Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [22]
These and other sciences in which progress was made had become partly emancipated from philosophy; their practitioners, ignoring metaphysical issues, sought knowledge not through philosophic speculation but empirically. (Mathematics is nonempirical, but Euclid’s approach to it was at least free of the mysticism of the Pythagorean geometers.) Psychology, meanwhile, in which no empirical methodology had been conceived of, remained a branch of philosophy.
Which was in decline. The wars that raged intermittently throughout Macedonia and the Near East, and the gradual decay of the social order in the former Greek city-states, engendered weariness and pessimism. Instead of searching for ultimate truths, philosophers sought solace; they distracted themselves with astrology, Near Eastern religions, and mystical adaptations of Platonism, and they narrowed philosophy to systems of ethics that would teach them how to live wisely in troubled times.
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.
The Epicureans
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.”4This 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
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,