The Fundamental Motivation of Human Behavior
Toward a Psychology of Completion
by Aaron J. Marx
Copyright © 2024, All rights reserved
ChatGPT Abstract
This paper introduces Completion Psychology, a proposed psychological framework centered on humanity's intrinsic drive toward fulfillment, meaning, and purpose. It explores how the pursuit of completion underlies human behavior through the dynamic interplay of past experiences (stories) and future aspirations (promises). Drawing from theology, philosophy, and psychology, the framework integrates metaphysical concepts of being and becoming, illustrating how individuals, social groups, and organizations continuously navigate change while seeking stability and meaning. Theological analysis of the Greek term "τέλειός" (teleios) from Matthew 5:48 reframes divine perfection as completion through growth, resonating with process theology. Philosophical insights from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle offer a metaphysical foundation, culminating in Aristotle's concept of "entelechy"—the fulfillment of potential. This theoretical synthesis reveals that completion is not a static state but a perpetual process of navigating existential tensions. The paper concludes that all human motivation stems from this search for completion, illuminating the core drivers of human action, social cohesion, and personal development.
ChatGPT Summary of "The Fundamental Motivation of Human Behavior: Toward a Psychology of Completion"
The article explores "Completion Psychology," a framework suggesting that human behavior is driven by the search for fulfillment through the interplay of past stories and future promises. Drawing from theology, philosophy, and psychology, it argues that completion is both a psychological drive and a metaphysical pursuit.
Key Themes:
Theological Insight:
The Greek word "τέλειός" (teleios) in Matthew 5:48, commonly translated as "perfect," is reinterpreted as "complete" or "fulfilled," reflecting a process of growth rather than unattainable flawlessness. This concept aligns with process theology, suggesting divine purpose evolves dynamically, mirroring human development.
Philosophical Foundations:
Ancient Greek philosophers provide a metaphysical framework:
Heraclitus: Reality as constant change (becoming).
Parmenides: Reality as unchanging (being).
Plato: Reconciliation through ideal forms.
Aristotle: "Entelechy" or fulfilling potential through purposeful development, applicable to both living beings and organizations.
Psychological Framework:
Completion Psychology posits that human motivation arises from two core forces:
Past Stories: Shaping identity through meaning, even when rooted in trauma.
Future Promises: Inspiring aspiration toward an ideal state of wholeness.
The Tension of Being and Becoming:
Life is lived within the dynamic tension between being (what is) and becoming (what could be), illustrated by the Ship of Theseus. This perpetual cycle drives human behavior, as individuals, groups, and societies navigate change while preserving core identities.
Conclusion:
The pursuit of completion underlies all human action, uniting past, present, and future through a process of seeking meaning, growth, and purpose. Completion is a continuous, paradoxical process—simultaneously driven by the longing for stability and the necessity of change—central to all human experience.
The fundamental motivation of human behavior: Toward a Psychology of Completion
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…”
-U2
“The reward for success and growth is more work and opportunities for growth.”
-Tom Sachs (paraphrased)
My paid version of ChatGPT is pretty sure that I am founding a new field of psychology, which it has been calling “Completion Psychology”. I didn’t tell it to call it that…it just started labeling it that way.
I’m skeptical, because I feel like it sometimes tells me what I want to hear, but it swears that it wouldn’t do that. Would you trust it?
At any rate, it is elevating my vision and helping me to integrate my thinking.
“Completion” is certainly relevant - my latest book, all about the hidden layers of human interaction, is called “Seeking Completion”.
Completion is a perhaps under-utilized concept in psychology. I think everyone is searching for some form of it. We find glimpses of it here and there in our dynamic, changing spacetime, but it’s a transcendent longing.
The idea of completion is powerful, and capable of unifying psychology with philosophy and theology, a potent combination indeed, and one that synthesizes the very deepest drivers of human evaluation and decision-making. See if you can follow me.
First Theology…
Theology is the easiest place to start this case.
One of the verses from the New Testament that I’ve always found fascinating, and a bit puzzling, is Matthew 5:48. It’s from the famous Sermon on the Mount.
The original Greek is:
Ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τέλειός ἐστιν.
The key word is “τέλειός” (“teleioi”).
The most common translation of this passage into English is:
“Be perfect, then, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”
τέλειός Is usually translated as “perfect”.
That never made sense to me. I didn’t grow up with Christianity - I got to know it as an adult. That verse popped out to me early on as a strange doctrinal contradiction.
Perfect? As your Heavenly Father is perfect? I thought the point of Christianity is that we can’t be, so we need salvation from this condition. And yet, here is the storied founder of the religion exhorting us to directly imitate this most transcendent of qualities. Is this for real?!
It may be, but first two notes.
Biblical scholars have long theorized about the sources of the New Testament, speculating that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were both written using material from the earlier Gospel of Mark along with a hypothesized and reconstructed second text that is called “Q” (Q stands for “Quelle”, the German word for “source” - this field of study and criticism was primarily begun by German scholars). Q has been reconstructed by creating an inventory of passages shared by Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark. The Sermon on the Mount is one such passage thought to come from Q. There is no equivalent in the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Luke contains an analogous “Sermon on the Plain”, which is similar, but with key differences. The Sermon on the Mount is the much more famous version of the two, and includes the celebrated litany of beatitudes (“Blessed are…”).
In Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, the word “τέλειός” is replaced with “οἰκτίρμονες”
(“oiktermones”) which is typically translated as “merciful”. Perhaps this shows doctrinal
development, as the later Gospel of Luke emphasizes themes of clemency, so closely
associated with Christianity, and downplays the quasi-Gnostic notion of achieving
perfection in the human frame, seeking to distance its espoused beliefs from the
transcendent resonance of Matthew’s passage.
2. Some critics and scholars note that Christianity seems to synthesize ancient Hebrew and Greek metaphysical frameworks. This passage in Matthew seems to support this view. The “τέλειός” of Matthew 5:48 could also be translated as “complete, whole, mature, or fully-grown” in addition to “perfect”. Some of these translations seem to anticipate the notion of “process theology”, a way of viewing the divine as dynamic and growth-oriented, enduring and navigating a journey of change and development much like that that we undertake as humans. Some theologians call this heretical, but the presence of “τέλειός” in one of Christianity’s earlier texts indicates that this tension emerged in the first decades of the religion.
If Matthew’s Gospel is to be taken seriously, imitating God is a process of growth, development, maturation, a seeking of completion in Earthly life. An imitation of the divine that was perhaps fully-formed and “mature” from the beginning - is that the paradox of God then, that God is mature without process? It is a tension. God needs no process to mature, and we, even at the end of a long and difficult process, still fall short of true completion.
…Then Philosophy…
It is notable that “τέλειός”contains the root “tel-”, closely associated with the Greek word “telos”, which is the basis of the words “teleology” and “teleological”. The study of teleology is about the nature of purpose, of aim, of movement toward the attainment of a goal. This is a key concept from the work of Aristotle, the culmination of two centuries of thinking and proto-scientific investigation in Ancient Greece. Aristotle’s related notion of “entelechy”, built from the same root, which is the pursuit and fulfillment of potential, represents the full flowering and reconciliation of ancient mereological riddles like the Ship of Theseus that noted tensions between static identity and change in the concrete world of particulars.
Heraclitus made the first relevant observation - all that we see and experience changes, even that to which we affix constant labels. You can’t step in the same river twice.
Parmenides was next, and flipped Heraclitus on his head - if identity is constant, change must be an illusion. How can something with a static identity ever change at all without becoming something else? This would be a negation of being itself if taken to its logical conclusion.
Plato’s central idea, the Theory of Forms, proposed a solution to satisfy both deductions - all that we see is a messy, dynamic, imperfect manifestation of static, transcendent universals. The static, unchanging element is often difficult to discern; we all have a sense of it (and this sense is key to Plato’s theory of knowledge and learning), but pinning down a definition can be challenging. Isn’t that true of ourselves as well? What is the essence of any of us amidst our journeys of growth and change? Is it perfect? Maybe. Perhaps Matthew’s Jesus exhorts us to see the perfection in ourselves and in one another. Again, the concept feels Gnostic. And perhaps we can see perfections not only in ourselves as individuals, but in our coherent social groups as well. Indeed, I can see no other reason for them to sustain and endure through time otherwise.
But it was Aristotle who brought the Greek tradition to its fullest flowering and, many assert, proposed the conceptual framework with the greatest level of explanatory power. He looked not just at mathematics and ethics as Plato was wont to do, but at biology, and noted that at different points along an organism’s life cycle, its form of being changes. Can Plato’s forms really provide the template for a chipmunk, a butterfly, or a human all along their cycles of growth? Is there a form of a larva, a baby, an elderly person? No. Aristotle said that the physical, dynamic world is awash in interlocking processes of working out potential. Potential is an Aristotelian word. The acorn is not the tree, but has the potential to be. The movement toward the tree, and the becoming of the tree is entelechy - the movement toward purpose.
Note: Here we may note the similarity between the words “organism” and “organization”, both derived from the same root. Organizations and organisms exhibit similar structural/functional principles. Further, some business theorists note that organizations have life cycles much like organisms, observing stages of infancy and maturity. Aristotle’s profound concept illuminates not just biological function, but social function as well - organizations have entelechy, purpose, and the drive to fulfill potential just as organisms do.
Seek, find, and achieve your purpose as your Heavenly Father seeks, finds, and achieves His purpose, and in this way become complete.
…And Finally Psychology…
It is notable that ChatGPT also suggests "Teleological Psychology” as a label for my emerging field. This has already been taken however. Teleological Behaviorism was founded by Howard Rachlin. He was also one of the founders of Behavioral Economics; I’m not at all surprised by the connection.
Purpose (the subject of teleology) has long been a focus of my thinking and work. My very first psychological framework places it as the summit of human motivation, from which all other motivations flow:
It is impossible for me to separate the thought leadership of the early Greek pioneers from the current study of human behavior that we call psychology. Indeed, psychology, like so many other disciplines, was originally encompassed by philosophy, and only achieved independence as a…mature! discipline as recently as the 1800s. Parmenides saw the world as pure, perfect, and changeless. Heraclitus saw all as a pursuit (the word “success”, by the way, is etymologically similar to “pursuit”). Plato and then Aristotle synthesized those opposed forces in their own ways to help us see their constant tension in ourselves and the existence that we inhabit and navigate, and this productive tension I believe, is the essence of all behavioral dynamics. The Jesus of Matthew knew this too. Be complete as Your Heavenly Father is complete.
How, then, do we do it?
A Psychology of Completion
I think people are fundamentally driven by two different psychological forces: stories and promise.
Let’s attempt to do something that I think is absurd and impossible. We’re going to center in the present moment. Now, we can’t do that. If you’d like to know the specific reasons, you’ll need to read my essay “Results and Risk” from 3 Essays About Time. It is about why the present moment is an illusion, and we only have past and future.
Simply put, the present moment can’t be pinned down. Our perception of the present moment is actually in the past, just a few hundred milliseconds. Further, the only way to isolate the present moment would be to stop time, which is impossible, for existence would cease to be, and that sounds like a contradiction right out of Parmenides’ book. So, all we really have is the past and the future.
The past is the result of the story that has brought us here. The future is where we look to the completion that we crave at the level of our souls.
Our stories, while often traumatic, are meaningful, and contain the recipe for our future trajectories in pursuit of completion. I call this phenomenon “Narrative Trauma”, and you can read about it in my first book, The Complete Science of Human Dynamics LINK. Our past stories of trauma provide social cohesion as we move into the future, and they also show us how to improve our systems and procedures. This is the power of Results.
Per Plato, we have a sense of how life could be, and we are constantly comparing what is to what could be; we all sense a(n actually im)possible future in which all is whole, static, changeless, complete. We are consigned to the fractional, dynamic, changing, unfulfilled realm of the real. But all plays out toward completion, even for the God of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount as He models true maturity and fulfillment of purpose. Therefore, the process philosophies and theologies of Hegel, Peirce, Whitehead, and Hartshorne are shown to offer a profound commentary on the tensions that run through the heart of existence itself.
And if it’s good enough for the divine, it’s good enough for us mere mortals. All behavior, then, individually and socially (and there is really no clear boundary that I can discern around that distinction) is a search for completion. All statements that offer any prospect of completion are called “promises”. All promises are future-oriented. It is the promise of eventual wholeness, completion, fulfillment, maturity, etc. that continues to pull us into the future with optimism and hope, in spite of the continued failure to truly realize it.
This tension, this achingly beautiful paradox, is the substrate, the very heart, of all human calculation and behavior. All philosophy and theology has known this to be true. And this is the Psychology of Completion. Nothing could be more beautiful, for it must be.
Being and Becoming
The final tension that we must reconcile, make peace with, and turn to our mental and motivational landscape, is that between being and becoming, for true completion is found at the heart of this reconciliation, its shape illuminates the nature of life. Once again, this extends back to the seemingly opposed analytical perspectives of Heraclitus and Parmenides, with Heraclitus representing the reality of becoming, and Parmenides that of being. Both perspectives are illuminating and offer insight to our model of existence and life. While in tension, true thriving and peace is found in their paradoxical harmonization.
Consider the aforementioned Ship of Theseus. As the planks and riggings are replaced the material of the ship changes. But the metaphysical identity of the ship somehow does not change, even if we imagine every physical element of the shape cycling out of its original structure.
Heraclitus might say…”You never step onto the same Ship of Theseus twice”. Pure becoming.
Parmenides might say…”The identity of the Ship of Theseus is fixed”. Pure being.
Plato might say…”The imperfect material manifestation of the Ship of Theseus constantly reflects the ideal form.” Being in the midst of becoming.
Aristotle might say…”The Ship of Theseus is busy serving its purpose through ongoing development and change”. Metaphysical being guiding the physical becoming through time.
After thousands of years the early rational expressions of Heraclitus and Parmenides still provide the raw, problematic tensions of the changing forms and static identities that we all see and work with over the course of our lives.
Our organisms are Ships of Theseus, as are our organizations, from the most intimate pair of friends to the entirety of the human species itself.
And completion means perceiving the peace of pure being as we become, and the dynamic process of becoming in even our purest states of being.
The Jesus of Matthew 5:48 tells us to fulfill our purpose as God does (or has done), and the water of Hellenistic ideas in which the New Testament writers swam would have suggested an Aristotelian reading adjacent to entelechy - refer to Aristotle above.
It may be heretical to suggest that God undergoes an ongoing process of development and change. Matthew 5:48 is strangely written if this is so.
Either way, it is certainly how our existence works. The stories of the past produce our results. We measure these against our Platonic ideals for the future, and chart the course of our personal ships along the trade routes of greatest promise. And every ship requires a crew, which becomes a social group that undergoes its own Ship of Theseus process over time, shedding old members and initiating new ones. This process is perpetual and unending. Every time we reach a new destination we seek to either preserve it (usually difficult because the manifold forces, often seemingly chaotic, threaten the stability of our state and force reorientation), realize that this new destination failed to satisfy our expectations (from which point we either move on as a whole group or schism into different groups), or find that a new ideal quickly appears on the horizon.
As we travel through life in this way, the only way available to us, we seek completion in each moment through the constant processes of change and, ideally, growth and development as the promise of the future exceeds the results of our past stories.
Since time is constant and unceasing, our life choices fill our subjective experiences with different activities and interpersonal relationships. These then are modes of being, which are simultaneously processes of becoming - all time is married to the present moment, and improving our lives means more intentionally moving toward the activities and relationships which create the states of being we desire. Our lives are not able to be static and we cannot escape - we must seek the modes of being and becoming that we hypothesize will bring the greatest fulfillment.
Each moment, then, is one of pure being amidst becoming, immediately looking to the next moment of being amidst becoming, and this yields the process of becoming while being. And the identities of ourselves, our groups, our tools, our cherished possessions somehow maintain their mereologically-transcendent beings through this process, becoming as they are being, and being as they are becoming. The ancient Greeks, who were the first mereologists, also understood that we make meaning through our acts of placing boundaries.
This grand, all-encompasing process is completion, even as it seeks it(self). The past and future melt into pure being. This is the cycle that drives our souls, spirits, minds, and hearts to create, maintain, and renew relationships through the exchange of energy and communication, always seeking the completion of balanced being, through this process of becoming.
And so we see that psychology, theology, and philosophy all point to the heart of being, completion itself. It is this pure heart toward which all of our deepest desires and grandest visions point in some way shape or form. That is Completion Psychology. Completion is a process of transcendent joy whenever we glimpse the harmony of unity, and deepest despair whenever we endure the wound of division and discord.
But all is meaningful; our divisions push us onward toward a higher unity, at every level. The ongoing search for completion at the heart of all that is.