Timaeus — Plato
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
The laws of cofitradiction. Ixvii among which are four special ones, characteristic both of states Republic ly. and of individuals. And the state which corresponds to the analysis. single form of virtue is that which we have been describing, * wherein reason rules under one of two names — monarchy and aristocracy. Thus there are five forms in all, both of states and of souls. . . .
In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate faculties, Introduc- Plato takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of faculties. ^'°''*' And the criterion which he proposes is difference in the working of the faculties. The same faculty cannot produce contradictory effects. But the path of early reasoners is beset by thorny entanglements, and he will not proceed a step without first clearing the ground.
This leads him into a tiresome digression, which is intended to explain the nature of contradiction. First, the contradiction must be at the same time and in the same relation. Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced into either of the terms in which the contradictory proposition is expressed : for example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink.
He implies, what he does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or by the impulse of anger, a man is restrained from drinking, this proves that thirst, or desire under which thirst is included, is distinct from anger and reason. But suppose that we allow the term 'thirst' or * desire ' to be modified, and say an * angry thirst,' or a 'revengeful desire,' then the two spheres of desire and anger overlap and become confused.
This case therefore has to be excluded. And still there remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term ' good,' which is always implied in the object of desire. These are the discussions of an age before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should remember that they are necessary to the clearing up of ideas in the first development of the human faculties.
The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of the soul into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as far as we know, was first made by him, and has been retained by Aristotle and succeeding ethical writers.
The chief difficulty in this early analysis of the mind is to define exactly the place of the irascible faculty {Qvfiog), which may be variously described under the terms righteous indignation, spirit, passion. It is the foundation of courage, which includes in Plata
Ixviii Passion and desire. Republic iv. moral courage, the courage of enduring pain, and of surmounting Introduc- intellectual difficulties, as well as of meeting dangers in war. Though irrational, it inclines to side with the rational : it cannot be aroused by punishment when justly inflicted: it sometimes takes the form of an enthusiasm which sustains a man in the performance of great actions.
It is the * lion heart ' with which the reason makes a treaty (ix. 589 B). On the other hand it is negative rather than positive ; it is indignant at wrong or falsehood, but does not, like Love in the Symposium and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth or Good, It is the peremptory military spirit which prevails in the government of honour. It differs from anger {bpyr/), this latter term having no accessory notion of righteous indignation.
Although Aristotle has retained the word, yet we may observe that 'passion' {dvuog) has with him lost its affinity to the rational and has become indistinguishable from ' anger ' {opYv). And to this vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws seems to revert (ix. 836 B), though not always (v, 731 A).
By modern philosophy too, as well as in our ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion are employed almost exclusively in a bad sense ; there is no connotation of a just or reasonable cause by which they are aroused. The feeling of ' righteous indignation ' is too partial and accidental to admit of our regarding it as a separate virtue or habit.
We are tempted also to doubt whether Plato is right in supposing that an offender, however justly condemned, could be expected to acknowledge the justice of his sentence ; this is the spirit of a philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal. We may observe (p. 444 D, E) how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle's famous thesis, that 'good actions produce good habits.
The words ' as healthy practices {kTTLTTjdevfxara) produce health, so do just practices produce justice,' have a sound very like the Nicomachean Ethics. But we note also that an incidental remark in Plato has become a far-reaching principle in Aristotle, and an inseparable part of a great Ethical system. There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by * the longer way ' (435 D ; cp, iii/ra, vi.
504) : he seems to intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not be satisfied with arguing from the principle of contradiction. In the sixth and seventh books (compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given us a sketch of such a mctaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for Republic i v. the final revelation of the idea of good, he is put off with the Introducdeclaration that he has not yet studied the preliminary sciences. ^'°^" How he would have filled up the sketch, or argued about such questions from a higher point of view, we can only conjecture.
Perhaps he hoped to find some a priori method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he might have asked which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and possibly have stumbled on the Hegelian identity of the 'ego' and the 'universal. Or he may have imagined that ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous to the construction of figures and numbers in the mathematical sciences.
The most certain and necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to this he was always seeking to refer all knowledge or opinion, just as in modern times we seek to rest them on the opposite pole of induction and experience.
The aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended to pass beyond the limits of human thought and language: they seem to have reached a height at which they are * moving about in worlds unrealized,' and their conceptions, although profoundly affecting their own minds, become invisible or unintelligible to others.
We are not therefore surprized to find that Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained his doctrine of ideas; or that his school in a later generation, like his contemporaries Glaucon and Adeimantus, were unable to follow him in this region of speculation.
In the Sophist, where he is refuting the scepticism which maintained either that there was no such thing as predication, or that all might be predicated of all, he arrives at the conclusion that some ideas combine with some, but not all with all.
But he makes only one or two steps forward on this path ; he nowhere attains to any connected system of ideas, or even to a knowledge of the most elementary relations of the sciences to one another (see iiif^'o).
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.