Plato and Freud

PLATO AND FREUD1 G. EDISON These arc the properties of the rational soul: it sees itself, analyses itself, and makes itself such as it" chooses.-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations XI. WHEN the world was younger and the skies were uncontested, there was a time when utterances from the gods were not disdained. It was then, so we are told, that the Pythian Apollo had his say. It was then that his paternal injunction, fvwfh (jfa.vrov, "Know-thyself,', first proclaip1ed the problem which has kept the introspective mind in travail from that day to this. Man has a fickle memory; but it is not surprisjng that he has recalled this injunction in every age, since none could have been more congenial to his inquiring spirit. To be sure3 most of us are quite unable to summon the poet's interest in "everything created in the bounds of earth and sky"; but few '?f us, it we are honest, would disclaim an interest in- ourselves, or in that most engrossing of all mortal quests, the quest to discover something of the nature of the rock- from which we were hewn or of the pit from which we were digged. Today, however, the paradox of our position in respect of self-knowledge appears to be that though we know so much, we are almost as lamentably situated as if we knew nothing at all! For confirmation of this, we have only to turn to the-experts under whose indefatigable hands man h~s been carved apart at all his joints a11d had his various members and functions gone over in endless detail. What'is Man? He is anything and everything we would have him be. The anthropologist explains that he is a sort of mammalian freak, . an animal that cooks his own victuals; the biologist points out that he is a prodigy among th~ primates in that he has taken to two feet in place of four, with the result that he tends to get kinks in the·spine and collapses in the pelvic orifice; the sociologist has it that he is a "function" of his own social patterns; the economist, that he is a producer as ·well as a consumer, both .of which enterprises are contingent upon something in the nature of things called the "economic balance"; the psychologist tells us that he is the product of such things as reflexes, hormic drives , ductless glands, and feeling-states; and the theologian points out that he is a creature above the beasts yet below the angels, half dust, half deity, who has been endowed with an immortal soul and vouchsafed the means of grace, both of which he prefers to exchange for a mess of po.ttage l· In all this we do not intend to decry either the value or the legitimacy; m their several domains, of these m·any different approaches to the de1This paper was delivered in the 1945-6 series o.f University·College Lectures. 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY scription of man. The point we wish to make is that' very few of these so-called answers to the question, What is Man? have any direct bearing upon the kind of self-knowledge which the Apollonian dictum implies; and when we assume that these answers really yield such knowledg~, then, like Chanticlee.r, who attributed the sunrise to his crowing, we pitiably deceive ourselves, and, either in arrogance or in na:ivete, end up by believing we know much more about ourselves than in fact we do. With this in mind, it may prove salutary to consider two historic attempts to give man this knowledge of himself without which he remains a forlorn and distracted creature in an alien world. The choice of Plato and Freud seems to--favour our purpose, since Plato makes one of the earliest, and, without question, one of the greatest contributions to this field of inquiry, and Freud one of the more recent, and, again without question, one of the more provocative contributions. Our discussion, like Plato's soul, Freud's ego, and Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts: in the first of which we shall be concerned with·the...