The Story of Psychology (6 page)

Plato also said, without any empirical evidence to go on, that the reason is located in the brain, the spirit in the chest, and the appetites in the abdomen; that they are linked by the marrow of the spine and brain; and that emotions are carried around the body by the blood vessels. These guesses are in part ludicrous, in part prescient of later discoveries. Considering that he was no anatomist, one can only wonder how he arrived at these judgments.

In the
Republic
Plato describes in remarkably modern terms what happens when appetite is ungoverned:

And he portrays in almost contemporary terms the condition we call ambivalence, which for him is a conflict between spirit and appetite that reason fails to control. In the
Republic
Socrates offers this example:

Yet he also says—and it is the most important message of the charioteer-and-team metaphor—that appetite should not be eliminated but, rather, controlled. Attempting total repression of our desires would be like holding the steeds in check rather than driving them on toward reason’s goal.

Two other items of Plato’s psychology are worth our noting. One is his concept of Eros, the drive to be united with the loved one. It usually has a sexual or romantic connotation, but in Plato’s larger sense it refers to a desire to be united with the Idea or eternal Form that the other person exemplifies. Despite the metaphysical trapping of the concept, it contributed to psychology the idea that our most basic drive is for unity with an undying principle. As Robert I. Watson, a historian of psychology, puts it: “Eros is popularly translated as ‘love,’ but may often be more meaningfully called ‘life force.’ This is something akin to the biological will to live, the life energy.”
¹⁵

Finally, Plato casually offered a thought about memory that would be used much later to counter his own theory of knowledge. Although he viewed recollection through reasoning as the most important kind of memory, he did admit that we learn and retain much from everyday experience. To explain why some of us remember more of that experience, or remember it more correctly, than others do, and why we often forget much of what we have learned, he resorted in the
Theaetetus
dialogue to a simile likening memory of experiences to writing on wax tablets; just as these surfaces may vary in size, hardness, moistness, and purity, so the minds of different persons vary in capacity, ability to learn, and retentiveness. Plato pursued the thought no further, but much later
it would epitomize a theory of knowledge diametrically opposed to his. The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke and the twentieth-century behaviorist John Watson would base their psychologies on the assumption that everything we know is what experience has written on the blank slate of the newborn mind.

Plato’s most distinguished pupil, Aristotle, spent twenty years at the Academy, but after leaving it he contradicted so effectively much of what Plato had taught that he had as great an influence on philosophy as his master. More than that, through philosophy he left his mark on areas of knowledge as diverse as logic and astronomy, physics and ethics, religion and aesthetics, biology and rhetoric, politics and psychology. “He, perhaps more than any other thinker,” asserts one scholar, Anselm H. Amadio, “has characterized the orientation and content of all that is termed Western civilization.”
¹⁶
And though psychology was far from Aristotle’s main concern, he gave “history’s first fully integrated and systematic account” of it, says the psychologist-scholar Daniel N. Robinson, adding, “Directly and indirectly, it has been among the most influential as well. Within the surviving works can be found theories of learning and memory, perception, motivation and emotion, socialization, personality.”
¹⁷

One might expect such an intellectual giant to have been a strange person, but almost no peculiarities have been recorded of him. Busts show a handsome bearded man with refined and sensitive features; a malicious contemporary said he had small eyes and spindleshanks, but Aristotle offset these drawbacks with elegant dress and impeccable barbering. Nothing is known of his private life during his years at the Academy, but at thirty-seven he married for love. His wife died early, and in his will he asked that at his own death her bones be laid next to his. He remarried, lived with his second wife the rest of his life, and left her well provided for, “in recognition of the steady affection she has shown me.” He was usually kindly and warm, but when sorely tried could be tart. When a long-winded fellow asked him, “Have I bored you to death with my chatter?” he replied, “No, indeed—I wasn’t paying attention to you.”

Although affluent by birth, Aristotle was an extraordinarily hard worker all his life, sparing himself nothing in his quest for knowledge. When Plato read his
Phaedo
dialogue aloud, wearied auditors tiptoed
out one by one, but Aristotle, and he alone, stayed to the end. On his honeymoon he devoted much of his time to collecting seashells, and he labored so assiduously at his research and writing that he completed 170 works in forty years.

Aristotle was born in 384 in Stagira, in northern Greece. His father was court physician to Amyntas II, King of Macedonia, whose son would become Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. Medical knowledge being traditionally passed down from father to son in Greece, Aristotle must have learned a good deal of biology and medicine; this may account for the scientific and empirical outlook that later made him the quintessential Realist, as opposed to Plato’s quintessential Idealist.

He came to Plato’s Academy at seventeen and stayed until he was thirty-seven; then he left, some say in anger, when Plato died and his nephew, rather than Aristotle, was appointed successor. He spent thirteen years away from Athens, first as philosopher-adviser to Hermeas, tyrant of Assus in Asia Minor; then as head of a philosophic academy at Mytilene on Lesbos, then as tutor to the teenage Alexander at Pella, King Philip’s capital. All the while, he was intensely busy reading, observing animal and human behavior, studying the skies, collecting biological specimens, dissecting animals, and writing. Some of his works, cast in dialogue form, were said to have been literary masterpieces, but all of these are lost. The forty-seven that remain, though intellectually profound, are numbingly prosaic and pedantic; they were probably lecture notes and treatises meant only for school use.

At forty-nine, at the height of his powers, Aristotle returned to Athens. Although the presidency of the Academy again became vacant, he was again passed over. He then founded a rival institution, the Lyceum, just outside the city, and there assembled teachers and pupils, a library, and a collection of zoological specimens. He lectured both morning and afternoon while strolling up and down the
peripatos
, the covered walk-way of the Lyceum (whence our word “peripatetic”), yet doubled his scholarly output by parceling out areas of research to students, much like today’s professors, and marshaling their findings in one work after another.

After thirteen years at the Lyceum, he left Athens when anti-Macedonian agitation broke out and he came under attack because of his Macedonian connections. His reason for moving away, he said, was to save the Athenians from sinning twice against philosophy (the first sin having been the conviction and execution of Socrates). He died the following year (322), at sixty-two or sixty-three, of a stomach illness.

None of this explains the immensity of his accomplishments. One can only suppose that, as with Shakespeare, Bach, and Einstein, Aristotle was a genius of the rarest sort who happened to live in a time and at a place that particularly favored his extraordinary abilities.

To be sure, many of his theories were later overturned or abandoned, and his scientific writings are riddled with myths, folklore, and outright errors. In his impressive
De Generatione Animalium
(History of Animals), for instance, he reported as fact that mice die if they drink in summertime, that eels are generated spontaneously, that human beings have only eight ribs, and that women have fewer teeth than men.

But unlike Plato he had the hunger for empirical data and the love of painstaking observation that have characterized science ever since. Despite the high value he placed on deductive reasoning and formal logic, he continually stressed the importance of inductive reasoning— the derivation of generalizations from observed cases or examples, a fundamental part of scientific method and a way of arriving at knowledge exactly contrary to that advocated by Plato.

For far from regarding sense perceptions as illusory and untrustworthy, Aristotle considered them the essential raw material of knowledge.
¹⁸
Extraordinary for one who had studied with Plato, he had, says one Aristotle scholar, “an intense interest in the concrete facts”;
¹⁹
he regarded the direct observation of real things, except in abstract domains such as mathematics, to be the foundation of understanding. In
De Generatione Animalium
, for instance, after admitting that he does not know how bees procreate, he says:

Like earlier philosophers, he sought to understand how perception takes place, but having no way to gather hard data on the matter— testing and experimentation were unknown, the dissection of human bodies impermissible—he relied on metaphysical explanations. He theorized that we do not perceive objects as such but their qualities, such as whiteness and roundness, which are nonmaterial “forms” that inhere in matter. When we see them, they are re-created within the eye, and the sensations they arouse are transmitted through the blood vessels to the
mind—which, he thought, must be in the heart, since people often recover from injuries to the head while wounds to the heart are invariably fatal. (The brain’s function, he thought, was to cool the blood when it became overly warm.) He also discussed the possible existence of an interior sense, the “common” sense, by means of which we recognize that various sensations arriving from different sense organs—say, white and round, warm and soft—come from a single object (in this case, a ball of wool).

If we ignore these absurdities, Aristotle’s explanation of how perceptions become knowledge is commonsensical and convincing, and complementary to the perception-based epistemologies of Protagoras and Democritus. Our minds, Aristotle says, recognize the similarities in a series of objects—this is the essence of inductive reasoning—and from those common traits form a “universal,” a word or concept signifying not an actual thing but a
sort
of thing or a general principle; this is the route to higher levels of knowledge and wisdom. Reason or intellect thus acts upon sense data; it is an active, organizing force.

Having spent so many years examining biological specimens, Aristotle was of no mind to regard the objects of perception as mere illusions, or to rank generalized concepts as more real than the individual things they summarize. Where Plato said that abstract ideas exist eternally, apart from material things, and are more real than they, his realistic pupil said they were only attributes that could be “predicated” of specific subjects. Though he never totally abandoned the metaphysical trappings of Greek thought, he came close to saying that universals have no existence except in the thinking mind. He thus synthesized the two main streams of Greek thinking about knowledge: the extreme emphasis on sense perception of Protagoras and Democritus and the extreme rationalism of Socrates and Plato.

About the relation of mind to body, at times he is hopelessly opaque, at other times crystal clear. The opacity concerns the nature of “soul,” which, waxing metaphysical, he calls the “form” of the body—not its shape but its “essence,” its individuality, or perhaps its capacity to live. This muddy concept was to roil the waters of psychology for many centuries.