Popper makes the case that Plato, especially in his later writings, as in “The Republic”, was diametrically opposed to the ideal of an open society. Plato felt all social change was decay. Political degeneration followed from moral degeneration. Plato’s perfect State, the form or idea of the State, was free from all change and corruption. “The original or primitive form of society, and at the same time, the one that resembles the Form or Idea of a state most closely, the ‘best state’, is a kingship of the wisest and most godlike men…. First after the perfect state comes ‘timarchy’ or ‘timocracy’, the rule of the noble who seek honour and fame; secondly, oligarchy, the rule of the rich families; ‘next in order, democracy is born’, the rule of liberty which means lawlessness; and last comes ‘tyranny…. the fourth and final sickness of the city’.” Furthermore, Plato viewed class conflict as both inevitable and the main cause of degeneration within the State. The origins of class conflict begin through divisions within the ruling class, “between virtue and money, or between the old-established ways of feudal simplicity and the new ways of wealth.” Plato’s ideal State had rigid class distinctions- between rulers and those being ruled; between masters and slaves; between law-giving guardians, developed and selected from amongst the warriors, and menial workers. There would be common ownership of property, including of women and children. Plato stated, “each should look upon all as if belonging to one family.” Furthermore, “the race of the guardians must be kept pure.” Among contemporary Greek city-states, Sparta exemplified Plato’s ideal.
For Plato, man was social by nature. This was because the human individual was imperfect by necessity. Human nature insured that the individual could not be self-sufficient. Even “rare and uncommon natures”, the best of the best, depend on society to reach towards perfection. “The state therefore must be placed higher than the individual since only the state can be self-sufficient (‘autark’), perfect, and able to make good the necessary imperfection of the individual.” For Plato, it followed that “the wise shall lead and rule, and that the ignorant shall follow.” He believed in the division of labor. “Is it better that a man should work in many crafts or that he should work in one only?…. Surely, more will be produced and better and more easily if each man works in one occupation only, according to his natural gifts.” These gifts were immutable and assigned to man at birth.
Plato’s ideal State was homogenous. It should remain small, lest size endanger unity. The whole State should be as one. In this sense, it was anthropomorphic. The State was the perfect individual and all its individual citizens were imperfect copies of it. Plato was reaching back in time for a lost tribalism, displaced by the humanism and democracy of the Athens of his day. Plato writes that the law “is designed to bring about the welfare of the state as a whole, fitting the citizens into one unit, by means of both persuasion and force.” Additionally, by “persuasion” Plato does not just mean the use of argument and debate, but also duplicitous means such as lies and propaganda.
Popper makes the case that Plato’s ideal State was a totalitarian reactionary one, in which all change is evil and stasis, alone, is divine. Popper also asserts that Plato’s conception of justice, in his later works, especially in “The Republic”, is defined as “that which is in the interest of the best state.” It is not the conception of individual justice, stressing equality before the law, that is common today and was even in Plato’s time. Plato states, “when each class in the city minds its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries and the guardians, then this will be justice.” The State is just that is “healthy, strong, united- stable.” This was in contrast to equalitarians of his day, such as Democritus and Pericles. Pericles stated, “our laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes.” Plato claimed, “equal treatment of unequals must beget inequity.” For him, justice meant to keep one’s place in the rigid structure of society. Plato wrote that in the ideal State, “you are created for the sake of the whole and not the whole for the sake of you…. Everything possible has been done to eradicate from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual. So far as it can be done, even those things which nature herself has made private and individual have somehow become the common property of all…. The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative…. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. In this way the life of all will be spent in total community.”
Plato felt that the common herd must be ruled and those best qualified to do the ruling were philosopher-kings. These philosophers must be educated and trained by the State not in free inquiry, but to follow its diktat. Plato stated, “it is the business of the rulers of the city, if it is anybody’s, to tell lies, deceiving both its enemies and its own citizens for the benefit of the city.” However, the philosopher must not be ambitious but merely “destined to rule, he the least eager for it.” Popper makes the case that the ideal State of Plato’s was a utopia. Popper writes, “the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship.” Plato’s utopia, as all utopias, rests on the assumptions that the ends of society are never changing and that there are rational means, also never changing, of getting to them. Popper proposes that Plato yearned to go back in time to the unified tribal communities of the early Greeks. However, the Athens of Plato’s day was in the process of making the transition from a tribal community to humanitarianism, where individualism had primacy. Society was losing its organic character. Groups and classes were not unified and fixed. Social bonds were fraying. In this kind of open society “personal relationships of a new kind can arise where they can be freely entered into, instead of being determined by the accidents of birth.” Sea communication and trade were major factors accelerating these new connections both within and between city-states. According to Popper, philosophy bloomed in this transitional period. “It is an attempt to replace the lost magical faith by a rational faith; it modifies the tradition of passing a theory or a myth by founding a new tradition- the tradition of challenging theories and myths and of critically discussing them.”
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