On The Desire For Drink In Plato And The Platonist Tradition

In our paper we set out to discuss some pages of the Platonic corpus – also commented upon within the Platonist tradition – in which Plato argues that elements such as desires and appetites are not identical with reason, and describes thirst as an appetite for drink. As our aim is to better understand what kind of desire that for drink is, we start with the section of Republic IV where this desire is used to illustrate the motivational conflict within the soul through the well-known example of thirst. It will be argued that this example does not refer, as is commonly maintained, to the urge to imbibe some kind of liquid, nor – as is often argued – to the need to drink water, but rather that it refers to the specific urge to drink wine. Moreover, it will be evaluated how the Platonic masters engaged with the issue of emotional conflict presented in the dialogues, especially in certain passages from Republic IV.