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attain any of the objects of knowledge-forms in its gradual developement, the framework of the whole. Hence the dialogue begins with showing that the Protagorean denial of a general standard of knowledge, and the Heracleitic theory of the flux of all things, and of Becoming alone remaining to the exclusion of all Being, as well as the principle here tried throughout, which sets up Perception, and Perception alone, for knowledge, do all refer to one another, and form one system. Socrates shows this while he supports the principles himself, and mutually upholds them by means of each other better than their authors had done, who in part, perhaps, less perfectly understood themselves, and the connection of their thoughts. And it is not before the Platonic Socrates has thus armed the theory of Protagoras against his own preliminary objections, as well as the nature of the subject admitted of, and exhibited it in a different and more connected form, that the dialogue proceeds to grapple seriously with those theories, and to show that the whole system, in so far as it affects to be knowledge and matter of instruction, falls to pieces of itself, and can never attain its object. Thus, first of all, the theory of Protagoras is attacked on two sides, which the dialogue itself, in order to prevent any misunderstanding, pronounces victorious. First, upon the side of the contradiction involved in the proposition which makes opinion the arbiter of knowledge. For, as long as other men place a knowledge still above opinion, that proposition destroys itself, inasmuch as the number of those to whom a thing appears true, is now the measure of certainty, and the predominant opinion, by the supposition, maintains itself against the value of opinion. Then it is shown that although

it may hold for the time being, that what appears to every one, is, as regards him, yet that it cannot hold for the useful, or for any thing which concerns the future*. Now should any one discover in this conclusion a contradiction to the way in which Plato has already considered the future elsewhere, when he showed that the knowledge of the future is not a particular knowledge, but that only he who is cognizant of the present can possibly be in a condition to judge of the future, he would nevertheless be mistaken. For, in the first place, Plato here places himself at the point of view of those to whom the future is a particular, and then the whole series of conclusions to which Plato intends, cannot still be drawn without taking the antecedent into consideration. Because, for instance, only what the physician thinks about the future fever is the truth; so also, by consequence, only what the physician thinks of the present state of health is the truth, and therefore the knowledge of it is distinct from mere perception. A consequence which Plato himself would have drawn somewhat more definitely, had he not been carried onwards by a press of accumulating investigations and applications, all of which were intended for this dialogue, as indeed he leaves throughout many conclusions in it to be drawn by the reader himself.

Next, and in a manner resembling this, the theory also of Heraclitus which had been already contained in the exposition of that of Protagoras, is attacked inde

*See Theætet. p. 178. A.

Ἔτι τοίνον ἐνθένδε ἂν μᾶλλον πᾶς τις ομολογήσειε ταὐτὰ ταῦτα, εἰ περὶ παντός τις τοῦ εἴδους ἐρωτῴη, ἐν ᾧ καὶ τὸ ὠφέλιμον τυγχάνει ὄν. ἔστι δέ που καὶ περὶ τὸν μέλλοντα χρόνον, ὅταν γὰρ νομοθετώμεθα, &c.

pendently, and upon such grounds that it is shown, that, according to this theory, strictly taken, neither a predicate could be found and adapted to a subject, nor a subject to a predicate, because even during the finding and the fitting, every thing ceases to be what it was, and thus, whatever resembles a knowledge or an enunciation is destroyed*. Hence an immediate though suppressed consequence brings us very close to the conclusion which Plato had in view, which is, that the subject of these untenable fluent operations is itself an untenable fluent, in which sense, as regards the immediate alterations of the body, Plato had already admitted the existence of simple and undeceiving perception. After this, lastly, the expression of the same idea, attributed immediately to Theaetetus, is especially contradicted, and now we have notices pointing chiefly to that, whereby and wherein true knowledge is alone to be discovered; for Socrates shows how perception itself, properly considered, points to operations in nature and origin entirely separate from it, and how, provided only we begin with securing the notion of being, it thus becomes at once manifest, that perception on no possible supposition can attain to being, and that truth therefore must necessarily be sought beyond and without its range.

Thus, then, the dialogue is advanced as far in reference to the theories hitherto tested as is possible under the conditions of the indirect process adopted, and now takes another turn in order to consider more closely

*P. 182. D.

Εἴπερ ἀεὶ λέγοντος ὑπεξέρχεται, ἅτε δὴ ῥέον.—Τὸ δ', ως ἔοικεν, ἐφάνη, εἰ πάντα κινεῖται, πᾶσα ἀπόκρισις, περὶ ὅτου ἄν τις ἀποκρίνηται, ὁμοίως ὀρθὴ εἶναι, οὕτω τ ̓ ἔχειν φάναι καὶ μὴ οὕτως, εἰ δὲ βούλει, γίγνεσθαι, ἵνα μη στήσωμεν αὐτοὺς τῷ λόγῳ.

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the discovery last made. In such a manner, however, that here also all that necessarily belongs to the indirect exposition is abstracted from ideas, and even being and the discovery made of the immediate activity of the mind are brought back into the sphere of the senses, and into that of the individual and particular; for it is only in this sense that conception (doča) is always spoken of in what follows. For with reference to the inquiry into the nature of knowledge, a new principle is set up affirming that it is right conception, and it is examined whether knowledge can lie within this more narrowly limited sphere. This investigation produces first of all, a laborious attempt to define the sphere of false conception, and from this, and simultaneously with it, that of true knowledge; an attempt which Socrates declares at the end of it to be unsatisfactory, because false conception at last must still rest upon an incomprehensible mistaking of knowledge, whence he concludes that the latter must be found before the former. Hence too, there grows a very important consequence, though as before, not expressly drawn, that it is impossible that pure knowledge should lie within the same sphere as error, and that truth or falsehood cannot be predicated of the former, but only possession or non-possession. After this attempt then, that principle is itself very shortly dispatched by the distinction set up and generally recognised, and which, by means of the example chosen, again refers to the practical and the Gorgias-the distinction between true conception to be mediately attained, and knowledge at all times and in all things immediate.

This, again, paves the way to the last attempt here made to grasp the nature of knowledge, starting with

the assumption, that it is right* conception combined with reasonable explanation. And here again by far the largest space is occupied by an accurately considered, though only incidental, investigation as to an assumed opposition, not however tenable throughout, in the relations of the simple and compound to knowledge in the sense assumed; and then again the principle itself is very soon dispatched according to the two significations given of reasonable explanation, which Plato especially distinguishes, inasmuch as the refutation of the last is also good at the same time for the first.

Wonderfully ingenious, when we consider these particular grand divisions one with another, is the uniformity of execution in the structure of the whole and of the particular parts. To begin with what comes last: how limited in comparison with the beginning appears at the end the sphere within which knowledge is still sought, though not found; and how near at last is what proceeds merely from sensuous impression, independent of ideas, brought to a deceptive similarity with knowledge, though it can never exalt itself to a level with it. It may be said that these three transitions from mere perception, as it is here represented, to right conception generally, and from this to such conception as is full and clear enough to furnish a reasonable explanation, give us a graduated scale for the simplest, and so to speak, the rudest up to the most refined view of common consciousness, so that it is rejected with all its pretensions to knowledge, and a question is at last started which manifestly points to the necessity of an opposite principle, but

* P. 201. D.

Τὴν μὲν μετὰ λόγου ἀληθῆ δόξαν ἐπιστήμην εἶναι, τὴν δὲ ἄλογον ἐκτὸς ἐπιστήμης· καὶ ὧν μὲν μή ἐστι λόγος, οὐκ ἐπιστητὰ εἶναι, οὐτωσὶ καὶ ὀνομάζων, ἃ δ ̓ ἔχει, ἐπιστητά.

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