92c: "How will you harmonize this statement with your former one?" Good one, S.
93a: A composite cannot be in a different "state" than its elements. What does "state" mean in this passage? If it's just a general term for quality or property, the principle seems prima facie false.
93b: One soul can't be more of a soul than another soul.
93c ff: Socrates seems to be taking very seriously the suggestion that a good soul is in harmony while an evil soul lacks harmony. It doesn't look like it's just an analogy for him.
94b-c: The soul opposes the affections of the body, e.g., the body is hungry and the soul prevents it from eating. Quite a different picture than Republic IV in which the soul is responsible both for the desire to eat and the desire not to eat.
Have a good night, everyone!
IanH: Thanks for pointing out that puzzling claim at 93b. I think we might rightly wonder: Why should it be obvious that something cannot be more or less of a soul than another soul? Why not think that having 'a soul' is a certain kind of achievement, e.g., that a conflicted soul is less of 'a (single) soul', a single psychological unit, than a harmonized and unconflicted soul? Think for instance of the tyrant's soul in the Republic: we might think that it looks more like a disparate, inconsistent bundle of thoughts and motives than the just person's harmonized, integrated, unanimous soul. If so, it might seem reasonable to conclude, further, that the tyrant's soul is really, importantly, less of a soul than the just person's soul.
ReplyDeleteA few suggestions in response to that train of thought:
1. The soul as considered here is not capable of genuine motivational conflict: what we have here is a highly intellectualistic, monistic psychology, which does not allow for distinguishable motivational capacities.
(But then the retort would be: that view of the soul has not been explicitly *argued* for, and could just as easily be denied by Simmias.)
2. Earlier, Socrates argued that the soul is "more like" the Forms, which entails that the soul is "more like" an incomposite thing (78b ff.). Perhaps Simmias is worried about going back on some earlier agreement; though at that earlier point in the text, Cebes was doing the answering, so Simmias is not personally committed to their conclusions.
(And another retort would be: just because the soul is more *like* an incomposite thing that a composite thing, doesn't mean that it simply is, unequivocally, an incomposite thing. A soul can be unlike a table, say, insofar as different capacities in the soul might not be spatially divisible "parts," like the legs and top are parts of the table. In this respect, the soul might be more like the Forms than a table. But this doesn't in any way rule out the possibility that the soul does indeed have distinguishable motivational capacities, which, under the right circumstances, could threaten its unity and hence, its ability to be called "a soul".)