From the Beginning to Plato

414 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
27 The word is sumphutos (246a).
28 As Johansen points out to me, on the account in the Phaedo it is perhaps only the
presence of the irrational or the ‘bodily’ which prevents the full flowering of the
rational soul. But elsewhere, e.g. in the Republic, the removal of (undue) irrational
influences is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of the acquisition of
wisdom; training is required, and even if this is translated into terms of anamnēsis,
it is not obviously just a matter of seeing off the irrational parts.
29 This is the traditional, and unsatisfactory, English rendering of the Greek thumos,
which is connected primarily with anger and indignation.
30 For Plato, what is natural is not what is normally the case, but rather what should
be the case, even if it rarely or never is.
31 Spirit, it seems, can and may listen to reason, like an animal adapted for
domestication, and yet speaks the same language as the appetitive part, pitching
emotion (especially shame, the reverse side of honour) against emotion. (The
appetitive part is summed up in the image of the many-headed beast in Republic IX:
even if it has some tame or domesticated heads, it cannot be reliably domesticated
as a whole, only restrained and cut back.) Yet reason too has its own desires (see
later in this section), and if so, it can apparently control the appetites directly, by
opposing its own drives to them. In that case, it is not clear why it needs its alliance
with the spirited part, however appropriate the corresponding idea might be on the
political level; there reason, in the shape of the philosopher-rulers, will need a
police force, for fear of being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the lowest
group in society.
32 This analysis, in Books VIII and IX of the Republic, may be compared with the
simpler one at the end of the Statesman, where the king or statesman’s chief role is
identified as the weaving together of the more aggressive and competitive type of
citizen with the quieter and milder.
33 249d-e. It is in this sort of context that the description of Plato as appropriating
other forms of discourse (see earlier in this section) seems particularly apt: the
philosopher does everything the ordinary lover does (251dff.), but for entirely
different reasons, and his experience is far more fulfilling than anything that
ordinarily goes under the heading of erōs or sexual love.
34 The description—in the main part of Socrates’ contribution to the banquet, which he
puts in the mouth of the imaginary priestess Diotima—is couched in terms of an
initiation, 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 will
be the master-dialectician (I owe this suggestion to Robin Hard).
35 The reasoning part, by contrast, seems to be adaptable: it can be corrupted, and be
pressed into the service of either of the other two parts (cf. Republic 587a). On the
possibility of a different model of the relationship between reason and the
irrational, in the Symposium, see especially n. 37 below.
36 Republic 485d; Socrates is here talking of the philosopher, and the way in which
his preoccupation with ‘the pleasure of the soul’ will lead him to neglect ‘those
through 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 introduce
the topic of tripartition in the Symposium, we have no particular justification for
introducing it ourselves, apart from what we think we can derive from conclusions
about the relative chronology of the dialogues (the Symposium is normally