Free The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World by Daniel J. Boorstin

moral philosophy. Near the beginning, Plato explains this way of seeking.
    . . . suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance, and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.

Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our enquiry?

I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.

True, he replied.

And is not a State larger than an individual?

It is.

Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and more easily discernible. I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing them.

That, he said, is an excellent proposal. (
The Republic,
Bk. II, Jowett trans.)
    In his way of seeking, Plato thus had made two crucial assumptions. One was the unity of the virtues, which we meet in other dialogues; the other, that there are as many forms of the state as there are forms of the soul. The character of a government expresses the character of its citizens. “Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that States are made of ‘oak and rock,’ and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale and draw other things after them?” “Yes, he said, the States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.”
    Plato’s notion of the identity of the virtues of the individual and of the state had momentous implications, to be revealed with the passing centuries. A beneficent implication was that “reasons of state” could not defy personal morality. But it implied too that the state, like the individual, required a coherent and orthodox set of beliefs. Morality for the individual meant ideology for the state. But the modern social sciences would discover crucial differences between the ways of groups and those of individuals.
    The whole
Republic
is thus one grand metaphor reminding us of the identity of seer and poet in ancient Greece. Great philosophers before Plato (Xenophanes and Empedocles, for example) had actually written in verse. Much of the charm and unforgettableness of
The Republic
remains in its myths and metaphors, of which the myth of the cave is only the most famous. As we shall see, the Utopia as a literary form would be wonderfully fertile, serving some of the most eloquent and passionate Seekers in the West. Though it would help open paths to change in the real world, a Utopian ideal sometimes would also breed despair, frustration, and violence.
    The metaphor of virtues writ large, which Plato so beautifully pursues in
The Republic,
attracted later generations precisely because it was a metaphor. Historians and philosophers would never cease to debate whether and to what extent Plato intended his grandest work to be a blueprint for the ideal community, or only another sally in his experiments of the intelligence. But whatever Plato may have intended for this work, it left a potent legacy as a metaphor. Later generations of Seekers would, after their different fashions, cast their own efforts to give meaning to their society in Utopian form. Myth and metaphor would be invitations to Utopia, with results that were not always happy. We can sense the spirit of later Seekers by their reactions to Plato’s
Republic.
    It is not surprising that the mythic charms of Plato’s work were quite lost on Thomas Jefferson, a Seeker in a more prosaic