Citamos por Obras completas, IV (Madrid, 1941); V (1942); VI (1951). La presente cita está tomada del tomo IV, p. 963.

El ideal de lo mejor que propone León Roch como norma de conducta para sí se halla también en correspondencia con las aspiraciones éticas del krausismo. No existe, sin embargo, oposición alguna, en este caso, entre krausismo y platonismo, ya que el primero se halla en relación con el segundo. Sobre la influencia del krausismo en esta novela, véase Juan López Morillas, «Galdós y el krausismo. La familia de León Roch», Revista de Occidente, IV (1968), pp. 331-357, y Denah Lida, «Sobre el krausismo de Galdós», Anales galdosianos, II (1967), pp. 1-27.

Uno de los temas de La república es el de la educación de la juventud. También se discute en este diálogo la función que desempeña la dialéctica en la formación filosófica. La novela El amigo Manso propone un sistema educativo de carácter filosófico que pudo ser inspirado por este diálogo de Platón.

El ser es la realidad última aprehendida por la mente racional. El no-ser no puede ser conocido y corresponde a la ignorancia: «Then since knowledge pertains to that which is and ignorance of necessity to that which is not, for that which lies between we must seek for something between nescience and science, if such a thing there be», p. 716. Entre el ser y el no-ser se halla el llegar a ser, al cual corresponde el mundo de lo opinable: «It would remain, then, as it seems, for us to discover that which partakes of both, of to be and not to be, and that could not be rightly designated either in its exclusive purity, so that, if it shall be discovered, we may justly pronounce it to be the opinable, thus assigning extremes to extremes and the intermediate to the intermediate», p. 718. Del llegar a ser hay que partir para remontarse al ser, o sea a la realidad última: «But our present argument indicates, said I, that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. Even so this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the world of becoming together with the entire soul, like the scene-shifting periactus in the theater, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being. And this, we say, is the good, do we not?», p. 750. Máximo Manso se da cuenta de la posibilidad de serlo todo por consistir su ser en un acto de pensamiento que lo acerca a la naturaleza de las esencias absolutas de las cosas. Paradójicamente su no ser nada deriva de su conciencia de no existir como ser real. Sin embargo, en virtud de la fuerza creadora del artista Máximo Manso adquiere una semblanza de vida real, con lo cual participa de la categoría del llegar a ser.

En el Fedro, Platón hace un elogio del orador y del arte de la oratoria, siempre que ésta no se aplique a falsas argumentaciones. Según el filósofo, el orador nace con una capacidad innata para dicho arte. Su educación debe ser completada, sin embargo, con la práctica, el ejercicio de la dialéctica, la adquisición de conocimientos y la aplicación al estudio de la naturaleza: «All the great arts need supplementing by a study of nature; your artist must cultivate garrulity and high-flown speculation; from that source alone can come the mental elevation and thoroughly finished execution of which you are thinking, and that is what Pericles acquired to supplement his inborn capacity. He came across the right sort of man, I fancy, in Anaxagoras, and by enriching himself with high speculation and coming to recognize the nature of wisdom and folly -on which topics of course Anaxagoras was always discoursing- he drew from that source and applied to the art of rhetoric what was suitable thereto» p. 515. La relación de la oratoria con el orden natural se manifiesta en el hecho de que el orador debe ser no solamente un observador de la naturaleza en general, sino que específicamente debe hacer un estudio de los tipos de alas existentes, a fin de influir debidamente sobre los individuos: «Since the function of oratory is in fact to influence men's souls, the intending orator must know what types of soul there are. Now these are of a determinate number, and their variety results in a variety of individuals. To the types of soul thus discriminated there corresponds a determinate number of types of discourse», p. 517. En otros de sus diálogos, Platón censura la oratoria hueca de los sofistas.

La visión de la realidad en sí (mundo del llegar a ser), tal como aparece iluminada por la luz del sol, en la alegoría de la caverna de La república, constituye un estadio intermedio entre las sombras y el conocimiento del verdadero ser: «Then there would be need of habituation, I take it, to enable him to see the things higher up. And at first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likenesses or reflections in water of men and other things, and later, the things themselves, and from these he would go on to contemplate the appearances in the heavens and heaven itself, more easily by night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than by day the sun and the sun's light» p. 748. El filósofo que ha logrado contemplar el verdadero ser podrá luego discernir lo que hay de mera semblanza en el mundo ordinario, en particular las falsas imágenes que mueven a los hombres: «Down you must go then, each in his turn, to the habitation of the others and accustom yourselves to the observation of the obscure things there. For once habituated you will discern them infinitely better than the dwellers there, and you will know what each of the 'idols' is and whereof it is a semblance, because you have seen the reality of the beautiful, the just and the good. So our city will be governed by us and you with waking minds, and not, as most cities now which are inhabited and ruled darkly as in a dream by men who fight one another for shadows and wrangle for office as if that were a great good, when the truth is that the city in which those who are to rule are least eager to hold office must needs be best administered and most free from, dissension, and the state that gets the contrary type of ruler will be the opposite of this» p. 752. En el Filebo, Platón hace un análisis del placer que producen las falsas anticipaciones de cosas que nunca han de suceder: «People often have visions of securing great quantities of gold, and pleasure upon pleasure in consequence; indeed they behold themselves in the picture immensely delighted with themselves ...So the evil, no less than the good, have pleasures painted in their minds, but these pleasures, I imagine, are false», p. 1120. El contraste entre realidad y mundos de ficción que Galdós desarrolla constantemente en sus novelas y que tiene un origen cervantino corresponde al proceso de discernimiento de la realidad en los diálogos de Platón.

Véase el capítulo «La realidad como ficción», en Realidad, ficción y símbolo, pp. 80-99.

Galdós destaca la desproporción existente entre la figura enclenque de Maximiliano y la hermosura y vigor físico de Fortunata, por una parte y, por otra, la que hay entre el cuerpo frágil del primero y la magnitud de su pasión amorosa, juntamente con la tarea ingente que se ha impuesto para cambiar a la que va a ser su mujer. Platón pone de presente los disturbios que puede ocasionar una pasión poderosa en un cuerpo débil: «And when in this compound there is an impassioned soul more powerful than the body, that soul, I say, convulses and fills with disorders the whole inner nature of man, and when eager in the pursuit of some sort of learning or study, causes wasting», Timeo, p. 1207. La proporción entre las partes constituye un postulado básico del orden natural en la filosofía platónica. La armonía de cuerpo y alma es parte de la concordancia universal: «There is one protection against both kinds of disproportion -that we should not move the body without the soul or the soul without the body, and thus they will be en their guard against each other and be healthy and well balanced... And the separate parts should be treated in the same manner, in imitation of the pattern of the universe, for as the body is heated and also cooled within by the elements which enter into it, and is again dried up and moistened by external things, and experiences these and the like affections from both kinds of motions, the result is that the body if given up to motion when in a state of quiescence is overmastered and perishes», Ibid., p. 1208.

La razón para escoger una vida mixta queda explícita en el siguiente fragmento del diálogo entre Sócrates y Protarco en el Filebo: «Sócrates: Imagine one of us choosing to live in the possession of intelligence, thought, knowledge, and a complete memory of everything, but without an atom of pleasure, or indeed of pain, in a condition of utter insensibility to such things. -Protarchus: Neither of these lives seems desirable to me, Socrates, and unless I'm very much mistaken, nobody else will think them so either. -Socrates: And what about the combined life, Protarchus, the joint life consisting in a mixture of the two? -Protarchus: You mean of pleasure, en the one hand, and reason with intelligence on the other? -Socrates: Yes, those are the sorts of ingredients I mean. -Protarchus: Anybody, I imagine, will prefer this mixed life to either of those others. Indeed I will go further -everybody will. -Socrates: Then do we realize what result now emerges in our discussion? -Protarchus: Yes, to be sure. Three lives were offered us, and of the first two neither is sufficient or desirable for any human being or any animal. -Socrates: Then surely it is obvious by this time that, if you take these two lives, neither of them proves to contain the good. If it did, it would be sufficient and complete and desirable for all plants and animals that had the capacity of living their lives under such conditions from start to finish, and if any of us preferred something else, he would be mistaking the nature of what is truly desirable, and taking what he never meant to take, as the result of ignorance or some sort of unhappy necessity», p. 1098. Metafóricamente las dos fuentes, la una de agua y la otra de miel, corresponden a la esfera de la inteligencia y a la del placer: «Socrates: «Why, it's just as if we were supplying drinks, with two fountains at our disposal; one would be of honey, standing for pleasure, the other standing for intelligence, a sobering, unintoxicating fountain of plain, salubrious water. We must get to work and make a really good mixture», p. 1143. La mezcla debe hacerse teniendo en cuenta la debida proporción entre los ingredientes, a fin de que el resultado no sea una masa informe: «Socrates: That any compound, whatever it be, that does not by some means or other exhibit measure and proportion, is the ruin both of its ingredients and, first and foremost, of itself; what you are bound to get in such cases is no real mixture, but literally a miserable mass of unmixed messiness», p. 1147. Es de recordar que el tema de la mezcla de ingredientes ocurre en El amigo Manso cuando el autor se propone escribir una novela sobre el asunto de la educación. La vida del personaje Máximo Manso muestra que hubo una desproporción en los ingredientes que constituyen su personalidad y que durante su existencia en el mundo del llegar a ser su exceso de actividad intelectiva (mezcla desproporcionada) lo perjudicó frente a su discípulo y rival Manolo Peña.

En la escala del amor (definido éste como el amor de lo bello) se encuentra en primer lugar el deseo físico de la generación, como lo expresa Diotima en El banquete, aunque existe también, en una etapa superior, el deseo de la generación espiritual: «Well then, she went on, those whose procreancy is of the body turn to woman as the object of their love, and raise a family, in the blessed hopo that by doing so they will keep their memory green, 'through time and through eternity.' But those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the flesh -and they are not unknown, Socrates- conceive and bear the things of the spirit. And what are they? you ask. Wisdom and all her sister virtues; it is the office of every poet to beget them, and of every artist whom, we may call creative», p. 560. Al final de la escala se encuentra la visión de la unidad perfecta, que coincide con la belleza única y la verdad: «Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is -but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable whole», p. 562. El neoplatonismo, por su parte, identifica esta visión última de la belleza con la idea de Dios y califica de perfecta la unión del hombre y del mundo con la divinidad: «Philón: De las cosas ya dichas podrás comprehenderlo fácilmente. El summo Dios produze con amor, y gobierna el mundo y lo ayunta en una unión; porque siendo Dios uno en simplicíssima unidad, es necesario que lo que dél procede sea también uno en entera unión, porque de uno, uno proviene, y de la pura unidad, unión perfecta», en León Hebreo, op. cit., I, p. 291.