The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (8 page)

What better refuge from the transient world of the senses?

Plato had created a new cosmology of Ideas, a secret universe of the mind. And so he gave absolute reality—in fact, the only reality—to the pure models. Taking off from the Socratic motto “Know thyself,” Plato had surprisingly led Seekers into another Other-World. But he had also set philosophers on a newly fertile path. While the physicists, the early Ionian philosophers, had looked only for beginnings, Plato, with his Theory of Ideas, set philosophers on a search for ends. And so he would show the way for his brilliant pupil Aristotle into vast new realms for Seekers of the following millennia.

Paths to Utopia: Virtues Writ Large

The other-world of Ideas was not much everyday help to the citizen or the practical politician. But Plato found another way of seeking that might provide earthly models as guides to virtue. In his longest and most influential dialogue,
The Republic,
Plato offered some specific this-worldly guidance. At the same time he created still another new literary form, the Utopia, depicting the ideal commonwealth. And just as homely analogies helped him explain his Theory of Ideas with his “three-tiered ontology” of the bed, he now made another simple analogy in search of the Good Society.

The English title of this dialogue, based on the Latin
res publica,
is incomplete. The Greek title
—The State, or On Justice—
makes it clear that the focus is on moral philosophy. Near the beginning, Plato explains this way of seeking.

. . . suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance, and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.
Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our enquiry?
I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.
True, he replied.
And is not a State larger than an individual?
It is.
Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and more easily discernible. I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing them.
That, he said, is an excellent proposal. (
The Republic,
Bk. II, Jowett trans.)

In his way of seeking, Plato thus had made two crucial assumptions. One was the unity of the virtues, which we meet in other dialogues; the other, that there are as many forms of the state as there are forms of the soul. The character of a government expresses the character of its citizens. “Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that States are made of ‘oak and rock,’ and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale and draw other things after them?” “Yes, he said, the States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.”

Plato’s notion of the identity of the virtues of the individual and of the state had momentous implications, to be revealed with the passing centuries. A beneficent implication was that “reasons of state” could not defy personal morality. But it implied too that the state, like the individual, required a coherent and orthodox set of beliefs. Morality for the individual meant ideology for the state. But the modern social sciences would discover crucial differences between the ways of groups and those of individuals.

The whole
Republic
is thus one grand metaphor reminding us of the identity of seer and poet in ancient Greece. Great philosophers before Plato (Xenophanes and Empedocles, for example) had actually written in verse. Much of the charm and unforgettableness of
The Republic
remains in its myths and metaphors, of which the myth of the cave is only the most famous. As we shall see, the Utopia as a literary form would be wonderfully fertile, serving some of the most eloquent and passionate Seekers in the West. Though it would help open paths to change in the real world, a Utopian ideal sometimes would also breed despair, frustration, and violence.

The metaphor of virtues writ large, which Plato so beautifully pursues in
The Republic,
attracted later generations precisely because it was a metaphor. Historians and philosophers would never cease to debate whether and to what extent Plato intended his grandest work to be a blueprint for the ideal community, or only another sally in his experiments of the intelligence. But whatever Plato may have intended for this work, it left a potent legacy as a metaphor. Later generations of Seekers would, after their different fashions, cast their own efforts to give meaning to their society in Utopian form. Myth and metaphor would be invitations to Utopia, with results that were not always happy. We can sense the spirit of later Seekers by their reactions to Plato’s
Republic.

It is not surprising that the mythic charms of Plato’s work were quite lost on Thomas Jefferson, a Seeker in a more prosaic age. “I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic,” in 1814, in his mellow seventieth year, he wrote from Monticello to his friend John Adams. “I am wrong in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” Adams responded gladly that Jefferson’s reflections “so perfectly harmonize with mine.” Despite Plato’s “bitter Satyre upon all Republican Government,” Adams reported that he had learned two things from Plato: where Benjamin Franklin had “borrowed” one of his popular ideas, and “that Sneezing is a cure for the Hickups. Accordingly I have cured myself and all my Friends of that provoking disorder, for thirty years with a Pinch of Snuff.”

Modern critics, after the rise of fascism, imperial communism, and Nazism, have found Plato’s ideas less amusing than menacing.
The Republic,
according to the eloquent Karl R. Popper, reveals Plato as the historic enemy of the “open society” and a kind of anti-Christ of democracy. Plato’s idea of destiny and the inevitable decay of political forms makes him for Popper the patron saint of “historicism,” the destructive belief that history is governed by its own iron rules and man is not free to shape his own experience. Our somber retrospect from the totalitarian governments of the twentieth century has made it hard for us to enjoy Plato’s playful speculative spirit.

Yet the speculative spirit of the dialogue is stifled in
The Republic
itself—Plato’s grandest dialogue and his most un-Socratic. Here Plato offers insistent answers to the problems that Socrates preferred to leave as questions. En route the dialogue offers conversational byplay on the meaning of Justice and the Good, and the relation of sensible experience to reality. Now Socrates himself is the narrator, recounting to his friend Timaeus on the next day the offerings of the participants.

What most troubles modern liberal critics are two features of Plato’s ideal community: its absolute and static character and its hierarchical class structure. “Although all the rulers are to be philosophers,” Bertrand Russell objects, “there are to be no innovations; a philosopher is to be, for all time, a man who understands and agrees with Plato.” The state arises, Socrates explains, “out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.” Division of labor then provides the needed services, while allowing each person to do what he is best fitted for. So the community has farmers, weavers, builders, merchants, shoemakers, and all the rest. And as the state expands to meet multiplying wants, it must have a standing army. Yet, until the refinements of culture have been added, this is no better than a “city of pigs.”

In another of his great myths, adapted, Plato says, from an old Phoenician tale, he offers one of those “necessary falsehoods” that hold the community together—“just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city.”

Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, therefore they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. (
The Republic,
Jowett trans.)

Athenians took such pride in being sprung from the soil of the city where they lived that until the mid-fifth century B.C. they wore golden cicadas in their hair as the symbol of their local origin.

Just as the role of each individual was fixed in the materials of his being, so the society as a whole had its destiny fixed in rigid cycles of history. In contrast to the unchanging Other-World of Ideas, Plato saw a universal earthly law of decay. Aristocracy (rule of the best) degenerates into Timocracy (the rule of honor), which degenerates into Oligarchy (the rule of the wealthy), which in turn degenerates into Democracy (the rule of the people). The chaos of Democracy finally produces Tyranny. Procreation at the wrong seasons accelerates this process by intermingling the races of gold, silver, brass, and iron. Incidentally Plato offers a whimsical Pythagorean formula, improved by the Muses, for finding the best seasons of procreation.

The Republic
was not the last step in Plato’s move from the Socratic Way of Dialogue to the way of dogma. After
The Republic,
and probably after his last Sicilian venture in 360, Plato wrote another work of similar length,
The Laws.
Ostensibly this, too, is in the form of a dialogue. But long monologues fill whole Books offering Plato’s views as those of “an Athenian Stranger.” Here dialogue ceases to be a lively intellectual encounter and becomes a mere frame for the Athenian Stranger’s opinion.
The Laws’
Twelve Books begin with still another exposition of the origins of government and the lessons of history, the kinds of constitutions, schemes of education, and the nature of virtue. Along the way are sententious observations on the pleasures and perils of strong drink, on crime and punishment, sex, slavery, property, and the family. While
The Republic
was for a community “of a size to which it can grow without losing its unity,” the Laws are designed for a community of 5,040 households. To ensure that the Laws will be “irreversible,” Plato prescribes a Nocturnal Council of specially educated Guardians. Most of the ideas in
The Laws
are better explained in other dialogues. But the hopes for the rule of the wise found in
The Republic,
a city “laid up in the heavens,” have become demands for the rule of earthly laws. And so Plato has displaced the question by the answer.

Aristotle: An Outsider in Athens

Who would have guessed that Plato’s most famous disciple would be (in words attributed to Plato) “the foal that kicks its mother”? Or that the inheritor of the mantle of the man sent to his death for exposing the pretensions of his time would be the West’s first encyclopedist? Or that it was possible to build a philosophy on a faith that “What everyone believes is true” (
Consensus omnium
)? Or that this Aristotle, a prize pupil in Plato’s Academy for twenty years, instructed in the Theory of Forms denying the reality of the sensible world, would produce a grand omnium-gatherum of facts on everything in the heavens and on the earth—from the ways of bees and horses to the form of the human heart and brain and the laws of nations civilized and barbaric?

Yet precisely such a prodigy emerged from classical Athens. Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.

Aristotle is the colossus whose works both illuminate and cast a shadow on European thought in the next two thousand years. Though thoroughly immersed in fourth century B.C. Athens, he was an outsider. “The Stagirite,” his nickname in the Middle Ages, underlined his non-Athenian origins. Born in Stagira, a town in northeastern Greece in 384 B.C., he did not come to Athens until he was seventeen. His father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician to the king of Macedonia, Amyntas, who was the father of Philip of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s family had a long tradition in the practice of medicine, then the most practically minded of the Greek sciences. After he was left an orphan, he was sent to Athens for his education. There he joined Plato’s Academy, as a student. But he never ceased to be a stranger. As a “metic”—a resident foreigner—he could not own real estate in Athens.

“In Athens,” Aristotle recalled in a letter written just before his death, “the same things are not proper for a stranger as for a citizen; it is difficult to stay in Athens.” He is reported to have observed acidly that the only honor the city of Athens ever gave him was the accusation of impiety, in 323 B.C. Plato was away on his second Sicilian frolic when Aristotle first came to Athens. But despite Plato’s occasional absences Plato’s spirit dominated the Academy.