Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [43]
Spinoza was greatly impressed by Descartes’ philosophy and, like him, used pure reasoning to deduce the nature of the world, God, and the mind. But he found Descartes’ theory about the pineal gland totally unconvincing and lacking in proof,17 and therefore saw no merit to his explanation of how body and mind interact. Unlike Descartes, who believed in free will, Spinoza saw all mental events, like all events in the physical world, as having causes, which in turn have preceding causes; he was, in short, a complete determinist, as he made clear in the early pages of the Ethics:* axiom 3: From a given determinate cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no determinate cause can be given, it is impossible that an effect can follow.
PROP. 29: In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner.
Demonst.: Whatever is, is in God; but God cannot be called a contingent thing, for He exists necessarily and not contingently. Moreover, the modes of the divine nature have followed from it necessarily and not contingently, whether it be considered absolutely or as determined to action in a certain manner.18
To decode this difficult language, for “God” substitute “the universe,” for “modes of the divine nature” read “mental and physical events,” and replace “contingent” with “not caused by something else.” It then becomes clear that Spinoza’s world, including human mental activity, is wholly subject to natural laws and capable of being understood.
He thus anticipates the fundamental premise of scientific psychology. He also says that the most basic of human motives is self-preservation;19again, this anticipates modern psychological theory. Yet his ideas affected the development of psychology only indirectly; his impact on modern thought, say Drs. Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick in their History of Psychiatry, “was so pervasive that many of his basic concepts became a part of the general ideological climate” and in that way influenced Freud and others without their knowing it.20
Aside from these basic concepts, Spinoza’s psychology was limited in scope and had little follow-up. He discussed perception, memory, imagination, the formation of ideas, consciousness, and so on, but said almost nothing new about them. In defining “mind” and “intellect” he grossly oversimplified: “mind” is nothing but an abstract term for the series of perceptions, memories, and other mental states that we experience, “intellect” no more than the sum of one’s ideas or volitions.
But these subjects do not much concern him; his interest in psychology has to do with the passions (emotions); specifically, how we can escape from bondage to them by understanding their causes. His analysis of the emotions is largely patterned on Descartes’. There are three basic ones, he says (Descartes said six)—joy, sorrow, and desire—and forty-eight different emotions result from the interplay of these three with the pleasant or unpleasant stimuli of everyday life.
These explanations, though reasonable enough, are purely logical and superficial; they say nothing about unconscious motivations, childhood development, social influences, or other components of emotional behavior as it is understood by modern psychologists. Like the rest of Spinoza’s writing on psychology, these passages