Seite - 176 - in The Complete Plato
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good health, and whom only a physician or trainer will discern at first sight
not to be in good health.
GORGIAS: True.
SOCRATES: And this applies not only to the body, but also to the soul: in
either there may be that which gives the appearance of health and not the
reality?
GORGIAS: Yes, certainly.
SOCRATES: And now I will endeavour to explain to you more clearly
what I mean: The soul and body being two, have two arts corresponding to
them: there is the art of politics attending on the soul; and another art
attending on the body, of which I know no single name, but which may be
described as having two divisions, one of them gymnastic, and the other
medicine. And in politics there is a legislative part, which answers to
gymnastic, as justice does to medicine; and the two parts run into one another,
justice having to do with the same subject as legislation, and medicine with
the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference. Now, seeing that there
are these four arts, two attending on the body and two on the soul for their
highest good; flattery knowing, or rather guessing their natures, has
distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the
likeness of some one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she
simulates, and having no regard for men’s highest interests, is ever making
pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is
of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and
pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and
the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or
men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best
understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved
to death. A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I
am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of
the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to
explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not
call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to
argue in defence of them.
Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of medicine;
and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the form of gymnastic, and
is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully by the help of lines,
and colours, and enamels, and garments, and making men affect a spurious
beauty to the neglect of the true beauty which is given by gymnastic.
I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say, after the manner
176
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Buch The Complete Plato"
The Complete Plato
- Titel
- The Complete Plato
- Autor
- Plato
- Datum
- ~347 B.C.
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- PD
- Abmessungen
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Seiten
- 1612
- Schlagwörter
- Philosophy, Antique, Philosophie, Antike, Dialogues, Metaphysik, Metaphysics, Ideologie, Ideology, Englisch
- Kategorien
- Geisteswissenschaften
- International