His celebrated school, the Academy, probably opened its doors in about 385 bc; and it soon attracted the brightest ornaments of intellectual Greece, among them Aristotle. Little is known of the structure and nature of Plato's Academy; but it is not implausible to think of it as an institute for advanced research. A comic poet portrays the young academicians as attempting to classify the pumpkin: is it a species of tree? a kind of grass? a vegetable? The caricature suggests that the natural sciences were studied in the Academy; there is good evidence for the study of mathematics; and of course philosophy, in all its branches, was the centrepiece. Plato himself doubtless spent much of his time in teaching and lecturing to his disciples and colleagues, and there are stories of a public lecture in which he managed to bemuse most of his lay audience.
Plato left behind him a body of philosophical writings, in dialogue form, unsurpassed for their literary elegance and their profundity. The notion of the psyche exercised him throughout his life, and reflections upon one aspect or another of psychology can be found in most of his works; but the primary sources for his psychological theories are the Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus.
Two topics concerned him especially: the question of the immortality of the psyche, and the problem of its unity. The two questions are closely linked; for Plato, like many thinkers after him, believed that only a unitary and indivisible item could be eternal — anything divisible would at some time actually be divided and hence destroyed. A psyche with parts cannot be immortal; and since Plato held both that the psyche has parts and that it is immortal, he found himself in a perplexity from which he never really escaped.
The Phaedo represents Socrates, on the day of his death, talking to his friends about the nature of the psyche: he is determined to discover whether the psyche survives death, or whether, as certain theories dictate, it perishes when the body perishes. The dialogue produces a battery of arguments, developed with great sophistication, to show that the psyche is indeed immortal. The arguments — together with subsidiary reflections produced in the Republic and the Phaedrus — repay close study. They are none of them cogent, and they are too complex to be profitably summarized, but one point about them is worth mentioning: in arguing for the immortality of the psyche, Socrates is arguing for his own immortality — in the Phaedo he believes that he has proved that he will survive his death. In other words, Socrates' psyche is the very same thing as Socrates: the one survives if and only if the other does. That is thoroughly consistent with the general Greek notion of psyche, and it shows that Plato, unlike many Christian thinkers, did not regard the person as a compound of body and soul, only one component of which can achieve immortality. My soul may be a part of me; my psyche is me.
The doctrine that the psyche has 'parts' is expounded in the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Timaeus. According to the Republic, the psyche is composed of an appetitive, an emotional, and a rational part. Plato argues for this tripartite division from the existence of certain types of psychological conflict; for example, a desert traveller may feel thirsty and experience a strong desire to drink from a well, while at the same time his reason (observing that the well is insanitary) urges him not to drink. Since one and the same thing cannot at one and the same time possess opposite properties (a single and undivided psyche cannot at the same time both urge the traveller to the well and hold him back from the water), it follows that the psyche contains at least two distinct parts.
Plato's tripartition of the psyche has been compared to Freud's distinction among the id, the ego, and the superego, and certainly it is very different in style from Aristotle's division of the various psychological faculties. Moreover, the basis of Plato's tripartition is logically dubious, and it is not clear if the tripartition is meant to be exhaustive or even exclusive. (Plato himself hints at a more refined and numerous partition, and elsewhere in the Republic he assigns appetites to the rational part of the psyche itself.) The fact is that Plato is not primarily concerned, as Aristotle was, with analytical psychology: his interest in the psyche centres on its role as a source of human behaviour, and in particular of moral action. The 'rational part' of the psyche is the morally superior part — the part that ought to govern our actions; and Plato singles it out, not from a desire to develop a detailed psychological theory, but because he wants to attend to the place of reason in the ethics of human action.
In the Timaeus (and also in a short passage in the Theaetetus) Plato offers accounts of the psychological faculties which are similar in style and motivation to those of the Pre-Socratics and of Aristotle. But those contributions to analytical psychology are not particularly original: moral psychology — the study of the psychological conditions of moral activity — was the focal point for Plato's interest in the affairs of the psyche.
Plato's dialogues have often been translated into English. The best complete translation is still the Victorian masterpiece of Benjamin Jowett (now available, in a revised and more accurate form, in paperback).
(Published 1987)
— Jonathan Barnes
- Bibliography
- Hare, R. M. (1982). Plato.
