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

PLATO'S POLITICAL THEORY 83
Its citizens. It is the god, they the perpetual
sacrifice; and their rulers are Its priests.
PL. Is that what men have made of the doctrine that
the community is supreme! What close bed-
fellows are truth and falsehood! But you do not,
I hope, accuse me of teaching so preposterous?"
That Members of Plato's Guardian Class are Alone
Individuals. The doctrines to which Philalcthcs refers
in his last speech will be developed at greater length on
a later page. 1 His criticism I believe to be in essence sound
and, as Lowes Dickinson insists, it has a peculiar
topical significance. It is, however, only fair to point out
that the charge of subordinating the individual to the
State is not one which can be substantiated in regard to
Plato's Guardian class. At any rate it is inapplicable to
what may be called the non-civic periods in die lives of
the members of this class. The Good which as philosophers
they cultivate is an individual good albeit, as
Lowes Dickinson points out, it is pursued only intermittently
in the intervals of civic duty; and the attainment
of the vision of reality which is the object of their lives
owes nothing but the training and leisure which make it
possible to the State.
This is true enough, and provided that we can accept
what amounts to a division of human beings into two
species, each with its own specific good, it affords an
adequate answer to the criticism. For the philosophic
activity and the word "philosophic" may in .this connection
be interpreted to include the spiritual, the intellectual,
the aesthetic, the scientific, indeed all those forms
of activity whose disinterested pursuit is at once the
distinction and the glory of the human species of the
highest class is, in Plato's State, dependent upon the con-
tented performance of their social functions by the lower
classes. This contented performance of social function
being the sole good of which the lower classes are con-
* See Chmptcri XV, pp. 593-& ** XV* pp* 643-6$*.