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

PLATO'S POLITICAL THEORY 77
development of his personality. Plato, except for a rather
grudging admission that children born to parents in the
third class may sometimes be qualified by native endowment
to rise into the first, apparently ignores this light.
There is again the criticism which presupposes the assumption
that all men are born free and equal, whereas Plato's
State denies a large part of what to us constitutes freedom
the citizen is not, for example, free to live or even
to wish to live under a different form of government, or
to leave his own class and canonizes inequality.
Plato's Reply in Terms of Vocation. Plato's reply
would no doubt take the form of questioning the assumptions
upon which these criticisms obviously rest. Men, he
would say, are not equal, and freedom has no meaning
except in regard to function. There are different types of
men who are fitted by their native endowments to perform
different functions and to live different kinds of life. For
eauh type, excellence consists in the proper performance
of the specific function of the type and in the right living
of the life appropriate to the type. In other words, there
is a different sort of excellence for each type of man, that
is to say, for each class in the State. Now every citizen
ia Plato's State has an equal opportunity to perform the
function for which he or she is by nature fined, and by
training and education prepared; every citizen is, in
other words, free and equally free to live the kind, of good
life that is appropriate to the sort of man that he is. Now
this, Plato would insist, is the only kind of freedom which
matters. Admittedly, the citizen is not free to choose his
good lift for himself. Admittedly, his status in the com-
munity is fixed not by him, but for him:
Plato might ask, that he should make
difficult a choice? It is only the Gi
not only what is right and wrong, wh
evil, but why the good is good and
who can form an adequate judgment <
in such a choice. Now it is the