Equus

4 Pages 978 Words

Reason and Logic

The play Equus, by Peter Shaffer, revolves around a conflict between a boy driven by his passions, Alan Strang and an older psychiatrist sick of his rational world, Martin Dysart. Plato is a great philosopher and perhaps the most well known rationalist of all time. His ideas of epistemology and metaphysics are surrounded by his believe that the world is best knowable by human reason and had Plato been given the chance to talk with Alan and Dysart, he would have been disappointed in both. Plato would have been angry with Alan because of the lack of reason and logic in his life and Dysart because of his resistance to knowledge of the world of forms, Plato’s theory about what is really real.
Everything wrong with Alan Strang stemmed from the fact that he allowed his passions to rule his every waking moment. In his book, Republic, Plato states, “It will be the business of reason to rule with wisdom and forethought on behalf of the entire soul; while the spirited element ought to act as its subordinate and ally” (104). Plato spends a fair amount of time in Republic setting out how the soul should be governed and the previous quote summarizes his conclusions about what the ideal soul should look like. In stark contrast to this ideal of Plato’s, Alan, “has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life… he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his God’s hairy cheek!” says Dysart (Shaffer 82). Alan’s passion for his god Equus has taken over ever shred of logic and rationality in his body and Plato would find this an extremely unhealthy soul. Plato uses an analogy of a cave to describe where people are in their journey to knowledge of the Good. In this analogy, Alan would be one of the men chained in the cave, seeing only shadows on the wall. Alan has made no attempts to escape his dark prison and so Alan’s life is completely devoid of the reason Plato ...