プラトン全集より対話篇「カルミデス」の身体と精神・疾病と道徳の話

Bredlau, Susan. "Illness as a Phenomenon of Being-in-the-World with Others: Plato’s Charmides, Kleinman and Merleau-Ponty." Medical Humanities, 2018, pp. medhum-2018-011572, doi:10.1136/medhum-2018-011572.

Plato, B. C. et al. テアゲス . カルミデス . ラケス ; リュシス. vol. 7, 岩波書店, 1975. プラトン全集 / 田中美知太郎, 藤沢令夫編.

Plato, B. C. et al. Complete Works. Hackett, 1997.

 

Medical Humanities を見ていたら、プラトンの対話編「カルミデス」から身体と精神・疾病と道徳の話をしている部分を扱った論文があったので、来年の授業のためにプラトンから英語でメモ。眼病ー頭痛ー全身ーたましいを含む全人格 という流れである。

 

Charmides was Plato's uncle, on his mother's side.  He is seen here as a teenager in conversation with Socrates in 432 BCE, when Socrates returned ti \athens from service in the battle at Potidaea, which initiated the Peloponnesian War.  Socrates' other interlocultor is an old kindman, first cousin of both Charmides and Plato's mother, Critias.  It was a very distinguished family, tracing its descent from Solon, the great poet and statesman of the beginning of the sixth century, with distinguished forebears even before that.
 
The subject of discussion is the virtue of sophrosune, here translated "temperance".  In Japanese, 克己節制 is the translation.  Sophrosune means a well-developed consciousness of oneself and one's legitimate duties in relation to others.  
 
Charmides should be called told that I [Critias] want him to meet a doctor for the weakness he told me he was suffereing from yesterday.  Just lately he has complained of a headache when he gets up in the morning.   Charmides came, he was indeed a beautiful young boy and attractive.  When he asked if I [Socrates] knew the headache remedy, I managed somehow to answer that I did.  It was a certain leaf, and that there was a charm to go with it.  If one sang the charm while applying the lief, the remedy would bering about a complete cure, but without the charm the leaf was useless.  Socrates spoke more freely about the nature of the charm.  Just now I was in difficulties about what method I would adopt in order to demonstrate its power to you.  Its nature, Charimides, is not such as to be able to cure the dead alone.  You have probably heard this about good doctors, that if you go to them with a pain in the yes, they are likely to say that they cannot undertake to cure the eyes by themselves, but that it will be necessary to treat the head at the same time if things are also to go well with the eyes.  And again it would be very foolish to suppose that one could every treat the head by itself without treating the whole body.  In keeping with this principle, they plan a regime for the whole body with the idea of treating and curing the par along with the whole.  
 
One of the Thracian doctors of Zalmoxis said that the Greek doctors were right to say that just as one should not attempt to cure the eyes apart from the head, nor the head apart from the body, so one should not attempt to cure the body apart from the soul.