Aristotle says that humans are political animals. Plato seems to assume the same. Even today, we still struggle with the relation of the individual to the group. How should my “private” self relate to my “public” self?
Jonathan, one of our “founding” members, having read my last Proceedings post, rightly objected that Plato’s imaginary city in the Republic was created, in Socrates’s terms, “playfully,” and on analogy with the human soul, and it is not clear Plato thought the specific arrangement of the rational, spirited and instinctual parts of the soul could really be extended to the city. That is, it's basically about the "private" self. Socrates is often ironic in the text, and many developments of the city must have struck even the Greeks as absurd. On the other hand, to the Greek mind the individual’s identity existed meaningfully only as a part of the state, that is, as part of the group, defined constitutionally according to that group’s values. So the Greek character is always and necessarily considered with reference to the group, and not merely within the individual. But, as our visitor, Bobby, pointed out this week, for the Greeks, character was also a kind of absolute ideal to live up to and participate in. Not a set of rules, but also not a mere personal, or even social, decision.
The Republic can be read as a kind of philosophical justification and exploration for character, broken down into its component parts of justice, moderation, courage and wisdom. The people involved in the dialogue assume these are desirable traits, but want to establish their intrinsic desirability, and not just their usefulness for obtaining other goods.
To draw this all together, then, we might say that if Plato considers democracy the third stage of decay of the ideal city, he does so rhetorically and only on terms of the analogy between the city and the human soul. For a city of people with good characters, we would hope, would be a healthy city no matter what its constitution. However, if you read Plato it is difficult to really get away from his references to actual democracies and their faults. I, too, resist his priority of the aristocratic state over the democratic. If this is the case, it must be because I, we, do not believe in this same absolute character that the good man will find – or we do not believe humans fundamentally good. If there is a good, we should not object to good men and women leading our society. If there is no good, we are left to defending our own desires and wishes, but then we cannot demand of society that it protect those desires without showing how such and such will protect everyone’s desires – and this is the beginning of the modern state. (To Be Continued...)
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