Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/198

 PLATO

160

PLATO

School in many respects. It had a definite location in the groves near the gymnasium of Academus, its tone was more refined, more attention was given to hterary form, and there was less indulgence in the odd, and even vulgar method of illustration which charac- terized the Socratic manner of exposition. After his return from his third journey to Sicily he devoted himself unremittingly to writing and teaching, until his eightieth year, when, as Cicero tells us, he died in the midst of his intellectual labours ("scribens est mortuus") ("De Senect.", v, 13).

II. Works. — It is practically certain that all Plato's genuine works have come down to us. The lost works ascribed to him, such as the "Divisions" and the "Unwritten Doctrines", are certainly not genuine. Of the thirty-six dialogues, some — the "Phaedrus", "Protagoras", "Phsedo", "The Repub- hc", "The Banquet" etc. — are undoubtedly genuine; others — e. g. the "Minos" — may with equal certainty be considered spvu'ious; while still a third group — the "Ion", "Greater Hippias", and "First Alcibiades" — • is of doubtful authenticity. In all his WTitings Plato uses the dialogue with a skill never since equalled. That form permitted him to develop the Socratic method of question and answer. For, while Plato elaborated to a high degree the faculty by which the abstract is understood and presented, he was Greek enough to follow the artistic instinct in teaching by means of a clear-cut concrete tj-pe of philosophical excellence. The use of the myth in the dialogues has occasioned considerable difficulty to the commentators and critics. When we try to put a value on t he con- tent of a Platonic myth, we are often baffled by the suspicion that it is all meant to be subtly ironical, or that it is introduced to cover up the inherent contra- dictions of Plato's thought. In any case, the myth should never be taken too seriously or invoked as an evidence of what Plato really believed.

III. Philosophy. — (1) The Starting-Point. — The immediate starting-point of Plato's philosophical speculation was the Socratic teaching. In his attempt to define the conditions of knowledge so as to refute sophistic scepticism, Socrates had taught that the only true knowledge is a knowledge by means of con- cepts. The concept, he said, represents all the reaUty of a thing. As used by Socrates, this was merely a principle of knowledge. It was taken up by Plato as a principle of Being. If the concept represents all the reality of things, the reaUty must be something in the ideal order, not necessarily in the things themselves, but rather above them, in a world by itself. For the concept, therefore, Plato substitutes the Idea. He completes the work of Socrates by teaching that the objectively real Ideas are the foundation and justifi- cation of scientific knowledge. At the same time, he has in mind a problem which claimed much attention from pre-Socratic thinkers, the problem of change. The Eleatics, following Parmenides, held that there is no real change or multiplicity in the world, that reality is one. Heraclitus, on the contrary, regarding motion and multiplicity as real, maintained that per- manence is only apparent. The Platonic theory of Ideas is an attempt to solve this crucial question by a metaphysical compromise. The Eleatics, Plato said, are right in maintaining that reality does not change; for the Ideas are immutable. Still, there is, as Hera- clitus contended, change in the world of our expe- rience, or, as Plato terms it, the world of phenomena. Plato, then, supposes a world of Ideas apart from the world of our experience, and immeasurably superior to it. He imagines that all human souls dwelt at one time in that higher world. When, therefore, we behold in the shadow-world around us a phenomenon or appearance of anything, the mind is moved to a re- membrance of the Idea (of that same phenomenal thing) which it formerly contemplated. In its delight it wonders at the contrast, and by wonder is led to

recall as perfectly as possible the intuition it enjoyed in a previous existence. This is the task of philosophy. Philosophy, therefore, consists in the effort to rise from the knowledge of phenomena, or appearances, to the noumena, or realities. Of all the ideas, however, the Idea of the beautiful shines out through the phenomenal veil more clearly than any other; hence, the beginning of all philosophical activity is the love and admiration of the Beautiful.

(2) Division of Philosophy. — The different parts of philosophy are not distinguished bj' Plato with the same formal precision found in Aristotelean and post- Aristotelean systems. We may, liowever, for con- venience, distinguish: (a) Dialectic, the science of the Idea in itself; (b) Physics, the knowledge of the Idea as incorporated or incarnated in the world of phenom- ena, and (c) Ethics and Theory of the State, or the science of the Idea embodied in human conduct and human society.

(a) Dialectic. — This is to be understood as synony- mous not with logic but with metaphysics. It sig- nifies the science of the Idea, the science of reality, science in the only true sense of the word. For the Ideas are the only realities in the world. We observe, for instance, just actions, and we know that some men are just. But both in the actions and in the persons designated as just there exist many imperfections; they are only partly just. In the world above us there exists justice, absolute, perfect, unmixed with injustice, eternal, unchangeable, immortal. This is the Idea of justice. Similarly, in that world above us there exist the Ideas of greatness, goodness, beauty, wisdom, etc., and not only these, but also the Ideas of concrete material objects such as the Idea of man, the Idea of horse, the Idea of trees, etc. In a word, the world of Ideas is a counterpart of the world of our experience, or rather the latter is a feeble imitation of the former. The Ideas are the prototypes, the phenomena are ectypes. In the allegory of the cave (Republic, VII, 514 d) a race of men are described as chained in a fixed position in a cavern, able to look only at the wall in front of them. When an animal, e. g. a horse, passes in front of the cave, they, beholding the shadow on the wall, imagine it to be a reality, and while in prison they know of no other reality. When they are released and go into the light they are dazzled, but when they succeed in distin- guishing a horse among the objects around them, their first impulse is to take that for a shadow of the being which they saw on the wall. The prisoners are "like ourselves", says Plato. The world of our experience, which we take to be real, is only a shadow-world. The real world is the world of Ideas, which we reach, not by sense-knowledge, but by intuitive contempla- tion. The Ideas are participated by the phenomena; but how this participation takes place, and in what sense the phenomena are imitations of the Ideas, Plato does not fully explain ; at most he invokes a negative principle, sometimes called "Platonic Matter", to account for the "faUing-off" of the phenomena from the perfection of the Idea. The limitating principle is the cause of all defects, decay, and change in the world around us. The just man, for instance, falls short of absolute justice (the Idea of Justice), because in men the Idea of justice is fragmentated, debased, and reduced by the principle of limitation. Towards the end of his life, Plato leaned more and more towards the Pythagorean number-theory, and, in the "Tima>us" especially, he is inclined to interpret the Ideas in terms of mathematics. His followers em- phasized this element unduly, and, in the course of neo-Platonic speculation, the Ideas were identified with numbers. There was much in the theory of Ideas that appealed to the first Christian philosophers. The emphatic affirmation of a supermundane, spiritual order of reality and the equally emphatic assertion of the caducity of things material fitted in with the