Plato: aesthetics and psychologyChristopher RowePlato’s ideas about literature and art and about beauty (his ‘aesthetics’) areheavily influenced and in part actually determined by his ideas about the mind orsoul (his ‘psychology’).1It is therefore appropriate to deal with the two subjectsin proximity to one another, and the second before the first.THE SOULPreliminariesGiving an account of any aspect of Platonic philosophy is made especiallydifficult by two facts about the way in which he wrote: that he did all his writing,not in treatise form, but in the form of dialogues, from which the direct authorialvoice is absent (so that it is always in principle an open question how much ofwhat is contained in them he might have wanted to endorse, and how firmly);and that each dialogue —if we discount occasional cross-references—is inprinciple separate from every other. It is nevertheless reasonable to suppose,especially since there are some ideas which recur repeatedly, that we can gain afair idea from the Platonic corpus about how and whatPlatothought, and thatthe separateness of individual dialogues does not constitute an absolute bar againstusing them jointly in an attempt to understand that thought. But it remains amoot point how we are to treat apparent differences between the ideas presentedto us in different works: whether perhaps as the response of a flexible mind toissues and problems, which nevertheless leaves untouched an underlying unityof doctrine; or rather as changes of mind, which betray the author’sphilosophical development.The issue is particularly important in relation to Plato’s ideas about thepsuchē,which appear to exhibit considerable variation between, and even within,individual dialogues, and to fit particularly well—at least in some respects—thehypothesis of a development in his thinking.In general, the developmental orevolutionary view of Plato has become almost standard among his interpreters(especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), partly because of an apparent coincidencebetween the results of investigations into the chronology of the dialogues andwhat has been seen as the gradual maturation of their ideas and arguments. Atypical overview will describe the Platonic corpus as falling into three parts:early, middle, and late. The early period, on this account, broadly represents thatof the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, when Plato was by and large occupied withrepresenting and preserving the intuitions and arguments of his master Socrates;the middle period shows him constructing those positive ideas which we mostclosely associate with the name ‘Plato’ (‘Forms’, ‘philosopher-kings’, and soon); while in the late period, he moves into a more critical and reflective phase,perhaps rejecting or heavily modifying some of his earlier ideas. The pattern atfirst sight fits quite neatly and easily in the case of Platonic ‘psychology’. In theApology,which all are agreed belongs to a time early on in Plato’s writing career,we find Socrates at his trial expressing an agnostic attitude towards the fate of anindividual after death:eitherdeath is annihilation,orthe soul is translated toanother place, where it will encounter the wise men of the past (if, as he says, thestories are true). By contrast, in thePhaedo(assigned to the ‘middle’ period),Socrates spends his last hours arguing rationally but committedly for theimmortality of the soul. It is in thePhaedo,too, that—on the account in question—we begin to see the formation of a detailed theory about the soul and itsnature, which is developed further in theRepublic(usually treated as the middledialoguepar excellence) and elsewhere. Finally, in the late dialogues, signs of aretreat have been detected from some aspects of the ‘middle’ theory, and there isa reduction in emphasis on the immortal nature of the soul, even if the idea itselfis plainly not abandoned.There are, however, a number of points on which a developmentalinterpretation of Plato’s treatment of the soul looks vulnerable, or unhelpful. IntheApology,where Socrates is (fictionally) addressing a general audience ofAthenian citizens, his description of the ‘other place’ to which the soul may betranslated after death is formulated in mainly traditional terms, which mayreflect more about what Plato considered appropriate to the dramatic audiencethan about either his own or Socrates’ views.2Again, the fact that theSymposiummanages to discuss immortality at length without once referring to thesoulasimmortal cannot reasonably be supposed to indicate that Plato has temporarilygiven up the idea, which is heavily canvassed in other dialogues apparentlywritten at about the same time. This looks like a clear case of what we may onlysuspect in the case of theApology,namely of Plato’s deciding what to includeand what to exclude by reference to a dramatic audience—in this case, a tragicplaywright and his guests at a dinner-party.3In thePhaedo,he has Socratescarefully skirt round the question whether the soul has parts, which becomescentral in other dialogues but in this context would impede the argument. Thisdoes not mean that we must adopt a strictly unitarian approach; what it doesmean is that chronological arguments need to be used sparingly, and that thereare likely to be other factors at work in determining the content of any particulardialogue.Plato was probably the first Greek thinker to articulate a theory of the soul.Socrates had a concept of it, but not a fully-articulated theory; and the same istrue of other pre-Platonic thinkers. Two of the main ideas on which Platonicthinking on the subject is predicated are, first, the traditional notion that the‘souls’ of the dead are in Hades (so thatsomethingof us, however insubstantial,continues in existence), and second, the idea—found for example in the medicalwriters—of a fundamental contrast between ‘soul’, on the one hand, and body onthe other.4Socrates’ way of conceiving of the soul as the moral self can be seenas building on the second of these ideas, developing it into something like ourfamiliar opposition between the bodily or carnal (as in ‘carnal pleasures’) and thespiritual; Plato combines this with the first, but in a version which owes much toboth Pythagoreanism and mystery religion, and—for a selected, philosophical few—reverses the relationship between life and death: for those who have livedphilosophically, it is death which is preferable to life, and which allows the truefulfilment of their goals.5However it is probably as correct to talk of Plato’sappropriationofPythagorean and other religious ideas as of his being influenced by them. It isreasonably clear that he believes in the immortality of the soul (since he goes onreturning to the question of how to prove it), and in the general proposition thatthe wise and the good6 will enjoy a better existence after death than the ignorantand bad; and beliefs of this general type7 were evidently quite widespread in theGreece of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC. He also shows more than apassing interest in the distinctively Pythagorean notion of the ‘transmigration’ ofthe soul, after a suitable interval, from one body to another (whether human oranimal). But each of these beliefs seems to be rooted in a deeper one, about theprimacy of goodness in the explanation of the world we inhabit, and about thepossibility of squaring that with the evident corruptibility of human motivation.Moreover Plato usually himself raises questions about the way his descriptionsof ‘Hades’ and of the fate of the human soul are to be taken, by casting them inthe form of ‘stories’. As he has Socrates say at the end of one of the most famouseschatological myths, in thePhaedo:to insist that these things are as I say is not fitting for a man of intelligence;but that either this or something like it is true about our souls and theirhabitations, if indeed the soul is evidently immortal—to risk thinking so, inmy view,isfitting. (114d)On such occasions, his use of the language of Pythagoreanism, or of initiatoryreligion, appears to hover tantalizingly between the literal and the metaphorical.A large part of the problem here is that Plato’s dialogues are no ordinaryphilosophical works, but—some of them—highly literary pieces, apparentlywritten for a relatively wide reading public (at any rate one wider than hisimmediate circle or school), and designed above all to persuade the reader of thevalue of philosophy itself. This they attempt to do by a variety of means, butespecially by portraying philosophy in action, and by showing it playing a largerole in, or even taking over for itself, normally distinct spheres of activity. Thusthe philosopher may be the ideal statesman, orator, poet, even lover; to see thetruth is to join the divine feast, or to be initiated into the highest mysteries. Andyet at the same time to do philosophy is to be involved in hard, often prosaic,argument. The common thread is a commitment to the importance of rationality:whatever is worth achieving in human life is for Plato achievable by the exerciseof reason, and by the assertion of the rational over the irrational. Through thismeans the authentic Platonic philosopher would simultaneously realize his—orher8—full human potentialities, and begin to resemble the (rational, Platonic)gods. If Plato does indeed genuinely believe in the immortality of the soul, thenthere is no reason to think of this latter goal as a merefaçon de parler. In somesense, the ultimate fate of the soul in a Platonic universe lies beyond its presenttemporary conjunction with a body. But there are clear signs that for humansouls actually to become divine is either in principle or in practice impossible,and that as in Greek poetry and myth, to begodlikeis the most that we canattain.9It is probably this which is part of what the doctrine of transmigration ismeant to express. Unlike the gods, we are ultimately bound into the cycle of birthand death10—and yet we share in their rationality.If this is so, then we need to steer a middle course: neither should we assumethat Plato takes literally all the many ideas that he develops through hischaracters in the dialogues (which would be dangerous on any account), norshould we attempt to eliminate altogether what may seem to us the morefantastic and apparently poetic elements among them. (Indeed, for someNeoplatonist and Renaissance interpreters the latter probably take us closer to thecore of Platonism.) We must remain aware that Plato’s philosophical writing is acomplex matter, and that his motives as a writer may sometimes directly affectthe content of that writing, as indeed may his chosen literary form. Thus, forinstance, particular dialogues will often follow out a particular line of thought tothe exclusion of others, which it is difficult to bring in within the fiction of aparticular conversation (the treatment of immortality in theSymposiumis oneclear example; see above).ThePhaedoThe exercise of our reason matters for Plato because of what it can do for us.Reason enables us, most importantly, to recognize what is best for us, which isalso what we desire; and this is one reason why even the driest discussion can bedescribed in terms of passionate emotion; philosophers areloversof the truth,11because truth is the only sure guide for the conduct of life, and a successful life issomething that we all want. This kind of passionate attachment to reason isnowhere more evident than in thePhaedo,12in which Plato represents Socratesin his last hours justifying his optimism in the face of death. He claims that it isin death, if anywhere, that the philosopher will be able to achieve the wisdom hesought but was unable fully to achieve while alive. We cannot ‘see’ the truth inits purity when in our embodied state, because of the confusion created by thebody and its desires; death is our—our souls’—final separation from body (if wehave ‘trained’ ourselves to have as little traffic with the body as possible); it istherefore ‘reasonable to suppose’ that it is then that all will be revealed to us.13This informal argument is then followed by four more tightly constructed onesfor the underlying assumption that the soul can be relied upon to survive death(and remains intelligent, unlike the witless shades of the Homeric Hades). Thesupreme importance of wisdom is thus illustrated on both the theoretical and thepractical level: Socrates both argues, and shows by his behaviour, that it issomething the philosopher desires to the exclusion of everything else. This is ahard and unattractive doctrine (and one that does not recur in quite the same formelsewhere in Plato); it is also somewhat paradoxical, in so far as the wisdom inquestion seemed originally to be valued—as it is at least in part, even accordingto thePhaedo14—for the sake of living a good life. On the other hand, if the soulisimmortal, then Socrates’ position is intelligible enough (even if no moreattractive); a single life in a body will have a vanishingly small importance,except in so far as it affects the quality of the soul’s future existence. In any case,the general point is clear enough: that it is wisdom that counts, or wisdom withthe virtue that flows from it.This framing argument of thePhaedo,together with the four arguments forimmortality, tells us a good deal about what Plato means, or can mean, by ‘soul’.Does this not turn out to be purification [for the soul]… separating the soulas far as possible from the body, and habituating it to gather and assembleitself together from all quarters of the body, and to dwell so far as possible,both in the present and in the time to come, freed from the body as fromfetters?(67c–d)It is certainly a separate entity in itself, and itself invisible and ‘bodiless’ orincorporeal (as is confirmed later in the dialogue: cf. 85e); it is in its proper state,not when it is in the (or a) body, but when it is out of it —if the body is like apair of leg-irons;15and it is essentially the rational, thinking element in us. Butsince what Socrates attempts to demonstrate, in the main part of the dialogue, isevidentlypersonalimmortality (the fear of death would hardly be assuaged by arational assurance that something impersonal, something other than us, willsurvive), this immortal ‘soul’ must also represent our essential selves. If we putthese last few points together, the result is that we are fundamentally rational(and incorporeal) beings, who become distorted or perverted by our associationwith the body, and are only fully ourselves when we are ‘purified’ of ‘its’16desires, lusts and fears. Any irrational behaviour we may display is on thisaccount simply a consequence of our enforced union with the body, though itseffects will normally outlast our deaths—that is, unless we have ‘purified’ourselves through philosophy, and ‘practised dying and being dead’ (64a).Something like this view of the soul also emerges elsewhere in the corpus, butin competition with the essentially different view of it as partly rational andpartly itself irrational, in the more or less literal sense of having irrational parts(as well as a rational one). As I have suggested, thePhaedodoes not commititself to saying either that the soul does or that it does not have parts;17and thecoexistence of the two views in theRepublic—which treats tripartition as(perhaps) a way of describing what the soul is like in consequence of itsassociation of the body—shows that they are not wholly incompatible. But in thefinal analysis they represent two quite different conceptions of human nature,which in turn reflect Plato’s ambivalence about the value of our life here onearth: one view emphasizing our (potential) kinship to the divine, the other ourdifference from it. In the context of thePhaedo,the unitary view is clearly moreat home. Yet there are clear problems with it, and particularly about itscompatibility with the demand forindividualimmortality. If any two souls werefully ‘purified’, then they would apparently be indistinguishable from each other,since they would both be purely rational and knowing beings, and what theyknew —given the Platonic model of knowledge—would actually be the same.(Just so, at the end of Book II of theRepublic,the argument seems to lead to the—admittedly unacknowledged—conclusion that there exists a multiplicity ofidentical, rational gods.) There are difficulties about identifying the individualwith his or her soul, on any interpretation of ‘soul’, but these are at their greatestif our ‘souls’ are supposed to be coextensive with our rational faculties. Whowould wish to be remembered as their ability to think, and nothing else—noteven the content of their thought?)18But soul also has at least one other role to play in thePhaedo. It is not onlyour true, rational self; it is also alife-principle,or as Socrates puts it in the lastargument for immortality, what ‘brings life’ to the body (105c-d). The idea ofsoul as an originator of motion, indeed, as the only self-activating source ofmovement anywhere in the universe, is widespread in Plato. In thePhaedrus(245e), Socrates suggests that ‘what is moved by itself is the ‘essence anddefinition’ of soul; in theLaws(896a), usually agreed to be Plato’s last work, itis ‘that movement which is capable of moving itself by itself. Now for someone,like Plato, who is apparently happy to think of the universe itself asfundamentally rational, i.e. both as ordered, and as actually a living and thinkingbeing, the idea that the ultimate source of motion should be a rational entitymakes a certain sense, on that macrocosmic level; but it makes rather less senseat the microcosmic level of human beings, compounds of soul and body, most ofwhose activities are necessarily irrational in nature. Functions like ingestion,digestion or excretion may be aspects of a rationally-designed system (or whatresembles such a system), but it looks distinctly odd to put them under the controlof the faculty of reason, when they are by their nature unthinking.It seems obvious enough that the tripartite model of the soul will work betterin this context, as it will in the previous one: if the soul which survives death retainsits emotions and its irrational desires, it will have a considerably greater chanceof standing in for the original person. In fact, this will turn out to be the caseeven in thePhaedofor all except the purified, philosophical soul. Whatever wesuppose to be the non-mythical equivalent of the fates of non-philosophical soulswhich Socrates describes (living on the shores of lake Acheron, or being sweptalong in the appalling rivers of the underworld), there will be little point inpunishing them unless they are recognizably the same souls, dominated byirrational impulses, which motivated the unsatisfactory behaviour for which theyhave been condemned; and indeed thePhaedoopenly acknowledges the point,describing the unpurified soul as ‘interspersed with what belongs to the categoryof the body’, however it may be that something incorporeal can be ‘interspersed’with anything (81c). To this extent the two models for understanding the soul,unitary and tripartite, will be practically indistinguishable.19But on eitheraccount virtually all individuality must be lost as soon as a soul enters anotherbody. There will certainly be no memory of any previous bodily existence, andso even if it is the same soul-stuff that animates the new body, it might as well bea new soul; no one will recognize Socrates in his new existence, and he (if it is ahe) will not even recognize himself.20What hewillhave a memory of is of the Platonic Forms, though his memorywill remain latent from birth unless and until he is able to ‘recollect’ it.21This isthe Platonic doctrine ofanamnēsis,which is brought in as the basis of the secondargument for immortality in thePhaedo,and which claims that ‘learning’ in theimportant cases is really a matter of rediscovering knowledge of things we knewbefore we were born. We are nowhere told, except in a mythical context,22exactly when and how we came to know the Forms; we have simply hadacquaintance with them in the past, and this is sufficient to guarantee our access,given the right conditions, to a collection of objects which are not themselvesobjects of direct experience in our bodily lives.23Once again, we are broughtback to the essential unworldiness of the soul in Plato’s thinking. His is anextreme form of dualism: the soul is not just a separate entity from the body, butone that, despite its function as originator of movement and change, seems tobelong—by its essential nature—outside the body, and outside the world24 inwhich that movement and change occur (though it still remains an open questionwhether any non-divine soul can remainpermanentlyin a discarnate state). Onlyin thePhaedois dualism allowed to be challenged, when one of Socrates’interlocutors brings forward the view that ‘soul’ is merely a kind ofepiphenomenon of the mixture of physical constituents in a body (the ‘harmony’theory of soul). But Socrates gives this rival account short shrift, dismissing it bymeans of arguments which with a little reformulation it might easily evade. Platohad evidently not seen the true strength of the competition to his own view.The Soul in Other DialoguesOne question which is likely to occur to any reader of thePhaedois why, if thesoul’s true place is outside the body, it is ever incarnated in the first place, andespecially if everything in the world is for the best. An answer, which emergesfrom thePhaedrusand theTimaeus,is just that the scheme of things demandsliving things, and living things require souls to animate them.25In bothdialogues, these souls have three parts: one higher and rational, and twoirrational, respectively responsible for the higher and the lower emotions. In theTimaeus,the story of the creation represents the first and immortal pan as beingcreated by the divine craftsman out of the same stuff as the soul of the universe,while the other two are the products of lesser divinities, specifically to meet therequirements of bodily existence (to survive, we shall need, for example, animpulse to assert and defend ourselves, and a desire to take in food and drink).26In thePhaedrus,the three parts are compared to a charioteer and his two horses,one his natural ally, the other—the lusting, lecherous one—in permanentopposition to him; but unlike normal chariot teams, this one, including thecharioteer, is a single whole, ‘grown together’.27Out of the body, the mostfortunate souls will be able to control their horses, and will join the gods, if onlytemporarily, to feast on reality and truth; in it, they will struggle against the lustsof the second horse to regain their memories of the feast.This opposition between the highest and lowest parts is a fundamental featureof the tripartite model of the soul. It expresses what thePhaedodescribes in termsof the opposition between soul and body, the ‘lower’ desires being preciselythose which are there treated as belonging to the body itself. Plato’s basicposition is in a way bipartite rather than tripartite; that is, in so far as he sees thehuman soul as a battleground between the rational, on the one hand, and theirrational or ‘bodily’ on the other. The rational part is as it were the ‘eye’ of thesoul, which will ‘see’ the truth, on two conditions: first, that it is itself fullydeveloped; and second, that it is not prevented from doing so by the irrational inus.28This is the view which underlies thePhaedo,and it is also what we find intheLaws. But elsewhere we find the more complex tripartite model, whichrecognizes that some aspects of the irrational are not only necessary for oursurvival, but can contribute positively towards the good life. By splitting theirrational element into two parts, one of which is the natural ‘ally’ of reason,while the other tends to disrupt it, Plato is able to make this concession whilestill maintaining the sense of a basic opposition between rational and irrational.However he also has independent grounds for this move. In Book IV of theRepublic,he has Socrates argue at considerable length for the existence of threesoul-parts. (In fact, Socrates introduces the term ‘part’ only with considerablehesitation: at first he preferseidos,‘kind of thing’,ethos,‘character-type’, orplain ‘something’, as in, for example,triton ti,‘a third something’ (435bff.). ButthePhaedrusand theTimaeusshow no such reluctance, and theTimaeusactuallylocates the three parts in separate parts of the body.) Socrates has argued that thevirtues of wisdom, courage, self-control and justice are attributable to acommunity or city in virtue of the qualities of, and relationships between, thegroups who perform, respectively, the functions of rulers, soldiers, andproducers; now he raises the question—since the ultimate aim in the context is todefine the virtues (and especially justice) in the individual— whether theindividual person has ‘these same kinds of thing in his soul’, so that the resultson the larger scale can be carried over on to the smaller. Using the basic principlethat ‘the same thing will not be disposed to do or have done to it opposite thingsin the same respect and in relation to the same thing at the same time’ (436b), heestablishes to the satisfaction of his immediate audience, first, that we need todistinguish something in us in virtue of which we experience physical desires,e.g. the desire for drink, from something else which may on occasion cause us toresist a particular object of desire, e.g. this drink now, for a reason (it iscontaminated, or poisonous); and second that we must equally separate ‘spirit’29or the ‘spirited part‘ from both of the other two. This part is naturally or ideally30the ally of reason, and never sides with the desiring part against reason, althoughwe discover later that it may itself oppose reason.The individual will possess justice and the other virtues when each of thesethree parts is performing its proper function, in harmony with the others. Thismeans, above all, that both of the two lower parts are properly under the controlof reason. If they are, then he will have only the right physical desires, and in theright measure, policed by the ‘spirited’ part;31if not, then either of the lowerparts may dominate and distort the reasoning part and its judgements. This givesPlato a kind of theory of imperfect types, which offers a further explanation of thedivision of soul into three parts. The person who is dominated by the love ofprofit, on Plato’s account, is ‘oligarchic’ man (oligarchic states being those runfor the material benefit of the rulers); ‘democratic’ man is ruled by different sortsof desire in succession, and none in particular; and ‘tyrannical’ man, the tyranthimself, is controlled by a single, all-consuming master-lust. But there is also theperson dominated by the love of honour, and the desire for self-assertion: the onePlato calls the ‘timocratic’ individual, the warrior of theIliad,or the ambitiouspolitician who is his counterpart in the democratic city-state.32This picture of human nature as it should be, with reason ruling over unreason,may seem to be disturbed by some aspects of thePbaedrus,and in particular bySocrates’ apparent readiness, in his central speech, to treat the philosopher asmad(244aff.). The beginning of the process of recollection of the Forms isdescribed in terms of an encounter between lover and beloved: the beauty of aparticular individual stirs the memory in the lover of Beauty Itself, and he isdriven out of his wits by it, behaving in all the usual ways that lovers do— exceptthat he manages to curb his lusts (in the shape of the black horse). The eventualoutcome is a common life of philosophy, in which both older and younger partnerrecognize the real source of their original passion. Thus, paradoxically, a life ofreason has its source in the opposite state, a kind of god-given madness whichSocrates compares to that of the seer and prophet, of the religious initiate, and ofthe divinely inspired poet. But the paradox is clearly deliberate, and in fact theovertly crazy behaviour of the philosophical lover is restricted wholly to the firststage, when he first falls in love, as he supposes with the beloved himself; afterthat, he recovers himself, and only appears crazed to the outside world, forneglecting ordinary concerns.33Yet at the same time the context shows that weare supposed to imagine him still in an ‘inspired’ state, still ‘in love’, since hismind remains directed towards, among other objects, the one—Beauty—whichoriginally stirred him to passion. In theSymposiumwe find what is recognizablya variant of this picture of the philosopher as lover. Having begun by falling inlove with a particular beautiful individual, he will be led (by a mysteriousguide)34ultimately to acknowledge the splendour of the Form from which thatindividual and all other beautiful things derive their beauty, and transfer hisallegiance to that.What emerges with particular clarity from thePhaedrusis that it isreason itselfwhich longs for Beauty. What is stirred by the vision and the memory of beauty(and Beauty) is primarily the charioteer himself, though the second horse, fromthe philosophical point of view unfortunately, also responds in its own way. Infact, Plato consistently treats the reasoning part as having its own desires and itsown pleasures. The lower parts of the soul cannot redirect themselves towardshigher objects, since they just are those parts of the soul with which we desirerespectively food, drink, etc., or honour. A horse cannot become a charioteer, norcan what we might call an instinct, unrefined by thought and reflection (adescription which at least fits the ‘appetitive’ part), be turned into a rationalwish, though both spirit and appetite may be trained to desire and enjoy thosethings in their respective spheres which reason determines to be right for them.35Of course, any time and energy spent on those things which are attractive to thelower elements mean less time and energy for higher things, and vice versa; andthis makes it natural for Socrates to use the image of the diversion of a stream, ashe does in theRepublic,‘we recognize, I suppose, that if a person’s desiresincline vigorously towards one thing, they are by this degree weaker in otherdirections, like a stream which has been diverted into that other channel’.36Butthe desires themselves remain distinct. The desire for, and impulse towards,Beauty and the other Forms, the objects of reason and intellect, must thereforebelong to the reasoning part itself.In that case the opposition in Plato between rational and irrational is not asimple one between reason and desire, except in so far as ‘desire’ is identifiedwith the lower or bodily desires. This point coincides with the consistent way inwhich (as we have seen) philosophy is described in the dialogues, as above all apassionatepursuit. If philosophy is not literallyerōs,passionate sexual love,because that must be directed towards people, it is nevertheless like it, and—soSocrates claims, on Plato’s behalf—it provides a degree of fulfilment far greaterthan what we can expect from ordinaryerōs. The way in which theSymposiumputs the philosopher’s goal, as a kind of union with the forms, at first sight suggeststhe sublimation of sexual passion. But if that entails the desire for one thing,sexual union, being satisfied by another, ‘being with’ Beauty, such a scenario is—as I have already argued—incompatible with Platonic tripartition, and it isequally incompatible with any other conception of the soul which is representedin the dialogues (in theSymposiumitself Socrates says nothing about what thesoul is, or is like, just as he says nothing about its mortality or immortality). Interms of tripartition, the model for the soul adopted by that other dialogue onlove, thePhaedrus,the ‘ascent of love’ would rather be a matter of the disguisedsubstitution of the fulfilment of one sort of desire for the fulfilment of another.37But so remarkable will the experience of the philosopher’s ‘erotic’ initiation be,on Socrates’ account, that he will never miss what he once left behind.The idea of reason as itself desiring and passionate also not only fits, but isdemanded by, the sort of view of the soul which we found Plato favouring in thePhaedo,and to which he returns at the end of theRepublic,even after havingargued at length for tripartition.38If soul is in its essence rational and unitary, andcapable of floating free through the universe, and perhaps especially if itactivates and animates bodies, it cannot be pure rationality; thinking about things,even including doing them, by itself moves nothing. That is, without desire aunitary rational soul does not look like a remotely plausible candidate as a selfmoveror source of movement for other things; it would, as we might put it, justlack amotivefor doing anything.Of course, the more reason appears like a separate agent, the greater theproblems for the tripartite model. Similarly also in the case of the other parts: itwill not be particularly helpful to analyse the soul, as a spring of action, intothree more.39Perhaps that should encourage us to take seriously Plato’s hint atthe end of theRepublic,and to suppose that he ultimately prefers aPhaedo-typeview. But this is a less than completely satisfactory solution. The prominence ofthe idea of the tripartite soul, both in theRepublicand elsewhere, reflects Plato’sinterest in the fact of internal conflict which it purports to explain, and makes ithard either for us or for him to set it aside. A better conclusion might be just thathe finds the arguments for the two conceptions of soul equally balanced, andveers between the two as the context demands, just as he does between thedifferent conceptions of humanity which they imply.LITERATURE AND ARTPlato returns repeatedly to the subject of literature, particularly poetry, and histreatment of the poets is always hostile. One important passage which is oftentaken as an exception, and as marking a softening in his attitude, in fact includessome of the main themes of his attacks elsewhere. The passage is the one in thePhaedrusbriefly referred to earlier, where Socrates is introducing the idea oferotic madness, and comparing it to other forms of madness. Third among theseis ‘possession and madness from the Muses’, which issues in ‘lyric and the rest ofpoetry’, and ‘by adorning countless achievements of past generations educatesthose who come after’ (245a). Socrates contrasts this inspired poetry with poetryproduced by someone not affected by the Muses’ madness, who ‘has beenpersuaded that after all skill will make him a good enough poet’; the poems ofthe mad leave those of the sane nowhere.We should not be misled by the fact that Socrates here claims to be supportingthe proposition that ‘the greatest of good things come to us through madness,provided that it comes by the gift of the gods’ (244a). There are clear signs ofplayfulness in the context as a whole, and the structure of the passage about thepoets echoes the central argument of the little dialogueIon,whose polemicalintentions are not in doubt.40The poets claim to educate people, which impliesthat they have something to teach: they know something. But in fact—Socratesargues against Ion—those who are any good are out of their minds, and theirpoetry has its real source not in them, but in the Muses. InRepublicX, Socratesreports an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, on the basis (or so itseems) of what the poets have said about people who claim to be wiser than them(607b-c); in Plato’s hands, philosophy gives as good as it gets.The attack on the wisdom of the poets is carried out nowhere more extensivelythan in theRepublicitself. Large parts of three of its ten books (II–III, and Xitself) are written against poetry, arguing for the conclusion that the poets shouldbe expelled from the ideal city as corrupting influences on the citizens, young orold. So the charge is even stronger: not only do they themselves lack wisdom,but so do their products. Now if these are the products of the Muses, then (sinceon Plato’s view the gods are good and without jealousy or malice) we shouldexpect them to contain the wisdom that the poets, according to theIonand thePhaedrus,themselves lack. But in fact, it seems, the argument there is anopportunistic one, whose point is just about the poets’ ignorance, and thereforetheir lack of qualification for a teaching role. ‘If, as you say,41your poems areinspired,’ Socrates asks, in effect, ‘won’t that mean that they come to you fromoutside?’ To which they would presumably reply that they mean nothing of thesort, only that their poetry either is or seems to be a joint product of skill andsomething else which they cannot explain; in other words they would simplyreject Socrates’ simplistic assumption that ‘inspiration’ excludes human skill.However there is a serious point behind the strategy of theIon.42This is aboutthe way in which poetry works on its audience, and, as it happens, on those whoperform it: Ion is a ‘rhapsode’, a professional performer specializing in Homer,who also lectures about him. Socrates uses the image of a chain of iron ringssuspended from a magnet. Each successive ring holds the next, and is held by theprevious one, not through any contribution of its own, but in virtue of the forceemanating from the original source. Similarly (Socrates claims) poet, performerand audience are simply carried away by the poetry of the Muses; it is in eachcase a passive process, and an irrational one, which none of them can thereforeexplain. What gives the simile much of its purchase is that Socrates and Ionagree that the experience, for performer and audience alike, depends on theemotions: the rhapsode feels sorrow and fear with and for the Homeric heroes,and is able to make his listeners do the same.43It is this tendency for poetry to speak to the emotions, or to the irrational partin us, which Plato seems to want to identify as the underlying cause of its faults.The chief evidence for this is in theRepublic. Socrates’ criticisms of poetry—along with the other parts of ‘music’, in the Greek sense44—in Books II–III haveto do with the capacity which it has for instilling beliefs and forming charactertraits,i.e. those dispositions to behaviour which are referred to under the headingsof the virtues and vices. The discussion is about the early education of futurephilosopher-rulers, and begins with the sorts of stories (muthoi,‘myths’) whichthey should be told. The chief purveyors of stories, which are by definition‘untrue’ or ‘false’(pseudeis),either because simply fictional or because actuallylying,are the poets, beginning with Homer and Hesiod, and many of theirproductions peddle seriously damaging ‘untruths’, particularly about the natureof the gods: that Kronos castrated his father Ouranos; that Zeus maltreatedhisfather Kronos; that the gods fight and quarrel with one another. Gods must berepresented to children as what they are, namely good, causes only of well-being(for our unhappiness, we are ourselves responsible), unchanging, telling only thetruth. Only so will our future rulers grow up with the right attitudes towards godsand others who require their respect. Poetic descriptions of Hades constituteanother category of untruth: to portray our fate after death as Homer does (and asPlato himself does, in his myths) is ‘neither true…nor beneficial for those whoare going to be good fighters’.45Descriptions of great men, and especially of gods,lamenting for the dead are also to be outlawed, on the grounds that if young peoplefail to laugh at them as they should, they’ll be more likely to break into tearsthemselves; excessive laughter is to go too (inIliadI, Homer has the godsbursting their sides with laughter as the lame Hephaestus bustles about: thatwon’t do). Truthfulness, self-control, endurance—these are the qualities ourpoets should, and even occasionally do, encourage.The last parts of Socrates’ treatment of ‘music’ in this context turn out to offera kind of bridge to his further, and crucial, defence of his position in Book X.The issue is first about how poets should address their audiences: throughnarrative, where the author speaks as it were for himself, or throughmimēsis,which here seems to mean something like ‘imaginative recreation’ (the poet, andthen the audience, take on the character being portrayed). The right mode,Socrates suggests, is combination of the two, but with a much greater proportionof straightforward narrative, because the only case wheremimēsiswill beacceptable is when the character involved is that of a good man, and onebehaving as a good man should, failing in a few minor respects.46Finally, achoice is made about the modes of music which the young should hear, whichturn out, unsurprisingly, to be the simpler ones, which contribute either towardsthe inculcation of warlike traits or towards a disciplined, harmonious, evenness ofmind.47Both of these sections are essentially about the way in which literature(‘music’ in the wide sense) reaches into our souls, which is what will form themain plank of the argument in Book X. The allegation is, and will be, that theeffects of poetry are insidious; that the poets, through the use of music and ofmimēsis,sneak past our reasoning selves undetected.48The rulers of a good citywill take advantage of this powerful instrument, and turn it to good. But this wouldinvolve a major reform of poetry. Existing poetry is powerful anddangerous.49This explains the space which is devoted to the criticism of literature in theRepublic,and specifically the way in which Socrates returns to it in the last partof this mammoth work: it is a subject of vital importance. Book X begins with adirect reference back to Books II–III: ‘we were absolutely correct in the way weproposed to found our city, and I say this not least with the subject of poetry inmind’ (595a). More precisely, Socrates means ‘our complete refusal to allow inall that part of it which is mimetic’. This is somewhat puzzling, since that was notwhat was proposed (some ‘mimetic’ elements were to be allowed), and it rapidlybecomes clear that the target is going to beallexisting poets. Thus a little later wefind him saying ‘So shall we lay it down that all poets [or “experts in the poeticart”,poiētikoi], beginning from Homer, aremimētaiof images of virtue and theother things they write about, and don’t grasp the truth?’50This sentence,however, suggests a solution to the puzzle: Socrates is now attacking poetsin sofar asthey are involved in ‘imaginative recreation’, but at the same time he istreating them as if that were the whole of poetry. The point that poetry could,ideally, contribute to the good life, or even sometimes actually does contribute toit, is now set aside, in favour of all-out attack. The attack in large takes its startfrom a negative reassessment of the whole idea ofmimēsis: it is not now a neutralprocess, taking its colour from what is represented (or represented), but is itselfsomething to be suspected and deplored. It is as if the stress had shifted from‘recreation’ to ‘imaginative’. At any rate, themimētai,the poets, deal inimages(eidōla),by which is clearly meant insubstantial and false images;51and theseimages, Socrates suggests, they present to one of the inferior elements in us.That this is the basis of his argument in Book X receives confirmation from thecontinuation of the opening exchange, referred to above. We were absolutelycorrect in refusing to allow poetry into the city; ‘and that we mustn’t allow it inseems to me even more evident now that we have divided the soul into itscategories’.52The complex argument that Socrates now mounts has the solepurpose of relating the effects of poetry to the lower part or parts of the soul, andmarking them as bad for that reason.53(The usual view is that there are severaldifferent arguments involved; but the signs are that Socrates himself regards it asone long argument including a number of subsidiary ones.) We begin from thequestion about whatmimēsisin general is. To find an answer to the question,Socrates takes the case of the painter, and contrasts his productions with those ofthe carpenter, and the Forms which (for the sake of the argument at least) aresupposed to be in the carpenter’s mind when he makes his bed or his table: theBed Itself, the Table Itself. These are said to be ‘in nature’, and if anyone madethem, it would have to be a god; by comparison with them, there is somethingcounterfeit even about the carpenter’s beds and tables, let alone those that thepainter reproduces in his paintings.54By Greek counting, this puts the painter’sproducts at third remove from the real thing, and the same will go for all other casesofmimēsis. Becausemimētai(now including the poet) are not dealing withreality, or how things really are, they must inevitably relate to how thingsappearto be. People say that in order to write well, poets must know the truth, but infact they do not. If they did, they would not be satisfied with recreating mereimages (mere surface views of things), but would prefer to try to recreate the realthing: thus if Homer really knew about medicine, he would have been a doctor,and if he knew anything about virtue, he would have been a lawgiver rather thana poet.55This is the route by which we reach the conclusion about ‘all poets’,that they are‘mimētaiof images of virtue’, without grasping the truth, for if theydo in any way represent good men in their poetry, saying and doing ‘virtuous’things, it cannot be because of their knowledge of virtue itself. But they have thetechniques which enable them to convince anyone else who is ignorant56 thatthey do know something.Then, after another piece of persuasive description57 to establish the poets’lack of knowledge, we reach the last stage of the argument. Ifmimēsisoperatesat third remove from the truth, Socrates asks, to which aspect of the human beingdoes it direct itself? Things may appear to have different shapes and sizes fromthe ones they really have (so, for example, a stick will appear bent if seenthrough water); in such cases, reason tells us one thing, which is contradicted byappearances. If we use the principle we used before, in the case of the soul, thatthe same thing cannot act or be acted upon in opposite ways at the same time,then it follows that the part58 of the soul which thinks things are other than theyreally are must be different from the one that ‘relies on measure and calculation’(603a), which is of course the best, reasoning or calculating, part; it musttherefore be one of the low-grade59 parts. So any sort of art concerned withmimēsis(so, again, poetry too) will be a low-grade sort of mistress, consortingwith the low-grade.There are some problems here: it looks as if we shall need some subrationalpart which is nevertheless capable of having beliefs (e.g. that ‘this stick is bent’),and neither the ‘spirited‘ nor the appetitive part, from descriptions of them inother contexts, looks particularly well suited for having this capacity. In that case,we shall need an extra ‘part’ of the soul, which is different both from the partthat is reasoning or calculating successfully, and from both of the other partswhich were argued for in Book IV. In the event, when he comes to the questionof which aspect of the mind60 is affected by poetry, Socrates at first avoidsidentifying it with either of these original two lower parts, and again simply talksabout something which is different from what is best, though it does also take onthe features of an individual: ‘as for the part which draws us towardsrecollections of our suffering and towards lamentations, and is insatiable for these—shan’t we say that it is unreasoning, and lazy, and fond of cowardice?’ (604d).Eventually, however, when he passes on to what he calls ‘the greatest charge’against poetry (that it can corrupt even the best), he comes clean: ‘And in relationto sex, too, and anger, and all those aspects of the soul which have to do with desireand pain and pleasure,61which we say accompany every action, it’s the case thatpoeticmimēsisworks similar effects [namely, carrying us away, so that weexperience violent feelings of the kind that in ordinary life, outside the theatre, weforcibly repress]; for it nourishes these by watering them, when they ought towither, and sets them in control of us when they themselves ought to be keptunder control’ (606d). We might fairly conclude that the problems which we sawaffecting the original division of soul into ‘parts’ are back with a vengeance.Even if we allow the general point that poetry appeals to our feelings andemotions, Plato’s own case—in Books II–III, but also as reinforced in the earlypart of Book X—is that it also instilsbeliefs;and in the sort of case which wouldparallel that of the straight stick which looks bent (while another part of usprotests, ever more faintly, that it’s straight), those beliefs will apparently have tobe attributed to the irrational, unreasoning parts.62But theTimaeus,for example,located the appetitive part in the belly: can the belly have beliefs?In the Greek context, that is not quite so absurd a suggestion as it might soundto us, for even Aristotle was prepared to take seriously the suggestion that theheart might be the organ of thought (and if Plato places reason in the head, it maybe for peculiar reasons).63But on the whole Plato does not seem to want to locatebeliefs in the ‘irrational’ parts; rather he prefers a model according to which ourreasoning part is distorted and perverted, ceases to reason clearly, and so beginsitself to harbour false notions. That, at any rate, appears to be what is entailed bythe idea of the domination of the individual soul by the lower parts—which isprecisely the idea which seems to re-emerge in the final stage of the argument(‘sets them in control of us’). In terms of this model, poetry would work on,encourage, and ‘water’ the irrational parts, so that they came to shake the beliefsheld by the reasoning part. In other words, it is not a case of contrarybeliefsatall,64except in so far as poetry, in addressing the emotions and encouraging theirexpression, can be said to teach something (‘that it is appropriate to give oneselfover to violent emotions’) which is contrary to what reason itself would teach.Whether that is, philosophically, a good position to adopt is another matter; whatis clear is that it is the one Socrates finally reaches.Plato’s most prominent targets are usually, as in theIon,the ‘tragic’, or‘serious’, poets,65with Homer in first place because of his dominant position inAthenian culture. (Socrates speaks—again inRepublicX—of the loving respectfor him that he has had since his childhood; even the greatest poet of all, andteacher, is not to be exempted.) But comedy gets its share of attention too; and ofcourse, Socrates specifically claimed to be talking inRepublicX about all poets,poets of all kinds. Paradoxically, comedy gets a warmer welcome than tragedy inthe the imaginary city of Magnesia constructed in theLaws. The tragedianswould come in and set up in the agora in competition with the lawgivers (in thisimaginary case, the philosophical participants in the conversation), using the finevoices of their actors to say about the same practices and institutions, ‘not thesame things as we do, but for the most part actually the opposite’ (Laws817a-c).They would be allowed in only if they could show that they were saying the rightthings. Comic playwrights, on the other hand, will be useful, even necessary, toprovide the citizens with an insight into the ridiculous. At first sight this allowsthe possibility of a distancing, an intellectual detachment on the part of theaudience from dramatic productions, which Plato rarely acknowledgeselsewhere.66His standard interpretation of audience reaction is exclusively interms of emotional involvement; and in fact theLawspassage is no exception.The question is abouthowcomedy would give us its insights. We get ananswer to this question from thePhilebus,in which Plato develops what may betermed a theory of the dramatic emotions. Socrates is involved in establishing theposssibility of pleasures which are mixed with pain, and finds one of his starexamples in tragedy: ‘Shall we not find [anger, fear, longing, sorrow, love, envy,spite67 and so on: i.e. the feelings in general] full of inexpressible pleasures?’ Soangeris undeniably pleasant, as is wailing and lamenting similarly whenaudiences watch tragedies, and ‘enjoy weeping’ (Philebus47e—49a). (It isbecause we enjoy them, of course, that such experiences have the capacity todraw us in.) With comedies too, Socrates goes on, our state of mind is the same:a combination of pleasure and pain. The feeling that comedy arouses in us is‘spite’(phthonos),68which along with other feelings has been agreed to be a‘pain of the soul’ (or, as we might put it, a ‘mental pain’: one which does nothave its source in the body). What we find comic or absurd is other peoplesuffering misfortune, and especially the misfortune of not knowing their ownlimitations. They can think they are richer than they are, or better physicalspecimens than they really are. But the commonest delusion they suffer is about‘the things of the soul’, especially wisdom. Now those in this last condition, ifthey are strong and powerful, are not objects of amusement at all, but dangerousand frightening, whether we encounter them in real life or in the theatre; it isonly if they are weak and unable to defend themselves that they are amusing. So,Socrates concludes, ‘our argument now indicates to us that in laments, intragedies and in comedies,69not only on the stage but in the whole tragedy andcomedy of life, pains are mixed in together with pleasures.’70By this point, it has become obvious that what he is talking about is not actualcomedy and comic audiences, but what comedy should be, and what its audiencecan and should get from it. By learning to laugh at the right things in the theatre,we will laugh at them, and avoid them, in life itself (and for Plato’s Socrates,nothing is more to be avoided than ignorance and the pretence of wisdom). We willlearn it through our feelings, by the same sort of process of habituation that thechildren of Callipolis in theRepubliclearned how to react to death and loss. Butthis will entail a new kind of comedy, which actually knows what is trulyridiculous. So also in theLaws: the comic play-wrights will have to change theiract as much as the tragedians would have to change theirs. But there is no needfor them, as there is for their comic counterparts, because a substitute isavailable: ‘weare ourselves poets, according to our ability,’ says the Athenianwho leads the conversation, ‘of the finest and best tragedy there is; so our wholeconstitution is established as amimēsisof the finest and best life, the very thingwe for our part say is genuinely a tragedy of the truest kind.’71No existing poet, then, whether tragic (or ‘serious’) or comic, knows the truthwhich his medium is potentially able to convey. This is one of the themes of theSymposium,in which Socrates meets, among others, two playwrights:Aristophanes, on the one hand, pre-eminent among writers of comedy, andAgathon, who has just won a victory with his tragedies (the occasion for thedinner-party). By the end of the proceedings, most of the company is asleep, butSocrates is still talking to the two poets, and ‘compelling them to agree that itbelongs to the same man to know how to write comedy and tragedy, and that theone who has the expertise to write tragedy will also be able to write comedy’(Symposium223c–d). He has to ‘compel’ them to agree (by means of argument,of course) because, by and large, tragedians of the day did not write comediesnor comic writers tragedies,72and Agathon and Aristophanes were certainlycases in point. What lies behind Socrates’ proposition is that anyone who knowsabout one member of a pair of opposites or contraries in a given sphere will knowabout the other. In just this way, he argues against Ion (in theIon) that if he is anexpert on Homer, best of poets, he ought to be equally expert on those whohandle the same things in an inferior way; good and bad poetry must be objects ofthe same knowledge. The implication is that neither Agathon nor Aristophanesreally knows his trade, and this has been demonstrated at length in the course ofthe dialogue, both through the juxtaposition of their speeches with Socrates’ (everyperson at the feast has to make a contribution on the subject oferōs) and, inAgathon’s case, through the demolition by Socrates of virtually everything hesays.73This represents a striking and paradoxical extension of the argument of theIonandRepublic. Socrates’ claim—and since it seems to be given special emphasis,it is a claim that Plato evidently wants us to take seriously—is not only that poetsare ignorant about the sorts of matters about which they pretend to teach, but thatthey do not even know aboutpoetry. In fact, this second point follows directlyfrom the first: existing poets are ignorant about poetry just because they areignorant about the things they ought to be teaching. Poetry, for Plato, cannotavoid its teaching role, because it is so powerful; it must therefore get things right(for there is only one way of being right, certainly in the most importantmatters), and if it does not, then it must be at best bowdlerized and at the worstrooted out and replaced with something more reliable. What that might be isdirectly indicated by the Athenian in theLaws,when he describes the accountthat he and his partners in the conversation have given of the constitution ofMagnesia as ‘the finest and best tragedy we can write’. TheSymposiumitselfwill be a mixture of tragedy and comedy: comedy, because it puts comic figureslike Aristophanes and Agathon on the stage,74and ‘tragic’ to the extent that,through its portrayal of Socrates (both as a character in the dialogue and as theobject of Alcibiades’ encomium) it is a ‘mimēsisof the finest and best life’,which theLawspassage declared to be the truest kind of tragedy.The consequence is that Plato himself is the true poet—not that he himself everclaims it, since he was not there to claim anything (he is mentioned only twice, withapparent casualness, in the whole corpus, and never appears as a character). Butthis in itself raises a familiar question. If poetry is such a bad thing, and he attacksit so regularly, why does he so regularly borrow (or appropriate) its methods?That he does so will be true even without the argument just derived from theSymposiumand theLaws,if it is an essential feature of poetry that it appeals tothe irrational in us,75since the dialogues themselves frequently combinereasoned argument with techniques which rely directly on an emotional responsefrom the reader (stories, persuasive descriptions, analogies, and so on).76Theanswer is straightforward enough: Plato uses such methods precisely because herecognizes their power, and because he is in business to persuade us. In any casehe repeatedly suggests that poetry itself might be useful. It is only becauseexisting poetry embraces ideals and teaches notions which are so different fromhis own that he must reject it (reluctantly, if he is anything like his Socrates). Inparticular, it portrays life in all its complexity and plurality, when—as he sees it—it should be describing the single, simple, best life.77In thePhaedrus,Plato formulates a theory of philosophical writing in terms of‘rhetoric’, the art of addressing audiences through the spoken and written word.In the ideal Platonic world, rhetoric too— normally the property of politiciansand others allegedly more interested in style than in substance—would bereformed and become the ally rather than the opponent of philosophy.78Theideal writer will be someone who knows about both his subject and the nature ofthe soul, who is able to ‘discover the form [of discourse] which fits each nature,and so arrange and order hislogos[i.e. what he speaks or writes], offering acomplex soul complexlogoicontaining all the modes, and simplelogoito a simplesoul’ (Phaedrus277b–c). The ‘simple’ soul here appears to be the one dominatedby reason, while the ‘complex’ or ‘variegated’ (poikilos,‘many-coloured’) soulfor its part recalls the democratic type of individual inRepublicVIII, in whom nosingle element or desire is in firm control; for the latter, Plato acknowledges thata purely rational mode of address will not be sufficient, and will need to besupplemented by other means. Playing on the emotions of one’s audience willcause nothing but trouble in the hands of the ignorant, whether he is an orator ora poet; for the knowledgeable writer and teacher, it is an indispensable tool if heis to address any but those already persuaded of the value of philosophy.A distinction of the sort in thePhaedruspassage, between the simple and the‘many-coloured’ is central to Plato’s thinking about literature and art in general.The simple, straightforward, and unmixed tends to be identified as good; thevaried, and especially what isinnovative,as bad. The most extreme statement ofsuch an idea is probably in thePhilebus,where Socrates is identifying ‘true’, i.e.pure and unmixed, pleasures. These are related to beautiful colours and shapes;they include ‘most pleasures of smell, and those of hearing’, all those caseswhere there is no antecedent or concomitant pain. He then explains what hemeans by a beautiful shape in this context. It is not what ‘the many’ would meanby it, pointing to a living creature or a painting, but rathersomething straight—so my account goes—and (something) round, andthen from these the planes and solids that are produced with lathes andwith rulers and squares. For these I say are not beautiful in relation tosomething, like other things,79but are always beautiful in themselves, andhave their own peculiar pleasures…and colours too which have thischaracteristic…(Philebus51c–d)Also included are smooth, clear sounds, which issue in some single pure tune;these too are beautiful ‘in themselves’. This simplicity is what delights therational mind, the mind of the Platonic mathematician; to it are opposed theintense and numerous pleasures of ‘the many’, the non-philosophical. Behind thewhole idea is perhaps the contrast between the uniqueness of truth, in thePlatonic view, and the multiple ways available for going wrong (we may think ofthe image inRepublicX, which represents reason as a man, the appetitive part asa many-headed beast). It follows, of course, that innovation must meandeviation; theLawsdeplores the decline in standards of literature and music atAthens, caused by too much attention to what the audience demands. But whatignorant people demand is no proper criterion of excellence in art of any kind.Art sinks deep into our souls;80if we are to live in an ordered society, peopled byordered souls, art must be controlled by the best element in us.81NOTES1 As will become clear, our word ‘mind’ and the Greek word traditionally translatedas ‘soul’(psuchē)are not synonymous. But they are closely related, and what Platosays aboutpsuchaior ‘souls’ will often have equal plausibility if applied to‘minds’; and both terms are in any case fairly elastic.2 There is certainly a gulf between the conception of ‘soul’ with which Socratesoperates in the ‘early’ dialogues at large and the ‘soul’ which, in the traditional,Homeric picture, flits off into the underworld at death. ‘Soul’, with Socrates, seemsgenerally to refer to human beings in their moral aspect: so, for example, he urgesus to ‘care for our souls’ by acquiring knowledge and virtue. A soul or ‘shade’ inthe Homeric underworld, by contrast, is merely a mindless, insubstantial image ofour physical selves.3 In a traditional context, the idea of animmortalsoul—one which continues to bealive, permanently, despite the intervention of death—has no place (see precedingnote); and the exchanges between the characters of theSymposium,for all theirintellectual and artistic pretensions, are firmly embedded in such a context: evenSocrates frames his decidedly radical ideas in (deceptively) familiar language.4 ‘Soul’ in this medical context covers the ‘mental’ aspects of the human organism,as opposed to those physical aspects which are more immediately accessible to thedoctor’s art. For the evidence from the doctors, see Claus [12.4]; and for another,but somewhat different, philosophical development of this contrast, see Vlastos [6.47].5 In Homer, the existence of the dead is famously unenviable; theOdysseyportraysthe once proud Achilles there in the underworld, openly declaring that he wouldrather be alive and a hired labourer than a king and dead. But there is also anequivalent to the Platonic philosopher’s heaven, in the shape of the Isles of theBlessed; quite what the criteria are for entry is unclear, though Menelaus qualifiesby having been the husband of a daughter of Zeus.6 For Plato, as for Socrates, virtue—or at any rate premium grade virtue— probablyalways remains conditional on philosophical knowledge.7 Mystery religions, such as the one associated with Eleusis in Attica, promised notso much immortality assomething,and something desirable, for the initiated afterdeath; but immortality, and an immortal soul, certainly played a role inPythagoreanism, along with other ideas like that of the soul’s transmigration, afterthe death of the original organism, into another body.8 Plato’s attitudes towards women are ambivalent: on the one hand, he has a lowopinion of women as they actually are, comparing them for their irrationality withslaves and children; on the other, he is prepared to admit that some women have thepotential to become philosophers, and there is some scattered, but good, evidencethat women attended the Academy.9 See especiallyTimaeus89d–90d.10 In some places, e.g. in the myth at the end of thePhaedo(114 c; see also 82 b–c),there are hints that exceptional souls may escape altogether. But it would be hard todistinguish between this kind of fate and becoming a god; and in general thedialogues seem to maintain a firm distinction between human and divine. One oftheloci classiciis atPhaedrus278d, where Socrates says that to his mind, the titlewise’(sophos)belongs only to gods, and the most to which human beings canaspire is to be called ‘lovers of/seekers for wisdom’, i.e. philosophers(philosophoi).That appears to be contradicted by theRepublic,which describes a citywhere philosophers have attained wisdom, and are thus qualified to rule; but thatshould probably count as part of the evidence for treating that central dialogueprimarily—in its political aspects—as a thought-experiment.11 Wisdom is ‘what we desire and say we are lovers of (Phaedo66e), where ‘lover’ iserastēs,the person who experienceserōsor sexual love for someone else.12 ThePhaedois subtitled ‘On Soul’, which is certainly of fairly late origin, but is areasonable indication of the main emphasis of the dialogue; at any rate, no otherPlatonic work has more to say directly about the subject.13 See especiallyPhaedo66b–68b.14 Thus at 68e–69d wisdom has value because of its role in the production of the(other) virtues; and in the myth at the end of the dialogue, the catalogue of therewards and punishments of the dead includes philosophers at one end and theworst criminals at the other.15 The idea of the body as the prison of the soul was evidently in origin Pythagorean;the negative view of life which it implies is certainly not maintained consistently inPlato’s dialogues. For him, the universe we know is not only the best of all possibleuniverses, but also, in so far as it can be described as the work of reason,good(astheTimaeustells us at length; cf. alsoPhaedo98b–99c), and it seems to follow thatlife within such a universe must have positive value.16 Although thePhaedodoes include talk of the desires etc. ‘of the body’, it isunlikely that we should take this at face value. Without soul to bring life to it, thebody is merely inert matter, and unable either to do or to feel anything.17 The issue arises specifically in relation to the third argument for immortality, theso-called ‘affinity’ argument: see Rowe [12.18] and [12.2], 189.18 In so far as that content would be memorable, in a Platonic world, it would betrue;but in that case it would not distinguish any one excellent soul from another.19 The chief difference will be that in the one case the soul can evidently lose itsirrationality altogether, while in the other it must permanently retain it— ifirrationality is part of its essence. Yet a soul which is both out of a body and hasbeen trained to separate itself from ‘bodily influences’ might perhaps be said tohave irrational elements onlypotentially,and then only if it is bound to bereincarnated. It might be partly this that Plato has in mind when in theTimaeushecalls the two lower parts ‘mortal’ (69e).20Republic498d suggests that arguments heard in a previous life might affect a soulin a subsequent one; and evidently, if what was a human soul passes into the bodyof a donkey, that must have something to do with what that soul had become in itsprevious occupation of a body (i.e. donkey-like). But neither that soul nor any otherwill have any evidence to connect it with the earlier human person; it cannot evenbe inferred that Ned (the donkey) was previously Fred (a man), since donkeys’souls may presumably also have previously animated donkeys.21 Elsewhere (Phaedrus249b–c) it looks as if Plato may envisage a partialrecollection of the Forms, which explains the formation of concepts presupposedby the ordinary, everyday use of language; but in thePhaedowhat is being talkedof is an experience which is evidently restricted to philosophers.22Phaedrus246dff. According to theMeno(86a), the soul is perpetually in a state ofhavinglearned the knowledge in question, which seems to imply that there never wasa point at which we actually acquired it.23 In theMeno,the theory of recollection is introduced to resolve the general questionabout how one can look for something one doesn’t know, or recognize it when onehas found it. It is evidently the vividness of the experience in question, togetherwith the way that what we remember allows things tomake sense,which issupposed to rule out the possibility of false memory.24 This expression should not be pressed too hard. The Forms, which are the objectsof knowledge for the soul, are apparently ‘outside’ time and space altogether;divine souls (gods), on the other hand, appear to be part of the natural universe(except in the case of the creator god of theTimaeus—but whether we are supposedto believe literally in his existence is unclear), which is where all discarnate soulsalso seem to be located; on death souls simply move to some less well-known, butnevertheless physical, location.25 An underlying assumption of theTimaeusis that if the world is as good as it can be,it cannot be any other way than it is, and will include all possible types ofcreatures.26 From this perspective, the description of these two parts as ‘mortal’ (see n. 19)looks natural enough, in so far as their presence is a consequence of the soul’sfunction in relation to the body, and the compound of soul and body is itselfmortal. They would be actually mortal if a soul finally and permanently escaped thebodily condition.27 The word issumphutos(246a).28 As Johansen points out to me, on the account in thePhaedoit is perhaps only thepresence of the irrational or the ‘bodily’ which prevents the full flowering of therational soul. But elsewhere, e.g. in theRepublic,the removal of (undue) irrationalinfluences is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of the acquisition ofwisdom; training is required, and even if this is translated into terms ofanamnēsis,it is not obviously just a matter of seeing off the irrational parts.29 This is the traditional, and unsatisfactory, English rendering of the Greekthumos,which is connected primarily with anger and indignation.30 For Plato, what is natural is not what is normally the case, but rather what shouldbe the case, even if it rarely or never is.31 Spirit, it seems, can and may listen to reason, like an animal adapted fordomestication, and yet speaks the same language as the appetitive part, pitchingemotion (especially shame, the reverse side of honour) against emotion. (Theappetitive part is summed up in the image of the many-headed beast inRepublicIX:even if it has some tame or domesticated heads, it cannot be reliably domesticatedas a whole, only restrained and cut back.) Yet reason too has its own desires (seelater in this section), and if so, it can apparently control the appetites directly, byopposing its own drives to them. In that case, it is not clear why it needs its alliancewith the spirited part, however appropriate the corresponding idea might be on thepolitical level; there reason, in the shape of the philosopher-rulers, will need apolice force, for fear of being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the lowestgroup in society.32 This analysis, in Books VIII and IX of theRepublic,may be compared with thesimpler one at the end of theStatesman,where the king or statesman’s chief role isidentified as the weaving together of the more aggressive and competitive type ofcitizen with the quieter and milder.33 249d-e. It is in this sort of context that the description of Plato asappropriatingother forms of discourse (see earlier in this section) seems particularly apt: thephilosopher does everything the ordinary lover does (251dff.), but for entirelydifferent reasons, and his experience is far more fulfilling than anything thatordinarily goes under the heading oferōsor sexual love.34 The description—in the main part of Socrates’ contribution to the banquet, which heputs in the mouth of the imaginary priestess Diotima—is couched in terms of aninitiation, and an initiate would no doubt have had an instructor. If we see the‘ascent of love’ as in part an allegory of a philosophical education, the guide willbe the master-dialectician (I owe this suggestion to Robin Hard).35 The reasoning part, by contrast, seems to be adaptable:itcan be corrupted, and bepressed into the service of either of the other two parts (cf.Republic587a). On thepossibility of a different model of the relationship between reason and theirrational, in theSymposium,see especially n. 37 below.36Republic485d; Socrates is here talking of the philosopher, and the way in whichhis preoccupation with ‘the pleasure of the soul’ will lead him to neglect ‘thosethrough the body’, i.e. those which reach the soul through the senses.37 It may be objected (and Penner in fact objected) that if Socrates does not introducethe topic of tripartition in theSymposium,we have no particular justification forintroducing it ourselves, apart from what we think we can derive from conclusionsabout the relative chronology of the dialogues (theSymposiumis normallyclassified as ‘middle’, along with thePhaedrusand theRepublic). If so, then wemight in principle try interpreting theSymposiumin terms of the (‘Socratic’)Lysis,which treats oferōswithout bringing in irrational desires: there are only beliefsabout what is good, together with a generalized desire for what is in fact good. Thisoption is attractive, particularly in so far as the lover’s advance in theSymposiumisdescribed in strikingly intellectual terms (there is at any rate little blind passion inevidence in the context). However, since an alternative explanation of this featureis available, namely in terms of the chosen metaphor of initiation, there isultimately no more justification for importing this model of the Platonic soul thanfor importing the other one. What theSymposiumoffers, through the figure ofSocrates, is above all a picture of how an individual’s concerns may be redirectedfrom (in Platonic terms) a lower to a higher level—a picture which is short onphilosophy but long on persuasion.38 ‘It is not easy…for what is put together out of many parts, and that not in the finestway, to be eternal’: so Socrates says, having offered another attempt at proof of theimmortality of the soul. He then makes his suggestion that the tripartite analysisapplies to the soul as it appears in this life, encumbered with a body and itsaccoutrements as the sea-god Glaucus is with barnacles and seaweed (611bff.).39 As Crombie points out ([10.36] 1:354), it is a necessary consequence of theargument ofRepublicIV that the parts are genuinely independent, since otherwisethe principle (that the same thing cannot act or be acted upon in opposite ways atthe same time) will be broken. But in that case there will be no such thing as aperson’s soul (in the singular), or even a person, or self. (In the next section, weshall discover a further problem with Plato’s use of the principle in question.)40 The clinching point is the low position of the poet in the grading of lives atPhaedrus248d–e (sixth, after e.g. the earthbound gymnastic trainer and doctor,only just before the craftsman and farmer, then the sophist and the demagogue, andfinally the tyrant). Lyric poetry, singled out in 245a, also figured earlier in thedialogue, at 235c, in the shape of the ‘beautiful’ Sappho and the ‘wise’ Anacreon,love-poets whom Socrates identified as possible sources for his own (inspired,poetic: 238c–d) praise of the non-lover. So much for his view of their ‘divineinspiration’.41 See e.g. Hesiod,Theogony22–8.42 The dialogue as a whole falls into three parts: (1) Socrates argues that Ion cannotperform or lecture on Homer through skill or understanding; (2) he must thereforebe able to do it by divine gift (i.e. by being inspired or maddened); then (3) whenIon protests that what he has to say about Homer is anything but crazy, Socratespresses him to say what knowledge it is that he has about his subject, and when hecannot identify this knowledge, he has to choose between either saying he is nogood at what he does, or that he does it in the way Socrates has suggested, i.e. byvirtue of a kind of madness.43Ion535d–e. There is a considerable degree of sleight of hand in Socrates’ handlingof Ion at this point. He first asks whether ‘we should call sane a person who,adorned in colourful dress and golden crowns, weeps at sacrifices and festivals,when he hasn’t lost any of these [namely, valuable possessions], or who is afraidwhen he’s standing among more than twenty thousand people who like him, and noone has stripped him or done him wrong?’ I suppose you must have a point, repliesIon. Socrates’ next move is then to suggest that performers like Ion ‘do the same’to the majority of their audience—which Ion understands to refer to his ability tomove them to emotion, while Socrates takes it as referring to his making themmad.44 I.e.mousikē,which is broadly that part of human culture which belongs to theMuses, though usually it covers poetry and music, with or without dance, all threeof which might be combined in performance (as for example in the theatre).45 386b-c. Given that Plato himself fails to follow the instructions he puts intoSocrates’ mouth, e.g. to ‘throw away all the horrible and frightening names, likeCocytus and Styx’ (deployed to magnificent effect e.g. in the eschatological mythof thePhaedo), there must be more than a suspicion that the second criterion ismore important than the first.46 Or, alternatively, on those few occasions when a bad character happens to bebehaving well. The asceticism of Socrates’ approach to literature is mitigatedslightly at this point (396d-e), when he is allowed to acknowledge that the listenermight adopt an unworthy persona ‘for the sake of amusement’. Occasionally, too,he hints at a feeling for the ‘poetic’ which is separate from the question aboutpoetic ‘truth’: so e.g. at 387b, when he is talking about descriptions of Hades(though the concession ‘not unpoetic’ is immediately taken away by ‘and pleasantfor the many,hoi polloi,to listen to’).47 These are, interestingly, the two sorts of character that reappear at the end of theStatesman(cf. n. 32), but as two sorts ofcharacter-types,needing to be reconciled.48 See especially 401c.49 In 400cff., Socrates broadens out the argument to make it apply to all craftsmen:they must not make ‘bad character, lack of self-control, meanness orunshapeliness’ part of their productions, whether these are paintings or buildings oranything else; we must look for those craftsman who are ‘able by their naturaldisposition to track down the nature of the beautiful and the well-formed’ (401a).Growing up among beautiful things will encourage conformity with the true beautyof wisdom. All of this hints at, without fully articulating, a kind of theory ofbeauty.50 600e. For the sense in which what the poets recreate are alreadyimages,seefollowing paragraph.51 They must be insubstantial and false because they are based on ignorance; poets goonly by superficial appearances, Plato suggests—and by offering images of images(see following paragraph).52 The word is againeidē,‘kinds of thing’.53 It is not that the lower parts are necessarily bad, of course (though the image of thehuman soul at ;88b might give one cause for doubt at least about the lowest part,which is represented as a many-headed monster with some tame heads). Rather it isthat the effect of poetry is so strong that it encourages the development of theirrational in us, which it is our business to keep in check.54 596e–597b. The Form of bed is somehowthebed (‘what [a] bed is’, which isrepresented asthe real thing: 597d), while the carpenter simply makesabed, which‘something of the same sort as’ the Form; the painter only ‘makes’ his bed ‘in acertain way’.55 Or again (600a), if he knew anything about generalship, he would have fought warsrather than writing about them. (That is, so Socrates implies, he would have been atruly expert general—or doctor, or lawgiver—who ‘looks to’ the relevant Forms,like the carpenter.) This is one of many clear echoes of theIonin this part ofRepublicX: what finally induces Ion’s capitulation is his inability to explain why he hasn’tactually been elected a general, if he knew about generalship (from Homer).56 I.e. the majority of mankind. Plato begins from the assumption that poetry appealsto a mass audience, not just to a few; Greek epic and drama are from hisperspective (and, on the evidence, in fact) parts of mass culture.57 The painter may paint a picture of something useful, like a bridle. Now in this sortof case, it is the person who actually uses the thing who really knows about it; thecraftsman who makes it just follows the instructions of the user, and so—asSocrates puts it—has merely ‘belief about what makes a good example of whateverit is in question (we should call it ‘second-hand knowledge’). The painter, for hispart, will be able to paint it without having either knowledge or ‘belief. Onceagain, the painter stands in for allmimētai,and what holds true of him is extendedto all the rest; so the poet too, in so far as he is amimētēs,will have a ‘charming(lack of) relationship to wisdom’, and his only criterion of success will be whatappeals to the many. (But we know from earlier parts of the dialogue—see e.g.590c–d—that the many are controlled by their appetites…)58 In fact, Socrates works throughout without once using the term ‘part’ (merosormorion). Perhaps he is already looking forward to 611aff., when he will expressdoubts about whether the soul, in its essential nature, can really possess ‘parts’ atall. But it may also suit his purpose not to identify too precisely the element in thesoul to which poetry is supposed to appeal; see following paragraph.59 This translation ofphaulosis borrowed from Waterfield [10.15].60 Literally, the Greek says ‘to this very (thing) of the mind(dianoia)with which themimetic (art) of poetry associates’ (603b-c), wheredianoiasuggests some kind ofrational or intellectual capacity.61 I.e. as the context shows, the ‘aspects of the soul’ (‘aspects’ is supplied, for theplain neuter plural of adjectives in the Greek) to do with lower desires andpleasures.62 ‘We said, didn’t we, that it was impossible to think(doxazein)opposite thingssimultaneously with the same (thing) simultaneously?’ ‘And we were correct to sayit.’ ‘Then what in the soul thinks contrary to the (actual) measurements [i.e. thething as measured by the reasoning part] will not be the same as what thinks inaccordance with them’ (602e–603a),63 Specifically, that reason moves in circles (or can be represented figuratively asdoing so, on the model of the motions of the heavens), and that the head is adaptedto containing circular movements in virtue of its roughly spherical shape; seeTimaeus34bff., 42eff.64 Even with the bent stick, it seems unnecessary to insist that the soul at any pointboth thinks that it is straight and thinks that it is bent; either it is confused (tarachē,602c), or one belief comes to replace the other. The capacity of the ‘best part’ tosee that the stick is straight, if only the ‘appearance‘ were absent, seems to betreated as itself an enduring belief in its straightness. This is intelligible, in so far asthe rational part is thought of as our essential selves.65 These are defined, in Plato, primarily by contrast with the comic poets, who deal inthe ridiculous or absurd (see following paragraph).66 AtRepublic396e, the concession that good citizens might sometimes impersonateinferior types ‘for the sake of amusement’ may refer to jesting in ordinary life ratherthan to the theatre. (For the idea that they mustrecognizeinferior or aberrantbehaviour, seeRepublic396a.)67 The term isphthonos,which normally means something like envy, jealousy, or thefeeling of someone who begrudges something; later in thePhilebusit will be usedspecifically to mean taking pleasure in other people’s misfortunes.68 See n. 67.69 ‘And in comedies’ is not in the transmitted text, but seems indispensable to thesense of the argument.70Philebus50b. Quite where the pain comes in is something of a puzzle; why shouldphthonosbe treated as a ‘pain of the soul’, rather than simply a pleasure?71Laws817b. The negative connotations of the termmimēsiswhich were present inRepublicX are clearly absent here.72 Cf.Republic394e: ‘the same people, I imagine, cannot even produce goodexamples ofmimēsisin those cases where the genres seem close to one another,such as when they write tragedy and comedy’. Tragedians certainly wrotesatyrplays, which have strong comic elements but were evidently still regarded as adistinct form.73 No such demolition of Aristophanes’ speech takes place, and many readers find hiswhimsical, moralizing tale so sympathetic that they look for a positive role for itwithin the argument of the dialogue. Its main point from Plato’s perspective,however, seems to be the way in which it stresses the incompleteness of merephysical union, while being unable to suggest anything to replace it. It is Socrates,of course, who fills the gap.74 According to the criterion suggested by thePhilebus,both are ridiculous orlaughable(geloios)in so far as they lay claim to a wisdom which they in fact lack.75 See earlier discussion ofRepublicX; cf. also 387b76 The use of dialogue form is itself another case in point; even where its dramaticpossibilities are not developed to any great extent, elements like the perceivedrelationship between the interlocutors help to shape our attitude to what is beingsaid, and make it more than a matter of the simple assessment of the strength andweakness of the arguments.77 See Gould [12.6].78 The new theory of writing in thePhaedruscannot of course be developed explicitlyin relation to Plato’s own writing, since from the perspective of the fiction itself itis a spoken and not a written context. But that the lessons taught do apply to thedialogues is assured by the generality of the terms in which they are framed.79 I.e. in this context, relative to some preceding lack or deprivation.80Republic401dff. (with reference to all forms of art, including ‘music’, painting,sculpture, embroidery and so on).81 I am grateful to Thomas Johansen for his comments on an earlier draft of the firstsection of this chapter, and to Terry Penner for his, on a second draft of the whole.Both helped to remove some errors and infelicites; neither may be supposed to becompletely content with the final version.BIBLIOGRAPHYEditions12.1 Dover, K.J.Plato, Symposium(Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics), Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1980. Greek text with introduction and commentary.12.2 Rowe, C.J.Plato, Phaedo(Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics), Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1993. Greek text with introduction and commentary.Studies12.3 Bremmer, J.The Ancient Greek Concept of the Soul,Princeton, NJ, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983.12.4 Claus, D.B.Toward the Soul: An Enquiry into the Meaning of before Plato,New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1981.12.5 Ferrari. G.R.F. ‘Plato and poetry’, in G.A.Kennedy (ed.)The Cambridge History ofLiterary Criticism,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989:92–148.12.6 Gould, J. ‘Plato and performance’, in A.Barker and M.Warner (eds)The Languageof the Cave(Apeiron25(4), 1992): 13–26.12.7 Griswold, C.L., Jr. (ed.)Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings,New York andLondon, Routledge, 1988.12.8 Keuls, E.C.Plato and Greek Painting,Leiden, Brill, 1978.12.9 Klagge, J.C. and Smith, N.D. (eds)Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues(Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophysuppl. vol.), 1992.12.10 Lovibond, S. ‘Plato’s theory of mind’, in S.Everson (ed.)Companions to AncientThought 2: Psychology(see [3.39]): 35–55.12.11 Moravcsik, J. and Temko, P. (eds)Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts,Totowa,NJ, Rowman and Littlefield, 1982.12.12 Murdoch, I.The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,Oxford,Clarendon Press, 1977.12.13 Murray, P. ‘Inspiration andmimesisin Plato’, in Barker and Warner (see [12.6]):27–46.12.14 Nussbaum [11.11].12.15 Penner, T. ‘Socrates on virtue and motivation’, in Lee, Mourelatos and Rorty (see[3.43]): 133–51.12.16 Price [11.14].12.17 Robinson, T.M.Plato’s Psychology,Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1970.12.18 Rowe, C.J. ‘L’argument par “affinité” dans lePhédon’,Revue Philosophique181(1991): 463–77.