Galen
& Circulation
by Matthew Megill, Dartmouth
College
In studying the heart, "What
did Galen hope to see?" The answer leaps off the pages of
his work, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, a
book which preserves much of his analysis of the heart. Starting
with his surviving introduction (1.2), Galen's polemical objective is clear:
he wants to prove the Stoics, and their view of the soul, wrong,
while upholding his own Platonic view of the tripartite soul.
The tripartite soul was Plato's
explanation for inner psychological disagreement and conflict.
He fully expounds the concept in Republic, Book IV, and embellishes on
the idea from a biological standpoint in the Timaeus. In this
book, we read that the heart acts as a sort of emotional guard-chamber,
passing the commands and spirit for applying reason, on to the
limbs of the body (70B-D). Galen seems not only to have accepted
these ideas, but also to have adapted and augmented them, claiming
that they were anticipated by Hippocrates. Galen's backward-looking
respect for Plato and Hippocrates in this, as in other issues,
is a hallmark of his style (see Tieleman xxi-xxii).
To Galen, the opponents of Plato
were the Stoics. And the Stoics were a prime example of the self-promoting,
sophistical schools that he so disliked. They had proposed radical
new theories: denying that emotions were legitimate, or that
any part of the soul was located outside of the heart, while
affirming that reason made up the undivided soul. Their arguments
used irrelevant poetry and etymology, and inaccurate, even deceptive,
science as support. They did all these things, in order that
the accurate theories of the Ancients might be supplanted.
In Galen's mind, the Stoic undivided
soul offered no explanation for mental conflict, and he aimed
to prove them wrong. Indeed, much of Galen's research was directed
against them, and his debating mindset cannot be denied. Christopher
Gill, for one, describes him as "highly partisan and misleading"
(113), in single-mindedly
defending his own brand of Platonism. As did many other polemicists
of the period, Galen attacks the leading proponent (Chrysippus)
of the school he wished to defeat (Tieleman, xxvi). Indeed, the
spirit of Galen's age was tuned towards these polemical disagreements.
As Von Staden has described, Galen's very goals and rhetorical
methods were influenced heavily by the Second Sophistic era in
which he lived, an era oriented towards combative public refutations
and disagreements. Within such a zeitgeist, it must come as no
surprise, that Galen's focus is on out-arguing an opponent.
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