1. Aristotle.
Many things in the history of thought
have been traced back to
Aristotle with varying de-
grees of
appositeness, but there is almost nothing ap-
posite in tracing back behaviorism to him. To credit
him, for
instance, with taking up a position on the
central methodological issue of
the use of publicly
observable data, as distinct from introspective evi-
dence, in studying human beings would
display a gross
lack of historical perspective; for the distinction be-
tween the private world of the individual's
own con-
sciousness and the public world,
which all could ob-
serve, was alien to the
Greeks. Indeed there is a sense
in which the Greeks had no concept of
consciousness
in that they did not link together phenomena such as
pain, dreams, remembering, action, and reasoning
as exemplifying different
modes of individual con-
sciousness. The
concept of consciousness was largely a
product of individualism, of the
various movements
such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christianity,
which supplied types of conceptual schemes that were
very different from
those which were appropriate to
the shared life of the city-states. The
coordinating
concept of individual consciousness was not made ex-
plicit until it found expression in the
systems of Saint
Augustine and Descartes. The use of introspection as
a
technique for investigating consciousness went along
with such systems of
thought, and behaviorism can only
be understood as a reaction against such
a technique.
It would, therefore, be absurd to search for hints of
the
central doctrine of behaviorism in a thinker such as
Aristotle, whose way
of thinking about human life
antedated the conceptual schemes which
permitted
such questions to be raised.
What can be said about Aristotle is that, being a
marine biologist by
training, he was the first to ap-
proach the
study of human beings in an objective and
systematic way. He developed a
classificatory system
which included plants, animals, and man as
belonging
to the same genus of living things. He sent his research
workers all over the known world to provide him with
facts, not only about
the different species of living
things but also about the different types
of customs
and systems of government under which men lived.
This was
all recorded and fed into the classificatory
system that he developed at
the Lyceum.
When, however, we turn to Aristotle's Metaphysics
and
De anima, and study the conceptual scheme
which
he thought appropriate for describing and explaining
human
behavior, we find not just that his doctrine of
form and matter was
incompatible with the materi-
alism espoused
by many behaviorists but that, in his
psychology, he was an explicit critic
of the mechanists
of his day.
Aristotle held that a living thing is a “body with
a
soul,” “soul” designating the self-originated
tendency
of living things to persist towards an end. This tendency
can
be exhibited at the nutritive and reproductive level
as in plants, at the
level of sensation and movement
as in animals, and at the rational level as
in man.
Aristotle accused mechanists such as Democritus and
Empedocles
of the all-pervading mistake of concluding
from the fact that the soul is
the cause of movement,
that it is itself moved. He maintained that the
soul
moves the body “by means of purpose of some sort,
that
is thought.” Thinking is not a sort of motion any
more than
desire or sensation are. His predecessors had
misunderstood the sort of
concept that “soul” was.
Insofar as it is a capacity,
how could it be moved?
A capacity is not the sort of thing that can be
moved.
Insofar as it is an exercise of a capacity, such as think-
ing, it is manifest in a process that
cannot adequately
be described as a change in motion. Aristotle
deployed
many ingenious arguments to substantiate this criticism
of
mechanical theories, many of which are similar to
those which can be found
in the work of modern
philosophers such as Ryle (Peters [1962], pp.
102-04;
Ryle [1949]).
There are thus almost no grounds for linking Aris-
totle with behaviorism either in respect of its central
doctrine or in respect of its more peripheral ones. If
Aristotle is to be
linked with any school in twentieth-
century psychology the obvious one would be that of
the
“hormic” (purposive) psychology championed by
William
McDougall. For here too we find behavior
studied objectively, an exaltation
of purpose as the
most important explanatory concept, and a vehement
attack on the mechanists of his day, namely J. B.
Watson and the
reflexologists. Indeed McDougall's
indebtedness to Aristotle is explicitly
acknowledged at
many points.
