To return to thirst, then,
said I,
will you not class it with the things Footnote 1τῶν τινὸς εἶναι: if the text is sound, εἶναι seems to be taken twice, (1) with τοῦτο etc., (2)τῶν τινός as predicates. This is perhaps no harsher than τὸ δοκεῖν εἶναι in Aeschylus Agamemnon 788. Cf. Tennyson’s
How sweet are the looks that ladies bendOn whom their favors fall,
and Pope’s And virgins smiled at what they blushed before.
Possibly θήσεις τῶν τινός is incomplete in itself (cf. 437 B) and εἶναι τοῦτο etc. is a loose epexegesis. The only emendation worth notice is Adam’s insertion of καὶ τινὸς between τινὸς and εἶναι, which yields a smooth, but painfully explicit, construction. that are of something and say that it is what it is Footnote 2Cf. further Sophist 255 D, Aristotle Met. 1021 a 27. Aristotle Cat. v., Top. vi. 4. So Plotinus vi. 1. 7 says that relative terms are those whose very being is the relation καὶ τὸ εἶναι οὐκ ἄλλο τι ἢ τὸ ἀλλήλοις εἶναι
. in relation to something—and it is, I presume, thirst?I will,
said he, —namely of drink.
Then if the drink is of a certain kind, so is the thirst, but thirst that is just thirst is neither of much nor little nor good nor bad, nor in a word of any kind, but just thirst is naturally of just drink only.
By all means.
The soul of the thirsty then, in so far as it thirsts, wishes nothing else than to drink, and yearns for this and its impulse is towards this.
Obviously.
Then if anything draws it back Footnote 3Cf. on 437 C, Aristotle, De anima 433 b 8, Laws 644 E, 604 B, Phaedrus 238 C. The practical moral truth of this is independent of our metaphysical psychology. Plato means that the something which made King David refuse the draught purchased by the blood of his soldiers and Sir Philip Sidney pass the cup to a wounded comrade is somehow different than the animal instinct which it overpowers. Cf. Aristotle Eth. Nic. 1102 b 24, Laws 863 E. when thirsty it must be something different in it from that which thirsts and drives it like a beast Footnote 4Cf. 589, Epistle 335 B. Cf. Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme, article xlvii:
En quoi consistent les combats qu’on a coutume d’imaginer entre la partie inférieure et la supérieure de l’âme.
He says in effect that the soul is a unit and the lower soul
is the body. Cf. ibid. lxviii, where he rejects the concupiscible
and the irascible.
to drink. For it cannot be, we say, that the same thing with the same part of itself at the same time acts in opposite ways about the same thing.We must admit that it does not.
So I fancy it is not well said of the archer Footnote 5Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 68:
Plato . . . delights to prick the bubbles of imagery, rhetoric, and antithesis blown by his predecessors. Heraclitus means well when he says that the one is united by disunion (Symposium 187 A) or that the hands at once draw and repel the bow. But the epigram vanishes under logical analysis.
For the conceit cf. Samuel Butler’s lines: He that will win his dame must do As love does when he bends his bow, With one hand thrust his lady from And with the other pull her home.
that his hands at the same time thrust away the bow and draw it nigh, but we should rather say that there is one hand that puts it away and another that draws it to.By all means,
he said. Are we to say, then, that some men sometimes though thirsty refuse to drink?
We are indeed,
he said, many and often.
What then,
said I, should one affirm about them?
Is it not that there is Footnote 6ἐνεῖναι μὲν . . . ἐνεῖναι δέ: the slight artificiality of the anaphora matches well with the Gorgian jingle κελεῦον . . . κωλῦον. Cf. Iambl. Protrept. p. 41 Postelli
ἔστι γὰρ τοιοῦτον ὃ κελεύει καὶ κωλύει
. something in the soul that bids them drink and a something that forbids, a different something that masters that which bids?I think so.
And is it not the fact that that which inhibits such actions arises when it arises from the calculations of reason, but the impulses which draw and drag come through affections Footnote 7The
pulls
are distinguished verbally from the passions that are their instruments. νοσημάτων suggests the Stoic doctrine that passions are diseases. Cf. Cicero Tusc. iii. 4 perturbationes, and passim, and Philebus 45 C. and diseases?Apparently.
Not unreasonably,
said I, shall we claim that they are two and different from one another, naming that in the soul whereby it reckons and reasons the rational Footnote 8λογιστικόν is one of Plato’s many synonyms for the intellectual principle. Cf. 441 C, 571 C, 587 D, 605 B. It emphasizes the moral calculation of consequences, as opposed to blind passion. Cf. Crito 46 B (one of the passages which the Christian apologists used to prove that Socrates knew the λόγος), Theaetetus 186 C
ἀναλογίσματα πρός τε οὐσίαν καὶ ὠφέλειαν
, and Laws 644 D. Aristotle Eth. 1139 a 12 somewhat differently. and that with which it loves, hungers, thirsts, and feels the flutter Footnote 9ἐπτόηται: almost technical, as in Sappho’s ode, for the flutter of desire. ἀλόγιστον, though applied here to the ἐπιθυμητικόν only, suggests the bipartite division of Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1102 a 28. and titillation of other desires, the irrational and appetitive—companion Footnote 10So the bad steed which symbolizes the ἐπιθυμητικόν in Phaedrus 253 E is ἀλαζονείας ἑταῖρος. of various repletions and pleasures.It would not be unreasonable but quite natural,
he said, for us to think this.
These two forms, then, let us assume to have been marked off as actually existing in the soul. But now the Thumos Footnote 11We now approach the distinctively Platonic sense of θυμός as the power of noble wrath, which, unless perverted by a bad education, is naturally the ally of the reason, though as mere angry passion it might seem to belong to the irrational part of the soul, and so, as Glaucon suggets, be akin to appetite, with which it is associated in the mortal soul of the Timaeus 69 D. In Laws 731 B-C Plato tells us again that the soul cannot combat injustice without the capacity for righteous indignation. The Stoics affected to deprecate anger always, and the difference remained a theme of controversy between them and the Platonists. Cf. Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen, ii. pp. 321 ff., Seneca, De ira, i. 9, and passim. Moralists are still divided on the point. Cf. Bagehot, Lord Brougham:
Another faculty of Brougham . . . is the faculty of easy anger. The supine placidity of civilization is not favorable to animosity [Bacon’s word for θυμός].
Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, pp. 60 ff. and p. 62, seems to contradict Plato: The supposed conflict between reason and passion is, as I hold, meaningless if it is taken to imply that the reason is a faculty separate from the emotions,
etc. But this is only his metaphysics. On the practical ethical issue he is with Plato. or principle of high spirit, that with which we feel anger, is it a third, or would it be identical in nature with one of these?Perhaps,
he said, with one of these, the appetitive.
Book 4