The Five Great Philosophies of Life

Excerpt: ...is Plato more keen or more fair than in his judgment of the money-maker. He says that he will generally do the right thing; he will be eminently respectable; he will not sink to very low or disreputable courses. All his goodness, however, will be of a forced, constrained, artificial, and at bottom unreal character. He will be good because he has to, in order to maintain that standing in the community on which his wealth depends. In Plato's own words: He coerces his bad passions by an effort of virtue; not that he convinces them of evil, or exerts over them the gentle influence of reason, but he acts upon them by necessity and fear, and because he trembles for his possessions. This sort of man will be at war with himself: he will be two men, not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones. For these reasons such an one will be more decent than many are; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will be far out of his reach. The next step down for the state is what Plato calls democracy. Of the democracy of intelligence and self-control diffused throughout the body of self-respecting citizens Plato had formed and could form no conception. By democracy he meant the state of things where each man does that which is Pg 148 right in his own eyes. In the first place the citizens are free. The city is full of freedom and frankness-there a man may do as he likes. They have a complete assortment of constitutions; and if a man has a mind to establish a state, he must go to a democracy as he would go to a bazaar, where they sell them, and pick out one that suits him. Democracy is a most accommodating and charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and (this, perhaps, is the keenest of all Plato's keen thrusts) dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike. The man corresponding to democracy in the state, is the man whose life is given over to the undiscriminating enjoyment...