Part 8 (1/2)
He belonged to what was just then the discontented cla.s.s, and might well have taken refuge from active political life in political ideals, or in a kind of self-imposed exile. A traveller, adventurous for that age, he certainly became. After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre!--all round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily. Think of what all that must have meant just then, for eyes which could see. If those journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for purposes of self-improvement they were continued: the delightful fruit of them is evident in what he writes; and finding him [148] in friendly intercourse with Dionysius the elder, with Dio, and Dionysius the younger, at the polished court of Syracuse, we may understand that they were a search also for ”the philosophic king,” perhaps for the opportune moment of realising ”the ideal state.” In that case, his quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed.
For the future he sought no more to pa.s.s beyond the charmed theoretic circle, ”speaking wisdom,” as was said of Pythagoras, only ”among the perfect.” He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet precincts of the Academus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state, nor even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the authentic text of his Dialogues upon the shelves: we may just discern the sort of place through the scantiest notices. His reign was after all to be in his writings. Plato himself does nothing in them to r.e.t.a.r.d the effacement which mere time brings to persons and their abodes; and there had been that, moreover, in his own temper, which promotes self-effacement. Yet as he left it, the place remained for centuries, according to his will, to its original use. What he taught through the remaining forty years of his life, the method of that teaching, whether it [149] was less or more esoteric than the teaching of the extant Dialogues, is but matter of surmise. Writers, who in their day might still have said much we should have liked to hear, give us little but old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as if they had been new ones, about him. The year of his birth fell, according to some, in the very year of the death of Pericles (a significant date!) but is not precisely ascertainable: nor is the year of his death, nor its manner.
Scribens est mortuus, says Cicero:--after the manner of a true scholar, ”he died pen in hand.”
NOTES
127-28. +Transliteration: Synesometha pollois ton neon autothi. Pater's translation: ”We shall meet a number of our youth there.” Plato, Republic 328a.
133. +Transliteration: Kai hos eipen erythriasas, ede gar hypephaine ti emeras oste kataphane auton genesthai. E-text editor's translation: ”And he blushed as he spoke, for presently the day began to break, so as to make him visible.” Plato, Protagoras 312a.
134. +Transliteration: Ta erotika. Pater's translation: ”the discipline of sensuous love;” more literally, the phrase means ”things pertaining to love.” Plato, Symposium 177d.
136. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: ”the discipline of sensuous love;” more literally, the phrase means ”things pertaining to love.” Plato, Symposium 177d.
136. +Transliteration: hetton ton kalon. Pater's translation: ”subject to the influence of fair persons;” more literally, ”yielding to beauty.” Plato, Meno 76c.
140. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: ”the discipline of sensuous love;” more literally, the phrase means ”things pertaining to love.” Plato, Symposium 177d.
140. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: ”a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection.”
Plato, Republic 486a.
146. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: ”a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection.”
Plato, Republic 486a.
CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
I. THE THEORY OF IDEAS
[150] PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies--a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the ”theory of ideas,” itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] from his old Eleatic teachers, which reduce ”the Many to the One.”
What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and species, cla.s.s-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their relations.h.i.+p to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic.
Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pa.s.s out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains it:-- that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question; and Plato is the father of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory; but rises, again and again, at least in a particular cla.s.s of minds, quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist:--See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here (giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common [152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our individual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to a.s.sist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, ”an intellectual world,” as Plato calls it, a true noetos topos +. So much for the modern view; for what common sense might now suggest as to the nature of logical ”universals.”
Plato's realism however--what is called ”The Theory of Ideas”--his way of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say about ”the Many and the One,” is often very difficult; though of various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds.
From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in ”universal definitions,” or ideas, only a serviceable instrument for the distinguis.h.i.+ng of what is essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him, Plato pa.s.ses by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct as we read him, to what may be rightly called a ”transcendental,” what to many minds has [153] seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, h.o.m.oion h.o.m.oio +, like to like--these persons const.i.tuting together that common, eternal, intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really knows, is in communion or correspondence. And here certainly is a theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the difficulties are many.
Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers, which from age to age preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness for some in the days of Plato.--
Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is, that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely, embodied in one general term) which--hypo logon +--under the influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language, become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to everything of which existence is a.s.serted from time to time.
This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun; but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us. And whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy; he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in motion-- kinei + --every definition [154] --logos+--every conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari- ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter.
Philebus, 15.+
The Platonic doctrine of ”the Many and the One”--the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato--is not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about ”the Many and the One.”
Plato's peculiar view of the matter, then, pa.s.ses with him into a phase of poetic thought; as indeed all that Plato's genius touched came in contact with poetry. Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such; to notions, we might think, carefully deprived of all the incident, the colour and variety, which fits things--this or that--to the const.i.tution and natural habit of our minds, fits them for attachment to what we really are. We cannot love or live upon genus and species, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses. Take a seed from the garden. What interest it has for us all lies in our sense of potential differentiation to come: the leaves, leaf upon leaf, the flowers, a thousand new seeds in turn. It is so with animal seed; and with humanity, individually, or as a whole, its expansion into a detailed, ever-changing, parti-coloured history of particular facts and persons.
Abstraction, the introduction of general ideas, seems to close it up again; to reduce flower and fruit, odour and savour, back again into the dry and worthless seed. We might as well be colour-blind at once, and there [156] is not a proper name left! We may contrast generally the mental world we actually live in, where cla.s.sification, the reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a cla.s.s, with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement to which Plato and his master so largely contributed--a world we might describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a continuous surprise, and every object unique, where all knowledge was still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully.
To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal cla.s.ses, under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms--a botanic or ”physic” garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it must be confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is more interesting than ever; the nineteenth century as compared with the first, with Plato's days or Homer's; the faces, the persons behind those masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or whatever it may happen to be they carry or [157] touch. The concrete, and that even as a visible thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and compa.s.s, in fineness, and interest towards us, by the process, of which those acts of generalisation, of reduction to cla.s.s and generic type, have certainly been a part. And holding still to the concrete, the particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first, thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as doing, just for that--for the particular gem or flower--what its proper service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive knowledge such as that.
Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental att.i.tude, between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the layman (so to call him) in picking up a sh.e.l.l on the sea-sh.o.r.e; what it is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really does for the furnis.h.i.+ng of the mind of the former. The layman, though we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain impressions, is in fact still but a child; and the sh.e.l.l, its colours and convolution, no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him. Let him become a schoolboy about it, so to speak. The toy he puts aside; his mind is [158] drilled perforce, to learn about it; and thereby is exercised, he may think, with everything except just the thing itself, as he cares for it; with other sh.e.l.ls, with some general laws of life, and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the ”vanity” of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete, the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract product of the mind. But when he comes out of school, and on the sea- sh.o.r.e again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it, he may see what the service of that converse with the general has really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees--in regard to the particular thing he actually sees. By its juxtaposition and co- ordination with what is ever more and more not it, by the contrast of its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper and perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circ.u.mjacent world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-hand now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all that, which only a long experience, moving patiently from part to part, could exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one's hand.
So it is with the sh.e.l.l, the gem, with a glance of the eye; so it may be with the moral act, [159] with a condition of the mind, or a feeling. You may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes's figure) this coinage of representative words and thoughts, at your pleasure, upon the acc.u.mulative capital of the whole experience of humanity.