Plato and Platonism Part 4

These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enesan de ge auto autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as consciously reasoned knowledge (erotesei epegertheisai, epistemai gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us--the doctrine namely of metempsychosis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal (athanatos an he psyche eie)+ prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth "over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal. It is right therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half- obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly!

Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the proper vocation of the philosophic teacher [67] to supervene with his encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine--a persuasion still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains-- "reminiscence." Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the locus cla.s.sicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain religious persons, priests and priestesses,

--who had made it their business to be able to give an account concerning their sacred functions. Pindar too a.s.serts this, and many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired.

And what they say is as follows. But do you observe, whether they seem to you to speak the truth. For they say that the soul of man is immortal; and that at one time it comes to a pause, which indeed they call dying, and then is born again; but that it is never destroyed. That on this account indeed it is our duty to pa.s.s through life as religiously as possible (because there's 'another world,' namely). 'For those,' says Pindar, 'from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of ancient wrong--she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, ill.u.s.trious and swift in strength, and men greatest in wisdom; and for remaining time they are called holy heroes among us.' Inasmuch then as the soul is immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that it has not learned; so that it is by no means surprising that it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other matters what it knew at least even aforetime. For inasmuch as the whole of nature is akin to itself (h.o.m.ogeneous) and the soul has learned all things, nothing hinders one, by remembering one thing only, which indeed people call 'learning' (though it is something else in fact, you see!) from finding out all other things for himself, if he be brave and fail not through weariness in his search. For in truth to [68] seek and to learn is wholly Recollection. Therefore one must not be persuaded by that eristic doctrine (namely that if ignorant in ignorance you must remain) for that on the one hand would make us idle and is a pleasant doctrine for the weak among mankind to hear; while this other doctrine makes us industrious and apt to seek. Trusting in which that it is true, I am willing along with you to seek out virtue:--what it is. Meno, 81.

These strange theories then are much with Socrates on his last sad day- -sad to his friends--as justifying more or less, on ancient religious authority, the instinctive confidence, checking sadness in himself, that he will survive--survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral fire; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other "righteous souls" of the national religion, he will be holding discourses, dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little better as must naturally happen with so diligent a scholar, this time to-morrow.

And that wild thought of metempsychosis was connected with a theory, yet more fantastic, of the visible heaven above us. For Pythagoras, the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as became the possessors of "a first principle"--of a philosophy therefore which need leave no problem untouched--on purely material things, above all on the structure of the planets, the mechanical contrivances by which their motion was effected (it came to just that!) on the relation of the earth to its atmosphere and the like. The doctrine of the transmigration, [69] the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work astronomy, which provided starry places, wide areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to move or rest in. A matter of very lively and presentable form and colour, as if making the invisible show through, this too pleased the extremely visual fancy of Plato; as we may see, in many places of the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, and most conspicuously in the tenth book of The Republic, where he relates the vision of Er--what he saw of the other world during a kind of temporary death. h.e.l.l, Purgatory, Paradise, are briefly depicted in it; Paradise especially with a quite Dantesque sensibility to coloured light--physical light or spiritual, you can hardly tell which, so perfectly is the inward sense blent with its visible counter-part, reminding one forcibly of the Divine Comedy, of which those closing pages of The Republic suggest an early outline.

That then is the third element in Plato derivative from his Pythagorean masters: an astronomy of infant minds, we might call it, in which the celestial world is the scene, not as yet of those abstract reasonable laws of number and motion and s.p.a.ce, upon which, as Plato himself protests in the seventh book of The Republic, it is the business of a veritable science of the stars to exercise our minds, but rather of a machinery, which the mere star-gazer may peep into as best he can, with its levers, its spindles and revolving [70] wheels, its spheres, he says,--"like those boxes which fit into one another," and the literal doors "opened in heaven," through which, at the due point of ascension, the revolving pilgrim soul will glide forth and have a chance of gazing into the wide s.p.a.ces beyond, "as he stands outside on the back of the sky"--that hollow partly transparent sphere which surrounds and closes in our terrestrial atmosphere. Most difficult to follow in detailed description, perhaps not to be taken quite seriously, one thing at least is clear about the planetary movements as Plato and his Pythagorean teachers conceive them. They produce, naturally enough, sounds, that famous "music of the spheres," which the undisciplined ear fails to recognise, to delight in, only because it is never silent.

That it really is impossible after all to learn, to be taught what you are entirely ignorant of, was and still is a fact of experience, manifest especially in regard to music. Now that "music of the spheres" in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the harmonious order of the whole universe (kosmos)+ was what souls had heard of old; found echoes of here; might recover in its entirety, amid the influences of the melodious colour, sounds, manners, the enforced modulating discipline, which would make the whole life of a citizen of the Perfect City an education in music. We are now with Plato, you see! in his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The [71]

Republic, of the earlier and vaguer Pythagorean brotherhood. Musical imagery, the notions of proportion and the like, have ever since Plato wrote played a large part in the theory of morals; have come to seem almost a natural part of language concerning them. Only, wherever in Plato himself you find such imagery, you may note Pythagorean influence.

The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all- pervasive in it that imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty, of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be this, that it sounds so well. Plemmeleia,+ discordancy,--all faultiness resolves itself into that. "Canst play on this flute?" asks Hamlet:-- on human nature, with all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness, or want of tune, he is himself the representative. Well! the perfect state, thinks Plato, can. For him, music is still everywhere in the world, and the whole business of philosophy only as it were the correct editing of it: as it will be the whole business of the state to repress, in the great concert, the jarring self-a.s.sertion (pleonexia)+ of those whose voices have large natural power in them. How, in detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there is no time to [72] show. Call to mind only that the perfect visible equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual youth of Greece--legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than its fancied forms of deity--the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the apoxyomenus; and how the most beautiful type of such youth, by the universal admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued from the severe schools of Sparta, that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of law.--Yet with a fresh setting of the old music in each succeeding generation. For in truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but by the natural course of organic development clothed far more completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs, the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves; in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would a.s.sure us) not ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. It is humanity itself now--abstract humanity--that [73] figures as the transmigrating soul, acc.u.mulating into its "colossal manhood" the experience of ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body.

So it may be. There was nothing of all that, however, in the mind of the great English poet at the beginning of this century whose famous Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood, in which he made metempsychosis his own, must still express for some minds something more than merely poetic truth. For Pythagoreanism too, like all the graver utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore also a constant tradition in its history, which will recur; fortifying this or that soul here or there in a part at least of that old sanguine a.s.surance about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his disciples. Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the lines which perhaps suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so- called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines have shown themselves not otherwise than at home.

[74] Happy, those days, he declares,

Before I understood this place, Appointed for my second race; Or taught my soul to fancy ought But a white celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love; But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

O! how I long to travel back And tread again that ancient track!

That I might once more reach that plain, Where first I left my glorious train.-- But Ah! my soul with too much stay Is drunk; and staggers in the way.

Some men a forward motion love, But I backward steps would move; And when this dust falls to the urn In that state I came return.

Summing up those three philosophies antecedent to Plato, we might say, that if Herac.l.i.tus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as Vaughan's, Pythagoreanism is the philosophy of re-action.

NOTES

52. +Transliteration: arche. Liddell and Scott definition: "I.

beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty, dominion; 2. office."

53. +Transliteration: h.o.m.oion h.o.m.oio. Translation: "like by like."

56. +Transliteration: Aletheian de ametria hegei syngene einai, e emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?" Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.

56. +Transliteration: Emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "To measure and proportion." Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.

59. *Or to Mr. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy; which I have read since these pages went to press, with much admiration for its learning and lucidity, and its unconventionality of view.

59. +Transliteration: to apeiron . . . to peras. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. without trial or experience of a thing . . . II.

boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity." As Pater indicates, in Plato the terms mean something like "infinite" and "finite," or "bounded" and "unbounded."

60. +Transliteration: systoichiai ton enantion. "Co-ordinates consisting of opposites."

60. +Transliteration: peras. See above, second note for page 59.

60. +Transliteration: to apeiron. See above, second note for page 59.

61. +Transliteration: askesis. Liddell and Scott definition: "excercise, training."

61. +Transliteration: physei. Liddell and Scott definition of physis: "the nature, inborn quality, property or const.i.tution of a person or thing." Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with regard to nature."

61. +Transliteration: theia moira. Translation: "one's lot by divine appointment."

62. +Transliteration: anamnesis. Liddell and Scott definition: "a calling to mind, recollection."

64. +Transliteration: hos dei. E-text editor's translation: "as is necessary."

64. +Transliteration: Nyn auto hosper onar arti anakekinetai hai doxai autai. Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him." Plato, Meno, 85c.

65. +Transliteration: hois episphragizometha touto. E-text editor's translation: "these things upon which we set this seal." Plato, Phaedo, 75d.

65. +Transliteration: Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erotesantos, epistesetai, a.n.a.labon, autos ex hautou, epistemen. E-text editor's translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through questioning alone, he will understand for certain, retrieving the knowledge out of himself?" Plato, Meno, 85d.

65. +Transliteration: episteme. Liddell and Scott definition "1.

knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific knowledge."

65. +Transliteration: enesan de ge auto autai hai doxai. E-text editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in him, weren't they?" Plato, Meno 85c. Source, if any.

65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autoi aletheis doxai,] erotesei epegertheisai, epistemai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may awaken into certain knowledge." Plato, Meno 86a.

66. +Transliteration: athanatos an he psyche eie. Pater's translation: "The soul, then, would be immortal." Plato, Meno 86b.

70. +Transliteration: kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.

order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order: of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."

71. +Transliteration: Plemmeleia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a false note . . . error, offense."

71. +Transliteration: pleonexia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a disposition to take more than one's share."

71. +Transliteration: peras. See above, note two, page 59.

CHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATES

[75] "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting a knot; for Plato speaks to us indirectly only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the Platonic Socrates, a figure most ambiguously compacted of the real Socrates and Plato himself; a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps have been fancied, or, so to speak, an idolon theatri--Plato's self, but presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a kind of stage disguise. So we might fancy but for certain independent information we possess about Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the Memorabilia of Xenophon.

The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world.

From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master, Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a G.o.d within. By a mind, of the compa.s.s Plato himself supposes, two quite different impressions may well have been made on two typically different observers. The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy, vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult and extraordinary thoughts. In the absence, then, of a single written word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic Dialogues credit him. It is a problem about which probably no reader of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:--how much precisely he must deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of defining to himself the Socrates of fact.

In Plato's own writing about Socrates there is, however, a difference.

The Apology, marked as being the single writing from Plato's hand not in dialogue form, we may naturally take for a sincere version of the actual words of Socrates; closer to them, we may think, than the Greek record of spoken words however important, the speeches in Thucydides, for instance, by the admission of Thucydides himself, was wont to be.

And this a.s.sumption is supported by internal evidence. In that unadorned language, in those harsh grammatic (or rather quite ungrammatic) constructions we have surely the natural accent of one speaking under strong excitement. We might think, again, that the Phaedo, purporting to record his subsequent discourse, is really no more than such a record, but for a lurking suspicion, which hangs by the fact that Plato, noted as an a.s.sistant at the trial, is expressly stated by one of the speakers in the Dialogue to have been absent from the dying scene of Socrates. That speaker however was himself perhaps the veracious reporter of those last words and acts; for there are details in the Phaedo too pedestrian and common-place to be taken for things of mere literary invention: the rubbing of the legs, for instance, now released from the chain; the rather [78] uneasy determination to be indifferent; the somewhat harsh committal of the crudely lamenting wife and his child "to any one who will take the trouble"--details, as one cannot but observe in pa.s.sing, which leave those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared.

We shall be justified then, in the effort to give reality or truth to our mental picture of Socrates, if we follow the lead of his own supposed retrospect of his career in the Apology, as completed, and explained to wholly sympathetic spirits, by the more intimate discourses of the Phaedo.