VII
To Plato, a good community was like a healthy body; a harmonious exercise of every function was the condition of its strength and vitality. Necessarily then a good community could not be simply a collection of individuals, each one of whom insists upon some private and particular happiness without respect to the welfare and interests of his fellows. Plato believed that goodness and happiness—for he would scarcely admit that there was any distinct line of cleavage between these qualities—consisted in living according to nature; that is to say, in knowing one’s self, in finding one’s bent, and in fulfilling the particular work which one had the capacity to perform. The secret of a good community, therefore, if we may translate Plato’s language into modern political slang, is the principle of function.
Every kind of work, says Plato, requires a particular kind of aptitude and training. If we wish to have good shoes, our shoes must be made by a shoemaker and not by a weaver; and in like manner, every man has some particular calling to which his genius leads him, and he finds a happiness for himself and usefulness to his fellows when he is employed in that calling. The good life must result when each man has a function to perform, and when all the necessary functions are adjusted happily to each other. The state is like the physical body. “Health is the creation of a natural order and government in the parts of the body, and the creation of disease is the creation of a state of things in which they are at variance with the natural order.” The supreme virtue in the commonwealth is justice; namely, the due apportionment of work or function under the rule of “a place for every man and every man in his place.”
Has any such society ever come into existence? Do not too hastily answer No. The ideal in Plato’s mind is carried out point for point in the organization of a modern symphony orchestra.
Now Plato was not unaware that there were other formulas for happiness. He expressly points out however that in founding the Republic he does not wish to make any single person or group happier beyond the rest; he desires rather that the whole city should be in the happiest condition. It would be easy enough “to array the husbandmen in rich and costly robes and to enjoin them to cultivate the ground only with a view to their pleasure,” and so Plato might have conferred a spurious kind of felicity upon every individual. If this happened, however, there would be a brief period of ease and revelry before the whole works went to pot. In this Plato is a thoroughgoing realist: he is not looking for a short avenue of escape; he is ready to face the road with all its ups and downs, with its steep climbs as well as its wide vistas; and he does not think any the worse of life because he finds that its chief enjoyments rest in activity, and not, as the epicureans of all sorts have always believed, in a release from activity.