The Human Soul: Appetite, Reason, And Soul

Thousands of years ago, men and women proceeded with their lives in Ancient Greece, sharing their own customs, rituals, and beliefs. When we fast-forward to present day, we’ll find that while many of their customs and rituals have been long forgotten, some of their beliefs they held such as the soul are still circling around the minds of today’s modern world. Over the years, the idea of the soul has been altered, stretched and twisted into something else entirely, but back then, the soul was believed to have been the very thing that differentiated life from the dead.

The human soul, Socrates claims, is made up of three parts: appetite, reason, and spirit. The appetite of man consists of his basic, innermost desires such as hunger, thirst,

Appetite is very fundamental and is found in the souls of both humans and animals. What separates a human soul from that of an animal is the second part of the soul, reason. When an animal hungers, it doesn’t care what it eats so long as it’s edible. However “the appetite for something of a certain sort depends on additions” (Book IV, 437e), where such “additions” relate to the reasonable part of the soul. Reason allows man to think critically and rationally. Instead of hungering for good in general, we can hunger for Kraft Mac N Cheese or ice cream. Furthermore, the second part of the soul is rational when the appetitive part of the soul is not. For example, if I am thirsty, and there is a liter of soda in front of

In Socrates Myth of Metals, people are assigned a class of work based on the metals, gold, silver, and bronze, they were born with. In this myth, a child with gold in his blood doesn’t necessarily have to have parents with gold in their blood and vice versa. If we assume this myth is true, there is still no concrete way of determining which working class each person belongs in. While these people may have metals in their blood, their blood isn’t actually the color of the metal, and so there is no discernable way of differentiating the jobs people should hold in this society. Since there is not a determining factor that shows people what they are best at, I think it’s impossible for them to choose a career that will enable them to live their best life. It’s incredibly difficult to decide on a career path, let alone one that must be permanent in the eyes of