Platonism

Front matter

Iptintttnn Mmurrfiitg

THE LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION LECTURES FOR 1917-1918 was established in 1912 with a bequest of $25,000 under the will of Louis Clark Vanuxem, of the Class of 1879. By direction of the executors of Mr. Vanuxem's estate, the income of the foundation is to be used for a series of public lectures delivered in Princeton annually, at least one half of which shall be on subjects of current scientific interest. The lectures are to be published and distributed among schools and libraries generally.

The following lectures have already been published or are in press:

Preface

Though this book goes out under the rather presumptuous title of Platonism, no one can be more aware than the author of the incompleteness of its argument. Almost nothing, for instance, is said of education and art and government, to name a few of the subsidiary subjects that occupy a large and important place in the Dialogues. These alluring topics have been passed by, somewhat reluctantly, in order that attention might be concentrated on the ethical theme that runs through all Plato's discussions and is certainly the mainspring of his philosophy. At another time and in another volume I may undertake to fill out the omissions here acknowledged; but, whether that is done or not, my purpose in the work now pubUshed has been to lay the foundation for a series of studies on the origins and early environment of Christianity and on such more modem movements as the Enghsh revival of philosophic religion in the seventeenth century and the rise of romanticism in the eighteenth. My conviction is that behind all these movements the strongest single influence has been the perilous spirit of liberation brought into the world by the disciple of Socrates, and that our vi PREFACE

mental and moral atmosphere, so to speak, is still permeated with inveterate perversions of Plato's doctrine.

It will be seen that my aim, in the present volmne and in its projected sequels, is not so much to produce a work of history — ^though, of course, historical accuracy must be the first requisite — as to write what a Greek Platonist would have called a ProtrepticuSj an invitation, that is, to the practice of philosophy. In saying this I am under no delusion as to what such a work is likely to accomplish. Readers of settled convictions who happen to take up this presentation of philosophy will accept or reject it in accordance with the bent of their minds ; and I know that the current of thought today runs against me and not with me. It is a fact to be reckoned with now, as it was when Socrates talked on these matters in the gaol of Athens, that for those who differ on fundamental principles there is no common counsel but only contempt for each other ; as St. Augustine says, si non sit intus qui doceat inanis fit strepitus noster. My hope would be with those who are still searching — particularly if I might touch the minds of a few of our generous college youth who, finding the intellectual life deprived of centre or significance, drift through the supposedly utiUtarian courses of economics and biology, and so enter the world with no better preparation against its distractions than a vague

PREFACE vii

and soon-spent yearning for social service and a benumbing trust in mechanical progress. I can foresee no restoration of humane studies to their lost position of leadership until they are felt once more to radiate from some central spiritual truth. I do not believe that the aesthetic charms of Uterature can supply this want, nor is it clear to me that a purely scientific analysis of the facts of moral experience can furnish the needed motive ; the former is too apt to rim into dilettantism, and the latter appeals too little to the imagination and the springs of enthusiasm. Only through the centrahzing force of rehgious faith or through its equivalent in philosophy can the intellectual life regain its meaning and authority for earnest men. Yet, for the present at least, the dogmas of religion have lost their hold, while the current philosophy of the schools has become in large measure a quibbling of speciahsts on technical points of minor importance, or, where serious, too commonly has surrendered to that flattery of the instinctive elements of human nature which is the very negation of mental and moral discipline.

It is in such a belief and such a hope, whether right or wrong, that I have turned back to the truth, still potent and fresh and salutary, which Plato expounded in the troubled and doubting days of Greece — the truth which is in religion but is not boimded by religious dogma, and which viii PREFACE

needs no confirmation by miracle or inspired tradition. The first task before me was to see this philosophy in its naked outlines, stripped of its confusing accessories, and cleared of the misunderstandings which, starting among the barbarians of Alexandria, have made of Platonism too often a support instead of a corrective of the disintegrating forces of society. This I have attempted to do, with imperfect success no doubt, in the present volume. If, when the series is completed, I may have succeeded in directing a few seeking minds to the inexhaustible source of strength and comfort in the Platonic Dialogues, I shall account my labour amply rewarded. Of strength and comfort we have need enough in these trying times, and shall have no less need in the days of peace, when they come.

To one criticism I should be sensitive. Those who have read the eighth volume of my Shelburne Essays will recognize that the present work is virtually an expansion of the views there summed up in the Definitions of Dualism, and they may think that I have tried to impose my own theories on Plato, to measure him in my pint cup. In a way every interpreter of a great author must be open to such a charge; he has no other measure than his own capacity. But at least I am not guilty of attempting to force Plato into conformity with a preconceived system ; the Definitions of Dualism were themselves the result of my

PREFACE ix

study of the Dialogues, and avowedly rejected any pretensions to originality.

In making the translations from Plato scattered through the following pages I have often had other versions before me, and have not scrupled to draw on them quite freely for words and phrases. Where these passages are included in inverted commas, I have adhered to the original as closely as possible while conforming to English idiom. The passages not so indicated, but noted by marginal references, are rather allusions than quotations.

Finally, I have to thank the trustees of the Vanuxem fund for permitting me to print in this volimie a large amount of material which it was impossible to include in the coxirse of five lectures.

P. E. M.

Princeton, N. J.,

Contents

PAGE

Preface v

I The Three Socratie Theses 1

Chapter I

THE THREE SOCRATIC THESES No person of antiquity, scarcely any of the modem world, has been portrayed so vividly as the master whom Plato made the responsible mouthpiece of his speculations. We seem to descry the man Socrates in the very flesh ; we can almost hear his voice, as he talked with friends and strangers in the agora and other meeting-places of Athens. But when we come to consider him as a philosopher in his own right, and to determine precisely what he taught, the way is not so plain. Of the two main witnesses on whom we must rely for our knowledge of his teaching, the one, our gossiping Xenophon, imderstood him too little, whereas the other understood him, in a manner, too well, developing his instruction into so rich and voluminous a body of thought that Socrates might have exclaimed with some apparent reason, as indeed he is said actually to have done on hearing one of the simpler of Plato's Dialogues: "By Heracles, what lies the young man has told about me!" Our conception of the Socratic phil-

Parmenides 130a osophy is thus, like the Eros of the wonderful ymposium ^^^^^^ q£ Mautiuea, the child of Penury and Abundance — an Abundance, we might add, "drunken with the drink of the gods."

Yet withal the leading theses of Socrates are in themselves, and taken separately, clear enough — or ought to be so to any one who approaches the subject with open mind — and the real difficulty begins only when we undertake to combine them into a coherent system, and to weigh their remoter consequences. These leading doctrines, if we may give such a name to the impulses that carried him towards philosophy, were three: an intellectual scepticism, a spiritual affirmation, and a tenacious belief in the identity of virtue and knowledge.

Of the sceptical, questioning disposition of Socrates we have ample testimony. This was the trait, particularly as it touched the common tradition in matters of government and morals, that most impressed those of his contemporaries who did not belong to the inner circle of disciples. And probably the irony of Socrates, his real or feigned ignorance used as a dissolvent of the assimied knowledge of others, is the characteristic first suggested today by the mention of his name. He himself, when obliged to defend his life before the tribunal of his fellow citizens, manfully admitted this scepticism, and even claimed for it Apology 2iA a divine sanction. One of his friends, so he declared, had gone to Delphi to inquire of the oracle whether there was any one wiser than Socrates, and had been told that there was none wiser. Whereupon Socrates, amazed and incredulous, had put himself to the task of testing this strange saying. His method of inquiry (which we may suppose he had employed from the beginning of his pubhc career, though with less deliberate purpose before the intervention of the oracle) was to select a man eminent for wisdom, and to cross-question him about his knowledge; and this he did repeatedly, and always with the same result. "It would soon become apparent," he says, "that to many people, and most of all to himself, the man seemed to be wise, whereas in truth he was not so at all. Thereupon I would try to show him how he was wise in opinion only and not in reality; but I merely made myself a nuisance to him and to many of those about him. So I used to go away reflecting that at least I was wiser than this man. Neither of us, I would say to myself, knows anything much worth while, but he in his ignorance thinks he knows, whereas I neither know nor think I know."^

^ I hold for many reasons that the biographical parts of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo present a faithful picture of the man Socrates, and in the main give a true account of his last days, however the glamour of Plato's rhetoric may lie over the whole. It is easier to believe in the power of Nature to create such a character than in the ability of an author to imagine it. Furthermore, though Xenophon

But if the existence, even the predominance, of the doubting mood in Socrates cannot be overlooked, the quahty of this scepticism needs none the less to be sharply distinguished from what commonly passes imder the name. The matter stands thus. Absolute suspension of judgment, however a man may profess it in words or strive to attain it in practice, is an impossibility. You may deny the power of human reason to explain the cause and ultimate nature of things; but the moment you do this, you will find yourself, if you examine your mind honestly, putting credence in some faculty either above the reason or below the reason. Some relation to appearances you must assume, some motive of action you are bound to obey, some affirmation you are forced to make ; ^ the only choice is to which of the alternative sohcitations you will say yes, and to which you will say no. Thus, when a man calls himself a sceptic, it commonly means that he subscribes to some form of materialistic dogma, and practi-

probably had little intercourse with Socrates and certainly was lio philosopher, yet he gives the same report of Socrates* ordinary ways of life, and one can find in the Memorabilia clear traces of the three Socratic theses.

^ This fact is virtually acknowledged by the clever exponent of ancient scepticism, Sextus Empiricus. See his Hypotyposes i, 17, et passim. As for modern agnostics, so-called, they too reserve their scepticism for the "unknowable" things of the spirit, and are thorough-going dogmatists in their theories of conduct based on the ikcmi irddrj.

cally believes that pleasures and pains of the body, however he may refine and intelleetualize their quality, are the one certain fact of experi- Phaedo ssb ence. As the followers of Aristippus used to say : "Only our sensations are comprehensible." This creed may be adopted from mere indolence of mind, or in the combative manner of the schools — but with results curiously ahke. According to his first disciple, Pyrrho, the father of professional scepticism, reduced the problems of philosophy to these three: "What is the nature of things? How should we be disposed towards them? What is the consequence to us of this determination?" The answer was that we know nothing of the great forces playing about us, and that he is wise who, freeing his soul of troublesome fears or questions, does not look beyond the pleasure within his reach.^ There is a pretty parable that tells how Pyrrho enforced this doctrine. Being once at sea and caught in a storm, he rebuked the terror of the passengers by pointing to a little pig that kept on feeding through all the conmiotion — such, he said, ought to be the tranquillity of the wise man. There is an affirmation in this — deck and disguise it as you will — the affirmation of the sty: pinguem et nitidum vises Epicuri de grege porcum. Such a man may call himself a philosophical sceptic by reason of his anti-rationalism, but his philosophy comes

from a plane below the reason, and is hard to distinguish from the indolent self-assurance that is content to do without thinking at all.

If we take the word "sceptic" in its truer sense, as describing one who takes nothing on trust but examines the facts of experience to their last conclusion, the Epicurean or Pyrrhonist has no right to the name, since he still labours under the delusion of supposing he knows what he does not know, and has yet to learn that pleasure and pain have no final value in themselves, but must be estimated by their relation to values of quite another order. Manifestly, at least, the scepticism of Socrates was no Pyrrhonic drifting with the current of opinion; it meant to him rather an unwearied questioning of the solicitations of both the reason and the senses, and a continuous exercise of the will, being of all states of mind the rarest and the most difficult for a man in this world to maintain. Doubt was thus to Socrates the beginning both of philosophy and of morality — ^of philosophy, since only those are prompted Lysis 218a to philosophizc truly who are ignorant and, at the same time, aware of their ignorance ; of morality, since only those will feel the compelling of a higher impulse who have seen through the illusory curtain of the senses. When Socrates came to explain to the court why he had not hesitated in a course of action which was sure to bring him into peril of losing what most men prize, including life itself, he replied boldly that he had followed the behest of the God for the reason that of those so-called perils we have no real knowledge — ^not even of the greatest of them. "For the fear of death," he said, "is just another form Apology 29a of appearing wise when we are foolish, and of seeming to know what we know not. No mortal '^/ knoweth of death whether it be not the greatest of all good things to man, yet do men fear it as if they knew it to be the greatest of evils. And is not this that most culpable ignorance which pretends to know what it knows not?" This sounds like the parable of Pyrrho and his pig; but note the difference in the consequences drawn. Socrates was not contradicting himself, but was basing his conduct on a prof ounder form of scepticism than Pyrrho's, when, in one and the same discourse, he avowed that his only wisdom was to know his own ignorance, yet declared himself ready to face death with this downright affirmation: "To do wrong and to disobey our superior, whether human or divine, this I do know to be an evil and shameful thing." He had an invincible assurance of this spiritual fact for the very reason that his scepticism went deep enough to include those current judgments and those immediate values of sensation which to a Pyrrho were the only certain guides through the perplexities of hfe.

There is, then, no inconsistency in the imion of intellectual scepticism and spiritual afBrmation; rather, scepticism is the negative aspect of the same intuitive truth of which spiritual affirmation is the positive aspect. It would even be a grave error — the gravest of all errors in its possible consequences — to reckon the sceptical attitude, because it is purely negative, as less essential to the Socratic life than its positive coimterpart. It is, if anything, more essential ; for its authority extends in a way beyond reason and the senses to the highest citadel of the soul. Our one safeguard against a host of ruinous deceptions that speak in the name of the spirit is the obstinate interrogation of every affirmation of every sort, and the holding of each presumptive truth to give proof of itself in experience. In later years these two aspects of Socratic doctrine were developed independently into separate schools, the sceptic, of which we have spoken, and the Neoplatonic. If Socrates had been ahve, and had been forced to choose between the books of a Sextus Empiricus, let us say, who in the name of scepticism rejected all authority of reason and the higher intuition, and the books of a Proclus, who accepted almost without discrimination any words uttered in the name of the spirit, he would have ranged himself, I am sure, with Sextus, and would have expended his powers of irony upon the religious jargon of the self-styled Platonist. He would have preferred the half-truth of the one to the sham-truth of the other; and Plato would have made the same choice.

But if it is easy to see how true scepticism and spiritual intuition may go hand in hand, the case is different when to these two theses we add the third. It was one of Socrates' favorite maxims that no man errs, or sins, willingly, but only through ignorance — a saying hard to reconcile with the actual conduct of the world, hard to reconcile with the other aspects of the Socratic doctrine. On its face this maxim implies an equation of virtue and knowledge, and by knowledge the evidence obliges us to believe that Socrates meant, not indeed a Pyrrhonic acquiescence in the solicitations of the present, but that larger calculation of life in the terms of pleasure and pain which from his day to this has been the mark of the rationahzing utihtarian. As we know better, he would say, the near and remote consequences of our acts in those terms, we are enabled to conduct ourselves more prudently; and this prudence is virtue. How, one asks in some bewilderment, can a teacher maintain such a thesis as this, yet as a sceptic reject the authority of the senses, and as a mystic avow that his morality depends on a superrational intuition? How can the same man be a rationalizing utihtarian and a sceptical mystic?

However perplexing such a union of contraries may appear to us, we have nothing to do but to accept the paradox as it stands. Above all we must not emphasize the rationalistic thesis so as to suppress the other two. In that way we should fall into the totally inadequate conception of Socrates made current to-day by the Greek Thinkers of Theodor Gomperz. According to that brilliant and much-quoted history, the Platonic Socrates, with his religious and fundamentally sceptical traits, is to be rejected for a mere questioner of popular tradition and promoter of the rationahstic "Enlightenment." The story in the Apology of his self-dedication to the service of the God is pure moonshine; Socrates had one simple aim, to set forth the unity of virtue and knowledge, and to that end there was no need of exhortation or animating appeal, no room for any positive ethical teaching based on an authority higher than reason. Now the Socrates of this school of interpreters is an impossibility — a creature manufactured in a Teutonic phrontisterion, and not the hving man of Athens from whom the deepest inspiration of philosophy has flowed even to this day. Gomperz himself offers a corrective to his portrait by quoting as the motto for his volume this sentence from Clement of Alexandria: "Wherefore also Cleanthes in his second book Concerning Pleasure says that Socrates always identified the just man and the happy man, and cursed him who first distinguished between the just and the profitable as one who had done an impious thing J" There is decidedly something of the exhorter and preacher of virtue in the words itahcized, though we need not, for all that, picture Socrates quite as a Lutheran parson. If Clement is right, and Plato was not a mere mystificator, and if human nature has any place in the study of philosophy, then Gomperz is wrong. We may be certain that beneath the irony of Socrates, deeper than his questioning of popular phrases and his search for precision of definition, lay a power of very positive teaching and a direct appeal to the conscience, in his own way and at his own time, which smote the heart even of such a worldling as Alcibiades to the quick, and shall never cease to vibrate in the hearts of Uving men. Plutarch was in the right tradition when, remembering the confession of Alcibiades, he said that "outwardly Socrates to those who met him appeared rude and imcouth and overbearing, but within was full of earnestness and of matters that moved his hearers to tears and wrung their hearts."^

On the other hand we must be on our guard against the contrary extreme of those scholars, such as Burnet and Taylor of St. Andrews, who, in their laudable desire to reinstate Socrates as a religious teacher and seer, go so far as to make a mechanical division between the rationalistic and the mystical elements in the Platonic Dialogues,

* Cato vii.

and then relegate all the former to Plato himself and derive all the latter from Socrates. Professor Bmnet^ would even have us believe that in the earher Dialogues, down to and including The Republic, Plato was merely reproducing as a dramatic artist the mystic and idealistic Pythagoreanism of his master, whereas in the later Dialogues he breaks away from this and gives expression to his own scientific and anti-Socratic rationahsm. Now, with all due deference to the great learning of Professor Burnet, one must say that such a theory has no warrant in history or in common sense. To assert that a man could write The Republic without a definite philosophy of his own is to run pretty close to a pedantic absurdity; and it is not much better to maintain that there was no rationahsm in the teaching of Socrates than that there was no mysticism in the teaching of Plato.

The efforts of various scholars to escape the Socratic Paradox by representing him on the one hand as a pure rationalist or on the other hand as a pure mystic are equally untenable. So far as we can judge from the records, Socrates never attempted to find an interpretation of the word "knowledge" which should reconcile his third thesis with the other two, nor did he even, we may suppose, see quite so logical a synthesis of his intellectual scepticism and higher intuition as we

^ Greek Philosophy, Part I, pp. 178, 179 £f.

have felt justified in deriving from the language of the Apology. For the most part he was con- / tent, it should appear, to enunciate his three principles as independent truths, and to enforce now one and now another of them as occasion prompted, leaving to his disciples, the creators of the so-called Socratic schools, the labour of constructing from them what properly may be regarded as a philosophic system. Endless inconsistencies and controversies were to arise among his successors from the varying emphasis placed by them on the different aspects of his creed. To Plato alone it was given to combine the three theses without sacrificing one for the other, and so to develop a philosophy that transcended the master's actual teaching while in no fundamental matter betraying it. So successfully did he accomphsh this great task that to the world at large Socrates has come to stand for httle more than a mouthpiece of the Platonic speculations. Nevertheless we shall be doing a grave injustice if, caught by the spell of Plato's richer and subtler genius, we forget that the imposing enimciation of his three doctrines by Plato's teacher was the determining event in the moral and religious life of the Western world; for the supreme need of a man's soul is not that he should acquire a splendid system of philosophy, but that he should hold as an inexpugnable possession that spirit of scepticism and insight and that assurance of the identity of virtue and knowledge for which Socrates hved and died.^

Yet however important, even revolutionary, the work of Socrates may appear, we must remember that he was only one teacher among many; nor can we rightly understand the Platonic philosophy without taking into account the strong currents of thought, sympathetic and antipathetic, amid which it took its origin. The age of Socrates was notable for an intellectual curiosity and a moral fermentation for which there is perhaps only one parallel in history, and that parallel takes us out of Europe to Asia. There, in the country of the Ganges, at a somewhat earher date, the old formahties of religion had ceased to satisfy the devout Hindu worshipper, and he could no longer accept the traditional precepts of morality until he had justified them at the bar of his own conscience. Everywhere men were asking themselves and one another about the underlying truth of things, and a rumour went abroad that certain lonely explorers had discovered a treasure of knowledge which they held as a secret possession. And so the books of the period are filled with stories,

^ The Christian philosophy of Pascal is founded on three similar principles: "II faut avoir ces trois qualites, pyrrhonien, geometre, Chretien soumis; et elles s'accordent, et se temperent, en doutant ou il faut, en assurant ou il faut, et en se soumettant oii il faut." — Pensee 268, Brunschvicg.

some of them quaint and obscure, others very beautiful, of eager inquirers who went out into the wilderness, where the sages had their solitary abodes, to question and hsten, and to learn, if they were deemed worthy, the new meaning of the old words of rehgion and morahty.

Something hke that, though the methods of teaching and the final results were different, was going on in Greece during the lifetime of Socrates. The supposed possessors of the secret were not eremites hiding in the forest depths, but teachers who called themselves sophists and went about from city to city imparting instruction for a price; and the inquirers who flocked to their lectures were not, for the most part, rehgious enthusiasts, but young men of family who were looking for the readiest path to honour and power in civic hfe. Yet, withal, the mental and moral ferments were much the same as in India, and in both lands the deepest problems of law and faith did not pass through the ordeal untouched.

Not the least extraordinary of Plato's literary gifts is his skill in reproducing in a colder age the ardour which surrounded his childhood and youth. In the opening of such a Dialogue as the Protagoras, for instance, there is a note of excitement, of expectation, which carries the reader back to a society stirred by a veritable renaissance of wonder. Even the more conservative citizens were moved, some to hostility, some to friendly curiosity. So, in the Theages, we have a charmingly realistic picture of an elderly man, of position and property, coming into Athens from the country to consult Socrates about the education of his son ; for the boy has heard rumours of the marvellous cunning of these professors who are flocking to the city from the ends of the world, and is determined to place himself as a pupil under one of them. The father, as befits a solid man of the soil, is bewildered and anxious; he doesn't mind spending the necessary money, but he has his suspicion of these innovations and he fears they are as likely to corrupt as to inform. Whereupon Socrates turns to the young man, and quizzes him to bring out just what he thinks this new wisdom is and what it will do for him.