3. The Metaphysician
There is no system in Plato, and if here, for order’s sake, his ideas are summarized under the classic heads of logic, metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, and politics, it should be remembered that Plato himself was too intense a poet to shackle his thought in a frame. Because he is a poet he has most difficulty with logic; he wanders about seeking definitions, and loses his way in perilous analogies; “then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end, came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.”79 He concludes: “I am not certain whether there is such a science of science” as logic “at all.”80 Nevertheless he makes a beginning. He examines the nature of language, and derives it from imitative sound.81 He discusses analysis and synthesis, analogies and fallacies; he accepts induction, but prefers deduction;82 he creates, even in these popular dialogues, technical terms—essence, power, action, passion, generation—which will be useful to later philosophy; he names five of the ten “categories” that will make up part of Aristotle’s fame. He rejects the Sophist view that the senses are the best test of truth, that the individual “man is the measure of all things”; if that were so, he argues, any man’s, any sleeper’s, any madman’s, any baboon’s report of the world would be as good as any other.83
All that the “rabble of the senses” gives us is a Heracleitean flux of change; if we had only sensations, we should never have any knowledge or truth at all. Knowledge is possible through Ideas, through generalized images and forms that mold the chaos of sensation into the order of thought.84 If we could be conscious only of individual things thought would be impossible. We learn to think by grouping things into classes according to their likenesses, and expressing the class as a whole by a common noun; man enables us to think of all men, table of all tables, light of every light that ever shone on land or sea. These Ideas (ideai, eida) are not objective to the senses but they are real to thought, for they remain, and are unchanged, even when all the sense objects to which they correspond are destroyed. Men are born and die, but man survives. Every individual triangle is only imperfectly a triangle, sooner or later passes away, and therefore is relatively unreal; but triangle—the form and law of all triangles—is perfect and everlasting.85 All mathematical forms are Ideas, eternal and complete;* everything that geometry says of triangles, circles, squares, cubes, spheres would remain true, and therefore “real,” even if there had never been, and never would be, any such figures in the physical world. Abstractions also are real in this sense; individual acts of virtue have a brief existence, but virtue remains as a permanent reality for thought, and an instrument of thought; so with beauty, largeness, likeness, and so forth; these are as real to the mind as beautiful, large, or like things are real to the sense.87 Individual acts or things are what they are by partaking of, and more or less realizing, these perfect forms or Ideas. The world of science and philosophy is composed not of individual things, but of Ideas;†88 history, as distinct from biography, is the story of man; biology is the science not of specific organisms, but of life; mathematics is the study not of concrete things but of number, relation, and form independently of things and yet as valid for all things. Philosophy is the science of Ideas.
Everything in Plato’s metaphysics turns upon the theory of Ideas. God, the Prime Mover Unmoved, or Soul of the World,91 moves and orders all things according to the eternal laws and forms, the perfect and changeless Ideas which constitute, as the Neo-Platonists would say, the Logos, or Divine Wisdom or Mind of God. The highest of the Ideas is the Good. Sometimes Plato identifies this with God himself;92 more often it is the guiding instrument of creation, the supreme form towards which all things are drawn. To perceive this Good, to vision the molding ideal of the creative process, is the loftiest goal of knowledge.93 Motion and creation are not mechanical; they require in the world, as in ourselves, a soul or principle of life as their originative power.94
Only that which has power is real;95 therefore matter is not basically real (to me on), but is merely a principle of inertia, a possibility waiting for God or soul to give it specific form and being according to some Idea. The soul is the self-moving force in man, and is part of the self-moving Soul of all things.96 It is pure vitality, incorporeal and immortal. It existed before the body, and has brought with it from antecedent incarnations many memories which, when awakened by new life, are mistaken for new knowledge. All mathematical truths, for example, are innate in this way; teaching merely arouses the recollection of things known by the soul many lives ago.97 After death the soul or principle of life passes into other organisms, higher or lower according to the deserts it has earned in its previous avatars. Perhaps the soul that has sinned goes to a purgatory or hell, and the virtuous soul goes to the Islands of the Blest.98 When through various existences the soul has been purified of all wrongdoing, it is freed from reincarnation, and mounts to a paradise of everlasting happiness.*99
4. The Moralist
Plato knows that many of his readers will be skeptics, and for a while he struggles to find a natural ethic that shall stir men’s souls to righteousness without relying on heaven, purgatory, and hell.101 The Dialogues of his middle period turn more and more from metaphysics to morals and politics: “The greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families.”102 The problem of ethics lies in the apparent conflict between individual pleasure and social good. Plato presents the problem fairly, and puts into the mouth of Callias as strong an argument for selfishness as any immoralist has ever given.103 He recognizes that many pleasures are good; intelligence is needed to discriminate between good and harmful pleasures; and for fear that intelligence may come too late we must inculcate in the young a habit of temperance, a sense of the golden mean.104
The soul or principle of life has three levels or parts—desire, will, and thought; each part has its own virtue—moderation, courage, and wisdom; to which should be added piety and justice—the fulfillment of one’s obligations to his parents and his gods. Justice may be defined as the co-operation of the parts in a whole, of the elements in a character, or of the people in a state, each part performing its fittest function properly.105 The Good is neither reason alone nor pleasure alone, but that mingling of them, in proportion and measure, which produces the Life of Reason.106 The supreme good lies in pure knowledge of the eternal forms and laws. Morally “the highest good . . . is the power or faculty, if there be such, which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of truth.”107 He who so loves truth will not care to return evil for evil;108 he will think it better to suffer injustice than to do it; he will “go forth by sea and land to seek after men who are incorruptible, whose acquaintance is beyond price. . . . The true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly lusts; and when philosophy offers them a purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence; to her they incline, and whither she leads they follow her.”109
Plato had burned his poems, and lost his religious faith. But he remained a poet and a worshiper; his conception of the Good was suffused with esthetic emotion and ascetic piety; philosophy and religion became one in him, ethic and esthetic were fused. As he grew older he became incapable of seeing any beauty apart from goodness and truth. He would censor, in his ideal state, all art and poetry that might seem to the government to have an immoral or unpatriotic tendency; all rhetoric and all nonreligious drama would be barred; even Homer—seductive painter of an immoral theology—would have to go. The Dorian and Phrygian modes of music might be allowed; but there must be no complicated instruments, no virtuosos making “a beastly noise” with their technical displays,110 and no radical novelties.
The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. . . . The new style, gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and
customs, and from these it . . . goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.111
Beauty, like virtue, lies in fitness, symmetry, and order. A work of art should be a living creature, with head, trunk, and limbs all vitalized and unified by one idea.112 True beauty, thinks our passionate puritan, is intellectual rather than physical; the figures of geometry are “eternally and absolutely beautiful,” and the laws whereby the heavens are made are fairer than the stars.113 Love is the pursuit of beauty, and has three stages, according as it is love of the body, or of the soul, or of truth. Love of the body, between man and woman, is legitimate as a means to generation, which is a kind of immortality;114 nevertheless this is a rudimentary form of love, unworthy of a philosopher. Physical love between man and man, or woman and woman, is unnatural, and must be suppressed as frustrating reproduction.115 This can be done by sublimating it in the second or spiritual stage of love: here the older man loves the younger because his comeliness is a symbol and reminder of pure and eternal beauty, and the younger loves the older because his wisdom opens a way to understanding and honor. But the highest love is “the love of the everlasting possession of the Good,” that love which seeks the absolute beauty of the perfect and eternal Ideas or forms.116 This, and not fleshless affection between man and woman, is “Platonic love”—the point at which the poet and the philosopher in Plato merge in the passionate desire for understanding, an almost mystic longing for the Beatific Vision of the law and structure and life and goal of the world.
For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has no time to look down upon the affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and enmity in the struggle against them; his eye is ever directed towards fixed and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and on these, so far as he can, he will mold his life.117
5. The Utopian
Nevertheless he is interested in the affairs of men. He sees a social vision too, and dreams of a society in which there shall be no corruption, no poverty, no tyranny, and no war. He is appalled at the bitterness of political faction in Athens, “strife and enmity and hatred and suspicion forever recurring.”118 Like a blue blood, he despises the plutocratic oligarchy, “the men of business . . . pretending never so much as to see those whom they have already ruined, inserting their sting—that is, their money—into anybody else who is not on his guard against them, and recovering the principal sum many times over: this is the way in which they make drones and paupers to abound in the state.”119 “And then democracy comes into being, after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power.”120 The democrats turn out to be as bad as the plutocrats: they use the power of their number to vote doles to the people and offices to themselves; they flatter and pamper the multitudes until liberty becomes anarchy, standards are debased by omnipresent vulgarity, and manners are coarsened by unhindered insolence and abuse. As the mad pursuit of wealth destroys the oligarchy, so the excesses of liberty destroy democracy.
Socr. In such a state the anarchy grows and finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them. . . . The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons . . . and the son to be on a level with his father, having no fear of his parents, and no shame. . . . The master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors. . . . Young and old are alike, and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men . . . imitate the young. Nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. . . . Truly, the horses and asses come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen . . . all things are just ready to burst with liberty. . . .
Adeimantus. But what is the next step? . . .
Socr. The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction. . . . The excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into slavery . . . and the most aggravated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme form of liberty.121
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. The rich, afraid that democracy will bleed them, conspire to overthrow it;122 or some enterprising individual seizes power, promises everything to the poor, surrounds himself with a personal army, kills first his enemies and then his friends “until he has made a purgation of the state,” and establishes a dictatorship.123 In such a conflict of extremes the philosopher who preaches moderation and mutual understanding is like “a man fallen among wild beasts”; if he is wise he will “retire under the shelter of a wall while the hurrying wind and the storm go by.”124
Some students, in such crises, take refuge in the past, and write history; Plato takes refuge in the future, and models a utopia. First, he fancies, we must find a good king who will let us experiment with his people. Then we must send away all the adults except those necessary to maintain order and teach the young, for the ways of their elders would corrupt the young into an image of the past. To all the young, of whatever sex or class, twenty years of education will be given. It will include the teaching of myths—not the immoral myths of the old faith, but new myths that may tame the soul into obedience to parents and the state.* At twenty all are to be given physical, mental, and moral tests. Those that fail will become the economic classes of our state—businessmen, workingmen, farmers; they will have private property, and different degrees of wealth (within limits) according to their ability; but there will be no slaves. The survivors of the first test will receive ten further years of education and training. At thirty they will be tested again. Those that fail will become soldiers; they shall have no private property, and shall not engage in business, but shall live in a military communism. Those that pass the second test will now (and none before) take up for five years the study of “divine philosophy”125 in all its branches, from mathematics and logic to politics and law. At thirty-five the survivors, with all their theory on their heads, will be flung into the practical world to earn their living and make themselves a place. At fifty such of them as are still alive shall become, without election, members of the guardian or ruling class.
They shall have all powers, but no possessions. There will be no laws; all cases and issues will be decided by the philosopher-kings according to a wisdom untrammeled by precedent. Lest they abuse these powers, they shall have no property, no money, no families, no permanent individual wives; the people will hold the power of the purse, the soldiers the power of the sword. Communism is not democratic, it is aristocratic; the common soul is incapable of it; only soldiers and philosophers can bear it. As for marriage, it must in all classes be strictly regulated by the guardians as a eugenic sacrament: “The best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible, and the inferior with the inferior; and they are to rear the offspring of one sort of union, but not of the other; for this is the only way of keeping the flock in prime condition.”126 All children are to be brought up by the state, and given equal educational opportunity; classes are not to be hereditary. Girls shall have an equal chance with boys, and no office in the state shall be closed to women because they are women. By this combination of individualism, communism, eugenics, feminism, and aristocracy Plato thinks that a society might be produced in which a philosopher would be glad to live. And he concludes: “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy . . . cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”127
6. The Lawmaker
He thought that he had found such a prince in Dionysius II. He felt, like Voltaire, that monarchy has this advantage over democracy, that in a monarchy the reformer has only to convince one man.128 To make a better state “you would assume a dictator young, temperate, quick at
learning, having a good memory, courageous, of a noble nature . . . and fortunate; his good fortune must be that he is the contemporary of a great legislator, and that some happy chance brings them together.”129 It was, as we have seen, an unhappy chance.
In his declining years, still longing to be a legislator, Plato offered a thirdbest state. The Laws, besides being the earliest extant classic of European jurisprudence, is an instructive study in the senile aftermath of youthful romanticism. The new city, says Plato, must be placed inland, lest foreign ideas undermine its faith, foreign trade its peace, and foreign luxuries its self-contained simplicity.130 The number of free citizens shall be limited to the conveniently divisible number of 5040; in addition to these will be their families and their slaves. The citizens shall elect 360 guardians, divided into groups of thirty, each group administering the state for a month. The 360 shall choose a Nocturnal Council of twenty-six, which shall meet at night and legislate on all vital affairs.131 These councilors shall allot the land in equal, indivisible, and inalienable parcels among the citizen families. The guardians “shall provide against the rains doing harm instead of good to the land . . . and shall keep them back by works and ditches, and make” irrigation “streams furnish even to the dry places plenty of water.”132 To control the growth of economic inequality, trade is to be held to a minimum; no gold or silver is to be kept by the people, and there shall be no lending of money at interest;133 everyone is to be discouraged from living by investment, and is to be encouraged to live as an active farmer on the land. Any man who acquires more than four times the value of one share of land must surrender the surplus to the state; and severe limits are to be placed upon the power of bequest.134 Women are to have equal educational and political opportunity with men.135 Men must marry between thirty and thirty-five, or pay heavy annual fines;136 and they are to beget children for only ten years. Drinking and other public amusements are to be regulated to preserve the morals of the people.137