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Plato's ‘Ideal’ State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
In C.Q. N.S. vii (1957), 164 ff. Professor Demos raises the question in what sense, if at all, the state which Plato describes in the Republic can be regarded as ideal, if the warrior-class and the masses are ‘deprived of reason’ and therefore imperfect. The ideal state, he thinks, appears at first sight to be composed of un-ideal individuals. But ‘the problem is resolved by separating the personal from the political-technical areas of control. In so far as they are citizens, men in the ideal city will indeed represent one part of the soul and one function.…
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1959
References
1 ‘The Modification of Plan in Plato's Republic’, in C.Q. vii (1913), 265 ff.Google Scholar: an important article which has not, I think, received much attention.
2 In Book 5 Socrates still speaks as thoughthe nature of justice has not yet been found. Suppose, he says, we do find out what justice is, are we to demand that every just person must have a share which corresponds exactly to it ? The answer is No: we should think none the worse of a painter who painted an ideally beautiful figure but could not show that a person as beautiful as that could exist. Here, of course, we are concerned with an ideal of perfection-the ideal of the philosopher who has knowledge, which may be acquired after the lengthy education described in Book 7.
1 e.g. by Foster, M.B., The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel, quoted by Demos (p. 164)Google Scholar. Demos himself has doubts (p. 168), supposing that the Rulers' duty to the state will come into conflict with private desire.
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can find no place in the souls of the rulers' (Foster, , op. cit., p. 99)Google Scholar. But the subordination of appetite to reason and the fulfilment of the proper function of appetite may both be regarded as achieved par excellence when appetite has as its object the same end as reason. In any case there is no unbalance.
3 ‘Plato populates his heaven with the forms of just individuals no less than with that of the just state’ (p. 164).Google Scholar
4 Demos (p. 166, n. 1) says that Plato ‘vacillates’ on the question whether his ‘ideal’ state is capable of realization, because while at 502 c he says that it is difficult of realization, but not impossible, he says at 529 a–b that it can be found nowhere on earth. But he does not say that it never could be—and I therefore find no vacillation.
5 To borrow wording from Demos (p.165), such a state might be called ideal under the circumstances—not, so to say, ideally ideal. I cannot see that it is ‘improper’ for Plato to call it a pattern laid up in heaven.
1 I regard Plato's Rulers as akin to the riigh Priests of a theocracy (Phil.Q. [1955], 69 f).