under six or seven heads:--(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest;
(3) the political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and
paradoxical vein; (5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the
relation of the work to the other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may
briefly consider the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which
can hardly be assumed without proof, since the two dialogues have
been questioned by three such eminent Platonic scholars as Socher,
Schaarschmidt, and Ueberweg.
I. The hand of the master is clearly visible in the myth. First in the
connection with mythology;--he wins a kind of verisimilitude for this
as for his other myths, by adopting received traditions, of which he
pretends to find an explanation in his own larger conception (compare
Introduction to Critias). The young Socrates has heard of the sun rising
in the west and setting in the east, and of the earth-born men; but he
has never heard the origin of these remarkable phenomena. Nor is Plato,
here or elsewhere, wanting in denunciations of the incredulity of 'this
latter age,' on which the lovers of the marvellous have always delighted
to enlarge. And he is not without express testimony to the truth of his
narrative;--such testimony as, in the Timaeus, the first men gave of the
names of the gods ('They must surely have known their own ancestors').
For the first generation of the new cycle, who lived near the time, are
supposed to have preserved a recollection of a previous one. He also
appeals to internal evidence, viz. the perfect coherence of the tale,
though he is very well aware, as he says in the Cratylus, that there may
be consistency in error as well as in truth. The gravity and minuteness
with which some particulars are related also lend an artful aid. The
profound interest and ready assent of the young Socrates, who is not too
old to be amused 'with a tale which a child would love to hear,' are a
further assistance. To those who were naturally inclined to believe that
the fortunes of mankind are influenced by the stars, or who maintained
that some one principle, like the principle of the Same and the Other
in the Timaeus, pervades all things in the world, the reversal of the
motion of the heavens seemed necessarily to produce a reversal of the
order of human life. The spheres of knowledge, which to us appear wide
asunder as the poles, astronomy and medicine, were naturally connected
in the minds of early thinkers, because there was little or nothing in
the space between them. Thus there is a basis of philosophy, on which
the improbabilities of the tale may be said to rest. These are some of
the devices by which Plato, like a modern novelist, seeks to familiarize
the marvellous.
The myth, like that of the Timaeus and Critias, is rather historical
than poetical, in this respect corresponding to the general change in
the later writings of Plato, when compared with the earlier ones. It
is hardly a myth in the sense in which the term might be applied to the
myth of the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Phaedo, or the Gorgias, but
may be more aptly compared with the didactic tale in which Protagoras
describes the fortunes of primitive man, or with the description of
the gradual rise of a new society in the Third Book of the Laws. Some
discrepancies may be observed between the mythology of the Statesman and
the Timaeus, and between the Timaeus and the Republic. But there is no
reason to expect that all Plato's visions of a former, any more than
of a future, state of existence, should conform exactly to the same
pattern. We do not find perfect consistency in his philosophy; and still
less have we any right to demand this of him in his use of mythology and
figures of speech. And we observe that while employing all the resources
of a writer of fiction to give credibility to his tales, he is not
disposed to insist upon their literal truth. Rather, as in the Phaedo,
he says, 'Something of the kind is true;' or, as in the Gorgias, 'This
you will think to be an old wife's tale, but you can think of nothing
truer;' or, as in the Statesman, he describes his work as a 'mass of
mythology,' which was introduced in order to teach certain lessons; or,
as in the Phaedrus, he secretly laughs at such stories while refusing to
disturb the popular belief in them.
The greater interest of the myth consists in the philosophical lessons
which Plato presents to us in this veiled form. Here, as in the tale
of Er, the son of Armenius, he touches upon the question of freedom and
necessity, both in relation to God and nature. For at first the universe
is governed by the immediate providence of God,--this is the golden
age,--but after a while the wheel is reversed, and man is left to
himself. Like other theologians and philosophers, Plato relegates his
explanation of the problem to a transcendental world; he speaks of what
in modern language might be termed 'impossibilities in the nature of
things,' hindering God from continuing immanent in the world. But there
is some inconsistency; for the 'letting go' is spoken of as a divine
act, and is at the same time attributed to the necessary imperfection of
matter; there is also a numerical necessity for the successive births
of souls. At first, man and the world retain their divine instincts, but
gradually degenerate. As in the Book of Genesis, the first fall of
man is succeeded by a second; the misery and wickedness of the world
increase continually. The reason of this further decline is supposed to
be the disorganisation of matter: the latent seeds of a former chaos are
disengaged, and envelope all things. The condition of man becomes more
and more miserable; he is perpetually waging an unequal warfare with the
beasts. At length he obtains such a measure of education and help as is
necessary for his existence. Though deprived of God's help, he is not
left wholly destitute; he has received from Athene and Hephaestus a
knowledge of the arts; other gods give him seeds and plants; and out of
these human life is reconstructed. He now eats bread in the sweat of his
brow, and has dominion over the animals, subjected to the conditions of
his nature, and yet able to cope with them by divine help. Thus Plato
may be said to represent in a figure--(1) the state of innocence; (2)
the fall of man; (3) the still deeper decline into barbarism; (4) the
restoration of man by the partial interference of God, and the natural
growth of the arts and of civilised society. Two lesser features of
this description should not pass unnoticed:--(1) the primitive men are
supposed to be created out of the earth, and not after the ordinary
manner of human generation--half the causes of moral evil are in this
way removed; (2) the arts are attributed to a divine revelation: and so
the greatest difficulty in the history of pre-historic man is solved.
Though no one knew better than Plato that the introduction of the gods
is not a reason, but an excuse for not giving a reason (Cratylus), yet,
considering that more than two thousand years later mankind are still
discussing these problems, we may be satisfied to find in Plato a
statement of the difficulties which arise in conceiving the relation of
man to God and nature, without expecting to obtain from him a solution
of them. In such a tale, as in the Phaedrus, various aspects of the
Ideas were doubtless indicated to Plato's own mind, as the corresponding
theological problems are to us. The immanence of things in the Ideas, or
the partial separation of them, and the self-motion of the supreme
Idea, are probably the forms in which he would have interpreted his own
parable.
He touches upon another question of great interest--the consciousness of
evil--what in the Jewish Scriptures is called 'eating of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.' At the end of the narrative, the Eleatic
asks his companion whether this life of innocence, or that which men
live at present, is the better of the two. He wants to distinguish
between the mere animal life of innocence, the 'city of pigs,' as it
is comically termed by Glaucon in the Republic, and the higher life of
reason and philosophy. But as no one can determine the state of man
in the world before the Fall, 'the question must remain unanswered.'
Similar questions have occupied the minds of theologians in later ages;
but they can hardly be said to have found an answer. Professor Campbell
well observes, that the general spirit of the myth may be summed up in
the words of the Lysis: 'If evil were to perish, should we hunger any
more, or thirst any more, or have any similar sensations? Yet perhaps
the question what will or will not be is a foolish one, for who can
tell?' As in the Theaetetus, evil is supposed to continue,--here, as the
consequence of a former state of the world, a sort of mephitic vapour
exhaling from some ancient chaos,--there, as involved in the possibility
of good, and incident to the mixed state of man.
Once more--and this is the point of connexion with the rest of the
dialogue--the myth is intended to bring out the difference between the
ideal and the actual state of man. In all ages of the world men have
dreamed of a state of perfection, which has been, and is to be, but
never is, and seems to disappear under the necessary conditions of human
society. The uselessness, the danger, the true value of such political
ideals have often been discussed; youth is too ready to believe in
them; age to disparage them. Plato's 'prudens quaestio' respecting the
comparative happiness of men in this and in a former cycle of existence
is intended to elicit this contrast between the golden age and 'the
life under Zeus' which is our own. To confuse the divine and human, or
hastily apply one to the other, is a 'tremendous error.' Of the ideal
or divine government of the world we can form no true or adequate
conception; and this our mixed state of life, in which we are partly
left to ourselves, but not wholly deserted by the gods, may contain some
higher elements of good and knowledge than could have existed in the
days of innocence under the rule of Cronos. So we may venture slightly
to enlarge a Platonic thought which admits of a further application to
Christian theology. Here are suggested also the distinctions between
God causing and permitting evil, and between his more and less immediate
government of the world.
II. The dialectical interest of the Statesman seems to contend in
Plato's mind with the political; the dialogue might have been
designated by two equally descriptive titles--either the 'Statesman,' or
'Concerning Method.' Dialectic, which in the earlier writings of Plato
is a revival of the Socratic question and answer applied to definition,
is now occupied with classification; there is nothing in which he takes
greater delight than in processes of division (compare Phaedr.); he
pursues them to a length out of proportion to his main subject, and
appears to value them as a dialectical exercise, and for their own sake.
A poetical vision of some order or hierarchy of ideas or sciences has
already been floating before us in the Symposium and the Republic. And
in the Phaedrus this aspect of dialectic is further sketched out,
and the art of rhetoric is based on the division of the characters
of mankind into their several classes. The same love of divisions is
apparent in the Gorgias. But in a well-known passage of the Philebus
occurs the first criticism on the nature of classification. There we
are exhorted not to fall into the common error of passing from unity to
infinity, but to find the intermediate classes; and we are reminded that
in any process of generalization, there may be more than one class to
which individuals may be referred, and that we must carry on the process
of division until we have arrived at the infima species.
These precepts are not forgotten, either in the Sophist or in the
Statesman. The Sophist contains four examples of division, carried on
by regular steps, until in four different lines of descent we detect
the Sophist. In the Statesman the king or statesman is discovered by
a similar process; and we have a summary, probably made for the first
time, of possessions appropriated by the labour of man, which are
distributed into seven classes. We are warned against preferring the
shorter to the longer method;--if we divide in the middle, we are most
likely to light upon species; at the same time, the important remark
is made, that 'a part is not to be confounded with a class.' Having
discovered the genus under which the king falls, we proceed to
distinguish him from the collateral species. To assist our imagination
in making this separation, we require an example. The higher ideas,
of which we have a dreamy knowledge, can only be represented by images
taken from the external world. But, first of all, the nature of example
is explained by an example. The child is taught to read by comparing
the letters in words which he knows with the same letters in unknown
combinations; and this is the sort of process which we are about to
attempt. As a parallel to the king we select the worker in wool, and
compare the art of weaving with the royal science, trying to separate
either of them from the inferior classes to which they are akin. This
has the incidental advantage, that weaving and the web furnish us with a
figure of speech, which we can afterwards transfer to the State.
There are two uses of examples or images--in the first place, they
suggest thoughts--secondly, they give them a distinct form. In the
infancy of philosophy, as in childhood, the language of pictures is
natural to man: truth in the abstract is hardly won, and only by use
familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a
reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often
originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the
suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly
employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts--weaving,
the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting,
medicine, the art of the pilot--all of which occur in this dialogue
alone: though he is also aware that 'comparisons are slippery things,'
and may often give a false clearness to ideas. We shall find, in the
Philebus, a division of sciences into practical and speculative, and
into more or less speculative: here we have the idea of master-arts,
or sciences which control inferior ones. Besides the supreme science
of dialectic, 'which will forget us, if we forget her,' another
master-science for the first time appears in view--the science of
government, which fixes the limits of all the rest. This conception
of the political or royal science as, from another point of view, the
science of sciences, which holds sway over the rest, is not originally
found in Aristotle, but in Plato.
The doctrine that virtue and art are in a mean, which is familiarized
to us by the study of the Nicomachean Ethics, is also first distinctly
asserted in the Statesman of Plato. The too much and the too little
are in restless motion: they must be fixed by a mean, which is also
a standard external to them. The art of measuring or finding a mean
between excess and defect, like the principle of division in the
Phaedrus, receives a particular application to the art of discourse. The
excessive length of a discourse may be blamed; but who can say what is
excess, unless he is furnished with a measure or standard? Measure is
the life of the arts, and may some day be discovered to be the single
ultimate principle in which all the sciences are contained. Other forms
of thought may be noted--the distinction between causal and co-operative
arts, which may be compared with the distinction between primary and
co-operative causes in the Timaeus; or between cause and condition in
the Phaedo; the passing mention of economical science; the opposition of
rest and motion, which is found in all nature; the general conception
of two great arts of composition and division, in which are contained
weaving, politics, dialectic; and in connexion with the conception of a
mean, the two arts of measuring.
In the Theaetetus, Plato remarks that precision in the use of terms,
though sometimes pedantic, is sometimes necessary. Here he makes the
opposite reflection, that there may be a philosophical disregard of
words. The evil of mere verbal oppositions, the requirement of an
impossible accuracy in the use of terms, the error of supposing that
philosophy was to be found in language, the danger of word-catching,
have frequently been discussed by him in the previous dialogues, but
nowhere has the spirit of modern inductive philosophy been more happily
indicated than in the words of the Statesman:--'If you think more about
things, and less about words, you will be richer in wisdom as you grow
older.' A similar spirit is discernible in the remarkable expressions,
'the long and difficult language of facts;' and 'the interrogation of
every nature, in order to obtain the particular contribution of each to
the store of knowledge.' Who has described 'the feeble intelligence of
all things; given by metaphysics better than the Eleatic Stranger in
the words--'The higher ideas can hardly be set forth except through
the medium of examples; every man seems to know all things in a kind of
dream, and then again nothing when he is awake?' Or where is the value
of metaphysical pursuits more truly expressed than in the words,--'The
greatest and noblest things have no outward image of themselves visible
to man: therefore we should learn to give a rational account of them?'
III. The political aspects of the dialogue are closely connected
with the dialectical. As in the Cratylus, the legislator has 'the
dialectician standing on his right hand;' so in the Statesman, the king
or statesman is the dialectician, who, although he may be in a private
station, is still a king. Whether he has the power or not, is a mere
accident; or rather he has the power, for what ought to be is ('Was
ist vernunftig, das ist wirklich'); and he ought to be and is the true
governor of mankind. There is a reflection in this idealism of the
Socratic 'Virtue is knowledge;' and, without idealism, we may remark
that knowledge is a great part of power. Plato does not trouble himself
to construct a machinery by which 'philosophers shall be made kings,' as
in the Republic: he merely holds up the ideal, and affirms that in some
sense science is really supreme over human life.
He is struck by the observation 'quam parva sapientia regitur mundus,'
and is touched with a feeling of the ills which afflict states. The
condition of Megara before and during the Peloponnesian War, of Athens
under the Thirty and afterwards, of Syracuse and the other Sicilian
cities in their alternations of democratic excess and tyranny, might
naturally suggest such reflections. Some states he sees already
shipwrecked, others foundering for want of a pilot; and he wonders not
at their destruction, but at their endurance. For they ought to have
perished long ago, if they had depended on the wisdom of their rulers.
The mingled pathos and satire of this remark is characteristic of
Plato's later style.
The king is the personification of political science. And yet he is
something more than this,--the perfectly good and wise tyrant of the
Laws, whose will is better than any law. He is the special providence
who is always interfering with and regulating all things. Such a
conception has sometimes been entertained by modern theologians, and by
Plato himself, of the Supreme Being. But whether applied to Divine or
to human governors the conception is faulty for two reasons, neither of
which are noticed by Plato:--first, because all good government supposes
a degree of co-operation in the ruler and his subjects,--an 'education
in politics' as well as in moral virtue; secondly, because government,
whether Divine or human, implies that the subject has a previous
knowledge of the rules under which he is living. There is a fallacy,
too, in comparing unchangeable laws with a personal governor. For the
law need not necessarily be an 'ignorant and brutal tyrant,' but gentle
and humane, capable of being altered in the spirit of the legislator,
and of being administered so as to meet the cases of individuals. Not
only in fact, but in idea, both elements must remain--the fixed law
and the living will; the written word and the spirit; the principles of
obligation and of freedom; and their applications whether made by law or
equity in particular cases.
There are two sides from which positive laws may be attacked:--either
from the side of nature, which rises up and rebels against them in the
spirit of Callicles in the Gorgias; or from the side of idealism, which
attempts to soar above them,--and this is the spirit of Plato in the
Statesman. But he soon falls, like Icarus, and is content to walk
instead of flying; that is, to accommodate himself to the actual state
of human things. Mankind have long been in despair of finding the true
ruler; and therefore are ready to acquiesce in any of the five or six
received forms of government as better than none. And the best thing
which they can do (though only the second best in reality), is to reduce
the ideal state to the conditions of actual life. Thus in the Statesman,
as in the Laws, we have three forms of government, which we may venture
to term, (1) the ideal, (2) the practical, (3) the sophistical--what
ought to be, what might be, what is. And thus Plato seems to stumble,
almost by accident, on the notion of a constitutional monarchy, or of a
monarchy ruling by laws.
The divine foundations of a State are to be laid deep in education
(Republic), and at the same time some little violence may be used in
exterminating natures which are incapable of education (compare Laws).
Plato is strongly of opinion that the legislator, like the physician,
may do men good against their will (compare Gorgias). The human bonds
of states are formed by the inter-marriage of dispositions adapted to
supply the defects of each other. As in the Republic, Plato has observed
that there are opposite natures in the world, the strong and the gentle,
the courageous and the temperate, which, borrowing an expression derived
from the image of weaving, he calls the warp and the woof of human
society. To interlace these is the crowning achievement of political
science. In the Protagoras, Socrates was maintaining that there was only
one virtue, and not many: now Plato is inclined to think that there
are not only parallel, but opposite virtues, and seems to see a similar
opposition pervading all art and nature. But he is satisfied with laying
down the principle, and does not inform us by what further steps the
union of opposites is to be effected.
In the loose framework of a single dialogue Plato has thus combined two
distinct subjects--politics and method. Yet they are not so far apart
as they appear: in his own mind there was a secret link of connexion
between them. For the philosopher or dialectician is also the only true
king or statesman. In the execution of his plan Plato has invented or
distinguished several important forms of thought, and made incidentally
many valuable remarks. Questions of interest both in ancient and modern
politics also arise in the course of the dialogue, which may with
advantage be further considered by us:--