There being no recognition
that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no
recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable.
There were only three types of faculties or powers in the
individual's constitution. Hence education would soon reach a
static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and
progress.
In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are
assigned to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and
supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over
and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively
courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the
state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace.
But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a
capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are
capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the
legislators of the state -- for laws are the universals which
control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that
in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole.
But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of
every individual, his incommensurability with others, and
consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet
be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net
effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality.
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