This article compares understandings of forms of mental determination and self-determination in cultural historical and existential theories with regard to their philosophical and methodological foundations. Of key importance for cultural-historical psychology was the idea of the temporal (historical) nature of cultural achievements that came with the individual mastery of object-mediated activity. The nonclas-sical nature of L.S. Vygotsky's psychology stems largely from the "ambiguous relationship" between two different worlds: the "big" world of culture and the "small" psychological world of personality. The self-determination of behavior is understood here as its freedom and voluntariness conditioned by the influence of culture and "stimuli-tools." This theory can also be used heuristically in explaining the alienation of personality by assigning simulacra as "stimuli-tools." The existential theory of the "absolute" freedom of the personality as a derivative of its "being-in-the-world" is examined, a theory in which the separateness of individual existence from being ("facticity," etc.) is understood as alienation. Furthermore, A.N. Leontiev's theory of the "image of the world" is compared with existential approaches, leading to the proposal of certain innovations.
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