Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [13]
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;