The Story of Psychology (5 page)

According to that theory, knowledge is recollection; we learn not from experience but from reasoning, which leads us to discover knowledge that exists within us (“to educate” comes from the Latin meaning “to lead out”). Sometimes Socrates asks for definitions and then leads his partner into contradictions until the definition is reshaped. Sometimes he asks for or offers examples, from which his partner finally makes a generalization. Sometimes he leads him, step by step, to a conclusion that contradicts one he had previously stated, or to a conclusion he had not known was implicit in his beliefs.

Socrates cites geometry as the ideal model of this process. One starts with self-evident axioms and, by hypothesis and deduction, discovers other truths in what one already knew. In the
Meno
dialogue he questions a slave boy about geometrical problems, and the boy’s answers supposedly
show that he must all along have known the conclusions to which Socrates leads him; he was unaware that he knew them until he recalled them through dialectical reasoning. Similarly, in many another dialogue Socrates, without presenting an argument or offering answers, asks a friend or pupil questions that lead him, inference by inference, to the discovery of some truth about ethics, politics, or epistemology—in each case, knowledge he supposedly had but was unaware of.

We who live in an era of empirical science know that Socratic dialectic, though it can expose fallacies or contradictions in belief systems or lead to new conclusions in such formal systems as mathematics, cannot discover new facts. Until Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723
A.D.
) first saw red corpuscles and bacteria under his lens, no Socratic teacher could have led his pupils or himself to “remember” that such things existed; until astronomers saw evidence of the “red shift” in distant galaxies, no philosopher could, through logical searching, have discovered that he already knew the universe to be expanding at a measurable rate.

Yet Socrates’ teachings greatly affected the development of psychology. His view that knowledge exists within us and needs only to be recovered through correct reasoning became part of the psychological theories of persons as diverse as Plato, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Kant, and even, in a sense, those present-day psychologists who maintain that personality and behavior are largely determined by genetics, linguists who say that our minds come equipped with language-comprehending structures, and parapsychologists who believe that each of us has lived before and can be “regressed” to recall our previous lives.

The notion that we have lived before is related to Socrates’ other major impact on psychology. He held that the existence of innate knowledge, revealed by the dialectic method of instruction, proves that we possess an immortal soul, an entity that can exist apart from the brain and body. With this, the vague mythical notions of soul that had long existed in Greek and related cultures assumed a new significance and specificity. Soul is mind but is separable from the body; mind does not cease to be at death.

On this ground would be built Platonic and, later, Christian dualism: the division of the world into mind and matter, reality and appearance, ideas and objects, reason and sense perception, the first half of each pair regarded not only as more real than but as morally superior to the second. Although these distinctions may seem chiefly philosophic and religious, they would pervade and affect humankind’s search for self-understanding throughout the centuries.

He was named Aristocles, but the world knows him as Plato—in Greek,
platon
, or “broad”—the nickname he was given as a young wrestler because of the width of his shoulders. He was born in Athens in 427 to well-to-do aristocratic parents, and in his youth was an accomplished student, a handsome charmer of men and women, and a would-be poet. At twenty, about to submit a poetic drama in a competition, he listened to Socrates speaking in a public place, after which he burned his poetry and became the philosopher’s pupil. Perhaps it was the gamelike quality of Socrates’ dialectic that captivated the former wrestler; perhaps the subtlety of Socrates’ ideas entranced the serious student; perhaps the quiet and serenity of Socrates’ philosophy appealed to the son of ancient lineage in that era of political upheaval and betrayal, war and defeat, revolution and terror.

Plato studied with Socrates for eight years. He was a dedicated student and something of a sobersides; one ancient author says that he was never seen to laugh out loud. A few scraps of love poetry attributed to him exist, some of them addressed to men, some to women, all of doubtful authenticity, and there is almost no gossip about his love life and no evidence that he ever married. Still, from the wealth of detail in his dialogues, it is evident that he was an active participant in Athenian social life and a keen observer of behavior and the human condition.

In 404, an oligarchic political faction that included some of his own aristocratic relatives urged him to enter public life under its auspices. The young Plato wisely held back, waiting to see what the group’s policy would be, and was repelled by the violence and terror it used as its tools of government. But when democratic forces regained power, he was even more repelled by their trial and conviction of his revered teacher, whom he calls, in the
Apology
, “the wisest, the justest, and best of all men I have ever known.” After Socrates’ death, in 399, Plato fled Athens, wandered around the Mediterranean meeting and studying with other philosophers, returned to Athens to fight for his city, then again went wandering and studying.

At forty, conversing with Dionysius, the despot of Syracuse, he daringly condemned dictatorship. Dionysius, nettled, said, “Your words are those of an old dotard,” to which Plato replied, “Your language is that of a tyrant.” Dionysius ordered him seized and sold into slavery, which might have been the end of his philosophizing, but Anniceris, a wealthy
admirer, ransomed him, and he returned to Athens. Friends raised three thousand drachmas to reimburse Anniceris, who refused the money. They thereupon used it to buy Plato a suburban estate, where in 387 he founded his Academy. This school of higher learning would be the intellectual center of Greece for nine centuries until, in
A.D.
529, the Emperor Justinian, a zealous Christian, shut it down in the best interests of the true faith.

We have almost no details about Plato’s activities at the Academy, which he headed for forty-one years, until his death in 347 at eighty or eighty-one. It is believed, however, that he taught his students by a combination of Socratic dialectic and lectures, usually delivered as he and his auditors wandered endlessly to and fro in the garden. (A minor playwright, mocking this custom, has a character say, “I am at my wits’ end walking up and down like Plato, and yet have discovered no wise plan but only tired my legs.”
⁷
)

Plato’s thirty-five or so dialogues—the actual number is uncertain, because at least half a dozen are probably spurious—were not meant for his students’ use; they were a popularized, semidramatized version of his ideas, addressed to a larger audience. They deal with metaphysical, moral, and political matters and, here and there, certain aspects of psychology. His influence on philosophy was immense and on psychology, although it was not his main concern, far greater than that of anyone who preceded him and of anyone except Aristotle for the next two thousand years.

Despite the veneration in which Plato is generally held, from a scientific standpoint his effect on the development of psychology was more harmful than helpful. Its most negative aspect was his antipathy to the theory that perception is the source of knowledge; believing that data derived from the senses are shifting and unreliable, he held that true knowledge consists solely of concepts and abstractions arrived at through reasoning. In the
Theaetetus
, he mocks the perception-based theory of knowledge: If each man is the measure of all things, why are not pigs and baboons equally valid measures, since they too perceive? If each man’s perception of the world is truth, then any man is as wise as the gods, yet no wiser than a fool. And so on.

More seriously, Plato has Socrates point out that even if we agree that one man’s judgment is as true as another’s, the wise man’s judgment may have better consequences than the ignorant man’s. The doctor’s
forecast of the course of the patient’s illness, for instance, is more likely to be correct than the patient’s; thus, the wise man is, after all, a better measure of things than the fool.

But how does one become wise? Through touch we perceive hard and soft, but it is not the sense organs that recognize them as opposites, he says; it is the mind that makes that judgment. Through sight we may judge two objects to be about equal in size, but we never see or experience absolute equality; such abstract qualities can be apprehended only by other means. We gain true knowledge—that is, the knowledge of concepts like absolute equality, similarity and difference, existence and nonexistence, honor and dishonor, goodness and badness—through reflection and reason, not through sense impressions.

Here Plato was on the trail of an important psychological function, the process by which the mind derives general principles, categories, and abstractions from particular observations. But his bias against sense data led him to offer a wholly unprovable metaphysical explanation of that process. Like his mentor, he held that conceptual knowledge comes to us by recollection; we inherently have such knowledge and discover it through rational thinking.
⁸

But going further than Socrates, he argued that these concepts are more “real” than the objects of our perceptions. The “idea” of a chair— the abstract concept of chairness—is more enduring and real than this or that physical chair. The latter will decay and cease to be; the former will not. Any beautiful individual will eventually grow old and wrinkled, die, and cease to exist, but the concept of beauty is eternal.
⁹
The idea of a right triangle is perfect and timeless, while any triangle drawn on wax or parchment is imperfect and will someday cease to be; indeed, over the door of the Academy was the inscription “Let no one without geometry enter here.”

This is the heart of Plato’s Theory of Ideas (or Forms), the metaphysical doctrine that reality consists of ideas or forms that exist eternally in the soul pervading the universe—God—while material objects are transient and illusory.
¹⁰
Plato is thus an Idealist, not in the sense of one with high ideals but of one who advocates the superiority of ideas to material objects. Our souls partake of those eternal ideas; we bring them with us when we are born. When we see objects in the material world, we understand what they are and the relationships between them—larger or smaller, and so on—by remembering our ideas and using them as a guide to experience.

Or rather we do if we have been liberated from ignorance by philosophy;
if not, we are deluded by our senses and live in error like the prisoners in Plato’s famous metaphorical cave. Imagine a cave, he says in the
Republic
, in which prisoners are so bound that they face an inner wall and see only shadows, cast on it by a fire outside, of themselves and of men passing behind them carrying all sorts of vessels, statues, and figures of animals. The prisoners, knowing nothing of what is behind them, take the shadows to be reality. At last one man escapes, sees the actual objects, and understands that he has been deceived. He is like a philosopher who recognizes that material objects are only shadows of reality and that reality is composed of ideal forms.
¹¹
It is his duty to go down into the cave and lead the prisoners up into the light of reality.

Plato may have been led to construct his otherworldly and metaphysical explanation of true knowledge by Socrates’ and his own reasoning. But perhaps the military and political chaos of his era made him seek something eternal, unshakable, and absolute in which to believe. Certainly his prescription for an ideal state, spelled out in the
Republic
, aims to achieve stability and permanence through a rigid class system and the totalitarian rule of a small elite of philosopher-kings.

In any case, in Plato’s epistemology that which is physical, particular, and mortal is considered illusion and error, while only what is conceptual, abstract, and eternal is real and true. His Theory of Ideas, greatly extending the dualism of Socrates, portrayed the senses as deceptive, the spiritual as the only path to truth; appearances and material things as illusory and transient, ideas as real and eternal; the body as corruptible and corrupting, the soul as incorruptible and pure; desires and hungers as the source of trouble and sin, the ascetic life of philosophy as the way to goodness. These dichotomies sound remarkably like anticipations of the fulminations of the early Fathers of the Church but are Plato’s own:

Soul, for Plato, is thus not only an incorporeal and immortal entity, as many Greeks had long believed: it is also mind. But he never explained
how thinking can take place in an incorporeal essence. Since thinking requires effort and thus uses energy, whence would the energy come to enable the soul to think? Plato says that motion is the essence of the soul and that psychological activities are related to its inner motions, but he is silent about the source of the energy for such motion.

Yet he was a sensible man with wide experience of the world, and some of his psychological conjectures about the soul are down-to-earth and sound almost contemporary. In some of the middle and later dialogues—notably the
Republic
, the
Phaedrus
, and the
Timaeus—
he says that when the soul inhabits a body, it operates on three levels: thought or reason, spirit or will, and appetite or desire. Though he castigated the lusts of the body in the
Phaedo
, now he says that it is as bad for reason wholly to suppress appetite or spirit as for either of those to overpower reason; the Good is achieved when all three aspects of the soul function in harmony. Here too he resorts to metaphor to make his meaning clear: He likens the soul, in the
Phaedrus
, to a team of two steeds, one lively but obedient (spirit), the other violent and unruly (appetite), the two yoked together and driven by a charioteer (reason) who, with considerable effort, makes them cooperate and pull together. Plato came to this conclusion without conducting clinical studies or psychoanalyzing anyone, yet to a surprising extent it anticipates Freud’s analysis of character as composed of superego, ego, and id.