Of Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Source: Italicum
Literary utopia, or a true manual for building politicians? Criticism of Plato's most scathing and incisive work has often moved between these two poles, considering this capital text from time to time as a rhetorical exercise, or an ontological proof, or instead, something that is to be shared, a true manifesto of universal politics, capable of constituting at any time a code of exemplary social stability. Other times however, as in the case of the liberal Popper, Plato and his “Republic” played the part of public enemy number one, the ideology that, proposing a well-organized society in itself, firm and solid and therefore closed to external dangers and evils, more than others, it endangers the beatitudes of the "open society".
The catalog of positions that the Platonic "Republic" presents is one that is difficult to digest for those with an egalitarian stomach, pacifist and progressive. It is impossible not to see that ancient classicism and postmodern degeneration are in antithetical positions. For bourgeois and moderate eyes, cosmopolitans and "do-gooders", Plato's thought represents the greatest scandal: it outlines the community to the highest degree, and therefore dismisses individualism a priori, which instead is the great refuge of liberal impotence. These are some of the most qualifying points of Platonic politics, which constitute – as rightly so, from his point of view, Popper noted – how much more unassimilable to the mentality of post-modern "democrats".: the rigid and severe paideia, the education and selection to which Plato entrusted in the "Republic" the growth of the ruling classes of the ideal city; the suppression of individualism in the face of the prevalence of community interests; community, really, of women and property; the abolition of private property; the dominance of the "organic" State over the individual, whose rights are unknown, but only duties; the type of government, hierarchical, aristocratic and elitist, in which philosophers participate and not at all the mass of the people. All this scandalises the hypocritical and fraudulent nature of modern "democrats"., who pass off their upper-bourgeois oligarchies as governments "of the people" and exchange their financial dictatorships for services rendered to the majority.
The Platonic one is the great fresco on the healing of man. The philosopher's analysis pertains to a true historicism, placing himself at the peak of the ages with the cut of the one who judges: and what history unfolds is degeneration, anthropological, psychophysics, precisely also biological that humanity incurs when it allows itself to liquefy in the mixing and loss of its original characteristics. The guardian class, to whom Plato entrusts the command of the perfect society, represents the awareness of this path of degradation, which only an iron will of opposition can bring about the remedy, which consists in breeding – authentic Züchtung, as the Platonist Nietzsche called it – of the best possible race of man. Each of the stages of degeneration in which Plato – in the manner that will later be of a Gobineau, of a Spengler – identifies the involutionary progression of history, it accompanies the degree of civilization represented by the metal, That, as in Hesiod, whether pure or impure, this is what generation or degeneration means, rise or fall, in short, good or bad. So long as, as Plato writes, “iron will mix with silver and bronze with gold and from this mixture Variation and absurd Irregularity will originate […] And in this way we must describe the distant origin and birth of Discord.". The physical and metaphysical Fall of Man has the name of betrayal of the laws of Nature which vary and divide, keeping separate what is valuable and nourishing from what brutalizes and sickens.
Barbarization and bastardization – both moral and physical, both psychological and biological, both ideal and material - attack the nature of man, leading it to ruin in the unfortunate event in which man, forgetful of his divine nature and of the divine nature of that which he divides by uniting, conceiving circumscribes, let yourself be abandoned to the betrayal of the pure by the impure: eugenics, the good cultivation in the high and diversifying forms with which Nature arranges things, it will then be, according to Plato's words, the only vital response to the death of the gene: eugenics, the science of well-being, of giving good birth to man, it is the salvation of the qualifying quality that is in man: properly, says Plato, this science is designed to "keep the genre of guardians pure", those who are the rank of the excellent, the best who lead the community. E, to avoid the fatal Fall of Man, must never mix the noble metals that circulate in the veins of the Aristoi with the ignoble metals that animate the mass of the vile, the plebs, the unknown.
This selective and philosophical technoscience, of bio-psychic preparation of an order of superior men, selected to serve the need for right coexistence and superior action, constitutes the naturalistic and biological framework of Platonic historicism.
This anthropology of differentiation is a cold-blooded structure, poiché viene fatta giacere sulla riflessione razionale, non sgorga all’improvviso dal fremito bassamente emotivo o dallo slancio creatore in qualche lampo notturno: dice anzi espressamente Platone che tutto deve prodursi dal retto compulsare, dandosi pertanto che l’intelletto guidi l’atto e il pensiero alla giusta e più elevata decisione. Il razionalismo speculativo così affermato, che non è piatta ragione calcolante, ma pensiero caldo d’intuito, non impedisce, However, il dispiegarsi su tutto il dispositivo platonico del fascino arcano di un disegno spirituale. Non al fine di un solo allevamento biologico si sollevano gli spiriti all’eroica selezione dei caratteri e delle nature, Indeed, but the best characters and natures will be refined and rewarded in the mind and body to give the image of a superior rank of light to the sight of the gods, based on the good of the spirit and the triumph of the idea: one and the other arranged to the side of Dike, Justice, that regulates and disposes everything, assigning over time the absolute ethical role bearing the existential dogma: “to each his own”.
Plato's, therefore, It's an education lesson, but also of re-education, revealing the highest and most conclusive refutation of Socrates. The listener of the Platonic dialogue therefore hears the proven uselessness of the individual teaching method practiced by Socrates. It will not be the logical-rational dialogue that will reawaken the dormant virtues of wisdom and harmony in the young man. Instead it will be the firm Castrense education in sober strength, in the desire to build a rank that defends the city and renews its moral robustness, to liquidate the chatter and turn to constructive facts. Plato proposes the abolition of traditional poetry, in which men – and even gods – were shown tormented by the worst passions, greed, cowardice, jealousy. The elevation of souls will have to be achieved through a new poetic form, and a figurative art, who know how to represent beauty, the harmonious, the good, the noble. A cleansing of culture, In short. The warrior rank that Plato, in the initial books of the Republic, indicates as the recipient of the physical and moral defense of the ideal community, and to whom all this attention must go, it is the most precious element for plotting a plan of counter-power capable of annihilating the ancient vices.
The hierarchical system conceived by Plato provides that the small and highly chosen class of Archons is drawn from the classes that cover the main functions - the government and the army, the best, those destined for the care of political leadership, who will be joined by the Epicuroi, the defenders of social order. To them, no ownership is permitted. Their task will be exclusively to think of the common good, forgetting individual profit. In this wanting to organize, assign roles, arranging merits and powers we see the Platonic intention of respecting the reality of nature. Plato's justice is natural justice. And the Republic based on justice is the one that respects characters, the virtues, the differences of each and every one. A differentialist and distributive justice. Fidelity to nature: the recognition of one's own being, different every time and worthy every time, whatever it is, leads to natural assignment, spontaneous, of one's function in a just society. In which command and obedience are equally essential, equally inclined to push the character and inner form of man, of every single man, upward.
Platonic justice, in fact, raise, and the principle that governs the just State is that which sees what is superior – the heroic spirit, intelligent excellence – driving what, afflicted by needs and desires of a lower order, and they are equally in need of enlightened command. But Plato's intellectual order is certainly not crude and impartial reason: here we do not have the outlines of the various social "Utopias" pre-packaged by Cartesian reason. In fact, let us remember that the intellect, the Platonic Nous, is actually “intuitive reason”, so that Plato's Republic, based on the difference in nature, it will have nothing of the “cold monster”, the bourgeois state, silent and alien, condemned by Nietzsche as an enemy of man. The intellect, as Plato specifies in the “Republic”, it is the “contemplation of the optimal in the field of being”. This statement refers us to the drawing, which was also Heidegger's in the twentieth century, to correct the political with a return to the primordial being. The German thinker, Indeed, he did philosophy by retracing the path that Plato took when going to Syracuse, in the dream of making the philosopher at the same time a political leader.
The divine order that Plato thinks of in the "Republic" is the traditional order of things, in which the good birth and the bond with the soil of the homeland have sovereign disposition and the maximum attribution of rank is the matching of one's nature with one's function. This conception depended on Plato having an organic idea of ​​society, according to the well-known tripartite division of powers, of Indo-European ancestry, between rulers, defenders and worker-traders: it is not a human construction, it is a living organism, to whose well-being all the vital organs that compose it contribute, from the highest and most essential to the most humble and secondary.
The implications that Plato's Republic entails - in its being the exact mirror image of modern society: hierarchical, anti-egalitarian, etnocentrica, sacral, etc. – are worth the observation that, in this text, the discourse on power and justice, on overcoming the conflict between rich and poor, on loyalty to their social role they are essentially considered as carriers of health, which otherwise means salvation. Health – mental and physical – for Plato it is the first canon of the best coexistence, coinciding with the highest merit: “And then virtue will be a kind of health, beauty and happy condition of the soul; the vice disease, ugliness and weakness". Man's mental and physical health depend on his correct position in society. This is where it comes from, according to Plato, salvation from the greatest misfortune: the disorder, the chaos, degeneration.