We have to remember here that by _philosopher_ Plato does not mean
Immanuel Kant. He means a living being, a man like Seneca or Francis
Bacon, a man in whom knowledge is fused with action, and keen perception
joins with steady hand; a man who has had not only the teaching of books
but the discipline of hard experience; a man who has learned with equal
readiness to obey and to command; a man whose thought is coördinated by
application to the vital problems of human society. “Inasmuch as
philosophers alone are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and
those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not
philosophers, I must ask you which of the two kinds should be rulers of
our state?”[35] Well, then, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings
and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, ...
cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”[36]
That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.
IV
Dishonest Democracy
Let us get back to the circumference and approach this same point by
another route.
I grant you, says Plato, that to have rulers at all is very
disagreeable. And indeed we should not need to have them were it not for
a regrettable but real porcine element in us. My own Utopia is not an
aristocracy nor a democracy, nor any kind of an _’ocracy_; it is what
some of you would call an anarchist communism. I have described it very
clearly in the second book of my _Republic_, but nobody cares to notice
it, except to repeat my brother’s gibe about it.[37] But instead of
this Utopia of mine being a “City of Pigs,” it is just because we are
pigs that I had to give up painting this picture and turn to describing
“not only a state, but a luxurious state.” I am still “of opinion that
the true state, which may be said to be a healthy constitution, is the
one which I have described,” and not the “inflamed constitution” to
which I devoted the rest of my book, and which in my opinion is much
more a “City of Pigs” than the other. It is because people want “to lie
on sofas, and dine off tables, and have dainties and dessert in the
modern fashion, ... and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and
cakes, and gold, and ivory, ... hunters and actors, ... musicians,
players, dancers, ... tutors, ... servants ... nurses wet and dry, ...
barbers, confectioners and cooks, ... and hosts of animals (if people
are to eat animals), ... and physicians; ... then a slice of neighbor’s
land ... and then war,”[38]--in short, it is because people are pigs
that you must have soldiers and rulers and laws.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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