Plato rationalism

When motivation became the object of scientific study, the same kind of exceptions to rational choice soon became apparent. Pavlov came up with the most robust solution—conditioned behavior, refined to conditioned motives, stated definitively in . H. Mowrer s two-factor theory (1947).1 In this form, Plato s passions seemed discernible in parametric research, and the ancient dual model was perpetuated. 

It is not a new idea that the self is multiple. Philosophers and psychologists since Plato have described competing principles of decision-making, usually a lower, impulsive principle and a higher, rational principle (Kenny 1963, Ch. 8 Kant 1960, pp. 15-49 Ricoeur 1971, p. 11 Freud 1923) but the relationship between these principles has been elusive. If the parts of the self can be clearly articulated, they may be suitable material for a model more microscopic than microeconomics, picoeconomics perhaps, in which the elements that combine to determine the individual person s values can be described. Freud proposed such an economic model and kept it in mind as he modelled motivational conflicts, but he never achieved a coherent system (1916-17, pp. 356-7). This chapter will present some preliminary suggestions about how a multiple self may be simply described. 

Political philosophers have traditionally conceived of justice as a relationship among people living within the same nation or state. Plato (1974), for example, held that a just state is rationally ordered. Hobbes (1982) held that principles of justice are rules that people adopt in order to attain the benefits of social cooperation and avoid the dangers of the state of nature. Conceptual problems arise when one extends this standard account of justice to the international domain, because people around the globe are not living in the same nation. The world s five billion people live in more than 150 nations. How can there be justice among people in different nations ... 

The superiority of pure reasoning, especially scientific and mathematical logic, lay in the fact that it was "pure of pain, maximally stable, and directed at the truth." The objects of such reasoning "are eternally what they are regardless of what human beings do and say." What one loved, or should love, Plato claimed, was not the beloved himself but rather the pure forms of unalloyed beauty reflected in the beloved. Only in this way could love remain straight and rational, free of the appetites. 

Nussbaum is concerned particularly with the differences between moral systems that allow for the passions and attachments of human life and closed, self-sufficient moral systems that achieve "moral safety and rational power at the expense of a fully human life. Plato, depending upon how one interprets the Symposium, is an exemplar of the latter, and Aristotle an exemplar of the former. 

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