Tripartite Soul

Plato’s structural anthropology of the psychē, set out in plato-republic Book IV and given mythic form in the plato-phaedrus (246a–254e). The soul has three parts: the logistikon (rational), the thumoeides (spirited), and the epithumetikon (appetitive). In the Phaedrus myth, reason is the charioteer; thumos the noble white horse; appetite the dark, unruly horse who must be lashed and bridled. Justice (dikaiosynē) within the individual is the right ordering of these three — reason ruling, thumos allied to reason, appetite obedient.

The middle term is the load-bearing one. Thumos is the spirited part: indignation, courage, noble anger, shame. It is neither cold reason nor brute appetite. Snell observes that Plato is consciously taking up the Homeric vocabulary — Plato’s thumos “deliberately echoes Homeric ideas,” used “purely ‘pedagogically’” inside a philosophical scheme (Snell 1953, p. 312). The continuity with Homer’s affective body is the load-bearing bridge between archaic poetry and classical philosophy.

The Timaeus gives the tripartition a cosmic architecture: reason in the head, thumos in the chest, appetite below the diaphragm — each placed in the body to reflect its relation to the world-soul (Cornford 1937, on Timaeus 69d–72d). Lorenz traces how, in the Timaeus and Philebus, the appetitive part is given a cognitive structure of its own — it responds to “images and appearances,” not to argument; reason can only persuade it by appealing to anticipated pleasures and pains (Lorenz 2006, on Timaeus 71a–d).

The Jungian inheritance is direct. The complex psychology of the ego, the shadow, and the affective faculties is structurally Platonic; the archetype an sich is the modern reformulation of the eidos that gives form to the soul’s parts.

Relationships

• thumos
• archetype
• divine-madness
• forms-eidos
• eros-as-daimon

Primary sources

• plato-republic (Plato, c. 380 BCE)
• plato-phaedrus (Plato, c. 370 BCE)
• plato-timaeus (Plato, c. 360 BCE)