Tripartite Of The Psyche Analysis

Tripartite of the Psyche The author Plato’s central focus in “The Republic” is to answer the questions of what makes a person just. To tackle this question, Plato’s character Socrates first starts off by recognizing that identifying justice in a state would be easier than defining justice in a person, since a government is on a larger scale and thus provides a clearer representation. As Socrates characterizes justice, in an ideal state, as the three parts of the state working in harmony—the rules, the auxiliaries, and the artisans—he concludes that this harmony of parts holds true for justice in an individual. After Socrates sets up the three components of the ideal state, he moves on to defining the three components of a person’s psyche.

Socrates opens page 136 by expressing how a person can be “thirsty and yet unwilling to drink” (136). In other words, he is saying that an array of reactions can be felt by a single physical experience. This indecisiveness suggests to Socrates that, in these types of instances, there must be an internal conflict between two or more parts of the person’s psyche—a part that stops them from doing something and another that brings about the initial desire. Socrates identifies the first part of the soul as the rational. He believes that this part of the psyche makes intellectual, sensible decisions based off of the situation. For instance, I may want to eat a piece of cake, but the rational part of my psyche stops me from eating the cake because I do not want to gain weight. In other words, I like to think of the rational part of the soul as the frontal lobe of the brain—if the person is healthy and in balance, then the frontal lobe regulates decision-making. This is analogous to the controlling role of the rational part of the psyche. Socrates suggests that the rational part of the soul can convince, if the parts of a person’s soul are balanced, the other sections to behave a certain way. Although rational normally governs a being, this part can be in conflict—like in the example of wanting to eat the