Note 40 — Chapter XIII · PLATO

Incarnation in animals, Phdr. 249 B; Rp. 618 A, 620 ff.; Phd. 81 E; Tim. 42 BC. That this part was any less seriously meant than any other part of his doctrine of metempsychosis is not in the least suggested by Plato himself. Acc. to Tim. 91 D–92 B, all the animals have souls that had once inhabited the bodies of men (see Procl., in Rp. ii, 332 Kroll; he is trying to harmonize Tim. and Phdr.). In fact, the idea that a man’s soul might inhabit an animal was precisely the great difficulty in Plato’s doctrine of the soul. If, as is said in Phdr. 249 BC, a real animal-soul cannot enter into a human body because it does not possess νόησις or the power of “dialectic” which constitutes the essential part of the human soul’s activity, how can a real human soul enter into an animal’s body when it is obvious that as an animal it can make no use of its νόησις? (For this very reason many Platonists—those who were not satisfied with ingenious or artificial interpretations: cf. Sallust., de Dis 20; Procl., in Tim. 329 DE—denied the entrance of the human soul into animals; cf. Aug. CD. X, 30, and partic. Nemes., p. 116 Matth. Lucr. iii, 760, already seems to have such Platonists in mind.) The λογιστικόν of the soul seems to be absent from animals or to be present but undeveloped as in children: Rp. iv, 441 A B (or does it remain permanently bound in ἀφροσύνη? see above, this chap., n. 33. Just such a theory put forward by exponents of μετεμψύχωσις who would make the ψυχή always the same but not always equally active, is attacked by Alex. Aphr., de An., p. 27 Br.). But acc. to the later doctrine of Plato the λογιστικόν comprises the whole contents of the soul before it enters a body; if the animals do not possess it then they do not strictly speaking possess a soul (θυμός and ἐπιθυμία in themselves are not the soul; they are only added to the soul when it first enters into a body). It seems certain that Plato adopted the view that the soul migrates into the bodies of animals from the theologians and Pythagoreans, while he still believed that the soul was not pure power of thought but also (as still in Phdr.) included θυμός and ἐπιθυμία in itself. Later, because it was difficult to do without the migration-theory of the soul on account of its ethical importance, he allowed the idea to remain side by side with his reorganized and sublimated doctrine of the soul. (On the other hand, metempsychosis into plants—which are certainly also ζῷα, though they only have to τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν, Tim. 77 B—was never adopted by him from Empedokles; cf. Procl., in Rp. ii, 333 Kr., and for the same reason: this idea was unimportant and indifferent from an ethical point of view.)