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| タイトル | ： 第九回 |
| 投稿日 | ： 2003/11/15(Sat) 12:25 |
| 投稿者 | ： 惣田正明 <vem13077@nifty.ne.jp> |
第九回テキスト
---はじめ---
Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths
which, to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in
the form of the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the
reign of Messiah, or "the day of the Lord," or the suffering
Servant or people of God, or the "Sun of righteousness with
healing in his wings" only convey, to us at least, their
great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato
reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which
is the idea of good --like the sun in the visible world; --
about human perfection, which is justice --about education
beginning in youth and continuing in later years --about
poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers and
evil rulers of mankind --about "the world" which is the
embodiment of them --about a kingdom which exists nowhere
upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern and
rule of human life. No such inspired creation is at unity
with itself, any more than the clouds of heaven when the sun
pierces through them. Every shade of light and dark, of
truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is
allowable in a work of philosophical imagination. It is not
all on the same plane; it easily passes from ideas to myths
and fancies, from facts to figures of speech. It is not prose
but poetry, at least a great part of it, and ought not to be
judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of history.
The writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic
whole; they take possession of him and are too much for him.
We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as
Plato has conceived is practicable or not, or whether the
outward form or the inward life came first into the mind of
the writer. For the practicability of his ideas has nothing
to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he
attains may be truly said to bear the greatest "marks of
design" --justice more than the external frame-work of the
State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science
of dialectic or the organization of ideas has no real
content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which
the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all
time and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and
seventh books that Plato reaches the "summit of speculation,"
and these, although they fail to satisfy the requirements of
a modern thinker, may therefore be regarded as the most
important, as they are also the most original, portions of
the work.
---終わり---