"There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good"
About this Quote
Plato treats the Good as the supreme measure of intelligibility and value, yet he refuses a naive picture of a world that can be purged of every defect. The cosmos, as the Timaeus suggests, is fashioned by a divine craftsman who imposes order on recalcitrant necessity; matter, motion, and the conditions of becoming do not fully yield to rational design. Hence there remains a remainder, a structural resistance that opposes the Good without being its equal counterpart. The antagonism is not a cosmic dualism with two balanced principles, but the stubborn drag of disorder, limitation, and misalignment that comes with a changing world.
That insight threads through Platonic ethics and politics. In the soul, the rational part must govern spiritedness and appetite, but the lower elements never entirely vanish. Virtue is the art of harmonizing what resists, not abolishing it. Courage, temperance, and justice have their very intelligibility in the presence of temptation, conflict, and imbalance; remove all antagonism and you remove the field in which virtue acts. Likewise in the city, lawgivers do not dream of extirpating every base impulse. They educate, channel, and proportion competing forces toward a common good, knowing that some friction is ineradicable.
Philosophically, the claim guards against utopian perfectionism. To demand that evils be eliminated outright is to ignore the metaphysical texture of the world and the limits of human craft. Yet it does not counsel resignation. The Good remains the orienting star, and the work of reason is precisely to reduce the sway of disorder, to convert necessity into harmony whenever possible. Later thinkers would call evil a privation rather than a substance: it parasitically opposes the Good while lacking independent standing.
The enduring presence of what is antagonistic to good is thus the condition of moral seriousness. It calls for vigilance, education, and measured governance, and it situates hope in the gradual, never-final labor of aligning souls and cities with what is best.
That insight threads through Platonic ethics and politics. In the soul, the rational part must govern spiritedness and appetite, but the lower elements never entirely vanish. Virtue is the art of harmonizing what resists, not abolishing it. Courage, temperance, and justice have their very intelligibility in the presence of temptation, conflict, and imbalance; remove all antagonism and you remove the field in which virtue acts. Likewise in the city, lawgivers do not dream of extirpating every base impulse. They educate, channel, and proportion competing forces toward a common good, knowing that some friction is ineradicable.
Philosophically, the claim guards against utopian perfectionism. To demand that evils be eliminated outright is to ignore the metaphysical texture of the world and the limits of human craft. Yet it does not counsel resignation. The Good remains the orienting star, and the work of reason is precisely to reduce the sway of disorder, to convert necessity into harmony whenever possible. Later thinkers would call evil a privation rather than a substance: it parasitically opposes the Good while lacking independent standing.
The enduring presence of what is antagonistic to good is thus the condition of moral seriousness. It calls for vigilance, education, and measured governance, and it situates hope in the gradual, never-final labor of aligning souls and cities with what is best.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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