Este principio (corruptio optimi pessima) parece haber sido punto importante en la doctrina socrática, según se desprende de Jenof. Mem. IV 1, 4: «Aquellos de los hombres que están mejor dotados y tienen una mayor grandeza de alma, llegan a ser los mejores y los más útiles si son educados y aprenden lo que se debe hacer, pero, cuando no han sido educados ni instruidos, resultan los seres más perversos y dañinos». También suele citarse a este respecto un conocido paso de Dante, Inf. VI 106-108: «Ritorna a tua scienza. Che vuol, quanto la cosa e piú perfetta, piú senta il bene, e cosí la doglienza». [Nota à versão espanhola da “República”]
Plato’s own intellectual development mirrors all these various stages. In recent literature widely divergent views have been held about the true character of Plato’s philosophy. There is one group of scholars who are convinced that Plato was, first and foremost, a metaphysician and a dialectician. They see in Plato’s Logic the central part, the core of the Platonic system. Others have stressed the opposite view; they tell us that Plato’s interest in politics and education was, from the very beginning, the mainspring and the great formative power of his philosophy.1 In his Paideia Werner Jaeger severely criticizes the former view. According to Jaeger not logic nor theory of knowledge but politeia and paideia are to be regarded as the two foci of Plato’s work. Paideia, says Jaeger, is not a mere external link that keeps the work together; it constitutes its true inner unity. In this regard Rousseau had a much truer conception of Plato’s Republic than the positivism of the nineteenth century when he said that this work was not a political system, as might be thought from its title, but the first treatise on education ever written.2
We need not go here into the details of this much discussed question. In order to find the right answer, we should distinguish between Plato’s personal and his philosophical interests. Plato belonged to an aristocratic family that had played a considerable role in Athens’ political life. In his youth he may still have cherished the hope of becoming one of the leaders of tire Athenian state. But he gave up this hope when he first met Socrates. He then became a student of dialectic and was so much absorbed by his new task that there was a time in which he seemed to have forgotten all political problems and to have resigned all his ambitions. Yet it was dialectic itself that led him back to politics. Plato began to realize that the Socratic demand for self-knowledge [63] could not be fulfilled so long as man was still blind with regard to the principal question and lacked a real insight into the character and the scope of political life. The soul of the individual is hound up with the social nature; we cannot separate the one from the other. Private and public life are interdependent. If the lattei is wicked and corrupt, the former cannot develop and cannot reach its end. Plato has inserted in his Republic a most impressive description of all the dangers to which an individual is exposed in an unjust and corrupt state. “Corruptio optimi pessima”—the best and noblest souls are particularly liable to these dangers. [Cassirer, The Myth of the State]
As to the first view I refer to Paul Natnrp, Plains Ideenlehre (Leipzig, 1903; 2d ed. increased by an important appendix, Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1921); as to the second see Julius Stenzcl, Platon der Erzieher (Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1923), and Werner Jaeger, Paideia (New York, Oxford University Press, 1943), Vol. II. ↩
Jaeger, op. cit, II, 200, 400 f. ↩