GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

378 ITHXOS \
PLATO: And what could you reply, if a sophist put tkat
view into words?
PHILALETHES: I should bring up arguments from history
and biology rather than from philosophy. I should
point out that common standards are earlier and more
natural than individualistic self-interest. I should
point to ftniiPfllg living in herds and to communities
of insects, antf show how all these creatures serve not
themselves but the society, having not indeed a
common ethical system, for we assume them not to
think, but a common rule of life. And what we find
in these creatures, I should add, we find also in the
most primitive communities of men. They live under
rules which it has never occurred to them to challenge.
So that the common observance, which shows itself
later as a convention, is the original fact, and has
more authority, therefore, in the nature of things,
than the egoistic perversion which grows up later
like a disease, among men who have strayed from
the natural atmosphere of the herd in which they
alone can breathe healthily.
PLATO: Your egoists must be less convinced and pertinacious
than ours if they are silenced by such arguments.
For my young men, made subtle as they were
by the sophists, would certainly have replied, that
insects and animals and primitive communities were
no law for them, that
escape
civilization means precisely
from such base and slavish, conditions, and
that, if standards can in fact be denied, it is absurd
to pretend that they ought not to be, merely because
some primitive and savage creatures had not yet
learnt how restrictive they are upon the splendour
and force of noble individuals. 1
PHILALETHES: If that line were adopted, I should reply
that standards are as necessary to self-preservation
in civilized as in primitive societies. For no individual
can stand by himself. If his property, his contracts,
'SeeCbftpterXVI, pp. 629-637 for a development of thU position.