9.3: The Tyrannical Soul

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See 572b-576b. Recall that, in the story Socrates tells of how a tyrant comes to power in the city, the troubles begin with a struggle between the idle drones and the conservative money-makers, which leads to the people choosing a champion from the drones to defend them from the perceived threat of oligarchic conservatism. Socrates thinks something like this can happen in the soul of a person raised in the liberty of a democratic household. Here the struggle is between the various desires of the appetitive part. The young man’s prodigal friends are continually pulling him towards the unnecessary pleasures. This prompts his father, who doesn’t approve of favoring one set of pleasures over another, to do what he can to pull him back towards a concern for the necessary pleasures. (One imagines him pausing in mid-sentence, vaguely aware that he is lecturing his son in the very words of his oligarchic father: about settling down, getting a job, investing his money, avoiding unmixed wine, and so on.) But the friends win out, for they “contrive to implant a powerful passion in him as the popular leader of those idle and profligate appetites – a sort-of great, winged drone.” In other words, one of the lawless desires – for drugs perhaps, or sex, or power – is unleashed from the confines of his dream life, and takes root at the center of his concerns. It grows into such a longing that it takes control of his soul, and a kind of madness sets in. Nothing that stands in the way of its gratification is tolerated. Like the tyrant, who purges the city of whomever dares to question his rule, the tyrannical desire crushes or locks away any old beliefs or desires that rise up to question the prudence or decency of its demands. And so it goes, from bad to worse, until the person finds himself no longer able to fund his lifestyle. With a lawless desire on the throne of his soul, he thinks nothing of turning to purse snatching, temple robbing, or the slave trade. If he is crafty, then the field of politics offers further opportunities, as do the law courts. And if he is spirited as well as crafty, and it is power over others that he craves, then, of course, there is organized crime, the highest form of which is tyranny.

How similar, psychologically, are political tyrants and drug addicts?
Imagine a person who is obsessed with pursuing the answer to an exceptionally challenging problem in mathematics. This is all he cares about. Everything in his life is subordinated to finding the answer to this problem. He has contempt for his fellow human beings – “mere particulars,” he calls them – and thinks nothing of stealing from them or manipulating them in other ways if it will help him as he works towards his problem’s solution. Would this person have a tyrannical soul? Socrates assumes that a person ruled by the rational part of the soul will live an orderly, virtuous life. But he also assumes that such a person either knows the form of the good or aspires to attain this knowledge. What then of the obsessed mathematician? Is this example psychologically possible, or does the pursuit of the forms, even of relatively unimportant mathematical forms, inevitably cleanse the soul of selfishness and moral insensitivity?