A college course I taught used the book Seven Theories of Human Nature: Christianity, Freud, Lorenz, Marx, Sartre, Skinner, Plato by Leslie Stevenson. I should pause long enough to explain the purpose of the course was to teach the students how to respond to ideas and provide the reader with the arguments and facts to support their response. As you can see from the list of names in the title of the work, some of the ideas directly contradict others in the list. While the title seems to imply it would be a ponderous tome, it is, in fact, a rather slim paperback. An aside: you can buy a used edition for less than five dollars from Amazon because it’s often used college text. I found the students would react viscerally to at least one of the ideas or the description of an idea. That was a major part of the reason for the course because when you react viscerally, you are reacting out of emotion and not reason. The current political divide in the country is an example of visceral reactions. The key for the students was recognizing they were having an emotional reaction. After making that discovery, they had to then look within themselves and discovered the reason for the reaction. Following the purpose of the course, they had to put those reasons on paper in a logical manner. When they didn’t have a visceral reaction to a theory, they found it much easier to write the required paper.
Six of the theories are arguments made by individuals. The first one, Christianity, is religion. I suspect the author included it because no religion can be argued in fact. Your belief in any religion is based on your faith. That’s the great strength of religion. You can put down on paper why you have that belief in your chosen religion. However, no one can argue with you because your choice of religion is based on what you choose to believe; i.e., Faith.
Near the end of the course, we would hold a discussion about what they had learned. Many did not know every name on the list or that person’s ideas, so there were those sorts of answers. Overall, the consensus was that they had learned when they are reacting viscerally and not out of reason. They saw benefits ranging from television ads to being challenged to do some foolish thing by friends. I was talking to a student long after the course ended and she said something like this, “First, I learned what a visceral reaction was. When that happens now, I stop and ask myself what’s going on and why. It keeps me from making stupid decisions.”
