"Plato thinks that a man could live on very little money if his wants were reduced to a minimum, and this no doubt is true. But he also thinks that a philosopher should be exempt from manual labor; he must therefore live on the wealth created by others. In a very poor State there are likely to be no philosophers. It was the imperialism of Athens in the age of Pericles that made it possible for Athenians to study philosophy. Speaking broadly, intellectual goods are just as expensive as more material commodities, as just as little independent of economic conditions. Science requires libraries, laboratories, telescopes, microscopes, and so on, and men of science have to be supported by the labor of others. But to the mystic all this is foolishness. A holy man in India or Tibet needs no apparatus, wears only a loin cloth, eats only rice, and is supported by very meager charity because he is thought wise. This is the logical development of Plato's point of view."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 138.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
A History of Western Philosophy
359 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by A History of Western Philosophy →
Related Quotes
"Heraclitus himself, for all his belief in change, allowed something everlasting. The conception of eternity (as oppos…"
"Passing from that small to the large, astronomy no longer allows us to regard the heavenly bodies as everlasting."
"A dose of disaster is likely to bring men's hopes back to their older super-terrestrial forms: if life on earth is di…"
"He [Anaxagoras] rejected necessity and chance as giving the origins of things; nevertheless there was no "Providence"…"
"Science, like philosophy, has sought to escape from the doctrine of perpetual flux by finding some permanent substrat…"
"Nothing daunted, the physicists invented new and smaller units, called electrons and protons, out of which atoms were…"
"The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no do…"
"The cheerfulness of the nineteenth century turned men against these static conceptions, and modern liberal theology b…"
"Philosophically inclined mystics, unable to deny that whatever is in time is transitory, have invented a conception o…"
"The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to …"