This is Plato’s longest dialogue. It deals with establishing the proper laws for the founding of a hypothetical colony as a new State. An unnamed Athenian gives most of the answers as he debates Clinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan, as they travel along from Cnossus together. First, the Athenian lays out the list of supreme human and divine benefits. “Health heads the list of the lesser benefits, followed by beauty; third comes strength, for racing and other physical exercises. Wealth is fourth—not “blind” wealth, but the clear-sighted kind whose companion is good judgment—and good judgment itself is the leading “divine” benefit; second comes the habitual self-control of a soul that uses reason. If you combine these two with courage, you get (thirdly) justice; courage itself lies in fourth place.” The lawmaker’s role is to encourage these virtues. “At every stage the lawgiver should supervise his people, and confer suitable marks of honor or disgrace…. He must use the laws themselves as instruments for the proper distribution of praise and blame.”
The lawmaker must use education to inculcate these higher virtues in the populus. “The earliest sensations that a child feels in infancy are of pleasure and pain, and this is the route by which virtue and vice first enter the soul…. I call ‘education’ the initial acquisition of virtue by the child, when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, that well up in his soul are channeled in the right courses before he can understand the reason why…. Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion…. Education, then, is a matter of correctly disciplined feelings of pleasure and pain.” However, there is a difference. "Pleasant and painful things come to a stop simultaneously, whereas good things and bad ones do not, because they are in fact different things.” The proper education of a child is no easy task. “Of all wild things, the child is the most unmanageable: an unusually powerful spring of reason, whose waters are not yet canalized in the right direction, makes him sharp and sly, the most unruly animal there is.” A well-served education must last throughout a man’s life. “We do not hold the common view that a man’s highest good is to survive and simply continue to exist. His highest good is to become as virtuous as possible and to continue to exist in that state as long as life lasts.”
Next, the Athenian begins by detailing the aims in the basic formation of the State. “A state ought to be free and wise and enjoy internal harmony, and that is what the lawgiver should concentrate on in his legislation…. There are two mother-constitutions, so to speak, which you could fairly say have given birth to all the others. Monarchy is the proper name for the first, and democracy for the second…. It is absolutely vital for a political system to combine them… if it is to enjoy freedom and friendship applied with good judgment.”
The Athenian realizes that in every successful State there must be rulers who stand below the laws. “Such people are usually referred to as ‘rulers’, and if I have called them ‘servants of the laws’ it’s not because I want to mint a new expression but because I believe that the success or failure of a state hinges on this point more than on anything else…. If law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise.” Laws must both be written down and embedded within the traditions of the society. “All the rules we are now working through are what people generally call ‘unwritten customs’, and all this sort of thing is precisely what they mean when they speak of ‘ancestral law’…. Although ‘laws’ is the wrong term for these things, we can’t afford to say nothing about them, because they are the bonds of the entire social framework, linking all written and established laws with those yet to be passed. They act in the same way as ancestral customs dating from time immemorial, which by virtue of being soundly established and instinctively observed, shield and protect existing written law…. We must do our best not to omit anything, great or small, whether ‘laws’, ‘habits’, or ‘institutions’, because they are all needed to bind a state together, and the permanence of the one kind of norm depends on that of the other.”
The Athenian adds some words of caution. “We should treat as the biggest enemy of the entire state the man who makes the laws into slaves, and the state into the servant of a particular interest, by subjecting them to the diktat of mere men.” Men must also know their place in society. “A reckless lack of respect for one’s betters is effrontery of peculiar viscousness, which springs from a freedom of inhibitions that has gone much too far.” The rulers and teachers bare the most responsibility. “Total ignorance over an entire field is never dangerous or disastrous; much more damage is done when a subject is known intimately and in detail, but has been improperly taught.” Vice is common to the common man, but the select few must rise above such pettiness. “Only a small part of mankind—a few highly-educated men of rare natural talent—is able to steel itself to moderation when assailed by various needs and desires; given the chance to get a lot of money, it’s a rare bird that’s sober enough to prefer a modest competence to wealth.”
Finally, the Athenian concludes by detailing the laws relationship to social relations and the common weal. “It is vital that men should lay down laws for themselves and live in obedience to them; otherwise they will be indistinguishable from wild animals of the utmost savagery. The reason is this: no man has sufficient natural gifts both to discern what benefits men in their social relationships and to be constantly ready and able to put his knowledge to the best practical use. The first difficulty is to realize the proper object of true political skill is not the interest of private individuals but the common good. This is what knits a state together, whereas private interests make it disintegrate. If the public interest is well served, rather than the private, then the individual and the community alike are benefited.” That is why, in the ideal State, reason must rule over all. “Knowledge is unsurpassed by any law or regulation; reason, if it is genuine and really enjoys its natural freedom, should have universal power: it is not right that it should be under the control of anything else, as though it were some sort of slave…. Law and regulation, which embody general principles… cannot provide for every individual case.”
In this exemplary society, dictated by the Athenian, obedience and lack of freedom among its citizens is a feature of the system, not a bug. “The vital point is that no one, man or woman, must ever be left without someone in charge of him; nobody must get into the habit of acting alone and independently…. In peace and war alike we must give our constant attention and obedience to our leader, submitting to his guidance even in tiny details…. In short, we must condition ourselves to an instinctive rejection of the very notion of doing anything without our companions; we must live a life in which we never do anything, if possible, except by combined and united action as members of a group…. This is what we must practice in peacetime, right from childhood—the exercise of authority over others and submission to them in turn. Freedom from control must be uncompromisingly eliminated from the life of all men, and of all the animals under their dominion.”
No comments:
Post a Comment