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and change that go with cognition, desire, decision making, pains, and pleasures.
In this light, the part of the soul that would survive bodily death is portrayed as
imprisoned for an earthly lifetime in a physical body that is an impediment to its
true happiness and interests, which lie in a bodiless, immaterial existence else-
where. Yet the soul is also portrayed as a life principle, whose essential function
is to animate the physical.
As we have seen, it is tempting to suppose, as some commentators have, that
Plato’s notion of an immaterial soul that can leave its body has its roots in sha-
manism, particularly as this influence was preserved in the Pythagorean move-
ment. In this interpretation, what Plato did, in effect, was to reinterpret
traditional Greek magico-religious ideas within the framework of a newly
emerging rationalism. So far as the soul is concerned, he did this by casting the
occult self of shamanism into the role of the rational soul. The shaman, through
a magical power that gets expressed in trance, detaches the occult self from the
body; the philosopher, through the power of reason, which gets expressed in
mental concentration, frees the rational soul from
bodily contamination. In sha-
manism, the soul, detached from the body, remembers past lives and acquires
occult knowledge; in Plato’s view, the soul, detached from the body, remembers
past lives and the knowledge of necessary truths, or the Forms, that
it acquired
when released from bodily contamination. Reincarnation finds a place in both
views.
8
In the Republic, Socrates claims that souls are divided into rational, spirited,
and appetitive parts. It is the interaction among these parts that explains how
people behave. In earlier writings, Plato had stressed that only the rational part
of the soul is immortal, the other two parts perishing with the body. As he
matured, he struggled to integrate this rather austere a priori philosophy
of the
self
as an “immaterial” thing with a more complicated empirical psychology
of
human mentality. Even so, in the Republic his discussion of divisions within
the
soul was not primarily meant to propose an empirical psychology but to make
the normative point that it is in each person’s self-interest that his or her soul be
harmonious. In Plato’s view, harmony of the soul requires that reason, rather
than spirit or appetite, rules. Yet while he thought that it is in one’s self-interest
for reason to rule, reason dictates that a person act not selfishly but in ways that
promote the welfare of others. Thus, in Plato’s view, the self-regarding impetus
of self-interest coincides with the other-regarding concerns of morality.
The details of Plato’s normative theories of self-interest and morality need
not concern us. For present purposes, it is more important that in explaining
these normative theories, Plato launched an empirical psychology, the first of its
kind in the West. Others, prior to Plato, tended to make proposals about what