What Reincarnates?

D IOGENES LAERTIUS has preserved the story that Plato, after meeting Socrates, burned the poetic tragedies of his youth and determined to devote the rest of his life to philosophy and to the regeneration of human society. Some may think, as a recent critic has said, that after this decision Plato allowed his imagination to wither, but we prefer the view that Plato’s literary genius, instead of drying up, made him the most readable of all philosophers. That he was also the greatest is an opinion that will probably evoke criticism, but express it we must, for caution in such matters is hardly appropriate. “Out of Plato,” said Emerson, “come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.” The late Alfred North Whitehead, most eminent of contemporary thinkers, remarked that the entire European philosophical tradition consists of “footnotes to Plato.” In recent years, however, Plato has been more attacked than admired. Shortly before the war, a Moscow professor, departing somewhat from the official Soviet line, claimed that Plato was the Founder and Father of Fascism, with Menshevist tendencies as well—in short, a Trotskyite. At about the same time, an English socialist had similar difficulties, but expressed them with greater intelligence. In the concluding chapter of his Plato Today, Mr. R. H. S. Crossman wrote: . . . I still find the Republic the greatest book on political philosophy which I have read. The more I read it, the more I hate it: and yet I cannot help returning to it time after time. For it is philosophy. It tries to reach truth by rational discussion and is itself a pattern of the disinterested research which it extols. It never bullies or deceives its reader or beguiles him with appeals to sentiment, but treats him as a fellow philosopher for whom only the truth is worth having. So Mr. Crossman, who in one place in his book whisks Plato into Nazi Germany and has him listen admiringly to one of Herr Goebbels’ speeches, becomes, as he admits, the Devil’s Disciple, recommending Plato, not because he wants to, but because he cannot help it. The integrity of Plato’s thought is for his severest critics a magnet more powerful than the repulsion of Plato’s “aristocratic” social system. This is something to ponder.