Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

We propose a synthesis of phenomenology and behaviorism whose starting point is the perspective of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). Ortega’s perspective involves a transformation of phenomenology in a direction that stresses ‘life as action’ or as ‘execution,’ as he puts it, and ‘historical reason’ as explanation. Whereas ‘life as action’ represents an effort to overcome a certain subjectivist idealism that persists in phenomenology, ‘historical reason’ implies an attempt to overcome phenomenology’s ‘fixation’ with essences and ‘things themselves’ at the expense of considering their genesis and hence their explanation. In Ortega’s somewhat idiosyncratic phenomenology we can see the influence of Aristotle—insofar as the notion of executive being concurs with that of the Aristotelian dynamic being (Ortega 1931/2002)—and of American pragmatism (Graham 1994)—life as action and as a problem to be solved. In this sense, Ortega would probably tend rather to speak of a ‘stream of behavior,’ paraphrasing William James’ celebrated notion of ‘stream of consciousness’ (James 1890/1999).

These influences come to bear on Ortega as an essentially Spanish philosopher, embedded in a Spanish culture epitomized by Don Quixote. Life would be seen in this context as the will to adventure in the broad, open landscape of a relationship with and against the world, but also as being among others in the agora or public space (favored by the climate), as opposed to a life of withdrawal into the home and into oneself, more characteristic of northern Europe, perhaps owing to the climate—so different from that of the Mediterranean—and to the Protestant religious climate—as opposed to the Catholic one. Ortega himself, although with a philosophical training in Germany, stresses his Latin philosophizing, in contrast with the German approach. It is no coincidence that his first philosophical work, in 1914, was entitled Meditations on Quixote (see Silver 1978). This Latin philosophizing translates in Ortega into his rooting of reason in life, rather than subjecting life to reason, or considering life to be irrational, and into his emphasis on life as a project and an adventure and as joyful, as opposed to an emphasis on anguish or being-toward-death.

Ortega’s phenomenology has a good deal of affinity with the radical behaviorism of Burrhus F. Skinner (1904–1990), despite the fact that neither Ortega nor Skinner referred to such a parallel. The [End Page 195] affinity between phenomenology and behaviorism may seem surprising to many, given the mutual prejudices often found among phenomenologists and behaviorists. But such affinity has in fact been mentioned previously (e.g., by Day 1969/1987), as has that between Skinner and Ortega (Yela 1987).

The theme of behaviorism constituted for Skinner largely a way of overcoming mentalism, represented by cognitivism, without falling into physicalism (a failing of other behaviorisms such as that of Watson and so-called methodological behaviorism), just as the theme of phenomenology was to overcome idealism without falling into realism, which Ortega indeed considered the ‘modern theme’ of philosophy (Ortega 1923/1961). Skinner’s radical behaviorism is not radical because it rejects private events—thoughts, experiences, and so on—as many assume that it does, but rather because it goes to the root of private events, focusing on their genesis—learning—and on their pragmatic sense or function. Thus, private events, ‘mental events,’ and ‘internal world’ are understood in genetic and functional conjunction with public events, as a part of reality and not as another reality—internal or mental—that is separate and self-originating, typical of Cartesian dualism. Radical behaviorism is also radical because it is novel and innovative, given the persistence of mentalism, as phenomenology continues to be novel and innovative in philosophy and, it goes without saying, in psychiatry and psychology. It is important to add that Skinner’s behaviorism is not positivistic, as is the case with other behaviorisms, as Smith (1986) has clearly shown. His philosophy of science is pragmatic and functional, constituting in itself a complete operant epistemology (Smith 1986, ch. 9).

Radical behaviorism offers an interactive, constructive–dialectical point of view...