Platonism

“ Plato held to the doctrine of ideas, of eternal verities, the archetypes of all forms of existence, and believed growth in wisdom to be a gradual realization of these ideas in consciousness. Modern Platonism makes man a part of the Divine Being, with power to progress in knowledge of truth and in moral insight. ”

“ The body of this teaching—its æsthetics, its metaphysics, and its ethics—was seen by the poets in its relation to Christian doctrine and to the passion of romantic love. The more permanent results for good are found in the fusion of Platonism with the ideals of Christian living and with its longing for perfection. If one passage in Plato may adequately sum up the teaching of Platonism most influential in 220English poetry, it is the passage in “Phædrus” in which the beauty of wisdom is taught (“Phædrus,” 250) . ”

“ The deep conceit which Spenser here uses points in the direction of Platonism; for there it 8was taught that wisdom could be seen only by the soul. This is a fundamental truth, present everywhere in Plato, in the vision of beauty that rises before the mind at the end of the dialectic of the “Symposium,” in the species of divine fury that accompanies the recollection of the ideal world in the presence of a beautiful object, as analyzed in the “Phædrus,” and in the “Hymn of the Dialectic” in the “Republic” by which the soul rises to a sight of the good. ”

“ Platonism is a very refined and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience and utters our inmost hopes." This insight into the values of human life, partial though it be, is what constitutes the abiding monument of Plato's genius. ”

“ Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it, is but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things.
There have been Platonists without Plato, and a kind of traditional Platonism in the world, independent of, yet true in spirit to, the Platonism [269] of the Platonic Dialogues. Now such a piece of traditional Platonism we find in the hypothesis of some close connexion between what may be called the aesthetic qualities of the world about us and the formation of moral character, between aesthetics and ethics. ”

“ Platonism was doubtless the highest effort of uninspired men, under the influence of pagan ideas and institutions, to attain a knowledge of God and the soul. It gloried in immortality, and claimed for man a nature akin to the deity, and destined to a higher development after death. ”

“ Philosophic differences are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world. ”

“ Many also have been the processes of individualization and diverse the mediatorial means, through which philosopher, apostle, or Church Doctor has tried to bring this principle down to man, and conceive him as spirit manifesting an intelligible selfhood through the organs of sense. Platonism was a beautiful, if elusive, expression of this endeavour, and Neo-Platonism a very palpable although darkening statement of the same. ”

“ The great representative of Platonism in English poetry thus condemns the less vital phase of Platonic thought. The great weakness of the theory lay in the fact that it had no moral significance; and just here lay the great strength of Plato’s ethics. Although preaching that beauty was a spiritual thing, this phase of Platonic æsthetics never blended with the conception of the beauty of moral 140goodness. And it failed to do this because it is a theory not of Plato but of Plotinus, who throughout the period of the Renaissance was understood to expound the true meaning of Plato’s thought. ”

“ PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies—a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or Just ”

“ The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind of Plato,—nothing less. ”

“ Platonism is the intuition of essences in the presence of things, in order to describe them: it is mind itself.
I am quite happy in this human ignorance mitigated by pictures, for it yields practical security and poetic beauty: what more can a sane man want? ”

“ The philosophy, of Plotinus is styled Neo-Platonism, because it is a revival of the Platonic doctrines, and also Eclecticism, because it aimed at combining with Platonism whatever was worthy of adoption in the tenets of other philosophers. ”

“ Platonism, having lent the formula for the Trinity, became the favorite philosophy of many of the Church fathers, and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism, that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative. ”

“ That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as colts do their mothers. A youth, it is said, who revered Plato always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as a Platonist. But he never could have understood the inwardness of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and the illumination of the Soul. ”

“ Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective, the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad-cast light he enjoys!—that scholar, confronted with the sea- shell, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circumstances which may never precisely so occur again ”

“ Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason—those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking things. ”

“ The Platonic doctrine of "the Many and the One"—the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato—is not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese ”

“ We may not even be thinking of, not looking at, the same thing, when we talk of Beauty, and the like; objects which, after all, to the Platonist are matters of theôria,+ of immediate intuition, of immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal experience ”

“ It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. ”

“ Now if philosophy really is where Plato consistently puts it, and is all he claims for it, then, for those capable of it, who are capable also in the region of practice, it will be precisely "that better thing than being a king for those who must be our kings, our archons." ”

“ Plato's realism however—what is called "The Theory of Ideas"—his way of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say about "the Many and the One," is often very difficult; though of various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds. ”

“ This division is made in accordance with the analysis of the soul on which Plato bases his doctrine of temperance. Within the soul are three distinct principles,—one rational and two irrational. The irrational principles are, first, the irascible impulse of spirit (θυμός) with which a man is angry and, second, the appetitive instinct the workings of which are manifested in all the sensual gratifications of the body, and in the love of wealth. The rational principle is that of reason by which a man learns truth. ”

“ THE GENIUS OF PLATO [124] ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the conditions, antecedent and contemporary, which helped to make it precisely what it was. But a complete criticism does not end there. In the evolution of abstract doctrine as we find it written in the history of philosophy, if there is always, on one side, the fatal, irresistible, mechanic play of circumstance—the circumstances of a particular age, which may be analysed and explained ”

“ The "theory of the Ideas," the high ideal, the uncompromising demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name; the immediate or intuitive character of the highest acts of knowledge; that all true theory is indeed "vision":—for the maintenance of that side of the Platonic position we must look onward to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen of all ages, to Spinoza, to Hegel ”

“ This struggle between the rational principle and the irrational elements in the soul does not, however, constitute temperance. That virtue, or rather that condition of all virtue, is the harmony and order resulting in the soul after reason has quieted the disturbing passions, and is conceived by Plato as its very health or 24beauty. ”

“ The Court affords little News at present, but that there is a Love call’d Platonick Love which much sways there of late: it is a Love abstracted 156from all corporeal gross Impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and Ideas of the Mind, not in any carnal Fruition. This Love sets the Wits of the Town on work ”

“ Nothing was left for him to do but to shift his mind from a conception of virtue as one, to an inferior notion of virtue as a manifold of personal graces. But in thus changing his idea, he destroyed the unity of his work. In his first two books he had explained how the soul could perfect itself in the full scope of its powers; and in doing this he had taught the Platonic doctrines of a heavenly beauty and of temperance as the condition of virtue in the soul. Here lay the basic idea of his conception of a gentleman. ”

“ The original Platonic argument about the Ideas amounts in general to saying, on the one hand, that only what Plato calls the Ideas are of such nature as to be truly and eternally independent realities, and on the other hand, that the Ideas, while thus independently real, are to be so defined as to explain the universality of knowledge, and the eternal validity of truth. The Platonic Ideas were therefore realistic entities, in the sense of our first conception of what it is to be. ”

“ Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
‘Fair, kind, and true,’ have often liv’d alone,
Which three, till now, never kept seat in one.”
(cv.) In another sonnet one phase of this argument is given a detailed treatment, and the poet’s object is to praise the beauty of his friend by describing its contrast with the beauty of earth, just as if he were speaking of absolute beauty. In this sonnet he uses the Platonic phraseology of the substance and the shadow, by which he means first, the reality that makes a thing what it is, the substance, not the matter or stuff of which it is made ”

“ Plato's answer, as indeed his whole ethics, is but {222} an application of the theory of Ideas. But here we can distinguish two different and, to some extent, inconsistent strains of thought, which exist side by side in Plato, and perpetually struggle for the mastery. Both views depend upon the theory of Ideas. In the first place, the Idea, in Plato's philosophy, is the sole reality. The object of sense is unreal, and merely clogs and dims the soul's vision of the Ideas. Matter is that which obstructs the free activity of the Idea. Sense-objects hide the Idea from our view. ”

“ That the controversy of Aristotle with Plato proved. The Platonic Ideas, as universals, early perished from among the entities of the realistic world, to transmigrate, as it were, to this new realm, or also to reappear, with their own immortal vitality, in that realm of genuine Idealism which we shall later explore. The One Being of the mystic is as One, an Individual, although, as the ineffable goal of all desire, it enjoys all the advantages of a Universal, and is indifferent to all our distinctions. ”

“ But though not very closely connected, neither is the digression out of keeping with the rest of the dialogue. The philosopher naturally desires to pour forth the thoughts which are always present to him, and to discourse of the higher life. The idea of knowledge, although hard to be defined, is realised in the life of philosophy. And the contrast is the favourite antithesis between the world, in the various characters of sophist, lawyer, statesman, speaker, and the philosopher,—between opinion and knowledge,—between the conventional and the true. ”