1.11 Philosophy and Politics

The triumph of science and the philosophy of thought postalessandrino focus on the inner life of man, represented the final victory of Socrates and Plato. In the second half of the fifth century a revolution took place in the Greek philosophy which is so completely identified with one man, Socrates, that its predecessors are known collectively as the "pre-Socratic". It would be wrong to believe that previous philosophers had completely ignored the man, focusing on nature and the cosmos, as it would be wrong to neglect the contribution of the contemporaries of Socrates, the much-abused sophists. However, Socrates was the catalyst for the change that he put the man at the center of philosophical inquiry. "Know thyself" (gnoti thyself) said the Delphic oracle, Socrates and made her the maximum, elaborating on numerous germinal ideas: that man is capable of knowing himself through a rigorous rational thought, through the dialectical method of analysis that compares hypotheses or alternative explanations; that the true knowledge can not be taught but must be learned for themselves and in themselves. Plato has Socrates say in 'Apology : "I have never been master of none". Human knowledge of himself, of his own nature, is the true end of knowledge and therefore of life. Yet Plato has Socrates say in the Apology: "A life is not investigated is not worth living". The final assumption is that men do evil out of ignorance and the final equation is this: knowledge (wisdom) = Virtue = happiness.

All attempts to deepen our understanding of these general principles fail because Socrates became a legendary figure within a generation. But Socrates is important is not the man who was the teacher of Plato's Socrates but who is the protagonist of many Platonic dialogues. Whatever the beliefs of Socrates and real-'s no reason to believe that he could better destroy the beliefs and arguments of others to build their own system- are the problems and formulations of the Platonic Socrates who have made their mark in much of Western Philosophy.

This Socrates believed that the human soul was the seat of his rational faculty, the essential factor that distinguishes man from beasts. But the soul also contains an irrational element, and the great problem for man is to become truly human, namely to allow rational element to dominate and control the irrational element. None of this makes sense in terms of isolation of man. The wisdom and goodness are really only possible where there is a relationship, on the one hand between man and man, and the other between man and the eternal. So among the important topics of the Socratic dialogues are love, friendship, the religiosità, l'immortality, but above all justice. The survey on justice led to analyze and criticize the ideas and practices prevailing political conduct. This step was essential in the Greek city-state, with his deep sense of community. It was believed that the police was the highest form of human association - "man is by nature a being made for the polis", Aristotle said later- and then justice could only be implemented in the polis.

At the time of Socrates the Greeks had long and complicated political experiences, and did not have to wait for him to start a discussion about the merits and defects of the various political systems. Democracy or oligarchy, pays for public office or qualifications census, local independence or empire: these matters were discussed continuously, even though we know little about the arguments because the debate was held in voice and in writing. Only brief passages in writers like Solon, Herodotus and the tragic offer us some clues, as well as the actual legislation and the history of political institutions. The novelty introduced by Socrates was neither the political discussion as such, nor the idea that politics and justice were connected, but the radical and systematic way to examine the issues and the continued insistence on the point that the policy, and all kinds of Conduct, must be guided by reason and judged in accordance with ethical absolute.

A fundamental principle for Plato, and for the mainstream of Greek philosophy back, was that men are created unequal; not only in the superficial sense of a physical inequality, economic or social, but unequal in the soul, and senso should. Some men are potentially able to conduct a completely rational, and thus a correct moral judgment; I'm not the most capable. The government, therefore, should be entrusted to the hands of the few morally superior: ideally, the true philosophers. And their authority should be total, in its scope and its purpose. This theory has its roots in the metaphysics of Plato, in his belief that there are absolute truths and absolute goods, accessible by some proper education. These themes recur often in Plato, but they are only prepared to fund the Republic. This is by far the largest of the Socratic dialogues, because the search for a definition of justice in Plato draws an original analysis of the components of the soul, therefore of educational theory and psychology of poetry and music, the nature of human associations in general and state in particular, Law and legislation, of mathematics and dialectic, with comments on the property, on the Status of Women, religion and immortality; in short, he faced here most of the problems for him were included in the horizon of the philosopher.

The Republic Plato does not want to be a practical program: wants to offer a foolproof set of rules to which man must look good and by means of which must be put to the test the existing political and social arrangements. For every action there is a social institution and a fundamental criterion of judgment: makes men better than they were before or not?

In another dialogue, the Gorgia, Plato says that not even the great Athenians of the past-Miltiades, Temistocle, Cimon and Pericles- were true statesmen. They were only more munifici their successors in satisfying the desires of demos by means of ships, walls and arsenals. But they failed to make the best citizens of Athens and so it was not right to call them "statesmen". For Plato, any form of police was the ideal, but the more distant from the latter were arguably the tyranny and extreme democracy as practiced in Athens, where sovereignty was entrusted to the demos, undeserving and unqualified, whose needs and whose decisions were made even worse by the lack of an adequate system of education. While we appreciate all the nobility of the Platonic conception of the State, there is no denying that the results of such a conception would lead towards a closed society and authoritarian. It was Aristotle who in the second book of the Politics, liquid unceremoniously both Republic che le Read, the other work of Plato's thought as a voluminous code in which there is a detail of the life of every citizen, foreigner or slave who escapes the regulatory, with the penis carefully measured for each type of violation. The Policy Aristotle is based on a subtle analysis of the existing political institutions; the material was collected by him and his disciples in short monographs of which has reached us only on the Athens. The analysis is of course not only descriptive: classification, recommended and judges, but always keeping in mind what is possible and what is desirable. Form a single group of rulers stable, he argues, is an invitation to stasis.

Aristotle and the polis disappeared almost simultaneously. When his contemporary Diogenes said, "I'm a Cosmopolites" (citizen of the universe), he proclaimed that citizenship had become a meaningless concept. The disciples cynical Diogenes asserted their intellectual descent from Socrates, and so did the Stoics, which became the most important philosophical school of Hellenism.

In this new world remained vital to the logic and physics of Aristotle, but not his politics or his ethics, precisely because they were conceived as "practical arts" in the context of police. Instead Plato, paradoxically, was ransomed being depoliticized. His rejection of the world in view of the experience of the eternal Forms, his mysticism, his interest in the soul, were never as convenient philosophies, given the nature of the states and of the company Hellenistic, addressed the need for man himself, and later, for a new religious concept that was centered on salvation. The motto was always "know thyself" but with implications that would have amazed Socrates.