Plato and Platonism
Plato and PlatonismCHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTIONCHAPTER 2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF RESTCHAPTER 3: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBERCHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATESCHAPTER 5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTSCHAPTER 6: THE GENIUS OF PLATOCHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATOCHAPTER 8: LACEDAEMONCHAPTER 9: THE REPUBLICCHAPTER 10: PLATO'S AESTHETICSCopyright
Plato and Platonism
Walter Pater
CHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
[5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that
of organic generation, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil
facit per saltum; and in the history of philosophy there are no
absolute beginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that
doctrine or idea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or
of "the perpetual flux," the theory of "induction," or the
philosophic view of things generally, the specialist will still be
able to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that
mental tendency. The most elementary act of mental analysis takes
time to do; the most rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge,
abstractions so simple that we can hardly conceive the human mind
without them, must grow, and with difficulty. Philosophy itself,
mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the
poetry that preceded it. A powerful generalisation thrown into some
salient phrase, such as [6] that of Heraclitus—"Panta rhei,"+ all
things fleet away—may startle a particular age by its novelty, but
takes possession only because all along its root was somewhere
among the natural though but half- developed instincts of the human
mind itself.Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the
creator of philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from
the crude or turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the
Ionians or the Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished
philosophical literature. His encyclopaedic view of the whole
domain of knowledge is more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing
that went before it, for compass and power and charm, had been
really comparable to it. Plato's achievement may well seem an
absolutely fresh thing in the morning of the mind's history. Yet in
truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of
philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the
claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were
already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with
off-cast speculative atoms.In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he
figures less as the author of a new theory, than as already an
eclectic critic of older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory
and counter-theory. And as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse
of all physical theories, so in reading the Parmenides we might
think that all metaphysical questions whatever had already passed
through the mind of Plato. Some of the results of patient earlier
thinkers, even then dead and gone, are of the structure of his
philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not as the stray carved
corner of some older edifice, to be found here or there amid the
new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic life in the
very stone he builds with. The central and most intimate principles
of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not merely to
his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master—to Socrates, who
survives chiefly in his pages—but to various precedent schools of
speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these
into that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic
apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that
unconscious philosophy, again, to certain constitutional
tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the intellect itself, such as
had given birth, it would seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the
older civilisations of India and of Egypt, as they still exercise
their authority over ourselves.The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we
find it so again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we
pass from him to them) are covered with the traces of previous
labour and have had their earlier [8] proprietors. If at times we
become aware in reading him of certain anticipations of modern
knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an
older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an
exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour
of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather,
as in many other very original products of human genius, the
seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the
actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself,
every particle of which has already lived and died many times over.
Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new
perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which
familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words,
the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical
literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full
signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is
nothing.There are three different ways in which the criticism of
philosophic, of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted.
The doctrines of Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as
so much truth or falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by
the student of to-day. That is the dogmatic method of criticism;
judging every product of human thought, however alien [9] or
distant from one's self, by its congruity with the assumptions of
Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel, according to the mental
preference of the particular critic. There is, secondly, the more
generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims at a selection
from contending schools of the various grains of truth dispersed
among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods of
large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like
that of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the
Neo- Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is
in the tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine
it professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with
the other elements of a pre-conceived system.Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own
century, under the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of
the ever-changing "Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third
method of criticism, the historic method, which bids us replace the
doctrine, or the system, we are busy with, or such an ancient
monument of philosophic thought as The Republic, as far as possible
in the group of conditions, intellectual, social, material, amid
which it was actually produced, if we would really understand it.
That ages have their genius as well as the individual; that in
every age there is a peculiar ensemble of conditions which
determines [10] a common character in every product of that age, in
business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion and
manners, in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from
himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its
proper point of view in the never-resting "secular process"; the
solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or
general history; that what it behoves the student of philosophic
systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these
convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of
speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely
twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English
lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending
forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to
have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts;
so, beliefs the most fantastic, the "communism" of Plato, for
instance, have their natural propriety when duly correlated with
those facts, those conditions round about them, of which they are
in truth a part.In the intellectual as in the organic world the given
product, its normal or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as
people say, by the "environment." The business of the young scholar
therefore, in reading Plato, is not to take his side in a
controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or
make apology for, [11] what may seem erratic or impossible in him;
still less, to furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some
theory or conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow
intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental process
there, as he might witness a game of skill; better still, as in
reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The Republic, to
watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a
sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of
conditions which can never in the nature of things occur again, at
once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary monument.
To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from antecedent
and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek life
generally: such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say,
of the really critical study of him.At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the
historic spirit impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading
thoughts are partly derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we
happen to possess independent information. From that brilliant and
busy, yet so unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here
another there stands aside to make the initial act of conscious
philosophic reflexion. It is done with something of the simplicity,
the immediate and visible effectiveness, of the visible world in
action all around. Among Plato's many intellectual [12]
predecessors, on whom in recent years much attention has been
bestowed by a host of commentators after the mind of Hegel, three,
whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in the very texture
of Plato's work, emerge distinctly in close connexion with The
Republic: Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the
philosophy of number and music; Parmenides, "My father Parmenides,"
the centre of the school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of
the doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be
admitted after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost
degree fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that
knowledge greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual
influence in Plato's writings.Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a
philosophy which was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in
style crabbed and obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be
forgotten—he too might be thought, as a writer of prose, one of the
"fathers" of Plato. His influence, however, on Plato, though
himself a Heraclitean in early life, was by way of antagonism or
reaction; Plato's stand against any philosophy of motion becoming,
as we say, something of a "fixed idea" with him. Heraclitus of
Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then is denoted by the
fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League)
died about forty years before [13] Plato was born. Here then at
Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of Ionia,
itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of
ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid
all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had
reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of
political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it
was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of
thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion.
Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as
elsewhere, the privileged class had gone to the wall. In this era
of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek youthfulness, one of the
haughtiest of that class, as being also of nature's aristocracy,
and a man of powerful intellectual gifts, Heraclitus, asserts the
native liberty of thought at all events; becomes, we might truly
say, sickly with "the pale cast" of his philosophical questioning.
Amid the irreflective actors in that rapidly moving show, so
entirely immersed in it superficial as it is that they have no
feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He reflects; and
his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth when it is
forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels already
old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly colder.
Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance of
what comes [14] to mind just then somewhat shrill or
overemphatic.Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar
to think, so early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history,
does but reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds
him, when he cries out—his philosophy was no matter of formal
treatise or system, but of harsh, protesting cries—Panta chôrei kai
ouden menei.+ All things give way: nothing remaineth. There had
been enquirers before him of another sort, purely physical
enquirers, whose bold, contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how
and of what primary elements the world of visible things, the sun,
the stars, the brutes, their own souls and bodies, had been
composed, were themselves a part of the bold enterprise of that
romantic age; a series of intellectual adventures, of a piece with
its adventures in unknown lands or upon the sea. The resultant
intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of gifted and sanguine
but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word neotęs,+ youth,
came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning, deciding,
rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to
discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming
and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible
world, were themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface
of existence.[15] Surface, we say; but was there really anything beneath
it? That was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers,
Heraclitus, with an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny.
Perpetual motion, alike in things and in men's thoughts about
them,—the sad, self-conscious, philosophy of Heraclitus, like one,
knowing beyond his years, in this barely adolescent world which he
is so eager to instruct, makes no pretence to be able to restrain
that. Was not the very essence of thought itself also such
perpetual motion? a baffling transition from the dead past, alive
one moment since, to a present, itself deceased in turn ere we can
say, It is here? A keen analyst of the facts of nature and mind, a
master presumably of all the knowledge that then there was, a
vigorous definer of thoughts, he does but refer the superficial
movement of all persons and things around him to deeper and still
more masterful currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing
the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one's feet. The
principle of disintegration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for
Heraclitus these are but very lively instances of movements,
subtler yet more wasteful still) are inherent in the primary
elements alike of matter and of the soul. Legei pou Hęrakleitos,
says Socrates in the Cratylus, hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei.+
But the principle of lapse, of waste, was, in fact, in one's self.
"No one has ever passed [16] twice over the same stream." Nay, the
passenger himself is without identity. Upon the same stream at the
same moment we do, and do not, embark: for we are, and are not:
eimen te kai ouk eimen.+ And this rapid change, if it did not make
all knowledge impossible, made it wholly relative, of a kind, that
is to say, valueless in the judgment of Plato. Man, the individual,
at this particular vanishing-point of time and place, becomes "the
measure of all things."To know after what manner (says Socrates, after discussing
the question in what proportion names, fleeting names, contribute
to our knowledge of things) to know after what manner we must be
taught, or discover for ourselves, the things that really are (ta
onta)+ is perhaps beyond the measure of your powers and mine. We
must even content ourselves with the admission of this, that not
from their names, but much rather themselves from themselves, they
must be learned and looked for. . . . For consider, Cratylus, a
point I oft-times dream on—whether or no we may affirm that what is
beautiful and good in itself, and whatever is, respectively, in
itself, is something?Cratylus. To me at least, Socrates, it seems to be
something.Socrates. Let us consider, then, that 'in-itself'; not
whether a face, or anything of that kind, is beautiful, and whether
all these things seem to flow like water. But, what is beautiful in
itself—may we say?—has not this the qualities that define it,
always?Cratylus. It must be so.Socrates. Can we then, if it is ever passing out below,
predicate about it; first, that it is that; next, that it has this
or that quality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it
should straightway become some other thing, and go out under on its
way, and be no longer as it is? Now, how could that which is never
in the same state be a thing at all? . . .[17] Socrates. Nor, in truth, could it be an object of
knowledge to any one; for, even as he who shall know comes upon it,
it would become another thing with other qualities; so that it
would be no longer matter of knowledge what sort of a thing it is,
or in what condition. Now, no form of knowing, methinks, has
knowledge of that which it knows to be no-how.Cratylus. It is as you say.Socrates. But if, Cratylus, all things change sides, and
nothing stays, it is not fitting to say that there is any knowing
at all. . . . And the consequence of this argument would be, that
there is neither any one to know, nor anything to be known. If, on
the other hand, there be always that which knows, and that which is
known; and if the Beautiful is, and the Good is, and each one of
those things that really are, is, then, to my thinking, those
things in no way resemble that moving stream of which we are now
speaking. Whether, then, these matters be thus, or in that other
way as the followers of Heraclitus affirm and many besides, I fear
may be no easy thing to search out. But certainly it is not like a
sensible man, committing one's self, and one's own soul, to the
rule of names, to serve them, and, with faith in names and those
who imposed them, as if one knew something thereby, to maintain
(damaging thus the character of that which is, and our own) that
there is no sound ring in any one of them, but that all, like
earthen pots, let water. Cratylus, 439.+Yet from certain fragments in which the Logos is already
named we may understand that there had been another side to the
doctrine of Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to
reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a
reasonable order, by the search for and the notation, if there be
such, of an antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceeding
uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical
theme, might link together in one those contending, infinitely
diverse [18] impulses. It was an act of recognition, even on the
part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the incoherent, the
insane, of that Wisdom which, "reacheth from end to end, sweetly
and strongly ordering all things." But if the "weeping
philosopher," the first of the pessimists, finds the ground of his
melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he
weep at the dulness of men's ears to that continuous strain of
melody throughout it. In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour
and the scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the boldly
aggressive, the paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural
collusion, as it was, with the destructiveness of undisciplined
youth; that sense of rapid dissolution, which, according to one's
temperament and one's luck in things, might extinguish, or kindle
all the more eagerly, an interest in the mere phenomena of
existence, of one's so hasty passage through the
world.The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension
of which the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in
alliance with a larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer
observation of the phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for
Heraclitus, at that early day. So, the seeds of almost all
scientific ideas might seem to have been dimly enfolded in the mind
of antiquity; but fecundated, admitted to their full working
prerogative, one by one, in after ages, by good favour of the
special [19] intellectual conditions belonging to a particular
generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself preoccupied by a
formula, not so much new, as renovated by new
application.It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the
most modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated
emphatically, justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make
bold to call it under the new light now thrown upon it) of the
ancient theorist of Ephesus. The entire modern theory of
"development," in all its various phases, proved or
unprovable,—what is it but old Heracliteanism awake once more in a
new world, and grown to full proportions?Panta chôrei, panta rhei+—It is the burden of Hegel on the
one hand, to whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye,
and religion too, each in its long historic series, are but so many
conscious movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and
on the other hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself
properly is not but is only always becoming. The bold paradox of
Heraclitus is, in effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital
persuasion just now of a cautiously reasoned experience, and, in
illustration of the very law of change which it asserts, may itself
presently be superseded as a commonplace. Think of all that subtly
disguised movement, latens processus, Bacon calls it (again as if
by a kind of anticipation) which [20] modern research has detected,
measured, hopes to reduce to minuter or ally to still larger
currents, in what had seemed most substantial to the naked eye, the
inattentive mind. To the "observation and experiment" of the
physical enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it lives by reveal
themselves, after all, as Heraclitus had declared (scarcely
serious, he seemed to those around him) as literally in constant
extinction and renewal; the sun only going out more gradually than
the human eye; the system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in
ceaseless movement nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is in constant
increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of
infinite space. The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains, as
still loftier mountains found their level there ages ago. The
granite kernel of the earth, it is said, is ever changing in its
very substance, its molecular constitution, by the passage through
it of electric currents. And the Darwinian theory—that "species,"
the identifying forms of animal and vegetable life, immutable
though they seem now, as of old in the Garden of Eden, are
fashioned by slow development, while perhaps millions of years go
by: well! every month is adding to its evidence. Nay, the idea of
development (that, too, a thing of growth, developed in the
progress of reflexion) is at last invading one by one, as the
secret of their explanation, all the products of mind, the very
[21] mind itself, the abstract reason; our certainty, for instance,
that two and two make four. Gradually we have come to think, or to
feel, that primary certitude. Political constitutions, again, as we
now see so clearly, are "not made," cannot be made, but "grow."
Races, laws, arts, have their origins and end, are themselves
ripples only on the great river of organic life; and language is
changing on our very lips.In Plato's day, the Heraclitean flux, so deep down in nature
itself— the flood, the fire—seemed to have laid hold on man, on the
social and moral world, dissolving or disintegrating opinion, first
principles, faith, establishing amorphism, so to call it, there
also. All along indeed the genius, the good gifts of Greece to the
world had had much to do with the mobility of its temperament.
Only, when Plato came into potent contact with his countrymen
(Pericles, Phidias, Socrates being now gone) in politics, in
literature and art, in men's characters, the defect naturally
incident to that fine quality had come to have unchecked sway. From
the lifeless background of an unprogressive world—Egypt, Syria,
frozen Scythia—a world in which the unconscious social aggregate
had been everything, the conscious individual, his capacity and
rights, almost nothing, the Greek had stepped forth, like the young
prince in the fable, to set things going. To the philosophic eye
however, [22] about the time when the history of Thucydides leaves
off, they might seem to need a regulator, ere the very wheels wore
themselves out.Mobility! We do not think that a necessarily undesirable
condition of life, of mind, of the physical world about us. 'Tis
the dead things, we may remind ourselves, that after all are most
entirely at rest, and might reasonably hold that motion (vicious,
fallacious, infectious motion, as Plato inclines to think) covers
all that is best worth being. And as for philosophy—mobility,
versatility, the habit of thought that can most adequately follow
the subtle movement of things, that, surely, were the secret of
wisdom, of the true knowledge of them. It means susceptibility,
sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short. It was the spirit of
God that moved, moves still, in every form of real power,
everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality in
things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this
principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that,
with all his contriving care for the future, he desires to
withstand. Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of the
immutable. The Republic is a proposal to establish it indefectibly
in a very precisely regulated, a very exclusive community, which
shall be a refuge for elect souls from an ill-made
world.That four powerful influences made for the political unity of
Greece was pointed out by [23] Grote: common blood, common
language, a common religious centre, the great games in which all
alike communicated. He adds that they failed to make the Greeks one
people. Panhellenism was realised for the first time, and then but
imperfectly, by Alexander the Great. The centrifugal tendency had
ever been too much for the centripetal tendency in them, the
progressive elements for the element of order. Their boundless
impatience, that passion for novelty noted in them by Saint Paul,
had been a matter of radical character. Their varied natural gifts
did but concentrate themselves now and then to an effective centre,
that they might be dissipated again, towards every side, in daring
adventure alike of action and of thought. Variety and novelty of
experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to an
equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities,
the claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a
ready sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,—herein,
certainly, lay at least one half of their vocation in history. The
material conformation of Greece, a land of islands and peninsulas,
with a range of sea-coast immense as compared with its area, and
broken up by repellent lines of mountain this way and that, nursing
jealously a little township of three or four thousand souls into an
independent type of its own, conspired to the same effect.
Independence, local and personal,—it was the Greek
ideal![24] Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may see, of
the still half-Asiatic rather than the full Hellenic ideal, of the
Ionian ideal as conceived by the Athenian people in particular,
people of the coast who have the roaming thoughts of sailors, ever
ready to float away anywhither amid their walls of wood. And for
many of its admirers certainly the whole Greek people has been a
people of the sea-coast. In Lacedaemon, however, as Plato and
others thought, hostile, inaccessible in its mountain hollow where
it had no need of any walls at all, there were resources for that
discipline and order which constitute the other ingredient in a
true Hellenism, the saving Dorian soul in it. Right away thither,
to that solemn old mountain village, now mistress of Greece, he
looks often, in depicting the Perfect City, the ideal state.
Perfection, in every case, as we may conceive, is attainable only
through a certain combination of opposites, Attic aleipha with the
Doric oxos;+ and in the Athens of Plato's day, as he saw with acute
prevision, those centrifugal forces had come to be ruinously in
excess of the centripetal. Its rapid, empiric, constitutional
changes, its restless development of political experiment, the
subdivisions of party there, the dominance of faction, as we see
it, steadily increasing, breeding on itself, in the pages of
Thucydides, justify Plato's long-drawn paradox that it is easier to
wrestle against many than against one. The soul, [25] moreover, the
inward polity of the individual, was the theatre of a similar
dissolution; and truly stability of character had never been a
prominent feature in Greek life. Think of the end of Pausanias
failing in his patriotism, of Themistocles, of Miltiades, the
saviours of Greece, actually selling the country they had so dearly
bought to its old enemies.It is something in this way that, for Plato, motion and the
philosophy of motion identify themselves with the vicious tendency
in things and thought. Change is the irresistible law of our being,
says the Philosophy of Motion. Change, he protests, through the
power of a true philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and
it is curious to note the way in which, consciously or
unconsciously, that philosophic purpose shapes his treatment, even
in minute detail, of education, of art, of daily life, his very
vocabulary, in which such pleasant or innocent words, as
"manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the synonyms of what
is evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed cycle of political
change; but conceives it (being change) as, from the very first,
backward towards decadence. The ideal city, again, will not be an
art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of art, that he
means to shape men anew; by a severely monotonous art however, such
art as shall speak to youth, all day long, from year to year,
almost exclusively, of the loins girded about.[26] Stimulus, or correction,—one hardly knows which to ask
for first, as more salutary for our own slumbersome, yet so
self-willed, northern temperaments. Perhaps all genuine fire, even
the Heraclitean fire, has a power for both. "Athens," says
Dante,
—Athens, aye and Sparta's
state That were in policy so
great, And framed
the laws of old, How small a
place they hold, How poor their art of noble
living Shews by thy delicate
contriving, Where what
October spun November sees
outrun! Think in the time thou canst
recall, Laws, coinage, customs, places
all, How thou hast
rearranged, How oft thy
members changed! Couldst thou but see thyself
aright, And turn thy vision to the
light, Thy likeness
thou would'st find In some sick
man reclined; On couch of down though he be
pressed, He seeks and finds not any
rest, But turns and
turns again, To ease him
of his pain. Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's
Translation.Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting it with Athens
and Sparta as he conceives them, Plato might have said to Athens,
in contrast with Sparta, with Lacedaemon, at least as he conceived
it.NOTES6. +Transliteration: Panta rhei. Translation: "All things
give way [or flow]." Plato, Cratylus 402 A, cites Heraclitus'
fragment more fully— Legei pou Hęrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai
ouden menei, or "Heracleitus says somewhere that all things give
way, and nothing remains." Pater cites the same fragment in The
Renaissance, Conclusion. The verb rheô means "flow," while the verb
choreô means "give way."14. +Transliteration: Panta chôrei kai ouden menei. Pater's
translation: "All things give way: nothing remaineth." Plato,
Cratylus 402A.14. +Transliteration: neotęs. Liddell and Scott definition:
"youth: also … youthful spirit, rashness."15. +Transliteration: Legei pou Hęrakleitos hoti panta chôrei
kai ouden menei. Pater's translation in The Renaissance,
Conclusion: "[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way;
nothing remains." Plato, Cratylus 402a.16. +Transliteration: eimen te kai ouk eimen. E-text editor's
translation: "We are and are not." Heraclitus, Fragments. Fragmenta
Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 326. Ed. F.W.A. Mullach.
Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860
edition). In the same fragment, Heraclitus is described as having
said, Potamois tois autois embainomen te kai ouk embainomen, which
translates as "we go into the same river, and [yet] we do not go
into the same river." Plato cites that thought in the passage
alluded to above, Cratylus 402a.16. +Transliteration: ta onta. Definition: "the things that
are."17. +Rather than retain the original's very small print for
such quotations, I have indented them throughout Plato and
Platonism. As Pater indicates, the source of his quotation is the
Cratylus, 439.19. +Transliteration: Panta chôrei, panta rhei. See above,
notes for pages 6, 14, 15, and 16. The verb rheô means "flow,"
while the verb choreô means "give way."24. +Transliteration: aleipha . . . oxos. Liddell and Scott
definition: "unguent, oil . . . sour wine, vinegar."
CHAPTER 2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST
[27] OVER against that world of flux,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
it is the vocation of Plato to set up a standard of
unchangeable reality, which in its highest theoretic development
becomes the world of "eternal and immutable ideas," indefectible
outlines of thought, yet also the veritable things of experience:
the perfect Justice, for instance, which if even the gods mistake
it for perfect Injustice is not moved out of its place; the Beauty
which is the same, yesterday, to-day and for ever. In such ideas or
ideals, "eternal" as participating in the essential character of
the facts they represent to us, we come in contact, as he supposes,
with the insoluble, immovable granite beneath and amid the wasting
torrent of mere phenomena. And in thus ruling the deliberate aim of
his philosophy to be a survey of things sub specie eternitatis, the
reception of a kind of absolute and independent knowledge [28]
(independent, that is, of time and position, the accidents and
peculiar point of view of the receiver) Plato is consciously under
the influence of another great master of the Pre- Socratic thought,
Parmenides, the centre of the School of Elea.
About half a century before the birth of Plato, Socrates
being then in all the impressibility of early manhood, Parmenides,
according to the witness of Plato himself—Parmenides at the age of
sixty-five—had visited Athens at the great festival of the
Panathenaea, in company with Zeno the Eleatic, a characteristic
specimen of Greek cleverness, of the acute understanding,
personally very attractive. Though forty years old, the reputation
this Zeno now enjoyed seems to have been very much the achievement
of his youth, and came of a mastery of the sort of paradox youth
always delights in. It may be said that no one has ever really
answered him; the difficulties with which he played so nicely being
really connected with those "antinomies," or contradictions, or
inconsistencies, of our thoughts, which more than two thousand
years afterwards Kant noted as actually inherent in the mind
itself—a certain constitutional weakness or limitation there, in
dealing by way of cold-blooded reflexion with the direct
presentations of its experience. The "Eleatic Palamedes," Plato
calls him, "whose dialectic art causes one and the same thing to
appear both like and [29] unlike, one and many, at rest and in
motion." Ah! you hear already the sort of words that seem sometimes
so barren and unprofitable even in Plato.
It is from extant fragments of a work of his, not a poem,
but, appropriately, To Syngramma,+ The Prose, of Zeno, that such
knowledge as we have of his doctrine, independently of the
Parmenides of Plato, is derived. The active principle of that
doctrine then lies in the acuteness with which he unfolds the
contradictions which make against the very conceivability of the
fundamental phenomena of sense, in so far as those phenomena are
supposed to be really existent independently of ourselves. The
truth of experience, of a sensible experience, he seems to
protest:—Why! sensible experience as such is logically
inconceivable. He proved it, or thought, or professed to think, he
proved it, in the phenomenon which covers all the most vivid, the
seemingly irresistible facts, of such experience. Motion was
indeed, as the Heracliteans said, everywhere: was the most incisive
of all facts in the realm of supposed sensible fact. Think of the
prow of the trireme cleaving the water. For a moment Zeno himself
might have seemed but a follower of Heraclitus. He goes beyond him.
All is motion: he admits.—Yes: only, motion is (I can show it!) a
nonsensical term. Follow it, or rather stay by it, and it
transforms itself, agreeably enough for the [30] curious observer,
into rest. Motion must be motion in space, of course; from point to
point in it,—and again, more closely, from point to point within
such interval; and so on, infinitely; 'tis rest there: perpetual
motion is perpetual rest:—the hurricane, the falling tower, the
deadly arrow from the bow at whose coming you shake there so
wretchedly, Zeno's own rapid word-fence—all alike at rest, to the
restful eye of the pure reason! The tortoise, the creature that
moves most slowly, cannot be overtaken by Achilles, the swiftest of
us all; or at least you can give no rational explanation how it
comes to be overtaken. Zeno had an armoury of such enigmas. Can a
bushel of corn falling make a noise if a single grain makes none?
Again, that motion should cease, we find inconceivable: but can you
conceive how it should so much as begin? at what point precisely,
in the moving body? Ubiquitous, tyrannous, irresistible, as it may
seem, motion, with the whole so dazzling world it covers, is—
nothing!
Himself so striking an instance of mobile humour in his
exposure of the unreality of all movement, Zeno might be taken so
far only for a master, or a slave, of paradox; such paradox indeed
as is from the very first inherent in every philosophy which (like
that of Plato himself, accepting even Zeno as one of its
institutors) opposes the seen to the unseen as [31] falsehood to
truth. It was the beginning of scholasticism; and the philosophic
mind will perhaps never be quite in health, quite sane or natural,
again. The objective, unconscious, pleasantly sensuous mind of the
Greek, becoming a man, as he thinks, and putting away childish
thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards Aristotle, towards
Aquinas, or shall we say into the rude scholasticism of the
pedantic Middle Age? And we must have our regrets. There is always
something lost in growing up.
The wholesome scepticism of Hume or Mill for instance, the
scepticism of the modern world, beset now with insane speculative
figments, has been an appeal from the preconceptions of the
understanding to the authority of the senses. With the Greeks,
whose metaphysic business was then still all to do, the sceptical
action of the mind lay rather in the direction of an appeal from
the affirmations of sense to the authority of newly-awakened
reason. Just then all those real and verbal difficulties which
haunt perversely the human mind always, all those unprofitable
queries which hang about the notions of matter and time and space,
their divisibility and the like, seemed to be stirring together,
under the utterance of this brilliant, phenomenally clever, perhaps
insolent, young man, his master's favourite. To the work of that
grave master, nevertheless—of Parmenides—a very different person
certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so
fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service. By its destructive
criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the
central and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real
support to Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that
is but phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we
might say) to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or
absolutely, that it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of
apprehension:—Parmenides and the Eleatic School were much occupied
with the determination of the thoughts, or of the mere phrases and
words, that belong to that.
Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged
to an outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive
validity to the sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called,
which corresponds to the "Pure Being," that after all is only
definable as "Pure Nothing," that colourless, formless, impalpable
existence (ousia achrômatos, aschęmatistos, anaphęs)+ to use the
words of Plato, for whom Parmenides became a sort of inspired
voice. Note at times, in reading him, in the closing pages of the
fifth book of The Republic for instance, the strange accumulation
of terms derivative from the abstract verb "To be." As some more
modern metaphysicians have done, even Plato seems to pack such
terms together almost by rote. Certainly something of paradox may
always be felt even in his [33] exposition of "Being," or perhaps a
kind of paralysis of speech—aphasia.+
Parmenides himself had borrowed the thought from another,
though he made it his own. Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of
Homer, by way of fitting Homer the better for the use of the
schoolboys of the ideal city, is ready to sacrifice much of that
graceful polytheism in which the Greeks anticipated the dulia of
saints and angels in the catholic church. He does this to the
advantage of a very abstract, and as it may seem disinterested,
certainly an uninteresting, notion of deity, which is in
truth:—well! one of the dry sticks of mere "natural theology," as
it is called. In this he was but following the first, the original,
founder of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who in a somewhat
scornful spirit had urged on men's attention that, in their prayers
and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various thoughts and
statements, graceful or hideous, about them, they had only all
along with much fallacy been making gods after their own likeness,
as horse or dog too, if perchance it cast a glance towards heaven,
would after the same manner project thither the likeness of horse
or dog: that to think of deity you must think of it as neither here
nor there, then nor now; you must away with all limitations of time
and space and matter, nay, with the very conditions, the
limitation, of thought itself; apparently not [34] observing that
to think of it in this way was in reality not to think of it at
all:—That in short Being so pure as this is pure Nothing.
