Plato's Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for Good

© 2015 Josh Wilburn This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. <www.philosophersimprint.org/015026/> I n the final argument of Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates attempts to demonstrate — against Protagoras’ earlier insistence to the contrary — that the virtue of courage is a kind of knowledge. What distinguishes the courageous individual from the coward, on Socrates’ view, is not that the former is willing to “go toward” what he fears while the latter is not, but rather that the courageous individual, unlike the coward, knows what is truly deserving of fear. In fact, Socrates claims, people never willingly choose what they know or believe to be worst or most fearful. All cases of cowardice, therefore, turn out to be cases in which the agent is ignorant or mistaken (at least temporarily) about what is truly fearful and bad, while courage is “wisdom about what is and is not to be feared” (360d). In the Republic, Plato provides a “new” account of courage in terms of his freshly introduced theory that the soul consists of three distinct sources of motivation, or “parts”: the reasoning, the spirited, and the appetitive. An individual possesses courage, Socrates says, when the spirited part of his soul, or thumoeides, “preserves what is announced by rational accounts” in the face of opposition from unruly appetites within the individual’s soul (442b–c). On the surface, at least, this new account seems very different from that of the Protagoras. Indeed, a dominant line of interpretation takes the Republic’s account of the soul to depart sharply from that of the Protagoras, and to do so in ways that have important implications for understanding and comparing the two dialogues’ discussions of courage. According to this traditional reading, one of the crucial innovations of tripartite psychology is that it allows Plato to countenance cases of akrasia — that is, cases in which an agent’s appetites force her to act in a way that she simultaneously judges to be worse than another available course of action.1 If this view is correct, then on the Republic’s account, acts of cowardice no longer necessarily involve ignorance or mistaken rational judgment as they did in the Protagoras. For it is now possible for an agent to correctly judge (or perhaps even know)2 which action is better and less fearful,

Courage and the Spirited Part of the Soul in Plato’s Republic

Aristotle: On Sleep and Dreams

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/classical_world/v106/106.1.mckirahan.pdf

The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy, 2 vols (review)

There are two types of aisthēsis in the Timaeus , which involve distinct physiological processes and different kinds of soul, appetite and reason respectively. This distinction explains Timaeus’ ambivalent attitude towards aisthēsis : on the one hand, it is one of the main causes of the disruption of the orbits of the immortal soul upon embodiment; on the other hand, it plays a central role in restoring the immortal soul to its original, god-like condition.

Aisthēsis, Reason and Appetite in the Timaeus

in the tripartite psychology of the Republic, Plato characterizes the “spirited” part of the soul as the “ally of reason”: like the auxiliaries of the just city, whose distinctive job is to support the policies and judgments passed down by the rulers, spirit’s distinctive “job” in the soul is to support and defend the practical decisions and commands of the reasoning part. This is to include not only defense against external enemies who might interfere with those commands, but also, and most importantly, defense against unruly appetites within the individual’s own soul. 1 Spirit, according to this picture, is by nature reason’s faithful auxiliary in the soul, while appetite is always a potential enemy to be watched over and guarded against. i n the Timaeus, the spirited part of the soul—or “the part which shares in courage and spirited anger,” as Timaeus refers to it—is once again depicted as having a supportive relationship with the reasoning part. Timaeus describes it as being “naturally superior” to the appetitive part, and he explains that the gods placed it in the chest, near the head (the bodily location of the reasoning part), so that it would be able to “hear” the reports and commands issued by the reasoning part, and so that it might help reason restrain the appetitive part if the latter should become unruly (69e–70b). There are two noteworthy features of Timaeus’s characterization. First, it is clear that some sort of intra-psychic “communication” takes place between the reasoning and spirited parts of the soul. i n order to respond to the reports and commands of reason, spirit must first in some sense understand them (‘understand’ here carrying no specific theoretical weight yet). Through what psychological mechanism does this communication occur, however? While recent commentators have provided some illuminating discussions of intra-psychic communication in the Timaeus, those discussions have focused overwhelmingly on the question how reason communicates with appetite (a topic that the dialogue itself treats in somewhat

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Jo S h Wilburn

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The Spirited Part of the Soul in Plato's Timaeus