Republic (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (70 page)

The practical influence of
Republic
is more difficult to gauge than its impact on the theorizing of later thinkers. Nonetheless, over the centuries, individuals have discovered in Plato’s works the inspiration for undertaking political or social or educational reform. The following two examples are illustrative. First, as is discussed in the introduction, Plato and his friend Dion (c.408-354 B.C.E.) evidently planned to educate the young Dionysius II of Syracuse in the hopes that, upon succeeding his father as the city’s ruler, he would put into practice the political ideals they cherished, which may have been something like the proposals for the ideal state and the government of philosopher-rulers that Plato has Socrates advance in Republic. More recently—and more modestly—Benjamin Jowett (1818-1893), the translator of this edition of Republic, placed Plato’s dialogues at the center of the humanities curriculum as part of his program of educational reform at Oxford University. It is interesting to note that Jowett seems to have met with more success than Dion. Whereas Dion was eventually assassinated for his zealous efforts to bring political and social reform to Syracuse and other Greek cities on Sicily, Jowett’s Plato-inspired campaign helped modernize Oxford and transform it into one of the world’s leading educational institutions.

Lastly, we may note that
Republic
has inspired not only much ex pository analysis, but also countless creative presentations, literary and otherwise. Many depictions of both utopian societies and their dystopian counterparts, ranging from Thomas More’s
Utopia
(1516) to Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s
Travels (1726) to Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
(1932) to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), have their roots in the ideal city brought to life by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Contemporary films such as
Gattaca
(1997) and
The Matrix
(1999) may not owe direct inspiration to
Republic,
but they participate in a long tradition of artistic works that ultimately trace their concerns back to the political, social, and metaphysical issues raised in
Republic.
Robert Pirsig’s
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(1974) represents a different type of inventively constructed narrative that looks critically at the formulations of Platonic philosophy and the influence that Plato has had on subsequent ages.

 

The field of philosophy has greatly changed since Plato began to teach near the shrine of Academus on the outskirts of Athens. It has evolved into a complex and sophisticated discipline that deals with issues and problems that Plato and his contemporaries would have been unable to conceive of, much less address. Nonetheless, as Alfred North Whitehead has suggested, the philosophical studies pursued today in Europe, Britain, and the United States are (still) deeply indebted to Plato. Most basically, Plato seems to deserve much credit for establishing that it is appropriate and meaningful for “philosophers”—in the name of the “love of wisdom”
(philosophia)
—to pursue a variety of interests, from ethics to political theory to metaphysics to epistemology to theology to logic, and to discover for themselves the modes of expression that best permit them to convey their ideas.

The members of a state must either have (1) all things or (2) nothing in common, or (3) some things in common and some not. That they should have nothing in common is clearly impossible, for the constitution is a community, and must at any rate have a common place—one city will be in one place, and the citizens are those who share in that one city. But should a well-ordered state have all things, as far as may be, in common, or some only and not others? For the citizens might conceivably have wives and children and property in common, as Socrates proposes in the
Republic
of Plato. Which is better, our present condition, or the proposed new order of society?

There are many difficulties in the community of women. And the principle on which Socrates rests the necessity of such an institution evidently is not established by his arguments....

We ought to reckon, not only the evils from which the citizens will be saved, but also the advantages which they will lose. The life which they are to lead appears quite impracticable. The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without actually ceasing to exist, it will become an inferior state.

—from book II, 1260b27-61a12, and 1263b29-34 in
Politics,
translated by Benjamin Jowett, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1905)

 

It is unlikely that either the Romans or the Greeks will find fault with the Academy, since in this book, which presents the Lives of Dion and Brutus, each nation receives very similar treatment. Dion was a disciple of Plato who knew the philosopher personally, while Brutus was nurtured on his doctrines, so that both men were trained in the same wrestling school, one might say, to take part in the struggle for supreme power. There is a remarkable similarity in many of their actions, and so we should not be surprised that they often illustrate a particular conviction of their teacher of virtue, namely that power and good fortune must be accompanied by wisdom and justice if a man’s political actions are to be seen as noble as well as great.

—from “Dion,” chapter 1, in
The Age of Alexander :
Nine Greek Lives by Plutarch,
translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 1973

 

Surely you don’t believe that there is any difference between those who sit in Plato’s cave gazing in wonder at the images and likenesses of various things—as long as they desire nothing more and are no less pleased—and that wiseman who left the cave and sees things as they really are?

—from
The Praise of Folly
(1509),
translated by Clarence H. Miller, New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1979

 

Plato’s
Republic,
which passes proverbially as an empty ideal, is in essence nothing but an interpretation of the nature of Greek ethical life. Plato was conscious that there was breaking into that life in his own time a deeper principle which could appear in it directly only as a longing still unsatisfied, and so only as something corruptive. To combat it, he needs must have sought aid from that very longing itself. But this aid had to come from on High and all that Plato could do was to seek it in the first place in a particular external form of that same Greek ethical life. By that means he thought to master this corruptive invader, and thereby he did fatal injury to the deeper impulse which underlay it, namely free infinite personality. Still, his genius is proved by the fact that the principle on which the distinctive character of his Idea of the state turns is precisely the pivot on which the impending world revolution turned at that time.

—from the preface to
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
(1821),
translated by T. M. Knox,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942

 

Plato’s philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

—from “Selected Ideas,” in
Dialogue on Poetry and
Literary Aphorisms
(1797-1800),
translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc,
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968

 

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our original ities. We have reached the mountain from which all these boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,—Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,—is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his best things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis. Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato.

—from “Plato; or The Philosopher,”
in
Representative Men
(1850),
J. M. Dent & Sons, 1908

 

What Socrates really meant by wanting to have “the poets” expelled from the state was that by writing in the medium of the imagination instead of precipitating men into ethical realization in actuality, the poets spoiled them and weaned them or kept them from it. One could be tempted by and large to make the same charge against “pastors” today. Yes, compared to Socrates Plato himself is a misunderstanding. Only Socrates managed to hold his uncompromising position of continually expressing the existential, constantly remaining in the present—thus he had no doctrine, no system and the like, but had one in action. Plato took his time—with the help of this enormous illusion there came to be a doctrine. By degrees the existential disappeared from view and the doctrine grew dogmatically broader and broader.

—from “Socrates,” vol. 4, entry 4275,
in
Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers,
edited and translated by Howard V Hong and
Edna H. Hong, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1975

 

Plato’s Republic, in so far as division of labour is treated in it, as the formative principle of the State, is merely the Athenian ideal isation of the Egyptian system of castes, Egypt having served as the model of an industrial country to many of his contemporaries also, amongst others to Isocrates, and it continued to have this importance to the Greeks of the Roman Empire.

—from part 4, chapter 14, section 5, in
Capital:
A Critique of Political Economy
(1867-1894),
translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and
edited by Frederick Engels,
New York: Modern Library, 1906

 

It was
modesty
that in Greece coined the word “philosopher” and left the extraordinary insolence of calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit—the modesty of such monsters of pride and conceit as Pythagoras, as Plato.

—from book 5, number 351, in
The Gay Science
(1882),
edited by Bernard Williams and
translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001

 

In estimating the
Republic’s
place in the history of thought we must take into account the circumstances under which it was composed. The exact date is uncertain, but whether it existed in the form of a book by 393 B.C. or not, its ideals certainly then existed in Plato’s mind and were known to his fellow-citizens, for the community of goods and the community of women are ridiculed in the
Ecclesiazusae
of Aristophanes, acted in that year. As a young man Plato had passed through terrible experiences, the complete shipwreck of the vessel of State by the disastrous termination of the Peloponnesian War, the atrocities of the oligarchical party who thereupon gained dominion in Athens, and the unjust execution of his own adored master by an ignorant and misguided democracy. Such events were well calculated to engender in Plato’s mind a distrust of all existing political systems, and to set him upon seriously projecting something to replace them. Ever since, the creation of ideal communities has been the frequent amusement of superior minds, and although every such endeavour has but strengthened the conviction that, as a matter of fact, the development of society must proceed upon the lines marked out for it from the beginning, in these, nevertheless, the aspiration after something is no unimportant factor. The winged genius which in ancient works of art accompanies the chariot of hero or demi-god adds nothing to the power or the speed, but stimulates the ardour of the charioteer.

Plato is broadly distinguished from his successors, More, Campanella, Bacon, Brockden Brown, etc., and his later self in his Critias, in this respect, that whereas these represent their ideal communities as already existing and only needing to be described, his Republic exists merely in thought, and not even there until it has been provided with a sound basis by a preliminary discussion of the abstract principles of justice. “Nothing actually existing in the world,” says [translator Benjamin] Jowett, “at all resembles Plato’s ideal State, nor does he himself imagine that such a state is possible.”

—from‘Tlatos ‘Republic,’ “ in
Modern English Essays,
vol. 2,
London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1922

 

The
Republic
[is] the greatest of Plato’s dialogues, because it is the most Platonic, because it exhibits best the peculiar merit of Plato, adequacy of style to subject, of manner to matter; because, while the matter is profoundly difficult and varied, the artistic handling, both as a whole and in detail, does not sink under this difficulty and variety, is not overlaid or embarrassed by it, but rises to it, is equal to it, and expresses and conveys it with the grace and ease of complete mastery.