Название: The Legacy of Greece
Автор: Various
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664583949
isbn:
His failure to make anything of Dionysius did not lead Plato to abandon his efforts to heal the wounds of Hellenism. One of the studies most ardently pursued in the Academy was Jurisprudence, of which he is the real founder. It was not uncommon for Greek states to apply to the Academy for legislators to codify existing law or to frame a new code for colonies which had just been founded. That is the real explanation of the remarkable work entitled the Laws, which must have occupied Plato for many years, and which was probably begun while he was still directing the studies of Dionysius. It appears to have been left unfinished; for, while some parts of it are highly elaborated, there are others which make upon us the impression of being a first draft. Even so, it is a great work if we regard it from the proper point of view. It is, in the first place, a codification of Greek, and especially Athenian law, of course with those reforms and improvements which suggest themselves when the subject is systematically treated, and it formed the basis of Hellenistic, and through that of Roman law, to which the world owes so much. There is no more useful corrective of the popular notion of Plato as an unpractical visionary than the careful study of the dullest and most technical parts of the Laws in the light of the Institutes.
No attempt has been made here to describe the system of Plato as a whole, and indeed the time has not yet come when such an attempt can profitably be made. We have no direct knowledge of his teaching in the Academy; for we only possess the works which he wrote with a wider public in view. In the case of Aristotle (384–322 BC), a similar reservation must be made, though for just the opposite reason. We have only fragments of his published works and what we possess is mainly the groundwork of his lectures in the Lyceum. It will be seen that there is still very much to be done here too. From the nature of the case, notes for lectures take a great deal for granted that would be more fully explained when the lectures were delivered, and some of the most important points are hardly developed at all. Nevertheless there are certain things which come out clearly enough, and it so happens that they are points of great importance from which we can learn something with regard to the philosophical problems of the present day.
In the first place, it is desirable to point out that Aristotle was not an Athenian, but an Ionian from the northern Aegean, and that he was strongly influenced by eastern Ionian science, especially by the system of Democritus (which Plato does not appear to have known) and by the medical theories of the time. That is why he is so unsympathetic to the western schools of philosophy, and especially to the Pythagoreans and the Eleatics. Empedocles alone, who was a biologist like himself, and the founder of a medical school, finds favour in his eyes. He is not, therefore, at home in mathematical matters and his system of Physics can only be regarded as retrograde when we compare it with that of the Academy. He did indeed accept the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity, but with that exception his cosmological views must be called reactionary. Where he is really great is in biology, a field of research which was not entirely neglected by the Academy, but which had been treated as secondary in comparison with mathematics and astronomy. The contrast between Plato and Aristotle in this respect seems to repeat on a higher plane that between Pythagoras and Empedocles, and this suggests something like a law of philosophical development which may perhaps throw light on the present situation. It seems as if this alternation of the mathematical and the biological interest was fundamental in the development of scientific thought and that the philosophy of different periods takes its colour from it. The philosophy of the nineteenth century was dominated in the main by biological conceptions, while it seems as if that of the twentieth was to be chiefly mathematical in its outlook on the world. We must not, of course, make too much of such formulas, but it is instructive to study such alternations in the philosophy of the Greeks, where everything is simpler and more easily apprehended.
On the other hand, Aristotle had been a member of the Academy for twenty years, and that could not fail to leave its mark upon him. This no doubt explains the fact, which has often been noted, that there are two opposite and inconsistent strains in all Aristotle’s thinking. On the one hand, he is determined to avoid everything ‘transcendental’, and his dislike of Pythagorean and Platonist mathematics is mainly due to that. On the other hand, despite his captious and sometimes unfair criticisms of Plato, he evidently admired him greatly and had been much influenced by him. It may be suggested that the tone of his criticisms is partly due to his annoyance at finding that he could not shake off his Platonism, do what he would. This is borne out by the fact that, when he has come to the furthest point to which his own system will take him, he is apt to take refuge in metaphors of a mythical or ‘transcendental’ character, for which we are not prepared in any way and of which no explanation is vouchsafed us. That is particularly the case when he is dealing with the soul and the first mover. On the whole his account of the soul is simply a development of eastern Ionian theories, and we feel that we are far removed indeed from the Platonist conception of the soul’s priority to everything else. But, when he has told us that the highest and most developed form of soul is Mind, we are suddenly surprised by the statement that Mind in this sense is merely passive, while there is another form of it which is separable from matter, and that alone is immortal and everlasting. This has given rise to endless controversy which does not concern us here, but it seems best to interpret it as an involuntary outburst of the Platonism Aristotle could not wholly renounce. Very similar is the passage where he tries to explain how the first mover, though itself unmoved, communicates motion to the world. ‘It moves it like a thing beloved,’ he tells us, and leaves us to make what we can of that. And yet we cannot help feeling that, in passages like this, we come far nearer to the beliefs Aristotle really cared about than we do anywhere else. At heart he is a Platonist in spite of himself.
Aristotle’s attitude to the practical life is also dependent on Plato’s. In the Tenth Book of the Ethics he puts the claims of the Contemplative Life even higher than Plato ever did, so that the practical life appears to be only ancillary to it. He does not feel in the same degree as Plato the call for the philosopher to descend once more into the Cave for the sake of the prisoners there, and altogether he seems far more indifferent to the practical interests of life. Nevertheless he followed Plato’s lead in giving much of his time to the study of Politics and that too with the distinctly practical aim of training legislators. He has often been criticized for his failure to see that the days of the city-state were numbered, and for the way in which he ignores the rise of an imperial monarchy in the person of his own pupil Alexander the Great. That, however, is not quite fair. Aristotle had a healthy dislike of princes and courts, and the city-state still appealed to him as the normal form of political organization. СКАЧАТЬ