ABSTRACT
It was something of a commonplace in Greek philosophical thought that both body and soul could be diseased and that both had their proper forms of healing: the medical art for ailments of the body and philosophy for the diseases of the mind.1 In The Republic, Plato explained his conception of the just soul with an analogy to Greek medical ideas about health and disease: just as “health is produced by establishing a natural relation of control and subordination among the constituents of the body, disease by establishing an unnatural relation … [s]o justice is produced by establishing in the mind a similar natural relation of control and subordination among its constituents, and injustice by establishing an unnatural one.” Thus Plato called the subordination of the appetitive and spirited elements of the soul to the rational element “a kind of mental health.”2 And where Plato outlined the course of education needed to enable the soul to achieve justice through an apprehension of the Good, he stressed in particular the need to shape carefully the student’s emotional life.3 Aristotle likewise argued in his Nicomachean Ethics that “anyone who is going to be a competent student in the spheres of what is noble and what is just – in a word, politics – must be brought up well in his habits.”4 Indeed, Aristotle went on to define human good precisely in terms of these moral habits, which he argued to involve a tempering of character according to a mean between opposite emotional dispositions as well as an understanding of what feelings and actions are appropriate in a given situation and in what measure.5 Clearly, as in Plato, rational thought was to supervene on natural human impulse in the formation of virtuous character.6 And that this achieved the good of the soul Aristotle clarified by analogy to bodily health and disease, noting that “we must use clear examples to illustrate the unclear.” Just
as “too much food and drink and too little ruin one’s health, while the right amount produces, increases and preserves it”, in the same way, “temperance, courage and the other virtues … are ruined by excess and deficiency, and preserved by the mean.”7
