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And in the breast, and in what is termed the thorax, they encased the mortal soul; and as
the one part of this was superior and the other inferior they divided the cavity of the
thorax into two parts, as the women’s and men’s apartments are divided in houses, and
placed the midriff to be a wall of partition between them.
The part of “the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and
loves contention” they located “nearer the head, midway between the midriff and
the neck, in order that it might more easily join with reason in controlling and
restraining desire.
9
In this curious passage, Plato seems to portray humans as having, in effect,
two souls, one independent of the body and wholly rational, the other bodily and
passionate but capable to some extent of joining with reason. The passage sug-
gests that Plato had seen that in having previously made the soul so otherworldly
in order to insure its immortality, he had deprived himself of the ability to appeal
to it to explain human behavior. So he postulated another, this-worldly soul to
take up the slack. That move must have made some—Aristotle?—wonder
whether there had been any need to postulate an immaterial soul in the first
place. Perhaps, though, the immaterial soul
is needed to explain either how one
comes to have knowledge of the Forms or to explain what is often assumed to be
each person’s unity of consciousness. How, say, could a material soul—a compos-
ite thing—explain unity? That question would haunt philosophers of personal
identity into the modern era.
Whatever Plato’s motives in the passage just quoted, such empirical, physio-
logical theorizing was startlingly original (though it may have had its basis in
Hippocrates [circa 400 b.c.e.]). Yet, as we have seen, by supposing that one’s
essence—reason—is immaterial, and the rest of one’s mentality material, the
problem arose of explaining the relationship of this essence—one’s true self—to
the body. A similar problem plagues Plato’s view of reality more generally. His
dualism seems to have been motivated by the conviction that only what is imma-
terial and either itself rational or capable of being grasped rationally is fully real,
everything else deriving whatever reality it has from its “participation” in the
fully real.
10
Even so, as we shall see, the view that the soul is an immaterial substance
would prove to be remarkably persistent, mainly because it would be endorsed
by Christianity. But another reason for its persistence is that it has seemed to
many thinkers that each of us has a kind of mental unity that could not be
explained if we were wholly material. When, in the twentieth century, personal-
identity thinkers en masse finally did embrace materialism, the question of how