Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  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 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 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 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 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 carričre 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,” 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 dęmos,+ 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 himsel
f to resist the whole fierce band, flung away before he shall have done any service 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 askęsis, 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 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.

  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 anęr)+ 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 (hautę di’ hautęn)+ 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 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 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 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 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 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.