The Republic - Noyemi

By Plato

translated by Benjamin Jowett


THE INTRODUCTION

THE Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception
of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them.  There are nearer
approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist;
the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions
of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art,
the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence.  But no
other Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same
perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world,
or contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old,
and not of one age only but of all.  Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper
irony or a greater wealth of humor or imagery, or more dramatic power. 
Nor in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave
life and speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. 
The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may
be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point to which ancient
thinkers ever attained.  Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among
the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge,
although neither of them always distinguished the bare outline
or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be
content with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized. 
He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen;
and in him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future
knowledge are contained.  The sciences of logic and psychology,
which have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages, are based
upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato.  The principles of definition,
the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle,
the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion,
between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division
of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements,
or of pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary--
these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found
in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. 
The greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers
on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference between
words and things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him,
although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his
own writings.  But he does not bind up truth in logical formulae,--
logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the science which he
imagines to "contemplate all truth and all existence" is very unlike
the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have
discovered.

Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part
of a still larger design which was to have included an ideal
history of Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy. 
The fragment of the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction,
second only in importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur;
and is said as a fact to have inspired some of the early navigators
of the sixteenth century.  This mythical tale, of which the subject
was a history of the wars of the Athenians against the Island
of Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an unfinished poem
of Solon, to which it would have stood in the same relation
as the writings of the logographers to the poems of Homer. 
It would have told of a struggle for Liberty, intended to represent
the conflict of Persia and Hellas.  We may judge from the noble
commencement of the Timaeus, from the fragment of the Critias itself,
and from the third book of the Laws, in what manner Plato would
have treated this high argument.  We can only guess why the great
design was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became sensible of some
incongruity in a fictitious history, or because he had lost his
interest in it, or because advancing years forbade the completion
of it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy that had this
imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have found Plato
himself sympathizing with the struggle for Hellenic independence,
singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making
the reflection of Herodotus where he contemplates the growth
of the Athenian empire--"How brave a thing is freedom of speech,
which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state
of Hellas in greatness!" or, more probably, attributing the victory
to the ancient good order of Athens and to the favor of Apollo
and Athene.

Again, Plato may be regarded as the "captain" ('arhchegoz') or leader
of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found
the original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City
of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous
other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. 
The extent to which Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted
to him in the Politics has been little recognized, and the recognition
is the more necessary because it is not made by Aristotle himself. 
The two philosophers had more in common than they were conscious of;
and probably some elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle. 
In English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only
in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great original
writers like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas. 
That there is a truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears
witness to herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has
been enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground. 
Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new
life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence. 
The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education,
of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul,
and Goethe are the legitimate descendants.  Like Dante or Bunyan,
he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly
impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church
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