More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Plato possessed the art to dress up illiberal suggestions in such a way that they deceived future ages,
From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality,
From Parmenides he derived the belief that reality is eternal and timeless, and that, on logical grounds, all change must be illusory. From Heraclitus he derived the negative doctrine that there is nothing permanent in the sensible world.
How is all this connected with authoritarianism in politics?
Goodness and Reality being timeless, the best state will be the one which most nearly copies the heavenly model,
Useful for religion & state
He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible. This view implies an oligarchy.
There is an element here that will attract anti- intellectuals to criticize the learned. How does resposible skepticism & idiocy differ?
This point of view is essentially aristocratic.
It is clear that no legally definable selection of citizens is likely to be wiser, in practice, than the whole body.
If true, representative government is more just than other forms
The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.
First, they represent the gods as behaving badly on occasion, which is unedifying; the young must be taught that evils never come from the gods, for God is not the author of all things, but only of good things.
Precusor to Christianity
The training of the body is to be very austere. No one is to eat fish, or meat cooked otherwise than roasted, and there must be no sauces or confectionery. People brought up on his regimen, he says, will have no need of doctors
The most important part of it is the dogma that God has created men of three kinds, the best made of gold, the second best of silver, and the common herd of brass and iron. Those made of gold are fit to be guardians; those made of silver should be soldiers; the others should do the manual work.
promoted or degraded accordingly. It is thought hardly possible to make the present generation believe this myth, but the next, and all subsequent generations, can be so educated as not to doubt
the city is just when trader, auxiliary, and guardian, each does his own job without interfering with that of other classes.
Platonic Justice
In spite of all the fine talk, skill in war and enough to eat is all that will be achieved.
Opinion cannot be of what is not, for that is impossible; nor of what is, for then it would be knowledge. Therefore opinion must be of what both is and is not.
“We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.”
in a wise community the philosophers would not seem foolish; it is only among fools that the wise are judged to be destitute of wisdom.
mathematics can never tell us what is, but only what would be if. . . .
“But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.
It is not necessary therefore for a prince to have all the above-named qualities [the conventional virtues], but it is very necessary to seem to. have them.”
The love of “liberty,” and the theory of checks and balances, came to the Renaissance from antiquity, and to modern times largely from the Renaissance, though also directly from antiquity.
there are chaotic periods during which obvious knavery frequently succeeds; the period of Machiavelli was one of them. In such times, there tends to be a rapidly growing cynicism, which makes men forgive anything
It follows that politicians will behave better when they depend upon a virtuous population than when they depend upon one which is indifferent to moral considerations; they will also behave better in a community in which their crimes, if any, can be made widely known, than in one in which there is a strict censorship under their control. A certain amount can, of course, always be achieved by hypocrisy, but the amount can be much diminished by suitable institutions.
The world has become more like that of Machiavelli than it was, and the modern man who hopes to refute his philosophy must think more deeply than seemed necessary in the nineteenth century.
