I*The Presidential Address

the truth of tripartition

by M. F. Burnyeat
In memoriam
Bernard Williams

abstract Since the arguments that Plato provides in the Republic for the
thesis that the human soul consist of three parts (reason, spirit, appetite) are
notoriously problematic, I propose other reasons for accepting tripartition:
reasons that we too could endorse, or at least entertain with some sympathy.
To wit, (a) the appetitive part of Platos divided soul houses desires and
tendencies we have because we are animal bodies programmed to survive
(as individuals and as a species) in disequilibrium with a variegated, often
varying environment, (b) the spirited middle part houses status concerns
that belong to us as social animals, while (c) what makes us rational animals
is a faculty of reason, conceived in strikingly non-Humean terms, which
determines what is best all things considered. Other psychic tendencies may
then be explained in terms of the education and mutual interaction of the
three parts we are programmed for from birth.

N o tutor would accept from a pupil the reasons given

by Plato for . . . the doctrine that the Soul is tripartite.
So wrote Gilbert Ryle (1947) in a welcoming review of Karl
Poppers much vilied attack on Platos political philosophy in
The Open Society and its Enemies.1 Already in antiquity there
was dissatisfaction with the Republics arguments for the thesis
that the human soul consists of three parts. But only Oxford
would express it in terms of the weekly tutorial. Thus is ideology
shaped by institutions.
My own view is that some truths are too important to stand or
fall by mere argument. I shall, nonetheless, oer reasons why we
should accept that a fairly weak version of the tripartition thesis

1. The welcome was because Popper engaged seriously, if too loudly, with Platos
philosophical arguments and thought.
*Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held in Senate House, University of London,
on Monday, 10th October, 2005 at 4.15 p.m.
2 m. f. burnyeat

is true. These reasons will at rst sight be entirely dierent from

those that Plato has Socrates put forward in Republic IV. No
matter. Plato himself warned, many centuries before Ryle, that
the method pursued in Republic IV is inadequate to establish a
properly accurate account of the soul. He accepts that there is
room for another approach.
No reader can fail to see that the divided soul is fundamental
to the entire enterprise of the Republic. Without it the city-
soul analogy, in terms of which the virtues are dened, will not
work, so the moral arguments of Books IV, VIII and IX, as
well as the theory of art in Book X, will fail. It is obvious also
that tripartition stands in a problematic relation to two well-
known Socratic theses, that virtue is knowledge and that no-
one does wrong willingly. For the divided soul makes certain
kinds of akrasia possible in a way that Socrates notoriously
denies.2 Yet the introduction of the divided soul in Book IV
is precisely the place where Plato has Socrates reveal that we are
following a second-best method, which he contrasts with a longer
method:

Let me tell you, Glaucon, that in my opinion we shall never

apprehend this matter accurately from such methods as we are
now employing in discussion. For there is another longer and
harder way that conducts to this. Yet we may perhaps discuss it
on the level of our previous statements and inquiries. (435d)3

The question is whether the soul really has three parts as the
ideal city does. By our present methods there is no chance of
an accurate or precise answer. This is recalled at 504ad: because
we are not taking the longer route, we are only working with a
sketch of the virtues.
I believe that the second-best character of our present method
is due to its reliance on one or more hypotheses which depend
on the agreement of the interlocutor. This becomes explicit, I
claim, when Socrates sums up the principle on which all the

2. This is not to say, with Bobonich (2002), 2178, 259, that explaining akrasia is a
main goal and accomplishment of Platos soul division.
3. All Republic translations are from Shoreys Loeb edition (193035), with
occasional revisions.
 the truth of tripartition 3

Republics arguments for dividing the soul depend, the Principle

of Opposites:

No such apparent counter-examples, then, will disconcert us or

get us to doubt that it is impossible for the same thing at the
same time in the same respect and the same relation to suer, be,
or do opposites. They will not me, I am sure, said he. Still,
said I, in order that we may not be forced to examine at tedious
length the entire list of such contentions and convince ourselves
that they are false, let us proceed on the hypothesis that this is
so, having agreed that, if it ever appear otherwise, everything we
have deduced from this principle will be lost.4 (437a)

If the divided soul rests on hypothesising the Principle of

Opposites, and the account of the virtues in Book IV rests on
the divided soul, then the proof that justice ensures happiness
likewise rests on a hypothesis. Indeed, all the moral arguments of
the Republic rest on hypothesis and the interlocutors agreement.
(So too does the further soul division, between reason and sense-
perception, brought in for Book Xs theory of art.) Contrary
to a common misconception, the Republics moral arguments
are not aimed at persuading an extremist like Thrasymachus,
who was left subdued rather than convinced at 358b. As with
the arguments in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, their target is
decent, well brought-up persons like Glaucon and Adeimantus,
who accept without argument that justice is a virtue (427e), which
Thrasymachus atly denied (348cd). The aim of these proofs


(504b 4:
o ) is to instill, not knowledge but, adamantine
conviction (o
) that justice is the better choice, both for life
and for death (618e619a; just what Glaucon demanded at 360b).
So what?, you may say, The Principle of Opposites is a
logical truth; there can be no risk in taking it as the basis
for argument. To this I reply that, even if the principle is a
logical truth (not that any Greek had that concept as we now
use it), it may still fail to do the argumentative work Socrates
expects from it. And many readers of Republic IV and X have
found the arguments for dividing the soul less than compelling;
understandably, in my view, for if the Principle of Opposites is

4. Not invalidated (Shorey, Reeve), which threatens to equate being unproven with
being falsied.
4 m. f. burnyeat

indeed a logical truth, the real life examples to which the proofs
appeal do not fall under it (they are not opposites in the relevant
sense), while if the examples do fall under the Principle, their
reality shows it to be false.5 So I shall not discuss the proofs.
Please do not press me to come to the aid of those arguments.
They are not what I want to discuss. Instead, I shall try to nd
other reasons that Plato could give in favour of dividing the soul.
Even better, I shall look for reasons that we too could endorse,
or at least entertain with some sympathy.
The weaker the substantive theoretical commitments of those
reasons, the better from Platos point of view. He takes great
care, when writing the Republic, not to make the main moral
argument depend on the high metaphysics of the Theory of
Forms. That would be on the map of the longer route, but
readers nd it conned within the digression (so-called at 543c)
of the central Books VVII. The welcome implication is that
we do not have to understand or believe the Theory of Forms to
be motivated to pursue justice for its own sake, as an intrinsic
good.6 Not until late in Book IX do we reach two subsidiary
arguments exalting the pleasures of the philosophic life, the
second of which (583a588d) does draw on the metaphysics and
epistemology of the central books.7 A mere ve Stephanus pages
to set beside the main moral argument extending over the better
part of three whole Books (IV, VIII, IX) down to 580c. Similarly,
the less contentious Socrates account of the human soul, the
better the prospects for his attempt to persuade readers that they
will ourish if they pursue justice for itself.

5. Their reality shows it to be false unless we accept a certain interpretation of

Timaeus 37ac, 43a44c, 89e90d, 91e92a. If, as some of us believe (following Sedley
1997 and Sarah Broadie), Plato in such passages thinks of the souls movements
as spatial movements in quite as literal a three-dimensional sense as the opposed
bodily movements at Rep. 436ce or the archer drawing his bow at 439b, where
the argument from the Principle of Opposites is clearly sound, then the Timaeus
oers a perspective from which one can give the talk of psychological movements at
Rep. 437bc and 439bd a similarly spatial sense, thereby vindicating the conclusion
that distinct parts are involved. But this potential consolation does nothing to help
readers of the actual arguments of the Republic itself. It merely conrms that the
dialogue is indeed following a second-best method, which minimizes (deliberately, I
suppose) the theoretical commitments invoked to support the main moral argument
of the dialogue.
6. Compare Williams (2006), 12830, 1335, on how little we need to know about
the Form of the Good to be persuaded to pursue justice as an intrinsic good.
7. This independence of the main moral argument is well argued in Scott (2000b).
 the truth of tripartition 5

I
My starting point is a passage, towards the end of the last Book
of the Republic, which looks back on the long journey we have
travelled:

Nor must we think that in its truest nature the soul is the kind
of thing that teems with innite diversity and unlikeness and
dierence in and with itself. How am I to understand that?,
he said. It is not easy, said I, for a thing to be immortal which
is composed of many elements not put together in the very best
way, as now appeared to us to be the case with the soul.8 It
is not likely. Well, then, that the soul is immortal our recent
argument and our other proofs would constrain us to admit.
But to know its true nature we must view it not marred by
communion with the body and other evils as we now contemplate
it, but consider adequately in the light of reason what it is when
puried. Then you will nd it to be a far more beautiful thing
and will more clearly distinguish justice and injustice and all the
matters that we have now discussed. But though we have stated
the truth of its present appearance, its condition as we have now
contemplated it resembles that of the sea-god Glaucus whose
primordial nature can hardly be made out by those who catch
glimpses of him, because the original members of his body are
broken o or mutilated and crushed and in every way marred
by the waves, and other parts have attached themselves to him,
accretions of shells and sea-weed and rocks, so that he is more
like any wild creature than what he was by naturejust so, I say,
we are contemplating a soul that is marred by countless evils.
But we must look elsewhere, Glaucon. Where?, said he. To its
philosophising. And we must note the things it apprehends and
the things it yearns to associate with, as being itself akin to the
divine and the immortal and to eternal being, and so consider
what it might be if it followed the gleam unreservedly and were
raised by this impulse out of the depths of this sea in which it
is now sunk, and were cleansed and scraped free of the rocks
and barnacles which, because it now feasts on earth, cling to
it in wild profusion of earthy and stony accretion by reason of
those feastings that are accounted happy. And then one might

8. The reference is to the conicted soul of 603cd, and through that to the entire
Book IV discussion. The implication has to be that, unless appearances are in some
way misleading, the soul is not immortal. But read on.
6 m. f. burnyeat

see whether in its real nature it is manifold (o 

) or single
(oo
), or what is the truth about it and how. But for the
present we have, I think, fairly well described its suerings and
the forms it assumes in this human life of ours. (611b612a)

The Republic discussion has been about the soul as it exists in

human form, not about its true nature, which according to the
Platonic Socrates is only displayed when it is on its own apart
from the body. If we could contemplate its original statethe
state we approximate to when engaged in philosophisingwe
would have a much clearer understanding of justice and injustice
and of everything else we have been through in the discussion
now nearing its end.
The only denite claim made about the soul on its own apart
from the body comes at the beginning of this quotation: the
soul is not essentially divided in such a way as to be at variance
with itself. The conictedness we examined at such length in
Books IV and X belies the souls true nature; it is appearance,
not reality. This does not entail that the soul is not divided
or composite at all. If we look for a positive characterization,
we nd a disjunction: either it is composite or it is single and
uniform (612a 4: 
 o 
 
 oo
), the rst option
being qualied by a condition stated at 611b: no composite of
many parts can be immortal unless it is put together in the
nest way. Granted immortality, which Socrates has just argued
for, the conclusion we are left with is that the soul in its true
nature must be either uniform or a wondrously well-wrought
composite.
As it happens (presumably, not by accident), each of these
options is taken up in a dialogue which is so written as to
presuppose the Republic.

(1) In the Phaedrus the soul is a composite imaged as a

charioteer representing reason and two horses representing spirit
and appetite. A gods soul is tripartite as well as the human
soul, and it is a god because it knows the Forms (249c 56).
That is how all we souls began (249bc), whole (oo
o) and
free of the evils of our present embodied state (250c). So long
as such a soul gets its intellectual nourishment from the Forms,
both horses are good and cause no troubletheir nourishment
 the truth of tripartition 7

is ambrosia and nectar, the substances which sustain the

immortality of the notoriously unintellectual Olympian gods. It
is only with the loss of knowledge by some chance (248c 6:
   



) that the wings drop away, with the
result that one horse gets restive and drags the soul down to
live in a human body, where the psychological conicts caused
by the bad horse are brilliantly described. The Socratic paradox
that virtue is knowledge remains true, but only from a cosmic
perspective. In this life we have a soul divided against itself and
liable to conicts of the sort we read about in the Republic.
About knowledge and virtue Socrates was fundamentally right.
But about actual human life he was wrong.
(2) The same conclusion can be reached by a dierent route
in the Timaeus, which expressly announces itself as a sequel of
sorts to the Republic. In the Timaeus too we have a tripartite soul,
each part with its own location in the body: reason in the head,
spirit ( o) in the heart, appetite in the lower region around the
liver. But reason has a dierent origin from the other two parts.
The rational soul is created by the Demiurge, spirit and appetite
by the Lesser Gods when the Demiurge decrees that reason be
embodied as a challenge to seek virtue, happiness, and salvation.
The Lesser Gods are the Sun, Moon, and other heavenly beings
who produce the cycles of generation, growth and decay in the
world below. In other words, the lower two parts of the soul are
the result of embodiment, and they perish at death. Only reason
is immortal. The conictedness which in the Phaedrus was the
cause of embodiment, in the Timaeus is its result. Either way,
tripartition is true of the soul as it is in this world. And that is
the thought I would like to develop here.

Not all of you, I guess, believe that the soul survives death.
Very few, I imagine, believe that your soul pre-existed your
birth. (The religions which have shaped Western culture are so
inhospitable to the idea of pre-existence that you probably reject
the thought out of hand, for no good reason.) But everyone,
I suppose, even an outright materialist, can contemplate the
signicance for human psychology of our embodied existence
in the physical world. We are so embodied, however that came
about. How does embodiment constrain our psychological make-
up? That is my starting point for this discussion.
8 m. f. burnyeat

Consider the question Socrates asks at 436ab:

Do we learn with one part of ourselves, feel anger with another,

and with yet a third desire the pleasures of nutrition and
generation and their kin, or is it with the entire soul that we
do each of these things?

The answer will be that we do each of these things with a different

part. This list of things done is our rst lead-in to the three parts
of the soul. Nourishment and generation are easily seen to go
together as aspects of our life as animals. We need nourishment,
as any animal does, because animals live in disequilibrium
with their environment. They must take in appropriate stu
to keep going. And they must reproduce to keep their kind
going. Neither of these things would happen unless they were
physically equipped to do it and psychologically programmed
(to appropriate a modern idiom) to use their physical equipment
for that purpose. As for the phrase and their kin, where Socrates
hints at further members of the family of appetitive desire, the
ensuing discussion suggests that we could add keeping warm or
cool (437de, 440cd), avoiding physical pain (440c), and no doubt
others. Let me suggest, then, that the appetitive part of Platos
divided soul houses desires and tendencies which we have because
we are animal bodies programmed to survive (as individuals and
as a species) in disequilibrium with a variegated, often varying
environment.
This is not said in so many words in the Republic, but it is
said at Timaeus 70de: the part of the soul that has appetites
for food and drink and whatever else it has a need for because
of the nature of the body. A positive purpose is implied here.9
We are embodiedthat is the challenge the Demiurge has set
usso we do need to cater for the bodys requirements. Just
so, the Republic counts as necessary desires not only those that
we cannot divert or suppress, but also those that are benecial
to us. For example, the appetite for enough bread plus meat
or sh to keep oneself in health and good physical condition
(558d559b), not just enough bread for survival. The principle of
grouping may be imprecise and open-ended, but I submit that it

9. Well brought out in chap. 7 of Johansens refreshing (2004); cf. Rep. 442b.
 the truth of tripartition 9

is intelligible and should be acceptable to those who are sceptical

about immortality and pre-existence.

II
For the middle part of the soul we need to take account of
the fact that we are not only animals, but also social animals.
Socrates initial example of what we do with the middle part
of the soul is getting angry, as evidenced in the pugnacity of
northern peoples such as the Thracians and Scythians (435e
436a). We could hardly guess at this stage that the key illustration
for the middle part of the soul will be a case of being angry
with oneself, out of disgust at ones own appetitive desires. The
truth is that anger straddles the boundary between non-social
and social animals. To show that anger is disjoint from reason,
Glaucon will cite newly born children who, long before the age
of reason, can be full of a rage that is perhaps best described as
unfocussed fury (441ab): the fury is clearly expressive, but one
may wonder whether it is an attempt to communicate. Socrates
at once adds animals, and here we may think of the image of
the tripartite soul at the end of Book IX, where spirit appears
as a lion or snake (588d, 590b). A lions anger is a defensive,
warning reaction to the threat of attack, for example, but it is as
communicative as a snakes hiss in similar circumstances.10
Yet communicativeness is still not enough. We only get to
anger as an essentially social reaction with the example of
Odysseus rebuking his heart at 441b. Odysseus, as ancient
readers familiar with the original context at the beginning of
Odyssey XX would know, was angry and indignant at the way
the maids in his household were cavorting with the suitors.
He restrains his anger because he is still pretending to be a
beggar and has not yet revealed that he is the master of this
house, the King of Ithaca returned from his wanderings. His
angry indignation has everything to do with his status as the
real master of the household where this unseemly behaviour is

10. See 590b for the suggestive imaging of the middle part as both lion and snake.
Thrasymachus began as a wild beast (336b), but was reduced by Socrates to the
condition of a charmed, quiescent snake (358b). In their communicativeness, both
roar and hiss go beyond the mere arousal in the face of danger which Tim. 70c
locates in the middle part.
10 m. f. burnyeat

going on.11 Little do they know it, but the maids and suitors
are insulting him in the most outrageous manner imaginable.
We are reminded (441b 4) that the words with which Homer
gives voice to Odysseus restraint were quoted earlier (390d), in
the discusssion of art and culture, as a model for the young
warriors of the ideal city to emulate.12 Concern for ones status
and honour is an essentially social phenomenon. It presupposes
an ongoing set of social relations in a way the lions angry roar
does not. The middle part is the honour-loving part (550b),
and consequently also the part to house ones sense of justice
(440cd). For status, honour and justice are bound up with other
people and how they regard and treat you.13 It is only through
this concern for others regard that we can understand the
extraordinary story of Leontius:

I once heard a story, I said, which I believe, that Leontius

the son of Aglaon, on his way up from the Peiraeus under the
outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies
that lay at the place of public execution, simultaneously felt a
desire to see them, and a repugnance and aversion. For a time
he resisted and veiled his head. But then, overpowered by his
desire, with wide staring eyes he rushed up to the corpses and
cried, There, you wretches, take your ll of the ne spectacle
( ov 
ov 

o). I too, he said, have heard the story.
(439e440a)

Leontius public display of disgust with his own eyes (you

wretches) illustrates the possibility of conict between appetitive
fascination, on the one side,14 and a sense of shame on the

11. A point rst made with the emphasis due to it by Cooper (1984), at 1316.
12. This inclines me not to go along with Cooper in saying that the conict reects
a corruption of spirit in Odysseus upbringing.
13. It is true that nowadays we know that wolves, monkeys and various other animals
have hierarchies, relations of dominance and status. But what that shows is that
there are more social animals than even Aristotle realised: the hierarchy of his bees
and other political, but non-human, animals is xed by nature, not the product of
interaction. Homer himself compares Odysseus inward growl at the misbehaviour
in his household to a bitch growling to protect her puppies from a man she does
not know (Od. XX 1416)which not only implies a background of humans she has
interacted with, but might bring to mind the philosophical dogs of Rep. 375e376c.
14. Probably a sexual interest in pale youths. Despite the fact that this explanation
rests on an otherwise unmotivated emendation of a corrupt fragment of Theopompus
Comicus, it has going for it the fact that a sexual desire in conict with anger would
 the truth of tripartition 11

other. He cannot himself see his wide, staring eyes, so we

have to suppose one or more onlookers who also heard him
denounce his base desires.15 Otherwise the story would not have
got aroundindependently it would seemto both Socrates and
Glaucon. Leontius humiliates himself in an attempt to rescue his
reputation. And now, thanks to Plato handing on the story to
readers of the Republic down the ages, Leontius is doomed to
blush for ever.
The key word in the story is ne (
o). It is used ironically,


of course, implying its opposite ugly, disgraceful (
o).
The corpses are not beautiful and staring at them is not
an appropriate way to behave. They are there to be noticed
(see what happens when you nd yourself on the wrong side
of the Athenian justice system), but no decent person would
(want to) linger over the sight. Both the corpses and Leontius
attitude are involved, because in Greek usage the opposite terms



o-
o range from the aesthetic to the ethical. Bernard
Williams writes,
They can have a purely aesthetic sense, but in their connection
with action and character, they relate centrally to dimensions of
honour and shame. This is often in Greek thought understood
in an external and conventional sense, so that it is a matter of
ones reputation, how one is seen or spoken of, but the values
can be more deeply internalized, and the distinction becomes one
between things that agents can be proud of, and think well of
themselves for having done or been, as opposed to things for
which they despise themselves, feel ashamed or embarrassed or
contemptible.16

When designing the cultural formation of the ideal citys military

class in Republic Books IIIV, Plato makes much use of

be unambiguously an appetite warring with anger, and an appetite warring with

anger is precisely the case that Socrates wants to prove. Furthermore, as Danielle


can mean sexual arousal
Allen (2000), 253 pointed out, the fact that the word o
as well as anger makes intelligible Glaucons initial thought at 439e 5 that the part
where it is housed might well be the appetitive part. At Phdr. 254c 7 the lustful black
horse does indeed rage in fury against the better horse.
15. Needless to say, this is a point about Platos literary presentation of the story,
regardless of such historicity as may be implied by the emendation mentioned in the
previous note.
16. Williams (1997), 62. For the role of shame in Greek (and, indeed, our own)
ethical experience, he refers us to his (1993), esp. Chap. IV and Endnote 1.
12 m. f. burnyeat

honour-based values deriving from spirit. The soldiers are

encouraged to aspire to glory and are rewarded with public
honours and a happiness greater than that of an Olympic victor,
because their victory is ner and more splendid (465d: 
).
And he sees a remarkably close connection between their sense
of honour and their sense of beauty:
And is it not for these reasons, Glaucon, that music is the
most decisive factor in ones upbringing? It is above all rhythm

and attunement (
o 
) that sink deep into the soul and take


strongest hold upon it, bringing grace ( 
o 
), and making
one graceful, if one is rightly reared - but if not, it has the opposite
eect. Secondly, someone who has been reared in music as they
should will be the sharpest at spotting defects in things that
are badly (`

)
crafted or badly grown. Rightly disgusted
by them, they will praise things that are ne (

), delighting
in them and welcoming them into their soul. With such
nourishment they will grow up ne and good (
o  

o)

themselves. Ugly things (


), by contrast, they will rightly
decry and hate while still young and as yet unable to understand
the reason. But when reason comes, someone brought up this
way will greet it as a friend with whom their rearing had made
them long familiar. (401d402a)17

Even if in todays Western world we nd the language of

honour somewhat foreign to us, it is undeniable that we are still
often motivated by ideas about how we are judged by others.
Shame, for example, is an essentially social emotion, as is much
anger, which Aristotle denes as a desire, accompanied by pain,
for apparent revenge in response to an apparent, undeserved
slight against oneself or ones own (Rhet. II 2, 1378a 3032); the
social is involved here at more than one level. Since the Leontius
story describes shame as anger with oneself, it is no surprise
when the Phaedrus locates shame in the horse representing spirit
(253de, 256a; compare, perhaps, Rep. 560a, 560d). Even if we
are mildly uncomfortable with talk of honour, the language of
status or standing remains familiar. Academics above all are
aware of how much status they have recently lost in society at
large, yet how much their standing in the profession depends

17. I discuss this passage and its implications in Burnyeat (1999), 217222.
 the truth of tripartition 13

on their colleagues opinion of them. But whatever you think

ought to count towards status, status-concernsconcerns about
how we are regarded by othersseem to me to be a reasonable,
if again rough and ready, grouping of desires and tendencies in
the psyche. They form a set of reactive attitudeshere I borrow,
because I think it deeply appropriate, a phrase from Strawsons
famous essay Freedom and Resentmentthat we have because
we are social animals.18

III
The next grouping is evident. We are not only animals, not only
social animals, but also rational animals. However, if we are
to understand Plato here, we must set aside the impoverished,
instrumental conception of reason epitomized by Humes famous
dictum that reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the
passions. In Plato, Aristotle and other pre-Christian thinkers
reason has desires and tendencies of its own, to seek the truth
and achieve the good. Go back to Odysseus at 441c: as Plato
describes the case, what holds spirit in check is some part
that has calculated about what is better or worse. Note the
comparative. Reason surveys the options: should I strike out
and punish the maids at once, or continue with my cunning plan
to devise a favourable opportunity to get back at both maids
and suitors in one go? Reason looks for the solution which
in the circumstances is best overall, best all things considered.
In the ideal case its wisdom enables it to determine what
is best overall for each part of the soul and for the body
(442bc).
Remember also the central, open-ended question of the
Republic, How best to live?. Reason not only calculates the
means to antecedent goals, it determines which ends of life are the
best to pursue. Only in the unjust characters of Books VIIIIX
does reason take its end from the passions, i.e. (in Platonic
terms) from spirit (the timocratic type who pursues honour as

18. The phrase is introduced in Section III of Freedom and Resentment, pp. 46
in Strawson (1974). Among his examples are resentment and gratitude, kindness
and rudeness. Hobbs (2000) 3037 gives a beautiful snapshot summary of the
characteristics of the middle part of the soul treated as a set of motivational
dispositions.
14 m. f. burnyeat

his main goal in life) or from one or another kind of appetite

(the oligarchic, democratic, or tyrannical types). That precisely
is reason becoming slave to the passions, but in Platos view it is
very far from what ought to be. If ought implies can, then the
judgement that reason ought not to be enslaved to the passions
commits Plato to the thesis that reason can determine from its
own resources how best to live. Plato believes it can do this
because he believes that reason is programmed to seek the good
as well as the truth. Hence this important and famous passage:

Is it not apparent, that while in the case of what is just and

admirable (

` 
` 

) many persons would be ready
to do and seem to do, or to possess and seem to possess, what
seems19 just and admirable, regardless of whether it really is so,
when it comes to what is good, no-one is content to possess
things that appear good, but everyone looks for what really is
good, spurning mere appearance? Yes, indeed, he said. That,
then, which every soul pursues and does its utmost to obtain,20
divining that there is such a thing but yet baed and unable to
grasp what it is exactly, unable even to form a stable conviction
about it as about other things, and so failing to derive whatever
benet is to be had from other things, in a matter of such quality
and moment, can we allow such ignorant darkness to prevail in
those best citizens in whose hands we are to entrust everything?
Least of all, he said. At any rate I do not think, I said, that
the just and the admirable will have secured a guard of much
worth unless it be someone who knows exactly what makes just
and admirable things good. (505d506a)

A contemporary philosopher is unlikely to feel able to rise to

such heights, but a distant echo is perhaps to be heard in the
anti-Humean line developed by T. M. Scanlon in his recent
What We Owe to Each Other, which explicates good in terms
of reasons: reasons to promote or prefer something.

19. [M]any . . . seems borrowed from the translation of Davies and Vaughan (18684 ),
which captures better than all later renderings the relation of o to the two
preceding innitives.
20. So Apelt (19234 ), as against Shorey and many other translators, who render for
its sake does all that it does, which is precisely what Socrates is denying when he
contrasts attitudes towards what is just and admirable with attitudes towards what is
good. Irwin (1977), 336, n. 45, is clear on both the translation and its philosophical
import.
 the truth of tripartition 15

Problem: this would cover the objects of all three parts of

Platos divided soul, each of which responds to some kind of
perceived value in the objects of their pursuit. Reason in Platos
sense pursues what is good, spirit what is admirable, appetite
what is physically pleasurable. The division of the soul is, in
eect, the thesis that we come into the world programmed
to pursue these three types of value, each of which in the
appropriate circumstances will count as good in the dominant
modern broad sense of the word. Aristotle agrees:

There being three objects of pursuit and three of avoidance, the

noble (= admirable, 
o), the advantageous ( o), the


pleasant, and their contraries, the base (
o), the injurious,
and the painful, about all of these the good man tends to get
things right. (EN II 3, 1104b 3035)

Correspondingly, under the generic heading desire (o)

Aristotle distinguishes rational desire (o 
) for the good,
spirited desire ( o) for the noble or admirable, appetite


( 
) for the pleasant (e.g. DA II 3, 414b 2). He also agrees
with Plato that pursuit of pleasure is an inborn part of our
animal nature, that concern for the noble/admirable depends
on a good upbringing, and that the good, here specied as the
advantageous, is the object of mature reection. In other words,
the three objects of desire acquire motivating eect at dierent
stages of development.21
With so much agreement, it may seem churlish of Aristotle
to complain that Platos method of dividing the soul ought to
show up many more parts than he acknowledges (DA III 9, 432a
22432b 4; 10, 433b 14).22 But since, like me, Aristotle does not
explain what he takes Platos method to be, or what exactly
the argument is, I cannot complain. At least Aristotle does not
object, as students often do, to the very language of soul parts,
which he uses himself (e.g. DA I 1, 411a 26-b 3; III 4, 429a 1012;
Mem. 1, 449b 46; EN I 13). He knows there are plenty of
non-material things which have parts. Aristotelian forms are a

21. More detail in Burnyeat (1980), 6992.

22. For a judicious assessment of Aristotles debts to, and departures from, Plato on
this topic see Price (1995), chap. 3.
16 m. f. burnyeat

notable example, for they have parts corresponding to parts of

their denition, so that the question arises how they can be a
unity (Met. Z1011). And if you ask to be introduced to some
Aristotelian forms, the leading candidateson some accounts
the only candidatesare the souls of living things. Less dicult
illustrations for the idea of non-material parts are the three
parts of the ideal city, the ten Books of Platos Republic, the
movements of a symphony, the constituents of an argument or
proof, the factors and components of Euclidean numbers (Elem.
VII Defs 3 and 4).23 Given, then, that Aristotle can and does
accept a good part of Platos results, I gladly sign up as his
follower.

IV
What we are pre-programmed for is of course not identical
with what we end up with. What sorts of tastes, preferences,
and character-traits we develop depends on how the three parts
are educated and how they interact. For that, read on into the
central Books for the best outcome, into Books VIIIIX for a
series of worse and worse outcomes. As for the question how
comprehensive the tripartite psychology is, that depends on how
far it can explain, by reference (a) to education, (b) to internal
interaction, psychological phenomena not expressly included in
the initial programming.24
Take, for example, the love of money and gain, which is held
to characterise the lowest part of the soul (580e581a; cf. 586d).
Clearly, love of money does not attach to us simply qua animals.
No animal understands what money is. We have money because
we are social animals who cooperate to satisfy our needs by
exchanging the products of our specialized skills, as described in
Book IIs pioneering analysis of the advantages to everyone of
trade and the division of labour. That we so cooperate is already

23. Price (1995), 40 agrees. Others emphasise that Plato speaks as often or more


about three forms or kinds (
) of soul. True, but of little help, since Plato regularly
regards species of a genus as parts thereof: Euthyph. 12cd, Gorg. 466a, Rep. 536a,
Tim. 30cd, Soph. and Polit. passim.
24. Santas (2001), 1225 is useful here, emphasizing that what we are rst introduced
to in Book IV is soul-parts in their natural or in-born state, prior to education and
development.
 the truth of tripartition 17

a function of our reason: we judge it in our best interests (369c

67). Money is the necessary medium of this cooperative
exchange (371bd). If our appetitive part comes to love money,
that is a learned response. Perhaps appetite satisfaction has been
habitually associated with greenbacks since childhood, perhaps
appetite has a more cognitive appreciation of money as the
means to secure the food, drink, and warmth (not to mention
sex) that we crave as animal beings. For present purposes
I need not decide between these and other developmental
stories.25 It is for the sake of this discussiona discussion of
human moral lifethat it is appropriate to call the appetitive
part the money-loving part (581a 37). It would not be
appropriate if the topic were animal appetite in general.
Likewise when it is said that appetite is most insatiate by
nature for wealth (442a). Appetite is by nature insatiable,
so in rational humans it is bound to fasten, insatiably, on
money.
After this example of reason aecting appetite, a case of
appetite aecting reason: the democratic mans appetite (yes,


  
is the word used) for philosophy or politics (561cd).
These are not appetites one could detect in a non-rational beast.
The creature they aict is a rational human whose reason is,
however, enslaved to appetites: not only the necessary ones, but
also quite unnecessary ones. His notion of the good is freedom
of expression for any and every desire that comes along, whether
necessary or unnecessary; his plan of life is to have no plan, no
priorities at all. The idea of doing some philosophy for fun is
a frivolity, a corruption of reason from its true purpose, which
is to seek and nd truth and the good. Likewise, playing the
politician by sounding o in ways that do not reect any stably
thought out policy. These are well classied as appetites because
their attachment to the object of pursuit is for the pleasure/ fun
of it, as opposed to for the good of it. But they are no part
of our biological make-up. They derive from the upbringing,
elaborately described in 559d561a, through which this pathetic
person came into being. Appetites conquest of his reasoning part
has the result that even desires expressive of reason become as

25. The rst is well told by Lorenz (2004), 11012, the second by Annas (1981),
12830.
18 m. f. burnyeat

eeting and whimsical, as quickly satised or forgotten, as the

urge to diet for a day (561c).26
A more important case to look at is grief. 606a speaks of


the irrational part as by nature such as to desire (  )
and hunger for tears and lamentation when the person has
been struck by a misfortune such as the death of their son. I
imagine that this counts for Plato as an appetitive emotion, not
only because it obstructs deliberation, but also, in part at least,
because tears pour out the grief in a very bodily way. The other
side of the coin is that the person is more likely to restrain their
tears and ght their grief when others are looking on:

Do you think he will be more likely to resist and ght against

his grief when he is observed by his equals or when he is in
solitude alone by himself ? He will be much more restrained,
he said, when he is on view. But when left alone, I fancy, he
will permit himself many utterances which, if heard by another,
would put him to shame, and will do many things which he would
not consent to have another see him doing. So it is, he said.
Now is it not reason and law that exhorts him to resist, while
that which urges him to give way to his grief is the bare feeling
itself ? True. (604a)

The role of shame before (not anyone, but) those he takes to

be his equals suggests some involvement of the middle part as
reasons ally or executive, contrary to the claim some have made
that the middle part is dropped in Book X. If I am right about
this, the management of grief involves us as social animals as well
as rational animals in the task of controlling our animal bodies.
Indeed, this example will serve as well as any Plato gives in
Book IV as empirical proof of the distinctness of his three rough
groupings of motivational springs of action. They are distinct
because they can and sometimes do oppose each other.27 This is
the break with Socrates, whom I, like many others, take to be
the awkward fellow envisaged at 438a as objecting that all desire

26. Here I am closer to Scott (2000a) 228 than to Cooper (1984) 12630, although
to my mind neither takes sucient account of interaction between the original three
parts.
27. This is much weaker than the claim implied in Book IV, that partition follows
logically from the premises agreed to by Glaucon. For some topics, as Aristotle knew,
induction is wiser than deduction.
 the truth of tripartition 19

is for what is good; even thirst, for example, being a desire, not
just for drink, but for good drink or drink which is good (for me
here and now). In dialogues like the Protagoras and Gorgias the
thesis that everyone always and only desires the good is a step-
ping stone to the famous paradox that all wrong-doing is due to
ignorance of what is good, so that akrasia is impossible. One can-
not both know what is good and act contrary to that knowledge.
True, Republic 505e still asserts, as we have seen, that everyone
desires the good and mostly fails to be right about what it is. But
the Republic denies that we only desire the good. We also desire
other things such as drink, without necessarily referring what we
desire to any idea of what is good. Granted, sometimes we do
so refer, but not always or necessarily.28 Desire for the good is
now located in the reasoning part, which we all have so that
we do all desire the good. Recall the description of Odysseus
rebuking his heart/spirit at 441bc: the source of the rebuke was
his (reasons) calculations about what is better or worse. That
is why Plato has Socrates argue at such length in 438a . that
thirst as such is the desire for drink as such, no more and no less.
Any qualication on the object desiredbe it that the desire is
for drink which is good or for drink which is coolis due to
some further factor. Thus a desire for a cool drink is no doubt
due to your feeling hot as well as thirsty. In this case the further
factor derives from the same appetitive part of the soul as the
desire for drink. But a desire for a healthy drink would involve
a factor introduced by the reasoning part whose distinctness is
to be proved by the argument from cases of conict between
longing to drink and reluctance to drink. Whatever the merits of
this argument, it shows that we must understand 505e as referring
to ones overall goal in life, not to any and every minor decision
we make. Indeed, 505e itself contrasts our attitude to the good
with our attitude to what is just and admirable.29
Many of us abide by the rules and conventions of our society
concerning what is just and admirable without worrying too
much whether it really is objectively so. I notice, for instance,
that we are all wearing clothes. Yet we might be hard put to it to

28. My thinking about these matters has long been inuenced by Irwin (1977),
chap. 7.
29. Recall n. 20 above.
20 m. f. burnyeat

explain what would be objectionable about a naked symposium.

It is something we just dont do around here, and we might be
arrested if we tried it out. By comparison, both authors and
audience care deeply about whether a philosophical paper is any
good or not. They want it to be really good, not merely to seem
so. Even the enslaved unjust characters of Books VIIIIX have
a notion, albeit a mistaken notion, of the good they aim at in
life, be it honour, wealth or untrammelled liberty. And both the
timocrat and the oligarch, even if not the democrat, can lapse
under temptation into acting contrary to their overall good, the
rst by acquiring extra wealth, the second by spending it to
satisfy an unnecessary desire. This is the admission of akrasia
and the break with Socrates. Yet I would suggest that rather
more is involved here than a disagreement over the possibility of
akrasia such as might be found in the philosophy journals today.
Implicit in the theory of the tripartite soul is a charge that
Socrates did not take sucient account of our animal nature or
of our being essentially social creatures. He went about Athens
trying to reform all and sundry by ratiocination, dialectical
examination. He failed in what he took to be his divinely ap-
pointed mission to the Athenians because he approached them
one by one as individuals, paying scant regard (1) to the cultural
and social institutions which formed their outlook, particularly
their sense of the ne (noble, admirable) and the disgraceful,
(2) to our animal physiology, to the fact that not everyone is as
seemingly immune as he to cold and sex. He talked as if reason
is the only source of desire; as if, once you know what is good,
that knowledge will so permeate your life that you fear only
what you ought to fear, and love only those you can do good
to, in a way that is good for you both, and will perhaps be able,
like Socrates himself, to withstand extremes of cold and alcohol
without impairment. In this world, that is an ideal one can at
best approximate to. If you want to improve peoples lives in this
world, you must take full account of our embodied condition in
society.
I would further suggest that the divided soul marks a
break, not only with Socrates, but also with a key element
in Thrasymachus view of human nature, an element that was
carried over into Glaucons challenge in Book II, to which
Socrates is responding. Thrasymachus assumed, and Glaucon
 the truth of tripartition 21

did not deny, that what lies deepest in human nature is pleonexia.
This term covers both the desire for more and more and the desire
for more than others have. It is both greed and competitiveness,
all rolled into one.30 The doctrine of the divided soul separates
these two aspects: greed is a vice of appetite, assertiveness a vice
of spirit. The separation has been prepared for since Book II
by the separation between the primitive economic city, which
provides only or chiey for bodily needsthe requirements for
life and reproductionand the luxurious city which introduces,
and tries to regulate for the best, the requirements for a good,
civilised life in a society which is more than a mere assemblage
of people cooperating to satisfy each others basic needs. In the
regulated, civilised city social relations are organised to promote
unity and amity throughout. Competitiveness is tamed and made
to serve the common good of all, thanks to the life prescribed
for the military class, whose spirited part will be so satised
with the honours and respect they receive that they will think
of themselves as happier than Olympic victors.
Another way of putting the points I have been sketching
would be to grant that Thrasymachus is largely right about
human life as currently lived, and Socrates largely right about
human life as it ideally could and should be lived, and then say
that the task of the Republic is to bring empirical reality and
the ideal to mesh more closely with each other, in both city and
individual soul. And for that it is essential to recognise, Plato
believes, that the soul embodied in this world is neither uniform
nor simply dual, but triple.
The big novelty here is triple. Greek literature is familiar
enough with vaguely conceived comparisons and contrasts
between reason and the passions. In Platos Protagoras the
position of the many is that knowledge of the good is often
overcome by anger, pleasure, pain, sexual desire, or fear (352bc),
and a similar view dominates Socrates rst discourse on love in
the Phaedrus: the one he delivers with head covered in shame
and then subsequently recants. Here he describes (237d238c)
two forces within us, irrational desire for pleasure and rational
judgement concerned with securing what is best. The former is
innate, the latter acquired. These two forces may be in harmony

30. Well discussed by Williams (1980), 1989.

22 m. f. burnyeat

or they may conict, in which case sometimes the desire for

pleasure wins, sometimes our better judgement. If the latter,
it is called temperance; if the former, then, depending on the
character of the conquering desire, it is called gluttony or some
other of a range of names for dierent kinds of excess. Both this
speech and the Protagoras account plainly intend to analyze the
presuppositions of ordinary moral vocabulary. In contrast, the
Republics innovative tripartition is part of what makes it
the rst work in the history of philosophy to take seriously the
fact that we are by nature social animals. By this I mean: to
take it seriously not only in political philosophy, but also when
it comes to analysing the moral psychology of individuals.31

All Souls College

Oxford, OX1 4AL

References
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 the truth of tripartition 23

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