A History of Intelligence and 'Intellectual Disability'

The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe

C.F. Goodey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317187837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Starting with the hypothesis that not only human intelligence but also its antithesis 'intellectual disability' are nothing more than historical contingencies, C.F. Goodey's paradigm-shifting study traces the rich interplay between labelled human types and the radically changing characteristics attributed to them. From the twelfth-century beginnings of European social administration to the onset of formal human science disciplines in the modern era, A History of Intelligence and 'Intellectual Disability' reconstructs the socio-political and religious contexts of intellectual ability and disability, and demonstrates how these concepts became part of psychology, medicine and biology. Goodey examines a wide array of classical, late medieval and Renaissance texts, from popular guides on conduct and behavior to medical treatises and from religious and philosophical works to poetry and drama. Focusing especially on the period between the Protestant Reformation and 1700, Goodey challenges the accepted wisdom that would have us believe that 'intelligence' and 'disability' describe natural, trans-historical realities. Instead, Goodey argues for a model that views intellectual disability and indeed the intellectually disabled person as recent cultural creations. His book is destined to become a standard resource for scholars interested in the history of psychology and medicine, the social origins of human self-representation, and current ethical debates about the genetics of intelligence.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315564838, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

PART 1
Problematical Intellects in Ancient Greece

Chapter 1
Ancient Philosophy and the “Worst Disability”

When we assume that in the distant past intelligence and its disabilities, under any label, existed in a sense we might understand them today, we turn a history that is rich and strange into a recital of our own prejudices. “Intellectual (dis)ability” presupposes an entire modern conceptual apparatus whose basic components would have been altogether obscure to the Greeks or indeed to Europeans of more than a couple of centuries ago. When Charles Dickens and William Henry Wills, in the 1853 edition of Household Words, claimed under the entry “Idiot” that this “hopeless, irreclaimable, unimprovable being” is a “main idea,” meaning a universal truth independent of time or place, they belonged to the specific generation which was just at that moment inventing such a being, as a complement to the middle-class identity their journal sought to establish: 1853 was also the foundation year of the Royal Earlswood Hospital, the world’s first mass, long-stay segregated institution.

The conceptual apparatus of modern psychology, a product as well as a producer of mass segregation, forms a huge barrier to historical enquiry, resting as it does on the following presuppositions, each of which will be challenged in more detail at various points in this book. (1) Intelligence follows certain laws of human nature, just as atoms and molecules follow the laws of the physical universe. (2) These psychological laws determine our place in natural history, as strictly as biological laws do; intelligence marks what is fully or typically human, rendering doubtful the species membership of those who lack it. (3) Such laws are exhibited in a common set of detailed intellectual operations that all members of the species bar a few reveal under observation, to varying degrees: logical reasoning, abstraction, information-processing, attention, etc., all of which boil down to cognitive competence. (4) The mind can be separated from the body, at least for purposes of method, as a distinct object in natural history: hence “intellectual” disability, running in parallel with physical disability. (5) Personal identity (which includes intellectual ability) is a temporal unity, defined by the permanent state of an individual mind taken as a whole over the period between birth and death or senile dementia. (6) Intelligence is a possession of the individual, like height or eye-colour. (7) There are many more or less normal people, and otherwise a small minority of abnormal ones who deviate from the norm in their cognitive abilities and are situated at the furthest extremes: highest in the genius, lowest in the idiot. (8) The causes of intelligence and disability belong either to nature or to nurture, or to both, or to some interaction between the two. (9) Cognitive psychology (educational, developmental, etc.) is an exact science, based on empirical data drawn from the human subject’s performance under observation; hence performance is evidence of ability, or simply is ability. (10) Rights are separable from competence; the first is a legal concept, the second a scientific one, based on expert assessments of an intelligence that has its own objective existence and is prior to the sphere of law as such. (11) Intellect is quite separate from morals; how we know about people’s intelligence is one thing, a matter for science, but how we value them quite another.

If today all this goes without saying as part of the modern mind-set, among ancient and early modern authors it simply was not said. We can find occasional traces of some of it, but not all at the same time or as part of an overall mind-set. That is not because those authors were primitives, struggling for a scientific explanation of human nature which transcends history and which we have finally come to understand. It is because people did not then ask the same questions about each other as we do now, nor will in the future.

When, as it so often does, a history of ideas starts with the Greeks, it maps out the remaining journey as an ascent towards the summit that is the modern discipline. In the case of psychology, this helps create the impression that categories describing the mind are stable, permanent historical objects. It follows then that they are sound: primitive Greek speculation about them has matured into an exact modern science. But if the claim is that Plato and Aristotle are psychology’s founding fathers, we ought in the era of DNA forensics to administer a paternity test. We then find that this role does not suit them at all. In the history of modern psychological concepts, Plato and Aristotle are not ancestors but outsiders, barbarians even. The role of ancestor better suits their intellectual opponents of the time, the sophists, who shared certain values with modern psychologists, among them the information-processing model of intelligence and the importance of speed. This was what Athenians liked to hear about themselves, and the sophists pandered to it. They coached people in the skills needed for social advancement, sold their expertise in a market economy as complex in its way as ours is and held a place in the society’s formal structures. Hence they earned the enmity of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, members of a leisured but politically marginalized landowning class. Unlike the sophists, the philosophers did not charge fees and were detached from power and the entire public arena; they preferred under the democratic circumstances to remain idiotai, that is, in a private capacity.¹

It is easy to misappropriate Plato or Aristotle to underwrite modern doctrine. They certainly valued some human activities more than others, some of which can be compared with things we ourselves call intellectual. But which of these exactly did they regard as better, and what was the out-group thus created (since it was not some golden age without scapegoating or stereotyping)? We cannot just assume that the philosophers had concepts such as “ability” or “intellect” to match our own, or that it was even possible to yoke two such concepts together in the first place. The texts are foreign territory. All we can do is reconnoitre the relevant vocabulary and try to reconstruct its meanings.

Ease of learning, “learning difficulty” and sophistry

It is easy to read into Plato the “scale of nature,” that central Western image of a natural hierarchy in which what is lowest in human beings is closest to the animals. But while he does indeed have a problem with animals, that is mainly because of their hedonism rather than absence of reason per se. We can detect in Plato the ascending series existence-life-intelligence, intrinsic to modern human sciences, but only very roughly – not as an obsessive need to maintain the sharpest possible separation between species. Instead, human abilities and disabilities are closely related to the more fundamental problem of ignorance, in which psychological, epistemological and ethical questions are inseparable from each other.

Plato presents Socrates in a constant state of puzzlement – part feigned, part real – when people confront him with an argument that seems too pat. His claim to be ignorant, as he worms their pre-packaged thoughts out of them, is a way of claiming intellectual ability for himself. One thing Socrates knows for sure: that other people’s knowledge claims are grounded in ignorance, plausible only because they happen to be popular or ideologically dominant. The intentions behind this ironic method often spiral beyond our understanding. Nevertheless Plato is not being playful for the sake of it; a stable world-view lies beneath. Although it is hard to pin him down to a system of thought holding good over his entire output, the late dialogues have a consistent terminology and scale of values related to intelligence and disability.

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1. Lene Rubinstein, “The Athenian political perception of the idiotes,” in Paul Cartledge et al. (eds), Kosmos.

Sifting through these terms, we find only one that is specific to humans alone: “making calculations” (logarizesthai). Thomas Hobbes, a shrewd interpreter of classical source-texts, noted how minor an item this was in ancient thought; he viewed calculation, central to his own mechanistic psychology, as the down-to-earth reality behind his contemporaries’ preposterous claims to higher intellectual abilities. He rightly thought they were misappropriating the Greek terms. Episteme (“understanding”) is not specific to humans, nor does it pretend to distinguish subjective operations of knowing from the knowledge at which they aim. Likewise nous (“intuited intellect”) is attributed not only to humans but also to divine beings, planets and occasionally to other animals. Other terms such as dianoia and noiesis, meanwhile, are too narrow, since the Greeks saw “intellect” in this sense as a succession of thinking states rather than as a prior capacity (“it consists of thoughts; these are one in terms of their succession, like numbers, not like sizes or spaces,” said Aristotle).² Phronesis (prudence or civic intellect) was less than specifically human, being restricted to citizens. Finally, there is logos (“rational account”), which is central to Greek philosophy. Plato nowhere says that this is exclusive to humans. Of all such terms it is the most susceptible to context. It can be good or bad, support false opinion as well as true and does not seem to cover subjective “ability.” Moreover it is the failed rational accounts that are described as “monsters,” not the struggling humans who submit them to Socrates’s withering cross-examination. Plato’s Theaetetus, which deals with the difficulties of giving a rational account, is peppered with such metaphors.

Then there are secondary operations, such as “ease of learning” (eumathia) and its opposite “learning difficulty” (dusmathia). These terms came from the sophists: enough reason to doubt whether Plato takes them seriously. Ease of learning is a “demotic” quality, he says – not something with which his Academy would want to be associated.³ In any case, according to the prevailing doctrine of the mean, there are desirable limits to intellectual activity.⁴ Moreover, ease of learning does not necessarily mean having a good memory; it is a necessary condition for the philosopher-ruler’s “understanding,” but not a sufficient one. The scope of learning difficulty is likewise limited; it is not pathological, and can go with having a good memory. Although Plato says in his Timaeus that it is a component of “ultimate ignorance” (amathia, the worst kind), they remain conceptually separate.

The difference between ease of learning and genuine understanding becomes clearer over the course of Plato’s work. In The Republic, from the middle period, he says that ease of learning cannot be of use to the philosopher-ruler unless it is accompanied, paradoxically, by the kind of plodding steadiness more often observed in people who find learning difficult.⁵ He does not, however, suggest the converse: that “learning difficulty” may be a positive value. In his late dialogue The Laws, where he describes the ideal state of Magnesia, he makes good this silence. He suggests unprecedentedly (for him) that even if people are illiterate, slow-witted and lack any specialized ability of the kind associated with the highest, reasoning part of the psyche, they can be rulers, simply on condition that the modicum of rational judgment they do possess is in harmony with the part of their psyche that deals with pleasure and pain.⁶ Whereas the rulers of The Republic rule in the name of the Absolute Good, the rulers of Magnesia seek the good for ordinary people. The unlearned can rule and possess civic intellect because what they are judging is everyday affairs, and this they are capable of.

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2. Aristotle, On the Soul, 407a. References are to the paragraph numbers given in the margins of most English or original-language editions of classical texts; the bibliography lists the most frequently used dual-language editions. Translations here and throughout the book are my own unless otherwise indicated.
3. Plato, The Republic, 494b.
4. Plato, Timaeus, 88a.
5. The Republic, 486a ff.
6. Plato, The Laws, 689d.

Plato’s “ease of learning” and “learning diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Problematical Intellects in Ancient Greece
• Part 2 Intelligence and Disability: Socio-economic Structures
• Part 3 Intelligence and Disability: Status and Power
• Part 4 Intelligence and Disability: Status and Power
• Part 5 Intelligence, Disability and Grace
• Part 6 Fools and Their Medical Histories
• Part 7 Psychology, Biology and the Ethics of Exceptionalism
• Part 8 John Locke and His Successors
• Works Cited
• Index