20

A MISTAKE IN PLUTARCH: For those readers who may be interested in the possibility of my theory being mistaken with regard to the interrelativity and inevitability of both positive and negative antitheses within the individual, there is a strong attack on such a theory in Plutarch's dialogue The Cleverness of Animals, wherein the character Autobulus, cast as Plutarch's father, puts forward to his old friend Soclarus a refutation of the said theory by emphasizing what he takes to be the impossibility of two completely contradictory elements within the same person. Hence, according to Autobulus, the rational and the irrational cannot exist side-by-side, since the latter would eliminate the former or vice versa. 'If,' he goes on the say, 'to make sure that Nature is not curtailed in any way, someone maintains that the part of Nature which has a soul must comprise both a rational and an irrational element, then someone else is sure to say that what has a soul must comprise elements capable of imagination and incapable of imagination, capable of feeling and incapable of feeling. The idea would be that these opposites, these positive and negative antitheses about the same thing should be kept, as it were, in equilibrium. But when we consider that all things which have souls must necessarily be capable of feeling and of imagination, it will appear absurd to go looking, in this class of living things, for antitheses between the feeling and the unfeeling, the imaginative and the unimaginative. And in just the same way it is pointless to find in living things an antithesis between the rational and the irrational ...'

I have quoted the best part of the paragraph under surveillance in order to make quite clear to the reader just how Autobulus' reasoning is wrong. For, having come this far in my theorizing and placed more than a little confidence in the authenticity of my argument, it is not something that I would like to hide away, refer to obliquely, or leave myself in any doubt about, particularly in dealing with a master like Plutarch. The mistake, then, clearly lies in the coupling of elements which are in no way antithetical but, with the exception of the rational and the irrational (which is paralleled by me in the essays entitled NOT ENTIRELY SANE and NOT ENTIRELY INSANE, as well as having been dealt with in considerably more detail by Carl Jung in his analyses of the compensatory relationship between the conscious and the unconscious minds in the totality of the psyche), distinctly contradictory. Instead of forming durable antitheses, they would spell the elimination of each other. Thus to be 'capable of feeling and incapable of feeling' is tantamount to saying 'to be capable of truth and incapable of truth' or 'to be capable of love and incapable of love' or, again, 'to be capable of goodness and incapable of goodness' when, in reality, it is truth and illusion, love and hate, good and evil, which form the antitheses, not the direct contradiction of the positive element achieved through the total elimination of the negative one!

So Autobulus' reasoning, although it may seem feasible at first glance, is really specious, in that it posits false antitheses as real ones. Rather than the refutation of feeling by unfeeling, why not the coupling of sympathy and callousness? We are all sympathetic in some contexts and callous in others, as well we might be.