The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Could someone of Plato’s intelligence and his chastening experience of political intrigue in Athens and Syracuse ever really have hoped to test his utopian vision in the profligate city-state of Syracuse? May he not at least have welcomed the opportunity, not available in Athens, to see what good could be done by one properly instructed dictator? Or perhaps he thought that his improved constitutions could help the Greek communities in Sicily resist the invading Carthaginians.

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  The Way of Dialogue, with its idealization of the spoken word—the sparks that fly in living conversation—makes it difficult to define the doctrines of particular philosophers. It is risky to turn Socrates’ questions into answers. Of all literary forms, then, dialogues are least suited to summary. Still, one idea more than others that have emerged from Plato’s works has become a symbol of “Platonism” and a clue to Plato’s own way of seeking. This was his Theory of Ideas (or Forms). We cannot know how much of it was owed to Socrates, but the historic influence of the theory is plainly due to Plato and his disciples.

  One impulse to the theory must have been the malaise in Athens in the lifetimes of Socrates and Plato. Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars gave a classic description of that malaise:

  . . . the whole Hellenic world was convulsed. . . . The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same. . . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city. . . . Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice, moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. . . . Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. . . . Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.

  To confront this impermanence, the Sophist teachers had prepared their own paradoxical response: “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras’ maxim was a way of seeking solace from the evanescence of everything else in the permanence of Man himself. At the same time they expressed the relativity of all other standards. So they taught rhetoric and the arts of persuasion, how to get on in the world where you happened to find yourself. Socrates, on the other hand, had sought to unmask the false contemporary certitudes, and to provide a technique of universal definition.

  Plato, moving along Socrates’ path, came up with a dazzling idea, to which he gave unforgettable form in his myth of the cave in The Republic:

  Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. (Jowett trans.)

  The cave becomes Plato’s stage for revealing the difference between his “real” world and the world of shadows which others have mistaken for reality. If anyone is “liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck around and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen only the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. . . . will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”

  So Plato urges us, too, to seek the changeless forms only crudely sensed in our shadowy sense experience. To describe objects in this changeless world, our English word “idea” is misleading. The Greek word ideai connotes “form.” But, while we think of “ideas” as somehow fleeting and unreal, for Plato the Idea was fully and permanently real. At the head of the hierarchy of ideas stands the Good, which plays the same role in the intelligible world that the sun plays in the visible. And it is not only grand ideas like the Good that have a static eternal reality. Even a humble object like a bed is a shadow of some static eternal Form.

  Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say—for no one else can be the maker?

  No.

  There is another which is the work of the carpenter?

  Yes.

  And the work of the painter is a third?

  Yes.

  Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?

  Yes, there are three of them.

  God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.

  Why is that?

  Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and not the two others.

  Very true, he said.

  God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.

  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.

  8

  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.

  9

  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?