One Noble Horse, One Its Opposite
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Socrates — εἶτα τῶν ἵππων ὁ μὲν αὐτῷ καλός τε καὶ ἀγαθὸς καὶ ἐκ τοιούτων ὁ δʼ ἐξ ἐναντίων τε καὶ ἐναντίος· χαλεπὴ δὴ καὶ δύσκολος ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἡ περὶ ἡμᾶς ἡνιόχησις.
Here is the image the whole palinode is famous for. Picture the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of a two-horse team. The gods' teams are matched and good, but ours is mixed: one of our horses is noble and good and bred from good stock, and the other is its complete opposite, from opposite stock and opposite in nature. So driving the human soul is, by necessity, hard and troublesome — chalepē kai dyskolos — a constant wrestling with a team that pulls two ways at once. This is Plato's picture of the divided self: reason at the reins, one impulse straining upward toward the good and the beautiful, another lunging down toward the ground, and the whole difficult art of a life consisting in how the driver manages the pull.
Socrates unfolds the great image. The human soul is a charioteer driving a team of two winged horses. One horse is noble and good, of fine stock; the other is its exact opposite, of opposite breeding. Driving such a mismatched pair is, of necessity, hard and vexing work — and that inner struggle is the shape of every human life.
The chariot is Plato's great myth of the divided self, and its structure is exact. The soul has three parts: the charioteer, who is reason, nous; the good horse, high-spirited and honor-loving, which strains upward on its own toward the beautiful; and the bad horse, the appetitive one, heavy and unruly, which drags everything down toward the earth and the body. It is the same threefold soul as the Republic's, but here it is set in motion — literally, as a moving thing, the self-mover just proved immortal. And the key word is that the driving is chalepē kai dyskolos, 'hard and troublesome,' ex anankēs, of necessity. Plato refuses two easy pictures at once. Against the first speech, which imagined the good soul as simply self-possessed and calm, he insists that no human soul is calm: to be human is to hold the reins of a team that fights you, always. But against a merely tragic view, he insists this is not a catastrophe but the ordinary condition, the very thing a life is for — the driver is not doomed, only tasked. When love enters, later in the myth, it will be the sight of beauty that throws this whole straining team into crisis and, if the driver is strong enough, lifts it. The hard, mismatched team is not a problem to be solved but the engine of the ascent: without the downward horse there would be no struggle, and without the struggle no wings.
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