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On Misunderstanding Plato
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
To anyone who has been engaged in teaching and studying Plato, particularly the Republic, for the last thirty or forty years, one fact must stand out with special prominence. That is the remarkable increase during that period of the direct applicability of Plato's discussions to our own problems. Thirty-five years ago the concrete situations which Plato had in mind in these discussions, the general assumptions at the back of them, the possibilities for good or evil that he envisaged, would all seem to the student of that time remote and almost unreal, and it required a considerable exercise of the imagination to discover that there were certain underlying ideas in them which had application to our own time. If we wanted contemporary illustrations of the rise of a tyrant we had to turn to some of the most backward States in South America. The idea of a completely planned society existed only in the minds of the writers of Utopias, to whom we were accustomed, sometimes, to say rather patronizingly that they had forgotten that constitutions, grow and are not made. We could study the criticisms of democracy as an intellectual exercise without any feeling that they might be one day applied in practice. How different is the situation now! Many of the possibilities are as near for us as they were to Plato. Many of the general ideas of Plato's day are as readily assumed by us as they were by him. Indeed the difficulty now is greater in trying to gain a sympathetic hearing for the ideas of thirty or forty years ago than for the ideas of the fourth century b.c.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1944
References
page 50 note 1 This work was reviewed by me in Philosophy, 1935. In the same journal for 1937 there is also a review of Mr. Crossman's broadcast talks, published in book form under the title of Plato To-day.
page 50 note 2 See my article on “Plato's Political Thought and its value to-day” in Philosophy, 1941Google Scholar.
page 54 note 1 It is worth remembering that the oft-quoted assertion from the orator, Alcidamas—“God has made all men free: nature has made no man a slave”—was put forward, not as a general challenge to the institution of slavery, but specifically in support of the claim of the Messenians to be free from the Spartan rule. There is no reason to doubt that the Messenians, when they were free, had slaves of their own, like everyone else.
page 55 note 1 For an instance of the powerful impression that Sparta can make on a writer of sensitive historical imagination, but with no sympathy for the Spartan outlook as a whole, I would refer to the historical novels of Mrs. Naomi Mitchison.
page 56 note 1 In the Laws 180, Plato says that if those in power could be converted to his views the transition to a satisfactory state would be easiest in the autocratically governed city, and most difficult in an oligarchy. Democracy comes in between. But, as I read the passage, he expresses no opinion about the relative likelihood of this conversion taking place in the different kinds of state. In any case I am not prepared to accept the Laws as decisive evidence of Plato's views throughout the greater part of his life, in spite of Professor Farrington's curious view that opinions expressed in the Laws must be given “the crowning place” in Plato's philosophy, on the ground that it is the latest (and also, oddly enough, the longest) of the dialogues.
page 56 note 2 Euphraeus, another Athenian student of Plato's, subsequently went to Oreus and became active in the politics of that place. We hear of him from Demosthenes who praises him highly, particularly for his anti-Macedonian activities. It is clear from Demosthenes' account that he was a democratic leader, even though, as so often happened, the democracy eventually threw him over.
page 58 note 1 The late Professor Cornford has pointed out, in his translation of the Republic, the subtle element of exaggeration that is introduced by the consistent translation of ψɛνδoς by “lie.” In fact, the word was used of any land of fiction, and could be quite naturally applied to the work of the poets.
page 59 note 1 In my article on “Plato and Natural Science,” in Philosophy for 1933, Subsequently reprinted in my Studies in Philosophy.