Plato on the Three Parts of the Soul

hi today i want to talk to you about the issues that are in a sense at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and ethics what kind of person i ought to be you might think depends on what it is to be a human being a good life for a human being you might think depends on what human beings are what they're like what their characteristics what their natures are and in some philosophers that's really neglected as we've seen confucius says it doesn't depend on human nature forget about that subsequent people in the chinese tradition did not agree and propose various theories of human nature as we'll see plato thinks it's crucial in his mature thought that we do think about what it is to be human in order to answer the question of what virtue is what we should do to become the kind of person we really ought to be to develop the right kinds of character strengths and to avoid weaknesses we need to think about what it is to be human and what in particular is the nature of the soul now by soul he doesn't really mean anything necessarily religious or deeply metaphysical the word ck is just translated often as mind in fact it's the root of our word psychology and so he's not got something mystical going on in the background here he's really talking about what it is to be human to decide to have a mind and what's involved in that and he thinks the answer is crucial to understanding what ethics is really all about as we're going to see he thinks there are three parts of the soul and we can't understand anything about what kind of person we ought to be unless we recognize the three parts of the soul so i'm going to talk today about plato's ethics about the overall picture and the way it develops out of his understanding of those three parts of the soul we talked some already about the problem of weakness of will knowing the better and doing the worse knowing what you ought to do but not doing it is that possible socrates thinks it is not possible that any time i choose i'm choosing what i think is best so if i choose the worst thing it's because i don't realize it's worse i think it's best in short i lack knowledge of what's better than what in this situation and so i lack wisdom so in every case he says a failure to be virtuous comes down to a failure to be wise that affirms his thesis that virtue in the end is just wisdom but it also suggests that knowing what you ought to do and not doing it is impossible if you don't do it that's because you didn't know that was the right thing to do now plato thinks that's wrong and thinks it's wrong on a deep level you might say it's a question of what philosophers called the phenomenology of moral conflict of being in a situation of temptation what i mean is how it feels internally what it's like to be in a situation where you're tempted where you're faced with the problem of weakness of will and the question is whether you're going to resist temptation or give in to it here's what plato has to say about that consider a case of conflict in which the person who has willpower resists his desires and the person who's weak of will gives into them a person in such a situation seems to be at war with himself and that's what it feels like to face temptation you're at war with yourself part of you really wants to eat that cookie part of you really doesn't last night my daughter very nicely ordered tiff's treats they were having a special on chocolate chip cookies sent me chocolate chip cookies warm still when they arrived okay i'm saying look i i really shouldn't eat those i've had enough calories today but they smelled wonderful and they were chocolate chip cookies and they were warm and so i ate one and then i ate another one and so okay but i was at war with myself for a little while anyway i was thinking wait i should resist these cookies but they smell good and they're gonna taste really good and so in the end i gave in i was at least for a while at war with myself well if that's true then socrates picture that this is a question of looking at two goods and deciding which is greater is really the wrong picture for socrates it's something like being offered a chance to have a five dollar bill or a ten dollar bill and you think well i'll take the ten right it's better and there's no problem it's just a question of which of these two options is the better option now notice in that case i'm not at war with myself if somebody says hey you just won first prize and first prize is your choice of ten dollars or five dollars i'll take the 10 right i mean it's not hard i'm not at war with myself and if i don't know if they hold the bills in two hands and say well you picked but in one is ten dollars and one is five dollars you don't know which then again i'm not really at war with myself i might think ooh but it just comes down to luck in that case i'm not going to be thinking oh i'm really tempted to go with the left but oh but the ride looks awfully good too i mean it's not like that right whereas a situation of trying to resist the chocolate chip cookies or some other sort of temptation that's much harder you feel at war with yourself and so plato says this is the wrong picture completely it's not just comparing two goods and deciding which is greater as socrates thinks it's something else going on here is someone staring at donuts right thinking about eating the donuts well that question of whether to resist the donuts is not just ah which good is greater like the five dollars or the ten dollars you feel at war with yourself or the cat tempted to reach in for the goldfish uh and try to resist that temptation even the cat feels this sense of tension and here a highly artistic depiction of eve in the garden of eden with the apple with a baby fully clothed by the way this is not very biblical but anyway the idea is you feel that sense of temptation and indeed that is the title of that painting temptation well plato says there is a different picture we have to have if you are experiencing this kind of moral conflict you are really being pulled or driven or impelled in two different directions part of you really wants the cookie part of you is trying to resist it part of you wants those donuts part of you is trying to resist the cat now part wants to reach in for the goldfish the other part is saying no they tend to squirt me with the squirt gut if i reach and go for the fish and so even the cat feels this sense of tension well if that's right if we're pulled in two different directions if there are things impelling us in different ways plato says that indicates there are different parts of the soul one thing cannot be impelled in different directions at the same time and in the same way he says if this is true if i'm being pulled in different directions or driven in different directions and if and look if it's coming within me i mean if two people are pulling on my arms that have me separated in different directions yeah that's not coming from within me although notice i do have two arms that they're pulling it would be hard for them to pull on one arm in two different directions and have that make any sense but in any case this is coming from within me it's not that something outside is grabbing on to me it's not like the cookie reaches out and says come eat me no instead it's coming from within me and if that's true if there's something in me that wants to go in this direction and something in me that wants to go in that direction it can't be the same thing in both cases it must be there two different parts of me that are in conflict with each other so he says there must then be different parts of the soul different parts of the personality different parts of the self again he doesn't necessarily mean something deep and metaphysical and mystical and religious it's just i must have different aspects of my mind that are pulling me in different directions there is a part of me that wants that cookie and then a part that doesn't want to do it a part of me that wants that donut and doesn't want that donut well plato says we have to divide the soul then into he thinks three parts now a lot of people have thought it's a question of two parts it's a matter of flesh versus spirit or in aristotle the rational versus the irrational element but that is not enough plato says there is the rational element reason that thinks the part that is telling me you shouldn't eat the cookie you shouldn't eat the doughnut there is the appetitive element desire that wants that wants the cookie that wants the donut but then he says in addition to that there is the spirited element emotion basically the part that feels and so within me there is reason i think art will say later i think therefore i am but also i feel i have an emotional part i feel therefore i am says much later and in addition to that i have desires i want and that i want is an important part of me too so a typical case of conflict is one where i have this desire pulling me in one direction but reason is telling me bad desire don't do that and trying to stop me from doing it the tension is between reason and desire that's not the only kind as we'll see however so here is how he depicts this he gives us a metaphor of the soul as a chariot of the nature of the soul their true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse let me speak briefly and in a figure let the figure be composite a pair of winged horses and a chariots here the human chariots here drives his horses in a pair and one of them is noble and of noble breed the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him this is his picture of the soul we are like charioteers or at least reason is like charioteers trying to control horses one of them is pretty cooperative the other is very difficult to control so here is one artistic depiction of that the charioteer striving to control the horses one of which is pretty well behaved the other of which is riotous and here's another depiction of that notice here it is well actually in that picture it's emotion that seems to be rearing up desire that is going straight ahead reason there in the chariot trying to control them as we'll see that's not entirely accurate he thinks it's desire that's the hardest one to control but in any case there are these three parts reason desire and emotion and that suggests that there can be three kinds of conflict there can be reason versus desire reason saying you don't need to eat those cookies desire saying but i want the cookies there can be reason versus emotion what kinds of cases are those well suppose you know suppose i find myself falling in love with someone but i think but that person's bad for me um reason might tell me stop don't do this but emotion is involved or what about emotion versus desire that's the hardest case as we'll see a lot of people would say look it's enough to have reason versus desire or maybe i can lump desire and emotion together as the irrational parts of the soul as the flesh versus the spirit or something like that as many people have subsequently so it's going to be important to examine why do i need that third part what is the sort of conflict that can exist between desire and emotion but i think there can be and plato's sure there can be so we'll talk about that in a second but here is the picture then a virtue that emerges being virtuous and he thinks being happy is a matter of rationality reason controlling the horses of that chariot and also maintaining a balance of the soul that idea about balance among the parts is crucial in plato and it's something that we have to combine to understand him those two different thoughts reason has to be in control it has to maintain control of the chariot it has to keep desire and emotion in check in order for you to be virtuous and in order for you to be happy but there has to be a balance he is not saying suppress desire suppress emotion he is not saying be like sherlock holmes a purely rational machine that has no emotion and has no desires not at all because think about the charioteer if there are no horses it doesn't go anywhere you can mount into the chariot like i'm ready to go but wait these rains don't hold on anything there are no horses i don't go anywhere all of the energy is coming from emotion and desire so we certainly don't want to say get rid of emotion get rid of desire we want to say control them okay make them go in the direction you want them to go you i shouldn't even say once here that suggests desire that you think you need to go typically what we're going to face is a situation of desire trying to lead us astray trying to lead us off that clip and reason saying no no no you don't really want to go there i don't want you to go there and i think that analysis is important reason is gonna at certain points say no no no that's not a good thing to desire or that's not a good thing to feel and sometimes it really does come down to that you have a certain emotional reaction and reason is telling you why are you getting upset you shouldn't get upset this is a good thing or you really shouldn't fall in love with that person or you know um gosh they're you know you you're feeling irritated at somebody but they're actually being pretty reasonable don't get irritated so there are various ways in which reason can tell you look control that emotion that emotion is going to lead you astray it's going to lead you off that cliff balance is important we have to have each part of the soul playing its proper role well that does suggest something important each part of the soul does have a role to play desire is what really gives us the main energy behind that chariot so desire impels us provides energy drives us forward emotion also supplies energy but it tries to keep things in check it tries to cooperate with the driver it doesn't always now plato at times seems to suggest it always does but that seems wrong to me i don't think it always does but it usually does okay he thinks usually what i think and what i feel to go together i'm going to feel a certain way if i think about it a certain way and i'm also going to think about it a certain way if i have this immediate emotional reaction to it if i get angry about it i'm going to think there's something wrong going on here and if i think there's something wrong i may get angry about it so thinking and feeling are more intimately connected than wanting and feeling or then wanting and thinking um desire goes off in its own direction quite frequently but that's less true of reason and emotion they usually cooperate usually thinking and feeling go together there's an interesting question here about what comes first remember the confucius said virtues of thought are fundamental and virtues of feeling follow from those so i tend to feel a certain way about things because i think about them a certain way other people known as intuitionists tend to think actually it's the feeling that usually comes first the thinking comes afterwards plato i think doesn't commit to any of you about that it's not a question of which one is primary they each have their role to play and they usually cooperate but not always well what then happens when we are virtuous each place each part does play its proper role and weakness of will is simply a matter of yes knowing the better and doing the worse knowing the proper roles but not being strong enough to force the elements into them think about that charioteer trying to control the chariot you may know where you want those horses to go but they might not go there because you're not strong enough the horses are stronger you're they're pulling say no no turn to the right and they're saying no turn to the left or they're saying head toward that cliff you're saying no no don't do that and you're trying to control them and you aren't strong enough so this idea of strength of will or weakness of will plato was saying is not just a metaphor it really is a question of being able to exert enough strength to control desire and emotion especially desire that's the harder one but really both reason has to be strong enough to do that and if it's not it may know where it wants to go all at once it won't be able to control the horses so it's easy to explain how weakness of will is possible here it's not that i always choose the better and do the better if i know what it is not at all i may know what it is but not do it because reason cannot control desire or cannot control emotion now there can be cases where desire and emotion come into conflict and so those are harder to describe but plato does give us an example of a soldier who is crossing a battlefield and sees many dead bodies strewn about and is horrified by this disgusted by it emotion repels him but nevertheless he has a desire to look at the dead bodies you might experience something like this if you see a dead animal on the side of the road part of you is disgusted and doesn't want to look but part of you does want to look there's a tension there between desire and emotion between the desire to look at something disgusting and then the emotion of disgust that pushes you away so he says that emotion of disgust and that feeling that in some cases we actually are kind of intrigued by the disgusting thing that tells us there is something that is a tension between desire and emotion but of course there can be other kinds of conflicts here too once you start being sensitive to that you start seeing it all the time now according to plato's picture as i've said virtue is a matter of keeping the parts of the soul in balance and there are specific virtues that are connected to that for example reason does have to control this desire that is the virtue of self-control sometimes translated as moderation or temperance it's a matter of controlling desires channeling them in the right path not getting rid of desire mind you but directing it in the right way and with emotion the basic virtue is well courage reason has to control emotion fear can get the better of you a lack of confidence or overconfidence can get the better of you and so reason has to control emotions like that now of course exactly what that virtue is depends on what the emotion is so fear and confidence give us courage other emotions might give us other things but plato tends to think courage is actually the most fundamental one because after all we're talking about action here and well yeah i mean in order to act i have to actually do something and have the confidence to do it and overcome any fear i might have of doing it so courage he thinks of as actually the most important of that family of virtues wisdom is the excellence of reason itself it's question of knowing where i should be directing the horses knowing where to go knowing what's better than what socrates was right at least about that but then what about the virtue of having all the parts playing their proper roles that he calls justice it's a different sense of justice from the one we're accustomed to usually we think of justice as a question of social arrangements we think of the criminal justice system or the civil justice system or of distributive justice this is something different it's justice within me he says there is an analogy between justice in the state and justice in the soul but there is such a thing as justice in the soul and it's a matter of each part of the soul being in balance with the others and playing its proper role well those cardinal virtues and that term by the way comes from the word for hinge they are the virtues on which all the balance of the soul and all the other virtues hinge they depend on it so these are the fundamental ones we talked about finding some virtues as central what makes them central or is it just their most useful most important in this case it's the ones every other virtue depends on it's not automatic that if you have these you have all the others but nevertheless you can't have the others without having these so these are something like necessary conditions for any other virtue what are they wisdom or prudence the excellence of reason self-control the excellence of desire and really the control of desire by reason courage something like the excellence of emotion and the control of emotion by reason and then justice the balance of the other parts the balance of the rest of the soul or you might say the entire soul the various parts together well suppose we think about that definition of virtue is virtue a question of the parts of the soul playing their proper roles are there cases of virtue that aren't like that are there times when the parts of the soul are playing their proper roles but we are not virtuous it's a hard question and i don't want to tackle it directly instead i want to look at an alternative picture that augustine presents some 800 years later augustine is a platonist he is someone who becomes the archbishop uh in hippo an area of north africa modern-day tunisia and he is a christian thinker who uses greek thought and especially plato to formulate a rather different philosophy it's not obvious in much of his writing because he's concerned with other things in the confessions his greatest work perhaps he lays out all sorts of opinions on a wide variety of topics on time on memory many things but along the way he gives us a picture of his conception of the soul and it's directly related to plato's he really constructs it as a way of responding to plato and giving us an alternative account he doesn't think there are three parts of the soul he thinks that's a mistake so how does this part go well remember the basic principle in plato one part of the soul cannot try to go in different directions in the same respect at the same time if there is conflict if i feel as if there are things in me that want to go in two different directions it means there are two different parts and he says wait a minute wait a minute if you accept that principle you're not going to get three parts of the soul you're going to get thousands of parts of the soul why because every single desire every single emotion every single thought can be its own part of the soul why because any of those can come into conflict with any others it's not always reason versus desire or reason versus emotion or emotion versus desire sometimes it's desire versus desire it's reason versus reason it's emotion versus emotion we can have conflicts within those and make it as specific as you want we can get very specific conflicts among individual thoughts among individual desires individual emotions so we're going to end up with thousands of parts of the soul let's ask the question can desires come into conflict well sure i can go into the ice cream shop and look and say wow there's so many flavors so many of those look good right yes i want that belgian chocolate but i also want the the butter crunch well gosh what do i do right i've got two conflicting desires i can't have both so that's a case where my desires can come into conflict and they can be good desires to have they can be bad desires to have it doesn't really matter maybe i want to study but i also want to help the poor i want to volunteer for this agency those are both good desires to have but i don't have time to do both i have to choose or i could they could be bad desires maybe i'm a car thief and i say oh i really would like to steal this bmw hmm but look at that one i also want to steal that porsche i've got bad desires there and they come into conflict so it's not always a question of a good desire conflicting with a bad desire might be but it also can be a case of good desires coming into conflict bad desires coming into conflict that happens all the time in fact look at a typical menu where there are many good choices and you're like oh gosh or for me it was always like this when i it came time to pick courses for the next semester i would look at the course catalog and say there's so many interesting things that i want to do i often took six courses in a given term even though i didn't have to because i just wanted to take all those courses and i'm afraid i'm still that way i think oh i'm interested in this i'm interested in that and i probably am too diffused in my intellectual interests because instead of devoting myself to one thing i spread myself among many things i find interesting well that that kind of desire even if it's a good desire can produce this sort of conflict because it can come into conflict with another desire the same thing can happen with emotion can feelings come into conflict well sure and here's a classic example from roman poetry in fact it's i think interesting roman literature is filled with conflicts of these kinds so here is an example famous example from the roman poet catholus antioxidant hate and i love why you may ask i don't know but i feel it and i am in torment catalyst is saying here look i'm in this love-hate relationship with this woman and many of his poems describe this relationship um she's unfaithful to him she's mean to him at certain points and yet he loves her there are times when he's furious times when he hates her but also he can't separate himself from that love and so he's often in this state of torment where he said look i love her and yet she treats me so badly i hate that i i hate her for doing it but i feel the love and the hate at the same time i've got conflicting emotions and of course that can happen in a lot of cases i might have an emotion that says yeah i'm proud of that but a little ashamed because i don't know if i should really have been doing that at all i did it well but should i have done it at all some things aren't worth doing well and and so these kinds of conflicts of emotion can happen the same thing is true of reason it would be tempting to say look reason is exempt from this reason never faces conflict but that's not true our rational conclusions can conflict one way they can come into conflict is just through paradoxes think about a sentence like this sentence is false if it were true it would be false that's what it says but if it were false hey it says it's false so it'd be true so it looks like if it were true it would be false if or false it would be true i get a contradiction out of this now it's not only in the case of weird logical paradoxes like this in general there can be all sorts of situations where i have reasons and powerful reasons for opposite conclusions there are entire books of philosophy dedicated to this kind of thing abelard's book seeket known yes and no or kant in the section of the critique of pure reason that he calls the antinomies of pure reason where he gives arguments that the will is free and arguments that the will is not free for example and he's saying look there are good reasons for both of these i you can't pick really each one has strong powerful reasons in support of it and so reason faces a conflict here so in short there are all sorts of settings where we say gosh i've got reasons for this and reasons for that there's evidence for this claim and evidence against it i i don't know what to do and so those conflicts can occur within reason itself well we've talked about weakness of will weakness of will then on augustine's perspective is not a question of knowing where the horses should go and not being able to direct them there it's not a matter of conflict among parts of the soul he says really we can't have thousands of parts of the soul we have to take the soul as unified but here's what's going on there are different kinds of desires and so for example i might want the cookies but i don't want to want the cookies i wish i didn't want them but i do and so he says it's a question of lower order desires like the desire for the cookies or the desire for the doughnut and then higher order desires about my desires because i can not only desire things or experiences i can desire desires i can want to have a desire i might say look i'm not very interested in this topic why did i sign up for this course i i wish i cared about it i wish i wanted to study it but i don't well yeah i don't have that first sort of desire to study but i wish i did i want to want to study and so i have the higher order desire and he's saying look those higher order desires can come into conflict with the lower order desires lower order willings as he put puts it can come into conflict with higher order willings so i think about exercising i think i should exercise but then maybe i'm lazy i think oh but i don't want to so we can define it this way weakness of will is a conflict between these higher and lower order willings willing to do what you don't will to will to do i choose not to exercise let's say so i will that i not exercise i don't want to do it but look i wish i wanted to exercise i will that i will that i exercises the way he puts it i think a little confusingly i want to want to exercise but i don't want to and that's a case of weakness of will if i give in to that lower order desire and don't do it so that's overall the picture i will to do what i don't will to will to do or maybe i don't will to do what i do will to will to do i've got a conflict between the higher order willings and the lower order willings well conflict is possible then between my first order desires i can want to study and also want to goof off and not study study so that's possible but i can also get that conflict between the first order desires and the higher order desires i want to do something but maybe i don't want to want it so in a good case i want to study for example and i want to want to study but in a bad case i want to goof off i don't in other words want to study but i don't want to want to goof off i want to want to study but i don't okay and that's a case of weakness of will if i give into that lower order desire and decline to study so this is our overall picture to conclude on his analysis temptation is not a matter of reason telling desire or emotion no and them fighting back instead it's having a desire you don't want to have and weakness of will giving into that desire so that idea of desires that we don't want to have or emotions we don't want to feel he says that's what's really at the root of weakness of will it's certainly possible in fact he thinks it's very very common but it doesn't commit us he thinks to different parts of the soul

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Id: YiqgfUnV4J4

Length: 32min 12sec (1932 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021