Divisions

I wrote a little post yesterday about divisions in the self. Sort of taking a one-sided view of things with a definite agenda to push.

Of course, the idea that the self is divided isn’t a new one. Plato divides up the soul into the rational, spirited, and appetitive parts — and the overall thesis of the Republic is that justice means the better part should govern the worse part. A just man is one in whom rationality is in control of the other parts of the soul, and the just state is the state in which the more rational individuals govern the less rational. (Note: this is a highly oversimplified summary.)

But divisions like that seem too simple, too pretty. Much better is the half-articulated view the Greeks and other pagan peoples had before the advent of systematic philosophy. A pantheon of capricious gods and goddesses is a far better analog to the human psyche than any neat tripartite division — be it Plato’s, Freud’s, or anyone else’s.

What is polytheism, from the point of view of the human psyche? It treats various natural and artificial phenomena as autonomous agents — Hades, god of death, Poseidon, god of the sea, Ceres, goddess of the harvest, etc. But equally, and more to the point here, it treats human passions and drives as autonomous agents that can possess the souls of individual human beings. And granted, we have divinities who embody rationality, or at least certain aspects of it — Apollo and Athena come to mind. But then we have gods who embody other passions — Aphrodite, goddess of love, Ares, god of war (more in the animal sense of bloodlust, mind you. Strategy and tactics were Athena’s realm), Bacchus, god of wine, etc.

So the psyche in the polytheistic world is not a unified thing. It’s a loose jumble of many drives (perhaps even divine drives), without necessarily having any unifying principle guiding them. Its understanding of the world takes the form of myth, not thought — stories, not facts and propositions. What’s revealed in myth and story is not the kind of thing that’s revealed in discursive thought — so you could say all I’m saying here is that what Homer’s doing in the Odyssey is fundamentally different from what Plato’s doing in the Republic.

Or is that what I’m talking about?

I started out talking about philosophy as opposed to polytheism — but I wonder if it really has more to do with rationality as opposed to art, or poetry.

Because there’s a conflict here. Plato famously banned poets from his hypothetical Republic, because of their corrupting influence on morals. He cites Zeus and his constant philandering as a good example, among others. “Are these really the stories we want to teach our children?” is pretty much the essence of the argument.

And of course no mother wants her son to grow up to be a womanizer. Anyway, artists are always a slightly unsavory bunch, at least from the standpoint of polite society. So, says Plato, we’ll have to get rid of the poets and all their awful myths about these immoral gods. Should be easy enough for us to make a brand new bunch of stories to promote good, sound morals — and as anyone who has ever seen a propaganda film knows, ideologues always make the best storytellers.

What Plato finds distasteful in his frequent diatribes against poets — and I say this full of love and admiration for Plato, make no mistake — is that they’re disorderly people, and they can’t give a clear account of how their poetry has its effect. They don’t know where it comes from, they don’t know how they do it, and they can never work in a way that guarantees a uniform level of quality.

(I would say it’s more likely that poets know exactly where their ideas come from, they just don’t talk about it because if they did they’d get locked up, chased out of town, etc… but aside from that, most of Plato’s criticisms hold true.)

I do wonder if it’s possible for a really excellent artist to be “just” in the way Plato describes. To subjugate the passions to reason could well lead to a good life, possibly even the Good Life, but it would also deaden access to the raw passion necessary to create art.

(Possibly.)

Remember, Dostoevsky would often create his best work out of financial desperation because he’d gambled all his money away. A more rational man would never have gotten himself into such a situation in the first place — and the whole world would be all the poorer for it. (And remember, we mean “rational” here in the sense of “guided by/dominated by” rationality, not in the sense of intellectual power. Obviously, Dostoevsky was a man of formidable intellect. But in this Platonic sense, he was not at all a rational man.)

Let me know if you draw any conclusions from that. As for me, I’m just sifting through the fragments of my mind and seeing if I can form any coherent whole or pattern out of them.

I don’t much care for jigsaw puzzles. I think it’s because I experience myself as one.