溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
How Many Selves Live in Me?
Do reason and desire within me struggle like one charioteer and two horses?
The soul is like the united force of a winged team of horses and their charioteer.
Plato likened the soul to a chariot. The charioteer is reason; of the two horses, one is noble spirit, the other unruly desire. The good life is the charioteer harmonizing both to rise together toward heaven. This picture of a "many-layered self" long survived. Aristotle divided the soul into rational and non-rational parts; Augustine confessed a "divided will" that wills the good and the evil at once. Much later Freud redrew this chariot as ego, superego, and id — the names changed, but the insight that more than one voice contends within me crossed two thousand years.
Between self-improvement and impulse, swaying each day, this chariot is still running inside you.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
I drive this chariot every day. In the morning the charioteer who wants to exercise fights the horse that wants to stay under the covers; when I am angry, the voice to hold back wrestles the voice to pour it out — each grasping for the reins. Plato's picture comforts me because this struggle is not a sign that I am flawed, but that the human soul is many by nature. The question is not which horse to kill but how to drive them together. Today, too, I take up the reins as a clumsy charioteer.
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