Welcome to the preview for the partially examined life episode 266, part two on Jonathan

Lears, essay Inside and Outside the Republic from his book Open Minded 1998.

The chunk I'm going to play you is actually from the middle of our recording where we start

to tease out the idea that these distinct parts of the soul, the rational, the appetitive

and the spirited can have causal efficacy on each other because they all ultimately are

built out of the same faint.

There's an idea that comes from Freud, everything is libido, so we start arguing about that

here and that argument continues after this clip.

I want to remove at least this much behind the paywall set up before you because I think

it's pretty philosophically central.

Enjoy.

Plato's picture seems to be between parts that are in conflict, right?

Parts of the soul or individuals in society and when you open up this idea of information

transfer, then it's like the parts actually interpenetrate each other.

Political fights are not just a bunch of isolated individuals competing for dominance and some

of them are ruled by reason and some of them are ruled by Thumus and some of them are

ruled by, it seems like the Thumus people would win every time if that was really the case,

but the locus people can convince the Thumus people of something.

The Thumus people can then realize that it is their proper place to let the logos people

call the shots and for them to play their part.

That information transfer, that what actually takes the form in Plato's Republic of the

noble lie of telling the guardians that the state is their parent and that they don't have

...