4. The Moralist
Plato knows that many of his readers will be skeptics, and for a while he struggles to find a natural ethic that shall stir men’s souls to righteousness without relying on heaven, purgatory, and hell.101 The Dialogues of his middle period turn more and more from metaphysics to morals and politics: “The greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families.”102 The problem of ethics lies in the apparent conflict between individual pleasure and social good. Plato presents the problem fairly, and puts into the mouth of Callias as strong an argument for selfishness as any immoralist has ever given.103 He recognizes that many pleasures are good; intelligence is needed to discriminate between good and harmful pleasures; and for fear that intelligence may come too late we must inculcate in the young a habit of temperance, a sense of the golden mean.104
The soul or principle of life has three levels or parts—desire, will, and thought; each part has its own virtue—moderation, courage, and wisdom; to which should be added piety and justice—the fulfillment of one’s obligations to his parents and his gods. Justice may be defined as the co-operation of the parts in a whole, of the elements in a character, or of the people in a state, each part performing its fittest function properly.105 The Good is neither reason alone nor pleasure alone, but that mingling of them, in proportion and measure, which produces the Life of Reason.106 The supreme good lies in pure knowledge of the eternal forms and laws. Morally “the highest good . . . is the power or faculty, if there be such, which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of truth.”107 He who so loves truth will not care to return evil for evil;108 he will think it better to suffer injustice than to do it; he will “go forth by sea and land to seek after men who are incorruptible, whose acquaintance is beyond price. . . . The true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly lusts; and when philosophy offers them a purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence; to her they incline, and whither she leads they follow her.”109
Plato had burned his poems, and lost his religious faith. But he remained a poet and a worshiper; his conception of the Good was suffused with esthetic emotion and ascetic piety; philosophy and religion became one in him, ethic and esthetic were fused. As he grew older he became incapable of seeing any beauty apart from goodness and truth. He would censor, in his ideal state, all art and poetry that might seem to the government to have an immoral or unpatriotic tendency; all rhetoric and all nonreligious drama would be barred; even Homer—seductive painter of an immoral theology—would have to go. The Dorian and Phrygian modes of music might be allowed; but there must be no complicated instruments, no virtuosos making “a beastly noise” with their technical displays,110 and no radical novelties.
The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. . . . The new style, gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from these it . . . goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.111
Beauty, like virtue, lies in fitness, symmetry, and order. A work of art should be a living creature, with head, trunk, and limbs all vitalized and unified by one idea.112 True beauty, thinks our passionate puritan, is intellectual rather than physical; the figures of geometry are “eternally and absolutely beautiful,” and the laws whereby the heavens are made are fairer than the stars.113 Love is the pursuit of beauty, and has three stages, according as it is love of the body, or of the soul, or of truth. Love of the body, between man and woman, is legitimate as a means to generation, which is a kind of immortality;114 nevertheless this is a rudimentary form of love, unworthy of a philosopher. Physical love between man and man, or woman and woman, is unnatural, and must be suppressed as frustrating reproduction.115 This can be done by sublimating it in the second or spiritual stage of love: here the older man loves the younger because his comeliness is a symbol and reminder of pure and eternal beauty, and the younger loves the older because his wisdom opens a way to understanding and honor. But the highest love is “the love of the everlasting possession of the Good,” that love which seeks the absolute beauty of the perfect and eternal Ideas or forms.116 This, and not fleshless affection between man and woman, is “Platonic love”—the point at which the poet and the philosopher in Plato merge in the passionate desire for understanding, an almost mystic longing for the Beatific Vision of the law and structure and life and goal of the world.
For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has no time to look down upon the affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and enmity in the struggle against them; his eye is ever directed towards fixed and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and on these, so far as he can, he will mold his life.117