by Morton Hunt
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:
The body fills us full of loves and lusts and fears and fancies of all kinds…We are slaves to [the body’s] service. If we would have true knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body—the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; then we shall attain the wisdom we desire, be pure and have converse with the pure… And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?12
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.
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:
When the reasoning and taming and ruling power of the personality is asleep, the wild beast within us, gorged with meat and drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime—not excepting incest or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food—which at such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.13
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:
I was once told a story, which I can quite believe, to the effect that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, as he was walking up from the Piraeus and approaching the northern wall from the outside, observed some dead bodies on the ground and the executioner standing by them. He immediately felt a desire to look at them, but at the same time loathing the thought he tried to divert himself from it. For some time he struggled with himself, and covered his eyes, till at length, over-mastered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide with his fingers, and running up to the bodies, exclaimed, “Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight!”14
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.
The Realist: Aristotle
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.
