A critical history of Greek philosophy

by W. T. Stace

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the subordination of all spiritual activities to philosophy is to be found in the doctrine of Eros, or Love. The phrase "platonic love" is on the lips of many, but, as a rule, something very different from Plato's own doctrine is meant. According to him, love is always concerned with beauty, and his teaching on the subject is expounded [{205}] chiefly in the "Symposium," He believed that before birth the soul dwelt disembodied in the pure contemplation of the world of Ideas. Sinking down into a body, becoming immersed in the world of sense, it forgets the Ideas. The sight of a beautiful object reminds it of that one Idea of beauty of which the object is a copy. This accounts for the mystic rapture, the emotion, the joy, with which we greet the sight of the beautiful. Since Plato had expressly declared that there are Ideas of the ugly as well as of the beautiful, that there are Ideas, for example, of hair, filth, and dirt, and since these Ideas are just as divine and perfect as the Idea of the beautiful, we ought, on this theory, to greet the ugly, the filthy, and the nauseating, with a ravishment of joy similar to that which we experience in the presence of beauty. Why this is not the case Plato omitted to explain. However, having learned to love the one beautiful object, the soul passes on to the love of others. Then it perceives that it is the same beauty which reveals itself in all these. It passes from the love of beautiful forms to the love of beautiful souls, and from that to the love of beautiful sciences. It ceases to be attached to the many objects, as such, that is to say, to the sensuous envelopes of the Idea of beauty. Love passes into the knowledge of the Idea of beauty itself, and from this to the knowledge of the world of Ideas in general. It passes in fact into philosophy.

In this development there are two points which we cannot fail to note. In the first place, emotional love is explained as being simply the blind groping of reason towards the Idea. It is reason which has not yet recognized itself as such. It appears, therefore, in the [{206}] guise of feeling. Secondly, the later progress of the soul's love is simply the gradual recognition of itself by reason. When the soul perceives that the beauty in all objects is the same, that it is the common element amid the many, this is nothing but the process of inductive reasoning. And this development ends at last in the complete rational cognition of the world of Ideas, in a word, philosophy. Love is but an instinctive reason. The animal has no feeling of the beautiful, just because it has no reason. Love of the beautiful is founded upon the nature of man, not as a percipient or feeling being, but as a rational being. And it must end in the complete recognition of reason by itself, not in the feeling and intuition, but in the rational comprehension, of the Idea.

One can imagine what Plato's answer would be to the sort of vulgarians and philistines who want to know what the use of philosophy is, and in what way it is "practical." To answer such a question is for Plato impossible, because the question itself is illegitimate. For a thing to have a use involves that it is a means towards an end. Fire has use, because it may be made a means towards the cooking of food. Money is useful, because it is a means to the acquisition of goods. That which is an end in itself, and not a means towards any further end, cannot possibly have any use. To suggest that philosophy ought to have use is, therefore, to put the cart before the horse, to invert the whole scale of values. It suggests that philosophy is a means towards some further end, instead of being the absolute end to which all other things are means. Philosophy is not for anything. Everything else is for it. And, if this seems an exaggerated or unpractical view, we may at least [{207}] remember that this is the view taken by the religious consciousness of man. Religion makes the supreme end of life the knowledge of, and communion with, God. God is for religion what the Idea is for philosophy. God is a figurative name for the Idea. To place the end of life in the knowledge of the Absolute, or the Idea, is therefore the teaching both of philosophy and religion.

4. Physics, or the Theory of Existence.

Dialectic is the theory of reality, physics the theory of existence, dialectic of that which lies behind things as their ground, physics of the things which are thus grounded. That is to say, physics is concerned with phenomena and appearances, things which exist in space and time, as opposed to the timeless and non-spatial Ideas. Things of this kind are both corporeal and incorporeal. Physics falls therefore into two parts, the doctrine of the outward corporeality, the world, with its incorporeal essence, the World-Soul, and the doctrine of the incorporeal soul of man.

(a) The Doctrine of the World.

If, in the dialectic, Plato has given an account of the nature of the first principle and ground of all things, the problem now arises of explaining how the actual universe of things arises out of that ground, how it is derived from the first principle. In other words, the Ideas being the absolute reality, how does the world of sense, and, in general, the existent universe, arise out of the Ideas? Faced with this problem, the system of Plato broke down. The things of sense are, we are told, "copies" or "imitations" of the Ideas. [{208}] They "participate" in the Ideas. So far, so good. But why should there be any copies of the Ideas? Why should the Ideas give rise to copies of themselves, and how is the production of these copies effected? To these questions Plato has no answer, and he therefore has recourse to the use of myths. Poetic description here takes the place of scientific explanation.

This poetic description of the origin of the world is to be found in the "Timaeus." We have seen that the Ideas are absolute Being, and that things of sense are half real and half unreal. They are partly real because they participate in Being. They are partly unreal because they participate in not-being. There must be, therefore, a principle of absolute not-being. This, in Plato's opinion, is matter. Things of sense are copies of the Ideas fashioned out of, or stamped upon, matter. But Plato does not understand by matter what we, in modern times, understand by it. Matter, in our sense, is always some particular kind of matter. It is brass, or wood, or iron, or stone. It is matter which has determinate character and quality. But the possession of specific character means that it is matter with the copy of Ideas already stamped upon it. Since iron exists in great quantities in the world, and there is a common element in all the various pieces of iron, by virtue of which all are classed together, there must be a concept of iron. There is, therefore, an Idea of iron in the world of Ideas. And the iron which we find in the earth must be matter which is already formed into a copy of this Idea. It participates in the Idea of iron. The same remarks apply to any other particular kind of matter. In fact, all form, all the specific characters and [{209}] features of matter, as we know it, are due to the operation of the Ideas. Hence matter as it is in itself, before the image of the Ideas is stamped upon it, must be absolutely without quality, featureless, formless. But to be absolutely without any quality is to be simply nothing at all. This matter is, therefore, as Plato says, absolute not-being. Zeller conjectures, probably rightly, that what Plato meant was simply empty space. [Footnote 14] Empty space is an existent not-being, and it is totally indeterminate and formless. It accords with this view that Plato adopted the Pythagorean tenet that the differential qualities of material substances are due to their smallest particles being regular geometrical figures limited out of the unlimited, that is, out of space. Thus earth is composed of cubes. That is to say, empty space when bound into cubes (the limiting of the unlimited) becomes earth. The smallest particles of fire are tetrahedra, of air octahedra, of water icosahedra.

[Footnote 14: Plato and the Older Academy, chap. vii. ]

We have, then, on the one hand, the world of Ideas, on the other, matter, an absolutely formless, chaotic, mass. By impressing the images of the Ideas upon this mass, "things" arise, that is to say, the specific objects of sense. They thus participate both in Being and in not-being. But how is this mixing of Being and not-being brought about? How do the Ideas come to have their images stamped upon matter? It is at this point that we enter upon the region of myth. Up to this point Plato is certainly to be taken literally. He of course believed in the reality of the world of Ideas, and he no doubt also believed in his principle of matter. And he thought that the objects of sense are to be [{210}] explained as copies of the Ideas impressed upon matter. But now, with the problem how this copying is brought about, Plato leaves the method of scientific explanation behind. If the Ideas are the absolute ground of all things, then the copying process must be done by the Ideas themselves. They must themselves be made the principles for the production of things. But this is, for Plato, impossible. For production involves change. If the Ideas produce things out of themselves, the Ideas must in the process undergo change. But Plato has declared them to be absolutely unchangeable, and to be thus immutable is to be sterile. Hence the Ideas have within themselves no principle for the production of things, and the scientific explanation of things by this means becomes impossible. Hence there is nothing for it but to have recourse to myth. Plato can only imagine that things are produced by a world-former, or designer, who, like a human artist, fashions the plastic matter into images of the Ideas.