The difficulty in understanding Plato lies precisely in this intoxicating mixture of philosophy and poetry, of science and art; we cannot always tell in which character of the dialogue the author speaks, nor in which form; whether he is literal or speaks in metaphor, whether he jests or is in earnest. His love of jest and irony and myth leaves us at times baffled; almost we could say of him that he did not teach except in parables. “Shall I, as an older person, speak to you, as younger men, in apologue or myth?” asks his Protagoras.7 These dialogues, we are told, were written by Plato for the general reading public of his day: by their conversational method, their lively war of pros and cons, and their gradual development and frequent repetition of every important argument, they were explicitly adapted (obscure though they may seem to us now) to the understanding of the man who must taste philosophy as an occasional luxury, and who is compelled by the brevity of life to read as he who runs may read. Therefore we must be prepared to find in these dialogues much that is playful and metaphorical; much that is unintelligible except to scholars learned in the social and literary minutiae of Plato’s time; much that today will seem irrelevant and fanciful, but might well have served as the very sauce and flavor by which a heavy dish of thought was made digestible for minds unused to philosophic fare.
Let us confess, too, that Plato has in sufficient abundance the qualities which he condemns. He inveighs against poets and their myths, and proceeds to add one to the number of poets and hundreds to the number of myths. He complains of the priests (who go about preaching hell and offering redemption from it for a consideration—cf. The Republic, 364), but he himself is a priest, a theologian, a preacher, a supermoralist, a Savonarola denouncing art and inviting vanities to the fire. He acknowledges, Shakespeare-like, that “comparisons are slippery” (Sophist, 231), but he slips out of one into another and another and another; he condemns the Sophists as phrase-mongering disputants, but he himself is not above chopping logic like a sophomore. Faguet parodies him: “The whole is greater than the part?—Surely.—And the part is less than the whole?—Yes . . . . Therefore, clearly, philosophers should rule the state?—What is that?—It is evident; let us go over it again.”8
But this is the worst that we can say of him; and after it is said, the Dialogues remain one of the priceless treasures of the world.9 The best of them, The Republic, is a complete treatise in itself, Plato reduced to a book; here we shall find his metaphysics, his theology, his ethics, his psychology, his pedagogy, his politics, his theory of art. Here we shall find problems reeking with modernity and contemporary savor: communism and socialism, feminism and birth-control and eugenics, Nietzschean problems of morality and aristocracy, Rousseauian problems of return to nature and libertarian education, Bergsonian élan vital and Freudian psychoanalysis—everything is here. It is a feast for the élite, served by an unstinting host. “Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato,” says Emerson; and awards to The Republic the words of Omar about the Koran: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book.”10
Let us study The Republic.
IV. The Ethical Problem
The discussion takes place in the house of Cephalus, a wealthy aristocrat. In the group are Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers of Plato; and Thrasymachus, a gruff and excitable Sophist. Socrates, who serves as the mouthpiece of Plato in the dialogue, asks Cephalus: “What do you consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from wealth?”
Cephalus answers that wealth is a blessing to him chiefly because it enables him to be generous and honest and just. Socrates, after his sly fashion, asks him just what he means by justice; and therewith lets loose the dogs of philosophic war. For nothing is so difficult as definition, nor anything so severe a test and exercise of mental clarity and skill. Socrates finds it a simple matter to destroy one after another the definitions offered him; until at last Thrasymachus, less patient than the rest, breaks out “with a roar”:
“What folly has possessed you, Socrates? And why do you others all drop down at one another’s feet in this silly way? I say that if you want to know what justice is, you should answer and not ask, and shouldn’t pride yourself on refuting others . . . . For there are many who can ask but cannot answer” (336).
Socrates is not frightened; he continues to ask rather than answer; and after a minute of parry and thrust he provokes the unwary Thrasymachus to commit himself to a definition:
“Listen, then,” says the angry Sophist, “I proclaim that might is right, and justice is the interest of the stronger . . . . The different forms of government make laws, democratic, aristocratic, or autocratic, with a view to their respective interests; and these laws, so made by them to serve their interests, they deliver to their subjects as ‘justice,’ and punish as ‘unjust’ anyone who transgresses them . . . . I am speaking of injustice on a large scale; and my meaning will be most clearly seen in autocracy, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not retail but wholesale. Now when a man has taken away the money of the citizens and made slaves of them, then, instead of swindler and thief he is called happy and blessed by all. For injustice is censured because those who censure it are afraid of suffering, and not from any scruple they might have of doing injustice themselves” (338–44).
This, of course, is the doctrine which our own day more or less correctly associates with the name of Nietzsche. “Verily I laughed many a time over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws.”11 Stirner expressed the idea briefly when he said that “a handful of might is better than a bagful of right.” Perhaps nowhere in the history of philosophy is the doctrine better formulated than by Plato himself in another dialogue, Gorgias (483 f), where the Sophist Callicles denounces morality as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength of the strong.
They distribute praise and censure with a view to their own interests; they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust—meaning by dishonesty the desire to have more than their neighbors; for knowing their own inferiority, they would be only too glad to have equality . . . . But if there were a man who had sufficient force [enter the Superman], he would shake off and break through and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and our laws, that sin against nature . . . . He who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them, and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. But the many cannot do this; and therefore they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their own inability, which they desire to conceal; and hence they call intemperance base . . . . They enslave the nobler natures, and they praise justice only because they are cowards.
This justice is a morality not for men but for foot-men (oude gar andros all’ andrapodou tinos) it is a slave-morality, not a hero-morality; the real virtues of a man are courage (andreia) and intelligence (phronesis).12