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| タイトル | ： 第16回 |
| 投稿日 | ： 2004/01/04(Sun) 13:59 |
| 投稿者 | ： 惣田正明 <vem13077@nifty.ne.jp> |
第16回テキスト
---はじめ---
Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the
successive stages of morality, beginning with the Athenian
gentleman of the olden time, who is followed by the practical
man of that day regulating his life by proverbs and saws; to
him succeeds the wild generalization of the Sophists, and
lastly come the young disciples of the great teacher, who
know the sophistical arguments but will not be convinced by
them, and desire to go deeper into the nature of things.
These too, like Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, are
clearly distinguished from one another. Neither in the
Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of Plato, is a single
character repeated.
The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly
consistent. In the first book we have more of the real
Socrates, such as he is depicted in the Memorabilia of
Xenophon, in the earliest Dialogues of Plato, and in the
Apology. He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the old
enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as
well as to argue seriously. But in the sixth book his enmity
towards the Sophists abates; he acknowledges that they are
the representatives rather than the corrupters of the world.
He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive, passing
beyond the range either of the political or the speculative
ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato himself
seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates,
who had passed his whole life in philosophy, to give his own
opinion and not to be always repeating the notions of other
men. There is no evidence that either the idea of good or the
conception of a perfect State were comprehended in the
Socratic teaching, though he certainly dwelt on the nature of
the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen. Mem. i. 4; Phaedo
97); and a deep thinker like him in his thirty or forty years
of public teaching, could hardly have falled to touch on the
nature of family relations, for which there is also some
positive evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem. i. 2, 51 foll.)
The Socratic method is nominally retained; and every
inference is either put into the mouth of the respondent or
represented as the common discovery of him and Socrates. But
any one can see that this is a mere form, of which the
affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method
of inquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by
the help of interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from
various points of view.
---終わり---