Plato Today (RLE: Plato)

R Crossman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136236167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Plato was born around 2, 500 years ago. He lived in a small city-state in Greece and busied himself with the problems of his fellow Greeks, a people living in scattered cities around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In all he tried to do for the Greeks he failed. Why, then, should people in the modern world bother to read what he had to say? Does it make sense to go to a Greek thinker for advice on the problems of an age so different from his own? To anyone who has questioned the relevance of Plato to the modern world Richard Crossman's lively book provides a brilliant reply. The problems facing Plato's world bear striking parallels to ours today, the author maintains, so who better to turn to than Plato, the most objective and most ruthless observer of the failures of Greek society. Crossman's engaging text provides both an informed introduction to Greek ideas and an original and controversial view of Plato himself.

I

PLATO AND THE MODERN WORLD

PLATO was born in 427 B.C., nearly two thousand three hundred and ninety years ago. He lived most of his life in a tiny city-state in Greece, and busied himself with the problems of his fellow Greeks, a people living in scattered cities around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In all that he tried to do for the Greeks he failed. Why then should people in this modern world bother to read what he had to say? Can it be worth while to go to a Greek thinker for advice upon the problems of an age so utterly different from his own?

To anyone who is not so steeped in the classical tradition that he finds all things Greek or Roman better than all things modern, these questions will seem extremely pertinent. The Greeks lived in small cities: we live in large nation-states. The Greeks depended on slave labour: we have abolished slavery. Greek religion was a tangle of superstition and philosophy: we, in the modern world, have the lesson of Christianity and have learnt from it a humanity and ideal of love and tolerance totally foreign to Greek thought. Admitted they were a gifted people who produced great literature, great architecture, and great sculpture, yet in the realm of science they showed a dilettantism and lack of interest which must seem repulsive to modern man, who has learnt by scientific method and patient perseverance to master that nature which the Greeks feared. We can enjoy Greek art and Greek literature: we may even enjoy Plato as an artist, but why should we bother ourselves to study Plato’s views on politics and morality unless we happen to be interested in the byways of history? Plato is dead; why recall him to life instead of trying to solve the actual political and social problems of our own world? Why not set out ourselves, fearless and independent of all authority, to solve them in our own way by the light of our own native reason?

But can we? Is our modern reason, our modern outlook, so independent of the past? If social science has taught us anything, it is this—that man is not a ‘completely free intelligence’, but, in large part at least, a product of his environment, conditioned in his feelings, his thoughts, his actions, by the society in which he lives. And the society in which he lives is itself a product of the historical process, not a pattern of life designed and constructed by rational minds. We are, in fact, creatures of history, and the story of the human race has been the story of our struggle to become, not the creatures, but the creators of history.

The contribution of modern science to this struggle has been the fashioning of a weapon with which man can free himself from the domination of nature. Distance, disease, starvation, are the tyrants which he can conquer by the aid of science, but even today science can tell us little about ourselves, or about the way in which we can build a decent and secure community. The scientist himself who, as Bacon put it, can control nature by discovering and obeying her laws, is still as a person the product of the society he lives in. In his own family and citizen life he is often the slave of the past, blindly submissive to the traditions of his country, his school, and his family. If we consider the purposes for which science is used, we shall see that by freeing himself from the domination of nature man has only accomplished half the task which his destiny has set him. The greater the knowledge of nature and the power over nature that he possesses, the larger the size of the state, the closer the communications between the continents of the world, the more dangerous becomes the subservience of man to tradition, and the refusal to ask himself the purpose and the place of the society in which he lives.

But it was precisely this problem with which the Greeks were chiefly concerned. Experimental methods in the natural sciences were almost unknown in Greece, where men were busied with social and political experiment, with the attempt by the light of reason, or by trial and error, to devise a way of life, or, as we should call it, a social system. Greek civilization was, in fact, a laboratory of social science, and it was precisely its experimental nature which made it so impermanent, so ruthless, and so alive. The science of self-government both in the individual and in the community was the central interest of Greek culture.

The very smallness of the Greek city-state made it specially suitable for such social experiments. Wherefew lives are concerned, great risks can be taken. Revolution in Greece was not the terrible responsibility which it has become in modern nation-states. A Greek city could go off the gold standard without creating a Greek crisis, far less a world crisis. It could experiment with countless types of constitutional and legal systems without profoundly disturbing its neighbours. And very largely for this reason, the Greeks were the first people to work out systems of social organization which we call constitutional governments. The experiments which the Greeks tried out on themselves in the laboratory of the city-state are still, hundreds of years after those city-states perished, the basis upon which we try to build our states in modern Europe. The application of Reason to the problems of morality and politics was their invention and their legacy to us. Under their hands tabu became law, government became not a privilege but a science, religion not a superstition but a creed. They left their rivers unbridged, their towns undrained, but they tried to make the life of man in society as clear and reasonable as the sculptures in which they portrayed him.

For the last hundred years, Western European man has been so busy conquering nature that he has left the development of society to the chances of a historical process which he has called (over-optimistically perhaps) by the name of Progress. This development has been as chaotic as it has been rapid. Thought about it has been concerned more to apologize for it after it has happened than to predict or plan its advance. The wild disarray of our world-society is in strange contrast to the meticulous neatness of the discoveries of science. In the latter there is co-operation and a systematic advance in all fields: in the former there are wars, conflicts, and rumours of final catastrophe.

Perhaps, after all, the contrast made earlier between Greek and modern life is not so great as it at first appeared. These scattered sovereign cities, largely dependent on imports for food supplies, filled with the jangle of party conflict and the threat of class-war, were like a small-scale map of modern Europe. The problems of government which harassed their rulers, the rules of diplomacy and the techniques of propaganda they employed, have an astonishing similarity to their modern analogues. And so, naturally enough, the two fundamental problems of Greek city life, how to give freedom to the citizen without producing anarchy, and how to retain the independence of the soverign state without falling under the constant threat of international war, are the fundamental problems of the modern world. Why did the Greeks fail to solve both of these problems?

If we raise this question, there is one man above all to whom we must turn. Plato’s life was lived in the decline of the city-state. The grandeur of the defeat of Persia had paled long before he was born. More than all his contemporaries he felt the failure of Hellenism, and his diagnosis of that failure is the most ruthless, and the most objective which we possess. He lived, as we do, at the end of an epoch of expansion: he was twenty-five when the great war between Athens and Sparta ended in the defeat and humiliation of his countrymen; the Athenian Empire crumpled before his eyes, and he saw that the real task was not to rebuild Athens but to save Greece. To do that a searching analysis of the city-state and of the nature of man was necessary, for he saw that a ‘League of Cities’ could only be constructed if the cities were fundamentally changed. To that task he devoted his life.

Thus in turning back to the world of Ancient History, we shall not be neglecting our own problems. On the contrary, to see those problems in miniature as they were first presented, is to see them isolated from a host of incidentals and accessories which blind and befog us when we look at the modern world. It is the peculiar skill of the scientist to isolate the phenomena he wishes to examine, and it is the peculiar difficulty of the social scientist that he can never get society into a laboratory, or dissect human relations under a microscope. The study of Greek politics offers a sort of substitute for this isolation and abstraction to which modern problems can rarely be submitted, and the study of Plato is the first step in this study of Greece.

If we consider Plato’s life we shall see why this is so.

The analysis of a society can rarely be made at the moment when that society is most creative and vital. Reflection and criticism arise only when the rifts begin to show and conflicts refuse to be resolved in action. Philosophy is thus the outcome of failure: we do not analyse the best till it is past. Then we attempt to recall a golden age, or to reconstruct a broken society in the pattern of that age. In Greece, as in our own day, the age of expansion was an age of activity: theory and analysis began when that expansion ceased, and it became clear that planning, reconstruction, and self-restraint were necessary if collapse was to be averted.

It is this striking similarity between the age of Plato and our own which makes him so apposite a study for the Western world. It is no exaggeration to say that it is world war that has made Plato intelligible to us. For us, too, the old traditions are breaking down; art has lost touch with the life of the people, democracy is in danger. We, too, are standing on the edge of the abyss, and philosophy has become a matter of life and death instead of a matter for polite discussion. Our life has become ‘politicized’: we are forced to make up our minds if we are Democrats or Marxists or Fascists.

Is the equality of man a mere idle dream? Is the freedom of the spirit worth the bother it gives, or the preservation of national sovereignty worth the perils it brings? These are no longer merely questions to discuss; they are political issues, the expressions of conflicts on whose solution depends the future of our civilization. We can no longer solve them at our convenience by armchair discussion: they must be solved by action at any moment when the conflict becomes acute.

These are the signs of a transitional epoch, and it is not surprising to find that once again men’s minds have been turned to Plato, the philosopher of transition. For many decades the philosopher has been regarded as an ‘academic’, a dreamer or thinker, remote from the petty conflicts of the everyday world: and Plato has inevitably been portrayed as a philosopher of this kind. Now, when our civilization has reached a crisis similar to that in which he lived, we are able to see him as he really was—an idealist, thwarted in action, a revolutionary reformer who could find no political basis for his reforms.

2

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

IF the argument of the preceding chapter is correct, it is clearly impossible to give a simple answer to the question, ‘If Plato lived again, what would he think of the modern world?’ For Plato was no disembodied spirit hovering with objective gaze over the process of history: he was a Greek, an Athenian, and an aristocrat who lived a troubled life in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ. Before we can bring him back to our world we must learn to know him in his own, and for this reason we must pause for a moment to glance at the history of Greek civilization and to pick out some of its distinctive characteristics.

Greek civilization was not confined to the country we call Greece, or even centred there. All round the Mediterranean, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Syrian coast, up the Dardanelles, on the Sea of Marmora, and round the whole of the Black Sea, were scattered the independent Greek cities. Not only the coasts of the mainland but the islands too were occupied; in particular Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, and the Greek Cyclades. Only where the Carthaginians held control in the Western Mediterranean were the Greeks repulsed in their colonizing activities. These colonies were quite unlike any modern colonies. The colonists, in spite of the ties of blood and commerce which often bound them to the mother city, were citizens of independent cities and, generally speaking, lived on equal terms with the ‘barbarians’ around them. Thus the European notion of the nation-state, with its coloured empire and imperial rivalries, was completely foreign to the Greek mind. The Greek recognized his nationality only in the sense that he felt himself a Hellene, culturally distinct from the peoples with whom he came into contact. But the idea that cultural unity should imply a common government or that cultural superiority gave the right to political domination was fundamentally un-Greek.

A Hellenic state was envisaged by none save empty dreamers, a federation of Hellenic city-states only by a few bold statesmen, who foresaw that the internecine rivalries of the politicians must ultimately exhaust the energy of their peoples. For the ordinary Greek citizen the city-state seemed to be as obvious a unit of political life, and as essential to security and freedom, as the nation-state appears to the ordinary European. Equally foreign was the modern notion of colonization and empire. The imperial control of foreign peoples, whether for their exploitation or for their well-being, did not appeal to a merchant people content to trade and live on equal terms with all. The Greek did not feel the weight of ‘the white man’s burden’, or at least did not feel that Greek culture could be imposed by the political and military control of vast continents. Alexander, the imperial missionary of Hellenism, was a Macedonian, not a Greek.

It is idle to search for a single cause of this remarkable difference between Greek civilization and our own. Geography doubtless played its part: for political unity between the townships scattered round the mountainous shores of the Aegean was difficult to achieve. But more important still is the simple fact that life in a tiny city-state contrasted so favourably with anything to be found in any of the great Oriental empires. The Greek international anarchy (for such it must be called) may have been the final cause of the collapse of Greek independence: it was also the chief reason for the wellnigh incredible activity which the Greeks displayed from about 750 B.C. until, in about 350 B.C., the rise of the Macedonian Empire brought the end of the ‘Classical Period’. When we remember this we shall understand the reluctance of Greeks as farsighted as Plato or Aristotle to face the possibility that the city-state had played its part and must be replaced by new forms of political organization.

The earliest period of Greek life of which we know enough to write any connected history is the early eighth century B.C. By this time the Greeks were settled in Greece proper and along the coast of Asia Minor. Homer had become a mythical figure; Mycenae, the city of Agamemnon, a ruin crumbling into the earth. The age of migrations was over, and it was already difficult to distinguish the newcomers from the original population. After the dark ages of confusion in which the Cretan civilization had foundered, the new era dawns with a burst of colonial expansion by a number of Greek cities. Between 750 and 500 B.C., colonists from Corinth and Miletus and many other towns occupied many of the best available sites on the coastlines of the Mediterranean and Black Sea: hundreds of new cities sprang up and Greek life as we know it began.

What is the explanation of Greek colonization? Partly, no doubt, it was caused by the pressure of population in countries whose agricultural possibilities were strictly limited by the climate and the poverty of the soil: partly by the fact that the inland territories of Asia Minor were already occupied while in Greece proper there is hardly any inland territory which is not mountain or desert. But though land-hunger may have been a cause, undoubtedly trade was another. The Greeks were always a maritime people, and already in the Dark Ages Greek traders were active. Naturally enough, therefore, when expansion was necessary, it followed the trade-routes. Not only the hungry peasant, but the ambitious merchant was willing to face the risks of a strange country and to settle overseas.

This brings us to the second distinguishing characteristic of Greek life. The Greeks were by necessity a seafaring race, and so the economy of the Greek city-state could not long remain a self-sufficient agricultural economy; it was bound to develop on mercantile lines and to become dependent upon foreign trade. Whereas in the Eastern empires the traders were a small class in comparison with the great mass of peasants, in Greece trade permeated the whole of city life and its importance was vastly increased by colonial activity. Rival trade-leagues sprang up, and the first Greek war of which we have any record was probably between two such leagues competing for the western trade, the one headed by Corinth, the other by Miletus. The date of the Lelantine war, as it was called, is about 700 B.C., and it left Corinth commercially supreme in the west, while Miletus maintained her power in the Black Sea.

Inevitably the growing influence of trade proved a no less disturbing factor in the domestic affairs of the city-states. The Greek city-state in 750 was usually ruled by an aristocracy or a king: the people met perhaps in a general assembly, but only to give its consent by acclaim to the dictates of its rulers. The aristocracy was an aristocracy of birth and land, and the trader belonged to the common people. Religion and justice alike were in the hands of those chosen families who by ancestral tradition claimed to know the ways of God and man. Such a political structure is suitable only to a stable agricultural community in which the wealth of the individual does not conflict with the interests of the people as a whole. But in the city-state agriculture was drawn into the orbit of trade as soon as the community ceased to be self-supporting. Whereas previously the merchant had imported only the luxuries of life and exported only the unwanted produce, now production began to be specifically for export, and cities became dependent upon imports for their raw materials. Corinth, for instance, began to monopolize the export of pottery to the west, and so became rapidly more and more dependent on imports for her food supply. The same thing happened in scores of towns.

The result was an ever deepening fissure between the supporters of the traditional and of the new way of life. The aristocracy was divided. Some sided with the new mercantilism, others fiercely opposed it; and a social struggle began between the old-fashioned landowners and the new traders. This struggle was intensified by the introduction of coinage about 650 B.C. For at first the control of the new means of exchange was not fully understood and for this reason it merely accentuated the social misery. The peasant proprietor was often bought up or enslaved: silver was hoarded and shortage of currency resulted in rising prices. Increasing misery brought political consciousness and the struggle between two rival groups of nobles became a social upheaval of the people claiming the right to live.

This social upheaval was the prelude to the second epoch of Greek history—the age of the Tyrants. Up and down the Greek world dictators supplanted the aristocrats and seized complete po...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Plato and the Modern World
• 2. The Historical Background
• 3. Socrates
• 4. Plato
• 5. Plato Looks at British Democracy
• 6. Plato Looks at British Education
• 7. Plato Looks at the Family
• 8. Plato Looks at Communism
• 9. Plato Looks at Fascism
• 10. Why Plato Failed
• 11. The Modern Plato Once More
• 12. Epilogue
• Index