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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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-


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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.