Plato: New Readings

The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Library," of the excellent translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to
indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing
growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting up the
vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope. The human
being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the
easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from the
distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding
the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had
turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and Columbus, was no
wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the
tree. These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good
basis for further proceeding. With this artist, time and space are cheap,
and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation. She waited
tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck
when man should arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion of the
earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts and the
cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the succession of
individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the fortune in the
history of mankind to mark an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the
Socratic reasoning, or on any thesis, as for example the immortality of the
soul. He is more than an expert, or a schoolman, or a geometer, or the
prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of the intellect,
the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms and so
disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions are in the
essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any
discoveries of the extent of the universe, but is as poor when cataloguing
the resolved nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But
the Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require and so to
anticipate the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind
does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, Here was a
more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses,
the understanding and the reason. These expansions or extensions consist in
continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural
vision, and by this second sight discovering the long lines of law which
shoot in every direction. Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end,
but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore every word becomes an
exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and
ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death
out of life and life out of death,- that law by which, in nature,
decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only
signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little in the large and
the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen and the citizen in
the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an
allegory on the education of the private soul; his beautiful definitions of
ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line, sometimes hypothetically
given, as his defining of virtue, courage, justice, temperance; his love of
the apologue, and his apologues themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring
of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden, silver, brass and iron
temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates,-
fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of
the zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul;*(16) his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of
return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe,
instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine, "what comes from God to
us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates' belief that the laws below are
sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the
coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and
virtue, but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that justice
was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it is profitable
throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the just conceal his
justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer injustice than to do
it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful
than homicide; and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more
calamitous than involuntary homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived
of true opinions, and that no man sins willingly; that the order or
proceeding of nature was from the mind to the body, and, though a sound body
cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render
the body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant,
namely, the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of
tune is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to
govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his guards
shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed that there is gold
and silver in their souls, which will make men willing to give them every
thing which they need.

This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the
globe of earth was not more lawful and precise than was the supersensible;
that a celestial geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles
here below; that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are
constant of oxygen, azote and lime; there is just so much water and slate
and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the
real at the base of the accidental; in discovering connection, continuity
and representation everywhere, hating insulation; and appears like the god
of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capability in
everything he touches. Ethical science was new and vacant when Plato could
write thus:- "Of all whose arguments are left to the men of the present
time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice, otherwise
than as respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom; while,
as respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the
soul of the possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet
sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings,- how, namely,
that injustice is the greatest of all the evils that the soul has within it,
and justice the greatest good."

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and
self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the
understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the
self-evolving power of spirit, endless, generator of new ends; a power which
is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of things. Plato is
so centred that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge
and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of
reminiscence he offers as the most probable particular explication. Call
that fanciful,- it matters not: the connection between our knowledge and the
abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less
magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale
of the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put
in all the past, without weariness, and descended into detail with a courage
like that he witnessed in nature. One would say that his forerunners had
mapped out each a farm or a district or an island, in intellectual
geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in
nature: man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven
represent as many circles in the rational soul. There is no lawless
particle, and there is nothing casual in the action of the human mind. The
names of things, too, are fatal, following the nature of things. All the
gods of the Pantheon are, by their names, significant of a profound sense.
The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; Saturn, the
contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion;
Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to
poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with
command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid of
holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the
intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his own ideal, when
he paints, in Timaeus, a god leading things from disorder into order. He
kindled a fire so truly in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated,
and can distinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude, every arc and
node: a theory so averaged, so modulated, that you would say the winds of
ages had swept through this rhythmic structure, and not that it was the
brief extempore blotting of one short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened
that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a
spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth, by
exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it,- are said to
Platonize. Thus, Michael Angelo is a Platonist in his sonnets: Shakespeare
is a Platonist when he writes,-

"Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean,"

or,-

"He, that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story."

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare's
proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of
this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of "Conjugal Love," is a
Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular
success is the moral aim which endeared him to mankind. "Intellect," he
said, "is king of heaven and of earth"; but in Plato, intellect is always
moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their
arguments, most of them, might have been couched in sonnets: and poetry has
never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. As the poet, too,
he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an
institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical,
with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors, his thought. You
cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to make
emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium which he would
set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by
demerit have put themselves below protection,- outlaws; and secondly, those
who by eminence of nature and desert are out of the reach of your rewards.
Let such be free of the city and above the law. We confide them to
themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure
the irregularities of Michael Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in
our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting
the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with the baser sort,
as people allow themselves with their dogs and cats.

 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophy & Classics

The Uncle Taz Library

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