The Approach to Philosophy Part 18

[Sidenote: The Progression of Experience toward G.o.d.]

- 161. There is, then, a "true order of going," and an order that leads from one to many, from thence to forms, from thence to morality, and from thence to the general objects of thought or _the ideas_. In the "Republic," where the proper education of the philosopher is in question, it is proposed that he shall study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and dialectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the variety and vagueness of the forms of experience with _clear_, _unitary_, _definite_, and _eternal_ natures, such as the number and the geometrical figure. Thus certain individual things are approximately triangular, but subject to alteration, and indefinitely many. On the other hand the triangle as defined by geometry is the fixed and unequivocal nature or idea which such experiences suggest; and the philosophical mind will at once pa.s.s to it from these. But the mathematical objects are themselves not thoroughly understood when understood only in mathematical terms, for the foundations of mathematics are arbitrary. And the same is true of all the so-called special sciences. Even the scientists themselves, says Plato,

"only dream about being, but never can behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a conventional statement will ever become science?"[330:9]

Within the science of dialectics we are to understand the connections and sequences of ideas themselves, in the hope of eliminating every arbitrariness and conventionality within a system of truth that is pure and self-luminous rationality. To this science, which is the great interest of his later years, Plato contributes only incomplete studies and experiments. We must be satisfied with the playful answer with which, in the "Republic," he replies to Glaucon's entreaty that "he proceed at once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain, and describe that in like manner": "Dear Glaucon, you will not be able to follow me here, though I would do my best."

But a philosophical system has been projected. The real is that perfect significance or meaning which thought and every interest suggests, and toward which there is in experience an appreciable movement. It is this significance which makes things what they really are, and which const.i.tutes our understanding of them. In itself it transcends the steps which lead to it; "for G.o.d," says Plato, "mingles not with men." But it is nevertheless the meaning of human life. And this we can readily conceive. The last word may transform the sentence from nonsense into sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an inchoate ma.s.s of color into a picture, disarray into an object of beauty; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, when it finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of perfection in which humanity is transformed into deity. There is frankly no provision for imperfection in such a world. In his later writings Plato sounds his characteristic note less frequently, and permits the ideal to create a cosmos through the admixture of matter. But in his moment of inspiration, the Platonist will have no sense for the imperfect. It is the darkness behind his back, or the twilight through which he pa.s.ses on his way to the light. He will use even the beauties of earth only "as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty."

[Sidenote: Aristotle's Hierarchy of Substances in Relation to Platonism.]

- 162. We have met, then, with two distinct philosophical doctrines which arise from the conception of the _absolute_, or the philosopher's peculiar object: the doctrine of the _absolute being_ or _substance_, and that of the _absolute ideal_ or _good_. Both doctrines are realistic in that they a.s.sume reality to be demonstrated or revealed, rather than created, by knowledge. Both are rationalistic in that they develop a system of philosophy from the problem of philosophy, or deduce a definition of reality from the conception, of reality. There remains a third doctrine of the same type--the philosophy of Aristotle, the most elaborately constructed system of Greek antiquity, and the most potent influence exerted upon the Scholastic Philosophy of the long mediaeval period. This philosophy was rehabilitated in the eighteenth century by Leibniz, the brilliant librarian of the court of Hanover. The extraordinary comprehensiveness of Aristotle's philosophy makes it quite impossible to render here even a general account of it. There is scarcely any human discipline that does not to some extent draw upon it.

We are concerned only with the central principles of the metaphysics.

Upon the common ground of rationalism and realism, Plato and Aristotle are complementary in temper, method, and principle. Plato's is the genius of inspiration and fertility, Aristotle's the genius of erudition, mastery, and synthesis. In form, Plato's is the gift of expression, Aristotle's the gift of arrangement. Plato was born and bred an aristocrat, and became the lover of the best--the uncompromising purist; Aristotle is middle-cla.s.s, and limitlessly wide, hospitable, and patient in his interests. Thus while both are speculative and acute, Plato's mind is intensive and profound, Aristotle's extensive and orderly. It was inevitable, then, that Aristotle should find Plato one-sided. The philosophy of the ideal is not worldly enough to be true.

It is a religion rather than a theory of reality. Aristotle, however, would not renounce it, but construe it that it may better provide for nature and history. This is the significance of his new terminology.

Matter, to which Plato reluctantly concedes some room as a principle of degradation in the universe, is now admitted to good standing. _Matter_ or material is indispensable to being as its potentiality or that out of which it is const.i.tuted. The ideal, on the other hand, loses its exclusive t.i.tle to the predicate of reality, and becomes the _form_, or the determinate nature which exists only in its particular embodiments.

The being or _substance_ is the concrete individual, of which these are the abstracted aspects. Aristotle's "form," like Plato's "idea," is a teleological principle. The essential nature of the object is its perfection. It is furthermore essential to the object that it should strive after a higher perfection. With Aristotle, however, the reality is not the consummation of the process, the highest perfection in and for itself, but the very hierarchy of objects that ascends toward it.

The highest perfection, or G.o.d, is not itself coextensive with being, but the final cause of being--that on account of which the whole progression of events takes place. Reality is the development with all of its ascending stages from the maximum of potentiality, or matter, to the maximum of actuality, or G.o.d the pure form.

[Sidenote: The Aristotelian Philosophy as a Reconciliation of Platonism and Spinozism.]

- 163. To understand the virtue of this philosophy as a basis for the reconciliation of different interests, we must recall the relation between Plato and Spinoza. Their characteristic difference appears to the best advantage in connection with mathematical truth. Both regarded geometry as the best model for philosophical thinking, but for different reasons. Spinoza prized geometry for its necessity, and proposed to extend it. His philosophy is the attempt to formulate a geometry of being, which shall set forth the inevitable certainties of the universe.

Plato, on the other hand, prized geometry rather for its definition of types, for its knowledge of pure or perfect natures such as the circle and triangle, which in immediate experience are only approximated. His philosophy defines reality similarly as the absolute perfection.

Applied to nature Spinozism is mechanical, and looks for necessary laws, while Platonism is teleological, and looks for adaptation and significance. Aristotle's position is intermediate. With Plato he affirms that the good is the ultimate principle. But this very principle is conceived to govern a universe of substances, each of which maintains its own proper being, and all of which are reciprocally determined in their changes. Final causes dominate nature, but work through efficient causes. Reality is not pure perfection, as in Platonism, nor the indifferent necessity, as in Spinozism, but the system of beings necessary to the complete progression toward the highest perfection. The Aristotelian philosophy promises, then, to overcome both the hard realism of Parmenides and Spinoza, and also the supernaturalism of Plato.

[Sidenote: Leibniz's Application of the Conception of Development to the Problem of Imperfection.]

- 164. But it promises, furthermore, to remedy the defect common to these two doctrines, the very besetting problem of this whole type of philosophy. That problem, as has been seen, is to provide for the imperfect within the perfect, for the temporal incidents of nature and history within the eternal being. Many absolutist philosophers have declared the explanation of this realm to be impossible, and have contented themselves with calling it the realm of opinion or appearance.

And this realm of opinion or appearance has been used as a proof of the absolute. Zeno, the pupil of Parmenides, was the first to elaborate what have since come to be known as the paradoxes of the empirical world.

Most of these paradoxes turn upon the infinite extension and divisibility of s.p.a.ce and time. Zeno was especially interested in the difficulty of conceiving motion, which involves both s.p.a.ce and time, and thought himself to have demonstrated its absurdity and impossibility.[337:10] His argument is thus the complement of Parmenides's argument for the indivisible and unchanging substance. Now the method which Zeno here adopts may be extended to cover the whole realm of nature and history. We should then be dialectically driven from this realm to take refuge in absolute being. But the empirical world is not destroyed by disparagement, and cannot long lack champions even among the absolutists themselves. The reconciliation of nature and history with the absolute being became the special interest of Leibniz, the great modern Aristotelian. As a scientist and man of affairs, he was profoundly dissatisfied with Spinoza's resolution of nature, the human individual, and the human society into the universal being. He became an advocate of individualism while retaining the general aim and method of rationalism.

Like Aristotle, Leibniz attributes reality to individual substances, which he calls "monads"; and like Aristotle he conceives these monads to compose an ascending order, with G.o.d, the monad of monads, as its dominating goal.

"Furthermore, every substance is like an entire world and like a mirror of G.o.d, or indeed of the whole world which it portrays, each one in its own fashion; almost as the same city is variously represented according to the various situations of him who is regarding it. Thus the universe is multiplied in some sort as many times as there are substances, and the glory of G.o.d is multiplied in the same way by as many wholly different representations of his works."[338:11]

The very "glory of G.o.d," then, requires the innumerable finite individuals with all their characteristic imperfections, that the universe may lack no possible shade or quality of perspective.

[Sidenote: The Problem of Imperfection Remains Unsolved.]

- 165. But the besetting problem is in fact not solved, and is one of the chief incentives to that other philosophy of absolutism which defines an absolute spirit or mind. Both Aristotle and Leibniz undertake to make the perfection which determines the order of the hierarchy of substances, at the same time the responsible author of the whole hierarchy. In this case the dilemma is plain. If the divine form or the divine monad be other than the stages that lead up to it, these latter cannot be essential to it, for G.o.d is by definition absolutely self-sufficient. If, on the other hand, G.o.d is identical with the development in its entirety, then two quite incommensurable standards of perfection determine the supremacy of the divine nature, that of the whole and that of the highest parts of the whole. The union of these two and the definition of a perfection which may be at once the development and its goal, is the task of absolute idealism.

[Sidenote: Absolute Realism in Epistemology. Rationalism.]

- 166. Of the two fundamental questions of epistemology, absolute realism answers the one explicitly, the other implicitly. As respects _the source of the most valid knowledge_, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza are all agreed: true knowledge is the work of reason, of pure intellection. Plato is the great exponent of dialectic, or the reciprocal affinities and necessities of ideas. Aristotle is the founder of deductive logic. Spinoza proposes to consider even "human actions and desires" as though he were "concerned with lines, planes, and solids."

Empirical data may be the occasion, but cannot be the ground of the highest knowledge. According to Leibniz,

"it seems that necessary truths, such as we find in pure mathematics, and especially in arithmetic and geometry, must have principles whose proof does not depend upon instances, nor, consequently, upon the witness of the senses, although without the senses it would never have come into our heads to think of them."[340:12]

[Sidenote: The Relation of Thought and its Object in Absolute Realism.]

- 167. The answers which these philosophies give to the question of _the relation between the state of knowledge and its object_, divide them into two groups. Among the ancients reason is regarded as the means of emanc.i.p.ation from the limitations of the private mind. "The sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own," but "the waking"--the wise men--"have one and the same world." What the individual knows belongs to himself only in so far as it is inadequate. Hence for Plato the ideas are not the attributes of a mind, but that self-subsistent truth to which, in its moments of insight, a mind may have access. Opinion is "my own," the truth is being. The position of Aristotle is equally clear.

"Actual knowledge," he maintains, "is identical with its object."

Spinoza and Leibniz belong to another age. Modern philosophy began with a new emphasis upon self-consciousness. In his celebrated argument--"I think, hence I am" (_cogito ergo sum_)--Descartes established the independent and substantial reality of the thinking activity. The "I think" is recognized as in itself a fundamental being, known intuitively to the thinker himself. Now although Spinoza and Leibniz are finally determined by the same motives that obtain in the cases of Plato and Aristotle, they must reckon with this new distinction between the thinker and his object. The result in the case of Spinoza is the doctrine of "parallelism," in which mind is defined as an "infinite attribute" of substance, an aspect or phase coextensive with the whole of being. The result in the case of Leibniz is his doctrine of "representation" and "preestablished harmony," whereby each monadic substance is in itself an active spiritual ent.i.ty, and belongs to the universe through its knowledge of a specific stage of the development of the universe. But both Spinoza and Leibniz subordinate such conceptions as these to the fundamental ident.i.ty that pervades the whole. With Spinoza the attributes belong to the same absolute substance, and with Leibniz the monads represent the one universe. And with both, finally, the perfection of knowledge, or the knowledge of G.o.d, is indistinguishable from its object, G.o.d himself. The epistemological subtleties peculiar to these philosophers are not stable doctrines, but render inevitable either a return to the simpler and bolder realism of the Greeks, or a pa.s.sing over into the more radical and systematic doctrine of absolute idealism.

[Sidenote: The Stoic and Spinozistic Ethics of Necessity.]

- 168. We have met with two general motives, both of which are subordinated to the doctrine of an absolute being postulated and sought by philosophy. The one of these motives leads to the conception of the absolutely necessary and immutable substance, the other to the conception of a consummate perfection. There is an _interpretation of life_ appropriate to each of these conceptions. Both agree in regarding life seriously, in defining reason or philosophy as the highest human activity, and in emphasizing the ident.i.ty of the individual's good with the good of the universe. But there are striking differences of tone and spirit.

Although the metaphysics of the Stoics have various affiliations, the Stoic code of morality is the true practical sequel to the Eleatic-Spinozistic view of the world. The Stoic is one who has set his affections on the eternal being. He asks nothing of it for himself, but identifies himself with it. The saving grace is a sense of reality. The virtuous man is not one who remakes the world, or draws upon it for his private uses; even less one who rails against it, or complains that it has used him ill. He is rather one who recognizes that there is but one really valid claim, that of the universe itself. But he not only submits to this claim on account of its superiority; he makes it his own. The discipline of Stoicism is the regulation of the individual will to the end that it may coincide with the universal will. There is a part of man by virtue of which he is satisfied with what things are, whatever they be. That part, designated by the Stoics as "the ruling part," is the reason. In so far as man seeks to understand the laws and natures which actually prevail, he cannot be discontented with anything whatsoever that may be known to him.

"For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavor of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole."[344:13]

In agreement with this teaching of Spinoza's is the famous Stoic formula to the effect that "nothing can happen contrary to the will of the wise man," who is free through his very acquiescence. If reason be the proper "ruling part," the first step in the moral life is the subordination of the appet.i.tive nature and the enthronement of reason. One who is himself rational will then recognize the fellowship of all rational beings, and the unitary and beneficent rationality of the entire universe. The highest morality is thus already upon the plane of religion.

[Sidenote: The Platonic Ethics of Perfection.]

- 169. With Spinoza and the Stoics, the perfection of the individual is reduced to what the universe requires of him. The good man is willing to be whatever he must be, for the sake of the whole with which through reason he is enabled to identify himself. With Plato and Aristotle the perfection of the individual himself is commended, that the universe may abound in perfection. The good man is the ideal man--the expression of the type. And how different the quality of a morality in keeping with this principle! The virtues which Plato enumerates--temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice--compose a consummate human nature. He is thinking not of the necessities but of the possibilities of life. Knowledge of the truth will indeed be the best of human living, but knowledge is not prized because it can reconcile man to his limitations; it is the very overflowing of his cup of life. The youth are to

"dwell in the land of health, amid fair sights and sounds; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, will visit the eye and ear, like a healthful breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul even in childhood into harmony with the beauty of reason."[345:14]

Aristotle's account of human perfection is more circ.u.mstantial and more prosaic. "The function of man is an activity of soul in accordance with reason," and his happiness or well-being will consist in the fulness of rational living. But such fulness requires a sphere of life that will call forth and exercise the highest human capacities. Aristotle frankly p.r.o.nounces "external goods" to be indispensable, and happiness to be therefore "a gift of the G.o.ds." The rational man will acquire a certain exquisiteness or finesse of action, a "mean" of conduct; and this virtue will be diversified through the various relations into which he must enter, and the different situations which he must meet. He will be not merely brave, temperate, and just, as Plato would have him, but liberal, magnificent, gentle, truthful, witty, friendly, and in all self-respecting or high-minded. In addition to these strictly moral virtues, he will possess the intellectual virtues of prudence and wisdom, the resources of art and science; and will finally possess the gift of insight, or intuitive reason. Speculation will be his highest activity, and the mark of his kinship with the G.o.ds who dwell in the perpetual contemplation of the truth.

[Sidenote: The Religion of Fulfilment, and the Religion of Renunciation.]

- 170. Aristotle's ethics expresses the buoyancy of the ancient world, when the individual does not feel himself oppressed by the eternal reality, but rejoices in it. He is not too conscious of his sufferings to be disinterested in his admiration and wonder. It is this which distinguishes the religion of Plato and Aristotle from that of the Stoics and Spinoza. With both alike, religion consists not in making the world, but in contemplating it; not in cooperating with G.o.d, but in worshipping him. Plato and Aristotle, however, do not find any antagonism between the ways of G.o.d and the natural interests of men. G.o.d does not differ from men save in his exalted perfection. The contemplation and worship of him comes as the final and highest stage of a life which is organic and continuous throughout. The love of G.o.d is the natural love when it has found its true object.

"For he who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty--and this, Socrates, is that final cause of all our former toils, which in the first place is everlasting--not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; in the next place not fair in one point of view and foul in another, . . . or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, nor existing in any other being; . . .

but beauty only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things."[347:15]

The religion of Spinoza is the religion of one who has renounced the favor of the universe. He was deprived early in life of every benefit of fortune, and set out to find the good which required no special dispensation but only the common lot and the common human endowment. He found that good to consist in the conviction of the necessity, made acceptable through the supremacy of the understanding. The like faith of the Stoics makes of no account the difference of fortune between Marcus the emperor and Epictetus the slave.

"For two reasons, then, it is right to be content with that which happens to thee; the one because it was done for thee and prescribed for thee, and in a manner had reference to thee, originally from the most ancient causes spun with thy destiny; and the other because even that which comes severally to every man is to the power which administers the universe a cause of felicity and perfection, nay even of its very continuance. For the integrity of the whole is mutilated, if thou cuttest off anything whatever from the conjunction and the continuity either of the parts or of the causes. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the way."[348:16]

FOOTNOTES:

[306:1] By _Absolute Realism_ is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe as the _absolute being_, implied in knowledge as its final object, but a.s.sumed to be independent of knowledge. In the _Spinozistic_ system this absolute being is conceived under the form of _substance_, or self-sufficiency; in _Platonism_ under the form of _perfection_; and in the _Aristotelian_ system under the form of a _hierarchy of substances_.

[308:2] Burnet: _Early Greek Philosophy_, p. 185.

[309:3] When contrasted with the temporal realm of "generation and decay," this ultimate object is often called the _eternal_.

[311:4] Holland, 1632-1677.

[312:5] Spinoza: _Ethics_, Part I. Translation by Elwes, p. 45.