Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [23]
The Stoics
Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium (336–264), based its ethical system on a psychological concept long familiar in Greek thought, namely, that one could achieve tranquillity through control of the emotions. The good life, Zeno held, was one in which the mind is in total control, enabling the individual to feel as little emotion as possible and thereby immunizing himself against suffering.7 Even desire and pleasure were to be avoided, since they render us vulnerable.8
His followers stressed that such mastery of the passions requires the exercise of the will; they echoed Plato’s view that the will carries out the directives of reason over the urgings of desire. But this created a problem for the Stoics. They believed, with Democritus, that the universe was made of atoms that operated according to inviolate physical laws, a concept that seemed to leave no room for free will. To solve or at least sidestep the difficulty, they argued that God cannot be constrained by the laws of the universe and so must have free will; and since the soul of each human being is a bit of God, it too must possess the power to act freely.9 This hypothesis, which obviously can be neither proved nor disproved, was to create one of the most intractable problems of psychology.
Roman Borrowers
As the eastern Mediterranean world was sinking into decadence and lethargy, Rome was becoming ever more vital and aggressive. But even as it conquered the eastern Mediterranean, it was itself conquered by Hellenistic culture. The Romans, empire builders but not innovators, administrators but not thinkers, adopted Greek styles of literature, architecture, sculpture, religion, and philosophy. Between the second century B.C. and the second century A.D., Rome expanded until, in Gibbon’s words, it “comprehended the fairest part of earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind,” but in all that time it remained a cultural parasite of Greece. As Bertrand Russell says in his History of Western Philosophy, “The Romans invented no art forms, constructed no original system of philosophy, and made no scientific discoveries. They made good roads, systematic legal codes, and efficient armies; for the rest they looked to Greece.”10
But in philosophy they copied the Greeks very selectively. Preoccupied with military conquest, the management of subjugated territories, the control of slaves and proletarians, and other practical matters, they had no use for the higher flights of Greek philosophic fancy; all they borrowed from Aristotle, for instance, was his logic. By and large they considered the proper sphere of philosophy to be the promulgation of rules for living wisely amid the uncertainties of life.
Lucretius
Epicureanism, therefore, appealed to certain Romans. Lucretius, a contemporary of Julius Caesar’s, expounded the doctrines of Epicurus in his roundup of science, a long poem titled On the Nature of Things. The rational and passive ethics he set forth there did not appeal to the avaricious, aggressive rulers of the Republic but it did to Roman aristocrats, most of whom stood apart from the violence of war and politics, and needed a philosophy to help them live calmly within the turmoil of their society.
Lucretius contributed nothing of importance to psychology in On the Nature of Things; he merely restated the views of Epicurus and Democritus in a somewhat schoolteacherish manner, adding a few comments designed to patch up weaknesses in each. He is as limited in his outlook as his sources; he says, for instance, that since we feel fears and joys in the “middle region of the breast,” that is where the mind or understanding is located, and that the mind and soul (which he says are united) are composed of particularly small,