The Two Rulers of the Soul
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — δύο τινέ ἐστον ἰδέα ἄρχοντε καὶ ἄγοντε, ἑπόμεθα· ἡ μὲν ἔμφυτος ἐπιθυμία ἡδονῶν, ἄλλη δὲ ἐπίκτητος δόξα, ἀρίστου
Before he will say a word about love, Socrates maps the soul. Two forces command us and we go where they pull: one is <em>born</em> in us — the raw appetite for pleasure — and the other is <em>won</em> by learning — the judgment that reaches for what is best. Love, he is about to argue, is simply what it is called when the first of these overpowers the second.
Beginning his own first speech on love, Socrates lays down a piece of psychology: within each of us two principles contend for command — and love will turn out to be what happens when one of them wins.
This is the seed of the chariot. The two rulers here — innate <em>epithymía</em> (appetite for pleasure) and acquired <em>dóxa</em> (judgment aiming at the best) — become, in the palinode a few pages later, the dark horse and the charioteer. Two of Plato's sharpest words are set against each other: <em>epithymía</em>, the downward craving, and <em>dóxa</em>, which means both 'opinion' and 'seeming,' forever short of knowledge. And the word for these ruling 'principles' is <em>idéa</em> — the same word, with <em>eîdos</em>, that names the eternal Forms, and the direct ancestor of our 'idea,' though Plato's ἰδέα is a reality outside the mind, not a thought within it. Even this first, deliberately cruder speech is already built from the vocabulary the great myth will raise to the heavens.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 237d in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 237d — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/237d/