Sivut kuvina
PDF
ePub

abundant occasion for expression of sentiments of this kind. For in the Apology Socrates represents his own disfavour as having commenced with the calumnies of Aristophanes, and similar false reports respecting the tendency of his exertions; and thus Plato also experienced something of the same kind soon enough. Let but the reader recollect how in the Ecclesiazusæ of Aristophanes, the representation of which is usually pût as early as the ninety-seventh Olympiad, the political views and new doctrines of Plato were exposed, and he will have no difficulty in conceiving how easily Plato may have apprehended a similar result. Hence, then, in order at the same time to justify to his friends and relations implicated in the concerns of public life-those friends who perhaps had hoped that his travels would have recalled him from abstract thought and brought him nearer to the world-thoroughly, I say, to justify to them his persevering withdrawal from the government of a state, in his own opinion, corrupt, as well as his own disadvantageous judgment upon the forms of it, and to show the necessity of being allowed to philosophize freely upon the art of politics; hence come those very strong expressions, outbidding anything in the Protagoras, against the most celebrated Athenian statesman of all time, with a slight reservation in favour of the living, as if they were less guilty; hence the way in which he puts into the mouth of Callicles the imputation of Laconism against himself, in order to show that what is so called arises at once quite naturally and spontaneously from the most simple and every-day experience.

Nay, even what he says cursorily upon the subject of poetry, may, in its more accurate application, be

connected with the same circumstances. Much of the natural hatred and spite of bad persons in the possession of power towards wiser men seems brought out exactly in the form in which it is, in order to touch, with a slight justification and correction, upon what had occurred to Plato during his first stay in Sicily with the elder Dionysius. And this again leads almost to the supposition, that the example also of Archelaus, if we are not to imagine that that monarch had not already at so early a period Socraticians about his person, and proceeded with them in a similar way, was chosen with the same referential purpose, in order to show most strongly how impossible it was, that Plato, as had perhaps begun even at that time to be the opinion of some, should have sought the friendship of an unjust and oppressive despot. These however are the only traces, slight ones certainly, of the time at which the dialogue was composed; and we could indeed place but little reliance upon them, did they not coincide so admirably with the position which must be assigned to it, between and after others, the period of which may be more decisively fixed. According to this it would be right to consider it as the first or second work after Plato's return from his first journey, as soon, that is, as his school had become so firmly established, and so widely extended as to induce Aristophanes to give a comic representation of it. For unless all accounts of this journey are false, Plato can scarcely have formed, previous to it, a particular school of his own.

There is one objection however to this date, which might certainly be brought by an ingenious person, and which I will not suppress. We know of a philosophical work of Gorgias, and the question may very

fairly be started, how Plato could have made Gorgias the principal person in a dialogue without uttering a syllable about this work, or noticing it by a single allusion. Put the dialogue into the period at which the process against Socrates was still going on, and we then have a very easy justification, in the supposition that at that time Plato had not yet become acquainted with it; but this supposition will not hold after his return from his travels, as he must unquestionably have made acquaintance with this work in Sicily. In this case, there are but two hypotheses from which to choose: either Plato, contrary to his usual custom in this particular, has kept so accurately to the time in which he places the dialogue, that he does not mention this work because at that period it was not yet known at Athens, and this may certainly be conceived, if as Olympiodorus says, it was written in the eighty-fourth Olympiad ; or Plato did not consider this work deserving of particular notice, not so much by reason of its sophistical tendency, as, much more probably, its utterly rhetorical style; and thus he only comprehends it generally under the description of the corrupting art of counterfeit, and makes Gorgias say, probably not without a meaning, that he does not pretend to be anything but an orator.

[blocks in formation]

IF the reader looks only to the difficulties which surround this dialogue considered in itself, and as it is usually understood, and to the sophistries of which it is accused by those who are uninitiated into the connection, he may perhaps wish for a fuller introduction to the understanding of it than he will here meet with. But much becomes at once clear from the place we assign to the Theætetus, and from immediate reference to what was said on the Gorgias. For when it is remembered what was there stated to be the common object of the two dialogues, and how the Gorgias is intended to pursue that object more on the practical side, the Theætetus more on the theoretical, the perplexity must at once become considerably less intricate, and some notion will be given of the real subject of the dialogue, in which, otherwise, at first sight, every thing seems to cancel the rest, and notwithstanding that knowledge is the subject of the argument, nothing apparently remains but ignorance; so that this hitherto sealed work will be explained at the same time that the correctness of that connection, and of the general view taken of the whole, receive additional confirmation. For according to that view, the main object of the Theatetus must be to show, that no science can be found unless we completely separate Truth and Being from the Perceived and Perceptible or Apparent. Only that in this dialogue, as the sciences generally were not so strictly separated and individually defined as the arts, Plato himself having been almost the first to attempt this, the dis

cussion does not here enter upon the whole system of the sciences, as in the Gorgias on that of the arts, but treats of their common element, or of knowledge in the strictest sense of the word. And not only this, but it was a principle of Plato, as well as his object to show, that both investigations are in their nature counterparts of one another, that the search for the good in pleasure, and that for pure knowledge in the sensuous perception, are grounded upon one and the same mode of thought, that, namely, which the Gorgias exhibits more at full. Therefore it is shown betimes, and no one will wonder how this subject came to be here introduced, what influence the doctrine tried must have upon the ideas of the good and beautiful, and upon the method of considering them -it is shown that in the mind of the follower of it, knowledge itself can only refer to pleasure, and that, as he who seeks only pleasure ends in the annihilation of all community of sentiment with others, contradictory even to the inward feelings themselves, so also he who, instead of knowledge, is content with sensuous impressions, can find no community either of men with one another, nor of men with God, but remains confined and isolated within the narrow limits of his own personal consciousness.

These allusions however to the connection between the theoretical and the practical, and consequently between the Theætetus and Gorgias, are found scattered in almost all parts of the dialogue. But the exposition of the theory, that knowledge ought not to be sought in the province of the senses-that, as the only source of pleasure is in the transition from one opposite to the other, so also perception is inconstant, and that whoever thinks to confine knowledge within its province, can never

« EdellinenJatka »