Philosophos Agonistes : Imagery and Moral Psychology in Plato's Republic

PhilosophosAgonistes:Imagery and Moral Psychology in Plato's Republic RICHARD PATTERSON THE COMPETITIVEIMPULSEin its simplest, first and best expression--be best and first in everything, as Peleus advised Achilles--seems foreign to the spirit of philosophy for a number of reasons. The most important of these finds metaphorical expression in a "Pythagorean" gnome of uncertain provenance: "Life, said [Pythagoras], is like a festival; just as some come to the festival to compete, some to ply their trade, but the best people come as spectators, so in life the slavish go hunting for fame or gain, the philosophers for the truth" (Diogenes Laertius VIII, 8). Plato's celebrated tripartite soul of the Republic provides a psychological underpinning for these observations about the festival crowd, and in particular the distinction between the agonistes--the competitor hunting victory and fame--and the philosophical seeker after truth. Bk. IV distinguishes a reasoning , a spirited, and an appetitive part or aspect of the soul, each having its own proper function and the three together providing a basis for Socrates' discussion of the virtues of wisdom, courage, sophrosyne,and justice. Bk. IX is explicit about all three parts having their own particular and natural pleasures and desires: the two lower parts, "spirit" and "appetite," appear respectively as lovers of victory and glory, on the one hand, and money, food, drink, and sex, on the other; the best, or reasoning, part is cast as that which loves learning and truth (58od-58 lC). Each type of love or desire establishes a different sort of rule or polity within the soul, and a correspondingly different sort of life. Consequently, the philosopher is as distinct from the competitor as is a life spent in pursuit of glory from a life ofphilosophia. The philosopher may even find something distinctly absurd in Peleus' advice. For although the best popular contests were the best precisely because [327] 328 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY i99 7 they featured competition among "the best," whether playwrights or potters, wrestlers or rhapsodes, Socrates insists against Thrasymachus in Republic I that the just man, "like the expert in any art or craft" will not try to outdo another expert. That would be like a lyre player trying to be better in tune than another expert musician who is already in tune. More generally, it is the only the nonexpert in any field who, in the grasping, overreaching spirit called pleonexia, foolishly tries to outdo everybody else (349 e, ff., esp. 35ob). 1 What, then, of the intellectual competition known as eristic, a kind of verbal wrestling having its own rules, but within which few holds were barred and whose object was victory over an opponent? This sort of disputation certainly looks suspiciously like Socrates' method of elenchus ("refutation"). ~ For this very reason, however, Plato is at great pains to distinguish the two, chiefly on grounds that the philosophic use of refutation aims not at personal victory over an opponent, but at removal of falsehood and above all at purgation of the false conceit of wisdom, as a propaedeutic to genuine search for the truth (see, e.g, Meno 84a-c ). More than once Socrates warns that young practitioners of this sort of disputation are liable to get themselves into eristic mischief ("like young puppy dogs tearing to shreds anybody who comes near," 539b), and goes so far as to suggest that youngsters (up to the age of thirty!) should not be allowed any taste of eristic on grounds that it would undermine all their convictions about justice and goodness, and "make their souls lawless" (538d539c ; cf. Apology ~3c, Philebus 15b). And what could be further from the gentleness (375 e, 41od, 486d) and cooperativeness Socrates repeatedly requires of the philosopher than a lawless spirit of contention? For these and other reasons it is not difficult to imagine that the Platonic life of philosophy is supposed to rise above the agonistic impulse, to a higher plane of quiet contemplation, of gentle and cooperative search for the truth. Indeed, in a culture devoted to competition of every sortp philosophy might ' Although Socrates' point about the lyre player is welltaken, his general conclusion remains paradoxical for...