TTT
Souls is a theme I started to work on in the middle of 2024. The goal is to represent different philosophers’ conceptions of the human soul or mind pictorially. The first five paintings are of the five distinct soul types Plato describes in his Republic. Basically, there are three parts of the soul according to Plato, each of which can rule the whole soul: Reason (to logistikon), spirit or temperament or spirit (ho thymos), and passion (he epithymia). In these paintings and in general in my soul paintings reason is yellow or white, temperament red/orange and passion many-colored but predominantly green.
The rational, “philosophic” or “aristocratic soul with reason firmly in command. This is the timocratic soul, the first degeneration from best soul. She loves victory and is easily angered. She bows to the powerful and is hard on slaves.The oligarchic soul is a degeneration of the timocratic soul and loves material wealth. She is ruled by her passionate part, which, however, is primarily interested in satisfying necessary desires. She greedy but thrifty.The democratic soul is unstable, a kind of combination of every other kind of soul. It is as if the soul-parts take turn in ruling. This is the tyrannical soul, a degeneration from the democratic soul. Reaon and spirit are completely subdued by passion.Here are Stoic human souls (the Crysippean version). They have eight parts: ruling part, five senses, voice and seed. They are parts of the soul of the cosmos. They are connected between one another and with the cosmos by sympathy.Two Cartesian souls interact with matter. Following Aristotle, Descartes distinguished between reason (whitish), imagination (colored lines) and the senses (colored dots). The external world (matter, extension) has no color, smell, taste, sound, these being altogether in the perceiving subject.
Descent. Three Plotinian souls who have just desended from the intelligible world. They are very confused but also curious. Their bodies are abstracted out and their bodily form is merely for the purposes of illustration because Plotinian souls are immaterial substances.