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IN DEFENSE OF PLATO

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The Attack on Plato

It would be difficult to specify any major constituent in the vast complex of our cultural tradition that has not, within recent years, been described as standing "at the crossroads,"

having arrived at the "hour of decision," or confronting its "crisis." Chris-tianity, education, capitalism, individualism, democracy — such is notoriously true of them all, and the list could easily be extended. In such circumstances, it would, indeed, have been strange had Plato escaped challenge; it could only have signified that he had lost all interest to the modern world.

The most casual survey of recent popular and semipopular Platonic litera-ture makes it clear that he has not escaped. The sun of Plato's unquestioned supremacy, as the sublime moralist, the god among philosophers, the son of Apollo, if not set, is at the moment thickly overclouded; Cicero's famous preference for being wrong with Plato, as against being right in any other company, is, to say the least, not the majority view. Plato, in these latter days, has been violently assailed by many sturdy liberals for his hostility to progres-sive and democratic ideals. Worse, he has been acclaimed and appropriated by some friends of totalitarianism, as the philosophical father of· dictatorship. And over and above these political defamations, his claims to affinity with the higher spiritual ideals of our culture have been repudiated.

If such detractions do not, on first hearing, cause a certain shock, the reason may be partly because the artillery of our thunderous times has put our more sensitive reaction mechanisms out of order. The more substantial reason, however, may be that most of us have rather forgotten how highly Plato had been enthroned between the cherubim of Western culture. There have, natu-rally, been occasional voices raised in dissent. In ancient times, there were the cynic snarls of Diogenes, and the gibes of Lucian, and the malevolent gossip of Athenaeus.1 Among the moderns, Bacon disparaged what he understood as Plato's high-flying way of speculation; Voltaire ridiculed the Greek philosopher "who invented Christianity without knowing it" ; Landor has an imaginary

1 Anti-PIatonism in antiquity is further commented on in n. 30, p. 407.



4 IN D E F E N S E OF P L A T O

conversation in which Plato is bitterly assailed through the mouth of his ancient detractor Diogenes and charged with almost all the crimes which later critics were to list on the anti-Platonic calendar; Macaulay, in his essay on Bacon, pulls down the placards of Platonic "Truth," "Beauty," and "Good," and replaces them by bright Baconian banners inscribed with the watchwords of scientific progress and the curing of all human ills. And here may be added the more moderate dissents of some accredited scholars of the middle and later nineteenth century, such as Grote and Zeller, who deplored the authori-tarian element in Plato's thought, or regarded his political philosophy as distorted at certain points by the prejudices of its author's social station.

But this derogation did not constitute a serious threat to Plato's good name. For such critics as Landor and Macaulay, though intending annihilation, spoke without authority; while those who, like Grote and Zeller, possessed sufficient prestige, were desirous only of setting right certain errors, falling within a general framework of philosophic argument for which, as a whole, they pro-fessed a profound respect.

Against these scattered critics was the collective voice of generations, reenforced by the most distinguished among contemporary specialists in each generation. In England, for example, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge forgot their historic differences in their agreement on this point. There were Cambridge Platonists, such as Henry More and the formidable Ralph Cud-worth, who fused Platonism and Christian ethics as a potent instrument to destroy the groveling materialism and brutish egoism which they saw focused in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. The Cambridge Platonists were supplied with abundant precedents in the Christian Platonists of ancient Alexandria, in Saint Augustine, and in the Florentines of Renaissance times.

At Oxford •—· to go no further back than the mid-nineteenth century — Benjamin Jowett was inspiring a whole generation of gifted pupils with en-thusiasm for Plato, whom he conceived as "the father of Idealism," whose truth, though it "may not be our truth . . . nevertheless may have an extraor-dinary value and interest for us." In the essays prepended to his translations of the dialogues, and in the graceful and often impressive rhythms of the trans-lations themselves, the thought of Jowett's "poet of ideas" was broadcast throughout the English-speaking world. For the first time the English reader could feel that Plato was an open book, invitingly, even inspiringly, readable, and sympathetic with the deeper moral aspirations of Christendom.

Meanwhile within the same university, but inhabiting a very different universe, Walter Pater was presenting to a small number of the elect his more secular though hardly less imposing version of Plato, published in the cadenced periods of Plato and Platonism in 1884. Here Plato appears essentially as the great seer of beauty, the true founder of that cult of harmonious living of which Pater himself was at once practitioner and priest. Much that the earlier poets, from Spenser to Shelley, had suggested of the aesthetic glamor of Plato's phi-



THE ATTACK ON PLATO 5

losophy of Love and Beauty, together with what such social reformers as Ruskin and William Morris had just been saying about the high importance for the perfection of the human soul of the shapes and colors that surround it, all this was brought together in Pater's book and through the congenial quality of his style was made effective to all who found Pater's aesthetic sublimations an attractive alternative to the traditional religion.

On our side of the Atlantic, too, Platonism did not lack its altars. Its central temple, it need scarcely be said, was at Concord; Emerson was its most inspired, if not at all times orthodox high priest. Reading his Plato first, perforce, for the most part in the inaccurate and neo-Platonized demi-English translations of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, he inevitably received Plato's thought dis-torted at certain points. The wonder rather is, as the reader of the earlier essay on Plato in Representative Men may well feel, how Emerson could have found so much inspiration in the Platonic light that struggled through these obscuring clouds.2

What Emerson thought he saw in Plato was, in his own words, nothing less than philosophy itself: "Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato." "Out of Plato," he tells us, "come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought." "Great havoc makes he among our originalities."3 These imposing generalities Emerson was not the man to document in detail, but he will consent to tell us some, at least, of the grounds of Plato's greatness.

To begin with, there was Plato's moral grandeur. Emerson discovered in him "a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and in the Phaedo, to piety"; "he has a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity."4 Plato imparts to his account of moral excellence a geometric quality of precision and definition, becoming thus "the Euclid of holiness."5

Emerson, like Pater, though to him it is less central, finds in Plato a music of ideas: "His writings have . . . the sempiternal youth of poetry"; and Emerson goes so far as to declare that "poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus." 6

But the crown of Plato's excellence as philosopher, and Emerson's chief reason for putting him among the representative men as the thinker par excel-lence, was his power of combining in the integrity of his metaphysical vision the two opposite poles of Reality: the one and the many, or, as Emerson pic-turesquely called them, Asia, the principle of unlimited and undifferentiated Being, and Europe, the principle of diversity, of bounded difference. "The won-

2 Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), as the only complete English translator of Plato before the Bohn Library, influenced many other philosophical men of letters, includ-ing Coleridge and Shelley, by his accent on the mystical element in Plato, and by his conviction, insisted upon in his extensive commentaries, that the dialogues should be

given the arcane theosophical interpretation imposed upon them by the later generations of neo-Platonists.

* Representative Men, 1876, pp. 39-40. 1 Ibid., 57-58. 'Ibid., p. 87. 'Ibid., 88-89.




derful synthesis so familiar in nature . . . the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every object . . . was now also transferred entire to the con-sciousness of a man. The balanced soul came." 7

The full measure of Emerson's appraisal of Plato's greatness is set forth with truly devout emotion in the concluding paragraphs of the essay:

Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. . . . How many ages have gone by and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, . . . it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest seen, when seen with the most respect. . . . The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.8

This slight sketch could, given sufficient time and knowledge, be amplified into a five-foot shelf. But from that part of the story that has here been told, it is evident that in dealing with Plato, one has to do with a thinker whose ideas have penetrated to the very core of our culture and have since the Renais-sance at least become integral parts of our literary and philosophic tradition.

Whoever will grant what has just been said, and to whom it appears credible that even a tithe of the veneration lavished upon Plato has been well bestowed, can hardly fail to feel some degree of concern over the present crisis in Plato-nism. To do so, the friend of Plato need have no wish to see him defended against the whole spirit of modern philosophy, still less rehabilitated into the standard of philosophical orthodoxy for all time. It is enough to believe that his writings may still be looked to as an unexhausted source of exciting intel-lectual experience from which genuine insights may still be gained, and to deprecate the arrival of a generation who will regard Plato with hostility and contempt, and hence will misread him or leave him unread.

But has this fixed star in the firmament of history in fact fallen? That is the basic question set for us by the present temper of the world as reflected in the recent literature about Plato. The question is large, indeed formidable, and at this stage of our discussion, unanswerable, unless we are to delude ourselves with opposing dogmatisms. Our first business must be to give a full and im-partial hearing to the case against Plato, as it has been urged in its greatest strength by his latter-day enemies in the English-speaking world. We cannot, of course, bring into our court all those who have witnessed against Plato in the recent literature; we shall, however, seek to omit no important charge. Our formal discussion will be chiefly concerned with four writers who have given extended expression to their views, but we shall occasionally turn aside to meet the criticisms of others, wherever their importance requires it.

In the early thirties of our century, there fluttered down upon the heads of Plato's admirers a slender and apparently innocuous volume by that witty and versatile if eccentric man of letters, the late John Jay Chapman, a book with

7 Ibid., 54-55. 'Ibid., 78-79.




a title rather bigger than itself: Lucian, Plato and Greek Morals.9 This all but unnoticed attack upon the Platonic stronghold will serve as well as any other as a not wholly arbitrary starting point for our history and appraisal of recent anti-Platonism. Since Macaulay's trenchant critique of Plato in his essay on Bacon, it would be difficult to find anything in English or American literature to compare with the deadliness of Mr. Chapman's intent to destroy Plato as a philosopher. Coming as it did just prior to a whole sequence of blasts and counterblasts, it may not unreasonably be considered as a sort of unconscious declaration of what has threatened to become almost a world war over the Platonic philosophy.

Chapman sustains with grace and verve the paradoxical thesis that the roles assigned by philosophical tradition to Plato and to Lucian, respectively, should be reversed. It is Plato, not Lucian, who must henceforth be regarded as the essentially playful, ironic, morally and logically unscrupulous entertainer; it is Lucian and not Plato whom we are to honor as the pure and ardent moralist-reformer whose brilliant intellect and prophetic insights require us to accord him "a high place among the thinkers of modern Europe."

This spirited if, one might suggest, somewhat hyperbolical estimate of "the Voltaire of antiquity" is the milder half of Chapman's paradox; it could have startled none but the uninformed. Few of Chapman's readers, however, could have been prepared to receive without shock the bland demotion of Plato from the rank of philosophic thinker to that of literary artist, deviser of "drawing-room diversions," and "prince of conjurors." And they might well have asked whether Chapman really meant what he said when, in speaking of the praise of love in Plato's Symposium, he branded it "the most effective plea for evil that one can point to or recall."

The plain answer is that Chapman meant what he said, every word of it, in spite of some playful talk in his introduction, wherein the author, in ironical self-depreciation, compares himself to a child scratching his nurse, and pres-ently exhorts himself and his readers to be "ignorant, nimble, and enthusiastic." He is announcing with all the force at his disposal that Plato, the King of Thought, is dead, and completing the formula by adding a viva for Plato the Prince of Conjurors.

Thus far we have merely stated the rather strange conclusions that Chapman has reached concerning Plato. It remains, in fairness, to show briefly the sort of evidence that he has adduced in their support. The "formula" of the pre-ceding paragraph suggests the two captions under which the material may con-veniently be disposed. We consider first the refutation of Plato the great philosopher.

There has been, Chapman charges, a species of conspiracy among the

" Lucian, Plato and Greek Morals, 1931. Page references to passages quoted from the detractors will not be given in this chapter,

but will be supplied in our later discussion of specific criticisms.



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learned and devout (from whose ranks have arisen the British and American editors and commentators upon Plato) to "regard Plato as an authority on Divine Truth," and with the aid of Christian theology and mysticism to read into him a "hieratic interpretation" presumed to reveal a "sacred depth" of meaning. This attitude inhibits the attempt to consider first, as in the light of the historical background one ought, "the obvious meanings" of such a docu-ment as the Symposium. Pursuit of this neglected method has persuaded Chap-man of the absurdity of those idealizing interpreters who imagine they have discovered in Plato a foreshadowing of the great mysteries of Christian love, the fruitio Dei, and Dante's transfigured passion for the heavenly Beatrice.

We must pause here to acknowledge the satiric skill with which our anti-Platonist has pictured (or caricatured) the incongruous results of these efforts to hold Plato within the boundaries of Christian doctrine. He has asked us to contemplate the truly ludicrous image of "Mr. Jowett, of Oxford," who, con-fronted by Plato's intractably pagan doctrine of love, "seizes the bull by the tail and is dragged round and round the field by him, sometimes catching at a post of Christian doctrine as it flashes by, sometimes trying to steer the bull by a gallant stubbing of his own toes against a yielding mound of middle class humbug."

The efforts of these well-meaning toreadors are vain, Chapman concludes. The truth is that the Symposium cannot be construed into the sublime, devoted as it is to an exploitation of pederasty "as a source of harmless jollification." Its purpose is not to "adumbrate a philosophy" but to praise "a particular practice. . . . The final palinode of Agathon in honor of 'love' is a call not to thought but to action." The claim of the Symposium upon our serious, phil-osophical attention thus disposed of, Chapman gives vent to his distaste for what he feels to be the "strangely heavy" atmosphere in which the dialogue is wrapped, and the repugnance aroused in him by the speech of Diotima, who wears the "thin disguise of Plato himself," and the other "odious characters," all, like "the room itself" stinking "of the poppy."

Confirmation of Plato's lack of moral seriousness Chapman finds in Plato's total inability to grasp the import of that great and grave moralist, whom nevertheless he loved and admired, Socrates. Relying on Xenophon's Memora-bilia as an honest soldierly account of the historical Socrates, Chapman finds in most of the Platonic dialogues only a phantom, lacking the solid dimensions and the iron will of his original. When face to face with a serious moral ques-tion, Socrates advanced on instinct to the attack; Plato sidestepped and covered his incompetence with brilliant but irrelevant brocades.

We are given also a spirited attack upon Plato, the reputed master of logi-cal method. Plato's celebrated dialectic turns out, under the Chapman touch-stone, to be merely a species of equivocation, a pretty and ingenious game of verbal shift and quibble, the object of which was, again, entertainment. Plato is thus assimilated and reduced to the lowest class of fourth-century sophist,



T H E ATTACK ON PLATO 9

the eristics, whose antics (though Mr. Chapman does not tell us this) Plato has himself satirically depicted in his dialogue the Euthydemus. We are asked to remember the joy that the Greeks, from Homeric times onward, took in subtlety and cunning of every kind, that they were the original inventors of "mock trials, imaginary orations, sophistries, paradoxes," et id genus omne, "each of which ended with a laugh and a quiet walk in the public garden." Some crucial passages from several of the dialogues, the Gorgias, Phaedo, and Crito, are submitted to brief analysis, with special emphasis on their pretense of demonstration, their internal inconsistency, and their contradictions one with another. Truth, we are to conclude, is not the object of a Platonic dialogue, but merely one of its ingredients, to be sparingly employed lest too liberal an application should upset the delicate equilibrium of light and shade.

It is creditable to Chapman's impartiality as a critic that his virulent con-demnation of the Symposium and his denial of Plato's very existence as a philosopher have not proved fatal to his appreciation of Plato the literary artist. He can even pay tribute to the conclusion of the Symposiumi "one of the supreme finales in all literature," and characterize the prison scenes in the Crito and Phaedo as "charming essays, well-imagined and beautiful." In the Phaedo, too, he recognizes "a picture by a great artist, wherein everything is falsified, and yet, as in a picture, everything is true." Observe that even amidst these civilities, Chapman will not permit the reader to forget that Plato's lit-erary achievement was at the price of his philosophy.

Nor will he let Plato's purely literary defects go unnoticed. He attacks him at one capital point, claiming that his mastery of the dialogue form is radically defective, sinking, for lack of a character internal to the dialogue and repre-senting the author's point of view, into something below the level of the dra-matic, "a journal intime of scholarly rumination." Thus, in spite of his con-cessions, Chapman, in his estimate of Plato's literary art, as in his judgment of Plato as thinker, stands, on balance, as the detractor and the anti-Platonist.

Three years after Chapman's book, appeared The Platonic Legend by the veteran moralist and professor of philosophy at Princeton, Warner Fite.10

This book reports and attempts to document a "discovery": after years of reading Plato in the light of the "idealistic tradition," he happened one day to question his impression that the scheme of education provided by Plato in the Republic excluded the ordinary citizens. Pursuing this hint, and relying on the results of his own inquiries, he found his impression confirmed. More, as he continued his investigation, weighing off his own reading of Plato's text against the significance attributed to it by Plato's recent admirers, among them Dean Inge, A. E. Taylor, and Paul Shorey — the "disciples," as Fite delights to call them — he discovered grounds for general "doubt and suspicion

10 The Platonic Legend, 1934.




with regard to orthodox interpretation." For now quite another Plato stood before his eyes, a Plato shorn of the inspiration, the infallibility, the divine perfections with which the "disciples" had endowed him, a figure of human proportions, shaped and limited by the historical forces of his day, whose thought was not only bounded by inevitable human limitations, but distorted by partisan prejudice and the small passions of personal embitterment. The objective of the book before us is, then, to "dismiss the idea of a divine revela-tion, and to treat the words of Plato, if possible, as we should treat the words of any other writer," to destroy "the legend of Plato . . . the consummate artist, . . . the shrewd interpreter of human nature, the stern and lofty moral-ist, and even of Plato the good Christian." He will touch Plato's metaphysics as lightly as possible, though they are inevitably involved in the general de-bacle; what is left of them, in Fite's opinion, is chiefly a "landmark," valuable for purposes of orientation to travelers in the realm of philosophic thought. It is Plato's social and ethical doctrine that the book seeks directly to demolish, and along with this, all claims in behalf of Plato's superlative greatness in any department of life or thought.

In presenting Fite's views on these topics, we may seem to imply that all he has said is scheduled for later refutation. On the contrary, it must be em-phasized that we shall see reason in our sequel to accept many of his specific criticisms and objections, though this will not entail assent to his more extrav-agant interpretations. Our summary must also inevitably be defective in failing adequately to convey the atmosphere of cynical disparagement in which his whole discussion moves. Fite has a pretty but mordant wit and a ruthless facility in the caricaturist's art of seizing upon an unlovely feature and making it the center of the physiognomy portrayed, neither of which we can hope properly to reproduce.

For the reader's convenience, we shall tabulate Fite's principal conclusions, and in view of their negative relation to the claims of Plato's "disciples," claims which Fite everywhere sardonically exhibits as the first step in his intended demolition of the master, we shall cast them in the form of denials, as follows:

1. It is denied that Plato's Republic contemplates the ideal of maximal happiness and self-development for all the citizens. The community does not offer, save for negligible exceptions, a "career open to talents." It is run in the interests of a small privileged leisure class, say, 10 per cent of the population, guided by the arrogant and esoteric wisdom of a still smaller minority within this, I per cent, at the cost of the exertion and sacrifice of the despised and cynically befooled 90 per cent of the citizens. The goal of all this striving is not the humane fullness of a richly cultural existence, which his native Athens could have taught him to love; it is the largely Spartan ideal of a closely regimented state, a stratified caste society, its members carefully bred to type, their quality ruthlessly main-tained by infanticide; it is organized largely for the practice of the military virtues, if not for conquest.

2. It is denied that either in the Republic or elsewhere in the dialogues does Plato show any anticipation of the Christian, Kantian, democratic sense of the value and dignity of the individual. He fails to discern the very nature of personality, as we conceive it, and the conditions for the development of genuine moral freedom. Even his philosopher kings




are impersonal beings; the mass of the citizens are creatures guided only by habit and fear of consequences. "Plato's . . . ideal of a society . . . is then a city of children," in which the small number of "enlightened philosophers" are "the only persons . . . who enjoy an adult status." Plato's suggestion in the Gorgias that it is better to suffer than to do injustice, is only superficially in accord with the Christian ideal, resting in reality on prudential considerations of what is materially advantageous in the long run.

3. Plato is far from having anticipated modern sentiment in the relation between the sexes: his conception of marriage is vitiated by the impersonality of the stock-breeder; he had no notion of marriage as a partnership of mutual respect. In this he fell below the standard of his own time and clime.

4. Fite repeats and amplifies Chapman's denial that the Platonic philosophy of "Eros," as expounded in the Symposium and Phaedrus, admits of the soaring mystical interpreta-tion that Plato's admirers have traditionally imposed upon it. On the contrary, Plato is accepting and glorifying a refined form of sexual perversion, an institution disapproved by the majority of his own contemporaries, and on occasion is condoning and waxing facetious over even its grosser forms.

5. It is denied that Plato had depth of insight into values. Plato labored under the great illusion that it is possible to apply to the moral life a standard of metrical precision which would replace the insights of experience. In so far as such measurement is success-ful, it reduces moral choice to a species of mathematical calculation. But the method is inapplicable, and Plato's attempt to give it logical and metaphysical support through the never clearly defined procedure known as "dialectic," terminates in mystical obscurity. Plato's conception of social good is so coldly scientific, so intimately dependent on minutely regulated, centrally directed order, that despite differences, it approaches most nearly the iron-clad system of Soviet Russia. The same standpoint applied to aesthetic values results in the reduction of beauty to the single impoverished type of abstract mathematical form.

6. It is denied that Plato is a sovereign master of the logic of argument. He is con-stantly guilty of fallacies, which the disciples explain as "playful" and deliberate. But this sort of playfulness is often a dishonest debater's trick. And even when he is most serious, as in the Republic passage about the divided line, we find him falling into elementary errors of reasoning. The conclusion must be that his power and integrity as reasoner have been grossly overrated.

7. It is denied that Plato possessed a high degree of economic and political wisdom. His scorn of industry and of trade is visible throughout the Republic; his plan of the ideal state is not to be contaminated with even the theoretical consideration of such things. The city of the Laws is to be planted far enough from the sea to discourage trade, his under-standing of which "does not . . . extend beyond the first chapter." As to international politics, Plato, with his backward gaze fixed upon the doomed sovereign city state, was unable to see that the crying need of his times was for federation. In fine, "Plato's political ideals, in the Republic or in the Laws, are resolutely and bluntly parochial. . . . It would be strange in any case if Plato had anything to tell the modern world about statesmanship."

8. It is denied that Plato has any place among the great masters in the world of art. He would not have been comfortable in such a seat among those for whom he habitually expresses his lively contempt and whom he rates, if the poets be taken as representative, as lowest in the hierarchy of reincarnated souls save for manual workers, sophists, and tyrants. Some artistic achievements stand to Plato's credit, a number of scenes and metaphors; but these are episodic. He has nothing to put beside Hamlet and Don Quixote. Many of the dialogues, including the Republic, far from being finished masterpieces, bear the marks of hasty and careless assembling. Plato is further guilty of shocking incongrui-ties that mar his best effects; witness the anticlimax of the discussion of rhetorical types that follows the myth of the charioteer in the Phaedrus; witness also the radical incon-gruity of introducing the simple austere Socrates into the artificial scenery of Athenian high life in the Symposium and making him confide his most intimate thoughts to a group of perfumed dandies. The truth is (here Fite stands with Chapman) that his art is too often a thing of mere artifice and decoration, or a method of ironical evasion of issues. It may be remarked in passing that Fite is of two minds regarding the historical Socrates, sometimes suggesting that he was a great liberal and experimental intelligence whom the



12 IN D E F E N S E OF PLATO

illiberal Plato was incapable of representing fairly, and again presenting Socrates as implicated, along with his disciple, in sophistical dishonesty and posturing mock humility, behind which a colossal arrogance is only half concealed.

9. And finally, Fite denies that Plato was significant either as a man or as a practical moralist. He was "not quite a man . . . his point of view and his attitude towards life were very largely what would today be called adolescent, not to say childish, and what has traditionally been called 'feminine.'" Plato was "a defeated aristocrat" who put "class and party first"; when his claim to personal leadership was rejected, he reacted by injured indignation. These traits are brought into high relief by his impractical and undignified Sicilian adventures in the education of the young tyrant Dionysius, upon whom he inflicted lessons in geometry as a foundation for his wise exercise of royal power, and at whose pretensions to philosophic wisdom, after he had rejected Plato's tutelage, the great phi-losopher permitted himself to display irritation and jealousy. Believing that of all possible conceptions of the human good only one can be right, Plato is intolerant of any insight but his own. His pessimism and distrust of his fellow men reveals his superficial conception of human motivation. "His one idea of morality is self-restraint; for his imagination is haunted by scenes of debauchery, illustrated unwittingly, and only faintly, by his own Symposium." His total inability to appreciate the aspirations of common men, the humble significance of the intimacies of their daily lives, his exclusively intellectual conception of a spiritual life "to be carried on in terms of logic and mathematics on behalf of imper-sonally 'great' ends," all this prompts the conclusion that "of all the writers of antiquity he is," so far from being Christian, "the most characteristically and explicitly 'pagan'."

Thus far our report may seem to have spoken as if Platonism and anti-Platonism were matters exclusively determined by the disinterested decisions of individual scholars, due allowance being made for their personal predilec-tions and temperaments. But without commitment to a thoroughgoing deter-ministic theory of intellectual history, we must remind ourselves of the un-blinkable fact that by no miracle of immunity has Platonic scholarship re-mained untouched by the deeper currents of historical change. Recent anti-Platonism is an outstanding case in point. One might say, without serious exaggeration, that during the decade of the thirties, the interpretation of Plato became a branch of economic and political, not to say, even, of military history. During these years when Fascism was hurling its imposing challenge to the democracies, it was inevitable that the coming war should cast its ideological shadow upon the interpretation of Plato, and that an international Streit um Platon should result, by comparison with which the issues raised by Fite were reduced to the proportions of a tempest in an academic inkpot.

It was now suddenly realized, no longer by a minority but by all thought-ful readers, and with a new sense of its full implications, that Plato in the Republic had raised in its most radical form the problem of leadership, and as it seemed to many, had advocated as a governmental ideal a pattern of political organization and social control that stood much nearer to dictatorship than to the Lockean program of government by consent of the governed. Fascist propagandists and their counterparts in Soviet Russia were quick to perceive the value to their respective causes implicit in the august name of



T H E A T T A C K O N P L A T O 13

Plato.11 As a consequence, the defenders of democracy presently began to dis-sociate themselves f rom so dubious an ally; in such a storm it seemed a dictate of elementary prudence to lighten their vessel by casting overboard this ill-omened prophet whom in an evil hour, mistaking him for one of themselves, they had let come aboard.

Out of the controversy emerged, among others,12 a book in which the politi-cal philosophy of Plato was closely inspected to disclose its bearing on the then current conflict of political ideals. This is Plato Today, by R. H. S. Crossman, a one time Oxford Fellow who already, at the date of publication in 1939, was an active member of the British Labour Party, of whose social philosophy he became one of the leading defenders. With his University background and the foreground of his political experience, Mr. Crossman brings to the study of Plato a rare and, one might say, truly Platonic set of qualifications, which have set their mark upon the book. Crossman's major interest, as Reinhold Niebuhr remarks in the foreword, is "in relating Platonic political insights to political issues." And Niebuhr adds his conviction that the book is "a valuable con-tribution to contemporary political thought as well as to an understanding of Plato's Athens."

How, then, does Crossman stand in relation to our central interest? He has been listed here in a sequence of Plato's all but unqualified opponents. Does the gravamen of his book confirm the complaints of Chapman and Fite? Does it array him with the defenders of democracy against a supposedly fascistic Plato ? The answer must be "yes," with some important reservations.

Crossman holds that Plato was wrong, both for his times and for ours, at several major points in his political program, and that the modern world would be dangerously wrong in following the direction he sees indicated in the Re-public, away f rom free popular government and toward the thoroughgoing regimentation of society by benevolent aristocrats possessed of supposedly final wisdom. Had Crossman halted his critique at this point, it would be doubtful wisdom to classify him as an anti-Platonist. Few indeed, even among Plato's most ardent admirers, would regard the Republic, thus literally taken, as a model for contemporary use. Crossman, however, steps across the line. His anti-Platonism is rendered almost inevitable by his initial assumption that in the political organization of Plato's ideal city we find the sum and substance of its author's recommendations for the Greek world of his day. Crossman's further condemnation of Plato (and by corollary of contemporary efforts to draw instruction f rom the Republic) is expressible in the following theses, maintained explicitly or by clear implication in his book: (1) that the institu-

1 1A consideration of the voluminous lit-erature lies beyond the boundaries of our discussion. Further mention of it is made on p. 441 below.

12 See Appendix I, p. 583 ff., which dis-

cusses the work of another Platonic detrac-tor, A. D. Winspear, author of The Genesis of Plato's Thought, 1940, and the criticism of Plato contained in Toynbee's Study of History, 1934-1939.




tional structure of the ideal city, without basic changes and far-reaching adaptations, was intended by Plato for immediate imposition upon actual com-munities of ordinary mortals; (2) that in reorganizing these communities, assigning to some of their inhabitants hereditary power, to others permanent subordination, Plato would have followed no higher principle than that of aristocratic class prejudice; and (3) that Plato would have sanctioned the employment, wherever expedient, of the most repellent weapons in the arsenal of political power.

On the other hand, as we shall see, Crossman regards Plato with a very considerable respect, both as writer and as thinker, construing him as a man of great ability and uncommonly good will, sincerely devoted to furthering the general happiness. There is also a sense in which, for all his criticisms, Crossman is himself a Platonist malgri lui. We find him sharing Plato's con-viction that in the human soul, awaiting only discovery and consistent devel-opment, there is implanted a type and standard of justice in accordance with which the life of individuals and community should find their guidance and their rule. True that for Plato those human souls which are capable of awaken-ing of their own initiative, and of holding fast the vision, are the few gifted natures, while Crossman cherishes the Christian faith that all men are potential possessors of this spiritual energy. Both men are committed to the sovereignty of reason in human affairs, as against the prescriptions of custom or the claims of superior power, Crossman, indeed, going so far as to urge upon a democrat the necessity of abandoning such a fundamental article of faith as belief in representative government, if reason and experience condemn its actual value in terms of its contribution to human good. And finally, from their separate standpoints, both men clearly see the extent to which economic and other social institutions underlie and condition the operation of human society and draw the identical conclusion that all such institutions must be subordinated to the authority of a moral ideal.

Throughout his book Crossman preserves to a remarkable degree his judi-cial poise, and though he has decided views of his own regarding the points at issue, he is misled only on rare occasions into special pleading and the use of an envenomed vocabulary.

Crossman prepares his reader for the understanding of Plato's thought by sketching in the background of several centuries of Greek economic and politi-cal change. The life of Plato was cast in a period when the city state had fallen into corruption, and politics had degenerated into ugly strife between equally unprincipled rival factions, while the whole Greek world was threatened from without by the rising empires of Carthage, and subsequently of Macedon. In Athens, Socrates, by questioning and discrediting the beliefs of his fellow citizens in the interests of an as yet undefined higher morality, had still further undermined social stability. Plato, seeing the moral corruption about him, undertook as his life's mission the discovery of this new higher morality, to



T H E A T T A C K ON P L A T O 1 5

which Socrates had but pointed, and the development of its consequences for politics, along lines which he wrongly believed Socrates would have approved.

Crossman now addresses himself to describing the tragically mistaken direction in which Plato turned. Being an aristocrat, and scorning the mean employments and pettinesses of the common man, Plato could not hope for a regeneration of the state through a moral awakening of the mass of the citizens. Instead, he dreamed of the restoration of the feudal organization of society, under the absolute control of the existing aristocracy, when once this had been morally reeducated, intellectually enlightened, and imbued with a spirit of dedication to the happiness of all the citizens. The Spartan constitution, with modifications designed to make it an instrument for the general good, would furnish the ground plan for the model state. Plato's own part would be the founding of a university, the Academy, to disseminate this political ideal, and to serve as the training ground for the new governing elite which should pro-vide philosophic rulers for the Greek world. Crossman thus depicts Plato as a practical reformer, convinced of his own rightness and steeled to adopt any measures necessary to bring to his fellow Greeks the benefit of his wisdom; the Republic, a book admirably frank and fair in dealing with the reader, is his program of action.

Crossman next imagines the author of the Republic as visiting Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and Germany, in 1939. In each country, Plato is represented as examining the national life to determine its ends and values, and as disapproving materialism or barbarism, wherever, as in Amer-ica, Russia, or Germany, either of these appears to displace the philosophic aim, the virtue and consequent true happiness of the people. But Crossman also depicts Plato as in each country approving, or recommending for im-mediate introduction, the existence of a small governing class specially trained for political responsibility, and the continued or newly instituted total exclusion of the ordinary citizen from all participation or interest in government. Plato is made to admire the various "noble lies" (Crossman's Plato constantly uses the phrase) by which the common people are deluded into believing what those who wield the actual power wish them to believe: namely, in America and Great Britain, and even in Russia, that the common people themselves have a voice in the government; in Germany, that all ideas and actions which its rulers reprobate are sinister Jewish machinations. Crossman's Plato does demand that the universities where the ruling class is trained must be left untrammeled in their pursuit of the truth, not turned into propaganda mills for inculcating the blind and brutish beliefs of those who now wield power; yet he would also wholly approve the use of violence and murder, as in Germany and Russia, provided only these were employed for nobler ends. In a chapter on modern marriage, Crossman shows Plato set-ting a correct value on sex as an element in truly personal love between kindred spirits, and credits him with having perceived rightly the necessity




of a new type of marriage and sex morality for any social group in which women are to be the equals of men. Of these elements, then, as Crossman con-ceives it, is composed Plato's message for our time.

Returning to antiquity, Crossman describes Plato's failure to benefit in any way the Greek world of his time, and then analyzes this failure and the uselessness of Plato's message in general, as due to three cardinal errors: Plato's premature despair of the potentialities of the common man; his mis-taken belief that a just government can be established by revolution; and his conviction that the final truth can be discovered, and that freedom of thought ought thereafter to be suppressed. Crossman's own faith is in the power of reason and the infinite possibility of self-development of every man; and on the strength of this he would have us alter any governmental form and break down every orthodoxy; in the world today, "it is Socrates, not Plato, whom we need."

This, then, is Crossman's final condemnation of a Plato to whose merits he has nevertheless so honorably borne witness. Though Crossman would no doubt deprecate the sentiment, it is difficult to suppress a word of regret that so enlightened and appreciative a student of Plato should have taken an official position on the opposition benches.

By far the most systematic, detailed attack upon Plato's metaphysical, moral, and political thought is that of K. R. Popper, comprising the first part of his extensive work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which first ap-peared in 1945.13 Professor Popper is second to none in his determined op-position to what he regards as the essential Plato; he announces his general agreement with Crossman's strictures, departing from him only in order to go further in the same direction. It is Popper's claim to have revealed, more clearly than any previous writer, the uncompromisingly totalitarian character of Plato's thought.

The plan of our book will not permit a continuous exposition and exam-ination, point by point, of Popper's arguments; we shall consider them separately, under distinct captions, in conjunction with the arguments of the other critics. This, unless we exercise special care, may be unjust to the author of a volume so notable for its systematic character. We shall accordingly attempt in the following outline of his argument to balance this disadvantage by special attention to its logical connectedness.

It may be well to begin with a brief statement of the conclusions reached: Plato was seeking a way to escape from the dangerous instability and moral

" A second and revised edition, Prince-ton, 1950, has appeared during the process of preparation of this book, and to this all references will be made. Care has also been directed to bringing all quotations and com-

ments into line with Popper's new version. The changes he has introduced into the new edition will be discussed in n. 17, p. 21 below.



T H E A T T A C K ON P L A T O 17

uncertainties of the society in which he lived, an escape into the security of a tribalistic "closed society," in which stability is at a maximum, the interest of the group as a whole becomes the absolute criterion of value, and the life of the individual is rigidly subordinated at all points to tribal prescriptions and taboos. Plato's motivation was psychological: resentment of change, class prejudice, scornful distrust of the common man's capacity for self-direction, and — inconsistently — the desire to benefit the common man by relieving him of strain; the reasons he adduced in support were metaphysical and in-volved the subordination of moral choice and political action to the supposed laws of historical decay. Plato believed that there had actually existed an aboriginal political state of all but Utopian perfection, to which it was yet possible by a bold reimposition of autocratic rule to effect a return. His Republic is to be read not as innovating speculation concerning untried future idealities, but as his serious attempt to reconstruct, as literally as possible, a state which had, he believed, actually existed in the bright morning of the primal day.

Popper's attack upon Plato is the negative aspect of his own positive con-viction, which motivates his entire book, that the greatest of all revolutions is the transition from the "closed society" to the "open society," an association of free individuals, respecting each other's rights within the framework of mutual protection supplied by the state, and achieving, through the making of responsible, rational decisions, a growing measure of humane and enlightened life.

Popper sees in the Athenian democracy of the latter part of the fifth cen-tury a society that was for the first time in history emerging into relative "openness." The Periclean ideal, as expounded in the famous Funeral Oration, constituted its charter, which was supplemented by the thought of a brilliant group of champions of equalitarian individualism and humanitarianism, in-cluding Herodotus, Protagoras, and other outstanding sophists, and Socrates, "perhaps the greatest individualist of all times." These men were breaking down the old barriers, intellectual and moral, and pointing the way forward.

Opponents of the new order, however, remained, the political party of the oligarchs, the privileged or formerly privileged classes of Athens, desirous of regaining the power they had enjoyed before the establishment of the democratic constitution. It was not the excesses of the democracy, inflamed by the reckless rhetoric of the demagogues, Popper would have us believe, but the oligarchic Spartophiles, who by their disloyalty, sabotage, and on occasion outright treason, encompassed the ruin of their native city, the defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404 B.c., which only a revived democracy was able partially to make good.

How, then, did Plato stand in relation to this struggle between reaction and the progressive movement of his time? Popper leaves us in no doubt, if we are to trust his reading of the record: Plato stood, however unwillingly,




on the side of reaction. Scion of an aristocratic family with strong oligarchic affiliations, he was early indoctrinated with the love of Sparta, the worst features of which, un-Athenian infanticide and harshness to slaves and under-lings, awakened in him no repugnance. The noble achievements of his native Athens he mocked and denied. Though brought for a time by the powerful moral magnetism of Socrates under the sway of humanitarian, individualist sentiments, he was unable to keep the faith. Frustrated by the turn of political affairs, he found no outlet in the world of action for those consuming ambi-tions which remained with him to the end. The dark struggle in Plato's soul between the Socratic faith and his growing treason to its principles accounts for the "spell of Plato," lending a hitherto unexplained fascination to his writings. For the record of Plato's thought, as Popper reads it, is a story of continuous degradation, in which the noble Socratic gospel, as Plato has sympathetically reported it in the Apology, the Crito, and others of the earlier dialogues, is gradually and treasonably perverted, against the inner protest of Plato's better self, into the poisonous crypto-totalitarianism of the Republic, with its scorn for all that the real Socrates had held dear and its dishonest attribution to him of a dogmatic authoritarianism which blasphemed the memory of the modest and cautious doubter; finally it is transformed into the "theory of inquisition" elaborated in the Laws, a polity in which Socrates would, with Plato's full approval, have met the death penalty for presuming to exercise the freedom of rational inquiry.

Popper insists that he does not see in Plato the merely dishonest propa-gandist for the reactionary cause; Plato, he tells us, was dishonest, but he was so in the interests of a cause in which he honestly believed. His hatred of democracy, even his very misanthropy, Popper believes, are not inconsistent with a strangely twisted and abstract love of his fellow Greeks and a zealous wish to procure for them the greatest happiness of which he believed them capable. The grounds upon which this interpretation proceeds will appear from the following exposition of Popper's analysis of Plato's positive beliefs.

At the very base of Plato's social philosophy Popper thinks he has dis-covered a species of fatalism, to which he gives the generic name of "his-toricism." Historicists are all those who believe that the final determiner of the conditions of human existence and the principles of value is a certain nonhuman, self-moving, and (with varying degrees of qualification) inevitable law of historical change. In the modern world Hegel and Marx in their re-spective fashions are examples of what Popper's term denotes. But these men thought of history as a process of forward motion, a vehicle of continuous advance. Plato, on the contrary, is an evolutionist in reverse; from the really perfect eternal Form (the Platonic idea, conceived as a dynamic "primo-genitor"), was born the first and natural, and all but perfect state. This state, Popper asserts, was for Plato no mere ideal, but an actual historical com-munity, from which, through successive stages of increasing badness, the vil-




lainous political systems of Plato's own day had been derived. Thus, in Popper's view, Plato imagined himself to be in possession not only of a true conception of how the historical process operates, but more importantly, he thought he had in hand a method of reading off, without further labor of thought or anxiety of conscience, the true scale of values relevant to appraising a human community.

But this knowledge left him still in the domain of bare theory; the facts needed for its practical application were still to seek. Where could the social archaeologist discover concrete examples to help him reconstruct and then preserve the ideal state of the past? Popper credits Plato with bringing great sociological insight and historical imagination to bear upon the solution of this problem. First, Plato arrived by analysis of recent Greek history at the conviction that at the beginning of every revolution, and hence at the very heart of social change, will be discovered a division of economic interest within the ruling class. Plato had here a principle of which, as will soon be apparent, he was to make full use. To this a second principle was added. Casting a shrewd eye about him, Plato noted that among contemporary Greek states were some which, like Crete and Sparta, possessed characteristics which stamped them as survivors from an earlier and hence more perfect time. A third principle, biological and eugenic, completed the theoretical frame. This was the fabrication, by Plato himself, of an occult number lore capable of regulating the quality of all human offspring.

The conditions for a solution of Plato's problem were now clear: he must note and combine the vestigial traces in the ancient constitutions of Crete and Sparta into a whole which, with the addition of the one modern element of Plato's number wisdom, in proportion as it achieved unanimity within its ruling class, would acquire the perfection of the primordial perfect state, and, essential ingredient and preserver of perfection, its stability. Plato himself, sole possessor of the eugenical number and descendant of ancient Attic royalty, would be its rightful Philosopher King, guardian of the purity of its "master race."

The result of these inquiries — the picture of a closed society, kept closed by all the totalitarian devices of censorship, propaganda, racism, autarky, and, for the ruling classes, thoroughgoing communism of wives, children, and property — Plato presented to the world in a cunning disguise of con-sciously falsified Socratic rationalism and pretended love of truth and justice as his Republic.

The preceding summary has conveyed an inadequate measure of Popper's wide and detailed acquaintance with many fields of thought, and it has only suggested his unqualified commitment to liberal and democratic ideals, to the defense of which the entire work is dedicated. It is the more unfortunate that the mistaken zeal of the crusader has, paradoxically, denatured his learning and his good will, the learning passing into a technique for perverting Plato's



20 I N D E F E N S E O F P L A T O

basic meanings and distorting the whole context of his life and thought; the good will passing, by uneasy alternations of attitude, now into moral indigna-tion, now into suspicion or distaste, and on occasion, into what one of his reviewers has called the "rage to blame." 1 4

We may see this process at work in Popper's handling of one particular weapon of debate. In spite of the high rating one must accord his initial in-tention of fairness, his hatred for the enemies of the "open society," his zeal to destroy whatever seems to him destructive of the welfare of mankind, has led him into the extensive use of what may be called terminological counter-propaganda. Instances abound. Does Plato speak of his guardians, in the Republic, under the image of shepherds caring for the human flock? Popper, seeing in this only an analogue to modern propagandist deception, translates and transforms the human flock into "human cattle," and by dint of many a repetition of the phrase, fastens upon Plato's guardians an indelible smear.15

The duties and responsibilities of the guardians appear uniformly as their

u Richard Robinson, mingling praise and blame in his extensive review of The Open Society and Its Enemies ("Dr. Popper's Defense of Democracy," 1951).

In this connection a brief review of Popper's reviewers may be in place. The extreme diversity of the reviews makes gen-eralization difficult, but the following state-ments are offered as a conscientious first approximation. The book has been well, in some quarters even enthusiastically, re-ceived. Almost all reviews have spoken of its extensive and varied learning and its obvious friendship to the cause of individu-alistic liberalism. One eminent authority in the domain of Platonic studies, Lord Lind-say, in 1945 welcomed the book as "excit-ing" and "illuminating," and expressed the wish that it might be widely read; the treat-ment of Plato he regarded as unfair, though conceding that "there is a good deal in the indictment" that Plato had proposed a too strictly regimented society on the Spartan model. With a few exceptions in Popper's favor, however, it is noticeable that review-ers possessed of special competence in par-ticular fields — and here Lindsay is again to be included — have objected to Popper's conclusions in those very fields. Social sci-entists and social philosophers have de-plored his radical denial of historical causa-tion, together with his espousal of Hayek's systematic distrust of larger programs of so-cial reform; historical students of philoso-phy have protested his violent polemical handling of Plato, Aristotle, and particu-

larly Hegel; ethicists have found contradic-tions in the ethical theory ("critical dual-ism") upon which his polemic is largely based. It will be noted, then, that Popper's attack on Plato cannot be said to have con-vinced the majority of his best qualified judges. Yet the partial accord his views have won justifies submitting them to the more inclusive and detailed consideration our sequel will supply.

15 Popper has acknowledged his indebt-edness to Toynbee for this conception of "human cattle" (Popper, op. cit., p. 498). He has, however, made it fully his own by intensification and the implication of sinis-ter motives. In Toynbee's hands the phrase was disparaging, indeed, but as a reader of Toynbee's parallel discussion of the Otto-man Turks (Toynbee, III, pp. 26-48) will perceive more figurative, and not intended to carry the implication, which Popper has even made explicit, of deliberate exploita-tion of a despised subject population (Pop-per, pp. 47-52). Toynbee at most is charg-ing Plato (Toynbee, III, pp. 90-99) with sponsoring a benevolently intended ant-col-ony, in which producers and warriors are so fully identified with their social functions as to impair their individual human charac-ter, and which was destined to gravitate into an oppressive system in which the gov-erning directors would inevitably become parasites upon the exploited animals be-low. — It is true that with his characteris-tic inconsistency toward Plato, Toynbee on one occasion, in unconscious anticipation




"prerogatives" or "privileges." Those citizens whom Plato admits to his city as able to serve only by bodily strength, are labeled, in what purports to be a direct quotation from Plato, as "drudges," though Plato used a milder word (diakonoi) perhaps best translated as "servitors." 1 6 Nor is Plato allowed a myth to be told to all the citizens, including the guardians, about their common birth from the soil and their distinctive differences, typified by the different metals mixed into their souls, without Popper's interposing between us and the just appreciation of Plato's parable, out of the Nazi lexicon, the slogan "Blood and Soil." Such language is doubtless sincere, but only with the sincerity of the partisan, and invites the unwary to draw mistaken inferences of the first magnitude.1 7

of Popper, goes the whole way, and speaks (Toynbee, I, pp. 247-9) of Plato's 'myth of the metals' as if Plato were a cynical puller of propagandist wires in the inter-ests of racialism; we shall have occasion to deal with this charge of Toynbee's and of Popper's in a later section; see p. 430 below.

l aSo Shorey renders it, Republic 371 D, Loeb Library. It can also be translated "agents" (so Lindsay, A.D., Everyman Li-brary edition, p. 50), or by the Latin word ministri. Cf. n. 72, p. 168 below.

17 See n. 266, p. 357, for an instructive example.

Popper's new edition, or rather that portion of it which deals with Plato, em-bodies numerous changes, most of which raise no new issue, being merely exten-sions and corroborations of views pre-sented in the first edition. Three new fea-tures, however, deserve comment, (a) Popper has included reference (pp. 485-6) to several authors whom he has found to have expressed views similar to his own. These are Bowra, Fite, Winspear, and Kel-sen, with whom the present book will have occasion to deal, and B. Farrington; only with the latter does Popper give warning that he substantially disagrees. Popper's implication that his own view tallies closely with those of the other writers named must be taken to indicate, especially in view of the inclusion of Winspear (see our Appendix I, p. 583), that the essential point of agreement is condemnation or unfavorable criticism of Plato; he does not consider it necessary to reject the support of writers who, like Kelsen, Win-

spear, and to some degree Fite, subject Socrates to the same destructive criticism. Yet Popper's whole interpretation of Plato the man, the reactionary betrayer of the faith of the Great Generation, may be said to depend on the contrast which he draws between Socrates and Plato. These authors in this respect support not Popper, but our own position, in that they show Plato's thought as continuous with that of Soc-rates; though we should combine this be-lief not with the joint condemnation in all major respects of both, but with an attempt to show that both were admirable men, whose thought can still be drawn upon for enlightenment, (b) Additional arguments (discussed on pp. 462 and 463, below) have been introduced in support of the thesis that Plato was ambition-ridden and secretly lusting for power. Popper has abated none of his conviction that hidden psychic abnormalities are to be detected in Plato, has indeed heightened the sup-posed contrast between Socratic modesty and Platonic self-exaltation, (c) Correc-tions have been made, removing erroneous statements of fact which in the first edi-tion served to underprop essential parts of Popper's argument. Three of these errors, of great importance respectively, as we shall show, for Plato's attitude to racial-ism, state worship, and the idealization of the past, have been removed, without caus-ing Popper in any case to make the neces-sary modification in his interpretation as a whole. (Cf. n. 45, p. 519 below, for ref-erences to document this statement.) Thus the major issues raised by the first edition, stand.




Our summary statement of the detractors' views is now complete, and we shall in due course undertake our detailed reply. But if the hearing is to be fairly conducted, an initial disadvantage to Plato's cause must be noted and offset: We who read, and those who have arraigned Plato as the enemy of the democratic ideal in some or all of its many aspects are, after all, partners in a common faith, standing together on a platform of convictions and aspira-tions developed through the centuries, that brings us into a closer relation to each other than can without effort be established between ourselves and any thinker of the ancient world. We are told that this ancient philosopher Plato attacked our common faith, and our hostility is on the alert. It is of some value merely to recognize this fact at this point in our discussion. In ensuing chapters we shall make it a principal part of our business to surmount the ob-stacle of the years and, although we shall not find in Plato a spokesman of all our values, we shall hope in the light of a closer imaginative sympathy with the cultural situation in which his life was cast to reach a more informed and impartial judgment of what he taught, and still can teach.

But were not most readers left a little breathless by the variety and viru-lence of the accusations? Who would have thought the old man had so much bad blood in him? Defamer of his native Athens, betrayer of his master Socrates, racist, statist, propagandist unabashed, equivocating, man-hating, boy-loving, frustrated aristocratical snob — one was prepared for an imputa-tion that the marble statue had feet of clay; we hear, instead, that it is com-posed entirely of mud.

The observant reader may well intervene at this point to say that it is unfair to charge all the chargers with imputing to Plato this whole catalogue of crimes, when even Popper has not included them all, and has, moreover, qualified the blackness of his indictment by including a stray ray or two of benevolent intention on Plato's part. The objection is valid in so far as purely logical considerations are concerned, but it does not take account of the subtler danger. Charges have a way of adding themselves up in a susceptible mind, and even mutually inconsistent charges are capable of psychologically reenforcing each other, when once receptivity to the guilt of a defendant has been established.

A closer examination of the four sets of charges will, in point of fact, reveal an ironical parallel to the situation which Fite describes as existing among those "idealistic" interpreters of Plato, the fabricators of the "Platonic legend," a situation which he turns against their credibility as witnesses. He diverts his readers with the comic spectacle of a Dean Inge finding in Plato a spokesman for the "inner light," after the Dean's own Quakerish fashion, and an A. E. Taylor recreating Plato in the highly admired composite image of a medieval mystic and a Hebrew prophet.

Less diverting, perhaps, but logically of at least equal and opposite weight, is the counterpicture that could be painted of the detractors of Plato, among



T H E A T T A C K ON P L A T O 23

whom this same procedure is visible in reverse. To Fite, whose moral world revolves about the central axis of personality, Plato's primal lack is his failure to value the uniqueness of the individual. And Popper, understandably enough, sees the Nazi terror lurking at every turn in Plato's thought.

Plato's attackers, also, not content with variety, add a note of mutual contradiction. Thus, we hear Fite deploring the perverse and brutish attitude of Plato towards sexual relations, and Crossman extolling Plato's good taste and practical moral wisdom in this realm. Again, while Fite denies that there is any touch of moral idealism to redeem the prudential spirit of calculation in the Gorgias, Popper is busy interpreting the same dialogue as evidence that Socrates, and not his betrayer Plato, could come close to the very spirit of the Christian gospels.

We have here a situation not wholly dissimilar to that contemplated in the opening paragraph of Augustus De Morgan's delightful dissection of mathe-matical fallacies, the Budget of Paradoxes. The passage is here reproduced, prefaced by an urgent disavowal of what may appear to be the condescending implications of the analogy:

If I had before me a fly and an elephant, having never seen more than one such magni-tude of either kind; and if the fly were to endeavour to persuade me that he was larger than the elephant, I might by possibility be placed in a difficulty. The apparently little creature might use such arguments about the effect of distance, and might appeal to such laws of sight and hearing as I, if unlearned in these things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand such flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quad-ruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and each one despis-ing and opposing the reasons of the other — I should feel quite at my ease. I would certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest.18

The purpose of the just-cited analogy must not be missed. It is, admittedly, a tu quoque ad hominem, spoken by one fly to a swarm of others, beseeching the whole species to be content with a less pretentious buzz. For all that the logic of analogy can tell us, several of us flies may be uttering at least some portion of the truth, and it is conceivable that one is the oracle of unqualified verity. The most that can be validly inferred from the differences of opinion among the various critics and admirers of Plato is the logical impossibility that he can be guilty of all the crimes, or possess all the excellences, that have been ascribed to him. In any case, each specific claim has a right to be con-sidered on its merits, unprejudiced by the company it keeps. This justice we shall seek to secure for our opponents.

In giving priority of consideration to the attack upon Plato we may inad-vertently have confirmed the general impression that recent Platonic litera-ture is uniformly a literature of dissent. The truth is rather that the dissenters have had a decided advantage in the contest for the public ear. For theirs was

18Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes 1872, (sub initio).



24 I N D E F E N S E O F P L A T O

the more newsworthy story, of all but yellow journalistic appeal: "Ancient Attic Sage Exposed." This is the contemporary "Platonic legend," and at this writing, bids fair to have established itself firmly in the general mind.1 9

It is therefore easy to forget the quality and extent of the literature that continues vigorously to maintain the questioned thesis of Plato's greatness and relevance to the problems of our times. The name of Werner Jaeger comes first to mind; his Paideia, bearing lightly its load of historical and philosophical learning, is easily the outstanding exhibit here. Jaeger's thought, however, from the very nature of his enterprise •—• the tracing of the develop-ment of the Greek ideal of culture in all its aspects — moves largely within the ambit of the ancient world, and seldom descends from its Olympian de-tachment to discuss the transcultural values of Greek thought.

At the other pole from Jaeger in this respect is John Wild, whose Plato's

18 An image of a "contemporized" Plato, viewed as if in a distorting mirror, is pre-sented by Sherwood Anderson in the pref-ace to his play about Socrates, Barefoot in Athens, 1951, and was supplied by him also to readers of the New York Times for October 28, 1951 ("Notes on Socrates," Drama Section, p. 1), by way of helping his prospective audiences to view the play, then opening on Broadway, in the desired perspective. When a dramatic artist gives his documented reasons justifying his in-terpretation of history, he has, by that act, forfeited the protection of his dramatic license. It would be impossible to expose the misconceptions to which Anderson stands sponsor, short of summarizing in advance the entire argument of the present volume. Suffice it to say here that the An-dersonian version of Plato plainly bespeaks a close and docile reading of Popper, de-parting from this author in almost nothing but to make more explicit and to translate, one may say, into the vernacular, Popper's most savage imputations. That Anderson's new-found distrust of Plato did not, as he implies (Barefoot in Athens, p. vii), arise solely from his own troubled reexamina-tion of Plato, assisted only by the chron-ological ordering of the dialogues achieved by Platonic scholars — that Anderson did not, as it might appear, stumble independ-ently on the self-same "obvious" truths which had previously been uncovered by Popper — is shown clearly by the other-wise incredibly close parallel in sentence structure and thought pattern between Anderson's p. ix and Popper's p. 44; An-derson has even gone so far as to set in

quotation-marks, as if they were verbatim utterances of Plato, sentences paraphrased direct, with some resulting inaccuracies, from Popper's already slightly distorted quotations from the Platonic text (see, e.g., our n. 228, p. 340). Anderson accord-ingly presents to the readers of his play a Plato who is the sinister advocate of "a communistic and brutal dictatorship," "maintained . . . by a ruthless use of as-sassination" (pp. ix, xii), and who dis-honestly attributes these ideas to the lib-eral, intensely democratic and individual-ist Socrates; this Plato also advocates most of the other evils and commits most of the other faults found in him by Popper. (It is fair to note that Anderson has also added some errors of his own, e.g., his con-fusion, on p. x, of the institutions of Plato's Laws with those of the Republic, and his naive citation of a notoriously spurious Xenophontic letter to Xanthippe.) In his Times article, Anderson presented a similarly underhanded Plato, a "homo-sexual" who championed what was, in practical terms, only a "dictatorship of thugs," prepared to employ without scru-ple "murder and torture." Since Brooks Atkinson, reviewing this play on the corre-sponding page of the Times for November 11, 1951, twice praises it as revealing Ander-son's customary careful "scholarship" — an opinion which may impose itself also upon many other readers of Anderson's learned-sounding preface — it is the more important to show the extent to which Anderson has derived from Popper the discolored Plato he presents.




Theory of Man cuts itself boldly free from the historical moorings of Plato's thought, and attempts, with great dialectical agility, to construct out of Plato's scattered insights the basis for a philosophy of culture, valid for every place and time. Thus Wild, in the interests of what he calls "greater philosophical precision," waives all consideration of the "archaic" questions that concern Plato's relation to Greek society of his period, leaving these to the philologists, and brushes aside in one footnote the whole contemporary literature of attack. The result is a book which, though of great interest and value as evidence of the vitality of the Platonic stimulus and its bearing on the cultural problems of our times, has not chosen to concern itself with meeting the precise attack with which the friends of Plato are currently faced.2 0

The two examples chosen from among the living friends of Plato may serve to suggest the justification for the present book. We have no wish to save Plato from the consequences of any fair accusation. But it is our conviction, born perhaps of tradition, but confirmed by long and anxious thought, that the attack upon Plato has passed the bounds of just criticism. In this crisis, the friends of Plato must not be content proudly to ignore the insolence of the attackers; neither can they further Plato's cause merely by erecting brilliant dialectical structures in his name. They must meet the new charges on their own grounds, accept of the indictment what in conscience they must, repel what in honor they can, confident that in such service they are remaining true to the noblest moral insights of their own epoch and at the same time to the spirit of their master. The furtherance of these aims is, then, the proper business of this book.

20 The two mentioned from among Plato's present-day supporters and ad-mirers serve as examples, illustrative of the direct study and evaluation of Plato's thought; no implication is intended that they stand alone. We shall have occasion on later pages to refer to the work of such men as Morrow and Cherniss, who have testified to the good sense and uprightness of the man, and to the philosophical co-herence, subtlety, and fertility of his thought; and the list could be vastly ex-tended.

It is also true that defense of Plato, of the sort here intended, has been made, though to our knowledge only on a smaller scale. As examples, we may cite the article, "On Misunderstanding Plato," by Profes-sor G. C. Field, 1944, and chapter X, "Plato Today," in his Home University Library volume, The Philosophy of Plato, 1949. Professor Field is protesting, against Crossman, Hogben, and others, the unwis-dom and injustice of setting Plato in modern perspective and identifying the re-

sulting distortion with the actual Plato. Unfortunately, we became acquainted with Professor Field's defense of Plato in these two works only after the present book was largely written, but it is none the less pleasant to acknowledge in him an able and distinguished ally.

Other defenders of Plato, at least against Popper's extreme attack, include two philosophers who have figured among his more notable reviewers: Richard Robin-son, mentioned on p. 20, who dissociates himself from the authoritarian element in Plato's thought and from Plato's tendency, as he views it, to exalt the state, but pro-tests sharply against Popper's ascription to Plato of malevolence and fraud, racial-ism and other assorted totalitarian traits; and H. D. Aiken, to whom we shall later refer (p. 475), who has some vigorous and eloquent words to say in defense of "the Socratic Plato, for whom the polar ideals of order and freedom, . . . individual con-science and public opinion . . . have their inviolable rights."



in defense of plato () || 1. the attack on plato

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