Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [313]
As far as one can tell, these creatures never wonder why the other acts as he or she does or why they themselves act as they do. It is only human beings who ask, “Why do we do what we do?”—perhaps the most important question we ever ask ourselves, and the fundamental question of psychology.
Primitive peoples had a variety of answers: Human behavior is governed by spirits, magical spells, the eating of particular parts of certain animals, and so on. The semiprimitive Homeric Greeks were only a little more sophisticated; they thought the gods put ideas and impulses directly into their minds. But the Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. made a historic leap: they attributed human behavior to internal forces—bodily feelings and thoughts.
They regarded those two sources, however, as opposed. Plato, for one, held that we are ruled by our appetites except to the extent that reason shows us the better way and that the will achieves a balance between the two forces. The idea that the passions—desires and emotions by which we are passively driven—are evil and that reason is good was to dominate Western ideas about behavior throughout the centuries, influencing thinkers as dissimilar as Paul, the great apostle of Christianity, and Spinoza, the supreme rationalist. Here is Paul lamenting the power of the passions:
For the good that I would I do not; but the evil that I would not, that I do.
Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present within me.
For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:
But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
—Romans 7:19–23
And here, seventeen centuries later, is Spinoza introducing his analysis of “human bondage” (the fourth part of his Ethic):
The impotence of man to govern or restrain the passions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him.
Although Paul and Spinoza advocated different ways of controlling the passions—Paul through salvation by means of faith in God’s grace, Spinoza through the use of reason and knowledge—both saw them, if uncontrolled, as causing humans to behave badly.
Aside from the conflict between reason and the passions, philosophers were never much interested in the influence of the passions on behavior; they were far more concerned with the workings of the intellect and the sources of knowledge. When they did discuss human behavior, it was generally in the context of moral philosophy—how we ought to behave—rather than the causes of our behavior. The psychology of the passions received only perfunctory notice before the modern era; Descartes, as we saw, did little more than name six primary emotions and interpret a number of others as combinations of them.1 And although Spinoza dealt with the passions in some detail, he did so in austere, logical terms that convey no sense of their power or of emotional experience. Love, for instance, he defined as “nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an external cause” and hatred as “nothing but sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause.”2
The first person to scientifically explore the influence of the emotions on behavior was not a psychologist but the great naturalist Charles Darwin. In 1872, more than a dozen years after the appearance of his historic Origin of Species, Darwin published an intriguing minor work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he argued that emotions evolved because they lead to useful actions and increase a creature