The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

The Birth of Humanism

Walter A. Borden, M.D.
waborden1@mac.com

There is a working relationship between psychiatry and our justice system. The state of mind of individuals in criminal and civil proceedings is often an important issue. But that relationship has been problematic, politicized, stigmatized, confused and confusing to professionals and public alike.

A need to understand that relationship prompted me to explore the history of the linkage between justice and the science of human nature. The exploration turned into a journey that took me back much farther than I had expected, took some surprising turns, and landed me in unanticipated places. It led me to the beginnings of science and its outgrowths, and to the work of key figures, the natural philosophers Thales, Xenophanes, Anaximander, and Heraclitus. They gave us the concept of science and studied nature divorced from the gods and mysticism. They started with the stars, turned to the earth, finally to humankind.

Thales defined laws of nature as determining such as storms, tides, movement of the stars, seasonal cycles. He said under the surface of seeming chaos and chance there is an underlying natural order. His student Anaximander perceived one law as a tendency for a balancing of forces anticipating homeostasis; Xenophanes dismissed the gods of Homer and Hesiod saying they were projections from the minds of men; Heraclitus made the leap to psychology and said “ Character is destiny.” Solon took laws of nature to laws of mankind, and borrowing an analogy used by Anaximander who likened the balancing of forces in nature to a legal trial where the judge is time, created a constitution with power shared by all classes, separated theology from state, and developed a public system of justice where conflict resolution was determined by a balancing of interests in an adversarial trial before a jury of citizens.

Hippocrates applied the concept of laws of nature to medicine. Pythogoras uncovered the mathematical basis of music. Others followed in what became a “ Big Bang “ of creativity and culture that enabled the development of what we call western civilization. Aeschylus became the dramatic spokesperson for Solon’s democratic justice in his Oresteia, and for this new philosophy of humanism in Prometheus Bound where he dramatized humankind’s creativity, humane values, need for and capacity for connection springing from within men and women, not from the gods.

From natural philosophy came science, medicine, psychology, democratic justice, tragic drama, and the birth of our civilization in Greece. These original thinkers opened new perspectives in understanding the nature of some current problems: the hidden price we pay for our passion for vengeance, for our tolerance, at best, of the abuse of children and women, for our disdain of reasoned understanding, for our stigmatization of psychology and the mentally ill, and for our penchant for waging of war. And my journey illuminated an issue we tend to avoid: the consequences of our devaluing emotional life and of psychological understanding.

America’s Founding Fathers read the classics. They read of Thales influence in Plutarch’s biography of Solon as they framed our Constitution, and they read Plato and Aristotle, whose views of law and government were shaped by Solon and immortalized by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Their influence can be seen every day in our courtrooms, media and hospitals.

References

1. OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY by Edward Zeller, Routledge and Keagan Paul LTD, London, New York; The Humanities Press 1963.

2. THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS, second edition, Cambridge University Press 2002.

3.THE ORESTEIA, Aeschylus translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics 1979 ISBN 014044-3339.

4. GREEK TRAGEDY, A Literary Study, H.D. Kitto, Routledge 1995.

5. PLATO COMPLETE WORKS (Book IX), Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge.

6. GREEK MEDICINE FROM THE HEROIC TO THE HELLINISTIC AGE, James Longberg, Routledge New York 1998.

7. AESCHYLUS THE CREATOR OF TRAGEDY, Gilbert Murray, Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press, 1940.

8. THE GREEKS by H.D. Kitto, Penguin Books 1957.

9. HIPPOCRATES, The Johns Hopkins University Press (Chapter 11), 1999.

10. FROM SOLON TO SOCRATES, Victor Ehrenberg, Second Edition, Routledge 1996 ISBN 0-415-04024.

11. PLUTARCH'S LIVES, The Modern Library, Random House, New York, NY.

12. THE GREEKS AND THE IRRATIONAL, E. R. Dobbs, University of California Press ISBN (0-520-00327-6).

Published: December 19, 2007