Phaedrus
lies'? Is not pleading 'an art of speaking unconnected with the truth'?
There is another text of Socrates which must not be forgotten in
relation to this subject. In the endless maze of English law is there
any 'dividing the whole into parts or reuniting the parts into a
whole'--any semblance of an organized being 'having hands and feet and
other members'? Instead of a system there is the Chaos of Anaxagoras
(omou panta chremata) and no Mind or Order. Then again in the noble
art of politics, who thinks of first principles and of true ideas?
We avowedly follow not the truth but the will of the many (compare
Republic). Is not legislation too a sort of literary effort, and might
not statesmanship be described as the 'art of enchanting' the house?
While there are some politicians who have no knowledge of the truth, but
only of what is likely to be approved by 'the many who sit in judgment,'
there are others who can give no form to their ideal, neither having
learned 'the art of persuasion,' nor having any insight into the
'characters of men.' Once more, has not medical science become a
professional routine, which many 'practise without being able to say
who were their instructors'--the application of a few drugs taken from
a book instead of a life-long study of the natures and constitutions of
human beings? Do we see as clearly as Hippocrates 'that the nature of
the body can only be understood as a whole'? (Compare Charm.) And are
not they held to be the wisest physicians who have the greatest distrust
of their art? What would Socrates think of our newspapers, of our
theology? Perhaps he would be afraid to speak of them;--the one vox
populi, the other vox Dei, he might hesitate to attack them; or he might
trace a fanciful connexion between them, and ask doubtfully, whether
they are not equally inspired? He would remark that we are always
searching for a belief and deploring our unbelief, seeming to prefer
popular opinions unverified and contradictory to unpopular truths which
are assured to us by the most certain proofs: that our preachers are
in the habit of praising God 'without regard to truth and falsehood,
attributing to Him every species of greatness and glory, saying that He
is all this and the cause of all that, in order that we may exhibit Him
as the fairest and best of all' (Symp.) without any consideration of
His real nature and character or of the laws by which He governs the
world--seeking for a 'private judgment' and not for the truth or 'God's
judgment.' What would he say of the Church, which we praise in like
manner, 'meaning ourselves,' without regard to history or experience?
Might he not ask, whether we 'care more for the truth of religion, or
for the speaker and the country from which the truth comes'? or, whether
the 'select wise' are not 'the many' after all? (Symp.) So we may fill
up the sketch of Socrates, lest, as Phaedrus says, the argument should
be too 'abstract and barren of illustrations.' (Compare Symp., Apol.,
Euthyphro.)
He next proceeds with enthusiasm to define the royal art of dialectic as
the power of dividing a whole into parts, and of uniting the parts in a
whole, and which may also be regarded (compare Soph.) as the process of
the mind talking with herself. The latter view has probably led Plato
to the paradox that speech is superior to writing, in which he may seem
also to be doing an injustice to himself. For the two cannot be fairly
compared in the manner which Plato suggests. The contrast of the living
and dead word, and the example of Socrates, which he has represented
in the form of the Dialogue, seem to have misled him. For speech and
writing have really different functions; the one is more transitory,
more diffuse, more elastic and capable of adaptation to moods and times;
the other is more permanent, more concentrated, and is uttered not to
this or that person or audience, but to all the world. In the Politicus
the paradox is carried further; the mind or will of the king is
preferred to the written law; he is supposed to be the Law personified,
the ideal made Life.
Yet in both these statements there is also contained a truth; they may
be compared with one another, and also with the other famous paradox,
that 'knowledge cannot be taught.' Socrates means to say, that what is
truly written is written in the soul, just as what is truly taught grows
up in the soul from within and is not forced upon it from without. When
planted in a congenial soil the little seed becomes a tree, and 'the
birds of the air build their nests in the branches.' There is an echo
of this in the prayer at the end of the Dialogue, 'Give me beauty in
the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.' We may
further compare the words of St. Paul, 'Written not on tables of stone,
but on fleshly tables of the heart;' and again, 'Ye are my epistles
known and read of all men.' There may be a use in writing as a
preservative against the forgetfulness of old age, but to live is higher
far, to be ourselves the book, or the epistle, the truth embodied in a
person, the Word made flesh. Something like this we may believe to have
passed before Plato's mind when he affirmed that speech was superior to
writing. So in other ages, weary of literature and criticism, of making
many books, of writing articles in reviews, some have desired to live
more closely in communion with their fellow-men, to speak heart to
heart, to speak and act only, and not to write, following the example of
Socrates and of Christ...
Some other touches of inimitable grace and art and of the deepest wisdom
may be also noted; such as the prayer or 'collect' which has just been
cited, 'Give me beauty,' etc.; or 'the great name which belongs to God
alone;' or 'the saying of wiser men than ourselves that a man of sense
should try to please not his fellow-servants, but his good and noble
masters,' like St. Paul again; or the description of the 'heavenly
originals'...
The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the
ages of Lysias and Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.
Lysias was born in the year 458; Isocrates in the year 436, about seven
years before the birth of Plato. The first of the two great rhetoricians
is described as in the zenith of his fame; the second is still young and
full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have been written in
the youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus
we should have to assign the Dialogue to a year not later than 406,
when Isocrates was thirty and Plato twenty-three years of age, and while
Socrates himself was still alive.
Those who argue in this way seem not to reflect how easily Plato
can 'invent Egyptians or anything else,' and how careless he is of
historical truth or probability. Who would suspect that the wise
Critias, the virtuous Charmides, had ended their lives among the
thirty tyrants? Who would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed
by Socrates, is the son of his old friend Cephalus? Or that Isocrates
himself is the enemy of Plato and his school? No arguments can be drawn
from the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the characters of
Plato. (Else, perhaps, it might be further argued that, judging from
their extant remains, insipid rhetoric is far more characteristic of
Isocrates than of Lysias.) But Plato makes use of names which have
often hardly any connection with the historical characters to whom they
belong. In this instance the comparative favour shown to Isocrates may
possibly be accounted for by the circumstance of his belonging to the
aristocratical, as Lysias to the democratical party.
Few persons will be inclined to suppose, in the superficial manner
of some ancient critics, that a dialogue which treats of love must
necessarily have been written in youth. As little weight can be attached
to the argument that Plato must have visited Egypt before he wrote the
story of Theuth and Thamus. For there is no real proof that he ever went
to Egypt; and even if he did, he might have known or invented Egyptian
traditions before he went there. The late date of the Phaedrus will have
to be established by other arguments than these: the maturity of the
thought, the perfection of the style, the insight, the relation to the
other Platonic Dialogues, seem to contradict the notion that it could
have been the work of a youth of twenty or twenty-three years of age.
The cosmological notion of the mind as the primum mobile, and the
admission of impulse into the immortal nature, also afford grounds for
assigning a later date. (Compare Tim., Soph., Laws.) Add to this that
the picture of Socrates, though in some lesser particulars,--e.g. his
going without sandals, his habit of remaining within the walls,
his emphatic declaration that his study is human nature,--an exact
resemblance, is in the main the Platonic and not the real Socrates. Can
we suppose 'the young man to have told such lies' about his master
while he was still alive? Moreover, when two Dialogues are so closely
connected as the Phaedrus and Symposium, there is great improbability in
supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the
other. The conclusion seems to be, that the Dialogue was written at
some comparatively late but unknown period of Plato's life, after he had
deserted the purely Socratic point of view, but before he had entered
on the more abstract speculations of the Sophist or the Philebus. Taking
into account the divisions of the soul, the doctrine of transmigration,
the contemplative nature of the philosophic life, and the character
of the style, we shall not be far wrong in placing the Phaedrus in the
neighbourhood of the Republic; remarking only that allowance must be
made for the poetical element in the Phaedrus, which, while falling
short of the Republic in definite philosophic results, seems to have
glimpses of a truth beyond.
Two short passages, which are unconnected with the main subject of the
Dialogue, may seem to merit a more particular notice: (1) the locus
classicus about mythology; (2) the tale of the grasshoppers.
The first passage is remarkable as showing that Plato was entirely
free from what may be termed the Euhemerism of his age. For there were
Euhemerists in Hellas long before Euhemerus. Early philosophers, like
Anaxagoras and Metrodorus, had found in Homer and mythology hidden
meanings. Plato, with a truer instinct, rejects these attractive
interpretations; he regards the inventor of them as 'unfortunate;' and
they draw a man off from the knowledge of himself. There is a latent
criticism, and also a poetical sense in Plato, which enable him to
discard them, and yet in another way to make use of poetry and mythology
as a vehicle of thought and feeling. What would he have said of the
discovery of Christian doctrines in these old Greek legends? While
acknowledging that such interpretations are 'very nice,' would he not
have remarked that they are found in all sacred literatures? They cannot
be tested by any criterion of truth, or used to establish any truth;
they add nothing to the sum of human knowledge; they are--what we
please, and if employed as 'peacemakers' between the new and old are
liable to serious misconstruction, as he elsewhere remarks (Republic).
And therefore he would have 'bid Farewell to them; the study of them
would take up too much of his time; and he has not as yet learned the
true nature of religion.' The 'sophistical' interest of Phaedrus, the
little touch about the two versions of the story, the ironical manner in
which these explanations are set aside--'the common opinion about them
is enough for me'--the allusion to the serpent Typho may be noted in
passing; also the general agreement between the tone of this speech and