[129] Aristot. Politic. ii. 5, p. 1264, a. 12-26, respecting the Platonic Commonwealth, καίτοι σχεδὸν τόγε πλῆθος τῆς πόλεως τὸ τῶν ἄλλων πολιτῶν γίνεται πλῆθος, &c. …
Ποιεῖ γὰρ (Plato) τοὺς μὲν φύλακας οἷον φρουρούς, τοὺς δὲ γεωργοὺς καὶ τοὺς τεχνίτας καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους, πολίτας.
Objection urged by Aristotle against the Platonic Republic, that it will be two cities. Spiritual pride of the Guardians, contempt for the Demos.
There is however another objection, which seems grave and well founded, advanced by Aristotle against the Platonic Republic. He remarks that it will be not one city, but two cities, with tendencies more or less adverse to each other:[130] that the Guardians, educated under the very peculiar training and placed under the peculiar relations prescribed to them, will form one city — while the remaining people, who have no part either in the one or the other, but are private proprietors with separate families — will form another city. I do not see what reply the Platonic Republic furnishes to this objection. Granting full success to Plato in his endeavours to make the Guardians One among themselves, we find nothing to make them One with the remaining people, nor to make the remaining people One with them.[131] On the contrary, we observe such an extreme divergence of sentiment, character, pursuit, and education, as to render mutual sympathy very difficult, and to open fatal probabilities of mutual alienation: probabilities hardly less, than if separate proprietary interests had been left to subsist among the Guardians. This is a source of mischief which Plato has not taken into his account. The entire body of Guardians cannot fail to carry in their bosoms a sense of extreme pride in their own training, and a proportionally mean estimate of the untrained multitude alongside of them. The sentiment of the gold and silver men, towards the brass and iron men, will have in it too much of contempt to be consistent with civic fraternity: like the pride of the Twice-Born Hindoo Brahmin, when comparing himself with the lower Hindoo castes: or like that of the Pythagorean brotherhood, who “regarded the brethren as equal to the blessed Gods, but held all the rest to be unworthy of any account”.[132] The Spartan training appears to have produced a similar effect upon the minds of the citizens who went through it. And indeed such an effect appears scarcely avoidable, under the circumstances assumed by Plato. He himself is proud of his own ideal training, so as to ascribe to those who receive it a sentiment akin to that of the Olympic victors: while he employs degrading analogies to signify the pursuits and enjoyments of the untrained multitude, who are assimilated to the appetite or lower element in the organism, existing only as a mutinous crew necessary to be kept down.[133] That spiritual pride, coupled with spiritual contempt, should be felt by the Guardians, is the natural result; as it is indeed the essential reimbursement to their feelings, for the life of drill and self-denial which Plato imposes upon them. And how, under such a sentiment, the two constituent elements in his system are to be competent to work out his promised result of mutual happiness, he has not shown.[134]
[130] Aristotel. Politic. ii. 5, p. 1264, a. 24. ἐν μιᾷ γὰρ πόλει δύο πόλεις, ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι, καὶ ταύτας ὑπεναντίας ἀλλήλαις.
The most forcible of the objections urged by Aristotle against the Platonic Republic, are those contained in this chapter respecting the relations between the Guardians and the rest of the community.
[131] The oneness, which Plato proclaims as belonging to his whole city, belongs in reality only to the body of Guardians; of whom he sometimes speaks as if they were the whole city, which however is not his real intention; see Republic, v. p. 462-463 A.
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Τοὺς μὲν ἑταίρους ἦγεν ἴσους μακάρεσσι θεοῖσιν, Τοὺς δ’ ἄλλους ἡγεῖτ’ οὔτ’ ἐν λόγῳ οὔτ’ ἐν ἀριθμῷ. |
[133] Plato, Republ. v. 465 D.