PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS
I
The Man and the Artist
Why do we love Plato? Perhaps because Plato himself was a lover: lover
of comrades, lover of the sweet intoxication of dialectical revelry,
full of passion for the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We
love him for his unstinted energy, for the wildly nomadic play of his
fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and
adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of
his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the
errors he has made. But above all we love him because of his high
passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because
he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement
which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he
conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation,
but for the remoulding, of the world. He speaks of himself, through
Socrates, as “almost the only Athenian living who sets his hand to the
true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time.”[17]
Philosophy was for him a study of human possibilities in the light of
human realities and limitations; his daily food consisted of the
problems of human relations and endeavors: problems of liberty _versus_
order; of sex relations and the family; of ideals of character and
citizenship, and the educational approaches to those ideals; problems of
the control of population, of heredity and environment, of art and
morals. With all his liking for the poetry of mysticism, philosophy none
the less was to him preëminently an adventure in this world; and unlike
ourselves, who follow one or another of his many leads, he sailed
virginal seas. Every reader in every age has called him modern; but what
age can there be to which Plato will not still be modern?
Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates died;[18] and though he was not
present at the drinking of the hemlock, yet the passing of the master
must have been a tragic blow to him. It brought him face to face with
death, the mother of metaphysics. Proudest of all philosophers, he did
not hide his sense of debt to Socrates: “I thank the gods,” he said,
“that I was born freeman, not slave; Greek, not barbarian; man, not
woman; but above all that I was born in the time of Socrates.” The old
philosopher gone, Athens became for a time intolerable to Plato (some
say, Plato to Athens); and the young philosopher sailed off to see
foreign shores and take nourishment of other cultures. He liked the
peaceful orderliness and aged dignity with which a long dominant
priesthood had invested Egypt; beside this mellow civilization, he was
willing to be told, the culture of his native Athens was but a
precarious ethnological sport. He liked the Pythagoreans of southern
Italy, with their aristocratic approach to the problem of social
construction and their communal devotion to plain living and high
thinking; above all he liked their emphasis on harmony as the
fundamental pervasive relation of all things and as the ideal in which
our human discords might be made to resolve themselves had men artistry
enough. Other lands he saw and learnt from: stories tell how he risked
his handsome head to build an ideal state in Syracuse; how he was sold
into slavery and redeemed by a friend; and how he passed down through
Palestine even to India, absorbing the culture of their peoples with a
kind of osmotic genius. And at last, after twelve years of wandering, he
heard again the call of Athens, and went home, stored with experience
and ripe with thought.
Arrived now at the mid-point of his life, he turned to the task of
self-expression. Should he join one of the political parties and try to
make the government of Athens a picture of his thought? Perhaps he felt
that his thought was not yet definite enough for that; politics requires
answers in Yes or No, and philosophy deals only in Yes-_and_-No. He
hesitated to join a party or pledge himself to a dogma; and was prepared
to be hated by all parties alike for this hesitation.[19] Aristocracy
was in his blood, and he would not stoop to conquer by a plebiscite. He
thought of turning to the stage, as Euripides had done, and teaching
through the mask; in his youth he had written plays, and smiled now to
think how he had hoped to rival Aristophanes. But there were too many
limitations here, of religious subject and dramatic form; Plato’s
philosophy was a thing of ever broadening borders, and could not be
cramped into a ceremony. But neither was his philosophy an arid academic
affair, to be written down as one places in order the bones of a
skeleton; it was vibrantly alive, it was itself a drama and a religion.
Why should there not be a drama of idea as well as of action?--Had not
the play of thought its tragedies and comedies?--Was not philosophy,
after all, a matter of life and death?
In such a juncture of desires came that fusion of drama and philosophy
which we know as Plato’s dialogues,--assuredly the finest production in
all the history of philosophy. Here was just the instrument for a man
whose thought had not congealed into dogmas and a system. All genius is
heterogeneous; a great man is a sum of many men;--let the soul give its
_selves_ a voice, and it will speak in dialogue.[20] Just instrument,
too, for a man who wished to play with the varied possibilities of
speculation, who cared to clarify his own mind rather than to give forth
finalities where life itself was so blind and inconclusive. A conclusion
is too often but the point at which thought has lost its wind; being not
so much a solution of the problem as a dissolution of thought. Hence the
riotous play of the imagination in Plato; lively game of trial and
error, merry-go-round of thought; here is imagery squandered with lordly
abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern
philosophers; here is no system but all systems;[21] here is one
abounding fountain-head of European thought; here is prose strong and
beautiful as the great temples where Greek joy disported itself in
marble; here literary prose is born,--and born adult.
II
How to Solve the Social Problem
To understand Plato one must remember the Pythagorean _motif_: _harmony_
is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics, of his psychological and
educational theory, of his ethics and his politics. To feel such harmony
as there is, and to make such harmony as may be,--that to Plato is the
meaning of philosophy.
We observe this at the outset in the more-mystified-than mystifying
theory of ideas. Obviously, the theory of ideas belongs to Socrates; the
Platonic element is a theory not of ideas so much as of ideals. Socrates
wants truth, but Plato wants beauty, harmony. Socrates is bent on
argument, and points you to a concept; Plato is a poet with a vision,
and points you to the picture that he sees. Understanding, says Plato,
is of the earth earthly; but poetic vision is divine.[22] Hence the maze
of quibbling in the dialogues; it is Plato and not Socrates who is
culprit here. Reasoning was an alien art to Plato; try as he might to
become a mathematician he remained always a poet,--and perhaps most so
when he dealt with numbers. Dialectic was in Plato’s day a recent
invention; he plays with it like a youth in the breakers, letting it now
raise him to heights of ecstatic vision and now bury him in the
deadliest logic-chopping. But--let us not doubt it--he knows when he is
logic-chopping; he goes on, partly that he may paint his picture, partly
for the mere joy of parrying pros and cons; this new game, he feels, is
a sport for the gods.
Let us smile at the heavy seriousness of those who suppose that this
man meant everything he said. No one does, but least of all men Plato,
who hardly taught except in parables. What is the “heaven” of the ideas
but a poet’s way of saying that the constancies observable in the
relations among things are not identical with the things themselves, but
have a reality and permanence of their own? So we phrase it in our own
distinguished verbiage; but Plato prefers, as ever, to draw a picture.
And notice, in this picture, the ever present reference to social needs.
What is a concept, after all, but a scheme for the conservation of
mental resources, an instrument of prediction, a method of control?
Without the power to form concepts we could never turn experience to
use, it would slip between our fingers; we should be like the maidens
condemned to carry water in a sieve. The _idea_ of anything is the sum
of its observed constancies of behavior; hence the medium of our
adaptation and control. To have _ideas_ of things is to know the map or
plan of things; it is to see tendencies, directions, and results; it is
to know how to _use_ things. That is why knowledge is power; every idea
is a tool with which to bend the world to serve our will. And that too
is why the Ideas are real: they have power, and “anything which
possesses any sort of power is real.”[23]
All this, as was said, is but an embellishment of the Socratic doctrine
that salvation lies in brains. But Plato rushes on. Not only may
everything be brought under a concept, an Idea, but it may be brought
under a perfect Form, an Ideal. Things are not what they might be. Men
are not such as men might be, states are often sorry states, beds might
be more ideal beds, even dirt could be more perfectly dirt. To all
things that are, there correspond perfect Ideals of what they might be,
in a thoroughly harmonious world. To say that these Ideals are real,
that they exist, is only to claim for them that they are operative, and
get results. Whether his supernaturalism was only part of his political
theory, others may dispute; let it suffice us at present that Plato
believed that the Ideals could and did operate through human agency. The
distinctive thing about man is that perceiving the thing that is, he can
conceive the thing that might be. He is the forward-looking,
ideal-making animal; through him, if he but will it, proceeds creation.
The brute may be a thinker, but man may be also an artist. Out of the
abundance of the sexual instinct (as Plato implies in the _Symposium_)
emerges this ideal-seeking and -making quality; from which come art and
ethics and religion. William Morris looks at a slum and conceives
Utopia; and forthwith begins to make for Utopia even though the road
lead him through a jail. Is it that William Morris loves “humanity”? Not
at all; he loves beauty and his dream; he is uncomfortable with all this
dirt and despair before him; it is his fortune or misfortune that he
cannot see these slums without falling thrall to a vision of better
things. So with most of us “reformers”: we wish to change things, not
because we love our fellows much more than “conservatives” do, nor
because we believe that happiness varies with income; but because we
hear the call of the beautiful, and see in the mind’s eye another form
wherein the world might come more pleasingly to sight.
What we have to do, says Plato, is to make people conceive a better
world, so that they may see this world as ugly, and may strive to
reshape it. We must conceive the perfect Forms of things, and batter
this poor world till it reform itself and take these perfect shapes. To
learn to see--and seeing learn to make--these perfect Forms: that is the
task of philosophers. To make philosophers: that is the social problem.
III
On Making Philosopher-Kings
It is simple, isn’t it? Give us enough philosophers, and the beautiful
city will walk out of the picture into the fact. But how make
philosophers? And perhaps there is a perfect Form for philosophers, too?
How shall we “see--and seeing learn to make”--the perfect philosopher?
Let us not worry about this little matter of dialectics, says Plato; we
know quite well some of the things we must do in order that we may have
more and greater philosophers. It is quite clear that one thing we must
do is to give our best brains to education.
Is that trite? Not at all. Do we give our best brains to education? Do
we offer more to our ministers or commissioners of education than to our
presidents, or governors, or mayors, or bank presidents, or pugilists?
Or do we honor them more? When Plato says that the office of minister of
education is “of all the great offices of state the greatest,” and that
the citizens should elect their very best man to this office,[24] he is
not pronouncing a platitude, he is making a radical, a revolutionary
proposition. It has never been done, and it will not soon be done; for
men, naturally enough, are more interested in making money than in
making philosophers. And yet, says Plato, gently but resolutely, we may
as well understand that until we give our best brains to the problem of
making philosophers our much-ado about social ills will amount to noise
and wind, and nothing more. “How charming people are!” he writes,
drawing an analogy between the individual and the body politic; “they
are always doctoring--and thereby increasing and complicating--their
disorders, fancying they will be cured by some nostrum which somebody
advises them to try,--never getting better but always growing worse....
Are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at legislation, and
imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and
rascalities of mankind, not knowing that they are in reality cutting
away at the heads of a hydra?”[25]
Notice that the aim of the educational process is, for Plato, not so
much the general spread of intelligence as the discovery and development
of the superior man. (This conception of the task of the educator
appears again and again in later thought: we hear it in the nineteenth
century, for example, in Carlyle’s “hero,” Schopenhauer’s “genius,” and
Nietzsche’s “superman.”) It is very naïve, thinks Plato, to look to the
masses as the source and hope of social improvement; the proper function
of the masses is to toil as cheerfully as may be for the development and
support of the genius who will make them happy--so far as they are
capable of happiness. To aim directly at the elevation of all is to open
the door to mediocrity and futility; to find and nurse the potential
genius,--that is an end worthy the educator’s subtle art.
Now if you are going to discover genius in the bud you must above all
things handle your material, at the outset at least, with tender care.
You must not overflow with prohibitions, or indulge yourself too much in
the luxury of punishments. “Mother and father and nurse and tutor set to
quarrelling about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is
able to understand them: he cannot say or do anything without their
setting forth to him that this is just and that unjust, this honorable
and that dishonorable, this holy and that unholy, do this and don’t do
that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not he is straightened by
threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood.”[26] Suppress here, and
you get expression there;--often enough, abnormal expression. Better
have no hard mould of uniformity and conformity wherein to crush and
deform each differently aspiring soul. Think twice before forcing your
_’isms_ and _’ologies_ upon the child; his own desires will be your best
curriculum. “The elements of instruction,” writes Plato, in a
too-little-noticed passage, “should be presented to the mind in
childhood, but without any notion of forcing them. For a freeman ought
to be a freeman in the acquisition of knowledge. Bodily exercise, when
compulsory, does no harm; but knowledge which is acquired under
compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but
let early education be a sort of amusement; that will better enable you
to find out the natural bent.”[27] There is a stroke of Plato’s genius
here: it is a point which we laggards are coming to after some two
thousand three hundred years. “To find out the natural bent,” to catch
the spark of divine fire before conformity can put it out; that is the
beginning and yet the summit of the educator’s task,--the _initium
dimidium facti_.
In this search for genius all souls shall be tried. Education must be
universal and compulsory; children belong not to parents but to the
state and to the future.[28] And education cannot begin too early.
Cleinias, asking whether education should begin at birth, is astonished
to be answered, “No, before”; and if Plato could have his way, no doubt
there would be a realization of Dr. Holmes’ suggestion that a man’s
education should begin two thousand years before he is born. The chief
concern at the outset will be to develop the body, and not to fill the
soul with letters; let the child be taught his letters at ten, but not
before.[29] Music will share with gymnastics the task of rounded
development. The boy who tells his teacher that the athletic field is as
important and necessary a part of education as the lecture-room is
right. “How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great
courage?”[30] Music mixed with athletics will do it. “I am quite aware
that your mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the
musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him.”[31] There
is a determination here that even the genius shall be healthy; Plato
will not tolerate the notion that to be a genius one needs to be sick:
let the genius have his say, but let him, too, be reminded that he is no
disembodied spirit. And let art take care lest its vaunted purgation be
a purgation of our strength and manhood; poetry and soft music may make
men slaves. No man shall bother with music after the age of sixteen.[32]
At twenty a general test will weed out those who give indication that
further educative labor will be wasted on them; the others will go on
for another decade, and a second test will eliminate those who will in
the meantime have reached the limit of their capacities for development.
The final survivors will then--and not before--be introduced to
philosophy. “They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too
early; that is a thing especially to be avoided; for young men, as you
may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue
for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, like
puppy-dogs that delight to tear and pull at all who come near them....
And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands
of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing
anything that they believed before, and hence not only they, but
philosophy generally, have a bad name with the rest of the world.”[33]
Five happy years are given to the study of philosophy. Gradually, the
student learns to see the universal behind the particular, to judge the
part by relating it to the whole; the fragments of his experience fall
into a harmonious philosophy of life. The sciences which he has learned
are now united as a consistent application of intelligence to life;
indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focussing them on the
central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true
philosopher.[34] But involved in this is a certain practical quality, a
sense for realities and limitations. One must study books--and men; one
should read much, but live more. So Plato legislates that his new
philosophers shall spend the years from thirty-five to fifty in the busy
din of practical life; they must, in his immortal image, go back into
the cave. The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time
from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with
a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one’s own
resources, to butter one’s own bread for a while,--that is an almost
indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come
with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar
is the mark of a lesson learned.
And now here are our philosophers, ripe and fifty, hardened by the tests
of learning and of life. What shall we do with them? Put them away in a
lecture-room and pay no further attention to them? Give them, as their
life-work, the problem of finding how Spinoza deduces, or fails to
deduce, the Many from the One? Have them fill learned esoteric journals
with unintelligible jargon about the finite and the infinite, or space
and time, or the immateriality of roast beef? No, says Plato; let them
govern the state.
Did Plato mean it? Was he so enraged at the state-murder of the most
beloved of philosophers that he forearmed himself against such a
_contretemps_ in his Utopia by making the philosophers supreme?--Was it
only his magnificent journalistic revenge? Was it merely his reaction to
the observed cramping and mediocritization of superior intellects in a
democracy? Was it but Plato’s dramatic way of emphasizing the Socratic
plea for intelligence as the basis of morals and social life? Perhaps
all this; but much more. It was his sober judgment; it was the influence
of the Egyptian priesthood and the Pythagorean brotherhood coming to the
surface in him; it was the long-accumulated deposit of the stream of his
personal experience.
We have to remember here that by _philosopher_ Plato does not mean
Immanuel Kant. He means a living being, a man like Seneca or Francis
Bacon, a man in whom knowledge is fused with action, and keen perception
joins with steady hand; a man who has had not only the teaching of books
but the discipline of hard experience; a man who has learned with equal
readiness to obey and to command; a man whose thought is coördinated by
application to the vital problems of human society. “Inasmuch as
philosophers alone are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and
those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not
philosophers, I must ask you which of the two kinds should be rulers of
our state?”[35] Well, then, “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.”[36]
That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.
IV
Dishonest Democracy
Let us get back to the circumference and approach this same point by
another route.
I grant you, says Plato, that to have rulers at all is very
disagreeable. And indeed we should not need to have them were it not for
a regrettable but real porcine element in us. My own Utopia is not an
aristocracy nor a democracy, nor any kind of an _’ocracy_; it is what
some of you would call an anarchist communism. I have described it very
clearly in the second book of my _Republic_, but nobody cares to notice
it, except to repeat my brother’s gibe about it.[37] But instead of
this Utopia of mine being a “City of Pigs,” it is just because we are
pigs that I had to give up painting this picture and turn to describing
“not only a state, but a luxurious state.” I am still “of opinion that
the true state, which may be said to be a healthy constitution, is the
one which I have described,” and not the “inflamed constitution” to
which I devoted the rest of my book, and which in my opinion is much
more a “City of Pigs” than the other. It is because people want “to lie
on sofas, and dine off tables, and have dainties and dessert in the
modern fashion, ... and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and
cakes, and gold, and ivory, ... hunters and actors, ... musicians,
players, dancers, ... tutors, ... servants ... nurses wet and dry, ...
barbers, confectioners and cooks, ... and hosts of animals (if people
are to eat animals), ... and physicians; ... then a slice of neighbor’s
land ... and then war,”[38]--in short, it is because people are pigs
that you must have soldiers and rulers and laws.
But if you must have them, why not train your best men for the work,
just as you train some to be doctors, and others to be lawyers, and
others to be engineers? Think of taking a man’s pills just because he
can show a count of noses in his favor! Think of letting a man build the
world’s greatest bridge because he is popular! You accuse me of
plagiarizing from Pythagoras, but in truth, you who believe in democracy
are the Pythagoreans of politics,--you believe in number as your god.
Your equality is the equality of the unequal, and is all a matter of
words and never of reality; your liberty is anarchy, it is the
congenital sickness wherein your democracy was conceived and delivered,
and whereof it inevitably dies; your freedom of speech is a license to
lie; your elections are a contest in flattery and prevarication. Your
democracy is a theatrocracy; and woe to the genius who falls into your
hands. Perhaps you like democracy because you are like democracy: all
your desires are on a level; that you should respect some of them and
discipline others is an idea that never enters your heads. It has never
occurred to you that it takes more time and training to make a statesman
than it does to make a bootblack. But statesmanship is something that
can never be conferred by plebiscite; it must be pursued through the
years, and must find the privilege of office without submitting to a
vote. Wisdom is too subtle a thing to be felt by the coarsened senses of
the mob. Your industry is wonderful because it is shot through with
specialization and training; but because you reject specialization and
training in filling the offices of your government the word _politics_
has become dishonored in your mouths. And just because you will let any
one be your leader no real man ever submits himself to your choice.
V
Culture and Slavery
There is much exaggeration here, of course, as might be expected of one
whose material and social concerns were bound up with the oligarchical
party at Athens, whose friends and relatives had died in battle against
the armies of the democracy; whose early years had seen the democratic
mismanagement of the Peloponnesian war and the growth of a disorderly
individualism in Athens. But there are also lessons here for those who
are strong enough to learn even from their enemies.[39] To press home
these lessons at this point would take us too far afield; our plan for
the moment is to follow Plato’s guidance until he has led us out into a
clear view of his position.
We shall suppose such a scheme of education as Plato desires; we shall
suppose that a moderate number of those who entered the lists at birth
have survived test after test, have “tasted the dear delight” of
philosophy for five years, and have passed safely through the ordeal of
practical affairs; these men (and women, as we shall see) now
automatically become the rulers of the Platonic state: let us observe
them in their work and in their lives.
To the guardians it is a matter of first principles that the function of
the state--and therefore their function--is a positive function; they
are to lead the people, and not merely to serve as an umpire of
disputes. They are the protagonists of a social evolution that has at
last become conscious; they are resolved that henceforth social
organization shall be a far-seeing plan and not a haphazard flux of
expediencies of control. They know that they are asked to be experts in
foresight and coördination; they will legislate accordingly, and will
no more think of asking the people what laws should be passed than a
physician would ask the people what measures should be taken to preserve
the public health.
And first of all they will control population; they will consider this
to be the indispensable prerequisite to a planned development. The state
must not be larger than is consistent with unity and with the efficacy
of central control. People may mate as they will,--that is their own
concern; but they must understand quite clearly that procreation is an
affair of the state. Children must be born not of love but of science;
marriage will be a temporary relation, allowing frequent remating for
the sake of beautiful offspring. Men shall not have children before
thirty, nor after forty. Deformed or incurably diseased children will be
exposed to die. Children must leave their mothers at birth, and be
brought up by the state. Women must be freed from bondage to their
children, if women are to be real citizens, interested in the public
weal, and loving not a narrow family but the great community.
For women are to be citizens; it would be foolish to let half the people
be withdrawn from interest in and service to the state. Women will
receive all the educational advantages offered to men; they will even
wrestle with them, naked, in the games. If any of them--and surely some
of them will--pass all the tests, they shall be guardians, too. People
are to be divided, for political purposes, not by difference of sex,
but by difference of capacity. Some women may be fit not for
housekeeping but for ruling,--let them rule; some men may be fit not for
ruling but for housekeeping,--let them keep house.
Without family, and without clearly ascertainable relationship between
any man and any child, there can be no individual inheritance of
property; the guardians will have all things in common, and without
Tertullian’s exception.[40] Shut off from the possibility of personal
bequests or of “founding a family,” the guardians will have no stimulus
to laying up a hoard of material goods; nay, they will not be moved to
such hoarding by fear of the morrow, for a modest but sufficient
maintenance will be supplied them by the working classes. There will be
no money in use among them; they will live a hard simple life, devoted
to the problems of communal defence and development. Freed from family
ties, from private property and luxury, from violence and litigation,
and all distinctions of Mine and Thine, they will have no reason to
oppress the workers in order to lay up stores for themselves; they will
be happy in the exercise of their high responsibilities and powers. They
will not be tempted to legislate for the good of their own class rather
than for the good of the community; their joy will lie in the creation
of a prosperous and harmonious state.
Under their direction will be the soldiers, also specially selected and
trained, and supported by the workers. But these workers?
They will be those who have been eliminated in the tests. The demands of
specialization will have condemned them to labor for those who have the
gift of guidance. They shall have no voice in the direction of the
state; that, as said, is a reward for demonstrated capacity, and not a
“natural right.”[41] Frankly, there are some people who are not fit to
be other than slaves; and to varnish that fact with oratory about “the
dignity of labor” is merely to give an instance of the indignities to
which a democratic politician will descend. These workers are incapable
of a subtler happiness than that of knowing that they are doing what
they are fit to do, and are contributing to the maintenance of communal
prosperity. Such as they are, these workers, like the other members of
the state, will find their highest possibilities of development in such
an organized society. And to make sure that they will not rebel, they
will have been taught by “royal lies” that their position and function
in the state have been ordained by the gods. There is no sense in
shivering at this quite judicious juggling with the facts; there are
times when truth is a barrier to content, and must be set aside.
Physicians have been known to cure ailments with a timely lie. Labor
stimulated by such deception may be slavery, if you wish to call it so;
but it is the inevitable condition of order, and order is the inevitable
condition of culture and communal success.
VI
Plasticity and Order
But is it just?--some one asks. Perhaps there are other things than
order to be considered. Perhaps this hunger for order is a disease, like
the monistic hunger for unity; perhaps it is a corollary to the _à
priori_ type of mind; perhaps it is part of the philosopher’s general
inability to face a possibly irrational reality. Here for order’s sake
the greater part of the people must work in silence: they shall not
utter their desires. Here for order’s sake are sacrificed that communal
plasticity, that freedom of variety, that happy looseness and
changeability of structure, in which lie all the suggestion and potency
of social reconstruction. If there is any lesson which shines out
through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system
is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility
for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave
nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. “Law and order in a
state are” _not_ “the cause of every good”;[42] they are the security of
goods attained, but they may be also the hindrance of goods conceived. A
state without freedom of criticism and variation is like a sail-boat in
a calm; it stands but it cannot move. Such a state is a geometrical
diagram, a perfect syllogism evolved out of impossible premises; and its
own perfection is its refutation. In such a state there could be no
Plato, with a penchant for conceiving Utopias; much less a Socrates,
holding that a life uncriticised is unworthy of a man. It would be a
state not for philosophers but for priests: very truly its basis would
not be dialectical clarity but royal lies. Here is the supreme
pessimism, the ultimate atheism, of the aristocrat, that he does not
believe in the final wholesomeness of truth. And surely something can be
said for democracy. Granted that democracy is not a problem solved but a
problem added; it is at least a problem that time may help to clarify.
Granted that men used to slavery cannot turn and wisely rule themselves;
what is better than that they should, by inevitable trial and error,
learn? _Errando discimus._ Granted that physicians do not consult us in
their prescriptions; but neither do they come to us before they are
chosen and called. “That the guardian should require another guardian to
guard him is ridiculous indeed.”[43] But he would! Power corrupts
unless it is shared by all. “Cities cannot exist, if a few only share in
the virtues, as in the arts.”[44] To build your culture on the backs of
slaves is to found your city on Vesuvius. Men will not be lied to
forever,--at least with the same lies! And to end with such a
Utopia,--what is it but to yield to Thrasymachus, to arrange all things
at last in the interest of the stronger? Is it just?
VII
The Meaning of Justice
But what is justice?--asks Plato. Don’t you see that our notion of
justice is the very crux of the whole business? Is justice merely a
matter of telling the truth? Nonsense; it may be well to have our
children believe that; but those who are not children know that if a lie
is a better instrument of achievement than the truth in some given
juncture of events, then a lie is justified. Truth is a social value,
and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there
of social value, then untruth is just.[45] The confusion of justice with
some absolute eternal law comes of a separation of ethics from politics,
and an attempt to arrive at a definition of justice from the study of
individuals. But morals grow out of politics; justice is essentially a
political relation. And taking the state as a whole, it is clear that
nothing is “good” unless it works; that it would be absurd to say that
justice demands of a state that it should be ordered in such a way as to
make for its own decay. Social organization must be effective, and lies
and class-divisions are justified if they make for the effectiveness of
a political order. Surely social effectiveness forbids that men fit to
legislate should live out their lives as cobblers, or that men should
rule whose natural aptitude is for digging ditches. Justice means, for
politics at least, that each member of society is minding his natural
business, is doing that for which he is fitted by his own natural
capacity. Injustice is the encroachment of one part on another; justice
is the efficient functioning of each part. Justice, then, is social
coördination and harmony. It is not “the interest of the stronger,” it
is the harmony of the whole. So in the individual, justice is the
harmonious operation of a unified personality; each element in one’s
nature doing that which it is fitted to do; again it is not mere
strength or forcefulness, but harmonious, organized strength; it is
effective order. And effective order demands a class division. You may
mouth as you please the delusive delicacies of democracy; but classes
you will have, for men will always be some of gold and some of silver
and some of brass. And the brass must not pass itself off as silver,
nor the silver as gold. Give the brass all the time and opportunity in
the world, and it will still be brass. Of course brass will not believe
that it is brass, but we had better make it understand once for all that
it is so, even if we have to tell a thousand lies to get the truth
believed.
And as for variation and plasticity, remember that these too are
valueless except as they make for a better society. They assuredly make
for change; but change is not betterment. History is a chaos of
variations; without some organ for their control they cancel one another
and terminate inevitably in futility. Our problem is not how to change,
but how to set our best brains to controlling change for the sake of a
finer life.
VIII
The Future of Plato
There are _aperçus_ here, and a bewildering wealth of suggestions, which
one is tempted to pursue to their ultimate present significance. But to
do that would be to encroach too much on the subjects of later chapters.
The vital thing here is not to accept or refute any special element in
Plato’s political philosophy; it is rather to see how inextricably
politics and philosophy were bound together in his mind as two sides of
fundamentally one endeavor. Here is the passion to remould things; here
is the seeing of perfection and the will to make perfection; here
speaks out for the first time in European history the courage of the
intellect that not only will perceive but will remake. Here is a man; no
dead academic cobweb-weaver, but a masterful, kingly soul, mixed up in
warm intimacy with the complex flow of the life about him. He paints
Utopia; but at the same time he takes his own counsel anent the
importance of an educational approach to the social problem, and founds
the most famous and influential university the world has ever seen.
Picture him in the gardens and lecture-halls of his Academy, arranging
and supervising and coördinating, and turning out men to whom nations
looked--and not in vain--for statesmen. Not merely to lift men up to the
beatific vision of unities and perfections, but to teach them the art of
creation, to fire them with the ardor of a new artistry; this he aimed
to do, and did. “The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do
after the death of the mortal men who planted them.”[46] So grew the
_Republic_, and the Academy.
To catch in a chapter the deep yet subtle spirit and meaning of this
“finest product of antiquity,”[47]--it is not easy. In Plato’s Utopia
there would no doubt have been a law against writing so briefly on so
vast a phenomenon,--with, in this case, the inevitably consequent
derangement of the Platonic perspective, and the impossibility, within
such compass, of focussing Plato in the political and philosophical
meaning of his time. One’s feeling here is of having desecrated with
small talk the Parthenon of philosophy. Perhaps as we go on we shall be
able to see more clearly the still-living value of Plato’s thought: in
almost everything that we shall hereinafter discuss his voice will be
heard, even though unnamed. To-day, at last, he comes again into his
own--as in Renaissance days--after centuries dominated by the influence
of his first misinterpreter; and generations bred on the throned
lukewarmness of the _Nicomachean Ethics_ yield to a generation that is
learning to feel the hot constructive passion of the _Republic_. Dead
these two thousand and some hundred years, Plato belongs to the future.