I want to go off on some rabbit trails about Greek views of the soul here, but I’m sure some of that will be covered later, so I’ll try to keep my question short. I’m vaguely aware Plato believed the soul was made up of logos, thymos, and eros, but did he or any other philosophers of his age conceive of anything like the New Testament distinction between soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma)?
Scripture presents both as components of the immaterial part of man, and it requires something sharper than a double-edged sword to separate them (Heb 4:12), but at the same time in 1 Cor 2:14, Paul says the natural (psuchikos) man cannot understand the things of the Spirit (pneumatos) of God because they are discerned spiritually (pneumatikos). That seems more or less compatible with the idea that psyche is present in all living things, but it also posits the existence of something even higher that is either missing or fundamentally broken in the man who is only psychical. (It’s a word; I looked it up. Psychic was obviously inappropriate in modern English.) I’m curious whether anyone had a similar concept outside the Bible.
Actually, no—we aren’t going to be talking about theories of the soul much. It simply doesn’t (or doesn’t have to) come up that much in constructing a systematic defense of the existence of the Christian God, not in my hands, anyway. Not to say we couldn’t get into it!
I don’t recall where Plato might have said the soul was made up of logos, thymos, and eros… As to the soul/spirit (psyche/pneuma) distinction, I don’t recall ever seeing such a thing in Plato, Aristotle, or other ancient writers. This wasn’t my area so I’m not sure.
I don’t think that the fact that ψυχ- is part of ψυχικός (“natural” in your translation), it follows that Paul was distinguishing between soul (psyche) and spirit. As I actually discussed above, ψυχή can mean simply “life” and sometimes it definitely has that sense and not anything like what we would mean by soul (implying subjectivity, for example). “Natural” is (rightly, understandably) used in the translations because Paul is distinguishing between fleshly man—I suppose meaning one whose life is merely biological—and spiritual things of God. More briefly, the contrast there (IMO) is not that between soul and spirit but between what is natural, fleshly, and fallen and what are the properly spiritual things of God.
It is not obvious or well agreed by theologians just whether there is, properly speaking, a distinction between an immaterial soul and spirit. The important theological and philosophical question is what these terms mean, which I think requires heavy duty philology and philosophy, as constrained by other, firmer issues in theology.
But, come to think of it, I should say this: You’re absolutely right that the Greeks (and ergo anyone speaking the Greek language though?!) had a notion that all living beings had “psyche,” and that “psyche” could be translated as “soul.” The question however is what to make of that. It is more a question about the Greek language than about Christian theology. If a tree is said to have “psyche,” should we infer that the Greeks thought that, in some weak way, they had what we would call a soul? Or would it be better to say that the word was ambiguous, plain and simple? Maybe the idea is that “psyche” involved a concept roughly “in between” our concept of soul and our concept of living being: a “living principle.” If so, then not every use of “psyche” (or “psychikos”) means something over and above what we call “soul.”
Maybe someone is here whose Greek is better than mine, and can comment?
Plato equates reason with virtue. Why? He says if the motions of the planets are rational they point to a virtuous soul who set them in motion. But we can think of many people who used reason to do evil things. So why must reason necessarily come from virtue?
On another note, I’d love to learn how you conduct textual analysis Larry. I had drafted an answer which stayed pretty close to the text. But you were able to know where Plato was heading and fill in the blanks for him. And lay out the logical steps where he may have jumped around or made assumptions. A great skill to have.
I’d like to redirect the question to others here rather than simply answer myself: Why does Plato equate reason with virtue? We will be reading some relevant parts of the Nicomachean Ethics if current plans hold firm, which contain answers. I can address this in a day or two if nobody else has thoughts.
How I conduct textual analysis—well, I’m not really sure what all I’m doing. The first step is to get a lot of practice logically reconstructing arguments, which is a thing one learns from much philosophical study, but maybe especially studying and teaching logic. This provides a discipline or order to the process, giving shape to the argument. But it also allows one to see where the “holes” are, where an author is assuming something without stating it. Teaching Ohio State students critical thinking with the Copi and Cohen text, which emphasizes logical reconstruction of arguments, does this. It’s also a thing that comes naturally to analytically trained philosophers in many subdisciplines and definitely in epistemology. That’s most of it, but then, after figuring out how the argument goes (staying as close to the author’s language as possible), I ask critical questions about each step. Do I agree? Are there any fallacies here? Any factual errors? Anything important left unexplained? Etc. To a great extent this is habitual but if you ask questions naturally, you are already doing it when you read the text. So just write your questions down.
That was an excellent essay. It triggered so many more questions to me. The argument itself is a lot more complex than I first thought. But my mind got hung up on Plato’s speculations on the “soul”.
I would love to see an accurate Venn diagram on Plato and Christian view of “the soul”. There are clear overlaps, but also very fundamental differences. The God incarnate was “foolishness to the Greeks” in part because of this view.
Thanks, Ben.
On Plato vs. Christian views of the soul, well, Plato had some mighty weird ideas about the creation of the soul in the Timaeus, and his famous theory in the Republic about the tripartite makeup of the soul (rational, spirited/emotional, and appetitive/desire) is fairly orthogonal to anything in Scripture. Plato is, however, sometimes credited with being the source of the common Christian view of the eternity of the soul. I do not see the eternity of the immaterial soul specifically affirmed anywhere in Scripture; but it is a view argued for in the Phaedo. (The soul is simple, without parts, so there is no way to destroy it, basically.)
Not sure that there is actually any unified Christian view of the soul; theologians have different views of it. Until the 20th century, dualism was common among most Christian theologians. (The materialist Hobbes and the idealists like Berkeley are noteworthy exceptions.) In the 20th century, I think what happened is many Christian theologians became impressed by the unpopularity of Cartesian dualism, and maybe even more, they were deeply impressed by the increasingly clear fact that the Hebrew notion of the person was that of an ensouled body (arguing that that is the best way to understand nephesh). Some have been suspicious of tendencies toward gnosticism, supposing that dualism has such a tendency; I’ve seen that, too, although the idea is kind of silly considering how long Christian theology was commonly dualistic. Anyway, a lot of modern theologians reject dualism altogether, saying there is no such thing as an immaterial soul, i.e., that all souls are embodied. Of course, there are some exegetical difficulties with this, to which they say, “Well, the NT writers were influenced by Greek philosophy,” forgetting that the NT writers did write Scripture, you know.
I was aware that the nature of motion occupied a great portion of Greek philosophy, but I never really had any idea why until I started this study. I think I have a handle on it now, but please correct any misconceptions you see here.
I’m assuming the unmentioned first six motions are just left, right, up, down, forward, and back. He gives rotation as an example of motion in one place. I’m not quite sure what he means by motion in several places. He might mean something like a ball rolling and bouncing down a hill or possibly it’s more along the lines of something having multiple points of articulation (like a swivel-arm battle grip!) Regardless, it’s the ninth and tenth types that are the focus of the argument.
“That which moves other things but not itself” is what we would call an inanimate object. The cue moves the ball, but it doesn’t move itself. Self-motion, in Plato’s thinking, requires an act of will that can only be performed by a living soul.
To understand his argument regarding heavenly bodies, we have to put aside what we now know about the motions of Earth and the solar system. Plato didn’t see the Earth spinning on its axis and revolving around the sun; he saw the sun, moon, and stars moving around Earth, rising and setting in slightly different places every day of the year. The motion of the planets seemed particularly erratic and remained the main subject of debate in astronomy until well after Copernicus. Plato also had no inkling that an object moving through a vacuum will continue to move forever unless something stops it. That’s not how things seem to work here on Earth. A rolling cart will slow down and come to a stop unless it is pushed or pulled by something living. When Plato saw the heavenly bodies continually moving in their complex courses, he naturally assumed they were either moving of themselves (which implied they were alive) or else living souls far more powerful than any man were constantly moving them.
We know many things Plato didn’t, and we can now explain the motions of planets in terms of natural forces, but the ultimate origin of those forces and the first cause of all motions cannot be discovered by purely naturalistic science. If the universe as we know it began in a Big Bang, natural science might conceivably be able to trace all causes back to that event, but the question of what could have caused a singularity with the mass of our entire universe to suddenly go Bang in the first place would remain entirely outside the realm of such science.
Tom, sorry for the long delay responding, and thanks for the meaty answer. I have no opinions about what the eight kinds of motion were…working them out would require reading some extremely vague prose very carefully, filling in a lot of blanks—a thankless task. I’m sure somebody has figured it out but I never looked it up. If you do, let us know.
I’m not sure self-motion requires an act of will; it simply, in the biological examples you and I probably have in mind, requires life. Even a tree or a mushroom grows (by natural activities it undertakes “by itself”, not passively as a stalagmite does), which is a kind of self-motion.
You’ve got important elements of his argument, but perhaps the most important part that is missing here is the similarity between the circular motion of the heavens and the “circular motion” of nous (mind, understanding). This suggests the source is mind, and in particular “the best” mind, because the circularity seems unusually consistent.
No apology needed. I’m in no hurry, and with as much as you’re writing, I completely understand if you don’t always have time to respond. I’m going to do my best to write some kind of answer to every question because that’s how I learn best, but don’t feel obligated to reply to all of them. I certainly appreciate your responses, of course.
I hadn’t considered growth as a type of self-motion, but it makes sense. “Will” was probably not the best choice of words in that respect, but I seem to have been on the right track, at least. I did have some thoughts regarding the circular motions of the heavens, but I wasn’t quite sure how to put them into words without going very far afield on the subject of ancient astronomy/astrology, so I figured it would be best to leave them out.
Leave a Reply to Larry Sanger Cancel reply