Mental Conflict by Price A. W

Author:Price, A. W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

Appetites are one kind of desire, and liable to conflict with rational desires that are equally exercises of ‘the desiderative faculty’. We meet the same way of thinking in the Ethics. Whereas the good man desires the same things ‘in the whole of his soul’ (NE 8.4.1166a14), the bad man’s soul is in a state of faction, one element pleased while another is pained, one pulling one way, another another, as if they were tearing him apart (b19–22). ‘Tear apart’ is a strong metaphor which Plato applies to destroying the unity of his utopian city (Rep 5.462a8–b1, 464c7–8, Laws 9.875a7). Strictly speaking, a single soul, unlike a city, cannot be torn apart (EE 7.6.1240b29–30), and Aristotle’s language strains expressively at the limits of possibility. Similarly, within divided minds that demand a self-control of which the ‘encratic’ are capable and the ‘acratic’ are not, reasoning and desire, being separate, push away (literally, ‘knock out’) one another (2.8.1224b23–4), with the victory going to the reasoning of the encratic and the desire of the acratic. In a different but equally mechanistic picture, we read that sometimes rational desire ‘defeats and moves’ other desire, and at other times is defeated and moved by it, like one ball hitting another, when acrasia occurs (DA 3.11.434a12–14). Such language puts one in mind of the ‘inward affections’ in Plato’s Laws that ‘being opposed to each other, pull one against the other to opposite actions’ (1.644e1–3). It is clear that Plato and Aristotle both conceive of the divided mind as the battleground of antagonistic desires that determine action according to a play of forces.

Does Aristotle agree with Plato’s use of the concept of mental conflict to yield a criterion of partition, that is, of a mapping especially of a mind’s desires into families or clusters each of which tends to be in conflict with others, but has no inherent tendency to be conflicted within itself? The clearest evidence is of a kind of bipartition between a part of the soul that has reason, and another that may oppose it:

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