Discussion Starter - Plato: The Republic

Plato’s account of true philosophers’ desires supports a predilection toward the desire for knowledge and reason, but does not entirely obscure the existence of appetitive and spirited desires in their souls. The three forms of desire exist harmoniously in the human soul, wherein the rational and spirited parts “govern the appetitive part, which is the largest part in each person’s soul” (Plato, 118). While the different classes of citizens are respectively characterized by their inclination towards one of the three desires, Plato makes it clear, particularly in 435-443 (Book V), that all three desires do indeed exist in humans in varying degrees. To reconcile the sharp and inherent contrasts in souls of different classes despite their possession of the same three kinds of desires, he uses the simile of a “stream that has been partly diverted into another channel” to argue that “when someone’s desires incline strongly for one thing, they are thereby weakened for others” (Plato, 159). That is to say, desire is exhaustive - its attribution to one kind of desire compromises its engagement with another. And thus of “true philosophers”, he elaborates: “when someone’s desires flow towards learning and everything of that sort, he’d be concerned, I suppose, with the pleasures of the soul itself by itself, and he’d abandon those pleasures that come through the body” (Plato, 159). In other words, a strong inclination to rationality exhausts one's desire for selfish and bodily pleasures. This, however, begs the question, “in what degrees and forms do the potentially corruptive spirited and appetitive desires exist in true philosophers, and do their persistence in the human soul render even philosophers potentially dangerous to rule?”

As we think about this in context of one of our central questions, what qualities describe the ideal person?, we must consider what role the controlling or “diverting” of desires plays. Is it practical to assume that desires are exhaustive and can be controlled by diverting them from one form to another? Does the ideal person today need to control their desires in the same way? I would think that Plato’s kallipolis demands that people be inherently and consistently drawn to one form of desire rather than another so that they can play their respective civil role without seeking upward or outward mobility into other occupational classes. Can Plato’s ideal person only support their civil structure if they have a predictable pattern of desire attributed in fixed proportions to the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive? High occupational mobility as such would threaten the stability of the class structure, and thus an inexhaustibility or inconsistency of desires simply cannot fit the picture of the kallipolis. To preserve the class division, we must assume that Plato’s true philosophers are fixed in their desire for knowledge, and that their desire for knowledge by itself exhausts the appetitive and spirited desires. Is this notion of desire consistent with our understanding of human nature today? Does this assumption sufficiently quell the fear that philosopher-kings might act on their potentially corruptive desires? Would Plato’s kallipolis collapse if philosophers’ desires were mobile, inconsistent, and less predictable?