When David Hume famously claimed that “reason is, and ought only to be a slave to the passions” (T. II.3.3, 415),Footnote 1 he was deliberately inverting the idea, long influential in philosophy, that reason ought to rule over passion in the human soul. At the head of this long tradition stands Plato.Footnote 2 Like Hume, Plato thought reason can be “enslaved” to another part of one’s psyche. However, unlike Hume, he deemed the enslavement of reason neither inevitable nor appropriate. Rather, on his view, every soul ought ideally to be “ruled” (archesthai) by reason.Footnote 3 But for Plato, what happens to a person’s reason when it is “enslaved”? The question is important for understanding Plato’s conception of reason in the context of the divided soul, his psychology of action, and his theory of vice. In this paper, I answer it by examining Plato’s depiction in Republic 8–9 of the four main kinds of vicious people, all of whose souls are ruled by an element other than reason. I focus most closely on the character type Socrates calls the “oligarchic man,” whose reason is “enslaved” to his soul’s appetitive part (553d1–7).Footnote 4 I argue that the oligarchic man’s reason not only remains active when it is enslaved, but also continues to give rise to his desires to do what he considers best overall. However, these desires now aim ultimately at a goal set by appetite: the accumulation of wealth. More generally, I argue that, for Plato, the “enslavement” of reason consists in this: instead of determining for itself what is good, reason is forced to desire and pursue as good a goal determined by the soul’s ruler.
1.
At the end of book 4 of the Republic, Socrates claims there is only one form of virtue, but an unlimited number of forms of “badness” or “vice” (kakias, 445c6), four of which are “worth mentioning” (445c7). At the start of book 8, after the long “digression” of books 5–7, he proceeds to examine these four kinds of vice in detail.Footnote 5 In each case, he first describes a corrupt city, then a corresponding kind of person. He also says not only what each city and person is like, but also how each comes to be. The result is a structured series of sixteen vignettes, extending well into book 9. Throughout this discussion, Socrates’s focus is on internal organization and the distribution of power within both cities and souls. In all four corrupt cities—the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic and tyrannical—power belongs to individuals or groups unsuited to wield it, rather than to the wise. By analogy, in all four corrupt souls, power belongs to an element in the soul unsuited to wield it, rather than to reason. Yet while the idea of a society ruled by those unsuited to hold power is familiar, the idea of a soul “ruled” by an element unsuited to hold power is less so. How should we understand this extension of political language to the sphere of psychology? In particular, how should we understand the idea that reason can be “ruled” by a nonrational element in the psyche? To answer this question, I begin with the “oligarchic man”—the second of the four kinds of corrupt person Socrates portrays. I then show how my account extends to the other character types he describes.
As Socrates presents things, the “oligarchic man” first emerges as follows (553a ff.). The young son of an honor-loving “timocratic man” initially emulates his father. However, everything changes after he witnesses his father, previously a person of high social standing, being ruined, both personally and financially, when false charges are upheld against him in court (553a9–b5). At this point:
The son sees all this, suffers from it, loses his property, and, being afraid, immediately drives from the throne in his soul the honor-loving and spirited part that rules there. Humbled by poverty, he turns greedily to making money, and, little by little, saving and working, he amasses property. Don’t you think this person would establish his appetitive and money-loving part on the throne, setting it up as a great king within himself, adorning it with golden tiaras and collars and girding it with Persian swords?
(553b7–c7)Footnote 6Humbled by poverty and driven by fear (deisas, 553b8), the young man dedicates himself single-mindedly to the task of accumulating wealth. His turn from loving honor to loving money corresponds to a change of “ruler” in his soul. In the terms of Socrates’s image, he “drives” the spirited part (to thumoeides) from the “throne” in his soul and sets “the appetitive and money-loving part” (to epithumêtikon te kai philochrêmaton) in its place, as if it were a Persian king.
Socrates next describes what happens to the two subservient soul parts—the spirited and rational parts—after appetite has taken control:
He makes the rational and spirited parts (to logistikon te kai thumoeides) sit on the ground beneath appetite, one on either side, reducing them to slaves (katadoulôsamenos).Footnote 7 He won’t allow the first to reason about or examine anything except how a little money can be made into great wealth. And he won’t allow the second to value or admire anything but wealth and wealthy people, or to have any ambition other than the acquisition of wealth or whatever might contribute to getting it.
(553d1–7)Footnote 8The resulting person is, above all, a lover of money or wealth (ta chrêmata). Thus, Socrates claims he resembles the oligarchic city first and foremost by “attaching the greatest importance to money” (554a2–3); Adeimantus adds that “money is valued most of all by both the city and the man” (554b2–3). However, the oligarchic man is not an extravagant spender, as we might expect of a money-lover. Rather, he is a “thrifty” (pheidôlos, 554a5) worker, who avoids all unnecessary expenditure. The reason for this restraint, we soon learn, is not true temperance, but rather his aversion to parting with his wealth, which is itself rooted in his desire to increase the size of his hoard. Thus, while he may be “the sort the majority admires,” in truth the oligarchic man is a “squalid” (auchmêros, 554a10) fellow, a miser who maintains his veneer of respectability only by forcibly holding his many “dronish” appetites in check (554b7–c2). His true nature, Socrates insists, will become evident whenever he has the opportunity to indulge his appetites without cost to himself.Footnote 9
What is the relationship between the oligarchic man’s character and the “government” within his soul? Since Plato often associates appetite with bodily pleasure, we might expect a person whose soul is ruled by appetite to be a crass hedonist and lover of bodily pleasure. However, in the Republic, the appetitive soul part is also often associated with desires for wealth. Socrates even calls it the “money-loving” (philochrêmaton) part of the soul.Footnote 10 In book 9, he explains this label by noting that desires for food, drink, sex and the like are mostly (malista) satisfied by means of money (580d–581a). Some take this passage to show that Plato envisaged appetite as itself capable of means-end reasoning.Footnote 11 I doubt it shows anything so strong.Footnote 12 But in any case, the important point for present purposes is simply this: wealth is an object of desire characteristically (albeit derivatively) associated with the appetitive part of the soul. Hence, it is no great surprise that a person whose soul is ruled by appetite turns out to be a “money-lover.”
What role do the oligarchic man’s enslaved spirited and rational parts play in his life? As Socrates presents things, the spirited part of the oligarchic man’s soul is “allowed” (ea[i]) to “value and admire” (thaumazein kai timan) nothing but wealth and wealthy people, and to “be ambitious” (philotimeisthai) for nothing but the acquisition of money (553d4–7). Two features of this passage stand out. First, spirit clearly does not lapse into inactivity when it is “dethroned.” Rather, it continues to generate the oligarchic man’s desires to be looked up to and admired, and his aversions to doing whatever he regards as shameful.Footnote 13 However—this is the second point—it is no longer permitted to desire as admirable the kinds of things his father once pursued: military honors, for example, or high public office. Rather, appetite allows spirit to regard and desire as admirable only wealth. Hence, the oligarchic man admires only wealth and those who have it.Footnote 14
I turn now to the oligarchic man’s enslaved rational part. As Socrates presents things, this is no longer “allowed” to “reason about or examine” (logizein kai skopein) anything except how best to increase his wealth (553d2–4). From this description, it is clear that reason, like spirit, does not lapse into inactivity when it is enslaved. The oligarchic man’s reason, not his appetitive part, is responsible for his deliberations about how best to increase his wealth. Moreover, like spirit, reason has its activity constrained by appetite: it is allowed to deliberate only about how to acquire and keep wealth. But does its activity consist only in such deliberations? Or does it also give rise to desires? In what follows, I argue that the oligarchic man’s reason is best understood as continuing to give rise to desires. Specifically, it gives rise to his desires do whatever he reflectively considers best. However, what he now considers best, and pursues as such, is wealth—an object of pursuit characteristically associated with his soul’s ruling, appetitive part.
2.
How should we understand the role of reason in the oligarchic man’s soul? Two possible views can be quickly and safely ruled out. On the first, all of the psychological operations of the person (both conative and cognitive) are performed by the soul’s ruling part, whatever that is in each person. On this view, all of the oligarchic man’s desires and reasoning processes should strictly be attributed to his soul’s appetitive part.Footnote 15 There are several problems with this interpretation. The first, and most serious, is that it is simply incompatible with the text. In particular, as already noted, Socrates is perfectly clear that both spirit and reason continue to play active roles in the oligarchic man’s soul when they are enslaved. In addition, this view fits poorly with the city-soul analogy and with the imagery of enslavement—rulers do not usually do everything themselves and masters usually put their slaves to some use. Finally, this view essentially requires reduplicating all of the capacities of the person in each soul part. It is, I take it, uncharitable to attribute such a fully “homuncular” view of soul parts to Plato unless the text requires it.Footnote 16
On a second possible view—the “deflationary” view—all talk of one soul part “ruling” or being “enslaved to” another should be dismissed as metaphorical: when Socrates says one part of the soul “rules” the others, he means only that one kind of desire is stronger than the others.Footnote 17 This view may appeal to some, since it enables obscure talk of “parts of the soul” to be eliminated and replaced with familiar talk about kinds of desires. However, it has not proven popular with interpreters. One problem is that it requires effectively ignoring (or dismissing as regrettably misleading) large parts of the text of the Republic, where the parts of the soul are regularly portrayed as interacting with each other and as having (not being) desires and other psychological states.Footnote 18 A second problem is that this view seems incompatible with the stated aims (and, arguably, the details) of Socrates’s argument for dividing the soul in Republic 4; for Socrates claims to show not merely that human desires are of three different kinds—he takes that to be evident—but rather that we learn, get angry, and desire the pleasures of food, drink, and sex “with” or “by means of” three different things “in us” (en hêmin), rather than “with the whole soul” (holêi têi psuchêi, 436b2).Footnote 19 Finally, proponents of this view are poorly placed to account for the effects of psychic rule as depicted in the Republic for, as we have seen in the case of the oligarchic man, the operations of the subservient soul parts are affected—specifically, they are restricted and shaped—by the soul’s ruler.Footnote 20
To this point, I have rejected two possible accounts of what the “enslavement” of reason amounts to in the Republic based largely on their incompatibility with passages describing the oligarchic man. These passages are however consistent with a third possible view. On this “Humean” view, an enslaved rational part forms no desires of its own, but works only to figure out how best to satisfy desires originating elsewhere in the psyche.Footnote 21 Despite its appeal, I believe this “Humean” view does not provide the best way of understanding how reason functions for Plato when it is enslaved. Instead, we have excellent reasons to prefer a different account. On the account I prefer, reason is a source of desires in the oligarchic soul, as it is in every soul. Specifically, it gives rise to desires to do whatever the person reflectively considers best overall.Footnote 22 However, when it is enslaved, reason no longer draws on its own resources to figure out what really is good. Rather, it is forced to regard and pursue as good an object characteristically desired by the soul’s ruling part—whatever that may be in each kind of person. In what follows, I will call this the “reorientation” view since, on it, the person’s desires for the good are reoriented as a result of their reason’s enslavement.
To be clear, I am not attributing to my opponents the view that Plato presents the reader with a Humean view of practical reason throughout the Republic. In agreement with most interpreters, I take Plato’s basic stance on the role of reason in action in the Republic (and elsewhere) to be non-Humean, not only because reason is described as a source of motivation in its own right, but also because its desires arise from judgments about value, rather than being “original existences” in Hume’s sense (T. 2.3.3.5).Footnote 23 Rather, the issue here specifically concerns the operation of reason in corrupt souls. Advocates of the view I oppose argue that, in corrupt souls, reason’s practical role is akin to that which Hume, as traditionally understood, took reason to play in all cases: it calculates means to ends, but gives rise to no desires of its own. By contrast, on my view, reason is always responsible—including in corrupt souls—for desires to do whatever the person considers best overall. These desires can then directly clash with the unreflective, short-sighted desires of spirit or appetite, for, say, revenge or food. Thus, in sum, the difference between the two views is as follows. On the Humean view, the oligarchic man’s enslaved reason “steps aside,” with the result that, at least in his everyday life, he acts only on his appetites. By contrast, on my view, the oligarchic man often acts on his rational desires for the good, as he understands it—it is just that, as a result of his reason’s enslavement, his conception of what is good has been reoriented towards the objects of appetite.
How are we to decide between these two views? Since both seem compatible with the passages in which the oligarchic man is described, I base my argument on considerations of charity and on consistency with what Plato writes elsewhere. The first way in which my view is charitable to Plato is that it obviates the need to subdivide the appetitive part of the soul. As noted, the oligarchic man often battles to keep his appetites in check to avoid spending his money. Imagine he desires to gorge on pastries and struggles to restrain himself due to his frugality. What are the parties to this conflict supposed to be? On the Humean interpretation, it seems they must both be appetites—that is, desires attributable to, or stemming from, the appetitive part of his soul. However, this motivational conflict is strikingly similar to that of the thirsty person who resists a desire to drink described in book 4 (439c–d). In both cases, a person fights a temptation to satisfy an immediate bodily appetite, having judged it would now be better to refrain. If the Humean interpretation is correct, it therefore seems Socrates should subdivide the appetitive part of the oligarchic man’s soul on pain of inconsistency: one part is responsible for his immediate desire for gratification while the other holds him back based on his judgment about the long-term good. Yet Socrates does not mean to subdivide the appetitive part of the soul. At least, he never argues for any such subdivision, and continues to treat the soul as having three parts later in the Republic (e.g., book 9, 580d2ff.), as does Plato in the Phaedrus and Timaeus. Footnote 24
Of course, Plato may simply have failed to notice that the oligarchic man’s inner conflicts should lead to further psychic subdivision on his own principles. However, there is a ready alternative. For perhaps these conflicts are best construed as battles—not within appetite, but rather between his occurrent appetites for bodily pleasure and his corrupted reason, which aims at what he now considers best. In fact, the text not only permits such a reading, but positively recommends it. In particular, when describing the oligarchic man’s version of self-control, Socrates says he generally keeps his “dronish” appetites in check with “some decent (epieikês) part of himself” (554c). My suggestion, stated simply, is that this “decent” part is his soul’s rational part.Footnote 25 If this is right, there is no need to charge Plato with inattention or inconsistency. He knew what kind of conflict Socrates was describing in the soul of the oligarchic man and could explain it by drawing on the resources of his tripartite psychology. This is because the conflict is between two distinct parts of the oligarchic man’s soul: his appetite, which gives rise to his unreflective desires for immediate bodily gratification, and his reason, which holds him back based on its calculations about how best to achieve the good as he understands it.
The second way the reorientation view is charitable to Plato is that it frees him from the need to assign a robust self-conception and a conception of the long-term good to each lower part of the soul. Plato clearly envisaged vicious people as having a conception of the good and as pursuing it in action. For instance, the oligarchic man does not merely act on impulse, but doggedly pursues wealth, having set it before himself as the good. Yet on the Humean interpretation, the rational part of the oligarchic man’s soul is not responsible for his considered desires for his perceived long-term good or for the means to attain it. Rather, these desires belong to his soul’s appetitive part. Hence, advocates of the Humean view must conceive of the soul’s appetitive part as having long-term goals and, thus, awareness of itself as persisting over time. Yet this brings well-known problems. One such problem, already noted, is that if appetite pursues its own long-term good, there will inevitably be clashes within it between its long-term goals and its immediate impulses for gratification. In addition, the view that each soul part is self-aware and has its own conception of the good requires needless reduplication of labor among the soul’s parts. Finally, this view—on which each soul part is not merely a source of motivation, but also a distinct centre of awareness—is difficult to square with our ordinary experience of personal and agential unity.
By contrast, the reorientation view eliminates the need to attribute self-awareness and long-term goals all three parts of the soul. To be sure, on my interpretation, all three soul parts serve as independent sources of motivation: roughly, appetite of desires for what one regards as a source of bodily pleasure, spirit of desires for what one deems admirable, and reason of desires for what one reflectively considers good.Footnote 26 However, the idea that there are distinct sources of motivation within us need not threaten personal unity, so long as every desire can be attributed to the person, who has a single view about what is best overall.Footnote 27 That view, I argue, resides in the soul’s rational part, even when it is enslaved. This in turn allows for an appealing division of labor among the soul’s three parts. In every soul, from the most virtuous to the most corrupt, appetite and spirit are responsible for immediate, unreflective desires and aversions, while reason gives rise to considered desires to do what one deems best overall. It is just that in corrupt souls, like that of the oligarchic man, reason, as a consequence of its enslavement, has come to desire and pursue as good a goal imposed on it by the soul’s ruler.
Finally, the reorientation view is not only more charitable to Plato, but also conforms better with his representation of reason’s desires elsewhere in the Republic. In particular, the Humean view seems incompatible with the analysis of certain motivational conflicts in Republic 4. There (434c ff.), Socrates builds his case that the soul has three parts by considering examples of inner struggle. These include resisting a desire to drink when thirsty based on rational calculation and resisting a desire to take immediate revenge based on the thought that it is not the right time. Although the cases are underdescribed, in each case the desires that hold the person back are clearly attributed to the soul’s rational part, based on its reflections about what it would be best to do overall.Footnote 28 Presumably, vicious people experience these kinds of motivational conflicts. For one thing, Socrates presents the conflicts in question as commonplace and familiar to everyone and Glaucon accepts them as such.Footnote 29 It would also be peculiar for Plato to deny that vicious people ever, say, feel thirsty yet wish not to drink. Certainly, Socrates doesn’t have virtuous people, with their harmonious souls, in mind. However, if the Humean account of enslaved reason is correct, Socrates cannot explain these everyday motivational conflicts in the same way when they occur in vicious people. This is because, on the Humean account, reason is not responsible for a vicious person’s desires to do what they consider best overall. Rather, on that view, both their reflective desires to do what they consider best and their unreflective impulses for immediate gratification stem from the same source: their soul’s ruling part—appetite, in the oligarchic man. As a result, these kinds of motivational conflicts cannot be explained by tracing impulses for immediate gratification and reflective desires to do what one considers best to different parts of the soul, as Socrates does in Republic 4. By contrast, on my view, the book 4 analysis of these common kinds of inner conflicts extends seamlessly to vicious souls.
3.
Let us take stock. To this point, I have focused on the oligarchic man, whose soul is ruled by its appetitive part. I have argued that the enslavement of his reason does not cause it to operate in a broadly Humean manner, giving rise to no desires of its own, but merely calculating how best to satisfy his appetites. Instead, I have argued, the rational part of the oligarchic man’s soul is responsible not only for his calculations about how to acquire more money, but also for his desires to do what he reflectively considers best, with a view to his overall goal of increasing his wealth. This view has the following main advantages. First, it alleviates pressure to subdivide the appetitive part of the soul. Second, it avoids the need to attribute self-awareness and views about the long-term good to appetite, with the problems that entails. Third, it allows for an appealing division of labor among the soul’s parts: reason alone aims at the agent’s long-term good, while appetite and spirit give rise only to immediate, unreflective desires.Footnote 30 Finally, it enables Socrates’s basic analysis of commonplace motivational conflicts in book 4—where unreflective impulses and the reflective desires for the good that directly oppose them are attributed to distinct parts of the soul—to extend seamlessly to vicious souls. If these arguments are accepted, they suggest the following general picture. In every soul, reason generates desires to do what the person reflectively considers best. In some souls, it is free to draw on its own resources to determine and pursue what really is good. In others, however, it is enslaved and, as a result of its enslavement, is forced to regard and pursue as good a goal imposed on it from without.
Does the reorientation view fit the other character types described in the Republic? I believe it does. In this section, I consider the “timocratic,” “democratic,” and “tyrannical” characters—the other three corrupt characters Socrates describes in Republic 8–9. In each case, I argue, it is both reasonable and helpful to conceive of the role of reason in the way I recommend: as changing its orientation as a result of its servitude rather than being usurped as the source of each person’s desires for the good. I then briefly consider the philosopher and, more generally, Plato’s contrast between souls that are ruled by reason and those that are not. Finally, I examine some other passages in Plato that refer to psychological “enslavement,” and argue these also fit well with the present account.
The “timocratic man” is the first vicious person Socrates describes (548d ff.). His soul is ruled by its spirited part, while his reason occupies a subservient role.Footnote 31 If my view is correct, we should expect his reason to remain the source of his desires for the good as he now understands it. We should also expect him to regard as the good, and to pursue as such, an object characteristically associated with spirit. These expectations are borne out by the text. In particular, the timocratic man is, above all, a lover of victory and honor—objects characteristically associated in the Republic with the spirited part of the soul.Footnote 32 My proposal, then, is that this man’s reason remains the source of his desires for what he now regards as good but has been reoriented as a result of its subservience. Why not instead attribute his considered desires for the good to his soul’s spirited part? To reiterate, that view would create rifts within spirit (imagine, for example, that his overall goal of living honorably would be served by losing this one fight). It would require attributing considerable (and needless) cognitive resources to the spirited part of the soul, with all of the problems for agential unity that entails. And if his reason were not responsible for his desires to do what he reflectively considers best, it could not oppose his unreflective spirited and appetitive impulses when he judges it better to resist acting on them.
Next after the oligarchic man is the “democratic man,” who is “always surrendering rule (archên) over himself to whichever desire comes along, as if it were chosen by lot … disdaining none but satisfying all equally” (561b6–8). The resulting character is inconstant and mercurial: one day he is drinking heavily, the next he drinks only water and is on a diet; one day he is seeking to be a soldier, the next he is playing at politics, or pursuing wealth, or engaged in some other pursuit (561c6–d8). What role does reason play in his life? I submit that the best way to understand the democratic man, consistent with the way he is portrayed, is to envisage his reason as serving his ruling desire, whatever it is at any given time—not only by calculating how to satisfy it, but also by pursuing its satisfaction as good. Why is it best to understand him this way? For one thing, the democratic man clearly has views about what would be good for him to do at any given time. For example, he sometimes spends a period of time—perhaps not long, but clearly more than a moment—determined to become a soldier before changing tack on a whim. During that time, he presumably regards becoming a soldier as good. Another advantage of understanding the democratic man in this way is that, when so understood, he exhibits basic rational agency; he may be outstandingly fickle, and his life may lack order (taxis, 561d6), but he is a comprehensible psychological type, not a “psychological salad.”Footnote 33 Yet his desires to do what he considers good at any given time cannot be attributed to his soul’s ruler. This is because, as Socrates presents him, his soul is “ruled” by a procession of individual pleasures and desires.Footnote 34 While on some views (if not my own), the lower parts of the soul have their own views about the long-term good, no one thinks individual pleasures and desires have such views. Pleasures and desires can, however, reorient and shape one’s views about the good, which is all my view requires.Footnote 35
The last of the four vicious characters Socrates describes is the “tyrannical man.” As Socrates depicts him (571a ff.), this man is utterly shameless and depraved, exercising no shred of restraint over even the basest of human desires: the “lawless” kind others experience only in their dreams.Footnote 36 What role does reason play in his soul? In contrast to democratic people, tyrannical people are ruled not by a succession of different desires, but rather by a single, persistent, consuming desire: an erôs, or “lust.”Footnote 37 Although the text is not explicit, this “lust” is probably best construed as aiming not exclusively at sexual pleasure, but rather at the pleasure that comes from satisfying one’s appetites. At least, that reflects the way the tyrannical man is portrayed.Footnote 38 Thus, as Socrates describes him, this man is ruthless in his pursuit of money and power, but always and only as means to satisfy his numerous unnecessary appetites (some, but not all, of which are sexual). As a consequence, he has stable goals and pursues them doggedly, even though his soul is in turmoil. Indeed, although most tyrannical people remain petty criminals, some become actual tyrants, thereby attaining great power to satisfy their “unruly mob” (thorubon, 575a4) of unnecessary appetites—not that this benefits them in the end, Socrates maintains.Footnote 39 I therefore submit that the tyrannical man’s views about the good, and desires for it, reside not in his soul’s ruler (the “lust” that rules like a tyrant in his soul), but rather in his soul’s enslaved (577d4) rational part, which now regards and pursues as good the object of his ruling desire: the pleasure of appetitive satisfaction, and the money and power that will enable him to secure more of it.Footnote 40
In sum, for all the vicious people described in Republic 8–9, it is not only possible, but also helpful, to envisage the role of enslaved reason in the way I recommend. What about when reason is not enslaved? In the Republic, the philosopher exemplifies a person whose soul is ruled by reason. For present purposes, we need not consider philosophers’ desires in detail. The main point I want to make is that Socrates presents progress toward wisdom as the natural development of reason—as proper to it, given its nature. This progress is not inevitable: in some people, reason lacks the requisite strength, while others are poorly raised. Yet Socrates seems to suppose that if people with “philosophical natures” are raised in a suitable environment, they will incline towards grasping the forms—objects to which their reason is naturally “akin.”Footnote 41 If all goes well, the “upward” journey initiated by their education culminates in knowledge of the good and, hence, of what is good. By contrast, those in whom reason is enslaved are compelled to look “downwards,” toward money, status, and bodily pleasure—objects associated with the lower parts of the soul.Footnote 42 This suggests Plato drew the following basic contrast between souls that are ruled by reason and souls that are not: if it is unimpeded and placed in a suitable environment, reason grows into its own nature, developing toward knowledge of the good; by contrast, when it is enslaved, its growth is stunted and warped, producing blindness about the good. In this way, reason’s enslavement causes ignorance about the good.Footnote 43
I conclude by briefly considering two related contexts in which Plato refers to psychic enslavement. First, late in Republic 9, Socrates claims that when the “best part” in someone is “naturally weak,” it is “unable to rule the beasts within him” but, instead, merely “serves” and “learns to flatter” spirit and appetite (590c1–5). What is best for such people, Socrates claims, is to be ruled by reason. If their own reason cannot rule them due to its weakness, it is best that each be a “slave” (doulon, 590c8) to someone whose soul is ruled by reason in the right way. What does this enslavement entail? Socrates is not thinking of literal slavery. Rather, as the continuing discussion makes clear, he has in mind something like the paternalistic control parents exercise over their children. I have argued that when reason is enslaved, it is forced to adopt a conception of the good—and hence its goals—from without. I now suggest this same basic idea extends to cases in which one person’s reason is enslaved to another’s. However, there is a difference between people paternalistically governed by wise rulers and vicious people, as described in Republic 8–9. In the latter, enslaved reason adopts its goals from spirit, appetite, or a nonrational desire and, hence, regards and pursues as good things that are not really good at all. By contrast, in the former, reason adopts its goals from the “divine” reason of wise rulers, presumably via education and laws. As a result, it is well-oriented with regard to the good, even if it lacks understanding. If this is right, it explains why Plato supposed—as he clearly did—that a person whose reason is “enslaved” to another’s could be better off than one whose reason is “enslaved” to their own spirit or appetite.
Second, although Socrates never speaks in the Phaedo of reason “ruling” or being “enslaved to” another part of the soul, he does speak there of the soul “ruling” or being “enslaved to” the body.Footnote 44 These passages anticipate the Republic’s language of psychic rule and enslavement. I submit they can also be understood along similar lines. Socrates’s basic idea in the Phaedo, it seems, is that those who are slaves to their bodies regard bodily pleasure (and related objects) as the good and pursue it on that basis. By contrast, those whose souls are not so enslaved disdain the body and the pleasures, pains, and other experiences that arise “through” it. In this way, those who are slaves to their bodies adopt their conception of the good from without. (In the context of the Phaedo’s soul-body dualism, I assume deriving one’s conception of the good from one’s body counts as deriving it in a way from “without.”) Indeed, Socrates sometimes suggests they adopt this conception of the good without ever consciously choosing it, merely by having experiences of bodily pleasures and pains.Footnote 45 Regardless, Socrates’s talk of the soul being “enslaved to the body” in the Phaedo fits well with my account of what it means for reason to be enslaved to another element in the soul in the Republic. Specifically, in both cases, that in us responsible for our considered desires for the good is enslaved and, consequently, has its perspective reoriented such that it now regards and pursues as good something that is not really good at all. On my interpretation of the Republic, I take this fit between the two dialogues to further support the thesis of this paper.Footnote 46
4.
In this paper, I have advanced a way of understanding what the enslavement of reason amounts to in Plato’s Republic. On the view I have defended, reason is distinctively responsible for each person’s desires to do what they reflectively consider best. This is true in every soul, from the most virtuous to the most corrupt. The most fundamental difference between the two kinds of soul lies in reason’s orientation. When it rules, reason draws on its own resources to determine what really is good. By contrast, when it is enslaved, it is forced to adopt a conception of the good from the soul’s ruler, whatever that may be in each case. As a result, it regards and pursues as good an object characteristically desired by a lower part of the soul, such as status, money, or bodily pleasure—none of which, according to Plato, is really good at all. In this way, for Plato, reason’s enslavement within the soul causes profound ignorance about matters of value.
Acknowledgments.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. I am grateful to audiences on these occasions, and to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, for their helpful questions, comments, and advice.
Mark Johnstone is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at McMaster University. He works primarily in ancient Greek philosophy, with a focus on ancient ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind.
