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unified we are mentally and how whatever mental unity we have might be
explained has come to the fore.
Returning to Plato, his division of the soul, together with his suggestion that its
lower functions are bodily and beastlike, may be the ultimate theoretical origin of
the idea of the unconscious. In Augustine, the view became one of true and false
selves. In the twelfth century, through the medium of Augustine, it spawned the
notion of self-deception. Subsequently, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the view that the soul is divided and in conflict with itself resurfaced in an army
of thinkers, including Montaigne, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau, until in the nine-
teenth century, first in Schopenhauer, then in Nietzsche, and then finally in
Freud, the lower parts of the soul were relegated to “the unconscious.”
11
In the Phaedrus, which is one of Plato’s relatively late dialogues, and in the
Laws, which is usually thought to be the latest, Plato introduced what seems to
be an entirely different conception of soul. In these dialogues, he defines the soul
as a self-moving thing and says that it is this attribute that makes it immortal:
“All soul is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal.” Things that
impart motion to other things but are themselves “moved by something else,” he
continued, are soulless; they “can cease to be in motion, and therefore can cease
to live.” Something self-moving, and only something self-moving, cannot “aban-
don its own nature.” Hence, only self-movers are immortal. So, we should “feel
no scruple in affirming that precisely that [that is, being self-moving] is the
essence and definition of soul.”
12
In these dialogues, the soul is said to be co-eternal with the gods. There is an
obvious connection between these reflections and Plato’s earlier thoughts in the
Phaedo, in which he stressed that the soul is essentially alive, as well as a connection
with Aristotle’s views. Yet Plato’s emphasis here on the importance of selfmotion
raises questions about corporeal souls in humans, animals, and plants. Did he think
that these corporeal souls, because they are not “self-moving,” are not really souls at
all but merely aspects of biological mechanisms, or did he think that even these
corporeal souls are immortal?
Whatever Plato’s ultimate view, in the surviving literature from the West in
which views of the self are expressed, nothing even remotely like Plato’s intel-
lectual sensitivity and sophistication, not to mention his imaginative and liter-
ary flair, had appeared previously. He represents a new beginning. The view of
the self that he expressed in the Phaedo was in the West destined to become one
of the most influential theories of the self of all time. Even so, it was not the
only influential theory of the self spawned by Greek culture. Within 150 years
of Socrates’ death two other rival theories of the self were expressed, each of
which ultimately would become as influential as Plato’s. One of these came