“There is no natural right but the right of the stronger. And natural nobility is to have strong passions and power to gratify them. The lawful
| is a word that cowards use, |
| Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.” |
Socrates entangles him in an argument in which it is proved that pleasure is different from good, and that there are good and bad pleasures.
Now the question is whether the life of philosophy, or the life which Callicles defends, is conducive to good. And it has been shown that rhetoric is one of a class of pursuits which minister to pleasure without discriminating what is good.
Callicles again becomes impatient. Did not Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles labour for their country's good? Socrates then renews his demonstration, proving that if the just man is wronged the evil lies with the wrongdoer, not with him, and that it is worst for the wrongdoer if he escape. And for avoidance of this greatest evil not rhetoric avails anything, nor any of the arts which save life (seeing that life may be used well or ill), nor even such an art of politics as Themistocles, Cimon, or Pericles knew, but another science of politics which Socrates alone of the Athenians practises. The pursuit of it may well endanger him; but his strength lies in having done no wrong. For in the world to come he can present his soul faultless before her judge. Not the show of justice but the reality will avail him there.
This truth is enforced by an impressive myth. And Callicles is invited to leave the life which relies on rhetoric and to follow Socrates in practising the life of philosophic virtue.
The value of justice has been shown. But what is justice? Is the life upheld by Socrates sufficiently definite for practical guidance?Republic. The views of Callicles have been overborne; but have they been thoroughly examined? Socrates claims to be the only politician. But how can that deserve the name of policy which results in doing nothing? These and cognate questions may well have haunted Plato when he planned the Republic, the greatest of his works. For that which lay deepest in him was not mere speculative interest or poetic fervour, but the practical enthusiasm of a reformer. The example of Socrates had fired him with an ideal of wisdom, courage, temperance and righteousness, which under various guises, both abstract and concrete, has appeared and reappeared in the preceding dialogues. But the more vividly he conceived of this ideal life, the more keenly he felt its isolation in the present world—that of the restored Athenian democracy. For to a Greek mind above all others life was nothing without the social environment, and justice, of all virtues, could least be realized apart from a community. Hence it became necessary to imagine a form of society in which the ideal man might find himself at home, a state to which the philosopher might stand in harmonious relationship, no longer as an alien sojourner, but as a native citizen, not standing aloof in lonely contemplation, but acting with the full consent of other men and ruling in the right of wisdom. Plato did not regard his own republic as a barren dream. He believed that sooner or later in the course of time a state essentially resembling his ideal commonwealth would come into being. Still more firmly was he convinced that until then mankind would not attain their highest possible development. To ignore this real aspect of his most serious work is to lose much of the author's meaning. Yet it is hardly less erroneous to interpret a great imaginative creation au pied de la lettre, as if examining a piece of actual legislation. Even in his Laws, a far more prosaic writing, Plato himself repeatedly protests against such criticism. In his most aspiring flights he is well aware of the difference between the imaginary and actual embodiment of an ideal,[1] although as a literary artist he gives to his creations, whether in anticipation or retrospect, an air of sober reality and matter-of-fact. He is more in earnest about principles than about details, and if questioned would probably be found more confident with regard to moral than to political truth. He may have been wholly unconscious of the inconsistencies of his scheme, but it would not have greatly disconcerted him to have discovered them, or to have been told that this or that arrangement would not “work.” He would have trusted the correction of his own rough draft to the philosopher-kings of the future.
The Republic falls naturally into five portions. (1) Bk. i. is preliminary, raising the main question about justice. (2) Bks. ii., iii., iv. contain the outlines of the perfect state, including the education of the “guardians,” and leading up to the definition of justice (a) in the state, and (b) in the individual. (3) Bks. v., vi., vii. (which to some critics present the appearance of an afterthought or excrescence on the original design) contain the cardinal provisions (1) of communism (for the guardians only), (2) that philosophers shall be kings, (3) of higher education for the rulers (viz. the philosopher-kings). This third provision occupies bks. vi. and vii. (which have again, as some think, the appearance of an outgrowth from bk. v.). (4) Bks. viii. and ix., resuming the general subject from bk. iv., present the reverse of the medal by showing the declension of the state and individual through four stages, until in the life of tyranny is found the image of ideal injustice, as that of justice was found in the life of the perfect state. (5) Bk. x. forms a concluding chapter, in which several of the foregoing enactments are reviewed, and the work ends, like the Gorgias, with a vision of judgment.
Thus the main outlines of the scheme are contained in bks. ii., iii., iv., viii., ix. And yet bks. v., vi., vii. form the central portion, a sort of inner kernel, and are of the highest significance.
In speculating about the composition of the Republic (as is the fashion of some interpreters) it is important to bear in mind the general character of Plato's writings.
“The conception of unity,” says Jowett,[2] “really applies in very different degrees to different kinds of art—to a statue, for example, far more than to any kind of literary composition, and to some species of literature far more than to others. Nor does the dialogue appear to be a style of composition in which the requirement of unity is most stringent; nor should the idea of unity derived from one sort of art be hastily transferred to another. . . . Plato subjects himself to no rule of this sort. Like every great artist he gives unity of form to the different and apparently distracting topics which he brings together. He works freely, and is not to be supposed to have arranged every part of the dialogue before he begins to write. He fastens or weaves together the frame of his discourse loosely and imperfectly, and which is the warp and which the woof cannot always be determined.”
It should be added, that as Dialectic was still a “world not realized,” and he was continually conscious of using imperfect methods, he was not solicitous to bind himself to any one method, or to watch carefully over the logical coherence of his work. “Sailing with the wind of his argument,” he often tacks and veers, changing his method with his subject-matter, much as a poet might adopt a change of rhythm. Absorbed as he is in each new phase of his subject, all that precedes is cancelled for the time. And much of what is to come is deliberately kept out of view, because ideas of high importance are reserved for the place where their introduction will have most effect. Another cause of apparent inconsequence in Plato is what he himself would call the use of hypothesis. He works less deductively and more from masses of generalized experience than Platonists have been ready to admit. And in the Republic he is as much engaged with the criticism of an actual as with the projection of an ideal condition of society. If we knew more of the working of Attic institutions as he observed them, we should often understand him better.
These general considerations should be weighed against the inequalities which have led some critics to suppose that the “first sketch of the state” in bks. ii.-iv. is much earlier than the more exalted views of bks. v.-vii.[3] If in these later books new conditions for choosing the future rulers are allowed to emerge, if in discussing the higher intellectual virtues the simple psychology of bk. iv. is lost sight of (it reappears in the Timaeus), if the “knowledge of the expedient” at first required falls far short of the conception of knowledge afterwards attained, all this is quite in keeping with Plato's manner elsewhere, and may be sufficiently accounted for by artistic and dialectical reserve. It can hardly be an altogether fortuitous circumstance that the culminating crisis, the third and highest “wave” of difficulty—the declaration that philosophers must be kings and kings philosophers—comes in precisely at the central point of the whole long work.
The great principle of the political supremacy of mind, though thus held back through half the dialogue, really dominates the whole. It may be read between the lines all through, even in the institution of gymnastic and the appraisement of the cardinal
