Jacques
Maritain Center
1 In this perspective the thought of Plotinus -- though it had other sources also and developed in an entirely different intellectual climate -- does indeed seem like a supreme consummation of the thought of Plato. But to achieve this it had to drop many things (in particular the major interest in politics) which in fact were of vital importance to Plato.
1 Laws, Book X, 898-899.
1 Gorgias, 478, trans. Lane Cooper, op. cit
2 Ibid., 507.
3 Ibid., 508.
4 Ibid., 527.
1 Republic, 1, 354, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, New York: Random House, 1937, Vol. I; London: OUP.
2 Ibid., IX, 580.
3 Ibid., II, 361.
4 Cf. Laws, 661-663.
5 Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. theol., I, 48, 6.
6 Cf. Gorgias, 509, trans. Lane Cooper, op. cit
1 Cf. Werner Jaeger, Paideia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1943, vol. II, p. 134 and p. 268; Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-1945.
1 Cf. Porphyry, History of the Philosophers, III, 10, in Philosophi Platonici. Opuscula Selecta, ed. Nauck, Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1886, p. 9. A certain Spintharos, whose son Aristoxenus recorded memories concerning Socrates, assures us that "when he was flamed with anger he became terrible to look upon; there is no action and no word from which he abstained at such moments".
2 Republic, IV, 443-44. Cf. Laws, II, 653.
1 Alas, this classic tag is not worth much, especially when it is translated literally into our modern tongues; and it seems that philosophical thought has paid dearly, in the course of history, for the poverty of moral vocabulary which is particularly evident in the case at hand. Instead of saying "honest good" we shall say rather good as right or good in itself and for itself, substantial good of the moral domain.
2 Republic, IV, 427-434; 441; Laws, I, 631; III, 688; XII, 963, 965. Plato sees these moral virtues from a civic or political angle. They are divine goods, he says in Laws, I, 631.
3 In any case Werner Jaeger is doubtless right in remarking (Paideia, vol. II, pp. 163 and 165) that Plato was not seeking a definition of the virtues, but rather a "vision" or intuitively caught idea of them.
1 Statesman, 262. 2 As opposed to Hegelian Sittlichkeit.
3 One might say "politically extroverted" morality of the conscience, as opposed to "religiously introverted" evangelical morality, where the conscience is centered on the spirit and attuned to the spirit.
1 The perspective of the Laws is not the same as that of the Republic; Plato takes greater account of the historical fact; he discusses the relative merits of the regimes of Sparta and Athens, and the weaknesses, resulting from a lack of culture and education of the Persian monarchy. He has his feet on the ground; if men reject the views of wisdom and reason, at least he will have proposed them in the context of a practical program. (Cf. the long preface to the French translation of the Laws by A. Diès, in the Guillaume Budé collection.) It is all the more significant that the theme of the kingly function of the sage, and of his sovereign ethico-political magisterium, should be as strongly marked in the Laws as in the Republic.
2 He says himself in the Republic (IX, 592) that the city of his choice doubtless exists only in heaven.
3 Republic, V, 473, trans. Jowett, op. cit Cf. ibid., VI, 499.
4 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951; London: Secker and Warburg, 1951.
1 Whether they act with the consent or against the will of their subjects, and with or without written laws, and using violence if necessary, the essential thing, Plato says in the Statesman (293-300), is that the government be in the hands of those rare men who possess science and wisdom. The written laws only make up for the absence of the crowned sage.
2 Laws, X, 906-909.
3 Cf. Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme, Paris: Le Cerf, 1938, p. 38.
4 VII, 803, trans. Jowett, op. cit
1 486.
2 Republic, IX, 591.
3 Theaetetus, 173-176.
4 Republic, VII, 496; cf. 500.
5 Henri Marrou used this word improperly here. Cf. above, pp. 28-29.
6 Henri Marrou, Histoire de l'Education dans l'Antiquité, Paris: Ed. do Seuil, 1948, p. 119-120. (Translation ours.)