The Laws by Plato

Author:Plato
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141961033
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2009-11-27T21:00:00+00:00

THE RIGHT USE OF LEISURE

Now to deal with how this doctrine should be taught and [803a] handed on. What method of instruction should we use? Who should be taught, and when should the lessons take place? Well, you know that when a shipwright is starting to build a boat, the first thing he does is to lay down the keel as a foundation and as a general indication of the shape. I have a feeling my own procedure now is exactly analogous. I’m trying to distinguish for you the various ways in which our character shapes the kind of life we live; I really am trying to ‘lay down the keel’, because I’m giving proper consideration [b] to the way we should try to live – to the ‘character-keel’ we need to lay if we are going to sail through this voyage of life successfully.30 Not that human affairs are worth taking very seriously – but take them seriously is just what we are forced to do, alas. Still, perhaps it will be realistic to recognize the position we’re in and direct our serious efforts to some suitable purpose. My meaning? – yes, you’d certainly be right to take me up on that.

[c] CLEINIAS: Exactly.

ATHENIAN: I maintain that serious matters deserve our serious attention, but trivialities do not; that all men of good will should put God at the centre of their thoughts; that man, as we said before,31 has been created as a toy for God; and that this is the great point in his favour. So every man and every woman should play this part and order their whole life accordingly, engaging in the best possible pastimes – in a quite different frame of mind to their present one.

[d] CLEINIAS: How do you mean?

ATHENIAN: The usual view nowadays, I fancy, is that the purpose of serious activity is leisure – that war, for instance, is an important business, and needs to be waged efficiently for the sake of peace. But in cold fact neither the immediate result nor the eventual consequences of warfare ever turn out to be real leisure or an education that really deserves the name – and education is in our view just about the most important activity of all. So each of us should spend the greater part of his life at peace, and that will be the best use of his time. What, then, will be the right way to live? A man should spend his whole life at ‘play’ – sacrificing, singing, dancing – so that he can win the favour of the gods and protect himself from his enemies and conquer them in battle. He’ll achieve both these aims if he sings and dances in the way we’ve outlined; his path, so to speak, has been marked out for him and he must go on his way confident that the poet’s words are true:

‘Some things, Telemachus, your native wit will tell you, [804a]

And Heaven will prompt the rest. The very gods, I’m sure,

Have smiled upon your birth and helped to bring you up.

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