Chapter III: The Platonic Subordination of Lower to Higher (2)

In the state democracy speedily and inevitably passes over into tyranny. All appetite is insatiable. In a state where each citizen does what he pleases "all things are just ready to burst with liberty; excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. Then tyranny naturally arises out of democracy." He then proceeds, with prophetic pen, to trace the evolution of the modern political boss. First there develops a class of drones who get their living as professional politicians. Second, "there is the richest class, which, in a nation of traders, is generally the most orderly; they are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones; this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them. There is also a third class, consisting of working-men who are not politicians and have little to live upon; these, when assembled, are the largest and most powerful class in a democracy; but then, the multitude is seldom willing to meet unless they get a little honey. Their leaders take the estates of the rich and give to the people as much of them as they can consistently with keeping the greater part themselves. The people have always some one as a champion whom they raise into greatness. This is the very root from which a tyrant (that is, as we should say, a boss) comes. When he first appears above ground, he is a protector. At first, in the early days of his power, he smiles upon every one and salutes every one; he, to be called a tyrant who is making promises in public and also in private, and wanting to be kind and good to every one! Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery." The worst form of government, according to Plato, is that which we know too well to-day in our great cities: the government of the professional politician who maintains himself by buying the votes of the poor with the money he has squeezed out of the rich. All pretence of administering the government in the interest of the community is frankly abandoned. The boss, or tyrant, as Plato calls him, frankly and unblushingly avows that he is in politics for what he can get out of it.

The true statesman, the philosopher king, in Plato's phrase, sees and serves the public good. Such a government Plato calls an aristocracy, or the government of the best for the good of all. First below that comes timocracy, or the government of those who are ambitious for power and place. Next comes oligarchy, the government of the rich for the protection of the interests of the moneyed class. Next below that, and as a logical consequence, comes populism, which is our word for what Plato calls democracy; a government which aims to satisfy the immediate wants of everybody, regardless of moral, legal, or constitutional restraints. Last, and lowest of all, comes the rule of the professional politician who has thrown all pretence of regard for the public good, all consideration of honour, all loyalty to the rich and genuine sympathy for the poor to the winds, and is simply manipulating the forms of government, getting and distributing offices, collecting assessments and distributing bribes, all in the interests of his own private pocket. Between disinterested service of the public good and such unblushing pursuit of private gain, Plato says that there is no stopping place. Logically Plato is right; historically, too, he was right at the time when he was writing. Modern democracy, however, is a very different thing from the populistic democracy with which Plato was familiar and which our large cities know too well. A democracy, resting on intelligence and public spirit, diffused through rich and poor alike, was beyond Plato's profoundest dreams. That great experiment the American people, with their public-school system, and their principle of the equality of all before the law, are now trying on a gigantic scale.

Corresponding to the tyrannical state comes the tyrannical man. "The wild beast in our nature gets the upper hand and the man becomes drunken, lustful, passionate, the best elements in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part which is also the worst and the maddest. He has the soul of the slave, and the tyrannical soul must always be poor and insatiable. He is by far the most miserable of all men." "He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real servant and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility and be the flatterer of mankind; he has desires which he is truly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor if you know how to inspect the soul of him. All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions. Even as the state which he resembles, he grows worse from having power; he becomes of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more impious; he entertains and nurtures every evil sentiment, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable and thus he makes everybody else equally miserable."

VII

THE INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Plato first constructs the ideal character and shows that it consists in the righteous rule of the intelligent principle in man over the spirit and the appetites. A soul thus in harmony with itself, under the rule of reason, is at once healthy, happy, beautiful, and good. Later, reversing the process, he shows how the good, beautiful, true, healthy condition of the soul may be destroyed through the successive steps of pride, avarice, lawless liberty, ending at last in the tyrannous rule of some single appetite or passion which has dethroned reason and set itself up as supreme. The consequence of it all is that "the most righteous man is also the happiest, and this is he who is the most royal master of himself; the worst and most unrighteous man is also the most miserable; this is he who is also the greatest tyrant of himself and the most complete slave."

The reason why the life of a righteous man is happier than the life of an unrighteous man is that it has "a greater share in pure existence as a more real being." "If there be a pleasure in being filled with that which agrees with nature; that which is more really filled with more real being will have more real and true joy and pleasure; whereas, that which participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied and will participate in a less true and real pleasure. Those, then, who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, never pass into the true upper world; neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste of true and abiding pleasure. Like brute animals, with their eyes down and bodies bent to the earth, or leaning on the dining table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent." "Thus when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there is no division, the several parts, each of them, do their own business and are righteous, and each of them enjoy their own best and truest pleasures. But when either of the other principles prevails, it fails in attaining its own pleasure and compels the others to pursue after a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs."

Having reached this point Plato introduces a figure, which carries the whole point of his argument. "Do you now model the form of a multitudinous, polycephalous beast, having a head of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, making a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man; the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second; then join them and let the three grow into one. Now fashion the outside into a single image as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within may believe the beast to be a single human creature. Now unrighteousness consists in feasting the monster and strengthening the lion in one in such wise as to weaken and starve the man; while righteousness consists in so strengthening the man within him that he may govern the many-headed monster." "Righteousness subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man, and unrighteousness is that which subjects the man to the beast."

Finally Plato sums up the discussion by anticipating the question which Jesus asked four centuries later. "How would a man profit if he receive gold and silver on the condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst? Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men, would be the gainer, however much might be the sum which he received? And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who sells his own divine being to that which is most godless and detestable and has no pity? Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her husband's life, but he is taking a bribe in order to compass a worse ruin." He even pushes the question a step further and asks, "What shall a man be profited by unrighteousness even if his unrighteousness be undetected? For he who is undetected only gets worse; whereas he who is detected and punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanised; the gentler element in him is liberated and his whole soul is perfected and ennobled by the acquirement of righteousness and temperance and wisdom. The man of understanding will concentrate himself on this as the work of life. In the first place he will honour studies which impress these qualities on his soul and will disregard others. In the next place he will keep under his body and will be far from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, and he will be always desirous of preserving the harmony of the body for the sake of the concord of the soul. He will not allow himself to be dazzled by the opinion of the world and heap up riches to his own infinite harm. He will look at the city which is within him, and he will duly regulate his acquisition and expense, in so far as he is able, and for the same reason he will accept such honours as he deems likely to make him a better man. He will look at the nature of the soul, and, from the consideration of this, he will determine which is the better and which is the worst life and make his choice, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unrighteous, and good to the life which will make his soul more righteous; for this is the best choice,--best for this life and after death. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly way and follow after righteousness and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil; then shall we live dear to one another and the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward."

With this magnificent tribute to the intrinsic superiority of righteousness over unrighteousness Plato concludes his greatest work. The question why a man should do right, even if he wore the ring of Gyges which would exempt him from all external consequences of his misdeeds, has been answered by a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the soul, and the demonstration that righteousness is that organisation of the elements of the soul into an active and harmonious unity, wherein its health and beauty and life and happiness consist. In conclusion let us borrow from another of Plato's dialogues the prayer which he ascribes to Socrates,--a brief and simple prayer, yet one which, in the light of our study of the Republic, I trust we shall recognise as summing up the spirit of his teaching as a whole. "Beloved Pan, and all ye gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy; and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me."

VIII

TRUTH AND ERROR IN PLATONISM

Obviously this Platonic principle is vastly deeper and truer than anything we have had before. The personality at which both Stoic and Epicurean aimed was highly abstract,--something to be gained by getting away from the tangle and complexity of life rather than by conquering and transforming the conditions of existence into expressions of ourselves. Epicurus makes a few sallies from his cosey comfortable camp, to forage for provender. The Stoic draws into the citadel of his own self-sufficiency; and from this fortified position defies attack. Plato comes out into the open field, and squarely gives battle to the hosts of appetite, passion, temptation, and corruption, of which the world outside, and our hearts inside are full. In this he is true to the moral experience of the race: and his trumpet-call to the higher departments of our nature to enter the "great combat of righteousness"; his demand of instantaneous and absolute surrender which he presents to everything low and sensual within us, are clear, strong notes which it is good for every one of us to hear and heed. To him as to Carlyle, "Life is not a May-game, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces waited on by the choral muses and the rosy hours; it is a stern pilgrimage through the rough, burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men, loves men with inexpressible soft pity, as they _cannot_ love him; but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of creation. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars, keen glancing, from the immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the eternities. Deep calls for him unto deep.

"Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man? None of thy promotions is necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven; to thee it may be momentous, to thee it may be life or death; to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. He wants none of thy rewards; behold also he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas; nor by thy gibbets and law-penalties restrain him. Thou canst not forward him; thou canst not hinder him. Thy penalties, thy poverties, neglects, contumelies,--behold all these are good for him. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible as death."

This is a note which appeals forcibly to every noble youth. It has been struck by the Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Apostles: by Savonarola and Fichte, and a host of heroic souls; but by no one more clearly and constrainingly than by Plato. It is the note of earnest and aggressive righteousness; without which no personality can be either sound or strong. The man who has never heard this summons to go forth and conquer the evils of the world without and of his own heart within him, in the name of a righteousness high above both his own attainment and the attainment of the world about him as the heavens are higher than the earth, is still in the nursery stage of personal development.

On the other hand, there is danger in the very sharpness of the antithesis which Platonism makes between the higher and the lower. For the most part this danger is latent in Plato himself; though even in him it came out in his tendency to regard family life and private property as detrimental rather than serviceable to that development of character on which the larger devotion to the state, and the ideal order, must ultimately rest.

In Neoplatonism, in the many forms of mysticism, in certain aspects of Christian asceticism, and notably in the numerous phases of what calls itself "New Thought" to-day, what was for the most part latent in Plato, becomes frankly explicit. In general it is a loosening of the ties that hold us to drudgery and homely duty; a weakening of the bonds that bind us to the men and women by our side, in order to gaze more serenely on the ineffable beyond the clouds. This developed Platonism admits that we must live after a fashion in this very imperfect world; but says our real conversation all the time must be in heaven. Individual people are but faulty, imperfect copies of the pattern of the perfect good laid up on high. We must buy and sell, work and play, laugh and cry, love and hate down here among the shadows; but we must all the time feed our souls on the good, the true, the beautiful, which these distorted human shadows only serve to hide. These Platonic lovers of something better than their husbands or wives, or associates or friends, go through the world with a serene smile, and an air of other-worldliness which, if we do not inquire too closely into their domestic life and business efficiency, we cannot but admire. They undoubtedly exert a tranquillising influence in their way, especially on those who are so fortunate as to behold them from a little distance. But they are not the most comfortable people to live with, as husband or wife, colleague or business partner. Louisa Alcott had this Platonic type in mind when she defined a philosopher as a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends having hold of the ropes, trying to pull him down to earth.

A good deal that passes for religion is this Neoplatonism masquerading in Christian dress. All such hymns as "The Sweet By and By," "Oh, Paradise, Oh, Paradise," and the like, which set heaven and eternity in sharp antithesis against earth and time, are simply Neoplatonism baptized into Christian phraseology; and the baptism is by sprinkling rather than immersion.

Thomas a Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," and indeed all the mystical books of devotion--Tauler, Fenelon, "The Theologia Germanica"--are saturated with this Platonic or Neoplatonic spirit. "Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou set a value upon any worldly thing." "Let therefore nothing which thou doest seem to thee great; let nothing be grand, nothing of value or beauty, nothing worthy of honour save what is eternal." "Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God, the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort." These words from the "Imitation of Christ" sound orthodox enough in our ears. But we ought to understand once for all that it is Neoplatonic mysticism, not essential Christianity, that breathes through them.

This type of personality reduces the world to two mutually exclusive elements, God and self; and permits no reconciliation or mediation between them. Fenelon puts this dualism in the form of a dilemma. "There is no middle course; we must refer everything either to God or to self; if to self, we have no other God than self; if to God, we are then without selfish interests, and we enter into self-abandonment." Undoubtedly for evangelistic purposes the sharp antithesis has great practical advantages. It is an easy way to reach heaven--this of scorning earth; an easy definition of the infinite to pronounce it the negation of the finite.

As Carlyle has represented for us the stronger side of Platonism, his friend Emerson shall serve to illustrate the weakness that lurks half hidden in all this way of thinking. It is so concealed that we shall hardly detect it unless we are sharply on the watch for this tendency to exalt the Infinite at the expense of the finite; the Universal at the expense of the particular; God at the expense of our neighbour.

"Higher far into the pure realm,
Over sun and star,
Over the flickering Daemon film,
Thou must mount for love;
Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves;
Where unlike things are like;
Where good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one."

"Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality. We are made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness depend on a person or persons. But the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection." "Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. Pressed on our attention, the saints and demigods whom history worships fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who on that condition gladly inhabits it." "The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, daring, which can love us and which we can love."

"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods." "True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer."

Here you have Plato and Thomas a Kempis in the elegant garb of a heretical transcendentalist. But you get the same dualism of finite and infinite, perfect and imperfect; unworthy, crumbling earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in heaven.

The combat of the higher against the lower is one in which we must all engage; and no doubt in order to win we must at times keep the lower solicitations at arm's-length. If, however, what appeals to us in the name of the highest counsels any relaxing of definite obligation, any alienation from the man or woman whom social institutions have placed closest by our side; any disloyalty to the plain companions and humble associates whom society or business places in our way; any breaking of social bonds which generations of self-sacrifice and self-control have laboriously woven, and centuries of experience have approved as beneficent; then it is time to abandon Plato, or rather those who have assumed to wear his mantle, and look for personal guidance to those greater masters who have transcended the antithesis of higher and lower, which it was Plato's great mission to make so sharp and clear. The principle of such a reconciliation we shall find in Aristotle; its complete accomplishment we shall find in Jesus.