Слике страница
PDF
ePub

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUE PLATO

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Harvard University.

Time has been exceptionally generous to Plato. None of his works are lost, and his fame and influence seem to be undiminished after twenty-three centuries. Such vogue, however, could hardly be maintained, in a world so inconstant as ours, by a philosophy not possessing an extraordinary adaptability and involving a certain vagueness. A severe and explicit system, however true, could hardly have appealed to people of such different mind and calibre as were the Platonists of various ages. Plato had the advantage of presenting a philosophy which in its first principles was practical and rational,-the philosophy of Socrates,-but of presenting it in a brilliant literary form and of escaping from it into eloquent flights of fancy, by which it was relieved of its natural severity and made to appeal to mystical and enthusiastic minds. Platonism is accordingly a many-sided and elusive thing, on which each successive disciple impresses his own stamp and grafts his own intuitions. All sorts of things have passed for Platonism, and passed for it with about equal right,-Pythagorean metaphysics, academic scepticism, Neo-Platonic mysticism, Christian theology, transcendental idealism, and the mere incoherent practice of speculation, whenever it is warm and rhapsodical.

While the philosophers have been content to adopt and adapt Plato in these ways to their own uses, we should naturally expect historical critics in our own day to attempt an impartial reconstruction of Plato's philosophy as it may have existed in his own mind.

Copyright, 1902, by Frederick A. Richardson.

Such a reconstruction is rendered exceedingly difficult by the fact, proved both by internal and external evidence, that Plato's works, although all extant, do not adequately cover his philosophy. The authenticity of many of the dialogues is doubtful, and the order in which they were written is a further point which critics feel called upon to settle, although it might seem to be in itself a matter of some indifference; the discussion of it might serve to produce doctors of philosophy at the universities, but might appear to involve no further benefit. Only, in Plato's case, the order of composition acquires a special interest, when we observe that there are notable divergencies among the dialogues in style and in thought, if not absolute contradictions in doctrine. One set is mythological, playful, and humane, another technical, abstruse, and rationalistic. As we give priority to one set of dialogues or to the other, we conceive one of the greatest of philosophers to have moved, as his thought and experience matured (for Plato was one of those philosophers who actually had experience) in one of two opposite directions. The question thus assumes some historic importance and some dramatic interest; it might even be thought to involve an argument from authority in favor of the attitude finally assumed by so illustrious and comprehensive a genius.

While the intrinsic value of the various dialogues remains untouched by such a problem, our notion of their living author is profoundly transformed as we shake our historical kaleidoscope and let those luminous fragments of his mind fall together into one pattern or another. Was Plato a conscientious scholar, did he subject himself to a scholastic discipline, working over abstruse technical problems, in order to rise afterwards, when his apprenticeship was over, to a poetic treatment of real things? Did he shake himself loose from dialectical scruples in his maturity, and proceed to handle the deepest themes with the freedom and irony of a master?

Such is the view that has commonly prevailed. If it has not been insisted upon with more emphasis, the reason is that such a view tends of itself to make people careless about those works which are conceived to be merely preparatory, so that these

works come to be practically ignored. The ordinary practice, even among scholars and philosophers, is not to read the "Laws" or the "Sophist" at all, and to glide over the "Parmenides" as an anomalous and singular performance, possibly not really Plato's. Yet the "Laws" is the longest, one of the latest, and the most earnest and unequivocal of Plato's works. The "Sophist" is one of the most incisive and the "Parmenides" one of the most profound. By losing sight of these dialogues, however, the question of their relation to the rest can be past over in silence, and Plato can be considered as if he were the author only of the more poetic and interesting pieces.

Or, if we take the other view, was Plato by natural inclination a poet, and did he, by the inspiration of his genius, turn at once the ethical doctrine of Socrates into a metaphysical idealism, the expression of his youthful and enthusiastic intuitions? Did he later analyze and interpret these intuitions in a more critical and sober way? Did he study the problems which they called up and reduce his theories more and more to mere expressions for practical and moral realities, until at last, in the "Laws," all allegory and hypostasis were abandoned in favor of a literal definition of spiritual goods,—the very thing which all that idealistic machinery had from the first been meant to express and to glorify?

Some such view, or at least the chronological theory which might support it, has recommended itself to many detached scholars in recent years. To speak only of those who write in English, Professor Lewis Campbell and Dr. Henry Jackson some time ago made suggestions tending to a reconstruction of Plato's philosophy. Professor Campbell's chronological theory, being buried in the introduction to an edition of the "Sophist" and "Politicus," attracted little attention. Dr. Jackson's papers were more noticed. But the very strong chronological argument they contain, based on a minute analysis of the group of critical dialogues, was prejudiced by a general interpretation of Platonism which was based upon them; and the learned public, generally feeling that interpretation to be unsympathetic and forced, condemned

also the chronology which had been used to introduce it. These English views, uttered by their distinguished authors only, so to speak, in an academic whisper, have recently been trumpeted by Mr. Lutoslawski in his scholarly and readable book on "The Logic of Plato." Here they are supported by a verbal apparatus which, if not calculated to convince the obdurate, serves at least to give the new conception a certain emphasis and to call attention to the more solid grounds which support it, grounds which Mr. Lutoslawski's analysis of the growing Platonic logic brings convincingly before the reader.

The most distinctive feature of his book, however, is the attempt to find a purely linguistic and mechanical method for solving the question of chronology at issue. As not only the style but also the vocabulary differ notably in the various dialogues, it has occurred to Mr. Lutoslawski, as to some of his German forerunners, to make statistics of Platonic language, showing in tables how often every word which seems characteristic of the latest Platonic style, as exemplified by the "Laws," occurs in the other works. Thus, all the dialogues can be arranged in a series according to their linguistic affinity to the "Laws"; and we are to infer that this series will correspond to the order of composition. This method, of course, might be more exhaustively applied, if a greater number of words were counted and compared. The results already attained lead unequivocally to the conclusion that the logical dialogues are later than the poetical, since their language has a much more marked resemblance to that of the "Laws." If further research should confirm this result, we should have, according to Mr. Lutoslawski, a scientific key to the order in which Plato wrote his works.

Such an argument is open to serious objection. Without denying the striking variety of Plato's compositions, it may be doubted whether the change in style is due to a permanent change in the man, and not rather to different and reversible poses in the writer. It is natural to use a different vocabulary in dealing with a different subject. For so imaginative and dramatic a genius as Plato, it is particularly natural to hold various moods

and interests in suspense, and to give utterance to them in turn without being obliged to concentrate, for the convenience of future critics, all the poetry in one period of one's life and all the logic in another. Doubtless verbal tricks and incidental phrases, being comparatively unconscious and instinctive, may serve as indications of certain epochs in a man's literary life. But here, too, much allowance must be made for the power of imagination to carry its own atmosphere with it, so that revulsion to a mood or subject belonging to a buried stratum of the mind may rejuvenate and resurrect a whole vocabulary and gamut of sentiment which had fallen into disuse and been overlaid by other habits. If second childhood can refurbish so many faded ideas, it is because the brain is a miser and hides more treasures than it is often willing to spend. There is no There is no difficulty, therefore, in conceiving that Plato should have tapped his various interests at various times and more or less adapted his expression to each theme he took up.

Critics too often forget that a great writer may have great elasticity, and if any performance seems to them essentially new or at all incongruous with a previous one they take refuge in the easy hypothesis of a forgery. Who knows how many of his works Shakespeare or Goethe, Cervantes or Byron could be suffered to retain under the restriction of never saying anything different in tone from what he had said before! Plato was a great artist, a great observer, a haughty though amiable judge of all opinions. He knew the limitations of art and the often ambiguous complexities of dialectic. What more conceivable, therefore, than that he should have sometimes etched a subject and sometimes filled it in with the richest colors, sometimes followed up the logic of a problem, and sometimes that of a passion? In the "Parmenides," indeed, we have these extreme phases actually juxtaposed,— a singularly picturesque scene, scintillating with brilliant and profound ideas, being followed by a singularly abstruse exercise in dialectic. But both parts are in substance and manner appropriate to their theme and worthy of their author.

Mr. Lutoslawski takes the "Laws" as the starting point of

« ПретходнаНастави »