Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 4Grote, George
Philosophy
Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 4
Grote, George
Philosophy, Ancient; Plato; Socrates, 470 BC-399 BC
There is however another objection, which seems grave and
well founded, advanced by Aristotle against the Platonic
Republic. He remarks that it will be not one city, but two cities,
with tendencies more or less adverse to each other:[130] that the
Guardians, educated under the very peculiar training and placed
under the peculiar relations prescribed to them, will form one
city--while the remaining people, who have no part either in the
one or the other, but are private proprietors with separate
families--will form another city. I do not see what reply the
Platonic Republic furnishes to this objection. Granting full
success to Plato in his endeavours to make the Guardians One among
themselves, we find nothing to make them One with the remaining
people, nor to make the remaining people One with them.[131] On
the contrary, we observe such an extreme divergence of sentiment,
character, pursuit, and education, as to render mutual sympathy
very difficult, and to open fatal probabilities of mutual
alienation: probabilities hardly less, than if separate
proprietary interests had been left to subsist among the
Guardians. This is a source of mischief which Plato has not taken
into his account. The entire body of Guardians cannot fail to
carry in their bosoms a sense of extreme pride in their own
training, and a proportionally mean estimate of the untrained
multitude alongside of them. The sentiment of the gold and silver
men, towards the brass and iron men, will have in it too much of
contempt to be consistent with civic fraternity: like the pride of
the Twice-Born Hindoo Brahmin, when comparing himself with the
lower Hindoo castes: or like that of the Pythagorean brotherhood,
who "regarded the brethren as equal to the blessed Gods, but held
all the rest to be unworthy of any account".[132] The Spartan
training appears to have produced a similar effect upon the minds
of the citizens who went through it. And indeed such an
effect appears scarcely avoidable, under the circumstances assumed
by Plato. He himself is proud of his own ideal training, so as to
ascribe to those who receive it a sentiment akin to that of the
Olympic victors: while he employs degrading analogies to signify
the pursuits and enjoyments of the untrained multitude, who are
assimilated to the appetite or lower element in the organism,
existing only as a mutinous crew necessary to be kept down.[133]
That spiritual pride, coupled with spiritual contempt, should be
felt by the Guardians, is the natural result; as it is indeed the
essential reimbursement to their feelings, for the life of drill
and self-denial which Plato imposes upon them. And how, under such
a sentiment, the two constituent elements in his system are to be
competent to work out his promised result of mutual happiness, he
has not shown.[134]
[Footnote 130: Aristotel. Politic. ii. 5, p. 1264, a. 24. [Greek:
e)n mia=| ga\r po/lei du/o po/leis, a)nagkai=on ei)=nai, kai\
tau/tas u(penanti/as a)llê/lais.]
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