Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Plato [4]

Taylor [Plato, p. 27] writes: “The first condition of enjoying real good and making a real success of life is that a man’s soul should be in a good or healthy state”, that is, his soul should have the wisdom or knowledge “which ensures that a man shall make the right use of his body and of everything else which is his”. This clearly indicates that by “soul” he means the vital and the mental being. Otherwise how can the soul be not “in good or healthy state”? Can we even say that the mental Purusha is or is not “in good or healthy state”?

Of course not. It is obvious that they are thinking of the mental and vital Prakriti or that part of the being which is involved in Prakriti, not of the Purusha.

The idea that the soul has to get “knowledge” at all would seem to us to be without meaning unless we take it in the sense that one has to develop the intuition as an instrumental faculty.

Yes, all these phrases are loose. At most one could say that the soul must bring out or develop the inner knowledge — that which is already there within or that the lower nature must receive the higher knowledge,— but not that the soul must get knowledge. I believe Plato himself held that all knowledge already was there within,— so even from that point of view this expression would be inaccurate.

2 July 1936