Anthony Price

It is well-known that Plato’s Republic introduces a tripartition of the incarnate human soul; yet quite how to interpret his ‘parts’ 1 is debated. On a strong reading, they are psychological subjects – much as we take ourselves to be, but homunculi, not homines. On a weak reading, they are something less paradoxical: aspects of ourselves, identified by characteristic mental states, dispositional and occurrent, that tend to come into conflict. Christopher Bobonich supports the strong reading in his Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics. In his The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, Hendrik Lorenz agrees with Bobonich that the parts of the soul are ‘the subjects or bearers of psychological states’. Any ascription to my Mental Conflict of the opposed, weak view needs qualification: my Plato is highly ambivalent.2 But my intention here is less to defend an earlier self – though I predict failing to escape it – than to reconsider tripartition in the Republic in the light of Bobonich’s virtuosity and Lorenz’s lucidity. They persuade me of the inexhaustibility of the text, notably within Book 4 from 436 to 439. About these pages we may indeed disagree: they find them decisive in favour of their view, as I don’t. When Socrates remarks, ‘Let us have our understanding still more precise, lest as we proceed we become involved in dispute’, he was not anticipating the dissensions of interpreters.

How are we to understand Aristotle's famous doctrine of the mean? "If ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds"... In fact, the relation of morality to physical health is more intimate than mere analogy. Emotions involve a bodily process (cp On the Soul 403al6ff): for example, 'Anger is productive of heat' (On the Parts ofAnimals 650b35), while 'Fear is, indeed, a kind of chill' (Rhetoric 1389b32). The hot temper of youth and the cool temper of old age, to take two extremes, are corollaries of physical extremes, of literal heat and cold respectively (Rhetoric 1389a2ff). In general, moral as well as bodily excellences are supervenient upon physical states; specific to moral excellence is what it supervenes upon, viz bodily pleasures and plains (Physics 246b3-247a20, an early passage not relevantly superseded). Health and virtue are both grounded upon the physiological condition of a psycho-physical entity... Yet it is hard to view the physiology of virtue as more than a general precondition. It more satisfactorily identifies natural virtue than virtue proper. The blood of young men is heated by nature (as though by wine), so that they are hot-tempered and hopeful; this makes them less timorous and more confident, and so more courageous, than the old (Rhetoric 1389al8ff). But the properly brave man is one 'who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time' (11 5b1b7ff)