哲学的故事03（金发燊译本）
CHAPTER ONE
座机转接
Plato
经期腰痛
I. The Context of Plato
古典音乐If you look at a map of Europe you will obrve that Greece is a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea. South of it lies the great island of Crete, from which tho grasping fingers captured, in the cond millennium before Christ, the beginnings of civilization and culture. To the east, across the Ægean Sea, lies Asia Minor, quiet and apathetic now, but throbbing, in pre-Platonic days, with industry, commerce and speculation. To the west, across the Ionian, Italy stands, like a leaning tower in the a, and Sicily and Spain, each in tho days with thriving Greek colonies; and at the end, the “Pillars of Hercules” (which we call Gibraltar), that sombre portal through which not many an ancient mariner dared to pass. And on the north tho still untamed and half-barb
aric regions, then named Thessaly and Epirus and Macedonia, from which or through which the vigorous bands had come which fathered the genius of Homeric and Periclean Greece.
Look again at the map, and you e countless indentations of coast and elevations of land; everywhere gulfs and bays and the intrusive a; and all the earth tumbled and tosd into mountains and hills. Greece was broken into isolated fragments by the natural barriers of a and soil; travel and communication were far more difficult and dangerous then than now; every valley therefore developed its own lf-sufficient economic life, its own sovereign government, its own institutions and dialect and religion and culture. In each ca one or two cities, and around them, stretching up the mountainslopes, an agricultural hinterland: such were the “city-states” of Eubœa, and Locris, and Ætolia, and Phocis, and Bœotia, and Achæa, and Argolis, and Elis, and Arcadia, and Mesnia, and Laconia—with its Sparta, and Attica—with its Athens.
等闲识得
Look at the map a last time, and obrve the position of Athens: it is the farthest east of t鲜虾干贝粥
he larger cities of Greece. It was favorably placed to be the door through which the Greeks pasd out to the busy cities of Asia Minor, and through which tho elder cities nt their luxuries and their culture to adolescent Greece. It had an admirable port, Piræus, where countless vesls might find a haven from the rough waters of the a. And it had a great maritime fleet.
In 490–470 B.C. Sparta and Athens, forgetting their jealousies and joining their forces, fought off the effort of the Persians under Darius and Xerxes to turn Greece into a colony of an Asiatic empire. In this struggle of youthful Europe against the nile East, Sparta provided the army and Athens the navy. The war over, Sparta demobilized her troops, and suffered the economic disturbances natural to that process; while Athens turned her navy into a merchant fleet, and became one of the greatest trading cities of the ancient world. Sparta relapd into agricultural clusion and stagnation, while Athens became a busy mart and port, the meeting place of many races of men and of diver cults and customs, who contact and rivalry begot comparison, analysis and thought.
狄金森的诗
Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercour; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all. Probably the traders were the first sceptics; they had en too much to believe too much; and the general disposition of merchants to classify all men as either fools or knaves inclined them to question every creed. Gradually, too, they were developing science; mathematics grew with the increasing complexity of exchange, astronomy with the increasing audacity of navigation. The growth of wealth brought the leisure and curity which are the prerequisite of rearch and speculation; men now asked the stars not only for guidance on the as but as well for an answer to the riddles of the univer; the first Greek philosophers were astronomers. “Proud of their achievements,” says Aristotle,1 “men pushed farther afield after the Persian wars; they took all knowledge for their province, and sought ever wider studies.” Men grew bold enough to attempt natural explanations of process and events before attributed to supernatural agencies and powers; magic and ritual slowly gave way to science and control; and philosophy began.
At first this philosophy was physical; it looked out upon the material world and asked what
was the final and irreducible constituent of things. The natural termination of this line of thought was the materialism of Democritus (460–360 B.C.)—“in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.” This was one of the main streams of Greek speculation; it pasd underground for a time in Plato’s day, but emerged in Epicurus (342–270), and became a torrent of eloquence in Lucretius (98–55 B.C.). But the most characteristic and fertile developments of Greek philosophy took form with the Sophists, travelling teachers of wisdom, who looked within upon their own thought and nature, rather than out upon the world of things. They were all clever men (Gorgias and Hippias, for example), and many of them were profound (Protagoras, Prodicus); there is hardly a problem or a solution in our current philosophy of mind and conduct which they did not realize and discuss. They asked questions about anything; they stood unafraid in the prence of religious or political taboos; and boldly subpoenaed every creed and institution to appear before the judgment-at of reason. In politics they divided into two schools. One, like Rousau, argued that nature is good, and civilization bad; that by nature all men are equal, becoming unequal only by class-made institutions; and that law is an invention of the stro
樊蒙
ng to chain and rule the weak. Another school, like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal; that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong; that power is the supreme virtue, and the supreme desire of man; and that of all forms of government the wist and most natural is aristocracy.
