Does Goldstein’s “Self-Actualization” Actually Explain Motivation?

General Philosophy
1

Been looking at Kurt Goldenstein’s theory of self-actualization as a possible alternative to a framework I am developing concerning fundamental human motivation. It caught my attention that Goldenstein was not merely proposing self-actualization as one motivation among others but was instead explicitly against the whole idea of multiple drives.

In The Organism (1939), while discussing “The so-called drives,” he writes:

“We assume only one drive, the drive of self-actualization”

Kurt Goldenstein, The Organism (1939), p. 197

He then argues that what appears to be different drives are actually different activities of the organism:

“Under various conditions, various actions come into the foreground; and while they thereby seem to be directed toward different goals, they give the impression of independently existing drives.”

— The Organism, p. 198.

And he goes further, arguing that the apparently different activities are ultimately instrumental to one end:

“These various actions occur in accordance with the various capacities which belong to the nature of the organism, and occur in accordance with those instrumental processes which are then necessary prerequisites of the self-actualization of the organism.”

— The Organism, p. 198

This is a very serious challenge to what I am working on because my own proposal is that survival, duty, and meaning may represent different, genuinely distinct motivational ends rather than merely expressions of one underlying drive.

Goldenstein’s response might be that they are not ultimately distinct but different manifestations of an organism trying to actualize its capacities.

He also explicitly rejects making self-preservation the fundamental motivation. He writes:

“The tendency of normal life is toward activity and progress.”

— The Organism, p. 197.

And regarding what are usually called drives, he writes:

“The organism has definite potentialities, and because it has them it has the need to actualize or realize them.”

— The Organism, p. 204.

Then what exactly is the psychological end being pursued in self-actualization?

He moves from the organism having potentialities to the organism having a need to actualize them. But does the existence of a capacity establish a distinct psychological motivation to realize that capacity?

More importantly, if virtually any motivational end can be interpreted as the actualization of some capacity—survival, fulfilling an obligation, pursuing an ideal, creating something, etc.—then does self-actualization genuinely reduce these motivations to one fundamental end?

Or does it become a sufficiently broad description that every motivation can be redescribed as self-actualization after the fact?

This isn’t an objection to Goldenstein’s claim that self-actualization is motivational. He is quite explicit that it is:

“This tendency to actualize its nature, to actualize ‘itself,’ is the basic drive, the only drive by which the life of the organism is determined.”

— The Organism, p. 197.

My question, therefore, to be more specific, is: Does Goldenstein actually demonstrate that self-actualization is the fundamental end behind apparently different motivations, or does he establish an organismic principle and then interpret its manifestation as a single motivation?

Has organisation of action become it's own explanatory problem?
2

I understand Goldstein doesn’t demonstrate that self‑actualization is the fundamental end behind all motivations. He begins with an organismic monism and then interprets every motivation as an expression of that principle. The reduction is conceptual, not evidential.

Hope I grasped this correctly.

3

He demonstrated it. He used observational experiments to arrive at this conclusion. So, not only he first observed what was happening with a patient, he then created a test to demonstrate that the subjects are behaving in a way the showed a motivation for self-actualization.

Goldtein’s is not to be confused with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

4

If you’re looking for evidence in favor of motivational pluralism, you’ll be able to find it. If you’re looking for evidence in favor of a global unifying principle of organism motivation you can find that, too. The evidence will not by itself resolve this question, because I think we’re dealing with some fundamental underlying conceptual differences in approach between figures influenced by Goldstein and a strictly plural notion of motive.

Goldstein set the stage for writers such as Piaget, Merleau-Ponty, Lewin, Canguilhem and the enactivists to treat the living creature as a self-organizing whole which aims to create and maintain stable norms of functioning in the face of a constantly changing environment. These norms dont just define the nature of the organism, the organism’s patterns of activity also co-define what constitutes its world.

Think of these norms as schemas. Piaget says says the normal organism, one which is successfully maintaining normative patterns of activity in its world, assimilates elements of its environment while accommodating its schemes of assimilation to the novel, changing aspects of that environment.

As the organism successfully does so, it progressively differentiates its schemes of action at a subordinate level into different ‘motives’, while integrating and coordinating them more and more at a higher level of its overall organization. The organism contains multiple processes and subsystems, but their significance derives from their participation in the organization of the organism as a whole.

Piaget defines a motive in terms of a ‘need’, and defines need as interruption in smooth functioning, “the expression of a totality momentarily incomplete and tending toward reconstituting itself”.

This hierarchical organization of normativity and motive is evident in Goldstein as well. Normativity is not merely the possession of norms; it is the capacity to organize, revise, and generate norms at different levels of activity. The plurality of motives is real at one level of description while still being unified by a higher-order normative organization. There is no contradiction between motivational pluralism (increasing differentiation of norms-motives) at the subordinate level and organismic monism (increasing integration of motives) at the highest level of total organization.

Higher-order organization constrains and gives significance to lower-order processes (the overarching motive of the maintenance of dynamic self-consistency of functioning) while lower-order processes and motives constitute the higher-order organization. The healthy organism must not only maintain its various norms but, more importantly, be capable of revising and replacing them from time to time in response to changing circumstances. This can only be done within the stability of global structural capacities of assimilation, an overarching ‘motive’ of anticipatory sense-making.

3 Likes
5

I am not familiar with Goldstien so my comments are to be taken lightly and will ne brief

From the description Goldstiens account is teleological. There is a version of us we strive to realise.

That does not mean that the motivations we might experience are singular. They may well be plural

So if I say that we are motivated to exercise the capacities that evolution gave us, as I am sometimes have said. That too implies a plurality of motivations

6

On the contrary, Goldstein’s theory is about the psychological or mental and biological life of organisms. His theory has an origin in the organism’s environment, not philosophical.

7

“Self-actualisation” is Aristotle’s eudaimonia, filtered through a bias towards individualism. It favours individual autonomy over civic virtue, and psychological welfare over virtue. That is, unsurprisingly, it reflects the cultural situation of its authors.

Supposing a single explanation for the complex actions of a human living in a community is an absurd oversimplification. We are not isolated organisms and we have conflicting motives. The “Self” is more a strange loop, constantly undergoing change, than a phenomenon with a single cause.

1 Like
8

Just for fun, I typed “self-actualization” into my search engine and got the Wikipedia definition:

Self-actualization is the psychological process of realizing and fulfilling your unique potential, talents, and capabilities to become the most complete and authentic version of yourself.

I haven’t read Goldstein, but I assume he has a more scientific concept than this one, which makes me smile (“Self-actualization means being your actual self” – gee thanks).

9

What makes Goldstein’s view scientific? It’s not falsifiable; if anything it is stipulative. How is “self-actualisation as the organising principle” empirically testable? There were subsequent research programs: Maslow, following on, invokes normative claims for individualism that are culturally partisan. But if whatever the organism does is an expression of self-actualisation, nothing has been explained. What behaviour does “self-actualisation” rule out? Pathology as a failure of the organism to achieve an appropriate relation with its environment is not the same as “self-actualisation”.

So I’m dubious.

10

Yeah, certainly selling the complexity of one’s fellow human beings short, not to mention the complexity of oneself.

11

Perhaps a bit clueless, too. Don’t get thrown by the seeming solipsism of the use of the term ‘self’ here. Goldstein isn’t proposing a conventional scientific hypothesis, he’s offering a different logic of biological explanation. Goldstein’s “self-actualisation” is not really a hypothesis about an inner force that causes behavior. It is an attempt to identify the normative organization of living activity itself. That makes it much closer to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of form, Wittgenstein’s notion of a criterion or grammar, and enactivism’s concept of autonomous organism-environment regulation than to Maslow’s later psychological theory

Goldstein is offering a practice-based account of the achievement of the ‘self’ of the organism. This self is the product of a principle of self-organization which involves the generation of normative autonomy through activities which define an environment through sensory-motor coupling at the same time that they specify a consistent pattern of functioning. If you’re not satisfied with Goldstein’s vocabulary you may prefer that of the enactivists, as well as their translation of his concepts into a more robust empirically-driven model. But there’s no mistaking his influence on their work.

For both approaches, behavior isnt an arbitrary collection of responses to stimuli. They predict that behavior will exhibit organismic organization, preferred modes of functioning, compensation, reorganization, and characteristic forms of breakdown when the organism cannot establish an adequate relation with its environment.

I should add that the understanding of a normative self employed in practice-based accounts differs significantly from that found in figures like Kant, Anscombe, Foot, Davidson and Mcdowell. The latter restricts normativity to rational norms of judgment as correctness of fit between subject and world, ( or failure of the organism to adapt its functions to an independently extant world), while the former treats judgement as secondary and derivative with respect to the organism’s capacity for the continuous generation and transformation of norms.

12

The distinction between levels is where am still unconvinced. I can accept that different motives may be intergrated into a higher order organization. But does that integration make the higher-order organization itself a motive?

If i ask why someone performs an action and eventually reach something like “because I had an obligation” or “beacuse this mattered to me” ,and the response is that this motives ultimately participate in maintaining the organism’s dynamic self consistency,have we actually identified a more fundamental psychological end or have we moved from the motivational level to an organismic/functional level of explanation?

Put differently: what makes the higher-order organization a motivational end rather than the condition or structure through which otherwise distinct motives are coordinated?

13

Well, I see your point, but I think this still brings me back to the distinction I was trying to make in the OP. If the experiments demonstrate that organisms behave in ways directed towards actualizing their capacities, that establishes a strong case for self-actualization as an organismic tendency. But does that by itself demonstrate that self-actualization is the fundamental psychological end behind apparently different motivations?

In other words, am I not asking whether Goldenstein has empirical evidence for self-actualizing behavior? What I am asking is whether that evidence can sufficiently justify the further step from “the organism tends towards self-actualization” to “self-actualization is the single fundamental motivation underlying the apparent plurality of motives.”

And yes, I am aware that Goldenstein’s position is not Maslow’s hierarchy with self-actualization placed at the top.

Thanks​:grin:

14

This is interesting. It sounds like their view doesn’t see self-actualization as involving “unique potential, talents, and capabilities to become the most complete and authentic version of yourself.” It was this glib, pop-psych formulation that struck me as particularly unscientific. Is there any sense in which the thinkers you’re discussing overlap with an ethically normative account of human development, though?

15

And the answer again is, yes, self-actualization is the fundamental goal or motivation for the organisms. This is not lost in Goldstein. And it is not controversial either.

We ourselves might read the human behaviors as a multitude of separate interests or motivations, but to stop there is to conclude prematurely.

Ask yourself, why do A, B, C, and D pursue different interests or life trajectory? Because organisms are not machines that can uniformly schedule their wants and needs according to the instruction manual. The same trauma or injury to the brain would not produce the same effects to individual agents. If we were mechanically similar, we would experience the same effects. But we’re not. Some of us might thrive in a structured life where organizations of physical objects would help us relearn things that got destroyed in memory. And some of us might thrive in spontaneous, disorganized living space, allowing us to improve and eventually function in society.

16

Let’s focus on psychological
motives. Behaviorally printed approaches treat reinforcement as its own motive. Set up a mechanism of reinforcement for any arbitrary behavior and one now has produced a motive for that behavior. But other approaches treat reinforcement (pleasure and pain) not as their own ends but as byproducts of preferences, aims and purposes which themselves made products of the way we schematize our world.

For instance, Wittgenstein said we set up language games which lay out criteria of correctness. The motives which give us our ethical and epistemic preferences are dictated by the terms of the language game. But language games themselves are aspects of forms of life. A single form of life connects multiple language games. So what constitutes a good or bad move, a right or wrong behavior, a rewarding or non-rewarding behavior, ultimately gets its criteria for overarching forms of life.

Heidegger also shows how particular motives are bound up with and get their criteria of goodness or badness from outbreak engagement with the world. We use tools in order to accomplish goals, which themselves are bound up with other goals, and this forms a total network of concerns. We use the hammer in order to pound the nail, in order to build the house, in order to inhabit that house, in order to raise a family, and so on. The detailed, subordinate goals only make sense in relation to the overarching goals which they further. These local ‘in order to’s’ are ‘for the sake of’ a global set of purposes, just as the intelligibility of a local activity gets its sense from more global webs of intelligiblity.

Goldstein repeatedly argues that isolated drives are abstractions. Hunger, sexuality, curiosity, ambition and fear are not independent mechanisms that later become integrated. They are expressions of an organism’s relation to its world.

What Heidegger provides is a vocabulary for explaining why. The reason is that the organism is never merely a collection of drives. It already exists within an organized field of significance.

From a Heideggerian perspective, the question of whether self-actualization is a motive or an organizational principle might be answered with , it is the more primordial phenomenon from which both “motives” and “organization” are abstracted.

The for-the-sake-of-which is not usually an explicit goal. Most of the time we are not consciously thinking My ultimate end is X.
Yet our activities are organized around some implicit understanding of what matters.
The carpenter is hammering, measuring, cutting, planning. Each activity points beyond itself. The chain eventually terminates not in another tool but in a way of being. This is what Heidegger means by the for-the-sake-of-which.

Now compare Goldstein. Goldstein says that particular behaviors derive their significance from the organism’s tendency toward realization of its possibilities as a whole. That sounds close to Heidegger’s claim that particular involvements derive their significance from a broader for-the-sake-of-which.

Merleau-Ponty, whose biological account was influenced by both Heidegger and Goldstein, repeatedly argues that behavior cannot be understood as the addition of separate causes.

The organism does not first have hunger, fear, curiosity and duty, and then compute a response. Rather, it inhabits a meaningful situation. A hungry animal does not perceive neutral stimuli and then infer food. Food already appears as edible. The environment is already organized according to significance. This is very close to Heidegger’s worldhood and Goldstein’s organism-environment unity.

You ask what makes self-actualization a motive rather than a condition that coordinates motives. The Heideggerian answer is that “motive” is the wrong category.The deeper phenomenon is not a motive the organized field of significance within which anything can count as a motive at all. Obligation matters because it belongs to a meaningful world.
Curiosity matters because it belongs to a meaningful world.
Hunger matters because it belongs to a meaningful world.

The question of which motive is deepest already assumes that motives are the primary explanatory units.Heidegger reverses the order. A global system of intelligibility is primary. Motives are derivative.

This is why Heidegger would not say that the ultimate “motive” is self-actualization. He would instead say human action arises from a disclosed world structured by a for-the-sake-of-which.

Goldstein’s self-actualization then begins to look less like a master motive and more like an attempt, using biological language, to describe the organism’s tendency to sustain and realize the meaningful organization of its existence.

That interpretation also brings Goldstein close to enactivism. Enactivists argue that meaning is not generated by internal representations or drives but emerges from the organism’s ongoing engagement with a world. Significance arises from the whole organism-environment system. In a Heideggerian vocabulary, one could say that action emerges from a field of relevance rather than from isolated motives.

From that vantage, the distinction you’re drawing between “motive” and “organization” starts to look less like a fundamental distinction and more like an artifact of a subject-centered psychology that all four thinkers are trying to move beyond. In each case, what is primary is not an inner drive but an organized field of significance within which particular motivations first become intelligible.