Lonesome Dogs and Platonic Harmonies

Higher Pleasures, Platonic Harmonies and Lonesome Dogs

Let’s compare three representations of the soul from Plato, Mill, and Lightnin’ Hopkins.  Further, let's take these figures as all engaging in moral psychology -  an examination of the psychological nature of the moral subject.  How do moral agents work?  What psychologically realistic expectations can we have of them? What are the actual causes of our behavior? What is the lived experience of the moral life? Below are summaries of J.S. Mill's theory of higher pleasures, Plato's 'happiness as harmony' account of the just soul in Book VII of the Republic and Lightnin' Hopkins' "Lonesome Dog".  So, I ask you, and please do give Lightnin' a listen below and you are encouraged to learn more about his work and life.  Below I have also included a few resources for understanding the relevant aspects of Plato and J.S. Mill.

Prompt: 500-100 words.
(A)What is the howlin' dog featured in Lonesome Dog Blues below? What part of life or the self does it stand for?   

(B) How might Lightnin' raise some interesting questions about Plato's 'harmony of the soul'  and/or Mill's distinction between Higher and Lower Pleasures? For example: Do you think Lightnin' is describing the same basic state of the soul and articulating what happens when the soul becomes disordered (Plato) or in the grips of lower pleasures (Mill)? 

(C) Is there a relevant social criticism of either Plato or Mill available in the song below or in the broader blues tradition Lightnin' was part of?  This need not be directly in the song or in his mind, but nonetheless succeed in bringing some relevant social variable into play that Plato or Mill were not sufficiently attentive to.

Lonesome Dog Blues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln1QTf3mqSc

Staying in jail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yFhlEEAKk4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yFhlEEAKk4

Platonic Harmonies

You can read my summary of Plato's arguments in standard argument form at this link.  
Statements 18-43.  36-43  gets to the heart of it, with some summary below.

36. Man is a bottom element of a many headed beast with both tame and wild desires -the biggest part - a middle element of a lion, and the smallest element of a man on top.

37. Justice maintains the natural function of each part and a harmony of the whole.

38. Thus, to promote injustice is to feed the beast and empower it to take over the lion and starve the man.

39. Thus, injustice enslaved the highest part to the most vile and turns the lion into an ape.

40. Thus, injustice always increases the disharmony that is vice and strengthens it's grip upon the soul.

41. Thus, injustice is a bad condition of the soul and cannot be considered good.

42. Thus, justice is a good condition of the soul and connot be considered bad.

43. Thus, justice is better and more profitable than injustice.

Plato argues that the common phenomenon of emotional ambivalence and similar forms of psychological conflict shows that there must be more than one element in the human soul.  One and the same thing cannot oppose itself, so the various forms of opposition we experience in ourself must exist between different elements within us: Reason (Nous), Spirit (Thumos) and Appetite (desire, roughly).   Throughout our lives, the higher and lower elements are at war with each other and seeks to control the ultimate direction and function of the soul.  We thus we have conflicted moral and emotional lives because of disharmony in the soul.  This is the human condition, but this disharmony can be improved through the acquisition of virtue, and this requires that Reason direct the whole soul.  Vice results when either the lower element (appetite) takes over the spirited element (emotion) to work for it’s lower purposes.  Emotion (Thumos) is the battle ground between appetite and reason, and which ever side wins the favor of Thumos will determine whether  a person's soul is well-ordered or disordered.  For Plato, to be happy is to be well-ordered, unhappiness  is disorder in the soul.  It seems like Lightning's "howling dog" is somewhere in this picture, but it would require some interpretation and imagination (i.e., yours!) to explain just where.

So…what is the proper ordering?  This is important because the specific ordering that creates happiness in the soul for Plato also creates Justice in the soul, and now we are making moral evaluations of people.  Plato argues that the proper function  of the rational element is to command on behalf of the whole soul (CEO of the soul).   The proper function of the Spirited element is to act as reason’s ally and in conformity with its commands, which includes keeping the lower element small, and in place, and to properly enlist the emotions in the aims set by reason.   The Appetitive element has a necessary role in deriving pleasures from activities that promote nutrition and growth.  However, the lower element easily becomes too large and eventually aims to take over the functioning of the soul as a whole.  A person as a whole is just  and happy when each of it's parts is doing it's own work, doing it well, and no part is doing the work of any other part.  Thus justice and happiness are a harmony in the soul. The just man has his 'house in order', gained mastery over himself, and set his parts in tune with the others, like three chords in a harmony. The just man has bound together the many elements to a harmonious unity.

Mill's Higher Pleasures:

The “doctrine of swine” objection to Bentham’s definition of happiness led J.S. Mill parts company with Bentham and distinguishes qualitatively different forms of pleasure.  Mill recognizes the common category of bodily pleasures, emotional pleasures and rational pleasures.  This gives us a hedonistic taxonomy of moral agency.  The taxonomy itself raises questions, but Mill goes further and argues for an ordering of the worth and value of these three forms of pleasure: Bodily pleasures lowest, emotional pleasures above that, rational pleasures highest of all.  With a simple weighting function, we can be sure that utility maximizing actions will tend to promote rational and emotional flourishing, not just sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, as the worry might be.   To justify this ordering, Mill argues that only competent judges are those that have experienced the full range of pleasures, and he assures us that all competent judges will indeed affirm his ranking.  Against Mill, we might note that the majority of people seem to pursue physical and emotional pleasures over rational pleasures.  To explain this, Mill argues that people may indeed more often prefer the lower pleasures while esteeming the higher pleasures because they suffer from weakness of will, or incontinence.  This allows Mill to maintain the superiority of the higher pleasures over lower pleasures even the face of evidence that people more often pursue lower pleasures over higher pleasures.