Philosophy
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Abstract
same three sorts of motivations and what he says about phantasia and its place in non-rational motivation expands upon Plato. Readers will welcome the book’s clarity and vigorous defence of positions through close textual analysis and confrontation with secondary literature. Half the chapters are on Plato. These defend division of the soul in Republic 4. L. carefully sets out the assumptions in support of tripartition – primarily that the same part of the soul cannot have desire for and aversion to the same thing at once – and develops a more robust version than usual. Whereas some prominent interpreters suppose the soul acts only as a whole, tripartition in the strong sense advocated by L. permits each part to motivate behaviour independently, so that the embodied soul is fundamentally composite. Tripartition also holds for later dialogues, though L. suggests that while the Republic still allows beliefs in the irrational parts of the soul, the Theaetetus and Timaeus reject judgement for any part but reason, the irrational parts getting by with sense and memory. Yet L. has Plato in Timaeus 71a3-e2 struggling with reason’s communicating with the irrational parts, resorting to images of the liver, only resolving the difficulty in the Philebus where reason generates appearance as forms of sensory awareness rather than in a physical medium. Such chronological interpretation, even if quite refined, seems problematic. It disallows Plato any motivation except setting out doctrines. Fortunately, such insensitivity to literary context does not much detract from the overall results of L.’s analyses. L.’s convincing insistence on the distinctness of the soul’s parts makes difficult the claim that ‘Plato thinks that appetite has an inbuilt tendency towards excess’ (2). The beasts do not tend to excess, only humans do, and hence we may doubt that the appetitive or spirited part is naturally unlimited and suspect that human excess is due to interaction of the parts of the soul. Is not excessive money love – and Plato summarizes the appetitive object as money (Rep. 580e2-581a1) – often a result of combining spiritedness, appetite and reason? We may attain honour from outdoing others in wealth, appetite being goaded into excess by competitive honour love, with reason slavishly pursuing money and honour (L. approaches nearest this on pp. 33 and 46-8). Yet L. urges that appetite by itself is thus excessive due to inappropriate moulding ‘from early childhood onward, under the influence of the surrounding culture’ (48). But is culture not fostering combined motivations engendering unlimitedness? Plato’s reliance upon tripartition and keeping each part of the soul or city to its own proper task, then, prevents pleonexia and injustice, naturally and spontaneously as in the ‘city of pigs’ or through full development of our nature in the dominance of reason in kallipolis. The multiheaded monster image in Republic 9, 588c7-e1 depicts the human rather than the brutish soul. Just because parts of the soul can be independent motivators does not mean they have to be. L. has Plato explaining cognition of the non-rational parts by sense and memory’s retention of sensory impressions; Aristotle goes along while working out further the association of sensory impressions by phantasia. Novel is L.’s case that phantasia is not needed in the formation of all desire, but only desire involved in locomotion: other desire depends merely on sense perception if some animals lack phantasia. L.’s interpretation of phantasia, rightly focusing on De anima 3.3, is compelling except for embracing the passage in 3.3 that entertains the possibility that some animals lack phantasia. Other passages tell against this, and we should be suspicious that p. 138 n.2 suggests revising one of these texts, 413b21-4. L. supposes that animal locomotion requires phantasia, but even stationary animals have locomotion of their parts. He has not appreciated that De anima 3.9-10 concern progressive motion (poreutikê) rather than merely locomotion, and De anima 3.11 speaks of ‘incomplete animals’ lacking distance senses and therefore progressive motion. But these animals have some locomotion of their parts, and hence on L.’s own argument should have phantasia in order to have desire. Though I have offered some objections, L.’s book is strongly recommended to those interested in Plato’s reasons for dividing the soul and his thinking about nonrational motivation in such dialogues as Republic, Timaeus and Philebus, and/or for those seeking insight into phantasia, memory and recollection as treated by Aristotle in De anima, the Parva Naturalia and De motu animalium. RONALD POLANSKY Duquesne University polansky@duq.edu