General Remarks. The text of the book is self-contained and may be read without these Notes. However, a considerable amount of material which is likely to interest all readers of the book will be found here, as well as some references and controversies which may not be of general interest. Readers who wish to consult the Notes for the sake of this material may find it convenient first to read without interruption through the text of a chapter, and then to turn to the Notes.
I wish to apologize for the perhaps excessive number of cross-references which have been included for the benefit of those readers who take a special interest in one or other of the side issues touched upon (such as Plato’s preoccupation with racialism, or the Socratic Problem). Knowing that war conditions would make it impossible for me to read the proofs, I decided to refer not to pages but to note numbers. Accordingly, references to the text have been indicated by notes such as: ‘cp. text to note 24 to chapter 3’, etc. War conditions also restricted library facilities, making it impossible for me to obtain a number of books, some recent and some not, which would have been consulted in normal circumstances.
* Notes which make use of material which was not available to me when writing the manuscript for the first edition of this book (and other notes which I wish to characterize as having been added to the book since 1943) are enclosed by asterisks; not all new additions to the notes have, however, been so marked.*
For Kant’s motto, see note 41 to chapter 24, and text.
The terms ‘open society’ and ‘closed society’ were first used, to my knowledge, by Henri Bergson, in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Engl. ed., 1935). In spite of a considerable difference (due to a fundamentally different approach to nearly every problem of philosophy) between Bergson’s way of using these terms and mine, there is a certain similarity also, which I wish to acknowledge. (Cp. Bergson’s characterization of the closed society, op. cit., p. 229, as ‘human society fresh from the hands of nature’.) The main difference, however, is this. My terms indicate, as it were, a rationalist distinction; the closed society is characterized by the belief in magical taboos, while the open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence (after discussion). Bergson, on the other hand, has a kind of religious distinction in mind. This explains why he can look upon his open society as the product of a mystical intuition, while I suggest (in chapters 10 and 24) that mysticism may be interpreted as an expression of the longing for the lost unity of the closed society, and therefore as a reaction against the rationalism of the open society. From the way my term ‘The Open Society’ is used in chapter 10, it may be seen that there is some resemblance to Graham Wallas’ term ‘The Great Society’; but my term may cover a ‘small society’ too, as it were, like that of Periclean Athens, while it is perhaps conceivable that a ‘Great Society’ may be arrested and thereby closed. There is also, perhaps, a similarity between my ‘open society’ and the term used by Walter Lippmann as the title of his most admirable book, The Good Society (1937). See also note 59 (2) to chapter 10 and notes 29, 32, and 58 to chapter 24, and text.
For Pericles’ motto, see note 31 to chapter 10, and text. Plato’s motto is discussed in some detail in notes 33 and 34 to chapter 6, and text.
1. I use the term ‘collectivism’ only for a doctrine which emphasizes the significance of some collective or group, for instance, ‘the state’ (or a certain state; or a nation; or a class) as against that of the individual. The problem of collectivism versus individualism is explained more fully in chapter 6, below; see especially notes 26 to 28 to that chapter, and text.—Concerning ‘tribalism’, cp. chapter 10, and especially note 38 to that chapter (list of Pythagorean tribal taboos).
2. This means that the interpretation does not convey any empirical information, as shown in my The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
3. One of the features which the doctrines of the chosen people, the chosen race, and the chosen class have in common is that they originated, and became important, as reactions against some kind of oppression. The doctrine of the chosen people became important at the time of the foundation of the Jewish church, i.e. during the Babylonian captivity; Count Gobineau’s theory of the Aryan master race was a reaction of the aristocratic emigrant to the claim that the French Revolution had successfully expelled the Teutonic masters. Marx’s prophecy of the victory of the proletariat is his reply to one of the most sinister periods of oppression and exploitation in modern history. Compare with these matters chapter 10, especially note 39, and chapter 17, especially notes 13–15, and text.
* One of the briefest and best summaries of the historicist creed can be found in the radically historicist pamphlet which is quoted more fully at the end of note 12 to chapter 9, entitled Christians in the Class Struggle, by Gilbert Cope, Foreword by the Bishop of Bradford. (‘Magnificat’ Publication No. 1, Published by the Council of Clergy and Ministers for Common Ownership, 1942, 28, Maypole Lane, Birmingham 14.) Here we read, on pp. 5–6: ‘Common to all these views is a certain quality of “inevitability plus freedom”. Biological evolution, the class conflict succession, the action of the Holy Spirit—all three are characterized by a definite motion towards an end. That motion may be hindered or deflected for a time by deliberate human action, but its gathering momentum cannot be dissipated, and though the final stage is but dimly apprehended, …’ it is ‘possible to know enough about the process to help forward or to delay the inevitable flow. In other words, the natural laws of what we observe to be “progress” are sufficiently … understood by men so that they can … either … make efforts to arrest or divert the main stream—efforts which may seem to be successful for a time, but which are in fact foredoomed to failure.’*
4. Hegel said that, in his Logic, he had preserved the whole of Heraclitus’ teaching. He also said that he owed everything to Plato. *It may be worth mentioning that Ferdinand von Lassalle, one of the founders of the German social democratic movement (and, like Marx, a Hegelian), wrote two volumes on Heraclitus.*
1. The question ‘What is the world made of?’ is more or less generally accepted as the fundamental problem of the early Ionian philosophers. If we assume that they viewed the world as an edifice, the question of the ground-plan of the world would be complementary to that of its building material. And indeed, we hear that Thales was not only interested in the stuff the world is made of, but also in descriptive astronomy and geography, and that Anaximander was the first to draw up a ground-plan, i.e. a map of the earth. Some further remarks on the Ionian school (and especially on Anaximander as predecessor of Heraclitus) will be found in chapter 10; cp. notes 38–40 to that chapter, especially note 39.
* According to R. Eisler, Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, p. 693, Homer’s feeling of destiny (‘moira’) can be traced back to oriental astral mysticism which deifies time, space, and fate. According to the same author (Revue de Synthèse Historique, 41, app., p. 16 f.), Hesiod’s father was a native of Asia Minor, and the sources of his idea of the Golden Age, and the metals in man, are oriental. (Cp. on this question Eisler’s forthcoming posthumous study of Plato, Oxford 1950.) Eisler also shows (Jesus Basileus, vol. II, 618 f.) that the idea of the world as a totality of things (‘cosmos’) goes back to Babylonian political theory. The idea of the world as an edifice (a house or tent) is treated in his Weltenmantel.*
2. See Diels, Die Vorsokratiker, 5th edition, 1934 (abbreviated here as ‘D5’), fragment 124; cp. also D5, vol. II, p. 423, lines 21 f. (The interpolated negation seems to me methodologically as unsound as the attempt of certain authors to discredit the fragment altogether; apart from this, I follow Rüstow’s emendation.) For the two other quotations in this paragraph, see Plato, Cratylus, 401d, 402a/b.
My interpretation of the teaching of Heraclitus is perhaps different from that commonly assumed at present, for instance from that of Burnet. Those who may feel doubtful whether it is at all tenable are referred to my notes, especially the present note and notes 6, 7, and 11, in which I am dealing with Heraclitus’ natural philosophy, having confined my text to a presentation of the historicist aspect of Heraclitus’ teaching and to his social philosophy. I further refer them to the evidence of chapters 4 to 9, and especially of chapter 10, in whose light Heraclitus’ philosophy, as I see it, appears as a somewhat typical reaction to the social revolution which he witnessed. Cp. also the notes 39 and 59 to that chapter (and text), and the general criticism of Burnet’s and Taylor’s methods in note 56.
As indicated in the text, I hold (with many others, for instance, with Zeller and Grote) that the doctrine of universal flux is the central doctrine of Heraclitus. As opposed to this, Burnet holds that this ‘is hardly the central point in the system’ of Heraclitus (cp. Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed., 163). But a close inspection of his arguments (158 f.) leaves me quite unconvinced that Heraclitus’ fundamental discovery was the abstract metaphysical doctrine ‘that wisdom is not the knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of warring opposites’, as Burnet puts it. The unity of opposites is certainly an important part of Heraclitus’ teaching, but it can be derived (as far as such things can be derived; cp. note 11 to this chapter, and the corresponding text) from the more concrete and intuitively understandable theory of flux; and the same can be said of Heraclitus’ doctrine of the fire (cp. note 7 to this chapter).
Those who suggest, with Burnet, that the doctrine of universal flux was not new, but anticipated by the earlier Ionians, are, I feel, unconscious witnesses to Heraclitus’ originality; for they fail now, after 2,400 years, to grasp his main point. They do not see the difference between a flux or circulation within a vessel or an edifice or a cosmic framework, i.e. within a totality of things (part of the Heraclitean theory can indeed be understood in this way, but only that part of it which is not very original; see below), and a universal flux which embraces everything, even the vessel, the framework itself (cp. Lucian in D5 I, p. 190) and which is described by Heraclitus’ denial of the existence of any fixed thing whatever. (In a way, Anaximander had made a beginning by dissolving the framework, but there was still a long way from this to the theory of universal flux. Cp. also note 15 (4) to chapter 3.)
The doctrine of universal flux forces Heraclitus to attempt an explanation of the apparent stability of the things in this world, and of other typical regularities. This attempt leads him to the development of subsidiary theories, especially to his doctrine of fire (cp. note 7 to this chapter) and of natural laws (cp. note 6). It is in this explanation of the apparent stability of the world that he makes much use of the theories of his predecessors by developing their theory of rarefaction and condensation, together with their doctrine of the revolution of the heavens, into a general theory of the circulation of matter, and of periodicity. But this part of his teaching, I hold, is not central to it, but subsidiary. It is, so to speak, apologetic, for it attempts to reconcile the new and revolutionary doctrine of flux with common experience as well as with the teaching of his predecessors. I believe, therefore, that he is not a mechanical materialist who teaches something like the conservation and circulation of matter and of energy; this view seems to me to be excluded by his magical attitude towards laws as well as by his theory of the unity of opposites which emphasizes his mysticism.
My contention that the universal flux is the central theory of Heraclitus is, I believe, corroborated by Plato. The overwhelming majority of his explicit references to Heraclitus (Crat., 401d, 402a/b, 411, 437ff., 440; Theaet., 153c/d, 160d, 177c, 179d f., 182a ff., 183a ff., cp. also Symp., 207d, Phil., 43a; cp. also Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 987a33, 1010a13, 1078b13) witness to the tremendous impression made by this central doctrine upon the thinkers of that period. These straightforward and clear testimonies are much stronger than the admittedly interesting passage which does not mention Heraclitus’ name (Soph., 242d f., quoted already, in connection with Heraclitus, by Ueberweg and Zeller), on which Burnet attempts to base his interpretation. (His other witness, Philo Judaeus, cannot count much as against the evidence of Plato and Aristotle.) But even this passage agrees completely with our interpretation. (With regard to Burnet’s somewhat wavering judgement concerning the value of this passage, cp. note 56(7) to chapter 10.) Heraclitus’ discovery that the world is not the totality of things but of events or facts is not at all trivial; this can be perhaps gauged by the fact that Wittgenstein has found it necessary to reaffirm it quite recently: ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’ (Cp. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921/22, sentence 1.1; italics mine.)
To sum up. I consider the doctrine of universal flux as fundamental, and as emerging from the realm of Heraclitus’ social experiences. All other doctrines of his are in a way subsidiary to it. The doctrine of fire (cp. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 984a7, 1067a2; also 989a2, 996a9, 1001a15; Physics, 205a3) I consider to be his central doctrine in the field of natural philosophy; it is an attempt to reconcile the doctrine of flux with our experience of stable things, a link with the older theories of circulation, and it leads to a theory of laws. And the doctrine of the unity of opposites I consider as something less central and more abstract, as a forerunner of a kind of logical or methodological theory (as such it inspired Aristotle to formulate his law of contradiction), and as linked to his mysticism.
3. W. Nestle, Die Vorsokratiker (1905), 35.
4. In order to facilitate the identification of the fragments quoted, I give the numbers of Bywater’s edition (adopted, in his English translation of the fragments, by Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy), and also the numbers of Diels’ 5th edition.
Of the eight passages quoted in the present paragraph, (1) and (2) are from the fragments B 114 (= Bywater, and Burnet), D5 121 (= Diels, 5th edition). The others are from the fragments: (3) B 111, D5 29; cp. Plato’s Republic, 586a/b … (4): B 111, D5 104 … (5): B 112, D5 39 (cp. D5, vol. I, p. 65, Bias, 1) … (6): B 5, D5 17 … (7): B 110, D5 33 … (8): B 100, D5 44.
5. The three passages quoted in this paragraph are from the fragments: (1) and (2): cp. B 41, D5 91; for (1) cp. also note 2 to this chapter; (3): D5 74.
6. The two passages are B 21, D5 31; and B 22, D5 90.
7. For Heraclitus’ ‘measures’ (or laws, or periods), see B 20, 21, 23, 29; D5 30, 31, 94. (D 31 brings ‘measure’ and ‘law’ (logos) together.)
The five passages quoted later in this paragraph are from the fragments: (1): D5, vol. I, p. 141, line 10. (Cp. Diog. Laert., IX, 7.) … (2): B 29, D5 94 (cp. note 2 to chapter 5) … (3): B 34, D5 100 … (4): B 20, D5 30 … (5): B 26, D5 66.
(1) The idea of law is correlative to that of change or flux, since only laws or regularities within the flux can explain the apparent stability of the world. The most typical regularities within the changing world known to man are the natural periods: the day, the moon-month, and the year (the seasons). Heraclitus’ theory of law is, I believe, logically intermediate between the comparatively modern views of ‘causal laws’ (held by Leucippus and especially by Democritus) and Anaximander’s dark powers of fate. Heraclitus’ laws are still ‘magical’, i.e. he has not yet distinguished between abstract causal regularities and laws enforced, like taboos, by sanctions (with this, cp. chapter 5, note 2). It appears that his theory of fate was connected with a theory of a ‘Great Year’ or ‘Great Cycle’ of 18,000 or 36,000 ordinary years. (Cp. for instance J. Adam’s edition of The Republic of Plato, vol. II, 303.) I certainly do not think that this theory is an indication that Heraclitus did not really believe in a universal flux, but only in various circulations which always re-established the stability of the framework; but I think it possible that he had difficulties in conceiving a law of change, and even of fate, other than one involving a certain amount of periodicity. (Cp. also note 6 to chapter 3.)
(2) Fire plays a central rôle in Heraclitus’ philosophy of nature. (There may be some Persian influence here.) The flame is the obvious symbol of a flux or process which appears in many respects as a thing. It thus explains the experience of stable things, and reconciles this experience with the doctrine of flux. This idea can easily be extended to living bodies which are like flames, only burning more slowly. Heraclitus teaches that all things are in flux, all are like fire; their flux has only different ‘measures’ or laws of motion. The ‘bowl’ or ‘trough’ in which the fire burns will be in a much slower flux than the fire, but it will be in flux nevertheless. It changes, it has its fate and its laws, it must be burned into by the fire, and consumed, even if it takes a longer time before its fate is fulfilled. Thus, ‘in its advance, the fire will judge and convict everything’ (B 26, D5 66).
Accordingly, the fire is the symbol and the explanation of the apparent rest of things in spite of their real state of flux. But it is also a symbol of the transmutation of matter from one stage (fuel) into another. It thus provides the link between Heraclitus’ intuitive theory of nature and the theories of rarefaction and condensation, etc., of his predecessors. But its flaring up and dying down, in accordance with the measure of fuel provided, is also an instance of a law. If this is combined with some form of periodicity, then it can be used to explain the regularities of natural periods, such as days or years. (This trend of thought renders it unlikely that Burnet is right in disbelieving the traditional reports of Heraclitus’ belief in a periodical conflagration, which was probably connected with his Great Year; cp. Aristotle, Physics, 205a3 with D5 66.)
8. The thirteen passages quoted in this paragraph are from the fragments. (1): B 10, D5 123 … (2): B 11, D5 93 … (3): B 16, D5 40 … (4): B 94, D5 73 … (5): B 95, D5 89 … with (4) and (5), cp. Plato’s Republic, 476c f., and 520c … (6): B 6, D5 19 … (7): B 3, D5 34 … (8): B 19, D5 41 … (9): B 92, D5 2 … (10): B 91a, D5 113 … (11): B 59, D5 10 … (12): B 65, D5 32 … (13): B 28, D5 64.
9. More consistent than most moral historicists, Heraclitus is also an ethical and juridical positivist (for this term, cp. chapter 5): ‘All things are, to the gods, fair and good and right; men, however, have taken up some things as wrong, and some as right.’ (D5 102, B 61; see passage (8) in note 11.) That he was the first juridical positivist is attested by Plato (Theaet., 177c/d). On moral and juridical positivism in general, cp. chapter 5 (text to notes 14–18) and chapter 22.
10. The two passages quoted in this paragraph are: (1): B 44, D5 53 … (2): B 62, D5 80.
11. The nine passages quoted in this paragraph are: (1): B 39, D5 126 … (2): B 104, D5 111 … (3): B 78, D5 88 … (4): B 45, D5 51 … (5): D5 8 … (6): B 69, D5 60 … (7): B 50, D5 59 … (8): B 61, D5 102 (cp. note 9) … (9): B 57, D5 58. (Cp. Aristotle, Physics, 185b20.)
Flux or change must be the transition from one stage or property or position to another. In so far as flux presupposes something that changes, this something must remain identically the same, even though it assumes an opposite stage or property or position. This links the theory of flux to that of the unity of opposites (cp. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b25, 1024a24 and 34, 1062a32, 1063a25) as well as the doctrine of the oneness of all things; they are all only different phases or appearances of the one changing something (of fire).
Whether ‘the path that leads up’ and ‘the path that leads down’ were originally conceived as an ordinary path leading first up a mountain, and later down again (or perhaps: leading up from the point of view of the man who is down, and down from that of the man who is up), and whether this metaphor was only later applied to the processes of circulation, to the path that leads up from earth through water (perhaps liquid fuel in a bowl?) to the fire, and down again from the fire through the water (rain?) to earth; or whether Heraclitus’ path up and down was originally applied by him to this process of circulation of matter; all this can of course not be decided. (But I think that the first alternative is more likely in view of the great number of similar ideas in Heraclitus’ fragments: cp. the text.)
12. The four passages are: (1): B 102, D5 24 … (2): B 101, D5 25 (a closer version which more or less preserves Heraclitus’ pun is: ‘Greater death wins greater destiny.’ Cp. also Plato’s Laws, 903 d/e; contrast with Rep. 617 d/e) … (3): B 111, D5 29 (part of the continuation is quoted above; see passage (3) in note 4) … (4): B 113, D5 49.
13. It seems very probable (cp. Meyer’s Gesch. d. Altertums, esp. vol. I) that such characteristic teachings as that of the chosen people originated in this period, which produced several other religions of salvation besides the Jewish.
14. Comte, who in France developed a historicist philosophy not very dissimilar from Hegel’s Prussian version, tried, like Hegel, to stem the revolutionary tide. (Cp. F. A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, Economica, N.S. vol. VIII, 1941, pp. 119 ff., 281 ff.) For Lassalle’s interest in Heraclitus, see note 4 to chapter 1.—It is interesting to note, in this connection, the parallelism between the history of historicist and of evolutionary ideas. They originated in Greece with the semi-Heraclitean Empedocles (for Plato’s version, see note 1 to chapter 11), and they were revived, in England as well as in France, in the time of the French Revolution.
1. With this explanation of the term oligarchy, cp. also the end of notes 44 and 57 to chapter 8.
2. Cp. especially note 48 to chapter 10.
3. Cp. the end of chapter 7, esp. note 25, and chapter 10, esp. note 69.
4. Cp. Diogenes Laert., III, 1.—Concerning Plato’s family connections, and especially the alleged descent of his father’s family from Codrus, ‘and even from the God Poseidon’, see G. Grote, Plato and other Companions of Socrates (edn 1875), vol. I, 114. (See, however, the similar remark on Critias’ family, i.e. on that of Plato’s mother, in E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, vol. V, 1922, p. 66.) Plato says of Codrus in the Symposium (208d): ‘Do you suppose that Alcestis, … or Achilles, … or that your own Codrus would have sought death— in order to save the kingship for his childrenȁ4had they not expected to win that immortal memory of their virtue in which indeed we keep them?’ Plato praises Critias’ (i.e. his mother’s) family in the early Charmides (157e ff.) and in the late Timaeus (20e), where the family is traced back to the Athenian ruler (archon-) Dropides, the friend of Solon.
5. The two autobiographical quotations which follow in this paragraph are from the Seventh Letter (325). Plato’s authorship of the Letters has been questioned by some eminent scholars (perhaps without sufficient foundation; I think Field’s treatment of this problem very convincing; cp. note 57 to chapter 10; on the other hand, even the Seventh Letter looks to me a little suspicious—it repeats too much what we know from the Apology, and says too much what the occasion requires). I have therefore taken care to base my interpretation of Platonism mainly on some of the most famous dialogues; it is, however, in general agreement with the Letters. For the reader’s convenience, a list of those Platonic dialogues which are frequently mentioned in the text may be given here, in what is their probable historical order; cp. note 56 (8) to chapter 10. Crito—Apology—Euthyphro; Protagoras—Meno— Gorgias; Cratylus—Menexenus—Phaedo; Republic; Parmenides—Theaetetus; Sophist—Statesman (or Politicus)— Philebus; Timaeus—Critias; Laws.
6. (1) That historical developments may have a cyclic character is nowhere very clearly stated by Plato. It is, however, alluded to in at least four dialogues, namely in the Phaedo, in the Republic, in the Statesman (or Politicus), and in the Laws. In all these places, Plato’s theory may possibly allude to Heraclitus’ Great Year (cp. note 6 to chapter 2). It may be, however, that the allusion is not to Heraclitus directly, but rather to Empedocles, whose theory (cp. also Aristotle, Met., 1000a25 f.) Plato considered as merely a ‘milder’ version of the Heraclitean theory of the unity of all flux. He expresses this in a famous passage of the Sophist (242e f.). According to this passage, and to Aristotle (De Gen. Corr., B, 6., 334a6), there is a historical cycle embracing a period in which love rules, and a period in which Heraclitus’ strife rules; and Aristotle tells us that, according to Empedocles, the present period is ‘now a period of the reign of Strife, as it was formerly one of Love’. This insistence that the flux of our own cosmic period is a kind of strife, and therefore bad, is in close accordance both with Plato’s theories and with his experiences.
The length of the Great Year is, probably, the period of time after which all heavenly bodies return to the same positions relative to each other as were held by them at the moment from which the period is reckoned. (This would make it the smallest common multiple of the periods of the ‘seven planets’.)
(2) The passage in the Phaedo mentioned under (1) alludes first to the Heraclitean theory of change leading from one state to its opposite state, or from one opposite to the other: ‘that which becomes less must once have been greater …’ (70e/71a). It then proceeds to indicate a cyclic law of development: ‘Are there not two processes which are ever going on, from one extreme to its opposite, and back again …?’ (loc. cit.). And a little later (72a/b) the argument is put like this: ‘If the development were in a straight line only, and there were no compensation or cycle in nature, … then, in the end, all things would take on the same properties … and there would be no further development.’ It appears that the general tendency of the Phaedo is more optimistic (and shows more faith in man and in human reason) than that of the later dialogues, but there are no direct references to human historical development.
(3) Such references are, however, made in the Republic where, in Books VIII and IX, we find an elaborate description of historical decay treated here in chapter 4. This description is introduced by Plato’s Story of the Fall of Man and of the Number, which will here be discussed more fully in chapters 5 and 8. J. Adam, in his edition of The Republic of Plato (1902, 1921), rightly calls this story ‘the setting in which Plato’s “Philosophy of History” is framed’ (vol. II, 210). This story does not contain any explicit statement on the cyclic character of history, but it contains a few rather mysterious hints which, according to Aristotle’s (and Adam’s) interesting but uncertain interpretation, are possibly allusions to the Heraclitean Great Year, i.e. to the cyclic development. (Cp. note 6 to chapter 2, and Adam, op. cit., vol. II, 303; the remark on Empedocles made there, 303f., needs correction; see (1) in this note, above.)
(4) There is, furthermore, the myth in the Statesman (268e–274c). According to this myth, God himself steers the world for half a cycle of the great world period. When he lets go, then the world, which so far has moved forward, begins to roll back again. Thus we have two half-periods or half-cycles in the full cycle, a forward movement led by God constituting the good period without war or strife, and a backward movement when God abandons the world, which is a period of increasing disorganization and strife. It is, of course, the period in which we live. Ultimately, things will become so bad that God will take the wheel again, and reverse the motion, in order to save the world from utter destruction.
This myth shows great resemblances to Empedocles’ myth mentioned in (1) above, and probably also to Heraclitus’ Great Year.—Adam (op. cit., vol. II, 296 f.) also points out the similarities with Hesiod’s story. *One of the points which allude to Hesiod is the reference to a Golden Age of Cronos; and it is important to note that the men of this age are earth-born. This establishes a point of contact with the Myth of the Earth-born, and of the metals in man, which plays a rôle in the Republic (414b ff. and 546e f.); this rôle is discussed below in chapter 8. The Myth of the Earth-born is also alluded to in the Symposium (191b); possibly the allusion is to the popular claim that the Athenians are ‘like grasshoppers’—autochthonous (cp. notes 32 (1)e to chapter 4 and 11 (2) to chapter 8).*
When, however, later in the Statesman (302b ff.) the six forms of imperfect government are ordered according to their degree of imperfection, there is no indication any longer to be found of a cyclic theory of history. Rather, the six forms, which are all degenerate copies of the perfect or best state (Statesman, 293d/e; 297c; 303b), appear all as steps in the process of degeneration; i.e. both here and in the Republic Plato confines himself, when it comes to more concrete historical problems, to that part of the cycle which leads to decay.
* (5) Analogous remarks hold for the Laws. Something like a cyclic theory is sketched in Book III, 676b/c–677b, where Plato turns to a more detailed analysis of the beginning of one of the cycles; and in 678e and 679c, this beginning turns out to be a Golden Age, so that the further story again becomes one of deterioration.—It may be mentioned that Plato’s doctrine, that the planets are gods, together with the doctrine that the gods influence human lives (and with his belief that cosmic forces are at work in history), played an important part in the astrological speculations of the neo-Platonists. All three doctrines can be found in the Laws (see, for example, 821b–d and 899b; 899d–905d; 677a ff.). Astrology, it should be realized, shares with historicism the belief in a determinate destiny which can be predicted; and it shares with some important versions of historicism (especially with Platonism and Marxism) the belief that, notwithstanding the possibility of predicting the future, we have some influence upon it, especially if we actually know what is coming.*
(6) Apart from these scanty allusions, there is hardly anything to indicate that Plato took the upward or forward part of the cycle seriously. But there are many remarks, apart from the elaborate description in the Republic and that quoted in (5), which show that he believed very seriously in the downward movement, in the decay of history. We must consider, especially, the Timaeus, and the Laws.
(7) In the Timaeus (42b f., 90e ff., and especially 91d f.; cp. also the Phaedrus, 248d f.), Plato describes what may be called the origin of species by degeneration (cp. text to note 4 to chapter 4, and note 11 to chapter 11): men degenerate into women, and later into lower animals.
(8) In Book III of the Laws (cp. also Book IV, 713a ff.; see however the short allusion to a cycle mentioned above) we have a rather elaborate theory of historical decay, largely analogous to that in the Republic. See also the next chapter, especially notes 3, 6, 7, 27, 31, and 44.
7. A similar opinion of Plato’s political aims is expressed by G. C. Field, Plato and His Contemporaries (1930), p. 91: ‘The chief aim of Plato’s philosophy may be regarded as the attempt to re-establish standards of thought and conduct for a civilization that seemed on the verge of dissolution.’ See also note 3 to chapter 6, and text.
8. I follow the majority of the older and a good number of contemporary authorities (e.g. G. C. Field, F. M. Cornford, A. K. Rogers) in believing, against John Burnet and A. E. Taylor, that the theory of Forms or Ideas is nearly entirely Plato’s, and not Socrates’, in spite of the fact that Plato puts it into the mouth of Socrates as his main speaker. Though Plato’s dialogues are our only first-rate source for Socrates’ teaching, it is, I believe, possible to distinguish in them between ‘Socratic’, i.e. historically true, and ‘Platonic’ features of Plato’s speaker ‘Socrates’. The so-called Socratic Problem is discussed in chapters 6, 7, 8, and 10; cp. especially note 56 to chapter 10.
9. The term ‘social engineering’ seems to have been used first by Roscoe Pound, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (1922, p. 99; *Bryan Magee tells me now that the Webbs used it almost certainly before 1922.*) He uses the term in the ‘piecemeal’ sense. In another sense it is used by M. Eastman, Marxism: Is it Science? (1940). I read Eastman’s book after the text of my own book was written; my term ‘social engineering’ is, accordingly, used without any intention of alluding to Eastman’s terminology. As far as I can see, he advocates the approach which I criticize in chapter 9 under the name ‘Utopian social engineering’; cp. note 1 to that chapter.—See also note 18 (3) to chapter 5. As the first social engineer one might describe the town-planner Hippodamus of Miletus. (Cp. Aristotle’s Politics 1276b22, and R. Eisler, Jesus Basileus, II, p. 754.)
The term ‘social technology’ has been suggested to me by C. G. F. Simkin.—I wish to make it clear that in discussing problems of method, my main emphasis is upon gaining practical institutional experience. Cp. chapter 9, especially text to note 8 to that chapter. For a more detailed analysis of the problems of method connected with social engineering and social technology, see my The Poverty of Historicism (2nd edition, 1960), part III.
10. The quoted passage is from my The Poverty of Historicism, p. 65. The ‘undesigned results of human actions’ are more fully discussed below, in chapter 14, see especially note 11 and text.
11. I believe in a dualism of facts and decisions or demands (or of ‘is’ and ‘ought’); in other words, I believe in the impossibility of reducing decisions or demands to facts, although they can, of course, be treated as facts. More on this point will be said in chapters 5 (text to notes 4–5), 22, and 24.
12 Evidence in support of this interpretation of Plato’s theory of the best state will be supplied in the next three chapters; I may refer, in the meanwhile, to Statesman, 293d/e; 297c; Laws, 713b/c; 739d/e; Timaeus, 22d ff., especially 25e and 26d.
13. Cp. Aristotle’s famous report, partly quoted later in this chapter (see especially note 25 to this chapter, and the text).
14. This is shown in Grote’s Plato, vol. III, note u on pp. 267 f.
15. The quotations are from the Timaeus, 50c/d and 51e–52b. The simile which describes the Forms or Ideas as the fathers, and Space as the mother, of the sensible things, is important and has far-reaching connections. Cp. also notes 17 and 19 to this chapter, and note 59 to chapter 10.
(1) It resembles Hesiod’s myth of chaos, the yawning gap (space; receptacle) which corresponds to the mother, and the God Eros, who corresponds to the father or to the Ideas. Chaos is the origin, and the question of the causal explanation (chaos = cause) remains for a long time one of origin (arche–) or birth or generation.
(2) The mother or Space corresponds to the indefinite or boundless of Anaximander and of the Pythagoreans. The Idea, which is male, must therefore correspond to the definite (or limited) of the Pythagoreans. For the definite, as opposed to the boundless, the male, as opposed to the female, the light, as opposed to the dark, and the good, as opposed to the bad, all belong to the same side in the Pythagorean table of opposites. (Cp. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 986a22 f.) We also can therefore expect to see the Ideas associated with light and goodness. (Cp. end of note 32 to chapter 8.)
(3) The Ideas are boundaries or limits, they are definite, as opposed to indefinite Space, and impress or imprint (cp. note 17 (2) to this chapter) themselves like rubber-stamps, or better, like moulds, upon Space (which is not only space but at the same time Anaximander’s unformed matter—stuff without property), thus generating sensible things. *J. D. Mabbott has kindly drawn my attention to the fact that the Forms or Ideas, according to Plato, do not impress themselves upon Space but are, rather, impressed or imprinted upon it by the Demiurge. Traces of the theory that the Forms are ‘causes both of being and of generation (or becoming)’ can be found already in the Phaedo (100d), as Aristotle points out (in Metaphysics 1080a2).*
(4) In consequence of the act of generation, Space, i.e. the receptacle, begins to labour, so that all things are set in motion, in a Heraclitean or Empedoclean flux which is really universal in so far as the movement or flux extends even to the framework, i.e. (boundless) space itself. (For the late Heraclitean idea of the receptacle, cp. the Cratylus, 412d.)
(5) This description is also reminiscent of Parmenides’ ‘Way of Delusive Opinion’, in which the world of experience and of flux is created by the mingling of two opposites, the light (or hot or fire) and the dark (or cold or earth). It is clear that Plato’s Forms or Ideas would correspond to the former, and Space or what is boundless to the latter; especially if we consider that Plato’s pure space is closely akin to indeterminate matter.
(6) The opposition between the determinate and indeterminate seems also to correspond, especially after the all-important discovery of the irrationality of the square root of two, to the opposition between the rational and the irrational. But since Parmenides identifies the rational with being, this would lead to an interpretation of Space or the irrational as non-being. In other words, the Pythagorean table of opposites is to be extended to cover rationality, as opposed to irrationality, and being, as opposed to non-being. (This agrees with Metaphysics, 1004b27, where Aristotle says that ‘all the contraries are reducible to being and non-being’; 1072a31, where one side of the table—that of being—is described as the object of (rational) thought; and 1093b13, where the powers of certain numbers— presumably in opposition to their roots—are added to this side. This would further explain Aristotle’s remark in Metaphysics, 986b27; and it would perhaps not be necessary to assume, as F. M. Cornford does in his excellent article ‘Parmenides’ Two Ways’, Class. Quart., XVII, 1933, p. 108, that Parmenides, fr. 8, 53/54, ‘has been misinterpreted by Aristotle and Theophrastus’ for if we expand the table of opposites in this way, Cornford’s most convincing interpretation of the crucial passage of fr. 8 becomes compatible with Aristotle’s remark.)
(7) Cornford has explained (op. cit., 100) that there are three ‘ways’ in Parmenides, the way of Truth, the way of Not-being, and the way of Seeming (or, if I may call it so, of delusive opinion). He shows (101) that they correspond to three regions discussed in the Republic, the perfectly real and rational world of the Ideas, the perfectly unreal, and the world of opinion (based on the perception of things in flux). He has also shown (102) that in the Sophist, Plato modifies his position. To this, some comments may be added from the point of view of the passages in the Timaeus to which this note is appended.
(8) The main difference between the Forms or Ideas of the Republic and those of the Timaeus is that in the former, the Forms (and also God; cp. Rep., 380d) are petri-fied, so to speak, while in the latter, they are deified. In the former, they bear a much closer resemblance to the Parmenidean One (cp. Adam’s note to Rep., 380d28, 31), than in the latter. This development leads to the Laws, where the Ideas are largely replaced by souls. The decisive difference is that the Ideas become more and more the starting points of motion and causes of generation, or as the Timaeus puts it, fathers of the moving things. The greatest contrast is perhaps between the Phaedo, 79e: ‘The soul is infinitely more like the unchangeable; even the most stupid person would not deny that’ (cp. also Rep., 585c, 609b f.), and the Laws, 895e/896a (cp. Phaedrus, 245c ff.): ‘What is the definition of that which is named “soul”? Can we imagine any other definition than … “The motion that moves itself”?’ The transition between these two positions is, perhaps, provided by the Sophist (which introduces the Form or Idea of motion itself) and by the Timaeus, 35a, which describes the ‘divine and unchanging’ Forms and the changing and corruptible bodies. This seems to explain why, in the Laws (cp. 894d/e), the motion of the soul is said to be ‘first in origin and power’ and why the soul is described (966e) as ‘the most ancient and divine of all things whose motion is an ever-flowing source of real existence’. (Since, according to Plato, all living things have souls, it may be claimed that he admitted the presence of an at least partly formal principle in things; a point of view which is very close to Aristotelianism, especially in the presence of the primitive and widespread belief that all things are alive.) (Cp. also note 7 to chapter 4.)
(9) In this development of Plato’s thought, a development whose driving force is to explain the world of flux with the help of the Ideas, i.e. to make the break between the world of reason and the world of opinion at least understandable, even though it cannot be bridged, the Sophist seems to play a decisive rôle. Apart from making room, as Cornford mentions (op. cit., 102), for the plurality of Ideas, it presents them, in an argument against Plato’s own earlier position (248a ff.): (a) as active causes, which may interact, for example, with mind; (b) as unchanging in spite of that, although there is now an Idea of motion in which all moving things participate and which is not at rest; (c) as capable of mingling with one another. It further introduces ‘Not-being’, identified in the Timaeus with Space (cp. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 1935, note to 247), and thus makes it possible for the Ideas to mingle with it (cp. also Philolaus, fr. 2, 3, 5, Diels5), and to produce the world of flux with its characteristic intermediate position between the being of Ideas and the not-being of Space or matter.
(10) Ultimately, I wish to defend my contention in the text that the Ideas are not only outside space, but also outside time, though they are in contact with the world at the beginning of time. This, I believe, makes it easier to understand how they act without being in motion; for all motion or flux is in space and time. Plato, I believe, assumes that time has a beginning. I think that this is the most direct interpretation of Laws, 721c: ‘the race of man is twin-born with all time’, considering the many indications that Plato believed man to be created as one of the first creatures. (In this point, I disagree slightly with Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 1937, p. 145, and pp. 26 ff.)
(11) To sum up, the Ideas are earlier and better than their changing and decaying copies, and are themselves not in flux. (See also note 3 to chapter 4.)
16. Cp. note 4 to this chapter.
17. (1) The rôle of the gods in the Timaeus is similar to the one described in the text. Just as the Ideas stamp out things, so the gods form the bodies of men. Only the human soul is created by the Demiurge himself who also creates the world and the gods. (For another hint that the gods are patriarchs, see Laws, 713c/d.) Men, the weak, degenerate children of gods, are then liable to further degeneration; cp. note 6(7) to this chapter, and 37–41 to chapter 5.
(2) In an interesting passage of the Laws (681b; cp. also note 32 (1, a) to chapter 4) we find another allusion to the parallelism between the relation Idea—things and the relation parent—children. In this passage, the origin of law is explained by the influence of tradition, and more especially, by the transmission of a rigid order from the parents to the children; and the following remark is made: ‘And they (the parents) would be sure to stamp upon their children, and upon their children’s children, their own cast of mind.’
18. Cp. note 49, especially (3), to chapter 8.
19. Cp. Timaeus, 31a. The term which I have freely translated by ‘superior thing which is their prototype’ is a term frequently used by Aristotle with the meaning ‘universal’ or ‘generic term’. It means a ‘thing which is general’ or ‘surpassing’ or ‘embracing’ and I suspect that it originally means ‘embracing’ or ‘covering’ in the sense in which a mould embraces or covers what it moulds.
20. Cp. Republic, 597c. See also 596a (and Adam’s second note to 596a5): ‘For we are in the habit, you will remember, of postulating a Form or Idea—one for each group of many particular things to which we apply the same name.’
21. There are innumerable passages in Plato; I mention only the Phaedo (e.g. 79a), the Republic, 544a, the Theaetetus (152d/e, 179d/e), the Timaeus (28b/c, 29c/d, 51d f.). Aristotle mentions it in Metaphysics, 987a32; 999a25–999b10; 1010a6–15; 1078b15; see also notes 23 and 25 to this chapter.
22. Parmenides taught, as Burnet puts it (Early Greek Philosophy 2, 208), that ‘what is … is finite, spherical, motionless, corporeal’, i.e. that the world is a full globe, a whole without any parts, and that ‘there is nothing beyond it’. I am quoting Burnet because (a) his description is excellent and (b) it destroys his own interpretation (E.G.P., 208–11) of what Parmenides calls the ‘Opinion of the Mortals’ (or the Way of Delusive Opinion). For Burnet dismisses there all the interpretations of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Gomperz, and Meyer, as ‘anachronisms’ or ‘palpable anachronisms’, etc. Now the interpretation dismissed by Burnet is practically the same as the one here proposed in the text; namely, that Parmenides believed in a world of reality behind this world of appearance. Such a dualism, which would allow Parmenides’ description of the world of appearance to claim at least some kind of adequacy, is dismissed by Burnet as hopelessly anachronistic. I suggest, however, that if Parmenides had believed solely in his unmoving world, and not at all in the changing world, then he would have been really mad (as Empedocles hints). But in fact there is an indication of a similar dualism already in Xenophanes, fragm. 23–6, if confronted with fragm. 34 (esp. ‘But all may have their fancy opinions’), so that we can hardly speak of an anachronism.—As indicated in note 15 (6–7), I follow Cornford’s interpretation of Parmenides. (See also note 41 to chapter 10.)
23. Cp. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1078b23; the next quotation is: op. cit., 1078b19.
24. This valuable comparison is due to G. C. Field, Plato and His Contemporaries, 211.
25. The preceding quotation is from Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1078b15; the next from op. cit., 987b7.
26. In Aristotle’s analysis (in Metaphysics, 987a30–b18) of the arguments which led to the theory of Ideas (cp. also note 56 (6) to chapter 10), we can distinguish the following steps: (a) Heraclitus’ flux, (b) the impossibility of true knowledge of things in flux, (c) the influence of Socrates’ ethical essences, (d) the Ideas as objects of true knowledge, (e) the influence of the Pythagoreans, (f) the ‘mathematicals’ as intermediate objects.—((e) and (f) I have not mentioned in the text, where I have mentioned instead (g) the Parmenidean influence.)
It may be worth while to show how these steps can be identified in Plato’s own work, where he expounds his theory; especially in the Phaedo and in the Republic, in the Theaetetus and in the Sophist, and in the Timaeus.
(1) In the Phaedo, we find indications of all the points up to and including (e). In 65a–66a, the steps (d) and (c) are prominent, with an allusion to (b). In 70e step (a), Heraclitus’ theory appears, combined with an element of Pythagoreanism (e). This leads to 74a ff., and to a statement of step (d). 99–100 is an approach to (d) through (c), etc. For (a) to (d), cp. also the Cratylus, 439c ff.
In the Republic, it is of course especially Book VI that corresponds closely to Aristotle’s report. (a) In the beginning of Book VI, 485a/b (cp. 527a/b), the Heraclitean flux is referred to (and contrasted with the unchanging world of Forms). Plato there speaks of ‘a reality which exists for ever and is exempt from generation and degeneration’. (Cp. notes 2 (2) and 3 to chapter 4 and note 33 to chapter 8, and text.) The steps (b), (d) and especially (f) play a rather obvious rôle in the famous Simile of the Line (Rep., 509c–511e; cp. Adam’s notes, and his appendix I to Book VII); Socrates’ ethical influence, i.e. step (c), is of course alluded to throughout the Republic. It plays an important rôle within the Simile of the Line and especially immediately before, i.e. in 508b ff., where the rôle of the good is emphasized; see in particular 508b/c: ‘This is what I maintain regarding the offspring of the good. What the good has begotten in its own likeness is, in the intelligible world, related to reason (and its objects) in the same way as, in the visible world’, that which is the offspring of the sun, ‘is related to sight (and its objects).’ Step (e) is implied in (f), but more fully developed in Book VII, in the famous Curriculum (cp. especially 523a–527c), which is largely based on the Simile of the Line in Book VI.
(2) In the Theaetetus, (a) and (b) are treated extensively; (c) is mentioned in 174b and 175c. In the Sophist, all the steps, including (g), are mentioned, only (e) and (f) being left out; see especially 247a (step (c)); 249c (step (b)); 253d/e (step (d)). In the Philebus, we find indications of all steps except perhaps (f); steps (a) to (d) are especially emphasized in 59a–c.
(3) In the Timaeus, all the steps mentioned by Aristotle are indicated, with the possible exception of (c), which is alluded to only indirectly in the introductory recapitulation of the contents of the Republic, and in 29d. Step (e) is, as it were, alluded to throughout, since ‘Timaeus’ is a ‘western’ philosopher and strongly influenced by Pythagoreanism. The other steps occur twice in a form almost completely parallel to Aristotle’s account; first briefly in 28a–29d, and later, with more elaboration, in 48e–55c. Immediately after (a), i.e. a Heraclitean description (49a ff.; cp. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 178) of the world in flux, the argument (b) is raised (51c–e) that if we are right in distinguishing between reason (or true knowledge) and mere opinion, we must admit the existence of the unchangeable Forms; these are (in 51e f.) introduced next in accordance with step (d). The Heraclitean flux then comes again (as labouring space), but this time it is explained, as a consequence of the act of generation. And as a next step (f) appears, in 53c. (I suppose that the ‘lines and planes and solids’ mentioned by Aristotle in Metaphysics, 992b13, refer to 53c ff.)
(4) It seems that this parallelism between the Timaeus and Aristotle’s report has not been sufficiently emphasized so far; at least, it is not used by G. C. Field in his excellent and convincing analysis of Aristotle’s report (Plato and His Contemporaries, 202 ff.). But it would have strengthened Field’s arguments (arguments, however, which hardly need strengthening, since they are practically conclusive) against Burnet’s and Taylor’s views that the Theory of Ideas is Socratic (cp. note 56 to chapter 10). For in the Timaeus, Plato does not put this theory into the mouth of Socrates, a fact which according to Burnet’s and Taylor’s principles should prove that it was not Socrates’ theory. (They avoid this inference by claiming that ‘Timaeus’ is a Pythagorean, and that he develops not Plato’s philosophy but his own. But Aristotle knew Plato personally for twenty years and should have been able to judge these matters; and he wrote his Metaphysics at a time when members of the Academy could have contradicted his presentation of Platonism.)
(5) Burnet writes, in Greek Philosophy, 1, 155 (cp. also p. xliv of his edition of the Phaedo, 1911): ‘the theory of forms in the sense in which it is maintained in the Phaedo and Republic is wholly absent from what we may fairly regard the most distinctively Platonic of the dialogues, those, namely, in which Socrates is no longer the chief speaker. In that sense it is never even mentioned in any dialogue later than the Parmenides … with the single exception of the Timaeus (51c), where the speaker is a Pythagorean.’ But if it is maintained in the Timaeus in the sense in which it is maintained in the Republic, then it is certainly so maintained in the Sophist, 257d/e; and in the Statesman, 269c/d; 286a; 297b/c, and c/d; 301a and e; 302e; and 303b; and in the Philebus, 15a f., and 59a–d; and in the Laws, 713b, 739d/e, 962c f., 963c ff., and, most important, 965c (cp. Philebus, 16d), 965d, and 966a; see also the next note. (Burnet believes in the genuineness of the Letters, especially the Seventh; but the theory of Ideas is maintained there in 342a ff.; see also note 56 (5, d) to chapter 10.)
27. Cp. Laws, 895d–e. I do not agree with England’s note (in his edition of the Laws, vol. II, 472) that ‘the word “essence” will not help us’. True, if we meant by ‘essence’ some important sensible part of the sensible thing (which might perhaps be purified and produced by some distillation), then ‘essence’ would be misleading. But the word ‘essential’ is widely used in a way which corresponds very well indeed with what we wish to express here; something opposed to the accidental or unimportant or changing empirical aspect of the thing, whether it is conceived as dwelling in that thing, or in a metaphysical world of Ideas.
I am using the term ‘essentialism’ in opposition to ‘nominalism’, in order to avoid, and to replace, the misleading traditional term ‘realism’, wherever it is opposed (not to ‘idealism’ but) to ‘nominalism’. (See also note 26 ff. to chapter 11, and text, and especially note 38.)
On Plato’s application of his essentialist method, for instance, as mentioned in the text, to the theory of the soul, see Laws, 895e f., quoted in note 15 (8) to this chapter, and chapter 5, especially note 23. See also, for instance, Meno, 86d/e, and Symposium, 199c/d.
28. On the theory of causal explanation, cp. my The Logic of Scientific Discovery, especially section 12, pp. 59 ff. See also note 6 to chapter 25, below.
29. The theory of language here indicated is that of Semantics, as developed especially by A. Tarski and R. Carnap. Cp. Carnap, Introduction to Semantics, 1942, and note 23 to chapter 8.
30. The theory that while the physical sciences are based on a methodological nominalism, the social sciences must adopt essentialist (‘realistic’) methods, has been made clear to me by K. Polanyi (in 1925); he pointed out, at that time, that a reform of the methodology of the social sciences might conceivably be achieved by abandoning this theory.—The theory is held, to some extent, by most sociologists, especially by J. S. Mill (for instance, Logic, VI, ch. VI, 2; see also his historicist formulations, e.g. in VI, ch. X, 2, last paragraph: ‘The fundamental problem … of the social science is to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it …’), K. Marx (see below); M. Weber (cp., for example, his definitions in the beginning of Methodische Grundlagen der Soziologie, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, I, and in Ges. Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre), G. Simmel, A. Vierkandt, R. M. MacIver, and many more.—The philosophical expression of all these tendencies is E. Husserl’s ‘Phaenomenology’, a systematic revival of the methodological essentialism of Plato and Aristotle. (See also chapter 11, especially note 44.)
The opposite, the nominalist attitude in sociology, can be developed, I think, only as a technological theory of social institutions.
In this context, I may mention how I came to trace historicism back to Plato and Heraclitus. In analysing historicism, I found that it needs what I call now methodological essentialism; i.e. I saw that the typical arguments in favour of essentialism are bound up with historicism (cp. my The Poverty of Historicism). This led me to consider the history of essentialism. I was struck by the parallelism between Aristotle’s report and the analysis which I had carried out originally without any reference to Platonism. In this way, I was reminded of the rôles of both Heraclitus and Plato in this development.
31. R. H. S. Crossman’s Plato To-day (1937) was the first book (apart from G. Grote’s Plato) I have found to contain a political interpretation of Plato which is partly similar to my own. See also notes 2–3 to chapter 6, and text. *Since then I have found that similar views of Plato have been expressed by various authors. C. M. Bowra (Ancient Greek Literature, 1933) is perhaps the first; his brief but thorough criticism of Plato (pp. 186–90) is as fair as it is penetrating. The others are W. Fite (The Platonic Legend, 1934); B. Farrington (Science and Politics in the Ancient World, 1939); A. D. Winspear (The Genesis of Plato’s Thought, 1940); and H. Kelsen (Platonic Justice, 1933; now in What is Justice?, 1957, and Platonic Love, in The American Imago, vol. 3, 1942).*
1. Cp. Republic, 608e. See also note 2 (2) to this chapter.
2. In the Laws, the soul—‘the most ancient and divine of all things in motion’ (966e)— is described as the ‘starting point of all motion’ (895b). (1) With the Platonic theory, Aristotle contrasts his own, according to which the ‘good’ thing is not the starting point, but rather the end or aim of change since ‘good’ means a thing aimed at— the final cause of change. Thus he says of the Platonists, i.e. of ‘those who believe in Forms’, that they agree with Empedocles (they speak ‘in the same way’ as Empedocles) in so far as they ‘do not speak as if anything came to pass for the sake of these’ (i.e. of things which are ‘good’) ‘but as if all movement started from them’. And he points out that ‘good’ means therefore to the Platonists not ‘a cause qua good’, i.e. an aim, but that ‘it is only incidentally a good’. Cp. Metaphysics, 988a35 and b8 ff. and 1075a, 34/35. This criticism sounds as if Aristotle had sometimes held views similar to those of Speusippus, which is indeed Zeller’s opinion; see note 11 to chapter 11.
(2) Concerning the movement towards corruption, mentioned in the text in this paragraph, and its general significance in the Platonic philosophy, we must keep in mind the general opposition between the world of unchanging things or Ideas, and the world of sensible things in flux. Plato often expresses this opposition as one between the world of unchanging things and the world of corruptible things, or between things that are ungenerated, and those that are generated and are doomed to degenerate, etc.; see, for instance, Republic, 485a/b, quoted in note 26(1) to chapter 3 and in text to note 33 to chapter 8; Republic, 508d–e; 527a/b; and Republic, 546a, quoted in text to note 37 to chapter 5: ‘All things that have been generated must degenerate’ (or decay). That this problem of the generation and corruption of the world of things in flux was an important part of the Platonic School tradition is indicated by the fact that Aristotle devoted a separate treatise to this problem. Another interesting indication is the way in which Aristotle talked about these matters in the introduction to his Politics, contained in the concluding sentences of the Nicomachean Ethics (1181b/15): ‘We shall try to … find what it is that preserves or corrupts the cities …’ This passage is significant not only as a general formulation of what Aristotle considered the main problem of his Politics, but also because of its striking similarity to an important passage in the Laws, viz. 676a, and 676b/c quoted below in text to notes 6 and 25 to this chapter. (See also notes 1, 3, and 24/25 to this chapter; see note 32 to chapter 8, and the passage from the Laws quoted in note 59 to chapter 8.)
3. This quotation is from the Statesman, 269d. (See also note 23 to this chapter.) For the hierarchy of motions, see Laws, 893c–895b. For the theory that perfect things (divine ‘natures’; cp. the next chapter) can only become less perfect when they change, see especially Republic, 380e–381c—in many ways (note the examples in 380e) a parallel passage to Laws, 797d. The quotations from Aristotle are from the Metaphysics, 988b3, and from De Gen. et Corr., 335b14. The last four quotations in this paragraph are from Plato’s Laws, 904c f., and 797d. See also note 24 to this chapter, and text. (It is possible to interpret the remark about the evil objects as another allusion to a cyclic development, as discussed in note 6 to chapter 2, i.e. as an allusion to the belief that the trend of the development must reverse, and that things must begin to improve, once the world has reached the lowest depth of evilness.
* Since my interpretation of the Platonic theory of change and of the passages from the Laws has been challenged, I wish to add some further comments, especially on the two passages (1) Laws, 904c, f, and (2) 797d.
(1) The passage Laws, 904c, ‘the less significant is the beginning decline in their level of rank’ may be translated more literally ‘the less significant is the beginning movement down in the level of rank’. It seems to me certain, from the context, that ‘down the level of rank’ is meant rather than ‘as to level of rank’, which clearly is also a possible translation. (My reason is not only the whole dramatic context, down from 904a, but also more especially the series ‘kata … kata … kato-’ which, in a passage of gathering momentum, must colour the meaning of at least the second ‘kata’.—Concerning the word I translate by ‘level’, this may, admittedly, mean not only ‘plane’ but also ‘surface’; and the word I translate by ‘rank’ may mean ‘space’; yet Bury’s translation: ‘the smaller the change of character, the less is the movement over surface in space’ does not seem to me to yield much meaning in this context.)
(2) The continuation of this passage (Laws, 798) is most characteristic. It demands that ‘the lawgiver must contrive, by whatever means at his disposal [‘by hook or by crook’, as Bury well translates], a method which ensures for his state that the whole soul of every one of its citizens will, from reverence and fear, resist any change of any of the things that are established of old’. (Plato includes, explicitly, things which other lawgivers consider ‘mere matters of play’—such, as, for example, changes in the games of children.)
(3) In general, the main evidence for my interpretation of Plato’s theory of change—apart from a great number of minor passages referred to in the various notes in this chapter and the preceding one—is of course found in the historical or evolutionary passages of all the dialogues which contain such passages, especially the Republic (the decline and fall of the state from its near-perfect or Golden Age in Books VIII and IX), the Statesman (the theory of the Golden Age and its decline), the Laws (the story of the primitive patriarchy and of the Dorian conquest, and the story of the decline and fall of the Persian Empire), the Timaeus (the story of evolution by degeneration, which occurs twice, and the story of the Golden Age of Athens, which is continued in the Critias).
To this evidence Plato’s frequent references to Hesiod must be added, and the undoubted fact that Plato’s synthetic mind was not less keen than that of Empedocles (whose period of strife is the one ruling now; cp. Aristotle, De Gen. et Corr., 334a, b) in conceiving human affairs in a cosmic setting (Statesman, Timaeus).
(4) Ultimately, I may perhaps refer to general psychological considerations. On the one hand the fear of innovation (illustrated by many passages in the Laws, e.g. 758c/d) and, on the other hand, the idealization of the past (such as found in Hesiod or in the story of the lost paradise) are frequent and striking phenomena. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to connect the latter, or even both, with the idealization of one’s childhood—one’s home, one’s parents, and with the nostalgic wish to return to these early stages of one’s life, to one’s origin. There are many passages in Plato in which he takes it for granted that the original state of affairs, or original nature, is a state of blessedness. I refer only to the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium; here it is taken for granted that the urge and the suffering of passionate love is sufficiently explained if it is shown that it derives from this nostalgia, and similarly, that the feelings of sexual gratification can be explained as those of a gratified nostalgia. Thus Plato says of Eros (Symposium, 193d): ‘He will restore us to our original nature (see also 191d) and heal us and make us happy and blessed.’ The same thought underlies many remarks such as the following from the Philebus (16c): ‘The men of old … were better than we are now, and … lived nearer to the gods …’ All this indicates the view that our unhappy and unblessed state is a consequence of the development which makes us different from our original nature—our Idea; and it further indicates that the development is one from a state of goodness and blessedness to a state where goodness and blessedness are being lost; but this means that the development is one of increasing corruption. Plato’s theory of anamnesisȁ4the theory that all knowledge is re-cognition or re-collection of the knowledge we had in our pre-natal past is part of the same view: in the past there resides not only the good, the noble, and the beautiful, but also all wisdom. Even the ancient change or motion is better than secondary motion; for in the Laws the soul is said to be (895b) ‘the starting point of all motions the first to arise in things at rest … the most ancient and potent motion’, and (966c) ‘the most ancient and divine of all things’. (Cp. note 15 (8) to chapter 3.)
As pointed out before (cp. especially note 6 to chapter 3), the doctrine of an historical and cosmic tendency towards decay appears to be combined, in Plato, with a doctrine of an historical and cosmic cycle. (The period of decay, probably, is a part of this cycle.)*
4. Cp. Timaeus, 91d–92b/c. See also note 6 (7) to chapter 3 and note 11 to chapter 11.
5. See the beginning of chapter 2 above, and note 6 (1) to chapter 3. It is not a mere accident that Plato mentions Hesiod’s story of ‘metals’ when discussing his own theory of historical decay (Rep., 546e/547a, esp. notes 39 and 40 to chapter 5); he clearly wishes to indicate how well his theory fits in with, and explains, that of Hesiod.
6. The historical part of the Laws is in Books Three and Four (see note 6(5) and (8) to chapter 3). The two quotations in the text are from the beginning of this part, i.e. Laws, 676a. For the parallel passages mentioned, see Republic, 369b, f. (‘The birth of a city …’) and 545d (‘How will our city be changed …’).
It is often said that the Laws (and the Statesman) are less hostile towards democracy than the Republic, and it must be admitted that Plato’s general tone is in fact less hostile (this is perhaps due to the increasing inner strength of democracy; see chapter 10 and the beginning of chapter 11). But the only practical concession made to democracy in the Laws is that political officers are to be elected, by the members of the ruling (i.e. the military) class; and since all important changes in the laws of the state are forbidden anyway (cp., for instance, the quotations in note 3 of this chapter), this does not mean very much. The fundamental tendency remains pro-Spartan, and this tendency was, as can be seen from Aristotle’s Politics, 11, 6, 17 (1265b), compatible with a so-called ‘mixed’ constitution. In fact, Plato in the Laws is, if anything, more hostile towards the spirit of democracy, i.e. towards the idea of the freedom of the individual, than he is in the Republic; cp. especially the text to notes 32 and 33 to chapter 6 (i.e. Laws, 739c, ff., and 942a, f.) and to notes 19–22 to chapter 8 (i.e. Laws, 903c–909a).—See also next note.
7. It seems likely that it was largely this difficulty of explaining the first change (or the Fall of Man) that led Plato to transform his theory of Ideas, as mentioned in note 15 (8) to chapter 3; viz., to transform the Ideas into causes and active powers, capable of mingling with some of the other Ideas (cp. Sophist, 252e, ff.), and of rejecting the remaining ones (Sophist, 223c), and thus to transform them into something like gods, as opposed to the Republic which (cp. 380d) petrifies even the gods into unmoving and unmoved Parmenidean beings. An important turning point is, apparently, the Sophist, 248e–249c (note especially that here the Idea of motion is not at rest). The transformation seems to solve at the same time the difficulty of the so-called ‘third man’; for if the Forms are, as in the Timaeus, fathers, then there is no ‘third man’ necessary to explain their similarity to their offspring.
Regarding the relation of the Republic to the Statesman and to the Laws, I think that Plato’s attempt in the two latter dialogues to trace the origin of human society further and further back is likewise connected with the difficulties inherent in the problem of the first change. That it is difficult to conceive of a change overtaking a perfect city is clearly stated in Republic, 546a; Plato’s attempt in the Republic to solve it will be discussed in the next chapter (cp. text to notes 37–40 to chapter 5). In the Statesman, Plato adopts the theory of a cosmic catastrophe which leads to the change from the (Empedoclean) half-circle of love to the present period, the half-circle of strife. This idea seems to have been dropped in the Timaeus, in order to be replaced by a theory (retained in the Laws) of more limited catastrophes, such as floods, which may destroy civilizations, but apparently do not affect the course of the universe. (It is possible that this solution of the problem was suggested to Plato by the fact that in 373–372 B.C., the ancient city of Helice was destroyed by earthquake and flood.) The earliest form of society, removed in the Republic only by one single step from the still existing Spartan state, is thrust back to a more and more distant past. Although Plato continues to believe that the first settlement must be the best city, he now discusses societies prior to the first settlement, i.e. nomad societies, ‘hill shepherds’. (Cp. especially note 32 to this chapter.)
8. The quotation is from Marx–Engels, The Communist Manifesto; cp. A Handbook of Marxism (edited by E. Burns, 1935), 22.
9. The quotation is from Adam’s comments on Book VIII of the Republic; see his edition, vol. II, 198, note to 544a3.
11. (1) As opposed to my contention that Plato, like many modern sociologists since Comte, tries to outline the typical stages of social development, most critics take Plato’s story merely as a somewhat dramatic presentation of a purely logical classification of constitutions. But this not only contradicts what Plato says (cp. Adam’s note to Rep., 544c19, op. cit., vol. II, 199), but it is also against the whole spirit of Plato’s logic, according to which the essence of a thing is to be understood by its original nature, i.e. by its historical origin. And we must not forget that he uses the same word, ‘genus’, to mean a class in the logical sense and a race in the biological sense. The logical ‘genus’ is still identical with the ‘race’, in the sense of ‘offspring of the same parent’. (With this, cp. notes 15–20 to chapter 3, and text, as well as notes 23–24 to chapter 5, and text, where the equation nature = origin = race is discussed.) Accordingly, there is every reason for taking what Plato says at its face value; for even if Adam were right when he says (loc. cit.) that Plato intends to give a ‘logical order’, this order would for him be at the same time that of a typical historical development. Adam’s remark (loc. cit.) that the order ‘is primarily determined by psychological and not by historical considerations’ turns, I believe, against him. For he himself points out (for instance, op. cit., vol. II, 195, note to 543a, ff.) that Plato ‘retains throughout … the analogy between the Soul and the City’. According to Plato’s political theory of the soul (which will be discussed in the next chapter), the psychological history must run parallel to the social history, and the alleged opposition between psychological and historical considerations disappears, turning into another argument in favour of our interpretation.
(2) Exactly the same reply could be made if somebody should argue that Plato’s order of the constitution is, fundamentally, not a logical but an ethical one; for the ethical order (and the aesthetic order as well) is, in Plato’s philosophy, indistinguishable from the historical order. In this connection, it may be remarked that this historicist view provides Plato with a theoretical background for Socrates’ eudemonism, i.e. for the theory that goodness and happiness are identical. This theory is developed, in the Republic (cp. especially 580b), in the form of the doctrine that goodness and happiness, or badness and unhappiness, are proportional; and so they must be, if the degree of the goodness as well as of the happiness of a man is to be measured by the degree in which he resembles our original blessed nature— the perfect Idea of man. (The fact that Plato’s theory leads, in this point, to a theoretical justification of an apparently paradoxical Socratic doctrine may well have helped Plato to convince himself that he was only expounding the true Socratic creed; see text to notes 56/57 to chapter 10.)
(3) Rousseau took over Plato’s classification of institutions (Social Contract, Book II, ch. VII, Book III, ch. III ff., cp. also ch. X). It seems however that he was not directly influenced by Plato when he revived the Platonic Idea of a primitive society (cp., however, notes 1 to chapter 6 and 14 to chapter 9); but a direct product of the Platonic Renaissance in Italy was Sanazzaro’s most influential Arcadia, with its revival of Plato’s idea of a blessed primitive society of Greek (Dorian) hill shepherds. (For this idea of Plato’s, cp. text to note 32 to this chapter.) Thus Romanticism (cp. also chapter 9) is historically indeed an offspring of Platonism.
(4) How far the modern historicism of Comte and Mill, and of Hegel and Marx, is influenced by the theistic historicism of Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) is very hard to say: Vico himself was undoubtedly influenced by Plato, as well as by St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei and Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Like Plato (cp. ch. 5), Vico identified the ‘nature’ of a thing with its ‘origin’ (cp. Opere, Ferrari’s second edn, 1852–4, vol. V, p. 99); and he believed that all nations must pass through the same course of development, according to one universal law. His ‘nations’ (like Hegel’s) may thus be said to be one of the links between Plato’s ‘Cities’ and Toynbee’s ‘Civilizations’.
12. Cp. Republic, 549c/d; the next quotations are op. cit., 550d–e, and later, op. cit., 551a/b.
13. Cp. op. cit., 556e. (This passage should be compared with Thucydides, III, 82–4, quoted in chapter 10, text to note 12.) The next quotation is op. cit., 557a.
14. For Pericles’ democratic programme, see text to note 31, chapter 10, note 17 to chapter 6, and note 34 to chapter 10.
15. Adam, in his edition of The Republic of Plato, vol. II, 240, note to 559d22. (The italics in the second quotation are mine.) Adam admits that ‘the picture is doubtless somewhat exaggerated’; but he leaves little doubt that he thinks it is, fundamentally, true ‘for all time’.
16. Adam, loc. cit.
17. This quotation is from Republic, 560d (for this and the next quotation, cp. Lindsay’s translation); the next two quotations are from the same work, 563 a–b, and d. (See also Adam’s note to 563d25.) It is significant that Plato appeals here to the institution of private property, severely attacked in other parts of the Republic, as if it were an unchallenged principle of justice. It seems that when the property bought is a slave, an appeal to the lawful right of the buyer is adequate.
Another attack upon democracy is that ‘it tramples under foot’ the educational principle that ‘no one can grow up to be a good man unless his earliest years were given to noble games’. (Rep., 558b; see Lindsay’s translation; cp. note 68 to chapter 10.) See also the attacks upon equalitarianism quoted in note 14 to chapter 6.
* For Socrates’ attitude towards his young companions see most of the earlier dialogues, but also the Phaedo, where Socrates’ ‘pleasant, kind, and respectful manner in which he listened to the young man’s criticism’ is described. For Plato’s contrasting attitude, see text to notes 19–21 to chapter 7; see also the excellent lectures by H. Cherniss, The Riddle of the Early Academy (1945), especially pp. 70 and 79 (on the Parmenides 135c–d), and cp. notes 18–21 to chapter 7, and text.
18. Slavery (see the preceding note) and the Athenian movement against it will be further discussed in chapters 5 (notes 13 and text), 10, and 11; see also note 29 to the present chapter. Like Plato, Aristotle (e.g. in Pol., 1313b11, 1319b20; and in his Constitution of Athens, 59, 5) testifies to Athens’ liberality towards slaves; and so does the Pseudo-Xenophon (cp. his Const. of Athens, I, 10 f.)
19. Cp. Republic, 577a, f.; see Adam’s notes to 577a5 and b12 (op. cit., vol. II, 332 f.). See now also the Addendum III (Reply to a Critic), especially pp. 330 f.
20. Republic, 566e; cp. note 63 to chapter 10.
21. Cp. Statesman (Politicus), 301c/d. Although Plato distinguishes six types of debased states, he does not introduce any new terms; the names ‘monarchy’ (or ‘kingship’) and ‘aristocracy’ are used in the Republic (445d) of the best state itself, and not of the relatively best forms of debased states, as in the Statesman.
23. Cp. Statesman, 297c/d: ‘If the government I have mentioned is the only true original, then the others’ (which are ‘only copies of this’; cp. 297b/c) ‘must use its laws, and write them down; this is the only way in which they can be preserved’. (Cp. note 3 to this chapter, and note 18 to chapter 7.) ‘And any violation of the laws should be punished with death, and the most severe punishments; and this is very just and good, although, of course, only the second best thing.’ (For the origin of the laws, cp. note 32 (1, a) to this chapter, and note 17 (2) to chapter 3.) And in 300e/301a, f., we read: ‘The nearest approach of these lower forms of government to the true government … is to follow these written laws and customs … When the rich rule and imitate the true Form, then the government is called aristocracy; and when they do not heed the (ancient) laws oligarchy,’ etc. It is important to note that not lawfulness or lawlessness in the abstract, but the preservation of the ancient institutions of the original or perfect state is the criterion of the classification. (This is in contrast to Aristotle’s Politics, 1292a, where the main distinction is whether or not ‘the law is supreme’, or, for instance, the mob.)
24. The passage, Laws, 709e–714a, contains several allusions to the Statesman; for instance, 710d–e, which introduces, following Herodotus III, 80–82, the number of rulers as the principle of classification; the enumerations of the forms of government in 712c and d; and 713b, ff., i.e. the myth of the perfect state in the day of Cronos, ‘of which the best of our present states are imitations’. In view of these allusions, I little doubt that Plato intended his theory of the fitness of tyranny for Utopian experiments to be understood as a kind of continuation of the story of the Statesman (and thus also of the Republic).—The quotations in this paragraph are from the Laws, 709e, and 710c/d; the ‘remark from the Laws quoted above’ is 797d, quoted in the text to note 3, in this chapter. (I agree with E. B. England’s note to this passage, in his edition of The Laws of Plato, 1921, vol. II, 258, that it is Plato’s principle that ‘change is detrimental to the power … of anything’, and therefore also to the power of evil; but I do not agree with him ‘that change from bad’, viz., to good, is too self-evident to be mentioned as an exception; it is not self-evident from the point of view of Plato’s doctrine of the evil nature of change. See also next note.)
25. Cp. Laws, 676b/c (cp. 676a quoted in the text to note 6). In spite of Plato’s doctrine that ‘change is detrimental’ (cp. the end of the last note), E. B. England interprets these passages on change and revolution by giving them an optimistic or progressive meaning. He suggests that the object of Plato’s search is what ‘we might call “the secret of political vitality”’. (Cp. op. cit., vol. I, 344.) And he interprets this passage on the search for the true cause of (detrimental) change as dealing with a search for ‘the cause and nature of the true development of a state, i.e. of its progress towards perfection’. (Italics his; cp. vol. I, 345.) This interpretation cannot be correct, for the passage in question is an introduction to a story of political decline; but it shows how much the tendency to idealize Plato and to represent him as a progressivist blinds even such an excellent critic to his own finding, namely, that Plato believed change to be detrimental.
26. Cp. Republic, 545d (see also the parallel passage 465b). The next quotation is from the Laws, 683e. (Adam in his edition of the Republic, vol. II, 203, note to 545d21, refers to this passage in the Laws.) England, in his edition of the Laws, vol. I, 360 f., note to 683e5, mentions Republic, 609a, but neither 545d nor 465b, and supposes that the reference is ‘to a previous discussion, or one recorded in a lost dialogue’. I do not see why Plato should not be alluding to the Republic, by using the fiction that some of its topics have been discussed by the present interlocutors. As Cornford says, in Plato’s last group of dialogues there is ‘no motive to keep up the illusion that the conversations had really taken place’; and he is also right when he says that Plato ‘was not the slave of his own fictions’. (Cp. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, pp. 5 and 4.) Plato’s law of revolutions was rediscovered, without reference to Plato, by V. Pareto; cp. his Treatise on General Sociology, §§ 2054, 2057, 2058. (At the end of § 2055, there is also a theory of arresting history.) Rousseau also rediscovered the law. (Social Contract, Book III, ch. X.)
27. (1) It may be worth noting that the intentionally non-historical traits of the best state, especially the rule of the philosophers, are not mentioned by Plato in the summary at the beginning of the Timaeus, and that in Book VIII of the Republic he assumes that the rulers of the best state are not versed in Pythagorean number-mysticism; cp. Republic, 546c/d, where the rulers are said to be ignorant of these matters. (Cp. also the remark, Rep., 543d/544a, according to which the best state of Book VIII can still be surpassed, namely, as Adam says, by the city of Books V–VII— the ideal city in heaven.)
In his book, Plato’s Cosmology, pp. 6 ff., Cornford reconstructs the outlines and contents of Plato’s unfinished trilogy, Timaeus—Critias—Hermocrates, and shows how they are related to the historical parts of the Laws (Book III). This reconstruction is, I think, a valuable corroboration of my theory that Plato’s view of the world was fundamentally historical, and that his interest in ‘how it generated’ (and how it decays) is linked with his theory of Ideas, and indeed based on it. But if that is so, then there is no reason why we should assume that the later books of the Republic ‘started from the question how it’ (i.e. the city) ‘might be realized in the future and sketched its possible decline through lower forms of politics’ (Cornford, op. cit., 6; italics mine); instead we should look upon the Books VIII and IX of the Republic, in view of their close parallelism with the Third Book of the Laws, as a simplified historical sketch of the actual decline of the ideal city of the past, and as an explanation of the origin of the existing states, analogous to the greater task set by Plato for himself in the Timaeus, in the unfinished trilogy, and in the Laws.
(2) In connection with my remark, later in the paragraph, that Plato ‘certainly knew that he did not possess the necessary data’, see for instance Laws, 683d, and England’s note to 683d2.
(3) To my remark, further down in the paragraph, that Plato recognized the Cretan and Spartan societies as petrified or arrested forms (and to the remark in the next paragraph that Plato’s best state is not only a class state but a caste state) the following may be added. (Cp. also note 20 to this chapter, and 24 to chapter 10.)
In Laws, 797d (in the introduction to the ‘important pronouncement’, as England calls it, quoted in the text to note 3 to this chapter), Plato makes it perfectly clear that his Cretan and Spartan interlocutors are aware of the ‘arrested’ character of their social institutions; Clenias, the Cretan interlocutor, emphasizes that he is anxious to listen to any defence of the archaic character of a state. A little later (799a), and in the same context, a direct reference is made to the Egyptian method of arresting the development of institutions; surely a clear indication that Plato recognized a tendency in Crete and Sparta parallel to that of Egypt, namely, to arrest all social change.
In this context, a passage in the Timaeus (see especially 24a–b) seems important. In this passage, Plato tries to show (a) that a class division very similar to that of the Republic was established in Athens at a very ancient period of its pre-historical development, and (b) that these institutions were closely akin to the caste system of Egypt (whose arrested caste institutions he assumes to have derived from his ancient Athenian state). Thus Plato himself acknowledges by implication that the ideal ancient and perfect state of the Republic is a caste state. It is interesting that Crantor, first commentator on the Timaeus, reports, only two generations after Plato, that Plato had been accused of deserting the Athenian tradition, and of becoming a disciple of the Egyptians. (Cp. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Germ. ed., II, 476.) Crantor alludes perhaps to Isocrates’ Busiris, 8, quoted in note 3 to chapter 13.
For the problem of the castes in the Republic, see furthermore notes 31 and 32 (I, d) to this chapter, note 40 to chapter 6, and notes 11–14 to chapter 8. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, p. 269 f., forcefully denounces the view that Plato favoured a caste state.
28. Cp. Republic, 416a. The problem is considered more fully in this chapter, text to note 35. (For the problem of caste, mentioned in the next paragraph, see notes 27 (3) and 31 to this chapter.)
29. For Plato’s advice against legislating for the common people with their ‘vulgar market quarrels’, etc., see Republic, 425b–427a/b; especially 425d–e and 427a. These passages, of course, attack Athenian democracy, and all ‘piecemeal’ legislation in the sense of chapter 9. *That this is so is also seen by Cornford, The Republic of Plato (1941); for he writes, in a note to a passage in which Plato recommends Utopian engineering (it is Republic 500d, f., the recommendation of ‘canvas-cleaning’ and of a romantic radicalism; cp. note 12 to chapter 9, and text): ‘Contrast the piecemeal tinkering at reform satirized at 425e …’. Cornford does not seem to like piecemeal reforms, and he seems to prefer Plato’s methods; but his and my interpretation of Plato’s intentions seem to coincide.*
The four quotations further down in this paragraph are from the Republic, 371d/e; 463a–b (‘supporters’ and ‘employers’); 549a; and 471b/c. Adam comments (op. cit., vol. I, 97, note to 371e32): ‘Plato does not admit slave labour in his city, unless perhaps in the persons of barbarians.’ I agree that Plato opposes in the Republic (469b–470c) the enslavement of Greek prisoners of war; but he goes on (in 471b–c) to encourage that of barbarians by Greeks, and especially by the citizens of his best city. (This appears to be also the opinion of Tarn; cp. note 13(2) to chapter 15.) And Plato violently attacked the Athenian movement against slavery, and insisted on the legal rights of property when the property was a slave (cp. text to notes 17 and 18 to this chapter). As is shown also by the third quotation (from Rep., 548e/549a) in the paragraph to which this note is appended, he did not abolish slavery in his best city. (See also Rep., 590c/d, where he defends the demand that the coarse and vulgar should be the slaves of the best man.) A. E. Taylor is therefore wrong when he twice asserts (in his Plato, 1908 and 1914, pp. 197 and 118) that Plato implies ‘that there is no class of slaves in the community’. For similar views in Taylor’s Plato: The Man and His Work (1926), cp. end of note 27 to this chapter.
Plato’s treatment of slavery in the Statesman throws, I think, much light on his attitude in the Republic. For here, too, he does not speak much about slaves, although he clearly assumes that there are slaves in his state. (See his characteristic remark, 289b/c, that ‘all property in tame animals, except slaves’ has been already dealt with; and a similarly characteristic remark, 309a, that true kingscraft ‘makes slaves of those who wallow in ignorance and abject humility’. The reason why Plato does not say very much about the slaves is quite clear from 289c, ff., especially 289d/e. He does not see a major distinction between ‘slaves and other servants’, such as labourers, tradesmen, merchants (i.e. all ‘banausic’ persons who earn money; cp. note 4 to chapter 11); slaves are distinguished from the others merely as ‘servants acquired by purchase’. In other words, he is so high above the baseborn that it is hardly worth his while to bother about subtle differences. All this is very similar to the Republic, only a little more explicit. (See also note 57 (2) to chapter 8.)
For Plato’s treatment of slavery in the Laws, see especially G. R. Morrow, ‘Plato and Greek Slavery’ (Mind, N.S., vol. 48, 186–201; see also p. 402), an article which gives an excellent and critical survey of the subject, and reaches a very just conclusion, although the author is, in my opinion, still a little biased in favour of Plato. (The article does not perhaps sufficiently stress the fact that in Plato’s day an anti-slavery movement was well on the way; cp. note 13 to chapter 5.)
30. The quotation is from Plato’s summary of the Republic in the Timaeus (18c/d).— With the remark concerning the lack of novelty of the suggested community of women and children, compare Adam’s edition of The Republic of Plato, vol. I, p. 292 (note to 457b, ff.) and p. 308 (note to 463c17), as well as pp. 345–55, esp. 354; with the Pythagorean element in Plato’s communism, cp. op. cit., p. 199, note to 416d22. (For the precious metals, see note 24 to chapter 10. For the common meals, see note 34 to chapter 6; and for the communist principle in Plato and his successors, note 29 (2) to chapter 5, and the passages mentioned there.)
31. The passage quoted is from Republic, 434b/c. In demanding a caste state, Plato hesitates for a long time. This is quite apart from the ‘lengthy preface’ to the passage in question (which will be discussed in chapter 6; cp. notes 24 and 40 to that chapter); for when first speaking about these matters, in 415a, ff., he speaks as though a rise from the lower to the upper classes were permissible, provided that in the lower classes ‘children were born with an admixture of gold and silver’ (415c), i.e. of upper class blood and virtue. But in 434b–d, and, even more clearly, in 547a, this permission is, in effect, withdrawn; and in 547a any admixture of the metals is declared an impurity which must be fatal to the state. See also text to notes 11–14 to chapter 8 (and note 27 (3) to the present chapter).
32. Cp. the Statesman, 271e. The passages in the Laws about the primitive nomadic shepherds and their patriarchs are 677e–680e. The passage quoted is Laws, 680e. The passage quoted next is from the Myth of the Earthborn, Republic, 415d/e. The concluding quotation of the paragraph is from Republic, 440d.—It may be necessary to add some comments on certain remarks in the paragraph to which this note is appended.
(1) It is stated in the text that it is not very clearly explained how the ‘settlement’ came about. Both in the Laws and in the Republic we first hear (see (a) and (c), below) of a kind of agreement or social contract (for the social contract, cp. note 29 to chapter 5 and notes 43–54 to chapter 6, and text), and later (see (b) and (c), below) of a forceful subjugation.
(a) In the Laws, the various tribes of hill shepherds settle in the plains after having joined together to form larger war bands whose laws are arrived at by an agreement or contract, made by arbiters vested with royal powers (681b and c/d; for the origin of the laws described in 681b, cp. note 17 (2) to chapter 3). But now Plato becomes evasive. Instead of describing how these bands settle in Greece, and how the Greek cities were founded, Plato switches over to Homer’s story of the foundation of Troy, and to the Trojan war. From there, Plato says, the Achaeans returned under the name of Dorians, and ‘the rest of the story … is part of Lacedaemonian history’ (682e) ‘for we have reached the settlement of Lacedaemon’ (682e/683a). So far we have heard nothing about the manner of this settlement, and there follows at once a further digression (Plato himself speaks about the ‘roundabout track of the argument’) until we get ultimately (in 683c/d) the ‘hint’ mentioned in the text; see (b).
(b) The statement in the text that we get a hint that the Dorian ‘settlement’ in the Peloponnese was in fact a violent subjugation, refers to the Laws (683c/d), where Plato introduces what are actually his first historical remarks on Sparta. He says that he begins at the time when the whole of the Peloponnese was ‘practically subjugated’ by the Dorians. In the Menexenus (whose genuineness can hardly be doubted; cp. note 35 to chapter 10) there is in 245c an allusion to the fact that the Peloponnesians were ‘immigrants from abroad’ (as Grote puts it: cp. his Plato, III, p. 5).
(c) In the Republic (369b) the city is founded by workers with a view to the advantages of a division of labour and of co-operation, in accordance with the contract theory.
(d) But later (in Rep., 415d/e; see the quotation in the text, to this paragraph) we get a description of the triumphant invasion of a warrior class of somewhat mysterious origin—the ‘earthborn’. The decisive passage of this description states that the earthborn must look round to find for their camp the most suitable spot (literally) ‘for keeping down those within’, i.e. for keeping down those already living in the city, i.e. for keeping down the inhabitants.
(e) In the Statesman (271a, f.) these ‘earthborn’ are identified with the very early nomad hill shepherds of the pre-settlement period. Cp. also the allusion to the autochthonous grasshoppers in the Symposium, 191b; cp. note 6 (4) to chapter 3, and 11 (2) to chapter 8.
(f) To sum up, it seems that Plato had a fairly clear idea of the Dorian conquest, which he preferred, for obvious reasons, to veil in mystery. It also seems that there was a tradition that the conquering war hordes were of nomad descent.
(2) With the remark later in the text in this paragraph regarding Plato’s ‘continuous emphasis’ on the fact that ruling is shepherding, cp., for instance, the following passages: Republic, 343b, where the idea is introduced; 345c, f., where, in the form of the simile of the good shepherd, it becomes one of the central topics of the investigation; 375a–376b, 404a, 440d, 451b–e, 459a–460c, and 466c–d (quoted in note 30 to chapter 5), where the auxiliaries are likened to sheep-dogs and where their breeding and education are discussed accordingly; 416a, ff., where the problem of the wolves without and within the state is introduced; cp. furthermore the Statesman, where the idea is continued over many pages, especially 261d–276d. With regard to the Laws, I may refer to the passage (694e), where Plato says of Cyrus that he had acquired for his sons ‘cattle and sheep and many herds of men and other animals’. (Cp. also Laws, 735, and Theaet., 174d.)
(3) With all this, cp. also A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, esp. vol. III, pp. 32 (n. 1), where A. H. Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire, etc., is quoted, 33 (n. 2), 50–100; see more especially his remark on the conquering nomads (p. 22) who ‘deal with … men’, and on Plato’s ‘human watchdogs’ (p. 94, n. 2). I have been much stimulated by Toynbee’s brilliant ideas and much encouraged by many of his remarks which I take as corroborating my interpretations, and which I can value the more highly the more Toynbee’s and my fundamental assumptions seem to disagree. I also owe to Toynbee a number of terms used in my text, especially ‘human cattle’, ‘human herd’ and ‘human watch-dog’.
Toynbee’s Study of History is, from my point of view, a model of what I call historicism; I need not say much more to express my fundamental disagreement with it; and a number of special points of disagreement will be discussed at various places (cp. notes 43 and 45 (2) to this chapter, notes 7 and 8 to chapter 10, and chapter 24; also, my criticism of Toynbee in chapter 24, and in The Poverty of Historicism, p. 110 ff.). But it contains a wealth of interesting and stimulating ideas. Regarding Plato, Toynbee emphasizes a number of points in which I can follow him, especially that Plato’s best state is inspired by his experience of social revolutions and by his wish to arrest all change, and that it is a kind of arrested Sparta (which itself was also arrested). In spite of these points of agreement, there is even in the interpretation of Plato a fundamental disagreement between Toynbee’s views and my own. Toynbee regards Plato’s best state as a typical (reactionary) Utopia, while I interpret its major part, in connection with what I consider as Plato’s general theory of change, as an attempt to reconstruct a primitive form of society. Nor do I think that Toynbee would agree with my interpretation of Plato’s story of the period prior to the settlement, and of the settlement itself, outlined in this note and the text; for Toynbee says (op. cit., vol. III, 80) that ‘the Spartan society was not of nomadic origin’. Toynbee strongly emphasizes (op. cit., III, 50 ff.) the peculiar character of the Spartan society, which, he says, was arrested in its development owing to a superhuman effort to keep down their ‘human cattle’. But I think that this emphasis on the peculiar situation of Sparta makes it difficult to understand the similarities between the institutions of Sparta and Crete which Plato found so striking (Rep., 544c; Laws, 683a). These, I believe, can be explained only as arrested forms of very ancient tribal institutions, which must be considerably older than the effort of the Spartans in the second Messenian war (about 650–620 B.C.; cp. Toynbee, op. cit., III, 53). Since the conditions of the survival of these institutions were so very different in the two localities, their similarity is a strong argument in favour of their being primitive and against an explanation by a factor which affects only one of them.
* For problems of the Dorian Settlement, see also R. Eisler in Caucasia, vol. V, 1928, especially p. 113, note 84, where the term ‘Hellenes’ is translated as the ‘settlers’, and ‘Greeks’ as the ‘graziers’—i.e. the cattle-breeders or nomads. The same author has shown (Orphisch-Dionisische Mysteriengedanken, 1925, p. 58, note 2) that the idea of the God-Shepherd is of Orphic origin. At the same place, the sheep-dogs of God (Domini Canes) are mentioned.*
33. The fact that education is in Plato’s state a class prerogative has been overlooked by some enthusiastic educationists who credit Plato with the idea of making education independent of financial means; they do not see that the evil is the class prerogative as such, and that it is comparatively unimportant whether this prerogative is based upon the possession of money or upon any other criterion by which membership of the ruling class is determined. Cp. notes 12 and 13 to chapter 7, and text. Concerning the carrying of arms, see also Laws, 753b.
34. Cp. Republic, 460c. (See also note 31 to this chapter.) Regarding Plato’s recommendation of infanticide, see Adam, op. cit., vol. I, p. 299, note to 460c18, and pp. 357 ff. Although Adam rightly insists that Plato was in favour of infanticide, and although he rejects as ‘irrelevant’ all attempts ‘to acquit Plato of sanctioning’ such a dreadful practice, he tries to excuse Plato by pointing out ‘that the practice was widely prevalent in ancient Greece’. But it was not so in Athens. Plato chooses throughout to prefer the ancient Spartan barbarism and racialism to the enlightenment of Pericles’ Athens; and for this choice he must be held responsible. For a hypothesis explaining the Spartan practice, see note 7 to chapter 10 (and text); see also the cross-references given there.
The later quotations in this paragraph which favour applying the principles of animal breeding to man are from Republic, 459b (cp. note 39 to chapter 8, and text); those on the analogy between dogs and warriors, etc., from the Republic, 404a; 375a; 376a/b; and 376b. See also note 40 (2) to chapter 5, and the next note here.
35. The two quotations before the note number are both from Republic, 375b. The next following quotation is from 416a (cp. note 28 to this chapter); the remaining ones are from 375c–e. The problem of blending opposite ‘natures’ (or even Forms; cp. notes 18–20 and 40 (2) to chapter 5, and text and note 39 to chapter 8) is one of Plato’s favourite topics. (In the Statesman, 283e, f., and later in Aristotle, it merges into the doctrine of the mean.)
36. The quotations are from Republic, 410c; 410d; 410e; 411e/412a and 412b.
37. In the Laws (680b, ff.) Plato himself treats Crete with some irony because of its barbarous ignorance of literature. This ignorance extends even to Homer, whom the Cretan interlocutor does not know, and of whom he says: ‘foreign poets are very little read by Cretans’. (‘But they are read in Sparta’, rejoins the Spartan interlocutor.) For Plato’s preference for Spartan customs, see also note 34 to chapter 6, and the text to note 30 to the present chapter.
38. For Plato’s view on Sparta’s treatment of the human cattle, see note 29 to this chapter, Republic, 548e/549a, where the timocratic man is compared with Plato’s brother Glaucon: ‘He would be harder’ (than Glaucon) ‘and less musical’; the continuation of this passage is quoted in the text to note 29.—Thucydides reports (IV, 80) the treacherous murder of the 2,000 helots; the best of the helots were selected for death by a promise of freedom. It is almost certain that Plato knew Thucydides well, and we can be sure that he had in addition more direct sources of information.
For Plato’s views on Athens’ slack treatment of slaves, see note 18 to this chapter.
39. Considering the decidedly anti-Athenian and therefore anti-literary tendency of the Republic, it is a little difficult to explain why so many educationists are so enthusiastic about Plato’s educational theories. I can see only three likely explanations. Either they do not understand the Republic, in spite of its most outspoken hostility towards the then existing Athenian literary education; or they are simply flattered by Plato’s rhetorical emphasis upon the political power of education, just as so many philosophers are, and even some musicians (see text to note 41); or both.
It is also difficult to see how lovers of Greek art and literature can find encouragement in Plato, who, especially in the Tenth Book of the Republic, launched a most violent attack against all poets and tragedians, and especially against Homer (and even Hesiod). See Republic, 600a, where Homer is put below the level of a good technician or mechanic (who would be generally despised by Plato as banausic and depraved; cp. Rep., 495e and 590c, and note 4 to chapter 11); Republic, 600c, where Homer is put below the level of the Sophists Protagoras and Prodicus (see also Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, German edn, II, 401); and Republic, 605a/b, where poets are bluntly forbidden to enter into any well-governed city.
These clear expressions of Plato’s attitude, however, are usually passed over by the commentators, who dwell, on the other hand, on remarks like the one made by Plato in preparing his attack on Homer (‘… though love and admiration for Homer hardly allow me to say what I have to say’; Rep., 595b). Adam comments on this (note to 595b11) by saying that ‘Plato speaks with real feeling’; but I think that Plato’s remark only illustrates a method fairly generally adopted in the Republic, namely, that of making some concession to the reader’s sentiments (cp. chapter 10, especially text to note 65) before the main attack upon humanitarian ideas is launched.
40. For the rigid censorship aimed at class discipline, see Republic, 377e, ff., and especially 378c: ‘Those who are to be the guardians of our city ought to consider it the most pernicious crime to quarrel easily with one another.’ It is interesting that Plato does not state this political principle at once, when introducing his theory of censorship in 376e, ff., but that he speaks first only of truth, beauty, etc. The censorship is further tightened up in 595a, ff., especially 605a/b (see the foregoing note, and notes 18–22 to chapter 7, and text). For the rôle of censorship in the Laws, see 801c/d.—See also the next note.
For Plato’s forgetfulness of his principle (Rep., 410c–412b, see note 36 to this chapter) that music has to strengthen the gentle element in man as opposed to the fierce, see especially 399a, f., where modes of music are demanded which do not make men soft, but are ‘fit for men who are warriors’. Cp. also the next note, (2).— It must be made clear that Plato has not ‘forgotten’ a previously announced principle, but only that principle to which his discussion is going to lead up.
41. (1) For Plato’s attitude towards music, especially music proper, see, for instance, Republic, 397b, ff.; 398e, ff.; 400a, ff.; 410b, 424b, f., 546d. Laws, 657e, ff.; 673a, 700b, ff., 798d, ff., 801d, ff., 802b, ff., 816c. His attitude is, fundamentally, that one must ‘beware of changing to a new mode of music; this endangers everything’ since ‘any change in the style of music always leads to a change in the most important institutions of the whole state. So says Damon, and I believe him.’ (Rep., 424c.) Plato, as usual, follows the Spartan example. Adam (op. cit., vol. I, p. 216, note to 424c20; italics mine; cp. also his references) says that ‘the connection between musical and political changes … was recognized universally throughout Greece, and particularly at Sparta, where … Timotheus had his lyre confiscated for adding to it four new strings’. That Sparta’s procedure inspired Plato cannot be doubted; its universal recognition throughout Greece, and especially in Periclean Athens, is most improbable. (Cp. (2) of this note.)
(2) In the text I have called Plato’s attitude towards music (cp. especially Rep., 398e, ff.) superstitious and backward if compared with ‘a more enlightened contemporary criticism’. The criticism I have in mind is that of the anonymous writer, probably a musician of the fifth (or the early fourth) century, the author of an address (possibly an Olympian oration) which is now known as the thirteenth piece of Grenfell and Hunt, The Hibeh Papyri, 1906, pp. 45 ff. It seems possible that the writer is one of ‘the various musicians who criticize Socrates’ (i.e. the ‘Socrates’ of Plato’s Republic), mentioned by Aristotle (in the equally superstitious passage of his Politics, 1342b, where he repeats most of Plato’s arguments); but the criticism of the anonymous author goes much further than Aristotle indicates. Plato (and Aristotle) believed that certain musical modes, for instance, the ‘slack’ Ionian and Lydian modes, made people soft and effeminate, while others, especially the Dorian mode, made them brave. This view is attacked by the anonymous author. ‘They say’, he writes, ‘that some modes produce temperate and others just men; others, again, heroes, and others cowards.’ He brilliantly exposes the silliness of this view by pointing out that some of the most war-like of the Greek tribes use modes reputed to produce cowards, while certain professional (opera) singers habitually sing in the ‘heroic’ mode without ever showing signs of becoming heroes. This criticism might have been directed against the Athenian musician Damon, often quoted by Plato as an authority, a friend of Pericles (who was liberal enough to tolerate a pro-Spartan attitude in the field of artistic criticism). But it might easily have been directed against Plato himself. For Damon, see Diels5; for a hypothesis concerning the anonymous author, see ibid., vol. II, p. 334, note.
(3) In view of the fact that I am attacking a ‘reactionary’ attitude towards music, I may perhaps remark that my attack is in no way inspired by a personal sympathy for ‘progress’ in music. In fact, I happen to like old music (the older the better) and to dislike modern music intensely (especially most works written since the day when Wagner began to write music). I am altogether against ‘futurism’, whether in the field of art or of morals (cp. chapter 22, and note 19 to chapter 25). But I am also against imposing one’s likes and dislikes upon others, and against censorship in such matters. We can love and hate, especially in art, without favouring legal measures for suppressing what we hate, or for canonizing what we love.
42. Cp. Republic, 537a; and 466e–467e.
The characterization of modern totalitarian education is due to A. Kolnai, The War against the West (1938), p. 318.
43. Plato’s remarkable theory that the state, i.e. centralized and organized political power, originates through a conquest (the subjugation of a sedentary agricultural population by nomads or hunters) was, as far as I know, first re-discovered (if we discount some remarks by Machiavelli) by Hume in his criticism of the historical version of the contract theory (cp. his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, vol. II, 1752, Essay XII, Of the Original Contract):—‘Almost all the governments’, Hume writes, ‘which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both …’ And he points out that for ‘an artful and bold man …, it is often easy …, by employing sometimes violence, sometimes false pretences, to establish his dominion over a people a hundred times more numerous than his partizans … By such arts as these, many governments have been established; and this is all the original contract, which they have to boast of.’ The theory was next revived by Renan, in What is a Nation? (1882), and by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals (1887); see the third German edition of 1894, p. 98. The latter writes of the origin of the ‘state’ (without reference to Hume): ‘Some horde of blonde beasts, a conquering master race with a war-like organization … lay their terrifying paws heavily upon a population which is perhaps immensely superior in—numbers … This is the way in which the “state” originates upon earth; I think that the sentimentality which lets it originate with a “contract”, is dead.’ This theory appeals to Nietzsche because he likes these blonde beasts. But it has also been proffered more recently by F. Oppenheimer (The State, transl. Gitterman, 1914, p. 68); by a Marxist, K. Kautsky (in his book on The Materialist Interpretation of History); and by W. C. Macleod (The Origin and History of Politics, 1931). I think it very likely that something of the kind described by Plato, Hume, and Nietzsche has happened in many, if not in all, cases. I am speaking only about ‘states’ in the sense of organized and even centralized political power.
I may mention that Toynbee has a very different theory. But before discussing it, I wish first to make it clear that from the anti-historicist point of view, the question is of no great importance. It is perhaps interesting in itself to consider how ‘states’ originated, but it has no bearing whatever upon the sociology of states, as I understand it, i.e. upon political technology (see chapters 3, 9, and 25).
Toynbee’s theory does not confine itself to ‘states’ in the sense of organized and centralized political power. He discusses, rather, the ‘origin of civilizations’. But here begins the difficulty; for some of his ‘civilizations’ are states (as here described), some are groups or sequences of states, and some are societies like that of the Eskimos, which are not states; and if it is questionable whether ‘states’ originate according to one single scheme, then it must be even more doubtful when we consider a class of such diverse social phenomena as the early Egyptian and Mesopotamian states and their institutions and technique on the one side, and the Eskimo way of living on the other.
But we may concentrate on Toynbee’s description (A Study of History, vol. I, pp. 305 ff.) of the origin of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian ‘civilizations’. His theory is that the challenge of a difficult jungle environment rouses a response from ingenious and enterprising leaders; they lead their followers into the valleys which they begin to cultivate, and found states. This (Hegelian and Bergsonian) theory of the creative genius as a cultural and political leader appears to me most romantic. If we take Egypt, then we must look, first of all, for the origin of the caste system. This, I believe, is most likely the result of conquests, just as in India where every new wave of conquerors imposed a new caste upon the old ones. But there are other arguments. Toynbee himself favours a theory which is probably correct, namely, that animal breeding and especially animal training is a later, a more advanced and a more diffi-cult stage of development than mere agriculture, and that this advanced step is taken by the nomads of the steppe. But in Egypt we find both agriculture and animal breeding, and the same holds for most of the early ‘states’ (though not for all the American ones, I gather). This seems to be a sign that these states contain a nomadic element; and it seems only natural to venture the hypothesis that this element is due to nomad invaders imposing their rule, a caste rule, upon the original agricultural population. This theory disagrees with Toynbee’s contention (op. cit., III, 23 f.) that nomad-built states usually wither away very quickly. But the fact that many of the early caste states go in for the breeding of animals has to be explained somehow.
The idea that nomads or even hunters constituted the original upper class is corroborated by the age-old and still surviving upper-class tradition according to which war, hunting, and horses are the symbols of the leisured classes; a tradition which formed the basis of Aristotle’s ethics and politics, and which is still alive, as Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) and Toynbee have shown; and to this evidence we can perhaps add the animal breeder’s belief in racialism, and especially in the racial superiority of the upper class. The latter belief which is so pronounced in caste states and in Plato and in Aristotle is held by Toynbee to be ‘one of the … sins of our … modern age’ and ‘something alien from the Hellenic genius’ (op. cit., III, 93). But although many Greeks may have developed beyond racialism, it seems likely that Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories are based on old traditions; especially in view of the fact that racial ideas played such a rôle in Sparta.
44. Cp. Laws, 694a–698a.
45. (1) Spengler’s Decline of the West is not in my opinion to be taken seriously. But it is a symptom; it is the theory of one who believes in an upper class which is facing defeat. Like Plato, Spengler tries to show that ‘the world’ is to be blamed, with its general law of decline and death. And like Plato, he demands (in his sequel, Prussianism and Socialism) a new order, a desperate experiment to stem the forces of history, a regeneration of the Prussian ruling class by the adoption of a ‘socialism’ or communism, and of economic abstinence.—Concerning Spengler, I largely agree with L. Nelson, who published his criticism under a long ironical title whose beginning may be translated: ‘Witchcraft: Being an Initiation into the Secrets of Oswald Spengler’s Art of Fortune Telling, and a Most Evident Proof of the Irrefutable Truth of His Soothsaying’, etc. I think that this is a just characterization of Spengler. Nelson, I may add, was one of the first to oppose what I call historicism (following here Kant in his criticism of Herder; cp. chapter 12, note 56).
(2) My remark that Spengler’s is not the last Decline and Fall is meant especially as an allusion to Toynbee. Toynbee’s work is so superior to Spengler’s that I hesitate to mention it in the same context; but the superiority is due mainly to Toynbee’s wealth of ideas and to his superior knowledge (which manifests itself in the fact that he does not, as Spengler does, deal with everything under the sun at the same time). But the aim and method of the investigation is similar. It is most decidedly historicist. (Cp. my criticism of Toynbee in The Poverty of Historicism, pp. 110 ff.) And it is, fundamentally, Hegelian (although I do not see that Toynbee is aware of this fact). His ‘criterion of the growth of civilizations’ which is ‘progress towards self-determination’ shows this clearly enough; for Hegel’s law of progress towards ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘freedom’ can be only too easily recognized. (Toynbee’s Hegelianism seems to come somehow through Bradley, as may be seen, for instance, by his remarks on relations, op. cit., III, 223: ‘The very concept of “relations” between “things” or “beings” involves’ a ‘logical contradiction … How is this contradiction to be transcended?’ (I cannot enter here into a discussion of the problem of relations. But I may state dogmatically that all problems concerning relations can be reduced, by certain simple methods of modern logic, to problems concerning properties, or classes; in other words, peculiar philosophical difficulties concerning relations do not exist. The method mentioned is due to N. Wiener and K. Kuratowski; see Quine, A System of Logistic, 1934, pp. 16 ff.). Now I do not believe that to classify a work as belonging to a certain school is to dismiss it; but in the case of Hegelian historicism I think that it is so, for reasons to be discussed in the second volume of this book.
Concerning Toynbee’s historicism, I wish to make it especially clear that I doubt very much indeed whether civilizations are born, grow, break down, and die. I am obliged to stress this point because I myself use some of the terms used by Toynbee, in so far as I speak of the ‘breakdown’ and of the ‘arresting’ of societies. But I wish to make it clear that my term ‘breakdown’ refers not to all kinds of civilizations but to one particular kind of phenomenon—to the feeling of bewilderment connected with the dissolution of the magical or tribal ‘closed society’. Accordingly, I do not believe, as Toynbee does, that Greek society suffered ‘its breakdown’ in the period of the Peloponnesian war; and I find the symptoms of the breakdown which Toynbee describes much earlier. (Cp. with this notes 6 and 8 to chapter 10, and text.) Regarding ‘arrested’ societies, I apply this term exclusively, either to a society that clings to its magical forms through closing itself up, by force, against the influence of an open society, or to a society that attempts to return to the tribal cage.
Also I do not think that our Western civilization is just one member of a species. I think that there are many closed societies who may suffer all kinds of fates; but an ‘open society’ can, I suppose, only go on, or be arrested and forced back into the cage, i.e. to the beasts. (Cp. also chapter 10, especially the last note.)
(3) Regarding the Decline and Fall stories, I may mention that nearly all of them stand under the influence of Heraclitus’ remark: ‘They fill their bellies like the beasts’, and of Plato’s theory of the low animal instincts. I mean to say that they all try to show that the decline is due to an adoption (by the ruling class) of these ‘lower’ standards which are allegedly natural to the working classes. In other words, and putting the matter crudely but bluntly, the theory is that civilizations, like the Persian and the Roman empires, decline owing to overfeeding. (Cp. note 19 to chapter 10.)
1. The ‘charmed circle’ is a quotation from Burnet, Greek Philosophy, I, 106, where similar problems are treated. I do not, however, agree with Burnet that ‘in early days the regularity of human life had been far more clearly apprehended than the even course of nature’. This presupposes the establishment of a differentiation which, I believe, is characteristic of a later period, i.e. the period of the dissolution of the ‘charmed circle of law and custom’. Moreover, natural periods (the seasons, etc.; cp. note 6 to chapter 2, and Plato (?), Epinomis, 978d, ff.) must have been apprehended in very early days.—For the distinction between natural and normative laws, see esp. note 18 (4) to this chapter.
2. *Cp. R. Eisler, The Royal Art of Astrology. Eisler says that the peculiarities of the movement of the planets were interpreted, by the Babylonian ‘tablet writers who produced the Library of Assurbanipal’ (op. cit., 288), as ‘dictated by the “laws” or “decisions” ruling “heaven and earth” (pirishte– shame– u irsiti), pronounced by the creator god at the beginning’ (ibid., 232 f.). And he points out (ibid., 288) that the idea of ‘universal laws’ (of nature) originates with this ‘mythological … concept of … “decrees of heaven and earth” …’*
For the passage from Heraclitus, cp. D5, B 29, and note 7 (2) to chapter 2; also note 6 to that chapter, and text. See also Burnet, loc. cit., who gives a different interpretation; he thinks that ‘when the regular course of nature began to be observed, no better name could be found for it than Right or Justice … which properly meant the unchanging custom that guided human life.’ I do not believe that the term meant first something social and was then extended, but I think that both social and natural regularities (‘order’) were originally undifferentiated, and interpreted as magical.
3. The opposition is expressed sometimes as one between ‘nature’ and ‘law’ (or ‘norm’ or ‘convention’), sometimes as one between ‘nature’ and the ‘positing’ or ‘laying down’ (viz., of normative laws), and sometimes as one between ‘nature’ and ‘art’, or ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’.
The antithesis between nature and convention is often said (on the authority of Diogenes Laertius, II, 16 and 4; Doxogr., 564b) to have been introduced by Archelaus, who is said to have been the teacher of Socrates. But I think that, in the Laws, 690b, Plato makes it clear enough that he considers ‘the Theban poet Pindar’ to be the originator of the antithesis (cp. notes 10 and 28 to this chapter). Apart from Pindar’s fragments (quoted by Plato; see also Herodotus, III, 38), and some remarks by Herodotus (loc. cit.), one of the earliest original sources preserved is the Sophist Antiphon’s fragments On Truth (see notes 11 and 12 to this chapter). According to Plato’s Protagoras, the Sophist Hippias seems to have been a pioneer of similar views (see note 13 to this chapter). But the most influential early treatment of the problem seems to have been that of Protagoras himself, although he may possibly have used a different terminology. (It may be mentioned that Democritus dealt with the antithesis which he applied also to such social ‘institutions’ as language; and Plato did the same in the Cratylus, e.g. 384e.)
4. A very similar point of view can be found in Russell’s ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ (in Mysticism and Logic); and in the last chapter of Sherrington’s Man on His Nature.
5. (1) Positivists will reply, of course, that the reason why norms cannot be derived from factual propositions is that norms are meaningless; but this shows only that (with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) they define ‘meaning’ arbitrarily in such a way that only factual propositions are ‘meaningful’. (See also my The Logic of Scientific Discovery, pp. 35 ff. and 51 f.) The followers of ‘psychologism’, on the other hand, will try to explain imperatives as expressions of emotions, norms as habits, and standards as points of view. But although the habit of not stealing certainly is a fact, it is necessary, as explained in the text, to distinguish this fact from the corresponding norm.—On the question of the logic of norms, I fully agree with most of the views expressed by K. Menger in his book, Moral, Wille und Weltgestaltung, 1935. He is one of the first, I believe, to develop the foundations of a logic of norms. I may perhaps express here my opinion that the reluctance to admit that norms are something important and irreducible is one of the main sources of the intellectual and other weaknesses of the more ‘progressive’ circles in our present time.
(2) Concerning my contention that it is impossible to derive a sentence stating a norm or decision from a sentence stating a fact, the following may be added. In analysing the relations between sentences and facts, we are moving in that field of logical inquiry which A. Tarski has called Semantics (cp. note 29 to chapter 3 and note 23 to chapter 8). One of the fundamental concepts of semantics is the concept of truth. As shown by Tarski, it is possible (within what Carnap calls a semantical system) to derive a descriptive statement like ‘Napoleon died on St. Helena’ from the statement ‘Mr. A said that Napoleon died on St. Helena’, in conjunction with the further statement that what Mr. A said was true. (And if we use the term ‘fact’ in such a wide sense that we not only speak about the fact described by a sentence but also about the fact that this sentence is true, then we could even say that it is possible to derive ‘Napoleon died on St. Helena’ from the two ‘facts’ that Mr. A said it, and that he spoke the truth.) Now there is no reason why we should not proceed in an exactly analogous fashion in the realm of norms. We might then introduce, in correspondence to the concept of truth, the concept of the validity or rightness of a norm. This would mean that a certain norm N could be derived (in a kind of semantic of norms) from a sentence stating that N is valid or right; or in other words, the norm or commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’ would be considered as equivalent to the assertion ‘The norm “Thou shalt not steal” is valid or right’. (And again, if we use the term ‘fact’ in such a wide sense that we speak about the fact that a norm is valid or right, then we could even derive norms from facts. This, however, does not impair the correctness of our considerations in the text which are concerned solely with the impossibility of deriving norms from psychological or sociological or similar, i.e. non-semantic, facts.)
* (3) In my first discussion of these problems, I spoke of norms or decisions but never of proposals. The proposal to speak, instead, of ‘proposals’ is due to L. J. Russell; see his paper ‘Propositions and Proposals’, in the Library of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy (Amsterdam, August 11–18, 1948), vol. I, Proceedings of the Congress. In this important paper, statements of fact or ‘propositions’ are distinguished from suggestions for the adoption of a line of conduct (of a certain policy, or of certain norms, or of certain aims or ends), and the latter are called ‘proposals’. The great advantage of this terminology is that, as everybody knows, one can discuss a proposal, while it is not so clear whether, and in which sense, one can discuss a decision or a norm; thus by talking of ‘norms’ or ‘decisions’, one is liable to support those who say that these things are beyond discussion (either above it, as some dogmatic theologians or metaphysicians may say, or—as nonsensical—below it, as some positivists may say).
Adopting Russell’s terminology, we could say that a proposition may be asserted or stated (or a hypothesis accepted) while a proposal is adopted; and we shall distinguish the fact of its adoption from the proposal which has been adopted.
Our dualistic thesis then becomes the thesis that proposals are not reducible to facts (or to statements of facts, or to propositions) even though they pertain to facts.*
6. Cp. also the last note (71) to chapter 10.
Although my own position is, I believe, clearly enough implied in the text, I may perhaps briefly formulate what seem to me the most important principles of humanitarian and equalitarian ethics.
(1) Tolerance towards all who are not intolerant and who do not propagate intolerance. (For this exception, cp. what is said in notes 4 and 6 to chapter 7.) This implies, especially, that the moral decisions of others should be treated with respect, as long as such decisions do not conflict with the principle of tolerance.
(2) The recognition that all moral urgency has its basis in the urgency of suffering or pain. I suggest, for this reason, to replace the utilitarian formula ‘Aim at the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number’, or briefly, ‘Maximize happiness’, by the formula ‘The least amount of avoidable suffering for all’, or briefly, ‘Minimize suffering’. Such a simple formula can, I believe, be made one of the fundamental principles (admittedly not the only one) of public policy. (The principle ‘Maximize happiness’, in contrast, seems to be apt to produce a benevolent dictatorship.) We should realize that from the moral point of view suffering and happiness must not be treated as symmetrical; that is to say, the promotion of happiness is in any case much less urgent than the rendering of help to those who suffer, and the attempt to prevent suffering. (The latter task has little to do with ‘matters of taste’, the former much.) Cp. also note 2 to chapter 9.
(3) The fight against tyranny; or in other words, the attempt to safeguard the other principles by the institutional means of a legislation rather than by the benevolence of persons in power. (Cp. section 11 of chapter 7.)
7. Cp. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, I, 117.—Protagoras’ doctrine referred to in this paragraph is to be found in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, 322a, ff.; cp. also the Theaetetus, esp. 172b (see also note 27 to this chapter).
The difference between Platonism and Protagoreanism can perhaps be briefly expressed as follows:
(Platonism.) There is an inherent ‘natural’ order of justice in the world, i.e. the original or first order in which nature was created. Thus the past is good, and any development leading to new norms is bad.
(Protagoreanism.) Man is the moral being in this world. Nature is neither moral nor immoral. Thus it is possible for man also to improve things.—It is not unlikely that Protagoras was influenced by Xenophanes, one of the first to express the attitude of the open society, and to criticize Hesiod’s historical pessimism: ‘In the beginning, the Gods did not show to man all he was wanting; but in the course of time, he may search for the better, and find it.’ (Cp. Diels5, 18.) It seems that Plato’s nephew and successor Speusippus returned to this progressive view (cp. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1072b30 and note 11 to chapter 11) and that the Academy adopted with him a more liberal attitude in the field of politics also.
Concerning the relation of the doctrine of Protagoras to the tenets of religion, it may be remarked that he believed God to work through man. I do not see how this position can contradict that of Christianity. Compare with it for instance K. Barth’s statement (Credo, 1936, p. 188): ‘The Bible is a human document’ (i.e. man is God’s instrument).
8. Socrates’ advocacy of the autonomy of ethics (closely related to his insistence that problems of nature do not matter) is expressed especially in his doctrine of the self-sufficiency or autarky of the ‘virtuous’ individual. That this theory contrasts strongly with Plato’s views of the individual will be seen later; cp. especially notes 25 to this chapter and 36 to the next, and text. (Cp. also note 56 to chapter 10.)
9. We cannot, for instance, construct institutions which work independently of how they are being ‘manned’. With these problems, cp. chapter 7 (text to notes 7–8, 22–23), and especially chapter 9.
10. For Plato’s discussion of Pindar’s naturalism, see esp. Gorgias, 484b; 488b; Laws, 690b (quoted below in this chapter; cp. note 28); 714e/715a; cp. also 890a/b. (See also Adam’s note to Rep., 359c20.)
11. Antiphon uses the term which, in connection with Parmenides and Plato, I have translated above by ‘delusive opinion’ (cp. note 15 to chapter 3); and he likewise opposes it to ‘truth’. Cp. also Barker’s translation in Greek Political Theory, I— Plato and His Predecessors (1918), 83.
12. See Antiphon, On Truth; cp. Barker, op. cit., 83–5. See also next note, (2).
13. Hippias is quoted in Plato’s Protagoras, 337e. For the next four quotations, cp. (1) Euripides Ion, 854 ff.; and (2) his Phoenissae, 538; cp. also Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (German edn, I, 325); and Barker, op. cit., 75; cp. also Plato’s violent attack upon Euripides in Republic, 568a–d. Furthermore (3) Alcidamas in Schol. to Aristotle’s Rhet., I, 13, 1373b18. (4) Lycophron in Aristotle’s Fragm., 91 (Rose); (cp. also the Pseudo-Plutarch, De Nobil., 18.2). For the Athenian movement against slavery, cp. text to note 18 to chapter 4, and note 29 (with further references) to the same chapter; also note 18 to chapter 10 and Addendum III (Reply to a Critic), especially pp. 330 f.
(1) It is worth nothing that most Platonists show little sympathy with this equalitarian movement. Barker, for instance, discusses it under the heading ‘General Iconoclasm’; cp. op. cit., 75. (See also the second quotation from Field’s Plato quoted in text to note 3, chapter 6.) This lack of sympathy is due, undoubtedly, to Plato’s influence.
(2) For Plato’s and Aristotle’s anti-equalitarianism mentioned in the text, next paragraph, cp. also especially note 49 (and text) to chapter 8, and notes 3–4 (and text) to chapter 11.
This anti-equalitarianism and its devastating effects has been clearly described by W. W. Tarn in his excellent paper ‘Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind’ (Proc. of the British Acad., XIX, 1933, pp. 123 ff.). Tarn recognizes that in the fifth century, there may have been a movement towards ‘something better than the hard-and-fast division of Greeks and barbarians; but’, he says, ‘this had no importance for history, because anything of the sort was strangled by the idealist philosophies. Plato and Aristotle left no doubt about their views. Plato said that all barbarians were enemies by nature; it was proper to wage war upon them, even to the point of enslaving … them. Aristotle said that all barbarians were slaves by nature …‘(p. 124, italics mine). I fully agree with Tarn’s appraisal of the pernicious anti-humanitarian influence of the idealist philosophers, i.e. of Plato and Aristotle. I also agree with Tarn’s emphasis upon the immense significance of equalitarianism, of the idea of the unity of mankind (cp. op. cit., p. 147). The main point in which I cannot fully agree is Tarn’s estimate of the fifth-century equalitarian movement, and of the early cynics. He may or may not be right in holding that the historical influence of these movements was small in comparison with that of Alexander. But I believe that he would have rated these movements more highly if he had only followed up the parallelism between the cosmopolitan and the anti-slavery movement. The parallelism between the relations Greeks: barbarians and free men: slaves is clearly enough shown by Tarn in the passage here quoted; and if we consider the unquestionable strength of the movement against slavery (see esp. note 18 to chapter 4) then the scattered remarks against the distinction between Greeks and barbarians gain much in significance. Cp. also Aristotle, Politics, III, 5, 7 (1278a); IV (VI), 4, 16 (1319b); and III, 2, 2 (1275b). See also note 48 to chapter 8, and the reference to E. Badian at the end of that note.
14. For the theme ‘return to the beasts’, cp. chapter 10, note 71, and text.
15. For Socrates’ doctrine of the soul, see text to note 44 to chapter 10.
16. The term ‘natural right’ in an equalitarian sense came to Rome through the Stoics (there is the influence of Antisthenes to be considered; cp. note 48 to chapter 8) and was popularized by Roman Law (cp. Institutiones, II, 1, 2; I, 2, 2). It is used by Thomas Aquinas also (Summa, II, 91, 2). The confusing use of the term ‘natural law’ instead of ‘natural right’ by modern Thomists is to be regretted, as well as the small emphasis they put upon equalitarianism.
17. The monistic tendency which first led to the attempt to interpret norms as natural has recently led to the opposite attempt, namely, to interpret natural laws as conventional. This (physical) type of conventionalism has been based, by Poincaré, on the recognition of the conventional or verbal character of definitions. Poincaré, and more recently Eddington, point out that we define natural entities by the laws they obey. From this the conclusion is drawn that these laws, i.e. the laws of nature, are definitions, i.e. verbal conventions. Cp. Eddington’s letter in Nature, 148 (1941), 141: ‘The elements’ (of physical theory) ‘… can only be defined … by the laws they obey; so that we find ourselves chasing our own tails in a purely formal system.’— An analysis and a criticism of this form of conventionalism can be found in my The Logic of Scientific Discovery, especially pp. 78 ff.
18. (1) The hope of getting some argument or theory to share our responsibilities is, I believe, one of the basic motives of ‘scientific’ ethics. ‘Scientific’ ethics is in its absolute barrenness one of the most amazing of social phenomena. What does it aim at? At telling us what we ought to do, i.e. at constructing a code of norms upon a scientific basis, so that we need only look up the index of the code if we are faced with a difficult moral decision? This clearly would be absurd; quite apart from the fact that if it could be achieved, it would destroy all personal responsibility and therefore all ethics. Or would it give scientific criteria of the truth and falsity of moral judgements, i.e. of judgements involving such terms as ‘good’ or ‘bad’? But it is clear that moral judgements are absolutely irrelevant. Only a scandal-monger is interested in judging people or their actions; ‘judge not’ appears to some of us one of the fundamental and much too little appreciated laws of humanitarian ethics. (We may have to disarm and to imprison a criminal in order to prevent him from repeating his crimes, but too much of moral judgement and especially of moral indignation is always a sign of hypocrisy and pharisaism.) Thus an ethics of moral judgements would be not only irrelevant but indeed an immoral affair. The all-importance of moral problems rests, of course, on the fact that we can act with intelligent foresight, and that we can ask ourselves what our aims ought to be, i.e. how we ought to act.
Nearly all moral philosophers who have dealt with the problem of how we ought to act (with the possible exception of Kant) have tried to answer it either by reference to ‘human nature’ (as did even Kant, when he referred to human reason) or to the nature of ‘the good’. The first of these ways leads nowhere, since all actions possible to us are founded upon ‘human nature’, so that the problem of ethics could also be put by asking which elements in human nature I ought to approve and to develop, and which sides I ought to suppress or to control. But the second of these ways also leads nowhere; for given an analysis of ‘the good’ in form of a sentence like: ‘The good is such and such’ (or ‘such and such is good’), we would always have to ask: What about it? Why should this concern me? Only if the word ‘good’ is used in an ethical sense, i.e. only if it is used to mean ‘that which I ought to do’, could I derive from the information ‘x is good’ the conclusion that I ought to do x. In other words, if the word ‘good’ is to have any ethical significance at all, it must be defined as ‘that which I (or we) ought to do (or to promote)’. But if it is so defined, then its whole meaning is exhausted by the defining phrase, and it can in every context be replaced by this phrase, i.e. the introduction of the term ‘good’ cannot materially contribute to our problem. (Cp. also note 49 (3) to chapter 11.)
All the discussions about the definition of the good, or about the possibility of defining it, are therefore quite useless. They only show how far ‘scientific’ ethics is removed from the urgent problems of moral life. And they thus indicate that ‘scientific’ ethics is a form of escape, and escape from the realities of moral life, i.e. from our moral responsibilities. (In view of these considerations, it is not surprising to find that the beginning of ‘scientific’ ethics, in the form of ethical naturalism, coincides in time with what may be called the discovery of personal responsibility. Cp. what is said in chapter 10, text to notes 27–38 and 55–7, on the open society and the Great Generation.)
(2) It may be fitting in this connection to refer to a particular form of the escape from responsibility discussed here, as exhibited especially by the juridical positivism of the Hegelian school, as well as by a closely allied spiritual naturalism. That the problem is still significant may be seen from the fact that an author of the excellence of Catlin remains on this important point (as on a number of others) dependent upon Hegel; and my analysis will take the form of a criticism of Catlin’s arguments in favour of spiritual naturalism, and against the distinction between laws of nature and normative laws (cp. G. E. G. Catlin, A Study of the Principles of Politics, 1930, pp. 96–99).
Catlin begins by making a clear distinction between the laws of nature and ‘laws … which human legislators make’; and he admits that, at first sight the phrase ‘natural law’, if applied to norms, ‘appears to be patently unscientific, since it seems to fail to make a distinction between that human law which requires enforcement and the physical laws which are incapable of breach’. But he tries to show that it only appears to be so, and that ‘our criticism’ of this way of using the term ‘natural law’ was ‘too hasty’. And he proceeds to a clear statement of spiritual naturalism, i.e. to a distinction between ‘sound law’ which is ‘according to nature’, and other law: ‘Sound law, then, involves a formulation of human tendencies, or, in brief, is a copy of the “natural” law to be “found” by political science. Sound law is in this sense emphatically found and not made. It is a copy of natural social law’ (i.e. of what I called ‘sociological laws’; cp. text to note 8 to this chapter). And he concludes by insisting that in so far as the legal system becomes more rational, its rules ‘cease to assume the character of arbitrary commands and become mere deductions drawn from the primary social laws’ (i.e. from what I should call ‘sociological laws’).
(3) This is a very strong statement of spiritual naturalism. Its criticism is the more important as Catlin combines his doctrine with a theory of ‘social engineering’ which may perhaps at first sight appear similar to the one advocated here (cp. text to note 9 to chapter 3 and text to notes 1–3 and 8–11 to chapter 9). Before discussing it, I wish to explain why I consider Catlin’s view to be dependent on Hegel’s positivism. Such an explanation is necessary, because Catlin uses his naturalism in order to distinguish between ‘sound’ and other law; in other words, he uses it in order to distinguish between ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ law; and this distinction certainly does not look like positivism, i.e. the recognition of the existing law as the sole standard of justice. In spite of all that, I believe that Catlin’s views are very close to positivism; my reason being that he believes that only ‘sound’ law can be effective, and in so far ‘existent’ in precisely Hegel’s sense. For Catlin says that when our legal code is not ‘sound’, i.e. not in accordance with the laws of human nature, then ‘our statute remains paper’. This statement is purest positivism; for it allows us to deduce from the fact that a certain code is not only ‘paper’ but successfully enforced, that it is ‘sound’; or in other words, that all legislation which does not turn out to be merely paper is a copy of human nature and therefore just.
(4) I now proceed to a brief criticism of the argument proffered by Catlin against the distinction between (a) laws of nature which cannot be broken, and (b) normative laws, which are man-made, i.e. enforced by sanctions; a distinction which he himself makes so very clearly at first. Catlin’s argument is a twofold one. He shows (a1) that laws of nature also are man-made, in a certain sense, and that they can, in a sense, be broken; and (b1) that in a certain sense normative laws cannot be broken. I begin with (a1). ‘The natural laws of the physicist’, writes Catlin, ‘are not brute facts, they are rationalizations of the physical world, whether superimposed by man or justified because the world is inherently rational and orderly.’ And he proceeds to show that natural laws ‘can be nullified’ when ‘fresh facts’ compel us to recast the law. My reply to this argument is this. A statement intended as a formulation of a law of nature is certainly man-made. We make the hypothesis that there is a certain invariable regularity, i.e. we describe the supposed regularity with the help of a statement, the natural law. But, as scientists, we are prepared to learn from nature that we have been wrong; we are prepared to recast the law if fresh facts which contradict our hypothesis show that our supposed law was no law, since it has been broken. In other words, by accepting nature’s nullification, the scientist shows that he accepts a hypothesis only as long as it has not been falsified; which is the same as to say that he regards a law of nature as a rule which cannot be broken, since he accepts the breaking of his rule as proof that his rule did not formulate a law of nature. Furthermore: although the hypothesis is man-made, we may be unable to prevent its falsification. This shows that, by creating the hypothesis, we have not created the regularity which it is intended to describe (although we did create a new set of problems, and may have suggested new observations and interpretations). (b1) ‘It is not true’, says Catlin, ‘that the criminal “breaks” the law when he does the forbidden act … the statute does not say: “Thou canst not”; it says, “Thou shalt not, or this punishment will be inflicted.” As command’, Catlin continues, ‘it may be broken, but as law, in a very real sense, it is only broken when the punishment is not inflicted … So far as the law is perfected and its sanctions executed, … it approximates to physical law.’ The reply to this is simple. In whichever sense we speak of ‘breaking’ the law, the juridical law can be broken; no verbal adjustment can alter that. Let us accept Catlin’s view that a criminal cannot ‘break’ the law, and that it is only ‘broken’ if the criminal does not receive the punishment prescribed by the law. But even from this point of view, the law can be broken; for instance, by officers of the state who refuse to punish the criminal. And even in a state where all sanctions are, in fact, executed, the officers could, if they chose, prevent such execution, and so ‘break’ the law in Catlin’s sense. (That they would thereby ‘break’ the law in the ordinary sense, also, i.e. that they would become criminals, and that they might ultimately perhaps be punished is quite another question.) In other words: A normative law is always enforced by men and by their sanctions, and it is therefore fundamentally different from a hypothesis. Legally, we can enforce the suppression of murder, or of acts of kindness; of falsity, or of truth; of justice, or of injustice. But we cannot force the sun to alter its course. No amount of argument can bridge this gap.
19. The ‘nature of happiness and misery’ is referred to in the Theaetetus, 175c. For the close relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘Form’ or ‘Idea’, cp. especially Republic, 597a–d, where Plato first discusses the Form or Idea of a bed, and then refers to it as ‘the bed which exists by nature, and which was made by God’ (597b). In the same place, he proffers the corresponding distinction between the ‘artificial’ (or the ‘fabricated’ thing, which is an ‘imitation’) and ‘truth’. Cp. also Adam’s note to Republic, 597b10 (with the quotation from Burnet given there), and the notes to 476b13, 501b9, 525c15; furthermore Theaetetus, 174b (and Cornford’s note 1 to p. 85 in his Plato’s Theory of Knowledge). See also Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1015a14.
20. For Plato’s attack upon art, see the last book of the Republic, and especially the passages Republic, 600a–605b, mentioned in note 39 to chapter 4.
21. Cp. notes 11, 12 and 13 to this chapter, and text. My contention that Plato agrees at least partly with Antiphon’s naturalist theories (although he does not, of course, agree with Antiphon’s equalitarianism) will appear strange to many, especially to the readers of Barker, op. cit. And it may surprise them even more to hear the opinion that the main disagreement was not so much a theoretical one, but rather one of moral practice, and that Antiphon and not Plato was morally in the right, as far as the practical issue of equalitarianism is concerned. (For Plato’s agreement with Antiphon’s principle that nature is true and right, see also text to notes 23 and 28, and note 30 to this chapter.)
22. These quotations are from Sophist, 266b and 265e. But the passage also contains (265c) a criticism (similar to Laws, quoted in text to notes 23 and 30 in this chapter) of what may be described as a materialist interpretation of naturalism such as was held, perhaps, by Antiphon; I mean ‘the belief … that nature … generates without intelligence’.
23. Cp. Laws, 892a and c. For the doctrine of the affinity of the soul to the Ideas, see also note 15 (8) to chapter 3. For the affinity of ‘natures’ and ‘souls’, see Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1015a14, with the passages of the Laws quoted, and with 896d/e: ‘the soul dwells in all things that move …’
Compare further especially the following passages in which ‘natures’ and ‘souls’ are used in a way that is obviously synonymous: Republic, 485a/b, 485e/486a and d, 486b (‘nature’); 486b and d (‘soul’), 490e/491a (both), 491b (both), and many other places (cp. also Adam’s note to 370a7). The affinity is directly stated in 490b(10). For the affinity between ‘nature’ and ‘soul’ and ‘race’, cp. 501e where the phrase ‘philosophic natures’ or ‘souls’ found in analogous passages is replaced by ‘race of philosophers’.
There is also an affinity between ‘soul’ or ‘nature’ and the social class or caste; see for instance Republic, 435b. The connection between caste and race is fundamental, for from the beginning (415a), caste is identified with race.
‘Nature’ is used in the sense of ‘talent’ or ‘condition of the soul’ in Laws, 648d, 650b, 655e, 710b, 766a, 875c. The priority and superiority of nature over art is stated in Laws, 889a, ff. For ‘natural’ in the sense of ‘right’, or ‘true’, see Laws, 686d and 818e, respectively.
24. Cp. the passages quoted in note 32 (1), (a) and (c), to chapter 4.
25. The Socratic doctrine of autarky is mentioned in Republic, 387d/e (cp. Apology, 41c, ff., and Adam’s note to Rep., 387d25). This is only one of the few scattered passages reminiscent of Socratic teaching; but it is in direct contradiction to the main doctrine of the Republic, as it is expounded in the text (see also note 36 to chapter 6, and text); this may be seen by contrasting the quoted passage with 369c, ff., and very many similar passages.
26. Cp. for instance the passage quoted in the text to note 29 to chapter 4. For the ‘rare and uncommon natures’, cp. Republic, 491a/b, and many other passages, for instance Timaeus, 51e: ‘reason is shared by the gods with very few men’. For the ‘social habitat’, see 491d (cp. also chapter 23).
While Plato (and Aristotle; cp. especially note 4 to chapter 11, and text) insisted that manual work is degrading, Socrates seems to have adopted a very different attitude. (Cp. Xenophon, Memorabilia, II, 7; 7–10; Xenophon’s story is, to some extent, corroborated by Antisthenes’ and Diogenes’ attitude towards manual work; cp. also note 56 to chapter 10.)
27. See especially Theaetetus, 172b (cp. also Cornford’s comments on this passage in Plato’s Theory of Knowledge). See also note 7 to this chapter. The elements of conventionalism in Plato’s teaching may perhaps explain why the Republic was said, by some who still possessed Protagoras’ writings, to resemble these. (Cp. Diogenes Laertius, III, 37.) For Lycophron’s contract theory, see notes 43–54 to chapter 6 (especially note 46), and text.
28. Cp. Laws, 690b/c; see note 10 to this chapter. Plato mentions Pindar’s naturalism also in Gorgias, 484b, 488b; Laws, 714c, 890a. For the opposition between ‘external compulsion’ on the one hand, and (a) ‘free action’, (b) ‘nature’, on the other, cp. also Republic, 603c, and Timaeus, 64d. (Cp. also Rep., 466c–d, quoted in note 30 to this chapter.)
29. Cp. Republic, 369b–c. This is part of the contract theory. The next quotation, which is the first statement of the naturalist principle in the perfect state, is 370a/b–c. (Naturalism is in the Republic first mentioned by Glaucon in 358e, ff.; but this is, of course, not Plato’s own doctrine of naturalism.)
(1) For the further development of the naturalistic principle of the division of labour and the part played by this principle in Plato’s theory of justice, cp. especially text to notes 6, 23 and 40 to chapter 6.
(2) For a modern radical version of the naturalistic principle, see Marx’s formula of the communist society (adopted from Louis Blanc): ‘From each according to his ability: to each according to his needs!’ (Cp. for instance A Handbook of Marxism, E. Burns, 1935, p. 752; and note 8 to chapter 13; see also note 3 to chapter 13, and note 48 to chapter 24, and text.)
For the historical roots of this ‘principle of communism’, see Plato’s maxim ‘Friends have in common all things they possess’ (see note 36 to chapter 6, and text; for Plato’s communism see also notes 34 to chapter 6 and 30 to chapter 4, and text), and compare these passages with the Acts: ‘And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; … and parted them to all men, as every man had need’ (2, 44–45).—‘Neither was there any among them that lacked: for … distribution was made unto every man according as he had need’ (4, 34–35).
30. See note 23, and text. The quotations in the present paragraph are all from the Laws: (1) 889, a–d (cp. the very similar passage in the Theaetetus, 172b); (2) 896c–e; (3) 890e/891a.
For the next paragraph in the text (i.e. for my contention that Plato’s naturalism is incapable of solving practical problems) the following may serve as an illustration. Many naturalists have contended that men and women are ‘by nature’ different, both physically and spiritually, and that they should therefore fulfil different functions in social life. Plato, however, uses the same naturalistic argument to prove the opposite; for, he argues, are not dogs of both sexes useful for watching as well as hunting? ‘Do you agree’, he writes (Rep., 466c–d), ‘that women … must participate with men in guarding as well as in hunting, as it is with dogs; … and that in so doing, they will be acting in the most desirable manner, since this will be not contrary to nature, but in accordance with the natural relations of the sexes?’ (See also text to note 28 to this chapter; for the dog as ideal guardian, cp. chapter 4, especially note 32 (2), and text.)
31. For a brief criticism of the biological theory of the state, see note 7 to chapter 10, and text. *For the oriental origin of the theory, see R. Eisler, Revue de Synthèse Historique, vol. 41, p. 15.*
32. For some applications of Plato’s political theory of the soul, and for the inferences drawn from it, see notes 58–9 to chapter 10, and text. For the fundamental methodological analogy between city and individual, see especially Republic, 368e, 445c, 577c. For Alcmaeon’s political theory of the human individual, or of human physiology, cp. note 13 to chapter 6.
33. Cp. Republic, 423, b and d.
34. This quotation as well as the next is from G. Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates (1875), vol. III, 124.—The main passages of the Republic are 439c, f. (the story of Leontius); 571c, f. (the bestial part versus the reasoning part); 588c (the Apocalyptic Monster; cp. the ‘Beast’ which possesses a Platonic Number, in the Revelation 13, 17 and 18); 603d and 604b (man at war with himself). See also Laws, 689a–b, and notes 58–9 to chapter 10.
35. Cp. Republic, 519e, f. (cp. also note 10 to chapter 8); the next two quotations are both from the Laws, 903c. (I have reversed their order.) It may be mentioned that the ‘whole’ referred to in these two passages (‘pan’ and ‘holon’) is not the state but the world; yet there is no doubt that the underlying tendency of this cosmological holism is a political holism; cp. Laws, 903d–e (where the physician and craftsman is associated with the statesman), and the fact that Plato often uses ‘holon’ (especially the plural of it) to mean ‘state’ as well as ‘world’. Furthermore, the first of these two passages (in my order of quoting) is a shorter version of Republic, 420b–421c; the second of Republic, 520b, ff. (‘We have created you for the sake of the state, as well as for your own sake.’) Further passages on holism or collectivism are: Republic, 424a, 449e, 462a, f., Laws, 715b, 739c, 875a, f., 903b, 923b, 942a, f. (See also notes 31/32 to chapter 6.) For the remark in this paragraph that Plato spoke of the state as an organism, cp. Republic, 462c, and Laws, 964e, where the state is even compared with the human body.
36. Cp. Adam in his edition of the Republic, vol. II, 303; see also note 3 to chapter 4, and text.
37. This point is emphasized by Adam, op. cit., note 546a, b7, and pp. 288 and 307. The next quotation in this paragraph is Republic, 546a; cp. Republic, 485a/b, quoted in note 26 (1) to chapter 3 and in text to note 33 to chapter 8.
38. This is the main point in which I must deviate from Adam’s interpretation. I believe Plato to indicate that the philosopher king of Books VI–VII, whose main interest is in the things that are not generated and do not decay (Rep., 485b; see the last note and the passages there referred to), obtains with his mathematical and dialectical training the knowledge of the Platonic Number and with it the means of arresting social degeneration and thereby the decay of the state. See especially the text to note 39.
The quotations that follow in this paragraph are: ‘keeping pure the race of the guardians’; cp. Republic, 460c, and text to note 34 to chapter 4. ‘A city thus constituted, etc.’: 546a.
The reference to Plato’s distinction, in the field of mathematics, acoustics, and astronomy, between rational knowledge and delusive opinion based upon experience or perception is to Republic, 523a, ff., 525d, ff. (where ‘calculation’ is discussed; see especially 526a); 527d, ff., 529b, f., 531a, ff. (down to 534a and 537d); see also 509d–511e.
39. * I have been blamed for ‘adding’ the words (which I never placed in quotation marks) ‘lacking a purely rational method’; but in view of Rep., 523a to 537d, it seems to me clear that Plato’s reference to ‘perception’ implies just this contrast.* The quotations in this paragraph are from Rep., 546b, ff. Note that, throughout this passage, it is ‘The Muses’ who speak through the mouth of ‘Socrates’.
In my interpretation of the Story of the Fall and the Number, I have carefully avoided the difficult, undecided, and perhaps undecidable problem of the computation of the Number itself. (It may be undecidable since Plato may not have revealed his secret in full.) I confine my interpretation entirely to the passages immediately before and after the one that describes the Number itself; these passages are, I believe, clear enough. In spite of that, my interpretation deviates, as far as I know, from previous attempts.
(1) The crucial statement on which I base my interpretation is (A) that the guardians work by ‘calculation aided by perception’. Next to this, I am using the statements (B) that they will not ‘accidentally hit upon (the correct way of) obtaining good offspring’; (C) that they will ‘blunder, and beget children in the wrong way’; (D) that they are ‘ignorant’ of such matters (that is, such matters as the Number).
Regarding (A), it should be clear to every careful reader of Plato that such a reference to perception is intended to express a criticism of the method in question. This view of the passage under consideration (546a, f.) is supported by the fact that it comes so soon after the passages 523a–537d (see the end of the last note), in which the opposition between pure rational knowledge and opinion based on perception is one of the main themes, and in which, more especially, the term ‘calculation’ is used in a context emphasizing the opposition between rational knowledge and experience, while the term ‘perception’ (see also 511c/d) is given a definite technical and deprecatory sense. (Cp. also, for instance, Plutarch’s wording in his discussion of this opposition: in his Life of Marcellus, 306.) I am therefore of the opinion, and this opinion is enforced by the context, especially by (B), (C), (D), that Plato’s remark (A) implies (a) that ‘calculation based upon perception’ is a poor method, and (b) that there are better methods, namely the methods of mathematics and dialectics, which yield pure rational knowledge. The point I am trying to elaborate is, indeed, so plain, that I should not have troubled so much about it were it not for the fact that even Adam has missed it. In his note to 546a, b7, he interprets ‘calculation’ as a reference to the rulers’ task of determining the number of marriages they should permit, and ‘perception’ as the means by which they ‘decide what couples should be joined, what children be reared, etc.’. That is to say, Adam takes Plato’s remark to be a simple description and not as a polemic against the weakness of the empirical method. Accordingly, he relates neither the statement (C) that the rulers will ‘blunder’ nor the remark (D) that they are ‘ignorant’ to the fact that they use empirical methods. (The remark (B) that they will not ‘hit’ upon the right method ‘by accident’ would simply be left untranslated, if we follow Adam’s suggestion.)
In interpreting our passage we must keep it in mind that in Book VIII, immediately before the passage in question, Plato returns to the question of the first city of Books II to IV. (See Adam’s notes to 449a, ff., and 543a, ff.) But the guardians of this city are neither mathematicians nor dialecticians. Thus they have no idea of the purely rational methods emphasized so much in Book VII, 525–534. In this connection, the import of the remarks on perception, i.e. on the poverty of empirical methods, and on the resulting ignorance of the guardians, is unmistakable.
The statement (B) that the rulers will not ‘hit accidentally upon’ (the correct way of) ‘obtaining good offspring, or none at all’, is perfectly clear in my interpretation. Since the rulers have merely empirical methods at their disposal, it would be only a lucky accident if they did hit upon a method whose determination needs mathematical or other rational methods. Adam suggests (note to 546a, b7) the translation: ‘none the more will they by calculation together with perception obtain good offspring’; and only in brackets, he adds: ‘lit. hit the obtaining of’. I think that his failure to make any sense of the ‘hit’ is a consequence of his failure to see the implications of (A).
The interpretation here suggested makes (C) and (D) perfectly understandable; and Plato’s remark that his Number is ‘master over better or worse birth’, fits in perfectly. It may be remarked that Adam does not comment on (D), i.e. the ignorance, although such a comment would be most necessary in view of his theory (note to 546d22) that ‘the number is not a nuptial … number’, and that it has no technical eugenic meaning.
That the meaning of the Number is indeed technical and eugenic is, I think, clear, if we consider that the passage containing the Number is enclosed in passages containing references to eugenic knowledge, or rather, lack of eugenic knowledge. Immediately before the Number, (A), (B), (C), occur, and immediately afterwards, (D), as well as the story of the bride and bridegroom and their degenerate offspring. Besides, (C) before the Number and (D) after the Number refer to each other; for (C), the ‘blunder’, is connected with a reference to ‘begetting in the wrong way’, and (D), the ‘ignorance’, is connected with an exactly analogous reference, viz., ‘uniting bride and bridegroom in the wrong manner’. (See also next note.)
The last point in which I must defend my interpretation is my contention that those who know the Number thereby obtain the power to influence ‘better or worse births’. This does not of course follow from Plato’s statement that the Number itself has such power; for if Adam’s interpretation is right, then the Number regulates the births because it determines an unalterable period after which degeneration is bound to set in. But I assert that Plato’s references to ‘perception’, to ‘blunder’ and to ‘ignorance’ as the immediate cause of the eugenic mistakes would be pointless if he did not mean that, had they possessed an adequate knowledge of the appropriate mathematical and purely rational methods, the guardians would not have blundered. But this makes the inference inevitable that the Number has a technical eugenic meaning, and that its knowledge is the key to the power of arresting degeneration. (This inference also seems to me the only one compatible with all we know about this type of superstition; all astrology, for instance, involves the apparently somewhat contradictory conception that the knowledge of our fate may help us to influence this fate.)
I think that the rejection of the explanation of the Number as a secret breeding taboo arises from a reluctance to credit Plato with such crude ideas, however clearly he may express them. In other words, they arise from the tendency to idealize Plato.
(2) In this connection, I must refer to an article by A. E. Taylor, ‘The Decline and Fall of The State in Republic, VIII’ (Mind, N.S. 48, 1939, pp. 23 ff.). In this article, Taylor attacks Adam (in my opinion not justly), and argues against him: ‘It is true, of course, that the decay of the ideal State is expressly said in 546b to begin when the ruling class “beget children out of due season” … But this need not mean, and in my opinion does not mean, that Plato is concerning himself here with problems of the hygiene of reproduction. The main thought is the simple one that if, like everything of man’s making, the State carries the seeds of its own dissolution within it, this must, of course, mean that sooner or later the persons wielding supreme power will be inferior to those who preceded them’ (pp. 25 ff.). Now this interpretation seems to me not only untenable, in view of Plato’s fairly definite statements, but also a typical example of the attempt to eliminate from Plato’s writing such embarrassing elements as racialism or superstition. Adam began by denying that the Number has technical eugenic importance, and by asserting that it is not a ‘nuptial number’, but merely a cosmological period. Taylor now continues by denying that Plato is here at all interested in ‘problems of the hygiene of the reproduction’. But Plato’s passage is thronged with allusions to these problems, and Taylor himself admits two pages before (p. 23) that it is ‘nowhere suggested’ that the Number ‘is a determinant of anything but the “better and worse births”’. Besides, not only the passage in question but the whole of the Republic (and similarly the Statesman, especially 310b, 310e) is simply full of emphasis upon the ‘problems of the hygiene of reproduction’. Taylor’s theory that Plato, when speaking of the ‘human creature’ (or, as Taylor puts it, of a ‘thing of human generation’), means the state, and that Plato wishes to allude to the fact that the state is the creation of a human lawgiver, is, I think, without support in Plato’s text. The whole passage begins with a reference to the things of the sensible world in flux, to the things that are generated and that decay (see notes 37 and 38 to this chapter), and more especially, to living things, plants as well as animals, and to their racial problems. Besides, a thing ‘of man’s making’ would, if emphasized by Plato in such a context, mean an ‘artificial’ thing which is inferior because it is ‘twice removed’ from reality. (Cp. text to notes 20–23 to this chapter, and the whole Tenth Book of the Republic down to the end of 608b.) Plato would never expect anybody to interpret the phrase ‘a thing of man’s making’ as meaning the perfect, the ‘natural’ state; rather he would expect them to think of something very inferior (like poetry; cp. note 39 to chapter 4). The phrase which Taylor translates ‘thing of human generation’ is usually simply translated by ‘human creature’, and this removes all difficulties.
(3) Assuming that my interpretation of the passage in question is correct, a suggestion may be made with the intention of connecting Plato’s belief in the significance of racial degeneration with his repeated advice that the number of the members of the ruling class should be kept constant (advice that shows that the sociologist Plato understood the unsettling effect of population increase). Plato’s way of thinking, described at the end of the present chapter (cp. text to note 45; and note 37 to chapter 8), especially the way he opposes The One monarch, The Few timocrats, to The Many who are nothing but a mob, may have suggested to him the belief that an increase in numbers is equivalent to a decline in quality. (Something on these lines is indeed suggested in the Laws, 710d.) If this hypothesis is correct, then he may easily have concluded that population increase is interdependent with, or perhaps even caused by, racial degeneration. Since population increase was in fact the main cause of the instability and dissolution of the early Greek tribal societies (cp. notes 6, 7, and 63 to chapter 10, and text), this hypothesis would explain why Plato believed that the ‘real’ cause was racial degeneration (in keeping with his general theories of ‘nature’, and of ‘change’).
40. (1) Or ‘at the wrong time’. Adam insists (note to 546d22) that we must not translate ‘at the wrong time’ but ‘inopportunely’. I may remark that my interpretation is quite independent of this question; it is fully compatible with ‘inopportunely’ or ‘wrongly’ or ‘at the wrong time’ or ‘out of due season’. (The phrase in question means, originally, something like ‘contrary to the proper measure’; usually it means ‘at the wrong time’.)
* (2) Concerning Plato’s remarks about ‘mingling’ and ‘mixture’, it may be observed that Plato seems to have held a primitive but popular theory of heredity (apparently still held by race-horse breeders) according to which the offspring is an even mixture or blend of the characters or ‘natures’ of his two parents, and that their characters, or natures, or ‘virtues’ (stamina, speed, etc., or, according to the Republic, the Statesman, and the Laws, gentleness, fierceness, boldness, self-restraint, etc.) are mixed in him in proportion to the number of ancestors (grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.) who possessed these characters. Accordingly, the art of breeding is one of a judicious and scientific—mathematical or harmonious—blending or mixing of natures. See especially the Statesman, where the royal craft of statesman-ship or herdsmanship is likened to that of weaving, and where the kingly weaver must blend boldness with self-restraint. (See also Republic, 375c–e, and 410c, ff.; Laws, 731b; and notes 34 f. to chapter 4; 13 and 39 f. to chapter 8; and text.)*
41. For Plato’s law of social revolutions, see especially note 26 to chapter 4, and text.
42. The term ‘meta-biology’ is used by G. B. Shaw in this sense, i.e. as denoting a kind of religion. (Cp. the preface to Back to Methuselah; see also note 66 to chapter 12.)
43. Cp. Adam’s note to Republic, 547a 3.
44. For a criticism of what I call ‘psychologism’ in the method of sociology, cp. text to note 19 to chapter 13 and chapter 14, where Mill’s still popular methodological psychologism is discussed.
45. It has often been said that Plato’s thought must not be squeezed into a ‘system’; accordingly, my attempts in this paragraph (and not only in this paragraph) to show the systematic unity of Plato’s thought, which is obviously based on the Pythagorean table of opposites, will probably arouse criticism. But I believe that such a systematization is a necessary test of any interpretation. Those who believe that they do not need an interpretation, and that they can ‘know’ a philosopher or his work, and take him just ‘as he was’, or his work just ‘as it was’, are mistaken. They cannot but interpret both the man and his work; but since they are not aware of the fact that they interpret (that their view is coloured by tradition, temperament, etc.), their interpretation must necessarily be naïve and uncritical. (Cp. also chapter 10 (notes 1–5 and 56), and chapter 25.) A critical interpretation, however, must take the form of a rational reconstruction, and must be systematic; it must try to reconstruct the philosopher’s thought as a consistent edifice. Cp. also what A. C. Ewing says of Kant (A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 1938, p. 4): ‘… we ought to start with the assumption that a great philosopher is not likely to be always contradicting himself, and consequently, wherever there are two interpretations, one of which will make Kant consistent and the other inconsistent, prefer the former to the latter, if reasonably possible.’ This surely applies also to Plato, and even to interpretation in general.