Platonic Dualism Notes

Platonic Dualism

Introduction

• Gilbert Ryle criticizes the "official doctrine" of mind-body dualism, attributing it mainly to Descartes.
• This doctrine posits that humans consist of a physical body and a non-physical mind, with the mind capable of surviving the body's destruction.
• Ryle denounces this as "the dogma of the ghost in the machine."
• The critique has fueled Cartesian studies, both for defending and attacking the doctrine.
• "Platonic dualism" is sometimes referenced as a less defined precursor to Cartesian dualism.
• Richard Rorty distinguishes between Platonic and Cartesian positions, showing more hostility toward the former.
• The aim is to examine Plato's arguments for the existence of immaterial souls and the identification of individuals with these souls, setting aside the issue of immortality until immateriality and identity are established.
• Plato employs two main arguments for his dualistic claims: metaphysical/epistemological and ethical.

1. The Metaphysical/Epistemological Argument

The Affinity Argument (Phaedo)

• This argument (Phaedo 78b4-84b8) focuses on the soul's immateriality.
• It suggests the soul is likely immortal because it resembles the eternal Forms more than the changing sensible world.
• Plato assumes the soul is invisible (79bl-14), leading to the conclusion that it is everlasting.
• It's argued that invisibility, shared between the soul and other invisible entities, doesn't automatically imply everlasting existence.
• Embedded within this, there's an argument suggesting the soul is an invisible entity:
  1. Forms are invisible entities (79a6-7, cf. 65d8-ll).
  2. Invisible entities are invariant (79a9-10).
  3. Cognition of Forms is possible (cf. 79dl-8).
  4. Cognition of Forms requires similarity between the knower and the Forms (assumed).
  5. Therefore, the cognizer of Forms is similar to an invisible entity.
  6. Therefore, the cognizer of Forms is similar to something invariant (79d5-6).
• Invisible here means imperceptible to the senses.
• Forms exist independently.
• The phrase "is similar to" hints at a tension within the argument.
• Cognition of Forms implies the soul is an invisible entity.
• Premise 4, identified by David Gallop as the Empedoclean principle "like knows like," is crucial.
• Plato argues that something purely visible or material cannot cognize invisible entities or universal truths.
• Denying universal knowledge aligns with nominalist or skeptical views.
• Plato's argument asserts that one can't consistently accept universal knowledge and materialism.
• The condition of knowledge of a universal cannot be an attribute of a particular if such knowledge entails an identity with the universal.
• "Particular" refers to something uniquely locatable in a four-dimensional matrix.
• Knowledge as identity with a universal cannot be an attribute of a body, as universals aren't located in the four-dimensional matrix.
• Knowing a universal involves identity with it.
• If the knower isn't identical with the universal, inference from the attribute characterizing the subject to knowledge of the universal would be required.
• Plato believes knowledge is infallible, making such inference problematic.
• The argument suggests that the knower of Forms must be similar to Forms in being a non-particular.
• The soul in Phaedo is not just a knower of Forms but also the agent of cognition, emotions, sensations, vegetative and nutritive functions.
• The soul, akin to Forms, becomes constant in their presence (79dl-7) but wanders and is confused when associated with the body (79c2-8).
• If the soul is invariant due to its likeness to Forms, either the immaterial soul varies under bodily conditions (79c2-8), or what varies isn't identical to what doesn't.
• This raises the problem of individual identity: how can the wanderer be identical to what cannot wander?
• Identifying the knower of Forms with the calculator, sensor, and feeler compromises arguments for immateriality, separateness, and immortality.
• Plato believes body and soul are causally related.
• However, conceiving the soul as both invariant and variant is contradictory.
• If the soul isn't identical to the body because knowledge can't occur in the particular, it’s challenging to relate it to the body.
• Plato suggests the unpurified soul can be interspersed with a bodily element after death (81bl-c6), conflicting with the soul as a cognizer of Forms.
• These issues are compounded by Plato's identification of man with his soul.
• Simply stating man is the agent of diverse functions (bodily and non-bodily) is an unsatisfactory solution for Plato, especially since states like knowing cannot be attributes of particular entities.
• If a mental state m cannot be a state of that of which bodily state b is a state, m and b cannot be states of the same entity.

2. The Ethical Argument for Dualism

• In Crito (47e-48a), Socrates distinguishes between the body (improved/destroyed by health/unhealthy actions) and another part (improved/destroyed by just/unjust actions).
• Socrates doesn't name this latter part the soul but emphasizes actions characterized without bodily reference.
• Being just or unjust is a statement without reference to the body.
• Let "health" represent the optimum bodily state and "body" the organic individual.
• Whether a man is healthy is distinct from whether he is just or unjust.
• Justice isn't a disposition or behavior but a state.
• If justice isn't bodily, dispositional, or behavioristic, it refers to something non-bodily, which is then termed the "soul."
• Even if "just" doesn't refer to behavior/disposition, it could refer to a bodily state causing certain behaviors.
• Plato counters that virtue is knowledge of good and evil, which is universal and thus not a bodily attribute, disposition, or behavior.
• This argument hinges on moral predicates being descriptive.
• "Moral" includes conative states with cognitive components.
• Example: Envy requires judging others' deserts, involving universal grasp.
• Beliefs (e.g., people deserve what they earn) aren't plausibly identified with bodily attributes, even if bodies are necessary for belief.
• If such beliefs aren't dispositions or behaviors, they are attributes of something non-bodily; whatever is envious is not a body.
• Plato identifies the soul with the self for ethical reasons.
• Alcibiades I expresses that self-knowledge (knowledge of the soul) is needed for virtue/happiness.
• The arguments in Gorgias (476a3-481b5) show that a wrongdoer escaping punishment is worse than suffering it.
• The worst fate for a criminal deserving death is being kept alive.
• Plato thinks it's sometimes good for people to suffer bodily harm/destruction.
• Therefore, since it is never good for someone to be harmed or destroyed, people are not bodies.
• The argument relies on conflating "good" and "good for someone."
• If "good" names a Form, it's univocal.
• The statement "x is good" is systematically incomplete, because there needs to be another item in the statement such as ''x is good for y''.
• "Good" isn't as relative as "tall"; if x is taller than y, y must be shorter than x, but if something is good for y, it isn't necessarily bad for y.
• If it is good that x do something to y, then necessarily it is good for y that it be done to him.
• "Good for y " is a pleonastic version of "good", similar to "true" and "true for y".
• Punishment is a bodily harm.
• In Crito, Socrates should refrain from injustice even at the cost of death.
• Bodily punishment is sometimes good because human excellence is non-bodily.
• A fulfilled human being is describable only in non-bodily terms; a man should be identified with what has distinctively human excellence (the soul).
• Being an excellent soul means being an excellent human being, achieved through possessions, including the body.

Difficulties and the Republic

• Both arguments (epistemological/metaphysical and ethical) face difficulties.
• Emphasizing the soul's immateriality and identity with the self makes connecting it to non-rational and bodily activities problematic.
• Acknowledging bodily existence reduces the plausibility of dualism.
• The focus shifts to the Republic, where the discussion advances via the soul's tripartition.
• The first stage (436a-439e) distinguishes appetite and reason based on their opposition (e.g., a thirsty man refusing to drink).
• "Calculations of reason" are practical (e.g., "I ought not drink") and not in a separate part of the soul from theoretical activity (Phaedo).
• The third part, , is established through the case of Leontius (439e-441a), who feels self-revulsion after succumbing to a prurient appetite resisted by reason.
• Is Leontius to be identified with one/all/none of these parts?
• Identifying Leontius with both appetite and reason creates another problem, since opposing parts of the soul must be distinct.
• Simultaneous multiplicity challenges identifying one self.
• The incoherence in each identification indicates a more sophisticated concept of self in the Republic.
• In the Republic, self-identity is distinguished by endowment and achievement.
• Leontius represents ordinary human conditions, experiencing appetites, rational resistance, and disgust at weakness.
• Leontius is to be identified with the subject of the appetites, the rational faculty, and the emotional reaction.
• Moral deterioration involves dissociating from the argument that submitting to appetite is wrong and separating what he thinks is good in general from what he thinks is good for him.
• Improvement consists in identifying with the rational faculty, viewing appetites as belonging to another person.
• One identifies with the life of the mind or physical pleasure like identifying with a cause or idea.
• Lack of self-identification is the state before this achievement.
• The Protagoras states that a is acting counter to one's good as one perceives it; a a a is impossible because no one acts contrary to one's good as one perceives it.
• The self is an a of action and a subject of desire that weighs desires and decides that, all things considered, is more desired than y.
• In the Republic a a a is explained by showing that the soul is not a single a of action nor, at least for ordinary men, a subject of commensurable desires.
• Desire is a stream directed through different channels (the three parts of the soul).
• Leontius's desire to gaze upon the corpse isn't commensurable with his desire to refrain, making his action acratic.
• There are at least two a a action in Leontius.
• Incarante individuals have desires of the three parts of the soul, implying that there is not one subject of all these desires.
• Leontius is to be identified with each soul part because he is a divided self.
• Ideally, there should be an identification with the rational part.
• The virtuous man becomes "one out of many" (443el), approaching commensurability between appetitive and rational desires.
• For the virtuous man, appetite will never be the a of action even though he recognizes himself as the subject of the appetites.
• The strongest desire always being a rational one.
• The vicious man achieves self-identification, identifying himself with his appetites, so that the strongest desire prevails, the strongest desire always being irrational.

Practical and Theoretical Reasoning

• In the Republic, Plato seems to conflate practical and theoretical reasoning.
• The faculty opposing appetite issues practical commands.
• How is identifying the man with this faculty be identifying with that which con templates?
• That 'a is dependent upon a , which requires a body.
• How can the ideal be identification of the self with the rational faculty when the rational faculty is described in such a way that its unity is problematic?

Analogy of Forms and Instances

• The problem is analogous to the relation of Forms to their sensible instances.
• The Form of beauty is immaterial; Helen's beauty is in flesh and bones, yet it's an instance of the Form.
• How can the immaterial and universal be identical with the material and particular?
• Mutability of Helen's beauty vs. immutable beauty.
• The nature of beauty must have attributes neither exclusively immaterial nor material.
• The reason for positing Forms is that if x is f and y is f, then the explanation of the sameness of x and y is neither x nor y nor f. It is a Form.
• The Form is and isn't identical with f, requiring a distinction within the Form and f.
• We distinguish beauty from flesh and bones of Helen and distinguish the eternal, immutable, immaterial entity, the Form, from the nature of beauty.
• Beauty per se is neither bodily nor immaterial, existing only in the Form, its instances, or the mind.
• The modes of cognition appropriate to f is a; to Forms, ? .
• Former require * and so requires a body; the latter does not.
• That a and ? , are activities having different objects no more negates the underlying identity of the agent than does the fact that the definition of beauty does not include flesh and bones negate the fact that Helen is beautiful and could not be so without flesh and bones.
• The essential immaterial activity of contemplating Forms by an agent doesn't negate identity with the agent interacting with the body.
• Changes in the brain can affect cognition, as recognized in the Timaeus (86b-87b), but such affection is no more an argument for materialism than is bodily death.
• The analogy between modes of cognition and modes of being illuminates the sense in which soul is separate from the body.
• Forms exist independently of their instances.
• Separation in the second sense can occur when separation in the first sense has occurred.
• "A ghost in a machine" does not adequately encapsulate Plato's views of incarnation anymore than "two-world ontology" adequately expresses the conclusion of an argument which holds that Helen is really beautiful, yet beauty is not identical with Helen's beauty.

Book 10 of the Republic

• The 10th book of the Republic offers a different proof of the soul's immortality, often interpreted as implying immortality of the entire tripartite soul.
• If only the highest part of the soul survives bodily death, but such interpretation is incompatible with the dualism provided above.
• If the entire soul is immortal, then either Plato thought that the immortal soul is not an immaterial entity or that psychic achievement is not identfication with the rational faculty.
• Anything destructible is destroyed by its peculiar evil; what is indestructible isn't destroyed by it.
• The soul's peculiar evil is vice, which doesn't destroy it; therefore, the soul is indestructible.
• If vice is evil, virtue is good, described as relations between soul parts.
• How survive virtue is partially removed from the body; Plato suggest diversity will not plague the discarnate soul, how can justices exist if justice is relations between the parts of the souls.
• The Platonically just man is one in whom each of the parts of the soul does its own job, that is, reason rules the appetitive and emotional faculties (441dl2-e2).
• The rule of reason is identifed with the knowledge that is wisdom (442c5-8).
• A Platonically just man will not do the things ordinarily ac counted unjust (442e4ff).
• The Platonically just man decides solely on reason, not appetite.
• Knowledge is essentially self-knowledge, that the self is to be identified with the rational faculty so that one's own good is to be determined solely by universalizing reason.
• Plato can and does retain the principle that no one does wrong willingly despite the recognition of the phenomenon of a a a.
• The man in whom reason rules looks upon the lower parts of the soul as alien to himself.
• The doctrine of the unity of virtue is transposed into a doctrine about the unification of the self.
• Plato indicates what the soul would become if it departed from bodily concerns and fixed its desires upon the everlasting, intelligible world.
• In the Laws (731d6-732b4), ''excessive self-love" is the source of all wrongdoing, defined as ''honoring one's own possessions more than the truth."
• "Honoring the truth" more than "one's own" is at least one way of describing the process of assimilation to the divine.
• honoring the truth is just the fideli ty to the rule of reason characteristic of one who regards the good and his own good as identical.
• The unity of virtues explains how the discarnate soul can be rational and virtuous without partition.
• The virtuous discarnate self would be as "large" as the intelligible world, whereas the vicious discarnate self would be ''small*" and its attitude to eternity something like boredom. It will have achieved self-alienation, whereas the virtuous soul will have arrived home.

Phaedrus and Timaeus

• Mythical description of the discarnate soul in the Phaedrus (246ff): souls of gods and men as charioteers with horses.
• Gods have two good horses, men one good, one bad, representing the tripartite soul.
• If taken literally, difficulties arise for a tripartite descarnate soul as great as those thought to be presented for a monopartite descarnate soul.
• Since the Republic myth begins with the discarnate soul of Er, Phaedrus doesn't show bodily immortality.
• If the Phaedrus myth is taken to indicate tripartition, then the discarnate soul can be said to be tripartite only in an equivocal sense.
• In Book 4 of the Republic conflicting desires in the soul indicate a division of the self, whereas in the myth of the Phaedrus the self cannot be identifed with anything but the charioteer, human or divine.
• The gods, who possess two good horses, are described as engaging solely in intellectual activity (247de).
• The motion of the horses symbolizes the activity of the charioteers.
• In the passage preceding the myth, the soul is defined as a self-mover (245d).
• The image of the discarnate human soul differs from the image of the divine soul in that it is capable of decline, owing presumably to the presence of the bad horse.
• The discarnate unified soul is identical with the incarnate tripartite soul and is not a fragment of it.
• The failure is of the whole self, not of an inferior part of it.
• Unless one accepts the rather implausible view that not only is the Timaeus not a late dialogue, but that it antedates the Phaedrus, the Timaeus supports.
• In the Timaeus the familiar tripartite soul is retained along with an explicit statement that only the highest part of the soul is immortal.
• The immortal part is rational and possesses its own motion which is identified with thought.
• Interaction of body and soul is described in great detail, particularly in the passage concerning psychosomatic illnesses.
• The description of the composition of the soul in the Timaeus also lends support to the interpretation of the Republic's dualism.
• The soul of the world is a mixture of indivisible and divisible ingredients of existence, sameness, and difference (35ab).
• The human soul is a mixture of the same ingredients, only having a lesser degree of purity (41de).
• The identical tripartite soul has cognitive powers some of which require a body and some of which do not.
• Plato ought to hold that the nature of soul, like the nature of Forms, is intrinsically neither material and particular nor immaterial and universal.
• The claim that soul is a mixture of indivisible and divisible existence, sameness, and difference, is at least one way of representing the claim that that which has a bodily life can be identical with that which has an intellectual life, even though material and immaterial being are not reducible to each other.
• There is further support for the interpretation of selfhood as an achievement in the passage in which Plato contrasts mortality and immor tality as results of the kind of concerns in a man's life.
• There is a contrast between psychic endowment and achievement.
• Perfect identification of the self with the immortal would exclude the "motion" that is thought; perfect identification with the bodily is not possible for precisely the same reason.