Plato and Platonism

ishable still, against the principle of flamboyancy or fluidity in things, and in men's thoughts about them. Political "ideals" may provide not only types for new states, but also, in humbler

in the life of Athens, of Greece, by forcing it back upon a simpler and mo

constitution of the typically Right State is introduced into what, according to one of its traditional titles- Peri Dikaiosyn?s +-might actually have figured as a dialogue on the nature of Justice. But tod' ?n h?s eoike prooimion+-the discussion of the theory of the abstract and invisible rightness was but to introduce the practical architect, the creator of the right state. Plato then assumes rather than demonstrates that so facile parallel between the individual consciousness and the social aggregate, passes lightly backwards and forwards from the rightness or wrongness, the normal or abnormal conditions, of the on

the most part, like other more purely physical things, states "are not made, but grow." Yet his own work as a designer or architect of what shall be new is developed quite naturally out of the question how an already existing state, such as the actual Athens of the day, might secure its pre-eminence, or its very existence. Close always, by the concrete turn of his genius, to the facts of the place and the hour, his first thought is to suggest a remedy for the peculiar evils of the Athenians at that moment;

Spartan dancers. His actual purpose therefore is at once reforming and conservative. The drift of his charge is, in his own words, that no political constitution then existing is suitable to the philosophic, that is to [239] say, as he conceives it, to the aristocratic or kingly nature. How much that means we shall see by and bye, when he maintains that in the City of the Perfect the kings will be philosophers. It means that those called, like the gifted, lost Alcibiades, to be the saviours of the state, as a matter of fact become instead its destroyers. The proper soil in which alone that precious exotic seed, the kingly or aristocratic seed, will attain its proper qualities, in which alone it will not yield wine inferior to its best, or rather, instead of bearing any wine at all, become a deadly poison, is still to be laid down according to rules of art, the ethic or political art; but once provided must be jealously kept

variety in those parts however, as Plato thinks, by no means likely to promote the unity of the whole, of the state as such, which must move all together if it is to move at all, at least against its foes. With this at first sight quite limited purpose then, paradoxical as it might seem to those whose very ideal lay precisely in such manifold development, to Plato himself perhaps, manifold as his own genius and culture conspicuously were-paradoxical [241] as it might seem, Plato's demand is for the limitation, the simplifying, of those constituent parts or units; that the unit should be indeed no more than a part, it might be a very small part, in a community, which needs, if it is still to subsist, the wholeness of an army in motion, of the sta

for, in a consequent "call" to, that function. We [242] know how much has been done to educate the world, under the supposition that man is a creature of very malleable substance, indifferent in himself, pretty much what influences may make of him. Plato, on the other hand, assures us that no one of us "is like another all in all."-Pr?ton men phyetai hekastos ou

of the natural indifference of men, their pliability to circumstance, while it is certainly truer to our modern experience, is also in itself more hopeful, more congruous with all the processes of education. But for Plato the natural inequality of men, if it is the natural ground of that versatility, (poikilia),+ of the wrongness or Injustice he must needs c

means came down thence; but, as Plato conceives, arises out of the earth, out of the humblest natural wants. Grote was right.-There is a very shrewd matter-of-fact utilitarian among the dramatis personae which together make up the complex genius of Plato. Poi?sei h?s eg?mai t?n polin h?metera chreia+.-Society is produced by our physical necessities, our inequality in regard to them:-an inequality in three broad divisions of unalterable, incommunicable type, of natural species, among men, with corresponding differentiation of political and social functions: three firmly outlined orders [244]

nger, it may be, resentment, against known wrong in another or in one's self, the champion of conscience, flinging away the scabbard, setting the spear against the foe, like a soldier of spirit. They are in a word the conscience, the armed conscience, of the state, [245] nobly bred, sensitive for others and for themselves, informed by the light of reason in their natural kings. And then, thirdly, protected, controlled, by the thought, the will, above them, like those appetites in you and me, hunger, thirst, desire, which have been the motive, the actual creators, of the mate

owing in fact no place at all for Justice; the very terms of which, precisely because they involve differentiation of life and its functions, are inapplicable to a society, if so it may be called, still essentially inorganic. In [246] a condition, so rudimentary as to possess no opposed parts at all, of course there will be no place for

tire history of Greece, its early colonisation, with all the bright stories, full of the piety, the generosity of a youthful people, that had gathered about it. No, the next step in social development was not necessarily going to war. In either case however, aggressive action against our neighbours, or defence of our distant brethren beyond the seas [247] at Cyrene or Syracuse against rival adventurers, we shall require a new class of persons, men of the sword, to fight for us if need be. Ah! You hear the notes of the trumpet, and therewith already the stir of an enlarging human life, its passions, its manifold interests. Phylakes or

fictions, with a provisional or economised truth in them, set forth under such terms as simple souls could best receive. Just here, at the end of the third book of The Republic he introduces such a fable: phoinikikon pseudos,+ h

s as being their brothers, born of the earth as they. All ye in the city, therefore, are brothers, we shall say to them proceeding with our story; but God, when he made you, mixed gold in the generation of those among you fit to be our kings, for which cause they are the most precious of all; and silver in those fit to be our guards; and in the husbandmen and all other handicraftsmen iron and brass. Forasmuch then as ye are all of one kindred, for the most part ye would beget offspring like to yourselves; but at times a silver child will come of one golden, and from the silver a child of gold, and so forth, interchangeably. To those who rule, then, first and above all God enjoins that of nothing shall

th its "privileges and also its duties." Men are of simpler structure and capacities than you have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more decisively appointed to this rather than to that order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper to an idealist, he

k, on a distant view, their minds full of a kind of heavenly effulgence, yet superintending the labours of a large body of work- people in the town and the fields about it. Of the industrial or productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato speaks only in outline, but is significant in what he says; and enough remains of the actual fruits [250] of

o the utmost degree in all its applications. Those who prosecute it will be allowed, as we may gather, in larger proportion than those who "watch," in silent thought or sword in hand, such animal [251] liberties as seem natural and right, and are not really "illiberal," for those who labour all day with their bodies, though they too will have on them in their service some measure of the compulsion which shapes the action of our kings and soldiers to such effective music. With more or less of asceticism, of a "common life," among themselves, they will be the peculiar sphere of the virtue of temperance in the State, as being the entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule. They represent, as we saw, in the social organism, the bodily appetites of the individual, its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right there, with the conscience and with the reasonab

ravery also, as the philosopher sees it, is a form of that "knowledge," which in truth includes in itself all other virtues, all good things whatever; that it is a form of "right opinion," and has a kind of insight in it, a real apprehension of the occasion and its claims on one's courage, whether it is worth while to fight, and to what point. Platonic knighthood then will have in it something of the philosophy which resides in plenitude in the class above it, by which indeed this armed conscience of the State, the military order, is continuously enlightened, as we know the co

nage, they have gold in them undefiled." Yet again we are not to suppose in Platonic Greece- how could we indeed anywhere within the range of Greek conceptions?- anything rude, uncomely, or unadorned. No one who reads carefully in this very book of The Republic those pages of criticism which concern art quite as much as poetry, a criticism which drives everywhere at a conscientious nicety of workmanship, will suppose that. If kings and knights never drink f

arch of will be manifest at last-that perfect oikeiopragia,+ which will be also perfect co-operation. Oneness, unity, community, an absolute community of interests among fellow-citizens, philadelphia, over against the selfish ambition of those naturally ascendant, like Alcibiades or Crito, in that competition for office, for wealth and honours, which has rent Athens into factions ever breeding [255] on themselves, the centripetal force versus all centrifugal forces:-on this situation, Plato, in the central books of The Republic, dwells untired, in all its variety of synonym and epithet, the conditions, the hazard and difficulty of its realisation, its analogies in art, in music, in practical life, like three s

c soul, loves unity, but finds it nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual members: it is partly also practical, and of the hour. Divided Athens, divided Greece, like some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an easy prey to any well-knit adversary really at unity in himself. It is by way of introducing a constringent principal into a mass of amorphic particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends will have all things in com

y, by making "regulars" to that extent of the secular clergy, succeeded, as many have thought, in his design of making them in very deed, soul and body, but parts of the corporate order they [257] belonged to; and what Plato is going to add to his rule of life, for the archontes,+ who are to be philopolides,+ to love the corporate b

n to it. The wisdom of Plato would certainly deprive mothers of that privacy of affection, regarding which the wisdom of Solomon beamed forth, by sending all infants soon after birth to be reared in a common nursery, where the facts of their actual parentage would be carefully obliterated. The result, as he

ts by the judgment of the Christian church. We must remember however, in fairness, that Plato in this matter of the relation of the sexes especially, found himself in a world very different from ours, regulated and refined, as it already is in some degree, by Christian ideas about women and children. A loose law of marriage, beyond it concubinage in some degree sanctioned by religion, beyond that again morbid vice: such was the condition of the Greek world. What Christian marri

ed department of the State, the women will have leisure to share the work of men; and will need a corresponding education. The details of their common life in peace and war he certainly makes effective and bright. But if we think

e in life at all? Is it possible, and under what conditions-this disinterestedness on the part of those who might do what they will as with their own, this indifference, this surrender, not of one's goods and [260] time only, but of one's last resource, one's very home, for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."- Those are almost the exact words of Plato. How shall those who might be egotists on the scale of an Alcibiades or an Alexander be kept to this strange "new mandate" of altruism?

orld of sense, are but "corpses." For Plato certainly they are no starvelings. The philosophic, or aristocratic, or kingly, nature, as he conceives it, will be the perfect flower of the whole compass of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost by the artificial influences of society-ka

it would be well that wise men should govern, wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is to say, particular details under coherent general rules, able to foresee and influence the future by their knowledge of the past:-there is no paradox in that: it belongs rather, you might complain, to the range of platitudes. But, remember! the hinge of Plato's whole political argument is, that the ruinous divisions of Athens, of Greece, of the entire social community, is the want of disinterestedness in its rul

ecoming an object of contention, the sort of battle which results, being at home and internal, destroys them, along with the common- wealth.-Most truly, he replied.-Have you then, I asked, any kind of life which can despise political offices, other than the life of true philosophers?-Certainly not.-Yet still it is necessary that those who come to office

or aristocracy must be secured from the love of it; you must insure their magnanimity in office by a counter-charm. But where is such a charm, or counter-char

id, the reward of the best, for the sake of which the most virtuous rule, when they are willing to rule. Or do you not know that the being fond of honours, fond of money, is said to be, and is, a disgrace?-For my part, Yes! he said.-On this ground then, neither for money are the good willing to rule, nor for honour; for they choose neither, in openly exacting hire as a return for their rule, to be called hirelings, nor, in taking secretly therefrom, thieves. Nor again is it for honour they will rule; for they are not ambitious. Therefore it is, that necessity must be on them, and a penalty, if they are to be willing to rule: whence perhaps it has come, that to proceed with ready will to the office of ruler, and not to await compulsion, is accounted indecent. As for the penalty,-the greatest penalty

who are capable also in the region of practice, it will be precisely "that better thing than being a king for those who mu

tainly found in the Christian religion. If philosophy is only star-gazing, or only a condition of doubt, if what the sophist or the philistine says of it is all that can be said, it could hardly compete with the rewards which the vulgar world holds out to its servants. But for Plato, on the other hand, if philosophy is anything at all, it is nothi

ne instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with philosophic vision, that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, that fond student of philosophy, of this very philosophy of Plato, served the Roman people so well in peace and war-with so much disinterestedness, because, in fact, so reluctantly. Look onward, and what is strange and inexplicable in his realisation of the Platonic scheme-strange, if we consider how cold and [266] feeble after all were the rays of light on which he waited so devoutly-becomes clear in the person of Saint Louis, who, again, precisely because his whole being was full of heavenly vision, in self-banishment from it for a while, led and

they desire may come to be, pass that question by lest they grow weary in considering whether the thing be possible or no; and supposing what they wish already achieved, they proc

O

ikaiosyn?s. Pater's translati

ion. E-text editor's translation: "this was onl

ein. E-text editor's translation: "to do one thing [only],

and Scott definitions: "poikilia = metaph: cunning; pleonexia = a di

xin. E- text editor's translation: "To begin with, each person is of a nature not the same as another's; rather, people differ

. Liddell and Scott definiti

ilia. Liddell and Scott def

k?s. E-text editor's translation: "As I see it, the city will come into existence because it so h

a chreia. E- text editor's translation: "As I see it, it wi

ourgoi. Liddell and Scott defin

itor's translation: "to one activity in accordance wi

already [grown] luxurious." The verb trypha? means "to live softly or delicate

already [grown] luxurious." The verb trypha? means "to live softly or delicate

hikan?s estai. E-text editor's translation: "And the land that

?teon. E-text editor's translation: "And so we will appropriate

. . . epikouroi. Pater's transla

mena. E-text editor's translation: "timely falsehoods that take the form

udos. E-text editor's translation: "Ph

neka. E-text editor's translation: "a common

unctioning," from oikeios (proper to a thing, fitting) and pragos or

ott definition: "the commons, common people,

r's translation: "the possessions of friends are held in

ontes. Liddell and Scott de

iddell and Scott definition: "[those]

r's translation: "the possessions of friends are held in

s. Liddell and Scott definition: "

ter's translation: "a [process or act of] be

Liddell and Scott definition: "be