Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/863

SOCRATES. not his purpose to develope the Socratic doctrine, and as he was not capable of penetrating into the peculiarity of a philosophic mode of thinking. But for that very reason his representation, with all its fidelity, is not adapted to give us a sufficient picture of the man whom all antiquity regarded as the originator of a new era in philosophy, and whose life each of his disciples, especially Plato the most distinguished of them, regarded as a model. Moreover it was the object of Xenophon, by way of defence against the accusers of Socrates, merely to paint him as the morally spotless, pious, upright, temperate, clear-sighted, unjustly con- demned man, not as the founder of new philoso- phical inquiry. It may easily be understood there- fore that there were various opinions in antiquity as to whether the more satisfactory picture of Socrates was to be found in Plato, in Xenophon, or in Aeschines. Since the time of Brucker how- ever it had become usual to go back to Xenophon, to the exclusion of the other authorities, as the source of the only authentic delineation of the personal characteristics and philosophy of Socrates, or to fill up the gaps left by him by means of the accounts of Plato (Meiners, Geschichte der Wissen- schctften^ ii. p. 420, &c.), till Schleiermacher started the inquiry, " What can Socrates have been, be- sides what Xenophon tells us of him, without con- tradicting that authority, and what must he have been, to have justified Plato in bringing him for- ward as he does in his dialogues ? " ( Ueber den Werth des Sokrates als Philosopher, in the Ab- handlungen der Berliner Akademie, iii. p. 50, &c., 1818, reprinted in Schleiermacher's Werke, vol. iii. pt. 2, p. 293, &c. ; translated in the Phi- lological Museum, vol. ii, p. 538, &c.) Dissen, too, had already pointed out some not inconsiderable contradictions in the doctrines of the Xenophontic Socrates {de Philosophia morali in Xenophoniis de Socrate Commentariis tradita, Gotting. 1812; re- printed in Dissen's Kleine Schrijlen, p. 87, &c.). Now we know indeed that Socrates, the teacher of human wisdom, who, without concerning him- self with the investigation of the secrets of nature, wished to bring philosophy back from heaven to earth (Cic. Acad. i. 4, Tusc. v. 4 ; comp. Aristot. Metaph. i. 6, de Part Anim. i. p, 642. 28), was far from intending to introduce a regularly or- ganised system of philosophy ; but that he made no endeavours to go back to the ultimate founda- tions of his doctrine, or that that doctrine was vacil- lating and not without contradictions, as Wiggers (in his Life of Socrates, p. 184, &c.) and others assume, we cannot possibly regard as a well founded view, unless his almost unexampled in- fluence upon the most distinguished men of his time is to become an inexplicable riddle, and the conviction of a Plato, a Eucleides, and others, that they were indebted to him for the fruits of their own investigations, is to be regarded as a mere illusion. Now we fully admit that in the repre- sentation of the personal character of Socrates Plato and Xenophon coincide (see Ed. Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen, o.i. p. 16, &c.); and further, that Socrates adjusted his treatment of the subject of his conversation according as those with wiiom he had to do entertained such or such views, were more or less endowed, and had made more or less progress ; and therefore did not al- wavs say the same on the same subject {Xenophon, by F, DelbrUck, Bonn, 1829. pp. 64, &c. 132, &c.). SOCRATES. 861 But, on the other hand, in Xenophon we miss every thing like a penetrating comprehension of the fundamental ideas of the Socratic doctrine to which he himself makes reference. The repre- sentations of Plato and Xenophon however may be very well harmonised with each other, partly by the assumption that Socrates, as the originator of a new era of philosophical development, must have made the first steps in that which was its distinctive direction, and the immediate mani- festation of which consisted in bringing into more distinct and prominent relief the idea and form of scientific knowledge (see Schleiermacher in the above quoted treatise) ; partly by the careful em- ployment of the remarks made by Aristotle re- specting the Socratic doctrine and the points of distinction between it and that of Plato (Ch. A. Brandis, in the above-mentioned treatise ; comp. Geschichte der griecMsch-romischen Philosophie, ii. 1. p. 20, &c.). These remarks, though not nume- rous, are decisive on account of their acuteness and precision, as well as by their referring to the most important points in the philosophy of So- crates. III. The philosophy of the Greeks before So- crates had sought first (among the lonians) after the inherent foundation of generated existence and changing phenomena, and then (among the Eleatics) after the idea of absolute existence. Afterwards, when the ideas of being and coming into being had come into hostile opposition to each other, it had made trial of various insufficient modes of reconciling them ; and lastly, raising the inquiry after the absolutely true and certain in our knowledge, had arrived at the assumption that numbers and their relations are not only the abso- lutely true UTid certain, but the foundation of things. Its efforts, which had been pervaded by a pure appreciation of truth, were then exposed to the attacks of a sophistical system, which con- cerned itself only about securing an appearance of knowledge, and which in the first instance indeed applied itself to the diametricallj'- opposite theories of eternal, perpetual coming into ewistence, and of unchangeable, absolutely simple and single existejice, but soon directed its most dangerous weapons against the ethico-religious consciousness, which in the last ten years before the Pelopon- nesian war had already been so much shaken. Whoever intended to oppose that sophistical sys- tem with any success would have, at the same time, at least to lay the foundation for a removal of the contradictions, which, having been left by the earlier philosophy without any tenable mode of reconciling them, had been employed by the sophists with so much skill for their own purposes. In order to establish, in confutation of the sophists, that the human mind sees itself com- pelled to press on to truth and certainty, not only in the general but also in reference to the rules and laws of our actions, and is capable of doing so, it was necessarj' first of all that to the inquiries pre- viously dealt with there should be added a new- one, that after knowledge, as such. It was a new inquiry, inasnmch as previously the mind, being entirely directed towards the objective universe, had regarded knowledge respecting it as a neces- sary reflection of it, without paying any closer regard to that element of knowledge which is essentially subjective. Even the Pythagoreans, who came the neai-est to that inquirv, had per- 3 I 2