Part 10 (1/2)
Misuse, again, is of course possible in a method which admits of no objective sanction or standard; the success of which depends on a loyalty to one's self, in the prosecution of it, of which no one else can be cognisant. And if we can misuse it with ourselves, how much more certainly can the expert abuse it with another. At every turn of the conversation, a door lies open to sophistry. Sophistry, logomachy, eristic: we may learn what these are, sometimes, from Plato's own practice. That justice is only useful as applied to things useless; that the just man is a kind of thief; and the like; is hardly so much as sophistry. And this too was possible in a method, which, with all its large outlook, has something of the irregularity, the accident, the heats and confusion, of life itself--a method of reasoning which can only in a certain measure be reasoned upon. How different the exactness which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to secure, in scientific procedure! For him, dialectic, Platonic dialectic, is, at best, a part of ”eristic” [192] --of the art, or trick, of merely popular and approximate debate, in matters where science is out of the question, and rhetoric has its office, not in providing for the intelligence, but in moulding the sentiments and the will. Conversely to that absoluteness and necessity which Plato himself supposes in all real knowledge, as ”the spectacle of all time and all existence,” it might seem that the only sort of truth attainable by his actual method, must be the truth of a particular time and place, for one and not for another. Dialogos peirastikos,+ ”a Dialogue of search”:--every one of Plato's Dialogues is in essence such like that whole, life-long, endless dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope, does but formulate, and in which truly the last, the infallible word, after all, never gets spoken. Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing less than the vision of what we seek. But can we ever be quite sure that we are really come to that? By what sign or test?
Now oppose all this, all these peculiarities of the Platonic method, as we find it, to the exact and formal method of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of Spinoza, or Hegel; and then suppose one trained exclusively on Plato's dialogues. Is it the eternal certainty, after all, the immutable and absolute character of truth, as Plato conceived it, that he would be likely to apprehend? We have here another of those contrasts of tendency, const.i.tutional [193] in the genius of Plato, and which may add to our interest in him. Plato is to be explained, as we say, or interpreted, partly through his predecessors, and his contemporaries; but in part also by his followers, by the light his later mental kinsmen throw back on the conscious or unconscious drift of his teaching. Now there are in the history of philosophy two opposite Platonic traditions; two legitimate yet divergent streams of influence from him. Two very different yet equally representative scholars we may see in thought emerging from his school. The ”theory of the Ideas,” the high ideal, the uncompromising demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name; the immediate or intuitive character of the highest acts of knowledge; that all true theory is indeed ”vision”:--for the maintenance of that side of the Platonic position we must look onward to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen of all ages, to Spinoza, to Hegel; to those mystic aspirants to ”vision” also, the so-called Neo-Platonists of all ages, from Proclus to Sch.e.l.ling. From the abstract, metaphysical systems of those, the ecstasy and illuminism of these, we may mount up to the actual words of Plato in the Symposium, the fifth book of The Republic, the Phaedrus.
But it is in quite different company we must look for the tradition, the development, of Plato's actual method of learning and teaching.
The Academy of Plato, the established seat of his [194] philosophy, gave name to a school, of which Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero, are the proper representatives,--Cicero, the perfect embodiment of what is still sometimes understood to be the ”academic spirit,” surveying all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, balancing, tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment. If Platonism from age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of ”being,” or the nearest attainable approach to or subst.i.tution for that; for others, Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne--that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance--conversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical rea.s.sertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a constant acc.u.mulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by empirical science, has had a.s.suredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.--”Their name is legion,” says a modern writer. Reverent [195] and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable--they have been called, indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Q'ue scais-je? it cries, in the words of Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.
Sanguine about any form of absolute knowledge, of eternal, or indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is, we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the reading of the Platonic Dialogues. But if we are little likely to realise in his school, the promise of ”ontological” science, of a ”doctrine of Being,” or any increase in our consciousness of metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking and suspended judgment, if we are not likely to enjoy the vision of his ”eternal and immutable ideas,” Plato may yet promote in us what we call ”ideals”-- the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect Beauty, physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs, than any one has ever yet seen; that kosmos,+ in which things are only as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they stand, the two [196] great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of ”ideas,” ”the great perhaps,” for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may a.s.sume to be objective or real:--and then, over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem) of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate att.i.tude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question--the ”philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.
NOTES
174. +Transliteration: Peri Physeos. Pater's translation: ”Concerning Nature.”
174. Sic. This form, ”situate,” may be Pater's archaism for situated, or it may simply be a typographic error in the original published edition.
175. *Essay--”A loose sally of the mind,” says Johnson's Dictionary.
Bailey's earlier Dictionary gives another suggestive use of the word ”among miners”--A little trench or hole, which they dig to search for ore.
178. +Transliteration: methodos. Liddell and Scott definition: ”method.” Plato, Republic 531c.
179. *Skepsasthai kai syzetesai hoti pote estin; kai, tach' an, par'
allela skopountes, kai tribontes, hosper ek pureion, eklampsai poiesaimen ten dikaiosynen. Pater's translation: ”to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks.” Plato, Meno 80d for the first line and, for the remainder, Republic 435a.
181. +Transliteration: hodos, kinesis, methodos. Liddell and Scott definitions: ”path, motion, method.”
181. +Transliteration: Alla metathometha. E-text editor's translation: ”But let us follow out [a different path of thought],” or ”let's examine this from a different perspective.” For example, Plato, Republic 334e.
182. +Transliteration: noetos topos. Pater's translation: ”reasonable world.” Plato, Republic 508b.
184. +Transliteration: h.o.m.oion h.o.m.oio. Pater's translation: ”like to like.” Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see, for example, Parmenides 132d.
185. +Transliteration: hope an ho logos, hosper pneuma, phere, taute iteon. Pater's translation: ”we must just go where the argument carries us, as a vessel runs before the wind.” Plato, Republic 394d.
187. +Transliteration: episteme. Liddell and Scott definition ”1.
knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific knowledge.”
189. +Transliteration: Kindyneuei. Pater's translation: ”it may chance to be.”
190. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: ”a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection.” Pater defines it in Platonic terms as ”immediate intuition.” For example, Plato, Republic 486a.
190. +Transliteration: apokamnon. Liddell and Scott definition: ”grow[ing] quite weary.” See, for example, Plato, Protagoras 333b.
191. +Transliteration: megaloprepos. Liddell and Scott definition / E- text editor's translation: ”liberally.” The exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates to which Pater refers begins at Republic 345b.
192. +Transliteration: Dialogos peirastikos. Pater's translation: ”a Dialogue of search.”
195. +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 fas.h.i.+on of a thing; II. an ornament. . .; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement.”
CHAPTER 8: LACEDAEMON
[197] AMONG the Greeks, philosophy has flourished longest, and is still most abundant, at Crete and Lacedaemon; and there there are more teachers of philosophy than anywhere else in the world. But the Lacedaemonians deny this, and pretend to be unlearned people, lest it should become manifest that it is through philosophy they are supreme in Greece; that they may be thought to owe their supremacy to their fighting and manly spirit, for they think that if the means of their superiority were made known all the Greeks would practise this. But now, by keeping it a secret, they have succeeded in misleading the Laconisers in the various cities of Greece; and in imitation of them these people buffet themselves, and practise gymnastics, and put on boxing-gloves, and wear short cloaks, as if it were by such things that the Lacedaemonians excel all other Greeks. But the Lacedaemonians, when they wish to have intercourse with their philosophers without reserve, and are weary of going to them by stealth, make legal proclamation that those Laconisers should depart, with any other aliens who may be sojourning among them, and thereupon betake themselves to their sophists un.o.bserved by strangers. And you may know that what I say is true, and that the Lacedaemonians are better instructed than all other people in philosophy and the art of discussion in this way. If any one will converse with even the most insignificant of the Lacedaemonians, he may find him indeed in the greater part of what he says seemingly but a poor creature; but then at some chance point in the conversation he will throw in some brief compact saying, worthy of remark, like a clever archer, so that his interlocutor shall seem no better than a child. Of [198] this fact some both of those now living and of the ancients have been aware, and that to Laconise consists in the study of philosophy far rather than in the pursuit of gymnastic, for they saw that to utter such sayings as those was only possible for a perfectly educated man. Of these was Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias the Prienean, and our own Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian, and Myson of Chen, and the seventh among them was called Chilon, a Lacedaemonian. These were all zealous lovers and disciples of the culture of the Lacedaemonians. And any one may understand that their philosophy was something of this kind, short rememberable sayings uttered by each of them. They met together and offered these in common, as the first fruits of philosophy, to Apollo in his temple at Delphi, and they wrote upon the walls these sayings known and read of all men: Gnothi sauton and Meden agan. Protagoras, 343.+