Ep. 266: Jonathan Lear’s Plato: Psyche and Society (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 266 is something like what's the relationship between psychology and politics? We're reading a couple of essays about Plato from Jonathan Lear's Open Minded, Working out the Logic of the Soul from 1998. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer unconsciously defending my consent conception of legitimate philosophy against Freudian barbarians in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin laying the ghosts of my unconscious to rest as ancestors in Austin, Texas.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan joining the resistance from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey reading the Republic to learn how to avoid despair in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Mark: Very nice, Wes. Tell us why we're reading this.

0:58 Wes: We are reading this because a fan requested that we do this. I'm not sure if that fan learned of Jonathan Lear from me. I have mentioned him on the show before and I have suggested him to you guys. He is someone that I knew in grad school only as an Aristotle scholar. He wrote a really good book called the Desire to Understand, and strangely enough, I came across him again when I was studying psychoanalysis, and it turned out he was also not only a philosopher and at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, but he was a practicing psychoanalyst and had written about the intersection of ancient philosophy and psychoanalysis, which was something that also interested me a lot.

So he was very influential on me and I've read a lot of his books, including the collection of essays we're reading today, Open Minded. But there's also a really good book called Love and Its Place in Nature. He wrote a book on Freud and a lot of other stuff too, so all very good. He combines a interest in psychoanalysis and ancient philosophy with kind of an approach of an analytic philosopher. So for people who like precision and clarity, they're going to like that about him. But he also has literary talent, so it's not just going to be dry and analytical.

So he hits a really good sweet spot for people with conflicting tendencies like I have, towards the literary and psychoanalytic on the one hand and towards the analytic and rational on the other.

2:25 Mark: So specifically we read chapter 10, inside and outside the Republic, which I think will probably be our main thing, but then also chapter seven, Eros and Unknowing the Psychoanalytic Significance of Plato's Symposium, and then chapter four, An Interpretation of Transference, which in part is about the death of Socrates or him being convicted, whether the Socratic method is anything like psychoanalysis. And what a notion of. I don't know. He's got a very interesting idea of transference. But overall, the theme seems to be, as I said, the relationship between the psyche and the state and specifically, sort of the causal net between them.

That is really taking seriously Aristotle's dictum, which Lear definitely reads into Plato, that we are social animals, that there's no making sense of human nature without referring to the state. And so Plato has very specific ideas about how certain kinds of states with certain kinds of educations produce certain kinds of citizens. And Lear wants to point out how that is cyclical. And, of course, having a state made up of certain kinds of citizens will contribute to making it a certain kind of state. So it's exploring that cyclical relationship.

3:31 Wes: And when we say state, we're using the term very broadly. Right. We're translating polis, and we mean the social and cultural environment. So this is about a metabolism between individual psyches and then the social and cultural environment in which they find themselves. And of course, there's mutual influence. And Lear thinks that that mutual influence is critical to giving a coherent explanation of what's going on in the republic, because the republic has a weird circularity to it, which is that we're meant to explain the psyche, what justice is in a particular human soul, by looking at the psyche writ large in the republic.

And yet a lot of what goes on in this ideal republic is explained in terms of human psychology. Right. It's explained in terms of the people in the republic and what they're like. We have to find some way to approach that circularity. And I think Lear thinks that psychoanalysis or some kind of depth psychology and an explanation that hinges on the internalization and externalization, the metabolism between psyche and polis is what helps us do that.

4:40 Dylan: Yeah. So you demand a little bit of Marx characterization or summary, as the kind of polis that you have depends upon the kind of people that you have. You would also add to that that the kind of people that you have depends on the kind of polis you have. And I like that word, metabolism. Wes. I don't think that Lear uses that word, but I think that's a perfect word to describe what he's doing in his characterization of Plato, his argument that Plato argues or presents a metabolism between culture and the individual, then that's key to understanding what he's doing in the republic.

5:15 Seth: Yeah, I mean, specifically, what he's setting out to do is To. He says that it's common to read the Republic's arguments about justice as argument by analogy, and that if that's all they are, then, yes, it's weak. And he's. Plato is open to the criticisms that are leveled against him, that it's a weak argument. But he's making the point that it can't just be, that it's much more nuanced, and it's not, strictly speaking, an argument by analogy. There's a much more dynamic interaction between the individual psyche and the polis that drives Plato's conception of how they relate to each other. That's much more nuanced and rich than just simply analogy.

5:55 Wes: Should we say what that argument is? He's responding to a critique by Bernard Williams. Right. Of this argument by analogy. I know, Mark, you looked into this a little bit.

6:05 Mark: Yeah, it was pretty well summarized in Lear. But just the idea that it's merely an analogy, and it's an analogy that doesn't really work and is question begging is a sort of common critique according to Lear of the Republic. But Lear wants to say it's not merely an analogy that the soul is like the individual psyche. I mean, there's, on the face of it, so many disanalogies between the two in that the individual parts of the polis are people. Right, Are fully formed psychologies. But are the individual parts of the person the appetitive part and the spirited part and the rational part, are those themselves minds?

Are they conflicted in themselves? There's at least some interesting questions if you want to take that seriously. So Lear wants to point out, as you were saying, Wes, that it's more of this metabolistic relationship, that specifically he uses the terms internalization and externalization so that when the society teaches you something, when you're growing up, it forms your personality. Then you're internalizing the values of the culture. And then when you go on to create social conditions, Right, Social construction, then you are externalizing things about your psyche and other people are doing the same.

And we're doing this cooperatively to create the society. So it actually is a straightforward causal circle and not just an analogy.

7:21 Dylan: Yeah, and I want to emphasize the metabolism part in that. I don't think you meant exactly this, but just in the way you described it, Mark, it was that the society goes and forms certain things in you and in this metabolism, it's a constant back and forth. And in fact, the generation of your psyche. You mentioned the essay on transference, but the notion of transference comes up just Immediately in the essay on the Republic, on sort of defining what that process of externalization and internalization is, and that it's a constant back and forth that we are making the world for ourselves, we are building our psyche in laying onto the world something that we want. And it's also affecting us by presenting an environment that we are interacting with.

8:12 Mark: So I like this book in that it was not. I was wary. Of course it's a psychoanalytic interpretation of Plato, but it's actually doing just as much interpretation of psychoanalysis as it is interpreting Plato. So this notion of transference, folks might know, in a clinical situation, the analysand, the person, the patient ends up having emotional feelings for the therapist that are transferred from, you know, the person's really mad at their parent or whatever and ends up. So this is a sort straightforward and is considered a mistake. It's an illusion.

Of course, it's not the analyst that did this wrong to the patient that needs to then be the brunt of this rage or love or whatever the thing is. But according to Lear, it's not just a matter that there is the real world and then there's these psychic mistakes like transference that people make. But transference is something that happens all the time, and it is a key tool by which we individually and as a group create social structures, create customs. He also uses that psychoanalytics analytic term of fantasy, the ph. Right, which sounds like that's purely illusion, but it is.

It's an invitation for you to participate in a social arrangement. And what would make it neurotic or something is if it's really just you, you know, so it's really pretty fucked up. But it is reflective of a process that is going all on all the time. It's exactly a type of this externalization.

9:42 Seth: Lear does a really good job of breaking things down and building it up to explain the mechanism that he wants to highlight around transference and so forth. In a way that I thought was really that third essay, the extra few days bought us, I thought was excellent. I mean, Lear wants to talk about the mechanisms of the individual psyche, starting with the way they work on themselves or work internally, and then how it broadens and starts to work on the world. So he does very clearly lay out his understanding of how, for example, at the root, the great insight, you know, of Freud from his perspective is that things that we do consciously are influenced.

You can say acted upon, but influenced is maybe a softer word by things that happen unconsciously. He wants to start by breaking down the Rigid interpretation of the Platonic psyche, which has the three parts, reason, appetitive and honor seeking thematic Thomas. And the conventional reading of Plato is the organized soul is the one in which the appetitive and the thumetic parts are subservient to reason in the appropriate way. And there's balance and yada yada. The first way that Lear wants to kind of create nuance and break that down, is to talk about ways in which the different parts of the psyche can actually influence each other.

So what he calls intrapsychic interaction, or he wants to say at first, the important thing that psychoanalysis gets right is to identify that conscious activity is influenced by a whole host of things that the. The actor is not aware of that are from a part of the psyche that is not necessarily the conscious or reasoning part.

11:28 Wes: In the Republic essay, we're thinking a lot about a structural model of the soul, which was Plato's eros and thumos and logos, corresponding to ID and SuperEgo and ego. And that structural model is a elaboration as a development over and above an earlier model, which just makes a distinction between conscious and unconscious, which doesn't go away. And Lear thinks that Plato makes a similar development of the Socratic approach, where for Socrates, there's conflicting beliefs, but there's not really a structural model of the psyche to explain that sort of intrapsychic conflict. And Plato is the one who does that. So Plato, in a way, is like later Freud in moving beyond simply a distinction between conscious and unconscious.

12:18 Seth: So I'm on page 59, right at the top. Let me read. Plato thus invented the first systematic object relations theory, a dynamic theory of the relations between psyche and the world it inhabits. Plato thought that he was living in a sick society. After all, Athens had just put to death its best citizen. And given his dynamic theory, he knew the sickness had to be traced back to the psyche. The psyche is divided into three parts. Appetite, narcissistic component, and reason. These parts are distinguished not only by their distinctive types of desires, but also by the possibility for each part to enter into fundamental forms of intrapsychic conflict with the others.

So Lear was pointing out what I was trying to say before Wes was the interaction between the individual psyche and the world. For the purposes of meaning, creation has a model, or there's a mechanism that happens inside this intrapsychical mechanism as well that's similar. So in other words, the individual parts of the soul can interact with and influence each other, and that is in turn the mechanism upon which you build the ability for the psyche to act on the world and influence the world. That's what I thought Lear was saying. And in that whole chapter, he breaks down the three levels of this psychic.

It's intrapsychic. And then what is it? The transference onto the individual and then the world. Like the three different. I think those were the three layers.

13:41 Mark: Well, so does it help to add, you know, that this transference, you're talking about intrapsychic conflict, but he wants to say it's not so different to intrapsychic relations that partially transference, correct me if I'm wrong here, can be literally transferring ideas from one person to another. Right. From one person to the cloud, as it were. The society in general.

14:02 Wes: We talked about this in our dream episodes with Freud as well. So the intrapsychic transference involves. And with Lacan, this is the whole slippage along chains of signifiers. That slippage is about transference. It's about. So, for instance, when little Hans, one of his cases fears, comes to have a phobia of horses because he has a repressed unconscious fear of his father, then that's transference, right? The fear has been transferred. And the transference creates symbols, it creates signifiers, it creates metaphors. So a metaphor is a classic form of transference, where you have one thing stand in for another. So transference and signification of a strong relationship to each other, or symbolism, let's say.

14:49 Mark: And can you just translate that from this, what Seth was just saying, the conflict between the three parts of the soul. So that the ID being kind of the appetitive part in creating a symbol that then shows up to us in consciousness, is that basically reason? And the appetitive part, can we understand that on Plato's analytic terms? I'm not sure how.

15:12 Wes: I'm a little unclear on what you're asking about.

15:15 Mark: So Seth was talking about what Plato normally talks about, that these three parts of us fight. So it's intrapsychic conflict. Transference is not a conflict. It's sort of a way of resolving a conflict. It's a way of. It's something that happens in the course of these parts of us interacting. So the unconscious and the conscious, which again, Lear is mapping onto, roughly onto the appetitive part. Some of the appetitive part is unconscious. No.

15:40 Wes: Well, yeah.

15:41 Mark: No.

15:41 Wes: The conscious and the unconscious famously do not simply map onto the parts. Right. The ID is, you can think of as unconscious, but the ego and the superego, some parts of them are conscious and large parts of them are entirely unconscious. So they call this the iceberg model of the psyche, where you. Almost everything is below water, and then you have little parts of it that are conscious, little parts of the ego and superego, so they don't map perfectly.

16:08 Mark: I was trying to suggest that there is something analogous between the fighting of the three parts of our soul and how then that individual as a whole interacts with the other elements of the polis, in other words, other human beings. And you've made it clear, following Lear, how information transfer can work within the human being in what you've just described in transference, in the formation of symbols in dreams and other contexts. And then there can also be transference between people. Obviously, that's like what the whole notion of transference was invented to capture.

I'm as patient inflicting this image of pain that I feel for my parent or onto you, the therapist, something like that. And that's supposed to, just for Lear, be one example of a constant, really ubiquitous process, that there's this sort of projection going on all the time. And that's how social construction works. So I'm trying to figure out if there's any way to explicitly relate those conflict model that's in Plato, and information transfer model that's in Freud.

17:16 Dylan: I mean, for me, in the transference essay, Lear said something that has made things a lot more clear to me, at least what he was trying to get at. He says, for transference, I believe, is just the psyche's characteristic activity of creating a meaningful world in which to live. And so transference is a way of resolving or creating meaning out of those tensions, a lot of those conflicts. And so the way you were talking about it, Mark, the way I would go to understanding it, is that tension between the different parts of the soul. One of the things that's going on is transference is part of that creating of that meaning out of that tension.

17:54 Mark: Yes, and I think one of Lear's main points here in interpreting the three parts of the soul doctrine from the Republic is that we tend to think of them as always in conflict, because that's the only time where they show up as separate things. When your appetitive part is fighting your reason, when you really want that piece of chocolate cake that you know you should not have, et cetera. But of course, even when there is no conflict, if we think this is a reasonable model of the soul, then somehow these things are working in cooperation, so there is information transfer between them. In the Timaeus, he describes biologically that it's like the brain and the heart, lungs and then the guts, that those actually are the physical manifestations of those three parts of our soul. And of course, in a well functioning human being, they work wonderfully, harmoniously, together.

18:40 Dylan: One of the things that I got out of hearing Lear, interpret psychoanalysis, interpret Freud as well as interpreting Plato, is sort of the back and forth between the explorations of pathologies to reveal something about how the soul or the polis or they both are working. Also looking at. To see, well, what does that mean for how they would be working? Non pathologically. So the tyrant and the oligarch as being examples of pathological souls, you know, a tyranny and an oligarchy as sort of pathological versions of a polis as a way to see examples of it being out of sorts. Insight into what it would mean to get back into sorts of.

19:25 Seth: Yeah.

19:25 Mark: Can we just give an example of the tyrannical soul as we want to describe?

19:29 Dylan: So Alcibiades, right. Is the tyrannical soul that he refers

19:33 Wes: to in the Symposium, the tyrannical soul is the one who's been taken over by their.

19:38 Dylan: Their appetites.

19:39 Wes: Yeah. Although now I'm trying to think of the distinction between that and the oligarchical soul.

19:45 Mark: The oligarchical soul, I think, is conflicted.

19:48 Wes: So, yeah, it's on the way. I mean, you start with the oligarchical soul, right. And that degenerates into the democratic soul and that degenerates into the tyrannical.

19:56 Mark: So yeah, let's try to say what each of those are, just to make that actually vivid. I remember the oligarchical soul is like. Remember in the Phaedo we were saying, Socrates was saying that truly having. Being temperate, for instance, doesn't mean tyrannically holding down your appetites. And that's what the oligarchical soul basically does, is that there is a part of him. Maybe it is reason that rules, but it is at war with itself. It has these very strong. It's really not tamed his appetites, tamed its eros to, you know, act harmoniously. It is having to just smash those down, subjugated them.

20:33 Wes: Yes.

20:34 Seth: And he talks about each of the parts of the soul having objects of desire. So this is from that same place I was reading from earlier. So for example, oligarchical character disorder was the outcome of appetites dominating the other parts and creating a division within itself whereby certain appetites were encouraged and others were forcibly held down. It still means that reason is employed in trying to satisfy those desires. And achieve, you know, satisfy those appetites. But it's the fact that it's the appetites, as opposed to the desires of reason that are prioritized that's the issue.

The oligarchical personality would tend to create an oligarchical society which was itself divided between the rich and the repressed poor. It was a sign, though, of oligarchies being a pathological structure, that an oligarchy could not entirely succeed at his characteristic activity and would produce only a conflicted structure which would eventually collapse of its own contradictions. So that's bringing in the concept of harmony, that an inharmonious soul and an inharmonious state will ultimately, you can call it, be pathological or be disordered.

21:37 Mark: And then he imagines that the son of such a person with an oligarchical soul like that would say, dad, I see what you're doing to yourself. I'm going to rebel against the superego part of you, basically, and I'm going to indulge in those desires. But because the person has no self discipline, he'll be very easily led astray by anyone. And so this is the democratic soul, this thing that really has no, according to Plato, no spine. That it is just pulled hither and thither by whims, whether the whims of the individual or the whims of other people as they sort of pull the individual.

22:14 Dylan: That way of talking makes it clear how you would understand the Republic as a book about education and about the cultivation of the necessary structure for a polis in order to cultivate the right kinds of arrangement of soul within its citizens, and vice versa, so that the right sorts of citizens are able to cultivate the right kinds of education and right kinds of poles to exist in the mirroring of the polis and the psyche. And this goes to Lear's interpretation, you know, or answer to Williams, which is that it doesn't have to be a perfect analogy.

It's that it's a metabolic analogy in which the analytic philosophy lines, you know, the if thens that are always show up in analytic philosophy is that it would be the case that in a just polis, some members of the polis are just. Also, in order for there to be a just polis, then some of the members must be just. So you get that back and forth where you have basically the predominant cultural structure is reflected by tyrannical souls, then you have tyrannical outcomes. And it's not that in a just polis that you're absent of tyrannical souls, it's just that they're not the dominant force, they're not the ones that are running things.

That part of it honestly made me think a lot about the past four years and the way in which leadership and their psychological makeup gets reflected in the society and back and forth.

23:44 Mark: That's also the fear then for the third stage that Plato describes here, which is that the democratic soul, having no spine, being easily influenced, would give birth to a dictatorship. It leads naturally to the tyrannical soul. So the sort of the son of a father who acted in this willy nilly way is going to be somebody who is thirsting for order, but yet has not received any of the proper training on how to order his desires under reason. And so there is going to be order and I'm going to set the order. I'm going to be the tyrant. But in fact, as Plato has told us at great length, that the tyrant is actually not maximally in control, but is a slave to his own desires.

24:26 Dylan: And you can see why Plato would go in this direction. I mean, look, democratic Athens put to death by popular vote, its most prestigious citizen.

24:36 Mark: Some of what's left in chapter 10 that I want to talk more about is about the role of poetry or the arts in general, in education and what the kinds of people. There's more sort of on these personality types. And you might think that a poet is some sort of exalted figure, but it's a. According to Lear's interpretation of Plato, this is a creature of desire, of Eros, which leads us kind of naturally into this chapter seven Eros and Unknowing, the Psychoanalytic significance of Plato's Symposium. Dylan, you already mentioned Alcibiades as being a key part of that.

It focuses on the very end of the Symposium. I would definitely advise folks to go listen to our episode 100 on the symposium if you want a general overview. But this essay is just about the very end of it, where you get Plato's picture of what love is, which as you would expect, is transcending earthly eros, right? Earthly lusts towards the love of beauty itself. The love of the form is becoming a more spiritual person, exactly in line with what we just heard in the Phaedo. But then Alcibiades storms in and is in love with Socrates, but he wants to be Socrates student.

He claims that. I know that what Socrates is teaching is the best possible thing, but every time Socrates leaves, I can't actually follow that. He comes in drunk, he is a drunkard, he's a person of Low moral character. And this, according to Lear, is maybe Plato's refuge reputation of what Socrates has been saying. Because Socrates has been saying that Eros is this philosophically respectable, otherworldly pointing thing that is all good, but Alcibiades is kind of Eros personified. He's just the most beautiful one around. He's all consumed by Eros, and yet he is a person that just tragically can't get out of his own way, can't transcend in the way that Socrates wants.

And maybe there is something, if you, on Lear's interpretation, read the Symposium as a tragedy, that there is something that is impossible about Socrates's request that we all, as in the Phaedo, look past earthly things toward the other world and prepare ourselves for death. That Eros, this thing that is the prime motivation in people to get us out of bed, to get us to do anything, you know, this thing is supposed to be the messenger between the mortal realm and the supernatural realm. The realm of the forms, in fact, is something that just as often stands in the way of any kind of transcendence like that.

I was trying to interpret both of these as, you know, ways that Lear is trying to help us fill in the gaps here, to understand how for Plato, everything supposedly fits together. So we had, in the Timaeus, physics and biology and psychology, and then we could see the context of that, which was supposed to be something that was going to be, maybe even a longer version of the Republic, something that would really get into how all these various systems interact. And to get very concrete about that of like how as a human being, as a mortal, you're supposed to act within such an elaborate system, you know, of course, is Plato's ethical project is arguably the only thing that he's really concerned about.

So it would be very tragic if it didn't add up. And so I don't know if the point that he's making here in this Eros article is a sort of Nietzsche like critique to say that actually the harmony that Socrates and hence Plato wants out of the universe really doesn't exist, that we can't. I don't know. There was something that Eros was supposed to point to a fly in the ointment, a flaw in the system. But what did you guys think?

28:13 Dylan: I took Lear as his interpretation first, keying off the very, very end in which there's this sort of famous and cryptic interaction with Socrates, talking to Aristophanes and Agathon, saying that the ultimate play would combine both tragedy and comedy, and that's just sort of left as a sort of closing fade out of the Symposium. You know, you imagine this room with the detritus of a late night party around and people passed out and Socrates is still awake and. And Aristophanes and Agathon are sitting there with him and they're having that conversation.

It just fades to black kind of thing. And you never get really a resolution of it. And Lear is really reading the Symposium through that lens and points to Plato that this is his answer. Like you were saying, Mark, to Socrates, failure. And it's embodied in a demonstration that the ladder of love that Diotima presents, where you start with the love of physical things, in fact physical people, and then you ascend this ladder until you are motivated by the love of the good, is that there's a missing rung of transformation because it's never really answered how that happens.

And the tragedy is that as Lear presents it, is that Socrates sort of presents himself as the example that ought to be compelling enough to turn a soul like Alcibiades to the love of the good. But it just fails. And there's no real answer to it. And that is where the joining of comedy and tragedy happens. Comedy is about the role of the body in the world. And tragedy at some level is about that transcendence. And so there's a missing gap there. How does the body get you to transcendence? And I take Lear as saying that Plato is in the Symposium, manifesting the story of the tragedy of Socrates in a failure to compel or influence somebody like Alcibiades, because he has no way to do it.

He lays there next to Alcibiades. Alcibiades has a hard on for Socrates. Socrates won't be swayed by it because he wants to move Alcibiades soul, but he doesn't have a way to do that other than just like being Socrates and being around him. And Alcibiades confesses, I can't control myself unless I'm like right next to him. And even then he finds himself almost uncontrollable and is just furious in the end, you know, in his drunken state at Socrates. And so that failure of Socrates, I mean, to me is very interesting. I never even thought of this as an interpretation of the Symposium.

That last scene is pointing to a Platonic criticism of a Socratic failure or at least a tension in just in the world that maybe there are certain something unreachable, something maybe in the comedic nature of the world or the human soul that's required to bridge that gap between erotically dominated soul to one that's erotically disposed towards goodness.

31:25 Mark: Wes or Seth, do you guys have

31:26 Seth: a take on this essay here? It's hard to talk about it without talking about the conclusion and the broader theme of the book. Thematically, Lear's defense of the republic. But it's also a recognition of Socrates as the founder. The very first, call it, psychoanalyst, I think he uses the term. But simultaneously having kind of psyche analyst. Psyche analyst, psych. Having a glaring fatal flaw in that role compared to bringing him in a modern comparison to Freudian or psychoanalysis. And so it's hard in his discussion of the symposium where he's talking about this flawed mechanism, as he sees it, of the idea that you would go from the particular to the general.

So you see a beautiful this and a beautiful that, a beautiful dog, a beautiful car, a beautiful house, and the Diotima path of progression is to then you just naturally, or if you successfully, you abstract from the particulars, and you just start grasping or comprehending or understanding beauty itself, using reason. Part of what I understood Lear's criticism of this to be is that, on the one hand, what we think is healthy to do in our kind of modern society and what the path of modern analysis of the soul is not to abstract from the particulars.

In fact, it's to turn around and dive into the particulars, because the particulars are the locus for these unconscious motivations or drivers of your conscious behavior. And so you don't want to abstract from the particular. You want to go deeper into the particular. So that's one criticism. And then the second criticism is that ultimately, if you make that move and you are able to abstract yourself entirely from the particulars, you start to straddle this line between the divine and the human. And he basically says that Socrates, by virtue of having succeeded in becoming partially divine by abstracting himself from the particulars of human experience, he no longer has anything to offer these other people, other than this dialectic approach.

But if they are not able to, in terms of their character, take the same strides that he does. And of course, very few people, I think, ever have or will be able to do that level of. Let's call it psychic development, that his ultimate role as a teacher gets called into question.

33:57 Dylan: Yeah. Lear characterizes it as if you said that Socrates was an analyst, you would say that he had committed malpractice with respect to Alcibiades.

34:08 Mark: Well, and his own execution was somehow evidence of a flaw in Socrates's method. Right. Because he's trying to help people. And part of his doctrine is that people resent when they are not helped, right? They recognize when they are helped. But yet these people he was trying to help, or at least their relatives, maybe this is out of. To Lear, it's not those very people. His students would liked him just fine. But a lot of the people that he was trying to help violently rejected that help. And Lear interprets that as comparable to an analyst being completely ignorant of the concept of transference.

34:45 Wes: The point of this essay is to ask the question of whether or not we see Eros as simply a force for good, as simply as a developmental force that will naturally lead us in the direction of maturity, right? Just like there's a sort of a natural logic to Diotima's ladder to the ladder of love. So you start out with the particulars. You start out loving particular bodies and then souls, and then ultimately it's beauty itself. But the tragedy here is that it may be that love itself is an obstacle. And Aristophanes gives us a little bit of a foreshadowing of that, right?

Love is an obstacle because it, in a way, it's a punishment from the gods. We are forced into a position of seeking out the divine, searching for other halves, of searching for something perfect, and we get drawn into that drama at the expense of other things in life. So the gods, you know, punish us for trying to become godlike by cutting us into two, and then we're stuck searching for our other halves all our lives. That's taken by Lear to be a metaphor for transference in the basic sense that our libidinal approach to the world can be shaped by the idea that we want to sustain Mommy, you know, that we want to bring Mommy back and everything, or basically in a sense that we want to be immature, we don't want to grow up.

We want everything to be perfect. We want the world to precisely match our most fundamental desires. And that's a lot of what transference is about. It's about interpreting our love objects, and the world in general, through the image of this most fundamental, perfect love object, and then acting that out in certain ways as well. And as you guys have pointed out, that becomes an impetus to the way we shape our cultural world, attempt to shape it in terms of this ideal image. So for the analyst, that Eros implies a transferential attitude, and the transferential attitude in turn, becomes the focus of analysis.

So you're trying to get people to become aware in a certain sense, not just like consciously, logically aware but at a very deep, deep level, aware of that transferential relationship, and you want to help them transcend it in one way or another, so that they are not simply going about, involved in this repetition of seeking their other halves, which they're never going to find, so that they can get to the point where they seek something more realistic, have a more realistic libidinal relationship to the world. They're not asking Eros to do something that it simply cannot do.

And so the difference with Socrates is that he does not analyze the transference. Eros is enough, and it's enough just to say no, to reveal people's contradictions to them. And it's a cathartic. So it's like an early Freudian cathartic method. You try to make the unconscious conscience, you reveal people's contradictions to them, and you hope that works. And what it does instead is it freaks people out and makes them hate you and even kill you.

37:42 Dylan: So, and it also aligns with the idea that what's wrong with people is that they don't really understand the good. And if they understand the good, then they will be naturally drawn towards it. And so it's the proper erotic disposition of their souls is one of just learning what the actual good things are.

38:01 Wes: Most of us, or all of us, our starting point for the erotic is one of fixation. And it's one that it's an attempt. It's a hubristic attempt at immortality, in a sense. Right, because the immortality, right, the transcendent, corresponds to the perfect maternal world that we're trying to restore. All that does is it ends up creating a rigid structure and harming us in a way. We're trying to give that up and mourn it and stop trying to have that loved object and stop trying to make the world into that sort of love object and just realize that, yeah, the world is disappointing and it's going to be a mediocre love object.

38:38 Mark: So the thing that really attracted me about Lear is that in his own way, he is giving just as cutting a critique of the Socratic picture as Nietzsche does. Maybe it's more like he's taking advantage of the fact that it's Plato, a poet writing about Socrates, to say that unlike what we would assume, you know, that everything Socrates says, or what Timaeus says in the case of the other dialogues, is exactly what Plato's doctrine is, that maybe Plato is a dramatist, that he's showing that there's something tragic and unfulfillable. He's showing the activity of theorizing in the way that you're describing Wes, as fixation.

You know, the way that Plato is normally described, right, by people that don't like him as putting up this fixed edifice that we really have no justification for and in fact is harmful to us. But Lear is going to point out that this creation of illusions, philosophical theories, is how we try to make sense of the world. And it does become harmful when we fixate on it, when it starts to harm us and we can't adjust, but that doesn't undermine the activity itself. So I was raising the idea in our phaedo episode of what is happening in Socrates is giving this myth at the end, or maybe even just what's happening in the entirety of the Timaeus.

If you say that we're really not in an epistemological place to be able to give such a certain metaphysical picture that really these have to be just likely stories. These have to be just things that we're putting out there to try to make sense of the world. And again, there's nothing wrong with that, but once we take it as dogma, then that's where we run into trouble. And I only had to read the preface of this Lear book to say, yeah, I want to read more of this. Because he's actually being defensive about analytic philosophers dismissing Freud.

Is it like kind of the first thing he's concerned with in this book? And also ruling out Lacan and about just all these things that philosophers of various stripes like to just categorically say, oh, well, Freud's been disproven, or continental philosophy is full of shit or whatever. And so that means I don't have to learn about it. I don't have to learn enough to actually dismiss it. He says the very idea of a profession of philosophy is a defensive structure. What are the American Psychoanalytic Association, The American Philosophical association, attempts to act on an illusion, an illusion for Freud, as a belief, set of beliefs or worldview caused by a wish rather than perception of how the world is.

These organizations spring from the wish to hold on to psychoanalysis and philosophy and for the ensuing belief that one might do so by professionalizing them erotically. We strive for the immortality of these deeply valuable activities, and inevitably we face the vicissitudes of dogmatism. So maybe what Socrates was engaged in, in so far as he's actually theorizing positively, right, that's the part that's actually associated with Plat. So this is kind of an ironic take, that it's actually probably Plato's fault that we get these supposed dogmas.

But Wes, I know you've always been in favor of interpreting Platonic dialogues as not dogmatic at all, as just putting something out there for consideration or, you know, you've agreed with the scholarly interpretations that do not take him as literally as someone like Nietzsche is, assuming that you, I think, have to take him.

41:50 Dylan: Yeah, you're stumbling over the Nietzsche part, aren't you? Yeah. Of attributing an interpretation to Nietzsche.

41:56 Mark: Yeah, Maybe he's more subtle than I'm

41:57 Wes: giving him advantage because Nietzsche, his dislike of Socratic asceticism ultimately has mixed feelings and he likes to tell us about the negative feelings.

42:04 Dylan: But he clearly loves Socrates in some important way too.

42:08 Wes: I think Lear sees at least just thinking about the Socratic part of this. If we take Socrates's self representation at face value, he is committed to openness and open mindedness, and he is committed to an approach which is very much like psychoanalysis in that it involves this cross examination of hidden beliefs. It's persistently asking the question how shall I live? And always being open to new answers. And then it's. There's kind of a free association method to it. You know, the interlocutor must always say what it is that they believe. It's just that psychoanalysis has a broader conception of what constitutes a psychic commitment.

You know, Socrates wants to know your beliefs for the sake of cross examination and psychoanalysis wants also to know about your wishes and your fantasies. And then there's also the different conception of what involves psychological improvement. So I think you guys have mentioned some of this. But whereas for Plato, the Diotima, we leave particularity behind. You know, we go from these particular beautiful forms to the form of beauty. But for the analyst, we're trying to get at that particular idiopolis that he talks about in another essay. We're trying to get at our own particular meanings that we manufacture to figure out.

And one of those, for instance, would be to find out that the horse is representative of the father. That's part of your own little culture, your own little language. And it's that particularity that the analyst is focused on not getting us to the general concept of beauty. And then finally there's the methodology that differs. The analyst analyzes the resistance and Socrates ignores it and just says, yeah, you know, it plays along with Alcibiades and doesn't take seriously Alcibiades transference. The reason I'm going through all that again, I just, I think that Socrates in a way still Is the model with some tweaks.

I don't think his dogmatism is the problem, you know, because I think he is a representative of openness and dialectic and examination. I just think there's some methodological problems. But for Plato and dogmatism. Yeah. I mean, to the extent that you want to say, okay, Plato is a dogmatist, then yes, Mark, I think you're right on about it. Representing a rigidity that comes about when we try to have a certain libidinal comportment to the world where we are trying to build that perfect transcendent world around us. And therefore we develop these illusions, we develop these associations and a quasi religious illusion that by developing a professional association we can preserve and propagate philosophy.

That if we just have all the right methods and structures in place, we can ensure that professional standards are met and that people are educated properly and that it can be almost operationalized. Right. Teaching methodologies and the students will come to the classroom and I'm just going to put philosophy in their heads and it's all going to be very simple. That's illusory. Life is much more messy than that. Those methods can't be operationalized. They have to be open. They have to approach them in that Socratic or psychoanalytic way as a very, very open ended inquiry where we walk into a classroom or a room together and we try to relate to each other as actual human beings.

45:20 Mark: The only thing I want to add to that is just to clarify your use of the term idiopolis, because I just love that term that's in this chapter five, which I didn't even read. All of, Restlessness, Phantasy, and the Concept of Mind. But that is the invitation, right? It's like a polis, a city based on an idea. But it's a fundamental form of externalization where I put out an idea that involves you, right. I think we're friends. And then you can buy into that, you can play along. And then we've created a building block of something that could become a custom, you know, at least we've created our own little world. Maybe if we only live together in a house and we ignore everybody else, that could be our own little idiopolis. Well, idiosyncrasy maybe is closer than idea based, right?

46:04 Wes: It's even worse than that because idia, right, it's the word from which we get idiot. And that's an association that Lear wants us to make, and he does explicitly at some point in this book. And to be an idiot is to be Completely cut off from others in a way that involves a kind of method in its madness. So the person with an idiopolis speaks a language that no one else can speak. And if in their language, horse means scary father, you know, some other people might have similar symbols, but it's always very different for each person that once you put together the entire symbolic structure that a person has going for them, it's largely, from my standpoint, very difficult to understand and interpret.

And so you look at all the things that people do and you're like, why the fuck are they doing that? That's crazy. But it makes sense from their particular internal culture. And the whole point of analysis for the psychoanalyst is to try to learn to speak the patient's language, the language that no one else speaks. By paying attention to all their free associations, paying attention to the intrapsychic transference, you gradually figure out, okay, what are their symbols? What are their signifiers? When they're talking about X, do they really. What's the subtext of that?

Are they really talking about Y? And that's an important part of that. So, yeah, so I'd see the idiopolis as something very, very particular to the individual. So it's a weird way to talk about. Lear is really making a lot of this analogy between the polis and the psyche, because what he's suggesting is that the psyche really is its own polis, because we do have our own particular

47:36 Dylan: internal cultures, and hence the idea of conflict. You don't have to go all the way to saying that, you know, there's a bunch of homunculi within us, fully developed psyches that. And run into a regression there, but you just simply have that there are smaller wholes, and let's not take that too far, that are in conflict with one another.

47:55 Wes: Ultimately, the conflict is within libido. Ultimately, it's within desire. And this is part of the whole thing with the, with the Republic essay is that it's difficult to understand the intrapsychic conflict unless you understand that these parts aren't just like these three wholly separate entities that don't have a underlying basis. And the underlying basis for Freud is libido. Everything is made up of libido. So libido is the clay. So when you talk about reason, you're talking about something that is constructed of libidinal. Same thing with conscience.

When we feel guilty about something and we don't do it, it's not just that, oh, here's the pleasure seeking part, but I have this other part of my soul that's stopping me. We have to get some sort of pleasure. There has to be something in it for conscience to work, right? Everything has to be motivated and therefore has to be somehow connected back to desire. Unless you're a Nietzsche and you can say, well, actually maybe the thumetic part of the soul is the primary and that's the clay, will to power is the clay. But let's leave that aside. So at bottom we can treat conscience and reason as articulations of eros, as structures within eros.

And therefore we have some recourse to explain intrapsychic conflict in terms of the way different desires balance against each other.

49:11 Mark: And I feel like Lear is at least playing with the idea at parts, at least as something to argue against that logos is the clay. So maybe we can get in that a little more. If all the parts, even the desire and the thumetic part, have their own logic, right? You can be an erotic person and still try to maximize your eros. You can be a reasonable desire based person who doesn't just chase after every cake, but tries to get the most cake that they can throughout their lives. That is an idea at least that there is logos involved, at least potentially involved in all of the different aspects. So I think we've hit a lot of the bases at least once. We're going to continue in a second part of this discussion in a few minutes here. Thanks for being a Partially Examined Life supporter. You can go get Part two should be the next thing in your feed.