the people should be philosophers, we must certainty consider what
was understood by Philosophy in the Platonic sense and in the sense
of the times. The word Philosophy has had in different periods very
different significations. There was a time when a man who did not
believe in spectres or in the devil was called a philosopher. When
such ideas as these pass away, it does not occur to people to call
anyone a philosopher for a reason such as this. The English consider
what we call experimental physics to be Philosophy; a philosopher to
them is anyone who makes investigations in, and possesses a theoretic
knowledge of chemistry, mechanics, &c. (Vol. I. p. 57). In Plato
Philosophy becomes mingled with the knowledge of the supersensuous,
or what to us is religious knowledge. The Platonic philosophy is thus
the knowledge of the absolutely true and right, the knowledge of
universal ends in the state, and the recognition of their validity. In
all the history of the migration of the nations, when the Christian
religion became the universal religion, the only point of interest was
to conceive the supersensuous kingdom—which was at first independent,
absolutely universal and true—as actualized, and to determine actuality
in conformity thereto. This has been from that time forth the business
of culture. A state, a government and constitution of modern times
has hence quite a different basis from a state of ancient times, and
particularly from one of Plato’s day. The Greeks were then altogether
dissatisfied with their democratic constitution, and the conditions
resulting from it (_supra_, p. 8), and similarly all philosophers
condemned the democracies of the Greek states in which such things
as the punishment of generals (_supra_, Vol. I. p. 391) took place.
In such a constitution it might certainly be thought that what was
best for the state would be the first subject of consideration; but
arbitrariness prevailed, and this was only temporarily restrained by
preponderating individualities, or by masters in statesmanship like
Aristides, Themistocles, and others. This condition of matters preceded
the disintegration of the constitution. In our states, on the other
hand, the end of the state, what is best for all, is immanent and
efficacious in quite another way than was the case in olden times. The
condition of the laws and courts of justice, of the constitution and
spirit of the people, is so firmly established in itself that matters
of the passing moment alone remain to be decided; and it may even be
asked what, if anything, is dependent on the individual.
To us government means that in the actual state procedure will be in
accordance with the nature of the thing, and since a knowledge of the
Notion of the thing is requisite to this, actuality is brought into
harmony with the Notion, and thereby the Idea is realized in existence.
The result of this thus is that when Plato says that philosophers
should rule, he signifies the determination of the whole matter through
universal principles. This is realized much more in modern states,
because universal principles really form the bases—certainly not of
all, but of most of them. Some have already reached this stage, others
are striving to reach it, but all recognize that such principles must
constitute the real substance of administration and rule.
What Plato demands is thus, in point of fact, already present. But what
we call Philosophy, movement in pure thoughts, has to do with form, and
this is something peculiar to itself; nevertheless, the form is not
responsible if the universal, freedom, law, is not made a principle in
a state. Marcus Aurelius is an example of what a philosopher upon a
throne could effect; we have, however, only private actions to record
of him, and the Roman Empire was made no better by him. Frederick
II. was, on the other hand, justly called the philosopher king. He
occupied himself with the Wolffian metaphysics and French philosophy
and verses, and was thus, according to his times, a philosopher.
Philosophy appears to have been an affair of his own particular
inclination, and quite distinct from the fact that he was king. But he
was also a philosophic king in the sense that he made for himself an
entirely universal end, the well-being and good of the state, a guiding
principle in his actions and in all his regulations in respect to
treaties with other states, and to the rights of individuals at home;
these last he entirely subordinated to absolutely universal ends. If,
however, later on, procedure of this kind became ordinary custom, the
succeeding princes are no longer called philosophers, even if the same
principle is present to them, and the government, and especially the
institutions, are founded on it.
In the Republic, Plato further speaks in a figure of the difference
between a condition of philosophic culture and a lack of Philosophy:
it is a long comparison which is both striking and brilliant. The idea
which he makes use of is as follows:—“Let us think of an underground
den like a cave with a long entrance opening to the light. Its
inhabitants are chained so that they cannot move their necks, and can
see only the back of the cave. Far behind their backs a torch burns
above them. In the intervening space there is a raised way and also
a low wall; and behind this wall” (towards the light) “there are men
who carry and raise above it all manner of statues of men and animals
like puppets in a marionette show, sometimes talking to one another
meanwhile, and sometimes silent. Those who are chained would see only
the shadows which fall on the opposite wall, and they would take them
for reality; they would hear, moreover, by means of the echo, what
was said by those who moved the figures, and they would think that
it was the voice of the shadows. Now if one of the prisoners were
released, and compelled to turn his neck so as to see things as they
are, he would think that what he saw was an illusive dream, and that
the shadows were the reality. And if anyone were to take him out of
the prison into the light itself, he would be dazzled by the light and
could see nothing; and he would hate the person who brought him to the
light, as having taken away what was to him the truth, and prepared
only pain and evil in its place.”[16] This kind of myth is in harmony
with the character of the Platonic philosophy, in that it separates the
conception of the sensuous world present in men from the knowledge of
the supersensuous.
Since we now speak more fully of this matter, we must in the second
place consider the nature of knowledge according to Plato, and in so
doing commence our account of the Platonic philosophy itself.
a. Plato gave a more precise definition of philosophers as those
“who are eager to behold the truth.”—Glaucon: “That is quite right.
But how do you explain it?” Socrates: “I tell this not to everyone,
but you will agree with me in it.” “In what?” “In this, that as the
Beautiful is opposed to the Ugly, they are two things.” “Why not?”
“With the Just and the Unjust, the Good and the Evil, and every other
Idea (εἶδος) the case is the same, that each of them is by itself a
One; on the other hand, on account of its combination with actions and
bodies and other Ideas springing up on every side, each appears as a
Many.” “You are right.” “I distinguish now, according to this, between
the sight-loving, art-loving, busy class on the one side, and those
on the other side, of whom we were just speaking as alone entitled to
be called philosophers.” “What do you mean by that?” “I mean by that,
such as delight in seeing and hearing, who love beautiful voices, and
colours, and forms, and all that is composed thereof, while their
mind is still incapable of seeing and loving the Beautiful in its own
nature.” “Such is the case.” “Those, however, who have the power of
passing on to the Beautiful itself, and seeing what it is in itself
(καθ̓ αὐτό), are they not rare?” “They are indeed.” “He then who sees
that beautiful things are beautiful, but does not apprehend Beauty
itself, and cannot follow if another should seek to lead him to the
knowledge of the same,—think you that he lives his life awake, or in
a dream?” (That is to say, those who are not philosophers are like
men who dream.) “For look, is it not dreaming when one in sleep, or
even when awake, takes what merely resembles a certain thing to be not
something that resembles it, but the very thing that it is like?” “I
should certainly say of such an one that he was dreaming.” “The waking
man, on the other hand, is he who holds the Beautiful itself to be the
Existent, and can recognize its very self as well as that which only
partakes of it (μετέχονυα), and does not confuse between the two.”[17]
In this account of Philosophy, we at once see what the so much talked
of Ideas of Plato are. The Idea is nothing else than that which is
known to us more familiarly by the name of the Universal, regarded,
however, not as the formal Universal, which is only a property of
things, but as implicitly and explicitly existent, as reality, as
that which alone is true. We translate εἶδος first of all as species
or kind; and the Idea is no doubt the species, but rather as it is
apprehended by and exists for Thought. Of course when we understand by
species nothing but the gathering together by our reflection, and for
convenience sake, of the like characteristics of several individuals
as indicating their distinguishing features, we have the universal in
quite an external form. But the specific character of the animal is its
being alive; this being alive is that which makes it what it is, and
deprived of this, it ceases to exist. To Plato, accordingly, Philosophy
is really the science of this implicitly universal, to which, as
contrasted with the particular, he always continues to return. “When
Plato spoke of tableness and cupness, Diogenes the Cynic said: ‘I see a
table and a cup, to be sure, but not tableness and cupness.’ ‘Right,’
answered Plato; ‘for you have eyes wherewith to see the table and the
cup, but mind, by which one sees tableness and cupness, you have not
(νοῦν οὐκ ἔχεις).’”[18] What Socrates began was carried out by Plato,
who acknowledged only the Universal, the Idea, the Good, as that which
has existence. Through the presentation of his Ideas, Plato opened
up the intellectual world, which, however, is not beyond reality, in
heaven, in another place, but is the real world. With Leucippus, too,
the Ideal is brought closer to reality, and not—metaphysically—thrust
away behind Nature. The essence of the doctrine of Ideas is thus
the view that the True is not that which exists for the senses, but
that only what has its determination in itself, the implicitly and
explicitly Universal, truly exists in the world; the intellectual world
is therefore the True, that which is worthy to be known—indeed, the
Eternal, the implicitly and explicitly divine. The differences are not
essential, but only transitory; yet the Absolute of Plato, as being the
one in itself and identical with itself, is at the same time concrete
in itself, in that it is a movement returning into itself, and is
eternally at home with itself. But love for Ideas is that which Plato
calls enthusiasm.
The misapprehension of Plato’s Ideas takes two directions; one of these
has to do with the thinking, which is formal, and holds as true reality
the sensuous alone, or what is conceived of through the senses—this
is what Plato asserts to be mere shadows. For when Plato speaks of
the Universal as the real, his conception of it is met either by the
statement that the Universal is present to us only as a property, and
is therefore a mere thought in our understanding, or else that Plato
takes this same Universal as substance, as an existence in itself,
which, however, falls outside of us. When Plato further uses the
expression that sensuous things are, like images (εἰκόνες), similar to
that which has absolute existence, or that the Idea is their pattern
and model (παραδεῖγμα), if these Ideas are not exactly made into
things, they are made into a kind of transcendent existences which
lie somewhere far from us in an understanding outside this world, and
are pictures set up which we merely do not see; they are like the
artist’s model, following which he works upon a given material, and
thereon impresses the likeness of the original. And owing to their
not only being removed from this sensuous present reality, which
passes for truth, but also being liberated from the actuality of the
individual consciousness, their subject, of which they are originally
the representations, passes out of consciousness, and even comes to be
represented only as something which is apart from consciousness.
The second misapprehension that prevails with regard to these Ideas
takes place when they are not transferred beyond our consciousness,
but pass for ideals of our reason, which are no doubt necessary, but
which produce nothing that either has reality now or can ever attain to
it. As in the former view the Beyond is a conception that lies outside
the world, and in which species are hypostatized, so in this view
our reason is just such a realm beyond reality. But when species are
looked on as if they were the forms of reality in us, there is again a
misapprehension, just as if they were looked at as æsthetic in nature.
By so doing, they are defined as intellectual perceptions which must
present themselves immediately, and belong either to a happy genius
or else to a condition of ecstasy or enthusiasm. In such a case they
would be mere creations of the imagination, but this is not Plato’s nor
the true sense. They are not immediately in consciousness, but they
are in the apprehending knowledge; and they are immediate perceptions
only in so far as they are apprehending knowledge comprehended in its
simplicity and in relation to the result; in other words, the immediate
perception is only the moment of their simplicity. Therefore we do not
possess them, they are developed in the mind through the apprehending
knowledge; enthusiasm is the first rude shape they take, but knowledge
first brings them to light in rational developed form; they are in this
form none the less real, for they alone are Being.
On this account Plato first of all distinguishes Science, the Knowledge
of the True, from opinion. “Such thinking (διάνοιαν) as of one who
knows, we may justly call knowledge (γνώμην); but the other, opinion
(δόξαν). Knowledge proceeds from that which is; opinion is opposed to
it; but it is not the case that its content is Nothing—that would be
ignorance—for when an opinion is held, it is held about Something.
Opinion is thus intermediate between ignorance and science, its content
is a mixture of Being and Nothing. The object of the senses, the object
of opinion, the particular, only participates in the Beautiful, the
Good, the Just, the Universal; but it is at the same time also ugly,
evil, unjust, and so on. The double is at the same time the half. The
particular is not only large or small, light or heavy, and any one of
these opposites, but every particular is as much the one as the other.
Such a mixture of Being and non-Being is the particular, the object
of opinion;”[19]—a mixture in which the opposites have not resolved
themselves into the Universal. The latter would be the speculative
Idea of knowledge, while to opinion belongs the manner of our ordinary
consciousness.
b. Before we commence the examination of the objective implicitly
existent content of knowledge, we must consider more in detail, on the
one hand, the subjective existence of knowledge in consciousness as we
find it in Plato, and, on the other, how the content is or appears in
ordinary conception as soul; and the two together form the relation of
knowledge, as the universal, to the individual consciousness.
α. The source through which we become conscious of the divine is the
same as that already seen in Socrates (Vol. I. pp. 410, 411). The
spirit of man contains reality in itself, and in order to learn what is
divine he must develop it out of himself and bring it to consciousness.
With the Socratics this discussion respecting the immanent nature of
knowledge in the mind of man takes the form of a question as to whether
virtue can be taught or not, and with the sophist Protagoras of asking
whether feeling is the truth, which is allied with the question of the
content of scientific knowledge, and with the distinction between that
and opinion. But Plato goes on to say that the process by which we
come to know is not, properly speaking, learning, for that which we
appear to learn we really only recollect. Plato often comes back to
this subject, but in particular he treats of the point in the Meno,
in which he asserts (p. 81, 84 Steph.; p. 349, 355, 356 Bekk.) that
nothing can, properly speaking, be learned, for learning is just a
recollection of what we already possess, to which the perplexity in
which our minds are placed, merely acts as stimulus. Plato here gives
the question a speculative significance, in which the reality of
knowledge, and not the empirical view of the acquisition of knowledge,
is dealt with. For learning, according to the immediate ordinary
conception of it, expresses the taking up of what is foreign into
thinking consciousness, a mechanical mode of union and the filling of
an empty space with things which are foreign and indifferent to this
space itself. An external method of effecting increase such as this,
in which the soul appears to be a _tabula rasa_, and which resembles
the idea we form of growth going on in the living body through the
addition of particles, is dead, and is incompatible with the nature
of mind, which is subjectivity, unity, being and remaining at home
with itself. But Plato presents the true nature of consciousness in
asserting that it is mind in which, as mind, that is already present
which becomes object to consciousness, or which it explicitly becomes.
This is the Notion of the true universal in its movement; of the
species which is in itself its own Becoming, in that it is already
implicitly what it explicitly becomes—a process in which it does not
come outside of itself. Mind is this absolute species, whose process
is only the continual return into itself; thus nothing is for it which
it is not in itself. According to this, the process of learning is
not that something foreign enters in, but that the mind’s own essence
becomes actualized, or it comes to the knowledge of this last. What has
not yet learned is the soul, the consciousness represented as natural
being. What causes the mind to turn to science is the semblance, and
the confusion caused through it, of the essential nature of mind being
something different, or the negative of itself—a mode of manifestation
which contradicts its real nature, for it has or is the inward
certainty of being all reality. In that it abrogates this semblance
of other-being, it comprehends the objective, _i.e._ gives itself
immediately in it the consciousness of itself, and thus attains to
science. Ideas of individual, temporal, transitory things undoubtedly
come from without, but not the universal thoughts which, as the true,
have their root in the mind and belong to its nature; by this means all
authority is destroyed.
In one sense recollection [Erinnerung] is certainly an unfortunate
expression, in the sense, namely, that an idea is reproduced which
has already existed at another time. But recollection has another
sense, which is given by its etymology, namely that of making oneself
inward, going inward, and this is the profound meaning of the word in
thought. In this sense it may undoubtedly be said that knowledge of
the universal is nothing but a recollection, a going within self, and
that we make that which at first shows itself in external form and
determined as a manifold, into an inward, a universal, because we go
into ourselves and thus bring what is inward in us into consciousness.
With Plato, however, as we cannot deny, the word recollection has
constantly the first and empirical sense. This comes from the fact
that Plato propounds the true Notion that consciousness in itself
is the content of knowledge, partly in the form of popular idea and
in that of myths. Hence here even, the already mentioned (p. 18)
intermingling of idea and Notion commences. In the Meno (p. 82-86
Steph.; p. 350-360 Bekk.) Socrates tries to show, by experiment on a
slave who had received no instruction, that learning is a recollection.
Socrates merely questions him, leaving him to answer in his own way,
without either teaching him or asserting the truth of any fact, and
at length brings him to the enunciation of a geometrical proposition
on the relation which the diagonal of a square bears to its side. The
slave obtains the knowledge out of himself alone, so that it appears as
though he only recollected what he already knew but had forgotten. Now
if Plato here calls this coming forth of knowledge from consciousness a
recollection, it follows that this knowledge has been already in this
consciousness, _i.e._ that the individual consciousness has not only
the content of knowledge implicitly, in accordance with its essential
nature, but has also possessed it as this individual consciousness and
not as universal. But this moment of individuality belongs only to the
ordinary conception, and recollection is not thought; for recollection
relates to man as a sensuous “this,” and not as a universal. The
essential nature of the coming forth of knowledge is hence here mingled
with the individual, with ordinary conception, and knowledge here
appears in the form of soul, as of the implicitly existent reality,
the one, for the soul is still only a moment of spirit. As Plato here
passes into a conception the content of which has no longer the pure
significance of the universal, but of the individual, he further
depicts it in the form of a myth. He represents the implicit existence
of mind in the form of a pre-existence in time, as if the truth had
already been for us in another time. But at the same time we must
remark that he does not propound this as a philosophic doctrine, but
in the form of a saying received from priests and priestesses who
comprehend what is divine. Pindar and other holy men say the same.
According to these sayings, the human soul is immortal; it both ceases
to be, or, as men say, it dies, and it comes again into existence, but
in no way perishes. “Now if the soul is immortal and often reappears”
(metempsychosis), “and if it has seen that which is here as well as
in Hades,” (in unconsciousness) “and everything else, learning has no
more meaning, for it only recollects what it has already known.”[20]
Historians seize upon this allusion to what is really an Egyptian
idea, and a sensuous conception merely, and say that Plato has laid
down that such and such was the case. But Plato made no such statement
whatever; what he here says has nothing to do with Philosophy, and more
particularly nothing to do with his philosophy, any more than what
afterwards is said regarding God.
β. In other Dialogues this myth is further and more strikingly
developed; it certainly employs remembrance in its ordinary sense,
which is that the mind of man has in past time seen that which comes
to his consciousness as the true and absolutely existent. Plato’s
principal effort is, however, to show through this assertion of
recollection, that the mind, the soul, thought, is on its own account
free, and this has to the ancients, and particularly to the Platonic
idea, a close connection with what we call immortality of the soul.