The Vortex of Dialectic

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

1

SOCRATES. — I wish, Alcibiades, that I might have heard your discourse with the Stranger about love. It is the most interesting of subjects, and anything new that he might have to report concerning it would be most welcome; especially as I gather that, although love has been for a thousand years the favorite and almost the only subject of poets and storytellers in the world, they have not been able to take a single step towards discovering the truth about it. True, I have the misfortune of not caring for fictions about love so much as about the reality; but I am sure that what you and the Stranger rehearsed was not a fiction, but either the truth or something aimed at the truth.

ALCIBIADES. — The greater part of what we said would not be worth repeating, even if we remembered it; yet there was one thing the Stranger asserted which without your aid I could not refute, although I suspect that it is untenable; and it is this: that it was a misfortune for me and the other Greeks to have been handsome.

SOCRATES. — Is that, Stranger, really what you believe, or is Alcibiades belying you?

THE STRANGER. — Yes, I believe it was a misfortune in some respects, though at the same time it was, I admit, a privilege and a dignity.

SOCRATES. —How many things you clever people manage to say at once, so that if any one of your observations proves false you may still pride yourselves on having been right in some one of the others, which has not yet been investigated! If you wish, as I do, to reach the truth on this subject — and nothing is more momentous than to distinguish good from evil — perhaps you will answer me a few questions on one point at a time; then, when we put your answers together, we may perhaps discover what you meant.

THE STRANGER. — I tremble, but I consent.

SOCRATES. — You assert that to be handsome is a misfortune in some respects. Perhaps you would say in the same way that to have a purse full of gold is a misfortune in some respects, because it might tempt robbers to waylay you and possibly to murder you?

THE STRANGER. — Yes, that is one danger involved in possessing a bag of gold; and not the only one; for you might add all the useless things you would probably buy with it, not to speak of the beggars and flatterers and volatile friends that might buzz about your purse like wasps round a honeyed flower, and perhaps sting after having rifled you.

SOCRATES. — Let us add your wasps, then, and all the other things you might mention, which I might be too dull to remember. On the other hand, would you say that possessing a purse full of gold would be in other respects an advantage, because then you would be able to buy more food and more clothes than you would have got on with nicely if you had been poor; and you could have paid the pilot to take you to Aegina if, being a slave to change or a foolish sight-seer, you preferred to go to Aegina when you might have remained more comfortably and economically in Athens, which is a much better place?

THE STRANGER. — Yes, and there are further advantages in having money, but I will not mention them, as I see you do not like me to shake out the picturesque miscellany of a tourist’s rag bag.

SOCRATES. — You may exhibit all the wares you carry, loved by the public at a country fair. We are in no haste, and we can pause until you have emptied the purse of your memory of all its golden images.

THE STRANGER. — No. These are sacred games, and let the argument run fast and naked after the truth, as if it were a Spartan at Olympia — only I could not help thinking how very advantageous money would have been to the unhappy natives of Aegina, to enable them to quit their sorry trades and go to live and philosophize at Athens.

SOCRATES. — Granted, with all my heart. And would you say that in all such cases advantage came from possessing the gold or rather from living in Athens, eating, drinking, and philosophizing?

THE STRANGER. — From the latter.

SOCRATES.—Similarly with the disadvantages: do they lie in the gold itself, or in the nuisances and servilities incidental to business, and in the violence of robbers, the treachery of flatterers, and the pest of parasitic fools?

THE STRANGER. — Again in the latter.

SOCRATES. — Gold, then, you would agree, is not advantageous or disadvantageous in itself, but only in view of the accidents which may follow the acquisition or possession or loss of it?

THE STRANGER. — Certainly; unless we consider the weight of the gold while we carry it an evil, or the brightness of it when we look at it a beauty and a good.

SOCRATES. — Now then, when you said that for Alcibiades and all other Greeks, except me, to be handsome was in some respects a disadvantage, did you mean in like manner that personal beauty was neither good nor bad in itself, but variously convenient or inconvenient in the effects which it had in the world?

THE STRANGER. — No, Socrates. The profound ambiguity which I felt in the value of beauty, as it was possessed and exhibited in Greece, not merely in people’s bodies but in all their works and actions, this ambiguity, I say, was intrinsic to the possession of such beauty and not due to any accidental effects. The vital properties and inherent destinies of things in the human world, Socrates, are no less mixed and ambiguous morally than are their social consequences. The beautiful, when it dominates the soul, or at least colors strongly all our other judgments and affections, fulfills human reason in a sort of divine madness. The Muses become too much our patron goddesses; too much, I mean, for the prudent and prosperous government of human affairs and also, I think, for a justly balanced development of the mind; because the roots of things are less beautiful than the flowers, but more important; and the study of them is indispensable for the material security and health of mankind, both in body and in spirit.

It was because I felt this internal and intrinsic ambiguity in the cult of the beautiful that I expressed myscll in the qualified way which you complained of as confusion of thought: since when things are hybrid and many-sided it is not easy for a judicious man to dispatch them simply and categorically.

SOCRATES.—Ah, my friend, things are manysided indeed, if you mean these growing and moving things about us, and our own unstable fancies and passions; and if you piled up together all the qualifications and all the contradictions that language affords, you would fail, I fear, to express adequately the flux and self-contrariety of nature. What the philosophers can report of material things is like the image of a man that children daub on the wall, two circles and four straight lines; because these young artists have observed quite scientifically that man has a head, a belly, two arms, and two legs. For that reason I have abandoned pictorial philosophy and the art of sketching the truth from nature. I am content to be ignorant of her constitution, since knowledge of it would not, as far as I can foresee, conduce at all to my discernment or possession of the good. It is in this other direction, in so far as art can change matter into forms more beautiful and useful than it naturally takes, that I am concerned with matter at all. I leave the secret of its power to the gods, whose power I suspect it really is; and I strive only to keep my own mind clear of confusion and not to pursue contrary objects at once.

About the good only do I put questions to my friends, for that is the sole topic on which I think them competent to enlighten me or to correct themselves. If we are confused about that, it is through our own haste and inattention, since it is in us that good and evil confront each other and by us that the choice between them has to be made. But for the confusion of nature we are not responsible; and God knows what he has made. So that even if it were a question of the material consequences of our judgment — whether virtue, for instance, would lead by some combination of accidents to imprisonment and death — I should not be eager to decide it, but should leave the issue in the hands of the gods, knowing only that if I had clung to the good the other circumstances would matter nothing.

THE STRANGER. — I thought that sometimes you were concerned to show that justice brought many external advantages in its train, in the upper world as well as here.

SOCRATES. — You mean that justice may conduce to the good order and military strength of cities.

THE STRANGER. — Exactly.

SOCRATES. — And would you consider military strength a good in itself, or good only because it conduces to preserve a city in which justice and good order prevail?

THE STRANGER. — It often conduces also to doing injustice with impunity to other cities.

SOCRATES. — With what sort of impunity? The sort that makes vice inveterate, which is the worst of punishments?

THE STRANGER. — I meant without bringing about an immediate destruction of the aggressor. In the long run I am afraid it is impossible to trace the good and bad effects of wars on the perhaps commingled descendants of the victors, the vanquished, and the neutrals.

SOCRATES. — Would the prolonged existence of a man or of a city, if it were an evil existence, be a good, and would justice be less advantageous if it prevented or cut short such an existence?

THE STRANGER. — You would not, then, claim for justice the merit of preserving life under all conditions?

SOCRATES. — How should I, with the cup of hemlock in my hand ? — Let us then leave, it you please, the complexities of nature aside, and the fact that by accident justice or beauty may, like the possession of gold, bring certain inconveniences in its train. What I would ask is in fine this: Why are these incidental consequences advantageous or disadvantageous in their turn? If you will answer that question, perhaps I may be able to discern whether you really believe that it is a misfortune to possess beauty, either in body or in soul or in the manners and arts of one’s native land. For I cannot help doubting whether you really believe it; or whether, without stopping to consider whether you believe it or not, you said it in a pet, because some circumstance, by chance attached to beauty, caused you displeasure or sadness; or whether you said it simply for effect or because it happened to occur to you while you were talking and it was easier at that moment, to say it than to check yourself and leave it unsaid.

THE STRANGER. — I see, Socrates, that although you proclaim openly that moral truth alone interests you, secretly you relish psychological truth also, and follow the scent in that field with equal avidity and success. And in the service of psychological truth I will admit seriously what you have suggested perhaps only in fun. What I first said to Alcibiades I did say only on the spur of the moment; and I should be glad to retract the words if you will convince me that they were foolish; but until you do so, I will try to defend my casual progeny. Natural piety leads us not to expose a newborn child to the wolves, until we are sure that to let it live would be a misfortune to it and to the community: for though the brat’s aspect and even his birth may have been unexpected to the father, the bond of blood is a potent one; and who can tell that the best part of our heritage may not be hidden in that child? So a word that comes to the lips unbidden may be the sudden expression of many silent, observations and approaches to thought scattered throughout a man’s life; for that, perhaps a psychologist, if his twaddle could interest you in spite of yourself, might show you to be the origin of inspiration.

SOCRATES. — Let us leave inspiration also, I beg of you, to wait outside the bounds of our argument, with her sister arts, psychology and the description of nature. If you were inspired you are safe, like a parricide or a public enemy taking refuge in a sanctuary. You may have said or done what you have no assignable reason for saying or doing; but the mantle of the god covers you, and law and philosophy must leave you in his hands. Meantime let us inquire whether your opinion is susceptible of any rational defense. When that has failed, there will still be time for you to claim inspiration, and to be divinely guided by enthusiasm in the absence of reason; while I, having a private daemon whispering in my ear, will never contradict that claim or speak of it ironically.

THE STRANGER. — I suspect you would then be better inspired than I, for what your daemon whispers, you tell us, is always Don’t! Let us hope, then, that reason will sanction our natural impulses and opinions, since otherwise, if the voice of your daemon is divine, we should have to stop thinking or even living.

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SOCRATES. — Let us then address ourselves all the more earnestly to reason, as to our only safeguard against shipwreck. And let us ask again for what reason, other than inspiration, do you think it a misfortune for all the Greeks (except me, again) to be beautiful. It is not, you say, because you expect more pains than pleasure to follow on their vain self-satisfaction?

THE STRANGER. — No, I do not accept that facile doctrine but agree entirely with what I believe is your serious opinion — though for argument’s sake you may sometimes have appealed to what pedants in my time called the hedonistic calculus — and I should maintain that the human good is complex, and that the natural overruling principle in compounding it is the need of harmony: an eminently rational principle, since it rubs down and renders compatible the various needs and powers of the soul.

ALCIBIADES. — Is that, Socrates, really your opinion? If so, I should expect you to approve, as perfectly virtuous, certain fierce Africans that I have known, in whom all the vices under heaven were united in the most perfect harmony, without a single moment of comparison, mutual reproach, or sense of contradiction. Their city, too, was said to be harmonized on the same principle of universal freedom. Greed, lust, guile, violence, recklessness, and cruelty were instilled into every young citizen by precept and uninterrupted example, so that only the very strongest and most insidious were able to keep their heads above water. These few champions of vice and crime, having absolute power, great riches, and unflinching wills, dominated the State, and would very soon, but for an untoward accident, have dominated the world. Is that, Socrates, a fair example of what you understand by the principle of harmony, presiding over the human good?

SOCRATES. — That untoward accident, Alcibiades, I suppose was an earthquake or flood or epidemic or the wreck of the whole fleet in a terrible storm? That would have proved that the regimen of that city, if in harmony with itself, was not in harmony with the gods ruling the earth, the sea, the sky, and the health of the human body.

ALCIBIADES. — No, the gods had nothing to do with it, and didn’t seem to mind. The trouble was weakness in a part of the people, who couldn’t keep up the pace. It was sedition.

SOCRATES. — Indeed? Sedition in a perfectly harmonious State?

ALCIBIADES. — It wouldn’t have lasted if the government had been keen and swift enough in stamping it out before undertaking arduous and doubtful enterprises abroad. They didn’t die of crime, but of miscalculation.

SOCRATES. — Ah, my friend, if you could show me your harmonious tyrants at peace with themselves, with their households, necessary guards, agents, and slaves, and at war only with the philosophy of Socrates, I should gladly allow you to go and live on intimate terms of friendship with those great men, and leave penniless Socrates and his tiresome philosophy to wither together. But where are your happy vicious and criminal tyrants? And why do you still dog the steps of your old solitary bald-headed friend ?

ALCIBIADES. — You are wandering from the point. Tell me why it was a good thing for me to be good-looking, although the Stranger here is inspired to say that it was an evil omen and a piece of bad luck. In fact, that or something else brought me to ruin; and if I skulk back to beg from you a few crumbs of sophistical amusement, it is only because the great world that I ran after turned me down.

THE STRANGER. — You see, Socrates, that Alcibiades also feels that there is some suggestion of the truth in my oracle, though the exact articulation of that truth may as yet escape us both. If you will drive us into a few more corners, we may at last take the right turn and get out of the labyrinth.

ALCIBIADES. — As for me, please leave me out of the argument, especially as I can tell you beforehand how I stand on this question. I secretly agree with the Stranger; but I know by experience that you, Socrates, will refute him and that if I made common cause with him you would compel me to eat my words and to contradict my real conviction; because although verbally confused I should remain still of the same opinion. Go on: it will entertain me to listen to you. Your conclusion will be nonsense, but you will have said some good things by the way.

SOCRATES. — Alas, how incorrigible we all are when once we are dead! I have been talking with Alcibiades these two thousand years, as time is reckoned under the planets, and he is no wiser and no more serious than he was on the first day. He has not been able to discard any one of those cheap phrases which he calls his opinions; and I too remain as unreasonably patient and devoted to him as ever, as if there were still some hope of saving his soul.

THE STRANGER. — There is no occasion for hoping, since that hope is already realized, as you yourself have said in many ways, direct and indirect. His soul knows itself, and remains an eternally necessary foil and companion to yours.

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SOCRATES. — Well then, since he will not help us, you and I must carry on the argument alone. It seems that one of the reasons that some people give for thinking beauty a sad and really worthless thing is that beauty fades: not only from the cheek of youth but from the verses of poets and t he stat ues of gods, when they become barbaric and old-fashioned, or too conventional, affected, feeble, and trivial. Is that, perhaps, what disenchants beauty in your eyes? Do you think death, or the passing away of anything, itself an evil?

THE STRANGER. — No indeed.

SOCRATES. — But do you not regard life, or the momentary existence of anything beautiful, as itself a good?

THE STRANGER, — A good life seems to me a good and a bad life an evil; but life and death simply are neither good nor evil in my eyes. Life is an opportunity or occasion for good and evil alike, and death is an insurance against both. Whether such an opportunity or such an insurance is the better prospect at a given juncture hangs on the circumstances of that moment: I mean on the chances that life, if it came to a specific soul then and there, would prove good or bad on the whole. As to death, it is pure and neutral, and either to choose it or to reject it for what it is in itself would be quite unreasonable and perhaps impossible to a clear and free spirit.

To love existence or be horrified at non-existence is a merely animal impulse, due to the psyche being already wound up and tending to go on moving and pushing. And the psyche has no reason for existing or wishing to exist: that point has been decided for it before it was there to vote. It is the physical vigor of life, impelled or repelled, that must cast it. Those whom life wearies or horrifies say they love death; and those who love life so blindly that nothing can prompt them to resign it say they hate death as if it were, in its nothingness, the greatest of evils.

SOCRATES. — Wonderful Stranger, who is still alive, yet speaks of life and death as if he had been dead for ages!

ALCIBIADES. — He forgets, and you too, Socrates, that the facts utterly contradict him. He says death is nothing; yet here we are, you and I, long since dead, enjoying a kind of being — not very good I admit, nor very bad, yet far removed from nothingness.

SOCRATES. — Hush, do not speak so glibly about the marvelous mystery of our immortal state. We are only the truth of what we once enacted, an undying echo of ourselves in those fields of being which are not temporal, where we are at once more and less than was our fleeting existence: more, in that it is rounded out into a total, each part enriched by all its relations to the other parts; less, in that neither the parts nor the whole feel the stress of hope or danger or insecurity, but all hang suspended in a common clearness and peace, like conviction in the crowded silence that follows upon eloquence.

But I see that Alcibiades cannot bear to be wholly silent even in death. Let the argument, then, return to him. Is possession or cult of the beautiful an evil only when, under the appearance of good, it covers and fosters inward corruption?

THE STRANGER. — Exactly. People like the Greeks, who cultivate a living and complete beauty, lend themselves unawares to the assumption that beauty is simply the evidence of physical and moral perfection. It was added by the grace of heaven or of their imagination to their typical heroes, who were reputed to have been made perfect by music and gymnastics and by the right discipline of manners and feeling. But if we turn instead to the beauty of women in the modern world — for the male among us is not beautiful — and to the beauty of ancient or superfluous objects of art — for our useful works are no more beautiful than our men — the case is rather different. My thoughts were turned too much, perhaps, to my own times when I spoke as I did; something about the peculiar tone and expression of our friend turned them in that direction. To you, Socrates, his aspect may suggest, at least by right and in essence, a divine Phidian perfection; he himself may rather incline to exemplify the pliant grace and engaging lasciviousness dear to Praxiteles; instead of which, to my eyes he seems to show something of the surfeited quality of Scopas, cloyed and turning to too great a ripeness, a gathering sadness and a deep fatigue. Where vital and unconscious beauty is concerned, however, I cannot see how the possession of it could be a curse, since then it would be simply the sensible aspect or aroma of all latent blessings.

SOCRATES. — What do I understand you to say now? Is it that Alcibiades either had a false beauty which was a misfortune and which I should call ugliness, or else had a true beauty that was a good?

THE STRANGER. — That seems to be what my concession implies.

SOCRATES. — Is it not your honest opinion?

THE STRANGER. — I am afraid I do not know at this moment what my honest opinion is, and perhaps I never had one on this exact subject. Genuine belief does not come to the mind in choosing between previous phrases, but requires a fresh phrase to do it justice. There is no denying in this instance that beauty is essentially beautiful and so an unmixed good; yet the natural relations of the beautiful, as it arises in particular instances, may render that instance of the beautiful a good loaded with sinister effects. It may be like Alcibiades himself at the high tide of his youth, a thing with a heroic ancestry and a sad future.

SOCRATES. — Do you mean that if in the flux of nature a good thing is by accident followed by something evil, it becomes partly evil in itself? Is life partly evil because it is followed by death; or is youth partly evil because it leads to old age; or speech, in that it opens the way to lies and curses and poetic fables and sophistical arguments, and ends after all in complete silence?

THE STRANGER. — Old age, death, and silence are not caused by the youth, life, and speech that have preceded, nor are they by any means, in my opinion, evils in themselves. A person who prizes them, at least as reliefs from the noise and strain of their contraries, would not admit that life, youth, and talk were rendered partly good because they always came at last to an end: so why should I say of good things that the fact that they have an end infects their existence with evil? Nothing can spoil them, while they exist, except, failure then to fulfill their natural functions. It is limping life, corrupt youth, and misused language that infect their excellence with an internal contradiction: and it was such an internal malady that I felt, perhaps unduly, to have secretly poisoned the bloom of Greece, like an invisible canker. Beauty is the natural expression of some kinds of perfection, such as health and unison of movements, as in music; but there are kinds of perfection that do not naturally issue in beauty, and if on that account they are suspended or contorted, the craving for beauty there has become a temptation and a vice.

I think it is so, for instance, in philosophy. The language in which philosophy is couched may be as beautiful as it likes, if it does not distort the science or the logic of the system; but truth and coherence are austere; and I should think it a dreadful omen in a philosophy or religion if, not satisfied with being eloquent in its conviction and trenchant in its criticism, it strayed into moralizing in cosmology and flattering the world in morals; for then I should be sure that it was false.

ALCIBIADES. — Then you are no follower of Heraclitus and the elegiac poets who are always bemoaning the transitoriness of things, especially of youth, love, and past ages.

THE STRANGER. — No; as you are well aware, I prefer to laugh with Democritus; or rat her, as in the matter of beauty, to follow Socrates and his pupil Plato, and attach my affections to the essences of things, which are eternal, rather than to cling to them vainly in their fleeting existence, like a crying child to his mother’s skirts.

ALCIBIADES. — I know; yet that hot sweating world of yours, from which you like to escape to us, is mightily proud of itself and of its passing follies. Pigs will wallow luxuriously in their sty, which stinks to our superior nostrils; and your young and beautiful women, who are daily growing older and uglier, and your plodding burghers, rounder-bellied every day, have more philosophy than you; for if the world deals them out their daily ration of fodder or of flattery, they munch that, and are vastly satisfied.

THE STRANGER. — They are or they pretend to be, because they are like children who can’t stop themselves running downhill. That, to my mind, is what nullifies them entirely.

SOCRATES. — Let us not trouble about what the world thinks, since it is not here to tell us, and the accused should be heard in their own defense. You, Stranger, who are both here and alive, must speak in their stead. And would you not admit that whatever puts an end to evil is, in so far, a good?

THE STRANGER. — I should admit it.

SOCRATES. — And that whatever puts an end to good is, in so far, an evil?

THE STRANGER. — Yes, I admit that also.

SOCRATES. — Then it seems to follow that the more a man loves life, and consequently hates death, the sadder and on the whole the more evil he must think life, for leading to such a great evil. Yet if life in this way has become an evil on the whole, like a beautiful but faithless mistress, death that removes that agonizing and vain life would have turned out to be a good, and a circumspect lover of life ought, on the whole, to love death also.

THE STRANGER. — Yes, he ought to and often does. Such is the vortex of dialectic.

SOCRATES. — Would you say, then, on the same principle, that if the corruption that may follow upon beauty can make beauty an evil possession on the whole, then corruption itself, which puts an end to that possession, has become, in so far, a good?

THE STRANGER. — The vortex of dialectic seems to have swept me round to that position; but it is absurd. The corruption of any good thing cannot be good for that thing; but it may easily be a good for something else; as the corruption of a corpse may be good for the worms, or for the man’s heirs. This is the way of nature. Nothing is born into this world, says the poet Lucretius, save aided by the death of some other thing.

SOCRATES. — Ah, my friend, the judgment of men concerning their own good is not naturally crooked, but it is easily twisted with too much bewitched gazing on a crooked world. The conjunctions of earthly things have nothing to do with their excellence, which is the divine and immortal part of them. If we would rightly judge the soul of anything, especially of a man or of a divine manifestation like beauty, we should look away from its accidental setting in this surging contradictory world, as of pearls in a tyrant’s crown, and consider only the pure pearls themselves, which can never cancel one another’s light. Do you find even the stars, which Anaxagoras said were bodies, but if so must be divine bodies, ever stand in one another’s way? When the moon passes before them she shuts off their light from us but does not extinguish it. No more do the sun and the air made visible by the sunlight, so that the true heaven being hidden from us by that blue or lowering veil, we might feel free all day to go about our earthly business.

Similarly if beauty or youth on earth are soon obscured and must yield to some sadder sequel, what fault is this of theirs, or what corruption of their intrinsic splendor? Do they do us any harm, because we suffer when we no longer live in their light? And mark me: it is not that like offended gods they turn away and wish to punish us; it is we that in our weakness and inconstancy, at so great a distance, cannot absorb the transforming virtue which they never cease to diffuse. Yet because of this insensibility in us and quick exhaustion of our vital powers, you accuse beauty, when for a moment reflected in our fragile mirror, of being an omen of evil! But perhaps I am wrong in imagining that you were floundering in the midstream of our argument, and it was some nether god, without giving his reasons, that had whispered this oracle in your ear.

THE STRANGER. — No. I perceive that I was verbally in the wrong. Beauty is no misfortune, but as you say, the instability of beauty in things is a misfortune for them.

ALCIBIADES. — I told you that Socrates would utterly confound you; yet I am as convinced as you were, and as you will be again in half an hour, that you were in the right.

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SOCRATES. — Alas, how little faith everybody but me seems to have in reason! Nobody has enough respect for his own words to care what they happen to be. Any chance opinion will do to occupy his soul, be it the ancient opinions of his country or the latest opinion of his day. And having no respect for the truth, he never troubles to express himself with any clearness, or to question whether what he happens to believe is false or true. On the contrary, he often makes a virtue of his prejudice, laziness, and indifference and calls it faith.

However, if God set me in the midst of such a frivolous world, it must have been because I was guilty of this same frivolity in some other life, or in order to make trial of me, and let experience convince me, for my own good, to put my house in order; thus without any hope of applause or friendly encouragement, but on the contrary at the price of mockery, slander, and death, I am condemned to strain all my thoughts and affections through the sieve of reason. Accordingly, since you will not take the trouble to reply sincerely and help me truly to answer the present question, which to me seems of great importance, I must put the questions to myself, and myself give the answers. Therefore, summoning myself against myself, for my own purgation, I proceed at once to the contest.

(SOCRATES stalks away for three paces, stops, turns about, and addresses the place where he stood before, as if he still occupied it.)

Tell me, O O Socrates, do you agree with the Stranger in thinking that it was an omen of evil for Alcibiades and the Greeks, except you and me, to have been beautiful?

(He stalks back to the place where he had stood at first, turns about, and addresses the place ’where he had last spoken.)

No, Socrates, I dare not agree to that without serious examination and cogent proof; because beauty is admitted by the Stranger and by all sensitive persons to be a great good; and it will require a mighty argument to convince me that it is an omen of evil to possess a good.

(Méme jeu)

Quite right, O Socrates; and now please reply to this other question. Do you agree with the Stranger in thinking that evils are evil only in that they derange the harmony of life in the soul?

(Méme jeu)

Yes, Socrates, I agree with him in that; or rather I agree with you and with myself, since it is either you or I that the Stranger is quoting when he puts forward that opinion.

ALCIBIADES. — I protest, O Socrates and Socrates, that you two, being lifelong friends, allow yourselves to palm off hollow sophistical reasonings on each other, simply because each of you knows how perfectly limp and incapable of originality he will find the other. And yet, if you go on much longer, you will be running great danger of quarreling; because nothing is more human than for a man to reject and despise his own opinions when another man proposes them.

SOCRATES (after again changing places). — Do not, O Socrates, allow our friend to disturb the course of our important argument, for he admits or rather boasts that he is not in earnest. Reply, if you can, to this further question: Does beauty derange the harmony of life in the soul, as might the possession of gold, by rendering the soul slavish in the continual eagerness to acquire it or fear to lose it?

(Méme jeu). No, I say: for if the soul became slavish, both it and its body would soon cease to be beautiful in reality, and at most could only seem beautiful to other slaves, or to women, or to freemen of bad taste and corrupt morals.

(Méme jeu)

Excellently said, O Socrates, I quite agree with you there. Shall we say, then, that it cannot be an evil omen to be truly beautiful, because true beauty is ocular evidence of health and strength and swiftness and purity and modesty and self-restraint and intelligence — all things of the best and holiest omen in the world. As for false beauty, which may be painted on or attributed to sickly and vicious persons by those who are vicious and sickly themselves, we will leave the appreciation of it to others; although we shall be inclined to agree with the Stranger, who has probably studied that sort of beauty more lovingly than you or I, that it is not only an evil omen but already in possession a great and ghastly misfortune.

(Méme jeu)

Agreed, Socrates, I reply with enthusiasm. We will stick to that, and finish the argument by declaring that you and I are of one mind, and hold firmly that true beauty is evidence that the gods love and cherish him who possesses it and have cast something of their own glory upon him; so much so, that if any atheist saw true beauty pass by, he would unfeignedly renounce his atheism and assert henceforth that with his own eyes he had seen one of the gods.

(Méme jeu)

Most true, I answer, O Socrates. Henceforth we will hold to that view. And with this prayer — for it is one — you and I will now depart, so united in soul and body that a single pair of legs will suffice to take us home.

(Makes as if to leave)

ALCIBIADES (holding him back). — Capital, you single actor with two masks. That is the first honest dialogue you ever carried on. Now at last you have openly given the answers to your own questions, while heretofore you stubbornly pretended to accept the answers of others, but in fact took care to impose your own, and by browbeating your interlocutors and snapping up their casual words and forbidding any full replies, you reduced them in despair to guessing what you required them to say and to saying it at once, so as to be rid of you as soon as possible.

SOCRATES. — Am I to blame if people have no convictions, or are not willing or able to defend them? I give them every opportunity and encouragement, and if they have nothing substantial to say, it is my loss and my sorrow, because I have to go away, as I am going now, with only my own answers to build upon, ruminating always alone, since nobody can really help me. What wonder if, reduced to my own miserable resources, I am monotonous and sterile and sunk always deeper and deeper in my own perhaps hasty opinions? If I vexed others only, it might not matter so much, since at last I should take myself away or they would drive me off with hard words, as you do, or with sticks, or would condemn me to death as a public nuisance; but who will take me away from myself and how, singlehanded, shall I drive my own ignorance out of my soul?

(Exit)

5

ALCIBIADES. — There he goes, the brave old fellow. Never was there anyone like him, and there never will be. What a hero he is!

THE STRANGER. —And how unfortunate!

ALCIBIADES. —1 know; but what can you expect when superior people must submit to be judged by mobs? After all, we must all die in the end, and Socrates lived to a ripe old age. What matters it whether a cup of hemlock carries you off, or a sluggish liver?

THE STRANGER. — I was not thinking of his death, which was magnificent, but of his philosophy. His work was perhaps the most important and the most generally praised that anyone ever accomplished in moral philosophy; and yet how profoundly disappointing!

ALCIBIADES. — Nobody can have all he wants. Socrates enjoyed many a happy hour: what banquets those were, when he outshone everybody! And he had good friends, to make up for me, faithful to the last, which is rare. His fame too is universal and very solid, as that of other philosophers is not. What is there disappointing about his lot?

THE STRANGER. — \ou see how intrepid he is in the pursuit of truth and how untiring; but do you think he has ever found it? On this very point which we have been discussing, has he grasped more than a thin ghost of the truth?

ALCIBIADES. — You were obliged to admit that he was right.

THE STRANGER. —Yes, verbally; for by making a distinction between true and false beauty, as if beauty were a proposition, he identifies all “true” beauty with such beauty as a bigoted moralist allows himself to relish; and all other beauties, often more beautiful, he pronounces to be false and ugly. By this trick he has begged the whole question. He has limited beauty, by a surreptitious definition, to those very simple and austere forms of it which appear together with certain Spartan utilitarian virtues, of which he is the advocate. Thereby he has proved to his own satisfaction that in no form of true beauty can there be anything sinister or sensuous or ethereal. His philosophy is all a play of words or logic of concepts, backed in his person by a heroic ascetic discipline, yet in itself arid and verbal, and fit to defend any fanaticism or superstition. If he were interested in nature and in the miscellaneous budding and joys of life, what would be the need of arguments and reasonings, and how could he ever have thought it an excellent method to squeeze the conventional language of ignorant people in order to distill the pure essence of the beautiful?

It is a sad fate that pursues moralists and logicians who pipe their dialectic as if they lived in Arcadia, where nothing is to be heard but the twittering of birds and the growling of bears. Civilized human life is more complicated and dense, and nothing at all is discoverable about it by playing in that way the flute or the bagpipes. On the contrary, the order of nature is disguised or reversed by dialectic. Parmenides and Plato and Anaxagoras, by tracing thin rays of identity, implication, or contradiction in ideal essences, logical or moral, cast an imaginary net over the world, like the parallels and meridians that modern geographers cast over the lands and seas of the earth; good terms in which to describe positions and distances between port and port in their voyages, but irrelevant to the hills and valleys, the nights and days, the works and the wars that diversify the world for its inhabitants.

If language exhausted nature and logic could control facts, a mythologizing moralist no doubt would have good sport, and Socrates might successfully confine beauty to the expression of vital and moral perfection. But perfections are multiple, and the beauty of one thing is incompatible with that of another. So with the virtues of different men, or ages, or nations: and Socrates and you, though thinking you still worshiped the gods of Hellas, really were forerunners of very un-Greek loves and very romantic rebellions.

ALCIBIADES. — So that according to you the judges who condemned Socrates were guided by a true though hopeless allegiance to the gods and to the laws of Athens; and I also was guided by a true instinct in actually running away, and even fighting against my country. For myself, I make no objection; but Socrates, if he heard you, would roll his popeyes in a terrific passion and transfix you with six questions like six Homeric spears.

THE STRANGER. — Ilis wrath would not be philosophical; for here, where the harvests of every season are garnered together, what matters it whether, while we lived, we worked at sowing, or reaping, or winter plowing?