A Soul in Parts
Too stressed out, or bored. Too aggressive, or too afraid to stand up for yourself. Too unfocused, or overly fixated on one tiny detail. Too unorganized, or too inflexible to deal with change. Racing around to please everyone, or withdrawing into the self, unwilling to risk trusting another. I’ve been all these at times, and still am to degrees; I doubt I’m alone, though it’s not something I’m proud of. Around the New Year is often a time to reflect on such things. I am thinking about how to address these things constructively via ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato.
I am not a Platonist, and the reasons why might fill a book. There are lots of beliefs and practices from ancient Athens that hardly seem worthy of aspiring to, like their sexism and militarism, and a few that are downright repugnant, like slavery and pederasty. However, these alone are not good reasons to reject Plato, and as nuanced thinking becomes harder to come by (more on that here), thinking about the soul in three parts, as Plato did, may be even more useful. Plato believed in an immortal soul, separate from the body, which existed before the body and will exist after it’s gone. Whether you or I literally believe all of that, some of that, or none of that is not important here (don’t believe in a soul? Think of it as a metaphor). That soul had three aspects: logos, or the part that seeks truth, thymos (pronounced “thoo-mos”) that is the “spirit” which moves us to passion, and eros, or bodily appetites.
Plato wanted us to direct our attention toward logos, which meant keeping the other two parts of our soul in line. There was this trend in classical civilization to distrust the body, as noted in Pierre Hadot’s work on Plotinus, but this also reflects Plato’s belief that an ideal society would be governed by a philosopher-king elite, symbolized by logos. Setting aside how transparently self-serving it is to argue that the ideal society would be ruled by “people like me” (Nietzsche criticizes virtue and other such ideas in Twilight of the Idols—I wrote about Nietzsche here), working to be more reasonable, and wanting to live among others who are also more reasonable, seems…well…reasonable to me.
Becoming more reasonable presumably means reading more books by people like Plato, separating out the “bad” ideas, and then applying what’s left to real life. It also means weighing ideas, evidence, and arguments on some meaningful, non-self-serving standard (i.e. not believing things just because they feel good, support your prejudices, or because a search engine algorithm or partisan talking-head told you to). Reading isn’t the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to develop this sense: Plato’s work is written as dialogues based on the dialogues of Socrates, who asked questions to point people to the unexamined assumptions that underpinned their knowledge. Talking and writing about ideas in good faith is at least as important as reading lots of stuff from diverse thinkers with diverse viewpoints.
Do most people do this? If not, why not? Enter thymos, the spirit, out of which the political theorist Francis Fukuyama argued we get a “struggle for recognition” (he argued that this was what ultimately drove human beings). This is the part of us that wants to make its mark on the world (closer to what Nietzsche actually means by “will to power,” not the ideological distortions of later revisionism), and it may be the most consistently visible part of us. With the militancy of the city-state political world of Greece, Plato saw this in a warrior class who would defend the ideal body politic and its interests (ideally, serving logos and using force reasonably, of course). Serving in the military would be one way to develop thymos, but it’s hardly the only one (discussions about peace and war aside for now). When was the last time you spoke in public, to an audience? Attended a protest or political event? Performed music or theater? Volunteered in the community?
My preferred thymotic exercise has been music. It’s uniquely cathartic for me. Writing can be thymotic, but years pass between when you write something, when it goes to print, and when people start talking about it. Teaching is quite rewarding, but not as directly thymotic as you’d think—there is this absurd misconception (especially strong right now) that teachers command some outsized power over students in a classroom. In reality, we couldn’t “indoctrinate” anyone if we tried—it is hard enough to keep up with paperwork and make sure assignments get turned in on time. Thymos, as I see it, is about living meaningful life.
Finally, there’s eros, the appetites. In intellectual elitist form, Plato defines this as the biggest group or category of people in his ideal society, who just work and breed and do what they’re told. In his anti-democratic static ideal society (read Karl Popper’s criticism in “The Open Society and Its Enemies, Book I”), Plato wants these folks kept in line, just like he wants our bodily appetites in constant check. But does suppressing our appetites make them go away, or does it cause guilt, compulsion, and even more unhealthy behaviors? Obviously, many appetites must often be restrained because we live in a society, and as freeing as it might be to think and act like children who do not need to control impulses or take responsibility for words or deeds, if everyone did this for any length of time, we would destroy ourselves.
I think of appetites in terms of habit, developing good ones and curbing bad ones. I don’t think of bodies as bad or appetites as necessarily destructive—in fact, just the opposite, as I’ll get to in a moment. This is more Aristotle than Plato, but is an idea shared by many thinkers (including the pragmatists, whom I talked about here) and one that seems to better align with modern neurobiological approaches to human feeling (I’m reading a fascinating book by Antonio Damasio right now on this topic). Bodies need training and appetites need discipline to be expressed at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right amount (another Aristotelian ethical view). This can’t be defined in advance and aped robotically, but must be practiced, worked toward, over time, and sensitive to the context.
I like to work out—lifting weights, cardio, and a good long walk outside—on a regular basis. For me this has strengthened my will, it is fulfilling (it feels good to see the change), and it keeps me “in touch with” my body a lot better (I know how I can move, how I cannot move, and how I should like to move better). I say this not as some moral or physical exemplar—far from it. I have been working to lose weight, and my body tends to be awkward and inflexible. I struggle with anxiety and bouts of melancholy. I drink too much coffee and too much beer, and often crave the wrong foods at the wrong time and in the wrong amounts. I have numerous old injuries including bad posture caused by long-standing back problems, as well as the aches of busted knuckles and sprained joints from a lifetime of…well…living. I am writing this for myself as much as for any who read it, to remind myself when I struggle or lose ground on one or all fronts that these are integral parts of living a good life. I am writing this knowing there is no magic formula for the good life, and that bodies, minds, and spirits—souls, if you like—are all different.
I think Plato was wrong about his three-part soul in terms of focus, as I think his ideal society was fundamentally flawed. Bodies make the rest possible. A body that is ruined by bad habits, that is malnourished, left in the elements too much, sick, or overexploited is not going to give rise to a logos or thymos capable of full expression or flourishing. A society is made strong not by philosopher kings (let alone demagogues or tyrants) nor by its capacity for making war but by being populated by people with healthy bodies capable of producing the conditions for human flourishing.
I’m working on Sunday evening again. Probably time for a rest. And a beer. But not too much…
Sources:
Aristotle. “The Nicomachean Ethics.”
Damasio, Antonio. “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.”
A Nod to Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” for some of the inspiration on thymos.
Popper, Karl. “The Open Society and Its Enemies: Book I, The Spell of Plato.”
Plato. “The Republic.”
Image Credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
