Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [16]
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