A letter on moral psychology and a fractured identity.
S.R.,
I have bored you, I’m sure, with the seemingly endless, tedious, trivial repetition, or have bothered you with the slow, inept movement of my hands, as if I were first learning to use them, and my complaints, of pain, at little progress over great swaths of time, or how little time there is left in the day after the toil and labor after daily bread and other, more serious pursuits, and my admiration of the talents of others, itself bordering on envy — though not really.
It does not sound as vibrant as it once did, when first it arrived at my doorstep, and I eagerly seized it, and stole away, proud of the fact that I had bought it. It has hardly aged, though it is worn down a little, and you can see the marks left by frequent, or at the very least inconsistent, use.
It has been, all together, a worthwhile investment, but I would not have you think that I would ever dream of being a professional — even if I do own three mandolins.
The goal, rather, was to amuse myself, and in this respect I take lead from Aristotle, who somewhere in his Nicomachean Ethics says something to effect of one must know enough music to entertain oneself, but not enough to be considered a professional musician.
The importance of a musical education is, however, not lost on him, though its purpose is unclear, as to whether it ought to be used to produce virtue, or merely enjoyment, or to contribute to intellectual development (cf., Politics 1339a).
And its importance certainly not on our Plato,
“But what is our education? Or is it difficult to find one better than that which has been known for some time, that is, gymnastics for the body and music for the soul?”
Plato, Republic 376e2–3 (my translation)
chiefly for its effect upon the soul, in so far as rhythm and harmony leave an impression upon it (cf., Republic 401d), or in so far as music is an imitation of the states and dispositions of the soul (cf., Laws 798d).
And with respect to the protreptic quality of music there is an amusing story in the Suda of which I am reminded.
It is related in a biographical account of Hypatia, that one of her disciples professed his love for her. Initially she attempted to assuage his desire with music, but when this failed, resorted to a shock-and-awe tactic atypical of a Neoplatonist, and one fitting moreso for the Cynic philosopher — but let me spare you my synopsis:
“She was thus so beautiful that even one of her disciples fell in love with her. But he was not able to master his love, but rather made his condition apparent to her. Some uninformed accounts say that Hypatia alleviated his sickness through music, but the truth informs us that music had no effect. And she having brought forth some of her menstrual rags threw them before him, and so made a symbolic display… [sc., akathartou geneseos] and said, “‘This what you love —and in no way is it beautiful.’”
Suda, Upsilon 166.6–7 (my translation)
Or perhaps one thinks of Orpheus in Virgil’s Georgics,
“And he,
consoling his love sickness with a lyre,
alone on the shore, sang of you, dear wife,
you, at the dawning of the day,
at the dusking of the day, you.”
Virgil, Georgics IV.464–466 (my translation)
In the Phaedo we find the analogy that the soul is, perhaps, a harmony of elements, and is con-substantial with the body, unlike the harmony produced by the lyre, which, though the lyre may perish, the harmony produced by its strings survives it:
“And I think that you, Socrates, have something like this in mind, that the soul be understood as being something like this, that the body is strung together and held together by hot, and cold, and wetness and dryness, and such things, and that our soul is a harmony and mixture of things like these, when they have been mixed together well and moderately…”
Plato, Phaedo 86b4-c2 (translation)
This, of course, raises problems as to the soul’s immortality which Socrates in later sections attempts to unwind — i.e., if the soul is con-substantial with the body, how can it be immortal, as its parts are subject to decay?
If we, for a moment, shy away from the metaphysical perplexities, I think we are left with a valuable conceptual starting-point for an ethical investigation.
If we concede that the soul is a harmony composed of various faculties, and is multipart, a unity, rather than a partless singularity, we allow ourselves the ability of explaining what we know to be true from perceptual experience — how we can be divided against ourselves, how our intellect can be opposed to our desires, and yet not subdue them, how we can exist as fractured individuals, and how we can transform ourselves, how we can change as individuals.
Chrysippus, I have often thought, takes on unnecessary pains in his claim that the soul is a singularity (that it consists in a single part), and that reason (or intellect) is its only part (in so far as a singularity can have parts within itself).
But this serves as an explanatory mechanism — how else would the rational part of the soul affect its own irrationality, i.e., the “part” which is the seat of the emotions, the passions? And so we enter into something akin to the mind-body problem, if we assume that they are entirely unlike, i.e., we raise serious problems in questioning the nature and even the very possibility of their interaction. For how could two things which are wholly unlike (e.g., like the “mental” and the physical) interact? And so, while Chrysippus is able to escape this, he runs headlong into another set of problems, e.g., the intractability of our irrational parts, the intractability of the phenomenological experience of emotion. If the emotions were somehow the result of our intellectual activity, wholly so, we might be able to dismiss their phenomenological effects by the use of reason alone, as that which is wholly the result of reason would seem to be able to be manipulated wholly by reason. But of course this is not so.
For example, if I were depressed, on this account it would seem that by just changing my thinking or reasoning that I could do away with the depression — and while this is true in part, in so far as it is through a diligent spiritual practice that I can change the disposition of my soul, and that this involves a cognitive aspect, the mere exertion of the intellect alone does not trigger the upheaval of myself necessary to realize change at the level of my affective dispositions. While we might change the way we think, in other words, for this change to take root we must manipulate some part of ourselves which is not wholly subject to reason, and while this is partly cognitive, by the sheer fact of what must be exerted and how much time must elapse we find evidence of a division of the soul into multiple parts.
We might proffer an alternative in saying that, while the parts are irretrievably distinct, there is a tenuous link between the rational and irrational, that the irrational part permits of some rational element, which we can demonstrate by appeal to our everyday experience.
Allow me to do so.
The emotions, it seems, while they are affective, while they somehow impinge upon or colour my perceptual experience when I am under the effect of some particularly powerful emotion, say, love, as before, have a cognitive element. Hypatia’s pupil was in thrall to her beauty because he assented to the implicit claim that she was beautiful, firstly, and secondly, that beauty was something to which one must be in thrall, in so far as beauty is a good, and possession of beauty is good, and so we arrive at the implicit judgement that to possess the beloved is good, because we possess their beauty, and so arises the passion that we call love, which is partly cognitive, partly affective (and we make this distinction on the assumption that the cognitive cannot be affective).
And so the analogy of a harmony is quite apt, in so far as we are multipartite and that there is the possibility of these parts not being in accord with one another, that they might be discordant.
But then we are forced to answer another question — what is the harmony of the soul?
“And I think, my good man, that it is better that my lyre be out of tune and sound poorly, and the chorus which I lead, and the majority of men to disagree with me and contradict me, than for me, being one, to be discordant with myself and to contradict myself.”
Plato, Gorgias 482b7-c3 (my translation)
The soul is a unity, composed of, as we have seen, at least two parts. One intellective, the other irrational. And of the irrational we can make a further division into those parts that are affective, the level at which we experience emotions as belonging to our perceptual experience, and the level at which we perform those processes, unconscious, necessary to our living. None of this is very groundbreaking.
What a a harmony entails is an accord between my intellect and that part of me which feels, which desires, which wishes, i.e., the will, in so far as it is the will which is the source of these.
And what this accord means is simply that I am not to be at odds with myself in my desires — that I should not act in one way and think another, that I should act in such a way that maintains my moral, and even more importantly, my psychic integrity, that I should not be divided against myself.
“It would be out of tune for me, being such an age, to be vexed at having to die.”
Plato, Crito 43b8–9 (my translation)
I cannot pretend that I am not even still bothered by that dictum of Hume’s, that reason is the slave of the passions, and in that respect even now I feel the need to look over my shoulder, lest he catch me unawares. And I am often at odds with myself in this respect–whether we are led by reason or we are led to believe that we act rationally, i.e., whether reason does the leading or is itself in thrall to our irrational parts. But with respect to what can we be rational if not the contents of our desires? And is this harmony nothing more than coming to desire those things which are dictated as being desirable by reason?
And further still I cannot pretend to know whether the soul exists as a natural harmony, in the way that, say, the G major chord is the natural relationship between the 1st (the eponymous note of the chord), 3rd, and 5th elements of the G major scale–where the correlate of the tonic in our case is the intellect, the 3rd and 5th being the appetitive and vegetative aspects of the soul– and it is only through external pressures that we become perverse and decadent in our desires and our actions, or whether the harmony is imposed on us from without, and we are born from discord, into discord, and are only saved through our projections of moral perfection.
This is what I mean–if we are a harmony, are we a harmony by nature, or by virtue, or by grace? I suppose the case is similar to that of musical instruction: we recognize musical relationships as existing independently of ourselves, knowing them only vaguely, but it is the act of playing or creating or learning that reifies these relationships within us, at the level of our being.
We begin, as it were, with the raw potential to create or construct, and with time and the right model and the right effort, we find that the task which once seemed so alien to us has become second nature–as the student learns scales which at first seem foreign and unintuitive, and gradually by and by integrates those theoretical concepts into their being at the level of experience, and thereby the frequencies of the physicist become the notes of the musician, and all this was possible through nature, but conditioned by praxis, and realized by grace.
But now, if you’ll excuse me, I have been putting off changing these strings.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George