[99] "SOPHIST," professional enemy of Socrates:--it became, chiefly
through the influence of Plato, inheriting, expanding, the preferences
and antipathies of his master, a bad name. Yet it had but indicated,
by a quite natural verbal formation, the class of persons through whom,
in the most effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand for
education, asserted by that marvellously ready Greek people, when the
youthful mind in them became suddenly aware of the coming of virile
capacity, and they desired to be made by rules of art better speakers,
better writers and accountants, than any merely natural, unassisted
gifts, however fortunate, could make them. While the peculiar
religiousness of Socrates had induced in him the conviction that he was
something less than a wise man, a philosopher only, a mere seeker after
such wisdom as he might after all never attain, here were the
sophistai,+ the experts--wise men, who proposed to make other people as
wise as themselves, wise in that sort of wisdom [100] regarding which
we can really test others, and let them test us, not with the merely
approximate results of the Socratic method, but with the exactness we
may apply to processes understood to be mechanical, or to the
proficiency of quite young students (such as in fact the Sophists were
dealing with) by those examinations which are so sufficient in their
proper place. It had been as delightful as learning a new game, that
instruction, in which you could measure your daily progress by
brilliant feats of skill. Not only did the parents of those young
students pay readily large sums for their instruction in what it was
found so useful to know, above all in the art of public speaking, of
self-defence, that is to say, in democratic Athens where one's personal
status was become so insecure; but the young students themselves felt
grateful for their institution in what told so immediately on their
fellows; for help in the comprehension of the difficult sentences of
another, or the improvement of one's own; for the accomplishments which
enabled them in that busy competitive world to push their fortunes each
one for himself a little further, and quite innocently. Of course they
listened.
"Love not the world!"--that, on the other hand, was what Socrates had
said, or seemed to say; though in truth he too meant only to teach them
how by a more circuitous but surer way to [101] possess themselves of
it. And youth, naturally curious and for the most part generous,
willing to undergo much for the mere promise of some good thing it can
scarcely even imagine, had been ready to listen to him too; the sons of
rich men most often, by no means to the dissatisfaction of Socrates
himself, though he never touched their money; young men who had amplest
leisure for the task of perfecting their souls, in a condition of
religious luxury, as we should perhaps say. As was evident in the
court-house at the trial of the great teacher, to the eyes of older
citizens who had not come under his personal influence, there had been
little to distinguish between Socrates and his professional rivals.
Socrates in truth was a Sophist; but more than a Sophist. Both alike
handled freely matters that to the fathers had seemed beyond question;
encouraged what seemed impious questioning in the sons; had set "the
hearts of the sons against the fathers"; and some instances there were
in which the teaching of Socrates had been more conspicuously ruinous
than theirs. "If you ask people at Athens," says Socrates in the Meno,
"how virtue is to be attained, they will laugh in your face and say
they don't so much as know what virtue is." And who was responsible
for that? Certainly that Dialogue, proposing to discover the essential
nature of virtue, by no means re-establishes one's old prepossessions
about it in the vein of [102] Simonides, or Pindar, or one's elders.
Sophist, and philosopher; Protagoras, and Socrates; so far, their
effect was the same:--to the horror of fathers, to put the minds of the
sons in motion regarding matters it were surely best to take as settled
once and for ever. What then after all was the insuperable difference
between Socrates and those rival teachers, with whom he had
nevertheless so much in common, bent like him so effectively, so
zealously, on that new study of man, of human nature and the moral
world, to the exclusion of all useless "meteoric or subterranean
enquiries" into things. As attractive as himself to ingenuous youth,
uncorrupt surely in its early intentions, why did the Sophists seem to
Socrates to be so manifestly an instrument of its corruption?
"The citizen of Athens," observed that great Athenian statesman of the
preceding age, in whom, as a German philosopher might say, the mobile
soul of Athens became conscious,--"The citizen of Athens seems to me to
present himself in his single person to the greatest possible variety
(pleista eidê)+ of thought and action, with the utmost degree of
versatility." As we saw, the example of that mobility, that daring
mobility, of character has seemed to many the special contribution of
the Greek people to advancing humanity. It was not however of the
Greek people in general that Pericles was speaking at the beginning of
the Peloponnesian [103] war, but of Athens in particular; of Athens,
that perfect flower of Ionian genius, in direct contrast to, and now in
bitter rivalry with, Sparta, the perfect flower of the Dorian genius.
All through Greek history, as we also saw, in connexion with Plato's
opposition to the philosophy of motion, there may be traced, in every
sphere of the activity of the Greek mind, the influence of those two
opposing tendencies:--the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies,
as we may perhaps not too fancifully call them.
There is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the Ionian or Asiatic,
tendency; flying from the centre, working with little forethought
straight before it in the development of every thought and fancy;
throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination;
delighting in colour and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful
material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in
architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself. In the
social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of local
and personal influences: its restless versatility drives it towards the
assertion of the principles of individualism, of separatism--the
separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions, the
development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and
individual in him. Shut off land-wards from the primitive sources of
those many elements it was to compose anew, shut off from all the rest
of the world, to [104] which it presented but one narrow entrance
pierced through that rock of Tempe, so narrow that "in the opinion of
the ancients it might be defended by a dozen men against all comers,"
it did recompose or fuse those many diverse elements into one
absolutely original type. But what variety within! Its very claim was
in its grace of movement, its freedom and easy happiness, its lively
interests, the variety of its gifts to civilisation; but its weakness
is self-evident, and was what had made the political unity of Greece
impossible. The Greek spirit!--it might have become a hydra, to use
Plato's own figure, a monster; the hand developing hideously into a
hundred hands, or heads.
This inorganic, this centrifugal, tendency, Plato was desirous to cure
by maintaining over against it the Dorian influence of a severe
simplification everywhere, in society, in culture, in the very physical
nature of man. An enemy everywhere, though through acquired principle
indeed rather than by instinct, to variegation, to what is cunning, or
"myriad-minded" (as we say of Shakespeare, as Plato thinks of Homer) he
sets himself in mythology, in literature, in every kind of art, in the
art of life, as if with conscious metaphysical opposition to the
metaphysic of Heraclitus, to enforce the ideal of a sort of Parmenidean
abstractness, and monotony or calm.
This, perhaps exaggerated, ideal of Plato is [105] however only the
exaggeration of that salutary, strictly European tendency, which,
finding human mind, the human reason cool and sane, to be the most
absolutely real and precious thing in the world, enforces everywhere
the impress of its reasonable sanity; its candid reflexions upon things
as they really are; its sense of logical proportion. It is that
centripetal tendency, again, which links the individual units together,
states to states, one period of organic growth to another, under the
reign of a strictly composed, self-conscious order, in the universal
light of the understanding.
Whether or not this temper, so clearly traceable as a distinct rival
influence in the course of Greek development, was indeed the peculiar
gift of the Dorian race, certainly that race, as made known to us
especially in Lacedaemon, is the best illustration of it, in its love
of order, of that severe composition everywhere, of which the Dorian
style of architecture is as it were a material symbol, in its constant
aspiration after what is dignified and earnest, as exemplified most
evidently in the religion of its preference, the religion of Apollo.
Now the key to Plato's view of the Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras,
Hippias, Prodicus, with their less brilliant followers--chosen
educators of the public--is that they do but fan and add fuel to the
fire in which Greece, as they wander [106] like ardent missionaries
about it, is flaming itself away. Teaching in their large,
fashionable, expensive schools, so triumphantly well, the arts one
needed most in so busy an age, they were really developing further and
reinforcing the ruinous fluidity of the Greek, and especially of the
Athenian people, by turning it very adroitly into a conscious method, a
practical philosophy, an art of life itself, in which all those
specific arts would be but subsidiary--an all-supplementing ars artium,
a master-art, or, in depreciatory Platonic mood one might say, an
artifice, or, cynically, a trick. The great sophist was indeed the
Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing victim of its own gifts,
its own flamboyancy, well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction of
its own parts, given over completely to hazardous political experiment
with the irresponsibility which is ever the great vice of democracy,
ever ready to float away anywhither, to misunderstand, or forget, or
discredit, its own past.--
Or do you too hold like the many (asks Socrates in the sixth
book of The Republic) that a certain number are corrupted
by sophists in their youth; and that certain sophists,
irresponsible persons, corrupt them to any extent worth noting;
and not rather that those who say these things are the greatest
sophists; that they train to perfection, and turn out both old
and young, men and women, just as they choose them to be?--When,
pray? He asked.--When seated together in their thousands at the
great assemblies, or in the law-courts, or the theatres, or the
camp, or any other common gathering of the public, with much
noise the majority praise this and blame [107] that in what is
said and done, both alike in excess, shouting and clapping; and
the very rocks too and the place in which they are, echoing
around, send back redoubled that clamour of praise and blame.
In such case, what heart as they say, what heart, think you,
can the young man keep? or what private education he may have
had hold out for him that it be not over-flooded by praise or
blame like that, and depart away, borne down the stream,
whithersoever that may carry it, and that he pronounce not
the same thing as they fair or foul; and follow the same ways
as they; and become like them? Republic, 492.+
The veritable sophist then, the dynamic sophist, was the Athenian
public of the day; those ostensible or professional Sophists being not
so much its intellectual directors as the pupils or followers of it.
They did but make it, as the French say, abound the more in its own
sense, like the keeper (it is Plato's own image) of some wild beast,
which he knows how to command by a well-considered obedience to all its
varying humours. If the Sophists are partly the cause they are still
more the effect of the social environment. They had discovered, had
ascertained with much acuteness, the actual momentum of the society
which maintained them, and they meant only, by regulating, to maintain
it. Protagoras, the chief of Sophists, had avowedly applied to ethics
the physics or metaphysics of Heraclitus. And now it was as if the
disintegrating Heraclitean fire had taken hold on actual life, on men's
very thoughts, on the emotions and the will.
That so faulty natural tendency, as Plato holds [108] it to be, in the
world around them, they formulate carefully as its proper conscious
theory: a theory how things must, nay, ought, to be. "Just that," they
seem to say--"Just that versatility, that mutable spirit, shall become
by adoption the child of knowledge, shall be carefully nurtured,
brought to great fortune. We'll make you, and your thoughts, as fluid,
as shifty, as things themselves: will bring you, like some perfectly
accomplished implement, to this carrière ouverte, this open quarry, for
the furtherance of your personal interests in the world." And if old-
fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than
they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that was
not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the
control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to
it, in regard to one's self? "It will break up,--this or that ethical
deposit in your mind, Ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear,
when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the
vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such
presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to
know their place."
Yes! says Plato (for a moment we may anticipate what is at least the
spirit of his answer) but there are some presuppositions after all,
which it will make us very vulgar to have dismissed from us. "There
are moreover," [109] those others proceed to say, "teachers of
persuasion (peithous didaskaloi)+ who impart skill in popular and
forensic oratory; and so by fair means or by unfair we shall gain our
ends." It is with the dêmos,+ with the vulgar, insubordinate, tag-rag
of one's own nature--how to rule that, by obeying it--that these
professors of rhetoric begin. They are still notwithstanding the only
teachers of morals ingenuous Greece is aware of; and wisdom, as seems
likely, "must die with them!"--
Some very small number then (says the Platonic Socrates) is
left, of those who in worthy fashion hold converse with
philosophy: either, it may be, some soul of in-born worth and
well brought up, to which it has happened to be exiled in a
foreign land, holding to philosophy by a tie of nature, and
through lack of those who will corrupt it; or when it may
chance that a great soul comes to birth in an insignificant
state, to the politics of which it gives no heed, because it
thinks them despicable: perhaps a certain fraction also, of
good parts, may come to philosophy from some other craft,
through a just contempt of that. The bridle too of our
companion Theages has a restraining power. For in the case
of Theages also, all the other conditions were in readiness
to his falling away from philosophy; but the nursing of his
sickly body, excluding him from politics, keeps him back. Our
own peculiarity is not worth speaking of--the sign from heaven!
for I suppose it has occurred to scarce anyone before. And so,
those who have been of this number, and have tasted how sweet
and blessed the possession is; and again, having a full view
of the folly of the many, and that no one, I might say, effects
any sound result in what concerns the state, or is an ally in
whose company one might proceed safe and sound to the help of
the just, but that, like a man falling among wild beasts,
neither willing to share their evil deeds, nor sufficient by
himself to resist the whole fierce band, flung away before he
shall have done any service [110] to the city or to his own
friends, he would become useless both to himself and to others:
taking all this into consideration, keeping silence and doing
his own business, as one standing aside under a hedge in some
storm of dust and spray beneath a driven wind, seeing those
about him replete with lawlessness, he is content if by any
means, pure from injustice and unholy deeds, himself shall
live through his life here, and in turn make his escape with
good hope, in cheerful and kindly mood. (What long sentences
Plato writes!) Yet in truth, he said, he would make his escape
after not the least of achievements.--Nor yet the greatest, I
observed, because he did not light upon the polity fitted for
him: for, in that fitting polity, himself will grow to
completer stature, and, together with what belongs to him, he
will be the saviour also of the commonwealth. Republic, 496.+
Over against the Sophists, and the age which has sophisticated them, of
which they are the natural product, Plato, being himself of a genius
naturally rich, florid, complex, excitable, but adding to the utmost
degree of Ionian sensibility an effectual desire towards the Dorian
order and askêsis, asserts everywhere the principle of outline, in
political and moral life; in the education which is to fit men for it;
in the music which is one half of that education, in the philosophy
which is its other half--the "philosophy of the ideas," of those
eternally fixed outlines of our thought, which correspond to, nay, are
actually identical with, the eternally fixed outlines of things
themselves. What the difference (difference in regard to continuity
and clearness) really is between the conditions of mind, in which
respectively the sophistic process, and the genuinely philosophical or
dialectic process, as [111] conceived by Plato, leave us, is well
illustrated by the peculiar treatment of Justice, its proper definition
or idea, in The Republic. Justice (or Righteousness, as we say, more
largely) under the light of a comprehensive experience of it,
carefully, diligently, adjusted to the nature of man on the one hand,
of society on the other, becomes in the fourth book of The Republic, to
ta hautou prattein+--to ta hautou prattein.+ There, then, is the eternal
outline of Righteousness or Justice as it really is, equally clear and
indefectible at every point; a definition of it which can by no
supposition become a definition of anything else; impenetrable, not to
be traversed, by any possible definition of Injustice; securing an
essential value to its possessor, independently of all falsities of
appearance; and leaving justice, as it really is in itself, unaffected
even by phenomena so misrepresentative of it as to deceive the very
gods, or many good men, as happened pre-eminently in the case of
Socrates.
[112] Here then is the reply of the Platonic Socrates to the challenge
that he should prove himself master of a more certain philosophy than
that of the people, as represented by the old gnomic poet Simonides,
"whom it is hard to disbelieve," (sophos gar kai theios anêr)+ on the
one hand; than that of the Sophists on the other, as represented by
Thrasymachus. "Show us not only that justice is a better thing than
Injustice; but, by doing what (alla ti poiousa)+ to the soul of its
possessor, each of them respectively, in and by itself (hautê di'
hautên)+ even if men and gods alike mistake it for its contrary, is
still the one a good thing, the other a bad one."
But note for a few moments the precise treatment of the idea of Justice
in the first book of The Republic. Sophistry and common sense are
trying their best to apprehend, to cover or occupy, a certain space, as
the exact area of Justice. And what happens with each proposed
definition in turn is, that it becomes, under conceivable
circumstances, a definition of Injustice: not that, in practice, a
confusion between the two is therefore likely; but that the intellect
remains unsatisfied of the theoretic validity of the distinction.
Now that intellectual situation illustrates the sense in which
sophistry is a reproduction of the Heraclitean flux. The old
Heraclitean physical theory presents itself as a natural basis for the
moral, the social, dissolution, which the sophistical [113] movement
promotes. But what a contrast to it, in the treatment of Justice, of
the question, What Justice is? in that introductory book of The
Republic. The first book forms in truth an eristic, a destructive or
negative, Dialogue (such as we have other examples of) in which the
whole business might have concluded, prematurely, with an exposure of
the inadequacy, alike of common-sense as represented by Simonides, and
of a sophisticated philosophy as represented by Thrasymachus, to define
Justice. Note, however, in what way, precisely. That it is Just, for
instance, to restore what one owes (to ta opheilomena apodidonai)+ might
pass well enough for a general guide to right conduct; and the
sophistical judgment that Justice is "The interest of the stronger" is
not more untrue than the contrary paradox that "Justice is a plot of
the weak against the strong."
It is, then, in regard to the claims of Justice, not so much on
practice, as on the intellect, in its demand for a clear theory of
practice, that those definitions fail. They are failures because they
fail to distinguish absolutely, ideally, as towards the intellect, what
is, from what is not. To Plato, for whom, constitutionally, and ex
hypothesi, what can be clearly thought is the precise measure of what
really is, if such a thought about Justice--absolutely inclusive and
exclusive--is, after all our efforts, not to be ascertained, this can
only be, because Justice is not [114] a real thing, but only an empty
or confused name.
Now the Sophist and the popular moralist, in that preliminary attempt
to define the nature of Justice--what is right, are both alike trying,
first in this formula, then in that, to occupy, by a thought, and by a
definition which may convey that thought into the mind of another--to
occupy, or cover, a certain area of the phenomena of experience, as the
Just. And what happens thereupon is this, that by means of a certain
kind of casuistry, by the allegation of certain possible cases of
conduct, the whole of that supposed area of the Just is occupied by
definitions of Injustice, from this centre or that. Justice therefore-
-its area, the space of experience which it covers, dissolves away,
literally, as the eye is fixed upon it, like Heraclitean water: it is
and is not. And if this, and the like of this, is to the last all that
can be known or said of it, Justice will be no current coin, at least
to the acute philosophic mind. But has some larger philosophy perhaps
something more to say of it? and the power of defining an area, upon
which no definition of Injustice, in any conceivable case of act or
feeling, can infringe? That is the question upon which the essential
argument of The Republic starts--upon a voyage of discovery. It is
Plato's own figure.
There, clearly enough, may be seen what the difference, the difference
of aim, between Socrates [115] and the Sophists really was, amid much
that they had in common, as being both alike distinguished from that
older world of opinion of which Simonides is the mouthpiece.
The quarrel of Socrates with the Sophists was in part one of those
antagonisms which are involved necessarily in the very conditions of an
age that has not yet made up its mind; was in part also a mere rivalry
of individuals; and it might have remained in memory only as a matter
of historical interest. It has been otherwise. That innocent word
"Sophist" has survived in common language, to indicate some constantly
recurring viciousness, in the treatment of one's own and of other
minds, which is always at variance with such habits of thought as are
really worth while. There is an every-day "sophistry," of course,
against which we have all of us to be on our guard--that insincerity of
reasoning on behalf of sincere convictions, true or false in themselves
as the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all
with each other, we must all be tempted at times. Such insincerity
however is for the most part apt to expose itself. But there is a more
insidious sophistry of which Plato is aware; and against which he
contends in the Protagoras, and again still more effectively in the
Phaedrus; the closing pages of which discover the essential point of
that famous quarrel between the Sophists and Socrates or Plato, in
regard to a matter which is [116] of permanent interest in itself, and
as being not directly connected with practical morals is unaffected by
the peculiar prejudices of that age. Art, the art of oratory, in
particular, and of literary composition,--in this case, how one should
write or speak really inflammatory discourses about love, write love-
letters, so to speak, that shall really get at the heart they're meant
for--that was a matter on which the Sophists had thought much
professionally. And the debate introduced in the Phaedrus regarding
the secret of success in proposals of love or friendship turns properly
on this: whether it is necessary, or even advantageous, for one who
would be a good orator, or writer, a poet, a good artist generally, to
know, and consciously to keep himself in contact with, the truth of his
subject as he knows or feels it; or only with what other people,
perhaps quite indolently, think, or suppose others to think, about it.
And here the charge of Socrates against those professional teachers of
the art of rhetoric comes to be, that, with much superficial aptitude
in the conduct of the matter, they neither reach, nor put others in the
way of reaching, that intellectual ground of things (of the
consciousness of love for instance, when they are to open their lips,
and presumably their souls, about that) in true contact with which
alone can there be a real mastery in dealing with them. That you
yourself must have an inward, carefully ascertained, measured,
instituted hold [117] over anything you are to convey with any real
power to others, is the truth which the Platonic Socrates, in strongly
convinced words, always reasonable about it, formulates, in opposition
to the Sophists' impudently avowed theory and practice of the
superficial, as such. Well! we all always need to be set on our guard
against theories which flatter the natural indolence of our minds.
"We proposed then just now," says Socrates in the Phaedrus, "to
consider the theory of the way in which one would or would not write or
speak well."--"Certainly!"--"Well then, must there not be in those who
are to speak meritoriously, an understanding well acquainted with the
truth of the things they are to speak about?"--"Nay!" answers Phaedrus,
in that age of sophistry, "It is in this way I have heard about it:--
that it is not necessary for one who would be a master of rhetoric to
learn what really is just, for instance; but rather what seems just to
the multitude who are to give judgment: nor again what is good or
beautiful; but only what seems so to them. For persuasion comes of the
latter; by no means of a hold upon the truth of things."
Whether or not the Sophists were quite fairly chargeable with that sort
of "inward lie," just this, at all events, was in the judgment of Plato
the essence of sophistic vice. With them [118] art began too
precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected
empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people's
productions, in congruity with a general method which everywhere
ruthlessly severed branch and flower from its natural root--art from
one's own vivid sensation or belief. The Lacedaemonian (ho Lakôn)+
Plato's favourite scholar always, as having that infinite patience
which is the note of a sincere, a really impassioned lover of anything,
says, in his convinced Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech
(tou legein etumos technê)+ unless one be in contact with truth, there
neither is nor can be. We are reminded of that difference between
genuine memory, and mere haphazard recollection, noted by Plato in the
story he tells so well of the invention of writing in ancient Egypt.--
It might be doubted, he thinks, whether genuine memory was encouraged
by that invention. The note on the margin by the inattentive reader to
"remind himself," is, as we know, often his final good-bye to what it
should remind him of. Now this is true of all art: Logôn ara technên,
ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs, doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai
atexnon parexetai.+ --It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words
(texnê atexnos)+ that he will have who does not know the truth of
things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it.
"Conception," observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and
artist of our own generation: [119] "Conception, fundamental brainwork,-
-that is what makes the difference, in all art."
Against all pretended, mechanically communicable rules of art then,
against any rule of literary composition, for instance, unsanctioned by
the facts, by a clear apprehension of the facts, of that experience,
which to each one of us severally is the beginning, if it be not also
the end, of all knowledge, against every merely formal dictate (their
name is legion with practising Sophists of all ages) Peri brachylogias,
kai eleeinologias, kai deinôseôs,+ concerning freedom or precision,
figure, emphasis, proportion of parts and the like, exordium and
conclusion:--against all such the Platonic Socrates still protests,
"You know what must be known before harmony can be attained, but not
yet the laws of harmony itself,"--ta pro tragôdias,+ Sophocles would
object in like case, ta pro tragôdias, all' ou tragika.+ Given the
dynamic Sophoclean intention or conviction, and the irresistible law of
right utterance, (anankê logographikê)+ how one must write or speak,
will make itself felt; will assuredly also renew many an old precept,
as to how one shall write or speak, learned at school. To speak pros
doxan+ only, as towards mere unreasoned opinion, might do well enough in
the law-courts with people, who (as is understood in that case) do not
really care very much about justice itself, desire only that a friend
should be acquitted, or an enemy convicted, irrespectively of it; but
[120]
For the essence of all artistic beauty is expression, which cannot be
where there's really nothing to be expressed; the line, the colour, the
word, following obediently, and with minute scruple, the conscious
motions of a convinced intelligible soul. To make men interested in
themselves, as being the very ground of all reality for them, la vraie
vérité, as the French say:--that was the essential function of the
Socratic method: to flash light into the house within, its many
chambers, its memories and associations, upon its inscribed and
pictured walls. Fully occupied there, as with his own essential
business in his own home, the young man would become, of course,
proportionately less interested, less meanly interested, in what was
superficial, in the mere outsides, of other people and their
occupations. With the true artist indeed, with almost every expert,
all knowledge, of almost every kind, tells, is attracted into, and duly
charged with, the force of what [121] may be his leading apprehension.
And as the special function of all speech as a fine art is the control
of minds (psychagôgia)+ it is in general with knowledge of the soul of
man--with a veritable psychology, with as much as possible as we can
get of that--that the writer, the speaker, must be chiefly concerned,
if he is to handle minds not by mere empiric routine, tribê monon, kai
empeiria alla technê,+ but by the power of veritable fine art. Now such
art, such theory, is not "to be caught with the left hand," as the
Greek phrase went; and again, chalepa ta kala.+ We have no time to hear
in English Plato's clever specimens of the way in which people would
write about love without success. Let us rather hear himself on that
subject, in his own characteristic mood of conviction.--
Try! she said (a certain Sibylline woman namely, from whose
lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what follows)
Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what I am going
to say. For he who has been led thus far in the discipline of
love, beholding beautiful objects in the right order, coming now
towards the end of the doctrine of love, will on a sudden behold
a beauty wonderful in its nature:--that, Socrates! towards which
indeed the former exercises were all designed; being first of all
ever existent; having neither beginning nor end; neither growing
or fading away; and then, not beautiful in one way, unbeautiful
in another; beautiful now, but not then; beautiful in this
relation, unlovely in that; to some, but not to others. Nor
again will that beauty appear to him to be beautiful as a face or
hands or anything else that belongs to the body; nor as any
kind of reasoning or science; nor as being resident in anything
else, as in a living creature or the earth or the sky or any
other [122] thing; but as being itself by itself, ever in a
single form with itself; all other beautiful things so
participating in it, that while they begin and cease to be, that
neither becomes more nor less nor suffers any other change.
Whenever, then, anyone, beginning from things here below, through
a right practice of love, ascending, begins to discern that other
beauty, he will almost have reached the end. For this in truth
is the right method of proceeding towards the doctrine of love,
or of being conducted therein by another,--beginning from these
beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with
that other beauty in view; using them as steps of a ladder;
mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two;
and from the love of two to the love of all; and from the love
of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employments--kala
epitêdeumata+ (that means being a soldier, or a priest, or a
scholar) and from the love of beautiful employments to the love
of beautiful kinds of knowledge; till he passes from degrees of
knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing
else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as
in itself it really is. At this moment of life, dear Socrates!
said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man truly lives,
beholding the absolute beauty--the which, so you have once seen
it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, or raiment, or
those beautiful young persons, seeing whom now, like many another,
you are so overcome that you are ready, beholding those beautiful
persons and associating ever with them, if it were possible,
neither to eat nor drink but only to look into their eyes and
sit beside them. What then, she asked, suppose we? if it were
given to any one to behold the absolute beauty, in its clearness,
its pureness, its unmixed essence; not replete with flesh and
blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life;
but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (monoeides)+
simply as it is. Do you think, she said, that life would be a
poor thing to one whose eyes were fixed on that; seeing that,
(hô dei)+ with the organ through which it must be seen, and
communing with that? Do you not think rather, she asked, that
here alone it will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through
which it may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, ho
nous+) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom
he [123] apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is
true? And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will
be born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium,
of the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he
will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal he will
be. Symposium, 210.+
The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato conceived it, was that for it
no real things existed. Real things did exist for Plato, things that
were "an end in themselves"; and the Platonic Socrates was right:--
Plato has written so well there, because he was no scholar of the
Sophists as he understood them, but is writing of what he really knows.
NOTES
99. +Transliteration: sophistai. Liddell and Scott definition: "at
Athens, one who professed to make men wise."
102. +Transliteration: pleista eidê. Pater's translation: "the greatest
possible variety." Pater refers to the Funeral Oration given by
Pericles to commemorate the Athenians who, to date, had died in the
Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.41.1.
107. +Plato, Republic 492.
109. +Transliteration: peithous didaskaloi. Pater's translation:
"teachers of persuasion." Plato, Republic 365d.
109. +Transliteration: dêmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "the common
people."
110. +Plato, Republic 496.
111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The
doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." The
translation elaborates on the original, but captures its meaning
accurately. Plato, Republic 433a-b.
111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The
doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." Plato,
Republic 433a-b.
112. +Transliteration: sophos gar kai theios anêr. E-text editor's
translation: "for he was a wise and excellent man." Plato, Republic
331e.
112. +Transliteration: alla ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "but, by
doing what. . ." Plato, Republic 367b.
112. +Transliteration: hautê di' hautên. Pater's translation: "in and
by itself." Plato, Republic 367e.
113. +Transliteration: to ta opheilomena apodidonai. Pater's
translation: "to restore what one owes." Plato, Republic 331e and
332a.
118. +Transliteration: ho Lakôn. Liddell and Scott definition: "The
Lacedaemonian [i.e., Spartan]."
118. +Transliteration: tou legein etumos technê. Pater's translation:
"a genuine art of speech." Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
118. +Transliteration: Logôn ara technên, ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs,
doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai. E-text
editor's translation: "In the art of speaking, therefore, the person
who does not know the truth, who has sought out only the opinions of
others, will come by nothing better than a kind of unskilled jesting."
Plato, Phaedrus 262c.
118. +Transliteration: texnê atexnos. Pater's translation: "[a]
bastard art of mere words." Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
119. +Transliteration: Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai
deinôseôs. E-text editor's translation: "Concerning brevity, and
speech that moves to pity, and exaggeration. . ." Plato, Phaedrus
272a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias. E-text editor's translation:
"the things before tragedy." Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias, all' ou tragika. E-text
editor's translation: "the things before tragedy, but not tragedy
itself." Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: anankê logographikê. E-text editor's
translation: "[the manner] required [in] prose-writing or speech-
making." Plato, Phaedrus 264b contains similar language.
119. +Transliteration: pros doxan. E-text editor's translation: "in
accordance with received opinion." Plato, Republic 362a, among other
passages.
121. +Transliteration: psychagôgia. Pater's translation: "the control
of minds." The verb agô means "lead or drive." Plato, Phaedrus 261a
and 271c.
121. +Transliteration: tribê monon, kai empeiria alla technê. Pater's
translation: "[not] by mere empiric routine, but by the power of
veritable fine art." Plato, Phaedrus 270b.
121. +Transliteration: chalepa ta kala. E-text editor's translation:
"fine things are hard [to obtain]." Plato, Republic 435c.
122. +Transliteration: kala epitêdeumata. Pater's translation:
"beautiful employments." Plato, Symposium 211c.
122. +Transliteration: monoeides. E-text editor's translation: "of one
kind, simple." Plato, Symposium 211a and 211e.
122. +Transliteration: hô dei. E-text editor's translation: "with what
is necessary." Plato, Symposium 212a.
122. +Transliteration: ho nous. Pater's translation: "imaginative
reason." The word nous or noos generally means "mind." Plato,
Symposium 210-212.
123. +The passage Pater cites--Diotima's speech about love--runs from
210-212a of the Symposium.