Skinner and Aquinas

In: Worldview, Band 16, Heft 9, S. 43-46

Abstract

A remarkable number of Christian theologians are, perhaps surprisingly, praising B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. A number of others believe his work incompatible with Christianity. Both may be wrong.Professor Skinner would be the last person to claim autonomous credit for Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It was not he, it was the environment that controlled the book's coming into being. And if we suppose that Skinner is a latter-day Thomas Aquinas, we might well imagine on his lips the echoes of an ancient outlook: "It was not owing to anything in me; everything was gift. Yet, I set hand to paper, but only through God's grace sweetly disposing all things…." We recall the countless unsigned medieval masterpieces, the anonymous achievements of Chartres and that now lost social and cultural sense which did not attach much significance to which individual it was who expressed best the artistic genius of the age. It was enough, in those days, that the people, the culture, flowered. So imagining, so remembering, we recover more fully the shock of the sudden birth of ego: the Eenaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of the Individual.