The Story of Psychology (8 page)

In this milieu, psychology no longer greatly interested philosophers. The Platonists and Aristotelians merely ruminated on and refined the hypotheses of their masters. The adherents of three popular new schools, the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics, limited their psychological discussions largely to Democritus’s epistemology (the theory that we know only what the senses tell us, from which we extract ideas and meaning through the use of reason), patching up any flaws they noticed and adding a few notions necessitated by their ethics.

Epicurus (341–270) based his survival ethics on the simplistic doctrine “Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life.”
²
Not that he was a sensualist or libertine; a frail and chronically ailing man, he sought and advocated only tranquil and moderate pleasures and lectured against such intense delights as gluttony, public acclaim, the exercise of power, and sexual intercourse. Of the last he said, “No man was ever better for sexual indulgence, and it is well if he be not worse.” He did, however, allow himself a concubine, since he considered sexual pleasure relatively harmless if one did not fall in love.
³

Ethics being Epicurus’s major interest, he paid little attention to psychology except to repeat and quibble with some details of Democritus’s theory of knowledge, which suited his pragmatic and mundane philosophy. Yet if he had pursued the psychological significance of one of his own doctrines, he would be a major figure in the story of psychology. According to Diogenes Laertius, “[The Epicureans] say there are two passions, pleasure and pain, which affect everything alive. And that one is natural, and the other foreign to our nature, and that this is the basis on which we judge all things that are to be chosen or to be avoided.”
⁴
This is a clear anticipation of the principle known today as the law of reinforcement, which modern psychologists view as the fundamental mechanism of learning. But Epicurus and his followers developed the metaphysical rather than the psychological implications of the dichotomy.

The Skeptics based their ethical system on the familiar doctrine that we cannot be sure our senses correctly report reality, which they took farther than their precursors. Pyrrho (360–270), the founder of the school, held that it is not only impossible to know whether our perceptions are truthful but equally impossible to find rational ground for preferring one course of action to any other. Such skepticism was useful in those times; if nothing was provably wrong, one could legitimately accept the customs or religion of whoever was in power.
⁵
The philosopher Arcesilaus took the final step, carrying Pyrrho’s skepticism to the ultimate with his mind-numbing apothegm “Nothing is certain, not even this.”
⁶
The Skeptics, in effect, reduced psychology to the systematic doubt of all thought.

Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium (336–264), based its ethical system on a psychological concept long familiar in Greek thought, namely, that one could achieve tranquillity through control of the emotions. The good life, Zeno held, was one in which the mind is in total control, enabling the individual to feel as little emotion as possible and thereby immunizing himself against suffering.
⁷
Even desire and pleasure were to be avoided, since they render us vulnerable.
⁸

His followers stressed that such mastery of the passions requires the exercise of the will; they echoed Plato’s view that the will carries out the directives of reason over the urgings of desire. But this created a problem for the Stoics. They believed, with Democritus, that the universe was made of atoms that operated according to inviolate physical laws, a concept that seemed to leave no room for free will. To solve or at least sidestep the difficulty, they argued that God cannot be constrained by the laws of the universe and so must have free will; and since the soul of each human being is a bit of God, it too must possess the power to act freely.
⁹
This hypothesis, which obviously can be neither proved nor disproved, was to create one of the most intractable problems of psychology.

As the eastern Mediterranean world was sinking into decadence and lethargy, Rome was becoming ever more vital and aggressive. But even as it conquered the eastern Mediterranean, it was itself conquered by Hellenistic culture. The Romans, empire builders but not innovators, administrators but not thinkers, adopted Greek styles of literature, architecture, sculpture, religion, and philosophy. Between the second century
B.C.
and the second century
A.D.
, Rome expanded until, in Gibbon’s words, it “comprehended the fairest part of earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind,” but in all that time it remained a cultural parasite of Greece. As Bertrand Russell says in his
History of Western Philosophy
, “The Romans invented no art forms, constructed no original system of philosophy, and made no scientific discoveries. They made good roads, systematic legal codes, and efficient armies; for the rest they looked to Greece.”
¹⁰

But in philosophy they copied the Greeks very selectively. Preoccupied
with military conquest, the management of subjugated territories, the control of slaves and proletarians, and other practical matters, they had no use for the higher flights of Greek philosophic fancy; all they borrowed from Aristotle, for instance, was his logic. By and large they considered the proper sphere of philosophy to be the promulgation of rules for living wisely amid the uncertainties of life.

Epicureanism, therefore, appealed to certain Romans. Lucretius, a contemporary of Julius Caesar’s, expounded the doctrines of Epicurus in his roundup of science, a long poem titled
On the Nature of Things.
The rational and passive ethics he set forth there did not appeal to the avaricious, aggressive rulers of the Republic but it did to Roman aristocrats, most of whom stood apart from the violence of war and politics, and needed a philosophy to help them live calmly within the turmoil of their society.

Lucretius contributed nothing of importance to psychology in
On the Nature of Things;
he merely restated the views of Epicurus and Democritus in a somewhat schoolteacherish manner, adding a few comments designed to patch up weaknesses in each. He is as limited in his outlook as his sources; he says, for instance, that since we feel fears and joys in the “middle region of the breast,” that is where the mind or understanding is located, and that the mind and soul (which he says are united) are composed of particularly small, fast-moving atoms. But elsewhere he is eminently sensible and realistic. Here, for instance, is a sample of Lucretius at his best:

While we may admire the common sense of the ancient poet, in him psychology is at a standstill; we need not linger here.

Stoicism was more to the taste of the aggressive ruling class of Roman society. From the first century
A.D.
this doctrine was popular among Roman politicians and military leaders, who led lives of luxury and power but knew that at any moment they might lose everything, including their lives. For them, Stoical dispassion and calmness in the face of personal tragedy was an ideal.

It is epitomized in the behavior of the philosopher Seneca the Younger (3
B.C.
–
A.D.
65) in the face of death. The poet, dramatist, statesman, and Stoic philosopher was rumored, probably falsely, to be plotting against the Emperor Nero. When the rumor reached Nero, he dispatched a centurion to Seneca’s country home to tell him that the Emperor desired his death. On hearing this, Seneca quietly called for tablets on which to write his will. The centurion refused permission for this lengthy task, whereupon Seneca told the weeping friends around him, “Since I cannot reward you for your services, I leave you the best thing I have to leave—the pattern of my life.” He calmly opened his veins, lay down in a hot bath, and while dying dictated to his secretaries a letter to the Roman people.
¹²

The best-known Stoic philosopher in Rome, Epictetus (60–120)—originally a Greek slave—was, like his Stoic forebears, uninterested in the nature of the universe, matter, or spirit. “What do I care,” he said, “whether all existing things are composed of atoms…or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to learn the true nature of good and evil?”
¹³
His central concern was to find a way to endure life. The only heed he paid to psychology was to offer a quasi-Platonic rationalization of how to “endure and renounce”:

Much the same kind of noble but unenlightening sentiment appears in the famous
Meditations
of the second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The only real contributions to psychology by Roman citizens were made by a Greek and an Egyptian.

The Greek, Galen (130–201), was the most famous physician and anatomist of his time and personal physician to Marcus Aurelius and his successors. The title of one of Galen’s tracts sounds promising
—The Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions—
but it contains only warmed-over Stoic and Platonic notions about the control of emotions through reason. Elsewhere, however, he developed in some detail a classification of emotions that Plato briefly suggested in the
Republic
, namely, that they are either of the “irascible” kind, having to do with anger or frustration, or the “concupiscible” kind, arising from the desire for various pleasures and the satisfaction of bodily needs.
¹⁵
Virtually all modern psychologists who have classified the emotions have made a similar distinction.

Galen’s major effect on psychology, mentioned earlier, was his theory of personality based on Hippocrates’ theory of the four humors. It was a negative contribution, since for many centuries it misled physicians and others as to the causes of personality patterns and psychological disorders. He did, however, recognize and correctly describe one kind of physical symptom produced by the emotions. He noticed one day that a female patient’s pulse speeded up when someone happened to mention the name of a male dancer. Galen arranged to have someone enter the room during her next visit and talk about the performance of a different male dancer, and to repeat the experiment on another day with another dancer’s name. In neither case did the patient’s pulse accelerate. On the fourth day someone mentioned the first dancer’s name again, her pulse became rapid, and Galen confidently diagnosed her ailment as love sickness, adding that doctors seem not to realize how bodily health can be affected by the suffering of the psyche.
¹⁶
Unfortunately, he went no further with the thought, which was not pursued until the advent of psychosomatic medicine in our own century.

The Egyptian Plotinus (205–270) made a wholly different kind of contribution to psychology. By his time, Roman civilization was decadent,
corrupt, and violence-ridden. In that atmosphere, many troubled people were attracted to Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, which combined the ethics of Stoicism with the mystical and unworldly components of Plato’s beliefs, including the most nonscientific and spiritual components of his psychology.

Plotinus, after studying Greek philosophy in Alexandria, came to Rome in 244, where, although a pagan, he lived like a Christian saint amid the city’s luxuries. Regarding the body as the prison of the soul— his biographer and disciple, Porphyry, says Plotinus was actually ashamed that his soul had a body—he took no care of himself physically, was unconcerned about dress and hygienic matters, ate the simplest foods, avoided sexual activity, and refused to sit for his portrait on the grounds that his body was the least important part of him. Despite these austerities, he was a popular lecturer and much sought out for his advice on sundry matters by well-to-do Romans.

Like Plato, whom he revered—usually alluding to him simply as “He”—Plotinus considered the evidence of the senses inferior to that of reasoning. He believed that the highest wisdom, the ultimate access to truth, came when the soul temporarily slipped free of the flesh in a trancelike state and perceived the world beyond. He himself, he wrote, had had a number of such experiences.