2. Plato: An Ordered soul

Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
George: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I... I sit... and yearn. Have you yearned?
George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving... but I haven't yearned.

People often compare Plato and Aristotle, and usually favour one and reject the other. They certainly do represent different visions of life. Aristotle guides us to to cultivate a life that warrants congratulations. It is the happy, successful life. By contrast, Plato guides us to to cultivate a life that warrants praise. It is a life that embodies the highest values. It is a truly meaningful life. 

I suggest that we pursue both paths. Furthermore, they are complementary paths.

Truth, Goodness, Beauty

Plato developed an understanding of human nature which is based on what human beings most long for. There is meaning to life, and we can know it. It is revealed not by speculative theorising or by material science, but by paying attention to our deeper longing. That is why I quoted Seinfeld above; what do we truly yearn for? That becomes the basis of philosophy. The Platonic philosopher Simone Weil offered an answer: “All human beings [...] can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.” You are a creature who thirsts for the true, the good, the just, the beautiful, and your life is better or worse depending on your relationship with, and embodiment of, those qualities. ​

This is why we love the people and things that we love: because they are bearers of all those qualities which make life wonderful and worthwhile. We love our wife because she is kind, good, loving, beautiful, faithful and so on. She is not goodness in itself, the source of goodness, but she embodies those qualities, albeit in a limited way. She participates in them. She enacts them. If she did not embody them then we would not have fallen in love with her. If she loses those virtues, or worse, if she becomes their opposite, we might fall out of love with her, or feel compelled to leave her.

​We often focus on the things that we love, without realising that it is these higher qualities that we truly love in them. We love the things of the world because those things are embodiments or manifestations of goodness, beauty and so on, in particular, limited forms.

This leads us to a question: how do I come to embody truth, goodness, justice and so forth? How do I live that kind of life, with all that is strengthening and deeply satisfying about it? How do I become a man of such deep character? How do I become a source of these things for others in the world?
​
A master psychologist

Those questions are vital. And yet, this essay is short, so let us step down a level. For to become such a man requires becoming a man of good character more generally. This means cultivating an ordered soul, or psyche. By soul or psyche I mean "the dynamic life force" that we are: a living, conscious being whose forces can be integrated, ordered toward the good, or can be disordered, and easily harmful. In reality we are all a bit of both.

We use the word psyche today in English words such as psychology (psyche-logos, the study of the psyche) and psychotherapy (therapy for the psyche) though the modern meaning is more narrow and mechanistic.

Plato was a master psychologist. He mapped out the parts of our psyche which, when ordered well, enable a good life, and which when disordered lead to a bad life. By "good life" in this context I mean a way of living wherein you are more fully conscious, aware, wise (the level of intellect), and in control of yourself (the level of will), and so you are also ordered and balanced and directed within yourself (the emotional and behavioural virtues), and so capable of pursuing and achieving and embodying the things that are good and that matter. Those things which matter include, as I said above, Aristotle's goal of flourishing, and also Socrates' and Plato's higher vision of life in terms of goodness, justice, and so on. By  "bad" in this context, I mean a life wherein you are obstructed, or even torn apart, by forces within you which send you down.

Philosophy now becomes, not only the activity of Socratic reasoning, but also the generation of a map for understanding ourselves and for creating a good life.

The Map of the Soul: A City, a Chariot, and a Man

The psychology Plato offers centres on three distinct parts of the soul or psyche.

Plato uses analogies to help us understand these three parts of ourselves. For example, he imagines a political system in which we have (1) the wise rulers, and (2) the guardian or warrior class, and (3) the producer and merchant class. Those three classes correspond to the three parts of the soul.

In another analogy which makes the same point, Plato imagines a man riding a chariot pulled by two horses, one white and one black. The charioteer is reason, the guiding element, while, as above, the white horse represents spiritedness and the black horse represents desire.

These two images help us to think about both the dynamics of our self or soul, and of what health of the soul looks like, and of how it all becomes disordered. For example, if the rulers of the city ignore the warrior or producer class, or if one of those other classes decides to usurp power, there will be disorder, war, and destruction. Likewise, the charioteer (reason) can go nowhere without the two horses, but if one of those horses decides to rebel or pull away after some narrow desire, the chariot will crash. When all three work in harmony, the chariot is capable of reaching the life and the things we most long for.

To lay these three elements of the soul out, we have:
​
Reason (corresponding to the ruler, and the charioteer): the capacity for reason and wisdom.

Spiritedness (corresponding to the warrior class, and the white horse): courage, honour.

Appetite (corresponding to the producers, and the black horse): the desire for pleasure, comfort, and creation, and the need for self-control.

Reason needs spiritedness and appetite to be in the world, to do anything in the world. However, if spiritedness or appetite takes over, it will be like civil war or a crashed chariot: a failed or damaged life for a man.

Imagine that your head dominates, leaving your chest diminished. Like Hamlet, you think and think, you analyse or ruminate, without ever exercising the courage to act.

Or perhaps your chest overpowers your reason, leading to callousness, aggressive stupidity, or egotism.

Or perhaps your appetites rule, reducing your life to laziness, indulgence, addiction...the life of an animal, not of a man. In each of these examples, things are out of balance. The whole is enslaved to the part.

This produces a state which is wonderfully captured in Christian scripture: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do." 2000 years later this state is familiar to all of us, in one way or another.

The Virtues: The Excellence of a Well-Ordered Soul

A good life is one in which reason guides, spiritedness exercises the assertive virtues (honour and enterprise), and appetite is enjoyed but in an ordered way (self-control), all parts working together for the flourishing of the whole. The ancient Greek word for such good functioning is arete, which means excellence, though we often use the Roman translation: virtue. (Virtue, or virtus, is a Latin word for manliness or the qualities of a true man--which inlcudecourage, moral character, competence.) 

Our head, our chest, and our belly need to be cultivated into an excellent or virtuous state, which is to say, according to the qualities of a true man, and we need also an excellent balance between the three.

Plato sets out four arete / excellences / virtues, which have become fundamental to the classical tradition. They are called "the cardinal virtues". They are on the banner of the homepage of this website, for they are fundamental to the work you and I will do. Each corrspesponds to one of the three three parts of the soul; it is that part's excellent state. The fourth virtue regards the balance between all three. The cardinal virtues are: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

1. Wisdom
This is the virtue of reason, enabling you to discern the true and the good in every circumstance, and to choose the right means of achieving it.

Within Plato's framework, wisdom is the perfection of the rational part of the soul—the ruler, the charioteer. Its role is to see reality clearly, to govern the other parts wisely, and to guide the entire person toward the good. This wisdom is not just cleverness; it is the capacity of reason to align itself--and so us--with reality. You will read more about reason on this blog.

2. Courage
This virtue is the proper excellence of the spirited part of the soul—the warrior class, the noble white horse, the chest. Courage here is our translation of the ancient Greek word andreia, which means courage, bravery, fortitude, manliness, honour, spiritedness.

A man who fails in this virtue will do so through a deficiency or excess. Deficiency means there is too little of this quality in him: he is cowardly, morally weak, ignoble, dishonourable, pusillanimous. Excess means that he goes too far: he is rash, reckless, over-aggressive, egostistical, and so on.

The classical insight is that reason, like the skill of a good archer, guides a man to hit the target, the balance between excess and deficiency. Consider if you have ever felt mocked in a social situation. On the one hand you are trying not to submit or be cowardly, but on the other hand if you respond to strongly that is ridiculous too, and reinforces the mocking.

C. S. Lewis used the metaphor of the head, the chest, and the belly to capture what Plato describes. A well ordered man is one who has the right order between his head, chest, and belly. Criticising the emerging post-war culture (in which we have now lived for 80 years) Lewis writes in his 1943 book The Abolition of Man that "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

I think of andreia as the assertive force in us. It is the force of honour and enterprise.

3. Temperance
Temperance is the virtue of moderation and self-control, which brings our desires and appetites under the rule of reason. It is the proper ordering of the appetitive part of the soul—the dark, unruly horse.

Temperance is one translation for the ancient Greek word sophrosyne. Other English words which capture its meaning include self-control, moderation (as in, a moderator), self-possession, and self-mastery. 

Self-mastery does not seek to obliterate our base desires but to discipline and moderate them, ensuring they are satisfied in the right way, at the right time, and to the right degree.

The result is a life that includes pleasure, but a life also of honour (andreia), a life of excellence (arete, virtue). It is a life ruled by higher things than the belly, penis, or ego. Our post-war, and especially post-1960s, culture is schizophrenic (split-minded) about this virtue: we expect it of men, but equally we mock it. If we mock or neglect it, we become slaves to the lower forces in us. We become owned by Gluttony (excess in eating and drinking), or Lust (excess in sexual desire), or Greed / Avarice (excess in the desire for material possessions and wealth), or Anger / Wrath (the absence of emotional self-control) or Hubris (arrogance, especially toward others). We become Commodus in the 2001 film Gladiator, as opposed to the hero Maximus whose virtues (courage and temperance) are both excellent, and in an excellent state of balance, which creates a potent force; or Gollum in Lord of the Rings, as opposed to the hero and king Aragon. 

A self-possessed individual's way of being is characterised by harmony and agreement: the appetites are ordered according to reason, finding their fulfillment within the bounds of the good for the whole.

When we speak of temperance, we tend to focus on the excess and tyranny of the apetites, because that it more common, and more destructive. But there is an opposite problem, a deficiency of appetite which we call insensibility or apathy. This is a person who cannot enjoy our human appetites, who becomes a bore or a scolding puritan (today's woke types often represent this--a hatred of natural life). Pleasure and satisfaction are a deeply good part of the good life. The issue is one of balance: they should not overwhelm us and destroy our good life. Indeed, like the example of the good wife above, pleasure is an embodiment of goodness and beauty. Plato explores this in his book Symposium: how there is a heirarchy of beauty, with appetite-pleasure at the bottom, not in the sense that it is bad, but in the sense that it is the most base form of beauty, but it is a form of beauty nonetheless. Just as we love the good and the beautiful as it is partially embodied in our wife, at a lower level we love the good and the beautiful as it is partially embodied in sense desires and pleasures.

I said above that "I think of andreia (courage) as the assertive force in us. It is the force of honour and enterprise." I think of sophrosyne (temperance) as a force that balances courage, honour, and enterprise, the sense that it is self-control, whereby we pull back, reign ourselves in, think before we speak. Courage and temperance therefore constitute a Ying Yang balance in our lives. Some men are typically deficient in andreia, and others in sophrosyne, and both deficiencies are equally a problem. A good life is one where both are vigorous, but balance each other in a dynamic tension. If you do not tension the guitar string, you do not get the good and right sound. If you tension it too much, the sound is bad, and then it snaps. This leads us to the fourth virtue: justice, the virtue of balance in the soul.

4. Justice
Justice is the virtue by which every part of the soul performs its own proper function without undermining the others. For Plato, justice is not merely a social virtue, but the internal state of a person whose soul is in proper order.

​In a just soul, the rational part rules wisely, the spirited part pursues or defends courageously, and the appetitive part obeys temperately. Or to put it slighty differently, wisdom sees and guides; courage is the assertive aspect of the self; temperance is the restraining aspect of the self. 

Justice orders everything into its proper balance. An English saying from the height of the Empire captured this tripartite balance perfectly: he is "a scholar, a soldier, and a gentleman." That is a well-ordered, and an excellent, state of character.

Conclusion

This is a very brief look at Plato, focused on one big idea of his which can help us think about our problems and about virtue.

Man is a combination of head, chest, and belly. When each of those is at its best, and all is balanced (just), this man is wise, courageous, and self-controlled. This enables him to deal with problems, to make life better, and to pursue a genuinely good life.

When the opposite is true, when the man embodies foolishness and vice, he lacks wisdom, or the virtues that make life good. He is also disordered: he is at war with himself, or his life is driven downwards through aggression and ego, or slavery to his appetites.

In the next post, we will turn to Plato's student, Aristotle, who provides the practical concepts and tools to actually do the work of cultivating these virtues and building this well-ordered soul.