Part 7 (1/2)
113. +Transliteration: to ta opheilomena apodidonai. Pater's translation: ”to restore what one owes.” Plato, Republic 331e and 332a.
118. +Transliteration: ho Lakon. Liddell and Scott definition: ”The Lacedaemonian [i.e., Spartan].”
118. +Transliteration: tou legein etumos techne. Pater's translation: ”a genuine art of speech.” Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
118. +Transliteration: Logon ara technen, ho ten aletheian me eidos, doxas te tethereukos, 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: texne atexnos. Pater's translation: ”[a]
b.a.s.t.a.r.d art of mere words.” Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
119. +Transliteration: Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai deinoseos. E-text editor's translation: ”Concerning brevity, and speech that moves to pity, and exaggeration. . .” Plato, Phaedrus 272a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro traG.o.dias. E-text editor's translation: ”the things before tragedy.” Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro traG.o.dias, all' ou tragika. E-text editor's translation: ”the things before tragedy, but not tragedy itself.” Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: ananke logographike. 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 pa.s.sages.
121. +Transliteration: psychagogia. Pater's translation: ”the control of minds.” The verb ago means ”lead or drive.” Plato, Phaedrus 261a and 271c.
121. +Transliteration: tribe monon, kai empeiria alla techne. 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 epitedeumata. 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: ho 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstance--the circ.u.mstances of a particular age, which may be a.n.a.lysed 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 pa.s.sion 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 const.i.tution 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 attained only by the chastis.e.m.e.nt, the control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature. Yes, the visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed for him: exists still--there's the point!--is active still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to invisible things.
[127] To the somewhat sad-coloured school of Socrates, and its discipline towards apathy or contempt in such matters, he had brought capacities of bodily sense with the making in them of an Odyssey; or (shall we say?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus; as indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own powers, a skill in philosophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might have const.i.tuted him the most successful of Sophists. You cannot help seeing that his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests eye or ear at all, is too trivial to note. Pa.s.sing through the crowd of human beings, he notes the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of their pettiest handicraft. A conventional philosopher might speak of ”dumb matter,”
for instance; but Plato has lingered too long in braziers' workshops to lapse into so stupid an epithet. And if the persistent hold of sensible things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest no less in the way in which he can tell a long story,--no one more effectively! and again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes from actual life, like that with which The Republic opens. His Socrates, like other people, is curious to witness a new religious function: how they will do it. As in modern times, it would be a pleasant occasion also for meeting the acquaintance one likes best-- Synesometha pollois [128] ton neon autothi.+ ”We shall meet a number of our youth there: we shall have a dialogue: there will be a torchlight procession in honour of the G.o.ddess, an equestrian procession: a novel feature!--What?