Plato and Platonism
by Walter Pater · English · Gutenberg #4095 · 469,836 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Plato and Platonism
Author: Walter Pater
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4095]
Most recently updated: December 27, 2020
Language: English
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PLATO AND PLATONISM (1910)
WALTER HORATIO PATER
CONTENTS
1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion: 5-26
2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest: 27-50
3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number: 51-74
4. Plato and Socrates: 75-98
5. Plato and the Sophists: 99-123
6. The Genius of Plato: 124-149
7. The Doctrine of Plato--
I. The Theory of Ideas: 150-173
II. Dialectic: 174-196
8. Lacedaemon: 197-234
9. The Republic: 235-266
10. Plato's Aesthetics: 267-283, end
CHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
[5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic
generation, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit per
saltum; and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute
beginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or
idea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or of "the
perpetual flux," the theory of "induction," or the philosophic view of
things generally, the specialist will still be able to find us some
earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The most
elementary act of mental analysis takes time to do; the most
rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple that
we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and with
difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation,
its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful
generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that of
Heraclitus--"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away--may startle a
particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all
along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-
developed instincts of the human mind itself.
Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of
philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or
turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the
Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical
literature. His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is
more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for
compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's
achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of
the mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was
already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the
oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the
processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he
breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.
In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less
as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of
older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory.
And as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse of all physical theories,
so in reading the Parmenides we might think that all metaphysical
questions whatever had already passed through the mind of Plato. Some
of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone,
are of the structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not
as the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or
there amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic
life in the very stone he builds with. The central and most intimate
principles of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not
merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master--to Socrates,
who survives chiefly in his pages--but to various precedent schools of
speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into
that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic
apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious
philosophy, again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions,
forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would
seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilisations of India
and of Egypt, as they still exercise their authority over ourselves.
The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so
again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pass from him
to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had
their earlier [8] proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading
him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite
obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary
world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of
his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely
new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human
genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of
which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame
itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times
over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the
new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which
familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the
form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as
in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that
word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.
There are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic,
of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines
of Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or
falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day.
That is the dogmatic method of criticism; judging every product of
human thought, however alien [9] or distant from one's self, by its
congruity with the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel,
according to the mental preference of the particular critic. There is,
secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims
at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth
dispersed among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods
of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like
that of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the Neo-
Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is in the
tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it
professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the
other elements of a pre-conceived system.
Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under
the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing
"Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third method of criticism,
the historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system,
we are busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as
The Republic, as far as possible in the group of conditions,
intellectual, social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if
we would really understand it. That ages have their genius as well as
the individual; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of
conditions which determines [10] a common character in every product of
that age, in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion
and manners, in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from
himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its
proper point of view in the never-resting "secular process"; the
solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or
general history; that what it behoves the student of philosophic
systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these
convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of
speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely
twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn,
is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of
the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the
creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so, beliefs the
most fantastic, the "communism" of Plato, for instance, have their
natural propriety when duly correlated with those facts, those
conditions round about them, of which they are in truth a part.
In the intellectual as in the organic world the given product, its
normal or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as people say, by
the "environment." The business of the young scholar therefore, in
reading Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or
refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or make apology for, [11] what may
seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to furnish himself with
arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty
is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the
mental process there, as he might witness a game of skill; better
still, as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The
Republic, to watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a
powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex
group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur
again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary
monument. To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from
antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek
life generally: such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say,
of the really critical study of him.
At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the historic spirit
impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading thoughts are partly
derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we happen to possess
independent information. From that brilliant and busy, yet so
unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here another there stands
aside to make the initial act of conscious philosophic reflexion. It
is done with something of the simplicity, the immediate and visible
effectiveness, of the visible world in action all around. Among
Plato's many intellectual [12] predecessors, on whom in recent years
much attention has been bestowed by a host of commentators after the
mind of Hegel, three, whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in
the very texture of Plato's work, emerge distinctly in close connexion
with The Republic: Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the
philosophy of number and music; Parmenides, "My father Parmenides," the
centre of the school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of the
doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be admitted
after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree
fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that knowledge
greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual influence in
Plato's writings.
Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which
was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and
obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten--he too might be
thought, as a writer of prose, one of the "fathers" of Plato. His
influence, however, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in early
life, was by way of antagonism or reaction; Plato's stand against any
philosophy of motion becoming, as we say, something of a "fixed idea"
with him. Heraclitus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then
is denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the
Ionian League) died about forty years before [13] Plato was born. Here
then at Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of
Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of
ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all
the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not
to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as
of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of
intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had
already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and
died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone
to the wall. In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek
youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that class, as being also of
nature's aristocracy, and a man of powerful intellectual gifts,
Heraclitus, asserts the native liberty of thought at all events;
becomes, we might truly say, sickly with "the pale cast" of his
philosophical questioning. Amid the irreflective actors in that
rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed in it superficial as it is
that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He
reflects; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth
when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels
already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly
colder. Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance
of what comes [14] to mind just then somewhat shrill or overemphatic.
Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think,
so early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does but
reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he
cries out--his philosophy was no matter of formal treatise or system,
but of harsh, protesting cries--Panta chôrei kai ouden menei.+ All
things give way: nothing remaineth. There had been enquirers before
him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold,
contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary
elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes,
their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part
of the bold enterprise of that romantic age; a series of intellectual
adventures, of a piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the
sea. The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of
gifted and sanguine but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word
neotês,+ youth, came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning,
deciding, rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to
discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming
and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world,
were themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface of
existence.
[15] Surface, we say; but was there really anything beneath it? That
was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers, Heraclitus, with
an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny. Perpetual motion, alike in
things and in men's thoughts about them,--the sad, self-conscious,
philosophy of Heraclitus, like one, knowing beyond his years, in this
barely adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct, makes no
pretence to be able to restrain that. Was not the very essence of
thought itself also such perpetual motion? a baffling transition from
the dead past, alive one moment since, to a present, itself deceased in
turn ere we can say, It is here? A keen analyst of the facts of nature
and mind, a master presumably of all the knowledge that then there was,
a vigorous definer of thoughts, he does but refer the superficial
movement of all persons and things around him to deeper and still more
masterful currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing the
apparently solid earth itself from beneath one's feet. The principle
of disintegration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for Heraclitus
these are but very lively instances of movements, subtler yet more
wasteful still) are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter
and of the soul. Legei pou Hêrakleitos, says Socrates in the Cratylus,
hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei.+ But the principle of lapse, of
waste, was, in fact, in one's self. "No one has ever passed [16] twice
over the same stream." Nay, the passenger himself is without identity.
Upon the same stream at the same moment we do, and do not, embark: for
we are, and are not: eimen te kai ouk eimen.+ And this rapid change, if
it did not make all knowledge impossible, made it wholly relative, of a
kind, that is to say, valueless in the judgment of Plato. Man, the
individual, at this particular vanishing-point of time and place,
becomes "the measure of all things."
To know after what manner (says Socrates, after discussing the
question in what proportion names, fleeting names, contribute
to our knowledge of things) to know after what manner we must be
taught, or discover for ourselves, the things that really are
(ta onta)+ is perhaps beyond the measure of your powers and mine.
We must even content ourselves with the admission of this, that
not from their names, but much rather themselves from themselves,
they must be learned and looked for. . . . For consider, Cratylus,
a point I oft-times dream on--whether or no we may affirm that
what is beautiful and good in itself, and whatever is, respectively,
in itself, is something?
Cratylus. To me at least, Socrates, it seems to be something.
Socrates. Let us consider, then, that 'in-itself'; not whether
a face, or anything of that kind, is beautiful, and whether all
these things seem to flow like water. But, what is beautiful in
itself--may we say?--has not this the qualities that define it,
always?
Cratylus. It must be so.
Socrates. Can we then, if it is ever passing out below, predicate
about it; first, that it is that; next, that it has this or that
quality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it should
straightway become some other thing, and go out under on its way,
and be no longer as it is? Now, how could that which is never in
the same state be a thing at all? . . .
[17] Socrates. Nor, in truth, could it be an object of knowledge
to any one; for, even as he who shall know comes upon it, it would
become another thing with other qualities; so that it would be no
longer matter of knowledge what sort of a thing it is, or in what
condition. Now, no form of knowing, methinks, has knowledge of
that which it knows to be no-how.
Cratylus. It is as you say.
Socrates. But if, Cratylus, all things change sides, and nothing
stays, it is not fitting to say that there is any knowing at
all. . . . And the consequence of this argument would be, that
there is neither any one to know, nor anything to be known. If,
on the other hand, there be always that which knows, and that
which is known; and if the Beautiful is, and the Good is, and
each one of those things that really are, is, then, to my thinking,
those things in no way resemble that moving stream of which we are
now speaking. Whether, then, these matters be thus, or in that
other way as the followers of Heraclitus affirm and many besides,
I fear may be no easy thing to search out. But certainly it is
not like a sensible man, committing one's self, and one's own soul,
to the rule of names, to serve them, and, with faith in names and
those who imposed them, as if one knew something thereby, to
maintain (damaging thus the character of that which is, and our
own) that there is no sound ring in any one of them, but that all,
like earthen pots, let water. Cratylus, 439.+
Yet from certain fragments in which the Logos is already named we may
understand that there had been another side to the doctrine of
Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of
chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the
search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm,
or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in
some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those
contending, infinitely diverse [18] impulses. It was an act of
recognition, even on the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the
incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom which, "reacheth from end to
end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things." But if the "weeping
philosopher," the first of the pessimists, finds the ground of his
melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he weep at
the dulness of men's ears to that continuous strain of melody
throughout it. In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and the
scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the boldly aggressive, the
paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural collusion, as it
was, with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth; that sense of
rapid dissolution, which, according to one's temperament and one's luck
in things, might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly, an
interest in the mere phenomena of existence, of one's so hasty passage
through the world.
The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension of which
the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in alliance with
a larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer observation of the
phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for Heraclitus, at that
early day. So, the seeds of almost all scientific ideas might seem to
have been dimly enfolded in the mind of antiquity; but fecundated,
admitted to their full working prerogative, one by one, in after ages,
by good favour of the special [19] intellectual conditions belonging to
a particular generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself preoccupied
by a formula, not so much new, as renovated by new application.
It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most
modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically,
justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it
under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of
Ephesus. The entire modern theory of "development," in all its various
phases, proved or unprovable,--what is it but old Heracliteanism awake
once more in a new world, and grown to full proportions?
Panta chôrei, panta rhei+--It is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to
whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion
too, each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious
movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other
hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not
but is only always becoming. The bold paradox of Heraclitus is, in
effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a
cautiously reasoned experience, and, in illustration of the very law of
change which it asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a
commonplace. Think of all that subtly disguised movement, latens
processus, Bacon calls it (again as if by a kind of anticipation) which
[20] modern research has detected, measured, hopes to reduce to minuter
or ally to still larger currents, in what had seemed most substantial
to the naked eye, the inattentive mind. To the "observation and
experiment" of the physical enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it
lives by reveal themselves, after all, as Heraclitus had declared
(scarcely serious, he seemed to those around him) as literally in
constant extinction and renewal; the sun only going out more gradually
than the human eye; the system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in
ceaseless movement nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is in constant
increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of
infinite space. The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains, as
still loftier mountains found their level there ages ago. The granite
kernel of the earth, it is said, is ever changing in its very
substance, its molecular constitution, by the passage through it of
electric currents. And the Darwinian theory--that "species," the
identifying forms of animal and vegetable life, immutable though they
seem now, as of old in the Garden of Eden, are fashioned by slow
development, while perhaps millions of years go by: well! every month
is adding to its evidence. Nay, the idea of development (that, too, a
thing of growth, developed in the progress of reflexion) is at last
invading one by one, as the secret of their explanation, all the
products of mind, the very [21] mind itself, the abstract reason; our
certainty, for instance, that two and two make four. Gradually we have
come to think, or to feel, that primary certitude. Political
constitutions, again, as we now see so clearly, are "not made," cannot
be made, but "grow." Races, laws, arts, have their origins and end,
are themselves ripples only on the great river of organic life; and
language is changing on our very lips.
In Plato's day, the Heraclitean flux, so deep down in nature itself--
the flood, the fire--seemed to have laid hold on man, on the social and
moral world, dissolving or disintegrating opinion, first principles,
faith, establishing amorphism, so to call it, there also. All along
indeed the genius, the good gifts of Greece to the world had had much
to do with the mobility of its temperament. Only, when Plato came into
potent contact with his countrymen (Pericles, Phidias, Socrates being
now gone) in politics, in literature and art, in men's characters, the
defect naturally incident to that fine quality had come to have
unchecked sway. From the lifeless background of an unprogressive
world--Egypt, Syria, frozen Scythia--a world in which the unconscious
social aggregate had been everything, the conscious individual, his
capacity and rights, almost nothing, the Greek had stepped forth, like
the young prince in the fable, to set things going. To the philosophic
eye however, [22] about the time when the history of Thucydides leaves
off, they might seem to need a regulator, ere the very wheels wore
themselves out.
Mobility! We do not think that a necessarily undesirable condition of
life, of mind, of the physical world about us. 'Tis the dead things,
we may remind ourselves, that after all are most entirely at rest, and
might reasonably hold that motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious
motion, as Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best worth
being. And as for philosophy--mobility, versatility, the habit of
thought that can most adequately follow the subtle movement of things,
that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them.
It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short.
It was the spirit of God that moved, moves still, in every form of real
power, everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality
in things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this
principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with
all his contriving care for the future, he desires to withstand.
Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of the immutable. The
Republic is a proposal to establish it indefectibly in a very precisely
regulated, a very exclusive community, which shall be a refuge for
elect souls from an ill-made world.
That four powerful influences made for the political unity of Greece
was pointed out by [23] Grote: common blood, common language, a common
religious centre, the great games in which all alike communicated. He
adds that they failed to make the Greeks one people. Panhellenism was
realised for the first time, and then but imperfectly, by Alexander the
Great. The centrifugal tendency had ever been too much for the
centripetal tendency in them, the progressive elements for the element
of order. Their boundless impatience, that passion for novelty noted
in them by Saint Paul, had been a matter of radical character. Their
varied natural gifts did but concentrate themselves now and then to an
effective centre, that they might be dissipated again, towards every
side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought. Variety and
novelty of experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to
an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the
claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready
sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,--herein, certainly, lay
at least one half of their vocation in history. The material
conformation of Greece, a land of islands and peninsulas, with a range
of sea-coast immense as compared with its area, and broken up by
repellent lines of mountain this way and that, nursing jealously a
little township of three or four thousand souls into an independent
type of its own, conspired to the same effect. Independence, local and
personal,--it was the Greek ideal!
[24] Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may see, of the still
half-Asiatic rather than the full Hellenic ideal, of the Ionian ideal
as conceived by the Athenian people in particular, people of the coast
who have the roaming thoughts of sailors, ever ready to float away
anywhither amid their walls of wood. And for many of its admirers
certainly the whole Greek people has been a people of the sea-coast.
In Lacedaemon, however, as Plato and others thought, hostile,
inaccessible in its mountain hollow where it had no need of any walls
at all, there were resources for that discipline and order which
constitute the other ingredient in a true Hellenism, the saving Dorian
soul in it. Right away thither, to that solemn old mountain village,
now mistress of Greece, he looks often, in depicting the Perfect City,
the ideal state. Perfection, in every case, as we may conceive, is
attainable only through a certain combination of opposites, Attic
aleipha with the Doric oxos;+ and in the Athens of Plato's day, as he
saw with acute prevision, those centrifugal forces had come to be
ruinously in excess of the centripetal. Its rapid, empiric,
constitutional changes, its restless development of political
experiment, the subdivisions of party there, the dominance of faction,
as we see it, steadily increasing, breeding on itself, in the pages of
Thucydides, justify Plato's long-drawn paradox that it is easier to
wrestle against many than against one. The soul, [25] moreover, the
inward polity of the individual, was the theatre of a similar
dissolution; and truly stability of character had never been a
prominent feature in Greek life. Think of the end of Pausanias failing
in his patriotism, of Themistocles, of Miltiades, the saviours of
Greece, actually selling the country they had so dearly bought to its
old enemies.
It is something in this way that, for Plato, motion and the philosophy
of motion identify themselves with the vicious tendency in things and
thought. Change is the irresistible law of our being, says the
Philosophy of Motion. Change, he protests, through the power of a true
philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and it is curious to
note the way in which, consciously or unconsciously, that philosophic
purpose shapes his treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of
art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or
innocent words, as "manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the
synonyms of what is evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed
cycle of political change; but conceives it (being change) as, from the
very first, backward towards decadence. The ideal city, again, will
not be an art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of art, that
he means to shape men anew; by a severely monotonous art however, such
art as shall speak to youth, all day long, from year to year, almost
exclusively, of the loins girded about.
[26] Stimulus, or correction,--one hardly knows which to ask for first,
as more salutary for our own slumbersome, yet so self-willed, northern
temperaments. Perhaps all genuine fire, even the Heraclitean fire, has
a power for both. "Athens," says Dante,
--Athens, aye and Sparta's state
That were in policy so great,
And framed the laws of old,
How small a place they hold,
How poor their art of noble living
Shews by thy delicate contriving,
Where what October spun
November sees outrun!
Think in the time thou canst recall,
Laws, coinage, customs, places all,
How thou hast rearranged,
How oft thy members changed!
Couldst thou but see thyself aright,
And turn thy vision to the light,
Thy likeness thou would'st find
In some sick man reclined;
On couch of down though he be pressed,
He seeks and finds not any rest,
But turns and turns again,
To ease him of his pain.
Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's Translation.
Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting it with Athens and Sparta
as he conceives them, Plato might have said to Athens, in contrast with
Sparta, with Lacedaemon, at least as he conceived it.
NOTES
6. +Transliteration: Panta rhei. Translation: "All things give way [or
flow]." Plato, Cratylus 402 A, cites Heraclitus' fragment more fully--
Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei, or
"Heracleitus says somewhere that all things give way, and nothing
remains." Pater cites the same fragment in The Renaissance,
Conclusion. The verb rheô means "flow," while the verb choreô means
"give way."
14. +Transliteration: Panta chôrei kai ouden menei. Pater's
translation: "All things give way: nothing remaineth." Plato, Cratylus
402A.
14. +Transliteration: neotês. Liddell and Scott definition: "youth:
also ... youthful spirit, rashness."
15. +Transliteration: Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai ouden
menei. Pater's translation in The Renaissance, Conclusion:
"[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing
remains." Plato, Cratylus 402a.
16. +Transliteration: eimen te kai ouk eimen. E-text editor's
translation: "We are and are not." Heraclitus, Fragments. Fragmenta
Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 326. Ed. F.W.A. Mullach. Darmstadt:
Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860 edition). In
the same fragment, Heraclitus is described as having said, Potamois
tois autois embainomen te kai ouk embainomen, which translates as "we
go into the same river, and [yet] we do not go into the same river."
Plato cites that thought in the passage alluded to above, Cratylus
402a.
16. +Transliteration: ta onta. Definition: "the things that are."
17. +Rather than retain the original's very small print for such
quotations, I have indented them throughout Plato and Platonism. As
Pater indicates, the source of his quotation is the Cratylus, 439.
19. +Transliteration: Panta chôrei, panta rhei. See above, notes for
pages 6, 14, 15, and 16. The verb rheô means "flow," while the verb
choreô means "give way."
24. +Transliteration: aleipha . . . oxos. Liddell and Scott definition:
"unguent, oil . . . sour wine, vinegar."
CHAPTER 2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST
[27] OVER against that world of flux,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
it is the vocation of Plato to set up a standard of unchangeable
reality, which in its highest theoretic development becomes the world
of "eternal and immutable ideas," indefectible outlines of thought, yet
also the veritable things of experience: the perfect Justice, for
instance, which if even the gods mistake it for perfect Injustice is
not moved out of its place; the Beauty which is the same, yesterday,
to-day and for ever. In such ideas or ideals, "eternal" as
participating in the essential character of the facts they represent to
us, we come in contact, as he supposes, with the insoluble, immovable
granite beneath and amid the wasting torrent of mere phenomena. And in
thus ruling the deliberate aim of his philosophy to be a survey of
things sub specie eternitatis, the reception of a kind of absolute and
independent knowledge [28] (independent, that is, of time and position,
the accidents and peculiar point of view of the receiver) Plato is
consciously under the influence of another great master of the Pre-
Socratic thought, Parmenides, the centre of the School of Elea.
About half a century before the birth of Plato, Socrates being then in
all the impressibility of early manhood, Parmenides, according to the
witness of Plato himself--Parmenides at the age of sixty-five--had
visited Athens at the great festival of the Panathenaea, in company
with Zeno the Eleatic, a characteristic specimen of Greek cleverness,
of the acute understanding, personally very attractive. Though forty
years old, the reputation this Zeno now enjoyed seems to have been very
much the achievement of his youth, and came of a mastery of the sort of
paradox youth always delights in. It may be said that no one has ever
really answered him; the difficulties with which he played so nicely
being really connected with those "antinomies," or contradictions, or
inconsistencies, of our thoughts, which more than two thousand years
afterwards Kant noted as actually inherent in the mind itself--a
certain constitutional weakness or limitation there, in dealing by way
of cold-blooded reflexion with the direct presentations of its
experience. The "Eleatic Palamedes," Plato calls him, "whose
dialectic art causes one and the same thing to appear both like and
[29] unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion." Ah! you hear
already the sort of words that seem sometimes so barren and
unprofitable even in Plato.
It is from extant fragments of a work of his, not a poem, but,
appropriately, To Syngramma,+ The Prose, of Zeno, that such knowledge as
we have of his doctrine, independently of the Parmenides of Plato, is
derived. The active principle of that doctrine then lies in the
acuteness with which he unfolds the contradictions which make against
the very conceivability of the fundamental phenomena of sense, in so
far as those phenomena are supposed to be really existent independently
of ourselves. The truth of experience, of a sensible experience, he
seems to protest:--Why! sensible experience as such is logically
inconceivable. He proved it, or thought, or professed to think, he
proved it, in the phenomenon which covers all the most vivid, the
seemingly irresistible facts, of such experience. Motion was indeed,
as the Heracliteans said, everywhere: was the most incisive of all
facts in the realm of supposed sensible fact. Think of the prow of the
trireme cleaving the water. For a moment Zeno himself might have
seemed but a follower of Heraclitus. He goes beyond him. All is
motion: he admits.--Yes: only, motion is (I can show it!) a nonsensical
term. Follow it, or rather stay by it, and it transforms itself,
agreeably enough for the [30] curious observer, into rest. Motion must
be motion in space, of course; from point to point in it,--and again,
more closely, from point to point within such interval; and so on,
infinitely; 'tis rest there: perpetual motion is perpetual rest:--the
hurricane, the falling tower, the deadly arrow from the bow at whose
coming you shake there so wretchedly, Zeno's own rapid word-fence--all
alike at rest, to the restful eye of the pure reason! The tortoise,
the creature that moves most slowly, cannot be overtaken by Achilles,
the swiftest of us all; or at least you can give no rational
explanation how it comes to be overtaken. Zeno had an armoury of such
enigmas. Can a bushel of corn falling make a noise if a single grain
makes none? Again, that motion should cease, we find inconceivable:
but can you conceive how it should so much as begin? at what point
precisely, in the moving body? Ubiquitous, tyrannous, irresistible, as
it may seem, motion, with the whole so dazzling world it covers, is--
nothing!
Himself so striking an instance of mobile humour in his exposure of the
unreality of all movement, Zeno might be taken so far only for a
master, or a slave, of paradox; such paradox indeed as is from the very
first inherent in every philosophy which (like that of Plato himself,
accepting even Zeno as one of its institutors) opposes the seen to the
unseen as [31] falsehood to truth. It was the beginning of
scholasticism; and the philosophic mind will perhaps never be quite in
health, quite sane or natural, again. The objective, unconscious,
pleasantly sensuous mind of the Greek, becoming a man, as he thinks,
and putting away childish thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards
Aristotle, towards Aquinas, or shall we say into the rude scholasticism
of the pedantic Middle Age? And we must have our regrets. There is
always something lost in growing up.
The wholesome scepticism of Hume or Mill for instance, the scepticism
of the modern world, beset now with insane speculative figments, has
been an appeal from the preconceptions of the understanding to the
authority of the senses. With the Greeks, whose metaphysic business
was then still all to do, the sceptical action of the mind lay rather
in the direction of an appeal from the affirmations of sense to the
authority of newly-awakened reason. Just then all those real and
verbal difficulties which haunt perversely the human mind always, all
those unprofitable queries which hang about the notions of matter and
time and space, their divisibility and the like, seemed to be stirring
together, under the utterance of this brilliant, phenomenally clever,
perhaps insolent, young man, his master's favourite. To the work of
that grave master, nevertheless--of Parmenides--a very different person
certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so
fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service. By its destructive
criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central
and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to
Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but
phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say)
to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that
it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides
and the Eleatic School were much occupied with the determination of the
thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.
Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged to an
outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to
the sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called, which
corresponds to the "Pure Being," that after all is only definable as
"Pure Nothing," that colourless, formless, impalpable existence (ousia
achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês)+ to use the words of Plato, for whom
Parmenides became a sort of inspired voice. Note at times, in reading
him, in the closing pages of the fifth book of The Republic for
instance, the strange accumulation of terms derivative from the
abstract verb "To be." As some more modern metaphysicians have done,
even Plato seems to pack such terms together almost by rote. Certainly
something of paradox may always be felt even in his [33] exposition of
"Being," or perhaps a kind of paralysis of speech--aphasia.+
Parmenides himself had borrowed the thought from another, though he
made it his own. Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of Homer, by way
of fitting Homer the better for the use of the schoolboys of the ideal
city, is ready to sacrifice much of that graceful polytheism in which
the Greeks anticipated the dulia of saints and angels in the catholic
church. He does this to the advantage of a very abstract, and as it
may seem disinterested, certainly an uninteresting, notion of deity,
which is in truth:--well! one of the dry sticks of mere "natural
theology," as it is called. In this he was but following the first,
the original, founder of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who in a
somewhat scornful spirit had urged on men's attention that, in their
prayers and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various thoughts and
statements, graceful or hideous, about them, they had only all along
with much fallacy been making gods after their own likeness, as horse
or dog too, if perchance it cast a glance towards heaven, would after
the same manner project thither the likeness of horse or dog: that to
think of deity you must think of it as neither here nor there, then nor
now; you must away with all limitations of time and space and matter,
nay, with the very conditions, the limitation, of thought itself;
apparently not [34] observing that to think of it in this way was in
reality not to think of it at all:--That in short Being so pure as this
is pure Nothing.
In opposition then to the anthropomorphic religious poetry of Homer,
Xenophanes elaborates the notion, or rather the abstract or purely
verbal definition, of that which really is (to on)+ as inconclusive of
all time, and space, and mode; yet so that all which can be identified
concretely with mode and space and time is but antithetic to it, as
finite to infinite, seeming to being, contingent to necessary, the
temporal, in a word, to the eternal. Once for all, in harshest
dualism, the only true yet so barren existence is opposed to the world
of phenomena--of colour and form and sound and imagination and love, of
empirical knowledge. Objects, real objects, as we know, grow in
reality towards us in proportion as we define their various qualities.
And yet, from another point of view, definition, qualification, is a
negative process: it is as if each added quality took from the object
we are defining one or more potential qualities. The more definite
things become as objects of sensible or other empirical apprehension,
the more, it might be said from the logician's point of view, have we
denied about them. It might seem that their increasing reality as
objects of sense was in direct proportion to the increase of their
distance from that perfect Being which is everywhere and at all times
in every possible mode of being. A [35] thing visibly white is found
as one approaches it to be also smooth to the touch; and this added
quality, says the formal logician, does but deprive it of all other
possible modes of texture; Omnis determinatio est negatio.+ Vain
puerilities! you may exclaim:--with justice. Yet such are the
considerations which await the mind that suffers itself to dwell awhile
on the abstract formula to which the "rational theology" of Xenophanes
leads him. It involved the assertion of an absolute difference between
the original and all that is or can be derived from it; that the former
annuls, or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth no real or
legitimate standing-ground as matter of knowledge; that, in opposite
yet equally unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience there is--
nothing! Of the most concrete object, as of the most abstract, it
might be said, that it more properly is not than is.
From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious
poets, that most abstract and arid of formulae, Pure Being, closed in
indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of
nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; "The
Absolute"; "The One"; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking,
doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the
universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the
experience of all men. To enforce a reasonable unity and order, to
impress some larger likeness of reason, [36] as one knows it in one's
self, upon the chaotic infinitude of the impressions that reach us from
every side, is what all philosophy as such proposes. Kosmos;+ order;
reasonable, delightful, order; is a word that became very dear, as we
know, to the Greek soul, to what was perhaps most essentially Greek in
it, to the Dorian element there. Apollo, the Dorian god, was but its
visible consecration. It was what, under his blessing, art
superinduced upon the rough stone, the yielding clay, the jarring
metallic strings, the common speech of every day. Philosophy, in its
turn, with enlarging purpose, would project a similar light of
intelligence upon the at first sight somewhat unmeaning world we find
actually around us:--project it; or rather discover it, as being really
pre-existent there, if one were happy enough to get one's self into the
right point of view. To certain fortunate minds the efficacious moment
of insight would come, when, with delightful adaptation of means to
ends, of the parts to the whole, the entire scene about one,
bewildering, unsympathetic, unreasonable, on a superficial view, would
put on, for them at least, kosmiotês,+ that so welcome expression of
fitness, which it is the business of the fine arts to convey into
material things, of the art of discipline to enforce upon the lives of
men. The primitive Ionian philosophers had found, or thought they
found, such a principle (archê)+ in the force of some omnipresent
physical element, [37] air, water, fire; or in some common law, motion,
attraction, repulsion; as Plato would find it in an eternally appointed
hierarchy of genus and species; as the science of our day embraces it
(perhaps after all only in fancy) in the expansion of a large body of
observed facts into some all-comprehensive hypothesis, such as
"evolution."
For Parmenides, at his early day, himself, as some remnants of his work
in that direction bear witness, an acute and curious observer of the
concrete and sensible phenomena of nature, that principle of reasonable
unity seemed attainable only by a virtual negation, by the
obliteration, of all such phenomena. When we have learned as exactly
as we can all the curious processes at work in our own bodies or souls,
in the stars, in or under the earth, their very definiteness, their
limitation, will but make them the more antagonistic to that which
alone really is, because it is always and everywhere itself, identical
exclusively with itself. Phenomena!--by the force of such arguments as
Zeno's, the instructed would make a clean sweep of them, for the
establishment, in the resultant void, of the "One," with which it is
impossible (para panta legomena)+ in spite of common language, and of
what seems common sense, for the "Many"--the hills and cities of
Greece, you and me, Parmenides himself, really to co-exist at all.
"Parmenides," says one, "had stumbled upon [38] the modern thesis that
thought and being are the same."
Something like this--this impossibly abstract doctrine--is what Plato's
"father in philosophy" had had to proclaim, in the midst of the busy,
brilliant, already complicated life of the recently founded colonial
town of Elea. It was like the revelation to Israel in the midst of
picturesque idolatries, "The Lord thy God is one Lord";+ only that here
it made no claim to touch the affections, or even to warm the
imagination. Israel's Greek cousin was to undergo a harder, a more
distant and repressive discipline in those matters, to which a
peculiarly austere moral beauty, at once self-reliant and submissive,
the aesthetic expression of which has a peculiar, an irresistible
charm, would in due time correspond.
It was in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem which from himself or
from others had received the title--Peri physeôs+ (De Naturâ Rerum) that
Parmenides set forth his ideas. From the writings of Clement of
Alexandria, and other later writers large in quotation, diligent modern
scholarship has collected fragments of it, which afford sufficient
independent evidence of his manner of thought, and supplement
conveniently Plato's, of course highly subjective, presentment in his
Parmenides of what had so deeply influenced him.-- [39] "Now come!"
(this fragment of Parmenides is in Proclus, who happened to quote it in
commenting on the Timaeus of Plato) "Come! do you listen, and take
home what I shall tell you: what are the two paths of search after
right understanding. The one,
hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai?+
"that what is, is; and that what is not, is not"; or, in the Latin of
scholasticism, here inaugurated by Parmenides, esse ens: non esse non
ens--
peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei?+
"this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes along with it. The
other--that what is, is not; and by consequence that what is not, is:--
I tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion:
tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon? oute gar an gnoiês
to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton?+
That which is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at
that; nor could you explain it to another; for Thought and Being are
identical."--Famous utterance, yet of so dubious omen!--To gar auto
voein estin te kai einai +---idem est enim cogitare et esse. "It is one
to me," he proceeds, "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come
back over again: tothi gar palin hixomai authis."+
Yes, truly! again and again, in an empty circle, we may say; and
certainly, with those [40] dry and difficult words in our ears, may
think for a moment that philosophic reflexion has already done that
delightfully superficial Greek world an ill turn, troubling so early
its ingenuous soul; that the European mind, as was said, will never be
quite sane again. It has been put on a quest (vain quest it may prove
to be) after a kind of knowledge perhaps not properly attainable.
Hereafter, in every age, some will be found to start afresh
quixotically, through what wastes of words! in search of that true
Substance, the One, the Absolute, which to the majority of acute people
is after all but zero, and a mere algebraic symbol for nothingness. In
themselves, by the way, such search may bring out fine intellectual
qualities; and thus, in turn, be of service to those who can profit by
the spectacle of an enthusiasm not meant for them; must nevertheless be
admitted to have had all along something of disease about it; as indeed
to Plato himself the philosophic instinct as such is a form of "mania."
An infectious mania, it might seem,--that strange passion for
nonentity, to which the Greek was so oddly liable, to which the human
mind generally might be thought to have been constitutionally
predisposed; for the doctrine of "The One" had come to the surface
before in old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which had been
revived, in the second century after Christ, in the ecstasies
(ecstasies of the pure [41] spirit, leaving the body behind it)
recommended by the Neo-Platonists; and again, in the Middle Age, as a
finer shade of Christian experience, in the mystic doctrines of Eckhart
and Tauler concerning that union with God which can only be attained by
the literal negation of self, by a kind of moral suicide; of which
something also may be found, under the cowl of the monk, in the clear,
cold, inaccessible, impossible heights of the book of the Imitation.
It presents itself once more, now altogether beyond Christian
influence, in the hard and ambitious intellectualism of Spinoza; a
doctrine of pure repellent substance--substance "in vacuo," to be lost
in which, however, would be the proper consummation of the transitory
individual life. Spinoza's own absolutely colourless existence was a
practical comment upon it. Descartes; Malebranche, under the monk's
cowl again; Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the "Vision of all
things in God"; do but present variations on the same theme through the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By one and all it is assumed, in
the words of Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable is the
note of the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing
steadily, as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite
attainable) condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by
the suppression of all the rule and outline of one's own actual
experience and thought.
[42] Something like that certainly there had been already in the
doctrine of Parmenides, to whom Plato was so willing to go to school.
And in the nineteenth century, as on the one hand the philosophy of
motion, of the "perpetual flux," receives its share of verification
from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern
science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest
also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the
exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from
the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals
with--matter, organism, consciousness--began in a state of
indeterminate, abstract indifference, with a single uneasy start in a
sort of eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface. Increasing
indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic
law, the world of motion and life is however destined, by force of its
own friction, to be restored sooner or later to equilibrium; nay, is
already gone back some noticeable degrees (how desirably!) to the
primeval indifference, as may be understood by those who can reckon the
time it will take for our worn-out planet, surviving all the fret of
the humanity it housed for a while, to be drawn into the sun.
But it is of Plato after all we should be thinking; of the
comparatively temperate thoughts, the axiomata media, he was able to
derive, by a [43] sort of compromise, from the impossible paradox of
his ancient master. What was it, among things inevitably manifest on
his pages as we read him, that Plato borrowed and kept from the Eleatic
School!
Two essential judgments of his philosophy: The opposition of what is,
to what appears; and the parallel opposition of knowledge to opinion;
(heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti dynamenê hekatera
autôn pephyke? ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston tauton einai?)+ and
thirdly, to illustrate that opposition, the figurative use, so
impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem
hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language,
of the opposition of light to darkness.--
Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The
Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not
something other than what is, be the object of opinion?
Yes! something else.
Does opinion then opine what is not; or is it impossible to have
even opinion concerning what is not? Consider! does not he who
has opinion direct his opinion upon something? or is it
impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about
nothing?
Impossible!
But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about something;
hasn't he? Yet after all what is not, is not a thing; but would
most properly be denominated nothing.
Certainly.
Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance: to what
is, knowledge.
Rightly: he said.
[44] Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of
opinion.
No!
Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.
It seems not.
Is it, then, beyond these; going beyond knowledge in clearness,
beyond ignorance in obscurity?
Neither the one, nor the other.
But, I asked, opinion seems to you (doesn't it?) to be a darker
thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance.
Very much so; he answered.
Does it lie within those two?
Yes.
Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two conditions?
Undoubtedly so.
Now didn't we say in what went before that if anything became
apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a thing
of that kind would lie between that which is in unmixed clearness,
and that which wholly is not; and that there would be, in regard
to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance; but, again, a condition
revealing itself between ignorance and knowledge?
Rightly.
And now, between these two, what we call 'opinion' has in fact
revealed itself.
Clearly so.
It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that which
partakes of both--both of Being and Not-being, and which could
rightly be called by neither term distinctly; in order that, if it
appear, we may in justice determine it to be the object of opinion;
assigning the extremes to the extremes, the intermediate to what
comes between them.
Or is it not thus?
Thus it is.
These points then being assumed, let him tell me! let him speak
and give his answer--that excellent person, who on the one hand
thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty itself,
ever in the same condition in regard to the same things (aei kata
tauta hôsautôs echousan)+ yet, on the other hand, holds [45] that
there are the many beautiful objects:--that lover of sight (ho
philotheamôn)+ who can by no means bear it if any one says that
the beautiful is one; the just also; and the rest, after the same
way. For good Sir! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one
of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly (under
certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions which will
not seem unjust or impious?
No! he answered. Rather it must be that they shall seem, in a
manner, both beautiful and ugly; and all the rest you ask of.
Well! The many double things:--Do they seem to be at all less
half than double?
Not at all.
And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy--will they
at all more truly be called by these names which we may give them,
than by the opposite names?
No! he said; but each of them will always hold of both.
Every several instance of 'The Many,' then--is it, more truly
than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be?
It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper-
parties!) playing on words, and the children's riddle about the
eunuch and his fling round the bat--with what, and on what, the
riddle says he hit it; for these things also seem to set both
ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of
them either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor
the other.
Have you anything then you can do with them; or anywhere you can
place them with fairer effect than in that position between being
and the being not? For presumably they will not appear more
obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more; nor more
luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that. We have
found then that the many customary notions of the many, about
Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and
being unmixedly.
So we have.
And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort
presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but
of opinion; to be apprehended by the intermediate faculty; as it
wanders unfixed, there, between. Republic, 478.
[46] Many a train of thought, many a turn of expression, only too
familiar, some may think, to the reader of Plato, are summarised in
that troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage. The influence then of
Parmenides on Plato had made him, incurably (shall we say?) a dualist.
Only, practically, Plato's richly coloured genius will find a
compromise between the One which alone really is, is yet so empty a
thought for finite minds; and the Many, which most properly is not, yet
presses so closely on eye and ear and heart and fancy and will, at
every moment. That which really is (to on)+ the One, if he is really to
think about it at all, must admit within it a certain variety of
members; and, in effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute, the
One, does become delightfully multiple, as the world of ideas--
appreciable, through years of loving study, more and more clearly, one
by one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted, permanent forms
of our veritable experience: the Bravery, for instance, that cannot be
confused, not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom, or Humility. One
after another they emerge again from the dead level, the Parmenidean
tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality of persons face to face
with us, of a personal identity. It was as if the firm plastic
outlines of the delightful old Greek polytheism had found their way
back after all into a repellent monotheism. Prefer as he may in theory
that [47] blank white light of the One--its sterile, "formless,
colourless, impalpable," eternal identity with itself--the world, and
this chiefly is why the world has not forgotten him, will be for him,
as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place. He
will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us,
with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicuously visual
emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of
himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic
teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the
better apprehend the world unseen.--
And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic) take
for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the lack
thereof, some such condition as this. Think you see people as
it were in some abode below-ground, like a cave, having its
entrance spread out upwards towards the light, broad, across the
whole cavern. Suppose them here from childhood; their legs and
necks chained; so that there they stay, and can see only what is
in front of them, being unable by reason of the chain to move
their heads round about: and the light of a fire upon them,
blazing from far above, behind their backs: between the fire and
the prisoners away up aloft: and see beside it a low wall built
along, as with the showmen, in front of the people lie the screens
above which they exhibit their wonders.
I see: he said.
See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all sorts
wrought in stone and wood; and, naturally, some of the bearers
talking, other silent.
It is a strange figure you describe: said he: and strange
prisoners.--
They are like ourselves: I answered! Republic, 514.
[48] Metaphysical formulae have always their practical equivalents.
The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the
Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the
Cynics or the Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as
truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of
the One, as the Cyrenaic monochronos hêdonê+--the pleasure of the ideal
now--is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as
sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for
the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many
phases of our so flexible human feeling. The abstract philosophy of
the One might seem indeed to have been translated into the terms of a
human will in the rigid, disinterested, renunciant career of the
emperor Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness. Let me however conclude
with a document of the Eleatic temper, nearer in its origin to the age
of Plato: an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic, which has justly
stirred the admiration of Stoical minds; though truly, so hard is it
not to lapse from those austere heights, the One, the Absolute, has
become in it after all, with much varied colour and detail in his
relations to concrete things and persons, our father Zeus.
An illustrious athlete; then a mendicant dealer in water-melons; chief
pontiff lastly of the sect of the Stoics; Cleanthes, as we see him in
anecdote [49] at least, is always a loyal, sometimes a very quaintly
loyal, follower of the Parmenidean or Stoic doctrine of detachment from
all material things. It was at the most critical points perhaps of
such detachment, that somewhere about the year three hundred before
Christ, he put together the verses of his famous "Hymn." By its
practical indifference, its resignation, its passive submission to the
One, the undivided Intelligence, which dia pantôn phoita+--goes to and
fro through all things, the Stoic pontiff is true to the Parmenidean
schooling of his flock; yet departs from it also in a measure by a
certain expansion of phrase, inevitable, it may be, if one has to speak
at all about that chilly abstraction, still more make a hymn to it. He
is far from the cold precept of Spinoza, that great re-assertor of the
Parmenidean tradition: That whoso loves God truly must not expect to be
loved by Him in return. In truth, there are echoes here from many
various sources. Ek sou gar genos esmen+:--that is quoted, as you
remember, by Saint Paul, so just after all to the pagan world, as its
testimony to some deeper Gnôsis than its own. Certainly Cleanthes has
conceived his abstract monotheism a little more winningly, somewhat
better, than dry, pedantic Xenophanes; perhaps because Socrates and
Plato have lived meanwhile. You might even fancy what he says an echo
from Israel's devout response to the announcement: "The Lord thy God is
one Lord." The Greek [50] certainly is come very near to his unknown
cousin at Sion in what follows:--
kydist', athanatôn, polyônyme, pankrates aiei
Zeu, physeos archêge, nomou meta panta kybernôn,
chaire· se gar pantessi themis thnêtoisi prosaudan, k.t.l.
Mullach, Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, I. p. 151.
Thou O Zeus art praised above all gods: many are Thy names and
Thine is all power for ever.
The beginning of the world was from Thee: and with law Thou
rulest over all things.
Unto Thee may all flesh speak: for we are Thy offspring.
Therefore will I raise a hymn unto Thee: and will ever sing of
Thy power.
The whole order of the heavens obeyeth Thy word: as it moveth
around the earth:
With little and great lights mixed together: how great art Thou,
King above all for ever!
Nor is anything done upon earth apart from Thee: nor in the
firmament, nor in the seas:
Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.
But Thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight: what is
without fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before Thee.
Thus hast Thou fitted together all things in one: the good with
the evil:
That Thy word should be one in all things: abiding for ever.
Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay Thee
the honour, wherewith Thou hast honoured us:
Singing praise of Thy works for ever: as becometh the sons of
men.+
NOTES
29. +Transliteration: To Syngramma. Translation: "The Prose."
32. +Transliteration: ousia achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês. E-text
editor's translation: "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible
essence." Plato, Phaedrus 247c. See also Appreciations, "Coleridge,"
where Pater uses the same quotation.
33. +Transliteration: aphasia. Liddell and Scott definition:
"speechlessness."
34. +Transliteration: to on. Translation: "that which is."
35. +The principle is that of Baruch Spinoza.
36. +Transliteration: Kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
36. +Transliteration: kosmiotês. Liddell and Scott definition:
"propriety, decorum, orderly behaviour."
36. +Transliteration: archê. Liddell and Scott definition: "I.
beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty,
dominion; 2. office."
37. +Transliteration: para panta legomena. Pater's translation: "in
spite of common language."
38. "The Lord thy God. . . ." Deuteronomy 6:4. "Hear, O Israel: The
LORD our God is one LORD: . . ." See also Mark 12:29: "And Jesus
answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The
Lord our God is one Lord: . . ."
38. +Transliteration: Peri physeôs. E-text editor's translation:
"Regarding Nature--i.e. the title De Naturâ Rerum."
39. +Transliteration: hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai.
Pater's translation: "that what is, is; and that what is not, is not."
Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana [Fragmentary Song or Poem], line 35.
Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 117. Ed. F.W.A. Mullach.
Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860
edition).
39. +Transliteration: peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei.
Pater's translation: "this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes
along with it." Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana [Fragmentary Song or Poem],
line 36. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118. Although I
have left the quotation as Pater renders it, the semicolon should be a
comma, as in the Mullach collection Pater used--otherwise the first
half of the sentence would be a question, and that is not how Pater
himself translates the verse.
39. +Transliteration: tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon; oute
gar an gnoiês to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton. Pater's translation: "I
tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion: That which
is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at that."
Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, lines 38-9. Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
39. +Transliteration: To gar auto voein estin te kai einai. Pater's
translation in Latin: "idem est enim cogitare et esse"; in English,
that may be translated, "Thinking and being are identical."
Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, line 40. Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
39. +Transliteration: tothi gar palin hixomai authis. Pater's
translation: "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come back over
again." Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, line 42. Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
43. +Transliteration: heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti
dynamenê hekatera autôn pephyke; ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston
tauton einai. E-text editor's translation: "opinion differs from
scientific knowledge...To each of them belongs a different power, so to
each falls a different sphere...it is not possible for knowledge and
opinion to be one and the same." Plato, Republic, 478a-b.
44. +Transliteration: aei kata tauta hôsautôs echousan. Pater's
translation: "ever in the same condition in regard to the same things."
Plato, Republic 478.
45. +Transliteration: ho philotheamôn. Liddell and Scott definition
"fond of seeing, fond of spectacles or shows." This word is from the
same passage just cited, note for page 44.
46. +Transliteration: to on. Translation: "that which is."
48. Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê. Pater's definition "the
pleasure of the ideal now." The adjective monochronos means,
literally, "single or unitary time." See also Marius the Epicurean,
Vol. 1, Cyrenaicism, and Vol. 2, Second Thoughts, where Pater quotes
the same key Cyrenaic language.
49. +Transliteration: dia pantôn phoita. E-text editor's translation:
"which courses through all things." Cleanthes (300-220 B.C.), Hymn to
Zeus, lines 12-13. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
Ed. F.W.A. Mullach. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of
the Paris, 1860 edition). Pater has translated Cleanthes' phrase
koinos logos as "undivided Intelligence." The relevant verse reads,
"su kateuthynês koinon logon, hos dia pantôn phoita," which may be
translated, "You guide the Universal Thought that courses through all
things." But the word logos is multivalent and subject to
philosophical nuance, so any translation of it is bound to be limited.
49. +Transliteration: Ek sou gar genos esmen. E-text editor's
translation: "For we are born of you." Cleanthes (300-220 B.C.), Hymn
to Zeus, line 4. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
Pater alludes also to Saint Paul's words in Acts 17:28: "For in him we
live, and move, and have our being."
50. +Here Pater provides a somewhat abbreviated translation of the Hymn
to Zeus. As above, the Greek is from Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
CHAPTER 3: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER
[51] His devotion to the austere and abstract philosophy of Parmenides,
its passivity or indifference, could not repress the opulent genius of
Plato, or transform him into a cynic. Another ancient philosopher,
Pythagoras, set the frozen waves in motion again, brought back to
Plato's recognition all that multiplicity in men's experience to which
Heraclitus had borne such emphatic witness; but as rhythm or melody
now--in movement truly, but moving as disciplined sound and with the
reasonable soul of music in it.
Pythagoras, or the founder of the Pythagorean philosophy, is the third
of those earlier masters, who explain the intellectual confirmation of
Plato by way of antecedent. What he said, or was believed to have
said, is almost everywhere in the very texture of Platonic philosophy,
as vera vox, an authority with prescript claim on sympathetic or at
least reverent consideration, to be developed generously in the natural
growth of Plato's own thoughts.
[52] Nothing remains of his writings: dark statements only, as occasion
served, in later authors. Plato himself attributes those doctrines of
his not to Pythagoras but to the Pythagoreans. But if no such name had
come down to us we might have understood how, in the search for the
philosophic unity of experience, a common measure of things, for a
cosmical hypothesis, number and the truths of number would come to fill
the place occupied by some omnipresent physical element, air, fire,
water, in the philosophies of Ionia; by the abstract and exclusive idea
of the unity of Being itself in the system of Parmenides. To realise
unity in variety, to discover cosmos--an order that shall satisfy one's
reasonable soul--below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last
the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy. Well! Pythagoras
seems to have found that unity of principle (archê)+ in the dominion of
number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which
number as such expands. Truths of number: the essential laws of
measure in time and space:--Yes, these are indeed everywhere in our
experience: must, as Kant can explain to us, be an element in anything
we are able so much as to conceive at all. And music, covering all it
does, for Pythagoras, for Plato and Platonism--music, which though it
is of course much besides, is certainly a formal development of purely
numerical laws: that too surely is something, [53] independently of
ourselves, in the real world without us, like a personal intelligible
soul durably resident there for those who bring intelligence of it, of
music, with them; to be known on the favourite Platonic principle of
like by like (homoion homoiô)+ though the incapable or uninstructed ear,
in various degrees of dulness, may fail to apprehend it.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras parted early into dust (that seems
strange, if they were ever really written in a book) and antiquity
itself knows little directly about his doctrine. Yet Pythagoras is
much more than a mere name, a term, for locating as well as may be a
philosophical abstraction. Pythagoras, his person, his memory,
attracted from the first a kind of fairy-tale of mystic science. The
philosophy of number, of music and proportion, came, and has remained,
in a cloud of legendary glory; the gradual accumulation of which
Porphyry and Iamblichus, the fantastic masters of Neo-Platonism, or
Neo-Pythagoreanism, have embodied in their so-called Lives of him, like
some antique fable richly embossed with starry wonders. In this spirit
there had been much writing about him: that he was a son of Apollo,
nay, Apollo himself--the twilight, attempered, Hyperborean Apollo, like
the sun in Lapland: that his person gleamed at times with a
supernatural brightness: that he had exposed to those who loved him a
golden thigh: how Abaris, the minister of that god, [54] had come
flying to him on a golden arrow: of his almost impossible journeys: how
he was seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at the same time.
As he walked on the banks of the Nessus the river had whispered his
name: he had been, in the secondary sense, various persons in the
course of ages; a courtesan once, for some ancient sin in him; and then
a hero, Euphorbus, son of Panthus; could remember very distinctly so
recent a matter as the Trojan war, and had recognised in a moment his
own old armour, hanging on the wall, above one of his old dead bodies,
in the temple of Athene at Argos; showing out all along only by hints
and flashes the abysses of divine knowledge within him, sometimes by
miracle. For if the philosopher really is all that Pythagoras or the
Pythagoreans suppose; if the material world is so perfect a musical
instrument, and he knows its theory so well, he might surely give
practical and sensible proof of that on occasion, by himself
improvising music upon it in direct miracle. And so there, in Porphyry
and Iamblichus, the appropriate miracles are.
If the mistaken affection of the disciples of dreamy Neo-Platonic
Gnôsis at Alexandria, in the third or fourth century of our era, has
thus made it impossible to separate later legend from original evidence
as to what he was, and said, and how he said it, yet that there was a
brilliant, perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the [55] most
abstract truths with what would tell on the fancy, seems more than
probable, and, though he would appear really to have had from the first
much of mystery or mysticism about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, "whom
even the vulgar might follow as a conjuror," must have been very unlike
the lonely "weeping" philosopher of Ephesus, or the almost disembodied
philosopher of Elea. In the very person and doings of this earliest
master of the doctrine of harmony, people saw that philosophy is
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute.
And in turn he abounded in influence on the deeds, the persons, of
others, as if he had really carried a magic lute in his hands to charm
them.
As his fellow-citizens had all but identified Pythagoras with him, so
Apollo remained the peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans; and we may
note, in connexion with their influence on Plato, that as Apollo was
the chosen ancestral deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the
philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks. If, as Plato was
aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let
strangers suppose--turned them all out from time to time and feasted on
it in secret, for the strengthening of their souls--it was [56]
precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music, of austere music,
mastering, remoulding, men's very bodies, they would then have
discussed with one another.
A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian cities of Magna Graecia,
at Crotona, that Pythagoras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious
influence. He founds there something like an ideal republic, or rather
a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that
inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for
it, as for him, ever the peculiar pledge of the presence of philosophic
truth. Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê emmetria;+ asks one
in The Republic; and Emmetria?+ of course, is the answer.
Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate as far as he can into that
mysterious community, there, long before, in the imagination of
Pythagoras is the first dream of the Perfect City, with all those
peculiar ethical sympathies which the Platonic Republic enforces
already well defined--the perfect mystic body of the Dorian soul,
built, as Plato requires, to the strains of music. As a whole, and in
its members severally, it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others
that inward order and harmony of which each one was a part. As such,
the Pythagorean order (it was itself an "order") expanded and was long
maintained in those cities of Magna Graecia which had been the scene of
the practical [57] no less than of the speculative activity of its
founder; and in one of which, Metapontum, so late as the days of Cicero
what was believed to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown. Order,
harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will
convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of
the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony,--that was the chief
thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though
they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done
what they liked--temperance in a religious intention, with many
singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like.
For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to
use the phrase of Wordsworth reproducing the central Pythagorean
doctrine, "from heaven," as he says, "trailing clouds of glory," so the
arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving
one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither,
of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one's carnal
elements, must be one; in consideration also, in curious questions, as
to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul,
before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all
the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in
the many revolutions of its existence. In the midst of that
aesthetically [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if
anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic
Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascêsis, about
him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards,
that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon
his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the
philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which
enveloped the entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had indeed kept
Pythagoras himself, as some have thought, from committing his thoughts
to writing at all, was congruous with such monkish discipline.
Mysticism--the condition of the initiated--is a word derived, as we
know, from a Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the eye that
one may better perceive the invisible, but more probably means to close
the lips while the soul is brooding over what cannot be uttered. Later
Christian admirers said of him, that he had hidden the words of God in
his heart.
The dust of his golden verses perhaps, but certainly the gold-dust of
his thoughts, lies scattered all along Greek literature from Plato to
the latest of the Greek Fathers of the Church. You may find it
serviceably worked out in the notes of Zeller's excellent work on Greek
philosophy, and, with more sparing comment, in Mullach's Fragmenta
Philosophorum Graecorum. No one of those Pre-Socratic philosophers has
[59] been the subject of a more enthusiastic erudition. For his mind's
health however, if in doing so he is not making a disproportionate use
of his time, inconsistent certainly with the essential temper of the
doctrine he seeks for, and such as a true Pythagorean would instantly
condemn, the young scholar might be recommended to go straight to the
pages of Aristotle--those discreet, unromantic pages, salutary
therefore to listen to, concerning doctrines in themselves so
fantastic.* In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Metaphysics, and
elsewhere, Aristotle gives many not unsympathetic notices at least of
the disciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a matter from the
first profusely, perhaps cheaply, embroidered, is like quiet
information from Pythagoras himself. Only, remember always in reading
Plato--Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras--that
the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides,
not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too
often, in the "infinite," those eternities, infinitudes, abysses,
Carlyle invokes for us so often--in no cultus of the infinite (to
apeiron) but in the finite (to peras).+ It is so indeed, with that
exception of the Parmenidean sect, through all Greek philosophy,
congruously with the proper vocation of the [60] people of art, of art
as being itself the finite, ever controlling the infinite, the
formless. Those famous systoichiai tôn enantiôn,+ or parallel columns
of contraries: the One and the Many: Odd and Even, and the like: Good
and Evil: are indeed all reducible ultimately to terms of art, as the
expressive and the inexpressive. Now observe that Plato's "theory of
ideas" is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean peras,+ with all the
unity-in-variety of concerted music,--eternal definition of the finite,
upon to apeiron,+ the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter,
of our experience of the world.
For it is of Plato again we should be thinking, and of Pythagoras or
the Pythagoreans, only so far as they explain the actual conformation
of Plato's thoughts as we find them, especially in The Republic. Let
us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from
that older philosophy, of which the two leading persuasions were;
first, the universality, the ultimate truth, of numerical, of musical
law; and secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity, of the soul.
In spirit, then, we are certainly of the Pythagorean company in that
most characteristic dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the
nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how one may attain thereto;
compelled to this subordinate and accessory question by the
intellectual [61] cowardice of his disciple, though after his manner he
flashes irrepressible light on that other primary and really
indispensable question by the way. Pythagoras, who had founded his
famous brotherhood by way of turning theory into practice, must have
had, of course, definite views on that most practical question, how
virtue is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly faithful to him
in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming
habit (askêsis)+ as enforced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as
he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good
natural disposition (physei)+ and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose
some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part (theia
moira)+ to the good pleasure of heaven, to un-merited grace. Whatever
else, however, may be held about it, it is certain (he admits) that
virtue comes in great measure through learning. But is there in very
deed such a thing as learning? asks the eristic Meno, who is so
youthfully fond of argument for its own sake, and must exercise by
display his already well-trained intellectual muscle. Is not that
favourite, that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is impossible to
be taught, and therefore useless to seek, what one does not know
already, after all the expression of an empirical truth?--
Meno. After what manner Socrates will you seek for that which
you do not know at all--what it is? For what sort of thing,
among the things you know not, will you propose as your [62]
object of search? Or even if you should have lighted full upon
it, how will you know that it is this thing which you knew not?
Socrates. Ah! I understand the kind of thing you mean to say,
Meno. Do you see what a contentious argument this is you are
bringing down on our heads?--that forsooth it is not possible
for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows
not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least;
because he knows it, and to one in such case there is no need
of seeking. Nor would he seek after what he knows not; for he
knows not what he shall seek for. Meno, 80.
Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits; not however in any
sense which encourages idle acquiescence in what according to common
language is our ignorance. There is a sense (it is exemplified in
regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things)
in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for,
or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total
ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware
of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could
one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means
incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans
are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence-
-: anamnêsis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise
way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know: how
that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument
most [63] fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning
may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves,
a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry:
introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where
diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the
table--particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when
subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths concerning
them. The problem required of him is to describe a square of a
particular size: to find the line which must be the side of such a
square; and he is to find it for himself. Meno, carefully on his
guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his
answers; whether he answers anything at any point otherwise than by way
of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable
questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like
sunlight on the photographer's negative.
"See him now!" he cries triumphantly, "How he remembers; in the logical
order; as he ought to remember!" The reader, in truth, following
closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that
after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem
for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the
questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself
illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is [64]
once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the
immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So
much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of
the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a
plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them:
that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the
mistakes also which he ought to make--the right sort of mistakes, such
as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a
kind of properly innate errors. Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai
hai doxai autai.+--"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been
stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us,
similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical
problems, with any and every problem whatever.
"If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for
such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger
outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine:--
If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe-
matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already
possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before
and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the
equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things
of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is
to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds
not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute
Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the
dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just
and good, and about all things whatever, upon [65] which, in
all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal--hois
episphragizometha touto + --That, which really is. Phaedo, 75.
But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno--from the prison-cell
to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment
upon the young boy with the square:-- Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all'
erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên;+
"Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning,
will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense
(epistêmê)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"--Yes! and
that recovery is an act of reminiscence.
These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about
side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enêsan de ge autô
autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right
opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when
stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as
consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai
gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not
quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as
he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading
psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us--the doctrine
namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through
various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral
retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by
Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the
Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of
Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so
comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a
personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then,
would be immortal (athanatos an hê psychê eiê)+ prospectively as well as
in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth
"over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an
encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all
events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal. It is right
therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that
is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the
boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not
come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half-
obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds
of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an
earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again
now, so kindly, so firmly!
Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under
the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the
proper vocation of the philosophic teacher [67] to supervene with his
encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine--a persuasion
still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong
presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that
great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains--
"reminiscence." Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the
locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain
religious persons, priests and priestesses,
--who had made it their business to be able to give an account
concerning their sacred functions. Pindar too asserts this,
and many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired.
And what they say is as follows. But do you observe, whether
they seem to you to speak the truth. For they say that the soul
of man is immortal; and that at one time it comes to a pause,
which indeed they call dying, and then is born again; but that
it is never destroyed. That on this account indeed it is our
duty to pass through life as religiously as possible (because
there's 'another world,' namely). 'For those,' says Pindar,
'from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of ancient
wrong--she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the
ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious and swift in
strength, and men greatest in wisdom; and for remaining time they
are called holy heroes among us.' Inasmuch then as the soul is
immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things
here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that
it has not learned; so that it is by no means surprising that
it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other
matters what it knew at least even aforetime. For inasmuch as
the whole of nature is akin to itself (homogeneous) and the soul
has learned all things, nothing hinders one, by remembering one
thing only, which indeed people call 'learning' (though it is
something else in fact, you see!) from finding out all other
things for himself, if he be brave and fail not through weariness
in his search. For in truth to [68] seek and to learn is wholly
Recollection. Therefore one must not be persuaded by that eristic
doctrine (namely that if ignorant in ignorance you must remain)
for that on the one hand would make us idle and is a pleasant
doctrine for the weak among mankind to hear; while this other
doctrine makes us industrious and apt to seek. Trusting in
which that it is true, I am willing along with you to seek out
virtue:--what it is. Meno, 81.
These strange theories then are much with Socrates on his last sad day-
-sad to his friends--as justifying more or less, on ancient religious
authority, the instinctive confidence, checking sadness in himself,
that he will survive--survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral
fire; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other
"righteous souls" of the national religion, he will be holding
discourses, dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little better as
must naturally happen with so diligent a scholar, this time to-morrow.
And that wild thought of metempsychôsis was connected with a theory,
yet more fantastic, of the visible heaven above us. For Pythagoras,
the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as became the possessors of
"a first principle"--of a philosophy therefore which need leave no
problem untouched--on purely material things, above all on the
structure of the planets, the mechanical contrivances by which their
motion was effected (it came to just that!) on the relation of the
earth to its atmosphere and the like. The doctrine of the
transmigration, [69] the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul
linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work astronomy, which
provided starry places, wide areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to
move or rest in. A matter of very lively and presentable form and
colour, as if making the invisible show through, this too pleased the
extremely visual fancy of Plato; as we may see, in many places of the
Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, and most conspicuously in the tenth
book of The Republic, where he relates the vision of Er--what he saw of
the other world during a kind of temporary death. Hell, Purgatory,
Paradise, are briefly depicted in it; Paradise especially with a quite
Dantesque sensibility to coloured light--physical light or spiritual,
you can hardly tell which, so perfectly is the inward sense blent with
its visible counter-part, reminding one forcibly of the Divine Comedy,
of which those closing pages of The Republic suggest an early outline.
That then is the third element in Plato derivative from his Pythagorean
masters: an astronomy of infant minds, we might call it, in which the
celestial world is the scene, not as yet of those abstract reasonable
laws of number and motion and space, upon which, as Plato himself
protests in the seventh book of The Republic, it is the business of a
veritable science of the stars to exercise our minds, but rather of a
machinery, which the mere star-gazer may peep into as best he can, with
its levers, its spindles and revolving [70] wheels, its spheres, he
says,--"like those boxes which fit into one another," and the literal
doors "opened in heaven," through which, at the due point of ascension,
the revolving pilgrim soul will glide forth and have a chance of gazing
into the wide spaces beyond, "as he stands outside on the back of the
sky"--that hollow partly transparent sphere which surrounds and closes
in our terrestrial atmosphere. Most difficult to follow in detailed
description, perhaps not to be taken quite seriously, one thing at
least is clear about the planetary movements as Plato and his
Pythagorean teachers conceive them. They produce, naturally enough,
sounds, that famous "music of the spheres," which the undisciplined ear
fails to recognise, to delight in, only because it is never silent.
That it really is impossible after all to learn, to be taught what you
are entirely ignorant of, was and still is a fact of experience,
manifest especially in regard to music. Now that "music of the
spheres" in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the
harmonious order of the whole universe (kosmos)+ was what souls had
heard of old; found echoes of here; might recover in its entirety, amid
the influences of the melodious colour, sounds, manners, the enforced
modulating discipline, which would make the whole life of a citizen of
the Perfect City an education in music. We are now with Plato, you
see! in his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The [71]
Republic, of the earlier and vaguer Pythagorean brotherhood. Musical
imagery, the notions of proportion and the like, have ever since Plato
wrote played a large part in the theory of morals; have come to seem
almost a natural part of language concerning them. Only, wherever in
Plato himself you find such imagery, you may note Pythagorean
influence.
The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all-
pervasive in it that imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative
theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how
the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival
of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty,
of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be
this, that it sounds so well. Plêmmeleia,+ discordancy,--all faultiness
resolves itself into that. "Canst play on this flute?" asks Hamlet:--
on human nature, with all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness,
or want of tune, he is himself the representative. Well! the perfect
state, thinks Plato, can. For him, music is still everywhere in the
world, and the whole business of philosophy only as it were the correct
editing of it: as it will be the whole business of the state to
repress, in the great concert, the jarring self-assertion (pleonexia)+
of those whose voices have large natural power in them. How, in
detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there
is no time to [72] show. Call to mind only that the perfect visible
equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual
youth of Greece--legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than
its fancied forms of deity--the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the
apoxyomenus; and how the most beautiful type of such youth, by the
universal admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued from the
severe schools of Sparta, that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian
temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to
the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of law.--Yet with a
fresh setting of the old music in each succeeding generation. For in
truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but
by the natural course of organic development clothed far more
completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay,
fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity
which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than
one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs,
the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves;
in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not
ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract
secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness
of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. It is
humanity itself now--abstract humanity--that [73] figures as the
transmigrating soul, accumulating into its "colossal manhood" the
experience of ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the
souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual
soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body.
So it may be. There was nothing of all that, however, in the mind of
the great English poet at the beginning of this century whose famous
Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood,
in which he made metempsychôsis his own, must still express for some
minds something more than merely poetic truth. For Pythagoreanism too,
like all the graver utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an
instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore also a constant
tradition in its history, which will recur; fortifying this or that
soul here or there in a part at least of that old sanguine assurance
about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his
disciples. Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon
to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the lines which perhaps
suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so-
called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to
blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which
indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines
have shown themselves not otherwise than at home.
[74] Happy, those days, he declares,
Before I understood this place,
Appointed for my second race;
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love;
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
O! how I long to travel back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train.--
But Ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk; and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came return.
Summing up those three philosophies antecedent to Plato, we might say,
that if Heraclitus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics
that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as Vaughan's, Pythagoreanism is
the philosophy of re-action.
NOTES
52. +Transliteration: archê. Liddell and Scott definition: "I.
beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty,
dominion; 2. office."
53. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Translation: "like by like."
56. +Transliteration: Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê
emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth
is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?" Plato,
The Republic, Book VI, 486d.
56. +Transliteration: Emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "To
measure and proportion." Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.
59. *Or to Mr. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy; which I have read since
these pages went to press, with much admiration for its learning and
lucidity, and its unconventionality of view.
59. +Transliteration: to apeiron . . . to peras. Liddell and Scott
definition: "I. without trial or experience of a thing . . . II.
boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity." As Pater
indicates, in Plato the terms mean something like "infinite" and
"finite," or "bounded" and "unbounded."
60. +Transliteration: systoichiai tôn enantiôn. "Co-ordinates
consisting of opposites."
60. +Transliteration: peras. See above, second note for page 59.
60. +Transliteration: to apeiron. See above, second note for page 59.
61. +Transliteration: askêsis. Liddell and Scott definition:
"excercise, training."
61. +Transliteration: physei. Liddell and Scott definition of physis:
"the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or
thing." Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with regard to
nature."
61. +Transliteration: theia moira. Translation: "one's lot by divine
appointment."
62. +Transliteration: anamnêsis. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
calling to mind, recollection."
64. +Transliteration: hôs dei. E-text editor's translation: "as is
necessary."
64. +Transliteration: Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai
autai. Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, these opinions
have been stirred up within him." Plato, Meno, 85c.
65. +Transliteration: hois episphragizometha touto. E-text editor's
translation: "these things upon which we set this seal." Plato,
Phaedo, 75d.
65. +Transliteration: Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos,
epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên. E-text editor's
translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through
questioning alone, he will understand for certain, retrieving the
knowledge out of himself?" Plato, Meno, 85d.
65. +Transliteration: epistêmê. Liddell and Scott definition "1.
knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific
knowledge."
65. +Transliteration: enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai. E-text
editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in
him, weren't they?" Plato, Meno 85c. Source, if any.
65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autôi alêtheis doxai,] erôtêsei
epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He
holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may
awaken into certain knowledge." Plato, Meno 86a.
66. +Transliteration: athanatos an hê psychê eiê. Pater's translation:
"The soul, then, would be immortal." Plato, Meno 86b.
70. +Transliteration: kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
71. +Transliteration: Plêmmeleia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
false note . . . error, offense."
71. +Transliteration: pleonexia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
disposition to take more than one's share."
71. +Transliteration: peras. See above, note two, page 59.
CHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATES
[75] "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The
Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting a knot; for Plato speaks to us
indirectly only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the Platonic
Socrates, a figure most ambiguously compacted of the real Socrates and
Plato himself; a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps have been
fancied, or, so to speak, an idolon theatri--Plato's self, but
presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a
kind of stage disguise. So we might fancy but for certain independent
information we possess about Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the
Memorabilia of Xenophon.
The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world.
From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline
of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was
clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek
conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected
pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary
young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical
things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master,
Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as
Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in
all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he
suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a god within. By a
mind, of the compass Plato himself supposes, two quite different
impressions may well have been made on two typically different
observers. The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy,
vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult
and extraordinary thoughts. In the absence, then, of a single written
word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the
true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all
besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite
original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed
something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have
thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was
of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all
that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic
Dialogues credit him. It is a problem about which probably no reader
of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:--how much precisely he must
deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of
defining to himself the Socrates of fact.
In Plato's own writing about Socrates there is, however, a difference.
The Apology, marked as being the single writing from Plato's hand not
in dialogue form, we may naturally take for a sincere version of the
actual words of Socrates; closer to them, we may think, than the Greek
record of spoken words however important, the speeches in Thucydides,
for instance, by the admission of Thucydides himself, was wont to be.
And this assumption is supported by internal evidence. In that
unadorned language, in those harsh grammatic (or rather quite
ungrammatic) constructions we have surely the natural accent of one
speaking under strong excitement. We might think, again, that the
Phaedo, purporting to record his subsequent discourse, is really no
more than such a record, but for a lurking suspicion, which hangs by
the fact that Plato, noted as an assistant at the trial, is expressly
stated by one of the speakers in the Dialogue to have been absent from
the dying scene of Socrates. That speaker however was himself perhaps
the veracious reporter of those last words and acts; for there are
details in the Phaedo too pedestrian and common-place to be taken for
things of mere literary invention: the rubbing of the legs, for
instance, now released from the chain; the rather [78] uneasy
determination to be indifferent; the somewhat harsh committal of the
crudely lamenting wife and his child "to any one who will take the
trouble"--details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave
those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and
tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have
sometimes been compared.
We shall be justified then, in the effort to give reality or truth to
our mental picture of Socrates, if we follow the lead of his own
supposed retrospect of his career in the Apology, as completed, and
explained to wholly sympathetic spirits, by the more intimate
discourses of the Phaedo.
He pleads to be excused if in making his defence he speaks after his
accustomed manner: not merely in home-spun phrase, that is to say, very
different from what is usually heard at least in those sophisticated
law-courts of Athens, nor merely with certain lapsing into his familiar
habit of dialogue, but with a tacit assumption, throughout his
arguments, of that logical realism which suggested the first outline of
Plato's doctrine of the "ideas." Everywhere, with what is like a
physical passion for what is, what is true--as one engaged in a sort of
religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and
meant us to know--he is driving earnestly, yet with method, at those
universal conceptions or definitions which serve to establish [79]
firmly the distinction, attained by so much intellectual labour,
between what is absolute and abiding, of veritable import therefore to
our reason, to the divine reason really resident in each one of us,
resident in, yet separable from, these our houses of clay--between
that, and what is only phenomenal and transitory, as being essentially
implicate with them. He achieved this end, as we learn from Aristotle,
this power, literally, of "a criticism of life," by induction (epagôgê)+
by that careful process of enquiry into the facts of the matter
concerned, one by one (facts most often of conscience, of moral action
as conditioned by motive, and result, and the varying degrees of inward
light upon it) for which the fitting method is informal though not
unmethodical question and answer, face to face with average mankind, as
in those famous Socratic conversations, which again are the first rough
natural growth of Plato's so artistic written Dialogues. The exclusive
preoccupation of Socrates with practical matter therein, his anxious
fixing of the sense of such familiar terms as just and good, for
instance, was part of that humble bearing of himself by which he was to
authenticate a claim to superior wisdom, forced upon him by nothing
less than divine authority, while there was something also in it of a
natural reaction against the intellectual ambition of his youth. He
had gone to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the [80] Phaedo,
in his last discourse, to a physical philosopher, then of great repute,
but to his own great disappointment.--
In my youth he says I had a wonderful desire for the wisdom
which people call natural science--peri physeôs historian.+
It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every matter:
how it comes to be; ceases to be; why it is. I lost my sight in
this enquiry to the degree of un-learning what I had hitherto
seemed to myself and others to know clearly enough. But having
heard one reading from a book written, as he said, by Anaxagoras,
which said that it is Reason that arranges and is the cause of
all things, I was delighted with this cause; and thought to
myself, if this be so, then it does with each what may be best
for it. Thus considering, it was with joy I fancied I had found
me a teacher about the cause--Anaxagoras: that he would show me
for instance, first, whether the earth was round or flat; and
then that it was best for it to be so: and if he made these
points clear I was prepared to ask for no other sort of causes.
Phaedo, 96.
Well! Socrates proceeds to the great natural philosopher, and is
immensely discouraged to find him after all making very little use of
Reason in his explanation why natural things are thus and not
otherwise; explaining everything, rather, by secondary and mechanical
causes. "It was as if," he concludes, "some one had undertaken to
prove that Socrates does everything through Reason; and had gone on to
show that it was because my body is constructed in a certain way, of
certain bones and muscles, that Socrates is now sitting here in the
prison, voluntarily awaiting death."
The disappointment of Socrates with the [81] spirit in which Anaxagoras
actually handled and applied that so welcome sapiential proposition
that Reason panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin +--arranges and is
the cause of all things--is but an example of what often happens when
men seek an a posteriori justification of their instinctive
prepossessions. Once for all he turns from useless, perhaps impious,
enquiries, into the material structure of the stars above him, or the
earth beneath his feet, from all physical enquiry into material things,
to the direct knowledge of man the cosmical order in man, as it may be
found by any one who, in good faith with himself, and with devout
attention, looks within. In this precise sense it was that, according
to the old saying, Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to
earth. Montaigne, the great humanist, expands it.--"'Twas he who
brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to
restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies.
He has done human nature a great service," he adds, "in showing it how
much it can do of itself." And a singular incident gave that piercing
study, that relentless exposure, of himself, and of others, for the
most part so unwelcome to them, a religious or mystic character. He
has a "vocation" thus to proceed, has been literally "called," as he
understands, by the central religious authority of Greece. His
seemingly invidious testing of men's pretensions [82] to know, is a
sacred service to the God of Delphi, which he dares not neglect. And
his fidelity herein had in turn the effect of reinforcing for him, and
bringing to a focus, all the other rays of religious light cast at
random in the world about him, or in himself.
"You know Chaerephon," he says, "his eagerness about any matter he
takes up. Well! once upon a time he went to Delphi, and ventured to
ask of the oracle whether any man living was wiser than I; and, amazing
as it seems, the Pythia answered that there was no one wiser than I."
Socrates must go in order, then, to every class of persons pre-eminent
for knowledge; to every one who seems to know more than he. He found
them--the Athenian poets, for instance, the potters who made the vases
we admire, undeniably in possession of much delightful knowledge
unattained by him. But one and all they were ignorant of the
limitations of their knowledge; and at last he concludes that the
oracle had but meant to say: "He indeed is the wisest of all men who
like Socrates is aware that he is really worth little or nothing in
respect of knowledge." Such consciousness of ignorance was the proper
wisdom of man.
That can scarcely be a fiction. His wholesome appeal then, everywhere,
from what seems, to what really is, is a service to the Delphic god,
the god of sanity. To prove that the oracle had [83] been right after
all, improbable as it seemed, in the signal honour it had put upon him,
would be henceforward his proper business. Committing him to a sort of
ironical humility towards others, at times seemingly petty and prosaic,
certainly very irritating, in regard to himself, in its source and
motive, his business in life as he conceived it was nothing less than a
divine possession. He becomes therefore literally an enthusiast for
knowledge, for the knowledge of man; such knowledge as by a right
method of questioning, of self-questioning (the master's questioning
being after all only a kind of mid-wife's assistance, according to his
own homely figure) may be brought to birth in every human soul,
concerning itself and its experience; what is real, and stable, in its
apprehensions of Piety, Beauty, Justice, and the like, what is of
dynamic quality in them, as conveying force into what one does or
creates, building character, generating virtue. Auto kath' hauto
zêtein ti pot' estin aretê+--to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and
by itself--there's the task. And when we have found that, we shall
know already, or easily get to know, everything else about and about
it: "how we are to come by virtue," for instance.
Well! largely by knowing, says naturally the enthusiast for knowledge.
There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend--Mêden estin
agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei +--a strenuously [84] ascertained
knowledge however, painfully adjusted to other forms of knowledge which
may seem inconsistent with it, and impenetrably distinct from any kind
of complaisant or only half-attentive conjecture. "One and the same
species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and
through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic"*: it will
be all this--the Virtue, for instance, which we must seek, as a hunter
his sustenance, seek and find and never lose again, through a survey of
all the many variable and merely relative virtues, which are but
relative, that is to say, "to every several act, and to each period of
life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us"--kath'
hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros hekaston ergon, hekastô
hêmôn --+ "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know
what sort of a thing it is"--ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti
eideiên;+ what its poiotêtes,+ its qualities, are? "Do you suppose that
one who does not know Meno, for example, at all, who he is, can know
whether he is fair and rich and well-born, or the reverse of all that?"
Yes! already for Socrates, we might say, to know what justice or Piety
or Beauty really is, will be like the knowledge of a person; only that,
as Aristotle carefully notes, his scrupulous habit of search for
universal, or catholic, definitions (kath' holou)+ was after all but
[85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts. Strange! out of
the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and
correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for
the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the
mystic intellectualism of Plato--Platonism, with all its hazardous
flights of soul.
A rich contributor to the philosophic consciousness of Plato, Socrates
was perhaps of larger influence still on the religious soul in him. As
Plato accepted from the masters of Elea the theoretic principles of all
natural religion--the principles of a reasonable monotheism, so from
Socrates he derived its indispensable morality. It was Socrates who
first of pagans comprised in one clear consciousness the authentic
rudiments of such natural religion, and gave them clear utterance.
Through him, Parmenides had conveyed to Plato the notion of a "Perfect
Being," to brace and satisfy the abstracting intellect; but it was from
Socrates himself Plato had learned those correspondent practical
pieties, which tranquillise and re-assure the soul, together with the
genial hopes which cheer the great teacher on the day of his death.
Loyal to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religion of
many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through
it to one unmistakable person, of perfect intelligence, power and
goodness, who takes note [86] of him. In the course of his seventy
years he has adjusted that thought of the invisible to the general
facts and to many of the subtler complexities of man's experience in
the world of sight. Sitivit anima mea, the Athenian philosopher might
say, in Deum, in Deum vivum, as he was known at Sion. He has at least
measured devoutly the place, this way and that, which a religion of
infallible authority must fill; has already by implication concurred in
it; and in fact has his reward at this depressing hour, as the action
of the poison mounts slowly to the centre of his material existence.
He is more than ready to depart to what before one has really crossed
their threshold must necessarily seem the cold and empty spaces of the
world no bodily eye can ever look on.
But, he is asked, if the prospect be indeed so cheerful, at all events
for the just, why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death
must be by self-destruction?--Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous
heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên.+ His consistent
piety straightway suggests the solution of that paradox: we are the
property, slaves, of the gods. Now no slave has any sort of right to
destroy himself; to take a life that does not really belong to him.
Comfort himself and his friends, however, as he may, it does tax all
his resources of moral and physical courage to do what is at last
required of him: and it was something quite new, unseen [87] before in
Greece, inspiring a new note in literature--this attitude of Socrates
in the condemned cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction,
multitudes, of a wisdom and piety, after all, so different from his,
have ever since assisted so admiringly, this anticipation of the
Christian way of dying for an opinion, when, as Plato says simply, he
consumed the poison in the prison--to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô.+
It was amid larger consolations, we must admit, that Christian heroes
did that kind of thing. But bravery, you need hardly be reminded, was
ever one of the specially characteristic virtues of the pagan world--
loyalty even unto death. It had been loyalty however hitherto to one's
country, one's home in the world, one's visible companions; not to a
wholly invisible claimant, in this way, upon one, upon one's self.
Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose, had been, as Alcibiades
suggested, by natural constitution a twofold power, an embodied
paradox. The infinitely significant Socrates of Plato, and the quite
simple Socrates of Xenophon, may have been indeed the not incompatible
oppositions of a nature, from the influence of which, as a matter of
fact, there emerged on one hand the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic
School, embodying respectively those opposed austerities and amenities
of character, which, according to the temper of this or that disciple,
had seemed to predominate in their common master. And so the courage
which declined to act as almost [88] any one else would have acted in
that matter of the legal appeal which might have mitigated the penalty
of death, bringing to its appropriate end a life whose main power had
been an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in Socrates,
paradoxically, with a genuine diffidence about his own convictions
which explains some peculiarities in his manner of teaching. The
irony, the humour, for which he was famous--the unfailing humour which
some have found in his very last words--were not merely spontaneous
personal traits, or tricks of manner; but an essential part of the
dialectical apparatus, as affording a means of escape from
responsibility, convenient for one who has scruples about the fitness
of his own thoughts for the reception of another, doubts as to the
power of words to convey thoughts, such as he thinks cannot after all
be properly conveyed to another, but only awakened, or brought to birth
in him, out of himself,--who can tell with what distortions in that
secret place? For we judge truth not by the intellect exclusively, and
on reasons that can be adequately embodied in propositions; but with
the whole complex man. Observant therefore of the capricious results
of mere teaching, to the last he protests, dissemblingly, and with that
irony which is really one phase of the Socratic humour, that in his
peculiar function there have been in very deed neither teacher nor
learners.
[89] The voice, the sign from heaven, that "new deity" he was accused
of fabricating (his singularly profound sense of a mental phenomenon
which is probably not uncommon) held perhaps of the same characteristic
habit of mind. It was neither the playful pretence which some have
supposed; nor yet an insoluble mystery; but only what happens naturally
to a really diffident spirit in great and still more in small matters
which at this or that taxing moment seem to usurp the determination of
great issues. Such a spirit may find itself beset by an inexplicable
reluctance to do what would be most natural in the given circumstances.
And for a religious nature, apt to trace the divine assistance
everywhere, it was as if, in those perilous moments--well! as if one's
guardian angel held one back. A quite natural experience took the
supernatural hue of religion; which, however, as being concerned now
and then with some circumstance in itself trifling, might seem to lapse
at times into superstition.
And as he was thus essentially twofold in character, so Socrates had to
contend against two classes of enemies. "An offence" to the whole
tribe of Sophists, he was hated also by those who hated them, by the
good old men of Athens, whose conservatism finds its representative in
Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic challenge of first
principles, in that ceaseless testing of the origin and claims of what
all [90] honest people might seem to take for granted, only a further
development of the pernicious function of the Sophists themselves, by
the most subtly influential of them all. If in the Apology he proves
that the fathers of sons had no proper locus standi against him, still,
in the actual conduct of his defence, as often in Plato's Dialogues,
there is (the candid reader cannot but admit it) something of
sophistry, of the casuist. Claiming to be but a simple argument, the
Apology of Socrates moves sometimes circuitously, after the manner of
one who really has to make the worse appear the better reason (ton
hêttô logon kreittô poiein)+ and must needs use a certain kind of
artificial, or ingenious, or ad captandum arguments, such as would best
have been learned in the sophistic school. Those young Athenians whom
he was thought to have corrupted of set purpose, he had not only
admired but really loved and understood; and as a consequence had
longed to do them real good, chiefly by giving them that interest in
themselves which is the first condition of any real power over others.
To make Meno, Polus, Charmides, really interested in himself, to help
him to the discovery of that wonderful new world here at home--in this
effort, even more than in making them interested in other people and
things, lay and still lies (it is no sophistical paradox!) the central
business of education. Only, the very thoroughness of the sort of
self-knowledge he [91] promoted had in it something sacramental, so to
speak; if it did not do them good, must do them considerable harm;
could not leave them just as they were. He had not been able in all
cases to expand "the better self," as people say, in those he
influenced. Some of them had really become very insolent questioners
of others, as also of a wholly legitimate authority within themselves;
and had but passed from bad to worse. That fatal necessity had been
involved of coming to years of discretion. His claim to have been no
teacher at all, to be irresponsible in regard to those who had in truth
been his very willing disciples, was but humorous or ironical; and as a
consequence there was after all a sort of historic justice in his
death.
The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is
tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that super-
ficial sense of the word according to which every misfortune
is called 'tragic.' In the latter sense, one might say of
Socrates that because he was condemned to death unjustly his
fate was tragic. But in truth innocent suffering of that sort
is merely pathetic, not tragic; inasmuch as it is not within
the sphere of reason. Now suffering--misfortune--comes within
the sphere of reason, only if it is brought about by the free-
will of the subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable;
as must be also the power against which that subject proceeds.
This power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of
a tyrant; because it is only in such case that the man is himself,
so to speak, guilty of his misfortune. In genuine tragedy, then,
they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which, from
this side and from that, come into collision; and such was the
fate of Socrates. His fate therefore is not merely personal, and
as it were part of the romance of an individual: [92] it is the
general fate, in all its tragedy--the tragedy of Athens, of
Greece, which is therein carried out. Two opposed Rights come
forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this
way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the
one towards the other: not as if this were right; that other
wrong. On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious
moral habit: the other principle, over against it, is the equally
religious claim--the claim of the consciousness, of the reason,
creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. The latter remains the common
principle of philosophy for all time to come. And these are the
two principles which come forth over against each other, in the
life and in the philosophy of Socrates. Geschichte der
Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.
"I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander," says
Montaigne, again, "but Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot";
and we may take that as typical of the immense credit of Socrates, even
with a vast number of people who have not really known much about him.
"For the sake of no long period of years," says Socrates himself, now
condemned to death--the few years for which a man of seventy is likely
to remain here--
You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to reproach
from those who desire to malign the city of Athens--that ye put
Socrates to death, a wise man. For in very truth they will
declare me to have been wise--those who wish to discredit you--
even though I be not. Now had you waited a little while this
thing would have happened for you in the course of nature. For
ye see my estate: that it is now far onward on the road of life,
hard by death. Apology, 38.
Plato, though present at the trial, was absent when Socrates "consumed
the poison in the [93] prison." Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells
us in the Phaedo, Plato would however almost certainly have heard from
him, or from some other of that band of disciples who assisted at the
last utterances of their master, the sincerest possible account of all
that was then said and done. Socrates had used the brief space which
elapsed before the officers removed him to the place, "whither he must
go, to die" (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ to discourse with those who
still lingered in the court precisely on what are called "The four last
things." Arrived at the prison a further delay awaited him, in
consequence (it was so characteristic of the Athenian people!) of a
religious scruple. The ship of sacred annual embassy to Apollo at
Delos was not yet returned to Athens; and the consequent interval of
time might not be profaned by the death of a criminal. Socrates
himself certainly occupies it religiously enough by a continuation of
his accustomed discourses, touched now with the deepening solemnity of
the moment.
The Phaedo of Plato has impressed most readers as a veritable record of
those last discourses of Socrates; while in the details of what then
happened, the somewhat prosaic account there given of the way in which
the work of death was done, we find what there would have been no
literary satisfaction in inventing; his indifferent treatment, for
instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in
violent [94] distress--treatment in marked contrast, it must be
observed again, with the dignified tenderness of a later scene, as
recorded in the Gospels.
An inventor, with mere literary effect in view, at this and other
points would have invented differently. "The prison," says Cebes, the
chief disciple in the Phaedo, "was not far from the court-house; and
there we were used to wait every day till we might be admitted to our
master. One morning we were assembled earlier than usual; for on the
evening before we heard that the ship was returned from Delos. The
porter coming out bade us tarry till he should call us. For, he said,
the Eleven are now freeing Socrates from his bonds, announcing to him
that he must die to-day."
They were very young men, we are told, who were with Socrates, and how
sweetly, kindly, approvingly, he listened to their so youthfully
sanguine discussion on the immortality of the soul. For their sakes
rather than his own he is ready to treat further, by way of a
posteriori arguments, a belief which in himself is matter of invincible
natural prepossession. In the court he had pleaded at the most for
suspended judgment on that question:--"If I claimed on any point to be
wiser than any one else it would be in this, that having no adequate
knowledge of things in Hades so I do not fancy I know." But, in the
privacy of these last hours, he is confident in his utterance on the
[95] subject which is so much in the minds of the youths around him;
his arguments like theirs being in fact very much of the nature of the
things poets write (poiêmata)+ or almost like those medicinable fictions
(pseudê en pharmakou eidei)+ such as are of legitimate use by the
expert. That the soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought!) is a harmony;
that there are reasons why this particular harmony should not cease,
like that of the lyre or the harp, with the destruction of the
instrument which produced it; why this sort of flame should not go out
with the upsetting of the lamp:--such are the arguments, sometimes
little better than verbal ones, which pass this way and that around the
death-bed of Socrates, as they still occur to men's minds. For
himself, whichever way they tend, they come and go harmlessly, about an
immovable personal conviction, which, as he says, "came to me apart
from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness":
(Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias).+ The
formula of probability could not have been more aptly put. It is one
of those convictions which await, it may be, stronger, better,
arguments than are forthcoming; but will wait for them with unfailing
patience.--"The soul therefore Cebes," since such provisional arguments
must be allowed to pass, "is something sturdy and strong (ischuron ti
estin)+ imperishable by accident or wear; and we shall really exist in
Hades." Indulging a little [96] further the "poetry turned logic" of
those youthful assistants, Socrates too, even Socrates, who had always
turned away so persistently from what he thought the vanity of the eye,
just before the bodily eye finally closes, and his last moment being
now at hand, ascends to, or declines upon, the fancy of a quite visible
paradise awaiting him.--
It is said that the world, if one gaze down on it from above,
is to look on like those leathern balls of twelve pieces,
variegated in divers colours, of which the colours here--those
our painters use--are as it were samples. There, the whole
world is formed of such, and far brighter and purer than they;
part sea-purple of a wonderful beauty; a part like gold; a part
whiter than alabaster or snow; aye, composed thus of other
colours also of like quality, of greater loveliness than ours--
colours we have never seen. For even those hollows in it, being
filled with air and water, present a certain species of colour
gleaming amid the diversity of the others; so that it presents
one continuous aspect of varied hues. Thus it is: and conform-
ably tree and flower and fruit are put forth and grow. The
mountains again and the rocks, after the same manner, have a
smoothness and transparency and colours lovelier than here. The
tiny precious stones we prize so greatly are but morsels of
them--sards and jasper and emerald and the rest. No baser kind
of thing is to be found in that world, but finer rather. The
cause of which is that the rocks there are pure, not gnawed away
and corrupted like ours by rot and brine, through the moistures
which drain together here, bringing disease and deformity to
rocks and earth as well as to living things. There are many
living creatures in the land besides men and women, some abiding
inland, and some on the coasts of the air, as we by the sea,
others in the islands amidst its waves; for, in a word, what the
water of the sea is to us for our uses, that the air is to them.
The blending of the seasons there is such that they have no
sickness and come to years more numerous far than ours: while
[97] for sight and scent and hearing and the like they stand as
far from us, as air from water, in respect of purity, and the
aether from air. There are thrones moreover and temples of the
gods among them, wherein in very deed the gods abide; voices
and oracles and sensible apprehensions of them; and occasions
of intercourse with their very selves. The sun, the moon and
the stars they see as they really are; and are blessed in all
other matters agreeably thereto. Phaedo, 110.
The great assertor of the abstract, the impalpable, the unseen, at any
cost, shows there a mastery of visual expression equal to that of his
greatest disciple.--Ah, good master! was the eye so contemptible an
organ of knowledge after all?
Plato was then about twenty-eight years old; a rich young man, rich
also in intellectual gifts; and what he saw and heard from and about
Socrates afforded the correction his opulent genius needed, and made
him the most serious of writers. In many things he was as unlike as
possible to the teacher--rude and rough as some failure of his own old
sculptor's workshop--who might seem in his own person to have broken up
the harmonious grace of the Greek type, and carried people one step
into a world already in reaction against the easy Attic temper, a world
in which it might be necessary to go far below the surface for the
beauty of which those homely lips had discoursed so much. Perhaps he
acted all the more surely as a corrective force on Plato, henceforward
an opponent of the [98] obviously successful mental habits of the day,
with an unworldliness which, a personal trait in Plato himself there
acquired, will ever be of the very essence of Platonism.--"Many are
called, but few chosen": Narthêkophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te
pauroi.+ He will have, as readers of The Republic know, a hundred
precepts of self-repression for others--the self-repression of every
really tuneable member of a chorus; and he begins by almost effacing
himself. All that is best and largest in his own matured genius he
identifies with his master; and when we speak of Plato generally what
we are really thinking of is the Platonic Socrates.
NOTES
79. +Transliteration: epagôgê. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
bringing on, to, or in . . . argument from induction."
80. +Transliteration: peri physeôs historian. E-text editor's
translation: "inquiry into nature." Plato, Phaedo 96a.
81. +Transliteration: panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin. Pater's
translation: "arranges and is the cause of all things." Plato, Phaedo
97c, offers a close paraphrase of Anaxagoras' saying.
83. +Transliteration: Auto kath' hauto zêtein ti pot' estin aretê.
Pater's translation: "to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by
itself." Plato, Meno 100b.
83. +Transliteration: Mêden estin agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei.
Pater's translation: "There is no good thing which knowledge does not
comprehend." Plato, Meno 87d.
84. *Tauton pantachou eidos--holon kai hygies--hen kata pantôn, dia
pantôn, epi pasi-kath' holou. Pater's translation: "One and the same
species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and
through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic." Perhaps
Pater is combining phrases here; only the first phrase was locatable.
Plato, Meno 72d.
84. +Transliteration: kath' hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros
hekaston ergon, hekastô hêmôn. Pater's translation: "to every several
act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do,
in each one of us." Plato, Meno 72a.
84. +Transliteration: ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti eideiên.
Pater's translation: "That, about which I don't know what it is, how
should I know what sort of a thing it is." Plato, Meno 71b.
84. +Transliteration: poiotêtes. Pater's translation: "qualities."
84. +Transliteration: kath' holou. Pater's translation: "universal, or
catholic, definitions;" the phrase might be translated, "in accordance
with the whole."
86. +Transliteration: Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous heatous
eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên. Pater's translation: "why
is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self-
destruction." Plato, Phaedo 62a.
87. +Transliteration: to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô. Pater's
translation: "he consumed the poison in the prison." Plato, Phaedo
57a.
90. +Transliteration: ton hêttô logon kreittô poiein. Pater's
translation: "to make the worse appear the better reason." Plato,
Apology 23d.
93. +Transliteration: hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai. Pater's
translation: "whither he must go, to die." The pronoun should be first
person--"whither I must go." Plato, Apology 39e.
95. +Transliteration: poiêmata. Liddell and Scott definition: "anything
made or done . . . a poetical work."
95. +Transliteration: pseudê en pharmakou eidei. Pater's translation:
"medicinable fictions." Plato, Republic 389b contains a similar
phrase.
95. +Transliteration: Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos,
kai euprepeias. Pater's translation: "came to me apart from
demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness." Plato,
Phaedo 92c.
95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin. Pater's translation: "is
something sturdy and strong." Plato, Phaedo 95c.
98. +Transliteration: Narthêkophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi.
Pater's translation: "Many are called, but few chosen." Plato, Phaedo,
69c.
CHAPTER 5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
[99] "SOPHIST," professional enemy of Socrates:--it became, chiefly
through the influence of Plato, inheriting, expanding, the preferences
and antipathies of his master, a bad name. Yet it had but indicated,
by a quite natural verbal formation, the class of persons through whom,
in the most effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand for
education, asserted by that marvellously ready Greek people, when the
youthful mind in them became suddenly aware of the coming of virile
capacity, and they desired to be made by rules of art better speakers,
better writers and accountants, than any merely natural, unassisted
gifts, however fortunate, could make them. While the peculiar
religiousness of Socrates had induced in him the conviction that he was
something less than a wise man, a philosopher only, a mere seeker after
such wisdom as he might after all never attain, here were the
sophistai,+ the experts--wise men, who proposed to make other people as
wise as themselves, wise in that sort of wisdom [100] regarding which
we can really test others, and let them test us, not with the merely
approximate results of the Socratic method, but with the exactness we
may apply to processes understood to be mechanical, or to the
proficiency of quite young students (such as in fact the Sophists were
dealing with) by those examinations which are so sufficient in their
proper place. It had been as delightful as learning a new game, that
instruction, in which you could measure your daily progress by
brilliant feats of skill. Not only did the parents of those young
students pay readily large sums for their instruction in what it was
found so useful to know, above all in the art of public speaking, of
self-defence, that is to say, in democratic Athens where one's personal
status was become so insecure; but the young students themselves felt
grateful for their institution in what told so immediately on their
fellows; for help in the comprehension of the difficult sentences of
another, or the improvement of one's own; for the accomplishments which
enabled them in that busy competitive world to push their fortunes each
one for himself a little further, and quite innocently. Of course they
listened.
"Love not the world!"--that, on the other hand, was what Socrates had
said, or seemed to say; though in truth he too meant only to teach them
how by a more circuitous but surer way to [101] possess themselves of
it. And youth, naturally curious and for the most part generous,
willing to undergo much for the mere promise of some good thing it can
scarcely even imagine, had been ready to listen to him too; the sons of
rich men most often, by no means to the dissatisfaction of Socrates
himself, though he never touched their money; young men who had amplest
leisure for the task of perfecting their souls, in a condition of
religious luxury, as we should perhaps say. As was evident in the
court-house at the trial of the great teacher, to the eyes of older
citizens who had not come under his personal influence, there had been
little to distinguish between Socrates and his professional rivals.
Socrates in truth was a Sophist; but more than a Sophist. Both alike
handled freely matters that to the fathers had seemed beyond question;
encouraged what seemed impious questioning in the sons; had set "the
hearts of the sons against the fathers"; and some instances there were
in which the teaching of Socrates had been more conspicuously ruinous
than theirs. "If you ask people at Athens," says Socrates in the Meno,
"how virtue is to be attained, they will laugh in your face and say
they don't so much as know what virtue is." And who was responsible
for that? Certainly that Dialogue, proposing to discover the essential
nature of virtue, by no means re-establishes one's old prepossessions
about it in the vein of [102] Simonides, or Pindar, or one's elders.
Sophist, and philosopher; Protagoras, and Socrates; so far, their
effect was the same:--to the horror of fathers, to put the minds of the
sons in motion regarding matters it were surely best to take as settled
once and for ever. What then after all was the insuperable difference
between Socrates and those rival teachers, with whom he had
nevertheless so much in common, bent like him so effectively, so
zealously, on that new study of man, of human nature and the moral
world, to the exclusion of all useless "meteoric or subterranean
enquiries" into things. As attractive as himself to ingenuous youth,
uncorrupt surely in its early intentions, why did the Sophists seem to
Socrates to be so manifestly an instrument of its corruption?
"The citizen of Athens," observed that great Athenian statesman of the
preceding age, in whom, as a German philosopher might say, the mobile
soul of Athens became conscious,--"The citizen of Athens seems to me to
present himself in his single person to the greatest possible variety
(pleista eidê)+ of thought and action, with the utmost degree of
versatility." As we saw, the example of that mobility, that daring
mobility, of character has seemed to many the special contribution of
the Greek people to advancing humanity. It was not however of the
Greek people in general that Pericles was speaking at the beginning of
the Peloponnesian [103] war, but of Athens in particular; of Athens,
that perfect flower of Ionian genius, in direct contrast to, and now in
bitter rivalry with, Sparta, the perfect flower of the Dorian genius.
All through Greek history, as we also saw, in connexion with Plato's
opposition to the philosophy of motion, there may be traced, in every
sphere of the activity of the Greek mind, the influence of those two
opposing tendencies:--the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies,
as we may perhaps not too fancifully call them.
There is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the Ionian or Asiatic,
tendency; flying from the centre, working with little forethought
straight before it in the development of every thought and fancy;
throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination;
delighting in colour and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful
material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in
architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself. In the
social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of local
and personal influences: its restless versatility drives it towards the
assertion of the principles of individualism, of separatism--the
separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions, the
development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and
individual in him. Shut off land-wards from the primitive sources of
those many elements it was to compose anew, shut off from all the rest
of the world, to [104] which it presented but one narrow entrance
pierced through that rock of Tempe, so narrow that "in the opinion of
the ancients it might be defended by a dozen men against all comers,"
it did recompose or fuse those many diverse elements into one
absolutely original type. But what variety within! Its very claim was
in its grace of movement, its freedom and easy happiness, its lively
interests, the variety of its gifts to civilisation; but its weakness
is self-evident, and was what had made the political unity of Greece
impossible. The Greek spirit!--it might have become a hydra, to use
Plato's own figure, a monster; the hand developing hideously into a
hundred hands, or heads.
This inorganic, this centrifugal, tendency, Plato was desirous to cure
by maintaining over against it the Dorian influence of a severe
simplification everywhere, in society, in culture, in the very physical
nature of man. An enemy everywhere, though through acquired principle
indeed rather than by instinct, to variegation, to what is cunning, or
"myriad-minded" (as we say of Shakespeare, as Plato thinks of Homer) he
sets himself in mythology, in literature, in every kind of art, in the
art of life, as if with conscious metaphysical opposition to the
metaphysic of Heraclitus, to enforce the ideal of a sort of Parmenidean
abstractness, and monotony or calm.
This, perhaps exaggerated, ideal of Plato is [105] however only the
exaggeration of that salutary, strictly European tendency, which,
finding human mind, the human reason cool and sane, to be the most
absolutely real and precious thing in the world, enforces everywhere
the impress of its reasonable sanity; its candid reflexions upon things
as they really are; its sense of logical proportion. It is that
centripetal tendency, again, which links the individual units together,
states to states, one period of organic growth to another, under the
reign of a strictly composed, self-conscious order, in the universal
light of the understanding.
Whether or not this temper, so clearly traceable as a distinct rival
influence in the course of Greek development, was indeed the peculiar
gift of the Dorian race, certainly that race, as made known to us
especially in Lacedaemon, is the best illustration of it, in its love
of order, of that severe composition everywhere, of which the Dorian
style of architecture is as it were a material symbol, in its constant
aspiration after what is dignified and earnest, as exemplified most
evidently in the religion of its preference, the religion of Apollo.
Now the key to Plato's view of the Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras,
Hippias, Prodicus, with their less brilliant followers--chosen
educators of the public--is that they do but fan and add fuel to the
fire in which Greece, as they wander [106] like ardent missionaries
about it, is flaming itself away. Teaching in their large,
fashionable, expensive schools, so triumphantly well, the arts one
needed most in so busy an age, they were really developing further and
reinforcing the ruinous fluidity of the Greek, and especially of the
Athenian people, by turning it very adroitly into a conscious method, a
practical philosophy, an art of life itself, in which all those
specific arts would be but subsidiary--an all-supplementing ars artium,
a master-art, or, in depreciatory Platonic mood one might say, an
artifice, or, cynically, a trick. The great sophist was indeed the
Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing victim of its own gifts,
its own flamboyancy, well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction of
its own parts, given over completely to hazardous political experiment
with the irresponsibility which is ever the great vice of democracy,
ever ready to float away anywhither, to misunderstand, or forget, or
discredit, its own past.--
Or do you too hold like the many (asks Socrates in the sixth
book of The Republic) that a certain number are corrupted
by sophists in their youth; and that certain sophists,
irresponsible persons, corrupt them to any extent worth noting;
and not rather that those who say these things are the greatest
sophists; that they train to perfection, and turn out both old
and young, men and women, just as they choose them to be?--When,
pray? He asked.--When seated together in their thousands at the
great assemblies, or in the law-courts, or the theatres, or the
camp, or any other common gathering of the public, with much
noise the majority praise this and blame [107] that in what is
said and done, both alike in excess, shouting and clapping; and
the very rocks too and the place in which they are, echoing
around, send back redoubled that clamour of praise and blame.
In such case, what heart as they say, what heart, think you,
can the young man keep? or what private education he may have
had hold out for him that it be not over-flooded by praise or
blame like that, and depart away, borne down the stream,
whithersoever that may carry it, and that he pronounce not
the same thing as they fair or foul; and follow the same ways
as they; and become like them? Republic, 492.+
The veritable sophist then, the dynamic sophist, was the Athenian
public of the day; those ostensible or professional Sophists being not
so much its intellectual directors as the pupils or followers of it.
They did but make it, as the French say, abound the more in its own
sense, like the keeper (it is Plato's own image) of some wild beast,
which he knows how to command by a well-considered obedience to all its
varying humours. If the Sophists are partly the cause they are still
more the effect of the social environment. They had discovered, had
ascertained with much acuteness, the actual momentum of the society
which maintained them, and they meant only, by regulating, to maintain
it. Protagoras, the chief of Sophists, had avowedly applied to ethics
the physics or metaphysics of Heraclitus. And now it was as if the
disintegrating Heraclitean fire had taken hold on actual life, on men's
very thoughts, on the emotions and the will.
That so faulty natural tendency, as Plato holds [108] it to be, in the
world around them, they formulate carefully as its proper conscious
theory: a theory how things must, nay, ought, to be. "Just that," they
seem to say--"Just that versatility, that mutable spirit, shall become
by adoption the child of knowledge, shall be carefully nurtured,
brought to great fortune. We'll make you, and your thoughts, as fluid,
as shifty, as things themselves: will bring you, like some perfectly
accomplished implement, to this carrière ouverte, this open quarry, for
the furtherance of your personal interests in the world." And if old-
fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than
they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that was
not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the
control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to
it, in regard to one's self? "It will break up,--this or that ethical
deposit in your mind, Ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear,
when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the
vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such
presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to
know their place."
Yes! says Plato (for a moment we may anticipate what is at least the
spirit of his answer) but there are some presuppositions after all,
which it will make us very vulgar to have dismissed from us. "There
are moreover," [109] those others proceed to say, "teachers of
persuasion (peithous didaskaloi)+ who impart skill in popular and
forensic oratory; and so by fair means or by unfair we shall gain our
ends." It is with the dêmos,+ with the vulgar, insubordinate, tag-rag
of one's own nature--how to rule that, by obeying it--that these
professors of rhetoric begin. They are still notwithstanding the only
teachers of morals ingenuous Greece is aware of; and wisdom, as seems
likely, "must die with them!"--
Some very small number then (says the Platonic Socrates) is
left, of those who in worthy fashion hold converse with
philosophy: either, it may be, some soul of in-born worth and
well brought up, to which it has happened to be exiled in a
foreign land, holding to philosophy by a tie of nature, and
through lack of those who will corrupt it; or when it may
chance that a great soul comes to birth in an insignificant
state, to the politics of which it gives no heed, because it
thinks them despicable: perhaps a certain fraction also, of
good parts, may come to philosophy from some other craft,
through a just contempt of that. The bridle too of our
companion Theages has a restraining power. For in the case
of Theages also, all the other conditions were in readiness
to his falling away from philosophy; but the nursing of his
sickly body, excluding him from politics, keeps him back. Our
own peculiarity is not worth speaking of--the sign from heaven!
for I suppose it has occurred to scarce anyone before. And so,
those who have been of this number, and have tasted how sweet
and blessed the possession is; and again, having a full view
of the folly of the many, and that no one, I might say, effects
any sound result in what concerns the state, or is an ally in
whose company one might proceed safe and sound to the help of
the just, but that, like a man falling among wild beasts,
neither willing to share their evil deeds, nor sufficient by
himself to resist the whole fierce band, flung away before he
shall have done any service [110] to the city or to his own
friends, he would become useless both to himself and to others:
taking all this into consideration, keeping silence and doing
his own business, as one standing aside under a hedge in some
storm of dust and spray beneath a driven wind, seeing those
about him replete with lawlessness, he is content if by any
means, pure from injustice and unholy deeds, himself shall
live through his life here, and in turn make his escape with
good hope, in cheerful and kindly mood. (What long sentences
Plato writes!) Yet in truth, he said, he would make his escape
after not the least of achievements.--Nor yet the greatest, I
observed, because he did not light upon the polity fitted for
him: for, in that fitting polity, himself will grow to
completer stature, and, together with what belongs to him, he
will be the saviour also of the commonwealth. Republic, 496.+
Over against the Sophists, and the age which has sophisticated them, of
which they are the natural product, Plato, being himself of a genius
naturally rich, florid, complex, excitable, but adding to the utmost
degree of Ionian sensibility an effectual desire towards the Dorian
order and askêsis, asserts everywhere the principle of outline, in
political and moral life; in the education which is to fit men for it;
in the music which is one half of that education, in the philosophy
which is its other half--the "philosophy of the ideas," of those
eternally fixed outlines of our thought, which correspond to, nay, are
actually identical with, the eternally fixed outlines of things
themselves. What the difference (difference in regard to continuity
and clearness) really is between the conditions of mind, in which
respectively the sophistic process, and the genuinely philosophical or
dialectic process, as [111] conceived by Plato, leave us, is well
illustrated by the peculiar treatment of Justice, its proper definition
or idea, in The Republic. Justice (or Righteousness, as we say, more
largely) under the light of a comprehensive experience of it,
carefully, diligently, adjusted to the nature of man on the one hand,
of society on the other, becomes in the fourth book of The Republic, to
ta hautou prattein+--to ta hautou prattein.+ There, then, is the eternal
outline of Righteousness or Justice as it really is, equally clear and
indefectible at every point; a definition of it which can by no
supposition become a definition of anything else; impenetrable, not to
be traversed, by any possible definition of Injustice; securing an
essential value to its possessor, independently of all falsities of
appearance; and leaving justice, as it really is in itself, unaffected
even by phenomena so misrepresentative of it as to deceive the very
gods, or many good men, as happened pre-eminently in the case of
Socrates.
[112] Here then is the reply of the Platonic Socrates to the challenge
that he should prove himself master of a more certain philosophy than
that of the people, as represented by the old gnomic poet Simonides,
"whom it is hard to disbelieve," (sophos gar kai theios anêr)+ on the
one hand; than that of the Sophists on the other, as represented by
Thrasymachus. "Show us not only that justice is a better thing than
Injustice; but, by doing what (alla ti poiousa)+ to the soul of its
possessor, each of them respectively, in and by itself (hautê di'
hautên)+ even if men and gods alike mistake it for its contrary, is
still the one a good thing, the other a bad one."
But note for a few moments the precise treatment of the idea of Justice
in the first book of The Republic. Sophistry and common sense are
trying their best to apprehend, to cover or occupy, a certain space, as
the exact area of Justice. And what happens with each proposed
definition in turn is, that it becomes, under conceivable
circumstances, a definition of Injustice: not that, in practice, a
confusion between the two is therefore likely; but that the intellect
remains unsatisfied of the theoretic validity of the distinction.
Now that intellectual situation illustrates the sense in which
sophistry is a reproduction of the Heraclitean flux. The old
Heraclitean physical theory presents itself as a natural basis for the
moral, the social, dissolution, which the sophistical [113] movement
promotes. But what a contrast to it, in the treatment of Justice, of
the question, What Justice is? in that introductory book of The
Republic. The first book forms in truth an eristic, a destructive or
negative, Dialogue (such as we have other examples of) in which the
whole business might have concluded, prematurely, with an exposure of
the inadequacy, alike of common-sense as represented by Simonides, and
of a sophisticated philosophy as represented by Thrasymachus, to define
Justice. Note, however, in what way, precisely. That it is Just, for
instance, to restore what one owes (to ta opheilomena apodidonai)+ might
pass well enough for a general guide to right conduct; and the
sophistical judgment that Justice is "The interest of the stronger" is
not more untrue than the contrary paradox that "Justice is a plot of
the weak against the strong."
It is, then, in regard to the claims of Justice, not so much on
practice, as on the intellect, in its demand for a clear theory of
practice, that those definitions fail. They are failures because they
fail to distinguish absolutely, ideally, as towards the intellect, what
is, from what is not. To Plato, for whom, constitutionally, and ex
hypothesi, what can be clearly thought is the precise measure of what
really is, if such a thought about Justice--absolutely inclusive and
exclusive--is, after all our efforts, not to be ascertained, this can
only be, because Justice is not [114] a real thing, but only an empty
or confused name.
Now the Sophist and the popular moralist, in that preliminary attempt
to define the nature of Justice--what is right, are both alike trying,
first in this formula, then in that, to occupy, by a thought, and by a
definition which may convey that thought into the mind of another--to
occupy, or cover, a certain area of the phenomena of experience, as the
Just. And what happens thereupon is this, that by means of a certain
kind of casuistry, by the allegation of certain possible cases of
conduct, the whole of that supposed area of the Just is occupied by
definitions of Injustice, from this centre or that. Justice therefore-
-its area, the space of experience which it covers, dissolves away,
literally, as the eye is fixed upon it, like Heraclitean water: it is
and is not. And if this, and the like of this, is to the last all that
can be known or said of it, Justice will be no current coin, at least
to the acute philosophic mind. But has some larger philosophy perhaps
something more to say of it? and the power of defining an area, upon
which no definition of Injustice, in any conceivable case of act or
feeling, can infringe? That is the question upon which the essential
argument of The Republic starts--upon a voyage of discovery. It is
Plato's own figure.
There, clearly enough, may be seen what the difference, the difference
of aim, between Socrates [115] and the Sophists really was, amid much
that they had in common, as being both alike distinguished from that
older world of opinion of which Simonides is the mouthpiece.
The quarrel of Socrates with the Sophists was in part one of those
antagonisms which are involved necessarily in the very conditions of an
age that has not yet made up its mind; was in part also a mere rivalry
of individuals; and it might have remained in memory only as a matter
of historical interest. It has been otherwise. That innocent word
"Sophist" has survived in common language, to indicate some constantly
recurring viciousness, in the treatment of one's own and of other
minds, which is always at variance with such habits of thought as are
really worth while. There is an every-day "sophistry," of course,
against which we have all of us to be on our guard--that insincerity of
reasoning on behalf of sincere convictions, true or false in themselves
as the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all
with each other, we must all be tempted at times. Such insincerity
however is for the most part apt to expose itself. But there is a more
insidious sophistry of which Plato is aware; and against which he
contends in the Protagoras, and again still more effectively in the
Phaedrus; the closing pages of which discover the essential point of
that famous quarrel between the Sophists and Socrates or Plato, in
regard to a matter which is [116] of permanent interest in itself, and
as being not directly connected with practical morals is unaffected by
the peculiar prejudices of that age. Art, the art of oratory, in
particular, and of literary composition,--in this case, how one should
write or speak really inflammatory discourses about love, write love-
letters, so to speak, that shall really get at the heart they're meant
for--that was a matter on which the Sophists had thought much
professionally. And the debate introduced in the Phaedrus regarding
the secret of success in proposals of love or friendship turns properly
on this: whether it is necessary, or even advantageous, for one who
would be a good orator, or writer, a poet, a good artist generally, to
know, and consciously to keep himself in contact with, the truth of his
subject as he knows or feels it; or only with what other people,
perhaps quite indolently, think, or suppose others to think, about it.
And here the charge of Socrates against those professional teachers of
the art of rhetoric comes to be, that, with much superficial aptitude
in the conduct of the matter, they neither reach, nor put others in the
way of reaching, that intellectual ground of things (of the
consciousness of love for instance, when they are to open their lips,
and presumably their souls, about that) in true contact with which
alone can there be a real mastery in dealing with them. That you
yourself must have an inward, carefully ascertained, measured,
instituted hold [117] over anything you are to convey with any real
power to others, is the truth which the Platonic Socrates, in strongly
convinced words, always reasonable about it, formulates, in opposition
to the Sophists' impudently avowed theory and practice of the
superficial, as such. Well! we all always need to be set on our guard
against theories which flatter the natural indolence of our minds.
"We proposed then just now," says Socrates in the Phaedrus, "to
consider the theory of the way in which one would or would not write or
speak well."--"Certainly!"--"Well then, must there not be in those who
are to speak meritoriously, an understanding well acquainted with the
truth of the things they are to speak about?"--"Nay!" answers Phaedrus,
in that age of sophistry, "It is in this way I have heard about it:--
that it is not necessary for one who would be a master of rhetoric to
learn what really is just, for instance; but rather what seems just to
the multitude who are to give judgment: nor again what is good or
beautiful; but only what seems so to them. For persuasion comes of the
latter; by no means of a hold upon the truth of things."
Whether or not the Sophists were quite fairly chargeable with that sort
of "inward lie," just this, at all events, was in the judgment of Plato
the essence of sophistic vice. With them [118] art began too
precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected
empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people's
productions, in congruity with a general method which everywhere
ruthlessly severed branch and flower from its natural root--art from
one's own vivid sensation or belief. The Lacedaemonian (ho Lakôn)+
Plato's favourite scholar always, as having that infinite patience
which is the note of a sincere, a really impassioned lover of anything,
says, in his convinced Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech
(tou legein etumos technê)+ unless one be in contact with truth, there
neither is nor can be. We are reminded of that difference between
genuine memory, and mere haphazard recollection, noted by Plato in the
story he tells so well of the invention of writing in ancient Egypt.--
It might be doubted, he thinks, whether genuine memory was encouraged
by that invention. The note on the margin by the inattentive reader to
"remind himself," is, as we know, often his final good-bye to what it
should remind him of. Now this is true of all art: Logôn ara technên,
ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs, doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai
atexnon parexetai.+ --It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words
(texnê atexnos)+ that he will have who does not know the truth of
things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it.
"Conception," observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and
artist of our own generation: [119] "Conception, fundamental brainwork,-
-that is what makes the difference, in all art."
Against all pretended, mechanically communicable rules of art then,
against any rule of literary composition, for instance, unsanctioned by
the facts, by a clear apprehension of the facts, of that experience,
which to each one of us severally is the beginning, if it be not also
the end, of all knowledge, against every merely formal dictate (their
name is legion with practising Sophists of all ages) Peri brachylogias,
kai eleeinologias, kai deinôseôs,+ concerning freedom or precision,
figure, emphasis, proportion of parts and the like, exordium and
conclusion:--against all such the Platonic Socrates still protests,
"You know what must be known before harmony can be attained, but not
yet the laws of harmony itself,"--ta pro tragôdias,+ Sophocles would
object in like case, ta pro tragôdias, all' ou tragika.+ Given the
dynamic Sophoclean intention or conviction, and the irresistible law of
right utterance, (anankê logographikê)+ how one must write or speak,
will make itself felt; will assuredly also renew many an old precept,
as to how one shall write or speak, learned at school. To speak pros
doxan+ only, as towards mere unreasoned opinion, might do well enough in
the law-courts with people, who (as is understood in that case) do not
really care very much about justice itself, desire only that a friend
should be acquitted, or an enemy convicted, irrespectively of it; but
[120]
For the essence of all artistic beauty is expression, which cannot be
where there's really nothing to be expressed; the line, the colour, the
word, following obediently, and with minute scruple, the conscious
motions of a convinced intelligible soul. To make men interested in
themselves, as being the very ground of all reality for them, la vraie
vérité, as the French say:--that was the essential function of the
Socratic method: to flash light into the house within, its many
chambers, its memories and associations, upon its inscribed and
pictured walls. Fully occupied there, as with his own essential
business in his own home, the young man would become, of course,
proportionately less interested, less meanly interested, in what was
superficial, in the mere outsides, of other people and their
occupations. With the true artist indeed, with almost every expert,
all knowledge, of almost every kind, tells, is attracted into, and duly
charged with, the force of what [121] may be his leading apprehension.
And as the special function of all speech as a fine art is the control
of minds (psychagôgia)+ it is in general with knowledge of the soul of
man--with a veritable psychology, with as much as possible as we can
get of that--that the writer, the speaker, must be chiefly concerned,
if he is to handle minds not by mere empiric routine, tribê monon, kai
empeiria alla technê,+ but by the power of veritable fine art. Now such
art, such theory, is not "to be caught with the left hand," as the
Greek phrase went; and again, chalepa ta kala.+ We have no time to hear
in English Plato's clever specimens of the way in which people would
write about love without success. Let us rather hear himself on that
subject, in his own characteristic mood of conviction.--
Try! she said (a certain Sibylline woman namely, from whose
lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what follows)
Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what I am going
to say. For he who has been led thus far in the discipline of
love, beholding beautiful objects in the right order, coming now
towards the end of the doctrine of love, will on a sudden behold
a beauty wonderful in its nature:--that, Socrates! towards which
indeed the former exercises were all designed; being first of all
ever existent; having neither beginning nor end; neither growing
or fading away; and then, not beautiful in one way, unbeautiful
in another; beautiful now, but not then; beautiful in this
relation, unlovely in that; to some, but not to others. Nor
again will that beauty appear to him to be beautiful as a face or
hands or anything else that belongs to the body; nor as any
kind of reasoning or science; nor as being resident in anything
else, as in a living creature or the earth or the sky or any
other [122] thing; but as being itself by itself, ever in a
single form with itself; all other beautiful things so
participating in it, that while they begin and cease to be, that
neither becomes more nor less nor suffers any other change.
Whenever, then, anyone, beginning from things here below, through
a right practice of love, ascending, begins to discern that other
beauty, he will almost have reached the end. For this in truth
is the right method of proceeding towards the doctrine of love,
or of being conducted therein by another,--beginning from these
beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with
that other beauty in view; using them as steps of a ladder;
mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two;
and from the love of two to the love of all; and from the love
of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employments--kala
epitêdeumata+ (that means being a soldier, or a priest, or a
scholar) and from the love of beautiful employments to the love
of beautiful kinds of knowledge; till he passes from degrees of
knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing
else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as
in itself it really is. At this moment of life, dear Socrates!
said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man truly lives,
beholding the absolute beauty--the which, so you have once seen
it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, or raiment, or
those beautiful young persons, seeing whom now, like many another,
you are so overcome that you are ready, beholding those beautiful
persons and associating ever with them, if it were possible,
neither to eat nor drink but only to look into their eyes and
sit beside them. What then, she asked, suppose we? if it were
given to any one to behold the absolute beauty, in its clearness,
its pureness, its unmixed essence; not replete with flesh and
blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life;
but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (monoeides)+
simply as it is. Do you think, she said, that life would be a
poor thing to one whose eyes were fixed on that; seeing that,
(hô dei)+ with the organ through which it must be seen, and
communing with that? Do you not think rather, she asked, that
here alone it will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through
which it may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, ho
nous+) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom
he [123] apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is
true? And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will
be born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium,
of the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he
will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal he will
be. Symposium, 210.+
The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato conceived it, was that for it
no real things existed. Real things did exist for Plato, things that
were "an end in themselves"; and the Platonic Socrates was right:--
Plato has written so well there, because he was no scholar of the
Sophists as he understood them, but is writing of what he really knows.
NOTES
99. +Transliteration: sophistai. Liddell and Scott definition: "at
Athens, one who professed to make men wise."
102. +Transliteration: pleista eidê. Pater's translation: "the greatest
possible variety." Pater refers to the Funeral Oration given by
Pericles to commemorate the Athenians who, to date, had died in the
Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.41.1.
107. +Plato, Republic 492.
109. +Transliteration: peithous didaskaloi. Pater's translation:
"teachers of persuasion." Plato, Republic 365d.
109. +Transliteration: dêmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "the common
people."
110. +Plato, Republic 496.
111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The
doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." The
translation elaborates on the original, but captures its meaning
accurately. Plato, Republic 433a-b.
111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The
doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." Plato,
Republic 433a-b.
112. +Transliteration: sophos gar kai theios anêr. E-text editor's
translation: "for he was a wise and excellent man." Plato, Republic
331e.
112. +Transliteration: alla ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "but, by
doing what. . ." Plato, Republic 367b.
112. +Transliteration: hautê di' hautên. Pater's translation: "in and
by itself." Plato, Republic 367e.
113. +Transliteration: to ta opheilomena apodidonai. Pater's
translation: "to restore what one owes." Plato, Republic 331e and
332a.
118. +Transliteration: ho Lakôn. Liddell and Scott definition: "The
Lacedaemonian [i.e., Spartan]."
118. +Transliteration: tou legein etumos technê. Pater's translation:
"a genuine art of speech." Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
118. +Transliteration: Logôn ara technên, ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs,
doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai. E-text
editor's translation: "In the art of speaking, therefore, the person
who does not know the truth, who has sought out only the opinions of
others, will come by nothing better than a kind of unskilled jesting."
Plato, Phaedrus 262c.
118. +Transliteration: texnê atexnos. Pater's translation: "[a]
bastard art of mere words." Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
119. +Transliteration: Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai
deinôseôs. E-text editor's translation: "Concerning brevity, and
speech that moves to pity, and exaggeration. . ." Plato, Phaedrus
272a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias. E-text editor's translation:
"the things before tragedy." Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias, all' ou tragika. E-text
editor's translation: "the things before tragedy, but not tragedy
itself." Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: anankê logographikê. E-text editor's
translation: "[the manner] required [in] prose-writing or speech-
making." Plato, Phaedrus 264b contains similar language.
119. +Transliteration: pros doxan. E-text editor's translation: "in
accordance with received opinion." Plato, Republic 362a, among other
passages.
121. +Transliteration: psychagôgia. Pater's translation: "the control
of minds." The verb agô means "lead or drive." Plato, Phaedrus 261a
and 271c.
121. +Transliteration: tribê monon, kai empeiria alla technê. Pater's
translation: "[not] by mere empiric routine, but by the power of
veritable fine art." Plato, Phaedrus 270b.
121. +Transliteration: chalepa ta kala. E-text editor's translation:
"fine things are hard [to obtain]." Plato, Republic 435c.
122. +Transliteration: kala epitêdeumata. Pater's translation:
"beautiful employments." Plato, Symposium 211c.
122. +Transliteration: monoeides. E-text editor's translation: "of one
kind, simple." Plato, Symposium 211a and 211e.
122. +Transliteration: hô dei. E-text editor's translation: "with what
is necessary." Plato, Symposium 212a.
122. +Transliteration: ho nous. Pater's translation: "imaginative
reason." The word nous or noos generally means "mind." Plato,
Symposium 210-212.
123. +The passage Pater cites--Diotima's speech about love--runs from
210-212a of the Symposium.
CHAPTER 6: THE GENIUS OF PLATO
[124] ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other
product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the
conditions, antecedent and contemporary, which helped to make it
precisely what it was. But a complete criticism does not end there.
In the evolution of abstract doctrine as we find it written in the
history of philosophy, if there is always, on one side, the fatal,
irresistible, mechanic play of circumstance--the circumstances of a
particular age, which may be analysed and explained; there is always
also, as if acting from the opposite side, the comparatively
inexplicable force of a personality, resistant to, while it is moulded
by, them. It might even be said that the trial-task of criticism, in
regard to literature and art no less than to philosophy, begins exactly
where the estimate of general conditions, of the conditions common to
all the products of this or that particular age--of the "environment"--
leaves off, and we touch what is unique in the individual genius [125]
which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful
way with that environment. If in reading Plato, for instance, the
philosophic student has to re-construct for himself, as far as
possible, the general character of an age, he must also, so far as he
may, reproduce the portrait of a person. The Sophists, the Sophistical
world, around him; his master, Socrates; the Pre-Socratic philosophies;
the mechanic influence, that is to say, of past and present:--of course
we can know nothing at all of the Platonic doctrine except so far as we
see it in well-ascertained contact with all that; but there is also
Plato himself in it.
--A personality, we may notice at the outset, of a certain
complication. The great masters of philosophy have been for the most
part its noticeably single-minded servants. As if in emulation of
Aristotle's simplicity of character, his absorbing intellectualism--
impressive certainly, heroic enough, in its way--they have served
science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination,
love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour. It is
not merely that we know little of their lives (there was so little to
tell!) but that we know nothing at all of their temperaments; of which,
that one leading abstract or scientific force in them was in fact
strictly exclusive. Little more than intellectual abstractions
themselves, in them [126] philosophy was wholly faithful to its
colours, or its colourlessness; rendering not grey only, as Hegel said
of it, but all colours alike, in grey.
With Plato it was otherwise. In him, the passion for truth did but
bend, or take the bent of, certain ineradicable predispositions of his
nature, in themselves perhaps somewhat opposed to that. It is however
in the blending of diverse elements in the mental constitution of Plato
that the peculiar Platonic quality resides. Platonism is in one sense
an emphatic witness to the unseen, the transcendental, the non-
experienced, the beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily eye.
Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was,--Who can doubt it
who has read but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led and kept
to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions
Plato actually discusses:--The author of this philosophy of the unseen
was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, "the
visible world really existed." Austere as he seems, and on well-
considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity,
aesthetically so winning, is attain
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