Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [20]
In De Anima and other works, Aristotle dealt briefly with or touched tangentially on a number of other psychological matters. Though none warrants our close attention, the range and perceptiveness of these comments are remarkable. Among other things, he offered a theory of motivation in terms of pleasure and pain, touched on the drives producing various kinds of behavior (courage, friendship, temperance, and others), and sketched the theory of catharsis (the vicarious purgation of pity and fear) to explain why we feel rewarded by seeing tragedies in the theater.
We may chuckle at some of his wilder guesses, like a good meal making us sleepy because digestion causes gases and body heat to collect around the heart, where they interfere with the psyche. But, writes Robert Watson, the “study of Aristotle is rewarded by a feeling of wonder at the modernity of much of what he says about psychological matters…He was, of course, wrong in many of his ‘facts’ and he omitted important topics, but his overall framework of growing, sensing, remembering, desiring, reacting, and thinking, with but a few changes, bear[s] more than a resemblance to modern psychology.”27
* Throughout this chapter, the dates given are B.C. unless otherwise noted.
*All emphases in quotations are those of the quoted writers.
TWO
The
Scholars
The Long Sleep
If it is difficult to account for the sudden appearance and vigor of psychology in Greece, it is almost as difficult to explain the dormancy that overtook it after Aristotle, a sleep that would last two thousand years. Not until the seventeenth century would psychological questions again fascinate and galvanize thoughtful men as they had during the brief flowering of Greek culture.
Yet “dormancy” and “sleep” are misleading; they imply a lack of awareness that was far from being the case. Throughout the twilight of Greek greatness, the Pax Romana, the transformation of society by Christianity, the disintegration of the Roman Empire, the emergence of feudalism in its ruins, and the renewal of learning during the Renaissance, psychology was neither moribund nor forgotten. During those many centuries and metamorphoses of society, some intellectuals continued to ask the questions posed by the Greek philosophers and to formulate answers to them. But they did so as scholarly commentators, reworking what had already been done, rather than as explorers and innovators; not one of them had a major new idea that significantly advanced psychological knowledge.
Perhaps by the end of Aristotle’s life psychology had developed almost as far as speculation and reflection could take it. After his time, those who were interested in psychological phenomena continued to rely on that approach, but the science could not progress without observation, measurement, sampling, testing, experimentation, and other empirical procedures.
There is, however, another and larger explanation of the long sleep: none of the social and religious systems that dominated Western civilization for those two millennia inspired men to explore the psychological unknown. For different reasons, Hellenistic society, Roman society, and Christianity motivated those who thought about psychological matters to do no more than pore over the work of their predecessors and revise it to fit their own belief systems.
Yet what these scholars, compilers, and redacters did deserves our attention for two reasons. For one, in the history of every science there are long periods when its practitioners labor at minor modifications of accepted theory in the effort to make it fit unruly facts. During such periods the