Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/415

PLATO. Th. H. Martin, Etudes sur le Timie de Plaion, I Paris, 1841.) With the physiology of Plato his doctrine of the Soul is closely connected. Endowed with the same nature as the soul of the world, the human soul is that which is spontaneously active and un- approachable by death, although in its connection with the body bound up with the appetitive, the sensuous ; and the ^u/ms, that which is of the na- ture of affection or eager impulse, the ground of courage and fear, love and hope, designed, while subordinating itself to the reason, to restrain sen- suality, must be regarded as the link between the rational and the sensuous. (7«»i. p. 69, d. 71, b.,rfe Bep. iv. p. 435, &c. ix. p. 57 1 .) Another link of con- nection between the intellectual and sensuous nature of the soul is referred to Love^ which, separated from concupiscent desire, is conceived of as an in- spiration that transcends mere mediate intellection, whose purpose is to realise a perpetual striving after the immortal, the eternal ; — to realise, in a word, by a close connection with others, the Good in the form of the Beautiful. In the Phaedrus Plato speaks of love under the veil of a myth ; in the Lysis he commences the logical definition of it ; and in the Symposium, one of the most artistic and attractive of his dialogues, he analyses the different momenta Avhich are necessary to the complete de- termination of the idea. In these and some of the other dialogues, however, beauty is described as the image of the ideas, penetrating the veil of phe- nomena and apprehended by the purest and bright- est exercise of sense, in relation to colours, forms, actions, and morals, as also with relation to the har- monious combination of the Manifold into perfect Unity, and distinctly separated from the Agreeable and the Useful. Art is celebrated as the power of producing a whole, inspired by an invisible arrangement ; of grouping together into one form the images of the ideas, which are everywhere scattered around. That the soul, when separated from the body, — or the pure spirit, — is immortal, and that a con- tinuance, in which power and consciousness or insight are preserved, is secured to it, Socrates, in the Phaedo of Plato, when approaching death, endeavours to convince his friends, partly by means of analogies drawn from the nature of things, partly by the refutation of the opposed hypothesis, that the soul is an harmonious union and tuning of the constituents of the body, partly by the attempt to prove the simplicity of the essential nature of the soul, its consequent indestructibility, and its rela- tion to the Eternal, or its pre-existence ; partly by the argumentation that the idea of the soul is inseparable from that of life, and that it can never be destroyed by moral evil, — the only evil to which, properly speaking, it is subjected (comp. de Rep. x. p. 609, b. &c., Fhaedr. p. 245, c). Respecting the condition of the soul after death Plato expresses himself only in myths, and his utterances respecting the Transmigration of Souls also are expressed in a mythical form. As a true disciple of Socrates, Plato devoted all the energy of his soul to ethics, which again are closely connected with politics. He paves the way for a scientific treatment of ethics by the refuta- tion of the sophistical sensualistic and hedonistic (selfish) theories, first of all in the Protagoras and the three smaller dialogues attached to it (see above), then in the Gorgias, by pointing out the PLATO. 403 contradictions in which the assertions, on the one hand that wrong actions are uglier than right ones but more useful, on the other that the only right recognised by nature is that of the stronger, are involved. In this discussion the result is de- duced, that neither happiness nor virtue can con- sist in the attempt to satisfy our unbridled and ever-increasing desires (de Bep. i.). In the Menon the Good is defined as that kind of utility which can never become injurious, and whose realisation is referred to a knowledge which is absolutely fixed and certain, — a knowledge, however, which must be viewed as something not externally com- municable, but only to be developed from the spontaneous activity of the soul. Lastly, in the Philebus, the investigation respecting pleasure and pain, which was commenced in the Gorgias, as also that on the idea of the Good, is completed ; and this twofold investigation grounded upon the prin- ciples of dialectics, and brought into relation with phys'cs. Pain is referred to the disturbance of the inward harmony, pleasure to the maintenance, or restoration of it ; and it is shown how, on the one hand, true and false, on the other, pure and mixed pleasure, are to be distinguished, while, inasmuch as it (pleasure) is always dependent on the acti- vity out of which it springs, it becomes so m.uch the truer and purer in proportion as the activity itself becomes more elevated. In this way the first sketch of a table of Goods is attained, in which the eternal nature of Measure, that is, the sum and substance of the ideas, as the highest canon, and then the different steps of the actual realisation of them in life, in a regular descending scale, are given, while it is acknowledged that the accom- panying pure (unsensuous) pleasure is also to be regarded as a good, but inferior to that on which it depends, the reason and the understanding, science and art. Now, if we consider that, ac- cording to Plato, all morality must be directed to the realisation of the ideas in the phenomenal world ; and, moreover, that these ideas in their reality and their activity, as also the knowledge respecting them, is to be referred to the Godhead, we can understand how he could designate the highest good as being an assimilation to God. {Theaet. p. 176, a., de Rep. x. 613 ; comp. Wyt- tenbach, ad Plut. de Ser. Num. Vind. p. 27.) In the Ethics of Plato the doctrine respecting virtue is attached to that of the highest good, and its development. That virtue is essentially one, and the science of the good, had been already deduced in the critical and dialectical introductory dialogues ; but it had been also presupposed and even hinted that, without detriment to its unity, different phases of it could be distinguished, and that to knowledge there must be added practice, and an earnest combating of the sensuous functions. In order to discover these different phases, Plato goes back upon his triple division of the faculties of the soul. Virtue, in other words, is fitness of the soul for the operations that are peculiar to it {de Rep. i. p. 353, d. x. p. 601, d.), and it manifests itself by means of its (the soul's) inward harmony, beauty, and health {Gorg. pp. 504, b. 506, b., Phaedo, p. 93, e., de Rep. iv. pp. 444, d. viii. 554, e.). Different phases of virtue are distinguishable so far as the soul is not pure spirit ; but just as the spirit should rule both the other elements of the soul, so also should wisdom, as the inner development of the spirit, rule the D D 2