Part 6 (1/2)
95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin. Pater's translation: ”is something st.u.r.dy and strong.” Plato, Phaedo 95c.
98. +Transliteration: Narthekophoroi 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 cla.s.s of persons through whom, in the most effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand for education, a.s.serted 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, una.s.sisted 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 inst.i.tution 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 compet.i.tive 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 eide)+ 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 a.s.sertion 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 Herac.l.i.tus, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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, fas.h.i.+onable, 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 a.s.semblies, 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 Herac.l.i.tus. And now it was as if the disintegrating Herac.l.i.tean 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 s.h.i.+fty, as things themselves: will bring you, like some perfectly accomplished implement, to this carriere ouverte, this open quarry, for the furtherance of your personal interests in the world.” And if old- fas.h.i.+oned 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 demos,+ 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 askesis, a.s.serts 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 G.o.ds, 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 aner)+ 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 (haute di'
hauten)+ even if men and G.o.ds 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 s.p.a.ce, as the exact area of Justice. And what happens with each proposed definition in turn is, that it becomes, under conceivable circ.u.mstances, 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 ill.u.s.trates the sense in which sophistry is a reproduction of the Herac.l.i.tean flux. The old Herac.l.i.tean 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 pa.s.s 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.”