Plato and Platonism

DIAL

he metrical form earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physe?s,+ "Concerning Nature"; according t

tuated midway between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubiou

natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing-of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities-is indicative of Montaigne's peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary form

hus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer's own mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the dialogue-that peculiar modification of the essay-anything less than essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the organism of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato's Dialogues, in fact, reflect, they refine [177] upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in which, by preference to a

ies the validity of the method-in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one's self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or "universal definitions," or notions, those "ideas," which, according to Plato, are the proper objects of all real knowledge; concerning the adequacy of one's hold upon them; the relationship to them of other notions; the plausible conjectures in our own or other

ena, to the facts, daintily, to the end that the said thought might just cover those facts, and no more. To the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus articulated, it was necessary to adjust the term; the term, or "definition," by which it might be conveyed into the mind of another. The dialogue-the freedom, the variety and elasticity, of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone afforded the room necessary for that long and complex process. If one, if Socrates, seemed to become [179] the teacher of another, it was but by thinking aloud for a few moments over hi

the more flexible the better. It was like a journey indeed, that essay towards Justice, for example, or the true Polity; a journey, not along the simple road to Athens, but to a mountain's top. The proportions, the outline, the relation of the thing to its neighbours,-how do the inexperienced in such journeys mistake them, as they climb! What repeated misconceptions, embodying, one by one, some mere particularity of view, the perspective of this or that point of view, forthwith abandoned, some apprehension of mountain form and structure, just a little short, or, it may be, immeasurably short, of what Plato would call the "synoptic" view of the mountain as a whole. From this or that point, som

ady changed. "Persevere," Plato might say, "and a step may be made, upon which, again, the whole world around may change, the entire horizon and its relation to the point you stand on-a change from the half-light of conjecture to the full light of indefectible certitude." That, of course, can only happen by a summary act of intuition upon the entire perspective, wherein all those partial apprehensions, which one by one may have seemed inconsistent with each other, find their due place, or (to return to the Platonic Dialogue again, to the actual process of dialectic as there exposed) by that final impression of a subject, a theorem,

y explaining difficulties by the way, as one can best do, by question and answer with him; above all, never falling into the mistake of the obscurum per obscurius. At another time it may seem to aim at plausibility of another sort; at mutual complaisance, as Thrasymachus complains. It would be possible, of course, to present an insincere dialogue, in which certain of the disputants shall be mere men of straw. In the Philebus again, dialectic is only the name of the process (described there [183] as exactly, almost as technically, as Aristotle,

e, which, in return, lends its name to the method it figures- "dialectic." Well! in that long and complex dialogue of the mind with itself, many persons, so to speak, will necessarily take part; so many persons as there are possible contrasts or shades [184] in the apprehension of some complex subject. The advocatus diaboli will be heard from time to time. The dog also, or, as the Greeks said, the wolf, will out with his story against the man; and one of the interlocutors will always be a child, turning round upon us innocently, candidly, with our own admissions, or surprising us, perhaps at the last m

y," seems at times to be in charge of a kind of "Providence." Or again, it will be as when hunters or bird- catchers "beat [185] the bush," as we say: Plato elaborates that figure in The Republic. Only, if they be knowing in the process, a fair percentage of birds will be found and taken. All the chances, or graces, of such a method, as actually followed in a

s, as such, sometimes-"by reason that, like ourselves, our discourses (our Platonic discourses, as such) have much participation in the temerity of chance." Of course, as in any other occasional conversation, with its dependence on the hour and the scene, the persons we are with, the humours of the moment, there will always be much of accident in this essentially informal, this un-methodical, [

he admits, "is easily refuted. Say rather, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth." That is reassuring, certainly! For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en caricature, in the Euthydemus, "Such is

then, that, as Lessing suggests, the search for t

and he makes for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real knowledge, he does think, or inclines his reader to think, that truth, precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be, in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various approximation, and of an "economy," as is said; that it

t does but propose further to explain and apply.-The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than cl

crates, of which the [189] famous Socratic irony-the pretence to have a bad memory, to dislike or distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a mid-wife in relation to other people's thoughts-was an element, is more than a mere personal trait; that it was welcome as affording a means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching. It belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic, of question and answer as t

eauty, and the like; objects which, after all, to the Platonist are matters of the?ria,+ of immediate intuition, of immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal experience; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words. Place, then, must be left to the last in any legitimate dialectic process for possible after-thoughts; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary conclusion, and leaves off only because time is up, or when, as he says, one leaves off seeking through weariness (apokamn?n).+ "What thought can think, another thought can mend." Another turn in the endless road may change the whole character of the perspective. You cannot, as the Sophi

h all its large outlook, has something of the irregularity, the accident, the heats and confusion, of life itself-a method of reasoning which can only in a certain measure be reasoned upon. How different the exactness which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to secure, in scientific procedure! For him, dialectic, Platonic dialectic, is, at best, a part of "eristic" [192] -of the art, or trick, of merely popular and approximate debate, in matters where science is out of the question, and rhetoric has its office, not in providing for the intelligence, but in moulding the sentiments and the will. Conversely to that absoluteness and necessity which Plato himself supposes

rtly through his predecessors, and his contemporaries; but in part also by his followers, by the light his later mental kinsmen throw back on the conscious or unconscious drift of his teaching. Now there are in the history of philosophy two opposite Platonic traditions; two legitimate yet divergent streams of influence from him. Two very different yet equally representative scholars we may see in thought emerging from his school. The "theory of the Ideas," the high ideal, the uncompromising demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the na

has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne-that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance-conversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from Descartes t

ect Justice, a more perfect Beauty, physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs, than any one has ever yet seen; that kosmos,+ in which things are only as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they stand, the two [196] great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of "ideas," "the great perhaps," for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:-

O

i Physe?s. Pater's transla

archaism for situated, or it may simply be a typ

iley's earlier Dictionary gives another suggestive use of the word "am

. Liddell and Scott definition:

t?n dikaiosyn?n. Pater's translation: "to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we mi

sis, methodos. Liddell and Scott d

"But let us follow out [a different path of thought]," or "let's examin

os. Pater's translation: "reasona

on: "like to like." Variants of the phrase occur in many

? iteon. Pater's translation: "we must just go where the argument c

tt definition "1. knowledge, understanding, skil

dyneuei. Pater's translati

, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection." Pater defines it in

nd Scott definition: "grow[ing] quite weary

E- text editor's translation: "liberally." The exchange between Thra

os peirastikos. Pater's trans

od behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order: of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion