From the Beginning to Plato

400 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
virtues of wisdom, courage, self-control and justice are attributable to a
community or city in virtue of the qualities of, and relationships between, the
groups who perform, respectively, the functions of rulers, soldiers, and
producers; now he raises the question—since the ultimate aim in the context is to
define the virtues (and especially justice) in the individual— whether the
individual person has ‘these same kinds of thing in his soul’, so that the results
on the larger scale can be carried over on to the smaller. Using the basic principle
that ‘the same thing will not be disposed to do or have done to it opposite things
in the same respect and in relation to the same thing at the same time’ (436b), he
establishes to the satisfaction of his immediate audience, first, that we need to
distinguish 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 to
resist a particular object of desire, e.g. this drink now, for a reason (it is
contaminated, or poisonous); and second that we must equally separate ‘spirit’ 29
or the ‘spirited part‘ from both of the other two. This part is naturally or ideally 30
the ally of reason, and never sides with the desiring part against reason, although
we discover later that it may itself oppose reason.
The individual will possess justice and the other virtues when each of these
three parts is performing its proper function, in harmony with the others. This
means, above all, that both of the two lower parts are properly under the control
of reason. If they are, then he will have only the right physical desires, and in the
right measure, policed by the ‘spirited’ part; 31 if not, then either of the lower
parts may dominate and distort the reasoning part and its judgements. This gives
Plato a kind of theory of imperfect types, which offers a further explanation of the
division of soul into three parts. The person who is dominated by the love of
profit, on Plato’s account, is ‘oligarchic’ man (oligarchic states being those run
for the material benefit of the rulers); ‘democratic’ man is ruled by different sorts
of desire in succession, and none in particular; and ‘tyrannical’ man, the tyrant
himself, is controlled by a single, all-consuming master-lust. But there is also the
person dominated by the love of honour, and the desire for self-assertion: the one
Plato calls the ‘timocratic’ individual, the warrior of the Iliad, or the ambitious
politician who is his counterpart in the democratic city-state. 32
This picture of human nature as it should be, with reason ruling over unreason,
may seem to be disturbed by some aspects of the Pbaedrus, and in particular by
Socrates’ apparent readiness, in his central speech, to treat the philosopher as
mad (244aff.). The beginning of the process of recollection of the Forms is
described in terms of an encounter between lover and beloved: the beauty of a
particular individual stirs the memory in the lover of Beauty Itself, and he is
driven out of his wits by it, behaving in all the usual ways that lovers do— except
that he manages to curb his lusts (in the shape of the black horse). The eventual
outcome is a common life of philosophy, in which both older and younger partner
recognize the real source of their original passion. Thus, paradoxically, a life of
reason has its source in the opposite state, a kind of god-given madness which
Socrates compares to that of the seer and prophet, of the religious initiate, and of