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Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good, and pleasure or feeling. Therefore the principal object for the second part of Plato’s works, and their common problem, will be to show, that science and art cannot be discovered, but only a deceitful semblance of both must be ever predominant, so long as these two are exchanged with each other, being with appearance, and good with pleasure. And advances are made to the solution of this problem naturally in a twofold way; yet without holding each course entirely apart in different writings: on the one hand, namely, that which hitherto had past for science and art is laid bare in its utter worthlessness: on the other, attempts are made, from the very position of knowing and acknowledging that antithesis to develop rightly the essence of science and art and their fundamental outlines. The Gorgias stands at the head of this class, because it rather limits itself, as preparatory, to the former task, than ventures upon the latter; and starting entirely from the ethical side, attacks at both ends the confusion existing herein, fixing on its inmost spirit, as the root, and its openly displayed arrogance as the fruits. The remaining dialogues observe this general distinction, they partly go farther back in the observation of the scientific in mere seeming, partly farther forwards in the idea of true science, and partly contain other later consequences of what is here first advanced in preparation.
From this point, then, we observe a natural connection between the two main positions demonstrated to the interlocutors with Socrates in this dialogue. The first, that their pretensions to the possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant. And from the same point likewise the particular manner in which each is proved, and the arrangement of the whole, may be explained. For when it is the good that is under consideration, and the ethical object is predominant, Truth must be considered more in reference to art than science, if, that is, unity is to be preserved in the work generally. And moreover, it is art in its most general and comprehensive form that is here discussed, for the dialogue embraces every thing connected with it, from its greatest object, the state; to its least, the embellishment of sensuous existence. Only, as his custom is, Plato is most fond of using the greater form as the scheme and representation of the general, and the less, on the other hand, as an example and illustration of the greater; that no one may lose himself, contrary to Plato’s purpose, in the object of the latter, which can never be anything but a particular. For rhetoric, it is to be observed, is here used to represent the whole would-be art of politics, but still only to represent it, and on that account especially, the introduction to the Protagoras is here repeated, verbally one might almost say, in order to draw attention the more certainly, by this change in the application of the word, to the more closely drawn variation from the earlier usage of it in that dialogue and the Phædrus, and further, to what is notwithstanding here more intimated than expounded or systematised, the separation of rhetoric from sophistics, so that the former, regarded as an art under the category of the science of semblance, is to contain whatever refers to the greatest object of all art, the state, while sophistics, as is further explained elsewhere, contain the semblance of communicating with the principles themselves. For though Socrates compares rhetoric only with the administration of justice, and sophistics on the contrary with legislation, the proper sense of this indisputably is, that sophistics are to be supposed to imitate the knowledge of the first principles, from which certainly original composition and conformation proceed, and rhetoric the application of them to a given subject. The case is exactly the same, according to the ancient ideas, with gymnastics, in which outward perfection of the human body is one and the same with the principles of its preservation and production; rhetoric, on the contrary, like politics in the ordinary sense, can never be anything but a remedial art, and applies those principles to a given corruption. Here then, to discover and expose the utter superficiality of the art of speaking, Socrates has to deal with the artists themselves, Gorgias and Polus. The confusion of the pleasant with the good is shown on the other hand in Callicles, whom a similarity in disposition had made a pupil of the other two; and then in the last section in which Socrates recapitulates all that had preceded, both sets of principles are shown to originate in the same one vicious principle, and to point to the same deficiency. Still, as it is not natural to Plato to make any decisive divisions in his general plan, so neither do we here find them in particular in the different sections.
In the first, then, of these, Socrates shows to Gorgias, to whom Plato, we know not with what justice, ascribes at the outset a somewhat limited purpose in his instructions, representing that that purpose tends only to a proper conduct of political life, and in no way to the cultivation of virtue—Socrates proves to him from his own method, and that of the other rhetoricians, that justice and injustice, which nevertheless he is obliged to recognise as the objects of his art, can never be consciously contained in it, or given by it. To Polus however the nature and relations of the art of semblance are still more accurately exposed, and he is shown in particular that in the idea of the beautiful, which he still refuses to give up as unmeaning, and persists in assigning to it a province of its own, the commission of injustice proves to be worse than the sufferance of it, which leads immediately to a distinction between the good and the pleasant. Here again the comparison with the Protagoras comes very near, that we may be enabled to see the use which in his indirect investigations Plato makes of the idea of the beautiful; I mean, that he propounds it formally and hypothetically only, and, allowing it to be entered as an abstract and exclusive notion, explains dialectically its relation to other homogenous ideas as to which men are substantially agreed. In the Protagoras, now, the apparent supposition of the unity of the good and the pleasant had been made the ground-work of the argument, and there remained therefore no other instrument of distinction, but mediateness or immediateness of the pleasant and unpleasant in time, which however can constitute no such instrument, as is so multifariously explained in the Protagoras itself and the dialogues connected with it. In the dialogue with Polus the identity of the good and the pleasant is left, less definite, and only the difference between the pleasant and useful more strongly laid down, without its being decidedly assumed (what indeed had been already contradicted in previous dialogues), that this distinction would depend only upon time. Whence, as soon as the distinction between the good and the pleasant is made out, the result comes out of itself, that the idea of the useful is immediately connected with the good.
In the conversation with Callicles Socrates’ immediate purpose is chiefly to awaken the consciousness of that opposition, and to force his interlocutor to allow that the proposition, that all good is exhausted in the pleasant, has no support in internal consciousness, but that this hypothesis compels us to place yet a further good beyond the sphere of the pleasant. And the attempts which in conjunction with Callicles Socrates makes for accomplishing this end, and which, moreover, are especially remarkable on account of the admixture, the first as yet, of Italian wisdom, might fairly be allowed to constitute in themselves the most ingenious part of this work. I mean, when we further take into consideration the manner in which they fail and the necessity for this failure, which is as nicely calculated as from the whole description of Callicles’ character it is beautifully applied, and the way in which Socrates, without having neglected, as he would have been most glad to have done, the excitement of the feeling, guards against the objection of giving himself pliable opponents; and returning to his own peculiar philosophical organ of dialectics, adduces a most important exposition of the true nature of pleasure, that it is something in perpetual flux, and can only be conceived as arising in the transition from one becoming state to another. All this is in fact far too ingenious, far too fully worked out and too accurately treated to allow of our considering it as only collateral matter occasionally touched upon, and the political part alone as the peculiar object of the work.
This explanation, as soon as Callicles has admitted a distinction between the pleasant and the good, though only quite in general terms, is followed by the third section, which connects and comprehends the two preceding. In this, then, Socrates, in accordance with the ethical and preparatory nature of the work, concludes with a development resting upon the disposition of the mind, and expressing it mythically. Now if a comparison is to be instituted also between this myth and that in the Phædrus, and there is to a certain extent much resemblance between the two, in so far as even this has been celebrated as a fundamental myth, it must be remembered that the future bears exactly the same relation to the will and to art in this, as the past does to science and knowledge in that, and that in the one as well as the other Time is only an image, while the essential point consists in the consideration of mind divested of personality. And thus Plato is so far from intending to set such a value upon the mythical part as might lead us to take it historically, that he connects it with the popular mythology. Nor, moreover, does the Gorgias leave the subject of love unnoticed, but in this dialogue love is quite as much the guiding principle of the political art, as it is in the Phædrus of the cultivation of the individual; only, as we must at all events suppose, relying upon the investigations pursued in the Lysis, it has already divested itself of its mythical dress.
But we need not pursue particular comparisons of this kind; only we may observe in general that a comparison with what has preceded brings us to our second result: I mean that with reference to the proof which the form may supply, the Gorgias not only belongs to the second part, but also occupies the first place in it. For in that which constitutes the main subject of the dialogue, the mode in which the particular instance, rhetoric, that is, as an example of mere semblance in art, is combined with the more general object of the whole exposition, the endeavour to investigate upon the practical side the opposition between the eternal and the mutable, in this the Gorgias, notwithstanding all its apparent similarity with the Phædrus, bears entirely the character of the second part. For in that dialogue, where philosophising was only spoken of as an impulsive feeling, and knowledge as inward intuition, the method, as a thing external, could only serve for illustration. But now when the Parmenides has so prepared the way, that it is rather the reality of knowledge together with its objects, that are to be discussed, instead of mere method, art is set up as something formed and finished, and the connection between the arts as something external, and the investigation is pursued rather with a view of discovering whether they have an object, and what it is. Nay, if we look to the mere structure, a decided transition may be pointed out from the Phædrus through the Protagoras to the Gorgias, and from this to the Euthydemus and Sophist, in which the form of utter negation comes out most strongly.
And in like manner all these dialogues are penetrated throughout by a germ, continually growing and treated only as an indirect object, of the positive, in the indication of true science and art and the objects of them, until at last it leaves this connection with the negative and comes out alone, when at the same time the whole of the indirect treatment passes into one of an opposite form. Thus, while the Gorgias clearly proves itself to belong to this series, it is quite as manifestly the first member of it, partly on account of the similarity already mentioned to the earlier method of instruction, partly because the last-mentioned combination of the negative object with the positive is far from being so ingenious and complicated as in the subsequent dialogues, the Euthydemus for instance, and Sophist. Moreover, the subdivision of the investigation under several heads, and the apparently frequent return to the commencement of the subject, are forms which appear more often in the sequel and become most important features, to which the Lysis and the little dialogues connected with the Protagoras afford but slight approximations.
Add to this, in order to fix the place of the Gorgias still more decisively, the ingenious manner in which almost all the earlier dialogues are again taken up in it, and sometimes particular points out of them, sometimes their actual results are more or less clearly interwoven with it, and, on the other hand, the perfectly unintentional way, though the skilful reader cannot overlook it, in which the germs of the following dialogues of this series already lie folded up in this. The former point has been already touched upon in general with reference to the Phædrus and Protagoras, but might still be pursued much further, and still more numerous references might be discovered in detail. Thus from the Phædrus the objection might be especially brought against Plato by other Socraticians, that notwithstanding his apparent intention in that dialogue of correcting the method of that species of rhetoric which tends only to delude, and his depreciation of it, he still allows it to hold such a place, that a person might look upon it as an object of desirable attainment. And it is precisely for this, that in the Gorgias its only possible use, according to moral principles, and of the necessary connection between method and thought, appears in so emphatic a form, and is so multifariously repeated, in order to show how impossible it is, starting from his principles, to come to any view, with regard to this subject, different from that here projected. And in the Protagoras the description of sophistical self-complacency might easily be thought exaggerated, and the game too easy, when the writer of the dialogues attributes to his opponent such follies and absurdities. Hence in this dialogue, when Gorgias finds himself similarly circumstanced with Protagoras, he proves far more pliant and docile with regard to the turnings of the dialogue, and draws less ridicule upon himself. But, on the contrary, Plato shews afresh in Polus at all events, that there is no doubt that rhetorical undialectic sophists are incapable of accomplishing anything in that art of conducting a dialogue upon which his Socrates prides himself; a serious play with the method which, though certainly in some degree an echo from the first series, manifestly stands here in a far more subordinate relation than the similar one in the Protagoras. Thus again from the Lysis; not only is the notion of the neither good nor bad taken up as a thing granted and acknowledged, but also what we find in that smaller dialogue upon the subject of love, predominant as it is, in a confined and limited form, obtains in this, like what was said in the Phædrus upon the nature of love generally, an extended application, beyond mere personality, to the more important civil relations as well, inasmuch as with almost verbal reference to the Lysis, love for the people and love for the boy are laid down as co-ordinate. And thus too it is now for the first time clearly proved, that in the Phædrus a peculiar value was justly attributed to the doctrine, not, it must be allowed, brought forward with sufficient clearness for every one, which inculcates the necessity of a similarity in the ideal, or character, for the production of love between two minds. With this, moreover, we are to put in connection that view of Plato which supports itself against all unmeaning disputation and persuasion, that those, who pursue principles morally opposed, can entertain no deliberation with one another in common; a view which had been already enunciated verbally in the Crito, but is here palpably exemplified in the first discussion of Socrates with Callicles, and contains likewise from this point of view the defence of the indirect dialectic method for the second part of the Platonic works. Moreover, in our present dialogue, Plato makes Socrates expressly acknowledge that the principle brought forward in the Laches, that courage cannot be conceived apart from knowledge, is certainly his opinion; and, in like manner, what has been declared in the introduction to the Charmides to be the result of that dialogue with reference to discretion. I mean that Socrates agrees in the explanation, that discretion is virtue, in so far as it is to be regarded as health of the mind; this principle also here receives corroboration. So also piety appears here, exactly as it was defined in the Euthyphro, as justice towards the gods. All these are retrospective references, if not quite literal, still quite certain and decisive; and we are sure that whoever considers them comparatively, will never entertain the notion of inverting the arrangement, and take these dialogues for further enlargements upon points here as it were preliminarily noticed. And even as to the lesser Hippias, any one who would undertake to find a confirmation of it in the Gorgias, might do so by affirming that the supposition started at the end of the first section, that the just man always wills to act justly, appears to refer less to the general position already advanced elsewhere, that every one always wills the good, than to the principle that willing belongs quite as necessarily as knowing to the nature of justice in particular, and that this is exactly the natural result of the sceptical treatment of the idea of justice in the Hippias. But any one must see that this reference is far from being either as important or as certain as the others. For the principle itself, that the exercise of justice eminently implies the presence of volition, is a thing so generally recognised, that it may be assumed without any reference to a previous proof.
Again, the traces of a promise or preparation for the majority of the subsequent dialogues, appear quite as clearly as the references to earlier works which we have instanced above; partly in the design of the whole, partly in particular passages. The manner, for instance, in which, after the establishment of the essential distinction between the good and pleasant, the notion of a combination of the two is notwithstanding again entertained, points to a problem not yet solved, and which is interwoven with the subject of the Philetus, the last dialogue of this series. The manner in which the nature of the art of counterfeit is taken up, and its province divided according to the rules of dialectics, is the first breathing of what we meet with in the Sophist and Statesman so artificially and comprehensively worked out. The stress laid upon separating and divesting mind of personality, and the mode of exhibiting it mythically, is, as it were, a prophetic anticipation of the Phædo. So that we may even decide from hence, how much in this second period proceeded from the point which we have specified as the centre point of the Gorgias, and what on the contrary belongs, so to speak, to a second formation, or must be referred to the point already indicated, as contradistinguished from it. And I speak not so much of the dialogues, as of the principal factors of the dialogues; for it is precisely in this reconciliation of the two points of view, the theoretical and practical, brought about as it is, without uniting them so completely as to cancel all opposition between the two, that the still more artificial form of the subsequent dialogues consists.
Hence, even the Gorgias, strictly taken, can only be viewed as a moiety of the beginning of this second part, and it is not until we have combined it with the Theætetus that we can look upon it as constituting a complete commencement, inasmuch as the latter treats of the opposition between existence in the abstract and conception, exactly as the Gorgias does that between the good and perceptive feeling. Hence, considering the total absence of any decisive testimony whatever as to the period of composition, and moreover, that the idea of the two works must arise almost simultaneously, and they are both of considerable extent, the appearance of the Gorgias prior to that of the Theætetus cannot be immediately and at once established. On the contrary, it is only as an inference mediately drawn from a variety of particulars, and these are nothing more than manifold references to what has preceded and to what follows, the character of a general prelude, if I may be allowed so to express myself, and that analogy, according to which every new layer in the philosophy of Plato commences originally with the ethical—these are the only grounds which can justify the precedence of the Gorgias, against several particular objections which might possibly be alleged against assigning it such a position.
Whoever takes up those traces and references, and is acquainted with the manner in which it is Plato’s custom to mark such notices, will undoubtedly discover of himself more of the same kind copiously interwoven with the details of this dialogue. For other persons we may be allowed to draw attention to some of them only. For instance, with what in reference to the Phædrus and Protagoras appeared to us before in an apologetic light, still more matter connects itself in this dialogue which we can only understand as a review of particular declarations of opinion against such Platonic writings as had hitherto appeared. However, what might be said upon this point must always remain within the limits of supposition, and the best method therefore will be, only to give slight indications in the particular places and passages where such matter occurs. And, besides this, there is much that stands in such close connection with the Apology of Socrates, that it might be said that all the essential matter in that piece is here repeated, only so given as to be exalted above the immediate personal relation. And it looks almost as if the Apology of Socrates, changed as it thus is into a defence of the Socratic modes of thought and action, has rather changed than lost its personal relation, and become a defence of Plato. Least of all can this repetition lead us to agree so far with another writer as to believe that the Gorgias must have been written soon after the death of Socrates, because assuredly Plato would not have reproached the Athenians a second time with so detailed a history of that act of which they had long since repented. For when we recollect that this also applies naturally to the Phædo, we have these repetitions compressed within so. short a period as to excite a feeling of satiety relative to the subject of which they treat; a process quite in contradiction with that richness and abundance which characterizes the Platonic composition, and which, in the present case, would have no conceivable object; nor is there any sign whatever of ridicule suffered or anger felt, for no trace appears anywhere of either, that might have driven Plato to such reproaches of his fellow citizens. On the contrary, the purpose I have indicated, of justifying himself by a retrospective view of what had lately happened, for his continual political inactivity, and at the same time of showing how fearlessly he intended to continue his philosophical course—this is a purpose which he may well be conceived to have entertained at a somewhat later period. Though indeed, as Plato, after having lived some time at Megara with the other Socraticians, does not appear to have returned to Athens, for any long time at least, what I have suggested can hardly have been the case at an earlier period than after his return from his first travels. Soon afterwards, however, he might have had abundant occasion for expression of sentiments of this kind. For in the Apology Socrates represents his own disfavour as having commenced with the calumnies of Aristophanes, and similar false reports respecting the tendency of his exertions; and thus Plato also experienced something of the same kind soon enough. Let but the reader recollect how in the Ecclesiazusæ of Aristophanes, the representation of which is usually put as early as the ninety-seventh Olympiad, the political views and new doctrines of Plato were exposed, and he will have no difficulty in conceiving how easily Plato may have apprehended a similar result. Hence, then, in order at the same time to justify to his friends and relations implicated in the concerns of public life—those friends who perhaps had hoped that his travels would have recalled him from abstract thought and brought him nearer to the world—thoroughly, I say, to justify to them his persevering withdrawal from the government of a state, in his own opinion, corrupt, as well as his own disadvantageous judgment upon the forms of it, and to show the necessity of being allowed to philosophize freely upon the art of politics; hence come those very strong expressions, outbidding anything in the Protagoras, against the most celebrated Athenian statesman of all time, with a slight reservation in favour of the living, as if they were less guilty; hence the way in which he puts into the mouth of Callicles the imputation of Laconism against himself, in order to show that what is so called arises at once quite naturally and spontaneously from the most simple and every-day experience.
Nay, even what he says cursorily upon the subject of poetry, may, in its more accurate application, be connected with the same circumstances. Much of the natural hatred and spite of bad persons in the possession of power towards wiser men seems brought out exactly in the form in which it is, in order to touch, with a slight justification and correction, upon what had occurred to Plato during his first stay in Sicily with the elder Dionysius. And this again leads almost to the supposition, that the example also of Archelaus, if we are not to imagine that that monarch had not already at so early a period Socraticians about his person, and proceeded with them in a similar way, was chosen with the same referential purpose, in order to show most strongly how impossible it was, that Plato, as had perhaps begun even at that time to be the opinion of some, should have sought the friendship of an unjust and oppressive despot. These however are the only traces, slight ones certainly, of the time at which the dialogue was composed; and we could indeed place but little reliance upon them, did they not coincide so admirably with the position which must be assigned to it, between and after others, the period of which may be more decisively fixed. According to this it would be right to consider it as the first or second work after Plato’s return from his first journey, as soon, that is, as his school had become so firmly established, and so widely extended as to induce Aristophanes to give a comic representation of it. For unless all accounts of this journey are false, Plato can scarcely have formed, previous to it, a particular school of his own.
There is one objection however to this date, which might certainly be brought by an ingenious person, and which I will not suppress. We know of a philosophical work of Gorgias, and the question may very fairly be started, how Plato could have made Gorgias the principal person in a dialogue without uttering a syllable about this work, or noticing it by a single allusion. Put the dialogue into the period at which the process against Socrates was still going on, and we then have a very easy justification, in the supposition that at that time Plato had not yet become acquainted with it; but this supposition will not hold after his return from his travels, as he must unquestionably have made acquaintance with this work in Sicily. In this case, there are but two hypotheses from which to choose: either Plato, contrary to his usual custom in this particular, has kept so accurately to the time in which he places the dialogue, that he does not mention this work because at that period it was not yet known at Athens, and this may certainly be conceived, if as Olympiodorus says, it was written in the eighty-fourth Olympiad; or Plato did not consider this work deserving of particular notice, not so much by reason of its sophistical tendency, as, much more probably, its utterly rhetorical style; and thus he only comprehends it generally under the description of the corrupting art of counterfeit, and makes Gorgias say, probably not without a meaning, that he does not pretend to be anything but an orator.