5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

     Some very small number then (says the Platonic Socrates) is
     left, of those who in worthy fashion hold converse with
     philosophy: either, it may be, some soul of in-born worth and
     well brought up, to which it has happened to be exiled in a
     foreign land, holding to philosophy by a tie of nature, and
     through lack of those who will corrupt it; or when it may
     chance that a great soul comes to birth in an insignificant
     state, to the politics of which it gives no heed, because it
     thinks them despicable: perhaps a certain fraction also, of
     good parts, may come to philosophy from some other craft,
     through a just contempt of that.  The bridle too of our
     companion Theages has a restraining power.  For in the case
     of Theages also, all the other conditions were in readiness
     to his falling away from philosophy; but the nursing of his
     sickly body, excluding him from politics, keeps him back.  Our
     own peculiarity is not worth speaking of--the sign from heaven!
     for I suppose it has occurred to scarce anyone before.  And so,
     those who have been of this number, and have tasted how sweet
     and blessed the possession is; and again, having a full view
     of the folly of the many, and that no one, I might say, effects
     any sound result in what concerns the state, or is an ally in
     whose company one might proceed safe and sound to the help of
     the just, but that, like a man falling among wild beasts,
     neither willing to share their evil deeds, nor sufficient by
     himself to resist the whole fierce band, flung away before he
     shall have done any service [110] to the city or to his own
     friends, he would become useless both to himself and to others:
     taking all this into consideration, keeping silence and doing
     his own business, as one standing aside under a hedge in some
     storm of dust and spray beneath a driven wind, seeing those
     about him replete with lawlessness, he is content if by any
     means, pure from injustice and unholy deeds, himself shall
     live through his life here, and in turn make his escape with
     good hope, in cheerful and kindly mood.  (What long sentences
     Plato writes!)  Yet in truth, he said, he would make his escape
     after not the least of achievements.--Nor yet the greatest, I
     observed, because he did not light upon the polity fitted for
     him: for, in that fitting polity, himself will grow to
     completer stature, and, together with what belongs to him, he
     will be the saviour also of the commonwealth.  Republic, 496.+

Over against the Sophists, and the age which has sophisticated them, of which they are the natural product, Plato, being himself of a genius naturally rich, florid, complex, excitable, but adding to the utmost degree of Ionian sensibility an effectual desire towards the Dorian order and askêsis, asserts everywhere the principle of outline, in political and moral life; in the education which is to fit men for it; in the music which is one half of that education, in the philosophy which is its other half--the "philosophy of the ideas," of those eternally fixed outlines of our thought, which correspond to, nay, are actually identical with, the eternally fixed outlines of things themselves. What the difference (difference in regard to continuity and clearness) really is between the conditions of mind, in which respectively the sophistic process, and the genuinely philosophical or dialectic process, as [111] conceived by Plato, leave us, is well illustrated by the peculiar treatment of Justice, its proper definition or idea, in The Republic. Justice (or Righteousness, as we say, more largely) under the light of a comprehensive experience of it, carefully, diligently, adjusted to the nature of man on the one hand, of society on the other, becomes in the fourth book of The Republic, to ta hautou prattein+--to ta hautou prattein.+ There, then, is the eternal outline of Righteousness or Justice as it really is, equally clear and indefectible at every point; a definition of it which can by no supposition become a definition of anything else; impenetrable, not to be traversed, by any possible definition of Injustice; securing an essential value to its possessor, independently of all falsities of appearance; and leaving justice, as it really is in itself, unaffected even by phenomena so misrepresentative of it as to deceive the very gods, or many good men, as happened pre-eminently in the case of Socrates.

[112] Here then is the reply of the Platonic Socrates to the challenge that he should prove himself master of a more certain philosophy than that of the people, as represented by the old gnomic poet Simonides, "whom it is hard to disbelieve," (sophos gar kai theios anêr)+ on the one hand; than that of the Sophists on the other, as represented by Thrasymachus. "Show us not only that justice is a better thing than Injustice; but, by doing what (alla ti poiousa)+ to the soul of its possessor, each of them respectively, in and by itself (hautê di' hautên)+ even if men and gods alike mistake it for its contrary, is still the one a good thing, the other a bad one."

But note for a few moments the precise treatment of the idea of Justice in the first book of The Republic. Sophistry and common sense are trying their best to apprehend, to cover or occupy, a certain space, as the exact area of Justice. And what happens with each proposed definition in turn is, that it becomes, under conceivable circumstances, a definition of Injustice: not that, in practice, a confusion between the two is therefore likely; but that the intellect remains unsatisfied of the theoretic validity of the distinction.

Now that intellectual situation illustrates the sense in which sophistry is a reproduction of the Heraclitean flux. The old Heraclitean physical theory presents itself as a natural basis for the moral, the social, dissolution, which the sophistical [113] movement promotes. But what a contrast to it, in the treatment of Justice, of the question, What Justice is? in that introductory book of The Republic. The first book forms in truth an eristic, a destructive or negative, Dialogue (such as we have other examples of) in which the whole business might have concluded, prematurely, with an exposure of the inadequacy, alike of common-sense as represented by Simonides, and of a sophisticated philosophy as represented by Thrasymachus, to define Justice. Note, however, in what way, precisely. That it is Just, for instance, to restore what one owes (to ta opheilomena apodidonai)+ might pass well enough for a general guide to right conduct; and the sophistical judgment that Justice is "The interest of the stronger" is not more untrue than the contrary paradox that "Justice is a plot of the weak against the strong."

It is, then, in regard to the claims of Justice, not so much on practice, as on the intellect, in its demand for a clear theory of practice, that those definitions fail. They are failures because they fail to distinguish absolutely, ideally, as towards the intellect, what is, from what is not. To Plato, for whom, constitutionally, and ex hypothesi, what can be clearly thought is the precise measure of what really is, if such a thought about Justice--absolutely inclusive and exclusive--is, after all our efforts, not to be ascertained, this can only be, because Justice is not [114] a real thing, but only an empty or confused name.

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