The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy—wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of party and the lust for the spoils of office.

Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In either case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims; but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease (556). “Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power” (557). But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy.

Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey,” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protector of the people” rises to supreme power (565). (Consider the history of Rome.)

Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters—like shoe-making—we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

“Like man, like state” (575); “governments vary as the characters of men vary;... states are made out of the human natures which

are in them” (544);

Human behavior, says Plato, flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Now just as effective individual action implies that desire, though warmed with emotion, is guided by knowledge; so in the perfect state the industrial forces would produce but they would not rule; the military forces would protect but they would not rule; the forces of knowledge and science and philosophy would be nourished and protected, and they would rule.

“Ruin comes when the trader, whose heart is lifted up by wealth, becomes ruler” (434); or when the general uses his army to establish a military dictatorship.

Only a philosopher-king is fit to guide a nation.

We must begin by “sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and by taking possession of the children, who will thus be protected from the habits of their parents” (540).

The first turn on our road is universal education.

For the first ten years of life, education shall be predominantly physical; every school is to have a gymnasium and a playground;

“To require the help of medicine because by lives of indolence and luxury men have filled themselves like pools with waters and winds,... flatulence and catarrh—is not this a disgrace?... Our present system of medicine may be said to educate diseases,”

But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided. “How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?—for they seem to be inconsistent with each other” (375).

. We do not want a nation of prize-fighters and weight-lifters. Perhaps music will solve our problem:

Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training is so powerful, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, bearing grace in their movements and making the soul graceful?” (401; Protagoras, 326).

“Damon tells me—and I can quite believe it—that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them.”14

“No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia”; the prophet (mantike) or genius is akin to the madman (manike) (Phædrus, 244).

Music and measure lend grace and health to the soul and to the body; but again, too much music is as dangerous as too much athletics. To be merely an athlete is to be nearly a savage; and to be merely a musician is to be “melted and softened beyond what is good”

Nor is music to be merely music; it must be used to provide attractive forms for the sometimes unappetizing contents of mathematics, history and science; there is no reason why for the young these difficult studies should not be smoothed into verse and beautified with song.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536).

Now since men are by nature acquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade them to behave themselves? By the policeman’s omnipresent club? It is a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and that is by lending to the moral requirements of the community the sanction of supernatural authority. We must have a religion.

The test will be impartial and impersonal; whether one is to be a farmer or a philosopher will be determined not by monopolized opportunity or nepotic favoritism; the selection will be more democratic than democracy.

the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards his child because he has to descend in the scale to become a husbandman or an artisan, just as there may be others sprung from the artisan class who are raised to honor, and become guardians and auxiliaries.

They are taught philosophy. They have now reached the age of thirty; it would not have been wise to let them “taste the dear delight too early;... for young men, when they first get the taste of philosophy in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting,... like puppy-dogs who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them”

First then, our young Elite must learn to think clearly. For that purpose they shall study the doctrine of Ideas.

Aristotle hints something of this when he says that by Ideas Plato meant what Pythagoras meant by “number” when he taught that this is a world of numbers (meaning presumably that the world is ruled by mathematical constancies and regularities). Plutarch tells us that according to Plato “God always geometrizes”; or, as Spinoza puts the same thought, God and the universal laws of structure and operation are one and the same reality. To Plato, as to Bertrand Russell, mathematics is therefore the indispensable prelude to philosophy, and its highest form; over the doors of his Academy Plato placed, Dantesquely, these words, “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here.”

Let these Ph.D.’s pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the “cave” of the world of men and things; generalizations and abstractions are worthless except they be tested by this concrete world; let our students enter that world with no favor shown them;

Those that survive, scarred and fifty, sobered and self-reliant, shorn of scholastic vanity by the merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom that tradition and experience, culture and conflict, can coöperate to give—these men at last shall automatically become the rulers of the state.

Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office.

But how can men of fifty have a flexible intelligence? Will they not be mentally plaster-casted by routine? Adeimantus (echoing, no doubt, some hot brotherly debate in Plato’s home) objects that philosophers are dolts or rogues, who would rule either foolishly, or selfishly, or both.

Plato “is the man who least resembles Kant, which is (with all respect) a considerable merit.”

“Friends should have all things in common,” as Pythagoras used to say (Laws 807).

Therefore no man or woman shall procreate unless in perfect health; a health certificate is to be required of every bride and groom (Laws, 772).

At the same time every precaution must be taken to avoid the occasions of war. The primary occasion is overpopulation (373); the second is foreign trade, with the inevitable disputes that interrupt it. Indeed, competitive trade is really a form of war; “peace is only a name” (Laws, 622).

The most frequent wars are precisely the vilest—civil wars, wars of Greek against Greek; let the Greeks form a pan-Hellenic league of nations, uniting lest “the whole Greek race someday fall under the yoke of barbarian peoples”

it will rest on the broad base of a commercial, industrial, and agricultural population. This last or economic class will retain private property, private mates, and private families. But trade and industry will be regulated by the guardians to

But trade and industry will be regulated by the guardians to prevent excessive individual wealth or poverty; anyone acquiring more than four times the average possession of the citizens must relinquish the excess to the state (Laws, 714f). Perhaps interest will be forbidden, and profits limited (Laws, 920).

prevent excessive individual wealth or poverty; anyone acquiring more than four times the average possession of the citizens must relinquis...

What is justice? There are only three things worthwhile in this world—justice, beauty and truth; and perhaps none of them can be defined.

Plato ventures a definition. “Justice,” he says, “is the having and doing what is one’s own” (433).

Justice is effective coördination.

Justice is a taxis kai kosmos—an order and beauty—of the parts of the soul; it is to the soul as health is to the body. All evil is disharmony: between man and nature, or man and men, or man and himself.

Truth changes her garments frequently (like every seemly lady), but under the new habit she remains always the same. In morals we need not expect startling innovations: despite the interesting adventures of Sophists and Nietzscheans, all moral conceptions revolve about the good of the whole.

In morals we need not expect startling innovations: despite the interesting adventures of Sophists and Nietzscheans, all moral conceptions revolve about the good of the whole.

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole. Probably all three doctrines must be combined to find a perfect ethics; but can we doubt which of the elements is fundamental?

favor. For a thousand years Europe was ruled by an order of guardians considerably like that which was visioned by our philosopher. During the Middle Ages it was customary to classify the population of Christendom into laboratores (workers), bellatores (soldiers), and oratores (clergy).

Much of the politics of Catholicism was derived from Plato’s “royal lies,” or influenced by them: the ideas of heaven, purgatory, and hell, in their medieval form, are traceable to the last book of the Republic; the cosmology of scholasticism comes largely from the Timæus; the doctrine of realism (the objective reality of general ideas) was an interpretation of the doctrine of Ideas; even the educational “quadrivium” (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) was modeled on the curriculum outlined in Plato.

The Jesuits who for a time ruled Paraguay were semi-Platonic guardians, a clerical oligarchy empowered by the possession of knowledge and skill in the midst of a barbarian population. And for a time the Communist Party