GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

52 ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE GREEKS
honest man mean? For, if he has both the virtue and the
vice, he is at the same tiine both knowing and not knowing
the same Good.
Wholes and Parts. This last criticism suggests a fundamental
defect in Socrates'* view. Socrates treats the soul
ofman as if it were one throughout and was wholly present,
as it were, in each of its activities. It is with the whole
soul that we conceive or misconceive the Good; it is with
the whole soul that we desire it, or desire the false semblance
of it that we have mistaken for. it. But how if the soul
be more than one? For why, after all, should it not possess
"parts", one "part" only, and not the whole soul, being
responsible for the conduct upon which its possessor
embarks at any given moment.
It is in the affirmation that the soul does in fact have
" parts " that Plato's advance upon Socrates's psychological
and ethical theory chiefly consists. I have spoken of "parts ",
because this word i* habitually used as a translation of
the expression which Plato employs when he is speaking
of the soul. Yet it is an exceedingly unsatisfactory word,
suggesting to a modern reader that the soul is made up
of "parts" in precisely the same way as that in which
a machine or a jig-saw puzzle is made up of "parts".
Now a machine or jig-saw puzzle is merely the arithmetical
sum-total of its "parts ", a characteristic which the machine
or the puzzle shares with all physical things. If a physical
the laws of
thing were not simply the sum of its "parts",
dynamics and mechanics would not apply to it. Its constitution
would also outrage the laws of arithmetic. Nevertheless,
there are some wholes, notably aesthetic wholes
and psychological wholes, to which the laws of arithmetic
do
troversial
not
one
in fact apply. The subject is a con-
and I cannot embark upon a detailed
discussion of it here, since it belongs to the metaphysical
rather than to the ethical side of philosophy, and is treated
at length in my Guide to Philosophy. 1 It is enough here to
*See Giddt to Philosophy, Chapter XV, pp. 415*21.