Eric Voegelin (6)

Was Plato a fascist?

As noted before, Voegelin puts a very high value on individual freedom, and for him it is completely illegitimate to impose an idea of the good on anyone by force. He also loves Plato. This might possibly be why Voegelin refuses to believe that Plato could ever have been an advocate of theocratic tyranny, appearances notwithstanding. One of Plato's imaginary states featured, for example, the Khmer-Rouge-like deportation of the adult population to the countryside in order to create the New Man out of the uncorrupted younger generation; indeed, it is not inconceivable that the Khmer Rouge got this idea from Plato, since several of their leaders are said to have studied at the Sorbonne. At any rate, Voegelin's explanations of how Plato did not mean what he seems to mean strike me as uncharacteristically circular and unconvincing.

I refer, for example, to the opening of chapter 4 in Plato and Aristotle. The program of deportation, Voegelin says, is "ingenious and eminently practical"; unfortunately it obviously "cannot be executed by true philosophers", because "any attempt to realize the order of the idea by violent means would defeat itself. The authority of the spirit is an authority only if, and when, it is accepted in freedom." (Though this seems to disregard the likelihood that the children of the deportees would "freely" accept the Order of the Idea once their corrupting parental influences had been removed.) Therefore, Plato, being the true philosopher par excellence, could not have intended the passage discussing deportation as a "program for political action in the historical environment." But the only internal evidence for this, as opposed to deductions from axioms about true philosophers, is that the passage in question is put in the form of a third-hand report (that is, it is effectively buried within layers of quotation marks). Why, then, did Plato report it at all? The only function of the passage, Voegelin says, is "to show that technically it is not impossible to translate the idea into reality, and to forestall the facile assumption that the Socratic politeia is an impractical daydream. The idea can be realized if the people want to realize it; the philosopher-king is present in their midst, waiting for their consent. Beyond this appeal, however, no attempt either will or can be made to force the consent". I confess to finding this confusing. The Socratic politeia is a practical proposition—but only if a lot of people can be deported to make way for the New Socratic Man. But such an imposition by philosophers would be self-defeating. How, then, is it practical? If, on the other hand, it is a matter of near-universal acceptance of rule by philosophers by the common people (impractical though this may seem), why bring mass deportations into the picture?

Strangely enough, Voegelin himself then goes on very interestingly to provide a reason why Plato might well have been prepared to commit what are now considered to be political atrocities. In short, he might have viewed the ordinary corrupted Athenians of his own decadent time as sub-human. This does not mean that Plato was a monstrous anomaly: it was a natural consequence of the dissolution of society in the pre-Christian era. The dissolution of society into the corrupted mass and a handful of truth-seekers, Voegelin suggests (p. 141),

engenders a tension of such sharpness that the common bond of humanity between the lost souls and the manic souls is almost broken. The difference between the souls tends to become a generic difference between a lower type of human [being], close to animals, and a higher type of semi-divine rank. This divinization, which seems absurd in the realm of Christian experience, is inherent in the logic of the myth of nature. If the particle of substance which animates a particular human individual happens to be of high quality, there is no objection to recognizing its semi-divine character. The obstacle to such recognition which in the Christian orbit stems from the experience of creaturely equality before a transcendent God, does not exist in the Platonic experience.

If nothing else, this ought to be a useful reminder of what we owe to Christianity.