by Walter Pater
Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men’s thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason — those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the instruments by which we tabulate and classify and record our experience — mere “marks” of the real things of experience, of what is essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of all true knowledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience to the “absolute.” In proportion as they lend themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are become — Justice and Beauty, and the perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible instances thereof, but which no two equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever — separate (chôristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they remain for ever — those eternal “forms,” of Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth.
That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic transcendentalism. Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products, but the cause of our reason in us: we did not make them; but they make us what we are, as reasonable beings. The eternal Being, of Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been diffused, divided, resolved, refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple, numerous, stellar world, so to call it — abstract light into stars: Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is. Permanence, independency, indefectible identity with itself — all those qualities which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality — belong to every one of those ideas severally.
It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love, Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls “animism.” Animism, that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every object, almost in every circumstance, which impresses one with a sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest illustration is primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky. That condition “survives” however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits; in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Schelling, who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such “animistic” instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato’s mental constitution, — the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them, imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly analysed and differentiated from each other, but participated, all alike and all together, in every single act of mind.
And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade of Plato’s departure from the simpler realism of his master, as noted by Aristotle, towards that “intelligible world,” opposed by him so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to follow him at all, and in which the “ideas” become veritable persons. To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were living persons; that, is the second stage of Plato’s speculative ascent. With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision, of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas themselves became animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause, of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the central idea; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means; of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts upon them. It was to the lover dealing with physical beauty, a thing seen, yet unseen — seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self- discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen, the knowing and the known — that the nature and function of an idea, as such, would come home most clearly. And then, while visible beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers will always tell you so) real with the reality of something hot or cold in one’s hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato assures us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, antitypes, out of all proportion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy, left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the Perfect State. The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre- occupying the mind with all the colour and circumstance of the relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such relationships only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the commerce of men’s minds with what really is, with the world in which things really are, only so far as they are truly known. “Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is — impassioned lovers”: Tou ontos te kai alętheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state — those impassioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens, the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.
He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another will — this lover of the Ideas — attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that “ascent of the soul into the intelligible world,” of which the ways of earthly love (ta erôtika)+ are a true parallel. His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by another, by which those “animistic” old Greeks explained natural madness. That philosophic enthusiasm, that impassioned desire for true knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ the madness to which some have declared great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied — the fourth species of mania, as Plato himself explains in the Phaedrus. To natural madness, to poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to prophecy like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to add, fourthly, the “enthusiasm of the ideas.”
The whole course of our theory hitherto (he there tells us) relates to that fourth form of madness; wherein, when any one, seeing the beauty that is here below, and having a reminiscence of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterôtai)+ fluttering upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below, he is charged with unsoundness of mind. I have told how this is the most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession) both to its possessor and to him who participates in it; how it comes of the noblest causes; and that the lover who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful. For, as has been said, every soul of man, by its very nature, has seen the things that really are, otherwise it would not have come into this form of life (into a human body).
But to rise from things here to the recollection of those, is not an easy matter for every soul; neither for those which then had but a brief view of things there; nor for such as were unlucky in their descent hither, so that, through the influence of certain associations, turning themselves to what is not right, they have forgotten the sacred forms which then they saw. Few souls, in truth, remain, to which the gift of reminiscence adequately pertains. These, when they see some likeness of things there, are lost in amazement, and belong no longer to themselves; only, they understand not the true nature of their affection, because they lack discernment. Now, of Justice, and of Temperance, and of all those other qualities which are precious to souls, there is no clear light in their semblances here below; but, through obscure organs, with difficulty, very few, coming to their figures, behold the generation (genos,+ the people) of that which is figured. At that moment it was possible to behold Beauty in its clearness, when, with the choir of the blessed following on, ourselves with Zeus, some with one, some with another, of the gods, they looked upon a blissful vision and view, and were made partakers in what it is meet and right to call the most blessed of all mysteries; the which we celebrated, sound and whole then, and untouched by the evil things that awaited us in time to come, as being admitted to mystic sights, whole and sound and at unity with themselves, in pure light gazing on them, being ourselves pure, and unimpressed by this we carry about now and call our body, imprisoned like a fish in its shell.
Let memory be indulged thus far; for whose sake, in regret for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length. As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true being, among those other eternal forms; and when we came down hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily senses, gleaming with utmost brightness. For sight comes to us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen by it. Marvellous loves, in truth, would that (namely, Wisdom) have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself, such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision — that, and all those other amiable forms. But now Beauty alone has had this fortune; so that it is the clearest, the most certain, of all things; and the most lovable. Phaedrus, 249.+
NOTES
152. +Transliteration: noętos topos. Pater’s translation: “intellectual world.” Plato, Republic 508b and 517b.
153. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Pater’s translation: “like to like.” Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato’s dialogues; see, for example, Parmenides 132d.
153. +Transliteration: hypo logôn. Pater’s translation: “under the influence of . . . thought and language.” Plato, Philebus 15d.
153. +Transliteration: kinei. Pater’s translation: “sets in motion.” Plato, Philebus 15e.
154. +Transliteration: logos. Pater’s contextual translation: “definition.” Plato, Philebus 15e.
154. +The passage begins at Philebus 15d.
161. +Transliteration: synagôgę . . . diairesis. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor’s translation: “.” For example, Phaedrus 266b.
162. +Transliteration: Ti poiousa. Pater’s translation: “by the doing of what.”
163. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater’s translation: “separable.” The term occurs often in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.
165. +Transliteration: genos. Pater’s translation: “seed, generation.” Liddell and Scott definition: “race, descent.” Plato, Phaedrus 247a. 165. +Transliteration: akęratô. Pater’s translation: “unmixed with sense.” Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
166. +Transliteration: tęn en tô ho estin on ontos epistęmęn ousan. Pater’s translation: “the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is.” Plato, Phaedrus 247e.
166. See Plato, Phaedrus 247b ff.
168. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater’s translation: “separable.” The term occurs often in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.
171. +Transliteration: Tou ontos te kai alętheias erastas tous philosophous. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor’s translation: “Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is . . .” Plato, Republic 501d.
171. +Transliteration: erastas. See previous note.
172. +Transliteration: ta erôtika. Pater’s translation: “the discipline of sensuous love;” more literally, the phrase means “things pertaining to love.” For one instance, see Plato, Symposium 177d.
172. +Transliteration: mania. Liddell and Scott definition: “madness, frenzy.” See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
172. +Transliteration: pterôtai. E-text editor’s translation: “[he] is furnished with wings.” Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
173. +Transliteration: genos. Pater’s translation: “seed, generation.” Liddell and Scott definition: “race, descent.” Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
173. +This passage begins at Phaedrus 249d.
THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
II. DIALECTIC
Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual conditions of different ages, prevailed — three distinct literary methods, in the presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeôs,+ “Concerning Nature”; according to the manner of Pythagoras, “his golden verses,” of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of thinking.
It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native intuition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which rattle in one’s ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a formal treatise; the perfected philosophic temper being situated midway between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and issues. Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of the relative, or “modern” spirit, in the Renaissance of the sixteenth century.*
The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth. If oracular verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper vehicle of enthusiastic intuitions; if the treatise, with its ambitious array of premiss and conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing — of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities — is indicative of Montaigne’s peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? Who knows? — in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.
And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic Dialogue, in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially an essay — an essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of philosophic poetry, the prose-poem of Heraclitus. There have been effective writers of dialogue since, Bruno, for instance, Berkeley, Landor, with whom, however, that literary form has had no strictly constitutional propriety to the ki
nd of matter it conveyed, as lending itself (that is to say) structurally to a many-sided but hesitant consciousness of the truth. Thus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer’s own mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the dialogue — that peculiar modification of the essay — anything less than essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the organism of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato’s Dialogues, in fact, reflect, they refine upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in which, by preference to anything like formal lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others. We see him in those Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places, the open houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from others; seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never concluding.
The Platonic Dialogue is the literary transformation, in a word, of what was the intimately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of conveying truth to others, but of coming by it for himself. The essence of that method, of “dialectic” in all its forms, as its very name denotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of question and answer, primarily with one’s self. Just there, lies the validity of the method — in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one’s self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or “universal definitions,” or notions, those “ideas,” which, according to Plato, are the proper objects of all real knowledge; concerning the adequacy of one’s hold upon them; the relationship to them of other notions; the plausible conjectures in our own or other minds, which come short of them; the elimination, by their mere presence in the mind, of positive ignorance or error. Justice, Beauty, Perfect Polity, and the like, in outlines of eternal and absolute certainty: — they were to be apprehended by “dialectic,” literally, by a method (methodos)+ a circuitous journey, presented by the Platonic dialogues in its most accomplished literary form.