Part 16 (1/2)
The _Theaetetus_ discusses more fully the theory of knowledge. It opens with a comparison of the Socratic method to midwifery; it delivers the mind of the thoughts with which it is in travail. The first tentative definition of knowledge is that it is sensation. This is in agreement with the Protagorean doctrine that man is the measure of all things. Yet sensation implies change, whereas we cannot help thinking that objects retain their ident.i.ty; if knowledge is sensation a pig has as good a claim to be called the measure of all things as a man. Again, Protagoras has no right to teach others if each man's sensations are a law unto him. Nor is the Heracleitean doctrine much better which taught that all things are in a state of flux. If nothing retains the same quality for two consecutive moments it is impossible to have predication, and knowledge must be hopeless. In fact, sensation is not man's function as a reasoning being, but rather comparison. Neither is knowledge true opinion, for this at once demands the demarcation of false opinion or error; the latter is negative, and will be understood only when positive knowledge is determined. Perhaps knowledge is true opinion plus reason; but it is difficult to decide what is gained by adding ”with reason”, words which may mean either true opinion or knowledge itself, thus involving either tautology or a begging of the question. The dialogue at least has shown what knowledge is not.
Locke, Berkeley and Hume, the eighteenth century sensation philosophers, were similarly refuted by Kant. The mind by its mere ability to compare two things proves that it can have two concepts at least before it at the same time, and can retain them for a longer period than a mere pa.s.sing sensation implies. Yet the problem of knowledge still remains as difficult as Plato knew it to be.
”Is the Sophist the same as the Statesman and the Philosopher?” Such is the question raised in the _Sophist_. Six definitions are suggested, all unsatisfactory. The fixed characteristic of the Sophist is his seeming to know everything without doing so; this definition leads straight to the concept of false opinion, a thing whose object both is and is not.
”That which is not” provokes an inquiry into what is, Being. Dualism, Monism, Materialism and Idealism are all discussed, the conclusion being that the Sophist is a counterfeit of the Philosopher, a wilful impostor who makes people contradict themselves by quibbling.
The _Politicus_ carries on the discussion. In this dialogue we may see the dying glories of Plato's genius. In his search for the true pastor or king he separates the divine from the human leader; the true king alone has scientific knowledge superior to law and written enactments which men use when they fail to discover the real monarch. This scientific knowledge of fixed and definite principles can come only from Education. A most remarkable myth follows, which is practically the Greek version of the Fall. The state of innocence is described as preceding a decline into barbarism; a restoration can be effected only by a divine interposition and by the growth of a study of art or by the influence of society. The arts themselves are the children of a supernatural revelation.
The _Timaeus_ and the long treatise the _Laws_ criticise the theories of the Republic. The former is full of world-speculations of a most difficult kind, the latter admits the weakness of the Ideal State, making concessions to inevitable human failings.
Though written in an early period, the _Apology_ may form a fitting end to these dialogues. Socrates was condemned on the charge of corrupting the Athenian youth and for impiety. To most Athenians he must have been not only not different from the Sophists he was never weary of exposing, but the greatest Sophist of them all. He was unfortunate in his friends, among whom were Critias the infamous tyrant and Alcibiades who sold the great secret. The older men must have regarded with suspicion his influence over the youth in a city which seemed to be losing all its national virtues; many of them were personally aggrieved by his annoying habit of exposing their ignorance. He was given a chance of escape by acknowledging his fault and consenting to pay a small fine. Instead, he proposed for himself the greatest honour his city could give any of her benefactors, public maintenance in the town-hall.
His defence contains many superb pa.s.sages and is a masterpiece of gentle irony and subtle exposure of error. Its conclusion is masterly.
”At point of death men often prophesy. My prophecy to you, my slayers, is that when I am gone you will have to face a far more serious penalty than mine. You have killed me because you wish to avoid giving an account of your lives. After me will come more accusers of you and more severe. You cannot stop criticism except by reforming yourselves. If death is a sleep, then to me it is gain; if in the next world a man is delivered from unjust judges and there meets with true judges, the journey is worth while.
There will be found all the heroes of old, slain by wicked sentences; them I shall meet and compare my agonies with theirs.
Best of all, I shall be able to carry out my search into true and false knowledge and shall find out the wise and the unwise. No evil can happen to a virtuous man in life or in death. If my sons when they grow up care about riches more than virtue, rebuke them for thinking they are something when they are naught. My time has come; we must separate. I go to death, you to life; which of the two is better only G.o.d knows.”
Two lessons of supreme importance are to be learned from Plato. In the first place he insists on credentials from the accepted teachers of a nation. On examination most of them, like Gorgias, would be found incapable of defining the subjects for the teaching of which they receive money. The sole hope of a country is Education, for it alone can deliver from ignorance, a slavery worse than death; the uneducated person is the dupe of his own pa.s.sions or prejudices and is the plaything of the horde of impostors who beg for his vote at elections or stampede him into strikes.
Again, the possibility of knowledge depends upon accurate definition and the scientific comparisons of instances. These involve long and fatiguing thought and very often the reward is scanty enough; no conclusion is possible sometimes except that it is clear what a thing cannot be. The human intelligence has learned a most valuable lesson when it has recognised its own impotence at the outset of an inquiry and its own limitations at the end thereof. Knowledge, Good, Justice, Immortality are conceptions so mighty that our tiny minds have no compa.s.ses to set upon them. Better far a distrust in ourselves than the somewhat impudent and undoubtedly insistent claim to cert.i.tude advanced by the materialistic apostles of modern non-humanitarianism. When questioned about the ultimates all human knowledge must admit that it hangs upon the slender thread of a theory or postulate. The student of philosophy is more honest than others; he has the candour to confess the a.s.sumptions he makes before he tries to think at all.
At times it must be admitted that Plato sounds very unreal. His faults are clear enough. The dialogue form makes it very easy for him to invent questions of such a nature that the answer he wants is the only one possible. Again, his conclusions are often arrived at by methods or arguments which are frankly inadmissible; in the earlier dialogues are some very glaring instances of sheer logical worthlessness. Frequently the whole theme of discussion is such that no modern philosopher could be expected to approve of it. A supposed explanation of a difficulty is sometimes afforded by a myth, splendid and poetical but not logically valid. Inconsistencies can easily be pointed out in the vast compa.s.s of his speculations. It remained for Aristotle to invent a genuine method of sorting out a licit from an illicit type of argument.
These faults are serious. Against them must be placed some positive excellences. Plato was one of the first to point out that there is a problem; a question should be asked and an answer found if possible, for we have no right to take things for granted. More than this, he was everywhere searching for knowledge, ridding himself of prejudice, doing in perfect honesty the most difficult of all things, the duty of thinking clearly. These thoughts he has expressed in the greatest of all types of Greek prose, a blend of poetic beauty with the precision of prose.
But Plato's praise is not that he is a philosopher so much as Philosophy itself in poetic form. His great visions of the Eternal whence we spring, his awe for the real King, the real Virtue, the real State ”laid up in Heaven” fill him with an inspired exaltation which lifts his readers to the Heaven whence Platonism has descended. There are two main types of men. One is content with the things of sense; using his powers of observation and performing experiments he will become a Scientist; using his powers of speculation he will become an Aristotelian philosopher; putting his thoughts into simple and logical order, he will write good prose. The other soars to the eternal principles behind this world, the deathless forms or the general concepts which give concrete things their existence. These perfect forms are the main study of the Artist, Poet, Sculptor, whose work it is to give us comfort and pleasure unspeakable. So long as man lives, he must have the perfection of beauty to gladden him, especially if Science is going to test everything by the ruler or balance or crucible. This love of Beauty is exactly Platonism.
It has never died yet. From Athens it spread to Alexandria, there to start up into fresh life in the School of which Plotinus is the chief; its doctrines are described for the English reader in Kingsley's _Hypatia_. It planted its seed of mysticism in Christianity, with which it has most strange affinities. At the Renaissance this mystic element caught the imagination of northern Europe, notably Germany. Pa.s.sing to England, it created at Cambridge a School of Platonists, the issue of whose thought is evident in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Its last outburst has been the Transcendental teaching of the nineteenth century, so curiously Greek and non-Greek in its essence.
For there is in our nature that undying longing for communion with the Divine which the mere thought of G.o.d stirs within us. Our true home is in the great world where Truth is everything, that Truth which one day we, like Plato, shall see face to face without any quailing.
TRANSLATIONS:
The version in 4 volumes by Jowett (Oxford) is the standard. It contains good introductions.
The _Republic_ has been translated by Davies and Vaughan.
Two volumes in the Loeb Series have appeared.
A new method of translation of Plato is needed. The text should be clearly divided into sections; the steps of the argument should be indicated in a skeleton outline. Until this is done study of Plato is likely to cause much bewilderment.
_Plato and Platonism_, by Pater, is still the best interpretation of the whole system.
DEMOSTHENES
One of the most disquieting facts that history teaches is the inability of the most enlightened and patriotic men to ”discern the signs of the times”. To us the collapse of the Greek city-states seems natural and inevitable. Their constant bickerings and petty jealousies justly drew down upon them the armed might of the ambitious and capable power which destroyed them. Their fate may fill us with pity and our admiration for those who fought in a losing cause may prejudice us against their enslavers. But just as the Norman Conquest in the long run brought more blessing than misery, so the downfall of the Greek commonwealths was the first step to the conquering progress of the Greek type of civilisation through the whole world. Our Harold, fighting manfully yet vainly against an irresistible tendency, has his counterpart in the last defender of the ancient liberties of Greece.