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Isn’t Plato an Out-of-Date Reference?


In the health sciences, our students are often taught not to cite papers that are more than 5 or 10 years old. The idea is that knowledge advances rapidly and we shouldn’t be relying on old information. In that context, why does Two Minds Theory make arguments drawn in part from classical sources? One reviewer of our initial theory paper strongly suggested that Plato was a dated reference and therefore should be removed.

Our position is that a good theory should be able to accommodate insights from astute observers of the phenomenon in question, regardless of when those observers collected their data. In this case, the phenomenon is human behavior, something that has been of concern to political, religious, and philosophical leaders throughout human history. Humans have evolved slowly enough that our mental apparatus today is substantively the same as it was during each of those historical periods. Therefore, Freud’s observations from 100 years ago should fit within TMT, as should Plato’s from 2000 years ago. We don’t accept all of theories that past thinkers put forward to explain behavior, of course, but we do need to accept their observations. A good theory of human behavior today should be able to account for human behavior as it has been described in the past.

Plato's Phaedrus, for instance, uses the analogy of a chariot with two horses to describe the difficulty that people sometimes experience in controlling their own behavior (full text here, beginning at paragraph 246d). The analogy is important because it identifies sub-parts within the human mind that are sometimes in conflict, producing what we describe as "intention-behavior gaps." In Plato's view, natural human inclinations have two parts -- one that wants what it wants right now (the dark horse) and one that responds to higher ideals of love, mercy, courage, etc. (the white horse). Plato sees human reason as the mediator between these two horses' desires (the charioteer). Our TMT model includes Intuitive-level factors that predispose people to unhealthy behaviors, as well as a Narrative system that can correct for those factors, although we no longer see the Narrative system as able to exercise executive control in the way that Plato argued. Our model as originally stated perhaps leaves out some of the more positive Intuitive-level influences embodied in the white horse, although the inclusion of mindfulness in the model suggests a way that these might be incorporated.

While Plato's writings point to the world of ideas and suggest the importance of narratives, his student Aristotle's work offers a more complex description of everyday decision-making via the Intuitive System. Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that people's behavior arises from a four-part soul: (a) nutritive, the level of basic physiology; (b) perceptual, the level of subjective experiences; (c) rational, similar to Plato's charioteer but presented in a more descriptive way as cognition and understanding rather than willpower; and (d) appetitive, similar to Plato's two horses with subdivisions between selfish desires (the dark horse) and the desire to behave in a virtuous way (the white horse). Aristotle's model is closer to TMT in that rational thought -- i.e., the Narrative System -- is presented as just one of many influences on behavior rather than the controlling force. Aristotle also allows for individual differences in perception or physiology that may have an effect on behavior. Finally, Aristotle suggested a practical approach to behavior change, beginning by acting in a virtuous way even though one might desire the opposite, until by practice the virtuous behavior becomes a habit and is produced automatically by the Intuitive system alone.

The ancient philosophers didn't know about the amygdala's role in fear and avoidance, or how formal logic involves activation in the prefrontal cortex. But they understood that both logic and emotion were important aspects of how people respond to situations they encounter in everyday life. And these writers used their observations to develop theories about the interacting components of the mind that can still inform our understanding of behavior today.

Image: Plato and Aristotle debating, detail from Raphael's "The School of Athens" (1509-1511), the Vatican. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

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