ABSTRACT
Plato, as we all know, represents Socrates in many of his dialogues as habitually expounding the doctrine that the true objects of scientific knowledge, and consequently the supreme realities of the objective world, are not sensible things, but certain ίδέaι, είδη, or, as Locke would have said, “real essences” which are indiscernible by sense-perception, and apprehended only by a kind of non-sensuous perception of the intellect, μόνωι θεατά νῶι. And it is to be noticed that he ascribes this doctrine to Socrates as one which he had maintained from a very early time in his mental history. In the Phaedo the doctrine is repeatedly spoken of as one recognised as fundamental not only by Socrates but by a whole group of his Eleatic and Pythagorean friends, in fact by the whole circle who were present at his death, as is shown by the repeated assertion that it is what “we” are accustomed to believe, the assumption which “we” regularly make when we “put the seal of ὸ έστι” on a term, and so forth. The passages have been already quoted with exact references in preceding essays, so that there is no need to reproduce the list of them here. Similarly, in the Parmenides, where Socrates is represented as an exceedingly young man, Socrates is said to have expounded the same doctrine to Parmenides and Zeno, and, what is more remarkable, they are assumed to have understood its meaning from the very first. They are represented as 179being in doubt as to the range of objects which are included among these εíδη; they have to ask, e.g., whether Socrates believes not only in εíδη answering to the concepts of the ideal “norms” of mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics, but also in εíδη of the physical elements and the beings formed out of their compounds (πῦρ, ὕδωρ, ἅνθρωπος, 130 c), and of apparently formless aggregates of matter such as θρίξ, πηλός, ῥύπος; and Socrates himself feels some difficulty about the matter (130 c–d). They also raise subtle difficulties about the nature of the relation between the εíδη and the sensible things which, according to the doctrine of the Platonic Socrates, get a secondary and derivative kind of existence from “participating” in these εíδη, “having communion with” them, exhibiting their “presence.” The one question they do not think of asking is what an εíδος or íδέα is. This they are presumed to understand perfectly from the outset. Similarly the doctrine is assumed to be known and accepted by the Locrian astronomer Timaeus, and he, too, though no member of the familiar Socratic group, but a Pythagoreau from Magna Graecia, represents it as something universally believed in by a community, presumably the Pythagorean circle to which he belongs. (Timaeus 51 c μάτην έκάστοτε εíναί τí ϕαμεν είδος έκάστου νοητόν, τὸ δ᾽ οὐδέν ἅρ ὴν πλὴν λόγος;) To be sure, it is almost universally asserted that this representation is unhistorical, and that Plato is merely making Socrates the mouthpiece of a doctrine which he well knew himself to have invented, and for which he had himself devised the characteristic technical nomenclature, much as the Alexandrian author of the Wisdom of Solomon and the Palestinian author of Ecclesiastes put thoughts demonstrably borrowed from Greek literature and philosophy into the mouth of the “son of David, king over Israel in Jerusalem”; though the theory still leaves it a mystery why Plato should have carried the fiction so far as to include the Pythagoreans of Magna Graecia among the “we” to whom he ascribes his doctrine, and why Aristotle should have accepted the fiction so readily that he habitually treats 180Platonism as Pythagoreanisin with a few peculiar modifications.
