7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade of Plato's departure [170] from the simpler realism of his master, as noted by Aristotle, towards that "intelligible world," opposed by him so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to follow him at all, and in which the "ideas" become veritable persons. To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were living persons; that, is the second stage of Plato's speculative ascent. With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision, of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas themselves became animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause, of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the central idea; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means; of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts upon them. It was to the lover dealing with physical beauty, a thing seen, yet unseen--seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self- discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen, the knowing and the known--that the nature and function of an idea, as such, would come home most clearly. [170] And then, while visible beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers will always tell you so) real with the reality of something hot or cold in one's hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato assures us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, antitypes, out of all proportion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy, left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the Perfect State. The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre- occupying the mind with all the colour and circumstance of the relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such relationships only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which things really are, only so far as they are truly known. "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is--impassioned lovers": Tou ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state--those impassioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens, the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.

[172] He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another will--this lover of the Ideas--attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that "ascent of the soul into the intelligible world," of which the ways of earthly love (ta erôtika)+ are a true parallel. His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by another, by which those "animistic" old Greeks explained natural madness. That philosophic enthusiasm, that impassioned desire for true knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ the madness to which some have declared great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied--the fourth species of mania, as Plato himself explains in the Phaedrus. To natural madness, to poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to prophecy like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to add, fourthly, the "enthusiasm of the ideas."

     The whole course of our theory hitherto (he there tells us)
     relates to that fourth form of madness; wherein, when any one,
     seeing the beauty that is here below, and having a reminiscence
     of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterôtai)+ fluttering
     upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a
     bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below, he is
     charged with unsoundness of mind.  I have told how this is the
     most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession) both
     to its possessor and to him who participates in it; how it comes
     of the noblest causes; and that the lover who has a share of
     this madness is called a lover of the beautiful.  For, as has
     been said, every soul of man, by its very nature, has seen the
     things that really are, otherwise it would not have come into
     this form of life (into a human body).  But to rise from things
     here to the recollection of those, is not an easy matter [173]
     for every soul; neither for those which then had but a brief
     view of things there; nor for such as were unlucky in their
     descent hither, so that, through the influence of certain
     associations, turning themselves to what is not right, they
     have forgotten the sacred forms which then they saw.  Few souls,
     in truth, remain, to which the gift of reminiscence adequately
     pertains.  These, when they see some likeness of things there,
     are lost in amazement, and belong no longer to themselves;
     only, they understand not the true nature of their affection,
     because they lack discernment.  Now, of Justice, and of
     Temperance, and of all those other qualities which are precious
     to souls, there is no clear light in their semblances here below;
     but, through obscure organs, with difficulty, very few, coming
     to their figures, behold the generation (genos,+ the people)
     of that which is figured.  At that moment it was possible to
     behold Beauty in its clearness, when, with the choir of the
     blessed following on, ourselves with Zeus, some with one, some
     with another, of the gods, they looked upon a blissful vision
     and view, and were made partakers in what it is meet and right
     to call the most blessed of all mysteries; the which we
     celebrated, sound and whole then, and untouched by the evil
     things that awaited us in time to come, as being admitted to
     mystic sights, whole and sound and at unity with themselves,
     in pure light gazing on them, being ourselves pure, and
     unimpressed by this we carry about now and call our body,
     imprisoned like a fish in its shell.

     Let memory be indulged thus far; for whose sake, in regret
     for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length.
     As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true
     being, among those other eternal forms; and when we came down
     hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily
     senses, gleaming with utmost brightness.  For sight comes to
     us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen
     by it.  Marvellous loves, in truth, would that (namely, Wisdom)
     have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself,
     such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision--that,
     and all those other amiable forms.  But now Beauty alone has
     had this fortune; so that it is the clearest, the most certain,
     of all things; and the most lovable.  Phaedrus, 249.+

NOTES

152. +Transliteration: noêtos topos. Pater's translation: "intellectual world." Plato, Republic 508b and 517b.

153. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Pater's translation: "like to like." Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see, for example, Parmenides 132d.

153. +Transliteration: hypo logôn. Pater's translation: "under the influence of . . . thought and language." Plato, Philebus 15d.

153. +Transliteration: kinei. Pater's translation: "sets in motion." Plato, Philebus 15e.

154. +Transliteration: logos. Pater's contextual translation: "definition." Plato, Philebus 15e.

154. +The passage begins at Philebus 15d.

161. +Transliteration: synagôgê . . . diairesis. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor's translation: "." For example, Phaedrus 266b.

162. +Transliteration: Ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "by the doing of what."

163. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater's translation: "separable." The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.

165. +Transliteration: genos. Pater's translation: "seed, generation." Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent." Plato, Phaedrus 247a. 165. +Transliteration: akêratô. Pater's translation: "unmixed with sense." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

166. +Transliteration: tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan. Pater's translation: "the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is." Plato, Phaedrus 247e.

166. See Plato, Phaedrus 247b ff.

168. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater's translation: "separable." The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.

171. +Transliteration: Tou ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous philosophous. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor's translation: "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is . . ." Plato, Republic 501d.

171. +Transliteration: erastas. See previous note.

172. +Transliteration: ta erôtika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." For one instance, see Plato, Symposium 177d.

172. +Transliteration: mania. Liddell and Scott definition: "madness, frenzy." See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 249d.

172. +Transliteration: pterôtai. E-text editor's translation: "[he] is furnished with wings." Plato, Phaedrus 249d.

173. +Transliteration: genos. Pater's translation: "seed, generation." Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

173. +This passage begins at Phaedrus 249d.

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