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Beyond the Tripartite Soul: The Dynamic Psychology of the Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Laurence D. Cooper
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Extract

Few philosophic devices have proved as influential or enduring as the tripartition of the soul in Plato's Republic. For all its virtues, however, we are mistaken to believe that the tripartite model is sufficient to convey, or that it was meant to convey, all the elements of the dialogue's psychological teaching. What is needed is an interpretation that takes fuller account of the soul's forces, and not just its “parts” (which are metaphorical anyway). This article outlines the basic elements of such an interpretation. After considering the virtues and limits of the tripartite model and of the structural perspective from it arises, the article examineseros and spiritedness, the soul's chief and most politically consequential forces, both in themselves and in their (surprising) relation to one another.

Few philosophic devices have proved as influential or enduring as the tripartition of the soul in Plato's Republic. The division of the psyché into the rational, spirited, and desiring parts, first introduced by Socrates in book 4, established the terms of psychological thought not only for the remainder of the Republic but for a great part of Western thought even to the present day. Perhaps even more important than the particular content of this schema has been the mode of analysis that it exemplifies. With Plato began a tradition of considering the soul as a differentiated structure whose respective parts perform specific, assignable functions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , Spring 2001 , pp. 341 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2001

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References

1. It may well be that Plato was not the first to treat the soul in this way—he is said by Cicero to have borrowed this approach from the Pythagoreans—but it is surely Plato's treatment of the soul from which so much subsequent thought has taken its bearings. See Tusculanae Disputationes, trans. King, J. E.. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945)Google Scholar. (The Pythagoreans are said to have divided the soul into only two parts, one rational and the other nonrational. This may call to mind Socrates′ own bipartite division of the soul earlier in the Republic; see 410–12.Google Scholar)

2. As my references to the secondary literature will show, a few scholars have in fact written on the dynamics of the soul in the Republic. To my knowledge, however, none has offered the kind of comprehensive outline I am attempting, in which the various forces and the structure of the soul are explored in themselves and in their relation to one another. And most commentators have not looked much beyond the tripartite structure.

3. Also see Socrates′ earlier indication that the conversation in book 4 is taking place in the intellectual equivalent of darkness (427d, 432d). All quotations from the Republic are from the Bloom, Allan translation (New York: Basic Books, 1968).Google Scholar

4. One such indication occurs at 590b, where Socrates, having previously likened the spirited part of the soul to a lion, refers to it as “the lion-like and snake-like part.” For much more on the different aspects of spiritedness, see Craig, Leon Harold, The War Lover: A Study of Plato's Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).Google Scholar

5. David Roochnik aptly compares book 9's correction of book 4's account to a Hegelian Aufhebung, a sublation or transcendence that preserves the earlier account even as it negates it. See “Irony and Accessibility,” Political Theory 25 (1997): 869–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. One finds indications, for example, that spiritedness is not in fact always reason's ally (440d); that the spirited part may be the source of more than just those emotions, such as anger, whose connection with spirit is obvious (439e); that spiritedness itself may be divisible into two parts (441c); and that the soul may in fact have more than three parts (443d).

7. Regarding the need for myth and mythological language to discover and express psychological truths, see Segal, Charles, “The Myth Was Saved′: Reflections on Homer and the Mythology of Plato's Republic,” Hermes 106 (1978): 315–36.Google Scholar

8. It should be clear from reading the dialogue that references to this or that “part” (meros) or “form” (eide) of the soul should indeed be taken metaphorically, i.e., that these words refer to functions or principles of action and not to material substances. This does not obviate the need for a psychodynamic perspective, however, for even if we understand these “parts” metaphorically, they still do not offer a clear view of what I shall soon identify as the soul's primary forces. For analyses of Plato's use of such language not only in the Republic but throughout his corpus, see Robinson, T. M., Plato's Psychology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970)Google Scholar, and Zakopoulos, Athenagoras.N., Plato on Man (New York: Philosophical Library, 1975)Google Scholar. For an extensive list of examples that would seem to confirm “the—seemingly inescapable—necessity of our speaking and thinking of intelligible but insensible things [i.e., psychological phenomena] in terms of the perceptible realm,” along with a brief discussion of the implications of this necessity for the philosophic quest, see Craig, , The War Lover, pp. 85–86.Google Scholar

9. Craig, , The War Lover, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

10. Political language is applied to the soul throughout the dialogue, from Cephalus′ reminder that eros can be a savage “master” (329c–d) to the mention of intra-psychic “battle” in book 10's renewed discussion of poetry (603c–d).

11. Other commentators have taken the opposing view, criticizing Plato for the failings of the structural model. See, for example, Annas, Julia, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 125.Google Scholar

12. My concern in the following section—indeed, in the rest of this article—is to illuminate that which remains dark from a strictly structural perspective, not to catalogue all the interpretive limits and paradoxes presented by that perspective. There is clearly much more to be said on the latter than I shall be able to say, especially regarding what Plato may have meant for those limits and paradoxes to signify.

13. The question, of course, is whether the city-soul analogy is operative here, or, rather, whether the analogy fails precisely because the city and its politics are not, and cannot be, erotic. For the latter interpretation, see Howland, Jacob, The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993)Google Scholar, who argues that the supposition of the city-soul parallel “obscures the erotic character of the soul, even as it appears to increase the ease of giving a logos of the soul” (p. 87).Google Scholar

14. This disparagement and its likely purpose is addressed by Rosen, Stanley, “The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic,” Review of Metaphysics 18 (1965): 454–62.Google Scholar

15. “Interpretive Essay,” in Bloom, , The Republic of Plato, p. 424Google Scholar. Bloom's characterization is as unexceptionable a shorthand characterization of eros as I have seen. We shall have more to add, however, in the section that follows.

16. Its veiling of the kinship between the philosopher and the tyrant might well be another virtue, a politic and therefore a political virtue, of the structural perspective.

17. For an illuminating discussion of the relation between the two dialogues, see Rosen, , “The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic,” who argues that “there is a specific relationship between the Symposium and the Republic, which turns upon the role assigned in each to Eros, whereby each dialogue illustrates primarily or exaggeratedly one of the two main aspects of philosophy” (p. 454)Google Scholar, those aspects being the poetic and the mathematical. One need not hold with this interpretation to recognize the usefulness of the Symposium for understanding the Republic's treatment of eros, however. See, for example, Santas, Gerasimos, Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love (New York: Basil Blackwood, Inc., 1988), pp. 72–73Google Scholar. Santas observes and makes interpretive use of “continuity and consistency” between the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus.

18. See, respectively, Santas, , Plato and Freud, p. 8Google Scholar, and Dover, K. J., Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 43.Google Scholar

19. Santas, , Plato and Freud, p. 33.Google Scholar

20. One who disagreed with this interpretation was Freud, who saw in Plato a proto-Freudian. See Santas, , Plato and Freud, pp. 154–57,Google Scholar for a brief account of Freud's reading of Plato.

21. See ibid., p. 31; also see p. 52 n. 31, for an explanation of why it is not anachronistic to apply the terminology of “aim” and “object” to Plato.

22. The phrase is Howland's (The Republic, p. 38).Google Scholar His characterization is worth quoting in full: “The root meaning of eros is sexual desire; more broadly, eros designates other kinds of passionate desires as well. Just as the depths of human sexual desire contain more than mere lust, so that eros is often translated as ‘love,’ eros in its distinctly human forms transcends mere appetite. Eros is definitive of the human condition: it is not a specific, discrete desire of a part of the soul or body, like thirst, but a mysterious longing of body and soul as a whole for whatever it is that will provide us with comprehensive satisfaction.”

23. Rosen, , “The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic,” p. 453;Google Scholar emphasis added.

24. Even the highest, most immaterial—that is, the most real—objects of desire are desired for one's own good, even if those goods can be shared with others. Eros always involves an object, an other, and the lover is often prepared to sacrifice for the sake of the beloved. Nevertheless, being eros, its primary concern is for one's own wholeness or comprehensive satisfaction, which means that a sacrifice for the sake of the beloved is, in the end, not really a sacrifice at all. (That all goods are desired ultimately for the sake of one's own good is also one of the major themes of the Lysis, where it is perhaps highlighted more than it is in the Republic; see 218c220e. For a fine analysis, see Bolotin, David, Plato's Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the Lysis, with a New Translation [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979], pp. 159–76.Google Scholar) For that matter, even the lowest objects of erotic desire, those which clearly can be possessed only by one person, are possessed at least in part through knowledge and sight. What varies as one ascends or descends among eros′ objects are (1) the degree to which the objects can be shared without compromising their erotic worth and (2) the degree to which the object is possessed through knowledge and sight; the latter variable is the determinant of the former.

25. One is tempted to say that wisdom, too, is an object of the philosopher's eros, and perhaps it is. We are never told that it is, however; and the very term philosophos should give us pause. As we saw earlier, cognates of “eros” are used in association with “that learning which discloses to them [i.e. to those with philosophic natures] something of the being that is always and does not wander about, driven by generation and decay"(485a-b; also see 490a-b). As far as I am aware, the closest we get to an “eros” of “sophia” is in Socrates′ revelation of the “third wave” in book 6: neither our city nor regime nor a man will become perfect, he says, until either philosophers take charge, “or a true erotic passion [alethinos eros] for true philosophy [or true love of wisdom; alethines philosophias] flows from some divine inspiration into the sons of those who hold power or the office of king, or into the fathers themselves"(499b-c; also see 501d). Some scholars have concluded that wisdom is an object of eros for Plato. Craig, , citing the erotic language and imagery with which Socrates describes the philosopher's love of truth and of that which is, finds in the Republic “repeated hints that philia for sophia entails—and may even essentially be—a sublimation of eros” (The War Lover, p. 54Google Scholar; emphasis in the original). And Laurence Lampert concludes that “for Plato,” as for Nietzsche, “‘philosophy’ could be thought a misnomer: Sophia demands not philia but eros; the lovers of wisdom are the supreme erotics.” See Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 324.Google Scholar

26. The philosopher-kings of the middle books of the Republic do seem to transcend eros, if indeed they were ever erotic at all: they seem to achieve such knowledge (and wisdom) that they no longer stand in need of it. These beings, however, are clearly fantastic: more godlike than human, they have no basis in the dialogue's subsequent portrayals of the philosophic quest and need only be contrasted with the palpably (albeit ambiguously) erotic Socrates. For some what disparate interpretations that nevertheless agree on the deliberate unrealism of the portrayal of the philosopher-kings, see Howland, , The Republic, pp. 116–17 and148–49Google Scholar; Rosen, , “The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic,” p. 466Google Scholar; Hyland, Drew A., “Plato's Three Waves and the Question of Utopia,” Interpretation 18 (1990): 91–109Google Scholar; and Nichols, Mary P., “The Republic's Two Alternatives: Philosopher-Kings and Socrates,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 252–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Spiritedness and Philosophy in Plato's Republic,” in Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche, ed. Zuckert, Catherine H. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many more commentators, however, have accepted the portrayal of the philosopher-kings as a serious even if perhaps unreachable goal.

27. Howland, , The Republic, p. 39Google Scholar. Howland, however, sees Socrates as first provoking and only then channeling the eros of his interlocutors, rather than channeling that which already was awake, as I have suggested.

28. Although “sublimation” more commonly refers to the upward channeling of something that is by nature gross or low (as it does for Freud), the word can also refer to upward chaneling of that which by nature ought to be high. In its broadest sense it denotes the phenomenon of upward channeling without any presupposition that the lower is either the truer or the more natural state of desire.

29. The classic statement of the process of sublimation, too long to quote here but crucial for an adequate understanding of the phenomenon, appears in Socrates′ account of Diotima's discourse on love in the Symposium (210a-212b). Among the important features of the account are that eros ascends to successively higher objects (from a single body to bodily beauty as such to various levels of spiritual beauty, culminating in love of wisdom and the sight of Beauty) and that it is reason which propels the ascent by successively apprehending higher, more real, instances of beauty.

30. How to square the claim that eros has a single object with the observation that the objects of the philosopher's eros are plural, that is, the forms? The answer would seem to be that objects of eros are satisfying to the extent that they are close to or participate in the form of the Good, and that the forms which constitute the objects of the philosopher's eros are quite close to or participate quite considerably in the form of the Good—certainly more considerably than any of eros′ more common objects.

31. Bloom, , “Interpretive Essay,” p. 347Google Scholar. It might be objected that ignorance is not the only reason one would pursue lesser (apparent) goods, and that strength of soul is also a reason. (This seems to be implied by the assertion that most people are incapable of living the philosophic life and would be made miserable by it [486c, 536e].) Undoubtedly insufficient strength is a source of our being attracted to lesser goods. But it is so, I would argue, precisely because it keeps us from seeing that the Good alone is what we want. In other words, weakness of soul is a source of ignorance, and it is as such that it causes us to pursue lesser goods.

32. Midway through her account, Diotima makes the Good primary and Beauty an instrument by which we might reach it. See Rosen, , Plato's Symposium, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar: “In other words, even if we should see beauty in itself, we can never satisy the desire to possess the good perpetually.…man may see beauty but not the good, except inasmuch as the good is exemplified by beauty” (p. 273).Google Scholar

33. Such, at least, is the surface teaching of Diotima's discourse. Bloom points out that a tension between love of the beautiful and love of the good is in fact discernable in Socrates′, speech. Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp. 506–507.Google Scholar

34. See, respectively Howland, , The Republic, pp. 144–45 and 148–49,Google Scholar and Nichols, “The Republic's Two Alternatives.”

35. Externally ugly and erotic, Socrates, according to Rosen, is internally beautiful and (by virtue of not needing anyone) unerotic. And the same is true of his speech. See Plato's Symposium, p. 320Google Scholar; also see p. 317. According to Rosen, , Plato criticizes Socrates′ unerotic nature while giving evidence of his own erotic one (p. 5).Google Scholar

36. But does not the cave allegory speak against my claim that the philosopher abides to a considerable extent with the objects of his desire? If the philosopher were able to keep company with the objects of his desire, why would a return to the cave be experienced as a painful separation from the objects of his eros? But the force of this objection dissipates if one interprets the painful return to the cave not as a simple or physical return to the city but as either a return to the prevailing mentality of the city or the assumption of a position of rule, either of which conditions would indeed have the effect of depriving the philosopher of contact with his beloved forms. Indeed, if the allegory is to have any relation to Socratic philosophic practice the return to the cave must be interpreted otherwise than as a simple return to the city's walls. After all, Socrates famously chose to dwell in the city, and there is ample reason to conclude that this choice served, rather than hindered, his philosophic inquiry.

37. Regarding the Republic's forgetting of the body, see Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 50–138Google Scholar. Strauss sees the Republic as “abstracting” not only from the body but also, and accordingly, from eros.

38. This bipartition is foreshadowed in book 2's discussion of the nature of the guardians-to-be (375a-76c).

39. Here I follow Nichols, , “Spiritedness and Philosophy in Plato's Republic” (see especially p. 48)Google Scholar, who interprets the communism of book 5 as the consequence of thymos's takeover and perversion of philosophy.

40. The range of spiritedness′ manifestations includes but is not limited to anger, courage, shame, reverence, the desire for recognition, pride, vanity, contempt, envy, idealism, and fanaticism. Even if one were to disregard all of its expressions besides anger, which is perhaps its primary expression, that still would leave a wide range of phenomena: anger, after all, is a category whose members range from “the most noble indignation about injustice, turpitude, and meanness down to the anger of a spoiled child who resents being deprived of anything, however bad, that he desires” (Strauss, , The City and Man, p. 110Google Scholar; cf. 441a-b). For more on the breadth of spiritedness′ expressions, see Robinson, , Plato's Psychology, p. 45Google Scholar; Pangle, Thomas L., “The Political Psychology of Religion in Plato's Laws,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976): 1062–64;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Joseph, H. W. B., Essays in Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 65 ff.Google Scholar

41. Craig, , The War Lover, pp. 76–78.Google Scholar

42. Strauss, Leo, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, selected and introduced by Pangle, Thomas L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 165–66.Google Scholar

43. See Nichols, , “Spiritedness and Philosophy in Plato's Republic,” pp. 53–57Google Scholar. My view is somewhat more qualified than that of Nichols, for whom spiritedness, apparently by it nature, “seeks absolute control.”

44. Benardete, Seth, Socrates′ Second Sailing: On Plato's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar, points out that by Plato's, time the word thymos was decreasingly applied to human beings and increasingly reserved for describing spirited beasts (p. 55).Google Scholar

45. Spiritedness can be provoked by any number of slights, and perhaps Achilles′ wrath would have been kindled all the same had Agamemnon taken, say, some coveted instrument of war. But what actually instigated Achilles′ epic anger was the theft of Briseis, an object of desire, and erotic desire at that. (Consider, too, the event that precipitated the war of which the Iliad's action was but a part: again one finds frustrated eros at the heart of the matter.) For more on the Homeric portrait of spiritedness and the echoes of this view in Plato, see Catherine Zuckert, “On the Role of Spiritedness in Politics,” in Understanding the Political Spirit.

46. Strauss, , The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 166Google Scholar; emphasis added.

47. Bloom, Love and Friendship, p. 518.Google Scholar

48. Howland, , The Republic, p. 95.Google Scholar

49. That the philosophic life is thymotically accomplished and that philosophic insight is the most satisfying kind of victory does not mean that philosophy is primarily a spirited activity. Philosophy is so thymotically accomplished precisely because it satisfies thymotic longing in the latter's highest and truest form, the form in which its focus is the same or nearly the same as that of erotic longing. It is with philosophy that we encounter thymos′ return to and subsumption by eros. Thus this most thymoticaUy accomplished activity is nevertheless primarily erotic, just as, and because, thymos itself is erotic in both origin and goal. Indeed, paradoxically, because it satisfies thymotic striving in its highest and truest (that is, erotic) form, philosophy can be said in the end to transcend thymos. (Let us keep in mind, though, that transcendence does not mean noninvolvement. If thymos is transcended, that is only because it is engaged, satisfied, and elevated—sublimated—to its (erotic) peak.) In this sense, the present interpretation is not inconsistent with Strauss's, proclamation that “Philosophy is not spirited” (The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 167Google Scholar; also see The City and Man, pp. 110–11.Google Scholar)

50. Regarding philosophy as the peak of thymotic activity, see especially Craig, , The War Lover. It should be noted, though, that Craig sharply separates the love of victory from the love of honor and sees the philosopher as exemplifying the former but not the latter (pp. 76–78).Google Scholar Regarding the covariation of eros and thymos, the evidence is quite strong, both in cities (in speech) and in individuals. In Adeimantus′ “city of sows,” both eros and thymos are absent; in the feverish city that follows that more placid one, both eros and thymos are rampant and disordered; and in the kallipolis, eros and thymos are both present but are severely regulated to the point of denaturing. As for covariation within the souls of individuals, we might take note not only of Socrates, whose case has already been discussed, but also of Glaucon, who is repeatedly described as both highly erotic and highly spirited. (Regarding Glaucon's erotic nature, see for example 474d, 468b, and 468c. For indications of his spiritedness, see especially 357a, where he is said by Socrates to be “always most courageous in everything"; also see 368c, 414c, 451b, and 506d: in each of these passages we see Glaucon forcefully asserting himself, either to compel Socrates to fulfill his obligation, or to encourage or defend some particularly bold part of the argument.) For more on both Socrates and Glaucon, see Craig, Howland, The Republic, and Rosen, “The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic.” One point that needs to be added, though, is that while those who are highly erotic always seem to be highly thymotic, there are some who appear highly thymotic without giving much evidence of eroticism—Thrasymachus, for example. Such cases, I would argue, are comparable to cases of individuals who are intensely erotic but whose eros is aimed at inappropriate objects. The mistake in each case is the same: the individual has failed to appreciate what his longing is really aimed at and what alone would satisfy him comprehensively. The likes of Thrasymachus also remind us that, while philosophy may indeed entail thymos in the ways indicated above, a poorly educated thymos inhibits philosophy as much as does a poorly educated or unsublimated eros. See Lutz, Mark J., Socrates′ Education to Virtue: Learning the Love of the Noble (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998),Google Scholar for a fine discussion of a thymos that, reflecting weakness, inhibits philosophy by preventing the development of philosophic eros. (Note, though, that what I say of “poorly educated thymos” Lutz says of thymos as such.)

51. The Politics, trans. Lord, Carries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1269b27–28.Google Scholar