Free Will vs. Determinism: Augustine, Freud, Marx, and Sartre

Introduction: Defining the Debate

The question of whether human beings possess genuine freedom of will or are determined by forces beyond their control has occupied theologians, philosophers, psychologists, and political theorists across centuries. The positions of Augustine, Sartre, Freud, Skinner, and Marx represent five distinct — and sometimes sharply opposed — answers to this enduring question.

Augustine and Sartre on Radical Freedom

To define his evolving notions of Original Sin in Christian theology, Augustine solidified within Christian doctrine a notion of the radical freedom of the human will. What made human beings wonderfully distinct from animals, he argued, was the human ability to freely choose good or evil in action. Augustine's approach to the "free choice of the will" assumed that "humans had a will," and that a good will was "a will by which we seek to live a good and upright life and to attain unto perfect wisdom" — which, of course, assumes that humans have the ability to choose the opposite.

Jean-Paul Sartre also argued for a radical freedom of the will, but contended that this freedom was often awful rather than awe-inspiring, neither straightforwardly good nor bad. Sartre's conception of the will's freedom was derived from atheism — from the human being's aloneness in the world. Humans were forced to define their own morality rather than having it defined for them by nature or pure need. As Sartre writes in Nausea: "The doctor would like to believe, he would like to hide out the stark reality: that he is alone, without gain, without a past, with an intelligence which is clouded, a body which is disintegrating. For this reason, he has carefully built up, furnished, and peddled his nightmare compensation: he says he is making progress" — but, Sartre insists, this is an illusion (96–97). Whether one arbitrarily chooses to focus on the body or the mind does not matter; one may choose what one likes, and both are equally amoral.

Freud and Skinner: Determinism and the Conditioned Self

In contrast to these advocates of freedom of will, Sigmund Freud saw all human beings as trapped within a determinist bond of innate sexual drives. These impulses could be creative, but were ultimately predetermined by the structure of one's unconscious and one's environment — both of which lay beyond conscious control. For instance, Freud argues that the enduring power of the Oedipus myth derives not from the individual freedom of the artist Sophocles but from its universality:

"Only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish fulfillment — the fulfillment of the wish of our childhood. But we, more fortunate than he, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, have since our childhood succeeded in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers, and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the person for whom this primitive wish of our childhood has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone in our minds since childhood." (The Interpretation of Dreams, quoted from Elpenor Greek World Website)

We are all Oedipus, Freud suggests — trapped by the psyche as if by the fate believed in by the ancient Greeks. Because psychology focuses on general patterns rather than specific free choices, the worldview even in non-Freudian analysis tends to be deterministic. This is evident in B. F. Skinner's thesis regarding the capacity of all organisms — from human to animal — to be conditioned, a view that denies the Christian emphasis on the difference between animal and human nature. "Reinforcement is the key element in Skinner's S-R theory. A reinforcer is anything that strengthens the desired response. It could be verbal praise, a good grade, or a feeling of increased accomplishment or satisfaction. The theory also covers negative reinforcers — any stimulus that results in the increased frequency of a response when it is withdrawn (different from aversive stimuli — punishment — which result in reduced responses)." (Operant Conditioning, 2004) Adam's free choice to take the apple from Eve in Augustine's Eden becomes, in Skinner's framework, merely a logical response to a positive stimulus.

Conclusion

Taken together, these five thinkers map the full spectrum of possible answers to the question of human freedom. Augustine and Sartre place the human being at the center of moral self-determination, while Freud and Skinner locate the causes of human behavior in forces that precede and shape consciousness. Marx occupies an intermediate position, acknowledging structural constraint while insisting that collective action can transform the conditions of human existence. The debate between free will and determinism thus remains unresolved — and remains one of the most consequential questions any philosophical tradition can address.