Home > The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul (No. B6)
Page The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul
The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul Page
Christian Churches of God
No. B6
THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF
THE SOUL
By
Professor John Burnet
(Edition 1.0 20000920-20000920)
This work
by Professor Burnet is an important step in understanding the introduction
of the Soul doctrine to Greco-Roman philosophy and thence to Trinitarian
Christianity.
Christian Churches of God
Email: secretary@ccg.org
(Copyright م 2000 Wade Cox)
This paper may be freely
copied and distributed provided it is copied in total with no alterations
or deletions. The publisher’s name and address and the copyright notice
must be included. No charge may be levied on recipients of distributed
copies. Brief quotations may be embodied in critical articles
and reviews without breaching copyright.
This paper
is available from the World Wide Web page:
http://www.logon.org and http://www.ccg.org
This work by
Professor Burnet has not been accorded the recognition it deserves largely
because of the impact it has on Trinitarian Christianity and the Soul
doctrine. It rightly places the use and development of the term Psuche
with Socrates and examines the importance of that thought process for
later Greek Philosophy.
The work was
produced for the Second Annual Lecture to the British Academy on 26
January 1916. It was copied in the Books for Libraries Press, Free Port
New York, 1930 and reprinted in 1968. It has remained largely unavailable
and undiscussed to the present time and it deserves much more attention
than it has received.
The work suffers
from one flaw, which is understandable. It provides the link between
the doctrine of the Soul in the Mysteries and the development in the
later Greco-Roman system. Further it does not adequately examine the
relationship between the Triune God developed by the Romans and the
Triune system as it appears among the mysteries.
Here Professor
Burnet shows that the Soul as postulated by Socrates was a development
from the Orphic daemon. The Orphic daemon was really the spirit of a
fallen god which had to be purified by ritual and ascetics. The Romans
had taken this to the position where the Trinity on the Capitoline was
the god Jupiter who was represented by an upright oak tree. It represented
the collective Genii of the Romans, that is, the collective male reproductive
system of the Roman State. The Juno represented the collective junones
or female reproductive capacity of the Roman State. The third element
was the Virgin Minerva who was the immaculately conceived virgin daughter
of Jupiter. Thus the three-fold aspect of the Triune God tied in the
reproductive force of the state and the gods and they formed the life
force, which we see represented in the Temple of Vesta.
Burnet could
have made much more of the early aspects of the philosophical development
but perhaps he went as far as he could given the circumstances by which
he was constrained and the subsequent horrors and purpose of the post
WWI Holocaust.
Further reading on this matter can be had from the following papers:
The Soul (No. 92);
The Resurrection of the Dead (No. 143);
Vegetarianism and the Bible (No. 183);
The Doctrine of Original Sin Part I The Garden of Eden (No. 246);
Doctrine
of Original Sin Part 2 The Generations of Adam (No. 248);
My Lords, Ladies
and Gentlemen
When the President
and Council did me the honour of inviting me to deliver the Annual Philosophical
Lecture, and when they asked me to take Socrates as my subject, they
were, of course, aware that the treatment of such a theme must be largely
philological and historical. I, certainly, have no claim to be regarded
as a philosopher, but I have tried hard to understand what Socrates
was and what he did, and I conceive that to be a question of genuine
philosophical interest. Whatever else it is, Philosophy, in one
aspect of it, is the progressive effort of man to find his true place
in the world, and that aspect must be treated historically, since it
is part of human progress, and philologically, since it involves the
interpretation of documents. I am not afraid, then, of the objection
that most of what I have to say to-day is history rather than philosophy.
We are men, not angels, and for many of us our best chance of getting
a glimpse of things on their eternal side is to approach them along
the path of time. Moreover, some of us have what may be called
a sense of loyalty to great men. In a way, no doubt, it does not matter
whether we owe a truth to Pythagoras or Socrates or Plato, but it is
natural for us to desire to know our benefactors and keep them in grateful
remembrance. I make no apology, therefore, for the historical character
of much that I have to lay before you, and I shall begin by stating
the problem in a strictly historical form.
1
In a letter to the philosopher Themistius, the Emperor Julian says:
The achievements of Alexander the Great are outdone in my eyes by Socrates son of Sophroniscus. It is to him I ascribe the wisdom of Plato, the fortitude Antisthenes, the generalship of Xenophon, the Eretriac and Megaric philosophies, with Cebes, Simmias, Phaedo and countless others. To him too we owe the colonies that they planted, the Lyceum, the Stoa and the Academies. Who ever found salvation in the victories of Alexander? . . . Whereas it is thanks to Socrates that all who find salvation in philosophy are being saved even now.1
These words of Julian’s are still true, and that is partly why there is so little agreement about Socrates. The most diverse philosophies have sought to father themselves upon him, and each new account of him tends to reflect the fashions and prejudices of the hour. At one time he is an enlightened deist, at another a radical atheist. He has been lauded as the father of scepticism and again as the high priest of mysticism; as a democratic social reformer and as a victim of democratic intolerance and ignorance. He has even been claimed - with at least equal reason - as a Quaker. No wonder that his latest biographer, H. Maier, exclaims:
In the presence
of each fresh attempt to bring the personality of Socrates nearer to
us, the- impression that always recurs is the same: ‘The man whose
influence was so widespread and so profound cannot have been like that!’ 2
Unfortunately
that is just the impression left on me by Maier’s own bulky volume,
though he has mastered the material and his treatment of it is sound
as far as it goes. Unless we can find some other line of approach, it
looks as if Socrates must still remain for us the Great Unknown.
That, to be
sure, is not Maier’s view. He thinks he knows a great deal about Socrates,
or he would not have written 6oo pages and more about him. The conclusion
he comes to is that Socrates was not, properly speaking, a philosopher,
which makes it all the more remarkable that the philosophers of the
next generation, however much they differed in other respects, all agreed
in regarding Socrates as their master Maier makes much of the differences
between the Socratic schools and urges that these could not have arisen
if Socrates had been a philosopher with a system of his own. There seems
to be something in that at first sight, but it only makes it more puzzling
that these philosophers should have wished to represent their philosophies
as Socratic at all. In modern times the most inconsistent philosophies
have been called Cartesian or Kantian or Hegelian, but in these cases
we can usually make out how they were derived from Descartes, Kant or
Hegel respectively. Each of these thinkers had set up some new principle
which was then applied in divergent and even contradictory ways by their
successors, and we should expect to find that Socrates did something
of the same kind. Zeller, from whom most of us have learned, thought
he knew what it was. Socrates discovered the universal and founded the
Begriffsphilosophie. Maier will have nothing to do with that, and
I rather think he is wise. The evidence does not bear examination, and
in any case the hypothesis would only account for Plato (if it would
even do that). The other Socratics remain unexplained. If, however,
we are to be deprived of this ingenious construction, we want something
to replace it, and for this we look to Maier in vain. He tells us that
Socrates was not a philosopher in
the proper sense of the word, but only a moral teacher with a distinctive
method of his own, that of 'dialectical protreptic' In other words,
his 'philosophy' was nothing more than his plan of making people good
by arguing with them in a peculiar way. Surely the man whose influence
has been so great 'cannot have been like that!'
II
Now it is clearly
impossible to discuss the Socratic question in all its bearings within
the limits of a single lecture, so what I propose to do is to take Maier
as the ablest and most recent advocate of the view that Socrates was
not really a philosopher, and to apply the Socratic method of reasoning
from admissions made by the other side. If we try to see where these
will lead us we may possibly reach conclusions Maier himself has failed
to draw, and these will be all the more cogent if based solely on evidence
he allows to be valid. He is a candid writer, and the assumptions he
makes are so few that, if a case can be made out on these alone, it
stands a fair chance of being a sound one. The experiment seemed at
least worth trying, and the result of it was new to myself at any rate,
so it may be new to others.
I resolved
not to quarrel, then, with Maier’s estimate of the value of our sources.
He rejects the testimony of Xenophon, who did not belong to the intimate
Socratic circle, and who was hardly more than twenty-five years old
when he saw Socrates for the last time. He also disallows the
evidence of Aristotle, who came to Athens as a lad of eighteen thirty
years after the death of Socrates, and who had no important sources
of information other than those accessible to ourselves. That leaves
us with Plato as our sole witness, but Maier does not
accept his testimony in its entirety. Far from it. For reasons
I need not discuss, since I propose to accept his conclusion as a basis
for argument, he holds that we must confine ourselves to Plato’s earliest
writings, and he particularly singles out the Apology
and Crito, to which he adds the speech of Alcibiades in the
Symposium. In these two works, and in that single portion of a third,
he holds that Plato had no other intention than 'to set the Master’s
personality and lifework before our eyes without additions of his own’3.
This does not mean, observe, that the Apology
is a report of the speech actually delivered by Socrates at his trial,
or that the conversation with Crito in the prison ever took place. It
simply means that the Socrates we learn to know from these sources is
the real man, and that Plato's sole object so far was to preserve a
faithful memory of him. Maier uses other early dialogues too, but he
makes certain reservations about them which I wish to avoid discussing.
I prefer to take his admissions in the strictest sense and with all
the qualifications he insists on. The issue, then, takes this form:
'What could we know of Socrates as a philosopher if no other account
of him had come down to us than the Apology,
the Crito, and the speech of Alcibiades, and with the proviso
that even these are not to be regarded as reports of actual speeches
or conversations?' I should add that Maier also allows us to treat the
allusions in contemporary comedy as corroborative evidence, though they
must be admitted with caution. Such are the conditions of the experiment
I resolved to try.
III
In the first
place, then, we learn from the Apology
and Crito that Socrates was just over seventy when he was put
to death in the spring of 399 B.C., and that means that he was born
in 470 or 469 B.C. He was, then, a man of the Periclean Age. He was
already ten years old when Aeschylus brought out the Orestean Trilogy,
and about thirty when Sophocles and Euripides were producing their earliest
tragedies. He must have watched the building of the new Parthenon from
start to finish. We are far too apt to see Socrates against the more
sombre background of those later days to which Plato and Xenophon belonged,
and to forget that he was over forty when Plato was born. If we wish
to understand him historically, we must first replace him among the
surroundings of his own generation. In other words, we must endeavour
to realize his youth and early manhood.
To most people
Socrates is best known by his trial and death, and that is why he is
commonly pictured as an old man. It is not always remembered, for instance,
that the Socrates caricatured by Aristophanes in the Clouds
is a man of forty-six, or that the Socrates who served at Potidaea (432
B.C.) in a manner that would have won him the V.C. to-day was about
thirty-seven. On that occasion he saved the life of Alcibiades, who
must have been twenty at least, or he would not have been on active
service abroad. Even if we assume that Potidaea was his first campaign,
Alcibiades was eighteen years younger than Socrates at the very outside,
and his speech in the Symposium carries us still further back, to the
time when he was about fifteen.4 In reading the account he
is made to give of the beginning of his intimacy with Socrates, we are
reading of a boy’s enthusiasm for a man just turned thirty. The story
makes a different impression if we keep that in view. What concerns
us now, however, is that the 'wisdom' of Socrates is assumed to be matter
of common knowledge in these early days. It was just because he had
some strange, new knowledge to impart that Alcibiades sought to win
his affection.5 We shall see the bearing of that shortly.
From the
Apology we learn further that Socrates conceived himself to have
a mission to his fellow-citizens, and that his devotion to it had brought
him to poverty. He cannot have been really poor to begin with; for we
have found him serving before Potidaea, which means that he had the
property qualification required at the time for those who served as
hoplites. Nine years later (423 B.C.), however, when Aristophanes and
Amipsias represented him on the comic stage, it appears that his neediness
was beginning to be a byword. They both allude to what seems to have
been a current joke about his want of a new cloak and the shifts he
was put to to get one. Amipsias, said he was 'born to spite the shoemakers,'
but Socrates may have had other reasons than poverty for going barefoot.
In the same fragment he is addressed as a 'stout-hearted fellow that,
for all his hunger, never stooped to be a parasite.' Two years later,
Eupolis used stronger language. He calls Socrates a 'garrulous beggar,
who has ideas on everything except where to get a meal.' Of course we
must not take this language too seriously. Socrates was still serving
as a hoplite at Delium, the year before the Clouds
of Aristophanes and the Connus
of Amipsias, and at Amphipolis the year after. Something, however, must
have happened shortly before to bring him into public notice, or the
comic poets would not all have turned on him at once, and it is also
clear that he had suffered losses of some kind. Very likely these were
due to the war in the first place, but the Apology
makes him poorer still at the close of his life, and he is made to attribute
that to his mission. We may infer, I think, that the public mission
of Socrates had begun before the year of the Clouds,
but was still something of a novelty then, so that its nature was not
clearly understood. He was absent from Athens, as we know, the year
before, and presumably in the preceding years also, though we do not
happen to hear of any actual battle in which he took part between Potidaea
and Delium. We are told, however, that his habit of meditation was a
joke in the army before Potidaea, and that it was there he once stood
wrapped in thought for twenty-four hours.6 It looks as if
the call came to him when he was in the trenches; and, if so, the mission
cannot have become the sole business of his life till after Delium,
when he was forty-five years old. Now we have seen that he was known
for his 'wisdom' long before that, and the, Apology
confirms the speech of Alcibiades on this point. It was before Socrates
entered on his mission that Chaerepho went to Delphi and asked the oracle
whether there was any one wiser than Socrates, from which it follows
that this 'wisdom,' whatever it was, was something anterior to and quite
independent of the public mission described in the Apology.
To sum up, the evidence Maier admits is sufficient to prove that Socrates
was known as a 'wise man' before he was forty, and before he began to
go about questioning his fellow-citizens. Whatever we may think of the
details, both the Apology and the speech of Alcibiades assume
that as a matter of course, which is even more convincing than if it
had been stated in so many words.
On the other
hand, it does not seem likely that the mission of Socrates stood in
no sort of relation to the 'wisdom' for which he was known in his younger
days. The Apology does not help us here. It tells us a good deal
about the mission, but nothing as to the nature of the 'wisdom' which
prompted the inquiry of Chaerepho, while Alcibiades is not sufficiently
sober in the Symposium to give us more than a hint, which would
hardly be intelligible yet, but to which we shall return. It will
be best, then, to start with the account given in the Apology
of that mission to his fellow-citizens to which Socrates devoted the
later years of his life, and to see whether we can infer anything from
it about the 'wisdom' for which he had been known in early manhood.
IV
We are told,
then, that at first Socrates refused to accept the declaration of the
Pythia that he was the wisest of men, and set himself to refute it by
producing some one who was certainly wiser. The result of his efforts,
however, was only to show that all the people who were wise in their
own eyes and those of others were really ignorant, and he concluded
that the meaning of the oracle did not lie on the surface. The god must
really mean that all men alike were ignorant, but that Socrates was
wiser in this one respect, that he knew he was ignorant, while other
men thought they were wise. Having discovered the meaning of the oracle,
he now felt it his duty to champion the veracity of the god by devoting
the rest of his life to the exposure of other men’s ignorance.
It ought, one
would think, to be obvious that this is a humorous way of stating the
case. For very sufficient reasons the Delphic oracle was an object
of suspicion at Athens, and, when Euripides exhibits it in an unfavourable
light, he only reflects the feelings of his audience. It is incredible
that any Athenian should have thought it worth while to make the smallest
sacrifice in defence of an institution which had distinguished itself
by its pro-Persian and pro-Spartan leanings, or that Socrates should
have hoped to conciliate his judges by stating that he had ruined himself
in such a cause. We might as well expect a jury of English Nonconformists
to be favourably impressed by the plea that an accused person had been
reduced to penury by his advocacy of Papal Infallibility.
On this point
recent German critics have an inkling of the truth, though they draw
quite the wrong conclusions. Several of them have made the profound
discovery that the speech Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates is not
a defence at all, and was not likely to conciliate the court. They go
on to infer that he cannot have spoken like that, and some of them even
conclude that the whole story of the oracle is Plato’s invention.
That is because they start with the conviction that Socrates must have
tried to make out the best case he could for himself. 'He only needed,'
says Maier,7 'to appeal to the correctness with which he
had always fulfilled the religious duties of an Athenian citizen. Xenophon’s
Apology makes him speak thus. And he certainly did speak thus.'
The inference is characteristically German, but the Socrates we think
we know from the Apology, the Crito,
and the speech of Alcibiades would never have stooped to do anything
of the sort. He was not afraid of the State, as German professors occasionally
are. He certainly admitted its right to deal with its citizens
as it thought but that is a very different thing from recognizing its
title to control their freedom of thought and speech.
The Socrates
of the Crito insists, indeed, that a legally pronounced sentence
must be executed, and that he must therefore submit to death at the
hands of the State; but we misunderstand him badly if we fail to see
that he asserts even more strongly his right not to degrade himself
by a humiliating defence, or to make things easy for his accusers by
running away, which is just what they wanted him to do. No. Each party
must abide by the sentence pronounced; Socrates must die, and his accusers
must lie under condemnation for wickedness and
dishonesty. That is what he is made to say in the Apology,8
and he adds that so it was bound to be.
Even
Xenophon, who does put forward the plea of religious conformity on behalf
of Socrates, shows rather more insight than the Germans. In his own
Apology he admits that other accounts of the speech - Plato's, of
course, in particular - had succeeded in reproducing the lofty tone
(μεγαληγορία) of Socrates. He really did speak
like that, he says,9 and he was quite indifferent to the
result of the trial. Unfortunately this is immediately spoilt by a complaint
that no one had accounted for his indifference, so that it seemed
'rather unwise,' just as it does to the Germans. Xenophon's own
view, which he modestly attributes to Hermogenes, is that Socrates wished
to escape the evils of old age by a timely death. He did not want to
become blind and hard of hearing. It has not been given either to Xenophon
or to the Germans to see that the only thing to be expected of a brave
man accused on a trumpery charge is just that tone of humorous condescension
and persiflage which Plato has reproduced. As we shall see, there
are serious moments in the Apology
too, but the actual defence is rather a provocation than a plea for
acquittal. That is just why we feel so sure that the speech is true
to life.
We need not
doubt, then, that Socrates actually gave some such account of his mission
as that we read in the Apology,
though we must keep in view the 'ironical' character of this part of
the speech. Most English critics take it far too seriously. They seem
to think the message of Socrates to his fellow-citizens can have been
nothing more than is there revealed, and
that his sole business in life was to expose the ignorance of others.
If that had really been all, it is surely hard to believe that he would
have been ready to face death rather than relinquish his task.
No doubt Socrates held that the conviction of ignorance was the first
step on the way of salvation, and
that it was little use talking of anything else to people who had still
this step to take, but even Xenophon, whom these same critics generally
regard as an authority on 'the historical Socrates,' represents him
as a teacher of positive doctrine. It ought to be possible to discover
what this was even from the Apology
itself.
V
We must not
assume, indeed, that Socrates thought it worth while to say much about
his real teaching at the trial, though it is likely that he did indicate
its nature. There were certainly some among his five hundred judges
who deserved to be taken seriously. Even if he did not do this, however,
Plato was bound to do it for him, if he wished to produce the effect
he obviously intended to produce. As a matter of fact, he has done
it quite unmistakably, and the only reason why the point is usually
missed is that we find it hard to put ourselves in the place of those
to whom such doctrine was novel and strange.
The passage which lets us into the secret is that where Socrates is made to tell his judges that he will not give up what he calls 'philosophy,' even though they were to offer to acquit him on that condition. Here, if anywhere, is the place where we look for a statement of the truth for which he was ready to die, and Plato accordingly makes him give the sum and substance of his 'philosophy' in words which have obviously been chosen with the greatest care, and to which all possible emphasis is lent by the solemnity of the context and by the rhetorical artifice of repetition. What Socrates is made to say is this:
I will not
cease from philosophy and from exhorting you, and declaring the truth
to every one of you I meet, saying in the words I am accustomed to use:
'My good friend, . . . are you not ashamed of caring for money and how
to get as much of it as you can, and for honour and reputation, and
not caring or taking thought for wisdom and truth and for your soul,
and how to make it as good as possible?’
And again:
I go about
doing nothing else but urging you, young and old alike, not to care
for your bodies or for money sooner or as much as for your soul, and
how to make it as good as you can.'
To care for
their souls, 10 then, was what Socrates urged on his fellow-citizens,
and we shall have to consider how much that implies. First, however,
it should be noted that there are many echoes of the phrase in all the
Socratic literature. Xenophon uses it in contexts which do not appear
to be derived from Plato's dialogues. Antisthenes, it seems, employed
the phrase too, and he would hardly have borrowed it from Plato. Isocrates
refers to it as something familiar.11 The Athenian Academy
possessed a dialogue which was evidently designed as a sort of introduction
to Socratic philosophy for beginners, and is thrown into the appropriate
form of a conversation between Socrates and the young Alcibiades. It
is not, I think, by Plato, but it is of early date. In it Socrates shows
that, if any one is to care rightly for himself, he must first of all
know what he is; it is then proved that each of us is soul, and therefore
that to care for ourselves is to care for our souls. It is all put in
the most provokingly simple way, with the usual illustrations from shoemaking
and the like, and it strikingly confirms what is said in the Apology.12
I am not called upon to labour this point, however, for Maier admits,
and indeed insists, that this is the characteristic Socratic formula.
Let us see, then, where this admission will lead us.
Just at first,
I fear, it will seem to lead nowhere in particular. Such language has
become stale by repetition, and it takes an effort to appreciate it.
So far as words go, Socrates has done his work too well. It is an orthodox
and respectable opinion to-day that each one of us has a soul, and that
its welfare is his highest interest, and that was so already in the
fourth century B.C., as we can see from Isocrates. We assume without
examination that a similar vague orthodoxy on the subject existed in
the days of Socrates too, and that there was nothing very remarkable
in his reiteration of it. That is why Maier, having safely reached this
point, is content to inquire no further, and pronounces that Socrates
was not a philosopher in the strict sense, but only a moral teacher
with a method of his own. I hope to show that he has left off just where
he ought to have begun.
For it is here
that it becomes important to remember that Socrates belonged to the
age of Pericles. We have no right to assume that his words meant just
as much or as little as they might mean in Isocrates or in a modern
sermon. What we have to ask is what they would mean at the outbreak
of the Peloponnesian War; and, if we ask that question, we shall find,
I believe, that, so far from appearing commonplace, the exhortation
to 'care for his soul' must have come as a shock to the Athenian of
those days, and may even have seemed not a little ridiculous. It is
implied, we must observe, that there is something in us which is capable
of attaining wisdom, and that this same thing is
capable of attaining goodness and
righteousness. This something Socrates called 'soul' (ψυχή). Now no one had ever said that before,
in the sense in which Socrates meant it. Not only had the word (ψυχή)
never been used in this way, but the existence of what Socrates called
by the name had never been realized. If that can be shown, it will be
easier to understand how Socrates came to be regarded as the true founder
of philosophy, and our problem will be solved. This involves, of course
an inquiry into the history of the word ψυχή,
which may seem to be taking us a long way from Socrates, but that
cannot be helped if we really wish to measure the importance of the
advance he made. It will be obvious that in what follows I have been
helped by Rohde's Psyche, but that really great work seems to
me to miss the very point to which it ought to lead up. It has no chapter
on Socrates at all.
VI
Originally,
the word ψυχή meant 'breath,' but, by historical
times it had already been specialized in two distinct ways. It
had come to mean courage in the first place, and secondly the
breath of life. The first sense has nothing, of course, to do with
our present inquiry, but so much confusion has arisen from failure to
distinguish it from the second, that it will be as well to clear the
ground by defining its range. There is abundant evidence in many languages
of a primitive idea that pride and courage naturally expressed themselves
by hard breathing, or - not to put too fine a point upon it - snorting.
Perhaps this was first observed in horses. At any rate, the phrase 'to
breathe hard' (B<,أν*μέγα)
survived in the sense of 'to be proud,' and warriors are said 'to breathe
wrath' and 'to breathe Ares.' So the word ψυχή*was used, just like the Latin spiritus,
for what we still call 'high spirit.' Herodotus and the tragedians have
it often in this sense and Thucydides once.13 From this is
derived the adjective ,ـψυχοϛ, 'spirited,' 'courageous,' and the
'magnanimous' man, the μεγαλόψυχοϛ,
is properly the 'man of spirit.' It is clear that, if we wish to discover
what Socrates really meant by ψυχή when he called the seat of wisdom
and goodness by that name, we must eliminate all instances of the word
which fall under this head.
The second
meaning of ψυχή is the 'breath of life,' the presence
or absence of which is the most obvious distinction between the animate
and the inanimate. It is, in the first place, the 'ghost' a man 'gives
up' at death, but it may also quit the body temporarily, which explains
the phenomenon of swooning (λιποψχία). That being so, it seemed natural
to suppose it was also the thing that can roam at large when the body
is asleep and even appear to another sleeping person in his dream. Moreover,
since we can dream of the dead, what then appears to us must be just
what leaves the body at the moment of death. These considerations
explain the world-wide belief in the 'soul' as a sort of 'double' of
the real bodily man, the Egyptian y ka,
the Italian genius, and the Greek ψυχή.
Now this 'double' is not identified with whatever it is in us that feels and wills during our waking life. That is generally supposed to be blood and not breath. Homer has a great deal to say about feelings, but he never attributes any feeling to the ψυχή. The θυμόϛ and the νόοϛ, which do feel and perceive, have their seat in the midriff or the heart; they belong to the body and perish with it. In a sense, no doubt, the ψυχή continues to exist after death, since it can appear to the survivors, but in Homer it is hardly even a ghost, since it cannot appear to them otherwise than in a dream. It is a shadow (σκιά) or image (,ثδωλον), with no more substance, as Apollodorus put it, than the reflection of the body in a mirror.14 Departed souls are witless and feeble things. Tiresias is the exception that proves the rule, and in the Nekyia it is only when the shades have been allowed to drink blood that consciousness returns to them for a while. That is not because death has robbed the ψυχή of anything it ever had; it had nothing to do with
the conscious
life when it was in the body, and cannot therefore have any consciousness
when detached from it. A few favourites of heaven escape this dismal
lot by being sent to the Isles of the Blest, but these do not really
die at all. They are carried away still living and retain their bodies,
without which they would be incapable of bliss. This point, too, is
well noted by Apollodorus.15
VII
It is generally
agreed that these views can
hardly be primitive, and that the observances of the mortuary cult (τ*νομιξόμενα), which we find practised at
Athens and elsewhere, really bear witness to a far earlier stratum
of belief. They show that at one time the ψυχή
' was supposed to dwell with the body in the grave, where it had to
be supported by the offerings of the survivors especially by libations
(χοαί)
poured over the tomb. It has been fairly inferred that the immunity
of the Homeric world from ghosts had a good deal to do with the substitution
of cremation for burial. When the body is burnt the ψυχή
has no longer a foothold in this life. At any rate, the early Athenian
ghost was by no means so feeble and helpless a thing as the Homeric.
If a man's murder went unavenged, or if the offerings at his grave were
neglected, his ghost could 'walk,' and the feast of the Anthesteria
preserved the memory of a time when departed souls were believed to
revisit their old homes once a year. There is no trace of anything
here that can be called ancestor-worship. It is something much more
primitive than that. Though less helpless, and
therefore more formidable, than the Homeric' shade,' the early Athenian
ghost is dependent on the offerings of the survivors, and they make
these offerings, partly, no doubt, from feelings of natural piety, but
mainly to keep the ghost quiet. That is hardly to be called worship.
It is plain,
on the other hand, that these beliefs were mere
survivals in the Athens of the fifth century B.C. We should know next
to nothing about them were it not that the mortuary observances become
of legal importance in cases of homicide and inheritance, so that the
orators had to treat them seriously, and,
moreover, they went on quite comfortably side by side with the
wholly inconsistent belief that departed souls all went to a place of
their own. We know now that Lucian's picture of Charon and
his boat faithfully reproduces the imagery of the sixth century B.C.;
for it agrees exactly with the representation on a recently discovered
piece of black figured pottery.16 There we see the
souls-miserable little creatures with wings - weeping on the bank
and praying to be taken aboard, while Charon sits in the stern and makes
all he has room for work their passage by rowing. The people who decorated
a piece of pottery, obviously intended for use in the mortuary cult,
with such a scene had evidently no living belief in the continued existence
of the soul within the grave. We find the same contradiction in Egypt,
but there both beliefs were taken seriously. The Egyptians were a businesslike
people, and got out of the difficulty by assuming two souls, one
of which (the ka) remains in the tomb while the other (the
ba) departs to the place of the dead. Similar devices were adopted
elsewhere, but the Greeks felt no need for anything of the sort. We
may safely infer that the old belief had lost its hold upon them.
Whichever way
we take it, the traditional Athenian beliefs about the soul were cheerless
enough, and we cannot wonder at the popularity of the Eleusianian Mysteries,
which promised a better lot of some sort to the initiated after death.
It does not appear, however, that this was at all clearly conceived.
The obligation of secrecy referred to the ritual alone, and we should
hear something more definite as to the future life, if the Mysteries
had been explicit about it. As it is, the chorus in the Frogs
of Aristophanes probably tell us all there was to tell, and that only
amounts to a vision of meadows and feasting - a sort of glorified picnic.
Of one thing we may be quite sure, namely, that no new view of the soul
was revealed in the Mysteries; for in that case we should certainly
find some trace of it in Aeschylus. As a matter of fact, he tells us
nothing about the soul, and hardly ever mentions it. To him, as to most
of his contemporaries, thought belongs to the body; it is the blood
round the heart, and that ceases to think at death. The life to come
has no place in his scheme of things, and that is just why he is so
preoccupied with the problem of the fathers' sins being visited on the
children. Justice must be done on earth or not at all.
In any case,
the promises held out in the Mysteries are quite as inconsistent with
the beliefs implied by the mortuary cult as are Charon and his boat,
and the fact that the Eleusinia had been taken over by the State as
part of the public religion shows once more how little hold such beliefs
had on the ordinary Athenian. I do not mean that he actively disbelieved
them, but I should suppose he
thought very little about them. After all, the Athenians were brought
up on Homer, and their everyday working beliefs were derived from that
source. Besides, Homer was already beginning to be interpreted allegorically,
and the prevailing notion in the time of Socrates certainly was that
the souls of the dead were absorbed by the upper air, just as their
bodies were by the earth. In the Suppliants
Euripides gives us the formula 'Earth to earth and air to air,' and
that is no heresy of his own.17 It was so much a matter of
course that it had been embodied in the official epitaph on those who
had fallen at Potidaea some years earlier (432 B.C.).18
There is nothing, remarkable in that. There was no room in the public
religion for any doctrine of immortality. The gods alone are immortal,
and it would be shocking to suggest that human beings might be so too.
The dead are just the dead, and how can the dead be deathless? In
the heroic age, indeed, some human beings had attained immortality by
being turned into gods and heroes, but such things were not expected
to happen now. The heroic honours paid to Brasidas at Amphipolis had
a political motive, and were hardly taken seriously.
VIII
So far I have
been dealing with the beliefs of the ordinary citizen and with the official
religion of Athens but it would have been easy to find people there
who held very different views about the soul. There were the members
of Orphic societies in the first place, and there were also the votaries
of Ionian science, who had become fairly numerous since Anaxagoras first
introduced it to the Athenians. On the whole, the Orphics would be found
chiefly among the humbler classes, and the adherents of Ionian science
chiefly among the enlightened aristocracy. Even in the absence of direct
testimony we should be bound to assume that Socrates, who was interested
in everything and tested everything, did not pass by the two most remarkable
movements which took place at Athens in his own generation, and if we
wish to replace him among the surroundings of his own time we must certainly
take account of these. The religious movement was the earlier in date,
and claims our attention first.
The most striking
feature of Orphic belief is that it is based on the denial of what we
have just seen to be the cardinal doctrine of Greek religion,
namely, that there is an impassable, or almost impassable, gulf between
gods and men. The Orphics held, on the contrary, that every soul is
a fallen god, shut up in the prison-house of the body as a penalty for
antenatal sin. The aim of their religion as practised was to secure
the release of the soul from its bondage by means of certain observances
directed to cleansing and purging it of original sin (καθαρμοί). Those souls which were sufficiently
purged returned once more to the gods and took their old place among
them.
That is certainly
not primitive belief but theological speculation, such as we find among
the Hindus and, in a cruder form, among the Egyptians. The trouble was
till recently that there seemed to be no room for an age of such speculation
within the limits of Greek history as we knew it, and many modern scholars
have followed the lead of Herodotus in holding that it came from the
'barbarians,' and in particular from Egypt. On the other hand, Orphicism
was closely bound up with the worship of Dionysus, which seems to have
come from Thrace, and we can hardly credit the Thracians with a gift
for mystical theology. If, however, we take a wider view, we shall find
that doctrines of a similar character are to be found in many places
which have nothing to do with Thrace. Zielinski has shown strong grounds
for believing that the Hermetic theology, which became important in
later days, originated in Arcadia, and especially in Mantinea, the home
of the prophetess Diotima, who is certainly not to be regarded as a
fictitious personage.19
There were mystical elements in the worship of the Cretan Zeus, and
a book of prophecies was extant in later days composed in the dialect
of Cyprus, which is practically identical with the Arcadian.20
The geographical distribution of the doctrine strongly suggests that
we have really to do with a survival from the Aegean Age, and that the
period of theological speculation we seem bound to assume was just the
time of the power of Cnossus. If that is so, the priests of Heliopolis
in the Delta may quite as well have borrowed from Crete as vice versa,
if there was any borrowing at all. There is no need to look for remote
origins.
However that may be, it is certain that such doctrines flourished exceedingly in the sixth century B.C., and that their influence on the higher thought of Greece was by no means negligible. We must, however, be careful to avoid exaggeration here; for, while it is certain that the Orphics attached an importance to the 'soul' which went far beyond anything recognized in the public or private religion of the Greek states, it is by no means so clear that they went much beyond primitive spiritism in the account they gave of its nature. In so far as the soul was supposed to reveal its true nature in 'ecstasy,' which might be artificially produced by drugs or dancing, that is obvious; but, even in its higher manifestations, the doctrine still bears traces of its primitive origin. The earliest statement in literature of the unique divine origin of the soul is to be found in a fragment of one of Pindar’s Dirges, 21 but even there it is called an 'image of life' ("<@l ,ثδωλον) surviving after death, much in the Homeric way, and we are expressly told that it 'sleeps when the limbs are active' (,ـ*,4 *¥*πρασσόντων*μελέων) and shows its prophetic nature only in dreams. In fact, as Adam said, it is rather like what has been called 'the subliminal self' in modern times, and is quite dissociated from the, normal waking consciousness.22 It may be divine and immortal, but it is really no concern of ours except in sleep and at the moment of death. It is not identified with what we call 'I'.
The word *ψυχή had also been used by the scientific schools of Ionia in quite another than the popular and traditional sense. This appears to have originated in the doctrine of Anaximenes, that 'air' (ήρ), the primary substance, was the life of the world, just as the breath was the life of the body. That doctrine was being taught at Athens by Diogenes of Apollonia in the early manhood of Socrates, who is represented as an adherent of it in the Clouds of Aristophanes. The emphasis lies entirely on the cosmical side, however. There is no special interest in the individual human soul, which is just that portion of the boundless air which happens to be shut up in our body for the time being, and which accounts for our life and consciousness. There is a great advance on primitive views here in so far as the*ψυχή*is identified here for the first time with the normal waking consciousness, and not with the dream-consciousness. This point is specially emphasized in the system of Heraclitus, which was based precisely on the opposition between waking and sleeping, life and death.23 The waking soul is that in which the elemental fire burns bright and dry; sleep and death are due to its partial or total extinction. On the other hand, the soul is in a state of flux just as much as the body. It, too, is a river into which
you cannot step twice; there is nothing you can speak of as 'I' or even 'this.' Anaxagoras preferred to call the source of motion he was
obliged to
postulate <@طϛ
instead of ψυχή, but for our present purpose he meant
much the same thing. The common feature in all these theories is that
our conscious life comes to us 'from out of doors' (θύραθεν),
as Aristotle puts it, employing a term elsewhere used in describing
respiration. Its existence is of a temporary and accidental character,
depending solely on the fact that for the moment a portion of the primary
substance is enclosed in a particular body. It will be seen that this
fits in well enough with the view commonly accepted at Athens and expressed
in the formula 'Earth to earth and air to air.' That is why no one was
shocked by the scientific view. The 'sophists' were accused of almost
everything, but I do not remember any place where they are blamed for
failing to 'think nobly of the soul.' There was no doctrine of soul
in the received religion, or none worth talking about, and there could
therefore be no impiety in what the sophists taught. The Orphic doctrine
was far more likely to offend current prejudices.
The Pythagoreans
might, perhaps, have developed a more adequate doctrine of the soul;
for they shared the religious interest of the Orphics and the scientific
interests of the Ionians. As it happened, however, their musical and
medical studies led them to regard it as a 'blend' (κρσιϛ) or 'attunement' (άρμονία) of the elements which compose the
body, of which, therefore it is merely a function.24 Democritus
went so far, indeed, as to distinguish the pleasures of the soul as
more 'divine' than those of the 'tabernacle' (F6νοϛ)
or body; but, since he held the soul to be corporeal, that was only
a difference of degree.25 On the whole, we must conclude
that neither religion nor philosophy in the fifth century B.C. knew
anything of the Soul. What they called by that name was something
extrinsic and dissociated from the normal personality, which
was altogether dependent on the body.
X
In the Athenian
literature of the fifth century the idea of soul is still more unknown.
We might have expected that the Orphic, if not the scientific theory,
would have left some trace, but even that did not happen. In a matter
of this kind vague general impressions are useless, and the observations
I am about to make are based on what I believe to be a complete enumeration
of all instances of the word *ψυχή in the extant Athenian literature
of the fifth century, including Herodotus, who wrote mainly for Athenians.
I was much surprised by the result of this inquiry, which showed that,
down to the very close of the century, there is hardly an instance of
the word in any other than a purely traditional sense.
In the first place, as I have said before, it often means ‘high spirit’ or courage, but that does not concern us for the present. In a certain number of passages it means ‘ghost,’ but ghosts are not often mentioned. In a larger number of places it may be translated 'life,' and that is where possible misunderstandings begin. It has not, in fact, been sufficiently observed that *ψυχή, in the literature of this period, never means the life of a man except when he is dying or in danger of death, or, in other words, that the Attic usage is so far the same as the Homeric. You may lose or 'give up' your ψυχή*or you may save it; you may risk it or fight or speak in its defence; you may sacrifice it like Alcestis or cling ignobly to it like Admetus. To 'love one’s ψυχή' is to shrink from death, and φιλοψυχία is a common word for cowardice. In the same sense you may say that a thing is dear as 'dear life.' As for the ψυχαί of other people, you may mourn them or avenge them, in which case *ψυχή clearly means lost life, and may just as well be rendered 'death' as 'life.' The one thing you cannot do with a ψυχή is to live by it. When Heracles in Euripides26 bids Amphitryon 'do violence to his soul,' he means 'Force yourself to live,' and the literal sense of his words is 'Hold in the breath of life
by force' and
do not let it escape. 'Refuse to give up the ghost,' comes near
it. Similarly, the expression 'Collect your ψυχή 27
properly means 'Make an effort not to swoon,' and implies the same idea
of holding one’s breath. You will search the Athenian writers of the
fifth century in vain for a single instance of ψυχή meaning 'life,' except in connexion
with swooning or death.
The ψυχή*is also spoken of in the tragedians as the seat of certain feelings, in which case we naturally render it by ‘heart.’ What has not been observed is that these feelings are always of a very special kind. We saw that Pindar thought of the ψυχή as a sort of 'subliminal self' which 'sleeps when the limbs are active,'
but has prophetic
visions when the body is asleep. In Attic tragedy this function is generally
attributed to the heart and not the 'soul,' but there is one place at
least where ψυχή seems definitely to mean the 'subconscious.'
In the Troades the infant Astyanax, when about to die, is pitied
for having had no conscious experience of the privileges of royalty.
'Thou sawest them and didst mark them in thy ψυχή but thou knowest them not.'28
This seems to be the only place where knowledge of any kind is ever
ascribed to the ψυχή, and it is expressly denied to be
knowledge. It is only the vague awareness of early childhood which leaves
no trace in the memory. We note the same idea in another place where
something is said to strike upon the ψυχή as familiar, that is, to awaken dormant
memories.29 That explains further how the ψυχή may be made to 'smart' by being touched
on the raw, and also why certain griefs are said to 'reach' the ψυχή.
We still speak of a 'touching' spectacle or an appeal that 'reaches'
the heart, though we have forgotten the primitive psychology on which
the phrases are based.
If we follow
up this clue we find that the feelings referred to the ψυχή*are always those which belong to that
obscure part of us which has most affinity with the dream-consciousness.
Such are all strange yearnings and forebodings and grief 'too great
for words,' as we say. Such, too, is the sense of oppression and gloom
which accompanies the feelings of horror and despair, and which is spoken
of as a weight of which we seek to lighten our ψυχή. Anxiety and depression - what we
call 'low spirits' - have their seat in the ψυχή, and so have all unreasoning terrors
and dreads. Strange, overmastering passion, like the love of Phaedra,
is once or twice said to attack the ψυχή..30 Twice in Sophocles
it is the seat of kindly feeling (,ـνοια),
but that goes rather beyond its ordinary range.31
It is safe
to say that the ψυχή is never regarded as having anything
to do with clear perception or knowledge, or even with articulate emotion.
It remains something mysterious and uncanny, quite apart from our normal
consciousness. The gift of prophecy and magical skill are once or twice
referred to it, but never thought or character. It is still, therefore,
essentially the 'double' of primitive belief, and that is just why it
can address us or be addressed by us as if it were something distinct
from us. That, of course, became a mannerism or figure of speech, but
it was not so at first. The 'soul' of the Watchman in the Antigone,
which tries to dissuade him from making his report to Creon, can claim
kindred with the 'conscience' of Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare's
Merchant.
We shall now be able to see the bearings of some special uses of the word ψυχή. It is spoken of, for instance, as the seat of a guilty conscience. That is brought out clearly by a remarkable passage in Antipho,32 where he is making his client argue that he would never have come to Athens if he had been conscious of guilt. 'A guiltless ψυχή will often,' he says, 'preserve both itself and an exhausted body, but a guilty one will leave even a vigorous body in the lurch.' It is from the same point of view that the law of homicide demands the forfeiture of the guilty 'soul' (*δράσασα*or βουλεύσασα*ψυχή),33 a phrase in which the use of ψυχή*as the seat
of conscience
is combined with its meaning of life as a thing to be lost. Several
passages of the tragedians are to be interpreted as the light of this.
Aeschylus, indeed, makes the conscience reside in the heart, as was
to be expected, but he is emphatic in referring it to the dream-consciousness.
It is 'in the right season' that the sore of the remorse breaks out.34
Even the placid Cephalus of Plato's Republic is wakened once
and again from his sleep by the fear that he may have some sin against
gods or men on his conscience.
Another mysterious feeling closely associated with the subconscious element in our life is the sentiment of kinship, what the French call la voix du sang. The Greeks, too, usually spoke of blood in this connection, but Clytemnestra in Sophocles addresses Electra as 'born of my ψυχή35 and occasionally near kinsmen are spoken of as having 'one soul' instead of 'one blood.'
Finally, we
must notice a curious and particularly instructive use of the word,
which we know to have been derived from popular language. The ψυχή*is
the seat of wayward moods and appetites, and especially of those unaccountable
longings for certain kinds of food and drink which sometimes emerge
from the more irrational and uncontrolled part of our nature. The Cyclops
in Euripides, who has not tasted human flesh for ever so long, says
he will do his ψυχή*a good turn by eating Odysseus up.36
Even Aeschylus does not disdain to make the ghost of Darius advise the
Persian elders to 'give their souls some pleasure day by day'37.
Just so the Romans said animo
or genio indulgere, and spoke of acting animi causa.
It is a quaint piece of primitive psychology, and it is certainly convenient
to make a 'double,' for which you are not strictly responsible, the
source of those strange yearnings for good living to which the best
of us are subject now and then. The Egyptian ka
had similar tendencies. Looked at in this way, the ψυχή is the merely 'animal' element of
our nature.
I have now
covered practically all the uses of the word ψυχή*in the Athenian literature of the fifth
century. Even in Lysias, who belongs to the fourth, there is only one
instance of the word in any but a traditional sense, which is the more
remarkable as he had belonged to the fringe at least of the Socratic
circle. The few exceptions I have noted are all of the kind that proves
the rule. When Herodotus is discussing the supposed Egyptian origin
of the belief in immortality, he naturally uses ψυχή*in the Orphic sense.38 Hippolytus
in Euripides speaks of a 'virgin soul,' but he is really an Orphic figure.39
Otherwise the word is used by Euripides in a purely traditional manner,
even in the Bacchae. Aeschylus employs it very seldom, and then
quite simply. Sophocles, as might be expected, is rather subtler,
but I cannot find more than two passages where he really goes beyond
the limits I have indicated, and they both occur in one of his
latest plays, the Philoctetes.
Odysseus tells Neoptolemus that he is to 'entrap the ψυχή*of Philoctetes with words,'40
which seems to imply that it is the seat of knowledge, and Philoctetes
speaks of 'the mean soul of Odysseus peering through crannies,'
41 which seems to imply that it is the seat of character. These
instances belong to the very close of the century and anticipate the
usage of the next. There is no other place where it is even suggested
that the 'soul' has anything, to do with knowledge or ignorance, goodness
or badness, and to Socrates that was the most important thing about
it.
Now, if even the higher poetry observed these limits, we may be sure that popular language did so even more strictly. When urged to 'care for his soul,' the plain man at Athens might suppose he was being advised to have a prudent regard for his personal safety, to 'take care of his skin,' as we say, or even that he was being recommended to have what is called 'a good time.' If we can trust Aristophanes, the words would suggest to him
that he was to 'mind his ghost.' The Birds tell us how Pisander came to Socrates 'wanting to
see the ψυχή*that
had deserted him while still alive,' where there is a play on the double
meaning 'courage' and 'ghost.' Socrates is
recognized as the authority on ψυχή, who 'calls spirits' (ψυχαγωγε)
from the deep.42 The inmates of his thought-factory (φροντιστή-ριον)
are derisively called 'wise ψυχαί' in the Clouds.43
It is true that once in Aristophanes we hear of 'crafty souls' (δόλιαι*ψυχαί), which reminds us of the Philoctetes;
but the speaker is an oracle-monger from Oreos, so that is another exception
that proves the rule.44 We may, I think, realize the bewilderment
which the teaching of Socrates would produce, if we think of the uncomfortable
feeling often aroused by the English words 'ghost' and 'ghostly' in
their old sense of 'spirit' and 'spiritual'. There is something not
altogether reassuring in the phrase 'ghostly admonition.'
XI
The novelty
of this Socratic use of the word ψυχή is also indicated by the curiously
tentative phrases he is sometimes made to substitute for it, phrases
like 'Whatever it is in us that has knowledge or ignorance, goodness
or badness.'45 On
the same principle I should explain the reference of Alcibiades in the
Symposium to ‘the heart or soul or whatever we ought to
call it.'46 Such fine historical touches are much in Plato's
way, and the hesitation of Alcibiades is natural if Socrates was the
first to use the word like this. He denied, if I am not mistaken, that
the soul was any sort of mysterious second self, and identified it frankly
with our ordinary consciousness; but, on the other hand, he held it
to be more than it seemed to be, and therefore to require all the 'care'
that the votaries of Orpheus bade men give to the fallen god within
them. No doubt it is open to any one to maintain that, even so, Socrates
was not really original. He only combined the Orphic doctrine of the
purification of the fallen soul with the scientific view of the soul
as the waking consciousness. That is a favourite device of those who
make it their business to depreciate the originality of great men. Against
it it may be urged the power of transfusing the apparently disparate
is exactly what is meant by originality. The religious and the scientific
view might have gone on indefinitely side by side, as we find them in
fact simply juxtaposed in Empedocles. It took a Socrates to see that
they were complementary, and by uniting them to reach the idea best
rendered in English by the old word 'spirit.' In that sense and to that
extent he was the founder of philosophy.
From the
Apology alone it may, I feel sure, be inferred that to Socrates
the immortality of the soul followed as a necessary corollary from this
view of its nature, but the important thing to notice is that this was
not the point from which he started nor that upon which he chiefly dwelt.
If, for a moment, I may go beyond the Apology
and Crito for a negative argument, it is not a little remarkable
that, both in the Phaedo47
and the Republic,48
Plato represents the closest intimates of Socrates as startled by his
profession of belief in immortality. It does not seem, then, that this
formed the ordinary theme of his discourse. What he did preach
as the one thing needful for the soul was that it should strive after
wisdom and goodness.
Of course,
Maier is compelled by the evidence he admits as valid to recognize that
Socrates called his work in
life 'philosophy,' but he holds that this philosophy consisted solely
in the application of the dialectical method to moral exhortation. That
is why he says Socrates was no philosopher in the strict sense of the
word. If he only means that he did not expound a system in a course
of lectures, that is doubtless true; but, even at the worst of times,
philosophy never meant merely that to the Greeks. It is not correct
either to say that the wisdom of which Socrates is made to speak in
the Apology and Crito
was merely practical wisdom. At this point Maier makes a bad mistake
by importing the Aristotelian distinction between φρόνησιϛ*and σοφία
into the discussion. No doubt that distinction has its value, but at
this date φρόνησιϛ*and σοφία,
were completely synonymous terms, and they continued to be used quite
promiscuously by Plato. It is wisdom and truth (ND`<0F4l
6"آ*λήθεια)
that the soul is to aim at, and it is an anachronism to introduce the
Aristotelian idea of 'practical truth.' If the word φρόνησιϛ*is
on the whole preferred to σοφία,
it is only because the latter had rather bad associations, like our
'cleverness.' It is hardly worth while, however, to waste words on this
point; for the Socratic doctrine that Goodness is knowledge amounts
to a denial that there is any ultimate distinction between theory
and practice.
XII
The conditions
of our experiment did not allow us to admit much evidence, and that
seemed at first rather unpromising. Nevertheless, we have been
able to reach a result of the first importance, which must now be stated
precisely. We have found that, if the Apology
is to be trusted in a matter of the kind, Socrates was in the habit
of exhorting his fellow-citizens to 'care for their souls.' That is
admitted by Maier. We have seen further that such an exhortation implies
a use of the word ψυχή and a view of the soul's nature quite
unheard of before the time of Socrates. The Orphics, indeed, had insisted
on the need of purging the soul, but for them the soul was not the normal
personality;49 it was a stranger from another world that
dwelt in us for a time. The Ionian cosmologists had certainly identified
the soul with our waking consciousness, but that too came to us from
outside. As Diogenes of Apollonia put it, it was a 'small fragment of
god,'50 by which he meant a portion of the cosmical 'air'
which happens for the time being to animate our bodies. Socrates, so
far as we could see, was the first to say that the normal consciousness
was the true self, and that it deserved all the care bestowed on the
body's mysterious tenant by the religious. The jests of Aristophanes
made it plain that Socrates was known as
a man who spoke strangely of the soul before 423 B.C., and this takes
us back to a time when Plato was not five years old, so that there can
be no question of him as the author of the view he ascribes to Socrates.
We may fairly conclude, I think, that the 'wisdom' which so impressed
the boy Alcibiades and the impulsive Chaerepho, was just this.
I promised
not to go beyond the evidence allowed by Maier, and I must therefore
stop on the threshold of the Socratic philosophy. I cannot, however,
refrain from suggesting the lines on which further investigation would
proceed. In a dialogue written thirty years after the death of Socrates,
the Theaetetus, Plato makes him describe his method of bringing
thoughts to birth in language derived from his mother’s calling, and
we can prove this to be genuinely Socratic from the evidence of Aristophanes,
who had made fun of it more than half a century before.35
The maieutic method in turn involves the theory of knowledge mythically
expressed in the doctrine of Reminiscence. The doctrine of Love, which
Socrates in the Symposium professes to have learnt from Diotima,
is only an extension of the same line of thought, and it may be added
that it furnishes the natural explanation of his mission.
If Socrates really held that the soul was irresistibly driven to go
beyond itself in the manner there described, there was no need of an
oracle from Delphi to [have] him take up the task of converting the
Athenians. That, however, is transgressing the limits I had imposed
on myself, and I do not wish to prejudice what I believe to be the solid
result we have reached. That in itself is enough to show that it is
of very little consequence whether we call Socrates a philosopher in
the proper sense or not; for we now see how it is due to him that, in
Julian's words, 'all who find salvation in philosophy are being saved
even now.' That is the problem we set out to solve. I only wished to
throw out a few hints to show that Maier would have to write another
6oo pages at least to exhaust the implications of his own admissions.
Some of us will prefer to think it has been better done already by Plato.
NOTES
1 264 c.
2 H. Maier, Sokrates, sein Werk und seine geschichtliche Stellung (Tűbingen, 1913), p. 3.
3 p. 147.
4 In passing from the story of his first intimacy with Socrates to that of Potidaea, Alcibiades saysε*J"طτά*τε*γάρ*μοι*B"<J" BD@L(`<,4s 6"آ*μετ J"طτα*κτλ., 'That was an old story, but at a later time, &c.' (Symp., 219 C, 5).
5 He thought it would be a stroke of luck πάντ*6@طF"4 ذF"B,D @âJ@l ³δει*(Symp., 217 a, 4).
6 Symp., 220 c, 3 sqq. Maier says (p.301 n.) that this obviously depends on trustworthy tradition.
7 P. 105.
8 39 b, 4 sqq.
9 Xen., Apol.,I, *κα*δλον*τι**τ*ντι*οτωϛ*ρρθη*π*Σωκρύτουϛ. Plato was present at the trial., but Xenophon was ‘somewhere in Asia.'
10 29 d, 4 sqq., and 3o a, 7 sqq.
11 For references see Maier, p. 333, n.3. The allusion in Isocrates (Antid.,§ 309) was noted by Grote (Plato, vol. I. P. 341).
12 [Plato] Alc., i. 127 e, 9 sqq.
13 Thuc., ii- 40, 3- In Herod., v. 124, we are told that Aristagoras was RLP¬< @غκ*κροϛ. From the context we see clearly that this means he was poor-spirited. I mention this because Liddell and Scott are wrong on the point.
14 Apollodorus B,Dآ 2,نν (Stob., Ecl., i. P- 420, Wachsm.) ποτίθεται*τϛ*ψυχl J@أl ,آ*f8@4l J@أl ¦< J@أl 6"JbBJD@4l N"4<@:X<@4l `:@\"l 6"آ J@أϛ*δι JT< كδάτων*συνισταμένοιϛ, J@أϛ*δι JT< ك*VJT< FL<4FJ":X<@4l J@أϛ*δι JT< كδάτων*συνισταμένοιϛ, FJ,D,D<f*0 *¥ bB`FJ"F4< @غ*,:\"< §P,4 ,ئϛ*<J\80R4< 6"آ*άφήν.*
15 Apollodorus, ib. (Stob., Ecl., i. P- 422), J@bJ@4l :¥< @ق< 6"آ*τ*σώματα**παρείναι.
16 Furtwنngler, Charon, eine altattische Malerei (Archiv für Religions-wissenschaft, viii. (1905), pp. 191 sqq.).
17 Eur., Suppl., 533-
**B<,ط:" :¥< BDخl "ئθέρα,
**J× Fن:" *z ¦l (ν.
18 C.I.A., I. 442 –
"ئ2²D :¥ν*ψυχϛ*ύπεδεϘξατο, Ff:"J" *¥*χθών
19 Archiv für Religionmissenscliaft, ix. (1906), p. 43.-
20 On Euclous the Cyprian, see M. Schmidt in Kuhns Zeitschrift, ix. (1860), pp.361 sqq. The identity of the Arcadian and Cypriote dialects is the most certain and fundamental fact with regard to the Aegean Age.
21 Pindar, fr. 131 Bergk.
22 Adam, The Doctrine of the Celestial Origin of the Soul (Cambridge Praelections, 1906). Adam pointed Out (p32) that Myers chose, the Pindaric fragment as the heading of his chapter on Sleep (Human Personality, vol.i.p.121).
23 See my Greek Philosophy, Part 1, Thales to Plato, §41.
24 See ib. § 75-
25 See ib. § 155,
26 Eur., Herc., 1366, RLP¬ν*βιύζου. Wilamowitz's interpretation of this is singularly perverse.
27 Eur., Herc., 626, Fb88@(@L RLPl 8"$¥ 3 JD`:@L J, B"طσαι. Cf. Phoen., 850, λλ Fb88,>@< F2X<@l ] 6"آ B<,ط:z ـθροισον.
28 Eur., Tro., 1171. See B. H. Kennedy in Tyrrell's note.
29 Soph., El.; 902.
30 Eur., Hipp., 504, 526.
31 Soph., O-C., 498, fr. 98.
32. De caede Herodis § 93.
33 Antipho, Tet.,T.a, 7. Cf. Plato, Laws, 873 a, i.
34 See Headlam, Agamemnon, p 186.
35 Soph., El., 775.
36 Eur., Cycl., 340
37 Aesch., Pers., 840.
38 Herod., ii. 123.
39 Eur., Hipp., 1006
40 Soph., Phil., 55
41 Sopli., Phil., 1013..
42 Arist., Birds, 1555 sqq.
43 Arist., Clouds, 94.
44 Arist., Peace, 1068.
45 Cf, Crito, 47 e, 8, سJ4 B@Jz ¦FJآ ²:,J ¦DT<s B,Dآ س »*τε**46\" 6"آ º*δικαιοσύνη ¦στίν .
46 Symp., 218 a, 3, RLPZ J¬ν*καρδίαν*γD » RLP¬< » ـJ4 "غJخ دνομάσαι*κτλ
47 Plato, Phaed., 70 2, 1 sqq.
48 Plato, Rep., 6o8 d, 3.
49 The doctrine of*παλιγγενσία or transmigration, in its usual form, implies this dissociation of the 'soul ' from the rest of the personality. For this reason I do not believe that Socrates accepted it in that sense.
50 A.19. Diels, :46Dخ< :`D4@< J@ط 2,@طζ
51 Arist.,
Clouds 137.
q
All Rights Reserved Powered by Free Document Search and Download
Copyright © 2011