"If there is someone, who deserves to be called a teacher of humanity, these are Plato and Aristotle-, Hegel wrote in his "Lectures on the history of philosophy-.
Clarifying this postulate, Hegel wrote that Plato belonged to personalities of world-historic importance and his philosophy was one of those creations of worldwide significance that since its emergence "had been exerting the greatest influence on spiritual culture and the course of its development during all the following epochs-.
In Plato's view, the aim of philosophy is to enable just mutual cohabitation of people in the State, created in conformity with the laws of justice. The aim of justice is to harmonize these different virtues in such a way that not only the citizens would be just, but the State as well, and vice versa. What is needed, is to harmonize functions of different citizens' strata that correspond to three parts of soul, the stratum of philosophers, corresponding to rational soul with wisdom as its virtue, the stratum of warriors, whose virtue is courage, the stratum of craftsmen, the desiring part of soul, with abstinence as its primary virtue, conforming to it. Such a division of aims detracts nothing from the principle of justice, as soon as it's founded not on social tenets, but on natural gifts, its foundations being not at all accidental. .
Making use of an ancient myth, in fact, Plato argued that people differed one from another by their natural gifts, depending on what matter their soul is made of: gold, silver or bronze. Hence Plato drew an unexpected conclusion that has allowed thinkers of other epochs to call him the first ideologist of totalitarianism. Plato pointed out that to realize better this rigid criterion of equality, as applied from the very start to all citizens, none of them should know, whose son he was, and the parents shouldn't even know who their children were. In Plato's view, such a principle would ensure a good operation of State, if supplemented by some other principles: commonality of property, women, rulers and warriors.
