by E R Dodds
All the symptoms I have mentioned—the revival of incubation, the taste for orgiastic religion, the prevalence of magical attack—can be viewed as regressive; they were in a- sense a return of the past. But they were. also, in another aspect, portents of things to come. As we shall see in the final chapter, they point forward to characteristic features of the Greco-Roman world. But before we come to that, we must consider Plato's attempt to stabilise the situation.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VI
VII
Plato, the Irrational Soul, and the Inherited Conglomerate
There is no hope in returning to a traditional faith after it has once been abandoned, since the essential condition in the holder of a traditional faith is that he should not know he is a traditionalist.
Al Ghazali
The last chapter described the decay of the inherited fabric of beliefs which set in during the fifth century, and some of its earlier results. I propose here to consider Plato's reaction to the situation thus created. The subject is important, not only because of Plato's position in the history of European thought, but because Plato perceived more clearly than anyone else the dangers inherent in the decay of an Inherited Conglomerate, and because in his final testament to the world he put forward proposals of great interest for stabilising the position by means of a counter-reformation. I am well aware that to discuss this matter fully would involve an examination of Plato's entire philosophy of life; but in order to keep the discussion within manageable limits I propose to concentrate on seeking answers to two questions:
First, what importance did Plato himself attach to nonrational factors in human behaviour, and how did he interpret them?
Secondly, what concessions was he prepared to make to the irrationalism of popular belief for the sake of stabilising the Conglomerate?
It is desirable to keep these two questions distinct as far as possible, though, as we shall see, it is not always easy to decide where Plato is expressing a personal faith and where he is merely using a traditional language. In trying to answer the first question, I shall have to repeat one or two things which I have already said in print,1 but I shall have something to add on matters which I did not previously consider.
One assumption I shall make. I shall assume that Plato's philosophy did not spring forth fully mature, either from his own head or from the head of Socrates; I shall treat it as an organic thing which grew and changed, partly in obedience to its inner law of growth, but partly also in response to external stimuli. And here it is relevant to remind you that Plato's life, like his thought, all but bridges the wide gulf between the death of Pericles and the acceptance of Macedonian hegemony.2 Though it is probable that all his writings belong to the fourth century, his personality and outlook were moulded in the fifth, and his earlier dialogues are still bathed in the remembered light of a vanished social world. The best example is to my mind the Protagoras, whose action is set in the golden years before the Great War; in its optimism, its genial worldliness, its frank utilitarianism, and its Socrates who is still no more than life-size, it seems to be an essentially faithful reproduction of the past.3
Plato's starting-point was thus historically conditioned. As the nephew of Charmides and kinsman of Critias, no less than as one of Socrates' young men, he was the child of the Enlightenment. He grew up in a social circle which not only took pride in settling all questions before the bar of reason, but had the habit of interpreting all human behaviour in terms of rational self-interest, and the belief that "virtue," arete, consisted essentially in a technique of rational living. That pride, that habit, and that belief remained with Plato to the end; the framework of his thought never ceased to be rationalist. But the contents of the framework came in time to be strangely transformed. There were good reasons for that. The transition from the fifth century to the fourth was marked (as our own time has been marked) by events which might well induce any rationalist to reconsider his faith. To what moral and material ruin the principle of rational self-interest might lead a society, appeared in the fate of imperial Athens; to what it might lead the individual, in the fate of Critias and Charmides and their fellow-tyrants. And on the other hand, the trial of Socrates afforded the strange spectacle of the wisest man in Greece at the supreme crisis of his life deliberately and gratuitously flouting that principle, at any rate as the world understood it.
1 For notes to chapter vii see pages 224-235.
It was these events, I think, which compelled Plato, not to abandon rationalism, but to transform its meaning by giving it a metaphysical extension. It took him a long time, perhaps a decade, to digest the new problems. In those years he no doubt turned over in his mind certain significant sayings of Socrates, for example, that "the human psyche has something divine about it" and that "one's first interest is to look after its health."4 But I agree with the opinion of the majority of scholars that what put Plato in the way of expanding these hints into a new transcendental psychology was his personal contact with the Pythagoreans of West Greece when he visited them about 390. If I am right in my tentative guess about the historical antecedents of the Pythagorean movement, Plato in effect cross-fertilised the tradition of Greek rationalism with magico-religious ideas whose remoter origins belong to the northern shamanistic culture. But in the form in which we meet them in Plato these ideas have been subjected to a double process of interpretation and transposition. A well-known passage of the Gorgias shows us in a concrete instance how certain philosophers—such men, perhaps, as Plato's friend Archytas— took over old mythical fancies about the fate of the soul and read into them new allegorical meanings which gave them moral and psychological significance.5 Such men prepared the way for Plato; but I should guess that it was Plato himself who by a truly creative act transposed these ideas definitively from the plane of revelation to the plane of rational argument.
The crucial step lay in the identification of the detachable "occult" self which is the carrier of guilt-feelings and potentially divine with the rational Socratic psyche whose virtue is a kind of knowledge. That step involved a complete reinterpretation of the old shamanistic culture-pattern. Nevertheless the pattern kept its vitality, and its main features are still recognisable in Plato. Reincarnation survives unchanged. The shaman's trance, his deliberate detachment of the occult self from the body, has become that practice of mental withdrawal and concentration which purifies the rational soul—a practice for which Plato in fact claims the authority of a traditional The occult knowledge which the shaman acquires in trance has become a vision of metaphysical truth; his "recollection" of past earthly lives7 has become a "recollection" of bodiless Forms which is made the basis of a new epistemology; while on the mythical level his "long sleep" and "underworld journey" provides a direct model for the experiences of Er the son of Armenius.8 Finally, we shall perhaps understand better Plato's much-criticised "Guardians" if we think of them as a new kind of rationalised shamans who, like their primitive predecessors, are prepared for their high office by a special kind of discipline designed to modify the whole psychic structure; like them, must submit to a dedication that largely cuts them off from the normal satisfactions of humanity; like them, must renew their contact with the deep sources of wisdom by periodic "retreats"; and like them, will be rewarded after death by receiving a peculiar status in the spirit world.9 It is likely that an approximation to this highly specialised human type already existed in the Pythagorean societies; but Plato dreamed of carrying the experiment much further, putting it on a serious scientific basis, and using it as the instrument of his counter-reformation.
This visionary picture of a new sort of ruling class has often been cited as evidence that Plato's estimate of human nature was grossly unrealistic. But shamanistic institutions are not built on ordinary human nature; their whole concern is to exploit the possibilities of an exceptional type of personality. And the Republic is dominated by a similar concern. Plato admitted frankly that only a tiny fraction of the population possessed the natural endowm
ent which would make it possible to transform them into Guardians.10 For the rest—that is to say, the overwhelming majority of mankind—he seems to have recognised at all stages of his thought that, so long as they are not exposed to the temptations of power, an intelligent hedonism provides the best practicable guide to a satisfactory life.11 But in the dialogues of his middle period, preoccupied as he then was with exceptional natures and their exceptional possibilities, he shows scant interest in the psychology of the ordinary man.
In his later work, however, after he had dismissed the philosopher-kings as an impossible dream, and had fallen back on the rule of Law as a second-best,12 he paid more attention to the motives which govern ordinary human conduct, and even the philosopher is seen not to be exempt from their influence. To the question whether any one of us would be content with a life in which he possessed wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and a complete memory of the whole of history, but experienced no pleasure or pain, great or small, the answer given in the Philebus13 is an emphatic "No": we are anchored in the life of feeling which is part of our humanity, and cannot surrender it even to become "spectators of all time and all existence"14 like the philosopher-kings. In the Laws we are told that the only practicable basis for public morals is the belief that honesty pays: "for no one," says Plato, "would consent, if he could help it, to a course of action which did not bring him more joy than sorrow."15 With that we seem to be back in the world of the Protagoras and of Jeremy Bentham. The legislator's position, however, is not identical with that of the common man. The common man wants to be happy; but Plato, who is legislating for him, wants him to be good. Plato therefore labours to persuade him that goodness and happiness go together. That this is true, Plato happens to believe; but did he not believe it, he would still pretend it true, as being "the most salutary lie that was ever told."16 It is not Plato's own position that has changed: if anything has changed, it is his assessment of human capacity. In the Laws, at any rate, the virtue of the common man is evidently not based on knowledge, or even on true opinion as such, but on a process of conditioning or habituation17 by which he is induced to accept and act on certain "salutary" beliefs. After all, says Plato, this is not too difficult: people who can believe in Cadmus and the dragon's teeth will believe anything.18 Far from supposing, as his master had done, that "the unexamined life is no life for a human being,"19 Plato now appears to hold that the majority of human beings can be kept in tolerable moral health only by a carefully chosen diet of "incantations" —that is to say, edifying myths and bracing ethical slogans. We may say that in principle he accepts Burckhardt's dichotomy—rationalism for the few, magic for the many. We have seen, however, that his rationalism is quickened with ideas that once were magical; and on the other hand we shall see later how his "incantations" were to be made to serve rational ends.
In other ways too, Plato's growing recognition of the importance of affective elements carried him beyond the limits of fifth-century rationalism. This appears very clearly in the development of his theory of Evil. It is true that to the end of his life21 he went on repeating the Socratic dictum that "No one commits an error if he can help it"; but he had long ceased to be content with the simple Socratic opinion which saw moral error as a kind of mistake in perspective.22 When Plato took over the magico-religious view of the psyche, he at first took over with it the puritan dualism which attributed all the sins and sufferings of the psyche to the pollution arising from contact with a mortal body. In the Phaedo he transposed that doctrine into philosophical terms and gave it the formulation that was to become classical: only when by death or by self-discipline the rational self is purged of "the folly of the body"23 can it resume its true nature which is divine and sinless; the good life is the practice of that purgation, Both in antiquity and to-day, the general reader has been inclined to regard this as Plato's last word on the matter. But Plato was too penetrating and, at bottom, too realistic a thinker to be satisfied for long with the theory of the Phaedo. As soon as he turned from the occult self to the empirical man, he found himself driven to recognise an irrational factor within the mind itself, and thus to think of moral evil in terms of psychological conflict
That is already so in the Republic: the same passage of Homer which in the Phaedo had illustrated the soul's dialogue with "the passions of the body" becomes in the Republic an internal dialogue between two "parts" of the soul;25 the passions are no longer seen as an infection of extraneous origin, but as a necessary part of the life of the mind as we know it, and even as a source of energy, like Freud's libido, which can be "canalised" either towards sensuous or towards intellectual activity.26 The theory of inner conflict, vividly illustrated in the Republic by the tale of Leontius,27 was precisely formulated in the Sophist,28 where it is defined as a psychological maladjustment resulting "from some sort of injury,"29 a kind of disease of the soul, and is said to be the cause of cowardice, intemperance, injustice, and (it would seem) moral evil in general, as distinct from ignorance or intellectual failure. This is something quite different both from the rationalism of the earliest dialogues and from the puritanism of the Phaedo, and goes a good deal deeper than either; I take it to be Plato's personal contribution.30
Yet Plato had not abandoned the transcendent rational self, whose perfect unity is the guarantee of its immortality. In the Timaeus, where he is trying to reformulate his earlier vision of man's destiny in terms compatible with his later psychology and cosmology, we meet again the unitary soul of the Phaedo; and it is significant that Plato here applies to it the old religious term that Empedocles had used for the occult self—he calls it the daemon.31 In the Timaeus, however, it has another sort of soul or self "built on to it," "the mortal kind wherein are terrible and indispensable passions."32 Does not this mean that for Plato the human personality has virtually broken in two? Certainly it is not clear what bond unites or could unite an indestructible daemon resident in the human head with a set of irrational impulses housed in the chest or "tethered like a beast untamed" in the belly. We are reminded of the naive opinion of that Persian in Xenophon to whom it was quite obvious that he must have two souls: for, said he, the same soul could not be at once good and bad—it could not desire simultaneously noble actions and base ones, will and not will to perform a particular act at a particular moment.33
But Plato's fission of the empirical man into daemon and beast is perhaps not quite so inconsequent as it may appear to the modern reader. It reflects a similar fission in Plato's view of human nature: the gulf between the immortal and the mortal soul corresponds to the gulf between Plato's vision of man as he might be and his estimate of man as he is. What Plato had come to think of human life as it is actually lived, appears most clearly in the Laws. There he twice informs us that man is a puppet. Whether the gods made it simply as a plaything or for some serious purpose one cannot tell; all we know is that the creature is on a string, and its hopes and fears, pleasures and pains, jerk it about and make it dance.34 In a later passage the Athenian observes that it is a pity we have to take human affairs seriously, and remarks that man is God's plaything, "and that is really the best that can be said of him": men and women should accordingly make this play as charming as possible, sacrificing to the gods with music and dancing; "thus they will live out their lives in accordance with their nature, being puppets chiefly, and having in them only a small portion of reality." "You are making out our human race very mean," says the Spartan. And the Athenian apologises: "I thought of God, and I was moved to speak as I did just now. Well, if you will have it so, let us say that our race is not mean—that it is worth taking a little bit seriously
Plato suggests here a religious origin for this way of thinking; and we often meet it in later religious thinkers, from Marcus Aurelius to Mr. T. S. Eliot—who has said in almost the same words, "Human nature is able to endure only a very little reality." It agrees with the drift of much else in the Laws— with the view that men are as unfit to rule themselves as a flock of sheep,36 that God, not
man, is the measure of things,37 that man is the gods' property and that if he wishes to be happy, he should be "abject," before God—a word which nearly all pagan writers, and Plato himself elsewhere, employ as a term of contempt.39 Ought we to discount all this as a senile aberration, the sour pessimism of a tired and irritable old man? It might seem so: for it contrasts oddly with the radiant picture of the soul's divine nature and destiny which Plato painted in his middle dialogues and certainly never abjured. But we may recall the philosopher of the Republic, to whom, as to Aristotle's megalopsych, human life cannot appear important we may remember that in the Meno the mass of men are likened to the shadows that flit in Homer's Hades, and that the conception of human beings as the chattels of a god appears already in the Phaedo.41 We may think also of another passage in the Phaedo, where Plato predicts with undisguised relish the future of his fellow-men: in their next incarnation some of them will be donkeys, others wolves, while the the respectable bourgeoisie, may look forward to becoming bees or ants.42 No doubt this is partly Plato's fun; but it is the sort of fun which would have appealed to Jonathan Swift. It carries the implication that everybody except the philosopher is on the verge of becoming subhuman, which is (as ancient Platonists saw)43 hard to reconcile with the view that every human soul is essentially rational.