From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 399
The Soul in Other Dialogues
One question which is likely to occur to any reader of the Phaedo is why, if the
soul’s true place is outside the body, it is ever incarnated in the first place, and
especially if everything in the world is for the best. An answer, which emerges
from the Phaedrus and the Timaeus, is just that the scheme of things demands
living things, and living things require souls to animate them. 25 In both
dialogues, these souls have three parts: one higher and rational, and two
irrational, respectively responsible for the higher and the lower emotions. In the
Timaeus, the story of the creation represents the first and immortal pan as being
created 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 the
requirements of bodily existence (to survive, we shall need, for example, an
impulse to assert and defend ourselves, and a desire to take in food and drink). 26
In the Phaedrus, the three parts are compared to a charioteer and his two horses,
one his natural ally, the other—the lusting, lecherous one—in permanent
opposition to him; but unlike normal chariot teams, this one, including the
charioteer, is a single whole, ‘grown together’. 27 Out of the body, the most
fortunate souls will be able to control their horses, and will join the gods, if only
temporarily, to feast on reality and truth; in it, they will struggle against the lusts
of the second horse to regain their memories of the feast.
This opposition between the highest and lowest parts is a fundamental feature
of the tripartite model of the soul. It expresses what the Phaedo describes in terms
of the opposition between soul and body, the ‘lower’ desires being precisely
those which are there treated as belonging to the body itself. Plato’s basic
position is in a way bipartite rather than tripartite; that is, in so far as he sees the
human soul as a battleground between the rational, on the one hand, and the
irrational or ‘bodily’ on the other. The rational part is as it were the ‘eye’ of the
soul, which will ‘see’ the truth, on two conditions: first, that it is itself fully
developed; and second, that it is not prevented from doing so by the irrational in
us. 28 This is the view which underlies the Phaedo, and it is also what we find in
the Laws. But elsewhere we find the more complex tripartite model, which
recognizes that some aspects of the irrational are not only necessary for our
survival, but can contribute positively towards the good life. By splitting the
irrational 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 while
still maintaining the sense of a basic opposition between rational and irrational.
However he also has independent grounds for this move. In Book IV of the
Republic, he has Socrates argue at considerable length for the existence of three
soul-parts. (In fact, Socrates introduces the term ‘part’ only with considerable
hesitation: at first he prefers eidos, ‘kind of thing’, ethos, ‘character-type’, or
plain ‘something’, as in, for example, triton ti, ‘a third something’ (435bff.). But
the Phaedrus and the Timaeus show no such reluctance, and the Timaeus actually
locates the three parts in separate parts of the body.) Socrates has argued that the