creates a tension between explanation and responsibility.
Psychology can explain why someone finds it difficult to trust others. But does that explanation mean they are incapable of changing?
Conversely, how much responsibility can we reasonably assign to someone whose possibilities have been severely restricted by their personal history?
Here philosophy prevents an explanation from quietly becoming a destiny.
Social psychology has demonstrated how readily people can conform to the judgement of a group. In Solomon Asch's experiments, participants sometimes gave obviously incorrect answers simply because the other members of the group had given those answers.
Nietzsche would probably not have been particularly surprised.
His critique of herd morality focused precisely on our tendency to adopt socially accepted values without questioning their origins or their worth.
But Nietzsche raises a question that goes beyond the experiment.
If an entire society agrees on certain moral principles, does that make those principles right?
Psychology investigates the conditions under which people conform. Philosophy asks when conformity becomes a surrender of one's own judgement.
Of course, the nonconformist is not automatically right either. Someone who disagrees on principle can be just as dependent on the group as someone who always agrees with it. Their opinion is simply determined by taking the opposite position.
Independence does not mean disagreeing with others. It means thinking for oneself.
Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that human decision-making is subject to systematic biases. We overestimate our abilities, allow irrelevant information to influence us, and preferentially seek confirmation of beliefs we already hold.
Centuries earlier, Descartes had taken a more radical approach. He questioned everything that could possibly be doubted in his search for a secure foundation for knowledge.
Modern psychology shows us how frequently our thinking goes wrong. Descartes asked what knowledge itself can ultimately rest upon.
But this raises a problem that also concerns psychology.
If human thinking is systematically prone to error, why should psychologists be exempt?
Science, of course, attempts to limit individual cognitive errors through testable methods, statistical procedures, and independent replication. Yet these methods are themselves developed and applied by human beings.
Philosophy therefore reminds science that its methods, too, rest on assumptions that must remain open to critical examination.
Albert Bandura demonstrated that people learn through observation. Children imitate the behaviour of adults, people model themselves on others, and social expectations influence our actions.
René Girard developed a related but philosophically more far-reaching idea. According to his theory, even our desires are often imitative.
We do not necessarily want certain things because they originally mattered to us, but because other people want them.
This raises a remarkable question.
If we borrow our desires from others, how much individuality remains in our decisions?
Perhaps our desire for a particular career, a status symbol, or social recognition is less personal than we like to believe.
Psychology investigates how we adopt behaviours from others. Girard asks whether we may even borrow our ideas about what makes a life worth pursuing.
Memory research shows that memories are not permanent recordings. We reconstruct our past, unconsciously altering details in the process.
Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated how easily memories can be influenced by information introduced after an event.
John Locke had connected memory with the question of personal identity centuries earlier.
What makes us the same person throughout our lives?
If our memories are unreliable, what does that mean for the story we tell ourselves about our own lives?
We ordinarily regard our biography as a sequence of events that made us who we are today. Yet perhaps that biography is also a narrative we continually revise to accommodate our present understanding of ourselves.
Psychology investigates how memories are formed and altered. Philosophy asks what remains of our identity if the story on which we base it cannot be trusted.
Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory identifies three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Human beings want to make their own decisions, experience themselves as capable of making a difference, and maintain meaningful relationships with others.
Hegel would have found the last point particularly interesting. For him, human self-consciousness does not emerge independently of others but develops substantially through mutual recognition.
This leads to an apparent contradiction.
We want to be independent, yet we need other people in order to experience ourselves as individuals.
Perhaps freedom, then, is not simply the absence of external influences. Perhaps it emerges precisely within our relationships with others.
Psychology investigates which conditions promote human well-being. Philosophy asks what freedom actually means.
And whether someone who believes himself to be entirely independent of others may be labouring under a particularly stubborn illusion.
Viktor Frankl regarded the search for meaning as a central human motivation. His experiences in Nazi concentration camps shaped his conviction that human beings can adopt an inner attitude towards their fate even under the most extreme circumstances.
Albert Camus approached the question differently.
What if the universe has no predetermined meaning at all?
For Camus, the absurd arises from the contradiction between our human need for meaning and a world that offers no answer.
His response was not to discover some hidden meaning, but to live consciously despite this recognition.
Here we encounter two remarkable perspectives.
Frankl emphasises how important meaning can be to human beings. Camus explores whether a fulfilling life is possible even without any ultimate, predetermined meaning.
Psychology asks what helps people cope with life.
Philosophy asks whether life requires justification at all.
After these ten comparisons, one might conclude that psychology deals with the causes of human behaviour while philosophy concerns itself with its meaning.
But the distinction is not quite so simple.
Psychology also investigates meaning, values, consciousness, and freedom. And philosophers have attempted to explain human behaviour since antiquity. Aristotle was as interested in observing human beings as he was in asking what constitutes a good life.
The dividing line, then, does not run neatly between two disciplines, but between different kinds of questions.
Psychology can investigate why someone is happy. It can identify the conditions under which people become more satisfied, productive, or resilient.
But none of this establishes that happiness ought to be the highest goal of human life.
It can demonstrate how people develop moral judgements. Yet that does not tell us which moral judgements are right.
It can explain why people obey authority. But that explanation alone cannot determine when obedience is justified.
And it can investigate the conditions under which people make particular decisions. Yet the question of what constitutes a free decision remains unanswered.
Psychology provides us with knowledge about human beings. Philosophy examines, among other things, what conclusions we are entitled to draw from that knowledge.
Neither can replace the other.
Perhaps the greatest temptation of modern psychology lies in its ability to offer an explanation for almost every form of human behaviour.
Someone avoids intimacy because their early attachment experiences were difficult. Another seeks approval because their self-esteem depends on it. Someone else conforms to a group because social belonging is a fundamental human need.
Such explanations can be correct and useful. They can foster understanding, reduce prejudice, and open up new possibilities for action.
But they also carry a danger.
The more we learn about the causes of our behaviour, the easier it becomes to equate a person with those causes.
A difficult childhood becomes an identity. A psychological pattern becomes a personality. A statistical probability becomes an individual prediction.
We explain someone and eventually convince ourselves that we have understood them.
Yet in doing so, we may overlook something essential. A human being can question his own history. He can change his habits, reject expectations, and make decisions that conform neither to his past nor to the expectations of those around him.
Of course, none of this happens outside psychological conditions. Nobody can simply step outside their biography, their body, or their society.
But between what influences us and what we make of those influences lies, at the very least, the possibility of reflection.
This is where psychology and philosophy meet in a particularly interesting way.
Psychology helps us recognise the influences to which we are subject. Philosophy challenges us not to mistake those influences for a final answer to the question of who we are and how we ought to live.
Perhaps this is why we need both disciplines.
Psychology without philosophy risks reducing human beings to systems that can be explained. Philosophy without psychology risks discussing a conception of humanity that exists only within its own abstractions.
Psychology can explain why we have become who we are. Philosophy reminds us that this does not yet determine who we ought to be.
And perhaps human freedom begins precisely when we recognise that difference.