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PLATO

Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but he reverts to General Consideration of the Universe and Deals with Politics and Legislation.

PLATONIC LOVE.--Platonic love, about which there has been so much talk and on which, consequently, we must say a word, at least to define it, is one of the applications of his moral system. As in the case of all other things, the idea of love is in God. There it exists in absolute purity, without any mixture of the idea of pleasure, since pleasure is essentially ephemeral and perishable. Love in God consists simply in the impassioned contemplation of beauty ; we shall resemble God if we love beauty precisely in this way, without excitement or agitation of the senses.

POLITICS.--One of the originalities in Plato is that he busies himself with politics--that is, that he makes politics a part of philosophy, which had barely been thought of before him , but which has ever since been taken into consideration. Plato is aristocratic, no doubt because his thought is generally such, independently of circumstances, also, perhaps, because he attributed the great misfortunes of his country which he witnessed to the Athenian democracy; then yet again, perhaps, because that Athenian democracy had been violently hostile and sometimes cruel to philosophers, and more especially to his own master. According to Plato, just as man has three souls, or if it be preferred, three centres of activity, which govern him--intelligence in the head, courage in the heart, and appetite in the bowels--even so the city is composed of three classes: wise and learned men at the top, the warriors below, and the artisans and slaves lower still. The wise men will govern: accordingly the nations will never be happy save when philosophers are kings, or when kings are philosophers. The warriors will fight to defend the city, never as aggressors. They will form a caste--poor, stern to itself, and redoubtable. They will have no individual possessions; everything will be in common, houses, furniture, weapons, wives even, and children. The people, finally, living in strict equality, either by equal partition of land, or on land cultivated in common, will be strictly maintained in probity, honesty, austerity, morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who corrupt morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret pang of voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending more or less to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato either by being evolved from them or by harking back to them.

THE MASTER OF THE IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.--Plato is for all thinkers, even for his opponents, the greatest name in human philosophy. He is the supreme authority of the idealistic philosophy--that is, of all philosophy which believes that ideas govern the world, and that the world is progressing towards a perfection which is somewhere and which directs and attracts it. For those even who are not of his school, Plato is the most prodigious of all the thinkers who have united psychological wisdom, dialectical strength, the power of abstraction and creative imagination, which last in him attains to the marvellous.

ARISTOTLE

A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher, more especially Moralist and Logician.

HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.--The moral system of Aristotle sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that the supreme happiness is the supreme good, and that the supreme good is the contemplation of thought by thought--thought being self-sufficing; which is approximately the imitation of God which Plato recommended. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is very practical and almost mediocre, as when he makes it consist of a mean between the extremes, a just measure, a certain tact, art rather than science, and practical science rather than conscience, which will know how to distinguish which are the practices suitable for an honest and a well-born man. It is only just to add that in detail and when after all deductions he describes the just man, he invites us to contemplate virtues which if not sublime are none the less remarkably lofty.

His very confused political philosophy is specially a review of the divergent political constitutions which existed throughout the Greek world. The tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are still very aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic than those of Plato.

VARIOUS SCHOOLS

The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

THE SCHOOL OF PLATO; THEOPHRASTUS.--The school of Plato was continued by Speusippus, Polemo, Xenocrates, Crates, and Crantor. Owing to a retrograde movement, widely different from that of Aristotle, it dabbled in the Pythagorean ideas, with which Plato was acquainted and which he often appreciated, but not blindly, and to which he never confined himself.

SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS.--We may just mention the very celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us--that of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which appears to have been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of Elea and of Gorgias.

CRATES; MENIPPUS; ARISTIPPUS.--Crates of Thebes is also mentioned, less insolent and better-mannered, yet also a despiser of the goods of this world; and Menippus, the maker of satires, whom Lucian, much later, made the most diverting interlocutor of his amusing dialogues. In an opposite direction, at the same epoch, Aristippus, a pupil of Socrates, like Antisthenes, founded the school of pleasure, and maintained that the sole search worthy of man was that of happiness, and that it was his duty to make himself happy; that in consequence, it having been sufficiently proved and being even self-evident, that happiness cannot come to us from without, but must be sought within ourselves, it is necessary to study to know ourselves thoroughly in order to decide what are the states of the mind which give us a durable, substantial, and, if possible, a permanent happiness. Now the seeker and the finder of substantial happiness is wisdom, or rather, there is no other wisdom than the art of distinguishing between pleasure and choosing, with a very refined discrimination, those which are genuine. Wisdom further consists in dominating misfortunes by the mastery of self so as not to be affected by them, and in dominating also pleasures even whilst enjoying them, so that they may not obtain dominion over us; "possessing without being possessed" was one of his mottoes which Horace thus translated: "I strive to subject things to myself, not myself to things." This eminently practical wisdom, which is only a highly-developed egoism, is that of Horace and Montaigne, and was expressed by Voltaire in verses that were sometimes felicitous.

THE SCHOOL OF CYRENE.--Aristippus had for successor in the direction of his school, first his daughter Arete, then his grandson. The Aristippists, or Cyrenaics , frankly despised the gods, regarding them as inventions to frighten women and little children. One of them, Euhemerus, invented the theory, which in part is false and in part accurate, that the gods are simply heroes, kings, great men deified after their death by the gratitude or terror of the populace. As often happens, philosophic theories being essentially plastic and taking the form of the temperament which receives them, a certain Cyrenaic enunciated the doctrine that the supreme happiness of man was suicide. In fact, if the object of man is happiness, since life affords far fewer joys than sorrows, the philosophy of happiness is to get rid of life, and the sole wisdom lies in suicide. It does not appear that Hegesias gave the only proof of sincere belief in this doctrine which can be given by anyone professing it.

EPICUREANISM

Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to Seek Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in Wisdom.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY.--Continuing to feel the strong impulse which it had received from Socrates, philosophy was now for a long while to be almost exclusively moral philosophy. Only it divided very sharply in two directions. Antisthenes and Aristippus were both pupils of Socrates. From Antisthenes came the Cynics; from Aristippus the philosophers of pleasure. The Cynics gave birth to the Stoics, the philosophers of pleasure to the Epicureans, and these two great schools practically divided all antiquity between them. We will take the Epicureans first because, chronologically, they slightly preceded the Stoics.

EPICUREAN MORALITY.--From the ethical point of view, Epicurus certainly attaches himself to Aristippus; but with the difference that lies between pleasure and happiness. Aristippus taught that the aim of life was intelligent pleasure, Epicurus declared that the aim of life was happiness. Now, does happiness consist in pleasures, or does it exclude them? Epicurus was quite convinced that it excluded them. Like Lord Beaconsfield, he would say, "Life would be almost bearable, were it not for its pleasures." Happiness for Epicurus lay in "phlegm," as Philinte would put it; it lay in the calm of the mind that has rendered itself inaccessible to every emotion of passion, which is never irritated, never moved, never annoyed, never desires, and never fears. Why, for instance, should we dread death? So long as we fear it, it is not here; when it arrives, we shall no longer fear it; then, why is it an evil?--But, during life itself, how about sufferings?--We greatly increase our sufferings by complaints and by self-commiseration. If we acted in the reverse way, if when we were tortured by them we recalled past pleasures and thought of pleasures to come, they would be infinitely mitigated.--But, of what pleasures can a man speak who makes happiness consist in the exclusion of pleasures? The pleasures of the wise man are the satisfaction he feels in assuring himself of his own happiness. He finds pleasure when he controls a passion in order to revert to calmness; he feels pleasure when he converses with his friends about the nature of true happiness; he feels pleasure when he has diverted a youth from passionate follies or from despair, and brought him back to peace of mind, etc.--But what about sufferings after death? They do not exist. There is no hell because there is no immortality of the soul. The soul is as material as the body, and dies with it.

You will say, perhaps, that this very severe and austere morality more nearly approaches to Stoicism than to the teaching of Aristippus. This is so true that when Horace confessed with a smile that he returned to the morality of pleasure, he did not say, as we should, "I feel that I am becoming an Epicurean," he said, "I fall back on the precepts of Aristippus;" and Seneca, a professed Stoic, cites Epicurus almost as often as Zeno in his lessons. It may not be quite accurate to state, but there would not be much exaggeration in affirming, that Epicureanism is a smiling Stoicism and Stoicism a gloomy Epicureanism. In the current use of the word we have changed the meaning of Epicurean to make it mean "addicted to pleasure." The warning must be given that there is no more grievous error.

STOICISM

The Passions are Diseases which can and must be Extirpated.

PRINCIPAL STOICS.--The principal adepts and masters of Stoicism with and after Zeno were Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Aristo, and Herillus in Greece; at Rome, Cato, Brutus, Cicero to a certain degree, Thrasea, Epictetus , Seneca, and finally the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism rapidly developed into a religion, having its rites, obediences, ascetic practices, directors of conscience, examination of conscience, and its adepts with a traditional dress, long cloak, and long beard. It exerted considerable influence, comparable to Christianity, but it penetrated only the upper and middle classes of society in antiquity without descending, or barely descending, to the masses. Like Epicureanism, Stoicism had a renaissance in modern times in opposition to Christianity; this will be dealt with later.

ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS

Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All Doctrines.

THE TWO TENDENCIES.--As might be expected to happen, and as always happens, the multiplicity of sects brought about two tendencies, one consisting in selecting somewhat arbitrarily from each sect what one found best in it, which is called "eclecticism," the other in thinking that no school grasped the truth, that the truth is not to be grasped, which is called "scepticism."

THE ECLECTICS: PLUTARCH.--The Eclectics, who did not form a school, which would have been difficult in the spirit in which they acted, had only this in common, that they venerated the great thinkers of ancient Greece, and that they felt or endeavoured to feel respect and toleration for all religions. They venerated Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Moses, Jesus, St. Paul, and loved to imagine that they were each a partial revelation of the great divine thought, and they endeavoured to reconcile these divergent revelations by proceeding on broad lines and general considerations. Among them were Moderatus, Nicomachus, Nemesius, etc. The most illustrious, without being the most profound--though his literary talent has always kept him prominent--was Plutarch. His chief effort, since then often renewed, was to reconcile reason and faith . Perceiving in mythology ingenious allegories, he showed that under the name of allegories covering and containing profound ideas, all polytheism could be accepted by the reason of a Platonist, an Aristotelian, or a Stoic. The Eclectics had not much influence, and only pleased two sorts of minds: those who preferred knowledge rather than conviction, and found in Eclecticism an agreeable variety of points of view; and those who liked to believe a little in everything, and possessing receptive but not steadfast minds were not far from sceptics and who might be called affirmative sceptics in opposition to the negative sceptics: sceptics who say, "Heavens, yes," as opposed to sceptics who always say, "Presumably, no."

THE NEW ACADEMY.--Scepticism, albeit attenuated, softened, and less aggressive, reappeared in a school calling itself the New Academy. It claimed to adhere to Socrates--not without some show of reason, since Socrates had declared that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing--and the essential tenet of this school was to affirm nothing. Only the Academicians believed that certain things were probable, more probable than others, and they are the founders of probabilism, which is nothing more than conviction accompanied with modesty. They were more or less moderate, according to personal temperament. Arcesilaus was emphatically moderate, and limited himself to the development of the critical faculties of his pupil. Carneades was more negative, and arrived at or reverted to scepticism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, with a certain foundation of Stoicism, was a pupil, and one of the most moderate, of the New Academy.

NEOPLATONISM

Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.

ALEXANDRINISM.--Amid all this, metaphysics--namely, the effort to comprehend the universe--appears somewhat at a discount. It enjoyed a renaissance in the third century of our era among some teachers from Alexandria who came to lecture at Rome with great success. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism"--that is, a renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one.

PLOTINUS.--Plotinus taught this: God and matter exist. God is one, matter is multiple and divisible. God in Himself is incomprehensible, and is only to be apprehended in his manifestations. Man rises not to comprehension of Him but to the perception of Him by a series of degrees which are, as it were, the progressive purification of faith, and which lead us to a kind of union with Him resembling that of one being with another whom he could never see, but of whose presence he could have no doubt. Matter, that is, the universe, is an emanation from God, as perfume comes from a flower. All is not God, and only God can be God, but all is divine and all participates in God, just as each of our thoughts participates of our soul. Now, if all emanates from God, all also tends to return to Him, as bodies born of earth, nourished by earth, invigorated by the forces proceeding from the earth, tend to return to the earth. This is what makes the harmony of the world. The law of laws is, that every fragment of the universe derived from God returns to Him and desires to return to Him. The universe is an emanation from the perfect, and an effort towards perfection. The universe is a God in exile who has nostalgia for himself. The universe is a progressive descent from God with a tendency towards reintegration with Him.

THE PUPILS OF PLOTINUS.--Plotinus had as pupils and successors, amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves little except the exposition of the doctrine of his master, and shows originality only as a logician. Iamblichus and his school made a most interesting effort to revive exhausted and expiring paganism and to constitute a philosophic paganism. The philosophers of the school of Iamblichus are, by the way, magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men as antipositivist as possible. Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential deity from whom he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary deities to emanate, ranging from those purely immaterial to those inherent in matter. The subtle wanderings of Neoplatonism were continued obscurely in the school of Athens until it was closed for ever in 529 by the Emperor Justinian as being hostile to the religion of the Empire, which at that epoch was Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY

Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, Adopted, or Created How it must Give a Fresh Aspect to All Philosophy, even that Foreign to Itself.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AND MORALITY.--Christianity spread through the Empire by the propaganda of the Apostles, and more especially St. Paul, from about the year 40. Its success was extremely rapid, especially among the populace, and little by little it won over the upper classes. As a general philosophy, primitive Christianity did not absolutely bring more than the Hebrew dogmas: the unity of God, a providential Deity, that is, one directly interfering in human affairs; immortality of the soul with rewards and penalties beyond the grave . As a moral system, Christianity brought something so novel and so beautiful that it is not very probable that humanity will ever surpass it, which may be imperfectly and incompletely summed up thus: love of God; He must not only be feared as He was by the pagans and the ancient Jews; He must be loved passionately as a son loves his father, and all things must be done for this love and in consideration of this love; all men are brethren as sons of God, and they should love one another as brothers; love your neighbour as yourself, love him who does not love you; love your enemies; be not greedy for the goods of this world, nor ambitious, nor proud; for God loves the lowly, the humble, the suffering, and the miserable, and He will exalt the lowly and put down the mighty from their seats.

Nothing like this had been said in all antiquity, and it needs extraordinary ingenuity , to find in ancient wisdom even a few traces of this doctrine.

Finally, into politics, so to speak, Christianity brought this novelty: there are two empires, the empire of God and the empire of man; you do not owe everything to the earthly empire; you are bound to give it faithfully only what is needed for it to be strong and to preserve society; apart from that, and that done, you are the subject of God and have only to answer to God for your thoughts, your belief, your conscience; and over that portion of yourself the State has neither right nor authority unless it be usurped and tyrannical. And therein lay the charter of individual liberty like the charter of the rights of man.

As appeal to the feelings, Christianity brought the story of a young God, infinitely good and gentle, who had never cursed, who had been infinitely loved, who had been persecuted and betrayed, who had forgiven his executioners, and who died in great sufferings and who was to be imitated . This story in itself is not more affecting than that of Socrates, but it is that of a young martyr and not of an old one, and therein lies a marked difference for the imagination and emotions of the multitude.

THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY.--The prodigious rapidity of the success of Christianity is easily explicable. Polytheism had no longer a great hold on the masses, and no philosophic doctrine had found or had even sought the path to the crowd; Christianity, essentially democratic, loved the weak and humble, had a tendency to prefer them to the great ones of this world, and to regard them as being more the children of God, and was therefore received by the masses as the only doctrine which could replace the worm-eaten polytheism. And in Christianity they saw the religion for which they were waiting, and in the heads of Christianity their own protectors and defenders.

ITS EVOLUTION.--The evolution of Christianity was very rapid, and from a great moral doctrine with a minimum of rudimentary metaphysics it became, perchance mistakenly, a philosophy giving account, or desirous of giving account of everything; it so to speak incorporated a metaphysic, borrowed in great part from Greek philosophy, in great part from the Hebrew traditions. It possessed ideas on the origin of matter, and whilst maintaining that God was eternal, denied that matter was, and asserted that God created it out of nothing. It had theories on the essence of God, and saw Him in three Persons, or hypostases, one aspect of God as power, another as love, and the other as intelligence. It presented theories on the incarnation and humanisation of God, God being made man in Jesus Christ without ceasing to be God. It conceived new relationships of man to God, man having in himself powers of purgation and perfection, but always needing divine help for self-perfection . And this he must believe; if not he would feel insolent pride in his freedom. It had ideas about the existence of evil, declaring in "justification of God" for having permitted evil on earth, that the world was a place of trial, and that evil was only a way of putting man to the test and discovering what were his merits. It had its notions on the rewards and penalties beyond the grave, hell for the wicked and heaven for the good, as had been known to antiquity, but added purgatory, a place for both punishment and purification by punishment, an entirely Platonic theory, which Plato may have inspired but did not himself entertain. Finally, it was a complete philosophy answering, and that in a manner often admirable, all the questions that mankind put or could ever put.

And, as so often happens, that has proved a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever brings a rule of life is practically compelled to support it by general ideas bearing on the relations of things and to give it a place in a general survey of the world; otherwise he appears impotent, weak, disqualified to give that very rule of life, incapable of replying to the interrogations raised by that rule of life; and finally, lacking in authority.

SCHISMS AND HERESIES.--Right or wrong, and it is difficult and highly hazardous to decide the question, Christianity was a complete philosophy, which was why it had its schisms and heresies, a certain number of sincere Christians not resolving the metaphysical questions in the way of the majority. Heresies were innumerable; only the two shall be cited which are deeply interesting in the history of philosophy. Manes, an Arab , revived the old Zoroastrian doctrine of two principles of good and evil, and saw in the world two contending gods, the God of perfection and the god of sin, and laid upon man the duty of assisting the God of goodness so that His kingdom should come and cause the destruction of evil in the world. From him proceeded the Manicheans, who exerted great influence and were condemned by many Councils until their sect died out, only to reappear or seem to reappear fairly often in the Middle Ages and in modern times.

Arius denied the Trinity, believing only in one God, not only unique, but in one Person, and in consequence denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. He was perpetually involved in controversies and polemics, supported by some Bishops, opposed by the majority. After his death his doctrine spread strangely. It was stifled in the East by Theodosius, but was widely adopted by the "barbarians" of the West . It was revived, more or less exactly, after the Reformation, among the Socinians.

A further explanation, perhaps, is that each new religion that was introduced at Rome did not oppose and did not contradict polytheism, the principle of polytheism being precisely that there are many gods; whereas Christianity denying all those gods and affirming that there is only one, and that all others must be despised as non-existent, inveighed against, denied, and ruined or threatened to destroy the very essence of polytheism. It was not a variation, it was a heresy; it was more than heretical, it was anarchical; it did not only condemn this or that religion, but even the very tolerance with which the Roman government accepted all religions. Hence it is natural enough that it should have been combated to the utmost by practically all the Emperors, from the most execrable, such as Nero, to the best, such as Marcus Aurelius.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE PHILOSOPHERS.--The relations of Christianity with philosophy were confused. The immense majority of philosophers rejected it, considering their own views superior to it, and moreover, feeling it to be formidable, made use against it of all that could be found beautiful, specious, or expedient in ancient philosophy; and the ardour of Neoplatonism, which we have considered, in part arose from precisely this instinct of rivalry and of struggle. At that epoch there was a throng of men like Ernest Havet presenting Hellenism in opposition to Christianity, and Ernest Havet is only a Neoplatonist of the nineteenth century.

A certain number of philosophers, nevertheless, either on the Jewish-Christian side or on the Hellenic, tried some reconciliation either as Jews making advances to Hellenism or as Greeks admitting there was something acceptable on the part of Sion. Aristobulus, a Jew , seems to have endeavoured to bring Moses into agreement with Plato; Philo , about whom there is more information, throughout his life pursued the plan of demonstrating all the resemblances he could discover between Plato and the Old Testament, much in the same way as in our time some have striven to point out the surprising agreement of the Darwinian theory with Genesis. He was called the Jewish Plato, and at Alexandria it was said: "Philo imitates Plato or Plato imitates Philo."

On their side, later on, certain eclectic Greeks already cited, Moderatus, Nicomachus, Nemesius, extended goodwill so far as to take into account, if not Jesus, at least Moses, and to admit Israelitish thought into the history of philosophy and of human wisdom. But, in general it was by the schools of philosophy and by the ever dwindling section of society priding itself upon its philosophy that Christianity was most decisively repulsed, thrust on one side and misunderstood.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHERS.--Without dealing with many others who belong more especially to the history of the Church rather than to that of philosophy, the Christians did not lack two very illustrious philosophers who must receive attention--Origen and St. Augustine.

ST. AUGUSTINE.--St. Augustine of Tagaste , long a pagan exercising the profession of professor of rhetoric, became a Christian and was Bishop of Hippo. It is he who "fixed" the Christian doctrine in the way most suitable to and most acceptable to Western intelligence. Instead of confusing it, more or less intentionally, more or less inadvertently, with philosophy, he exerted all his great talents to make the most precise distinction from it. Philosophers have always regarded the world as an emanation from God. Then all is God. Such is not the way to reason. There is no emanation, but creation; God created the world and has remained distinct from it. He lives in it in such a way that we live in Him; in Him we live and move and have our being; He dwells throughout the world, but He is not the world; He is everywhere but He is not all. God created the world. Then, can it be said that before the world was created God remained doing nothing during an immense space of time? Certainly not, because time only began at the creation of the world. God is outside time. The eternal is the absence of time. God, therefore, was not an instant before He created the world. Or, if it be preferred, there was an eternity before the birth of the world. But it is the same thing; for eternity is the non-existence of time.

Some understand God in three Persons as three Gods. This polytheism, this paganism must be rejected. But how to understand? How? You feel in yourself several souls? No. And yet there are several faculties of the soul. The three Persons of God are the three divine faculties. Man has body and soul. No one ought to have doubts about the soul, for to have doubts presupposes thought, and to think is to be; above all things we are thinking beings. But what is the soul? Something immaterial, assuredly, since it can conceive immaterial things, such as a line, a point, surface, space. It is as necessary for the soul to be immaterial in order to be able to grasp the immaterial, as it is necessary for the hand to be material in order that it can grasp a stone.

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