Note.—From a book whose interesting defence of the Socratic ethic from the standpoint of psychoanalysis was brought to the writer’s attention after the completion of the foregoing essay: “The Freudian ethics is a literal and concrete justification of the Socratic teaching. Truth is the sole moral sanction, and discrimination of hitherto unrealized facts is the one way out of every moral dilemma.... Virtue is wisdom.” Practical morality is “the establishment, through discrimination, of consistent, and not contradictory (mutually suppressive), courses of action toward phenomena. The moral sanction lies always in facts presented by the phenomena; morality in the discrimination of those facts.” Moral development is “the progressive, lifelong integration of experience.”—The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, by Edwin B. Holt, New York, 1915, pp. 141, 145, 148.
CHAPTER II
PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS
I
The Man and the Artist
WHY do we love Plato? Perhaps because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the sweet intoxication of dialectical revelry, full of passion for the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wildly nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the errors he has made. But above all we love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation, but for the remoulding, of the world. He speaks of himself, through Socrates, as “almost the only Athenian living who sets his hand to the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time.”[17] Philosophy was for him a study of human possibilities in the light of human realities and limitations; his daily food consisted of the problems of human relations and endeavors: problems of liberty versus order; of sex relations and the family; of ideals of character and citizenship, and the educational approaches to those ideals; problems of the control of population, of heredity and environment, of art and morals. With all his liking for the poetry of mysticism, philosophy none the less was to him preëminently an adventure in this world; and unlike ourselves, who follow one or another of his many leads, he sailed virginal seas. Every reader in every age has called him modern; but what age can there be to which Plato will not still be modern?
Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates died;[18] and though he was not present at the drinking of the hemlock, yet the passing of the master must have been a tragic blow to him. It brought him face to face with death, the mother of metaphysics. Proudest of all philosophers, he did not hide his sense of debt to Socrates: “I thank the gods,” he said, “that I was born freeman, not slave; Greek, not barbarian; man, not woman; but above all that I was born in the time of Socrates.” The old philosopher gone, Athens became for a time intolerable to Plato (some say, Plato to Athens); and the young philosopher sailed off to see foreign shores and take nourishment of other cultures. He liked the peaceful orderliness and aged dignity with which a long dominant priesthood had invested Egypt; beside this mellow civilization, he was willing to be told, the culture of his native Athens was but a precarious ethnological sport. He liked the Pythagoreans of southern Italy, with their aristocratic approach to the problem of social construction and their communal devotion to plain living and high thinking; above all he liked their emphasis on harmony as the fundamental pervasive relation of all things and as the ideal in which our human discords might be made to resolve themselves had men artistry enough. Other lands he saw and learnt from: stories tell how he risked his handsome head to build an ideal state in Syracuse; how he was sold into slavery and redeemed by a friend; and how he passed down through Palestine even to India, absorbing the culture of their peoples with a kind of osmotic genius. And at last, after twelve years of wandering, he heard again the call of Athens, and went home, stored with experience and ripe with thought.
Arrived now at the mid-point of his life, he turned to the task of self-expression. Should he join one of the political parties and try to make the government of Athens a picture of his thought? Perhaps he felt that his thought was not yet definite enough for that; politics requires answers in Yes or No, and philosophy deals only in Yes-and-No. He hesitated to join a party or pledge himself to a dogma; and was prepared to be hated by all parties alike for this hesitation.[19] Aristocracy was in his blood, and he would not stoop to conquer by a plebiscite. He thought of turning to the stage, as Euripides had done, and teaching through the mask; in his youth he had written plays, and smiled now to think how he had hoped to rival Aristophanes. But there were too many limitations here, of religious subject and dramatic form; Plato’s philosophy was a thing of ever broadening borders, and could not be cramped into a ceremony. But neither was his philosophy an arid academic affair, to be written down as one places in order the bones of a skeleton; it was vibrantly alive, it was itself a drama and a religion. Why should there not be a drama of idea as well as of action?—Had not the play of thought its tragedies and comedies?—Was not philosophy, after all, a matter of life and death?
In such a juncture of desires came that fusion of drama and philosophy which we know as Plato’s dialogues,—assuredly the finest production in all the history of philosophy. Here was just the instrument for a man whose thought had not congealed into dogmas and a system. All genius is heterogeneous; a great man is a sum of many men;—let the soul give its selves a voice, and it will speak in dialogue.[20] Just instrument, too, for a man who wished to play with the varied possibilities of speculation, who cared to clarify his own mind rather than to give forth finalities where life itself was so blind and inconclusive. A conclusion is too often but the point at which thought has lost its wind; being not so much a solution of the problem as a dissolution of thought. Hence the riotous play of the imagination in Plato; lively game of trial and error, merry-go-round of thought; here is imagery squandered with lordly abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern philosophers; here is no system but all systems;[21] here is one abounding fountain-head of European thought; here is prose strong and beautiful as the great temples where Greek joy disported itself in marble; here literary prose is born,—and born adult.
II
How to Solve the Social Problem
TO understand Plato one must remember the Pythagorean motif: harmony is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics, of his psychological and educational theory, of his ethics and his politics. To feel such harmony as there is, and to make such harmony as may be,—that to Plato is the meaning of philosophy.