Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater by Walter Pater

Author:Walter Pater [Pater, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Delphi Main Series
ISBN: 9781786560933
Publisher: Delphi Classics
Published: 2017-07-17T22:00:00+00:00

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

II. DIALECTIC

Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual conditions of different ages, prevailed — three distinct literary methods, in the presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeôs,+ “Concerning Nature”; according to the manner of Pythagoras, “his golden verses,” of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of thinking.

It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native intuition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which rattle in one’s ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a formal treatise; the perfected philosophic temper being situated midway between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and issues. Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of the relative, or “modern” spirit, in the Renaissance of the sixteenth century.*

The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth. If oracular verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper vehicle of enthusiastic intuitions; if the treatise, with its ambitious array of premiss and conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing — of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities — is indicative of Montaigne’s peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? Who knows? — in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.

And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic Dialogue, in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially an essay — an essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of philosophic poetry, the prose-poem of Heraclitus.

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