9: THE REPUBLIC

[258] Ta tôn philôn koina.+--With this soft phrase, then, Plato would take away all those precious differences that come of our having a little space in things to do what one will or can with. The Platonic state in fact, with its extraordinary common marriages, would be dealing precisely after the manner of those who breed birds or dogs. A strange forbidding experiment, it seems, or should seem, to us, looking back on it in the light of laws now irrevocably fixed on these subjects by the judgment of the Christian church. We must remember however, in fairness, that Plato in this matter of the relation of the sexes especially, found himself in a world very different from ours, regulated and refined, as it already is in some degree, by Christian ideas about women and children. A loose law of marriage, beyond it concubinage in some degree sanctioned by religion, beyond that again morbid vice: such was the condition of the Greek world. What Christian marriage, in harmonious action with man's true nature, has done to counteract this condition, that Plato tried to do by a somewhat forced legislation, which was altogether out of harmony with the facts of man's nature. Neither the church nor the world has endorsed his theories about it. Think, in contrast, of the place occupied in Christian art by the mother and her child. What that represents in life Plato wishes to take from us, though, as he would have us think, in our own behalf.

[259] And his views of the community of male and female education, and of the functions of men and women in the State, do but come of the relief of women in large measure from home-duties. Such duties becoming a carefully economised department of the State, the women will have leisure to share the work of men; and will need a corresponding education. The details of their common life in peace and war he certainly makes effective and bright. But if we think of his proposal as a reinstatement of the Amazon we have in effect condemned it. For the Amazon of mythology and art is but a survival from a half-animal world, which Theseus, the embodiment of adult reason, had long since overcome.

Plato himself divides this confessedly so difficult question into two: Is the thing good? and in the second place, Is it possible? Let us admit that at that particular crisis, or even generally, what he proposes is for the best. Thereupon the question which suggested itself in regard to the community of goods recurs with double force: Where may lie the secret of the magnanimity (that is the term to hold by) which will make wealth and office, with all their opportunities for puissant wills, no motive in life at all? Is it possible, and under what conditions--this disinterestedness on the part of those who might do what they will as with their own, this indifference, this surrender, not of one's goods and [260] time only, but of one's last resource, one's very home, for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."-- Those are almost the exact words of Plato. How shall those who might be egotists on the scale of an Alcibiades or an Alexander be kept to this strange "new mandate" of altruism? How shall a paradox so bold be brought within the range of possibilities? Well! by the realisation of another paradox,--if we make philosophers our kings or our kings philosophers. It is the last "wave of paradox," from the advancing crest of which Plato still shrinks back, oddly reluctant, as we may think, to utter his whole mind. But, concede his position, and all beside, in the strange, paradoxical new world he is constructing, its extraordinary reaches of philadelphia, will be found practicable.

Our kings must be philosophers. But not, we must carefully note, because, as people are apt to fancy, philosophers as such necessarily despise or are unable to feel what is fascinating in the world of action, are un-formed or withered on one side, and, as regards the allurements of the world of sense, are but "corpses." For Plato certainly they are no starvelings. The philosophic, or aristocratic, or kingly, nature, as he conceives it, will be the perfect flower of the whole compass of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost by the artificial influences of society--kalokagathos +--capable therefore in the extreme degree of success in a purely "self-regarding" policy, of an [261] exploitation, in their own interests, of all that men in general value most, to the surfeiting, if they cared, of their ambition, their vanity, their love of liberty or license.

Nor again must our kings be philosophers mainly because in such case the world will be very wisely, very knowingly, governed. Of course it would be well that wise men should rule. Even a Greek, still "a youth in the youth of the world," who indeed was not very far gone from an essentially youthful evaluation of things, was still apt to think with Croesus that the richest must of course be the happiest of men, and to have a head-ache when compelled to think, even he would have taken so much for granted. That it would be well that wise men should govern, wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is to say, particular details under coherent general rules, able to foresee and influence the future by their knowledge of the past:--there is no paradox in that: it belongs rather, you might complain, to the range of platitudes. But, remember! the hinge of Plato's whole political argument is, that the ruinous divisions of Athens, of Greece, of the entire social community, is the want of disinterestedness in its rulers; not that they are unfit to rule; rather, that they have often, it may be, a natural call to office--those exceptional high natures--but that they "abound" therein exclusively "in their own sense." And the precise point of paradox in philosophic kingship, [262] as Plato takes it, is this, that if we have philosophers for our kings, our archons, we shall be under a sort of rulers who as such have made sacrifice of themselves, and in coming to office at all must have taken upon them "the form of a servant."--

     For thus it is.--If you can find out a life better than being
     a king, for those who shall be kings, a well-governed city
     will become possible, and not otherwise.  For in that city
     alone will those be kings who are in very deed rich.  But if
     poor men, hungering after their private good, proceed to public
     offices, it is not possible; for, the kingly office becoming an
     object of contention, the sort of battle which results, being
     at home and internal, destroys them, along with the common-
     wealth.--Most truly, he replied.--Have you then, I asked, any
     kind of life which can despise political offices, other than
     the life of true philosophers?--Certainly not.--Yet still it
     is necessary that those who come to office should not be lovers
     of it; otherwise the rival lovers will fight.--That must be
     so.--Whom then will you compel to proceed to the guardianship
     of the city save those, who, being wisest of all in regard to
     the conditions of her highest welfare, are themselves possessed
     of privileges of another order, and a life better than the
     politician's?  Republic, 520.

More capable than others of an adroit application of all that power usually means in the way of personal advantage, your "legitimate," and really elect royalty or aristocracy must be secured from the love of it; you must insure their magnanimity in office by a counter-charm. But where is such a charm, or counter-charm, to be found? Throughout, as usual in so provident a writer as Plato, the answer to that leading [263] question has had its prelude, even in the first book.--

Contents