Plato and Platonism

by Walter Pater

For it is of Plato again we should be thinking, and of Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans, only so far as they explain the actual conformation of Plato's thoughts as we find them, especially in The Republic. Let us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from that older philosophy, of which the two leading persuasions were; first, the universality, the ultimate truth, of numerical, of musical law; and secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity, of the soul.

In spirit, then, we are certainly of the Pythagorean company in that most characteristic dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how one may attain thereto; compelled to this subordinate and accessory question by the intellectual [61] cowardice of his disciple, though after his manner he flashes irrepressible light on that other primary and really indispensable question by the way. Pythagoras, who had founded his famous brotherhood by way of turning theory into practice, must have had, of course, definite views on that most practical question, how virtue is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly faithful to him in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming habit (askêsis)+ as enforced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good natural disposition (physei)+ and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part (theia moira)+ to the good pleasure of heaven, to un-merited grace. Whatever else, however, may be held about it, it is certain (he admits) that virtue comes in great measure through learning. But is there in very deed such a thing as learning? asks the eristic Meno, who is so youthfully fond of argument for its own sake, and must exercise by display his already well-trained intellectual muscle. Is not that favourite, that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is impossible to be taught, and therefore useless to seek, what one does not know already, after all the expression of an empirical truth?—

Meno. After what manner Socrates will you seek for that which you do not know at all—what it is? For what sort of thing, among the things you know not, will you propose as your [62] object of search? Or even if you should have lighted full upon it, how will you know that it is this thing which you knew not?

Socrates. Ah! I understand the kind of thing you mean to say, Meno. Do you see what a contentious argument this is you are bringing down on our heads?—that forsooth it is not possible for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least; because he knows it, and to one in such case there is no need of seeking. Nor would he seek after what he knows not; for he knows not what he shall seek for. Meno, 80.

Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits; not however in any sense which encourages idle acquiescence in what according to common language is our ignorance. There is a sense (it is exemplified in regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things) in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for, or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence- -: anamnêsis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know: how that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument most [63] fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves, a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry: introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the table—particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths concerning them. The problem required of him is to describe a square of a particular size: to find the line which must be the side of such a square; and he is to find it for himself. Meno, carefully on his guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his answers; whether he answers anything at any point otherwise than by way of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like sunlight on the photographer's negative.

"See him now!" he cries triumphantly, "How he remembers; in the logical order; as he ought to remember!" The reader, in truth, following closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is [64] once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them: that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the mistakes also which he ought to make—the right sort of mistakes, such as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors. Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai autai.+—"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical problems, with any and every problem whatever.

"If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine:—

If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe- matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just and good, and about all things whatever, upon [65] which, in all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal—hois episphragizometha touto + —That, which really is. Phaedo, 75.

But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno—from the prison-cell to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment upon the young boy with the square:— Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên;+ "Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning, will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense (epistêmê)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"—Yes! and that recovery is an act of reminiscence.

These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us—the doctrine namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal (athanatos an hê psychê eiê)+ prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth "over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal. It is right therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half- obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly!