Philosophical Roots of Knowing about Ourselves and the World

Philosophical Roots of Knowing about Ourselves and the World

            Interest in questions about human nature and in methods of answering these questions can be traced to the early Greek philosophers.  Plato (350 B.C.) and later his student Aristotle (350 B.C.) differed in their philosophies of whether the mind and body were distinct, whether there are inborn (innate) ideas, and on how to find answers to these questions (Kenny, 1998).

The Mind/Body Question

            Are the mind and body connected or are they two separate entities?  According to Plato (using dialogue based on his teacher, Socrates), mind (or the soul) and body are distinct and the mind survives the death of the body. Later, in support of Plato, Descartes (1641, as cited in Kenny, 1998) proposed that, based on animal dissections, the mind survived the body’s death because of fluid in the cavities of the brain.  Based on his observations, Aristotle (350 B.C.) considered the mind and brain connected.  Advances in technology, such as the electroencephalogram, have supported Aristotle, i.e., death is accompanied by both the absence of blood pressure and the absence of brain activity.

Knowing about brain-death clearly has religious implications.  Indeed, the language we use indicates that people implicitly understand that we can’t know the answers to questions regarding an afterlife, including heaven and hell, god, etc.  People say, for example, that they “believe” or “don’t believe” in god, rather than that there “is” or “isn’t” a god, as one would say “there is a United States president,” or “there isn’t a United States prime minister.”  Put another way, we can’t answer the question of whether god created people or people created god.  Regarding death, it isn’t unusual for people’s words and their nonverbal behavior regarding the death of a loved one conflict.  For example, ministers and other speakers refer to the services following a death as a “celebration” of the person’s life – while family members agree with the words, but their sobs describe the anguish that indicates that they indeed are at a “funeral.”  Perhaps, Plato was tapping into our need to find meaning in both life and death.  Frankl (1975), a psychiatrist who survived three years at concentration camps, recognized that the Holocaust illustrated a human need to find meaning.

The Nature of the Mind at Birth

            Both Plato and Aristotle held the most extreme, though opposite, positions on the state of the mind at birth.  Plato (360 B.C.) held that all knowledge was inborn and emerged through deductive arguments (Socratic dialogues).  Aristotle (350 B.C.) argued that all human knowledge was a result of remembering our experiences, or, as later expressed by Locke (as cited in Kenny, 1998), the mind at birth is a “blank slate.”  The Aristotelian position has had a powerful influence on other academic disciplines, especially in Western democracies, for at least two reasons.  First, the theory that human differences are attributable to experience provides justification for social intervention to provide equal opportunities for all people to have the same experiences.  Probably more importantly, theories of genetic differences have been misused to justify group differences.  Weber (as cited in Bendix, 1974) recognized that social-status groups formed to allow members to hold themselves “in high regard” (p. 154) relative to other groups differing in variables such as “race, language, religion, local or social origin, descent, residence, etc.” (p. 155). Despite robust evidence that began accumulating as early as 1947 that there are no genetic differences between races (Dobzhansky & Montague, as cited in Montagu, 1974) or between ethnic, religious, and other such groups (reviewed in Neisser (1997), genetic theories continue to be misused.  Indeed, Darwin’s theory of evolution (1872), not only distressed and continues to distress “creationists,” but also has been misused to justify claims of genetic differences based on racial and other groups.  Of course, within-species survival depends upon the “natural selection” of members best able to adapt to changing conditions, for example, “when hardest pressed for food…the swiftest and slimmest wolves would have the best chance of survival.”  Darwin was referring to genetics in the sense of inheritance from parents and also was careful to note that the qualities conducive to survival were dependent upon gradual changes in environmental conditions.  Although Darwin himself wrote little about the human species, his theory was used not only to justify racism but also to make unwarranted assumptions about human characteristics conducive to survival.  Indeed, early and not-so-early theories of intelligence are based upon the assumption that survival is associated with verbal/analytical skills (what traditional intelligence tests measure).  Although gradual changes in environmental conditions are difficult to predict, it’s odd that qualities related to intellect have been considered as having much survival value, when we consider that Socrates was forced to drink hemlock and that an intellectual pygmy, Joe McCarthy, destroyed the careers of genuine intellectuals.

            In actuality, evidence disconfirming the mind as a “blank slate” has been based upon two forms of genetic influence.  First, there is evidence that the human brain at birth is genetically equipped to perform certain activities common to people in general, i.e., where reference is not being made to individual differences.  For example, there is evidence that the human brain at birth is structured to enable language acquisition.  The noted linguist, Chomsky (1965), observed that children and adults in countries with different cultures and different languages demonstrated “linguistic universals.” In the absence of shared experiences, these universals implicated the role of the human brain.  Children from these different countries acquired language in the same stages (e.g., cooing, babbling, single- and then multi-morpheme utterances, until by around the age of five, children have mastered almost all of the syntactical rules of their languages, without direct teaching of any kind.  In acquiring language, they make the same kinds of errors, typically resulting from regularizing words that do not follow regular syntactical rules (in English, for example, saying “goed,” regularizing “ed” endings for past tense,  “childrens,” regularizing plural endings), resulting in utterances the children had never before heard.  Research has provided evidence that babies not only can distinguish between speech and other sounds, but also can distinguish between different phonemes, different tastes, and different odors (Shaffer, 1999).  Older children and adults both within and between cultures share some basic cognitive processes, such as in pattern recognition, limited capacities of information that can be held in consciousness (short-term memory), and distortions in perception and memory (Hunt & Ellis, 2004).

            However, the questions that have interested early philosophers and later those from other disciplines have concerned whether there is a basic human nature, in terms we consider admirable or not admirable.  Although Plato (360 B.C.) argued that justice was an inborn value, a character in The Republic, Glaucon, argued that from infancy human nature is guided by what resembles the Freudian id, essentially that “I want what I want and I want it now.”  Thus, according to Glaucon, at first behavior consists of taking from others whatever one pleases, which continues until one experiences the pain when others do the same.  Since the pain of retaliation is more intense than the pleasure of taking from others, there is an agreement to abide by laws that prevent stealing from or harming others.  Glaucon tells the story of Gygus, a shepherd who found a ring which, when turned into his hand, made him invisible.  He promptly seduced the queen, they both killed the king, and he took over the kingdom.  He asks whether anyone, even those who consider themselves just, could resist using the power to steal and kill, knowing they would not be caught.  Although few people think of themselves as Glaucon describes them, the question of whether they could find reasons to justify behaving as Glaucon proposes is interesting.  Socrates’ counter-argument that justice and virtue are innate “wins” but not because his view is more persuasive than Gaucon’s – Socratic dialogues are “rigged” in the sense that Plato uses “straw men,” so to speak, for Socrates to debate.  Later, in the tradition of Glaucon, political philosopher Hobbes (1660) theorized that people are born with approximately equal abilities but thought of themselves as superior.  As a result, when “two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, the become enemies…[and unless they agree to abide by the rule of law, people will live in “continual fear and danger of death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Chapter XIII).  In the Platonic tradition, Rousseau’s philosophy (1755) was that in their original state in nature, while humans were motivated by self-preservation, they also were born with an innate capacity for “pity” – “an innate repugnance to see his fellow man suffer.”  Hobbes, he believed, did not trace human history far back enough to observe the original state of nature.  Unlike Plato, however, humans were gradually corrupted so eventually there were “social classes and strict notions of property,” resulting in Hobbes’ description and subsequent need for rules of law.  Interestingly, recent findings (reviewed in Jaffe, 2007) based on new technologies have been the existence of “mirror neurons,” demonstrating that the cells activated when one personally experiences an even are the same as those activated when perceiving another person experiencing the same event, which “suggest that mirror neurons play a large role in empathy” (p. 22).  If adults in modern society have retained the capacity Rousseau described as an “innate repugnance” to witness suffering and if brain activity indicates that adult humans demonstrate empathy, it is hard to understand why since the beginning of recorded history, there hasn’t been a time when one group of people wasn’t inflicting cruelty on another group (Braudel & Mayne, 2003).  Indeed, how can it be that despite the capacity to feel empathy, at least every minute of every day someone is engaged in behavior towards another that makes the phrase “civilized society” an oxymoron.

            Individual differences, along with shared genetic characteristics, disconfirmed “blank-slate” theory.  Genetics do help explain individual (though not group) differences.  With the exception of characteristics such as genetic sex and illnesses such as Huntington’s chorea, cystic fibrosis, and hemophilia, for many psychological characteristics, such as verbal/analytical ability (measured by traditional intelligence tests), creativity, shyness, nonverbal behavior, there are genetic predispositions that interact with experience and cognitions of experiences in determining whether a characteristic will be manifested (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994).

Answering Questions Raised by Philosophers

            It isn’t possible to overestimate the importance of Aristotle’s use of empirical observation in leading to the development of the scientific method, culminating in the work of Bacon (1620, as cited in Gower, 1996).  At the heart of the scientific method is only experimentation allows attributing cause.  For example, in a correlational study, if health improves when people receive a medication, placebo effects (or more generally, expectancy effects), rather than the medication, could account for the improvement.  In a classical medical double-blind experiment, participants are randomly assigned to receive either the medication or the placebo, and those measuring improvement do not know whether a person has received the medication or the placebo.  While experimentation isn’t always possible or ethical (e.g., in the early studies of cigarette smoking and cancer, people could not be randomly assigned to a condition where they needed to smoke a pack a day!), the scientific method at least requires that the observer isn’t aware of the researcher’s theory.  As Bacon noted (1620, as cited in Gower, 1996), perception and memory are implicitly distorted in the direction of confirming our theories and beliefs.  It wasn’t until the 20th century that the scientific method became the basis of research in experimental psychology, although major findings too often have not been noted in other disciplines.

References

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Braudel, F., & Mayne, R. (2003).  A history of civilization.  New York:  Penguin.

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Chomsky, N. (1965).  Aspects of the theory of syntax.  Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Darwin, C. (1872).  The origin of species.  Retrieved June 20, 2008, from www.literature.

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Frankl, V. E. (1975).  Man’s search for meaning.  New York: Pocket Books.

Gower, B.  (1996). Scientific method: A historical and philosophical introduction.  New York:

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Hunt, R. R., & Ellis, H. C. (2004).  Fundamentals of cognitive psychology. New York:

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Jaffe, E. (2007).  Mirror Neurons: How we reflect on behavior.  Observer, 20, 21-25.

Kenny, A. J. P.  A brief history of Western philosophy.  Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers.

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Shaffer, D. R. (1999).  Developmental psychology.  Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.