Sophist
false. For thought is only the process of silent speech, and opinion is
only the silent assent or denial which follows this, and imagination is
only the expression of this in some form of sense. All of them are akin
to speech, and therefore, like speech, admit of true and false. And
we have discovered false opinion, which is an encouraging sign of our
probable success in the rest of the enquiry.
Then now let us return to our old division of likeness-making and
phantastic. When we were going to place the Sophist in one of them,
a doubt arose whether there could be such a thing as an appearance,
because there was no such thing as falsehood. At length falsehood
has been discovered by us to exist, and we have acknowledged that the
Sophist is to be found in the class of imitators. All art was divided
originally by us into two branches--productive and acquisitive. And
now we may divide both on a different principle into the creations or
imitations which are of human, and those which are of divine, origin.
For we must admit that the world and ourselves and the animals did not
come into existence by chance, or the spontaneous working of nature, but
by divine reason and knowledge. And there are not only divine creations
but divine imitations, such as apparitions and shadows and reflections,
which are equally the work of a divine mind. And there are human
creations and human imitations too,--there is the actual house and the
drawing of it. Nor must we forget that image-making may be an imitation
of realities or an imitation of appearances, which last has been
called by us phantastic. And this phantastic may be again divided into
imitation by the help of instruments and impersonations. And the
latter may be either dissembling or unconscious, either with or without
knowledge. A man cannot imitate you, Theaetetus, without knowing you,
but he can imitate the form of justice or virtue if he have a sentiment
or opinion about them. Not being well provided with names, the former
I will venture to call the imitation of science, and the latter the
imitation of opinion.
The latter is our present concern, for the Sophist has no claims to
science or knowledge. Now the imitator, who has only opinion, may be
either the simple imitator, who thinks that he knows, or the dissembler,
who is conscious that he does not know, but disguises his ignorance. And
the last may be either a maker of long speeches, or of shorter speeches
which compel the person conversing to contradict himself. The maker of
longer speeches is the popular orator; the maker of the shorter is
the Sophist, whose art may be traced as being the
/ contradictious
/ dissembling
/ without knowledge
/ human and not divine
/ juggling with words
/ phantastic or unreal
/ art of image-making.
...
In commenting on the dialogue in which Plato most nearly approaches the
great modern master of metaphysics there are several points which
it will be useful to consider, such as the unity of opposites, the
conception of the ideas as causes, and the relation of the Platonic and
Hegelian dialectic.
The unity of opposites was the crux of ancient thinkers in the age of
Plato: How could one thing be or become another? That substances have
attributes was implied in common language; that heat and cold, day and
night, pass into one another was a matter of experience 'on a level with
the cobbler's understanding' (Theat.). But how could philosophy explain
the connexion of ideas, how justify the passing of them into one
another? The abstractions of one, other, being, not-being, rest, motion,
individual, universal, which successive generations of philosophers had
recently discovered, seemed to be beyond the reach of human thought,
like stars shining in a distant heaven. They were the symbols of
different schools of philosophy: but in what relation did they stand to
one another and to the world of sense? It was hardly conceivable
that one could be other, or the same different. Yet without some
reconciliation of these elementary ideas thought was impossible. There
was no distinction between truth and falsehood, between the Sophist
and the philosopher. Everything could be predicated of everything,
or nothing of anything. To these difficulties Plato finds what to us
appears to be the answer of common sense--that Not-being is the relative
or other of Being, the defining and distinguishing principle, and that
some ideas combine with others, but not all with all. It is remarkable
however that he offers this obvious reply only as the result of a long
and tedious enquiry; by a great effort he is able to look down as 'from
a height' on the 'friends of the ideas' as well as on the pre-Socratic
philosophies. Yet he is merely asserting principles which no one who
could be made to understand them would deny.
The Platonic unity of differences or opposites is the beginning of the
modern view that all knowledge is of relations; it also anticipates the
doctrine of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Plato takes or
gives so much of either of these theories as was necessary or possible
in the age in which he lived. In the Sophist, as in the Cratylus, he is
opposed to the Heracleitean flux and equally to the Megarian and
Cynic denial of predication, because he regards both of them as making
knowledge impossible. He does not assert that everything is and is not,
or that the same thing can be affected in the same and in opposite ways
at the same time and in respect of the same part of itself. The law
of contradiction is as clearly laid down by him in the Republic, as by
Aristotle in his Organon. Yet he is aware that in the negative there is
also a positive element, and that oppositions may be only differences.
And in the Parmenides he deduces the many from the one and Not-being
from Being, and yet shows that the many are included in the one, and
that Not-being returns to Being.
In several of the later dialogues Plato is occupied with the connexion
of the sciences, which in the Philebus he divides into two classes of
pure and applied, adding to them there as elsewhere (Phaedr., Crat.,
Republic, States.) a superintending science of dialectic. This is the
origin of Aristotle's Architectonic, which seems, however, to have
passed into an imaginary science of essence, and no longer to retain
any relation to other branches of knowledge. Of such a science, whether
described as 'philosophia prima,' the science of ousia, logic or
metaphysics, philosophers have often dreamed. But even now the time has
not arrived when the anticipation of Plato can be realized. Though many
a thinker has framed a 'hierarchy of the sciences,' no one has as yet
found the higher science which arrays them in harmonious order,
giving to the organic and inorganic, to the physical and moral, their
respective limits, and showing how they all work together in the world
and in man.
Plato arranges in order the stages of knowledge and of existence. They
are the steps or grades by which he rises from sense and the shadows of
sense to the idea of beauty and good. Mind is in motion as well as
at rest (Soph.); and may be described as a dialectical progress which
passes from one limit or determination of thought to another and back
again to the first. This is the account of dialectic given by Plato in
the Sixth Book of the Republic, which regarded under another aspect
is the mysticism of the Symposium. He does not deny the existence of
objects of sense, but according to him they only receive their true
meaning when they are incorporated in a principle which is above them
(Republic). In modern language they might be said to come first in the
order of experience, last in the order of nature and reason. They are
assumed, as he is fond of repeating, upon the condition that they shall
give an account of themselves and that the truth of their existence
shall be hereafter proved. For philosophy must begin somewhere and may
begin anywhere,--with outward objects, with statements of opinion, with
abstract principles. But objects of sense must lead us onward to the
ideas or universals which are contained in them; the statements of
opinion must be verified; the abstract principles must be filled up and
connected with one another. In Plato we find, as we might expect, the
germs of many thoughts which have been further developed by the genius
of Spinoza and Hegel. But there is a difficulty in separating the germ
from the flower, or in drawing the line which divides ancient
from modern philosophy. Many coincidences which occur in them are
unconscious, seeming to show a natural tendency in the human mind
towards certain ideas and forms of thought. And there are many
speculations of Plato which would have passed away unheeded, and
their meaning, like that of some hieroglyphic, would have remained
undeciphered, unless two thousand years and more afterwards an
interpreter had arisen of a kindred spirit and of the same intellectual
family. For example, in the Sophist Plato begins with the abstract and
goes on to the concrete, not in the lower sense of returning to outward
objects, but to the Hegelian concrete or unity of abstractions. In the
intervening period hardly any importance would have been attached to the
question which is so full of meaning to Plato and Hegel.
They differ however in their manner of regarding the question. For Plato
is answering a difficulty; he is seeking to justify the use of common
language and of ordinary thought into which philosophy had introduced
a principle of doubt and dissolution. Whereas Hegel tries to go beyond
common thought, and to combine abstractions in a higher unity: the
ordinary mechanism of language and logic is carried by him into another
region in which all oppositions are absorbed and all contradictions
affirmed, only that they may be done away with. But Plato, unlike Hegel,
nowhere bases his system on the unity of opposites, although in the
Parmenides he shows an Hegelian subtlety in the analysis of one and
Being.
It is difficult within the compass of a few pages to give even a
faint outline of the Hegelian dialectic. No philosophy which is worth
understanding can be understood in a moment; common sense will not teach
us metaphysics any more than mathematics. If all sciences demand of us
protracted study and attention, the highest of all can hardly be matter
of immediate intuition. Neither can we appreciate a great system without
yielding a half assent to it--like flies we are caught in the spider's
web; and we can only judge of it truly when we place ourselves at a
distance from it. Of all philosophies Hegelianism is the most obscure:
and the difficulty inherent in the subject is increased by the use of
a technical language. The saying of Socrates respecting the writings of
Heracleitus--'Noble is that which I understand, and that which I do not
understand may be as noble; but the strength of a Delian diver is needed
to swim through it'--expresses the feeling with which the reader rises
from the perusal of Hegel. We may truly apply to him the words in which
Plato describes the Pre-Socratic philosophers: 'He went on his way
rather regardless of whether we understood him or not'; or, as he is
reported himself to have said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of
you who understands me, and he does NOT understand me.'
Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian
philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest
about it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology,
maintains not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by
a mere crude substitution of one word for another, but by showing
either of them to be the complement of the other. Both are creations of