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John Ferrari Department of Classics University of California, Berkeley April 8, 2005 Friday, 4:00pm-6:00pm Nursing, Room 127 A full picture of the human soul emerges only gradually from the Republic. In Book 4 we come first upon a conventional enough distinction between calculation and desire, which under pressure from the correspondence between the microcosm of the just individual and the macrocosm of the just society, with its three different classes, is complicated by the addition of a third element, the element of 'high spirit' (thymos). When we revisit these three elements in Books 8 and 9, however, they have taken on a different look. In Book 4 they seemed most like faculties; now they seem more like drives. The desiring element is specified as the drive towards material satisfaction; spirit as the drive to win and to look good; calculation as the drive to discover truth. They have not shed their characteristic functions, but these have found a new context; and the biggest change is to the calculative element. Previously it had been unclear whether this element even had a goal of its own or was merely a supervisor that placed limits on the interests of the other elements in the interest of the individual as a whole. Now it is assigned an object of desire all its own, and that object is not the good, whether the good of the individual or the good tout court, but wisdom. It has turned out to be the philosophic element in the soul. The implications are startling. Since we all have this calculative element in our souls, and since its natural goal is wisdom, we are all philosophers. That is, we would all be philosophers if this element were strong enough, as in most of us it is not, and if, even when it is strong, it did not get distorted by education and upbringing, as in most cases it does. We should not be content, then, for the calculative element merely to supervise within us, not if we want to be happy; for its natural passion is for something different and better than this. As the philosophic element in the soul, it takes on the job of ruling the soul with a reserve comparable to that with which philosophers take on the job of ruling the city. Even within the soul, ruling is work. Freud's tripartite psychology makes a useful foil to Plato's. There is a pessimistic cast to even the ideal Freudian life, the life lived in self-knowledge. Freudian self-knowledge is a matter of accepting the results of our genesis -- accepting that we are what we are through repression -- and of managing the inevitable tensions that result. The task of management falls to the Ego, which seems to lack goals of its own (in the famous image, the Ego is a rider who guides the horse of the Id where the horse wants to go), and is above all a negotiator. In the Republic's terms, it is as if Freud's account is stuck in the framework of Book 4, in which a principle of conflict is used to distinguish the elements of the soul from each other, and the calculative element is merely managerial. His account never rises to the optimism of the later books of the Republic, where soul-doctoring makes way for philosophic passion. On the other hand, Freud's pessimism is at least democratic; we are all in his boat together. Plato is hopeful about human potential but extends his hope only to the few. 'Passion' is not too romantic a word to use for the philosopher's drive to discover truth. Plato's philosopher is not like an engineer cracking puzzles; he is like an aesthete learning to understand the beauty of artworks -- in the philosopher's case, the beauty of the way things are. Plato is often thought of as the enemy of the emotions. But the tripartite soul is emotional through and through. It is only a question of how intelligent those emotions are.  |
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