The essence of Plato’s practical philosophy is that we should put our reasoning faculty in charge and follow it where it leads. As mentioned, I think there are two different routes to this conclusion, each having their own appeal. Perhaps you will find one more helpful than the other. The first route is via Plato’s recognition that there are two worlds – a world we see with our eyes and a world we see with our minds – and therefore there is a distinction between what ‘seems’ and what ‘is’. If we want to live well, we should strive to see what ‘is’ and not get caught up in what only ‘seems’ to be. Only the exercise of our reason can do this, so we should exercise our reason to do it.
The second route is via Plato’s idea about the tripartite soul. We have different competing parts of ourselves, and we only live well when we allow our reasoning faculty to be in charge.
Route #1: Use your reason to look beyond what ‘seems’ and see what ‘is’
The Platonic philosophical background for this lesson should by now be familiar: there is a distinction between what ‘seems’ and what ‘is’, between appearance and reality. It is only reason that can show you this distinction, and it is only reason that can penetrate mere appearance and find the true reality underneath. This is expressed, by Plato, as the distinction between the visible world and the intelligible world. The visible world ‘seems’, but only the intelligible world really ‘is’, and we use our reason to access the intelligible world.
A picture of a horse ‘seems’ like a horse, but it is not actually a horse. Perhaps that much is obvious. But what of two lines of equal length that, due to an optical illusion, seem to be of different lengths? What of food that ‘seems’ nice; is it actually good for you? What of a political leader who talks a good talk and seems to be telling the truth? What of a way of living that ‘seems’ like it should be a good life but instead leaves you feeling empty? It’s common sense really: you need to think it through and not trust only to appearances.
The applications in a therapeutic context are more obvious. Cognitive behavioural therapy has many applications of it. The most obvious of these come under labels like ‘emotional reasoning’. Essentially, just because you feel a certain way doesn’t mean it is actually the case. For example, say you have depression and are feeling suicidal: just because you feel like life isn’t worth living, doesn’t mean it’s not. It might seem that way, but there is a difference between what ‘seems’ and what ‘is’, and the ‘seeming’ alone is not enough to show you the real state of things. If you base your understanding of reality only on how things ‘seem’, you are very likely to miss something important. You need to apply your reason, break your chains, and pierce the veil of mere appearances. Once you do that, you will come to see more in the world, and in coming to see more in the world you have a better chance of seeing things as they really are. Like a chess-player sees more than just a random bunch of plastic shapes scattered on a flat surface; they see a world densely populated with meaning. It’s the power of intelligible understanding that’s doing the work here to see beyond what ‘seems’ to what ‘is’.
Or consider if you have anxiety or phobias. Whatever the source of your fear, it can certainly seem threatening in a very real way. But just because it seems threatening, doesn’t mean it actually is threatening. There is a distinction between what ‘seems’ and what ‘is’, and what ‘seems’ is not really real, whereas what ‘is’ is really real. You need to apply your reason, break your chains, and pierce this veil of mere appearances and get to the actual reality underneath. The majority of the time, when this is done, repeatedly, the ‘seeming’ disappears as the reality shines through; in coming to see the world as it is, rather than merely how it seems, your fear disappears. You realise it to be the shadow that it is. If, however, you continue to base your understanding of reality only on how things ‘seem’, then you will get stuck with a needless fear. You need to prioritise your reasoning faculty and look beyond the shadows.
This route to Plato’s conclusion is clear and clearly widely applicable. So much so that it seems a bit obvious and trite, even if we can acknowledge that it’s not meant to be easy (like Socrates crawling out of the cave). Most of the time we know that our fears, or our depressions, are irrational, but it’s of little use to point that out. Something is needed to break through and show us how it is irrational, or else show us a way out of that irrationality. Particularly with depression, something is needed to show us why we should care about being more rational.
Nonetheless, the message is clear: Do not be led by appearances. You should choose what you know is good, regardless of how it seems; you should turn away from what seems good, if you know it isn’t.
It is a basic rule to live by, even if it might be quite challenging to adhere to at all times. To my mind, it’s such a basic rule that its greatest danger is to be rendered trivial by being so obvious. Consider it in practice in this trivial example: You must get up for work or else you will be late. But the bed is comfy and you are tired; or at least it seems to you that the bed is comfy and it seems to you that you are tired. But are you too tired to get up? Have you really not had enough sleep to make it through the day? Of course not. So you’re not really tired. And is the bed really as comfy as it seems? Are you not capable of enduring the discomfort of rising out of it? You know it ‘is’ good to get up and not be late, and only ‘seems’ good to stay in bed, so apply your reason and pierce the veil of mere appearances and choose what ‘is’ and not what ‘seems’ good.
And you can run the same line of reasoning for diet and exercise, work and study, short-term and long-term gain, etc., etc. Often we know full well what the ‘right’ answer is to these questions. You know this, and you don’t need a philosopher telling you. What we need reminding of is why it is the right answer. Plato’s hierarchy of reality gives us that reminder by showing us what is really real. How things merely ‘appear’ to us is not what is really real. And so we shouldn’t let ourselves be led by mere appearances. It’s our reason – our ‘thinking things through’ – that enables us to understand this.
Route #2: The Tripartite Soul
A quick reminder of Plato’s ideas about the three parts of a human soul:
Firstly, we have ‘appetite’. This seeks pleasures and the satisfaction of bodily needs, it is averse to denying these, and it is fearful of pain and death.
Secondly, we have ‘spirit’. This seeks glory and reputation, freedom, and victory. It hates to lose; it hates to be constrained. It fears shame and humiliation, or to be meaningless or trivial.
Thirdly, we have a reasoning faculty, or ‘mind’. This seeks truth, and is averse to falsity and contradiction. It wants knowledge; it fears ignorance.
Does this ring true for you? Reflect on your desires. Some of these desires relate to bodily goods or things that indirectly reduce to bodily goods. Comforts and pleasures are the most directly obvious examples here, but you might also find that you have a desire to gain wealth, for example, which is not an obviously bodily good. But perhaps you only desire wealth in order to have money to spend on comforts and pleasures like holidays or expensive foods and drinks. So the desire for wealth is reducible to the bodily desire for comforts and pleasures. You might find that you desire someone’s good opinion, for example, and this isn’t an obviously bodily good; but perhaps you only desire their good opinion so that you might be able to have sex with them.
Some of your other desires relate to spiritual goods that do not necessarily reduce to bodily goods. You desire a clean conscience. You desire glory and reputation. You desire a reason to feel proud. These are feelings, it’s true, but it’s not clear that they relate to any bodily goods. Often these desires conflict with bodily goods, such as when you need to exert self-restraint and deny your bodily desires in order to achieve something that you can be proud of. Sometimes other desires can be spirit-based desires in disguise, such as when you desire wealth not for the pleasant things it can buy but because of the status being wealthy provides. Some people pursue wealth merely as a matter of competition; which must surely be true of the wealthiest in the world, who already have more wealth than they could ever spend in their lifetime and yet keep pushing for more.
In amongst the chaos of bodily and spiritual desires, you might find another distinct kind of desire, if you are philosophically inclined: you might find a desire for truth. This desire for truth does not seem to be for the sake of pleasure, or glory, or anything outside of itself. It is a desire for truth for its own sake. This, according to Plato, is what guides the reasoning faculty.
Plato says any human being, analogous to any political state, will never be free from their troubles until they put their reasoning faculty in charge. Only the reasoning faculty can properly govern the soul as a whole.
I think reflection on Plato’s tripartite soul, and the analogy with political philosophy, can be very useful. We don’t have to agree with Plato’s three categories here, or his distinctively ancient Greek reasons for prioritising the desires of ‘spirit’, let alone his wide-reaching criticisms of democracy. For it to be a useful tool for reflection, all we need to accept is that there are various parts of yourself that make you what you are. You can attach whatever labels you like to them. Amongst these parts of yourself you will find all manner of wants and desires, fears and ambitions, and many of them will pull you in different directions. The point to realise is that it’s up to you to decide which of these you allow to govern your life, and to what extent. You might not get to choose the parts that make you what you are – no one chooses to be burdened with an irrational fear – but it’s up to you to decide how to govern the parts of your soul.
There are many other ways of categorising the parts of your soul. Perhaps rather than drawing the contrast between ‘appetite’ and ‘spirit’, you draw the distinction between ‘wants’ and ‘fears’, or ‘desires’ and ‘aversions’. These will serve the same purpose. They explain why you might feel conflicted. You ‘want’ the job but ‘fear’ the interview. You ‘desire’ the tasty cake but are ‘averse’ to the excess calories. Something needs to step in here and decide which part of yourself should be followed. Do you want to be ruled by your fears, or by your wants? What is the right answer? Only the reasoning faculty is well-suited to answer this question.
The content of that picture of a soul will differ from person to person, so I can speak in representative examples only; perhaps they will ring true for you, perhaps they won’t. You need to find your own examples. But whatever the content, the structure or form will remain the same: there will be competing parts, those parts must be ruled by reasons of your choosing, and in order to live well as a human being those reasons must be chosen by your reasoning faculty, oriented towards an idea of goodness.
Consider a representative example: The anxious person has a fear – that is a part of them and it, in part, makes them who they are. But they must still choose whether to approach or avoid the object of that fear. They must decide whether to let that fear rule them. If they ask what the fear thinks is best – putting it to a democratic vote, as it were – it will only give them one answer here: ‘Run away!’ They need to decide whether to listen to that instruction or not. That decision-making process must involve finding another part of themselves that says something different. A practical application of Plato’s theory emerges from this: when you want to face a fear, look to those parts of yourself that say something different to the fearful part. Throw the focus on those parts of yourself, give them free rein and let them reign over you, at least for the moment. They will drown out the voice of fear.
If they looked to, borrowing Plato’s term, their ‘spirit’, they might find a different answer: ‘Attack it! Are you content to be defeated by a shadow?!’ Rebellious pride is as good a motivation to overcome fear as any other. Classical myths and history are full of these images: picture Leonidas and the 300 Spartans standing against the overwhelming might of Xerxes’ army. Or repeat the famous lines of a poet, speaking of the Roman ‘captain of the gate’ Horatius: ‘And how can man die better, Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.’
Alternatively, they can look to whatever ‘want’ might be satisfied by facing and overcoming the fear. The advice to people facing the fears of childbirth is often to focus on what comes after: they get to meet their beautiful baby. Keeping that ‘want’ clearly in mind helps to overcome the ‘fear’ that they need to face. Let their desire rule them and the feared object starts to look very different; merely a stepping stone to be stepped on and moved beyond on the way to better things.
Whatever and however you are, there will be competing parts of yourself, and you must decide how to govern yourself. Ultimately, living well will mean living only by the instructions of reason, whatever you decide they might be. That is the best and only way to ensure that you are aiming for the outcome that you want. You should put your inner philosopher in charge.
The Ship
Imagine you are a ship. The hull, mast, and sails are your ‘body’; your feelings, thoughts, ambitions and aversions, wants and fears, everything that makes up your ‘soul’, are the crew. The ship needs to sail, but in order to do so the crew needs to be organised. You need to hoist the sails, plot a course, catch the wind, and navigate the seas. The ship needs a captain. Who do you put in charge? Who tells the ship what to do and where to go?
Each of the crew members thinks they have the best claim to the captaincy. Your fears and aversions think they should be in charge, because they know where the rocks are, and you could wreck yourself on these rocks if you’re not careful; there are a lot of different fears though, and they all want to go in different directions to avoid different rocks, or else remain in port. Your wants and ambitions think they should be in charge, because they know where you want to end up; again, though, there are a lot of different wants and they all want to go somewhere different, and none of them really know how to get there. Your feelings think they should be in charge and they want you to know that they are the most powerful and can take control of the ship by force if they have to, so you’d better keep them on side… Your thoughts think they should be in charge because only they are in a position to explain themselves; they don’t have to resort to a power-grab like your feelings. Some of these thoughts have useful knowledge, like being able to navigate by the stars or read a map; others are less useful, more prone to getting drunk and singing bawdy songs.
You need to appoint a captain from amongst your crew: whom do you choose?
If you appoint your fears to be your captain, you will be led blindly back and forth, always avoiding rocks but never really getting anywhere. You start heading out west with the wind, but see a rock so turn back east against the wind. You carry along that course for a bit until you encounter a storm, so you turn and head south until you see more rocks, at which point you turn north…etc. You’re going nowhere, really, and it’s hard-sailing all the way. Eventually you start to run low on supplies so have to return to safe harbour, exhausted and not very inclined to return to sea any time soon.
If you appoint your wants to be captain, you’ll set a destination, say ‘Eastport’, and head out to sea. But you don’t really know how to navigate or set the sails, so you drift about for a bit whilst you work out how to get the ship going in the right direction. In the meantime, an argument breaks out in the crew about where the ship should be sailing. They are not willing to share power. There is a mutiny. A new want is appointed captain and a new destination is set: Southport. More navigational confusion follows, so another period of drifting, until you get on track and make some headway. Maybe you even land at your destination and make port. Unfortunately, many of the crew didn’t want to be at Southport; they’d rather be at Eastport. They are disgruntled. Over a few pints in the local tavern, another fight breaks out, and the dissident crew commandeers the ship to set out for Eastport once again. But they still don’t really know how to get the ship going in the right direction, so there’s more drifting, more arguments, and you end up going round in circles. You spend most of your time either at sea or in ports dealing with drunken fights amongst your crew.
If you appoint your feelings to be your captain, you go wherever the wind takes you. There is some good sailing, as you breeze along with the wind in your sails, heading out to open water. The sun is shining and everything is just lovely. But then you hit a storm. It batters your sails and sends you wildly off course. All you can do is batten-down the hatches and hold on for dear life, hoping against hope that the storm will pass. Sometimes, the storm passes, and you can sail in sunny days again. Sometimes the storm wrecks you on some rocks. No one can predict the weather.
If you appoint your thoughts to be your captain, you find that they can be very useful. The thoughts are willing to share power and divvy up the labour amongst the crew according to their strengths. Some thoughts ensure that you are well-prepared and well-supplied before you leave harbour. Some thoughts are able to listen to the other crew members – the wants, the fears, and the feelings – and learn from them, because each can offer something useful: the wants can tell you about desirable destinations, the fears can tell you about dangerous rocks, the feelings can tell you about sailing the ship smoothly with the wind. The thoughts can negotiate with all to settle on a course or destination that satisfies most. Some thoughts have learnt to use compass, clock, and sextant, and are able to navigate by the sun and stars. Some thoughts know how best to set the sails, to catch the wind regardless of its strength or direction, even to read the weather so that you can avoid storms. Other thoughts are less useful, it’s true: they mooch about on the deck causing trouble, berating the crew and getting dead-drunk. Sometimes these thoughts go so far as to call for a mutiny and even threaten to scupper the ship! Strict discipline is needed to keep them in check. Fortunately, unlike the other crew members, thoughts require and respond to a chain of command. Higher ranking thoughts are recognised as such because they are better able to sail the ship, and because of this knowledge they are understood to be more qualified to lead. Other thoughts will obey the orders of these higher-ranking thoughts, if they are pressed, because they can recognise that it’s in their interests to do so. So long as the chain of command is maintained, it’s clear sailing and you get where you want to go.
Sailing a ship is a tricky business. Only your thoughts are in a position to know how to sail the ship, so you should really put them in charge. It is very much in our interest to be guided by our reason. Only our reason really knows what’s it’s doing. The other parts of ourselves are only good and useful if they are put to good use by reason using them in the right way.
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