Trying to understanding the soul

by Patrick Persaud

Gregory MacIsaac is trying to do something very new with something very old. An assistant professor at the College of the Humanities, MacIsaac is currently writing a book about one of the seminal works in philosophy, Plato’s Republic. This, however, is not something new. What is new is that it is not being written for students, the general public, or experts and academics, but is being written for all of them.

“Most academics are terribly guilty of writing in a way that only other specialists can understand. What I am trying to do is to take something very important, like Plato’s Republic, and write something that will interest other academics, but which should also be perfectly comprehensible to the person who has a decent education or who is decently smart.”

The Republic, written close to 2500 years ago, is most often considered a work of political theory. But according to MacIsaac, who has been working with the text for over 20 years, it is so very much more. It is a guide to what is eternal in humans, the soul, and is just as relevant today as it was back then.

“There is still such a thing as desire in the 21st century, there is still spirit, the part of you that gets angry and is daring, we still have the ability to make rational decisions.” This, he believes, is the soul in action.

For MacIsaac, the task of every philosopher, student and teacher, is to try and understand everything, and it is through reading and understanding works like Plato’s Republic that a person can start taking that task on.

More often than not for researchers, under the social sciences and sciences model, there is an external immediacy to their work, a need to produce something in order to receive funding. All too often researchers find themselves under the gun of a deadline or a publisher. According to MacIsaac and Plato, to receive the best of education, whether as a teacher, a student or a researcher, one must participate in a “the Life of Leisure” from time to time, free from external pressures.

It is for that reason that MacIsaac has chosen to seek out a publisher for his work, Politeia: An Introduction to the Study of Plato’s Republic, “only when it is done.” In a project like this, there is little to no difference between teaching and research, except that the beneficiary of the endeavor changes, from student to professor.

“I am a humanities researcher, which means that my research is an activity by which I teach myself things which I think are important, and these are quite often the same things I teach my students,” states MacIsaac.