Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

temperance, and justness, are the three phases of the one cardinal virtue, wisdom. Justness is made to include piety or holiness, by which man preserves a proper attitude toward the gods.

A fuller development of the virtues is not given. The reason of the particular four which are described rests rather in the wants of the State than of the individual. A special treatise on duties is superfluous, as in Plato's opinion the harmonious soul is of itself able to find the right in each particular conjuncture.

THE PLATONIC STATE.

It is a noteworthy advance of the ethical consciousness that morality is here conceived of not as belonging to the mere individual, but as finding its full expression in the community. But this thought is developed with such passionate theorizing one-sidedness that, in his ideal State, Plato has produced what appears in the eyes of practical reflection as a mere satirical caricature, and brought upon himself the charge of utterly impracticable Utopianism. It has been sought to save his reputation by holding that he never intended his State for realization. But both the charge and this apology are equally unjust to Plato. His "State" is plainly his most mature and favorite work. There is not the least evidence that his ideal was not intended for realization; there is, on the contrary, much evidence that he made repeated attempts, and had strong hopes of seeing it put into practice by Dionysius the Younger in Syracuse. Moreover, he himself teaches its applicableness in practice.

The State of Plato is diverse enough from modern ideas; but to Greeks, especially those who favored Doric politics, it was by no means so novel, and, in fact, it had been partially realized in the laws of Sparta. The Platonic State is especially instructive in its contrasts to the Christian ideas of the community, the Church, and the State. Let us notice them.

According to Plato it is not the individual, but the State, that is the properly moral person; and by the State all morality of the individual is conditioned and produced. Moral individuals do not make the State, but the State makes them. Without and apart from the State there is no proper morality, but only barbarism. The object of the State is, hence, to make of the citizens morally good men.

The State is a simple moral organism corresponding to the three forms of the soul-life. In its teaching, defending, and victualing functions it represents reason, courage, and sensuousness in the three classes, the wise, and therefore ruling ones, the warriors, and the producers. It realizes inward harmony, and hence justness and happiness, by assuming the reins of the arbitrary individual wil! and assigning and forcing upon each the precise sphere of his activity. There must be strict separation of classes, the rulers allotting to each his rank. The special virtue of the producers is temperance or modesty. Those of both the warriors and rulers are bravery and wisdom. The rulers and warriors are gold and silver; the producers are but ignoble brass. This class is not to meddle with politics, but only with trade and agriculture. Slavery is a matter of course, though, when possible, only non-Greeks should be enslaved.

Of the rulers the essential trait is wisdom. There can never be many acting rulers; it is best when there is only one, and he a philosopher. The good of the whole requires the unlimited dominion of the best--aristocracy or monarchy. As wisdom can find the best step in every case, the power of the rulers should not be hampered by many statutes. The wise regent will often, without law and against the will of individuals, realize the good of the State, and compel the citizens to allow themselves to be made happy.

A truly free personality is consequently ascribed only to the wise ruling ones; all others are, in the whole scope of their life, absolutely subject to the State. If some liberty is allowed to the third class, it is only out of contempt: "though cobblers are bad, it does not endanger the State." But the truly wise and manly citizen is in absolute tutelage to the State. The two upper classes, as the chief factors of the State, are by the State both reared, educated, and in their whole activity directed. Music and gymnastics, as tending to harmony, are the main elements in education. The rulers cannot enter on their functions before the age of fifty. Their training requires the additional sciences of mathematics and philosophy. Any other religious training than that given by philosophy Plato could not commend, as he well knew the worthlessness of the popular religion.

The all-embracing, all-determining State has all and unconditioned rights; the individual has rights only so far as the State concedes them. Even to his own life he has no right when the State can no longer profit by him. Physicians must let the incurably sick perish without help. The State alone may possess; individual property should not be allowed. The artisan class labors not for itself but for the State; by which regulation Plato hoped to have excluded all cause of social strife. Even poetry is subject to a strict censorship. The drama is utterly prohibited. The State prescribes the meters in which alone verse may be written, and of musical instruments allows only the lyre and the cithara.

THE PLATONIC FAMILY.

The family is not the foundation, but only a subordinate phase of the State. Personality has in it no rights. The person of one consort belongs not to the other, but to the State. Wedlock proper is hence not allowable. The citizen should beget children in the interest of the State, and his stimulus should not be love of the sex, but civic duty. The citizen may not select the wife who temporarily is allowed him; but the State gives her to him, ostensibly by lot, but, in fact, the rulers should "make use of falsehood and deception" in artfully controlling the lot so as always to bring about the most suitable matches. Men may beget between the ages of thirty and fifty-five years; women may bear between those of twenty and forty. Permanent marital relations are out of the question; in fact, a change of wives is expressly required. No one may regard his wife as exclusively his own. It is to be a fundamental principle for the free, active citizen, "that all the women shall be common to all the men, that no one should live entirely with another, and that also the children should be in common, the father neither knowing what child is his, nor the child who is its father." Hence children are to be taken from the mother immediately at birth and reared by the State, every precaution being used to prevent the mothers from ever recognizing the children they bore. They are to be suckled by the women in common, and promiscuously. The sickly and crippled are to be let perish. After the lapse of the prescribed age for procreating, the men and the women may have com

merce with each other according to, elective affinity, save only that births must be prevented, and, where this cannot be done, the children must be starved at birth.

The woman is not the mother of the family, she is a citizen with political duties; and she may even fill governmental offices. They must practice manly trades, and must participate, naked, in the gymnastic exercises. They must even march forth to war, though in battle they are to hold the rear position. For between men and women there is no other difference than that the former beget and the latter bear; the former are stronger, the latter weaker.

CASTE.

This family-annulling despotism of the State applies strictly only to the two higher classes, while the producing class is less cared for, and allowed greater liberty. The great problem of all moral social life, namely, to realize the good of the community through the moral freedom of the individual, Plato was unable to solve, save by giving a sweeping plenary authority to the civic organism at the utter sacrifice of all individual self-determination. Objective morality swallows up and precludes all subjective morality. This, however, is not peculiar to Plato; it is the Greek tendency in general. Rather do we find in him a decided advance. While the Spartan system, somewhat like the Chinese, gave remorseless sway to impersonal law, and did away with personal liberty in very essential things; and while in the Athenian democracy the irrational whim of the masses disposed of the fate of the individual, the Platonic system gives the former into the hands of the personal spirit, at least in the person of the philosophically-educated and tried regent. From the stand-point of heathen antiquity, which conceded no right of the individual as against the State, this is a real progress; and what appears to us as unnatural and one-sided in it is owing, not so much to the erroneousness of the step forward, as to the fundamental erroneousness of Greek philosophy in general.

That the Spirit of wisdom and power may and is to be poured out on all flesh, (Joel iii, 1,) that there is no acceptation of persons with God, but all are equally called to be children of the truth, such a thought is utterly unknown to all FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXII.-37

antiquity, and hence also to its greatest philosopher. Of an absolute morality binding on all Plato knows nothing. To a Greek, civilization without slavery is inconceivable. The slave is incapable of morality, and even only a small minority of the freemen can practically attain to wisdom. Proclivities toward or against virtue are transmitted physically from parent to children. The ground for this classification of mankind into a rational minority, and an unreasoning passive majority, lies not exclusively in the general consciousness of the Greeks, but also in the peculiar ontological views of Plato himself. The primitive dualism of all being shows itself also in man. As the world is not an absolutely perfect expression of the spirit, and as the rational spirit is not an absolutely omnipotent power, but can only, more or less fully, impress itself on the primitive stubborn chaotic substratum of all actuality, without being able perfectly to dominate and spiritualize it, so also in humanity do the rationally-enlightened few stand over against the unreasoning and relatively unspiritual many, whose destiny it is to be shaped and led by the few.

ETHICAL PROGRESS.

The real advance of Plato beyond former ethical views consists in the fact that, freeing the idea of the good from all dependence on the mere pleasure of the individual, he conceived it as per se valid and based in God himself, and, hence, described morality as Godlikeness, as the image of God in man, as, in fact, the very essence of rationality itself, and that, consequently, he regarded the moral life as a harmonious unity growing out of the one principle of wisdom. But by not fully freeing himself from the dualism so characteristic of heathen thought, he rendered it impossible for him to rise to the conception of the entire freedom of God and man, and, in fact, to that of a perfect morality. True personality is recognized neither in its scope and rights, nor in its guilt. There remains in all existence, even in the highest moral life, a stubborn, indelible, spirit-hampering element of primitive chaos, over which God himself is not absolute master. The barrier to perfect morality lies, not in the transgression of the individual, but in this uncongenial primitive element of his and of all other nature. The possibility and duty of morality are differ

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »