Gorgias
by
Plato
Part 1 out of 4
This etext was prepared by Sue Asscher
GORGIAS
by Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
INTRODUCTION.
In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his
interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the
main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe
rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with
one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have
the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular of the dialogues there is
also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning is not forgotten at
the end, and numerous allusions and references are interspersed, which form
the loose connecting links of the whole. We must not neglect this unity,
but neither must we attempt to confine the Platonic dialogue on the
Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare Introduction to the Phaedrus.)
Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this matter.
First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one another by the
slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory
assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle of
Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied his
method with the most various results. The value and use of the method has
been hardly, if at all, examined either by him or them. Secondly, they
have extended almost indefinitely the scope of each separate dialogue; in
this way they think that they have escaped all difficulties, not seeing
that what they have gained in generality they have lost in truth and
distinctness. Metaphysical conceptions easily pass into one another; and
the simpler notions of antiquity, which we can only realize by an effort,
imperceptibly blend with the more familiar theories of modern philosophers.
An eye for proportion is needed (his own art of measuring) in the study of
Plato, as well as of other great artists. We may hardly admit that the
moral antithesis of good and pleasure, or the intellectual antithesis of
knowledge and opinion, being and appearance, are never far off in a
Platonic discussion. But because they are in the background, we should not
bring them into the foreground, or expect to discern them equally in all
the dialogues.
There may be some advantage in drawing out a little the main outlines of
the building; but the use of this is limited, and may be easily
exaggerated. We may give Plato too much system, and alter the natural form
and connection of his thoughts. Under the idea that his dialogues are
finished works of art, we may find a reason for everything, and lose the
highest characteristic of art, which is simplicity. Most great works
receive a new light from a new and original mind. But whether these new
lights are true or only suggestive, will depend on their agreement with the
spirit of Plato, and the amount of direct evidence which can be urged in
support of them. When a theory is running away with us, criticism does a
friendly office in counselling moderation, and recalling us to the
indications of the text.
Like the Phaedrus, the Gorgias has puzzled students of Plato by the
appearance of two or more subjects. Under the cover of rhetoric higher
themes are introduced; the argument expands into a general view of the good
and evil of man. After making an ineffectual attempt to obtain a sound
definition of his art from Gorgias, Socrates assumes the existence of a
universal art of flattery or simulation having several branches:--this is
the genus of which rhetoric is only one, and not the highest species. To
flattery is opposed the true and noble art of life which he who possesses
seeks always to impart to others, and which at last triumphs, if not here,
at any rate in another world. These two aspects of life and knowledge
appear to be the two leading ideas of the dialogue. The true and the false
in individuals and states, in the treatment of the soul as well as of the
body, are conceived under the forms of true and false art. In the
development of this opposition there arise various other questions, such as
the two famous paradoxes of Socrates (paradoxes as they are to the world in
general, ideals as they may be more worthily called): (1) that to do is
worse than to suffer evil; and (2) that when a man has done evil he had
better be punished than unpunished; to which may be added (3) a third
Socratic paradox or ideal, that bad men do what they think best, but not
what they desire, for the desire of all is towards the good. That pleasure
is to be distinguished from good is proved by the simultaneousness of
pleasure and pain, and by the possibility of the bad having in certain
cases pleasures as great as those of the good, or even greater. Not merely
rhetoricians, but poets, musicians, and other artists, the whole tribe of
statesmen, past as well as present, are included in the class of
flatterers. The true and false finally appear before the judgment-seat of
the gods below.
The dialogue naturally falls into three divisions, to which the three
characters of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles respectively correspond; and
the form and manner change with the stages of the argument. Socrates is
deferential towards Gorgias, playful and yet cutting in dealing with the
youthful Polus, ironical and sarcastic in his encounter with Callicles. In
the first division the question is asked--What is rhetoric? To this there
is no answer given, for Gorgias is soon made to contradict himself by
Socrates, and the argument is transferred to the hands of his disciple
Polus, who rushes to the defence of his master. The answer has at last to
be given by Socrates himself, but before he can even explain his meaning to
Polus, he must enlighten him upon the great subject of shams or flatteries.
When Polus finds his favourite art reduced to the level of cookery, he
replies that at any rate rhetoricians, like despots, have great power.
Socrates denies that they have any real power, and hence arise the three
paradoxes already mentioned. Although they are strange to him, Polus is at
last convinced of their truth; at least, they seem to him to follow
legitimately from the premises. Thus the second act of the dialogue
closes. Then Callicles appears on the scene, at first maintaining that
pleasure is good, and that might is right, and that law is nothing but the
combination of the many weak against the few strong. When he is confuted
he withdraws from the argument, and leaves Socrates to arrive at the
conclusion by himself. The conclusion is that there are two kinds of
statesmanship, a higher and a lower--that which makes the people better,
and that which only flatters them, and he exhorts Callicles to choose the
higher. The dialogue terminates with a mythus of a final judgment, in
which there will be no more flattery or disguise, and no further use for
the teaching of rhetoric.
The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts
which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced
in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents, and is
celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the dialogues of
Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain dignity, and is
treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is no match for him
in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric all his life, he is
still incapable of defining his own art. When his ideas begin to clear up,
he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can be wholly separated from justice
and injustice, and this lingering sentiment of morality, or regard for
public opinion, enables Socrates to detect him in a contradiction. Like
Protagoras, he is described as of a generous nature; he expresses his
approbation of Socrates' manner of approaching a question; he is quite 'one
of Socrates' sort, ready to be refuted as well as to refute,' and very
eager that Callicles and Socrates should have the game out. He knows by
experience that rhetoric exercises great influence over other men, but he
is unable to explain the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know
nothing.
Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes him,
who wanted originally to have taken the place of Gorgias under the pretext
that the old man was tired, and now avails himself of the earliest
opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author of a work on
rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the inventor of
balanced or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.). At first he is
violent and ill-mannered, and is angry at seeing his master overthrown.
But in the judicious hands of Socrates he is soon restored to good-humour,
and compelled to assent to the required conclusion. Like Gorgias, he is
overthrown because he compromises; he is unwilling to say that to do is
fairer or more honourable than to suffer injustice. Though he is
fascinated by the power of rhetoric, and dazzled by the splendour of
success, he is not insensible to higher arguments. Plato may have felt
that there would be an incongruity in a youth maintaining the cause of
injustice against the world. He has never heard the other side of the
question, and he listens to the paradoxes, as they appear to him, of
Socrates with evident astonishment. He can hardly understand the meaning
of Archelaus being miserable, or of rhetoric being only useful in self-
accusation. When the argument with him has fairly run out,
Callicles, in whose house they are assembled, is introduced on the stage:
he is with difficulty convinced that Socrates is in earnest; for if these
things are true, then, as he says with real emotion, the foundations of
society are upside down. In him another type of character is represented;
he is neither sophist nor philosopher, but man of the world, and an
accomplished Athenian gentleman. He might be described in modern language
as a cynic or materialist, a lover of power and also of pleasure, and
unscrupulous in his means of attaining both. There is no desire on his
part to offer any compromise in the interests of morality; nor is any
concession made by him. Like Thrasymachus in the Republic, though he is
not of the same weak and vulgar class, he consistently maintains that might
is right. His great motive of action is political ambition; in this he is
characteristically Greek. Like Anytus in the Meno, he is the enemy of the
Sophists; but favours the new art of rhetoric, which he regards as an
excellent weapon of attack and defence. He is a despiser of mankind as he
is of philosophy, and sees in the laws of the state only a violation of the
order of nature, which intended that the stronger should govern the weaker
(compare Republic). Like other men of the world who are of a speculative
turn of mind, he generalizes the bad side of human nature, and has easily
brought down his principles to his practice. Philosophy and poetry alike
supply him with distinctions suited to his view of human life. He has a
good will to Socrates, whose talents he evidently admires, while he
censures the puerile use which he makes of them. He expresses a keen
intellectual interest in the argument. Like Anytus, again, he has a
sympathy with other men of the world; the Athenian statesmen of a former
generation, who showed no weakness and made no mistakes, such as Miltiades,
Themistocles, Pericles, are his favourites. His ideal of human character
is a man of great passions and great powers, which he has developed to the
utmost, and which he uses in his own enjoyment and in the government of
others. Had Critias been the name instead of Callicles, about whom we know
nothing from other sources, the opinions of the man would have seemed to
reflect the history of his life.
And now the combat deepens. In Callicles, far more than in any sophist or
rhetorician, is concentrated the spirit of evil against which Socrates is
contending, the spirit of the world, the spirit of the many contending
against the one wise man, of which the Sophists, as he describes them in
the Republic, are the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves
carried away by the great tide of public opinion. Socrates approaches his
antagonist warily from a distance, with a sort of irony which touches with
a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion to some scandal
of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in
most profound earnest, as Chaerephon remarks. Callicles soon loses his
temper, but the more he is irritated, the more provoking and matter of fact
does Socrates become. A repartee of his which appears to have been really
made to the 'omniscient' Hippias, according to the testimony of Xenophon
(Mem.), is introduced. He is called by Callicles a popular declaimer, and
certainly shows that he has the power, in the words of Gorgias, of being
'as long as he pleases,' or 'as short as he pleases' (compare Protag.).
Callicles exhibits great ability in defending himself and attacking
Socrates, whom he accuses of trifling and word-splitting; he is scandalized
that the legitimate consequences of his own argument should be stated in
plain terms; after the manner of men of the world, he wishes to preserve
the decencies of life. But he cannot consistently maintain the bad sense
of words; and getting confused between the abstract notions of better,
superior, stronger, he is easily turned round by Socrates, and only induced
to continue the argument by the authority of Gorgias. Once, when Socrates
is describing the manner in which the ambitious citizen has to identify
himself with the people, he partially recognizes the truth of his words.
The Socrates of the Gorgias may be compared with the Socrates of the
Protagoras and Meno. As in other dialogues, he is the enemy of the
Sophists and rhetoricians; and also of the statesmen, whom he regards as
another variety of the same species. His behaviour is governed by that of
his opponents; the least forwardness or egotism on their part is met by a
corresponding irony on the part of Socrates. He must speak, for philosophy
will not allow him to be silent. He is indeed more ironical and provoking
than in any other of Plato's writings: for he is 'fooled to the top of his
bent' by the worldliness of Callicles. But he is also more deeply in
earnest. He rises higher than even in the Phaedo and Crito: at first
enveloping his moral convictions in a cloud of dust and dialectics, he ends
by losing his method, his life, himself, in them. As in the Protagoras and
Phaedrus, throwing aside the veil of irony, he makes a speech, but, true to
his character, not until his adversary has refused to answer any more
questions. The presentiment of his own fate is hanging over him. He is
aware that Socrates, the single real teacher of politics, as he ventures to
call himself, cannot safely go to war with the whole world, and that in the
courts of earth he will be condemned. But he will be justified in the
world below. Then the position of Socrates and Callicles will be reversed;
all those things 'unfit for ears polite' which Callicles has prophesied as
likely to happen to him in this life, the insulting language, the box on
the ears, will recoil upon his assailant. (Compare Republic, and the
similar reversal of the position of the lawyer and the philosopher in the
Theaetetus).
There is an interesting allusion to his own behaviour at the trial of the
generals after the battle of Arginusae, which he ironically attributes to
his ignorance of the manner in which a vote of the assembly should be
taken. This is said to have happened 'last year' (B.C. 406), and therefore
the assumed date of the dialogue has been fixed at 405 B.C., when Socrates
would already have been an old man. The date is clearly marked, but is
scarcely reconcilable with another indication of time, viz. the 'recent'
usurpation of Archelaus, which occurred in the year 413; and still less
with the 'recent' death of Pericles, who really died twenty-four years
previously (429 B.C.) and is afterwards reckoned among the statesmen of a
past age; or with the mention of Nicias, who died in 413, and is
nevertheless spoken of as a living witness. But we shall hereafter have
reason to observe, that although there is a general consistency of times
and persons in the Dialogues of Plato, a precise dramatic date is an
invention of his commentators (Preface to Republic).
The conclusion of the Dialogue is remarkable, (1) for the truly
characteristic declaration of Socrates that he is ignorant of the true
nature and bearing of these things, while he affirms at the same time that
no one can maintain any other view without being ridiculous. The
profession of ignorance reminds us of the earlier and more exclusively
Socratic Dialogues. But neither in them, nor in the Apology, nor in the
Memorabilia of Xenophon, does Socrates express any doubt of the fundamental
truths of morality. He evidently regards this 'among the multitude of
questions' which agitate human life 'as the principle which alone remains
unshaken.' He does not insist here, any more than in the Phaedo, on the
literal truth of the myth, but only on the soundness of the doctrine which
is contained in it, that doing wrong is worse than suffering, and that a
man should be rather than seem; for the next best thing to a man's being
just is that he should be corrected and become just; also that he should
avoid all flattery, whether of himself or of others; and that rhetoric
should be employed for the maintenance of the right only. The revelation
of another life is a recapitulation of the argument in a figure.
(2) Socrates makes the singular remark, that he is himself the only true
politician of his age. In other passages, especially in the Apology, he
disclaims being a politician at all. There he is convinced that he or any
other good man who attempted to resist the popular will would be put to
death before he had done any good to himself or others. Here he
anticipates such a fate for himself, from the fact that he is 'the only man
of the present day who performs his public duties at all.' The two points
of view are not really inconsistent, but the difference between them is
worth noticing: Socrates is and is not a public man. Not in the ordinary
sense, like Alcibiades or Pericles, but in a higher one; and this will
sooner or later entail the same consequences on him. He cannot be a
private man if he would; neither can he separate morals from politics. Nor
is he unwilling to be a politician, although he foresees the dangers which
await him; but he must first become a better and wiser man, for he as well
as Callicles is in a state of perplexity and uncertainty. And yet there is
an inconsistency: for should not Socrates too have taught the citizens
better than to put him to death?
And now, as he himself says, we will 'resume the argument from the
beginning.'
Socrates, who is attended by his inseparable disciple, Chaerephon, meets
Callicles in the streets of Athens. He is informed that he has just missed
an exhibition of Gorgias, which he regrets, because he was desirous, not of
hearing Gorgias display his rhetoric, but of interrogating him concerning
the nature of his art. Callicles proposes that they shall go with him to
his own house, where Gorgias is staying. There they find the great
rhetorician and his younger friend and disciple Polus.
SOCRATES: Put the question to him, Chaerephon.
CHAEREPHON: What question?
SOCRATES: Who is he?--such a question as would elicit from a man the
answer, 'I am a cobbler.'
Polus suggests that Gorgias may be tired, and desires to answer for him.
'Who is Gorgias?' asks Chaerephon, imitating the manner of his master
Socrates. 'One of the best of men, and a proficient in the best and
noblest of experimental arts,' etc., replies Polus, in rhetorical and
balanced phrases. Socrates is dissatisfied at the length and unmeaningness
of the answer; he tells the disconcerted volunteer that he has mistaken the
quality for the nature of the art, and remarks to Gorgias, that Polus has
learnt how to make a speech, but not how to answer a question. He wishes
that Gorgias would answer him. Gorgias is willing enough, and replies to
the question asked by Chaerephon,--that he is a rhetorician, and in Homeric
language, 'boasts himself to be a good one.' At the request of Socrates he
promises to be brief; for 'he can be as long as he pleases, and as short as
he pleases.' Socrates would have him bestow his length on others, and
proceeds to ask him a number of questions, which are answered by him to his
own great satisfaction, and with a brevity which excites the admiration of
Socrates. The result of the discussion may be summed up as follows:--
Rhetoric treats of discourse; but music and medicine, and other particular
arts, are also concerned with discourse; in what way then does rhetoric
differ from them? Gorgias draws a distinction between the arts which deal
with words, and the arts which have to do with external actions. Socrates
extends this distinction further, and divides all productive arts into two
classes: (1) arts which may be carried on in silence; and (2) arts which
have to do with words, or in which words are coextensive with action, such
as arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric. But still Gorgias could hardly have
meant to say that arithmetic was the same as rhetoric. Even in the arts
which are concerned with words there are differences. What then
distinguishes rhetoric from the other arts which have to do with words?
'The words which rhetoric uses relate to the best and greatest of human
things.' But tell me, Gorgias, what are the best? 'Health first, beauty
next, wealth third,' in the words of the old song, or how would you rank
them? The arts will come to you in a body, each claiming precedence and
saying that her own good is superior to that of the rest--How will you
choose between them? 'I should say, Socrates, that the art of persuasion,
which gives freedom to all men, and to individuals power in the state, is
the greatest good.' But what is the exact nature of this persuasion?--is
the persevering retort: You could not describe Zeuxis as a painter, or
even as a painter of figures, if there were other painters of figures;
neither can you define rhetoric simply as an art of persuasion, because
there are other arts which persuade, such as arithmetic, which is an art of
persuasion about odd and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the
necessity of a further limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art
of persuading in the law courts, and in the assembly, about the just and
unjust. But still there are two sorts of persuasion: one which gives
knowledge, and another which gives belief without knowledge; and knowledge
is always true, but belief may be either true or false,--there is therefore
a further question: which of the two sorts of persuasion does rhetoric
effect in courts of law and assemblies? Plainly that which gives belief
and not that which gives knowledge; for no one can impart a real knowledge
of such matters to a crowd of persons in a few minutes. And there is
another point to be considered:--when the assembly meets to advise about
walls or docks or military expeditions, the rhetorician is not taken into
counsel, but the architect, or the general. How would Gorgias explain this
phenomenon? All who intend to become disciples, of whom there are several
in the company, and not Socrates only, are eagerly asking:--About what then
will rhetoric teach us to persuade or advise the state?
Gorgias illustrates the nature of rhetoric by adducing the example of
Themistocles, who persuaded the Athenians to build their docks and walls,
and of Pericles, whom Socrates himself has heard speaking about the middle
wall of the Piraeus. He adds that he has exercised a similar power over
the patients of his brother Herodicus. He could be chosen a physician by
the assembly if he pleased, for no physician could compete with a
rhetorician in popularity and influence. He could persuade the multitude
of anything by the power of his rhetoric; not that the rhetorician ought to
abuse this power any more than a boxer should abuse the art of self-
defence. Rhetoric is a good thing, but, like all good things, may be
unlawfully used. Neither is the teacher of the art to be deemed unjust
because his pupils are unjust and make a bad use of the lessons which they
have learned from him.
Socrates would like to know before he replies, whether Gorgias will quarrel
with him if he points out a slight inconsistency into which he has fallen,
or whether he, like himself, is one who loves to be refuted. Gorgias
declares that he is quite one of his sort, but fears that the argument may
be tedious to the company. The company cheer, and Chaerephon and Callicles
exhort them to proceed. Socrates gently points out the supposed
inconsistency into which Gorgias appears to have fallen, and which he is
inclined to think may arise out of a misapprehension of his own. The
rhetorician has been declared by Gorgias to be more persuasive to the
ignorant than the physician, or any other expert. And he is said to be
ignorant, and this ignorance of his is regarded by Gorgias as a happy
condition, for he has escaped the trouble of learning. But is he as
ignorant of just and unjust as he is of medicine or building? Gorgias is
compelled to admit that if he did not know them previously he must learn
them from his teacher as a part of the art of rhetoric. But he who has
learned carpentry is a carpenter, and he who has learned music is a
musician, and he who has learned justice is just. The rhetorician then
must be a just man, and rhetoric is a just thing. But Gorgias has already
admitted the opposite of this, viz. that rhetoric may be abused, and that
the rhetorician may act unjustly. How is the inconsistency to be
explained?
The fallacy of this argument is twofold; for in the first place, a man may
know justice and not be just--here is the old confusion of the arts and the
virtues;--nor can any teacher be expected to counteract wholly the bent of
natural character; and secondly, a man may have a degree of justice, but
not sufficient to prevent him from ever doing wrong. Polus is naturally
exasperated at the sophism, which he is unable to detect; of course, he
says, the rhetorician, like every one else, will admit that he knows
justice (how can he do otherwise when pressed by the interrogations of
Socrates?), but he thinks that great want of manners is shown in bringing
the argument to such a pass. Socrates ironically replies, that when old
men trip, the young set them on their legs again; and he is quite willing
to retract, if he can be shown to be in error, but upon one condition,
which is that Polus studies brevity. Polus is in great indignation at not
being allowed to use as many words as he pleases in the free state of
Athens. Socrates retorts, that yet harder will be his own case, if he is
compelled to stay and listen to them. After some altercation they agree
(compare Protag.), that Polus shall ask and Socrates answer.
'What is the art of Rhetoric?' says Polus. Not an art at all, replies
Socrates, but a thing which in your book you affirm to have created art.
Polus asks, 'What thing?' and Socrates answers, An experience or routine of
making a sort of delight or gratification. 'But is not rhetoric a fine
thing?' I have not yet told you what rhetoric is. Will you ask me another
question--What is cookery? 'What is cookery?' An experience or routine of
making a sort of delight or gratification. Then they are the same, or
rather fall under the same class, and rhetoric has still to be
distinguished from cookery. 'What is rhetoric?' asks Polus once more. A
part of a not very creditable whole, which may be termed flattery, is the
reply. 'But what part?' A shadow of a part of politics. This, as might
be expected, is wholly unintelligible, both to Gorgias and Polus; and, in
order to explain his meaning to them, Socrates draws a distinction between
shadows or appearances and realities; e.g. there is real health of body or
soul, and the appearance of them; real arts and sciences, and the
simulations of them. Now the soul and body have two arts waiting upon
them, first the art of politics, which attends on the soul, having a
legislative part and a judicial part; and another art attending on the
body, which has no generic name, but may also be described as having two
divisions, one of which is medicine and the other gymnastic. Corresponding
with these four arts or sciences there are four shams or simulations of
them, mere experiences, as they may be termed, because they give no reason
of their own existence. The art of dressing up is the sham or simulation
of gymnastic, the art of cookery, of medicine; rhetoric is the simulation
of justice, and sophistic of legislation. They may be summed up in an
arithmetical formula:--
Tiring : gymnastic :: cookery : medicine :: sophistic : legislation.
And,
Cookery : medicine :: rhetoric : the art of justice.
And this is the true scheme of them, but when measured only by the
gratification which they procure, they become jumbled together and return
to their aboriginal chaos. Socrates apologizes for the length of his
speech, which was necessary to the explanation of the subject, and begs
Polus not unnecessarily to retaliate on him.
'Do you mean to say that the rhetoricians are esteemed flatterers?' They
are not esteemed at all. 'Why, have they not great power, and can they not
do whatever they desire?' They have no power, and they only do what they
think best, and never what they desire; for they never attain the true
object of desire, which is the good. 'As if you, Socrates, would not envy
the possessor of despotic power, who can imprison, exile, kill any one whom
he pleases.' But Socrates replies that he has no wish to put any one to
death; he who kills another, even justly, is not to be envied, and he who
kills him unjustly is to be pitied; it is better to suffer than to do
injustice. He does not consider that going about with a dagger and putting
men out of the way, or setting a house on fire, is real power. To this
Polus assents, on the ground that such acts would be punished, but he is
still of opinion that evil-doers, if they are unpunished, may be happy
enough. He instances Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, the usurper of
Macedonia. Does not Socrates think him happy?--Socrates would like to know
more about him; he cannot pronounce even the great king to be happy, unless
he knows his mental and moral condition. Polus explains that Archelaus was
a slave, being the son of a woman who was the slave of Alcetas, brother of
Perdiccas king of Macedon--and he, by every species of crime, first
murdering his uncle and then his cousin and half-brother, obtained the
kingdom. This was very wicked, and yet all the world, including Socrates,
would like to have his place. Socrates dismisses the appeal to numbers;
Polus, if he will, may summon all the rich men of Athens, Nicias and his
brothers, Aristocrates, the house of Pericles, or any other great family--
this is the kind of evidence which is adduced in courts of justice, where
truth depends upon numbers. But Socrates employs proof of another sort;
his appeal is to one witness only,--that is to say, the person with whom he
is speaking; him he will convict out of his own mouth. And he is prepared
to show, after his manner, that Archelaus cannot be a wicked man and yet
happy.
The evil-doer is deemed happy if he escapes, and miserable if he suffers
punishment; but Socrates thinks him less miserable if he suffers than if he
escapes. Polus is of opinion that such a paradox as this hardly deserves
refutation, and is at any rate sufficiently refuted by the fact. Socrates
has only to compare the lot of the successful tyrant who is the envy of the
world, and of the wretch who, having been detected in a criminal attempt
against the state, is crucified or burnt to death. Socrates replies, that
if they are both criminal they are both miserable, but that the unpunished
is the more miserable of the two. At this Polus laughs outright, which
leads Socrates to remark that laughter is a new species of refutation.
Polus replies, that he is already refuted; for if he will take the votes of
the company, he will find that no one agrees with him. To this Socrates
rejoins, that he is not a public man, and (referring to his own conduct at
the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae) is unable to take
the suffrages of any company, as he had shown on a recent occasion; he can
only deal with one witness at a time, and that is the person with whom he
is arguing. But he is certain that in the opinion of any man to do is
worse than to suffer evil.
Polus, though he will not admit this, is ready to acknowledge that to do
evil is considered the more foul or dishonourable of the two. But what is
fair and what is foul; whether the terms are applied to bodies, colours,
figures, laws, habits, studies, must they not be defined with reference to
pleasure and utility? Polus assents to this latter doctrine, and is easily
persuaded that the fouler of two things must exceed either in pain or in
hurt. But the doing cannot exceed the suffering of evil in pain, and
therefore must exceed in hurt. Thus doing is proved by the testimony of
Polus himself to be worse or more hurtful than suffering.
There remains the other question: Is a guilty man better off when he is
punished or when he is unpunished? Socrates replies, that what is done
justly is suffered justly: if the act is just, the effect is just; if to
punish is just, to be punished is just, and therefore fair, and therefore
beneficent; and the benefit is that the soul is improved. There are three
evils from which a man may suffer, and which affect him in estate, body,
and soul;--these are, poverty, disease, injustice; and the foulest of these
is injustice, the evil of the soul, because that brings the greatest hurt.
And there are three arts which heal these evils--trading, medicine,
justice--and the fairest of these is justice. Happy is he who has never
committed injustice, and happy in the second degree he who has been healed
by punishment. And therefore the criminal should himself go to the judge
as he would to the physician, and purge away his crime. Rhetoric will
enable him to display his guilt in proper colours, and to sustain himself
and others in enduring the necessary penalty. And similarly if a man has
an enemy, he will desire not to punish him, but that he shall go unpunished
and become worse and worse, taking care only that he does no injury to
himself. These are at least conceivable uses of the art, and no others
have been discovered by us.
Here Callicles, who has been listening in silent amazement, asks Chaerephon
whether Socrates is in earnest, and on receiving the assurance that he is,
proceeds to ask the same question of Socrates himself. For if such
doctrines are true, life must have been turned upside down, and all of us
are doing the opposite of what we ought to be doing.
Socrates replies in a style of playful irony, that before men can
understand one another they must have some common feeling. And such a
community of feeling exists between himself and Callicles, for both of them
are lovers, and they have both a pair of loves; the beloved of Callicles
are the Athenian Demos and Demos the son of Pyrilampes; the beloved of
Socrates are Alcibiades and philosophy. The peculiarity of Callicles is
that he can never contradict his loves; he changes as his Demos changes in
all his opinions; he watches the countenance of both his loves, and repeats
their sentiments, and if any one is surprised at his sayings and doings,
the explanation of them is, that he is not a free agent, but must always be
imitating his two loves. And this is the explanation of Socrates'
peculiarities also. He is always repeating what his mistress, Philosophy,
is saying to him, who unlike his other love, Alcibiades, is ever the same,
ever true. Callicles must refute her, or he will never be at unity with
himself; and discord in life is far worse than the discord of musical
sounds.
Callicles answers, that Gorgias was overthrown because, as Polus said, in
compliance with popular prejudice he had admitted that if his pupil did not
know justice the rhetorician must teach him; and Polus has been similarly
entangled, because his modesty led him to admit that to suffer is more
honourable than to do injustice. By custom 'yes,' but not by nature, says
Callicles. And Socrates is always playing between the two points of view,
and putting one in the place of the other. In this very argument, what
Polus only meant in a conventional sense has been affirmed by him to be a
law of nature. For convention says that 'injustice is dishonourable,' but
nature says that 'might is right.' And we are always taming down the
nobler spirits among us to the conventional level. But sometimes a great
man will rise up and reassert his original rights, trampling under foot all
our formularies, and then the light of natural justice shines forth.
Pindar says, 'Law, the king of all, does violence with high hand;' as is
indeed proved by the example of Heracles, who drove off the oxen of Geryon
and never paid for them.
This is the truth, Socrates, as you will be convinced, if you leave
philosophy and pass on to the real business of life. A little philosophy
is an excellent thing; too much is the ruin of a man. He who has not
'passed his metaphysics' before he has grown up to manhood will never know
the world. Philosophers are ridiculous when they take to politics, and I
dare say that politicians are equally ridiculous when they take to
philosophy: 'Every man,' as Euripides says, 'is fondest of that in which
he is best.' Philosophy is graceful in youth, like the lisp of infancy,
and should be cultivated as a part of education; but when a grown-up man
lisps or studies philosophy, I should like to beat him. None of those
over-refined natures ever come to any good; they avoid the busy haunts of
men, and skulk in corners, whispering to a few admiring youths, and never
giving utterance to any noble sentiments.
For you, Socrates, I have a regard, and therefore I say to you, as Zethus
says to Amphion in the play, that you have 'a noble soul disguised in a
puerile exterior.' And I would have you consider the danger which you and
other philosophers incur. For you would not know how to defend yourself if
any one accused you in a law-court,--there you would stand, with gaping
mouth and dizzy brain, and might be murdered, robbed, boxed on the ears
with impunity. Take my advice, then, and get a little common sense; leave
to others these frivolities; walk in the ways of the wealthy and be wise.
Socrates professes to have found in Callicles the philosopher's touchstone;
and he is certain that any opinion in which they both agree must be the
very truth. Callicles has all the three qualities which are needed in a
critic--knowledge, good-will, frankness; Gorgias and Polus, although
learned men, were too modest, and their modesty made them contradict
themselves. But Callicles is well-educated; and he is not too modest to
speak out (of this he has already given proof), and his good-will is shown
both by his own profession and by his giving the same caution against
philosophy to Socrates, which Socrates remembers hearing him give long ago
to his own clique of friends. He will pledge himself to retract any error
into which he may have fallen, and which Callicles may point out. But he
would like to know first of all what he and Pindar mean by natural justice.
Do they suppose that the rule of justice is the rule of the stronger or of
the better?' 'There is no difference.' Then are not the many superior to
the one, and the opinions of the many better? And their opinion is that
justice is equality, and that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer
wrong. And as they are the superior or stronger, this opinion of theirs
must be in accordance with natural as well as conventional justice. 'Why
will you continue splitting words? Have I not told you that the superior
is the better?' But what do you mean by the better? Tell me that, and
please to be a little milder in your language, if you do not wish to drive
me away. 'I mean the worthier, the wiser.' You mean to say that one man
of sense ought to rule over ten thousand fools? 'Yes, that is my meaning.'
Ought the physician then to have a larger share of meats and drinks? or the
weaver to have more coats, or the cobbler larger shoes, or the farmer more
seed? 'You are always saying the same things, Socrates.' Yes, and on the
same subjects too; but you are never saying the same things. For, first,
you defined the superior to be the stronger, and then the wiser, and now
something else;--what DO you mean? 'I mean men of political ability, who
ought to govern and to have more than the governed.' Than themselves?
'What do you mean?' I mean to say that every man is his own governor. 'I
see that you mean those dolts, the temperate. But my doctrine is, that a
man should let his desires grow, and take the means of satisfying them. To
the many this is impossible, and therefore they combine to prevent him.
But if he is a king, and has power, how base would he be in submitting to
them! To invite the common herd to be lord over him, when he might have
the enjoyment of all things! For the truth is, Socrates, that luxury and
self-indulgence are virtue and happiness; all the rest is mere talk.'
Socrates compliments Callicles on his frankness in saying what other men
only think. According to his view, those who want nothing are not happy.
'Why,' says Callicles, 'if they were, stones and the dead would be happy.'
Socrates in reply is led into a half-serious, half-comic vein of
reflection. 'Who knows,' as Euripides says, 'whether life may not be
death, and death life?' Nay, there are philosophers who maintain that even
in life we are dead, and that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the
soul. And some ingenious Sicilian has made an allegory, in which he
represents fools as the uninitiated, who are supposed to be carrying water
to a vessel, which is full of holes, in a similarly holey sieve, and this
sieve is their own soul. The idea is fanciful, but nevertheless is a
figure of a truth which I want to make you acknowledge, viz. that the life
of contentment is better than the life of indulgence. Are you disposed to
admit that? 'Far otherwise.' Then hear another parable. The life of
self-contentment and self-indulgence may be represented respectively by two
men, who are filling jars with streams of wine, honey, milk,--the jars of
the one are sound, and the jars of the other leaky; the first fils his
jars, and has no more trouble with them; the second is always filling them,
and would suffer extreme misery if he desisted. Are you of the same
opinion still? 'Yes, Socrates, and the figure expresses what I mean. For
true pleasure is a perpetual stream, flowing in and flowing out. To be
hungry and always eating, to be thirsty and always drinking, and to have
all the other desires and to satisfy them, that, as I admit, is my idea of
happiness.' And to be itching and always scratching? 'I do not deny that
there may be happiness even in that.' And to indulge unnatural desires, if
they are abundantly satisfied? Callicles is indignant at the introduction
of such topics. But he is reminded by Socrates that they are introduced,
not by him, but by the maintainer of the identity of pleasure and good.
Will Callicles still maintain this? 'Yes, for the sake of consistency, he
will.' The answer does not satisfy Socrates, who fears that he is losing
his touchstone. A profession of seriousness on the part of Callicles
reassures him, and they proceed with the argument. Pleasure and good are
the same, but knowledge and courage are not the same either with pleasure
or good, or with one another. Socrates disproves the first of these
statements by showing that two opposites cannot coexist, but must alternate
with one another--to be well and ill together is impossible. But pleasure
and pain are simultaneous, and the cessation of them is simultaneous; e.g.
in the case of drinking and thirsting, whereas good and evil are not
simultaneous, and do not cease simultaneously, and therefore pleasure
cannot be the same as good.
Callicles has already lost his temper, and can only be persuaded to go on
by the interposition of Gorgias. Socrates, having already guarded against
objections by distinguishing courage and knowledge from pleasure and good,
proceeds:--The good are good by the presence of good, and the bad are bad
by the presence of evil. And the brave and wise are good, and the cowardly
and foolish are bad. And he who feels pleasure is good, and he who feels
pain is bad, and both feel pleasure and pain in nearly the same degree, and
sometimes the bad man or coward in a greater degree. Therefore the bad man
or coward is as good as the brave or may be even better.
Callicles endeavours now to avert the inevitable absurdity by affirming
that he and all mankind admitted some pleasures to be good and others bad.
The good are the beneficial, and the bad are the hurtful, and we should
choose the one and avoid the other. But this, as Socrates observes, is a
return to the old doctrine of himself and Polus, that all things should be
done for the sake of the good.
Callicles assents to this, and Socrates, finding that they are agreed in
distinguishing pleasure from good, returns to his old division of empirical
habits, or shams, or flatteries, which study pleasure only, and the arts
which are concerned with the higher interests of soul and body. Does
Callicles agree to this division? Callicles will agree to anything, in
order that he may get through the argument. Which of the arts then are
flatteries? Flute-playing, harp-playing, choral exhibitions, the
dithyrambics of Cinesias are all equally condemned on the ground that they
give pleasure only; and Meles the harp-player, who was the father of
Cinesias, failed even in that. The stately muse of Tragedy is bent upon
pleasure, and not upon improvement. Poetry in general is only a rhetorical
address to a mixed audience of men, women, and children. And the orators
are very far from speaking with a view to what is best; their way is to
humour the assembly as if they were children.
Callicles replies, that this is only true of some of them; others have a
real regard for their fellow-citizens. Granted; then there are two species
of oratory; the one a flattery, another which has a real regard for the
citizens. But where are the orators among whom you find the latter?
Callicles admits that there are none remaining, but there were such in the
days when Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and the great Pericles were still
alive. Socrates replies that none of these were true artists, setting
before themselves the duty of bringing order out of disorder. The good man
and true orator has a settled design, running through his life, to which he
conforms all his words and actions; he desires to implant justice and
eradicate injustice, to implant all virtue and eradicate all vice in the
minds of his citizens. He is the physician who will not allow the sick man
to indulge his appetites with a variety of meats and drinks, but insists on
his exercising self-restraint. And this is good for the soul, and better
than the unrestrained indulgence which Callicles was recently approving.
Here Callicles, who had been with difficulty brought to this point, turns
restive, and suggests that Socrates shall answer his own questions.
'Then,' says Socrates, 'one man must do for two;' and though he had hoped
to have given Callicles an 'Amphion' in return for his 'Zethus,' he is
willing to proceed; at the same time, he hopes that Callicles will correct
him, if he falls into error. He recapitulates the advantages which he has
already won:--
The pleasant is not the same as the good--Callicles and I are agreed about
that,--but pleasure is to be pursued for the sake of the good, and the good
is that of which the presence makes us good; we and all things good have
acquired some virtue or other. And virtue, whether of body or soul, of
things or persons, is not attained by accident, but is due to order and
harmonious arrangement. And the soul which has order is better than the
soul which is without order, and is therefore temperate and is therefore
good, and the intemperate is bad. And he who is temperate is also just and
brave and pious, and has attained the perfection of goodness and therefore
of happiness, and the intemperate whom you approve is the opposite of all
this and is wretched. He therefore who would be happy must pursue
temperance and avoid intemperance, and if possible escape the necessity of
punishment, but if he have done wrong he must endure punishment. In this
way states and individuals should seek to attain harmony, which, as the
wise tell us, is the bond of heaven and earth, of gods and men. Callicles
has never discovered the power of geometrical proportion in both worlds; he
would have men aim at disproportion and excess. But if he be wrong in
this, and if self-control is the true secret of happiness, then the paradox
is true that the only use of rhetoric is in self-accusation, and Polus was
right in saying that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong, and Gorgias
was right in saying that the rhetorician must be a just man. And you were
wrong in taunting me with my defenceless condition, and in saying that I
might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with impunity. For I
may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to be stricken--to do
than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds. I
myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can
deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils,
and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the last
must be a ruler, or the friend of a ruler; and to be the friend he must be
the equal of the ruler, and must also resemble him. Under his protection
he will suffer no evil, but will he also do no evil? Nay, will he not
rather do all the evil which he can and escape? And in this way the
greatest of all evils will befall him. 'But this imitator of the tyrant,'
rejoins Callicles, 'will kill any one who does not similarly imitate him.'
Socrates replies that he is not deaf, and that he has heard that repeated
many times, and can only reply, that a bad man will kill a good one. 'Yes,
and that is the provoking thing.' Not provoking to a man of sense who is
not studying the arts which will preserve him from danger; and this, as you
say, is the use of rhetoric in courts of justice. But how many other arts
are there which also save men from death, and are yet quite humble in their
pretensions--such as the art of swimming, or the art of the pilot? Does
not the pilot do men at least as much service as the rhetorician, and yet
for the voyage from Aegina to Athens he does not charge more than two
obols, and when he disembarks is quite unassuming in his demeanour? The
reason is that he is not certain whether he has done his passengers any
good in saving them from death, if one of them is diseased in body, and
still more if he is diseased in mind--who can say? The engineer too will
often save whole cities, and yet you despise him, and would not allow your
son to marry his daughter, or his son to marry yours. But what reason is
there in this? For if virtue only means the saving of life, whether your
own or another's, you have no right to despise him or any practiser of
saving arts. But is not virtue something different from saving and being
saved? I would have you rather consider whether you ought not to disregard
length of life, and think only how you can live best, leaving all besides
to the will of Heaven. For you must not expect to have influence either
with the Athenian Demos or with Demos the son of Pyrilampes, unless you
become like them. What do you say to this?
'There is some truth in what you are saying, but I do not entirely believe
you.'
That is because you are in love with Demos. But let us have a little more
conversation. You remember the two processes--one which was directed to
pleasure, the other which was directed to making men as good as possible.
And those who have the care of the city should make the citizens as good as
possible. But who would undertake a public building, if he had never had a
teacher of the art of building, and had never constructed a building
before? or who would undertake the duty of state-physician, if he had never
cured either himself or any one else? Should we not examine him before we
entrusted him with the office? And as Callicles is about to enter public
life, should we not examine him? Whom has he made better? For we have
already admitted that this is the statesman's proper business. And we must
ask the same question about Pericles, and Cimon, and Miltiades, and
Themistocles. Whom did they make better? Nay, did not Pericles make the
citizens worse? For he gave them pay, and at first he was very popular
with them, but at last they condemned him to death. Yet surely he would be
a bad tamer of animals who, having received them gentle, taught them to
kick and butt, and man is an animal; and Pericles who had the charge of man
only made him wilder, and more savage and unjust, and therefore he could
not have been a good statesman. The same tale might be repeated about
Cimon, Themistocles, Miltiades. But the charioteer who keeps his seat at
first is not thrown out when he gains greater experience and skill. The
inference is, that the statesman of a past age were no better than those of
our own. They may have been cleverer constructors of docks and harbours,
but they did not improve the character of the citizens. I have told you
again and again (and I purposely use the same images) that the soul, like
the body, may be treated in two ways--there is the meaner and the higher
art. You seemed to understand what I said at the time, but when I ask you
who were the really good statesmen, you answer--as if I asked you who were
the good trainers, and you answered, Thearion, the baker, Mithoecus, the
author of the Sicilian cookery-book, Sarambus, the vintner. And you would
be affronted if I told you that these are a parcel of cooks who make men
fat only to make them thin. And those whom they have fattened applaud
them, instead of finding fault with them, and lay the blame of their
subsequent disorders on their physicians. In this respect, Callicles, you
are like them; you applaud the statesmen of old, who pandered to the vices
of the citizens, and filled the city with docks and harbours, but neglected
virtue and justice. And when the fit of illness comes, the citizens who in
like manner applauded Themistocles, Pericles, and others, will lay hold of
you and my friend Alcibiades, and you will suffer for the misdeeds of your
predecessors. The old story is always being repeated--'after all his
services, the ungrateful city banished him, or condemned him to death.' As
if the statesman should not have taught the city better! He surely cannot
blame the state for having unjustly used him, any more than the sophist or
teacher can find fault with his pupils if they cheat him. And the sophist
and orator are in the same case; although you admire rhetoric and despise
sophistic, whereas sophistic is really the higher of the two. The teacher
of the arts takes money, but the teacher of virtue or politics takes no
money, because this is the only kind of service which makes the disciple
desirous of requiting his teacher.
Socrates concludes by finally asking, to which of the two modes of serving
the state Callicles invites him:--'to the inferior and ministerial one,' is
the ingenuous reply. That is the only way of avoiding death, replies
Socrates; and he has heard often enough, and would rather not hear again,
that the bad man will kill the good. But he thinks that such a fate is
very likely reserved for him, because he remarks that he is the only person
who teaches the true art of politics. And very probably, as in the case
which he described to Polus, he may be the physician who is tried by a jury
of children. He cannot say that he has procured the citizens any pleasure,
and if any one charges him with perplexing them, or with reviling their
elders, he will not be able to make them understand that he has only been
actuated by a desire for their good. And therefore there is no saying what
his fate may be. 'And do you think that a man who is unable to help
himself is in a good condition?' Yes, Callicles, if he have the true self-
help, which is never to have said or done any wrong to himself or others.
If I had not this kind of self-help, I should be ashamed; but if I die for
want of your flattering rhetoric, I shall die in peace. For death is no
evil, but to go to the world below laden with offences is the worst of
evils. In proof of which I will tell you a tale:--
Under the rule of Cronos, men were judged on the day of their death, and
when judgment had been given upon them they departed--the good to the
islands of the blest, the bad to the house of vengeance. But as they were
still living, and had their clothes on at the time when they were being
judged, there was favouritism, and Zeus, when he came to the throne, was
obliged to alter the mode of procedure, and try them after death, having
first sent down Prometheus to take away from them the foreknowledge of
death. Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus were appointed to be the judges;
Rhadamanthus for Asia, Aeacus for Europe, and Minos was to hold the court
of appeal. Now death is the separation of soul and body, but after death
soul and body alike retain their characteristics; the fat man, the dandy,
the branded slave, are all distinguishable. Some prince or potentate,
perhaps even the great king himself, appears before Rhadamanthus, and he
instantly detects him, though he knows not who he is; he sees the scars of
perjury and iniquity, and sends him away to the house of torment.
For there are two classes of souls who undergo punishment--the curable and
the incurable. The curable are those who are benefited by their
punishment; the incurable are such as Archelaus, who benefit others by
becoming a warning to them. The latter class are generally kings and
potentates; meaner persons, happily for themselves, have not the same power
of doing injustice. Sisyphus and Tityus, not Thersites, are supposed by
Homer to be undergoing everlasting punishment. Not that there is anything
to prevent a great man from being a good one, as is shown by the famous
example of Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But to Rhadamanthus the
souls are only known as good or bad; they are stripped of their dignities
and preferments; he despatches the bad to Tartarus, labelled either as
curable or incurable, and looks with love and admiration on the soul of
some just one, whom he sends to the islands of the blest. Similar is the
practice of Aeacus; and Minos overlooks them, holding a golden sceptre, as
Odysseus in Homer saw him
'Wielding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.'
My wish for myself and my fellow-men is, that we may present our souls
undefiled to the judge in that day; my desire in life is to be able to meet
death. And I exhort you, and retort upon you the reproach which you cast
upon me,--that you will stand before the judge, gaping, and with dizzy
brain, and any one may box you on the ear, and do you all manner of evil.
Perhaps you think that this is an old wives' fable. But you, who are the
three wisest men in Hellas, have nothing better to say, and no one will
ever show that to do is better than to suffer evil. A man should study to
be, and not merely to seem. If he is bad, he should become good, and avoid
all flattery, whether of the many or of the few.
Follow me, then; and if you are looked down upon, that will do you no harm.
And when we have practised virtue, we will betake ourselves to politics,
but not until we are delivered from the shameful state of ignorance and
uncertainty in which we are at present. Let us follow in the way of virtue
and justice, and not in the way to which you, Callicles, invite us; for
that way is nothing worth.
We will now consider in order some of the principal points of the dialogue.
Having regard (1) to the age of Plato and the ironical character of his
writings, we may compare him with himself, and with other great teachers,
and we may note in passing the objections of his critics. And then (2)
casting one eye upon him, we may cast another upon ourselves, and endeavour
to draw out the great lessons which he teaches for all time, stripped of
the accidental form in which they are enveloped.
(1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, we are
made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old difficulty
of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the arts and the
virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words, such as nature,
custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up. The Sophists are
still floundering about the distinction of the real and seeming. Figures
of speech are made the basis of arguments. The possibility of conceiving a
universal art or science, which admits of application to a particular
subject-matter, is a difficulty which remains unsolved, and has not
altogether ceased to haunt the world at the present day (compare
Charmides). The defect of clearness is also apparent in Socrates himself,
unless we suppose him to be practising on the simplicity of his opponent,
or rather perhaps trying an experiment in dialectics. Nothing can be more
fallacious than the contradiction which he pretends to have discovered in
the answers of Gorgias (see above). The advantages which he gains over
Polus are also due to a false antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an
erroneous assertion that an agent and a patient may be described by similar
predicates;--a mistake which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in
the Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a 'robust sophistry' are likewise
discernible in his argument with Callicles.
(2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the
argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts
himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may
sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists, or
pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the ambiguous terms
good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as useless to examine his
arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to criticise this ideal
from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say that the ideal is
generally regarded as unattainable, and that mankind will by no means agree
in thinking that the criminal is happier when punished than when
unpunished, any more than they would agree to the stoical paradox that a
man may be happy on the rack, Plato has already admitted that the world is
against him. Neither does he mean to say that Archelaus is tormented by
the stings of conscience; or that the sensations of the impaled criminal
are more agreeable than those of the tyrant drowned in luxurious enjoyment.
Neither is he speaking, as in the Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of
pleasure, an opinion which he afterwards repudiates in the Phaedo. What
then is his meaning? His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best by
parallel notions, which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always
existed among mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself
implies that he will be understood or appreciated by very few.
He is speaking not of the consciousness of happiness, but of the idea of
happiness. When a martyr dies in a good cause, when a soldier falls in
battle, we do not suppose that death or wounds are without pain, or that
their physical suffering is always compensated by a mental satisfaction.
Still we regard them as happy, and we would a thousand times rather have
their death than a shameful life. Nor is this only because we believe that
they will obtain an immortality of fame, or that they will have crowns of
glory in another world, when their enemies and persecutors will be
proportionably tormented. Men are found in a few instances to do what is
right, without reference to public opinion or to consequences. And we
regard them as happy on this ground only, much as Socrates' friends in the
opening of the Phaedo are described as regarding him; or as was said of
another, 'they looked upon his face as upon the face of an angel.' We are
not concerned to justify this idealism by the standard of utility or public
opinion, but merely to point out the existence of such a sentiment in the
better part of human nature.
The idealism of Plato is founded upon this sentiment. He would maintain
that in some sense or other truth and right are alone to be sought, and
that all other goods are only desirable as means towards these. He is
thought to have erred in 'considering the agent only, and making no
reference to the happiness of others, as affected by him.' But the
happiness of others or of mankind, if regarded as an end, is really quite
as ideal and almost as paradoxical to the common understanding as Plato's
conception of happiness. For the greatest happiness of the greatest number
may mean also the greatest pain of the individual which will procure the
greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Ideas of utility, like those of
duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant consequences. Nor can Plato in
the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering that Socrates
expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to
others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is
by the ancients merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well
as in the Stoics, the social principle, though taking another form, is
really far more prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics.
The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have exercised
the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological import of this, or
into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may have given rise,
we need not now enter. All will agree that the ideal of the Divine
Sufferer, whose words the world would not receive, the man of sorrows of
whom the Hebrew prophets spoke, has sunk deep into the heart of the human
race. It is a similar picture of suffering goodness which Plato desires to
pourtray, not without an allusion to the fate of his master Socrates. He
is convinced that, somehow or other, such an one must be happy in life or
after death. In the Republic, he endeavours to show that his happiness
would be assured here in a well-ordered state. But in the actual condition
of human things the wise and good are weak and miserable; such an one is
like a man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to every sort of wrong and
obloquy.
Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that if
'the ways of God' to man are to be 'justified,' the hopes of another life
must be included. If the question could have been put to him, whether a
man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests in the
Apology, 'death be only a long sleep,' we can hardly tell what would have
been his answer. There have been a few, who, quite independently of
rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation, or any other influence
of public opinion, have been willing to sacrifice their lives for the good
of others. It is difficult to say how far in such cases an unconscious
hope of a future life, or a general faith in the victory of good in the
world, may have supported the sufferers. But this extreme idealism is not
in accordance with the spirit of Plato. He supposes a day of retribution,
in which the good are to be rewarded and the wicked punished. Though, as
he says in the Phaedo, no man of sense will maintain that the details of
the stories about another world are true, he will insist that something of
the kind is true, and will frame his life with a view to this unknown
future. Even in the Republic he introduces a future life as an
afterthought, when the superior happiness of the just has been established
on what is thought to be an immutable foundation. At the same time he
makes a point of determining his main thesis independently of remoter
consequences.
(3) Plato's theory of punishment is partly vindictive, partly corrective.
In the Gorgias, as well as in the Phaedo and Republic, a few great
criminals, chiefly tyrants, are reserved as examples. But most men have
never had the opportunity of attaining this pre-eminence of evil. They are
not incurable, and their punishment is intended for their improvement.
They are to suffer because they have sinned; like sick men, they must go to
the physician and be healed. On this representation of Plato's the
criticism has been made, that the analogy of disease and injustice is
partial only, and that suffering, instead of improving men, may have just
the opposite effect.
Like the general analogy of the arts and the virtues, the analogy of
disease and injustice, or of medicine and justice, is certainly imperfect.
But ideas must be given through something; the nature of the mind which is
unseen can only be represented under figures derived from visible objects.
If these figures are suggestive of some new aspect under which the mind may
be considered, we cannot find fault with them for not exactly coinciding
with the ideas represented. They partake of the imperfect nature of
language, and must not be construed in too strict a manner. That Plato
sometimes reasons from them as if they were not figures but realities, is
due to the defective logical analysis of his age.
Nor does he distinguish between the suffering which improves and the
suffering which only punishes and deters. He applies to the sphere of
ethics a conception of punishment which is really derived from criminal
law. He does not see that such punishment is only negative, and supplies
no principle of moral growth or development. He is not far off the higher
notion of an education of man to be begun in this world, and to be
continued in other stages of existence, which is further developed in the
Republic. And Christian thinkers, who have ventured out of the beaten
track in their meditations on the 'last things,' have found a ray of light
in his writings. But he has not explained how or in what way punishment is
to contribute to the improvement of mankind. He has not followed out the
principle which he affirms in the Republic, that 'God is the author of evil
only with a view to good,' and that 'they were the better for being
punished.' Still his doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments
may be compared favourably with that perversion of Christian doctrine which
makes the everlasting punishment of human beings depend on a brief moment
of time, or even on the accident of an accident. And he has escaped the
difficulty which has often beset divines, respecting the future destiny of
the meaner sort of men (Thersites and the like), who are neither very good
nor very bad, by not counting them worthy of eternal damnation.
We do Plato violence in pressing his figures of speech or chains of
argument; and not less so in asking questions which were beyond the horizon
of his vision, or did not come within the scope of his design. The main
purpose of the Gorgias is not to answer questions about a future world, but
to place in antagonism the true and false life, and to contrast the
judgments and opinions of men with judgment according to the truth. Plato
may be accused of representing a superhuman or transcendental virtue in the
description of the just man in the Gorgias, or in the companion portrait of
the philosopher in the Theaetetus; and at the same time may be thought to
be condemning a state of the world which always has existed and always will
exist among men. But such ideals act powerfully on the imagination of
mankind. And such condemnations are not mere paradoxes of philosophers,
but the natural rebellion of the higher sense of right in man against the
ordinary conditions of human life. The greatest statesmen have fallen very
far short of the political ideal, and are therefore justly involved in the
general condemnation.
Subordinate to the main purpose of the dialogue are some other questions,
which may be briefly considered:--
a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which as in other dialogues is
supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with the
transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge
and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and pleasure,
the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite, harmony or beauty and
discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so many pairs of opposites,
which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are seldom kept perfectly
distinct. And we must not forget that Plato's conception of pleasure is
the Heracleitean flux transferred to the sphere of human conduct. There is
some degree of unfairness in opposing the principle of good, which is
objective, to the principle of pleasure, which is subjective. For the
assertion of the permanence of good is only based on the assumption of its
objective character. Had Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of
good, but on the subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have
been found to be as transient and precarious as pleasure.
b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without any view to truth, or the
improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all alike
dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived. To
Plato the whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on self-interest.
To this is opposed the one wise man hardly professing to have found truth,
yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous life is the only good, whether
regarded with reference to this world or to another. Statesmen, Sophists,
rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up for judgment. They are the
parodies of wise men, and their arts are the parodies of true arts and
sciences. All that they call science is merely the result of that study of
the tempers of the Great Beast, which he describes in the Republic.
c. Various other points of contact naturally suggest themselves between
the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic, the Philebus, and
the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit and language
in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal similarity tending
to show that they were written at the same period of Plato's life. For the
Republic supplies that education and training of which the Gorgias suggests
the necessity. The theory of the many weak combining against the few
strong in the formation of society (which is indeed a partial truth), is
similar in both of them, and is expressed in nearly the same language. The
sufferings and fate of the just man, the powerlessness of evil, and the
reversal of the situation in another life, are also points of similarity.
The poets, like the rhetoricians, are condemned because they aim at
pleasure only, as in the Republic they are expelled the State, because they
are imitators, and minister to the weaker side of human nature. That
poetry is akin to rhetoric may be compared with the analogous notion, which
occurs in the Protagoras, that the ancient poets were the Sophists of their
day. In some other respects the Protagoras rather offers a contrast than a
parallel. The character of Protagoras may be compared with that of
Gorgias, but the conception of happiness is different in the two dialogues;
being described in the former, according to the old Socratic notion, as
deferred or accumulated pleasure, while in the Gorgias, and in the Phaedo,
pleasure and good are distinctly opposed.
This opposition is carried out from a speculative point of view in the
Philebus. There neither pleasure nor wisdom are allowed to be the chief
good, but pleasure and good are not so completely opposed as in the
Gorgias. For innocent pleasures, and such as have no antecedent pains, are
allowed to rank in the class of goods. The allusion to Gorgias' definition
of rhetoric (Philebus; compare Gorg.), as the art of persuasion, of all
arts the best, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their
own free will--marks a close and perhaps designed connection between the
two dialogues. In both the ideas of measure, order, harmony, are the
connecting links between the beautiful and the good.
In general spirit and character, that is, in irony and antagonism to public
opinion, the Gorgias most nearly resembles the Apology, Crito, and portions
of the Republic, and like the Philebus, though from another point of view,
may be thought to stand in the same relation to Plato's theory of morals
which the Theaetetus bears to his theory of knowledge.
d. A few minor points still remain to be summed up: (1) The extravagant
irony in the reason which is assigned for the pilot's modest charge; and in
the proposed use of rhetoric as an instrument of self-condemnation; and in
the mighty power of geometrical equality in both worlds. (2) The reference
of the mythus to the previous discussion should not be overlooked: the
fate reserved for incurable criminals such as Archelaus; the retaliation of
the box on the ears; the nakedness of the souls and of the judges who are
stript of the clothes or disguises which rhetoric and public opinion have
hitherto provided for them (compare Swift's notion that the universe is a
suit of clothes, Tale of a Tub). The fiction seems to have involved Plato
in the necessity of supposing that the soul retained a sort of corporeal
likeness after death. (3) The appeal of the authority of Homer, who says
that Odysseus saw Minos in his court 'holding a golden sceptre,' which
gives verisimilitude to the tale.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing 'both sides of the
game,' and that in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus, we are
not passing any judgment on historical individuals, but only attempting to
analyze the 'dramatis personae' as they were conceived by him. Neither is
it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato is a dramatic
writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which he
puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have
the best of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as
well as a philosopher; or to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern
standard, but interpreted with reference to his place in the history of
thought and the opinion of his time.
It has been said that the most characteristic feature of the Gorgias is the
assertion of the right of dissent, or private judgment. But this mode of
stating the question is really opposed both to the spirit of Plato and of
ancient philosophy generally. For Plato is not asserting any abstract
right or duty of toleration, or advantage to be derived from freedom of
thought; indeed, in some other parts of his writings (e.g. Laws), he has
fairly laid himself open to the charge of intolerance. No speculations had
as yet arisen respecting the 'liberty of prophesying;' and Plato is not
affirming any abstract right of this nature: but he is asserting the duty
and right of the one wise and true man to dissent from the folly and
falsehood of the many. At the same time he acknowledges the natural
result, which he hardly seeks to avert, that he who speaks the truth to a
multitude, regardless of consequences, will probably share the fate of
Socrates.
...
The irony of Plato sometimes veils from us the height of idealism to which
he soars. When declaring truths which the many will not receive, he puts
on an armour which cannot be pierced by them. The weapons of ridicule are
taken out of their hands and the laugh is turned against themselves. The
disguises which Socrates assumes are like the parables of the New
Testament, or the oracles of the Delphian God; they half conceal, half
reveal, his meaning. The more he is in earnest, the more ironical he
becomes; and he is never more in earnest or more ironical than in the
Gorgias. He hardly troubles himself to answer seriously the objections of
Gorgias and Polus, and therefore he sometimes appears to be careless of the
ordinary requirements of logic. Yet in the highest sense he is always
logical and consistent with himself. The form of the argument may be
paradoxical; the substance is an appeal to the higher reason. He is
uttering truths before they can be understood, as in all ages the words of
philosophers, when they are first uttered, have found the world unprepared
for them. A further misunderstanding arises out of the wildness of his
humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but by the rest of mankind,
to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At length he makes even Polus
in earnest. Finally, he drops the argument, and heedless any longer of the
forms of dialectic, he loses himself in a sort of triumph, while at the
same time he retaliates upon his adversaries. From this confusion of jest
and earnest, we may now return to the ideal truth, and draw out in a simple
form the main theses of the dialogue.
First Thesis:--
It is a greater evil to do than to suffer injustice.
Compare the New Testament--
'It is better to suffer for well doing than for evil doing.'--1 Pet.
And the Sermon on the Mount--
'Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness' sake.'--Matt.
The words of Socrates are more abstract than the words of Christ, but they
equally imply that the only real evil is moral evil. The righteous may
suffer or die, but they have their reward; and even if they had no reward,
would be happier than the wicked. The world, represented by Polus, is
ready, when they are asked, to acknowledge that injustice is dishonourable,
and for their own sakes men are willing to punish the offender (compare
Republic). But they are not equally willing to acknowledge that injustice,
even if successful, is essentially evil, and has the nature of disease and
death. Especially when crimes are committed on the great scale--the crimes
of tyrants, ancient or modern--after a while, seeing that they cannot be
undone, and have become a part of history, mankind are disposed to forgive
them, not from any magnanimity or charity, but because their feelings are
blunted by time, and 'to forgive is convenient to them.' The tangle of
good and evil can no longer be unravelled; and although they know that the
end cannot justify the means, they feel also that good has often come out
of evil. But Socrates would have us pass the same judgment on the tyrant
now and always; though he is surrounded by his satellites, and has the
applauses of Europe and Asia ringing in his ears; though he is the
civilizer or liberator of half a continent, he is, and always will be, the
most miserable of men. The greatest consequences for good or for evil
cannot alter a hair's breadth the morality of actions which are right or
wrong in themselves. This is the standard which Socrates holds up to us.
Because politics, and perhaps human life generally, are of a mixed nature
we must not allow our principles to sink to the level of our practice.
And so of private individuals--to them, too, the world occasionally speaks
of the consequences of their actions:--if they are lovers of pleasure, they
will ruin their health; if they are false or dishonest, they will lose
their character. But Socrates would speak to them, not of what will be,
but of what is--of the present consequence of lowering and degrading the
soul. And all higher natures, or perhaps all men everywhere, if they were
not tempted by interest or passion, would agree with him--they would rather
be the victims than the perpetrators of an act of treachery or of tyranny.
Reason tells them that death comes sooner or later to all, and is not so
great an evil as an unworthy life, or rather, if rightly regarded, not an
evil at all, but to a good man the greatest good. For in all of us there
are slumbering ideals of truth and right, which may at any time awaken and
develop a new life in us.
Second Thesis:--
It is better to suffer for wrong doing than not to suffer.
There might have been a condition of human life in which the penalty
followed at once, and was proportioned to the offence. Moral evil would
then be scarcely distinguishable from physical; mankind would avoid vice as
they avoid pain or death. But nature, with a view of deepening and
enlarging our characters, has for the most part hidden from us the
consequences of our actions, and we can only foresee them by an effort of
reflection. To awaken in us this habit of reflection is the business of
early education, which is continued in maturer years by observation and
experience. The spoilt child is in later life said to be unfortunate--he
had better have suffered when he was young, and been saved from suffering
afterwards. But is not the sovereign equally unfortunate whose education
and manner of life are always concealing from him the consequences of his
own actions, until at length they are revealed to him in some terrible
downfall, which may, perhaps, have been caused not by his own fault?
Another illustration is afforded by the pauper and criminal classes, who
scarcely reflect at all, except on the means by which they can compass
their immediate ends. We pity them, and make allowances for them; but we
do not consider that the same principle applies to human actions generally.
Not to have been found out in some dishonesty or folly, regarded from a
moral or religious point of view, is the greatest of misfortunes. The
success of our evil doings is a proof that the gods have ceased to strive
with us, and have given us over to ourselves. There is nothing to remind
us of our sins, and therefore nothing to correct them. Like our sorrows,
they are healed by time;
'While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.'
The 'accustomed irony' of Socrates adds a corollary to the argument:--
'Would you punish your enemy, you should allow him to escape unpunished'--
this is the true retaliation. (Compare the obscure verse of Proverbs,
'Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him,' etc., quoted in Romans.)
Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own lives:
they do not easily see themselves as others see them. They are very kind
and very blind to their own faults; the rhetoric of self-love is always
pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting a similar figure of
speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence but in
accusation of themselves. As they are guided by feeling rather than by
reason, to their feelings the appeal must be made. They must speak to
themselves; they must argue with themselves; they must paint in eloquent
words the character of their own evil deeds. To any suffering which they
have deserved, they must persuade themselves to submit. Under the figure
there lurks a real thought, which, expressed in another form, admits of an
easy application to ourselves. For do not we too accuse as well as excuse
ourselves? And we call to our aid the rhetoric of prayer and preaching,
which the mind silently employs while the struggle between the better and
the worse is going on within us. And sometimes we are too hard upon
ourselves, because we want to restore the balance which self-love has
overthrown or disturbed; and then again we may hear a voice as of a parent
consoling us. In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the
consciences of men 'accusing or else excusing them.' For all our life long
we are talking with ourselves:--What is thought but speech? What is
feeling but rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be
always in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at
first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.
Third Thesis:--
We do not what we will, but what we wish.
Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learn--that good
intentions, and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by
wisdom, are of no value. We believe something to be for our good which we
afterwards find out not to be for our good. The consequences may be
inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may often be
the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase pauperism by
almsgiving; when we tie up property without regard to changes of
circumstances; when we say hastily what we deliberately disapprove; when we
do in a moment of passion what upon reflection we regret; when from any
want of self-control we give another an advantage over us--we are doing not
what we will, but what we wish. All actions of which the consequences are
not weighed and foreseen, are of this impotent and paralytic sort; and the
author of them has 'the least possible power' while seeming to have the
greatest. For he is actually bringing about the reverse of what he
intended. And yet the book of nature is open to him, in which he who runs
may read if he will exercise ordinary attention; every day offers him
experiences of his own and of other men's characters, and he passes them
unheeded by. The contemplation of the consequences of actions, and the
ignorance of men in regard to them, seems to have led Socrates to his
famous thesis:--'Virtue is knowledge;' which is not so much an error or
paradox as a half truth, seen first in the twilight of ethical philosophy,
but also the half of the truth which is especially needed in the present
age. For as the world has grown older men have been too apt to imagine a
right and wrong apart from consequences; while a few, on the other hand,
have sought to resolve them wholly into their consequences. But Socrates,
or Plato for him, neither divides nor identifies them; though the time has
not yet arrived either for utilitarian or transcendental systems of moral
philosophy, he recognizes the two elements which seem to lie at the basis
of morality. (Compare the following: 'Now, and for us, it is a time to
Hellenize and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraized too much and have
overvalued doing. But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism
remain for our race an eternal possession. And as humanity is constituted,
one must never assign the second rank to-day without being ready to restore
them to the first to-morrow.' Sir William W. Hunter, Preface to Orissa.)
Fourth Thesis:--
To be and not to seem is the end of life.
The Greek in the age of Plato admitted praise to be one of the chief
incentives to moral virtue, and to most men the opinion of their fellows is
a leading principle of action. Hence a certain element of seeming enters
into all things; all or almost all desire to appear better than they are,
that they may win the esteem or admiration of others. A man of ability can
easily feign the language of piety or virtue; and there is an unconscious
as well as a conscious hypocrisy which, according to Socrates, is the worst
of the two. Again, there is the sophistry of classes and professions.
There are the different opinions about themselves and one another which
prevail in different ranks of society. There is the bias given to the mind
by the study of one department of human knowledge to the exclusion of the
rest; and stronger far the prejudice engendered by a pecuniary or party
interest in certain tenets. There is the sophistry of law, the sophistry
of medicine, the sophistry of politics, the sophistry of theology. All of
these disguises wear the appearance of the truth; some of them are very
ancient, and we do not easily disengage ourselves from them; for we have
inherited them, and they have become a part of us. The sophistry of an
ancient Greek sophist is nothing compared with the sophistry of a religious
order, or of a church in which during many ages falsehood has been
accumulating, and everything has been said on one side, and nothing on the
other. The conventions and customs which we observe in conversation, and
the opposition of our interests when we have dealings with one another
('the buyer saith, it is nought--it is nought,' etc.), are always obscuring
our sense of truth and right. The sophistry of human nature is far more
subtle than the deceit of any one man. Few persons speak freely from their
own natures, and scarcely any one dares to think for himself: most of us
imperceptibly fall into the opinions of those around us, which we partly
help to make. A man who would shake himself loose from them, requires
great force of mind; he hardly knows where to begin in the search after
truth. On every side he is met by the world, which is not an abstraction
of theologians, but the most real of all things, being another name for
ourselves when regarded collectively and subjected to the influences of
society.
Then comes Socrates, impressed as no other man ever was, with the unreality
and untruthfulness of popular opinion, and tells mankind that they must be
and not seem. How are they to be? At any rate they must have the spirit
and desire to be. If they are ignorant, they must acknowledge their
ignorance to themselves; if they are conscious of doing evil, they must
learn to do well; if they are weak, and have nothing in them which they can
call themselves, they must acquire firmness and consistency; if they are
indifferent, they must begin to take an interest in the great questions
which surround them. They must try to be what they would fain appear in
the eyes of their fellow-men. A single individual cannot easily change
public opinion; but he can be true and innocent, simple and independent; he
can know what he does, and what he does not know; and though not without an
effort, he can form a judgment of his own, at least in common matters. In
his most secret actions he can show the same high principle (compare
Republic) which he shows when supported and watched by public opinion. And
on some fitting occasion, on some question of humanity or truth or right,
even an ordinary man, from the natural rectitude of his disposition, may be
found to take up arms against a whole tribe of politicians and lawyers, and
be too much for them.
Who is the true and who the false statesman?--
The true statesman is he who brings order out of disorder; who first
organizes and then administers the government of his own country; and
having made a nation, seeks to reconcile the national interests with those
of Europe and of mankind. He is not a mere theorist, nor yet a dealer in
expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his mind; while the
head is conceiving, the hand is executing. Although obliged to descend to
the world, he is not of the world. His thoughts are fixed not on power or
riches or extension of territory, but on an ideal state, in which all the
citizens have an equal chance of health and life, and the highest education
is within the reach of all, and the moral and intellectual qualities of
every individual are freely developed, and 'the idea of good' is the
animating principle of the whole. Not the attainment of freedom alone, or
of order alone, but how to unite freedom with order is the problem which he
has to solve.
The statesman who places before himself these lofty aims has undertaken a
task which will call forth all his powers. He must control himself before
he can control others; he must know mankind before he can manage them. He
has no private likes or dislikes; he does not conceal personal enmity under
the disguise of moral or political principle: such meannesses, into which
men too often fall unintentionally, are absorbed in the consciousness of
his mission, and in his love for his country and for mankind. He will
sometimes ask himself what the next generation will say of him; not because
he is careful of posthumous fame, but because he knows that the result of
his life as a whole will then be more fairly judged. He will take time for
the execution of his plans; not hurrying them on when the mind of a nation
is unprepared for them; but like the Ruler of the Universe Himself, working
in the appointed time, for he knows that human life, 'if not long in
comparison with eternity' (Republic), is sufficient for the fulfilment of
many great purposes. He knows, too, that the work will be still going on
when he is no longer here; and he will sometimes, especially when his
powers are failing, think of that other 'city of which the pattern is in
heaven' (Republic).
The false politician is the serving-man of the state. In order to govern
men he becomes like them; their 'minds are married in conjunction;' they
'bear themselves' like vulgar and tyrannical masters, and he is their
obedient servant. The true politician, if he would rule men, must make
them like himself; he must 'educate his party' until they cease to be a
party; he must breathe into them the spirit which will hereafter give form
to their institutions. Politics with him are not a mechanism for seeming
what he is not, or for carrying out the will of the majority. Himself a
representative man, he is the representative not of the lower but of the
higher elements of the nation. There is a better (as well as a worse)
public opinion of which he seeks to lay hold; as there is also a deeper
current of human affairs in which he is borne up when the waves nearer the
shore are threatening him. He acknowledges that he cannot take the world
by force--two or three moves on the political chess board are all that he
can fore see--two or three weeks moves on the political chessboard are all
that he can foresee--two or three weeks or months are granted to him in
which he can provide against a coming struggle. But he knows also that
there are permanent principles of politics which are always tending to the
well-being of states--better administration, better education, the
reconciliation of conflicting elements, increased security against external
enemies. These are not 'of to-day or yesterday,' but are the same in all
times, and under all forms of government. Then when the storm descends and
the winds blow, though he knows not beforehand the hour of danger, the
pilot, not like Plato's captain in the Republic, half-blind and deaf, but
with penetrating eye and quick ear, is ready to take command of the ship
and guide her into port.
The false politician asks not what is true, but what is the opinion of the
world--not what is right, but what is expedient. The only measures of
which he approves are the measures which will pass. He has no intention of
fighting an uphill battle; he keeps the roadway of politics. He is
unwilling to incur the persecution and enmity which political convictions
would entail upon him. He begins with popularity, and in fair weather
sails gallantly along. But unpopularity soon follows him. For men expect
their leaders to be better and wiser than themselves: to be their guides
in danger, their saviours in extremity; they do not really desire them to
obey all the ignorant impulses of the popular mind; and if they fail them
in a crisis they are disappointed. Then, as Socrates says, the cry of
ingratitude is heard, which is most unreasonable; for the people, who have
been taught no better, have done what might be expected of them, and their
statesmen have received justice at their hands.
The true statesman is aware that he must adapt himself to times and
circumstances. He must have allies if he is to fight against the world; he
must enlighten public opinion; he must accustom his followers to act
together. Although he is not the mere executor of the will of the
majority, he must win over the majority to himself. He is their leader and
not their follower, but in order to lead he must also follow. He will
neither exaggerate nor undervalue the power of a statesman, neither
adopting the 'laissez faire' nor the 'paternal government' principle; but
he will, whether he is dealing with children in politics, or with full-
grown men, seek to do for the people what the government can do for them,
and what, from imperfect education or deficient powers of combination, they
cannot do for themselves. He knows that if he does too much for them they
will do nothing; and that if he does nothing for them they will in some
states of society be utterly helpless. For the many cannot exist without
the few, if the material force of a country is from below, wisdom and
experience are from above. It is not a small part of human evils which
kings and governments make or cure. The statesman is well aware that a
great purpose carried out consistently during many years will at last be
executed. He is playing for a stake which may be partly determined by some
accident, and therefore he will allow largely for the unknown element of
politics. But the game being one in which chance and skill are combined,
if he plays long enough he is certain of victory. He will not be always
consistent, for the world is changing; and though he depends upon the
support of a party, he will remember that he is the minister of the whole.
He lives not for the present, but for the future, and he is not at all sure
that he will be appreciated either now or then. For he may have the
existing order of society against him, and may not be remembered by a
distant posterity.
There are always discontented idealists in politics who, like Socrates in
the Gorgias, find fault with all statesmen past as well as present, not
excepting the greatest names of history. Mankind have an uneasy feeling
that they ought to be better governed than they are. Just as the actual
philosopher falls short of the one wise man, so does the actual statesman
fall short of the ideal. And so partly from vanity and egotism, but partly
also from a true sense of the faults of eminent men, a temper of
dissatisfaction and criticism springs up among those who are ready enough
to acknowledge the inferiority of their own powers. No matter whether a
statesman makes high professions or none at all--they are reduced sooner or
later to the same level. And sometimes the more unscrupulous man is better
esteemed than the more conscientious, because he has not equally deceived
expectations. Such sentiments may be unjust, but they are widely spread;
we constantly find them recurring in reviews and newspapers, and still
oftener in private conversation.
We may further observe that the art of government, while in some respects
tending to improve, has in others a tendency to degenerate, as institutions
become more popular. Governing for the people cannot easily be combined
with governing by the people: the interests of classes are too strong for
the ideas of the statesman who takes a comprehensive view of the whole.
According to Socrates the true governor will find ruin or death staring him
in the face, and will only be induced to govern from the fear of being
governed by a worse man than himself (Republic). And in modern times,
though the world has grown milder, and the terrible consequences which
Plato foretells no longer await an English statesman, any one who is not
actuated by a blind ambition will only undertake from a sense of duty a
work in which he is most likely to fail; and even if he succeed, will
rarely be rewarded by the gratitude of his own generation.
Socrates, who is not a politician at all, tells us that he is the only real
politician of his time. Let us illustrate the meaning of his words by
applying them to the history of our own country. He would have said that
not Pitt or Fox, or Canning or Sir R. Peel, are the real politicians of
their time, but Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Ricardo. These during
the greater part of their lives occupied an inconsiderable space in the
eyes of the public. They were private persons; nevertheless they sowed in
the minds of men seeds which in the next generation have become an
irresistible power. 'Herein is that saying true, One soweth and another
reapeth.' We may imagine with Plato an ideal statesman in whom practice
and speculation are perfectly harmonized; for there is no necessary
opposition between them. But experience shows that they are commonly
divorced--the ordinary politician is the interpreter or executor of the
thoughts of others, and hardly ever brings to the birth a new political
conception. One or two only in modern times, like the Italian statesman
Cavour, have created the world in which they moved. The philosopher is
naturally unfitted for political life; his great ideas are not understood
by the many; he is a thousand miles away from the questions of the day.
Yet perhaps the lives of thinkers, as they are stiller and deeper, are also
happier than the lives of those who are more in the public eye. They have
the promise of the future, though they are regarded as dreamers and
visionaries by their own contemporaries. And when they are no longer here,
those who would have been ashamed of them during their lives claim kindred
with them, and are proud to be called by their names. (Compare Thucyd.)
Who is the true poet?
Plato expels the poets from his Republic because they are allied to sense;
because they stimulate the emotions; because they are thrice removed from
the ideal truth. And in a similar spirit he declares in the Gorgias that
the stately muse of tragedy is a votary of pleasure and not of truth. In
modern times we almost ridicule the idea of poetry admitting of a moral.
The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in primitive antiquity are one and
the same; but in later ages they seem to fall apart. The great art of
novel writing, that peculiar creation of our own and the last century,
which, together with the sister art of review writing, threatens to absorb
all literature, has even less of seriousness in her composition. Do we not
often hear the novel writer censured for attempting to convey a lesson to
the minds of his readers?
Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to give
amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind, good or bad,
or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There have been poets
in modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have not forgotten their
high vocation of teachers; and the two greatest of the Greek dramatists owe
their sublimity to their ethical character. The noblest truths, sung of in
the purest and sweetest language, are still the proper material of poetry.
The poet clothes them with beauty, and has a power of making them enter
into the hearts and memories of men. He has not only to speak of themes
above the level of ordinary life, but to speak of them in a deeper and
tenderer way than they are ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of
them in others. The old he makes young again; the familiar principle he
invests with a new dignity; he finds a noble expression for the common-
places of morality and politics. He uses the things of sense so as to
indicate what is beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. He
expresses what the better part of us would fain say, and the half-conscious
feeling is strengthened by the expression. He is his own critic, for the
spirit of poetry and of criticism are not divided in him. His mission is
not to disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to them their own
nature, and make them better acquainted with the world around them. True
poetry is the remembrance of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the
happiest and holiest moments of life, of the noblest thoughts of man, of
the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to his
greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may
not be effected for the human race by a better use of the poetical and
imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with
truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of pleasure to be
excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we raise
men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make an ideal,
or rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand sermons?
Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and artistic
influences. But he is not without a true sense of the noble purposes to
which art may be applied (Republic).
Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato's language, a
flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose, the
poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language and metre.
Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he has the 'savoir
faire,' or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit of poetry.
He has no conception that true art should bring order out of disorder; that
it should make provision for the soul's highest interest; that it should be
pursued only with a view to 'the improvement of the citizens.' He
ministers to the weaker side of human nature (Republic); he idealizes the
sensual; he sings the strain of love in the latest fashion; instead of
raising men above themselves he brings them back to the 'tyranny of the
many masters,' from which all his life long a good man has been praying to
be delivered. And often, forgetful of measure and order, he will express
not that which is truest, but that which is strongest. Instead of a great
and nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy of a heated
brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is not the master
of his words, but his words--perhaps borrowed from another--the faded
reflection of some French or German or Italian writer, have the better of
him. Though we are not going to banish the poets, how can we suppose that
such utterances have any healing or life-giving influence on the minds of
men?
'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:' Art then must be true,
and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true and not a
seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought out of disorder,
truth out of error and falsehood. This is what we mean by the greatest
improvement of man. And so, having considered in what way 'we can best
spend the appointed time, we leave the result with God.' Plato does not say
that God will order all things for the best (compare Phaedo), but he
indirectly implies that the evils of this life will be corrected in
another. And as we are very far from the best imaginable world at present,
Plato here, as in the Phaedo and Republic, supposes a purgatory or place of
education for mankind in general, and for a very few a Tartarus or hell.
The myth which terminates the dialogue is not the revelation, but rather,
like all similar descriptions, whether in the Bible or Plato, the veil of
another life. For no visible thing can reveal the invisible. Of this
Plato, unlike some commentators on Scripture, is fully aware. Neither will
he dogmatize about the manner in which we are 'born again' (Republic).
Only he is prepared to maintain the ultimate triumph of truth and right,
and declares that no one, not even the wisest of the Greeks, can affirm any
other doctrine without being ridiculous.
There is a further paradox of ethics, in which pleasure and pain are held
to be indifferent, and virtue at the time of action and without regard to
consequences is happiness. From this elevation or exaggeration of feeling
Plato seems to shrink: he leaves it to the Stoics in a later generation to
maintain that when impaled or on the rack the philosopher may be happy
(compare Republic). It is observable that in the Republic he raises this
question, but it is not really discussed; the veil of the ideal state, the
shadow of another life, are allowed to descend upon it and it passes out of
sight. The martyr or sufferer in the cause of right or truth is often
supposed to die in raptures, having his eye fixed on a city which is in
heaven. But if there were no future, might he not still be happy in the
performance of an action which was attended only by a painful death? He
himself may be ready to thank God that he was thought worthy to do Him the
least service, without looking for a reward; the joys of another life may
not have been present to his mind at all. Do we suppose that the mediaeval
saint, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Catharine of Sienna, or the Catholic
priest who lately devoted himself to death by a lingering disease that he
might solace and help others, was thinking of the 'sweets' of heaven? No;
the work was already heaven to him and enough. Much less will the dying
patriot be dreaming of the praises of man or of an immortality of fame:
the sense of duty, of right, and trust in God will be sufficient, and as
far as the mind can reach, in that hour. If he were certain that there
were no life to come, he would not have wished to speak or act otherwise
than he did in the cause of truth or of humanity. Neither, on the other
hand, will he suppose that God has forsaken him or that the future is to be
a mere blank to him. The greatest act of faith, the only faith which
cannot pass away, is his who has not known, but yet has believed. A very
few among the sons of men have made themselves independent of
circumstances, past, present, or to come. He who has attained to such a
temper of mind has already present with him eternal life; he needs no
arguments to convince him of immortality; he has in him already a principle
stronger than death. He who serves man without the thought of reward is
deemed to be a more faithful servant than he who works for hire. May not
the service of God, which is the more disinterested, be in like manner the
higher? And although only a very few in the course of the world's history
--Christ himself being one of them--have attained to such a noble
conception of God and of the human soul, yet the ideal of them may be
present to us, and the remembrance of them be an example to us, and their
lives may shed a light on many dark places both of philosophy and theology.
THE MYTHS OF PLATO.
The myths of Plato are a phenomenon unique in literature. There are four
longer ones: these occur in the Phaedrus, Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic.
That in the Republic is the most elaborate and finished of them. Three of
these greater myths, namely those contained in the Phaedo, the Gorgias and
the Republic, relate to the destiny of human souls in a future life. The
magnificent myth in the Phaedrus treats of the immortality, or rather the
eternity of the soul, in which is included a former as well as a future
state of existence. To these may be added, (1) the myth, or rather fable,
occurring in the Statesman, in which the life of innocence is contrasted
with the ordinary life of man and the consciousness of evil: (2) the
legend of the Island of Atlantis, an imaginary history, which is a fragment
only, commenced in the Timaeus and continued in the Critias: (3) the much
less artistic fiction of the foundation of the Cretan colony which is
introduced in the preface to the Laws, but soon falls into the background:
(4) the beautiful but rather artificial tale of Prometheus and Epimetheus
narrated in his rhetorical manner by Protagoras in the dialogue called
after him: (5) the speech at the beginning of the Phaedrus, which is a
parody of the orator Lysias; the rival speech of Socrates and the
recantation of it. To these may be added (6) the tale of the grasshoppers,
and (7) the tale of Thamus and of Theuth, both in the Phaedrus: (8) the
parable of the Cave (Republic), in which the previous argument is
recapitulated, and the nature and degrees of knowledge having been
previously set forth in the abstract are represented in a picture: (9) the
fiction of the earth-born men (Republic; compare Laws), in which by the
adaptation of an old tradition Plato makes a new beginning for his society:
(10) the myth of Aristophanes respecting the division of the sexes, Sym.:
(11) the parable of the noble captain, the pilot, and the mutinous sailors
(Republic), in which is represented the relation of the better part of the
world, and of the philosopher, to the mob of politicians: (12) the
ironical tale of the pilot who plies between Athens and Aegina charging
only a small payment for saving men from death, the reason being that he is
uncertain whether to live or die is better for them (Gor.): (13) the
treatment of freemen and citizens by physicians and of slaves by their
apprentices,--a somewhat laboured figure of speech intended to illustrate
the two different ways in which the laws speak to men (Laws). There also
occur in Plato continuous images; some of them extend over several pages,
appearing and reappearing at intervals: such as the bees stinging and
stingless (paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic, who are
generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which is
to the visible world what the idea of good is to the intellectual, in the
Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite animal, having the form of a
man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a many-headed monster
(Republic): the great beast, i.e. the populace: and the wild beast within
us, meaning the passions which are always liable to break out: the
animated comparisons of the degradation of philosophy by the arts to the
dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the parricide, who 'beats his
father, having first taken away his arms': the dog, who is your only
philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument
wandering about without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved,
from the Gorgias: the argument personified as veiling her face (Republic),
as engaged in a chase, as breaking upon us in a first, second and third
wave:--on these figures of speech the changes are rung many times over. It
is observable that nearly all these parables or continuous images are found
in the Republic; that which occurs in the Theaetetus, of the midwifery of
Socrates, is perhaps the only exception. To make the list complete, the
mathematical figure of the number of the state (Republic), or the numerical
interval which separates king from tyrant, should not be forgotten.
The myth in the Gorgias is one of those descriptions of another life which,
like the Sixth Aeneid of Virgil, appear to contain reminiscences of the
mysteries. It is a vision of the rewards and punishments which await good
and bad men after death. It supposes the body to continue and to be in
another world what it has become in this. It includes a Paradiso,
Purgatorio, and Inferno, like the sister myths of the Phaedo and the
Republic. The Inferno is reserved for great criminals only. The argument
of the dialogue is frequently referred to, and the meaning breaks through
so as rather to destroy the liveliness and consistency of the picture. The
structure of the fiction is very slight, the chief point or moral being
that in the judgments of another world there is no possibility of
concealment: Zeus has taken from men the power of foreseeing death, and
brings together the souls both of them and their judges naked and
undisguised at the judgment-seat. Both are exposed to view, stripped of
the veils and clothes which might prevent them from seeing into or being
seen by one another.
The myth of the Phaedo is of the same type, but it is more cosmological,
and also more poetical. The beautiful and ingenious fancy occurs to Plato
that the upper atmosphere is an earth and heaven in one, a glorified earth,
fairer and purer than that in which we dwell. As the fishes live in the
ocean, mankind are living in a lower sphere, out of which they put their
heads for a moment or two and behold a world beyond. The earth which we
inhabit is a sediment of the coarser particles which drop from the world
above, and is to that heavenly earth what the desert and the shores of the
ocean are to us. A part of the myth consists of description of the
interior of the earth, which gives the opportunity of introducing several
mythological names and of providing places of torment for the wicked.
There is no clear distinction of soul and body; the spirits beneath the
earth are spoken of as souls only, yet they retain a sort of shadowy form
when they cry for mercy on the shores of the lake; and the philosopher
alone is said to have got rid of the body. All the three myths in Plato
which relate to the world below have a place for repentant sinners, as well
as other homes or places for the very good and very bad. It is a natural
reflection which is made by Plato elsewhere, that the two extremes of human
character are rarely met with, and that the generality of mankind are
between them. Hence a place must be found for them. In the myth of the
Phaedo they are carried down the river Acheron to the Acherusian lake,
where they dwell, and are purified of their evil deeds, and receive the
rewards of their good. There are also incurable sinners, who are cast into
Tartarus, there to remain as the penalty of atrocious crimes; these suffer
everlastingly. And there is another class of hardly-curable sinners who
are allowed from time to time to approach the shores of the Acherusian
lake, where they cry to their victims for mercy; which if they obtain they
come out into the lake and cease from their torments.
Neither this, nor any of the three greater myths of Plato, nor perhaps any
allegory or parable relating to the unseen world, is consistent with
itself. The language of philosophy mingles with that of mythology;
abstract ideas are transformed into persons, figures of speech into
realities. These myths may be compared with the Pilgrim's Progress of
Bunyan, in which discussions of theology are mixed up with the incidents of
travel, and mythological personages are associated with human beings: they
are also garnished with names and phrases taken out of Homer, and with
other fragments of Greek tradition.
The myth of the Republic is more subtle and also more consistent than
either of the two others. It has a greater verisimilitude than they have,
and is full of touches which recall the experiences of human life. It will
be noticed by an attentive reader that the twelve days during which Er lay
in a trance after he was slain coincide with the time passed by the spirits
in their pilgrimage. It is a curious observation, not often made, that
good men who have lived in a well-governed city (shall we say in a
religious and respectable society?) are more likely to make mistakes in
their choice of life than those who have had more experience of the world
and of evil. It is a more familiar remark that we constantly blame others
when we have only ourselves to blame; and the philosopher must acknowledge,
however reluctantly, that there is an element of chance in human life with
which it is sometimes impossible for man to cope. That men drink more of
the waters of forgetfulness than is good for them is a poetical description
of a familiar truth. We have many of us known men who, like Odysseus, have
wearied of ambition and have only desired rest. We should like to know
what became of the infants 'dying almost as soon as they were born,' but
Plato only raises, without satisfying, our curiosity. The two companies of
souls, ascending and descending at either chasm of heaven and earth, and
conversing when they come out into the meadow, the majestic figures of the
judges sitting in heaven, the voice heard by Ardiaeus, are features of the
great allegory which have an indescribable grandeur and power. The remark
already made respecting the inconsistency of the two other myths must be
extended also to this: it is at once an orrery, or model of the heavens,
and a picture of the Day of Judgment.
The three myths are unlike anything else in Plato. There is an Oriental,
or rather an Egyptian element in them, and they have an affinity to the
mysteries and to the Orphic modes of worship. To a certain extent they are
un-Greek; at any rate there is hardly anything like them in other Greek
writings which have a serious purpose; in spirit they are mediaeval. They
are akin to what may be termed the underground religion in all ages and
countries. They are presented in the most lively and graphic manner, but
they are never insisted on as true; it is only affirmed that nothing better
can be said about a future life. Plato seems to make use of them when he
has reached the limits of human knowledge; or, to borrow an expression of
his own, when he is standing on the outside of the intellectual world.
They are very simple in style; a few touches bring the picture home to the
mind, and make it present to us. They have also a kind of authority gained
by the employment of sacred and familiar names, just as mere fragments of
the words of Scripture, put together in any form and applied to any
subject, have a power of their own. They are a substitute for poetry and
mythology; and they are also a reform of mythology. The moral of them may
be summed up in a word or two: After death the Judgment; and 'there is
some better thing remaining for the good than for the evil.'
All literature gathers into itself many elements of the past: for example,
the tale of the earth-born men in the Republic appears at first sight to be
an extravagant fancy, but it is restored to propriety when we remember that
it is based on a legendary belief. The art of making stories of ghosts and
apparitions credible is said to consist in the manner of telling them. The
effect is gained by many literary and conversational devices, such as the
previous raising of curiosity, the mention of little circumstances,
simplicity, picturesqueness, the naturalness of the occasion, and the like.
This art is possessed by Plato in a degree which has never been equalled.
The myth in the Phaedrus is even greater than the myths which have been
already described, but is of a different character. It treats of a former
rather than of a future life. It represents the conflict of reason aided
by passion or righteous indignation on the one hand, and of the animal
lusts and instincts on the other. The soul of man has followed the company
of some god, and seen truth in the form of the universal before it was born
in this world. Our present life is the result of the struggle which was
then carried on. This world is relative to a former world, as it is often
projected into a future. We ask the question, Where were men before birth?
As we likewise enquire, What will become of them after death? The first
question is unfamiliar to us, and therefore seems to be unnatural; but if
we survey the whole human race, it has been as influential and as widely
spread as the other. In the Phaedrus it is really a figure of speech in
which the 'spiritual combat' of this life is represented. The majesty and
power of the whole passage--especially of what may be called the theme or
proem (beginning 'The mind through all her being is immortal')--can only be
rendered very inadequately in another language.
The myth in the Statesman relates to a former cycle of existence, in which
men were born of the earth, and by the reversal of the earth's motion had
their lives reversed and were restored to youth and beauty: the dead came
to life, the old grew middle-aged, and the middle-aged young; the youth
became a child, the child an infant, the infant vanished into the earth.
The connection between the reversal of the earth's motion and the reversal
of human life is of course verbal only, yet Plato, like theologians in
other ages, argues from the consistency of the tale to its truth. The new
order of the world was immediately under the government of God; it was a
state of innocence in which men had neither wants nor cares, in which the
earth brought forth all things spontaneously, and God was to man what man
now is to the animals. There were no great estates, or families, or
private possessions, nor any traditions of the past, because men were all
born out of the earth. This is what Plato calls the 'reign of Cronos;' and
in like manner he connects the reversal of the earth's motion with some
legend of which he himself was probably the inventor.
The question is then asked, under which of these two cycles of existence
was man the happier,--under that of Cronos, which was a state of innocence,
or that of Zeus, which is our ordinary life? For a while Plato balances
the two sides of the serious controversy, which he has suggested in a
figure. The answer depends on another question: What use did the children
of Cronos make of their time? They had boundless leisure and the faculty
of discoursing, not only with one another, but with the animals. Did they
employ these advantages with a view to philosophy, gathering from every
nature some addition to their store of knowledge? or, Did they pass their
time in eating and drinking and telling stories to one another and to the
beasts?--in either case there would be no difficulty in answering. But
then, as Plato rather mischievously adds, 'Nobody knows what they did,' and
therefore the doubt must remain undetermined.
To the first there succeeds a second epoch. After another natural
convulsion, in which the order of the world and of human life is once more
reversed, God withdraws his guiding hand, and man is left to the government
of himself. The world begins again, and arts and laws are slowly and
painfully invented. A secular age succeeds to a theocratical. In this
fanciful tale Plato has dropped, or almost dropped, the garb of mythology.
He suggests several curious and important thoughts, such as the possibility
of a state of innocence, the existence of a world without traditions, and
the difference between human and divine government. He has also carried a
step further his speculations concerning the abolition of the family and of
property, which he supposes to have no place among the children of Cronos
any more than in the ideal state.
It is characteristic of Plato and of his age to pass from the abstract to
the concrete, from poetry to reality. Language is the expression of the
seen, and also of the unseen, and moves in a region between them. A great
writer knows how to strike both these chords, sometimes remaining within
the sphere of the visible, and then again comprehending a wider range and
soaring to the abstract and universal. Even in the same sentence he may
employ both modes of speech not improperly or inharmoniously. It is
useless to criticise the broken metaphors of Plato, if the effect of the
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