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As far back as Empedocles at least, men have sought what is “basic” in life. Thalheimer has found it in what he terms “the basic tendency,’ which he affords the status of hypothesis and defines as follows:
There is a basic tendency in all living organisms, regardless of species, to respond in such a way as to maximize (i.e., to increase or at least to maintain) stimulation insofar as it is vitalizing and to minimize (i.e., to terminate or at least to decrease) stimulation insofar as it is devitalizing and, up to a limiting point, to do so in direct relationship to the degree to which the stimulation is, respectively, vitalizing or devitalizing.
He defines it further:
By “vitalizing” stimulation is meant stimulation which serves to strengthen the life of, to increase the internal well-being of, to further the functional role of. By “devitalizing” stimulation is meant stimulation which threatens to weaken the life of, to decrease the internal well-being of, to impede the functional role of.
Pursuing these and other reflections, he ranges broadly over many key and pivotal questions in the life of mankind—free will and free choice, causation, the definition of existence and of reality, determinism versus indeterminism, realizing potential, religion and art, Freud and the unconscious, self-destructive behavior and masochism.
Thalheimer has the courage to deal with many issues steeped in controversy and in so doing takes a position on a question with which I am intellectually and emotionally involved—the monist-dualist conflict regarding the nature of basic tendencies. In a separate section, so titled, he contemplates the causes of “self-destructive behavior,’ as he describes an example, and then asks:
Does this fact, however, point to the existence of a self-destructive “need” or “instinct”? In my judgment, it does not. In my view, the resultant self-destruction is simply a by-product or end-result of the operation of the BT.
And in the next paragraph, in amplifying further, he