Philosophy and the Social Problem

by Will Durant

We observe this at the outset in the more-mystified-than mystifying theory of ideas. Obviously, the theory of ideas belongs to Socrates; the Platonic element is a theory not of ideas so much as of ideals. Socrates wants truth, but Plato wants beauty, harmony. Socrates is bent on argument, and points you to a concept; Plato is a poet with a vision, and points you to the picture that he sees. Understanding, says Plato, is of the earth earthly; but poetic vision is divine.[22] Hence the maze of quibbling in the dialogues; it is Plato and not Socrates who is culprit here. Reasoning was an alien art to Plato; try as he might to become a mathematician he remained always a poet,—and perhaps most so when he dealt with numbers. Dialectic was in Plato’s day a recent invention; he plays with it like a youth in the breakers, letting it now raise him to heights of ecstatic vision and now bury him in the deadliest logic-chopping. But—let us not doubt it—he knows when he is logic-chopping; he goes on, partly that he may paint his picture, partly for the mere joy of parrying pros and cons; this new game, he feels, is a sport for the gods.

Let us smile at the heavy seriousness of those who suppose that this man meant everything he said. No one does, but least of all men Plato, who hardly taught except in parables. What is the “heaven” of the ideas but a poet’s way of saying that the constancies observable in the relations among things are not identical with the things themselves, but have a reality and permanence of their own? So we phrase it in our own distinguished verbiage; but Plato prefers, as ever, to draw a picture. And notice, in this picture, the ever present reference to social needs. What is a concept, after all, but a scheme for the conservation of mental resources, an instrument of prediction, a method of control? Without the power to form concepts we could never turn experience to use, it would slip between our fingers; we should be like the maidens condemned to carry water in a sieve. The idea of anything is the sum of its observed constancies of behavior; hence the medium of our adaptation and control. To have ideas of things is to know the map or plan of things; it is to see tendencies, directions, and results; it is to know how to use things. That is why knowledge is power; every idea is a tool with which to bend the world to serve our will. And that too is why the Ideas are real: they have power, and “anything which possesses any sort of power is real.”[23]

All this, as was said, is but an embellishment of the Socratic doctrine that salvation lies in brains. But Plato rushes on. Not only may everything be brought under a concept, an Idea, but it may be brought under a perfect Form, an Ideal. Things are not what they might be. Men are not such as men might be, states are often sorry states, beds might be more ideal beds, even dirt could be more perfectly dirt. To all things that are, there correspond perfect Ideals of what they might be, in a thoroughly harmonious world. To say that these Ideals are real, that they exist, is only to claim for them that they are operative, and get results. Whether his supernaturalism was only part of his political theory, others may dispute; let it suffice us at present that Plato believed that the Ideals could and did operate through human agency. The distinctive thing about man is that perceiving the thing that is, he can conceive the thing that might be. He is the forward-looking, ideal-making animal; through him, if he but will it, proceeds creation. The brute may be a thinker, but man may be also an artist. Out of the abundance of the sexual instinct (as Plato implies in the Symposium) emerges this ideal-seeking and -making quality; from which come art and ethics and religion. William Morris looks at a slum and conceives Utopia; and forthwith begins to make for Utopia even though the road lead him through a jail. Is it that William Morris loves “humanity”? Not at all; he loves beauty and his dream; he is uncomfortable with all this dirt and despair before him; it is his fortune or misfortune that he cannot see these slums without falling thrall to a vision of better things. So with most of us “reformers”: we wish to change things, not because we love our fellows much more than “conservatives” do, nor because we believe that happiness varies with income; but because we hear the call of the beautiful, and see in the mind’s eye another form wherein the world might come more pleasingly to sight.

What we have to do, says Plato, is to make people conceive a better world, so that they may see this world as ugly, and may strive to reshape it. We must conceive the perfect Forms of things, and batter this poor world till it reform itself and take these perfect shapes. To learn to see—and seeing learn to make—these perfect Forms: that is the task of philosophers. To make philosophers: that is the social problem.

III
On Making Philosopher-Kings

IT is simple, isn’t it? Give us enough philosophers, and the beautiful city will walk out of the picture into the fact. But how make philosophers? And perhaps there is a perfect Form for philosophers, too? How shall we “see—and seeing learn to make”—the perfect philosopher?

Let us not worry about this little matter of dialectics, says Plato; we know quite well some of the things we must do in order that we may have more and greater philosophers. It is quite clear that one thing we must do is to give our best brains to education.

Is that trite? Not at all. Do we give our best brains to education? Do we offer more to our ministers or commissioners of education than to our presidents, or governors, or mayors, or bank presidents, or pugilists? Or do we honor them more? When Plato says that the office of minister of education is “of all the great offices of state the greatest,” and that the citizens should elect their very best man to this office,[24] he is not pronouncing a platitude, he is making a radical, a revolutionary proposition. It has never been done, and it will not soon be done; for men, naturally enough, are more interested in making money than in making philosophers. And yet, says Plato, gently but resolutely, we may as well understand that until we give our best brains to the problem of making philosophers our much-ado about social ills will amount to noise and wind, and nothing more. “How charming people are!” he writes, drawing an analogy between the individual and the body politic; “they are always doctoring—and thereby increasing and complicating—their disorders, fancying they will be cured by some nostrum which somebody advises them to try,—never getting better but always growing worse.... Are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at legislation, and imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind, not knowing that they are in reality cutting away at the heads of a hydra?”[25]

Notice that the aim of the educational process is, for Plato, not so much the general spread of intelligence as the discovery and development of the superior man. (This conception of the task of the educator appears again and again in later thought: we hear it in the nineteenth century, for example, in Carlyle’s “hero,” Schopenhauer’s “genius,” and Nietzsche’s “superman.”) It is very naïve, thinks Plato, to look to the masses as the source and hope of social improvement; the proper function of the masses is to toil as cheerfully as may be for the development and support of the genius who will make them happy—so far as they are capable of happiness. To aim directly at the elevation of all is to open the door to mediocrity and futility; to find and nurse the potential genius,—that is an end worthy the educator’s subtle art.

Now if you are going to discover genius in the bud you must above all things handle your material, at the outset at least, with tender care. You must not overflow with prohibitions, or indulge yourself too much in the luxury of punishments. “Mother and father and nurse and tutor set to quarrelling about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand them: he cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that unjust, this honorable and that dishonorable, this holy and that unholy, do this and don’t do that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood.”[26] Suppress here, and you get expression there;—often enough, abnormal expression. Better have no hard mould of uniformity and conformity wherein to crush and deform each differently aspiring soul. Think twice before forcing your ’isms and ’ologies upon the child; his own desires will be your best curriculum. “The elements of instruction,” writes Plato, in a too-little-noticed passage, “should be presented to the mind in childhood, but without any notion of forcing them. For a freeman ought to be a freeman in the acquisition of knowledge. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; that will better enable you to find out the natural bent.”[27] There is a stroke of Plato’s genius here: it is a point which we laggards are coming to after some two thousand three hundred years. “To find out the natural bent,” to catch the spark of divine fire before conformity can put it out; that is the beginning and yet the summit of the educator’s task,—the initium dimidium facti.