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Plato: The Man and His Work, II.
By A. E. Taylor
The Republic is at once too long a work, and too well known by numerous excellent summaries and commentaries, to require or permit analysis on the scale we have found necessary in dealing with the Phaedo or Protagoras. We must be content to presume the student’s acquaintance with its contents, and to offer some general considerations of the relation of its main theses to one another and to those of dialogues already examined.
To begin with, it is desirable to have a definite conception of the assumed date of the conversation and the character of the historical background presupposed. It should be clear that Athens is supposed to be still, to all appearance at any rate, at the height of her imperial splendour and strength.
All these considerations, taken together, suggest that the supposed date of the conversation must be about the time of the
There is nothing in the dialogue to support any of the fanciful modern speculations about a possible “earlier edition” without the central books which discuss the character and education of the “philosopher-kings” or the possible existence of the first book by itself as a “dialogue of search.” On the contrary, the appearances are all in favour of regarding the whole as having been planned as a whole. It is not until we come to the sixth book that we are in sight of the “goodness” which is one and the same thing with knowledge; the goodness of the “guardians” of Republic ii-iv has been carefully marked as remaining all along at the level of “opinion.” It rises no higher than loyalty to a sound national tradition taken on trust, and is thus so far on a level with the “popular” goodness of the Phaedo, though the tradition in this case is that of a morally sounder society than that of Athens, or of any existing Greek πόλις.
“There is no distinction, except one of convenience, between morals and politics. The laws of right are the same for classes and cities as for individual men. But one must add that these laws are primarily laws of personal morality; politics is founded on ethics, not ethics on politics.”
The fundamental issue is raised in the introductory book with great artistic skill. From the simple observations of old Cephalus about the tranquility with which a man conscious of no undischarged obligations can look forward to whatever the unseen world may have to bring, Socrates takes the opportunity to raise the question what δικαιοσύνη, taken in the sense of the supreme rule of right—“morality” as we might say—is. What is the rule by which a man should order the whole of his life? Before we can embark on the question seriously, we need to be satisfied that it is not already answered for us by the ordinary current moral maxims of the decent man; that there really is a problem to be solved. Next we have to see that the theories in vogue among the superficially “enlightened,” which pretend to answer the question in a revolutionary way, are hopelessly incoherent. Only when we have seen that neither current convention nor current anti-conventionalism has any solution of the problem are we in a position to raise it and answer it by the true method. Thus there are three points of view to be considered: that of the unphilosophical decent representative of current convention, sustained by Cephalus and his son Polemarchus; that of the “new morality,” represented by Thrasymachus; and that of sober philosophical thinking, represented by Socrates.
As to the first point of view, that of decent acquiescence in a respectable convention which has never been criticised, we note, and this may serve as a corrective to exaggerations about the extent to which “the Greeks” identified morality with the νόμος of a “city,” that Plato has deliberately chosen as the exponent of moral convention a representative who, as a μέτοικος, naturally makes no appeal to the “city” and its usages; the rule of Cephalus is specially characteristic not of a πόλις but of a profession, and a profession which in all ages has enjoyed the reputation of sound and homely rectitude. The old man’s morality is just that which is characteristic of the honorable merchant of all places. “Right” according to him, means “giving to every man his own, and speaking the truth,” i.e. a man is to honor his business obligations and his word is to “be as good as his bond”; the man who acts thus has discharged the whole duty of man. The point of the conversation
Against Polemarchus, who thinks that morality can be reduced to “giving every one his duev in the sense of being a thoroughly valuable friend to your friends and a dangerous enemy to your foes (a working morality expressed in the “gnomic” verses of Solon and Theognis), it has to be shown that to make such a principle of conduct acceptable to a decent man’s conscience, we must at least take our “friends” and “foes” to mean “the good” and “the bad” respectively, and that, even then, the principle is condemned by the fact that it makes it one half of morality to “do evil” to some one. The argument equally disposes incidentally of the “sophistic” conception of “goodness” as a kind of special accomplishment by showing: (1) that in any definite situation in life, the “accomplishment” needed to confer the benefit demanded by that situation is some kind of skill other than “goodness”; and (2) that all these accomplishments can be put to a morally bad, as well as to a morally good, use. Virtue, for example, will not make a man the best of all advisers about an investment, and the knowledge which does make a man a good counsellor on such a matter also makes him a very dangerous adviser, if he chooses to use it for a fraudulent end. This prepares us to discover later on that though “goodness” in the end is knowledge and nothing but knowledge, it is something quite different from the “arts” or “accomplishments” with which the professional “teachers of goodness” confound it.
When we come to the anti-conventional “immoralism” of the “enlightenment” it is important to remark that Thrasymachus is made to overstate the position; as Glaucon says, at the opening of the second book, he has bungled the case. (As we know of no reason why Plato should misrepresent a prominent man of the preceding generation, the violence and exaggeration is presumably a genuine characteristic of the actual Thrasymachus, and it is used
The fact is that Thrasymachus, like Mr. Shaw or Mr. Chesterton, has the journalist’s trick of facile exaggeration. He is too good a journalist to be an esprit juste, and the consequence is that he lands himself in a dilemma. If his “sovereign” who has a view only to the interests of “number one” is meant to be an actual person or body of persons, it is obvious, as Socrates says, that he is not infallible. It is not true that the moral code and the institutions of any society are simply adapted to gratify the personal desires of the sovereign who, according to Thrasymachus, devises them, or to further his interests; judged by that standard, every existing set of νόμοι is full of blunders.
“Socrates is guided by the Pythagorean analogy between tuned string,
healthy body and healthy mind, which is the key to
half the best thought of the Greek moralists.”
On the argument by which Socrates meets the strictly ethical assertion that “conventional” morality is a mere expression of the low intelligence and weakness of the “herd,” all I wish to remark here is that he is guided throughout by the Pythagorean analogy between tuned string, healthy body and healthy mind, which is the key to half the best thought of the Greek moralists. The immoralist’s case is really disposed of in principle by the often misunderstood argument about πλεονεξία (avarice) (Republic i. 349b-350c). The reasoning already contains in germ the whole doctrine of the “right mean” afterward developed in the Philebus and the Ethics of Aristotle. The point is that in all applications of intelligence to the conduct of activity of any kind, the supreme wisdom is to know just where to stop, and to stop just there and nowhere else.
With the opening of the second book, we are introduced to the genuine version of the immoralist doctrine of which Thrasymachus had given a mere exaggeration, the theory that regard for moral rules is a pis aller {last resort}, though one which is unfortunately unavoidable by ordinary humanity. The theory is often referred to as that of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but it should be noted that Adeimantus takes no part in the statement of the theory and that Glaucon, who does explain it fully, is careful to dissociate himself from it; it is given as a speculation widely current in educated circles of the time of the Archidamian war and supported by specious though, as Glaucon holds, unsound arguments. His own position is simply that of an advocate speaking from his brief. He undertakes to make an effective defense of the case which Thrasymachus had mismanaged, in order that it may really be disproved, not merely dismissed without thorough examination of its real merits. The important feature of his argument is not so much the well-known statement of the “social contract” theory of the origin of moral codes as the analysis of existing morality to which the historical speculation is meant to lead up. The point is that “men practice the rules of right not because they choose, but because they cannot help themselves.” At heart everyone is set simply on gratifying his own passions, but you will best succeed in doing this by having the fear of your fellow-men before your eyes and abstaining from aggression on them. If you get the chance to gratify your passions without moral scruples, and can be sure not to be found out and made to suffer, you would be a fool not to benefit by your opportunity. This is the point of the imaginative fiction about the “ring of Gyges.” {A magical ring that conferred invisibility.} The real fact which gives the sting to the fiction is simply that we all know that there is no human virtue which would not be deteriorated by confidence of immunity from
The contribution of Adeimantus to the discussion is that he places the argument for regarding respect for the rights of one’s neighbor as a mere cover for self-seeking on a basis independent of all speculations about moral origins. The tone of his speech is carefully differentiated from that of Glaucon. Glaucon, as he himself admits, is simply making the ablest forensic defense he can of his case, and can jest about the gusto with which he has thrown himself into the cause of a dubious client; Adeimantus speaks from the heart in a vein of unmistakable moral indignation. He complains not of the speculations of dashing advanced thinkers, but of the low grounds on which the defense of morality is based by the very parties who might be presumed to have it most at heart. Parents who are sincerely anxious that their sons should grow up to be honest and honorable men regularly recommend virtue simply on the ground of its value as a means to worldly success and enjoyment; they never dwell on the intrinsic worth of virtue
The effect of the two speeches, taken in conjunction, is to impose on Socrates the task of indicating, by a sound analysis of human nature, the real foundations of morality in the very constitution of man, and of showing how education and religion can be, and ought to be, made allies, not enemies, of a sound morality. This, we may say, is the simple theme of the whole of the rest of the dialogue. Some comments may be offered on the various stages of the demonstration. The theme has already been propounded in the demand of Glaucon that it shall be made clear how “justice” and “injustice” respectively affect the inner life of their possessor, independently of any sanctions, human or divine. It is to the answer to this question that Socrates is really addressing himself in the picture of an ideally good man living in an ideal relation to society, which culminates in the description, given in Books VI-VII, of the philosopher-king, his functions in society, and the discipline by which he is fitted for their discharge, as well as by the briefer studies, in Books VIII and IX, of increasing degeneration from the true type of manhood. The answer to Adeimantus, so far as his indictment of education is concerned, has to be found in the account of the training of the young into worthy moral character by a right appeal, through literature and art, to the imagination (Books III-IV); his attack on immoral religion may be said to be the direct occasion both of the regulation of early “nursery tales” with which Socrates opens his scheme of reform in Book II, and of the magnificent myth of judgment with which the dialogue closes, itself a specimen of the way in which the religious imagination may be made the most potent reinforcement of a noble rule of life. In dealing with the details of the positive contributions of the dialogue to both politics and religion, it is necessary to observe some caution, if we are to
(1) In the impressive picture given in Books II-IV of the working of the principle of specialization of function according to vocation, which will ultimately turn out to be the foundation of all “justice” there are one or two points which have perhaps not received sufficient attention, and may therefore be briefly noted.
I think it is clear that we must not take the description of the three successive stages through which Socrates’ community passes as meant to convey any speculation about the beginnings of civilization. The “first city” is already on the right side of the line which separates civilization from barbarism. Its inhabitants are already agriculturists, permanently cultivating a fixed territory; they are at home in the working of metals, and in some respects they exhibit an advance in economic organization on the Athens of the Periclean age. (Thus they have their clothes made by a distinct class of artisans, not woven in the house by the women of the family, as was still largely the custom at Athens.) The notion that we are reading a satire on Antisthenes and the “return to nature” is merely ludicrous. What is really described is, in the main, the condition of a normal πόλις where the citizens are farming-folk. To me it seems clear that, so far as Plato has any particular historical development before his mind, he is thinking of what Athens itself had been before the period of victory and expansion which made her an imperial city and the center of a world-wide sea-borne commerce. (This is suggested almost irresistibly by the assumption that even the “first city” like Athens, requires to import a good many of its necessaries from elsewhere,
(2) We must, of course, note that not all the artificial wants which arise in the city as it becomes “luxurious” are meant to be condemned. Even the demand for delicacies for the table is an indication that the standard of living is rising, and all social students know that a rise in this standard is by no means an entirely unwholesome thing. It is more significant that one of the chief features of the development is the growth of professions like those of the actor and the impresario. People are beginning to feel the need of amusement, and this means, of course, that they are becoming conscious that they have minds, which need to be fed no less than their bodies. Presumably the reason why Socrates could not look for “justice” in the community of farmers, but has to wait for the “luxurious city” to come into existence and be reformed, is precisely that the members of the first society would hardly be alive to the fact that they have souls at all; they could not feel the need for a daily supply of any bread but that which perishes; they have no “social problem.”
(3) It has been asked why, when over-population leads to an acute social problem, aggressive warfare rather than colonization should be assumed as the only way out of the difficulty. The answer, of course, is simple. In the first place, peaceful colonization of derelict territories had never been a feasible procedure for a Greek city. The founders of the ancient and famous cities we call the “Greek colonies” had regularly had to wrest their sites from previous occupants not much inferior to themselves in “culture.” There was no America or Australia in the Mediterranean basin. And in the second, Socrates knows his countrymen and is well aware that a Greek “surplus population” would not be likely to transport itself across the seas in quest of a new home so long as there was a fair chance of a successful inroad on its neighbors. He is, as he says, not discussing the morality of the proceeding; he is merely noting that it is what the city would, in fact, do. (In theory, to be sure, it was a commonplace that an aggressive war of expansion is not a iustum bellum {war theory}.) And the point he wishes to insist on is the perfectly sound one, that the experience of having to make common sacrifices and face common dangers in war, just or unjust (but when did any nation throw its soul into the prosecution of a war which it seriously believed to be unjust?), does more to generate self-devotion in citizens than any other. War gives the social reformer his chance, for the double reason that it produces the temper which is willing to live hard, make sacrifices, and submit to discipline, and, when it is hard contested and
“Neither socialism nor communism is to be found in the Republic....there is no system of “caste” in the Republic.”
(4) It is unhappily customary to make two bad mistakes about the nature of the reconstituted social structure which, in Socrates’ narrative, emerges from the experience provided by a great war. It is called a “system of caste,” and the matter is then made worse by calling the δημιουργοί who form the third of Socrates’ social classes, “the working class,” or “the industrial class.” The immediate consequence is that the social and political theory of the Republic suffers a complete travesty, due to the unconscious influence of ideas derived from our experience of modern “industrialism.” To guard against misconceptions of this kind, we must, in the first place, be clear on the point that there is no system of “caste” in the Republic. The characteristic of “caste” is that one is born into it, and that once born into a caste it is impossible to rise above it. You may forfeit your caste in various ways, as a Brahmin does by crossing the seas, but no one can become a Brahmin if he is not born one. Now Socrates believes, rightly or wrongly, that heredity is a powerful force in the intellectual and moral sphere; as a general rule, a man will find his natural place in the “class” to which his parents belong (all the more, no doubt, as procreation is to be placed under careful “eugenic” regulations). But the rule has its notable exceptions: there are those who prove quite unfitted for the work of the class into which they are born, and those who show themselves qualified to take their place in a higher class. Hence it is part of Socrates’ idea that the early life of the individual shall be under close and constant surveillance, and subjected to repeated tests of character and intelligence. There is to be every opportunity for the discovery and degradation of the unworthy and the promotion of the worthy; no one is to be ensured by the accident of birth in a particular social status, and no one is to be excluded by it from rising to the highest eminence. This qualification of the principle of heredity by the antithetic principle of the “open career” for ability and character is absolutely destructive of “caste.” The philosopher-kings or the soldiers of the Socratic state are no more a “caste” than Napoleon’s marshals. And, in the second place, the δημιουργοί do not correspond to what we call the “artisan” or “working” class, i.e. to wage-earners or persons who maintain themselves by selling their labour. They include our wage-earners, but they also include the great bulk of what we should call the civilian population, independently of economic status. The thought underlying the distinction of the three classes has primarily nothing to do with economic status. It is simply that in any full-grown society, you may distinguish three types of social service. There is a small section which serves the community directly by directing its public life, making rules and regulations and controlling policy. These are the “complete” or “full-grown” guardians. There is necessarily
(5) An immediate consequence is that, in spite of all that has been said about the “socialism” or “communism” of the Republic, there is really neither socialism nor communism to be found in the work. The current confusions on the point are probably due mainly to the mistaken notion that the emphatic demand of Book IV
The point made in Book IV. is simply that a man’s character and work in life will be spoiled equally by the possession of irresponsible wealth, with no adequate social duties attached to it, and by a penury which breaks his spirit and forces him to do bad and scamped work in order to keep himself alive. A man may be aware of these dangers without adopting either the socialist or the communist theory of the right economic organization of society. In point of fact,
(6) It may not be unnecessary to remark that, as there is no socialism, there is also no “community of women” in the Republic. If the reader will take the trouble to work out the consequences of the regulations prescribed for the mating of the guardians, he will find that the impulses of sex and the family affections connected with
(7) There are one or two remarks which may be made about the plan of moral and religious training laid down in Books II and III, as supplementary to the many excellent studies of this part of the dialogue already in existence. We note that in the proposed purification of the stories by which religious impressions are to be communicated to the very young, it is not merely, nor even mainly, the Homeric mythology to which exception is taken. The crowning offenders are Hesiod and the other theogonists who have related
(8) Most of the specific criticisms contained in the discussion of the educational employment of poetry and music are, naturally enough, negative. Socrates clearly holds quite strongly that the tendency of the art of his own time is to a love of a relaxed and formless complexity and variety for its own sake, and he thinks it necessary, in the interests of character, as well as of taste, to revert to austerer and more “classical” standards. It is important to remember that these strictures are put into the mouth of Socrates, speaking not later than the peace of Nicias.
We must not, then, suppose that they are aimed at epigoni (offspring) of a later generation. It is not the floridity of Timotheus or Agathon which is the object of attack, but the art of the Periclean age. We are only throwing dust in our own eyes if we suppose that Socrates wants merely to repress the cheap music-hall and the garish melodrama, or the equivalents of freak movements like Dada. He is seriously proposing to censure just what we consider the imperishable contributions of Athens to the art and literature of the world, because he holds that they have tendencies which are
(9) Since the whole of the early education contemplated in the Republic is based on an appeal to taste and imagination, it follows that, as Socrates is careful to insist, the “goodness” it produces, though it will be quite sufficient for every class except the statesmen, is not the true and philosophic goodness of which the Phaedo speaks. As we are carefully reminded, the self-devotion of even the fighting force of the reformed city is founded on “opinion,” not on knowledge; their virtue is absolute loyalty to a sound tradition which they have imbibed from their “social environment,” not loyalty to the claims of a summum bonum grasped by personal insight. Thus the virtue described and analysed in Book IV is still “popular virtue”; its superiority over the goodness of the average Athenian, the respectability we have heard Protagoras preaching, is due simply to the superiority of the “social tradition” of the Socratic city over that of Periclean democracy. There is thus a double reason
Recognition that the whole account of the virtues given in Republic iv. is thus provisional should save us from attaching too much importance to the famous doctrine of the “three parts” of the soul. We must be careful to understand that this doctrine does not profess to be original nor to be a piece of scientific psychology. We have already found it presupposed as something known in educated circles in the Gorgias and Phaedo, and have seen reason to think that it is Pythagorean in origin, as Posidonius is known to have maintained,
This means that we are to take it primarily as a working account of “active principles” or “springs of action,” which sufficiently describes the leading types of “goodness” as goodness can be exhibited in any form short of the highest. The scheme will thus be excellently applicable to the goodness of the ἐπίκουροι (epicurians), for their life is still a form, though the worthiest form, of the φιλότιμος βίος (conscientious life). Loyalty to “honor,” “chivalry,” “ambition” (though a wholly unselfish ambition), is the utmost we demand of them; the life of duty remains for the best of them a struggle between a “higher” and a “lower,” though a struggle in which the “higher” regularly wins, and this justifies our recognition of a plurality of “parts of the soul” in them. It will be characteristic of their experience that there should be conflicts of “desire” with the tradition of loyalty, and that chivalrous sentiment should be required to act as the reinforcement of loyalty to tradition in the conflict. But the familiar Socratic doctrine is that the “philosopher” who has directly gazed for himself on that supreme good of which the Symposium has told us, necessarily desires the good he has beheld; to him “disobedience to the heavenly vision”
I do not think it needful to say more about the doctrine here, than to utter a word of warning against two possible misunderstandings. We must avoid every temptation to find a parallel between the “parts” or “figures” in the soul and the modern doctrine of the “three aspects” of a complete “mental process” (cognition, conation (volition), feeling). Plato is not talking about “aspects” of this kind, but about rival springs of action, and the doctrine, as presented in the Republic, has no reference to anything but action and “active principles” or “determining motives.” Also we must not make the blunder of trying to identify the θυμοειδές with “will” (spirited). From the Socratic point of view, will cannot be distinguished from the judgment “this is good,” and this judgment is always, of course, a deliverance of the λογιστικόν (logical). But the λογιστικόν may pronounce a true judgment, or it may be led into a false one under the influence of present appetite or of anger or ambition, or again, it may only be saved from false judgment because the “sense of honor” comes into collision with the promptings of appetite. To look in the scheme of the Republic for some facultas electiva, intervening between the formation of a judgment of “practical thinking” and the ensuing action, would be to misunderstand its whole character.
(10) We see then why there can never have been a “first Republic” including the “guardians” and the scheme for their early education, but without the philosopher-king and his training in hard scientific thinking. The philosopher-king is doubly demanded as the only adequate embodiment of the Socratic conception of goodness, and also as the authority whose personal insight into good creates the public tradition by which the rest of society is to live. To do full justice to the conception we must not forget that Socrates’ statesmen are expected to combine two
How preoccupation with science was expected to ennoble character (provided that only the right type of person is allowed to meddle with it), we see most readily by comparing the courage pronounced in Book IV to be all that is wanted of the ἐπίκουροι with the still higher type of courage declared in Book VI to be part of the character of the philosopher. The “courage” demanded of the good soldier, in whose make-up θυμός plays the leading part, was defined as steadfast loyalty in the face of perils and seductions to the right opinions inculcated in him by education. Its foundation is thus allegiance to a code of honor held with such passion that no fear of pain or death and no bait that can be offered to cupidity is able to overcome it. Clearly a courage like this will carry a man “over the top” make him volunteer for a desperate enterprise, or win him a V.C. But there are situations in life which make a demand for a still higher degree of fortitude. It is matter of experience that a V.C. may not be equal to the task of duty imposed, for example, on a priest whose business it is to tend daily the last hours of the victims of some foul pestilence in a plague-smitten city. Or again a brave soldier, who will face deadly peril when his “blood is up” and the eyes of his comrades and his commander are on him, may not have the nerve of the scientific man who will quietly inoculate himself with some loathsome disorder to study its symptoms, or try the effects of some new and powerful anesthetic upon himself, in order to decide on its possible utility in medicine. This is the sort of courage of which Socrates speaks as only possible to a man who “knows” the relative insignificance of the duration of any individual personal life from his habitual “contemplation of all time and all existence.” We should, probably, prefer, both in the case of the priest and in the case of the man of science, to speak of “faith,” but the point is that, in both cases, the agent is inspired by an absolutely assured personal conviction about the universal order and his own place in it. Without this absolute assurance of conviction, one is never wholly free from liability to illusion about one’s own personal importance, and so never quite a free man. Because Socrates holds that the sciences form a ladder which leads up in the end to the vision of the
(a) The Forms (ἰδέαι) in the Republic. From the Phaedo, among other dialogues, we gather that there is a form corresponding to each “universal” predicate which can be significantly affirmed of a variety of logical subjects. The same thing is explicitly said in the Republic (vi. 507b, x. 596a); in the latter place the “form of bed or table” is given as an example. (This seems at variance with the well-known statement of Aristotle that “we”—i.e. the Platonists—deny that there are “forms” of artificial things,
Now, since it is assumed in the Republic that scientific knowledge is knowledge of forms, the objects which are thus said to derive their being from “the good” must clearly mean the whole body of the forms. The “good” thus holds a preeminence among forms, and strictly speaking, it might be doubtful whether we ought to call it a “form” any more than we can call the sun a colour. At least, all the other forms must be manifestations or expressions of it. In the Phaedo nothing was said which would warrant this treatment of the forms as a hierarchy or ordered series with a first member of such a unique
That Socrates finds himself unable to speak of this form of good except negatively, and that he can only characterize it positively by an imperfect analogy, is inevitable from the nature of the case. The same thing may be seen in any philosophy which does not simply deny or ignore the “Absolute” or supreme source of all reality. Because this source is ex hypothesi a source of all reality, you are bound to insist that it transcends, and is thus “wholly other” than, every particular real thing; every predicate you affirm of it belongs properly to some of its effects in contradistinction from others and can therefore only be asserted of the supreme source “analogically” and with the warning that the analogy is imperfect and would mislead if pressed unduly. At the same time, because it is the source of all reality, every predicate which expresses a “positive perfection” must, in its degree, characterize the source of all “perfections” and must be ascribed to it “analogically.” All we gain by knowledge of the “detail” of the universe must add to and enrich our conception
“Science is eternally progressive just because it is always tentative.”
{Hence, science can never be ‘settled.’}
The language used in the Republic of the “form of Good,” as the last paragraph has suggested, at once raises the question whether or not this form can be identified with God, of whom language of the same kind is used by Christian theologians and philosophers. We cannot answer this important question correctly except by making a distinctio sometimes forgotten. If the question means “is the Form of Good another name for the God recognized in the Platonic philosophy?” the answer must be definitely No, for the reason given by Burnet, that the good is a form, whereas God is not a form but a “soul,” the supremely good soul. When we come to deal with the Laws, we shall see the importance for Plato’s own thought of this distinction. It is just because his God is not a form that God can play the part the Platonic philosophy assigns to Him. But if we mean “is the Good spoken of in the Republic identical with what Christian divines and philosophers have meant
(b) The Criticism of the Sciences. In studying the criticism Socrates passes upon the sciences and his theory about their limitations, we must not be misled by the fact that he deals throughout only with the various branches of mathematics as recognized in the fifth century. This was inevitable because he had before him no other examples of systematic and organized knowledge. In principle what he has to say is readily applicable to the whole great body of more “concrete” sciences which has grown up since his own day. If we speak of his comments as a criticism on the
The main thought is quite simple. In all the sciences the objects we are really studying are objects which we have to think but cannot see or perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences throughout direct attention to these objects, which are, in fact, forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense. The geometer draws a figure which he calls a “square” and a line which he calls
This suggests to us at once the possibility and necessity of a higher and more rigorous science, “dialectic.” Such a science would differ from the sciences in vogue in two ways: (1) it would treat the initial postulates of the sciences as mere starting-points to be used for the discovery of some more ultimate premisses which are not “postulated,” but strictly self-luminous and evident (ἀνυπόθετα), a real “principle of everything,” and when it had
In this account of the aims of dialectic we recognize at once the method described in the Phaedo as that of σκέψις ἐν λόγοις (logical studies) on which Socrates had fallen back after his disillusionment about Anaxagoras. Only here the special emphasis is thrown on just that side of the dialectic method which the immediate purposes of the Phaedo permitted us to dismiss in a single sentence. We are contemplating the procedure there said to be necessary if anyone disputes an initial “postulate.” In that case, the Phaedo told us, our “postulate” will require to be itself deduced as a consequence from one more ultimate, and the process will have to be repeated until we come to a postulate which all parties are content to accept. In the last resort this would, of course, involve deduction from some principle which can be seen to possess unquestionable internal necessity. Thus, so far, the Republic agrees exactly with the Phaedo about the task of “dialectic,” except that it lays special stress on just that part of it which had not to be taken into account in the Phaedo because the company there were all willing to admit the doctrine of forms as a “postulate” without demanding any justification of it. It is clear from the Republic that if a disputant should refuse to make this admission, the theory of forms itself would require to be examined in the same way in which the postulates of the mathematician von Fach are to be investigated. In the one passage of the dialogues where any such examination is made, it is not put into the mouth of Socrates but into that of the Pythagorean Timaeus (Timaeus 51b 7 ff.).
Though Socrates naturally confines himself to criticisms of the sciences which had attained some degree of organization in his own day, it is obvious that they would apply with equal force to any others. Physics, chemistry, biology, economics are all full of undefined “primitive notions” and undemonstrated assumptions, and it is part of the work of the students of these sciences themselves to make a steady effort to ascertain just what their untested presuppositions are, and to consider how far they are really required, and how far they form a consistent system. The progress made by pure mathematics in the last half-century has largely consisted in a more accurate and complete statement of the “primitive notions” and “indemonstrable postulates” of the science and the
But the “reduction of all pure mathematics to logic” is only a part, and not the most important part, of what the Republic understands by “dialectic.” Such a unification of the sciences as the Republic contemplates would require a combination of the reduction of mathematics to logic with the Cartesian reduction of the natural sciences to geometry. When the task was finished, no proposition asserting “matter of fact,” devoid of internal necessity, should appear anywhere among the premisses from which our conclusions are ultimately drawn. The first principles to which the dialectician traces back all our knowledge ought to exhibit a self-evident necessity, so that science would end by transforming all “truths of fact” into what Leibniz called “truths of reason.” This involves a still more significant extension of the range of
We need not suppose that Plato imagined this programme for the completion of science as capable of actual execution by human beings. We have learned from the Symposium that “philosophy” itself is a life of progress, it is not those who are already in possession of “wisdom,” but those who are endeavouring after it, who philosophize. The Timaeus reminds us with almost wearisome repetition that, in physical science in particular, all our results are inevitably provisional, the best we can reach with our present lights, and that we must be prepared to see them all superseded or modified. One of the standing contrasts between Plato and his great disciple Aristotle is just that this sense of the provisionality and progressiveness of science is so prominent in the one and so absent from the other. Plato never assumes, as Aristotle was so apt to assume, that he can do the world’s scientific thinking for it once for all. This apparent finality, which made Aristotle so attractive to the thinkers of the thirteenth century, who were just recovering the thought of “Nature” as a field for study on her own account, makes the real value of Aristotle’s science rather difficult for us to appreciate today. Plato was far too true to the Socratic conception of the insignificance of human knowledge by
(c) It should be unnecessary to dwell on the point that, with all his devotion to this demand for a critical metaphysic of the sciences, Plato is no champion of a mere vita contemplativa divorced from practical social activity. One could not even say that he, like Kant, conceives of “speculative” and “practical” reason as active in two distinct spheres of which one is subordinated to the other. To his mind, the two spheres are inseparable. The unification of science is only possible to one who is illuminated by the vision of the Good which is the principle of the unification, and the Good is only seen by the man who lives it. Hence the demand that the “philosopher” shall devote the best years of his working life to the arduous practice of governing, in all its details great or small, is only the other side of the conviction that without the “heroic” character no one will ever rise to the supreme rank in science itself. The “philosopher” is necessarily a missionary and a sort of lesser Providence to mankind because, on Socratic principles, the “good” cannot be seen without drawing all who see it into its service. The “philosophers’” social activity is all the more effective that it is not pursued directly for its own sake, in the spirit of the well-meaning but tiresome persons of our own day who take up “social work” as they might take up typewriting or civil engineering, but issues naturally and inevitably, as a sort of “by-product,” from their aspiration after something else, just as the “great inventions” of modern times regularly issue from the discoveries of men who were not thinking at all of the applications of science to convenience and commerce, or as art, literature, social life have all owed an incalculable debt to St. Francis and his “little brethren,” who never gave a thought to any of them.
(12) This desultory chapter may be brought to an end by a few remarks on the impressive picture of Republic viii-ix about the stages of progressive degeneration through which personal and national character pass as the true ideal of life falls more completely out of view. It should be obvious that the primary interest of these sketches is throughout ethical, not political. The “imperfect” constitutions are examined in order to throw light on the different phases of personal human sinfulness, not in the interests of a theory
It is generally admitted that the picture of the “democratic” city where every one does as he pleases, and the most typical of citizens is the gifted amateur who plays, as the mood takes him, at every kind of life from that of the voluptuary to that of the ascetic—a sort of Goethe, in fact—is a humorous satire on Athenian life and manners. Of course we should be alive to the further point that the satire would be wholly beside the mark if directed against the drab and decent bourgeois Athens of Plato’s manhood. The burlesque is aimed directly against the Imperial democracy of the spacious days of Pericles when Athens was a busy home of world-commerce and the “new learning.” If we read the description side by side with the famous Funeral Oration in Thucydides, we shall see at once that the very notes of Athenian life which Pericles there selects as evidence of its superiority are carefully dwelt upon by Socrates for the opposite purpose of proving that, for all its
We are given no hint of the source from which the picture of the intermediate society, where wealth is the great title to admiration and “merchant princes” control the national destiny, is taken. But I do not doubt that we can name the State which Plato has in mind. When we remember that, as we see from allusions in the Laws and in Aristotle’s Politics,
The reasoning is that we have already met in the Gorgias, and turns on the application of the medical formula of “depletion and recovery from depletion” to the moral life. The “passions,” like the physical appetites of hunger and thirst, are capable of no permanent and progressive satisfaction. You feed full today, but tomorrow finds you as hungry again as though today had never been. What you mistake for happiness has been only the temporary arrest of a “depletion” On the other hand, what you gain in knowledge
See further:
Nettleship, R. L. “Lectures on the Republic of Plato,” vol. ii. of Philosophical Remains; Plato’s Conception of Goodness and the Good; The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic in Hellenica II, 61-165.
>Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 175-215.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 3-39, 554-641 al.; Platons Staat, Darstel lung des Inhalts. Stuttgart, 1909.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 181-245.
Barker, E. Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 145-268.
Stewart, J. A. Myths of Plato, 133-172; “Myth of Er” 471-474; “Myth of the Earth-born”; Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 47-62.
Shorey, P. Plato’s Republic. (London and New York, Vol. I 1930, Vol. II 1935.)
Dies, A. Introduction to the edition of the dialogue in the Collection des Universite’s de France. (Paris, 1932.)
The Phaedrus
The first question, on examination, proves capable of being narrowed down to one which we may regard as of minor importance. No serious student of Platonic style now defends the singular theory of some critics in classical antiquity that the prominence of Eros in the dialogue and the loaded rhetoric of Socrates’ encomium on him prove the work to be a youthful writing, perhaps the earliest of all the dialogues.
On the other hand,
The other problem is more difficult, and I would recommend the reader to suspend his judgment on it until he has followed our analysis of the dialogue. My own opinion is on the side of those who regard the right use of “rhetoric” as the main topic, for the following simple reason. In Socrates, with whom the “tendance of the soul” was the great business of life, it is quite intelligible that a discussion of the use of rhetoric or anything else should be found to lead up to the great issues of conduct. If the real subject of the Phaedrus were sexual love, it is hard to see how its elaborate discussion of the possibility of applying a scientific psychology of the emotions to the creation of a genuine art of persuasion, or its examination of the defects of Lysias as a writer, can be anything but the purest irrelevance.
In structure the dialogue is of the simplest type. Socrates falls in with Phaedrus who is, under medical advice, taking a constitutional in the country outside the city walls, and, for the sake of his company, joins him, departing for once from his preference for the streets of the town. He soon persuades Phaedrus to sit down by the bank of the Ilissus under the shade of a plane tree; the conversation which ensues takes place here and is strictly tete-a-tete. As for the supposed date of the conversation, it can be approximately fixed by the opening sentences. Lysias, who figures as a mere lad in the Republic, is now at the height of his fame as a writer of λόγοι (228a), and is living at Athens (227b). We may add the further detail that Polemarchus is also alive and, according to Socrates, “has betaken himself to philosophy” (257b), also that Isocrates, though still young, is already rivaling Lysias in his profession; Socrates anticipates that he may either throw Lysias and all former professors of it into the shade, or even aspire to a still higher calling,
When Socrates falls in with Phaedrus, the time of day is already close on noon (this explains why the pair so soon take rest under the plane-tree). Phaedrus has spent the early morning listening to a brilliant and paradoxical λόγος—we should call it an essay—by Lysias in defense of the thesis that a lad should be kinder to a wooer who is not “in love” than to one who is. He has the written text with him, and Socrates professes to believe that he is taking his solitary stroll for the express purpose of getting it by heart. The main point of the short and playful conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus as they make their way to the place they have chosen for their siesta (227-230) is to pitch the ethical key for what is to follow. Socrates is not interested in the “rationalisation of myths” like that of Boreas and Orithyia, because he is preoccupied with a graver problem, that of learning to “know himself”; he is indifferent to the charms of the country, because the trees, unlike the men he meets in the streets, can “teach him nothing” that bears on this supreme topic, the moral being of man. These remarks prepare us for the moral earnestness with which the merits of Lysias’s essay and the possibilities of rhetoric are to be treated in the body of the dialogue.
The Essay of Lysias (230e-234c). It has been disputed whether the discourse Phaedrus proceeds to read is an authentic composition of Lysias or a brilliant imitation of his style by Plato himself. There is no evidence either way, but for my own part, I feel that we must agree with those scholars, including Lysias’ latest editor, Hude, who regard the essay as genuine. No one doubts Plato’s ability to compose a λόγος for Lysias with perfect fidelity to the style of the supposed author. But, since the dialogue ends with severe and formal censure of Lysias, founded on a searching criticism of the λόγος, I find it difficult to believe that the document is an invention. It would be self-stultifying to publish a severe criticism of a well-known author based on an imitation of him which the critic had composed for his own purposes and could
The thesis of Lysias, we must remember, would be an offensive paradox even to the section of Athenian society which practiced “unnatural” aberrations. The fashionable theory was that the relations in question are ennobled when they are inspired by genuine “romantic” attachment, but not otherwise, as is taken for granted by the encomiasts of them in the Symposium. To suffer the advances of an ἐραστής from calculations of advantage was regarded as the basest thing a Greek lad could do. For a modern parallel to the paradox we might imagine a clever essay written to show that Tom Jones’s conduct towards Lady Bellaston is morally more innocent than his affair with Molly Seagrim. We must not suppose that Lysias intends his argument to be taken seriously. He simply means to exhibit his cleverness by showing how good a case he can make out for the worst conduct, much as a clever writer today might amuse himself and his readers by an essay on the moral elevation of a bomb-throwing “Communist” But there are theses which cannot be defended and arguments which cannot be employed, even in jest, without revealing deep-seated moral depravity or insensibility; the kind of cleverness which sustains such theses by the use of such arguments is a real moral danger to the community and requires to be countered, as it is by Socrates, with better morality and superior wit.
The discourse may be summarized very briefly; it is throughout an appeal to considerations of “utility” in the most sordid sense of the word. One is likely to make one’s price much more effectively out of a suitor who is a cold sensualist. Romantic love has its fits of repentance and its lovers’ quarrels; it changes its object, and when it does so, it passes into hate and scorn. It imperils reputation, since the romantic suitor “blabs” of his success, while the business-like sensualist knows how to hold his tongue. The “lover” is notoriously jealous and tries to monopolize his beloved; the cool sensualist does not object to going shares with rivals recommended by their wealth or other qualities.
The “lover” is attracted by physical charm before he has considered the suitability of the connexion in other respects; the man who is not “in love” chooses carefully. The lover’s judgment is blinded by his passion, and this makes him the worst of confidants and advisers. He flatters one’s weaknesses and quarrels with one’s better qualities. On all these grounds it is absurd to expect solid and lasting advantage from one’s complaisances towards him. (Manifestly such a
Socrates professes at first to have paid no attention to the matter of the discourse. He was attending wholly to its stylistic qualities, and these even Lysias himself could hardly approve, since it was full of empty repetition and tautology. The mere recollection of what poets like Sappho and Anacreon have said about love would enable a man to make a much better speech on the same theme. Lysias has in fact shown no “invention” in his essay; he has merely dwelt on one obvious point, the “blindness” and irrationality of the lover’s passion, a point no one could miss. The whole merit of his performance, if it has any, must be looked for in the arrangement (διάθεσις) of this commonplace material. Phaedrus himself admits this (236a-b), but challenges Socrates, if he can, to treat the same theme (ὑπόθεσις), the admitted “madness” of the lover’s passion, better than Lysias has done. Socrates accepts the challenge, with a prayer to the Muses to make up for his well-known ignorance by the aid of their “inspiration.” With this preface he makes a rival speech on the theme, only carefully introducing one slight but significant modification. The supposed speaker, in his discourse, is to be not a cold-blooded sensualist making a disgraceful “business proposition,” but a “lover” astute enough to cloak his passion under an appearance of indifference. (This gives Socrates a double advantage over Lysias. He safeguards his own character by abstaining from even a playful defense of a morally disgraceful thesis, and he leaves himself free, if he pleases, to urge subsequently that the apparent reasonability of the speech is only the simulated rationality of a madman, since the client into whose mouth it is put is really inspired all the time by “romantic” unreason.)
First Speech of Socrates—Thesis: It Is Bad to Listen to the Blandishments of a “Lover” (237b-241d). The first requisite for all sound deliberation is to know the real character of the object about which we are deliberating. Since the question is whether one should yield to a lover, we must start by understanding what “love” is, and what it aims at, and whether it is for our good or for our harm. “Love” is, of course, a desire or craving for something. Now there are two principal types of desire—the “inborn” craving for the pleasant, and the desire for the “best,” which is not inborn, but has to be acquired, and is based on judgment (δόξα)—and there is often a clash between the two. The victory of judgment (δόξα) in this conflict over appetitive craving is what we call sophrosyne; the victory of appetite over our judgment of good |304| we call “lust” or “passion” (ὔβρις). “Love” (ἔρως, sexual passion) is one special variety of ὔβρις or “lust.” It is the prevalence of violent desire for the pleasant uninformed by rational judgment of good, when aroused by physical beauty (238c). The question before us, then, is whether it is for the benefit or for the hurt of the party who has aroused such a passion to gratify it. And here, Socrates says, he will give the rein to an almost “poetical” eloquence with which he feels himself inspired beyond his ordinary, perhaps by the surroundings in which he is speaking. (The artificial graces of Lysias are to be met by the “unstudied eloquence” of the “heart.”)
The “lover,” being a slave to his pleasures, will, of course, desire his beloved to be the pliant minister to them, and will hate everything which makes him less subservient, and gives him any kind of personal independence. Now wisdom, valour, even ready wit and eloquence themselves, tend to give one an independent personality, and for that reason a “lover” will object to them in the object of his passion. His jealousy will prompt him to exclude the beloved from all intercourse which would “make a man” of him, and above all from “divine philosophy.” The last thing he will desire is that his “minion’s” charm for himself should be endangered by the acquisition of intelligent and manly qualities of soul. In the next place, he will resent the acquisition of hardy and manly physical qualities such as make one of worth in “war and other necessities”; he will deliberately, for his own pleasure, try to keep the ἐρώμενος to a soft and effeminate course of life. Finally, he will be anxious to isolate his victim from all the influences of family affections; he will object to his having any financial independence, or to his marrying and forming a family of his own, since he resents whatever tends to emancipate the victim from the position of mere minister to his own selfish pleasure. Thus the “lover” is an enemy to the good alike of the victim’s soul, of his body, and of his estate. (We see that Socrates’ pretence of being carried out of himself on a flood of “inspired” eloquence must not be taken too seriously. He is deliberately observing the rules of arrangement which Lysias had neglected. His theme is nominally that of Lysias, the jealous and petulant selfishness of the “lover.” But he has carefully articulated his argument and avoided vain repetition by grouping the effects of the lover’s jealousy on his victim under the heads of mind, body, estate. This has given him further the opening for lifting the whole argument to a worthier moral level by insisting on the supreme importance of the moral goods which are jeopardized by complaisance. Considered simply as an example of effective pleading, Socrates’ speech has thus stylistic advantages over that of Lysias which far outweigh his neglect of the verbal graces and prettinesses of the other.)
The speech ends with a further consideration. Connexion with an ἐραστής has been shown to be productive of evil to mind, body, and fortune. We may add, as a minor point, that besides
Even Phaedrus can see that this discourse, though it gives good reasons against bestowing favours on a “lover” does nothing to advance the plea of the suitor who is not “in love.” Socrates, who, of course, did not mean to act as advocate for such a client, suggests that it would be enough to add that such a person is in all respects the very opposite of the lover whose faults we have exposed. He is about to take his leave of Phaedrus with this remark, when “the divine sign” checks him. He professes to understand this as a warning that, since Eros is a god, he has committed an impiety by denouncing him and must purge himself of his contempt by a palinode, as Stesichorus did when he had blasphemed Helen. If a real gentleman had overheard either the speech of Lysias or that which Socrates has just delivered, he would have imagined that he was listening to persons brought up among “common sailors,” incapable of understanding what a free man means by “love.” Thus the point of the “palinode” is to be that it is a recantation of the identification of ἔρως with a brutal physical appetite (241d-243e).
Second Speech of Socrates (244a-256e) The True Psychology of Love. The ground on which we have so far maintained that it is better to associate with one who is not in love than with a “lover” is that the lover is “beside himself” (μαίνεται), but the man who is not in love retains his sanity, and sanity is better than “madness.” This is the proposition we are now to recant. It would be true if there were only one kind of frenzy, common madness. But there is an inspired “frenzy” which is productive of good we could not equally obtain in a state of sanity and control of ourselves. One of its forms is prophecy; the priestess of Delphi, who predicts in a state of “exaltation,” is far superior as a prophet to diviners who predict the future by calculations based on the flight of birds and similar omens; a second form is the “exaltation” of the authors of “purifications” and “initiations,” “founders of
In the first place, the soul is immortal (245c), a statement which means to a Greek that it is divine. The proof of this is that whatever is always in motion is immortal, and the soul is always in motion. The minor premiss of this syllogism is again proved thus. The soul is the source and initiator of its own motions; its motions are not communicated from without, but spontaneously originated from within. Thus they were never started by anything else, and, as the soul itself is the first fountain of them, they can never come to an end. If the soul could come to an end, there would be an end of nature and becoming universally (245e)—a statement which implies that souls are the only things which can move from within, and so the only possible sources of movement. The soul may thus be rigorously defined as “that which moves itself” (246a).
But
(We see at once that we are dealing in a parable with the “three parts” of the soul; the driver is judgment, the two horses are “honor” or “mettle” and “appetite.” If we press the details, they imply that all three “parts” are present not only in the soul which has not yet put on the garment of the flesh, but in the gods, who are never embodied at all. This would be quite at variance with the hints of the Republic and the express teaching of the Timaeus. But it is not really permissible to extract metaphysics from mythical details which are necessitated by simple regard for the coherency of the pictorial representation.)
The myth proceeds to describe the life of all souls under the image of a great festal procession. The souls progress, under the leadership of the gods, round the whole compass of the heavens, maintaining the universal order of things. The goal of the whole pilgrimage is reached by an ascent to a region outside the whole heaven, “the plain of reality,” where the procession pauses and enjoys a Sabbath rest in the contemplation of “bodiless reality, without figure, colour, or tangible quality” (in other words the forms); this is the true home of souls, and the source of their spiritual food. Thus the thought is that it is in the strength of this pure contemplation that gods and men alike execute the practical task of establishing and maintaining natural and moral order in the realm of mutability and becoming. Like Moses they make everything after the pattern they have seen “in the mount.” The gods, of course, achieve this “steep ascent of heaven” with complete success; they actually conduct their living chariots out of the whole region of “nature” to the goal outside it. With men it is otherwise. The best of them only succeed for a time in getting their heads above the visible region, and attaining a glimpse of
Now our sensible experiences only suggest few and faint images of righteousness and temperance and the other forms, but beauty is much more impressively adumbrated in sense-experience, and the effect of the experience in awakening “recollection” is therefore exceptionally startling. In the soul which has all but lost the impression of heavenly beauty, the effect of its earthly adumbration is to provoke “brutal” appetite (τετράωοδος νόμον, 250e) for intercourse with the beautiful body. But in a soul fresh from deep contemplation of spiritual beauty, the sight of earthly beauty
But we must remember what we said about the difference in strain between the horses of the human soul. The better horse is modest and chivalrous, a “thorough-bred”; the worse horse is a “bolter.” So when the charioteer is wrapt in the contemplation of the beloved, the better horse modestly holds himself in, but the worse “bolts,” in spite of rein and whip, from lust after carnal delight. The worse horse may be often “pulled to his haunches,” but he persists in his struggles, and the time of really fierce temptation comes when the passion which began on one side is reciprocated on the other. If the temptation is successfully resisted, the pair have won one out of the three “Olympic victories” necessary to release them from incarnation in the flesh. Henceforward they have mastered the evil in themselves and won their freedom. But if their lives are directed only to the second-best, “honor,” in the place of the first-best, “wisdom,” the evil horse may get his way in an unguarded moment, and then there will be other such moments in their lives, though not many, as their conduct has not commended itself to their “whole souls.” Their attachment will be real, but not so real as that of the pair who have won the mastery over themselves. At death, they are still “wingless” though “desirous to be winged,” and even this is a gain. It is at least a beginning of the journey heavenwards, and the rest will come (253a-256d).
This, then, is what association with a true lover may bestow; intimate relations with the man who is “not in love” lead to a meanness of soul, falsely taken for a virtue, and a nine-thousand-years’ period of “folly,” spent on and under the earth. May Eros accept this recantation, grant Socrates not to lose his “skill in matters of love,” and punish Lysias by converting him, as his
Phaedrus is delighted with the fine speech to which he has just listened. Lysias himself could hardly match it. Perhaps he would not try; he is a touchy man and was recently gravely offended by a politician who had called him a mere “writer of speeches” in depreciation. But, says Socrates, politicians who affect to despise “discourse-writing” are only disguising envy under the mask of contempt. They are vain enough of the decrees they propose and carry, and what is a decree but the record of a “discourse” to which the author has prefixed the names of its admirers, “the council” or “the people”? And how much vainer a man is when his “discourses” are preserved in perpetuity as the “laws” of a State. Clearly, if there is any discredit it is not in composing discourses, but in composing them ill. And this raises the whole question, what is good writing? (258d). This is the sort of problem which it gives an educated man real pleasure to discuss. If we neglect it and prefer to sleep out the warm noon-tide, the cicadae over our heads may carry our bad report to their patrons the Muses.
The Principles of Style (259e-278b). (Nominally the question under discussion is that of the canons of a sound rhetoric, but we shall see that it rapidly expands into a consideration of the character of “style” in literature in general. A speaker or writer has a case of which he wishes to convince his hearer or reader. The question is what principles may be laid down for the presentation of this case in the way which will be most effective. Thus the considerations urged by Socrates bear as much on the written exposition of a subject in an essay or a treatise as upon the spoken presentation of it to an audience. The reason for approaching the topic primarily from the side of spoken discourse is simply that, in the age of Socrates, there was no serious prose literature in existence. The one still extant prose work of importance of an earlier date than the supposed conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus was the book of Herodotus. The “preSocratic philosophers” had, indeed, attempted to state their views about φύσις in a sort of prose; the Periclean age saw the first written manuals of “rhetoric” and medicine, and the first written discussions of ethical and political problems. But the writers of τέχναι made no pretensions to style, and their compositions were not regarded as “literature.” Literary prose, as a vehicle for the artistic expression of reflection upon life, was the creation of Isocrates,
It would seem obvious that the first prerequisite of a really good “discourse” is that the deliverer of it should know the truth about his subject. Yet the accepted view is that this is unnecessary. To compose a telling speech you need not know what are the δίκαια, the “rights and wrongs of the case”; you need only know what the audience who are to decide the issue think right and wrong. You win your case by appeal to the “prejudices of your hearers.” But this view will not bear examination. It would be a comic situation if Phaedrus, being under the impression that the word “horse” means a donkey, should be persuaded by a discourse on the usefulness of the horse in war to provide himself with a donkey
May we not define rhetoric as verbal “sorcery” (ψυχαγωγία)
The writers on the subject, it is true, generally confine the sphere of the art to public discourses before law-courts and popular assemblies; but they forget that such a restriction would amount to excluding Zeno and his paradoxes from consideration.
A second grave fault in style is that there is no recognizable order in the discourse of Lysias. It is not the consistent development of a theme and has no organic structure. There is no discoverable reason why the various points of the speech might not have been made in a wholly different order. But a good discourse ought to have a definite organic structure, just like a living creature. There should be a definite plan underlying it which would be ruined if you inverted the order of its paragraphs.
Here again the discourse with which the Nymphs inspired Socrates presents an instructive contrast. It began by saying what “love” is, a kind of “madness” or “frenzy.” Next it distinguished two main types of
Phaedrus agrees that this is a good account of “dialectic,” and that Socrates has a correct conception of a “scientific style.” But Thrasymachus and the other teachers of prose style have not the qualities we have described. What they mean by “rhetorical style” is something different. They mean, in fact, the arrangement of the parts of a “discourse” on a certain model which they prescribe, but which has nothing to do with the kind of logical structure just described. To use technical terms, they say, e.g., that a good speech must have its exordium (προοίμιον); then you must go on to the narration (διήγησις), which relates what you allege to be the facts of the case; next to the production of the depositions (μαρτυρίαι) of witnesses; then to a consideration of the presumptions (τεκμήρια) and plausibilities (εἰκότα); and there are many other subdivisions. (The precise meaning of the technical terms is in
Suppose a man claimed to be a physician on the ground that he knew recipes for raising and lowering the body’s temperature, producing a vomit and an evacuation and the like, would specialists like our friend Eryximachus admit his claim? If he did not know also in what patients, when, and with what violence to produce these effects, they would say at once that he did not know medicine. So Sophocles or Euripides would say to anyone who knew how to make single speeches effectively but not how to construct an artistic whole out of them, “You may understand the preliminaries to play-making, but you don’t know how to make a play.” So Pericles, we may be sure, would have told us urbanely that a man who has learned the devices of the textbooks has only learned the preliminaries to “rhetoric.” The art consists in knowing how and when to use the various devices to effect (πιθανως) and to make your discourse into a real whole (268a-269c).
Admittedly this cannot be learned from any of the law-books: how then should a man set himself to acquire a really persuasive style? To begin with, he must have a natural gift of expression, or he will be wasting time in trying to cultivate a barren soil. If he has the natural gift, its cultivation demands both knowledge and practice (μελέτη), and is thus not wholly a matter of “art.” In so far as it does depend on knowledge and thus is an “art” Lysias and Thrasymachus have misconceived the kind of knowledge required. What it is may be suggested to us by the facts about Pericles, the most effective of all our great orators. Over and above his natural gift of speech (πρὸς τῳ εὐφυὴς είναι, 270a), Pericles had the advantage of early association with Anaxagoras. This gave him a certain largeness of mental outlook which makes itself felt in his political oratory.
The great stylist, in fact, needs
The same thing is true of the “orator.” He is trying to produce healthy convictions in the minds of his audience by discourses exactly as the physician produces healthy conditions in their bodies by his prescriptions. Hence anyone who undertakes to teach the art of persuasion needs first of all to have a thoroughly scientific knowledge of the mind. He must know what are its components and exactly how each type of discourse will affect them. In a word, he must have a sound psychology of human nature. Thus he must understand what different temperaments there are among his auditors, what different types of “discourses” there are, and why such and such a type of “discourse” appeals to such and such a temperament. And this is not all. The effective speaker, like the successful physician, must have skill in diagnosis. He must be able in practice to judge rapidly and surely of the temperament of an actual audience and the type of appeal which will go home to them. Only when he has thus diagnosed his hearers’ temperaments and decided on the right kind of appeal to make will he be in a position to apply the rules given in the hand-books for producing the kind of effect which will be opportune (269d-272b).
The road to oratorical success we have described is, no doubt, a long and difficult one; but can the writers of the handbooks really show us an easier short cut? We know that, as has been already mentioned, they often say the “speaker” or “stylist” need not concern himself with realities or “truths”; he need only aim at being plausible, and, indeed, should often prefer plausibility to truth. Thus if he is employed in a case where a plucky little man has beaten a stronger but cowardly man, he would, speaking
We may now turn to the question, suggested by the sneer of the unnamed politician about Lysias (257c, whether it is a proper thing to perpetuate one’s discourses in writing. Socrates professes to have heard a story—Phaedrus prefers to think that he is inventing it—that, in the old days when Egypt was governed by gods, the god Thoth invented the art of writing and recommended it to Amon,
“...written records tend to make us neglect the cultivation of memory by making it unnecessary, and to fill men with an empty conceit of their own wisdom. They think they know a great deal which they have merely read without understanding and without any abiding effect on their minds.”
Amon reproved him, on the ground that written records tend to make us neglect the cultivation of memory by making it unnecessary, and to fill men with an empty conceit of their own wisdom. They think they know a great deal which they have merely read without understanding and without any abiding effect on their minds. The art of writing does not act as a substitute for memory; it merely provides us with memoranda—convenient means of refreshing our memory from time to time. A book is like a picture. The figures of the picture may actually “look alive,” but they cannot speak. So the words and sentences in a written book look full of wisdom, but if you question the book about its meaning, you can get no reply. A “discourse” once written down, comes into the hands of the unintelligent, as well as of the intelligent, and is exposed to misinterpretation. If it is to be rightly understood, it needs the living voice of the author to explain and defend it. Thus the written discourse is at best a lifeless image of the living thought which is
This conviction that a man’s personality ought to be greater than his literary “work,” and, in particular, that the true philosopher is a great personality whose very deepest thoughts are those which he cannot set down “in black and white,” was one Plato held strongly and retained to the end of his life.
It explains why he never attempted to put in writing any of his own profoundest metaphysical speculations. They were the fruit of a “way of life,” and, to be understood, presupposed the living of the same life on the part of the recipient. To record them for the world at large would have been merely to court dangerous misunderstanding. Even so, Carlyle, as the jest has it, wrote thirty-seven volumes to persuade the world that silence is golden. Naturally he could not tell us the secret of the “golden silence.” That could only be told to a man with the soul of a second Carlyle, and such a man would discover the secret without needing to read the thirty-seven volumes.
Nothing remains now but that Socrates should take leave of the spot where he has spent his hour of siesta with a brief prayer to Pan and its other tutelary spirits. His prayer is that “he may become fair in the inward man, and that the outer man may be conformable to the inward; that he may regard wisdom as the true riches and that his wealth may be such as none but the temperate can carry.” Thus the prayer is for good of mind, body, and fortune, and is worded in a way to remind us of the Socratic estimate of the relative importance of the three.
There is no real need to enter into the idle questions which have been raised about the significance of the allusions to Isocrates. What is said is strictly true and appropriate to the assumed situation. Isocrates certainly had greater parts than Lysias and stood on a higher intellectual and moral level. He showed his superiority in parts by becoming the real creator of literary prose style, and his superiority in character by deserting “speech-writing” for the foundation of a school for the training of the young for public life. However defective Plato may have thought the training he gave, the simple fact that it was based on a generous Pan-Hellenism, and that Isocrates was the recognized mouthpiece of this Pan-Hellenism among the publicists of his age, fully explains Plato’s ascribing to Socrates the remark, quite likely enough to have been actually made, that there was a strain of philosophy in the man. There can be no doubt about the historical fact of the influence of Socrates on Isocrates.
As to the alleged “feud” between Isocrates and Plato, of which much has been made by some modern writers, there is really no evidence for it. The frequent expressions in Isocrates’ writings depreciatory of “science” and “eristic” as a propaedeutic for the statesman are, indeed, pretty clearly meant specially for the Academy, but the attempts to find sarcastic rejoinders in Plato to these little acerbities have not really been successful, and the ingenuity devoted to these attempts seems to me to have been simply wasted. After all, Plato and Isocrates had a good deal in common in their views on practical politics, and they were neither Alexandrian literati nor German Professors. We in this country can quite understand how two eminent men can differ in their |319| philosophical programmes without becoming personal enemies, or how the bigger man of the two can afford to take an occasional “rap over the knuckles” from the lesser in good part. (No one supposes, for example, that Shakespeare’s relations with Ben Jonson were disturbed by Ben’s occasional quips.) Hence I cannot but agree with Professor Burnet in thinking that the tradition followed by Cicero, which represents Plato and Isocrates as being on personally friendly terms, is likely to be the true one.
In taking leave of the Phaedrus, we may note that while it supplements the Gorgias in its conclusions about the value of “style,” it modifies nothing that was said in the earlier dialogue. The moral condemnation pronounced on the use of eloquent speech to pervert facts and produce false impressions remains the same. So does the verdict that the sort of thing the professional teachers from Tisias to Thrasymachus profess to expound is not a science but a mere “trick” or “knack” (and therefore cannot be conveyed, as they professed to convey it, by “lessons”). In adding that a thorough knowledge of a subject-matter and a sound knowledge of the psychology of the public addressed furnish a really scientific basis for a worthy and effective style, Plato is saying nothing inconsistent with the results of the Gorgias. There is thus no sufficient ground for thinking that the teaching of the Phaedrus represents a later “development” from the more “Socratic” position of the Gorgias. Socrates cannot have lived in the Athens of the Archidamian war and the subsequent twenty years without having had occasion to turn his thoughts to the problem of the value of “rhetorical” style, and there is no reason why he should not actually have reached the conclusions of the Phaedrus, though naturally we cannot prove that he had.
See further:
Thompson, W. H. Plato’s Phaedrus.
Robin, L. Phedre. Collection des Universites de France, Paris. 1933.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 39-62; Platons Dialog Phaidros 2, pp. 1-280.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 245-279.
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Natorp. Platons Ideenlehre, 52-87.
Stewart, J. A. Myths of Plato, 306-396 Phaedrus Myth; Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 62-65 and Part II.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon II, 400-449.
It seems possible to date the composition of the Theaetetus more precisely than that of any other Platonic dialogue. For the main discussion is introduced by a short preliminary conversation between the Megarians, Euclides and Terpsion, whom we met in the Phaedo as members of the inner Socratic circle. Terpsion relates that he has just met Theaetetus of Athens, who is being conveyed home from the Athenian camp at Corinth after a battle, wounded and suffering severely from dysentery. The thought of the loss such a man will be to the world reminds Euclides that Socrates had once met Theaetetus, just before his own death, and had prophesied a distinguished future for the lad. Euclides professes to have heard all about this from Socrates himself; he was so struck that he at once wrote out memoranda of what Socrates had told him, and afterward corrected and enlarged them with the help of Socrates himself.
Since much stress is laid on the point that Theaetetus, who is called a distinguished “man” by Terpsion (142b) was a mere “lad” in the year 399, it is clear that the battle from which Theaetetus, as the whole tone of the Prologue implies, was carried home to die, must fall a good while later. As Dr. Eva Sachs has shown,
Manifestly the dialogue was written as a tribute to the memory of Theaetetus, shortly after his death, which Euclides and Terpsion regard as certainly impending. This brings us to 368 or the beginning of 367 as the date of its completion. Thus, as Burnet points out, it must have been finished on the very eve of Plato’s departure from Athens to throw himself into his great political adventure at Syracuse, and probably with full consciousness that he was, for the time, about to abandon the studious life for that of affairs.
Several points in the introduction call for remark, (1) When Euclides explains that, to avoid tediousness, he has adopted the
The main conversation is dated very shortly before the famous trial of 399, as we see from the concluding sentence (210d), where Socrates explains that he has to attend at the office of the “king” to put in his answer to the indictment of Meletus. The parties present, besides Socrates, are the Pythagorean geometer Theodorus, the lad Theaetetus, his companion the younger Socrates (147d), who is a “mute personage,” and possibly one or two other unnamed lads. The scene is an unnamed palaestra (144c), possibly that in the Lyceum. We learn in the course of the dialogue that Theodorus comes from Cyrene, and that he is a friend and admirer of the now deceased Protagoras, though he professes to be strictly a mathematician, wholly unversed in the methods and terminology of contemporary Athenian “philosophy” (146b, 165a). That he belonged to the Pythagorean order is indicated by the appearance of his name in the list of Pythagoreans given by Iamblichus (Vita Pythagoras. xxxvi. 267). A notice preserved by Proclus in his commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements (Friedlein, p. 66) shows that Eudemus in his History of Mathematics ranked Theodorus with Hippocrates of Chios as one of the greatest of fifth-century geometers. Xenophon (Memorabilia iv. 2, 10) mentions him in a way which implies that Socrates knew him, though this may be only Xenophon’s inference from our dialogue. Theaetetus, it is important to remember, was a member of Plato’s Academy and one of the very first mathematicians of the fourth century. Eudemus, as we see from Proclus (loc. cit.), named him along with Archytas and Leodamas as one of the three prominent geometers of the fourth century. From notices in the Scholia to Euclid’s Elements and elsewhere, we gather that he was one of the first mathematicians to begin the systematic study of the types of “quadratic surd” worked out to its completion in Euclid’s Tenth Book, and he is still more often referred to as the geometer who completed the theory of the “regular solids,” by adding to the three known to the Pythagoreans (tetrahedron, cube, dodecahedron) the remaining two (octahedron, icosahedron).
Though the dramatic power of the Theaetetus is still remarkable, it has features which show that we are near the point at which
Introduction (143d-151e). The problem to be discussed is still made to arise, in the fashion of the Protagoras or Republic, apparently almost by accident. In the old way, Socrates is made to speak of his interest in the young and to ask Theodorus whether any of the lads of Athens have struck him as showing remarkable promise. Theodorus says that there is one whose remarkable combination of quick intelligence, perseverance, and modesty afford grounds for hoping very great things of him, Theaetetus. It is curious that this remarkable boy has a quaint physical resemblance to Socrates himself. This gives Socrates his opening. He calls Theaetetus out of the group of lads who are anointing themselves after their exercises and begins a conversation with him. Theodorus, he says, has just made a remark about our facial resemblance. As Theodorus is not a portrait-painter, such a remark from him is not very important. But as he is an eminent man of science, his opinion about our mental endowments carries weight. Hence Socrates would be glad to discover whether the lad’s mental gifts really bear out the very high commendation they have just received. He will put this to the test by asking a question. Theaetetus is learning geometry and other things from Theodorus. Now to learn means to be acquiring knowledge. But what exactly is knowledge? Can Theaetetus offer any answer to this question, one which has often perplexed Socrates himself? The lad begins, as Plato so often makes an interlocutor do, by an enumeration. Geometry and the other things taught by Theodorus are knowledge; so is shoe-making or carpentry.
Of course, as Socrates points out, this is no answer to the question. To answer the question what knowledge is by saying that shoe-making is knowledge only amounts to saying that knowing how to make shoes is knowledge. Knowing how to make furniture is also knowledge. Our problem is to say what we mean by the “knowing” which appears as a “determinable” in both these statements. Theaetetus seizes the point at once, since it makes the problem under consideration the same in type with a mathematical one which he and the younger Socrates have just solved. That problem was to find a common formula for what we call, in our modern terminology, “quadratic surds” or “irrational square
Socrates is delighted with this achievement, and only wishes Theaetetus to apply the same ability to determining the class of “sciences” or “knowledges,” by bringing them all under one common determinable (148d). Theaetetus is eager to solve the problem, but does not feel equal to the task, though he cannot persuade himself to let it drop from his mind. This shows that Theaetetus is “pregnant” with a thought which he cannot successfully bring to the birth. Now Socrates, like his mother, practices the obstetric art, not, like her, on the bodies of women, but on the souls of men. He has no spiritual offspring of his own to bear, as midwives are no longer fruitful when they enter on their profession.
But he has great skill in assisting at the birth of a younger man’s thoughts, and in discerning whether they are healthy and well formed or
First Definition of Knowledge (151e-186e) Knowledge and Sensation: The Theory Stated (151e-160d). With this encouragement Theaetetus attempts a first definition. A man who knows a thing “perceives” the thing he knows (as our own proverb says, “seeing is believing”). So we may say, as a first suggestion, that “knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) is just perception” (αἴσθησις).
This would seem to be only another way of saying what Protagoras expressed by the formula that “man is the measure.” Theaetetus, who has often read Protagoras (152a), agrees with Socrates that Protagoras meant by this that “what appears to me, is to me; what appears to you, is to you.” In fact, “I perceive this” = “this appears to me” = “this is so to me” (152b). “Sense” (αἴσθησις) is thus always apprehension
We should note very carefully exactly what is the theory here ascribed to Protagoras. (That the interpretation of his dictum is the correct interpretation, or at least that supposed by his readers at large to be correct, is clear, since it is assumed that all the parties to the conversation are quite familiar with the context of the saying, and not one of them suggests that there can be any mistake about its meaning.) The view Plato ascribes to Protagoras is not “subjectivism.” It is not suggested that “what appears to me” is a “mental modification” of myself. The theory is strictly realistic; it is assumed that “what appears to me” is never a “mere appearance” but always “that which is,” “reality.” But Protagoras denies that there is a common real world which can be known by two percipients. Reality itself is individual in the sense that I live in a private world known only to me, you in another private world known only to you. Thus if I say the wind is unpleasantly hot and you that it is disagreeably chilly, we both speak the truth, for each of us is speaking of a “real” wind, but of a “real” wind which belongs to that private world to which he, and only he, has access. No two of these private worlds have a single constituent in common, and that is precisely why it can be held that each of us is infallible about his own private world. Protagoras is not denying the genuine “objectivity” of each man’s private world; his equation of “appears to me” with “is, is real, to me” is meant to insist on this objectivity. But he denies the reality of the “common environment” presupposed by “intra-subjective intercourse.” His thesis is strictly metaphysical, not psychological.
But now, how if Protagoras really meant something more elaborate than this, and explained his meaning more fully to his intimates “in secret,” though he gave the world at large only this one hint of it? There is a “far from contemptible” (οὐ φαυλος) view which we might regard as implied by the Protagorean dictum, and it is as follows.
If you selected your standard differently, the same thing could truly be said to be “small” or “cold,” relatively to the new standard. This applies even to existential propositions. You cannot say absolutely “this is,” any more than you can say “this is so.” You can only say “this is, is real” relatively to something else. For the very word “is” is a misnomer. The things we speak of as “existing” are really events which “happen” as a consequence of movements; movement is the only thing which is ultimately real in the universe, as
Before we can judge such a theory on its merits we need a further clarification of our thoughts. On the “private-world” theory, six dice will not only “appear” but “be” at once “many” and “few”: “many,” if a group of four is my standard of comparison, “few” if my standard is a dozen. Reflection on such cases leads us irresistibly to make three affirmations which seem to be self-evident and yet not all mutually compatible: (1) nothing can become greater in bulk or number except by being augmented
Yet the case of the dice, or the case in which Socrates is one year taller than Theaetetus but the next shorter, seems to create a difficulty. In this last case, Theaetetus has grown, but Socrates has neither grown nor shrunk. He is now, what he was not last year, “shorter,” and yet there has been no process of “coming to be shorter.” How are we to explain the paradox? We cannot explain it at all to a corporealist who denies the reality of acts and processes and the invisible generally. But it might be explained y the theory of certain more refined (κομψότεροι) persons, whose secret Socrates offers to disclose (156a). Their theory is this. As has been already suggested, the only reality is motion. There are two types of motion, the active and the passive. The mutual friction or interference (τριψις) of an active and a passive motion regularly gives rise to a twin product, “sense” + “sensible quality” and neither of these is ever to be found without its “twin.” And this twin product is itself, again, a pair of movements, though of movements more rapid than those which gave rise to it. Thus, to apply the theory to the case of vision, you have first two “slower” causative “movements” (the “active” movement here is supposed to be the “event” which is the visual apparatus, the “passive” is the event we call the environment); when there is an “interference” of these two motions, in that very process there emerge two correlated “quicker” movements, neither of which ever exists without the other,
Thus the couple “seeing eye” and “colour seen” are themselves a dual more “rapid” event produced as an effect by the mutual interference of the two “slower” causal movements. It follows that all predication is strictly relative. The “causal” motions themselves are strictly relative to one another, each is “active” or “passive” only in relation to its correlate; and similarly in the “effect” the seen colour is seen only by this “seeing eye,” and this “seeing eye” sees only this colour. “Being” is thus a strictly relative term. To speak accurately, we ought never to say “x is,” but “x is, relatively to y”; if we omit the qualification, it is only because of an inveterate linguistic bad habit. Socrates does not
We note that the difference between the Protagorean formula and the doctrine now given as that of certain unnamed “fine wits” is that the first is a piece of “epistemology,” the second is ontology, and professes to give the grounds for the individualistic or “solipsist” epistemology. The proposition that my perceived world only exists for me, and that it is meaningless to ask whether your “world” and “mine” can contain one and the same object, is only one special consequence of the much more far-reaching doctrine that “is” itself has no meaning unless one adds the qualification “relatively to.” It is now being asserted not merely that perceived qualities only exist “for” the percipient who is aware of them, and he is only “percipient” of just these qualities, but that the correlated active and passive “slower” movements, thing and environment, only are relatively to one another. (Thus, e.g., the statement that a particle A exists would actually mean that A interacts in a certain way with B and C, and so on for B and C themselves.) This is why the doctrine described here cannot be disposed of in the summary way in which Mr. Bradley has disposed of the “phenomenalism” of many modern scientific men in Appearance and Reality. The persons of whom Mr. Bradley is thinking have really not got behind the restricted doctrine of the “relativity” of perceived quality to percipient. At the back of their minds there is still the notion that both percipient and perceived quality are effects of something which, though not itself perceived, is, or is real in an absolute sense, and thus they are easily convicted of inconsistency with themselves. But the theory we are now dealing with asserts that the “slower motions,” assumed by the victims of Mr. Bradley’s dialectic to be simply “real,” are themselves purely relative, each such “active” motion being relative to a specific “passive” motion and vice versa. It is thus not open to the criticism that it regards anything whatever, perceptible or imperceptible, as simply real; “this is real” is, on this view, always an incomplete statement which, as it stands, is strictly devoid of significance.
It is not clear from what quarter Socrates is supposed to have learned the theory. He is clearly not inventing it, since he represents it as the “secret” of certain refined wits. Nor do I think it likely that Plato has devised the whole thing for himself simply as a metaphysic which might be urged, and in fact would have to be urged, by a far-seeing defender of the Protagorean formula. The insistence on motion as the only reality at once suggests a Heraclitean influence, and the elaborate kinematic working out of the thought further suggests that the κομψοί (fashionable) of whom Socrates is thinking are persons with a strong mathematical interest. If we had more information than we have about the curious blend of
With this general metaphysical theory as a presupposition, we could now dispose of the superficial objection to Protagoras that some “appearances”—those of dreams, delirium, fever—are deceptive. The world of the sleeper or the fever-patient is as real to him, while his dream or fever lasts, as the world of the man awake and in health is to him. And it is not true to say that there is any conflict between the way in which the world appears to one and the same percipient, according as he is awake or asleep, ill or well. On the theory, the “twin-product,” sensation + sensed quality is a function of the complex, organism + environment. But it is an immediate consequence that, since a sleeping or delirious organism is different from a waking or healthy organism, the result of interaction with environment must be different. Socrates asleep is different from Socrates awake in important organic respects, and, on the theory we are considering there is no “self” or “percipient” but the organism as it is at the moment. Thus the sensa of Socrates asleep are real relatively to Socrates asleep, exactly as those of Socrates awake are real relatively to Socrates awake, and it would be abandoning the whole theory of the relativity of “being” to judge of the reality of the sensa of Socrates asleep by reference to those of Socrates awake (157e-160c). The sensa of any percipient organism at any moment are relative to the state of that organism at that moment, and to nothing else, just as that organism at that moment is relative to those sensa and to nothing else. (The esse of the organism at the moment t, we may say, is to perceive the sensa it perceives at that moment; the esse of those sensa is to be perceived by it at that moment; neither organism nor sensa have any further reality.) Consequently the “world” of any percipient at any moment is private to that percipient and that moment. “My perception is inerrant, for it is relative to my world (ἐμὴ οὐσία) at that moment.”
If we are to press mere verbal points, any
Socrates’ Proposed Defense of Protagoras (166a-168c). Protagoras might fairly say that he would not have been affected by the question about memory which puzzled a lad like Theaetetus. He would have exposed the absurdity of talking about memory as if it meant the “persistence” of the state of the organism in which it was at the moment of stimulation. He would have insisted on the point that, according to his theory, each of us is not one percipient but a different percipient with every change in the state of his organism. And he would have urged that it is for his opponent to refute him directly by proving either that a man’s “senses” (αἴσθησις) are not private to himself, or, alternatively, that, granting this position, the sense-object which “appears” or “is” need not be private.
Meanwhile, the thesis of Protagoras remains untouched. Each percipient has his own strictly personal and private world; it is not merely his “apparent” world, but a real, though private, world. And yet there is a difference between the wise man and his neighbors, a practical difference. The wise man is one who can influence another so that the other man’s private world, which appears and really is bad, is made to appear and be good (166d). Thus the abnormal perceptions of the diseased organism are as much a disclosure of reality as the normal perceptions of the healthy. The physician does not attempt to argue the patient into denying their reality. He subjects the patient to a regimen which brings his perceptions into accord with those of his fellow-men, and thus makes them “wholesome” or ”useful,” whereas they were, before treatment, dangerous and unwholesome. So the “sophist,” who is the physician of the soul, aims not at giving a pupil “truer views”—that would be impossible, if the pupil is the “measure” of his own real world—but at giving him “better” and more wholesome views of life (166d-167c). The defense made by Socrates for Protagoras thus amounts to crediting him with a “pragmatist” view. Any one belief, actually held, is as “true” as any other, but some sensations and some ways of thinking are “better” that is, “more useful his practice” than others. It is implied, though not actually said, that the “useful” way of perceiving and thinking is that
Since Socrates offers this interpretation as a substitute for an “official” exegesis, it is clear that it cannot have been given by Protagoras himself; since it is welcomed by Protagoras’ old admirer Theodoras, we may infer that it is offered as a fair and honest attempt to explain what Protagoras meant, on the assumption that he was a man of intelligence and that his doctrine was intended to be compatible with his claims for himself as a practical teacher. So far as I can see, it is not only offered in good faith, but is about the best defense which can be made for the view that the “common” world is strictly the creation of the “intersubjective intercourse” on which all practical co-operation depends. Against modern statements of pragmatism it has the advantage that it does not attempt the task of equating “true” with “practically useful”; it simply sets aside the distinction between “true” and “false” as irrelevant to human life, and replaces it by the obviously relevant distinction between “useful” and “harmful.” Our attention is thus concentrated on the fundamental question whether the abolition of the distinction of true from false really leaves this all-important practical distinction between useful and harmful standing or not. This ultimate issue is so serious that we cannot allow the case for the pragmatist to be prejudiced by being left to the championship of a boy, even if he is, like Theaetetus, a boy of genius; Theodoras must take the defense on himself (168c-169e).
Digression. The Contemplative Life (172c-176c). How far the pragmatist criterion is from being self-evident or universally accepted we may see by contrasting the whole attitude towards life of the philosopher or true man of science with that of the “man of affairs,” and the man of law. The former is free where the latter is a slave,
But from the philosopher’s point of view, the brilliant practical man is equally absurd. Take him away from the field of small personal concerns and set him to think about the ultimate issues of life, what are right and wrong, what are human happiness and misery, and how is the one to be found and the other shunned—in a word, take him out of the realm of the temporal into the eternal, and he is helpless in “discourse,” for all his forensic “acumen.”
This conflict between opposing standards of valuation is inherent in “mortality,” and that is the very reason why the man who means to be happy must make it his supreme aim to “escape” from mortality. The only way of escape is “to become assimilated
The whole passage recalls, and is obviously meant to recall, the spiritual mood and even the phraseology of the Gorgias and Phaedo. But its connexion with the present argument is loose, and hardly amounts to more than this, that the worldly man’s estimate of the philosopher and the philosopher’s estimate of him furnish the best proof that there is no single accepted standard of valuation. The most natural way of accounting for the presence of the digression is that of Burnet, that it is an expression of the mood in which Plato is contemplating his own coming absorption in the necessarily largely uncongenial mundane life of the Syracusan court. The ideal of the world-renouncing pure “scientist” had never been his own; his early ambitions had been definitely political, and his mature conviction was that the gifts of the philosopher ought to be consecrated to the work of practical administration, but we can readily understand that he would have a keen sense of the sacrifice he was making to public duty and the pettiness of the personalities and problems with which he was now called to mix himself up (Greek Philosophy, Part I pp. 244-5). It would be a bad mistake, though the mistake has been made, to find in so splendid a passage a polemic against the aims of his older rival Isocrates. Whatever the limitations of Isocrates were, Plato must have sympathized with his attempt to give his pupils at least a broader and nobler outlook on the problems of public life than that of the mere party-man of a little Greek πόλις; the whole picture of the “man of affairs” who is pitted against the philosopher suggests in its details an admirer of Antiphon or Thrasymachus rather than a figure from the school of Isocrates, the last place where the cult of “successful unrighteousness” would be likely to be in favour.
Second Criticism of the Protagorean Thesis Concluded (176c-179b). To return—We had just said that though the thinkers who identify reality with change and those who teach that “what appears to anyone is for him the reality,” are ready enough to extend these formulae to right and wrong, no one seriously contends that what a city agrees to regard as good or useful must really be so, so long as the agreement continues. Everyone recognizes that what is really good or profitable is so independently of the beliefs which may be entertained about it. Now this suggests a generalization of the problem raised by the saying of Protagoras. When a city makes regulations to ensure good or advantage, it is acting with a view to the future. So we may ask, granting that the Homo mensura formula is valid for convictions about the present,
Final Refutation of the Identification of Knowledge with Sense-perception (179d-186e). The complete examination of the theory that actual present sense-perception is knowledge demands a consideration of the already mentioned metaphysical theory that nothing is real but movement. We cannot get any coherent statement of the grounds for this theory from its official representatives, the Heracliteans, who disdain connected exposition and affect to speak in cryptic aphorisms; we must try what we can make of the doctrine for ourselves (179e-180c). We must remember, too, that Melissus and Parmenides maintain the very opposite—that what is is one and unmoving. A complete examination would involve studying the views both of the “men of flux” (the ρέοντες) and of the “faction of the one-and-all“” (the του ὅλος στασιωται); it might end by carrying us over into one of the camps, or by leaving us in the comically presumptuous position of standing alone against both parties. Still we must make the venture, and we will begin by considering the Heraclitean view (180c-181b).
Everything is always in motion: what is the precise sense of this? There are two easily distinguishable types of “motion”: (a) one which includes translation and rotation, which we will call locomotion (φορά); (b) another illustrated by the transition from youth to age, from black to white, from hard to soft; we will call it alteration (ἀλλοίωσις). Is it meant, then, that everything is at every moment changing both its position and its quality, or only that each thing is at every moment exhibiting one or other of these changes? If the statement that there is no rest or stability in the world at all is meant strictly, we must take the former interpretation. Nothing ever keeps the same quality for the tiniest interval, any more than it retains the same position (181e). Otherwise there would be some sort of stability about things.
Socrates now enters on a line of thought which is by far the most important contribution the dialogue has as yet made to the solution of its problem. He calls attention to the, so far neglected, distinction between sensation and thought, or judgment. We can point out the bodily instruments which a man uses in seeing, hearing, touching. He sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and so forth. Or to be still more accurate, since it is always the man, that is his ψυχή, which sees and hears, we should do well to say rather that he sees and hears through his eyes and ears (184d).
If we try to make a list of the determinations of an object which are thus made “without any bodily organ,” we have to reckon among them not only “reality” (οὐσία), number, sameness, difference, likeness and unlikeness, but good and bad, right and wrong (186a). Thus the ultimate categories of value, like those of “fact,” are apprehended by thought, not by sense. In fact, they are asserted as the result of reflection, comparison, and discrimination: this explains why animals are as capable of sensation as men, and babies as adults (186c), but sound convictions about “reality and value” (οὐσία and ὠφέλεια) are only attained by us with time and pains and education. Now we cannot have knowledge without apprehension of a “reality” (οὐσία) which is known. Hence it follows that “knowledge” is not to be sought for in the affections of our sensibility (τοις παθήμασι) but in the mind’s reflection upon them (ἐν τω περὶ ἐκείνων, 186d). And this finally proves that knowledge is not the same thing as sensation (ibid. b).
Second Definition: Knowledge Is True Judgment (187b-200c). The common name for the process of reflection, comparison, and discrimination to which the occurrence of our sensations gives rise is “belief” or “judgment” (δόξα, τὸ δοξάζειν). The word δόξα is being used here in a way characteristic of Plato’s later dialogues. In his earlier writing δόξα had commonly been thought of as contrasted with ἐπιστήμη; it had meant “belief,” with the implication that the belief is a mistaken one, or at any rate a doubtful one; in our dialogue, and henceforward, the meaning is judgment, intellectual conviction in general, without any suggestion of disparagement. This is one of the many indications that a chief difference
If we are to examine the truth of this statement, we must begin by considering the difficulty suggested by the old arguments which have been used to show that a false judgment is impossible. The old argument, which we have met in the Euthydemus, was that either you know what you are judging about or you do not. If you do know, you cannot judge falsely; and if you do not, you cannot make any judgment at all, because your mind is a mere blank about that of which you “know nothing.” The point has now to be considered elaborately with a view to discovering the specific character of true judgments. If a man knows both A and B, it would seem that he cannot mistake one for the other; if he knows A but not B, how can he compare A with the merely unknown? If both A and B are unknown, is not the impossibility of a confusion even greater (188a-c). Perhaps we may avoid these difficulties if we say that a false judgment is a belief in “what is not” (188d), thus avoiding all reference to “knowing” in our definition.
But the “unreal” (τὸ μὴ ὄν), it may be said, is just nothing at all, and you can no more think and yet think nothing than you can see and yet see nothing. To think or believe is always to think or believe something; to think nothing is all one with not thinking at all. (Just as Parmenides had long ago declared that “what is not” can neither be thought nor spoken of.) This consideration leads us to try a third explanation of what we mean by a false judgment. We mean thinking that one reality (one ὄν) is some other reality, thinking that something is other than it is (ἀλλοδοξία) (mistaking one thing for another); false thinking is thus the mental confusion of one reality with another (189c), e.g. thinking that “fair is foul and foul is fair.” In the Sophistes we shall find that this is the true account of the matter and can be successfully defended against the Eleatic dialectic. But the defense will depend on recognizing that the Eleatic metaphysic itself requires a grave modification; there is a sense in which “the unreal” can be both thought and spoken of. In our dialogue Socrates is not allowed to probe the question to the bottom; he has already explained that he is not prepared at present to examine Eleaticism as a metaphysical theory. He contents himself therefore with raising the question within what limits the “confusion” of one reality with another would seem to be possible.
We may represent the process figuratively thus. There is something in each of us like a wax block prepared to receive the “impressions” of signets of all kinds; the quality of the wax is very different in different persons. We may regard sensation as a process in which an object stamps an impression of itself on the wax (the whole of the traditional language about “impressions” and “ideas” is ultimately derived from this passage).
How definite this impress is and how long it will remain undeformed depends on the original quality of the wax. So long as the impress remains, we may say that a man has memory and knowledge (191d). Now consider the case of a man who “knows” the impresses left on the block, and at the same time is attending to his present sensations. We may say that the confusion with which we have identified error can only arise in one specific way. If I “know” both Theodorus and Theaetetus and am simply thinking about one of them, I cannot confuse him with the other. If I “know” only one of them, I cannot confuse him in thought with the other, who is wholly unknown to me. If I neither “know” nor am
On reflection, however, this theory proves to be unsatisfactory in spite of its attractiveness. For it is not the fact that all error is misinterpretation of present sensation. A man may falsely think that 7+5 = 11, and most men do make arithmetical errors of this kind in operating with big numbers. And they do not make such mistakes only when they are counting things present to their senses, but when they are simply thinking of numbers and numerical relations. Thus error (and by consequence true judgment) cannot be restricted to the interpretation of present sensations. There may be false (and also true) judgments where the “sensible” does not figure as a constituent of the judgment at all (195d-196b). Thus our simile of the waxen block has not done what we hoped it would for us. (It has the merit of taking into account the facts of learning and forgetting, ignored in the crude old argument against the possibility of “false beliefs,” but it leaves the possibility of sheer intellectual error where it found it.
To cover the case of purely intellectual error we must amend our account of ἀλλοδοξία, and this may be done if we borrow a hint from a current statement about knowledge. (It is true that a mere “disputant for victory” would deny our right to use any such statement while we are still in quest of a definition of knowledge, but the fault, if it is one, is inevitable, and we have committed
Clearly the new suggestion has advanced the argument. As Socrates says, the distinction between knowledge in possession and knowledge in use has relieved us of the old difficulty that false judgment seems to involve both knowing and not knowing the same thing; there is no difficulty in admitting that a man “possesses” what he cannot lay his hand on. We may add (1) that a comparison of “beliefs” with living creatures is psychologically much sounder than the old comparison with “impresses” made once for all on a block of wax; judgment is a living process, not the mere retention of a stamp left on the mind once for all; (2) that the distinction made here is the starting-point for the more extended antithesis of “potentiality” and “actuality”
But there is still a grave unsolved difficulty. Error is now said to be due to a wrong “use” of knowledge which we already have in possession. If this is so, a man’s knowledge is the direct source of his false judgments; he only confuses A with B because he possesses “knowledge” of them both. At this rate, might we not equally say that error may be the cause of knowledge, or blindness of vision? (This difficulty is perhaps not meant to be taken wholly
Theaetetus suggests that we might elude this difficulty by modifying our image. We might say that there are “ignorances” as well as “pieces of knowledge” in the aviary, and that the man who makes a false judgment is putting his hand on an “ignorance.” But if that is so, since he really believes his false judgment, he must suppose the “ignorance” to be a piece of knowledge. And this gives an opening to the eristic for raising the old problem once more. Can a man who knows what knowledge and ignorance are confuse one with the other? And if he does not know what both are, how can he confuse something he knows with something of which he is quite unaware, or one thing of which he is unaware with another of which he is equally unaware? If we try to meet our opponent by suggesting that there is a “knowledge of the difference between knowledge and ignorance” which is a sort of knowledge of the second order, and that false judgment arises from inability to put one’s hand on this knowledge, we shall clearly be involved in an impossible “infinite regress” (200c). Thus the point which Socrates is labouring is the sound one that it is impossible to have a psychological criterion of true and false beliefs.
Independently of this impossibility of a criterion, there is an obvious objection to the identification of knowledge with a “true belief.” A man may be induced to hold a belief which in fact is true not by proof but by persuasive dexterous special pleading.
Third Definition: Knowledge Is “True Judgment Accompanied by Discourse” (201d-210d). Possibly the difficulty just raised may be turned. As Theaetetus says, he had forgotten to specify that a true judgment, to be
The analogy from letters and syllables is specious, but we must examine it more closely. It is true that the first syllable of Socrates’ name, the syllable So, has a certain λόγος. You can say that it is S and o the letter S has no such λόγος. You can make statements about it, e.g. that it is a “hissing” sound, but you cannot explain the sound by analysing it into components. But now arises a difficult question. Is the syllable So simply the sounds or signs S and o, taken in that order, or is it a new unity of a type different from that of its “component” sounds or symbols? If you take the first view, that So is just “S and o,” then it seems ridiculous to say that a man can “know” “S and o,” and yet neither know S nor know o. On the second view, So is itself a unity, and has not really S and o as “constituent” parts. Hence the syllable should, like the single letter, be an object of simple apprehension, and therefore, on the proposed definition, not an object of knowledge (202d-205e). Besides, the experience of our own early schooldays seems to show that we learned to recognize syllables simply by learning to recognize the letters of which they are composed; this tells forcibly against the view that “syllables” can be known when their component “letters” are not known (206a-c).
Apart from the question of the soundness of this analogy from letters and syllables, what may we suppose to be meant by λόγος (“discourse”) in the statement that knowledge is “a true judgment” accompanied by discourse? Three, and only three, possible meanings occur to us. (a) “discourse” may mean actual uttered speech made up of nouns and verbs. This, however, cannot be the meaning intended, for any true judgment can be expressed in speech, even if it is not entitled to rank as knowledge (206d). (b) Or the meaning might be a complete enumeration of the component “parts” of the thing thought about. Hesiod says that a hundred planks go to a wagon. You and I cannot name more than a few of them: is it meant, then, that we have only a “…”true judgment“…” about a wagon, but should know what a wagon is, if we could name all the hundred? The objection to this interpretation is that we cannot say that a man really knows a complex unless he can recognize its components not merely as components of that
This account looks as though it ought to be true, but when you examine it closely it is as perplexing as theatrical stage-paintings seen from close quarters. How can I have a “true judgment” about Theaetetus at all, if I am not alive to the distinctive individual characters which mark off Theaetetus from every one else? If I am unaware of them, how can my judgment be said to be about Theaetetus rather than about Theodoras or any man you please? Thus it would seem that to make a true judgment about Theaetetus, I must already have the differentia of Theaetetus in mind. Then what is added when this true judgment is converted into knowledge by the addition of the “discourse” of the differentia? It cannot be meant that we are to add a “true judgment” of the differentia to our existing true judgment, for we must clearly have possessed that in order to make a true judgment about Theaetetus. And to say that what is meant is that we reach knowledge when we not merely think but actually know the differentia amounts to the circular definition that “knowledge is true judgment plus knowledge of the differentia” (208c-210e).
Thus our dialogue of search ends formally with a negative conclusion. Three suggestions have been made and all found untenable. Theaetetus has no further suggestion of which to be delivered. If he should ever find himself pregnant with any further suggestions in future, we must examine them in the same fashion. It is not the function of Socrates to make any positive contribution to knowledge, and besides it is time that he went to the “…”king’s“…” office to make his formal reply to the indictment preferred by Meletus (210b-d).
The Theaetetus has thus been true to type as a Socratic dialogue in ending with no avowed results. But negatively we have reached a series of results of the highest importance. We have disposed of the identification of knowledge with sensation or any form of simple apprehension. We have also seen that pure relativism is untenable alike in the theory of knowledge and in metaphysics. It may be added that it has been at least forcibly suggested by the tenor of the whole argument that all the proposed definitions have failed precisely because each of them has attempted to provide a psychological criterion of knowledge, and no such psychological criterion is possible. The most important positive
Possibly the most striking feature of the whole dialogue is its silence on a matter about which we should have expected to hear something. Plato has written a long and elaborate discussion of knowledge without making a single reference to the doctrine of forms, though we might have thought it almost impossible for him to keep it out of the argument against relativism. A similar silence may be said to occur in all the dialogues we still have to examine. The forms are mentioned only in two of them: the Parmenides, where the doctrine is said to be that of Socrates in his early years and is criticised by Parmenides and Zeno, and the Timaeus, where it is put into the mouth of a fifth-century Pythagorean. I do not see how to account for these facts on the view that Plato had himself originated the doctrine and regarded it as his special contribution to philosophy. If we trust his own accounts of the matter, we shall find it most natural to suppose that in the earlier dialogues, which speak of the forms, Plato has not yet developed a doctrine which he feels to be specifically his own; he is reproducing the common inheritance of Socratic men. If that is so, the silence about the forms in the Theaetetus may mean either that when he wrote that dialogue he was feeling the necessity for a “Platonic” doctrine which had not yet been definitely worked out, or else that he had already arrived at the results Aristotle always assumes to be the Platonic teaching, and felt that they were so definitely his own that dramatic verisimilitude would be outraged by putting them into the mouth of Socrates.
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I, 234-253.
Campbell, L. The Theaetetus of Plato 2. Oxford, 1883.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 96-120; Gedankengang und Grundan schauungen on Platos Theatet in appendix to Untersuch ungen ueber Platon. Stuttgart, 1888.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 279-297.
Diels, H. Elementum. Leipzig, 1899.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, 450-452.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 65-68.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 88-116.
Sachs, E. de Theaeteto Atheniensi. 1914.
It is most probable that the Parmenides and the Theaetetus were composed almost simultaneously. The Parmenides cannot well be a decidedly earlier work than the other, since it exhibits the same interest in Eleaticism and its great founder Parmenides; it cannot well be later, since it is the best example in Plato of that cumbrousness of the indirectly reported dialogue form which is mentioned in the Theaetetus as the reason for return to the simpler type of the earliest dialogues. Indeed, it may well be that it was just the difficulty of keeping up in the Parmenides the fiction that the whole is recited by a speaker to whom it had been formerly recited by a second person, who in his turn had heard it from a third, which led Plato to renounce this type of composition for the future. It had been useful so long as his purpose had been largely dramatic, but was found to be worse than useless for works in which the main interest lies in the analysis and criticism of ideas.
The dialogue has always been regarded as an exceptionally puzzling one, and the most divergent views have been held about its main purpose. Yet if we attend to certain plain hints, given by Plato himself, we may find that his object is indicated with unusual clearness. The general scheme of the dialogue is this. It falls into two parts of unequal length. In the first and briefer part (126a-135c) Socrates is represented as a very young man expounding his newly formulated theory of the “participation” of sensible things in forms to the great Parmenides and his famous scholar Zeno; Parmenides subjects the theory to a series of criticisms which look annihilating and to which Socrates offers no reply. Still he maintains that philosophy cannot dispense with the conception of the forms. The weakness of Socrates is that, being very young, he is attempting to philosophize without a sufficient logical discipline in considering all the consequences which follow from the acceptance or denial of a fundamental “hypothesis.” In the second part of the dialogue (136a-166c), Parmenides illustrates the kind of logical discipline he has in mind by taking for examination his own thesis that “Reality is One” or that “Things are a Unity.” He apparently shows in a series of antithetical “antinomies” that whether this thesis is affirmed or denied, the consequence is that a host of pairs of contradictory
Now it is quite certain that Plato never dreamed of denying the law of Contradiction; Aristotle would certainly have said something on the point if that had been so.
We get a clue to Plato’s real drift when he makes Parmenides say (135d) that the method of which he is about to give an example is that of Zeno, the inventor of “antinomies.” This remark is clearly meant to send us back to the earlier sentences (128c-d) in which Zeno has been made to explain the real intention of his own famous puzzles. His purpose, he says, was simply to retort on opponents who said that the Parmenidean doctrine “reality is one” leads to paradoxical conclusions by showing that their rival “hypothesis” that “reality is many” leads to still worse paradoxes. If we interpret the Parmenides, as we clearly ought to do, in the light of these broad hints, we shall see that it is constructed on the same pattern as the paradoxes of Zeno. A series of attempts to show that the Socratic “hypothesis” of forms leads to impossible results is retorted upon by an elaborate attempt to show that the Eleatic hypothesis is in still worse case. It is not safe even to mention it, for whether you assert it or deny it, in either case a clever formal logician can compel you to admit either that all assertions whatsoever are true or alternatively that they are all false.
It follows then that the objections urged against the doctrine of sensible things as “partaking of” forms are not Plato’s own, and are not meant as a serious criticism by himself either of Socrates or of his own earlier theories. They correspond to the objections against Parmenides which Zeno had in view in composing his own work. In other words, we are directed to regard these criticisms as coming from opponents of the theory of “participation.” And since Plato’s imitation of the Zenonian method takes the form of raising still worse puzzles about the consequences of the Eleatic doctrine, it is clear who these opponents must be. We must look for them among the formal logicians of the school of Megara who were the continuators of Eleaticism. It is in strict keeping with this interpretation that the main point of the objections made by Parmenides to Socrates is not to raise difficulties about the reality of the forms. That he seems to concede. What he criticises is
If this is the right way to understand the dialogue, and Plato seems to tell us that it is, it follows that the Parmenides is, all through, an elaborate jeu d’esprit, and that all interpretations based on taking it for anything else (including an earlier one by the present writer), are mistaken in principle. It equally follows that the ironical spirit of the work must not be forgotten in dealing with isolated passages. E.g., when Parmenides gravely censures Socrates for refusing to believe in forms of mud and dirt, and says that he will get the better of such a prejudice when he grows older and more philosophical (130e), we must understand the remark to be a piece of polite irony. In Parmenides’ mouth, it can only mean that a man who is going to admit any kind of reality in sensible things ought to be prepared to “go the whole hog” and nothing more. Presumably the remark is a reproduction of actual Megarian criticism. It tells us nothing of Plato’s own thought. More than any other Platonic work of any considerable compass, the Parmenides bears throughout the stamp of being an “occasional” composition. Its purpose is to “have some fun” with Monists who regard the sensible as illusion, and very little more.
There are several interesting points to be noted in connexion with the introductory narrative. The otherwise unknown speaker, Cephalus, who recites the dialogue, is a citizen of Clazomenae, the native town of Anaxagoras. It is not said where he is speaking or to whom, but apparently the scene is in one of the Ionian cities. The assumption is that he had gone to Athens expressly to learn the true story of the meeting between Socrates and the great Eleatics from the only surviving person who could relate it, Plato’s own half-brother Antiphon, son of Perictione by her second husband, the well-known statesman Pyrilampes. Antiphon could tell the tale accurately because he had often heard it when he was younger, from Pythodorus. (The person meant is the well-known Pythodorus, son of Isolochus, prominent in the Archidamian war, whom the writer of the Alcibiades I names as an actual pupil of Zeno.) Pythodorus had been the host of Parmenides and Zeno on their visit to Athens at the time of the great Panathenaea in a year when Socrates was still “very young.” It follows from all this that we are to suppose the meeting of Socrates with the Eleatic
Why does Plato make this unparalleled assumption that a conversation of Socrates is being repeated outside Athens, after Socrates’ death and a good half-century after the holding of the conversation? Clearly, by insisting on the early date of the conversation, and the fact that no one is living who could check the third-hand report of what passed, he frees himself from responsibility for the strict accuracy of his narrative. If we find the conversation so à propos to present-day Megarianism, well, we only know what Socrates and Parmenides said from a second-hand story told by Antiphon, a younger man than Plato himself, and who will go bail for Antiphon? I think it ought also to be said that the tale of the anxiety of the Ionian philosophers to hear Antiphon’s story justifies an inference. Why the lonians of Asia Minor should feel this interest is obvious. They would be members of the school founded in Ionia by Anaxagoras on his removal from Athens; Socrates, the favourite pupil of Anaxagoras’ successor Archelaus, would in any case be an object of interest to such a group. That Plato thinks it a plausible fiction that their interest should lead them to visit Athens in order to gather a true account of events fifty years old seems only explicable on the supposition that the encounter of Socrates with the great Eleatics was a real historical fact and, for philosophical circles, a memorable one, as an encounter between two great chess-players or gamblers is memorable for persons interested in chess or gaming.
The situation at the opening of the conversation is this. Zeno has just been reading aloud his famous work containing the antinomies for which he is still remembered. Socrates fastens on one of them, an argument which has not survived and of which the precise sense is uncertain, to the effect that “if things are many, they must be like and must also be unlike, but this is absurd,” as an example of the rest. He proposes to regard the whole work as intended to establish the thesis of Parmenides by disproving its contradictory. Parmenides says “reality is one,“ Zeno that “reality is not many.” Zeno accepts the statement with the minor correction that his object was not to prove the Parmenidean thesis, but simply to silence its critics by showing that their own rival “hypothesis” has even more impossible consequences than those they urge against Parmenides (127d-128e). Socrates then suggests that if we will only accept the doctrine of forms and the participation of things in forms, there is really no paradox in saying that the same “things” may “partake” at once of the form of likeness and of that of unlikeness, and so be at once like and unlike. But it would be a real and intolerable paradox (τέρας) to hold that
I may summarize these arguments the more briefly that they are admirably dealt with by Professor Burnet in Greek Philosophy, Part I, 253-264, and other writers on the philosophy of Plato. I have attempted a complete discussion of their weight and derivation elsewhere in “Parmenides, Zeno, and Socrates,” Philosophical Studies, pp. 28-90, whither I may refer a reader desirous of further information.
Parmenides begins by raising the question what precisely is the content of the world of forms. Socrates professes himself certain that there are forms corresponding to the fundamental notions of ethics—Right (δίκαιον), Good (αγαθόν), Noble (καλόν); he is doubtful about forms of organisms and physical things (Man, Fire, Water); in the case of such things as mud, dirt, hair—i.e.
The theory then is that all the “particulars” of which a common predicate is affirmed owe their possession of that predicate to their “participation” in the corresponding form, and Parmenides sets himself to show that, however we understand this relation of “participation,” we are led to consequences which are logically absurd. This is exactly the line of reasoning adopted by Zeno for the confutation of the Pythagorean mathematicians who assume that “reality is many.” The argument may be analysed as follows:
(a) If a form is “in” each of a number of things, either the whole of it is “in” each of them, or only part of it is “in” each. In the first case the form itself being as a whole “in” each of several separate things is “outside” itself (i.e. it is, after all, many and not one, contrary to the Socratic thesis of its unity). In the second case, the form is divisible (μεριστόν), and thus becomes many by division just as, on the alternative view, it becomes many by multiplication; the whole form is thus “in” no one of the things called after it, and thus they are not really entitled to the “common name” (131a-e). Thus we have an apparent reductio ad absurdum of the “hypothesis” of “participation”; it permits of only two alternative interpretations and you are led, by a slightly different route, to the same denial of the hypothesis itself, whichever alternative you adopt. The hypothesis is thus “self-refuting.” (The precise meaning of the reasoning by which the second of the alternatives is refuted in the special case of the form “magnitude” is obscure, but seems to be this. If you say that one thing is bigger than another in virtue of the presence in it of a ”part” of the form of “magnitude,” less than the whole of the form, you are maintaining in effect that there is such a relation as “not quite bigger than.” Thus you are committed to holding that, e.g., if A and B are segments of a straight line, the relation between them may be that A is “not quite longer” than, or “nearly longer” than B, and this is manifestly nonsense. So, in the case of the form of “smallness,” you are committed to the view that it would be significant to say that “A is nearly smaller than B, but not quite
(b) The reason and the only reason for Socrates’ doctrine is the assumption that when several things have a common predicate, it is assumed that there is a single determinate reality (the form) denoted by this predicate. But it ought to follow that, since the common predicate can be affirmed of the form itself, there must be a second form “present” alike to the first form and the things which “participate” in it, and similarly, by the same reason, a third, and so on in indefinitum. Thus there must be no one single form of, e.g., magnitude, but a simply infinite series of forms of magnitude; thus, once more, the Socratic theory is shown to be self-refuting, and again it is the asserted “presence” of forms to things which has created the difficulty (132a-b).
In strict logic this reasoning is not conclusive, since it turns on a confusion between a predication and the assertion of an identity. E.g. David and Jonathan are a pair of friends, Orestes and Pylades are another pair. Both pairs have something in common, the cardinal number 2, which is the number of the members of each. But the number 2 is not itself a pair; it is a number, and cannot be said to have a number. Since Plato’s object is merely to rehearse the objections of Eleatics to the Socratic doctrine in order to over-trump them by showing that their own methods can be turned with even more effect against their own theories, we need not suppose that he was unaware of this logical flaw, though he has no occasion to expose it. He had already made Socrates himself in the Republic (597c) remark in passing that if you once surrender the absolute unity of the form by admitting that there can be two forms of the same thing, you are committed to the “infinite regress.” We may reasonably infer that this kind of reasoning was already current in Socrates’ own lifetime, not invented for the first time after his death by Eleatic critics of the positions ascribed to him in the Platonic dialogues. Hence I think it unlikely that this particular difficulty has anything to do with the difficulty urged, as Alexander of Aphrodisias tells us, by Polyxenus the Megarian against the doctrine of “participation.” As I understand the statements of Alexander, the point of Polyxenus was that on the Platonic theory there ought to be not only visible men, like Socrates and Plato, and a form of man, but also a “third” man, intermediate between the two, exactly as, on the Platonic theory itself, there are certain “mathematical objects” intermediate between the form of
(c) At this point Socrates suggests a way of escape from the difficulty about the unity of the form. How if a form is really a “thought” (νόημα) and therefore is not “in” things at all, but “in our minds” (ἐν ψυχαις)? We could then maintain its unity without exposing ourselves to either of the lines of argument (a) and (b). Parmenides, however, has a reply based on the principle which is employed in his own poem as the foundation of his criticism of all his precursors. You cannot think without thinking of something—that is, of something real (to think of nothing would be equivalent to not thinking at all); this something is some one determinate thing which “that thought thinks, as being there in all the instances.” In other words, what the thought thinks is always a form. (E.g., when you think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, you think some definite predicate about them, such as, e.g., that they are all men, and thus we are back at our old position. You are thinking of man as a form “present” to the three.) What then, on this view that a form is a thought, can the “presence” of the form to the thing mean? Does it mean that a thing is a complex of thoughts and that everything thinks? Or would you admit that there are “thoughts which do not think”? (132b-c).
Once more, the difficulty is one not about the reality of the form but about the possibility of the “presence” of it to something
(d) Socrates next falls back on what Aristotle regarded as the Pythagorean formula for the relation between form and thing. The form is an archetype or model (ωαράδειγμα), the other things called by its name are likenesses (ὁμοιώμασατα) of it, so that the relation between sensible thing and form is that the “thing” is a
As before, the difficulty really arises from a fallacy. As Proclus rightly says, the relation of copy to original is not simply one of likeness. (It is in fact a relation of resemblance + derivation, and this relation is not symmetrical. My reflection in the glass is a reflection of my face, but my face is not a reflection of it.) It should be specially remarked that the suggestion that the relation between form and “thing” is one of “likeness” is not offered as an alternative to the doctrine of “participation,” but as a further specification of its precise meaning (132d 3, ἡ μέθεξις αὕτη…των εἰδων οὐκ ἄλλη τις ἢ εἰκασθηναι αὐτοις), and that Parmenides meets both formulae with precisely the same objection that they appear to involve the “indefinite regress.”
(e) The gravest difficulty of all has yet to be faced. It is that the recognition of two “worlds,” presupposed by Socrates, a world of forms and an “other” world of “things” which somehow “partake” of the forms, leads direct to complete scepticism (133a-135c). For the world of which each of us is a member is ex hypothesi not the world of forms, but the “other” world (since it had been observed at the outset that each of us is a man, none of us is the “form of man”). Consequently the relations between forms will belong exclusively to the world or system of related forms; corresponding relations of which “we” are terms will belong to “our world” and will have their correlates within “our world.” There will be a relation between “master” as such and “servant” as such, and the terms of this will be the form of master and the form of servant. But each of us will be master or servant to another man, and the relation between this pair will fall outside the world of forms; it will connect one man with another man, not with a form. So the correlate of the form of knowledge will be Reality as such. But the correlate of our knowledge will be such reality as the objects of our world possess. And it is admitted that “our” knowledge is not the form of knowledge (that is, the knowledge we have is partial and imperfect). Its counterpart therefore is not the completely real. We are precluded from knowing what real good is, for the counterpart of a merely relative and partial knowledge must be a relative and partial reality. And we may invert the argument with even more startling results. God, at any rate, might be supposed to possess “absolute” or “perfect”
Yet to deny the reality of forms is destructive of thought itself, since it amounts to a denial of the possibility of definite knowledge, if Socrates has been badly perplexed by the discussion which has just been closed, it is because, in his zeal, he has attempted to enunciate his doctrine about forms without a sufficient preparatory discipline in arid and apparently “useless” formal logic. The kind of discipline required may be exemplified by Zeno’s famous antinomies, but needs to go even beyond them. Zeno had attempted to prove the thesis that “reality is many” self-refuting any showing that it can be made to lead to pairs of contradictory conclusions. For a really searching investigation it is not enough to ask what follows from the assertion of a thesis, but also what follows from the denial of it. E.g. Zeno should have asked not merely, “If things are many, what can be asserted about the many things, and what about the unit, and about the relation of the two?” But also, “If things are not many, what follows about plurality, the unit, and their relations?” (It was not enough to argue that the consequences of Pluralism are self-contradictory; the same issue should have been raised about the consequences of denying Pluralism.) Complete investigation of any proposed philosophical principle demands this twofold consideration of the implications both of its assertion and of its denial (135b-136c).
In these remarks, which effect a transition to the second half of the dialogue, there are two interesting implications. If Parmenides ascribes the helplessness of the young Socrates in face of the difficulties just raised to want of training in formal logic, we may infer that the suggestion is that the apparently formidable arguments are themselves fallacious and would be seen to be so by a more practiced logician. That is, the fault of Plato’s Megarian critics is not that they are logicians, but that they are not logical enough. If we are only thorough enough with our logic, the alleged logical objections to the metaphysic of forms will vanish of themselves, It seems further to be meant that the particular fault of these logicians is one-sidedness. They scrutinize the consequences of the
In the second part of the dialogue Parmenides consents to give an elaborate example of the kind of logical method he has been recommending, choosing as the respondent to his questions the youngest member of the party, Aristoteles, on the ground that his very youth will be a guarantee that his answers will be given without finesse of any kind. The thesis selected for examination is, naturally enough, Parmenides’ own principle that “reality is one.” (136c-137c. It is significant that he speaks of the whole proceeding as an elaborate “game” (παιδιά), a plain hint that the antinomies now to follow are not to be taken quite seriously, and that we must not be surprised if there is a touch of conscious “sophistry” about some of them. In fact, it is incredible that Plato should not have known that some of them are pure fallacies. But, as his purpose is simply to show that the methods of his critics can be made to recoil on themselves, it is strictly fair that he should play their game by their own rules. Any kind of reasoning they permit themselves is equally permissible in a “skit” upon them.)
According to the programme already laid down by Parmenides, we should expect to find him raising four problems: (1) if the real is one, what can be asserted about this one real? (2) if the real is one, what can be said about “the many”? (3) if the real is not one, what can be said about the one? (4) if the real is not one, what can be said about the many? But by a further refinement, each of these questions is raised twice over, the purpose being to show that on either assumption (that the real is one or that it is not one) you can make it appear at pleasure either that contradictory predicates can be both affirmed or both denied alike of the one and of the many. Thus we get altogether eight arguments forming four “antinomies”—two in which the subject of both thesis and antithesis is the one, and two in which it is the many. The issue is that the apparent dilemma to which Socrates had been reduced at the end of the first part of the dialogue, that knowledge of the real is equally impossible with or without his theory about forms and “participation” is more than matched by the dilemma offered to the Eleatics, and maliciously offered through the mouth of their own founder Parmenides professing to be applying their own peculiar method, that, whether you accept or reject their Monism, you must either simultaneously assert or simultaneously deny both members of an indefinite series of contradictory pairs of propositions.
A{ I. If the real is one, nothing whatever can be asserted of it (137c-142a).
A{ II. If the real is one, everything can be asserted of it (142b-157c).
B{ III. If the real is one, everything can be asserted of “things other than the one” (157b-159b).
B{ IV. If the real is one, nothing can be asserted of “things other than the one” (159b-160b).
C{ V. If the one is unreal, everything can be asserted of it (160b-163b).
C{ VI. If the one is unreal, nothing at all can be asserted of it (163b-164b).
D{ VII. If the one is unreal, everything can be asserted about “things other than the one” (164b-165e)
D{ VIII. If the one is unreal, nothing can be asserted about anything (165e-166c)
It would be taking Plato’s metaphysical jest too gravely to make a minute examination of all the details of these bewildering arguments. It will be sufficient to point out the peculiar character of the dialectical method employed and to summarize the results. The peculiarities of the method are dictated by the consideration that it is avowedly a parody of that of Zeno. Now Zeno’s special trick of fence, a perfectly legitimate one, was to turn one-half of the assumed “postulates” of his opponents against the other half. This is the secret, for example, of the famous “paradoxes” about motion. The double assumption of the geometers whom Zeno is criticising is that (a) any finite segment of a straight line can be bisected, (b) such a segment is a path between two end-points which are finite minima of magnitude. The geometers cannot give up (a) without ruining their whole scientific edifice; they cannot give up (b) without destroying the parallelism between geometry and arithmetic which is part of their system. Zeno turns (a) against (b). From (a) it follows at once that there must be an endless series of points intermediate between any two given “end-points” and this is fatal to the view that the point has a finite magnitude. His reasoning silences his opponents because they are not prepared to surrender (a) by admitting the existence of “indivisible lines” nor yet to give up (b) by regarding the point as a geometrical zero. In exactly the same way, the “hypothesis” of the Eleatics—“if It is one” or “if there is One”—as they understand it, really covers two assumptions—(a) unity is real, (b) reality is unity; Plato’s trick is to play off one of these assumptions against the other. This will come out more clearly if we compare the main positions of the antithetical members of each “antinomy.”
A. 1. “It is one;” therefore, “it” is not many, and therefore is not a whole and has no parts. Ergo it has neither beginning,
So it can have no temporal predicates. It cannot be contemporary with, nor more nor less ancient than itself or anything else (the reasoning being exactly like that just used about equality and inequality). It cannot, then, be in time at all. For we may say of whatever occupies time, but of nothing else, that (a) it is at any moment “becoming older” than itself and also “becoming younger” than itself; and (b) that its existence fills just the duration it does, and neither more nor less, and so it is “simultaneous with,” “of the same age as” itself. Since neither statement can be made about the one, it cannot be “in time.” Therefore, we must not say of it, “it was,” “it became,” “it will be,” “it will come to be,” since all these expressions involve reference to past or future, that is, to time. But the very word “is” or “comes to be” also involves a reference to time, to present time. And therefore we may not say of “it” that “it is” or “it becomes,” since “it” is not in time at all. But if we cannot say “is” of the one, we cannot ascribe being to it. It must be nonexistent. And if it is nonexistent, it cannot even be one, for to be one, it would have to be. But what is nothing at all can neither be named, spoken of, thought of, known, nor perceived by the senses. Thus we actually deduce from the proposition “it is one” the conclusion that nothing whatsoever can be thought or said about “it.”
It has been asked what the “it” presupposed as the subject
2. If the one is (ἕν εἰ ἔστιν), it “partakes of” being. It has two distinct characters; it is, and it is one. Thus it has “parts” (or, as we should say, distinct “aspects”). Unity and existence are parts, or constituents of “the existing one,” which is therefore a whole. And each of these “parts,” on inspection, is found to have itself the same two “parts.” Each is a constituent of the “existing one” and each is one such constituent. The “existing one” is thus an infinite manifold (ἄπειρον πλῆθος). Again, unity is different from existence, and difference is itself something different from both existence and unity. Here then are several terms—unity, existence, difference—which can be grouped into pairs. Each pair has a number—the number 2. We have thus established the existence of the numbers 1 and 2, and the addition of 1 and 2 establishes the existence of 3. We can then go on, by addition and multiplication, to establish the existence of the whole integer-series as a direct consequence of the existence of “the one.” Being thus has an infinite plurality of parts, and each of these parts is one part; there are as many units as there are “parts” of being. Thus not only “being” but “unity” itself turns out to be infinitely many.
Since parts are parts of a whole, they are contained by the whole and thus have a bound (πέρας). The “existing one,” then, is not only indefinitely many or boundless, but is also bounded, and therefore has first, last, and intermediate parts—beginning, middle, and end. Thus it has a shape or form (σχῆμα) of some kind. It is “in” itself, for all the parts are in the whole, and “the one” is at once “all the parts” and “the whole.” But equally the whole is not in the parts, either singly or taken together. To be in them all, it would have to be in each singly, and that is impossible. But it must be somewhere, if it is anything, and, as it cannot be “in itself,” it must be “in” something else. Thus, considered as “all the parts,” it is in itself; considered as “the whole,” it is in something not itself. Since it is “in itself” and so in one place (ἐν ἑνί) it is at rest; but since it is “always in something else,” it cannot be at rest, and so is moving. The one is neither a part of
The one is different from other things, and they are neither more nor less different from it, but to a “like” degree. Thus the one and other things are alike because different. But if difference implies likeness, identity will imply unlikeness, and the one and other things have just been shown to be identical. Therefore, because identical, they are unlike. And yet again, in so far as two terms have the same predicate they are alike, and in so far as they have different predicates they are unlike. So the one and other things will be alike because identical, and unlike because different. And since the one has been shown to be both identical with and different from itself, it must be both like and unlike itself.
Since the one is both “in” itself and “in” other things, it will have contact with itself and with them. But things which are in contact must occupy adjoining regions (ἐϕεξῆς κεῖσθαι), and that which is one cannot occupy two adjoining regions. Hence the one is not in contact with itself. But once more, nothing has contact with itself, and if there are to be n contacts, there must be n + 1 things in contact. Now the “things other than the one” cannot have any number, since what has a number “partakes of unity.” There can therefore be no contact between the one and other things, since contact implies number.
Again, the one is at once equal to and unequal to itself and to “other things.” (a) If a is > b, this means that the form of μέγεθο, greatness is in a relatively to b, and the form of σμικρότης, smallness in b relatively to a; if a is to be absolutely small or large, this means that the form smallness or greatness is “in” a. But neither greatness nor smallness can be “in” the one as a whole or in any part of it. For if smallness is in the one as a whole it is equal with the one, and if it “envelops” it it is greater than the one; in either case the form smallness would be “doing the function” of the different form ἰσότης, equal or greatness. And the same reasoning applies if we suppose smallness to be in any one part of the one. We may argue in the same way, mutatis mutandis, about greatness. Thus smallness and greatness cannot be “in” anything whatever, and it follows that nothing, except the form of greatness, can be “greater than” anything, and nothing except the form of smallness “less than” anything.
Once more, “if there is one,” the one is. And is expresses present participation of being. Hence the one is “in time.” And time “goes on” (πορεύεται). Hence the one is always getting older than itself as time goes on, and therefore, since “older” always has “younger” as its correlate, it is always getting younger than itself also. And at any moment in this process, it is both older and younger than itself. And yet it fills the same duration as itself, neither more nor less, and so neither is nor grows older nor younger than itself. Again, before there can be several things, there must be one to start with. Hence the “one” must have come to be before “the others”; it must be more ancient than “the other things.” Yet we proved that the one has “parts,” beginning, middle, end. Its beginning must have come to be before itself; the one itself will not be there until its end also comes to be. Thus the one is the last thing to come to be; everything else is more ancient than the one. But, after all, each “part” of the one is one part, and thus whenever anything comes to be, the one comes to be, and the one thus comes to be contemporaneously with everything else. Next, if one thing is older or younger than another, the interval in age between the two never grows greater or less. So we may say that the one is more ancient or more recent than other things, but never grows more ancient or more recent. And yet, though the one has been “in being” (γέγονε) longer than “the others,” the difference between their respective ages is steadily being relatively diminished as time goes on, and we may therefore say that, in so far as the one is more ancient than “the others,” it steadily becomes less ancient relatively to them, and they more ancient relatively to it. But, in so far as it is less ancient than “the others,” it is steadily growing, relatively to them, older, and they, relatively to it, younger. And finally, in so far as a time-interval remains the interval it is, the one is neither becoming more nor becoming less ancient than anything else.
In conclusion, the one, “partaking of time,” has past, present, future. It was, is, will be, was becoming, is becoming, will become. It stands, has stood, will stand, in various relations. There can be knowledge of it, belief about it, perception of it, and therefore it
Appendix (155e-157b). The one, then, both is and is not, and its being is “in time.” It is during some intervals, during others it is not, since it cannot be said to be and not to be at once. It must pass through transitions from being to not-being and from not-being to being. It undergoes aggregation and disgregation, assimilation and dissimilation, augmentation and diminution. It begins to move and ceases to move. So these reversals of the sense of a process must also be “in time.” And yet they cannot be “in time”; the reversal must be strictly instantaneous, occupying no time, however paradoxical we may find the conception of an instant (τὸ εξαίφνης) which is strictly without duration. At the instant of the reversal of sense, both members of a pair of antithetic processes must be denied of the one. At such an instant, it is not “coming to be” nor yet “passing away,” neither being aggregated nor being disgregated, neither being assimilated nor dissimilated. As with states, so with processes; both members of an antithesis must be asserted of the one and both must be denied.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this argument to our own minds is this introduction at its close of the notion of an unextended “instant” Plato is plainly stating exactly the paradoxes which beset the founders of the Calculus when they took the notion of the “infinitesimal” seriously and mistakenly supposed that the Calculus really deals either with infinitesimal increments or with ratios between infinitesimals. But the subtlety of some parts of the long development must not blind us to the fact that most of the reasoning throughout 2. is purely sophistical and much of it clearly consciously sophistical, and that the fallacies committed are mostly of a very obvious kind, such as equivocation between “each” and “all collectively.” Plato can and does, in this very dialogue, when it suits his purpose, expose the very confusions in question and therefore must not be supposed to be serious when he commits them. It is enough for his purpose to perplex the “eristics” (debaters) by availing himself of fallacies of the kind which they habitually commit in their own argumentation. His parody of their elenchus is also an exposure of it. The one important point to keep in mind is that the conclusions to which he is led by his application of the Eleatic methods to the Eleatic “hypothesis” are not meant to be asserted as his own. They are simply what happens to the “hypothesis” if you make the Eleatic criticise himself by his own methods. If we wish to know what Plato himself thought of the Eleatic thesis, we must turn from the Parmenides to the Sophistes, where he is really criticising it by the rules of a logic which is his own. For the present it is enough to remark that, just as in 1., the emphasis was laid on the unity of “what is,” with the consequence that being itself has to be denied of it, so in 2, the emphasis is laid on its reality, with the consequence that the unity of the one has to be simultaneously affirmed and denied. So far, and no further, the
3. If the one is, what of “other things”? Since they are “other” things, they are not the one; yet they must “partake of” it. For they must have parts (if they had not, they would be just “the one”), and therefore parts of one complete whole. And each of these parts must again be itself one definite part of the one whole. The “other things” are therefore a manifold or aggregate (πλείω). They must be a numerically infinite manifold, since each “part” participates in unity and therefore is not itself, in its own nature, one. And yet, in the act of participating in unity, each part is “bounded” or “limited” or “determinate” relatively to the whole and to any other part; “something arises in it” which constitutes a bound (πέρας). The “other things” are thus at once infinitely numerous and also bounded. In so far as all are “unlimited,” each is like every other, and again each is like every other in exhibiting “limit.” But in so far as each is at once unlimited and limited, each is unlike itself and the rest, and by similar reasoning we may show that all the antithetical pairs of predicates canvassed in 1. and 2. may be both affirmed and denied of the “other” things.
4. But let us consider the same question once more. “The one” and “the others” form a complete disjunction. Neither is the other, and there is no tertium quid. They are thus completely “separated” (χωρίς). And what is strictly one can have no “parts.” From these two premisses it follows that neither the one as a whole, nor a “part” of it, can be in “the others.” They cannot participate in it in any sense. There is no unity in them, and therefore they are not even a manifold (πολλά), and have no number. They are, after all, not “both like and unlike” one another; if they were, each of them would have in it two opposed forms, and would thus “partake of two,” whereas we have just seen that none of them can even “partake of one,” and therefore we must also deny that either member of the alternative “like-unlike” can be asserted of “the others.” The same kind of reasoning will show that no predicates at all can be asserted of them.
3. and 4. thus answer in inverted order to 1. and 2. In 3., as in 2., the emphasis falls on the reality of the Eleatic ὂν ἕν, in 4., as in L, on its unity. 3. proves for τὰ ἄλλα (the others) what 2. had proved for τὸ ἕν undertakes to prove of them what I had established for τὸ ἕν. The total result of 1.-4. is summed up for us at 160b 2: “If the one is, the one is everything and is nothing at all, relatively alike to itself and to ’the others.’”
5. We come to the second half of the complete dialectical investigation proposed at 136a-b. If the one is not, what follows? When a man says “if the one is not,” or “if magnitude is not,” or generally “if x is not,” he is making an intelligible supposition. Whether we say that “the one” is or that it is not, we mean the
6. And yet again, “if the one is not,” that means that being is wholly denied of it. The denial is absolute and must be understood without qualification. If the one is not, it cannot come to be, nor pass out of being, since it can neither get nor lose what is, ex hypothesi, wholly foreign to it. Neither can it alter in any way, for the same reason, and therefore it cannot move. Nor can it be at rest, for to be at rest is to be “in the same place” at successive times. It can have no predicates or relations, for if it had any, it would be whatever you truly assert of it. Hence it cannot be known, thought of, perceived, spoken of, or named. (Thus what was proved about the one in I. on the assumption that it exists, is now proved on the assumption that it does not exist. In either case nothing can be affirmed or denied of it.)
7. “If the one is not” what must be said of “the others”? They must be “other than” and therefore different (ἕτερα) from something or we could not call them “the others.” As there is no “one” from which they could differ, they must be different from one another. They must also be different infinite assemblages (ὄγκοι), not different units, since, ex hypothesi, there is no unit.
8. And yet, to go over the ground for a last time, “if there is no one,” τὰ ἄλλα obviously cannot be one. And they cannot be many, for then each of the many would be one. They must be zeros, and no multitude can be constructed out of zeros. And they do not even seem to be one or to be many. By hypothesis, “the unit” is just nothing at all, and hence nothing can even seem to be a unit; a fortiori nothing can seem to be many, a collection of units. By carrying the thought out it would follow that τὰ ἄλλα have none of the positive or negative determinations we have ascribed to them, and do not even seem to have any. Nothing can be thought or said of them, (a conclusion which answers to that drawn in 4.). Thus we may summarize the result of our whole series of antinomies by saying that “whether the one is or is not, it and ’the others’ alike, are and seem to be, and also are not and do not seem to be, all sorts of things (πάντα), relatively both to themselves and to one another” (166c 2).
In the four discussions which take for their point of departure the non-existence of the “one” or “unit,” even more obviously than in those which have preceded, the ultimate source of our perplexities is the ambiguity of the word “is.” We get contradictory results according as “is” is taken to be the symbol of predication (Peano’s ε), or that of existence (Peano’s ∃,
Many of the inferences turn simply on this confusion of a predication with what we now call an “existential proposition.” It is legitimate parody to employ this fallacy, because, as we can see from the remains of the poem of Parmenides, the whole point of Eleaticism lies in ignoring the distinction. To make it clear, and to show that Eleaticism had ignored it, is, in fact, the main purpose of Plato’s Sophistes. So long as he is merely undertaking to show that the Eleatic logic would be even more damaging to the Eleatic “postulate” than to the Socratic postulate of μέθεξις, he is fully entitled
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 253-272.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 63-96; Platons Dialogs, 1-24. Stuttgart, 1903.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 297-317.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 215-217.
Apelt, O. Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, 3-66. Leipzig, 1891.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 68-84.
Stallbaum, G. Platonis Parmenides. Leipzig, 1848.
addell, W. The “Parmenides” of Plato. Glasgow, 1894.
Wahl, J. Etude sur le Parmenide de Platon. Paris 1926.
Dies, A. Platon, Parmenide, vi-xix, 1-53. Paris, 1923.
Robin, L. Platon, 119-140.
Hardie, W. F. R. A Study in Plato. Oxford, 1936.
Taylor, A. E. “Parmenides, Zeno and Socrates,” Philosophical Studies, London, 1934, pp. 28-90.
Taylor, A. E. Plato’s Parmenides. Oxford, 1934.
Lee, H. P. D. Zeno of Elea. Cambridge, 1936.
Tannery, P. Pour l’Histoire de la Science Hellene, ed. 2, by A. Dies, Paris, 1930, c. x. Zenon d’Elee.
The dialogues which we have still to consider all reveal themselves, by steady approximation to the style characteristic of the Laws, as belonging to the latest period of Plato’s activity as a writer. In particular they all agree linguistically in the adoption of a number of the stylistic graces of Isocrates, particularly the artificial avoidance of hiatus, a thing quite new in the prose of Plato. They also agree, as regards their form, in two important respects. All of them are formal expositions of doctrine by a leading character speaking with authority; the part of the other speakers is merely to assent, and there is no longer any thoroughly dramatic eliciting of truth from the clash of mind with mind; in every case, except that of the Philebus where there is a good reason for the exception, Socrates is allowed to fall into the background, and in the Laws he is absent. To account for so marked a change in manner even from the Theaetetus and Parmenides, it seems necessary to suppose a reasonably long interval of interruption in Plato’s literary activity, and if, as we have seen reason to think, the Theaetetus was composed just before Plato’s visit to Syracuse in the year 367, we can account for the interruption by the known facts of his life. From 367 down to at least 361-360, the year of Plato’s second and longer sojourn with Dionysius II and his final resolution to take no further direct part in the affairs of Syracuse, he must have been too fully occupied in other ways to have much time for composition. We must probably, therefore, think of this whole group of latest dialogues as written in the thirteen last years of Plato’s life, 360-348/7. Since the Sophistes and Politicus attach themselves outwardly to the Theaetetus, and the former, in fact, contains the critical examination of Eleatic principles which that dialogue had half promised, it is reasonable to hold, as most recent critics do, that the Sophistes opens the series. The curious state of the text of the Laws—it is not permissible to account for it by the arbitrary assumption that our MSS are less trustworthy for the Laws than for other works—seems to show that the work had never received the author’s final revision. Thus Plato’s activity as a writer has no assignable terminus ad quem earlier than his death. Beyond this, we have no special evidence by which to date the composition of the individual dialogues. The main thing which is clear about the whole group is that Plato felt that the
In a biography of Plato it would be necessary to dwell at some length on the precise character of his experiences at Syracuse, as illustrated by his extant correspondence with Dionysius and Dion. I must be content to refer the reader for all details to the excellent accounts of Grote
The chief points which have to be borne in mind are these. Plato’s interposition in Syracusan affairs had from the first a very practical object. The immediate political necessity was to secure the future of Greek civilization in Sicily and the West against the double peril that the work of Dionysius I might be undone by the aggressions of Carthage, or that, under a successor unequal to the position, the Oscans or Samnites whom that vigorous ruler had employed might usurp the sovereignty of Syracuse for themselves. The project of Dion and Plato was clearly that Dionysius II should first be educated into statesmanship himself, and should then use his position to convert the real though informal “tyranny” at Syracuse into a constitutional monarchy embracing the cities which Dionysius I had subdued, and strong enough to hold both the Carthaginians and the Italians at bay. The hope of making a scientific statesman out of Dionysius II appears not to have survived Plato’s experiences of 367/6, and, indeed, had always, according to Epistle vii., been a very remote hope; the more modest anticipation that the personal feud between Dionysius and Dion might be accommodated and that constitutional monarchy might at least get its chance, though an imperfect chance, took Plato back once more to Syracuse in 361. It even outlasted his final disillusionment about Dionysius, as we see from the fact that most of the correspondence with that monarch belongs to the time after Plato’s last departure from Syracuse. For the years between 367/6 and 361/360 we have only one contemporary document (Epistle xiii.). The suspicions which have been felt about the letter have been based entirely on its contents; linguistically it is above suspicion. One or two of the objections commonly raised are curiously captious. It is said, absurdly enough, that the reference to Plato’s mother as still living, and to the existence of four
Read without misconceptions of this kind, the document is a natural one enough, and highly creditable to the writer. Apart from references to certain small commissions undertaken by Plato at the request of Dionysius, and from an introduction to him of Helicon, who had studied under Eudoxus and Polyxenus as well as in the school of Isocrates, as a man who could be serviceable to him in his studies,
Apart from this settlement of accounts between the parties, the letter deals with two other matters. Dionysius had employed Plato’s offices in attempting to obtain a credit on the Aeginetan banker Andromedes, who declined to make any advance, on the ground that he had found it difficult to recover advances made to Dionysius I. Application in another quarter was more successful, and Plato takes the opportunity to administer a courteous homily to the young king on the importance of prompt discharge of money obligations and attention to one’s accounts. The details of the transaction in question are only hinted at, but it can hardly have been concerned simply with the personal settlement between Dionysius and Plato. More probably Dionysius wanted a credit for his own purposes, and found it difficult to obtain one from bankers who had known his father as an unsatisfactory customer. This would explain the emphasis laid in the letter on the necessity to a monarch of a good financial reputation.
Sophistes and Politicus
Though the main interest of the Sophistes is logical, that of the Politicus political, outwardly the two form a single whole, and both are externally linked more loosely with the Theaetetus. The assumption is that we are still in the spring of the year 399. The personages of the Theaetdus have reassembled, as had been suggested in the last words of that dialogue (210d 3), but Theodorus has brought a friend with him, an Eleatic pupil of Parmenides and Zeno, who is—the words imply that one would not have expected it—a really profound “philosopher.” After a brief initial conversation this Eleatic visitor takes the conduct of the conversation into his own hands; Socrates and Theodorus relapse into what is all but unbroken silence. The Eleatic remains throughout anonymous, and in this respect stands alone among the characters in Plato, but for the other example of the Athenian who plays the leading part in the Laws. We could hardly be told more plainly that these two personages are purely fictitious; the object of the fiction seems to be that, as they have no historical character to sustain, they may be used freely as simple mouthpieces for the views of their creator. No one doubts that this is the case with the Athenian of the Laws. We are not entitled to say that he is meant precisely as a portrait of Plato by himself, but he is certainly meant to represent the ethics and politics of the Academy. Our Eleatic, too, turns out to be a respectful but exceedingly outspoken critic of the main thesis of his nominal teacher, Parmenides. The suggestion plainly
Formally there is a further link between the Sophistes and the Polilicus. The question propounded at the opening of the Sophistes is whether sophist, statesman, philosopher, are three different names for the same person, or three names for two types of person, or names for three different types.
The answer of the “Eleatic” is that the three characters are all distinct. The object of the two dialogues is ostensibly to prove this by defining first the sophist and then the statesman; both definitions are obtained by elaborate and repeated use of the characteristically Academic method of subdivision of a genus (εῖδος) into its constituent species. The method itself has consequently to be explained and illustrated by simple and half-playful examples. Incidentally this explains what might at first seem a strange feature of the Politicus. We can understand the silence of Socrates in the Sophistes, where the logical matter of the discussion takes us far away from the circle of ideas commonly represented by Plato as familiar to him. But the problems of politics are precisely those in which the Socrates of the Gorgias and Republic had been peculiarly interested, and we might have expected that here he would be given his old part of chief speaker. What makes this impossible is not so much the particular character of the results arrived at, though they do depart to a marked degree from the uncompromising “idealism” of the Republic, but the necessity of employing the precisely formulated “method of division.” The peculiarity of both dialogues is that each has thus a double function. Each has certain definite results to be arrived at; each is meant, at the same time, independently of its special conclusions, to be an elaborate exercise in the careful employment of logical method. As far as “results\” go, we might say that the object of the one is to explain the true character of a significant negative proposition, of the other to justify “constitutionalism” in politics. But we must not allow ourselves to forget that both have further the common purpose of presenting us with an “essay in philosophical and scientific method.” Hence the chief speaker in both must be a logician; it is because the speaker is a “formal logician,” with a sounder logic than that of the Eleatics of Megara, that he is represented as the true continuator of Parmenides and
I. The Sophistes
The opening words of the dialogue show us how keenly Plato feels that the Megarian formal logic is a departure from the genuine Socratic spirit of pursuit of real truth. He is greatly relieved to learn that the Eleatic friend of Theodorus is a “truly philosophic soul”; from his antecedents he had expected rather to find in him a θεὸς ἐλεγκτικός, a “fiend” in constructing dilemmas, (like those of the Parmenides). But the true philosopher is not always easy to recognize; he is taken sometimes for a sophist, sometimes for a statesman, and sometimes for a downright madman. Now this raises the question whether the philosopher, the sophist, the statesman, are three distinct characters, or two, or possibly are all the same. The genuine Eleatic tradition is that they are three distinct types, though it is hard to define the precise differences between them (217b). The Eleatic undertakes, if Theaetetus will act as respondent, to attempt a precise delineation of one of the three types, the sophist, though he warns his audience that the discussion will be long and tedious, a distinct hint that the name “sophist” will be found to stand for something less readily recognizable than the familiar type of the fifth-century teacher of “goodness.” We discover, as the dialogue proceeds, that the persons meant are, in fact, the Megarian pedants of an uncritical formal logic. They are “sophists” not genuine philosophers, precisely because they have never subjected the principles on which their own logic rests to a thorough critical scrutiny. (In fact, they are “dogmatists” in Kant’s sense of the word.) This special use of the word σοφιστής is a real innovation in terminology, though its adoption by Aristotle, who regarded his Megarian opponents as conscious tricksters, has given rise to the modern conception of sophistry as the deliberate abuse of logic. The length of the discussion is due to the difficulty of analysing so elusive a thing as the spirit of uncritical logical formalism.
Illustration of Method (218d-221c). Our problem, then, is to frame a satisfactory definition, and it is to be solved by a method characteristic of Plato and the Academy, the method of accurate logical division of a genus into its constituent species. As this method was definitely a creation of Plato and his immediate followers, it is necessary to explain and illustrate it for the reader by applying it to a simple and familiar case; Plato chooses that of the angler. Of course, as Burnet has said, the example is half-playful; the very baldness of the illustration chosen is an advantage since the simplest and most obvious illustrations are the best for the purpose of setting the principle of the procedure in the clearest light. In practice the use of the method in the Academy led to results of great importance. Thus the tenth book of Euclid’s Elements, that great repertory of demonstrated propositions about “quadratic surds” is at bottom concerned with the attempt to
In principle the procedure is this. If we wish to define a species x, we begin by taking some wider and familiar class a, of which x is clearly one subdivision. We then devise a division of the whole class a into two mutually exclusive sub-classes b and c, distinguished by the fact that b possesses, while c lacks, some characteristic β which we know to be found in x. We call b the right-hand, c the left-hand, division of a. We now leave the left-hand division c out of consideration, and proceed to subdivide the right-hand division b on the same principle as before, and this process is repeated until we come to a right-hand “division” which we see on inspection to coincide with x. If we now assign the original wider class a, and enumerate in order the successive characters by which each of the successive right-hand divisions has been marked off, we have a complete characterization of x; x has been defined. The Aristotelian rule of definition by “genus and difference, or differences” is simply the condensation of this Academic method into a formula; a still more exact reproduction of it has been given in our own times in W. E. Johnson’s account of the progressive determination of a “determinable” (Logic, i. xi). It is, of course, presupposed that we are already adequately acquainted with the “determinable” or “genus” a itself, and that, at each step in its further determination, we have the “gumption” to select as the character constitutive of the new “right-hand” division one which is relevant to the specification of x and also itself admits of further “division”; finally that we recognize the point at which the process can stop because x has now been sufficiently specified. The satisfaction of these conditions depends on our native acumen and our acquaintance with the subject-matter, and no rules can be given for it, precisely as no rules can be given for the discovery of a promising explanatory hypothesis. The method, like all scientific methods, will not work in vacuo. This is what Aristotle seems to ignore in his depreciatory remarks about the “method of divisions” (Analytics Prior, A 46a 31 ff.). He complains that the method involves a petitio principii [circular argument]. From man is an animal, an animal either is mortal or is immortal, it does not follow that man is mortal, but only that man either is mortal or is immortal; and so with the other
Definition of the Sophist (221c-237a). The actual “division” by which the definition of angling is obtained need not detain us long. So far as it is anything more than a simple illustration of the method to be adopted in characterizing the sophist, its further point lies in the playful suggestion of certain unpleasing features which we shall rediscover in the sophist himself, who is also, among other things, a kind of “angler.” The division itself may be graphically represented by the following tree:
∧
of making – of acquiring
∧
of acquiring by consent – of capture
∧
of open capture – of stealthy capture = hunting
∧
of lifeless things – of living things
∧
of terrestrial animals – of animals which live in a fluid
∧
of birds – of fishes
∧
fishing by nets – fishing by striking
∧
by night – by daylight
∧
by a stroke from above – by a stroke from below
=
angling.
We now proceed to apply this method several times over to the sophist. (Thus Plato is fully alive to the point that the same species may be determined by the division of different genera, the same term may have more than one adequate definition; relevancy to the purpose in hand will be the principle which guides us in the selection of a genus to be divided. Each of the successive divisions is meant to throw some one characteristic of the sophist into strong relief.)
(a) We might follow the precise example we have just chosen down to the point where we divided the art of hunting living things, and then turn our attention to the left-hand division of this. For the sophist is a hunter of “civilized living beings” that is, of men. He hunts them, not like kings, pirates, and kidnappers, by violence, but by the arts of persuasion. Persuasion may be practiced in public, or, as the sophist practices it, on individuals. And the persuading may be done by one who gives a present (the lover), or by one who takes a fee. And the fee may be taken for making one’s self agreeable and amusing (as in the case of the κόλαξ or “parasite”) or got by promising to impart “goodness.” This gives us a possible definition of the sophist as a professional of the art of hunting rich young men individually for a cash payment, on the pretense of educating them (223b). Thus the points brought out are the sophist’s commercialism, the unreality of his “wisdom,” and his suspicious family likeness to the “parasite.”
(b) The sophist, however, has more guises than one. We might detect him again if we started by dividing the left-hand branch of the art of acquisition, namely, acquisition by exchange, and then subdivided exchange into exchange of presents and exchange of commodities (ἀλλακτική). Exchange of commodities again includes the transactions of the man who sells his own produce and those of the middleman who sells that of others. And middlemen may be engaged either in the home retail traffic (καπηλική) or in interstate trade (ἐμπορική). One branch of such interstate trade is traffic in mental wares (ψυχεμπορική), serious or trifling. Under this head falls interstate traffic in sciences (μαθήματα), and one form of this traffic is the selling of scientific knowledge of “goodness.” This enables us to define the sophist again as a retail exporter of the knowledge of goodness (224d), though we must add that he sometimes retails his merchandise in the home market, and occasionally even manufactures some of it himself. As before,
(c) Yet again, we might diverge from our original division at a different point. We spoke of an art of acquisition by open capture. We may, if we please, divide this into two branches, competition and combat. (Plato is thinking of competition for prizes in the great games, at the Dionysia, and the like.) And combat may be physical or mental; the latter being contention, of which “discourses” (λόγοι) are the weapons. When the “discourses” employed are question and answer, we call this sort of contention disputation, and disputation about right and wrong (περὶ δικαίων αὐτων καὶ ἀδίκων) carried on under regular rules of the game is what we call eristic. When eristic is practiced for gain, it is sophistry. Thus the sophist now appears as a man who makes a paying business of contentious disputation about right and wrong (226a). He invents insincere paradoxes about morality for gain.
(d) We have not done with him even now. Making an entirely new start, we observe that there are a host of familiar occupations which are all alike in being ways of separating different materials from one another. Now some of these separate like from like, others aim at separating a better from a worse, and all these we may group together under the common rubric of purifying or refining. Purification or refining, again, may be either of the body or of the soul. And purification of the soul itself may be of two kinds, since there are two “vices” which affect the soul: spiritual disease and spiritual deformity (αἰσχος), villainy, “wickedness” as it is commonly called, and mere ignorance (ἄγνοια). The soul is purified from wickedness by justice, “the art of discipline”; from ignorance by teaching (διδασκαλική = persuasion that teaches). But there are different kinds of ignorance and correspondingly different kinds of teaching. The worst form of ignorance is the self-conceit which believes itself to know what it does not know; the teaching which purifies from this is what we mean by παιδεία, “education,” “culture” and all other teaching is merely subservient to it (229d). There are, again, two forms of παιδεία. There is the old-fashioned method of the pѐre de famille who relies for success on rebuke, mingled with exhortation; this we may call admonition (νουθετητική). But some of us are convinced by reflection that all error is involuntary, and that no one can be expected to “learn better” until he has been convinced that as yet he does not know. They adopt the milder method of trying to convince the man who has a false conceit of his wisdom by asking questions which lead him to discover his ignorance for himself and to feel the longing for knowledge (230b-e). We cannot well give the name sophist to those who practice this kind of teaching (which is, in fact, the familiar “obstetric” of Socrates); the title would perhaps be too high an
There is a certain resemblance between the eristic and these dialecticians, but it is such a resemblance as that of the wolf to the high-bred dog. Still, for the sake of argument, let us waive this scruple and define the sophist once more as a professional of the art of purifying the soul from its false conceit of wisdom (231b). (Here, of course, it at last becomes clear what quarry Plato is hunting. The definitions already suggested would cover Protagoras and his rivals; the specialization of the sophists’ method to “contention by question and answer” definitely indicates that the persons meant are inferior imitators of the Socratic dialectic who abuse its resources for a purpose which Plato regards as at bottom commercial.)
(e) We have still not gone quite to the root of the matter. The sophist has exhibited the guises successively of: (i) a paid hunter of rich youths; (2) an exporter of spiritual lore; (3) a retailer of such lore in the home market; (4) a small manufacturer of it; (5) an “athlete” of controversy; (6) a “refiner” of convictions which are hostile to knowledge (though his title to this last distinction is not uncontested). To penetrate deeper we must ask what one calling there is which can masquerade in all these guises (233a). The answer is suggested by the consideration that, as we have seen, the sophist is, among other things, an ἀντιλογικός, a pitter of discourse against discourse, a contradiction-monger. He undertakes to discover antinomies everywhere—in divinity, in nature, in morals and politics—and writes books explaining how the specialist in all these departments can be reduced to silence. Now obviously one man cannot really be an “expert” in all knowledge. The secret or miracle (θαυμα) of sophistry lies in contriving to appear to be such a universal expert. A clever illusionist might delude children into the belief that he can make anything and everything by showing them pictures of all sorts of things at a sufficient distance. (If a child were young enough, it would, e.g., take the men and horses in a cinema picture for real animals.) Why then should there not be an analogous art of illusion by means of discourses which imposes “imitations” of truth on the youthful mind? May we not say that at bottom the sophist is an “imitator” and
Criticism of Eleaticism (237b-249d). The difficulty must first be fairly stated. If we say seriously “x is not,” it seems clear that the subject of the statement x cannot be anything that is (an ὄν), and therefore cannot be a “somewhat” (τὶ), since “somewhat” always means a “being,” an “existent.” Hence he who speaks of “what is not” seems to be speaking about “nothing.” Yet can we say that he is “saying nothing” (making an “unmeaning noise,” 237e)? This is bad, but there is worse behind. If we are to talk about “non-entity” at all, we must do so either in the singular (μὴ ὄν) or in the plural (μὴ ὄντα). But mere non-entity can have no predicates, and so neither unity nor plurality can be significantly asserted of it. Hence it seems we can neither think nor speak of it at all (238c). Yet in the very act of saying that “it is unthinkable,” by using the word “it” we are talking of nonentity as though it were one thing (239a). It seems then that we must say nothing whatever about “what is not,” and this ruins our attempt to characterize the sophist as an artist in illusion. He would argue that an illusion is “what is not,” and therefore that “maker of an illusion” is a meaningless sound. Unless the sophist really “takes us in” by producing a false belief in us, there is no illusion, and if he succeeds for a moment in producing the illusion, a false belief must be something real; but, as we have just seen, that is what the sophist will not admit. He will say that
We may say that Parmenides and all the early thinkers have dealt with the problem too light-heartedly, almost as though they were merely “telling a fairy-tale” (μυθον (mython), 242c). Some of them have said that what is is three things (?Pherecydes); another (?Archelaus),
Thus we see that the theory of those who
To complete our survey of the difficulties about being, let us consider what “the other side”
We need not say much about the thesis of the “materialists” but we may imagine them to be at any rate so far better than they actually are as to deign to answer our questions civilly. We will then ask them whether there is not such a thing as a soul; whether some souls are not righteous and wise, others wicked and foolish. If they say Yes, as they must, we shall ask whether this does not imply that wisdom and the other “virtues” are something, and whether they are anything that can be seen or handled. Even if they try to save themselves by saying that the soul is a kind of body, they will hardly venture to say that wisdom is a body, nor yet to say that it is nothing at all, though a genuine and persistent materialist would have to take this second alternative. We shall have gained our point with any of them who will admit that anything whatever can be and yet not be a body. To put it most simply, we shall ask them to admit no more than this, that anything which has any “power” however slight, of acting or being acted upon, certainly is—in fact, that “what is” is δύναμις (“force,” power), active or passive (245e-247e).
It is not clear precisely what persons are meant by the “giants” of materialism. They are certainly not atomists, as has sometimes been fancied. The atomists who insisted on the reality of the ἀναφὴς φύσις (vacuum) cannot be classed among persons who say that only what can be seen and felt is. Nor could Theaetetus say, as he does (246b), that he has met “lots” of these men; he would not meet many disciples of Leucippus, to say nothing of Democritus, in the Athens of 399 B.C. It seems to me most probable that Plato has in view the crass unthinking corporealism of the “average man” rather than the doctrine of any particular “school.” We must also be careful not to make the mistake of taking the proposed definition of “being” as “force” for one seriously intended by Plato. It is given simply as one which the materialist could be led to concede if he were willing to reflect, and we are warned that, on further consideration, we might think better of it.
We have now to consider the view of the “friends of forms,” the immaterialists already referred to. They hold that “becoming” and “being” are sharply contra-distinguished. Our body is in touch with “becoming” through sense-perception; our mind in touch with real and unchanging “being” through thought (248a). We have to ask them what they mean by “being in touch with.” Do they mean “acting or being acted on by a force”? Theaetetus may not be able to say, but the Eleatic speaker is familiar with the persons who are being criticised, and consequently knows that they would reject the statement. So far from accepting the identification of being with “the power to act or be acted on” they would say that both action and passion belong to the realm of “becoming”; “being” neither acts nor is acted on.
We cannot seriously think that “what utterly is,” the perfectly real, neither thinks nor lives, or that it thinks but does not live. If it thinks and is alive, it must have a soul, and if it has a soul, it cannot stand everlastingly still; it must have movement. If mind is to be real, there must be both motion and variety and also rest and uniformity in things (248e-249d).
It has been a much-discussed question who are the thinkers to whom the dialogue ascribes the doctrine just criticised. From the statement of their theory, it is clear that they are extreme dualists, who regard “being” and “becoming” as absolutely sundered. They then identify “becoming” with the sensible world, and consequently hold that the sensible world has no real existence. To put the same thing from the epistemological standpoint, they deny that sensation has any cognitive value, or plays any part in the apprehension of truth. This shows that the reference cannot be to the type of theory ascribed to Socrates in the Phaedo and Republic. The whole point of the doctrine of “participation” of sensible things in forms was just to break down the absolute severance between a real world of being” and an illusory world of “becoming,” by ascribing a partial and secondary reality to the sensible. So the doctrine of “recollection” was intended to assign sensation a genuine, if a humble, part in the process of reaching truth; sensation is, on that theory, just what “suggests” or “calls into our minds” the thought of the forms. A fortiori,
Proclus in Parmenides, p. 562 Stallbaum (Cousin, iv. 149); Greek Philosophy, Part I, 91 n. i, 280.
The Meaning of Significant Denial: The Platonic Categories (249e-259e). So far we have reached the result that though movement and rest are contraries, both of them certainly are. There is movement and there is rest, and when I say “rest is,” I do not mean that rest is motion, nor when I say that “motion is” do I mean that motion is rest. Motion, rest, being, are all distinct, and being embraces both of the others; though it is neither of them. It thus seems as difficult to say what “being” is the name for, as we found it to say what “what is not” is the name for. If we can answer the one question we shall probably find that we have learned how to answer the other (250e-251a).
Every one knows that we are always making assertions about, e.g., a man, in which we do not confine ourselves to the statement that “a man is a man,” but say something further about his complexion, his shape, size, good or bad qualities, and the like, and in all these cases we are saying that a man is not one thing only, but at the same time many (not merely a man, but ruddy, tall, lanky, patient, etc.). Raw lads and men who have begun their thinking too late in life
If we consider the three concepts being, rest, motion, there are just three logical possibilities: (a) that they all “partake in” one another, i.e. any one can be predicated of any other; (b) that none of them can be conjoined with any other, i.e. none can be predicated of another; (c) that some of them can be predicated of (“partake in”) others. We can reject (b) at once, since it would forbid us to say both that there is motion and that there is rest. This would make an end of the views alike of Heracliteans, Eleatics, “friends of forms” as well as of all the physicists who account for things as due to the aggregation and disgregation of “elements,” whether infinite in number (Anaxagoras) or finite (Empedocles). The theory is actually self-refuting, since you cannot state it without using such words and phrases as “is,” “apart from everything else,” “by itself,” and the like (252c). You cannot even deny the possibility of “synthetic judgments” except by making such a judgment. The proposition “only identical propositions are true” is not itself an identity; (a) is an even more absurd theory, since it would require us to affirm that rest is motion and motion rest (252d). Thus the only possible alternative is (c) that some “concepts” will “combine” and others will not (252e), just as some letters can be combined to form syllables, others cannot.
This illustration suggests a further point of supreme importance. Vowels hold a “favoured position” among the elementary sounds of language. Every syllable must contain a vowel, and the vowels are thus the “connecting links” which make syllabic composition possible. There is a special art (τέχνη, art or craft), that of the “teacher of letters,” which considers what combinations of consonants by the help of a vowel are possible and what are not, just as another art, music, considers what combinations of notes of different pitch will make a tune and what will not.
So there clearly must be a science which considers what “concepts” will “blend” so as to give rise to “discourses“ (λόγοι = speeches) and what will not, and again whether there is a class of concepts which, like the vowels in spelling, make all combinations possible, and another class which gives rise to distinctions (253c). Thus logic is here, for the first time in literature, contemplated as an autonomous science with the task of ascertaining the supreme principles of affirmative and negative propositions (the combinations and “separations”), But this task of dividing things rightly according to their “kinds,” detecting one “form” (idea = form, appearance) where it is disguised by complication with others, and distinguishing several which form a single complex, is precisely that of “dialectic.” Thus we have unexpectedly identified the true philosopher before
We cannot now work out the whole inquiry into the “communion” between forms, but we may deal with it for the special case of a few of the most important and all-pervading. As we have said, “being,” “motion” “rest,” are three of these universalissima or μέγιστα γένη (greatest kinds). Two of them—rest and motion—refuse to combine. But the third will combine with both of the two, since both motion and rest are. Moreover, each of the three is distinct or different (ἕτερον (another)) from the other two, but identical with itself. And difference and identity, again, are neither motion nor rest. Nor is either of them the same as “being.” We ascribe being alike to motion and to rest, but this is not to assert that motion is identical with rest. For “different from” is always a relative term, whereas being has an absolute sense.
Thus we have five, not merely
Let us now consider the relations between these five all-pervading forms. (It is never said that the list of the universalia universalissima is complete, though later Platonists, like Plotinus in Ennead vi. 1-3, treat them as a complete list of Platonic “highest universals,” or categories.) Motion is not rest, nor rest motion. But both are and are identical with themselves, and thus “partake” (μετέχει) of being and identity, and also, since each is different from the other, of difference. Thus we can say, e.g., that motion is—it is motion; but also is not—it is not rest. But in just the same way we can say that motion “partakes of” being and so is—there is such a thing as motion; but motion is not identical with being, and in that sense we may say that it is not, i.e. it is not-being. The same line of thought shows that “not-being” may be asserted of all the five forms already enumerated, even of being itself, since each of them is different from any of the others, and thus is not any of the others (255e-257a).
Now these considerations enable us to dismiss the difficulties which have been raised about “not-being.” When we say that something “is not so-and-so,” by the not-being here asserted we do not mean the “opposite” (ἐναντίον (against, versus)) of what is but only something different from what is. “A is not x” does not mean that A is nothing at all, but only that it is something other than anything which is x (257b-c). Not-beautiful, for example, is the name not of nothing but of all the things other than the things which are beautiful. And the things which are not-beautiful are just as truly as those which are beautiful. The “not-large” is, every whit as much as the “large” the “not-right” as much as the “right.” In making a denial we are not asserting an antithesis between nothing and something, but an opposition of something and something else different from it (258b). We may say, then, that “not-being” is as real and has as definite a character as being. This is our answer to Parmenides. We have not merely succeeded in doing what he forbade, asserting significantly that “what is not, is”; we have actually discovered what it is. It is “the different” (τὸ θάτερον, the one, the other of two), and since everything is different from all other things, we may say boldly that “not-being” is thoroughly real (ὄντως ὄν, 257b-258e). Henceforth we shall not give ourselves any further concern about the alleged paradox that “what is not” is that unthinkable thing “the absurd,” the “opposite” of what is. It is childishly easy to see that any thing is different from other things and so may be said to be “what is not”; the true difficulty is to determine the precise limits of the identity and difference to be found among things (259d).
Application of Our Result to the Problem of “False Opinion”: Final Definition of the Sophist (260a-268c). Our identification of
And both the statements are about Theaetetus, the false statement no less than the true. A statement which was not about (or “of”) some subject would not be a statement at all (263c). Thus some complexes of nouns and verbs are false. Now thinking is an internal conversation in which the mind asks itself a question; belief or judgment (δόξα) is the statement, affirmative or negative, in which the mind answers its own question, without audible words. Sometimes the internal conversation is accompanied by sensation, and then we call it “fantasy” (i.e. when the debate of the mind is started by the attempt to interpret a present sensation). Hence, from the possibility of false statement or discourse follows the equal possibility of false belief or judgment and false “phantasy” (erroneous interpretation of sensation,
We said that we could divide it into the making of accurate likenesses (ikόnes) and the making of inaccurate images (φαντάσματα, phantasms), both of which are forms of “imitation.” Let us reconsider this more in detail. The making of imitations is a branch of creative art, as distinguished from the arts of acquisition, as we said long ago. We may now divide creative art into divine creative art and human creative art. The difference is that God (not, as the thoughtless say, unintelligent “nature”) creates all real things without any preexisting material (πρόερον οὐκ ὄντα, 265c);
Divine creation of images.
Human creation of images.
The images created by God are such things as dreams, shadows thrown by a light, reflections in a polished surface; those created by man are pictures of things made by man (houses, etc.), and the like. Here we bring in again our former and now justified subdivision of images. Man-made “mages” are either accurate likenesses or phantasms. Phantasms again are of two kinds: those produced by tools of some kind (like the painter’s brush), and those for which the producer acts as his own tool, as when another man (e.g. an actor) imitates the physical bearing or the tone of voice of Theaetetus by his own facial gestures and his own voice, and this kind of imitation is what we call mimicry (μίμησις = mimesis, to imitate). Mimicry, again, is twofold. A man may know what he is mimicking or he may not know it. Many persons who have no knowledge of the true figure (σχημα) of justice or goodness generally try to make their speech and action exhibit the appearance of what they fancy to be goodness and justice, and some of them succeed in conveying the impression they are aiming at. This is a plain case of mimicry by a man who does not know (267d). There is no recognized name for this specific “mimicry by the man who does not know,” so we coin one for the moment and call it δοξομιμητική
One closing remark may be made on the main result of the whole dialogue. Plato’s solution of the old puzzle about “what is not” and the later paradox, grafted on it, of the impossibility of error, turns, as we see, on distinguishing what we should call the use of “is” as the logical copula, or sign of assertion, from the existential sense of “is.” To us the distinction may seem almost trivial, but it only seems so because the work of making it has been done so thoroughly, once for all, in the Sophistes. Though Plato lets us see that he thought the ordinary Megarian a good deal of a conscious impostor, the difficulty about the possibility of error and of significant denial was a perfectly serious one with its originators and remained so until the ambiguity had been thoroughly cleared up. It is impossible to overestimate the service to both logic and metaphysics rendered by Plato’s painstaking and searching examination. We shall realise the magnitude of the issue better if we are careful to remember that, as Plato himself knew, the problem is at bottom one which affects all assertion. His point is that all significant propositions are “synthetic,” in the sense that they are more than assertions of the equivalence of two sets of verbal symbols, and that they are all “functions” of an “argument” which is “not null.” This would be a mere paradox if there were no other sense of “is” than the existential. We can see that a completed logic would have to carry the work of distinction further than it is carried in the dialogue. Notably the “is” which asserts the identity of the object denoted by two different descriptions (e.g. “the victor at Pharsalia is the consul of the year 59 B.C.”) needs to be distinguished both from the “copula” and the existential “is.” But the first step and the hardest to take is the recognition of the “copula” and its functions for what they are. Since the Sophistes takes this step for the first time, it is not too much to say that it definitely originates scientific logic.
II. The Politicus
We must deal much more briefly with the application of the method of division to the definition of the statesman. We may be content, now that we have grasped the principle of the method, to concentrate our attention in the main on the solid result it is used to establish. Plato’s real purpose in the dialogue is much less merely to continue his lesson in logical method than to deal with a fundamental problem in the theory of government on which men’s minds even now continue to be divided. The issue is whether, as the actual world goes, “personal rule” or impersonal “constitutionalism” is the better for mankind, and Plato means to decide definitely for constitutionalism and, in particular, to commend “limited monarchy.” His reading of the facts of the political situation is that monarchy has to be revived, as it was in fact revived by Philip, Alexander, and their successors, but that whether it is to be a great blessing or a great curse will depend on the question whether it is revived as constitutional monarchy or as irresponsible autocracy. Democracy, with all the defects it has shown at Athens, is the most tolerable form of government where there is no fixed “law of the constitution,” autocracy the most intolerable; where there is such a fixed law, a monarch is a better head of the executive and administrative than either a select “oligarchy” or a “town’s meeting.”
In form, the dialogue is a continuation of the Sophistes, with one change in personnel. Theaetetus is present as a silent character, but, to save him from undue fatigue, his place as respondent is taken by his companion, a lad named Socrates, who has been present without speaking through the Theaetetus and Sophistes. (The great Socrates, as in the Sophistes, is completely silent but for one or two opening remarks.) The “younger” Socrates has been introduced by one phrase in the Theaetetus (147d 1) as studying mathematics in company with Theodorus and Theaetetus. He is known to have been an original member of the Academy. There is one further reference to him in a letter belonging to the later years of Plato’s life, usually condemned by the editors as spurious, though for no obvious reasons (Epinomis x. 358e). We learn there only that he is in poor health at the time of writing. Aristotle mentions him once (Metaphysics B 1036b 25) in a way which shows that he belonged to the Academic group reproached elsewhere by Aristotle for their “pam-mathematicism.”
I think it all but certain that it is he, not the
The dialogue begins (257a-267c) with an attempt to characterize the science or art (τέχνη, ἐπιστήμη) of the king or statesman (πολιτική, βασιλκή) by assigning it a place in the classification of the sciences. Some “sciences” merely provide us with knowledge, others, including all the industrial arts, produce results embodied in material objects (σώματα). So we begin by dividing sciences into the practical (πρακτικαί) and the purely cognitive (γνωστικαί). The science of the statesman involves little or nothing in the way of manual activity; it consists wholly or mainly in mental insight. Thus we class it as cognitive (259c). But there are two kinds of cognitive sciences. Some of them are concerned merely with apprehending truths, and may be called critical (arithmetic is an example); others issue directions or orders for the right performance of actions, and may be called directive (ἐπιτακτικαί), and the science of the statesman is of this kind (260c). Again, some of the arts which direct merely pass on instructions which do not originate with the practitioner (as a “herald” communicates the directions of his commander), others give sovereign directions, are sovereignly directive (αὐτεπιτακτικαί, 260e). Among these we may distinguish those which have the sovereign direction of the production of living beings from those which are concerned with the production of lifeless things (like the science of the master-builder). This puts the king, or statesman, in the class of persons exercising sovereign control over the production and nurture (τροφή) of animals. Next, there is a distinction between the groom, who exercises this calling on a single animal, and the herdsman who practices it upon a whole herd or flock; the statesman, like the latter, has a flock or herd to deal with (261d).
We are thus on the point of identifying the ruler with the shepherd of a human flock (a metaphor as familiar to the Greeks from their recollections of Homer as it is to us from the language of Old Testament prophecy). But it would be a violation of the rules of method to divide “herds” at once into herds of men and herds of other animals. We must observe the rule that a division must proceed in regular order from the highest to the lowest classes, not make sudden leaps. It is unscientific to single out mankind as one class and to throw all the rest of the animal world, irrespective of all differences of structure, into the one ill-constituted group “other animals” just as it would be unscientific to divide mankind into Greeks and “barbarians” (262d) or integers into “the number 10,000” and “all other numbers.” A reflective crane might be
The effect of our division then is to define the statesman as a kind of herdsman of gregarious animals, with a trade of the same kind as the cow-keeper or the pig-drover, except that his herd consists of unusually “kittle” beasts. But there is a difficulty of which such a definition takes no account. In the case of the statesman there are a goodly number of rivals who might challenge this description. Farmers, corn-dealers, physicians, professors of “gymnastic” might all urge that the definition “raiser of the human herd” applies to themselves as much as to the ruler. This difficulty does not arise in the other analogous cases of the shepherd, ox-herd, swine-herd, because every one of them is at once breeder, feeder, and physician of his herd. As this is not the case with the ruler of men, there must be something faulty about the classification we have followed; our business is next to see where the error has come in. We may get a hint from a tale we all heard as children, the story that the sun reversed his daily path in horror when Thyestes started the series of crimes which disgraced the line of Pelops by stealing the “golden lamb” (268e).
The imaginative myth which now follows (268e-274e) is built up on the basis of ideas of which we may find traces in the early cosmogonists, combined with fancies known to have been specially affected by the Pythagoreans. From the cosmogonists we have the notion of a past “golden age” before Zeus had dethroned Cronus; many of the details about this age of gold seem to be “Hesiodic.” The conception of the life of the universe as an
Thus dramatic propriety is observed by making the Eleatic visitor utilize for his story precisely the materials which would be specially familiar to a native of Magna Graecia. The tale is told simply to make an immediate point. It is wrong on principle to take any part of it as scientific cosmology meant seriously by Plato, and to attempt, like Adam, the impossible task of fitting the story into that of the Timaeus. In outline the story runs as follows. The tale of the sun’s return on his track, like much of the existing mythology, is a fragment of a very ancient tradition about the transition from the age of Cronus to the age of Zeus. The whole may be reconstructed thus. Only God has complete immortality. The universe as a whole, being corporeal, cannot be quite immutable, but makes the nearest approximation it can to immutability by alternately revolving round the same axis in opposite senses. There are periods when God himself is at the helm of the world-ship with his hand on the rudder, and there are alternate periods when he “retires” to his look-out (περιωπή, 272e) and leaves the ship to follow its own course. The immediate result is a complete reversal of sense of all biological as well as cosmological processes. Life runs backward, in “looking-glass” fashion. The reversal of sense is attended by gigantic cosmic catastrophes, but when the first confusion is over, the ship settles down once more to a uniform course, though with a reversed sense; at first the regularity of its processes is almost as complete as when God was steering. But as time goes on, the world “forgets God, its Maker” and the irregularities due to the “lusts” inherent in its bodily frame accumulate; all regularity is on the point of vanishing, the ship nearly founders in the “sea” of the “infinite,” when God puts his hand to the tiller again, and once more reverses the sense of the cosmic movements.
The stories of the golden age, when men lived peacefully, without agriculture, clothes, or laws, are reminiscences of the condition of the world “under Cronus,” when God was actually steering the ship, and acting literally as the “shepherd” of mankind, with departmental gods under him as “deputy shepherds.” Our own age, that of Zeus, belongs to the period when the world is left to itself,
Were the men of the golden age really happier than ourselves who belong to the “iron time”? It depends on the use they made of their immunity from the struggle with nature for physical existence. If they used their freedom from the cares of life to glean wisdom from the beasts and one another, no doubt they were happier. If they used it merely to fill themselves with meat and drink, and to tell idle stories to the beasts and one another, we know what to think about that kind of life (272c).
The moral of the story is that our attempt to define the statesman as the “shepherd of men” has involved two errors—one serious, the other comparatively light. The serious error is that we have confused the work of a statesman in our historical world with that of one of the gods of the “age of Cronus.” They actually “fed” their flock; the statesman of the historical world does not. The minor fault was that we said truly that the statesman is a ruler, but made no attempt to specify the kind of “rule” he exercises. We ought to have reserved the work of “feeding and breeding” the flock for a god; of the statesman, who is a man among men, we should have said more modestly that his business is the “tendance” (ἐπιμέλεια, θεραπεία) of the flock (275b-276b). (The object of the remark is to eliminate the “superman” from serious political theory, and so to strike at the root of the worship of the “man who can,” the autocrat or dictator paternally managing the rest of mankind without the need of direction or control by law.) If we had made this clear, we should not have found the provision-dealers and others claiming that our description was as applicable to them as to the statesman. As to the other fault, it arises from overlooking an important step in our division. We forgot that the “feeding,” or, as we now propose to say, the “tendance,” may be either forced on the flock (βίαιον) or freely accepted by them (ἐκούσιον). This is what makes all the difference between the true “king” and the “tyrant” or “usurper.” The “tyrant”
Yet we must not be too much in a hurry to accept this as an adequate account of statesmanship. We have, it may be, drawn the outline of our portrait of the statesman correctly, but we still have to get the colouring of the picture right (277a-c). To explain what we mean by this, we shall do well to illustrate our point by a familiar example. And before we do this, we may even illustrate the use of examples by a preliminary example. This preliminary example shall be taken from the way in which small children are taught their letters. At first they may be given a set of very simple syllables which they soon read off exactly. But they still make mistakes in recognizing these very same combinations when they meet with them elsewhere. We correct their mistakes by making them compare the combinations they have misread with the standard alphabet or syllabary they have already mastered. This is their exemplar; the purpose of repeatedly referring them back to it is to make them able to detect unerringly any combination given them when they meet with it again in a new setting. This is the function of every example (277c-278d).
Now for our example of the kind of discrimination which will be necessary, if we are to distinguish the statesman’s “tendance” of the community from all cognate or analogous occupations. We may take it from the humble industry of weaving woolen garments. If we set to work to distinguish the weaver’s industry from every other, a series of obvious “divisions”—we need not repeat them, though Plato gives them—soon leads us to the result that it is the industry of fashioning defenses against climate and weather by the intertexture of wools (279b-280d). But this statement, though true, is not sufficiently precise. If we described the weaver as occupied with the “tendance” of clothes, wool-carders, fullers, stitchers, and others, to say nothing of the makers of the implements they all use, might put in a claim to be called “weavers.” If we are to avoid this difficulty, we must, in the first place, distinguish carefully between the art which actually makes a thing, and those which only contribute in a subsidiary way to its production—the principal and the subordinate arts (281d-e). Next, among principal “arts” concerned with clothes, we must set aside those which have to do with cleansing, repairing, and adorning the material; this is “tendance of clothes” but not the kind of tendance exercised by the weaver (282c). Next, if we consider the work of actually making the clothes, which we will call “working in wool” (ταλασιουργική), we can divide it into two kinds, each of which may be subdivided again. Part of the work consists in separation of the composite (the carding of the wool is an illustration); part consists in combining the separate into one. And this work of combining may take either of two forms, twisting or interlacing (282d). Both the warp and the woof of the intended web are made by twisting (or spinning), the one being spun closer and
We may distinguish two kinds of measurement (μετρητική) and two standards of measure—one extrinsic and relative, the other intrinsic and absolute (the actual names are mine, not Plato’s). We may measure things as great and small simply by reference to one another, or by reference to the standard of τὸ μέτριον (moderate), the right amount, or, as it is also expressed, in words meant to sound paradoxical, κατὰ τὴν τὴς γενέσεως ἀναγκαίαν οὐσίαν (“by the standard of the being which is indispensable to the production” 283d). (The meaning is, to take a simple example, that a teaspoonful of a liquid may be “very little” by comparison with a bucketful; but it is dreadfully “too much,” a dreadful “overdose,” if the liquid contains a concentrated poison, medicinal in minute doses.) The arts and their products, for example both statesmanship and the art of weaving, of which we have just spoken, are constantly employing this standard of the “just proportionate” in estimating excess and defect; it is by adhering to it that “all good things” are produced and preserved. To demonstrate the reality of this intrinsic standard of measurement might prove as long a business as we found it to demonstrate the reality of “what is not,” and, as we do not wish to be led too far away from our immediate topic, it is sufficient for our purpose to point out that unless we recognize it we shall have to deny the very possibility of applying science to the regulation of action (284a-d). (This thought of a “just right mean” and its significance for action will meet us again still more prominently in the Philebus. From the use made of it in the Ethics it has come to be spoken of familiarly as the Aristotelian principle of the Mean. In justice to both Aristotle and Plato it is necessary to point out that the whole doctrine is Platonic, and that Aristotle never makes any claim to its authorship, though he is careful to call attention, throughout the Ethics, to the points on which he believes himself to be correcting Plato and the Academy.)
Thus the sciences generally fell into two classes—those which measure numbers, lengths, areas, velocities, etc., against one another, and those which take as the standard of their measurements the right mean (μέτριον), the appropriate (πρέπον), the seasonable (καιρός), the morally necessary (δέον). The saying that “all science is measurement” is only true on the condition that we remember this distinction between two kinds of measurement. (Thus Plato combines the view that “science is measurement” with strict adherence to the principle of the absoluteness of moral and aesthetic values.) As an illustration of the point, we
We now return to the main argument. The example has impressed it on us that in defining a science it is indispensable to discriminate it from others which are (a) subsidiary to it; (b) analogous, but not identical with it. We must try to make this double discrimination for the case of the statesman (287b-305d).
Arts or callings subsidiary to a principal “art” will, with a little forcing, come under one of the following heads:
1. Those which make the instruments used by the principal art as its implements;
2. Those which make vessels for the safe keeping of products of all kinds;
3. Those which make stands and vehicles (ὀχήματα)
4. Those which make coverings and defenses of all kinds;
5. Those which ornament and embellish a product, and make it tasteful—arts of “play”;
6. Those which fabricate what the principal art uses as its “raw material”;
7. Those which provide nutriment of all kinds (287c-289c).
If we add one other branch of art, “the rearing of herds” already often mentioned, this classification will cover all our “property” (κτήματα), except slaves and personal servants (i.e. except those human “chattels” who directly assist a man, in a subordinate way, in the actual living of his life). (The thought is that the only piece of “property” which cannot be reckoned, roughly speaking, under the head of “implements” or “provisions,” is the “chattel” who is also your assistant in the work of living. You could not well apply to the services of your confidential clerk—who at Athens would have been your “property”—the formula that his business is to make, or to take care of, that which you use. He really is, in his degree, contributing to the actual “tendance” of your soul.) Thus there is the same sort of analogy between the work of the king and that of a personal servant or slave as between the work of the weaver and that of the carder or spinner. The person whom it would be most excusable to mistake for the king—the irony is characteristically Platonic—is the “menial” (289c). For all his pomp and circumstance, the king really is very much like a “menial servant.”
We should expect, then, that the most plausible false pretender to the functions of the king would be some class of menials. On inspection we find, however, that most menials never dream of advancing such pretensions. If we extend the range of the term
There are three well-known types of government: monarchy (the rule of a single person), oligarchy (rule by a small select group), democracy (rule by the general citizen body). But we may add that the first two have two forms, so that the whole number of types should be reckoned as five. The single person may rule in accord with law and with the consent of the ruled,
So the rule of the few, based on law, is aristocracy; the lawless rule of the few by mere force is oligarchy. Democracy commonly retains the name whether it is based on law or on mere force (291d-292a). This is the current popular classification of forms of government. (It is, in fact, that regularly insisted on by Isocrates, a good representative of “popular culture.”) But is the classification really scientific? We have already seen that kingship or ruling is a directive science. The one relevant distinction between claimants to be rulers is therefore their possession or want of this science, not the distinctions between rule by the rich and rule by the poor, rule by fewer or more persons, on which the current classification is founded (292c). Now real knowledge of the science of ruling men is a very rare thing—rarer even than first-rate knowledge of draughts, though even that is rare enough. The number of genuine statesmen must be exceedingly few (293a). Those few, because they have scientific knowledge of principles, will be. true kings or statesmen, whether they exercise their profession with the popular consent or not, with a written law as a control or not, just as the man who knows the science of medicine is the true physician whether his patients like his treatment, whether he follows the prescriptions of a textbook, or not (293a-b). In any case, he, and only he, does the work of the physician, preserves the bodily health of the patients he “tends.” So the one ideally right form of statesmanship is rule by the man who has true scientific knowledge about the “tendance of the soul,”
Yet it is a hard saying that it is indifferent whether government is carried on by law or without it, and our position requires further examination. Legislation is, in a sense, part of the work of a statesman, and yet the ideally best thing would be the supremacy not of the laws but of the embodied wisdom of the true king. For no law can be trusted to produce the best effects in every case; this is impossible, since the law cannot take account of the infinite variations of individual character, situation, and circumstance. Any law will give rise to “hard cases” (294b-c). Why, then, is legislation indispensable? Because it is impossible for the ruler, who is a man with the limitations of humanity, to give individual direction in each of the countless cases which have to be considered. He has to fall back on giving general directions which will suit the “average” man and the “average” situation (295a).
Now suppose that, over and beyond this, any practitioner of a directive science, e.g. a physician, were compelled to absent himself from his patients for long and frequent intervals, how would he meet the risk of their forgetting his directions? He would provide them with written memoranda of the regimen they were to follow in his absence; but if he came back sooner than he had expected, he would have no scruple about changing these written regulations if the case demanded it. So the true statesman, if he could return after an absence, would have no scruple in modifying his institutions and regulations for similar reasons, nor a second true statesman in changing those of a first (295e). It is popularly said that an innovation in the laws is permissible if the proposer can persuade the city to adopt it, but not otherwise. Yet we should not say that a medical man who insisted on breaking through a written rule of treatment when he thought it necessary to do so had committed a fault in medical treatment because the patient had objected to the departure from the “books”; so if a statesman makes the citizens better men by forcing them to innovate on their written and inherited laws, we must not say that he has committed a fault in his science, a “crime” or a “wrong” (296c). Nor does a man’s claim to make such innovations depend on superior wealth; the one and only relevant qualification is his wisdom and goodness. If he has these qualifications, he is entitled to save the “vessel of the State” as his goodness and wisdom direct, just as an actual pilot shapes his course by his living “art,” not by a written rule. The wise ruler has only one rule which is inviolable, the rule of doing what is wise and right (τὸ μετὰ νου καὶ τέχνης δικαιότατον, 297b) (“following the dictates of mind and art”). The one perfect “form of government” would be government by the living insight of such an ideal ruler; all others are mere imperfect “imitations,” of varying degrees of merit.
In the absence of such an ideal ruler, that is, in the actual circumstances of human life, the best course is the very one we have just pronounced absurd where the ideal ruler is presupposed. The
The laws are at least an approximate “imitation” of the principles on which the living ideal “king” would act. As we said, such a man would refuse to be bound by formulae when they do not really apply. In this one respect of departing from formula and precedent, the politicians who disregard the law are like the true statesman. But, since they are by hypothesis ignorant of the principles of statesmanship, they imitate his “innovations” badly they depart from law and precedent in the wrong cases and for wrong reasons. In any community where the ruler is not the ideal scientific statesman, and that means in every society where the “sovereign” is a body of several men, and most, if not all, when he is one man, the law ought to be absolutely paramount (301a). (This means that we must eliminate from “practical politics” the “rule of the saints” at which the Pythagorean brotherhood had aimed in the cities of Magna Graecia. The infallible ruler would be a god or a superman. Supermen are not found in the historical world; there, the sovereignty of law is the succedaneum for an actual theocracy, as is further explained in the fourth book of the Laws.)
These considerations explain why in actual fact we find five, not merely three, distinguishable forms of government. When the “well-to-do” govern with strict regard for law we have aristocracy; when they disregard law, oligarchy. One person ruling with
It is an important, if not strictly relevant, question which of these various constitutions is least unsatisfactory. We may say at once that monarchy, the rule of a single person, is the best of all, if it is strictly subject to good fundamental laws; in the form of sheer personal rule without laws, “tyranny,” it is worst of all. As for the “rule of a few,” it is “middling”; the rule of the multitude, from the inevitable subdivision of the sovereign power, is weakest of all for good or evil. Thus, where there is a fundamental law, monarchy is the best constitution, aristocracy the second, democracy the worst; where caprice rules instead of law, democracy is least bad, oligarchy worse, despotism worst of all. (There is likely to be more “fundamental decency” in a big crowd than in a little “ring,” and least of all in an uncontrolled autocrat, 302b-303b.)
We can now at last say who are the serious pretenders to the name of the statesman or king, from whom it is so important to discriminate him. They are the men of affairs in the imperfect constitutions, who delude themselves and their admirers into false belief in their practical wisdom; they call themselves πολιτικοί (statesmen), but are really στασιαστικοί (party politicians). These are the supreme “wizards” and “sophists” of the world (303c).
We have now, so to say, purged away all the dross from our concept of statesmanship; only good ore is left. But as “adamant,” itself a precious thing, is separated from gold in the last stages of the process of refining, so we have still to distinguish statesmanship from the tasks of the soldier, the judge, the preacher of righteousness who “persuades men” into goodness by the noble use of eloquence. Reflection satisfies us that the business of the statesman is not to persuade or to win battles, but to decide whether persuasion or enforcement shall be adopted, whether war shall be made or not. So his business is not to administer the laws but to make the laws which the courts then administer. Each of the callings just mentioned has charge of one action, the proper performance of which is its contribution to the “tendance” of the city; the statesman’s superior function is to control and coordinate all these inferior activities (303d-305e). His task is to weave together all classes in the State into the one fabric of the life of the whole.
Just as a web is made by the inter-texture of the stiffer threads
The statesman then proceeds to give instruction for the interweaving of the threads he has selected, the characters who can be trained into the combination of valour with sophrosyne. He will regard as the threads of his warp the temperaments in which the original bias is to action and adventure, as the threads of the woof the tamer and quieter. The actual weaving of the two together is a double process; the “everlasting” in the souls of the citizens will be knit by a “divine” bond, the merely “animal” by a “human.” The “divine” bond is constituted by “true and assured beliefs” about good and right, bad and wrong. These the statesman will look to the educator to provide. The effect of such an education is to make the naturally daring soul gentler by teaching it respect for the rights of others, and to develop the natural orderliness of the quiet and unambitious into sophrosyne and wisdom. This education, which corrects the bias of each type, is the “divine” bond which most effectively produces unity of life and character, but it will only produce its full effect in the finest souls. The “human” and inferior way of producing unity in the society is to take care that marriages are contracted on the right principles.
At present, to say nothing of marriages based on equality in fortune or rank, the tendency is for persons of the same type of temperament to mate with one another, the adventurous with the adventurous, the quiet with the quiet. But this is a false principle,
It will be observed that the dialogue is peculiarly rich, apart from its immediate political teaching, in ideas which have passed over into the substance of Aristotelian ethics. Thus, in addition to the conception of the “intrinsic” standard of the Right Mean, we may mention the distinction between Cognitive and Practical Science, which corresponds to Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy;
All these conceptions happen to be more familiar to us from the Ethics and Politics than from the Politicus, but it is from the Politicus that
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 273-301; Platonism. 1928, c. 5.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 120-165, 185-258, 642-657; Platons Dialoge, 25-67; Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon, 1-94.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 317-354.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 271-296, 331-338.
Apelt, O. Platonische Aufsatze, 238-290. 1912.
Apelt, O. Platonis Sophista. Leipzig, 1897.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 84-91; Myths of Plato, 173-211 The Politicus Myth.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 352-399, 450-522.
Barker, E. Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 276-291.
Campbell, L. Sophistes and Politicus of Plato. Oxford, 1867.
Dies, A. Platon, Le Sophiste, Paris, 1925, and Platon, Politique Paris, 1935.
Cornford, F. H. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge. Translation of Theaetetus and Sophistes with Commentary, London, 1935.
Stenzel, J. Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles, 10-23, 126-133. Leipzig, 1924.
And for the history of Plato’s relations with Dion and Dionysius II, the full treatment in Meyer, E. Geschichte des Altertums, v. 497-528.
In the Philebus we are once more dealing with “practice,” and more specifically with “individual” morality. The dialogue is a straightforward discussion of the question whether the “good for man” can be identified either with pleasure or with the life of thought. Socrates once more takes the part of chief speaker, a place given him in no other dialogue later than the Theaetetus. The explanation of this is no doubt, as Burnet has said, that the subject-matter, the application of Pythagorean “categories” to problems of conduct, is precisely that which Plato represents as having always been his chief interest. I think it significant that, as we shall see, all through the discussion the “categories” with which Socrates works are the Pythagorean concepts of the Unbounded, the Limit, and their synthesis. We know from Aristotle that one of the characteristic divergences of Plato from the Pythagoreans was that he substituted for their antithesis of the Boundless and the Limit that of the Boundless, conceived as “unbounded in both directions” (the Great-and-Small), and the One.
(On the Pythagorean view, the One, or Unit, was the simplest synthesis of the Boundless with Limit.) It is clear, since Aristotle never hints at any change in Plato’s teaching, that the doctrine he calls Platonic must have been taught in the Academy as early as his own arrival there in 367; the Philebus is certainly one of the latest works of Plato’s life, and must have been written years after 367, but it still uses the Pythagorean, not the Platonic, antithesis. I can see no explanation except the simple one that for the purposes of the discussion the Pythagorean categories are satisfactory, and that Plato is unwilling to make Socrates expound what he knows to be a novelty of his own.
There are no data for determining the relative dates of composition of Philebus, Timaeus, Laws. Presumably the composition of the Laws was going on when the other two were written. The dramatic date of the conversation cannot be fixed, except that from Philebus 58a 7 we see that it is later than the first visit of Gorgias to Athens; the scene is also left unspecified, though it is, no doubt, “somewhere in (or about)” Athens. The two young men who figure as interlocutors, Protarchus and Philebus, are entirely
If we know so little about the date of the dialogue, we seem able to say much more definitely than for most of the dialogues what were the circumstances which occasioned its composition. The object of the discussion is to examine two rival theses about the “good”: (a) that it is pleasure (ἡδονή), (b) that it is “thinking” τὀ φρνειν, τὀ νοειν. The way in which the theses are formulated at the outset (11b) suggests at once that we are dealing with a quaestio disputata within a regular philosophical school. When we find that the purpose of the dialogue is to criticise both, to dismiss both as inadequate, and to suggest a via media, the impression naturally arises that Plato, as head of the Academy, is acting as “moderator” in a dispute within his own school. The evidence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics seems to convert the possibility into a certainty. As is well known, Aristotle there deals twice over with the problem of the relation between good and pleasure. In the discussion of the seventh book, he starts with an anti-Hedonist thesis that pleasure is not good at all, examines the arguments adduced by its defenders, and urges that they are so inconclusive that they do not even prove that pleasure is not the supreme good.
“{Aristotle’s} arguments are all taken from Platonic dialogues,
including the Philebus itself, but employed to prove something
different from the conclusions drawn in Plato.”
The arguments are all taken from Platonic dialogues, including the Philebus itself, but employed to prove something different from the conclusions drawn in Plato. Since one of these is that “pleasure must be bad, because it hinders thought”—a misrepresentation of the argument of Phaedo 66a ff.—the persons who advanced them clearly held that the good is “thinking” (τὀ φρονειν), the thesis pitted against the identification of good with pleasure at the opening of our dialogue. Aristotle incidentally mentions among their arguments the contention that pleasure cannot be the good because pleasure and pain are both bad things which a wise man avoids, and names the author of the doctrine, Speusippus.
In the second discussion of the subject, he also tells us who the person who identified “the good” with pleasure was; it was the famous
The attitude taken by Plato in the dialogue to this discussion is, to all intents and purposes, precisely that of the “moderator” in the schools of the Middle Ages “determining” a quaestio disputata. The arguments produced by both parties are reviewed and weighed, and the balance is struck between the disputants. It is decided that the issue shall be narrowed down to a consideration of the “good for man” in particular. When the question has thus been delimited, it is “determined” by the answer that neither pleasure alone nor thought alone is the “good” or best life for men; the best life must include both thought and grateful feeling; bat of the two, thought is the “predominant partner.” This is, in fact, the conclusion to which the discussion is made to lead; it is also the verdict given on the same issue in Aristotle’s Ethics, which owe more of their inspiration to the Philebus than to any other Platonic dialogue.
The Question Propounded (11a-20b). What is “the good”? Philebus has an answer to this question: “pleasure, joy, delight,” this is the good for all living creatures. Socrates disputes this: “thought, intelligence, memory, true judgment,” are better than pleasure “for all who can share in them” (11b). Thus Philebus originally makes an assertion not simply about the good for man in particular, but about good universal, “the” good. Socrates commits himself to no assertion about good universal, but asserts that for an intelligent being, like man, there is something better than pleasure, namely, the exercise of intelligence. If we are to decide between those conflicting views, we must at least agree on the sense to be put on the phrase, “the good for man.” We may take it that both of us mean by this phrase “a condition and state (ἕξις καὶ διάθεσις) of soul which can make any man’s life happy” (11d).
The question is whether pleasure, or again, thought, or possibly something better than either, is that “state and condition.”
Now “pleasure” is a word with many shades of meaning. A “life of pleasure” often means a vicious life, yet we say that the continent man finds his very continence pleasant; we talk of the “pleasures” of folly and extravagant daydreams, but we also say that the “thinking man” finds his thinking pleasant. Thus there may be pleasures of many kinds, and we have no right to assume that all must be good (12d). You may say, as the Hedonist does, that the difference of which Socrates speaks is a difference in the sources from which pleasure is derived, not in the pleasure yielded, but this would be evading the real issue. All pleasant experiences agree in being pleasant, just as all coloured surfaces agree in being coloured. But there are more or less marked colour-contrasts also. Why then may there not be pleasure-contrasts within the genus pleasure? If there are, this will be a reason for hesitating to ascribe the predicate good to all pleasures.
“Pleasure is good” is, in fact, a synthetic proposition (13a), and therefore we cannot assume the impossibility of regarding some pleasures as good, but others as bad. They are all, of course, pleasant, but pleasantness might be present both in good and in bad experiences. Similarly, if we consider the rival thesis, that thought is “the good” we can see that it is one thing to make the analytic propositions “science is science,” “knowledge is knowledge,” another to say that “science (or knowledge) is good.” If there are a plurality of “sciences,” or other activities of intellect, some of them may conceivably be good, others bad (14a). Thus we see that our present discussion raises the old and eternally recurring problem of the one and the many (14c).
One form of this problem may now be regarded as long ago disposed of, the ancient difficulty of the possession of many qualities or parts by the same individual (14d-e). This was the form in which the problem had arisen, e.g. in the Phaedo; presumably Plato means that the solution given there is sufficient to dispose of the question. The case which still needs investigation is that in which the “one” is not a thing which comes into or passes out of being, but belongs to the non-phenomenal order. This case gives rise to three questions: (a) whether there really are such non-phenomenal “units”; (b) how we are to reconcile their unity with their reality or being;
(c) how we can think of such units as being at
We certainly cannot evade these problems; they are perpetually turning up in all our “discourses” and we must meet them as best we can (15d-16b). There is no better way of dealing with them than that of which Socrates has always been a lover. (Compare the way in which he speaks in the Phaedrus of his reverence for the true dialectician who knows how to “divide” a subject rightly.) There was long ago a Prometheus—Pythagoras is the person meant—who revealed the art by which such problems may be treated. His followers have handed down to us the tradition that “whatever is at any time said to be” is composed of the constituents limit and the unlimited. No matter what subject we study, we can find these elements in it. We can always find a single form (the allusion is to the Pythagorean doctrine that the “unit” is the first combination of limit and unlimited)—and on inspection we shall, with care, be able to discover two, or three, or some other number of definite further forms included in it. We should next take each of these forms and look for a definite number of forms included in them, and continue this process as long as fresh forms are to be found. It is only when we can no longer repeat the process that we should let things “go to infinity.” In this way, the only way worthy of a dialectician, we shall discover not only that every form is at once one and infinitely many, but also how many it is (16c-17a). (That is, we must not be content to say, for example, that animal, or anything else, is one kind and also that there are an indefinite number of animals; we must attempt to make a logical division which will show us exactly what and how many species of animals we can distinguish. It is only when we have reached an infima species incapable of further logical subdivision that we may consider the indefinite multiplicity of individuals. So long as you can go on with the logical division, each genus has not an indefinite plurality but a determinate number of constituents.) Thus the grammarian must not say that articulate sound is in a sense one, and yet that there are “any number” of different articulate sounds; he must know how many distinct sounds his alphabet has to represent. To do this he has to divide articulate sounds into vowels and consonants, and the consonants again into “stops” and “sonants” It is only if he finds that these classes cannot be subdivided into sub-classes that he may then enumerate the individual vowels, stops, or sonants. Thus definite number (the number of the constituent species and sub-species) is everywhere the intermediate link between the one genus and its indefinitely numerous members (17b-18d).
We must apply this consideration of method to our special moral problem. Before we can decide whether all pleasure or all thinking is good or not, we must know not only that pleasure is one
Preliminary Delimitation of the Problem: Neither Pleasure nor Thought Alone Is the Good for Man (20c-22c). Socrates, as we shall see, has no serious intention of allowing the question whether there are “kinds” of pleasure to be shirked. But we can get rid of one of the issues raised without going so deep into the matter. He seems to remember hearing—perhaps in a dream—that “the good” is neither pleasure nor thought, but something better than both. If that should be true, we can, at any rate, dispose of the doctrine that pleasure is the good, and we can deal with this point without going into the question about “kinds” of pleasure (20c), if we can agree on certain “notes”
We may thus make it a criterion of the good for man that it is what any one of us who knows what it is would choose in preference to anything else, and would be completely satisfied by. Judged by this criterion, neither pleasure nor “thought” can be that good. Even a professed Hedonist would not choose by preference a life simply made up of moments of intense pleasurable feeling and nothing else. He would want to be aware that he is feeling pleasure in the present, to remember that he has felt it in the past, and to anticipate that he will feel it in the future. Thus he would demand intellectual activity as well as feeling to make him happy; a life all feeling would be that of an oyster rather than of a man. The same thing is true about a life which is all thinking and no feeling. No man would choose a life of mere intellectual activity entirely neutral in feeling-tone. Any man would prefer a “mixed” life, which contains both “thought” and pleasant feeling. The “mixed life” is thus better for man than the unmixed. A life of “unmixed” feeling would only be “complete” and “sufficient” for a brute, or perhaps a plant; a life of “unmixed” intellect may perhaps be suitable to
The Relative Significance and Place of Pleasure and Thought in the Good for Man (23c-66d). Formal Character of Each (23c-30e). Anything which is actual can be placed in one of four classes: (a) infinite or unbounded (τὸ ἄπειρον); (b) limit (πέρας); (c) the “mixture” or combination of both these constituents; (d) the cause which brings them together (23c-e). To explain a little more precisely: “temperature” or, in the Greek phrase, “hotter and colder,” is an example of what we mean by (a). We can call it “infinite” or “boundless” because anything can always be made hotter or colder than it is; there is no temperature which is the maximum or minimum conceivable, and again, if you have two different degrees of temperature, you can insert between them an endless number of intermediate temperatures different from both. Since temperature may be increased or diminished, we may also call it a “great and small” or “a less and more” (a μέγα καὶ μικρόν), and this, as we know from Aristotle, was Plato’s own name for what the Pythagoreans, whose language Socrates is using in our dialogue, called the ἄπειρον. And what we can say about temperature, we can equally say about everything which allows of indefinite variation in magnitude or in degree, admits of “more and less,” or such qualifications as “intense,” “slight.” We may thus class together all that admits of such variation under one single head as the “infinite” (24e). The “infinite” is thus what we should call quality with a continuous range.
By the “limit,” again, as a single “form” we mean whatever does not admit “the more and the less,” but admits such predicates as “the equal,” “the double,” in a word, whatever is “as an integer to an integer or a measure to a measure” (25b). The limit (πέρας) means thus precise mathematical determination, number, ratio, measure. (The last is added to cover the case of “surd” ratios, like that of 1: √2 or side of square: diagonal.)
The “mixed” class, or “mixture of the two,” means a precise and definitely determined magnitude or intensity of any quality. (Thus, e.g., temperature is an ἄπειρον, 20° is a πέρας, a temperature of 20° C. is an instance of the “mixture”; rainfall is an ἄπειρον, 6 is a πέρας, but a rainfall of 6 inches is a μεικτόν, and so on,) The introduction of determination into a “more and less” is precisely what we call a genesis, or process of becoming. (E.g., to raise water to a temperature of 100 C. is the “process” of making it boil, it is also the introduction of the “limit” 100 into the ἄπειρον, temperature.)
As for the “cause,” we mean by it the agent which sets up such a process as we have described, τὸ ποιουν (26e). We have therefore to distinguish it both from that which it produces, the process or genesis, and that which “subserves it for the process,” the “matter” of the process. The process we have already referred to our third class; the “matter” of the process is just the factors which are brought into combination, the unlimited and limit. This is why we had to add the fourth class to the other three. We note here that the account of the “…mixed” class is the direct source of the “right mean” in Aristotle’s Ethics. “Moral” goodness, according to Aristotle’s familiar account in Nicomachean Ethics ii., is a fixed and habitual right “mean” or proportion in our appetitions and tempers, and the process of becoming good is one of “qualifying” them, i.e. training them to exhibit just the proportion demanded by the “right rule” (ὀρθὸς λόγος).
But all the examples of the “mixed” class in the Philebus are taken from the world of “events,” and the forms clearly are not “mixtures” of that kind. Not to dwell on the further point that the πέρας of the Philebus stands for any definite ratio, whereas the πέρας element in the forms, according to Aristotle, was the “one,” and the “one” in the Philebus is only spoken of as equivalent to any genus regarded as a single whole. It is clear that the line of thought which leads to the classification in the Philebus brings us nearer to what Aristotle knew as the central doctrine of Platonism than anything else in Plato’s writings. But it seems equally clear that Plato’s final thought is not disclosed even here. From his own language in Epistle vii. we may infer that he never intended the reading of a written work to do more than supply hints which might put a really original mind in the position to discover his thought after a great deal of hard personal thinking, and that he did not expect even as much as this apart
The Psychology of Pleasure and Pain (31a-53c). We have seen to what class pleasure and pain themselves belong; they are ἄπειρα. We must next consider “that in which they arise” (the subject of them), and the πάθος, or state of things, which gives rise to them, in other words, the actual conditions of their occurrence. To begin with pleasure. “That in which pleasure (or pain) arises” is always a living creature, the creature which feels the pleasure (or pain), and as such it belongs to the “class of the mixture,” since its organism is a complex of a plurality of ingredients (31c). The way in which they arise, the πάθη which occasion them, are that “when the attunement (that is, the proper balance between the ingredients of the organism) in an animal is disturbed, pain is felt, and when it is restored after disturbance, pleasure is felt.” Disturbance of organic equilibrium is attended by pain, restoration of the equilibrium by pleasure 31d-e). Thus when the body is unduly heated or chilled, we have a λύσις της φύςεως disturbance of the normal organic equilibrium, and it is painful; the antithetic process of recovering the normal temperature, which is a return to the οὐσία (the “natural state”), is pleasant. This defines for us one kind or form (εῖδος) of pleasure, namely, the agreeable processes of return to the normal condition of the organism after disturbance, or, as the defenders of the same type of theory in modern times usually say, the process of recovery from organic waste (22a-b).
Next, there is a second “form” or “kind” of pleasure which depends on processes purely mental, and is not attended by either disturbance or recovery of the balance in the organism. A simple example is that the mental anticipation of a painful disturbance of the organic balance is itself painful, the expectation of the agreeable antithetic recovery from disturbance is itself pleasant, and in these cases there is no actual accompanying organic process, the pleasure and pain belong in a special way to “the soul by herself” (320). These are the two distinct εῖδος of pleasure and pain it is necessary to begin by discriminating, if
Next, if there are antithetic processes of disturbance and recovery of the organic balance, and these are respectively painful and pleasant, there must also be an intermediate case, that in which the balance is maintained without deflection in either direction, and this, on our theory, must be neutral in respect of feeling-tone, neither pleasant nor painful (32e). This would be the condition, so far as feeling-tone is concerned, of the life of thought unmixed with pleasure or pain already spoken of, and there is no impossibility in the notion that there might be such a life, a life of permanent maintenance of equilibrium. Very possibly it is the life appropriate to a god (33b) and so the best of all. But we are discussing a different matter, the part which thought and pleasant feeling should play in the life of men like ourselves (for whom such an existence without any rhythmic alternation is out of the question). For our purposes, we must pursue the psychology of the second class of pleasures and pains further. They are all dependent on memory (since, of course, without memory we could have no anticipations), and this makes it necessary to explain briefly what memory is and what sensation itself is. We may say that some bodily processes die away before they can reach the soul, but others penetrate to the soul: the first we may call unconscious; the second are conscious. This enables us to define sensation as a movement (κίνησις) which affects the body and soul together (κοινη, 34a). Memory (i.e. primary memory) is the retention (σωτηρία) of sensation as thus defined (ibid.); and, finally, recollection (ἀνάμνησις) is the recovery (reproduction) by the soul “by herself” of a lost memory or sensation (34b-c). These considerations will make it clearer what we mean by a “purely mental” pleasure, and also throw light on the nature of desire (ἐπιθυμία, 34e). To understand what desire is, we may consider it in its simplest form, such as hunger or thirst. A thirsty man desires, or lusts after drink. To speak more precisely, the thirsty man is in a state of depletion, his organism has been depleted of its normal supply of liquid, What he really desires is not simply “drink,” but to be “filled up” with the liquid he will drink. (He desires not the water, but the drinking of it.) Thus he actually is in one state (a state of depletion), but desires the antithetic state (the corresponding repletion). To desire to drink the thirsty man must “apprehend” (ἐφάπτεσθαι) repletion. He does not “apprehend” it with his body. That is just what is undergoing the unnatural depletion, and it cannot be passing through two antithetic processes at once. Thus it must be with his soul that he “apprehends” the repletion he lusts after. The importance of the example is that it shows that (in spite of popular language), there is really no such state as a “bodily” desire or lust. All desiring is a state of soul (35c), since desire is endeavour towards the opposite of the present state of the organism, and it is in virtue of memory that this “opposite” is apprehended.
They also suggest an important problem. When a man is actually in a state of pain due to organic “depletion,” but remembers and thinks of the pleasant experiences which would remove the depletion, can we say that his condition is either purely painful or wholly pleasant? If he despaired of ever realising the anticipation of “filling up” no doubt, he would be doubly wretched, but suppose he is feeling the painful depletion but expecting the repletion (like a really hungry man who expects to be fed)? The anticipation that his want will be removed is pleasant, but the felt want must surely be painful, and thus it appears that we must say that, in the case assumed, the experience is a mixed one, pleasurable and painful at once (36b).
(The conception of “mixed” states which are half pleasant, half painful, is so characteristic of Plato and so important in itself that it cannot be passed over without some comment. Hedonists naturally refuse to accept it, since it is quite inconsistent with the treatment of pain as equivalent to subtraction of pleasure which lies at the root of the Hedonic calculus. They have, accordingly, to explain the facts to which Plato appeals in one or other of two ways. They have to hold that the total feeling-tone of any moment of life is either simply pleasant or simply painful. It is then open to them either to interpret the facts about still unsatisfied craving by holding that the experience is one of rapid alternation between pleasure and pain, or by holding that it is, according to circumstances, one of a low degree of pleasure, or one of pain, though of a moderate degree of pain. Neither view seems to me to be in accord with fact. When I am genuinely and acutely thirsty, e.g. in the course of a long tramp in hot weather, but confidently anticipating arrival at a place of refreshment in an hour’s time, it is not the fact that I oscillate rapidly between pure misery and pure delight according as my attention is directed to my present condition or to the condition I anticipate; nor yet is it true that I am continuously feeling a qualified pleasure or a qualified pain. I certainly feel the tension between the pleasant anticipation and the actual pang of thirst in a single pulse of experience. And there is no real difficulty in understanding why this is so, if we remember that the physical correlate of my mental condition is made up of a great complex of neural excitations. No one of the constituent neural excitations can have two antithetic senses at once, but the complex may perfectly well contain elements with opposite senses. Hence it seems to me that Plato’s doctrine of “mixed states,” which coincides with the standing thought of great poets about the “unrest which men miscall delight,” is strictly true to the facts of common experience, and that the criticisms leveled against it are all based on false simplification of the facts.)
True and False Pleasure (36c-53c). We have thus distinguished two “kinds” of pleasures: (a) those directly due to an
There is such a process as judging, and such a process as feeling pleased. When we judge, we make a judgment about something, and when we feel pleased, we are pleased with something. And a judgment does not cease to be an actual judgment because it is false; similarly a false feeling of pleasure would still be an actual feeling of pleasure (37b). (This last remark, of itself, shows that Plato has no intention of denying that a “false” pleasure is a pleasure; it is its worth, not its actuality, which is in question.) The question is whether pleasure and pain, like judgment, permit of the qualifications true and false. They certainly permit of some qualifications, such as “great,” “small,” “intense”; and Protarchus
Let us look at the facts. Pleasure and pain sometimes accompany true beliefs or judgments, sometimes false. Now these beliefs may be regarded as answers given by the soul to questions which she has put to herself; sometimes the answer is right, sometimes it is wrong. We have, so to say, a scribe and a painter within our souls. The interpretation of present sensation by the aid of memory involved in all perception is the work of the scribe writing “discourses” in the soul; the painter (imagination) designs illustrations (εἰκόνες) to the scribe’s text (39d-e), and his pictures may be called true or false “imaginings” according to the truth or falsity of the “discourse” they illustrate. These discourses and pictures concern the future as well as the present or the past; we are all through life full of “fancies” (ἐλπίδες) about the future, and when we anticipate pleasure or pain to come, we take an “anticipatory” pleasure or pain, which has already been classed as strictly “mental” in entertaining such expectations (39d-e). This is true of good and bad men alike, but, since the good are “dear to God,” their pleasant anticipations are commonly fulfilled, those of the bad are not (40a-b). (The good man gets pleasure in anticipating sequences which are in accord with the order God maintains in the world; the bad man gets his pleasure from daydreams of sudden enrichment and other events which do not come about in the “world as God made it.”) Thus the bad man’s pleasure in his anticipations is as actual as the good man’s, but the good man, as a rule, gets the pleasure which he anticipates, the bad man does not. This affords one sense in which the bad man may be said to have false, or unreal, pleasures; he derives present pleasure from anticipations which will not be realised, and this pleasure may rightly be said to be deceptive, a caricature of true pleasure, and the same argument will apply to pains due to anticipation (40c) as well as to emotions—fear, anger, and the like—generally (40e). Like beliefs, all these states may have a foundation in reality or may have none. Now the goodness of a belief lies in its truth, and its badness in its falsity; only true beliefs are good, and only false beliefs are bad. (For, of course, the raison d’etre of a belief is that it should be true; that is what every belief aims at being.) May we not say then that the badness of bad pleasures—Protarchus has allowed that there are such states—is simply falsity and nothing else? a bad pleasure means a “false” or “deceptive” pleasure.
Protarchus is unconvinced. There may be “wicked” (πονηραί) pleasures or pains, but pleasures and pains are not made wicked by being “false.” We will, however, reserve the consideration of wicked or sinful pleasures for a moment, and call attention to a second sense in which it might be possible to speak of many
The illusion is still more marked in other cases. As we said before, disturbance of the organic balance is painful, restoration of the balance is pleasant. But suppose the organism is undergoing neither process. It is true that many of the wise deny that this case actually occurs; they say that “everything is always flowing either up or down” or, in Leibniz’s phrase, that the “pendulum never is at rest.” But they must concede at least that we are not always conscious of its oscillations. Small oscillations either way are “infinitesimal.” It is only considerable oscillations which are attended by pleasure and pain (43c). Thus we have to admit the possibility of a life which is neither pleasant nor painful, but just painless. There are persons who actually say that this painless life is the “most pleasant” of all (44a). But this statement cannot be strictly true. To feel no pain is manifestly not the same thing as to feel pleasure, though this is the thesis of the real “enemies of Philebus,” the downright anti-Hedonists. These anti-Hedonists are eminent scientific persons, who maintain that there really is no such thing as a pleasure and that the experience Philebus and his friends call pleasure is merely “relief from pain (44c).
Though we cannot accept this doctrine, which is really due to the scorn of fastidious souls for vulgar pleasures, it will yield us a useful hint towards the discovery of the kind of pleasures which deserve to be called “true” (44d). Their thought is this. If we want to
Now let us consider one or two examples of these exciting experiences. A man who has an itching spot on his body gets great enjoyment from scratching or chafing it; but, of course, he is only stimulated to do so by the irritation of the itching. This is typical of a host of experiences which language calls “bitter-sweet.” They depend on a tension between antithetic processes; these processes may be both bodily, or one may be bodily and the other purely mental, or both may be mental. In all cases the violently exciting character of the experience depends on the tension. There must be a highly painful factor in order that the rebound may be intensely pleasant (46b-c). (Thus the difference between this case and that of the “illusions of perspective” already mentioned is that the element of contrast and antithetical tension is now an ingredient in the actual concrete single experience.) The point, then, is that in such a “mixed” experience, there may be an exact balance of pleasurable and painful ingredients, so that, exciting as it is, its “net pleasure value” would be nil, or pleasure may predominate, or pain may predominate. But in no case is the “pleasure value” simply measured by the intensity of the excitement, and the “ticklish” person, for example, who gets so excited when he is tickled that he says he is “dying with pleasure” is not really getting anything like the “quantity of pleasure” he supposes. For the intensity of the excitement is due to the simultaneous contrast between the fully stimulated region of the skin and a neighboring region which is uneasily aching for similar stimulation, 46d-47b). Here is a plain case where a man’s own estimate of the pleasure he is getting is erroneous. The cases of tension already mentioned, where the antithesis is between the actual condition of the body and a mentally anticipated “opposite” condition, may, of course, give rise to the same “mixture” of pleasure with pain and the same errors in estimation (47c).
Now to explain why the feeling this spectacle rouses in the audience is “mixed.” It might seem that it is wrong to enjoy the misfortunes of our friends; yet we do find self-conceit in persons we like “funny,” when, as has just been explained, it is quite harmless. (The connexion with comedy, I take it, is that, if we are to enjoy a comedy, we must feel that we “like” the person who is being exposed, for all his failings. If we could not find him likeable, the comedy would cease to be comic, as Tartuffe does, for the simple reason that we detest Tartuffe seriously.) Thus our sense of the “comic” is a kind of malice (φθόνος), and this is, in its nature, a painful emotion; yet our laughter shows that we are enjoying the experience, which must therefore be a “mixed” one (49e-50a). (The observation appears true and subtle; when, for example, we see Malvolio on the stage, there is an element of the painful in our mirth. It is, in a way, humiliating to see another man “make such a fool of himself.” If the absurdity were carried a little further, or the exhibition of it a little more prolonged, the painful would distinctly predominate. Even as it is, we can detect its presence by a careful examination of our feelings.) Now this
We may now consider the question what experiences are purely pleasant without any admixture of painfulness. On our general theory of the connexion of feeling-tone with organic process, we can see at once that in any case where a “subliminal” or unconscious process of “depletion” is followed by a conscious process of “repletion,” there will be an experience which is wholly pleasant. This may explain the case of the pure aesthetic pleasure we get from the contemplation of pattern (σχήματα), colour (χρώματα), tone (φθόγγοι), and the great majority of odours (51a-b).
Again the “intellectual pleasure” which we get from the “sciences” (μαθήματα) is of this “unmixed” kind. There is no felt pain antecedent to it; merely not to possess geometrical knowledge, for example, is not painful as hunger is painful; and again, the process of forgetting something we have learned is not attended by pain. Of course it may be disagreeable to find that we have forgotten something which it would now be advantageous to know, but the process of forgetting itself is not painful, as the process of growing hungry again, after we have eaten, is (52a-b).
The Metaphysics of Pleasure—Can it be an End? (53c-55c). We may remind ourselves of a second doctrine of the “wits” (κομψοί), which we shall find suggestive. They say that pleasure is always a “process of becoming” (γένεσις; that it has no stable and determinate being (οὐσία, 53c). That is, the theory is that pleasure is an accompaniment of transitions, incompleted developments. It is felt while the development is going on, but falls away when the definite and permanent goal of the “evolution” is reached. We must not be misled into identifying the “wits” of this passage with the third-century Cyrenaics who called pleasure a “gentle motion,” nor have we any right to ascribe their doctrine by anticipation to the elder Aristippus. We meet it again in Aristotle’s Ethics, where one of the string of arguments against the goodness of pleasure, all taken from recognizable passages in Plato, is said (1152b 13) to be that “every pleasure is a sensible transition (or development) into a natural condition” (γένεσις εἰς φύσις αἰσθητή), an obvious allusion to the section of the Philebus we are now considering. We may take this as an indication that the κομψοί to whom the doctrine is due are the anti-Hedonist party in the Academy, a view which, as we shall see, is borne out by the language of Aristotle in dismissing their doctrine. The thought arises by a natural, though illegitimate, extension of the depletion-repletion formula to cover all cases of pleasures. On this theory, the good, healthy, or normal state is, of course, that of balance or equilibrium; pain and pleasure are both felt only when there is a
We can now express this thought in a general formula. The end or goal is always of more worth and dignity than the means or road to it. The means is “for the sake of” the end, not the end for the sake of the means. And a process which culminates in the establishment of a permanent condition is to that condition as means to end. Thus the processes of shipbuilding and all the appliances and raw material they employ are “for the sake of” what comes out of them, the vessel. (E.g. the naval architect’s skill, his implements, the timbers of which he makes the vessel, all of them only have worth because the vessel itself has worth—in this case, an “economic” worth (54c).
If pleasure is a “becoming,” then it must be relative to an end in which it culminates, must be the coming-to-be of something. That something will be in the μοίρᾳ or category of the good, i.e. will have “intrinsic value.” But the end and the process by which it is reached are never in the same category, and therefore, on the hypothesis, pleasure will not be a good. The “wits” from whom we have borrowed this suggestion will therefore think it ridiculous to say that life is not worth having without pleasure. This would amount to saying that life is worth having when it is an alternation of aspiring after a good we have not yet attained and losing one we have attained, but not when it is the fruition of present good (54c-55a).
We note that Socrates is not made to accept the doctrine that pleasure is only felt in the transition from an “unnatural” to the “normal state” as his own. He clearly does not accept it without reserve (as Spinoza does in his definitions of laetitia and tristitia, Ethics, iii. Appendix, def. 2, 3). He cannot do so because he holds, as we shall see, that some pleasures, the “pure” or “unmixed” class, are themselves good, whereas the theory under criticism, as he is careful to point out, compels us to hold that no pleasure is good, since no pleasure, according to it, can be an end. The criticism of Aristotle on the theory is based on the same conviction of the
We may add the further consideration that it is a paradox to hold that all goods are mental, that pleasant feeling is the only mental good, and, by consequence, that, e.g., beauty and strength, valour, temperance, intelligence, have no inherent value, and that a man’s intrinsic worth depends on the question how much pleasure he is feeling (55b). This, we see, is a valid argument against the Hedonist, independently of the worth of the contention that all pleasure is a genesis.
The Intellectual Values (55c-59d). We have seen that there are two types of pleasures, the “pure” and the “mixed,” and we shall expect to find that they have different values for human life. We must now consider intellectual activities and their worth in the same way. As with pleasures, so with forms of knowledge, we have to discover which are “truest to type,” most fully deserving to be called knowledge. We may begin by dividing “knowledges” or “sciences” into those which have to do with making things, the “industrial” arts (χειροτεχνικαὶ ἐπιστημαι), and those which are περὶ παιδείαν καὶ τροφήν, have to do with the cultivation of the soul itself, the “cultural” arts and sciences. (This is, in effect, the Aristotelian distinction between “theory” and “practice.”) We may begin by considering the “industrial,”
Again, if we consider the “exact” sciences themselves, we have to make a similar distinction. There are two “arithmetics”: that of the “many,” and the much more scientific arithmetic of the “philosopher.” The former operates with “concrete” and very unequal units, such as one man, one army, one ox, and disregards the fact that the men, oxen, armies, counted may be unequal; the other operates with units which are absolutely and in every way equal—in fact, with numbers, not with numbered things. So there are two forms of “mensuration”: the loose measurement of the architect or the retail trader, and the accurate measurement of the geometer and calculator.
Thus one “knowledge,” no less than one pleasure, may be “purer,” truer to type, than another. The “exact” forms of knowledge which are concerned with number, measure, weight, are much more exact and “truer” than all others, and the “philosopher’s” or “theorist’s” arithmetic and geometry are much more exact and true than those of the mechanician or engineer (56d-57e). And we cannot, without blushing, deny that dialectic, whose business it is to study the absolutely real and the eternal, must insist on a still more rigid standard of exactness and truth than any other kind of knowledge. It must be still more intolerant of mere approximation than any other science. Gorgias, to be sure, used to claim the first place among the sciences for rhetoric, on the ground that it can secure
The Formal Structure of the Good Life (59e-66d). The best life for men, we saw, must be a blend of two constituents—intelligent activity and pleasant feeling. We have now examined each genus of the two apart, and distinguished in each a variety which is truer, and one which is less true, to type. We have now to consider on what principle the two ingredients should be blended. What will be the formula which appears as the πέρας in this “mixture”? Our task is like that of the man who mixes the ingredients of a sweet drink; pleasure is the honey for our mixture, intelligent thought the water; the problem is to mingle them in just the right proportion (61c). It would be rash to assume that we shall succeed in doing this by simply blending every form of pleasure with every form of “thought”; we need to proceed more cautiously. It will be prudent to begin by considering first those pleasures and those forms of knowledge which we have found to be most genuine, most true to type (ἀληθέστατα); if we find that the blend does not completely satisfy our original condition that the “good” must be “sufficient” all a man’s life requires, we can then consider admitting the inferior pleasures and arts into the mixture (61e). There can be no dispute about stipulating that the good is to include all knowledge of the “truer” type, the exact knowledge of the timeless things; we shall certainly require for the best life a knowledge of “righteousness itself” and the intelligence to use the knowledge, and the same considerations will apply to all such knowledge of the “absolute.” But will this be enough for the purposes of life? If a man is to live a life among men, he must have some at least of the inferior knowledge which is inexact. A man who knew only the “absolute” and exact lines and circles of the geometer, but knew nothing of the rough approximations to them with which life presents us, would not even know how to find his way home. (As we might say, a chemical balance is a beautiful thing, but it won’t do to weigh your butter and cheese in.) So the intervals we make on our musical instruments are only approximations, they are not “true”; but a man must be conversant with them, as well as with the mathematical theory of harmonics, unless he is to go through life with none but the “unheard” melodies for
Thus we have let all the “water” go into the bowl in which the draught of “happiness” is to be brewed. We must now consider what we are to do with the “honey.” Here, again, it will be safer to consider the “unmixed” pleasures first and the “mixed,” which, as we have seen, are not wholly true to type, afterward. It is clear that we shall not be able to let in all this second class without reflection. If there are any of them which are “unavoidable” (ἀναλκαια, sc. such as arise directly from the functions of sound and healthy life themselves), they must, of course, be admitted. But whether we can admit all the rest depends on the question whether all pleasures, like all knowledges, are profitable, or, at worst, harmless (63a). To decide this question we may ask the pleasures themselves whether they would prefer to keep house with all wisdom and knowledge, or by themselves. We may be sure (since we have seen that the best life is the “mixed” one) that the pleasures would reply that it is not good to live alone, and that the best companion with whom to keep house would be “knowledge of all things and in especial of ourselves” (63c).
Now we put the same question to the various knowledges. “Do you need the company of pleasure?” “In particular, do you need, over and above our class of true pleasures, the company of the intense and violent pleasures?” knowledge would say that, so far from desiring these exciting pleasures, she finds them a perpetual hindrance; they vex the souls in which she has taken up her abode with mad frenzies, and destroy her offspring by producing forgetfulness and neglect. She would claim kinship with Socrates’ class of “true” and “unmixed” pleasures; of the rest—those which are “mixed” satisfactions—she would accept such as accompany health and a sober mind and any form of goodness, but reject those of “folly and badness” in general, as obviously unfit to find a place in such a “blend” as we are contemplating (63d-64a).
There is only one further ingredient for which we must stipulate—ἀλήθεια, “truth,” “reality,” “genuineness.” If this is left out, the result of the blending itself will not be real or genuine. (The bearing of this remark is a little obscure, but it is probably meant to lead up to the next stage of the argument, the consideration of the relative importance to be laid on the different constituents of the “mixed life” for man and the assigning of the first place in it to its rational structure, the last, to the “harmless” pleasures.
We have now tracked down the good, so to say, to its very
We may now draw our conclusion. Pleasure is neither the best nor the second-best thing. We must give the first place to “measure, the measured, that which is ‘in place’” (τὸ καίριον);
Formal Epilogue to the Discussion (66d-67b). Philebus had originally said that the good for us is the plenitude of pleasure (ἡδονὴ πασα καὶ παντελής), Socrates that “intelligence” (νους) is at any rate (γε) a far better thing for man’s life than pleasure. We long ago convinced ourselves that neither can be the whole of human good, since neither would be “all-satisfying,” apart from the other. But our investigation has shown us that “intelligence” is at any rate infinitely (μυρίῳ) more closely related to the “victor” (the “mixed life” which proved to be the best of all for a man) than pleasure. (The point is that though the best life includes both elements, it is the element of rationality which gives it its specific character. A man is not a creature who uses an intellect to contrive ingenious devices for getting pleasures, but a creature who finds it pleasant to practice intellectual activities. Hume’s view that in action reason “is and ought to be the slave of the passions” just inverts the true relation. Human “passions” should be the servants of intelligence.) Pleasure is not the good, even though all the horses and oxen of the world should say it is, with the assent of the “many” who think the “lusts of beasts” better evidence than the discourses of philosophers (67b).
The last sentence obviously alludes, in its reference to the θηρίων ἔρωτας, to the argument of Eudoxus, afterward adopted by Epicurus, that pleasure must be “the good” because it is that which “all living creatures” pursue when left to themselves (Nicomachean Ethics x. 1172b 9 ff.). The supposed unmannerly reference to Aristippus in the remark about the “horses” (ἵπποι) is a mere unhistorical fancy. Even if Aristippus had been aimed at in the criticism of Hedonism, such an allusion would be impossible, for the simple reason that the leading anti-Hedonist of the Academy, Speusippus,
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 324-332.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 165-258, 497-554; Platons Dialog, 68-97; Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon, 95-173.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 357-374.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 296-331.
Nettleship, R. L. Plato’s Conception of Goodness and the Good. Works, i. 307-336.
Baeumker, C. Das Problem der Materie in der Griechischen Philosophie, 193-196. 1890.
Poste, E. The “Philebus” of Plato. Oxford, 1860.
Bury, R. G. The “Philebus” of Plato. Cambridge, 1897.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 385-399.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 92-100.
Robin, L. Platon, c. iv.
The Timaeus stands alone among the Platonic dialogues in being devoted to cosmology and natural science. Owing to the fact that the first two-thirds of it were continuously preserved through the “dark ages” in the Latin version and with the commentary of Chalcidius, it was the one Greek philosophical work of the best age with which the west of Europe was well acquainted before the recovery of Aristotle’s metaphysical and physical writings in the thirteenth century; it thus furnished the earlier Middle Ages with their standing general scheme of the natural world. In the present volume it is impossible to deal with the contents of the dialogue in any detail; I have tried to perform the task in my Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford, 1928), with which the later commentary of Professor Cornford (Plato’s Cosmology, London, 1937) should be compared.
The date of composition cannot be precisely determined. There is no external evidence, and the internal evidence of style only serves to show that the dialogue belongs to the last period of Plato’s authorship; thus we must place the composition at some time after the Sophistes, i.e. within the years 360-347. It is quite uncertain, so far as I can see, whether we should regard the Timaeus or the Philebus as the later work. As to the date of the imagined conversation I think it is possible to be more precise. We have to consider (a) the internal evidence of the Timaeus itself, (b) the evidence supplied by the Republic, (a) The interlocutors in the dialogue are Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. Of Timaeus nothing is known except what we learn from Plato, that he is a Locrian from South Italy, with a career of eminence in both science and politics behind him (20a). From the fact that the doctrine he is made to expound is recognizably a version of Pythagoreanism in which the biology and medicine of Empedocles is grafted on the original Pythagorean mathematics, we can really have no doubt that he is meant to be a Pythagorean of the same type as the more famous Philolaus. This suggests that he is at least as old a man as Socrates, and that we may perhaps connect what we are told of the magistracies he has filled with the facts about Pythagorean political ascendancy in Magna Graecia in the first half of the fifth century.
Hermocrates is plainly the famous
If we were right in our view of the dramatic date of the Republic, this brings us to the time of the peace of Nicias or very shortly before it, the year 422 or 421. Such a date fits all the indications of the Timaeus itself. It enables
The dialogue falls into three distinct parts: (a) introductory recapitulation of the contents of Republic i-v by Socrates (17a-19b), with expression of a strong desire to see the doctrine there laid down embodied in a dramatic story of concrete achievements (19b-20c); (b) relation by Critias of the alleged heroic exploit of Athens in resisting and defeating the kings of Atlantis (20c-26d); (c) the cosmological discourse of Timaeus, which extends unbroken, but for an occasional word of assent from Socrates, to the end of the dialogue (27c-92c). We may consider these divisions in their order.
(a) Introduction (17a-20c). There is not much on which we need make any comment. It is useless to speculate on the identity of the unnamed person who has been kept away from the conversation by indisposition and whom Timaeus agrees to replace as speaker. As Timaeus takes his place, we are no doubt to understand that he belongs to the same group of “Italian” philosophers. Philolaus, as Burnet suggests, would suit the part, or we might perhaps even think of Empedocles. Plato is merely intending a graceful expression of the debt of his dialogue to fifth-century “Italians.” The most striking feature of the recapitulation of the Republic is that it covers only the ground of Books I-V. Nothing is said of the philosopher-kings and their education in mathematics and dialectic, of the Form of Good, or of the contents of Republic viii-x. I suggest that the most likely explanation of this silence is that which is also the simplest. Just so much of the Republic, and no more, is recalled as will be an appropriate basis for the story of the Athenian victory over Atlantis. Plato is quite alive to the fact that the philosopher-king is an “ideal” which has never been realised, and therefore abstains from an attempt to exhibit a society of
The remarks with which Socrates closes his recapitulation are interesting as showing that Plato fully understood that his own hero had his definite limitations. Socrates, as he says, can give us a picture of the really healthy society, but he cannot “make the figures move” He cannot tell an actual story of the behavior of such a society in a life-like way, and the reason is that he has not enough personal experience of the work of the active statesman. He remains, after all, something of the theorist and doctrinaire (19b-e). This was, in fact, true of Socrates, and it helps to explain the fact that his influence on many of his associates was not wholly beneficial. Association with him in early life was not an unmixed good for the average lad; so far, there was just a slight basis of foundation for the distrust with which practical workers of the democratic constitution, like Anytus, regarded him.
(b) The Story of Atlantis (20c-25d). The story told by Critias is to the effect that nine thousand years before the time of Solon Athens had enjoyed just such institutions as those described in Republic i-v. Her soil was then wonderfully rich and fertile, as it had not suffered from the denudation which has since reduced the district of Attica to a rocky skeleton. The prehistoric Athenians, strong only in public spirit and sound moral, encountered and defeated the federated kings of Atlantis, an island lying in the Atlantic outside the Straits of Gibraltar, who had already successfully overrun all Europe as far as Italy, and all Africa as far as the Egyptian border. Afterward both the prehistoric Athenian victors and the island Atlantis were overwhelmed in a single day and night of earthquake and inundation. The story only survived in the records of Egypt, where Solon heard it when on his travels.
It should be clear that this whole tale is Plato’s own invention. He could not tell us so much more plainly than he does in the Critias (113b), when he makes Critias appeal to the testimony of “family papers” as his sole evidence for the narrative. Not only the existence of the island-kingdom, but the statement that Solon had ever contemplated a poem on the subject is represented as a “family tradition"; in other words, nothing was ever really known of any such intention. It is not hard to see what the materials for the tale are. The alleged shallowness of the sea just outside the “pillars of Heracles” and perhaps tales of Carthaginian sailors about islands in the Atlantic, are the foundation for the story of the lost island; the account of its destruction is manifestly based on the facts of the great earthquake and tidal wave of the year 373 which ravaged the Achaean coast. The main conception of the successful conflict of a small and patriotic nation in arms against an invader with vast material resources and immense superiority in the art of military engineering—a point on
(c) The Discourse of Timaeus (27c-92c). The lecture which Timaeus now delivers covers the whole ground of natural knowledge from astronomy to pathology and psycho-physics. It will be impossible to deal with more than its most outstanding features. It starts with two fundamental positions: (a) that the sensible world, being sensible, “becomes,” or, as we might say, is a world of “happenings” or “events"; (b) that whatever “becomes” has a cause, by which Timaeus means that it is the product of an agent (28a-c). The “artisan” or “craftsman” (δημιουργός) who makes the world thus comes into the story, and it is assumed that this maker is God. Now a craftsman always works with a model or archetype before him, and so we must ask whether the model on which the world has been made is itself something that has “become” or something eternal. Since the maker is the best of all causes and the thing he makes the best of all effects, clearly the model of which the sensible world is a “copy” or “likeness” (εἰκών) is eternal (29a). (In more modern language, it is meant that the natural world is not constituted by “events” only, but by events and the objects (in Professor Whitehead’s sense) situated in the events, and this is why it is intelligible and can be known.) This leads us to lay down an important canon of the degree of truth to be expected in natural science. Discourse about the fixed and unchanging archetype, or model, can be exact and final; it has the definitiveness of its
Next we may ask ourselves why the Maker produced a world at all. He was perfectly good, and for that very reason did not want to keep his goodness to himself, but to make something like himself. So he took over the whole of the “visible” which was in a condition of chaotic disorder, and made it into an ordered system, since order is better than chaos. For the same reason, he put mind (νους) into it, and, as mind can only exist in a soul (ψυχή), he gave it a soul, and thus the sensible world became “by the providence of God, a living being with soul and mind” (30b). The model in the likeness of which he made it was, of course, a νοητόν or “intelligible,” something complete and whole (τέλεον), and something living. The sensible world, then, is the sensible embodiment of a living creature or organism (ζῳον) of which all other living creatures are parts. And there is only one “world” of sense (as against the Milesian tradition of the “innumerable” worlds). For the model is one, and a perfect copy of it will reproduce its uniqueness (30c-31b).
Thus, in the scheme of Timaeus, we see that the “efficient cause” of the world is thought of definitely as a “personal” God, and this “creator” or “maker” is, strictly speaking, the only God,
It may naturally be asked how much of this can be conceived to be serious Platonic teaching and how much is mere imaginative symbolism? No one, of course, could answer the question precisely; possibly Plato himself could not have made a hard-and-fast distinction between philosophical content and mythical form. But one or two points are important. It would stultify the whole story to follow the example of some interpreters, who wish to find something like the philosophy of Spinoza in Plato, by making the “artisan” a mythical symbol of his “model” the νοητὸν ζῳον. This may or may not be good philosophy and theology, but it is not the thought of Plato, as we shall see more clearly when we come to deal with the doctrine of God in the Laws. God and the forms have to be kept distinct in Plato for the reason that the activity of God as producing a world “like” the forms is the one explanation Plato ever offers of the way in which the “participation” of things in forms is effected. If “God” simply meant the same thing as the forms, or as a supreme form, it would remain a mystery why there should be anything but the forms, why there should be any “becoming” at all. How far the explanation that God “makes” a world on the model of the forms was taken by Plato to be a literal statement of truth is a question that may be left to anyone who is bold enough to pronounce exactly how literally Leibniz intended his similar language about God’s “choice of the best” as the reason why the actual world is actual. The one thing which is clear from the Laws is that God, in Plato, is a “soul” not a form.
A more legitimate question is whether God in the Timaeus is quite all we mean by a “creator.” Are we to take seriously the representation, which runs through the dialogue, of God’s action as the imposing of order on a preexisting chaos? Does Plato mean that the world was formed out of preexisting materials? On this point we find a discrepancy of interpretation springing up in the first generation of the Academy itself. Aristotle, as is well known, insists on finding in the Timaeus the doctrine that the world is γεννητός ("had a beginning), and is severely critical of this error, as he regards it. On the other hand, the Platonists for the most part—the Neoplatonists unanimously—adopt the view, originally propounded by Xenocrates, that the representation of
Thus, on their view, the account of the world, or rather its constituents, as they were before God began his work, is merely a picture of the sort of thing you would have left on your hands if you tried to do what you never can do successfully, to think away all traces of the order and structure in which God’s authorship of things reveals itself. The only two Platonists who are known to have taken Aristotle’s view on this question are Plutarch and Atticus, a writer of the Antonine age. It is significant that their attempt to take the words of Timaeus literally gets them into very grave difficulties. Since the undoubted Platonic doctrine, expounded most fully in the Laws, is that “soul” is the cause of all movements, Plutarch finds himself bound to discover in the Laws, the doctrine that there is an “evil” world-soul, which he supposes to have animated the original chaos. Though this discovery has been followed in modern times by such scholars as Zeller, it is certainly a mere “mare’s nest.” The words of the Laws say no more than that, since there is disorder in the world as well as order, there must be some soul or souls other than God to cause the disorder.
If we look at the text of the Timaeus, we shall see that at any rate Plato does not mean to say that there ever was a time before God constructed the world, since he tells us, as Aristotle allows,
Thus the language which seems to imply a primitive state of pure chaos cannot be meant seriously, and so far Xenocrates seems to be right in his interpretation. (This would leave it a logical possibility that the series of events had a first member, and that the interval between the first member and the event which is my writing of these words, is a finite number of years, but I do not think any scholar acquainted with Greek thought is likely to suppose Plato to be contemplating this alternative.) Again, as will be clearer from what we shall have to say later on about the use of the notion of “necessity” it seems plain that the
The story of the making we cannot here follow far into its details. Since natural things can be seen and grasped, fire (light) and earth must be among their constituents. To combine two such terms in a stable way, there must be a “mean” between them. But fire and earth are volumes and have three dimensions. Hence you cannot insert a single mean proportional between them, but need two.
This need is met by air and water. Fire is to air what air is to water and water to earth. This playful application of the doctrine of the geometrical mean effects a transition from Pythagorean mathematics to the four “roots” of Empedocles. We shall see shortly that for Timaeus they are not “elements” (31b-32c). God used up the whole of these materials in making the world. It excretes nothing and assimilates nothing, and this secures it against age or disease. Its form was appropriately made spherical, since the sphere has the greatest volume of all bodies with the same perimeter, and is therefore the right figure for that which is to contain everything. It was given no sense-organs, since there is nothing outside itself to be apprehended, no digestive organs, as there is nothing it can take in as food, and no organs of locomotion, for it has nowhere to travel. It needed no hands, for there is nothing for it to grasp or repel. Being alive, however, it moves with the most uniform of all motions, uniform rotation on its own axis. Finally, we must add that it was animated all through with a ψυχή, and this was the generation of a “blessed god” (32c-34b).
We have begun, however, at the wrong end. We should have described first the fashioning of the world’s soul, since soul takes precedence of body in order of “production” as well as of worth
(Apparently we are to imagine a long ribbon with intervals marked on it at distances corresponding to the numbers indicated by the directions for making the notes of the scale.) Next, the ribbon was split longitudinally into two halves, which were laid cross-wise, thus +. Then each ribbon was bent into a circle so as to give two circles, in planes at right angles to one another, with double contact, like the equator and a meridian on a sphere. The outermost of these circles was called that of the Same, the innermost that of the Other. The circle of the Same was made to revolve “to the right,” that of the “Other” was subdivided into seven concentric circles at unequal distances from one another, which were made to revolve with unequal velocities “to the left” (34c-36d). We learn a little later that the inclination of the two circles was made oblique (39a), so that they turn out in the end to stand for the sidereal equator and the ecliptic, their revolutions being the (apparent) diurnal revolution of the “starry heavens” and the orbits of the sun and the planets in the Zodiac respectively. It must be carefully noted that nothing is said of “spheres” and, again, that as usual in the classical period, the orbit of a heavenly body is thought of as itself revolving, like a cart-wheel, and carrying round the body which is set in it. We have heard now of the orbits of the whole and of the seven planets, but so far nothing has been said about any bodies which, as we should say, “revolve in” these orbits. We are now at last (36e) told that the creator finally constructed the body of the world “within” its soul and adapted the two; this begins the “unceasing and reasonable life” of the κόσμος (cosmos) as an organism. The circle of the Same and the Other, being circles primarily “in the soul” of the world, have an epistemological as well as an astronomical significance. Their absolutely uniform revolutions symbolize—perhaps Timaeus means that they actually embody—
The creator next proposed to make his work even more like the model on which he had designed it. He could not make it, like its model, eternal (ἀΐδιος) (since nothing sensible can be so), but he made it as nearly eternal as he could. He devised a “moving image of eternity,” which he called time. Time is to eternity as number is to unity; its absolutely uniform flow is an imperfect mirroring of the self-sameness of eternity, and time is the characteristic form of the sensible. We try to speak of the eternal as that which “was and is and is to be.” But strictly, what is eternal simply “is"; we must not say that it “was” or “will be” for such language can only be used properly of what “happens.” So again we say that the past is past, the future is to come, the nonexistent is nonexistent. But all such language, which ascribes being to what is mere “becoming” and even to “what is not” is unscientific
The true state of the case is that the model eternally is, its sensible embodiment has been going on and will be going on all through time (38c). If there is to be time, there must be perceptible bodies with uniform movements to serve as measures of it, and so God devised the sun and the other “planets” and put them into the orbits provided for them by the splitting of the circle of the Other. Their order, reckoning outwards from the earth, is Moon, Sun, Hesperus, the “star of Hermes,” then the three “outer” planets, for which no names are given here. The sun, Hesperus, and the “star of Hermes” have the same “period,” but the two latter are in an unexplained way opposed to the sun, so that they are always catching him up and being caught up by him. The details about the apparent behavior of the others would require more time than we can spare for their description. The important points to remember are that their velocities are different, that each of them has two motions, one communicated to it by the outermost circle, that of the Same (which revolves from E. to W. with a period of twenty-four hours), another, oblique to this, and with a longer period (the planet’s “yea”), from W. to E. The result is that the actual visible movements are complicated “corkscrews” (ἕλικες, helices). Men ought to understand, as they do not, that the components of the movements of all are perpetually uniform and regular, and are “time” just as much as a lunar month, or a solar year. There is a great period, the longest of all, at the completion of which all the planets are once more, relatively to the sidereal heavens and to one another, in the same positions. “To enable them to see their way” round these circuits, a great
God had now to make the various lesser animals which were to inhabit the different regions of the universe. This was done by reproducing the various forms of organism mind discovers in the form of “living being.” Of these there are four, each inhabiting its own region: gods who live in the sky, winged creatures who inhabit the air, aquatic creatures, and land-animals. The “gods” were made approximately of pure fire, given spherical form, distributed over the heaven which revolves with the circle of the Same, and given a double movement motion with the circle of the Same (i.e. a diurnal revolution), and an axial revolution of their own. (Thus the “gods” of Timaeus are simply the stars. We gather that they are self-luminous, since they are made of fire, and from comparison of the mention of their axial rotations, with the absence of any corresponding statement about the planets, we may (perhaps?) infer that the planets are not supposed to have any such rotations.) As for the earth, our mother, God made it for “a guardian and artificer of night and day, swinging (ἰλλομένην) on the path about the axis of the universe” (τὴν περὶ τὸν διὰ παντὸς πόλον τεταμένον, 40b). To describe the system further would be impossible without an actual visible model, and is irrelevant (39e-40d).
Full discussion of this astronomical passage is impossible here, but the following points should be noted, (a) There is no reference to the famous theory devised by Eudoxus within the Academy itself, which analyses the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies into combinations of axial rotations of imaginary “spheres,” with a common center at the center of the earth. Timaeus never speaks of “spheres,” but, in the language originated by Anaximander, of “circles,” conceived to turn round like a wheel spun about its center. And though one of the motions of each true “star” is said to be “controlled by” the circle of the Same (40b), this motion is expressly ascribed to the star itself, not to an outermost “sphere.” Presumably the mere fact that Timaeus is a fifth-century astronomer, speaking many years before the origination of Eudoxus’ hypothesis, sufficiently explains this. (b) The stars are not thought of, after Aristotle’s fashion, as made of a superior and “celestial” stuff. They are made of “fire,” the finest quality of fire, but still the same fire to be found in ourselves and bodies round us. We cannot too carefully remember that the fateful distinction between “celestial matter” and “elementary matter” was unknown to Greek science until Aristotle introduced it as a direct consequence of his hypostatization of the purely mathematical spheres of Eudoxus into physical globes, (c) It is worthwhile also to observe the complete freedom of the whole theory from any traces of the planetary astrology which was, later on. to infest the minds of the Hellenistic age. The position of
(e) A much more important question is suggested by the remarks about the earth. Does Timaeus mean to ascribe a motion to the earth, or does he not? In the middle of the last century there was a sharp controversy on the point between Grote, who found the motion of the earth in the dialogue, and Boeckh, who denied it. On one point Boeckh was clearly right. Timaeus cannot mean, as Grote thought, to give the earth an axial rotation with a period of twenty-four hours, since this would conflict with his own express attribution of this period to the “circle of the Same” at 39c. If the stars were revolving round us once in twenty-four hours and the earth rotating in the opposite sense with the same period, manifestly the interval between two successive transits of the same star over the meridian would not be twenty-four hours but twelve, and we cannot suppose, as Grote suggested, that Plato may have forgotten so obvious a point. On the other hand, though nearly all later editors have followed Boeckh, it is equally plain that he must be wrong in making the earth of Timaeus motionless. His interpretation
The interpretation just given follows Professor Burnet, who is at least certainly right in insisting that the word used by Timaeus of the earth (ἰλλομένην) must stand, as Aristotle said, for a notion of some sort. Mr. Cornford has since developed a very different, and attractive explanation, according to which the meaning is that the earth, situated at the center of the universe, has a diurnal rotation in the opposite sense to that of the “circle of the same” and thus exactly compensating it (op. cit., pp. 120-124). Attractive as this view is, I still doubt whether it could have been expected to be divined by a reader with nothing before him but the bare statement that the earth ἰλλεται, “winds” or “curls,” and have therefore hesitated to adapt my text to it, though I am not confident that it may not be right after all. But it is conceivable that Timaeus may be supposed to hold that some sort of “slide” of the earth would explain one or both of two “appearances,” (a) the inequality of the “seasons” into which the year is divided by the equinoxes and solstices, (b) the notorious fact that though the sun and moon are “in conjunction” every lunar month, a solar eclipse is not regularly observed at each conjunction. But I give this avowedly as a guess.
In the chapter of the de Caelo already referred to, Aristotle, after mentioning that some of the Pythagoreans held that the earth is a planet revolving round a central luminary, adds that “many others too might accept the view that the center should not be assigned to the earth, for they think (οἴονται) that the most honorable region should belong to the most honorable body, and that fire is more honorable than earth, and the boundary than the intermediate. Now circumference and center are boundaries; so on the strength of these considerations they think that not the earth, but rather fire, is situated at the center of the sphere” (op. cit. 293a, 27-35). Aristotle does not say who these persons are, except that they are not the Pythagoreans of whom he had begun by speaking. Yet he must be speaking of actual persons, since he twice uses the phrase “they think.” From what Plutarch has told us on the authority of Theophrastus, it seems to me certain that the unnamed “some” mean here, as so often in Aristotle, Plato and his followers. In that case, we have the evidence not only of Theophrastus, though that would be sufficient, but of Aristotle, that Plato “in his old age” regarded the earth as a planet revolving along with the rest round a central luminary, a view quite unlike that expounded by Timaeus. This is borne out by the evidence of an important passage in the Laws (821e-822c) where the Athenian speaker speaks of it as a truth which he has only recently learned that every planet has one and only one path (οὐ πολλὰς ἀλλὰ μίαν ἀεί). This can have only one meaning, that the speaker intends to deny the doctrine of the double or composite motion on which Timaeus insists. He must mean that the diurnal revolution is not communicated to the planets, and so is not a component of their motions; each planet has only its “proper” movement through the Zodiac. Since the appearances which prompted the double motion theory still have to be accounted for, we are driven to suppose that the “diurnal revolution” must be intended to be regarded as only apparent, being really due to a motion of the earth. The implication is that the earth is a planet revolving round an invisible central luminary in a period of twenty-four hours, as the moon is supposed to revolve round the same body in a lunar month, or the sun in a year. A little more light is thrown on the matter by a sentence of the Epinomis, a dialogue which is generally “athetized” on extremely inadequate grounds, but admitted to have been at any
Plato’s own doctrine would seem, thus, to be neither that of the motionless earth, nor that of Timaeus, nor the full-blown Copernicanism which some modern admirers have read into him. He appears to attribute one motion only to the earth, a motion of revolution round an invisible center (not round the sun), with a period of twenty-four hours. The important point is not that he has a well-worked-out hypothesis, but that his scientific instinct has seized the fundamental point that a true mechanic of the heavens must start with a revolving earth; this, no doubt, is his reason for dissatisfaction with the scheme of Eudoxus, beautiful as it is. Another inference of first-rate importance is this. We clearly have no right to assume that the view ascribed to Plato by Theophrastus and apparently presupposed in the Laws was arrived at after the completion of the Timaeus. We have seen that the Timaeus and the Laws must have been in progress simultaneously. And it is hardly credible that if Plato had suddenly made so
Timaeus next adds that the Creator further made a number of created gods who, unlike the stars, only show themselves when they choose, Oceanus, Tethys, Phorcys, Cronus, Rhea, and their offspring. We have no evidence for the existence of these beings except that of persons who claim to be their descendants, but we may fairly suppose these persons to know their own pedigrees (40d-e). This is, of course, satire, not, as has been sometimes supposed, a concession for safety’s sake to the religion of the State. Most of the figures named belong to the cosmogonies of poets like Orpheus and Hesiod, not to the Attic cultus, and the ironical remark that a man must always be believed about his own family-tree is aimed at poets like Orpheus and Musaeus. Timaeus, as a scientific Pythagorean, has his own reasons for not wishing to be confounded with the Orphics. The Creator now addresses the created gods, explaining that whatever is his own immediate work is imperishable. Hence for the making of creatures which are to be perishable, he will employ these created gods as his intermediaries (41a-d). He then himself makes immortal souls, in the same number as the stars, of the “seconds” and “thirds” of the mixture from which he has made the souls of the world and the stars. Each soul is conducted to its star and made to take a perspective view of the universe and its structure. It is then explained to the souls that in due process of time they are all to be born as men in the various “instruments of time” (i.e. the planets).
The souls are then sown, like seeds, in the various planets, while the created gods fashion bodies
We are next told something of the way in which this work was done, but the story is only given in outline, with the necessary warning that, since it has to do with the mutable, it can only be tentative (42e-47e). In making the human body, the gods first constructed the head as a suitable dwelling-place for the immortal soul, which, of course, like the soul of the κόσμος, contains the two circles of the Same and the Other. (This means that Timaeus rightly accepts the discovery of Alcmaeon of Crotona that the brain is the central organ in the sensory-motor system.) The skull was therefore made spherical, as the body of the κόσμος is spherical. The trunk and the limbs were added for the safety and convenience of the head (44c-45b). The organ of sight was then constructed. It is literally a ray of sunlight dwelling within the body and issuing out through the pupil. We thus see by an actual long-distance contact of this ray, which is a real, though temporary, member of the body, with the visible object—the theory explained by Empedocles in verses cited by Aristotle. To this account of vision Timaeus appends an explanation of sleep as produced by an equable diffusion of this internal “fire” when darkness prevents its issuing out to join its kindred fire outside us, and a brief account of mirror-vision (45b-46c). His main points at present are, however, of a different kind. He dwells on the thought that the effect of the conjunction of the soul with a body which is always “flowing,” giving off waste material and taking in fresh, is to throw the movements of the “circles” in the soul into complete disorder. The movement of the circle of the Same is temporarily arrested, and that of the circle of the Other rendered irregular. Hence the thoughtlessness and confused perception and fancy of our infancy and childhood. It is only when the “flow” of the body becomes less turbid, as waste and repair come to balance one another in adult life, that the movements of the “circles” recover from the initial disturbance of birth, and men come to discretion and intelligence, and then only with the aid of “right education” (43a-44c). Also, we must be careful to remember the distinction between true causes and mere subsidiary causes (συναίτια). Any account we give of the mechanism of vision, or any other function, is a mere statement about the subsidiary or instrumental cause. The true cause, in every case, is to be sought in the good or end a function subserves. Thus the real end for which we have been given eyes, is that the spectacle of the heavenly motions may lead us to note the uniformity and regularity of days, nights, months, and years, and that reflection on this uniformity may lead us to science and philosophy, and so make the revolutions of the “circles in the head” themselves regular and uniform. And the same thing is true of hearing; its real purpose is not that we may learn to tune the strings of a lyre, but that we may learn to make our own thinking and living a spiritual melody (46c-47e).
The sections which are now to follow are marked by Timaeus as the most original and important part of his whole cosmology. We shall see that they serve to connect the two main currents of scientific thought, the biological and the mathematical, by providing a geometrical construction for the “corpuscles” of the four “elements” which the biologist Empedocles had treated as the “simples” of his system. The four types of body thus constructed are then, in the Empedoclean fashion, treated as the immediate units from which the various tissues and secretions of the living body are formed by chemical composition. The result is thus that Timaeus, in the spirit of Descartes, offers us an anatomy and physiology in which the organism appears as an elaborate kinematical system; natural science is thus reduced in principle, as Descartes and Spinoza held it ought to be, to geometry. Plato is not, of course, very strictly committed by the details of speculations which he repeatedly says are provisional, but it is clear that he is in sympathy with the general attitude known today in biology as mechanistic. The human organism, as he conceives it, is a machine directed and controlled by mind or intelligence, but the machine itself is made of the same ultimate constituents as other machines and the workings of it follow the same laws as those of the rest.
It is important, if we are to approach the exposition in the right spirit, to understand what is meant by the initial distinction between the part of Intelligence and that of Necessity in the cosmic system. We must be careful not to confuse the “necessity” of which Plato is speaking with the principle of order and law. Law and order are precisely the features of the world which he assigns to intelligence as their source; we are carefully told that necessity
The reason for introducing it into the story seems to be simply that it is impossible in science to resolve physical reality into a complex of rational laws without remainder. In the real world there is always, over and above “law” a factor of the “simply given” or “brute fact,” not accounted for and to be accepted simply as given. It is the business of science never to acquiesce in the merely given, to seek to “explain” it as the consequence, in virtue of rational law, of some simpler initial “given.” But, however far science may carry this procedure, it is always forced to retain some element of brute fact, the merely given, in its account of things. It is the presence in nature of this element of the given, this surd or irrational as it has sometimes been called, which Timaeus appears to be personifying in his language about Necessity. That “mind persuades necessity” is just an imaginative way of saying that by the analysis of the given datum we always can rationalise it further; we never come to a point at which the possibility of “explanation” actually ceases. But the “irrational” is always there, in the sense that explanation always leaves behind it a remainder which is the “not yet explained.” When we have followed the exposition a little further, we shall discover that in the last resort this element of the irreducible and given turns out to be exactly what Professor Alexander has called the “restlessness of space-time” But, unlike Professor Alexander, Plato does not believe that the restlessness of space-time is enough to account for its elaboration into more and more rationally articulated systems; left to itself, it would be
We find, then, that we need to revise our first account of the sensible world. We had already spoken of two things which need to be carefully discriminated, the intelligible archetype and its visible copy. We have now to take into account a third concept which we shall find obscure enough, that of the “receptacle” (ὑποδοχή) or “matrix” (ἐκμαγειον) in which “becoming” goes on. This receptacle or matrix of process cannot be fire or water or any of the things which the earliest philosophers had selected as the primary “boundless.” Experience shows that these are constantly passing into one another; there is now fire where there was water, or water where there was fire. The various bodies are mutable and impermanent; what remains permanent under all the variations is the region or room or place where they arise and vanish. This is there and self-same under all the processes of change, and has no form or structure of its own, precisely because it is its indifference to all which makes the appearance of all within it possible. We find it hard to apprehend, because it cannot be discerned by sense; it must be thought of, but can only be thought of by a sort of “bastard reflection” (λογισμῳ τινι νόθῳ, 52b), i.e. by systematic negation, the denying of one definite determination after another. It is, in fact, “place” (χώρα). We may, incidentally, remind ourselves that each of our three principles is apprehended in a special way. We can satisfy ourselves of the reality of the forms by considering that if there were only sensible objects, science and true belief would be the same; whereas it is clear they are not. Science can only be acquired by learning (διδάχή) a true belief may be produced by “persuasion” appeal to our emotions; what we know can always be justified to the intellect (τὸ μὲν ἀεὶ μετ̉ ἀληθους λόγον), a true belief not always; we cannot be argued out of the one, we can be persuaded out of the other. Since science and true belief thus differ, their objects must be different.
If we try to picture the condition of things “before” the introduction of ordered structure, we have to think of the “receptacle”
The first step God takes towards introducing determination and order into this indeterminate “happening” is the construction of bodies of definite geometrical structure. This brings us to the doctrine of the geometrical structure of the “corpuscles” of the “four roots” which Empedoclean biology wrongly treats as simple ultimates. The construction is effected by making a correspondence between the “four roots” and the originally Pythagorean doctrine of the regular solids which can be inscribed in the sphere (53c-56c). There are five and only five distinct types of regular solid, and four of them can be built up geometrically by starting with two ultimate simple types of triangle, which are the most beautiful, and therefore the most appropriate, of all. These two triangles are the ultimate “elements” of the Timaeus. One of them is the isosceles right-angled triangle, called by the Pythagoreans the “half-square"; the other is the triangle which can be obtained by dividing the equilateral triangle into six smaller triangles by drawing the perpendiculars from the angular points on the opposite sides, or less symmetrically, by dividing the equilateral triangle into two by a single such perpendicular. (Hence the Pythagorean name for it, the “half-triangle”) Timaeus does not explain what the peculiar beauty of these triangles is, but we know independently that it lies in the fact that the ratios of the angles of the two triangles are the simplest possible. Those of the “half-square” have the ratios 1: 1: 2, those of the “half-triangle” the ratios 1: 2: 3. From the former, by a symmetrical arrangement of four such triangles about a center of position we get the square, and from a proper arrangement of six square faces, the cube. A similar symmetrical arrangement of six triangles of the second type gives us the equilateral triangle, and there are three regular solids which can be made with equilateral triangles as their faces—the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron. For physical reasons, we take the cube as the form appropriate to a corpuscle of earth, the tetrahedron as that of a particle of fire, the other two as the forms of the particles of air and water respectively. There is still a fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, which has twelve pentagons as its faces; but this can be constructed from neither of the elementary triangles, and has a different part to play. God employed it (55b) “for the whole, adorning it with constellations.” (This
We next have an attempt to specify the most important “varieties” of each of the four types of body and the “chemical compounds” they form with one another, and to account for the sensible qualities of all these bodies by reference to their geometrical structure, which must be passed over here (58c-68d). Its most interesting feature is a long psycho-physical account of the conditions of pleasure-pain (64a-65b), in terms of the depletion-repletion formula. The “unmixed” pleasures of sense are brought under the formula by the hypothesis that they are sudden and appreciable “repletions” of a “depletion” which has been too gentle and gradual to be propagated to the “seat of consciousness."
With the next section of the dialogue we pass definitely from physics to anatomy, physiology, and medicine (69a-87b). Again, it must be sufficient in this volume to pass over the details lightly. The main point is that the organism has been constructed throughout to minister to the soul. To fit the soul for its embodied life it had to receive two temporary and inferior additions, the “spirited” and “concupiscent” “parts” or “forms” already familiar to us from the Republic. Each of these has a central “organ” or “seat,” just as the “rational” part has its seat in the brain; “spirit” is lodged in the thorax, “appetite” in the lower region of the trunk, beneath the diaphragm (69a-70e). In connexion with this least orderly and disciplined element in the soul, the liver has a specially important part to play. It is the source of visions and bad dreams
The physiology is followed up by a section on pathology which makes a curious attempt at a classification of the various known diseases (82a-86a). The theory could only be properly discussed in connexion with what we know of other fifth- and fourth-century speculations on the same subject from the Hippocratean corpus and other sources. Its most outstanding feature is that it departs wholly from the lines of the Hippocratean “humoral pathology” by treating “phlegm” and “bile” not as ingredients of the organism in its normal state but as unwholesome morbid secretions. I have tried elsewhere to show reasons for supposing that Plato is deriving the doctrine from Philistion of Locri, with whom, as we see from the Epistles, he had made acquaintance at Syracuse, and that in its main outlines it is in general accord with what we know to have been the medical theory of Philolaus, though there are points of difference. If this is so, we can understand why this particular medical theory should be expounded by the Locrian Timaeus. In any case, we must not suppose that Plato has invented an amateur pathology of his own and is teaching it dogmatically. He will simply be following what he regards as respectable specialist authority.
The pathology of the body leads up to the pathology of the soul (86b-87b), and this to some regulations of physical and mental hygiene (87e-90d). Undesirable moral propensities are due very largely to physical constitutional defects; e.g. undue propensity to sexual irregularities is largely of physiological origin. The other chief cause of “badness” is education in bad social traditions. Hence Timaeus infers—not quite consistently with his own earlier insistence on personal responsibility—that those who begot and educated the transgressor are really more to blame than the transgressor himself. We must remember that he is, among other things, a medical man, and that “the profession” are prone to views of this kind. Plato may well be treating his speaker with a certain touch of irony when he makes the moral theory of Timaeus a little inconsistent with his mental pathology.
In laying down rules of hygiene, the supreme object we should
A still more important topic is the hygiene of the mind which is to rule and direct the movements of the body. Timaeus cannot relevantly enter on a systematic discussion of the principles of education, but he lays down the general principle that our intelligence is the divine thing in us, and the real “guardian spirit” (δαίμων) of each of us. It has been truly said that man, whose divine part resides in the head, is like a tree with its root not in the earth, but in the sky (90a). The rule of healthy living for the soul is that this divine thing in us should “think thoughts immortal and divine,” and that the merely human “parts” of the soul should “worship” and “tend” it. The true “tendance” of any creature consists in providing it with its appropriate food and “exercise (κινήσεις, 90c), and the “exercise” appropriate to the rational soul is thus “the thoughts and revolutions of the whole.” The end of life is to correct the “revolutions in the head” and bring them once more into correspondence with the “tunes and revolutions” of the world-soul, in whose image they were made at first (90a-d).
The story closes with a development which should not be taken as seriously as has been done by some interpreters. Timaeus, we remember, had incorporated in his narrative the old fancy that the first men were directly sprung from the soil. Hence his physiology has taken no account of the reproductive system. This, we are now told, was only wanted in the second generation, when the second-best of the original “men” came to be reborn as women. He gives an unmistakably playful account of the modifications which had to be introduced into the physiological scheme to suit the new situation (90e-91d), and then adds more briefly that the lower animals in general were also derived by degeneration from the original human pattern, the deformation being greater or less as the souls which were to tenant the various bodies had fallen more or less short of virtue and wisdom in their first life (91d-92b). Nothing is said here of the hell and purgatory of the eschatological
Here our story comes at last to an end. We have now told the whole tale of the birth of this sensible world, “a visible living creature, modeled on that which is intelligible, a god displayed to sense” (92c).
The Critias calls for no special consideration. Its declared purpose is to relate in detail the story of the defeat of the Atlantid kings, of which Critias had given the bare outline in the Timaeus. It remains, however, a bare fragment. Critias describes the topography of Attica and Athens as they were before the process of denudation which has reduced the country to a mere rocky skeleton (109b-111d), and the happy condition of the inhabitants (111e-112e). He then gives a much longer account of the island of Atlantis and its kings, the descendants of the god Posidon, their institutions, and their wonderful engineering works (118a-120d), and is about to relate how their hearts were lifted up with pride in their wealth and power, and how Zeus resolved to bring them into judgment, when the fragment breaks off, just as Zeus is about to declare his purpose to the assembled gods. The chief things which call for notice are the clear-headed way in which Plato has grasped the effects of gradual geological denudation on Attica,
but the
The conception of the “purpose of Zeus” seems to be an echo from epic poetry. It is hardly a mere accident that the last complete sentence of the fragment recalls the version of the Trojan story given in the Cypria, where the origin of the great war is traced to the plan of Zeus for the prevention of over-population. There may be some significance in the fact that Zeus is said to summon the divine council to his “most honorable abode” in the center of the universe.
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 335-349; Platonism. 1928, c. 7.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii., 258-287 al.; Platons Dialoge, 98-158; Neue Untersuchungen über Platon, 174-182.
Levi, A. Il Concetto del Tempo nella Filosofia di Platone. Turin, N.D.
Stewart, J. A. Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, 101-105; Myths of Plato, 259-297 (The Timaeus), 457-469.
Dies, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 522-603.
Taylor, A. E. A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Oxford, 1928; Plato, Timaeus and Critias, translated, 1929.
Rivaud, A. Platon, Timaeus, Critias. Paris, 1925.
Friedlander, P. Platon; Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos (1928). Excursus II. on the city of Atlantis.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entivichelung, 374-394.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 338-358.
Baeumker, C. Das Problem der Materie in der Griechischen Philosophie, 115-188.
Martin, T. H. Études suv le Time’e de Platon.(Paris, 1841.
Robin, L. Études sur la signification et la place de la physique dans la philosophie de Platon. Paris, 1919.
Robin, L. Platon, c. v.
Cornford, F. M. Plato’s Cosmology (Timaeus translated with commentary, Cambridge, 1937.
The Laws is not only the longest of all Plato’s writings; it also contains his latest and ripest thought on the subjects which he had all through his life most at heart—ethics, education, and jurisprudence. Plato’s services to the theory of education, in particular, have usually been grossly underrated, from an inexcusable neglect of the very thorough treatment given to it in what he probably himself regarded as his most important work. His theology, again, has often been misconceived in modern times, because the tenth book of the Laws is the only place in his works where it is systematically expounded. This neglect of so noble a work is perhaps to be explained by two considerations. In one respect the Laws makes a greater demand on the reader than any other Platonic writing. The dramatic element is reduced to a minimum; if one does not care for the subject-matter of the book, there is little in its manner to attract. To all intents and purposes, the work is a monologue, interrupted only by formulae of assent or requests for further explanation. Further, the purpose of the whole is severely practical, and will not appeal to a reader who cares more for metaphysics and science than for morals and politics. More than any other work of Plato, the Laws stands in direct relation to the political life of the age in which it was composed and is meant to satisfy a pressing felt need.
In the last twenty years of Plato’s life it was becoming more and more obvious that the old city-states which had been the centers of Hellenic spiritual life had had their day. Athens herself had become a second-rate power ever since the collapse of the great Syracusan expedition, as Plato knew only too well. Sparta, to whom the hegemony had passed at the end of the Decelean war, had proved wholly unfitted for such a post, and had been crushed, in a way from which she never recovered, by the brilliant successes of Epaminondas, which made Thebes for a few years a power of the first order. Meanwhile the very existence of Hellenic civilization was endangered by the encroachments of Persia in the East and Carthage in the West. It was clear that if civilization of the Hellenic type was to hold its own, none of the older city-states was in a condition to become its center. We know now that the historical solution of the problem was to be provided by the rise of the Macedonian monarchy and the achievements of Philip and Alexander.
The date of composition of the work cannot be very precisely fixed. But we may readily fix a terminus a quo [point of origin]. One of the chief principles on which Plato insists is that the legislator has not really done his work when he has merely enunciated an enactment and provided it with a “sanction” in the form of a penalty for nonobservance. This is like the method of an empiric “slave” doctor, treating other slaves; he merely orders a prescription to be followed under the threat of consequences if it is neglected. A great physician treating an intelligent freeman tries to enlist his patient in the work of the cure by explaining to him the principles on which the treatment rests. In the same way, a legislator should try to enlist
The personnel of the dialogue, if we can call it one, is exceedingly simple. There are three characters—an Athenian, left anonymous, who is the main speaker, and two minor characters, Megillus, a Spartan, and Clinias, a Cretan. All of them are old men; of the Athenian we learn that he has astronomical and mathematical knowledge, is regarded by the others as a highly suitable person to give advice on matters of jurisprudence and political science, and that he has had personal experience of association with a “tyrant” (711a). Thus his intellectual qualifications are those of a member of the Academy, and his personal experiences are modeled on Plato’s own, and to that extent we may fairly take him as standing for Plato, though we have no reason to suppose that he is drawn with any deliberate intention of self-portraiture. All we learn of the others is that the Spartan belongs to a family in which the office of proxenus (ambassador) of Athens is hereditary, and that the Cretan is connected by blood with the famous medicine-man Epimenides (642b, d). This is meant to account for the unusual readiness of both to learn from an Athenian. When the work opens we find the three old men engaged in a general conversation about the merits and purpose of the institutions of the traditional legislators of Sparta and Cnossus, Lycurgus and Minos. They propose to continue their conversation as they walk to the cave of Dicte, the legendary birthplace of Zeus. The full situation is only disclosed at the end of the third book (702b-d). It then appears that the Cretans have resolved to resettle the site of a decayed city; the making of the necessary arrangements has been left to the citizens of Cnossus, who have devolved it upon a commission of ten. Clinias, the head
The argument of the first three books may be regarded as introductory. Plato winds his way very gradually into his subject, advancing almost imperceptibly from a problem of ethics, through educational theory, to the consideration of strictly political and juristic matter, and does not reveal his full purpose until the preparatory positions have been thoroughly secured. This method is very characteristic, and it is unfortunate that some modern readers should have appreciated it so little as to speculate about the possibility that the whole arrangement is due to the piecing together of disconnected papers by an editor. I trust that the brief analysis which follows will reveal the real march of the argument as far too carefully studied to be the result of a well-meant blunder.
Book I: What is the central purpose of the institutions of Lycurgus and Minos? The Spartan and Cretan agree that their law-givers have discovered the fundamental truth that, under all disguises, the brute hard fact about the life of a city is that it is a “war to the knife” with all rivals; almost in Hobbes’s phrase, independent cities are in a state of nature towards one another, and the state of nature is a state of real but undeclared war (πόλεμος ἀκήρυκτος). Hence the supreme good for a city is victory in this unremitting warfare, and the business of a citizen is to be, before everything, a combatant. All the institutions of Sparta and Crete are therefore rightly directed towards producing the one great virtue, efficiency in warfare, ἀνδρεία, valour. The Athenian dissents entirely from this ethic of warfare. The supreme victory for any community or any man is not victory over the foe without, but victory over self, that is, the conquest of the worser elements in the community or the individual soul by the better. And this victory is not complete when the better elements coerce or expel the worse; it is only complete when subjugation is followed by reconciliation and harmony. Peace, not war, between the components of community or individual soul is the best state; it is with a view to peace that a good legislator must make his enactments. From this point of view, wisdom, sophrosyne, justice, are the supreme virtues; mere martial valour will rank only fourth (631c). Now when we consider the Spartan system of training we see that all its peculiarities—the common meals of coarse fare, the bodily exercises and hunting, and the rough discipline in general—aim only at fostering the one virtue we have just ranked lowest among the four of the familiar quadrilateral. And, what is more, they aim at teaching only the easier and less valuable half of the one virtue.
True “manliness” or valour does not consist simply in the power
A chance remark of Megillus in reply to these criticisms provides the material for the rest of the discussion of Book I. He regards it as highly creditable to Sparta that its pleasures are so few; a wine-party, for example, is an unheard-of thing (637a). This leads the Athenian into a long discussion of the practice of μέθη, the convivial use of wine. (As a mere drink with meals wine was used sparingly at Sparta, as everywhere else in Greece, for the simple reason that the water is bad.) Some communities wholly prohibit the practice, others allow anyone who pleases to indulge in it as much as he pleases and whenever he likes. Both, the Athenian thinks, are mistaken. A Spartan may urge that the Spartans beat the “wet” forces in the field whenever they meet them, but we cannot generalize by enumeration from a few instances. The issue of numberless engagements goes unrecorded, and we can point to examples on the other side, such as the victory of the toping Syracusans over the abstemious Locrians. If we are to judge of wine-drinking or any other practice we must see what can be made of it under proper regulation. Now under two important conditions—(a) that the party is presided over by a sober man who is not himself giving way to the merriment, and (b) that this president is a man of more years and experience than the rest of the party—such a gathering might have valuable social uses. In vino veritas is true in the sense that when a man is warmed with wine, he shows himself for what he is without disguise. He blurts out thoughts which he would normally keep to himself, and exhibits tempers he would normally hide. If there were a drug which would gradually produce groundless fear and apprehension, as there is not, it would enable us to make a very safe and easy test of a man’s courage. We could make him take deeper and deeper draughts of it, and watch his success in mastering his pathological alarms. We should thus be able to do without risk what, in fact, we can only do by exposing a man to actual risk, distinguish the more from the less valiant. Wine does give us such a test of a man’s sophrosyne. We can see who forgets himself least and keeps his modesty best under the artificial removal of restraints produced by the wine-cup, and, if the party is rightly conducted, there is no danger that the application of the test will have serious consequences; the subject will be a little noisy and
Book II: The sentence just quoted does not occur until the end of the second book, but before we reach it, Plato has ingeniously made the problem of the right use of wine lead up to that of the use of music and poetry as a vehicle of early moral education. There is still a further valuable social service which may be derived from a proper use of wine, but before we can say what this service is, we must ask the question what right education is. To answer this, we reflect that a child’s first experience in life is acquaintance with pleasure and pain (653a), and that an education in character begins with learning to feel pleasure and pain about the right things (ibid. b). To understand how this education is to be got, we consider that a young creature cannot keep still; it is always jumping and shouting (ibid. d). In man, by the gift of God, these boundings and shoutings can be transformed into tuneful and rhythmical singing and dancing, and it is with this transformation that education begins (654a). Thus, by a liberal interpretation, the whole of the early moral training of the young, which is to begin as soon as they are sensible to melody and rhythm, can be brought under the rubric of education in the “choric” art, the art of song accompanied by the lyre and by the movements of an appropriate ballet d’action. The connexion of the discussion with the previous problem of the right use of wine is effected by a playful artifice very characteristic of Plato. It is at first assumed that, since the community as a whole must take its part in the worship of the Muses, there will be three choirs at our musical festivals—one of the boys and girls, a second of the younger, and a third of the older, men. But old men who ale “stiff in the joints” and past the feelings of frolic will naturally not find it easy to recapture the youthful spirit of gaiety which will make it natural for them to sing and dance before a
The details of the book cannot be discussed here, but it should be noted that while the treatment proceeds on the same main principles as those laid down for the employment of music in the schoolroom in Republic iii., the whole discussion is much richer in psychological insight; no account of Plato’s views about the moral influence of music on character can possibly afford to neglect Laws ii., though many professed accounts commit the fault. For the general theory of moral education, the most significant utterances are the declaration, emphatically commended by Aristotle, that the whole problem is to teach the young to “feel pleasure and pain” rightly (653b) and that “rightly” means “in accord with the rightly uttered discourse of the law” (659d, πρὸς τὸν ὑπὸ του νόμου λόγον ὀρθὸν εἰρημένον),
With Book III, we enter on the main problem of political science, what a “city” is, and how it arises. To illustrate the way in
In course of time, men would pass from this “nomad life” to agriculture, and the inhabiting of some sort of “city.” These settlements would naturally be made first of all in the uplands, and agriculture would bring along with it the first rude attempts at “enclosures” (681a). For defense against dangers, families would coalesce in large “houses” (like the “long houses” of the North American Indians). This would, in time, lead to an Ausgleich (balance, leveling out) of rules of life. The “large house” would develop a rule of life out of the various rules each family group brought with it into the settlement, and we might call this the first rude beginning of legislation (ibid. b-c). So we should find the first beginnings of sovereignty at the same stage in the appearance of a sort of “aristocracy” of headmen, who see that the rule of life is duly observed (681d). When the memory of the cataclysm had sufficiently died out, a further step would be taken. Men would venture to come down into the plains and build cities on a larger scale, like Homer’s Ilios (682a). With this development we find ourselves in an age of rich and powerful monarchs who can engage in serious hostilities. (It will be noted with how sure an eye Plato discerns the general character of the Greek “Middle Ages,” as they are depicted for us in the Iliad, which he rightly regards as historical in its representation of the old days of “chivalry.”)
The traditional story of the disasters of the return from Troy and of the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese also has a lesson for us. The narrative of the conflicts between the returning warriors and the new generation, and of the Dorian invasion, throw light on the way in which a “world-war” changes the face of history (682d ff.). The main point, made at considerable length, is that the Dorian invaders, if they had only been wise in their generation, had the opportunity of establishing a State which could have held its own against all the Oriental monarchies, since they found
We learn the same lesson from the history of Persia and that of Athens. The principle is that, in the last resort, there are two “matrices” of constitutions—personal rule (monarchy), and democracy (popular rule, 693d). In a sound constitution both need to be blended. This was the case with the Persians under Cyrus, as well as with the Athenians of the same time. But in Persia, the element of popular control has disappeared, and government has become capricious autocracy, with the result that Persia is now only formidable on “paper,” since there is no real loyalty in the subject. At Athens, respect for personal character and authority has been lost in a complete reign of the mob. The cause, in both cases, has been the same, ignorance of the true principles of education. Since the great Darius, every Persian prince has been “born in the purple” and brought up by women and eunuchs, who ruin him by gratifying all his caprices. At Athens, the mischief began when the uneducated learned to think their own opinion about music and drama as good as that of the educated, and the same delusion soon spread to political matters; the Athens of today is not really a “democracy” but a “theatrocracy” of ignorant sensation-lovers (694a-701d). In Persia, no one is taught how to command, and in Athens no one learns how to obey. The lesson of history for the intending legislator is thus that every wholesome
It is a good corrective to some popular misconceptions of Plato, to note the judicious way in which he employs poetry and tradition as the basis for his tentative reconstruction of prehistory, and the moderation and sobriety of the lessons he draws from history. In the main, his conception of the stages by which men pass through the nomad to the agricultural state, and from the life of the family group to that of the “city” agrees with Aristotle’s, and I might suggest that the well-known account of the “household” and “village” as the precursors of the “city” in the Politics is consciously inspired by the more detailed picture of Laws iii. In one respect, Plato is more “modern” than Aristotle or any other ancient; he, like ourselves, has a vivid sense of the enormous lapses of time and the numerous changes which must have gone to the making of society before our records begin.
The third book of the Laws ends with the statement that Clinias and his friend are actually engaged in a visit to the site of the proposed new city, and an invitation to the Athenian to assist them by continuing his discourse on legislation as they walk. In Book IV Plato proceeds at once to give us a lesson in practical constitution-making. The very first requisite is to be well informed about the topography, climate, economic resources of the State for which we are to legislate, and the character of its inhabitants. The constitution and legislation must, of course, be adapted to all these conditions; Plato is no builder of Utopias, but an extremely practical thinker. In the present case, he assumes that the territory of the imagined city is varied: it contains arable, pasture, woodland, and the like, in reasonable quantity, but it is not extremely fertile. In situation, the city is some miles from the sea, though there is a spot in its territory which would make a good harbor. It has no very near neighbors. These conditions are assumed, because without them some of the features Plato regards as most desirable in national life could not be secured. He wants his territory to be varied in order that it may be as nearly as possible self-supporting and independent of imports; he wants it not to be over-fertile, mainly in order to exclude the rise of production for the foreign market, and for much the same reasons he is glad that it should not have easy access to
Now what would be the most favourable opportunity for the creation of a thoroughly sound system of laws and institutions? Though the remark seems paradoxical, the best chance would be offered by the cooperation of a thoroughly wise statesman with a “tyrant” but the tyrant would have to be young, intelligent, and endowed with unusual moral nobility (709e). The thought is that in this case the statesman would have the freest hand. He would need only to convert the autocrat to his plans, and the rest of society would follow suit, partly from loyalty, partly because the autocrat has the requisite force to constrain the malcontent. He must be young as well as intelligent, of course, if he is to be won to such an undertaking: an older man would be less easily impressed. He must have moral nobility, because he will be called on to sacrifice his own position as autocrat, if the combination of authority with “freedom” is to be effected. It is improbable that there should ever be such a conjuncture as the association in one age and place of a supreme statesman with a young autocrat of such unusual qualifications, but we cannot say that the thing is impossible (711d). So we may imagine that the condition has been realised and proceed
If a man with a genius for statesmanship ever got this favourable opportunity of carrying his conceptions out in practice, he would, in accord with the principles already laid down, take care not to establish an “unmixed” constitution of any of the three types familiar in the Greek world. That would be to create a sovereignty of a favoured person or class over a subject class or classes. In a true “constitution” the sovereign is not class-interest, but God, and the voice by which God makes His commands known is the law. Hence the fundamental principle of good government is that the sovereign shall be not a person or a class, but impersonal law (713e). In such a society the posts of authority will be awarded for superiority not in birth, or wealth, or strength, but in wholehearted service to law. Its point of honor will be loyalty to the laws. The Athenian accordingly imagines himself to be in the position of a legislator speaking in the presence of the whole body of intending citizens, and proceeds to begin an address to them on the majesty of law (715e-718a); the opening words of this speech are, perhaps, the one “text” quoted more frequently than any other by the Platonists of later antiquity. God eternally pursues the “even tenor of his way,” and Justice attends Him; he who would be happy must follow in their train with a “humbled and disciplined” spirit (ταπεινὸς καὶ κεκοσμημένος). To follow God means to be like God, who is the true “measure of all things” (716c). We are like God so far as we follow the life of right measure.
In the life of measure reverence (τιμή) must be meted out to its various recipients in the right order, first to the gods of the upper world and our city, next to those of the underworld, then to “spirits and heroes,” then to ancestors and dead parents, and last to our living parents; in honoring these last, we must remember that to support them with our substance is the least office, to minister to them with our bodies something more, to give them the affection and devotion of the soul the great thing. We cannot do too much for them while we have them with us; when they die, the most modest funeral is the most decent and honorable. At this point the discourse on the duties of life breaks off, to be resumed again in the following book. The reason for the interruption is that the speaker recollects that there are two possible types of law, a brief one and a longer. The brief type of law is that in common vogue. It consists of a command or prohibition accompanied by a “sanction” in the form of a penalty threatened for non-compliance.
Book V in its opening pages contains the continuation of the great preamble (726-734d). From reverence to parents, we proceed to the reverence or respect due to ourselves and our fellows. The rule of self-reverence is that the soul is more than the body and the body than possessions. A man must prize his soul more than his body and his body more than his “goods.” We dishonor our own soul when we put bodily vigour and health or power or riches before wisdom and virtue, or when we gratify unworthy caprice or passion. We dishonor the body when we prefer wealth to health. Plato’s view is that extraordinary beauty or robustness or wealth are bad for the soul, generally speaking, no less than extraordinary ugliness, deformity, ill-health, penury. The first breeds vanity, the second gross lusts, the third idleness and luxury. In respect of advantages both of body and of fortune,
Next follows an exhortation as to the spirit in which a man should conduct himself in matters where the law can lay down no specific commands or prohibitions. The supreme demand on a man is for ἀλήθεια ("genuineness”) in all the relations of life—in fact, for “loyalty.” A man who is not “true and loyal” is wholly untrustworthy; want of loyalty makes friendship and all the happiness of life impossible. We must lay it down that in this, and in all points of virtue, it is good to practice them yourself, better to go further and to bring the misdeeds of others to the knowledge of the authorities, best of all, actually to assist them in chastising the misdoer. We must add that rivalry in goodness of all kinds is the one form of emulation we should encourage in all our citizens, as it is the one kind of rivalry which aims not at engrossing a good to one’s self, but at communicating it as widely as possible. To the faults of others a good man should be merciful, whenever they are remediable, since he knows that “no one is bad on purpose"; he will only let his anger have its course with the incorrigible. A man must beware, too, of the deadly fault of improper partiality to one’s self. And he must repress all tendency to unrestrained emotionalism (726b-732d).
We must not forget that it is men, not gods, whom we are trying to enlist on the side of virtue. We must therefore make allowance for the universal human desire for a pleasant existence. We cannot expect men regularly to choose the noble life unless they are persuaded that it is also the pleasant. Its nobility has already been argued; Plato now proceeds to contend that, even by the rules of a Hedonic calculus, if you only state the rules correctly and work the sum right, the morally best life will be found to be also the pleasantest. The rules are that we wish to have pleasure, and not to have pain; we do not wish for a neutral condition, but we prefer it to pain. We choose a pain attended by an overbalance of pleasure, and refuse a pleasure attended by an overbalance of pain; to an exact balance of pleasure and pain we are indifferent. We have to take into account as “dimensions” of pleasure and pain “number” and “size"—i.e. frequency and duration and intensity. We wish to have a life in which, when attention has been given to all these “dimensions” the balance works out on the side of pleasure; not to have one in which the balance is on the side of pain. The life in which the balance is zero is preferable to that in which there is a balance of pain. If we consider four pairs of lives, corresponding to the four currently recognized virtues and their contrary
There is still one more matter to be dealt with before proceeding to the legislation in detail—the creation of the necessary magistracies. The magistrates are, so to say, the warp, the rest of the citizens the woof, of the fabric we have to weave. The warp must have the stronger and tougher constitution, must be made of those elements of the population who have most strength of character and are least pliable. We begin by laying it down (737c) that the size of the community, the number of households, must be kept permanent. (We want to exclude the social revolutions which would be produced by either marked decline or marked increase in population.) We require to have just such a population as our territory will support in industry and sobriety, neither more nor fewer. If the population grows beyond this limit, it will begin to expand at the cost of wrong to its neighbors; if it falls below it, it will not be adequate to its own defense. The actual number of households will depend on the size of the territory, but, for purposes of illustration (737e), we may imagine it fixed at 5040, a number which recommends itself by the fact that it is divisible by all the integers up to 10. This is convenient, since there may be practical reasons for wishing to divide the inhabitants into administrative groups for various purposes.
We may say at once that the very best and happiest of all societies would be one where there was no “private” interest, where even wives and children were “common” and the word “my own” never heard (739c). What we are describing now is a
It will, unfortunately, be impossible to prevent economic inequalities altogether, but they may be kept within bounds, and both penury and irresponsible wealth excluded by the following regulations. The patrimonies should be, as nearly as possible, of equal value (737c); to secure that they remain inalienable in the same family, a careful survey of the whole territory will be made and preserved in the public archives (741c). To keep out the taint of commercialism, the State will have its own currency, valueless outside its own territory, and it will be a crime in a citizen to own the coined money of a foreign city (742a).
There shall be no lending of money on interest, and no credit (742c). The reason for this is simply that we do not wish to encourage a man to live on the automatic return of investments; we want him to be a farmer living by the labour of his own hands. Accumulation will be checked by the establishment of four economic classes, the poorest possessing nothing beyond their patrimony, the richest being allowed to possess no more than four times the yield of the patrimony. Any further increase of wealth will be escheated to the State (744d-745a). Thus wealth will have some weight, as well as character and birth, in the distribution of offices. This is regrettable, but it is a condition we cannot wholly exclude (744b).
Book VI brings us at last to the appointment of the various magistrates and administrative boards. We must be content here to describe the most important of these and the method by which they are constituted, as illustrative of Plato’s insight into the practical business of “representation.” The most important ordinary magistracy is that of the νομοφύλακες or guardians of the constitution, a body of thirty-seven men of approved character and intelligence, who must be at least 50 years old at appointment, and must retire at the age of 70. Their functions are to watch over the interests of the laws in general and, in particular, to take charge of the register of properties, and penalize and “blacklist” any citizen guilty of fraudulent concealment of income. They figure also as the presiding magistrates in connexion with the trial of grave offences of various kinds. They are to be elected by votes given in writing and signed with the voter’s name (as a precaution against an irresponsible vote), and the election has several stages, by which the three hundred names first selected are finally reduced to thirty-seven (three for each “tribe” with an odd man to prevent an equal division of opinions).
The ordinary great council, the “representative chamber” of the society, is elected on a plan ingeniously contrived to eliminate extreme “class-consciousness” and to make wire-pulling and cabal impossible. It is ultimately to consist of 360 members, ninety from each of the four property-classes, but the selection has several stages and is spread over a week. In the first instance 360 representatives of each class are chosen, the voting covering four days.
The chief criticism a modern thinker would be likely to pass on the scheme would probably be that it runs the risk of making the extremist all the more dangerous by leaving him no chance of airing his grievances in the “council of the nation.” But it might be said that we are learning by experience how hard it is for the same body to combine the functions of a “safety-valve” and a really effective national council.
The most important office in a Platonic community is, as we should expect, that of the Minister of Education. The well-being of the community depends directly on the character of the education given to successive generations, and the overseer of education should therefore be the best and most illustrious man in the community, as holding its most responsible post. He must be a man of over fifty, with children of his own, and should be elected for a period of five years out of the body of the νομοφύλακες by the votes of the other magistrates (765d-766b). The “President of the Board of Education” is thus the “premier” in Plato’s commonwealth.
If the life of the society is to be thoroughly sound from a moral point of view, we must first ensure that the tone of family life itself is sound. Marriage must be regarded as a solemn duty to society; selfish neglect to discharge that duty, as we have already
"Music” requires a fuller treatment. We must remind
We proceed with the details of the education to be reared on this basis of a sound taste which is at once aesthetic and moral. We have, so to say, laid the keel of the vessel and have now to design the ribs. We may feel, perhaps, that the voyage of life is not so serious an affair as it seems. Perhaps we are only playthings for God, but even if that is so, we must “play the game” well, not in the inverted fashion of mankind at large, who fancy that war is the business of life, peace only the play. The truth is that it is peace which is “real” and “earnest,” for it is only in peace that we can pursue education, the most serious affair of life (803a-804c).
To return to our subject. We shall need schools for the teaching of the things we have spoken of, with proper buildings and grounds. And the teachers in these schools will have to receive salaries, and therefore must be foreigners. All the children must attend school (φοιταν) daily; this must not be left to parental caprice. This applies to girls as well as to boys; they must even
It is important to note the magnitude of the proposal made here. As Professor Burnet points out, what is being conceived for the first time is the “secondary school” a permanent establishment for the higher education of boys and girls by specially competent teachers duly organized and paid. (The impossibility of maintaining such an institution without salaries is the reason why, in accord with Hellenic sentiment, it is assumed that they must all be non-citizens.) The “grammar school” meets us as an actual institution in the Macedonian age; it is presumable that it owes its existence to the influence exerted in that age by members of the Academy as the recognized experts in education and jurisprudence. The old practice of the Periclean age had been that “higher education” of all kinds was got from attending the lectures of sophists, each with his speciality. Plato’s new idea is the systematization of secondary education by coordinating the specialists in single institutions.
We need not be afraid of the criticism that our views on the education of women are paradoxical. We see that women can share the labours of men by the example of Thrace and other districts where they do agricultural work, though at Athens they are expected to do nothing but sit indoors, mind the store-closet, and spin and weave. At Sparta a middle course is followed; the girls learn to wrestle, and they do no house-work, but they are not expected to be capable of doing anything for the national defense. With all courtesy to a Spartan hearer, we must confess that we cannot be satisfied with such a compromise; the women should at least be able, in case of need, to scare away raiders from the city (806b).
The scheme we have adopted for our community makes it certain that our citizens will not have to labour long hours for the means of existence; they will have abundant leisure, and they must not waste it in fattening themselves like cattle, but use it in setting themselves to live the most strenuous of all lives, that which aims at goodness of mind and body. They will have to be up betimes, before all the servants, and to prevent waste of the precious hours in sleep, it will be enjoined that public as well as household business shall be transacted in the early morning. Sleeping long and late is as bad for the body as for the mind (806d-808c). It follows that the boys must be taken to school at daybreak, and both the servants who conduct them there and the schoolmasters must pay the closest attention to their moral, for a boy, just because he has a “spring of intelligence” in him, which does not as yet run clear, is the most unruly of all animals. As to the subjects of
There are still three “branches of knowledge” (μαθήματα) which any free man should possess—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (817e). Only a few young people are capable of high proficiency in them, but all must study them “so far as is truly necessary” (818b). But how far is that? At least as far as the Egyptians succeed in carrying large classes of young people. They have a method of teaching them to deal with fractions and to find the divisors of numbers by means of games in which garlands and other objects have to be divided among a given number of persons,
Book VIII and Book IX The contents of Books VIII and IX must be dealt with very summarily. Provision is made, as would be the case in any actual Greek “legislation,” first of all for the cultus of the State, every month of the year and every day of the month being provided with its appropriate worship; the object is simply to place the whole daily life of the whole community under the “religious sanction” (828). Since there will be “gymnastic” and musical “contests” as part of this regular worship, Plato then goes on to lay down regulations for the regular monthly exercises of the citizen militia, as well as for the “contests” which will mark special festivals. The latter are meant to correspond to the pan-Hellenic games of actual life, but the programme of “events” is revised. Competition is to be in exercises of strength and endurance which have a real military value, particularly in rapid evolutions in complete accoutrement, and the mimic warfare is to reproduce its model as closely as possible; there must be a spice of real danger about it. The girls and women must share in all this, so far as their physique permits, but we cannot make detailed regulations on this point in advance (829-835d).
This raises an important ethical question. Is there not a real danger that the very free association of young people of both sexes in pursuits of this kind, and their abundant leisure from “work,” may lead to a relaxed sexual morality? Plato thinks not, if we can only establish the right social tradition in such matters, which is that “homosexual” relations of all kinds must be reprobated as unnatural and that the normal sexual appetite is to find no gratification outside the bounds of lawful matrimony. This demand may strike most persons as Utopian, and as an attempt to suppress “love.” But we must not be misled by equivocal terms. “Love of good-will” is one thing, love of carnal appetite quite another; the suppression of the second in no way militates against
The speaker now turns to a consideration of regulations necessary for the pursuit of agriculture, the economic foundation of his contemplated society. Under this caption we have proposals for dealing with such matters as encroachments on boundaries, diversion of watercourses, ownership of stray animals, regulation of the market, 3 and the like.
In matters like these, there are many already existing good rules which we shall do well to follow (843e), a significant hint that many of the regulations proposed are simply based on the actual code of Attica. The student of Plato’s political philosophy need not delay over such details, though they have a double interest for the historian of law and custom. They throw a great deal of light on questions of Attic law, and they provide the starting-point for the casuistry by which Roman lawyers and, in modern times, publicists like Grotius and Pufendorf have laboured to arrive at the principles of a satisfactory law of property. It is not surprising that Plato’s actual examples recur, for example, in the Institutes of Justinian and the de Jure Belli et Pacis. The discussion of the regulation of the market leads naturally to consideration of the conditions on which aliens may be allowed to enter the society and practice industry (850b-d). They are to be subjected to no poll-tax, but they must have an industry by which to support themselves, must conform to the rules of the
We come now to criminal jurisprudence, with an apology for the necessity of admitting that there will be any crime to be legislated against in a rightly constituted society. The crimes first considered are, in the order of their gravity, sacrilege, treason, parricide. These are “capital” crimes, and it is best for a citizen who commits them that he should be allowed to live no longer, but we must lay it down once for all that the capital sentence must not include the penalizing of his innocent family by the confiscation of property, and that they are not to be regarded as tainted in their honor by his offence. Similar crimes in an alien or a slave will be more mildly visited by whipping and expulsion from the country. In general, Plato allows himself a freer use of corporeal chastisements than modern legislators, since he does not accept the “humanitarian” estimate of physical pain nor the view that its infliction is peculiarly degrading. These capital crimes are to be tried before a court composed of the νομοφύλακες and a number of the magistrates of the preceding year, and the proceedings must be spread over three days.
We must insist, however, that in our State criminal jurisprudence takes a scientific account of the psychology of the offender (857c-d). Current opinion on this matter, as shown by the practice of existing societies, is in a state of confusion. Justice is held to be a “fine” thing (καλόν), but the just chastisement inflicted on a criminal is regarded as a disgrace to him (859d-860b). Yet to be consistent, we ought to hold that if it is “fine” to do what is just, it is also “fine” to get what is just done to you.
The secret of the current confusion is that actual jurisprudence assumes that men are bad and do wrong “voluntarily,” hence the one great distinction recognized by actual law is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary transgression. But we must adhere to the philosophical principle so familiar to us from earlier dialogues that “all wrongdoing is involuntary” (860d), and therefore we cannot make the distinction between voluntary and involuntary the basis of our penal code (861d). The distinction we really need is a different one, that of βλάβη, the causing of hurt or loss, from ἀδικία, the violation of a right. In inflicting penalties, the proper question is not whether the act committed was voluntary or not, but whether the person on whom it was inflicted received mere loss or hurt, or was further injured in his rights. The proper thing to say about a man who has caused an unintended loss or hurt to another is not,
Plato now applies these principles to the construction of a penal code. We have to distinguish violation of rights from the mere causation of damage, and in the case of the former, we must distinguish between violence and craft. Regulations are then laid down for the cases of homicide, suicide, maiming, wounding with intent to kill, minor assaults, the object being to give a specimen of a logically constructed criminal code. The penalties will depend not only on the main distinction already laid down, but on the status of the parties, whether citizens, aliens, or slaves. The details must be passed over here. What inevitably impresses a modern reader most unfavourably is the special severity with which injuries committed by a slave on free persons are treated. This is, however, a direct consequence of the recognition of the servile status, which gives these crimes something of the character of mutiny.
Book X introduces us to one of the most important developments of Platonism, its theology. Plato appears as at once the creator of natural theology and the first thinker to propose that false theological belief—as distinguished from insults to an established worship—should be treated as a crime against the State and repressed by the civil magistrate. He is convinced that there are certain truths about God which can be strictly demonstrated, and that the denial of these leads directly to practical bad living. Hence the denial of these truths is a grave offence against the social order and must be punished as such, the principle upon which the Roman Church still maintains that it is the duty of the magistrate to suppress heretical pravity. Historically we have here the foundation of natural or philosophical theology, The name we owe to the famous Roman antiquarian, M. Terentius Varro, who distinguished three kinds of theology, or “discourses about gods"—the poetical, consisting simply of the myths related by the poets; the civil, which means knowledge of the Calendar of the State’s cultus and is the creation of the “legislator"; and the natural or philosophic, the doctrine about things divine taught by philosophers
The three heresies Plato regards as morally pernicious are, in the order of their moral turpitude: (a) atheism, the belief that there are no gods at all, the least offensive of the three; (b) Epicureanism, as we may call it by a convenient anachronism, the doctrine that God, or the gods, are indifferent to human conduct; (c) worst of all, the doctrine that an impenitent offender can escape God’s judgment by gifts and offerings. It is morally less harmful to believe that there is no God than to believe in a careless God, and it is better to believe in a careless God than in a venal one. Against these three heresies Plato holds that he can prove the existence of a God or gods, the reality of providential and moral government of the world and man, and the impossibility of bribing the divine justice.
(a) Atheism is treated by Plato as identical with the doctrine that the world and its contents, souls included, are the product of unintelligent motions of corporeal elements. Against this theory, he undertakes to demonstrate that all corporeal movements are, in, the last resort, causally dependent on “motions” of soul, wishes, plans, purposes, and that the world is therefore the work of a soul or souls, and further that these souls are good, and that there is one ἀρίστη ψυχή, “perfectly good soul” at their head. Thus the demonstration of the being of God serves also, in principle, as a proof of the indestructibility of the soul, a doctrine which has to be introduced in refuting the two graver heresies. He indicates that atheism as an opinion has two chief sources—the corporealism of the early Ionian men of science, who account for the order of nature on purely “mechanical” principles without ascribing anything to conscious plan or design (889a-d), and the sophistic theory of the purely conventional and relative character of moral distinctions (889e-890a). If these two doctrines are combined, atheism is the result. It has to be shown, as against this atheism, that the motions of body are actually all caused by prior “movements” of soul, so that τέχνη, conscious design, purpose, is the parent of τύχη, not τύχη of τέχνη, as the proverb says (892b). Or, more briefly, mind, not bodies, is “what is there to begin with” (892c).
Next, there must be more than one soul which is the cause of cosmic movements (i.e. Plato’s theology is theistic, not pantheistic). There must be at least two such souls and there may be more. For there is disorder and irregularity in nature as well as order and regularity, hence the “best soul” clearly cannot be the only source of motion in the universe; since order has the upper hand, God, the “best soul,” is clearly the supreme cause, but there must be other souls which are not wholly good (896e-898d. (It must be carefully noted that there is no trace in the language of the doctrine of a “bad world-soul” read into the Laws in ancient times by Plutarch and Atticus, and in modern times by Zeller and others. The point is not that there are two souls responsible for the universe, but that there are at least two; the “best soul” is not the only soul there is, but we are at liberty to suppose as many inferior souls as the appearances seem to require.)
If we are not to misunderstand Plato’s whole conception we must note the following points carefully, (1) Evil, no less than
The refutation of the two other heresies now becomes a simple matter.
(b) Epicureanism (899d-905d) The belief that though there are gods they are indifferent to our conduct is suggested by the spectacle of successful lifelong iniquity, but it is really no more than a nightmare or bad dream (900b). If the gods pay no attention to our conduct, the reason must be either that they are unable to regulate everything or that they regard man and man’s doings as trifles, and neglect the control of these small matters either because they think them insignificant or because they are “too fine” to attend to them. We may dismiss the suggestion of lack of power at once; it is easier in action to handle small affairs than to handle great, though it is the minute things which it is hardest to perceive accurately. As to the other suggestions, all competent practitioners of medicine, engineering, and the other arts, especially that of the statesman, know that no one ever succeeds in the main of any enterprise if he neglects what appear to be “small details,” and we cannot suppose that the “best” soul is more ignorant than a human practitioner, even if it were certain, as it is not, that human conduct is a “trifle” from God’s point of view. To suppose that God neglects us because He is too indolent or fastidious to attend to us, would amount to saying that the “best soul” is cowardly or “work-shy,” and this is no better than blasphemy. Nor is it true that the regulation of human destiny in accord with moral law would involve endless “interference” with the machinery of things. The result is secured from the first by a law of singular simplicity, the law that “like finds its like,” souls, like liquids, “find their level.” A man “gravitates” towards the society of his mental and moral likes, and thus, through the endless succession of lives, he always “does and has done to him” what it is fitting that such a man should do or have done to him (904e). That is the “justice of God” from which no man can escape in life or death.
We may dispose of (c) the doctrine that God can be bribed to wink at sin even more summarily (905e-907d). For our argument has justified the old belief that we are the “chattels” or “flock” (κτήματα) of the gods. If they wink at the conduct of human “beasts of prey,” they are behaving like shepherds or watch-dogs who allow the wolf to rend the flock on condition of sharing in the plunder. A blasphemy like this is more fittingly met by honest indignation than by argument or gentle remonstrance.
We now come to the penalties for the publication of these various heresies. The overt maintenance of any of them ought to be brought at once to the notice of the magistrates, who are to bring the case before the proper court. If a magistrate neglects to act, he must
Plato is so much in earnest with this horror of immoral superstition that he ends by proposing to suppress all shrines and sacrifices except those belonging to the public worship of the city. No one may be permitted to have a private “chapel” or “oratory” or to sacrifice except at the public altars and with the established ritual. His motive is not so much the economic one of preventing the locking-up of wealth in the “dead hand,” as the moral one of protecting society against the insidious lowering of the ethical and religious standard.
Book XI: The discourse now proceeds to deal with legislation for the security of private property and trade, particularly with the regulations necessary to prevent dishonesty in buying and selling, and in executing or paying for “piece-work.” Then follow regulations about wills, the guardianship of orphans, the conditions on which a son may be disinherited, and the enforcement of the claims of parents on their children. Penalties are enjoined for vendors of philtres and sorcerers, with the remark that the last-named offence
These matters of private law must not detain us here, though Plato’s treatment of them has the double interest of being founded largely on Attic practice, which he is trying to amend where it seems defective, and of having exercised a considerable indirect influence on the development of Roman law.
With Book XII we return to the sphere of public law and the law of the constitution. Peculation or embezzlement of the public funds, an offence regularly charged on every Attic politician by his enemies, is unpardonable and in a citizen must always be visited with death, irrespective of the magnitude of his defalcation (942a). In military matters everything depends on discipline and strict fidelity to orders; this must therefore be enforced in all the exercises which have been enjoined as the standing military training. Cowardice in the face of the enemy is to be punished by loss of all citizen-rights as well as by a heavy fine (944e-945a).
To ensure that the magistrates do their duty, Plato adopts the Attic practice of requiring every magistrate at the end of his term of office to submit to a εὔθυνα or audit, and gives special care to the appointment of the board of corregidors (εὔθυνοι) charged with the holding of the audit. The members of the board must be over 50 years old, and are to be chosen by the following method. There is a vote by universal suffrage, each citizen voting for only one candidate. This process is to be repeated until the number of names not eliminated is reduced to three. Twelve such officials are to be appointed in the first instance. As soon as the three oldest members of the board reach the age of 75 they retire, and in future there will be an annual election of three new
It would be inconsistent with the whole spirit of the legislation to permit citizens to withdraw themselves from the life of the State at their choice. Travel abroad must therefore always receive the sanction of the authorities, and this sanction will only be given in the case of persons over 40 (950d). It is desirable that older men of sound character should visit other States with a view to learning how the customs of our own society may be improved by judicious imitation of those of others. The traveller should, on his return, make a report on his observations to the “nocturnal council,” a sort of extraordinary Committee of Public Safety, which is to be in perpetual session and is charged with a general supervision over the public welfare. We have heard of this body before in connexion with the proceedings against heresy, and are now told how it is constituted. Its members are the εὔθυνοι,
It gets its name from the regulation that its daily sessions are to be held before daybreak. One of its chief functions is to foster sound scientific research (952a). There will be a similar careful control of the temporary admission of foreign visitors to our own community. Special encouragement will be given to responsible persons from abroad whose object is to impart or acquire lessons in true statesmanship. They will be honored “guests of the nation” (953d).
It is not enough to have made a good constitution and code for our society; there is need for constant vigilance to preserve our institutions from degeneration (960d). This vigilance will be exercised by the “nocturnal council,” which may fairly be called the “brain” of our whole system (961d). To discharge its functions it will need to have a thorough understanding of the end to which social life is directed, the development of “goodness” in all its four great forms. This means that its members will require very much more in the way of education than anything we have yet provided (965b). If they are really to understand what goodness is, they must be able to “see the one in the many” (965c), to appreciate and realise the great truth of the unity of all virtues (ibid. d-e). In fact, they must have a genuine knowledge of God and the ways of
It is sometimes said that in the Laws astronomy has taken the place formerly given to dialectic as the supreme science, and that this indicates a growing uncertainty in Plato’s own mind about the possibility of metaphysics. This is a complete misinterpretation of the concluding section of the Laws. The intellectual quality demanded in the members of the supreme council, that they should be able to see the “one in the many” is precisely the character always ascribed in the dialogues to the dialectician. And we note that astronomical science is only one-half of the qualification laid down. It must be accompanied by a right understanding of the doctrine of the place of ψυχή in the universe, the doctrine which, more than any other, lies at the root of Platonic metaphysics. Though the name “dialectic” is not used, the demand for the thing remains unabated.
The Epinomis
There is no real division between the Epinomis and the Laws, and the former is sometimes actually quoted by later writers as the “thirteenth” book of the Laws, though the Epinomis was already reckoned as a distinct work by Aristophanes of Byzantium.
There is no real ancient evidence against the authenticity of the dialogue. Diogenes Laertius (iii. I, 37) says that “some” ascribed it to the Academic Philippus of Opus, but, as he has just told the story that Philippus “transcribed” the Laws “from the wax,” he presumably only means that he was said to have done the same for the Epinomis. Proclus, who disliked the work, wished to reject it, but, as he merely offers two very bad arguments for his view, he presumably knew of no Academic tradition
The immediate purpose of the dialogue is to discuss the question left unanswered in Laws xii., of the complete scientific curriculum necessary for the members of the “nocturnal council": What studies will lead to σοφία (973b)? We must recognize that σοφία, in any case, is only attainable by a select few, and with difficulty (973b ff.), and that most of the so-called ἐπιστημαι do not help us to it (974d). Thus we may exclude all the arts and sciences which simply contribute to material civilization or to amusement (974e-975d), as well as those of war, medicine, navigation, and rhetoric, and still more unhesitatingly the mere art of acquiring and retaining multifarious information, which many confuse with σοφία (975e-976c). We ought to give the name σοφία only to studies which make a man a wise and good citizen, capable of exercising or obeying righteous rule. Now there is a branch of science which, more than any others, has this tendency and may be said to be a gift of a god to man, being in fact the gift of Heaven (οὐρανός) itself. This gift is the knowledge of number, which brings all other good things
Without knowledge of number we should be unintelligent and unmoral (977c-e). How divine a thing it is we see from the consideration that where there is number there is order; where there is no number, there is nothing but confusion, formlessness, disorder (977e-978b). To be able to count is the prerogative which marks men off from the animals. We learn to count up to fifteen by simply studying the daily changes in the face of the moon as she rounds to the full; a much bigger problem is set us when we go on to compare the period of the moon with that of the sun, as the agriculturist must. In our own recent discussion it was easy enough to see that a man ought to have goodness of soul, as well as of body, and that to have this he must be “wise.” The difficult question was what kind of knowledge this all-important “wisdom” is. What we have just said suggests the answer (978b-979d).
Perhaps we may not discover a single “wisdom” which covers the whole ground. In that case, we must try to enumerate the various branches of wisdom and say what they are (980a). We may go back to our thought that the best way a man can spend his life is to spend it in praising and honoring God. Let us then, to the praise of God, construct an improved “theogony,” holding fast to the natural theology we have laid down, and particularly to the principle of the causal priority of soul over body (980b-981b). An “animal” we know, is a soul conjoined with a body. There are five regular solids, and we may recognize five corresponding forms of body—earth, water, air, fire, and aether
The body of each kind of animal is a compound in which the “element” that forms its habitat is predominant. Hence the two most conspicuously visible classes of living beings are those which live on the earth, of whom man specially interests us, and those which have bodies made chiefly of fire and are gods, the stars and planets. Their bodies are more beautiful than ours, and more lasting, being either deathless or of age-long vitality. A comparison of the restless and disorderly movements of man with the majestically orderly movements of the heavenly bodies is enough to show that their souls equally surpass man’s in intelligence. If they, unlike us, never deviate from one path, it is because their motion exhibits the necessity imposed by rational pursuit of the best (982b). Their real bulk, as science can demonstrate, is enormous, and there is
This means that we must master the science of the revolutions of the stars and planets. At present we have not so much as names for the planets, though they are called the stars of several gods, a nomenclature which has come to us from Syria (986e-987d).
The study we need to lead us to true piety, the greatest of the virtues, is thus astronomy, knowledge of the true orbits and periods of the heavenly bodies, pursued in the spirit of pure science, not in that of Hesiod’s farmer’s calendar (990a). But since such a study is concerned with the difficult task of the computation of the relative periods of sun, moon, and planets (and thus has to reckon with
Without this scientific knowledge, a city will never be governed with true statesmanship, and human life will never be truly happy. The wisest man is the man who has attained all this knowledge; we may feel confident that when death translates him from the sensible region, he will finally achieve the complete unification of the self, and his lot, wherever it may be cast, will be truly blessed. As we said before, the attainment is only possible for the few, but we must insist that our supreme governors at least shall devote themselves to it (992a-d). Thus the Epinomis ends by the unqualified reassertion of the old demand that statesmanship and science shall be combined in the same persons.
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 301-312 al.
Ritter, C. Platon, ii. 657-796 al.; Platons Gesetze, Kommentar zum griechischen Text. Leipzig, 1896; Platos Gesetze, Darstellung des Inhalts. Leipzig, 1896.
A. E. Taylor. The Laws of Plato translated into English. London, 1934.
Raeder, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 395-419.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 358-365.
Barker, E. Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 292-380.
Jaeger, W. Aristoteles, 125-170.
Muller, F. Statistische Untersuchung der Epinomis des Philippos von Opus. 1927.
And for the problems presented by the Epistles:
Friedlander, P. Platon: Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos. 1928.
Egermann, FR. Die platonischen Briefe VII und VIII. Vienna, 1928.
Souilhe, J. Platon, Lettres. Paris, 1926.
Novotny, F. Platonis Epistulae. Brno, 1930.
Harward, J. The Platonic Epistles. Cambridge, 1932.
XIX. Plato in the Academy: Forms and Numbers
To us Plato is first and foremost a great writer, but from his own point of view, books and the study of them are a secondary interest with the “philosopher"; what counts as supreme is a life spent in the organized prosecution of discovery (τὸ συζην). There can be no doubt that Plato thought his work as the organizer of the Academy much more important than the writing of dialogues. Since Aristotle commonly refers to the teaching given in the Academy as Plato’s “unwritten doctrine” (ἄγραφα δόγματα), we may be reasonably sure that Plato did not even prepare a MS. of his discourses. This explains why there were several different versions in the next generation of the famous lecture on “the Good,” which seems to have contained Plato’s most explicit account of his own philosophy. We are told that several of the hearers, including Aristotle, Xenocrates, and Heraclides of Pontus, all published their notes of it, and the obvious implication is that there was no “author’s MS.” to publish. Consequently we have to discover Plato’s ultimate metaphysical positions indirectly from references to them in Aristotle, supplemented by occasional brief excerpts, preserved by later Aristotelian commentators, from the statements of Academic contemporaries of Aristotle, like Xenocrates and Hermodorus. This creates a serious difficulty. When it is a mere question of what Plato said, the testimony of Aristotle is surely unimpeachable; but when we go on to ask what Plato meant, the case is different. Aristotle’s references are all polemical, and Aristotle is a controversialist who is not unduly anxious to be “sympathetic.” Unfortunately, too, mathematics, the science specially important for its influence on Plato’s thought, is the one science where Aristotle shows himself least at home. Thus there is always the possibility that his criticisms may rest on misunderstanding. And the misunderstandings may not even originate with him. The criticism of Plato all through the Metaphysics seems to be subsidiary to Aristotle’s standing polemic against Xenocrates, the contemporary head of the Academy. Hence it is possible that much of the criticism of Metaphysics M-N, the most sustained anti-Academic polemic in Aristotle, may be directed rather against Academic misinterpretation of Plato than against Plato himself.
In a necessarily brief statement our safest course is to deal
When we turn to these Aristotelian statements we find that, for the most part, they amount to a version of the theory of forms with a very individual character, and of a much more developed type than anything the dialogues have ascribed to Socrates. There are also one or two other notices of specific peculiarities of Plato’s doctrines, all concerned with points of mathematics, and it is with some of these I propose to begin, as they may help us to understand the point of view from which the doctrine of forms as known to Aristotle was formulated.
We must remember that though mathematics was by no means the only science cultivated in the Academy, it was that which appealed most to Plato himself, and that in which the Academy exercised the most thoroughgoing influence on later developments. All the chief writers of geometrical textbooks known to us between the foundation of the Academy and the rise of the scientific schools of Alexandria belong to the Academy. In Plato’s own lifetime, Theaetetus had completed the edifice of elementary solid geometry, by discovering the inscription of the octahedron and icosahedron in the sphere. He and Eudoxus and others had laid the foundations of the doctrine of quadratic surds as worked out in the tenth book of Euclid’s Elements; Eudoxus had invented the method of approximating to the lengths and areas of curves by exhaustion (the ancient equivalent of the Integral Calculus), and had recast the whole doctrine of ratio and proportion in the form in which we now have it in Euclid’s fifth book, for the purpose of making it applicable to “incommensurables.” We naturally expect to find traces in Plato’s doctrine of this special preoccupation with the philosophy of mathematics which is characteristic of the work of the school.
To understand the motives which were prompting the Academy to a reconstruction of the philosophy of mathematics, we must go
With these considerations in mind, we can readily understand certain statements which Aristotle makes about mathematical views of Plato. There are three such statements which we may at once elucidate, (a) Plato stated that the “point” was a
(c) Plato said that “there is a first 2 and a first 3, and the numbers are not addible to one another” (Metaphysics M 1083a 32, the one statement about numbers which is definitely attributed to Plato by name in the last two books of the Metaphysics). A similar point is made about the Academy generally in the Ethics (Nicomachean Ethics 1096a, 17 ff.), where we are told that they held that there is no form (idea) of number, because “in numbers
This explains why there is no form of number. The reason is that each “number” is itself a form, as was really implied in the Phaedo itself when Socrates spoke of “the number 2” and “the number 3” as instances of what he meant by a form. Hence the ordered series of integers is not a form, it is a series of forms. The point may be grasped if we remember that in our own philosophy of mathematics we do not find it possible to define “number” or even “integer"; all that we can do is to define the series of integers or the series, e.g., of “real” numbers, and to define individual numbers. I can define “the integer series” as a series of a certain type with a certain first term, and I can define “the integer” n+1 by saying that it is the number of that series which is next after n, but I cannot really define “integer.” Aristotle is never tired of arguing against Plato that there is no number except what Aristotle calls “mathematical” number, or alternatively “number made of 1’s” (μοναδικός ἀριθμός); but the simple truth is that no “number” is “made of 1’s,” and that it is precisely what Aristotle calls “mathematical” number which has no existence except in his imagination. Plato may well have been led to this denial that numbers are “addible” by his recognition that “surds” like √2, 3√2, must be admitted into arithmetic as numbers, since it is evident that no process of “adding 1 to 1” could ever yield such numbers as these.
Thus this doctrine, also, may well be connected with the fact that the “real” numbers form a continuum. But it is important to be clear on the point that the principle that number is not really generated by addition of 1’s
This brings us to the consideration of Aristotle’s account of Plato’s theory of forms. According to the Metaphysics,
It is plain from the explanations attempted by the later commentators on Aristotle that the chief source from which the doctrine alluded to in the Metaphysics was known in antiquity was the reports of the auditors of Plato’s famous lecture on “the Good.” As we do not possess these reports and cannot be sure how far the statements of Peripatetic commentators on Aristotle about them can be trusted, we need to be cautious in our interpretation. But there are certain points on which we can be reasonably certain. It is quite clear from the whole character of Aristotle’s polemic against “ideal numbers,” that the numbers which Plato declared
To some extent, at least, it seems possible to recover this key. We have to begin by understanding what is meant by speaking of one constituent of a number as the “great-and-small” and by calling this an “indeterminate duality.” Even without the help of the commentators on Aristotle, the Philebus would enable us to give a reasonable answer to this question. We saw there that “that which admits of more and less indefinitely” was Plato’s description of what we call a “continuum,” though the number-series itself does not figure among the examples of continua given in the dialogue. This enables us to see at once why Plato spoke of what the Pythagoreans had called the “unlimited” (ἄπειρον) as a “great-and-small” or a “duality.” It is a duality because it can be varied indefinitely in either of two directions. Probably the commentators arc right in connecting this with the more specific view that you can equally reach plurality, starting from unity, by multiplication or by division, e.g. when you divide a given class regarded as a whole into sub-classes, you have two or more more determinate forms within the original γένος. This indicates a direct connexion between the theory of number ascribed to Plato by Aristotle and the preoccupation with the problem of the subdivision of forms in the later dialogues on which Stenzel has done well to insist, though he has allowed himself to neglect too much the specifically mathematical problem. We can also see, I think, why the other constituent of a number should be said to be “the one,” and why the “unit” is no longer regarded, in Pythagorean fashion, as a “blend” of “limit” with the “unlimited,” but as itself the “limit.” Here, again, we have a point of contact with the theory of logical “division.” As the Philebus had taught us, we may arrive at a “form” in either of two ways; we may start with several different idê as many and seek to reduce them to unity by showing that they are all special determinations of a more general “form,” or again we may start with the more general “form” and discover
In the case of numbers it is easy to see how the conception, already implied in the Epinomis, of a “continuum” of “real” numbers leads to the Platonic formulas. If we wish to discover a number whose product by itself is 2, it is easy to show that we can make steady approximation to such a number by constructing the endless “continued fraction":
1 + 1
2 + 1
2 + 1
2 + 1
2+ ...
By stopping off the fraction at successive stages, we get a number of values with the following peculiarities.
1, 1+1, 1+1,
2 2 + 1
2
The values are alternatively less and greater than √2, and each value differs from √2 less than the preceding value; by carrying the fraction far enough, we can get a fraction a/b such that a2 /b2 differs from 2 by less than any magnitude we please to assign. This is what we mean by saying that √2 is the limiting value to which the fraction “converges” when it is continued “to infinity.” Now in forming the successive approximate values, or “convergents,” we are making closer and closer approximation to the precise determination of an “infinite great-and-small.” It is “infinite” because however many steps you have taken, you never reach a fraction which, when multiplied by itself, gives exactly 2 as the product, though you are getting nearer to such a result at each step. It is “great-and-small,” because the successive approximations are alternatively too small and too large. √2 is, so to say, gradually pegged down between a “too much” and a “too little,” which are coming closer together all the time. I choose this particular example because this method of finding the value of what we call √2 was pretty certainly known to Plato.
It is clear, however, that we have not yet exhausted the meaning of Plato’s doctrine. From Aristotle’s polemic we see that the Platonic analysis was not meant to apply simply to the case of the “irrationals” which Plato was the first to recognize as numbers. The theory also involves a doctrine of the structure of the integer-series itself, since it is clear that the numbers with which the forms are identified are, as Aristotle always assumes, the integers. The integers themselves, then, have the “great-and-small” and the “one” as their constituents. How is this to be understood?
How, then, does Plato suppose the series of integers to be constructed? I doubt if the notices preserved to us enable us to answer the question finally. What is clear is that Plato rightly rejects the view retained by Aristotle, that an integer is a collection of “1’s,” and that the series is thus constructed by additions of 1 to itself. 2 is not “1 and 1” but “the number next after 1.” (This ought to be plain from the simple consideration of the way in which we learn to count. We do not count, “one, one, one, one…” but “one, two, three…”) But when we ask in what way the “duality” comes in in constructing the series of integers, we are puzzled by the confusion which seems to run through Aristotle and his commentators between the “indeterminate duality” or “great-and-small” and the number 2. If it were only in the polemic of Aristotle that this confusion were found, we might conceivably dismiss it as a mere misunderstanding, but it appears to have occurred also in the Academic reports of Plato’s doctrine. The complete study of the problem would require a long discussion of the mass of material collected and examined by M. Robin in his volume La Theorie platonicienne. Here it must be enough to remark that the following points seem to be quite certain, (1) The “dyad” was called δυοποιός, because it “doubles” everything it “lays hold of.” There is no doubt that the “dyad” meant is the “great-and-small,” but “it also seems clear that there is a confusion, perhaps from the very first, with the αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστι δυάς, the number 2, and that the function of the “dyad” within the integer-series is thought of as being to produce the series of “powers of 2 by repeated multiplication, 1 x 2, 1 x 2 x 2, 1 x 2 x 2 x 2, and so forth (cf. Epinomis 991a 1-4).
Cp. Aristotle’s
If, as seems probable, Plato’s conception has these defects, we must not be surprised. He probably started with the right conviction that what we should call the notion of a “section” is necessary for the definition of the “irrationals,” and went on to extend the conception to cover the case of the integers. What could not be expected of the first thinker who had formed the notion of a “real” number is the recognition that integers, rational fractions, real numbers, do not form a single series, in other words that the “integer,” 2, the “rational number” 2/1, and the “real number 2” are all distinct. In the logical construction of the types of number, we need three distinct steps: the rules for defining the successive integers, the derivation of the rational numbers from the integers, and the derivation of the “continuum” of the real numbers from the series of rational numbers. These, however, are matters on which mathematical philosophers have only reached clear comprehension in very recent times. The important point is that Plato should have grasped the necessity of enlarging the traditional conception of number and of strictly defining numbers of all kinds.
What are the “mathematical” which Plato distinguished from his numbers or forms? Aristotle tells us that they differ from forms in the fact that they are many, whereas the form is one, and from sensible things by being eternal (Metaphysics A 987b 15). It is to be noted that he does not call them “mathematical numbers,”
So we, too, are familiar with analytical geometry in which we study the properties of curves and surfaces by means of numerical equations. All the properties of the curves and surfaces can be discovered from these equations, but the application of equations is not confined to geometry or geometrical physics; the same methods, for example, play a prominent part in the study of economics, as when we plot out curves to show the effects of modifications of duties on the “volume” of foreign trade. In a word, I take it, the “mathematicals” are what the geometer studies.
We may now perhaps be in a position to see what is meant by the statement that the constituents of the forms are the constituents of everything. The things of the sensible world, as we have learned from the Philebus, are one and all in “becoming"; they are events or processes tending to the realisation of a definite law, and this law, Plato thinks, can be expressed in numerical form. Because these things are always “in the making” they do not exhibit permanent and absolute conformity to law of structure; if once they were “made” and finished, they would be the perfect embodiment of law of structure. And because the stuff of things is extension itself, the law thus realised would be geometrical and therefore, as we should say, be expressible in the form of an equation
Aristotle seems, as I said, to connect his complaint about the Academic “separation” (χωρισμός) between forms and sensible things specially with the doctrine we have just been discussing. He is commonly taken to mean no more than that the Platonic form is a sort of “double” of the sensible thing, supposed to be in some “intelligible world,” wholly sundered from the real world of actual life. It is hard to suppose that he could put such an interpretation on a theory which according to himself makes the στοιχεια of number the στοιχεια of everything. Hence I think Stenzel
As he points out, one of Aristotle’s chief difficulties about the “numbers” is that he holds that if “animal” is one number and “man” is another, we have to face the question whether the “units” in “animal” are part of the “units which constitute “man” or not; (e.g. if you said “animal” is 2, “man” is 4, since 2 X 2 = 4, “man” would seem to be the same thing as “animal” taken twice over). The complaint, as Stenzel says, is not that an εῖδος is treated as something distinct from a sensible individual, but that the more universal εἴδη, the γένη as Aristotle calls them, are thought of as though they had a being distinct from that of the ἄτομον εἰδος or infima species. Aristotle’s point is that “animal,” for example, has no being except as “horse,” “man,” “dog,” or one of the other species which can no longer be divided into sub-species. This would be, in effect, a criticism on the method of division as practiced in the Sophistes, where it is made a rule that in summing up the result of the division into a definition, all the intermediate differentiae which have been employed must be recapitulated. This is a procedure condemned by Aristotle’s own doctrine that a definition need only state genus and specific difference; the specific difference includes in itself all the intermediate differences. Hence, according to Stenzel, the χωρισμός of which Aristotle complains is that the Platonic account of “division” as
See further:
Burnet. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 312-324; Platonism, c. 5, 2, 7.
Natorp, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 366-436.
Baeumker, C. Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen Philosophie, 196-209.
Stenzel, J. Zahl and Gestalt bei Platan und Aristoteles. 1924.
Robin, L. La Theorie platonicienne des idees et des nombres apres Aristote. Paris, 1908.
Milhaud, G. Les Philosophes-geometres de la Grece, Platon et ses predecesseurs. Paris, 1900.
Taylor, A. E. Philosophical Studies, pp. 91-150.
Thompson, D’Arcy W. “Excess and Defect” in Mind, N.S., 149.
Chronological Table
| Dates B.C. | Events |
|---|---|
| 428-7 | Plato born (Ol. 88, 1). Fourth year of Archidamian War; year following death of Pericles. Revolt and subjugation of Mytilene. Capture of Plataea by Peloponnesians. Hippolytus of Euripides. |
| 427 | Gorgias at Athens as envoy from Leontini. Aristophanes’ first comedy (Δαιταλῆς = Daetalês) produced. |
| 425 | Tribute of Athenian allies raised. Capture of Sphacteria. Pan-Sicilian congress at Gela. Acharnians of Aristophanes performed. (?) Hecuba of Euripides. | 424 | Athenian defeat at Delium (Pyrilampes wounded.) Brasidas in the north. Loss of Amphipolis and banishment of Thucydides. Battle outside Megara. Knights of Aristophanes. |
| 423 | Year’s truce with Sparta. Revolt of Scione. Clouds of Aristophanes. Connus of Amipsias. | 422 | Death of Brasidas and Cleon before Amphipolis. (?) Socrates serves in this campaign. Wasps of Aristophanes. |
| 421 | Peace of Nicias; Scione captured and inhabitants massacred. Peace of Aristophanes. | 418 | Battle of Mantinea; Laches killed, διοιϰισμός of Arcadians by Sparta. |
| 416 | Melos captured by the Athenians and inhabitants massacred. Tragic victory of Agathon. | 415 | Mutilation of Hermae and “profanation of mysteries.” Despatch of Syracusan expedition under Alcibiades, Nicias and Lamachus; recall and disgrace of Alcibiades. Troades of Euripides. |
| 414 | Clouds of Aristophanes. | 413 | Final ruin of Syracusan expedition; deaths of Nicias and Demosthenes. Decelea occupied by the Spartans. (?) Electra of Euripides. (?) Iphigenia in Tauris. |
| 411 | Revolution of the “four hundred.” Return of Polemarchus and Lysias from Thurii. Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata of Aristophanes. | 410 | Battle of Cyzicus. Philoctetes of Sophocles (410-9). |
| 409 | Carthaginian invasion of Sicily; Selinus and Himera destroyed. | 408 | Hermocrates in Sicily. Orestes of Euripides. |
| 407 | Battle of Notium. Return of Alcibiades to Athens. Hermocrates killed in street-fighting at Syracuse. | 406 | Battle of Arginusae. Trial and condemnation of the generals; protest of Socrates. Deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. |
| 405 | Battle of Aegospotami. Dionysius I becomes “tyrant” at Syracuse. | 404 | End of the Peloponnesian War; Athens surrenders to Lysander. Appointment of the “Thirty"; the murder of Polemarchus. Affair of Leon of Salamis (404-3). |
| 403 | Fall of the “Thirty"; deaths of Critias and Charmides. Restoration of democracy at Athens. | 401 | Expedition of Cyrus and the battle of Cunaxa. |
| 399 | Trials of Andocides and Socrates for impiety and the death of Socrates in the archonship of Laches. | 395-87 | Corinthian War. Rebuilding of the Athenian Long Walls (395-393). Pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates (c. 392-390). Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes. Destruction of Spartan mora by Iphicrates (?392 or 390). |
| 388 | First visit of Plato to Sicily and Italy at the age of 40. Traditional date of the capture of Rome by the Gauls. | 387 | Corinthian War ended by “King’s Peace.” Approximate date of foundation of Academy. |
| 385 | Birth of Aristotle at Stagirus. | 382 | Spartan seizure of the citadel of Thebes and the political murder of Ismenias. |
| 380 | Panegyricus of Isocrates. | 379-8 | Spartan garrison expelled at Thebes by Pelopidas and his associates. Raid of Spartan Sphodrias on Piraeus. |
| 378 | Alliance of Athens and Thebes. Second Athenian League founded. | 373 | Great earthquake and tidal wave on the Achaean coast. |
| 371 | "Peace of Callias” between Sparta and Athens. Spartan power broken by Epaminondas at Leuctra. Liberation of Messene and the foundation of Megalopolis follow in the next year or two. | 369 | Spartan lines on Mt. Oneion broken by Epaminondas. (Theaetetus was probably wounded in this campaign.) |
| 367 | Death of Dionysius I. Plato summoned to Syracuse by Dion. Aristotle enters the Academy. Traditional date of “Licmian rogations” and the defeat of the Gauls by Camillas at Alba. | 362 | Battle of Mantinea; Epaminondas killed. |
| 361-60 | Third visit of Plato to Sicily. Traditional date of penetration of Gauls into Campania. | 357 | Capture of Syracuse by Dion. |
| 356 | Birth of Alexander the Great at Pella. | 354 | Murder of Dion by Callippus. Plato’s VII Epistle. Earliest extant speech of Demosthenes (on the Symmories.) |
| 353 | Overthrow of Callippus. Plato’s VIII Epistle. | 351 | First Philippic of Demosthenes. |
| 349-8 | Olynthiacs of Demosthenes. Capture of Olynthus by Philip (348). | 347 | Death of Plato. |
| 346 | Peace of Philocrates. Philip acts as general in the “Sacred War” against the Phocians, becomes a member of the Amphictionic Council and presides at the Pythian games. Temporary restoration of Dionysius II at Syracuse. | 344-3 | Dionysius is finally overthrown by Timoleon. |
| 343-2 | Aristotle at Pella as tutor to Alexander. |
Appendix: The Platonic Apocrypha
In using the name Apocrypha as a convenient collective designation for those items contained in our Plato MSS. of which it is reasonably certain that they have no real claim to Platonic authorship, I make no gratuitous assumption of fraudulence in their writers or worthlessness in their contents. Apart from the collection of Definitions, which has its own special character, the Apocrypha seem to be undisguised imitations of Platonic “discourses of Socrates” and most of them to be the work of the early Academy; the attribution to Plato has arisen naturally and by accident. The works in question fall into three classes: (A) items actually included in the canon of Thrasylus; (B) the collection of ὅροι or definitions, which falls outside the division into “tetralogies"; (C) νοθευόμενοι, dialogues recognized in antiquity as spurious.
A. Dialogues included in the “tetralogies,” but certainly, or all but certainly, spurious.
Of these there are seven: Alcibiades I, Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, Amatores (the whole “of the fourth “tetralogy”), Theages ("tetralogy” V), Clitophon ("tetralogy” VIII), Minos, ("tetralogy” IX). All were clearly regarded as genuine by Dercylides and Thrasylus. The only fact known about their earlier history is that Aristophanes of Byzantium had included the Minos in one of his “trilogies” along with the Laws and Epinomis (Diogenes Laertius iii. 62). Since we never hear of Dercylides or Thrasylus as introducing any items into the Platonic canon, it seems reasonable to infer that the whole group were already accepted by the Alexandrian scholars of the third century B.C. and that the composition of all must therefore be dated earlier still. None of the group is certainly quoted by Aristotle, or even Cicero
It follows that we should assign their composition,
Alcibiades I. This is in compass and worth the most important member of the group, as it contains an excellent general summary of the Socratic-Platonic doctrines of the scale of goods and the “tendance” of the soul. The Platonic authorship has been defended by Grote, Stallbaum, C. F. Hermann, J. Adam and recently M. Croiset and P. Friedlander; Jowett included a version in his English translation of Plato. For my own part I feel reluctantly forced to decide for rejection on the following grounds. (1) Close verbal study seems to show that in language the manner is that of the later Plato,
(2) It seems incredible that Plato, who has given us such vivid portraits of Alcibiades in the Protagoras and Symposium, should ever have treated his personality in the colourless fashion of this dialogue. (3) It should be still more incredible that Plato, with his known views on the worth of “text-books” should have composed what is, to all intents, a kind of handbook to ethics. The work has the qualities of an excellent manual, and this is the strongest reason for denying its authenticity. I agree, then, with those who hold that Alcibiades I is a careful exposition of ethics by an early Academic, written well before 300 B.C., and possibly, though perhaps not very probably, even before the death of Plato. I should say with Stallbaum that it contains nothing actually unworthy of Plato, but I am equally satisfied that it contains echoes of Plato which are not in the manner
The writer’s purpose is to expound the thoughts that the one thing needful for true success in life is self-knowledge, that this means knowledge of what is good and bad for our souls, and that such knowledge is different in kind from all specialism. Alcibiades is drawn as a young man of boundless ambition just about to enter on public life. (The date assumed is the end of his “ephebate,” before the outbreak of the Archidamian War. Pericles is at the head of affairs, 104b.) Socrates, who has long admired the wonderful boy from a distance, is now allowed by his “sign” to express his admiration for the first time.
To succeed as a statesman, A. must be a good adviser and so must have knowledge which his neighbors have not, and this knowledge must come to him either as a personal discovery or by learning from others. But none of the things A. has “learned” are matters considered by sovereign assemblies, and in the matters which such an assembly does consider there are experts who would be much better counsellors than A. His boasted “advantages” of person, rank, wealth, are irrelevant. On what topics, then, would he be a competent adviser of the public? He says, “On the conduct of their own affairs, e.g. the making of war and peace.” Yet it is the expert we need to advise us whether it is better to make war, on whom, and for how long. Our standard of the “better” is supplied by the expert’s τέχνη. Now, what τέχνη is the relevant one in these questions of state? When we declare war, we always do so on the plea that our rights have been infringed. Has A., then, ever learned “justice,” the knowledge of rights and wrongs? He has never received instruction in it, nor can he have discovered it for himself. To do that he would need first to look for it, and to look for it he must be first awake to his ignorance of it. But from his childhood he has always been wrangling with his companions
But, says A., the politician need not know what is right; he need only know what is expedient. Well, if A. thinks he knows what the expedient is, let him answer one question: Is the expedient always the same as the right or is it not? A. thinks not, but Socrates is confident that he can prove the contradictory (114d). The proof turns on establishing the equations ϰαλόν = ἀγαθόν, αἰσχρόν = ϰαϰόν (114d-116b).
How, then, must we set to work on the “care” (ἐπιμέλεια) of ourselves? We wish to be as good as possible at the goodness of a ϰαλὸς ϰἀγαθός, that is, of a φρόνιμος, a man of sound judgement in all things. About what things do the ϰαλοί ϰαγαθοί, the “virtuous,” show this sound judgment? A. says, in capacity to command “men who associate with one another to transact the business of civic life” (125c), or more briefly, “men sharing in the constitutional rights and functions of citizenship” (125d). The statesman’s τέχνη is εὐβουλία, “excellence in counsel respecting the conduct and safety of the State.” This safety depends on the existence of φιλία, or more precisely, ὁμόνοια, “oneness of mind” between the citizens; not the “oneness of mind” secured by the arts of number, weight and measure, but the kind of “oneness of mind” which makes men agree “in a house” and is the basis of family affection. Such agreement implies that both parties to it have a “mind of their own,” and so differs from any arrangement by which one party leaves a matter of which he is himself wholly ignorant to the sole discretion of the other. That is not what is meant when justice is said to be “minding your own business and leaving others to mind theirs (127d). (The exposition at this point shows traces of a confusion one would not expect in Plato.)
Again (the transition is oddly abrupt), what is “care for a man’s self"? With some needless elaboration, we reach the result that to care for a thing means to make it better, and that we cannot tell what will make a thing better unless we know what the thing is. So our question becomes “What is the self?” (128a). It is argued at length that an agent is never identical with the tools he uses. All of us are constantly using our hands, eyes, members generally, as tools. The body is thus an instrument used, and therefore cannot be the agent who uses the instrument. The real self, the agent which “uses” and “commands” the body, must be the ψυχή, and the true definition of man is that he is a “soul using a body”
The great business of life is “self-knowledge,” the “care” of ourselves (132c).
So the soul can “see itself” only by either gazing at another man’s soul, particularly at “that region of it where the
Alcibiades II.
A poor production, stamped as not Plato’s by its style, by manifest imitations of Alcibiades I, and, as has generally been admitted since Boeckh, by a definite allusion to one of the Stoic “paradoxes.”
The subject is Prayer. The writer seems to take his cue either from the passage of the Memorabilia where Xenophon, who may himself be thinking of the closing words of the Phaedrus, says that Socrates “used to ask the gods simply to give him good things, since they know best what things are good” and thought it perverse to pray “for gold or silver, or a tyranny, and things of that kind,”
A. says, Oedipus was notoriously “a mere lunatic.” This raises a problem. “Lunatic” is the contrary of “sane.” But mankind may be divided into two classes which allow of no tertium quid, the φρόνιμοι, men of sound judgement, and the ἄφρονες, men of unsound judgement. On the
The φρόνιμοι are those who know “what is proper to do and say.” The ἄφρονες do not know this, and so unintentionally do and say what they should not. Oedipus does not stand alone in this. If a god appeared to Alcibiades himself and offered to make him autocrat of Athens, or Hellas, or Europe, A. would probably think he was offered a great boon. Yet the power and splendor of the position would be no true boon to one who had not the knowledge how to use it. A tyranny may prove fatal to the recipient, as was the case with the murderer of Archelaus; he was himself murdered after a reign of three days.
A. would do well, then, to postpone his prayer until he has learned to pray aright. But who will teach him? “Your sincere well-wisher” says Socrates, “but there is a mist which must first be removed from your soul” A. rewards these words of encouragement by “crowning” Socrates with the garland he had meant to wear while praying, and Socrates fatuously accepts the compliment. (A tasteless reminiscence of the Platonic playful “crowning” of Socrates by the drunken Alcibiades, Symposium, 213d-e.)
The very poor dialogue is dependent on, and therefore later than, Alcibiades I. Besides the echoes already mentioned, we note that the μαινόενον ἄνθρωπον of 138a 6, said of Oedipus, is a verbal imitation of the use of the same phrase, “a mere lunatic,” with reference to Alcibiades’ own brother at Alcibiades I, 118e 4. The ill-managed fiction of the god who offers A. the “tyranny” of Athens, Hellas, or Europe, is founded on what is said more naturally of A’s own day-dreams at Alcibiades I, 105b-c.
It is still more significant that the discussion of the Stoic “paradox” is forcibly dragged into the argument at its very opening. Oedipus is mentioned merely to give an opening for the remark that he was “crazy,” and the nominal main argument is kept standing still while Socrates goes off at a tangent to discuss the irrelevant question whether all unwise persons are “crazy” too. The writer thus betrays the fact that his real concern is to attack the Stoics. This shows that he is not writing before some date when Stoicism was already in existence, i.e. not before the early decades of the third century. In the time of Arcesilaus, president of the Academy from 276 to 241 B.C., anti-Stoic polemic became the main business of the school. It does not necessarily follow that the polemic may not have begun rather earlier.
Linguistic considerations do not take us far. Stallbaum produces a respectable “haul” of alleged non-Platonic words and phrases, but forgets that many of these may only go to show that the writer was a poor stylist, without throwing any light on his
Amatores (or Rivales. The title is ’Ερασταί in the famous MSS. BT, Άντερασταί in the margin of B).
The scena is the school of the reading-master Dionysius, said by Diogenes and others (Diogenes Laertius iii. 5) to have been Plato’s own first teacher. Two boys are disputing, apparently on a point of geometry. Socrates is told by the “lover” of one of them that they are “chattering philosophy” about “things on high” (τὰ μετέωρα). The tone of the remark leads him to ask whether philosophy is a thing to be ashamed of. The “lover’s” rival is surprised that Socrates should act so much out of character as to put this question to a man who leads the life of a voracious and sleepy athlete. This new speaker is a votary of “music” as the other is of “gymnastic.” His opinion is that philosophy is so divine a thing that a man must be less than human if he disprizes it. But what is this “philosophy?” “What Solon meant when he spoke of ’learning something fresh every day of one’s life’.”
The cultivated “lover” feels bound,
Again, what studies would a true lover of wisdom regard as most important? The “musician” says, “Those which will win you the highest reputation.” A philosopher should be at home in the “theorick” of all the professions, or at least, of those which are in high consideration, though he should not stoop to meddle with their manual part. He should know them as the “master-builder”
Let us make a fresh start. In the case of our domestic animals, there are two sides to the professions which “tend” them. The expert knows a good horse or dog from a bad one better than other men; he also “disciplines,” or “corrects” (ϰολάζει), the animals under his care. What “art” similarly “corrects” human beings? Justice, the “art” of the dicast (judge and juror); hence we should presume that the practitioners of this art also know a good man from a bad one. The layman in the art is ignorant even of himself, does not know the true state of his own soul. This is why we say that he has not sophrosyne (self-restraint, moderation, balance); by consequence, to have sophrosyne will mean to be a practitioner of the art we have just called justice, the art of true self-knowledge. We call this art sophrosyne because it teaches us to know ourselves, and also justice, because it teaches us to “correct” what we discover to be amiss (138b). Since the life of society
The purpose of the little work is clearly to set the Platonic conception of philosophy as the knowledge of the good, with its corollary, the identification of the true philosopher and the true king, in sharp contrast with the shallower conception of philosophy as “general culture.” The great representative of this view of philosophy in Attic literature is Isocrates,
The facts would,
Theages. The main object of the work seems to be to relate a number of anecdotes about Socrates’ “sign.” Theages, son of Demodocus (perhaps the general of the year 425-4 mentioned at Thucydides iv. 75), is twice named in Plato (Apology, 33d, Republic 496b). From these references we learn that he suffered from delicate health and was dead in 399. According to the Republic, he might have been lost to philosophy but for the invalidism which kept him out of public life. In the Theages he is a mere lad whose future destination is giving his father some anxiety. There is no indication of dramatic date except that in 127e, apparently verbally echoed from Apology, 19e. Prodicus, Polus and Gorgias are all assumed to be present in Athens. The piece can hardly be said to have an argument. Demodocus thinks that nothing would prepare his son for a great career so well as association with Socrates. But, says S., my young friends do not always benefit by my society; everything depends on the “divinity.” My “sign” sometimes interferes, and it is always lost labour to disregard it. Charmides neglected my advice not to train for the foot-race at Nemea and had reason to be sorry for it. Timarchus insisted on leaving a dinner-party to keep an engagement in defiance of the “sign.” The “engagement” was, in fact, to assist in an assassination, and Timarchus afterward confessed, on the way to execution, that he had done wrong to disregard my warnings. The sign” also predicted the great public disaster at Syracuse. Aristides, grandson of the great Aristides, made famous progress while he was with me, but, in a short absence, forgot all he had learned, though Thucydides (the grandson of Pericles’ opponent) was associating with me to his great advantage. Aristides explained that he had never directly learned anything from me, but found his own intelligence mysteriously aided by being in the same room with me.
All through this conversation there are recognizable borrowings from the Platonic dialogues. The “sign” is described (128d) in the actual words of Apology, 31d; the statement that it warned S. that some lads would not benefit by his company is taken from Theaetetus 151a, and the anecdote about the boys Aristides and Thucydides has been constructed by combining that passage with the Laches, where these two lads are introduced to S. by their fathers. There is an allusion to the usurpation of Archelaus (124d) which verbally reproduces Gorgias 470d. Theages, like the young
Stallbaum
I see no force in this reasoning, which starts with a bad blunder. Stallbaum has forgotten the statement of the Theaetetus (151a) about the warnings of the “sign” which is our author’s real starting-point. There is no misunderstanding of the Theaetetus in the Theages. Also it is antecedently just as likely that the Theages is one of the sources from which Antipater “collected” his tales as that it is drawing on him. In fact, a Stoic would not be likely to be satisfied with Plato’s account of the merely inhibitory character of the “sign.” Xenophon’s version of the matter, which makes the “sign” give positive guidance, is much more in keeping with Stoic theories about “the divinity.” Hence I hold that the fidelity of the Theages to Plato on this point is definite evidence against the presence of Stoic influence. The linguistic arguments are also nugatory. Some of the expressions to which Stallbaum took objection are actually Platonic, others are mere examples of a slightly turgid diction.
On the evidence I think it
Hipparchus. By general admission the language and diction of the dialogue are excellent fourth-century Attic, not to be really discriminated from the authentic work of Plato. This should put Stallbaum’s view that it is a clever late imitation out of court. That might have been possible after the rise of “Atticism,” but not earlier. I shall discuss Boeckh’s unlucky speculation on the authorship later on.
Socrates and an unnamed friend
The first and obvious answer is “A greedy man is one who is not above making a profit from an unworthy source” (ἀπὸ τῶν μηδὲνος ἀξίων). But a man who expects to make a profit from what he knows to be worthless must surely be silly, whereas we think of the greedy not as silly, but as “cunning knaves” “slaves of gain” who know the baseness of the source and yet are not ashamed to make the profit. Here there is a difficulty. He who knows when and where it is “worthwhile” to plant a tree, or perform any other operation, is always some kind of expert. And an expert would not expect to make a profit out
Here the friend complains that Socrates is “gulling” him. But that, says S., would be a shocking act and would violate the precept of that good and wise man Hipparchus, the eldest of the Pisistratids. He introduced Homer’s poetry to Athens, regulated its recitation, patronized Anacreon and Simonides, all out of zeal for improving his fellow-citizens. For the country-folk he set up Hermae by the roads engraved with maxims intended to surpass the wisdom of the famous Delphian inscriptions. One of these maxims was ΜΗ ΦΙΛΟΝ ΕΞΑΠΑΤΑ, “never gull a friend.” After the murder of this great and good man, his brother Hippias ruled like a tyrant, but so long as he lived, Athens enjoyed a golden age. The true story of his death is that Harmodius murdered him from jealousy because Aristogiton preferred the wisdom of Hipparchus to his own.
To return: we cannot give up any of our theses, but perhaps we might qualify one of them, the thesis that gain is always good. Perhaps some gain may be bad. But at least, gain is always gain, as a man, good or bad, is always a man. In a definition we should
The thoughts of the trifle are, all through, as Platonic as its language, and, apart from the one awkward “circle” in the reasoning, the main argument seems to me worthy of Plato in his more youthful vein. The interest shown in economic facts is thoroughly intelligent. The real evidence of non-Platonic authorship is, to my mind, the anonymity of the interlocutor and the inferiority and irrelevant length of what is meant to be the humorous interlude about Hipparchus. The dialogue should be assigned to an Academic of the earliest period with an excellent style and an intelligent interest in economics.
Clitophon. The work is no more than a brief fragment, but raises interesting questions. Clitophon, a minor character in the Republic,
He is convincing,
It looks, then, as though one of two things must be true. Either Socrates has the same limitations as a man who can speak eloquently in praise of a science in which he is himself only a layman, or, more probably, Socrates did not choose to explain himself fully. Clitophon is sure he needs a physician of the soul, but, unless S. can do more for him than he has so far done, he will be left to fall into the hands of Thrasymachus or another for practical treatment (410a-e).
It is not quite clear to what conclusion the writer is leading up, but it should be plain that the apparent commendation of Thrasymachus at the expense of Socrates is ironical. Clitophon’s point is that unless Socrates can do more for him than simply preach on the
Minos. Like the Hipparchus, this dialogue gets its name from the introduction of an historical narrative; the respondent is anonymous. The question discussed is the nature of law, and the point is to be made that it is not of the essentia of law to be a command. A law is the discovery (ἐζεύρεσις) of a truth,—the view common to all champions of “eternal and immutable” morality. The piece opens, in an un-Platonic way, by a direct question from Socrates, “What is law?” (The abruptness seems to be copied from the opening of the Meno, but there the abrupt question is put into the mouth of Meno and is dramatically appropriate.) The answer given is that “the law” is a collective name for τὰ νομιζὁμενα, the aggregate of “usages.” But this is like saying that sight (ὄψις) is the aggregate of visibles (ὁρώμενα). The statement, that is, tells us nothing about the formal character of the “legal” as such. A new definition is
What are we to say about the notorious divergences between the laws of different communities or different generations? One thing is clear; no society ever fancies that right can really be wrong. A law not based on reality (τὸ ὄν) is an error about τὸ νόμιμον. (It may be accepted as law, but it ought not to be so accepted.) And we see from the examples of medicine, agriculture and other arts that the laws of an art are the regulations of the ἐπιστήμων, the man who has expert knowledge about some region of τὸ ὄν. So the true “laws” of civic life are the directions given by “kings” and good men (the experts in moral knowledge), and therefore will not vary; a mistaken direction has no right to be called “law.”
Now, who knows how to “distribute” (διανεῖμαι) seeds to different soils properly? The farmer who knows his business. The physician’s “distributions” of food and exercise are the right distributions for the body, the shepherd’s distributions the right ones for the flock. Whose distributions are the right ones for men’s souls? Those of the king who knows his business.
In ancient days, there were such “divinely” wise experts in kingship, of whom Minos of Crete was one. The current story is that he
The thought of the Minos is Platonic; not so Platonic is the eulogy of Minos, of whose institution the Laws speaks with some severity.
Stallbaum’s theory that the work is an Alexandrian forgery is excluded by the known fact that Aristophanes of Byzantium placed it in one of his “trilogies.” The right inference is not Stallbaum’s, that Aristophanes brought the work into the Platonic canon, but that he found it there. The language points to a date after the death of Plato, but still in the fourth century. Aristophanes and Thrasylus both evidently regarded the Minos as a kind of “introduction” to the Laws. The discrepancy between its estimate of Minos and Cretan institutions and that of Laws, I. shows that the piece can hardly have been intended so.
I subjoin here some brief notes on the contents of those among
I. By an unknown and turgid writer to an unknown recipient, who seems to be, virtually at least, an autocrat. The writer has long held the highest ἀρχαί in “your city,” and has had to shoulder the odium of false steps taken against his advice. He has now been dismissed with contumely, and so washes his hands of the “city” and returns an insultingly small sum of money sent him for his present expenses. The situation answers to none in the life of Plato, nor, so far as one can see, in that of Dion, to whom Ficinus wished to transfer the authorship. Yet the style seems fourth-century, and its total unlikeness to that of all the other Epistles shows that we can hardly be dealing with a deliberate forgery meant to pass as Plato’s. If the “city” is Syracuse, the writer might be a Syracusan who has been sent into actual or virtual banishment and therefore poses as no longer a citizen. But why does he write in Attic? Or is our text a transcription into Attic? (I have sometimes thought of the historian Philistus—who had been sent into virtual exile at Adria by Dionysius I but returned at his death and was the chief opponent of Dion—as a possible author.
V. Plato to Perdiccas of Macedonia: A letter recommending Euphraeus of Oreus as a political adviser.
Constitutions, like animals, have their distinctive “notes"; Euphraeus is skilled in the knowledge of these, and would not be likely to recommend measures “out of tune” with monarchy. An unfriendly critic might discount the recommendation by urging that its author has not even caught the “note” of the democracy in which he lives. But the truth is that “Plato was born too late in the day” for his country to listen to advice which he would have rejoiced to give. Objections to the letter will be found in the works of C. Ritter and R. Hackforth,
I cannot think Plato, who wrote the Politicus and played the part he did at Syracuse, would have thought it unreasonable to give advice to a Macedonian king, and the influence of Euphraeus with Perdiccas is attested as a fact. (Athenaeus 506e.) The attacks on the very intelligible language about the “notes” of different constitutions seem to rest on the arbitrary assumption that the writer must be recalling and misunderstanding the words of Republic 493a-b about the cries of the democratic belua. Ritter can urge nothing against the language, which he regards as very much like that of Epinomis iv; he gives away his whole case, to my mind, by suggesting that v. is a genuine letter
VI. Plato to Hermias, Erastus and Coriscus: The two young Academics (Coriscus is Aristotle’s friend whose name figures so often in his “logical examples ) are introduced to Hermias, who had made himself “tyrant” of Atarneus and was soon to be the patron of Aristotle, as well as the first martyr in the Hellenic “forward movement” against Persia. He needs confidants of high character; the two young men have character and intelligence, but need an ἀμυντιϰὴ δύναμις, a “protector” whom they can find in him. The writer hopes that his letter will lay the foundation for an intimate friendship. We are not likely to hear any more of the “spuriousness” of vi. since the vigorous defense of it by Wilamowitz in his Platon and the throwing of a flood of light on the philosophical and political importance of the “Asiatic branch” of the Academy at Assos by Jaeger.
IX. Plato to Archytas: Archytas has complained of the heavy burdens and anxieties of public life. He should remember that our country and our family have both as much claim on our thought and our time as our personal concerns.
A promise is made to care for a young man named Echecrates, from regard to Archytas no less than on his own and his father’s account. No one has alleged anything suspicious in the language of ix. The difficulty which has been made about the youth of Echecrates arises from the assumption that he is the man of that name who appears in the Phaedo. Archer-Hind rightly called attention in his edition of the dialogue to the mention of an Echecrates of Tarentum, the city of Archytas, in Iamblichus’s list of Pythagoreans. The date of the letter cannot be fixed. Plato and Archytas were already friends in 367 B.C. (Epinomis vii. 338a) and we do not know how much earlier.
X. Plato to Aristodorus: A mere note commending the loyalty of the recipient to Dion and expressing the conviction that “loyalty, fidelity, honesty” (τὸ βέβαιον ϰαὶ τὸ πιστὸν ϰαὶ ὑγιές) are the true “philosophy.” There are no materials for judgement either way, but, as Ritter says, the tone “seems genuine.” And why should one forge such a note?
XI. Plato to Leodamas: A meeting would be desirable, but
XII. Plato to Archytas: A note acknowledging the receipt of certain “papers” (ὑπομνήματα) and expressing admiration of their author as fully worthy of his legendary ancestors. The writer sends certain unrevised “papers” of his own in return. Our chief MSS. append a note that the authenticity of this letter was disputed,—when or why is not known. C. Ritter inclines to attribute it to the author of ii., vi. and xiii. (that is, as I hold, to Plato). The strongest argument on the other side is its apparent connexion with the pretended letter from Archytas to Plato prefixed to Ocellus (or Occelus) the Lucanian on the Eternity of the Cosmos.
B. The Οροι (Terms)
This is a collection of definitions of terms of natural and moral science. The total number of terms defined is 184, but a good number of them receive two or more alternative definitions. In the “canon” the collection was definitely marked off from the genuine work of Plato by exclusion from the “tetralogies.” Since our collection was thus known to Dercylides and Thrasylus, it must be older than the Christian era. I do not know that there is any further evidence to show when or where it was made. The genuineness of the contents as old Academic work is fairly guaranteed by two considerations. Many of the definitions are simply extracted from the dialogues; others are quoted and criticised by Aristotle, whose Topics, in particular, are rich in allusions of this kind. I think it will be found that there are no signs of Stoic influence, and this suggests that the collection, or a larger one of which it is what remains, goes back to a time before the rapprochement between Academicism and Stoicism under Antiochus of Ascalon in the second quarter of the first century B.C. There seems also to be no serious trace of Aristotelian influence. No use is made of the great Aristotelian passe-partout ἐνέργεια; the genus of εὐδαιμονία is actually given (412d) as δὑναμις; the Aristotelian distinction
C. νοθευόμενοι (Adulterated)
de Justo. A conversation between Socrates and an unnamed friend on the nature of τὸ δίϰαιον. Justice, the art of the judge (δίϰαστής), like counting, measuring, weighing, is an art of distinguishing. It distinguishes the rightful from the wrongful. A given act, e.g. the utterance of a false statement, may be sometimes right, sometimes wrong: right when it is done “in the appropriate situation” (ἐν δέοντι), wrong in all other cases. It is knowledge which enables a man to recognize the appropriate occasion. Wrongdoing, then, is due to ignorance, and so is involuntary.
de Virtute. This conversation also is held by Socrates with a friend who is anonymous in most of the MSS. In the Vatican MS. called by Burnet O, he has a name, Hippotrophus. The piece is thus presumably that mentioned by Diogenes Laertius under the alternative names Midon and Hippotrophus. It has the same type as the last. The question is whether “goodness” can be taught. In both pieces Socrates is made, as in the Minos, to originate the problem. The example of the various “arts” is used to show that if you would acquire special knowledge, you must put yourself under a specialist’s tuition. But “goodness” apparently cannot be acquired thus, since Themistocles, Aristides, Thucydides, Pericles were all unable to impart it to their sons. Again “goodness” does not seem to come “by nature.” If it did, we might have specialists in human nature, as we have fanciers of dogs and horses, and they would be able to tell us which young persons have the qualities that will repay careful training. “goodness” then, like prophecy, seems to depend on an incalculable “divine” inspiration.
Boeckh, as we have said, regarded these trifles as the genuine
They cannot be that for several reasons. For (1) they are slavishly close imitations, often reproducing whole sentences of Plato’s text. Thus the argument about the parallel between “justice” and the arts of number and measure in the de Iusto has been directly copied, as Stallbaum said, from Euthyphro 76 ff. The de Virtute is largely made up of similar “liftings” from the Meno and Protagoras. (2) The discourses ascribed to the cobbler Simon must have been shorter even than our two νοθευόμενοι, for there were thirty-three of them in a single roll (Diogenes Laertius ii. 122). (3) The work ascribed to Simon was almost certainly a forgery. (The learned Stoic Panaetius said that the only certainly genuine dialogues by “Socratic men” were those of Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Aeschines; those ascribed to Euclides and Phaedo were doubtful, all others spurious. Diogenes Laertius ii. 64.) In fact, it is hard to doubt that we are dealing with late exercises in imitation of Plato’s style, “atticizing” copies of a classic. The purity of the language is partly explained by this, partly by the presence of verbatim extracts.
Demodocus. This hardly even pretends to be a dialogue. It is a direct harangue of Socrates to an audience which includes Demodocus (? the father of Theages). The style is halting to the verge of inarticulateness. The drift, obscured by verbiage, is that Socrates has been asked to advise the audience on some decision they are about to take. The request implies that there is a “science of giving advice.” Either the present audience possess this science or they do not. If they all possess it, there is nothing to discuss; if none of them possess it, discussion is waste of time. If one or two possess it, why do not they advise the others? Where is the use of listening to rival counsellors, or of taking a vote when their counsel has been heard? How can persons who do not know for themselves which is the advisable course vote to any purpose on the advices of rival counsellors? Socrates will certainly not advise such a set of fools.
At this point the shambling speech ends. What follows seems to be a detached set of anecdotes, having nothing in common with what has gone before, except that Socrates is apparently the narrator, and that each anecdote embodies a rather puerile dilemma.
(a) I once heard a man blame his friend for accepting the story of the plaintiff in a suit without troubling to hear the other side. This, he said, was unfair and a violation of the dicast’s oath. The friend retorted that if you cannot tell whether one man is speaking the truth, you will be still more at a loss if there are two speakers with different stories. If they should both tell the same story, why need you listen to it twice?
(b) A man is reproached by a friend to whom he has refused
(c) A man is blamed for giving ready credence to the random utterances of irresponsible persons. Why? Because he believes the tale of “anyone and everyone” without investigation. But would it not be an equal fault to believe the tales of your most particular intimates without examination? If a speaker is an intimate of A and a stranger to B, will A be right in believing his tale and B equally right in disbelieving the same story? If the same tale is told you by an intimate and a stranger, must it not be equally credible on the lips of both?
The shambling and helpless style of these anecdotes shows that they come from the same hand as the foolish harangue to Demodocus. The writer must have been a person of low intelligence, with no power of expression and a taste for futile “eristic.” I doubt whether his scraps were meant to form a connected whole.
Sisyphus. Socrates is in conversation with a Pharsalian of the singular name of Sisyphus,
But what is consultation (τὸ βουλεύεσθαι)? A process of inquiry (τὸ ζητεῖν). Inquiring is trying to get fuller knowledge of something of which we have some preliminary notion, but not full knowledge. It is the presence in us of ignorance which makes this process difficult. But men do not “consult” about what lies beyond the range of their knowledge; hence the business of yesterday should have been called an inquiry into the interests of Pharsalus. Why did not the inquirers take the course of “learning” the truth from
The writer is perhaps the same man as the author of the Demodocus; he has the same foible for childish eristic, the same interest in the alleged puzzle about “deliberation” and the same helplessness of style, though the Sisyphus is not quite so helpless as the Demodocus. He has read the Meno
Eryxias. This is a much more serious production than any of the four just examined. The writer has provided a definite audience, scene and date. Socrates is talking in the portico of Zeus Eleutherius
The date is supposed to be between the Peace of Nicias and the determination taken in 416 by Athens to attack Syracuse, as we see from the opening remarks made by Erasistratus on the necessity of taking a firm line with that “wasp’s nest.” The subject of the discussion, which is made to arise quite naturally, is the nature and worth of πλοῦτος, “capital,” as we should say. Erasistratus holds that “the richest man is he who owns what is worth most.” If so, may not a poor man in lusty health be said to be richer than an opulent invalid with whom he would never dream of changing places? And there may be things of higher worth than health. It is evident, also, that the thing of highest worth is happiness (εὐδαιμονία). It should follow that the richest of men are the “wise and good,” because they do not impair their happiness by making false steps in life: “the man who knows what is good is the only real capitalist,"—a clear allusion to the Stoic paradox, solus sapiens dives. Eryxias objects that a man might be as wise as Nestor and yet in want of the bare necessaries of life. Still, says S. If such a man’s wisdom might have a high value in exchange in any district where it was esteemed. A man
Here S. directs attention to the original and still more fundamental question what wealth is. You may say, “abundance of χρήματα, means.” But what are means? It is argued, with a little needless display of general information, that means are “possessions which are of use to us.” Hence a cartload of Carthaginian currency would not be “means” at Athens, where it will not exchange for anything. Coin is popularly confused with wealth simply because it exchanges freely for clothes and all other commodities. Now a professional man can exchange his professional services for commodities, and thus ἐπιστῆμαι, knowledge of professions, seems to be one form of capital. Again an article is only capital to one who knows how to use it, and the ϰαλοὶ ϰἀγαθοί are the persons who know how to make the right use of everything. Thus there is a sense in which to make a man wiser is to make him richer. Critias still protests that possessions are not wealth, but the argument is continued. In any trade, a man’s capital clearly includes not only his materials but his implements, and sometimes also appliances for making those implements. If a man were once fully equipped with all that his body requires, money and such things would be useless to him. Again, since to learn you must be able to hear, the money a man pays his doctor for taking care of his hearing is actually useful as a means to “goodness.” This money may have been made in a “base” calling, and thus a “base” thing may be useful for good. We are
I think it clear that the purpose of the dialogue, which is very interesting for its economic theses, is to canvass the Stoic doctrine that wisdom, virtue, wealth are identical, and that the sage is the only “capitalist.” This is the thesis which Eryxias treats as idle playing with words and Socrates “side-tracks,” in order to discuss the more than verbal question whether riches are good or bad. It is part of the anti-Stoic polemic that S. supports Eryxias against Critias who denies that “property” is wealth. The author means to protest against “pulpit declamation” which amounts to nothing but words and to replace it by the dispassionate Academic view that wealth and wisdom are different things, the one at the bottom, the other at the top of the scale of good. The Greek of the dialogue is not the Attic of Plato, yet it is hardly the vulgar ϰοιή. I should conjecture that the work belongs to the beginnings of the Academic polemic against Stoicism, in the early decades of the third century. The writer seems to have drawn some of his material from the Callias of Aeschines,
Axiochus. In style this dialogue is far inferior to the Eryxias. The language is a vulgar ϰoeê, full of non-Attic words and phrases. The mise-en-scene shows complete ignorance of the personages of Plato’s dialogues. The principal figure, apart from Socrates, is Axiochus of Scambonidae, the uncle of Alcibiades. The supposed date is fixed by a reference to the trial of the generals after Arginusae (368d) as not earlier than 405, and Axiochus represents himself as having supported the protest of Socrates against the unconstitutionality of the proceedings. The writer has forgotten that Axiochus was, next to Alcibiades, the chief victim of the scandals of 415 and shared the capital sentence.
In the opening
I feel personally convinced that Immisch is right in the view taken of the purpose of the dialogue in his edition of it.
This is the argument of which Axiochus speaks with marked contempt as superficial “twaddle” momentarily
It is hardly necessary to say anything of the little trifle, not contained in our Plato MSS., called the Alcyon and attributed, in MSS., variously to Plato or to Lucian. (It is commonly included in printed texts of Lucian; the only recent editor of Plato to print it is C. F. Hermann.) This piece of silly prettiness is certainly neither Plato’s nor Lucian’s; since it was already known to Favourinus of Arles,
Diogenes Laertius (iii. 62) gives the following list of νοθευόμενοι: Midon or Hippotrophus, Eryxias or Erasistratus, Alcyon, [a corrupt
There still survives in Syriac a translation of a “Socratic” dialogue, Herostrophos
A more interesting personal document is Plato’s Will (Diogenes Laertius iii. 41-43). The probability is that this and the Wills of Aristotle and Theophrastus are genuine. The Academy would have legal reasons for safeguarding the document, just as a society today preserves its charter of incorporation or its title-deeds. The Will runs thus: “Plato leaves possessions and devises them as hereunder. The property at Iphistiadae bounded on the N. by the road from the shrine at Cephisia, on the S. by the shrine of Heracles at Iphistiadae, on the E. by the land of Archestratus of Phrearria, on the W. by the land of Philippus of Chollidae, shall be neither sold nor alienated, but secured in every way to the boy Adimantus.
…Item, three minae of silver. Item, a silver goblet, weight 165 dr. Item, a cup, weight 45 dr. Item, a gold finger-ring and earring,
By comparison with the similar wills of Aristotle and Theophrastus we can see that Plato was by no means in affluent circumstances.
See further on the works dealt work above:
Shorey, P. What Plato Said. pp. 415-444, “Doubtful and Spurious Dialogues."
Souilhe, J. Platon, Dialogues Suspects (Paris, 1930. The author tends to accept the Clitophon, and Alcibiades I): Platon, Dialogues Apocryphes. Paris, 1930.
Friedlander, P. Die Platonischen Schriften. Berlin and Leipzig, 1930; pp. 117-127 on Hipparchus; 147-155 on Theages; 233-245 on Alcibiades I.
All these are accepted.
Finis
.
Alfred Edward Taylor1869–1945
Eminent British Idealist philosopher
Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, McGill University, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of St. Andrews and University of Edinburgh.
Editor’s Note: The Addenda, which formerly accompanied the Appendices, have been added to their pertinent pages noted as Add.
Reference
Taylor, Alfred E. Plato: The Man and His Work. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1955.