Chapter 5
Parts of Yourself
In Book IV of Plato’s Republic, there is a famous discussion of the parts of the human soul, or self. Plato thinks he needs to establish that the self has different parts in order to say clearly what the human virtues are. Since, as he supposes, the polis (the city-state) is just the individual written large, what he can say about the human individual will have a parallel in what he wants to say about the city, or state. Just as, he supposes, there are three parts of the polis – the ruling class, the army, and the working class – so, Plato thinks, there are also three parts of the individual soul or self – reason, spirit, and appetite. Moreover, to say what a virtue like temperance or wisdom or courage is will include, he thinks, saying something about what it is for these parts to do their respective jobs well.
Although later philosophers and psychologists have not followed Plato in exactly the way they have divided the self, many, including, most notoriously, Freud, have made some sort of division. Indeed, Freud followed Plato in maintaining that the self has three parts, although he described his three parts differently. Other thinkers have supposed that there are just two parts, perhaps the conscious self and the unconscious self, or the rational self and the irrational self. And even people who haven’t thought much about the matter may be inclined to say things like ‘Part of me wants to do that and part of me doesn’t.’ Such common ways of talking also invite us to think of ourselves as divided into parts.
Here is the culmination of a fascinatingly intricate passage from Plato’s Republic in which the idea of a divided self is first argued for. The point here is to try to establish that each human soul or self has at least two distinct parts. (Socrates is the one doing most of the talking.)
Now, would we assert that sometimes there are thirsty people who don’t wish to drink?
Certainly, it happens often to many different people.
What, then, should one say about them? Isn’t it that there is something in their soul, bidding them to drink, and something different, forbidding them to do so, that overrules the thing that bids?
I think so.
Doesn’t that which forbids in such cases come into play—if it comes into play at all—as a result of rational calculation, while what drives and drags them to drink is a result of feelings and diseases?
Apparently.
Hence it isn’t unreasonable for us to claim that they are two, and different from one another. We’ll call the part of the soul with which it calculates the rational part and the part with which it lusts, hungers, thirsts, and gets escited by other appetites the irrational appetitive part, companion of certain indulgences and pleasures. (Republic IV 439cd, Grube, trans.)
I used this Plato passage as inspiration for another story aimed at starting a philosophical discussion with kids. Here is what I came up with:
Parts of Yourself
Anna: “Dad, do you think that you’ve got parts?”
Father: “Well, of course, Anna. I have two legs, two arms, a body and a head. Those are all parts of me.” Anna’s father was just settling into his recliner in front to the TV to watch a football game.
Anna: “No, that’s not what I mean. Like when we were just eating Thanksgiving dinner earlier today, I had already eaten so much that I was about to pop. But Mom had made brownies to go with the ice cream for dessert and she said that, since it was Thanksgiving and all, I could eat as many as brownies I wanted. So I ate two of them. Then, you could say, part of me wanted another brownie, but part of me said I had better stop, so I wouldn’t get sick. Do you think I really have different parts like that, one that wants to eat more and more brownies, and one that is sensible and says that I had better stop?”
Father: “Well, why not say that? Why not say you have a greedy part of you that always wants to eat more brownies, and a reasonable part that tells you when to stop?”
Anna: “That’s what my friend, Tony, says. He says you have different parts, and one part wants to do one thing and the other wants to do something else instead. We were having an argument about that at lunch yesterday in the school cafeteria. I said that saying things like that was, you know, just a way of talking. We don’t really have any parts like that, I said. It’s just that we have different wants, you know, different desires. And sometimes we realize that we can’t satisfy all our desires. We can’t, for example, satisfy the desire to eat more and more brownies and also satisfy the desire not to get sick. So the desire to have another brownie fights with the desire not to get sick ”
Father: “That sounds pretty sensible to me.”
Anna: “But get this! What Tony said was that desires don’t just float around in your mind, like leaves on a pond. You don’t have a desire unless it’s you that wants something. But it can’t be both you that wants another brownie and also you that wants to stop eating them., to avoid getting sick.”
Father: “Why not?”
Anna: “Well, Tony said that that would be like saying that you are sitting still and you are also moving. Part of you could be moving, say, your hand, and part sitting still. But you, as a whole, can’t be doing both. Do you want to know what I said to that?”
Father: “Sure, tell me, Anna.”
Anna: “I said, and I’m really proud of myself for thinking of this, I said you can be sitting in the school bus and all of you be sitting still in your seat, but yet all of you could be moving because the school bus is moving.”
Father: “That’s pretty clever, I have to admit.”
Anna: “Yeah, but Tony had an answer to that, too. He’s so smart. He said that you can’t, all of you, be both moving and sitting still with respect to the same thing. So you can’t, all of you, be both moving and also sitting still with respect to the ground, say. Similarly, with respect to the last brownie sitting on the plate in front of you, you can’t, all of you, both want it and not want it. But part of you can want it and another part not want it. Do you think he’s right about that?”
Father: “I don’t know, Anna. But I want to watch the football game now.”
Anna: “Oh Dad, I wish you’d help me. . . I guess I’ll just have to figure this out for myself. Do I really have different parts like that or not? That’s what I want to know.”
I discussed this story with 5th-graders in two different classes in an elementary school in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Both classes began their discussion by focusing on the analogy in the story between bodily movement and desire. Tony, in the story, had said that you can’t be both sitting still and moving at the same time. But, he had added, part of you, say, your hand, could be moving and the rest of you sitting still.
Anna had pointed out that you could be sitting in a school bus that was moving. Then all of you might be both sitting still and also, at the same time, all of you moving. But the sitting still and the moving would be with respect to different things. Thus all of you could be sitting still with respect to the seat, she said, yet moving with respect to the ground.
One child immediately wanted to know what ‘with respect to’ means. I tried to dramatize the idea of sitting still with respect to the seat and moving with respect to the ground by pretending I was in a bus. I probably looked rather foolish. The kids seems amused. But I think they got the idea.
What seemed to interest those kids first was the idea of one’s body being somehow both moving and yet remaining still, at the same time. They began to think about whether your body is ever completely at rest. “You could be sitting still and yet your heart would be beating,” said Jason. “A human body can never do nothing,” announced Esther. “Even if you’re breathing, you’re doing something,” put in Carl.
Plato, in a passage from his dialogue, Republic, that comes before what I quoted above, had chosen a cleaner analogy than my example of sitting still in a bus that’s moving. Plato used the idea of a perfectly spinning top. I must admit that all the tops I can remember spinning for my children either wobbled inelegantly, or, even if they remained perfectly upright for a few seconds, still floated around the floor on their point while they were spinning. Of course, I can imagine a top doing what Plato described, namely, spinning so perfectly in place that you might think it was magically standing still on its point. In such a case one could say, with Plato, that the top was both moving and at rest; it would be moving with respect to its outer surface, but it would be at rest with respect to its axis because it was spinning perfectly in place.
In making up my story I had though I would choose a simpler analogy than Plato’s spinning top. But the kids smoked me out. Even with respect to the seat of the school bus, and sitting perfectly still, one might have moving parts, for example, one’s heart, or even, as one child suggested, a blinking eye. So long as we are alive, she insisted, we are never perfectly still. I had to agree.
What about the main idea in the story, though — Plato’s idea that every self has at least two different parts? Several kids seemed to find that idea immediately plausible, even natural. Unprompted, Alex even identified the parts of the self in true Platonic fashion as reason and appetite. Yet he seemed not to be simply passing on something he had been told, since he made up his own terminology for reason and appetite. “There is a wiser one,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “and a wanting one; the wanting one wants something and the wiser one says “’No.’” The contrast Alex drew between reason and appetite runs through the whole history of Western philosophy. Yet it seemed that Alex was inventing it afresh.
Several children mentioned the idea of conscience. But they were not entirely sure how to think of conscience. Is it an inner agent? Is it a kind of censor, or just a “voice within”? They seemed unsure. (I am, too!)
In the second class in which I discussed this story, Laura suggested that each of us has an “angel” whispering in one ear and a “devil” whispering in the other. Lilly and Eddy pooled ideas they had about neurophysiology to suggest that, when we have conflicting desires, there are different, and conflicting, messages coming to the brain. One message, they thought, might come from the tongue that tastes the sweetness of the brownie that Anna talks about in the story and invites the brain to see to it that I eat another brownie. Another message might come from the stomach, which, let’s suppose was getting stuffed and was beginning to warn of the possibility of throwing up. The kids seemed to think that the neorophysiological story was more scientific than the story about the angel and the devil.
Alex fastened onto the idea of there being different thoughts that go to the brain, rather than different parts of the self. “It’s not so much different parts as it is different thoughts,” he said, “and the brain has to decide which thought to go with.”
At this point in the discussion several kids suggested that there could be more than just two competing desires. That suggestion, ordinary as it may seem, harbors a very profound critique of the traditional account of conflict in desires as a battle between reason and appetite. Sometimes we realize that there are two or more good things we want to do, though we can do only one. Or we realize that there are two or more equally bad things we want to do, even though we can, at most, do only one of them. When either of these things happens, we cannot understand what is going on as a contest between reason and appetite, or between an angel and a devil. There may be two angels in conflict with each other, or two devils, — or three, or seven, or any number. Thus I may be torn between putting my savings in the Salvation Army bucket at Christmas time and using that money to buy a toy for my baby sister instead. Both of those things would be good things to do, but I can do only one. Or I may be unable to decide whether to skip my brother’s piano recital altogether, since he skipped my band concert, or to go to the recital and try to make him nervous so that he will miss some notes. Those would both be bad things to do and I may want to do them both, though I realize I can do no more than one of them. The profound conclusion from all this is that a conflict in desires need not be a conflict between a good impulse and a bad one. .
The model of desire-conflict that these kids found themselves attracted to is thus much more flexible than the traditional Platonic story. If, thinking of the mind as the brain, we understand the situation as one in which different messages come to the brain and the brain realizes that it can’t make the body act on them all, then we can allow for much more variety in motivational conflict. Perhaps the messages often do come in pairs: “This is sweet, so eat this!” and “This will make you sick, so stop eating this!” But, in principle messages may come in triples or quadruples. And even if they come in pairs, it may not be the case that one speaks for the wiser self and the other for the greedy self.
I left those two classroom sessions thinking that, interesting and provocative as those two discussions were, they hadn’t really dealt with the question I had meant to pose in the story I had brought with me. I had hoped that we might get on to the issue of whether talk about parts of the self is a cop-out. Saying that a part of me wants another brownie and another part wants to stop eating brownies seems to leave me out of the picture. St. Paul, in the biblical book of Romans (at 7:17), says, “It is not I that do it, but sin that dwells in me.” Now if I overeat, or perhaps take more than my share of brownies, I might try to escape censure by saying, in the fashion of St. Paul, “It wasn’t I that did it, but that greedy appetite acting in me.”
Arnold Lobel wrote a delightful and profound story about not being able to stop eating cookies, although one realizes that one should. The story, called “Cookies,” belongs to a collection of his Frog and Toad stories called, Frog and Toad Together.i In Lobel’s story, Frog tells Toad that what they need is willpower. “What is willpower?” asks Toad. “Willpower is trying hard not to do something that you really want to do,” says Frog.ii The story moves on to its profound conclusion, which I won’t reveal here. But the reader is left to worry about who is responsible for the lack of willpower. Is it the rational part of oneself, that can’t control the addictive appetite? That doesn’t seem right. Reason just draws conclusions, such as, ‘If you eat another cookie, you may get sick.’ It doesn’t implement decisions. Is it then the appetite? That doesn’t seem right either. We need willpower to control appetite. The appetite is not the seat of responsibility.(For some questions to use in thinking about “Cookies” and two other stories in Lobel’s philosophical classic, Frog and Toad Together, see Appendix A.)
On the way home from the Northampton school that day I realized that the kids in those two classes had, after all, dealt with the problem of responsibility. They had decided that it’s not so much that we really have parts, one wanting to do something and another wanting not to do it. It is, rather, they suggested, that there are different messages coming to the brain, that is, to the mind. “You don’t do anything unless the mind agrees to it,” one of the kids had remarked. If the mind really is in charge, then I certainly can’t get myself off the hook by saying that it was that greedy part of me that made me do it. The greedy part sends a tempting message to the brain, but nothing happens unless the brain agrees to act on the greedy suggestion.
Putting the brain (or mind) in charge of what one does in a tug-of-war between reason and appetite does not solve the classic philosophical problem of Weakness of Will (that is, the problem of how I can ever be doing what I know I ought not to be doing). But at least it rules out the all-too-easy escape route, “It wasn’t I that did it; it was my appetite.”