Search Results

The chapter takes up the argument for the tripartition of the soul in Republic and the consequent deepening of the account of personhood. An embodied tripartite soul is a disunited person or self. Selfhood for the embodied person is chronically episodic and plastic. Self-transformation can now be articulated in terms of the unifying of the person into one part, the rational faculty. With tripartitioning, Plato deals more perspicuously with the relation of person to human being and body. The embodied person is an entity capable of self-reflexively identifying itself as the subject of one or another of its psychic capacities. The successful embodied person strives for and ultimately achieves a permanent identification with a subject of rational activity.

Posidonius wanted the Stoics to return from Chrysippus' intellectualism to Plato's tripartite soul, which he re-described as consisting of three capacities, not just Chrysippus' reason, but also two emotional capacities: one concerned with domination and one with appetite. Typically, emotions do involve Chrysippus' judgements, but not always. They do not consist of judgements alone, so the education of emotions cannot be purely rational. The movements of the emotional capacities depend on physiology, and respond rather to music, gymnastics, and imagery. The previous Stoic neglect of emotional capacities leaves too much human psychology unexplained to provide an adequate ethic. The credibility of Galen as the source for Posidonius is defended.

In Republic 4, the soul is divided into appetite, spirit, and reason. This chapter discusses the nature of these parts and their relation to soul and person. Reason alone, it argues, is a person. The other parts are more like parasites on reason that alter its functioning and goals, while at the same time helping it, when properly educated and ruled, to deal with the problems of embodiment.

This chapter continues the discussion about the relationship between aesthetics and desire, focusing exclusively on Plato’s Republic. Starting with the tenth book of the Republic, the chapter moves gradually backward, its final destination being a section of the third book that so far remains underexplored. Socrates’s explicit and implicit references to the encounter with poetry as being analogous to an affair with a hetaira are explored within a broader context, both Platonic and cultural. More light is shed on Plato’s views on desire in relation to the way mousikê affects the three parts of the soul throughout the Republic. The final section examines in detail the last part of Plato’s discussion about mousikê in the third book. The chapter concludes with a suggestion regarding the great importance of this discussion for understanding Plato’s meditation upon the tension between desire and aesthetic contemplation.

This chapter discusses the way thumos (spirit), the intermediary function of the tripartite soul, and the kind of desire traditionally associated with it, philotimia (love of honour), is central in the platonic conception of love. As an emotive centre of the experienced love, closely linked with the sense of honour and shame, thumos is depicted by Plato both as a as a dangerous challenge for philosophical love, but also as an opportunity to use the energy expended by philotimia in order to serve philosophical goals. Despite a violent critique of philotimia both in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato nevertheless leaves open a way of using thumos' force in giving it a proper object of value.

Garrett Sullivan explores connections between Spenser’s Fairie Queene and Gothic readings of Acrasia as vampire, arguing that ‘readings of Spenser’s text that centre on psychic processes such as projection, or denial, or abjection find substantiation in the tripartite soul’, as ‘the tripartite soul introduces into the conception of human vitality a vocabulary for depicting and exploring the nature of self-division’. Thus, while respecting historical differences, ‘the tripartite soul enables the Gothic to recognize itself in Spenser’.