Mental Conflict

A. W. Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415041515
• eBook ISBN: 9781134820436
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

As earthquakes expose geological faults, so mental conflict reveals tendencies to rupture within the mind. Dissension is rife not only between people but also within them, for each of us is subject to a contrariety of desires, beliefs, motivations, aspirations. What image are we to form of ourselves that might best enable us to accept the reality of discord, or achieve the ideal of harmony?
Greek philosophers offer us a variety of pictures and structures intended to capture the actual and the possible either within a reason that fails to be resolute, or within a split soul that houses a play of forces. Reflection upon them alerts us to the elusiveness at once of mental reality, and of the understanding by which we hope to capture and transform it. Studying in turn the treatments of Mental Conflict in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, A.W. Price demonstrates how the arguments of the Greeks are still relevant to philosophical discussion today.

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SOCRATES

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Plato’s early dialogues contain a moral psychology very different from that which emerges in the Gorgias and Phaedo and is elaborated in the Republic. We need not decide here whether they present the mature views of the historical Socrates or the early views of Plato himself; they may, of course, do both. Their conception of the nature and goal of desire appears at once attractive and alien: we, surely, cannot be quite like that. It has the corollary that most forms of mental conflict become an impossibility. It is thus highly relevant to our topic in an indirect way: we learn how we might be if we were to be less liable to mental conflict than we are. Socrates illumines the reality that he denies.

My primary source for Socrates’ general conception of desire will be the Symposium. To the informed, this may seem a perverse choice, for it is one of the first dialogues, together with the Phaedo, in which Plato ascends far beyond anything that we have reason to take as Socratic into the empyrean of his own theory of transcendent Forms. However, while the Symposium provides no reliable independent evidence of earlier views, nothing prevents it from combining a psychology that is strictly or loosely Socratic (strictly if it presents Socrates’ own views, loosely if it develops them) with a metaphysics that is wholly Platonic; and this is what I believe it to do. Diotima, the mythical priestess whom Socrates cites as his mentor, introduces the ascent-passage which first features the Forms with a sentence that marks off what follows: ‘Into these matters of love perhaps you too, Socrates, could be initiated; but I do not know if you would be capable of the rites and revelations for the sake of which even they exist, if anyone pursues them correctly’ (209e5– 210a2). This indicates that the so-called ‘lesser mysteries’ which precede the ‘greater’ are either Socratic, or at least much more nearly Socratic than the theory of Forms; so there is no sound inference from the Platonism of the ensuing metaphysics against the Socratism of the antecedent psychology.¹ The combination is still unexpected—which may be why it is overlooked. What could explain it? We need to remember that the Symposium is not a treatise by Plato on the nature of love, but a series of speeches trying to praise love as beautifully as possible, just as Eryximachus proposed (177d2–3).² It is true that Socrates initially agrees with the proposal (d6–e6), but later baulks when it appears that truth is not expected of encomia (198c5–199a6). However, there may be fine authorial irony when he offers instead not a eulogy but the truth told in his own way (199a6–b1): what he will say may be truth from his own point of view, but eulogy from Plato’s. By retaining a Socratic psychology Plato can combine what Socrates contrasts: Socrates will tell the truth as he sees it, but in Plato’s eyes that will be half-truth too approving of love by half. It is striking that Socrates makes no distinction between good and bad love such as was drawn by Pausanias (who refused simply to eulogize Eros, instead opposing a popular love that is indeed vulgar to a heavenly love that is free of outrage, 180c4–181c4), and will be recurrent in Plato (cf. Rep 3. 403a4–b3, Phdr 265e3–266b1, Laws 8.837b2–d1). As we shall see, Socrates remains free of moral error in Plato’s eyes, for his vision of love is blind to those aspects that are not proper objects of eulogy. A Socratic conception of love is an expression of innocence.

Agathon threw out the commonplace that love is of beauty (197b5); Socrates wishes to draw the conclusion that its object is one’s own happiness (204e6–7). He gets there partly on his own, partly on the authority of Diotima. What takes him there is three quick transitions: Love loves beautiful things to have them for himself (204d5–7), to love beautiful things is to love good things (e1–3), and to have good things is to be happy (204e5–205a1). Thus the lover desires to have beautiful things; so he desires to have good things; so he desires to be happy. Happiness is a final end: we need not ask why anyone wishes to be happy (205a2–3). As so often, Socrates makes his way with a mixture of truisms and surprises; all his steps are presented as obvious, and yet none is simply downhill. The topic of the Symposium is specifically erotic love, and this is most plausibly of beauty not because love is an ef fect of which only beauty can be a cause (pace 206d3–7), but because to be in love with someone is to find him beautiful: as we would say, beauty is not always the material, but is always the intentional, object or occasion of love. Further, this beauty is specifically erotic: it is the kind of beauty that is correlative to a sexual response or a personal infatuation. It is a different if related matter to identify love’s goal or objective, though the concept of desire blurs the distinction: in love, I am said to desire both a person to be won (who is the object), and some end to be achieved (which is my objective). We may presume that the lover wishes to possess the beloved in some way. If he is to think of achieving that goal as itself beautiful, this may derive from his finding the beloved beautiful, but implies a different manner of being beautiful. When Socrates is later reported as refusing to make love to Alcibiades on the ground, as I would paraphrase it, that while he was beautiful, that would not be (218e2–219a1), his objection was presumably not aesthetic, let alone erotic, but (in some way) moral.³ It was earlier agreed that good things are also beautiful (201c2–3). This must apply even to health, strength, and wealth (all mentioned at 200c6–d1), which are commonplace examples of goods (cf. Gorg 451e3–5, 467e4–5) even if the commonplace is not secure from Socratic questioning elsewhere (cf. the argument around a claim at Meno 88d4–5 that they really vary between being good and bad). Beauty here can be nothing specifically and literally sensible. It is rather, metaphorically, the face that goodness wears when it draws or attracts us (cf. Price 1989:16). This thought can help us to follow the new claim not only that beautiful things are also good (so that beauties and goods coincide actually or materially), but that to desire to have beautiful things is to desire to have good things (so that beauties and goods coincide intentionally): to desire a good is to find it beautiful, and what one finds beautiful, in this sense, is what one desires as good.⁴ Socrates is thus depending upon a sleight of hand (shifting from the erotic beauty of love’s object to the different beauty of its objective) and an assumption: goodness is the goal of desire. Agathon’s commonplace has been translated into Socratic philosophy.

Now it is possible to accept the assumption in a sense that relegates it to tautology: thinking good might reduce to desiring, so that to think something good is simply to desire it; goodness might merely be the formal object of desire. That this is not Socrates’ meaning is clear when he distinguishes the good from other alleged substantial objects of desire: love is only of the half or of the whole if these happen to be good, and only of one’s own if one calls goodness ‘one’s own’ (205e1– 8); desiring does not constitute thinking good but presupposes it. Socrates adds further substance to the goal of desire in two ways. The shift from ‘beautiful’ to ‘good’ is not made for its own sake, but to introduce the thought that the final end of desire is eudaimonia or happiness (202c6–11, 204e1–7). Happiness is the state of having acquired goods and beauties (202c 10–11, 205a1), and of possessing them still (204e5–7). It is a complex state, requiring the enjoyment of a multiplicity of goods over a long period of time. (As Aristotle was to put it, ‘One swallow does not make a summer’, NE 1.7.1098a18–19.) Next, Socrates advances from the proposition that men always want to have good things (205a7–8) to the yet more striking claim that they want to have them always (206a9–12). Desire is thus identified as a point of view upon a very broad perspective: to desire a thing is to take a wide view of it as it were both spatially, within a broad pattern, and temporally, within an unending sequence, of goods.

We may be happy to accept that there is such desire, but hesitate to claim that all desire is such. Do, and can, all desires always take such long views? This worry increases when Socrates reports Diotima as defining love more specifically and idiomatically as one of the species of desire: though all men love and desire happiness, we call ‘lovers’ only those who pursue it in one manner among others (205a5–d8). What is the defining goal of love narrowly so called? It is to achieve desire’s final end, which includes immortality, through the means of ‘generation in beauty’ (206e2–207a4). In sexual reproduction or verbal communication the lover passes on his physical or mental life to a child or loved one so that it will continue even after he himself has died. Diotima speaks as if the thesis that generic love is for always possessing the good oneself (206a11–12) entails the corollary that specific love pursues the end of immortality through the means of generation in beauty (note the repeated ‘necessary’, 207a1, a3). Here the Socratic view that all desire is directed towards happiness, and so concerned about one’s whole life, is developed into a yet stranger thesis, useful to Plato in defining the specificities of love, that it must be sensitive to the demands of immortality. (We may prefer to distinguish sharply between (a) always desiring to possess the good, (b) desiring to possess it now and ever after, i.e., so long as one is alive, and (c) desiring to exist, and to possess it, for ever—none of which entails, or need involve, the next.) I need not now discuss the details or the difficulties (some of which I treat in Price 1989:25–35). What we have to notice here is how extraordinary the theory is as an account not just of the project of procreation, but of all erotic desire. In particular, do sexual desires all really derive from so distant a goal? Socrates urges us to accept that they do. He makes out that the pull of generation is evident even in our physiology: it is beauty that causes sexual arousal, and the reason is that conception and procreation cannot take place ‘in the ugly’ (206c4–d1); further, our metabolism is constantly setting us an example by replacing old ‘hair and flesh and bones and blood’ by new (207d5–e1). He takes our bodies to be the home of a natural teleology whereby ‘mortal nature seeks so far as it can to exist always and be immortal’ (d1–2). This nature is evident in our bodily processes, and in the behaviour of unintelligent creatures: we see how keen animals are not only to copulate but to bring up offspring, and even, if necessary, to die so that it can live (207a7–b6). Of course they are dumb, but we share an animal nature with them, and can draw on our own conscious and communicable desires in order to interpret what they are really after. We are aware within ourselves of the pull of immortality in many forms: the ambitious are ready to face any danger for the sake of a lasting reputation (208c4–d2); Alcestis, Achilles, and Codrus, all of whom laid down their lives, can only have thought to leave an undying memory behind them (d1–e1); men who prefer women to boys suppose that by begetting children they will achieve eternal happiness for themselves (e1–5). Thus sexual desires have a double aspect, being children at once of our ultimate ends, and of our physical make-up. The two aspects are wedded by the natural teleology that governs all living creatures: immortality is an end common to unconscious processes and conscious purposes. Sexual desires are at once spontaneous responses (like sexual arousal) and immortal longings.

This conception fits the purposes of eulogy in two ways. Firstly, it marginalizes, if it does not actually exclude, the sterilities of the practising pederast, viewed ambivalently by most Greeks (cf. Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium) and dismissively by Socrates (who once compared them to piglets’ rubbing themselves against stones, Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.29–30). In pursuit of ‘immortality together with the good’ (206e8–207a1) a man may still pursue transient goods that have a place within a longer sequence, but ephemeral indulgence cuts sexuality off from the roots that bed it so deeply in our biology. It is, in fact, uncerotic, in that it discards the purpose that marks off eros from other human pursuits. (Here the theory has prescriptive implications that may be motivations.) Secondly, and most relevantly for us, Socrates’ conception would appear to exclude any real conflict between sexual desires and moral scruples: if all desires aim at the same longterm goal, achieving it demands judgement and perseverance but not self-control. Now this might be doubted. Borrow a different example, that of thirst, from the Republic (4.439b3–c7). Even if Socrates is right, might I still not feel thirsty at a time when I know, say for reasons of etiquette, that I must not drink? And might this not produce a conflict between thirst, urging me towards the happiness of drinking, and other considerations that tell decisively against drinking on behalf of happiness overall? This is plausible but not cogent. If all my desires share the final goal of my overall well-being, and I am of one mind in judging that this requires me not to drink, thirst cannot fuel a conflict of desire. What makes thirst refractory in the Republic is that it assigns to appetites a final goal of their own, namely, sensual pleasure (cf. 436a11, 439d8); then thirst may be inhibited (say by visions of a hangover, when the only drink available is gin), but it will tend to be deaf to the dry demands of prudence. If Socrates’ view that all desire derives from a single conception of the good is to apply even to sensual desires, he must make the most of a distinction between thirst as a sensation (which has a cause but not a goal), and thirst as a desire (which pursues happiness). Plato will call appetite ‘a companion of various repletions and pleasures’ (Rep 439d8), whose impulses come of ‘affections and diseases’ (d2). Socrates must liken the thirsty man who knows he must not drink to a man walking uphill with tired feet but a mind fully set on completing his journey: both feel a discomfort that is not a conflict. The discomfort gives him some reason to drink; and he may well have some desire to drink, but one that, if outweighed, retains no factional power of resistance. Thirst may not be silenced or lose its voice (for relieving discomfort is a special part of happiness), but it will be hushed and no longer demand a hearing: the discomfort may continue to gnaw, but the desire must cease to press.⁵ Without final ends of its own, appetite cannot battle against reason.⁶

If the conception of desire in the Symposium remains Socratic, it is also precarious, for it is easier to suppose that desires that are rooted in the body have their own ends that are not identical to the goal of reason. In the Phaedo, written at about the same time as the Symposium, Plato ascribes desires to the body itself (66c7), and aims them at ‘the pleasures that are through the body’ (65a7). Celebrating the escape of the soul from the body, and not hymning the loves of soul and body, the Phaedo takes a less positive view of the body’s inclinations. The Symposium avoids pointing soul and body in different directions: even if we say (as Socrates in fact does not) that our bodies desire what our ‘mortal nature’ pursues (207d1), this will still be a single end desired as a result both of rational deliberation (cf. 207b6–7), and of a natural teleology that explains both animal behaviour and physiological processes.⁷ Of course the upshot contradicts common sense, and may seem not so much innocent as myopic. Socrates owes us a redescription of the phenomena that we commonly take to constitute mental conflict. For this we must now turn to an earlier and more thoroughly Socratic dialogue, the Protagoras.

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The section of the Protagoras that concerns us (351b3–358d4) reaches a statement of a Socratic thesis within the scope of a less expected supposition:

If what is pleasant is good, no one who either knows or believes that something else is better than what he is doing, and is in his power to do, subsequently does the other, when he can do what is better.

(358b6–c1)

This conjunction of the novel and the familiar raises questions: has Socrates really adopted hedonism? If not, why is he making use of it? What will be implicit in the Symposium has been explicitly argued here: knowledge of the good can never be defeated by desire. Yet it is unclear what Socrates is up to.

The Socratic thesis itself is at once reasserted categorically:

Now surely no one freely goes for bad things or things he believes to be bad; it’s not, it seems to me, in human nature to be prepared to go for what you think to be bad in preference to what is good.

(358c6–d2)

I have already noted (in §1) that a statement like this can be saying very little. We read much the same not only in the half-Socratic Gorgias (‘It is for the sake of the good that those who do these things do them all’, 468b7–8), but even in the non-Socratic Republic (the good is ‘that which every soul pursues and for its sake does all things’, 6.505d11– e1), where rational and irrational desires are targeted upon very different objects. What gives the statement substance here in the Protagoras is two things. Firstly, a ‘bad’ action is taken to be one that the agent performs instead of an alternative that is both ‘better than what he is doing, and is in his power to do’ (358b7–c1). The thought is not merely that all desires aim at goods, but that one must choose to do what one judges to be best. Secondly, it is assumed that the agent is out for his own good. Socrates gets to hedonism through the concept of living well (eu zên): no one counts as living well if he lives in pain (351b3–6), and what is good is living a pleasant life to the end (b6–c1). He later argues that the many call some pleasures wrong because they produce eventual and greater pains (353c4–354d3), implicitly for the agent.⁸ People do not merely pursue the good, but make their choices after weighing the alternatives, short-term and long-term, as if in the scales (356a8–c1). Pursuing the good in a maximizing mode, they need an art of measurement as a guide (356c8–357d7). Hedonism seems to consort happily with this conception of choice, for the pleasures and pains of a lifetime sound the sorts of thing to be weighed one against another.

What form does the hedonism take? Plato takes us briskly through an ascending sequence of theses: pleasure (or at least no preponderance of pain) is a necessary condition of living well (351b4–6); pleasure is a sufficient condition of living well (b6–c1); things are good in respect of being pleasant (c4–5); things are bad to the extent that they are painful (c5–6), good to the extent that they are pleasant (e1–2); pleasure is good (e2–3); being pleasant is identical to being good (e5–6). This final claim takes a linguistic turn: the terms ‘pleasant’ and ‘good’ name one value, not two (355b3–c1, c5–6). Short-term pleasures may turn out badly in the long run, and in this sense pleasant things can be evils (353c8– 354c2). Socrates anticipated that from the start (351c5), and it disarms the initial resistance to hedonism that Protagoras shares with the many (c1–d7). It is implied that most people do not observe the maxim ‘Know thyself’ that Socrates is always quoting (e.g., 343b3); for he argues that they really accept hedonism, and infers that pleasure is all that they pursue (354b5–d1). If we distinguish ethical hedonism as a thesis about values (pleasure is the only good) from psychological hedonism as a thesis about ends (people only pursue pleasure), psychological hedonism must be true of the many since they accept ethical hedonism, and only pursue the good.

Why does Socrates bring hedonism into his argument? It may be that he is sincerely recommending a hedonism that neither overvalues the pleasure of the moment, nor cultivates an excess of appetite (like Callicles in the Gorgias), but looks to the long term and still takes overall happiness as the final good and goal. Such a hedonism might be ascribed to the preface to the laws of Plato’s eventual republic (Laws 5. 732e4–734e2): pleasures and pains are especially human, and from them every mortal creature is suspended by the strongest cords (732e4–7); in their number, magnitude, intensity, and equality they determine desire and choice (733b6–c1); we desire a predominance of pleasure over pain, and ‘if we say that we desire anything besides these, we say so through ignorance and inexperience of actual life’ (d4–6). However, it seems clear that such remarks define not what constitutes the human good, but what motivates us to act wel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Hors-D’œuvre
• Introduction
• 1 Socrates
• 2 Plato
• 3 Aristotle
• 4 The Stoics
• Notes
• Primary Sources
• Note on Translations
• Secondary Citations