The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men [Vol. 4]

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER

Dr. Richard Garnett, in his Life of Emerson, ends his comment on the previous chapter, the "Uses of Great Men," by saying that "we find ourselves landed at last in Emerson's favourite conclusion [the Universal Mind], with but slight idea how we have arrived at it. 'Genius appears as the exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of a First Cause.' It is the purpose of the remaining lectures to resolve this pure ray of primal intellect into the sixfold spectrum of philosopher, mystic, skeptic, poet, man of the world, and writer respectively personified by Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare, Napoleon, and Goethe."

In Mr. Emerson's journal in the spring of 1845 is this note: "A Pantheon course of lectures should consist of heads like these. [Here follow the six names of the subjects of these chapters.] Jesus should properly be one head, but it requires great power of intellect and of sentiment to subdue the biases

of the mind of the age and render historic justice to the world's chief saint."

As has been said in the introductory note, Mr. Emerson began in his college days to make the acquaintance of Plato, and the readings thereafter were a frequent refreshment. When he went to lonely Nantasket Beach to write his oration, The Method of Nature, he read in Plato for inspiration, and wrote thence to a friend:—

18 JULY, 1841.

I brought here Phaedrus, Meno and the Banquet, which I have diligently read. What a great uniform gentleman is Plato! Nothing is more characteristic of him than his good-breeding. Never pedantic, never wire-drawn or too fine, and never, O never obtuse or saturnine; but so accomplished, so good humoured, so perceptive, so uniting wisdom and poetry, acuteness and humanity, into such a golden average, that one understands how he shall enjoy his long Augustan empire in literature. I have also three volumes new to me of Thomas Taylor's translations, Proclus, Ocellus Lucanus, and Pythagorean Fragments.

The next year he writes to the same friend:—

CONCORD, 7 MAY 1842.

… I read last week the Protagoras and Theages of Plato. The first is excellent and gave me much to think. With what security and common sense this Plato treads the cliffs and pinnacles of Parnassus, as if he walked in a street, and came down again into a street as if he lived there.

My dazzling friends of Alexandria, the New Platonists, have none of this air of facts and society about them. This Socrates is as good as Don Quixote all the time. What impenetrable armor of witty courtesy covers him every moment.

In his journal, under the head of "The Poppy-wreath," he says, "Plato, well guarded from those to whom he does not belong by a river of sleep."

Journal, 1845. "It requires for the reading and final disposition of Plato, all sorts of readers, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, English, and Americans. If it were left to apprehensive, gentle, imaginative, Plato-like persons, no justice would be done to his essence and totality, through the excess or violence of affection that would be spent on his excellence of reason and imagination. But Frenchmen have no reverence, they seize the book like merchants, it is a piece of goods, and is treated without ceremony after the manner of commerce; and though its diviner merits are lost by their profanation, the coarser, namely, the texture and coherence of the whole and its larger plan, its French availableness, its fitness to French taste, by comprehending that. Too much seeing is as fatal to just seeing as blindness is. People speak easily of Cudworth, but I know no book so difficult to read as Cudworth proper. For, as it is a magazine of quotations, of extraordinary ethical sentences, the shining summits of ancient philosophy, and as Cudworth himself is a dull writer, the eye of the reader rests habitually on these wonderful revelations, and refuses to be withdrawn; so that after handling the book for years, the method and the propositions of Cudworth still remain a profound secret. Cudworth is sometimes read without the Platonism; which would be like reading Theobald's Shakspeare, leaving out only what Shakspeare wrote.

"I think the best reader of Plato the least able to receive the totality at first, just as a botanist will get the totality of a field of flowers better than a poet."

Page 39, note 1. The less usual use of "secular," as

applied to books, in its strict classic sense, to mean that live through the ages, is characteristic.

Omar the Caliph was Mahomet's cousin and second successor.

Page 39, note 2. Here came in, in the original lecture, the sentences: "Nothing but God can give invention. Everything else, one would say, the study of Plato would give."

Page 39, note 3. And yet Plato quotes from the earlier men, as mentioned later in this essay and in "Quotation and Originality," Letters and Social Aims.

Page 40, note 1. This rare book is thus entitled:—Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People, exhibited in its professed connection with the European, so as to render either an introduction to the other; being a translation of the AKHLAK-I-JALALY, the most esteemed work of Middle Asia, from the Persian of Fakìr Jāny Muhammad Asäad, (with references and notes), by W. F. Thomson, Esq., of the Bengal Civil Service. London, 1839.

The translator says in his introduction, "The latter half of the fifteenth century may indeed be considered as the Augustan age of Persian letters," that about that time the Akhlak-i-Jalaly was produced, and that it is "the best digest of the important topics of which it treats." He says that through the translations of the Greek philosophers, or, in some cases, the transference "in extract from writer to writer," the Moslem people came to have a knowledge of the great Greek systems of thought. "The most successful efforts of the entire people" to reconcile the Greek philosophy with the social and religious systems of the Mohammedans "may be said to be concentrated in the work before us; but the treatise from which it more particularly originates is the Kitat-at-Jaharat, an Arabic work composed in the tenth century."

This work "is an amalgam of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, carried out, however, to the most minute practical application," etc. This Arabic work, having passed with improvements, due to the increase of knowledge in five hundred years, through the hands of two Persian writers, appears as the Akhlak-i-Jalaly. It treats, after an Exordium, in Book I. of The Individual State; in Book II. of The Domestic State; in Book III. of The Political State, and in the Conclusion gives, I. Platonic Maxims on Ethics; II. Aristotelian Maxims on Politics.

Page 42, note 1. Dr. Holmes thus comments on this passage: "The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his store-houses."

Page 43, note 1. Mr. Emerson quotes Stanley as saying that Plato first used the word Poem.

Page 43, note 2. When Mr. Emerson gave this lecture in Concord, a lady walking home with her neighbor, a substantial farmer's wife, found that she did not approve of it. On pressing her to learn what she objected to, the disapproving matron said, "Well! If those old heathen did what Mr. Emerson said they did, the less said about them the better!" "Why, what do you mean?" "He said they ground their wives and children into paint!"

Page 47, note 1. The majesty of planets and suns and systems, in their ordered courses, especially appealed to Emerson from his youth. He draws constantly his imagery from astronomy, and especially honored Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. In the years between 1835 and 1845 his journals and the scattered fragments of "The Poet" (see Poems, Appendix) show how constantly he sought "the sweet influence of the Pleiades" and "Arcturus and his sons."

Divine inviters, I accept The courtesy ye have shown and kept From ancient ages for the bard.

O birds of ether without wings! O heavenly ships without a sail! O fire of fire! O best of things! O mariners who never fail! Sail swiftly through your amber vault, An animated law, a presence to exalt.

Page 48, note 1. These doctrines are discussed in the Parmenides and the Theaetetus of Plato. That of the Identity, Ἓν καὶ πᾶν, came from Xenophanes. See also Emerson's "Xenophanes" in the Poems.

Page 49, note 1. The journal of 1845 shows that Mr. Emerson was reading, not only in the Koran and Akhlak-i-Jalaly, but in the East Indian Scriptures, and he gives many quotations. He writes, "The East is grand and makes Europe appear the land of trifles." It was natural that Plato should lead him to the most ancient fountains of the religion of the Aryan race.

In the midsummer of 1840 Mr. Emerson told in a letter to a near friend of his high prizing of the Vedas.1

"In the sleep of the great heats there was nothing for me but to read the Vedas, the bible of the tropics, which I find I come back upon every three or four years. It is sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble and poetic mind, and nothing is easier than to

separate what must have been the primeval inspiration from the endless ceremonial nonsense which caricatures and contradicts it through every chapter. It is of no use to put away the book: if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, nature makes a Bramin of me presently: eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence,—this is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment—these penances expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods."

Page 49, note 2. The thought that appears in "Brahma," which is but a poetical rendering of a passage from the Bhagavat-Gita.

Page 50, note 1. This suggests Mr. Emerson's poem "Pan," which has often been alluded to in these notes because it presents the doctrine of the Over-Soul.

Page 51, note 1.

Find me, and turn thy back on Heaven."Brahma," Poems.

Page 54, note 1. Dr. William T. Harris said of this passage: "What Emerson says of Plato we may easily and properly apply to himself. But he goes farther than Plato toward the Orient, and his pendulum swings farther West into the Occident. He delights in the all-absorbing unity of the Brahman, in the all-renouncing ethics of the Chinese and Persian, in the measureless images of the Arabian and Hindoo poets. But he is as practical as the extremest of his countrymen. His practical is married to his abstract tendency. It is the problem of evil that continually haunts him, and leads him to search its solution in the Oriental unity which is above all dualism of good and evil. It is his love of freedom that leads

him to seek in the same source an elevation of thought above the trammels of finitude and complications. Finally, it is his love of beauty, which is the vision of freedom manifested in matter, that leads him to Oriental poetry, which sports with the finite elements of the world as though they were unsubstantial dreams."1

Page 57, note 1. From the Timaeus.

Page 58, note 1.

The gods talk in the breath of the woods,They talk in the shaken pine,And fill the long reach of the old seashoreWith dialogue divine;And the poet who overhearsSome random word they sayIs the fated man of menWhom the ages must obey."The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

See also the poem "My Garden."

Page 58, note 2. Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book III., Canto XI.

Page 59, note 1. From the Theaetetus.

Page 61, note 1. From the Gorgias.

Page 61, note 2. This suggests a passage in a letter which Mr. Emerson wrote to a spiritually minded Quaker friend in 1847.

"For the science of God our language is unexpressive and merely prattle: we need simpler and universal signs, as algebra compared with arithmetic. Thus I should affirm easily both

those propositions, which our Mr. Griswold balances against one another; that, I mean, of Pantheism and the other ism.

"Personality, too, and impersonality, might each be affirmed of Absolute Being; and what may not be affirmed of it in our own mind? And when we have heaped a mountain of speeches, we have still to begin again, having nowise expressed the simple unalterable fact."

Page 62, note 1. See an early poem of Emerson's, "The Bohemian Hymn," in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 63, note 1. Compare The Republic, Book VII.

Page 63, note 2. From the Phaedrus.

Page 65, note 1. When, as a schoolboy, I was complaining of the difficulties of geometry, I was surprised at my father's words, for he had found mathematics so hopeless a study for himself that he always shared his children's feelings on the subject, much to their comfort. But on this occasion he said, "Geometry, yes, one must study geometry for its elegance." Plato had probably made it sacred to him—in theory. Yet there is some truth in Dr. Holmes's remark, "Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the Academy, over which was the inscription,—μηδεις ἀγέωμετρητος εἰδίτω—Let no one unacquainted with Geometry enter here,—would have been closed to him."

Page 66, note 1.

From the stores of eldest matter,The deep-eyed flame, obedient water,Transparent air, all-feeding earth,He took the flower of all their worth,And, best with best in sweet consent,Combinèd a new temperament."Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 68, note 1. It was this doctrine of Symbolism which made Emerson prize Swedenborg so highly.

Page 69, note 1. See Republic, Book VI.

Page 69, note 2. Mr. Emerson's use of the authors was to give him a spur—he "read for lustres," and in the great masters especially. Thus, writing to Carlyle in July, 1842, he said, "I had it fully at heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer, or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse, a chapter on Poetry, for which all readings, all studies, are but preparation."

Page 70, note 1. This idea appears in "Love" in the First Series of Essays and in the poem "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love."

Page 76, note 1. This literary or philosophic coldness Mr. Emerson satirizes in some lines which, after his death, were printed in the Appendix to the Poems, under the title "Philosopher." He complained of finding this professional mood in himself at times. To pure Intellect he always assigned a lower plane than to Love. In the journal for 1845 is this passage, headed Buddha, or he who knows, and also Icy Light:—

"Intellect puts an interval: if we converse with low things, we are not compromised, the interval saves us. But if we converse with high things, with heroic persons, with virtues, the interval becomes a gulf, and we cannot enter into the highest good."

Page 78, note 1. What Mr. Emerson says here of Plato, and also a few pages earlier, "He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement," cannot but recall his own method of presenting in turn different facets of the gem of

truth. Churchman and Agnostic can easily find good weapons for argument in his works. Dr. Holmes says of this passage, "Some will smile at hearing him say this of another." It illustrates the felicity of the Doctor's remark that Emerson holds up the mirror to his characters at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero.

Page 79, note 1. Dr. Richard Garnett tells a story of an occurrence which might well have happened in England: "Can you tell me," asked an auditor of his neighbor at the lecture, "what connection all this has with Plato?" "None, my friend, save in God."

Page 81, note 1. This paragraph suggests the "Song of Nature" in the Poems.

Page 82, note 1. But these lines are but segments of great returning curves like the orbits of the heavenly bodies.

In vain produced, all rays return, Evil will bless and ice will burn.

Page 83, note 1. The cave of Trophonius, where he delivered oracles, is more particularly told about by Plutarch in his Lives. The ring, strangely found by Gyges the shepherd, made him invisible and by means of it he won great temporal power (Republic, Book II.). The soul is figuratively represented as a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. "Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble and of noble breed, while ours are mixed, and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble, and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble, … and, as might be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them." (Phaedrus.)

"God has formed you differently. Some of you have the power of command and these he has composed of gold, wherefore

also they have the greatest honor; others of silver to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has made of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in their children. But, as you are of the same original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son or a silver parent a golden son." (Republic, Book III.)

Socrates relates that the Egyptian god Theuth, having invented the use of letters, showed them to Thamus the king. "'This,' saith Theuth, 'will make Egyptians wiser and give them better memories.' But Thamus replied, … 'This invention of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories.'" (Phaedrus.)

In the strange vision of Er, the Pamphylian, is the scheme of the planetary system whirled by the sister Fates, Lachesis singing of the Past, Clotho of the Present, and Atropos of the Future. He saw also the spirits of departed heroes choosing their destinies in a new life. (Republic, Book X.)

Page 83, note 2. Dr. Holmes says, "These two quaint adjectives are from the mint of Cudworth."

Page 85, note 1. These correspondences of matter and spirit Mr. Emerson celebrates everywhere.

Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,Murmur in the house of life,Sung by the Sisters as they spin;In perfect time and measure theyBuild and unbuild our echoing clay.As the two twilights of the dayFold us music-drunken in."Merlin," II., Poems.

Page 86, note 1.

Vast the realm of Being is,In the waste one nook is his;Whatsoever hap befallsIn his vision's narrow wallsHe is here to testify."Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Page 87, note 1. And yet, in the winnowing of Time, Plato is not one of those who, as poet, survived "The Test" as answered in "The Solution," in the Poems, although, strangely, Swedenborg is. Perhaps this was because Emerson chose but one representative of a nation and Homer stood for Greece.

Notes

• 1

  Letters of Emerson to a Friend, edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1899.
• 1

  "Emerson's Orientalism" in The Genius and Character of Emerson, Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1885.