by Walter Pater
Upon the aristocratic class therefore, in its two divisions, the army and the church or hierarchy, so to speak, the “rule” of Plato — poverty, obedience, contemplation, will be incumbent in its fullest rigour. “Like hired servants in their own house,” they may not seem very enviable persons, on first thoughts. But remember again that Plato’s charge against things as they are is partly in a theoretic interest — the philosopher, the philosophic soul, loves unity, but finds it nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual members: it is partly also practical, and of the hour. Divided Athens, divided Greece, like some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an easy prey to any well-knit adversary really at unity in himself. It is by way of introducing a constringent principal into a mass of amorphic particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends will have all things in common; and, challenged by the questions of his companions in the dialogue to say how far he will be ready to go in the application of so paradoxical a rule, he braces himself to a surprising degree of consistency. How far then will Plato, a somewhat Machiavelian theorist, as you saw, and with something of “fixed” ideas about practical things, taking desperate means towards a somewhat exclusively conceived ideal of social well-being, be ready to go?
Now we have seen that the genuine citizens of his Perfect City will have much of monasticism, of the character of military monks, about them already, with their poverty, their obedience, their contemplative habit. And there is yet another indispensable condition of the monastic life. The great Pope Hildebrand, by the rule of celibacy, by making “regulars” to that extent of the secular clergy, succeeded, as many have thought, in his design of making them in very deed, soul and body, but parts of the corporate order they belonged to; and what Plato is going to add to his rule of life, for the archontes,+ who are to be philopolides,+ to love the corporate body they belong to better than themselves, is in its actual effects something very like a law of celibacy. Difficult, paradoxical, as he admits it to be, he is pressed on by his hearers, and by the natural force of his argument, reluctantly to declare that the rule of communism will apply to a man’s ownership of his wife and children.
Observe! Plato proposes this singular modification of married life as an elevation or expansion of the family, but, it may be rightly objected, is, in truth, only colouring with names exclusively appropriate to the family, arrangements which will be a suppression of all those sentiments that naturally pertain to it. The wisdom of Plato would certainly deprive mothers of that privacy of affection, regarding which the wisdom of Solomon beamed forth, by sending all infants soon after birth to be reared in a common nursery, where the facts of their actual parentage would be carefully obliterated. The result, as he supposes, will be a common and universal parentage, sonship, brotherhood; but surely with but a shadowy realisation of the affections, the claims, of these relationships. It will involve a loss of differentiation in life, and be, as such, a movement backward, to a barbarous or merely animal grade of existence.
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.
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 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 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 w
ant 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, 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 question has had its prelude, even in the first book. —
Therefore it was, for my part, friend Thrasymachus, I was saying just now that no one would be willing of his own motion to rule, and take in hand the ills of other people to set them right, but that he would ask a reward; because he who will do fairly by his art, or prosper by his art, never does what is best for himself, nor ordains that, in ordaining what is proper to his art, but what is best for the subject of his rule. By reason of which indeed, as it seems, there must needs be a reward for those who shall be willing to rule, either money, or honour, or a penalty unless he will rule. — How do you mean this Socrates? said Glaucon: for the two rewards I understand; but the penalty, of which you speak, and have named as in the place of a reward, I do not understand. — Then you do not understand, I said, the reward of the best, for the sake of which the most virtuous rule, when they are willing to rule. Or do you not know that the being fond of honours, fond of money, is said to be, and is, a disgrace? — For my part, Yes! he said. — On this ground then, neither for money are the good willing to rule, nor for honour; for they choose neither, in openly exacting hire as a return for their rule, to be called hirelings, nor, in taking secretly therefrom, thieves. Nor again is it for honour they will rule; for they are not ambitious. Therefore it is, that necessity must be on them, and a penalty, if they are to be willing to rule: whence perhaps it has come, that to proceed with ready will to the office of ruler, and not to await compulsion, is accounted indecent. As for the penalty, — the greatest penalty is to be ruled by one worse than oneself, unless one will rule. And it is through fear of that, the good seem to me to rule, when they rule: and then they proceed to the office of ruler, not as coming to some good thing, nor as to profit therein, but as to something unavoidable, and as having none better than themselves to whom to entrust it, nor even as good. Since it seems likely that if a city of good men came to be, not to rule would be the matter of contention, as nowadays to rule; and here it would become manifest that a ruler in very deed, in the nature of things, considers not what is profitable for himself, but for the subject of his rule. So that every intelligent person would choose rather to be benefited by another, than by benefiting another to have trouble himself. Republic, 346.
Now if philosophy really is where Plato consistently puts it, and is all he claims for it, then, for those capable of it, who are capable also in the region of practice, it will be precisely “that better thing than being a king for those who must be our kings, our archons.” You see that the various elements of Platonism are interdependent; that they really cohere.
Just at this point then you must call to memory the greatness of the claim Plato makes for philosophy — a promise, you may perhaps think, larger than anything he has actually presented to his readers in the way of a philosophic revelation justifies. He seems, in fact, to promise all, or almost all, that in a later age natures great and high have certainly found in the Christian religion. If philosophy is only star-gazing, or only a condition of doubt, if what the sophist or the philistine says of it is all that can be said, it could hardly compete with the rewards which the vulgar world holds out to its servants. But for Plato, on the other hand, if philosophy is anything at all, it is nothing less than an “escape from the evils of the world,” and homoiôsis tô theô,+ a being made like to God. It provides a satisfaction not for the intelligence only but for the whole nature of man, his imagination and faith, his affections, his capacity for religious devotion, and for some still unimagined development of the capacities of sense.
How could anything which belongs to the world of mere phenomenal change seem great to him who is “the spectator of all time and all existence”? “For the excellency” of such knowledge as that, we might say, he must “count all things but loss.” By fear of punishment in some roundabout way, he might indeed be compelled to descend into “the cave,” “to take in hand the wrongs of other people to set them right”; but of course the part he will take in your sorry exhibition of passing shadows, and dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself “the form of a servant” — you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with philosophic vision, that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, that fond student of philosophy, of this very philosophy of Plato, served the Roman people so well in peace and war — with so much disinterestedness, because, in fact, so reluctantly. Look onward, and what is strange and inexplicable in his realisation of the Platonic scheme — strange, if we consider how cold and feeble after all were the rays of light on which he waited so devoutly — becomes clear in the person of Saint Louis, who, again, precisely because his whole being was full of heavenly vision, in self-banishment from it for a while, led and ruled the French people so magnanimously alike in peace and war. The presence, then, the ascendancy amid actual things, of the royal or philosophic nature, as Plato thus conceives it — that, and nothing else, will be the generating force, the seed, of the City of the Perfect, as he conceives it: this place, in which the great things of existence, known or divined, really fill the soul. Only, he for one would not be surprised if no eyes actually see it. Like his master Socrates, as you know, he is something of a humorist; and if he sometimes surprises us with paradox or hazardous theory, will sometimes also give us to understand that he is after all not quite serious. So about this vision of the City of the Perfect, The Republic, Kallipolis,+ Uranopolis, Utopia, Civitas Dei, The Kingdom of Heaven —
Suffer me, he says, to entertain myself as men of listless minds are wont to do when they journey alone. Such persons, I fancy, before they have found out in what way ought of what they desire may come to be, pass that question by lest they grow weary in considering whether the thing be possible or no; and supposing what they wish already achieved, they proceed at once to arrange all the rest, plea
sing themselves in the tracing out all they will do, when that shall have come to pass — making a mind already idle idler still. Republic, 144.
NOTES
236. +Transliteration: Peri Dikaiosynęs. Pater’s translation: “on the nature of justice.”
236. +Transliteration: tod’ ęn hôs eoike prooimion. E-text editor’s translation: “this was only by way of introduction.” Plato, Republic 357a.
241. +Transliteration: to hen prattein, to ta hautou prattein. E-text editor’s translation: “to do one thing [only], to do only things proper to oneself.” Plato, Republic 369e.