Part 6 (2/2)
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, const.i.tutionally, 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 s.p.a.ce of experience which it covers, dissolves away, literally, as the eye is fixed upon it, like Herac.l.i.tean 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 apt.i.tude 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, inst.i.tuted 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 mult.i.tude 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 Lakon)+ Plato's favourite scholar always, as having that infinite patience which is the note of a sincere, a really impa.s.sioned lover of anything, says, in his convinced Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech (tou legein etumos techne)+ 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: Logon ara technen, ho ten aletheian me eidos, doxas te tethereukos, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai.+ --It is but a kind of b.a.s.t.a.r.d art of mere words (texne 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 deinoseos,+ 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 traG.o.dias,+ Sophocles would object in like case, ta pro traG.o.dias, all' ou tragika.+ Given the dynamic Sophoclean intention or conviction, and the irresistible law of right utterance, (ananke logographike)+ how one must write or speak, will make itself felt; will a.s.suredly 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 verite, 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 a.s.sociations, 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 (psychagogia)+ 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, tribe monon, kai empeiria alla techne,+ 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 epitedeumata+ (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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sociating 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, (ho 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 G.o.d, 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 eide. 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: demos. 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 aner. 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: haute di' hauten. Pater's translation: ”in and by itself.” Plato, Republic 367e.
<script>