[134] Plato, Theætêt. p. 208 E.
[135] Plato, Theætêt. p. 151 C.
Comparison of the Philosopher with the Rhetor. The Rhetor is enslaved to the opinions of auditors.
A portion of the dialogue to which I have not yet adverted, illustrates this anxiety for the preliminary training of the ratiocinative power, as an indispensable qualification for any special research. “We have plenty of leisure for investigation[136] (says Sokrates). We are not tied to time, nor compelled to march briefly and directly towards some positive result. Engaged as we are in investigating philosophical truth, we stand in pointed contrast with politicians and rhetors in the public assembly or dikastery. We are like freemen; they, like slaves. They have before them the Dikasts, as their masters, to whose temper and approbation they are constrained to adapt themselves. They are also in presence of antagonists, ready to entrap and confute them. The personal interests, sometimes even the life, of an individual are at stake; so that every thing must be sacrificed to the purpose of obtaining a verdict. Men brought up in these habits become sharp in observation and emphatic in expression; but merely with a view to win the assent and approbation of the master before them, as to the case in hand. No free aspirations or spontaneous enlargement can have place in their minds. They become careless of true and sound reasoning — slaves to the sentiment of those whom they address — and adepts in crooked artifice which they take for wisdom.[137]
[136] Plato, Theæt. p. 155. ὡς πάνυ πολλὴν σχολὴν ἄγοντες, πάλιν ἐπανασκεψόμεθα, &c.; also p. 172.
[137] Plato, Theætêt. p. 172-173.
I give only an abstract of this eloquent passage, not an exact translation. Steinhart (Einleitung zum Theætêt. p. 37) calls it “a sublime Hymn” (einen erhabenen Hymnus). It is a fine piece of poetry or rhetoric, and shows that Plato was by nature quite as rhetorical as the rhetors whom he depreciates — though he had also, besides, other lofty intellectual peculiarities of his own, beyond these rivals.
The Philosopher is master of his own debates.
Of all this (continues Sokrates) the genuine philosopher is the reverse. He neither possesses, nor cares to possess, the accomplishments of the lawyer and politician. He takes no interest in the current talk of the city; nor in the scandals afloat against individual persons. He does not share in the common ardour for acquiring power or money; nor does he account potentates either happier or more estimable for possessing them. Being ignorant and incompetent in the affairs of citizenship as well as of common life, he has no taste for club-meetings or joviality. His mind, despising the particular and the practical, is absorbed in constant theoretical research respecting universals. He spares no labour in investigating — What is man in general? and what are the attributes, active and passive, which distinguish man from other things? He will be overthrown and humiliated before the Dikastery by a clever rhetor. But if this opponent chooses to ascend out of the region of speciality, and the particular ground of injustice alleged by A against B — into the general question, What is justice or injustice? Wherein do they differ from each other or from other things? What constitutes happiness and misery? How is the one to be attained and the other avoided? — If the rhetor will meet the philosopher on this elevated ground, then he will find himself put to shame and proved to be incompetent, in spite of all the acute stratagems of his petty mind.[138] He will look like a child and become ashamed of himself:[139] but the philosopher is noway ashamed of his incompetence for slavish pursuits, while he is passing a life of freedom and leisure among his own dialectics.[140]
[138] Plato, Theæt. pp. 175-176.