Walter Pater
Plato and Platonism
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Table of contents
CHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
CHAPTER 2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST
CHAPTER 3: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER
CHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATES
CHAPTER 5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
CHAPTER 6: THE GENIUS OF PLATO
CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
CHAPTER 8: LACEDAEMON
CHAPTER 9: THE REPUBLIC
CHAPTER 10: PLATO'S AESTHETICS
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.
—
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!