olitics rotted the strength within. Beside
Athens, Sparta, a communistic oligarchy, was a tower of strength and
effectiveness. The Spartans made mistakes; they were slow, inept, rude,
and tyrannical, but they were a unit on the war, their policy was
consistent, responsibilities were adequately centered, good order and
loyalty designated the aims and habits of life.[98] The Republic is the
response to the confrontation of Spartan and Athenian; the attempt to
find an adequate solution of the great social problem this confrontation
expressed. The successful state becomes in it the model for the
metaphysical one, and the difference between fact and ideal is amended
by dialectically forcing the implications of existence in the direction
of desire. Neither Athens nor Sparta presented a completely satisfactory
social organization. There must therefore exist a type of social
organization which is so satisfying. It must have existed from eternity,
and must be in essence identical with eternal good, identical with that
oneness and spirituality, lacking which, nothing is important. This
archetypal social organization whose essence is excellence, it is the
congenital vocation of the philosopher to contemplate and to realize.
Philosophers are hence the paragons among animals, lovers of truth,
haters of falsehood and of multiplicity, spectators of all time and all
existence. In them the power to govern should be vested. Their nature is
of the same stuff as the Highest Good with which it concerns itself, but
being such, it appears, merely "appears" alas! irrelevant to the actual
situations of the daily life. The philosopher is hence opposed and
expelled by that arch-sophist, Public Opinion: the man on the street,
failing to understand him, dubs him prater, star-gazer,
good-for-nothing.[99] He becomes an ineffectual stranger, an outlaw, in
a world in which he should be master.

Plato's description of the philosopher and philosophy is, it will be
seen, at once an apology and a program. But it is a program which has
been petrified into a compensatory ideal. The confession of impotence,
the abandonment of the programmatic intent is due to identification of
the ideal with metaphysical fact, to the hypostasis of the ideal. With
Christianism, that being a philosophy operating as a religion,
world-weariness made the apology unnecessary and converted the
hypostasis into the basis of that program of complete surrender of the
attempt to master t