BMCR 2008.11.21, Jean-Franc,ois Pradeau, E/tudes Platoniciennes IV

Jean-Franc,ois Pradeau (ed.), E/tudes Platoniciennes IV. Les puissances
de l'a^me selon Platon.  Paris:  Les Belles Lettres, 2007.  Pp. 464.
ISBN 978-2-251-44332-4.  EUR 35.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto
([email protected])
Word count:  3000 words
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[The articles contained in this volume and their authors are listed at
the end of this review.]

The volume here reviewed is the fourth in a series that began in 2004.
Each volume contains essays on a particular topic in Plato and its
elaboration in the Platonic tradition, a "Bulletin Platonicien"
containing reviews of works on the topic in that year, and a
"Bibliographie Platonicienne" that aims to record all the publications
on Plato and the Platonic tradition in that year.  The first volume was
a rather eclectic collection of essays on Plato; the second focused on
Plato's Timaeus and the lengthy and complex history of reading that
dialogue; the third volume, like the fourth, focuses broadly on issues
relating to Plato's account of the soul, both human and cosmic.

Plotinus, uncharacteristically, grumbled that Plato sometimes spoke
"enigmatically" about the soul.  No student of the dialogues will have
any reason to doubt this.  As we learn in the rich first section of
this book, the ancient Greek term for soul, psyche^, was used prior to
Plato loosely for whatever it was that differentiated something living
from its dead successor.  To be ensouled was to be alive.
Philosophical difficulties (but also religious and legal difficulties)
begin when we ask about the relation between soul, thus considered, and
persons or human beings.  If the person is just the ensouled body or
living animal, then its demise is equivalent to the destruction of the
property of being alive.  A religious doctrine of reincarnation,
however, whatever its provenance may be, seems to require that soul
possesses some entitative status of its own such that it can be that
which reanimates another body.  For, if soul were just a property,
there would be no reason at all to maintain that it is reincarnated, as
opposed to simply acknowledging the generation of a new and different
living animal.  Apart from the religious doctrine of reincarnation, the
simple model of a person as a living animal eventually has to confront
the tension between conflicting criteria for personal identity, that
is, in terms of body or in terms of "soul" construed as the locus of
cognitional, affective, or moral attributes.  If it should turn out
that bodily criteria are different from "psychic" or "mental" criteria,
and if a priority is assigned to the latter, then there is potentially
at least one way of explaining how reincarnation is supposed to work.
Plato's dialogues are as much about these issues as about anything
else.  It is not possible in a review of reasonable length to give
details of the many complex and textually based arguments contained in
this volume.  I shall limit myself to discussing most of the papers in
the two sections of the volume concerned with cosmic, individual, and
demiurgic psychic identity.

Francisco Lisi begins his paper by noting the common scholarly opinion
that there is no unified psychic doctrine in Plato.  That is, there is
in the dialogues no single account of the soul that explains the
individual soul, the "soul of the universe" and (at least on one
standard interpretation) the soul of the Demiurge.  Lisi's concise
strategy for unifying the various claims made across the dialogues
consists in (a) focusing on the Idea of the Good as the principle of
unification and (b) suggesting that in fact the Idea of the Good and
the Demiurge are to be identified.  Lisi can thus argue that different
kinds of soul (cosmic, divine, human, and animal) are all produced by
the Demiurge in imitation of itself.  The various souls are
hierarchically ordered with respect to their proximity to the first
principle of all.

Lisi's position seems to respond to the Middle Platonic conundrum
regarding the relation among the first principle of all, intellect, and
soul.  If the first principle of all is the Demiurge and the Demiurge
is an intellect, and, as in the Timaeus, the immortal soul of human
beings seems to be just intellect, why should we not infer the psychic
nature of the first principle?  And yet, if the Demiurge creates soul,
must it not be intellect and nothing more?  The real problem here is
that if there is reason to distinguish soul and intellect, there is
also reason to distinguish intellect and the first principle.  What
Lisi wants to do is to make that first principle an intellect, thereby
undercutting the idea that the ultimate good for an individual soul is
entirely impersonal. But there is no evidence that Plato ascribed to
the Idea of Good what Lisi calls "a noetic nature".

Christopher Gill briefly reprises a theme of earlier works in which he
argued that the conception of the self in Plato's Alcibiades I is to be
distinguished sharply from a modern or contemporary conception; the
former is "objective-participative" and the latter is
"subjective-individualist".  Gill argues that in the Alcibiades I the
questions of self-knowledge and of the nature of the self are distinct.
Accordingly, self-knowledge interpreted as self-reflexivity is not a
part of the concept of the self.  And with the severing of
self-reflexivity from self, the subjective-individualist conception of
the self becomes irrelevant.  The key phrase is at 129b1 where Socrates
asks Alcibiades the question, "how can we discover what the self itself
(auto to auto is (cf. 130d4)".  Gill translates the puzzling Greek
phrase as "the itself itself" which certainly suggests that the
discovery of the nature of the self would be the discovery of something
objective, that is, something the knowledge of which would not be
limited to the subject.  This objective conception of the self
illuminates the Platonic ideas of assimilation to the divine and
achievement of the Good as themselves objective, that is,
non-idiosyncratic.  This sort of interpretation is more in line with an
impersonal Good, first principle of all, than is Lisi's.

I think Gill is right to insist that the Alcibiades I provides no
support for the subjective-individualist conception of the self, at
least as this has come to be understood in modern philosophy.  Yet I am
not convinced that we do not see beginning in that dialogue
self-knowledge construed as self-reflexivity, that is, as the awareness
by a subject of its own cognitive states.  Since for Plato the human
ideal is the achievement of a cognitive state, the self-reflexivity of
that state does not allow us to reduce the self to something that is
completely objective.  Thus, if knowledge, the highest form of
cognition, is self-reflexive, knowledge is subjective in the sense that
it is first-person, not third-person or objective, and not directly
transmittable.  Knowledge of the self could not be, for Plato,
something like scientific knowledge, communicable among selves.

Filip Karfik offers an analysis of the cognitive activity of the
Demiurge in Plato's Timaeus. The trick here for any interpreter is to
include all the parts of the story in a way that is both coherent in
itself and at least takes account of Plato's treatment of these
elsewhere.  These parts are: the Forms (or: the Living Animal), The
Good, numbers, the Receptacle, the inchoate constituents of the
Receptacle, the soul of the universe, and, of course, the nature of the
Demiurge himself. All of these are obviously intended by Plato to be
understood together.  Karfik makes an impressive attempt to do just
that.  Appealing to the Republic, he argues that the Demiurge achieves
his good in thinking the Forms.  (Karfik could have also appealed to
the Symposium, I believe.)  Appealing to the Phaedo, and ultimately to
Plato's interpretation of Anaxagoras in the Phaedo, he sees in the
Demiurgic intellect Plato's insistence on connecting theoretical
activity with its practical expression.  Thus, the desire for the Good
among intellects is achieved in thought and action is the natural
expression of that achievement.  This is the doctrine that Plotinus
expressed in Aristotelian language as the doctrine of internal and
external energeiai.

The intellectual activity of the Demiurge, Karfik rightly insists, is
not psychic activity; the immortal part of the soul of human beings
(their intellects) is in the Timaeus only an image of the pure
Demiurgic intellect.  The Demiurge imposes on the Receptacle and its
"contents" a mathematical order, the elements of which are the
mathematical intermediaries, representations of the intelligible
content of the Living Animal with which the Demiurge is eternally
cognitively identical. This makes the intermediaries, such as the World
Soul, the product of the Demiurge, and begins to illuminate the
puzzling Old Academic doctrine of the soul as a moving number.

I would disagree, however, with Karfik's further claim that the
quasi-qualities of the Receptacle prior to the imposition of
mathematical order by the Demiurge are themselves "traces" of the Forms
rather than traces of their current, cosmic versions. Thus, say,
precosmic fire is sort of like cosmic fire without the mathematical
arrangement of it.  We do not need to assume a Form of Fire to be other
than an ideal mathematical ratio.  But why should one pure mathematical
ratio be Fire and another one Water?  That is, why should one
qualitative array be matched up with one ratio and another with
another?  The need for an answer to this question is, as Karfik sees,
precisely why the Demiurge's Goodlike intellect is needed.  He imposes
his mathematical order in the best possible way.

Gwenae+lle Aubry provides an analysis of one example of the way that
Plotinus systematizes Platonic doctrine.  In the Alcibiades I and in
the Charmides, we seem to get two different views of the nature of
self-knowledge; the first pertaining to psychic self-knowledge and the
second to intellectual self-knowledge.  As Aubry shows, Plotinus
presents a sort of projective model, wherein the diverse accounts are
mapped onto a hierarchical metaphysics: psychic self-knowledge in
Ennead 1.1 and intellectual self-knowledge in 5.3.  What links these
two accounts for Plotinus is their commensurability in terms of
relative proximity to the Good, the first principle of all.  The
self-knowledge of the soul is a stage on the way to the self-knowledge
of intellect which, in its ultimate achievement, is constituted by an
intellectual vision of all that is intelligible in the Good.

In 1.1, for example, we find the tripartite division
soul/body/composite, which Plotinus interprets as separate
soul/embodied soul/animate body, in part because Plotinus accepts the
Aristotelian point that an inanimate body is not a body except
equivocally.  This is not exactly what Plato says, but if one's goal is
to articulate a philosophical position (call it "Platonism") that one
believes is revealed in part through Plato's dialogues, then one will
not hesitate to draw on other dialogues, where Plato comes much closer
to giving Plotinus' tripartite division or at least implying it, and
drawing upon Aristotle's insights as well as a means of expressing that
philosophical position.

If, as Plato seems to maintain, the immortal soul is an intellect, and
its immortality has some relevance to me, then my self-knowledge is
intellectual or self-reflexive, in contrast to the embodied psychic
self-knowledge of the Alcibiades.  I myself, insofar as I am embodied,
and insofar as I am ideally that separated intellect, am the link
between the two accounts of self-knowledge.  The transformation of the
self in achieving self-knowledge at the intellectual "level" is exactly
what achievement of one's own good amounts to.  According to Plotinus,
Plato taught that philosophy is the practice of the self-transformation
that is the achievement of self-awareness.  As Aubry points out, this
Platonic approach to self-knowledge does not easily fit in with a
supposed tradition of first-person primacy or subjectivity.  The
so-called autonomy of the self is denied implicitly by Plotinus in the
denial of its self-sufficiency; if the self were self-sufficient it
would be, counterfactually, the Good.

Olivier Renault addresses the issue of the tripartition of the soul in
the Republic.  He faces squarely and with a good deal of subtlety two
problems that have been raised for Plato's doctrine.  The first is that
the tripartition of the soul in Book IV does not seem to cohere with
the triparititioning assumed in Book VIII and IX.  The second is that
the conflict that supposedly "generates" tripartition seems to imply
that each of the three parts is itself sufficiently rational to engage
in conflict with the other parts.  Renault wants to resolve both
problems in the same way.  He distinguishes a subjective and an
objective point of view. According to the first, the rational self
observes the appetites or emotions that occur within it and adjudicates
among them.  This adjudication requires the rationalization of the
appetites and emotions and the application of reasons to decide on
whether or not to satisfy them.  In this way, there is no need to
postulate reason quarreling with, say, appetites, that provide  their
own reasons; rather, the single rational self reasons with itself.  The
parts of the soul are in fact psychic functions of a particular type of
soul, namely, a rational one.  According to the second, objective point
of view, the conflict described in Book IV is a metaphorical
representation that needs to be unpacked according to various
conceptions of the Good and of proximity to it.  Thus, identifying
one's own good as an appetitive good as opposed to an exclusively
rational good is a psychic defect.  It is a defect because the
particularity or idiosyncratic nature of the appetites is further
removed from the Good that is the exercise of universal reason.  The
grades of proximity to the Good are given a typology in Books VIII and
IX.  Psychic conflict represents a hierarchy of types of life.  This
allows us to see the different types of life as metaphorically
represented by the different psychic selves that are constructed in
action.

Anne Merker, in a lengthy and complex study, addresses some of the same
issues as Renault.  She argues that the appetitive part of the embodied
soul (to epithume^tikon) does not exhaust the sources of desire,
according to Plato.  For this reason, the real dualism for Plato is not
between soul and body (since all the "bodily" desires are in reality
those of an embodied psyche), but rather between the disembodied
immortal soul and the mortal soul, which is inseparable from a body.
This distinction is explicit in the Timaeus and it is an important
feature of Merker's study that she sees this in the Republic as well.

The correct account of Platonic dualism, therefore, enables us to see
the unity of embodied desire.  This unity is in turn both determined
and articulated by the unity of the Good which embodied persons seek.
The lack that is the fundamental property of desire is a manifestation
of the general incompleteness of all becoming that is oriented in the
direction of being (ousia).  All desire of whatever sort is desire for
real being, but only the intellect can attain this.  Intellectual
attainment--knowing--is the attainment of the Good.  Whereas
philosophical dialectic is the process whereby the Good is attained,
for the embodied person politics is the process which both makes
philosophy possible and provides for the possibility of the attainment
of as much of the Good as an embodied person can aspire to possess.

Since knowing that which is good for oneself is identical with knowing
the Good, and since knowing the Good is a necessary and sufficient
condition for desiring it, the Socratic paradox that no one does wrong
willingly is only paradoxical for the conflicted embodied person who
supposes that his good is determinable from an examination of his own
embodied desires.  Such a one is not in fact desiring what he wills.
Accordingly, it is perfectly consistent for Plato to maintain both that
no one does wrong willingly and that people are capable of acting
incontinently, that is, acting against their own interests, even as
they conceive of it.  On the one hand, to conceive of one's interests
as the satisfaction of embodied desire is to commit an intellectual
mistake; on the other, to conceive of one's interests exclusively as
attainment of the good is to become virtuous, which is to say,
impervious to incontinence.  The difference between authentic politics
and its sophistic counterpart is simply that the first recognizes this
and the second does not.

There are many other pieces in this collection well worth reading.  Any
Plato specialist should seriously consider an ongoing subscription to
this series.


Section 1: Ante/ce/dents, context, mode\les:
Marie-Laurence Desclos, "Le vocabulaire de l'analyse psychologique chez
les sophists."
Alberto Bernabe/, "L'a^me apre\s la mort: mode\les orphiques et
transposition platonicienne."
Sandra Boehringer, "Comment classer les comportements e/rotiques?
Platon, le sexe et ero^s dans le Banquet et dans les Lois."
Arnaud Mace/, "La surpuissance morale des a^mes savants a\ l'aune de la
procedure athe/nienne d'examen public des compe/tences techniques."


Section 2: L'a^me, puissance cosmique:
Francisco Lisi, "Individual soul, World Soul and the Form of the Good
in Plato'sRepublic and Timaeus."
Francesco Fronterotta, "Intelligible Forms, Mathematics, and the Soul's
Circles: an Interpretation of Tim. 37a-c."
Filip Karfik, "Que fait et qui est le demiurge dans le Time/e?"


Section 3: L'a^me humaine: le soi a\ l'e/preuve du multiple:
Christopher Gill, "La connaissance de soi dans l'Alcibiade de Platon."
Gwenae+lle Aubry, "Conscience, pense/e et conaissance de soi selon
Plotin: le double heritable de l'Alcibiade et du Charmide."
Olivier Renaut, "Les conflits de l'a^me dans la Re/publique de Platon."
Anne Merker, "Le de/sir chez Platon."


Section 4:  L'a^me, puissance cognitive:
Yvon Lafrance, "Les puissances cognitive de l'a^me: la reminiscence et
les Formes intelligible dans le Me/non (80a-86d) et le Phe/don
(72e-77a)."
Jan Szaif, "Doxa and Episte^me^ as Modes of Acquaintance in Republic
V."
Francisco Gonzalez, "Wax Tablets, Aviaries or Imaginary Pregnancies? On
the Powers in Theaetetus' Soul."


Section 5: L'e^me puissance pratique et politique:
John Cooper, "Socrate et la philosophie comme manie\re de vivre."
Annie Larive/e, "L'a^me pedagogue du corps. A\ propos d'une tension
entre le Charmide et le Time/e."
Mario Vegetti, "Politica dell' anima et anima del politico nelle
Repubblica."


Section 6: Varia:
Claudia Maggi, "La concezione plotiniana dell'uomo tra fascino e
autodominio: la questione degli influssi astrali".