Phaedrus — Plato

xxxil GENERAL INTRODUCTION youth has not sounded. In many cases the dialogue ends with the question at issue unsettled. In such cases one sees that Plato's purpose in that dialogue is not to set forth the truth as he sees it, but to show men in struggle for the truth. The former were the achievement of a philosopher; the latter is the achievement of a dramatist whose drama is the whole spiritual journey of mankind.

If I may borrow a figure from Pilgrim's Progress, I shall say that Plato, the Philosopher, had sight of the Celestial City ; but that Plato, the Dramatist, kept also in view the long way back to the City of Destruction.

He knew all the way stations upon that road, how many there are, how far apart, and how in one or another of them — in Vanity Fair, in the Valley of Humiliation, in the Slough of Despond, in the Arbor of the Enchanted Ground — men dance or curse or pray or lie in perilous sleep far from the Celestial City. PLATO THE LOVER. This title is not a new invention. In several ways Plato distinctly claimed it for himself.

For one thing, he called Wivas^M phtlo-sophos, lover of wisdom. This title meant two things. It meant for one thing that he would not be called sophos, wise. This was not mock humility. In one sense Plato was not humble. He was a proud man. He believed that he had found the way toward truth while most men wander blind and helpless in other ways. He believed that he had found some essential truth which the world must accept or perish for lack of. When he had these things in mind, he spoke with the dog-

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXxiii matic authority of a prophet. But just because he saw so far into the truth of things, he saw more clearly than most men ever do, that the whole truth is not to be compassed in this life, that none is Wise but God. And just because he felt so deeply the need of actual truth, to live by, now, he turned from all pretense of wisdom with instinctive hatred.

There will be nothing new in this to any one who has learned Plato from his own writings. In most dialogues, the Platonic Socrates is more genuinely docile than his antagonists or disciples.

On the day of his death, he warned those about him against letting their love of him add undue weight to his arguments, and bade them withstand him might and main, where he seemed astray .^ But the title philo-sophos meant more with Plato than a recognition that he was not like God, — wise. Above all things this title meant that he was quite literally a lover of wisdom, that his desire to be wise was a passion.

In order to prepare one's self to appreciate Plato's passion for the Absolute Good, one might read some of those passages in the Bible which express the longing of the soul for God. The Psalmist says, " As the hart panteth for the water brooks, so longeth my soul for Thee. " My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord ; my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

Moses declares that the first and greatest > A fashionable amusement of this century is to bait philosophers. It may be that philosophers as a class deserve and need this chastisement. As a rule, however, those who, professing to speak for common sense or for exact science, deride philosophical inquiry into the problems of life, will give you the solution to any such problem while standing on one leg. Such men make queer figures in presence of Socrates.

XXxiv GENERAL INTRODUCTION commandment is " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength," and to this Christ adds, "and with all thy mind/* The emotional tone of these and such passages is characteristically different from that of Plato, but his language is not less strong.

One can imagine his quoting and approving all these passages/ In the Phaedrus and Symposium, Plato represents love as a principle which ranges through many fornis from animal passion up to the purest longing for absolute truth. In all its forms it is intense, a mania, an ecstasy. In its highest form, it is holy fire in which the earthly soul is consumed and the heavenly soul is reborn. But Plato is more than philo^ophos^ lover of wisdom.

With the same intensity and for the same reason he \s phil^nthropos^ lover of men. Love, says the wise woman, Diotima, in the Symposium, is not love of the beautiful and good only.

Love is essentially love of " birth in beauty.*' ' " Some," she goes on, " beget earthly children, but some are more creative in their souls.*' " He who in youth has the seeds of temperance and justice implanted in him desires to implant them in others.*' Above all, when he finds a fair and noble and well-nourished soul, " he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man, and he tries to educate him, and they are married by a far closer tie and have closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their com- 1 As nearly as I can characterize the difference, it is this : Plato is not himself so lost in the ecstatic longing which he describes as the Psalmist seems to be.