7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

I. THE THEORY OF IDEAS

[150] PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies--a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] from his old Eleatic teachers, which reduce "the Many to the One."

What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and species, class-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their relationship to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic. Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pass out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains it:-- that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question; and Plato is the father of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory; but rises, again and again, at least in a particular class of minds, quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist:--See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here (giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common [152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our individual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to assist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, "an intellectual world," as Plato calls it, a true noêtos topos +. So much for the modern view; for what common sense might now suggest as to the nature of logical "universals."

Plato's realism however--what is called "The Theory of Ideas"--his way of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say about "the Many and the One," is often very difficult; though of various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds. From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in "universal definitions," or ideas, only a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of what is essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him, Plato passes by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct as we read him, to what may be rightly called a "transcendental," what to many minds has [153] seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, homoion homoiô +, like to like--these persons constituting together that common, eternal, intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really knows, is in communion or correspondence. And here certainly is a theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the difficulties are many.

Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers, which from age to age preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness for some in the days of Plato.--

     Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is,
     that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely,
     embodied in one general term) which--hypo logôn +--under the
     influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language,
     become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to
     everything of which existence is asserted from time to time.
     This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun;
     but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and
     ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us.  And
     whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is
     delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy;
     he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in
     motion-- kinei + --every definition [154] --logos+--every
     conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and
     firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other
     and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari-
     ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and
     then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he
     becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular,
     till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first,
     and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him,
     older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither
     father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely
     even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would
     hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter.
     Philebus, 15.+

The Platonic doctrine of "the Many and the One"--the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato--is not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about "the Many and the One."

Contents