Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
5 - The division of the soul
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
Summary
It is interesting, is it not, that when Plato introduces 'spirit’ or thumos in the Republic, as he arrives through reflection at the division of the soul into Reason, Spirit and Appetite, that it is manifested as an indignation directed to oneself: it is Kant's Imperative, there from the start, our first felt moral task. Nevertheless, it is only a phase of the moral life.
Self-possession or Besonnenheit … the expression is ambiguous, between the edgy uncertainty of enkrateia, and the relaxed fullness of sophrosune, between the joyful, effortless action celebrated by such thinkers as Schiller, Nietzsche and Blake (‘virtues of delight’) and the effortful, necessitated product of moral struggle. Passage from the one to the other is obscured from view unless we see moral struggle as a phase or modality of ethical sensibility and not as an inescapable and permanent aspect of the ethical.
The trouble with a life of enkrateia, a virtue that can be too successful, is that a person undergoes transformations they are not even aware of: ‘that pale religious lechery, that wishes but acts not’, for instance. If you toss out nature with a pitchfork, it will still in the end return.
So what is an ‘ethical sensibility’ you may well ask. Just as I want to map the movement from akolasia, through enkrateia to sophrosune onto the stages of the development of a moral sensibility, I want to understand the latter in terms of a movement of eros, from physical beauty to beauty of soul.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Transformations of MindPhilosophy as Spiritual Practice, pp. 72 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000