The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy
The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy, Ancient
which it abounded. To him, as to the early poets and sages, Sôphrosynê,
or self-knowledge and self-command taken together, was the first and
most necessary of all virtues. Unlike them, however, he does not simply
accept it from tradition, but gives it a philosophical foundation—the
newly-established distinction between mind and body; a distinction
not to be confounded with the old Psychism, although Plato, for his
reforming purposes, shortly afterwards linked the two together. The
disembodied spirit of mythology was a mere shadow or memory, equally
destitute of solidity and of understanding; with Socrates, mind meant
the personal consciousness which retains its continuous identity
through every change, and as against every passing impulse. Like the
Humanists, he made it the seat of knowledge—more than the Humanists,
he gave it the control of appetite. In other words, he adds the idea
of will to that of intellect; but instead of treating them as distinct
faculties or functions, he absolutely identifies them. Mind having
come to be first recognised as a knowing power, carried over its
association with knowledge into the volitional sphere, and the two
were first disentangled by Aristotle, though very imperfectly even by
him. Yet no thinker helped so much to make the confusion apparent as
the one to whom it was due. Socrates deliberately insisted that those
who knew the good must necessarily be good themselves. He taught that
every virtue was a science; courage, for example, was a knowledge
of the things which should or should not be feared; temperance, a
knowledge of what should or should not be desired, and so forth. Such
an account of virtue would, perhaps, be sufficient if all men did what,
in their opinion, they ought to do; and, however strange it may seem,
Socrates assumed that such was actually the case.[89] The paradox,
even if accepted at the moment by his youthful friends, was sure to
be rejected, on examination, by cooler heads, and its rejection would
prove that the whole doctrine was essentially unsound. Various causes
prevented Socrates from perceiving what seemed so clear to duller
intelligences than his. First of all, he did not separate duty from
personal interest. A true Athenian, he recommended temperance and
righteousness very largely on account of the material advantages they
secured. That the agreeable and the honourable, the expedient and the
just, frequently came into collision, was at that time a rhetorical
commonplace; and it might be supposed that, if they were shown to
coincide, no motive to misconduct but ignorance could exist. Then,
again, being accustomed to compare conduct of every kind with the
practice of such arts as flute-playing, he had come to take knowledge
in a rather extended sense, just as we do when we say, indifferently,
that a man knows geometry and that he knows how to draw. Aristotle
himself did not see more clearly than Socrates that moral habits are
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