YaleCoursesThe Tripartite Soul - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 8
YaleCourses
City and soul 0:00
The lecture returns to justice in the city and justice in the soul. It revisits the noble lie from Book III, where rulers, auxiliaries, and craftsmen are said to have gold, silver, or iron and bronze mixed into them by the god. The point is that rule is not inherited automatically. Each generation has to be tested for leadership.
Classes and virtues 8:00
The discussion then turns to Plato’s city in Book IV. The rulers are rational and have wisdom. The auxiliaries are spirited and have courage. The farmers and craftsmen are desiring and have moderation, since they must keep desire in check. Justice is the proper relation among these three parts, and the same pattern will later be applied to the soul.
Freud and the soul 18:36
Freud borrows Plato’s three-part soul and names its parts the super-ego, the ego, and the id. The ego handles daily life. The super-ego tells you what you should do. The id pushes desire and must be held in check. Plato’s scheme still sits behind how people talk about the mind, even if Freud’s science is disputed.
Justice and inner order 25:06
Justice in the soul means each part stays in its proper place and does not meddle with the others. Plato says the just person minds his own business, sets his house in good order, and becomes one from many. He compares the soul to a chord with low, middle, and high notes in balance. That gives justice the feel of a well-run inner life, with reason in command and desire kept in its place.
Plato and communal life 33:35
Plato links justice with a shared life. He imagines no private property, common education, women on the same footing as men, and the nuclear family set aside so children are raised together. The point is a city where people belong to the whole community before they belong to themselves. The speaker notes that this can look like communism, but also like a convent, a commune, a kibbutz, a boarding school, or even a military order.
Philosopher rulers 38:30
The rulers are to be educated as philosopher-kings, lovers of wisdom who keep the city in order. They are not meant to be critics who keep changing the system. That raises a hard question: if you train people in philosophy, why would they not want to improve the republic further? The lecturer says Plato matters because he gives a deep account of justice and education, even if his own scheme would not be chosen today.
Community and exclusion 40:00
The class then turns to present-day examples of shared life and exclusion. Yale is named as a place where students eat together, study together, and, now, men and women receive much the same education. That leads into Martin Luther King Jr. and Virginia Woolf, whose writing will be used to ask who is left out of the community and how a more just one can be made.
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