Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [12]
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.
The Idealist: Plato
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