IIC 171: Know Thyself, Love Thyself, Govern Thyself: Socrates and Plato Discuss Parts Work

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: One of the most famous quotes in all of history is just two words long, and it’s just as true today as it was 2,400 years ago when the Greek philosopher Socrates spoke them. “Know thyself.” Know thyself. Now here are those two little words in a broader context of the quote from Socrates. He says, “My friend, care for your psyche. Know thyself. For once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves.” Once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves, how to care for ourselves, how to love ourselves properly. Socrates says the easiest and noblest way is not to destroy others, but to improve yourself. He wants us to improve ourselves by caring for ourselves, and he says, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It’s compassion here in Socrates. He discusses love. He discusses the inner life and so does Plato.

[00:01:13] Dr. Peter: Plato encourages us to seek the light of truth. He says, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” Plato addresses love as well, how love unifies our nature, helping us to integrate inside. He says, “Love is born into every human being. It calls back the halves of our original nature together. It tries to make one out of two and to heal the wound of human nature.”

[00:01:52] Dr. Peter: And as we will see in this episode, Plato addresses multiplicity through what he calls the parts of the soul and how those parts of the soul can be in conflict with each other. Plato focuses so much on the whole and the parts. He says, “Love is the pursuit of the whole.” And he also says, “If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.” So there’s this continual theme in Plato of the whole and the parts. And now I want us to watch a clip of Dr. Gerry Crete in Interior Integration for Catholics, episode 167 on the early Church Fathers where he emphasizes something really important. Let’s take a look. 

[00:02:54] Dr. Gerry: Was Christianity unduly influenced by Greek philosophy? I would argue that it created something somewhat new, like it took things, obviously, from Greek philosophy, but even expanded it and gave it a completely different understanding. Like, so it’s a bit mind blowing to see what happens there. And when you look at the early Church Fathers, from Origen to the Cappadocian fathers and so on, like there’s an explosion of thought and ideas around this and even some, like Plato and Aristotle are, even though they’re pre-Christian, they’re almost considered like pre-Christian saints on some level by some, because they didn’t have the exposure of Revelation, like the Jewish people did. But they’re grasping something of human nature and something of understanding of the divine in a, generally speaking, beautiful way. I mean, it has to be filtered and it has to be kind of repurposed, if you will. But there’s so much in there, and so you don’t really fully understand the early Church Fathers, especially the Greek ones, unless you have some understanding of Greek philosophy. 

[00:04:06] Dr. Peter: So Dr. Gerry is telling us that you don’t really fully understand the early Church Fathers, especially the Greek ones, unless you have some understanding of Greek philosophy. And today we are getting back into Greek philosophy by looking at what Socrates and Plato have to say about the human condition, about the interior life, the inner life, especially the multiplicity and the unity inside ourselves and about loving and how do we live the good life, and how do we thrive, and how do we flourish? How can we be happy? How can we govern ourselves wisely? And with human nature not changing through the years, the ideas that Socrates and Plato share with us are relevant today. So let’s do this. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. Thank you for being here. It is so good to have you with us. Welcome to you, your innermost self, and every single one of your parts. I am a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts, but most of all, I am a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you taste and see the height and depth and breadth and the warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, your father. Also, I want you to be able to deeply embrace the love of Mary your mother. God the father, Mary your mother. These are your spiritual parents, your primary parents, and I’m here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary with all your heart, with all your parts.

[00:06:00] Dr. Peter: And why? Because they can help us not only in the spiritual realm, but they can help us with our human formation, which is what this podcast is all about. And throughout all of 2025, we are bringing in the insights from Internal Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, and we’re bringing in ideas from other parts and systems models. We’re harmonizing them with the truths of the Catholic faith. That’s really important. Why? To help you live out the three great loves and the two great commandments: to love God, your neighbor and yourself. That’s what this is all about, and I am bringing you the best of Catholic professionals in the field as my expert guests to share with you their insights, their understanding, their experience. And again, this is so that you can love wholeheartedly with all your parts, with all of your being, to love God, to share in his joy, to share in his peace, all your parts sharing in the bliss of a deep union with God forever and ever. That’s what I’m looking for for you.

[00:07:02] Dr. Peter: This is episode 171 of the Interior integration for Catholics podcast. It releases on August 4th, 2025, and today it’s titled Socrates and Plato on Loving Yourself Properly. We are getting into the fascinating thought and work of these ancient Greek philosophers, these foundational thinkers in Western philosophy, whom so many of the other church fathers and later thinkers referenced heavily in their work. And I am excited to have on for the very first time as my co-host on the IIC podcast, a fellow psychologist, a dear friend. Dr. Eric Gudan. Dr. Eric Gudan is a clinical psychologist in private practice. He’s the founder and director of Integritas Psychological Services in Indiana, Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his doctorate in psychology from the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, and has provided therapy and conducted assessments for nearly 20 years. He’s presented at national meetings at the Society of Personality Assessment, the Catholic Psychotherapy Association, on a variety of assessment and psychotherapeutic issues. He brings broad experience as a clinician to address anxiety and depression. He’s EMDR trained. He has trauma-informed training using parts language. He’s worked extensively and presented professionally on clinical difficulties, especially around sexuality, including compulsive pornography use.

[00:08:26] Dr. Peter: He is the chair of the Seminarian Psychology Special Interest Group of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association, and provides vocational assessments for a variety of dioceses and religious orders. He also performs fitness for duty assessments for the Federal Aviation Administration. And I gotta say, I met Dr. Eric Gudan long ago when he was a graduate student many years ago. And I encouraged him, once he became licensed, to come to Indianapolis, this was about 14 or 15 years ago because I was swamped with referrals. I needed another clinician. I needed somebody young to help out here, and I invited him to establish his own practice. We worked together. So it is so good, so good to have you with me here, Dr. Gudan. Eric Gudan, a pleasure to have you here.

[00:09:16] Dr. Eric Gudan: Always a pleasure, Peter. It’s good to see you.

[00:09:18] Dr. Peter: It’s good to have you here. So I am really excited again, for the first time, we’ve got a whole new crew today, for the first time, as our expert guest to have Dr. Anthony T. Flood. He is a professor of philosophy at North Dakota State University. And his first two books, I wanna show you these, The Root of Friendship, and then his second book, The Metaphysical Foundations of Love. Those were both published by the Catholic University of America Press. They draw upon the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas to articulate a relevant and persuasive account of the nature of love in the life of a person. Now, what’s going on here is that Anthony Flood, he looks at the central role that the love of self performs both in terms of integrating one’s interior life, and also as serving as the basis for appropriately interacting and loving others.

[00:10:16] Dr. Peter: Okay, so when I read Anthony Flood’s work for the first time, especially this book, The Metaphysical Foundations of Love, it blew my mind. This right here is the most important philosophical work, the most important metaphysical work, I have ever read from my practice as a psychologist. I’m just gonna say that, flat out. This book changed the way I thought about the practice of psychology, even though it’s not a psychological book per se. So his work has been just fantastic. I’ve recommended it to many other psychologists. We’ve discussed it in our depth psychology group, which Dr. Gudan is a member of. Dr. Flood is currently working on a book that focuses on what it means to love oneself for God’s sake. I’m so looking forward to that coming out. He resides in Minnesota with his wife and three children, and so it is so good to have you, Dr. Flood, with us today. It’s great to have you here.

[00:11:10] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah, very happy to be here and I appreciate the invitation.

[00:11:15] Dr. Peter: So we are in a lot of ways going back to the beginning of Western thought on multiplicity, systems, parts. And so if you were to sort of take us back, Tony, where would you start, as we’re starting to consider like the Western roots of this parts and systems thinking?

[00:11:38] Dr. Anthony Flood: Socrates is always the correct answer I think, on this. He’s really the first to systematically, at least in the philosophical tradition, reflect on what the self is. He’s not the first to talk about the self, obviously. The self is a given, I think, in literature and any text you find. But to actually take a step back and say, okay, what is that self? That’s a very Socratic question, and it’s one of his sort of hallmarks of his thought is taking that maxim of know thyself and really taking that seriously. Most famous quote from Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Really, that could be recast as the unexamined self because that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about what it means to be a self.

[00:12:28] Dr. Peter: Wow. All right. If we’re gonna look at the extent literature, where would you point us to, to kind of understand Socrates’ position on the self and how he understood it?

[00:12:42] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think the best first thing to read would be Plato’s Gorgias. Now, just a quick little boring historical note. Socrates did not write anything down, so what we know of Socrates comes from Plato, and so some texts of Plato seemed to be trying to give us a sense of the historical Socrates. Later Plato seems to be Plato trying to wrestle with these Socratic themes and then developing his, namely Plato’s, own thought. What makes it a little confusing as Plato continues to use Socrates as the main character. So if you’re just reading Socrates, Socrates, Socrates, well, sometimes it seems to be Socrates, sometimes it’s Plato. But the Gorgias, most scholars think, is a Socratic dialogue. It’s Plato trying to capture what Socrates thought of the issues being addressed. And he really goes into a sophisticated account of the self in that work.

[00:13:39] Dr. Peter: So what’s there? What’s there?

[00:13:41] Dr. Anthony Flood: So when he’s talking to Callicles, and the Gorgias is composed of three quick little dialogues, you have a dialogue with Gorgias, a dialogue with Polus, and then Callicles. And so it’s a nice conversation. It’s an aggressive conversation. It gets a little heated at the end. But Callicles is basically just saying, I’m gonna live my life in whichever way I want. I’m gonna seek as much pleasure as I can, and I’m gonna let my appetites for pleasure grow and grow and grow, and I’m just gonna satisfy ’em. And that’s the ideal life. And Socrates has already been saying that’s not the ideal life. And Calice is just very dismissive. And he says, Socrates, you’re just living a small impoverished life where you’re denying yourself of all of this pleasure. Why would you do that? And with that, Socrates launches into a defense of the nature of self-control, beginning with the observation of, well, wait a minute. If there’s such a thing as self-control and I am the one who am trying to control something else about myself, there must be something in myself that’s more than just a homogenous unity. There must be parts. Minimally, there must be two parts. The thing that trying to control of myself and the thing that’s controlling. And I think that’s where Plato really begins, and even as a later thought, he’s gonna just develop this idea of the self or the soul has these different parts and what it means to live a human life is trying to find the proper orientation and balance of those parts.

[00:15:24] Dr. Peter: All right, so there’s questions here, it sounds like, of self-governance or self-control, or how do I manage my internal world? And how does that lead to the good life? That’s what I’m sort of picking up here.

[00:15:41] Dr. Anthony Flood: Okay. Well, I’ll keep it in terms of Callicles. So Callicles says, okay, Callicles doesn’t flinch at the idea that the self might have parts. That’s not his issue. He just says, I just want the pleasure. And Socrates says, but yes, look at that. If you let your appetites for pleasure grow so large, you’re always going to be at the mercy of those appetites. Those appetites are going to be the part of the self that controls you. And not only that, he goes on to say, it’s gonna be a very unfulfilled life, because the nature of bodily appetites is they always grow in proportion to how much you try to satisfy them.

[00:16:22] Dr. Anthony Flood: In fact, it’s even worse than that. They don’t merely grow in proportion. They outpace the ability to satisfy them. So Socrates says, look, Callicles, you’re gonna go down a path where you’re going to want pleasure, but you’re always going to be left unfulfilled because the appetite’s always going to be larger than the amount of pleasure you can stuff in. And so, as this addiction grows and grows for pleasure, you’re always gonna want it. You’re gonna be enslaved to that passion for it, and you’re gonna be frustrated because there’s never gonna be enough stuff that you can fill into the container. He says the container is, you know, it’s growing larger than, you know, whatever you’re putting into that container. So it’s a very impoverished life. Well, flip that around, so the good life, then, at least minimally, must be about stopping that from happening. So whatever else the good life is, it has to prevent that.

[00:17:19] Dr. Anthony Flood: So a necessary condition is going to be not letting our appetites grow so large as number one, they control us, and number two, they’re in principle unsatisfiable. And that’s where Socrates says, we have this higher part. Now, Plato will later call it the rational part, but in the Gorgias, it doesn’t actually get that name. But the idea is we’re going to have a thinking part that, a choosing part, that’s able to restrain that appetite. And Socrates says, once you have self-control, maybe somewhat surprisingly, you actually experience more pleasure than the Calliclean pleasure addict because they’re always unsatisfied. But you as self-controlled, can actually take in whatever, enjoy it, and walk away with some satisfaction.

[00:18:10] Dr. Eric Gudan: So it sounds like the ancient Greeks had a very clear understanding of what more recent psychologists call the hedonic treadmill. How, and from the name you figure out what it is, like the pursuit of pleasure on a circle, not actually going anywhere. That, in searching for pleasure, we habituate to the degree of satisfaction of what feels good around us. And it sounds like Socrates is pointing that out to Callicles quite a while ago.

[00:18:37] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. Socrates, minimally Socrates, I think had a very good understanding of these things, just naturally gifted, in human psychology. And I think that comes about through that self-examination. The more you’re focused on yourself, the more you’re focused on the nature of the psyche. That’s gonna be not merely about just yourself, but about the human condition as such.

[00:18:59] Dr. Peter: Well, when he is saying that these are not just random urges or just sort of unpredictable internal phenomena, there’s a structure and an order to the system inside. And that you can actually study or understand, model what’s happening.

[00:19:19] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. And so from, I mean, to sort of transition a little bit here to Plato’s Republic. So the Gorgias is this work that’s trying to capture the historical Socrates. Now, when you read the Socratic dialogues, you’re always left a little unsatisfied intellectually because Socrates proposes these ideas and he has great insight, but he also then backs off because he feels that if he doesn’t have a good intellectual understanding of it, his job is then to back off, and to pursue further. Alright, so you’re always left a little unsatisfied. Well, Plato and the Republic will come along and say, okay, this is probably 10 years later. Now Plato is going to say, I’m going to take that idea that you find in other dialogues as well, but the Gorgias is really where it’s fleshed out, and say, I’m not merely gonna restate the Socratic position. I’m going to take his intellectual method of how he came about with this understanding of these parts and I’m gonna push it much further. And he has a very sophisticated methodology of how we can determine the nature of parts to the soul is think of all the different kinds of conflicts you can have interiorly, not because we want those conflicts, but because we have those conflicts and that will reveal the nature of the parts. And once we have a good understanding of the nature of the parts, then we can figure out how to correctly order them.

[00:20:56] Dr. Eric Gudan: Through the simple human experience, the observation, recognizing these tensions exist, these conflicts exist, and kind of extrapolates that into the system that we see him elucidating in the Republic.

[00:21:09] Dr. Anthony Flood: And what’s very remarkable about that, just historically is there was already a good deal of investigation of the exterior world. You’re going to go out and you’re going to investigate the different kinds of rocks and the different kind of plants and animals, they’re out there, but to then take that methodology and shine the spotlight within. I think that’s what you really see with the ancient Greek philosophical tradition that’s novel. And it takes flight, that it becomes much more universal than just the Greeks, back to that.

[00:21:43] Dr. Anthony Flood: So with Plato’s Republic, if I may elaborate on that, everybody has heard the title Plato’s Republic, and the reason for that is, it’s one of the most influential books ever written or work ever written. In it, Plato covers every conceivable topic you can think of. I mean, all of the major branches of philosophy he covers. And in a real sense, you could even say he develops those branches because they really hadn’t been systematically articulated and divided. So The Republic is a groundbreaking work on that.

[00:22:22] Dr. Anthony Flood: Now because of its name. I think most people think, oh, that’s just a work in political philosophy. Right? And if you read it, political philosophy is part of it, but it’s not even the main part of it. The focus is actually, what is the individual person? What is the good life for the individual person? And how we even begin talking about the state in that context is Plato says, well, it turns out the parts of the self are analogous to the parts of a society, of what he calls the city state, the government, a polis, hence our word politics. Well, he says, isn’t it easier to see things when they’re really big versus small? So if all of these parts that we want to talk about are manifested on a very large scale in society as such, let’s talk about that and then use that as a model to understand the smaller self.

[00:23:28] Dr. Eric Gudan: So The Republic is much more, well, it’s first an anthropology, understanding human person for ethics, for living well, through the lens of an explanation of political philosophy.

[00:23:39] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. So the big question is what is the good life? Or even more to more pointedly than that, why should I be just? Is the big question of the Republic. Why should I care? I mean, why, as I, as an individual, why should I obey the laws of the state? Why should I abide by traditional morality, even if it’s not enshrined in the laws of the state? Why should I live this so-called just, good, moral, ethical life. And, in this case, instead of Callicles, now we have another guy named Thrasymachus, who is very similar to Callicles, where he just like, you shouldn’t do that. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. Why do you philosophers make it so complicated? Just go out there and do whatever you wanna do, and that’s the good life. That’s the Thrasymachun position. That’s the one that Plato wants to argue against. And Thrasymachus puts it in terms of a very modern objection to governments. He says, you know, it’s really, when you’re out there obeying the law, the benefit of your obedience to the law doesn’t accrue to you. The benefit accrues to the leaders who are basically just taking advantage of you. They’re living a wealthy, affluent, powerful life. And all you are doing by obeying the law is maintaining their political superiority over you.

[00:25:06] Dr. Eric Gudan: This is not right. I’m being taken advantage of. Not getting mine.

[00:25:10] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. And he says, it’s like a shepherd who tends to the sheeps. He says, Thrasymachus says, that might look like a nice image, but in reality, why is it happening? The sheep are being tended to, not for the benefit of the sheep themselves, but for the benefit of somebody else, of being fleeced and then maybe even eaten.

[00:25:31] Dr. Eric Gudan: Yeah. Sometimes I feel like I’m being fleeced. attention to the common good here.

[00:25:37] Dr. Anthony Flood: And so Socrates wants to, and again, I’m saying Socrates now, this is now Plato using Socrates as his mouthpiece. In the Republic, Plato wants to argue against that and say, you should be just because it’s inherently good to be just. So, in other words, it’s not just good for the benefit of the leaders of society or even other people in society. It can be that, right? I mean, it’s perfectly possible that it’s to the good of everybody, but it’s in your interest to be just because justice is inherently good. And so the whole thrust of the republic then is defending that claim, that justice, traditional morality is something that you should espouse because it’s good for you. So that’s that you cannot have a good life, you cannot have an ultimately flourishing life, unless you’re a just person. And then because of this, he’s gonna get into all the parts of the soul and all of that, all of these other topics are gonna flow from that single question.

[00:26:49] Dr. Eric Gudan: So making a claim for ethics in the sense of living justice. And I see why you were saying this is a very, very powerful, influential, important book to ground civilization upon for people to cooperate for the common good as opposed to sacrificing to the sun god, to maintain the society.

[00:27:09] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And also think when you’re looking at the ancient world and classical philosophy in general, and I think ultimately the Catholic tradition, ethics is not just some system of rules that are a burden to the individual. The idea of ethics is that it’s a way of life that’s inclusive of rules, but those rules are in service of an end, of a goal. And the goal in this case for both the Greeks and then the later philosophers is the Greek word is eudaimonia, which is gonna translate as flourishing, think of it as objective happiness. Happiness in the fullest sense of wellbeing possible. The Latin thinkers like Aquinas are going to use the Latin word beatitudo to translate eudaimonia. But for them, the concept is the same. That ethics is a way of life in service of obtaining eudaimonia, flourishing, objective wellbeing.

[00:28:12] Dr. Anthony Flood: And so all of these conversations are in service of what is the good life and how do we get it? And as Socrates will say, early on all the way back to the Apology, he says, if you’re not interested in the question of what makes a life good, if you’re not interested in the question of the good life, what are you interested in? I mean, what else could possibly matter if it’s not in service of that question of what is the good life? So he says that that’s the question. And Plato definitely agrees with that. And we see it manifested through hundreds of pages in the Republic.

[00:28:52] Dr. Peter: So going back to the cities, you know, the city states, back in these days, in what’s now modern day Greece, there were a lot of different varieties of government. It was not like, you know, saying, okay, this is what Joliet, Illinois looks like and how that’s set up versus, you know, Peoria, Illinois, ’cause there’s gonna be a lot more similarity, you know, in the way that our municipalities are set up in the US than what was going on. Because these city states were independent and often in conflict with one another.

[00:29:24] Dr. Anthony Flood: Correct. Yeah. So the word polis, very Greek term, again, the root word of metropolitan for us, a polity, police, interestingly, if you think, there’s actually a fairly obvious connection, politics. A polis was a small society in effect. So Athens was its own society. Sparta was its own society. So it wasn’t as if these were little states as part of a larger political entity like we would think of in terms of states. These were independent sovereign governmental entities. Now this was not true across the world. There were plenty huge empires and things of that nature. But for the Greeks at this time, it was very local, if we wanted to think of it that way. Governments were local entities. Each city state was a local entity. And because of that, as you mentioned, yeah, there’s going to be different forms of government. Now, interestingly, Athens where Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and all the big names they’re located in Athens. Athens at this time is a democracy. And we all remember from civics, right? It’s the first, that’s where democracy is invented and all of that sort of stuff. And we love the word democracy, right? I mean, we Americans hear the word democracy and we all well up inside.

[00:30:49] Dr. Peter: And we misuse it all the time by calling the United States a democracy, which it’s not, it’s actually Republic, but yeah.

[00:30:57] Dr. Anthony Flood: So when you’re reading Plato, and this is my cautionary note on Plato that I always like to throw out. When reading Plato, particularly the Republic, you’re going to take turns being highly impressed and illuminated by some idea that you consider to be completely modern, the most brilliant mind right now must have written this, it’s so penetrating, takes this vast knowledge of human nature. And then it’ll be followed by a paragraph where he just says something that’s just so awful where you’re not in the sense of just like a blatantly wrong, but just something in terms of, well, that’s morally horrific. So just be aware of that. I mean, when you’re reading, you’re taking a little bit of an intellectual rollercoaster, but he’s always making you think, so you’re always on your toes and it’s always fun in that regard. But, you know, when I endorse Plato, I am not endorsing each and every word of Plato. Nobody does, ’cause you just, you can’t. 

[00:31:55] Dr. Anthony Flood: But with respect to the city states, Athens is a democracy. Now, here’s a historically important fact for Plato. Socrates is ultimately executed by the city state of Athens. So the work, the Apology, Plato’s Apology, the Apologia, is an account of Socrates’ defense, his civil defense in this trial, on these charges of corrupting the youth and introducing false gods, right? And he is ultimately found guilty. And he is executed. I mean, and that’s historical fact. He’s executed very late in life. He’s 71 years old. He’s lived his entire life in Athens. Plato is already a follower of Socrates. And follower is a good word here, ’cause Socrates didn’t have a school or a academy. He was just hanging out in the public forums in Athens and doing his thing. And he attracted people. And Plato was one of these. So Plato is profoundly impacted by not merely the death of Socrates, but the way in which that death takes place, which is execution by the government of Athens. And what is the government? Well, it’s a democracy.

[00:33:13] Dr. Anthony Flood: So Plato is not a fan of democracy. He doesn’t think it’s the worst form of government. He thinks tyranny is worse, but only just, right. They’re both down there. So knowing that historical context is important, I think, when reading. But it’s not merely personal. He gives reasons why democracy is problematic. And I think they’re good cautionary reasons to take into consideration. So when looking at his different analyses, it’s gonna be low on his list. And then, would you like me to talk about the five forms and how those play into?

[00:33:49] Dr. Peter: Yeah, I think we could go ahead and get into the five forms. I think it’s probably good just to name them, just so that we can get oriented. And he does set up a hierarchy of these five forms, and that represents or it reflects the different forms within a particular person. And so you can kind of say.

[00:34:07] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah, let me do that. Let me talk about those five forms of governments super quick. Then let’s go back and talk about the parts of the self that Plato’s articulated in the Republic. And then look at that in the context of those five. So the five forms of government that he’s going to treat are what he calls an aristocracy. And aristocracy is a rule by the best educated people, in effect, the aristos, which would just for the Greeks, be the best. And best educated for Plato in this case, means those who have the most political expertise. And his argument for this is very simple. If I start feeling, you know, sharp abdomen pains, and I’m thinking, okay, I wanna know what this is and how I should treat it. Am I gonna go to a hundred random people and say, Hey, I want you all to vote on what you think is going on here, and I’ll just follow your recommendations. Or am I going to go to a doctor who has medical expertise, somebody who actually has the expertise in question? Well, Plato takes this, rhetorically, as, well, obviously you’re gonna go to the doctor. Why would you subject your decision-making to a group of untrained people who lack the expertise? Why would you do that? You would never do that with any important matter in your life. So he says, why would we then do that for the most important social matter of how we’re gonna craft the laws of the state? Why would we just put ’em out there for a vote amongst those who don’t really have political expertise? So that’s gonna be his critique of democracy. But flip that around. He says, well, therefore we want those with political expertise running the show. We want the political doctors, if you want to think of ’em as that in those terms.

[00:36:01] Dr. Eric Gudan: Best trained, most expert, specialized.

[00:36:03] Dr. Peter: Would that be equivalent to what we would call professional politicians? Would we say, okay, so this guy’s been a senator for 40 years and so therefore he really is the guy that should run the country?

[00:36:14] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well, and I think we Americans, our objection to this, and it’s a good objection, is that, yeah, I don’t know that that political expertise is possible. So, I mean, the analogy that there’s medical expertise and that there’s engineering expertise and there’s expertise in all these different subject matters. We’re less comfortable saying there’s political expertise in the same way. There’s political experience, there’s career politicians, but does that yield actual intellectual knowledge into how the state ought to be run?

[00:36:50] Dr. Eric Gudan: Even expediency. Like you can have somebody who’s very good at gaining political power, but that may not be the same way you want the government to be run. The Melion dialogue.

[00:37:00] Dr. Anthony Flood: Plato’s not naive. He knows that a lot of people who claim to have political expertise don’t have it. And so, book five, book six and book seven of the Republic. So there’s 10 books of the Republic, 10 big chapters, if you wanna think of it that way. You know, three out of the 10 are meant to address the question of where does political expertise come from? And it’s where we get the allegory of the cave and where we get how you have to transcend the physical material world and dwell with the forms. And, you know, it gets esoteric. And we don’t need to go into it. But the point is, for Plato, he knows it’s hard to come by, but he thinks it is possible. And he says, if it is possible, then it’s those people who should be running. So that’s the aristocracy.

[00:37:48] Dr. Peter: And they would be just too, right? I mean, this is an important consideration.

[00:37:52] Dr. Anthony Flood: And we can circle back to that at the end. Because of the intellectual illumination that they’re going to have, they’re going to see the choice worthiness of justice. They’re going to see that justice is inherently good, and therefore that’s gonna morally orient them in the appropriate ways. And then you’re gonna have a timocracy. A timocracy is a rule by the military. That’s the second on his list. And that’s Sparta. So, I mean, everybody’s sort of somewhat familiar with the Spartans. It was a society that was militaristic, ruled by the military, Plato doesn’t have a lot of problems with it. He actually puts it number two on his list. He thinks it’s not ideal because ultimately you have people who aren’t making decisions based on what’s ultimately true and what’s ultimately in the best interest of the common good. But it’s a very well ordered discipline state and he appreciates that.

[00:38:49] Dr. Eric Gudan: Not the common good, but a common good, a good pointed out of themselves, subordinate to a higher good that they’re trying to serve. Even though that can be distorted, there’s still a goodness within that. It’s easy to maintain relatively.

[00:39:00] Dr. Anthony Flood: And he thinks anytime you’re looking at these other forms of government that aren’t ideal, there’s an inherent sort of friction within their very structure that over time or transgenerationally, it’s likely to fall apart. It may not fall apart in one generation, but you know, each subsequent generation has to have the appropriate buy-in for this society to function long term. And he thinks there’s always this inherent flaw and it gets worse and worse as you go down the list where it’s going to implode. So that’s why you really get the sense it’s aristocracy or nothing in terms of what’s sustainable.

[00:39:38] Dr. Anthony Flood: And I think that’s important for us when we’re really reading what’s going on here, which is, yes, he’s talking about political thought, but again, he’s talking about what the good life is for the individual and when we look at that analogically, what he’s saying is, anytime you allow any vice even of the smallest sort to enter into the system, sort of project it out, it’s going to take you down if you don’t deal with that, right? If there’s a structural flaw, any disorder that you’ll voluntarily allow into the system and let it flourish, it’s going to ultimately disrupt the harmony on a larger scale. So I think that’s where he is going with that in terms of his analogy.

[00:40:23] Dr. Eric Gudan: And Tony, yeah, like, so any error, it becomes writ large. A small error in the beginning becomes a larger in the end. And it reminds me of the principle of the ends do not justify the means. And that once you surrender a choice for the good, well, we can let this happen. We can go ahead and, it’s really dangerous now, so it’s okay if we use torture to get the correct answers that we need. Once you start doing that, then you start losing the foundations you were upon. Again, reminds me of the Melion dialogue.

[00:40:46] Dr. Anthony Flood: Might be a short term benefit, but yes. Long term it’s going to create, I mean, it’s actually going to be undermining of the very end that you think you’re serving because you’re gonna create more harm long term. So aristocracy, timocracy, then he has an oligarchy, and oligarchy is simply the rule by the wealthiest. Does that sound familiar? So a rule by, you know, the property owners, those who own the most, and now this is right in the middle of his list. He thinks the interior dynamics of an oligarchy can’t help but to fall apart because you’re gonna have, basically, he says a city of two. You’re gonna have the haves and the have nots and the have nots are gonna outnumber the haves, those who own things. So he says eventually they’re just gonna rise up and say, no, no, no, we’re not taking this. And he says, the oligarchs are always gonna construct laws for their own benefit, for the benefit of property owners. So it’s just the instability of the system. It’s going to collapse in on itself sooner rather than later, he thinks.

[00:41:52] Dr. Anthony Flood: And then democracy, as we talked about the rule by the people, that’s where just everybody has a say. And for the Greeks, it was a direct democracy. If you were a citizen, you voted. Now not everybody who lived in Athens would’ve been a citizen, but anybody who was a citizen did vote. So you had massive amounts of people voting, particularly relative to the population. And then lastly, you have tyrannies. Tyranny is the worst. That’s the rule by one really nasty dictator, in effect, what we might call a dictatorship. The tyrant is somebody who just rules for their own benefit. And every decision, every political decision is really the basis of their private interest is a tyrant and everybody is meant to serve them. It’s sort of going full circle. It’s what Thrasymachus sees in all governments of their nature. Plato says, no, it’s not all governments of their nature, but it can be. You can have cases of tyrannies where the government becomes such that it’s only serving the interest of the tyrant.

[00:42:58] Dr. Eric Gudan: Even in oligarchies you have different rich people who have different goals, and so at least the selfishness, self-absorption, and oppression are diluted by different goals. Something like that.

[00:43:08] Dr. Anthony Flood: Exactly. Right. So by the time you get to the bottom, you just have one. And it’s, you know, that later phrase that absolute power is going to corrupt. Absolutely not Plato. But that idea, I think is there, with the tyrant. That even if the tyrant begins as a benevolent, well-meaning tyrant, just that amount of power, it’s going to inherently corrupt. I mean, it’s gonna inherently corrupt them and things are going to fall apart quickly. Okay. So those are the five societies or the five forms of government. Now let’s go back to what I think is really interesting here. What we really want to probably be talking about, which is if we have this question of why should I be just, well, Plato observes, listen to that question. Why should I be just? So we’re right back to that fundamental question of, well, shouldn’t we dwell on figuring out what the word “I” refers to, right? ‘Cause that’s really the heart of the question and it’s back to that Socratic point of yet self-examination. What is the self? And then it’s connected. What is the self and what is the good life? It almost seems to be two sides of the same question for Plato and Socrates. You can’t really address one without addressing the other because why you’re interested in yourself is because you want the good life. And when you want the good life, that’s gonna inherently reflect back on, okay, to be a good self means we first have to figure out what the self is. You’re looking at the two sides simultaneously.

[00:44:39] Dr. Anthony Flood: Again, the technique that he uses to figure out what the self is, is this idea of interior conflicts. He says, just reflect on different moments in your life where you felt tension and then articulate, what was in tension, what were the parts in tension? And he doesn’t make this overly complicated. He thinks there turn out to be three main parts. Now each of these parts can be subdivided into other aspects, but at least on the large scale, we have three big parts. And he’s gonna call ’em the rational part, the spirited part, and the appetitive part. 

[00:45:23] Dr. Anthony Flood: Now start with the easy one. The rational part versus the appetitive part. It’s just a continuation of the Gorgias. We can reflect on those times where somebody put a dozen donuts in front of us and we had a really, really strong desire to eat those donuts. But we also had another part of us saying, eh, you know, I shouldn’t eat those donuts, right? If I eat those, I’m gonna feel sick and I’m trying to lose weight, et cetera, et cetera. So we are all aware of this part of some executive part of us. Some decision making part of us, some rational part of us, as Plato’s going to call it, that can come into conflict with a desire for food, drink, or sex. And that’s what Plato’s calls the appetites. The appetites, generally food, drinking, sex. Okay. So that would tell us then we have a decision making part of us that has to do with knowledge and reflection and intelligence. Well, he’s gonna call that the rational part. The bodily appetites, he just calls the appetitive part.

[00:46:28] Dr. Anthony Flood: And appetite, we think of an appetite, I think almost exclusively in terms of food, but for Plato, an appetite is any interior striving, any bodily movement towards something. So food, drink and sex would all be appetites. Later philosophers, even Aquinas will use the term appetite even broader than that, that you can have an appetite for knowledge. You can have a striving for knowledge. But when Plato’s using the word appetite, 90% of the time, it means he means bodily appetite. Okay. Well, that’s the easy conflict. We’ve all had that, but he says, that’s not the only kind of conflict we can have. He says, take other examples. There might be times, it’s a bit of a bizarre example. I’m gonna give it, because it’s in the Republic. Then I’ll give, I think, maybe a better one. He says, let’s say you’re walking along the road and you come across the aftermath of a battlefield.

[00:47:29] Dr. Eric Gudan: Like everybody’s done. 

[00:47:31] Dr. Anthony Flood: In the ancient world, I don’t think it was uncommon. People would’ve known the reference, right? Like, yeah, yeah, Tuesday. Plato says, part of you really wants to look at the aftermath. Part of you has this desire to look at the corpses and all of that, but he says there’s another part of the part of you that says, no, that’s shameful, that’s not appropriate. That’s just, don’t look. And he says, well, let’s examine that, that’s another tension. Well, the desire to look on the battlefield is not issuing from a bodily appetite. It’s not related to food, drink, or sex. I know I’m talking to psychologists now, but go back with Plato, for the ancient, for Plato, anyway, this has nothing to do with food, drink, or sex. And so it must be something else. And he calls it the spirited part. It’s the part of us that has to do with victory and a sense of self.

[00:48:32] Dr. Anthony Flood: And I think I can give a better example than he does there. Well, number one, we can update his example, right? I mean, anytime you take a trip on an interstate, you’re gonna come across an accident scene. If it’s the same sort of thing. Yes, I mean, it’s okay to glance to see what happened, but you don’t wanna dwell when you see the ambulances and the stretchers. You know that there’s something unseemly about just gawking at that. I think that’s the example Plato is going for there. But in terms of victory, yeah, just think of it this way, or this, the spirited part. Somebody comes up to you and just starts insulting you. And let’s say they’re a really big guy who’s coming up and insulting you, right? Some 6′ 8″ ripped big guy. And there’s a part of you that says, no, no, no, I’m gonna confront this. I’m not gonna take this. I’m gonna get in his face and I’m gonna tell him I’m not gonna back down from you, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:49:29] Dr. Anthony Flood: But there’s this other part of you that’s saying, oh, this is not the time. This is not the time. He is belligerent, he’s angry, he’s huge. You don’t want the beating. Just take the flight approach here, right? Take the flight option. Well, regardless of what the right answer is, notice that conflict is between not your reason in your bodily appetites, definitely not your bodily appetites in this case. You’re averse to pain at the bodily level, but you’re still willing to accept pain at the spirited level. In order to defend my sense of honor, I am willing to accept this risk, even when I know high probability in this case, it’s not gonna end well for me physically. Well, I think that’s what Plato means by the spirited part, those impulses in us that have to do with our, not merely self preservation, but sense of honor, sense of self, particularly in relation to others.

[00:50:26] Dr. Anthony Flood: And we see it manifested just casually as that’s the part of us that gets really excited when we win a game, right? So you’ve just won the Super Bowl, you’ve been out there battling for hours, you’re bruised, you’re bleeding, you’re hurt, and yet you’re still euphoric. Well, it’s not sensual pleasure that you’re experiencing there. It’s not a pleasure of the sense like it would be with a bodily appetite. It’s a different kind of pleasure, but it’s real, and it’s much more even intense than sensual pleasure. Well, Plato says that’s the spirited part of us, and it’s just as important as the appetitive part and they’re all important parts that he doesn’t think that, he never paints the picture that we just need to suppress the spirited part, or we need to suppress the appetitive part. He says, the only difference is the rational part is more in control and the rational part is able to correctly order these other parts so that they all work together.

[00:51:25] Dr. Anthony Flood: So it’s never about part suppression. It’s really about how can I get the best out of, not merely each part, but how can I get the best for the self as a whole? How can I order these parts to work together in the best possible way? And the rational part does most of the heavy lifting on that. But with Plato, you never wanna say the self just is the person, at least the person is not just the rational part. The person literally is a entity that has these three parts. And the rational part is gonna be doing the most work at the end of the day in the pursuit of the good life. But it’s still, all of those parts need to be incorporated because they’re parts of who you are. So those are the big three parts, and then you could see how you can subdivide it. Well, even with the appetitive part, right? That’s one part. But then we could subdivide it into food, drink, and sex. And even later, he is gonna throw in the desire for profit as seemingly connected to that as well. So each of these can be subdivided, but that’s the big picture, sometimes called the tri-part division of the soul, meaning just three parts of rational, spirited, and appetitive part.

[00:52:40] Dr. Peter: So does he think with these three parts, in terms of systems, does he talk about like alignments? Well, he’s clearly talking about polarizations, if you want to take it into sort of IFS language. He’s clearly talking about polarizations. Does he ever talk about alignments? You know, like where the spirited part and the appetitive part, they gang up on the rational part or something like that? I mean, they talk about it in that sort of sense?

[00:53:04] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes, he will talk about, I mean, his favorite pair of words are order and disorder. And order and disorder, that’s a spectrum. You don’t just have order, you don’t just have disorder. They’re ends of a spectrum. And so you’re gonna have tending towards order, tending towards disorder. But when you go into how you tend towards disorder or tend towards order, then you have the alignment issue of if the spirited part is working hand in hand with the appetitive part, you’re in trouble, at least against the rational part because you are not merely pointing in this way. You are pointed toward disorder and heading towards it, right? it’s a motion toward it.

[00:53:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: Whereas if the appetitive part and the spirited part are working with reason, I mean, even if you haven’t achieved this perfect state of virtue, and we probably should bring up the concept of virtue here at some point, but even if you haven’t achieved that, if they’re relatively working together, then you’re going to be pointed in that direction. So for Plato, I think realistically it’s more where that arrow points. See, he’s not a perfectionist in the sense of, I don’t think he thinks people are going to achieve that state of perfection. When you’re reading him, I think it’s clear that he thinks Socrates did. I think he thinks that that one person did hit that mark. So it’s possible. But for the rest of us, what we wanna do is use that exemplar and aim toward it, knowing that it is possible. And even if we don’t achieve it, we’re still going to achieve a share of the good life that we otherwise wouldn’t have. And that’s worth it.

[00:54:48] Dr. Eric Gudan: But I appreciate that you make a distinction that the self is not simply the reason. And not simply that ordering part, but is a wholeness to the person. Even in Platonic and Socratic thought.

[00:55:01] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. And Plato is very, very clear with that. The big distinction you’ll get in Plato that makes it a little confusing is he’ll identify the person with the soul and not the body. So he’ll sometimes hear Plato’s called a dualist because he thinks there’s body and soul, and we’re not really our body. Our body’s like unremovable clothing. It’s there, but you would never identify with your shirt as part of you. It’s just an add-on. Well, Plato says, your body’s just an add-on too. It’s just an unremovable add-on. So you need to know that when you read it, but at the same time, when he actually begins articulating the nature of the self, I don’t know that that distinction matters as much because the bodily desires are still going to be so closely connected to bodily needs that it’s going to be as if the body is part of you. Because those desires, that appetitive part is definitely part of the soul. And it’s concerned principally with the body. So from a person’s lived experience point of view, I think, you’re gonna have both the psychic and the physiological needs playing a role in how you need to achieve that balance. So there’s two big pieces of the puzzle we haven’t addressed, and I’ll start to bridge that. So what does this have to do with the five cities I just talked about?

[00:56:27] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well, Plato says a society, any given society, any given state, any political entity is going to have three parts. So that three, magic number three. And you’re going to discover them in the same ways, in terms of both conflicts, but also in terms of functions. So he says that for any society, you’re going to have to have laws being created. So you need to have those who create the laws, which are going to construct how the citizens need to be behave. And he’s going to call that the ruling class. You’re going to have rulers, you’re gonna have people, decision makers. We would probably think of it as an executive, well, an executive and legislative branch in one, right? This idea that somebody needs to craft these laws and put ’em in place. But then for a society to function, you also need to protect against both internal and external threats. So sometimes there’s going to be criminal behavior. So you know, a murderer running around that’s gonna need to be dealt with internally. Other times you’re gonna have adversaries coming from other city states or empires and trying to take you over, and those threats need to be repelled. Well, he calls that the guardian class. And so what we would think of as police and military, he just combines in the guardian class, those who protect against threats, both internal and external. And then lastly, for there to be society, goods and services need to be produced, right? You need food, you need buildings, you need clothing, all the various things that make a society function. Well, he calls this the working class or the working part. He calls it the working class. I’m always hesitant to use that term because people always interpret it in a Marxist way when we hear working, but don’t think of it that way because blue collar workers and white collar workers, they would all be workers for Plato. So doctors, lawyers, farmers, electricians, they’re all in. Anybody who’s producing a good or service that’s not directly connected to the protection of society as the rulers or crafting the laws of the rulers, they’re a worker, right? So it’s literally everybody else. And those are gonna be the three big parts.

[00:58:54] Dr. Anthony Flood: So you’re gonna have the rulers, the guardians, and the workers, and he says, well, if you reflect on that, you can see a deep similarity between that and the individual person, right? So the rational part is gonna be very similar to the rulers who use knowledge to craft laws and how things ought to be governed. The guardians are gonna be like your spirited part, right? That part of you that’s concerned with honor and self-defense, and it’s gonna repel threats, not merely physical threats, but also social threats. Somebody, again, somebody mocking you may not be threatening you physically, but you still need to stand up for yourself that it’s gonna be the spirited part. And then what are the bodily appetites? What are these appetites do? Well, they enable us to maintain our body so that our physiological functions are taken care of, so that we can go on with these other parts of our life well. Plato associates that with the working class, they’re producing the material necessities for a society to function. But he says you need to have all three parts. All right. So just as society has three parts, so the individual has three parts.

[01:00:03] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well, now let’s put this all together. Why is it that you can have five different kinds of political constitutions? Well, he thinks because of the way the parts can interact with each other, that if one part ends up taking supremacy over another part, that’s going to look different. So if a spirited part rules versus the rational part versus the appetitive part, that’s going to look different. Well, that’s the same for the societies, right? When you have the rulers who are run by the military, the guardian class, or by the working class, that’s going to affect the way a city is constituted or run. And so again, his method here is it’s just we’re more familiar, at least for him. And I think this is right in terms of a temporal reading, for him, more people were familiar with political constitutions and how the state runs versus the individual psyche. 

[01:00:58] Dr. Peter: Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of introspection. You know, I mean, I don’t think people were sitting around thinking about themselves in this kind of way. In fact, this idea of personhood or selfhood was like relatively new. Like we’re at the genesis in some ways of the conceptualizations that guide our thinking on it.

[01:01:14] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah, so he’s taking what’s better known and making a case for what’s less known. And that’s always a good method. But what’s more known or less known can actually vary by age, right? By, you know, moments of history. So nowadays, I think in 2025, there’s certainly gonna be a lot of people who are more familiar with the psychological side, if we want to call it that, than the political side. You probably find both cases. So just in terms of how you would approach an argument, Plato might seem to be doing it, going from the less known to the better known, but for his audience, it was reversed. So that’s why he follows that structure. But whichever way, I think you can see his point and understand the systems. But he’s gonna make the case now that if an aristocracy is the best form of government and a tyranny is the worst form of government, well, whatever the corresponding individual would look like, if an individual manages their life in such a way that the rational part reigns supreme, that’s gonna be the best possible individual, that’s gonna be the good life. And anybody who looks like that tyrannical person, which is gonna have something to do with the bodily appetites running the show, that’s going to be the most miserable person. And so that’s where he is now gonna bridge the gap and say, we can use this political knowledge to finally answer that question, why should I be just? And the quick answer is, well, because you’re gonna be really, really miserable if you’re not just, because you’re gonna tend towards this highest degree of disorder that you find in a tyrannical person. And you don’t want that. You want a well ordered life that the aristocratic person has, the person with the rational part who runs the show. You want that life because that’s going to be the most desirable.

[01:03:05] Dr. Eric Gudan: So Plato’s arguing that the tyranny, it’s Callicles.

[01:03:07] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes, yes. Callicles is definitely the tyrant in this case. Yep.

[01:03:13] Dr. Eric Gudan: And mapping those out, but wait a minute. You told us there are three parts and there’s five, and I guess Plato’s not a mathematician. Is this factorials, set theory?

[01:03:23] Dr. Anthony Flood: That is correct. So here’s how that works. And at some point we have to talk about virtue, but I’m dragging my feet on that. So the aristocracy is going to be the form of government run by the ruling class, right? Because that’s the ones with political expertise, the ones who actually have taken the time to learn this stuff, they’re the decision makers. They’re not the military class, they’re not the working class. They’re a separate class devoted just towards this social function of gaining political expertise and then using that political expertise to craft laws for the sake of acquiring the common good. Okay. The timocracy, the rule by the military, well, that’s gonna be a city state run by the guardian class. So the ruling part gets subsumed under the guardian class. It’s not as if it goes away. That function gets subsumed by the military. Well, similarly with the individual, the timocratic person, the person who’s gonna be motivated most by a sense of victory and honor, all of their decisions, they’re still going to have a rational part. But the idea is that rational part is gonna be in service of, how do I get victory? How do I get honor? ‘Cause that’s what I want outta life the most.

[01:04:43] Dr. Anthony Flood: So for Plato, you can’t make a part go away. At no point do parts go away. It’s just their functions get subordinate to another part that, so it’s always about the ordering. Okay. So now those two are easy, ’cause those are two different parts. The aristocracy is the rational part running, the timocracy is the spirited part running. Okay, so how do we get three more? Seems to be your question there. 

[01:05:06] Dr. Eric Gudan: I can get wine.

[01:05:08] Dr. Anthony Flood: The last two I think are easy. The middle one’s a little confusing. So for the oligarchy, he says the oligarchy is run by those who are the property owners, the corporate types. And he says it’s ruled by those who are motivated most significantly by a desire for profit. I think as that goes, it’s right, right? And oligarch is gonna be somebody who’s motivated by the quest for money. Now, where that desire for money actually fits in terms of parts, that’s a little harder to ascertain. And Plato recognizes this.

[01:05:49] Dr. Eric Gudan: Doesn’t it make sense for it to be somewhere between the spirited part and the appetitive part?

[01:05:54] Dr. Anthony Flood: And that’s exactly Plato’s answer. He said somehow it is sort of a shared impulse, right? That desire for money. It’s not just a desire for wealth, it’s a desire for sort of corporate victory, if you will. Or monetary victory where you enjoy that acquisition and having that victory over your competitors.

[01:06:12] Dr. Peter: Sort of status rather than honor kind of a thing, right?

[01:06:16] Dr. Eric Gudan: And money’s a proxy for being able to get whatever nice thing I want. The nicest and choicest meats and liquor. 

[01:06:23] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. Yeah. So you definitely have that. And so that’s the mixed one. I mean, I think, in terms of where the parts analogy with three parts. The next two I think are somewhat easy. A democratic society and a democratic person, the person who looks like that. The democratic society is simply gonna be a society run by the workers because they take over the ruling duties and there still is a guardian class. But the guardian class, their votes are gonna be so diluted by the workers that it’s effectively the workers who craft the laws of the state. Right? Because if any law is enacted by a majority vote, and the vast majority of voters are in the working class, then de facto it’s the working class that runs the show.

[01:07:14] Dr. Eric Gudan: It’s the oppression by the majority.

[01:07:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yep. Yeah. And that was the ancient Greek model. It was simple majority, so you know, 51%, you got it. You don’t need unanimous. In fact, that’s how Socrates is executed because he has a jury, it’s a jury trial, which is interesting too. Athens was not merely a democracy politically. It actually used that in its political and its judicial system. So when Socrates is on trial, he has a jury of a couple hundred people. So it’s not just 12, it’s a couple hundred. But the big difference is you don’t need a unanimous verdict for the person to be guilty. It’s a simple majority. And so Socrates, there were plenty of people on that jury who thought he was innocent, but simple majority is what enabled him to be convicted.

[01:08:03] Dr. Anthony Flood: So what then distinguishes a tyranny from a democracy? Well, if a democracy is ruled by the workers, he says, Plato says, here’s what happens. He tells a little story. He says, okay, the people initially really like this right to vote. Yeah, we’re in charge. We’re making the laws. And he says, but over time, 10, 20 years, the workers begin to realize, wait a minute, we don’t know what we’re doing. Every time we craft laws, they seem to hinder our ability to actually get the society we want. We’re shooting ourself in the foot.

[01:08:36] Dr. Eric Gudan: Horribly inefficient as you’re saying. So the legislative class becomes like sclerotic and inability to govern, is what you’re saying.

[01:08:42] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah, yeah. And Plato says the answer’s very simple. They don’t have political expertise. So I mean, it would be just like somebody without any medical expertise diagnosing, I guess themselves in this case. You know, over time, that’s gonna lead to very bad consequences, ’cause they’re gonna miss obvious things that somebody with medical expertise would’ve picked up on and could have dealt with early on. So he says, over time, even though the democratic people like that there’s no elitist rulers or property owners over them, they don’t like the mess that their lives have become. So they say they’re at this impasse. They’re like, okay, this isn’t working. What do we do? Well, we don’t wanna create the very problem that we wanted to avoid in the beginning. We don’t want to create a king. We don’t wanna let the military takeover. We don’t want that. So what do we do? Well, let’s pick somebody from us. Let’s pick a fellow worker and just say, you seem that you’re one of us, right? We can identify with you. You share our interests and goals. We’re gonna give you all the power that we can muster, and you just take over and do this for us. So he says that democracy inevitably just turns itself over to somebody who’s identified as sympathetic to the working class and given all the power. And he says that then just devolves into a tyranny. So it’s now ruled by one, but it’s one who kind of came from the working class, right? 

[01:10:16] Dr. Eric Gudan: Not particularly trained or led by honor or led by the eudaimonia, the aristos.

[01:10:21] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yep. So it’s going to have bad results. Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year, but, you know, 10 years down the line, 20, it’s going to become a system where all of the laws are crafted in terms of the self-interest of that person. And that’s going to be very unsustainable for the society as a whole, but also very probably destructive to the lives of the individual. What does that look like for the individual, right? Because if we have five types of government and each of those is meant to be a model for how our parts can interact with one another, what’s Plato actually saying here? Well, I’m gonna begin with tyranny and actually work our way up. Let’s just go in reverse. The tyrant, the tyrannical person. All right, well, now I have three parts. I’ve got my rational part, I’ve got my spirited part, I’ve got my appetitive part. Well, the tyrant is taken from the working class, the appetitive part by analogy, but it’s just one. So Plato’s gonna say in this type of person, it’s one desire that takes over.

[01:11:30] Dr. Eric Gudan: So the alcoholic.

[01:11:31] Dr. Anthony Flood: You can think of it as the alcoholic. He’s gonna go with eros. Now, eros is a vague term. Sometimes it’s good, if we talk about the Phaedrus, sometimes eros could be very good, but if eros in the crudest sort of bodily way, it’s just gonna be lust. And the lustful person is ruled by the desire for sex, every decision made is ultimately in service of that. But yeah, you could think of any addiction. I mean, really any bodily addiction, this works, right? Because that one thing determines all of the thinking and decision making of the person in question. It’s all in service of how am I gonna do these other things? So now there might be good decisions still being made.

[01:12:13] Dr. Eric Gudan: Accidentally.

[01:12:13] Dr. Anthony Flood: In a sense, but they’re ultimately all in service of that one end. And so Plato says, you know, over time that’s gonna be very bad. You’ve become Callicles. So over time, Callicles, you’re gonna be unsatisfied. It’s that same dynamic. Your desire’s gonna keep growing and growing and growing, and you’re gonna become increasingly enslaved to it. And you’re gonna be ultimately unsatisfied because the desire outpaces your ability to fulfill it, just like any addiction ultimately, how manifests. So he says, who would want this? Right? Who would want this? He says, this is the most undesirable life. He’s gonna say, this is the life of pure vice. Now vice for Plato is the word that he pairs with virtue. Virtue is going to be a good quality, vice is going to be a bad quality. The life of the eros-driven tyrannical person in this case is a vicious life. Now, I don’t like the adjective vicious ’cause we always think of that in terms of violence, but just vicious in terms of vice. They’re gonna be ruled by vice, which is just another shorthand way of saying disorder. Their rational part has been neutralized. Their spirit of part has been neutralized and there’s no way out of it.

[01:13:35] Dr. Eric Gudan: Lack of counterbalance. It’s a disorder. It’s a chaotic way to live that ’cause the ordering factor, that what you’re organizing life around is not ordered. There is no order that we’re choosing to order. It doesn’t order.

[01:13:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: Extrapolate a little bit more, I mean, the danger that Socrates sees in the Gorgias and that Plato is identifying here is because your capacities for making decisions are the very things that we’re talking about here. Once you achieve this level of disorder, there is no internal way out of the problem. You can’t will yourself out of this situation because the very capacity you would need to do that, namely a rational part that was strong enough to make those decisions, has been so overcome and subservient to the appetite in question that it’s incapable of achieving the efficacy necessary to get yourself out of it. This is why he’s warning of a danger. You don’t want to go down this path ’cause once you’re there, you’re there.

[01:14:39] Dr. Eric Gudan: Callicles, you say you want this, but when you go there, your capacity to choose will be so atrophied and you’ll be so blinded to the good that you’ll be eating dirt and think it’s good for you.

[01:14:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right. Now I think if you now zoom ahead to the modern world, I think we could say this is the value of exterior counseling and therapy, right? Somebody coming from the outside to help a person reorient their interior life. And Plato does not talk about this. Plato just says, you don’t wanna go down this path, ’cause once you do, you’re stuck and you can’t get out of it. And that’s gonna be your existence. But I think we could make the case that, well, what if there’s an exterior, an external aid that even if a person cannot do it on its own, so you can’t overcome alcoholism on its own. But what if there’s a support group, or what if there’s these larger counseling sort of services that, that could help bring that. And I think you can make the case that yes, those are very successful, but it’s not incompatible with the Platonic picture. I guess I’m saying. It would be a way of looking at that. 

[01:15:46] Dr. Eric Gudan: So then a democracy is not to that extreme.

[01:15:48] Dr. Anthony Flood: So a democracy is a person who is not ruled by one desire alone. I should have had the Republic in front of me, but Socrates has this nice quote, because he’s very sarcastic. He says, Wouldn’t a democratic person be wonderful because what are they? They’re somebody who’s ruled by whatever desire happens to be firing at that moment. So he says, one day they like this, and another day they like this, and then they move on to this project and that. He says, isn’t that great? And then he flips it, says, no, it’s not great. The point is yeah, it hasn’t become such that there’s one desire that rules over everything. It sounds like a Lord of the Rings.

[01:16:29] Dr. Peter: Right. Yeah. I was just sort of thinking that.

[01:16:31] Dr. Anthony Flood: It probably is quite frankly. But the person is still just that there’s an inconstancy to the interior life because it’s always being pulled in various unpredictable directions because the person is not in control of the desires. The desires are still ruling over them.

[01:16:49] Dr. Eric Gudan: Kind of a mob rule or what come to mind is Twitter, being changed, whatever very flighty sense of what’s important that builds some momentum and then crashes, oh, look something else sparkly. And we’ll be mad about this for now.

[01:17:01] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And in fact, the Greek word demos of democracy, it doesn’t translate people, it translates mob. It’s ruled by the mob. And I don’t actually know the story there as to why, if that was somebody like Plato who didn’t like the form of government, who called it democracy, but it certainly fits with the Platonic theme of, that’s not a good word, right? If you said rule by the mob, people would say, well, that doesn’t sound good. Well, that’s what Plato wants us to think, right? It’s not good. So yeah, it would be an interior rule by the mob. The mob of your desires is what controls you. And so your life is going to be very scattered, very inconstant. And Plato does talk about, it’s gonna be hard to sustain relations with others as a result of this. Obviously, for the tyrant, if you’re ruled by some addiction, it’s gonna be hard to sustain relationships. But even at the level of this multiplicity of desires, because you need some stability to maintain relationships with others, and that stability’s just not gonna be there. And then moving up to the oligarchic person, I think is easy. It’s just the person motivated by profit in their individual life, that all their decisions are financial decisions. It’s all about the bottom line, making money.

[01:18:10] Dr. Eric Gudan: And while that person can be abusive in relationships, that person is more likely to create positive benefits for someone else interacting with them.

[01:18:18] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. And so that’s why we’re in this case, we’re now going up the ladder. So the tyrannical person ruled by eros, by an addiction, that’s very bad. That’s almost nonrecoverable, the democratic person not nearly as bad. And by the way, because they’re not nearly as bad, Plato, I think even in his methodology, thinks the person could turn it around. There’d be enough, if they really wanted to, it’d be a struggle, but they could turn it around. And then going up, he said, you know, the person motivated by profit, very possible that they’re in control of all of those other desires, right? They can easily, maybe not easily, but they can set aside immediate desire, gratification for the sake of these longer term financial pursuits. And so there’s an interior order there that gives a stability that is desirable. And so we’re sort of now on the cusp of the good life where we have an interior order. He thinks it’s still problematic because the desire for profit, if that’s what’s operating as your chief desire, the desires for truth and knowledge and goodness, these other things are not going to be as strong. But he says you at least have a share of interior order that’s manageable and sustainable long term.

[01:19:37] Dr. Eric Gudan: At some degree of order, more degree of order, and so it’s less chaotic and does a better life and there is capacity for a greater experience of actually enjoying life.

[01:19:46] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And there’s a use of the rational part in terms of reason. I mean, to really be successful in business, you generally have to be knowledgeable at least about those matters. And if you’re using your intellect at all, in robust ways, Plato says you’re on the right path. I mean, that’s good. That’s good. It just needs to be freed from just the shackles of thinking about the bottom line and let it free to more just, I don’t wanna say truth for its own sake, but let’s just say truth for its own sake, as what’s gonna be beneficial. And then the timocratic person that, you know, the person that looks like the timocracy, well, they’re gonna be ruled by their spirited part. And Plato’s example of this is the Olympic athlete. Remember the Olympics began, that’s an ancient Greek invention. That’s their thing. These different city states would come together and compete in these games every four years. And it was a big celebratory sort of thing, ’cause the best athletes also tended to be the best soldiers. And so it was a showcase of what this city can bring both militarily and just physically to the table, this bodily excellence. And Plato says, look, to achieve highest honor at the Olympics, to get that gold medal, you’ve gotta train and train and train and train. The amount of self-discipline is phenomenal, right? I mean, we’re not at the top yet, but we’re getting there. So Plato says, look at the interior order of the Olympic athlete, particularly the successful Olympic athlete that who, those who get the gold, silver, or bronze. The amount of dedication to this cause shows an interior stability and comportment that is desirable.

[01:21:30] Dr. Eric Gudan: Even more order and less chaos.

[01:21:33] Dr. Anthony Flood: And really the idea of just suppressing. I don’t know, forget that word, of taming the bodily appetite so that they don’t interfere with this process. ‘Cause notice they’re not suppressed, right? You’ve still gotta eat. I mean, you still gotta do all these things, but they’re at the service now of this spirited pursuit. And so Plato says there’s a lot to be admired here. But again, what’s admirable is the correct ordering, the beginning of the correct ordering of the parts. And then lastly, the aristocratic person, the person who’s going to be ruled over by the rational part.

[01:22:16] Dr. Anthony Flood: Here’s where virtue, I mean, virtue should have come into this earlier, but I’ll bring it in now. Plato thinks there are four key virtues. Justice, wisdom, courage, and self-control, or temperance or moderation, however you wanna look at that, he says, and what is a virtue? Well, virtue for the ancient Greeks is any excellence, any quality that we would prefer to have rather than not have anything that makes us better. So the virtues aren’t just moral virtues. There can be physical virtues, so agility. I would rather be agile and fast than not. Now I can will that all I want. I’m not gonna get those things. But I can see that they’re attractive, desirable qualities, and they would enhance my physical state if I had them. Well, these moral virtues, these four key cardinal virtues, they are the pivot points for what a good life is, as such. If I’m a just person, if I’m courageous, if I’m wise, if I’m self-controlled, and Plato articulates all of these in terms of this part structure, that the ideal person, the aristocratic person, the person who has the rational part and spirited part, and the competitive part correctly aligned, is doing so because of these virtues. The virtues are the key. So a couple of them are fairly obvious. So if my rational part needs to make the best decisions for how I ought to govern my own life, well, that’s gonna be wisdom, right? I’m gonna have to cultivate the virtue of wisdom, of not merely knowledge of the stars and the planets, but knowledge of what is good for me in my interactions, both with myself and with other people. And that, that’s practical. We call it practical wisdom. Plato just calls it wisdom. But it’s this idea that the rational part is going to be developed and cultivated such that it can operate the best possible way relative to decision making. Courage is going to be found in our spirited part. It’s the part that’s going to cultivate our spirited part to do what? Well, to protect us against threats. And again, those threats may be physical. They may be social threats, but they’re threats. And so the courageous person is one who knows how to stand up. But notice even when it comes to courage, courage is, now that we’re talking the ideal for Plato, courage is subordinate to wisdom.

[01:24:49] Dr. Eric Gudan: There’s an ordering to it.

[01:24:50] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes. So to go back to my example earlier on, you know, if the six eight person is threatening you, your spirited part wants to fight back, but it still might be that practical wisdom in this case says, don’t worry about it. What’s the phrase?

[01:25:10] Dr. Eric Gudan: Discretion is the better part of valor.

[01:25:12] Dr. Anthony Flood: Discretion is the better part of valor. Right? And just that discretion is not in and of itself, courage. Right? Discretion, it has that mental connotation to it. It’s wisdom. And so the spirited part, it will do its thing and it’ll protect you. But it will do it in accord with reason. And if your rational part says, I don’t want you doing it this way, it will listen, in effect, is the idea. And then self-control, obviously the bodily desires being subordinate to reason. So if somebody puts donuts in front of me, well maybe, the rash person says, yeah, sure, have a donut, it’s fine.

[01:25:52] Dr. Eric Gudan: Have another donut. And there’s more donuts there.

[01:25:56] Dr. Anthony Flood: But the point though, then my desire still might be there. And then the rash person says, all right, enough is enough. But the point is I can still have the desire, I can still act on the desire, but the desire is not pulling me. Through my rational part, for Plato, I am in control of that desire. Because again, you’re not your rational part, but through your rational part, you are able to control that. Now interestingly, it gets a little sophisticated here. Plato thinks self-control also is the virtue that pertains to the spirited part’s deferral to the rational part. So in a self-controlled person, it’s not just your bodily appetites, it’s also your spirited part deferring to reason in those cases where it’s irrational. So in our discretion is the better part of valor, note it’s that same idea. It would actually be self-control there where the courage of the spirited part would be saying here, but the self-controlled part of the spirited part would be saying, okay, I’m gonna defer to the rational part here.

[01:26:55] Dr. Eric Gudan: So these four virtues don’t map perfectly onto the cardinal virtues, but pretty close, not quite the same.

[01:27:01] Dr. Anthony Flood: And so lastly, big question then, which virtue did I leave out? If we’ve got the rational part with wisdom, the spirited part with courage, self-control with the bodily appetites and the spirited part deferring to reason, what’s the one I didn’t name? Justice.

[01:27:20] Dr. Eric Gudan: Oh, the whole, the thing that orders everything.

[01:27:22] Dr. Anthony Flood: And that’s the thing that goes back to the very beginning of the republic. Why should I be just, right? What is justice? You know, what am I as an individual? What is justice? What is the good life? These all get answered simultaneously at the end with Plato saying justice. And he defines it in a way that when you first hear it, you’re like, eh, I don’t even think he’s talking about the same thing we mean by justice. But he is. You gotta be patient with his definition. His definition of justice is, the first attempt at the definition is this, that justice is each part performing its proper function. Rational part, spirited part, appetitive part, performing the thing that they’re good at, the thing that they’re designed to do and not interfering with the proper functioning of the other parts. So justice is the proper function of each part and the non-interference of one to the other.

[01:28:24] Dr. Eric Gudan: A very subsidiarity, libertarian form of government there.

[01:28:27] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And so you’re thinking, okay, well, that’s not a bad definition in a sense. I can understand why that would be a good thing, but what does that have to do with our colloquial sense of justice? Well, Plato says it’s very obvious, at least obvious to him, he says, well, you look at justice. What are we looking at? We’re looking at what is owed to another, generally to another person. Right? So I borrow $10 from you all, then I owe you $10. It’s part of justice for me to give what I owe to you. Well, Plato says, what is it that each part owes to the other parts? Well, each part, my rational part, owes it to my spirited part and my appetitive part to make good decisions. And my spirited part owes it to the other parts to protect me against dangers and so on and so forth. And each part owes it to the other part to not meddle with the proper affairs of the other. Right? So this is where for even Plato, this is why like the rational part shouldn’t meddle in the appetitive part. Once the rational part has made its decisions and the appetitive part is obeying reason and the appropriate sense, it doesn’t need to then dwell on that because you still need to satisfy these bodily needs.

[01:29:41] Dr. Anthony Flood: So there’s a balance that’s to be had even by the rational part, kind of stepping back and letting these other parts do what they need to do. And this again is why the rational part is not the person, because the person is the composite of these three things that have to be in balance and each has to be functioning in the appropriate ways. And so Plato says justice simply is that interior order that is produced by the parts in concert with one another. And he says, vice just is the disorder, the interior conflict that you have when your parts are out of whack. So the tyrannical person, he says, is miserable because no matter how much wealth they have exterior to them, they have a nasty, conflicted, tumultuous inner self that is with them always and with every experience. It’s inescapable, it’s inescapably part of everything they do. Whereas the virtuous person has an interior order and harmony and sort of peaceful contentment that comes from that, that they bring to every situation, even no matter how bad it is. If you’re in a situation where the external conditions are bad, you still have that interior harmony that you’re bringing to that. And so this is the idea that virtue is its own reward. Vice is its own punishment because virtue simply is that interior harmony that you experience as a result of the proper ordering of your parts. And vice just is that inner conflict and sort of miserable self experience. And so going back, well, why should I be just, well, you don’t wanna be miserable and you want a pleasant interior life because that’s the one thing you can control. You can’t control the exterior world. And stoicism will later will take cues from Plato here and develop this. You can’t control the exterior world, so don’t worry about it. But you can control the interior world, if you will, of your own self. And so that’s where you should focus your energies.

[01:31:54] Dr. Eric Gudan: To keep things in order for the possibility of and of actually experiencing goodness, really enjoying life.

[01:32:02] Dr. Anthony Flood: And once you have that interior order, well, now you can bring that. That’s gonna be naturally, and this is where Augustine and Aquinas will really run with this. Once you have that interior order, that’s gonna naturally spill out to your relations with other people. You’re gonna want to enter into relations with other, and you’re gonna be able to sustain those relations with other people because you’re not at always war with yourself. If you’re always at war with yourself, it’s really hard to then have meaningful, stable relations with others. So you are the anchor point, and once you develop that, then you have this ever expanding network of relations that you can enter into and sustain.

[01:32:41] Dr. Peter: So if we were to start to translate this into, and I ‘ m kind of interested in doing this, starting with the aristocratic person, right? From an IFS perspective or from a modern parts work understanding, we would say that the innermost self is leading and guiding the system, perhaps somewhat analogous to the rational part, although I don’t think it would be exactly analogous, and then all the other parts are in harmony. In other words, all parts are accepted. Parts have roles that contribute to the flourishing of the whole system. And there is a sense of interior integration, a sense of inner harmony, a sense of both distinctions and a unity within the person. And there’s an order and a sense of, you said the word, coming from Plato, justice. There’s a fairness, what’s good for one part is good for all parts of the system. There’s a beauty and a goodness and a sense of conforming to what’s real. I mean, that seems to make sense to me, even though I don’t know that, IFS would certainly not put the innermost self sort of at the same, the rational part, you know, as the innermost self at the same level in a sense. There’s more of a hierarchy, but there is also a hierarchy within Plato, right? He argues that there ought to be this internal hierarchy, which we’re gonna lose when we get to democracy. But if we then went to the timocracy, then we’re looking at the protector parts, the ones that are on guard really running the system, right? So there’s maybe some influence of the innermost self or the rational part, you know, kind of analogy there. But there is this emphasis on protection, but then also I would say on the adherence to a particular standard of honor. You know, something that those parts believe to be true.

[01:34:30] Dr. Peter: And I’m thinking of within some of our language within Souls and Hearts, Catholic standard bearers. These are the parts that believe they know what God wants or they believe they know what’s right. There’s a code of conduct that we must conform ourselves to, but it doesn’t take into consideration the entirety of the person, right. Because you might have in that the fact that we should never eat anything that has this ingredient in it.

[01:34:55] Dr. Peter: Not for biological reasons necessarily, but because of ethical reasons or something. So yeah, there you have the sort of guardian class, and with that emphasis on protection, you know, and I think the example of Sparta is just really a good one, right? Like you can kind of see that in Sparta, ’cause I can’t imagine that the arts were flourishing in Sparta in the same way that they were flourishing in a more balanced city state, right?

[01:35:18] Dr. Eric Gudan: It’s a harsh world. 

[01:35:19] Dr. Anthony Flood: And you know, one last thing, I don’t wanna talk about Plato’s allegory of the cave, that’ll take us too far into the weeds, but he does make one point that we can easily transfer to this. He says, you know, the people we’re gonna educate and get them to where they have the political expertise that’s gonna require this very all encompassing education. It’s where we get, in fact, our notion of the liberal arts comes from the discussion that he gives of the curriculum that it would take to get to political expertise. Well, he says, you know, once you achieve that, the rulers in training, they’re really gonna wanna just dwell with that, right? They’re gonna just love this contemplation and learning. And he said, Plato says they’re not gonna wanna go back and then do the dirty work of ruling a city state, ’cause that’s tedious, right? I mean, once you’ve seen this, why would you want to come down and do this? But he says it’s their function to do that. They actually have to set aside their interest to go back and rule. Well, again, to put it in terms of the analogy with the person, he’s saying something very profound there, because he’s saying that the rational part, which again, we almost always wanna just kinda go that route and say, well, it must be the rational part only when reading Plato. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Because the rational part, yes, it can attain to truth and understanding and these things are very desirable, and once you achieve them, they’re very alluring. But he says the rational part also has to set aside what we might think of as the philosophical life, the intellectual life, and actually do the dirty work of managing the life of the person, which is not always pleasant. And that also might include managing the social relations within one’s life, namely your family obligations and all of those obligations. It would be a lot easier just to sit and on a top of a hill and think and speculate. But at the end of the day, the rational part needs to set aside its own interest in that case, in order to do what’s good for the whole, for the person as a unity, and not just reduced to the rational part.

[01:37:34] Dr. Eric Gudan: Not simply spin off into its own interest on its own, but take into account justice as an order, and not just be looking at more of an abstraction of order.

[01:37:43] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah.

[01:37:43] Dr. Peter: And so then as we come down to the oligarchic person, we’ve got the pursuit of perceived goods by parts. But again, these could be, to use a Thomistic term, right, they could be concupiscent goods or something, right? They’re starting to blend into that realm. There’s a combination perhaps of those that already have established a sense of rule that has a self-interested aspect to it. Difficult to dislodge, right? So there’s a kind of homeostasis that still exists with oligarchic internal structure. But yeah, the poor are the exiles, right? They’re the ones who are not being heard, the exile parts in IFS, the have nots. They’re the ones that, you know, do not have any standing within the society any longer. They’re not included in the common good because the common good is no longer being considered, in favor of the agendas, if you will, of the managerial class that’s running the system, right? So the managers that are in front. And then when you get to the democratic city, then it just sort of seems like you have sequential blending. It’s like whoever manages to get to be king of the mountain in the moment is sort of in charge in governing, right? 

[01:38:59] Dr. Eric Gudan: A lot of pendulum swinging.

[01:39:00] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Pendulum swings and allied parts that are sharing something of a mutual agenda or at least complimentary agendas, you know, trying to take over. It’s chaotic and it’s very inconstant, right? There’s like little structure left, and then when you get to the tyrant, it’s just one part. This is just it, it is just one part with a very narrow vision, a very narrow agenda. No consideration of the other parts or the innermost self. Yeah, it’s just my agenda because however it worked out that part managed to establish something of an ongoing rule within, but it’s gonna be, as you were pointing out in the city state, it’s gonna be unstable. Whether it’s gonna be unstable in the city state, or whether it’s gonna be unstable intrapsychically within an individual, there’s gonna be an instability there. So it’s fascinating that these considerations were going on, we’re talking what, 2,400 years ago, right? Something like that. So, yeah. Wow.

[01:39:56] Dr. Anthony Flood: So, yeah, and Plato, so, you know, if you have me back, we can talk about Aristotle, who is, Aristotle’s his own thinker, but he knows Plato personally. He’s a member of Plato’s Academy for 20 years. So these names that have so influenced so many people when it comes to intellectual pursuits, they’re all together. I mean, Plato is a student of Socrates, Aristotle is a student of Plato. This moment of 50 years where this brilliance comes together and really impacts and shapes intellectual history, in a profound way going forward.

[01:40:36] Dr. Peter: So as we kind of bring this to a close for our audience, I always like to ask about like one key takeaway. If there was one thing that each of you would like the audience to remember or to hold onto, from our conversation today as we look at Socrates and Plato, what would you like them to hold on to? If there’s one thing.

[01:41:01] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think it goes back to the key question of the republic of, and particularly Plato’s suggestion that why should I be just? Why should I bother taking this somewhat difficult ownership over my actions and doing certain things that even in the moment I may not really want to be doing? My preference would be to do other things. It all makes sense if it’s in service of a good life that is inherently choice worthy. Once you see that these decisions here have their payoff in this interior harmony that you can bring to the table in all other situations, then I think it all makes sense. So I think to the question, why do we do what we do? Well because we’re trying to achieve a good, stable form of life, that’s not merely gonna be good for me right now on this date. It’s gonna be good for me months ahead, years ahead, and really, throughout.

[01:42:02] Dr. Eric Gudan: Tony did say it. You already said it, but I’m gonna say it in a slightly different way. way That to live well, we need to have a bit of order. Because if you’re just doing whatever, then you’ll never get anywhere.

[01:42:17] Dr. Peter: Okay.

[01:42:18] Dr. Eric Gudan: I’ll say a little more simply, but I think Tony said it a lot more, but to live well, you have to have the order that’s there. You have to find an order and without infringing upon the other, it’s to see what this is for. And so that includes a kindness and a capacity to listen to the different parts, a capacity to be aware of rational order, and listening to each, and putting each in order.

[01:42:40] Dr. Peter: Well, I’m gonna add something that we haven’t talked about. But that really came out of this for me. And that is that if you go to the Program for Priestly Formation 6th Edition, this is the very first time that the USCCB, the American Catholic Bishops defined human formation and the way they defined human formation was as education in the virtues according to St. Thomas, essentially.

[01:43:07] Dr. Eric Gudan: Could do worse.

[01:43:08] Dr. Peter: Well, you could do worse, but it doesn’t resonate with us ’cause we tend to think of education as sort of like classrooms and workbooks and things like that. But one of the things that Fr. John Nepil helped me out with was to understand education is in the way that the Greeks were talking about. It’s a much broader concept than what we tend to think of education as. We tend to think of education primarily as intellectual formation. But what I’m gonna argue that what we’ve been talking about is actually education as human formation. That we’re actually talking about human formation, which as St. John Paul II said, is the basis of all formation, in Pastores Dabo Vobis. And so that’s what’s kind of exciting to me about this is actually making that come alive.

[01:43:53] Dr. Anthony Flood: I would agree. Yeah. This education, this idea of being led forth, led out to something. If education is connected to the virtues, it’s the goodness that, the good life that you’re being led into, or at least being led into in a much deeper, fuller way.

[01:44:10] Dr. Peter: And with that, I think we’ll just bring this to a close by, first of all, thanking each of you. And you mentioned this, I’m very excited. I would love to have you back, dear Tony, for a discussion on Aristotle. And I also, we should still preserve a capacity for choice, I want to respect your free will, but definitely Aquinas too, because we wanna talk about Aquinas and I know that’s a particular interest of yours, a focus of your two books. So definitely and so good to have you with us. We are gonna have to talk about giving this band back together, Aristotle, when we cover St. Thomas. 

[01:44:43] Dr. Peter: So, on YouTube like us, subscribe, all that business. Share this episode with your family, friends, and acquaintances, especially those that are maybe a little more philosophically minded. Spread the word. There is nothing like personal recommendations for getting the word out. And also share with us, write questions or comments. Let us hear from you in the comment section for this episode at our YouTube channel, at Interior Integration 4 Catholics. Also give us a review on Apple Podcasts. Share your experiences there. And if you’re watching or listening to this episode on its release date on August 4th, I want you to know that we are inviting you to be on the podcast for episode 172. That one will be recorded live on Zoom on Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 from 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM Eastern time, go to our Interior Integration for Catholics podcast landing page to register. That’s at soulsandhearts.com/iic. Or click on the link in this episode description. Dr. Gerry Crete, Dr. Christian Amalu will be returning to answer your questions from episodes 166 to 170 of this podcast on Catholic parts work and Scripture, the early Church Fathers, St. Augustine, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Bonaventure. We would love to have you join that conversation.

[01:46:07] Dr. Peter: If you really liked this episode and you wanna learn more about self-love and self-governance in especially in Thomas Aquinas, check out this book again, The Root of Friendship. Really recommend this. And we will be having Dr. Anthony Flood and Dr. Eric Gudan back for another episode on Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and self-love and parts and all that business. So I wanna tell you about the Resilient Catholics Community, the Resilient Catholics Community, or the RCC. That is our main community at Souls and Hearts. It’s for Catholics who love the faith, who embrace the teachings of the church. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have trouble sometimes, or a lot of times, living it out. We’re not perfect by any stretch, but we endorse what the Catholic Church teaches as authoritative, and we wanna work on our human formation. We wanna work on our interior life. We wanna work on our human formation, really helping to bring our parts together under the leadership and guidance of our innermost self. We wanna seek that self-governance that Plato was really emphasizing in his book The Republic. We want that to be really ordered in a proper, hierarchical way, and we have a step-by-step program in the RCC to do that. I’ve actually brought together with some of my colleagues, we’ve brought together the best of what’s out there in the natural realm, whether it’s Catholic, whether it’s not Catholic. We harmonize it with the Catholic faith, and we package it so that you have this way to go about it, not by yourself, not as a lone wolf, in community, with your companions, in your company meetings, and with your individual companion. Check that out, soulsandhearts.com/rcc. We take new applications every February, June, and October right now. And you can get on an interest list at soulsandhearts.com/rcc. Find out a lot more about it there.

[01:48:09] Dr. Peter: Also, we have the Formation for Formators community. This is for formators. We’re talking about spiritual directors. We’re talking about coaches. We’re talking about therapists, counselors, anyone who individually accompanies others in their personal formation. You need to work on your own human formation. You need to really focus inwardly because you can’t give what you don’t have. And so we have created a program just for you with our foundations experiential groups, with our retreats. I really invite you to check that out. soulsandhearts.com/fff. There’s lots going on at Souls and Hearts. I am so excited to be able to share that with you. I want you to know that you can reach out to me also in my conversation hours, which are every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern Time at (317) 567-9594. That’s my cell phone number. We can have a conversation about these podcast episodes. We can have a conversation about what I’m writing about in my semi monthly reflections that you can check out at soulsandhearts.com/blog. Whatever you’d like to talk about. We can’t do any clinical work. I can’t do any assessments or provide any clinical services, but we certainly wanna have an opportunity to be able to talk about what’s important to you with regard to what we offer at Souls and Hearts. So without, let’s just bring this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.