We have to remember here that by _philosopher_ Plato does not mean Immanuel Kant. He means a living being, a man like Seneca or Francis Bacon, a man in whom knowledge is fused with action, and keen perception joins with steady hand; a man who has had not only the teaching of books but the discipline of hard experience; a man who has learned with equal readiness to obey and to command; a man whose thought is coördinated by application to the vital problems of human society. "Inasmuch as philosophers alone are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the two kinds should be rulers of our state?"[35] Well, then, "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race."[36]
That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.
Let us get back to the circumference and approach this same point by another route.
I grant you, says Plato, that to have rulers at all is very disagreeable. And indeed we should not need to have them were it not for a regrettable but real porcine element in us. My own Utopia is not an aristocracy nor a democracy, nor any kind of an _'ocracy_; it is what some of you would call an anarchist communism. I have described it very clearly in the second book of my _Republic_, but nobody cares to notice it, except to repeat my brother's gibe about it.[37] But instead of this Utopia of mine being a "City of Pigs," it is just because we are pigs that I had to give up painting this picture and turn to describing "not only a state, but a luxurious state." I am still "of opinion that the true state, which may be said to be a healthy constitution, is the one which I have described," and not the "inflamed constitution" to which I devoted the rest of my book, and which in my opinion is much more a "City of Pigs" than the other. It is because people want "to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and have dainties and dessert in the modern fashion, ... and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, and gold, and ivory, ... hunters and actors, ... musicians, players, dancers, ... tutors, ... servants ... nurses wet and dry, ... barbers, confectioners and cooks, ... and hosts of animals (if people are to eat animals), ... and physicians; ... then a slice of neighbor's land ... and then war,"[38]--in short, it is because people are pigs that you must have soldiers and rulers and laws.