The Story of Psychology Read Online Free PDF Page B

conviction of his revered teacher, whom he calls, in the
Apology
, “the wisest, the justest, and best of all men I have ever known.” After Socrates’ death, in 399, Plato fled Athens, wandered around the Mediterranean meeting and studying with other philosophers, returned to Athens to fight for his city, then again went wandering and studying.
    At forty, conversing with Dionysius, the despot of Syracuse, he daringly condemned dictatorship. Dionysius, nettled, said, “Your words are those of an old dotard,” to which Plato replied, “Your language is that of a tyrant.” Dionysius ordered him seized and sold into slavery, which might have been the end of his philosophizing, but Anniceris, a wealthyadmirer, ransomed him, and he returned to Athens. Friends raised three thousand drachmas to reimburse Anniceris, who refused the money. They thereupon used it to buy Plato a suburban estate, where in 387 he founded his Academy. This school of higher learning would be the intellectual center of Greece for nine centuries until, in A.D. 529, the Emperor Justinian, a zealous Christian, shut it down in the best interests of the true faith.
    We have almost no details about Plato’s activities at the Academy, which he headed for forty-one years, until his death in 347 at eighty or eighty-one. It is believed, however, that he taught his students by a combination of Socratic dialectic and lectures, usually delivered as he and his auditors wandered endlessly to and fro in the garden. (A minor playwright, mocking this custom, has a character say, “I am at my wits’ end walking up and down like Plato, and yet have discovered no wise plan but only tired my legs.” 7 )
    Plato’s thirty-five or so dialogues—the actual number is uncertain, because at least half a dozen are probably spurious—were not meant for his students’ use; they were a popularized, semidramatized version of his ideas, addressed to a larger audience. They deal with metaphysical, moral, and political matters and, here and there, certain aspects of psychology. His influence on philosophy was immense and on psychology, although it was not his main concern, far greater than that of anyone who preceded him and of anyone except Aristotle for the next two thousand years.
    Despite the veneration in which Plato is generally held, from a scientific standpoint his effect on the development of psychology was more harmful than helpful. Its most negative aspect was his antipathy to the theory that perception is the source of knowledge; believing that data derived from the senses are shifting and unreliable, he held that true knowledge consists solely of concepts and abstractions arrived at through reasoning. In the
Theaetetus
, he mocks the perception-based theory of knowledge: If each man is the measure of all things, why are not pigs and baboons equally valid measures, since they too perceive? If each man’s perception of the world is truth, then any man is as wise as the gods, yet no wiser than a fool. And so on.
    More seriously, Plato has Socrates point out that even if we agree that one man’s judgment is as true as another’s, the wise man’s judgment may have better consequences than the ignorant man’s. The doctor’sforecast of the course of the patient’s illness, for instance, is more likely to be correct than the patient’s; thus, the wise man is, after all, a better measure of things than the fool.
    But how does one become wise? Through touch we perceive hard and soft, but it is not the sense organs that recognize them as opposites, he says; it is the mind that makes that judgment. Through sight we may judge two objects to be about equal in size, but we never see or experience absolute equality; such abstract qualities can be apprehended only by other means. We gain true knowledge—that is, the knowledge of concepts like absolute equality, similarity and difference, existence and nonexistence, honor and dishonor, goodness and badness—through reflection