A Short History of Greek Philosophy by John Marshall

Author:John Marshall [Marshall, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Closely connected in subject with the Symposium is the Phaedrus. As Professor Jowett observes: "The two dialogues together contain the whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in The Republic and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the Phaedrus and Symposium love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the other. The spiritual and emotional is elevated into the ideal, to which in the Symposium mankind are described as looking forward, and which in the Phaedrus, as well as in the Phaedo, they are seeking to recover from a former state of existence."

We are here introduced to one of the most famous conceptions of Plato, that of Reminiscence, or Recollection, based upon a theory of the prior existence of the soul. In the Meno, already alluded to, Socrates is representing as eliciting from one of Meno's slaves {143} correct answers to questions involving a knowledge or apprehension of certain axioms of the science of mathematics, which, as Socrates learns, the slave had never been taught. Socrates argues that since he was never taught these axioms, and yet actually knows them, he must have known them before his birth, and concludes from this to the immortality of the soul. In the Phaedo this same argument is worked out more fully. As we grow up we discover in the exercise of our senses that things are equal in certain respects, unequal in many others; or again, we appropriate to things or acts the qualities, for example, of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness. At the same time we recognise that these are ideals, to which in actual experience we never find more than an approximation, for we never discover in any really existing thing or act absolute equality, or justice, or goodness. In other words, any act of judgment on our part of actual experiences consists in a measuring of these experiences by standards which we give or apply to them, and which no number of experiences can give to us because they do not possess or exemplify them. We did not consciously possess these notions, or ideals, or ideas, as he prefers to call them, at birth; they come into consciousness in connection with or in consequence of the action of the senses; but since the senses could not give these ideas, the process of {144} knowledge must be a process of Recollection. Socrates carries the argument a step further. "Then may we not say," he continues, "that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty and goodness and other similar ideas or essences, and to this standard, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them—assuming these ideas to have a prior existence, then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, not? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and if not the ideas, then not the souls.

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