Part 12 (1/2)

It comes of Plato's literary skill, his really dramatic handling of a conversation, that one subject rises naturally out of another in the [236] course of it, that in the lengthy span of The Republic, though they are linked together after all with a true logical coherency, now justice, now the ideal state, now the a.n.a.lysis of the individual soul, or the nature of a true philosopher, or his right education, or the law of political change, may seem to emerge as the proper subject of the whole book. It is thus incidentally, and by way of setting forth the definition of Justice or Rightness, as if in big letters, that the const.i.tution of the typically Right State is introduced into what, according to one of its traditional t.i.tles-- Peri Dikaiosynes +--might actually have figured as a dialogue on the nature of Justice. But tod'

en hos 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 a.s.sumes rather than demonstrates that so facile parallel between the individual consciousness and the social aggregate, pa.s.ses lightly backwards and forwards from the rightness or wrongness, the normal or abnormal conditions, of the one to those of the other, from you and me to the ”colossal man,” whose good or bad qualities, being written up there on a larger scale, are easier to read, and if one may say so, ”once in bricks and mortar,” though but on paper, is lavish of a world as it should be. A strange world in some ways! Let us look from the small type of the individual to the monumental [237] inscription on those high walls, as he proposes; while his fancy wandering further and further, over tower and temple, its streets and the people in them, as if forgetful of his original purpose he tells us all he sees in thought of the City of the Perfect.

To the view of Plato, as of all other Greek citizens, the state, in its local habitation here or there, had been in all cases the gift or ordinance of one or another real though half-divine founder, some Solon or Lycurgus, thereafter a proper object of piety, of filial piety, for ever, among those to whom he had bequeathed the blessings of civilised life. Himself actually of Solon's lineage, Plato certainly is less aware than those who study these matters in the ”historic spirit” of the modern world that for 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; and in his delineation of the ideal state he does but elevate what Athens in particular, a s.h.i.+p so early going to pieces, might well be forced to become for her salvation, were [238] it still possible, into the eternal type of veritable statecraft, of a city as such, ”a city at unity in itself,” defiant of time. He seems to be seeking in the first instance a remedy for the sick, a desperate political remedy; and thereupon, as happens with really philosophic enquirers, the view enlarges on all sides around him.

Those evils of Athens then, which were found in very deed somewhat later to be the infirmity of Greece as a whole, when, though its versatile gifts of intellect might const.i.tute it the teacher of its eventual masters, it was found too incoherent politically to hold its own against Rome:--those evils of Athens, of Greece, came from an exaggerated a.s.sertion of the fluxional, flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian element in the h.e.l.lenic character. They could be cured only by a counter-a.s.sertion of the centripetal Dorian ideal, as actually seen best at Lacedaemon; by the way of simplification, of a rigorous limitation of all things, of art and life, of the souls, aye, and of the very bodies of men, as being the integral factors of all beside.

It is in those simpler, corrected outlines of a reformed Athens that Plato finds the ”eternal form” of the State, of a city as such, like a well-knit athlete, or one of those perfectly disciplined 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 const.i.tution 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 from innovation. Organic unity with one's self, body and soul, is the well-being, the rightness, or righteousness, or justice of the individual, of the microcosm; but is the ideal also, it supplies the true definition, of the well-being of the macrocosm, of the social organism, the state. On this Plato has to insist, to the disadvantage of what we actually see in Greece, in Athens, with all its intricacies of disunion, faction against faction, as displayed in the later books of Thucydides. Remember! the question Plato is asking throughout The Republic, with a touch perhaps of the narrowness, the fanaticism, or ”fixed idea,” of Machiavel himself, is, not how shall the state, the place we must live in, be gay or rich or populous, but strong--strong enough to remain [240] itself, to resist solvent influences within or from without, such as would deprive it not merely of the accidental notes of prosperity but of its own very being.

Now what hinders this strengthening macrocosmic unity, the oneness of the political organism with itself, is that the unit, the individual, the microcosm, fancies itself, or would fain be, a rival macrocosm, independent, many-sided, all-sufficient. To make him that, as you know, had been the conscious aim of the Athenian system in the education of its youth, as also in its later indirect education of the citizen by the way of political life. It was the ideal of one side of the Greek character in general, of much that was brilliant in it and seductive to others. In this sense, Pericles himself interprets the educational function of the city towards the citizen:--to take him as he is, and develope him to the utmost on all his various sides, with a 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 const.i.tuent 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 stars in their courses, of well-concerted music, if you prefer that figure, or, as the modern reader might perhaps object, of a machine. The design of Plato is to bring back the Athenian people, the Greeks, to thoughts of order, to disinterestedness in their functions, to that self-concentration of soul on one's own part, that loyal concession of their proper parts to others, on which such order depends, to a love of it, a sense of its extreme aesthetic beauty and fitness, according to that indefectible definition of Justice, of what is right, to hen prattein, to ta hautou prattein+, in opposition, as he thinks, to those so fascinating conditions of Injustice, poikilia, pleonexia, polypragmosyne,+ figuring away, as they do sometimes, so brilliantly.

For Plato would have us understand that men are in truth after all naturally much simpler, much more limited in character and capacity, than they seem. Such diversity of parts and function as is presupposed in his definition of Justice has been fixed by nature itself on human life. The individual, as such, humble as his proper function may be, is unique in fitness 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, a.s.sures us that no one of us ”is like another all in all.”--Proton men phyetai hekastos ou pany h.o.m.oios hekasto, alla diapheron ten physin, allos ep allou ergou praxin +.--But for this, social Justice, according to its eternal form or definition, would in fact be nowhere applicable. Once for all he formulates clearly that important notion of the function, (ergon)+ of a thing, or of a person.

It is that which he alone can do, or he better than any one else.

That Plato should exaggerate this definiteness in men's natural vocations, thus to be read as it were in ”plain figures” upon each, is one of the necessities of his position. Effect of nature itself, such inequality between men, this differentiation of one from another, is to be further promoted by all the cunning of the political art. The counter-a.s.sertion of the natural indifference of men, their pliability to circ.u.mstance, 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 correct, will be the natural ground of Justice also, as essentially a unity or harmony enforced on disparate [243]

elements, unity as of an army, or an order of monks, organic, mechanic, liturgical, whichever you please to call it; but a kind of music certainly, if the founder, the master, of the state, for his proper part, can but compose the scattered notes.

Just here then is the original basis of society--gignetai toinyn hos egomai polis epeide tunchanei hemon hekastos ouk autarkes +--at first in its humblest form; simply because one can dig and another spin; yet already with antic.i.p.ations of The Republic, of the City of the Perfect, as developed by Plato, as indeed also, beyond it, of some still more distant system ”of the services of angels and men in a wonderful order”; for the somewhat visionary towers of Plato's Republic blend of course with those of the Civitas Dei of Augustine. Only, though its top may one day ”reach unto heaven,” it by no 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. Poiesei hos egomai ten polin hemetera 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] in the state, like three primitive castes, propagating, reinforcing, their peculiarities of condition, as Plato will propose, by exclusive intermarriage, each within itself. As in the cla.s.s of the artisans (hoi demiourgoi)+ some can make swords best, others pitchers, so, on the larger survey, there will be found those who can use those swords, or, again, think, teach, pray, or lead an army, a whole body of swordsmen, best, thus defining within impa.s.sable barriers three essential species of citizens.h.i.+p--the productive cla.s.s, the military order, the governing cla.s.s thirdly, or spiritual order.

The social system is in fact like the const.i.tution of a human being.

There are those who have capacity, a vocation, to conceive thoughts, and rule their brethren by intellectual power. Collectively of course they are the mind or brain, the mental element, in the social organism.

There are those secondly, who have by nature executive force, who will naturally wear arms, the sword in the sheath perhaps, but who will also on occasion most certainly draw it. Well, these are like the active pa.s.sions and the ultimately decisive will in the bosom of man, most conspicuous as anger--anger, 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] n.o.bly 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 appet.i.tes in you and me, hunger, thirst, desire, which have been the motive, the actual creators, of the material order all around us, there will be the ”productive” cla.s.s, labouring perfectly in the cornfields, in the vineyards, or on the vessels which are to contain corn and wine, at a thousand handicrafts, every one still exquisitely differentiated, according to Plato's rule of right--eis hen kata physin +; as within the military cla.s.s also there will be those who command and those who can but obey, and within the true princely cla.s.s again those who know all things and others who have still much to learn; those also who can learn and teach one sort of knowledge better than another.

Plato however, in the first steps of the evolution of the State, had lighted quite naturally on what turns out to be a mistaken or inadequate ideal of it, in an idyll pretty enough, indeed, from ”The Golden Age.”--How sufficient it seems for a moment, that innocent world! is, nevertheless, actually but a false ideal of human society, allowing 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 disturbance of parts, for proportion or disproportion of faculty and function. It is, in truth, to a city which has lost its first innocence (polis ede tryphosa)+ that we must look for the consciousness of Justice and Injustice; as some theologians or philosophers have held that it was by the ”Fall” man first became a really moral being.

Now in such a city, in the polis ede tryphosa,+ there will be an increase of population:-- kai he chora pou he tote hikane smikra ex hikanes estai.+ And in an age which perhaps had the military spirit in excess Plato's thoughts pa.s.s on immediately to wars of aggression:-- oukoun tes ton plesion choras hemin apotmeteon?+ We must take something, if we can, from Megara or from Sparta; which doubtless in its turn would do the same by us. As a measure of relief however that was not necessarily the next step. The needs of an out-pus.h.i.+ng population might have suggested to Plato what is perhaps the most brilliant and animating episode in the entire 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sions, its manifold interests. Phylakes or epikouroi,+ watchmen or auxiliaries, our new servants comprehend at first our masters to be, whom a further act of differentiation will distinguish as philosophers and kings from the strictly military order.

Plato nevertheless in his search for the true idea of Justice, of rightness in things, may be said now to have seen land. Organic relations.h.i.+p is come into the rude social elements and made of them a body, a society. Rudimentary though it may still be, the definition of Justice, as also of Injustice, is now applicable to its processes.

There is a music in the affairs of men, in which one may take one's due part, which one may spoil.

Criticising mythology Plato speaks of certain fables, to be made by those who are apt at such things, under proper spiritual authority, so to term it, hos en pharmakou eidei ta pseude ta en deonti genomena,+ medicinable lies 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,+ he calls it, a miner's story, about copper and silver and gold, such as may really [248] have been current among the primitive inhabitants of the island from which metal and the art of working it had been introduced into Greece.--

And I shall try first of all to persuade the rulers themselves and our soldiers, and afterwards the rest of the community, as to the matter of the rearing and the education we gave them, that in fact it did but seem to happen with them, they seemed to experience all that, only as in dreams. They were then in very truth nourished and fas.h.i.+oned beneath the earth within, and the armour upon them and their equipment put together; and when they were perfectly wrought out the earth even their mother put them forth. Now, therefore, it is their duty to think concerning the land in which they are as of a mother, or foster-mother, and to protect it if any foe come against it, and to think of their fellow-citizens 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 G.o.d, 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 bra.s.s. 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 G.o.d enjoins that of nothing shall they be so careful guardians, nothing shall they so earnestly regard, as the young children--what metal has been mixed to their hands in the souls of these. And if a child of their own be born with an alloy of iron or bra.s.s, they shall by no means have pity upon it, but, allotting unto it the value which befits its nature, they shall thrust it into the cla.s.s of husbandmen or artisans. And if, again, of these a child be born with gold or silver in him, with due estimate they shall promote such to wardens.h.i.+p or to arms, inasmuch as an oracular saying declares that the city is perished already when it has iron or bra.s.s to guard it. Can you suggest a way of getting them to believe this mythus? Republic, 414.

[249] Its application certainly is on the surface: the Lacedaemonian details also--the military turn taken, the disinterestedness of the powerful, their monastic renunciation of what the world prizes most, above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy with its ”privileges and also its duties.” Men are of simpler structure and capacities than you have fancied, Plato would a.s.sure us, and more decisively appointed to this rather than to that order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent them (that is the force of the mythus) as actually made of different stuff; and society, a.s.suming a certain aristocratic humour in the nature of things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard, further promote it, by law.

The state therefore, if it is to be really a living creature, will have, like the individual soul, those sensuous appet.i.tes which call the productive powers into action, and its armed conscience, and its far- reaching intellectual light: its industrial cla.s.s, that is to say, its soldiers, its kings--the last, a kind of military monks, as you might think, 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 cla.s.s, 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 Greek industry to enable us to complete his outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of Greek art, together with the words of Homer and Pindar, equip and realise the full character of the true Platonic ”war-man” or knight; and again, through some later approximate instances, discern something of those extraordinary, half-divine, philosophic kings.

We must let industry then mean for Plato all it meant, would naturally mean, for a Greek, amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts.

The ”rule” of Plato, its precepts of temperance, proportion, economy, though designed primarily for its soldiers, and its kings or archons, for the military and spiritual orders, would probably have been inc.u.mbent also in relaxed degree upon those who work with their hands; and we have but to walk through the cla.s.sical department of the Louvre or the British Museum to be reminded how those qualities of temperance and the like did but enhance, could not chill or impoverish, the artistic genius of Greek workmen. In proportion to what we know of the minor handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able to fill up, as the condition of everyday life in the streets of Plato's City of the Perfect, a picture of happy protected labour, ”skilled” to 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 appet.i.tes of the individual, its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right there, with the conscience and with the reasonable soul in it.

Labouring by system at the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps, perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as we know, to enable them the more readily to exchange their produce (nomisma tes allages heneka)+ working perhaps in guilds and under rules to insure perfection in each specific craft, refining matter to the last degree, they would const.i.tute the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service, like the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul--to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its ”golden” humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly resides, and who, as being not merely its discursive or practical reason, but its faculty of contemplation likewise, will be also its priests, the [252] medium of its wors.h.i.+p, of its intercourse with the G.o.ds.

Between them, between that intellectual or spiritual order, those novel philosophic kings, and the productive cla.s.s of the artists and artisans, moves the military order, as the sensitive armed conscience, the armed will, of the State, its executive power in the fullest sense of that term--a ”standing army,” as Plato supposes, recruited from a great hereditary caste born and bred to such functions, and certainly very different from the mere ”militia” of actual Greek states, hastily summoned at need to military service from the fields and workshops.

Remember that the veritable bravery 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 cla.s.s above it, by which indeed this armed conscience of the State, the military order, is continuously enlightened, as we know the conscience of each one of us severally needs to be. And though Plato will not expect his fighting-men, like the Christian knight, like Saint Ranieri Gualberto, [253] to forgive their enemies, yet, moving one degree out of the narrower circle of Greek habits, he does require them, in conformity with a certain Pan-h.e.l.lenic, a now fully realised national sense, which fills himself, to love the whole Greek race, to spare the foe, if he be Greek, the last horrors of war, to think of the soil, of the dead, of the arms and armour taken from them, with certain scruples of a natural piety.

As the knights share the dignity of the regal order, are in fact ultimately distinguished from it by degree rather than in kind, so they will be sharers also in its self-denying ”rule.” In common with it, they will observe a singular precept which forbids them so much as to come under the same roof with vessels or other objects wrought of gold or silver--they ”who are most worthy of it,” precisely because while ”many iniquities have come from the world's coinage, 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 workmans.h.i.+p, will suppose that. If kings and knights never drink from vessels of silver or gold, their earthen cups and platters, we may be sure, would be what we can [254] still see; and the iron armour on their bodies exquisitely fitted to them, to its purpose, with that peculiar beauty which such fitness secures. See them, then, moving, in perfect ”Justice” or ”Rightness,” to their Dorian music, their so expressive plain-song, under the guidance of their natural leaders, those who can see and fore-see--of those who know.