Plato and Hegel.

The view of Plato which we shall take as the basis of our discussion is the traditional view. It may or may not be historically correct. That question does not concern us because we are attempting to understand, not Plato, but Hegel. And it was this traditional interpretation of Plato which influenced Hegel. Even if what we shall here put forward as the philosophy of Plato were to be regarded as a wholly imaginary philosophy, it would still be, just as the same, one of the foundation stones of Hegelian thought. It is very important to explain first previous philosophers like Plato and his philosophy for it has influenced Hegel in building his ambitious project the Logic of Science. Although, there are many diverse interpretation of Plato but what is cited here is his basic premise of his philosophy. Thus, it may not be historically correct but the question does not concern us because we are attempting to understand, not Plato, but Hegel. And we it is an accepted premise that the philosophy of Plato is one of the foundation stones of Hegelian thought.

The Eleatics had distinguished between appearance and reality, between sense and reason. These distinctions held their ground till the time of Protagoras, whose teaching amounted to a denial of them. Protagoras said that whatever seems to me true is true for me, and whatever seems to you true is true for you. This implies that whatever seems or appears, is the reality, or at least that there is no other reality than this seeming or appearances. Moreover, what the senses present to us is what appears. What the senses give us is, therefore, the truth, the reality. Since whatever seems is true, one seeming is as good as another. What seems to my senses to be true is quite as much the truth as what may seem to me true after I have applied my reason to these sense-data. Hence reason adds nothing to our knowledge of reality. Reality is given through sensation. Knowledge is senses-perception. The distinction between sense and reason, or at any rate the value of the distinction, disappears with the disappearance of the distinction between appearance and reality. In order to refute this doctrine, which practically involves the denial of all values, Plato undertook the analysis of sensation. He showed that mere sensation is so far from giving us knowledge that it can barely give us consciousness of any sort, that even the knowledge of my own sensations, as when I say I am warm, implies organs of knowledge which have nothing in common with the physical senses.

There is a basic fact on the time of Plato especially his contemporaries Protagoras who claimed in this manner that whatever seems to me true is true for me, and whatever seems to you true is true for you. In this case, reality is given to us through appearance

Suppose I know that my body feels warm. I can only express this in the formmy body is warm, i.e., in the form of a proposition. Even if I donot sayit, but only think it, it must still take that form. But how do I know that what feels warm is a body? And how do I know that what it feels is warmth? I can only know that my body is a body because I have seen other bodies before, and can compare it with them,and find it is like them; and because I see that it is unlike other objects, such as houses, trees, or triangles. And I only know that what I feel is warmth because I compare it with previous similar sensations, and contrast it with other sensations such as those of redness, hardness, sweetness, or coldness. Now this implies classification. The word body stands for a class of objects, and the word warmth stands for a class of sensations. Thus ideas of classes, that is to say, concepts, are involved even in the most sensuous knowledge. Every word in every language,except perhaps proper names, which are said to have no connotation,-connotes a concept. For there are not only concepts of substantive things, but also concepts of qualities, actions, relations. To give is a concept, for it describes a whole class of actions. This is a concept, since it applies, not only to one individual thing,but to all things. Everything is a this. Is is a concept, since all things are. In is a concept, for it expresses an entire class of relations. There are no words in any language which do not stand for concepts. Thus not merely some knowledge, but all knowledge, is conceptual. Hence from bare sensation, as such, no knowledge can arise. Concepts are not perceived by the senses, but are the work of the mind which compares, contrasts, and classifies what the sense give it. We can know nothing whatever of any object except the concepts which apply to it. No matter what we say of an object, what we say consists in asserting that such and such a concept applies to it. For whatever we say is a word, and every word stands for a concept. I say that this object before me is a white, oblong, soft, material, solid, useful thing called paper. All these predicates are concepts.

But if such is the nature of my knowledge of the paper, what is the paper itself? A concept is not a particular thing; it is a general class; it is a universal. All I can know o the paper is that such and such universals, or concepts, apply to it, or, in other words, that it belongs to such and such general classes. It is oblong, soft, white, i.e. it belongs to those classes. Then what is it? It belongs to various classes, but there must, one would think, be a something which belongs to these classes, just as, in order to have motion, one supposes there must be something to move. What is this it, apart from the classes to which it belongs? Obviously, if there is any it, we cannot know it. It must remain for ever unknowable to us. For all our knowledge is conceptual, i.e. is a knowledge of classes. Therefore anything apart from classes, such as this it, cannot be known. But it is perfectly gratuitous to assume the existence of that of which we have, and can have, no knowledge. For if it did exist we could not know it. And therefore to affirm its existence is to affirm something of which we have no knowledge, something which, accordingly, we can have no possible grounds for affirming. It would seem, therefore, that there is no it, even that such an it is an inconceivable and selfcontradictory thought; for every thought, is conceptual, is the thought of a class, and the it in itself cannot be thought, and is therefore strictly unthinkable. There is no it. The entire nature of this piece of paper lies in the fact that it belongs to various classes. The classes alone are real. The paper is simply a congeries of concepts or universals. There is nothing else in it. Hence if we admit that the paper is not a mere figment of my imagination, that it exists outside of my mind, it will follow that concepts or universals likewise exist on their own account, objectively, independent of my, or any other, mind. These objective universals are called by Plato Ideas. It would seem that nothing is real except universals. It is true that Plato spoilt the consistency of this theory by admitting the existence of what he called matter, a formless, indefinite, substrate of things. This matter

is simply the unknowable it. He failed to see that matter it itself a universal. He admitted the existence of the it. At the present time there is a school of philosophers, the New Realists, who admit the reality, or the subsistence, of universals, but insist that they are not mental. According to this view it would be wrong to speak of them as objective concepts. And even the traditional Platonic Ideas are now, by these philosophers, designated forms. It is doubtful whether there is anything here but a dispute about terminology. By saying that universals are not mental they appear to mean that they are not the thoughts of any individual mind, mine or yours or Gods, but that they subsist independently of minds. This is, of course, just what Plato, Aristotle, Heel, and all idealists, mean. According to Plato, at any rate, universals are real, are objective. It is not merely I who classify objects. The classes themselves have a being independent of my mind. What is real in the sense-object is the universals. But the source through which we receive knowledge of universals is not sensation, but reason. For sensation cannot give us concepts. Concepts are formed by abstracting, by reasoning. Therefore reason is the source of truth, sensation the source of error. Sensation gives us the word of sense, the world of particular objects, and this is the false world. What is alone genuinely real is universals, and we know of these through reason. Sensation gives us appearance; reason gives us reality. And this is the essential determination of the universal philosophy, namely, that the real is the universal. This is the central and distinctive doctrine of all idealism, whether it be that of Plato, of Aristotle, or of Hegel. This conclusion throws a great deal of light upon the seeming paradox to which Eleaticism led us,-that the real does not exist. For the real is now the universal. And the universal cannot be said to exist. White things exist, but not whiteness itself. There are in existence chestnut horses, white horses, black horses, race

horses, cart horses. But where is the universal horse, the horse in general? To exist means to exist at some specific space or time. But not by searching all space shall we find whiteness quartered in any part of it. And not by ransacking all time shall we find the universal horse that is neither chestnut nor white nor black, neither a racehorse nor a cart horse, but simply horse. The universal, then, is neither in place nor in time. It is nowhere and nowhen. And to say that something is nowhere and nowhen is the same as saying that it does not exist. We may put the same thing in another form by saying that to exist means to be an individual existence. Whatever exists is an individual. But the universal is just that which is not individual. The universal, therefore, does not exist. It is, of course, no answer to say that the universal exists in time in the form of a concept in the stream of human consciousness. We are not speaking of concepts, subjective universals, but of objective universals which we have found to be the essence of reality and to have a being independent of minds. Being is real, but it is nowhere and nowhen. It does not exist. This is possible because Being is a universal. It is what all things have in common. For all things are. Being is the isness which is common to all things. Whiteness is not here or there, then or now, is not any thing individual, and so does not exist. The same is true of Being. It is not any particular being, such as this horse or that tree. It is Being in general,-a universal. Even Plato himself did not get so far as definitely saying that universals, the Ideas, do not exist. But he said that the Ideas are not in space or time. And that amounts to the same thing. The one universal philosophy holds then that the universal is the real, and that the real does not exist. This is now, to some extent, intelligible. But not fully so. What is still wanting is that we should have clear definitions of the words reality and existence. We will begin by getting a clear idea of the distinction between reality and appearance. It may occur to someone to say that this distinction is on the fae of it an absurd one. For an appearance also is real.

Even a dream is real. It exists in the mind just as certainly as elephants exist in the world. It is a real thing. Now this is true. A dream, a delusion, we say, is unreal. Now it is quite easy to see what is meant by this. A real mountain is one which exists independently of us. A dream-mountain is called unreal because it does not exist independently of the dreamer. It is produced in some way by him, by his brain. And in the same way we say that a shadow is unreal. The shadow really exists. But popular thought conceives that the object which throws the shadow exists on its own account, independently, whereas the existence of the shadow is dependent on the object which throws it. And so we say that the object is real, the shadow unreal. Reality, in the philosophic sense, is that which as a wholly independent being, a being of its own, on its own account, which does not owe its being to anything else. Appearance is that which has only a dependent being. Its being flows into it from something else which is itself an independent being, a reality. It will be noticed that we donot speak of dependent and independent existence here. We do not use the word existence, but the word being. This is merely because we have already assigned another meaning to the word existence. We have seen that the real has no existence. We cannot therefore define it as that which has independent existence. Appearance is that which depends on the reality. Its being arises out of, is in some way produced by, the reality. Hence if we say that the universal is the real, and that the world of sense is appearance, it then becomes incumbent upon us to show that the universal produces the world of sense. This is precisely why Plato tried to show that the Ideas are the beings which actually produce the world, that they are the primordial foundation and cause of all things.1

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