The ally of reason: Plato on the spirited part of the soul

THE ALLY OF REASON: PLATO ON THE SPIRITED PART OF THE SOUL Joshua Wilburn

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY Advisers: John M. Cooper and Alexander Nehamas

January 2011

UMI Number: 3437767

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3437767 Copyright 2010 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346

© Copyright by Joshua Wilburn, 2010. All rights reserved.

iii Abstract My dissertation aims to provide an explicit and detailed account of the role of thumos in Plato’s moral philosophy and, in doing so, to defend Plato’s commitment (both in the Republic and beyond it) to including thumos in his moral psychological picture and to the theory of tripartition as a whole. I argue that Plato’s primary motivation for introducing the theory of tripartition was neither a rhetorical one nor (as has often been assumed) the result of his thinking about akrasia, but rather that he saw a crucial role for thumos and spirited desires to play in early moral education and the virtue of individuals. In Chapter 1 I examine the nature of spirited desire and offer an account of how the primitive spirited desires that Plato attributes to non-human animals and infants evolve into the more mature spirited desires that he attributes to adult human beings. I argue that for Plato, what is essential to mature spirited desire is the desire to be kalos – admirable or beautiful. In Chapter 2 I take a detailed look at the program of early education that Plato proposes in Republic 2 and 3 and argue that musical education as Plato conceives it (in addition to gymnastic education) is primarily directed at the spirited part of the soul. I also address important ways in which early education is directed at the reasoning part of the soul and suggest why Plato does not seem to direct moral education at the appetitive part of the soul. In Chapter 3 I provide an account of the amicable relationship between thumos and reason that explains both how intra-psychic communication betweeen the two takes place and why thumos responds to reason’s judgments, desires, and commands in the special way that it does. Finally, in Chapter 4 I confront and reject the recent proposal that Plato abandoned the theory of tripartition in his later dialogues, and I offer an

iv interpretation of crucial passages from the Laws that suggest, on the contrary, that Plato maintained his commitment to that theory in his later works.

v

For Rachel and Joey

vi Contents

Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................viii Chapter 1: The Nature of Spirited Desire............................................................................1 1. Primitive Spirited Desire......................................................................................7 2. Mature Spirited Desire.......................................................................................15 3. Thumos in Republic 4, 8, and 9..........................................................................26 Chapter 2: Early Education and the Tripartite Soul...........................................................42 1: Early Education and Thumos.............................................................................44 2: Early Education and the Reasoning Part of the Soul.........................................63 3: Early Education and the Appetitive Part of the Soul.........................................81 4: Conclusion: Motivating Tripartition..................................................................93 Chapter 3: The Relationship between Reason and Thumos...............................................98 1: The Responsiveness of Thumos to Reason......................................................100 2: Communication between Reason and Thumos................................................109 3: The Ally of Reason..........................................................................................121 Chapter 4: Laws 644d-645b: Plato’s Divine Puppet and the Tripartite Soul...................141 1: Responding to the Argument from Silence......................................................144 2: A New Interpretation of the Puppet Passage...................................................155 3: Advantages of the New Interpretation.............................................................170 4: Psychic Weakness............................................................................................179 5: The Principle of Opposites and Partitioning of the Soul.................................186 Appendix A......................................................................................................................195

vii Appendix B......................................................................................................................198 Appendix C......................................................................................................................203 Bibliography....................................................................................................................209

viii

Acknowledgments

I first took a special interest in ancient philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. My work owes a great deal to the education that I was provided there, and in particular to Paul Woodruff, who was a dedicated and always insightful adviser during my thesis work on ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, and who encouraged me to go to graduate school for philosophy. The Princeton University Department of Philosophy has provided me with excellent resources and support that have been crucial to my research. I have also benefited greatly from the Princeton University Center for Human Values, the support of which allowed me to devote my attention to the writing of this dissertation during the 20092010 academic year. The opportunity to present early drafts of the dissertation chapters in the Philosophy Department’s Dissertation Seminar and in the Center for Human Values’ Graduate Prize Fellows Seminar, and the feedback I have received in those seminars, have been especially beneficial to me. My philosophical thinking and developing views about my topic have benefited from the conversation and feedback of several individuals, including Samuel Baker, Lara Buchak, Ryan Cook, Josh Gillon, Elizabeth Harman, Dan Herrick, Terence Irwin, Philipp Koralus, Angela Mendelovici, Ben Morison, Jessica Moss, Philip Pettit, Gideon Rosen, Whitney Schwab, Michael Smith, and Josh Vandiver. I also received very helpful written feedback on an early draft of Chapter 3 from both Thomas Johansen and Mark Johnstone.

ix Three faculty members at Princeton have served as mentors for me and have contributed richly and immeasurably to my thinking about my topic and about ancient philosophy in general. Hendrik Lorenz has shown me extraordinary generosity with his time by indulging me with countless conversations about my topic, and many of the central ideas contained in this dissertation were born directly out of my discussions with him. I have never walked out of his office less clear in my thinking about a given topic than I was when I walked in, and I am much indebted to him and to the sharpness and lucidity with which he has always pressed me on my ideas. John Cooper has been a consistently tough, incisive, devoted, and brilliant adviser who has given me detailed and penetrating comments on numerous drafts of this dissertation. I first started thinking about thumos during his seminar on Aristotle’s Politics in my first semester at Princeton, and since then his always challenging feedback and insight have been invaluable to the development of my views on my topic. My work owes a great deal to him, and I suspect that I will never write philosophy without hearing his voice in my head, the voice of rigor and reason. Alexander Nehamas has been an inspiring and always enlightening adviser, who through his kindness, encouragement, and profound conversation has always pushed me to think about things in new ways. He has taught me what it means to pursue philosophy as a labor of love – how, as it were, to “give birth in beauty” – and he has greatly influenced the way I think about ancient philosophy, as well as, in fact, the very way I think about living life. I would also like to thank my family and friends – especially my parents, Ruth Brown and James Wilburn, who have given me endless love and support, and whose pride in me has always both motivated and flattered me. I also owe a great deal to Char-

x les Brown, Marilyn Davis, Mike Grenert, Gentry Wilburn, Nicole Wilburn, Taylor Wilburn, David Grenert and Taylor Grenert. Jada Twedt Strabbing, in addition to being a great friend, has contributed to my project both through helpful feedback on my written work and through the many conversations we have had together, in which she has never failed to amaze me with her philosophical acuity and brilliance. I owe more than I could ever say to Roel Lopez, who more than any other single person has listened to and eased my frustration and self-doubt over the years through his encouragement and friendship. I am also especially deeply indebted to Corinne Gartner, who has been a close friend since we started at Princeton five years ago, and who has contributed invaluably to my thinking about my topic. She is, without a doubt, one of the most engaging and stimulating conversationalists that I have ever met, as well as a generous and loyal friend, and our friendship has contributed a great deal to my understanding of ancient philosophy. Finally, I would like to thank my grandfather Robert Davis, who when I was fourteen years old started giving me commentaries on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and German editions of Nietzsche, long before I would ever understand them. He has provided me, by example, with a true ideal of intellectual curiosity and briliance, and one to which I could never possibly live up – but then, such is the nature of one’s heroes.

1 Chapter 1 The Nature of Spirited Desire

In the Republic Plato famously proposes a novel theory of the embodied human soul according to which the soul has three parts, each of which has its own characteristic desires and impulses.1 The reasoning part of the soul desires what is good for an individual as a whole, the appetitive part desires bodily pleasure, and a third part, called “spirit” or thumos, desires honor, victory, and good reputation.2 This third part of the soul represents what is most innovative about the the-

1

Plato provides indications in the Republic that he is not committed to the theory of tripartition as a theory of the unembodied soul – that is, the soul in its pure, immortal form. Most notably, in Book 10 at 611a ff., Socrates expresses skepticism about whether the immortal soul is composed of parts and tells Glaucon that in order to find out what the soul is like “in truth,” they would have to examine it in its pure state by looking to its love of wisdom. “Then,” Socrates says, “we’d see what its true nature is and be able to determine whether it has many parts or just one and whether or in what manner it is put together. But we’ve already given a decent account, I think, of what its condition is and what parts it has when it is immersed in human life” (612a). Similarly, in the Timaeus, the reasoning part of the soul is called “immortal,” while the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul constitute the “mortal soul” (69d). It is worth noting that in the Phaedrus, where Socrates likens the tripartite soul to a charioteer and his team of two horses, Socrates implies through the myth that he tells that all three parts of the soul are immortal, since the charioteer and both horses are all present during the tour of the heavens that the soul takes prior to its incarnation. It is quite possible, however, that this implication is an incidental effect of the metaphor and the myth, rather than a serious indication of a revised view on Plato’s part about the nature of the immortal soul. 2 I will follow custom in referring to the spirited part of the soul as “spirit” or thumos. However, it is worth noting that Plato usually uses thumos to refer to the emotion of anger, and he usually refers to the spirited part of the soul itself either as to thumoeides or through periphrastic expressions (e.g. Tim. 70a: “the part of the soul that shares in courage and anger (thumos).”) See Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, p. 6 for a discussion of this point.

2 ory of tripartition, for by introducing thumos Plato rejects a straightforward division of our motivations – or of our souls – into simply the rational and the nonrational. Instead, he recognizes two non-rational parts of the soul that he takes to be importantly different from one another. Whereas Plato characterizes appetite as resistant to the rule of reason and as a largely incorrigible source of mischief and vice in the soul, he characterizes spirit as the educable ally of reason. Because of appetite’s unruly nature, moreover, Plato presents it as the greatest threat to the moral progress of human beings and throughout the text focuses on ways in which its negative influence in the soul can be minimized. He gives spirit, by contrast, a prominent positive role in the development and maintenance of human virtue – in particular, it is uniquely responsible for the virtue of courage – and he presents it as crucial both to the moral success of individuals and, on a larger scale, to the political success of the ideal city. Despite its evident importance to the moral and political project of the Republic, however (as well as its appearance in two other dialogues, Timaeus and Phaedrus), Plato’s theory of thumos has been a target of criticism. Critics have argued that Plato’s presentation of thumos is inconsistent and that Plato fails to provide the resources for constructing a philosophically attractive and plausible account of thumos – that is, an account of its nature, its psychic function, and how the various psychological phenomena for which it is said to be responsible are unified. Commentators have pointed out that throughout the Republic, Plato makes varied use of thumos and attributes to it a diverse range of psychic and behavioral phenomena that includes everything from the primitive savageness of

3 animals to the mature expressions that are found in human beings, such as shame, admiration, and the love of honor. The apparent heterogeneity of this list has raised the question of whether the various primitive and mature expressions of thumos can be sensibly understood as having a common character and psychological origin in the way the theory of tripartition indicates. If they cannot be so understood, then that would suggest either that Plato’s ideas about thumos were simply not tenable or that he never had fully worked-out, concrete ideas about thumos at all. Indeed, one line of criticism has questioned Plato’s motivation for introducing the spirited part of the soul in the first place and has suggested that Plato was never even interested in developing an account of thumos. Because the philosophical agenda of the Republic largely depends on the success of the citysoul analogy, the argument goes, Plato needed for the soul to have three parts that corresponded to the three classes of the ideal city (i.e. the ruling class of philosopher-kings, the guardian class in charge of defending the city, and the productive class of craftsmen). Without thumos, the soul would have lacked a part analogous to the guardian class, and so, the argument goes, it was primarily under pressure from this analogy that Plato included spirit in his division of the soul.3 According

3

See Terence Penner and T. M. Robinson for this line of thought. Robinson, for example, writes: “The ambiguous status of the spirited element in the soul allows it to be fitted with some show of plausibility into a scheme of tripartition invented as an imposing analogue for the tripartite state. It serves a purpose in a context, and should not be pressed” (46). One of the dubious assumptions involved in taking this line of criticism is the assumption that the city-soul analogy was somehow in charge of Plato, rather than the other way around. We should assume not that metaphor and analogy came first for him and determined the philosophical content of his work, but rather that Plato proceeded by first arriving at substantive philosophical commitments and then finding useful and effective ways of expressing them in his dialogues.

4 to this argument, then, despite the architectonic usefulness of thumos in the Republic, Plato was never really serious about including it in his moral psychological picture and thus was never really serious about the theory of tripartition. Beyond relying on the theory (and on whatever superficial plausibility it might have had) in the city-soul analogy, the argument goes, Plato never had any intention of pushing through a full-scale analysis of the human soul in tripartite terms. Challenges to Plato’s tripartite psychological theory receive further encouragement from Plato’s omission, in many of his later works – including, most prominently, the Laws – of any talk of tripartition or any explicit acknowledgment of thumos as a distinct part of the soul. This has been taken to show either that Plato was never committed to the tripartite theory of the soul to begin with or that he had come to reject that theory following his composition of the Republic.4 In this dissertation I aim to provide a detailed psychological account of thumos that illuminates both its nature and function as well Plato’s reasons for introducing it as part of the theory of tripartition. In doing so, I hope to defend both the tenability of that account as well as Plato’s commitment to it. As I will argue, Plato introduced the spirited part of the soul because of his thinking about moral education and because he had come to believe that thumos and spirited attitudes (as a distinct and special set of emotions and motivations originating in 4

Christopher Bobonich argues for the latter position. He claims that Plato rejects the theory of tripartition in his later works because he comes to see irreparable problems with it. In particular, Bobonich thinks (1) that the theory of tripartition compromises unity of the individual by making the person a fragmented collection of agent-like soul-parts, and he thinks (2) that it does not allow for an adequate account of communication between soul-parts. In Chapter 3 I answer the second objection at length by providing an account of reason’s communication with the lower soul-parts, and in Chapter 4 I briefly address the first objection.

5 thumos) play an essential role in the moral progress and virtue of individuals. The theories of tripartition and of thumos, then, are not merely philosophical conveniences devised especially for the political argument of the Republic, but rather serious and substantive commitments on Plato’s part and form the psychological basis for his considered ethical and political views. In Chapter 2 I will provide a detailed examination of the program of early education that Plato lays out in Books 2 and 3 of the Republic and will highlight the crucial psychological role that thumos plays in the early moral development of human beings. In Chapter 3 I will offer an analysis and explanation of the complex relationship between reason and spirit that will shed light on the nature of spirit’s function in the soul as the ally of reason. I will conclude in Chapter 4 by examining the moral psychological picture that Plato presents in the Laws and will argue that, despite the absence there of an explicit endorsement of tripartition, we should not think that Plato has abandoned his earlier views on the soul in that text. In the present chapter, I will attempt to fill out some of the details of Plato’s account of thumos and to explain the apparent heterogeneity among the phenomena with which it is associated in the text. The Republic contains roughly three discussions that offer explicit, extended treatment of thumos or of spirited impulses and behavior: the discussion of early education in Books 2 and 3, the argument for tripartition in Book 4, and the discussion of the degeneration of souls in Books 8 and 9. In each of these discussions, Plato has a special philosophical purpose that dictates his use of thumos, and as a result his presentation of thumos and the qualities of it that he emphasizes vary considerably. In the discus-

6 sion of early education, Plato first introduces thumos by way of the primitive spirited impulses, found in dogs and other animals, of savageness toward what is foreign and gentleness toward what is familiar. He then goes on to characterize thumos as the source of the attitudes of admiration, disgust, and shame. In Book 4, Plato uses instead the spirited emotion of anger to establish the existence of thumos as a distinct part of the soul, and he then highlights the special relationship he sees between thumos and the reasoning part of the soul. Also in that discussion, Socrates offers explicit definitions of the virtues in psychological terms and identifies thumos, through its role as reason’s ally, as uniqely responsible for the virtue of courage. Finally, in Books 8 and 9 Socrates advocates and argues for the rule of reason in the soul, and he characterizes individuals and societies ruled by spirit – as well as the spirited part of the soul itself – as lovers of honor, victory, and good reputation. I will begin in §1 by examining Plato’s introduction of thumos (in which thumos is characterized as alternately savage and gentle), in order to illuminate what Plato takes to be the primitive form of spirited impulses. I will suggest that thumos is primitively rooted in the desire to excel among others in one’s perceived roles. In §2 I will argue that spirited desire in human beings aims at the kalon – what is admirable, beautiful, or fine – and I will offer an explanation of how and why the primitive form of spirited desire evolves into this more sophisticated or mature spirited desire in human beings. Although commentators have previously noted spirit’s attraction to the kalon, no serious attempt has yet been made to explain how this attraction relates to the primitive spirited impulses that

7 adult humans share with infants and other animals, and I will be attempting to fill that gap. In §3 I will examine the discussions of thumos in Books 4, 8, and 9 and will explain why Plato presents thumos as he does in those discussions. My goal in this chapter is, by filling out the details of Plato’s account of thumos and by explaining both what is common to all spirited desire and how that desire evolves in human beings, to provide evidence that Plato was drawing on a well-worked out and tenable account of thumos when he composed the Republic. 1. Primitive Spirited Desire In Republic 2 Socrates identifies the need for a class of guardian warriors who will protect the city and its possessions against outsiders (and who, as the subsequent discussion brings to light, also and most importantly will protect the city’s institutions against threats arising from within the city itself). Noting that the guardians’ effectiveness is crucially important to the city’s well-being – far more so, he points out, than the effectiveness of the city’s craftsmen – Socrates emphasizes to Glaucon that they must undertake the difficult task of assembling a warrior class with great care, and so in the remainder of Books 2 and 3 he and Glaucon go on to describe the process of identifying, raising, and educating the right individuals for the job in extraordinary detail. They begin their discussion with an attempt to delineate the type of nature that individuals who are to become warriors should possess. Socrates suggests that the nature of a noble puppy and that of a noble young man might be relevantly similar, and on that assumption he sets out to describe the nature of the former in order to illuminate the nature of the latter. It is in this context that Plato first introduces, explicitly at least, a spirited

8 aspect of animal or human nature. One of the first qualities that Socrates claims the guardians will need is courage, and he asks, “Then, will horse or dog – or any other animal whatsoever – be willing to be courageous if it’s not spirited (thumoeidês)? Haven’t you noticed how irresistible and unbeatable spirit (thumos) is, so that its presence makes every soul fearless and invincible in the face of everything?” (375a).5 Hence the first characteristic of spirited impulse that Plato draws explicit attention to in the text is the crucial role that it evidently plays in courage. Thumos, Socrates claims, provides the soul with the fearlessness and indomitability necessary for courageous fighting.6 A problem arises at this point, however. Socrates worries that if spirit makes the guardians savage in this way, then they will treat not just their enemies cruelly, but also their fellow citizens. If they are to be good guardians, however, they must be savage toward outside enemies but also, very importantly, gentle toward each other and toward the fellow citizens whom they protect. But savage5

Courage is, in fact, the first quality of the soul that he says the guardians will need, the three qualities mentioned before courage all being bodily characteristics – i.e. sharp senses, speed, and strength. Translations throughout this dissertation are drawn from John Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works; Thomas L. Pangle (trans.), The Laws of Plato; Allan Bloom (trans.), The Republic of Plato; and Peter Kalkavage (trans.) Plato’s Timaeus. I have also made modifications to translations where I have found it suitable to do so. 6 Importantly, Plato does not identify the virtue of courage with these psychic qualities, which would conflict with the definition of courage he provides at the end of Book 4. What he does do, however, is recognize a non-rational quality of the soul that is a necessary condition of courage, and he attributes that quality to the spirited part of our nature. This anticipates the Book 4 definition, however, in identifying thumos as having a special responsibility for the virtue of courage. Cf. Laches 192c ff., where Laches proposes that courage is “some kind of endurance of the soul.” Socrates objects to this definition because, he argues, while endurance accompanied by wisdom is a fine thing, endurance accompanied by ignorance is harmful; courage is always fine, however, so it cannot be the same as endurance.

9 ness and gentleness are opposites, Socrates points out, which suggests that if being spirited makes the guardians savage, then they will not also be gentle. Socrates solves this worry by again looking to the nature of dogs, pointing out that a noble dog is gentle and loving with those who are familiar, or oikeioi, to it and angry and savage toward those who are foreign, or allotrioi, to it.7 “When it sees someone it doesn’t know,” he says, “it’s angry, although it never had any bad experience with him. And when it sees someone it knows, it greets him warmly, even if it never had a good experience with him” (376a). It is in this way that Plato introduces two of the most primitive expressions of spirited desire in animals: hostility toward the unknown and affection for the familiar. The question for our purposes is what these dual impulses can reveal to us about spirited desire itself – or, according to what analysis can we explain how both of these evidently “opposite” tendencies can be understood as having a single origin, in thumos. Here I would like to propose that the most basic form of spirited desire – the form that is common to both the hostility and the affection of animals – is the desire to excel among others in one’s perceived roles. The language of “excellence” and “roles” is not meant to indicate anything cognitively

7

Oikeios can be translated as “akin,” “one’s own,” or (most revealing, perhaps) “belonging to one’s household.” As A. W. H. Adkins points out, Homeric society consisted of more or less autonomous noble households (oikoi), the heads of which were responsible for defending their members and ensuring their prosperity. In Homeric society, Adkins writes, “the most powerful terms of denigration are applied simply to failure to ensure the safety and well-being of the members of the group of which one is the head” (29). Given this strong historical connection between success of the heroic individual and the protection of the household and its members, we can see why thumos would have come to be associated with a concern for one’s oikeioi, and why Plato would have chosen to introduce its primitive form by way of such an association.

10 loaded or robust here: the formulation I am offering means simply that animals have a sense of what they are supposed to do (both as creatures of a certain kind and in whatever social relationships they find themselves), that they desire to do those things well, and that that desire is spirited desire in its most basic form. Moreover, I offer this formulation not as the only correct way to characterize primitive spirited desire, but as the one that, by bringing to the fore what I take to be the crucial (and neglected, in this context) notion of perceived roles, will help us best understand both the primitive expressions of spirited desire that Plato discusses in Book 2 and how those primitive expressions evolve into the mature spirited desires that we find in human beings.8 In order to understand my characterization of spirited desire and how it helps to explain the impulses of hostility and affection, we should begin by noting

8

Spirited desire (especially as it becomes more sophisticated) involves a cluster of related desires and tendencies – among them, competitiveness, the desire for recognition, and (as noted above) affection for one’s oikeioi – and commentators have characterized spirited desire in terms of this cluster in a variety of similar ways. (See below, pp. 13-14 in the main text, for further discussion of the various aspects or characteristics of spirited desire.) John Cooper, for example, says that spirited desire has its root “in competitiveness and the desire for self-esteem and (as a normal presupposition of this) esteem by others” (134). Angela Hobbs claims that the essence of thumos is “the need to believe that one counts for something” (30). Hendrik Lorenz writes that being spirited “crucially involves an aspiration to distinguish oneself” (Brute Within 151). I want to emphasize that my formulation is not intended as a rejection of these previous accounts, which have different focuses but all say something true and revealing about spirited desire and are all consistent with my account. Indeed, because the text does not give us a “definition” of spirited desire, it invites a range of different but compatible ways of spelling out or characterizing what precisely spirit desires and wants. Moreover, it is worth noting my aims in offering a formulation are somewhat different from those of other commentators: because previous commentators have not been primarily concerned (or concerned at all) with providing an explanation of how primitive spirited impulse evolves into mature spirited desire, they have tended not to distinguish between primitive and mature forms of spirited desire.

11 that Plato’s discussion of noble dogs is not wholly original, but rather is modeled on a parallel passage from Homer that describes the anger of Odysseus (an anger he feels in his thumos, we are told): “And as a bitch stands over her tender whelps growling, when she sees a man she does not know, and is eager to fight, so his heart growled within him in his wrath at their evil deeds” (20.14-16).9 This passage is important, first of all, because it was clearly important to Plato in his thinking about thumos. Not only does his Book 2 discussion draw on it, but the very next lines of the passage are the crucial ones that Plato uses at 441b to establish the separateness of thumos from reason in the argument for tripartition: “But he smote his breast and reproached his heart with word.” The passage is also illuminating because it shows that despite being “opposites,” hostility toward the unknown and affection for the familiar are not really independent impulses, but rather are closely connected to each other: it is an animal’s affection for what is familiar to it that makes it hostile to outsiders – the mother dog becomes aggressive toward unknown people out of a desire to protect her pups. The hostile reaction to the unknown is an expression of the animal’s protective instinct to defend itself and its family against external threats. Socrates makes an analogous point in the Symposium, where he describes the effects of love on animals. He says, “Footed and winged animals alike, all are plagued by the disease of Love. First they are sick for intercourse with each other, then for nurturing their young – for their sake the weakest animals stand ready to do battle against the strongest and even to die for them, and they may be racked with fam-

9

I will discuss the context of this passage later in this chapter, in §3.1.

12 ine in order to feed their young” (207b). Affection and love, Socrates points out, not only make animals aggressive toward external threats, but also make them willing to go hungry, suffer injury or even die before letting harm come to their loved ones. My proposal, then, is to trace this double instinctual motivation in animals back to the impulse to excel among others in one’s perceived role. In its most basic form, this impulse will express itself in an animal’s instincts to assert itself against others (especially threatening others) and to defend itself in the pursuit of its own bodily needs. This is because tending to and protecting its body is one of the first and most basic things that an animal instinctively “knows” it is supposed to do. However, what the above considerations show is that when animals are part of a social order, and when they assume specialized roles within that order, then their basic spirited desires become considerably more complex because of their expanded sense of their needs, responsibilities, and enemies. Animals that come to understand themselves as part of a group and to identify that group as their oikeioi will come to view their own success as intimately tied up with that of the group and will develop spirited desires accordingly.10 That expanded selfunderstanding will mean, first of all, coming to develop an affection or a concern for those others. As a result, the animal will take a spirited interest in protecting them and defending their interests against threats in addition to its own individual interests. As we have seen, the well-being of others in that group may even come to supersede its individual well-being as far as spirited desire is concerned. If the 10

Please see Appendix A for a discussion of how the de-privatization policies of Republic 5 are aimed at precisely this spirited tendency.

13 animal takes itself to have a particular role within its social group – say, that of mother or of leader of the pack – then it will seek to execute that role as effectively as possible, and its sense of self-esteem will depend upon its success in doing so. Since a mother’s effectiveness as a mother is measured by the health and flourishing of her young, an animal that has come to identify that as its social role will come to have those things, above even its own health and flourishing, as its primary spirited goals. On the basis of this analysis, we can make several observations about primitive spirited desires and impulses. First, these impulses and the behavior that they generate cannot be explained by the basic appetites animals have because of their bodily needs or as a consequence of experiencing physical pleasure or pain, because many of them actually defy those basic appetites.11 An animal’s willingness to endure pain in battle or starve itself in order to protect or feed its young cannot be an impulse it derives from its appetites, because appetites, on Plato’s view, are by their nature averse to pain and hunger. Second, spirited desires are characteristically active in nature. Odysseus’ spirited wrath is not merely a desire that something bad happen to his enemies; it is the desire to do something to them himself. Similarly, a mother dog does not simply desire the wellbeing of her pups; she desires to provide that wellbeing herself as their mother. In this respect spirited desires are importantly different from appetitive desires, which primarily seek passive experiences and feelings rather than actions for their own

11

Not all of them do, however. As I mentioned above, one basic way that animals will express their spirited impulses is by protecting their bodily well-being and asserting themselves in the pursuit of their bodily needs (for food, drink, etc.).

14 sake. One’s feeling of hunger, for example, will be equally sated whether one hunts down one’s food and feeds oneself or whether someone else simply spoonfeeds the food into one’s mouth. Third, spirited desires are essentially competitive and social. To begin with, they involve both the desire to assert and defend oneself against those who are viewed as threats or competition (say, competition for a mate) and the desire to protect and nurture one’s loved ones. In both of these ways, spirited desire is a desire the creature has in relation to others. Furthermore, an animal’s perceived success in satisfying its desire is also largely dependent upon the behavior of those others – the deference of an enemy, for example, or the advances of a desirable mate. That is, in order for an animal to feel that it has excelled in its role, it is often necessary for other animals to act as if it has done so. Therefore, the need for recognition of one’s excellence by others – in the case of animals, that “recognition” will amount simply to certain forms of behavior – is an important part of the social nature of spirited desire. Fourth, and finally, spirited desires involve a notion of the self. This is not to attribute any sort of robust consciousness or self-awareness to non-human animals, but rather to point out that, in order to have the sorts of social desires that have been described, an animal must have a sense of what it is, what needs and responsibilities it has, and what its role is in relation to its fellow creatures. It is in terms of this kind of self-conception that animals formulate the particular spirited desires that they do: a mother dog wants to protect her pups because she has a sense that these pups belong to her and that her job is to keep them safe.

15 2. Mature Spirited Desire So far I have attempted, on the basis of Plato’s portrayal of what he takes to be the most primitive expressions of spirited impulses – the characteristic expressions found in non-human animals – to identify what the basic, common element of all spirited desire is. As we have seen, in its most primitive expressions spirit takes the form of hostility toward the allotrion and affection for the oikeion, and I have suggested that what these attitudes express is the basic spirited desire to excel among others in one’s perceived roles. However, it is clear that in human beings, spirit takes on much more diverse, complex, and sophisticated forms than those found in dogs. Notably, over the course of the Republic, spirit comes to be associated with the emotions of shame, admiration, disgust, and anger, and it is said to be responsible for an individual’s desires for victory, honor, and good reputation. In order to defend the view that Plato had concrete and tenable ideas about thumos, we must be able to provide an account of what all of these mature manifestations of spirited desire have in common and how they can be understood to be rooted in the kind of basic spirited impulse that is found in non-rational animals. In this section I will propose that in human beings, the primitive spirited desire to excel among others in one’s perceived roles evolves into the more sophisticated desire to be kalos (which I will translate interchangeably as “admirable” or “beautiful”) and the attraction to what is kalon.12 I will begin by briefly

12

The Greek term kalon has a variety of uses. It can be used to describe the physical beauty of an individual, the nobleness of an action, or even the fineness of a useful instrument. Alexander Nehamas has proposed that what unites the various uses of kalon is the idea that a kalon thing accomplishes its end in the most fitting way and is something of which to be proud (127).

16 discussing Plato’s association of thumos with the attitudes of admiration, shame, and disgust, and I will indicate how this association points to the characterization of thumos that I am advocating. I will then provide an explanation of how and why primitive spirited desire evolves into its more sophisticated form in human beings. 2.1 In the discussion of early education of the guardians in Books 2 and 3, Plato emphasizes the spirited attitudes of admiration, shame, and disgust. The reason these attitudes are of special importance to Plato is that he takes them to be crucial to our early moral development. Through poetry and other elements of musical education, Plato seeks to affect an individual’s non-rational spirited attitudes during the critical period of time in youth when the individual is not yet capable of reasoning. Plato wants to make sure that the young guardians feel admiration, shame, and disgust toward actions and people appropriately before they are able to understand why those actions or people are admirable, shameful, or disgusting. In Chapter 2 I discuss Plato’s proposed program of early education at length and argue for my intepretation of how early education is supposed to work on a psychological level. That discussion involves complex issues, and I will not go into detail about those here. However, in this context I would like to draw attention to the fact that in the discussion of education in Books 2 and 3, what matters to Plato about thumos is that it is responsible for admiration, disgust, and shame.

17 We can see that Plato takes thumos to be the psychological source of these attitudes not only through a proper understanding of Books 2 and 3, but also from remarks scattered throughout the Republic. Concerning admiration, Socrates tells us that when appetite is in control of the soul (resulting in the character called “oligarchic”), it allows reason to calculate about nothing other than how to increase wealth and allows thumos “to admire and honor nothing but wealth and the wealthy” (Rep. 553d). Just as engaging in calculation is a characteristic activity of the reasoning part of the soul (which appetite can misdirect toward the maximization of wealth), so also Socrates presents honoring and admiring as characteristic activities of the spirited part of the soul (which appetite can also misdirect). Thumos, then, on Plato’s view, is not merely the part of the soul with which we desire admiration and honor, but also the part of the soul with which we ourselves admire and honor others. Hence in Book 8 Socrates emphasizes that the spirited citizens of the timocratic city and the timocratic individual himself, despite their inordinate love of ruling, all nonetheless honor rulers (547d, 549a). Conversely, thumos is also responsible for feelings of disgust toward others and is associated throughout the Republic with laughter, ridicule, and contempt.13 And finally, we get important indications that thumos is responsible for the emotion of shame. In Book 9, Socrates says that when we are asleep, the appetitive part of us is able to express its most beastly and wild desires because it is “freed from all shame and prudence” (571c). The implication of the passage is that during sleep, thumos and reason, which are usually responsible for holding appetite in check, are inactive 13

See Chapter 2, pp. 54-56 for further discussion of the relationship between thumos and laughter.

18 and do not exercise control over it. “Prudence” is clearly a reference to a state of reason, and “shame” is evidently a reference to a state of thumos.14 In Book 1, moreover, the spirited character Thrasymachus blushes out of shame at being bested in argument by Socrates (350b). We also find a telling example outside the Republic. In the Phaedrus, where Socrates likens the tripartite soul to a charioteer and his two horses, Socrates says that the “good horse,” representing spirit, is always controlled “by its sense of shame (aischunê)” (254a).15 What unites the attitudes of admiration, disgust, and shame is that all of them are reactions of some kind to what a person perceives either as kalon (beautiful or admirable) or its opposite, aischron (ugly or shameful), in themselves or others. When we see others act in ways that we find beautiful or admirable, we respond by admiring them, and when we see them act in ways that we find contemptible, we react by blaming them and feeling disgust toward them. Similarly,

14

It is also worth mentioning, in illustrating the association between spirit and shame, that in the Laws Plato characterizes shame as the fear of bad reputation: “We often fear reputation, when we think we will be considered evil if we say or do something that is not noble. This is the sort of fear that we at least, and I believe everyone, calls ‘shame’” (646e). 15 Subsequently, in describing the good horse’s resistance (in obedience to the charioteer) to the pulling of the bad horse, Socrates says that the good horse “drenches the whole soul with sweat out of shame and awe” (254c). Interestingly, when Socrates describes Thrasymachus’ blushing in the Republic, he says: “Thrasymachus did not agree to all of this as easily as I tell it now, but he dragged his feet and resisted, and he produced a wonderful quantity of sweat, for it was summer. And then I saw what I had not yet seen before – Thrasymachus blushing” (350c-d). No doubt one reason that sweat is associated with thumos is that pursuing spirited objectives tends to demand effort and exertion. However, the association may also have to do with the fact that thumos is associated with blood, fire, and warmth. In the Timaeus, for example, Plato writes that thumos is located near the heart and says that it “boils” in anger in order to assist reason in guarding against internal and external threats (70a ff.). Cf. Aristotle DA 403a30, NE 1149a30.

19 when we fail in our own goals or do something disgraceful (especially if we are aware of ourselves as the object of admirable others’ disgust), then we feel shame.16 We should also add pride to this list, which we feel when we take ourselves to have done something noble (especially when others admire us for having done it). The unifying feature of these attitudes points toward an analysis of mature spirited desire: in human beings, spirited desire takes the form of the desire to be kalos and the corresponding attraction to what one finds kalon. The spirited desires that we have are desires to do things that will make others admire us and that will make us feel pride in what we have done and who we are. Spirited desire involves, first of all, the desire to act in certain ways, live a certain kind of life, and be a certain kind of person as determined by a one’s conception of what is kalon. It involves having a sense of what one is supposed to do and be like, both as a human being in general and in whatever particular roles one has or aspires to have. However, the spirited desire to be kalos is not just the desire to actually be, say, an exceptional soldier or husband or mother, but to be those things in a way that earns one the respect and recognition of others. This feature of our spirited

16

Our shame in any given instance is not dependent upon the actual digust of others. However, if people whom we respect express disgust at our shameful behavior, it is likely to intensify whatever shame we already feel. On the other hand, if people who are not admirable – or at least, whom we ourselves do not admire or respect – are disgusted with us, it is likely to have a much less compelling effect on us (if it has any effect at all). In order for the disgust of others to affect our sense of shame, those others have to matter to us. As Bernard Williams points out, we might actually feel shame at being admired by certain people (or pride at being the object of their disgust, presumably), if we consider them to be shameful, contemptible people. See the chapter “Shame and Autonomy” (p. 75 ff.) from his Shame and Necessity for further discussion.

20 desire distinguishes it from our rational desire for the good, from the point of view of which it may very well be indifferent, all else being equal, whether one performs a noble deed in secret or in public view.17 Spirit, in contrast, by its nature motivates us to act conspicuously so that the admirable things that we do actually attract the admiration of others. In turn, we as spirited creatures are also mindful of and attracted to the admirable qualities of others. This attraction to admirable others is closely connected to our desire to be admirable ourselves, because what we actually aspire to is largely shaped by what kind of role models we find ourselves admiring to begin with.18 To find someone kalos is to see them as excellent in some way and as somone who is in that respect to be emulated. In this way people we see as kaloi and admire as such inspire us and influence the spirited goals that we have for ourselves. Moreover, our desire to be kalos is related to our concern with admirable others in another way: because our spirited desire is an essentially competitive desire, it involves comparative evaluation of ourselves in relation to others, and it therefore matters to us how well others are faring in their goals. An admirable person is one who is exceptional in some way, and not everyone can be exceptional.19 Therefore, the spirited satisfaction we get in pursuing our goals will re-

17

This difference between spirited and rational desire is source of potential conflict between them (see Chapter 2, §3.4). In the ideal city, however, such conflict would be avoided, because the “others” whose admiration one seeks would, as a result of proper education, admire the right things, and hence seeking to act in ways that earn their admiration would be seeking to act in ways that are good. 18 Presumably, there is influence in both directions: we also admire and adopt as role models those who exemplify the lifestyles to which we already aspire. 19 That is, if everyone succeeds to the same degree, then no one has excelled at all in relation to the others. Similarly, if every participant in a competition is given

21 quire our attention to, and awareness of, the admirable qualities and activities of our peers. 2.2 The issue at this point is why and how primitive spirited impulse becomes the mature spirited desire to be kalos. (For convenience, I will use the locution “desire to be kalos” to refer to “the desire to be kalos and the corresponding attraction to people, actions, and things that one finds kala.”) In order to understand how primitive spirited impulse evolves in human beings, we must look first of all to what is distinctive about human beings: their rationality. Being rational affects both the social and psychological conditions of human beings in ways that significantly influence the nature of their spirited desires. To begin with, rationality enables human beings to form complex social arrangements and relationships with one another. Human society consists of occupations, social roles, activities, and interactions that are far deeper, more complicated, and more diverse than those of even the most sophisticated social arrangements elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Spirit and spirited desires, as we have seen, are essentially social and competitive in nature and are concerned with the individual’s interactions with others and with the roles and functions the individual has in relation to those others. The roles that human beings adopt, the tasks that they set for themselves, and their relationships with one another are much more numerous and complex than the ones non-rational animals have; hence the spirited desires and goals that they have are more complex as well. the same medal, then the medal loses its significance as a symbol of honor and as something to take pride in receiving.

22 Moreover, being rational also means that human beings are capable of engaging in long term planning and reasoning about the future. Unlike other animals, human beings are capable of developing long-term goals, engaging in means-end reasoning about how to achieve their goals, and understanding their various goals as forming a coherent life plan. As a result, the pursuits that they have and their sense of what counts as being successful in those pursuits is considerably more complicated than it is for other animals. Non-human animals may have a sense of what they are supposed to be doing from moment to moment or in the short-term (e.g. “fight this animal,” “get this food”), but they do not and cannot have the kind of long-term objectives that human beings have. Because human beings are able to consider what they want to accomplish and the kind of people they want to become in the long-run, their spirited desires are informed by an awareness of future possibilities and goals, and that makes them more nuanced and complex than the moment-to-moment impulses of other animals. The intricacy of human society and the ability to engage in reasoning about the long-term go a long way toward explaining why spirited desire in human beings is more complex than in other animals, but it does not yet explain why the more complex spirited desires that humans have take the specific form of the desire to be kalos. That explanation has to do both with the nature of what is kalon and with the unique ability of human beings to see things as kalon. Let us begin with the former. For Plato, a kalon thing is, first of all, something that is able to accomplish whatever function or aim it has in an effective and exceptional way, and it is able to do so in virtue of its harmony and proportionality. In some-

23 thing or someone kalon, things fit together in the right way for accomplishing whatever proper aim that thing or person has.20 A kalon knife is one that is put together in such a way that it is able to cut well, and a kalon body is one whose parts have the appropriate size and strength in relation to one another to perform the tasks demanded of it, such as running or wrestling.21 Beautiful or admirable things do not merely possess certain qualities or act in certain ways, however; they also, in doing so, attract the attention and admiration of others. Beauty, Plato points out, has a compelling psychological effect on us that other kinds of value do not (or at least, they do not unless we have learned to appreciate them in the right way). Whereas identifying an action or a person as moderate or just may leave us unmoved when it comes to choosing what to do or who we want to spend our time with, seeing actions or people as beautiful and admirable necessarily means being drawn to them. We find a striking example of this in the Symposium, where Alcibiades describes the effect that seeing what is “inside” Socrates has had on him. He says, “I once caught him when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: 20

I am not attempting to offer a definition of the kalon in this context; I am merely pointing to some of the essential features of beautiful things. I will take up the topic of the kalon again in Chapter 3. As I point out there, identifying a precise definition of the kalon in Plato is an elusive task. Nonetheless, we could perhaps say that beauty is something like the following: “the visible, captivating face of the rational order that constitutes a thing’s goodness.” 21 See Hippias Major 495 for the latter example. There Socrates continues, “In each case we look at the nature the thing has, its manufacture, its condition; then we call what is useful ‘fine’ in repsect of the way it is useful, what it is useful for, and when it is useful; but anything useless in all these respects we call ‘ugly.’” Cf. Rep. 352d ff., where Socrates characterizes virtue (aretê) as that which allows something to accomplish its function (ergon) finely. See also Republic 601d: “Aren’t the virtue, beauty, and rightness of each instrument, animal, and action related to nothing but the use for which each was made or grew naturally?”

24 they were so godlike – so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing – that I no longer had a choice – I just had to do whatever he told me” (216e-217a). When Alcibiades sees the extraordinary beauty within Socrates, he is drawn to him in a way that he finds inescapable and that makes him want to be better himself. That, Plato wants us to see, is the effect that beauty has on us. Beautiful and admirable things, then, are distinctive in ways that appeal precisely to the concerns of our most primitive spirited impulses – that is, to our competitive desire to excel among others and to have our excellence recognized by them. Admirable people and things both demonstrate the kind of excellence and success that we ourselves spiritedly seek in our pursuits and do so in a way that draws our attention to that excellence and makes us admire them because of it. This analysis allows us to see why, given the nature of the kalon, the complex spirited desires that we human beings have should be directed at it. Why, however, do only human beings, and not also other spirited animals, seek the kalon in this way? That is, why is it not the case that, say, a dog’s spirited desires, although relatively very simple and unsophisticated, nonetheless do not aim at the kalon in the way that our spirited desires do? The answer is that we as human beings are unique in seeing things as kalon (or aischron), where “seeing” crucially involves experiencing the distinctive attitudes that we as human beings experience in the presence of what we find kalon (or aischron). Other animals, in contrast, are limited in the ways that they perceive themselves, their actions, and others. When a dog, for example, encounters an impressive and dominant member of its group, it sees that other dog as (let

25 us say) big and strong and to-be-avoided, but it does not see that other dog as admirable. As a result, the way it shows its awareness of the other dog’s dominance is simply by avoiding it or submitting to it, not by admiring it.22 Non-human animals, because they do not see things, actions, and other animals as kalon, are not subject to the special compelling power that beauty has on human beings. They do not feel awe and admiration, and they do not adopt each other as role models to be emulated. Also, very importantly, because other animals do not experience admiration or disgust, they likewise have no awareness of themselves as the objects of those attitudes in others. Animals are aware of whether their enemies back down or their children are safe, but they are not aware of whether others feel admiration toward them or not.23 Human beings, on the other hand, are aware both of the attitudes of others and of the fact that outward behavior is not always a reliable indicator of those attitudes. When we seek the recognition of others for our excel22

It is true that animals may react to beauty or ugliness in certain distinctive ways for the purposes of reproduction. Indeed, in the Symposium Plato says that people and animals alike become joyful and reproduce in the presence of beauty and shrink away in the presence of ugliness (206d). What am I saying is not meant to deny that phenomenon. Certainly, animals can be attracted to certain pleasures to be gotten from association with what is beautiful – sexual pleasure, say. My point is simply that whatever reaction animals have to beauty, it is not the reaction of admiration that human beings experience. 23 Shame is an emotion that is often attributed to dogs. My account need not deny to dogs (or other animals, for that matter) the possibility of experiencing profound disappointment of spirited desire or the feeling of having failed in some pursuit. Indeed, inasmuch as animals have spirited goals, however simple, we should assume that they are sensitive to whether or not they achieve those goals and that they experience a kind of distress of thumos when they fail. And given that they experience it, we should also assume that sometimes they manifest that distress in their behavior. However, we can say all of that without saying that they experience the spirited distress that they do because they see themselves as having done something shameful, and thus that the feeling they have constitutes shame proper.

26 lence, therefore, it is not enough that people merely act in certain ways toward us; we also want them to feel a certain way about us. (We do not, for example, want someone to compliment our success because he was bribed to do so; we want him to do it as an expression of his actual attitudes toward our accomplishments.) The reason that spirited desire in human beings is unique in aiming at the kalon, then, is that human beings are unique both in seeing things as kalon and responding to them with admiration, and in being aware of themselves as the object of that response (as well as its contrary) in others. As a result, what counts as success and excellence for human beings, as well as what counts as recognition of that success by others, is grounded in the kalon and in the distinctive ways that we and others respond to it.24 3. Thumos in Republic 4, 8, and 9 In the previous section I argued that primitive spirited impulse comes to take the form, in human beings, of the desire for the kalon, and I have attempted to explain why that happens. This analysis fits especially well with the connections Plato establishes, in the discussion of early education and in other select passages, between thumos and the attitudes of admiration, disgust and shame. However, Plato’s treatment of spirit and spirited desire in the text is complex, and in the two other extended discussions in the Republic that feature spirited desire, Plato approaches thumos from somewhat different perspectives than he does in Books 2 and 3. As I mentioned above, in Book 4 he emphasizes spirit as the source of anger and provides a psychologically detailed analysis of its responsibil24

See Appendix B for further discussion of why human beings are distinct from other animals in this way.

27 ity for the virtue of courage, and in Books 8 and 9 he characterizes spirit as a lover of honor, victory, and good reputation. The discussions from Republic 4, 8, and 9 are especially important because, unlike the earlier discussion, they come after Plato has formally introduced (or begun to introduce) the theory of tripartition. If my account is to be made convincing, I must be able to explain Plato’s treatment of thumos in these passages, and I must be able to account, in particular, for the fact that in neither discussion does Plato explicitly state that spirit desires the kalon. In this section I will examine Plato’s presentations of thumos in each of the two later discussions. I will argue that Plato’s characterization of thumos in each one is determined by the particular argumentative aims he has at that point in the text, and that characterizing thumos formally and explicitly as a lover of the kalon was rightly not part of his agenda in those parts of the Republic. I will argue that Socrates’ discussions in Books 4, 8, and 9 nonetheless draw on or presuppose the idea that spirit is characterstically attracted to the kalon (and averse to the aischron). 3.1 In Book 4 Plato sets out to formally introduce the theory of tripartition by establishing three distinct parts of the embodied human soul. The crucial premise in his argument is the Principle of Opposites (PO) – the principle that the same thing cannot do or experience opposites at the same time in the same part of itself and in relation to the same thing (436b). Using this principle, Plato seeks to show that the soul does sometimes do opposite things at the same time and in relation to the same thing – namely, it sometimes has, simultaneously, both a desire for and

28 an aversion to the same object – and that in order not to violate the PO, the soul must do those things with different parts of itself. Socrates first distinguishes appetite from the reasoning part of the soul by pointing out that sometimes we are thirsty and desire to drink but at the same time are held back from doing so by the part of us that reasons about what is best for us. He then asks whether the part of us that gets angry is identical with one of these two parts or whether it is distinct from both of them. Socrates first considers whether thumos is separate from appetite and turns to the case of Leontius, who, according to the story Socrates has heard, once noticed corpses lying on the ground at the site of public executions and desired to gaze at them, but was disgusted and tried to resist his desire.25 Ultimately, his appetite won out, and out of anger he cursed his eyes for making him look. “This story,” Socates concludes, “certainly indicates that anger sometimes makes war against the desires as one thing against something else” (440a). Having observed that our anger sometimes opposes our concurrent appetitive desires and that we tend to become angry with ourselves when we give in to our appetites, Socrates concludes that thumos is separate from appetite. Socrates then considers whether spirit is distinct from reason. He distinguishes spirit from reason by appealing to the example of Odysseus. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca (where he is still king) disguised as a beggar, he is treated 25

The text is unclear about whether the disgust is directed at the bodies themselves, the act of corpse-gazing, or at himself for having the desire to gaze at them. Probably all three are intended to some extent, but the second one – the repulsion to the act of corpse-gazing – must be involved if the case is to constitute the kind of conflict necessary for identifying two distinct soul-parts in accordance with the PO. Because Leontius’ appetitive desire is a desire for the corpse-gazing itself, his spirited aversion must be an aversion to the corpse-gazing if their conflicting attitudes are to count as being “in relation to the same thing.”

29 with severe disrespect by the suitors who are courting his faithful wife Penelope, and upon seeing the suitors seducing her maids, Odysseus becomes enraged and wants to exact immediate revenge by killing all the offenders at once. However, he thinks better of doing so (rationally, on Plato’s reading of it) and is able to calm himself down by “reproaching his heart with word.” “Here,” Socrates says, “Homer clearly presents that which has reasoned about better and worse and rebukes that which is irrationally angry as though it were a different part” (441c). Having observed that anger sometimes opposes our considered rational judgments and desires, Socrates concludes that thumos is separate from reason. Despite wanting to distinguish spirit from reason as two distinct parts of the soul, however, Plato also uses the tripartition discussion as an opportunity to draw attention to a special affinity between reason and thumos. Socrates points out that when our appetites force us to do something contrary to our reasoning, our anger “fights” on the side of reason. Moreover, he says, our anger can be aroused by our belief that we have been done injustice, or calmed down by the judgment that we deserve a punishment that we receive.26 Spirit, Socrates concludes, is “by nature an auxiliary to the reasoning part” (441a). This characterization of thumos as the ally of reason sets up the subsequent discussion about what the “job” of each part of the soul is and what role it has in making the soul virtuous. Spirit, according to Socrates, is supposed to serve as reason’s faithful ally, both in fighting against external enemies as well as (especially) in fighting against

26

See Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of spirit’s responsiveness to reason.

30 recalcitrant appetitive desires from within.27 He then explains that, in doing this job in the soul, spirit is responsible for the virtue of courage. “It is because of the spirited part,” Socrates says, “that we call a single individual courageous, namely, when it preserves through pains and pleasures the declarations of reason about what is to be feared and what isn’t” (442b-c). The idea is that reason’s job is (among other things) to determine, on the basis of reasoning and deliberation, what counts as a threat and what does not and how the individual should best fight each threat, and thumos’ job is to assist reason in carrying out its decisions and help it fight against enemies from within and without. In the Book 4 discussion, then, Plato has two main objectives concerning thumos: first, to establish it as a part of the soul distinct from both appetite and reason, and second, to illuminate its psychic role as the ally of reason. Given those aims, we can see several reasons why highlighting thumos as a source of anger and courageous fighting makes good sense for Plato. First, anger is the expression of spirited impulse that is best able to illustrate the kind of psychic conflict that Plato needs for the purposes of distinguishing soul-parts through the PO. Whatever conflicts may arise between other spirited states – the desire for honor, say – and appetitive or rational ones, those conflicts are likely to be more am-

27

Socrates says, “These two, thus trained and having truly learned their own business and been educated, will govern the appetitive part... They’ll watch over it to see that it isn’t filled with the so-called pleasures of the body and that it doesn’t become so big and strong that it no longer does its own work but attempts to enslave and rule over the class it isn’t fitted to rule, thereby overturning everyone’s whole life... And wouldn’t these two do the finest job of guarding against enemies from without on behalf of all the soul and the body, the one deliberating, the other making war, following the ruler, and with its courage fulfilling what has been decided?” (442a-b).

31 biguous and less stark and dramatic than internal conflicts involving anger.28 The phenomena of getting angry at oneself for giving into a base appetite and of calming oneself down from one’s rage are striking and, for most people, easily recognizable examples of psychological conflict involving our spirited desire. Moreover, thumos was already strongly associated in Greek culture with anger and courageous fighting.29 This is important for two reasons. First, it means that Plato did not have to make any contentious assumptions or claims about spirit to get his tripartition argument through. By appealing to a familiar and paradigmatic example of spirited desire, he was able to avoid having to characterize thumos and its desires in any way that might have been controversial, and instead he was able to focus simply on the question of whether the source of our spirited behavior is a distinct part of the soul. Second, one of Plato’s key projects in the Republic is that of taking over, and recasting for his own purposes, the vir28

Consider, for example, how one’s desire to achieve honor might compete with one’s desire to pursue what is good. Conflict between those desires is likely to take place not in a single noteworthy instance, but rather continually and diachronically. Moreover, in many (if not all) cases that conflict might actually be best understood as a kind of diachronic vacillation in which, when one’s spirited desire is psychologically prominent, either one temporarily forgets one’s opposed rational judgment, or that judgment gets temporarily compromised. Such vacillation, because it does not involve experiencing opposites “at the same time,” would not represent the kind of conflict relevant to the PO. 29 Examples abound in Homer. To give a few: “And wearing this armour did Ereuthalion challenge all the bravest; but they trembled sore and were afraid, nor had any man courage to abide him. But me did my enduring thumos set on to battle with him in my boldness” (Il. 7.151-154); “Then his thumos was stirred, as he heard the evil tale, and he went his way and put on his body his gleaming armor” (Il. 9.595-596); “...lest thy thumos should darken with wrath as you saw it; for we are quick to anger, we tribes of men upon the earth” (Od. 7.305-307). Some examples outside of Homer: “...suppressing the unspeakable anger in his thumos” (Pindar, Ol. 637); “...quite different were the strength and courageous thumos of that one” (Mimnermus, 14.1W); “...the courageous thumos in their breasts increased” (Hesiod, Theog. 641); “let us fight with thumos” (Tyrtaeus, 10.13 W).

32 tue of courage. Thumos was already taken to be responsible for the endurance and resolve involved in courageously fighting against one’s enemies in war, and Plato’s goal was to show that true courage also, and most importantly, requires fighting the battle against our own vicious appetites within, and that thumos bears responsibility for that battle as well.30 By presenting the resistance of our bad appetites (which are, for Plato, the greatest threat to our moral progress) as the same kind of struggle as the resistance of an enemy, Plato sought to enlist spirited impulses on the side of virtue.31 With that purpose in mind, his association of thumos with anger and his use of martial language to describe its role in the soul are not only understandable, but ingenious. Because he appealed to the accepted, popular understanding of courage and thumos, he was able to appropriate and adapt that understanding to suit his philosophical aims. Finally, we should note that although Plato’s focus is justifiably on anger and courage in the Book IV discussion, he nonetheless acknowledges, and in fact appeals to, the connection between spirit and the kalon in a crucial passage of the discussion – the story of Leontius. Socrates’ telling of the story contains three indications of this. The first is that Leontius’ initial aversion to the corpse-gazing

30

In the Laws Plato calls the soul the thing that is most one’s own (oikeiotaton) (726a). If courage requires defending one’s family and fellow citizens because they are one’s oikeioi, then a fortiori, Plato thinks, it requires defending the integrity of one’s own soul. 31 Cf. Laches 191d, where Socrates, in criticizing Laches’ proposed definition of courage as “remaining at one’s post and defending against one’s enemy,” says, “...I wanted to include not only those who are brave in the face of pain and fear but also those who are clever at fighting desire and pleasure.” Cf. also Laws 633d: “Are we to define [courage] simply in terms of a fight against fears and pains only, or do we include appetites and pleasures, which cajole and seduce us so effectively?”

33 is characterized as a feeling of disgust (duscherainô) toward something he evidently finds shameful. The second is that, in his effort to resist his desire, he not only turns away from the corpses but also covers his face, which of course serves to further obstruct his vision from the sight of the corpses, but which is also a sign of shame.32 Third, and most significantly, when Leontius finally gives in to his appetite, he yells at his eyes angrily, “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the beautiful (kalon) sight!” Leontius’ use of kalon is sarcastic, of course, and is meant to indicate precisely the opposite – that the sight is an aischron one. The spirited anger to which Socrates attributes Leontius’ resistance to, and censure of, his appetite is thus anger at himself for failing to admire what is kalon and for admiring instead what he takes to be shameful. 3.2 In Book 8 Socrates returns to the subject from which he and his interlocutors took a “detour” at the beginning of Book 5 – the topic of the five kinds of “regimes” that exist in souls and the question of which one of them makes a man happiest. The first kind is the regime of the virtuous individual’s soul – the soul of the philosopher whose character they have already outlined in the preceding discussion – and the other four kinds are the regimes of vice that exist in the men Socrates calls timocratic, oligarchic democratic, and tyrannic.33 Ultimately, Soc-

32

Cf. Phdr. 237a, where Socrates says: “I’ll cover my face while I’m speaking. In that way, as I’m going through the speech as fast as I can, I won’t get embarrassed by having to look at you and lose the thread of my argument.” 33 Socrates makes a point of saying (in Book 4, prior to his digression) that the four non-virtuous regimes that he will discuss are not exhaustive, because vice can take on a multitude of forms. Nonetheless, he considers these four to be especially noteworthy and takes them to be an instructive sample of the forms of

34 rates wants to argue that each successive psychological regime results from a corruption of the previous one, and that with each corruption comes increasing unhappiness. Staying true to the analogy between city and soul, Socrates suggests that they first examine what each kind of regime is like in a city and then examine the corresponding type of soul-regime. What interests us here is Socrates’ characterizations of the timocratic city and the timocratic man – that is, the city that is ruled by spirited individuals and the man who is ruled by spirit itself. Of the timocratic city he says, “Due to the dominance of spiritedness one thing alone is most distinctive in it: love of victories and of honors,” and he calls the timocratic man “a lover of ruling and of honor” (548c, 549a).34 In his descriptions of both, Socrates emphasizes the desire for honor, ruling, and victory, and it is to that desire that he attributes their problems and, ultimately, their downfalls. In the timocratic city, he explains, the citizens (particularly the rulers, who establish social trends) are unduly interested in war and hold martial achievements in the highest honor, and as a result they focus on gymnastic training at the expense of musical training and rational education. And because they neglect music and argument, Socrates explains, they never learn “through persuasion” that excesses of money and pleasure are bad, and so they are willing to hoard money and indulge human viciousness. He says, “It looks to me as though there is one form for virtue and an unlimited number for vice, but four among them are worth mentioning,” (445d). 34 Socrates goes on to attribute the timocrat’s desires directly to the part of the soul that is in charge of him, the spirited part. He explains, “He turned over the rule in himself to the middle part, the victory-loving and spirited part, and he became a proud and honor-loving man” (550a). It is not just the individual, Socrates indicates here, but also in some sense the spirited part of his soul itself, that desires honor and victory. He makes this point even more explicit in Book 9, as indicated below.

35 in pleasure as long as they do not get caught. This sets the stage for the rapid degeneration of the timocratic regime into an oligarchic one in which love of money dominates.

Analogously, Socrates explains, the timocratic individual pursues

honor, martial excellence, and gymnastic training at the expense of music and argument, and, consequently, as he gets older he takes an increasing delight in sharing the money-lover’s nature. In both cities and individuals, Socrates wants to show, the timocratic regime is an inherently unstable one that, through its inordinate emphasis on victory and honor and its corresponding neglect of music, contains the seeds of its own further decline.35 In Book 9, having completed his argument that the virtuous, rational soulregime is the happiest (and the tyrannical soul-regime the unhappiest) for an individual, Socrates seeks to make two further “proofs” of this point. He begins by claiming that each part of the soul has its own characteristic pleasures and desires, and he offers a quick analysis of what those are for each part. He identifies reason as a lover of learning and wisdom and appetite as a lover of money and profit, and about thumos, he asks, “Don’t we, of course, say that it is wholly dedicated to the pursuit of ruling, victory, and good reputation? ...Then wouldn’t it be appropriate for us to call it victory-loving and honor-loving?” (581a). As in Book 8, Socrates emphasizes the spirited desire for rule, victory, and honor, and he adds to this list “good reputation.” On the basis of this division of kinds of pleasure and desire, Socrates proceeds with his two arguments.36 In his first proof, he argues

35

See Ch. 2 for a detailed discussion of musical education and its function and importance in the Republic. 36 The first argument is at 581c ff.; the second is at 583b ff.

36 that the pleasures of the reasoning part of the soul are the the most truly pleasant and that, therefore, the man who is ruled by reason and who enjoys those pleasures the most has the most pleasant life. In his second proof, he argues that only when reason is in charge is each part of the soul allowed to pursue its own pleasures properly and without a mix of pain. When appetite or thumos is in charge, on the other hand, the other soul-parts are forced to pursue “alien” pleasures and the individual’s pleasures are mixed with pain. If an individual is ruled by spirit, for example, his love of honor will give rise to the pain of feeling envy for others who are honored, or his love of victory will bring unnecessary violence into his life (586c). According to the arguments of Books 8 and 9, an individual will be happiest if he is ruled by reason as opposed to either appetite or the spirited part of the soul. Plato’s objective in talking about thumos in these arguments is to show that its rule in the soul is unstable, problematic, and non-ideal, and for that purpose he reasonably chooses to characterize thumos as a lover of ruling, victory, honor, and good reputation. The question that arises for us is why he did not explicitly characterize thumos as a lover of what is kalon or of being kalos, if that is, as I have argued, the fundamental nature of mature spirited desire. Books 8 and 9 pose a more serious challenge in this regard than Book 4, because in the earlier book, Plato was never interested in discussing what thumos wants or what its desires aim at. There he was concerned primarily with discussing what spirit does in the soul and what its job is, and he never addressed the topic of what its desires are like or what it is a “lover” of. In this later discussion, however, Plato does iden-

37 tify a characteristic object – or, rather, group of objects – of spirited desire, and the fact that when he does so, he does not make explicit what I take to be central to his account of spirited desire might reasonably give one pause about the picture I have presented. Again, however, by taking context into account and considering Plato’s aims, we can see that he had no need to talk explicitly about the desire for the kalon and that it would not have been advantageous for him to do so. First, we should note that although Plato does provide a brief sketch of the desires of each part of the soul in Book 9, even there Plato is never concerned with offering anything like a focused analysis of their desires. Rather, what he wants is simply to establish, for the purposes of his argument, a rough (but accurate) characterization of what each soul-part wants. That he has this more modest objective is clear from Socrates’ treatment of appetite. He points out that “the third part” is difficult to characterize because of the heterogeneity of its objects, but he says they call it both “appetitive” and “money-loving” because of its strong desires for food, drink, and sex, and because of the way money facilitates the satisfaction of such desires. He then says, “So if we said that its pleasure and love are for profit, wouldn’t that best determine its general form for the purposes of our argument and ensure that we are clear about what we mean when we speak of this part of the soul?” (581a) Plato’s objective is not to provide a detailed examination of appetitive desire, but rather to draw attention to some characteristic expressions of its desire and to propose a shorthand and general way of referring to appetite on that basis. He wants to be sure that his interlocutors know what he means when

38 he “speaks of” appetite in his arguments concerning true and real pleasures. Similarly, in the case of spirit, Plato is not interested in formally answering questions like “What is thumos?” or “What is the the common feature of all spirited desire?” but rather wants simply to point to the most noteworthy expressions of spirited desire for the purposes of explaining how dominance by thumos and its pleasures harms and undermines a happy human life. With that in mind, Plato’s characterization of thumos is understandable. To begin with, his characterization is not as far from the account that I have offered as might at first appear, because victory, honor, ruling, and good reputation are, for Plato’s contemporaries, precisely the things that show that one is kalos or that one is recognized as kalos by others. In the Greek way of thinking, martial excellence, winning a competition, or ruling represent the clearest cases of being exceptional and admirable, and receiving honors and being held in good repute among one’s peers represent the clearest cases of being recognized as exceptional and admirable.37 Therefore, while Plato does not explicitly call thumos a lover of the kalon in the Book 8 and 9 discussions, the characterization of it that does offer there presupposes and implies its attraction to the kalon: honor and victory are the things that a Greek, in seeking to be kalos, would want.

Moreover, the

characterization he offers has the advantage, once again, of appealing to popular ideas about spiritedness, because thumos was already associated in Greek culture with desires for fame and glory.38 Socrates has no need to go into deeper detail

37

See Douglas L. Cairns, Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honor and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature for more on honor and the kalon in ancient Greek culture and thought.

39 for fame and glory.38 Socrates has no need to go into deeper detail about the nature of spirited desire in giving the arguments of Books 8 and 9; he only needs to secure from his interlocutors a quick acceptance of a general, commonsense, and uncontroversial characterization of spirited desire, and that is what he does. Moreover, in Books 8 and 9 Plato needed a characterization of spirited desire that would be useful for the purposes of explaining the behavior of people and societies. Pointing to the desire for things like honor and victory helps him do that in a very clear way: the excessive desire for victory, for example, explains the timocratic society’s obsession with war, and the timocratic individual’s valuing of honor above all else explains why he is willing to hoard money as long as no one finds out and he receives no disapprobation for it. The danger of explicitly characterizing thumos as a lover of the kalon is that doing so would introduce unnecessary ambiguities and difficulties. The problem is that to say that thumos is attracted to the kalon is ambiguous between two readings. It could mean either that the spirited part of one’s soul is innately oriented toward what is truly kalon in the same way that the reasoning part is innately oriented toward the Good, or it could mean that it is attracted toward whatever the individual takes to be kalon – that is, whatever seems kalon to him – whether or not he is mistaken. In characterizing spirited desire as the desire to be kalos, it is the second reading that we must have in mind. Spirit is not attracted only to those people, actions, and things that are truly and actually admirable. (If that were the case, then there would be 38

Some examples: “...each man’s thumos was athrob as they strove for victory” (Homer, Od. 23.371); “...their thumos desired war more than before” (Hesiod, Theog. 665); “Thumos, do not pursue accomplishment older than your number” (Pindar, fr. 127.4).

40 no need for the kind of moral education of thumos that Plato advocates in the Republic.) Rather, spirit is attracted to those people, actions, and things that appear admirable to the person, and what appears admirable to a person will vary according to his nature, the education he receives, and the society in which he is raised. If Plato had explicitly called thumos a lover of the kalon, it would have invited the misleading first reading, and that would have raised problems for his arguments. If spirit aimed at what is in fact admirable, then given the metaphysically venerable position that Plato grants to the Form of the kalon in the Republic and given the relationship he establishes between the kalon and the Good, there would be no reason for an individual or society ruled by spirit to go astray. Plato could not, then, have explicitly characterized spirited desire as aiming at the kalon without raising complicated philosophical issues that would have required further clarification. As I have said, Plato did not need to, and had good reason not to, raise such issues in the context of giving his arguments about rule in the soul. By identifying thumos as a lover of victory and honor instead, Plato was able to provide an uncontroversial and uncomplicated picture of spirited desire that, if not analytically complete, was nonetheless accurate and effective, and that presupposed and pointed in the direction of an analysis of spirited desire in terms of the kalon. 3.3 In this chapter I have argued that the primitive form of spirited impulse is the desire to excel among others in one’s perceived roles, and that in human beings, this impulse evolves into the more mature desire to be kalos and the attraction to people, things, and actions that are admirable. In doing so, I have hoped to

41 achieve two main goals. First, I want to provide a response to suggestions that Plato’s use of thumos in the Republic is too varied and heterogeneous to admit of a unified account. As I have shown, not only can we understand the various manifestations of spirited impulse, from the most primitive to the most mature, as having a common aim and psychological origin, but we can also explain why and how spirited impulse is transformed in human beings as a result of our rational nature and our unique responses to the kalon. While this may not fully vindicate Plato’s account of thumos against claims that he only introduced thumos because of the city-soul analogy or was never really serious about it, it does show that he was working with a tenable account of spirit and spirited desire, and, therefore, it at least weakens much of the motivation for such criticism. Second, I want to provide the foundations for the thorough investigation of the psychological role of thumos in moral education and virtue that I will undertake in Chapters 2 and 3. As we will see in Chapter 2, it is spirit’s attraction to the kalon and the emotional responses of shame, admiration, and disgust that go along with that attraction that, on Plato’s view, makes spirit an appropriate and necessary target of early moral education. Moreover, spirit’s attraction to the kalon, I will argue in Chapter 3, is the basis of its responsiveness to the commands of the reasoning part of the soul. Plato’s reason, I will argue, for introducing the theory of tripartition and recognizing thumos as a disinct non-rational source of motivation, was that he saw that thumos, if properly trained, can be made to serve as the faithful ally of reason in the development and maintenance of human virtue, and it is its desire for the kalon that makes that possible.

42 Chapter 2 Early Education and the Tripartite Soul

In the previous chapter I argued that Plato was drawing on a philosophically well worked-out account of thumos when he composed the Republic. I argued that, for Plato, what unites the apparently diverse forms of spirited desire and their expression is the impulse to excel among others in one’s perceived role, and I explained how that impulse evolves in human beings into the more mature desire to be kalos – admirable or beautiful – and the corresponding attraction to people, actions, and lifestyles that seem kala. However, it is one thing to explain what Plato’s account of spirited desire consisted in; it is quite another to explain why he introduced that account at all in the Republic and why he took it to be important to the moral and political project of the text. If, as some commentators have suggested, Plato introduced thumos primarily under pressure from the citysoul analogy – that is, in order to fill in the psychic “blank” that was supposed to correspond to the guardian class of the city – then we would be justified in doubting whether Plato was committed to thumos as a distinct part of the soul outside the context of that analogy. If, on the other hand, we can point to strong substantive reasons for Plato’s introduction of thumos, then we will have to take his emphasis on thumos seriously as a carefully arrived-at philosophical commitment and thus as a commitment that may very well have significant import for our understanding of Plato outside of the Republic. In this chapter I will argue that Plato

43 did, in fact, have good philosophical reasons for developing his account of thumos and that, far from being merely an imaginative flourish on Plato’s part, that account is indispensable to the moral theory that he advocates in the Republic. More specifically, I will argue that what led Plato to introduce thumos into his moral psychological picture were considerations about moral education and the crucial role that he saw for thumos in the early psychological development of human beings. In order to provide support for this conclusion, I will examine in detail the program of early education outlined in Republic 2 and 3, with emphasis on musical education, and I will examine, in terms of the tripartite theory of the soul, how early education is supposed to work on a psychological level. Music is of special interest here because of the unique status that Socrates accords it in the dialogue: he identifies it as the single most important and necessary institutional element for keeping a good city intact. Changes in music, he says, are a danger to the whole city, “for never are the ways of music changed without the greatest political laws being changed” (424c). And indeed, when he discusses the degeneration of regimes in Books 8 and 9, he attributes the initial unraveling of the ideal society to its neglect of the musical practices that he has proposed.39 Understanding how musical education works, therefore, is crucial not just to our understanding of the psychological theory presented in the Republic (as I will argue it is), but also to our understanding of the moral and political project of the text as a whole. I will begin in §1 by explaining how the program of musical education outlined by Soc-

39

See Rep. 546d ff. and Appendix C, pp. 207-208.

44 rates in the Republic provides education for thumos – in particular, how it conditions individuals to feel the spirited emotions of admiration, disgust, and shame appropriately. I will then confront, in §2, the question why Socrates says that music is for the “philosophic” part of our nature, and I will explain how musical education provides education for the reasoning part of the soul. In §3 I will address the issue of why appetite is not a special target of early education in the way thumos and reason are. Finally, I will conclude in §4 by briefly arguing that Plato’s primary reason for developing the theory of tripartition was his thinking about thumos and its role in moral education. 1. Early Education and Thumos In Book 2 of the Republic, after having argued that the ideal city will need guardians who have both a spirited and a philosophic nature – that is, both a nature that makes them courageous and one that makes them lovers of learning – Socrates embarks on the question of what kind of rearing and education the young guardians should receive. He identifies the need for a twofold training in music (mousikê) and gymnastic, and he begins by looking at music (which on his conception, it is important to note, encompasses not just song but also poetry, dance, drama, the mechanical arts, and culture more generally).40 In the course of his discussion Socrates provides guidelines about the content and style of speech and poetry, the types of songs and melodies that should be allowed in the city, and even what products of craft (such as embroidery and furniture) should be like.

40

The Greek mousikê is, in general, a broader notion than the English “music” and prominently includes poetry; Socrates, in including all mechanical arts in mousikê, stretches this broad usage even further.

45 The question I would like to address here is what exactly musical education is supposed to accomplish and how, psychologically, it is supposed to accomplish it. Socrates tells us that music is for the “philosophic” part of our nature (and gymnastic, he says, for the “spirited”).41 However, he does not say much about what that means, and closer examination of his discussion reveals that music is designed to have psychologically complex effects that are by no means limited to its effects on the philosophic or reasoning part of our nature. In particular, as I will argue, musical education has important and direct effects on the spirited part of the soul. My goal in this section will be to offer an account of how music trains thumos that illuminates the important role of thumos in early moral development. I will also comment on the effect of gymnastic on thumos and how it relates to musical training. In §2 I will address the issue of why, if music is primarily or largely directed at thumos, Socrates says that music is for the “philosophic” part of our nature. Before I examine music’s impact on thumos, I would first like to set aside a worry one might have about discussing the effects of early education on parts of the tripartite soul. The worry is that, because Socrates outlines his educational 41

Socrates simply refers to “the philosophic” (to philosophon) and “the spirited” (to thumoeides). Throughout this discussion I will supply “aspect of our nature” or “part of our nature.” Socrates makes the claim that music is for the philosophic and gymnastic for the spirited at 411e as a revision of the claim he made at the beginning of his discussion that music is for the soul and gymnastic for the body (376e). He says he now thinks that music and gymnastic are both for the soul. Presumably, the initial claim at 376e was intended to introduce gymnastic and music into their discussion by way of traditional ideas about education. Since music and gymnastic were already established as methods of education (they have been discovered, Socrates says, “over a great expanse of time”), Plato is able to propose them without any resistance and then recast them over the course of the discussion in accordance with his own philosophical agenda.

46 program before his introduction of the tripartite soul in Book 4, we cannot simply assume that the spirited and philosophic aspects of the guardians’ nature at which music and gymnastic are directed are to be identified with the spirited and the reasoning parts of the soul. However, Plato gives us clear indications that this identification is justified. To begin with, he characterizes the aspects of our nature as discussed in Books 2 and 3 and the parts of our soul as discussed later in the Republic in matching ways. Just as the spirited part of our nature is said to be responsible for courageousness in the discussion of early education, for example, the spirited part of the soul is later identified as the unique psychic source of the virtue of courage. One caveat that we should add is that, because Plato thinks that children are not born with reasoning, and that the rational part of the soul develops gradually throughout childhood but does not become fully mature until sometime around adolescence, we should think of the philosophic side of the young guardians’ nature not as the mature reasoning part of the soul, but rather as the developing reasoning part of the soul. Plato actually indicates explicitly, immediately following the argument for tripartition, that we are supposed to identify the earlier aspects of nature with the parts of the soul. There, in the course of describing the relationship between reason and spirit, Socrates asks, “Isn’t it proper for the calculating part to rule, since it is wise and has forethought about all of the soul, and for the spirited part to be obedient to it and its ally? And, as we were saying, won’t a mixture of music and gymnastic make them accordant?” (441e) Although there was no explicit talk of soul-parts in the discussion of education, Plato makes it clear that, now that the tripartite psychology is in place, we are to

47 read it back into that earlier discussion and understand the spirited and philosophic sides of our nature as corresponding to the spirited and reasoning parts of the soul. 1.1 The primary goal of musical education is to make sure that the kinds of people, actions, and lifestyles that the individual finds kala – and that he therefore aims to emulate – are ones that really are kala. (Thus Socrates says that music ends in “love of the beautiful” at 403c.) This is the purpose, especially, of the extensive proposals that Socrates makes concerning poetic content and style. He devotes by far more time to this topic than to any other single topic in his discussion of music, so it is of obvious importance to Plato and must be given careful attention. I would like to begin by pointing out why, of the three parts of the soul, thumos is the part that is particularly in need of being kept away from harmful poetry (and conversely, of being exposed to good poetry) and why, therefore, it is the primary target of this crucial part of Socrates’ program of musical education. The reason, I want to argue, is that thumos is the part of the soul that is primarily, and in a special way, suspectible to the influence of poetry. The problem with poetry, on Plato’s view, is not just that it presents gods, heroes, and other ostensibly noble characters as behaving in ways that are, in fact, shameful, but also, as Socrates argues in Book 10, that it does so in a way that is compelling. Poetry has the deceptive power to make characters seem admirable and good even if they are not, and it thereby creates a sort of moral illusion. Poetry “charms” us, as Socrates puts it, into admiring and praising characters whom we should not admire or

48 praise (607c). This power to charm has its effect, in particular, on the nonrational parts of our soul. The reason is that appetite and thumos – unlike reason – lack the cognitive capacities that are required to overcome, or “see past,” appearances. They have no cognitive access to the intelligible realm of being and therefore, on Plato’s view, cannot distinguish reality as something distinct from the way things appear in the sensible world. In his Book 10 discussion, Socrates distinguishes the part of our soul that is responsive to reasoning from the “foolish” part of our soul that is taken in by illusions. He gives the example of a tree that looks bigger when observed from up close and smaller when observed from far away. The reasoning part of us, he says, is able to judge, on the basis of calculation, that the tree remains the same size regardless of the distance from which it is viewed, but the foolish part of us is incapable of overcoming the illusion that the same tree is at one time bigger and at another time smaller (602c ff.). It is on this foolish part, Socrates says, that poetry has its power, because the same part of us that cannot help but believe that a tree is whatever size it looks also cannot help but believe that the characters in poetry are as admirable and good as poets make them seem. Although appetite and thumos are both included in the “foolish,” nonrational part of us that is taken in by poetry’s deceptive power, that power has its most profound and damaging effects on thumos.42 That is because the illusion

42

Plato drops the explicit language of tripartition in this argument, so he does not explicitly say that the foolish part includes appetite and thumos. However, at 606d he provides a list of psychic states for which the foolish part is responsible, and that list includes both appetitive and spirited desires and emotions (e.g. sexual desire and anger). Presumably, the reason Plato does not need to mention appetite

49 that poetry creates – the illusion that certain kinds of people and behavior are admirable – is an illusion of something that matters to thumos.43 As we have seen, in having the spirited desire to be kalos, an individual desires be a certain kind of person, to live a certain kind of life, and to fulfill his perceived social roles in the most effective and admirable ways possible. Poetry, by presenting characters that seem manly or courageous or admirable, appeals precisely to this fundamental spirited impulse of a human being. Poetry provides role models for the young that they need and are naturally interested in and attracted to given the nature of their spirited desires. Because of poetry’s “charm,” moreover, these role models have an almost inevitable effect on an individual’s spirited sense of how they themselves should act and what kind of person they should be. When a young

and thumos explicitly, or to distinguish between them, is that for the purposes of his argument, he is interested only in distinguishing the portion of our soul that can engage in reasoning and measurement and that can therefore see past appearances, and the portion of our soul that cannot. Appetite and thumos both equally cannot engage in reasoning and measurement, and thus there is no need to distinguish them here. See Chapter 4, pp. 152-154, for more on this topic. 43 I do not mean to deny that some poetry will also appeal to the appetitive part of the soul and that it could, therefore, have damaging effects on it as well. Poetry could, for example, depict unnatural pleasures and, in doing so, give rise to appetitive desires in the viewers that they would not have had otherwise. There are three reasons why, nonetheless, we should understand poetry as having its primary influence on the spirited part of the soul: (1) Mostly importantly, and as we will see in §3, thumos, but not appetite, can be both negatively and positively influenced by poetry; appetite, on the other hand, can be influenced only in negative ways. That is, one can educate thumos with good poetry, but all one can do as far as appetite is concerned is keep appetite away from the influence of bad poetry. (2) The poetry that concerns Plato the most is Homer, and the subject matter of that poetry is overwhelmingly spirited, rather than appetitive, in nature. (3) Socrates’ program of musical education through poetry takes place during childhood, and an entire class of appetitive desires – namely, sexual ones, or aphrodisia – do not have the psychological presence in young children that they do in adolescents and adults. Our full set of basic spirited desires, on the other hand, are present “right from birth” (Rep. 441a).

50 man watches a performance of Homer, he cannot help but admire a character like Achilles and cannot help but get the feeling that that is how a good man or soldier or lover acts and thus how he, as someone who desires to be those things, ought to act as well. In this way poetry that misrepresents what admirable people and behavior are like corrupts an individual’s thumos and introduces vicious desires and motivations into his soul. There is also a social aspect to the effects of poetry, because poetry makes not just the individual, but the whole crowd admire characters, and given thumos’ concern for the approval of others, what they think has a powerful influence on an individual’s spirited impressions. Socrates’ discussion of poetic content, therefore, aims to correct the damaging effect that traditional poetry has on the spirited part of the soul by replacing the emotional, imperfect, and unsteady heroes found in Homer with truly good role models who exemplify virtue. By getting rid of bad role models and introducing good ones, Plato seeks to ensure that the young guardians have the proper spirited sense of what kinds of actions, and what style of doing them, are appropriate and noble and which are not.44 1.2 Thumos, then, is specially sensitive to the influence of poetry and role models, and musical education seeks to exploit that sensitivity for the moral benefit of the individual. It accomplishes this by instilling in the guardians the proper spirited reactions to what is kalon and aischron (“shameful”) and by fostering the

44

See Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Plato on Learning to Love Beauty,” for an enlightening discussion of the place of thumos in the moral education of the individual.

51 best possible condition of the spirited part of their souls. That music has this aim is confirmed by the characteristically spirited nature of the attitudes, emotions, and psychic states that Socrates concerns himself with in his discussion of poetry. This is evident, to begin with, in the explicit aims that he sets for his proposals. In summary of his guidelines concerning the poetic portrayal of the gods, Socrates says, “About gods, then, such, it seems, are the things that should and should not be heard, from childhood on, by men who would honor gods and ancestors and not trivialize their friendship with each other” (386a). The primary goal of the policies he has proposed, then, is not to promote any sort of distinctly rational activity – say, having correct beliefs or understanding about the gods – but rather to promote the proper attitudes of honor toward the divine and friendship (philia) toward one another, both of which are distinctly spirited attitudes.45 Similarly, Socrates next words are, “And what if they are to be courageous? Mustn’t they also be told things that will make them fear death least?” The policies that follow, which reject the depiction of Hades as a nightmarish place, are designed to make sure that the guardians have the right psychic constitution for developing the virtue of courage. If they are accustomed to feeling fear and if they fear death as a terrible thing, Socrates claims, then they are much less likely to act bravely in dangerous circumstances (387b). Moreover, even when Socrates advocates poetic 45

Plato is less explicit that friendship is rooted in our spirited emotions than Aristotle, who calls thumos “the capacity of the soul by which we feel friendship” (Pol. 1327b40). However, given that Plato characterizes thumos as the part of the soul that is responsible for our affection toward others (that is, toward our oikeioi) and for our caring about what others think, it is a short step to seeing that it is responsible for the feelings, states, or activities that constitute friendship as well. It is also worth mentioning that at Prot. 322c, Plato characterizes shame (a spirited emotion) as a source and necessary condition of friendship.

52 content that is designed to promote the moderation of appetitive desires, he frames his suggestions in terms that are clearly aimed, not at the appetitive part of the soul itself, but once again, at thumos. He recommends that depictions of the excessive pursuit of pleasure and wealth be purged from poetry and that they be replaced by “speeches and deeds of endurance by famous men in the face of everything” (390d).

Socrates’ goal is to make the guardians disdain pleasure-

mongering and acquisitiveness and to recast the resistance of pleasure as a noble act of courageous endurance. By making the defeat of one’s own recalcitrant desires for pleasure the same kind of act as the defeat of an external enemy in battle, Plato seeks to instill in the young guardians a spirited motivation for developing the virtue of moderation. Moreover, Socrates makes it clear that the policies on poetic content that he advocates are designed, above all, to make the young guardians feel the distinctly spirited emotions of admiration, disgust, and shame at the appropriate times and in response to the appropriate kinds of people and actions. Socrates maintains his emphasis on the spirited attitudes of the guardians throughout his discussion of content, but I will draw attention to just two examples. First, in offering his ideas about poetic portrayals of the gods, Socrates asserts, “Above all, it mustn’t be said that gods make war on gods, and plot against them and have battles with them – for it isn’t even true – given that those who are going to guard the city for us must consider it most shameful to be easily angry with one another”

53 (378b).46 If the young guardians see the gods engaged in petty dispute, Socrates claims, then they will not be ashamed to engage in such disputes themselves with their fellow citizens. If even the gods argue and fight with one another, the worry goes, then arguing and fighting will not seem ignoble. The purpose of keeping the guardians away from such representations of the gods, therefore, is to train two sorts of spirited emotions at once. First, it is supposed to make sure that the guardians feel shame in the face of unseemly conflict, and second, it is supposed to prevent them, because of that sense of shame, from feeling anger inappropriately to begin with. The second example comes from Socrates’ remarks on the way heroes and gods ought to be portrayed when they experience personal tragedy or loss. Having banished speeches of excessive lamentation, Socrates explains: For, my dear Adeimantus, if our young should seriously hear such things and not laugh scornfully (katagelôien) at them as unworthy speeches, it’s not very likely that any one of them would believe these things to be unworthy of himself, a human being, and would reproach himself for them, if it should enter into his head to say or do any such thing. Rather, with neither shame nor endurance, he would chant many dirges and laments at the slightest sufferings. (388d) Once again, Socrates’ concern is that, if the guardians see heroes and gods engaged in behavior that is, in fact, shameful, then the guardians will not find it shameful to engage in that behavior themselves when in similar circumstances. 46

Socrates thinks that even if such poetry were true, it should not be heard by the young: “How Uranus behaved, how Cronos punished him for it, and how he was in turn punished by his own son... Even if it were true, it should be passed over in silence, not told to foolish young people” (377e-378a). Cf. Rep. 382c, 414c, and 459c for Plato on the usefulness of falsehoods.

54 What Socrates wants instead is for the young guardians to be conditioned in such a way that they find excessive displays of grief shameful and contemptible. He wants them to “laugh scornfully” at such speeches and, if any impulses to openly cry, grieve, or lament arise in them at any point in their own lives, to reproach themselves and resist those impulses out of shame and endurance. The reference to shame in this passage is an obvious indication that Socrates wants to train the guardians’ spirited parts, but closer inspection reveals even more deliberate connections to thumos than might at first appear. To begin with, the word “endurance” (karteria) has a strong association with the virtue of courage (for which, of course, the spirited part of the soul is said to be uniquely responsible in the Republic). In the Laches, in fact, the dialogue’s namesake suggests, as an attempt to define courage, that courage is “some sort of endurance of the soul” (192c). Laughter, moreover, is in Plato a distinctively spirited type of behavior. Although this point has not received much attention in the literature, the evidence in its favor is compelling. Both Thrasymachus and Glaucon, who are emphatically depicted as spirited character types in the text – through their own behavior and through comments addressed to them and about them (including, in Glaucon’s case, the explicit comparison of him to the honor-loving timocrat of Book 8) – are prone to laughter in a way that other characters are not. 47

47

Glaucon is compared to the timocratic man at 548c by Adeimantus: “I suppose that as far as love of victory goes, [the timocratic man] would be somewhere near to Glaucon here.” He is also said to own hunting dogs (459a), while the timocratic man is said to be a lover of hunting (549a). Glaucon also, like a good guardian, promises to defend Socrates in his argumentative quest (474a). The name “Thrasymachus” itself comes from thrasos, impetuousness or excessive boldness, and Thrasymachus is at various points compared to a wolf

55 When Thrasymachus initially resists Socrates’ arguments about justice in Book 1, he expresses his derision by bursting out in laughter (337a).48 Glaucon, much more good-naturedly, also laughs at multiple points throughout the text, and Socrates, evidently understanding Glaucon’s likely sensitivity to the laughter of others, is careful to warn him on several occasions that they must not be afraid to be laughed at for offering controversial arguments.49 The association of laughter with thumos becomes complete in Book 10, where Socrates argues that comic poetry feeds “the laughing part” (to geloion) of us. The part of us that wants to make jokes, he says, is usually held down by reason out of shame and the fear of a bad reputation, but poetry allows that part to engage in laughter in circumstances that make doing so seem acceptable.50 The fact that the laughing part of us usu-

(336d), a lion (341c), and a snake (358b), all of which are also associated with spirit and spirited individuals in the text. A wolf is what a spirited individual becomes when, as a result of corruption by vicious appetites, he becomes savage toward those who are his oikieoi and whom he is supposed to protect: “Surely the most terrible and shameful thing of all is for shepherds to rear dogs as auxiliaries for the flocks in such a way that due to licentiousness, hunger, or some other bad habit, they themselves undertake to do harm to the sheep and instead of dogs become like wolves” (416a). At 588d, the spirited part of the soul is represented as a lion in the multiform creature that Socrates imagines as a metaphor for the human being and the tripartite soul. And at 590b, thumos is called “snake-like.” Evidently, in comparing thumos to a snake, Plato has in mind a snake’s ability to be charmed, for Socrates says that Thrasymachus, “has been charmed like a snake.” Thrasymachus also becomes savage toward Socrates (336b), blushes (350d), interprets the argument with Socrates as a competition aimed at gaining honor (336c), and wants to win a good reputation (338a). 48 Cf. the outburst of laughter in the Gorgias by the spirited character Polus (473e). 49 See, for example, 398c and 451b, where Glaucon laughs. At 452b and 473c, Socrates warns him that they might be the targets of ridicule. 50 Note the contrast with “the mournful part” that hungers for tears in times of grief at 606a. The mournful part is held back by force, but the laughing part is held back by logos. These are clear references to the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul and the characteristic way that each is kept in check by the reasoning

56 ally refrains from mockery out of shame and fear of a bad reputation makes it clear that that part must be thumos. The connection between the spirited part of the soul and laughter is readily understandable. For laughter is a way of expressing ridicule, mockery, scorn, and a lack of respect, and thumos, with its characteristic concern for status, is the part of the soul that is both prone to expressing such scorn toward what appears shameful and that is also sensitive to such expressions by others. In the Book 3 passage, then, Socrates wants the guardians to laugh at excessive displays of grief because laughter reveals the spirited emotion of disgust, and that, he thinks, is the right reaction to have toward such behavior. Socrates’ emphasis on spirited emotions continues as he moves on from poetic content to discuss poetic style (lexis) – that is, the way in which poetic content is expressed. He begins by carefully distinguishing three types of poetic presentation: imitative, narrative, and mixed. In imititative poetry, which is used in tragedy and comedy, the poet does not speak in his own voice but “likens himself” to the characters by making it seem as if they are doing the speaking instead of him. In narrative poetry, which is used in dithyramb, the poet speaks in his own voice without “hiding himself.” And in mixed poetry, which is used in epics, the poet makes use of a combination of both styles. Socrates’ ostensible aim at this point is simply to determine which styles of poetry – and thus which types of poetry – will be allowed in his and Adeimantus’ city. This is, at any rate, what Adeimantus expects, for he says to Socrates, “I divine that you’re considering whether we’ll admit tragedy and comedy into the city or not” (394d). However, part of the soul. In the next chapter, I will examine reason’s relationship to the other two soul-parts and how it keeps them in check in detail.

57 this question is one that Socrates does not attempt to answer directly until Book 10. Instead, Socrates “goes where the argument takes him” and asks whether the guardians themselves should be imitators – that is, whether they should imititate other people and things through speech, sound, and movement. He argues that they should be imitators, but only in a very limited sense. In particular, he thinks that they should, on some occasions, imitate decent and good men but that in general they should narrate in their own voice and that they should always avoid imitation of any other kinds of people or things.51 The problem with imitation, as Plato sees it, is that the distinction between acting like something and actually being that thing is perilously thin, with the result that one tends to actually become like the things that one imitates. “Or haven’t you noticed,” Socrates asks, “that imitations, if they are practiced continually from youth onwards, become established as habits and nature, in body and sounds and in thought?” (395d). On Plato’s view, to imitate a shoemaker, and especially to imitate one well, is in a very serious sense to practice being a shoemaker. To imitate a bad man is to practice being bad. Therefore, if the guardians are to practice only the art of guardianship, as the “one man, one job” principle demands, and to live and act in a consistently virtuous way, then they must avoid imitation of all but virtuous men.52

51

Socrates allows at 386d that the guardians may sometimes, and “briefly,” imitate an inferior man, but only if it involves imitating the inferior man doing something good. 52 The “one man, one job” principle is first introduced at 370a ff.: “We weren’t all born alike, but each of us differs somewhat in nature from the others, one being suited to one task, another to another. Or don’t you think so? ...The result, then, is that more plentiful and better-quality goods are more easily produced if each person does one thing for which he is naturally suited, does it at the right

58 Socrates intends for this policy to extend to every aspect of the guardians’ lives. This point is contested by Burnyeat, who claims that Socrates’ question whether the guardians should be imitators is a question of whether they should engage in dramaturgy – that is, in writing and producing tragedies and comedies in front of large audiences. It is not, he claims, a question of whether they should “indulge in mimicry at parties.”53 However, Burnyeat’s interpretation cannot be correct. To begin with, by this point in the text Socrates and his interlocutors have already emphatically agreed, on the basis of the “one man, one job” principle, that the guardians must not engage in any other craft but the craft of guardianship. A man cannot be skilled in the art of war, Socrated has said, while “practicing any other art whatsoever” (374c). Therefore, there is absolutely no question, as far as Socrates and his interlocutors are concerned, about whether the guardians should be poets or even dabble in poetic composition. They already know the answer to that question. At the very least, it is one that they would be able to answer again very quickly with a simple reminder of “one man, one job” and would not require an extended discussion. The reason we get the extended discussion is because Plato wants to make a new point that is not obvious: that imitating, for example, a shoemaker, is a way of engaging in the art of shoemaking, and that imitating bad men, in even the most mundane of contexts, is a way of behaving badly oneself. Therefore, Socrates wants to proscribe all bad imitation by the guardians, not just bad imitation involved in composing comedies and

time, and is released from having to do any of the others.” The principle is then reiterated and emphasized in the specific case of the guardians at 374b-c. 53 See Burnyeat, “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” 71 ff.

59 tragedies. That he has the broader intention is clear when he says that a young guardian should narrate in the proper style “whenever he must say anything” (396c, emphasis mine). Contra Burnyeat, then, mimicry at parties is exactly the sort of behavior that Socrates wants to rule out – or rather, it is part of exactly what he wants to rule out. Socrates begins his discussion as a discussion of poetic style, and, to be sure, among the conclusions he draws are conclusions about what sorts of poets will be allowed in the city. But Plato has a much broader ambition in composing this discussion, and he uses the notion of poetic imitation to ease the reader into a discussion of imitative behavior more generally. Ultimately, he wants to show not just how poetry should be expressed, but how good men should express themselves in everything they do at all times. The focus on spirited emotions comes when Socrates describes the attitudes that he hopes to instill in the guardians toward different kinds of imitative behavior. He says that when a sensible man comes in his narrative to some speech or deed of a good man, he will not be “ashamed” to imitate him. However, he will refuse to imitate an inferior or unworthy man out of shame. “He’ll be ashamed,” Socrates says, “both because he’s unpracticed at imitating such men and because he can’t stand forming himself according to, and fitting himself into, the models of worse men” (396d). If the guardians are properly reared, Socrates thinks, then they should be ashamed not just to do bad things themselves, but also even to imitate the bad actions of others. It is not enough that the guardians feel disgust toward the wailing speeches of Achilles and that they be ashamed to indulge in such speeches in their own times of sorrow: they must also be ashamed

60 to impersonate or imitate Achilles or any other indecently behaving man. Because performing a bad action in one’s own life and imitating the bad action of another man both produce bad habits and patterns in the soul, guardians must avoid the imitation as much as the real thing. The purpose of Socrates discussion, then, is to broaden the scope of the actions that are forbidden to the guardians, and to make sure that the spirited attitudes shaped by early education prevent them from engaging in that wider range of behavior. 1.3 Music, I have argued, educates thumos by conditioning the individual to feel the spirited attitudes of admiration, disgust, and shame appropriately. If musical education has this effect on thumos, however, then that raises the question of what exactly gymnastic training does for the spirited part of the soul, and what the relationship is between music and gymnastic. Gymnastic is, after all, the part of education that Socrates explicitly says at 411e is for the spirited side of our nature. To address this issue, we must first examine the way that Socrates characterizes music’s effect on the individual and on spirit – that is, by what sort of process music’s psychological influence takes place. When he introduces his discussion of poetic content, Socrates says, “Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it” (377a). Music, Socrates indicates, works by molding the souls of the young guardians – that is, it educates them by directly shaping their attitudes and desires. Although Socrates does not

61 yet mention spirit explicitly, later in Book 3 he describes the psychological effects of music on thumos in strikingly similar terms. He says: When a man gives himself to music and lets the flute play and pour into his soul through his ears, as it were into a funnel – using those sweet, soft wailing harmonies we were just speaking of – and spends his whole life humming and exulting in song, at first, whatever spiritedness he had, he softens like iron and makes useful from having been useless and hard. But when he keeps at it without letting up and charms his spirit, he, as the next step, already begins to melt and liquefy his spirit, until he dissolves it completely and cuts out, as it were, the sinews from his soul and makes it ‘a feeble warrior’ (411a). Here Socrates likens the spirited part of the soul to a metal that, when softened to a certain degree, becomes useful (and when softened too much, loses its strength and becomes useless). The reason metal becomes useful when it is soft, of course, is that when it is soft one can mold it into whatever instrument one wants. Similarly, this passage suggests, when thumos is “soft” one can mold it into the kind of spirited soul-part that one wants it to be. Presumably, that molding is the influencing of thumos that happens through poetry and speeches in the way I have described; it is the process of “stamping a model” on the soul, as Socrates puts it. However, this passage also suggests that music does something more to spirit, for it indicates that musical education is responsible, not just for molding spirit, but also for making spirit malleable to begin with: thumos becomes soft, Socrates tells us, through melody and song. The picture that emerges of musical education of thumos, then, is of a kind of two-part process: song and melody soften the spir-

62 ited part of the soul so that it is open to influence, and poetry does the influencing by shaping spirit’s sense of what is admirable and shameful.54 This characterization of thumos’ development helps us to see the purpose of gymnastic education as well as Socrates’ motive for insisting (without any real explanation) that music must precede gymnastic in early education. Gymnastic training, as Socrates describes it, is designed to make thumos stronger. To make a soul-part stronger in this sense is presumably to have effects such as increasing the motivational force of its desires and maximizing its effectiveness in its proper psychic role (which, for thumos, is making the individual courageous). Gymnastic achieves this strenthening effect through competitive exercises and rewards for success in those exercises that are designed to stimulate and test the spirited part of the soul as well as exercise its psychic “muscle.” The effect of gymnastic, then, is just the opposite of music: gymnastic hardens and toughens spirit. It is crucial for gymnastic to come after music, then, because gymnastic is supposed to solidify and strengthen the spirited dispositions and attitudes that the individual develops through musical education. If the individual has not yet developed those dispositions, then gymnastic will do him no good. In order to make a functional metal object, one must first soften and shape the metal and then harden it; if one did things in the reverse order, one would end up with a uselessly puddy-like chunk of metal (albeit one in the shape of something useful, perhaps – say, a wrench-shaped piece of metal that is not hard enough to actually turn anything). Another reason gymnastic must come second is that it is supposed to test the 54

This is not to imply that this is all that song and melody do for the soul, but only that this is their primary effect on thumos.

63 guardians’ commitment, through pleasures and pains, to the right opinions that have been inculculated in them by music. If they undergo gymnastic training first, then they will not yet have those opinions, and gymnastic tests will show nothing conclusive about their dedication to virtuous principles. Early education, then, trains the spirited part of the soul in two ways that are independent of each other: music provides thumos with what is properly called “moral education” – that is, education about what is valuable and good – and gymnastic solidifies the effects of that education and makes thumos stronger. 2. Early Education and the Reasoning Part of the Soul According to the view I have presented, musical education directly trains the spirited part of the soul by conditioning an individual to feel the attitudes of admiration, disgust, and shame correctly. Given Socrates’ focus on these spirited attitudes in his discussion and his characterization of music as a process of “molding” the individual, we have good reasons for thinking that the policies he advocates concerning music – and concerning poetic content and style, in particular – are conceived with thumos primarily in mind, as I have suggested. 55 However, as we have noted, Socrates’ stated position is that music is for the philosophic side of the guardians’ nature – that is, for what he later identifies with the (developing) reasoning part of their soul – and in order to fully appreciate and understand the program of early education that Plato develops in the text, we must be able to account for this claim by identifying some important sense in which music is for “the philosophic” in us. Here I would like to outline how music provides educa55

See Appendix C for further evidence from Socrates’ discussion that indicates he understands music as having a direct influence on the spirited part of the soul.

64 tion for the reasoning part of the soul, and I will suggest that that education importantly includes a role for thumos itself to play in reason’s development. 56 I will then argue that music’s long-term and complete success in training the spirited part of the soul depends on music’s success in fostering reason’s proper condition. 2.1 In order to see how music educates the rational part of the soul, we must first examine the nature of reason and identify how, given its nature, reason can and should be educated. On Plato’s view, reason is innately attracted to wisdom and the Good, which means both that reason desires those things by nature and that it has the innate capacity to actually pursue and attain them, if left to its own devices. The problem, however, is that during embodiment, reason’s innate pursuit of the Good gets interfered with by its ties to the physical world and, in particular, by its ties to the non-rational soul-parts, whose concerns and desires are limited to that physical world. Their influence, Socrates tells us, has the effect of “weighing reason down.” He says: If this part of such a nature [i.e. the reasoning part] were trimmed in earliest childhod and its ties of kinship with becoming were cut off – like leaden weights, which eating and such pleasures as well as their refinements naturally attach to the soul and turn its vision downward – if, I say, it were rid of them and turned around toward the true things, this 56

In Rep. 7 we learn that the study of harmonics is the highest study that the intended philosopher-king receives prior to dialectic and the rise to knowledge of the Good (530d ff.). Harmonics is entirely distinct from early musical education (see Rep. 522a), but it is worth noting that, in addition to the role that Plato sees for music in early education, he also sees a much more advanced role for it in (much) later, purely rational education. Cf. Timaeus 47c-e and 80a-b; Laws 961d.

65 same part of the same human beings would see them most sharply, just as it does now those things toward which it is now turned (519a). Through the influence of (especially) appetite, human beings come to direct their rational desires and powers away from the realm of true being and wisdom and toward objects and pursuits in the world. We see this, for example, in the case of the money-loving oligarch of Book 8, whose appetitive part has taken over control of his soul and whose reasoning part, as a result, acts as a slave to appetite and is not allowed “to reason about or consider anything but where more money will come from less” (553d). The oligarch is still making use of the reasoning part of his soul and its capacities – for example, to engage in means-end reasoning, deliberate about long-term plans, and even think about what is best for him – but because the individual has, under appetite’s corrupting influence, come to mistakenly identify wealth as the primary value for a human being, reason’s capacities are misused and do not lead it toward the true object of the person’s rational desire, the Good. If one could eliminate the negative influences of appetite (and thumos, too), however, then reason would be free to pursue wisdom and goodness correctly. It is with this picture in mind that Socrates characterizes rational education as a process of “turning reason around” – that is, a process of directing reason and its inherent capacities toward the intelligible realm of being and toward, therefore, what it truly and innately wants. Thus there is an important difference between the education of thumos and the education of reason. Whereas the education of spirit, as Socrates presents it, is best undestood as a process of shaping the indi-

66 vidual – of directly impressing the right kinds of attitudes and desires on him – rational education cannot be understood this way. Reason’s desire for the Good is, because of reason’s nature, a given: it is neither possible to shape or change reason’s desire, nor is there any need to do so. In the case of reason, the question is not how to mold its inclinations and interests, but rather how to make sure that the interests and inclinations it already has by nature can be satisfied given the conditions of embodiment. Socrates makes this contrast between reason and the other soul-parts explicit when he says, “[The other virtues of a soul] are really not there beforehand and are later produced by habits and exercises, while the virtue of exercising prudence is more than anything somehow more divine, it seems; it never loses its power, but according to the way it is turned, it becomes useful and helpful or, again, useless and harmful” (518d). Reason, on Plato’s view, can be directed or misdirected, distracted or not distracted, interfered with or not interfered with, but it is not there to be molded and shaped or not. 2.2 We can now see that music, as Socrates conceives it when he says that musical education is for the philosophic side of us, must educate the reasoning part of the soul not by imprinting good opinions or desires onto it, but rather by preparing it to “turn around” toward the realm of being. The word “prepare” is important here, because as I noted earlier, the reasoning part of the soul is not yet fully developed during childhood and therefore not yet capable of “turning” toward the intelligible realm. Socrates is mindful of this point, and he later distinguishes music and gymnastic from those studies that involve the actual turning

67 around of reason.57 Music, therefore, inasmuch as it contributes to educating reason, must do so by nourishing the developing reasoning part of the soul and by preparing it for serious rational study later on. Music does this, I want to claim, by providing both environmental and psychological conditions that are conducive to reason’s eventual pursuit of wisdom and the Good. Let us consider first the environmental. As we have seen, musical education seeks to make sure that, to the greatest extent possible, the young guardians are surrounded by people and things that are truly good and admirable. The reason this assists an individual’s rational progress has to do with the fact that, on Plato’s view, reason’s successful pursuit of wisdom depends in large part the individual’s access to “reminders” of the Forms – that is, his access to things in the physical realm that serve to direct his rational attention, in an illuminating and inspiring way, toward the realm of being. In the Symposium, for example, the philosopher’s ascent toward his love and understanding of true Beauty begins with his love of a beautiful human body.58 Through his reflection on the beauty of the body, he comes to love beautiful souls, and then beautiful laws and speeches, and finally he progresses to loving intelligible Beauty Itself. Similarly, in the Phaedrus, the philosopher’s passion for wisdom and his recollection of the Form of Beauty (which his soul is presumed to have “seen” prior to its embodiment) is awakened by the sight of a beautiful boy.59 Plato, then, despite taking the

57

See 522a-b. See Nehamas, “Beauty of Body, Nobility of Soul” for an enlightening examination of the philosopher’s ascent and Plato’s understanding of erôs. 59 In the Republic, Plato is less explicit than in the Symposium or Phaedrus that beautiful sensibles have this specific psychological function, but given that Plato 58

68 distractions of embodiment to be the primary obstacle to the pursuits of reason, also sees a crucial positive role for people and things in the physical world to play in our moral progress. It is a role that they play effectively, however, only if they are (truly) beautiful and good. If one is surrounded by bad people acting in shameful ways, by ugly bodies, and by unsightly products of craft, then (whatever appetitive or spirited desires may be stimulated by those things) they will not be successful at reminding one of what is of true value, for the simple reason that they are nothing like anything of true value. 60 Musical education, on the one hand, seeks to eliminate negative influences of this kind (which have a distracting effect on reason by directing its attention and thought, and potentially also its desires, toward bad things) from the individual’s environment and, on the other

is clear in the Republic that exposure to beautiful sensibles through musical education has value to the developing reasoning part of the soul, and given the supplementary evidence provided by Phaedrus and Symposium, we can figure out what he has in mind. Moreover, Plato also makes it explicit in the discussion of the philosopher’s education in Book 7 that rational study of sensibles (for example, study of the cosmos in astronomy and study of music in harmonics; see 529c ff.) is an essential part of the philosopher’s assent toward the good. 60 Perhaps, at best, ugly and bad things could, in a sense, “remind” an especially gifted thinker of Beauty and Goodness through reflection on the qualities that they lack – that is, a certain amount of reflection on what ugly and bad things are not may be helpful in figuring out what beautiful and good things are. It is worth noting, however, that in the Phaedrus the philosopher is not reminded, in the strict sense, of true Beauty until he sees striking beauty in the world. The implication is clearly that whatever non-beautiful things in the world he has come into contact with up to that point have failed to remind him of Beauty Itself. In the Phaedo (73c ff.) Socrates distinguishes two ways in which a person might be reminded of something – by something similar, and by something dissimilar. By similar he has in mind the way that equal sticks or stones can make a person think of the Equal Itself. By dissimilar he has in mind the way that a piece of clothing can make a lover think of his beloved. A piece of clothing and a beloved individual are dissimilar because, of course, they are different in kind. Note, however, that Socrates does not recognize a way in which one can be reminded of something by coming into contact with its opposite.

69 hand, seeks to replace them with positive influences that will help guide reason’s powers in the right direction. Although the young guardians are not at their age mature enough to engage in the sort of reasoning necessary to achieve wisdom, music makes sure that their developing reasoning capacities are directed toward the right objects and, in doing so, prevents their rational focus from being misdirected toward ugly and bad things at an early age. This paves the way for the guardians to make moral progress as they mature rationally. Music also aims to make the individual’s psychological conditions conducive to his pursuit of wisdom and the Good. To begin with, this means making reason’s influence in the soul as great as possible. Therefore, musical education aims at nourishing the reasoning part of the soul or, as Socrates puts it, “tightening” it. According to Socrates, music stimulates and fosters an individual’s reasoning and his love of learning, while neglect of music, on the other hand, has a debilitating effect on them. Although Socrates does not fill in precise details about how music has these effects, he does offer an important clue, asking Glaucon, “What happens when a man does nothing and never communes with a Muse? Even if there was some love of learning in his soul, because it never tastes of any kind of learning or investigation nor partakes in speech or the rest of music, doesn’t it become weak, deaf, and blind because it isn’t awakened or trained and its perceptions aren’t purified?” (411c-d). The problem, it seems, is that although reason is innately inclined to engage in reasoning and pursue the Good, if an individual never directs his reasoning toward any worthy objects or activities, his rational capacities and interests will be severely compromised and weakened. That

70 does not necessarily mean that the reasoning part of his soul will not retain rational powers in a different sense – the money-loving oligarch may in fact be quite a shrewd and clever calculator about how to obtain wealth – but the individual’s ability to use reason in the way it is naturally suited, and very crucially his interest in using it in that way, will suffer if he does not receive proper musical education. Individuals must, therefore, “learn” and “investigate,” and their “perceptions” must be purified so that their love of learning does not become “deaf” and “blind.” The language Socrates uses here suggests that the kind of investigation that is encouraged at this early stage involves learning about new things through the senses – specifically, learning about the fine and good things that musical education ensures are part of the young guardians’ environment.

Perceptual

learning is precisely the sort of learning that young children are capable of and often interested in from a very early age, and Socrates apparently identifies it as an important precursor to the strictly rational education that the young guardians will receive later on.61 Socrates also specifically mentions the importance of exposure to speeches. Presumably, Plato thinks that there is an important connection between familiarity with speeches (logoi) at an early age and the use of reason (logos) as a mature adult: in listening to and taking an interest in speeches (for example, in poetry), the young guardians are actively exercising, in a primitive way, the very same capacity to use and understand language that will form the basis of their capacity to reason later on. 61

Cf. the opening words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses.” (980a22-23).

71 What all of this shows is that musical education does not merely expose the young guardians to truly fine and good things and speeches, but also encourages and involves study of and thinking about those things in a way that fosters and empowers their love of learning. The plausible point that Plato wants to make is that individuals who cultivate no interest in learning and discovery during childhood are unlikely either to be interested in serious rational education as an adult or to be fit for such education. Musical education, therefore, aims to make sure that the individual’s love of learning is stimulated and thriving from an early age so that when the individual becomes mature, he will have developed the rational interests that are necessary for the pursuit of true wisdom. Thus music, in a sense, “strengthens” the reasoning part of the soul in much the same way that gymnastic strengthens the spirited part.62

62

The difference, however, is that

In Book 6 of the Republic Socrates discusses what kind of nature the future philosopher-kings should have and how such a nature is to be found. “[This nature] must be tested,” he says, “in the labors, fears, and pleasures we mentioned then; and moreover – what we passed over then but mention now – it must also be given gymnastic (gymnazein dei) in many studies to see whether it will be able to bear the greatest studies, or whether it will turn out to be a coward, as some turn out to be cowards in the other things” (503e). Here Socrates indicates that prior to taking up “the greatest studies,” the guardians must receive “gymnastic in studies” to see whether they are fit for higher education. The text is ambiguous, however, about which branch of early education is to include this newly mentioned intellectual gymnastic: (1) music, or (2) gymnastic itself. (We can reasonably assume that it belongs to one of the two branches of early education, since Socrates never mentions any other study falling between early education and “the greatest studies,” and since he clearly presents intellectual gymnastic as coming before the “the greatest studies.”) If it belongs to (1), then that would confirm the idea that musical training involves active study designed to prepare the young guardians for later rational education. On this reading, Socrates’ use of the word gymnazein would not be meant to indicate the branch of study to which intellectual gymnastic belongs, but merely to draw an analogy between intellectual exercise and endurance and the strenous physical exercise and endurance that gymnastic proper involves. If intellectual gymnastic belongs to (2), then that would suggest a con-

72 whereas making thumos stronger and providing moral education for it are independent of each other, in the case of reason the two effects cannot be separated in the same way. That is, one can make spirit stronger whether or not it has the right desires – Socrates explicitly addresses this possibility when he speaks of those who, much to their own detriment, devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic – but to make reason “stronger” necessarily involves pointing its desire for the Good in the right direction, since reason’s “strength” just means its ability to carry out its innately given activity.63 By exposing an individual to the sorts of activities and objects that appeal to his love of learning, therefore, one both nourishes or “strenghtens” the reasoning part of the soul and at the same time helps prepare it to turn toward the Good.

tinuum of the seriousness of study, beginning during musical education with the encouragement of perceptual learning and exposure to stories and speeches, continuing through gymnastic education with more intellectually demanding exercises, and arriving finally at the “greatest studies,” which are responsible for actually turning reason around toward the intelligible realm. One reason for preferring the second interpretation (aside from the use of gymnazein) is that gymnastic education comes after musical education, and it makes sense to think that rigorous testing in “many studies” would take place at a later, rather than an earlier, point in childhood. Moreover, it also sems likely that Plato would have seen an advantage in continual rational, or proto-rational, stimulation, rather than an early period of rational stimulation followed by a period of none. If this interpretation is correct, then what Socrates does here is sneak rigorous intellectual training into what his interlocutors had previously been led to believe was training for spirit (and for the body, secondarily) alone. His remark that this intellectual training is something “that we passed over then but mention now” really does reveal a genuine sleight of hand on Plato’s part, then. 63 There is no contradiction in Plato’s thinking both (1) that reason’s power to pursue wisdom is innate and (2) that reason needs to be nourished through musical education if its power is to be realized and properly utilized. Similarly, there is no contradiction in saying that the body does not have to be “trained” to grow, but that it does have to be fed. The point is that reason by its nature pursues, and has the capacity to pursue, wisdom, but it has to be “fed” on learning so that its native power is not compromised by harmful influences.

73 While reason’s influence in the soul must be maximized, the other side of this point is that the negative influence of the other soul-parts in the soul must be minimized. Throughout the Republic, Plato presents the soul’s desires – and in particular the desires of the appetitive and reasoning parts – as being in competition with one another. Socrates says, for example, “We surely know that when someone’s desires incline strongly to some one thing, they are therefore weaker with respect to the rest, like a stream that has been channeled off in that other direction” (485d). On Plato’s view, a person has a fixed amount of desiderative energy at any given time, with the result that a person’s rational and appetitive desires are involved in a sort of zero-sum contest: if reason and its desires are strong, then appetite and its desires must be correspondingly weak; if appetite strong, then reason weak.64 Therefore, ensuring through musical education that the young guardians focus on the right objects and activities is largely a matter of ensuring that they do not focus on the wrong ones. If the guardians do not receive musical training, then their attention and desire will necessarily be directed elsewhere, either by the desires of thumos – which, because it is not being properly balanced by reason, will be savage and uncontrolled – or by the desires of appetite. Whatever the case, the individual will be strengthening the non-rational soulparts and feeding their desires at the expense of the reasoning part, and the result of that neglect will inevitably be that his reasoning part will be overpowered, dis-

64

Early in the text, Cephalus anticipates this tension by stating, “As the other pleasures, the ones connected to the body, wither away in me, the desires and pleasures that have to do with speeches grow the more” (328d). Along similar lines, Socrates later asks, “Isn’t virtue in tension with wealth, as though each were lying in the scale of a balance, always inclining in opposite directions?” (550e).

74 tracted, and corrupted by the inferior elements in his soul. Musical education makes sure that reason and its desires have the appropriate strength and influence in the soul relative to the other soul-parts and that, as a result, reason is eventually able to pursue, without interference or distraction, the wisdom that it desires and seeks by nature. Finally, another way that music helps produce psychological conditions conducive to reason’s pursuit of wisdom is through its education of thumos. As we saw, musical education trains the individual to feel the spirited attitudes of admiration, disgust, and shame appropriately. The benefit of those attitudes for the individual, however, need not be limited to their providing spirited motivation to do the right thing or spirited aversion to doing the wrong thing. They can also help the individual progress rationally. As we saw, the individual’s pursuit of wisdom crucially begins with his attention to people and things in the world that, by having qualities such as goodness and beauty, serve as “reminders” of the intelligible realm. However, through thumos, music can do much more than merely place those beautiful people and things in the individual’s environment and hope that he pays rational attention to them; it can also direct his attention to them in a compelling way through his spirited emotions. If an individual has been trained to admire good individuals for their goodness – if such individuals captivate him – then his admiration will serve both to guarantee that he pays attention to them and that he sees the very qualities in them that make them admirable and good. Likewise, if an individual has been trained to feel shame in the face of truly

75 shameful actions, then he will not be able to help but see those actions as bad.65 In this way musical education has a profoundly beneficial psychological effect on reason that is mediated through the individual’s spirited attitudes and emotions. By getting the individual to pay attention to good people and things and to begin seeing what is good about them (and by getting him to see what is bad about bad things), music provides invaluable assistance to the reasoning part of his soul in its pursuit of Goodness and wisdom. And in this way thumos, because of musical education, has a valuable role to play in an individual’s rational development. 2.3 If thumos, through musical education, can help provide the right psychological conditions for reason’s pursuit of wisdom, it is also true that thumos cannot be successfully educated in the absence of a properly developed (or developing) reasoning part. To see why this is so, we should begin by looking at Socrates’ discussion of noble dogs in Book 2 – the discussion that he uses to introduce the topic of early education (as we saw in Chapter 1). There Socrates observes that a noble dog is both savage toward those it does not know and gentle and tame toward those it does, and Socrates argues that if it is to be gentle in this way, it must be “philosophic” in addition to being spirited. He says: When it sees someone it doesn’t know, it gets angry, even if it never had any bad experience with him. But when it sees someone it knows, it greets him warmly, even if it has never had a good experience with him... Surely this is an attractive quality of its nature and one that is truly philosophic.... Be65

See Jessica Moss, “Shame, Pleasure, and the Divided Soul,” for an excellent discussion of the psychological role of shame in the Gorgias and the connection between shame and thumos.

76 cause it distinguishes a friendly face from a hostile one on no other basis than having learned the one and being ignorant of the other. How could it be anything other than a lover of learning, if it defines what is its own and what is alien by knowledge and ignorance?” (376a-b).66 The idea is that a dog’s spirited impulses lead it to act savagely toward anyone unfamiliar – anyone of whom it is “ignorant” – and therefore, if the dog never recognized anyone, it would never act gently and tamely toward anyone. When the dog has “knowledge” of someone, on the other hand, then its spirit is gentle and calm, and the dog responds warmly to the person. The tameness that the dog feels toward those he recognizes is a feeling or impulse that arises from its thumos, but it is a feeling that arises only in the presence of a certain kind of “knowledge” or information.67 The dog’s “philosophic” nature is the aspect of its nature responsible for the dog’s use of such “knowledge” to determine who is its own, and for that reason it is a necessary complement to its spirited nature if the dog is to act gently and tamely toward its oikeioi. Socrates does not actually think that dogs are philosophic, of course; he is making a joke in calling them that. On Plato’s view, dogs do not have anything like reason or a reasoning part of the soul, and they do not, therefore, seek or “love” actual wisdom, which for Plato would necessarily involve trying to dis-

66

To complete the argument, Socrates then asserts that love of learning (to philomathes) and love of wisdom (to philosophon) are the same (376b). 67 The impulse to act gently and warmly could not be an impulse of anything but the dog’s spirit, since dogs lack a reasoning part of the soul (and hence lack a distinct, rational source of motivation and behavior), and since the impulse is clearly not an appetitive one, on Plato’s view.

77 cover the Good.68 Socrates, in fact, reminds us of this fact in the passage just quoted by pointing out that a dog warmly welcomes someone it knows whether or not it has ever had a good experience with him. The dog reacts without any regard for what is good because it lacks a truly philosophic part of its nature that could have any regard for what is good. Likewise, the “knowledge” that the dogs have and make use of is not real knowledge at all (at least, not on Plato’s theory), but is merely perceptual information, presumably supplied through the faculties of memory and sense-perception, to the effect that someone is familiar.69 It is through the analogy to noble dogs that Plato introduces the philosophic part of human nature in the text. Like dogs, Socrates claims, a human being must be philosophic by nature and a lover of learning if he is going to be gentle toward those he knows (376b-c).70 There is, of course, a significant disanalogy between humans and dogs: while dogs do not have reason, humans do. Therefore, human beings do have a genuinely philosophic, wisdom-seeking nature, and they also have a distinct part of the soul responsible for that nature. While Socrates is

68

See Rep. 441a-b. The text leaves some questions about what exactly the “philosophic” nature of dogs is and what does. All that we know is that it is the part of the dog’s nature in virtue of which the dog uses knowledge to define what is its own. Does that mean that it processes the information received through perception? Is it somehow responsible for seeking such information? Is it the perceptual faculty itself, which supplies the information? These open questions would be troubling only if Plato were presenting a theory of canine psychology. Since the philosophical purpose of the analogy (discussed below, in the main text) is not one that requires Plato to have a definitive account of the psychological nature of dogs, however, we need press the analogy’s details. 70 It is in this passage that Socrates first introduces the notion of being a “philosopher” (philosophos) in the Republic, which of course becomes a richly developed and important notion later in the text. The idea that people should be philosophers like dogs are is (and is meant to be) a humorous one. 69

78 only being tongue-in-cheek in attributing a “philosophic” nature to dogs, he is genuinely committed to the idea of a philosophic nature of human beings, and as he indicates later, he identifies that part of human nature with the reasoning part of the soul in its various stages of development. Despite the whimsical nature of the analogy to dogs, Plato uses it because he wants to make a serious point about human nature: just as the dog’s gentleness of spirit is made possible by its “philosophic” nature, so also the spirited part of the human soul will be appropriately tame and controlled only if the reasoning part of the individual’s soul – what is philosophic in him – does its own job in the soul and provides a necessary balance to the spirited part. There are two ways in which the reasoning part of the human soul makes thumos gentle, the first of which is direct and the second indirect. The first has to do with the special relationship that Plato identifies between reason and thumos. Socrates characterizes thumos as “the ally of reason,” and he presents thumos as being specially responsive to the commands and desires of reason (in a way that the appetitive part of the soul is not).71 When a person’s spirit boils up in the face of a perceived slight, the reasoning part of his soul is able to “call in” thumos as a shepherd calls in a dog, and it is able to extinguish the impetuous revengeimpulses to which thumos naturally gives rise or to redirect them toward appropriate, more considered courses of action (440d).72 If a man rationally judges that he is being punished justly, Socrates tells us, then if he is noble, his thumos will 71

In the next chapter, I examine, and provide a psychologically detailed explanation of, this congenial relationship between reason and thumos. 72 Note that, once again, Plato uses dogs in talking about thumos. Here, however, spirit itself is compared to a dog.

79 be sensitive to that judgment and the man will not be angry toward his punisher (440c). Reason, then, is able to mitigate the savage impulses of thumos by offering information and guidance about, for example, what is admirable or just. In the same way that a dog’s spirit responds to information about who is familiar by becoming gentle and affectionate, so also the spirited part of the human soul becomes gentle and controlled when guided by the information and judgments provided by reason. The point of Plato’s analogy between dogs and humans, therefore, is not to reveal anything special about the “philosophic” part of the human soul itself, but rather to reveal something special about thumos and its relationship to reason and to the information that reason provides.73 The second way that reason – or the philosophic part of human nature – makes thumos gentle is by making it possible for human beings to engage in persuasion. On Plato’s view, violence and savageness are appropriate, at least ideally, only against those who do not belong to one’s family, city or people – that is, only against genuinely foreign enemies. 74 Conflicts and disagreements that occur

73

The analogy is even closer than it might at first appear in light of the account I provide in Chapter 3. There I argue that communication between reason and thumos takes place by means of quasi-perceptual representations that are provided by the individual’s faculty of imagination. Therefore, the “information” that thumos receives in the human soul is the same in kind as the information that dogs get – in both cases, the content of the information is perceptual. The difference between dogs and humans, then, is that because human beings have reason, the breadth and sophistication of the information that is available to thumos from reason is significantly greater than that of the information that can be provided only by the senses themselves. 74 See, for example, Rep. 470c: “Then when Greeks do battle with barbarians or barbarians with Greeks, we’ll say that they are at war and are enemies by nature, and this hatred must be called war. But when Greeks do any such thing to Greeks, we’ll say that they are by nature friends, but in this case Greece is sick and factious, and this kind of hatred must be called faction.”

80 among those who fall within one’s circle, on the other hand, should be resolved peacefully. Being “tame” toward those who are familiar in part means using persuasion rather than force to influence their behavior. In order for peaceful interaction and conflict resolution to take place, however, the guardians must be able to engage in thoughtful discussions with one another in which they are able to appeal to each other’s rational nature.75 If they are incapable of that kind of interaction, then spirited feelings of frustration and anger among them will not be able to be redirected toward, or mitigated by, non-violent courses of action. Musical training allows the individual to develop the rational capacities that are required for persuading others (and for being persuaded by them) and thus for interacting peacefully with them. It is no coincidence that when a man neglects music, “he no longer makes any use of persuasion by means of reason, but goes about everything with force and savageness” (411d). Musical education aims, as we have seen, to make the young guardians not only courageous and savage toward their enemies, but also, even more importantly, gentle and tame toward their friends. The philosophic part of their nature, both through its ability to soothe and influence thumos directly and by providing the individual with the ability to engage in persuasion, is what makes such tameness possible for a human being.

75

Thus in the discussion of harmonic modes, Socrates says that they should leave one mode that imitates a courageous man performing warlike, violent deeds in battle, and a second mode “for a man who performs a peaceful deed, one that is not violent but voluntary, either persuading someone of something and making a request – whether a god by prayer or a human being by instruction and exhortation – or, on the contrary, holding himself in check for someone else who makes a request or instructs him or persuades him to change” (399a ff.).

81 3. Early Education and the Appetitive Part of the Soul We have seen that, as Socrates tells us, early education is both for “the philosophic” and (especially) for “the spirited” parts of our nature – later identified with the reasoning and spirited parts of the soul – and that it affects both in complex ways. What is conspicuously missing from the account of early education that Socrates provides, however, is any training or education aimed specifically at the appetitive part of the soul. This omission is particularly striking given that, throughout the Republic, appetite and its desires for pleasure and wealth are characterized as the main threat to the aims of reason and to an individual’s moral progress. One would expect, then, that Plato would devote special attention to methods of training and improving the appetitive part of the soul through education. The reason he does not, I will argue, is that appetite is simply not educable in the ways that thumos or reason are. Indeed, given the importance of moral education to Plato, and given the threat to moral progress posed by appetite, we can be sure that if Plato had thought that appetite was educable in the same or similar ways, he would have told us that. The fact that he does not is very revealing. In this Section I will suggest why, given appetite’s nature, it cannot or should not be educated in the ways that spirit and reason are, and why attempting to educate it in those ways would, therefore, be either futile or straightforwardly bad for the individual. I will then argue, that, nonetheless, there are ways to moderate and control appetite, I will suggest what those ways are, on Plato’s account, and I will argue that those methods of controlling appetite do not count as moral education.

82 3.1 According to the account I have offered, early education is designed to have two main effects on the spirited and reasoning parts of the soul. First, musical education makes sure (in different ways for each) that both reason and spirit desire and pursue the right things: in the case of thumos, it does this by training thumos to desire things that are, in fact, admirable and good; in the case of reason, it does this by providing conditions conducive to reason’s pursuit of the goodness that it already desires by nature. Second, music and gymnastic make spirit and reason stronger by feeding them on the objects of their desire: gymnastic strengthens thumos with competitions and honors, and music strengthens reason with speeches and learning. Plato does not designate a branch of education designed to bring about either of these effects in the appetitive part of the soul, however. The reason, I will now argue, is that appetite cannot be educated in the first way, and it should not be educated in the second way. The reason appetite cannot be educated in the first way – that is, made to reliably desire only things that are good – has to do with the object of its desire: bodily pleasure. The reasoning part of the soul, as we have seen, by nature desires goodness and has innate resources for pursuing it. Therefore, if one removes obstacles to reason’s native activity, it will pursue what is good on its own. Thumos is different, because what thumos in a human being desires is not the good but rather what seems admirable or kalon, and thumos will not, if simply left to its own devices, pursue what is truly admirable. Nevertheless, thumos is educable because one can, through education, substantially influence what a person finds

83 admirable. One can do so, as we have seen, through the sorts of role models that one provides and by influencing what kinds of people and things are actually honored and treated with admiration in that person’s society. The reason that appetite cannot be educated in the way that thumos can is that appetite’s characteristic and most primitive desire is the desire for bodily pleasure, and what counts as pleasurable for someone is to a large extent determined by brute facts about their body and the nature of the physical world. Therefore, it is not the kind of desire that can be molded and shaped through education. One can, in various ways and to a great extent, influence whether a young individual finds a certain kind of behavior admirable – say, holding oneself together in times of grief – but one cannot make him feel pleasure when he wounds his hand or pain when he eats the food that sates his hunger.76 The problem, moreover, is not just that a person’s appetites resist education, but also that appetitive desires tend by their nature to be in tension with a person’s pursuit of what is actually good for him. The problem is that the appetitive part of the soul desires pleasure indiscriminately – that is, without any regard for whether the pleasurable thing is good for the individual. That would be fine if only good things felt pleasurable to people; but that is not the case. As a result, whenever what is physically pleasurable or painful for someone (or what he expects to be physically pleasurable or painful) is in conflict with what is good for him, his appetites will potentially provide a motivation for him to do something 76

Perhaps there are extreme, sadistic measures that one could take to bring about a perverse result of this sort. However, Plato is not interested in being abusive or making individuals pathological, so such measures, if they do exist, are not the sort he would want to make use of in a general education program.

84 wrong. The temptation of the pleasures of food, drink, and sex provide the paradigmatic examples of conflict between pleasure and goodness. Often individuals are hungry or want a drink or want sex when it would be bad for then to eat or drink or have sex. Likewise, it is sometimes good for individuals to do things that are likely to be physically painful – for example, risking injury in battle for a noble cause. Therefore, the appetitive part of the soul does not, and cannot be made to, desire only good things, because by nature it desires something that turns out to be bad for people sometimes, and that desire is resistant to being directed or restrained. The reason appetite should not be educated in the second way mentioned above – that is, made stronger – is that appetite, on Plato’s view, becomes increasingly harmful to an individual the stronger it is. This point is, of course, related to the previous one: if appetite cannot be educated, then making it stronger would only increase the psychic influence of incorrigible desires. Those desires do not just become more powerful when appetite is stronger, though; they also become worse, on Plato’s view. Even in its most primitive and basic expressions – hunger, thirst, and the desire for sex – appetitive desire will sometimes be in conflict with what is good for an individual, as we just saw.

As appetite becomes

stronger, however, its desires become increasingly variegated and perverse, and it becomes an increasingly disruptive force in the soul. In Book 9 Socrates likens the appetitive part of the soul to a many-headed beast snapping and biting in every direction (588c ff.). Feeding it on pleasures, he says, only makes it more savage and empowers it to take control of the human being. Socrates worries about this

85 possibility, which is why he assigns to reason and thumos the joint task of keeping appetite in check. “They’ll keep an eye on it,” he says, “for fear of its being filled with the so-called pleasures of the body and thus becoming big and strong, and then not minding its own business, but attempting to enslave and rule what is not appropriately ruled by its kind and subverting everyone’s entire life” (442a).77 Feeding appetite on pleasures makes it stronger in the way that gymnastic makes thumos stronger and music makes reason stronger. However, the reason that those soul-parts should be made stronger through education is that both of them can be made to desire only good things. Therefore, it serves the individual’s interest to have their influence in the soul be as strong as possible. Because the spirited and reasoning parts of the soul are educable, they both have positive psychic roles to play in an individual’s moral development: according to the account that Socrates offers, spirit is uniquely responsible for the virtue of courage, and reason is uniquely responsible for the virtue of wisdom. Appetite, in contrast, is not uniquely responsible for any virtue in a comparable way and has no significant positive contribution to make to an individual’s good moral condition. Presumably, appetite does have some positive function in the soul – the function of providing awareness of bodily needs – and it needs to perform that function if a soul is to count as just (that is, as a soul in which all three parts “mind their own business.”) However, that is a function that appetite can

77

“Minding its own business,” for appetite, means providing motivations to satisfy natural bodily needs and even taking pleasure in the satisfaction of those needs. Thus Plato is not an ascetic about appetitive desire: there is nothing wrong with pleasure, only with unnatural and excessive pleasure that interferes with the rule of reason in the soul.

86 satisfy at its weakest. The desires of hunger and thirst are baseline appetitive desires that human beings (and other relevantly similar animals) have straight from birth simply in virtue of the physical sensations they experience; they are not desires that a person needs to “train” to have. And for Plato, the most important role appetite plays in the soul is simply the negative role it plays in the virtue of moderation – the role of not interfering with the rule of reason – and that negative role is one for which it will be best suited if it is weak rather than strong.78 Strengthening the appetitive part of the soul, therefore, is not a desirable effect of education because making it stronger makes its intractable desires not just more powerful but also worse, and because the function of appetite in the virtuous soul is one that demands its weakness and non-interference rather than its strength. 3.2 The fact that appetite is not educable in the way that thumos is does not mean that it cannot be trained or controlled at all. Indeed, it can be and, in Plato’s mind, must be if an individual is to develop and sustain virtue. However, the “training” for appetite is importantly different from the training that thumos receives through early education. I think we can identify three main methods in Plato for moderating and controlling appetite. I will first discuss what each of those methods is and will then discuss how they differ from the methods used to educate the spirited part of the soul. The first thing that can be done to make appetite behave, as the previous section suggests, is simply to make sure that it is as

78

Socrates defines moderation as the psychic condition that occurs “when the ruling part and the two ruled parts are of the single opinion that the reasoning part ought to rule and don’t raise a faction against it” (442d).

87 weak as possible. What this means is that an individual’s appetitive desires should not be indulged beyond providing him with those pleasures that are, in fact, good for him – most prominently, of course, the pleasures involved in satisfying his basic bodily needs. The individual should not be allowed either to pursue basic pleasures in immoderate amounts – eating gluttonously or getting excessively drunk, for example – or to pursue unnecessary or perverse pleasures. Limiting both the amount and the scope of the pleasures in which the individual is allowed to indulge will prevent appetite from becoming a powerful and unruly psychic force. Conversely, one can and should also take measures to make reason and thumos as strong as possible – precisely what Plato aims to do through early education, as I have shown – so that appetite’s relative power in the soul is minimal. Second, one can moderate and control appetite through something like attention-focusing. By limiting the individual’s exposure to harmful and unnecessary pleasures (as was suggested above), one not only makes appetite weak but also prevents it from having opportunities to desire those bad pleasures. If appetite has never been exposed to a certain kind of pleasure – a non-necessary pleasure, that is – then it is unlikely to develop a desire for that pleasure at all. Moreover, appetites are strongest and are the most psychologically disruptive when the object of desire is present: an ex-smoker is much more likely to feel the attractions of a cigarette in a bar full of people smoking than in a place where there are no cigarettes around. By removing harmful pleasures from the guardians’ environment, therefore, one goes a long way in keeping them from desiring those

88 pleasures. Conversely, one can presumably influence what pleasures appetite wants in a positive way by making the pleasures it is supposed to desire the ones that are actually available to it and by habituating the person to take pleasure in those things. Finally, one can use force, fear, and punishment to exploit appetite’s aversion to pain. One way to prevent someone from acting on a bad appetitive desire is simply to physically hold him back from doing so with force. Physical prevention of all bad actions, of course, is a difficult method to employ on a wide scale in a society. However, one can punish people when they act badly or threaten to punish them if they act badly. By punishing and threatening people in this way, one can make palpable to their appetitive part the pain that follows or accompanies certain pleasures, and the result will be that appetite’s desire for those pleasures is restrained, diminished, or eliminated. Over time, one may even be able to make appetite develop an aversion to harmful things that it used to desire as pleasurable. The use of threats and force against appetite is, on Plato’s view, the primary means of controlling it. This becomes most evident in his characterization of intra-psychic control of appetite. In the course of the argument for tripartition in the Republic, Socrates describes conflicts between appetite and the other two parts of the soul as a “war” in which the latter fight as allies against appetite (440a-b). One purpose of the martial metaphor is to present a picture of psychic conflict in which the brute force of rational and spirited desires competes against the brute force of appetitive desires. Provided that the better elements in the soul are appropriately strong, the motivations they generate will be powerful enough to

89 overcome appetitive motivations. Their success, it is clear, depends on the use of psychic force. Similarly, in the Phaedrus Socrates presents a metaphor for the tripartite soul in which reason is represented by a charioteer, thumos by an obedient, “good” horse, and appetite by a trouble-making, “bad” horse. In the story he tells, the charioteer and the horses all become filled with desire when they see a beautiful boy, but while the charioteer and the good horse refrain from approaching the boy out of prudence and shame, the bad horse wants to lunge on the boy (presumbly, out of sexual desire). The struggle between the bad horse and the others culminates in the bad horse’s attempt to pull the others forward through sheer force. At that point, Socrates says: [The charioteer] falls back as he would from a starting gate; and he violently yanks the bit back out of the teeth of the insolent horse, only harder this time, so that he bloodies its foul-speaking tongue and jaws, sets its legs and haunches firmly on the ground, and ‘gives it over to pain.’ When the bad horse has suffered this same thing many times, it stops being so insolent; now it is humble enough to follow the charioteer’s warnings, and when it sees the beautiful boy it is overwhelmed with fear (254e). Again, the struggle that takes place between appetite and the other parts of the soul is one that is resolved with force. Socrates describes, in the most violent terms, the way that the bad horse is repeatedly subjected to pain and injury by the charioteer. Finally, after the bad horse has undergone this pain many times, it no longer tries to lunge on the beautiful boy, because it fears what it takes to be the the inevitable pain that will follow its attempt to do so. The idea here is that appe-

90 tite can be made to be obedient, but its obedience depends upon the threat of violence. Making that threat effective, moreover, requires the repeated use of force and punishment. In order to make the pain of punishment more salient to appetite than the pleasure it seeks, it seems, a long process of psychic conditioning through pain is required. The metaphor at once reveals both a possible method of training appetites and the limitations of that method. On the one hand, one can, it seems, moderate and control appetitive desires through the use of force and through threats of punishment. On the other hand, the extreme difficulty involved in doing so suggests that we can moderate and control appetites only to a certain extent, and only if they are not too strong and not too diverse. It requires a tremendous amount of time and trouble on the part of the charioteer just to control appetite’s sexual desire for one beautiful boy. It is no surprise, then, that Plato thinks that a multiplicity of bad appetitive desires or especially strong ones are an overwhelming and virtually irresistible force in the way of moral progress. It is significant, moreover, that the soul Socrates is talking about in the charioteer story is not an inferior human soul; it represents the human soul in general, including, as Socrates goes on to make clear, the soul of the philosopher.79 That shows that even in the most well-organized and virtuous of souls, a person’s basic appetitive desires will sometimes conflict with what is good for the person, and that they will therefore require constant, careful management.

79

See 256a.

91 3.3 I will conclude by explaining in what respect the type of “training” to which appetite is subject is importantly different from the education that thumos receives, and why, in fact, the methods used to train appetite do not count as education at all. To begin with, we should get clearer on what we mean by “education” – or, more precisely, by “moral education.” Let us say that moral education is a process through which an individual comes to value something because of the features of that thing that in fact make it valuable. This is not meant as an analytic definition of moral education; it is simply a guide that provides one prominent necessary condition – a condition that seems to reflect Plato’s ideas about education – for counting as a method of moral education.80 This condition, we can see, is one that musical training of thumos meets: through music, thumos comes to appreciate truly good and beautiful things because they are beautiful. This is a point that I will make in more metaphysical detail in Chapter 3, but for now, it suffices to observe that beauty, for Plato, is a genuinely morally valuable quality and one that is closely connected to goodness itself, and through musical education, thumos is trained to identify and admire the beauty of beautiful people, actions, and things – that is, a feature of those things that actually makes them good. None of the methods employed in moderating and controlling appetite meet this condition, however. This is most obvious in the case of making appetite

80

It is not a sufficient condition because, for example, brainwashing seems to meet this condition, although we might not want to classify brainwashing (even for the person’s benefit) as moral education.

92 weak by depriving it of unncessary and harmful pleasures. Weakening appetite in this way no more counts as education than starving one’s dog to the point that it no longer has the energy to misbehave would count as “teaching” it not to misbehave.81 In the latter case, one has not taught the dog anything about how it is good or bad to act; one has simply made its condition such that it is incapable of acting badly. Similarly, keeping appetite in a weak state may keep it from generating strong motivations to pursue bad pleasures, but its failure to generate such motivations will not be due to any appreciation on its part of what is about bad about the pleasures in question. Likewise, the method of attention-focusing does not instill any appreciation of genuine value in the appetitive part of the soul. To make further use of the comparison to dogs, we can see that similar effects can be achieved by dogowners who keep their dogs from wanting and begging for “people food” simply by never giving them a taste of it, or who get the dog to stop barking for an object by removing that object from the dog’s sight. Conversely, they may be able, over time, to train their dogs to have a “taste” for a certain kind of food that might initially not have been pleasant to it by offering the food in contexts that lead the dog to associate the food with something it likes. None of these effects, however, is brought about by getting the dog to see what is good for it (let’s assume it is good for it) about the one kind of food or bad for it about the other. In the same way, 81

There is an important disanalogy here. It is clearly bad for one’s dog if one starves it to the point of exhaustion, but the “starving” of appetite, as Plato understands it, is good for appetite (see Rep. 586e). To make the analogy more fitting, one could consider a pet which, if fed the appropriate amount, is an obedient and sometimes useful companion, but if fed in excess, turns on its master both to its master’s detriment and its own.

93 limiting appetite’s exposure to harmful pleasures, or training it to have a “taste” for certain kinds of healthier pleasures through positive exposure, does not teach appetite that the former is harmful or the latter healthy. Finally, the use of force and fear also fails to meet the crucial condition on moral education. In the case of force, this point is fairly obvious: if appetite has to be, as it were, dragged kicking and screaming away from a pleasure, then it is clear that it in no sense appreciates the goodness of abstaining from that pleasure. The use of fear is somewhat more complex, because as the charioteer metaphor shows, fear can make appetite (eventually) refrain from pursuing a certain kind of pleasure on its own, without the forceful interference of the rest of the soul. However, even then appetite has not learned to appreciate what makes refraining valuable or what makes the pleasure itself bad. It holds back from pursuing a pleasure not because the pleasure is bad, or even because of any of the badmaking features of the pleasure, but rather because it fears the bodily pain involved in pursuing it. Bodily pain, however, is not what actually makes the action of pursuing the harmful pleasure bad, nor is the absence of pain what makes refraining from the harmful pleasure good. The use of punishment, threats, and fear, therefore, may succeed in training appetite to associate a particular kind of bad action with pain and may even, for that reason, make appetite averse to that action, but it cannot make appetite averse to that action because the action is bad. 4. Conclusion: Motivating Tripartition In this chapter I have tried to provide a psychologically detailed account, in terms of the theory of the tripartition, of the complex ways in which the pro-

94 gram of early education presented in the Republic affects the souls of individuals. I have argued that musical education targets not just the developing reasoning part of the soul, but also, and in fact especially, the spirited part of the soul. In particular, musical education conditions the individual to feel the spirited attitudes of admiration, disgust, and shame appropriately, which both makes thumos itself a source of morally good motivations within the individual and also serves to direct the individual’s rational attention toward the sorts of people, actions, and objects that facilitate reason’s own pursuit of wisdom. In presenting this account, I have tried to show that Plato did not introduce thumos into his moral psychology simply in order to fill a gap in the city-soul analogy, but rather because he saw a crucial role for thumos in the moral development of individuals. It was this thinking about moral education, I want to argue further, that in fact led Plato to develop the theory of tripartition altogether – and not, as has often been assumed, because he was interested in accounting for the phenomenon of akratic action. According to that popular line of thought, Plato proposed the tripartite soul as a revision to the kind of so-called “Socratic” moral psychology that we find in the Protagoras, where akratic action is characterized as a kind of ignorance.82 In the Republic, the argument goes, Plato introduces the tripartite theory in order to provide an alternative psychological picture in which he recognizes, in addition to reason, two distinct, non-rational sources of motivation that can make a person act contrary to what he rationally believes is best.

82

See Prot. 357c ff.

95 Whether or not Plato changed his mind about akratic action in this way (or, for that matter, whether he himself ever actually held the view that the character Socrates presents in the Protagoras, however we are to interpret that view), Plato gives us clear indications in the Republic that thinking about akratic action was not what led him to introduce the theory of tripartition. Most importantly, he goes out of his way to avoid ever explicitly acknowledging a clear-cut case of weak-willed action – that is, a conflict between reason and appetite that appetite ends up winning – and he avoids doing so even when he explicitly addresses conflict between reason and appetite. In the argument for tripartition, Socrates applies the Principle of Opposites – the principle that the same thing cannot at the same time do or suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing – to cases of psychic conflict in order to generate soul-parts, and he begins by describing a conflict between reason and appetite. Sometimes, he says, a person’s thirst bids him to drink, but the person is unwilling to do so. Socrates takes this to be a conflict between his rational calculation about what is good for him and his appetitive desire for the drink. It is crucial, though, that as the case is described, the thirsty man ends up refraining from drinking – that is, his rational desire prevails over his appetitive thirst.83 If Plato’s reason for developing the theory of tripartition had been to account for cases of akratic action, then it 83

The case of Leontius is one in which appetite does prevail. However, in the description of the case, Plato indicates only that appetite prevails over spirit, and reason is never mentioned. Certainly, it seems reasonable to guess that, on Plato’s view, both spirit and reason are involved in fighting against appetite in Leontius’ case, but the point is that Plato never actually acknowledges that explicitly. Again, if his main intention had been to provide an account of how we can ever act contrary to our rational judgments and desires, then he surely would not left rational judgment and desire out of his description of the case.

96 would have been extraordinarily strange for him to have avoided giving an example of such action in his argument for that theory. Rather, I want to claim, Plato developed the theory because of his thinking about the role that he identified for thumos in moral development. Despite believing that virtue for a human being depends above all on the proper state of reason, Plato also believed, as we have seen, both that reasoning does not become developed until adolescence and that the youngest period in a child’s life is when the child is the most open to moral education and when it is most critical that he receive it. If moral education were a purely rational matter, however, as the “Socratic” view suggests, then it is not clear why a person’s moral progress should be most dependent on the time in his life when he is the least rational. What Plato shrewdly observed is that the non-rational attitudes, desires, and emotions that can be trained during early education are crucially different both from rational attitudes and from the appetitive attitudes that animals have in virtue of being able to feel pleasure and pain. Plato saw that those spirited attitudes can be molded while individuals are young and that, in fact, moral progress seems to depend on their being molded in the right way. Clearly Plato’s thinking about the differences among rational, appetitive, and spirited desires, and in particular his thinking about the psychological conflicts that can arise among them, also influenced his development of the tripartite theory. That is why he appeals to such conflict to make his argument for the theory. However, the argument for tripartition makes it clear that it really is the possibility of psychic conflict that interests Plato, and not the possibility – if it is a possibility – that that conflict can result in akratic

97 action.84 For Plato, then, the theory of tripartition – and his introduction of thumos – is neither the arbitrary product of an analogy nor Plato’s abstruse attempt to explain some specific piece of human behavior, but rather the psychological foundation for his considered philosophical views on education, virtue, and the moral development of individuals. That is why Plato thinks the theory deserves the attention that he devotes to it in the Republic, and it is why it deserves our attention as interpreters of Plato well beyond the Republic.

84

To see this, note that nothing about the tripartite theory commits Plato to the view that weak-willed action is a psychological possiblity. The theory is consistent with thinking that although the soul includes two non-rational parts that can generate desires contrary to person’s reasoning, those parts can succeed in actually making the individual act on those desires only by compromising reason’s judgment itself, such that it would not be a case of strict akrasia at all but simply a case of changing one’s mind under the influence of bad desires. It is true, of course, that the theory of tripartition provides a ready model for acknowledging and explaining akratic action. My point is that, although the model might be available to use in that way, Plato himself does not do so.

98 Chapter 3 The Relationship between Reason and Thumos

It is commonly observed that while our emotions are not themselves typically the outcome of a process of reasoning, they are nonetheless often sensitive to certain kinds of rational judgments. If we resent someone for a perceived slight against us, for example, our resentment can often be mitigated or even eliminated by a thought like, “I shouldn’t blame her for that. She didn’t mean to offend me.” Moreover, we tend to think that such emotions should be responsive to our rational judgments. If our resentment persists despite our belief that it is unwarranted, we tend to view that as somehow non-ideal. Plato, too, recognized a class of psychic states that, despite having a non-rational origin, are specially informed by, and sensitive to, reasoning: namely, our spirited states.85 Throughout the Republic – as well as in two other dialogues that feature thumos, Phaedrus and Timaeus – Plato makes it clear that spirit has a far more sophisticated and congenial relationship with reason than does appetite. He calls thumos “the ally of reason” and presents thumos and its feelings and desires as sensitive to rational considerations in a way that appetite and its desires are not. Despite this characterization, however, Plato never makes any explicit attempt to explain the relationship between reason and 85

Note that although thumos is the part of the soul that Plato identifies as being responsible for many of our prominent emotions, it would be misleading to identify thumos with emotion, both because it is engages in psychic activities that are not emotions – for example, desiring victory – and because some emotions may involve more than just the spirited part of the soul – for example, grief, which in Rep. 10 Plato depicts as crucially involving appetitive urges.

99 thumos – that is, he never addresses the question of why the reasoning part of the soul can influence thumos in a way that it cannot influence appetite. My goal here is to address that question and provide a psychologically detailed account of the relationship between reason and thumos – a relationship that I take to be more systematically and acutely conceived by Plato than interpreters have so far envisaged. In Chapters 1 and 2 I argued that Plato’s account of thumos in the Republic was well-conceived and that he had substantive philosophical reasons for introducing thumos and the theory of tripartion. In the present chapter I will add further support to those arguments: by examining and explaining the interaction between reason and thumos, I will show how thumos is able to play the psychic role that Plato conceives for it. In order to provide background, I will begin by examining thoroughly in what precisely Plato takes the relationship between thumos and reason to consist and the ways in which he thinks former can be influenced by the latter. I will then address the question of how reason communicates with thumos. I will outline the cognitive resources that Plato makes available to thumos and will explain how, given those resources, thumos is able to understand what reason tells it. Finally, I will propose that thumos has a more sophisticated relationship with reason than appetite does because of the fact that thumos seeks the kalon – fine, admirable, or beautiful – while appetite seeks pleasure, and because of the special way that the kalon, or fineness, is related to goodness, which is what reason seeks. That relationship, I will explain, does not hold between pleasure and goodness. My proposal in this paper, then, will be that thumos is the ally of reason not because it has cognitive resources superior to those of appetite (as one might think),

100 but rather because of the special relationship between the object of its desires and the object of reason’s desires. 1. The Responsiveness of Thumos to Reason When Plato characterizes thumos as the ally of reason and claims that it is “by nature an auxiliary to the reasoning part,” he is making a twofold assertion. On the one hand, he is making a teleological claim: thumos is designed for the purpose of assisting reason (and, on Plato’s view, therefore should be responsive to reason). Spirit’s function in the soul, according to Plato, is to “preserve, through pleasures and pains, the declarations by reason about what is to be feared and what isn’t” (442c). Spirit’s given purpose, which is identified with the virtue of courage by Plato, is to respond to, and execute, the commands of reason. On the other hand, in calling thumos reason’s ally, Plato is also making an empirical claim: thumos, as a matter of fact, typically is responsive to reason in certain ways. It is the second claim with which this essay is primarily concerned. The explanandum here is thumos’ tendency, in contrast to the tendencies of appetite, to respond to rational considerations.86

Plato’s characterization of this tendency is not just a

characterization of the ideal case – that is, of the individual who has been properly educated so that the reasoning and spirited parts of his soul desire the right things and function in harmony with each other. As we will see, the observations he uses to establish and characterize their alliance are not observations about the best citizens of the Kallipolis, the Republic’s ideal city, but rather about people as they 86

Please note that at this point, in speaking of thumos’ “responsiveness to reason,” I mean to indicate only that when certain rational considerations are present, thumos tends to act in certain ways. In Section II I will address the issue of how exactly reason affects thumos, and it will turn out that rational considerations do not actually affect thumos as rational considerations.

101 lipolis, the Republic’s ideal city, but rather about people as they actually are. Therefore, when we come to the question of why thumos responds to reason, our answer must be able to account for both ideal and non-ideal cases. Before attempting to explain thumos’ responsiveness to reason, however, it is important first to get clear on what exactly Plato takes that responsiveness to consist in and how he thinks it gets demonstrated in our psychology and behavior. Broadly speaking, Plato recognizes two related aspects of thumos’ responsiveness to reason that I would like to examine: thumos can be motivated by rational considerations, and thumos can also be restrained by them. 1.1 To begin with, Plato recognizes that rational judgments and desires are able to give rise to new, spirited desires. For Plato, the paradigmatic occasion for spirit’s motivation by reason is in times of crisis when force is needed to overcome a threat or enemy and when thumos’ assistance is, therefore, of the most crucial importance. Most obviously, this will include times when an individual faces an external threat of some kind – for example, when facing an enemy in battle or when someone has insulted or slighted him and thus threatened his status as a person to be reckoned with. Plato draws attention to such occurrences when he has Socrates ask, “What happens when a man believes that someone has been unjust to him? Isn’t the spirit within him boiling and angry, fighting for what he believes to be just?” (Rep. 440c). Because this observation comes in the context of Socrates’ attempt to establish the natural alliance between reason and thumos, the belief of the “man” must be understood as a belief for which the reasoning part of his soul is re-

102 sponsible.87

The point of the example is to show that when a person rationally

judges that an injustice has taken place and that some particular course of action is the just response, his rational judgments and desires can rouse thumos to add its own motivational support to help reason achieve its objectives.88

Intuitively,

Plato’s observation here seems correct: the judgment that one has been unjustly wronged by someone else tends to be accompanied by an emotional response such as anger, resentment, or blame, and if one judges that some sort of sanction is war87

Because Socrates says only that “the person” believes he is the object of an injustice, there may be some controversy over whether the judgment mentioned here is a judgment the person has as a result of his reasoning, as opposed to, say, a judgment or impression he has in his thumos itself. However, context makes it clear that Plato intends the former. His purpose in this passage is to emphasize the affinity between the reasoning part of the soul and thumos and to characterize thumos as reason’s ally. If the judgment about injustice were not a rational judgment, then he would fail to make his point and would establish in its place only the quite trivial point that thumos’ behavior is influenced by its own impressions. That the passage concludes with the statement that thumos will fight until it has been called off by reason further supports my interpretation, as does the fact that the remark is immediately preceded by, and intended to reinforce, the observation that spirit always sides with reason over appetite in cases of conflict. Finally, the use of summachei at 440c2 clearly implies that thumos is not fighting “alone,” but that it is fighting with something else, and that most naturally points to reason. 88 It is important to note that for Plato, there is not a sharp distinction between rationally judging that some action, x, is the action one (all things considered) ought to perform and rationally desiring to perform x. Plato is, in that sense, a sort of radical internalist about rational motivation. Judging that an action is best and desiring it are either straightforwardly identical on his view, or they are simply necessarily concomitant. Thus, for example, to say that reason judges that revenge ought to be exacted is to say that reason desires that revenge be exacted. One reason this point should be kept in mind is to avoid thinking that Plato is motivated to include thumos in his moral psychology by Humean concerns. It is not the case that reason needs the support of thumos because reason itself is motivationally inert. As the debate about weakness of will in the Protagoras (see 353c ff.) makes clear, the pressing question for Plato is not whether reason can produce an action that it judges best, but rather how it can ever fail to do so. Plato never shows any doubt that reason is fully capable of producing motivationally efficacious desires. For him, reason automatically produces motivations in making judgments about what the individual ought to do, even if sometimes those motivations may be overcome by competing non-rational ones.

103 ranted by the injustice, then one’s emotional response will tend to provide additional intensity to one’s pursuit of retribution.89 Although responding to external threats is an important occasion for thumos’ responsiveness to reason, it is not necessarily the most important, on Plato’s view. Rather, he takes the principal role of spirit to be to support reason against internal threats – namely, against recalcitrant appetitive desires.90 Thus in his observations about the interaction between reason and thumos, Plato emphasizes reason’s ability to motivate thumos for intra-psychic struggle. In the Timaeus, for example, the dialogue’s namesake explains the physical location of thumos in the body as follows: “Now the part of the mortal soul that exhibits courage and spirit, the ambitious part, [the gods] settled nearer the head, between the midriff and the neck, so that it might listen to reason and together with it restrain by force the part consisting of appetites, should the latter at any time refuse outright to obey the dictates of reason” (70a).91 Timaeus’ subsequent remarks indicate that he understands

89

In many or even most cases, the rational judgment and the emotional response may be experienced so synchronically that it is unclear whether the judgment is psychologically prior to the emotion in the relevant way. And indeed, Plato indicates elsewhere that the emotional response can arise even in the absence of a corresponding rational judgment. However, Plato does seem to think that when rational judgments and spirited emotions coincide, the judgments tend to have psychological priority, as he makes clear in his discussion of Leontius’ corpse-gazing when he writes that thumos boils up “when desires force someone contrary to calculation” (Rep. 440a). Cf. Aristotle, who says that thumos boils up when reason or imagination informs us that we have been insulted (NE 1149a31). 90 Thus, as discussed in Chapter 1, §3.1, Plato turns the popular, Homeric conception of courage as prevailing against external threats into a conception of courage that emphasizes prevailing against internal threats and thus serves his theory of the virtues. 91 Timaeus explains elsewhere that reason is situated in the head because that is where, because of the head’s shape, it is best able to engage in the circular motions that constitute proper reasoning.

104 reason’s rousing of thumos for intra-psychic struggle to take place in precisely the same way that it does for external struggle. Timaeus explains that thumos becomes roused whenever reason reports that some unjust act involving the body is taking place, whether it is something being done to it from outside or something originating from the appetites within (70b). The idea here is that appetite can threaten what reason determines to be the true good of the individual in the same way that an outside agent can. When reason judges that the appetitive part of the soul is motivating the person to do something that is unjust or wrong (and therefore opposed to the true good), thumos will assist reason in resisting appetite in the same way that it would assist it in resisting the injustice inflicted by another person. In other words, the rational judgment that one ought not satisfy a bodily desire that one has will generate a spirited desire to suppress that appetite that is auxiliary to reason’s own desire to suppress it. Plato actually introduces thumos into the moral psychological theory of the Republic by way of this sort of intra-psychic struggle. As we saw in Chapter 1, in Republic 4 Socrates recalls the story of Leontius, who, upon noticing corpses lying by the public executioner, desired to look at them but was disgusted and resisted his desire. After finally being overpowered by his appetite, Leontius became angry with himself and cursed his eyes (439e).92 Thumos’ opposition to appetite in this case takes the forms of anger, self-reproach, and shame (as discussed in Chapter 1,

92

He curses his eyes as a metonymous way of cursing his appetite, as if his appetitive desire to look were a bodily desire for pleasure of or in the eyes.

105 pp. 32-33).93 Although Socrates’ initial description of the case does not mention reasoning or how it relates to these spirited reactions, his subsequent remarks make explicit the role of reason in thumos’ opposition to shameful appetites. Socrates asks his interlocutor: Don’t we often notice in many other cases that when appetite forces someone contrary to rational calculation, he reproaches himself and gets angry with that in him that’s doing the forcing, so that of the two factions that are fighting a civil war, so to speak, spirit allies itself with reason? But I don’t think you can say that you’ve ever seen spirit, either in yourself or anyone else, ally itself with an appetite to do what reason has decided must not be done (440a)? Here Socrates indicates that in the “many other cases” he has in mind, spirited emotions enter the picture only after reason has already involved itself in a psychic struggle against a bad appetitive desire. The clear implication is that those spirited emotions enter the picture because reason has involved itself in that struggle.

93

While Plato often focuses on anger in establishing thumos’ responsiveness to reason, he also acknowledges that thumos’ responsiveness to reason gets manifested in its feelings of shame as well. For example, in the charioteer metaphor of the Pheadrus (discussed below, in the main text), while Socrates initially says that the noble horse (representing thumos) is controlled by the verbal commands of the charioteer (representing reason) alone, he then immediately says that the noble horse controls itself by its sense of shame (253e). The seamless shift between these two ways of describing the behavior of the good horse strongly suggests that the charioteer’s commands are able to influence the good horse’s feelings of shame and that their ability to have that influence is the source of their effectiveness. And in the Republic, after Socrates has provided arguments in support of his claim that philosophers should be rulers of the ideal city, his interlocutor suggests that their vehement opponents will become less angry with them as a result of hearing their arguments. Socrates responds, “If it’s all right with you, let’s not say that they’ll simply be less angry but that they’ll become altogether gentle and persuaded, so that from shame, if nothing else, they’ll agree with us” (501e). Here Socrates suggests that an individual’s (spirited) sense of shame will prevent the individual from expressing opposition to an argument by which he or she has been (rationally) convinced.

106 But Socrates goes even further than that in this passage by evidently endorsing the strong and emphatic claim that in cases of psychic struggle, thumos never allies itself with appetite against reason. This remark has proven somewhat controversial. Many commentators find the claim implausible and dismiss it as exaggeration.94 However, reflection on the context allows us to see that Socrates’ remark is much more sensible and astute than it has appeared to some. As we have just seen, Socrates is in the midst of discussing cases of opposition between appetite and reason and wants to address the issue of which side of the conflict spirit will support. Note, however, that because Socrates has just presented the story of Leontius and is in the process of drawing conclusions partly on the basis of that story, he has some rather specific ideas in mind about what it would mean for spirit to “support” one side or the other: namely, it involves putting up a forceful fight against the soul-part that it sides against and responding with anger, self-reproach and shame if that enemy soul-part “wins.” To make Socrates’ observation vivid, consider what it would mean for spirit to become angry with reason or ashamed after reason gets its way. That would be a case in which an individual has an appetitive desire – say, an exsmoker’s strong desire for a cigarette – that he rationally opposes and a case in which, having successfully resisted the appetite, he becomes enraged with himself and ashamed for failing to have a cigarette. If that is what it means for thumos to take sides against reason, then Socrates’ remark is not an exaggeration on Plato’s part, but rather represents a plausible insight into human moral psychology. Plato 94

R. F. Stalley (p. 78), for example, doubts the plausibility of the claim. Hobbs (p. 18) and Robinson (p. 44) both suggest that the claim is immediately qualified by Plato when he has Socrates indicate that thumos can be corrupted by bad rearing (441a).

107 recognizes that our emotions of anger and shame are informed by, and connected to, our rational judgments in a way that does not permit us to become angry with ourselves and ashamed for doing what we truly believe is best.95 When we are held back from doing something we wanted to do by our judgment that it is all things considered wrong to do it, we do not (as long we continue to maintain that judgment) become angry with ourselves or with our judgment. 1.2 Although Plato seeks to emphasize the positive psychic role of thumos and its ability to be motivated by reason, he also recognizes ways in which reason can inhibit spirited desire. One way it can do so is simply by mitigating spirited anger or by preventing it from arising altogether. In his discussion of thumos, immediately following the passage in which he claims that thumos never sides with appetite against reason, Socrates asks, “What happens when a person thinks that he has done something unjust? Isn’t it true that the nobler he is, the less he resents it if he suffers hunger, cold, or the like at the hands of someone whom he believes to be inflicting this on him justly, and won’t his spirit, as I say, refuse to be aroused against that man?” (Rep. 440c). In the absence of any relevant judgment of reason, an individual would tend to become angry in the face of any infliction of pain by another agent (as many animals do). However, human beings, in virtue of being 95

People do, of course, sometimes have the experience of cursing their consciences for holding them back from an otherwise attractive course of action. However, that experience is nothing like the shame and self-directed anger felt by Leontius. Sometimes such cases involve something like a second-order rational judgment that one’s conscience is overfastidious and that nothing is actually wrong with the action in question. Other times, people seem to be more than anything expressing frustration at the moral circumstances rather than genuine anger at, or disappointment in, themselves for failing to meet an ideal.

108 rational, are uniquely capable of judging that they deserve the pain or punishment that is inflicted upon them. Here Plato observes that when this rational judgment is present, it tends to have a mitigating effect on the emotion of anger. He shrewdly acknowledges, though, that this effect may not be complete. In the best case scenario, the judgment that one deserves one’s punishment will prevent anger entirely, but in non-ideal cases where someone is “less noble,” it will only in varying degrees make one’s anger less severe than it would have been in its absence. Plato also recognizes cases of outright conflict between anger and reason in which reason is able to restrain anger. The case that Socrates explicitly draws attention to is that of Odysseus, who “struck his chest and reproached his heart with word.”96 The context, as we saw in Chapter 1, is Odysseus’ return to his home of Ithaca, where he is the king, disguised as a beggar. Upon his arrival he is treated with abuse and insult by suitors who are attempting to court his faithful wife Penelope, and when he finds the suitors sleeping with the maidservants, Odysseus spiritedly desires to exact immediate revenge on them. What interests Plato about this example is that Odysseus, as represented by Homer, is able to restrain his thumos simply by speaking to it. It is revealing, however, to note the nature of the disagreement between reason and spirit as well as resolution. The disagreement is not over whether the suitors have behaved abominably and offensively or even over whether they are deserving of severe punishment. Reason does not dispute either of those things. If it did, then that would, in ideal cases at least, presumably mitigate or eliminate Odysseus’ rage against the suitors. Rather, reason is in agreement with 96

Context makes it clear that Socrates takes Odysseus, in addressing his heart, to be addressing his thumos.

109 thumos that the suitors have behaved abominably and deserve severe punishment but disagrees with thumos over the best way of punishing them: Odysseus’ spirited desire to kill the suitors immediately is opposed by reason. Instead Odysseus deliberates and eventually endorses an alternative, calculated course of action that will lead to killing them later. In Odysseus’ case, then, the rational consideration that a better path to vengeance is available affects his thumos not by preventing or eliminating his anger, but by holding thumos back from its desire to seek revenge at once and by ultimately directing his outrage toward a better course of action. 2. Communication between Reason and Thumos It is clearly important to Plato that when reason influences or restrains thumos, it does so not by force – by using the strength of its own desire to suppress spirited impulses – but by communicating to it and commanding it. Through such communication, reason is able to overcome spirited desires not simply by overpowering them but by changing them.97 Recognizing that one deserves one’s punishment can make it the case, not that one angrily seeks revenge but is forcibly held back by reason, but that one no longer feels anger at all and that revenge does not 97

In fact, in none of his presentations of thumos does Plato ever describe a case of conflict between reason and thumos that is resolved by force. The reason, I would suggest, is that Plato’s reflections on psychology and behavior led him to think that forceful imposition of reason’s will on thumos does not take place. One simply does not resist anger the way one resists an appetite. Consider an occasion in which one has become enraged at someone and desired to say something very hurtful or to take some similarly impulsive, retributive course of action. Plato’s plausible insight is that if one successfully resisted one’s anger in that instance because of the judgment that one ought to do so, then one succeeded not by prevailing over one’s anger with the brute strength of rational desire, but rather by affecting the anger itself – either by redirecting one’s wrath toward a more suitable means of revenge, or simply by mitigating it with rational considerations, such as that the person did not intend to cause offense or that the retributive course of action is wrong or inappropriate.

110 seem appealing. On the other hand, while rational considerations can both motivate or inhibit spirit, they cannot affect appetite in the same way: one cannot convince oneself to appetitively desire something painful. If, for example, one is averse to having a cavity filled because of the discomfort involved, the rational judgment that (all things considered) one should get one’s cavity filled may well provide sufficient motivation for going through with it, but what it cannot do is make it the case that one desires the physical experience involved in undergoing it. That judgment cannot make the drill feel pleasurable any more than one’s judgment that it is an inappropriate time to eat can make hunger pains in one’s stomach or one’s desire for food go away. Quite simply, appetitive desires cannot be changed by rational desires. Instead, they can only be overpowered or manipulated by them.98 That is why, in his depictions of reason’s confrontation with recalcitrant appetites, Plato

98

This, of course, relates to the various methods of moderating, controlling, and manipulating appetite through nurture and rearing that I discussed in Chapter 2, §3.2. By “manipulating” an occurrent appetitive desire of one’s own, I have in mind methods such as focusing one’s attention on some unpleasant or painful aspect of the desired object to make it seem less appealing (e.g. thinking about what “goes into” a Big Mac that one desires but knows one should not eat in order to make it seem unappetizing) or redirecting one’s attention away from the desired object and so “drowning out” the appetite. These are all, of course, ways of dealing with an occurrent appetitive desire that one already has. Plato also recognizes that there are ways of “training” or moderating appetite so that problematic appetitive desires tend not to arise to begin with (as also discussed in Chapter 2), such as through the use of pain or threats of pain or by simply not indulging one’s appetites beyond what is necessary or reasonable. These methods, too, are manipulative, because they do not involve influencing appetite’s desires by making appetite see what is bad (or bad-making) about certain kinds of pleasures and making that badness be unpleasant to it. Plato’s observations about dealing with recalcitrant appetites are no doubt relevant to modern discussions of weakness of will, which often point out that one of the characteristic features of appetitive desires is their persistence. If occurrent appetites cannot be changed, but only resisted by a person or kept out of attention, as Plato thinks, then it makes sense that they do not go away and tend to recur unless satisfied.

111 always presents reason as controlling appetite only through brute force and threats of pain. That thumos responds to reason and its commands in the way that it does reveals two facts about their relationship. First, in some important way that requires explanation, thumos understands what reason tells it. Second, what reason says matters to thumos. If the first were not true, then we would have no way of explaining how thumos, simply by being “spoken to,” comes to have desires that are in response to, and aligned with, the particular judgments and desires of reason. If the second were not true, then we would have no way of explaining why thumos would have come to have those desires just by understanding what reason says in whatever way it does. In this section I will address the issue of how communication between reason and thumos takes place, leaving the issue of thumos’ caring about what reason says to §3 below. I will begin by examining what cognitive capacities are available to the non-rational soul-parts given Plato’s theory. I will then consider two passages that might be taken to suggest that thumos has more advanced cognitive resources than appetite and will show why that interpretation fails. Finally, I will explain how, given its cognitive abilities, thumos is able to understand what reason tells it. 2.1 The question, then, is what capacities the lower soul-parts possess and how we can make sense of reason’s ability to communicate with thumos in the particular ways it does given those capacities. For Plato, the essential difference between the rational part of the soul and the non-rational parts is that the former has access to

112 the realm of true reality and being – the intelligible realm of the Forms – and can perform cognitive tasks requiring such access, while the latter lack access to that realm and hence lack the cognitive capacities that require access to it. That means that thumos and appetite cannot perform tasks such as engaging in dialectic, reasoning about what is best, or forming beliefs.99 The capacities that are available to the non-rational soul-parts, then, must be ones that they can exercise entirely on the basis of contact with the realm of appearances – that is, with the physical world taken simply as it appears, without attention to what anything actually is or to anything about the natures of things. With that condition in mind, we can identify four important cognitive capacities that Plato is comfortable attributing to both thumos and

99

It may be considered controversial whether Plato allows belief to the non-rational soul-parts, because in the Republic he explicitly attributes something he there calls “belief” (doxa) to them. (See Rep. 430b, 442c, and 603a for examples.) However, in at least three of his later dialogues, Plato demonstrates that he would no longer be comfortable making that attribution. In the Phaedrus Socrates claims that the capacity for speech and concept-formation – presumably, the very sort involved in belief – requires reason’s unique access to the realm of truth and being (249b). In the Timaeus Plato identifies belief with a particular kind of circular psychic motion that is peculiar to the reasoning part of the soul (37b). And in the Theaetetus, Socrates and his interlocutor characterize believing (doxazein) as an activity of the soul that crucially involves having ideas about the being of things. What we should conclude, however, is not that Plato’s views about the non-rational parts of the soul underwent significant revision between his composition of the Republic and these later dialogues, but rather that in the earlier text, Plato was content to apply the term “belief” to less sophisticated psychic states that his later, more technical use of “belief” would exclude. That is, nothing in the Republic suggests that Plato believes in that dialogue that thumos or appetite are capable of performing the cognitive activities that he later identifies as constituting belief. Rather, what he calls “belief” in the Republic and attributes to them there is a behavioral or dispositional sort of cognitive attitude and not the belief proper that he takes to involve the use of language, concepts, and some familiarity with the realm of being. Therefore, we can be confident in denying that according to Plato’s view in the Republic and elsewhere, the non-rational parts of the soul have the capacity for belief-formation in this strict sense.

113 appetite: sense-perception, memory, imagination, and dispositional attitudes of response to how things appear. Plato takes perception to be the fundamental capacity available to the nonrational soul-parts. In the Timaeus he identifies perception as one of the essential “ingredients” of the non-rational soul and describes in magnificent detail the sensory process by which external objects affect the soul. The capacity for senseperception, in turn, provides the basis for further cognitive resources. Most obviously, perhaps, it makes memory possible, which in the Philebus Socrates defines simply as “the preservation of perception” (34a).100 It also crucially makes possible the ability to generate, understand, and act on the basis of, quasi-perceptual mental representations of the world. That means, first of all, that the non-rational soulparts are capable of imagining the perceptible world as being a certain way. In the Philebus Socrates explains that non-rational psychic states such as pleasure, pain, fear, envy, and anger are all partially constituted by something analogous to a painted image – a “presenting” of the world as being a certain way. Those images, moreover, have motivational significance whenever they present the world in a way that stimulates the characteristic desires or aversions of appetite or thumos. Thus, we can attribute developed dispositional or behavioral attitudes of response to the non-rational soul-parts, where that roughly means a disposition for the agent to act and behave as if the world is a certain way. Note that because Plato holds that non100

Note that in the Timaeus, Plato attributes sense-perception to plants but rightly does not seem to think they are capable of things like memory, imagination, or behavioral attitudes. Presumably, the reason is that because their “bodies” do not allow them to exercise the full range of sensory capacities – they cannot see or hear, for example – they do not possess all of the cognitive resources that senseperception makes possible given a suitable physical constitution.

114 rational psychic states are all partially constituted by these dispositional attitudes, his theory cannot distinguish appetitive states from spirited ones by attributing such attitudes of quasi-belief only to the latter. This is perhaps in contrast to modern tendencies, which sometimes characterize emotions as partially constituted by belief-like states in a way that brute pleasurable experiences are not. According to Plato, the emotional states of thumos and states of pleasure and pain are all constituted by the same kind of dispositional attitude. 2.2 Note that in attributing to thumos and appetite the same cognitive abilities, I am in effect rejecting one potential strategy for explaining how their relationships with reason are different: the strategy of claiming that thumos is capable of understanding reason in a way that appetite is not. There are two important passages that might be taken to support the idea that thumos has, or makes use of, greater cognitive abilities than does appetite. The first is from the Phaedrus, where (as discussed in Chapter 2, pp. 89-90) Socrates presents, as a metaphor for the tripartite soul, the allegory of a charioteer and his two horses – a good horse that represents spirit and a bad horse that represents appetite. In telling his story, Socrates emphasizes that the good horse is guided by verbal commands alone, while in contrast, the bad horse is “deaf” and unable to hear the charioteer’s commands (253e). The fact that the bad horse cannot hear reason while thumos can suggests that thumos may possess some cognitive capacity – metaphorically represented as the capacity for hearing – that appetite lacks and in virtue of which it can understand reason. In the second passage, Timaeus similarly suggests appetite’s cognitive inferiority when he

115 says, “[The gods] knew that this part of the soul was not going to understand the deliverances of reason and that even if it were in one way or another to have some awareness of them, it would not have an innate regard for any of them, but would be much more enticed by images and phantoms night and day” (Tim. 71a). Again, because Timaeus explicitly denies to appetite comprehension of what reason says (and does so immediately after characterizing thumos as reason’s ally), one might conclude that, for Plato, thumos can comprehend reason and that that difference between the non-rational soul-parts accounts for their different relationships with reason. In fact, both of these passages are perfectly consistent with the view that thumos and appetite have the same cognitive capacities, and what we should conclude from them is not that thumos understands reason in a way appetite does not, but that thumos cares about what reason says in a way appetite does not. With regard to the Phaedrus passage, we should bear in mind that while Plato no doubt composes the details of his metaphors with extraordinary care, the nature of metaphor is such as to permit more than one interpretation in some cases. One appropriate way to represent a soul-part that does not care about what reason says is as an animal that for some reason cannot hear what reason says and thus cannot pay attention to reason. Therefore, the fact that the bad horse cannot hear reason as the good horse can does not necessarily mean that Plato intended to indicate that appetite cannot understand reason as thumos can. Moreover, note that if what had been important to Plato, in composing this metaphor, was to indicate that appetite is cognitively inferior to thumos, there are clearer ways for him to have done so. He

116 could, for example, have represented appetite as a cognitively inferior animal, or, in his description of the bad horse, he could simply have described it as “stupid.”101 Instead, he chose to represent thumos and appetite as two of the same kind of animal. Finally, further details of the passage make it clear that the reason the bad horse cannot hear the charioteer is not, in fact, that it is innately deaf and lacks the capacity for hearing, but rather that it has shaggy hair covering its ears. It would be strange for Plato to have attributed the bad horse’s deafness not to a difference in its essential capacities but to an incidental physical characteristic if he wanted to show that appetite is somehow cognitively inferior to thumos. Rather, what seems to have mattered to Plato is not that appetite cannot understand reason, but that something in its nature blocks it from listening: it is, as it were, “deaf to reason.” Likewise, in the Timaeus passage Plato means to emphasize not that appetite does not understand reason at all but that, as Timaeus actually says, even if it did, it would not care about what reason says. Rather than conclude from Timaeus’ remark that he thinks thumos can understand reason in whatever way appetite cannot, we should take his remark to indicate that he assumes thumos cannot understand reason in whatever way appetite cannot understand it. The fact that Timaeus describes thumos as listening to reason and heeding the reports of reason does nothing to undermine this interpretation, because in that same section of the text he also says that reason and thumos must restrain the appetitive part of the soul if it should

101

The pig, which Greeks considered a particularly stupid animal, might have been a suitable alternative if Plato had wanted to emphasize cognitive abilities.

117 ever refuse to obey the dictates of reason (70a).102 Here Timaeus clearly implies not only that appetite can in some sense understand reason’s commands, but that in some cases it actually will obey them. What we should take away from these passages, then, is that there is a sense in which both appetite and thumos can understand what reason says, and there is also a sense in which neither can. If the capacity to understand reason is taken as the capacity to understand the content of a logos – that is, an account that explains why something is the case, which is the kind of account that reason seeks in seeking wisdom – and to respond to the logos on the basis of that understanding, then we should attribute that capacity to neither of the non-rational soul-parts. If, however, in saying that a soul-part can understand reason, we simply mean that reason can successfully communicate certain kinds of information to it in some way that it can understand, then we should, I think, attribute that capacity to both appetite and thumos. Thus the Timaeus passage is perfectly compatible with the claim that appetite and thumos have access to the same cognitive capacities (namely, the ones I have outlined above).103 The difference between appetite and thumos lies elsewhere.

102

Furthermore, at 70b Timaeus says that when reason sends urgent reports of wrongdoing to thumos, the latter boils and causes blood to rush throughout the body, “so that every bodily part that is sensitive may be keenly aware, through all the narrow vessels, of the exhortations or threats and so listen and follow completely.” Elsewhere in his account, he states both that soul composed of all the types of soul is distributed throughout the body and that it is in virtue of the presence of soul that the bodily parts are perceptive. 103 A third passage might also be taken to support the idea that appetite has cognitive abilities inferior to those of thumos. Concerning the nature of plants, Timaeus says, “What we are talking about now partakes of the third type of soul, the type that our account has situated between the midriff and the navel. This type is totally devoid of belief, reasoning or intellection, though it does share in sensation, pleasant and painful, and desires” (77b). Here Timaeus explicitly denies advanced cog-

118 2.3 We are now prepared to answer the question of what exactly thumos’ understanding of reason’s commands consists in. Given the cognitive resources available to thumos, I think we have decisive reasons for denying that when thumos responds to rational considerations, it is responding directly to those considerations – that is, to the linguistic content that constitutes reason’s thoughts and conclusions. Because thumos does not have the capacities necessary to understand logos, it cannot be the case that reason informs and influences thumos directly by means of speech – that is, reason cannot simply “tell” thumos what to do. Instead, my proposal is that reason communicates with thumos by way of quasi-perceptual representations of speech. The idea is that when reason issues certain kinds of judgments, commands, and desires, those judgments, commands, and desires are accompanied by mental imaginings (provided, or made possible by, the individual’s perceptive faculties) that in some way represent their content, and it is that representation that stimulates the desires or aversions of thumos itself. Thus, for example, reason’s judgment that

nitive capacities to the appetitive part of the soul (assuming that what he says here is intended to characterize appetitive soul in animals too), but he does not at any point in his speech explicitly deny them to thumos. One might want to take this as evidence that thumos is cognitively superior to appetite in some way. In particular, one might think that thumos is at least capable of some sort of belief, which in the earlier dialogue the Republic Plato had attributed to both lower parts of the soul. However, as we saw above (n. 99), the overwhelming preponderance of evidence indicates that Plato’s thinking about belief by the time he wrote the Timaeus was such that he did not to attribute what he by that time was willing to call “belief” to either of the non-rational soul-parts. Therefore, we cannot take his explicit denial of belief to appetite in the Timaeus as an implicit allowance of it to thumos. Rather, when Timaeus makes his remarks about appetite, he has the very limited focus of explaining the nature of plants, which only have an appetitive part of the soul, and therefore we cannot take his remarks as indicating anything at all about the spirited part of the soul.

119 an enemy should be vanquished would be accompanied, in being presented to the non-rational soul-parts, by some appropriately related mental representation of that event. In other words, strictly speaking, thumos is responsive not to what reason tells it, but to what reason shows it.104 One may be skeptical about the extent to which linguistic content can be effectively represented by perceptual content. However, we should bear in mind that we need not claim that the complete content of every logos can be represented by imagination. No doubt reason’s thoughts involve a great deal of complicated and sophisticated content that does not admit of perceptual representation. That only means, however, that there are many things that reason cannot communicate to the non-rational parts of the soul, and that limitation is clearly in line with Plato’s philosophy. Moreover, Plato’s emphasis in discussing the communication between reason and thumos is on reason’s ability to issue commands. Thus, he is primarily focused on thumos’ capacity to respond to reason’s judgments about which actions ought to be taken, and actions are precisely the sort of thing that can be represented by imagination. In issuing a command, reason need only communicate the practical conclusion at which it arrives about which immediate course of action is best; it need not communicate its reasons for thinking it is best. Note that an individual can also imagine things like admiration, praise, honors, prizes, and victory – all objects at which spirited desire aims – and when those things accompany or result

104

According to my interpretation, passages which emphasize that thumos responds to words, such as the Phaedrus passage in which the good horse responds to verbal commands, are intended merely to emphasize reason’s ability to influence thumos with its own desires and commands and are not intended to describe any specific linguistic mechanism through which that influence takes place.

120 from actions sought by reason, its commands may involve thoughts that make those things vivid to thumos through imagination. Furthermore, we should take very seriously the fact that Plato often talks about the resemblance between speech and images and that he seems to have been more optimistic than we are inclined to be about the extent to which the latter can represent the former. The example of the scribe and painter from the Philebus provides the most obvious evidence of this. There Socrates claims that when an individual perceives something, there is within him both something like a scribe who writes judgments with words about is perceived and something like a painter who paints illustrations of those judgments (39a). The idea appears elsewhere as well. In the Republic a recurring theme is the idea that a single archetype or pattern (tupos) can be imitated and represented at different levels and in a variety of ways that include both speech and images. Thus, for example, Socrates claims that both poets and craftsmen must create an “image” (eikôn) of good speech and good character in their products (401a). Because artifacts and speech can both be made by looking to a common pattern, Plato finds it appropriate to speak of artifacts as imitating or representing speech in some meaningful way. Similarly, Plato addresses the issue of reason’s communication with appetite in the Timaeus by speaking of patterns. Having just claimed that the appetitive part of the soul responds to images but neither understands nor cares about speeches, Timaeus explains: Hence the god, having planned for this very tendency, constructed a liver, a structure which he situated in the dwelling place of this part of the soul. He made it something dense, smooth, bright, and sweet, though also having a bitter quality, so that the power of the thoughts sent down from the mind might be

121 received by it in the way that a mirror receives patterns and returns visible images (71a). According to Timaeus’ account, the purpose of the liver in the body is to serve as a medium through which reason can make vivid to appetite various visual representations that it wants to convey.105 In particular, reason communicates and makes vivid its commands and threats to appetite by using the liver in this way. Fanciful physiology aside, the important point for our purposes is that Plato clearly recognizes a meaningful and effective way in which rational thoughts can be conveyed to a non-rational soul-part in the form of visual representations. Thus, whatever reservations one might have about the possibility of translating the content of speech into image, we must keep in mind that Plato himself thought it possible and recognized it as a means of communication among the parts of the soul. 3. The Ally of Reason The fact that, according to Plato’s theory, a mechanism is in place for communication between reason and thumos only partially explains thumos’ responsiveness to reason: it explains how thumos understands what reason says. We must also explain why what reason says matters to it. In this section we will see that the different relationships that thumos and appetite have with reason are to be explained by examining what each one characteristically desires. In particular, we will see that thumos’ receptiveness to reason is due to its desire for the kalon – which I will translate as “fine,” “admirable,” or “beautiful” – while appetite’s lack of receptiveness is due to its characteristic desire for pleasure. I will begin this section by ex-

105

See Lorenz’s paper, “The Cognition of Appetite in Plato’s Timaeus,” for an enlightening discussion of this passage.

122 amining the relationship between the object of spirited desire, fineness or the kalon, and the object of rational desire, goodness or the agathon. I will then explain how thumos’ desire for the kalon allows us to account for its responsiveness to reason, and I will also explain appetite’s apparent indifference to reason. I will conclude with a discussion of how the typically congenial relationship between thumos and reason, in which thumos is its ally, can break down. 3.1 As we saw in Chapter 1, spirited impulses in human beings evolve into the desire to be kalos – fine, admirable, beautiful, – and to have others acknowledge and admire one as such. Like primitive spirited impulses, these desires are crucially competitive and social in nature: they seek personal success that will set one apart from others in a conspicuous way. What makes them more complex is that, in aiming at being kalos, mature spirited desires aim at one’s being a certain kind of individual – that is, at living up to an ideal of the kind of person one should be. Thus they crucially involve a sense of the individual one would like to be in the future and thus a sense of oneself as an individual who exists over time with a variety of desires and goals. Thumos’ relationship with reason emerges over time as the reasoning part of the soul becomes increasingly developed in the individual. Plato tells us that reason is a lover of wisdom, which means, in particular, that it seeks the ultimate object of knowledge, the Form of the Good, and seeks to promote the good of the individ-

123 ual.106 When the reasoning part of an individual’s soul does become developed, the individual begins engaging in deliberation about what is best for him and why it is best for him and comes to have rational desires in accordance with that deliberation. These rational desires are the source of the “commands” that reason issues to thumos, and they are, as we have seen, presented to thumos accompanied by corresponding quasi-perceptual representations of their content. Understanding thumos’ responsiveness to those images requires that we examine briefly the nature of the Good and the Fine according to Plato’s metaphysical theory of the Forms. Plato is notoriously quiet on the details of the relationship between the Good and the Fine. However, his characterization of their relationship in various 106

See Rep. 581b. In what follows I will capitalize Kalon and Good only when I am referring explicitly to the metaphysical Forms of the Kalon and the Good. Note that in claiming that thumos desires “the kalon,” I mean that it desires what seems kalon on the basis of appearances. I do not claim that thumos desires the Kalon (capital “K”), which for Plato would mean that the Form of the Kalon itself is the proper object of its desire as well as anything that really is kalon (i.e. accurately described as kalon) in the realm of appearances. As I claimed in Chapter 1 (p. 39-40), that would be incorrect. It would be incorrect for at least two reasons. First, because thumos does not have cognitive access to the realm of being or the nature of things, but rather has access only to appearances, it cannot apprehend the true being or nature of the kalon and has no sure criterion for determining which things and people really are kalon in the perceptible realm. As a result, its attraction to anything as kalon is fully dependent upon the way that things appear. Second, the things that are kalon and the things that seem kalon can, and often do, come apart, and Plato makes it clear that when they do, spirited desires are concerned with the seeming, rather than with the reality, of fineness. Socrates says, for example, “And I think you see that honor-lovers, if they can’t become generals, become captains, and if they can’t be honored by people of importance and dignity, are content with being honored by insignificant and inferior ones” (Rep. 475a). Similarly, he asks, “And isn’t this also clear? That in the case of just and beautiful things, many people would choose to do, possess, and seem to be things that are believed to be just and admirable, even if they aren’t?” (Rep. 505d). The point is that because thumos does not innately desire what is truly admirable and kalon, but only what seems admirable and kalon, it can be satisfied with mere appearances even when those appearances are deceptive. Thus it will often be the case that what a person’s thumos finds attractive merely seems kalon but is in fact not.

124 relevant passages consistently indicates that the two are closely related metaphysically in a way that guarantees that the set of good things is coextensive with the set of fine things. In the Hippias Major, Socrates rejects an otherwise promising definition of the kalon because, according to an argument he presents, it would entail that the Fine is not good nor the Good fine.107 His rejection assumes that any satisfactory definition of the Fine or the Good must permit their mutual predicability. Furthermore, in the Symposium, where Socrates recites the wisdom of the priestess Diotima in his encomium to Eros, he initially asserts that what love seeks is to possess the good forever, but as he continues, it is the Kalon or Beautiful itself that turns out to be the ultimate object of the philosopher’s love.108 The transition requires that the Beautiful is, if not identical with the Good, at least itself necessarily good. And in the Republic, Plato Socrates describes the Good itself as exceeding truth and wisdom in fineness (508e). He also calls the Good “the cause of all that is correct and fine in anything,” thereby attributing to it metaphysical preeminence and indicating that the being of the Fine and of fine things in some way depends upon or derives from it (517b). Plato, then, makes it clear that fineness and goodness are inextricably linked, and he points to at least a partial explanation of that link by emphasizing the primacy of the Good and making it the source of fineness itself. We can further illuminate the relationship between the Fine and the Good, however, if we consider the nature of each – what it is that makes something fine or good. Once again, Plato is elusive in providing any explicit definitions of either 107

See HM 297c. Although the authentic Platonic authorship of the HM is debated, the text is widely agreed to be reflective of genuinely Platonic ideas and is therefore useful in this context. 108 See Symp. 205e-211d.

125 (particularly when his characters have as their stated goal the pursuit of such a definition), but he does provide clues about what sorts of qualities are essential to goodness and beauty. In particular, he makes it clear that both involve harmony, proportion, and order that are in accordance with reason and for the sake of a rationally determined purpose. In the Gorgias, for example, Socrates asks his interlocutor Callicles, “So it’s when a certain order, the proper one for each thing, comes to be present in it that it makes each of the things there are, good?” (506e). Timaeus, meanwhile, claims that because the creator god wanted everything to be as good as possible, he set out to bring order to the universe, believing it to be in every way better than disorder (Tim. 30b). Regarding fineness, Socrates claims in the Republic that rhythm, grace, and harmony, having permeated a soul, make that soul beautiful, and in the Timaeus proportion is said to be the most beautiful bond for holding together the universe and making it unified and beautiful (Republic 401d, Timaeus 31b).109 What these characterizations elucidate is that the coextensiveness of good things and fine things is not mere metaphysical coincidence. Rather, it is due to the fact that being good and being fine both essentially depend on a common rational order. What, then, is the difference between goodness and fineness? While Plato does not provide a complete or determinate answer to that question, he does indicate something he takes to be special about fineness: fine or beautiful things not only possess rational order, but also exhibit their rational order and, in doing so, 109

Further examples include Tim. 87c: “Now all that is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is not ill-proportioned. Hence we must take it that if a living thing is to be in good condition, it will be well-proportioned.” Also, Phil. 64e: “Measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue.”

126 strike their viewer in a particular way. The Phaedrus provides insight into this phenomenon. There Socrates describes the process through which our souls, prior to their incarnation, are taken on a tour of the heavens in which they behold the Forms of moderation, justice, and other ideas that constitute the basis of our ability to use language and acquire knowledge as human beings. He says, “Now, beauty, as I said, was radiant among the other objects; and now that we have come down here we grasp it sparkling through the clearest of our senses ...Beauty alone has this privilege, to be the most clearly visible and the most loved” (250d). What makes beauty special in the physical world, Socrates claims, is its perceptibility. Goodness and justice can be grasped only through reasoning, but we can literally see and hear beauty.110 That does not mean, of course, that all beauty can be perceived through the senses or that beauty can be understood and thus fully appreciated on the basis of sense-perception. Intelligible forms of beauty, such as the Form of Beauty itself or the beauty of a well-constructed mathematical formula, can only be grasped through reasoning and thought. And fully appreciating the beauty of something – even its physical beauty – requires an understanding of its rational order and hence also, for Plato, an understanding of its goodness. However, when things are beautiful in the realm of appearances, their beauty, unlike their goodness, can be perceived and experienced (at least in a preliminary way) simply through senseperception. One way of putting this point would be to say that the beautiful-making features of something in the physical world – the features that constitute its rational order – can affect and excite us through our senses even if we do not yet under110

Cf. HM 298 ff., where Socrates suggests as a definition for the kalon, “the pleasant through sight and hearing.”

127 stand, or have any thoughts about, what makes the thing beautiful or good or why. When rational order excites us in this way, we are perceiving beauty. On the other hand, we cannot perceive a thing’s goodness in the same way, because finding something good, for Plato, does require having at least some thoughts, not acquired through perception, about what goodness is generally as well as what makes the thing in question good and why. Hence very young children can respond to, and delight in, the beauty of a song before they have even the minimal concept of beauty required to call the song “beautiful.” Children cannot, on the other hand, delight in a thing’s goodness without having some ideas about what it means for something to be good. This way of distinguishing beauty is primarily a phenomenological one that appeals to the way we experience something as beautiful or good. It is, therefore, consistent with a variety of ways of spelling out the essential or metaphysical differences, if any are to be found, between beauty and goodness.111 We can set that

111

This reading leaves open, in particular, some complicated questions about the exact relationship between goodness and fineness at the intelligible level. If the difference between the two in the realm of appearances is that beauty is perceptible, and if perception is not possible in the intelligible realm, then it is unclear how to distinguish the Fine and the Good. Indeed, some commentators, such as Angela Hobbs, have actually argued that the Good and the Fine are metaphysically identical (pp. 220-227). While remaining neutral on that question, I would simply like to point out that the idea that fineness or beauty is in some sense distinguished from goodness by the way it exhibits the beauty it possesses to the “perceiver” can be applied quite naturally to beauty in the intelligible realm. While it would be wrong to say that intelligible beauty is perceptible, it does seem appropriate to say that intelligible beauty is distinguished by the way it manifests itself to the “mind’s eye” of the understanding philosopher. It is surely no accident that Plato’s favorite metaphor for the philosopher’s grasp of the Forms is the metaphor of sight (as in the Phaedrus and in Republic 6-7). In the realm of appearances, beauty strikes its viewer through sense-perception; in the intelligible realm, it does so through reasoning. In either case, beauty is the captivating aspect or “face” of rational order

128 question aside, however, because the important points for our purposes (and the ones that Plato is most clearly committed to) are simply, first, that beauty in the realm of appearances can be perceived through the senses, and second, that the rational order that is manifested to the senses in something’s being beautiful is the same rational order that its being good consists in. Hence, not only will anything that is beautiful also be good, as we have seen, but it will also be beautiful in the same way, and for the same reason, that it is good.112 3.2 We now have the resources for explaining thumos’ responsiveness to rational commands. Let us begin with the ideal case, in which reason issues commands that really are good for the individual and thumos has developed an accurate sense of fineness. The explanation of thumos’ responsiveness to reason lies in the fact that the images reason presents to thumos in issuing its commands will exhibit fineness in whatever way, and to whatever extent, the rational commands that they represent are good. In having the spirited desire to be kalos, an individual desires to perform actions and live a life that displays a particular kind of order, and the reasoning part of his soul, both as its primary psychic function and as its innate activity, calculates about and seeks to instill rational order in his life and soul. Although thumos is not moved by mere thoughts about goodness, it does care about fineness, and goodness. This reading receives some support in the Platonist tradition from Plotinus, who despite demonstrating a certain reluctance to state definitively the exact relationship between Beauty and the Good, does claim that the Good “holds up Beauty in front of itself like a screen” (I.6.7). 112 Note, however, that although every good thing is beautiful, not every good thing appears beautiful to everyone. Beautiful things will only exhibit their beauty to viewers who, by nature or as a result of proper education, have the right “aesthetic” tastes.

129 and because of the relationship between goodness and fineness, the rational order that reason desires and advocates in the form of goodness becomes manifest to thumos through reason’s presentation of images. Thus, the perceptible face of reason’s concern for the good of the individual – the face that thumos “sees” – is concern for fineness. Because thumos can recognize in reason’s commands a common concern for the fineness of the individual, it will, given its own desires, have a natural openness and responsiveness to them. In some cases, reason’s desires may simply reinforce desires that thumos has on its own. If, for example, the individual is under attack from an enemy, then (given normal circumstances) immediate self-defense will be both the apparently attractive course of action that thumos desires as well as the course that reason deems best. In other cases, however, reason will be able to direct the desires of thumos in ways that thumos itself could not have directed them on its own. There may be occasions when figuring out that one has been wronged requires a certain amount of reasoning, and in such cases one’s rational calculations will stimulate a spirited desire that one would not have had in the absence of reason. Also, it is important to note that becoming an admirable individual, which is a person’s ultimate spirited desire, requires calculation and long-term planning of which thumos is incapable. Therefore, there is a very real sense in which thumos needs reason in order to fulfill its desires, and there will be opportunities for reason to contribute information about acting and living admirably that thumos could not have figured out on its own but that it can come to recognize as helpful. The case of Odysseus provides an example. Left to its own devices, the spirited part of

130 Odysseus’ soul would have led Odysseus to exact immediate revenge that ultimately would have been less spiritedly satisfying to him. Because reason intervened, however, he was able to carry out a plan that was both better from the rational point of view and more appealing and satisfying to his spirited side. Because reason (but not thumos) is capable of working out the consequences of two competing courses of action, it can present, in the form of images, “information” to thumos about those courses of action that thumos could not have obtained independently.113 That “information,” in turn, can allow thumos to see that a non-immediate course of action is finer and more admirable than the immediate one toward which it would have inclined in reason’s absence. To the extent that reason issues commands that appeal to thumos’ antecedent sense of what is admirable, thumos will derive pride and satisfaction from executing those commands and will be more inclined to recognize their source, reason, as a valuable leader. In turn, the more that thumos recognizes reason as such a leader, the more it will be inclined to listen to its commands and to identify the success and fineness of the individual with the carrying out of those commands. This alliance works most successfully and obviously in the ideal case – that is, when thumos has been trained to find the right things admirable and when those are the same things that reason judges to be good. However, one of the virtues of this account of thumos’ responsiveness to reason is that it does not require the ideal case. The reason that is a virtue of the account is that, as I noted earlier, Socrates’ discus113

Note that because thumos is by nature impetuous (naturally “warm and hasty,” as Aristotle puts it at NE 1149a30), even if it did have some minimal capacity to consider and weigh competing courses of action against each other, it would not necessarily be inclined to stop and use it in cases like Odysseus’.

131 sions of the relationship between reason and thumos make it clear not only that their alliance is constitutive of a virtuous soul but that it tends to occur naturally even in imperfect souls. Therefore, it is important that whatever account we give of the relationship between reason and thumos be able to explain non-ideal cases as well as ideal ones. As long as the images that reason presents to thumos manifest and promote the particular kind of fineness that thumos has become accustomed to find attractive, thumos will be reliably motivated by them and will derive spirited satisfaction from executing the commands that they represent. However, nothing requires that those images actually be kalon – that is, fine when judged by the standard of the Good (and so, truly fine). The timocratic man, whom Socrates discusses in Book 8 of the Republic in his account of the degeneration of souls and regimes, provides a useful illustration. What distinguishes the timocratic man is that his spirited part controls his soul and, as a result, he values honor and victory above all and structures his life accordingly (550b). We should not, think, however, that the fact his thumos “sets the agenda,” as it were, means that it is no longer responsive to his reason. What it means is that the timocrat’s reasoning is corrupted and misdirected by the dominance of his spirited desires in such a way that it comes to judge honor and victory to be the highest values and the life of honor as best for the individual. Because the commands the timocrat’s reason issues will reflect and promote the particular version of fineness that thumos itself values, thumos will be responsive to them just as it is in the ideal case. We have seen above that truly fine images will exhibit the rational order that makes them good. It is also true that imperfectly fine

132 or even ugly images will exhibit the lack of rational order that makes them bad. Therefore, the fact that reason and thumos are not always (or even usually) in an ideal condition does not undermine thumos’ natural tendency to become reason’s ally. 3.3 This account also provides the resources for explaining why appetite does not respond to reason in the way that thumos does. First, we must note that goodness and pleasure – in particular, the bodily pleasure characteristically desired by appetite – are not related in the way that goodness and fineness are.114 It is not true either that the set of pleasurable things and the set of good things are coextensive or that what makes something pleasurable is directly related to what makes it good. Therefore, there is no guarantee that the commands that reason issues will, in commanding the best action, also be commanding the most pleasurable one. A possible objection to this point is that Plato clearly advocates the view that one can evaluate the “truth” of pleasures. Even in the Republic, Plato calls pleasures “true” or “untrue” (mê alêthê) and judges their value accordingly, and in the Philebus he goes further and provides an elaborate theory in support of the idea

114

In this context I am concerned exclusively with the relationship between appetitive pleasure and goodness, although much of what I will say also applies to nonappetitive kinds of pleasure as well. In Book 9 of the Rebublic Plato presents all three parts of the soul as having their own characteristic kinds of pleasure corresponding to the characteristic objects of their desires (See Chapter 1, §3.2). Reason’s pleasures are the pleasures of learning and acquiring wisdom, thumos’ are the pleasures of victory and achieving honors, and appetite’s are the pleasures of the body (and, derivatively, the pleasures of acquiring and possessing wealth). When Plato characterizes appetite as the part of the soul that seeks pleasure, then, he has in mind appetitive pleasure. Appetite does not, for example, motivate the individual to seek the rational pleasure of finding out about the Good.

133 that some pleasures are true and others false.115 However, although Plato does want to provide the theoretical resources for distinguishing true from false pleasures, he does not equate a pleasure’s being true with its being a pleasure. On the contrary, he has Socrates clarify that one must not identify the conditions for the truth of a pleasure with the conditions for there being a pleasure at all. He explains, “Whoever has any pleasure at all, however ill-founded it may be, really does have pleasure, even if sometimes it is not about anything that either is the case or ever was the case, or often (or perhaps most of the time) refers to anything that ever will be the case” (40d). Therefore, although reason, in issuing commands that are good, will be commanding actions that contain and promote the truest pleasure, it will not necessarily be commanding actions that contain the most pleasure.116 That is the

115

See Rep. 586d ff. and Phil. 38e ff. The crucial feature of the Philebus theory is the claim, already noted, that pleasures and pains, like other psychic states, are constituted by quasi-perceptual presentations of the world as being a certain way. Because they are so constituted, pleasures count as true whenever the world actually is the way that they represent it, and they count as false whenever the world is not that way. Plato’s paradigmatic example is the pleasure of anticipation. If someone takes pleasure in the expectation that he will possess a great deal of gold and in imagining that future time, and if that expectation does not represent the world as it actually will be in the future, then his pleasure is a false one. 116 At Republic 587e, Socrates makes the rather cryptic claim that the philosopherking lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant. If read in isolation, that claim might be taken to suggest that, in the Republic at least, Plato thinks that quantity of pleasure does correspond to the goodness of a life. However, context makes it clear that Socrates means 729 times more truly pleasantly and is talking specifically about the quantity of true pleasure. Hence what he says is not in any tension with the picture we find in the Philebus. Also, note that Socrates is not talking exclusively about appetitive pleasure when he makes this claim. In fact, the reason the philosopher’s life is so much more (truly) pleasant than the tyrant’s is primarily due to his ability to properly enjoy rational pleasures. While Plato does also think that the philosopher’s life will include, on the whole, the highest quantity of the best and truest appetitive pleasures, he does not claim that it will necessarily contain the highest quantity of appetitive pleasure simpliciter. Certainly, as my next point will

134 crucial point, because the appetitive part of the soul is not concerned with the truth of pleasures, but rather with the pleasures themselves and their quantity. One could point out, however, that in the case of someone whose reason has been corrupted by appetite and who, as a result, rationally pursues a life of pleasure, reason may very well consistently advocate the course of action that yields the most pleasure. However, even that would not be sufficient to make appetite the ally of such a person’s reason, because while the reasoning part of the soul, in thinking about the good of the person, would care about maximizing pleasure in the longterm, appetite, due to two constraints on its nature, is concerned primarily with immediate pleasure. To begin with, appetite is constrained by the influence of the body, the pleasures and pains of which are insensitive to considerations about the future. The judgment that one should forego eating a cookie now – even if one’s reason for that judgment is that one will receive a much more savory and satisfying meal later on only if one resists the cookie – cannot by itself make one’s hunger go away or make the cookie look any less delicious.117 Second, appetite is constrained by the way things appear, and appearances have a distorting effect on pleasure. In the Protagoras Socrates describes the process of comparing competing pleasures and claims that, just as objects look smaller when seen from a distance, so also pleasures that are temporally closer to us appear bigger than those farther away. The art of measurement, Socrates explains, allows us to overcome the distorting make pertinent, he does not claim (or believe) that it will contain the highest quantity of immediate appetitive pleasure. 117 There are ways that a person who rationally judges that he should not indulge a particular appetitive desire can deal with or influence that desire (see n. 98). The point here is that the rational judgment itself (or rather, its corresponding image as it is presented to appetite through imagination) does not change the appetite.

135 effect of appearances and compare near and remote pleasures as if they were on two sides of a balance scale. However, because the appetitive part of the soul has access only to appearances, it is incapable of measurement, which is for Plato a distinctly rational activity.118 What this means is that whenever appetite is faced with competing pleasures, one near and one remote, it will always prefer the one that is near because that is the pleasure that will appear greater.119 Therefore, any time the shrewd pleasure-

118

See Prot. 356a-357b. In the Republic Plato again discusses the deceptive power of appearances, and he contrasts the reasoning part of the soul, which is able to overcome appearances through measurement, with “the soul’s irrational part, which cannot distinguish the large and the small but believes that the same things are large at one time and small at another” (605b). Note that although thumos, too, has access only appearances, Plato does not suggest that distance distorts beauty in the way it distorts pleasure. His omission seems correct: if a misshapen and ugly tree is twenty yards closer than a lush and healthy one of comparable size, the ugly tree may appear larger, but it does not, in virtue of its greater proximity, appear more kalon. 119 This relates to a point of controversy concerning the cognitive capacities of the non-rational parts of the soul – namely, whether they are capable of means-end reasoning. Lorenz denies that they are (See Brute Within 47-52), both on the grounds that means-end reasoning is not different in kind from reasoning about the Good, which Plato allows only to reason itself, and on the grounds that if the lower soulparts were capable of means-end reasoning, then they would be capable of experiencing simultaneous aversions and desires for the same object in a way that would violate Plato’s Principle of Opposites and require further sub-partitioning of the soul. The latter argument appeals to the idea that if, for example, appetite desired both some long-term goal y – say, the possession of an expensive video game console – and some short-term goal, x – say, eating a delicious but expensive meal – then if appetite were capable of appreciating that saving money is the necessary means of achieving y and that x is an obstacle to y, then it would also acquire an aversion to x (and one which would not arise in a way that eliminates appetite’s brute desire for the pleasure of x). I agree with Lorenz that robust means-end reasoning requires genuine reasoning of the sort that Plato attributes exclusively to the reasoning part of the soul, and that the lower parts of the soul are therefore incapable of performing that cognitive task. However, I disagree with Lorenz on two points. First, I think that the lower parts of the soul may very well be capable, purely on the basis of their non-rational cognitive resources, of figuring out how to get what they want in a way that, as I understand him, Lorenz thinks would be

136 seeker desires some immediate pleasure but rationally judges that he will get more pleasure in the long-term from abstaining, his appetite will not be moved by reason’s commands alone. And if the person then acts for the greater pleasure, that will be because of the strength of his rational desire to do what he thinks is best, despite the pull of appetite toward the disallowed immediate pleasure. The point, then, is that whatever kind of life reason judges to be best for the individual, and even if its judgments are corrupted by the dominance of appetite itself, reason will not, because of its concern for the long-term, consistently command actions that contain what appetite perceives as the biggest pleasure.120 A related reason for ap-

problematic for Plato’s theory. Second, I think that their ability to do so is not, in fact, problematic. In particular, I see no reason why the resources of perception, memory, imagination, and dispositional attitudes should not be sufficient, if not for an understanding of the instrumental relation between saving money and possessing a video game console (where understanding indicates something robust and includes comprehending why and how the two are related in the way that they are), at least for some sort awareness of an association between possessing money and being able to get things one wants and of the fact that having money will lead to having the console. I disagree, however, that that awareness could lead to appetite’s aversion to eating the expensive dinner, because I think the ability to form that aversion depends on the rational capacity for measurement. If appetite were capable of comparing the pleasure of possessing a video game console with the pleasure of eating an expensive dinner and judging that the former exceeded the latter, then I think appetite would, in fact, acquire an aversion to eating the dinner. Because appetite cannot engage in that activity, however, it is not capable of judging that the pleasure of y is greater than the pleasure of x. Instead, appetite’s impulses are constrained by the way things appear. And because appearances always make the nearer object seem larger, appetite will not be capable of desiring y in preference to x when x is the more immediately attainable object. In other words, I think that appetite will continue to desire both y and x, and that because x seems greater on account of its proximity, that is the object it will pursue. I take this to be no different than what happens when appetite is aware of two delicious cupcakes in the room at the same time, one of which looks (and possibly is) bigger than the other. 120 Plato himself gives us the example of the oligarchic man, whose soul is ruled by appetite and who pursues a life of wealth. Socrates says of such a man that he holds down his evil appetites by force with some decent part of himself (Rep. 554d). If we assume that the decent part of him refers to his reasoning part (as I

137 petite’s failure to become reason’s ally is that, because appetite’s desires aim at immediate pleasure and not characteristically at some long-term interest of the individual, it does not have the same innate need for reason that thumos has in aiming at the fineness of the person.121

think we should), then what Socrates reveals here is that even when reason’s judgments are supportive of interests determined by appetite itself, those judgments will not reliably be motivating to appetite. 121 My account also allows us to see why, for related reasons, thumos does not respond to appetitive desires the way it responds to rational ones. It does not respond to them because appetite’s desires do not manifest fineness the way that reason’s desires do and therefore do not stimulate thumos’ attraction to the kalon. Because pleasure arises independently of goodness, it also arises independently of fineness: that explains why, at least when thumos is properly trained, conflict between thumos and appetite will always be possible. However, we can go further and identify two features of appetitive desire that explain why, in general, what it wants does not appeal to thumos. The first is that appetite, in desiring pleasure, is concerned not with the individual’s actions, but with a passive experience. Its desires for that experience do not, as we have seen, require or involve a sense of, or regard for, “the individual” (where that means a sense of the individual as a complete person who exists over time with different kinds of desires and long-term interests). Thumos, in contrast, seeks the accomplishment of the individual through the exercise of his or her agency, as we saw in Chapter 1. Because mere experiences are not generally sources of pride or objects of admiration, and because appetitive desires demonstrate no concern for the individual, thumos will not be moved by what they desire in the way it is by what reason desires and will not come to identify appetite as an ally or leader. This point also helps to explain Socrates’ emphatic claim that thumos never sides with appetite against reason. Because appetite’s desires are for mere experiences without regard for the individual as a person, and because rational desires are for the good of the individual, the latter very plausibly will always appeal more to thumos’ desire for fineness than the former, regardless of what precisely thumos takes fineness to consist in. Secondly, we can see why appetite’s desires do not generally appeal to thumos if we note Plato’s characterization of appetitive desire as being rooted in the pleasures of taste and touch – in particular, the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex. In several places, moreover, Plato indicates that taste, touch, and smell are inferior to sight and hearing and that the reason they are inferior is that we do not perceive beauty through them, whereas we do perceive beauty through sight and hearing (Appendix B addresses this topic in more detail). This idea suggests that one reason the objects of appetite’s desires do not manifest fineness is because they are rooted in, and aim at, sensory experiences that do not, and in fact cannot, involve the perception of fineness. We do not taste, smell, or feel beauty; we see and hear

138 3.4 The relationship between reason and thumos is one that develops naturally given the nature of each and what each one desires, but it is a relationship that can break down. To the extent that reason’s commands manifest and promote the kind of fineness that thumos antecedently has come to find attractive, thumos will be moved by those commands and will derive spirited satisfaction from their execution. When, however, reason’s judgments about what is good are not aligned with thumos’ sense of fineness, their relationship will be less harmonious. Plato provides a dramatic example of such tension between spirited impulses and rational judgments in the Symposium, where the character Alcibiades declares, in an encomium to Socrates: Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame – ah, you didn’t think I had it in me, did you? Yes, he makes me feel ashamed: I know perfectly well that I can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what I should do; yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd. My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should (216b). His speech at once reveals the amicable relationship between reason and thumos as well as the fragility of that relationship. On the one hand, Socrates’ rational arguments about what kind of life Alcibiades should lead have an irresistible influence on the latter that not only convinces him of the ideal to which he should be aspiring,

it. If spirit’s sense of fineness is necessarily rooted in sight and hearing, then its indifference to objects of appetitive desire is readily understandable.

139 but also makes him feel shame at failing to meet it. On the other hand, because the virtuous life is not what receives the honor and admiration of the crowd, Alcibiades finds it impossible to sustain a spirited commitment to his principles in the public realm given his spirited desire for approval.122 This example illustrates the crucial role that thumos plays in the psychology and moral development of the individual as well as the importance of being raised in the right society. Because an individual’s spirited sense of the kalon can be shaped and influenced by the culture in which he is raised and, in particular, by what is treated with honor and admiration in that culture, improper education poses a very serious danger to the individual’s moral development. What the case of Alcibiades shows is that when people – even those endowed with the best natures – are raised in a society with the wrong values, they will face extraordinary challenges on the path to virtue that few are able to overcome. On the other hand, proper education and culture can be profoundly beneficial in shaping spirited desires and directing the person toward a life of virtue. Because virtue, according to Plato’s theory, requires thumos’ responsiveness to reason, proper moral education of the individual requires not just rational training of the intellect but also careful attention to the education and training of thumos. The spirited part of the soul, for Plato, has a valuable and necessary role to play in the proper moral development of 122

Another example of disharmony can be found in the Gorgias, where the character Callicles, despite his conviction that the best and most admirable life consists in indulging one’s every appetite, is led by his sense of shame to feel disgust when Socrates draws attention to certain base pleasures. Callicles’ sense of shame, then, is responsive not to his rational judgment, but to values that he has non-rationally internalized. In his case, his spirited reaction actually undermines his stated beliefs and leads him to see that they lead to at least one unacceptable consequence.

140 the individual, but ensuring that it plays that role reliably and consistently – that it becomes the perfect ally of reason – requires, in all but the very strongest natures, an ideal society in which what is truly kalon, namely virtue, is admired and respected above all. In the Republic, as we saw in Chapter 2, Plato set out to create just that.

141 Chapter 4 Laws 644d-645b: Plato’s Divine Puppet and the Tripartite Soul

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the theory of tripartition provided Plato with the philosophical resources for developing novel accounts of moral education and virtue of the individual, and it allowed him to account for complexities of human psychology such as motivational conflict. In the Laws, which is considered a later or perhaps his last text, Plato continues to acknowledge and make use of a diverse range of human motivations and psychic phenomena. In the text, Plato’s main speaker – the unnamed Athenian Visitor – plans out with his interlocutors how to found and govern an ideal city that they call Magnesia. In the proposals for Magnesia that he develops over the course of the text, the Athenian makes it clear that his task – and, on his view, the proper task of any legislator – concerns not just the rational desires associated with reasoning, but also, very crucially, the non-rational desires and states of the soul. Of special interest for my purposes, he places great emphasis on emotions that in the Republic are attributed to the spirited part of the soul. The Athenian identifies shame as the lawmaker’s most important and powerful legislative tool for keeping citizens in check, and he makes shame the central component of both the program of moral education and the penal code that he develops and advocates over the course of the text. He also provides an extended and detailed discussion of anger as a distinct cause of criminal behavior. Despite the attention Plato gives to spirited psy-

142 chic phenomena in the text, however, he never in the Laws offers us any explicit endorsement of tripartition, and thus it is not obvious that when he writes about non-rational states such as anger and shame, he still means to account for them with a tripartite psychology. This raises the question, does Plato still accept tripartition at all in the Laws, and does he still envision for thumos the important psychological role that he carved out for it in the Republic? Christopher Bobonich, pointing both to Plato’s silence on tripartition and to what he takes as positive evidence in the Laws of a non-partitioning theory of the soul, has argued that by the time Plato wrote the Laws, he had abandoned the theory of tripartition in favor of a unitary theory of the soul. The crucial passage to which Bobonich appeals is Laws 644d, where the Athenian Visitor likens the human being to a divine puppet as a way of illustrating the phenomenon of psychic weakness, or “being weaker than oneself.” Bobonich claims that the puppet passage is intended to provide a new account of the soul that denies the the existence of soul-parts and thus denies tripartition. This passage is crucial to the Laws as a whole because it presents the psychological picture that informs the educational and legislative policies that the Athenian goes on to advocate in the text. The dialogue’s primary objective is to figure out what kinds of laws are needed and why for the purpose of making citizens as virtuous as possible, and the puppet passage sets up that discussion by identifying what kind of psychological weakness people are subject to that needs to be prevented and corrected in the first place. Therefore, understanding the puppet passage and the psychological picture that it presents is crucial to our interpretation of the text as a whole. Moreover, if,

143 as Bobonich claims, the Laws no longer recognizes appetite or spirit as distinct parts of the soul, that would represent a substantial revision in Plato’s thinking about human psychology and the causes of human vice. It would mean, in particular, that Plato no longer saw the need to include thumos in his accounts of early moral education and virtue of the individual, and thus that he had abandoned his previously central view that reason needs an “ally” in the embodied human soul. Therefore, the puppet passage has important implications, not just for our interpretation of the Laws, but also for our understanding of Plato’s late philosophy and the development of his thought. In the present chapter I would like to offer a new interpretation of the puppet passage, and in doing so I have three main goals. First, I would like to show that the passage is consistent with the theory of tripartition and thus to pave the way for understanding the Laws in light of that psychological theory and in light of Plato’s views on thumos. Thiswill serve as evidence against the view, which I noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, that in his later works Plato gave up his commitment (or showed he was never really committed in the first place) to the tripartite theory of the soul as he developed it in the Republic. Second, I would like to illuminate the evidently important role that Plato sees for law in the psychological picture presented in the puppet passage. And third, I would like to get clearer on what notion of psychic weakness concerns Plato in the puppet passage and in the text as a whole. I will begin in §1 by looking at the passage in question. I will explain why Plato omits the theory of tripartition in that passage and will argue that his omission does not point to his abandonment of tripartition. In

144 §2 I will briefly outline Bobonich’s interpretation of the puppet passage and will present my own new interpretation of the passage, one which draws on the importance of law in text. In §3 and §4 I will point to several reasons for preferring my interpretation to Bobonich’s and will argue that my interpretation of the puppet passage yields a notion of psychic weakness that is useful for interpreting later passages in the Laws in a way that Bobonich’s interpretation is not. I will conclude in §5 by providing one positive argument, on the basis of the puppet passage, in favor of thinking that Plato retains the theory of tripartition in the Laws. 1. Responding to the Argument from Silence Let us turn now to the passage in question. The context, as I said, is an attempt by the Athenian Visitor to elucidate the sense in which an individual might be “stronger” or “weaker” than himself, that is, how someone might either succeed or fail in exercising rule over himself. He says: Let’s think about these things in this way: let’s consider each of us living beings to be a divine puppet, put together either for their play or for some serious purpose – which, we don’t know. What we do know is that these affections (pathê) work within us like tendons or cords, drawing us and pulling against one another in opposite directions toward opposing deeds, struggling in the region where virtue and vice lie separated from one another. Now the argument asserts that each person should always follow one of the cords, never letting go of it and pulling with it against the others; this cord is the golden and sacred pull of reasoning (logismos), and is called the common law of the city; the other cords are hard and iron, while this one is soft, since it is golden; the others resemble a multitude of different forms. It is always necessary to assist this most noble pull of law, because reasoning, while noble, is gentle rather than violent, and its pull is in need of

145 helpers if the golden kind in us is to be victorious over the others (644d-645b). This passage presents a picture of human weakness in which our “iron cords,” representing the non-rational impulses and desires we have, oppose our “Golden Cord,” representing the desires we have that are associated with reasoning and law. We are enjoined to “pull with” the Golden Cord, and our moral success evidently depends on whether we succeed in doing so and in prevailing over the pull of the iron cords. Bobonich takes this passage as evidence of Plato’s rejection of the theory of tripartition. He draws on the fact that, although the passage is concerned with the psychology of human motivation and weakness, the metaphor of the puppet not contain any details designed to make tripartite pyschology salient. And, as Bobonich points out, when the Athenian subsequently provides a more specific list of psychic states associated with the iron cords, he includes pleasure, pain, spirited emotions (thumoi), sexual desires, fear, and boldness, but he groups all of them together without distinction and without assigning them to parts of the soul.123 The only two elements the Athenian introduces, Bobonich emphasizes, are a person’s affections and the person himself. “Although these affections may oppose each other,” he writes, “there is only a single subject of the opposed affec123

Bobonich also takes as evidence for his view the fact that the pathê all seem to be occurrent psychic states of some sort, and that none of them is described as a part of the soul or as agent-like. However, the fact that the pathê themselves are not described as agent-like is not significant, for the simple reason that even in his explicit accounts of tripartition, Plato never characterizes pathê this way. To the extent that anything is agent-like in Plato’s tripartite theory, it is always parts of the soul, not pathê, and he does not equate the two. It would indeed have been a radical revision of his previous psychological theory if Plato had proposed that individual psychic states themselves are sources of motivation that have access to cognitive resources such as memory and sense-perception. That role is always reserved for the soul and its parts.

146 tions and that is the person. There are no nested puppets within the puppet itself that are the possessors of some of the affections.”124 If Plato did still hold the theory of tripartition, the argument goes, why did he not make that clear in the puppet passage? Bobonich’s conclusion is that the metaphor is intended to present the soul as unitary and non-partitioned. There are several points to be made by way of response to the argument from silence. The best way to respond, I believe, is to point out that Plato gives at least two important indications that he is simply not interested in offering a theory of the embodied human soul in the Laws. The first and most important indication is that neither in the buildup to the puppet passage nor in the metaphor itself does Plato ever actually uses the word “soul” (psuchê). The puppet, the Athenian says, 124

Plato’s Utopia 261. Bobonich’s view is that in this passage, and in the Laws in general, we find appetitive desires and spirited emotions but no longer the corresponding parts of the soul. Bobonich pays special attention to the fact that thumos is on the Athenian’s list of affections. He takes this as evidence that Plato no longer considers spirit to be a part of the soul, but merely one among other nonrational psychic states. However, we must distinguish thumos the emotion of anger from thumos the part of the soul responsible for anger and spirited desire. The former is a kind of affection; the latter is not. Plato himself recognizes and employs this distinction. As Hobbs notes, when Plato uses the word thumos in the Republic, he is usually talking about an emotion, and when he wants to refer to the part of the soul responsible for spirited qualities and emotions, he employs a different term, thumoeides (Plato and the Hero 6). Similarly, in the Timaeus, Plato uses thumos to refer to one of the many psychic states that belong to the mortal soul, but when he introduces the spirited part of the soul, he leaves it nameless and refers to it periphrastically as “the part of the soul that partakes of courage and thumos” (70a) Because thumos or anger itself is taken to be one of the most distinctive expressions of spirited desire, Plato does sometimes use thumos to refer to the part of the soul. However, in such cases he apparently does so metonymically. The point is that even in his explicit accounts of tripartition, Plato never seems to identify the spirited part of the soul with the emotional state of anger. Therefore, when he lists thumos as an affection in the Laws, he is not revealing anything significant about his psychological theory. Finally, see below in the main text for a discussion of Laws 863b, where Plato seems to make it a point to leave open the possibility that thumos is a part of the soul.

147 is supposed to show what the person is like. It is, of course, true that the puppet passage provides an illustration of psychological phenomena and thus of stuff going on in the soul, but the point I would like to make is that if Plato’s intention had been to offer a theory of the soul, the he would have talked about the soul. If, as Bobonich claims, this is the place where Plato is offering us his revised theory of the human soul, then it is extraordinarily mysterious that he does not tell us explicitly that he is talking about the soul.125 This point, then, shifts the argument from silence back in the other direction. The second indication Plato gives that he is not interested in providing a theory of the soul comes in Book 9, where the Athenian discusses the psychological causes of criminal behavior. Among those causes he lists thumos – which is, of course, what Plato sometimes calls the spirited part of the soul in other places but which also often simply means “anger” – and when he mentions thumos, he says that it is is one thing in its nature, adding “whether it is an emotion or a part” (pathos or meros) (863b). What the Athenian’s comment reveals is that Plato wishes to set aside, for the purposes of his discussion, questions about the structure and nature of the embodied soul and its parts. The comment is also telling because if Plato had rejected the theory of tripartition by the time he wrote the

125

Cf. the discussions of the tripartite soul in Republic and Phaedrus, which both begin in ways that make Plato’s intention to analyze the nature of the soul unambiguously clear. At Republic 435c Socrates asks, “Then once again we’ve come upon an easy question, namely, does the soul have these three parts in it or not?” At Phaedrus 245c Socrates says, “Now we must first understand the truth about the nature of the soul, divine or human, by examining what it does and what is done to it.” And at 246a he continues, “Now here is what we must say about the soul’s structure.”

148 Laws, then it would have been strange for him to go out of his way include a remark that apparently leaves open the possibility that thumos is a soul-part. The next line of response to the argument from silence answers Bobonich’s observation that, in the puppet passage, there is one unified subject of a person’s affections: the person himself. Bobonich takes this to show that Plato means to present the soul as unitary and non-partitioned. However, the fact that there is a unified subject of the affections does not support the view that Plato has abandoned his tripartite theory of the soul, for two reasons. First, the thing that is unified in the puppet passage is not the soul, but the person, and the presence of a unified person or subject is not incompatible with tripartition. There being a single subject of affections leaves open the possibility that those affections are reducible to, identical with, or explicable in terms of, activities performed by different parts of the single subject’s own soul. In the case of anger, for example, the tripartite account allows for the possibility that anger is attributable to the person in virtue of a certain kind of motion or activity occurring in the spirited part of his soul and nowhere else in it. Consider a physiological analogue. One might well ask how we cough, and the answer might be that we cough when certain kinds of motions occur in our lungs and throats. However, there should be no temptation to say that our lungs and throats are doing the coughing or that we do not rightly count as the subjects of that coughing.126

126

This suggests one way, but not the only way, that soul-parts could be responsible for psychic activities and states without compromising the unity of the person. On this view, the soul part would be the source or subject of the motions that characterize some particular psychic state, but those motions would be nonidentical with the psychic state itself. That is why, strictly speaking, we would

149 Second, we have good reason for thinking that Plato never saw the presence of a unified subject as incompatible with tripartition. Indeed, he introduces the discussion of the tripartite soul in the Republic by asking: Do we act in each of these ways with the same thing, or are there three things, and with a different one we act in each of the different ways? Do we learn with one, become spirited with something else within us, and desire the pleasures of nourishment and generation and all their kin with a third; or do we act with the soul as a whole in each of them once we are started? (436a) Plato takes it for granted that the individual is the subject of these three types of activity. Neither the question he asks nor the answer he ends up giving suggest that it is wrong to attribute them to the unified person. What Plato wants to find out in his discussion is what goes on inside of us when we engage in these different kinds of psychic behavior, but he accepts that each of us is one person in a way that makes it accurate to speak of ourselves as the unified, individual subjects of that behavior. Likewise, in the Laws, the Athenian is clear that the puppet is intended as an image of “each of us,” and he begins his discussion of the puppet passage by asking, “May we assume that each of us is one person?” (644c). And not say that the spirited part of the soul is angry, but that the individual is angry in virtue of a certain kind of motion in the spirited part of his soul. Hendrik Lorenz offers another possibility by drawing a distinction between the proper subject of a psychic state and the derivative subject of it (Brute Within 26 ff.). He suggests that, on Plato’s theory, the parts of the soul are the proper subjects of desires and psychic states, and that the unified person is derivatively the subject of them. According to his view, it would be appropriate to say that the spirited part of the soul is angry, because the psychic motions of which the spirited part of the soul is the subject constitute, or are identical with, the psychic state itself. I do not have a strong commitment to one of these views over the other, and they may not exhaust the possibilities. The important point is that there are plausible accounts compatible with what the texts actually say that allow both for soul parts and for a unified subject of psychic states.

150 since Plato evidently does not see any incompatibility between partitioning of the soul and unity of the person, we have no reason to take his presentation of a unified person in the Laws as evidence for his abandonment of tripartition.127 Finally, in response to the argument from silence, we should note that parallel passages in both the Republic and Timaeus show that Plato is quite comfortable abandoning the language of tripartition when doing so suits the aims of his arguments. The following passage from Republic 430e, which is prior to Book 4’s introduction of tripartition (a point that I will address presently), is particularly relevant: Isn’t the phrase ‘stronger than himself’ ridiculous though? For, of course, the one who’s stronger than himself would also be weaker than himself, and the weaker stronger. The same ‘himself’ is referred to in all of them… But this phrase looks to me as if it wants to say that, concerning the soul, in the same human being there is something better and something worse. The phrase ‘stronger than himself’ is used when that which is better by nature is master over that which is worse… And when, from bad training or some association, what is smaller and better is mastered by the inferior multitude, then this, as though it were a reproach, is blamed and the man in this condition is called weaker than himself and licentious. Note that both here and in the puppet passage, Plato’s explicit intention is to make sense of the expressions “stronger than oneself” and “weaker than oneself.” 127

Bobonich takes the presence of a unified subject as significant in part because he thinks that in earlier works, particularly the Republic, Plato does treat the parts of the soul as robustly agent-like subjects in a way that undermines unity of the soul, and Bobonich takes that agent-like status to be an essential feature of the theory of tripartition. I would deny, however, that the parts of the soul were ever robustly agent-like in way that he assumes. In particular, I disagree with Bobonich’s claim that the two lower soul-parts ever, on Plato’s view, possessed the ability to hold complex beliefs (see, Chapter 3, n. 99) or engage in reasoning (see Chapter 3, n. 119).

151 Moreover, the two accounts are remarkably consistent with each other and share important features. As in the puppet passage, in this passage there is a single, unified subject: Plato emphasizes that it is the same “himself” that is both stronger and weaker. Also, in the Republic passage there is no explicit mention of parts of the soul, only competing forces or “things” in one’s soul.128 Therefore, Plato apparently feels that one can explain the phenomenon of psychic strength or weakness without explicitly appealing to partite psychology (and a fortiori without explicitly appealing to specifically tripartite psychology). Of course, because the Republic passage comes before Plato introduces tripartition at 436a, we can explain the absence of soul-parts by noting that Plato has not yet provided the theoretical resources for mentioning them at this point in the text. However, it is one thing to provide an account earlier in the text that does not mention or make use of material that appears later in the text; it is another to provide an account earlier in the text that is inconsistent or incompatible with material that appears later in the text. Plato often does the former, but it is doubtful that he would give two incompatible accounts in the same text, especially when those accounts appear con-

128

Note, as a further similarity between the two passages, that in the Republic passage, an inferior “multitude” is opposed to “what is smaller and better,” just as in the puppet passage the Golden Cord is just one cord opposed to all the iron cords that “resemble a multitude of different forms.” One might argue that the 430e passage, in positing competing “things” in one’s soul, already strongly suggests that there are competing parts of the soul, and thus already strongly suggests a partite (if not a specifically tripartite) psychology. I would agree. However, I do not presuppose that interpretation here in order to avoid begging the question against Bobonich’s interpretation of the puppet passage. Since the puppet passage also posits competing elements within the soul without explicit talk of soul-parts, and since Bobonich denies that there are soul-parts in that account, he presumably would not interpret 430e as a clear endorsement of soul-partitioning either.

152 secutively and when one of them is fundamental to the text as a whole.129 At any rate, we certainly should not think that Plato would do so if he himself recognized them as incompatible. And if Plato thought the accounts of pyschic weakeness and tripartition were compatible in the Republic, then given the similarity between the Republic 430e and the puppet passage, we have good reason to believe that Plato did not view tripartition as inconsistent with the latter, either. Even after having introduced the three parts of the soul in the Republic, Plato shows that he is comfortable dropping explicit talk of tripartition when it suits his purposes to do so. In Book 10 he mentions only two “parts” of the soul, the part that follows calculation and the foolish part that is affected by imitation. In this context, because the distinction he wants to make is between what can and cannot make use of calculation in the soul, and because the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul equally lack a calculative capacity, Plato does not need to mention all three parts of the soul by name. All that he needs for his purposes, in referring to the “foolish part” of the soul, is to refer generically to any part or aspect of the soul that does not possess the power of calculation and that is exactly what he does. Mentioning all three soul-parts would provide no additional support to his intended point, which is that some of the soul has the power of reasoning and some of it does not. And once again, we have no reason to think that Plato takes what he is doing to be incompatible with, or a revision of, the theory he has just introduced a few books earlier.

129

The Republic passage about weakness is at 430e, and the tripartition argument begins at 434b.

153 Book 10 provides another useful parallel to the puppet passage. As noted earlier, among the affections that the puppet experiences, the Athenian lists pleasure, pain, spirited emotions, erotic desires, fear, and boldness (644d, 645d). As we also noted, he does not assign any of these affections to specific parts of the soul or make distinctions among them that would indicate tripartition. However, Book 10 suggests that Plato sees nothing compromising to tripartite theory in grouping together the variety of psychic states associated with the two lower parts of the soul. He writes that among the psychic states that are stimulated by poetry – i.e. those belonging to the “foolish” or non-rational portion of the soul – are sexual desires, anger (thumos), appetites, pains, and pleasures (606d). Because context renders the distinction between the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul unimportant, it is likewise unnecessary to make distinctions between appetitive motivational states and spirited ones. We find a similar literary strategy at two points in the Timaeus, where for much of the text, the psychic distinction that is important for Plato’s purposes is between the immortal and mortal parts of the soul. Accordingly, when he introduces the mortal soul, he describes the psychological phenomena that it experiences in embodiment without reference to soul parts. “First,” he writes, “there would be sensation, one and the same for all of them and innate, arising from forceful affections; and second, erotic love mixed with pleasure and pain; and in addition to these, terror and anger (thumos) and whatever goes along with them and all such things that by nature tend to be contrary and set at odds with each

154 other” (42a). Likewise, when he resumes his discussion of the mortal soul after having digressed to other topics, Plato writes: [The gods] housed within the entire body another form of soul, the mortal form, which has within itself affections terrible and necessary: first pleasure, evil’s greatest lure, then pains, deserters of goods; and yet again, boldness and fear, thoughtless counselors the pair of them; and anger (thumos), difficult to appease; and expectation, easy to seduce; and having blended them all together with irrational sensation and all-venturing lust, they put together the mortal kind, as was necessary (69d). This second description actually prefaces Timaeus’ account of tripartition and his division of the mortal soul into a spirited part and an appetitive part. Thus we should have no doubt that Plato understands the generic list of “mortal” affections as consistent with tripartition. Timaeus speaks generically when he is talking about mortal soul as opposed to immortal soul and fills in the detail about the mortal soul and its parts when his account demands it. The passages from Republic 10 and Timaeus indicate that, given appropriate contexts, Plato is comfortable shifting seamlessly between the language of tripartition and more general talk of non-rational affections as belonging to a single “part” or kind of soul. Thus, the fact that in the puppet passage, Plato mentions various non-rational psychic states without explicitly assigning them to parts of the soul is inconclusive on the question of whether he accepts tripartition.130

130

What the Republic 10 and the Timaeus passages do clearly indicate, if not tripartition, is at least a partioning of the soul – in the former case, between the calculating and foolish parts of the soul, and in the latter, between the mortal and immortal parts. See §5 of this chapter for a discussion of how the puppet passage similarly suggests partitioning of the soul, if not specifically tripartitioning.

155 Morever, if we consider the context of the puppet passage and the Laws, we can see that Plato’s omission of the theory of tripartition, or of any theory of the soul for that matter, makes good sense. For the conversation that takes place in the dialogue is not a conversation among philosophers seeking theoretical understanding. Rather, it is a political discussion between the Athenian and two friends of his from foreign cities, one of whom has been put on a committee that is in charge of founding a new city and wants insight. The conversation is, from the beginning, a discussion about what kinds of laws are effective and good and what kinds are not, and in the puppet passage, all that Plato is interested in distinguishing are psychic states that are opposed to reasoning and law and psychic states that are not (hence only two kinds of “cords”: iron and golden). Given that that is the aim of their conversation, we can see that this is not the right place for providing a theory of the soul and that doing so would, in fact, have been a potential distraction to the issue at hand. Because the dialogue’s context makes Plato’s silence on tripartition perfectly explicable, this is simply not a case in which silence is informative. 2. A New Interpretation of the Puppet Passage In this section I will propose a new interpretation of the puppet passage that differs from Bobonich’s and that is consistent with the tripartite theory of the soul. I will begin by briefly outlining the points of dispute between our two interpretations and will note the ways in which Bobonich’s interpretation is unfriendly to the theory of tripartition. I will then go on, in §2.2, §2.3, and §2.4, to spell out

156 my interpretation in more detail, giving close attention to the role that law plays in the passage. 2.1 My interpretation differs from Bobonich’s in a number of significant ways, but the central point of controversy concerns the status of the Golden Cord and what it means for someone to “pull with it” in the way that the Athenian suggests we all must in order to be virtuous. According to Bobonich’s reading, the rational desires associated with the Golden Cord are, or at least prominently include, the person’s occurrent rational desires to perform particular actions. (In what follows I will use the term “particular action” to refer to a determinate, fullyspecified action such as “taking a sip of this water here in front of me now.” I will use the term “particular desire” to refer to a desire to perform a particular action of this sort and the term “particular judgment” to refer to a rational judgment about a particular action.) The picture that Bobonich takes the Athenian to be presenting is one of outright motivational conflict between non-rational desires to perform a particular action, A, and an opposed rational desire to perform a particular, opposed action, not-A. (In what follows I will refer to this kind of conflict as “strict akratic conflict.”) With this picture in mind, Bobonich offers a range of possible interpretations of “pulling” with the Golden Cord – or what he calls “psychic intervention.” Most minimally, he suggests that psychic intervention could simply involve stepping back from one’s desires and reflecting on them in a way that results in an increase in the strength of one’s rational desire. More boldly, he suggests that it could be an additional psychic process such as deciding

157 or intending, or even a special rational activity that somehow expresses the selfmotion of the soul. The first option, although taken by Bobonich to be compatible with the kind of belief-desire psychology that we find in the Republic, would at least entail that Plato had introduced a new process into the story of human action – the process of increasing the strength of an already existing rational motivation – and thus that he no longer took the action theory associated with tripartition to be complete. The latter options, which Bobonich argues are the most attractive, are taken to involve psychic states or activities for which belief-desire psychology by itself cannot account.131 Whatever option one takes, Bobonich’s interpretation would suggest either that Plato had given up his tripartite theory of the soul or that he had at least substantially revised it by the time he composed the Laws. According to my interpretation, the Golden Cord represents not a person’s rational desire to perform particular actions, but rather a person’s general rational desire for the Good and his associated desires to follow correct reasoning and law. The Golden Cord, on this view, always pulls a person toward virtue and toward what is actually best for him, but because a person may reason imperfectly or corruptly, there is no guarantee that his own judgments about which particular actions are best for him will coincide with it. Psychic intervention, on this interpretation, is what happens when agents do make proper use of their capacity to rea-

131

Bobonich actually expresses doubts about whether Plato was ever committed to belief-desire psychology (see Plato’s Utopia p. 276). In attributing beliefdesire psychology to Plato in the Republic, I have in mind only that Plato is content in that text to explain human action and behavior by appealing to nothing more than an individual’s desires, aversions, and beliefs or knowledge; he does not rely on any other kind of psychic states or activities to explain what happens when people act.

158 son and when, consequently, their particular rational judgments and desires are aligned with the pull of the Golden Cord. If, for example, a particular action A is the one that is best for an agent in a given situation, then pulling with the Golden Cord occurs when the agent figures out that A is best on the basis of reasoning and rationally wants to do A as a result. Thus what’s doing the work of the “pulling” in my account of psychic intervention is simply the force provided by a rational motivation (as opposed to the force provided by a new psychic activity such as intending or deciding, as on Bobonich’s interpretation). When, on the other hand, a person fails to reason correctly and figure out which particular action he ought to perform, then he fails to pull with the Golden Cord.132 2.2 The Athenian Visitor describes the Golden Cord as “the golden and sacred pull of reasoning” and “the noble pull of law,” thereby giving us at least a prima facie reason for thinking that the Golden Cord represents the pull of the Good and correct law, as I have suggested. There is an initial worry we might have about this interpretation, however: if the Golden Cord represents not the individual’s 132

He may even, as it were, “pull” with one of the iron cords. The view I am advocating allows that psychic intervention could occur with respect to the iron cords: the individual would count as pulling with one of the iron cords if his judgments about what is best for him and his corresponding rational desires were in agreement with it – that is, if he rationally endorsed the action toward which his iron cords were pulling him. This represents a further difference between me and Bobonich. Bobonich claims that psychic intervention is connected to reasoning in such a way that one can intervene only on behalf of the Golden Cord, but not on behalf of the iron cords. Bobonich writes, “The above account assumes that the person’s intervention is to support his rational judgments and rational desires. But is this necessary? In terms of the image, could the person ever pull along with one of the iron cords? Nothing in Plato’s language suggests such a possibility. With regard to the iron cords, the person is seen only as passive, that is, as sometimes giving in to their pull” (Plato’s Utopia 274).

159 own particular rational judgments and desires – that is, the judgments and desires he has about particular actions – then it is not obvious in what sense it can be said to “pull” the individual at all in cases where his reasoning and judgments turn out to be non-ideal. The passage suggests that the Golden Cord is always there exerting at least some sort of minimal influence on the person. My interpretation must provide an account of how we can attribute a constant motivational tug to the Golden Cord even when the individual’s particular judgments are not in agreement with it. That is, if an individual reasons badly and arrives at the particular rational judgment that he ought to do something that is, in fact, bad for him, then in what sense can we say that reasoning and the Good are pulling him at all? The answer has to do with the nature of reason itself. Although Plato recognizes that reason may be corrupted by external influences, he consistently attributes to it a divine nature that pursues and desires the true Good. 133 Thus every human being, in virtue of possessing reason, has an innate orientation toward the Good. The implications for my interpretation of the Golden Cord are clear. The sense in which the Golden Cord always “pulls” on the individual, whether or not individual’s own particular rational judgments and desires concur with it, is that human nature includes the rational motivation to pursue what is truly good by reasoning about it and deliberating about how to achieve it. Because mortal nature can corrupt reason’s activity, the individual may often fail to recognize or desire the specific thing that is actually good for him. However, even when that failure

133

See, for example, Tim. 36d ff. and 44a ff., and Rep. 518d ff.

160 occurs, the basic motivation to pursue the Good – and thus the gentle “pull” of the Golden Cord – remains. The pull of our desire for the Good cannot do all of the work in our interpretation of the Golden Cord, however. One reason why is that the Athenian tells us that our affections pull us toward opposing actions (praxeis), and our rational desire for the Good does not seem to be sufficiently determinate to count as a desire to perform any very specific action. That does not mean it does not motivate us to act at all, for, as I just indicated, it does motivate us to engage in reflection about what constitutes the Good and deliberation about how to achieve it. However, it does not produce action beyond the psychic activity of reasoning itself until that reasoning arrives at conclusions that have immediate practical significance. This is the case with any general principle that an individual holds or end that he has: they do not motivate him to act unless he also recognizes that this particular action is the way to achieve his end or that his principle applies to this action now. He may, for example, rationally desire to avoid gluttony, but unless he also reasons that eating this doughnut now would be overindulgent, he will not have a corresponding rational desire to refrain from eating it. If the Golden Cord represents only our general desire for the Good, and if the Athenian has in mind particular actions when he introduces motivational opposition among the cords, then my interpretation of the Golden Cord does not seem to capture his intention. One way one might attempt to resolve this issue would be to say that the Golden Cord represents not merely the pull of the Good, but also of the outcome of ideal reasoning about the Good – i.e. the specific rational conclusions at which

161 ideal reasoning would arrive in any given case if it were carried out. There is, on Plato’s view, a fact of the matter about which particular actions are best for us, so one might argue that the Golden Cord simply pulls us toward those actions. The problem this view faces, however, is that there does not seem to be any straightforward sense in which individuals who are ignorant about which particular actions are best for them are rationally motivated to perform those actions. The puppet metaphor is designed to provide an illustration of the psychology of human motivation and action, and thus the “pull” of the strings toward actions must be understood as the motivation or desire to perform those actions. If we cannot point to something on the other side of the puppet’s strings that the individual is actually motivated to do, then the strings lose their explanatory value as part of an account of the individual’s behavior. The pull of the iron cords represents the individual’s relatively determinate motivations to perform actions associated with pleasure and pain, and it explains his pursuit of those actions. In contrast, the pull of the Golden Cord toward a particular action that the agent does not believe is good for him could not represent a motivation to pursue that action, because if the agent were ignorant an action’s being best for him, then he would have no rational motivation to act in that way.134 If the Golden Cord represents something more

134

Moreover, we would apparently face a problem if we claimed that in cases of ignorance about which action is best, the Golden Cord does represent a rational desire to perform the best action. The problem is that if the individual, out of ignorance, rationally desires to act in accordance with one of the bad iron cords, and if the Golden Cord represents a particular rational desire to do the right thing, then the person would have both a rational desire for and an aversion to the same action. The Principle of Opposites from Republic 4 would then entail a subdivision of the reasoning part of the soul. This assumes, of course, that Plato still accepts the Principle of Opposites. I argue in §5 that we have reason for thinking that he

162 general, such as the individual’s desire for the Good, then we can point to something he is actually motivated to do – namely, trying to figure out what is good for him. But this leads us right back to the original difficulty – that doesn’t seem to be the kind of specific “action” toward which the Athenian imagines the Golden Cord to be pulling us. 2.3 The solution to this difficulty is to be found by considering how Plato conceives of the role of law in the passage. If we give due attention to the role of law, then we need not conclude either that the Golden Cord pulls us toward the fully determinate actions recommended by ideal reasoning or that it pulls us only toward the activity of reasoning about the Good. The Athenian, as we saw earlier, identifies the Golden Cord with the pull of both reasoning and law. However, for him, these are not really distinct or different in kind. Rather, law is just a special case of reasoning. It is the embodiment of ideal reasoning at the public level, or, as he puts it, reasoning that has become the common opinion of the city (644d). Correct laws are the product of, and express, correct arguments and reasoning about what is good and how people should act.135 Because the pull of the Golden Cord includes the pull of law, we can see how the Golden Cord draws us toward

does. Even if he does not, however, a rational conflict of that sort would surely represent a strange psychological condition in need of explanation. 135 Not all laws are correct, and those that are not do not embody ideal reasoning. In the puppet passage, the Athenian makes it clear, through the reverent language with which he describes law, that he has in mind good law. Moreover, the Laws itself establishes in its opening words that law is given by God, and the project of the text could justly be understood as an effort to vindicate that claim. In that context, it is reasonable for the Athenian Visitor to speak of “law” when what he means is “correct law.”

163 actions that have the appropriate degree of generality. For laws represent practical, moral injunctions or prohibitions that are neither fully determinate nor as general as reason’s native impulse to pursue the Good. In contemporary terms, we could say that laws explicitly command or prohibit action-types but not explicitly action-tokens. For example, one of the Athenian’s laws is that one must not shamefully abandon one’s weapons of war (943e ff.). This law prohibits a relatively specific kind of action but does not, of course, state that some particular agent cannot perform some particular action, which is not the sort of thing that laws do. If an individual rationally accepted a law such as the law about abandoning weapons, then according to my interpretation, that law would partly constitute the pull of the Golden Cord on him. If he were in a situation in which, say, non-rational fear made him desire to abandon his weapons, but in which it would in fact be shameful for him to do so, then it would be correct to say that his affections were pulling against one another toward opposing deeds: his rational desire to obey the law would pull him in one direction, his non-rational fear in the opposite direction. However, note that so far we have said nothing that determines whether he will have a specific rational desire not to abandon his weapons in this instance. That is because although the law that he rationally accepts prohibits the action of shamefully abandoning weapons, he must still do some reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that abandoning his weapons in these circumstances would be a case of abandoning his weapons shamefully. He may antecedently have very mistaken ideas about what is shameful that lead him to the wrong conclusion, or his non-

164 rational desires might interfere with his reasoning and compromise his judgment. The important point, though, is that even if he does reach the incorrect conclusion that it is not shameful to abandon his weapons now, with the result that his particular rational desire aligns with his non-rational fear, it will still be true of him that he is pulled by the Golden Cord toward the opposite course of action. Moreover, that opposite course of action will not merely be the very general action of pursuing the Good, but a relatively specific one: namely, the action of not abandoning his weapons shamefully (or put, more positively, the action of holding onto his weapons nobly). Taking into account the role of law in Plato’s moral psychological account thus provides the resources for avoiding the difficulties that have been raised. On the one hand, it allows us to interpret the Golden Cord as a motivation to act in a relatively specific way and makes it appropriate to say that the Golden Cord really does pull us toward actions.136 And on the other hand, it allows us to avoid saying that the Golden Cord represents a desire to act in a fully

136

We should also note here that the laws and rational principles that we accept can motivate us at various levels of generality. At the most general level, as we have noted, they motivate us to engage in reasoning about the good. At the most specific level, and given correct reasoning on our part, they motivate us to engage in the particular actions immediately available to us. And we have also seen that they motivate us to adhere to laws and principles whose degree of generality falls somewhere in between. We should be aware, however, that those laws and principles will themselves come in degrees of generality. An individual may, in his reasoning about the good, conclude that he should live virtuously. He may further conclude that living virtuously consists in living bravely and moderately and that living bravely and moderately consists in acting in certain kinds of ways. Still more reasoning may lead him to consider the best means of carrying out those kinds of actions. All of these sub-conclusions of his practical calculation mediate his desire for the Good and his most particular rational desire to perform a fullyspecified action. This is really just a point about the process of deliberation itself. Some rational principles that we accept require a great deal of deliberation or thought to execute; others require little or none.

165 determinate way, which would make it difficult to account for the motivational pull of the Golden Cord in cases where the individual fails to follow through on his reasoning and arrive at the right practical judgments. 2.4 Here I would like to provide two examples from Plato that illustrate that he conceives of the role of law in human psychology in the way I have suggested. The first is from Laws 3, where the Athenian wants to determine how the ancient regimes of Argos and Messene became corrupt. He attributes their deterioration to “the greatest sort of ignorance,” which he identifies as dissonance between a person’s opinions about what is good and his feelings of pleasure and pain (689a). Although we might expect this dissonance to amount to straightforward motivational conflict or weakness of will, in which individuals’ affections lead them away from particular actions that they know are best, the way the Athenian fills out the details of his explanation suggests that something more nuanced is going on in the case of the ancient regimes. He says that the dissonance that corrupted the regimes occurred when their kings were seized by the desire to have more than the established laws allowed and were no longer in consonance with what they praised in speech and with the oaths they swore as rulers – specifically, oaths they swore not to rule harshly and to protect the populace against injustice.137 The Athenian does not indicate in his description that the kings’ desires are out of line with particular rational motivations that they have, but rather that they are out of line with more general principles that they have rationally accepted. In par-

137

See 684a-b.

166 ticular, they desire more than their share, and that desire is opposed to their earlier oaths. That leaves open the possibility that they are rationally unaware that the thing they are doing – i.e. the thing that constitutes taking more than their share – is a case of abusing their power or ruling unjustly. Indeed, the Athenian describes their failure as in part a rational one, for he explains: Didn’t their mistake consist in the fact that they were ignorant of what Hesiod has stated very correctly – that ‘the half is often more than the whole’? When it is harmful to take the whole, but the half is a measured amount, then the measured amount should be considered more than the amount that is unmeasured – for the one is better and the other is worse (690e). In the language of the puppet passage, we would say that the Golden Cord, embodying in this instance the lawful oaths that they have sworn and accepted, is pulling them in the direction of ruling justly and taking their fair share, but their iron cords are pulling them toward actions that conflict with those virtuous principles. Because they do not make correct use of their reason, however, they do not recognize the tension and are led astray. In the case of the kings, their laws and oaths are in need of assistance, but the kings fail to “intervene” on their behalf. Their moral failure is a double one: they have unlawful non-rational desires, and, at the same time, because they do not reason well, they fail to recognize and execute the particular practical prescriptions that their laws, if properly reasoned through, would lead them to carry out. The second example is from Republic 10. There Socrates points out that the decent man, when he suffers a personal loss, will not grieve publicly or inappropriately, but rather will fight against the pain when he is around his peers. He

167 then asks, “Isn’t it argument and law that tell him to hold out, while the suffering (pathos) itself is what draws him to the pain?” (604a). The law, he explains, says that it is most noble to keep as quiet as possible in misfortune, that taking it hard accomplishes nothing, and that being in pain impedes what one needs most in difficult situations, which is deliberation about what has happened. While the best part of us is willing to follow reasoning in such situations, the other part of us wants to indulge in the suffering. This discussion bears striking similarities to the puppet passage. In both, reasoning and law are spoken of (interchangeably) as playing a significant motivational role, and in both, the individual experiences psychological opposition between a part of his soul that is responsive to law and a part of it that is not. Moreover, the fact that Socrates goes on to describe the better part of the soul as “ready to be persuaded in whatever direction the law leads” suggests that although reason is drawn toward law, that inclination does not by itself constitute a fully-formed, particular motivation or judgment. The individual must still rationally recognize the direction in which the law leads in order to follow it, and the fact that there is room for error becomes even clearer in the discussion that follows. Socrates says that although decent men do not dare grieve publicly themselves during personal sorrow, they enjoy and praise characters who do so in poetic performances. He explains: What is held down by force in our own misfortunes and has hungered for the satisfaction of weeping and lamenting, since it desires these things by nature, is that which now gets satisfaction and enjoyment from the poets. The part of ourselves that is best by nature, since it hasn’t been adequately educated either by argument or habit, relaxes its guard over the lamenting part when it is watching the suf-

168 ferings of somebody else. The reason it does so is this: It thinks that there is no shame involved in praising and pitying another man who, in spite of his claim to goodness, grieves excessively... I suppose that only a certain few men are capable of calculating that the enjoyment of other people’s suffering has a necessary effect on one’s own (606a-b). This passage tells us that although decent men accept the law forbidding shameful indulgence in suffering, they may nonetheless fail to have rational motivations fully in harmony with that law. In cases of personal sorrow, it seems, relatively little reasoning is required to recognize and adopt what the law prescribes.138 However, when it comes to grief in poetry, Socrates tells us that only the most sophisticated thinkers are able to reach the correct conclusion that the spectator’s delight constitutes an improper indulgence of their own inferior desires. As in the puppet passage, the picture we have is one in which individuals feel the psychological pull of law, but in which they nonetheless will fail to have the correct rational desires in particular circumstances whenever they fail to exercise reason correctly and “pull with” the law. These examples help illustrate two important points about law as Plato is using it that need to be made. The first is that in characterizing law, or nomos, as a psychological influence on the reasoning part of our souls, Plato does not think of law as being limited to official, written legislation. Rather, he understands it, in accordance with its broad Greek usage, to include both written and unwritten laws, as well as customs and accepted principles. Thus the injunction against

138

The fact that indulgence in personal grief is publicly treated as shameful by the majority is no doubt of great assistance to reason in arriving at the right conclusion.

169 public grieving need not be written down by a lawgiver in order to play the psychological role Plato has in mind for it; it is sufficient that it be imposed by popular opinion. The second point is that Plato seems to think that most people rationally accept at least some, or perhaps even many, laws that are correct. This addresses a worry one might have about my interpretation of the puppet passage: because most people are not brought up under ideal constitutions, it might seem that most people are not subject to the noble pull of law discussed by the Athenian. If that were true, then it would turn out that in the psychology of most people, the Golden Cord really does represent nothing more than reason’s general desire for the Good and does not pull in the direction of any action besides the activity of reasoning itself, which would raise the worries that I mentioned above. Moreover, the Athenian’s psychological account would then apparently apply only to the small subset of human beings who are raised under ideal law, which would be strange, given that he presents his image as if it provides a general account of human psychology. However, because the overwhelming majority of people get some or many things right when it comes to rational principles, we can understand them as subject to the pull of the Golden Cord even in non-ideal political conditions.139 It is, to be sure, a consequence of this account that if someone accepted no rational principles, even very general ones, that are correct, then it would not be appropriate to describe him as subject to the pull of law, and his “Golden

139

Presumably, the majority of people get many things right at higher levels of generality and at least a few things right at more specific levels. Sophisticated and shrewd thinkers will get many things right at specific levels as well.

170 Cord,” which would presumably be quite weak indeed, would represent only the vague and feeble pull of his much-neglected desire for the Good. Plato does not seem to think such individuals exist very often; the tyrant of Book 9 of the Republic would presumably be one example, however. And the fact that Plato characterizes him as “lawless” suggests that Plato would find my interpretation of such an individual unobjectionable. 3. Advantages of the New Interpretation To review, then, according to my new interpretation, what is going on in the puppet passage is the following: The iron cords represent the motivations an individual has that arise independently of reasoning, and the Golden Cord represents the individual’s innate rational motivation to pursue the Good and his rational motivations to adhere to laws that embody ideal reasoning. Although the Golden Cord exerts a constant pull on the individual, it cannot lead him to actually act virtuously in particular instances unless the individual reasons properly and arrives at the practical conclusions that in fact follow from the good laws that he accepts. When the individual does reason properly in this way, he will come to have rational motivations to act in the particular ways that are virtuous, and those motivations are what do the “pulling” along with the Golden Cord. This interpretation differs from Bobonich in that (1) it does not understand the Golden Cord to represent the individual’s particular rational desires, and (2) it does not understand psychic intervention as an additional psychic moment or activity above and beyond desire.

171 I would now like to point out what I take to be the advantages my interpretation has over Boboinch’s. First, my interpretation allows for a much simpler account of psychic intervention that relies only on moral psychological views that Plato explicitly advocates and develops in the Laws and elsewhere. On my interpretation, there is nothing mysterious about the additional force or pull supplied by the intervention: it is simply the force that is supplied by a new rational desire – namely, the particular rational desire that results from one’s reasoning about what to do. On the other hand, because Bobonich takes the conflict that is described in the puppet passage to be strict akratic conflict, he interprets psychic intervention as something that happens after all of the desires that are involved in a given case of psychic weakness are already in place. This means that he cannot say, as I do, that the rational process of intervening is simply the process of arriving at the rational desire to act in particular way, because on his interpretation of the passage, that rational desire is already present prior to the intervening. Indeed, what all of Bobonich’s proposed interpretations of psychic intervention have in common is that none of them understands intervening as introducing a new desire into the motivational equation. The opposed desires are all already there, on Bobonich’s view, and the question for him is how we can understand the motivationally significant activity of “pulling” with the Golden Cord without appealing to some new desire itself. This leads him to engage in speculation about what such an activity might be – deciding, intending, increasing the strength of one’s rational desire through reflection, or engaging in some sort of activity that expresses the self-motion of the soul – but as he acknowledges, the textual evi-

172 dence underdetermines any of his suggestions, and they all involve positing a complicated addition to Plato’s moral psychology rather than drawing on the theoretical resources that Plato had already put in place explicitly by the time he wrote the Laws.140 Another advantage of my interpretation is that it allows us better to see why the Athenian would say that the pull of the Golden Cord is “gentle” and always needs assistance in order to be motivationally efficacious.

Because

Bobonich takes the puppet passage as a characterization of strict akratic conflict, he assumes that the gentleness of the Golden Cord refers to a gentleness of rational motivation generally. If the puppet’s struggle is an akratic one, then since his Golden Cord is said to be “soft” and “gentle” (in contrast to the “hard” iron cords), the implication is that in cases in which our rational desire to act in a particular way is opposed by our non-rational desire, our rational desire will always be too gentle to prevail in the conflict in the absence of further “assistance.” That is, Bobonich’s interpretation entails that even particular rational desires are not strong enough on their own to overcome recalcitrant non-rational desires in cases of conflict between the two. The problem, however, is that we have no reason for thinking that Plato ever held the view that rational desire is motivationally weak in this way, and it in fact contradicts what he consistently says on the subject. One of the central issues in Plato’s moral psychology, which both the Protagoras 140

Moreover, if Plato had arrived at the view that some extra psychic activity such as deciding or intending was involved in the aetiology of action, that would have represented an exciting and dramatic departure from his earlier theory of moral psychology, and it seems extremely unlikely, having arrived at such an exciting new view, that he would have chosen to express it merely as the ambiguous intimation of a metaphor, instead of explicitly stating it and developing it.

173 and the Republic address, is whether anyone can ever act contrary to what he believes is best, i.e. whether reason can ever fail to produce action. There is never any doubt that it can succeed some or most of the time in doing so by mastering our other impulses. Thus in Republic 4, for example, it is clear that reason is capable of effectively overcoming both appetitive and spirited desires. In the Timaeus, reason is able to suppress recalcitrant appetites through the use of threats and frightful images. And in the charioteer metaphor of the Phaedrus, reason successfully holds appetite in check and is anything but gentle in doing so. On the contrary, the charioteer makes use of strikingly forceful and bloody violence against the impulses of the bad horse.141 Indeed, if Plato had come to think that rational desire is generally weak in the face of bad non-rational desires, that would have represented a major departure from his earlier views and from the theory of tripartition. In the absence of any further evidence that Plato made this significant revision to his views about the motivational power of reason, we simply cannot justify the claim that Plato’s changed his mind in this way by the time he wrote the Laws. It seems much more natural to think, as my interpretation has it, that the Golden Cord is “gentle” and needs assistance because, although the rational part of the individual naturally desires what is truly good, the individual will not in fact pursue what is truly good unless he reasons correctly and comes to have the

141

See my discussions of these passages in Chapters 2 and 3. One could of course suggest that in these passages, reason’s motivational success occurs after a psychic intervention of the sort Bobonich proposes. However, without any textual indication of an additional psychological step of that sort, such a response would be purely ad hoc.

174 right particular desires as a result. Our rational desire for the Good motivates us to try to figure out what is good and to pursue whatever we believe to be good, but that desire by itself can only pull us gently in the right direction; we still have more work to do to arrive at, and fully accept as our own, the right conclusions about the specific practical possibilities open to us. When we do use our reasoning correctly, we come to have a new rational motivation to act in a particular way, and that motivation constitutes our “assistance” of the Golden Cord. The significance of saying that the Golden Cord always requires assistance but the iron cords do not, then, is not that non-rational motivations are strong and rational ones weak, but rather that the Golden Cord represents an impulse of the individual’s nature that cannot pull him toward particular actions unless he makes proper use of his capacity to reason and acquires the correct rational desires that accord with the Golden Cord. The iron cords, on the other hand, represent relatively specific motivations that can produce action “on their own” regardless of whether the individual’s calculations and rational desires are aligned with them. Contrary to Bobonich’s interpretation, then, the passage does not indicate that rational desire is weak. Calling the Golden Cord “gentle” does not, in fact, indicate anything about its motivational strength at all, but only refers to the unique way that our basic desire for the Good motivates to act virtuously. The Athenian does not merely claim that the Golden Cord always needs assistance, however. He also clearly advocates the view that one should always

175 give it assistance.142 A further disadvantage of Bobonich’s account is that it does not make very good sense of this moral imperative. For if the Golden Cord represents the individual’s own particular rational judgment, then claiming that one should always follow the Golden Cord amounts to saying that one always ought to do whatever one rationally believes one ought to do. That would be unproblematic if Plato thought that rational beliefs are infallible, but it is clear that he never held such a view. For him, correct belief is always an achievement, not a given.143 But if practical belief is not infallible, then Bobonich’s interpretation yields the odd consequence that the Athenian Visitor’s moral message is that one

142

The Greek “dei” can have a purely descriptive sense, i.e. it can describe a mere lack, or it can also have a normative sense, i.e. it can state an obligation. It might be suggested that when the Athenian uses “dei” to describe what one must do, he really does intend to make only the descriptive claim that the Golden Cord is in need of assistance, without committing himself to any claim about whether one should actually assist it. However, context makes it clear that “dei” is also used normatively here. Among other contextual clues, the Athenian Visitor’s description of the Golden Cord as “golden,” “sacred,” and “noble” makes it impossible to interpret him as neutral on the question of whether one should pull along with it. 143 Bobonich at one point distinguishes the desire for the good, which is associated with reason’s practical judgments and which is a desire of reason itself, from a desire originating independently of reason which reason then endorses. Although he does not do so, he could perhaps expand this distinction and claim that the Golden Cord represents only desires of reason that arise on their own, and not desires of reason that result from a corruption by non-rational desire. It would then be more plausible to suggest that the beliefs embodied in the Golden Cord are infallible. All one would have to show is that Plato thinks that when reason is not interfered with by non-rational affections, it always reaches the right conclusion. However, there are good reasons for thinking that Plato does not endorse even this modified claim in the Laws. For one thing, it is unclear why Plato would feel the need to discuss ignorance as a cause of injustice distinct from pleasure and pain if he could explain any failure of reason as the result of nonrational affections. Moreover, the Athenian Visitor’s discussion of the “just atheist” in Book 10 emphasizes his naturally virtuous disposition as a way of indicating that his failure to arrive at the correct beliefs really is a failure of reason itself, and not a failure that is caused by having the wrong feelings of pleasure and pain.

176 should follow one’s rational judgment even if it is mistaken.144 This would amount to a “good conscience” view, according to which a person is considered virtuous, or does what he ought to do, as long as he acts in accordance with what he believes is best.145 If that were Plato’s view, however, then his treatment of the

144

Even saying that “one ought to follow one’s rational judgment even if it is mistaken” assumes a distinction that Plato does not accept or even recognize. Modern ethical theorists often distinguish between two kinds of “ought” – the objective and the subjective. What one ought to do objectively is determined by facts that make it the case that that action is the best one to perform (however one’s theory understands “best”), while what one ought to do subjectively is determined by what it would be reasonable for one to do, given one’s beliefs and other mental states. Thus, for example, if I must decide between performing one of two actions, x and y, and I am (in fact) morally obligated to perform x, but I believe, on the basis of deceptive but justifiably convincing evidence, that I am morally obligated to perform y, then modern theorists might say that I ought objectively to perform action x, but that I ought subjectively to perform action y. Moreover, they might claim that since my beliefs do not justify performing action x, it would actually be irrational for me to do so. If one held this view, then the claim that one ought to do whatever one believes one ought to do would sound quite plausible, as long as one understood the “ought” as subjective. However, Plato does not recognize the distinction between two kinds of ought. For Plato, if one falsely believes that one ought to perform some action, then one is irrational for failing to see what one really ought to do. Thus, if Plato were to advocate the view that under such conditions one ought to do whatever one believes one ought to do, that would amount to saying that what one objectively ought to do is whatever one believes one ought to do. 145 “Good conscience” interpretations of the Laws have enjoyed some popularity. The crucial passage to which such interpretations appeal is not this one, however, but 864a, where the Athenian Visitor asserts, “When the opinion about what is best… holds sway in souls and brings order to every man, then, even if it is in some way mistaken, what is done through this, and the part of each man that becomes obedient to such a rule, must be declared to be entirely just and best for the whole of human life.” I think that there are conclusive reasons for rejecting “good conscience” interpretations of 864a as well. One reason, which Saunders points out (“Socratic Paradoxes” 428), is that it would be strange if Plato, having just declared agnoia to be an aition adikêmatôn, were to then call it an aition dikiaôn as long as one acts in accordance with it. The interpretation of 864a that Saunders advocates as a way of avoiding the good conscience interpretation, and that I accept as well, is that “the opinion about what is best” refers to correct opinion about what is best.

177 two atheists of Book 10 would be inexplicable. 146 Both act in accordance with their mistaken beliefs about the gods, but they are neither considered virtuous nor understood to be doing what they are supposed to do. Rather, they both do wicked things (kaka ergazein) and deserve punishment.147 It is clear that what they are doing does not count as following the Golden Cord, although they do act in good conscience.148 Plato also shows that he does not hold the “good conscience” view in his remarks about the “popular” form of moderation, which he says consists in a natural ability to overcome pleasures and pains. Presumably, a person who possesses popular moderation would be someone who acts in accordance with his rational judgments and thus in “good conscience.” However, Plato says that this kind of moderation, in the absence of the other virtues, is not worthy of mention (710b).

146

See 908a ff. The case of the atheists provides further proof that Plato does not think belief is infallible. It also points to another phenomenon that is problematic for Good Conscience interpretations: inverse akrasia, i.e. cases in which x is good, and the individual takes non-rational pleasure in x but rationally judges that x is bad. Inverse akrasia is not a phenomenon that Plato explicitly addresses, but it does seem that the just atheist has non-rational preferences that do a better job of tracking the good than do his rational beliefs, and if so, that would represent a case in which Plato acknowledges some version of inverse akrasia. Note that Aristotle does acknowledge cases in inverse akrasia at NE 1146a22 ff. About a sophistic difficulty that has been raised, he writes, “There is an argument from which it follows that folly coupled with akrasia is excellence; for a man does the opposite of what he believes owing to akrasia, but believes what is good to be evil and something that he should not do, and in consequence he will do what is good and not what is evil.” 148 This is especially true of the “naturally just” atheist, whose false belief is explicitly attributed to ignorance alone, and not to bad character. 147

178 Plato would not be dismissive of a standing disposition to act in good conscience if he identified acting in good conscience with doing what one ought to do.149 Finally, the “good conscience” view is inconsistent with one of the most central Platonic doctrines, which is that what it is best for one to do is determined not by individuals or by convention, but by objective facts about the Good, and that virtue consists above all in correctly identifying and pursuing that goodness. One indication among many that Plato retains this fundamental view in the Laws is that in Book 12 the Athenian assigns to the Nocturnal Council the task of attaining knowledge of the truth and nature of the Beautiful and the Good (966a). Similarly, he distinguishes between what a person actually wishes for and what he should wish for, the latter being determined by accordance with the virtue of prudence (687e). If Plato had advocated the “good conscience” view in the Laws, it would have represented a radical revision of his earlier theory. Because the evidence is conclusive that he did not intend such a revision, however, it is an unacceptable consequence of Bobonich’s interpretation of the Golden Cord that it commits Plato to that view.150

149

One could perhaps attempt to preserve “good conscience” interpretations of the puppet passage and 864a by claiming that those passages are not intended to provide accounts of true virtue but only of the popular form of virtue. According to this line of thought, the passages would be making the much more modest claim that one possesses, for example, the popular form of moderation as long as one acts in accordance with one’s rational beliefs, correct or not. (Pangle explicitly advocates this interpretation of 864a.) However, the context of both passages simply does not permit this interpretation. The puppet passage comes in the context of a discussion of education that the Athenian says is aimed at true and complete virtue, and the virtue described at 864a is the kind that makes a man and his actions “entirely just and best for the whole of human life.” 150 One further advantage of my interpretation that is worth mentioning is that my interpretation gives due attention the special role of law in the puppet passage and

179 4. Psychic Weakness 4.1 I would now like to draw attention to the concept of psychic weakness – or “failing to exercise rule over oneself” – that emerges from my interpretation of the puppet passage. I will argue that that concept, rather than the one that follows from Bobonich’s interpretation, is the one that Plato actually proves to care about and make use of in the Laws. On my view, the puppet passage is not primarily concerned with the kind of weakness that is involved in cases of strict akrasia or what we would call weakness of will – that is, cases in which a person has the non-rational desire to perform some particular action A and rationally judges that they should not perform A, but ends up doing A anyway. According to my interpretation, rather, the notion of psychic weakness that the puppet passage attempts to explicate is the kind that occurs anytime a person’s non-rational motivations lead them to act in a way that conflicts with their basic rational desire for the Good and with their rational desires to live up to correct laws that they accept in their pursuit of the Good. The puppet passage provides a broad account of human weakness and vice that is intended to illustrate what happens, in general, when people stray from virtuousness because of their non-rational desires. As I have noted, because Bobonich, on the other hand, takes the Golden Cord to represent primarily the individual’s own particular rational judgments and desires, he does take the psychic conflict characterized by the passage to be akratic conflict, and so provides an explanation of why law features into the account in the way that it does and how law is related to our rational motivations; Bobonich’s interpretation, on the other hand, fails to explain or adequately address the importance and function of law in the passage.

180 he thinks that the puppet passage is primarily concerned with giving an account of strict akrasia. Another way of clarifying this difference between our views is to point out that on my interpretation, the puppet passage describes the psychic condition in which we find ourselves before we are subject to strict akratic conflict (whereas, as discussed above, pp. 171-172, on Bobonich’s interpretation the passage primarily describes the condition of strict akratic conflict itself). In the puppet passage the Athenian asks us to intervene on behalf of the Golden Cord, and on my interpretation, doing so means producing, as a result of our reasoning, a rational motivation to act in a particular way that is opposed to our non-rational motivations. A case of strict akratic conflict, therefore, is a case in which we have already intervened, not a case in which we still need to do so.151 If we are experiencing strict akratic conflict, then we have already figured out which specific action is best for us and are already fighting rationally to do that thing against our worse desires. At that point, it is an open question whether reason’s desire will prevail. The outcome of the conflict will be settled by which motivation is the strongest or most dominant; but since we have already “assisted” the Golden Cord at that point in the conflict, we need not think that our rational desire is still “gentle” in the way Bobonich takes it to be.

151

That is not to say that strict akratic conflict is the only possible outcome of psychic intervention – i.e. of figuring out which particular course of action one ought to take and rationally desiring to act in that way. Rational desires may in some cases influence our non-rational ones in a way that makes the non-rational ones go away or change. As we saw in Chapter 3, this is exactly what typically happens when reason conflicts with spirited desire.

181 4.2 The advantage of shifting the focus from strict akrasia to a broader notion of psychic weakness is that it is the broad notion that Plato actually appeals to and makes use of in the Laws. That is, it is psychic weakness in the broad sense that the policies and laws advocated in the text can be reasonably understood as combating. We have already seen that in the Athenian’s account of the downfall of the ancient kings of Argos and Messene, the kings’ psychic dissonance was of the broader sort. Here I would like to point out two other crucial discussions in the text where Plato seems concerned with broad psychic weakness rather than akrasia. Most notably, in Book 9, the Athenian Visitor provides an extensive and detailed discussion of the psychological causes of criminal behavior, and in that discussion he analyzes the various ways in which non-rational psychological states can cause a person to act “weakly” and to fail to exercise control over themselves. The problem for Bobonich’s view is that although the Athenian evidently considers all instances of criminal behavior to be instances of psychic weakness, not one of the many cases that he discusses involves strict akrasia. That is, not one of them involves a case in which a non-rational desire to perform a given action is opposed to an occurent rational desire to abstain from that action. The Athenian divides the causes of criminal behavior into two main nonrational types. The first type is pleasure, and the primary example that he gives of a pleasure-crime is murder committed out of greed and the undue desire for wealth. However, the Athenian makes it clear that criminals who commit such murders rationally approve of doing so. He calls pleasure-murders “voluntary”

182 and characterizes them as being carried out with forethought.152 The Athenian also says that pleasure works “through persuasion and trickery,” which suggests that he understands pleasure as being responsible not just for the criminal desire itself, but also for corrupting the individual’s reasoning and causing him to make a bad rational judgment about the crime (863b). The point here is that pleasurecriminals are not akratic criminals. Rather, they are criminals who have come to the all-things-considered conclusion that their criminal actions are justified. The second non-rational cause of criminal behavior is anger, and again the primary case that the Athenian addresses is murder committed out of anger. He distinguishes two versions of angry-killing.153 In one version, the individual plans out his crime and feels no regret after committing it. Thus, like the pleasuremurderer, this angry killer rationally approves of his crime. The second version of angry-killing is different, though, and it occurs when someone who does not plan to kill does so because of a sudden, angry impulse and feels regret immediately afterward. As the Athenian presents the crime, what happens in angrykillings of this kind is that the individual’s anger leads him to commit the murder so suddenly and impetuously that the individual never has time to think about whether he ought to do it. The fact that the killers feel immediate regret indicates that if they had had time to reason about the crime, they would not have rationally approved of it. Therefore, once again, such murderers do not kill out of strict akrasia, because that would require them to have a particular, all-things-considered

152 153

See 869e ff. See 866d ff.

183 judgment opposed to their anger, and that judgment is precisely what they never have time to make.154 Bobonich attempts to deal with these cases of criminal behavior by, in various ways, treating them as impure cases of akrasia.155 However, it would have been very strange for Plato to use the puppet metaphor to introduce a notion of psychic weakness that he goes on to make only indirect, impure use of. It makes much more sense to think that, as I have argued, the puppet passage is intended to illustrate the broad notion of psychic weakness that I have suggested, a notion that can be applied directly and in a quite natural way to the cases of criminal behavior. Pleasure and anger, we can say, pull the individual toward crimes that are opposed to the individual’s desire for the Good and to any applicable good laws that the individual rationally accepts – laws, say, against acquiring wealth unjustly or against unjust killing. And we can say that, in the case of pleasure, pleasure corrupts an individual’s practical reasoning and thereby causes the individual to rationally approve of the crime and thus to, as it were, “pull along with the iron cord.” In the case of impetuous anger, we can say that anger simply pulls the individual toward the criminal act with such haste and force that

154

Aristotle, in his discussion of akrasia in NE VII.3, distinguishes perceptual knowledge from knowledge proper, and he leaves open the possibility that akratic agents have the former (at least in a sense) when they act akratically, while denying that they have the latter. Therefore, Aristotle has the resources for allowing that impetuous killers do in a sense have a certain kind of knowledge or judgment contrary to which they act when they commit their murders. Plato never explicitly recognizes a distinction between perceptual knowledge and knowledge proper, and therefore, since impetuous killers clearly do not have knowledge proper that what they do is wrong when they act, he denies that they have it at all. 155 He calls them cases of “weak akrasia.” See his discussion in Plato’s Utopia pp. 267-273.

184 the individual never has a chance to reason things out and thus never has time to pull along with the Golden Cord. 4.3 The fact that the broad notion of psychic weakness is the one at play in the puppet passage is also evidenced by the discussion of the psychological phenomenon of drunkenness that the puppet passage actually introduces. Just after offering the metaphor of the puppet, the Athenian Stranger provides a clever argument for the good of public intoxication that begins with the following exchange with his interlocutor Kleinias: Ath. Tell me: if we introduce drunkenness into this puppet what effect shall we produce? Kl. What do you have in mind in asking this? Ath. Nothing in particular just yet. I’m just asking what happens, in general, when the two come together. But I’ll try to explain what I want more clearly. What I’m asking is this: doesn’t the drinking of wine make pleasures, pains, spirited emotions, and sexual desires, more intense? Kl. Why yes, yes it does. Ath. What about sensations, memories, opinions, and prudent thoughts? Do they become more intense in the same way? Or don’t they completely abandon anyone who becomes thoroughly wasted? Kl. Yes, they completely abandon him. Ath. So he arrives at the same disposition of the soul that he had when he was a young child? Kl. But of course. Ath. At such a time he would be least the master of himself. Kl. Yes, least (645d ff.). The purpose of this passage is to establish that when a person is very drunk, his rational capacities abandon him. That is precisely why drinking is so useful, the Athenian asserts. By getting a man drunk, one can see what motivations he has in

185 the absence of his practical judgments. In order to test whether a man has perverse desires, he points out, it is much easier, and certainly much safer, to get him drunk in a controlled environment and observe him than, as he puts it, “to hand over one’s sons and daughters to him” and hope for the best (649e). Thus the practice of public intoxication that he recommends answers an epistemological worry that one might have as a Magnesian legislator. The problem is that the legislator is supposed to know the condition of the souls over which he rules so that he can do whatever is in his power to make them better. However, the truly moderate man and the merely self-controlled man act in objectively equivalent ways in most cases. The difference between them is that the moderate man’s non-rational desires are aligned with his rational ones, whereas the self-controlled man has recalcitrant non-rational desires that may potentially lead him to perform unjust actions on some occasions and that, at any rate, keep him from having an ideally ordered soul. Introducing drunkenness into a man’s soul solves this epistemological problem by giving the legislator a way of discovering the individual’s non-rational desires. However, this works only if the person does not have particular judgments, arrived at on the basis of reasoning, and corresponding rational desires that could oppose his non-rational ones. Thus, it is crucial to the experiment that the drunk individual not make judgments about what is best for him to do when he acts. The Athenian’s exchange with Kleinias confirms that he does not. If opinions and prudent thoughts abandon him (completely, if the Athenian and Kleinias are to be believed) and he becomes like a young child, then we must conclude that in such a state he is no longer making

186 reasoned calculations about the good or being affected by them. Yet although the drunk individual does not have particular rational desires or judgments, the Athenian clearly wants to characterize any vicious actions that the drunkard performs as actions that he performs out of weakness. Once again, we can see that for this to be the case, it must be the broad notion of weakness that he has in mind, and not strict akratic conflict. It is very telling, furthermore, that not only in the discussions of drunkenness and criminal behavior, but in fact, in the entirety of the Laws, Plato never discusses a case of strict akratic conflict. What this shows, I think, is that Plato simply does not care about strict akrasia, either in the puppet passage or in the text as a whole. The reason is apparently that Plato does not consider strict akratic conflict to be the most serious threat to human virtue arising from nonrational desire. Rather, he takes the most serious threat to be the possibility that reason will, in various ways, be corrupted, interefered with, and undermined by non-rational desire. As far as the metaphor of the puppet is concerned, what keeps people from being virtuous is not that they pull along with the Golden Cord but are pulled more strongly by the iron cords anyway, but rather that they do not pull along with the Golden Cord at all. 5. The Principle of Opposites and Partitioning of the Soul 5.1 So far I have shown that the argument from silence fails as an argument that Plato had given up tripartition by the time he composed the Laws, and I have argued for a new interpretation of the puppet passage that avoids the features of

187 Bobonich’s interpretation that are unfriendly to the tripartite division of soul as Plato presented it in earlier works. Here I would like to note one important way in which the puppet passage might positively suggest a partitioning theory of the soul. This argument relies on the assumption that Plato, while writing the Laws, has not abandoned the Principle of Opposites (PO) as he established it in the Republic. I will first make the argument and then offer some considerations in support of that assumption. The PO is stated by Socrates as follows: “The same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing” (436b). As we saw in Chapter 1, this is the crucial premise in Socrates’ subsequent argument to establish that there are three parts of the soul. He makes use of it by pointing out cases in which the same thing – namely, the soul – does do or suffer opposites at the same time and in relation to the same thing, but he concludes that these case are not in tension with the PO because the soul does not do so with respect to the same part. Rather, it is different parts of the soul that have simultaneous, opposites responses to the same thing. In his description of the puppet, the Athenian uses language that recalls the PO: he states that our affections pull us, against one another, in opposite directions toward opposite actions.156 However, in order for this conflict to generate

156

One might point out that whereas the PO states that the same thing cannot (at the same time and with respect to the same part) do or experience opposites in relation to the same thing, the puppet passage seems to describe cases in which we experience the same thing in relation to opposites. In other words, whereas in the Republic, Socrates applies the PO to cases in which people simultaneously have a desire for, and an aversion to, some single thing, in the puppet passage we seem to be described as simultaneously having two desires for different, opposed

188 soul-partitioning, it must be a conflict between one desire to do a particular thing and another desire to do the opposite – that is, it must be a case of what I have been calling “strict akratic conflict” – and as I have argued, that is not the kind of conflict that the puppet passage describes. While the iron cords represent motivational states that pull in the direction of specific (or relatively specific) actions, the Golden Cord represents a more general desire to pursue what is good and the laws that embody that goodness. The PO will apply, though, only if the individual’s rational desire is opposed to the same specific thing that his non-rational desire seeks, because otherwise it will not be true of him that he has a simultaneous desire and aversion in relation to the same thing.157 However, as I have also argued, the puppet passage clearly leaves open the possibility of strict akratic conflict as a condition that can result from psychic intervention. According to the interpretation of psychic intervention that I have of-

things (namely, one desire to perform an action that is virtuous and another desire to act in the opposite, vicious way). This would be a problem, however, only if Plato distinguished desiring not-x from having an aversion to x. He does not indicate an interest in making that distinction, however, and the variety of ways in which he characterizes aversion in the Republic actually suggests that he would find the distinction misguided and erroneous. He initially characterizes the opposite of desire as a not-wanting (aboulein) or not-desiring (mê epithumein) that involves pushing the objection of aversion away, but when he describes the case of the thirsty man, he describes the opposite of thirst as a kind of forbidding that involves pulling away from the object of aversion (437c, 439b-c). The flexibility with which he describes aversion suggests that he would object to a distinction between pulling away from an action and pulling toward its opposite – i.e. between being averse to x and desiring not-x – and hence the puppet passage admits application of the Principle of Opposites. 157

Note that in the Republic, Socrates does not and could not establish the division between appetite and reason by pointing out that sometimes a person simultaneously desires to drink and desires what is good for him; it is crucial that the person simultaneously desires to drink and desires not to drink.

189 fered, cases of strict akratic conflict will result anytime the following three conditions are met: (1) the Golden Cord is opposed to the iron cords, (2) the individual intervenes on behalf of the Golden Cord by desiring the particular action that is opposed to the action toward which the iron cords are pulling, and (3) the iron cords remain opposed to the Golden Cord throughout the psychic intervention (that is, the presence of the new rational motivation does not disrupt or eliminate the opposed, non-rational ones). The Athenian makes it clear through the puppet passage that condition (1) is commonly met, and he in fact recommends the satisfaction of condition (2). Condition (3) is important, because if it were the case that psychic intervention on behalf of the Golden Cord always resulted in the elimination of bad non-rational desire, then the opposition between the particular rational desire and the particular non-rational desire would be diachronic rather than synchronic, and the conflict would not be strictly akratic.158 However, the

158

This could lead to a vascillation model of psychic conflict. One way one might try to support such a reading on the basis of the puppet passage would be to point out that the Athenian does not say that our affections pull us in opposed ways simultaneously. Thus he evidently does not exclude the possibility that our affections pull us in opposite ways, but not at the same time. This reading is implausible, however. To begin with, if that were what Plato meant, then it would be strange for him to present the metaphor the way he does without making that important qualification. As it is written, the passage clearly suggests that the cords are pulling us puppets in opposite ways simultaneously. We have even more conclusive evidence, however. In Book 9, Plato makes a clear allusion to the puppet passage by again raising the issue of being stronger or weaker than oneself. He points out that although we often consider someone to be stronger or weaker than pleasure or anger, we do not consider anyone to be stronger or weaker than ignorance. He then writes, “And we assert that all these things, at least, often turn each man in directions opposite to that toward which his wish (boulêsis) at the same time (hama) draws him” (863e). This remark apparently refers to the kind of conflict described in the puppet passage, while importantly adding ignorance to the list of things that can pull against an individual’s rational desire. The significant feature of the statement for our purposes is that Plato

190 puppet passage gives us no reason to think that psychic intervention has a determinate effect of this kind on the iron cords. We can assume, then, that in at least some (if not many) cases, our non-rational desires continue to pull in the wrong direction even after we have figured out rationally that it is the wrong direction. Condition (3), therefore, can be satisifed as well. Applying the PO to cases in which these three conditions are met – cases of strict akratic conflict – we should conclude that our souls have more than one part.159 Because Plato never addresses the PO in the Laws, whether one accepts that Plato still believes his principle is true when he writes the Laws will depend largely on where one thinks the burden of proof lies – whether with those who claim he still holds it or with those who claim he has rejected it. Certainly, as a general rule, one cannot simply assume that any philosophical commitment Plato makes in one dialogue, unless he explicitly repudiates it, is one he holds in all subsequent dialogues. However, the Principle of Opposites is not just any philosophical commitment; it is the foundational principle of one of his most ambitious and comprehensive works. His theory of virtue and the moral psychology of makes it explicit that the motivational forces pulling in opposite directions do so simultaneously. Because of this later clarification and the implications of the puppet passage itself, we cannot get around the PO by claiming that our psychological cords pull against each other at different times. 159 I say “more than one part” because applying the PO to the conflict described in the puppet passage does not yield specifically a tripartioning of the soul, but merely a partitioning. The discussion does not go on to describe (nor should it, given its role in the dialogue) the varieties of psychic conflict that can occur, which it would have to do to establish a tripartite soul. Thus, while the passage does indicate Plato’s view that the soul has parts, it merely leaves open the possibility that he believes it has three parts in particular. Of course, because his other works indicate that tripartition is the partitioning theory of the soul that is “on the table” for Plato, we are justified in thinking that if Plato holds a partitioning theory of the soul in the Laws, it is a tripartite one.

191 the Republic depends on it, as does the city-soul analogy, which crucially influences the structure of the dialogue. Because of its importance, if Plato had abandoned the PO after writing the Republic, we would expect him to have indicated doubts about it at some point. We know that Plato is willing to question, revise, or elaborate on his own previous philosophical positions, and we also know what it looks like when he does so: he provides careful and thoughtful discussions such as those we find in the Parmenides regarding the nature of the Forms. It would have been especially strange for Plato to fail to indicate his abandonment of the PO given the language with which he characterizes motivational conflict in the puppet passage (and in Laws 9; see n. 158). He speaks in terms of opposites and opposed psychic states in a way that parallels the language of the PO itself, and he repeatedly uses cognates of “helkô” to describe the pull of the cords, which is significant because three times in his short discussion of the thirsty man in the Republic, he uses cognates of the same word to characterize the pulling motion of desire. If Plato had rejected the PO and his tripartite theory of the soul, it is unclear why he would use language that so obviously puts any reader of his dialogues in mind of his argument for tripartition without offering any indication that he no longer accepts that theory. It makes much more sense to think that he uses that language as an invitation to understand tripartition beneath the surface of his discussion. 5.2 In the course of this chapter I have tried to illuminate what Plato takes the role of law to be in the story of human virtue and motivation. On the one hand,

192 what emerges is the idea that law can and should provide the basis for reasoning about how to act and live virtuously. On the other hand, we can also see that law is not by itself enough, and that even an individual who accepts correct laws will not reliably act in the way that is best for him unless he also properly and vigorously exercises his capacity to reason. That task is often compromised by the influence and interference of our non-rational impulses, and when it is compromised in this way, the individual is subject to the kind of psychic weakness that I have tried to bring to light, the kind that the Laws concerns itself with preventing and correcting. In giving my reinterpretation of the puppet passage, I have offered an alternative to Bobonich’s interpretation that avoids attributing to Plato any views that might be in tension with tripartition. In particular, unlike Bobonich’s interpretation, mine does does not understand psychic intervention either as either a new moment in the story of human action or as a new psychic activity altogether, and my interpretation also does not understand Plato as having come to believe that rational motivations are motivationally weak in a way that they clearly were not in his earlier accounts of tripartition. Indeed, my interpretation presents an account of the soul that is perfectly consistent with the tripartite theory of the soul. As I have presented the metaphor, it should be quite natural to think that although Plato makes no explicit mention of the three parts of the soul, we can nonetheless understand the iron cords as representing desires that originate in appetite and thumos, while the Golden Cord represents the desires that the reasoning part of the soul has in accordance with its pursuit of the Good.

193 The implications of this interpretation for our reading of the Laws are profound. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, moral psychology does not stand alone for Plato as a detachable appendix to his ethical and political views, but rather provides an indispensable psychological foundation for them. The question whether Plato takes the soul to be composed of three distinct parts or unitary is thus of no small importance not just for our understanding of the Laws, but of Plato’s late moral philosophy more generally. The question is especially important for our understanding of Plato’s late views on thumos and its place in human psychology. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Plato makes rich use in the Laws of psychic states and conditions that he previously attributed to the spirited part of the soul. They feature heavily in his discussions of education, human development, and criminal psychology, and he grants shame, in particular, preeminent responsibility for both the moral success of individuals and the political success of cities. If Plato continues to hold, in the Laws, that spirited states are to be attributed to a spirited part of the soul, then far from having given up his ideas about thumos in the text, we may actually find that he came to see an even richer and more expanded role for “the ally of reason” than what he had previously identified for it. More work must be done to show conclusively that Plato has tripartite psychology and the spirited part of the soul in mind when he composes the Laws and to explore what we can learn about Plato’s philosophy from the text. However, by paving the way for understanding the theory of tripartition in the background of the Laws and by shedding some light both on the text’s central topic – that is, law itself – and on the important notion of psychic weakness, I have tried

194 to provide resources that will help us begin to make better sense of the text and of the moral, political, and educational theories that are advocated in it. If my interpretation is correct, then Plato’s commitment to the theory of tripartition and to his account of thumos as integral parts of his ethical theory is not just a passing and idiosyncratic feature of the Republic, but one that he maintains and draws on to the very end of his career.

195 Appendix A

Plato goes to great lengths to make sure that the guardians’ spirited responses to the familiar and the foreign are controlled in such a way that the guardians neither are savage with the wrong people nor fail to care for the right ones. In Book 4, Socrates proposes that the guardians be denied any private property that is not absolutely necessary, and specifically he says that they are not to possess any land, houses, or money (416c). He says that this policy is required, in addition to proper education, if the guardians are to be tame with one another and with their fellow citizens. Later, in Book 5, Plato famously has Socrates propose that the guardians hold wives and children in common. Socrates explains that a community is most unified when its citizens experience pleasure and pain in response to the same things, but that the privatization of property and families creates the possibility of conflict between one person’s feelings of pleasure and pain and another’s. Therefore, he says, the best governed city is one which the citizens say “my own” (to emon) and “not my own” about the same things (462c). These policies work in a couple of different but related ways. On the one hand, because the guardians will not develop attachments to personal stores of wealth and property or to particular groups of individuals as their own, they will not have the spirited motivations that accompany those attachments and that could cause them to view others within the city as threats – in other words, motivations that could lead them to view some of their fellow citizens as “outsiders” and to feel corresponding impulses of hostility toward them. On the other hand, Socrates

196 thinks that the abolition of private families will have the effect, not that the guardians will consider no one in the city as their own, but rather that they will consider everyone as their own (a point with which Aristotle takes issue at Pol. 1261a ff.). When Socrates prompts Glaucon by asking whether any of the guardians would ever consider one of his fellow guardians to be an outsider (allotrios), Glaucon’s response is, “Not at all. With everyone he happens to meet, he’ll hold that he’s meeting a brother, or a sister, or a father, or a mother, or a son, or a daughter or their descendants or ancestors” (463c). By making the guardians recognize everyone in the city as family, Socrates hopes to make them feel, toward all their fellow citizens, the special feelings of attachment that people feel toward what is their own. Those feelings would make them especially effective guardians, because they will both be gentle toward their fellow citizens and defend them fiercely when necessary. Note, furthermore, the way that the effects of Socrates’ policies on property and families are anticipated by the discussion of Book I. There Thrasymachus argues, “Justice and the just are really someone else’s good, the advantage of the man who is stronger and rules, and a personal harm to the man who obeys and serves” (343c). The word Thrasymachus uses to denote “someone else” here is allotrios.

Because Socrates ensures that the

guardians of his ideal city will consider none of their fellow citizens an allotrios, he in effect precludes the possibility of conflict between the interest of the guardians and that of the rest of the city and thus renders Thrasymachus’ proposed definition of justice irrelevant.

197 One final point: it is telling that the de-privatization policies are explicitly aimed only at the class of guardians, and that Socrates never says that they should also apply to the productive class of farmers and producers. In fact, Socrates gives us strong reasons for thinking that they will not apply to them, as for example when he claims that the non-guardians will pay taxes to provide for the guardians, suggesting that the former will possess money privately (416d). Plato does not, however, offer us anything explicit about property and family in the productive class and does not focus any attention on spelling out the details of their private lives, as he surely would have if he had considered such details important. (Aristotle notes Plato’s omission of a determinate discussion of this kind about the productive class at Politics 1264a13-17: “The multitude of the other citizens constitute pretty well the entire multitude of the city, yet nothing has been determined about them, whether the farmers too should have communal property or each his own private property, or whether their women and children should be private or communal.”) Clearly his focus is on the class of guardians, and presumably that is both because they are the ones who have especially strong spirited impulses of affection for the familiar and hostility toward the foreign, and because, as the city’s guardians, it is especially important for them to have the right impulses of affection and hostility.

198 Appendix B

Although we need not offer a complete account, in psychological terms, of why there is this critical difference betwen humans and other animals with respect to the kalon (the important point is simply that there is such a difference), it is worth exploring some possible resources that Plato provides for reconstructing that account. To begin with, in the Laws Plato hints at the possibility that animals may not only fail to see things as beautiful in the robust sense of “seeing,” but may even fail to see beauty at all (or at least, to see most beauty) in a relevant way. During the discussion of early education, the Athenian Visitor states, “Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony” (653e). Similarly, the Athenian later specifies, other animals are also incapable of perceiving order in sound (664e). On a superficial level, the Athenian’s observation is just the obvious one that animals do not and cannot engage in or respond to dance and music in the way that human beings can. However, the point may have much deeper significance for Plato. On his view, order, rhythm, and harmomy are the essential features of beauty and of all beautiful things – that is, they are features that make things beautiful – so the Athenian’s emphatic denial of any perception of those features at all to non-human animals, at least in the case of movement and sound,

199 suggests that perceiving and experiencing beauty may be uniquely human capacities. In the Laws passage, Plato is narrowly concerned with the use of choruses in musical education, so he is not interested in giving us a general account of the capacities of non-human animals to perceive beauty. However, the passage has further relevance if we consider that for Plato, sight and hearing are the only perceptual modes through which we can perceive beauty. For that very reason, he thinks, taste, touch, and smell are inferior senses. In the Hippias Major, Socrates says, “Anyone in the world would laugh at us if we called it not pleasant to eat but fine (kalon), or if we called a pleasant smell not pleasant but fine. And as for making love, everybody would fight us; they’d say it is most pleasant, but that one should do it, if he does it at all, where no one will see, because it is the foulest thing to be seen” (299a). We do not call objects of touch, taste, and smell “beautiful,” and that is not because they possess a beauty that is imperceptible to us. Rather, it is because they do not, in fact, contain beauty or the essential properties that constitute it at all. (What would it mean for a smell to be “harmonious” or for a taste to be “orderly”?) In the Laws Plato calls sight and hearing “the highest senses,” and in the Timaeus they are called “gifts from the god” (Laws 961d, Tim. 47c). The reason they are valuable in a way the other senses are not, Timaeus explains, is that through them we can perceive the harmony and beauty that is akin to reason itself. If sight and hearing are the only senses through which we perceive harmony and beauty, however, then the Athenian’s claim at Laws 653e is quite restrictive. It means that animals cannot perceive the beauty of sounds at all and that they cannot

200 perceive the beauty of sights inasmuch as that beauty involves or relates to motion. If animals can perceive beauty at all, then at most, the passage indicates, they can see it only in the purely physical properties of a static object (for example, in the proportionateness of another animal’s body). That would mean that they do not and cannot perceive actions as orderly and admirable, and a fortiori that they do not and cannot perceive agents, taken as individuals who bear a relation to actions, as such. The Athenian’s comments, then, entail either that animals have a substantially impoverished awareness of beauty or that do not have an awareness of it at all. It seems likely that Plato takes the special ability of human beings to perceive order in a wide variety of things to be linked to our rationality. The Phaedrus may provide further insight in this regard. There Socrates presents a myth in which every human soul, prior to its incarnation, is taken on a tour of the heavens in which it is given a view of the Forms of Moderation, Justice, and Beauty, among others. In that myth Socrates characterizes the tripartite soul using the metaphor of a charioteer (representing reason) and his two horses (representing appetite and thumos). According to Socrates’ account, when human beings see beauty in the physical world, they are “reminded” of the true beauty that they saw in the heavens, and it is because of that recollection that they are excited by beauty in the way that they are. This is, in the first instance, an excitement of our rational nature in its desire for wisdom (only the charioteer, Socrates indicates, sees the Forms prior to incarnation). When a philosopher sees beauty, Socrates says, “he takes wing and flutters in his eagerness to rise up, but is unable to do so; and he gazes aloft, like a bird, paying no attention to what is down below” (249c).

201 Beauty, Socrates thinks, has a special power to make us seek an understanding of the Forms. Of all the things we perceive in the physical realm that share in properties of the Forms, beauty is the only one that by its nature captivates us in this way and draws us toward wisdom and the realm of true being: it is, as Socrates puts it, “the most clearly visible and the most loved” (252d).160 However, although initially due to our rationality, our response to the kalon ultimately occurs in all three of our soul-parts, including spirit and appetite. Socrates tells us that when the charioteer sees the beauty of a boy, the whole soul is filled with desire (253e). It may be important that the charioteer sees the boy’s beauty first; the fact that the horses do not react to the beauty until after the charioteer sees it suggests that their reactions are in some way dependent upon his – or, to step outside of the metaphor, it suggests that because of our rational nature, our whole soul sees beauty in a way that it otherwise would not. Non-human animals, both because they lack reasoning and because (so the myth implies at 249b) many of them have never seen Beauty to begin with, do not recognize and react to beauty in the way human beings do. The passages from the Laws and the Phaedrus, taken together, provide the resources for distinguishing more and less rich ways of perceiving things. According to the view that is suggested by them, the content of perceptual experience is not determined solely by the properties of the object that is perceived. Human beings and animals who are hearing the same song, the Athenian tells us, do not hear it in the same way. In the Timaeus, Plato offers a detailed physiologi-

160

Cf. Symp. 210a ff.

202 cal account of sense-perception in which he characterizes perception as a process through which external bodies act on our sense-organs and, in turn, on our souls. Presumably, Plato does not mean to claim in the Laws that the sounds that strike the sense organs and souls of animals are different from the sounds that strike the sense organs and souls of human beings when we and animals hear the same song. Rather, the difference lies in the way each soul receives the perceptual properties that are being transmitted. (In language that Timaeus uses, we could say that the pathêma does not determine the aisthêsis.) And what the Phaedrus suggests is that in virtue of possessing reason, our souls receive and respond to sensory information differently than they otherwise would and that, as a result, we have richer perceptual experiences than do other animals – experiences that include perceiving the order in a wide variety of things and, as a result, perceiving them as kalon. We need not conclude on that basis that perception is a rational capacity or involves such capacities; Plato is quite explicit in calling perception alogismos in the Timaeus (69d). However, the fact that perception is not a rational psychological process that relies on distinctively rational capacities does not preclude the possibility either that some of our perceptions are mediated by, and enchanced through, our reasoning, or that rationality simply makes us perceptually sensitive to certain kinds of properties to which we otherwise would not be sensitive. It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to sort out the details of such an account, but it does seem that a plausible is likely to be available.

203 Appendix C

In Chapter 2, I provide a psychologically detailed account of the way in which musical education trains thumos, and I address the question why Socrates says that music is for the philosophic side of our nature, if in fact it affects thumos in the ways I have suggested. Here I will briefly address the contrary question: given that Socrates says that music is for the philosophic side of our nature, what further evidence can we provide for thinking that music really does affect thumos? That is, I would like to address doubts about whether the account I have given of music’s effects on thumos is acceptable, given Socrates’ explicit comment that music is for the philosophic side of our nature. Based on the discusssion I provide in §1, we already have good reasons for dismissing these doubts. The fact that, as I have shown, spirit is the part of the soul that is specially suspectible to poetry’s influence provides a strong reason for thinking that the discussion of poetic content and style targets thumos, and Socrates’ focus on spirited attitudes throughout that discussion confirms this reading. Moreover, Socrates characterizes music’s influence on the individual as a kind of molding, and while, as he later indicates, molding is the right way to think of the way that thumos is educated, it is not, as I discuss in §2 of Chapter 2, an appropriate way to think of the way that reason is educated. Here I would like to further address this worry, however, by pointing to three key points in Socrates’ discussion of early education where he acknowledges that music has direct effects on the spirited part of the soul.

204 The first comes in his concluding remarks on musical education. There Socrates summarizes the effects that music has on the soul of the individual and says: [Rearing in music] is sovereign because the man properly reared on rhythm and harmony would have the sharpest sense for what’s been left out and what isn’t an admirable product of craft or what isn’t an admirable product of nature. And, due to his having the right kind of dislikes, hewould praise the admirable things; and, taking pleasure in them and receiving them into his soul, he would be reared on them and become a gentleman. He would blame and hate the shameful in the right way while he’s still young, before he’s able to grasp the reason. And when the reason comes, the man who’s reared in this way would warmly welcome it, recognizing it on account of its familiarity (401a). Here Socrates provides important clues that music’s effect of making the individual react in the right ways to what is kalon or aischron is an effect that it has on the spirited part of the soul. First of all, he says that the individual acquires these proper reactions and attitudes before he is able to reason, which indicates that the kind of education he is talking about is not yet a rational education. Rather, it is education that involves training individuals to respond in the right ways to different kinds of people, actions, and objects before they are able to engage in reasoning about them. The attitudes of admiration and digust that music cultivates, therefore, are non-rational attitudes that do not involve reasoned understanding of why various things are admirable or shameful. When individuals become more mature and the reasoning part of their souls does become sufficiently developed, then they will start thinking about what is good or bad and why those things are

205 good or bad, and, if all goes well, the individual will “warmly welcome” his rational conclusions. One might try to argue that this welcoming acceptance of reason is rooted in the reasoning part of the soul itself, however. In particular, one might try to argue that, although the individual, when he is young, might not yet be able to understand why things are good or bad, he will still have rational or quasi-rational beliefs that things are good or bad. Thus, one might think that when the individual welcomes “the reason,” that just means that he rationally embraces the logoi (once he is able to understand them) that support and explain the beliefs that he has already come to hold in a preliminarily rational way. However, Socrates provides a further clue that the welcoming of reason is a spirited one, for he describes it in language that strikingly, and clearly quite intentionally, parallels the language he used to describe the behavior of noble dogs at the beginning of the discussion of education. Noble dogs “warmly welcomed” (aspazomai) those whom they “recognized” (gnorizein) because they were “familiar” (oikeion). Socrates’ description of the musically-educated young man’s welcoming of reason is given in the same terms. The noble dogs, of course, were introduced precisely to provide an example of a spirited animal. Moreover, the basic impulse to respond favorably to someone or something simply because it is familiar is, as we saw in Chapter 1, a characteristically and primitively spirited impulse. We can be sure, then, that if the musically-trained individual responds to rational considerations warmly because they are familiar (as Socrates tells us he does), then that response must be a spirited one.

206 Socrates also provides two explicit indications that music has a direct impact on thumos, however. The first indication is from Republic 411a-b, the passage about the softening effect that music has on spirit. There, and in the remarks that follow, Socrates describes the way that excess and deficiency of musical education affect the spirited part of the soul. Excess melts the individual’s spirit to the point of uselessness (as discussed in Chapter 2, §1.3). Deficiency, on the other hand, makes a man savage and aggressive like a wild beast. Socrates even includes some nuanced details in this account, such as claiming that excess of music affects a man differently depending on how much spiritedness he is naturally born with. If he was relatively spiritless by nature, then excess of music will render his thumos impotent in relatively little time; if he was very spirited by nature, then excess of music will simply make him quick-tempered and irritable. This discussion represents an explicit acknowledgement, on Plato’s part, that musical training not only affects the rational part of the soul, but also has a direct effect on thumos itself. The second explicit indication comes after Socrates provides the argument for tripartion. In the course of talking about the reasoning and the spirited parts of the soul, Socrates says, “As we were saying, won’t a mixture of music and gymnastic make them accordant, tightening the one and training it in fair speeches and learning, while relaxing the other with soothing tales, taming it by harmony and rhythm?” (441e). The part of the soul that is trained in speeches and learning is quite clearly the rational part, and that means that the part that is trained with

207 soothing tales and tamed by harmony – both of which are aspects of musical education – must be the spirited part. It is also worth noting in this regard that, as we saw in Chapter 1, music features heavily in Socrates’ account of the timocratic regime. In the timocracy, Socrates says, the citizens “weren’t educated by persuasion but by force – the result of the true Muse accompanied by arguments and philosophy while giving more distinguished honor to gymnastic than music” (547b). The neglect of music no doubt has a negative impact on the citizens largely because the reasoning parts of their souls are not being properly trained and educated, but Plato also seems to think that music has a special responsibility for the proper training of the spirited part of the soul as well, such that neglecting music makes thumos more brutish. It is significant that Plato does not mention anything about musical education in his description of the oligarchic, democratic, or tyrannical societies. He apparently thinks that in characterizing and explaining a society dominated by spiritedness, unlike other sorts of societies, it is crucial to mention the role played by neglect of music. Similarly, when he describes the lifestyle of the timocratic man, Socrates emphasizes that the man’s corruption is due to his having been abandoned by what Socrates calls “the best guardian” – namely, reason mixed with music. “It alone,” he says, “when it is present, dwells within the one possessing it as a savior of virtue throughout life” (549b). The fact that Socrates thinks that the soul’s virtue requires music as an accompaniment to reason or argument suggests that music has psychological effects beyond training the soul in reason and argument. Interestingly, Socrates also makes a point of saying that although the timocratic

208 man is not ideally apt at music, he loves it. This suggests not just that music can affect thumos, but that thumos itself may be responsible for a certain kind of affinity for music. At any rate, Plato makes it clear in his presentation of the timocratic regime and man that neglect of music is a characteristic feature of any society or individual dominated by thumos, and that suggests that thumos is in some way or other deeply and directly influenced by music.

209 Bibliography Primary Texts Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Bloom, Allan. The Republic of Plato. United States: Basic Books, 1968. Cooper, John M., ed. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997. Homer. The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Kalkavage, Peter. Plato’s Timaeus. Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2001. Pangle, Thomas L. The Laws of Plato. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Pindar. Pindar I and II, ed. and trans. William H. Race. Loeb Classical Library Vols. 56 and 485. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hesiod. Hesiod I: Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia and Hesiod II: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most. Loeb Classical Library Vols. 57 and 503. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006. Secondary Sources Adkins, A. W. H. From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and Beliefs. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970. Bobonich, Christopher. Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Burnyeat, M. F. “Culture and Society in Plato's Republic” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Grethe B. Peterson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999: 215–324. Cairns, Douglas L. Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honor and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

210 Cooper, John M. “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation” in Reason and Emotion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Hobbs, Angela. Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lorenz, Hendrik. The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. --. “The Cognition of Appetite in Plato’s Timaeus.” in Proceedings of Toronto-Cornell Conference on Plato's Divided Soul, edited by Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain (forthcoming). Lear, Gabriel Richardson. “Plato on Learning to Love Beauty,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic. Ed. Gerasimos Santas. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006: 104-124. Moss, Jessica. “Shame, Pleasure, and the Divided Soul.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XXIX (Winter 2005): 137-170. Nehamas, Alexander. “Beauty of the Body, Nobility of Soul: The Pursuit of Love in Plato’s Symposium,” in Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles Burnyeat. Ed. Dominic Scott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997: 87-135. Penner, T. “Thought and Desire in Plato,” in Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Gregory Vlastos. New York: Anchor Books, 1971: 96-118. Plotinus. “On Beauty,” in Plotinus: Porphyry on Plotinus, Ennead I, trans. A. H. Armstrong. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978. Robinson, T. M. Plato’s Psychology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Saunders, Trevor. “The Socratic Paradoxes in Plato’s Laws: A Commentary on 859c-864b.” Hermes 96.3 (1968): 421-434. Stalley, R. F. “Persuasion and the Tripartite Soul in Plato’s Republic.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XXXII (Summer 2007): 63-90. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.